In July, astronomers at the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System discovered an interstellar object racing through the solar system at a velocity never before seen in a purported comet. Only the third interstellar object ever observed, and now named 3I/ATLAS, it has become the subject of inevitably extravagant internet theories. This possibly ten-billion-year-old visitor has now ‘disappeared’ behind the sun, though not before the European Space Agency photographed it from Mars as it passed by. It looks like a luminous cylinder. Optical illusion, says Nasa. Interstellar objects enter our unconscious just as phases of the moon do. Who knows if they also, like the moon, exert mysterious influences on terrestrial minds?
Last week I was in London for the gala opening of a film at the Royal Festival Hall based on a novel I wrote 12 years ago, The Ballad of a Small Player. It’s set in Hong Kong and Macau; the Macau I knew 20 years ago as a broke amateur baccarat player. I was convinced at the time that my escalating failures – at the tables and in life – were the result of cosmic forces unfairly stacked against me. Unfairly? Well, cosmic forces cannot be either fair or unfair. They can only be benevolent or malevolent. At the time, however, I was superstitiously beguiled by this idea. I loved the Chinese belief that luck itself was like a supernatural wind blowing through messy little lives and scattering us like leaves. The I Ching, that ancient Chinese divination text, seemed to be an interstellar enigma, exerting a magnetic influence on sleeping and waking minds. Now, shacked up in a Marylebone hotel for two weeks, I felt the return of superstition related to both ATLAS and a gala event whose prospect had filled me with dread. What if a thousand people booed and I had to run out the back door?
Wealthy old friends from Hong Kong called me as soon as I landed in London. Did I want to go to Harry’s Bar on South Audley Street? It might well be my favourite street in London. I am fond of Mount Street Gardens, with their London plane trees and Lombardy poplars, their long-forgotten graves. On the street between Harry’s and the Grosvenor Chapel I was under a full moon and, I would say, susceptible to ‘influences’. Three negronis at the bar and my long spell of alcoholic abstinence was sadly broken. We sat under the restaurant’s stained-glass windows devoted to various saints and as my host – a great collector of wine in Hong Kong – reminisced about our Hong Kong days and nights, I looked across the room and thought I recognised a face from that same city, though not someone Chinese. I was a little the worse for wear (jetlag; Santenay) but it seemed to me that this man was looking at me in the same way, as if neither of us could quite figure out from where we knew each other. Was it a fellow decrepit gambler from Macau days who had eventually made good? Good enough for Harry’s Bar anyway. It was as possible as it was impossible. I had not yet seen the movie, which was opening two nights later, but the encounter immediately brought to mind my long-suffering non-hero, Lord Doyle, who is always bumping into fellow gwailou in obscure casinos and gilded restaurants. The book had come back to me, and yet I never revisit one if I can help it: they are like messages in bottles coming back from the past. What would their messages mean to you?
The night of the gala came. I went alone to the RFH in black velvet, photographed on the red carpet by a thousand paparazzi who had no idea who I was. The bliss of un-fame. It was a strange feeling, watching my little world of the past come alive again, some version of myself brilliantly played by Colin Farrell and dressed in the same velvet jackets for which I have an unforgivable taste – and which I used to wear every midnight as I descended the torrid escalators of the Lisboa, with a pocket filled with grubby banknotes. Even if I was incapable of objectivity, I had to admit the film was stupendous in some slightly mystical way which people will either see or won’t. It captures the seas of Lamma, the world of ghosts, the supernatural dimension of money itself. I’d wanted back then to write a fable, a ghost story about money, about capitalism if you like. Not addiction, but the nature of haunting. And I duly found myself haunted all over again.
I took a car to the after-party and the moon was still there; it made me think of the interstellar visitor hiding behind the sun, as if watching us, or watching me in any case. 3I/ATLAS might not be a comet after all, the Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb has recently claimed. He is like one’s ideal reader or moviegoer – a believer in other worlds.
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