The Weightless World (19 page)

Harry nods, once, and withdraws into the cabin.

‘What?’ I shout after him into the hot gloom. ‘What are you doing? Can’t you see…’

Then Harry comes out again, leading Asha by the arm, gripping her arm in one hand, pointing at the men with his other.

Asha allows herself to be led. As she goes, she narrows her eyes on the walking men. She presses her lips together in a sneer of disapproval, of disavowal, the single most violent expression I’ve ever seen on the face of a human being.

Together Harry and Asha somehow go towards the approaching row of men. How do they do this – oppose the wave, the force, the magnetic repulsion of that approach? The same repulsion that seems about to lift me off my feet and hurl me bodily into the back of the cabin, under a blanket, under a table? I can’t imagine how they do it. I need all my strength only to keep on standing by the doorway, in the sunlight, in full view of the men.

Abruptly Asha stops walking. Harry, taken by surprise, stumbles over his own feet then stops also. Without looking at him, without noticeable irritation, Asha shakes his hand off her arm. She raises her chin, squares her shoulders.

The advancing men cease their advance only a few feet away from the point at which Harry and Asha stand waiting for them. There’s no special ceremony to the way the men do this; a couple of them shuffle to a halt, then a couple more, a couple more, until they’re all standing still, the row, if it was ever really anything so orderly as a row and not just a trick of perspective. Only a clear space is left round the two men who halted first, an elderly guy with a neat short white beard and a younger guy with a pair of glamorous chunky headphones slipped round his neck like a futuristic brace. I assume the older guy is the village headman,
the younger an advisor of some sort, but the truth is I don’t know who or what either of them is. They could be Laxman’s grandfather and father. Laxman’s doctor, Laxman’s teacher.

Of Laxman himself there’s no sign. I don’t know why I thought there would be, but anyway there isn’t one. I picture him back at the village, in a soft bed in a cool hut, some part of him in plaster while all the other parts of him play a handheld computer game. This is the picture I need to see, the story I need to believe, the story of the bed and the hut and the computer game and the boy with a major but fundamentally non-serious injury.

Harry takes a half step towards the two men who I think are the village headman and his advisor. He begins to speak, in stammering American, but it’s clear that the two men have no idea what he’s saying. Raising his palms in a gesture pleading forbearance, he starts again, this time with quick turns of his head and meaning glances at Asha. He seems to think that Asha is going to translate for him. But there never seems any real possibility of this happening and Asha, ignoring him, takes plunging strides forward into the proximity of the two men and starts to roar at them in rapid-fire Hindi.

Funny: there is very visibly no language barrier between Asha and the two men from the village. And yet they seem to have no idea what she’s saying either.

While she goes on roaring, Harry stands with a grave expression. Now and then he nods, as if to underline some excellent point she’s made. But I’m not sure he understands her any better than I do, and I don’t understand her at all. To my ears, and possibly also to Harry’s, Asha could be proposing to the men what is in her view the best, most efficient way of killing us and getting rid of our bodies.

The men’s reactions to her speech are no reliable indication of anything either. The older man seems to be sourly considering Asha’s perspective, his lips pinched and cheeks sucked in within
his beard, while the younger keeps flapping a hand at her, as if directing traffic, signalling her to move on. Asha aims at this guy an especially vociferous cluster of shrill syllables, and both men flinch with indignation. Quickly this indignation flares to anger. And then all the men are angry, shifting their feet in the dust, voicing the same restive vowel. The way they do this brings back into prominence the various objects in their hands, the glistening antennae, the bow-like blades.

Now several things happen at once. Harry takes an unwary gallant step forward. The guy with headphones round his neck raises the staff in his right hand until its ornate point soars above his head. And exactly as these things are happening there is a sudden crash next to my head, a sudden blur in front of my eyes, a thready flip of sweated fabric and straining muscle.

I blink. Somewhere in this blink there is the sense of a flash of blue lightning. There is a sense that this flash issued not from the sky but from the point of the staff raised above the headphones guy’s head. There is a sense also that this flash struck Harry’s body. But I don’t know, didn’t see, because I blinked somewhere in the middle of it.

Then several things have happened. Harry is lying in the dust with a flat frozen look. The headphones guy is gleefully examining his staff, appraising it from end to end, flicking at what looks like a sort of handmade control panel mounted on its side. The other men are shouting, some at Harry, some at Asha, some at the older guy, some at the younger headphones guy posing with his scifi staff, some at each other. And Tarik is running. Tarik has run out of the cabin, run past me, run away on to the plain. I turn and look and I see him running. He appears to be running towards the test site. And he appears to be carrying something, cradling something in his arms.

‘Tarik!’ I shout after him. But he only carries on running.

Asha is leaning over Harry, pressing her fingers to his neck, pressing her ear to his lips. A couple of the men totter towards her and her head snaps back and she roars at them and the men shamefacedly retreat. Another couple appears to be remonstrating with the headman, indicating his advisor with gestures of accusation and cancellation. And yet the final couple of men seem to be remonstrating with this group, flinging their palms in similar gestures of derision and dismissal.

Tarik has reached the test site. The white streak of his kurta disappears into a gap between two blocks.

‘Asha!’ I shout. ‘Can you see this? Can you see what Tarik’s doing?’

Harry lets out a low groan. His face is grey-blue, depthless; his eyebrows and beard have a compressed, vacuum-packed sort of appearance. He groans again and Asha leans back from him. She climbs to her feet, shouting at the men standing over her.

One of the blocks at the test site flickers, as if something has fallen away from it. I keep looking and I see it again, the same but different: a flicker at the block’s other side, only this time something flying up, something slender, a strand, a hair.

‘Asha!’ I shout. ‘Are we seeing this? Are we seeing what Tarik’s doing?’

Still lying on the ground, Harry moves a grey-blue hand to his grey-blue face. He pushes his specs round on the bridge of his grey-blue nose.

Asha is arguing with the headphones guy. She pushes him on the chest. He takes a step back then a step towards her again. She knocks the staff out of his hand and they both stand looking down at it.

A dot, a speck bubbles up on top of the block. The speck lengthens into the shape of a man. Tarik is standing on top of the block.

Carrying something.

A flicker at one side then the other. Slender somethings falling away, flying up.

He’s untied the rope. He’s retied the wire. And he’s standing on top of the block.

Cradling something in his arms.

‘Asha!’ I shout. ‘Oh Jesus fucking Christ, Asha…’

And then, all at once, no one’s shouting. I look round and for a second the men from the village seem to be staring at me. Asha, pivoting away from the headphones guy, seems to be staring at me. Harry, sitting up on the ground with his frozen look, seems to be staring at me. Then I realise they’re not staring at me but past me.

The block has risen into the air. As I watch – as we all watch – it shrugs off and drops the huge impediment of its shadow. The block goes on rising.

Tarik is standing on top of it.

He’s untied the rope. He’s retied the wire.

‘Oh Jesus fucking Christ…’

Now Asha is running, kicking up the dust as she sprints towards the test site, towards the block rising unstoppably into the vertiginous blue sky. I open my mouth to shout again, but there’s nothing left to shout. There’s nothing left to do, either, but Asha goes on running anyway, as the block rises and rises and then melts to a spot of black in the highest part of the sky, then a dot, then a speck, then nothing at all.

Harry was right.

At Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport I’ve been waiting for almost two hours when I look up and she’s there, standing on the walkway with a lopsided smile and a suitcase propped behind her. I start towards her, not sure how this is going to pan out, whether we’re going to hug or shake hands or nod
hello
to each other or whatever, then she laughs and throws her arms round me and laughing I throw my arms round her.

She’s there, she’s right here, pressed against me, in my arms.

It’s strange, all of it, for quite a long while. The reality of her presence is hard to take in. It seems I can manage only bits of her at a time: her hair, then her lips, then her eyes of unearthly substance – her eyes like portals to another earth.

We kiss then I say, ‘How are you? How was the flight?’

‘Like seventeen hours in a pub toilet. How are you?’

‘I’m fine.’ Then I say, ‘I’m so sorry, Alice.’

‘Mmn. You’re sorry, I’m sorry, everyone’s sorry.’ She shrugs: the clarity, the pristine wonder of her shoulders.

Moving on down the walkway, we come in sight of a gigantic banner – urban dusk, dangling feet – and pause, arm in arm, to look at it. Alice blows through her lips and says, ‘How’re we feeling about that?’

‘We’re not feeling anything about that. It’s nothing to do with us.’

‘But you don’t think…’

‘No, I don’t think.’ I smack a kiss onto her mouth, which she seems quite pleased about. ‘I don’t think.’

Back at his place, Harry shakes only the very tips of her fingers. He looks as if it were crossing his mind to curtsy. Then Alice gives him one of her big, silly hugs – she turns you round and round, like she’s looking for something – and after that he loosens up and we are able to talk more or less naturally. He says of course Alice is welcome under his roof for as long as she pleases to stay under it, and of course for the duration of her stay his room will be ours; he will himself be perfectly comfortable on the couch. Alice begins to object, but I cut across her, maybe somewhat sharply, with, ‘Don’t worry about it. Let the old fucker suffer.’ And Harry nods, meekly, almost gratefully.

Later we go to the spare room to look at Ess. He seems to be asleep. We sit on the end of the bed looking at him and Alice says, ‘Can’t anyone do anything?’

‘There’s a doctor who comes. He says we just have to wait for him to come out of it in his own time.’

Elderly, slab-haired Doctor Sharma visits the flat very regularly. Harry seems to have given him a key, because sometimes I find him sitting in Ess’s room, applying an ointment or a cream, talking to Ess about the cricket or the economy. At some point I got used to the sight of the growing colony of jars and tubes and bottles and packets on Ess’s bedside table. At some point, also, I got used to the sight of Doctor Sharma’s face in the sick room or the sitting room or the kitchen, everywhere in the flat, Harry somewhere nearby, both of them laughing with their high, hooked, old-guy teeth.

But what I think is:
No, Darling. No one can do anything.

‘Well, here we are,’ she says, and breathes a sigh of mysterious contentment. She laces her fingers with mine, their cool wax, their supple life. ‘What do we do now?’

‘We could go out. We could go to bed…’

‘No, not “now”. I mean
now
. What do we do
now
?’

After Tarik ascended into the sky Asha kept running until she herself was no more than a dot on the horizon. Before she came back the men from the village had stood for a long time in wonderment, begun to show expressions of perplexity, of something akin to grief, and then with laborious hand gestures and sharp shoves in each other’s sides shuffled their feet and started to move away. Before Asha came back the elderly guy who I thought was the village headman took hold of my hands and pressed them between his then nodded with mercurial tears flying free at the ends of his eyes.

Two of the men stayed with Harry, checking he was all right, and I stayed with them too, and the rest of the men departed with shuffling steps for the village. Soon there was no one else in view anywhere on the plain. At last the distant human dot that was Asha started to get bigger and some time later she was standing with us again, her hair covering her face. I don’t know whether she was crying or not. I’m tempted to think not.

Harry recovered quickly. None of us knew what had happened to him. After a rest and plenty of water he was able to stand, and talk. His face looked frostbitten from the inside out. He spoke to you quite normally but then every few minutes a fit of icy shudders would descend and all he could do was stand there hugging himself while his eyes bluely glared and his teeth chattered.

I went to check on Ess. He was still lying on his sleeping bag in the storage shed, as if nothing had happened. I didn’t try to
talk to him, didn’t try to wake him but only checked that he was still breathing (he was) and that he seemed comfortable (he did) and then I went back to the cabin where Harry was sitting on a chair by the workbench while Asha examined him and poured water down his throat and kept taking his pulse.

I have to admit that at this time also I made a thorough search of the cabin. I wasn’t subtle about it, and made a big mess. I saw right away that Tarik’s laptop had gone, but nonetheless I turned the place upside down in my hunt for the machine’s schematics, for any scrap, any clue to the machine’s marvellous functioning. Harry and Asha were careful not to watch me while I did this, as if they knew before I did that I wasn’t going to find anything, though in fact there’s no way they could have known this. Anyway, I didn’t find anything. I smashed a couple of things – the workbench, a cupboard or two – then Asha took hold of me bodily and forced me sit down on the floor next to Harry while she poured water down my throat and listened to my chest and took my pulse.

That night Harry and Asha slept in the cabin. I slept in the storage shed next to Ess. There was some talk between Harry and Asha about moving Ess, about picking him up and bringing him into the cabin, but I rejected these plans, somewhat fiercely. ‘We’re going to have to move him sooner or later,’ Harry said. This was obviously true. But at that time I wasn’t yet ready for us to start moving him. So I slept next to him in the storage shed.

In the morning we moved him. At the instant that I woke him he opened his eyes and seemed to smile at me with a loopy wide smile, then he closed his eyes and went on smiling that strange smile with his eyes shut while Harry and I picked him up and carried him across to the Adventurers car and fitted him into the backseat and put the seatbelt on him. While we did this Harry kept up a weird one-sided conversation with him, which seemed to me both disgusting and crazy, though I
managed not to comment on it. All that morning I felt dry, light, flammable, dreadfully ashamed of my behaviour the previous evening, looking for the schematics and wrecking Tarik’s cabin.

While we packed the car I asked Asha if the men from the village had said anything about Laxman. With eyes pinched tight by suspicion of me and my motives, she said they had. She said she had asked the headman if Laxman was badly injured, and the headman had said he wasn’t – he was recovering in the clinic from a superficial wound to his shoulder. She said the revelation of this fact had been her main point of contention with the men. It was what she’d been arguing about with them when Tarik began to ascend into the sky.

Then we drove back to Mumbai. During the journey Ess relieved himself, silently and helplessly, many times. Soon the car reeked of his piss and shit. We wound the windows down, stuck our heads out in the blasting air when we could, and didn’t talk about it.

We arrived in the city late at night. Asha drove us to Harry’s place, a large and wildly luxurious ground floor flat not far from the causeway. Then she drove away and Harry and I picked up Ess and carried him into the flat and put him down on the couch, where he went on sitting and smiling with his eyes shut until Harry and I came back and picked him up and carried him to Harry’s spare room and laid him down on the bed. That night he slept in the bed and I slept on the couch and we carried on sleeping in those places until Alice arrived at the airport with her suitcase.

‘You were right,’ I said to Harry, when it all started to happen. ‘Have you seen this? I mean, you were really right. You were right about everything.’

After dinner at Leopold’s one night we’re walking back along the causeway when Alice says, ‘It makes sense though, doesn’t it? If we’re doing this.’

‘We’re doing it,’ I say.

‘We’d have our own space but not be too far away. We’d have to get jobs for the lease and such like. Don’t know what we’re eligible for, but we’d find something. Cleaning windows, scrubbing pots…’

‘What about your work? I mean your
work
? Your…’

‘I can do that anywhere. That’s the beauty of it.’ She grins at me. And she’s right. Her work, her
thinking
, it is her core, her brilliant viscera, and it comes with her everywhere. ‘We could keep up with Ess, pop in whenever, see how he’s doing. Keep up with Harry, too. Only not so much cramping his style.’

‘Oh, Darling,’ I chortle, ‘I’m not sure there’s much style there to cramp.’

‘Maybe not. But at least he’ll have more time alone with his boyfriend.’

We continue walking along the causeway for a while. Then I say, ‘What?’

‘Harry and his boyfriend. When we move out, they’ll have more time together.’

‘Harry and his
what
? Harry doesn’t have a
boyfriend
.’

‘Yes he does. Doctor Sharma is Harry’s boyfriend.’ Patiently she blinks at me. ‘You didn’t see that? The whole flirtation, coded-courtship thing they’ve been doing? For like
a month
? Jesus, Steven, you need to open your eyes. You know, take a look round once in a while.’

It’s late afternoon and I’m walking on Chowpatty Beach when I’m startled by a familiar sight: the white flash and boxy build of the Adventurers car. There are some people standing by it,
youthful, European – paying Adventurers. There’s a guide, also, addressing the group, pointing to one end of the beach then the other. At last the young Adventurers move off to explore the beach and the guide stands leaning against the car, arms folded. Now I get my first proper look at her. And obviously she’s Asha.

My immediate instinct is to run – to pelt down the beach and throw myself at her feet. Instead I walk towards her slowly, creakily, over the ridges and lumps, the tidelines of trash. I halt a short distance away then painfully clear my throat and say, ‘Hi. Uh, hello.’

She looks at me. She looks away. She says, ‘Hello, Steven.’

‘I wanted to say…’ I’ve no idea what I wanted to say. My hands rise from my sides and clutch either side of my face, as if I’m concentrating on something, which I’m not. ‘How are you? These days? Asha?’

‘I’m very well.’ She looks at me again. ‘How are you?’

‘I’m fine. Alice is here now. I mean in India, in Mumbai. Actually we’re talking about staying, you know, “making a new life” here.’ As soon as I’ve said it I hear how unlikely it sounds – that we could stay; that we could make a new life, here or anywhere. I start to nod. ‘We’re just talking. Airing the possibility.’

She looks away again.

‘Do you ever think about what happened?’ I say.

She frowns, as if a wholly unrelated thought has occurred to her.

‘I do. I think about it all the time. I think about Tarik, about that block going up, up, until I feel sick with it. I wonder what happened to him. I wonder where he is. In the sky somewhere. In space. Way up in the, the high channels… And Reva. Sometimes I wonder what happened to Reva. Do you ever think about that?’

Asha stands there, arms folded, leaning against the car, not looking at me. Then she says, ‘Why do you think something happened to Reva?’

‘Didn’t it?’

‘Why does something have to have happened to Reva?’ She looks at me again. ‘I’ll tell you what I think. I think Reva is watching us, right now. Watching us, and laughing at us, laughing at us all. Like god.’

‘Is that what god does?’

‘Watch. Laugh. Other things.’ She looks away again.

A while later I say, ‘I keep thinking. I should’ve…’ And that’s all I say.

‘You did what you do. What you always do. You people, you English.’

‘Maybe,’ I say. And I nod and then I turn and walk away and I never see Asha again.

Harry was right.

The Swiss got there first.

Nineteen days after Tarik Kundra ascended into the sky and vanished, taking with him not only the machine’s sole working prototype but also its schematics and his laptop and every other clue to the thing’s marvellous functioning, a team of physicists at CERN held their press conference to announce to the world that they had developed a viable antigravity technology. As you know. Not that the scientists made the nature of their work immediately apparent: no doubt fearing incredulity, they called the conference stating only that they had a ‘major breakthrough’ of ‘international significance’ to present.

We all saw Prof Hesse give that brief and baffling speech from that plastic lectern on the edge of Lake Geneva before introducing three young associates who, he nervously promised,
would ‘make plain by their actions what I may only muddy in words’. These youngsters, wearing what looked like climbing helmets and hockey pads, and each equipped with a lightweight backpack – the ones containing a parachute – then began to bounce about the air, leaping over the trees, cartwheeling above the lake. Footage of the conference pretty well preserves the reactions of the unsuspecting press, the shrieks, the technical fumbles, the continual failure to focus on something moving very quickly very high up in the sky.

So the reality of antigravity technology has begun to sink in. Commentators began using phrases like
antigrav tech
and then
AGtech
[‘ay-gee tech’] and now,
agtech
. Current affairs programmes began debating things like
agcommerce
and
the agmarket
and
the agfuture.
The reticent Prof Hesse himself became a conspicuous media presence and pop icon, his woolly, canine face appearing on screens and T-shirts and bedroom walls everywhere.