The Weightless World (12 page)

‘No, no.’

‘Yes, yes.’

Ess and Tarik are talking. Harry and Asha are talking.

I wander over to the machine on its platform.

The machine is hooked up to a box of ports. The ground is covered with loops of wire. So in fact it’s incredibly easy.

I pull all the wires out of the port box.

I take a fresh loop of wire and plug it into the port box. I tie the wire round my waist.

I look at the machine. It has only one switch. So in fact it’s incredibly easy.

‘Shall I do it? Who thinks I should do it?’

No one has time to stop me. Would they stop me, if they had time?

I throw the switch.

And I swim up in the air, catch on my line and turn and turn and turn in the white sea of the sky.

They bring me down a changed man.

It turns out the soft landing of the blocks was misleading. After a while of Tarik waving up at me and pointing down at the machine, of Asha taking my photograph, of Ess shouting through cupped hands, ‘Try to crumple,’ Tarik presses the switch and I slam down towards the ground. I land feet-first with a splintering impact that surely breaks both my ankles. I say, ‘Ow.’

‘Light as a feather!’ Ess cries, and mimes my descent with fluttering fingers.

I wait for myself to keel over with my broken ankles. But I don’t keel over. My ankles are not broken. I’m not in pain, not even dizzy. Only the ground, the earth, rushing against the soles of my feet.

‘What was it like?’ Ess asks.

‘What was it
like
?’ I free myself from the wire, stagger round a bit, start to laugh.

But they bring me down a changed man.

I stagger about in circles until my feet feel normal, or normalish, then get off to a limping start across the plain.

‘Where are you going?’ Ess shouts.

‘Call of nature,’ I shout back. Which, I suppose, is one way of putting it. One way of describing the urgency that now possesses my mind and body.

We’ve no money.

The machine works and we’ve no money.

As I limp across the plain I try to remember what else Ess said was part of the deal: ‘safe passage out of India’. What’s that? A passport? A visa? Papers – sort of thing? I’m pretty sure Ess explained all this to me in some detail. But at the time I wasn’t listening.

I open the rickety door to the latrine, scuttle inside and drag the door shut after me. I stand in the reek with one hand looped in the bit of string that passes for the door handle while with my other hand I revolve the innards of my phone for Martin Cantor’s number, the number he gave me for use in the event of unease, then hit ‘Call’.

The phone rings, rings. The reek fumes round me.

Rings, rings. The torpid jets, the lazy furnace of the latrine.

Then the ring fillips and an automated voice reconnects me to voicemail.

‘Martin? Hi, this is Steven, Steven Strauss? Uh, call me back. I don’t know what else to say. I’m not in trouble or anything, but uh, we need the money. The money? The account? For Mr Kundra’s fee? We need the bogus account to be uh, not bogus. We need it to be a real account with, with real money in it. I don’t think he’s tried it yet, I mean Ess, so it’s all right, I don’t think he… What I mean is we need to make a deal out here and I’m pretty sure he still
doesn’t know
and so we need the money really as soon as you can manage that. I mean it works. It
works
and we need to
buy
it and we need
the money
… so call me back. Okay. Uh, thanks. Bye.’

The mood of general celebration lasts at least halfway into dinner, which is again rice and beans, again taken on a scramble of rugs under the plain’s water-bright stars. With Asha more or less sitting on his knee, Ess makes a long and hilarious and heartfelt speech;
we all laugh and fall about and clear the corners of our eyes with the heels of our palms. Then he raises his cup – ‘in honour of the genius of our dear friend, a benefactor of humanity and a guardian of the very earth, Tarik Kundra’ – and we all go crawling over the rugs to join our cups to his in a clashy toast. Tarik sits with his sketched-on smile. Ess tries to get him to make a speech as well, but Tarik crumples the idea up in a twisting hand and throws it playfully over his shoulder. We all laugh some more.

Every few seconds, I check my phone. No reply from Martin Cantor yet.

After the toast, the mood drops. It may be no more than everyone realising how tired they are, how pummeled by adrenaline, by the racing chemistry of the day. Ess and Asha fold into their own quiet conversation, Tarik excuses himself and drifts away into his cabin, and Harry and I are left alone on our side of the rugs.

I watch Harry eat, drink, peer across the plain, smile over his thoughts. After a while I realise I’m not sure what I’m looking at. His face is like an optical illusion – a rabbit, a duck; the pouchy bags and random straggles of a well-meaning innocent; the spiked brows and lizard eyes of another sort of man altogether. Harry Altman: who is he again? What kind of man is he? All along I’ve felt it, something about Harry that he’s hiding. Now, whatever it is, the concealed truth of Harry Altman seems close to the surface, close to the spec rims and the beard ends, as if at any moment it might burst into visibility.

At last he sees me looking at him. ‘Great day,’ he says.

‘You think so?’

‘I do indeed.’ He laughs. ‘Today we witnessed a miracle. A grandeur that will cover the earth. I’d say that makes the day pretty great.’ Then he shakes his head and says, ‘I just wish I knew how he did it.’

‘Yoga,’ I say.

‘Huh? Oh, no. You think I mean: How did Tarik make the blocks go up? No, what I mean is: How did Raymond persuade Tarik to make a deal? That’s the interesting question.’

‘Is it?’

‘Boy, I’d like to know what Raymond offered him. For the machine, the plans, the rights, the whole shooting match… I mean, what can that be worth?’

‘You’re asking the wrong guy.’

‘I’m not asking anyone. I’m just saying. The thoroughness of the transformation, the
totalness
of it… what’s that got to be worth? Billions? Billions of billions? The scale of this thing, you need new numbers. You need a new math.’ He laughs one of his bullshit laughs. ‘What do I know? I just hope Raymond’s got deep pockets, is all I’m saying.’

‘Or what?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Or what? If he doesn’t have deep pockets?’

‘Or nothing.’ Harry does his arms-open-in-surrender thing. ‘It’s no concern of mine.’

What is he? CIA? Corporate spy? Horned devil, avenging angel?

‘You’ve got pretty deep pockets yourself, wouldn’t you say, Harry?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘With your “concerns”. Your tour company, your school. “The Harry Altman School for Wayward Girls”. Must be a nice little pile you’ve got put away somewhere.’

‘I’ve got money.’ An earnest blink – so-what, so-kill-me.

‘Must be a fortune.’

‘I wouldn’t say “fortune”.’ He snorts. ‘I’ve got what you may call ‘software money’, but I’m not rich. Sure, it’s relative, say in
Indian
terms… but not so much in American terms. In American terms, in my field, my ex-field, I’m pretty close to average. You
work your window, your five to ten years, you make your “nice little pile”, and you clear the hell out. Guys in my profession, my ex-profession, I could tell you about, not even guys who worked on like
Skype
… Wow. I mean “Wow”. No, I’m par for the course. I only perhaps in my hubris like to think it’s what I do with my “nice little pile” that’s not quite so par for the course.’

He says this as if expecting a round of applause or something. I stare at him. Harry sits nodding to himself.

Then he says, ‘Is it funny I still think about things like that in American terms?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘It’s not funny.’

‘No,’ he says, ‘I guess not.’

‘Why are you here, Harry?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Why are you here?’

‘I’m having a lovely time exploring the countryside and meeting new people. Why are you here?’ His voice is steady. I’m shocked by how little shocked he appears by the conversation we’re having.

‘I’m here because it’s my job to be here. Why are you here?’

‘Raymond asked if I would care to join him on an adventure, and I said I would.’ His tone is now one of exhausted reasonableness. ‘As a guy who for the majority of his life has failed to make a high enough priority of going on adventures, who opened a tour company and called it “Adventurers” without ever having been on an adventure, I decided this time I would go on an adventure. That’s why I’m here.’

‘Do you feel like you’ve had an adventure?’

‘I surely do, yes sir.’

‘Then you don’t have much reason to hang round any more.’

‘I wouldn’t say I’m “hanging round”…’

‘Whatever you’ve got in mind, it’s not going to work.’

‘Why do you think I have anything in mind?’

‘Because you don’t make sense, Harry. You don’t fit together.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ With slow effort, Harry gathers up his brows – all their tired quills and points. ‘I don’t know what’s going on with you right now, Steven, but I have to tell you you’re seeing things that aren’t there. You seem to think… when all that happened is I saw Raymond’s expedition on our books, an enigmatic proposition if ever there was one, I took an interest, I made contact… and Raymond and I became friends.’ Slowly the brows relax, spread their broken fans. ‘Is that so hard to believe?’

‘You’ve had your adventure, Harry. Time to move on.’

He sighs. Then in the straggle mass of his beard his lips palpably harden and he says, ‘You know what, I’m not sure I’m done adventuring.’

‘If I were you, I’d be thinking seriously about moving on.’

‘Yeah well you’re not me,’ he says, and looks away from me across the plain.

I try to think of something else to say, but I can’t. I’m sick with the sense Harry was ready for everything I had to say, deeply prepared for it. I sit with my arms round my knees, all my joints locked to keep them from shaking. Then I look away from Harry and out across the plain too.

‘It works,’ I tell Alice later, in the storage shed.

‘Fantastic.’ In the screen she nods, curls her lip.

‘Uh, yeah, it is.’

‘I agree.’ She nods again.

‘It’s going to change the world.’

‘No doubt.’

‘Once you start thinking about it, it’s like your head’s going to explode.’

‘That’s probably because you’ve just started thinking about it.’

‘While you…’

‘I’m pretty used to the idea. I’ve been giving it credence.’

I nod. She has. Somehow there’s nothing else to say on the matter.

I say, ‘The only problem is, we don’t have any money.’

‘No?’

‘We didn’t bring any money.’

‘You didn’t tell me that.’

‘No.’

‘Well then you’re going to be busy.’

‘Yeah.’ I blink at her in the skin of glass. ‘How about you? Are you… well?’

‘I’m fine.’

She’s annoyed with me for some reason, I’m annoyed with her for being annoyed with me, so we bring the conversation to an early close.

We end on a bumpy note. I say, ‘I love you.’

‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘Yeah.’

I wait. Then I say, ‘And do you love me?’

And she says, ‘Yeah, yeah.’

Then I’m staring at the blank screen, thinking about New York.

Which isn’t fair, because for most of the three days Alice and I spent in New York last year we were very happy. Staying in an apartment that belonged to a friend of Alice’s (one of the stunningly useful contacts she’d made on the conference circuit), buying groceries at a local store that had the atmosphere of a second-hand bookshop and eating our homemade sandwiches on a bench in Madison Square Park, we enjoyed all the romance of a New York winter without feeling, as I’d feared we would, that the city was continually mining us – drilling our cells, chiseling our platelets – for money. We walked often, took cabs sparingly, spent a lot of time standing at the brink of crowded sidewalks with our arms round each other and our faces tipped up into
the chasm of the skyscraper sky, pretending to see which of us could catch a snowflake on their tongue first, when in reality there were no snowflakes, it wasn’t even snowing.

On our last night we decided to splash out. I booked a table at a restaurant on East 16
^th
Street, put on the suit that had so far only gathered wrinkles in my suitcase, and took a cab across the flatiron with Alice in shiny dark eye makeup and another of the molten black dresses that she seems to have an endless supply of. We ate fish with roasted vegetables followed by a banana tart that we picked apart with two forks. Alice drank two glasses of the house white and began a happy-sad monologue about Daniel, about some dreadful thing he’d said to her the other day, some wicked prank he played on her when he was ten, about the impact of his most recent
lurch
– as she called them – the cerebral lapse or winnowing that made her hesitate to take the trip at all, though it was more than a year since Daniel had lurched and he’d now recovered to the point that he was up and bombing about in his chair again and doing a first-rate job of pissing everyone off.

Then she looked at me with her wine-sleepy eyes, and smiled her sad-happy smile, and said, ‘But why am I telling you this? You’ve no idea what I’m talking about.’

‘Don’t I?’ I said. ‘Why don’t I?’

‘How could you? The way you live… no friends, never see your family, never see anyone, really, except me… no ties, no commitments, no attachments… you just sort of breeze along, don’t you? Breeze along in a nice little soap bubble. Don’t you?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Oh come on, you
do
.’

‘No,’ I said.

And then, for the first time in the two years since we’d met, it was impossible for us to speak to each other. For a while Alice tried gamely to talk a way into my ‘sulk’ or my ‘grump’ or my ‘slouch’, but she couldn’t do it; I literally couldn’t let her do it.
Staring at the dessert dish, the two forks whimsically crossed, I felt as if I’d turned to stone. I couldn’t raise my eyes to look at her, couldn’t open my mouth to speak to her. All I would really have had to do was smile – relinquish the tiniest, most rueful corner of a smile – and she would have burst out laughing (
ho ho ho
) and I would have too and the entire mass of the thing would have collapsed, dematerialised. But I couldn’t do it. I started to become slightly afraid that I’d never be able to do anything again and would have to stay where I was the for the rest of my life, an odd and amusing exhibit kept in place by the restaurant’s tolerant owners.

Somehow we managed to pay, find a cab and get back to our borrowed apartment. Alice stormed round the bathroom and made up a bed for herself on the couch in front of the attractive, iron-barred, exposed-brick fireplace. Remotely I experienced all this as violence, as a sort of violence that was happening to both of us, though I could do nothing about it. I tumbled over on the bed, a razed statue, a lopped-off gothic gargoyle.