Vellum (2 page)

“I know where it is,” I said.

“I'll believe it when I see it,” said Joey.

So will I,
I thought.
So will I.

Between Kabala and Calculus

Three years for me, and as many generations for my family—maybe more if my uncle was right. In the Middle Ages, he'd told me, every guild, every craft or trade had their own mystery play based on a story from the Bible or from the apocrypha. The Masons would put on a play about the Tower of Babel. The wine merchants would put on a play about the drunkenness of Noah. And there was a play he'd heard of, he told me, about the angels who fought neither for God nor Lucifer, but instead fled from the War in Heaven, down to Earth, and carried with them the Book of Life, so that it should be safe from the destruction. They carried it across the earth, from one hiding place to another, always on the move. The play, of course, was performed by the Carters.

“Well, of course,” my father said, “that's where the whole story comes from. The Carters traveled all over the place. The mystery plays were performed all over Britain, and on the Continent. And everywhere they went, you get these stories appearing about this ancient book. Myths based on a play cobbled together from a legend written in the margins of scripture. Stories created from stories created from stories. None of it's true, but eventually people start to forget what's fiction and what's fact. The Masons don't have a monopoly on spurious mythology, you know. But it's ridiculous. The idea that the last of the earth-bound angels hired a young Carter to take a secret book across Europe to…”

He went suddenly quiet; he must have realized from the confused expression on my face that I'd never heard this part of the story before. He sighed.

“That's what your grandfather believed,” he said. “That the Carters had taken over from the angels as guardians of the Book. But they lost it. And they've been looking for it ever since.”

“Your grandfather was a sick man,” he said, quietly, sadly. “He was in the Great War, you know. He wanted to believe in…something greater. War changes people. Death…changes people.”

Death changes people.

I remembered Jack and Joey fighting; I remembered watching as Jack self-destructed; Joey pulling a bottle of ouzo out of his hand and shouting at him; Jack screaming at him over and over again—
fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.

You describe people as crazy—you say,
that Jack, he's crazy—
and it doesn't mean anything until you see them really, truly, going crazy.

There was a Jewish scholar, Isaac ben Joshua, in Moorish Spain who said that the Book drove everyone who saw it crazy. He said that it held not deeds but laws, that it was, in fact, the original Book of the Law—not the Mosaic Torah but an even older covenant known only in the most marginal of apocrypha, dating from the antediluvian time of Enoch and the rebel angels, binding the physical world in principles somewhere between kabala and calculus. He referenced an Islamic source, a story saying that all but one solitary page were blank, and on that page there was only a single simple sentence, an equation which captured the very essence of existence. This, he said, was why all those who'd ever looked upon the Book had gone insane, unable to comprehend, unable to accept, the meaning of life laid out in a few words of mathematical purity.

After what happened to Thomas, I remember thinking that I knew what that sentence was. Two words.

People die.

The page I looked at now, though, the first page of the Book, had no words on it, only a blueprint of the maze of concrete tunnels and chambers that surrounded me, here in the bunkered depths of the old building. Gold illumination traced out conduits, ventilation and wiring, heating ducts, while the same eye-like logo on the cover of the book was inked in black here, smaller though, more cursive; I felt that burning feeling rising in my head again. There was something wrong about an artifact as ancient as this with content that was so…modern. This wasn't some doggerel prophecy before me, not a vague prediction but a precise plan, a schema. And, flicking forward to the next page, I recognized the library as I'd seen it on the architectural plans I'd been studying for so long. Again that symbol in the center of it. Pages two and three together mapped out the building in its context, the network of roads and footpaths, the buildings and grassed areas of the campus around the library. I recognized it; I had recognized it instantly and it was that recognition that had made me close the Book and reopen it, as if the act might change it, as if looking at it again, I might this time see something more rational, more sensible.

Instead it seemed even less rational. Now that I studied it more closely, it worried me even more because, in the tiniest of places—only here and there, mind you—the location of this pathway, the outline of this building—it seemed just a little different from my memory.

A Cool White Pillow

“What time is it?” asked Jack. I checked my watch, but Puck answered before me.

“Summer,” he said. It was April, actually, but there was time and there was Puck Time, where hours and minutes were described as quarter past a freckle and any day sunny enough to lie out on the grass and smoke cigarettes was summer. It was glorious that day, sunlight pouring down on us where Puck and Jack lazed like dogs on the slope of walled-in grass between the library and the reading room, the squat block of the campus cafeteria lowering behind us where we couldn't see it and the tower of the university reaching up into the blue, too solid and archaic to be quite a dreaming spire but still, in the fluted intricacy of its anachronistic design, denying the reality of its Victorian construction for a fantasy of antiquity. It was glorious that day, so it was summer.

The sunlight slanted off the glass exterior of the library to my right, and painted the white pebble-dashed areas of the walls with Moorish or Mediterranean warmth, flashed on the glass doors into the Hunterian Museum as they revolved, students passing in and out. At the ground level the library and the museum fused into one building, blockish and modern, all cuboids and cylinders, an abstract iron sculpture nestling in curved simplicity on the flagstones outside the doors, before the low steps that led down onto cobbles running down toward University Avenue. Following them down you passed the Mackintosh House, a museum-piece replica of a tenement home filled with furniture and fittings designed by one of Glasgow's most famous sons; built onto the Hunterian and accessed from inside the museum, its false front door perched absurdly in midair with no steps to reach it. To my left there was the reading room, built in the twenties, low and circular with tall slender windows and a domed roof—Art Nouveau, I thought, though I was never sure of the distinction between Nouveau and Deco. And though the sixties brown-brick, smoked-glass block monstrosity of the Hub at my back, with its cafeteria and student shops, deserved a bomb for its sheer ugliness, I never loved any little corner of the world so much as that slope of grass walled in with rough-hewn sandstone between the reading room and the library, never loved anywhere so much as there and then.

I sat on a wooden block that was a recent addition to the slope. The university had hired a modern artist to commemorate their 550th anniversary by turning that green slope into a sort of art installation, and I'd watched with some trepidation as they'd fenced off the area and torn up the grass. But when it was finished, I had to admit, it made that little area even more serene. The artist had laid ten of these long wooden blocks in pairs, each pair of blocks offset as if to mark out diagonal corners of a long, thin rectangle, the other corners marked out by low shrubs, five of these thin rectangles dividing up the space of the slope. Each of the dark wooden blocks had a white porcelain pillow at one end of it, and thin panels of glass text, buried in the ground running along either side of the blocks—lit up at night—told the story of the piece in ten sections. The shrubs were all herbs with medicinal properties, a reference to the university's first physic garden, a record that had only recently been turned up by some academic burrowing through archives. The blocks were replicas of old-style anatomist's dissection slabs, in memory of the oldest faculty of the university.

I lay on one of them, that day, head resting on the cool white pillow, or swiveled round and sat upright on it to slug back beer out of the cans we'd brought with us because, of course, you couldn't study for exams on such a day without refreshments.

“It's half two,” I said.

“Fuck,” said Jack. “How long have we been here?”

“A couple of hours,” I said. “Not long.”

I picked up the
Norton's Anthology of Poetry
splayed facedown beside me on the block, glanced at it and closed it, lay it down beside Jack's biography of John Maclean.

“John Maclean. What? As in
Die Hard
?” Puck had said.

“As in the founder of Scottish Socialism, scrag.”

Jack had shaken his head.

Of all the students lounging and laughing on the slope, sitting on the grass in circles, cross-legged on the blocks with sandwiches, cans, packets of cigarettes or tobacco scattered around them, nobody was really doing any work. It was the Easter break; we had exams coming up soon, so soon, but it just felt like we had all the time in the world.

I looked down at Jack and Puck, Jack with his hands under his head, Puck at right angles, using Jack's stomach as a headrest, one arm flopped across his chest—a scritch of fingers at his ribs—and the other stretched out to the side with a cigarette between his fingers, smoke rising from its tower of ash like slow, solemn incense, rising up into the still cerulean air.

Angularities and Curves

I flicked forward to pages four and five. A map. Again the scale had changed, zoomed out by another magnitude. Now all the streets and roads of the whole bohemian district in and around the university were clear, with the river and the park marked off, the museum and art galleries, all drawn with the precision of a modern cartographer. But all altered alarmingly, if only subtly, from the bohemian district I knew so well. Christ, my Bank Street house should have been on the map at this scale—I lived less than five minutes' walk from the old cloistered quadrangles at the very heart of the campus—but instead the street wasn't even marked. The river seemed to twist to flow over where it should have been, and the rough gridwork of streets and tenement buildings was shifted to accommodate it. Two main roads that should have crossed at right angles met and merged instead in a Y-shaped junction. It was as if the smallest changes at the lowest level cascaded upward.

The map of the city on pages six and seven was completely unfamiliar.

I remember, as a child, looking at an architectural model of my school and its surroundings that stood on display in the main hallway of the school itself, where the principal, the deputy principal and suchlike had their offices. One tiny discrepancy—a set of stone steps leading down from the raised car park of a block of flats, steps that had never been built but were shown on the model—and, as a child, I could not grasp the idea that the model was wrong. It wasn't that I thought the steps should be there in reality if they were on the model, or vice versa—I was too young to understand exactly why it bothered me—but I remember the vague unease, the confusion at the inconsistency. I felt that same disquiet now, but more profound, so many years later.

I turned another page and there I saw the city in its environs, the coastline and the countryside around it. Now it was definitely not the city that I knew; the city that I knew sat on a river, but not at its mouth. The whole geography was wrong, but, at the same time, I did recognize it. I knew the shape of the coastline well enough, and I recognized the island sitting out a short ferry ride from the city's docks; I even recognized those docks as being where, in reality, a small seaside town of ice cream parlors and amusement arcades sat, gathering retired old folks and families on Sunday outings. It was as if the city of my own experience had been picked up and dropped some thirty miles to the southwest of its natural location, and had to warp and weave itself into a slightly different shape as it settled, to accommodate its new surroundings. Where the city should have been, on the map, was only a small village in the midst of farmland.

The Macromimicon. Was it then a book of maps, not of what was, but of what might have been, of a world that had taken a different course, with this village growing into a town instead of that one, this town burgeoning into a city instead of another? I turned another page. Even the language that marked out the streets and roads, the cities, towns and villages, seemed the product of some parallel development, composed of angularities and curves, bearing a similarity to the Roman or Cyrillic alphabets, but again not quite the same. Strangely—in retrospect—it never occurred to me that this book might actually be nothing more than mere invention, a work of fancy: perhaps the accuracy of the blueprint of the library held that idea from my mind; perhaps it was the power of the old family legends engrained so deep within me. All I know is what I felt: a growing conviction that this book spoke somehow of a larger truth.

The Tower of Bible

“Jack.”

He didn't answer.

“Jack,” I said again.

“For fuck's sake, Jack,” called Joey. “Let us in.”

“Come on. Please,” I said.

We'd been there for maybe half an hour and all we'd got from the other side of the door was silence. I was worried myself, but I could hear from the fury in Joey's voice, the way he swore at Jack, insulted him, told him again and again how stupid and pointless all this was, that he was really terrified. If you didn't know him you'd have thought that he was more concerned about this…waste of time he had to suffer, more bothered about his own inconvenience than anything else. But I could hear the edges and points in his voice, the tightness in his throat. Joey was coming to hate Jack because he couldn't stand what he was doing to himself; it hurt too much.