‘There was an engine on the glider,’ Halloway explained. He sat up, pointing to the roof of the cabin. Somewhere above him there was the steady drumming of an internal-combustion engine. ‘I can hear it now…’
Lights flickered in the Negro’s palm. Again the strange alphabet sorted itself into a message. His pensive eyes presided over these reassembling letters as if over the anagrams of stigmata. — There is a power generator on the roof As if to reassure Halloway, he pressed a wall switch.
When the electric light — an antique tungsten-filament glow — came on in the cabin Halloway examined his surroundings. He was lying on a bunk in a large landcruiser, one of a group drawn up together on what he guessed was the top floor of the car park. In front of him, beyond a small kitchen, was the driver’s compartment, the steering wheel and instrument panel below a high windshield.
Sitting beside him, clearly relieved to see Halloway regain consciousness, was the tenant of the cruiser. The left side of his face was covered by a fretwork of notches, minute cuts clearly inflicted during his childhood. At first Halloway assumed that they were some kind of tribal insignia, but later he learned that they were the scars left by a serious automobile accident.
With his intelligent face and curiously unfocused eyes, which seemed to be fixed on some point within his mind, he reminded Halloway of a circus clown without his make-up. He sat here in his land-cruiser with the same vaguely melancholy posture of the clowns whom Halloway and his friends visited in their trailers whenever they toured Garden City. As he gazed down at Halloway with his alert but neutral expression he looked as if he had been alone too long, and was unsure how to respond to the physical presence of another human being.
He touched Halloway’s shoulder, obviously convincing himself that his visitor posed no threat.
Now — are you all right?
‘I’m a lot better. I guess it was your truck I crashed.’
His rescuer waved this aside. He seemed about to speak, but checked himself. In one hand, almost hidden between his slim fingers, was a pocket calculator. With surprising swiftness, he tapped out a message, which flashed up on the alphanumeric display.
Forget it. There’s not exactly a shortage here.
As he gazed through the window of the cruiser Halloway had the distinct impression that this solitary young mute was a prisoner here, high above this museum of cars in the centre of the abandoned airport. His fingers fluttered across the keys of the calculator. As each sentence came up it was glanced at and quickly erased, fingers flicking away in this reverse Braille. Obviously he was used to holding long conversations with himself.
‘I’m sorry about the truck,’ Halloway said. Remembering the frightening violence he had witnessed that morning, he asked cautiously: ‘Do you live here? What’s your name?’
Olds.
‘Olds? What, as in -?’ Halloway laughed, despite himself, but the young Negro nodded, clearly taking no offence. Joining in the joke, he touched the scars on his scalp. Fingers flicked across the keyboard.
Yes. As in Oldsmobile. Ten years ago I renamed myself He stared at the illuminated message, his mind drifting away. An expression of regret hovered around his faint smile.
‘Why not?’ Halloway said encouragingly. ‘I like it, it’s a good name.’ He looked at his watch. It was after two o’clock. He felt drawn to this solitary young Negro, but it was time to be moving on.
‘Olds, I ought to be going.’
All right. But first have some food.
They left the cabin and stepped down on to the tenth floor of the car park. Four of the land-cruisers were drawn up to form a private enclosure. From the balustrade Halloway looked down at the thousands of vehicles that covered the airport.
The breakdown truck lay on its side by the pyramid of radiator grilles. He took for granted that Olds had constructed these monuments. On trestle tables beside the land-cruisers lay an extensive selection of electrical parts — dynamos and transformers, fuse-boxes and switching units. Power cables trailed across the floor, running from the generator on the roof to a barbecue in the centre of what he assumed was Olds’ dining area. Rotating on the spit was the body of a small deer. The fused flesh gleamed like polished oak. Olds beckoned Halloway to a chair, and began to cut steaks from the carcass.
An hour later Halloway had finished the most intoxicating meal of his life, and made his decision to postpone any return to Garden City for as long as possible. After the pallid vegetarian cuisine of his childhood, the flavour of venison and animal fat acted on him like adrenalin. Surrounded by the bones and meat scraps, he felt like the early pioneers who had colonized this land and built its cities.
Olds had watched him eat with obvious pleasure. At intervals, as he urged him to take second and third helpings, his right hand flicked out some brief message to himself on the calculator, as if he were transcribing a commentary on a second life going on inside his head.
During their meal he told Halloway about himself, and how as a boy of five years old during the final evacuation of the city he had been knocked down by a housewife driving her Oldsmobile to the neighbourhood scrap-yard. Thus he had become the world’s last traffic casualty. Fifteen years later, after a long and incomplete recovery from his brain injuries, he left the technical training centre at the commune hospital fifty miles to the north of the city and made his home among the thousands of cars parked on the runways of this abandoned airport. Here, moved by some profound compulsion, he spent his time putting together this museum of cars, perhaps in an attempt to find the missing sections of his mind. His ambition, he explained to Halloway, was to have a running model of every make of car ever manufactured.
Only then will I come to terms with my accident.
He flashed a self-deprecating smile and added: After that I can learn to fly.
Halloway nodded sympathetically, unsure whether Olds was pulling his leg. This clever, shy but self-confident man seemed to be all there as far as Halloway could tell. When they had finished the meal Halloway asked Olds to take him on a tour of the museum.
‘You repaired all these yourself? It’s hard to believe — in the first place, what about the fuel?’
Olds gestured casually at the sea of vehicles that stretched to the horizon on all sides of the car park.
There are five million cars in this city alone. Almost every tank still has a little gas in it.
Halloway walked down the line of cars, gazing at his reflections in the lovingly refurbished radiator, grilles, hubcaps and chromium trim. Olds led the way, pointing out a rare Mercedes 600, a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud, a Facel Vega. He was clearly proud to show off his collection, but at the same time Halloway noticed that he seemed slightly bored by these vehicles. His eyes were forever straying to the moss-covered airliners parked by the terminal buildings.
‘And you’re sure they all run?’ Halloway asked. He pointed to a resplendent limousine. ‘What about this one Daimler Majestic?’
With remarkable speed, Olds leapt behind the wheel of the car. Within seconds its engine roared out, headlamps pulsed, momentarily blinding Halloway. The horn sounded imperiously.
‘Olds, it’s unbelievable!’ Halloway congratulated him. ‘Let’s see you try another — this Pontiac Firebird.’
For the next thirty minutes the two men moved through the museum, Halloway shouting and pointing to one car after another, Olds leaping like an excited faun, an automotive Ariel, from one driver’s seat to the next, switching on the ignitions and bringing the engines to life. Each car he left with its motor racing and headlamps full on. First a dozen cars came alive, then more than thirty, and finally the entire eighth and ninth decks of the car park. The roar of the engines, the exhaust swirling in the headlamp beams, the vibrating floors and balustrades, the smell of burning fuel and the noise booming out over the deserted airport, made Halloway feel that the entire city had begun to spring to life, re-starting itself under the hands of this young recluse.