Murmur Read online

  “Eddington, the astronomer?”

  “Exactly so. Or a car might backfire at me in the street, and I might hear a sharp order barked at me and begin to panic. The council of the machines is one example. I have had other insights that seemed more revelatory, complete dreams as it were, though inaccessible to me when my torpor lifts and I am back in the swing of things.”

  Stallbrook’s motionlessness pushed me to continue.

  “One recurring figment, which I find oddly consoling, involves a correspondence with June Wilson, whom I have not seen in many years. We are explaining matters to each other, and the conversation turns on my situation, which it soothes me to be able to discuss with her. She is keen to impress on me the urgency of her understanding and sympathy. She is entirely rational and humane—an ideal friend. It is such a hopeful condition, our communication, and I see it in the form of actual letters, there in front of me, on the table in Lyon’s, or wherever I happen to be. She is encouraging, saying, in so many ways, ‘There’s something behind this, and you will get to the bottom of it. There is a way through it, Alec. It is simply a question, as so often in life, of holding your nerve. That’s all you’ve to do—hold your nerve.’”

  *

  My brother John has wiry red-brown hair, unlike anyone else in the family, and eyes that are never still. He is tall and wide, and his hands are several sizes too large for trivial tasks. I am afraid of him, and grateful. His advice has been invaluable. But I am not sure that I respect him, and I think he knows it.

  When I told him I’d been arrested, and what my crime was, he grabbed the desk—held it between finger and thumb. In his stripes and collar and tie he looked as henchmen do in thrillers when a knife catches them in the back.

  Color and animation soon returned. He yelled at me, “Why on earth did you do it?” He meant: Why had I gone to the police about the burglary? He pointed out, rightly, that if I had not, they would never have fingerprinted the house, or found out about Cyril. I told John that it was a point of principle. I could not allow myself to be blackmailed by Cyril’s naval acquaintance. He yelled again that I was an ass. I was disgusting, unimaginable, revolting—but mostly I was an ass. A normal-sized shadow occupied the smoked-glass door of the office, then moved away, and John lowered his voice. How could someone so clever be so stupid? He spat the word over his desk. I could taste the tobacco in the air-borne spittle, and for a moment it was as if he had kissed me.

  I remained calm and, in the middle of our altercation, realized that being calm was the problem. To a passionate person like John, for whom a certain kind of permitted masculine emotion—being moved to tears by the coronation, say—is a marker of trust and sincerity, a trump card with which to confound the silly-ass rationalists, my self-control must have seemed utterly infuriating.

  I remember The Times of 3 June last year with distaste. Phalanx of Princes. Ovation from Great Throng. Fervor in Oxford Street. Tribal Dancing and Processions (this last not in Oxford Street). Judges in Their Robes. Pages of it—so that one had to look hard for glimpses of an unhypnotized reality. There were few. The whole paper was given over to spectacle and genuflection, apart from the weather forecast, and two letters on page 9 about Icelandic fishing and the price of Danish butter.

  *

  Determined as I am, like the spring, to mark a propitious change, I am pleased to say that the letter about Danish butter may have had an effect on governmental policy in respect of its Ag and Fish subsidies. The proposed rise in the price of butter to perhaps 5s a pound has not taken place in the half-year since Mr. Andreas Jacobsen put pen to paper; instead it has fallen to an average of 3s 9d a pound.

  I am noticing things again. The strife in my veins is over, and the world is still out there. I watched a heron catch a fish today, poking forward, an old man rejuvenated by a win at Doncaster. My mother called on the telephone to thank me for her Christmas presents (a blanket and a pot of cyclamen). The Hutchings boy came in for a game of chess, and then his mathematics lesson, and together we considered a trefoil knot as a segmented reduction, and how the indefinite length of a symbolic description—one can always increase the number of segments—makes it hard to tell, merely from their description, if any two knots are the same.

  His name is Raymond and he is at the local grammar. He whispers and stammers, but what he stammers is surprisingly informative. He considers problems as I considered them at his age, distractedly but seriously. He sits at a near-perfect ninety-degree angle to me, in the green library chair, and makes very few notes. He prefers neat diagrams and instant disclosure, the candor of the shy.

  His parents want him to be a doctor, but he wants to mend pianos.

  He was meant for Wargrave—paternal ambition—until, so Ray maintains, his mother put her foot down. Over my dead body, she said, will that boy go to one of those schools, and evidently she carried the day.

  Perhaps all mothers feel the same way. Mine did. After my revelation, almost the first thing she said was that she had never wanted me to follow John to the same school. It was “wrong for me,” she said. And perhaps it was. It was certainly frightening at times, and of course the masters were disappointments, to themselves and others. I was nervous whenever I parsed something well or found out a problem—my first readings in Euler, say. The pleasure was like sunny wind in April, it blew itself out; and each triumph bordered on a faintness of heart at the thought of what might come next—failure, punishment—and what might not. Christopher solved that for me, because his presence taught me how to be on my own, and if I had not gone to Wargrave I would not have met him, or welcomed my solitude, so that I cannot honestly say I regret any of it.

  Tonight, I’m having cheese on toast. Sunday evening fare at Wargrave. Pleasure’s danger is that it echoes former pleasures and produces a likeness that fails on inspection, in which case don’t order the inspection! Cheese on toast, a pickled onion, and an apple before bed, that’s the ticket. I find malic acid to be an effective sedative.

  *

  I don’t know that I will ever recover my build. My thighs and calves are roughly the size and shape they were before the Stilboestrol, but now they have a different consistency. They’re flabby. I am vain, no doubt. I wear a vest, but then so do all men, and I have never enjoyed looking in mirrors. Outwardly, there is nothing peculiar. Inwardly, too, the pulse of fear has stopped and its murmur, taking my thoughts down as if by dictation, has faded. I am left with the images, the semi-swoons, and if I pay attention to the tinnitus in my right ear I can just hear the council of the machines deprecating half a show, half a memory, how unacceptable the half of it is, etc.

  Therein lies a conundrum for thinking machines. They can do nothing by halves. In theory, they will be made to remember everything, and with such a lot to remember they might not grasp how important it is, sometimes, for persons to forget. That is a kind of demonstration of Wittgenstein’s saw—his Witticism, let us call it—about answers to questions of science not answering the questions of life.

  But an educable machine would be no mere store. It would sift and discard, and discriminate, as a child does. That granted, one finds oneself treating mechanical memory as a normal feat of reconstruction, and then the difference between human and machine lessens considerably, because for both creatures remembering becomes evaluative and processual, rather than crudely restorative.

  In my own case, the whole question of forgetting is problematic. I’m sure I have the fragments of things, the figments, somewhere. I’m sure most people do, even the senile. Nothing is forgotten in that sense. What I lack, and this is the great change to have been worked in me, is the capacity to organize those fragments properly. (But if they are not organizable, how can I be said to remember them?) Between the walls of his study, with its eyeless maps and Degrees, the kindly Dr. Stallbrook says that this is a symptom of shock. Shell-shocked memories exist in a twilit state.

  One is left with the rest of the world. I told Raymond that it is satisfying to mend
things, as well as people, and that music gives a great deal of comfort to almost everybody. At which he pointed to my violin, lying open in its case these last seven days, asked if he could have a go, and gave a most spirited, lovely rendition of “Over the Mountains”! I have the Ferrier recording.

  *

  Now if I had had a son like that—particularly like Ray—I would not have wanted to send him away, either. When we sit together, it is as if our two lives have blended in time and are no more than the same life at two different stages.

  The tax on old pleasures, those I have come to value more and more—food, sunlight on the common, listening to familiar music—is that they are shadowed by discoveries. One has had the chance to do so much “not in the ordinary line” that it is painful to find oneself of use in this new and ordinary way.

  *

  I think empathy is a treated, enhanced version of sympathy, but I am not sure it exists. We can’t be in someone else’s emotional shoes. We don’t ever feel what they’re feeling. What makes us cry or makes our heart race is probably just this intense awareness of “not quite”—of being so close to feeling what they’re feeling. I’d go so far as to say that empathy is a sort of artifice. And what, one might ask, is wrong with that?

  *

  To Brighton yesterday, at last, for which bright skies.

  I went to the fortune-teller’s stall on the front pier and before I knew it I was outside again, being fussed over by Anthony and his wife, Elizabeth. I’d fainted—the first time in years. I must have seen blood, though I examined myself thoroughly afterward for cuts and grazes and found none. I had no reading, that much is clear, because the shawled lady came out after me and pressed my shilling back into my hand.

  It has left me shaken. On the train on the way back, a little sick with the seaside’s cure-all remedy—fish and chips—Elizabeth said that I looked as if I’d seen a ghost, and the moment she suggested it I seemed to hear someone else say, “Why on earth did you do it?”—though it was not exactly the voice of anyone I knew, or at least not the voice of any one person, and the voice was not angry—and I answered back, quite honestly, “Because I didn’t think it mattered.”

  What did I do? What am I supposed to have done? What have I not done, yet?

  Why my mind alights on these imponderables I’m not certain. They seem to be puzzles that are “unsolvable” in the mathematical sense of that word. Not puzzles that absolutely lack a range of answers, but ones that we cannot in practice find answers to—ones that a procedure or a process will not clarify in any humanly helpful stretch of time. I think we have been asking these simple questions since we first killed living things and ate them, perhaps since we first woke up and knew that the day was the day. It probably is true that if you know where something is at any locatable point in the universe and you have a full description of the forces working on it, then you can in principle work out where it will be many years from now. But there is just not the time to make that calculation. It isn’t algorithmically compressible, and therefore the puzzle is unsolvable. I should add, by the way, that I see quantum uncertainty in a similar light—i.e., as something practically unverifiable, not as a problem that is inherently mysterious. The mystery resides in the fact that the observer who supposedly acts on wave function to bring about its collapse into stability does so at intervals. But if the observer could be made to carry on staring at the system—ever so rudely, as it were—then its evolution might slow to a halt. In other words, history happens in the gaps. We can’t in practice keep on looking at something all the time and expect to know what it will do next. A total observation yields nothing. If you do look at circumstances that way, you end up with a person or a situation that is stuck in time, and how they are ever to be sprung from that I do not know. Some sort of induced calamity by one’s own hand or another’s. A fluke from outer space.

  Or a bit of a shock. When I heard that voice asking why I’d done whatever it is I’m supposed to have done, I had a strong memory of asking the fortune-teller if I would ever meet Christopher again, and she said yes, we are all made of the same materials, we are atoms, bits of Morse, and you are breathing him in even now. Her shawl smelled maternal—a hint of bergamot and talc—but her eyes were like Indra’s net, inhumanly compound, and after that I must have passed out.

  I came back from the station via the deep shelter, at the edge of the common’s south side, where I sometimes fancy the murmur has gone into hiding, along with the machines. They are down there, at the bottom of the spiral staircase, stuck in a loop, possessors of all the information they need to find out about the universe, but unable to sift any of it. Doubtless they find it unacceptable.

  In the light of these winter afternoons, the eastern half of the entrance to the shelter stays white and frosty. The western section, caught by the sun, is like one of those bronze cauldrons the early Britons buried, not in fear of death, but to extend the feast of life. I had an impulse to go over and put my ear to the door.

  There I stood, rattling the padlock like a madman. Stallbrook says that analysis is a little like the voyage of a shaman who goes down into middle earth to bring back the buried parts of a sick man’s soul, but I don’t know about that. One can have too much talk, which in any case tends to drive people away. It is better to listen. The machines are in council, down there, wherever they are, because they cannot decide on anything. That is why they suffer from a sense of persecution and abstraction. They need a connection to something beyond themselves, which it may not be easy for them to achieve, or admit, given their prowess, but I’ve decided I’m willing to lend an ear. Before speech there was listening, and the dead rise with the love of it.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to thank the Bodleian Library in Oxford for a Sassoon Visiting Fellowship in 2016 that greatly assisted the completion of this book. I wish also to acknowledge the collegiate support of the universities of Melbourne and Warwick, the hospitality of Yale Review, Sonofabook, and Hotel magazines, the generosity of the Society of Authors, the encouragement of the BBC National Short Story Award 2017 (for which the opening chapter of this novel was shortlisted), the critical help of Anna Aslanyan, and the friendly guidance at all times of Dr. Hunaid Rashiq and family.

  —W.E.

  BELLEVUE LITERARY PRESS is devoted to publishing literary fiction and nonfiction at the intersection of the arts and sciences because we believe that science and the humanities are natural companions for understanding the human experience. With each book we publish, our goal is to foster a rich, interdisciplinary dialogue that will forge new tools for thinking and engaging with the world.

  To support our press and its mission, and for our full catalogue of published titles, please visit us at blpress.org.

  BELLEVUE LITERARY PRESS

  New York