Novelties & Souvenirs

by John Crowley

  When we reached the Canal, the Israelis had already occupied the east bank. The airport at Ismailia was a shambles, the greater part of the Egyptian air force shot up, planes scattered in twisted attitudes like dead birds after a storm. We could find no plane to take us. He had gone desperately broody, wide-eyed and speechless, useless for anything. I felt as though in a dream where one is somehow saddled with an idiot brother one had not had before.

  And yet it was only the confusion and mess that made my task possible at all, I suppose. There were so many semiofficial and unofficial British scurrying or loafing around Port Said when we entered the city that our passage was unremarked. We went through the smoke and dust of that famously squalid port like two ghosts—two ghosts progressing through a ghost city at the retreating edge of a ghost of Empire. And the crunch of broken glass continually underfoot.

  We went out on an old oiler attached to the retreating invasion fleet, which had been ordered home having accomplished nothing except, I suppose, the end of the British Empire in Africa. He stood on the oiler’s boat deck and watched the city grow smaller and said nothing. But once he laughed, his dry, light laugh: it made me think of the noise that Homer says the dead make. I asked the reason.

  “I was remembering the last time I went out of Africa,” he said. “On a day much like this. Very much like this. This calm weather; this sea. Nothing else the same, though. Nothing else.” He turned to me smiling, and toasted me with an imaginary glass. “The end of an era,” he said.

  March 10

  My chronicle seems to be degenerating into a diary.

  I note in the Times this morning the sale of the single known example of the 1856 magenta British Guiana, for a sum far smaller than was supposed to be its worth. Neither the names of the consortium that sold it nor the names of the buyers were made public. I see in my mind’s eye a small, momentary fire.

  I see now that there is no reason why this story should come last, no matter my feeling, no matter that in Africa he hoped it would. Indeed there is no reason why it should even fall last in this chronicling, nor why the world, the sad world in which it occurs, should be described as succeeding all others—it does not, any more than it precedes them. For the sake of a narrative only, perhaps; perhaps, like God, we cannot live without narrative.

  I used to see him, infrequently, in the years after we both came back from Africa: he didn’t die as quickly as we both supposed he would. He used to seek me out, in part to borrow a little money—he was living on the dole and on what he brought out of Africa, which was little enough. I stood him to tea now and then and listened to his stories. He’d appear at our appointed place in a napless British Warm, ill-fitting, as his eyeglasses and National Health false teeth were also. I imagine he was terribly lonely. I know he was.

  I remember the last time we met, at a Lyons teashop near the Marble Arch. I’d left the Colonial Service, of course, under a cloud, and taken a position teaching at a crammer’s in Holborn until something better came along (nothing ever did; I recently inherited the headmaster’s chair at the same school; little has changed there over the decades but the general coloration of the students).

  “This curious fancy haunts me,” he said to me on that occasion. “I picture the Fellows, all seated around the great table in the executive committee’s dining room; only it is rather like Miss Havisham’s, you know, in Dickens: the roast beef has long since gone foul, and the silver tarnished, and the draperies rotten; and the Fellows dead in their chairs, or mad, dust on their evening clothes, the port dried up in their glasses. Huntington. Davenant. The President pro tem.”

  He stirred sugar in his tea (he liked it horribly sweet; so, of course, do I). “It’s not true, you know, that the club stood somehow at a nexus of possibilities, amid multiplying realities. If that were so, then what the Fellows did would be trivial or monstrous or both: generating endless new universes just to see if they could get one to their liking. No: it is we, out here, who live in but one of innumerable possible worlds. In there, they were like a man standing at the north pole, whose only view, wherever he looks, is south: they looked out upon a single encompassing reality, which it was their opportunity—no, their duty, as they saw it—to make as happy as possible, as free from the calamities they knew of as they could make it.

  “Well, they were limited people, more limited than their means to work good or evil. That which they did they should not have done. And yet what they hoped for us was not despicable. The calamities they saw were real. Anyone who could would try to save us from them: as a mother would pull her child, her foolish child, from the fire. They ought to be forgiven; they ought.”

  I walked with him up toward Hyde Park Corner. He walked now with agonizing slowness, as I will, too, one day; it was a rainy autumn Sunday, and his pains were severe. At Hyde Park Corner he stopped entirely, and I thought perhaps he could go no farther: but then I saw that he was studying the monument that stands there. He went closer to it, to read what was written on it.

  I have myself more than once stopped before this neglected monument. It is a statue of the boy David, a memorial to the Machine Gun Corps, and was put up after the First World War. Some little thought must have gone into deciding how to memorialize that arm which had changed war forever; it seemed to require a religious sentiment, a quote from the Bible, and one was found. Beneath the naked boy are written words from Kings:

  Saul has slain his thousands

  But David his tens of thousands.

  He stood in the rain, in his vast coat, looking down at these words, as though reading them over and over; and the faint rain that clung to his cheeks mingled with his tears:

  Saul has slain his thousands

  But David his tens of thousands.

  I never saw him again after that day, and I did not seek for him: I think it unlikely he could have been found.

  IN BLUE

  THE ROUTE THEY TOOK EVERY MORNING from their dormitory to the project’s buildings took them through very old parts of the city. They crossed a square where weeds grew up between enormous paving stones, a square so vast it could diminish even the long, square-columned, monolithic buildings that bordered it. The square was usually deserted and silent; not even the indigenous population of the city, descendants of those who had built this square or at least of men and women who had inhabited it when it was still a living place, ever came here much. It was too open, too lifeless: or rather it had a life too large, too intimidating; nothing could be done with it. The new populations of the city, the squatters and refugees, also rarely came here; probably most of them weren’t even aware of its existence.

  Hare’s group passed out of the square beneath an arch the height of ten men and as thick as a room. Looking up as they passed under it, Hare could see that the honeycomb pattern of its vaulting was distorted deliberately to make the arch seem even higher, even more intimidating than it was. The hexagons high up, in the center of the arch, were actually smaller than the ones on the sides, lower down; the circles inscribed inside the hexagons were really ovals, making the center of the curve of the arch seem to retreat into a space within itself, a space that could not exist, a space into which Hare’s heart seemed to be drawn.

  Then he had passed under the arch and moved on with the others.

  Why had they done it that way? Every morning he wondered. Why had it occurred to anyone to expend so much ingenuity on a trick like that, who had then been willing to take the trouble to execute it? Slaves. But they must have been skilled nonetheless, and proud of their skills. The effort of it, the enterprise of it, at once oppressed and lightened him, drawing his mind apart.

  He looked back, as he always did, to see the whole of it, and to study the band of letters that ran across the top. Each letter must have been a meter long; between the words there were diamond-shaped stops as large as a hand. But what were the words? What was the language? He tried to memorize the first few letters, as he always did, but as always by the time he reached work h
e would forget their exact shapes.

  He turned away. One or two of the others had also glanced back, to see what it was that Hare looked at, but they couldn’t see it, and looked curiously at Hare; the woman who worked beside him at the project smiled at him, enjoying his oddness. Hare returned the smile and looked ahead.

  Farther on were narrow streets, and these, too, contained fragments of the ancient city, not ruins so much as antiquities in the process of being packed up in new construction. That the old cornerstones and bits of columned fronts were being preserved in this way was an illusion; the incremental plan for new housing, for places to put the thousands who were coming in from the countryside, made it necessary to squeeze modular units wherever Applications determined they could go, leaving the old disorder to be carted away later. Hare supposed it wouldn’t be long before the gray boxes, which stacked to any height, which could be piled up anyhow wherever there was room, would spill out into the square, growing with the shy persistence of ivy, higgledy-piggledy, full of children, strung with lines of laundry and hung with gaudy hectoring posters in country dialects. In these streets the uniform units had already climbed above all but the tallest of the older buildings, their zigzag stairways like ivy’s clutching roots.

  Through the open doors of some units, Hare’s group passing by could glimpse women at stoves, or nursing children; more often, though, doors and shutters would be quietly closed as the group passed, the faces that looked out suddenly occluded by a door. These country people were shy; if they found themselves observed, they would turn away, or even cover their faces with their hands. Had they used to do so in their old home places? Where Hare had grown up, people had been friendly and talkative. He thought it must be the city, the sight of strangers, cadre in Blue who had an uncertain but real control over their lives. When Hare’s group came upon children playing in the labyrinthine streets, they would stop playing and withdraw into doorways or behind pillars, silent, their dark eyes large; they wouldn’t come out though Hare’s group waved and called to them.

  It was a problem in figure-ground mechanics, Hare thought: that the cadre in Blue knew themselves to be the servants of masters, the people; but the people thought that the servants were their masters—and of course there were instances when the servants did seem to be directing the lives of their masters. It must be hard for them, Hare thought: the uniforms of Blue meant survival, food, shelter, help, and before them even the grown-ups were as shy as children offered sweets or kindnesses by great strangers.

  But most of Hare’s group had, like Hare, also come here from the country or from small towns, and also felt themselves to be displaced—perhaps that’s why they smiled and waved at the elusive children of the altered streets, and why they talked little or in low voices as they walked through this many-layered necropolis where the living trod on the dead, who when they had lived had trod on other dead. Hare, in the city, felt for the first time sharply how many more dead there are than living.

  The dead had carved in stone; the living wrote on paper. The long, bannerlike posters were everywhere, explaining, exhorting, encouraging: not only explaining how not to waste water, but why it was important that water not be wasted. Some were torn off in midsentence, by hands or wind; kindly teachers whose mouths were suddenly stopped.

  “Look,” Hare said to the woman who walked next to him. He read from a poster. “‘If you don’t know how to read, begin learning now.’”

  “Yes,” the woman said. “There’s a lot of illiteracy still.”

  She took the hand of the woman next to her, who smiled without looking at her. Hare said nothing.

  Hare’s work at the project was the preparation of training manuals, introductory lessons in act-field theory and social calculus. Presently he was working on an introduction to coincidence magnitude calculations.

  It was not difficult work; it was far less demanding than the work for which Hare had been trained, and for which he had shown such early promise in school, when it was thought that he might be one of those few who could alter the calculus that altered the lives of men and women. When he walked the long halls of the project building, he passed the open doors of rooms where men and women sat together, without tools beyond a terminal or a pad or without even those, men and women at work on that calculus; Hare, as he passed their doors, hearing their low voices or their laughter, could almost see the networks of their thought growing. If they caught sight of Hare, they might wave, for he had worked with some of them in these rooms and in rooms like these in other places. Then he passed on, through other rooms, meeting rooms and commissariats and the communications annex, to the cubicles where work like his was done. Beyond these cubicles lay the maintenance sheds, the shops and warehouses. Then that was the end. Hare, sitting down at his work station and turning on the dim light above it, wondered how long it would be before he was shifted that one last degree.

  Not long, he thought. He wasn’t sure he could even complete the manual he was working on in any form that could be submitted. And beyond the maintenance sheds, the shops and warehouses? Only the world that Hare’s manuals taught about: life: the whole act-field. He would most likely go on moving, as he had moved, by degrees down from the highest realm of thought about it, to a mere place in it: or no place.

  He opened the composer on his desk and retrieved the notes he had made the day before.

  “Introduction. Definitions. Description of contents. Figure-ground mechanics a necessity for coincidence magnitude calculation. Probabilities and how they differ from coincidence magnitudes: example. Problems and strategies: synchronicity, self-reference paradoxes, etc. Conclude introduction: importance of coincidence magnitude calculation to the social calculus, importance of the calculus to act-field theory, importance of act-field theory to the Revolution.”

  He considered these notes for a long time. Then, keyed to the line about the difference between probabilities and coincidence magnitude, he wrote this:

  “Example:

  “It was once believed that no two snowflakes are exactly alike. More properly we can say that the probability of any two snowflakes’ being exactly alike is very low. The fall, at the same moment, of two snowflakes that are exactly alike, and the fall of those two snowflakes on this word ‘snowflake’ that you are now reading, would be a coincidence of a probability so low as to be virtually incalculable.

  “But the magnitude of the coincidence, if it were to be calculated by the methods you will learn here, would not be high.

  “This is because coincidence magnitude is a function of meaningfulness as well as of probability. We know that only acts (as defined by the special and general act theories) can have meaningfulness; an act’s meaningfulness is a function of its definition as an act, a definition made possible by the infinitesimal social calculus. An act bearing high meaningfulness and low probability generates a high coincidence magnitude. To calculate meaningfulness against probability, and thereby arrive at the magnitude of the coincidence, requires that coincidence magnitude calculation be operable within act-field theory as a differential social calculus.

  “Act-field theory predicts the occurrence, within any given parameters of the field, of coincidences of a certain magnitude. It is said to account for these. The appearance within those parameters of coincidences greater in magnitude than the theory accounts for is a coincidence of implicitly high magnitude, generating its own parameters in another dimension, parameters calculable within the theory, which then accounts for the higher level of coincidence. The generation of such new parameters is called an implicit spike, and the process is itself accounted for.”

  Here Hare’s thought branched.

  “Implicit spikes,” he wrote, and then erased it.

  “Act-field theory, then,” he wrote, and erased that.

  Whichever way his thought branched it seemed likely to take him to the tolstoy edge.

  Once (Hare had no conception of how long ago, but long ago) they had thought that if the position and
velocity and mass of every atom in the universe could be known, at some given moment, then the next moment and thus each succeeding moment could be predicted with certainty. Of course such complete knowledge could not be assembled, no computer could be built large enough to contain all the facts, or to calculate with them; but if they could be. And then they learned that the universe was not made like that at all, that only probabilities of states and events could ever be known with certainty, and that the very act of measuring and perceiving those probabilities entailed altering them. Some people (Hare had heard) had gone mad when this was proven, out of the awful loss of certainty, the loss even of the possibility of certainty. Others rejoiced: the loss of false certainty made real knowledge possible. The calculations began again, and were fruitful. The universe of events danced inexhaustibly, and the mind could dance with it, if it would.

  And there had also been a time (the same time, perhaps, the same olden days) when people had thought that history might also be calculated: that if the weather and the size of harvests and the productivity of factories and the rate of invention and every other possible variable could be known, though it could not be, and every hurt every person had suffered, every belief or thought each one had—every man’s position and mass and velocity—then it could be known with certainty why every event that happened had happened, and what would happen next.

  But the human universe was no more like that than the universe of stars and stones. Such calculations would fail not because they were impossibly difficult but because no such certainties as were aimed at could possibly exist. It could not even be determined what units were to be measured—human acts—and where one stopped and another began. All conceivable plans for making the measurements met a mirror paradox, a self-reference, an infinite regression: the tolstoy edge.