The Weight of Numbers Read online

  The WEIGHT of

  NUMBERS

  The WEIGHT of

  NUMBERS

  SIMON INGS

  First published in Great Britain in 2006 by Atlantic Books,

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

  Copyright © Simon Ings 2006

  The moral right of Simon Ings to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 1 84354 463 6

  eBook ISBN: 978 0 85789 646 9

  Printed in Great Britain by {}

  Atlantic Books

  An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London WC1N 3JZ

  www.groveatlantic.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Lake Kissimmee, Florida

  Banshee

  Beira, Mozambique

  London –Johannesburg

  Glasgow, UK

  Portsmouth, UK

  Chicago, Illinois

  Lake Forest, Illinois

  The Gift

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  White Man’s Magic

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Annihilation Therapy

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  PQRD

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Renamo Moto

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Glass

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Modern Medicine

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Maps of The World

  Monday, 17 July 2006

  Epilogue

  Christmas Eve, 1968

  Acknowledgements

  For Anna

  It will be an inhuman, an atrocious performance,

  but these are the facts.

  General Giuilo Douhet, Il Dominio dell’Aria

  The WEIGHT of NUMBERS

  PROLOGUE

  Lake Kissimmee, Florida

  —

  Monday, 25 October 1965

  Marilyn, Jim’s wife of thirteen years, pours out his second Coke, takes up her own and clinks his glass with ceremony as though it were champagne. Her eyes are big and black in the candlelight, wet with the unnamable emotions pilots’ wives acquire in proximity to Canaveral.

  Through the window of the restaurant, the night sky is speckled – had they but eyes to see – with spillage from the afternoon’s catastrophe: a fuel explosion massive enough to shred a final stage to so much kitchen foil. For Jim the worst part is that at six minutes past three that afternoon, six minutes after the launch and at the very moment the Agena’s engine turned over and choked on six tonnes of liquid fuel, he had been gaping, like some fool kid, eyes upturned on a calm sky.

  ‘It’d have reached orbit,’ he says, shaking his head.

  ‘Tonight,’ their waiter explains, ‘our bass comes with a macadamia nut butter.’

  ‘Well, whoop-de-doo,’ says Marilyn.

  ‘Ma-am?’

  Marilyn blinks. ‘I really have no idea why I said that.’ She lays her hand on the boy’s arm. ‘I do apologize. Really.’

  Perhaps she felt it, too, today. At six minutes past three, a wrinkle in things.

  When they are alone: ‘Marilyn?’

  Marilyn giggles. This is the girl he fell in love with in high school. ‘No idea at all. Sorry. Odd day today.’

  Jim sets about his meal, determined to shake off bad thoughts. ‘This fish,’ he says.

  The fish is really very good.

  ‘Yes,’ says Marilyn.

  He’s been told about this place: the best largemouth bass in the county, the tables small, unfussy, few, the air sweet off Lake Kissimmee – all this barely an hour from the Cape. Come December, Jim Lovell is riding shotgun with Frank Borman in Gemini Seven. An unprecedentedly long mission, two whole weeks, Seven is meant to test the shirt-sleeve environment the engineers have planned for the Apollo spacecraft. There’s other, rather more gung-ho business for Frank and Jim to perform – for instance, they’ll be demonstrating a new, more accurate form of controlled re-entry – but the core of their mission is ‘station-keeping’, NASA’s word for staying clean and tidy and alive for 200 orbits of the Earth. One of the more damn-fool experiments dreamed up for them requires that Jim weigh every mouthful that enters his system before, during and after the flight. Although there are still six weeks to go before the launch, this will be, for Jim, his last unfussed-up meal for some while. To mark the fact, tonight he has arranged babysitters so he can take his wife out to dinner.

  He says, ‘I was standing on the crawlerway.’ A pause. ‘This afternoon. I watched it take off from the crawlerway.’

  The main body of the rocket, the launch vehicle proper, was an Atlas, the machine that put John Glenn, America’s first astronaut, into space. Today’s Atlas worked perfectly, as far as he’s aware. It was the final stage, the Agena Target Vehicle that exploded, one minute after separation, the very moment it tried to start its engine. Without a target vehicle for them to pursue, astronauts Wally Schirra and the rookie Thomas Stafford are even now slouching their way through the most disappointed night of their careers: the launch of Gemini Six, scheduled for tomorrow, is scratched.

  ‘What will they do with Tom and Wally?’ Marilyn’s thoughts are tracking Jim’s own with a niceness they had all expected of Gemini Six and its ill-fated target. ‘Could they run their mission and yours together in any way that makes sense?’

  James Lovell looks out the window at the lake. The sky is clear tonight. The water is so still, he can see the brighter stars reflected in the water. ‘Probably,’ he says. ‘We’d at least be able to practise the alignment manoeuvres.’ The Geminis are meant to lead to Apollo, and a bid for the moon. They are the only real practice the crews are going to get before the big push. Every Gemini failure makes Apollo that bit more daunting. ‘It’s not docking practice, but it’d be something.’ Jim turns back to his wife, aware that in his preoccupation he is hardly giving her interest its due.

  Every couple caught up in NASA’s folly has its own way of dealing with the dangers and disappointments. Each solution is personal, its secrecy carefully guarded. It is impossible to know if Marilyn’s careful, intelligent curiosity about Gemini is shared by any of the other wives. In public, and even among themselves, there can be no breach of the women’s etiquette. This has less to do with class and custom – though that is part of it – so much as their common need to bootstrap a workable life out of the demands and sacrifices of the Cape. The artificiality of that life – Sunday clambakes in the shadow of the Vertical Assembly Building – is a given. That life is artificial, something you have to construct for yourself, like a shed or a car motor or a Thanksgiving dinner, is the great, soon-to-be-forgotten lesson of these days.
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  ‘They let you on the crawlerway?’ says Marilyn, double-taking his earlier remark.

  ‘That’s where I watched it from.’

  The crawlerway is, like any construction site, out of bounds. But there was no danger, watching a launch from there.

  Practically speaking, the crawlerway is a four-lane highway connecting the launch complexes to the Vertical Assembly Building, where Apollo’s colossal Saturn rockets will be built. But the lanes are deceptive. They are built, not for ordinary traffic at all, but for the giant caterpillar tracks of a single vehicle: the 500ft-high mobile launcher.

  Standing there today, watching as the Atlas-Agena assembly rose out of its own exhaust cloud, high above Complex 14, Jim felt as though he were standing among giants, in a giant’s footprint. He felt smaller than a child and infinitely less significant among these towering machines. He felt more like a rat: something tolerated and expendable.

  ‘It seems to me now that I felt it.’ This is something Jim Lovell absolutely will not say to his wife. ‘It seems to me that there was a wrinkle in things. At six minutes past three this afternoon, and with nothing left to see besides the contrail, all of a sudden I became aware of a wrongness in the sky’s fabric; a wrongness so intimate, at first I was afraid there was something the matter with my eyes.’

  ‘What are you thinking?’ Marilyn is asking him.

  Drawn back to the present, Jim is startled to find himself already behind the wheel of their car. Marilyn is next to him, their meal is done, and Camp Mack Lane is already rumbling beneath their wheels. They are part-way home.

  ‘Wait,’ he says. ‘Wait a minute.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This isn’t right.’

  A wrinkle in things. Surfaces are bent and drawn into accidental contact. A short circuit, and the evening comes apart, skipping and hopping like a scratched record. ‘Wait,’ he says. He slows the car. ‘Hang on.’ He checks his rear-view mirror, slows them almost to a stop and turns them around.

  He cannot rewind the evening. All those minutes wasted in introspection. He has to do something; this is their last easy evening together.

  ‘What is it?’ Marilyn asks. ‘Did you forget something?’

  ‘Everything is going to be fine,’ he says, and he switches on the radio: a clue for her.

  He drives them deeper and deeper into Florida’s rural dark, under canopies of post oak and hickory, through pastures abandoned to mesquite. One by one, the stations peter out: WWBC out of Cocoa; WKGF from Kissimmee. Wayne Fontana and The Mindbenders drift in and away and a silence descends, with an eerie, out-of-range sensation that Marilyn remembers now. ‘You old fool,’ she laughs, guessing his game. ‘You fool, you.’

  At a sign for a fishing lodge, he rolls the car down a dirt track. There are no lights, no other vehicles. Woods hug the shore. Between the tree trunks, moonlight glistens on Lake Kissimmee.

  She leans over and slips into his arms. ‘What about the babysitter?’ she asks him.

  ‘What about tomorrow’s early start?’

  ‘Did I switch the oven off?’

  ‘Did I lock the door?’

  A goofy routine to propitiate the ageing process: they understand that they are too old for this. After their first kiss, Jim draws away and turns off the ignition: it would be just like him to knee the stick into Drive and land them in the lake. The headlights die, the night is blue, they kiss again.

  An orphan cloud covers the moon. Blue turns to black. The car’s surfaces, tin frame and plastic fascia, close in around them. His scream is silent, wracking him out of her arms. He arches back as though electrocuted and cracks his head against the door column. ‘Fuck—’

  ‘Jim!’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Not much better.’

  ‘Sorry. Darn.’

  She tries to laugh. ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Jim.’

  ‘Nothing. A rabbit ran over my grave.’

  She thinks this over.

  ‘Pesky rabbits,’ she says.

  She leans over and kisses him again. But the moment has passed. ‘I’m going for a smoke,’ she says, a minute later. She pecks him on the cheek and climbs from the car. He watches her go. He sits back, lays his hands on the steering wheel and forces himself, by main effort, to calm down. A second cloud hides the moon and the night swallows her. He leans forward and peers up at the sky: what is happening to the weather?

  One by one, between the slowly stirring branches, stars are going out.

  The waters off Japan, February 1954.

  This is shortly after the Korean War and two years into Jim’s marriage to Marilyn, effected just a couple of hours after graduating from the Naval Academy at Annapolis. At this point in his career, Jim is just a humble aviator, assigned to the SS Shangri-La from Moffet Field. He’s flying McDonnell F2H Banshees: brutal turbo-powered monsters that cheerfully nudge the stratosphere.

  The airframe wraps around him in the night, the dark itself turned metal, stuffing eyes and mouth, as he takes stock. What he’s been following all these hours, burning up his fuel, what he thought was his homing beacon – well, it turns out that it wasn’t. He’s been following the wrong signal for – how long is it now? – and there are no ground lights, no ships in the vicinity, to help him find his way back on course. Neither are there any stars. He can’t afford to waste fuel punching the cloud layer, because any navigation reading he takes will be meaningless by the time he descends again, and anyway he hasn’t the fuel. Thank God the instrument lights are working. Without them, how could he be sure which way is up? It is at this point that he thinks to plug in the little geegaw he’s made to boost the cockpit illumination – and in doing so, he fuses every light in the cockpit.

  In a lonely bubble, bobbing above the Pacific, Jim Lovell, navy pilot, looks out from his blacked-out Banshee at the sky. If it is the sky. There are no stars. His instruments are out and his lights are out and there are no stars and there is no carrier, there is no Shangri-La. Where is the goddamn Shangri-La?

  Jim Lovell, astronaut, climbs from the car. He misses the path and pushes through the undergrowth to the shore of Lake Kissimmee. Marilyn is stood at the end of a narrow wooden jetty, facing away from him. A red flare arcs and gutters as she tosses her cigarette into the water.

  The screws of the carrier Shangri-La agitate the waters of the Pacific. The water, rich in plankton, glows. In the extremity of his failure, Jim Lovell, navy pilot, sees a green light: the wake of a ship. He follows the wake. It leads him home.

  He steps onto the jetty. He walks up to his wife. An F2H Banshee stays in the air using two Westinghouse J34-WE-30 turbojets, each rated at 3,150 pounds of thrust. It takes off by means of a rubber catapult. It comes to rest by means of a grappling hook. It is very important for him to control his speed at this point. It is vital that he not overshoot and topple off the end of the jetty into the bass-rich waters of Lake Kissimmee. He bites his lip against laughter. The day has shaken loose so many bits of himself, all the joy and fear of what he does. He touches Marilyn on the shoulder.

  She turns. ‘Oh,’ she says, looking straight into his eyes. ‘You again.’ She lets his laughter roll on a little way, then stops it with a kiss. ‘Time to go home.’

  BANSHEE

  Beira, Mozambique

  —

  November 1992

  In 1992, Mozambique’s seventeen-year-old civil war was ended by the worst drought in living memory. Even fertile Gorongosa, in the interior of the country, found itself dependent on food aid. From trains grinding their way west along the contested Beira–Machipanda rail-line, armed men rolled sacks of grain into the dust. The sacks split. It could be days since the last train and I would still find boys from my class crawling about the embankments, sifting grains from fistfuls of gravel.

  With the region in such disarray, I found it relatively easy to desert my post. So I returned to the coast and settled in Beira, Mozambique’s second city.

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bsp; Beira was a port town. It depended for its income on Mozambique’s landlocked neighbours to the west, and on the busy overland corridor through which their trade was conducted. Attacks on this corridor by RENAMO, the apartheid-backed faction in this war, had rendered Beira redundant, and today’s famine relief effort, shipping grain for onward distribution, was too little and too hesitant to revive the city’s fortunes. Consequently, the streets had acquired a timelessness that was not romantic. There was no light, no water, no food, no sanitation. There were only people.

  Shelter was at a premium. In my building whole families lived out diagonal lives in the stairwell. There was no electricity to run elevators, so the cheapest apartments in the city were on the upper floors of the tower blocks. None of the blocks was especially high by Western standards, so my tenth-floor eyrie gave me views across the whole city.

  It was the piano, rather than the views, which first sold the apartment to me. I hadn’t had a piano since I was a child. It was an antique upright from colonial days, shipped from Portugal and abandoned during the exodus. Its lid was locked, so I couldn’t try it out, but once I’d established that it came with the apartment, I agreed to take the place, overpriced as it was.

  For the most part of each day, I would sit out on my handkerchiefsized balcony and watch the city consume itself. There was no firewood to be had, and since most of the windows in town were mesh, not glass, people had decided that it was an easy and a relatively harmless thing to chip out the window frames for fuel. When that supply was exhausted, people turned on their furniture. Those who had run out of furniture pulled up sections of floor. By evening, the woodsmoke from 10,000 braiis made my eyes smart, and I went indoors. Usually I went to bed around this time. There was little else to do. The radio was useless as batteries were hard to come by.

  The piano was a different story.

  The day I moved in, the first thing I did was break open the keyboard. I sat down to play. The instrument emitted a dreadful dead thumping and wheezing. I pulled off the top and looked in.