Mobius Dick

by Andrew Crumey

  ‘Helen!’

  She opened her eyes, swung her head only as far as was necessary, and gazed listlessly at him.

  ‘It’s me,’ he said. ‘John. I knew you once, I’m sure it wasn’t only a dream.’

  She stared at him with eyes that looked drugged and uncomprehending. Her dilated pupils, Ringer noticed, were of unequal size, making one eye look darker than the other, so that her face was like an unsettling composite of two separate halves. She closed them and readopted her placid, yogic pose.

  ‘Ooooo-AHH!’

  Ringer watched in fascination; but then she suddenly ceased her meditation, opened her eyes and looked at him.

  ‘Who are you?’ she said. ‘What do you want?’ Her pupils were normal now; it was as if she had instantly woken from a bizarre alteration of mind.

  ‘Can you remember anything?’ Ringer asked her.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  He wondered if his own lapses of consciousness were as drastic as Clara’s. ‘My name’s John Ringer,’ he said, kneeling beside her. ‘I’m a patient like you. As far as I can tell, we’re the only two in the entire hospital.’

  ‘What about Harry?’ she said.

  ‘Who?’ The name was somehow familiar.

  ‘He’s here too – I’ve been to see him.’

  ‘Where’s his room? How can I find it?’

  Clara’s face bore a dreamlike calmness, as if she had been stirred from visions far more pleasant than anything the rational world could offer. ‘Close your eyes and let your mind slip,’ she said. ‘Then you can go anywhere you like.’

  ‘Are you telling me you’ve seen Harry in a dream? Or have you met him in reality?’

  Clara shrugged. ‘What’s the difference?’ Her inability to separate fact from fiction, Ringer realized, was a sure symptom of the condition that was also his own. ‘We’ve got to fight the hallucinations,’ he said.

  She beamed at him with the vacuous joy of a cult member. ‘Why fight?’ she said. ‘Don’t you like being everywhere at once?’ Her pupils were dilating again, spreading their uneven pools as she started lapsing into another trance. He was losing her, and Ringer could feel the return of his own dizziness. Unable to remain upright, he leaned against the woman beside him until they both fell over in a clumsy, intoxicated embrace.

  ‘Ooooo-AHH!’

  They rolled onto a floor that was beginning to undulate beneath them like an ocean swell. Furniture was floating free of its moorings, bobbing and drifting, transforming itself while Ringer, drowning, watched helplessly. The bed was making and unmaking itself like rapidly melting and recongealing wax; a picture on the wall had transformed itself into a window, then started migrating in search of a more favourable location before declaring itself a picture again. Everything was in flux; and when the process subsided and the metamorphosis was at last complete, Ringer had no way of knowing if he had been returned to his original starting point. A second or a century might have passed; he might have slid a hair’s breadth or a light year across the smooth floor. His companion, bearing an expression of serene contentment, lay asleep beside him. Ringer, though, was filled with unease. His eyes told him that the room was unchanged; the upheaval it had undergone existed only in his mind. Yet his mind itself had suffered a distortion that was far greater. He had the inescapable sensation of being somehow elsewhere; he was not really here. The planks of time and space had come apart, dividing him between its separating pieces.

  All was quiet, and Clara, slumped beside him, dreamily raised an arm across her sleeping face, resting the back of her hand on her forehead. It was a gesture he thought he recognized. ‘Helen,’ he murmured.

  Suddenly the door opened. Ringer swung his head to see who was there. It was himself.

  That other Ringer, the intruder, stood aghast as he beheld the two figures on the floor. Wearing jacket and tie, he looked pale and unwell; his collar was unbuttoned and his tie askew. Without a word, this other Ringer stood watching, paralysed with shock, until eventually he entered the room, closed the door behind him and approached. Standing over them, as if about to faint, the Other finally reached down and touched the top of Ringer’s head.

  ‘You’re real!’ he gasped.

  The Other knelt down on the floor and extended a trembling arm towards the sleeping woman, but drew it back, as if terrified.

  ‘Laura!’ he whispered to himself. ‘Now I understand everything!’ He looked again at Ringer. ‘This isn’t a hallucination – you really are me.’

  Ringer was doing all he could to resist the vision, but finally surrendered. ‘How can I be in two places at once?’

  The Other smiled. ‘Have you forgotten everything you ever learned? Photons manage; it seems physicists can too.’ He coughed, gagged, looked as if he might throw up, but then recovered his composure and brought his sweat-smeared face close to Ringer’s, looking at him with bloodshot eyes. ‘You really have forgotten, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes, everything,’ said Ringer, looking at his hideous reflection. ‘Tell me whatever I need to know.’

  The Other, swallowing hard, said, ‘You and I belong to different worlds. You’re one of my potential futures; I’m one of your possible pasts. We aren’t meant to overlap, because wave functions are supposed to … collapse.’ He looked as though he himself might collapse, but then he reached into his jacket pocket and brought out some printed documents. ‘I found these in the library here not long ago. They fell out from between the pages of a journal. The Rosier Corporation know all about the dangers of driving the vacuum array at full energy. Non-collapsible wave functions are exactly what they’re hoping to create.’

  The Other’s words, though spoken with such urgency, meant nothing to Ringer.

  ‘The hospital is only camouflage,’ the Other told him. ‘So’s the Q-phone network. At least that’s my guess, though I don’t think they’ve told Don Chambers.’

  With a trembling hand, he gave the pages to Ringer, who looked at the printed words and was surprised by what he saw. ‘I can’t read this,’ said Ringer. ‘Everything’s back to front.’

  The Other, puzzled and sweating, stared at Ringer with an expression bordering on outrage. Then a look of understanding swept across his face. He smiled with private delight, nodded, and by way of silent explanation, took hold of Ringer’s left hand, where a wedding ring shone. The Other, Ringer saw, wore his identical ring on the right. Almost laughing, the Other made Ringer feel his own scalp. Ringer found that the two of them parted their hair on opposite sides. They were mirror images.

  The Other was murmuring excitedly to himself. ‘How extraordinary. I never anticipated parity reversal.’ His discovery appeared to satisfy him so much that he could briefly forget his sickness. He nodded towards the unconscious woman. ‘Now I understand why Laura is right handed, when Helen wrote with her left.’

  Ringer, too, gazed at the woman beside him. ‘Are you saying she’s Helen’s reflection?’

  The Other suddenly retched, catching hold of his mouth and swallowing. New droplets of perspiration had begun to glisten and trickle at his temples. Again he recovered. ‘Reflection?’ he said, then shook his head. His brief joy was restoring itself to sorrow. ‘No, Laura’s a human being, as alive and real as you. It’s Helen who was her image. I understand it now. Helen never truly existed. Nor, in a sense, do I.’ He trembled, shivered, grew still once more and said, ‘We’re one of your pasts. We live only in memories you’ve lost.’

  Bewildered by what he was being told, Ringer began leafing through the pages he held. Among the documents was a map.

  The Other, still trying to frame events within a logic Ringer by now felt inclined to abandon, said, ‘It’s like being in a cinema, coming in halfway through the movie.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ringer, still gazing at the map. ‘That’s how it feels.’

  ‘There’s a woman on the screen: she’s sitting down at a table in the university canteen.’

  ‘Is this woman Helen?’ Rin
ger asked, looking up.

  ‘Give her any name you like,’ said the Other, speaking more calmly now. ‘She’s placing a novel on the table, beside her plate. While she talks to the man sitting opposite, she taps this novel with the fork in her hand.’

  Ringer began to see it in his mind, as if he had been the man at the table. Was it only a movie he’d once watched?

  ‘Tell me,’ said the Other. ‘Which side of her plate is the book on?’

  Ringer wondered what was the purpose of the Other’s strange conundrum. Some days or weeks previously, Ringer realized, it must have been he himself who asked the question.

  ‘It’s on her left,’ said Ringer. ‘The fork is in her left hand.’

  ‘Very well,’ said the Other. ‘The film goes on. We see the same woman, lying unconscious on the floor of a hospital. We keep watching, and eventually there she is again, sitting down at the canteen table, placing the book beside her.’

  ‘Is life an endless loop?’ said Ringer. A fragment of his dream was resurfacing: he was in a dining room, gazing at a woman’s necklace where it lay across her ample bosom.

  ‘Watch more closely,’ said the Other, wiping the perspiration from his face now that his nausea had abated. ‘Helen is sitting at the table with the book beside her; but this time you see it to the right of her plate. Her fork is in her right hand, her knife in her left. The lettering on the book’s cover is reversed, so is a sign above the serving hatch in the distance. Everything – the entire film – is running back-to-front, though none of the actors can possibly notice, because from their point of view nothing has changed. Only we in the audience know what has happened. When the ends of the film were fastened together to form a continuous loop, they were given a twist. The film is a Möbius strip.’

  ‘But we aren’t characters in a film,’ said Ringer. ‘I’m alive: I have thoughts and feelings.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said the Other. ‘I have no way of knowing. You could say that we’ve been granted a moment together in the darkness where the audience of the universe is allowed to sit. From that perspective, our thoughts matter little.’ He pointed at the documents in Ringer’s hand. ‘This map shows the layout of Burgh House Hospital. Right now, you’re on it somewhere. And down here, at the lowest level, is the vacuum array you must destroy.’

  Ringer was shocked. ‘Destroy? Why?’

  ‘The array enables multiple realities to exist simultaneously: letting a person be in two places at once, or projecting a living image backwards in time. I don’t know why we – you and Laura – appear to be the only people to have experienced the effect, but if the machine runs at full power it could happen to every atom in the planet: the whole world could be duplicated and multiplied; even annihilated.’

  Ringer still doubted a message coming to him by means, he reminded himself, of a particularly convincing dream. ‘Why should Laura and I have been chosen?’

  ‘The explanation must lie in your future,’ said the Other, ‘which is to be our beginning.’ Then he retched again, swaying as dizziness gripped him. Ringer, too, felt a return of his own giddiness. ‘You have to destroy the machine. Trust me, and for God’s sake do what you must.’

  Then the floor began to rise and fall, slowly at first, with long, rolling waves. Gradually they swelled until Ringer toppled again and found himself prostrate, watching the Other disappear intermittently behind the smooth crests of a floor turned molten.

  ‘Remember what I’ve said!’ the Other called to him, trying to reach out for his double but finding himself already drifting too far. The room was melting; a picture was dripping from the wall and weaving itself into a rug. At the far end, the Other stood at the door of the office in Craigcarron where all of this happened, and before he could float beyond sight, Ringer saw two men take hold of him, subduing him as he struggled. They’re going to kill him, Ringer thought, as he watched the Other’s flailing limbs and his assailants’ violent response. And yet, Ringer reminded himself, they can’t have killed him; for this was how Ringer got here. They had knocked him unconscious, and he had woken up in hospital.

  All was still. The visions had fled, and beside him, quietly, lay Laura. He could call her that now; it was her true name. In other places her image might be Clara or Helen, but Laura was who she really was; the rest belonged to the world of vapours and dreams that it was his duty to extinguish.

  ‘Ooooo-AHH!’ As if rising from a great depth, she gasped herself into wakefulness.

  ‘Why do you keep doing that?’ Ringer asked her.

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘Right now, we need to visit Red Zone.’ He got to his feet and found himself free of dizziness. Laura too was steady as he helped her stand.

  ‘Why do we have to go?’ she asked, with something of the dreamlike calm that was the mark of her illness.

  Ringer held her by the shoulders and spoke sternly, as if trying to rouse her from slumber. ‘Your name is Laura. If we go to Red Zone then perhaps you can be cured.’

  Her expression changed. ‘Laura,’ she said softly to herself, mouthing it two or three times with such touching sweetness that Ringer felt his grip on her softening into what was almost an embrace.

  He let go of her, then reached down for one of the pages he had dropped on the floor. ‘This is how we’ll get to Red Zone,’ he said, lifting the map and showing it to her. He took her hand and led her to the door. The corridor outside was deserted; Ringer looked one way and then the other, expecting Maggie or Dr Blake to come into view at any moment, but he soon decided it was safe for the two of them to set off. ‘If anybody challenges us,’ he said, ‘we’re taking a walk together, that’s all.’ After a while he saw a stairwell, closed off behind double doors marked Authorized Personnel Only. ‘Come on,’ he said to her, and they both went through.

  It was dark and cool here. The stairs were dusty; the walls were bare concrete, uninterrupted by windows or any other feature. In passing from the brightly lit corridor, Ringer and Laura had forsaken an environment of clinical cleanliness for one of utilitarian sparseness. There was no lighting on the stairs; the only illumination came from the swing doors’ small reinforced panes, which projected some light from the corridor the couple had left. Ringer held the map up and examined it, tracing with his finger the route he thought they’d followed. ‘These must be the stairs marked A,’ he said.

  ‘Hold on,’ said Laura, tugging the map into her field of view as she stood beside Ringer in the feeble light. ‘No, I think you’ve got everything back to front.’

  It was true; the writing on the map was reversed, as Ringer already knew, but so too was the map itself, showing a hospital transformed in space. They tried to match the lines they saw with the real corridors and rooms they had passed.

  ‘We’re at R,’ Laura finally decided, pointing on the map to a reversed letter that looked as though it belonged in the blueprint of a Russian cargo ship.

  ‘No,’ said Ringer, ‘I’m sure this must be J. We only have to swap left and right, not up and down.’

  ‘What about front and back?’ she suggested, adding another level of complexity that had not occurred to Ringer. The map he held had passed between universes; it bridged not only different points of time and space, but also different realities.

  ‘Perhaps we should just go downstairs,’ Ringer suggested at last.

  And so they descended. With no windows to the outside world, and no lighting on the stairwell, what lay beneath them was almost total darkness, pierced feebly at intervals by whatever light escaped from the hospital’s illuminated levels. The next floor down offered them locked doors, through whose glass panes they saw an empty laboratory, unmanned workbenches and idle equipment glimmering palely, as if in expectation of the thousands who would one day pray that a cure might be found here for the madness that had engulfed them.

  ‘Keep going,’ Laura told him. ‘This isn’t Red Zone.’

  Ringer was startled. ‘You mean you’ve already been th
ere?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But I think I’m starting to remember it.’ Somehow she knew what she must find, though on the floor below, she still did not see it. This time it was the entrance to an underground car park where three vehicles stood among room for as many hundred. ‘Further,’ she told Ringer, though beneath them now the darkness was absolute. It was a lightless shaft they ventured down; and when they had passed what felt like another two or three floors without any door to punctuate their journey, Ringer wondered if there was anything he could drop into the blackness in order to assess its extent. Having nothing to hand, he paused, leaned over the stair-rail into the void, and let a drop of spittle fall from his lips. He didn’t hear it land, but felt a slight breeze, a barely perceptible air current rising upwards from the unseen depths.

  ‘Are you getting cold?’ he asked Laura, whom he could no longer see, but whose arm he held. The two of them were wearing only their robes and slippers; and by now, he thought, they must be a hundred feet or more beneath the ground, still spiralling down the endless stairwell that reminded Ringer of a castle tower, taking them far into the mountain. Beyond the cool dark air they breathed, and the concrete walls, lay miles of solid rock, encasing them like a tomb.

  ‘Don’t stop,’ she said. ‘I’m sure we’re nearly there.’

  And then they were at the bottom. They could see nothing; they knew only that the stairs had terminated on a smooth floor. ‘Keep hold of me,’ Laura whispered, as the two of them began to grope their way around the invisible walls in search of an exit. At last they found one.

  ‘A door!’ Ringer hissed. He could feel no handle; nor was there any window on the door, or even a gap around its edge that might offer them some light. What lay beyond, Ringer knew, was Red Zone. ‘We’ve got to get inside somehow,’ Ringer whispered, but then felt Laura’s grip on him grow weak. She was sliding to the floor. ‘Laura!’