God of Speed

by Luke Davies

  They couldn’t find my clothes quickly; by now it had been some time since I’d last been dressed. Finally they outfitted me in a pair of boxer shorts, a bathrobe and sandals. They wrapped me in a woolen blanket and strapped me to a stretcher, just me and my box of medicine. One, two, three, lift! They carried me down the fire escape, down nine flights of stairs. The bends were tight. I tossed in my stretcher as if at sea.

  When we burst into the open air I felt scared. We had no protocols to follow. The stench of burning filled my throat. I resisted the urge to retch. Dark-skinned people ran through the night. I craned my neck up from the stretcher. A three-story building a block away seemed to be leaning impossibly over the street. At the instant I focused on its strange architecture, it relaxed, and began to collapse in an extraordinarily leisurely fashion. Bricks spat from it like baseballs. My cordon of men fumbled with the stretcher and the back door of the limousine. Dust billowed outwards from the still-settling rubble of the lately deceased building.

  I was extremely anxious by now, being manhandled at improper speeds into the Mercedes. There were many sights and sounds to process. There was a lot of information simply yearning to slow down. I was not at all used to such rapid stampeding of the rhythms of my life. We were in the open and exposed, in a single limousine, in a city without rules or traffic lights, and all the phone lines down. I began to take stock of our situation. I knew I would have no chance finding a vein in a moving car without proper interior lighting, so I felt descending upon me a kind of sullen glumness, tinged with a sharp edge of anxiety.

  But then our way was blocked by a freshly abandoned bus, and I began to pant, and my heart raced greatly. More dark people rapped on the window, one of them holding his bloodied broken arm before us. The Mormons handled the reversing superbly.

  Whole blocks were now in flames. We were not driving anywhere; we were just driving fast, until we arrived somewhere less devastated. There were more buildings collapsed. There were bodies in the street. Our windshield was covered in dust. The windshield wipers merely smeared it worse.

  Sweat ran into my eyes. My head span. The Mercedes was nothing but a Very Small Room.

  Take me back to the hotel! I screamed, my voice hoarse. It’s this dust that will kill us! Please, take me back!

  Sir, we can’t go back. We need to head out of the city. Away from the fires and the buildings.

  Then hurry up!

  Because all our safety measures had been breached. There were microbial spores no doubt coming through the air-conditioning vents. There was calamity all around us. I could not afford to take a chance with germs.

  The wider earth, these powerful forces, were not to be trusted. I remembered back to that terrible time in 1968, when the Atomic Energy Commission ran its underground nuclear tests in the Nevada desert, and I tried so hard to get them stopped, and even Nixon couldn’t, or wouldn’t, help. On April 26, 1968, I had cowered under the bed for two hours. I’m sure I even felt the blast. Everybody knows that bacteria and spores are released in underground nuclear tests. On July 10, 1968, yet another underground test, I stayed in the bathroom all day, washing my face and arms with rubbing alcohol and paper towels. That atomic fallout was invisible! Who was to say it was not the same with an earthquake, that rapid realigning of the plates? And who was to say this nightmare in Nicaragua was not the beginning of a war? None of us knew anything. Communications were gone to hell. Even my satellites, circling high above me, meant nothing here. Nobody knew where we were!

  A Mormon injected me straight into my shoulder. I was never a great fan of intramuscular as opposed to intravenous injections, but then again December 23, 1972 was not an ordinary night.

  We drove for shelter to Ambassador Turner Shelton’s house, but once there learned there had been some structural damage. I refused to go inside: think of all that gently cascading plaster. So Shelton organized access for us to go to President Somoza’s summer estate in the hills outside of town. I liked being back on the road. It was good to move forward. I was thinking straight again. We sped through the smoke and the ruins to the Somoza villa.

  As we reached the foothills the air cleared, the dust thinned. The orange glow pulsed behind our shoulders. The hills before us were dark and pure. We rose up out of the tectonic pit.

  The Somoza estate was a Spanish-style villa that reminded me of Los Angeles in the twenties. I remembered the Vista del Arroyo, when we lay on warm concrete by the pool, my cousin Kitty Calloway and I, and the hummingbird sucked from the stamens and ravaged the jasmine. I had thought back then that it was impossible to become old. Now half a century had passed, and in the hills outside Managua there were fruit bats screeching in the fig trees. I was filled with dread.

  Somoza was out of the country; lesser lackeys took care of us. I refused to go into the house. There were too many unknowns. But I did take up their offer and transfer from the Mercedes into the presidential limousine, which was certainly more spacious. A Mormon turned it around and parked it for me at the top of the driveway. Then he left me to sit and gather my composure, the engine purring, the air-conditioning running, with my medicine box by my side. From high up there I watched the city burn as dawn rose to meet my sixty-seventh birthday. I prepared an injection just to celebrate alone, and this time, with slightly calmer hands, I could find a vein at my own pace. My men would tell me later that seven thousand people were dead. Six hundred square blocks of the downtown were leveled. The city was an ash-heap. We had to get out of there. I needed extra Valium and Librium that day, just to keep my adrenalin in check. Soon after dawn we sped back down the hills, back into the swirling smoke, through the outskirts of the city and on to the airport. I was fervently wishing that the future would come: tomorrow, or the next day, somewhere safe. All these years, I thought my punishment was to die, Jack. Perhaps in fact it was to live this long. In Managua I felt sorry for the dark people, with the dust and soot everywhere, and the buildings burning. But if this is what my life had become, it would frankly be better to die.

  Or ascend, as the case may be. Our chartered jet took off at seven a.m. We flew to Fort Lauderdale. A lifetime ago I had disappeared there, too, when I was the wandering man on the beach, mad and happy for ninety days with nothing but the seagulls and the dunes. But we were merely refueling, and with the tax issues, in fact, we had to get out of there in a hurry. We were thinking on the run. It was like the glory days again! We would go and live in London for a while.

  Then we were temporarily impounded on the tarmac in Florida. Flight clearance was refused. The IRS demanded I disembark. We sat in a stalemate for nine hours while the press gathered in the terminal and negotiations continued. In actual fact there was something of a phone-around. The phones were running hot, if not us. And I remembered Nixonburgers, of course. My men contacted the president’s men. Finally the IRS was told to back off. Instead they insisted on a compromise: that an Internal Revenue agent board the plane, to interview me—in person!—to sight me, like a document—to verify that I was actually alive.

  It was an awful dilemma. I had to be present; my presence was required. Perhaps my hair was a little lank, my beard unkempt. I was very much used to the Mormons. But I did not like strangers.

  I took extra medicine to calm my nerves.

  I sat in shadow, beneath a blanket at the far back corner of the cabin.

  He came on board, a nervous man with a briefcase.

  Mr. Howard Robard Hughes?

  That’s me.

  Sir, I’m sorry for the inconvenience.

  And so you should be.

  Sir, I just need you to sign this document, stating that I’ve sighted you.

  I took the pen and scribbled. No, my fingernails were not as long as everybody said. I knew about nail clippers! I wasn’t an animal.

  And then we flew to London. And here we are. Isn’t life just splendid? I cannot believe it was only six months ago.

  The earthquake was a message: get off the earth. Just as a horse buck
s a rider from its back. And we came here to this beautiful Inn on the Park. And took the top two floors. I needed only to settle down for a while, get the blood flow back to “galactically slow”. And I called Jack to London. I called you here to London, I will say. And I gained my breath. And I found my strength. And I knew that we would talk into the night—because you know I’ve come to believe, Jack, that communication is everything.

  Memo on memos, 1973

  A good letter should be immediately understandable … a good letter should be immediately understandable … a good letter should be immediately understandable … a good letter should be immediately understandable.

  Think your material over in order to determine its limits … think your material over in order to determine its limits … think your material over in order to determine its limits … think your material over in order to determine its limits.

  A dash, or two, shall be used to denote words preceding, or following, a quotation. Two dashes shall be used to denote the deletion of words when a group of words are quoted and one dash shall suffice when only one word is quoted. In either case, there shall be a space between the quotation mark, the dash, or dashes, and the quoted word, or vice versa: i.e.,—and will best assure—.

  The word “shall” shall be used throughout instead of “will” in the third person singular and plural, making all sentences in the imperative rather than the indicative.

  The infinitive shall not be used to express a major thought, except as an auxiliary to a main verb.

  No changes or marks shall be made on the original pencil version.

  The numbering system set forth in the notes shall not be a criterion for any future numbering systems.

  V

  INN ON THE PARK,

  LONDON, JUNE 10, 1973

  … MORNING …

  “My honey must flow off in the great rains as all the parts thereto do thereto belong ha, and we are pitched toward the last love, the last dream, the last song.”

  —Berryman, The Dream Songs

  ROUND-THE-WORLD RECORD, 1938

  THE DAY AFTER my return, a million and a half people lined the streets for the tickertape parade, from City Hall to Battery Park. The world spilled down upon me in an open limousine, a blizzard of confetti; how happy I felt, how bewildered by the goodwill of others. Standing ten-deep on the sidewalks, the crowd was hysterical with admiration. They leaned out their windows from the high canyon walls of the office buildings. The air was dense with scraps of paper, all gaily fluttering Hughesward. As I waved my fedora at the well-wishers I was remembering only Katharine Hepburn, how I had woken in the night, the night before, when she’d come around to my suite at the Drake Hotel, and I’d watched her smiling and twitching in her sleep. I was thirty-two years old, Jack. My goodness.

  That evening after the parade I went to the reception, with Katie on my arm. There were many speeches and I was rather bored and later I would have to do it all again—parades and dinners and speeches—in Washington and Los Angeles, and Houston, of course, where the hometown boy truly made good.

  “Coming from Texas,” I said at the Houston banquet, “peculiarly fits a person for flying around the world. There’s nothing you can see anywhere that you can’t see in Texas, and after you’ve flown across Texas two or three times, the distance around the world doesn’t seem so great. We didn’t see any mountains on our trip that were any steeper than the mountains of west Texas. We didn’t see any plains broader than the plains of central Texas. And we didn’t see any swamps that were any wetter than the swamps of Houston.”

  They laughed at that one.

  Then it was all done. I had mastered the planet. I landed in this world of shattered forms, broken shadows, anxious dreams. After all the ticker tape washed down the gutters, I felt the sensation of emptiness. Perhaps, then, it was time to settle down, perhaps that would take away the emptiness. So a week or two after my astonishing feat I proposed to Katharine—would she marry me?

  She was silent and said, I will tell you tomorrow. She sighed and said, It is not a question I take lightly. I thought this was the magnificent unfolding of events, the etiquette, the propriety. I looked forward to the dawn.

  She was pensive at dinner, though she smiled for the photographers. I tried to cheer her up. I was feeling light. I was feeling the future bear me aloft. I didn’t talk about marriage, though. I let her find her way. She attacked her ice-cream sundae as lustily as any other time, and I took this to be a good sign.

  We didn’t stay together that night. I need to think, she said. I took it as yet another good sign when she blew me a kiss, smiling from the back of the limousine.

  In the morning the same limousine picked her up and brought her around to the Drake, where my suite was festooned with flowers, and a simple breakfast of bread rolls and English jam and freshly steaming coffee was spread on a yellow gingham tablecloth.

  She walked into the room, ushering in, as always, that joyful energy, and she said, How lovely.

  But she sat, and pressed her fingertips together, as if in prayer, as if unable to move forward with the ritual of the sugar and cream lest it put her in some trance from which she might not wake.

  She said, Howard.

  She pursed her lips, drew in deeply through her nose, and sighed.

  No, she said. No.

  She said No, Jack!

  Howard, she said. My sweet darling.

  I think we’ve become more friends than lovers, she said.

  She could have fooled me. We had made love only the night before last, and I had proposed in the aftermath.

  I said nothing. I had been removing my napkin from the silver napkin ring, and suddenly the action seemed suspended as if it would never now be completed, as if I were looking down at an oil painting of a hand and a napkin ring on a yellow tablecloth.

  She said, Howard, this is a very difficult decision. But I think we are not really heading in that direction.

  She said, Please don’t be offended by this, but I think perhaps your mind is elsewhere.

  I felt nothing; I felt myself falling, as if through empty space.

  I thought, I’ll show you what elsewhere means. Elsewhere is every woman lining up.

  Then again, perhaps that’s what she meant, Jack! But I think she was actually talking about my planes.

  She suggested I was not the marrying type. (She must have liked the marrying type, since she stuck by that goddamned cocksucker Spencer Tracy all those years while he refused to divorce his wife.)

  We’ve had a good run of things, she said, but our lives are so widely divergent—I don’t know if she said widely or wildly, Jack, to be honest—and it might be good to have a break. Just see where things land in a month or two.

  Or a year or two, I said.

  She was already fading from my presence as she spoke the words. All that wild abandon, fading. It was as good as gone. I didn’t care. Sure, she could be my friend, but I didn’t focus on my friends. Why was it always so hard, all this talk? It was simpler just to act. The reason there is Yes and No is that at some point you have to make a decision. Goddamn. Goddamn. There was nowhere to turn. All the things on the inside were a problem, all the thoughts. And all the things on the outside were a problem, too: how to communicate. Or rather, how to bother. Only the medicine has ever made it right.

  I was an all-or-nothing kind of person, Jack. I just couldn’t stand the thought that someone might not be thinking of me every second of the day.

  There were simpler fillies than Hepburn prancing through the fields: all beribboned mane, all sinew and swishing tail, all wide-eyed and tetchy and pawing at the earth.

  All those goddamned elsewheres. Excuse my language, Jack.

  Of course, I didn’t realize it at the time. But whatever it was that I needed so badly, it was clearly not there in the arms of the women. Yessiree. But that’s called retrospective wisdom, as we all know. I saw her to the door. We briefly hugged. I was rejected, Jack. It is as simple as
that. I thought I could have whatever I wanted. Kate came along and thought otherwise. Well, it’s another ten minutes of my life accounted for; that’s a good way of looking at it, yes?

  Nevertheless, it was hard to shake my sense of disorientation. I had circumnavigated the globe, sustained by the anticipation of reunion. She wasn’t supposed to be going anywhere! It was physically unpleasant, the shock of it. It began as a burning sensation between my shoulderblades. I had thought she would say Yes, but what she said wrenched me in the opposite direction. There was no warning. Just the sense that I had blinked, and opened my eyes to an entirely foreign world.

  When I closed the door I turned around and sat down on the bed. I was never one for wailing. The room, of course, had suddenly become strange: not unfriendly, but of an alien disposition. The walls shimmered with otherness. At first I felt very alone, but after a while I felt neutral, and then numb. Then I gazed for a long time at dust motes suspended in a shaft of sunlight, and a great peace descended, which is different, surely, from numbness, if I am remembering it correctly. Then I cried.

  I will have to tell you, more than almost anything, about how nothing ever happens in the way we like to dream it will.

  NO MORE SLEEPS

  I FLEW AROUND the world, once. And I’m going to fly again: today, if I’m not very much mistaken! Today we go off into the sky together. But we must be vigilant. Outside, they will be everywhere: too many people, too many viruses, and the press, waiting in ambush.