The Weight of Numbers Read online

  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.

  Lake Forest, Illinois

  —

  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.

  The sailor, muffled against the cold in a threadbare black parka and thin knitted gloves, noticed him from across the snowbound street and recognized him for all his winter clothing. He just shambled right on up to Jim in the street and spoke to him, big-eyed and awestruck.

  He was a big man so when Jim shook his hand the feel of it – its smallness and fragility – frightened him. The man’s features were small, too. They were a woman’s features – no, a doll’s. Beautiful and cruel. Jinks, he introduced himself, in an English accent.

  Nick Jinks.

  They made, to begin with, a sort of over-serious smalltalk typical to extreme places. In Punta Arenas, everybody seems to be making a documentary about everybody else, and even the sportsmen and climbers couch their hiking plans in the rhetoric of the study trip. Jinks knew all the teams, but he didn’t seem to belong to any of them. He claimed to have drifted in one day – and he didn’t seem in any hurry to leave. The man seemed a throwback to the Antarctic’s brutal beginnings, years of whaling and sealing, frostbite and trench foot and filthy cabins lit by penguin oil.

  Jinks wanted to know if there were any rats on board Apollo Thirteen.

  ‘Come again?’

  How did they keep the rats off the ship?

  ‘Well, I don’t think—’

  That main B bus undervolt which was the start of all their peril – could it have been the work of a rat?

  Jim extricated himself as fast and as pleasantly as he could.

  In Ellsworth Land, Antarctica, and especially on the Patriot Hills, you can find bubbles in solid ice, sometimes in strings like a diver’s air bubbles, and in the summer, when the sun shines continuously, a liquid film forms on the inside of the bubbles, and things in the water begin to grow.

  It is -20°F without windchill and Jim Lovell is out here looking for bubbles. He feels as clumsy as an infant in his cheery standard-issue red parka, and his hands, snug in layers of polyfleece and wool and leather, feel as useless as paws, when a sudden, unbelievably chill gust nearly takes him off his feet.

  Instinctively the team huddle together like penguins under the onslaught of the wind.

  Wind whips snow into the air. It is old snow: Antarctica is a desert, and precipitation falls as rarely here as it falls on the Sahara. The granules, ground against each other over decades, are so tiny they will penetrate the weave of rucksacks and the walls of tents. The team leader has them rope themselves together. Any second now, visibility is going to vanish. Really vanish. (Back in Chile, during their familiarization programme, the instructor had them put white plastic buckets on their heads to simulate the effects of white-out.)

  Careful, groping, blind mice, the team edge down the slope towards their camp.

  How they missed the body on the way out is no mystery. A thin skein of snow would have been enough to conceal him completely. The fierce wind has revealed ice that would be blue were there any sun. Now it is as black as jet.

  There he is, inside the ice.

  Jim’s cry is inaudible in the gale. Katabatic winds – flash floods of cold thick air, spilling from rocky pockets in the highlands, fierce as waters and unimaginably colder – steal his words away. Finally the rope translates his sudden stop to the others of his team. Careful, purblind, they gather round. Jim kneels.

  It makes no sense. This man here in the ice. Each inch of ice is an eon of human time. How can this man be buried here, arms spread as though he were treading water, head straining for the surface, eyes open, a trail of bubbles from his screaming lips?

  They have to leave him, then. Nothing they can do in this wind. Nothing they can do, period. The next day, they cannot retrace him. They do not try hard, or for long. No way can they dig him out from under all that ice and anyway, what would be the point? In the fug and fabric-whip of their igloo-like Scott tents, the men talk out what they have seen. It must be the body of some early casualty of exploration, interred now in a grander coffin than any undertaker can provide.

  A week later, in the relative warmth and comfort of the Amundsen– Scott station at the Pole, Jim Lovell and Skylab astronaut Owen Garriott sing for their supper; they glad-hand the residents and give talks about their experiences. Shouldering his burden (‘veteran astronaut and motivational speaker’) Jim stands and, without notes, begins his address.

  But to be upright in the ice, one knee up and one knee straight, head tilted back like that, the ice so clear?

  Jim, standing there before them all – the ultimate captive audience – falls silent. To cover his confusion, he takes a drink of coffee. Where is he up to? What was he talking about? Apollo Eight? Thirteen? It’s Thirteen everybody wants to hear about, not least because of the movie. He doesn’t mind. It’s a decent movie. Is he so precious that he should look such a gift-horse in the mouth? Heck, no, the film’s put him back in demand. Would he be here without Ron Howard? Well, yes, for certain – but the expedition sure wouldn’t have gotten a plug from CNN.

  They have logged the body, as well as they can, with the search and rescue people, and together they have agreed not to rehash the episode in front of the press. Besides, death and dereliction rarely make it out of the back pages this far south of the sixtieth parallel.

  Now where was he?

  Apollo Eight? Apollo Thirteen?

  His audience wait expectantly.

  Jim fakes a cough and takes another sip of coffee.

  Gemini Seven maybe. Nobody’s very interested in Gemini Seven. Not when the talk is only an hour long and they know that Thirteen, the explosion and NASA’s most testing hour is still to come. It’s not cynicism that makes him think this. He’s been at this racket long enough to know what makes a good story and what doesn’t. The sad fact is that it’s very hard to make Gemini Seven exciting. The way everything, but everything, started packing up around them. Thrusters. Fuel cells. Poor Frank Borman, with a commander’s tunnel vision, just itching to twist that abort handle, and who could blame him? Still, they hung in there, waiting for Stafford and Schirra to turn up in Six. Fourteen days in a capsule that, hour by hour, malfunction after malfunction, came to resemble a floating toilet cubicle.

  Gemini Seven. The one he never gets to talk about. The one, therefore, that has come to haunt him more and more.

  Rising through a calm black ocean, this steel bubble of ape life.

  Winter comes. The sun is gone in now. Blue ice turns black. The film of water round each air bubble freezes solid, killing everything inside. There is no colour anywhere. Life stops.

  Hoar-frost on the rations in the Odyssey command module. Conditions aren’t much better in Aquarius. (Is this where he is now? Is this where he is up to – Apollo Thirt
een, the lunar module their lifeboat, and nothing to do but wait?) He is speaking. The audience is leaning forward, rapt. Now and again, there is laughter. He wishes he could grasp the meaning of the words as they slide, smooth and practised, out of his mouth.

  Nick Jinks, the strange Englishman who had approached him on the street in Punta Arenas, was gone by the time they returned, five weeks later, on the first leg of their long journey home. Nobody in town knew of him or remembered him.

  So Jim, unable to find any evidence to contradict it, has had to carry this impossible image around with him ever since, unable to shake it free, unable to discount it: that the man in the ice was Nick Jinks. That Nick Jinks somehow fell into the ice. Which is the same as saying, that he fell into time. Jinks’s pretty, cruel, close-set eyes stare out at Jim from the unimaginable past. His mouth, in rictus, mimes a ghastly Eeeee! In boots that look modern – not seal-skin, but plastic – Nick’s right foot is raised to step on a sabre-toothed tiger’s tail; the left, toe pointed, tests the warm waters of the Cambrian.

  There is no Shangri-La. Where is the fucking Shangri-La?

  Jim fumbles behind the steering wheel for the light switch and fills the unlit Lake Forest road with light. The dashboard comes alive, a soft green glow. Windscreen wipers squeal back and forth. Jim snaps them off with a curse that becomes an instant chuckle: in his eighth decade, he can freely admit that he’s never been particularly good around buttons and switches. (He’ll never forget the dirty look Frank shot him in Apollo Eight, the time he accidentally inflated his life jacket.)

  Beyond the immediate splash of illumination cast by his head-lamps, the world is a ghostly grey, no colour anywhere. But Jim Lovell is a professional. With a set smile and eyes tuned to the colours of the world, the greens and the reds, the instruments and signs, Jim Lovell, bubbled in steel, steers his way home as he has steered his way home before, across unimaginable distances, across oceans of night, through the deep black calm of death.