After James (21 page)

It came to me not what the drawing depicted, but what Pierluigi would think it depicted. He'd sent me and Amanda an encryption program, which I installed before writing to him. He replied immediately.

“yes! integrated circuit!”

“So how could this be a vision of the end?”

“the circuits are in everything, james. everywhere in the place and time. you have to forget your ideas of ‘end.' ”

He was about to start firing again and so I cut off the exchange and forwarded it to Amanda and Detta.

A minute later Pierluigi sent me a version of his diagram with English labels added. Now it looked like a satellite photo of a railway switching yard or palace compound or suspected missile site. The parallel lines were apparently diodes. The things they connected, capacitors and resistors. The larger structures or open spaces were marked variously as silicon ingots and composite crystal assemblies. I returned to the unlabelled diagram and sat with it. The shape and pattern were everywhere, not just in circuit boards but in marked-up calendars, stuffed bookshelves, lines of prose or justified verse, and yet the drawing seemed particular, of something very close by.

It sat horizontal. I held it at arm's length, raised my arms slightly. There, on Durant's wall. It had been over my head the whole time. Since moving in I'd looked once or twice at the framed drawing or diagram or maybe print of a painting and assumed it was abstract art, slightly too busy and geometrical for my tastes. The design echoed Pierluigi's drawing: tight, parallel, segmented lines connected by thinner crossing lines, some of them forming a well or knot (or composite crystal assembly). The dimensions were proportionally about the same. Each image had sets of horizontal rows. The wall-art version was coloured, with precise resolution, so that what looked like
shading in Pierluigi's rectangle were, in the picture, arrays of the finest lines, like hairs strung between the rows or maybe rhizomatic growths in a substrata not representable in 2-D.

With my phone I took a picture of Durant's artwork and sent it to him with the text “Research question: What is this? Thx, J.”

Beyond being a misfit, Pierluigi was also very likely a clinical paranoid, but his vision made me test my own beliefs. I didn't believe in reliable foreknowledge of the end of the world, beyond what any sensible person already possessed, the knowledge that it would someday end, badly. I did believe in a widespread and justified renewal of common paranoia brought on by the obvious, sorry truths, collapsing polar shelves, persistent evil, the fact that most lives were now being tracked and subject to algorithms that could predict their behaviour with a high degree of accuracy.

On this last point I believed, maybe hoped, that many people would unplug, refuse to be configured as market data, that there would be an ever-growing back-to-the-earth movement, but (not my hope now) given the scarcity of available earth to get back to, competitions would form, market logic would take hold, legal language would shift, and even some of the enlightened and peace-loving back-to-earthers would become militant in defence of their needs and unalienable rights as they viewed them. I believed in a coming chaos that could be forestalled only by even worse possibilities, nuclear or biological apocalypse, mass raining death or global natural disaster brought on by, say, a meteor of the magnitude of those that had already caused extinctions and in fact, with a glancing
blow, had brought about the moon and oceans and nudged the planet off its axis, forming seasons and, in a sense, earthly time.

But did I
really
believe in the likelihood of these doomsday scenarios?

In a great vastness the size of my body I was alone with the question of what I believed, and so checked my email. Durant had responded.

“That thing on the wall over your desk came with the apartment but it looks very much like a synteny graph I once worked up to represent the history of the black death genome as it morphed over time into other plagues. The enterobacterium is beautiful. So is the graph. The contagions are not, of course, and they just keep coming. We're due for a big one soon. You still want to meet? Bring Amanda if she's free. Let's say three in the Protestant Cemetery.”

Amanda found me at the gate on Caio Cestio. She took my hand and looked at me earnestly but didn't kiss me or say what the look meant. Then she let go of my hand. I sensed she regretted our night together and wanted to signal as much before saying so. In emotional self-defence I tried to focus my attention away from her. We stood near three
carabinieri
with their peaked hats and white straps running diagonally across their chests. I couldn't imagine why military police were guarding the entrance to a cemetery. My Rome guidebook had mentioned that, more so than the
polizia
, the
carabinieri
are the subject of popular jokes, a tradition deriving from northern snobbishness at the many southern rural men who join the force to escape
poverty. I was working through some connection between the
carabinieri
and Pasolini when Amanda brought me back.

“I never wanted this to happen.” I thought she meant us, but she was speaking of Durant. “Our theory will crush him.”

“I think he's pretty resilient.”

“He's built everything on one hope. I can't even be around him without feeling like a stand-in.”

He didn't so much come into view as make an entrance, an effect I would have thought impossible to produce while coming down a long city street. He walked fast, as people never do around cemeteries, and sort of swept us into the grounds. We were three abreast, Durant in the middle, but I felt the way he inclined toward Amanda. I'd never seen them together. The connection was clear, a father-daughterly affection that ran both ways. He said he liked to come here because the quiet helped him think.

“I've just spent a few hours with colleagues at EMBL, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Monterotondo. They're doing amazing things in marine metagenomics.” He said he hoped with his mollusc work to secure an affiliation with EMBL that would allow him to stay in Rome another year. His description of the laboratory, his friends there, the work they were doing, microbiological genetics, continued unbroken for several minutes. “I need to land a new fellowship to pay back my research team the funds from the last mollusc grant. That's how I've paid you both, by the way. My life lately is one big shell game. But the world is not, is it, James?”

The question almost literally tripped me, caused a hesitation in my stride before I recovered. I didn't understand it
or why it was addressed to me, but already he'd moved on. He was talking now about yet a different set of colleagues, these ones at another Roman university, Sapienza. We'd made it deep into the cemetery along one of the paths. Durant paused for about twenty seconds and even the quiet felt commemorative, the cypress trees shouldered together like the graves in the crowded precincts of death.

What a terrible idea to meet here. We should never have agreed to it.

Now he was talking about the cemetery itself, its famous dead, its poets, including Keats and Shelley. I recounted popular versions of Shelley's death by drowning, and the one about how, during the cremation, a friend snatched the poet's heart from the fire and later gave it to Shelley's wife, Mary, who kept it for thirty years in a copy of the poem “Adonais” and only later had it encased in silver.

“There are those who still believe that snatched-heart story,” said Durant. “There's no underestimating people's gullibility. Mary must have been in on the mythmaking. She'd have done better to focus on her novels. What a mess she made after
Frankenstein.
” Now he turned to me. “So what do you have to tell me?”

Seconds passed and I found I couldn't speak. Amanda rescued me. She told him that she understood what it felt like to see a lost loved one in the poems and told him of her brother and said she'd begun to see Marcus and his death at Three Sheets. She explained how her own theory of the Solaris effect had been displaced by a new one that I'd struck upon. Durant stopped us and took her hands in his.

“I'm sorry. So sorry. I misread your distress. I should have seen that it wasn't about me.”

She absolved him with a soft smile and I thought he was going to hug her but he just lowered his eyes. He began walking slowly now, and led us to a bench on which sat two fat pigeons that vacated it only when we stood over them. We sat, me between them.

“Your theory, James.”

As I spoke he looked at me squarely, not even glancing at Amanda. I said the theory's improbability was part of its power. Without describing Pierluigi's suspect authority or apocalyptic take on things, I evoked his expertise and his support for the idea that private details from Durant's and Amanda's lives had been extracted and used against them.

“That's it?” He smiled slightly, as if relieved. “The government's in our underwear drawers?”

“Maybe more than one government or corporation if your underwear's deemed threatening. Imagine the Poet, or someone he hires, or some program, tracks discussions, flags certain people. Biographical details are gathered from the virtual debris field. New poems are written from these biographical fragments, ever more private details of these selected readers' lives. And why? To infiltrate the minds of people posing threats. To lead the eye, misdirect their dangerous attention.”

Neither of us had moved, but he seemed closer to me now, his regard farther away.

“So you think Amanda and I were prompted into each other's lives, the easier to control? You're right, it's a little
far-fetched.” He turned to her. “Given what you've just said about your brother and your own investigations, I understand how you could be seen as a threat. But how am I?”

“I don't know,” she said. “Maybe it depends on why your daughter disappeared.” His involuntary response, to lift his head just slightly while blinking and keeping his eyes shut for a moment longer than normal, somehow suggested that he was confirming something to himself. “Was she a threat to anyone? Will you tell us about her?”

As a way of gathering himself, he clasped his hands behind his head and straightened his spine, brought his elbows together and looked from one to the other. Then he crossed his arms and stared straight ahead. He told us of a young family, an early death, a move to California, single parenthood.

“What do you think happened to your daughter?” Amanda asked.

“The truth is she disappeared on her own but then stayed that way. From the outside it looked like her choice, so I've been unable to get police involved, just private investigators who find nothing.”

“Did she work with secrets professionally?” I asked.

“She worked in the drug racket. So, yes. I like to think that if there were whistles to blow, she'd blow them.”

I asked if he or his daughter had ever written in emails or posted online the details he'd found in the poems—the blinking sun, the blue tie and spooling galaxies, the dream of the dog in Marseilles—but he didn't answer. We waited for a group of teenagers to walk by, smoking, loudly talking and
laughing. One of them, a skinny young guy wearing what looked like tie-dyed medical scrubs, smiled at us. A friend handed him something and the kid skipped over and asked in English if any of us had a smoke. Durant looked at the ground, as if alone, and I saw in his face the answer to my question—yes, the details had been or could well have been communicated online—as Amanda got a cigarette and lighter from her bag and gave them to the kid. He lit up and offered her a few coins he'd been holding but she smiled and shook her head, and he glanced at Durant, realizing then that he'd blundered into something, and handed back the lighter and made a little involuntary gesture, his hand with the smoke cocking slightly and his eyes flitting away. He nodded and was gone.

“Let's walk,” she said.

Durant stood and looked back in the direction we'd come from.

“There's a theory that Shelley was killed by government agents,” he said. “The idea is they rammed his boat and he drowned before he could publish ‘A Philosophical View of Reform,' with its arguments for women's rights and the formation of trade unions. It's where he wrote that poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind. And in fact, after he died, the thing wasn't published for another hundred years.” He actually raised his finger to stress the point. “But he wasn't murdered. He'd just had his schooner refitted and it was a bad job and the thing was made unseaworthy. A storm blew up. He drowned. No plot. No conspiracy of interests.” Whatever the truth was behind Three Sheets, he said, he didn't believe that any “Shadowy Apparatus” could be so
nuanced in its manipulations. “These people you describe know money and tradecraft, but they think hearts and minds are things to be won. It's laughable, the idea that they're practising mind control when they can't control crowds in public squares. They don't do subtle nudgings, James.”

Maybe Shelley wasn't murdered, I thought, but over the centuries writers and poets were murdered by governments all the time. If not Shelley, then Lorca, then Mandelstam, then Neruda, Saro-Wiwa—

“I know plausibility isn't what it used to be,” he said. “But the problem with your theory is the poetry. Slogans control people, not poems.”

And yet we were all in Rome because he'd read “The Art of Memory.” And Amanda's search for evidence of her brother's murder had been directed by a poem mentioning a Guatemalan general who possibly didn't exist. What if these two, my American friends, had been led to look in the wrong places? I held to my theory but left him unchallenged. He was moving now, inviting us to walk, struggling, I thought, to find the energy he'd had when our meeting began. Whether he knew it or not, his physical self suggested we were closer to the truth, which meant his daughter wasn't speaking to him in poems, which made it harder to believe she was alive.