by Jon Ronson
Deborah’s building, the University College London Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, was just around the corner on Queen Square. It was more modern and equipped with Faraday cages and fMRI scanners operated by geeky-looking technicians wearing comic-book T-shirts. Their nerdy demeanors made the machines seem less intimidating.
“Our goal,” said the center’s website, “is to understand how thought and perception arise from brain activity, and how such processes break down in neurological and psychiatric disease.”
We reached Deborah’s pigeonhole. I scrutinized it.
“Okay,” I said. “Right.”
I stood nodding for a moment. Deborah nodded back. We looked at each other.
Now was surely the time to reveal to her my secret agenda for wanting to get inside their buildings. It was that my anxiety levels had gone through the roof those past months. It wasn’t normal. Normal people definitely didn’t feel this panicky. Normal people definitely didn’t feel like they were being electrocuted from the inside by an unborn child armed with a miniature Taser, that they were being prodded by a wire emitting the kind of electrical charge that stops cattle from going into the next field. And so my plan all day, ever since the Costa Coffee, had been to steer the conversation to the subject of my overanxious brain and maybe Deborah would offer to put me in an fMRI scanner or something. But she’d seemed so delighted that I’d agreed to solve the Being or Nothingness mystery I hadn’t so far had the heart to mention my flaw, lest it spoil the mystique.
Now was my last chance. Deborah saw me staring at her, poised to say something important.
“Yes?” she said.
There was a short silence. I looked at her.
“I’ll let you know how I get on,” I said.
The six a.m. discount Ryanair flight to Gothenburg was cramped and claustrophobic. I tried to reach down into my trouser pocket to retrieve my notepad so I could write a to-do list, but my leg was impossibly wedged underneath the tray table that was piled high with the remainder of my snack-pack breakfast. I needed to plan for Gothenburg. I really could have done with my notepad. My memory isn’t what it used to be. Quite frequently these days, in fact, I set off from my home with an excited, purposeful expression and after a while I slow my pace to a stop and just stand there looking puzzled. In moments like that everything becomes dreamlike and muddled. My memory will probably go altogether one day, just like my father’s is, and there will be no books to write then. I really need to accumulate a nest egg.
I tried to reach down to scratch my foot. I couldn’t. It was trapped. It was fucking trapped. It was fucking . . .
“YEAL!” I involuntarily yelled. My leg shot upward, hitting the tray table. The passenger next to me gave me a startled look. I had just let out an unintentional shriek. I stared straight ahead, looking shocked but also slightly awed. I didn’t realize that such mysterious, crazy noises existed within me.
I had a lead in Gothenburg, the name and business address of a man who might know the identity or identities of “Joe K.” His name was Petter Nordlund. Although none of the packages sent to the academics contained any leads—no names of possible authors or distributors—somewhere, buried deep within the archive of a Swedish library, I had found “Petter Nordlund” referenced as the English translator of Being or Nothingness. A Google search revealed nothing more about him, only the address of a Gothenburg company, BIR, that he was somehow involved in.
If, as the book’s recipients suspected, a team of clever puzzlemakers was behind this expensive, enigmatic campaign for reasons not yet established (religious propaganda? viral marketing? headhunting?), Petter Nordlund was my only way in. But he didn’t know I was coming. I’d been afraid he’d go to ground if he did. Or maybe he’d tip off whichever shadowy organization was behind Being or Nothingness. Maybe they’d try to stop me in some way I couldn’t quite visualize. Whatever, I determined that doorstepping Petter Nordlund was the shrewdest course of action. It was a gamble. The whole journey was a gamble. Translators often work at a great distance from their clients, and Petter Nordlund might well have known nothing at all.
Some recipients had suggested that Being or Nothingness was a puzzle that couldn’t be decoded because it was incomplete, and after studying the book for a week, I’d come to agree. Each page seemed to be a riddle with a solution that was just out of reach.
A note at the beginning claimed that the manuscript had been “found” in the corner of an abandoned railway station: “It was lying in the open, visible to all, but I was the only one curious enough to pick it up.”
What followed were elliptical quotations:My thinking is muscular.
Albert Einstein
I am a strange loop.
Douglas Hofstadter
Life is meant to be a joyous adventure.
Joe K
The book had only twenty-one pages with text, but some pages contained just one sentence. Page 18, for instance, read simply: “The sixth day after I stopped writing the book I sat at B’s place and wrote the book.”
And all of this was very expensively produced, using the highest-quality paper and inks—there was a full-color, delicate reproduction of a butterfly on one page—and the endeavor must have cost someone or a group of people an awful lot of money.
The missing piece hadn’t turned out to be secret writing in invisible ink, but there was another possibility. On page 13 of every copy a hole had been assiduously cut out. Some words were missing. Was the solution to the mystery somehow connected to those missing words?
I picked up a rental car at Gothenburg airport. The smell of it—the smell of a newly cleaned rental car—never fails to bring back happy memories of past sleuthing adventures. There were the weeks I spent trailing the conspiracy theorist David Icke around as he hypothesized his theory that the secret rulers of the world were giant, blood-drinking, child-sacrificing pedophile lizards that had adopted human form. That was a good story. And it began, as this one was, with the smell of a newly cleaned rental car.
The SatNav took me past the Liseberg funfair, past the stadium where Madonna was due to play the next night, and on toward the business district. I imagined Petter Nordlund’s office would be located there, but instead the SatNav told me to take a sharp, unexpected left and I found myself bouncing up a tree-lined residential street toward a giant, white, square, clapboard house.
This was, it told me, my destination.
I walked to the front door and rang the buzzer. A woman in jogging pants answered.
“Is this Petter Nordlund’s office?” I asked her.
“This is his home,” she said.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “Is he here?”
“He’s with patients today,” she said. She had an American accent.
“He’s a doctor?” I asked.
“A psychiatrist,” she said.
We stood on her doorstep and talked for a while. She said her name was Lily and she was Petter’s wife. They had been childhood sweethearts (he went to school in America) and had been considering settling in her home state of California, but then Petter’s uncle died and he inherited this huge house and they just couldn’t resist.
Petter, Lily said, was not only a translator but a highly successful psychiatrist. (I later read his LinkedIn page that said he worked with schizophrenics and psychotics and OCD sufferers, and had also been a “protein chemist” and an advisor to both an “international investment company” and a “Cambridge biotech company” specializing in something called “therapeutic peptide discovery and development.”) He was working in a clinic two hours outside Gothenburg, she said, and, no, there was no point in my driving over there. They would never let me in without the proper accreditation.
“I can’t even get ahold of him when he’s with patients,” she said. “It’s very intense.”
“Intense in what way?” I asked.
“I don’t even know that!” she said. “He’ll be back in a few days. If you’re still in Gothenburg
, you’re welcome to try again.” Lily paused. “So, why are you here? Why do you want to see my husband?”
“He translated a very intriguing book,” I said, “called Being or Nothingness. I’ve become so fascinated by the book I wanted to meet him and find out who his employer was and why it was written.”
“Oh,” she said. She sounded surprised.
“Do you know Being or Nothingness?” I asked her.
“Yeah,” she said. She paused. “I . . . Yeah. I know which book you’re talking about. I . . . He translates several things. For companies. And that was . . .” She trailed off. Then she said, “We don’t get into each other’s work. I don’t even pay attention to what he’s doing, quite honestly! I know he’s very much into molecular something, but I don’t understand it. Sometimes he says, ‘I’ve just translated this for some company’ and if it’s in Swedish, or something, I don’t understand it so I really don’t try and look into his work.”
“Anyway, it was lovely talking to you,” I said. “I’ll pop back in a few days?”
“Sure,” said Lily. “Sure.”
The days that followed passed slowly. I lay in my hotel room and watched the kind of strange European TV that would probably make perfect sense if I understood the language, but because I didn’t, the programs just seemed dreamlike and baffling. In one studio show a group of Scandinavian academics watched as one of them poured liquid plastic into a bucket of cold water. It solidified, they pulled it out, handed it around the circle, and, as far as I could tell, intellectualized on its random misshapenness. I phoned home but my wife didn’t answer. It crossed my mind that she might be dead. I panicked. Then it turned out that she wasn’t dead. She had just been at the shops. I have panicked unnecessarily in all four corners of the globe. I took a walk. When I returned, there was a message waiting for me. It was from Deborah Talmi, the neurologist who had first approached me. A suspect had emerged. Could I call her?
The suspect, I discovered to my annoyance, wasn’t in Sweden. He was in Bloomington, Indiana. His name was Levi Shand and he had just gone online to post the most implausible story about his involvement in Being or Nothingness.
Levi Shand’s story, Deborah told me, went something like this: He was a student at Indiana University. He’d been driving aimlessly around town when he happened to notice a large brown box sitting in the dirt underneath a railway bridge. So he pulled over to have a closer look at it.
The box was unmarked and noticeably clean, as if it had only recently been dumped there. Even though Levi was nervous about opening it—anything could be in there, from a million dollars to a severed head—he plucked up the courage, and discovered eight pristine copies of Being or Nothingness.
He read the stickers on each: Warning! Please study the letter to Professor Hofstadter before you read the book. Good Luck! and was intrigued. Because he knew who Professor Hofstadter was, and where he lived.
“I’m not familiar with Professor Hofstadter,” I said to Deborah. “I know there are references to him scattered all over Being or Nothingness. But I couldn’t work out if he’s a real person or a fictional character. Is he well known?”
“He wrote Gödel, Escher, Bach!” she replied, surprised by my lack of knowledge. “It was momentous.”
I didn’t reply.
“If you’re a geek,” sighed Deborah, “and you’re just discovering the Internet, and especially if you’re a boy, Gödel, Escher, Bach would be like your Bible. It was about how you can use Gödel’s mathematic theories and Bach’s canons to make sense of the experience of consciousness. Lots of young guys really like it. It’s very playful. I haven’t read it in its entirety but it’s on my bookshelf.”
Hofstadter, she said, had published it in the late 1970s. It was lauded. It won a Pulitzer. It was filled with brilliant puzzles and wordplay and meditations on the meaning of consciousness and artificial intelligence. It was the kind of book—like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance or A Brief History of Time—that everybody wanted on their shelves but few were clever enough to really understand.
Even though the world had been at Hofstadter’s feet in 1979, he had retreated from it, and had instead spent the past three decades working quietly as a professor of cognitive science at Indiana University. But he was well known among the students. He had a shock of silver-white hair like Andy Warhol’s and a huge house on the edge of campus which was where—Levi Shand’s story continued—the young student now drove with the intention of presenting Hofstadter with the eight copies of Being or Nothingness he had found in the box underneath the railway bridge.
“A railway bridge,” I said to Deborah. “Have you noticed the parallel? In that covering letter to Douglas Hofstadter, the writer talks about finding some old typewritten pages carelessly thrown in the corner of an abandoned railroad station. And now Levi Shand has found some copies of Being or Nothingness thrown underneath a railway bridge.”
“You’re right!” said Deborah.
“So what does Levi Shand say happened when he went to Hofstadter’s house to deliver the books?” I asked.
“He says he knocked on Hofstadter’s door and it swung open to reveal to his astonishment a harem of beautiful French women. And standing in the midst of the harem was Hofstadter himself. He invited the openmouthed young student inside, took the books, thanked him, and showed him to the door again.”
And that, Deborah said, was the end of Levi Shand’s story.
We fell into a puzzled silence.
“A harem of beautiful French women?” I said.
“I don’t believe the story,” she said.
“It doesn’t seem plausible,” I said. “I wonder if I can get Levi Shand on the phone.”
“I’ve done some research on him,” Deborah said. “He’s got a Facebook page.”
“Oh, okay,” I said. “I’ll contact him through that, then.” There was a silence.
“Deborah?” I said.
“I don’t think he exists,” Deborah said suddenly.
“But he’s got a Facebook page,” I said.
“With three hundred American friends who look the part,” Deborah said.
“You think . . . ?” I said.
“I think someone has created a convincing Facebook persona for Levi Shand,” Deborah said.
I took this possibility in.
“Have you thought about his name?” Deborah asked.
“Levi Shand?”
“Haven’t you worked it out?” she said. “It’s an anagram.”
I fell silent.
“ ‘ Lavish End’!” I suddenly exclaimed.
“No,” said Deborah.
I got out a piece of paper.
“ ‘Devil Has N’ . . . ?” I asked after a while.
“‘Live Hands,’” said Deborah. “It’s an anagram of ‘Live Hands.’”
“Oh, okay,” I said.
“Like the drawing on the cover of Being or Nothingness,” prompted Deborah. “Two hands drawing each other . . .?”
“So if Levi Shand doesn’t exist,” I said, “who created him?”
“I think they’re all Hofstadter,” said Deborah. “Levi Shand. Petter Nordlund. I think they’re all Douglas Hofstadter.”
I went for a walk through Gothenburg, feeling quite annoyed and disappointed that I’d been hanging around here for days when the culprit was probably an eminent professor some four thousand miles away at Indiana University. Deborah had offered me supplementary circumstantial evidence to back her theory that the whole puzzle was a product of Douglas Hofstadter’s impish mind. It was, she said, exactly the sort of playful thing he might do. And being the author of an international bestseller, he would have the financial resources to pull it off. Plus he was no stranger to Sweden; he had lived there in the mid-1960s. Furthermore, Being or Nothingness looked like a Hofstadter book. The clean white cover was reminiscent of the cover of Hofstadter’s follow-up to Gödel, Escher, Bach—the 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop.
True, the cre
ation of a fake Indiana University student with a fake Facebook page and an unlikely tale about a harem of beautiful French women was an odd addition, but it would do no good to second-guess the motives of a brilliant man like Hofstadter.
Furthermore, Deborah believed she had solved the book’s puzzle. Yes, there was a missing piece, but it didn’t take the form of invisible ink or significant words cut out of page 13. It was, she said, the way the book had revealed an inherent narcissism in its recipients.
Being or Nothingness, and the package it came in, photographed by a recipient, Eric Rauchway, professor of history at the University of California, Davis, and reproduced with his permission.
“That’s what I Am a Strange Loop is about,” said Deborah. “It’s about how we spend our lives self-referencing, over and over, in a kind of strange loop. Now lots of people are asking themselves, ‘Why was I selected to receive this book?’ They aren’t talking about the book or the message. They’re talking about themselves. So Being or Nothingness has created a strange loop of people and it is a vessel for them to self-reference.” She paused. “I think that’s Hofstadter’s message.”
