The Thing Itself (43 page)

I looked. I didn’t need to be told that the lights that were, somehow, brighter than the perfect brightness were individuals, not galaxies. And something else, beyond the magnificence and intimacy, the simultaneous distance and closeness, of this waterfall or avalanche or updrift of stars, was their
motion
. I could see, now, that they were all in motion, and that although I was in a space without ground and so without a horizon, yet nevertheless the direction of their flow was over the horizon, beyond the reach of even my augmented consciousness to perceive.

I turned back to Peta, my Virgil, to ask one last question; but he, or she, or it, was gone. And the whiteness was sound as well as light, and a sharp, sweet blindness swept through me, and—

—I was surrounded by electrically generated light, and the sound of a great storm, which was the beating of rotary blades in the night sky. I thought I could see stars but when I looked again it was the motion of flakes of snow, lifted from the ground by the helicopters and gushing through the strong beams of the searchlight. Somebody was hauling a heavy sack
off
me – Belwether’s body, I suppose. Words were yelled. I was conscious of pain, but not in the intimate way we usually experience that thing. I couldn’t exactly say that I had a pain, where I’d been stabbed. Though there certainly was a pain, somewhere, and it wasn’t entirely disassociated from me. Ghosts were everywhere, the rubbernecking idiots.

Then I was being lifted, and then I was being loaded into the helicopter, and then I was being flown away. And inside my head the music of the spheres was echoing, faintly but beautifully, and it was a whisper of the waterfall of white noise that harmonised and distilled into pure tones in that other place. Later, in the clinic, after I’d been sewn up, after my feet had recovered, passing through stages of horrible pain back to rheumatic ordinariness, I tried to distinguish the boy Thomas, or the girl Cynthia, or even that voice I associated with Peta, amongst all the many ghosts that hovered about me. The clinic was a popular place for visiting ghosts, and so far as I could tell they’d always been there. They weren’t, though. There’d been a time without them, except that once they came that time no longer obtained. I don’t know what they hoped to find, although presumably it was to do with getting as close as they could to the originary point. I’ve been told that my being loaded on to the chopper, back on the ice, happened before a large crowd of ghosts, all peering and trying to intuit … I don’t know what. Something significant. Important. The problem with ghosts is that they’re too attached to the here and now, to their own lives, no matter how they fade.

Before, when I closed my eyes, I saw a sort of indistinct greyness, or at night, a purer blackness. Now I close my eyes on a turquoise-inflected whiteness, in the fineness of which is a hint of that many-coloured glass that stains, so they say, the white radiance of eternity. It makes me happy to close my eyes.

12

The Professor

Necessity

The dead are everywhere, he says. But this isn’t true, says the ghost. You only want it to be true. The reality is the dead are nowhere, for the dead have stopped existing. The living outnumber the dead in the same way that the number twelve is bigger than the number zero. Still, there’s almost no limit to the amount of suffering we can allow other people to bear.

White drapes hang at the windows in many vertical creases and shadowlines like bars on a cage. His left eye was weak almost to the point of blindness. But he could see with his right. The right was the righteous side, the left the sinister.

The afternoon seems to last for ever. The shadows stretch and the light becomes more rosé and the sun seems to be struggling to stay in the sky. Evening comes eventually, of course, of course. The sun slowly succumbs to his own weight and finally drops behind the horizon, of course, of course. The next thing was that it was the darkest part of the night, as if the sky had gone into mourning. The moon presents itself sliced in half, the nearest it can come to half-mast.

Dawn always surprises him.

The steps up to the building are flanked by a balustrade of regular white columnettes and a smooth marble rail. Approaching the building presented the eye with a line of plump-bellied pillars that framed a line of vase-shaped gaps, which view flipped unexpectedly to a line of solid vases framing a line of pillar-shaped gaps. It puzzles the mind.

Precisely at five minutes before the clock chimes five in the morning, whatever the season, light or dark, cold or hot, Lampe, the footman, marches into his master’s room and shouts aloud in a military tone: ‘Mr Professor, the time is come.’ The Professor always obeys this alarm. As the clock strikes, he is sat at his breakfast table, to drink his single cup of hot tea and afterwards smoke his sole daily pipe. Never food, until dinner; it interferes with his careful balance of somatic circulation. Lampe scowling at him. He had insulted him, stolen from him, appeared drunken in his presence many times – degraded himself, abandoned his noble bearing to that of a beast. How many years since the old ruffian had been dismissed? The Professor thinks of it: the absolute regularity of daily habit tends to erode the sense of time passing on a longer scale. It is perhaps why he was so wedded to habit. Irregularity of habit is the friction that impedes smooth passage. Thorns that stick in the throat. His new servant has made him gruel. He cannot remember the name of the fellow. He can remember Lampe’s name. Military bearing; his features not coarse (though his manners were). But, then again, his features
were
coarse, or were made so by drink and old age and decrepitude. Time is the thing that separates out the handsome young Lampe from the slobbering old Lampe, for these two quite different things cannot be the same thing by virtue of the logical exclusion of mutuality.

Untie the dressing-gown cord; and retie it again. The motion of his own fingers, curling and knotting, is soothing to him.

Wasianski is talking. Manners dictate that he be heard, though the toad that lives inside the Professor’s chest where his human heart used to be wants only to scream at him to shut up, to leave him in peace, to bring back Lampe – but the young Lampe. The upright posture, shaped by his time in the army. Of course the Professor does not shout anything. Does not raise his creaky old voice. Instead he whispers: ‘Say again, my friend?’

‘Mr Professor,’ says Wasianski, with that simpering clerical manner he has. He always smells of flowers, which the Professor considers an unmanly affectation. Wasianski might as well be a florist. ‘Mr Professor I was only this morning debating with Mr Jäsche.’

‘Indeed?’

‘The question as to whether you yourself, Mr Professor, are the greater metaphysician, or whether Plato still occupies that throne. The whole of Königsberg is jealous of the honour that – it is you, sir, you.’

Smiling face. The Professor has a foggy sense that Wasianski means to flatter him, and he is hostile to the very notion of flattery, on principle. But the capacity for outrage is slack in him this morning. Lampe is bringing him up his soup, and a glass of port. Lampe has changed his face. Lampe does not look like Lampe.

‘Plato’s advocacy,’ he tells the audience of two. ‘Of that most abominable and bestial sin, contra natura, of man lying with man—’ Heat inside his breast again. There is something still there, some potency of anger. All faces looking at him. Wasianski the cleric he knows: the other man he knows not. For one dizzying moment he can’t remember the name of the town where he lives, where he has lived all his life. There’s a third person in the room with them. Who is it?

He turns his head. There’s nobody there.

Always dull and stupid. The Professor’s mere word as sacred as other men’s oaths. It was February last year, or perhaps the year before, or perhaps the year before that. How they melt away, the years! The Professor dismissed Lampe. He could no longer contend with the man, no longer struggle with him.

Now he has to lean on his servant – he can’t remember the young man’s name – in order to complete his constitutional. A huge tree with a trunk like a grooved Corinthian column in brown-black, and a ponderous head of foliage like a great foaming galaxy of green. The breeze crescendos, burlies against him, flaps his shirt collar upon his cheek like it wants his attention. So, crossly, he
gives
his attention. What? What is it? The tree is leafless. The brown is black. The sky is white. What happened? It is winter, now, and winter, now. One day he stares at the trunk of a massive orange-brown tree and wonders why its upper branches have been so savagely pruned. At some level within himself he could see that it was the main spire of the castle tower: red brickwork, the four smaller spires at the two-thirds point, marking the platform from which the more slender, conical main spire reaches upwards.

‘Mr Professor? It is time to return, Mr Professor.’

The steps up to the main entrance of his own building were flanked by a balustrade of regular white columnettes and a smooth marble rail. Approaching the building, slowly, with halting steps, his eye is presented with a line of plump-bellied pillars framing a line of vase-shaped gaps, which view flipped unexpectedly to a line of solid vases framing a line of pillar-shaped gaps. It puzzles the mind. ‘I am a mere child now, and you must treat me as such,’ he tells his servant.

‘Mr Professor?’

Each morning, after his cup of tea and his pipe, the Professor is guided to his study. There is a view through the window across his neighbour’s garden to the summit of a local tower. Just the sight of that tower was reassuring to him. He had on the desk before him a copy of Dr Augustin’s
On the Medical Use of Galvanism
. His own copy. Bought with his own money, earned with his own labour. He had been reading this book carefully for many months, marking his thoughts in the margin. Augustin was a Berliner, and a medical doctor, but what he says about galvanic force clearly had a far wider significance. It was electricity that formed the clouds – for how else could such phenomena be accounted? Did not lightning strike down from them?

He dozes. It crept up on him increasingly, for he slept badly at night, on account of the ache in his stomach. And that he had bad dreams. Yet he would not relinquish his early mornings, and insisted on being installed in his study at his usual hour. Often he could not marshal his thoughts to work, so he simply stared at the view through his window. The electricity book lay unopened before him. He put his head against its stony pillow and slept. Lampe is there, but young and handsome. Standing behind him, and pressing his chest against the Professor’s back, and reaching round to his thighs.

Awake with a jolt.

His left eye is weak almost to blindness. But he can see with his right. The right was the righteous side, the left the sinister.

Waniaski joins him for dinner, and two other gentlemen, and a fourth figure who is always at the edge of the Professor’s eyeline. He turns his head to see this fourth person – diminutive in stature, a dwarf possibly, or a child – but he cannot quite make him out. The Professor talks to the party with unusual animation, interesting facts unearthing themselves from his huge store of factual information as if by their own force. ‘The name Königsberg is usually taken to mean King’s Mountain – although there are few mountains hereabouts! According to Mr Dach, the name has a more ribald etymology, for it was originally Kunnegsgarbs, which is to say the garb of the female organs of generation, the hair that grows upon the pubis.’ He chuckles at this. They say he never laughs, that he is a machine, a mere automaton for thinking and working. But he often laughs.

Then, looking around, he sees expressions aghast, and immediately wonders which of the group had violated propriety. ‘My mother,’ he says, in a halting voice, looking from face to face. Somebody is lurking in the shadows of the room, the mysterious fifth member of the party. Why can’t he catch the lad’s eye? ‘My mother was a saint,’ he says, his voice close to breaking.

Untie the dressing-gown cord; and retie it again.

‘The weather has been unusually sharp,’ says one of the party. ‘One expects February to be chill, of course. But this is an unusually sharp snap of cold.’

The weather is one of his topics. People expect him to talk about the weather. It is because he understands that the larger patterns of weather relate in a direct manner to the smaller patterns of the individual health. ‘I have been reading,’ he tells the party, ‘Augustin on electricity. It is clear to me now that electricity is the unifying force that draws together all the epiphenomena of ordinary life, the secret code of God himself.’ The smiles looked fixed. It occurs to him to wonder if he has said this before. He seems to recall saying it before, but whether to this party, five minutes earlier, or to another party five years ago he cannot tell. But surely not five years ago, for at that time he had never read Augustin’s work!

Where is his cup of coffee? He will never receive it. The new servant is lazy. God’s grace is always
to be
disposed upon mankind, and is never just there. The wind has grown agitated and makes the boughs of the big tree sway back and forth, like an automaton performing the same action – digging in the ground, sawing at the log, over and over again. The Professor watches it with strange fascination.

‘Mr Professor, it is time for your walk?’

But he cannot rise. His body has enacted a treasonable noncompliance. Snow on the roofs. It shifted, minutely, creaking over his head. By noon the sun might have loosened a slab of the stuff, hard as marble, and it would slide down the eaves and crash to the pavement.

‘Let my walk not be my usual walk,’ he tells the servant boy. ‘Let it only be to the King’s Gardens, which is not far.’

The boy looks puzzled, which in turn makes him look stupid, which in turns makes him look ugly. ‘Mr Professor,’ he says. ‘Our walk has
been
to the King’s Gardens for many months now.’

‘I know, of course,’ he says, although he doesn’t. ‘Today, however, I cannot use my legs today.’

Again the servant looks anxious. ‘Mr Professor, you have been carried in a conveyance for these last months. You do no walking now. Do you not remember your fall?’

He recalls slipping, in the icy weather. A woman helped him up and he gave her a rose he happened to be carrying. But then it cannot have been winter, or icy, if he had about him a rose. Such is the necessary logical induction.

‘I have been reading,’ he tells his interlocutor, ‘Augustin on electricity. It is clear to me now that electricity is the unifying force that draws together all the epiphenomena of ordinary life, the secret code of God himself.’ The city port receives over a hundred vessels a year; in the summer sometimes two or three large cargo craft a day. But of course fewer in the winter, when the harbour was prone to ice.

Mr Professor! Mr Professor!

He had fallen asleep at his desk, and one of the candles had set his nightcap alight. With a calm hand he pulls the cap off his head and throws it to the floor, where he can tramp out the flame with his foot. The servant is flapping at him like a bat – most provoking, most irritating. He shouted at the impudent fellow. There is a noisome stench of burned hair in the room.

Mr Professor!

It seems he had set his nightdress alight in attempting to stamp out the burning cap. He slumps in his chair, and submits with a painful sense of physical degradation as the servant slaps at him. The cook comes running up with a blanket in which a mass of snow has been cached, and throws it about the professorial frame. ‘Impudence,’ rails the Professor. ‘I’ll have you both dismissed! Where is Lampe?’

‘Long gone, Mr Professor,’ quails the cook, retreating to the door of the study.

The new footman (what was his name?) helps the Professor out of his clothes and dresses him again. Then he fetches coals for the warming pan, leaving the Professor alone in the bedroom with the young boy. ‘Why are you hanging about me?’ the Professor demands of this figure. ‘Can’t you see I’ve no need for a second servant? I live a frugal life.’

The boy smiles and nods, and the Professor finds himself explaining the electrical basis of planetary motion, and of the way clouds in the sky are manifestations of galvanic forces.

The boy is the one from his dreams. All through the winter he had terrible bad dreams, and pains in his stomach, and though he complained bitterly to his servant and to Wasianksi they did nothing to help him. He recalls there is a play by Shakespeare in which a noblewoman sleep-walked and had bad dreams, but he can’t bring the title to mind. And
she
had a guilty conscience, and he has nothing to be guilty about! Lampe had outraged him, and had to be dismissed. The fellow was a foolish and a vulgar sort. Had the Professor ever acted upon his bestial instincts he could not have reconciled it with the moral imperative, for if it became a general law that people succumbed to unnatural vice, then there would be no future generations. But, no, that logic was faulty: for though there were some platonically inclined, to embrace after the manner that ugly Socrates embraced handsome Alcibiades, yet not all were moved by such urges. Others might give way to unnatural vices of other sorts and yet still seed and germinate children. Accordingly, there must be some other logical reason why such platonic urges were gross. The thought flickers in his head that he has it the wrong way around – the spaces between the pillars assumed sudden solidity – and that it was
repressing
such urges that was wrong. For what if everybody acted that way, and repressed the natural urges God had planted in their bodies? If everyone forced themselves into monkish chastity then there would be neither new generations nor love nor joy nor hope for peace.