Walking to Hollywood

1. Sherman Oaks

At three minutes past noon on 8 October 2007, I found myself standing listening to Sherman Oaks beside a dew pond on the crest of the South Downs in Sussex. A single cramped ash was reflected in the gunmetal disc of water, a disc that was ringed with pocked earth and cupped in a fold of cropped turf. Had an eavesdropper crept up on the pair of us, they might have thought Sherman’s magniloquence prompted by the very finitude of this watering hole, that the way he lectured not only me but the thrushes flitting overhead was an attempt to break free of this claustrophobic scene: the sky closely sealed by a lid of cloud, cut-outs of hedge and woodland stuck on the receding crests of the downs.

I knew this not to be the case.

Sherman had always been a big talker. I remember him aged seven or eight, rolling around in the boot of my mother’s car when it was her turn to do the school run, spouting a stream of wisecracks and making razor-sharp observations on the foibles of the world. A precocious anarchist, at thirteen Sherman told me he was going to strip naked, except for a skullcap and an attaché case, then stump into Grodzinski’s, the Jewish bakery in Golders Green. When challenged he would say only this — in a thick, mittel-European accent: ‘Can you tell me the way to Grods?’

It’s barely worth remarking that the impact of this stunt would be hugely enhanced by the perpetrator’s stature: at eight Sherman had been less than three feet tall, at thirteen he was perhaps three-foot-two, thirty-five years later he had gained, at most, an inch.

Assuming Sherman did do it — and I have no reason to doubt him — his dwarfism was the reason he got away with it, for in the North London of the 1970s the uneasy ridicule that disability once provoked had mutated into a tolerance that already verged on de facto acceptance of collective responsibility: we were all to blame for Sherman Oaks’s restricted height. Not that our peers felt exclusively this way; after all, children are always in a state of nature — always nasty, brutish… and short. Sherman may not have been overtly persecuted, but he undoubtedly felt excluded — forever eddying while the life stream flowed forward all around him.

In my early teens I felt that way too. It wasn’t commonplace spottiness — my face was mailed in acne. Then there was Dick Holmes, who could’ve used a D-cup bra. Together we formed a mismatched trio: the Small, the Fat and the Spotty lanky one. I daresay there are plenty of outcasts who sink into introspective angst, but with Sherman to goad us on there was no chance of that: he made me march into the chemist’s, where I bought the useless salves for my hurting face and confronted the pharmacist, claiming that it was the product that had done it to me. He got Dick Holmes to dress up in his mother’s frock and buy us booze, and he himself led us into the reference section of High Hill Bookshop, where he sat insouciantly on a table reading the Britannica aloud. When confronted, he said he was a five-year-old genius.

Still, as the lugubrious narrator of La Jetée would have it: ‘Nothing tells such memories from ordinary memories; only afterwards do they claim remembrance on account of their scars.’ Sherman, having none to spare, never gave an inch. I was in awe of his chutzpah — he was our own home-grown Vamana: Vishnu incarnated as a dwarfish trickster. As for me, I had already imperfectly grasped an awareness that would harden within me even as my acne scabbed then flaked away: whatever the emotional scars I might bear my life would remain coddled and my instincts conformist — only a striving such as Sherman’s against his crushing disability could be accounted an exercise of will at all.

On his sixteenth birthday Sherman threw a party at his parents’ house on Norrice Lea. The studious entrepreneurialism of Mr Oaks — he manufactured cash registers in a 1950s block near Hangar Lane that looked like a cash register — had kerchinged the family this Lutyens villa, complete with redbrick loggias and a sunken garden. Twice-my-height privet hedges hid the mullioned windows, behind which lay an enormous open-plan kitchen — the first I had ever seen. Beneath track lighting (again, the first I had ever seen) gleamed two of every white good, for although Sherman bought ham at the deli then wolfed it straight from the wrapper, Mrs Oaks kept strict kosher.

The child of a ruptured family from the wrong side of the North Circular, I was awed by the opulence of the Oakses’ home. Our kitchen window still had several broken panes patched with cardboard and Sellotape — the result of my parents’ penultimate row. Our goods weren’t white at all, but yellowed with sadness and neglect. There was less than one of everything and the family dog had had a nervous breakdown, while my older brother — having absorbed the force of Christopher Logue’s clerihew ‘When all else fails, try Wales’ — had decamped. To Swansea.

I was awed by the Oakses’ home — and captivated by the Oaks sisters. There were three of them, ranged around Sherman in age and each seemingly more lovely and gracile than the preceding one. The youngest, Tertia, was an outright stunner. My mother, whose own neuroses and phobias made her a lightning conductor for any distress sparking across the suburb, speculated on what quirk of heredity had produced Sherman. But, while it was tempting to think in terms of throwback, or kick sideways, or even adoption, he shared with his sisters the same white-blond hair, fierce blue eyes and highly wrought features; it was the parents who failed to jibe — their doughy pans were both dashed with liverish freckles, and their bottoms were as broad as the seats of the Mercedes in which they purred the 500 yards to Greenspan’s in the Market Place, where they bought schmaltz herring and smoked salmon. While not discounting Mr Oaks’s ability to drive a hard bargain, the notion that they had got the kids in a job-lot was preposterous.

Anyway, on this summer evening the old Oaks had been got rid of so that the teens could get drunk, dance and feel each other up shamelessly — either on the G-plan leather sofas in the living room, or at the top of the house, in a rumpus conversion fully equipped with snooker table, one-armed bandits and a 1950s jukebox loaded with 1970s rock ’n’ roll revival singles. Showaddywaddy anyone? Unlike my own house, where cobwebs smeared the ceilings, here the only spiders were from Mars and locked up in the polished beech cabinets of a Bang & Olufsen stereo system, from where they screamed to us of slinking through the city, smarming in and out of sexes, before bawling teen abandonment to the rooftops.’

In the previous year the religious anointment of hydrogen peroxide had sloughed off my beastly mask. It had hurt, and no one — least of all me — believed that any great beauty lay beneath, so how to explain Tertia, who after two hours and twice that many Bacardi-laced Cokes, waltzed me backwards across the hall and into the oddly antiseptic gloom of her father’s study, where, her neat denim behind aligned on the desk blotter, she grabbed hold of my crotch while exhorting me to ‘Do it!’

The alcohol certainly helped, but, with hindsight and the benefit of career résumés — gobbets of gossip sucked up gummily in dentists’ waiting rooms — I can only conclude that Tertia was practising on me. Of course, unlike her many subsequent conquests, I had no reputation to sully, family to alienate or assets to strip. Nor could she have wanted to humiliate me sexually — after all, she was only fifteen. Still, humiliated I was: it was all over in hundredths of a second, with four layers of clothing for prophylaxis.

I say I had no assets — but there was one: Sherman. I understood enough of the family dynamic to realize that he, by reason of his charm quite as much as his disability, was doted on by both his parents. He was also their only son, and moreover, although we may balk at such dispositional crudity, their daughters were already outsoaring them, while Sherman would always remain their little boychick.

My rapidly cooling semen pooling in my underpants, I recoiled from Tertia, who gave a precociously vicious laugh. There she sprawled, the diamonds of evening sunshine scattered across her bare belly, her father’s obsessively aligned pen stand, his Dictaphone, and paperclip holder, etc. Is it only a currently felt scar, rather than the memory, that makes it seem now as if there was more pathos and eroticism on that desktop than I would ever fully grasp — let alone experience?

Then there was Sherman. So much was unsaid between us — could not even be framed, still. I knew these teen soirées were a nightmare for him; that as our hormones spurred us on, he felt he lagged further and further behind. Earlier that day, on the phone, he had said heavily: ‘Stick by me this evening, will you?’ Now I’d not only abandoned him but been seduced by his little sister.

I yanked my way out of the study, madly scanned the kids in the kitchen, the living room, pelted to the top of the house and checked there, then tumbled down a storey to Sherman’s bedroom, where the sensitively truncated furniture and juvenile decoration belied the.22 air pistol and cubic inch of Pakki Black I knew he had hidden under the floorboards. He was nowhere to be seen — but had he seen us?

I eventually located him in the most sunken part of the garden, standing by the perfectly round pond fringed with marigolds and primulas. He had his back to the house, and before I heard the words of his bitter rant, I saw all the tension in his blocky shoulders; crammed into them were all conceivable miseries — for now, forever. Over and over he incanted, ‘Fucking cunts, fucking cunts, fucking fucking fucking cunts…’ — a bizarre accompaniment to Bryan Ferry’s complacent yelp of ‘What’s her name, Virginia Plain’, which was belting from the open french windows.

Worse was to emerge: first Sherman’s handsome face uglified by tears, then Sherman’s square fist raised like a pestle before being ground down hard into the mortar of his palm, again and again — ‘Fucking cunts, fucking cunts, fucking fucking fucking cunts…’ — while in that hand, already mashed, glistened the innards, the greyish braided and bloodied fur, of Max Headroom, Tertia’s beloved mouse.

I let him wind himself down. I let him punch me in the stomach with his gory knuckles. I took the mouse’s corpse and lost it in the compost heap. I took Sherman in through the side door and washed his Othello hands in the little sink in the little bathroom beside the great big kitchen. Then I got the hash. We sat back down by the pond and I stuck three Rizla papers together, split a Benson & Hedges and built a joint. We passed it between us, sucking up the smoke, acrid as Accra. Then Sherman said a lot of the unsayable things — about how it was for him, and how he feared it would be.

Inevitably, after that night we didn’t so much drift as scamper apart. I never grew any more, only became annealed by a life that seemed at the time to have had plenty of significant events — addictions, affairs, marriages, children, the micro-mosaics of literary composition — yet which, when I came to in the dusty stalls of middle age, I realized had been altogether lacking in high drama: no blitz or pogrom had been visited on me; the angel of death awaited me in Edgware or Bushey, at a care home, in a cardigan.

Of Sherman I had picked up bits and pieces over the years — he had done a foundation art course somewhere in the north, then dropped out. Next I heard it said he was in Berlin, squatting in the Kreuzberg — and incidentally driving his parents to despair. Then he was back in England and at Goldsmiths completing his studies. All this seemed apt: he was merely another contemporary I had lost touch with, his life to be expressed through the bare bones of his curriculum vitae, rather than felt for, or loved.

Then, in the late 1980s, there began the inexorable rise of Sherman Oaks, the artist.

From the very beginning the Oaks phenomenon caught the public’s imagination. His contemporaries may have been flashier and more pretentious — but, while they were conceptualists, at a remove from the fabrication of their works, he was an unashamedly personal actualizer, a macher, who hewed stone and wood; shaped, pummelled and spun clay; smelted and cast iron, bronze and steel. He created enduring facts on the ground — not airy abstractions of blood, meat and crumpled paper that had life only in temperature-controlled galleries. That he, a middle-class Jewish boy, should be working on such pieces alongside tough Northumbrian welders and phlegmatic West Country stonemasons made the enterprise seem that much more authentic. That Sherman was also a person of restricted height lent a greater poignancy to his monumental works, which, twice and three times life size from the outset, grew still larger as soon as he got the funding. And of course, every single piece derived from his own body.

For the masses, with their fractals of I-know-what-I-like ceaselessly yet variably replicated throughout the nineties then the noughties, this was narrative enough — but Sherman evinced a modesty that, if not exactly false, certainly didn’t ring true to me. Not for him the dialectical twaddle of theorizers, or the de haut en bas of the new Kulturkampf. Instead, when interviewed he’d cackle disarmingly, ‘I’m a very small man making very big things.’ Then, if pressed, he’d add, ‘Believe me, mine is an utterly content-free art: what you see is what you get.’

I tracked his progress, first through newspaper and magazine items, then larger features, then radio and television segments. Invitations to private views arrived concurrently — at first to group exhibitions, then solo ones and eventually retrospectives. The evolution of his ‘content-free art’ had almost amused me. More remarkable was his ability, unerringly, to produce a likeness of himself — even when it was a 64-foot-high basketry woven from steel struts. Nevertheless, I would scrutinize the pasteboards for a while, tracing the fine lettering with my own gross digit, then whirl the duff Frisbee away into the pile of waste paper in the corner of my writing room; a pile that I bagged up weekly, then deposited outside the house, so it could be carted away, pulped and turned into more invitations to private views.

I supposed we must meet again eventually — we revolved in interlinked circles of the social Olympiad — but I was in no hurry. I suspected that after the enormous success of Sherman’s Behemoth, a 128-foot-high body form set astride the Manchester Ship Canal near Runcorn, he would — no matter how small — have become too big for his boots. ‘Behold,’ read the inscription on the plinth, ‘he plunders the river and does not harden.’ The sculpture had at first been the occasion for local scorn, then regional and eventually metropolitan. But inevitably, when it became internationally regarded as an icon of the new and prosperous Britannia, it was appropriated as a symbol of national pride. Sherman had accepted a gong from the government.

Really, it wasn’t the outer man I feared but the inner. Whatever may be said about the indelible marks of childhood memories, mine, for the most part, were vague and unthreatening. I could recall sitting in an antique Silver Cross pram with a pillowcase full of dirty laundry as my mother pushed it up Deansway to the laundrette in East Finchley. Sometimes I thought of a promotional Esso T-shirt I had loved fiercely — its bold blue roundel the target all futurity should aim at — that I had worn until it disintegrated. And then there was my third birthday.

That morning, after breakfast, my jealous brother told me he was going to run away from home. I said I would come as well and carefully packed one of my mother’s old handbags with toy cars, but when the time came to leave he said he wasn’t interested any more, so I set off alone. I can see now the terror-annihilated face of the lorry driver as I dashed across the North Circular in front of his wheels, and also the police car pulling up at the bus stop where I was waiting with what I imagined was mature casualness. And lunging up from that car, her face mottled and cracked like a saltpan, my mother — she was only forty-four when I ran away, but I fancy the taint was already on her: green grave weeds, rotting at the edges.

The bus stop was right beside the synagogue, at the end of Norrice Lea.

About three or four years after Behemoth was installed, my brother — who knew my love for all things out of scale — gave me a 1:200 scale model of Sherman’s sculpture. The metal figurine was dubbed a ‘minumental’ and had been made by Paul St George, an artist my brother knew. I’ve no idea whether St George is successful or not, but I thought it likely that it was his own massive sense of failure and envy that had been compressed into this, and the other teensy travesties he had made of his contemporaries’ works.

I placed the minumental Behemoth in among the little wooden blocks and cylinders modelled on London landmarks — Big Ben, the Millennium Wheel, Telecom Tower — that my daughter had bought for me at Muji, and that I had ranged about the base of the anglepoise in the middle of my desk. Attached to the lamp was a tuft of wool I had picked up from a hillside on the Shetland island of Foula — this was the off-white cloud on the horizon of the diminished capital.

The memory that preyed on me was both definite and embodied; it visited me on waking, dissolving only imperfectly to reveal the expected things — penis sputtering, kettle whistling — then reforming into Sherman’s rock-hard shoulders, the leaden disc of the garden pond, his pile-driving fist and the mouse mush.

I avoided Sherman because of my shame — and so Vamana played tricks on me. Over the years I betrayed an increasing preoccupation in my work with littleness, hugeness and all distortions of scale. Nobody gave a damn about the big stuff, but the wilful insertion of dwarfish characters into my stories was… insensitive. Worse still were the riffs on smallness I retailed to my cronies, and the paltry anecdotes they reciprocated with. How this one had attended the Little People of America convention, where he had seen a primordial dwarf^* brother and sister treated like film stars. While that one had written a play about the actors who played the Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz; they had stayed at the Culver City Hotel in Los Angeles during the shooting, and it was said they slept four to a bed, with predictably ‘comic’ antics.

Most shaming of all was the ‘game’ I devised for my children’s amusement when they were small, ‘Child or Dwarf’. Driving in the car, if one of us saw an ambiguous figure walking along the pavement we would cry out ‘Child or dwarf?’ and the others would make their guesses until we pulled past and turned to observe his or her face. What could possibly have been my motivation for this sick and derogatory form of ‘entertainment’, which was nothing less than laughing at someone’s misfortune? What was the difference between my behaviour and that of the Victorian showmen who had exhibited Charles Byrne, the Irish Giant, or Caroline Crachami, the Sicilian Dwarf? Even those who had taken these poor folk’s bodies when they died, dissected them, rearticulated their bones, then put their skeletons on show in the Hunterian Museum had science — or at least pseudo-science — on their side, but I had nothing but the sham jocundity of those who, having much to hide, expose themselves over and over again.

What did I expect to see when the car drew level with, then passed, the small and heroic figure that stumped between the elongated legs of the shoppers who font du lèche-vitrines along the King’s Road? Had that jacket been purchased in the boys’ outfitting department of Peter Jones by a parent or the person who wore it? Was this a child, a dwarf — or Sherman, who, until I had the courage to confront him, would remain both for me?

When I eventually met up with Sherman Oaks again he was nothing but charm itself. His eldest sister, Prima, had a share in a Bond Street gallery. I’d seen her about town — she was in her fifties now, but not showing it. She’d been sending me her pasteboards for a while before she began personalizing them. Then one day she sent an invitation to an opening that was emphatic: ‘Please come. Sherman will definitely be there, he so wants to see you again. Please.’

I went, and stood on the fringes of the openeers, a representative sample from the Venn intersection of Taste and Money that exhibited not much of either. The works themselves weren’t too bad: they looked like enormous drinks coasters attached to the hessian walls, and bore the curved stains that had, presumably, been left there by enormous glasses. I couldn’t identify the artist, but assumed he must be at the epicentre of a particularly dense thicket of tastefulness — assumed, until trunks parted and I spied Sherman holding forth.

I had seen photographs and television pictures of the great man; still, I was shocked. Sherman had always had the large head and short limbs associated with achondroplastic dwarfism. (I defer from using the term ‘disproportionate’; after all, who is to say which body form represents the human mean?) As a child, on his broad face the precise nose, etched cheekbones and petaline lips he shared with his sisters had seemed a little lost — morsels on a fleshy plate. Now the blue eyes weren’t just fierce but commanding, while the cultivation of neat moustachios and a stroke of beard accented his stronger features. He had, I realized, based his look on the Velázquez portrait of a court dwarf, Don Sebastián de Morro. This was typically Shermanesque chutzpah, then, as he came towards me, round-housing one leg then the other, I took in the well-cut dark clothes that allowed his face to float, as if disembodied, within its aureole of white-blond hair.

He came right up to me before saying hello. Sherman had always done this: tucked his short body inside the personal space of others, so challenging us to refute the idea that it was he who was the measure of all things. We talked easily and unaffectedly, although of what exactly I have no recall. Probably there was a deal of cynicism about the drinks coasters; I do remember laughing in a full-bellied way that I hadn’t since I’d last heard his devastating wit. He drew you in, Sherman, and so drew you down. You began by bending your neck, but, as he continued rubbishing reputations and lisping shibboleths, you’d find yourself bending over, then hunching, then hunkering down, until finally you were squatting or even kneeling in front of him, mesmerized both by what he said and by his unusual intonation — a trifle old-fashioned — as he barked, ‘Jolly good!’ or affirmed ‘Quite right!’ about something he himself had just said.

After that initial meeting we fell readily enough into a pattern of regular contact, meeting up at a Chinese restaurant in Baker Street near his flat for long — and, on his part, bibulous — suppers. We reassumed the easy commerce of our teenage friendship, and it made me wonder if this was true for all men: that it was impossible to attain such proximity to another man, unless you had known him before the hardening of that deceptively transparent carapace: the ego.

There was more. At an experimental play we attended in a warehouse theatre — Sherman was friends with the stratospherically famous actress who was slumming in the lead — our seats were on a two-foot-high dais. When we arrived Sherman hoiked himself up on to this with no prevarication, then, when the lights came up at the end of the single act, he stood, turned to me and raised his arms. Responding involuntarily I lifted him down.

When Sherman visited our home for the first time, he descended the steep steps to the basement kitchen quite unafraid, despite our yapping snapping Jack Russell. I yanked the dog away and slapped it, but Sherman only remarked, ‘I’m not too fond of dogs for obvious reasons.’ He charmed my wife and saw fit to ignore our youngest son — then aged six — who, having been cowering upstairs prior to Sherman’s arrival, saying he was scared of ‘the elf’, now tiptoed up behind him so he could compare their heights.

Grace is what my wife said Sherman possessed, and, although this was a quality I had never associated with him when we were young, I could concede it to him now. My own behaviour had by contrast been utterly graceless — was it any surprise that my children had been corrupted by my facetiousness? As I grew closer to Sherman once more, I tried to squeeze this bladder, inflated with mockery, into the smallest cavity inside of myself. The disappearing trick didn’t work.

Dreams began to plague me. In them, trampolining children shot inexorably skywards from the back gardens of suburbia. In my reverie I saw first one, then two or four, their trainers skimming past the cherry blossom. Then my perspective changed: I was out on the marshes to the east of the city, and looking back could see a purple-grey cyclone hunched over the endless rooftops, rising up into the firmament, into which were being sucked a myriad vortices, each one comprised of a myriad children.

The children of London — they were being taken up. Yet this was no Rapture, for I knew there was nothing above them but the vacuum. I had to warn someone, but I’d lost my shoe and slashed my cheese-white foot on some razor wire. Up in the heavens the haemorrhaging had begun, tens of thousands of little lungs filling up with blood.

^* Of all the 200 syndromes associated with restricted height, primordial dwarfism results in smallest and most fairylike individuals.

2. Round the Horn

Sherman Oaks stood stabbing the end of his unlit cigar at the South Downs and described his latest project to me: a 30-metre-high iron statue that he wished plunked in the River Seine: ‘It’ll be ten times life size, knee-deep in those bière-coloured waters and slap-bang opposite the Bibliothèque Nationale. Unlike Behemoth this one’ll be a hollow figure, the outer layer of which will be cut away in transverse sections — like an anatomical model — to reveal its interior.’

‘And what will be inside?’ I felt obliged to ask.

‘Aha!’ He sucked on the damp butt. ‘Inside it will be hundreds — thousands probably — of smaller solid figures, varying in size from the very little to the twice life size.’

‘So, the big figure is Pantagruel the giant, while the small figures it contains—’

‘Are representative of all the odd distortions of his size in the novels — yes, yes, of course. You would’ve thought that in the city where Rabelais died there’d be enormous enthusiasm for such an exciting piece, but the planning committee are proving almost wilfully obstructive — banging on about the preservation of the skyline!’

I tried to be tactful. ‘You have to concede, Sherman, that this would be a very, um, radical, addition, to a traditionally, er, traditional city. But, tell me, is there a Rabelaisian anniversary of some kind — I mean, what’s the pretext?’

Sherman put his sculptural head to one side of his plinth of a body and scrutinized me. He seemed on the verge of a crushing put-down, but was interrupted by the cheap-bleep of his mobile phone, which he fetched up from one of the pockets of his self-designed silk waistcoat. He turned away and began barking into it:

‘No, no, call Klaus in Stuttgart, he has the plans, he’ll be able to email them to the Kapellmeister in Berne… What’s that? No, I’m in Sussex… Suss-ex, not having sex — but I’ll be flying to Bremen late this evening so have Heidi send copies to the hotel there for me, and make sure the tent’s there too… Yes, and the crampons… Cramp. Ons, yes, quite right, jolly good!’

I wasn’t certain whether I found Sherman’s habit of punctuating our times together with these noisy one-sided conversations infuriating or endearing. Invariably it was me who proposed the excursions, then made the arrangements, and, while I was flattered that the Great Man dealt with me directly, unobstructed by the small tribe of factotums that staffed his growing atelier, I couldn’t help but feel that his inability to cease from his Herculean labours was a message barked at me: See how busy I am! How sought after! How creatively fired up!

It was true that Sherman’s career trajectory had become near-vertical in the fifteen years since Behemoth bestrode the Manchester Ship Canal. Now, not a week went by without an invitation arriving at my house to an Oaks opening in Seoul or Soweto, Kiev or Cancun. Along with executing smaller works for private galleries and public collections, Sherman politicked remorselessly: trying to arrange funding and permissions so that he could have body forms poised on Alpine mountaintops, or sunk in Norwegian fjords, or submerged where the Kattegat met the Skagerrak.

Taken in sum, Sherman’s works were acquiring a peculiar sort of public reverence — as if they were secular votive objects. Their very simplicity, combined with their creator’s refusal to spout the usual arty-gnomic guff, seemed to inspire people’s devotion. You might’ve imagined that the critics would have accused Sherman’s big things of exhibiting the usual fanfaronade of the monumental, which, historically, has been a totalitarian mode, yet they said nothing of the sort; instead the notion took root that this was an individualistic, Neoliberal giganticism — besides, in a globalized world of ever taller buildings, longer bridges and thicker dams, Sherman’s statues were, comparatively speaking… dinky.

That no one saw fit to remark on the way Sherman was populating the world with big Shermans I found inexplicable. Moreover, while it was well known that all the body forms were derived from casts of Sherman’s own body that were then enlarged, what everyone seemed oblivious to was that the basic unit of Shermanness — one Sherman, if you will — was not his actual height, 3′3”, but 6′4″. That this was my own height may have been a coincidence — if an odd one.

On the first point, as a friend of sufficient long-standing to have seen him playing with clackers, I felt able to tackle the Maître: ‘Isn’t it a little egotistical,’ I ventured across the table in the Heavenly Kingdom, ‘the way that all your works are, um, you?’ I was almost blown away by the vehemence of his rebuttal:

‘For fuck’s sake! Don’t be so dumbly, simplistically, bruisingly, prosaically predictable, mate.’ He speared a prawn ball with a chopstick. ‘The works aren’t me. It doesn’t matter that they’re based on my own body any more than it matters that pharaonic statues were all made using a single set of standardized measurements and dimensions of someone who wasn’t even a fucking pharaoh! The point is that the body forms are archetypes — they are everyman.’

The obvious rejoinder — as a person of restricted height Sherman was not that archetypal — died in my mouth. Had I uttered it when riled, I may have been unable to prevent myself asking him not only why he scaled up his own height to mine, but also why he thought no one else had done the calculation. This seemed especially bizarre, given a recent public exhibition had involved one hundred ‘life-sized’ Shermans being ranged right along Hadrian’s Wall — yet nobody pointed out that all of them were six-footers.

It made me ponder whether my own guilt was only a subsection of a more widespread shame. Perhaps the unacknowledged six-foot dwarfs were evidence of a collective uneasiness about the sizeism that dare not speak its name? Or maybe — in Britain and, increasingly, the States as well — the scaling up of the small was registered, albeit unconsciously, as a just commentary on the misadventures of post-imperial nations that were in stature denial, and went on punching above their weight in the world arena, KOing hundreds of thousands of blameless everymanikins?

So, I said nothing in the Heavenly Empire, and I said still less up on the Downs; where we walked on, with Sherman fleshing out the impression of his next week’s itinerary that I had been given by the phone call. The tent and crampons were needed for a trip up on to the Grosser Aletsch glacier, where the installation of an heroic group of Shermans — the central one standing 37 metres, and surrounded by five more half that size — was being strenuously fought by what the artist termed ‘a bathetic coalition of tree-huggers and chalet maids’, with whose positions, nonetheless, he sympathized.

It was at the core of Sherman’s steely grace that he refused his disability the right to dictate his physical limitations. When he was young this had seemed feisty; now he was middle aged it had taken on an almost mystical character. Sherman Oaks couldn’t gaze upon lake, river or sea without stripping off and diving into it. Confronted by a rocky wall or an icy defile, he would insist on scrambling up it. If on our rambles we came across signs prohibiting access or fences barring it, Sherman was duty bound to trespass.

Thus he kicked against the pricks — but they remained big ones. He had great energy but it was wearisome for him to walk more than a mile or two. So he was almost always attended by his driver, Baltie (short for Balthazar), a dim old Etonian, who, as Sherman put it — out of his earshot — ‘Rather than being equipped with an elaborate and expensive education should’ve aged fourteen been packed off to deliver groceries!’

On this particular day Baltie had picked us up in the Range Rover where the train halted at Plumpton Racecourse. Then he drove us up a track on to the Downs, and Sherman walked with me to Ditchling Beacon; then, in his own coinage, he ‘called in a Baltie-strike’. I next saw him at Saddlescombe, where he clambered down from the car and accompanied me to the Devil’s Dyke.

Such a punctuated companionship did have its advantages: being with Sherman for more than an hour or two at a time was de trop. The constant phone calls, the bluster, the charging into fields with bulls in them — it all grew wearing; besides, I also needed time alone to process (the therapese is warranted here) certain psychological symptoms that had been latent in me for many years, and were now coming disturbingly to the fore.

Were those the shreds of black plastic bags caught on the legs of the pylons that strode over the hills? Or were they the clothes of plane-crash victims who in death had transgressed the first commandment of globalism: keep your belongings with you at all times? Was there any more distressing sight to behold than television news images of rayon blouses, frumpy brown skirts and smalls unlaundered for the entire fortnight, now caught in the bushes at the airport’s perimeter? To say nothing of the holdalls and suitcases that lay ruptured like sickeningly burst boils. Enfin, the corpses, neatly packed away in body bags, all they once possessed having already been decanted.

In eleven days’ time I was due to leave for a fortnight’s book tour, heading first to Toronto and then on to several cities in the USA. Due to, but I was questioning whether I could go at all, since my as yet unpacked bag dragged on me like an anchor. Of course, I had long since dispensed with anything but carry-on and was taking only a small rucksack — and not one of those pantechnicons you see being hauled up the aisle, a shotgun marriage between human and trunk. The lapwing pee-witting up above me, the ladybird millimetring along the buttercup at my feet, the red kite swooping between me and Fulking, or the rabbit hopping across the chalky path — were they so encumbered? I yearned in my own life to re-create Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise by stylizing my impedimenta over and over again, each time reducing the scale of books, clothing and toiletries, until all I took with me was a sheaf of sketches slipped inside my wallet. Nowadays, the thought of carrying anything more seemed grotesque, making of my world an nth-class cabin into which — my greasepaint moustache shining — I manoeuvred the steamer trunk packed with the other Capitalist Brothers.

At the Devil’s Dyke, Sherman and I sat on a bench. I wanted to tell him the folk tale associated with this great V-shape gouged out of the chalk escarpment. How the Devil, bent on flooding the Sussex Weald so as to drown all its sleeping cotters, one night set to with his mighty spade, aiming to dig a ditch through the Downs. But an old woman living alone in a farmhouse awoke in the small hours and lit her lamp. Satan, fearing the dawn, cast his tool aside and with a howl leapt all the way across the Weald to the North Downs, where he landed, thus creating the enormous depression now known as the Devil’s Punchbowl.

Wanted to — but couldn’t, because Sherman, while chewing a pizzle of biltong I’d handed him, was on the phone to a powerful arts Gauleiter half a world away, etching with incisive verbalizations his plan to implant the crater of Rano Kau, the volcano at the south-west corner of Easter Island, with scores — if not hundreds — of carved basalt Shermans, latter-day moai that, like those celebrated statues, would awe visitors by the sheer implausibility of their being in that place at all.

‘Make it happen!’ Sherman cried, then turning to me said, ‘So, what were you saying?’ But then he was interrupted once more by the fo-fiddle-i-o of contemporaneity, so that while he exchanged yelps with some willowy curator in a Berlin bunker I was left to tell myself that the destination for this trip was Lancing College, which stood on its knoll on the far side of the River Adur. My father and uncle had been educated there, and the neo-Gothic pile loomed large in the family mythology, having been founded by my great-great-grandfather, Nathaniel Woodard.

His photograph — an original daguerreotype — had hung in the gloomy stairwell between the second and third storeys of my grandparents’ house on Vernon Terrace in Brighton, throughout the interminable Sunday afternoons of my childhood. It now hung in exactly the same position in my own terraced house in South London. The High Anglican churchman, and apostle of public school education to the rising middle classes, sat, life sized, behind thick glass, edged in gilt and framed with black mahogany, his expression at once stern and soppy, his cheeks furry.

At Lancing we would find something pleasingly out of joint — another oddity to add to our collection. Together, Sherman and I had visited the Tradescants’ monument at St Mary at Lambeth, and, rubbing away the lichen from the tomb, read the inscription: ‘Whilst they (as Homer’s Iliad in a nut) / A world of wonders in one closet shut’ — a reference to the gardening family’s celebrated ‘cabinet of curiosities’, the Ark, which in the seventeenth century occupied a site close to my house. In place of the long-departed Ark there was now a takeaway called Chicken World, which seemed painfully apt: a world of chickens in one box shut…

Another time Baltie had driven Sherman and me down the M3 to Painshill. Here we had wandered Charles Hamilton’s landscaped park, surveying its grottoes, its ruined abbey, cascade and temple. Standing by the lake while Sherman bellowed at a banker in Shanghai, I was entranced as a flotilla of model dreadnoughts came cruising by, line abreast; then appalled, when one of these six-foot Edwardian warships was opened from within, the entire deck and superstructure flipping up to reveal the pasty face of the middle-aged boy who was lying inside.

I thought often of Claude Lévi-Strauss, still alive and buzzing at a hundred, an anthropological bee deep in the honeyed hive of the Sorbonne. It was his contention — made with reference to Clouet’s portrait of Elizabeth of Austria — that all miniatures have an intrinsic aesthetic quality derivable from their very dimensions. So it was that Sherman and I set out for Godshill, a model village on the Isle of Wight, where we discovered a model of the model village inside of it, and inside this model, model village a third.

Not that we neglected the sublime; after all, Sherman’s own works were themselves Burke’s ‘great objects and terrible’, willed concretizations that forced us into submission — albeit democratically. So we visited Northern Ireland for the weekend, and Baltie drove us in a rental Range Rover back and forth along the lanes to the south-west of Belfast, until we were able to establish the exact location from which Swift had seen the Divis and the Black Mountain massif as a recumbent giant, the easternmost tumulus of Cave Hill being its nose.

I had also proposed a longer trip to the remote Shetland island of Foula, although, given the lack of network coverage, I very much doubted Sherman would agree to go. On Foula we could see thousand-foot sea cliffs, vaulting stone arches, plunging rocky gullies — and all of this natural giganticism crammed into nine square miles. It was the ultimate fantasia on the sublime themes of the very big and the very little.

Not that either of us mentioned the B or the L word. It may have been all right for Sherman to say in public that he was a very small man who made very big things, but that was a deflection that effectively stymied any more penetrating questioning. I didn’t want to talk about it either — I enjoyed Sherman’s company, his curious grace, his hunger for life, his all-devouring eye, but I knew that sooner or later we would have to confront what was going on, then there it would be, winched upright like one of his own body forms, my vast and artfully oxidized shame.

Sherman finished his call and after we’d settled on our next rendezvous he joined Baltie in the Range Rover and they bumped away. I went on alone along the ridge, past fields where cattle lay as brown and glossy as the pools of their own shit. Six hundred feet below lay the amiable farmland of the Weald, while up here I simply revolved in my cloudy ball. But between Perching and Edburton hills my moodiness fused into a certainty: I could no longer cope at all with the infantilizing demanded by intercontinental air travel. It was over: no more would I dutifully respond to those parental injunctions go here, go there, empty my pockets and take off my shoes. Never again would I take my underpants to see the world, which meant in turn that never would the world witness them espaliered on a hedge.

I say fused, but disintegrated would be closer to the truth. Of course, I had always performed certain… rituals, but doesn’t everyone? Doesn’t everyone count the cracks and divide them by the number of paving stones? Doesn’t everyone ascribe numerical values to each action and every thing, then compute their way through the day? Doesn’t everyone listen to the fridge intently so as to be certain that its vibration calibrates with their pulse and heartbeat? Doesn’t everyone wash their hands because they touched the soap? Doesn’t everyone know that each digit has its own personality — feckless 2, arrogant 1, incurably romantic 9? Doesn’t everyone fear the world and their own subjectivity getting out of sync? It’s true that no one I knew personally wielded a Polaroid camera as I did, taking one snap of the knobs on the front of the gas cooker, a second of the fridge door shut, a third of my hand holding the front-door knob, a fourth of the blur as I pulled it to, a fifth of my hand pushing it to confirm that the latch had sprung. Nor did I see anyone stopping, as I did, halfway to the tube and shuffling through these shiny squares of recency — but that doesn’t mean they weren’t doing it, does it?

All the walls of my writing room were tessellated with Polaroids, and the shiny tide was creeping up on to the ceiling when I bought my first digital camera. What a relief! Now I need only pause in front of the urinal, in the empty youth hostel on top of the Downs, to confirm that the world and I were continuing to coincide. It helped — a bit.

Coming down off the ridge over stiles and between fizzing pylons, the Adur appeared, flowing sluggishly between curving banks. A derelict cement works stood on the floodplain, its dirty chimney giving the finger to the overcast sky. And in the hazy mid-ground loomed the spiritual aircraft hangar I was bound for: the massive chapel of Lancing College. Its rose window was the biggest in England, its nave higher than that of Notre-Dame. Had the chapel’s tower ever been built it would, at 350 feet, have rivalled those of Chartres.

My ancestor had insisted that, despite the scarcity of funding, one end of the chapel be raised to its full height at the very start, lest he or his successors ever waver in their ambition to build this very big thing. And now his bronze effigy lay in a tomb lodged in one side of the soaring nave, like a fishbone caught in the deity’s gullet — although a very High Anglican he had been a smallish man.

I crossed the river by a footbridge and walked past a fishery where miserable men sat on hired jetties, their rods dangling in a bilious pond. After a flurry of phone calls, I met up with Sherman and Baltie in a chalky hollow. The Range Rover lumped away, its thick tyres white-walled with clods, leaving the two of us to snap and crackle through the autumnal undergrowth towards the hypertrophied house of God.

We emerged from the woodland into the teensy paddocks and chicken-wire enclosures of the College’s farm. But if 350 feet high why not 35, or 3,500? There were recently shorn alpacas that looked like Dr Seuss’s therianthropes. There were also a couple of motos in a fenced-off wallow. As ever I found the motos’ nuzzling baby-faced muzzles repulsive, but Sherman lisped away happily with them; then, while he took a call from a Milanese brassière manufacturer who was sitting beside the drained infinity pool of his Ibizan villa, he caressed their jonckheeres.

We were expected, and an amiable youth met us at the headmaster’s office then guided us around the flint-knapped quads. He was possessed of sufficient sangfroid not to react to our oddness as a couple, while I found myself unbearably affected by the large spot on his neck to which a concealer had been uselessly applied, and also by the Windsor knot of his school tie. By the time the lad had itemized the crests and memorials and was leading us back through swags of drizzle towards the chapel I was openly weeping.

‘Buck up!’ Sherman snapped.

Inside the chapel the organ pipes were wrapped in translucent plastic — it was more than a century since Canon Woodard’s death and still the biggering continued. I found his tomb and pressed my ear to his bronze breast, beside where his married hands rose, the keel of this capsized prayer boat. Sherman took a photo with his iPhone, and said, ‘Very good.’

Afterwards Baltie drove us into Brighton and dropped us on the edge of the Lanes. Sherman and I walked through the quaint zone to English’s, the fish restaurant. We ate on the second floor, sitting side by side with our backs to the window, and observing the sole other table of diners as if they were a repertory play — which in a way I suppose they were. Sherman didn’t help my digestion by whispering improvised dialogue for these two couples, most of which was obscene. He also professed himself to be delighted with our outing as he snidely dissected his own Dover sole.

I had my doubts — I was beginning to suspect that Sherman was toying with me, just as he toyed with the Californian ephebe who phoned during dinner, and whom Sherman had assured would be in receipt of a body form that was 633.333 recurring feet high within the month. But why not 6,333, or 63.3? ‘Believe it!’ He belched as the other diners looked at us for a change. ‘This mother is so big it’ll be able to lean its elbow on the roadway of the Golden Gate as if it were a bar.’

Baltie drove us back to London and when they dropped me off I said goodbye to Sherman casually, without making any arrangement for the future. But I felt certain we would meet again soon — a reckoning of some kind was long overdue.

3. Fin du trottoir roulant

Eleven days later, despite all my queer resistances and awkward premonitions, I left for Canada. I took no luggage with me, only a Barbour jacket^* I had bought from their concession in Mohamed Al Fayed’s Harrods department store, the capacious pockets of which I intended to fill with a few essential things. But, despite this simple solution to my luggage phobia, I still lay awake night after night obsessing in nauseating detail how I would ‘pack’ the jacket.

It didn’t help that it was hot in the bed — an emperor-sized cherrywood lit bateau. None of our four children had ever quite managed to make it through the night in their own beds. No matter how many times I lifted them up, their sweaty thighs clamped about my hips, and laboured upstairs to put them down again, they still came creeping back and wormed their way in. Our eldest son was away at university; however, he not only walked but entrained in his sleep, and often in the small hours I would hear his key in the lock, followed by the heavy tramp of his feet, he would push the dog aside and insinuate his adult form so that the six of us lay tightly packed, like the victims of a civil disaster laid out on the varnished floorboards of a school gymnasium.

I visualized filling the pockets, then emptying them, filling them — then emptying them, over and over again. Should I put that in there, or this? I fretted until the predawn, when I heard the milkman wheedle open the gate and set down three bottles of half-fat, or was it a third of a bottle or thirty? In the half-light the methane off the entire family lay in a mustard haze atop the Flanders of the duvet, my sons’ bayonets digging into me from either side, my mind roved across the terrain of the past: The human race was doomed, the only link with survival passed through time.

My obsessions with bigness, with littleness, with all distortions in scale — surely this was only a spatial expression of my own arrested development? In my mid-twenties I had still been living in my mother’s flat and speaking a shared idiolect of mushy diminutives — ‘-kins’, ‘-ums’ and ‘noo-noo’ — with her that we referred to shamelessly as ‘baby talk’. Had her premature death not thrust me into the actual-sized world, we might’ve been there still, me with my collections of Langenscheidt Lilliput dictionaries, she with her hefty Henry James novels. While I remained in the spare bedroom — which, due to the botched conversion of the Victorian house, had the proportions of an upright cereal box — dreamily making little tableaux with trolls, pencil erasers and.002-scale plastic soldiers, she would sit in the front room, concentrating hard on the subtle velleities of James’s characters.

It was not to be. Instead, it was ‘Off with her head!’ as the cancer shot up through the meningeal fluids of her spine to her brain, and I was thrust through the little door and into the caucus race of adulthood, which has no precise start or finish, and although everyone is promised a prize, only a select few ever receive them.

A minute envelope materializes, the flap of which opens and closes while arrows arc up and down, conveying the strong impression to the user — and the suggestion of physiological addiction is highly appropriate — that vital communications are being transmitted through the ether. She sits there, radiation pinging off the back of her retinas, unable to tear her eyes from this very little thing — the envelope icon — which is an insult to the illustrious history of the epistolary — I mean to say: who’s this email from, Laclos?

Of course, of course, all new technologies cannibalize their predecessors: the horses are put down and the carriage rolls on complete with postilions and oil lamps. If futurological imaginings establish anything at all, it’s woe betide anyone who dares to conceive of the un become in too great a detail — and yet here we are, with the entire Library of Babel inscribed on a pin, and a trillion web pages expressed by the digits 1 and 0.

A few days later I set off, leaving wife, children and dog, all laid out on this weekend morning like idols in their great bed of wear. The last vision of home I took with me was of the fat woman who lives in the block of flats opposite, and whose bedroom window is exactly level with that of my writing room. As I slid notebook, passport, etc. into the pockets of my waxy jacket she swished back her curtains then proceeded to plump up her duvet, punching the white slug with her yellowy-black fists.

At the end of the road I paused to check I had turned off the cooker, shut the fridge and closed the front door. At my feet a concrete bollard lay toppled on the pavement: the severed penis of a god at once Brutalist and kaloi. I looked for Lysippus among the bus drivers smoking outside their garage… the lime trees in their raised beds were losing their foliage… and then, quite suddenly, I was at Paddington — no, Heathrow, and wandering shoeless and un belted through security.

If I was going to be infantilized, why couldn’t I be miniaturized? Miniaturized along with Jane Fonda in a mini-submarine, then injected into America — but no, there would be no fantastic voyage, only the atomizers of Arpège on the shelves of the Duty Free, why not 5mls or 500?, empty suitcases chained outside a luggage store, and beneath a TV monitor some frummers davening as they laid tefillin. There was the travelator, a grooved tongue glistening as if with saliva, ready to slurp me up into the belly of the beast.

Since I’d started to see Sherman again I’d had a revulsion from any ‘humour’ associated with dwarfism. Unfortunately, I’d been at it for so long that people still brought me anecdotes they thought would amuse me. Only the day before I left, a friend told me of a rash of audacious thefts from Scandinavian luxury tourist coaches. The authorities were confounded: the tourists’ suitcases had been in the locked luggage compartment of the coaches all day, yet when they reached their hotel and went to unpack they found all their valuables had been spirited away.

The police could find no leads, until at last an informer of restricted height came forward. He had been, he told them, a member of a gang of dwarfs who had enlisted larger accomplices to go on the tours, while they hid in their suitcases. Once the coaches were under way the dwarfs unzipped themselves and went to work. The inversion of drug smugglers’ modus operandi had a certain symmetry — here was the package that ingested the mule — but I didn’t believe a word of it.

I took off the Barbour and dropped it in the corner of the toilet stall where I squatted shortly before boarding. It was so stiff with stuff and waxing that it leant there — about the height of a small child, or a dwarf. I strained, fixating on the creases in its collar, pursed black lips. After only a few days’ ownership the jacket seemed to be taking on a life of its own, what might it do to me while I sleep? Then, when I rose to wipe myself and jumped as the toilet automatically flushed, it smirked at me from behind its cuff.

But in club class, with the hateful thing stashed in the overhead locker, I was free of all burdens, free to smirk at the frummer who was making his way awkwardly up the aisle dragging an enormous wheeled case, which bumped against one seat back and then the next. He was overweight and sweat wormed from beneath his hot homburg, his silk-faced frock coat falling open to reveal a black cummerbund and untuckings of white shirt. He seemed oblivious to the little anguishes he was causing — pre-flight champagne spilled, a laptop jogged — his eyes, in the shadows between his heron’s nest beard and his hat brim, unaffected, or so it seemed to me, by proximate concerns, yet brimming with the awe and anxiety provoked by Yahweh.

Consulting his ticket, he threw himself down beside me, ignoring the bag, which was left for a brace of cabin crew, straining like navvies, to lever into a locker. Then, nothing: we sat eyes front, with nought to meditate on but a spray of plastic flowers in a vase bolted to a bulkhead. The fabric of the aircraft whiningly tensed, groaningly relaxed. The copilot came on the PA: we had, he said, been slow getting away from the gate and now we’d lost our one o’clock slot; as soon as he had any more information he would let us know. But he didn’t. We sat in that rebreathed time, inhaling seconds, then minutes, then half hours. The frummer grew restless and began making a flurry of phone calls, slooshing Yiddish into the only clamshell he was allowed. Finally the stewardess came to tell him to stop phoning because the plane was taxiing, but this too he ignored.

I found the frummer heartening; his contradictory behaviour — at once mystical and insufferably worldly — seemed wholly in keeping with the paradox of modern air travel, whereby millions of pounds of thrust, a galaxy of halogen lights and leagues of concrete encapsulate a mundane environment dominated by the most trivial concerns. And it was while I was reflecting on this that the four merciless deities bolted to the wings began to howl and the jet trundled along the runway with all the grace of a stolen shopping trolley, then rattled into the clouds.

When a while after takeoff the stewardess came by I ordered herb salad, followed by Vincent Bhatia’s prawn bhuna masala with coconut and curry leaf rice. Oh, and Eton mess to follow. The frummer laid tefillin. Of course, I knew a bit about phylacteries — they were bound to appeal to me — and if I’d ever inclined to observance tying little boxes to my head would’ve been a big part of the draw.

I chewed salad — he lashed the shel yad to his arm and the shel rosh to his head. I ate curry — he prayed: And it shall be for a sign for you upon your head, and as a memorial between your eyes, that the law of the LORD may be in your mouth, for with a strong hand has the LORD brought you out of Egypt. You shall therefore keep this ordinance in its season from year to year.

This, just one of the injunctions for the faithful to write down on parchment that a box was to be tied to their head, which was then put in a box that was tied to their head — a reduction ad absurdum that made me dizzy with joy. That within the tefillin was a scroll upon which no fewer than 3,188 Hebrew characters were written in kosher ink confirmed the magical intent. After all, it took fifteen hours with a limner’s abject concentration to write them, and if one was wrong, or two were out of order, the juju wouldn’t work: no mitzvah! This little black box was the flight recorder for a Haredi jet-propelled through life by the halacha, a set of rules so comprehensive — if open to labyrinthine interpretation — that they told him what he should be doing every moment of the day, and exactly how he should be doing it.

What was my own life beside such finicky precision? Cack-handed! Anomic! Eton-messy! True, the parchment scrolls of Torah verses were by no means the smallest books in existence,^* but they had the virtue of being fragments of a single work that was all you ever needed to read — if, that is, you believed the universe had been created by a omnipotent games-playing deity with attention-deficit disorder as a real-time moral-philosophic experiment. I had my doubts.

Mm, house truffle, Earl Grey pearl and liquid salted caramel — popping one of the dusty balls into my mouth I preferred to think of Him as a cosmic artisan du chocolat. The plane had reached its cruising height of 35,000 feet over Ireland, but why not 350,000 so we could orbit the earth with fiery Apollo, or 3,500 so we could see the zephyrs comb the heathery chest of the Black Mountain? Ach! The vicious constraint of worshipping the infinite through the contemplation of the vanishingly small was getting to me — that and the multiplying and then dividing of truffles, clods, bald-headed men and book pages… I must have slept, exhausted — or at least assumed I was dreaming, otherwise it would’ve been madness to pop the catch of the overhead locker with the frummer’s great crate in it.

The plane hit an air pocket and the case slammed down on top of me. The zip was already open and Sherman tumbled out, dressed in a black rollneck and black jeans, equipped with a head torch and wire cutters. ‘What the fuck!’ he exclaimed. ‘I assumed the frummer would check me in as hold baggage.’

I looked up the aisle, but the cabin crew were all goofing off in their curtained booth; as for the passengers, not a single one seemed to have noticed — they were all lost in the light caves hollowed out of the back of each other’s heads. Sherman disentangled himself from old-fashioned flannel underpants, long black socks and a prayer shawl. I watched him, thinking of the first six-inch TV I’d had back in the early 1980s.

While the miners had fought the Battle of Orgreave, I lay on a slagheap of mattresses watching James Robertson Justice play Vashtar, the leader of an enslaved people (I don’t recall the J-word) compelled to build a mighty pyramid for the Pharaoh. The wide open desert, the massed teams of extras pulling stone blocks on rollers, the whole CinemaScope sweep of the epic compressed into that tiny screen — I squinted at it, awed.

‘C’mon,’ hissed Sherman, leading me aft.

As we prowled up the aisle the plane banked slightly and my eyes were flung sideways down through a window to where, 17,000 feet below, the emulsive cloud had congealed into a vast simulacrum of the paths, box hedges and yew avenues of a formal eighteenth-century garden. As I watched, humbled, a monstrous baby staggered upright from the horizon 300 miles away, its chubby arms formed by vortices of cumulo-stratus. As the plane drew closer I saw that this apparition was one of my own children; it seemed that Gaia had been busy uploading the essence of my sentimentality and fashioning it into this towering love object — which we flew straight through.

‘Will you come on!’ Sherman pulled my sleeve, and reluctantly I joined him between the stainless-steel galley and the flimsy toilet doors, where he went unerringly to a section of carpet and lifted it to expose a D-ring. He opened the hatch and we let ourselves down into the cold booming hold, the beam of his head torch picking out the Samsonite blocks on pallets.

‘Y’know Faulkner had a screen credit on Land of the Pharaohs,’ I remarked, apropos of everything, but Sherman only hissed:

‘Will you shut the fuck up,’ and went about his task with a will, snapping combination locks with his clippers, then unzipping the bags so that their contents spilled on to the aluminium deck.

‘Look at this drek,’ he said, snatching up a handful of stuff. I recognized the seat covers we had had in my childhood home, the print of a historic map of Worcestershire that had hung above the phone table, a paperback edition of C. E. M. Joad’s Guide to Modern Wickedness and my mother’s dentures.

‘Can you believe people cross the Atlantic with such tat,’ he spat, ‘and pay for it too!’

‘Dentures are pretty much essential,’ I said, ‘if you don’t have any teeth.’

Sherman slid down the baffler of bags until he was sitting. The cyclopean eye of his torch dazzled me, and his voice — nasal, insistent — soared above the jeremiad of the jets. ‘You and your dumb books!’ he prated. ‘Micro-satire, dirty doodlings in the margins of history!’

‘I say, that’s a bit harsh.’

‘Is it? When Gutenberg invented the printing press there were at most a hundred titles produced annually; by 1950 this had swollen to a quarter of a million; now a book is published somewhere in this dumb world every twenty seconds, and you have the nerve — no, the gall, to contribute to this flood of verbiage that is inexorably inundating the land with ill-contrived metaphors!’

‘I–I…’ I wanted to rebut him forcefully; instead I only spread my hands and said, ‘I don’t know how to do anything else.’

Add a dream, lose a reader — isn’t that Uncle Vladimir’s line? Well, the lover of little girls has aught to teach me. I awoke as the British Airways flight settled down over Toronto and shat its undercarriage, sending said reader end over end, down to where the survivors had retreated, a network of tunnels deep under Chaillot. The victors stood guard over a kingdom of rats. In the half-light before full consciousness I took in the drear panorama of the razed city, the stalk of the CN Tower wilting among the charred stumps of the skyscrapers, the grid pattern of blackened rubble — all of it irradiated by the sickly green glow from Lake Ontario.

I remembered my first visit to Canada in 1977, with my father. We stayed out in Dundas with his friend, the philosopher George Grant. While they debated Red Toryism, I lay upstairs on an iron bedstead smoking. I loved the Players pack, the way one side read ‘Players Filter’ and the other ‘Players Filtre’ — all of Canadian happenstance seemed bound up in the reversal of e and r.

I took a bus into town and wandered the Hagia Sophia of the Eaton Center in a consumerist ecstasy — it was big enough to swallow whole five of London’s poxy malls. I bought a disposable lighter for a few bucks — the first I’d ever seen — and when I got back to Dundas I lay back down on the iron bedstead, then held the translucent green canister to my eye so as to look through the liquid gas.

I left the frummer behind where we had been sitting. He appeared stricken, making none of the phone calls that other passengers had begun the instant the plane had landed; nor did he rise to retrieve his flight bag from the overhead locker. But I couldn’t concern myself with that — the flight had arrived almost two hours late — and so I strode off through the dun corridors, hopping on to travelators with whistling insouciance. The two men crammed into dun uniforms at Immigration only glanced at my passport. I was kicking about in the dun arrivals hall, pondering my transport options, when I became aware of snuffling behind me and turning discovered the frummer looking very down-in-the-beard and accompanied by a member of the airline’s ground staff, who was pushing a wheelchair in which sat the obese flight bag, its front zip creased in a complacent smile.

‘What’s the problem?’ I asked brightly.

‘It’s dusk… so, it’s Shabbat,’ he muttered. ‘You must’ve noticed me, on the flight… as soon as I realized we were gonna be delayed I began trying to get through to someone by phone.’

‘And?’

‘Yes’ — he stared shamefaced at his black dress shoes — ‘I guess you’re right — it wouldn’t’ve made any difference, I can’t go in any car on Shabbat.’

I was merciless. ‘Or bus, or train.’

‘Or bus, or train.’

‘You’ll have to stay out here at the airport.’

‘No, no, I can’t do that, it’s a really important Shabbat, the last before my youngest son’s bar mitzvah, I must get home.’

‘Well, you should’ve thought about that before you booked a flight with an insufficient margin of safety.’

‘I know, I know,’ he moaned.

‘Of course’ — I looked towards the main doors where gentile-mobiles were pulling away from the kerb with unholy despatch — ‘you could always walk.’

‘Walk…’ He savoured the word in a prayerful way.

‘Yup’ — plunged my hands into the pockets of the Barbour — ‘walk — I think I’ll walk into town, the weather’s OK and I could do with stretching my legs. You’re welcome to come with, but I’d advise you to check that into left luggage — it’s a good seventeen miles.’

‘Walk…’ I hadn’t noticed the flattened vowels of his Canadian accent before, the a cowering as if an umlaut had been fired over its head. ‘Yes, I guess I could walk, but I’ll have to bring my bag, it’s got valuable, uh, stuff in it.’

‘Stuff, or a valuable person?’

‘I’m sorry, I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’

One of his fish-belly-white hands flipped towards me. ‘My name’s Reichman, Howard Reichman, and… well, it’s an awfully big favour to ask but would you consider helping me with the bag — unless, that is, you keep Shabbat yourself?’

I shook my head.

‘And I could pay you—’

I shook it again. I felt guilty — but then I always do. In this instance it was guilt over my snide thoughts. However, it wasn’t this that motivated me, but the sheer challenge. ‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Reichman,’ I said. ‘Now let’s get going.’

As I took the flight bag’s handle and trundled away, I wondered: was this one of the Reichmann brothers who ran Olympia & York, at one time the largest property developer in the world? If so, it was a curious coincidence; after all, before they went bust in the recession of ’92 they had built the biggest skyscraper London had ever seen, Canary Wharf; not only the biggest — the most banal. I looked back; he was struggling along in my wake. His coat looked hot — his hat hotter; he was as ill-equipped for exodus as anyone I’d ever seen.

On we went along Airport Road, then Silver Dart, before crossing beneath the 427 expressway. To begin with I waited for Reichman to come puffing up in his woefully constricting cummerbund, but soon enough I was struggling with the dumb bag, which lurched from one tiny wheel to the other, yanking my arm in its socket as if it were a drunkenly dependent toddler. I had to lift it over the cobbled ravelins under freeway bridges and hump it up grassy embankments. He was tirelessly grateful. ‘Thank you, oh, thank you, most kind,’ he kept saying as we rumbled between the down-at-heel warehouses and unbusinesslike premises that lined International Boulevard. When I looked back, the sun was setting behind the airport and the jets coming into land incandesced in its last gleaming.

We reached the Royal Woodbine golf course and I yanked the bag along aggregate paths to a culvert containing Mimico Creek, a rivulet of tea-coloured water that a hundred yards further on disappeared into darkness under Highway 27. ‘Surely,’ Reichman said, ‘you don’t mean to…’ But I did, and so manhandled the bag down to the flat bottom, then dragged it splashing through the shallows, while the observant corvid flapped blackly along behind me.

The Kufic script of aerosol graffiti rippled on the concrete walls; ducklings paddled serenely past. On the far side of Highway 401 I weight-lifted the bag up the embankment and clambered after it, to discover that, although we were now benighted, we were nonetheless entering a kind of Eden — vetch tangled with brambles, maple saplings and the occasional wild iris. We were both entranced: the mondial groan and turbofart of the Lester B. Pearson International Airport had been utterly abstracted by this profound localism. In place of multi-storey car parks there was only an ear of wild wheat bowed to listen to the breeze.

Despite the season and the hour we were both sweating now, and I envied Reichman, because he was able to remove his coat, hat and cummerbund, then, with his back obscuring my view, unzip his case and pack them away inside. I sat groggily on the ground. When Reichman straightened up, Sherman was lying there in the long grass, naked in the half-light save for a skullcap — a newborn, middle-aged savant, with his clever thumb in his intelligent mouth. Nothing is ever funny twice, but it was cheering to hear that immortal line once again: ‘Can you tell me the way to Grods?’

But of course he wasn’t there — any more than my companion had disrobed outside on Shabbat; both visions were products of my fervid expectation, cooked up in waxed cotton. If I’d taken the Barbour off, I would have to have carried it over my shoulder like a child that had to be returned to its bed — and there was no bed to be found. Still, I went on half expecting Sherman, as all that long Saturday evening I continued hauling the frummer’s case through West Deane Park, Ravenscrest Park, Thomas Riley Park, until we eventually reached a jollily lit convenience store on Bloor Street, where I bought a bottle of Evian. He davened, I drank, then we went on again past apartment blocks and monstrous Tudorbethan houses further and further into the city.

Reichman may have been grateful to me for leading him through this suburban netherworld, but I was equally grateful to him. His sanctity enfolded me and I felt as hermetically sealed as a suitcase encased in polythene by one of those weird machines at the airport. I needed this: I needed my cheating heart to remain safely inside of me, foetally curled in my own dirty laundry. I had foolishly craved the freedom of travelling light, yet arrived in the New World more encumbered than ever. It was better to at least share the psychic burden, and so we went on until we reached the junction of Dundas and Spadina in Chinatown, where our ways naturally divided. Reichman got me to drag the bag the last few yards to where it could be temporarily entrusted to the doorman of an apartment block where some friends of his lived. Then, back out in the street, he turned to face me and said, ‘I can’t thank you enough. You’ve performed a great mitzvah — you will be blessed.’

He offered me his hand, but I had to restrain myself from grabbing his shirtfront and nestling into his beard.

‘You never told me your name,’ he said.

‘No,’ I answered. ‘I never did. But listen, leave me alone now like a good chap, will you. I’m footsore and sad, and I want…’ I nodded to the restaurant beside us, its window hung with orange-glazed ducks, ‘… to eat some pork.’

^* I’d never owned one of these waxed cotton jackets before — they were standard-issue country kit for the scions of the British upper and upper-middle classes and as such an anathema; but I needed a garment versatile enough to cope with a 30-degree temperature range and all kinds of precipitation. After the success of Stephen Frears’s The Queen (2006), in which Helen Mirren, looking frumpily monarchical, sported a Barbour while staring balefully at Scots glens cluttered with antlers, Americans couldn’t get enough of them and Stateside sales increased by 400 per cent. 40 per cent would’ve been too much — and yet, curiously, 4,000 per cent still credible — these were after all boom years.

^* Which is Vesper Enfärhschein’s edition of fifty copies of Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Settlement’, each a 45-page book, with 22 lines of type per page, each book measuring.45 of a millimetre square, leather bound, gilt-tooled and slip-covered.

4. The LongPen

Tony Blair stood, his Church’s shoes squishing into the Albertan muskeg, all his vaulting ambitions reduced to this halting lecture tour, all the breadth of his vision focused now on the 1.7 trillion barrels of bitumen — but why not 17,000,000,000,000, or 170,000,000,000? — that constitute the world’s largest oil deposit, the Athabasca Tar Sands. Meanwhile I rode up to the twenty-second floor of the Westin Harbour Castle Hotel — but why not the 220th, or a queered mezzanine between the second and third storeys? — already straitjacketed by Canadian politeness.

Inside the room there were the little comforts, the scaled-down soaps, the cotton buds and the sewing set borrowed from the Borrowers. On the back of the bathroom door hung a terrytowelling robe with a monogram that implied the hotel and I were one. Outside a window that had been shut for thirty-three years genotypic skyscrapers stood about the lake front, awaiting the call to stand in as parts of New York or Chicago.

By way of unpacking I took off the loathsome Barbour; then I rode the elevator up to the penthouse suite, where I registered for the book festival and received my folder full of never-to-be-read info-sheets. The roomesque space was dominated by paper doilies, muffins and a tub of vicious poinsettia; in the corner a tablet computer linked to a desktop computer sitting on a workstation. ‘The LongPen,’ a functionary in a knee-length cardigan dripped (Canadian gushing). ‘You’ve heard about it? Peggy Atwood’s invention so that authors can sign their books long distance.’

‘…’

‘We’re very excited to have it here — Peggy herself will be doing some signing during the festival.’

I was excited as well — sexually excited. I felt my penis sleepily unfurl in its 92 per cent cotton, 8 per cent Lycra burrow. I hadn’t had any erotic thoughts in a while — or, rather, I had repressed them savagely, since the adrenalized counting of licks, tweaks and caresses was a torment, let alone the division of caresses by licks, or the multiplication of tweaks by… grunts. But the LongPen could well be the solution, interposing thousands of miles between the infinitesimal motions of a single fingertip and the 8,000 nerve endings packed into a few thousandths of an inch of tissue. Although why not…?

‘Is the suite open twenty-four hours?’ I enquired innocently.

‘Uh, no,’ the cardigan rumpled suspiciously. ‘We’re staffed until midnight.’

‘Oh, OK.’ I filed the intelligence away.

For four days I lay in Room 2229, planning a trip out to have one of the eyelets on my left walking boot repaired. During the walk from the airport a metal grommet had become detached and the lace subjected to microwear — an aglet was splitting open. I lay there on the made bed and thought how strange it was that such a small thing could immobilize a grown man. And I thought about Nicholson Baker’s obsessive detailing of the microwear of his shoelaces in The Mezzanine, and I thought of Baker himself, with whom, a decade before, I had shared a stage at a similar book festival in Brighton. I remembered how pinheaded he had seemed — considering the size of his thoughts; and how later that night I had swallowed a powderywhite MDMA pill with a titchy dolphin stamped on it; and how still later I’d ended up in a boutique hotel room knocking back whisky miniatures with a man who will reappear at the end of this tale to confirm that my life has had no narrative — which implies a linear arrangement of events — but only spiralled either out of control, or into a vicious centrifuge of repetition and coincidence.

Enslaved characters from children’s classic literature shared Room 2229 with me — Stuart Little paddled up and down the bath in a birch-bark canoe, Moomintrolls trampolined on the pillows, the aforementioned Borrowers strung together climbing ropes out of my dental floss, then expertly tackled the four pitches necessary to ascend to the top of the armoire. Then they triumphantly rappelled back down with an individual UHT milk carton that they winched up to where I lay, pinioned by the invisible — yet unbreakable — hawsers of my obsessive-compulsive disorder. As they dribbled the last homogenized drops between my cracked lips, I croaked my thanks, then manumitted them.

Eventually I forced myself from Room 2229 and abseiled down the lift shaft into the subway. At the Royal Ontario Museum I became transfixed by the bags visiting high school students had left trustingly strewn across the lobby: how could anyone be allowed to receive an education who insisted on dragging about that much stuff? And transfixed again in a subterranean gallery by the pensées of the former premiere Pierre Trudeau: ‘To remove all the useless baggage from a man’s heritage is to free his mind from petty preoccupations, calculations and memories.’

If it had worked for him, what was he doing here — or at least a photograph of his younger self, in white T-shirt and belted jeans? More to the point, what was the very canoe that he had been paddling when he had this epiphany doing here? Looking round I realized that this wasn’t so much an exhibition as a lumber room, with items from the museum’s permanent collections cast about willy-nilly: a Mercedes saloon got up with wood, a shamanic grizzly bear cast in bronze, and behind this shape-shifter Bacon’s Study for Portrait No.1, the reflex-dilation of Pope Innocent’s anus-dentata as shockingly disregarded as it must once have been when it leant against the wall in the artist’s South Kensington studio.

‘I’m sorry, sir, there’s no photography allowed.’

‘But I’m not photographing anything.’

‘Sir, no photography.’

‘I’m not taking pictures, I’m looking at them.’

The vertically aligned cooker knobs and key-in-lock coition from an ocean away had undone me: I desperately needed reassurance that things had been turned off and closed up, because in my mind’s eye my house was a burning oil well, shedding hairy-black smoke all over the neighbourhood.

Using Canadian magic, the guard pushed me with disapproval alone towards the stairs… and stumping along behind him, swinging one abbreviated leg in front of the other, came another who had more reason to. But no! This was ridiculous, if I carried on like this I’d soon be kitting Sherman out in a hooded shiny-red raincoat and putting a dagger in his hand.

I managed to thrust Sherman away but he rejoined me at the Eaton Center, where I was scanning the directory for a heel bar. He stood sizing up the atrium, and comparing it unfavourably — in loud un-Canadian tones — to the Galleria Umberto 1: ‘Yeah, these fat Canucks could do with a little risanamento, d’jewknowhatImean? Look at that muffin stand — oops! Sorry, it isn’t a muffin stand, it’s some people queuing for a muffin stand.’

He snatched at the air, as if given sufficient reach he might tear down the flock of model birds suspended from the barrel-vaulted ceiling, and hymned the absurd complaisance of the city government: ‘The base of the figure’ll be down there by the fountains on the lower level — but this one won’t stand upright, instead one arm’ll extend along the second level, and one leg will sorta kick through the atrium, while the other arm and shoulder brace against the roof. It’s the biggest yet, mate — a logistical nightmare, of course…’

Novelty Shoe Rebuilders offered a ‘waiting service’, so I waited in socked feet while a cobbler replaced the eyelet of my boot with practised economy. ‘Will that be all?’ he asked. I forbore from mentioning the aglet.

‘There were no egos up there.’ His name was Dan, and he wore a CND badge, the roundel formed by gaping red lips. He also had grey hair in a ponytail and a grey beard. No egos? No fucking egos! I wanted to scream at him: I’m all ego, my friend, I’m a Babushka doll of egos — ego-inside-ego-inside-ego-inside-ego-inside-ego. Hell, if you unscrewed the fifth ego you’d probably find another one in there ready to shout you down as well.

But I didn’t say anything of the kind, because this was Toronto and we were buried somewhere deep inside the Harbourfront’s concretized bollix, and Dan had just been chairing the ‘event’ I’d come all this way to participate in — an event that had involved me sitting onstage with the actor David Thewlis. In truth, Thewlis didn’t seem at all egocentric — more to the point, he was actual size, which was something of a shock because one’s so used to actors being either much smaller than their image on a movie screen, or much larger than the one on the TV.

Thewlis, who had written an amiable comic novel, had a slightly prominent top lip, a wispy moustache and lean, expressive good looks. If there were to be a biopic of my life I’d want to be played by him. I tried to ingratiate myself with him while we waited backstage by mentioning mutual acquaintances, and he chatted away amiably enough. Onstage he was still more comically self-deprecating. He wore an expensive and globular watch that he brought up to his face from time to time, so that his finger and thumb could twist the end of his moustache. I found this tremendously amiable — and not comical at all.

Afterwards, when the books had been signed, I was on the point of suggesting we go get something to eat, when Thewlis was whisked away by his entourage, leaving me with Dan. It was a shame, because I’d wanted to ask him about his role in Mike Leigh’s Naked. It was the first time I’d noticed Thewlis and I thought his performance mesmeric and bruising — like being beaten up by a hypnotist. It was widely known that Leigh worked largely by improvisation, encouraging his actors to bring their own characters to the set, then spurring them on to create dialogue and action spontaneously. In the opening scene of the film Thewlis’s alter ego, Johnny, was having vigorous congress with a woman in an alley. But was it rape? Some might say that consent is a very little thing — but is it? I wanted an answer to this, a question that had haunted endless late-night conversations in the mid-1990s — after all, Thewlis should know.

Much later that night I lay in Room 2229 unable to sleep and regretting having freed my mini-slaves. I rose, dressed and laced my boots — appreciating the neat job that had been done on the eyelet. Then I went for a walk around the cavernous hotel counting my charged paces in tens, then hundreds; counting the emergency stairs in tens, then hundreds; stopping beside service carts and riffling the shampoo miniatures — then moving on.

In the morning the driver who drove me to the airport was tight-lipped. I could understand why — the highway was wide and terrifyingly nondescript, the buildings resisted the anthropomorphism of scale, the sky over Lake Ontario was bigger than a nebula. I scanned the verges of the freeway; even though it was midweek I hoped against hope that Reichman had got the walking bug, and I would see him pulling his own suitcase back to Pearson.

The driver took a call on his cell phone and listened intently to the muffled squeaking.

‘Pest control problem?’ I asked when he hung up.

‘You could say that,’ he answered curtly. ‘The festival’s suite at the hotel was broken into last night. Things were done with the LongPen… dreadful things.’

5. There is Hope — Make the Call

‘Excuse me sir, you have too many things in your pockets.’

We stood on a desert island of carpet tiles somewhere in the placid lagoon of Pearson International Airport. I was a pre-wrecked Crusoe; she was a squat mermaid of South Asian extraction with blue-black hair. She wore a nylon jacket with fluorescent patches that bulged at the hips and the fishtail of her lower body was poured into black slacks. At least it was healthy flesh and not all the necrotic stuff I had wadded into the Barbour, stuff she began to gingerly extract with rubber-gloved hands, laying it all out on the brushed steel.

I waited with the Ohrwurm boring into me: a tiny finger flutter of the keys, the entire orchestra dangling from the pianist’s hangnail…

The security woman unearthed the tiny plastic tomb within which this vast and resonant performance of Beethoven’s third piano concerto — by Daniel Barenboim with the London Philharmonic — was interred. She bunched up the skirt of the Barbour, appalled to discover yet another pocket — the poacher’s — and unzipping it removed the small corpse of my rolled-up plastic trousers.

Leaving Tor-Buff-Chester (a mega-region embracing Toronto that stretches all the way from Buffalo to Quebec City, and has an annual $530 billion of economic activity) was proving more difficult than anticipated. ‘The concert piano and all wind instruments bore me in small doses and flay me in large ones,’ contended Uncle Vladimir — meaning ‘bore’ as in ‘induce tedium’. I didn’t feel that way: my ability to build a concert hall in the inches between my ears was the only thing that made all of this — the queuing, the carpet tiling, the pornographic X-raying of my possessions — remotely tolerable.

Then, aloft, as the Northwest flight skipped across the dimpled Great Lakes, I dipped carottes coupées et pellées in trempette ranch, while little Daniel braced himself in the aisle and puuuushed! with his fluttery fingers, so that the entire fuselage of the plane widened and the trolley dollies could dance about one another in Busby Beethoven routines.

There were 216 private jets booked into Miami International Airport for the Miami Basel Art Fair. ‘Fine art is a luxury good, and so there is a natural marketing synergy, a comparable customer profile and a similar trend cycle,’ or so said Jeremy Laing, the Canadian fashion wunderkind. I wondered if Sherman would be there: he was outwardly disdainful of money, contending that if he sought the maximum for his pieces and ruthlessly hired, fired and even circumvented his gallerists, it was only to further the work.

‘I’m just a very little man making very big things,’ he’d said when I last taxed him with posing for the cover of a glossy auction house magazine. ‘And you have to appreciate the costs involved: the planning, the technical drawings, the lobbying — materials and fabrication are only the tip of the iceberg.’

I hadn’t observed that the end result was as egotistic as any other monumentalism, and that really spending his money extravagantly might be of more benefit to others than these iron giants trampling down the hills, or standing forlorn in the Seine. I hadn’t, for the shameful reason… but there was also Sherman’s indisputable generosity: restaurant bills paid without a murmur, plane tickets chucked like paper darts, and opera seats offered offhand.

And yet… and yet… I was never entirely comfortable with his largesse; was it all adding up to a costly obligation? Besides, Sherman devalued his gifts by exhibiting the appetitive disdain I’d noticed in others like him — those who, by their own efforts, had worked their way up from a comfortable childhood to being seriously rich.

Sherman had shirts and suits tailored by the score; and, as he advanced through life, Baltie brought up the rear, picking up the clothes that had been discarded by his boss because they were slightly soiled. Sherman bought bottles of Cristal, drank half a glass, then, gripped by a whim for a pint of lager, climbed down from tables doodled with costly food — dots of Beluga caviar, scrawls of langoustine — and marched away, leaving Baltie to settle the bill. Sherman — having already extracted a Hoyo de Monterrey Petit Robusto from the humidor that went everywhere with them — would wait at the kerb: a fire hydrant spurting smoke. Needless to say, the expensive cigar was stomped to shreds after a few puffs.

‘When I see a guy lighting a cigarette as I turn the corner, I don’t think he’s gonna be taking the bus!’

I could see her point, but I’d been waiting for the service for a while and even in the northern Californian sunshine everything was weighing heavily on me: I needed a smoke. The timing was wrong for a walk into town — besides without a Reichman to goad I didn’t really have the oomph. I thought of the days ahead of me, the paltry rituals of a man alone in a strange city: reading suppers — possibly a concert, an excursion to see the Golden Gate Bridge.

The Metroline bus blatted along I-29, through the cleft of the buttocky hills, one of which bore the tattoo CITY OF INDUSTRY. I’d never liked San Francisco in all the time I’d been visiting; for me the city always remained tangled in the fallen freeways of the 1989 earthquake, and these, in turn, contained within their distressed steel and clots of concrete the ghost of the 1906 earthquake with its subprime fatalities — 300, 3,000 or 30,000? The tenderloin was a cut of putrefying meat, crawling with tramp-flies and shoved in the face of tourists, and in the Prescott Hotel on Post Street where I had slumped, stifled by swags, pelmets, tassels, throw cushions — all the amniotic padding of an embryonic luxury — I noticed for the first terrifying time that reflected in the mirror the label of the mineral water bottle read NAIVE.

I couldn’t believe that San Francisco had been hiding these big things from me — but there they were, floodlit: a concert hall, a city hall, some kind of library or museum, all stacked along avenues wide enough to gladden Albert Speer. No doubt in Sacramento there would be a state capitol that was a copy — near enough — of the one in Washington; it was the same throughout the States: prêt-à-porter legislatures and courts, bought from the Great Framers up in heaven.

I had booked the best seat in the house, the plush throne of B1 in the balcony. High above the stage dangled enormous transparent sound-bafflers, and as the soloist mounted the keys with his fingers, climbing up and up to the tremolo peak of the allegro, I wondered how great a compass of emotion might be contained between one note and another, dreadfully pinched by the minims. The Ohrwurm bored on into my cheesy brain, proof — if any were needed — that I was already dead.

I zombied back towards the Prescott under a full and ruddy moon, appraising the bitten-off cripples along Market Street: what diabolic ghoul could have taken that leg or arm? Surely not these slim Latino girls bussed in from the Bay Area? They sported fetching light-up devil horns and glittery red micro-mini dresses, and cavorted on the sidewalks goosing one another with outsized plastic forks.

Ploughing my way through burger ’n’ fries in the laminated belly of the Pinecrest Diner, I envied them all the easily converted currencies of youth: sex and bullshit. Envied even the kid who sat opposite me, the hood of his H. H. Geiger alien rubber suit pushed up off his brow to expose the pained maquillage of pimples and white-blond bum-fluff.

At the Prescott yet again, I naively slept, then cynically dream-dollied myself in through the doors of the Moscone Convention Center. The Little People of America were gathered — no less grotesque than any who sport celluloid name badges, yet certainly no greater. My mobile phone rang and I answered it as quickly as I could, although not fast enough: a clutch of dwarfs swarmed about me. ‘Have some goddamn respect,’ said a termagant with a perm as tight and prickly as a burr. ‘Can’t you see there’re royalty present?’

What gives? Sherman’s voice in my ear.

‘Um, n-nothing.’

Are you attending some kind of levee?

‘I thought the lady told you to cut that out!’

The phone was snatched from my hand, and before I could remonstrate there was a Nagasaki of flashes, a low moan, and the dwarfs surged towards the main doors — then were checked by a force field of awe.

Tiptoeing into the convention centre came a brother and sister; they had the same white-golden hair, worn shoulder length, and must have been in their late teens. They held hands, and seemed not so much shy as bemused by the adoration they had provoked. I noticed first the tiny patchwork denim bag the girl wore slung over one shoulder, then their savagely undershot jaws and keel noses, then their stature: for they stood at most twenty, maybe twenty-one inches high.

‘Aren’t they beautiful?’ said the burr-headed woman, clutching my leg so fiercely that her nails dug into the tendon behind my knee.

‘Beautiful,’ sighed the little man who’d snatched my phone. He pulled a silk handkerchief from his blazer pocket and mopped his eyes.

I understood that these were the dwarfs’ dwarfs, embodying for them all the aesthetic qualities the actual sized ascribe to the miniature. Wishing Lévi-Strauss was with me, I found myself being pushed forward and instinctively I offered my hand to the primordial dwarf girl. She rearranged the strap of her handbag and I was acutely aware of the quail’s ribcage beneath her doll’s cardigan — then the grossness of my fingers, with their elephant’s knees knuckles and fertile crescents of dirt beneath the nails. As our hands Sistined together she turned to quicksilver and burst into a spray of droplets, one of which hung from the chin of the burr-headed woman. I stared at this bubble world and saw in its mirrored convexity the dwarf conventioneers, the concrete and glass of the foyer, and my own moon face, cratered by its passage through deep space.

I awoke with the Barbour’s waxen arms wrapped around me, my face buried in its musty tartan lining, its double zips nipping my neck — and couldn’t stop weeping until a young woman in the line for the breakfast buffet offered me a Kleenex and said, ‘I’d appreciate it if you didn’t.’ Determined to walk away these black-and-blues, I went back to my room, packed the Barbour’s pockets, then headed out into the sunshine.

The temperature was in the mid-seventies and the jacket wasn’t a mistake — it was burden that had to be endured as I toiled up Nob and downhill, passing show couples with show dogs posing outside pacific patisseries. I cursed myself for a fool: far from being unencumbered here was I, beneath an ice cream headache, sweating with the exertion of carrying a shooting jacket.

At Marina Boulevard, where the Palace of Fine Arts hid its Moorish fakery behind an arras of pines, I nearly gave up — my progression was purely arithmetic. Only the previous week, when I was either 53,710 or 537 miles away, district officials had scuttled the idea of plastering the Golden Gate with corporate advertising. ‘If you ain’t into this you real sucka,’ J. J. Bigga told the 500- 50-? 5,000-? — strong audience at the Cow Palace… House repos were up 622 per cent to 10,427 in the last quarter… or was it 104,270, or even 1,042? At Crissy Field I stopped a bucktoothed Scotswoman on a bike and asked her for directions to the inconceivably big thing that arced through the haze to the green hills above Sausalito, and she looked at me the way the sane look at the mad.

I plodded on — the Barbour was a waxwork effigy of William Cavendish, 4th Duke of Devonshire, which melted across my shoulders. I set the sludge down on the grass and moulded it into a semblance of Alcatraz, which stood off in the bay. Then I took it up once more and went on, while my LongPen shaded in an afternoon two months previously: an exhibition of Ron Mueck works at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh, where, wandering through the rooms, I was arrested by the follicle-perfect dummy of a depressed woman lying in bed, her white face five times life size. Around the peak of her nose a security guard came hurrying — he told me to stop taking photographs. Perhaps if he’d been a Canadian he would’ve added, civilly, ‘It’ll do you no good to confront your past writ large. Besides, that is not your mother, wrung out by postnatal depression and eking out the years between parturition and cancer with gardening and library books.’

At the time I’d realized that what Mueck was doing reversed everything I thought I understood about the distortion of scale: far from his giantess being a purely intelligible object, she was all feeling — her desperation magnified until it filled the gallery with the ultrasonic howl of a harpooned leviathan—

Mounting the path that switch-backed up through Fort Point National Heritage Site, I was seized not by the Ektachrome of the evergreens and the waters of the bay; nor by the towers of the bridge that rose up before me, which appeared sandy-damp, as if freshly moulded by giant hands, then raised by massed Lilliputians drawing on their steel cables. What grabbed me were the walkers, in their T-shirts and sneakers, their jeans and sweat pants, who converging on the bridge’s approach reached a pedestrian density I’d seldom seen in the States before, except in an airport concourse, a mall or Midtown Manhattan.

I, better than most, understood the compelling urge to walk across a big thing, an urge separated by a mere carpaccio of neurones from the compelling urge to throw yourself off it. It goes without saying that thoughts of suicide were never absent, but burbled repetitively in my ear — ‘Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself’ — just as did the stream of anxiety: ‘You forgot to turn off the gas/shut-and-lock the door’ and, more recently, the times-10/divide-by-10 tic. It took only the signs to alert me: EMERGENCY PHONE AND CRISIS COUNSELING and then, a few score paces on, CRISIS COUNSELING. THERE IS HOPE. MAKE THE CALL. THE CONSEQUENCES OF JUMPING FROM THIS BRIDGE ARE FATAL AND TRAGIC.

If I had had any reservations at all the ‘and tragic’ banished them entirely. The composers of the signs understood entirely not merely the anger-born-of-fear of the felo de se — in my view an emotion much exaggerated — but, more importantly, our narcissism. Yes! A tragedy! That’s what it would be, a fucking tragedy, I had been cut down in my prime, after struggling manfully for years against this debilitating condition, one that I had — still more tragically — vouchsafed to hardly a soul. My notebooks, left open on the table in my room at the Prescott, would explain all that, explain also the awful shame that pursued me, the tiny Eumenides sprung from the Titan’s blood.

By the time I had reached the middle of the bridge, and was standing there listening to the wind shear lament through the cables, and watching the drop yawn below me, I had succumbed to its sublime contours. If the monumental was an architecture of social control, then what could be said of monumental bridges, save that they were very obviously for jumping off — that they in fact ordered you to jump off them? ‘Jump!’ they bellowed, sergeant-majors on the vast parade ground of civilization, and so the Mayans, the Easter Islanders, the Norse Greenlanders, the Romans and now the entire West did their bidding.

What possible purchase could Section 2193 of the State of California’s Penal Code have on the profound gravity of this situation; for this was about physics, about small things and big things — people hardly entered into it. And in those last few moments, when a woman in a hijab heading one way and a Japanese — American woman eating a beanshoot salad from a Tupperware container as she strolled the other, simultaneously gasped as I vaulted nimbly on to the thick, rivet-warty girder of the balustrade, my loved ones were of scarcely any concern, being irredeemably actual size.

I had hoped… for what? A game of Scrabble on the way down, or to get married, or at the very least to link hands with a serendipitous octet of fellow self-murderers — the drop had certainly looked big enough for such skydiving antics. After all, the waves in the bay were wrinkles, while from up there downtown San Francisco had no more civilization than a playroom Lego ruin.

As I fell towards the deceptively yielding pavé of the bay (and, believe me, like all suicides, I knew just how hard the impact would be, foresaw entirely the Faroese slaughter of my expiration: a small pink whale gashed open and wallowing in a cloudy red stain), I also anticipated feeling this consolation: that I had cast the beastly Barbour aside, and so was meeting my fate without any baggage at all, no plasticized Beethoven, no paperback Great Expectations, no rolled-up plastic trousers, no waxed cotton class suit; I was going to my execution as every baby-boomer should: in a T-shirt and Levis, bravely refusing Ray-Bans.

So it was with a sense of fretful — almost pettish — annoyance that I realized Death was bopping me on the head without any more ado, that my extinction, far from being profoundly protracted, was to have all the grand tragedy of a prankster creeping up behind me and suddenly yanking down the woolly hat I’d forgotten I was sporting, so that I was entombed in a tickly darkness — for all eternity.

I came to in a large poorly lit room notable for a tacky earthenware statue of the Buddha on a low table. This Gautama had an expression not so much spiritual as obscurely self-satisfied, while the joss sticks set before him curdled brown smoke into the gloom. Around me shuffled the shades, all dressed in floppy shirts and baggy pants of faun, umber and other earthy tones, which looked to be woven from flax, or hemp, or some other retro-fibre.

My groan hearkened one of these souls to me; he or she was suitably inter-sex, with sepia hair scraped into a mule tail and circular wire-rimmed spectacles. ‘Would you like an urbal tea?’ he or she asked gently. ‘We’ve got most varieties, cardamom, caraway seed, ginger?’

‘Whatever,’ I pleaded, and he or she footed soundlessly away.

A lissom man, with a sandy trowel-shaped beard and the tense look of someone who practises yoga furiously, mounted the low platform behind the Buddha and concertinaed into a full lotus as easily as I might’ve scratched my arse (when alive). Despite my recent death I could sense the aggression radiating from this man, and as he picked up a small brass mallet and tapped a bell his mild features writhed with barely repressed fury.

I was remarkably unfazed.

‘For our dharma discussion today,’ announced the sandy Sangha, ‘I will be taking suggestions; anything you wish guidance on I am happy to consider—’

‘It’s vervain,’ said the shade, pressing a tepid mug into my hand. ‘Enjoy.’

Remarkably unfazed because this all seemed altogether just: that the Tibetan Buddhist cosmology should turn out to be correct and that my own bardo should — at least initially — take the form of a room full of the angriest people in the world: occidental Buddhists. Of course, what would begin to happen when my ego started to disintegrate I shuddered to think; presumably in place of the multi-headed demons that tormented Tibetans I’d be visited with my own bogeybeings; perhaps the fibrous Buddhists would transmogrify into giant Bionicles, those weirdly skeletal robotic toys loved by my youngest child that had techno-scimitars and laser guns for arms, and could be posed on their long legs so as to delve surgically in their victims’ innards.

‘Drug addiction and the dharma,’ offered one seeker. ‘Dharma and movement practice,’ said a second. ‘The three pearls,’ a third in lotus position said, his thick glasses like an insect’s compound eyes.

‘OK, OK,’ the Sangha snorted. ‘That’s enough — we could go on all night taking suggestions and have no time for instruction.’

The seekers tittered obsequiously, while behind the Sangha’s enlightened head I could see the dark ballooning of a massive and unconstrained ego.

‘I’m, I’m…’ I grasped the wrist of the exiguous urbalist who had coiled into the canvas chair beside me, ‘not dead, am I?’

‘Heavens no,’ s/he relied in a beige undertone. ‘You poor man, you fell backwards from the parapet of the Golden Gate Bridge on to the walkway there and were brought by paramedics into the rescue centre. We get a lot of sufferers such as yourself; if there isn’t absolute proof that a person is trying suicide’ — ‘trying’, I liked that, it suggested that suicide was only one of the options available from the smorgasbord of inexistence — ‘then the Bridge cops are happy to, like, outsource—’

‘It seems,’ the sandy Sangha’s gentle voice was viciously clenched, ‘that someone with us this evening has a more nuanced interpretation of the three pearls; so, would you like to share?’

The urbalist bowed his/her head in abject shame. I, however, was on the point of rising up and chinning the fraud, but was forestalled by a commotion from the doors — that and the sharp pain in the back of my head, which was — I now realized — swathed in a crêpe bandage.

One of the slipshod sannyasas came shuffling down the aisle and bent to whisper, ‘Your friend is here now to collect you.’

Friend? What friend? As I limped to the door, passing by the rows of outlines of devotion, I racked my bruised brain: I had no friend in San Francisco, nor — without being self-piteous — did I have that many friends anywhere. Besides, how might such a friend have found me?

The answer to the second question came in the form of the Barbour, thrust into my unwilling arms so that it hung, slick and black as a roosting flying fox. The answer to the first was Sherman Oaks, who stood out on the Sausalito sidewalk, pulling intemperately on a stogie.

In that instant of recognition, my eyes drinking in the scant three feet of him, I realized a thing at once terrifying and beautiful: it wasn’t that the Buddhists had been rendered indistinct by their quest for the white void, or that the community hall within which they were assembled was any more vapid than such places usually are — it was me. Had I suffered some pinpoint-accurate injury to my visual cortex, or was this only a form of hysteria? Whichever the case, the result was the same: casting wildly about the main street of the chichi resort town, I could make out the outlines of all intermediately sized things — such as cars, people and the no-good pagoda of Spinnakers seafood restaurant — but not their infill; whereas the very large things that blocked in the horizon — the hills, the bridge, Alcatraz — retained their detailing even in the twilight.

Then there was Sherman, who, with his potbelly and droopy ears, was truly the presiding spirit of the very little, and who stood proud of the indistinctiveness of his setting, just as the very little things in the window of the Swarovski’s across the road — crystal strawberries dimpled with brilliants, vitrified bouquets half an inch high — leapt to my retina and swarmed there as veridical as after-images.

Naturally, I said nothing of this to Sherman, who anyway only left off barking into his own phone to bark at me: ‘They checked your phone to see who you’d called recently, then rang a few people. I happened to have been in SF for the Web 2.0 thing, flew here from Miami, so I came out to get you, you dumb fuck.’

The outline of a Range Rover pulled up to the kerb, the outline of Baltie at the wheel.

‘Yeah, yeah, I know. I have to see some people at Stanford in the morning, then I’ll be with you at lunchtime—’ He broke off again: ‘Go on, get in the car willya?’

I got into the back seat and Sherman clambered into the front. Baltie’s shape said ‘Hi’, with that special tone people reserve for failed suicides, at once sympathetic and reassuringly annoyed, as if to say: See the trouble you’ve put us to!

Within minutes we were tooling back over the bridge, the tyres of the big car drumming the deck plates, the mighty lyre of the cables strumming past. At last, shorn of the encumbrance of any human scale whatsoever — no finicky aerials or watertank bobbins — the San Francisco skyline acquired, for me, the majesty others always claimed they found in it. Once we were down off the bridge and augering into the core of downtown, the sidewalks were as unthreatening as Hanna-Barbera backdrops, the homeless mere silhouettes, the traffic no longer steely but graphite — reduced to a few pencil marks on the fronts of the buildings.

I made a conscious decision to say nothing of this… nothingness to Sherman, while he treated my rescue as simply another chore to be completed with despatch. ‘What’ve you got on here?’ he rapped as the Range Rover pulled up beside the Prescott. I muttered something about a book reading at the City Lights in two days’ time. ‘Fine, then. You can come out to Stanford and the Google Campus with me tomorrow in the day — we’ll pick you up around ten. If you need me you’ve got the number, we’re staying in the Transamerica building, they rent out a penthouse suite.’

As I prepared to insert my stick body into the line drawing of my bed I pictured Sherman in his odd accommodation, at the very apex of the Transamerica’s 48-storey white granite-faced pyramid. With Baltie a hieroglyph on the marble wall, Sherman rollicked back and forth in this despotic bed and breakfast, stubbing out a Hoyo here, snatching up a glass of champagne over there, consulting a sale catalogue while he barked at Borzois in Kiev, or Pekineses in Beijing. I wondered if, in all that restless communication, he had taken the time to reassure my family, who might have been concerned by the phone call from the paramedics who had scooped me up from the Golden Gate Bridge. Wondered this — yet felt powerless to call them myself.

This latest episode in my relationship with Sherman had taken things to another level. I knew that my behaviour in the past had been shameful, yet this very Dickensian coincidence — of which I could’ve had no great expectation when I teetered atop the parapet — brought home to me quite how much psychic baggage I was carrying with me.

Perhaps I should’ve felt more disturbed by the excision of any sense of proportion that I had once had, and its replacement by a thick fog of mediocrity welling up from San Francisco Bay. I didn’t, though, for since having come to Marin County and listened to the pugnacious Sangha, I had been blissfully free of the multiplier and the divisor.

Lying in the darkness of the Prescott, I ran over the stats: the bridge was 8,981 feet long, the longest span was 4,200 feet. It was 746 feet high, and there were 80,000 miles of wire in its main cables, while approximately 1,200,000 rivets had been used in its construction. Between its completion in 1937 and 2005, more than 1,200 people had jumped the 245 feet to their death in the chill waters below. 1,200, not 120 nor yet 120,000, but 1,200 — these figures were incontrovertible: the facts on the ground.

5.5

The Last Nurdle

Watch it bigger day by day! Natural manhood enhancement! Easily to get male package… Demetrius Erectile Organ Cosmic. Gargantuan Penis Beau. Reach out and bone someone… I stood in the restroom at the Googleplex, Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, and these came back to me: Fuck Stick Ample Floyd. Rosa Full-Size Fuck Stick. Body part enlarged shown. FannieMonumentalCock… Manglings of syntax and grammar that nonetheless got across the hollow promise that a credit card number could be exchanged for Viagra — and Cialis and Ambien, should you so choose.

I stood at the urinal and held on, remembering these emails spammed at me through the yielding tissue of virtual reality. It wasn’t that I thought any of Google’s 450,000 servers might be implicated in this huge trafficking of drugs intended to make the relatively little grow bigger; it was just that the laminated sheet of programming tips tacked above the urinal naturally tended one’s thoughts in that direction; this, and the fact that one was holding one’s LongPen.

‘Testing on the Toilet’, the sheet was headed; beside it were two light bulbs, one happy and shining, the other upside down, dim and sad. Below that the screed continued: ‘Normally people are only interested in the test data for coverage files…’ but I couldn’t read any further, it was all impenetrably technical to me — and besides, I’d pissed on my shoes.

Back past the niches containing the electric toothbrushes and facecloths of the never resting microserfs, back past the misaligned bookcases, the dangling model jet engines, the defunct servers piled up into statuary and the colossal novelty beanbags, I found Sherman and Baltie in the canteen noshing on piles of bean sprouts and slurping smoothies. ‘Get yourself a tray,’ Sherman commanded; ‘you need to build up your strength.’

I supposed I should’ve felt more grateful to Sherman than I did; after all, he had scooped me up in San Francisco and incorporated me into his whirlwind schedule. That morning we had already visited the Stanford Linear Accelerator, where he had discussed plans with the facility’s director to site a Sherman piece alongside the two-mile-long klystron gallery, which — as both men saw fit to inform me — was the longest building in the States.

‘The longest building — quite right!’ Sherman had crowed as we puttered through the campus in the Range Rover, past the great Romanesque halls of learning. ‘While the accelerator itself is the world’s straightest object! That’s why this body form will be so sinuous, with arms and legs cuddling the gallery, cheek pressed against it. I particularly like the fact,’ he continued as Baltie angled the Range Rover up the slip road on to Highway 280, ‘that the whole installation lies right across the San Andreas fault. The next time there’s a big one, my piece and the accelerator will go down together, erotically entwined, spurting electrons and positrons in a lava death fuck!’

I doubted that Stanford would’ve let Sherman anywhere near the collider if they’d heard him talk in these terms — but then I doubted this piece would ever get made; it seemed to be just another of the notions sprouting from the artist’s ever fertile mind as he revolved around the world. True, plenty of Shermans were getting made — a group of three mediumsized thirty-footers had been erected in Death Valley only the previous week — but the ratio of planned to enacted Shermans did seem to be shifting decisively.

After our veggie lunch at the Googleplex, Sherman lectured the employees for over an hour on ways in which their 450,000 servers might be adapted to serve his own ends. He proposed Sherman start pages, Sherman links and Sherman levies on advertisers. He quite seriously entertained the idea of a Shermanet (at least, disloyally, that’s how I thought of it), with each Google search contributing to the creation of a body form so large it could exist only in cyberspace. ‘Your servers process a petabyte of data every hour — fifty petabytes is roughly equal to the entire written works of humankind up until now…’ He looked significantly at me, scrunched up in the front row trying to hide the pee stains on my shoes.

‘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.

In the backstreets of Watts, Sherman told me about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area of the Pacific a thousand miles west of California and twice the size of Texas. He expatiated on how discarded plastic from all over the globe had become concentrated there: ‘Packing tape, plastic soldiers, widgets, grommets, webbing, shopping bags — you name it! It all pitches up in the Patch, and there it photo-degrades, breaking down and down and down, into littler and littler blobs known as — I kid you not — “nurdles”.’

He seemed oblivious of the miniature gravestones and other Halloween decorations studding the front yards of the tumbledown frame houses — immune also to any sense of threat in this, one of the most feared ‘hoods in South Central. It occurred to me, observing the way cars slowed and fingers pointed, that here it was not Sherman’s restricted size that attracted attention — no one was playing ‘Child or Dwarf’ — but only the fact of our age, our colour and our class. All Hallows’ Eve was nigh, and the gun crews who tried dicking with us were warned off by our middle-aged, middle-class, white man horror masks.

We stood beneath the airy minarets of the Towers and Sherman tugged his beard. I understood where the nurdling had been leading: he was intent on matching Simon Rodia’s awesome feat of bricolage with one of his own: ‘There has to be a way to fuse all that plastic into a single sculpted agglomeration—’

‘You mean a body form?’ I queried, knowing full well the answer.

‘Yes, yes, a body form of course!’

And I saw the monstrous baby staggering upright from the horizon, its chubby arms formed by billions of nurdles.

5.25

It’s a Small World

At the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Downtown LA I struck up a friendship with Felipe on the concierge’s desk. He had an outsized pencil that reminded me of the ones I had on my desk at home — one blue, one lead — writing implements that juxtaposed amusingly with my minumental figurine of Sherman’s Behemoth. Felipe used his big pencil to doodle while he waited for guests to ask him things: Where’s this — or that? How do I get to…? Can you recommend? When he was distracted in this way I took the opportunity to swivel the ledger and examine the doodles, but there seemed no precise relation between the series of boxes, circles, triangles and these enquiries.

I say friendship, but I doubt Felipe thought I was anything but a saddo, flopping around the colossal atrium of the hotel, peering disconsolately into the ornamental fountain, or else standing caught in the fugue of minimal preference, looking from one souvenir to the next in the gift concession. I had a reading to give at the Los Angeles Public Library, but apart from this my time was my own. I forced myself out to wander the stepped pyramid of Bunker Hill, pausing in its cigarette-packet-sized parks to admire the crumpled tinfoil public sculpture.

There were no calls from Sherman — there couldn’t be any network coverage out there on the Bonneville Salt Flats. Baltie revved up the earth mover, then slipped the clutch. ‘Hey!’ his boss cried, rattling around in the jump seat as they doodled across the crystalline page, describing a line that could be erased only by a once-in-a-decade ‘rain event’. In Beverly Hills Britney had retreated to the shower stall to speak to an interviewer from Coast FM — I could hear the pitter-patter lying on my bed at the Westin. The kids were arriving for their court-ordered time with Mom.

Felipe, seeing how loose my ends were becoming, malevolently suggested I might like to visit a carniceria out in East LA, so I walked over Bunker Hill to Broadway and waited among the baggage, the denim and the rolled gold for the 31 bus. It ground across the bridge over the Inca runnel of the Los Angeles River, then along 1st Street, while I watched in-bus American Latino TV: adobe men in white hoodies yapping like Disney characters for a public health campaign.

It was mid-morning and the carniceria sat beside the dusty road, a nondescript three-storey building. Inside, the narrow aisles lined with chiller cabinets smelt of blood and there was sawdust on the floor. Signs read FOOD STAMPS ACEPTAMOS, the lighting was yellow and blue, pigs’ trotters lay in a stepped pyramid climbed by lost flies. There was no one about — I reached across to where a cleaver lay on a wooden chopping board scored with never-to-be-erased blows. I hefted the cleaver — it felt right, perfectly weighted. I only let it fall, applying no force — only let the inertia carry it through its short arc, the same way my late father-in-law had told me to play a golf stroke: letting the weight of the club head follow through the ball, which in this case was a chunk of my thigh, and a neat slice of my jeans. The fabric absorbed the blood from the meat — a few drops fell across the sawdust.

I had a handkerchief with me and I tied it round my leg, thinking I looked acceptably Peckinpah. Or at least I must have done this, because when I was myself again I was standing on the parched grass of the Evergreen Cemetery, looking at the effaced tombstones of Civil War dead, and there was the tourniquet and the ferrous red on my spasmodic hands.

Sherman called that evening and when he realized the state I was in he had Baltie drive him back into town from Palm Springs. ‘You are fucked up, man,’ he said, finding me lying in my slough at the top of the yellow tower in the Westin. I’d stolen Felipe’s big pencil and scrawled stuff on the walls: ‘Very little application, very little hope, very little probity, very little…’

‘Sherm,’ I croaked, ‘there’re things we need to talk about — stuff to do with the past.’

‘I don’t wanna hear about it,’ he snapped, then: ‘Yup, no, Vargas has the necessary financial instruments.’ He turned his back on me and toddled to the window, continuing the call — which seemed to be something to do with piling up five dressed-stone body forms at Machu Picchu. It was left to Baltie to haul over the business directory and find a doctor who’d do a house call.

The next day Baltie drove us south through the flatlands to Anaheim. It was an interminable journey, strip after mall after strip. I suppose I must have been a little feverish, and despite — or perhaps because of — the OxyContin the doctor had prescribed, I kept slipping sideways from consciousness, only to slice back in as we pulled up at another stoplight and there was Sherman’s blocky head spewing words and cigar smoke: ‘There’s no sense to that, if the base plate is being fabricated in Manaus it will have to be taken down the Amazon…’

At Disneyland, Sherman explained: ‘I think you’re in need of a little reparenting, you’ve lost your way.’ He reached up and took my hand with surprising tenderness. ‘I want you to think of me as your mother—’ Then, exactly like my long-dead mother, his attention was snagged by an incoming call, and he let go of my hand to field it.

We wandered along the ersatz Main Street USA, and queued for Autopia in Tomorrowland. Sherman’s grace was well to the fore: no matter how many kids pointed or called out to him, he responded with a cheery wave. ‘Don’t you love it here?’ he asked after we’d driven the dinky karts round the circuit for a while and were heading for the Small World ride, the three of us licking outsized ice cream cones.

‘Um, well, love may be a bit too strong, but Sherman, I have to—’ Once again I was frustrated, this time by the ride being shut. The Disney people wouldn’t admit what had happened, but later we learnt that one of boats had blocked the flume.

‘They were built for smaller people!’ Sherman crowed. ‘And now these fatties cram themselves in it’s definitely a smaller world.’

The day after that it was the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City and Sherman and I were riveted for hours by Hagop Sandaldjian’s microminiature sculpture of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs poised in the eye of a needle.

The Armenian had been an extremely calm man, and there was the assumption that acts of such controlled creation necessarily implied taboos on acts of procreation.

We were staying at the Culver City Hotel and I couldn’t get Sherman on the house phone, so I took the stairs up to his floor. When I knocked on the door it swung open and there he was, naked, sprawled across the high four-poster bed. It would’ve been a cliché to describe him as ‘lost’ in the billowing breasts of the brunette who was sharing the bed with him. A cliché — and straightforwardly wrong, because in the split-second before he bawled at me to ‘Fuck right off!’ I saw that Sherman was quite at home.

5.125

Burke Shops at Wal-Mart

Standing in the Chevalier Woods, my boots buried in damp leaf mould, I stared into the white face of a deer. Overhead a jet’s headlights carved a tunnel out of the autumn dusk. There had been no way of walking out of the O’Hare terminal, which was surrounded by runways, so I took the subway to Rosemont, then picked my way between office blocks to the banks of a cold and polluted river.

The coincidence of this serrated defile between evergreens and the flight path held me, my breath smoky in the twilight, as jet after jet poised above my head. Such gravity! Such noise! Such comet heat! The deer scattered its legs into the trees, darkness unlimbered, falling to the forest’s ferny floor — I walked and found a road, suburbia, a bus stop, a bus, rode this to the subway, rode the subway into town, where it elevated itself on a bridge above canyons, which I walked through to the lakeside concert hall. A slip of a girl played Sibelius’s violin concerto, up and up, tiny expert movements — massive drama. When it was over the audience went away and I bought a toothbrush in a Walgreens.

The Chicago Humanities Festival had allocated me a room in the Seneca Hotel on Chestnut Street, which turned out to be an extensive suite of chilly rooms. The tables all had thick glass surfaces and there seemed more skirting boards than were strictly warranted. In the kitchenette the smell of the electric cooker’s rings was overpowering. On the seventh floor I spoke with an elderly lady wearing a tweed jacket and an arthritis brace. Police crime-scene tape had been stretched across one doorway of the Festival’s suite, and she told me that I, of course, knew about the sexual assault that had been committed with the LongPen the weekend before.

That sophism was taken for fate in disguise… I didn’t like her tone, although I knew it was nothing personal. Anyway, my tics had returned and what time I could grapple from the repetitive operations messing up my head was assigned to the flesh-coloured foam rubber between the brace and her bent wrist. Fantastic materials, glass terrycloth, plastic…

Of a truth too fantastic to believe he retains the meaning: ‘Save Money. Live Better.’ At 4650 North Avenue I stood in the parking lot and read my receipt. I’d bought a single pair of mixed merino and acrylic socks, which, at $4.94 (plus 45 cents sales taxes), didn’t seem that cheap to me. I’d walked out to North Avenue from the Loop, through maybe nine miles of tracts that got blacker and poorer, until a handwritten sign in a shop window read ‘N — Word Not Allowed Here’, while there were taquerías, storefront Baptist churches and immigration lawyers all along the shattered boulevard.

My mobile phone rang and it was so long since I’d answered it I took a while to find it, searching through six stuffed pockets. Then I was detained by the ringtone — stylized as a minuet — and then by its Art Deco fascia. Technology had moved on faster than walking pace.

‘I’m in hospital, in New York,’ Sherman’s voice said.

‘What happened?’ My heart limbered up in my ribcage.

‘Deep-vein thrombosis — they took me off a flight from Moscow, my right leg looks like a fucking turnip—’

‘I’m coming!’ My heart broke into a trot. ‘I’ll be with you this evening!’

‘Why?’ He chuckled. ‘Have you got a stash of low-molecular-weight heparin in that dumb Barbour of yours?’

5.0625

Rat Poison

Which was more shocking: the monitors menacing Sherman with their winking readouts, the trails of plastic tubing seeping drugs into him, or the artist himself, tucked in tight at the head of the hospital bed, while an angular bulge beneath the covers hid the clotted leg? Baltie was propped on the windowsill reading The Tatler.

‘They won’t let me have my phone!’ Sherman yelped as soon as he saw my hangdog face. ‘And he’ — a significant lash of a drip — ‘is too dumb to make calls for me. Be a love, will you…’

He had a list. I sat on a bench beside Riverside Drive and postponed press conferences and speeches, apologized for Sherman’s nonattendance at dinners and awards ceremonies. I called Prima at her gallery and she said she’d tell the family. It was drizzling and I was grateful for the Barbour.

‘Did you speak to Herve?’ Sherman quacked as soon as I returned.

‘We-ell, I think it was him — my French is, um, rather inadequate. But Sherm, don’t you think you should try to rest?’

‘No, no, I don’t — I’m fucking flat out here as it is.’

‘What do the doctors say?’

‘They say hooray, we’re coining it, then they send in a nurse with another bag of rat poison.’

‘Is that what that stuff is?’

‘Yes, yes, nothing quite like it for thinning the blood.’

Baltie had been sent out to buy petits fours, which was what Sherman most wanted besides his phone back. I sat on the bed — there was plenty of room. My friend’s head moulded the pillows, and for the first time I wondered about the process involved in casting his body forms. I reached out to take his hand but he jerked it away:

‘What the fuck’re you crying for?’ he said.

5.03125

Light Aircraft

It was the smallest check-in desk either of us had ever seen — more like a lectern, with the Loganair logo plastered across the front. ‘Loganair!’ Sherman guffawed. ‘Should be loganberry.’ He stumped over to a drinks dispenser and began punching buttons distractedly. I wondered if he was already withdrawing from his phone habit.

Sherman’s doctor had said ambulation was the key to long-term recovery from DVT. ‘He means walking,’ the artist explained to me, ‘so if you’re still game for this northern jaunt let’s go.’

It had been a grim winter in London — I scratched my wrists so much one of them went septic. It was all right now, though, and as the twin-engined plane motored towards the thousand-foot sea cliffs of Foula I felt the unfamiliar turbulence of optimism. Sherman was in the co-pilot’s seat telling the pilot what to do.

5.015625

Paying Guests

An off-white cloud hung above the hills behind Mrs Field’s bungalow; tractor tyres weighted down the roof. She didn’t seem that pleased to see me again — although Sherman soon charmed her.

‘I’ve another chap staying,’ she explained, ‘and to be honest I don’t like the extra work.’

It was the man from the boutique hotel in Brighton, he was amazed by the coincidence — I couldn’t remember his name. Mrs Field grilled mini chicken Kievs for tea.

5.0078125

The Confession

‘Why would I want to hear about—’ His words were snatched away by the wind screeching up over the cliff edge. A giant skua hung above a perfectly round pool in the sward.

5.00390625

Top of the World, Ma

‘You know nothing of what I feel, believe me — you never have.’

5.001953125

La Jetée

I hurt him and there was only this way.

5.0009765625

Left Behind

Some rolled-up plastic trousers.

5.00048828125

The Earth Summit

And a mobile…

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Global Reach

… phone.