‘He wants to have them so he does them. And has their wives.’
‘Mm. Hence the love of pain: he’s correcting himself for it. He had plenty of pain this morning. His op. They plugged his hip back in. He’s in raging agony now and he won’t touch his morphine. Hey. Your forehead.’
‘Tried to blind me. His own son.’
‘So you’re not upset?’
‘I don’t see what difference it makes. In the newspaper I described Jo as “another mad prick”. Another — like Mick Meo. I don’t see what difference it makes.’
‘It makes a difference to me. It more or less cancels my reason for going after you in the first place.’
‘That’s true. It also dilutes the incest — if we had. We still share Hebe Meo. Christ: my mum. Oh well. You’ve got to let it be. You can’t go to your death-bed still … still obsessed by your kiddie cot. Easy for me to say. You’re all right I hope?’
‘Yeah. You know, you’ve undermined my magical thinking. The universal seductress — she won’t fly any more. Maybe it’ll be a relief. I’m quitting the vengeance business. And I’m considering quitting the industry. Now that I’m so rich. You know what’s really wrong with porno? Getting older, two of you, sexually, that’s the hardest thing, right? And the best thing, maybe. And porno’s the sworn enemy of that.’
‘… Cora, is Jo done with me?’
‘Well he’s the type, isn’t he. They come back at you. Unless they’re dead they come back at you.’
‘Last night … I called him a poof.’
‘What? Then he’ll come back at you. Listen, I’ll speak to him. He owes me.’
‘Don’t get out. You know, I loved your mother. She was wild, but she was a great sis to me. It killed me for a year when she died. And I love you. But in the right way.’
‘Thanks. And me too. Here’s a secret about the Sextown Sniper. It hasn’t been made public because it’s too sensitive politically. All the chicks would go on strike. The Sextown Sniper’s a woman.’
‘How can they tell?’
‘Oh, it’s just the things she leaves in her hides. Eyeline pencils. Knitting-patterns. Recipes. And why else would she never kill anyone?’
So he left Lovetown, home of the gentle, the tender, the loving Sextown Sniper. The commuter flight took him up over Fucktown, which stayed there like a circuit diagram, and towards Los Angeles, arrayed like the stagecape of some old crooner the size of a comet.
6. Men in power
He wrote it over Greenland:
Dear Russia,
I hesitate to set this down, because I am greatly afraid of recurrence — I am very greatly afraid of the misery of recurrence. But I feel like a man who wearily consults an old wound or grievance, and finds it isn’t there.
Over the last few days I think I’ve worked out what my accident did to me. I used to suspect that it had shorn me of certain values — the values of civilisation, more or less. Well it did do that. But it did something else too: it fucked up my talent for love. It fucked it up. Love was still there, but it was love of the wrong kind. There was a terrible agitation in it. An impotent agitation. And now that agitation seems to have gone, retreated, lifted.
General thoughts are not my strength, but here’s a general thought. Men were in power for five million years. Now (where we live) they share it with women. That past has a weight, though we behave as if it doesn’t. We behave as if the transition has been seamlessly achieved. Of course there’s no going back. I went back. As if through a trapdoor I dropped into the past, and we shared that disaster. Still, we should acknowledge the weight of it, the past. Unconsciously, and not for long at a time, men miss women being tractable, and women miss men being decisive; but we can’t say that. All I’m suggesting, perhaps, is that there’s a deficiency of candour (and that’s the thing that’s wrong with what I write — or with what I wrote). It would be surprising if women weren’t a little crazed by their gains in power, and if men weren’t a little crazed by their losses. We will argue about this, I hope, and you will win and I won’t mind. No, strike that out. You will win, and I will mind, but I’ll probably pretend not to. What I’m saying is that it will take a century to work off those five billennia and consolidate the change. We pretend it is, but the change isn’t yet intact and entire.
My memory is filling out — I can remember Billie saying ‘here comes my lovely daddy to take me home from school’ (she rose on her toes as she said it). And that’s the kind of daddy I am going to go back to being, if you give me the chance. I wasn’t quite right, in the head or the heart. Not right, not right. Memory. The only major gap now seems to be Sophie’s birth; it’s still gone, but I’m hoping it will reappear one day. I don’t know why this absence oppresses me so much. Of course I can remember very clearly declining to watch Billie’s caesarian. But I’ve forgotten Sophie’s birth — and I don’t want to be a man who has never watched a woman being born. Naturally I wish I could forget the creature I became, but I can’t and I won’t.
I may have done too much damage. I may have frightened and disgusted you too deeply and lastingly. And there’s one other thing you’re going to have to forgive me for — a strange kind of family entanglement. You’d think it premature (and alarming) if I were to write here about love. So I’ll just say that my profound hope has to do with your generosity. You are too generous not to try to forgive me.
Much has happened. I will tell you everything. I can’t understand why I want to tell you this now, but I do. In the past, when I thought about my father, I used to fantasise that he was allowed occasional glimpses of my life. Now of course he died when I was still married to Pearl. But I used to think: he would work it out, he would put two and two together, and see that I had married you now, and that we had these two girls, Billie and Sophie. I don’t believe he can do that. But it would be good and right if he was allowed to, every now and then — the privilege expiring after a couple of generations, the story discreetly fading from view when the children are about sixty-five. And when we’re dead, I should be allowed to watch the boys, and you and I should be allowed to watch the girls.
Epithalamium.
CHAPTER TEN
1. February 14 (2.19 p.m.): 101 Heavy
With furious precision the maddened corpse of Royce Traynor delivered its final, smashing blow, and he was gone, away, spinning end over end through the plane-shaking clouds …
The pressurised air in 101 Heavy now fled it too: a squall of dust and grit. The mid-section of the cabin floor instantly collapsed, severing all remaining hydraulic lines.
Reynolds felt the bang, the howl like a ricochet, the stinging wind, the harsh vibration. In ragged unison the oxygen-masks dropped and hovered. After a few seconds all the cigarette smoke was replaced by a thin white mist.
Captain John Macmanaman: … Feel it, Nick.
First Officer Nick Chopko: No …
Macmanaman: No quantity. None.
Flight Engineer Hal Ward: … You know the ‘feel’ they put into it’s bullshit. It’s just the computer. The yoke’s bullshit.
Macmanaman: Engineer, we’re flying by direct law.
Chopko: And if we reengage?
Macmanaman: We’d get fictitious feel, if anything. Gentlemen, we have no hydraulic control over this aircraft. She’s banking. She’s banking. The throttle, Nick. If you … She’s coming back. She’s coming back … We’re just blundering around up here. We have no flaps and no spoilers. If we can get her down we ‘re going to land at 300 knots with no reverse thrust and no brakes. We don’t need an airport. We need an interstate. Three miles of good road. And one on our present setting. Nick. Brief SAM [System Aircraft Maintenance]. Hal? I’m going to be asking you to line up every kind of rescue and emergency we can get. She’s banking. Come on back …