The Weight of Numbers (6 page)

‘I don't suppose you've got a cigarette?'

I leaned in through my window and got Felix to hand me his packet of 555s. I opened the packet and offered it to her.

‘What are these?' she said. However unfamiliar she was with the brand, it wasn't going to stop her taking one.

There was a lighter inside the pack so I fired up her cigarette for her, cup-handed, shielding the flame from the wind. I handed it over. She smoked. Where it emerged from the cuff of her coat, her wrist was as thin as a child's. She did not cough, but she certainly changed colour. ‘Jesus,' she said. She climbed down from the cab. Now I saw why I had not been able to guess her age. Her bright yellow North Face jacket hung off her as though from a peg. She was terrifyingly thin. It had to be an illness.

I glanced through the windscreen and glimpsed her driver: a porcine woman with a double-chin and dykish hair. I thought to myself: Laurel and Hardy.

‘The radio said something spilled,' said the girl.

‘Yes,' I said, teeth chattering. I lit a cigarette for myself, breaking a twenty-year pledge.

Felix got out the car and walked around, smiling his smile.

Things were in danger of degenerating into a social occasion. I tried to relax. I looked at my watch. Eleven fifteen.

‘You're English,' she said.

Her own accent was a mid-Atlantic thing I couldn't pin down.

My Englishness seemed to fascinate her; I couldn't work out why. Poor Felix didn't get a look-in. She seemed to want me to reciprocate her interest and, since it was a good way of not talking about myself or my passenger, I asked her where she was going. This was all the prompting she needed. She leaned back into the truck and came out again with a couple of flyers for us. ‘I'm opening tonight,' she said, ‘if we ever bloody get there.'

Was the English swear-word for my benefit?

It was only as she climbed back into her van that it occurred to me: she was familiar for some reason.

The flyer was headed
SCTV02
, and underneath there was a picture of a bubble. There was something odd about that bubble. I unfolded the flyer, revealing the rest of the photograph: a hand was holding a disposable cup, and a trail of misshapen bubbles had spilled from the rim of the cup and were hanging in the air.

The bubbles were water, floating in air.

The photograph had been taken in space.

I went to see her show. There were no films I especially wanted to see, Jonny Lang had sold out at the Rialto Square weeks before and I couldn't think what else to do with my time. Felix was in good hands, and I would be seeing him in the morning.

If the venue for
SCTV02
had been some left-field place I might not have gone, but back at the hotel I read the flyer properly and discovered it was playing early at the Museum of Contemporary Art opposite Jan Svankmeyer's
Alice
. I figured if I didn't like the one I could go and watch the other and still have time to hunt down a decent meal.

The woman's name was Stacey Chavez and I understood why my Englishness had intrigued her. From her potted biography I learned that she had been a British TV star. Hearing my accent, she had expected me to recognize her.

Perhaps this was arrogant of her, perhaps not: I had found her vaguely familiar, after all, even though her active years coincided with my time in Mozambique. I had never seen
The Singing Detective.
I had never seen
The Moth.
I had no idea, come to that – beyond the none-too-subtle clues buried in
SCTV02
– how or why a mainstream actress came to be creating intricate, difficult and (for my money) downright unenjoyable performance art for a Chicago museum.

The premise was simple: in space, everything floats, so it is very difficult to eat and drink. Afterwards I couldn't tell whether Stacey's performance, a weird fusion of mime and dance and gesture, had gone over my head, or whether what I had seen was really all there was to get: the sterile white set, part hospital, part spaceship interior; plates that would slip out from under her hand; cups that hovered above her, just out of reach; the pink ‘space food' she squeezed into her mouth from an upended detergent bottle.

I had had a belly-full of art for one evening, and rather than repair to the MCA bar – wall-to-wall twenty-somethings in tea-cosy hats – I braved a snow flurry and walked the couple of blocks to the nearest dive.

There was an old episode of
Cheers
running on a TV above the plasticated bar, as if to emphasize the degree to which this watering hole failed to live up to tourist expectation: characterless beer, sterile wood-effect surroundings, bar staff who bore all the behavioural stigmata – bright smiles, gimlet eyes – of some sort of customer-service boot camp. Everything designed and arranged so as to convince us that nothing bad was going to happen. No wonder the people around us were hardly drinking.

The door opened, letting in the cold. I glanced around, and there was Stacey Chavez. When she got to the bar I pointed to the show on the TV
– Kelsey Grammer sparring with Rhea Perlman – and said to her, ‘In Rio, meanwhile, the swimsuit boutiques have “The Girl from Ipanema” on a tape loop.'

It took her a moment to remember me. ‘Did you see the show?' she asked me.

‘I saw the show.'

‘You didn't like it.'

I shrugged. ‘Was I supposed to?'

‘Oof,' she said, miming a blow to the head.

I was growing used to her thinness. I was able to look beyond it, to fill in the gaps, as it were. To see the skin above the skull. This made her seem more familiar. She had a big-featured face, hawkish, striking more than beautiful. Not very kissable. A TV face – distinctive enough to survive the flattening effect of the lens, symmetrical enough not to repulse.

She said, ‘I was walking down Southampton Row – Bloomsbury – you know London at all? I passed this place: “Virginia Woolf's Burgers, Kebabs and Grills”.'

‘Where's your driver?' I asked her.

‘Back at the hotel. We're not a couple.'

‘Do people assume that?'

‘People have dirty minds.'

I had stolen Felix's pack of cigarettes – I figured he had plenty more – and offered her one.

‘I remember these,' she said. ‘Aren't they African?'

‘Among other places.'

‘I tried smoking these in Mozambique one time.'

Had I met her in Mozambique? Surely I would have remembered. But the truth turned out to be more banal. She told me about a documentary she had gone out there to make, a mine-clearance appeal, and I remembered that I had, after all, seen her on TV, exactly a year before, as I lay on my bed in a Glasgow hotel room, draining the mini-bar,
waiting for Comic Relief to be over and for Nick Jinks to ring. Not a night to remember with great fondness – though it maybe explained why her image should have lodged with me.

We talked about Chicago, and she explained how she had timed her tour so that she could sort out legal wrangles to do with her mother's estate. ‘She was only forty-six,' she told me, out of nowhere. She had things she needed to tell somebody.

I listened, or I appeared to be listening – I had my own troubles at this time – and afterwards I was rewarded with a dinner invitation at a place Stacey had learned about on the internet.

It seemed incongruous, her inviting me out to eat. First there was the age difference: I was nearly sixty by then. Second, there was the whole, vexed business of Stacey and food. Her fingers, curled for support around her whiskey glass, were knobbled and grey. When she gestured, the sleeves of her knitted shrug flapped as though hung off wires. Still, she made the place's huckster style sound inviting. ‘Then there's Halley's Comet,' she said.

‘Halley's Comet?'

‘Gin martini. But I prefer their Super Nova.'

‘Which is?'

‘Vodka martini. Only they stuff the olive with blue cheese.'

‘Jesus Christ.'

So it was, later that same evening, that we made our entrance – a starlet and her sugar-daddy – down the carpeted stairs of Lovell's of Lake Forest.

At the bottom of the stairs a small, athletic man glad-handed the patrons as they arrived. Any urge I might have had to giggle at the restaurant's gen-you-wine NASA memorabilia or its novelty martini menu was hereby instantly quashed: this was James Lovell, in the flesh, the veteran of Apollos Eight and infamous Thirteen.

The Ron Howard film had come out a few years before, the one with Tom Hanks as Lovell. I'd seen it on a long-haul flight someplace –
I don't remember where. Since then, Stacey told me, the locals had been queuing up to gobble down his son Jay's modern American cuisine, in hope of meeting Dad. Lovell, for his part, showed his face every few days so as not to disappoint; as we entered the bar he was guiding a family of Gary Larson characters to a coffee table made out of a relief map of an Apollo landing site. A chore for him, or a pleasure? His laugh was higher pitched than I would have imagined. Infectious. But you can't go by smiles or body language; these men are professionals.

Jim Lovell: the man had survived explosion and asphyxia and risked abandonment and slow death in deep space, but had never set foot on the moon. According to Stacey, the fact still rankled with him, even after all these years. (She had read his book, among many others, doing research for her show, and spoke as though she had some knowledge of him.)

I watched Lovell moving about the room, marrying the man to Stacey's words. Yes, it rang true, that here was a man prepared to admit to a single, defining regret. I did not know what attracted her to this idea, or how true it was. But I approved of it, on principle as it were. To compare Lovell's experiences with mine would be pointless, even laughable. Still, I fancied I too knew something about survival; about the double-edgedness of it, and the hollow feeling that comes over you sometimes, on sleepless nights, that you are living beyond your time.

the same day

In the dining room of Lovell's in Lake Forest, just outside Chicago, an alarmingly thin girl shares a candle-lit dinner with a man old enough to be her father. Jim Lovell has seen her before; is she a model? Her companion, a taciturn Englishman with a weathered face and uneasy eyes, has ordered the trio of pâtés with jellied onions and cornichons followed by sliced duck atop a vivid huckleberry reduction. She has ordered – nothing. She has brought in her own food. There it is on her plate: a muffin, as brown and unappetizing as a turd.

Watching her eat is like watching somebody drown. It's all Jim can do not to go over and shake her. Hard. Snap her out of it somehow. And he can imagine the headlines in the
Sun-Times
if he did: ‘
APOLLO VETERAN ASSAULT SHOCKER
'.

Jim Lovell steers himself out of the restaurant. Let the poor folks eat their meals in peace. He heads for the office and moves his chair from behind the desk, over to the radiator. Just looking at her makes him feel cold. Chilled right through. Not a metaphor. He's really shivering.

Don't anyone tell him it's his age, neither. You don't play the ‘You are Old, Father William' card on a man who's only just got back from the Antarctic. Five weeks at -10°F – and that was the temperature
inside
the tent – all to find bugs that might flourish on Mars. Really, he is too old for this shit.

Her shrunken face. Her claw-like hands. Jesus, no, he doesn't want to shake her, they'd be picking pieces of her out of the carpet for weeks. Whatever's holding her together must be as weak as wet cardboard by now. What should be wires under the skin turned to taffy. He doesn't want to think about it.

How does she manage to sleep? The waiter had to bring her a cushion, her rear end was too bony for the chairs. What does she lie on at night, that her bones don't jangle her awake? How does she keep warm?

Jim climbs out of his chair, pushes it away and sits on the floor, leaning his back against the radiator. It's scalding hot, and even through his clothes, the skin of his back puckers. He luxuriates: leans away, settles back, leans away, settles back. Should take a shower, he thinks. Warm up properly. But he can't bear the thought of having to take off his clothes.

He shakes his head. Pathetic. A month ago he was braving white-outs in the Patriot Hills. What is up with him? What has changed in him since he returned, that the cold seems to come at him, not from the outside any more, but from within, from his own bones?

Jay, his son, has a theory. (And incidentally, how on earth did the kid persuade him to buy into the restaurant business? Was there ever an occupation so grinding, so thankless?) Jay reckons he still hasn't got over the corpse they found in the ice.

Jim struggles to his feet. As if this was the worst he had ever faced! Jay should know better than to spout the philosophy of daytime TV at him. Yet…

Jim makes his excuses to the staff, finds his coat, heads outside, gets in his car, turns the heater up full, starts the engine, begins the journey home.

And yet.

(Darkness strobed by streetlights. This might be anywhere. The streetlights stop. No stars. All dark. He is thinking: Where is my ship? Where is the
Shangri-La
?)

Ever since Antarctica, things and people have started to acquire a family resemblance. Nothing is just itself any more; everything suggests an unconnected something else. The last time he experienced this muddy sort of thinking was following a particularly brutal centrifuge exercise. (The memory comes cluttered with medical buzzwords:
carbon dioxide poisoning; G-strain anoxia.) It's like the world is melting around him. Why should a girl with an eating problem remind him of a dead sailor, any more than a dead sailor should remind him of a live sailor, a sailor he met, large as life and definitely living, on the streets of Punta Arenas?

This was their jumping-off point: a sterile little township at Chile's southern tip. The polar microbe hunters had a week in Punta Arenas to arrange their gear, to check and recheck their supplies and equipment; above all, to wait. Jim didn't mind. It felt good to be working towards a target again. Missions are like charmed little lives: their purpose is pre-ordained, they are rich in intense experience and (God willing) they end happily. More happily than real life ever can.