The Weightless World, page 16
‘But we’re here, and the machine works, and we’ve no money…’
‘Yes, yes. Not the end of the world, is it?’
I stare at him. His face isn’t coursing down any more but I still can’t get a fix on it.
He says, ‘As it happens, we have something rather more valuable then money. At least as far as Tarik’s concerned.’ He waits. Then he says, ‘You see, we have his wife.’
‘What?’ I’m sitting down but all at once I can’t get my balance. ‘We have his what?’
‘Good lord, that sounds dreadful, doesn’t it? Forgive me, Mr Strauss, but I haven’t been completely open with you. I haven’t told you quite everything I might.’
And then he tells me the story.
Once upon a time there was a boy called Tarik who lived in a village on the outskirts of a great city. He lived in a house with his father, mother and two brothers. The family lived in a house and not a hut because Tarik’s father was the wealthiest man in the village, a merchant and landowner wealthier even than the village headman, who lived in a house too.
He was an anxious child, Tarik was. It seemed the anxiety was there before he was; anxiety that he lived in a house with brick walls and a slate roof while the other kids at school lived in huts of wood, clay and thatch; anxiety that these same children and his brothers too enjoyed in their bodies a litheness of movement he could find nowhere in his, a spangling jitter whose presence in wrists and ankles made even the poorest of his classmates solemn and gorgeous while he, lacking it, trembled like a sickly dog. He hated school, the dirt, the crush, the constant reminder in the press of flesh on his at all times that he was defective, missing a crucial part that others possessed so naturally they were not even aware of it.
In his corner of the crowded classroom he did everything he could not to be present – to withdraw, to vanish. Sometimes he tried to vanish into the teacher’s shrill, violent voice; sometimes into the surface of the slate he balanced on his knees, the cracks, the jags, the zagging grain; sometimes into the work the class was set, the grammar tests, the sums. But he soon discovered there was nowhere he could vanish to, nowhere at all.
One day after school the teacher walked home with him. The teacher’s silence left no room for doubt that he’d done something dreadful, though he didn’t know what. As they walked, he grew certain that the moment he’d always feared had finally arrived: the moment when his defect was revealed, when he was reviled and cast out.
Arriving at the house, the teacher spoke quietly to one of Tarik’s brothers, who went inside then returned with their father.
‘There is a grave problem with young Tarik here,’ the teacher said to his father.
‘Is that so?’ His father’s easy smile told Tarik at once that his father was prepared to beat him: to pound out of him whatever sin was in him.
The teacher passed Tarik’s father his slate – the one on which he’d completed the afternoon’s sums. ‘It would appear that he’s a genius.’
‘Oh yes?’ Tarik’s father’s face looked suddenly jolted, shocked, shivered.
‘It would appear so. Which creates for us the grave problem of what to do with him.’
The grave problem became the daily task and battle of Tarik’s father for the next ten years. He determined to make the problem the village’s problem – ‘our gift, our burden’ – and engaged in frequent lengthy meetings with the headman, meetings for which Tarik was always required to be present, at least at the beginnings and ends of them, freshly scrubbed in his best shirt and spectacles, with his slate in his hand, like a prop. While the meetings were in progress Tarik was allowed to sit in the kitchen and work on the tasks he’d been set by his very expensive private tutor from the city.
One humid afternoon Tarik was sitting in the headman’s kitchen, struggling with a task, when the headman’s daughter came into the room. She was tiny, dark, beautiful. She didn’t go to school, because she was the headman’s daughter. Her name was Reva.
Without speaking, she leant over the table and stared at his slate. She nodded then looked at him in a weird way: the eyes luminous, questioning, slightly bulging.
‘You can’t do it, can you?’ she said.
‘I can do it,’ he said.
‘You can’t do it. And it’s easy.’
She was right. He couldn’t do it. And she picked up his chalk and solved it and she made it look easy. He was twenty. She was sixteen.
‘How did you do that?’ he asked.
‘How did I do what? I don’t do anything, I’m not here, I don’t exist.’ He saw then that the bulging of her eyes was not a look but something she couldn’t help, an imperfection that was also part of her beauty. He saw also that she was about ten times as clever as he was. This was a part of her beauty too.
He studied in the city. During the week he slept on a cot in his uncle’s flat and at weekends he returned to the village to pay his respects to the headman and the headman’s daughter. By the time he was twenty-five he’d still obtained no solid evidence that Reva’s interest in him extended to anything more than the tasks he brought her – the homework he more or less brought her to do for him. Then, one afternoon, he obtained solid evidence. Twenty-one, glistening with intelligence and her new womanly fullness, she put down the chalk and picked up his hand. She looked at him with her bulging eyes.
‘There is a grave problem with young Tarik here,’ she said.
‘There is,’ he agreed, and put his other hand over hers, and two years later with the blessing of both fathers they were married.
After he completed his studies Tarik took a prestigious job at a prestigious company in the city – an electronics company with a reputation for innovation. Tarik and Reva moved into a flat in the city’s fashionable downtown. They were happy. Tarik gained the respect of his colleagues, was admiringly addressed in the lab as ‘the boy wonder’, was assigned important roles on fascinating projects. Reva made friends, went modestly shopping, and continued at home to more or less do Tarik’s work for him.
They’d been living this prosperous life for almost a year when Tarik began to notice a change in Reva. She grew quiet, irritable. She approached the tasks he brought her no longer as a ravishing pleasure but an annoyance, an inconvenience, while at the same time she seemed to have nothing else to do. She went out less and less often with her friends. Less and less often she presented him with the fruits of her modest shopping sprees.
He came home from work one day and found her crying. She told him that she hated the city, hated city people, hated her city friends and wanted to go back to the village. In the village, she said, she was beautiful. But here she was ugly. Here, she said, she was fat.
‘You’re what?’ He had literally no idea what she was talking about.
‘You’ve seen the women here. They’re sticks, they’re wisps. And I’m…’
‘You’re beautiful,’ he said.
‘Village beautiful. Here I’m a potbellied pig.’
‘Here you’re beautiful. Everywhere you’re beautiful. You’re everywhere beautiful.’
But it did no good. She stayed in the flat, refused to see her friends – who, she said, were all having ‘gym parties’ and would only ‘snigger into their sweatpants’ if she were to go ‘waddling in’. At least she was able to laugh about it, for a while. Then she wasn’t able to laugh about it. She became prickly, spiky, all the time. She cried. She told him she was too tired to do his work, or else she threw the papers away from her and told him to do his own fucking job. And she grew fat. By the time they’d been living in the city two years her village beauty had gone, her womanly fullness receded behind a veil of intricate flab. She seemed wreathed with it, ornamented with it, as if for a terrible wedding.
Tarik’s work suffered – because, for the first time, it was truly his own. It turned out the village teacher had overestimated him, and he was a very bright fellow, but not a genius. His work for the company was excellent but no longer astonishing. Among his colleagues disappointment set in. The ‘boy wonder’ tag detached, dissolved. The assignments grew less fascinating. At home his wife grew sadder and fatter and in the lab he sat desperately working on small-time projects for spare-change money.
One evening he came home to find her staring into space. She’d fallen down on the bedroom floor and couldn’t get up. The rubber ring, the perverse flotation device of her own fat had defeated all her efforts. She’d been there for six hours and had filthied herself.
That weekend he built a chair for her. She wouldn’t get into it, screamed at him, wept. Then one day the following week he came home and she’d started to use it.
Six years, eight years. Tarik had painful little successes at work, painful little failures. Reva grew lighter, grew heavier. But they lived no moment that was not pulled between these poles, these gravities.
Then all at once she was happy again. She was still fat, but happy, full of energy. When he came through the door he noticed everywhere signs of deliveries during the day: boxes, polystyrene packing blocks, sheets of bubble-wrap that combusted under his feet like gunfire. She told him she was working on ‘a project’ of her own. Cheerfully she presented him with her online purchases – not the saris or jeans or shoes of her earlier sprees but a soldering iron, a welding kit, a pack of circuit-boards.
One Friday afternoon several months later she called him at work and told him in a voice breathless with urgency that he had to come home right away. He vaulted up the nine flights to their flat, his heart in his mouth. She was waiting for him, in the sitting room, in her chair. She asked if he was ready. He said, ‘Ready for what?’ He noticed the modification she’d made to her chair, a ragged bit of circuit with a trailing wire and switch in it attached to the armrest, only when she depressed her right thumb into the switch.
The next thing he saw was that two things had happened to her face. It had changed its position in the room, and it was laughing. It was the most frightening thing he’d ever seen.
The next thing he saw was that her chair had risen three feet above the floor.
‘How did you do that?’ Because she was laughing, he started to laugh too.
‘How did I do what?’ She laughed harder, slapped the arms of her chair.
Grandly she invited his examinations. He took the mop and swept it back and forth under the chair. He waved an arm under the chair, then both arms. He climbed up into the chair and sat in her lap. She picked lazily at his head, subjected it to her usual search for dandruff, and told him with luminous, lantern-like eyes, ‘Now I’m beautiful.’
‘Yes,’ Tarik said. He had no idea what she meant.
She showed him her schematics for the miraculous chair modification and he was still puzzling over them when she fell asleep. In her chair he floated her to the bedroom and rolled her gently out onto the mattress and pulled the sheet up to her chin. Then he went back to the schematics and to the sticking, snagging nag of his idea.
In fact it took him almost another year, working from Reva’s schematics after hours in the lab, to reconstruct her circuit and build a prototype. At last, though, he grasped it – he understood what she’d done. While this work was not a secret, exactly, he didn’t discuss it with Reva, who seemed never to consider that there was anything especially to be done with her invention. She didn’t even use it much, and ascended in her chair only on days when getting round the flat was a particular chore. For her, the invention seemed to have been a point to prove, and now it was proven she had no further interest in it.
One Wednesday morning Tarik asked his colleagues in the lab if he could show them something. They smirkingly gathered round a heap of bricks, tied up in a rope and a wire, with a soldered black plastic box on top of it. With an effort of premeditated showmanship, not really successful, Tarik asked one of the researchers to hold the other end of the rope. The researcher took the rope, Tarik threw the switch on the plastic box, and the whole stack wavered up into the air. Fairly abruptly the researcher was flying a kite made out of bricks.
Tarik’s colleagues responded to the demonstration with various grades of disbelief, euphoria and acclaim. The one who had flown the brick kite clutched his face on either side and roared, ‘You did this? You did this?’
‘I did,’ Tarik said. ‘I did this, yes.’
The researchers then inspected his prototype for themselves. They became serious, sober, eyeing Tarik warily. The supervisor kept going out to make phone calls. One of the researchers, a man Tarik had known for years, at one point took a hard hold of his upper arm and seemed about to say something, then didn’t say anything.
Tarik started to freak out. He said he was suddenly feeling ill, overcome, and had to go home. The supervisor said he thought that was a bad idea, but Tarik packed up his prototype and left the lab. On his way out of the main entrance he was stopped by security. He opened his bag and spilled the prototype onto the floor. For good measure he trampled it a bit, pretending woozily to be attempting to pick it back up. The guard was so astonished by this performance Tarik was able to get away. He ran home and told Reva everything.
While he spoke her face barely moved. When he tried to explain why he had tried to steal her invention, to pass it off as his own, she seemed bored. When he tried to explain that the company would now very likely try to steal the invention off both of them, that the company would very likely do anything and everything in its power to make the invention its own, to get rid of them, to dispose of them, and they were now in terrible danger and had to leave, at once, she seemed merely annoyed, as if by a fly trapped in the curtains. He told her he would go to the bank, withdraw all the money they had, and they would leave the city. He wanted to tell her he was sorry, to weep and beg for forgiveness, but couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. As he slunk from her unmoving, unremarking sight, he vowed he would do it when he came back from the bank.
And when he came back from the bank Reva, and her chair, were gone.
*
‘So he came here.’ On the riverbank Ess circles a hand in the air – the river, the trees, the plain. ‘Tarik fled the city alone and here he has remained, watching the skyline for company agents, pining for his beloved and waiting to die.’
‘Fucking hell,’ I say.
‘Fucking hell indeed. That’s exactly what I said, though of course I said no such thing but rather “A-ha!” or “Now wait a minute!” When Tarik told me this story, I made him a promise. I vowed that I would purpose every iota of my shall we call it influence, dedicate every penny of my as it were capital, to recovering his Reva. To finding her and bringing her to him, to reuniting them, husband and wife, before expediting their swift transit out of India. This essentially was our agreement.’
‘Okay.’ I nod. I seem to be sliding about in the middle of some catastrophe.
‘And, I’m delighted to say,’ Ess says, ‘thanks to a certain tireless associate of mine, my promise is almost kept. Reva is found, and en route, and due to join us any day.’
‘She’s coming here?’
‘In the care of my indefatigable associate, yes. Reva is coming here.’
‘Your tireless, uh, your indefatigable…?’
‘To whom else would I entrust so solemn a task? Fancy Bill. You remember Fancy Bill, don’t you? Of course you do. Fancy Bill Fancy.’ Then Ess does an extraordinary thing. He purses his lips and releases a stunning salvo of highly decorative whistling. Suddenly, shockingly, the air by the river is full of the song of larks and nightingales. And then I remember, I know who he means: Bill – ‘Bill here’ – Bill Fancy, the wildlife photographer turned private investigator, the whistling detective whom Ess briefly contracted to keep tabs of a friendly sort on his ex-wife. The cheerful chubby cheeks, the cardsharp way he had of laying out his photos – Eunice in a café, in her car, in a bathroom window.
‘Have no doubt, my boy, Fancy Bill has been busy in our behalf. I don’t pretend that his services have come cheaply, but then neither did he, to his undying credit, and his quest has unavoidably incurred expenses. But yes, he’s done it. Ticklish sort of a business, tax returns, paper trails, I shan’t bore, but the long and the short is he managed to track Tarik’s missus to a cousin of a cousin – possibly of a cousin – working as a housemaid in a hotel in Goa. Seems she’s been staying illicitly in this hotel, tucked away in a basement room or some such, in the care of this distant relative of hers. Fancy Bill reports that, uh, shall we say, Reva has attained a certain condition of physical fullness. Nonetheless, where there’s a will, where there’s a well-meaning penny, sometimes the mountain can indeed be induced to, to… no, I abjure that remark, don’t know what’s wrong with me. Overexcited, I apologise.’
He laughs, waves the hand again. ‘Still, you get the idea. Even now Reva, under the careful stewardship of my Fancy Bill Fancy, is making her way to this very spot. They’ll arrive any day. And then the lovers shall kiss, the papers change hands, the friends fondly part, and all shall be well.’ He laughs again. ‘I’m sorry I had to keep all this from you. But I understood you had your quite sensible doubts. So I edited somewhat, trusting the moment would come when I could open with you. Such as now.’
‘Okay.’ I nod. Reva has been staying in a basement room in a hotel in Goa. She’s got very fat. Bill Fancy is by some means bringing her to the plain. All right. This sounds all right. Then I say, ‘The company’s gone, Ess. Resolute’s gone.’
‘The company hasn’t gone. The company is precisely where it always was.’ He taps the side of his head. ‘Every name. Every address, every telephone number. Not quite every but a good few of the birthdays.’ He pulls his shirt on over his head, making me aware for the first time in a while that he’s been topless, and rubs his hands together. In his scrubbed face the graph-paper scar sheds a strong, pink, latticed light. ‘I thought that might be something else we could do together. Once we’re back in Blighty and we’ve registered the patent and whatnot. We’ll take what’s in here’ – the head tap again – ‘and put it to use. Every name, every address. None of your email, your phone. We’ll go door to door. Everyone Resolute ever employed, every machinist, every cleaner, every manager, even the poor swine who got laid about by that Skycoach mess, every last one. A job if they want it. Sky-high pay and princely conditions in the world’s first company to manufacture and mass-market antigravity technologies.’ He stands, stands over me. He seems about to put his hand on top of my head. Then he puts his hand on top of my head. ‘What say you? When everything’s signed. We’ll go knocking on doors.’
