God of Speed

by Luke Davies

  Well, of course, I’m not going to go crazy here—no point pushing the limits to where it hurts—but discomfort, sure. Bring it on. It’ll be no worse than the mosquitoes. I’ll simply reduce the Empirin, gradually. Missing every second injection might sound like a lot but it’s not—I’ll keep that going for a couple of weeks. That’s what I mean by gradually. Then after a couple of weeks, I’ll start missing every second one again, according to the new schedule. That’s what I mean by exponential decrease.

  And surely every second injection (the abstract, the negation) will not be missed, because every other second injection (the real, the experienced) will come as a great reward!

  I really think I can do this thing, Jack!

  And maybe I can cope with more discomfort than I think. It would be hard to know, since the Empirin is a painkiller and I am the first to admit it might therefore have masked some effects, some sensations of discomfort over recent years. So something even more astounding may await me! That I could stop. That I could go outside again. That the world might not assail me with its … intentions. What a breathtaking idea.

  I’m so thrilled with it. When should I begin? No point in not beginning now. All right. The plan. I’ll only have every second injection. Just let me get this right again: every time it’s time for an injection, I won’t have it, until it’s time for the next one. It is so diabolically simple! So. So then. So is there an injection due around now? I guess so. So perhaps I should have this one, and then not have the next one. That sounds fair enough. Or what about—better still—I’ll not have this one, and have the next one? That’s tougher, but if I’m going to be serious about this I’m going to have to be tough. I’ve already worked it out. Some discomfort will be involved. But I have reservoirs of willpower. I built the world’s largest flying ship, I flew around the globe faster than anyone else, I bought studios, bought companies, bought elections. I could outmaneuver anyone. So I can do this.

  So that’s the way I’ll do it. Good.

  No injection just for now.

  I’ll just lie back and think about things for a while.

  A smooth, uninterrupted row of thinking. That sounds nice. And chat with you, Jack.

  So what will it be? What can I think about?

  Cary Grant, for example! Once we were all one big family. In 1946 we were all in love with life, we were sitting on top of the world. I had just taken delivery of the new Lockheed Constellations for TWA, and I flew us all to a party in New York—Cary, and Tyrone Power, Virginia Mayo, Randolph Scott and Walter Pidgeon and Linda Darnell and others, but most of all, that day, that week, that month, sweet Gene Tierney, whose presence in the plane made my head swim with anticipation. This will be a difficult flight, I had whispered to her at the airfield in Los Angeles. Difficult not to touch you. We have to behave among our friends.

  Well then, behave, she said, smiling demurely like the cat that licked the cream.

  That night at the Ambassador I came out from the bathroom. Gene lay naked on the bed, a dozen chocolate hearts wrapped in red tinfoil spread over her body. Happy Valentine’s Day, she said. Though the chocolate was a secondary feast.

  Okay. So far so good. It’s easy to think. It all just flows along. I lie here and everything just comes to me, all wealth, all memory, all events real and imagined. Am I thinking out loud? I don’t want the Mormons to eavesdrop on what I plan to tell Jack.

  It is so easy to think. It all just flows along. It is the easiest thing in the world. And it doesn’t need Empirin to prod it along. And see, I didn’t have my next injection, and so now my next one is a real one. Which is much better than doing it the other way around. The only question that remains is, when to do my next one. Well, let’s see. I’m not at all used to clock-watching. But I figure it must be … soon. Probably now would be a bit too soon. After all it’s only … what, half an hour? Who knows how long it’s been since I thought of this plan. I’m exhausted from all this thinking. Maybe hours. I will have to enlist the Mormons’ help in getting the timing right with my new plan. We can develop a program, a timetable. That would mean I could get it all more precise, and wean myself off it more quickly. With their help I’ll know exactly when not to have the injection I was about to have, and when to have the one that follows, after the appropriate time lapse. And, after a while, when to have less of the one that follows, of the every-second-one, and, more importantly, just how much less. It gets complex, so you can see how the Mormons fit in.

  And eventually—no more Empirin!

  Except for specific physical pain, of course, should it arise. And no more Valium—except for specific sleeplessness, should it arise. And morphine would only be a very rare event. I’ll be fully weaned, more or less. What Cary would think of me then! How proud he would be. I’ll be a new man. A new Howard Hughes. It’s never too late.

  I can barely remember the days before the painkillers. I can remember all the events, every little thing that happened, but not so much how I was feeling. I seem to remember an awful lot of anxiety, though. I’m not sure if that’s a feeling or an experience. But in the mere remembering, a little anxiety comes back into me now. Which is not a good thing. Since I’m currently in the period of the lead-up to the every-second-one. No point creating additional anxiety. I’m embarking on a new plan here, and every new plan contains elements of the unknown, and hence whatever one can do to keep things smooth, well surely that can only be a good thing. So the thing to do now would be not to focus on any anxiety, past or present, which might increase the load of the past.

  Of course, the sheer effort of not thinking about the issue of the missed—the forgone—interim injection, or indeed of the upcoming every-second-one, could in itself be an anxiety-inducing event. So I’ll think good thoughts instead. Try to think of Cary Grant, of how we’ll laugh over all the good old times. (Talking to you, Jack, when you wake and come to see me, will be a practice run for this type of thing, for the new Howard, for the new Howard just like the old Howard, out on the town and full of life.)

  Yes indeed. The less I think about timing and the upcoming injection, the more it will be a pleasant surprise when it arrives out of the blue. Not literally out of the blue—I’d still know it’s coming, sooner or later. I just mean that if I haven’t been thinking of it then I haven’t been expending unnecessary energy on it and I haven’t courted the possibility of entering into anxiety, which really is, when all is said and done, a thing that eats you up.

  He would come here—no, I’ve got a better idea, don’t have him come here, get out and meet him. I would meet him … let’s keep it simple … let’s say downstairs in the lobby. I would stroll out of here, take the lift down, stroll across the lobby. Cary would rise to greet me. I would be wearing a comfortable suit, no tie, perhaps tennis shoes. No point dressing up, we were always the best of friends. I would have worked all day, checking stock prices from New York on the teletext, putting in a few calls, buy and sell, dictating a few memos to the Mormons if necessary, or no, writing them myself, I’d be feeling energetic. I would have shaved and showered and brushed my hair. We would clasp hands, hug perhaps. Cary would have a cocktail; for me, a lemonade.

  There would be so many things to talk about. I wouldn’t be living life from the bed anymore. I wouldn’t have a care in the world.

  Ah, Jack. Ah, Jack. Ah, Jack. Wake up. Please come and visit me. There are so many things that hum. The refrigerator, the television. The air-conditioning system.

  IV

  “Let us grant that there is an exhilarating dynamism in our condition, but this does not prevail, and it is not the norm of our existence. Trauma is far closer to our days and nights: fears of lovelessness, deprivation, madness, and the anticipation of our deaths.”

  —Bloom, Omens of Millennium

  ROUND-THE-WORLD RECORD, 1938

  IN 1938, WHERE was I, we flew from Omsk to Yakutsk, ten hours of incessant vibration and drone. Gradually the Steppes gave way to the tundra. One tends to go into oneself
. It is tiring, trying to shout over the noise.

  In Siberia (above it, I should say), when the rain clouds we flew above for seven hours parted, there was revealed to me then sunlight glinting on lakes in the tundra, the lakes flashing one after the other like a rolling semaphore, the barren expanses like a clanging and a wailing in my heart. Sadness? I’d gone far beyond that here. No thoughts in any case of putting a flare gun into my mouth. The end would be soon enough for every one of us, no point in hurrying. As the low sun lit the land, I sensed the coldness of every long shadow. I tasted the tang in that water that would freeze the chest. I knew myself to be closer to knowing the planetary despair of life’s essential uninhabitability, of all the astonishing emptiness between atoms, than to feeling sadness, just because to be a peasant, a wheat farmer, a commie, or all three, is equally as absurd as anything else.

  All this trip we were buffeted by winds.

  The yokels in Yakutsk were beyond belief. They knew of the International Date Line: how in one part of the world it might be Monday, and in another, Tuesday. Through an interpreter we learned they were perplexed by the Lockheed’s name, New York World’s Fair, 1939. Was there also a line that divided 1938 from 1939? In any case, I was the harbinger of the future.

  Twelve hours from Yakutsk to Fairbanks, Alaska. Halfway across the top of the world, near dusk, I saw both moon and sun suspended in the sky—one to port, one to starboard—globes of perfect stillness. No stretch to call this the nicest moment (non-sexual) in my life. I sent another cablegram to Hepburn: This is an extraordinary beauty. Still safe, HH. Across the Bering Strait and into Alaska we fought freezing headwinds. I pissed into a jar and cradled it between my thighs for warmth. So there is another ten minutes of my life accounted for.

  At Fairbanks we were refueling and Dick was doing his standard airframe checks. We had filled much of the lining of the plane with ping-pong balls—our theory was that if we crash-landed smoothly on water, we might float longer. Dick was tired, possibly even delirious by now, and opened the wrong hatch. It was a fierce, blustery day out on the airfield. A tornado spout of ping-pong balls erupted from the plane. For an instant Dick was like a man on fire flapping at the flames, the little white globes swirling all around him, Dick the stunned center of a white dust dervish, jumping backward away from the hatch in his panic. Thousands and thousands of ping-pong balls cascaded onto the runway. They scattered in all directions, bouncing and skittering, pulses and tides of them advancing and retreating on the tarmac, looping in slow motion and spreading, thinner and thinner, off into the whiteness, where they simply disappeared. God knows, they’re probably still out there today, swirling like the snows.

  From Fairbanks it was an easy run to Minneapolis. By now the press was in a frenzy. From Minneapolis we might as well have been gliding into New York.

  At 2.37 p.m. on July 14, 1938, we touched down again at Floyd Bennett Field. We had flown around the world in three days, nineteen hours, seventeen minutes. We had opened new possibilities for the future of travel. Twenty-five thousand people were waiting to see us home. Twenty-five thousand people crowded around the plane on the tarmac. The reporters were fighting for a piece of me. “The whole country is captivated by this heroic young man and how he has not let himself be spoiled by inherited wealth,” said Lowell Thomas. Pleading tiredness, I slipped away from the official welcome to go see Kate in her townhouse near Washington Square. But the press were all camped out there waiting. I went back to my suite at the Drake Hotel and called her on the phone instead. She came around and fucked me into sleep. One can get very tired but one is never too tired for that. It was a very warm place, to fall into her arms. You are my special Howard, she said, nibbling at my ear. You are my hero. My muscles still hummed from the endless vibration. And all the strain dropped off.

  COULD I CUT THE ENGINES

  I HAD ALWAYS liked the clarity of the higher altitudes. I had liked to rise above Los Angeles. The air was very clean. I liked to fly north over the San Gabriel Mountains, or across the high deserts to Palm Springs. I loved the constant presence of the sun. I loved the vibrating of the fuselage.

  One dark night in 1937 I had ventured far out over the water. High above the dark Pacific, out on a long aimless loop from Los Angeles, through space, through my thoughts, I switched off the control-panel lights. In a blackness I had never known I felt the fear that freedom brings.

  Suddenly I was aware of the ceaseless drone of the giant Lockheed engines. The brutal magic of the stainless steel that pushed me through the brittle air. For many hours this deafening comfort had lodged in the back of my mind. Now, with light cut, my senses clung to noise. It seemed an intruder in the blackness, the blood through my temples noise enough.

  Could I cut the engines? Did I have the courage? Could I cut the engines and would they start again? To crash in the ocean. To sink down there where the giant manta rays glide, profoundly untroubled. A death without form and location, unnoticed by all who watch my every move. The one who is known by everybody in the world: that is fame. To be in a place that is neither true south, nor true north, but true nowhere: that is the trick. For death to be uncertain.

  So I cut the engines.

  Not silence but something close as the engines wound down. And the soothing rush of wind on steel, high in the air in the middle of the night. I put my hand in front of my face. I could see nothing. Looked all around me, to the roof, to my feet, to where the windshield was. Nothing. I saw more light when I closed my eyes than in all that open space.

  I said, I am Howard. Howard. How-ard. Howard Hughes.

  I could hear the words come out of my mouth, my own clear voice for the first time since take-off.

  I could not tell if in any way I could feel the descent of the plane. Not yet. I hoped my sense of time stayed true. Eight thousand feet, strong tailwind: I calculated I could give myself one hundred seconds of darkness and silence, allowing a huge margin of safety.

  A kind of blood rush. A kind of unconsciousness. The blackness crushes you. You feel it in the thighs. You feel so hot. It’s the cunt of the goddess of night. The plane descending. The blackness descending. Squeezing your tiny thighs. My tiny thighs. The thighs of Howard Hughes, so frail beneath the haunches of the night. The haunches of the night descending on my cock.

  I needed to come. I wanted to come in that black silence of descent.

  I switched on the engines and control lights. The cockpit glowed. The engines shuddered and took. Climbing toward twelve thousand feet, I licked my right hand and began to masturbate. The normal images. Women I’d known. Jean Harlow going down on me. A mass of blonde hair, a silver sequined gown. Elma Rane at junior high in Houston, the girl beyond attainment. How I longed to stroke her knees, untie the ribbons in her rigid hair.

  Several times in the climb I came close to coming. Then I’d stop for a moment to let it subside. Or open my eyes to check the instrument panel. For seven thousand feet I drifted in and out of this languorous state as the plane strained and hauled through the air.

  Then for the second time, I cut the engines and lights. Instantly the bright fantasies of submissive women disappeared. The plane began to angle downwards. Dark gales howled inside my head, whose boundaries expanded wider than the cockpit and wider than the Pacific. Down there my body and my legs and my cock connected to my right hand.

  I dreamed—did I dream?—that a giant, a goddess, had straddled me, was fucking me. I am most worthy I said. Fuck me fuck me. My head rolled back. That fierce wind, the wind of sex. More saliva. A huge woman. The rolls of fat. Her thighs. My thighs. The fatness of the night.

  She had a face, but it was galaxies away. It did not matter. I buried my expanded head in her breasts. I was no longer this small tin thing crawling through the air like an ant across a football field. I began to moan. The cosmic push of her belly on mine was the deep satisfaction that death must be. The smell of the goddess: diesel and grease. I could fuck you forever oh goddess of diesel and grease. I could
fuck you forever.

  I slipped into the final stage, the long slide into coming when you’re powerless to stop. I was beside myself with a pleasure that years later would be matched only by morphine. Crystal patterns broke and reformed in front of my eyes. With my left hand I pushed the joystick forward. The plane dived steeply. I spread my legs. Inside my boots my toes arched backwards. My spine pressed hard into the seat. In near-vertical descent the plane reached terminal velocity. The ocean was down there in the darkness, heading straight toward me. I had no way of knowing how much time was left. My hand was hot, the only hand in the world. No, goddess, the only goddess. My hand a vehicle of the goddess. Instrument of the will of the goddess of sex and death. Or was that night and day? I could not think straight, pinned to my seat and facing the roiling Pacific at lethal speed. If I was to die it was important that I came first. I imagined the ocean smashing my eyeballs back through their sockets. My head awash with death and salt.