The Weightless World (8 page)

‘Nice hat,’ Asha says, not taking her eyes off what I think is the oil gauge.

‘No it’s not.’ It’s not: a roundel of artificial fibre with a headband all itchy trusses and grips. ‘I only got it because he went so mental.’

She glances at me, then back at the oil gauge. ‘Who went mental?’

‘He lost his rag with me in the shop.’ I nod at Ess, unhappily hunched over his phone fifty or sixty feet away. I suppose I should be glad, at least, that he can get a signal out here.

‘Ah,’ Asha sighs. ‘It is often the way with powerful men. They need a release, an outlet. I wouldn’t take it personally.’

‘Is it “often so” with Harry?’

She slams down the bonnet and turns to me with a banal look.

‘I mean you work for Harry, don’t you?’ I say. ‘Isn’t he a powerful man too?’

‘I don’t work for Harry.’

‘I thought you said…’

‘I work for myself. No one else.’

‘Yeah, but I thought you said…’

‘Harry owns the company. He doesn’t own me.’

‘No. Obviously not.’ I stand blowing through my lips for a while. Then I nod at Ess again and say, ‘Who’s he talking to?’

‘I don’t know.’ She folds her arms. ‘Do you?’

‘How would I know that?’

‘How would I?’

Now I fold my arms also. ‘Is he talking to Tarik?’

‘Does he do that?’

‘What?’

She raises her chin. ‘Does he communicate with Tarik Kundra?’

‘I’ve no idea. That’s why I asked you.’

‘Maybe.’ She shrugs slackly, somehow aggressively. ‘Maybe you already know the answers to these questions, and only want to find out if I know them too.’

‘That’s not why I asked you.’

We’re sort of grinning at each other. I’m not sure what’s going on.

‘Let me ask you a question.’ Arms still folded, she leans back against the car. Then she tilts her head, narrows her eyes, as if taking aim at me, and says, ‘Does Tarik Kundra exist? Is he a real person?’

Even before the sky changes colour I know I’ve lost track of time. It doesn’t matter how often I tell myself to look at my watch: every time I look I see that hours have vanished, leaked from its face. As if time has gone the way of space and become its own immaculate featureless body, unintelligible, ungraspable.

Then the sky changes colour. A tinge of citric yellow seeps in at the skyline, then deep acidic lemon, then gross tangerine. Then the whole sky turns red. The car seems to putter along in silence, through wave after wave of turbulent red. There’s nothing else to see. Then the red darkens and the day starts to become night.

Blue layers of shadow are softly vying at the windows when Harry takes off his specs, pinches the bridge of his nose, and says, ‘Well, that’s me out.’

‘No more signal?’ I ask.

‘No more signal.’

We’re going along in pitch darkness, and it’s obviously time for me to step in. It’s time for me to lean forward between the seats and say something along the lines of, ‘Okay, guys, what say we pick this up in the morning? Asha, is there anywhere round here we could turn in for the night?’ I’ve been expecting this moment or one like it for weeks, for as long as I’ve been signed up for this trip, so I’ve had plenty of time to prepare for it. But now it’s here there’s a problem. I keep telling my mouth to open. But my mouth keeps not opening.

We stop. With the engine still running Asha clicks on the dashboard light and sits studying the map lying massively open in her lap. Then she grunts, throws off her whistling seatbelt, shoulder-barges her door and without a word disappears into the road.

Ess, Harry and I look at the black space beyond her door. Faint wisps, specks, floating bits of thread seem to rear from the darkness, and I fear mosquitoes, drawn by the dashboard light. I want to ask Ess to reach across and shut her door but at the same time I don’t want to speak to him, don’t want to look at him.

Asha returns. She slams back into her seat in a way that makes no one feel like asking her anything. She starts driving again very
much more quickly. We smash down into potholes and smash up out of them again, everything in the car slewing about. Still no one says anything. Ess puts a hand on her arm but she doesn’t seem to notice. We hurtle along, slew about in the cratered night.

We pass a village, a wide rotating edge of densely packed shapes like dark silos or enormous canisters. At each rotation hot dots of light spark out then vanish along with their streaks of nubbled infrastructure, their field tones, forest tones. I search the sky round the place for the flying webs of telegraph wires, and see them – see one maybe – maybe none.

A couple of miles beyond the village Asha stops the car again. She storms out into the road again. She slams back into her seat and sits studying the map again. In the rear-view mirror she looks as if she has to keep reminding herself to breathe.

She starts driving again, very much more slowly. She turns the car off the road; the headlights pick out the startling waste in front of us, the gnarled trees, the ashen bushes. Slow as we’re going, the car judders violently and continuously, sliding on pebbles, crashing into rocks. Asha grapples the wheel like she’s trying to force its arms behind its back.

Then she cries out. A wordless screech that freezes me into my seat. Is she hurt? Has something struck her? Has someone attacked her?

The car turns again and the headlights wash across a series of luridly pitted surfaces that tessellate only gradually into a lonely cluster of buildings: a metallic cabin surrounded by wooden sheds. Then there’s a movement, the drift of a figure – the white kurta, the fashion specs – and there he is, standing in front of the car, in the glaring headlights, the inventor, the recluse, Tarik Kundra.

Now I know what heat is.

Outside the storage shed in which Ess and I have spent the night, I stand in heat like an act of violence. I thought Mumbai was hot, but I know now that the city is two hundred square miles of accessible shade and air conditioning; that heat there is an idea, an imitation of heat. This, this attack, this onslaught – this is heat.

Narrowing my eyes, I make out shapes against the furnace-white sky: the dazzling metal of the cabin; the bleached wood of the other two storage sheds; the rickety latrine; the silhouetted Adventurers car, a propped heel the only sign of Asha slumped in the back; the busy encampment that Harry produced from his backpack and in which I assume he’s still sleeping. There’s something else, further out from the cluster of buildings even than Harry’s nylon homestead, the only other deviation from the level of the plain, tidy foundations, oddly orderly ruins – but I’ve had enough and duck back into the shed.

In the space we somehow cleared last night, stacking and re-stacking boxes in total darkness, Ess is sitting up awake. For the first time I notice how we arranged the sleeping bags that Asha brought us from the car: not top-to-tail, like camping teens, but face-to-face, like a married couple. Showing no trace of our uncomfortable night’s sleep, he now springs to his feet, slips on his sunglasses, picks up his hat as if handling a soft loaf and drops it over his head. He throws my hat at me and says, ‘Now you see why I made you buy
that
.’

Outside, he stands as I did a moment ago, surveying the contents of the plain, then he claps his hands together and says, ‘You know, I’ve a jolly thought.’

I don’t want to hear it. Whatever is on his mind, I’m not ready for it. I’m not ready for any part of this situation. Until last night I was sure that Tarik Kundra didn’t exist. But then until three days ago I was pretty sure that Asha Jarwal didn’t exist either.

‘I wonder if I can’t arrange a little demonstration for us.’ He peers at me over his sunglasses, eyes brimming, the vivid crinkles spilling. ‘What say you to that? Little demonstration? Little demonstration of an antigravity machine?’

‘Okay.’ Somewhat manically I nod, smile. What else can I do?

‘Not too bad a thought, is it? Not
too
bad.’ He laughs, managing to read in my expression the delight he’s looking for. ‘Very well, Mr Strauss. Let’s see what I can’t sort out.’ And he strides away, across the plain, towards Tarik’s cabin.

From the shed I watch as he reaches the cabin and knocks smartly on the door. We both wait. Then he knocks again and we both wait again. Then the door opens and there’s Tarik, a slight, neatly made man, late thirties or early forties, with light designerish stubble and a thick mop of curls in which I intuit the touslings of product. This is no wild man of the plain; this is a city boy, an urban pretty boy, all trust fund and vintage vinyl. He has no more business being out here, in this stippled waste, than the rest of us do.

What else? But it’s hopeless. I don’t know what I’m looking at, I have no way of making sense of Tarik Kundra because the great majority of me still refuses to believe that he exists, is a real person, a living fact I’m at some point going to have to think about and deal with. Though I can see him, right there in the doorway of his dazzly metal cabin, he’s still essentially a figure in a story, a figment, a ghost.

Ess talks. Tarik nods. Then Tarik says something and steps back into his cabin and closes the door. Ess bows to the closed door, then turns and strides back to me, his face triumphant under the wide brim of his daft hat.

‘A demonstration, did we say? Why then a demonstration we shall have!’

‘He agreed to it?’

‘He did. Tarik is eager to exhibit his wares. And so he shall, immediately after our repast this evening.’ Ess grins as if he could burst with it. ‘What say you to that?’

‘That’s fantastic.’ I nod, I smile. I don’t want to say or do anything else. I have an idea that if I don’t say or do anything else, nothing else can happen. Only it’s not true, and eventually I have to shrug and say, ‘So… what do we do now?’

‘What we do now,’ Ess says with his bursting grin, ‘is we see what Harry’s got in for breakfast.’

When we shout his name Harry rolls about inside his tent for a bit then sticks his head out of a polythene porthole and wishes us a civil good morning. Ess asks if he has a morsel or two of anything to eat and a minute later Harry is sitting wide-eyed and cross-legged over a tiny space-age cooker and silvery packets of astronaut food that disgorge hot delicious hunks of egg, bacon, sausage. We’re wolfing our way through all this when a timer goes somewhere and then Harry’s passing round tin cups of hot coffee.

‘Your rude health, my fine fellows,’ Harry says, and we clash our cups together with a happy chain-gang dinging.

It’s a nice sort of a moment, blokeish, bullish, but its spirit soon passes. Ess and Harry fall into discussing the geography of the plain and I fall into gloomily wondering what the hell we’re doing here. Why are we here – I mean Ess and me? And why is
he
here – I mean Harry? I’m aware that I have not yet asked Ess any
of the many questions I want to ask him about Harry Altman. For instance: Why did Ess not even mention Harry to me until we were already in India? Why did he not tell me that he had invited Harry to join us on our trip to the plain? What reason did he have for keeping those things from me? Has he entered into some dark compact with the American that he doesn’t want me to know about? Or – darker yet – has the American some hold over him, some leverage, some force?

One further scenario presents itself: that Harry has his own designs on the machine. That he is a con man and he’s been fooling us from the start, charming us with his frowns and titters, with his lumbering, shaggy amenability, only and precisely so we would lead him to Tarik Kundra’s wondrous antigravity machine and give him opportunity to steal it as soon as he’s made sure it works. Well, if that’s true, Harry is in for a disappointment, because the wondrous machine is not going to work. Still (I would like to know), has
Ess
thought of any of this? Has he considered the possibility at all?

But it’s pointless. If there is some ingenious way I could pry the two of them apart, get Ess alone and make him answer my questions, I don’t know it.

Ess and Harry fall into discussing the climate; I fall into thinking about Alice. All at once I need to see her face, to hear her voice. Moreover, I’m certain she’ll know what to do. If I can only somehow speak to her, I have no doubt she’ll be able to tell me what to do.

And so, when we’ve eaten, I fit my hat more tightly over my head, squint towards the horizon and ask, ‘How far away do we think that village we passed is?’

‘Three, four miles. Maybe further.’ Ess frowns. ‘Why?’

‘If we’re kicking our heels until this demo, I thought maybe I could walk over there, look for a payphone, anything, really, any form of…’

‘No need.’ Harry smiles. ‘We’ve got wifi.’

‘No…’ I say.

‘Oh yeah. Tarik’s got wifi. See for yourself. Have you got your phone?’

I do. I check it and there’s a wifi connection. I hit ‘select’ and the internet twirls open in my screen like a paper flower.

‘How the hell’s he managed that?’

‘He works in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform.’

I glance up at Ess, to check that he’s joking. And he is, more or less.

Ess and Harry start talking again, and after a polite pause I scuttle back to the shed. Sitting on my sleeping bag, next to the dead-umbrella tangle of my mosquito net, I open my tablet, link it also to the magical wifi connection, and login to my email account.

Three messages. None, somewhat ominously, work related.

Again I think about contacting Martin Cantor – about checking in, sending an update. But the thought of tapping away at a message to him in the hot storage shed is unexpectedly repellent, shameful, even. I think: I’ll do it later.

A message from Alice.

And a message from Daniel.

And a message from Michael – the elder and the bigger dick of my two dick older brothers. This one, for some reason, I open at once.

‘hey steve! hope you’re having fun out there with crazy ess!! how is the old nutjob? foaming at the mouth yet?? howling at the monsoon moon???’

There are no real surprises here. My brother Michael is well known for his trade in this sort of weak, jokey viciousness. My brother Peter is the same. I honestly don’t know what’s wrong with them. Mum says they suffer from ‘an excess of high spirits’,
which isn’t it at all. Dad doesn’t say anything. Suggest to him that (at least) two of his three sons are unusually nasty pieces of work and he doesn’t contradict you – he’s not that sort of bloke – but he smiles, with deflecting creases of his mild, round, wax-white face.

Still, re-reading the email, I can’t help myself.

‘Oh, you dick,’ I mutter softly, almost wonderingly. ‘Oh, you
fucking
dick.’

Yes, that’s right, Raymond Ess went mad, ha ha ha.

Is it funny? This is funny: I thought he had a cold. For about two weeks in March last year he came into work with red eyes and a blocked-sinus voice and a tendency to trail off in the middle of whatever he was saying then spend a long time blowing his nose. For about two weeks that was it: he just couldn’t seem to stop blowing his nose.

Then he went off for a couple of weeks. I spent the time helping out back in HR – back under the mild auspices of Marie, who, as I’ve said, I didn’t mind at all – and guessed he was taking it easy in bed with an extra blanket and a hot lemon drink.

Early in April he came back to work, but didn’t seem better. If anything, he seemed quite a bit worse. His face looked as if it had been lightly peeled; his voice sounded trapped in his guts – hollowly resonating in his bowels. In his new, gaspy boom he began sentences that didn’t trail off but rattled on and on along unmappable tracks, sentences that started off being about the day’s meetings then went on to consider the nature of days, the nature of meetings, man and his improbable lot. He began talking about Eunice, his ex-wife, which he’d not done before, when she’d still been his wife.

He talked about the collapse of their marriage, which had largely taken place the year before, and which he’d barely mentioned
to me – barely exhibited any sign of – at the time. He talked about the separation, the trial period, the effort made by both parties to salvage what of the union could be salvaged (nothing, it transpired). He defended Eunice vigorously. Whatever she’d done, she’d done with the best of reason. He understood exactly why she’d left him; he upheld her decision in every particular. To say that she’d left him was not strictly accurate, given that Eunice still lived with the girls in the house in Montacute while he for the last nine months had been renting a two-room flat in Yeovil, but I saw no need to point this out. He wouldn’t have listened anyway. By then he was far too busy explaining Eunice’s superb reasons for leaving him, chief among them the fact that he was not, nor had ever been, ‘a spirited lover’.

‘And that’s true, you know,’ he gasped and boomed, with a vibrating sort of nod, ‘she’s quite right to say it. Never a truer word spoken, as far as I’m concerned.’

It was about this time I realised there was something pretty seriously wrong with him. Ess had always enjoyed risqué conversation, but nothing like this, so personal, so private. Now he seemed unable to talk about anything else. If it wasn’t man and his earthly destiny it was the paltriness of his amatory technique. If I tried to lead the conversation back to work matters he grew irritable and glared at me with his nose violently twitching until I shut up and let him get back to how crap he’d always been at cunnilingus or whatever.

‘You have to tell someone,’ Alice said, when I raised the subject with her one night.

‘I’m telling you, aren’t I?’

‘You have to tell someone else.’

‘Such as who?’

‘Would there be any point talking to his wife?’

‘Eunice?’ Eunice Ess: I’d only ever seen her at the Resolute Christmas Dinner, high and hard and haughty on the stage next
to Ess while he made his speech, like the painted wooden prow of a Viking longship. Once or twice I’d spoken to her, exchanged chill party pleasantries, held the tips of her long fingers; she’d seemed to me perfectly pleasant, with a nice unexpected raucous woof of a laugh, but obviously it was impossible – unthinkable – that I would talk to her, about Ess or anything else. ‘No,’ I said to Alice. ‘Oh, no, no…’

‘Does he have kids?’

‘He does.’ Esther and Krista. The owlish twin faces that haunted every surface of the Perfume Counter with their ribbons and bows, their enamelled fringes, their unearthly pallor. I’d never met Esther, but I’d met Krista. One day I walked into his office and she was there – some arrangement or other had fallen through – sitting curled in a chair at his desk, drawing in a large sketchbook. Visibly discomfited, Ess tried to introduce us, to make the odd situation less odd. He didn’t succeed. And it wasn’t really that the situation was weird; it was Krista who was weird. She refused to leave the room, refused to respond to either of us in any way, only worked continuously in her sketchbook, drawing something with sullen concentration. And then at the end of the day she uncurled her legs, sprang from her chair, ran round the desk to kiss Ess on the cheek, and said to us both with great gulps of passion, ‘Thank you, thank you! I’ve had such a
lovely
day.’

The look on his face then, clenched, ridged, gritted – it was a look of terror. The holy terror of his daughter-love.

Krista was, I think, twenty-one at the time.

‘I’m not talking to his kids,’ I told Alice.

‘Well then someone at work. Could you tell someone at Resolute?’

‘Such as who? And tell them what? “Ess has gone a bit wonky now his divorce is final”?’

‘Do you think that’s what it is?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe. It could be that.’

I kept thinking he would get better, but he didn’t. In the office he started reading aloud to me from the love letters Eunice had written him in the early days of their courtship: ‘“My dearest one,”’ he intoned in his hollow boom, the paper trembling between his fingers, ‘“I have been thinking all night about what you said to me at the pavilion yesterday, and I have decided you are right. Mitch and Gwen are slow, dull, lapidary people, pleasant after their fashion but quite incapable of fineness of feeling…”’