Phases of Gravity

After a while he rose from the bed and went to look out the window. In so doing he blocked the fragile line of moonlight and let the darkness in.

Basti, chawl, whatever the Calcuttans called it, it was the ultimate slum. Stretching for miles along the railroad tracks, the maze of tin-roofed shacks and gunnysack tents was penetrated only by a few winding paths that served as both streets and sewers. The density of people was almost beyond belief. Children were everywhere, defecating in doorways, chasing each other between huts, and following Baedecker with the light-footed hop of the shy and the barefoot. Women looked away as Baedecker passed, or pulled up the cloth of their saris to cover their faces. Men stared with open curiosity verging on hostility. Some ignored him. Mothers squatted behind their children, intent on pulling lice from matted hair. Little girls crouched next to old women and kneaded cow dung with their hands, shaping it into properly sized patties for fuel. An old man hawked phlegm into his hand as he squatted to shit in an empty lot.

'Baba! Baba!' Children ran alongside Baedecker. Palms were stretched out and hands tugged at him. He had long since emptied his pockets of coins.

'Baba! Baba!'

He had agreed to meet Maggie at two o'clock at Calcutta University but had become lost after getting off the overcrowded bus too soon. It must have been getting close to five o'clock. The paths and dirt streets wound back on themselves, trapping him between the railroad tracks and the Hooghly River. He had captured repeated glimpses of the Howrah Bridge, but he could never seem to get closer to it. The stench from the river was rivaled only by the stink of the slums and mud through which he walked.

'Baba!' The crowd around him was getting larger and not all of the beggars were children. Several large men pushed right behind him, speaking rapidly and thrusting out their hands in jabs that fell just short of landing.

My own goddamn fault, thought Baedecker. The Ugly American strikes again. The huts had no doorways. Chickens ran in and out of the cramped, dark spaces. In a low-lying pond of sewage, a group of boys and men washed the black sides of a sleepy bullock. Somewhere in the tightly packed maze of shacks there was a battery-powered radio playing loudly. The music had been rising to a crescendo of plucked strings that augmented Baedecker's growing anxiety. Thirty or forty people were following him now, and lean, angry men had all but pushed the children away.

One man with a red bandanna around his head screamed loudly in what Baedecker took to be Hindi or Bengali. When Baedecker shook his head that he did not understand, the man blocked his way, waved his thin arms in the air, and shouted more loudly. Some of the phrases were repeated by other men in the crowd.

Much earlier, Baedecker had picked up a small but heavy rock. Now he casually put his hand in the pocket of his safari shirt and palmed the stone. Time seemed to slow and a calm descended on him.

Suddenly there was a screaming from one side, children were running, and the crowd abandoned Baedecker to jog down a side street. Even the man with the red bandanna shouted a parting syllable and moved quickly away. Baedecker waited a minute and then strolled after them, descending a muddy path to the river's edge.

A crowd had gathered around something that had washed up in the mud. At first, Baedecker thought it was a bleached tree stump, but then he saw the awful symmetry of it and recognized it as a human body. It was white — white beyond albino white, beyond fish-belly white — and gases had bloated it to twice normal-size. Black holes seemed to stare out from the puffy mass that had once been a face. Several of the children who had been following Baedecker now squatted close to the thing and ran their hands across it with shrill giggles. The texture reminded Baedecker of white fungus, of huge mushrooms rotting in the sun. Pieces of flesh collapsed inward or broke off as the boys prodded and giggled.

Finally some of the men went closer and prodded the body with sharp sticks. They backed away as gas escaped with an audible hiss. The crowd laughed. Mothers with infants slung on their hips pressed forward.

Baedecker backed away, moved quickly down an alley, made a right turn without thinking about it, and suddenly emerged onto a paved street. A trolley car passed, swaying from its load of hanging passengers. Two rickshaw coolies trotted past, pulling overweight Indian businessmen home for dinner. Baedecker stood in the traffic for a few seconds and then waved down a passing cab.

'How are you doing, Richard?'

'Great, hon. Not much to do for the next couple of days. Tom Gavin's been doing most of the work and taking real good care of us. Dave and I are going to send him out to retrieve the film canisters in a few hours. How are things at home?'

'Just great. We watched the lunar lift-off yesterday from here at Mission Control. You never told us that it went up so quickly.'

'Yeah. It was quite a ride.'

'. . . want to . . . few . . .'

'Sorry. Say again. Didn't copy that.'

'. . .said that Scott would like to say a few words.'

'Okay . . . great! Put him on.'

'All right. Good-bye, Richard. We're looking forward to seeing you on Tuesday. Bye!'

'Hi, Dad!'

'Hi, Scott.'

'You looked really neat on the TV. Did you really set a speed record like they said?'

'Ahh . . . for land speed . . . for driving on the moon, yeah, I guess we did, Scott. Only Dave was driving. I guess the record's in his name.'

'Oh.'

'Well, Tiger, we've got to get back to work. It's been real good talking to you.'

'Hey, Dad.'

'Ah roger, Scott . . .'

'I can see all three of you on the big TV here. Who's driving the command module?'

'Ah That's a good question, isn't it, Tom? I guess . . . Scott . . . I guess that for the next couple of days . . . uh . . . Isaac Newton's doing the driving.' The live transmission of the families talking to the astronauts had been NASA's idea of effective PR in time for the evening news. They did not repeat it on the next flight.

'The illustrious sepulchre of His Exalted Majesty Shah Jahan, the Valiant King, whose dwelling is in the starry Heaven. He traveled from this transient world to the World of Eternity on the twenty-eighth night of the month of Rahab in the year of 1076 of the Hegira.' Maggie Brown closed the guidebook, and they both turned their backs on the white eminence of the Taj Mahal. Neither was in the mood to appreciate beautiful architecture or precious stones inlaid in flawless marble. Outside the gates the beggars waited. Baedecker and the girl crossed the chessboard pavement to lean on the wide railing and look out over the river. A monsoon downpour had driven away all but the most hardy of tourists. The air was as cool as it had been during Baedecker's entire visit — as low as the eighties. The sun was hidden behind bruise-black stratocumulus to the west, but a gray light permeated the scene. The river was broad and shallow, and it moved by with the absorbing serenity of all rivers everywhere.

'Maggie, why did you follow Scott to India?'

She looked at Baedecker, avoided a shrug only by hunching her shoulders, and tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear. She squinted across the river as if searching for someone on the far bank. 'I'm not sure. We only knew each other for about five months before he decided to drop out and come here. I liked Scott . . . I still do . . . but sometimes he seemed so immature. Other times he was like an old man who had forgotten how to laugh.'

'But you followed him ten thousand miles.' This time she did shrug. 'He was hunting for something. We were both serious about that . . .'

'Places of power?'

'Something like that. Only Scott thought that if he didn't find it soon, he never would. He said that he didn't want to piss away his life like . . .'