The world adapted with amazing rapidity to Henry’s revelations, and gave them the welcome they deserved. Everyone but a few diehard traditionalists stuck in the mud of mental indolence accepted that the solar system was an existential fragment trapped like a fly in amber within the cocoon of a quintessential lens, and that infinity had never been anything but a human delusion of grandeur. The imaginative horizons of the human race collapsed like a punctured balloon, and came back down to Earth with a splutter. Humankind’s image of itself was seriously and significantly changed, seemingly for the better. Thankfully, there were no longer more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in human philosophy. The universe was no longer stranger than humans could imagine, or even stranger than humans did imagine. All of sudden, whatever their faults might be, humans really were the crowning glory of creation. There was one Earth, one sun, and a litter of dead rocks—such was the extent of the material world.
Several eminent rivals, inevitably, accused Henry bitterly of taking science back two thousand years, to the days of Aristotle’s closed world and crystal spheres—but others pointed out that it was in that image that the true harmony of the spheres, as described by Aristotle’s mentor, Plato, had always resided. Centuries of human imaginative endeavor, the envious claimed, had been laid waste at a single stroke—and a good thing too, Henry’s supporters said. How much more valuable time might have been wasted in arcane quasi-alchemical dabblings with incomprehensible and futile illusions? Henry’s own triumph was soon followed by others of a similar stripe, which demonstrated that the bizarre microcosm of quantum mechanics was equally illusory, and that atoms were really tiny transparent spheres closely akin to the macrocosmic sphere that enclosed them, and just as deceptive.
The day that Henry’s divorce was finalized was, coincidentally, the day on which he had been invited to address the largest gathering of the world’s scientists ever assembled in one place. He had already declined that invitation, as he had declined all others; he preferred to let the written word speak for him, and was content to leave public performance, idolatry and controversy to people who liked those sorts of things. He felt that he had done his work, and had no wish either to mourn the fate of obsolete paradigms or dance on their grave.
He had resigned his post at the University a few days before, and had decided to indulging himself in an unprecedented breach of etiquette by not working out his period of notice. Instead, when the divorce papers delivered in the morning mail confirmed that he was single again, he set out to drive his unobtrusive car into the desert, only pausing en route at a suburban supermarket to buy a revolver. He intended to find a quiet spot where he could blow his brains out without seriously inconveniencing anyone.
He was not quite sure why he intended to commit suicide, but it somehow seemed to be a good idea, in aesthetic if not in moral terms. He told himself that the decision had nothing to do with the divorce, nor with the fact that, by radically changing his fellow human beings’ concept of their relationship with the universe he had significantly altered the course of history. He simply felt, without reasoning it through, that his life was over and that there was nothing left for him to do but end it swiftly and neatly.
Henry parked the car just off the highway, at a conveniently remote location, loaded the gun, and then got out. He locked all the doors and checked the trunk. He replaced the keys in his pocket and began walking south, into the great wasteland. He walked for about an hour, until the road and the car were no longer visible, and the sound of the distant traffic had been reduced to a vague and distant murmur that might have been the hum of insects. By this time, it was late evening. He sat down in the shadow of an outcrop of tawny rock, in order to watch the stars come out.
He had not intended to linger over the business of self-disposal, but his hand seemed curiously reluctant to raise the barrel of the pistol in order to direct it at his skull. He realized, while he paused, that it was a long time since he had actually looked up at the stars with his naked eyes, in rapt contemplation of their glory. That glory had been theoretically eroded, of course—practically destroyed, since he had exposed them for the lies that they were—but in purely visual terms, the stars were exactly what they had always been, just as tantalizing and frustrating as ever. They were only optical illusions, no longer unduly mysterious, but they were still fascinating, in their fashion—and while he watched them emerge in the clear desert sky, it struck him quite forcibly that they were still quite beautiful. There was something about them that he could not quite specify or analyze, in spite of all his triumphant calculations. Strangely enough, they seemed unfamiliar, even though there was no man on Earth more familiar with their disposal and their true nature than he was.
Perhaps, he thought, it had been so long since he had last renewed sensory contact with the objects of his affection that he had forgotten the actual and immediate effect of staring up into the reaches of the night sky.
Nostalgia meant nothing to Henry McCanles, but something stirred in his veins while his eyes dwelt upon the stardust ribbon of the Milky Way, and his mind’s eye drew constellation patterns among the brighter lights. It might have been sentiment, but it was more likely a touch of vulgar madness.
A snake, resting in a crevice at the base the outcrop of rock, was roused from its patient inertia by the proximity of warm-blooded flesh. It moved out into the open, its scales rustling like silk over the rough surface of the sand. Henry heard it, and looked down. In the darkness, he took it for a rattlesnake, although it was not. He also imagined that it spoke to him, and immediately assumed that the voice he heard was the voice of God. Needless to say, it was not—but Henry presumably needed to hear the voice of God right at that moment, and improvised as best he could.
“What do you want?” was what Henry imagined the voice of God saying to him.
His immediate impulse was to inform God that he had come out to seek oblivion through the customary channels, but he changed his mind. “This was all your doing,” was what he finally said. His voice was colorless, without any trace of anger or spite.
“True,” admitted the snake.
“You created it: the illusion; all the illusions. You made me fall in love with the stars, and with Stella. You fooled us all into thinking there was an infinite universe with countless suns and countless worlds, and love too. You encouraged us believe that we were part of something big—something truly important—but there was only us. Humankind. Stella and me. One sun, and a few lumps of rock floating round it. A pair of contact lenses. Nothing real.”
God did not bother to point out the several minor inaccuracies in this unusually heartfelt statement. Instead, He said: “For most of their history, people have believed there was only Earth, with a few lights scattered in the sky. It made them feel important. Then they came to believe that there was a lot more. That made them feel clever. Now they believe that there really is only Earth, after all, and a few lights scattered in the sky, and they feel important as well as clever. It’s all good, all progress. I’ve always been in favor of progress, whatever people say.”
“It’s not progress,” Henry replied, “and it’s not good. We can’t ever recover the kind of innocence we once had. We had the illusion, we fell for it, and then we lost it. It can’t ever be the same again. We glimpsed infinity and we believed in it. We did all we could to encompass it in our imagination, but now we have to stop and go back again. The divorce is final now. How do you close an open mind?”
“I don’t know,” said God. “I never had such a thing. Are you quite sure that you did?”
“Why did you do it?” asked Henry.
“Why did you?” countered God. “It was you who made the discoveries, you who proved impotent, you who told the world and became famous. You appointed yourself as a messiah—that wasn’t my doing. To tell you the truth, Henry, you wouldn’t have been my first choice. You’re too dull, and you have more than a hint of lunacy about you.”
“Whose fault i
s that?” asked Henry, flatly, but with a hint of sarcasm.
“That’s right,” said the snake. “You can always blame me. I make a great scapegoat.”
They might have argued about that for hours, but Henry was beginning to find the imaginary conversation a bit wearing. He tried to get back to the point by saying: “You still haven’t told me why you did it.”
“Does it matter?” said God.
“You’re not a great one for answering questions, are you?” commented Henry.
“No,” admitted the snake. “It was never one of my strong points—but I can certainly ask them. Does it matter?”
“It does to me,” said Henry.
“Whose fault is that?” countered God.
They could have argued about that for a long time, too, if Henry had had the energy. He didn’t.
“I believed in it,” said Henry. “I really did. I believed in a vast and wonderful universe, in something rich and complex, in a universe of unlimited possibility, of unimaginable potential—but it was all a lie: the universe and life alike. Because you couldn’t be bothered. Because you couldn’t make a universe like that. All you could manage was a sun and an Earth and some loose debris, all wrapped up in a crinkly piece of wrapping material.”
“Aristotle liked it,” said the snake. To Henry, that seemed like a remark of unparalleled irrelevance—but he knew that God was letting him down gently. The truth was that almost everybody liked it. Henry didn’t—but he had always been a misfit.
“I was going to shoot myself,” Henry said, “but now I’ve met you, I can’t see that there’s any need. Here’s my hand. Bite me.”
So saying, Henry transferred the pistol from his right hand to his left, and held the right hand close to the snake’s mouth, inviting it to strike.
“Certainly,” said God, and bit the hand that was not attempting to feed Him.
God was not, however, poisonous. The snake was harmless, and its teeth barely scratched Henry’s skin. He sat and nursed the hand for some minutes, waiting for the agony to begin, while the snake retreated apprehensively to its crevice. Nothing happened. Henry didn’t even feel giddy.
“It’s all a cheap trick, isn’t it?” asked Henry, sounding genuinely bitter for the first time. “Even this is just a cheap trick.” The scratch was hardly bleeding.
“I don’t know,” said the snake, from a safe distance. “You tell me.”
“I’ll tell you what,” said Henry. “I’ll make a deal with you. Send me back in time to the moment of my birth so that I can start all over again…and I’ll try to do better.”
“Not exactly generous with the incentives, are you?” the snake observed. “Besides which, it’s just not on. The trouble with you humans is that you want everything easy: mechanical; straightforward; laid on. Well, it’s not. You have to start from where you are. Common sense tells you that. No second chances.”
“From where I am?” said Henry. “Newly divorced from a marriage I couldn’t consummate? In a universe no bigger than a comet’s orbit? In a life full of nothing but tarnished illusions? Don’t you think that’s asking of a lot from a weak sort of individual like me?”
“Certainly,” said God, deigning to answer a question for once.
Henry sat still for two more minutes. Then he looked up into the sky. The stars were still shining. They were still beautiful. Like a Rembrandt that had turned out to be a fake, they had lost their glamour, their mystique and their presumed value in the marketplace of the imagination, but they still looked just as good. They were some forgery. Looked at dispassionately, they were about as romantic as electric lights reflected in a contact lens, but they were still there.
The snake, perhaps feeling, in his role as stand-in for God, that all decisions could now be left safely in Henry’s hands, slid out of sight into the utmost depths of the crevice.
Henry, realizing that he was all alone again, suddenly remembered another question.
“Hang on a minute,” he called, speaking aloud for the first time. “Is there life after death?”
The question echoed in the night, disturbing the comfortable silence that was now undisturbed even by the hum of insects, or anything similar. Somewhere, out of sight, the snake eventually hissed. Somewhere in the hiss, Henry imagined that God was saying: “Use your imagination.”
It was not the answer for which he had hoped, but he had to admit that it was probably correct.
Henry walked back to the car and drove back into town. He stopped off at the supermarket to claim a refund on the gun, and used the cash to buy groceries. As he left the store he smiled at the cashier, who blinked back at him, perhaps mistaking his intentions, in a conspicuously myopic fashion.
“You should have your eyes tested and get some spectacles,” he advised her. “The world would be in focus then, and you’d know what you’ve been missing.”
The cashier studiously ignored the remark, but he knew that she was probably thinking that he ought to mind his own business.
THE HAUNTED NURSERY
The Englishman, the Scotsman, and the Irishman agreed that they would take turns to enter the haunted nursery and make every effort to stay there all night. They each put £100 into the pot; the one who contrived to remain in there for the longest time would scoop the pool. They cut cards to decide who would go first, and the Englishman drew the lowest.
After twenty-five minutes, the Englishman was back in the drawing-room, pouring himself a very large brandy.
“That’s no ordinary haunted room,” he told the Scotsman and the Irishman. “I met the Devil himself. That wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d been able to face up to him man-to-man, but I wasn’t. The moment I looked at him I was thirteen again, in my first term at Eton, fagging for that sadistic bastard Harding. He made my life a living hell, you know—I can’t go into details. A living hell. It was worse than the army—worse than the Gulf, far worse than Belfast before the cease-fire—because I wasn’t equipped. I wasn’t trained. There’s only one thing worse than being thirteen in a living hell, and that’s going back to being thirteen in a living hell—being stripped of all the adult equipment, all the training, being reduced to absolute helplessness and knowing just how pathetically and ridiculously helpless you are. I’d forgotten it all, buried it and blanked it out—but he brought it all back again. I could endure having my eyes plucked out, but not that.”
The Scotsman and the Irishman had a good laugh about that before the Scotsman took his own turn in the haunted nursery.
He was back in the drawing-room twenty-five minutes later, pouring himself a huge whisky.
“Same bloody thing,” he said, in his terse Scottish manner. “Devil in disguise. I wor nae but six year old an’ ma bloody da had his bloody belt off again. Blubbin’ like a babe, I was. All ma life I’ve been tellin’ maesel’ that if ever I’d got holt o’ that bastard when we were two of a size I’d ha’ kicked the shit out o’him an’ spat on the wreck—but I wor nae but six year old and there was nithin’ I could do while that brass buckle came down an’ down an’ down agin. Nithin’ at all—an’ I remembered everythin’ I’d forgot about all o’ that stuff. Every bloody thing I’d buried an’ blanked. I could’ae taken havin’ ma eyes plucked out, but no’ that. No’ that.”
This time, it was only the Irishman who laughed. As the Irishman went off to the haunted nursery to take his turn, the Englishman said to the Scotsman: “Do you think he has sense or sensitivity enough to be taken the same way?”
“I give him ten minutes,” the Scotsman said, grimly. “Not a bloody minute more.”
The Irishman came back after exactly ten minutes. He poured himself a modest glass of whiskey and sipped it delicately, as if he’d never tasted it before. Then he turned to his adversaries.
“Twas the Divvil all right,” he said. “Hisself in all his foul an’ fire-an’-brimstone glory, just like the Faithers up at Saint Pat’s used to tell us. Never thought to see the like. Four years old, I thought I was, befor
e me first communion—an’ lookin’ the Divvil hisself in the burnin’ yeller eye.” He stopped, and took another appreciative sip from his glass.
“And then what?” said the Englishman, breathlessly wanting to hear the gory details before he and the Scotsman split the pot.
“I just said ‘How d’ye do, Musther Divvi, it must be awful dull an’ lonely stuck in this pokey little room fer all eternity. Would ye like to swap bodies wi’ me for a little while, so that I can win a bet against a Presbyterian an’ a public schoolboy?’ An’ the Divvil said ‘Sure’—an’ here he is.”
And the Irishman—or whatever was wearing his body just then—reached out with one clawed hand to pluck out the anxious eyes of the Englishman and the Scotsman, while the other collected the £300.
THE PHANTOM OF TEIRBRUN
I.
In the days before the great city of Is was swallowed up by the sea, the port had a number of satellite towns, all of which were thought by their citizens to be places of importance by virtue of their proximity to such a notorious place. One of these was the ancient walled town of Teirbrun, whose citizens were extremely proud of the antiquity of their residence—which, they claimed, dated back to the times when Is had been a mere fishing-port named Ys and the great forest of Leonais had been a royal hunting-ground whose name was spelled Lyonesse. Their disapproval of Is was entrenched long before the great city acquired its reputation as the most reprehensible sink of iniquity west of Byzantium, and was always expressed in terms of an exaggerated regard for the niceties of morality and the sternness of the legal retribution.
In fact, the citizens of Teirbrun were not particularly moral by the standards of Leonais, nor did the town’s watchmen and constables contrive to arrest a greater proportion of common law-breakers than any town of comparable size within the province, but those law-breakers who were apprehended and brought to trial there were often punished with greater ferocity. When a crime was committed for which no perpetrator could be identified, that circumstance always excited a great deal of angry complaint and bitter criticism of the town authorities.
The Cosmic Perspective and Other Black Comedies Page 3
