by Tom McCarthy
“Where’s the set?” he asks.
“Above the work table,” she tells him.
He clambers onto this and retrieves, from a glass-fronted cupboard on the wall, a large boxed chemistry set. His father gave it to him for his seventh birthday, but Sophie’s made it more hers than his. She grabs it keenly as he passes it down, and tells him:
“Get the book as well.”
His hand feels its way around the cupboard and pulls out a heavy hard-bound tome: The Boy’s Playbook of Science. She grabs this from him too. By the time he’s climbed back to the floor she’s opened the box’s lid and is flipping through the book, looking for an experiment to carry out. Her eyes dart from it to the glassed, coloured liquids with a kind of avarice. Serge kneels on a stool beside her, peering over her shoulder. Her hair smells fresh and alive amidst the workshop’s must.
“ Sulphur,” she says. “Yes, we’ve got that. Potash… yes. Nitre?” Her finger runs up and down the rows of bottle-stoppers as though playing a glockenspiel. Serge feels a chemical reaction in his stomach, a kind of effervescent coupling and expanding of juices and elements. “Right,” Sophie announces. “We’ll do this one. Read me the recipe. Page eighty-four.”
She thrusts the book at him and starts laying out tubes, bottles, retorts and a gas burner. The Playbook’s cover has a flowery pyramid embossed on it. Serge flips it open, flips past “Properties of Matter,” “Adhesive Attraction,” “Impenetrability,” arrives at “Chemistry.” Hermes or Mercurius Trismegistus, minister of Osiris… alchemy… chemical combination, one or more substances uniting and producing third or other body different in nature from… Page 84: To return to…
“ ‘To return to our first experiment with the gunpowder,’ ” he reads, “ ‘take sulphur, place some in an iron ladle, heat it over a-’ ”
“Iron ladle?” Sophie says. “We can use a cup.” She roots around the work table, tips a bunch of fuses from a metal cup and, after wiping its interior with her fingers, decants clear liquid into it from a bottle. A sharp smell burns Serge’s nose, inside the bridge. Wrinkling her own, Sophie sets the bottle down, sparks up the Bunsen burner and holds the cup over it. “What next?”
“ ‘… over a gas flame till it-’ ”
“I’m doing that already, stupid. Till it what?”
“ ‘-catches fire,’ ” Serge reads.
On cue, the cup starts burning. “Oh, wow!” says Sophie. The flames are blue, not orange; they make her eyes, already blue, glow bluer and her teeth flare bluey-white, like patterned marble.
“We’re meant to pour it into a bucket of water,” Serge says, “but the room should be blacked out.”
“Well, we’ll skip that,” Sophie tells him. “What’s next?”
Next is an experiment with sulphur and dissolved nitre; then one with sulphates of potash and baryta; then another with nitrate of baryta and metal potassium. Serge reads directions from the Playbook; Sophie executes them, her face running red, orange, grey and blue again as each compound lights, flares or fizzles. When they come to heat up charcoal Sophie blows into the cup and they watch sparks fly out, the powder turning from black to red, then fiery white, before falling back grey and ashen, consumed by its own heat. As Sophie prods the ashes, Serge feels the reaction in his stomach again: a liquid flaring eating his own insides.
“Pearl-ash next,” says Sophie. “Read out the next passage.”
“ ‘If some more nitre be heated in a ladle, and charcoal added,’ ” Serge begins, “ ‘a brilliant deflagration (deflagro) occurs, and the charcoal, instead of passing-’ ”
“It’s ‘day-flag-row,’ stupid, not ‘der-flower-grow,’ ” she says as she holds the new concoction over the Bunsen flame. “Carry on.”
“ ‘-instead of passing away in the air… passing, passing away as…’ ”
The queasiness is spreading to his head as his own stomach deflagrates, something sour and crimson blossoming, expanding. He looks up. Sophie’s staring at him, static. Her whole face seems to have slowed down-slowed down and expanded too. Her hair has expanded outwards from her head, rising to stand straight up in the air. His gaze follows it upwards and he sees instruments rise and hover above shelves. They do this incredibly slowly, as though willing themselves upwards, through excruciating effort, millimetre by millimetre. A window breaks, with the same slowness; he watches each of its glass fragments separate from the plane around it. There’s no crash or tinkle; there’s no sound at all. Serge tries to ask Sophie how she can make her hair stand up like that, but finds that his words, instead of travelling out into the air, push back into his mouth and on towards his stomach. Now sound and speed return, first as an after-rush of air, then, emerging from within this, a high-pitched hum that seems to have been going for some time but of which he’s only now become aware. Sophie’s still staring at him. Her hair’s tangled and her eyes are wild. A gasp comes from her mouth; then another, then a shriek of pleasure. She shouts something to him.
“What?” he shouts back. The hum’s filling his ears.
“Expl-” she begins-but he throws up right then, on the floor. His puke is red, laced with a briny, effervescent silver the same colour as potassium. Sophie looks at it, then back at him, then shrieks again, her shoulders shaking as the shrieks turn into sobbing laughs that judder her whole body.
Their father opines later that there must have been some contaminant in the cup to cause such a violent explosion. He ventures, further, that Serge and Sophie’s extreme proximity to the point of detonation kept them from harm: had they been standing three feet from it, the force of the expanding air would have been enough to kill, or at least seriously injure, them. He plots diagrams showing the explosion’s vectors through the room-table to work table, to shelf, to window-and tries for several days to ascertain the exact nature of the compound inadvertently concocted by his children. Serge and Sophie, for their part, spend weeks, then months, trying to reproduce the blast. They use means more intuitive than their father’s-mixing elements together at random, heating, cooling and remixing them-but have no more success than he did. All they ever get are small-fry phutts and phizzes, unsatisfying placebos.
4
i
Sophie and Serge are educated together. Their tutor, Mr. Clair, is shinily clean-shaven, with sharp features and an aquiline nose down which he peers through metal-framed glasses as he reads dictations, eyes zapping from his paper to the children.
“ ‘Amund-sen’s last ven-ture, through the Northwest Pass-age, yielded little joy. It is to be hoped, by those that value con-quest of the earth, that his current one, to the anti-po-dean regions, will prove for-tui-tous. For those whose daily tra-vels take them no fur-ther than the slums of Man-chester and Glas-gow, it will be of scant conse-quence. The forth-coming coro-nation, simi-larly, will do little to put bread on ta-bles of the poor.’ ”
Serge gets stuck on words like “antipodean” and “fortuitous,” and even ones like “tables.” He keeps switching letters round. It’s not deliberate, just something that he does. He sees letters streaming through the air, whole blocks of them, borne on currents occupying a zone beneath the threshold of the comprehensible, and tries to pluck and stick them to the page as best he can, but it’s an imprecise science: by the time he’s got a few pinned down, the others have floated on ahead or changed their meaning, and “Manchester” ’s “chest” has turned into an old oak coffer, the king’s “coronation” into a flower, a carnation. While Sophie scribbles neatly and assiduously, and always faultlessly, inscribing each word as it emerges from Mr. Clair’s mouth, Serge, bathing in the phrases’ afterglow, usually gives up after a few lines and just lets the words billow around him, losing himself in their shapes and patterns, bright and alive in front of Clair’s grey skin.
When Mr. Clair arrived at Versoie House, one of the first things he unpacked from his trunk, alongside volumes by the likes of Morris, Bastiat and Weber, was a painting, which he hung carefully on the wall of his small room. Unde
r interrogation from Serge and Sophie, who spent so much time curiously perching on his bed and window-sill that Maureen had to come and turf them out, he admitted having painted it himself. It showed, he told them, Venice: the intersection of two canals, a mooring jetty being approached by a small boat. Painting’s a big thing for him; he’s made it a large part of their curriculum. Here too, though, Serge is wanting. He’s a steady brushman, and has a good feel for line and movement, but he just can’t do perspective: everything he paints is flat. Mr. Clair’s explained the principle of it to him, its history, and what he calls its “use-value”; he’s shown him its mechanics, how to scale figures and objects so as to make them appear distant, how to make lines converge towards a vanishing point set within or just beyond the picture’s border and so on. But Serge just can’t do it: his perceptual apparatuses refuse point-blank to be twisted into the requisite configuration. He sees things flat; he paints things flat. Objects, figures, landscapes: flat. Even when Clair sits him down in front of reproductions of Giottos, Constables and Vermeers and orders him to copy them, the scenes accordion down into two dimensions, sideways-facing characters stuck straight onto squashed backdrops. On Tuesday afternoons, the slot Clair’s assigned to landscape painting, the children invariably head up to the attic, and Serge paints the estate from above: its paths, corridors and avenues all laid out in plan view. Sophie, meanwhile, takes a leaf or branch with her and copies it in photographic detail.
Sophie’s so advanced in natural science that Mr. Clair makes no pretence of knowing anything she doesn’t, or even half of what she does. When the three of them collect pollen samples from around the Crypt Park or Mosaic Garden, Sophie whisks the jars off to her “lab,” the smaller stable workshop (ceiling-beams stained by a burn-mark that the years have faded but not wiped away) she’s now made her own and from which Serge is more or less excluded, and emerges two days later with drawings of magnified slides and diagrams showing varying rates of cross-pollination which she’s correlated with her analysis of the constituent mixture of this season’s honey. It is she, not Clair, who leads the trio on walks through Bodner’s Kitchen Garden. While the mute servant trundles around shunting wheelbarrows of dead stems to the compost corner, she reels off the names of plants:
“Portal Ruby, Jonker Van Tet, Symphony, Haphill, Royal Sovereign…”
“A tautologism,” Mr. Clair says. “All sovereigns are royal.”
“This one is Boskoop Giant,” Sophie continues. “And this, blackcurrant Ben Sarek.”
“And most of them are illegitimate.”
“Cherries: Stella, Morello. Pear: Doyenne du Comice. And here are apples: Charles Ross, Lord Lambourne, King of Pippin…”
“A cavalier named all our fruits. Come the new Commonwealth we’ll name them after tradesmen: cobblers, bakers-”
“Shh!” hisses Sophie. “Look.” She juts her finger at a stalk two or three inches from the ground, where a small spider clings almost vertically to its web. “A walnut orb-weaver,” she tells them. “And this,” she says, pointing at a tiny dark thing navigating its way over clumps of earth below the spider’s eyrie, “is a bloody-nosed beetle. It dribbles bright red fluid from its mouth…”
Behind them, a fountain more than dribbles as its centrepiece, a wrought-iron swan, gurgles and vomits as though it had over-gorged itself on the garden’s aristocratic fruit. Sophie leads them round this, towards the lilies. As they pass the enormous poppy bed she exchanges finger-signs with Bodner, who’s half-lost among the swollen, bulbous heads.
“Don’t ever let your father catch you doing that,” Clair warns her.
Sophie shrugs. “These lilies,” she continues lecturing them as they arrive beside swathes of deep maroon, “are Sun Gods. Here-” she digs her hand into the ground to scoop and scrape earth away from the bulb-“is the basal plate, this round pyramid thing. At the top, the flowers: three outer sepals and three inner petals.” As her fingers gently separate the flower-parts, Serge gazes at the earth wedged beneath their nails, stark half-moon hemispheres of dark against pale white. “Six anthers and a three-lobed stigma.” She caresses the stamen, running her fingers right up to the end where white pistils stick out like antennae. “These ones are seventh generation, from a single parent flower.”
“They can’t be from just one flower,” Clair says. “You need two to make baby flowers.”
“Not with lilies,” Sophie corrects him. “They can fertilise themselves. And then their offspring fertilise each other.”
“Endogamy,” tuts Clair. “Perversion of royal houses.”
“What’s mahogany?” asks Serge.
“You’re as bad as Mama,” Sophie tells him.
“No I’m not!” he snaps back. She flicks small flecks of earth at him.
“I think this conversation has gone far enough,” says Mr. Clair. “Back to the classroom.”
Their tutor’s not averse to games. He even schedules in a “ludic session” every week. Excitedly unwrapping a parcel which arrives from London via Lydium several months into his tenure, he presents to them the Realtor’s Game, in which contestants must move object-avatars (a car, a ship, a dog) round squares which represent the city of Chicago, amassing wealth and influence as they progress.
“R.R.: I own that. Fare, one hundred dollars!” Sophie gleefully announces as Serge’s near-destitute mutt pitches on her territory. She has a knack of snapping up prime squares, leaving Serge to mop up dregs of real estate: Rickety Row, Shab Street and the like-although he’s always keen to buy the Ting-a-Ling Telephone Company, despite its poor yield, sold on visions of humming wires and buzzing switchboards, of connections.
“Public transport should be gratis,” Clair announces as he lends Serge the hundred. “And that loan is interest free: I don’t need a pound of dog-flesh thrown into the bargain. I hope this game adequately impresses upon you the iniquities of capital.”
It doesn’t: they both love it. They play extra rounds during free sessions and at weekends. One warm early-summer morning they decide to play outside, but, finding the board won’t sit flat on the Mulberry Lawn’s grass and being so familiar with the layout of the grid that its actual presence before them has become unnecessary, they assign one of the estate’s landmarks to each of its squares-Crypt Park’s second bench for George Street, beehives for Soakum Lighting System and so on-and conduct their game by moving physically from one spot to another. To determine the number of places to advance on any go, they throw a handful of sycamore leaves up in the air and see how many fall within the circumference of a skipping-rope laid on the grass around the thrower’s body. As the outdoor version takes over from the original, additions creep into the rules, modifications: if two players find themselves in the Maze Garden at the same time, one may challenge the other to a “rolling duel” in which two tennis balls are rolled by hand along the maze path, the goal of each roller being to knock the other’s ball out of the maze, the winner subsequently commandeering from the loser a property of his or her (usually her) choice; or if a player finds him- or herself short of rent when lodged beside the beehives, he or she (usually he) may place his hand against a hive and hold it there, braving stings, for half a minute in lieu of making payment-a full minute if the rent’s above five hundred dollars. At first, games advance slowly as both players have to travel to their opponent’s game-location on each move, to check that the other doesn’t cheat when counting sycamore-leaf numbers. After a while, though, Serge has the idea of expanding the Ting-a-Ling Telephone Company out into real space, and they rig up, with the help of poles that feed them over garden walls and around hedges, a primitive web of strings and soup-can mouth- and earpieces through which they can communicate their positions and report the outcomes of each sycamore-throw, for some reason trusting each other to tell the truth when being overheard live. The network can’t cover the whole estate; they have to come to speaking-listening hubs that, in reality, are close enough to one another that they could simply shout. So as not to blow
the fantasy of telecommunication, they conduct their business in hushed voices, almost whispers. After a few days they’re spending whole sessions not trudging from spot to spot but rather sitting at their tele-posts, quietly agreeing their positions and negotiating sub-clauses for each now-imaginary move…
The attic draws them back again and again. On rainy days they go to play the estate-wide version of The Realtor’s Game at its window, shunting their imaginary doubles from park to garden, avenue to path to lawn. While doing this, they fiddle with their father’s archive. He has stacks of old recordings: lamp-blackened glass phonautograph plates and rolls of paper bearing scratch marks laid down by voices moaning from deaf bodies before either of them was born; zinc master discs that, cut in the final years of the last century and the first few of this, appear to Serge like coins of some exotic currency gone out of circulation-miniature, round islands of arrested time. The surfaces of the zinc discs give off a faint smell of beeswax-beeswax overlaid with some sharp chemical. (“Chromic acid,” Sophie tells him when she sees him wrinkling his nose at one. “I’ve got a whole phial of it in my lab.”) The cylinders they find beside these are formed entirely of wax: solid brown columns of the stuff whose smooth, moulded surfaces have been defaced by networks of engravings-strange, meshed graffiti. Sophie and Serge can play these back, thanks to an old Edison phonograph they find gathering dust among them. Selecting recordings at random (some are in labeled cardboard tubes, others are loose and unmarked), they slide the cylinder onto its mandrel and wait for the sound to trickle out. Most of the cylinders contain sequences of letters, spoken out aloud, repeatedly:
“B. B-ee. B-b-b-b-b-ee. T. T-ee. T-t-t-t-t-ee. S-s-s-s-s, S-s-s-s-s. B-ee…”
The voices, those of Day School pupils (now alumni), manifest varying degrees of distortedness and atonality; the letters warp and morph as they progress. They gather certain rhythms, patterns of repetition or half-repetition, then, just when it seems that there’s a logic to their sequences, break and relinquish them again. Serge and Sophie fall into the habit of putting on these recordings each time they’re in the attic, a mechanical background chorus to their various antics up there. Sometimes they play, on a newer Berliner gramophone, not cylinders but discs: exhibition plates their father’s had printed to showcase his students’ ability to enunciate whole phrases or manage entire conversations. After setting the disc gently on its turntable and cranking the Berliner’s handle, they lead the needle down towards the narrow groove with the assiduousness of surgeons guiding knives back to incisions made on previous occasions, then return to their tasks while random dialogues (model exchanges between infant shopkeepers and customers or passengers and train guards) waft around them. Often, when a disc’s come to its end, they let it run on, playing and replaying the same stretch of silence-silence which in fact is anything but silent, bursting as it is with a crackle and snap that conjures up for Serge the image of Bodner’s deformed mouth opening and closing: many Bodners’ mouths, repeated side by side in rows that fill the attic’s air and extend out beyond its roof and walls. Sometimes, while Sophie’s busy copying plants, he props his head right up against the gramophone and watches the needle running through its trench, snagging and jumping constantly as though locked in constant hostile struggle with the furrow. The disc’s made of a thick black material.
