Tom Mccarthy - Men in Space

Jean-Luc’s atelier turns out to be big. The front door leads into a kind of antechamber which itself is larger than her whole apartment. There’s a storage space in the near corner of this antechamber, a sort of cupboard without walls which is full of rolled-up strips of canvas and lengths of wood. Beside that, protruding from the back wall, there’s a strange construction made of metal poles, two vertical and seven or eight horizontal, like a skeletal bunk bed: must be for hanging paintings out to dry. Sitting on the horizontal poles with their legs dangling down towards the floor are some long-haired US guys she’s seen busking on Charles Bridge and would bet an even dollar any day of the week have CA on their licence plates when they’re back stateside. Still, they’re not English teachers either, so it’s Cool: one; Samo-Samo: zip. There are two Czech girls and a French- or Polish-looking guy up there with them — squeezed in, tangled up together, arms and legs all pointing willy-nilly. The buskers have got their guitars and are banging at them, really giving it some, playing that old song by the Beatles or was it the Stones ‘Back in the USSR’, throwing their heads back as they howl the lines out:

Flew in from Miami Beach BOAC

Didn’t get to bed last night

Oh, the way the paper bag was on my knee

Man, I had a dreadful flight

I’m back in the USSR …

Beneath their dangling feet there’s a large duvet which is bulging and contorting: somebody, well two people and maybe even more, are making out big time underneath it. Cool: two. Roger’s opened up a fridge and is transferring bottles from the crate to this. He pulls out two cold ones from the freezer comp, cracks them open and passes one to her.

“Just throw your coat in with those canvases,” he says.

Heidi does this. Roger does ditto. They move on into the atelier’s main room, which is huge — and has those very skylights she’s been coveting. There’s a fifteen-odd-rung stepladder standing in the middle of the floor, the skylight-ceiling is that high. The walls are hung with huge, bright canvases that show cartoony, pop-art figures striding through stripy frames. Two unfinished paintings in the same style are standing on the floor propped up against the windows. In one of these the figure’s got wings and is upside down and falling towards a bright-blue sea, like Orpheus — no, Ithacus … or something. He’s falling to the sea only the whole painting’s done like a — what is it with names? That guy who paints like cartoons, all in dots, I pressed the trigger and Wham! Tatatata! Richten, Fichten, Somethingstein … To the right of the door is a little podium, and a band is setting up there, ratcheting the cymbals to the drum kit, plugging in the amps. Behind them, pinned to the wall, there’s a bedsheet which has blood marks on it. Cool: three …

There are maybe thirty, forty people in this room. Nick’s there, sitting at the top of the stepladder blowing bubbles from this kiddie bubble kit he’s got — but Heidi doesn’t want to rush up to him as though she needed him as some kind of entrance ticket; besides which, he’s not exactly in her good books right now having sort of fucked her around re the whole street-door/telephone-cabin thing. Besides which, Roger’s kind of cute and to-be-stuck-with for a while. He seems to know all the band people: as he leads her over towards a projector that’s sitting on a table in front of the podium pointing at the sheet (and is the bloodstain menstrual, Heidi wonders, or has this Jean-Luc been deflowering teeny-bopper Czech girls? Which one is he, anyway?), two of them come up to him. They swig from his beer, start talking technical stuff about plugs and voltage or whatever — for which Roger even seems to have the vocab, which makes Heidi wonder if his parents are Czech or something, although she doesn’t verbalize this query. He introduces her to a Jiří and a Kuba, who both smile and say hello. Then Jiří goes and plugs the projector lead into some massively overloaded socket and Roger delves beneath the table, pulls out a stack of circular tins, opens these up and unwinds the first few feet of the film inside each, holding the strip up towards the light so he can see what’s on it.

“Can I help?” she asks him.

“Do you know how to feed film through a projector?”

“Well … sure,” she says, figuring she’ll work it out.

“Stick this one in, then,” he tells her, handing her a tin. “I’ll just go take a leak.”

And he’s off. So: there are two things which kind of turn, and one of these already has the plastic spider on it, which must be for gathering the film as it comes out — so probably the reel should go on this front one. But then all this shit in-between is a real fucker because there’s any number of ways it could go round all these little rubber fingers. Why did she pretend in the first place? Is Roger not going to want to know her if he finds out she can’t load a projector? She bends down to pretend to look more closely at the turning thing, to make anyone looking at her think she’s thinking “Is it an x-type turning thing, the type that feeds from underneath, or a y-type turning thing, that feeds from above?” The stoners are still wailing in the antechamber:

Been away so long I hardly knew the place

Gee, it’s good to be back home

Leave it till tomorrow to unpack my case

Honey disconnect the phone

I’m back in the USSR …

Heidi’s sure by now that everyone is looking at her thinking She can’t thread a spool: she must be just an English teacher! A bubble breaks across her face, as though Nick were pissing on her from on high: she’s gone so red that to be anally exact about it the bubble doesn’t actually break across her face, i.e. strike her skin and break as a result: it pops a couple of millimetres from it, from the heat she’s giving off. An object touches her chin from behind; she turns round to find a tall, spindly black man has put his arm around her shoulder. He’s dressed in a white toga, and has a pistol in his hand, and he says to her:

“My dear, I think you’re doing it all wrong.”

His voice is high and theatrical, or kind of operatic even, like he was singing. And he’s got, that’s right, a fucking pistol in his hand. But he’s smiling. He’s quite old, like maybe forty plus or even fifty, and his thin face has deep creases in it as he smiles. He’s got his other arm around a beautiful blond boy whose eyes stare out serene, or dazed, or stoned.

“You like my weapon?” he says, then the creases in his face contract as his eyes narrow and his mouth pulls open. He throws back his head and whoops out a long, loud laugh. “Karel loves my weapon. He just loves my tool. My piece. Isn’t that so, Karel?”

The blond boy smiles and answers:

“ Krásná , Tyrone. Big black weapon.”

The black man throws back his head and whoops again.

“Here, let me show you how you do it,” he says when he’s finished laughing. “You understand a little English?”

“Yeah. I’m from Vermont,” she says.

“No! Oh my God! Ver- mont !”

Heidi notices his eyeballs are huge and white amidst all that black skin. A vein has burst inside the right one, daubing the white with red. She asks him:

“You too?”

“My dearest, dearest friend is from Vermont. Veronica. We call her Vermont Veronica. She’s got a great act back in San Francisco. A drag act, you know. If you’re ever over in San Francisco go to The Pink Pollen Box and look for Vermont Veronica. You do that. She loves to meet people from home. She’ll take you everywhere in town.”