Hammer was standing to settle the bill. On a smeared plate, four pancakes and one bacon rasher, snapped in two unequal parts, and a toothpick remained. The glass syrup jeroboam was empty. It was a miracle the man was thin. He said, ‘We’re due in forty minutes and it’s forty-five miles. Let’s go!’
Beard could think of nothing to say and so, morosely, he followed his friend out into the blinding light of the parking lot towards the car.
They headed north across the grasslands towards the interstate, both men silent, though Hammer at the wheel whistled random notes, as though performing some earnest avant-garde piece. Beard was generally adept at avoiding inconvenient or troubling thoughts, but now that his spirits were low he was brooding about his health, and staring at the reddish-brown blotch, a map of unknown territory, on his wrist. The biopsy was in. Doctor Eugene Parks had confirmed in the morning that it was a melanoma and that it had grown just a half-millimetre deeper into the surrounding tissue than he would have preferred. He named a specialist in Dallas who could remove it tomorrow and start the radiation therapy. But Beard wanted to be in Lordsburg for the opening and told Parks he would come back within the month, as soon as he was free. Parks, in his engaging, neutral manner, told him he was being irrational. No time to lose, on the edge of no return, metastasis a possibility.
‘Don’t be a denier,’ Doctor Parks had said, appearing to refer back to their climate-change chats. ‘This won’t go away just because you don’t want it or are not thinking about it.’
And that was not all the bad news, though the rest was familiar enough. Beard had stripped to the waist and was now, resentfully, buttoning his shirt. The consulting rooms were on the nineteenth floor of a block in downtown El Paso, same floor, Beard remembered, that his mother had died on. Parks, whose people originally came from St Kitts, had minty breath and a wise old leathery face of silvery black. His head projected forward from his shoulders turtle fashion and bobbed kindly whenever Beard spoke. He was the same age as Beard, though some inches taller, and kept in shape by swimming, he said, every morning of the working week, between six and seven, before he saw his first patient. Beard could not imagine being wet, or even awake, at that time of day and knew he could never compete with this boast, could never pay the price of such inconvenience and discomfort to lower his body-mass index.
It was true, the doctor did not lecture or moralise, but he compensated with a disengaged, insulting frankness. With each instance, each looming physical catastrophe, the wise turtle head protruded a little further and he gently tapped his own palm with a pencil. No one, he said, not even Beard, would choose to walk around with a body like Beard’s. He was carrying an extra sixty-five pounds, the equivalent of a combat infantryman’s full pack. His knees and ankles were swollen from the weight, osteoarthritis was a growing possibility, his liver was enlarged, blood pressure was up again and there was a growing risk of congestive heart failure. His bad cholesterol was high, even by English standards. He was clearly experiencing breathing difficulties, he stood a decent chance of diabetes mellitus as well as advancing the likelihood of prostate and kidney cancer and thrombosis. His one piece of luck – luck, Beard noted, not virtue – was that he was not addicted to cigarettes, otherwise he might already be dead.
The doctor’s head and shoulders were framed by a south-facing plate-glass window, a glaring rectangle of hazy white sky suggestive of the oppressive morning heat. Occasionally, an airplane drifted across, taking a turn around the city before landing on the east side. Over the river was Juarez, currently a world capital for murder as drug gangs fought their turf wars and slaughtered along the way soldiers, judges, policemen and city officials. Now the Mexican cartels were hiring unemployed Texan teenagers to do their killing. Clearly, life would push on without Michael Beard. As he listened to Parks enumerate his possible futures, he decided not to mention his recent acquisition of a classic symptom, the occasional sensation of tightness around his chest. It would only make him appear even more foolish and doomed. Nor could he admit that he did not have it in him to eat and drink less, that exercise was a fantasy. He could not command his body to do it, he had no will for it. He would rather die than take up jogging or prance to funky music in a church hall with other tracksuited deadbeats.
When Beard made his vague promise to return within the month, Doctor Parks was for tying him down to dates. Tuesday the twenty-third or Thursday the twenty-fifth, he must take his pick. Beard hesitated, Parks insisted, as though it were his own bloodstream through which liberated cancer cells were about to drift, looking for a new place, a nearby lymph node, to set up home. Beard chose the remoter date, knowing that he could phone Parks’s secretary and blamelessly cancel.
Now, as Hammer ceased his terrible whistling and slowed to pass through the minute township of Cotton City, the sanctuary of an obscure clinic in Dallas looked more attractive. But Beard knew that he did not have the strength to run away. The arrangements for tomorrow had a momentum he could not interrupt, not when he was so hungry for public triumph, for that time in the early evening when little Lordsburg with its neon and burger joints and abundant air conditioning became nominally carbon neutral, and American civilisation, which stood for the aspirations of all the world, could continue on its way without the inconvenience of overheating. The eight-year journey from the slow deciphering of the Aldous file to lab work, refinements, breakthroughs, drawings, field tests must be completed. General acclaim was the final stage. Tarpin could do his worst.
Beard fiddled with the radio to catch the on-the-hour news, and there it was, a snappy interview with one of Hammer’s PR team explaining that sunlight and water would first power Lordsburg and, one day, the entire planet.
Hammer whooped. ‘Beautiful! I trained that girl up well.’
He and Beard never acknowledged, not even to each other in private, that they would not really be supplying electricity to Lordsburg at all. They would be selling kilowatt hours to a local utility company that were the rough equivalent of the town’s average consumption over a year. The electrons from their revolutionary plant would swarm anonymously among the rest.
‘We’ll all be down there,’ the announcer said. ‘Out on Highway 90, three miles east of 70. Join us at 6 p.m. tomorrow, countdown to switch-on, when Lordsburg leads the world!’
Soon they were heading east on the interstate, and then swinging north round the town and after a couple of miles turning right for Silver City. Minutes later they came over a slight rise that gave them a view of the site. Beard had seen it many times in the past months, with everything in place and dry runs going smoothly after some initial setbacks. But still, this afternoon he felt a little swoon of pride. Sensing the mood, Hammer slowed.
‘Well, matey,’ he said, concealing his own strong emotions behind a hideous attempt at cockney. ‘Don’t it just warm the cockles of your ‘eart?’
The twenty-three big tilted panels had a dull gleam under the ferocious sun. They were fed by a mess of pipework and valves. Behind them were the storage tanks for the compressed hydrogen and oxygen, and alongside were the breezeblock sheds housing the fuel-cell generator and the catalysts. Power lines on new poles led to the nearest of the ancient wooden pylons that tottered in succession across the immensity of semi-desert. On the other side of the tanks was a pumping station built over the deep water source, and beyond was a neat brick building that housed the computers.
What was new were the hundreds of people, construction workers, vendors and sound technicians, moving importantly between tasks, and the many hundreds or thousands of Stars and Stripes planted on poles around the panels where the security fence should have been, and in triangular bunting along the top of the giant pale blue marquee and down its guy ropes, around the sound stage, and lining the recently bulldozed half-acre square where the army band would march, and suspended in artfully drooping streamers over the bleachers where the local VIPs would sit, and along the avenue formed by fast-food and cold-drink concessions and, at ri
ght angles to it, down an even grander avenue of portable lavatories, and around the perimeter of the parking lot, where there were at least a hundred vehicles instead of the usual dozen, with room for a couple of thousand more. Not a single Union Jack, Beard noted moodily, to honour himself, the inventor and first mover of the project. But he said nothing, and banished the thought.
To one side, on another space cleared of vegetation, and unadorned by flags, were media trucks and satellite dishes. A few hundred yards out into the scrub, on a low rise parallel to the highway, was the unlit neon ‘Lordsburg!’ sign, in homage to the lettering of the famous Hollywood landmark, all characters erected except the exclamation mark, and even now this thirty-foot-high punctuation was being hauled upright with ropes by men in hardhats.
As they turned off the road onto a dirt track and passed under a proscenium of yet more Stars and Stripes, an aroma of frying fat, chilled by the car’s air conditioning, filled the cabin and tickled their noses.
Beard said, ‘Toby, you’re a genius!’
Hammer nodded in grave acknowledgement. ‘I like to bring things and people together. But, Michael. This is your invention. The genius is you.’
Feeling serene now, Beard nodded in return. This was how friendship should be.
Even as they parked, men in T-shirts and baseball caps, some holding clipboards, were hurrying towards them through a dust cloud. This was Hammer’s team, or a part of it, and among the group were engineers, hydraulic and computer specialists and other technicians. Beard had done the theoretical work, designed and supervised the experiments in the lab, but the rest, the scaling up, the drawings, the mass-production design, the actual plant layout and construction, the pipes and valves and how they were represented in the software, was not his concern. He knew the principles, he owned the patents, but he could not have given a detailed account of the site. Here on the open plain, he was an eminence, almost a legend, and everybody treated him with appropriate respect, with the intimate politeness at which Americans excel, but no one needed him to come and peer into a trench or adjudicate on spheres of responsibility. The NREL in Golden, Colorado, had examined the prototype and confirmed that the process he had devised worked to a high level of efficiency. The rest was for this friendly bunch of practical men waiting for Toby Hammer, who himself knew nothing about the technicalities or underlying principles, but had a gift for detail and co-ordination and man-management.
So now, as the two men stepped out of their car and engaged in a round of handshakes and backslaps, Beard prepared to slip away. The roasting air was amplifying the appeal of cooking smells, of meat grilling on wood fires, drifting across the parking lot from the concessions. The news about Tarpin had ruined his brunch, but his concentration would remain unsettled until he had strolled down this instant desert boulevard and made a considered choice. Toby, who kept a pick-up on site, handed the car keys over and he and his group headed across the parking lot towards the array.
After barely five minutes’ reflection, Beard was sitting alone in deep shade at a trestle table with a paper plate of barbecued brisket, Texan style, with three giant gherkins and a mound of potato salad and a small waxed-paper bucket of draught beer. By the common standards of energy production, the Lordsburg Artificial Photosynthesis Plant, known as LAPP to the engineers, was negligible, a mere toy, barely a prototype. But sitting here, with the blue smoke of grilled chicken rolling past him from the joint next door, and country rock on speakers mounted on poles, and the chefs shouting cheerily to each other of the news that twenty-four hungry men from the ‘Lordsburg!’ sign-erection team were heading this way for rump steaks, Beard felt himself to be at the centre of the world. How delicious it was, not only the food, but to be here, cosily ignored, in an obscure corner of the American heartland, and to know that the din, the construction, the digital media and soon, jet fighters and marching bands, this imminent industrial revolution, owed their existence at this spot among the palmillas and dried grasses to what he had once conceived eight years ago, lying on a dirty sofa in a basement flat five thousand miles away.
He had his teeth clamped about the fourth piece of succulent brisket when something happened that he had not experienced since his schooldays and even then considered intensely annoying. He felt a presence at his back and before he could turn, warm hands clamped over his eyes, gripping his head tightly so he could not move, and a voice said in a whisper into his ear, ‘Guess who?’
A finger of the left hand was pressing uncomfortably on the northern hemisphere of his eyeball and he dared not struggle. His tongue was laden with meat, and in the shock of the moment he was unable to swallow. But still, he managed to say indistinctly, ‘Tarpin?’
‘She your Chinese girl?’ There was merry laughter as he was released.
Darlene, of course, and his irritation vanished as he struggled to his feet, chewing rapidly to empty his mouth, and embraced her. Who could not love Darlene? She was a good-hearted, overweight woman from Nebraska who had waited tables all her life, had married three times, had four grown-up children who appeared to adore or need her, for they phoned constantly, had discovered New Mexico twelve years back and changed her name from Janet. She now spoke fluent Spanish, after living for six years with a Hispanic truck driver in a trailer on the southern edge of town before she threw him out.
And now she had set her heart on Michael Beard. At their first sexual encounter she had told him he was her very first older man. And then, correcting herself, her first much older man. He did not like to think that her own choices, like his, might be narrowing. He was, after all, something of a local hero, honoured by the Chamber of Commerce on East 2nd Street for bringing jobs to the town. He was not such a bad proposition. And she, of course, fulfilled Beard’s old fantasy of the grand lowlife. In that way of Americans good-naturedly declaring a class affiliation, she chewed gum, open-mouthed, remorselessly, all day, even while she talked, stopping only in order to kiss him. She never read books or newspapers or even magazines, had never been to church, and disliked wholesome food as much as Beard, and when she doused her plate was fond of evoking Ronald Reagan’s celebrated insight that ketchup was a vegetable. Beard was disappointed by her lack of religion. It did not conform to type. But she was staunch. She was not even an atheist, she said, she could not care enough even to deny God’s existence. He simply did not ‘come up’.
They had met when Beard, with many hours to kill before a meeting, drove out of Lordsburg one afternoon and turned along a track that led to the ghost town of Shakespeare and, faintly bored, afflicted in the spring warmth by formless sexual expectation, wandered down the old main street, from the old saloon to the old general merchandise to the old Stratford Hotel, where Billy the Kid once washed dishes. As Beard was leaving he came across Darlene in the parking lot. She had come out to lend support to her friend Nicky, who was after a job as a tour guide and had just been told she was too unconfident and ignorant to qualify. She was crying on Darlene’s arm as Beard, in predatory mode, strolled across and kindly asked if he could be of help. Darlene explained the outrageous rejection while Nicky tried to join in. She was a scrawny, freckly, crop-haired chain-smoker with a stutter, trying to inhale even as she wept, and Beard thought that he himself would not have hired her in any capacity. But this was her third failed attempt in as many days to get a job and so they went back to Darlene’s trailer and drank consolatory beers and scotch all afternoon, with Nicky producing cocaine and pot, which he and Darlene refused. To endear himself to Darlene he promised to find Nicky something out at the site (which he did, and Hammer sacked her two days later), and after she had left to see to her children, Beard and Darlene made love in the oak-veneered bedroom next door.
He saw her whenever he came to Lordsburg. There was a bar on 4th Street they liked, and sometimes they partied in his room at the Holiday Inn, but mostly they enjoyed themselves in the trailer, which she kept neatly. There was a small yard at the rear with two lemon trees she cared for like children
, trees just big enough to cast some shade in the late afternoon on a couple settling down to drink. After a couple of scotches – she shared that taste with Beard – she laughed a lot, very loudly, and after three or four drinks she loved to go indoors, into the cool throb and rattle of the air conditioning, to make love. For Beard the affair was an unexpected sexual renaissance, with piercing sensory pleasure, much like that near-inversion of agony he remembered from his twenties. A lifetime had swept by since he last shouted out involuntarily like a madman at the moment of orgasm. He never would have believed he would be experiencing such extremities of sensation with a woman of fifty-one, whose body was as slack and tired and inflated, as scribbled on by varicose veins, as his own. He assumed that this might well be his last throw at such ecstasy, and so he cherished her. Just as he took presents from El Paso or Dallas airports to Melissa and Catriona, so he lugged in reverse items for Darlene from Heathrow. In another town, another country, she might have been considered a noisy drunk. In Lordsburg she was popular and useful, and through her he came to respect the town. Apart from her evening waitressing job at the Lulu Diner, she worked as a volunteer in a grade school, tidying classrooms and cleaning up grazed knees. For two weeks a year she did unpaid menial jobs at a summer camp for autistic kids in the Gila hills. Only rarely, two or three times in a year at most, was she gathered insensate off the sidewalk at night by a neighbour or a patrolman and brought home to the trailer.