Dark Terrors 3 (44 page)

‘Whoa, wait a minute. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Euclid dates back to what? 300 or so BC? That cosmology of Greek and Roman gods survived him by centuries. And even then you’re talking, what, hundreds of years more before things really caught on.’

‘Of course!’ Klein shouted. ‘Because it took that long for the Euclidean conception to approach its critical mass. You couldn’t pick up a paper in ancient Rome and read about how Euclid redefined the world! There was no Page Three girl to help spread word of the invention of this neat new geometry. There wasn’t any CNN to tell the masses: Greek gods dead, film at ten.’

Klein was sort of bouncing up and down as he spoke and alternately enthralling and intimidating me. Generally excitable, he was now at the edge of something more extreme. The room had emptied out, but those still around eyed him with nervous apprehension or undisguised mirth.

‘There was no mass media. It took hundreds of years for ideas to be made real. Now it happens in no time. Or practically no time. The first work to see chaos for what it was appeared barely three decades ago. Within a few years we have theories of fractal geometry and complexity, and philosophies of deconstruction. And now it’s on Yves Saint Laurent’s bloody knickers.’

‘Take it easy, Klein. Sit down.’

Klein looked around. He was breathing hard and his glasses were so filthy he might as well have been wearing shades. He stood still for a moment, ran his tongue over his dry lips and flopped back into the chair.

‘Two thousand years ago Euclid killed the gods. What’s going to happen this time?’

I had no idea, but strongly suspected that Klein didn’t have it quite right. The other diners went back to their affairs. I started to proffer a counter-argument when Klein’s already ashen pallor went even whiter.

‘Shit,’ he said and got up. I turned around and saw Margaritte eyeing us from the door. Klein ran over to his wife, but she didn’t look happy. They started arguing almost at once, then she stormed off. He trudged after her, pressing his glasses to his face with one hand and I heard their rising voices carrying on down the hall. Shaking my head and smiling at the onlookers with a ‘well-what-can-you-do?’ kind of grin, I gathered up his books and papers and took them with me. I didn’t know what to think of Klein’s theory, but I was frankly worried for his mental health.

Rightly so, as it turned out. For I would never see him alive again.

* * * *

Klein called at 4:02:35. Ah, the priceless precision of the digital age.

I grabbed the phone on the second ring. Elaine never moved. I’d neither seen nor heard from Klein for ten days following our lunch, though I’d tried to call him. In the interim I’d come across an article in the
Spectator
decrying the dangerous political correctness of the deconstructive influence in schools, and seen two TV news features relating to chaotic processes on the Internet. One even featured a sound bite from Mandelbrot.

‘Hi, Steve.’

It was a most un-Kleinlike greeting. He sounded tired and hoarse and out of sorts.

‘Hey, Klein. How are you?’

‘It looks bad, Steve. I’m frightened.’

‘What? Of what? What’s wrong?’

I glanced over and saw that Elaine was awake and watching me. I spoke softly, but there was an edge to my tone that must have got though to her. She looked groggy but concerned.

‘I’ve been running the models, Steve. Exact calculations. Thousands of iterations before the equations converged. Soon that won’t work any more, you know. Iterative processes are doomed. But for now, for a little while longer, maximum likelihood estimates don’t lie. Though I wish they did.’

‘Klein...Have you been drinking?’

Elaine’s eyebrows leapt up like grasshoppers. I’d never known Klein to imbibe anything stronger than tea with lemon.

‘A little. Margaritte keeps a supply, you know.’

I didn’t wonder. ‘Are things, you know, okay with you and Margaritte? After the other day and all?’

There was a lengthy pause with only line noise and Klein’s deviated septum to fill the silence.

‘I . . . that is, Margaritte . . . we’re approaching a threshold, too. It’s all gone to turbulence, now, and I can see the edge. I can
feel
it, Steve. I ... I know it doesn’t matter. In the bigger picture, I mean. The equations, the models, they prove it. But still. Shit, Steve. It still, you know, it
hurts.’

There was another staticky silence. I hesitated, but with my eyes fixed on Elaine’s, decided to go ahead.

‘Listen to me, Klein. You can’t always...depend on the numbers. They’re like you were saying with Euclid, you know? They’re not quite real. They’re just representations and they’re different from people. Abstract. People aren’t fixed things. Even when you think they are.’

‘I don’t know, Steve . . .’

‘What I’m about to tell you, I’ve never talked about before and I ...
we
don’t like to think about it. Especially now. But I’m going to tell you. All right?’

I was talking to Klein, but looking at Elaine. She nodded back at me.

‘My first teaching position was back in the States, right out of my doctorate. It was a shit-hole of a department in a dull Midwestern town and it was horrible. Elaine was miserable. She had left behind her job and all her friends because it was the only position I could get and we were committed to staying together.

‘Well, let’s just say that things got bad. Real bad. I had a killer teaching load and the town was full of overqualified faculty spouses, so Elaine couldn’t find any work. I’d come home tired and mean and she’d be angry and bored. For a while we communicated through grunts and yells.’

‘Steve . . .’

‘Just listen, Klein. It was the end of the semester and we hadn’t . . . been together for weeks. I was starting to browse the classifieds for studio apartments. So it’s right around finals time - and you know, I’ve got a couple, three hundred undergrads and it’s just pure chaos, you’ll pardon the expression - when this perky little sophomore comes to see me. She’s a total airhead, but with one of those teenage bodies that won’t quit. And she’s failing the course and the door’s closed and she
knows
what she’s doing and I’m unhappy and ... I don’t know, Klein, I just figured what the fuck, you know? I just... it was just an idea, Klein.

‘I hated myself for it and I still do. I figured for sure it was the end for us and probably my career. Hell, I thought maybe that’s why I did it. And I won’t lie to you, Klein, it got pretty bad. But it also brought stuff into focus. There was a lot of pain, but we found a way through it. Eventually. And my point is this: in the end I...we decided that it was all just a moment. Just an
idea,
you see? And we rose above it. We
made
healing tractable. An idea isn’t real unless you make it so.
Choose
to make it so. Otherwise it’s
only
an idea, only an abstraction. I mean, isn’t that what we were talking about?’

There was silence, and then there was laughter. Distant, dim and very scary.

‘Just
an idea. Just an
idea.’
He said it over and over and was still laughing when he hung up the phone.

I tried to call him back, but the line was engaged. I crawled back into bed and kissed the tears off Elaine’s face. I tried to go back to sleep, but I kept hearing Klein’s laughter in my head.

* * * *

I don’t know what time the phone rang.

Elaine had gone to bed early, but I stayed up to watch
The South Bank Show.
Melvin Bragg was interviewing Derrida.

At about half-eleven, Elaine staggered out of the bedroom clutching her belly. Her face was white as milk, and blood oozed down her thighs. She was crying and moaning and collapsed to the floor before I could get to her. I thought
about calling an ambulance, but couldn’t bear the wait. I lifted her up and put her in the car, then sped to the local hospital in a panicked daze.

Elaine lost the baby, but it was worse than that. Her uterus had become malformed in the pregnancy. It was actually touch and go for a while, although the surgeon didn’t tell me that until later. The doctor also said she had never seen or heard of anything quite like it before, and asked if Elaine had ever worked around radioactive or toxic substances. I couldn’t make any sense of it then, but of course anything and everything is explainable now.

I left the hospital confused and exhausted, but satisfied that Elaine was going to be okay.

The police were waiting for me when I got home. A detective accompanied by a pair of PCs. I immediately assumed something had happened to Elaine.

‘Steven Rich?’ the detective asked.

I managed a nod.

He mumbled his name, but I didn’t catch it. ‘Do you know a Dr Paul Klein?’

Another nod.

‘When did you last have contact with him?’

‘A week or two ago. Why? What’s going on? Is this about Elaine? Is Elaine all right?’

The detective glanced at one of the constables who started back toward the car. ‘I don’t know about any Elaine, sir. But Dr Klein killed his wife and took his own life early this morning. Your phone number was found on his person. Did he call you at any time last night or early today?’

I never thought of myself as a fainter, but things went black around me. I felt like Dorothy caught up in the twister and carried over the rainbow into some alien landscape. Fortunately the cop caught me by the arm and helped me to a sitting position on the front steps.

I told him in rambling terms about Elaine and what had happened the previous night. That I knew Klein and Margaritte were having troubles, but that his news was an utter
shock. He clucked sympathetically and tried to look interested.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘We may want to talk to you some more, but that can wait. Why don’t you get some rest now.’

The cop helped me inside and guided me to the living room sofa where I collapsed. He closed the front door softly as he left and I fell quickly and deeply asleep.

Neither of us thought to check the blinking light on the answerphone.

* * * *

Our answering machine is an old model - it works well enough that I never saw any reason to buy a fancier one - but it only gives you sixty seconds to leave a message.

‘I’ve been running the equations for days, Steve, but they won’t converge. The iterations will go on for ever now.

‘I was grading exams the other day, you know? The first-year class. A girl wrote out elaborate calculations for a problem that didn’t require it, a problem with a simple answer. In the end she just put a big “X” through it all and gave up. I saw it as
sous rature
and gave her full credit.

‘It’s coming now, Steve. Almost here. I thought I should warn you. We’re at the base of the S-curve, but the explosion will happen soon. The numbers don’t. . . didn’t lie . . .

‘I put her under erasure. Margaritte. I thought it was for the best. The only thing I wish . . .’

Sixty seconds.

* * * *

I remember
Klein
once told me about something called luminiferous aether. It was an early, discarded notion in physics, like spontaneous generation or phlogiston. Aether was supposed to be the medium which filled all unoccupied space and was the mechanism for transmission of magnetic and electrical forces.
Klein
said that there had been some promising work verifying its existence and the idea was catching on until Einstein disproved it all with relativity.
Klein
always repeated the same thing when the topic of relativity came up.

‘Hell of an idea,’ he would say.