Next, Harold and Linda were teleported to the corner of Nytorgsgatan. Two police officers in a parked Volvo were keeping an eye on the hole. One of them opened a thermos and poured himself a cup of thick pea soup.
After a while they turned on their flashing lights and drove off.
Harold and Linda moved closer to the gaping hole.
“Why are we here again?” she said. “What can we do, Harold?”
“Don’t you understand, Linda? This whole city is going to disappear. All our friends, every person living here is blissfully unaware of the fact that there’s a yawning gulf just below their feet. We have to call someone.”
“All right. Tell me who, then?”
“I don’t know.”
They stood in silence. The icy wind assaulted them, like a blast from infinity.
Next, Harold was watching a televised image of a landing strip at an airport, with a monstrous jet plane looming just above it, its wheels touching the tarmac with a little puff of smoke. Without an explosion, acrid smoke or flames, even without a sound, the runway ripped like a huge piece of paper and the plane disappeared. The police were quickly on the scene. A tarpaulin the size of a football pitch was stretched across the runway. Witnesses were rounded up and taken away in coaches.
The evening news bulletin reported that a group of anarchists had tried to dupe the general public with a cowardly trick. The airline had sent its spokesman to the news studio.
“There’s been no loss of planes, so it seems rather redundant to speak of an air disaster, wouldn’t you agree?” said the spokesman. “We are living in a world that is being taken over by terrorists and other elements actively working against democracy, equality, and other civilized values.”
A few moments later the Prime Minister appeared to make a statement. It ran from his mouth like gravy: “We are talking of a plane that does not exist, hundreds of witnesses that do not exist, a hundred and fifty passengers that no one has managed to name. In other words, we are talking of a staged, simulated event, a trick organized by a group of a highly motivated and dangerous individuals, all of whom will be hunted down, arrested and punished vigorously through our legal system.”
That same night, Harold and Linda packed clothes and food in a rucksack and took the back door out of the apartment block, exiting via the stinking refuse room in the basement.
Two hours later a group of plain-clothes police officers arrived, kicked in the door and submitted the whole flat to a careful search, even ripped the sofa apart and took up the floorboards and looked in suitcases for secret compartments.
When they found nothing, they concluded that Harold and Linda were part of a terrorist cell.
Having spent his whole life longing for more space, Harold now found himself living under the open sky among a group of people who’d taken refuge in the Greenstone Mountains of Västerbotten, close to the Arctic Circle.
A geologist from Uppsala University had advised them that the earth’s crust was older and deeper here. Here, if anywhere, they would have firm ground under their feet until the end of time.
Behind them, Stockholm had already collapsed into the abyss.
Linda was a changed woman. She was tougher and more resourceful, always sewing or making ingenious devices for cooking over open fires, with a train of children behind her, always one at her breast and several more hanging at her skirts.
Harold had to admit that their children were very lovable. As for Linda, now that she had her children she seemed less concerned about Harold. He was a spent force, a cracked amphora whose value had been proved, although lately eclipsed by these small growing entities whose significance was infinite and almost cosmic.
Sometimes Harold reflected that he would never again walk along city streets, browsing for CDs or renewing his insurance policy at the broker’s. Such things were now obsolete. Along with everything else, they had gone down the hole.
One day a fleet of military helicopters arrived, landing on a piece of level ground and disgorging a number of Ministers and high public officials with their assorted wives, husbands and families. The politicians did not speak to the settlers, merely threw embarrassed glances in their direction. In no time at all they had built a palisade and, within it, a village of strong, timbered houses with proper stone chimneys. Guards were placed at the gates.
The government announced a public meeting, at which the Prime Minister set about justifying his policies. As soon as the Cabinet had found out about the hole, he explained, it was thought more merciful to keep the truth from the people. This was partly to avoid panic. After all, the entire population could not have emigrated to the mountaintops of Västerbotten.
The Prime Minister also reported that all the major cities of the world had fallen into the bottomless void. Who knew where the Eiffel Tower was now, or Big Ben?
Maybe one day the planet would spew forth lava and build new continents. When this happened, the human race would come down from the mountains and build a new Jerusalem based on the same Grecian ideals.
The years passed. Disease and starvation were widespread among the settlers. The bureaucrats, with their solid houses and well-stocked warehouses behind the palisade, had an abundance of food and medicine. Occasionally they would make a grand gesture and donate some medicine to a dying settler outside the walls.
Sometimes at night Harold could hear the politicians standing on prominent rocks, practicing the speeches they would make on the day the first foundation stone was laid for the reconstruction of Stockholm.
VI
He woke from the dream at three in the morning. Outside, a storm was hammering the building. The gods were angry.
Harold looked for Linda but she was not in the bed and not in the bathroom either. Then he remembered that she had gone. Probably she was staying with her sister in Solna, but he knew he mustn’t telephone her there, or ask her to come home. Linda was not like that. Leaving, for her, had been a final gesture. Harold closed his eyes and tried not to cry. Things snapped sharply into focus, like new-broken glass.
At first he had an absurd vision: he saw the lady with the shopping trolley, falling through the air and occasionally making a slow revolution. In her hand she held an umbrella, like a sort of Mary Poppins figure in a neatly buttoned blue overcoat, her hair held in place by a hat and hat-pins. She still had not reached the bottom of the hole! Her eyes were wide-open, more in amazement than terror.
Then, as he moved in closer, he recognized Linda’s features, so familiar yet out of reach.
Even as she fell, she grew aware of him and looked over with a hurt, disappointed expression. There was a finality there, a realization that nothing could be changed.
Harold understood that he had created the bottomless hole, and now his Linda would be falling forever.
MY WORLD IS LIMITATION, HAS BEEN LIMITATION FROM BEGINNING TO END. I’ve gotten used to it. The first time I saw a woman naked I looked at her and thought, “My God, it’s not what I thought!” And when I went to the obligatory places for the first time—Venice, Paris, Barcelona—they struck me as self-conscious arenas designed for the tourist to come and buy a postcard. Consumed, empty theatres.
At any rate, when I woke in the morning in my friend’s house, I wasn’t prepared for the utter brilliance of it all. He had bought acres of derelict houses in a tumbledown medieval town in Sardinia, then somehow managed to persuade the authorities to let him knock them all together and build a big white pod that dwarfed everything else in the town.
All his architectural ideas were invested in that building.
There were stark concrete terraces with overhanging Tibetan eaves and carved dragon’s heads; arrangements of terracotta pots with flowering plants; teak decking; plunge pools of fragrant juniper wood imported from Finland; a library with built-in bookcases; a secret door to the music room; a snooker room where the green baize of the table was always brushed, the symmetrical polished balls pristine as a Derbyshire tea-set; overlooked by a donnish bar stocked with every conceivable malt whisky, behind it a vulgar touristic map in the background, framed in dark wood, displaying “The Great Whiskies of the Auld Country.”
“How the heck did you get planning permission for this?” I asked him, and he laughed with that anything-can-be-done expression of the land of his birth, California.
“Never ever ask an architect how he swung the fucking planning application,” he oozed, almost breaking into an oily sweat at the thought of his triumph. “If against your better judgment you do ask, don’t have any illusions about getting the truth, because you won’t get it.” Before I could respond, he added: “You know, sometimes decay works in your favor. I told them this street would fall down if nothing was done. My builders saved fifteen houses adjoining this building.”
“So that’s the truth, then?”
“Plus I offered an anonymous donation to the municipality.”
“If you have money there are no problems, only solutions.”
There was something petulant in my voice when I said that. I was a penniless Londoner, flown in to visit my big-shot friend. He had always approved of me, said I was a “genuine phoney,” a phrase he stole from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. He’s not concerned with originality, he’s a straight-talking Jimmy from Sacramento and nothing ever went wrong in his life.
“That’s not quite true. Money is simplistic, kind of like a lens. If you have money you’re looking through one lens, and if you don’t you’re looking through another. But neither is true.”
“That’s profound, Jimmy. Profound. But I still don’t understand what the hell possessed you to live here. What do you do here? Don’t you get bored?”
“Bored? Sure I get bored. I get bored anywhere, Chuck. Boredom …” he muttered, frowning as his sluggish brain-cells dug into the problem, “…is the human condition. That’s why I’m into form, and structure, and startling buildings. We need all that, we need beauty, Chuck. Or we’re fucking finished.”
We were sitting on a terrace outside his library, an incredible number of swifts and swallows darting over the tiled roofs below us, screaming as they tumbled with great daring through the air. To make things even more scenic, we were drinking green tea out of Chinese hand-bowls. People like Jimmy always employ interior decorators with an ill-disguised hostility towards handles, even door handles… in fact doors altogether are anathema to an architect worth his salt. In design-land, every room has to be open-plan, every little object has to scream out its identity and, above all, the identity of its owner.
There was something bemused about the way Jimmy acceded to design. I genuinely believe he had no aesthetics of his own. He had simply decided to be successful, and after that he’d aped what he saw in magazines, or in his friends. As we stood there talking, I considered the absurdity of a large, fluorescently yellow pig placed daringly against the window. Its bulky balls suggested the message of the piece, something like, “Hey, I’m ugly but I’m full of spunk.” I thought of Jimmy getting up in the morning, calling out to his latest girlfriend before he gets into his station wagon to drive into Los Angeles: “There’s something I gotta do, honey. Gotta get myself that pig, remember the one we saw yesterday? I couldn’t sleep all night, it would just look great in Sardinia. You know my friend Dennis? He’s invested in a Perspex calf. I reckon plastic animals are kind of zeitgeist. Soon they’ll all be extinct and we’re gonna be like that old Indian chief said. Dying of loneliness.”
Jimmy. Always talking about zeitgeist. That bullshit word. Zeitgeist, leitmotif, Forbes Magazine. These were the Holy Trinity.
Everything had been fine for Jimmy until one day he decided a man of substance must have a wife. That was when his problems started.
A wife presented some major disadvantages. A knock-out wife could not be bought or downloaded. Even Jimmy, with his clueless, status-obsessed mind and his concern for the outward appearances of everything, knew that wife acquisition, at its most fundamental, was about what you had to offer inside. You could buff up your inner spirit, pay for a hell of a lot of therapy and spend a substantial amount of time meditating in Himachal Pradesh, but if you were still the sort of person who loathed sharing a toothbrush with your lover, it was unlikely that you would ever make her happy.
Most women, Jimmy had confided in me once, are too into intimacy.
“So beauty, Jimmy. Very big word, that. You think you found it?”
“You dumb shit. You can’t find beauty. You can only be a seeker,” said Jimmy, with a slight flickering of the eyes, signifying he didn’t know what he was talking about.
“Where did you read that?”
“Oh, in some book.” He waddled over to the bar, where he took a few cut-glass tumblers from a cabinet, dropped in some ice cubes and filled them with single malt.
“Speaking of beauty, when am I going to meet your wife?”
“Now you’re making assumptions.”
“Well they’re usually beautiful, your women. I’d be bloody impressed if you ever fell for a normal-looking type your own age. I suppose you come down here for the good life? Eat well, go swimming, have a game of tennis in the morning, all that?”
“We don’t live here. I would never live in south-east Sardinia, for Christ’s sake, that would be the end of my career,” said Jimmy. “I do get bored here, but it’s good to be bored sometimes. My brain needs a rest sometimes. I work hard, you know. I even work when I’m sleeping. A good architect has to give people what they want before they know they want it.”
“And your wife likes it here?”
“Why do you have to bring up my wife all the time?”
“I’m curious, for God’s sake. You’re so mysterious about her. And it’s all so recent.”
“Not really. I ran into her about six months ago. Took her for dinner a few times, and then we went to Aspen, hung out, had a few steam-baths.”
“That’s what I mean. One minute you’re a normal thrusting architect building up your firm in Manhattan and doing very nicely. You meet some woman and just like that” (clicking my fingers) “you build yourself a Sardinian palace which to me seems the best thing you’ve ever done.”