By the time he arrived back in California, Hunter was experiencing peripheral hallucinations, not a full-blown usurpation of the visual field, but the constant flicker of mistaken identities on the edge of his vision. The shadows of camels and axe murderers thrown up by the headlights on the hillsides and the rocks, as Raoul drove him back from Carmel to Apocalypse Now, were less disturbing than the improbable mouse that had just scurried across the empty seat beside him and disappeared when he turned to confront it. He had been to New York, Oxford, London, Assisi, Paris, London and New York again and was now, just ten days later, back on the West Coast. He had powered on because there were so many meetings, decisions, time zones and acquisitions, and so much pressure to be charming or ball-breaking, as the occasion required, that sleep had been sent to the back of the line again and again. Bullying his body with prescription medication made each collapse more brutal than the last. On the flight from New York, he felt as if a mafia enforcer had thrown him out of a helicopter into a rat-infested landfill site, among shards of broken china and twisted metal, cushioned only by illegal hospital waste and bulging diapers. It was a feeling he was prepared to do almost anything to change. He definitely had a problem accepting any form of disappointment, and he had made the stupid decision to pop another pill. Now he was paying the price, not only with hallucinations of scuttling mice, but also with the hordes of barbarian thoughts pouring through the undefended gates of his editorial intelligence and vandalising even the most basic concepts until they looked unintelligible and menacing.
Driving along Route One was reminding him of the sense of crisis about motion he had first felt when he was fourteen, sitting in the back of his father’s car, returning to London on a Sunday afternoon. He had been half-listening to his ridiculous, embarrassing parents as they analysed the social currents of their deadly weekend in a draughty English house, with most of its rooms closed and the rest packed with the pompous caricatures who had stood between him and a cool weekend cruising around Camden Lock with his school friends from Westminster. British motorways in those days were usually down to one lane, making it marginally quicker to walk back to London, but on this occasion, due to some miscalculation at the Ministry of Transport, all three lanes were fully operational, and the family car was hurtling through the rain well above the speed limit. Like someone concentrating on a single instrument in the orchestra, Hunter tuned out from his parents’ tedious post-mortem and focused on the sticky sound of the tyres clinging to the wet road. In the midst of this self-imposed soundtrack, he found himself suddenly overwhelmed by the paradox that his body was immobile in the back seat and at the same time rushing along at ninety miles an hour. What was really going on? He moved his hand away from the direction of travel and wondered whether he was slowing down its journey but decided that it didn’t have a journey separate from the rest of his body or, more precisely, separate from itself. Everything was at rest relative to itself: his body, the car, the Earth, the Sun; they only achieved motion from their relation to something else: his body to the car, the car to the Earth, the Earth to the Sun, and, of course, the other way around and in relation to all other objects. His body, isolated from any other reference point, was simply always where it was, whether he was diving off a cliff, sitting on a plane or dead. On the one hand, everything was moving: waves undulating, blood circulating, particles thrown or pulled by one force or another, planets spinning, stars erupting, the Andromeda galaxy racing towards the Milky Way at a quarter of a million miles an hour; but on the other hand, everything was at rest relative to itself, just being where it was. The two rival pictures seemed to be throttling him, with both their thumbs pressing on his windpipe.
‘Stop the car!’ he shouted.
‘Excuse me, Mr Sterling, you need to stop here?’ asked Raoul.
‘No, no, sorry Raoul, I was just remembering a story.’
‘No problem, Mr Sterling,’ said Raoul, relieved not to have to stop on the cliff edge of a hairpin bend.
After a lot of protests from his parents and a lot of screaming from him, his father had drawn over to the side of the road, letting Hunter lurch outside and pace along the hard shoulder, with the traffic rushing by dangerously close, trying to see if he could make any difference to his confusion by penetrating space with his own motive force, but although he eventually calmed down and got back resentfully into the car, he knew that it was futile and that there was something unresolved lurking at the root of his panic, something he simply tried to ignore from then on. Hunter could feel it again right now; the memory was so vivid that it had managed to replicate that old British motorway angst from thirty-four years ago. If anything, it had gotten worse. He had learnt more about science since then, especially from Saul and his other advisers during the two years they had been collaborating on Digitas acquisitions, but there was still no way of escaping his root confusion; in fact it had grown worse as he became more knowledgeable. The tension could only be resolved if he could conceptualise absolute motion, motion relative to nothing else. That, however, could only exist in absolute space, a vacuum containing an immaterial grid of mathematical coordinates. And how would that be measured, except by the very thing he was trying to measure in the first place: the motion of a solitary particle, not subject to any forces – since gravity, for instance, would require another massive object – from one coordinate to another, along a grid that itself could only be measured by motion, since it needed to stretch in at least two directions in order to exist? Jesus, he really needed some rest.
This latest trip may have been a mind-fuck, but it had been a business bonanza. Saul had beaten the competition by securing the new ceramic armour patented by a brilliant French inventor. It was not only stronger and lighter than other ceramic armours, with a unique visor which was a transparent version of the same material, but the suit also drew inspiration from snakeskin to create a set of overlapping scales that provided total flexibility. A filter system ensured protection against chemical and biological weapons. Once you were inside that armour, the only thing you could die from was a heart attack, a stroke, an aneurysm, a pre-existing condition or a systems failure.
Assisi had been fantastic as well. Poverty, chastity and obedience were not Hunter’s special areas of interest; in fact, chastity was the last thing he had on his mind, especially when it came to Lucy, who he was increasingly fascinated by. In any case, despite his contempt for these three phoney virtues, he could see that Catholics, a captive market of 1.2 billion consumers, really got off on the Assisi pilgrimage deal. St Francis had been Italy’s patron saint since 1939, a tough year to start a tough job, but he was also a global icon of authenticity and exceptionalism, a Catholic who wanted to be a Christian; not a politician, a murderer, a paedophile or an art collector, but a Christian. Powerful message. As to the Blessed Fra Domenico, himself a Franciscan contemplative, living in a hut in the woods near St Francis’s old hermitage, he was a logistical pain in the ass, who had taken a vow to remain on a silent retreat, forcing Saul’s team to get a scanner, a generator and a whole bunch of special equipment down leafy slopes, outcrops of rock and rutted paths, to his fucking hut in the woods. If anybody ever doubted that humility was the ultimate arrogance, they should drop in on the Blessed Fra Domenico, but when they finally scanned him, he turned out to be an El Dorado of data that was going to take Brainwaves to another level. ‘BFD’, as the team took to calling him, had been on retreat for thirty years and had a quotation from St Anthony of Padua over the door of his hut which turned out to mean, ‘Contemplation is more precious than all works, and nothing else desirable can compare to it.’ Father Guido, the kindly Abbot in charge of the contemplative division of the Franciscan Order, had eventually been persuaded that he would be doing God’s work by agreeing to get BFD into the test tube to submit to an hour’s scanning, allowing the faithful to witness the cerebral stigmata of such a prodigious ascetic discipline. What blew everybody’s minds when they saw the scans was that BFD’s language-processing centres were off the charts. The dual pathways connecting the auditory cortex to the frontal lobes were like the Yangtze and the Ganges in full flood.
‘Holy shit,’ said Saul, ‘look at that middle temporal gyrus!’
Some people might think that thirty years of silence would generate such a harrowing sense of loneliness that the poor man talked to himself the whole time, or that the transition from the simple pallet bed of his sanctuary to the thudding and throbbing cacophony of the scanner had induced a panic attack and BFD was screaming silently in order not to break his vow, but Father Guido, pointing to the beatific smile on the friar’s face as he slid into the inferno of claustrophobic technology, had another explanation, which was definitely the one they were going to put on the Capo Santo version of Happy Helmets, aimed at the Catholic market: ‘It is very simple,’ said the bespectacled Abbot, in his rustic Italian accent, ‘ordinary people speak to each other for five or maybe ten hours a day about a variety of mundane concerns, but Domenico, who has devoted his entire life to prayer, speaks for twenty-four hours a day to God about the most profound questions of the universe. He even prays while he sleeps! Here is the scientific proof of a truly miraculous level of spiritual attainment!’
‘Incredible,’ said Saul, ‘just incredible; that dopamine pathway must be humming. Go, Baby, go! His nucleus accumbens is giving him an Olympic Gold every few seconds. If we could replicate the trans-cranial stimulation loop between these different areas,’ he said, sweeping his excited hand over the entire polychrome image on the screen, and into the woods beyond, ‘we are going to have some very happy customers!’
Saul had also been excited by Hunter’s proposed acquisition of the Oxford virtual reality app. He totally got that it would provide a narrative arc for the next-level Brainwaves consumer, who didn’t just want the bliss, but some spiritual and intellectual entertainment along the way, labouring through the jeering streets wearing the crown of thorns; sitting under the spreading Bodhi Tree in Bodhgaya; joining the throbbing orange mass following the juggernauts that dragged a marigold-strewn statue of the elephant-headed Ganesh; vultures circling above Zoroastrian towers of silence, and all the rest of it, The Varieties of Religious Experience niche within the Happy Helmets range.
Thank god, he was almost home. Hunter could see the lights and the outline of the house against the crest of the hill and felt immense relief at the prospect of dissolving into sleep in his own bed, after the luxurious but shattering vagabondage of the last ten days. His apartments in New York and London didn’t feel like home; Apocalypse Now was home. Once he arrived, he hurried away from his solicitous staff to the inner den, the ultimate sanctuary: a red lacquered sitting room with no windows, adjacent to his suite of private rooms, which occupied half the Pacific side of the first floor. He washed down his sleeping pills with some bourbon. After pouring himself another shot, he placed his glass on the low brushed-steel table in front of him, sank back into the soft turquoise leather of an art deco sofa, puffed out his cheeks theatrically, to signal to himself that he had made it, even if he hadn’t shaken off his sense of encroaching insanity. He was intending to have a word with Jade while the sedatives took effect, but instead found himself drawn into the brilliant surface of the golden screen in front of him, an exquisite sixteenth-century Japanese painting of a gnarled pine branch on a ledge of rock, its swirling bark and dark needles reaching into a gold-leaf canyon of indeterminate depth. Hanging opposite this masterpiece by Tˉohaku was a video screen of exactly the same size, on which an artist had made an animated version of Hokusai’s famous wave, programmed to curl and crash, in slow motion, over the course of fifty minutes. When Hunter was in California, he could stretch out comfortably on the second sofa of the pair, opposite the one he was now on, and turn on the Hokusai video by remote control, so that it completed its cycle at exactly the moment that his daily conference call with his two New York psychotherapists came to an end.
Despite the intense silence and the therapeutic associations of this deeply enclosed, studied and controlled space, not to mention what should have been the calming effects of the bourbon, his mind was still racing, and still disintegrating under the pressure of cumulative sleep-privation. If only Lucy were waiting for him next door, curled up naked in his bed, perhaps he would have found some peace. As well as feeling strongly attracted to her, and being impressed from the start by her agile and forceful mind, since their confusingly sincere dinner on his return visit to London the other day, when his combative personality had fallen away, without any forethought, and she had opened up to him, without making too much of it, about her fucked-up background, he found himself wanting to look after her as well. Her particular combination of strength and fragility had elicited a sense of tenderness he hadn’t even known he could feel. More strength might have aroused his competitiveness and more fragility would have bored him. He normally delegated his somewhat vague feelings of compassion to his chequebook, but this new feeling seemed to have taken up a stubborn residence in his heart and somehow, by making room for the idea that he might look after her, he had created the longing for her to look after him right now – while he was at his most fragile. Why wasn’t she here? He was going to die if he didn’t have her – although, to be fair, he was going to die even if he did have her.
The brutal fact was that she was not next door, at the moment, and although he was in an allegedly safe setting, his mind seemed hell-bent on making him feel even more threatened than ever by a primitive terror of his surroundings. Added to the incomprehensibility of motion that had afflicted him in the car, now that he was at rest, he was being persecuted by the incomprehensibility of space. When an object, like the steel table in front of him, occupied a space, did the space get annihilated by the solidity of the mass? Or was it just denser space? Or was it a dented space, in the way that all massive objects dent the fabric of space-time. The more massive they are the deeper the hole they make, ultimately a black hole, sucking everything into itself. But the mass was itself mainly made up of space, everybody knew that. On the scale where the nucleus of the atom was the size of a marble, the electron was the width of a human hair two miles away from the marble, but matter must be irreducibly dense, at least in the nucleus itself, and so what happened to space in that place? If matter deleted space by moving into it, did the space get reborn when matter moved out again? Was space popping in and out of existence, as matter occupied it and then set it free? He tapped Saul’s name on the screen of his phone, but the call went straight to voicemail.
‘Hi, Saul, I know it’s late, but I’m worried about some things I need you to clear up for me. Like, you know the way we think the house is the walls and the roof,’ said Hunter, ‘but we live in the space contained by the walls and roof – I have a Rachel Whiteread: she solidifies the empty space and deletes the containers, she plays with all that – and in this Tˉohaku, in front of me in the den, the branch is like the nearby wall of a house and those cloudy mountaintops in the distance are the broken parapets that mark the outer edge, and in between them is the empty space that is the true subject of the painting. But, without getting into art, just staying with the physics, and without getting into the quantum vacuum that’s fizzing with potential, or the mind-fuck of non-locality, or not being certain where the particle is located, or leptons and the whole subatomic thing, or neutrinos shooting through the Earth, totally unimpressed by the fields or charges or density, blah-blah-blah-blah-blah, forgetting all of that, and sticking with this,’ said Hunter, leaning forward and holding the phone next to his fist as he thumped the steel table, ‘can you tell me exactly what the relationship is between matter and space? Is this a fucking solid object, Saul? Call me back! Give me a clear answer, because if physics doesn’t have clarity about the most basic concepts that it deploys, maybe I should … I mean, okay, so under ordinary conditions we can treat a tightly bound lattice of atoms as solid, as having extension and impenetrability: steel can crash into space, but not the other way around, right? So, what I want to know, what I need to know, is this: when they put this steel table into this room, what happened to the space that used to be in the space that the steel table is now in. I mean…’ Hunter broke off abruptly.
‘Saul? Saul? My muscles are cramping. This is something that sometimes happens. Saul? Fuck. Saul?’
Hunter felt a tightening in his arms and shoulders and chest muscles. That last pill on the plane might have been a symptom of his immaturity, but now that he was about to die, he really-really got it and was truly-truly sorry and promised that, if he was allowed to survive, he would never do it again. Fuck, this was not part of the plan. Raoul was used to finding plenty of empty bottles and a whole lot of incriminating drug paraphernalia, and he was paid enough to keep quiet about it, but a corpse would definitely test his discretion and loyalty beyond breaking point. As he fell sideways in the direction of his jacket, Hunter started to imagine the disastrous newspaper coverage: Apocalypse at Apocalypse Now. Trusted family butler, Raoul Dominguez, commented, ‘Señor Sterling, may he rest in peace, was a truly great man, but I tell you, when it came to narcotics, the guy was like a pig in a trough.’
Hunter forced the rigid muscles to inch his right arm towards his jacket. His hand, which intermittently convulsed into an agonising, clutching claw, finally insinuated itself into the breast pocket. He could feel his chest growing more constricted and a pain climbing up his left arm and he knew that he was about to be cut down by a well-deserved heart attack. With a final gesture of defiance, he worked the pill box out of the pocket and managed to press the little button on its side. The lid sprung open and he tipped the contents on to the sofa. Scattered among the multicoloured pills were the two round pink pills he needed, maximum strength beta blockers that might bring his muscles and his hypertension under control. Normally, one would be enough to handle a hostile cross-examination for crimes against humanity on prime-time television, but this was an emergency and so he pushed both into his mouth and ground them up with his teeth to accelerate the effect. He then lay motionless, making frantic deals with fate to negotiate his survival. He must get Jade to clear his schedule and book him into his favourite room at Nuova Vita Ranch. No more pills and powders – at least no more stimulants; natural sleep was a rumour he refused to believe in – and when he got out, gallons of herbal tea and fresh vegetable juice, with only a little alcohol on special occasions.
Half an hour later, half-reassured that he was not going to die immediately, he sat up and finished his second shot of bourbon. He wished Saul had picked up. He had questions about matter and space that he needed answered by someone who knew what he was talking about. For instance, thought Hunter, even now unable to crush his undermining speculations completely, there wasn’t supposed to be any space before the Big Bang, so what had that super-hot singularity expanded into? It made space as it expanded, it made space with matter in motion, it came into existence by having an edge that was not in the same place as its origin: by being relative. Of course! He could ring Lucy. She might be able to help, and it was deep into the working day in the UK, and anyhow it would be great to have an excuse to talk to lovely Lucy.
Her phone, like Saul’s, went straight to voicemail. ‘Fuck!’ he shouted, ending the call, not sure whether he had shouted ‘Fuck’ before or after ending it. Whatever. He was going to give a huge Christmas bonus to someone who could tell him what space and matter and motion were in themselves, their intrinsic nature and not just their mathematical relationships to each other, but now perhaps the time had come to get a little rest, to lay some coins on the eyelids of the nearly dead, to invest in a long and dreamless sleep, to weave his frayed nerves back into cables strong enough to carry the surging current, the sheer juice of being Hunter Sterling. With a show of belated puritanism, he poured himself a glass of his own carbon-filtered water – according to his nutritionist, most mineral water was pure poison. With the downers he had taken, he knew that he could achieve his ideal, which was to wake up late tomorrow afternoon, fully refreshed and ready for the next set of challenges with which he packed his life, like a man loading more and more brushwood on to a camp fire to keep the hyenas of boredom and triviality at bay. His fear of a heart attack, psychosis and the other discouraging footnotes to his gargantuan lifestyle was trivial compared to his horror at the idea of doing anything ordinary.
Experience had taught him that eighteen hours of heavily drugged sleep could deforest his memory overnight, and he wanted to focus one more time on what it was, or more economically, on what it wasn’t, that had disturbed him about the world view that had shot past the window of his mental bullet train over the last few hours of reflection, and perhaps record a memo for Jade to type up tomorrow.
He must get to his bed, though, before he passed out. After swaying down the corridor, Hunter made it into his bedroom, locking the outer door and then closing a further soundproof door behind him. He pressed the button to bring down the steel shutters and, clumsily peeling off his clothes, fell on to the bed and insinuated himself under the covers. He must try to connect with Jade before it was too late.
‘Jade?’ said Hunter, trying to keep his eyes open while he croaked into the phone next to him on the pillow.
‘Hey, Hunter!’
‘Did I wake you?’
‘No, it’s seven o’clock in the morning. I’m already up working with the legal team in Paris. That acquisition you made is amazing, Hunter. You’re amazing.’
‘You think so?’
‘Everybody thinks so,’ said Jade.
Hunter’s eyelids closed and he felt himself swooning into unconsciousness, but he made one last effort.
‘You’ve gotta take a memo…’ he gasped, forcing his eyes open. ‘Space … matter, what is it? Space … and also motion – and fields: are they halfway between space and matter? I mean…’
‘Hunter?’
‘Is anything solid?’ whispered Hunter.
‘Hunter, I’ve taken some notes,’ said Jade, ‘and they sound really interesting to me, but you have to get some rest now. You’ve been working so hard.’
‘At rest,’ said Hunter, ‘or in motion … and, Jade, book me into Nuova Vita … and block out the first week in May for a Digitas party at Plein Soleil.’
‘Great, that’ll flow beautifully into Cannes,’ said Jade. ‘Hunter? Hello? Hunter, don’t forget to switch off your phone!’
‘Oh, yeah, thanks,’ sighed Hunter, just managing to shut it down in time.