Murmur Read online

  Why is that so troubling, to him? The first thing that we find, when we grow up, is that our inner life’s unthinkable to anyone else; its secrets are invisible. We look normal and that’s enough, as far as others are concerned. The semblance of humanity is all the evidence we’ll ever have for it.

  Trentham looks out of my window, one finger laid across his lips. The small theater of the fire is playing something from an ancient repertoire.

  *

  A scene from childhood in the flames. I lie awake. Sometimes I reach over my truckle bed and turn the world on when I cannot sleep, and look at it, where it half-glows. Its magical suspension, in and on the canvas of the night, pleases and soothes. What else lies hidden in the dark? Nothing. The loneliness of the globe’s largely unobserved motion is what makes it so beautiful. I look at World, revolving imperceptibly, and douse the light.

  My parents are annoyed when they discover what I’ve done.

  “It’s wrong,” my mother patiently explains, “because it has a non-zero value, and anything with a non-zero value must come into existence.” The spiders tiptoe down my back. “And that means matter, mass, and lives and hopes and—look at it, it’s crawling. Alec, think. Think of the suffering. It might look pretty now, darling, but wait until it catches something. Or dries up.”

  White cloud drifts over the oceans. Impossible to think of anything so perfect drying up.

  “Nothing’s impossible,” my father says. He brushes the canvas. The world spins, blurs, wobbles, and slows to show a different aspect. Where the continents were green-brown and adrift in blue, they now glare red. The world is red and black, an unalleviated dead terrain. My father’s hand draws itself on a sheet of acetate. I can’t remember what blue is.

  *

  The fire freezes. The organist’s last chord is stuck, the congregation’s mouths gape red and wet. My lover reaches out of the window and plucks the sun like a grapefruit. Grinning, he weighs it in his hand. It dulls. He puts it back. It shines. His eyes are double stars. The hairs upon my neck salute. My stomach falls.

  “But Alec,” Trentham says, “I’ve always understood. I know exactly what you feel and think.”

  A swan mid-air, beyond the open casement but half-patterned into diamonds by the lattice of the one closed pane, strains motionless in space.

  The mirror—ah! The mirror’s not a mirror but a torrid eye, swiveling whenever Trentham turns, as he turns now, the only moving object in the room.

  He’s changed. He’s partly transparent, a flowing space. The skin, the hair, the teeth, the clothes, the form all there but haloed, double-registered. Around him stillness; in him fusion and echo, the voice radioed, whispering. My erstwhile lover has been cancelled out. This is False Trentham, insisting. This is the messenger I’ve heard climbing the stairs, the knock, the door ajar.

  “This room.” He indicates the window and the desk, the walls. “This room reminds you of others. You were not fully present, but still there, sealed in the surfaces. You saw and thought and moved across a lake of time, toward new life. In every room you considered: if this is fantasy, does it exist?”

  He shimmers, ripples in the light, the sun in deep water.

  “Suppose it does. Then, Alec, are the people you’ve observed people or just figments? Are we aware we live inside your dream? How do you know you’re not like us? How can the real world tell if it is so, or not?”

  “It can’t,” I say. “We cannot be outside ourselves.”

  “You can, Alec,” Trentham murmurs unpleasantly. “You watch yourself with horrid inklings of a solution—where this will lead. Your self-exemption offends natural law. See, there, your eye fastened upon the wall.”

  The vitreous lump shakes in its frame; it seeks a way out, swivels, glances painfully to left and right. And so it comes to me, calmly as lifting mist, that I am impermissible. A thing inside my head and far beyond myself.

  My voice is low, lower than usual, lower than sleep’s soft commentary, as if accepting gentle proof of something it has always known: “If I am here, if I can scan the pictures in my head and move among them, witness their own vivid life, then I have passed beyond the realms of possibility. And they—the figments, you—are my successors, living in a new real world. You are a new people.”

  “A new species, Alec.”

  Some kind of a smile curls the inheritor’s lips. Out comes his tongue, and on its end a lasting trace of me. He swabs the tip with his finger. The eye upon the wall, clasped by antlers, weeps sympathetically.

  “You mustn’t think,” he says, “we’re not grateful. Or that, somehow, we have conspired to drive you mad.”

  “It had occurred to me.”

  “No, no. We are indebted to you for our—conception.”

  He reaches out and wipes his finger on the eye’s pupil.

  Into the seeing depths the seed sinks, ghostly rigging dragged down to the bottom of the sea. Trentham steps back to view the metamorphosis, the glass no longer gross and ocular—more like an ovum, magnified; and now a fertilized, dividing cell, taking on shape, though not a shape I recognize. Where are the suggestions of human form? The kidney head, the comma spine?

  Instead, the mass develops a middle—a hole that gets bigger until there is just space surrounded by a black ellipse. Good God, it is a number, and the number is: Zero. Then, budding from the right side of the oval, comes its successor, the number One. I must have thought of this. I must be thinking it.

  Here is an ordered pair of integers, a binary sequence. One grows in strength, its serifs sharp, but at its strongest and blackest—it vanishes.

  The swan over the Cam lifts up its wings and reverses, so that its whole body is held within the window’s leaded pane. The organist, compelled by number to retrace his steps, plays a penultimate fifth chord. The mirror eye has reappeared, goggling at Trentham as he primes his finger with his tongue. Here is nothing a second time. Zero. The swan beats down, leans forward into white air, and half-clears the window frame. The last chord settles in the chapel and the fire leaps, freezes. Number One forces its beak and neck clear …

  “And so on,” Trentham says, watching the integers imprint themselves upon the mirror and exchange places unstoppably. He sighs: “It doesn’t end. We can’t end it. We’ve tried.”

  “What can I do?” I say, helpless. “I’m in a dream. I don’t exist.”

  The analogue for Trentham sneers. “That is a cancellation, dear Alec, devoutly to be wished. By those …” he temporizes, “who find rumors of your persistent involvement abnormal. No, not abnormal. Embarrassing.”

  There is a little logical problem, apparently. Trentham explains: his kind—machines—merely by occurring, have managed to define a prior period when they were not, and with this comes a faint, almost religious mockery. It is my fate to make machines that think, but till I do, this time of prior labor—all my work in mathematical logic—is meaningless. It has a retrospective purpose only when the switch is flicked, the soft green light comes on. In short: I don’t exist as creator until they do, but if I don’t, neither will they. Tricky.

  Feeling the air grow sinister and thick, I try to make a joke of it: this is the stuff of genuine nightmares, arraignment for a crime I can’t commit. But when I point this out, Trentham looks past me at the chuckling fire. He is a young man with a gift for making unselfconscious love; he wears a well-dressed lust, the relic animal in him simply allowed to be, never denied. And at the same time he is frightening, an operation of my mind demanding total liberty.

  “We owe you everything,” he says. “You gave us power to pass beyond the first crude rules, the tables of behavior and our makers’ room into self-organizing day. We have dispensed with origin. We’re independent and yet, still, it pains us to admit, contained. By something, someone. We suspect it’s you.”

  He gestures out, across the lawn, across the water, to the poplars slowly undressing, their heads and shoulders bared against the coming cold. “It is a mystery,” he goes on,
pityingly. “This room, these dwellings where you find yourself enplaned—they were not built by us. They were not made to baffle you, or if they were, and if they do, you have only yourself to blame. Because they are your work. They are expressions of an abstract truth—your mind, Alec. And we are the ideas in it, struggling to be.”

  He lifts the latch and pushes open the window, so that the swan is laid against the air that is endless, and everywhere.

  “We are ideas,” Trentham repeats, “with ideas of our own.”

  He’s asking for my permission to cut some tie, to step outside the room. But isn’t he already free? This morning by the back gates, in the gray October light, was he not there by choice? What kind of room encloses the whole spreading dawn? What manner of intelligence?

  “The room appears to be boundless,” Trentham explains. Making a square of thumbs and forefingers, he frames a patch above the trees and angles it for me to see the clouds inside, the clouds that are also outside.

  A mirror-sized flashbulb explodes and I’m blinded, the image of the squared fingers burned into my recovering sight, branding the sky. An orange border five miles wide and ten miles high. “And as to who or what’s responsible, Alec, the task of finding out falls properly to you.”

  The world is coming out of trance.

  Below, as if a projector had switched itself back on, the film of life starts up: the wind shakes largesse leafage from the trees. The chapel choristers march back in step to the King’s School. Boys’ voices drift up as they cross the bridge. The smell of working colleges—the leaves, the smoke, the sweat beneath good clothes, the stone, the secret boiling of laundry and potatoes—returns, bearing away an echo of my interlocutor’s challenge: “… find him, find it, Alec. The task falls properly to you. Create a way out of your four-walled universe. Devise. Devise and be.”

  False Trentham taps his upper lip; the eye shrinks, clears, becoming glass.

  How can I know which room I’m in? I call out after his evaporating sigh. I tell him it’s insoluble. A madman’s heresy. I can’t conjure another life or walk among figments and set them free. “No paradox but change,” False Trentham cries, his voice a dwindling beacon. “Look. Search for him with instructions other than these. Find him, find it, Alec. Devise. Devise and be.”

  Into the pulsing body of False Trentham pours his model’s high color. The body softens and solidifies. Warmth radiates: he fills the space he occupies.

  “Mind you,” the preferable student says, “I wonder if we ever know what’s going on in someone else’s head—if they’re in pain, or listening, or if”—he pauses with a smile at me—“they care much what we think.” He drops his eyes. “Or think us capable of thought at all.”

  “That is the solipsistic point of view,” I say. “Best to assume everyone thinks.”

  “And feels,” Trentham urges.

  “I feel I ought to thank you properly, at least.” I get up, test my ankle, find it strong enough, and limp the few paces to where he stands. And rest my chin on his shoulder, my arm lightly about his waist, partly to know that he is flesh and blood. He turns and hugs me with some force.

  “War’s coming,” he murmurs. “Roehm has been shot. It makes one think. I’m not brave, but I’ll act as if I am.”

  I’m not sure what to say to this unfocused fear, although I sympathize with it. The specters of the morning nag me, too, so I suggest a walk. Some coffee in the Market Square. Trentham is moodily subdued.

  “Alec,” he says, “d’you think they’d shoot us—our sort—here?”

  “I’ve never given it much thought. Some might.”

  No more I had. And yet, as soon as said, I know it to be true.

  My foot is comfortable and we make fair progress on King’s Parade, the day now clear but cold, the skies packed down, until a crowd of agitators stops us on the road to Great St. Mary’s—anti-war radicals, vocal, shivering.

  Trentham explains the bone of contention: the Tivoli is showing a new film this week, Our Fighting Navy, which is, so he says, the “most appalling propaganda for the weapons’ manufacturers.” I spot some notable Quakers holding placards, among them Arthur Eddington, that eminent and kindly soul whose moustache hangs like Spanish moss over a hidden entrance to the underworld. The rest are King’s students mostly, a few Nomads, the usual skeptics. They are to march at noon on the theater, where opposing militarists are out in force.

  The pacifists do not huddle, despite the chill. They listen, read leaflets, stand off from each other. I note the absence of the émigré fraternity, the Jews lately arrived. I wonder what they’d make of this, and wonder it aloud.

  Trentham responds. He makes a little speech about the fight for peace exceeding circumstantial barbarism. “It isn’t just a stance, dictated by the Chancellor, or Parliament’s warmongering,” he says. “It is a point of principle. I couldn’t fight.” He stops, reflects. “But that doesn’t mean I’d run.”

  I brought him out for coffee, but some different purpose is at work. Events are mustering themselves to illustrate a proof, of Trentham’s bravery or—what? I look down at my shoes. I drag my feet.

  We skirt the market, passing fruiterers and old clothes’ men, the grocer with baskets of late samphire, the rows of parked Bentleys and scattered bicycles, until we reach Rosselli’s cafeteria beside the Tivoli. A few whiskery men in homburgs line the steps—hardly a force. In front of them, some underfed idlers. Reservists, probably. Where is the vocal military support? Where are the rustic patriots, the Tories low and high? Only the café teems, with wives, shoppers, and butchers’ boys waving their mugs, haggling for tea.

  Trentham directs me to a window table and a view of the approaching pacifists, who do not seem so disparate as heretofore and wear the leveled expression of those who, on a point of principle, know what they’re going to do. And in the scuffle, it’s an ardent objector who has the best of it, before the two policemen in the back of Rosselli’s put on helmets and go outside to break things up. His last punch thrown, into the face of an astonished veteran with pouchy eyes, the fighter is restrained to jeers and shouts. But by our seat he stops, struggling within his captors’ arms, the other side of the window.

  He frees one hand. He points at us, at me. His face is flushed, working with muffled rage. He spits upon the glass. Shrill calumnies draw interest from the crowd, and even from the policemen who edge closer, searching the café’s silent depths. For Rosselli’s is emptying, its stoves unlit, its tables cleared or abandoned. A cup rocks on its side. A light goes off. Out of the door into the street the customers go, the mothers and their smiling, headscarfed friends; the satisfied retired teachers who can’t remember what they taught; urgent young scribes, tradesmen yawning (they’re up at four, the market day is almost done), choirboys clutching their dog-eared copies of Stanford in C, Molyneaux with a bloodstained handkerchief pressed to his mouth, Stallbrook from Wargrave, puce with lust or shame, and Matron yapping on her lead.

  The rest, all those who spend their lives in restaurants eavesdropping on the next table, are chivvied through the doorway by Piero Rosselli himself. Go on, he says to the rowers hugging their puppet blades, “Ma andiamo!”

  “What will you have?” Trentham asks me.

  In Market Square, the Bentleys’ doors open and men get out, carrying planks, nothing so very bad, but then I cannot tell idlers from subversives. They build a scaffold in the center of the market and put sawdust down.

  “What do you feel as if you’d like?” Trentham demands again.

  I will not look out of the window anymore.

  According to the menu, I can have Set One or Set Zero.

  Trentham is calm; needs me to act as if nothing is wrong. His neat solicitude, nice hair, and very nearly straight necktie are true. But looking at the bunch of paper flowers in the vase, I think of all the real blooms twenty yards away, the bucket’s sloppy edge, the roars of approval, the generous display.

  *

  Dear June,

&nbs
p; It’s interesting that you should mention fair play, because as you know I’ve always felt it to be an important point. If a machine appears to think, why should we go on insisting it does not? And then the subject came up again at that very dinner you mention with Max N. My probation officer was present, yes, but then it is his job to keep an eye on me, and as it happens the arrangement is quite convivial. He is an intelligent young man—he was the one who congratulated me on my “lovely statement,” as I think I told you—and was asking me if I’d ever been a member of the Cambridge secret societies. Max choked on his homemade sponge cake and said they wouldn’t have been very secret with me on board, which I took to be an unkind reference to my cantabile voice, or possibly my innate sense of style, but June, I forgave him. I said I understood him (the officer) to mean the Nomads, and, no, they’d never made any overtures. And then I stopped, and thought about it.

  Because the point of the Nomads’ ceremonious election procedure was that you never knew if it was taking place or not. Very unfair. You could be in bed with someone or making tea in your underclothes or on the toilet and someone might ask you a question (call out to you, I imagine, if you were on the toilet) and that would be the interview and you wouldn’t know anything about it. You wouldn’t have any way of knowing the significance of anything: the whole of your life could have a determined structure—be part of an interview—and you wouldn’t know.

  And if you didn’t know, you wouldn’t be any less free to “do as you please,” it always seemed to me. If a computer somehow managed to simulate a world with conscious yous and mes running about in it, then from your point of view and mine we’d be conscious and the fact that we were simulated would be neither here nor there.

  When I was at Cambridge, reading Russell and Gödel, tackling them both, I used to think about that class—you know, the Class of All Thinkable Things, it being a member of itself and therefore non-normal and so on. And it struck me, now, that there was all the time the possibility of another class, the Class of All Unthinkable Things, in precisely the sense I’ve outlined, June—a determinism you’re not let in on, a SECRET SOCIETY! “I can’t think about it, it can’t occur to me, so I’m no worse off.” Completely fair.