The Secret Knowledge

by Andrew Crumey

  The Frenchman slaps his thigh and exclaims with delight at this observation. “Yes, the allegory of chance, a cosmic casino. Are you a betting man?”

  “I have insufficient love of money.”

  “Gambling is not about money, it is about perpetually renewed hope. Every turn of the wheel is independent of the previous one, the past is erased. Would you put a loaded revolver to your head?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then perhaps you have an insufficient love of life. I had a friend who was an incurable gambler, his lucky charm was a counterfeit coin made of glass.”

  “And what do you do?”

  “For a while I was a musician with dreams of being a great composer. Now I am a philosopher like yourself.”

  “A natural consequence of disillusionment.”

  “Come to think of it, I believe I may have noticed you previously. Aren’t you a friend of the Russian actress?”

  HIGH VOLTAGE

  Prostitution is described as the oldest profession because it is the prototype of wage labour in general. The worker comes to see time as a commodity he can sell, and capitalism becomes its perpetual degradation, an attempt to buy time at lowest cost. Time travel became a theme of fantastic fiction only after the invention of the motor car: it is the myth of instantaneous arrival, just as the whore is the myth of instantaneous gratification. The greatest good is attached to whatever can “save time”, an acceleration imagined to preserve the moment of youth while hastening us towards death. In the modern allegory of commodities, the whore occupies a special position analogous to that of the skull in the Baroque.

  REFRIGERATOR

  Asja, you say you sleep with anyone you choose, that your partner doesn’t mind and does the same, because this is the most progressive form of existence. But do you really choose freely? Is there a hidden mechanism of association, a shell trick that gives the illusion of will and makes us believe in the power of choice when actually the game is rigged so that one must always lose? The Frenchman, he’s another, isn’t he? You sleep with every man on this island except me, because I’m the only one who loves you.

  Consider my position. I have a wife in Frankfurt, a child I love dearly and would never do anything to hurt. My wife is an outstanding person, morally and intellectually, I admire and respect her. Yet I don’t desire her. Belief has abandoned me, as it abandoned the millions who saw their currency devalued to nothing. It is not only a wrecked economy that has brought me to Capri, it is also a wrecked marriage, one I know to be doomed, because it exists only on the plane of material reality, a surface without metaphysical depth. For a long time, thoughts of escape: to Palestine, Paris, anywhere.

  I cannot resist this capitalist love, this desire to own and live in contemplation of you, to be loved by you. I envy the air that surrounds you, the light that reflects from your face when you waken, your eyes that are like an infinite ocean, I regret every minute of my life that has not been spent with you, all of it wasted. My life is not to be found in drawers, photographs, letters tied with ribbon, souvenirs without context; it lies in the future I yearn for. I will sacrifice everything for you, this is the meaning of passion, which is to say suffering and martyrdom, I shall be annihilated by your immortality, it is what I wish, though I know the desire is not a free one: that is what renders it authentic. We cannot choose whom we love; love chooses us, its emblem a skeleton wielding a scythe.

  SEASON’S GREETINGS

  “Yes,” says Benjamin, “I know Miss Lacis. You’re a friend?”

  “I saw you with her,” the Frenchman declares as a fly settles on the rim of Benjamin’s wine glass. “You’re in love with her, aren’t you? I could tell. Don’t think I’m being rude, I’m an eccentric, that’s all, I speak my mind. We French, you understand, are experts in love.”

  “You already told me you’re half-German.”

  He laughs. “German only in my head, thank God, but I have the heart of a Frenchman. Oh yes, I’ve loved, many times, and always truthfully, I’m no libertine. But you see, sir, I embrace risk, and what greater risk is there than love? The game is only worth it if the stakes are high, and that means you must first of all love life. What are the two things men kill themselves over? Money and women. I asked if you would put a loaded revolver to your head. I’ve done it. Pulled the trigger and… click. I live another day. Imagine if everyone in the world were to do that.”

  “Millions would die.”

  “And the rest would love life. They would end all war and poverty, live together in peace and prosperity in a world blessed by chance.”

  “You’re a utopian.”

  “While you, I take it, are a Bolshevik, like the actress.”

  An unexpected challenge to define himself; Benjamin doesn’t know what he is. “I think Marx was a philosopher of profound insight.”

  “But does the situation in Russia prove his theory? You can hardly call it a Marxist revolution, more like a Blanquist one.”

  “You mean a conspiracy rather than a proletarian uprising? Blanqui never had much success with that in France.”

  “But Lenin has in Russia. Make everyone think it’s a popular revolution when really it’s a coup: that’s genius.”

  LINGERIE DEPARTMENT

  Comparison between Baudelaire and Blanqui: their isolation. De Tocqueville saw Blanqui at his trial and described him as looking like a skeleton in an overcoat, a hideous apparition. Baudelaire drew a portrait of Blanqui, his idol. The connection may be arbitrary: all the more reason to look into it more deeply.

  DO NOT LEAN OUT OF THE WINDOW

  “We haven’t even introduced ourselves, my name is Pierre Klauer.”

  “Walter Benjamin. And you must tell me exactly how you know Miss Lacis.”

  “Oh, I was invited to a dinner party a few weeks ago and she was among the guests. Then not long afterwards I noticed her with you.”

  Klauer must really have remembered it as soon as he arrived at the café and saw Benjamin sitting there. Nothing is random.

  “You say you were a composer.”

  “I gave up music and haven’t touched a piano in ten years.”

  “I find that extraordinary.”

  “Some men forego sex, I renounced music, which is easier for me.”

  “But why?”

  “Because I no longer believed in it. Rather, I came to believe in something else. I was working on a large-scale orchestral piece, all I had done was a piano version; but that, I decided, would be my final work. As a composer I died. And was reborn.”

  “As what?”

  “A man who loves life. But you, sir, you aren’t happy, and it’s because of the actress. She’s leading you a merry dance, anyone can see it, even a perfect stranger like myself who happened upon you both in a restaurant.”

  “It was really so obvious?”

  “Painfully so. Intellectuals are always the worst victims, too much thinking.”

  “Then what should I do?”

  With a bent finger Klauer beckons his companion closer. “Get hold of a revolver, put a single bullet in it, spin the chamber and let fate decide.”

  He imagines Asja’s face when she hears: Walter Benjamin has killed himself. He imagines his wife and son, his friends. But mostly he imagines Asja.

  “What if I survive?”

  “That’s the point, my friend, you will. Or if you don’t, you’ll never know anything about it, so what is there to lose?”

  It is Pascal’s wager for the era of mass production: the phantasmagoria of immortality.

  “I lack your courage,” says Benjamin. “And what of your family and friends, did you renounce them too?”

  “Completely. Though I did return to my parents’ home in Paris, just once. I knew they would be away, I only wanted to see the place.”

  “You doubted your decision to leave?”

  “Not at all, I thought of retrieving my last work and burning it. And as I walked in those once-familiar rooms I truly felt myself to b
e a ghost, for my mother had made the place a shrine to my memory. Here is posterity, I said to myself, here is what you craved, to be remembered, and what does it amount to? The tears of those few who knew you, the continued indifference of the multitude who did not. Pierre Klauer can be removed from the world like a loose brick and who will notice the hole he leaves?”

  “You say you loved women.”

  “They found other men. We are interchangeable.”

  “If everyone thought like you there would be no art or science, no great works passed down the generations.”

  “And every generation would be a world renewed. But I didn’t burn my score, because when I opened the drawer of my desk I found that it was gone, in fact for a moment I wondered if it had ever really been there. Its destiny, you see, was always to be non-existent, and I was glad that it was missing, I hoped that someone else had put a match to it, as I would have done. Yet the drawer wasn’t empty. I had also deposited a book there, that I used while composing the work.”

  “The source of your inspiration?”

  Klauer smiles. “You could say that. I took it with me and still have it.”

  “Then you are more attached to art and literature than you care to admit.”

  “The book is neither,” the Frenchman says with an air of satisfaction, as though a point has been scored. “It’s very old, written in a language I don’t understand, elegantly bound in yellow calfskin. And now that my finances have taken a bad turn I’m thinking of selling it. I expect I’ll let it go for far less than it’s worth.”

  “I’m a collector of books.”

  “Are you really? Then isn’t this a fine stroke of chance for both of us?”

  Chapter Seven

  Conroy sits alone in the darkness of his rented flat, place where no one can find him, view through the uncurtained window of purple night clouds scummed with streetlight orange. In a world gone mad he’s the only one who can see the truth. They made Laura disappear, now it’s Conroy himself who must surely be next. Eliminate all witnesses, erase the evidence, already he can feel the breeze of annihilation airbrushing him out of history. That’s why he’s hiding, covering his tracks, making himself a non-person before those bastards can do it to him. If oblivion’s the only option it’ll be on his terms, not theirs.

  Art and death: two lines of escape. And another, disappearance. The landlord wanted references, bank details. Conroy gave a false name and a wad of cash and that was sufficient, he’s been here a week and no one has knocked on his door. A telephone squats in a corner on the grubby carpet, Conroy doesn’t know if it’s connected and doesn’t plan on using it. His mobile went in a bin, his laptop is in the house he left.

  Conroy refills his whisky glass, the bottle’s nearly empty. The portable TV is perched muted on a cardboard box he hasn’t bothered to unpack, he can see the start of a science documentary, that physicist who used to be a pop star or something, kind everyone can relate to. He’s standing on a mountain side waving his arms, Conroy thinks of turning the sound up but the remote is further away than the Glenfiddich. He couldn’t bring a piano here, not even the upright, enforced musical celibacy is driving him nuts. This is what it’s like, life without art. Wake up, do stuff, watch TV, go to sleep, start over next morning and you’re no different except a day older.

  Silent images of scientific authority: that big machine where they smash atoms. The space telescope. An urge to play but no instrument, his final greatest loss, and like all the others self-inflicted. He drove away his lover and his public, his recording label and his students, denied himself everything that was most precious, like he planned to screw up right from the start, planned his own destruction. Like Klauer. The dark demonic rhythm in his skull is the first movement of The Secret Knowledge, he hears its strident chords, feels left-hand leaps he’ll never show to anyone. The performer needs an audience, take that away and it’s God or nothing. Music is truth, the world prefers illusion.

  The programme note still writes itself inside his head, critical commentary on an event that will never happen. There is no “secret knowledge”, that surely is the implicit message of a work determined, like the man who made it, to shock. Striking is its quality of montage, the disconnectedness of components sequentially juxtaposed without evident logic. Like getting back from a concert tour and finding your partner has been unexisted. That sudden theme in G sharp minor: where else is it to be found, in the remaining composition or entire universe? Its singularity is guarantor of significance and critical death sentence. When complicity is the only possible success, failure becomes imperative. What Conroy’s telling himself is that the sole available outcome of all this is disaster.

  He needs to look up some references but hasn’t brought his books; he tries to recall what Adorno said about the commodification of music. Mass culture replaces critical appreciation with mere recognition: to hear anything often enough is equivalent to liking it. We become nicotine addicts conditioned to think that what we crave is what we genuinely need and desire, the vocabulary of taste reduced to saying that a tune has a good beat. What the artist and philosopher have in common is their apprehension of a future existing unacknowledged within the present. Klauer could foresee the urban masses for whom the iPod would offer essential diversion.

  He stretches for the remote and raises the sound, bringing the physicist’s chummy northern vowels into audible focus. Hundreds of millions of light years, and us a single tiny speck. Computer graphics colourfully erupt, dazzling as a stained-glass window. It dawns on Conroy he’s like the average person in one of his own concerts, nagged by desire for self-improvement but motivated more by hunger for distraction. When the TV physicist was a kid he must have been doing equations and reading textbooks same as Conroy was practising scales, not for fun but out of a rare unnameable compulsion that amounted to belief in the future.

  Instead of a single universe there’s a multiverse.

  And then the phone rings. Takes a moment to recognise the sound that’s startled him, insipid peeping from the corner with a dodgy stain where something maybe had a crap once, goes and lifts the receiver, plastic’s an unnameable colour between beige and yellow, sticky in his stooping grip. Holds the dirty thing to his ear and waits, says nothing, expects a voice but there’s only the sound of empty wires and lonely nights, some jerk like him hoping it’s a woman at the other end, though against his own TV’s low mumble Conroy can’t even hear breathing, a void without background.

  An infinite number of possible worlds and alternative realities.

  The caller’s holding, this is almost entertaining, Conroy walks back across the room, dragging the phone unit that dangles from the end of the handset cable like a wounded animal, lifts the remote from the chair arm and kills the volume, lets his attention fall fully on the absence at his ear, the black hole of non-being. A tease he won’t give in to, the crackle of static is a symphony, a constellation of diamonds on a velvet cushion of silence, he rests his head against the softness of endless stars. The line goes dead.

  They’ve got his number. He needs to move on, find another safe house, though he’s so tired he wonders if it might be better to surrender. Slumped in the armchair once more he gazes at the television, prefers it without sound. Closes his eyes and when he opens them can’t tell if he’s seeing the programme or an advertisement, whatever it is he won’t buy it. Closes again then suddenly it’s morning, the sky white as bird-shit, mouth like sandpaper, limbs stiff and his head aching.

  Later he’s in the park, sitting on a bench spilling milk from a carton on his chin and overcoat while cold sunshine burns his eyes. He’s thinking about Paige, whether to send the score like she asked.

  “Hello, David.”

  Startled, Conroy turns to see beside him a haircut and zippered jacket he recognises. It’s the police inspector.

  “What do you want? Put another bug on me?”

  “Those students, the ones your neighbour saw.”

  “I’ve done no
thing wrong.”

  “Give me their names.”

  He has to protect Paige. “I never saw them.”

  “They were at your house. And you’ve been making abusive phone calls.”

  “I don’t live there any more.”

  “Wishing our soldiers dead. Inciting violence. We have to think of public safety, national security.”

  “I’ll give you any help you want as long as you tell me where Laura is.”

  “This was never about her.”

  Conroy drains the last of the milk and wipes his lip. “I’ve been trying to remember the assignment she was on.”

  “Let’s stick to the point.”

  “Some big corporation.”

  “How many others were involved?”

  “New technology. Does something to your brain.”

  “They posted those messages from your computer. You do realise you could go to prison for this, David? Unless you decide to co-operate.”

  The reality is startling; Conroy looks at the inspector’s profile beside him and sees a man confident of his own power, a man like a particle accelerator. “What messages?”

  “Don’t pretend you don’t know. I’ll give you time to think about it, but not long.”

  “Why not arrest me now?”

  “Give us what we want and I’ll make sure you get the help you need.” The inspector stands. “Do the right thing.” He walks away.

  Conroy places the empty milk carton on the bench beside him, reaches into his pocket and searches until his fingertips find what he expects, the device that he pulls out, gleaming in the sunshine. He hurls it away across the grass and it makes his head feel clearer, there’d been a buzzing before but no longer, he can hear birdsong. In the distance, near some trees, a man stands watching him.

  He doesn’t know anything about those messages but needs to find out, he leaves the park swiftly, trying to lose the guy who’s tailing him, though as he nears the library he sees him again, a figure on the opposite street corner facing the other way in a poor attempt at concealment. Inside the library Conroy finds a row of unused computers, he’s never been before and expects to be able to log on freely but when he sits down at one of the screens he finds it prompting him to enter a number. Types a few random sequences but nothing works, then a woman with a false name badge interferes, says he can have temporary access if he shows proof of identity. He leaves immediately.