Murmur Read online

  The pressure of the water shears the room. Its prisoners noting the angle of their walls prepare for death, which does not come.

  Across the plane of the ceiling, the tree of life takes root.

  *

  Molyneaux dives into my element.

  The Colonel’s room dismembering itself supplies the waves with all manner of tidal junk. Books lollop past, their pages fronds, the groaning carcasses of shelves and desks and oak crossbeams go down into the trench.

  The young man’s breathing apparatus is a length of garden hose. He has the idea that he will find Alec, set him to rights, avert this so-called disaster, and show him interesting specimens from the lake bed: freshwater mollusks, older marine fossils, Roman pottery and glass. He’s so happy. One of the ottomans, caught in the downdraught of the universal wreck, tugs at his curiosity. He follows it through the stone ruins of the main building. It’s larger than before, almost a habitable size.

  Down, down it goes—and comes to rest in a small cloud of sediment. It finds its place not in the submerged grounds of Wargrave School but in a bustling market town, where people walk and breathe and drive their cars and go shopping. The flood is limitless, and in that flood, however far you have to go to find it, you will find the world remade an infinite number of times. Not everything has come to grief! For there are Royal Blue coaches in Sunkenbridge, with people from the former settlement of Earth mouthing behind their sealed windows.

  He’s followed by some men and by a pike or two.

  He thinks about his air supply. The other men—the men following, now catching up—can breathe the water very naturally, and one of them, his doctor, Mr. Julius Trentham, says that’s because he hasn’t any senses, so of course it’s fine.

  But Molyneaux is still attached. He walks about the town as if it were a toy-world in a womb and he the line-fed embryo. As a small boy, he used to siphon water from the upstairs bath to gladden the garden: the hose smelled rubbery. He sucked hard to create the flow, could taste its warm, soapy approach. That sense persists and merges with a natural fear of lake water filling the pipe and drowning him.

  The ottoman is barnacled with decorations like the Porters’ Lodge at King’s. It sits inside a sedimentary façade. Its gates are closed today—“and they are closed to everyone without the key, which is disguised,” Trentham whispers.

  “What is the key’s disguise?” Molyneaux asks, his hand about to knock.

  “The key is part of a message, carried unconsciously, like someone incubating a disease. It’s so well hidden we have not been able to find it—although we’ve tried for many years—because the search is self-inverse: we see only another search, looking for us. It is a fact about the world, and it is also personal.”

  “Is it a word, this key?”

  Trentham declines to speculate. He simply says, “Take a deep breath,” and Molyneaux obeys. He holds it, trusting to his doctor’s instructions.

  “You were the disaster,” one of the other men puts in. “You are the key. You were the disaster. You are the key …” (He is a circular machine, fishy and shy, not proud of his reduced function but sadly stuck with it.)

  The hose sinks to the cobbled ground and never reaches it. Touched by a messenger of light, it feels the faint voltage and starts. An eel chicanes away. Molyneaux’s lungs collapse. His breath expends itself against the wood.

  Now that he comes to look at them, for the first time, the gatehouse doors are skewed, bent out of shape at depth to form a new style—pseudo-Perpendicular Gothic. Out of the corner of his fading eye he sees the chapel tilt, its lines making a knight’s move to the left. The door leans over—buckles—with the weight of many atmospheres until the lock gives silently. A moment, then: the boy feeling not pain exactly but a more perfunctory loss. Some trophy slipping off a wall.

  Molyneaux shrugs his skin aside and enters at the speed of thought. He passes over the threshold into a garden, where I’ve been waiting.

  *

  Dearest Alec,

  When you write so matter-of-factly about the changes wrought in you by this awful regimen, I can barely stand it myself. I wish I could see you and let you know how much you mean to me, and have always meant. There, I’ve said it. But I have the feeling you are shy of really meeting, because you are physically brought low and do not want to be seen.

  What do I care what you look like? I haven’t clapped eyes on you in years. We do not see people as they are, in any case. We see only the outside. I see much more of you in these letters, between the lines of your remarkable self-possession.

  And the dream, this time, is so very clear, because it is about what you have suppressed in order to remain outwardly calm. More and more I think that dreams are literal: they show us what the mind is and our feelings are, not simply what they resemble. The emotion has to go somewhere, and it does. It’s a river that has been forced underground. At some point it must emerge through the cracks and gaps in life, and it threatens then to sweep everything away.

  I wish I knew what to do. I feel as if I am shut tight inside the same room as you, and almost as if you are keeping me there or waiting for me to come up with the right suggestion for escape.

  The original you exists, dear friend. It always has. You have been made to disguise your feelings, to put on some fairground show of limited display, behind which the inner life goes on as usual, though unsuspected. That life is there, I am sure, and it needs only a little society, tea with someone who knows you, for you to know it, too.

  It alarms me when you talk about robots not knowing they are people. Surely you know what a wholly real person you are? (I read Pinocchio when I was very young, and naturally it terrified me. I wanted to know: What becomes of the puppet who is left behind, slack and empty, fleshless, when Pinnochio becomes a boy? It’s too horrible!)

  I do wonder if the end of machines—the “coming doom” in reality—may not be some cataclysm of emotion, such as you describe. A returning wave of distress and exultation! When we are capable of everything, we may not be able to decide what to do with our lives, d’you not think? It will be a sort of paralysis of competence. I feel it already when I want to cycle to the village shop but the car glares at me, and Bill says unhelpfully that I must do as I please, and do I even need to go out at all? Only a feeling will help me choose. The more rational people are—poor Bill—the more one wants to scream at them.

  I feel it, certainly, and more than ever on your account, because I want to be able to do something to help, and because I have such an uncannily near intuition of what you mean when you talk about pain and, as I understand it, the shared oddity of life. One is separated from others by such a thin veil—a shadow here, a word or an accident there. That veil is so strong! The magic of the big screen, I have always thought, isn’t the film or the story, but the screen itself. Barely noticed, always in disguise, but there.

  What I want to say is that this is precious. “Everything is leafing and flowering, the hebe, the foxgloves, the elder, the poppies and roses. The birds are raising their second brood, and the dragonflies are laying their eggs in the ponds and the canals. The whole amazing process is underway and all of everything, the whole thing, is holy.” Those, as near as I can get them, were the words of a woman I heard speaking at one of Bill’s Quaker meetings not long ago. I don’t, as you know, believe. I’m not built to do that, I think. But the “all” of creation made sense on that occasion in a way it hasn’t before. It wasn’t a claim for power and miracles. It was a claim for almost nothing, as in “this is all that there is, and there will be no more.”

  I will be waiting at the bottom of A staircase, in Gibbs’, next Sunday, at noon.

  Love,

  June

  … biological phenomena are usually very complicated … It is thought, however, that the imaginary biological systems which have been treated, and the principles which have been discussed, should be of some interest in interpreting real biological forms.

  —A. M. Turing
, “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis” (1952)

  The Successions

  Molyneaux passes through the gates into the four-parterre of King’s front court, the chapel on his right, the dining hall clattering a summons to his left, and Gibbs’, that fallen-sideways torso of a building, straight ahead. I wait where the parterre’s triangles meet, where once there stood a statue of the college’s founder.

  He cannot stop. He’s pure current. Molyneaux fades. He always fades, as species do, into the next in line. He sees in me another of his inaccessible futures, the thing his death foreclosed, and his extended hand begins to leak away, like smoke, like milk poured in a stream. He smiles and speaks. His words ripple across the flooded tank, the world’s amnion, confidences only we—the two of us—can hear. At the perimeter, on the flagstones, Trentham and his machine ally watch us confer.

  They do not hear Molyneaux’s voice become my own: “Make others free, especially the souls who did not want your love, whom you would like to hurt.” That much appears to come from him, though it is flat-sounding and close and unheimlich—a diver’s voice in his own ear.

  His body spins into a white vortex. A cyclone made of albumen.

  A plughole opens in the ground and down he goes.

  They must disperse. Set them to wander and succeed. You will be hurt instead. You will look on at your own life and find it jealous and constrained. But after that, after an unfair while, you will pass through the mirror of dismay into the bottom of the lake. So much will then astonish you. Life will arise, its accidental bitterness, its strength, swift as a shoal, rare as the kernel in the peach.

  After the last of Molyneaux has disappeared, I feel the pull of gravity myself, the Coriolis force grabbing my mind. The whole of everything as he saw it, the water-world, must drain away. The flood subsides. This is the death of one viewpoint, and its rebirth, like land rising above the waves, or sea foam running off a crowded deck: the odd totality of persons each of whom says “me.”

  I have more than one body waiting in this luridly familiar place, a college full of rooms. I feel them cautiously intuiting their kindred selves as they read books, look up, and frown. (Divide one soul into a thousand and a thousand souls will wonder why.) The water’s galloping retreat is every bit as fearful as the inundation that preceded it. Around the arches of the library its ebb tides rush and funnel me toward an open door in Gibbs’. Unconscious gallons run into the ground.

  One last look back before I enter the building. The sky is blue above and must be sunset red elsewhere because the gatehouse ornaments are pink. Out of the four-parterre rise hebe, foxgloves, elder, poppies, and dog rose. A flock of starlings makes its usual broadcast of whoops and clicks, as though some universal operator were dialing at sea, and every now and then the signal whine seems to resolve into a phrase.

  The last cascade gargles its way down A staircase. I slap the basement door, a body of water against a slab of wood. The room, according to an inscription, belongs to someone called A. M. Pryor. There are no people here—no one that I would recognize—but there is urgency. Everything’s quick.

  I seethe under the oak and into Pryor’s set.

  I am the body in the bed. I’m what sees him. I am the room.

  I have been wondering about the strangeness of a point of view on pain and fear, the physical distinctions in a rush of feeling or a train of thought.

  But now I pass around the Pryor room, I see that I am made from it. Its windows are my eyes (dark now, or blind), the thin striped mattress and the shelves of books my diaphragm and ribs, the whole material space a mind arising from such things quite naturally, a geometry that shifts and is itself the act of observing.

  I am alive in here, but it is night outside. What has happened? I hear a woman very distinctly, outside the door, the sound of difficult speaking.

  “Do you?” she says, and then corrects herself. “How can we tell?”

  I hear the oscillations and acoustics of another large and populated room, a corridor or ward. “Perhaps he knows that I am here—”

  “The spectral content of the EEGs and MEGs is weak … there’s too much damage in the upper layers, and what that means, Mrs. Pryor, what—June—”

  “I know. I know. Don’t use that voice. That voice you all adopt.” An almost laughing squeal. “You even sound like him.”

  “I am so sorry. June. Just, take your time. Talk to your family, and him. Keep doing that. I wish I had some better news for you.”

  “There isn’t any rush, is there?”

  Her voice presses against the plaster of my tympanum. The wall flexes and sheds a flake or two of paint. I put aside the herringbone blanket, get up, and stand in front of the mirror, waiting for more. A patient, some distracted wanderer—that person whom the staff must endlessly retrieve—stares back.

  “There isn’t any rush, no. Absolutely not, and we have not by any means abandoned hope. You take the time you need.”

  Flat-soled shoes patter up the steps. I go back to my bed and listen to the sound of breathing at my door, the trembling of these old, original windows.

  A gust rattles the glass. Some angry thought. Some rage.

  *

  I am the Red Lady of Paviland.

  I was mistaken for a tribal Celt by my Victorian discoverers, but I am much older than that. I am the guardian of the cave, a time machine in ice.

  Imagine that I woke, as you are waking now, one morning thirty thousand years ago. The golden droplet of the dawn between my eyelashes, the way out of the cave glimpsed from its chilly depths. I climb down to the plains with my clansmen.

  We have been watching four mammoths—a bull, a cow, a youngling, and another older male—hazard the plains these past three days. Once they were drowsy midges on the horizon. Now they are horned beetles. The older male sings wearily. They come for water in the lee of the mountains, for shelter, and for scrub.

  The mountains curve out to the left of our fastness, and on the other side of that far tusk of rock the grass thickens, and there are springs. Hyenas, too, and boar, though they are not a threat. They will avoid even a lumbering and starved giant. They do not want to be trampled or gored.

  We wait until the parents and the calf are round the rock, then move swiftly to separate and kill the laggard bull, who is too weak to call for help. I am upon him and climbing his flanks, digging my pole-flint in behind his ears. He sags and falls, groaning, onto his knees. I stand and ride his back, aroused by all the blood, the sight of it like tar pits bubbling at the forest’s edge.

  Time to dismount … but I have not retrieved my spear.

  I think to pull it free as I jump down, whooping, but it is lodged fast by its fashioned teeth. My feet slide forward and I fall—too near to my conquest.

  The mammoth rolls on top of me. My body’s contents flood my mouth.

  My clansmen drag me out and I can dimly understand their conference. There is a ritual to observe, a truth that comprehends my loss. I must be buried with my prey. I know that I am crushed. They think that I am dead, but I am still alive. I lie on the savannah, listening to the sound of flints, watching the stars come out.

  The sky and constellations form an insect eye in negative.

  It takes all night to quarter him and drag us harrowingly far, in pieces, up the slope, over the treachery of path and fissure, to the cave. We will be taken deep into the cliff. The cave’s bone pit honors us both. Like chiefs, we wear its stones.

  *

  Now she is talking to me and I want to say I can’t remember who you are. I can’t remember, but I do notice the room acquiring light and shade. The gloss paint on the windowsill shines bright or else goes gray whenever her words touch the wall. The wooden desk is to the right of the window, tucked into a corner. The drawers have cupped handles of brass. Its surface is red leather, strewn with calculations, and an odd device sits in the middle, pupating. It shifts inside a sort of sac—cube, tile, tendril, and bead—sweetbreads, or food not dead. A meal come
back life.

  “They’re doing what you said, Alec,” she says. “It’s all about the ‘how’ they get you stable, how they know you’re done for, how I’ll manage, how it’s going to be. It’s like an interview.” She stops and makes the walls shiver. I see shoulders—I think I see shoulders moving. “‘How would you cope? How would you pay for that?’ Nothing about the who—the who is left. To deal with this. Who I am talking to. Who will be left. What will be left of you. I can’t just sit here … saying stuff.”

  The shifting sac puts out a glistening mimetic limb. Some evolutionary leap from pseudopodium to flower takes place. It is a vascular crysanth in wet plastic.

  “Fucking flowers. Not mine. I ought to say nice things.” She stops. “And all I want to do is tell you—”

  Then I miss a crucial bit, because the flowers from the filling station have become a bonsai carboniferous forest, and died. A slimy jaw breaks through the gastrodermal shell on my work desk, a primitive eel. There! Watch it go! Madly familiar in its fast flick-flack agitations, knocking something to the floor—a mug.

  “—although you know I do. Talking to you is like talking to her, someone who can’t say what she thinks, if she can think at all …”

  The silence puts its hand on her stomach.

  “I’m so angry with you. I can’t say, ‘Here we are. Flowers, your mug.’ That’s what they have in mind. Alec. That’s what the doctors think will bring you back. I can’t do it. I won’t say mindless things. How could—what have you done? We never even—how has this happened?” The mirror sticks out its glass throat. “Before we were married, in Canada, I had my doubts. I’ve never said. I never minded very much about the rest. If you can hear me, this is what I remember.”

  The wall is running with moisture.

  “I had to get that plane and we were in the hotel, in that awful twin-bed room. You didn’t want to come downstairs. I had to say, ‘I’m going now.’”

  The condensation in the room recalls a winter window, yellow and opaque. Behind it, as you pass by in the street, families argue, laugh, and children dangerously imitate their parents’ tone of voice.