The Map of the Sky (76 page)

Nauseated, Wells vomited onto the snow, two, three, countless times, while part of his brain realized he was traveling back and forth in time, racing blindly through the years, perhaps through the centuries, scattering his errant footsteps throughout eternity. His body yearned to escape
death, that terrible, interminable numbness overwhelming him, threatening to freeze his guts. But what was the use of fleeing in time if he was trapped in space, always greeted by the same hostile landscape, this icy vastness intent on becoming his last resting place, at times plunged into darkness, at times barely illuminated by a weak sun shining in the sky like a bead of mercury. He could not escape from a place that seemed older than time itself. After a while, faint from the exertion, Wells noticed that his nausea had finally subsided. A soft light was making the snow sparkle, and the cold was not so biting. The temperature must have been three or four degrees, Wells estimated, and, exhausted as he was, he managed a weak smile of gratitude. For a while, he lay sprawled on the ground, expecting another leap through time, but nothing happened. On the brink of unconsciousness, he wondered whether the strange mechanism in his brain had been driven so hard it had burned out. Just like the
Annawan
in the ice, his body had finally become trapped in some unknown year, about which all he knew was that it would be the year of his death.

Then he saw the face of God.

It was a sallow face, with high cheekbones and almond eyes that radiated an intelligent simplicity. For a moment, they gazed at him fixedly, as though attempting to recognize in him a stray sheep, and, perhaps because he had atoned for his mistake and saved the planet, God decided he should live. He picked him up with his diminutive hands and stretched him out on a sleigh. Wells was conscious of something being laid on top of him, keeping him warm, and then he heard a sharp hissing noise, a kind of crackle, which a few moments later he realized must be the sound of the sledge gliding over the snow. God was taking him somewhere, and after a while, whether days, hours, or centuries he did not know, he heard voices, a swarm of words in varying tones the meaning of which he could not grasp. He felt hands examining him and undressing him, until finally the world stopped spinning and he came to a halt in a warm sense of well-being. And although, immersed in a fog of unconsciousness, Wells had no clear understanding of what was going
on, he noticed that the cold had vanished. He was no longer caught in its terrible maw, and gradually he was able to perceive the forgotten contours of his body: he could feel his toes touching what he thought was a blanket, his back lying on something pleasantly silky, his head cushioned in a cocoon of softness. He was once more firmly defined in the world.

One day, he did not know how long afterward, he awoke in a bunk in a warm, cozy cabin. He was at what appeared to be a whaling station, alive and seemingly in one piece, although his right hand was bandaged. He was unable to tell what year he was in from the furniture or from the clothing worn by those drifting in and out of his cabin, and so, to everyone’s surprise, he announced his emergence from unconsciousness by asking what year it was. He was told it was the year of our Lord 1865. Wells nodded and smiled weakly. He had not fled far. It was possible he had taken bigger leaps while he was dying on the ice, but he had no way of knowing. Now he found himself thirty-five years ahead in time from the day he had harpooned the Envoy’s monstrous body and scarcely a year before the moment when, in a humble, bug-infested dwelling in Bromley, a man identical to him in every respect would be born.

When, a few days later, the surgeon at the whaling station removed his bandage, he discovered they had amputated his thumb and forefinger, but this seemed a small price to pay for being alive. He lay for at least a week longer in that rustic but comfortable-enough bunk, regaining his strength, silently savoring his remarkable victory over the Envoy, reliving every detail of the infernal expedition up to the final dramatic moments when he was convinced he would fail and everything would be in vain, that he would never be able to accomplish the heroic feat.

During this time he also remembered reading somewhere, perhaps in one of the many articles about the Baltimore author, that Edgar Allan Poe and the explorer Jeremiah Reynolds were the sole survivors of an extraordinary expedition that had culminated in a mutiny, which until then Wells had never thought to connect with the voyage of the
Annawan.
Clearly the two men had thought they managed to trap the Envoy permanently in the ice (perhaps by fleeing, after a sudden brainwave, to
the stern of the ship where the ice was thinner?) and had somehow managed to return to civilization, where they had decided to lie about what had happened to them at the South Pole. However, now that Wells had seen with his own eyes what really happened, he did not blame them for having lied to the world. Would they have been taken for anything but madmen otherwise? Yes, it had been better to invent a mutiny and pray the matter would be forgotten, and that they could carry on their lives where they had left off. Wells did not remember what had become of Reynolds, but Poe had become one of the world’s greatest writers. Wells himself considered Poe one of his favorite authors and had assiduously read all of his works, including
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket,
that unwholesome tale permeated with a profound horror, the origin of which Wells had now discovered.

Once he had recovered, Wells set sail for New York and then London, a serene smile on his lips. He would be able to start a new life now, free from guilt. He had earned it. And although he could have settled anywhere in America, he had chosen to go home. He wanted to see London again, to make sure that everything was as it should be, in its proper place. But more than anything, he had to admit, he needed to be close to the Wells who would be born a year later, to see him live from afar, perhaps watch over him. Yes, he wanted to see what the life he could no longer live would be like, for he had to forge another life now, and his missing right thumb and forefinger, which he had once used to hold a pen, intimated to him that he must resign himself to an ordinary life. To being, simply, one among many.

XLI

H
.
G
.
W
ELLS ARRIVED IN
L
ONDON A YEAR BEFORE
he was born.

During the long voyage, contemplating the vast, shimmering ocean from the ship’s deck, Wells had had more than enough time to make plans: he would start a new life under the name Griffin; he might even let his hair and beard grow so that no one could recognize him—though there might be no need for that, for by the time the real Wells (why could he not help referring to him as the genuine one?) reached his age, he would be a venerable old man whose wrinkled face would be disguise enough. There were other, more important considerations, he told himself. Where would he settle in order to begin this new life, for example? After weighing up the various options, he decided on Weybridge, partly because it was one of the towns around London that had most suffered during the Martian invasion, but also because it was the same distance from the capital as it was from Woking and Worcester Park, where the other Wells would settle. Because he was clear about one thing: he had no choice but to start a new life, even though it would be little more than a mere existence, because he would never consider it his own life. His true life, with its satisfactions and miseries, would be lived by the other Wells, and only by remaining as close to him as possible, by becoming a witness to the most significant events in the life of his double—those he had already experienced and those he would never experience—could he manage to endure life. He applied himself to this as best he could: he settled in Weybridge, took employment at a chemist, and let each day
run uneventfully into the next, like a stream into which he had no interest in casting his line.

From time to time, he would take a carriage to witness parts of his real life: he saw himself as an infant in Bromley, where his parents owned a small china shop. He saw himself slip from the innkeeper’s son’s hands and break his leg as he fell onto one of the beer tent stakes, and then, in his convalescence, reading
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket,
by Edgar Allan Poe. He saw himself dazzling Mr. Morley, who ran a college in Bromley, with his lively intelligence; wilting in the heat inside the Rodgers and Denyer draper’s shop in Windsor, where his mother had sent him to work; and excelling at Midhurst Grammar School, from where, aged only fifteen, he was sent as an apprentice to Mr. Edwin Hyde’s Southsea Drapery Emporium.

Wells observed all this from a safe distance, torn between compassion and nostalgia, taking great care not to alter the chain of events, letting his double do exactly what he had done, to the letter. But when the time came for his double to begin an apprenticeship at the Southsea Drapery Emporium, Wells decided this was the moment for him to show himself, because there was one thing in his life he had long wanted to alter. He had given the matter a great deal of thought, studying every possible ramification his intervention might entail, before concluding that it was probably not significant enough to cause any major change. And so Wells traveled to Southsea, where, planted opposite the drapery shop in which his twin was languishing, he allowed his memories to come flooding back. He remembered his unhappiness and bewilderment at his mother’s insistence on keeping him out of school and university and forcing him to learn the accursed trade of draper, which he was supposed to exercise until the end of his days, as if it were the most commendable job in the world. Unless he ventured inside, or peeped through the shop window, Wells could not see himself, but he imagined his double smoothing out the fabric after showing it to the customers, folding and unfolding lace curtains, realizing how hard it was to roll up a bolt of linen, or dragging mannequins back and forth in accordance with
Mr. Hyde’s enigmatic intentions, and doing all this with a book sticking out of his overall pocket, which would soon earn him a reputation as a daydreamer and an idler.

Wells was immersed in these memories one evening when he saw himself emerge from the building, exactly at the hour he remembered, and trudge wearily toward Southsea Pier, a downcast expression on his face. Quietly he followed the boy until he saw him pause before the murky waters, where he used to remain for almost an hour, toying with the idea of suicide, thinking that if this was what his life was going to be, then he preferred no life at all. He felt compassion for this pale, skinny lad whom life had cheated. In fact, if he remembered correctly, he had never considered suicide a very honorable solution, but the cold embrace of the sea, compared to the barren existence that awaited him, did not seem like such a dreadful alternative. Wells shook his head at the boy’s suffering, which had been his own. He knew that happily, things would look up for him in a matter of months, when he at last resolved to rebel against his mother and wrote to Horace Byatt asking for help, whereupon Byatt offered him a job as assistant teacher at Midhurst Grammar School on a salary of twenty pounds a year. However, the tormented boy staring into the sea was as yet unaware he would succeed in escaping this tedious life as a draper’s apprentice and construct a pleasant life as a writer. Wells strolled over to himself on the pier, preparing to burst in on his own adolescence in order to speak with himself. He hoped the fifty years that had left his face furrowed with wrinkles would prevent the youth from recognizing him, but above all he hoped his calculated intrusion in the flow of events would not provoke a landslide bigger than the one he intended.

“Suicide is always a possibility,” he said in a soft voice, catching his double’s attention, “and so it’s advisable to exhaust all others first.”

The boy wheeled round, startled, and gazed at Wells suspiciously. And for the few moments his scrutiny lasted, Wells was also able to study himself. So this was what he had looked like aged fifteen, he reflected, astonished by the boy’s eyes that had seen so little, his lips still devoid of
their characteristic ironic grimace, his exaggeratedly tragic mannerisms. He found his earlier self painfully fragile and vulnerable, however much the boy, possessed of youth’s absurd bravado, considered himself somehow invincible.

“I’m not thinking of—” Wells heard the boy start to say, only to break off abruptly and add, in a tone of puzzled defiance: “How did you know?”

Wells smiled at him as amiably as he could, hoping this friendly gesture would favor an easy exchange between them.

“Oh, it’s not so hard to figure out,” Wells replied with relaxed joviality, “above all for someone who as a youth entertained the same thoughts when gazing into these waters, with the same anguish you feel now.” He shook his head vigorously, showing how painful it was for him to look back on that now. “But first you have to fight, to try other ways. If your life displeases you, my lad, try to change it. Don’t give in to defeat so easily. Death is the only sure defeat. It is the end of everything.”

For a few moments, the boy contemplated him in silence, still with some mistrust. What did this stranger want? Why had he come up to him and spoken to him like this?

“Thanks for the advice, whoever you are,” he responded coldly.

“Oh, I’m nobody.” Wells shrugged, pretending to be distracted by the gentle ripple of the waves. “Just a stranger who has watched you come here too often. You are an apprentice at Mr. Hyde’s draper’s shop, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” the boy replied, visibly uncomfortable to learn that this stranger whose intentions he could not fathom was spying on him.

“And doubtless you think you deserve more in life than to be a simple draper’s apprentice,” Wells went on, trying to sound as friendly as possible. “You shouldn’t feel guilty about it. I had the same thoughts at your age, my lad. I was forced into an equally thankless job that neither satisfied nor fulfilled me. I dreamed of being a writer, you know.”