Joe Speedboat (28 page)

04:37 and he still hadn't come back. Joe and P.J.; I had never thought it was really possible. I swear. Even though it was so
obvious. And it went so easily: Joe closed the door behind him and everything changed. Should I go and look for him? Wait in front of her door, sneak in, find them? Naked, asleep?

Strangle them.

WHEELCHAIR ATHLETE EXTERMINATES LOVE NEST

05:20. Outside, the traffic had started rolling.

We got back on Saturday afternoon. On Sunday morning I turned on the transistor and left it tuned to Radio God; I wanted to hate. A marriage was announced, between Elizabeth Betz and Clemens Mulder. The groom's name, as it happened, was not entirely unfamiliar to me: it was the roofer from the Sun Café.

‘The vows will be celebrated at two-thirty,' the man of God said in a Vaselined voice.

The roofer, too, had found a female of the species with whom he could produce little roofers. And no one raised a finger to stop them. The man of God continued with the week's deceased.

‘Mrs Slomp, having passed away at the age of eighty-two.'

Organ, lento.

‘Mrs Tap, having passed away at the age of fifty-seven.'

Organ, andante.

‘Mr Stroot, having passed away at the age of seventy-three.'

Organ, allegro moderato.

‘Let Thy light shine upon these families in their hour of mourning.'

Organ, allegro con brio.

When the man of God said it was time to bring the Lord our gifts of love, I switched to Sky Radio.

On Wednesday my picture appeared in the
Lomarker Weekly
. I was wrestling with the Czech, the two of us listing like a ship.
INTERNATIONAL SUCCESS FOR LOMARK DUO
was the headline above the article, which dripped with local sentiment. The information was correct but caricatural; Ma, however, was so proud of that story. She was, if I'm not mistaken, more interested in the newspaper report than in the way it really went. Pa's silence was deeper than ever. After the discovery of the briquette fraud we had been living with our backs to each other, both of us with different kinds of shame in our souls. Ma said he had hung the clipping beside the coffee and powdered-soup dispenser. For weeks, ‘the newspaper story' served as point of departure for most of her conversations; she didn't know that Joe had lost his virginity only a couple of hours after that picture was taken. That his hands, accustomed to gears and drive shafts, had never felt anything so soft. That he had been walking around ever since in a sort of loathsome glow, while at night I sweated the love out of my system like a fever. I masturbated myself silly, as the only remedy against fits of jealous frenzy.

My friend and my dream lover had broken the triangle, the triangle that forms the basis for every sound construction. I had lost contact with the new connection, become a floating point in the darkness. Ever since Joe had come back to Lomark and started work at Bethlehem, I had believed in the illusion of unchangeableness. Now he was in love.

But how could I shove Joe and P.J. out of my life? They were the only people with whom I felt any kinship. I was confronted with a crucial moment in the process of growing up: the capitulation.

It took a lot of willpower when I was around Joe to act as
though nothing had happened. We attended tournaments, and I kept looking for Islam Mansur. I think Joe never noticed anything of the cold depths between us. I doubt whether he ever knew that I loved P.J., that I had longed for her from her first day in Lomark. He had never been particularly receptive when it came to affairs of the heart. He told me all about it. About how, when the violence in their relationship became habitual, P.J. had left Lover Boy Writer. The writer had gone on pestering her for a while; his own pathetic narcissism wouldn't let him accept anyone leaving
him
.

‘Sometimes I'm glad it happened,' Joe said, ‘that he fucked up like that. Not the punching and stuff, but you know. Otherwise this never would have happened.'

His expression actually went all
soft
when he said things like that.

‘Everything's different now,' he said, ‘even though nothing much has really changed. Except the thing with P.J. I wake up with the feeling that something's waiting for me, something good and important. Every day is a promise. And when I go to sleep that feeling's still there. It's a kind of perpetual motion, an uninterrupted flow of energy that doesn't need any fuel. Except for a telephone call, sometimes, or a kiss.'

I nodded, the bile rose in my throat. I was capable of hating him. I was vaguely shocked by the ease with which I could accept that idea. Somehow, though, the thought wasn't unwelcome; it would be easier, after all, to hate the man who possessed what I wanted most in the world. Meanwhile, with masochistic pleasure, I let him tell his story. I always encouraged him to tell me more. Only never about sex, he never talked about that, maybe out of reverence, or maybe it was simply discretion.

He had taken her to the Dolfinarium, in Harderwijk. The dolphin
show in the big tank had been set against the background of a story with witches and fairies. The actors were laughably bad, the dregs of the profession. The whole thing revolved around a magic pearl, which the fairy queen consistently referred to as the ‘magical poil'. The dolphins themselves were completely irrelevant to the story; all the animals had to do was a little synchronized jumping out of the water, for which they were rewarded with a herring. At the end the fairies and the witches had sung a song of reconciliation. The dolphins jumped through a hoop. Joe and P.J. were beside themselves with laughter, the story of the ‘magical poil' was to become one of their pet memories.

The November sky was clear and cold, full of orange contrails that lit up like fireworks. Down here on the ground everything was in its naked form. Disorderly clouds of lapwings rose up above the washlands, slow explosions of thousands of specimens heading southwest before the freeze rolled in.

Joe spent all his free time in Dirty Rinus's barn, working on his bulldozer. Once, when I went down to visit him there, I saw the plane again for the first time in years. It stood against the back wall, damaged and dismantled. There, in such miserable condition, stood the object that once filled me with such mad hope – of there being a way out that had to do with the will and the ability to think big. And it no longer interested Joe at all. I felt a lump in my throat. I made my way between a stripped Citroën 2CV, an antique hay tedder and a few other machines from the early days of industrialized farming. Dirty Rinus never threw anything away. He was so frugal that he even locked the garbage can when he left the house. People in the village weren't particularly fond of him, but he was still remembered for his pronouncement during the oil embargo in the Seventies: ‘Oil crisis? What oil crisis? I used to spend twenty-five at the pumps, and I still do!'

The wings of the plane were leaning against the wall, with
nasty rips in them. I reached out and tapped my index finger against the tail. The canvas was as taut as when Engel had first fastened it with tie-rips. It made a pleasant sound. This plane belonged in an aviation museum, it was a miracle that a couple of boys had actually built something airworthy, it should have been the showpiece in some private collection. The worst damage was up at the front; rods were sticking through the torn fuselage, you could see right through it. The propeller had been taken off and was lying on the floor, everything was covered in a layer of sticky dust.

‘Roofing tiles fell on it,' Joe shouted from the front of the barn.

I looked around, he was standing on the ladder of the bulldozer, from up there he could see me amid all the rubbish. I saw the hole in the barn's roof, the sky above. Around the plane lay mossy, broken roofing tiles. It galled me that Joe no longer even looked at the thing, but that's the way he was. He made something, tested its possibilities, then let it fall from his hands. Conservatism was foreign to him; he let time and roofing tiles do their work while he started in on a new chapter in his study of mobility. He didn't think much about things that weren't there; neither tomorrow nor yesterday were there, and so of little importance to him. I wasn't like that. There were days when I bridled at the sense of standing with my back to the future: a river running back uphill into the mountains.

Joe had always been obsessed with motion. Motion driven by the internal combustion engine. I remember a dark hotel room that smelled of old overcoats, somewhere in Germany or Austria I think, with Joe lying on the other bed and orating about his favourite subject. Every once in a while I could see his cigarette flare up.

‘Fear and overconfidence,' he said, ‘those are the prime
movers of history. First you have fear, which is all the thoughts and feelings that tell you something can't be. There are lots of those. The problem is, they're often true. But all you have to know is what's needed, nothing more than that. Knowing too much leads to fear, and fear leads to stagnation. The drudges are the people who tell you that you can't do something if you're not trained to do it, but talent doesn't pay any attention to that. Talent builds the engine, the drudge checks the oil: that's how it works. What do you think, you think Anthony Fokker knew what he was doing? He didn't even have a pilot's license, only talent and a lot of luck. Overconfidence is every bit as important as talent:
I
can't
do it, but I'm
going
to do it anyway
. You see for yourself whether it works or not. Some people get lucky, others don't, that's pretty much all you can say. There was no way we could build an airplane, we didn't have the technology to do it. But I can do my arithmetic, and Engel can too. In fact, Engel is a giant at arithmetic. And that's what you need if you're going to build a plane. Together, the two of us did the strength calculations for the wings and fuselage. Calculating and weighing, weighing all the time. We fudged a little with the battery, it weighed something like thirteen kilos, so that was the last thing we put in, a little ways to the back because the plane was nose-heavy.'

I heard a deep sigh in the dark.

‘I was more afraid of it not getting off the ground than I was of crashing.'

His face was lit up by the flame he used to find the ashtray.

‘And one other thing, Frankie. Energy that isn't put to use, that isn't applied, reverts to heat. Heat is the lowest form of energy. Then comes kinetic energy, like in an engine, and then electricity or maybe nuclear energy. But heat is the lowest level. A person who's sweating is converting motion into heat, the
way a stove does with fuel. And heat is loss. Entropy, Frankie: the law of irreversible loss. That's why the heated, high-entropic world is so simple, because it's all about loss. Anyone who doesn't know that doesn't know what's happening. People spend most of their lives looking for warmth. A little monkey that can choose between two artificial mothers – a steel one that provides food or a terrycloth one without food – will choose the terrycloth one. Warmth and affection: eternal babies is what we are. Fleaing each other. But too much warmth makes you dull, makes you drowsy. That's the oppressive thing about so many marriages – and once things get to that point, the spirit screams bloody murder. So what do you do? You buy a car or build a boat, the way Papa Africa did, because motion is the basis of all life. The molecular speed of an object determines its temperature – and if you add the factor of speed to that . . . Jesus, like having a rocket up your ass! For a lot of men the car is the only escape they have left, the only release from the cloying warmth of all the promises they've made: their marriage, their mortgage, the indignities tossed at them at work. Driving fast and fucking on the sly. That's why adultery is a bourgeois act, Frankie, something for people who promise too much, because the promise summons up its own violation. So watch out for people who promise too much. That's all I'm trying to say.'

He yawned.

‘Man, am I ever tired.'

Joe had bought the bulldozer, a yellow Caterpillar of solid, functional design, in order to take part in the Paris–Dakar rally. No one had ever driven Paris–Dakar in a bulldozer before and, seeing as there were no rules against it, Joe was going to be the first to try. I didn't understand what he saw in it, but he considered
the bulldozer the crown of his kinetic creation. It took a hell of a lot of work though to modify that heavy machine and make it suited for the rally.

Joe's biggest problem was how slow the thing was. It had engine power aplenty, he explained, but the gearing was too low, so it could never produce the kind of speed he wanted. He had ordered four larger gears from a machine plant, one for each wheel, and meanwhile he went on rebuilding the cab. The standard cab construction was too rigid to sit in during a rally, especially on the kind of stony desert substrates he was expecting. That's why he was putting the whole thing up on springs, and Joe had also added a pneumatic driver's seat from a truck in order to keep his kidneys in place while tearing at a hundred kilometres per hour or so across stones and through craters. In order to get to such speeds, which were insanely high for a bulldozer, he jacked up the revs by putting a heavier spring in the fuel pump. Now the engine could get up to 2500 rpm; parked there in Dirty Rinus's barn was a racing car that weighed almost nine thousand kilos.

We were in Halle, at the close of a nerve-racking tournament in which I'd barely squeaked into third place, when we heard about Engel. Joe phoned home from the hotel room. I remember that the window was open, letting in street noises and a breath of spring. After a while he hung up gingerly and looked at me.

‘Engel is dead,' he said.

There was only one thing I was really sure of at that point: that I longed blindly for the moment before that announcement, when the world hadn't been wrenched from its pilings.