The Thing Itself

by Adam Roberts

  He is weeping. He does not know why. He dislikes the sensation very much. It is like perspiring – something else he did not do – except concentrated in the eyes. Yet he cannot stop, it seems. Might weeping have the effect of cooling the face, as perspiration the body? Was that its function?

  He smiles when strangers appear in his room. Some of the strangers greet him, impudently, as if they were friends of long standing. Only the boy remained, when all the others had gone. The bell rope goes up beside his bed like a spear, and through a hole in the ceiling to the little cot-room where his footman lives. He begins a new habit – even at so advanced an age! – of waking from tempestuous, distressing dreams and hauling on this rope as a drowning man clutches at any floating matter. The distant tinkling of the bell, softened by the intervening woodwork, echoes his sobbing.

  The boy can’t get downstairs soon enough to comfort you, Mr Professor, says Wasianski. It would be better if he slept in the room with you. It would indeed be a simple matter to have a low bed built, near the door.

  The boy already sleeps in my room, the Professor replies. Is there room for two?

  Which boy, though? They are confused.

  Untie the dressing-gown cord; and retie it again.

  There’s a grizzled quality to the sky today: grey as a tendon, grey as pewter. A dog outside his window shouts, shouts, shouts, as if incapable of understanding that nobody can understand him. There is a sour, urinous smell in the room. When the servant boy comes in, he yells at him, and keeps yelling until he creeps away. The lad returns with a stranger. ‘My old friend,’ the man says, and the Professor is aware of a renewed gust of urine stench. Is it coming from this visitor? ‘You must vacate the bed for a moment,’ the stranger is saying, ‘only for a moment, my friend.’ He has not even taken off his hat. His face is red, ergo it is cold outside. His face is red, ergo he is ashamed or embarrassed. How can the distinction possibly be drawn? The dog has stopped barking at any rate, so that is a blessing. Infinitely placid and biddable, the Professor permits the strange man to help him out of the bed, and the boy hauls the sheets off like a deckhand pulling in a sail. ‘People in Germany and England say al-jeers,’ he explains to the stranger. ‘But the g is hard, is hard as ice. Algiers. Algiers.’

  ‘Very good, most interesting,’ says Wasianski, lifting his arms to remove the Professor’s nightdress. The Professor decides not to rebuke him for smelling of urine, not today.

  He endeavours to be happy at all times, and show the world a pleasant demeanour, but the truth is that the bustle of a numerous company confounded and distressed him.

  ‘The thing itself,’ he explains to the ghost-lad, crouching in the corner of his room. ‘Space and time are structures of apperception, not intrinsic to the thing itself. The thing itself is,’ and he stops. Was he going to say life? Or was he going to say death? He is Aesop’s donkey, standing exactly equidistant from two equally delicious hanging clusters of figs, and so doomed to starve.

  Stabbing pains in the gut. Poor digestion. It was electricity, for it could not be his diet. Perhaps the global store of galvanic power is slowly increasing, as mankind begins to generate excess to the natural store with piles and batteries and rotating devices. He imagines the cosmos’s store of electricity as a reservoir filled to the brim, and man’s dabbling with galvanic equipment as a reckless addition to the quantity stored. Naturally it would overspill. Some of that spillage had found its way into his guts, and now they crackled and stabbed with sparky pains at all hours.

  Distance, distance, only let us get further away!

  Time was collapsing. His mind is enfeebled, he knew. I am a child again, he tells one of the men who was standing about him in his study. And you must treat me as a child.

  The mind decays with the body. But the soul could not decay, or it would not be eternal and immortal! So mind and soul did not coincide? But what if his lifelong accumulation of knowledge was stored in the mind only, and he went to the afterlife as ignorant as a chicken or puppy? That would be intolerable!

  His left eye is weak almost to blindness. But he can see with his right. The right is the righteous side, the left the sinister.

  He would eat nothing but bread and butter and English cheese. ‘I am descended of Scotsmen,’ he tells the shadowy figures who surrounded him. ‘The lad in my room is English, too, though, thank heaven, he speaks tolerable German.’ When his doctors deny him the cheese as injurious to his health the Professor loses all dignity: he weeps and begs, tries to bribe his footman with increasingly ample sums of money, cries out in the night.

  Eventually he grows calm. His servant dices his food and places it on a broad spoon, sets the spoon in his hand and helps guide it to his mouth. His right eye is stone blind, and the sight in his left misty and grey.

  He is not without lucid interludes. ‘My memory, that was once proverbial across the city for its capaciousness, is now characterised by its irretention.’

  The boy smirks at him from the shadows.

  ‘If you ever told me your name,’ says the Professor, ‘then I have forgot it.’

  ‘I never told you it,’ says the lad.

  ‘You are not alive.’

  ‘Neither am I dead! I am the one with the keys.’

  The Professor thinks of that old bearded saint, once a fisherman and stinking (doubtless) of fish, now standing outside the gates of heaven. ‘Let us imagine,’ the Professor says, closing his good eye to enjoy the darkness and solitude, ‘that soul and mind are one and the same. Since space and time are structures of the mind, not of the thing itself, does the degradation of mind, through senescence or pathology, lead to an erosion of space and time?’

  The boy nods sagely. ‘Go on.’

  The Professor tries to find the words. The words are not there. He is thinking: what has happened to me is after the manner of a fog that has settled over the structure of a mountain – let us say, a sea fog, rolling in over the barrow where some mighty king from the age of heroes is buried. The structure is still there, massy and irremovable. It is just harder to see because of the accident of the fog. But, as against this image, comes another. The Professor recalls his early youth, and straying into an orchard with schoolfriends. Even where so trivial a transgression was concerned, he felt uneasy. But he was hungry and there were so many apples. So he reached up to one, still dangling from its tree, and snapped its tendon-stalk, and only after he had done so did he notice that the whole far side of the globe had been chewed and rotted away by some insect or other. Whilst it still dangled on the branch! And now the Professor thinks: what if soul is like that, something given to the decay of all perishable things? What if it is thuswise hollowed out, thus leaving himself no longer himself? He cannot remember how to write his name.

  The boy says: Might decay of memory be simply a breaking down of the previously rigid categories of time in the soul? Decay of reasoning and bodily control likewise the breakdown of the previously rigid categories of space?

  But this does not seem right. He thinks of his own brain, like an apple – a winter apple, kept in a cupboard, its skin grey and pale yellow and wrinkled with those striations anatomists note in their dissection of human mental organs. But what if some wasp has burrowed in, metaphorically, and is eating the Professor away from the inside?

  The servant who is not Lampe says: Shall I light a candle for you, Mr Professor?

  Ce que vous allumez, m’eteins.

  What was that, sir?

  I said: Do so, do so. There is a scratchy sound and the vague intimation of unfocused light somewhere on his right-hand side. Untie the dressing-gown cord; and retie it again.

  The springs of life losing their force. The moving power of the mechanism withdrawing itself.

  To erect a fence, a large fence, first to excavate postholes and then erect the posts. Many posts, heavy posts – then much goodness – then much gratitude.

  God forbid I should be sunk so low as to forget the offices of humanity.

 
As the soul is devoured, it operates to a lesser and lesser extent. The question, the only question that matters: Am I somewhere here, still? Or am I permanently diminished? Because diminishment is fractionalising, and each division into fractures is decay of the purity of the totality of the purity of totality of tying the dressing-gown cord and unpicking it and retying it.

  Impossible to tell the identity of the man standing at his bedside. Is it Wasianksi? Is it Lampe? Foolish, infinitely foolish to have denied himself. A lifetime’s kisses thwarted and boxed up, as oriental maidens deform their feet in too-small shoes and so produce monstrous hooves where their feet should be. Kiss me.

  What was that, Mr Professor?

  Kiss me! Kiss me!

  The faintest touch, as though from a million miles away, of leather-lips brushing his leathern cheek. He is weeping now.

  The truth shines in a single spear-like shaft of light, from his right-hand side. The nature of love is infinite, and when one analyses such geometries one sees that no amount of fraction-carving from an infinite quantity can ever reduce it. A kiss is only the littlest thing, barest symbol of all he had missed in living, yet when we are talking of the nature of love, which is infinite, we can understand that a little is enough. It is sufficient.

  Mr Professor?

  It is enough.

  Did you say something, Mr Professor?

  It is enough.

  He’s trying to speak, I think. Let me … uh! The odour is not … let me just— Mr Professor? What is it, Mr Professor?

  It is enough.

  The ghost is close by again. ‘Does the deterioration in mental faculties,’ he said, ‘and the decay of personality, correspond to an exactly equivalent senescence or decrepitude in the material fabric of the brain? This is what we would expect, were consciousness merely a product of brain function. Yet brains may suffer substantial physical damage without a change in personality, and brain tissue may be entirely whole and perfect and the personality alter, or lose sanity, or disappear. The relationship, for relationship there must be, is not a simple one of cause and effect. And whoever thought—’ Is it the boy, speaking now, or the Professor? How beautiful his face! Beautiful though disfigured. ‘Whoever thought cause and effect a simple relationship? Does the brain create the soul, or does the soul create the brain, as certain sea creatures spin a hard shell about themelves? Is it not necessarily a dialectical relationship between the two things? There is strong explanatory power in the paralogisms of the soul.’

  The curtains are drawn back. Light, light, light, light, light, light, light, light, light, light, light, light.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Some of the components of this novel draw on published sources, I hope in more or less patent ways. You’ve already noticed, for example, the Bloomish section four, or that the final section recasts Thomas De Quincey’s well-known account of Kant’s last days. There is a ferry that runs from North Berwick to Anstruther, but it is not a car ferry and not in the least as I have described it in Chapter 9 here.

  Thanks as ever to Simon Spanton. Thank also to Will Wiles for letting me use ‘Way Inn’ as the name of my chain of hotels. Two portions of the novel appeared (in slightly different forms) in publications edited by Ian Whates and I am grateful for his willingness to let me rework them here. For discussions on the finer points of Kant, I would like to thank Robert Eaglestone, Andrew Bowie and Paul Smith. As an atheist writing a novel about why you should believe in God, I have taken more than I can say from the eloquent and persuasive devotional writing of my friends Alan Jacobs and Francis Spufford, Christians both.

  Also by Adam Roberts from Gollancz:

  Salt

  Stone

  On

  The Snow

  Polystom

  Gradisil

  Land of the Headless

  Swiftly

  Yellow Blue Tibia

  New Model Army

  By Light Alone

  Jack Glass

  Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea

  Bête

  A Gollancz eBook

  Copyright © Adam Roberts 2016

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Adam Roberts to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in Great Britain in 2016 by

  Gollancz

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DZ

  An Hachette UK Company

  This eBook first published in 2016 by Gollancz.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 0 575 12774 6

  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  www.adamroberts.com

  www.orionbooks.co.uk