Men in Space (10 page)

Nick explained to her earlier today: Jean-Luc’s bell doesn’t work, and so you have to call from this phone cabin on the end of V.P. Čkalova – a cabin that, like most in Prague, doesn’t work either, i.e. it takes your money and then cuts you off as soon as you connect. But don’t worry, Nick told her, because Jean-Luc is intimately acquainted with the disconnecting sound that this particular cabin makes as opposed to the disconnecting sounds of other malfunctioning telephones, so will know there’s someone just around the corner trying to get in: she should just trot over to the front door as soon as she’s made the call. Like, right. She’s done this three fucking times already, and the fucking door has remained firmly fucking closed. And so she’s standing out here in the cold cursing this Nick and this Jean-Luc and that Alexander Graham Bell and V.P. Čkalova too, whoever the fuck he was …

Now a young guy’s appearing from around the corner carrying a crate of beer towards the door. So Heidi perks up and addresses him in Czech, and he responds by asking her if she’s trying to get up to Jean-Luc’s – a question she understands, and replies yes to. He says he has a key and opens up the door, then jams open the lock with a match stick so no one else will have to go through what she just has,
he explains – which she also sort of understands, though more from the context than the language. But all the same, she’s getting quite excited, hardly ever having spoken Czech this much before and wondering if she might even be able to get the breakfast line in somehow when this guy switches to English and asks her, in an American accent which is totally native, how she knows Jean-Luc. Fucking typical.

It turns out this guy is Roger, whom she’s heard about from Nick and his real Yugoslavian friend Mladen. He tells her he’s heard about her too, from ditto sources. As they turn the banister into the third flight he tells her he knows her father makes the glue that weapons manufacturers use to stick guidance cameras onto the main body of long-range missiles, which
really
doesn’t make her happy, and in fact she wishes she’d never let that slip to Nick in the first place, and wonders why he’s so damn fascinated by it. Roger’s a West Coaster and, she being from Vermont, Heidi assumes that the old US intercoastal enmity will make itself felt before they reach the top flight – but he turns out to be quite gracious, complimenting her on her Czech which is no great humble-pie fest on his part since his is ten times better but still – and he gives her to understand without actually
saying
as much that don’t worry, he’s not getting on her case politically or anything about the smart-bomb glue, his father worked at Lockheed for ten years. By the fifth banister bend he’s asked her if she’ll let him film her talking about whatever she wants, because he’s collecting short episodes of people talking about themselves, wants to create a picture of what’s generally going down here – and at this point he uses words like “barometer” and “epoch” and “Zeitgeisty”, which she finds a little grandiose but lets slide. He says she wouldn’t even have to mention the glue on camera, although it would be nice if she did but, really, anything will do, he finds her “visually fascinating” – which he says in a way that implies she’s pretty-photogenic rather than, like,
Elephant-Man-photogenic. And so by the time they swing into the final stretch and Roger kicks open Jean-Luc’s door she’s on an up.

Jean-Luc’s atelier turns out to be big. The front door leads into a kind of antechamber which itself is larger than her whole apartment. There’s a storage space in the near corner of this antechamber, a sort of cupboard without walls which is full of rolled-up strips of canvas and lengths of wood. Beside that, protruding from the back wall, there’s a strange construction made of metal poles, two vertical and seven or eight horizontal, like a skeletal bunk bed: must be for hanging paintings out to dry. Sitting on the horizontal poles with their legs dangling down towards the floor are some long-haired US guys she’s seen busking on Charles Bridge and would bet an even dollar any day of the week have CA on their licence plates when they’re back stateside. Still, they’re not English teachers either, so it’s Cool: one; Samo-Samo: zip. There are two Czech girls and a French- or Polish-looking guy up there with them – squeezed in, tangled up together, arms and legs all pointing willy-nilly. The buskers have got their guitars and are banging at them, really giving it some, playing that old song by the Beatles or was it the Stones ‘Back in the USSR’, throwing their heads back as they howl the lines out:

Beneath their dangling feet there’s a large duvet which is bulging and contorting: somebody, well two people and maybe even more, are making out big time underneath it. Cool: two. Roger’s opened up a fridge and is transferring
bottles from the crate to this. He pulls out two cold ones from the freezer comp, cracks them open and passes one to her.

“Just throw your coat in with those canvases,” he says.

Heidi does this. Roger does ditto. They move on into the atelier’s main room, which is
huge
– and has those very skylights she’s been coveting. There’s a fifteen-odd-rung stepladder standing in the middle of the floor, the skylight-ceiling is that high. The walls are hung with huge, bright canvases that show cartoony, pop-art figures striding through stripy frames. Two unfinished paintings in the same style are standing on the floor propped up against the windows. In one of these the figure’s got wings and is upside down and falling towards a bright-blue sea, like Orpheus – no, Ithacus … or something. He’s falling to the sea only the whole painting’s done like a – what is it with names? That guy who paints like cartoons, all in dots,
I pressed the trigger and Wham! Tatatata!
Richten, Fichten, Somethingstein … To the right of the door is a little podium, and a band is setting up there, ratcheting the cymbals to the drum kit, plugging in the amps. Behind them, pinned to the wall, there’s a bedsheet which has blood marks on it. Cool: three …

There are maybe thirty, forty people in this room. Nick’s there, sitting at the top of the stepladder blowing bubbles from this kiddie bubble kit he’s got – but Heidi doesn’t want to rush up to him as though she needed him as some kind of entrance ticket; besides which, he’s not exactly in her good books right now having sort of fucked her around re the whole street-door/telephone-cabin thing. Besides which, Roger’s kind of cute and to-be-stuck-with for a while. He seems to know all the band people: as he leads her over towards a projector that’s sitting on a table in front of the podium pointing at the sheet (and is the bloodstain menstrual, Heidi wonders, or has this Jean-Luc been deflowering teeny-bopper Czech girls? Which one is he, anyway?), two of them come up to him. They swig from his beer, start talking technical
stuff about plugs and voltage or whatever – for which Roger even seems to have the vocab, which makes Heidi wonder if his parents are Czech or something, although she doesn’t verbalize this query. He introduces her to a Jiří and a Kuba, who both smile and say hello. Then Jiří goes and plugs the projector lead into some massively overloaded socket and Roger delves beneath the table, pulls out a stack of circular tins, opens these up and unwinds the first few feet of the film inside each, holding the strip up towards the light so he can see what’s on it.

“Can I help?” she asks him.

“Do you know how to feed film through a projector?”

“Well … sure,” she says, figuring she’ll work it out.

“Stick this one in, then,” he tells her, handing her a tin. “I’ll just go take a leak.”

And he’s off. So: there are two things which kind of turn, and one of these already has the plastic spider on it, which must be for gathering the film as it comes out – so probably the reel should go on this front one. But then all this shit in-between is a real fucker because there’s any number of ways it could go round all these little rubber fingers. Why did she pretend in the first place? Is Roger not going to want to know her if he finds out she can’t load a projector? She bends down to pretend to look more closely at the turning thing, to make anyone looking at her think she’s thinking “Is it an x-type turning thing, the type that feeds from underneath, or a y-type turning thing, that feeds from above?” The stoners are still wailing in the antechamber:

Heidi’s sure by now that everyone is looking at her thinking
She can’t thread a spool: she must be just an English teacher!
A bubble breaks across her face, as though Nick were pissing on her from on high: she’s gone so red that to be anally exact about it the bubble doesn’t actually break
across
her face, i.e. strike her skin and break as a result: it pops a couple of millimetres from it, from the heat she’s giving off. An object touches her chin from behind; she turns round to find a tall, spindly black man has put his arm around her shoulder. He’s dressed in a white toga, and has a pistol in his hand, and he says to her:

“My dear, I think you’re doing it all wrong.”

His voice is high and theatrical, or kind of operatic even, like he was singing. And he’s got, that’s right, a fucking
pistol
in his hand. But he’s smiling. He’s quite old, like maybe forty plus or even fifty, and his thin face has deep creases in it as he smiles. He’s got his other arm around a beautiful blond boy whose eyes stare out serene, or dazed, or stoned.

“You like my weapon?” he says, then the creases in his face contract as his eyes narrow and his mouth pulls open. He throws back his head and whoops out a long, loud laugh. “Karel
loves
my weapon. He just
loves
my tool. My piece. Isn’t that so, Karel?”

The blond boy smiles and answers:

“
Krásná
, Tyrone. Big black weapon.”

The black man throws back his head and whoops again.

“Here, let me show you how you do it,” he says when he’s finished laughing. “You understand a little English?”

“Yeah. I’m from Vermont,” she says.

“No! Oh my God! Ver-
mont
!”

Heidi notices his eyeballs are huge and white amidst all that black skin. A vein has burst inside the right one, daubing the white with red. She asks him:

“You too?”

“My dearest,
dearest
friend is from Vermont. Veronica. We call her Vermont Veronica. She’s got a
great
act back in San Francisco. A drag act, you know. If you’re ever over in San Francisco go to The Pink Pollen Box and look for Vermont Veronica. You do that. She loves to meet people from home. She’ll take you everywhere in town.”

“OK,” she tells him, smiling nervously and looking at the creases in his skin and thinking that she’s never seen a black guy of his age from this close back home: of course she’s
seen
them, but they were cab drivers or postmen or gas-pump attendants or just generally people whose faces you didn’t really clock – but here she is now with an elderly black queen who’s alluding to a world of drag bars and intercity hopping where you just go look people up when you land in such and such a town, and he’s assuming she’s part of that world too. Cool: four. And then this great black pistol. Heidi tries to sound all blasé as she asks:

“Is that a real gun?”

Tyrone’s head goes back again. Another long, long whoop.

“You’re priceless, my dear,” he sings. “She’s priceless! Karel, kiss this gorgeous girl for me.”

She looks at the blond boy, who fortunately seems not to understand. Tyrone continues:

“No, I’m only joking, my dear. Karel’s mine alone. For my eyes only,” and his big white eyes roll up. Then he gives out a theatrical kind of start or gasp as he remembers why he came over to her in the first place: “The film goes on the other spool. Here, give me that.”

He’s got the whole thing loaded in about ten seconds – which is perfect timing because just then Roger comes back followed by this tall, older guy with big white teeth, sees it’s all threaded correctly and says:

“Thank you. Did you study film?”

“My dear, she
is
a film,” says Tyrone. “A real star. Lights! Lights!”

While Roger’s introducing the big-toothed older guy to her as Michael who’s in advertising and she’s shaking Michael’s hand, the lights go down although not out completely: there’s a free-standing lamp over in the corner which she figures is an artist’s lamp because its glow is pretty strong. An image comes up on the bedsheet: art-house-type found footage from the Fifties of this woman in her kitchen who just turns once towards the fridge and then it starts again and then again and so you’re kind of forced to think about the gesture, i.e. turning to a fridge, and see it as a symbol or whatever, which is anyway what makes it kind of art-house. As the image comes up there’s a crackle as an amplifier is switched on. The band start playing; their front, a girl, starts singing, in English but with a totally Czech accent:

– a song that Heidi’s heard maybe a hundred times on Radio Jedná, and really likes. As the girl sings on, she realizes with a sudden rush of excitement that these people are the
real
band that sing this on the radio, The Martyrdom of Somebody: she’s just met two of them at a private party, with them playing to her in the atelier of a French artist in Prague – which is, just, Cool: one zillion.

The Fifties art-house woman has escaped from her first gesture-loop, and is now tearing the leg off a pre-cooked chicken – again and again, of course. Then suddenly this lion, all Seventies and colourful, is ripping chunks of flesh from a dead zebra. Roger’s standing closer to her right side than he was two minutes earlier. Then someone moves up on her left side and nudges it: it’s Mladen the Yugoslavian, and he’s smiling at her, pushing his head forwards to the rhythm of the music. She smiles back and kind of does the same, but brings
her upper torso into it more because Mladen’s moving in a way that makes him look kind of like a chicken too, and she doesn’t want to move like that, nor to seem to copy him. Bubbles are still floating down across the bedsheet screen and across the band. She has to admit it does look quite good – and anyway it wasn’t really Nick’s fault that the street-door/disconnecting-cabin-sound interface didn’t deliver: maybe someone other than Jean-Luc picked up the phone, which Nick wouldn’t have thought of, that there’d be maybe forty-fifty people there – well he’d have known
that
but you know, and anyway she likes him fine and Roger is his friend and Mladen the real Yugoslavian ditto. She turns around and waves up to him, hoping she won’t get Fairy Liquid or whatever in her eyes …