Wittgenstein Jr (5 page)

He came to Cambridge to be
close to the thieves
, he says.
Blessed are those who know at what time of night the thieves will come. They will be awake, gathering their strength and strapping on their belts, before the thieves arrive
.

It is night, he says. He is strapping on his belt. Because he came to Cambridge to
rout the thieves
.

(EDE (whispering): Isn’t Wittgenstein, technically, a don?

ME (whispering): But not
spiritually
. And that’s the point.)

Little St Mary’s Church, damp and quiet. Bottled-up air. The smell of wet plaster.

It’s really only the fragment of a church, you can see that, Wittgenstein says. It was meant to be part of something larger.

He admires the flintwork of the tower. Cambridgeshire flint, he says, the only stone round here. He admires the windows, and the daggers and mouchettes in the tracery. So similar to Ely Cathedral, he says. So unlike other East Anglian churches …

A long pause. The rest of us stand about awkwardly. Wittgenstein smiles. The problem is, none of us really knows what to
do
in a church, he says.

We know we have to be quiet, he says. We know we mustn’t
disturb
the church. Even Benwell knows that he shouldn’t make a racket in the calm. But that’s all that remains of the old reverence for the place where heaven and earth were supposed to meet.

WITTGENSTEIN (inspecting the chantry chapels): Christianity declares us to be wretched: that’s its greatness. Christianity knows us as sinners. (A pause.) I suppose you are all atheists.

Titmuss begins to speak of religion in India. No one listens.

MULBERRY: Do
you
believe in God?

WITTGENSTEIN: I do not. Not, at least, in the sense you think I might.

MULBERRY: Surely you either believe in God or you don’t.

WITTGENSTEIN: Perhaps it is not a question of belief. Perhaps the concept of God is not the kind of thing in which one can believe or disbelieve.

DOYLE: You mean religion is a
cultural
thing? That it’s all about belonging to a tradition?

Silence.

WITTGENSTEIN: A despairing man cries,
O God
, and rolls his eyes up to heaven. It is on that basis we should understand both the words
God
and
heaven
. A despairing man cries,
I am damned
, and falls, weeping, to the ground. It is on that basis we should understand both the words
damnation
and
Hell
.

The concept of God is used to express an
extremity of wretchedness, suffering, and doubt
, he says. Really, religion is only for the wretched. That’s why we, who know nothing of wretchedness, know nothing of religion. And that’s why we, who never feel ourselves to be wretched, know nothing of philosophy, either.

A painting of St Michael, weighing souls in his scales. Of St Christopher, crossing a great river with the infant Christ on his shoulder.

Titmuss’s phone goes off (who else would have a
Govinda Jaya Jaya
ringtone?). He fumbles through his pockets.

Come, let’s go, Wittgenstein says. We shouldn’t wake the church. The church is dreaming. The church is falling through the centuries. The church doesn’t want to be woken up. It doesn’t want us here.

Trumpington Street. A sudden shower. Rain, falling heavily. We shelter in the museum porch, watching the water splash from the gutters.

TITMUSS: It’s like an Indian monsoon. The weather’s gone weird.

EDE: The world’s ending.

MULBERRY: And Cambridge will be the first to go under. Cambridge and Cambridgeshire and East Anglia … The North Sea will reclaim it all.

EDE: You seem pleased.

MULBERRY: Oh, I can’t
wait
for the world to end!

Rain pours from the mouths of the gargoyles. Chained monkeys … A drowning monk … A faceless figure with a snake in its mouth …

WITTGENSTEIN: Do you know why God sent the Flood? Men spilled their seed on trees and stones. They copulated with beasts. And the greater beasts copulated with lesser beasts—the dog, with the rat; the cock, with the peahen. (A pause.) So God
reversed
the act of creation, unleashing the sea he had once sealed up, allowing the waters of the deep to sweep over the land.

TITMUSS (quietly): Far out, man.

MULBERRY (quieter still): You’re a fucking hippie, Titmuss.

• • •

Inside the Fitzwilliam, sheltering from the rain.

His brother thought of himself as a kind of
Noah
, Wittgenstein says, as we wander among the exhibits.

Logic is what guards against the Flood, his brother said. Against the annulment of order. Against the destruction of goodness.

Noah sought a sanctuary on the face of the abyss
, his brother wrote in his notebooks.
And isn’t that what I am seeking: a sanctuary on the face of the abyss?

As love is stronger than death, so is logic stronger than chaos
, his brother wrote in his notebooks.
In the storm of the world, the ark of my thought will anchor on the mountain of certainty
.

Guy Fawkes’. Midnight, after the pubs close. Mulberry’s annual
derangement of the senses
house party.

Coats in the front room. DJ in the living room. Dealer in the dining room, showing his wares: MDMA, ‘Miaow Miaow’, and a mystery powder he can’t identify. An
amusebouche
, he says—a free snort for anyone who buys …

The kitchen. Dozens of cans of beer, wine. A jam-tub full of punch, with floating cherries and slices of banana. Stacks of plastic cups wrapped in cellophane.

The first bedroom upstairs. Very grand, with sanded floorboards and tall sash windows looking out onto the street. The marijuana zone. Posters: Che in his beret, Bob Marley in Rasta colours. We join the smoking circle.

Conversation is dopey, making Ede impatient. Where are the Clare College girls Mulberry promised? Ede needs girls!

EDE: Have you ever been in love, Peters? I mean
really
in love?

Ede speaks of his romance with a Master’s daughter. Her summer dress and flip-flops … A lily pond … A raft … Skinny-dipping … A bottle of champagne chilling in the water …

Great love will be the making of him, he’s sure of it, Ede says. Only romance will teach him what to do with his life.

The bathroom. Guthrie’s in the tub, reenacting the death of Seneca under Doyle’s direction.

GUTHRIE/SENECA:
As long as you live, keep learning
how to live; and this is as true for me, today, as it is for any of you. Expectation is the greatest impediment to living; running ahead to tomorrow, it loses today. The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity …

How noble Guthrie seems! How profound!

GUTHRIE/SENECA:
Sometimes even to live is an act of courage
.

Guthrie sniffs cocaine from a mirror. Ede rubs some on his gums (it acts more quickly this way, he says). Mulberry, trousers down, applies his cocaine
rectally
(it’s even quicker
this
way, he says).

The second bedroom (set aside for ketamine, Mulberry tells us). It’s dark inside. The music thumps up from downstairs, bass magnified through the floorboards. Slumped individuals, among them Scroggins … Is it Scroggins? Yes: there he is, lost in a K-hole.

The third bedroom, Mulberry’s, up a second flight of stairs. Posters. Mapplethorpe’s men fisting. A large drawing of a headless man, with a labyrinth for viscera and a death’s head for genitals, holding a knife in one hand and a bleeding heart in another. A glassed-in roof terrace, full of straggly marijuana plants.

Mulberry laces a spliff with codeine and passes it round. We have to lie down, it’s so strong.

The roofs of Cambridge! We’re on top of the world! The sky above us. The sky: an abyss. The night: a great cave. What a night to lose our minds!

Benwell is letting off fireworks in the garden. Bursts of colour. Cerise. Vermillion. A Catherine wheel spinning. A smouldering fire, spitting out sparks. Ede says he can
feel
the fireworks. Mulberry says he can
taste
the pink ones.

Three AM. The girls are here. We lie on our bellies,
watching them from the terrace. Girls in Barbour jackets, in vintage fur.

How beautiful the girls are! How beautiful, the fireworks! And we’re beautiful, too. All the young are beautiful.

Wittgenstein’s brother took his life at
twenty
, we muse. He knew he was all washed up at
twenty
. At our age! And we haven’t even
begun
to live! We haven’t
done
anything. We haven’t
failed
at anything. Our lives lie ahead of us. Wittgenstein says we haven’t been
tested
yet, Mulberry reminds us.

To kill yourself at twenty! To have finished with life at twenty! To have run out of options at twenty! Twenty: and for your life to have run its course. To be twenty is surely to be stood at the
brink
of life! To be twenty is yet to have
turned the page
!

Perhaps that’s what it means to be brilliant, really brilliant, we speculate: to have already seen past the limits of life. To have seen all the way to the end.

Is that what brilliance means: understanding the whole of life, seeing the whole? Is it that we’re not
clever
enough to kill ourselves? We don’t
want
to die—not now, not today: is this a sign of our shallowness?

The girls are playing with sparklers. The girls are cooing with delight about their sparklers. How beautiful they are, the girls with their sparklers, making loops in the air …

They can’t help their beauty, we agree. It has nothing to do with them. It has nothing to do with any of us. We are young, so young. But what does our youth
mean
?

A cry from downstairs. Scroggins!

Down we go, forcing our way through the crowds on the staircase. A glimpse of a glassy-eyed Chakrabarti, with a beer
backpack and a suction tube. Of Guthrie, snoring on the floor. Both Kirwins in sweaty snogs with Clare College girls.

Then Scroggins, like Kurtz at the end of
Apocalypse Now
. Muttering obscurely. Running his hand over his face. We can’t understand what he’s saying … The overturning of nonsense … Half words, non-words, speech thickening and wandering and failing …

And then he’s out—cold. Locked into his private hell.

Ede googles
ketamine. Causes dissociative anaesthesia
, he reads. That means you can’t tell whether you’re dreaming or awake, he says.
Ketamine can make you feel you’ve died and come back to life
, he reads. I’m not sure Scroggins is going to come back to life, I say.

We wave our hands in front of Scroggins’s eyes. Nothing. And he smells terrible! Has he soiled himself? Yes! Yes, he has! Scroggins is incontinent!

Mulberry suggests administering MDMA—that’ll pick him up. Ede shakes his head. No. It’s probably best to call the authorities.

Scroggins is groaning. A deep, abysmal groan. A gurgling in the throat. A kind of living death rattle …

Paramedics come for Scroggins, lifting him onto a stretcher. Would anyone like to accompany him? No! The ambulance rolls off, lights flashing.

Ede and I walk off into the night, to let our heads cool off.

EDE: That girl! That girl! Did you see her?

I shake my head.

EDE (swigging from his bottle): How could you miss her, Peters? She was a dead-ringer for that Cressida—Prince Harry’s girl. You know, hippyish. Plaits. Scarf round her
hips. Anyway, she’s my future wife … She’s Duchess Ede … (Another swig.) Fuck Scroggins and his emergency. I hope he fucking dies. (A third swig.) Have you ever felt you were
made for something
, Peters? That you had some greater
purpose
? That’s what I feel now: I’m made for something. It’s all becoming clear. It’s to do with that Clare College girl. It’s providence. It’s
fate
. (Fourth swig.) All the light of the world seemed to rest on her face—did you notice that, Peters?

Ede throws the bottle over a hedge and loses his balance. Ede, flat on his back on the pavement.

He has a faith he never knew he possessed, Ede says. He has
means
he never knew he had … He feels
taller
than he was.

EDE (sitting up): Am I really taller, Peters?

He’s high, he says, as I pull him to his feet. Higher than he’s ever been. And it’s not drugs. It’s life! Life! He’s never going to sleep.

He has a sense of the future, he says. Of the
real
future, which is nothing like our present. Tomorrow will not be like today, he says. Tomorrow is going to be quite different from today …

He’s been thrown from the track, Ede says. This is a new direction. He’s at the surf’s edge. The waves’ edge. He won’t be afraid to leave himself behind. To relearn everything. He’s going to fight against everything he does not love …

Our College. The staircase to my rooms. Ede gives me some Zs—they’ll help you zzz, he says. Zolpidem. Zopiclone. Old friends. I swallow a handful, and stagger upstairs.

Class in five hours, I remind myself, setting the alarm clock …

Silence in the classroom.

Mulberry’s asleep behind sunglasses. Ede’s sunk so low, his head is level with the tabletop. Alexander Kirwin looks vacantly out the window. Benedict Kirwin looks vacantly out the window. Titmuss looks vacantly out the window. Guthrie looks vacantly at Wittgenstein. Chakrabarti just looks vacant. Scroggins, usually the most vacant of all: missing.

The
effort
of thinking. Wittgenstein stands silently in the corner of the room. He grasps his head. He shakes his head. Sweat streams from his face.

Divine help: that’s what he needs, he says. We cannot think by ourselves, no more than we can create ourselves.

Wittgenstein asks a general question, and waits for a reply.

Silence.

He asks his question again, slightly rephrasing it.

More silence.