‘And I want you to eat them; even if you are worried sick about Monday.’
So I mumbled crumbly biscuits and hard cheese, as the long and sticky afternoon slipped by jerks into the late twilight. Around four o’clock I turned on the air-conditioning unit propped in our bedroom window, simply to drive out the wet; and sat, in shirt-sleeves, increasingly chilled, in front of the computer screen, too cold to mind the goose-pimples running up my arm. Wrapped in that cocoon of solitude in which we never age, I pored over the last lines Müller ever wrote, the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle, at which the picture grows clear: Syme, Wegener, Karding, Pitt standing arm in arm in arm over a battered broken globe. For there is never an end, pace Phidy. Hutton was right: only endless modifications of the middle. As perhaps even Müller realized, subconsciously, when he scribbled this note on the back of the only sheets he had to hand, the Syme Papers, on his final journey.
I have just had a most unusual and unsuspected encounter, which has left me in a flutter of nervous spirits and quite incapable of sleep. Passing on my return through Hamburg, a short day’s travel from home, I dashed into a roadside inn to avoid a violent shower of summer rain. It had been threatening all afternoon, from a black, lowering, miserable sky, the air so thick it could scarce be breathed. Thus, drenched to the bones, I undraped before the warm fire and called for a glass of hot rum to chase the cough out of my lungs. Spreading these papers on the table before me to dry – the rain had come so sudden and so fierce that even my portmanteau, clutched beneath my cloak, grew wet as a rat – I turned again to that long-ago morning, the day of the great eclipse, when even I the doubter half-hoped, half-feared we stood on the verge of something grand. Busily poring over the dripping pages, I did not look up, when the hot dose was set at my elbow with a sharp rap.
‘I see you are an author,’ said a voice, in the high, uncertain, fluting tones of old age, far too elegant to have fallen from the lips of a mere servant. I glanced up to see who had addressed me, whereupon I found his voice belied my interlocutor, for the fellow at my elbow, dressed in soaking yellow breeches and a pink cravat, was quite a young man still, scarce thirty. He possessed one of those eternally youthful countenances (and voices) which suggest such wonderful innocence and promise in a boy, and such idleness and neglected fortunes in a man: pink cheeks, a little puffed with exertion, startling blue eyes, dim almost as glass, golden, thinning hair pulled back from his forehead, a dirty neck.
‘I was once an author,’ I replied, ‘but these’ – I gestured over the drying pages – ‘belong to a private matter.’
‘Memoirs?’ he queried, drawing up a chair and burying his nose in his own glass of hot grog. ‘Forgive me,’ he said, mopping a drop of the brew from his pink nose, ‘I have had a cold these … three years,’ he added, ‘and this is purely medicinal.’
‘Memoirs of a kind, besides an old journal, a recent inheritance,’ I answered, to my own surprise; for had I not kept these things under such lock and key, that even now I felt the blood flutter in my veins to speak of them again, and blinked, as though unaccustomed to the light? ‘They refer rather to a matter of science.’
‘Ah,’ he said, drinking another long draught and summoning more. ‘Now we come upon my particular province. Peter Wegener,’ he added, stretching forth his hand, ‘Inventor.’
‘Phidy – Friedrich Müller,’ I replied, and cast a querying glance at him. ‘Might I have come across any of your devices, do you think?’
‘Not likely,’ he said, tapping his forehead. ‘I’m no such fool. Keep them locked up, in here. Now,’ he added, rolling up his sleeves and setting his elbows on the table, ‘let’s hear the business.’
Why did I not turn him away at once? For I had reckoned now what manner of man he was. I had seen them before, in my time. A younger son, perhaps, supporting a meagre income with some grand illusion, some wonderful ambition, never realized, never attempted, yet colourful enough to accompany him on his travels. Too poor to marry, too idle to get on, they spend a perpetual youth on one hopeless goose-chase after the next; and die, as like as not, in the Debtors’ Prison, among a class of men they have had every chance to grow accustomed to. Often quite clever gentlemen, more’s the pity, only lacking the necessary fire.
This particular specimen of the breed, I soon discovered, was quite exceptionally clever – quick as a terrier on his wits’ feet, he nipped at my heels through the long, dark afternoon, and would not let an old man sleep. And before I could say yea or nay I had begun the whole mad thing from the first. Would you credit it, the half-forgotten thoughts – ideas I had believed long rusted and out of use – flew from my lips as bright as the day they were coined, made of such shadowy stuff time could not touch them? Sam himself could not have explained them better; his words had such a renaissance in my heart, I almost wept, an old foolish man, at the recollections they aroused.
‘It all began’, I said for the hundredth time, but the first in nearly half a century, ‘with a question of mass.’ And the sad fool called for quill and paper and quibbled and scribbled through all that dark, thunderous afternoon, pausing only to wet his lips and call for more grog. Only once Herr Wegener stopped, pointing with childish delicacy and delight, to a small robin, much bedraggled, so dirty with rain and weather his breast scarce blushed, who had hopped on a broken leg through the door as a traveller swept past him towards the fire. ‘Now, now,’ said the landlord, a short, squat gentleman with a great head of hair, ‘we’ll have none of you,’ and plucked him from the ground and, cupping the delicate bird in his great hands, tossed him light as ashes into the windy night, where we saw him flutter up against the lines of rain and away.
And so through supper we threshed the matter out, gesticulating bone in hand and diagramming wildly in butter, setting the salt here and the pepper there, explaining the world away with potatoes and a sliced fresh onion we called for from the landlord. Deep into the night, as drunk as lords we talked, until the flushed pink face before me gave way in my mind’s eye to other faces in other times; and the landlord sent us up to bed at last, lest we demand our breakfast next. And here I am, a drunk old man on his knees in bed, with a foolish fire in his heart, searching desperate and happy through a white and crackling world of loose pages.
There is nothing reminds a man of his age so much as sudden happiness. For it begets in him a kind of worry, a feeble trepidation, a weakness of heart and knee, a sleeplessness, an ache, the whole condition as much like joy, as a young man’s longing resembles love. All this wants thinking on.
And so the morning comes, and, as I have a thousand times in youth, I wonder at my foolishness of the night before. My head rings like a cracked bell; my eyes blink aching against the sun which shines bright as new in the forgiving heavens; and the pain in my stomach is such that twice this morning I could not breathe for as long as a boy might count to fifty, the air comes in so sharp and bitterly. It took me the best part of an hour to collect these scattered pages, and only then did I realize my great loss.
I summoned the landlord at once, and tried to keep an old man’s petulance from my voice. ‘I possessed, you see, a certain journal, an old battered thing, a keepsake, title of New Platonist, with a man’s name scribbled inside. Not my own. It was of no earthly use to any man living apart from myself; but I would like it back. I would very much like it back.’ How I hated the quaver, high pitched, fretful and lost, which echoed in my ears like the voice of a stranger, a tiresome, meddlesome stranger, who will not keep quiet and will not leave.
‘Who do you suspect took … it?’ the landlord asked, grimacing at the end, nodding his great head on his short neck, and leaning conspiratorially forwards. He had a terrible habit of keeping the last word back and using it only when nothing else would do, as some men save the icing of a chocolate cake for the final bite.
‘Why, man,’ I answered, already in a temper, ‘I should have thought that was plain. That inventor fellow, I mean the young man, Wegener, who kept us up
so late. I wish you to summon him at once.’
The landlord nodded his great head again. ‘That’, he said, ‘is where you and I … agree. That’s precisely what I wish, too. The fact is’, he added, as one considering a delicate matter, ‘THAT man has Took Off. Without paying neither. Which roughly puts you and me, sir, in one and the same … boat.’
So there was nothing I could do but settle the bill and have him bring my luggage to the door. I cannot think what such a fellow would want with such a thing. I suppose men like that get in a habit of stealing, as certain birds are said to lard their nests with food they will never touch. They take what comes their way, never guessing what will serve their purpose in the end, they have such wandering intentions. Pinch it for luck, they say to themselves; and like as not forget it at once, or discard their prize, acquired at such risk, negligently by the road, whenever their burden becomes too heavy. Else it lingers so long with them, tucked in some out-of-the-way pocket, they cannot bear to part with it at last; and keep the thing, forgetful of the day they stole it or the reason therefore – as a kind of charm.
Sam you are dead now indeed, when such a man as he has got you in his hands. And now the last journey home.
A bit of luck, you say, for Wegener and geognosy. Well, perhaps, seen back to front. (How easily, you see, we slip into belief, simply because a pattern holds!) But by an irony of fate, the theft that drew Syme into the great evolution of intellectual history robbed me of that vital piece of evidence, the last New Platonist, necessary to prove my … to prove his case (and win my tenure?). What struck me, however, as I sat in the blow of the vent, was that Phidy, regardless of all that nonsense my son discovered – ‘you are wrong, you are wrong, it is all absurd, you are wrong’ – at the very end, could not quite bring himself to … disbelieve entirely: ‘the half-forgotten thoughts flew from my lips as bright as the day they were coined, made of such shadowy stuff time could not touch them’. We would soon learn what time could touch, however – when the tenure committee sat to decide my future and their past. Sam, you will be dead indeed if they turn me down.
Pitt did not lie easy in bed that night; and Susie held him, in the warm stink of her arm, until she slept; but he could not.
*
It seemed the best thing I could do – on a bright Monday morning utterly forgetful of the night’s sweats – was to press on, as the English say. Joe was stuck at the office all day (teaching, or some such lark), and set in the evening to attend the Promotion and Tenure Committee, as it sat in judgement over Pitt. But I had the key to Joe’s garage. (Keep busy, boy.) ‘Run out the boat, my broken comrades‚’ Pitt murmured to himself and the shades of Syme and Phidy, in that dry-grass whisper of Dr Edith Karpenhammer. ‘For the last embarkation of feckless men, let every adverse force converge: here we must needs embark again.’
I drove on a sparkling March day towards the hill-country where Joe lived, north and west with the sun blinking off the mirror, as I chased my own shadow up the Missouri Pacific Highway. The city flew by me on either side, white clapboard neighbourhoods nesting somewhere behind the outlet malls and cineplexes looking over the road. A freight train, burned with rust, followed me slowly at one stretch, running clear against the low scrub of the flat land, towards, it seemed, the comforting illusion of the Nothing and Nowhere that lay all around us. Telephone wires dangled and glinted blackly in the sunshine. I wondered if Susie wanted me to fail.
Pioneering, Pitt thought, carrying on an argument well rehearsed, is the only way to set up shop and family. We must begin in Nowhere, stripped of accustomed props, to see how we Get On. I have always – and this is my proper boast – freed myself from the familiar, and then set forth. (If only Susie would follow, uncomplaining.) The burden of old errors is too great for little lovers to share: the unraked harvest of the family tree, rotting, mulching its acid into the soil. (Pitt, if he knows anything, knows about the burden of old errors.) It is best to begin from scratch. Scratch away until you get to scratch. Texas is it: scratch itself, a dry, prickly country, big enough for any number of beginnings. In short, I had little desire to go ‘home’ to New York.
Turning off MoPac, I entered green and shadowy streets, heaped upon one another, rising, along the thrust of rock beneath the wheels. There were no shops or sidewalks here, only the broad asphalt trembling like a butterfly in the sunshine that got through the sharp, dark sycamore leaves. Much of the faculty lived roundabouts, in houses they designed themselves, to suit an outcrop of the hill and catch the view – long, high views over the Nothing and Nowhere below. Curious, Pitt thought, how similar our imaginations run when left to themselves: for most of the houses looked as like as two hands, belonging perhaps to different men but built along the same lines. Maybe the Pitts would move round here, given time and fortune. I pulled, crackling over pebbles, into Joe’s drive.
It took me much of the afternoon just to set up the thing. Phidy, of course, had come upon the middle of the experiment, and could not help me. Joe had got together a bucket of shavings – nickel and iron ore; he worried the scraps might choke the fire, but he figured they’d melt quicker, and start to run among the coals, which is what we wanted. Joe, pushing his tongue against a corner of his cheek, and scratching the stubble of the skin, had expressed certain doubts regarding the ‘upshot’ of the experiment. ‘Seems likely to me’, he’d said, ‘Syme meant it for show, mostly. Smoke and lights, fifty cents a pop, as you say. Can’t imagine he had much hopes for it, beyond that.’
Pitt also had his doubts, especially as he came to lay the coal in the bottom of the clay globe – cut open at the half, and connected each way by a peg-and-hole system. He nested several layers of coal with a sprinkle of shavings, and hoped that the bump and grind of the spinning planet would cast together the elements. Creation, at its best, would prove to be a very messy affair: a gunge of smelted ash caking the clay sides in various configurations (which exactly, Pitt presumed, Syme hoped to discover). At its worst, Pitt feared, he would open a smoking globe only to find a heap of burned coal, occasionally interspersed with slightly glowing fingernail-clippings of iron and nickel. He rummaged through Joe’s junk to find some fire-lighter, and came across all sorts (including a rather remarkable collection of mustard jars), before discovering a box of the shiny white sticks. These he crumbled into the opened world.
Yes, as Pitt surveyed the ‘crazy-thing’ (Fräulein’s word) – their careful handiwork – doubts beset him. (How clever doubts are, and far-reaching – much more insinuating, intricate and complete, in their way, than hopes. Hopes at least have ends and beginnings; whereas doubts eat everything, even the ground beneath our feet, even the space through which we fall.) Such a silly little planet, stuck with handlebars for spinning, pricked through with holes. Those mad legs, resting quietly; the single whirling arm, flung high, clutching the globe, quite still now, time stopped. I was reminded of Phidy’s reaction to the double-compression piston (would that be next, on my spiralling career?). Phidy had said:
I felt somehow as if I had stumbled upon a former field of battle, which by its very stillness evoked some measure of the storm that had led to such a calm. At the same time the fantastical device smacked of a more intimate and solitary defeat, suggested in some indescribable fashion the mechanical workings of a most particular imagination, which had overreached itself and become entangled in its own proliferation.
(The trouble was, as Syme had said, that it could not – rather, that I could not – swallow myself.)
Yet Sam himself seemed to set some store by the ‘experiment of creation’, unless it was merely the wilfulness of temper that turned him against Tom, as his associate cleared up the harmless remains of the broken world:
‘Stop at once‚’ he cried. ‘What act of ignorance – of wanton waste and destruction – are you about to commit? Answer me, Tom. Indeed, there is no fool like a happy fool; and all you can do is stand there, grinning idly. Give that to me directly.’ And he snatched the parcel from
Tom’s hand, and spread it over the flagstones before the hearth, adding the small piece in his palm to the suddenly precious collection.
Perhaps the pieces held some clue to the ‘mechanical workings of a most particular imagination’; proving like dreams to be fragments and emblems of a deeper preoccupation.
It was around teatime that the Fräulein, knocking timidly from the inside of the house, came in, bearing tea. A pretty girl, I must say for Joe – too thin for Pitt’s taste, lightly freckled around the eyes, straight in figure under cropped sandy hair.
‘Thank you, my dear‚’ Pitt said, taking a mug, and raising it to his face to inhale the brown heat. ‘Much needed.’ And Pitt stood with his eyes shut against the comfort of steam.
‘Joe said I mustn’t show you this‚’ the Fräulein murmured through thin lips, lifting a crumple of paper from the back pocket of her skinny jeans. ‘But I thought – it is only fair – to know. It is always fair – to know.’
I took it from her freckled hand, which hung idly, its duty done, by the Fräulein’s hip, too still for comfort. Then she clasped the fingers in her other hand, and held them both against her belly; released them, conscious of her fidgeting, and stood painfully quiet – a wrinkle trying to smooth herself away. But she did not go. She waited for Pitt to read.
Memo: from Dr Sal Bunyon, Dean of History To: The Promotion and Tenure Committee Regarding: Dr Douglas Pitt
Forgive informal nature of note but I’m off to Paris tomorrow to chair conference on the Politics of Food so shan’t be around for Doug’s tribunal. A few jottings then as I’m the man that brought him in and should answer for him.
Facts. He hasn’t written. (Except for a little piece blasting me on Trinitarian thought which I took in good part though he played the man and not the ball as for as that went and kicked him in the shins. This isn’t the place for my reply.) As for his teaching, he hasn’t, much. We don’t mind folks trotting off to London God knows but they gotta show something for it and he hasn’t shown. Most of the kids here think he’s nuts except for the kids who are nuts and I suspect we split along the same lines. There are stories which I won’t get into now about his ‘classroom antics’ (involving some species of broken lantern and a swimming trip to Barton Springs) but what worries me more are his classroom absences. The truth is this year he’s let himself go. The best thing we can do for him is to get him to stop.
The Syme Papers Page 52
