Hello America. J. G. Ballard
a hundred years ago. Then, two weeks out of Plymouth, during one of the long calms, Steiner called Wayne back to his cabin after the stowaway had brought his supper from the galley.
‘It’s all right, Wayne…’ Steiner smiled with some amusement at this seaborne Tom Sawyer, with his thatch of blond hair, legs like stilts, eyes lit by all kinds of strange dreams. Wayne was trembling with excitement as he faced the Captain – both Ricci and Professor Summers had been urging Orlowski to re-route the Apollo’s passage so that they could put Wayne ashore at the Azores.
‘Wayne, calm down. You look as if you’re about to take over the ship.’ Could he already see Wayne’s aggressiveness in his broad shoulders, in the thickening bones of his forehead and jaw? ‘You’ll be glad to hear we’re not calling in at the Azores. But I want to show you something else.’
Leaving his supper uneaten, Steiner opened the safe and quietly unwrapped the Time and Look magazines. He turned the faded pages, showing Wayne the illustrations of the Cape Kennedy Space Center, the Space Shuttle landing at Edwards Air Force Base after a test flight, and the recovery of an Apollo capsule from the Pacific. There was a special bicentennial supplement celebrating every aspect of American life in the long-ago 1970s – the crowded streets of Washington on Carter’s Inauguration Day, long queues of holiday jets on the runways of Kennedy Airport, happy vacationers lying by the swimming-pools of Miami, raking the ski-slopes of Aspen, Colorado, fitting out their yachts in a huge marina at San Diego, all the enormous vitality of this once extraordinary nation preserved in these sepia photographs.
‘Well, Wayne, you want to go to America. Let’s see how much you know about it.’ Steiner sounded sceptical, but nodded encouragingly as Wayne moved from picture to picture:
‘That’s easy—the Golden Gate Bridge; Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas; LA—Mann’s Chinese Theatre; Fisherman’s Wharf in Frisco; Detroit—the Edsel Ford Expressway. Any more, Captain?’
‘Not for now, Wayne. But that’s very good, you’re a stowaway with a difference. We’ll have to work together…’
Not one in a thousand Europeans of Wayne’s age would have had the faintest idea what these ancient scenic views represented. Sadly, Europe, Asia and the rest of the populated world had long since lost interest in America. But clearly Steiner had guessed that Wayne would recognise them. As he locked away the magazines he remarked:
‘With luck you’ll be seeing them soon. Tell me, Wayne, from where in the United States did your family originally come?’ He glanced at Wayne’s long-boned figure, child-like straw hair. ‘Kansas, the Midwest somewhere? You look like a Texan…’
‘New England!’ Wayne lied before stopping himself. ‘Jamestown. My great-grandfather ran a hardware store.’
‘Jamestown?’ Steiner nodded sagely, careful not to smile as he beckoned Wayne to the door. ‘Well, you’re going back to the beginning, all right. Perhaps you’ll start everything up again, Wayne. You could even be President. From stowaway to the White House, stranger things have happened.’ He gazed thoughtfully at Wayne, his shrewd, navigator’s face almost serious, set in a curious expression Wayne was to remember for ever.
‘Think, Wayne – the forty-fifth President of the United States…’
Why had he lied to Steiner?
Taking his eyes off the golden shore in front of him, Wayne looked up at the bridge, where Steiner stood beside the helmsman, binoculars raised to scan the flat water of the channel. Wayne angrily drummed his right hand on the rail. He could have told the truth, the Captain would have been sympathetic, he was something of an outcast himself, this sea-wandering Jew who had turned his back on his own true nation. Why hadn’t he blurted out: I don’t know where I came from, who my father was, let alone my grandparents. My mother died five years ago, after spending half her life as a psychiatric outpatient and the rest as a barely competent secretary at the American University in Dublin. All she left me were years of rambling fantasy and a blank space on my birth certificate. Tell me, Captain, who I am…
A sharp spray rose from the cutwater of the Apollo and stung Wayne’s cheeks. Steiner was ringing down to the engine-room for more steam, and the ship gained speed across the bay, drawn towards the magnetic coast as if by the heavier gravity of this land of dreams. Remembering Steiner’s words – the forty-fifth President? – Wayne thought of his mother again. During her last years in the asylum she often rambled about Wayne’s real father, variously Henry Ford V; the last US President-in-Exile, President Brown (a devoutly religious nonagenarian who had died sixty years before Wayne’s birth in a Zen monastery in Osaka); and a long-forgotten folk singer named Bob Dylan, one of whose records she endlessly played beside her bed on a hand-cranked gramophone.
But once, during a brief moment of lucidity while recovering from an overdose of Seconal, his mother fixed Wayne with a calm eye and told him that his father had been Dr William Fleming, Professor of Computer Sciences at the American University, who had vanished during an ill-fated expedition to the United States twenty years earlier.
Wayne had thought nothing of this odd confession. But while going through the unhappy muddle of his mother’s possessions after her death – a mad antique shop of costume jewellery, newspaper clippings and drug vials—he had come across a ribbon-wrapped set of postcards, signed by Dr Fleming and postmarked ‘Southampton, England’, the expedition’s point of departure. The tone of these brief but intimate messages, the repeated mention of being back for ‘the great day’, and the solicitous interest in this young secretary’s pregnancy had together sown their seed in Wayne’s mind.
Was his obsession with America, which his unknown ancestors had abandoned a century earlier, was his determination to return to this lost continent merely an attempt to find his true father? Or had he invented the quest for his father in order to give his obsession some kind of romantic meaning?
Did it matter now? Wayne pulled himself from his thoughts and gazed through the quickening spray at the Manhattan skyline rising towards him across the vivid water. Like his unknown ancestors centuries before him, he had come to America to forget the past, to turn his back for ever on an exhausted Europe. For the first time since he had stowed aboard the Apollo, Wayne felt a sudden sense of companionship, almost of commitment to his fellow passengers who had braved the long voyage with him.
On either side of him people were pressed against the rail, ignoring the spray whipped up by the rusty bows, members of the crew and the scientific expedition elbow to elbow. Even Dr Paul Ricci for once failed to annoy Wayne. The dapper, self-immersed nuclear physicist was the one member of the expedition whom Wayne disliked – a dozen times during the voyage he had strolled up behind Wayne as he worked in the log-room over the old street-maps of Manhattan and Washington, implying with a smirk that the whole of the United States was already his territory. He now stood beside Professor Summers, calling out landmarks to her.
‘There’s the Ford Building, Anne, and the Arab Quarter. If you look closely you can see the Lincoln Memorial…’
Had his grandparents ever lived in Manhattan, as he claimed? Wayne was about to correct him, but everyone had fallen silent. Orlowski, the expedition commissar, stood next to Wayne, holding the mainmast shrouds as if frightened that the increased speed of the Apollo might lift him off his little feet and carry him away over the topsails. Ricci had placed his arm around Professor Summers’s waist, his ludicrous commentary ended, protecting himself behind her from the golden shore.
For once, Anne Summers made no effort to push him away. Despite the spray, her severe make-up remained in place, but the wind had begun to unravel the blonde hair which she kept tightly rolled in a bun. For all her efforts, Wayne reflected, the long voyage had freshened her Saxon complexion and given her toneless face and high, pale forehead an almost schoolgirlish glow. Wayne was her greatest admirer. Once, to her annoyance, he had entered the radiology lab without knocking and found her immersed