Tom Mccarthy: Men in Space

“Wait!”

Janachkov here. He’s still peering into the woods — looking, presumably, for this oddly named Greek, Jerémiah. Eventually he points to the left and says:

“This way.”

Janachkov trudges in first; Anton follows him; Koulin brings up the rear. They have to walk in single file because the footpath’s narrow. Beside it, little white flowers are pushing through the wood’s floor, a whole army of them. Ilievski’s exit from the car was so bizarre. Right by the flower shop, too. Perhaps he’d had bad news from Sofia, some family death that he was keeping to himself. Chrysanthemums are funeral flowers: when Anton’s father died, his aunts and uncles all sent chrysanthemums, white ones. Stoyann even managed to phone in an order from Philadelphia — a feat his sister, Anton’s mother, never got her head round, enquiring, even after Anton had explained it to her several times, whether Stoyann could have grown them in his garden: she’d heard that the climate in America was agreeable, much milder than Sofia … They pass some plastic bottles strung up from the lower branches of a tree to hold water for birds. There’s birdsong all around them, really loud. Robins, thrushes, finches, magpies maybe. He can’t see them: must be hiding in the mesh of trunks and branches with this Jerémiah. Half a million, Koulin said. What’s that in Greek? Miso hil … no, hiliariko is a thousand; half a million’s miso ekatomirio. Miso ekatomirio . Janachkov’s stopped and turned to face him; he’s ushering him off to the track’s right, waiting for him to go first, like a well-trained footman …

“We’re meeting him right in the middle of the woods?”

Janachkov nods.

“Jesus! What’s wrong with cafés these days?”

Janachkov shrugs. Anton steps past him and negotiates his way around twigs and stumps. It’s really dense here: the trees’ trunks all rise straight up, the tall birches and the sycamores and then the taller fir trees, their main branches falling across one another and smaller, higher branches and their even smaller offshoots madly networking against the clouds’ white. Anton’s feet crunch twigs and leaves as he walks. He’s trying not to step on the white flowers, but it’s difficult: they’re everywhere, just like the birdsong was until a moment ago when this plane, this real plane, started flying by, eclipsing bit by bit all other noises. It must be low: the whole wood’s moaning, singing with the sound of metal flight and speed and distance. A twig’s prodding him from behind, digging into his ribs: makes him think of Ilievski for some reason. Anton drops onto his knees and inspects the ground more closely. There are so many layers: first ferns, then leaves — large sepia-toned leaves whose skeletons loom through their decomposing flesh, and then those straight leaves he used to throw up in the air and watch helicoptering down towards the pavement when he was a child; then, below these, pieces of dead wood with insects crawling over them. Then, even lower down, moss, more twigs, earth. Looking at it from this close is like being in a plane or helicopter flying over a landscape: tiny sprouts of fern become tall trees, green canopies erupting high above a forest roof …

Somehow the twig’s got into him. Ilievski’s finger, Jerémiah’s twig. Anton, still kneeling, turns round. Behind Janachkov, who’s holding some kind of black thing, a calculator on which he’s working out figures, exchange rates — or perhaps a toy, some kind of toy like kids were playing with somewhere, his and Helena’s kids or the ones she’s got already or perhaps himself when he was small, Anton can see the star’s face, winking one of its eyes at him, then winking another, red and white eyes on a white face, closing.

* * * * *

It’s an hour from Prague to Amsterdam, then eight hours from Amsterdam to JFK, then four more hours from there to San Francisco. The first leg’s on one of those cute little propeller numbers. Roger and Barbara walk out of the terminal, past the row of Soviet helicopters rotting in the long grass by the runway, then climb up a wheel-around staircase. It must have been like this to fly in the Sixties, or even the Fifties. Each time the plane hits a cloud it’s buffeted sideways, and both their Bloody Marys get all worked up in their glasses. Air pockets swallow and regurgitate them, as though deeming their tiny metal dragonfly too small to merit digesting. It’s overcast, but when they clear cloud level Roger’s amazed at how many other aeroplanes they can see. You never see any when you fly over the US. European airspace must be tightly regulated, carved up into invisible corridors to avoid collisions. Not so invisible, at that: vapour trails sparkle above and around them. When the cloud clears he can see markings cutting up the earth, too: motorways, rivers, fire breaks in forests, walls of cemeteries, the crossed loops of sewage works. They land among a coruscating whirl of yellow, white and red lines that split from and then rejoin one another as they lead them to the terminal: feels like they’re moving over a huge basketball court …

They’ve only got two hours in Amsterdam: can’t even leave the airport. Barbara would have had to buy a visa, thirty dollars for two hours, and if they’d wanted to stay any longer they’d have had to pay a stopover excess, which fuck it. Mladen’s given him a number for Nick; he calls it, gets an answering machine, leaves a message. Then it’s up towards the stratosphere again, this time on a proper KLM jumbo with the works: Top Cat eye-covers and toothbrushes, headphones, rugs, slippers. When they’ve finished their meal and coffee and the lights are dimmed, two hours or so into the flight, they slip their rugs on and Barbara leads his hand into her lap, sends it past undone buttons and elastic to where it’s warm and damp, then turns her head away and presses it against the window, mouth opening to the dark blue of the early evening sky …

They’re flying with the sun: behind it, so it seems time’s standing still. It was dusk when they left Schiphol and it’s still dusk as they’re clearing Greenland. Roger can see huge white cliffs of ice that drop straight into the sea. He knows it’s Greenland because there’s a screen at the front of the section they’re in which has a map on it showing their position, speed and altitude. The image alternates between the area they’re over right now, with a large plane nudging its way across it, and the whole stretch of northern hemisphere between Europe and America, with a much smaller plane. Zooms and pull-backs, just like in cinema: they contextualize — is what he was taught back at Berkeley. The short dashes trailed behind the plane-symbol confer narrative progress. Bread-and-butter techniques: he should brush up on them when he gets home. Going to need them. Michael, the adman who he met at Jean-Luc’s party last December, has set him up with his agency’s San Francisco branch, a job in the creative dept: filming, editing, stuff like that. It’s perfect, just perfect. Maybe he can even come in Sundays and edit all the European rushes, the peasant 90210 , get them shown at indie festivals. There’s time for everything; he’s just got to use it right, not get bogged down. Up here in the sky Roger feels good, confident, invigorated , that’s the word, ready to hit the ground running, eight hundred twenty kilometres/five hundred ten miles per hour …

Barbara’s fallen asleep. The screen gives over to promotional footage of a KLM jet in mid-flight: revolving angle, must have been shot from a fighter plane flying around it. There’s sunlight flashing from behind its fin — although the near side’s not in shadow, so the sun must have been edited in afterwards. The sunlight becomes a column beaming out from a projector, then the angle spins round to reveal the KLM in-flight entertainment logo blazing on a screen. They’re going to be shown Dances with Wolves . Whoopee. Roger slips his headphones on and finds the right channel. Kevin Costner is cruising the Wild West befriending animals and Indians alike, discovering among the latter group a squawed-up Mary McDonnell, with whom he sets about getting all jiggy. Trouble brews. Et cetera. After the first half hour Roger takes the headphones off and watches without sound. He finds he can infer the entire dialogue. Besides, watching it mute gives it a quality it never had originally — a rich, alien feel, as though the characters were living in some kind of outer space through which sound doesn’t travel …