Gnomon

by Nick Harkaway

  There is a way of imagining causality – one of many, but one, in particular, that I see now – in which the universe is a perpetual sine wave, constantly made and unmade, perfectly or imperfectly replicating the same steps over and over again. In that picture, we exist now, and we die, and then in an almost incomprehensibly long time we exist again just as we are. Who is to say that the time when we are not is more significant than the time when we are? Who is to say that it exists at all if we cannot see it? Who is to say that the frequency of our making and unmaking is not radically more compressed, and that the universe does not shatter and remake itself second by second, and us none the wiser?

  If the sine wave is the truth, it implies the potential of Stella’s endless replication, her regeneration. Would we maintain that Stella in the next wave is different from Stella in this one, when the entire flow of time in the universe is wrapped around the spindle of a cosmic zoetrope? No. No, we would acknowledge in the end that the way we have thought of ourselves is flawed: that we are not singular or temporary, but amnesically recurrent in the most glorious way – and if that were so, then this would be a shortcut, a hack, and Stella would come back a little early, to be with me.

  A hack. That’s all.

  And it’s true that the way we see the world is riven through with untested, unverifiable assumptions about what it means to have a self. It’s true that we might possess no will of our own, just be acting out determined or random steps and dreaming of choice-making; that we could be brains in jars, or surgical patients on operating tables or old women dying alone in nursing homes fantasising about other lives, or alien players of immersive games trapped in the system, or even just simulations of simulations in some enormous engine analysing a stock market in a universe far above our own; or that we might be physically real, but exist in fact as a sequence of selves, each alive only for an instant in the uptick of an electrical pulse, gone again the next, each fraudulently recollecting in his own short span the chemically stored memories of a billion others back down the line to the womb and declaring them his own. And that’s just how we fail to understand ourselves, before we even touch the mystery that is other people. Do they think at all? Do they think the same way that we do? Do they experience love, hope, self? Or do they merely behave as if they do? We have no way of knowing – not yet, not until we can connect two heads with thick, ropy cables and taste with another person’s tongue, share the feeling of wine or wind on their lips. Even then, consciousness regresses, an endless loop of doubt.

  Descartes was a mathematician first, a philosopher afterwards, and perhaps a little mad. But he was right that we have no idea what we truly are. Megalos’s perspective is no more absurd than any other chosen illusion. Why not, if one is better than another, choose that?

  I could have Stella back.

  Prove, please, that Stella = Not Stella.

  From the past, Gelasia Cosmatou is talking to me, and the Old Girl is not pleased: ‘Of course, boy. Bring back the dead, live in harmony, never doubt and never mind that she died. Just decide she didn’t, that it’s all a matter of perspective. Will you do your mathematics that way also? Let five equal four because that solves the puzzle? No? Well, then, that tells you that his New Greece is so much pigeonsquitter on a wet beach, doesn’t it! Use your bloody head!’

  I am using my head. I am using it with everything I have.

  I do not speak, and after a while watching me with that same depthless, unwavering calm, Nikolaos Megalos gets up. He unlocks my handcuffs, because he knows that whatever else happens now, he doesn’t need them any more. After a while, with something like regret, he says: ‘I will send Adrasteia to bring you to her home. Meditate upon what I have said, but be quick. We must begin soon, while the world is still in flux. Search your soul.’

  There’s no such thing as souls.

  In which case Not Stella could be Stella.

  Nikolaos Megalos departs in silence, but not in peace.

  And I thought the shark was dangerous.

  *

  I sit by myself for a while, wondering what to do.

  There is no Stella. There could be Stella. There can never be Stella again.

  There will be Stella tomorrow, for a given value of Stella.

  I am sitting in that exhausted space between mania and emptiness when she opens the door and comes into my room. She has that way of patting the side of her head where her glasses should be, because her hair is thick enough to hold them and she is not sure that they are there. She has the same look that she always had, the look of measurement and perplexity, as if she cannot decide where to begin with me, and yet she knows that she will.

  ‘Hi,’ I say, when the moment has already been too long.

  Nothing in her face speaks of disappointment in me. She does not flinch – and yet she must, inside, at this too-cool greeting. Stella would, if I met her that way, having just discovered she was alive after all this time. Stella would slap me.

  She snorts, which is the other thing Stella would do, and her snort expresses volumes of exasperation. I am a dullard: a lumpen, obstinate male, and as always I will come around in time, but I will have to be coaxed and massaged to believe it was all my own idea. If it were not for the fact that the coaxing pleases her, the game and the chase, it would be utterly unacceptable.

  Is that how we were? Or is my mind painting it that way now? Each recollection bends memory to a new shape. Did Stella look that way, with her lips half smiling? Or am I seeing her that way then because I see this woman now? If the latter: how long will it take before this Stella swallows that one?

  ‘Come and see the real world,’ she says, and she leads me down into the perfectly lifelike village of Nikolaos Megalos.

  *

  The real world is a small cluster of fisher cottages close by the sea. There are perhaps a few hundred houses, scattered around a working dock that looks, I imagine, much the same as it did when navigation was a matter of tasting the water and spitting. A few paces inland of the quay is a little market square, runnelled and drained so that the blood and bones from the fishwives’ stalls can be washed into the sea in the afternoon. Fat gulls stroll along the outer wall, proud of their domain.

  Eyes shut, I breathe in fresh air. In Athens – it must be just along the coast a way, unless we are on an island – the air tastes of hot stone and combustion, coffee and tobacco: the peculiar sensory seal of the capital. Here, you remember that the world doesn’t have to smell that way. The air is rich with salt and pine, olive groves and eucalyptus. I look out across the village and the sight matches the flavour that’s churning in my head: baking white sun and fecund blue water, soft marble blocks and terracotta tiles, wooden beams and doors. There’s fresh plaster render on some of the walls, space for frescoes and murals as yet unpainted. The little square is full of men with tanned, golden skin and dark hair – not fat but thick with Heraklean muscle, and gleaming with oil. The women have supple limbs and broad hands, dark eyes proud and sharp. When the wind gusts inland, it carries up to us the scents of roasting and bread, of fresh fish on coal and olive oil and artichokes. From the other direction, it brings peppers and tomatoes growing on the vine; the hum of bees, the sound of hearty laughter. This is time travel, to a Greece that never was: a vaccinated and aerobicised Olympian Pastoral Republic.

  Away to one side, close by the seafront but dignified and set apart from the business of commerce, a circle is carved into the stones, and within it is a lowered, wood-boarded space surrounded by old-fashioned torches and covered in a layer of sand: a play area for children, say, or a showing pen for livestock. I can hear the sound of the sea in the rocks below, twenty metres down. Stella-Adrasteia catches the direction of my gaze.

  ‘The zagre,’ she says.

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The proving circle. It is for trials.’

  ‘What, by combat?’ Half, I believe it must be. Perhaps that’s how elections work: maybe Megalos got his hat by beating three septuagenari
ans to a pulp with his bare hands.

  She laughs. ‘No! For justice, we have laws, of course, and magistrates. No. I mean for legitimacy, for the right to belong. Some here are true Greek, born in the blood, but others are Greek of the heart and the soul, but born in other nations. The seed of Greece is spread wide and one cannot always know it by sight. One must know if a person is truly invested, Megalos says: whether they are Greek in meaning.’

  ‘And for that, what? Do they fight?’ I picture blood on the sand, scrawny refugees spilling out of North Africa in desperation, drowning their way here like ants in a ball, being told that this is how it’s done now, this is asylum: a gladiator’s chance, and all they have to do is rip the eyes off the other man. Immigration reduced by 50 per cent, at a minimum. A perfectly Gordian one: if a puzzle offends you, cut it in half.

  ‘Sometimes, of course. Men and women. Sometimes the test is more symbolic, resonant with the person. Each test is made for the person, like a lovesong. It is a question of rightness, and resolve.’

  Stop your so-very-wise condemnation, and tell me that if the person you most miss in the world were offered to you back again, in however strange or impossible a fashion and at whatever price, you would be able to walk away unhesitating: anti-Orpheus, leaving the ghost in Hades without a second look. Tell me that you can imagine your life without the one you most love, and that you can imagine rejecting the possibility of their return in however broken a form.

  ‘Did you fight?’ I don’t want to know, so I ask.

  She stares at me for a moment. ‘I am Stella Cosmatou. Of course not.’

  Of course not. Stella was Greek. Stella is Greek, has always been Greek, and this is Stella. Megalos’s world is strangely perfect in its tautologies.

  There is a procession of some sort coming down the street. Stella looks over and murmurs: ‘Oh! Make way!’

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘Because it’s polite,’ she replies, taking my arm to guide me.

  Her fingers graze the blade of my hand. It is our first contact, skin on skin. Not really first contact, I suppose, because she put a bag over my head, so technically we have touched before. But it is the first contact that is real, between persons, tacit permissions given by the working of the social world. Her hand plucks my sleeve to hasten me out of the way, and she presses me to one side with her hip. It is done innocently and spontaneously, as between old friends, but it is not like that at all. It is as if I have been reattached to mains power after a lifetime on batteries. I am alive, truly alive. I see in colour, hear in quadrophonic stereo. My breath stops. I can feel her. I know her weight and her balance, the tenor of her muscles and bones. I feel her fingertips against my wrist, the curve of her body where it traps me against the stone wall, the rhythm of her heart inside her. Stella’s hip, that I have held and kissed, moving as Stella moved it, in the ineffable signature of one person’s way, known only to dance partners and lovers.

  Illusion. Suggestion. It cannot be the same.

  But it is the same. I feel her and she is in my head and my heart.

  And she feels it too. She feels the same shock of connection. Impossible. She was not there. She cannot have that understanding of me, cannot share my history, was not there unless she is most literally and actually Stella, transmigrated.

  And why not? Why not, if gods swim in the markets and devour economies? If I have made a deal with an ancient divinity, sacrificing time and money, being paid in both? Why not?

  Her head turns slowly, afraid of what it may find. Sees fellowship. Shared bewilderment.

  Desire. Delusion. Desperation. Divine intervention.

  Divine madness.

  At any moment, I will kiss her, or she will kiss me.

  She leans forward just a little, for just a moment, mouth opening so that I glimpse the tip of her tongue, taste her on the breeze – and then she catches herself and steps away.

  Her departure is the least simple physical motion I have ever experienced. Her body twists slightly, her hips no longer turned away but slipping around to face me so that as she leans inward to recover her balance her whole body briefly seals against mine. From thigh to shoulder my left side is embraced, the contact just a fraction longer than it needs to be, the brief extra pressure of groin and breast emphatic. Her upper body comes away first, the motion pulling her upright, the last fading touch imparted by her hips to mine, undeniable gravity. Even the scent of her is right, is what it always was: olfactory Stella-ness.

  And she’s gone, back in her own orbit, her own unshared private space.

  ‘Pilgrims,’ she says.

  What?

  The word is noise, not sense, because there is no context beyond her. Then my tunnel vision loosens, and I remember what is around us. ‘Oh, right.’ Right, and nothing happened, tra la la. Just like the old days when we were kids: act natural, look busy, keep your hands on the table.

  I wonder who we are lying to. Are we lying to one another and to ourselves, or are we watched, in this perfect village? Are there eyes upon us, upon me, gauging my reactions, the progress of my seduction? The progress of her transition? If she fails, will there be another Stella along in a minute to try again?

  Is she on my side or on theirs? Stella would be with me. She cannot be Stella unless she is with them. Must I, then, be with them? Megalos thinks so. Around and around we go.

  ‘Pilgrims,’ she repeats, demanding my attention.

  Following the direction of her finger, I see coming towards us what appears to be a centipede as tall as a person, slowly but surely looping its way down the opposite side of the stone gallery under which we walk. Then it draws closer, and it is just an old woman, prostrating herself at the head of a line of serious pilgrims making the last steps of their journey. Behind her is a middle-aged man, and behind them are some children, who because they are shorter are having trouble keeping up.

  Toothless, she passes me, and in her expression is quite placid. She reminds me of the Patriarch – if that’s what he is now.

  It is the most wrong thing I have ever seen.

  The centipede ripples on, and away.

  ‘The people are devoted,’ Stella says. ‘Because they see the divine with clear eyes. There is no need for faith. There is certainty.’

  ‘And you?’

  Eye contact. ‘My path is more complex.’

  We walk on through the little port, taking the air.

  *

  These people are not the first iteration of themselves, nor will they be the last. They are not this person, they are the space that this person occupies in the painting.

  Down winding village streets we go. We are walking not through a city but a map, a physical space that exists to chart the differences between portraits, and the portraits are rendered in living people. White brick, pink brick, flowers in window boxes, blue Mediterranean sky: all symbols on the map, meaning nothing without the key.

  Stella, as we walk, is more Stella all the time. The longer I spend with her, the more I know her, the less I remember whether she is different from the old Stella. My knowledge of her inscribes itself on my memory, rolling itself back into the past and changing my recollection of it. As we walk we share things, moments we have experienced before – or which I now remember experiencing, even if three days ago I wouldn’t have.

  As we climb the hill on the far side of the harbour, smelling watered earth and eucalyptus, she is very serious. I remember once when we were writing a paper, Stella worked out a schedule of the time we could spend doing maths, eating, sleeping and making love. She was extremely stern about this last one, because she had identified it as a key area where we lost huge amounts of mathematical progress. Needless to say it was a failure: when I suggested, obedient to her instruction, that we get out of bed, she stretched out to the timetable she had stuck to the wall – the stretch, I remember, was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen, her whole naked body reaching in a perfect curve from knee to fingertip, swaying as she n
eared the limit of her reach – and pulled it down, then tore it to pieces and threw them in the air. Before the paper snow finished falling she was already on top of me, and I don’t think we emerged again that day.

  This is like the bit when she was wearing clothes, not the other bit.

  I’ve begun to think of her as having been that person. It’s harder and harder to recall the in-between times, the day when she died without me. She is alive.

  What if Megalos has stumbled upon something he does not understand? What if he’s wrong about everything except this, and Stella has been drawn here through time? Perhaps the Stella I knew was a pre-echo of this one, a shadow who had to die in order to exist fully in a later state. Or perhaps the universe has just recreated her perfectly as a Boltzmann entity, a woman born out of a random event. It is not theoretically impossible. On any given day, boiling water poured over your hand could make you cold – although, of course, it never does, just as you never win the lottery every week for a year. Or those odds may come in all the time and we never notice: deep space could be filling up with spontaneous creations, persons existing for a heartbeat of bewildered, frozen agony, as James or Kalil or Sara or Mariam jerks into being in the endless waste between stars and, mistakenly remembering a life, dies mystified and appalled. I was just shopping in Glyfada! But they weren’t. They had never been to Glyfada.

  Perhaps there never was a Stella until now, and this is the first one and the one that I remember is the ghost. Perhaps there’s always a Stella, somewhere, and you just have to go and find her and there she is, still in love with you, still the same.

  When you start making the theory fit the supposition, you’re already fucked. What you have to do is start with the facts and find the reality, but reality is something I’m losing touch with, and have been since a god-shark invaded my head and crashed the stock market.

  How is it that I have no problem believing in a divine pagan shark living in my head and corrupting Fortune 500 companies, but Megalos’s proposal is giving me trouble? Hell, if I want Stella back, maybe I should cut out the middleman, go right to the shark.