by Mike Ashley
“OK,” said Hector, wincing inwardly to see his father so evidently throwing his money away on this crank end-of-the-world notion, “I see. For earthquakes, is it?”
“Any kinda tremor,” said his father.
Inside they fetched two mid-day beers, and sat down on the porch outside to drink them together. They talked about the book. “I read the book,” Hector told his Dad. “After I got your email. The end of the world is nigh!”
“Yeah,” said his Dad.
“Took me a while to track it down,” said Hector. The sentence didn’t come out as rebuking as he’d thought, or hoped, it might. “That title Off On A Comet, that’s not the title in French. I,” he added, preening a little, “I read it in French, you know.”
“Yeah,” said his Dad. The bright sunlight brought out the lines in his face, like acid resolving the grooves and gouges into an etcher’s plate. They fanned from the corners of his eyes, like the route-maps provided by airlines from a hub, Atlanta say, to a hundred destinations. His left cheek had a deep fold running from his eye to the corner of his mouth, but there was no corresponding fold on his right cheek. Perhaps he slept always on his left side, always pressing the crease into that side of his face, every night.
“It’s a crazy book,” he told his father.
“Yeah,” said his Dad. “It’s some book.”
But this was not what Hector had meant. “So,” he said, breezily, “the hero, this guy you reckon is an ancestor – he’s in the French army in Algeria. And this comet hits the earth, and he’s there with his batman and at first he thinks it’s resulted in this great flood, since he’s surrounded by sea which he wasn’t before.” Hector’s father stared impassively at his son during this recital of a story that he knew perfectly well. But Hector junior wanted to stress the absurdity of the adventure, and hence of his father’s new craze. “He searches about and finds some more survivors of this comet-hit, and they all band together, but something’s gone screwy with the heavens, the sun’s rising in the west –”
Hector paused, loitering over this point for reasons he didn’t wholly fathom within himself.
“Rising in the west, and Venus looming large, and so on. Then it turns out they’re all living on a chunk of land – and sea, which is I think we can agree pretty tough to swallow – that’s been knocked off the earth by the collision of the comet and carried away on the comet . . .” Hector shook his head. “You see how crazy that is?”
“Yeah,” said his Dad. “Tell me – how is it crazy?”
“Well for one thing, this comet crashes into North Africa, scoops up a chunk of the ground, and flies on . . . but the people on the chunk of land can still see the sky, they’re not you-know embedded in the comet, so the chunk of ground must somehow have been flipped over through one-hundred-eighty . . .” He grinned a goofy grin to emphasize how stupid this was. “Then they fly through the solar system, with – you know, gravity, and with atmosphere, and with the sea freezing rather than boiling off into space, it’s daffy.”
“Yeah,” said Hector senior.
“And then they return to the earth at the end and they plan to float off the comet in a balloon, and then they just float into the Earth’s atmosphere, phhhw.” Hector raised his hands, palms upwards, in front of his chest, as if lifting two fragile, invisible spheres. “Crazy. And then they get home, and nobody’s noticed that they’ve even gone, and nobody seems to have figured that a comet carried off half of Algeria. I mean, what is that? Is it one of those, And I Awoke and Behold it was a Dream things?”
His father was staring into the middle distance. How he could look so long, without sunglasses, without even wrinkling his broad blue eyes, was beyond Hector.
“Then I figured the name of the guy, the title of the book in French, is Servadac, and that’s ‘cadavers’ reversed. You see? So I figured it was a trope,” and as he spoke, he revised his words en courant to an idiom more appropriate for his father, substituting, “a manner of speaking, a metaphor rather than a literal account. It was Verne deconstructing, you know, Verne criticizing and playing around with the conventions of nineteenth-century science fiction. I wondered whether it isn’t all about death, and spirit journeys, what are they called, astral journeys, and heaven and hell and so on. I’m not hugely experienced in reading these sorts of texts. Books I mean.” Hector had minored in English, but it had mostly been Shakespeare and African-American literature. He had majored in History of Art.
“It’s kind of a shame,” said his father, in a low voice with a burr underneath it, as if he needed to clear his throat with a strong cough, “that you didn’t bring Marjorie with you.”
5
Outside, alone, Hector walked over to a low concrete structure, three feet in all directions, perhaps some sort of bunker or store, and sat on the edge of this and smoked a cigarette. The fact that the ranch was in a declivity gave it a weirdly foreshortened, film-set feel; the horizon looked close enough to touch. The sky above was pure, cyanide blue. The sunlight felt heavy and hot. He wondered, absently, whether he shouldn’t borrow a hat from his Dad.
No cicadas spoiled the perfect silence.
At Yale, where he’d majored in Art History, Hector’s room-mate had been a theology student, a lawyer’s son from Pennsylvania called Orwell Matthiesson. Hector remembered his own astonishment, imperfectly hidden behind a bottle of beer in a dim-lit bar, when Orwell had described – laughing, as if it were the biggest joke in the world – punching his own father during a fight. “You actually hit him?” Hector had asked, goggling. Orwell was a beanpolish, sharp featured guy with long arms and big hands. “Sure,” he had replied. “I whaled him in the stomach. He saw the blow coming, he was able to tense up, no harm done. He was mad, though. Man he was mad with me. But you know how it is when you’re having a fight with your Dad, you know how fierce it can get.”
But Hector didn’t know. He had never once fought with his Dad, never so much as raised his voice, or stormed out of a room. He had barely even contradicted his father, during all the long years growing up in the LA house. In fact, as he looked back on his childhood and adolescence from the vantage point of Yale freshmanship, he could barely remember talking to his father at all. What did they have to talk about?
He had decided to study Art History because, he told himself, he loved art; but his first year at school had been a process of fastidiously unlearning his visual tastes; or if not unlearning (for the sorts of paintings that moved him as a teenager still stirred something in him as a student, against his better judgment) then rather a carefully modulated process of systematic repression of his gut-responses. His mother had been an artist, producing brightly coloured figurative canvasses depicting lush natural landscapes, or animals, or nudes with animals, or sometimes, Hector shuddered to recall (for these were the paintings that sold in California in the seventies) unicorns, dolphins, pumas, starscenes, zodiacal interpretations. As a child Hector had almost worshipped his mother’s ability to conjure these images out of two boxes of paint and a stretch of canvas. As a teenager, he had of course acquired distance from them, which out of her presence sometimes took the form of disdain; but his taste in the fine arts was indelibly marked by his childish immersion in those images: he loved Gauguin, he admired (without true heart’s yearning) Van Gogh, he thought Chagall beautiful. At Yale, however, after some over-enthusiastic partisanship, it dawned on him that these sorts of artists marked him as insufficiently aesthetically sophisticated, and so he conditioned himself to love abstract art, to prefer Leonardo’s sketches to his completed paintings, to drop names like Ben Nicholson and Karen Waldie. He had settled on Cézanne as a doctoral topic in part as a compromise between the figurative and the abstract. Compromise was one of the badges of his life, like stretch-marks on his soul. Coming to terms with the world, the world meeting him less than half way. It was the realization that growing up was, beyond a certain point, a kind of shrinkage.
He had never really known what his father did for a
living. Something in business, it seemed. Something involving selling, or speculating, with the now-wealthy ex-hippies of San Marino and Silverlake and Los Feliz.
Hector sat on the concrete cube in front of the ranch house and pondered as the smoke scraped into his lungs with its delicious thousands of miniature hooks, and his skull relaxed minutely. When he said to his Dad, about the Verne novel, “You see how crazy that is?” he had actually been saying “you see how crazy your life is now, Dad? You see how insane you were to sell the house and buy this ranch and move here with these weird followers, these cultists, whatever they are?” But if his Dad had deciphered this particular communication, he didn’t show it. There ought to be a way, Hector thought to himself, that I can tell Dad what I really feel.
The Bulgarian woman (Hector had forgotten her name) had come out of the house and was walking over the dirt towards him. As she approached the sound of an industrial drill started up, from somewhere well away, behind the main building. The distance shrank it to an amplified mosquito noise.
“Hello,” she said. “Do you mind if I sit with you?”
By way of response Hector offered her a cigarette. “Smoke?”
She didn’t reply, instead settling herself on the edge of the concrete, disconcertingly close to Hector. Their hips were touching. Her legs, as long as Hector’s, stretched straight out. Even in heavy-duty jeans, he could see that they were good legs, shapely legs. Trying to be surreptitious, he glanced up and down her body. His intimate from-above perspective of her breasts gave her a shelf-like forcefulness of figure. Her curling hair was dark brown. It smelt faintly of candy. Her face, which had struck Hector earlier as conventionally pretty in a broad-set sort of way, looked better in profile: the clean lines of her nose running down to a proportioned tip of flesh at the end, lines at the edges of her mouth suggesting a laughing personality. Despite his Dad’s warning, Hector’s libido, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say his mere habit of bodily response, perked up at the prospect represented by this woman. He imagined her undressing. He imagined placing his hand, purposefully, on the spot where his hip had accidentally achieved contact with hers. He speculated about the way her flesh would feel under his fingers; not too taut, not too slack. And straight away, without thinking about it, without weighing the propriety or even likelihood of success, he began wondering about the best way to get her into bed – a direct address, a sly insinuation, a slow seduction. His cigarette had burnt into a drooping hook of ash. He dropped it in the dirt.
“I’m sorry?” he asked. She had said something to him, but he’d been too preoccupied with the entwining physicality of her presence, and he hadn’t properly heard.
“Je pense que vous cherchez,” she said, looking straight ahead, “une simple question qui n’exigera qu’un oui ou un non. Mais c’est n’pas ça facile.”
The fact of her speaking in French further confused Hector’s fidgety, jetlagged mind. “I’m sorry?” he said again.
“You have,” she said, turning her head enough to see him out of the corner of her eye, and presenting another attractive half-profile, lips that Hector felt an actual physical itch to reach over and kiss, “just come back from France, I think?”
“Yes,” he replied. And belatedly, he added, in his flat American-accented French, “c’est vrai. C’est simplement que votre mots prononcés . . .”
“It’s alright,” she said, smiling warmly and thickening the laughter lines prettily at the edges of her mouth. “Only I wanted to say that this question does not exist. It is more complicated than a simple yes or no, is all I wanted to say. If you could stay here longer, you’d maybe understand.”
This puzzled Hector; and piqued him too, as if he were being banished from the sexual possibilities of this woman as soon as he had been introduced to them. “I can stay,” he insisted. “Why can’t I stay? Does Dad want me to go?”
She was still looking at him out of the side of her eyes. “You misunderstand. I have not expressed myself well. You will stay as long as any of us. Only, if you could have come earlier, it would have perhaps been better.”
Hector had an insight into what she meant. “Is it happening soon, then? This end of the world stuff?”
“Tonight,” she said.
The sound of the drill rose and fell in the hot air.
“Well,” said Hector, trying to think of something witty and ingratiating to say to this woman, whose hip was still pressed so suggestively against his, “I guess I’ll get an answer to my question soon enough. Tonight, I guess.” He fiddled a new cigarette out of the packet, and slipped it into his mouth. “What happens when, or if, I should say – if tomorrow dawns and everything’s still the same as it was? I mean, like the millennium. I often wondered how the people who really believed the world was going to end in 2000, how they felt waking up the next day and realizing they were wrong.”
Instead of answering this, the woman said, “I said if you could stay here longer because we hoped you could have come weeks ago, and then we could have persuaded you of the inevitability of this thing. But your father thought you would get into a temper and leave, and then you would be away from the ranch when it happens.” Her accentless English slowed over these last three words, to give the unspoken “it” an appropriate weight. “So it is better that you are here only today, although it will be a shock for you when it happens.”
“If it happens,” said Hector. He clicked his skull-topped metal lighter and placed a knob of fire on the tip of his cigarette. “I’m sorry,” he said, drawing and blowing off a lungful of smoke before removing the cigarette from his mouth and holding it away from her, “I should have asked – do you mind?”
She was looking away from him now, which gave Hector licence to peer closely at the interwoven fibres of her curly brown hair, at the snuffbox indentation in the exact centre of the back of her neck. She smelled sweet, the heat and light squeezing wafts of whatever conditioner she used out of her hair straight to Hector’s nose.
The drill stopped its noise, and sudden silence was almost as startling as sudden loudness. Hector looked hastily to the front, not wanting to be caught staring.
“I love Hector,” the woman said. And for a moment Hector’s heart scurried in his chest, and he could sense the blood pumping in his head; but she meant his father, of course. The downstroke of this realization, with its release of petty annoyance, almost tipped Hector into vindictiveness; he almost asked, and are you sleeping with him then? But he did not ask this question. Instead he dragged on his cigarette, and looked away to cover his confusion.
“If you’d been able to stay for a few weeks,” she said, “you might have had one of the visions yourself.”
“Oh,” he said, scornfully. “Visions, is it?”
“They are very eloquent visions.”
“Yeah?”
“Without your father,” she said, simply, “I would be, now, in Europe, and tomorrow I would be dead. You also.”
“Everybody dies,” he said; but although he intended this as debonair and fearless, it came over merely as flip and rather callous. He sucked too strongly on his cigarette again, and had to stifle a cough. “I used to imagine,” he said, spontaneously, with a tingling in his chest of the sort he felt when he was doing something reckless, something filled with the possibilities of huge triumph and huge disaster mixed together, like asking a beautiful woman out, or attempting a risqué answer to a crucial question in an important interview, “I used to imagine exactly what it would be like to fight with my Dad. I used to lie awake at night, when I was at college, planning exactly what I’d say, exactly what his response would be, how I would cut him down to size, everything. But it never came to the right moment in actual life. There are so many things,” he went on hesitantly, although in fact exaggerating his hesitancy of expression because he felt this was something he ought to express in a circumspect fashion, “so many things that I’ve never been able to communicate to him, about how I feel.”
“Y
our father thinks,” she said, as if replying to this confession, “that it is merely a random matter that he got the visions. That it could have happened to anybody. But I don’t think so. I think he got the visions because of who he is.”
She hopped off the ledge and turned to look at him. Her breasts moved just out of synch with the rest of her body, a fact of physics that sent jangles of electric excitement along Hector’s nerves.
“Hey,” he said, uncertain what to say.
“I think you like me,” she said, and smiled.
Hector simply stared at her.
“Perhaps you are worried about Tom, but after tonight it won’t matter so much. The first child I have will be his, and maybe the second. But genetic mixing is an important part of this, of this whole thing, and there are only a few men here, and it would be foolish to be too exclusive.”
This, Hector thought, wide-eyed, was perhaps the most extraordinary speech a woman had ever spoken to him. “Christ, you’re forward,” he said, gruffly, suddenly aware of his own Adam’s apple, like an unswallowed lump in his throat. “Christ.”
“You do not remember my name,” she said, smiling again. And then she turned and went back inside.
6
He ate that evening with the whole group, sitting on the porch, scooping beans and fried potatoes and hot dogs western-style, and watching the setting sun polish the distant round-shouldered hills a startling lobster-red. He still couldn’t remember anybody’s names, but the mood of the group was chatty, informal. “Isn’t the world supposed to be ending in a few hours?” Hector asked nobody in particular, loudly, after his third beer. “You’re all mighty jolly.” But his only reply was laughter.
He only spoke to his father for a few minutes in total that evening. “I was just wondering, Dad,” he said, emboldened by the booze, and by the strange social environment (and with the Bulgarian’s strange words still buzzing in his brain from earlier), “about this Jules Verne book.”