The Brooke-Rose Omnibus (34 page)

–Do you say that because –

–he disagrees with me? I’ve thought of that, Laurence, I have, believe me. I have no illusions about my age. Infinite space exhausts me. Look at my eyes, I’ve worn them out with listening.

–I know.

–Of course we could secretly brain-drain him to the States, but so far they have put out no tentative feelers even, let alone tempting offers, except to me, and I don’t want to start a second life. Would you, Laurence?

–No, sir.

–No. Of course not. Why, I’d need three separate lives to catch up, and then what would I do?

–What will he do, Something?

–You may well ask, my boy, you may well ask. How did we get on to this, most unscientific, oh yes, Dekko. How shall we recognise him, Laurence? We must devise a way.

I don’t know how to reach him. As one of my ex-patients who assumes that analysis consists of sitting dumbly with the analyst, feeding him no items and then giving up, your kind, of science doesn’t work, says Dr Dekko. He doesn’t tell his wife about the tentative feelers and the tempting offers he receives after all to drain his brain across the ocean, or anyone, least of all me. He keeps them tight in those close-knit meridians that do not fluctuate one inch into any wavering outlines. Yet something emanates out of his small corona in the mad morse of neural cells that reject in every cycle of his undrained brain the one decoying premiss as it blocks with irrelevance the programming of both his ambition and his loyalty. So that he starts again, feeding the items of his desires, disgorging their binary arithmetic on wide white sheets of hope except for the one item of his wife’s own chemistry now galled by the banality of the same untender story with the mixture not quite as before owing to the presence of plump affronted virtue. My wife? Well, what about her?

–Wouldn’t she like to get away, to go to America? Have you asked her?

–What do you mean? Who said anything about going to America?

–Surely you’ve had offers. All the scientists do. Especially since –

–Since what, Laurence?

–Well, since the Theory.

–THE Theory, you call it. Whose theory?

–Oh, come off it, Tim.

–Our theory. Yes, team-work, Head called it on
television.
I noticed he mentioned no names.

–Names, what do names matter?

–Ah, the anonymous greater glory of science.

–My dear Tim, the television people can’t clog the public with a lot of names, except for Tell-Star and such.

–Just because you have to appear anonymously on programmes in your field –

–But surely you don’t think the brief subliminal flash of names under your episodic image remains for one moment in the public mind? You have your name on the technical stuff.

–Yes. At least some people know who does the work around here.

–Smile, Tim, smile.

–What good will that do me? I work all round the clock as Head gets more and more dotty and turns pop-scientist –

–And takes all the credit, you mean.

–Credit must circulate. Otherwise energy falls off.

–And in no time at all you have no shocks, no movement and no life.

–Oh, stop quoting Head’s obiter dicta at me. You know nothing about it, Laurence, they have no relevance at all.

–You don’t like him much, do you Tim?

–Of course I like him. I … I used to admire him enormously, who wouldn’t. When I first came here, and even long before, I thought of him as a, yes, as a god, a giant among intellects, I mean, why, his work as a young man, well, you wouldn’t understand, but –

–But scientific genius gets played out at forty? Do you believe that, Tim. Do you … fear it?

–Of course not. Head went from strength to strength, and so will I. And so will you, Laurence, in your own queer field, well, I mean, when you get your vigour back.

–Only you don’t think I will?

–I didn’t say that. These things take time. Everyone knows a serious illness affects the metabolism of the brain, at first I mean.

–As does old age in the end?

–But Laurence, you can’t call yourself old.

–I meant Professor Head.

–So you’ve got it all lined up. You brain-drain me away so that your wife has a nice clear field all to herself as Head dodders into retirement. But she’ll have to show a bit of brilliance, you great innocent. Stop spying on me, Laurence, stick to your more naïve, less empirically minded patients. Yes, yes, I see, what does my wife think, wouldn’t she like, oh Laurence, you great clumsy oaf.

I have heard this conversation in waves that run
backwards
through time, I even seem to supply the words and their internal combustion pushes them along though I don’t do the steering. We make the bumps as we go and leave them on the road like horse-power waste as the little orange lights flicker on the control-panel, over Erase, Next
Instruction,
Uninhibit, One-shot-trigger and things like that, which flicker in Dekko’s eyes while his mouth dips a little and he apologises, I get so tired, he says.

–I know, Tim. I know. You do work hard. I only meant, about your wife, she might want to get away from, well, have you talked to her at all, Tim, have you asked her? I mean, perhaps more than just scientific facts come into it.

–You think you know a lot, don’t you?

–Not in your field, Tim, of course.

–Yes well, I admit, I mean I agree, that scientific facts, as our admin friend would say, never hurt anyone. Only when –

–People –

–Yes. People. Sometimes I think you read right into me, Laurence. I get frightened by your eyes. Not frightened exactly, but, unsettled, shall we say. They’ve got so big. They look as if they might come right out of your head on long stalks, and yet they stay deep sunk. Do you take drugs or something?

–I seem to live backwards, or rather, part of me, my ears and eyes, as if their atoms consisted of anti-matter. I realise this makes no scientific sense.

–It has no physical meaning. I mean even in theory you’d cancel them out or if not you then other matter.

–Probably sleeplessness does it. And a sort of weird forgotten memory of, a wish –

–A wish? For what?

–To die again. And a fear. They go together. Sometimes I think that during my death I became everyone I know.

–But you didn’t die, Laurence.

–A sort of love, perhaps, which I left behind. Because at other times I feel appalled and overwhelmed by the
ineffectualness
of love, or friendship, or tolerance. Or perhaps I only mean the ineffectualness of my own, for I feel none of these things, they died with me, so that I can’t after all expect anything from them.

–You say, at other times, you mean like now?

–Like now. Forgive me, Tim, I don’t know what’s come over me.

–I think I know. But if I put it into words it would sound mean and disagreeable. Everything I say nowadays sounds mean and disagreeable, after I’ve said it.

–I suppose pure scientists tend to get frightened of words, because they don’t use them. I believe that poets also get frightened of them, for the opposite reason. But it all comes to the same thing in the end. We all have to face the same facts.

–I think, perhaps, I will talk to Sally. Insofar as I can. And to Brenda.

–Why Brenda?

–My eldest daughter. You’ve met her many times. You don’t have much memory for names, do you?

–No. For some reason –

–But then, as you would say, what do names matter? She takes her common entrance next year. An upheaval wouldn’t do her any good. Maths and physics. Yes, she takes after me. Bright girl, brighter than the other two. Yours also, I gather. But then, women in science, you know, they don’t reach the top flight. Still, I will talk to her. Harvard, after all .. But then –

The permutations of desires start grinding round his inner automation at the slow speed of unhealing time, rejecting in each cycle the one decoying premiss in two parts
a
and
b
with the basement of his life feeding in again the same two blocking items. Unless perhaps I have pushed his atoms a little towards his daughter’s physics with a word thrown in that might make rings around those infinite distances and lasso him with more widening circumstances, him, Sally, Brenda and the less bright other two whose names I can’t remember.

Inside the mirror on the landing of my consulting-room the shape stares back, spinning meridians, latitudes and spirals that grow and fill the entire glass but silently, emanating no messages, no nervous handwriting, no atoms of any anger, love or wonder. Something however creates the undulations and if not anger or love then some nebulous memory, surely, behind the eyes. But the eyes close to avoid the issue of their death and amazing recovery. The pain behind them resolves the optical image in the dark, as with a change of lenses, so that inside the mirror the tall thin man stares back, as before death, before recovery, as when life took its normal course through blood-vessels, nerve-fibres, muscle spindles, tendons, flesh and such.

These ache. Their returned presence mocks the spinning curves, the latitudes and spirals and the wavering outlines that grow suddenly monstrous before vanishing as if they had not wavered or spun there at all, curves doubling, trebling each other’s trebles like water rippling from a stone thrown or a word perhaps, filling the entire mirror or, with some others, the whole room, bursting its walls, the house, the street, the square or the whole sky. The blood-vessels, nerve-fibres, muscle spindles ache, form some sort of presence, something to hold on to at least, such as the
doorknob
that moves away into a shaft of light where hangs the voice of a remote girl-spy with all its wavering outlines widening out from a small dry foetus of well how do you feel today into a threnody of unacknowledged anguish that fills the room, bursting its walls, the house, the entire sky untenable because I have come to the conclusion that you see radiation, Larry, and radiation consists after all of decay, degeneration so that you see the death that lies inherent in all living existence but why? why me?

–I don’t know, Larry. Don’t you remember anything, a moment, a non-temporal moment perhaps, of total
knowledge,
or total intuition, some final decision for or against made in the light of the person you had become midway through life in the dark wood?

–For or against what?

–For or against, well, the clarity of total consciousness.

–No, I remember nothing but opaqueness. Or something perhaps –

–Like, volition? As opposed to will?

–moving through space, forewards but back at the same time, as if I consisted of anti-matter for ever cancelled out –

–That makes no scientific sense.

–as if in all our words and gestures, acts and attitudes we effected some sort of parallel penetration into whatever had originated them, their primeval atom, say, with built-in unstableness.

–Well, not built-in, Larry, the instability would have occurred in the next moment of creation, together with time and space, causing, at once or ultimately, the big bang or whatever. The moment between nothingness and time. Or, if you like, between eternity and time. So vice versa. The moment of death, neither before nor after, affording a non-temporal transition in time from one state to another, through which the two interpenetrate into a total
consciousness
of both the whole of before and the whole of after, the first enabling you to choose once and for ever, don’t you remember anything?

–Since I didn’t in fact have to choose, clearly none of that can have occurred, if it does at all, how could it? Sometimes I feel that during my death I became everyone I know, even my patients perhaps, whose names and the names of whose neuroses I can’t remember, whose aggressions, inabilities and blindnesses I have absorbed over the years, unless mine perhaps, so that how could I choose? Do you believe that possible: at the moment of death, instead of facing oneself, if at all – but what exactly happened to me, Brenda, did I really die?

–I don’t know. The doctor said so many things, such as most satisfactory in the circumstances –

–but then circumstances do not touch everyone with the same meridians –

–or that recent experiments in resuscitation have shown that life ebbs away slowly, and can remain a long while in a body otherwise incapable of it. They can maintain life in some organs as you know. But sooner or later comes a moment – which they can always tell, except – well, they can’t tell one thing, the precise moment when the soul has left the body.

–The soul, Brenda?

–The psyche, you prefer to call it.

–Oh names, what do names matter? Sometimes I feel that during my death I became quite unsettled she looks as the latitudes and spirals fill the room again out of some word perhaps thrown in to split a nucleus unstable inside the small dry foetus of interest which grows into an anxious query about death, her own, not merely that of others, briefly but hugely glimpsed, personally envisaged not dispassionately observed, so that the cells whirl round their alarming morse around the lymphatic glands, which he said they should examine too with radio-active isotopes. They couldn’t do it before, I mean in your state of health, they couldn’t submit you to further tests, and at first they said you had nothing organically wrong with you, no, not your eyes or ears either, nothing at all, just nerves. That ache, and blood vessels, muscle spindles, bones flesh and such that form some sort of presence to hold on to, such as your patients. Shouldn’t you perhaps start seeing a few patients again?

The voice leaps from the shaft of light saying how do you feel and things like that they’ve telephoned, many of them. Many? Well, several. It might do you good.

–I’d hardly call that a sensible reason for seeing patients. Whose names I can’t remember and whose aggressions, inabilities and blindnesses I have absorbed over the years so that I couldn’t possibly have chosen anything if any choice occurs inside the latitudes and spirals that fill the room, forming an anxious query about death as traced with
radio-active
isotopes leaving something behind, volition perhaps as opposed to will which, when it finally catches up can in a sudden flash say gug, grr, pa-pa like a doll bent.