‘But why not generate a calculus of say 5,000 petabytes of differentials describing the shapes of a body form that, were it to actually be built, would dwarf this entire solar system — more than that! It would be so big it could link arms with the spiral arm of the galaxy and high-kick across the heavens!’
I had to hand it to Sherman — not for the breathtaking egomania of his artistic vision, but for that grace that had so struck my wife, and that allowed him to use the d-word so offhandedly, standing there, all thirty-nine inches of him, in front of the Googlers. It was difficult not to love Sherman at times like this — Velázquez’s portrait of de Morro may have imbued the court dwarf with humanity, but it was a humanity defined by thwarted emotions, smouldering resentments and long-anticipated slights. But Sherman was a de Morro in motion: his hands a blur of explication, his head bobbing with such self-affirmation that his beard seemed like a brush putting the finishing touches on his own shining countenance…
I thought all this, then I looked around me at the other listeners, only to discover that they weren’t listening at all and that their faces, far from glowing with the enthusiasm that beamed off Sherman, were merely bathed in the chilly light of the laptops they had propped open on their knees.
Later, as Baltie expertly piloted the Range Rover along the crowded drag of El Camino Real, I sought to comfort Sherman: ‘They were probably catching up on some work. I mean they’re driven so hard in that place — there’re even programming tips stuck up in the men’s.’
‘I’m not bothered in the least!’ he snapped back. ‘They weren’t working — they were googling me.’
As I say, I should’ve felt more grateful for my salvation, but functioning in this odd new realm where the median had been annihilated, leaving only ever accelerating electrons, and lumbering Shermans, was… taxing. I had thought it was hard enough dealing with my tics and compulsions without having to cope with troublesome emotions — but now I wasn’t simply feeling ashamed in relation to Sherman, but terribly indebted to him. So, when they dropped me off at the Prescott, and he began saying, ‘Listen, Will, it strikes me that you need a little human comfort in your life’, I was about to interrupt him when his phone did it for me:
‘Yes, yes, Sergei… that’s all arranged,’ he said. ‘And no, we won’t be needing snowshoes or the dog team, let alone the sodding umiak — it’s only late October… Jolly good!’ He broke the connection, then explained: ‘We’re flying out this evening; the Albertan government is interested in my doing something with the Athabasca Tar Sands — sort of massive tar-baby-type body form.’
I was secretly relieved, and as he seemed to have forgotten the touchy-feely stuff I said goodbye casually; but then:
‘Don’t imagine for a second this means I won’t be keeping tabs on you,’ he flung at my retreating back. ‘In fact, I’ll be calling every day.’
However, he didn’t call the next day, and that evening I gave a reading at the City Lights bookstore with the ghost of Allen Ginsberg howling in my ear and the bloated corpse of Kerouac beating a port wine jug on the floor in the corner. Nor did he call the day after that, when I flew to Seattle and walked the sixteen miles in from the gargantuan bobbin-terminals of SeaTac along the Green River trail to the city centre. I could see nothing of the orderly suburbs I paced through, only coppery bills agitating on the trees and the discrete cloud of Bill Gates’s $70,708,080,100,000 wispy over Medina. Footsore, dragging myself along the East Marginal Way past the Boeing Field, I looked first at the splitting aglets of my bootlaces, next at the seven-storey tailfins cleaving the vapours above the airstrip. And, as I crossed over the goods yards and began to drag up the desolation row of 4th Avenue, the heroic skyline in front trickled down to the homeless man who walked ahead of me, in the gutter, pushing his shopping cart piled high with nothing fit for e-commerce.
Another Prescott Hotel and the naivety of mineral water and the sculptural folds of strewn towels and tossed sheets. Of my work in Seattle I recall very little. That night, dark visions of the inflamed papules and vesicles around the anus of a lover I had taken from behind — perhaps in this very room — in a previous millennium, whose face was still other sculptural folds buried in the marbled pillows. In the dream, heaving over her runty thighs, I looked at the mobile phone clutched in my left hand and longed for it to ring: Sherman’s bark might rouse me from this torturous in-and-out that was going nowhere, but still he didn’t call.
The following morning, before dawn, I headed back to SeaTac. A panel had been damaged on the International Space Station and the crew were trapped up there in the bus-sized craft costing $100 billion — while down here on the bus, we ploughed through the asteroid belts of the Seattle suburbs. In the seat beside me sat a girl tricked out as Madame de Pompadour, complete with powdered wig, mauve feathers and a silk bustle.
It was Halloween — I was scared, but still boarded an Alaskan Airways flight down to Los Angeles and, stepping out from the arrivals hall on to Century Boulevard without any clear idea of where I might be headed, was shocked to see Baltie’s blond quiff — layered by Trumper — outlined by the driverside window of another rental Range Rover. Then his master’s stumpy legs swung round the bumper, followed by his master’s heroic and oft-copied trunk.
Sherman — who was on a call — put me on hold with a digit; I dallied in the louche southern Californian noon: an entire civilization with its collar unbuttoned. ‘Yes, yes, Harriet,’ he was saying, ‘of course I’ll need more than ten earth movers — what if half of them break down? What? Yes, I’ll be in LA for a couple of days, then I’ll come to you. Jolly good!’
To me he was equally abrupt: ‘C’mon, let’s go to the Watts Towers! You need to stretch your legs — lanky fellow like you crunched up in economy, it’s only a matter of time before a blood clot forms in your leg — curious that such a little thing can do for you, no?’
We walked along Century — or, rather, I walked. Baltie picked Sherman up and dropped him off again and then again, in a resumption of our usual way of travelling together. While he was bowling along beside me, making no concession to the heat (I had the Barbour slung over my shoulder once more, as weighty and useless as a constitutional monarch), Sherman explained about the earth movers and the project to carve the 26-mile-long outline of his own body form into the impacted salt of the Great Salt Lake Desert in Utah: ‘You’ve no idea the politicking involved,’ he yelped, lighting a Hoyo. ‘It’s Federal land, and I’ve been pogoing back and forth to DC for months now to butter up wonks at the Bureau of Land Management.’
At Inglewood, beside the Hollywood Racetrack, I found myself alone. From the gentle rise I could see the distant sierra and feel the hot body of Los Angeles aroused beneath my soles. It occurred to me that Sherman was revolving around me with two distinct magnitudes: first, on his longer sweeps as a comet does a solar system; and secondly, with these small hops along Century, as an asteroid does a planet. In neither case, I thought, were these orbits stable — at some point he must lose speed and crash into me. There would be a conflagration.