Murmur Page 11

  On one side of the table are two semi-childish classroom chairs. The nearest to me holds a subtly older version of the schoolboy Christopher, his uniform and shoes the same but indefinably unloved, speckled with dust, worn at the cuffs.

  The other has a freak in it.

  He is the spit of someone else. He’s naked, open-mouthed, the same age as his smart neighbor. He sits in the light-cone of one of those green-shaded lamps on chains that seem always to be caught in the act of lowering themselves. His lovely, unbelieving eyes follow Matron, moving behind the men. She scuttles off to fetch from the shadows a small trolley, on which the needles and neat swatches of white gauze are laid like so much cutlery and cake.

  Thresholds, membranes, molecular illusions of separate things—and then the growling continuity of force, number, and medium. I am the universal lake. Out of me every living body slowly forms. I hold this room in my vision, and into that thin layer of contemplation everything I see falls steadily, fetal and desolate as a small bathysphere in the Atlantic night. The room begins to jolt and creak under pressure. It is an ordinary room. It is an egg in hot water, an air bubble upon that egg. It is the chained box in Houdini’s tank. And as Stallbrook paces the room, throwing glances, at me, at the low concrete-poured ceiling on which a massive boot begins to stamp, at his two prisoners, I feel the temperature rising—heat loss and fear. Is that water, sliding along a corridor outside, the voice that says “this, too; now this …”?

  “Time is against us, gentlemen,” Stallbrook reveals, hands offered up in submission, the old familiar drifting voice graveled with care. Is his anxiety sincere, or faked? “A life has gone missing, and very possibly another is about to slip the net. Their rescue—their retrieval—must depend on what we can learn, here, today.”

  Matron advances on the naked freak.

  “I’m going to ask you some questions. Your answers may be right or wrong, halting or confident, knowingly false. Your task is to respond.”

  As Stallbrook sets the terms—explains his test—she paddles fingers over a syringe, but settles for a swab of cotton wool and ethanol. What current of excitement shakes her hands? A trust in what she does, or has been asked to do?

  “It is your interest in these questions that we prize,” the Colonel says. He moves his tie, palpates one side of his moustache, and scans the tree of life appearing in the cracked ceiling. “We wish to guard against a facile truth. We are hospitable to doubt, to fear, to the temptations of fancy. Try not to let your different … physical conditions deter you. Say simply what you think.”

  The seasoned Molyneaux straightens his back and lays his hands upon his thighs, ready to play. He gives these mock-constraints credence. They are the rules he now obeys and in that moment of submission—while his companion stares agitatedly at me, searching for news, for sense (a last-minute reprieve, perhaps?)—chooses to overlook the shuddering of walls whose corners exhale dust, settle, but seem increasingly untrue.

  A cry escapes the creature with brown hair and eyes, gray backward-sloping teeth, a dampened sex, and fat in hanging wads about his hips and chest.

  “Such a great fuss,” Matron exclaims, wiping his upper arm.

  Why does she pantomime her care? The freak communicates with me. A ripple in the air. Because, his houseless voice whispers, hers is a confusion of role and feeling she has long since lost. Surely my lake-dark vision is to blame, but now I see what’s wrong with my guardians. Their faces are unknown to them. Their eyes pure scar. They are the faces of people, or entities, to whom questions do not occur.

  What will their questions be?

  Matron inverts the vial of Stilboestrol and draws the fluid into her syringe. She draws too much—she sometimes stumbles upon generosity—and bites her lip, smiling. Depresses the plunger to bleed some drops … then, with a curious kind of voided puzzlement, but no self-consciousness at all, ignores the freak’s prepared deltoid and stabs his thigh instead.

  His hands fly up. His body draws away at a steep angle from his leg so that he looks like someone squirming with embarrassment. White as the sky in cattle ponds. He briefly harmonizes with the squealing walls, and I remark on it, like this:

  For I am mathematics and a page, the witness of a wilderness. I am the declined answer to all pain. A lake. A deer crossing the lake.

  Somewhere, a mile above our heads, a red stag senses danger and abandons the reed bed. A glimpse of tusk, a scent: these are enough to warrant flight. Land is not safe. Water is risk. The perilous crossing confirms the life it takes away. The water is a strong master. I grip my prey.

  The stag’s breath startles the surface, his snorting head a ragged system of vapor and spit. He needs to find the other shore; his antlers shake about their head-root like a brake of thorns. Everything acts on him, the cold, the deep, the motion of a boar’s tongue at the reed bed’s edge. He’s made by an unfeeling world, and yet how hard he swims. He bays at his reflection, not the picture of some imposed form but a form proposed by the moon and her reflected light.

  I feel the animal’s shocked heart beneath my own. The force and course of change, the hormone spreading through his veins.

  Deep down, below the wind-blown surface, in the box, the room from which nothing escapes, the Colonel asks, “Now, what is x?”

  *

  Molyneaux shifts and coughs. He has been separated from his errant friend and brought back to the school. But illness and the night linger, their shame a bond. His body has functions and incapacities alike he scarcely can control.

  He looks about him at the luxury of wood in Colonel Stallbrook’s Wargrave set, a suite facing the quad with lancet windows, bays, two ottomans, and pile carpet the color of young leaves throughout. The bronze-pinned steps up to the living room are empaneled on either side and bossed with quatrefoils. They bring a visitor into a long, high-ceilinged gallery of formal domesticity. Tall bookcases and heavy portrait frames look taller, heavier in the mullioned light.

  The gowned master, sitting behind a desk, in silhouette against one of the shallow bays, rattles his cup in its saucer. He is accelerating with the earth.

  “That’s better, Molyneaux.” He stops, and turns, frowning, into the sun. “Don’t be alarmed. I’ve no desire to punish you.”

  The thought that there might be such a desire spins its quiet web.

  “Foolish, to go along with Pryor’s schemes, no doubt—but that is punishment enough for now. For the future, we’ll see.”

  The young boy takes a breath, and then one more, and tries to stretch his lungs against the pain. But Stallbrook sees. His voice changes. That hint of amateur theatricality, of clownish mascotry, that makes a master masterful is set aside.

  “You’re going home today. Your parents will be here quite soon. I spoke to them this morning on the telephone. They are worried, of course.”

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “No, no. It’s clear to us you are—not well. But Molyneaux, aside from that, aside from, well, let’s call it pure bad luck … there is another matter I cannot ignore.”

  The spider, in its spiral scheme, listens. Stallbrook assures his somber pupil of his confidence. This is a confidential chat, the runners’ pause before a race.

  “It is for you to decide, now, how much of weakness your whole character will tolerate.” The Colonel frowns. “D’you see, I think a person with your gifts, your very, I may say … fraternal compassion for others, needs to be careful.”

  “Please, sir.”

  The boy is horribly ashamed, red-faced, adrift. Nothing like that, not anything. It was a dream—Deauville, the shelter and the bed. A temptation: unreal. His voice cracks, penitent, high-low, low-high, the amateur choir of youth.

  “I make no excuses,” Stallbrook remarks. “Any small school, any small institution, tends to concentrate the joys and miseries of existence. Your kindness to Pryor’s a case in point. It is doubtless commendable. He is the sort to be picked on, let us be frank. It shows how difficult a very solitary
life must be without loyal support. But you must think, a little, of your own claims on society.”

  Molyneaux cannot hear the words—Stallbrook’s, his own—for blood, though their meaning is clear. He’s being asked to choose. Between two versions of himself. Two abstractions, or maybe one with two faces—a variable. Two paths in life. One path that forks. (If Alec were here now, he’d laugh: “Poincaré! This is what he meant! The art of giving different names to the same thing!”)

  In all his shame and confusion, he has the sense that he is being asked to break with a good friend, and in the same moment to turn away from something in himself, to join a club. Occasionally, at school, he has glimpsed masters chortling in the SCR, behind their oak. It looks so comfortable in there.

  “Sir, he is—Pryor—sometimes it is hard to—catch his drift …”

  The words come fast. They are oblique. An emotion pushing at glass.

  “I’ve always been a good influence, I think. I’m good, at least, in ways examiners can understand.” (Stallbrook inflates his chest, swallows his amusement.) “But Pryor’s fast. He has the answers all at once. That’s why he makes a mess. He has to go back over things to fill in all the blanks for us—to make us see. For someone with a mind like that, it’s very hard to explain what he knows. To be like him, you have to leave others behind. It makes me cross. I’d like to think that way—and he imagines that I can—but honestly I can’t. He’s brilliant. We’re not the same—”

  The young man’s speech unnerves the Colonel, who balks. He is about to spoil a better person’s life. His guilt gives him that strange feeling of being watched. A tiny awareness clicking its postulates into shipshape, mid-sail, mid-web.

  Stallbrook presses a thumb into his brow. “You may be luckier than you know,” he says. “It is not unequivocally a gift, that sort of brain.” His thumb presses harder. “If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say that Pryor’s life will be a disaster.” His eyebrows lift as if the thought had just occurred to him. “He is brilliant, of course, you’re right, but quite beyond the reach of all morality. Such persons never integrate.”

  “Sir.”

  “Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you?” The friendliness has gone. “We do not need to be prophets to make a prophecy. Certain dismay awaits your friend. That boy already senses it. And he will lead you to a similar reward, however much you admire him.”

  It would make perfect sense, Molyneaux thinks, if only it were not so mean. In front of him, Stallbrook is hung upon the moment like a moth. It doesn’t make a form of words, this quivering desire of upright men to draw a line.

  He comes upon the revelation like a beggar in the road. One kind of person, the self-willed, cannot be helped. The beggar has beggared himself! The other must be made to give up who he really is, and in so doing choose a better fate.

  Molyneaux hears an engine in the arch below. His parents’ car.

  “I sometimes wonder if I’ve got a future, sir.”

  Stallbrook sits motionless, a light-backed shape.

  “I sometimes feel someone is watching me. I don’t know what you mean by a reward. Soon now, I’m going to be taken away.”

  The boy leans forward into pain, a silent doubling. The person others see, the thing he is. The cough leaves mucus on his fist and little cauliflower clusters of red.

  “You will be well looked after in the sanatorium.”

  “I want to get out of this room.”

  The master’s hand is palm down on his desk.

  “You will be made quite comfortable.”

  Christopher Molyneaux goes on, “I’ve often imagined these rooms—a master’s set, I mean. We live in dorms, downstairs. The funny thing, now that I’m here, is that it’s very similar—to how I saw it in my head. Just a bit off. Now, why is that? Who gave me the layout, or put it in my head? The panels, carpet, and the ottomans. It’s just as if another person read my mind and put them there. Though, come to think of it, I added the windows. A Gothic touch.”

  “And ottomans,” Stallbrook reflects. “Never devoid of mystery.”

  “Beg pardon, sir, but you half-sound as if you were expecting this. I feel—”

  “You feel?”

  “—something, an instinct, pressing me to—make a run for it. I want to get out of this room. I have to leave—or I will … I will have betrayed …”

  Molyneaux stands, blue-thin and young, the twilit memory of an original, brow working, fingers white. Stallbrook’s expression stays unreadable.

  “When you have taught a dozen generations of young minds, young man, you’ll learn to tolerate passion. The door is waiting for you over there.”

  Turning to go, Molyneaux sees the panel and the door absurdly still and unnegotiable.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” the poor boy says, slumping, a flush upon his cheeks.

  I can’t, he tells imagination’s whisperer. I’m neither brilliant nor brave. I’m not unusual. That is my mother stepping off the Daimler’s running board with a light gasp at the high step. I will be ill, cautious, confused. I will be good.

  He sees, around the Colonel’s head, the rays of an eclipse, a possibility, but one too wild and unlikely to last. It is a blanket and a fast embrace, a wordless instruction, a summerhouse, a daybed, and a rattan chair; perhaps, later, two flats in Battersea, a trust unnoticed by the world, two keys to open the same lock. A version of himself minus the attributes he has, the normal inclinations and sobriety, minus even his looks and build, but still himself. A friend transposed. The delicate image decays.

  The Colonel nods. As usual, he thinks. The boy will soon get used to it, as every conscious figment must—the whispering in one’s ear. A man, a woman—no, a man. And every time you turn around to look, the body isn’t there.

  He looks up to find Molyneaux in front of him, inches away, blocking the light. The young lad’s smell is lupine and aroused, his hands are slimed and streaked. Molyneaux smiles, a signal power arrived in his green eyes.

  “I’ve changed my mind, again,” he says. “I want to get rid of this room. I cannot leave it, but I won’t let you, or anyone, take me away.”

  The Colonel is about to speak, when Molyneaux stops him. He slides his wet fingers into the Colonel’s mouth. The Colonel jerks and gapes at this unspeakable affront, but what he can’t see is his own, and independently aroused, passion, which gulps disjointedly, a snake transfixed by predation. His eyes watering, he sucks and laps, his palate softening against the four fingers searching his throat. He wants the whole of the boy’s arm. The hand passes beyond the soft parts and the folds. Consumptive blood and drivel coat his chin.

  He chokes and cries. The tears merge, like a sense of shame, with other bodies of water, and in the quad those gathered in its dam-burst flow—children, lovers, species, the dead—are lost to the torrent.

  A creaking by the steps, as if a ship were complaining. Molyneaux’s parents just have time to shout, to say each other’s names, their voices carrying so far and then cut off, the noise of the ship breached astern.

  The fountain in the quad becomes a waterspout. Whatever part of you it is that can’t be seen and bows to pressure will come back. And all the culverted personae of matter will rise to show you how mysterious the world of matter really is.

  I charge the corridor and feel its wooden throat disjoint, tongue-and-groove parquet sundering; the mitered frames, detendonized panels—driftwood. Take me apart, take all my stones and bodily features away and I will still be here. I slide under the door and up the carpet, stair by stair.

  *

  The freak is at a loss. The answer is “a variable,” but that is also variable, a property that logically transforms at times into a constant, which it’s not. Because he is a freak who secretly likes poetry, he wants to say x isn’t merely Cartesian but just the sort of thing Lucretius would have liked, a point or particle tethered to change. He can’t. He’s silenced by the fluency of Molyneaux’s answers, and
stunned by pain.

  The changes in his body are too visible. A chemical postman sorting his blood finds sacks of hate mail for each tissue cell. The freak’s chest fills, his waist expands, his fine muscles detach. He voids himself, and in his muffled head he screams. Once at the pain, twice at the thought that this is happening.

  Each spasm is an explosion along his spine. A kinesthetic squeal, white light as cutting tool. Molyneaux talks on brilliantly, and doesn’t seem to see or hear, or smell, his companion’s distress. Matron has made a sunflower head of the freak’s thigh, each puffy puncture mark a variation on a theme.

  “x marks the spot,” Molyneaux says. “x is a poor man’s signature. x is a choice—select a box. x is a deletion. x multiplies—has powers. x is a half-lap joint …”

  The fact is, no one takes much notice of the freak at all.

  “… x was inserted to support the spire at Wells …”

  “Now that is most astute,” Stallbrook concedes, opening a drawer. As Molyneaux continues, he removes some typescript from the drawer and runs his finger over it. The pages are too far away. One letter, surely, features more than periodically.

  “x is a ray—a photo and a ghost. x is for hybrid vigor in a dog. x is a crossroads and a meeting point. x is anonymous. x is a parting kiss. x is against your name. x is your source, a secret, and expendable. x is a letter. x is not—”

  Molyneaux hesitates. Uncurls his fists and holds his thighs.

  “—the right answer?”

  Stallbrook consults his documents and shakes his head. “Alas, invariably,” he says. “It is the main problem. You’re very convincing. I just can’t tell if what you say is what you mean, or if it makes a real difference to you, or not.”

  The slightly fustian schoolboy inspects his hands. “I have a picture in my head of possible answers, but it is torn and wet at the edges. I think I died. I think I went into the underworld, where memories are affine spaces in a mirrored field and mackerel skies are filled with mackerel. I wanted to save someone from a disaster.”