Pitt, I must confess, stood in need of renewal. Like his father, he had made a great beginning; but there was no end in sight. Even Müller believed, as Aaron discovered, that ‘the great error of my life was not the foolish betrayal (paradoxically vengeful and affectionate) for which you dismissed me at last, but the fact that I never told you, simply this: you are wrong, you are wrong, it is all absurd, you are wrong.’ Susie for one had no intention of falling into such an error, nor suffering such regrets. She reminded me at every turn of this plain truth (as she called it), until even my thoughts stopped short at Syme’s absurdity, and refused to budge. A hollow earth, for God’s sake! A dead man better left buried.
One end, however, stood in full view: the meeting of the tenure committee, set for 15 March, a date that would decide my academic future, if nothing else.
Susie had already threatened to ‘up tents’, as she said – she had a muddling way with metaphor – and return to New York, should I fail. I answered only that one folded tents, cut anchor; possibly upped sticks … And she looked at me, quite unhappily, and said I took nothing seriously, out of temperament, nothing that mattered, and she had almost given up. I should listen to her, and hear how unhappy she was.
I said I did listen. I knew nothing to say – to unhappiness. I wish I did.
‘Well‚’ she sighed, ‘I suppose it’s much easier, and more interesting, to prove that the earth is hollow.’
‘Be fair‚’ I said.
‘No.’
I thought, but did not say: It is no easier at least, believe me, to prove that the earth is hollow.
It was books, in the end, that gave me ‘a kick’, in my father’s phrase. Specificially, another meeting of the Blue-stocking Society, convened upon the question of ‘Failure’. We met at the house of Bill Robinson – a law professor, who lived at the edge of the hill-country, in a deep-echoing bungalow built of cement and glass. We sat and bit olives and commented on the new art in the long living room – walled on one side by windows overlooking a gorge, which fell away from the house in a tangle of vines and live-oak. Ben called him always ‘Bill Robinson’ in a single flowing phrase, never Mister, or Bill – a faintly ironic, more broadly affectionate term, for the ginger-moustached man who used to come round bearing books of verse for the boy, marking a page with his thick thumb for a recitation on greeting.
Spring had come early to Texas; and the crickets creaked through the February evening, spread broad and deep over the hill-country. But there was just enough nip in the air to justify a fire. And Bill Robinson laid one over his stainless-steel hearth, indulging himself in a brief lecture, on the atavistic tendencies of modern man, while he lit the balled newspaper under the log. Then he straightened up, pressed his palms against the butt of his back – he used to be a ball-player of sorts, and suffered for it now – and called the session to order. He picked a slim volume from the pocket of his tweed, held it away from his eyes, squinted far-sighted while rolling an olive pit on his tongue.
‘A Grammarian’s Funeral‚’ he announced. Bill was no faintheart in the matter of stress. He gave the big words their weight; and declared in a light, resonant voice, rising to the corners of his sitting room:
That low man seeks a little thing to do,
Sees it and does it.
This high man, with a great thing to pursue,
Dies ere he knows it.
That low man goes on adding one to one.
His hundred’s soon hit.
This high man, aiming at a million,
Misses an unit
That, has the world here – Should he need the next,
Let the world mind him!
This, throws himself on God, and unperplexed,
Seeking, shall find him.
A shiver tightened my temple, my forehead, ran along the crooks of my elbows, the heft of my back, my balls, fattened the goose-bumps on my thighs. Pitt knows it well. That is Syme, I thought.
I should say now that Bill Robinson keeps an excellent bottle of champagne in the fridge, knowing Pitt’s fancy for the tipple; and I had got drunk exceedingly by the time Dr Edith Karpenhammer, blessed and beautiful woman, rose to speak, in her slow-burning drawl. (It would light the old fire under Pitt, again.) She looked like nothing so much as a sheaf of wheat, running sparse. Her ‘yaller’ hair, as she would say, poked out of her head at all angles; a smudge of fat crimson replaced her puckered lips. Specs as big as moon-eyes perched heavy on her nose, leaving a pink pinch against the bridge. Her husband had run off with a student when she was fifty-five. That was twenty-odd years ago, and she hadn’t changed since – a tough, skinny Texan of the old school, with several bones to pick; and she would pick them clean. She was too dry foraging; lacked the moisture Time needed to ferment.
‘Come, let me read the oft-read tale again!’ she said, in a voice smoked in decades of Gauloise, spitting out the verse as she might a newspaper article:
The story of the Oxford scholar poor,
Of pregnant parts and quick inventive brain,
Who, tired of knocking on preferment’s door,
One summer morn forsook
His friends, and went to learn the gipsy-lore,
And roamed the world with that wild brotherhood,
And came, as most men deemed, to little good,
But came to Oxford and his friends no more.
But once, years after, in the country lanes,
Two scholars, whom at college erst he knew,
Met him, and of his way of life enquired;
Whereat he answered; that the gipsy-crew,
His mates, had arts to rule as they desired
The workings of men’s brains,
And they can bind them to what thoughts they will.
‘And I‚’ he said, ‘the secret of their art,
When fully learned, will to the world impart;
But it needs heaven-sent moments for this skill.’
This said, he left them, and returned no more.
She reached over and lifted from the glass table a glass of water, squeaking in the ring of its condensation. She drank loudly, set it down with a bang, and began to address the marvellous gipsy scholar, a Symist after my own heart.
–No, no, thou hast not felt the lapse of hours!
For early didst thou leave the world, with powers
Fresh, undiverted to the world without,
Firm to their mark, not spent on other things;
Free from the sick fatigue, the languid doubt,
Which much to have tried, in much been baffled, brings.
O life unlike to ours!
Who fluctuate idly without term or scope,
Of whom each strives nor knows for what he strives,
And each half lives a hundred different lives;
Who wait like thee, but not, like thee, in hope.
Thou waitest for the spark from heaven! and we,
Light half-believers of our casual creeds,
Who never deeply felt, nor clearly willed,
Whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds,
Whose vague resolves never have been fulfilled;
For whom each year we see
Breeds new beginnings, disappointments new;
Who hesitate and falter life away,
And lose to-morrow the ground won to-day –
Ah! do not we, wanderer, await it too?
The spark from heaven. And just as I began to mourn its absence in my life, steel struck flint and the tinder caught. A flame no greater than a match’s burned in my head, illuminating the clutter. I had compiled a record of Syme’s life: taped together the scraps he left behind him, collected the memories of his associates, tracked his influence through the disparate generations, traced him even as far as Alfred Wegener, lost in arctic snows. But I had never lifted a single foot in his steps, never followed him an inch along the course he set himself. The time had come for Pitt to experiment: with burning globes – fluvia – double-compression pistons.
And I, Pitt thought, the secret of Syme’s art, when fully learned, will to the world impart; but it needs heaven-sent moments for this skill.
Dr Edith Karpenhammer read on, interminably dry, while the rest of us picked at the olives and stared at the fire, carefully arranged in the hearth, and the art, carefully arranged upon the walls. Pitt could have kissed her quiet on her powdery mouth.
*
I talked to a guy I knew in the History Department, Joe Schapiro, a natural Texan, with a pate as bald as Pitt’s, and the hands of a football player. He sidelined in what he called ‘construction art’, and exhibited from time to time in a Tex-Mex café out in Terrytown. Joe was a fellow of infinite and various sneezes; they rolled around his head like thunder in the Colorado mountains (where, incidentally, he kept a cabin) and split from time to time the echoing air. His great hands were never far from his face, kneading cheek and jaw, brow and nose, temple and cortex, to loosen the next fit. Other than that, he was a soft-spoken gentleman, who liked to sculpt things out of rusty scrap.
Joe had this virtue: he wondered at nothing. The variations of Nature, of which he was a keen observer, had prepared him for any of the lesser diversities of men. I approached him with Syme’s ‘Sketch towards the construction of the magnesium lantern, dubbed by Mr Tom Jenkyns The Flu” alongside Phidy’s description:
Sam designed an improvement upon the magic lantern, his first invention, whose small flame was a blue eye peering into the hollows of the earth. It was called the magnesium match, a thin, flammable wire trapped in a crystal prism and suspended from the inside of a glass hood. We held this lantern above a fire of leaves or twigs or the alcohol solution of loose earth or pond water. Then we lit the match and a thin blue spirit of light appeared in the smoke and danced high or low upon the lantern’s glass walls. The position of this gay faerie depended on the content of fluvia in the smoke, and we etched a fine web of reckonings against the glass to chart her. We could now measure such niceties of blue as would suffice an angel in tracking the depths of Heaven.
Joe held the scribbled sketch in the palm of his hand, pinned at the top by the curl of his fingers, and lifted it to the light in his garage studio. His thick arm swelled his college sweatshirt, frayed at cuff and neck through long affection, as he set an impossibly dainty pair of gold specs across his nose, and read over Phidy’s account. He stared at it. I stared at him. He stared at me; then unlooped his specs delicately from his pink ears, and pressed his eyes shut.
‘I guess it’s your business‚’ he said.
‘I guess it is‚’ I answered. Pitt is an incorrigible mimic, and a great admirer of Men in their Trades, who get to the heart of a matter, then stop. (This has never been Pitt’s modus operandi.) Pitt cannot help himself; confesses a sneaking affection for tool-belts, boots and hammers; for drawls; for all things native and unlearned, since Pitt himself belongs best in the world of the acquired.
‘If these fellas made one‚’ he answered at last, ‘I don’t see a reason – I can’t.’
*
How sweet it glinted in the sunshine of Saturday morning when Joe ‘brought it round the house’, as he said. Susie was gone with the boys, and the drive was empty. I meant to take them to their soccer matches out at Zilker, but then Joe called, so I rustled pink Susie out of her folded sleep. ‘Is it Monday yet?’ she said, in a languorous, pretty muddle, as I rattled open the curtains, and set a cup of coffee on her bedside book. ‘Not Saturday morning‚’ she grumped, blinking, suddenly unmuddled, as I tried to rouse her. ‘Saturday morning is my morning.’
‘Drink that‚’ I said. ‘Joe’s coming round. He says it’s ready.’
‘Joe, joe, joe‚’ Susie muttered, obscurely mocking, as she swung a leg to the floor. ‘Joe joe joe joe joe. Joe. Joe. Joe joe.’
‘Joe,’ I murmured, an hour later, holding the lantern to the sunshine, and watching the cut glass cut the light. ‘Joe.’
‘Looks fine‚’ Joe said, ‘I believe.’
A square frame, edged in brass, ran up to a kind of polished steeple. I held the lantern by the ‘nod’, as Joe called it – from the sketch, he said – a rounded hook that tipped the roof. The magnesium match hung from the underside of it, that ‘thin, flammable wire trapped in a crystal prism’. The device had no bottom, so I poked my finger through to touch the match – a rough, curling strip that felt like sandpaper to the tip. ‘That’ll want replacing‚’ Joe said, ‘time to time.’ But the beauty of it all lay in the etchings, which resembled nothing so much as the rays on a child’s sun, impossibly particular, burning through the frosted glass. They had been carefully labelled in a loose script that seemed to tumble down the lines: Calliope, Cassandra, Caesar and Washington, and even Maria S., after Mrs Simmons, I supposed. Each glass panel recorded a slightly different concentration of fluvial spirits, which depended on the seasons, and the power of an eclipse.
‘To think Sam held this in his hands most of two hundred years ago; and set out with it, to look into the heart of the earth. Such an air of precision, Joe, of careful beauty. Precision, he once said, is only one kind of abundance. Such colours, too – when the green comes off the grass. Is not the magnesium lantern glorious?’
‘Well‚’ Joe said, pressing his palms to his temples in a rather extraordinary fashion, as if to unscrew his head, ‘seeing I built it, yes. But what it’s good for, that’s nothing to do with me.’
‘I’ll show you. All we need’s a Petrie dish and a drop of methanol. Short of that a cornflake bowl and a bottle of gin. Come on, Joe – we’ll take it round the park this minute.’
Joe and I looked around the park. The sprinklers had kicked up along the football field and darkened the sheet of mud along the sewage pipe. In one endzone, a man sat on an icebox drinking; another stoked a grill. The toddlers’ pool was almost full, of legs and balloons, it seemed; two mothers lay on their bellies with their bikini tops unhooked. The sun stood on the arch of noon and looked down. ‘Pitt‚’ Joe said, squinting, smiling a blind smile, ‘I don’t think I’m drunk enough.’
I can’t tell you what fun it was, at first. By the time Susie and the boys got back Pitt had covered half of the football field down to the creek, and the grass verge of the tennis courts on the other side. His sneakers were soaked through, and stank of sock – the creek, I must say, proved particularly fruitful, rich in curious exhalations of all kinds, not to mention milk cartons, candy wraps, newspapers, orange peels, syringes, bottle tops, beer cans, and the teardrop strips of metal that open them. The knees of his chinos stuck to his skin, then peeled off, as he stretched a leg. Pitt’s elbows, likewise, bore evidence of his table manners: the creek-bank where he propped himself; the burred football field; the sprinkled lawn. The rubber tongue of one sole flapped every step, cleft from the shoe above, and chattering idly. When Aaron stepped out of the car in socks, trailing his cleats on a finger over his shoulder, and discerned his father plodding up the drive, he said, ‘Mom, who’s that bum?’
‘What’s he done with Dad?’ Ben piped.
‘Go inside, boys, and get cleaned up‚’ Susie said, in the Voice That Brooks No Dissent. ‘You too, Doug.’
I must confess that I hadn’t dreamed at first of mapping the results – aiming as I did just to get the measure of Sam’s thoughts by following in his steps, not the measure of the fluvial content in Shipe Park, Austin, Texas. (That would be crazy.) It was simply a matter of knowing the way he worked. ‘Have you ever tracked a dead man’s thought down the gloomy corridors of the mind‚’ I once wrote, ‘your comprehension lit by the same shower of synapses that illuminated the passages of his brain almost two centuries before, spark for spark?’ To do that, I needed to know how his hands felt, going about their business, his knees and feet, his back. I wanted to consider the question of a hollow earth from the point of view of a man who had trod, touched, scraped, burned, measured the ground under his feet, and reduced a few acres of countryside in his clever hands to a map of numbers in his clever head.
/> Naturally, Pitt was – observed. A bearded dude, a fellow of houseless head and unfed sides, in looped and windowed raggedness attired, burst sneaks, cut jeans, asked me once what I was ‘lighting up’.
‘Fluvia‚’ Pitt replied.
‘Is that something new?’ the gentleman asked, leaning over me, and sniffing, wrinkling a long, straight nose of unexpected refinement.
‘Old‚’ Pitt said. ‘Very old.’
‘Used to be’, he muttered, ambling off, ‘we’s all shared what we scored.’
A gang of kids surrounded me once, pointing, when their football tumbled into the creek-bed. I hunched over the edge of the water, lit a dish of earth and scum dosed with gin, then struck the magnesium match, and stood back to observe the blue ‘gay faerie’ dancing on the cut glass. They said nothing, as I jotted the result in a ringed notepad. Children have a natural respect for the utterly strange, acts without reference, too alien to be assaulted. At last one of their number, obligated by a shadowy moustache, dared to clamber down, pick up the wet ball, and scat. Some of them lingered longer. They looked vaguely saddened by the whole affair, sobered up, after the high spirits of their game. It took a few steps into the playing field till the rise of the creek obscured them and their tongues loosened and they cried their tireless boasts and prompts again. ‘He burning shit‚’ they said. ‘That man burning some weird shit. Man, he burning. You see that?’
I was lucky (I see that now) to attract a cop whose indifference to the vagaries of the world, either natural or professionally acquired, was sufficient for him to accept at face value my rather garbled account of the experiment. ‘You see‚’ I spluttered, drying my hands on my thighs, and rummaging through a stuffed wallet for a university card, ‘it is essentially a question of – those – escaped subterranean gases – that groove the internal spheres – whose occasional cracks – overlap, thereby producing an unusual concentration – of – fluvia. Thus far the theory‚’ Pitt cried, conscious, for the first time, of a desire to dissociate himself from the great Sam Syme. ‘I am, in point of fact, a historian, properly speaking, bent on a species of archaeological experiment – not a scientist at all, by any means.’
The Syme Papers Page 49
