by Mike Ashley
“Yeah,” said his Dad, looking levelly at him.
“I was just wondering. I don’t see how it can be, you know, real. It’s so wacky.”
Hector senior nodded. The Bulgarian woman’s boyfriend, whom Hector now knew, after what she had said, was called Tom, was sitting close to him; and he leant in at this point. “Servadac knew Verne,” he said, smiling. “Had worked as a crewman on his yacht. When he had his vision, he went to Verne. That’s what happened.”
“Yeah,” said Hector senior, nodding sombrely, as if he knew what the hell this was about.
“Verne wrote it up, published as fiction of course. But, as a novel, it’s so far removed from his usual thing – his usual thing, you know, is thoroughly plausible machines and inventions, it’s all very much feet-on-the-ground stuff. But Off On A Comet, man, that’s strange. Servadac. Didn’t you think it was strange?”
“Sure,” said Hector.
“That marks it out. Its very strangeness is the badge of its truth.”
“I guess I don’t understand what you mean by true.”
“It came to him, to Servadac, as a vision, a vision so intense he felt he was living it,” Tom said, with unnerving vehemence. “It was a warning. It came a little early, yeah. But it was a true warning.”
Hector played with his beer, picking at and peeling away the Budweiser label, rolling it up between his finger into a skinny cigarette, and then unrolling it. He could not think of a suitably forceful manner of expressing how absurd this sounded to him. Once Tom had moved away to talk to somebody else, he leant closer to his Dad and asked: “You really believe that?”
His father only nodded.
The light faded, the red hills becoming cigar-coloured, and then they were black against a carbon-purple sky fantastically replete with stars. Some people, as if to preserve the wild-west mood, were lighting actual oil lamps and suspending them from the overhang.
Hector took himself off to bed.
He had slept on the plane over from France, and had been able to stay awake all day without much bother. This was his patented failsafe technique for dealing with jet-lag: to push through the first full day, to resist the urge to nap in the afternoon and then to go straight to sleep at the proper time. Nevertheless his body clock was operating according to a different logic than the daytime-nighttime of California, and he did not feel sleepy at this point.
He undressed, naked in the heat, and sat in bed to read for a while. There was no bedside table, or bedside lamp, so he was forced to read by the main ceiling light. Attempting to move his bed to be better placed underneath this light source he discovered that all four legs were screwed into the floor. This annoyed him. And so instead of reading his book, he sat up, with the cotton sheet over his naked body, and fumed mentally. He wanted to masturbate, but at the same time he half-hoped, whilst more than half-disbelieving, that the Bulgarian woman would come to his room; in which case he wanted to keep himself in a state of appropriate readiness.
The lightshade threw a wineglass shaped shadow over the ceiling.
If Dad had been possessed by the Bible, he thought to himself, would that have been better or worse? Possessed by the book of Mormon, and visions that told him to build a temple in the desert, something like that? But that would have been worse, because his Dad had always been thoroughly practical and material; it was his Mom who had been artistic and mystical. And his Mom had died, and floated away to some mystical realm, beyond Hector’s reach, whilst his Dad had stayed right here, thank you very much, slap in the middle of the material, physical realm, living and breathing and smelling of sweat. Jules Verne? It was too outlandish even to be weird, like something so cold it feels hot.
He ordered the thoughts in his brain. He told himself: I’ll put these thoughts in some sort of order in my brain, file them away, and then I can go to sleep. And, glancing at the inside of his bedroom door, if this woman comes, she can damned well come and wake me up.
It was the particular book that galled him. For his Dad to think that – say – 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was a true story would be one thing, surely batty but within the realm of possibility. Maybe some nineteenth-century billionaire could have secretly constructed a submarine, and blah-blah-blah, and maybe it had been hidden from the world and blah-blah-blah. But this book, with its kooky Hale-Bopp-cultist air, its fly-away-on-a-comet-to-paradise nonsense? And his Dad had had visions, telling him this book was true, that the world was going to end this way?
He had not, he realized, ordered his thoughts. He had made himself more annoyed. He got out of bed and turned out the main light and got back into bed. He lay in the dark for a long time, thank you very much.
7
So, he went to sleep. It was dark, and he went to sleep. Despite the fact that his body thought it was mid-morning rather than late at night. In fact, he fell asleep just as he was telling himself that, in a minute, he’d get out of bed and turn the light back on so as to be awake when the world ended. But, with the perversity of the unconscious, it was this that acted as a trigger and propelled him into sleep.
So when the world indeed ended, he was asleep.
He was woken because somebody was shaking him, rocking him from side to side in the bed. The sheet was on the floor beside the bed.
Nobody was rocking him from side to side. He was alone in the room. But he was rocking from side to side.
He yelped, and woke up, or, more precisely, came to an approximation of consciousness. Grains of sleep made his eyelids sticky and unresponsive.
He jumped out of the bed. At some level of his half-awake brain he knew this was an earthquake. He’d grown up in California, so he knew about earthquakes, and he told himself that the thing to do was get out of the house as fast as possible, to get the hell out of there.
He stumbled to the door and pulled it open. It felt like a live thing in his hands, trembling and shaking as if afraid. He flung it open, but it bounced and juddered back and forth on its hinges. The floor heaved beneath him as if the room were about to vomit. The straight rectangle of the doorframe warped as he staggered through it to a parallelogram, and then flicked back to a rectangle.
The carpet wriggled underneath his naked feet as he rushed at the landing. In the funhouse surrealism of this jelly house, and in his half-awake, panicked state, Hector acted instinctively. He ran as if he were in the Pasadena house; not this strange new ranch, but the house he knew in his bones, the place where he had grown up. He ran in the dark and turned right to bound down the staircase. But there wasn’t a staircase. Instead he received a smack across his stomach, as if somebody had thwacked him fairly hard with a pool cue, and suddenly he was falling.
His mind clarified with extraordinary suddenness. The earthquake tremor vanished from his senses. He understood instantly what he had done; he had run right through the railing along the top of the landing and was falling through space, such a stupid thing to do, such (he immediately believed, with complete conviction) a stupid way to die. He thought two thoughts in rapid succession: one, an annoyance that he had never even learnt the name of the Bulgarian woman; the other, more self-remorseful wail, I’m thirty-eight and I’m going to die without even getting tenure for fuck’s sake.
He was weightless for the second, or second-and-a-half, of the fall.
Then he collided with something that jarred his ankles painfully. He felt a tumble of further motion, up-down, difficult to make sense of in the dark, and then he was standing upright on the trembling floor. It took considerably longer to understand that he was still alive than it had done to realize that he was falling. His heart was gulping repeatedly in his chest, and his nerves burned along his limbs and up and down his torso.
In his mind came one thought, with bell-like clarity: her name is Vera Dimitrov and they call her Dimmi.
The earthquake was still going on, but it seemed diminished in comparison with the intensity of Hector’s own aftershock and fear. He turned on wobbly legs, and looked behind him.
In the extreme dimness of the hallway he could just make out the crescent shape of the sofa that had broken his fall. He had burst through the railing at the top of the balcony hallway, and happened to land exactly on the central cushion. He had bounced up and forward and come to rest where he was now standing. It was a fluke.
A light went on. Hector flinched.
His father came in. “Are you up?” he asked.
“It’s an earthquake falling,” said Hector, through a gummy mouth. “We should get outside.”
With a precision of diction that only added to the sense of unreality pervading the night, Hector senior said, “The house is reinforced. The house is the safest place to be right now. Go back to bed, Hec. Go back upstairs to bed.”
Still trembling, Hector obeyed his father, pulling himself up the stairs by the shuddering banister and retracing his steps to his room. As in a fever-dream he clambered back onto his juddery mattress, and pulled the sheet back over himself, and lay there whilst the world shimmied and shook all around him.
8
He fell asleep again, despite all the shuddering. When the earthquake subsided he woke, with the unexpected stillness of the earth; but an aftershock ruffled through the ground, and another one, and he started counting them, and soon was asleep again.
He dreamt, for some reason, of a fireworks show. He was in the Pasadena house again, with the Bulgarian woman, Vera or Dimmi or Hot Momma or whatever she was called, and she was smiling at him over her shoulder as she walked away. But as she stepped through the door she was a different person, and dream-Hector believed she had removed her face Mission-Impossible-style, to reveal somebody else underneath. The door of the house opened, with the impossibly concertinaed topography of dreams, directly into Griffith Park. It was dusk, and many people were milling about underneath a sharkskin-coloured sky. Hector tried to catch up with Vera, but placing a hand on her shoulder she turned and was a stranger, somebody he didn’t recognize. “Your point?” this stranger asked. “Your point is?” “That’s a pretty fucking deep question,” replied dream-Hector, trying to throw a laugh into the statement but only managing an insincere gurgle. Somebody else (the connection wasn’t clear, it jumbled) was talking to a crowd, and dream-Hector trying to push to the front, and the speaker was saying “these fireworks are special, they are the true nature of things.” Dream-Hector thought to himself, “that sounds like my Dad”, but it wasn’t his Dad, it was some dark-skinned, dark-eyed man no older than Hector was himself. The sky had dimmed abruptly into a clear desert night-sky, flush with stars like dustings of static electricity, and in between the sparkles was a purple so dark it was barely distinguishable from black. “These fireworks,” the speaker was still saying, “are special, they are the true nature of things. You’ve heard of the Big Bang? That was exactly like these fireworks.” Dream-Hector tried to contradict, because this didn’t seem to him right at all, the Big Bang being ancient history not current affairs, but he couldn’t remember when fireworks were invented, the Chinese wasn’t it, and his mouth was gummed up, he couldn’t form the words. He turned to the person next to him in the crowd, but everybody’s face was angled upwards, looking at the dark sky, and above him the fireworks were bursting in glory, marvelous sunflower- and lily-shaped expansions of light occupying the sky hugely, flowering with intense illumination, and then breaking into crumbs of neon red and white.
He woke to a bright window. After the end of the world. The shaking house, and himself falling from the first storey. “Well,” he said, to his empty room, “was that a fucking weird dream?” But he knew that it had not been a dream. He knew it had all happened. The palms of his feet felt tender, as if they’d both been slapped hard. Otherwise he was unhurt. But his mind was dancing, one-two-three, one-two-three.
Fin, as it says at the end of French movies.
As he was dressing he realized that the whiteness of the window was the sign of a general fog. Fog in high summer in the Californian desert. How weird was that?
He went downstairs, but the house was deserted. The sofa looked somehow smug in the daylight; the whole scene shrunk by its perfect visibility to a comical rather than a tragic arena. Had he really believed he was going to die, just falling one storey? The most he’d have suffered would have been a twisted ankle, maybe, at the worst a broken bone. Yet the terror was still there, in mental aftertaste; the genuine death-is-here terror.
An aftershock rumbled and gave the floor an odd number of shakes. Hector flung his arms out, like a high-wire artiste, to steady himself. The shocks settled.
Out on the porch the world was milky and immediate, with an oceanic tang to the air, salty and ozoney. The view had been perfectly opaqued; Hector couldn’t even see the parked cars a few yards away.
Tom was sitting to the left of the front door, cradling what Hector at first thought was a cup of hot coffee, but which, looking twice, he saw was a pistol. The gun brought an automatic hey-I’m-your-friend grin to Hector’s face.
“Hi,” he said.
Tom looked up, his grin already broad. “Good morning,” he said. “Some night, yeah?”
“Yeah,” said Hector. “That was some quake.”
“You could say that,” said Tom, blinking with what looked like suppressed glee. “You could say that.”
“That one wasn’t predicted,” said Hector. “At least, I didn’t see it in any papers. It wasn’t on the TV.”
“No.”
“My Dad, is he about?”
“He’s checking the perimeter with Pablo and Esther. They’ll be an hour more, I’d say.”
Hector said nothing for several minutes. He took a seat next to Tom and stared at the blankness of the fog. “This is pretty freaky weather. It was so hot and clear yesterday, and now so white and chilly. I mean, I lived in California most of my life but never saw anything like this. I mean, this far inland.”
“It’s very striking weather,” said Tom, almost grinning with delight at the joke which he had a portion of, but which Hector didn’t yet get.
“But,” said Hector, groping inwardly for a laugh to lighten the words but not finding one, “hardly the end of the world . . .”
The fog sat, motionless as cataracts. After it became clear that Tom wasn’t going to reply, Hector said. “I mean, fog is hardly the end of the world, is it?”
“It’s the Pacific,” said Tom.
“What is?”
Tom gestured with the pistol. “All this.”
“The fog is the Pacific?”
“What’s left of it. Much of it boiled away to space, I guess, but a fair proportion of it ended up here. Most of it will distil out again, eventually. It depends how close we come to the sun.”
Hector tried to listen to this, and the words made sense, of a sort. But they did not lodge in his consciousness in a meaningful way. He could have been listening to an engineering specialist explain some complex process in a technical language of which Hector was himself ignorant. Forcing a laugh, that sounded accordingly more like a bark, he replied, “so a comet hit the earth last night and boiled the Pacific?”
“Something hit,” said Tom, in a clear, low voice. “Not a comet.”
They sat in silence for a while. The sound of two people talking became audible, somewhere away in the fog, but Hector could not pick out the words, only the fact that one speaker was a man and one a woman. That conversation, whatever it was, came to an end, and everything was quiet again.
Eventually Tom began speaking. “Something hit,” he said. “Something very dense. Ve-ery dense, and relatively small, and traveling fast. And something intelligent, I think. That’s what I think. When – it – realized it was going to collide with the earth it sent ahead, somehow, broadcast something to communicate with the inhabitants, to warn them maybe, or maybe – who knows? – to brag.”
“Who knows?” repeated Hector, amiably, trying not to hear exactly what was being said, but not succeeding.
“I think it tried in the 1870s, to communicat
e I mean, which resulted in the strange and rather garbled vision that Monsieur Servadac experienced.”
“I see,” said Hector, thinking with focused fury and anxiety on an imagined mental picture of Vera, called Dimmi, naked, stark naked. He tried to pour all his attention, his mental energy, into that image. He tried to divert all his fear and incomprehension into that inward vision, so that he could present an unruffled and fearless visage to Tom. He fiddled in his pocket for cigarettes, but he’d left the packet upstairs.
“The whatever-it-is,” said Tom, “hit last night. Somewhere a little east of India, in the sea, through the sea and, thwack, into the earth. It penetrated pretty deep, breaking up the globe, shattering it into myriad lumps, before losing its speed and stopping – somewhere below us now. Not too far, couple of hundred miles I think. Maybe a thousand.”
“Directly below us?” asked Hector.
“The world was broken apart, of course. But the lump we’re on, it’s in the best position. In terms of survival. Maybe a sixth of the globe’s mass in size, but the – object – is so massive, though small, that its gravitational pull is three times that of the rock it’s embedded in. If the fog cleared, you’d see. We’re on a strange shaped planetoid now, my friend.”
Hector wanted to say: I can’t believe you could speak aloud a sentence like that. But he didn’t say anything.
“If the fog cleared, then it would look as though the horizon were rearing up all around us. If you tried to walk to Frisco, it would get steeper and steeper until eventually it’d be more like mountain climbing. But that’s good, because it means that we’re in the bottom of the concavity, so the air, and eventually the water, will settle here.”
“It’s a good story,” said Hector, eventually.
They sat in silence a while longer.
“And this object, stuck in the soil below us, spoke to my Dad, did it?” Hector asked, eventually. “It communicated with him? Warned him?”