by Sam Leith
In the run-up to the Intercept, lines had appeared and stayed. Sleeping madmen were babbling the same things thousands of miles from each other, at opposite ends of America. These lines on the map formed a double-looping cat’s cradle with two huge empty patches. The lines intersected in Atlanta, where an unnamed vagabond – he had signed himself ‘Nobody’ in a smudgy scrawl when he’d been admitted to the Salvation Army shelter where he’d had the seizure and been tagged in ’98 – was saying, by the look of it, the same thing as his brother lunatics coast to coast.
The utterance charts for the media involved in this event were highly unusual. Underneath the noise, some consistent patterns were emerging: Nobody was producing them most consistently and urgently, but fragments of these utterances were uniting media on a sweeping continuum of tangents up the south-east.
A disyllable or trisyllable that seemed to be ‘Meat hook’, ‘Me door’, ‘Meet her’, ‘Ammeter’, ‘Umma’ or ‘Ramada’ was coming up. ‘Ankara’, ‘Gon’ and ‘Nameless’. ‘Wadis’, or ‘at ease’, or ‘hotsy’, too. Nobody had been able to make any sense of it and, in truth, Sosso would probably have been as freaked out as anybody else if they had. Most of the time Sosso – who was a true believer but inclined to the comforting notion that whatever signals came through from wherever would be deliberately impossible to understand – would affect excitement if they could coax half a line of a Kraftwerk lyric out of the whole of the continental United States.
It was the pattern and consistency of the affinity tags that was striking. It seemed impossible to account for by chance alone. And perhaps, Sosso had speculated, that was all they could hope for.
But in the last twenty-four hours, the blue dot that was the crossing point of the weird figure of eight started moving west – in fits and jerks. Right at that crossing point – still, apparently, ranting like a champ – was Nobody. The transmitter showed he was on the move, and his direction and pace seemed to be shadowing the data from the casino numbers.
Chapter 12
The point of the journey, for Alex, had become the driving itself. He felt as if he had left his old life – not for a holiday, or for a week, but entirely and irrevocably. He had moved deeper into his solitude. Even while he was moving forward towards Carey, he felt as if he was moving further away from everything else.
Road sadness crept up on him. He used the car stereo less and less. At first, he had driven with the windows down and the air rushing in, but as the hours passed he found the noise not exhilarating but distracting, and he stopped it. He wound the windows up, put the air con on. It made a gentle whoosh. When it got too cold, he turned it off. Then as the car heated he turned it on again. He did this automatively, unthinkingly, until day cooled into evening and he left it off altogether.
The road sadness was half pleasurable: less sharp than his initial homesickness. But it was what was going on, and he gave himself to it. The America he was driving through was familiar to him from films, but it wasn’t the America in the foreground of films but in the background: the highway America that was endless and the same everywhere.
He woke up in Tupelo and drove into Memphis. It was late morning and he followed the tourist signs to Graceland but he didn’t go in. He drove past without seeing any Elvis impersonators. He stopped mid-afternoon, that day, for food and petrol. And he pressed on.
He got used to the rhythms. His mornings were startled by the brightness of sunlight. He’d wake up in a room in a chain motel, and get up and shower and check out and head onto the road when the sky was still whiter than blue. His mornings were full of optimism. Any time before midday he felt in command. He felt the star of his own film.
He’d stop early, sometimes, for lunch; or he’d have a late breakfast and skip lunch.
The wheels turned and the car hummed and the petrol needle made its half-daily journey across the dial on the dashboard. He would eat fast food, or food from gas stations. He tried monster bags of pork rinds – pretty horrible, actually; giant, chemical-tasting puffs that were to pork scratchings as popcorn is to sweetcorn – and grazed on sour-apple liquid candy. He ate microwave sandwiches and Jack in the Box burgers, nacho cheese and Gatorade. He browsed in chillers, with heavy doors, full of Vitamin Water and cardboard carry-packs of longneck beer.
The vastness of the country impressed itself on him. The road, when he was in between cities, was worn pale grey and yellow: and was only two lanes in either direction. An image came to him of the roads – arteries they call them – as the country’s circulatory system. He imagined himself swept along them like a blood cell, a platelet, shouldering past the big trucks, pumped by a huge heart somewhere miles away. That made him think of cells dying, DNA unknitting, fraying, counting down.
He drove for hours and hours in a near trance, adjusting cruise control, watching the road ahead vanish under his car, thinking about Carey and trying to imagine a joint future. Again and again, his imagination failed him.
He could imagine their past well enough. Drunken scamperings in college. Their becoming a fixture of the scene, ‘Beauty and the Geek’ – they’d gone to one fancy-dress party as that. But the future was a blank.
He started to drive into the night. As he crossed over into New Mexico the landscape changed. The neon minarets of the rest stops thinned out, became less frequent in the big desert, in between cities. It was just the ribbon of road and the car and the scrub to either side.
He felt calm but alert, as if he could go on for hours without sleep. Then, as time went on, he felt a little dislocated – as if he had gone on for hours without sleep, but hadn’t noticed it. He couldn’t tell how fast time was passing, or had passed.
There was a period of about an hour – was it an hour? – when he became hypnotised by the road in his headlights. There were no other cars around. The car seemed to be floating – just ahead of it fifteen feet of tarmac rushing in a blur in the yellow light. No sense of forward motion or acceleration. No sense of time or space passing. He was barely aware of the wheel in his hand.
Far, far ahead in the distance he could see red tail lights, but no road or horizon line to orient them against. They rose slowly, as if levitating into the air. Then they winked out and it was dark as far as he could see.
Alex eased off the pedal a little. The speedo kept steady. He had put cruise control on without noticing it. The red light reappeared – higher than it had been, and still climbing, moving off to the left. Alex started to wonder whether it was a car at all. Had there been mountains?
He looked down in front of him, saw the road coming into existence a car’s length or more ahead, churning monotonously towards him, vanishing as it hit the lower sill of the windscreen. Alone, he thought. He raised his eyes.
The whole of his consciousness seemed, now, to be zeroed on that little red light, miles in the distance. Would he, one day, remember this moment? The road fell away underneath him. Nothing was funny. Nothing was sad.
If you moved far enough out, for long enough, you lost your bearings.
The red light vanished again. The car started to climb. Alex imagined around him, unseen, trains creaking and lumbering through the night. Sleeping families. Empty forecourts. Rough sleepers mumbling. In his pocket was the ring that was going to link him to Carey, whoever she was, whoever he was.
A little later, as the Pontiac crested a rise of some sort, Alex saw a glow in the distance – not the sharp point of red that had been the lights of the car in front – rather a diffuse, blue-grey lambency announcing itself on the horizon.
It got closer. It was big – not a building but more a pool of light – huge, by the side of the road, with darkness and the empty land all around it. It was a car dealership, out in the middle of nowhere. There was nobody there. The windows of the building itself were black. It rose up from the car park like the bridge of a container ship. All around it were cars, hundreds of cars, parked hull to hull, with halogen lights burning bone white above them.
It made h
im think of an elephants’ graveyard. Not white bones tanning in the sun, but empty windscreens, roof props, the scratchproof paint shining under the cold arc lights.
Alex rode on, until it vanished behind him, an island of light, unpopulated, in the enormous desert night.
Isla spends the week with Nicolas. At first, he doesn’t say much at all, though he behaves as if he was somehow expecting her – an affectation of serene foreknowledge that she doesn’t know whether or not to trust.
He ushers her into the shack. She ducks her head under the lintel as she enters. He, behind her, nodding courteously. The shack has a smell of wood and something sweet and dusty, like a church. He follows her in, gestures at a wooden chair that’s pushed in against a desk. On either side of the chair are tall stacks of yellow paper. The stacks of paper are everywhere. He sees her looking at them, waves dismissively as if brushing them away, shuffles to the chair and pulls it out, turns it round for her, busily nods and points her at it.
‘There, there – please… sit.’
The old man smiles encouragingly, nodding again faster as she advances.
She sits, nervously. She still has her backpack on so she teeters on the front couple of inches of the seat, smiling back at him, hands on her knees. She keeps suppressing an instinct, like someone meeting a nervous dog, to extend a low palm, gently.
He turns round, fumbles behind one of the piles of paper and fishes out an ancient kettle on the end of a snaking orange extension lead, then fills it from a large earthenware jug. He mumbles to himself in a sing-song voice under his breath as he does so.
As the kettle starts to rattle and cough, he moves over to an arrangement of shallow wire baskets hanging one above the other from chains. She can see a couple of leeks just going dry at the ends, a red net of cashew nuts. The whole assemblage wobbles as he rummages in it, and two handsomely sized eggs, smeared with a dab of dried brown, loll against each other in the bottom basket.
He pulls something out and returns, his tall body hunched over a little as if half out of shyness, half to save himself the effort of standing up only to bend again. On the floor he puts a dark green mug. It is the colour of old copper, she can see, on the inside. He produces a cloudy tumbler from somewhere else, puts it down too, and as the kettle passes its crisis of excitement, drops a pinch of some sort of herb into each and tops it with boiling water.
‘I don’t get many visitors,’ he says, stirring each with a spoon before handing her the mug, punctiliously, handle first. The infusion smells very strongly of sage. He sits down cross-legged with a great crack of the knees and looks at her, then downwards into his beard, whose ends he worries at absently between finger and thumb.
He begins with a cough, and a shrug. ‘I’ve been gone a long time,’ he says. ‘I know… I know… I’m very – touched – that you have come to see me. My last letters – I must apologise for… well, let’s…’
He pauses and shakes his head quickly from side to side.
‘We’ll talk about that later, perhaps. Yes. I’m glad you came.’
Isla simply sits there with her face glowing. She tells him how much he is admired, how much she has longed to meet him. After several minutes of this he starts to respond more than monosyllabically.
‘Oh, it’s a long time since I did mathematics, really. A child’s game. A means to an end. My work now is very different.’ She can see the flattery working on him. ‘But you know that, don’t you?’
He is still reluctant to meet her eyes for more than a moment. But she keeps talking, tries to keep him talking. She picks up on points in their correspondence, passes on faculty gossip – to which he listens with what she suspects is feigned interest, apart from the odd light of recognition, sometimes hostile, when the name of a mathematician of his own generation is mentioned.
At one point during their conversation – this is when Isla thinks she has made a breakthrough – he sees her eyes drifting over to a netting bag of some green vegetables by the pallet where he sleeps.
‘Ah, yes,’ he says, and the twist of his mouth seems almost self-mocking. ‘Artichokes.’
Occasionally she feels something spiky in his mind pushing back at her. He’ll ask a question about a point of mathematics, as if testing her, checking she’s understood. Sometimes the look when he raises his eye is minutely sharper, more appraising – then the sentences will again trail off and the combing of the fingers through the beard will increase. He continues to sit cross-legged, without apparent discomfort.
As they talk, he hauls over a pottery container filled with pea pods, takes a handful and pushes the container over towards Isla. They shell and eat the peas, which taste woody, but less horrible than the sage tea – and to Isla, who is both hungry and nervous, they are a welcome opportunity to do something with her hands.
That first night, she keeps talking to him till the sun sinks. He lights the hurricane lamp and moths loop in crazy eights around the table. They pass a point where impoliteness has become moot. Only when he notices her start to shiver a little, and tries to give her his blanket, does she make a move. The blanket, she guesses, is the origin of the dusty smell.
‘I’m sorry. You are too kind. I must leave you…’ She dares his first name: ‘Nicolas. I have to go and pitch my tent.’ She asks if she can set up her tent down the slope from his house. ‘Perhaps we can talk some more in the morning; if I’m not intruding?’
‘No,’ he said, wanly. ‘You are intruding, but you are not an intruder. Perhaps a helper. A sharer.’
That night she sets up her tent, laboriously, in the pitch dark. She dreams of goats bleating, and the following morning she is woken by the sound of chickens pecking about at the entrance to her tent. It hasn’t rained. Shivering from the dawn, she pokes her head out and sees Banacharski, bent over in his corduroy trousers, scrubbing at something in the dirt up by the front of the shack.
That is how Isla Holderness’s week with Banacharski starts. She quietly slots into his life, and he lets her. That first morning, she offers to make him breakfast and he, affecting to be startled by the emergence of this woman from the dew-steaming tent at the foot of his garden, nods. ‘Come.’ She uses the eggs she saw – they are fresh enough, and finds a couple more in a dirt bath under the house, one still warm.
The gas canisters she saw outside heat a little tank of hot water Banacharski uses to wash. But he also has a single-ring burner on a bottle of gas and she finds a skillet.
‘I don’t usually cook,’ he says.
She makes omelettes, seasoned with chervil she finds growing at a short distance from the house, and they eat them. He, again, insists she take the chair while he sits on the floor.
For most of that morning she helps him potter around the garden, pulling weeds. He does this more than she, but he points, occasionally, and grunts. She doesn’t know anything about gardening; she has always lived in big cities. As it goes on, prompted gently, the older man starts to talk a little more – about himself, about the disappearance. He won’t say much about it, but when she says something about being overcome by ‘pressure’ he turns to her sharply.
‘I am not mad,’ he says, looking her very directly in the eyes. ‘I know that that is what they want everyone to think. And it suits me – for my own purposes, for different purposes. But I am not mad. I know exactly what they are doing. EXACTLY.’
He turns his head from her and roots at the foot of the hedge, turns back – looking cross, with a dandelion leaf tangled in his beard. ‘Exactly what they are doing. I am not mad.’
That is followed by another long silence and a furious bout of weed pulling.
It is early afternoon when he declares that he has to work. He does so in a sudden snap – a violence of gesture that takes her by surprise. She senses, suddenly, that he’s long past when he’d have started ordinarily, as if his gardening has been a distraction he has affected until it has become intolerable. The weeds he has been pulling are some way from his garden. They were ther
e for a reason.
He walks briskly into the shack and shuts the door. Isla goes for a walk. The weather is pleasant enough. She walks a contour of the hill behind the shack, descends into a valley and marches up the other side until there is a pleasant ache in the tops of her legs, thinking all the way. She thinks how to approach him, how to coax him out. She has never done anything like this before.
Will he be finding her attractive? The thought has crossed her mind. He did have girlfriends when he was younger. He probably hasn’t had a woman since… unless… Why should she speculate? He’s an old man. She knows Mike would say: is it safe? She feels safe. He’s an old man. He’s reedy, pot-bellied. If he tried anything she could, with these strong thighs and these arms she goes swimming with… she feels safe.
But she wonders, just in the abstract, if he finds her attractive.
And so it goes. She returns later in the afternoon and knocks on the door. He lets her in. He has been in the chair at the table, writing on a yellow pad. He seems in a good mood.
‘My new work,’ he says, tilting the pad towards her. It’s in prose, very densely written, studded with what look like algebraic notations. She makes to peer more closely at it, but he snatches the pad away and puts it face down on the desk.
‘Tell me, Isla Holderness… what do you think happens to us when we think? When we want something?’
Isla raises both her eyebrows, opens her face, looks deferentially blank. Banacharski snorts. They don’t talk about his work again that night. But, as last night, she asks whether she can stay in her tent, and perhaps help him tomorrow and he assents with a courteous gesture.
And so they establish a routine. Isla helps him to cook, makes a few efforts to clean up the shack – though she knows better than to touch his mouse-nests of paper, let alone order them or be seen trying to read them. And, gently reasserting her interest, she piece by piece steers him into talking about his work. It is a slow and elliptical process.
