The Weight of Numbers

by Simon Ings

  Mo no longer smuggles marijuana.

  ‘Please,’ he says. He is reduced to begging. ‘Please,’ he says, stroking Stacey’s shoulder. What there is of it. The bones.

  Stacey whispers something, far too soft to hear. She is glued to the screen.

  Mo follows Stacey’s gaze, into the television.

  Scenery rips past.

  Only now does Mo see what his daughter is driving.

  Inside the plastic PlayStation housing, inside the machine, a fractal math sculpts trees and mountains, throwing them upon the TV screen with the careless mastery of a potter. Each rock, each leaf, each twisted branch is unique, an effervescent work of mindless art, no sooner glimpsed than gone. Clouds swell, glower, then disperse, revealing a low, late sun. Blue shadows spill from the hoardings and stands and the cheering, screaming onlookers, every one an extemporized original, as Stacey, made whole by games like these, made superfast, pumps the brake with a bony forefinger and thumbs the wheel around.

  The world has come a long way since Turbo. The viewpoint skids and topples, then rights itself, as the game’s forgiving physics bounce her off a wall and back onto the track.

  Stacey has never got this far before. Her walnut heart shivers, and the game, sensitive to the moment, slackens its break-neck pace. The road straightens as it enters a beautiful park.

  Deer graze beneath tall trees with foliage so rich and thick, it looks more black than green.

  A dark lake flashes by.

  Stacey hits the brake, turns the cream Thunderbird carefully around and, counter to the spirit of the game, retraces her route.

  There are no pursuers now. She has fallen out the bottom of the game.

  She wonders where she is now.

  In the middle of the lake, a fountain sends a crystal jet into the air like a glittering whip, spreading coolness all around.

  Stacey Chavez unclips her seatbelt. The cherry-red leather upholstery sticks to the backs of her legs as she reaches for the door.

  The boy at the burger bar counter is sweating from more than chip heat, for he cannot hold medium chips and apple pie in his head without dropping the bacon cheese double. Neither can he operate the till: a twenty-by-twenty grid of buttons, their colour-coded subdivisions long since overridden by wear and spillage.

  Fifty years ago, no one would have cared that this boy was dull-witted. Back then, being dim was neither a crime nor a catastrophe. These days even operating a till requires a degree.

  Anthony Burden takes his shopping-day lunch over to a table. He sits. He eats. The mush slides down easily enough. He faces the counter. He watches the boy. He feels something. Something he has no use for, no interest in. Something like compassion.

  The net has been cast. Anthony Burden can see this. Though he is old and out of touch, though he has spent most of his life trying and failing to improve the lot of the poorer people of the earth, and though it is only the siren call of free health care and council housing that has convinced him to come back to the UK, he knows enough about the modern world. He knows about these places and how they work: how the till talks to the stock control computer, which talks to the email generator, which talks to the supplier’s mainframe, and on and on and on. He can see, as though it were etched on the air, the self-stitching net that has been thrown over the world. He can see the struggles of people trapped within that net. He knows where the dreams of his youth have led.

  As the boy struggles through his robot day, Anthony Burden realizes it has been given him, in these final years of his much-travelled and impecunious life, to witness something important. Here now, in a Portsmouth burger bar, he is witnessing the birth struggles of a world he has always dreamed of: a pre-wired, pre-fabricated world that has no need of people. A world already in control of itself.

  Anthony Burden finishes his meal and leaves. He cannot remember the way home. Every street is like every other street. Every pavement is like every other pavement. Every hoarding is like every other hoarding. There are more connections in the human brain than there are stars in the sky, yet, by their chatter, all these connections go to make one singular ‘I am’. So this city, webbed together with glass fibre and microwave, copper, coherent light and GSM, is one place now, one square foot of earth, and to walk through the streets of the city is to return to that square foot of earth continuously and reaffirm the city’s great ‘I am’.

  Anthony Burden is lost, though there is nothing unfamiliar about his surroundings. On the contrary, everywhere he turns, he sees the same familiar scene. He is lost, and yet there can be no doubt where he is.

  He is lost, as a man is lost who never leaves his home.

  He walks.

  This is the world he dreamed of: infinite trivial variations on a single theme. He walks, and the city rolls beneath his feet like a hamster’s wheel, recurring endlessly.

  His shopping bag knocks against his shin. Inside, his treasures: a bag of Young’s frozen prawns (30 per cent extra free) and a half-price coconut. Anthony is going to weave magic tonight. Tonight, Anthony turns escapologist. He is going to make himself a pot of caril de amendoim, and taste his way to younger times and warmer lands.

  When you have worked with as many anoretics as Professor Emeritus Loránt Pál, it should be painfully apparent to you that their well-being depends less upon their physical condition as upon their outlook.

  ‘Their philosophy…’

  Loránt Pál sucks his teeth, savouring his mot juste, but neither Stacey nor the man accompanying her seems impressed by his analysis.

  He recognizes Stacey. He met her during her numerous visits to see her mother, and even then he had it in the back of his mind, given her radical appearance, that he might see her again – that she might one day self-refer.

  Deborah, her mother, died here. They’d been unable to bring her out of her coma. An interesting case, if a harrowing one. Impossible to know for sure what caused the original damage. Stacey had told them it was a car accident, but Pál remembers the dent in Deborah’s skull: it looked more like something made with a hammer.

  ‘The anoretic constantly tests her body’s limits,’ Pál explains, sliding, out of bad habit, into an impersonal, third-person style of address. He spends too much time in the lecture hall these days, playing the Grand Old Man of organic therapy. He flounders a second, experiments with an ingratiating grin and addresses Stacey Chavez directly: ‘At least, while you’re pushing your body as far as it can go, you’re still engaged with it!’

  Of course, the person he should really be trying to convince is her companion, this Spanish-looking gentleman in the ice-cream suit who claims to be the man behind the payments Coronation House received for Deborah. What on earth is his business with them, Pál wonders, that he wants Coronation House to treat yet another generation of the same family?

  Once again – and is this by design, or by some malign chance? – he has acted too late. From experience, Pál knows just by looking that Stacey is a hopeless case. With the right treatment and surroundings the expert staff of Coronation House might sustain her for a few months more. But the heart is shrivelled beyond saving; the cold is deep in her bones.

  Of course, he would not dream of saying such things to her directly. In fact, what can he say to her? What is he trying to say? One would think, at his great age, that Professor Loránt would have learned by now not to trip over his own professional enthusiasms. But it is his nature to be a bumbler in casual conversation. He prefers the lecture hall, and the freedom it gives him to shape a fully rounded idea.

  ‘It is as well you came when you did, I think,’ he says to them, euphemistically.

  What he means is: Ms Chavez requires twenty-four-hour hospice care. Ms Chavez has passed the Point of No Return. Ms Chavez is dying. He can’t disguise a helpless little shudder as he recalls the other ones – not many of them, but enough – who came to him too late.

  Unwisely, he seeks to prepare them a little. He explains that the Point of No Return comes when
you start thinking: What lies beyond the body’s limits? What happens if I let the body go?

  The couple stare at him.

  With a sigh, Pál gives in, at last, to the inevitable. ‘Well, perhaps I should explain what treatments we offer here,’ he says.

  The man’s interest wakens straight away, while Stacey’s sunken eyes burn with suspicion. Both reactions are predictable.

  The working day proceeds as normal and by its end, as usual, Professor Emeritus Loránt Pál is left sitting on his hands, waiting for his taxi. Coronation House is profitable enough that he and his senior staff could each have their own driver if they wanted, but Pál, as senior partner, has set a very different tone for his flagship clinic. Not every client of theirs has a five-figure disposable income, nor is every outpatient immortalized in Hello!. One journalistic wit from Vogue, intuiting how the clinic used money from celebrity treatments to subsidize more interesting cases, compared the running of the place to an old-style grammar school. Pál and his colleagues sometimes stand accused of cherry-picking the most interesting cases. No one, however, can deny their excellent rates of success.

  Pál uses the delay to open the day’s non-urgent post. On top of the pile sits a large, heavy, brown padded envelope; Pál’s thumb scrubs impotently at the flap. Even opening a letter is hard work, now that he is an old man.

  After all his efforts, it is yet another ‘courtesy’ edition of The Idealist, this time with a flash on the cover announcing that Miriam has won the Elizabeth Longford Prize. God, is there no stopping this juggernaut?

  Pál’s feelings about the book are complicated by the fact that he misses and regrets Anthony Burden. He was as keen as anyone to learn what became of his client in the years following their psychological adventure. What he wasn’t prepared for was Miriam’s snide character assassination; the way she laid the blame for Anthony Burden’s later life squarely, if subtly, at his professional door.

  Of course he has regrets. What practitioner doesn’t? Miriam is hardly the first biographer to judge the actions of the past by the mouers of the present. Young Pál leaps off the pages of The Idealist like a character out of early Harold Pinter.

  Having to reassure people about that bloody book is getting to be an irritating obligation. ‘Well, of course not!’ he had exclaimed, that very morning, to the man in the ice-cream suit, that sinister fixer who would not give his name. ‘Anyway, what the hell has ECT got to do with eating disorders?’ His brain, catching up with his mouth at last, took over the reins: ‘Look, what say you both come over to the clinic and meet our staff and see what we actually get up to here? What? Well, no, of course.’ Polite laugh through gritted teeth. ‘I won’t be her actual physician. I am an old man now!’

  No, no, no, my son, quite right, God forbid you should entrust your dearest to my hands, sullied as they are by over sixty years of practical experience—

  Oh, but what’s the use? Pál tosses Miriam’s book aside. As if he hasn’t memorized the thing already.

  The great charm of The Idealist – or, depending upon your point of view, its great failing – is that Miriam has been unable to ascertain whether Anthony Burden is alive or dead. Her trail of her subject goes cold after Mozambique. Pál doesn’t know whether he wants the book and all the attendant fuss to flush the old man from hiding or not. Obviously the mystery is good for sales. It has turned The Idealist into a sort of scientific-political Donald Crowhurst: the man goes overboard, leaving his writings to tantalize.

  Still, can it be much of an Odyssey that ends so abruptly, and without any homecoming?

  Pál wonders: if Anthony Burden was alive and they met again, what would they say to each other? Would Anthony blame him for the warp and weirdness of his life? Pál doubts it. After all, Anthony was there. He knew what happened, and why.

  What would I say to him? Pál wonders. Would I say sorry? Certainly he has regrets. Of course he has regrets. He is an old man.

  What would I say? Like a boy with a scabbed knee, Pál cannot help himself, but has to pick, pick, pick at his wound. He takes up the book and turns with practised ease and heavy heart to chapter five. Miriam writes:

  By the end of the Second World War, armed service medical personnel were being taught the fundamentals of ‘ECT’ – primarily as a palliative for schizophrenia – as part of their general training.

  Accordingly, in the autumn of 1939, the Society sent letters to the Italians Cerletti and Bini, inviting them to present a paper of their choosing to its Drill Hall open programme on Mental Infirmity and the Arts. The exigencies of war prevented the clinicians from accepting.

  Undeterred, the Society later played host to some lesser-known promulgators of electro-convulsive therapy.

  The cocksucker. For an old man Pál has surprisingly strong lungs. The stupid, dried-up old vagina. He never could stand that jumped-up receptionist. Those stinking cigarettes she used to smoke; those dreadful white blouses with the piping on them, like some kind of overgrown sailor-suit.

  Lesser known. All right, so Loránt Pál is not the first name you’ll hit when you look up the encyclopaedia entry. But what does that signify?

  He closes the book and tosses it onto his desk.

  He thinks: She’ll outlive the lot of us.

  In the driveway below his window, a taxi blows its horn.

  The exigencies of war prevented them. How can she write like that and not want to fry her own face?

  He eases himself down the stairs to the lobby. No lifts, no escalators for him; well into his eighth decade, he daren’t let himself seize up for fear he might never get going again. Halfway down, a sudden convulsion seizes his hip. Frightening, insistent, alien – Good God, is this it? Is this how it ends? He imagines the clot in his thigh shattering into greasy brown shards, the shards racing helter-skelter for his heart and brain…

  It is only his mobile phone, which he set to vibrate before this morning’s staff meeting, then forgot to reset. Cursing, he wheedles the spiteful silver nugget out of his pants. Damned thing has nearly given him a heart attack.

  ‘Hello?’ he says.

  This is the gauntlet that Pál runs now: the stuff of articles in the TLS; graduate papers on the internet; phone calls from ‘freelance researchers’; an uncomfortable lunch or two with some gimlet-eyed bastard from the New Scientist, ‘just to tease out wheat from chaff’.

  Isn’t there something, well, unnatural about all this? That Miriam Miller of all people, so much the Society’s servant and retainer, should suddenly acquire her own voice, and at such a late date, suggests to Pál – a keen reader and re-reader of Dumas, père and fils – some long-nursed mission of revenge. Is it not treacherous, the way she has turned the Society’s dull and muddled papers to her own account?

  In any event, Miriam’s unexpected foray into biography is stirring up no end of trouble for poor Pál. To begin with it had amused him to see how popular her long and tedious opus became. Whatever its stylistic limitations, The Idealist had somehow succeeded in awaking the forces of canonization in this nation that forgives failure so much more readily than success.

  Now everyone wants a piece of Anthony Burden, the absentee genius, the prophet whose brain was so cruelly fried, who almost invented the computer, the network, the world-wide web; who set down the theoretical principles of virtual reality in the late forties, in a set of school exercise books that he never gave anyone to read.

  Pál’s own amusement cooled quickly. Watching this fad – this fascination with what might have been – coagulate in backwater after backwater of the public mind has become about as edifying as watching damp spread across a ceiling.

  In response to enquiries, Pál has gone over his original notes again and again. He has reported faithfully and discussed candidly everything he can about the case, in so far as it does not transgress his professional code. After all, Anthony Burden may still be alive. His privacy must be respected.

  Nobody really wants to know the reasoning behind Pál’s treatme
nts, of course. People just want to believe that it wouldn’t happen now, to them, to their children. People want to believe that medicine is getting better.

  Better! And no sooner do we denigrate the therapies of our fathers, their shocks and surgeries, than we start feeding amphetamines to schoolchildren, for fuck’s sake! Better, indeed! As if medicine could ever get better!

  Whatever you say to them about what medicine really is – where it sits in the realm of social practice – all they want to hear is that you are sorry for what you have done.

  Of course, Pál would not treat a man today as he treated poor Burden then. Then was then. Now is now: the AIDS-riddled, porn-infested Now. Why is this so hard to understand? To forgive? Truly, the past is another country, and old men are merely refugees. Go on, tell us to go back where we came from. Spit at us on the street, if you must. Kick us in the head. I dare you…’

  A polite cough calls Professor Pál to order. The pleasant young man at the other end of the line experiments with a laugh: ‘Perhaps I should call back at another time…’

  Pál tries to swallow. Lord, what has he said now? He was never able to make much distinction between thinking and speaking, even at the height of his youth and powers. Old age has hardly improved him.

  ‘I am an old man. I am an old man, do you understand? I am old.’

  The fact of it is, he is being haunted by his younger self. ‘I was a young man then. I was young. Do you understand? Now I am old. I am an old man.’

  It is the irony of his life that he wasted his youth in pursuit of a certain notoriety. The best marks in his class? An assured future in provincial medicine? What did he care for trivia like that? No, he had to throw all that up, of course, if he was ever to live a real life, following Cerletti and Bini around Europe, snapping at their heels like a crazy little dog…