Free The Weightless World by Anthony Trevelyan Page A

than vague depths of foundations, bags of cement, piles of tubing. Still, Harry insists on directing my attention to various blocks of unoccupied air while saying stuff like, ‘Here’s the kitchen’ and ‘There’s the nursery’ and ‘Over yonder, note thesanctuary of the staff room’ until I have no choice but to take a step back, breathing noisily through my lips.
    ‘Sorry, Harry. Don’t know you’re talking about. I can’t see it.’
    ‘Ah!’ He is triumphant. ‘Because it’s not there! And what on earth can we do about that?’ He rubs his face eagerly. ‘I’ll show you what.’
    Harry now leads me to one of three prefabricated offices on the edge of the site. The office contains a couple of garden chairs and a card table with a laptop on it. The laptop is connected to an unfamiliar chunk of hardware – a sort of steely microscope.
    ‘You know what this is?’
    ‘No idea what that is.’
    ‘Then allow me to show you.’ He fiddles with the laptop then turns back to me grinning. ‘Sit, sit. You’ll want to see this.’
    We sit in the garden chairs. For a while there’s nothing to see. Then with an abrupt bony click the barrel of the microscope-looking thing descends and its tip starts darting about on its platform – extruding, fusing, hectically welding.
    Twenty minutes later Harry goes to the microscope, which has retracted its barrel with a series of further bony clicks, and he takes something from the platform. The something is bright green, plastic, about the size of a paperback book. It is a slightly warm, stunningly detailed model of an American-suburb style junior school.
    ‘3D printout.’ Harry smiles. ‘The architect, old pal of mine, Belgian guy, he sends an email. He sits in his office in Brussels and he sends like a zip file. And we hit a button here and we just print it right out. A sketch, a model, a working design in three dimensions.’
    ‘It’s fantastic,’ I say, turning the model between my hands. It is.
    ‘Soon it won’t be just models we’re getting this way. In a couple more years, it’ll be the buildings. We’ll hit a button and we’ll print out the whole building. The whole street. The wholecity.’ He takes the model from me and examines it, his smile as he admires the thing obscurely melancholy, as if his own thought has unexpectedly saddened him. I feel I should comfort him, console him, though I don’t do this.
    We leave the office. Harry directs me to sit in another garden chair under the tree at the centre of the square, disappears into the site and returns a few minutes later with two plastic thimbles of undrinkably hot chai and a paper plate heaped with chutney sandwiches. As Harry settles into a chair next to me, I wonder what happened to the redoubtable Rajeev. Then I see him, sitting on the other side of the square exactly as we saw him last, cross-legged on the earth in a circle of friends.
    I take one sip of the chai then set the little cup on the ground and don’t touch it again. I pick up one of the sandwiches, notice its garish two-tone filling – pink and green – and at once return it to the plate. Meanwhile Harry eats with relish. He chews carefully but quickly, with avid method, as if trying to discover a free gift hidden in his food.
    ‘What do you do here?’ I ask him. ‘You yourself?’
    ‘I like to think I’m pretty hands-on. Though I guess my role is primarily, uh, financial.’ He chuckles through his food. ‘I know what you’re thinking: privileged, bleeding-heart, do-good American asshole blowing his dough on never-gonna-happen public venture. Tossing his money into the black hole of Indian inefficiency. That’s what you’re thinking, right?’
    ‘I’m not thinking anything.’
    ‘I know how it looks. These guys, they know how it looks too. That’s why they make it look this way.’ He throws back the chai as if it’s a shot of whisky. ‘I come by here maybe twice a week. Every time I come, this is what I see. Guys