The Weightless World (9 page)

Soon afterwards he contracted a private investigator to ‘keep friendly tabs’ – as he put it – on Eunice. A couple of times the man appeared at the Perfume Counter and then I had to sit excruciated while the two of them went through the photos he’d taken. Ess tried to involve me in these examinations, recommending the pictures on their artistic merits. ‘You know, Bill here in his day was an absolutely exceptional wildlife photographer,’ he told me. I looked at a few of the pictures (Eunice in a café, Eunice in her car, Eunice half-dressed in a bathroom window) and I could see what he meant. The private investigator clearly enjoyed his work as much as he did Ess’s praises. A jaunty, jowly fellow, given to shrill bursts of decorative whistling – birdcalls and birdsong – he laid his glossy snaps across the desk as if preparing a complicated card trick.

I kept thinking it was just the divorce, kept thinking that Ess was having a funny turn, going through a funny phase, while he absorbed the reality of his divorce, and once he’d done that he would quickly rally and get back to normal. It wasn’t true, and I knew it wasn’t true. But while I could entertain the thought I could maintain my position of not having to do anything. While he was just having a turn, going through a phase, there was nothing to do anything about.

Except it wasn’t just his divorce. It was also work, the company, the slow death of Resolute Aviation. For years his attitude towards Resolute’s troubles had been whimsical, if not
outright cavalier; only now it gained the brittleness, the clanging hardness of denial. After a genuinely terrifying episode in the office one morning – the quickening gasp, the gnawing twitch – I decided I would ask him no more direct questions about the company’s future. Others were not so mindful (not so cowed, or cowardly), and Ess’s meetings with the board soon became unminutable, unbearable. The questions Martin Cantor put to him during these meetings were not merely reasonable, but urgently legitimate; nonetheless for a while I hated the man, hated the way he pushed, the way he insisted, until Ess could do nothing but snap, snarl, scream and shout. More than anything else about those meetings, I remember Ess’s pain. I don’t know how the rest of them managed not to see it, the pain he was in, the twists of the agony.

It was in one of these meetings that he finally reached crisis point: that things came to their head. By this time (late July) there had already been any number of public and semi-public embarrassments, slanging matches spilling out into the corridors, gaining momentum in the car park. Ess had denounced Cantor, belittled him in front of colleagues, berated him in the presence of clients; yet all this had been tolerated. Whatever Ess threw at him Cantor blinked into it, with a mild boyish flush, then said no more than could defensibly be said. The crisis point, the breaking point, came in a meeting of the company’s senior executives and their PAs (the likes of me – the mutes, the untouchables). It was a cool summer morning, the bickering in which Ess and Cantor were locked making its familiar pitter-patter, nothing apparently too serious, their wrangling over detail hardly worth paying attention to, when Ess rose to his feet, his face a grinning mask of baffled agony, and he said, not even very loudly, but quietly, tractably, almost endearingly:

‘Shut up, you awful little cunt, before I fuck you like I never fucked my wife. Do you hear? Shut up before I fuck you, and I fuck you, like I never even fucked my wife.’

It wasn’t a silence that followed this speech but a void, a gulf. Ess looked around the room with eager eyes; then he glanced down at the table, which he began thoughtfully to tap. When the board member sitting next to him stood, spoke into his ear, nodded towards the door, Ess moved away from the table and walked out with him, still not looking up.

I don’t know why it wasn’t me who stood, spoke into his ear, led him to safety. It just wasn’t. I just sat there. And when I finally got up to leave the meeting, straightening my jacket, patting my files together, all the glances my way were sympathetic.

That afternoon I was called to a small conference room on the ground floor of the main office complex. I sat facing Martin Cantor, his sneering PA, and another woman who didn’t at any point say anything and who typed at a laptop all the while I was in the room. This was, in fact, my first ever conversation with Cantor. I hated him; I trembled with an urge to knock him down, to tell him that Ess was right, he was a cunt and he should shut his cunt mouth. But Ess wasn’t right. Cantor wasn’t a cunt. And for the duration of the meeting I heard myself desperately, cravenly trying to ingratiate myself with Martin Cantor.

The next morning Ess didn’t come in. I made a start on rearranging the office filing system. I kept thinking that I should give him a ring, though this was one of the things Cantor had specifically told me not to do (‘I don’t think we want to be bothering him right now with phone calls, emails, any of that. Anything that could be seen as our being, you know, not quite
sympathetic
’). Obviously, I should have called him anyway. I should have gone straight round to his two-room flat and done whatever he needed me to do. But I didn’t. I didn’t call, didn’t go round.

By the end of the week I’d been drawn again into the fold of HR. I kept an eye on Ess’s phone calls and email accounts, same as usual, but here too I had my instructions: anything of interest that came in I was to refer directly to Martin Cantor. Which I did, at first with visceral spikings of remorse, then soon robotically, unblinkingly.

And the next thing I knew Ess had taken six months leave and bought a plane ticket to India.

‘A-ha!
There
you are!’

I’m still swearing over Michael’s email when Ess comes striding back into the shed, crouches over his suitcase, unzips it and begins vigorously rummaging through. He says, ‘I hope you brought your swimmers.’

‘Why do you hope that?’

‘Because you’re going to need them. Come on. Look sharp.’

Harry, waiting outside with his toiletries bag, is at least slightly more helpful. ‘We thought we’d have a look at the river.’

With our bags Ess, Harry and I leave the triangle of the storage sheds. We mill about, making false start after false start; I squint again at that odd collection of shapes, foundations or ruins, long, dark oblong hulks exposed to the sun, but fail to make any more sense of it. At last the plain starts to green and we find a slope that scutters and scabs its way down to a clutch of dry trees, a bit of grassy riverbank and a broad passage of almost motionless brown water.

Ess says, ‘Last one in’s a drain-snaker’s glove.’

‘This is a good idea, is it?’ I look from Ess to Harry then back again.

‘Swim in it.’ Ess slaps my shoulder. ‘Just, you know, try not to drink it.’

Very disconcertingly, Ess and Harry start to undress. There’s nothing to do about this except pretend to become suddenly fascinated by the branches crisscrossing overhead (wires, tungsten filaments of shade; but shade, anyway). The next time I look round the two men are in their trunks – Ess’s red and flared and goading as a matador’s cape, Harry’s a pinch of too-tight pea-green – hopping about at the edge of the water, putting a toe in, taking a toe out. In the end it’s Harry who coughs ritually into each bunched fist, measures half a dozen paces back from the brink, then starts forward at a lumbering run, his belly a bagged dog trying to escape drowning in every direction it can think of, then leaps and vanishes with a smash into the water.

This before I can suggest we check the depth or make sure there’s not a ziggurat of tin cans at the bottom or any of that boring stuff.

A moment later he resurfaces as if lifting a trapdoor of water, splashing, laughing, evidently having neither smashed his head open nor gashed his shins. His naked eyes are tiny, straining, comically vulnerable. His beard seems to have disappeared; then you see the gunpowder trails on his cheeks and neck, the smoky meniscus wobbling under his chin.

I teeter in after him and for half an hour or so tread the numb water. Ess, meanwhile, enters the river last and leaves it first. He wades out up to his waist, briskly scoops water over his chest and head then returns to the bank to loll in his sunglasses and snooze and dry off. Harry goes on swimming, loosely circling against the current.

Midday comes and goes. On the riverbank, in the wiry shade of the trees, we eat lunch – another bourgeois picnic from the wicker-lined deeps of Harry’s backpack – then Ess drops off under his hat, Harry disappears with a stick along the river, and
I’m smoking a cigarette, fiddling with my tablet, emailing Alice to set up a Skype date for this evening, when a shadow thuds into the grass beside me and I see that Asha has joined us.

She yawns. ‘Is there any food?’

I close my tablet and point at the remains of our picnic. ‘Breakfast is served.’

‘Hilarious,’ she says, sorting through the picnic plates. ‘You remember I drove for fifteen hours straight yesterday.’

Asha finds a chicken leg, holds it up to the light for a moment, as if looking for a maker’s mark, then begins cautiously to eat it, using only the outermost planes of her teeth. And then, because he’s on my mind, and because for the first time since we arrived he’s not breathing benevolently down my neck, I say, ‘So Harry, eh?’

‘What about him?’

‘Well… he’s a
case
, isn’t he?’

‘I’m sure I wouldn’t know.’

‘Does he do this a lot? Tag along on your trips, that sort of thing?’

‘I wouldn’t say “a lot”.’

‘Why do you think he wanted to come along this time, then?’

‘I’ve no idea.’ And her face turns to me with a bland look that has a blazing line of fire right through it. ‘Why do
you
think he did?’

‘Christ, I’ve no idea either. I’m just talking…’

‘No, please tell me. Clearly you have thoughts on the matter. Why do
you
think Harry chose to come on this trip? What maniacal purpose do you think cleared his diary? What unscrupulous motive do you suppose packed his bag?’

‘I’ve no thoughts on the matter,’ I say. ‘I’m just making pleasant conversation.’

‘Are you? I’m never sure about you.’ She leans towards me, squints into my face. I hold in my smoke until she leans back, sniffs. ‘Your eyes are weird.’

‘So I hear.’

‘Bits and pieces, whirling around.’

‘My girlfriend says they look like something exploding.’ Only Alice doesn’t say this; I’ve just made it up. Why?

‘Like a sandstorm, like a blizzard,’ she says emphatically, as if telling me off. ‘How the world must look through such eyes. It’s a wonder you can see anything at all.’

We’re sitting on the riverbank, the four of us, sitting or lying in the tungsten shade, Harry in the middle of a colourful and vaguely improving story from his Baltimore youth (a stolen car, a friend’s drug-addict father), when I notice Tarik approaching. At the same time I notice that the sky behind him has, if not exactly darkened, dulled or cooled, lost its seething white-hotness. What time is it? Is it evening? Is it night?

Tarik marches past us to the edge of the water, kneels, removes his specs and lays them on the grass at his side, then sweeps three quick handfuls of water into his face, a fourth over his head, into his hair. Then he picks up his specs, stands and turns towards us, water streaming down his face, swirling over his lips, whorling in the stubble. He takes the hem of his kurta and begins using it carefully to clean the lenses of his specs.

For a while no one says anything. Tarik seems to have this effect. Last night, during our introductions, he greeted each of us with a curt nod that made clear he had no interest in hearing what any of us might have to say. I suppose a genius would probably come off like this, especially one living in perpetual fear of his being hunted down and killed by agents of his nefarious
former employers. But then (I further suppose) so would a cheat, a con artist working an elaborate scam on a wealthy lunatic.

‘Good evening, Tarik,’ Ess now says, his cheer for once not carrying well – faltering, failing in the rivery air.

‘Hey, Tarik,’ Harry says, his elderly murmur for once elastic, assured.

Asha says nothing. Merely stares at him, as if at an image on a screen.

‘Hey, Tarik,’ I say, feeling I should say something; then, realising my intonation has trapped me into saying something else: ‘How’d you get wifi out here? I mean it’s great and everything… but how’d you do it?’

He looks at me. ‘I steal it.’ He finishes cleaning his specs, slots them back onto his face and says, ‘Let’s eat. And then, if you wish, I will demonstrate my machine.’

Under the cooling sky Tarik leads us towards his cabin. I’m wondering if he’s going to invite us in, serve us dinner in the secret interior of that metalled shell; then I see the ground in front of it is covered by a dusty carpet of flung-about rugs, an informal arrangement of place settings. Asha drops onto one of the rugs with a martial-arts-looking roll and sits inspecting her feet. Ess, smiling at nothing, folds his legs into the rug next to Asha’s. Harry bobs downwards, as if to sit, then goes on awkwardly standing. I go on standing too. For some reason, it’s weird to sit down. But now it’s also weird to stand because Asha and Ess are sitting down. Tarik ducks into his cabin, ducks out again with bowls of curried beans and rice and bottles of water. At this point abruptly it’s not weird to sit down any more and I sink into a rug and so does Harry.

Then for a while it’s the Mumbai roof terrace all over again – though minus the forks clicks, because Tarik doesn’t have or doesn’t give us any forks. We eat with our fingers in an unevenly shared silence. Finally Ess murmurs, ‘Quite the feast, this, Tarik.’

Tarik looks at him. He adjusts his specs with odd, flickery gestures, a stop-motion or slipping-pause-button stutteriness, then says, ‘It’s rice and beans.’

‘Yes, of course I realise that.’ Ess attempts one of his razzamatazz grins. ‘But what beans! What rice!’

No one laughs. Tarik nods then looks down at his food. We all carry on eating.

I keep glancing up at Tarik. And I return to the question I began considering earlier: What is he? Somehow the idea that he’s a conman – a conman
as such
– doesn’t quite fit. Surely if he were a conman
as such
he would have some of the swagger, the blithe flash of the high-stakes criminal. And Tarik doesn’t have that, doesn’t have that at all. He flickers, he stutters. He’s like a nervy postgrad running late for a deadline.

Which leaves what? A fantasist, a crackpot? Some bedroom-dwelling fanboy long lost to the digiscapes of his franchise movies and the lasersights of his games? That is, a hyperindulged product of India’s burgeoning middle class, a souring and a mangling of new-minted privileges, a messiah-complex tech junkie camping out in a wilderness bought and paid for with his parents’ new-minted money? Sort of thing?

Or what? A lunatic – a simple lunatic? That stop-motion, slipping-pause-button way of his could be an indicator of lunacy, though a quiet, inward, somehow
not very interesting
lunacy. But then (I think) all we need out here is another madman.

There’s something else: something I’m missing. But before I can track it down Tarik is standing, sliding his hands into his pockets, nodding at some point across the plain, saying blandly, ‘I think we’re ready for the demonstration.’

As the first dim swirls of evening start to show in the sky, we set off across the plain. It’s soon clear that Tarik is leading us towards that collection of shapes I’ve seen during the day, those dark oblongs exposed to the sky, which turn out to be six huge concrete blocks arranged in a circle, their shorter ends pointing inwards and outwards, like the aftermath of a gigantic domino run, like a toppled Stonehenge. The blocks are strange, immediately but obscurely strange, and I get so interested in working out why
that I miss the first few minutes of Tarik’s commentary on what we’re looking at.

I catch him referring to the place as his ‘test site’. The blocks – he calls them ‘casts’ – are each belted with a rope and a wire. Leading us round the outside edge of the circle, round the outward faces of the six blocks, he shows us how each cast is tied by a rope that is in turn tied to a steel stake driven into the ground. Leading us through the gap between two casts, he then takes us round the inside edge of the circle, round the inward faces of the blocks, and shows us how each cast is tied by a wire that web-tremours its way into a machine mounted on a platform at the exact centre of the circle. Without taking his hands out of his pockets he indicates the machine and we all look at it. It resembles a very, very primitive cassette player.

‘There it is,’ Ess confirms, as if no one else has quite noticed the thing. He’s excited, but mindfully doing his best to control himself – after all, he has, or believes he has, had this tour before.

‘So,’ I say to Tarik, who happens to be standing next to me, ‘these blocks, these “casts”, they’re…?’

‘They’re blocks. They’re casts.’

‘Yeah…?’

‘Swimming-pool casts. Casts of swimming pools.’ He looks at me. Then goes on in the quick-fire monotone of someone who has just said exactly what they’re saying now: ‘I bought six identical swimming-pool skins, filled each with concrete and then stripped the skin away to produce six casts in precisely the same material of precisely the same dimensions. My reasons for doing so are technical and without significance to the layman.’

It sounds improbable, impossible. Then I look more closely and I see this is what’s so strange about the blocks: the round corners, the ladder-shaped incisions that show they were moulded in swimming-pool skins and that render them coolly, surreally identical.

‘How did they get here?’ I ask.

‘I brought them here.’

‘How? From where?’

But Tarik is no longer talking to me, instead impatiently addressing the group: ‘For the purposes of this demonstration, I have attached all six casts to a single machine. Each is attached by its own tether. There’s no special reason why there are six. It isn’t a limit or an optimum or any such thing. There could be fewer, there could be more. As many as you like. So long as each is attached by its own tether. In any case, here there are six.’

Not much of a public speaker, then – no oily hoaxer’s patter. Which leaves crackpot, does it?

A crackpot who has somehow transported six unbelievably massive concrete blocks to the middle of the wilderness.

Which leaves crackpot plus trust fund, does it?

Or what?

Tarik says, ‘I will now begin the demonstration.’

He walks to the platform; he reaches for the machine. Everything that’s happening now is interesting, almost unbearably interesting. The evening clouds taking shape above us, the plain shadows extending around us, the air dimming, thickening with concealment, right in front of our eyes; all this is interesting. I smile (I can’t help myself) and look about for the wires, the extra wires, the fishing-line supports; the platforms, the extra platforms, the camouflaged hydraulic rods and beds. Is it dark enough yet that there could be a crane somewhere – that there could be six cranes? I’m smiling, looking about, high and low, eager for a glimpse of the secret mechanism of the illusion to come.

My smiling look falls on Ess. The expression on his face is indescribable. Like a child who… like a saint who… But it’s indescribable.

I look at Asha, standing next to him with her arms folded and chin raised, expectant, waiting to be convinced. I look at Harry,
standing a little further away. There’s nothing very remarkable about the expression on his face – a big boyish American grin – but somehow it reminds me, with a flash of distant panic, of all the questions I still have about Harry. Why is he here? What is he up to? Who, in fact, is he? He doesn’t make sense, doesn’t fit together. And there’s the feeling I’ve had before, that there is something about Harry Harry is hiding, something important critically encoded by the specs and the beard, by the whole shaggy-dog demeanour, that there is a whole other man standing and grinning in the disguise of this other one’s flesh…

I look at Tarik, his fingers trembling on the machine’s control panel. I look at the six concrete blocks, huge, dark. And now I’m not just interested, I’m excited. I’m thrumming with excitement, with awful, stomach-churning hope and dread, wanting, wishing, willing the blocks to move, to rise, to lift from the earth in silent, miraculous flight…

Tarik throws the switch.

At first, nothing happens. Dark air swirls round six concrete hulks.

Then nothing happens. The heaving shadows, the soughing plain.

Then Tarik says, ‘All right. Uh, sorry. We’ve got a fault.’

Still none of us can breathe. Then Ess says, ‘A fault?’

‘I thought this might happen.’ Tarik’s expression is grim. ‘There was a chance. Eighty-twenty if not fifty-fifty. Maybe seventy-thirty. I was trying a shortcut, trying to avoid a complete fix, but… looks like I’ll have to do a complete fix.’

‘And that’ll take…?’ Ess is wrenching back his sleeve, groping for his watch.

‘A few hours. I won’t be able to run the demonstration now until morning. Or later. Some time tomorrow.’

The thrumming drains from me, a series of sharp, bitter shocks. A fault – a glitch – a delay – a postponement. Obviously. Well, obviously.

But the sudden drain-off has left a trace in me, a rough sediment that scores my guts, that rasps my skin. I’m hurt, suddenly. I’m in a peculiar sort of pain.

‘Tomorrow.’ Ess sags, crumples. In an instant he appears to shed about two-thirds of his body mass. He attempts a gesture – rising shoulders, spreading hands – but it fails to cohere. ‘Oh, well. That’s…’

Asha drifts towards him and places a hand on his elbow. The hand lingers; then she removes it and drifts away. At no point during this contact did either one of them look at the other. And this, I think, is fairly interesting too.

‘Poor Ess!’ says Alice.

I’m sitting in the storage shed with my tablet in my lap and my eyes moving rapidly between the screen and the open door. After the failed demonstration Tarik retreated to his cabin and Harry invited everyone else to join him for a nightcap at his camp. I made my usual excuses, scuttled back here to keep my nine o’clock Skype date, but I have a feeling that Ess won’t be far behind, and I don’t like the idea of his walking in on me when Alice and I are saying we love each other or whatever. From where I’m sitting I can’t quite see Harry’s camp, but I should at least have a good view of Ess before he makes it in through the door.

‘Don’t feel too sorry for him,’ I say. ‘He got over it in like a
minute
. Like a
minute
later he was carousing round the campfire, joking, singing… He’s tougher than you think.’

‘Is he?’ Said as if it were I, not she, who underestimated Ess’s resilience. ‘And isn’t it funny how he’s been right about
everything? He said you’d go to such and such a place and meet Tarik Kundra, and you go there, and there Tarik Kundra is…’

‘There’s a guy here called Tarik Kundra. Proves nothing.’

‘You don’t think he’s an inventor then, or…?’

‘I think he
thinks
he’s an inventor. But if you’re asking do I think he’s invented this, this machine… no, I don’t. Obviously I don’t.’ This comes out more abrasively than I intend. But I can’t seem to help myself. The wound, the peculiar scorches in my guts.

Alice raises her eyebrows. ‘Do you think he’s lying?’

‘Not
lying
… It’s like half the time he’s not here. And I don’t mean the time he spends hiding in his cabin, I mean when he’s standing right in front of you. It’s like… he’s low-def. Like he’s missing some pixels. A few dots, a few specks…’

‘You’re making me feel sorry for him. Poor bloke! Poor Tarik!’ She laughs: those booming
ho ho hos
(where do they come from – out of what barrels, what tunnels, what deep-girded chambers?). ‘You’ll look out for him though, won’t you? ‘

‘I’ll what?’

‘Make sure Ess doesn’t run rings round him. Take poor Tarik for a ride.’

‘Where’s “poor Tarik” come from? What happened to “poor Ess”?’ And – while we’re talking about it – what happened to poor
Steven
?

‘You said it yourself, Ess is tough. He probably doesn’t realise how tough he is, or when he’s being tough on other people. You’ve said enough times he’s tough on you… Just don’t let him be too tough on poor Tarik.’

‘I literally don’t know what we’re talking about now.’

She laughs again: more Father Christmas booms. It strikes me, not for the first time, that it is
she
who is running rings round
me
– which admittedly she has opportunity to do quite a lot. In fact I mind this much less than she seems to think I do. Alice
is clever; it’s just how she is. But the way she always swerves to puncture anything she says that could be construed as being even remotely clever (a sputter of trail dots, an artfully aimed obscenity, booming laughter) makes me wonder occasionally about the history of her cleverness, the history of its reception, of how people have taken it.

Certainly it can be unsettling – Alice’s cleverness. When she’s working,
thinking
, sitting at her desk with her laptop and all her papers and books, it’s like another presence in the room, a weight on the air, a steely vibration or hum, a threading of migraine. Usually I can cope with it, but sometimes it builds up and up in my head like the bandwidth of a pylon and I just have to stop what I’m doing and get out of the flat and stay out until she’s finished
thinking
. It’s weird. Though the really weird bit is, when I come back she’s always hugely apologetic. As if there’s something wrong with her, when it’s perfectly obvious that there’s something wrong with me.
It’s not your fault, it’s my fault
, I want to say, on these occasions. Though I don’t say it, haven’t ever yet said it. I’m not entirely sure why.

Alice says, ‘Let’s talk about something else. Did you get Daniel’s email?’

‘I did.’ That’s right: I did, didn’t I? I was going to open it, read it. But somehow this didn’t happen – this hasn’t happened. ‘Yup, yep. Pleased to see that.’

‘Anything you’d like me to pass along?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I’m seeing him tomorrow, so if you want to reply in any sort, I could…’

‘I can reply myself.’

‘You can?’

‘I’ll send him an email.’

‘I just thought if you were too busy, or…’

‘I’m not too busy. I’ll do it.’

‘He’d appreciate that. I think he’s got worked up over this Bangalore situation. The bombs, the… well, you’ve read his email, haven’t you?’

‘Yup, yep.’ I nod mechanically.