The Infinities Read online

  I knew it was Benny. When I sensed the presence of an intruder in the house I knew it had to be him. I must have been expecting him, all along, without realising it.

  From the top of the short stairs now the two of them advance creakingly into the gloom. To get a sight of them at all I have to swivel my eyes so violently to the side and downwards the sockets would hurt, if I could feel them. The pair seem phantoms, bearing down on me across the darkened room. I must not let them see me looking: they will think I am only feigning stupefaction, which in a way I must be, given that my brain is so busy. Probably I can see them better than they can see me, my eyes being by now so thoroughly accustomed to this damnable false night in which my wife has condemned me to live since I was laid low. Benny—look at him, my homunculus. He is speaking in a priestly murmur, his tonsured head inclined towards my daughter, who is inclining too; they might be monk and maiden in the confessional. I strain in vain to catch what he is saying to her, what mischief he might be pouring into her ear. Mm mm mmm. And here I lie, mumchance.

  Petra goes to the middle window, the one that my bed faces, and lifts her arms and with a dancer’s large dramatic gestures draws the heavy curtains open, leaning sideways first far to the left and then far to the right. How it pierces me now, the sight of a human being in movement. The daylight seems to hesitate a moment before entering. Dazzled, I shut my eyes tight, and on the inners of the lids the after-glare makes tumbling shapes, darker upon dark, like blobs of black dye bursting slowly in water already soiled. Yet I thrill to the unwonted glare, as I thrilled a moment ago to my daughter’s dancerly swoopings. When the time comes, and it cannot be very long now, I want to die into the light, like an old tree feeding its last upon the radiance of the world. In these recent days—how many?—with the curtains pulled, I have felt myself to be in an enormous dark space where distant doors are closing slowly, one by one. I do not hear them close, but feel the alteration in the air, as of a succession of long, slow breaths being painfully drawn in. I always liked to think that death would be more or less a continuation of how things already are, a dimming, a contracting, a shrinkage so gradual that I would not register its coming to an end at last until the ending was done with. Perhaps that is Ursula’s intention, keeping me in the dark so I will not notice the light failing. But I do not want to breathe my last in this room. Why did she banish me up here, of all places, site of my triumphs and so many more numerous failures? I want to be elsewhere. I want to die outdoors—I wonder if that can be arranged? Yes, on a pallet somewhere, on the grass, under trees, at the soft fall of dusk, that would be a boon, a final benison.

  But what if at just that moment I were to begin to feel again, what if—no, no, that way there are things I do not wish to be confronted with. Let me die numbly, insensate, yet thinking still, if that were possible.

  I feel—I feel!—by what must be a quaking of the floorboards Benny Grace approach the bed. Now in a show of hushed and reverent solicitude he stoops over me and peers into my face, and I am as a boy again pretending to be fast asleep as my suspicious mother bends over me in the light of a school-day morning. You see how Benny’s coming has already reduced me to this childishness, these dreams and maundering fears dragged from out of the depths? Now, perhaps sensing how unsettled I am by his warmly breathing presence leaning over me like this, he snickers softly.

  Should I open my eyes? Should I open my eyes.

  “He hasn’t changed,” he says over his shoulder to Petra at the window, where she remains, no doubt nervous of approaching too close to me, fearful of what she will have to look upon. I do not blame her: a catheter, for instance, even if only the suggestion of it, is not a pretty object for a daughter to have to contemplate, given what it is, and where it is placed. “Still the black hair,” Benny says, “the noble profile.” Again he gives his snuffly laugh. “The original Adam.” This last he addresses as if to me, intimately, in a murmur; he must know I can hear him, or at least must suspect it. He turns aside and begins to pace, those hobbled feet of his making a goatish clatter on the wooden floor. “Yes, years,” he says, from a little way off now, to Petra, continuing evidently an earlier train. “The things I could tell you! The stories!”

  I would laugh if I were capable of it. I am in a sort of panic of amazement—Benny Grace here, at Arden, with his stories! And I flat out and speechless while he stands upright—Benny, of all people. I cannot credit it. I must have been wrong in what I said, or rather in what I thought, a minute ago; I must not have been expecting him, for if I had been, why would I be so surprised that he has come? But after all it was inevitable he would make an appearance at the end. Benny Grace, my shadow, my double, my incorrigible daemon. Yes, I would laugh.

  I have never been any good in dealing with people. I dare say I am not alone in this sad predicament, but I feel acutely my incompetence in the matter of other folk. You know how it is. Say you are walking down a not particularly crowded street. You spy, at quite a long way off still, out of the corner of your eye, out of the corner of your watchfulness, as it were, a stranger who, you can see, has in his turn become aware of you as you approach him. Even at that distance you both begin to make little adjustments, covert little feints and swerves, so as to avoid eventual collision, all the while pretending to be perfectly oblivious of each other. As often as not all your efforts of evasion fail, precisely because you have been making them, I imagine, and in the end one of you is compelled to sidestep clumsily to allow the other to plunge past with a snarling smile. This is the way it is in general, with me, wherever I am, with whomever I happen to be. I am always, always on guard against coming smack up against one of my own kind. And when I am forced to enter on that agitated, long-distance dance of avoidance the broadest pavement becomes a tangled track, and I am as in an unsubdued jungle where the little apes howl and the birds of night scream and scatter. I do not doubt it could be otherwise. There is no reason not to stride forward smiling and clasp the approaching stranger manfully to one’s breast in fellowship and affection. If I remember rightly it was the poet Goethe—entirely forgotten now but in his day there were those who would have ranked him above the sublime Kleist!—who urged that we should greet each other not as monsieur, sir, mein Herr, but as my fellow-sufferer, Socî malorum, compagnon de misères! Or was it Schopenhauer? Not to be able any longer to look anything up—ah! Well, no matter, you get the drift. For my part I would be happy to take this good advice provided I am allowed to send my greetings by semaphore.

  I did not see Benny Grace coming, that was the trouble. It was in the far north that I first encountered him—or that he first encountered me, more like—which strikes me as odd, since I think of him as so much a creature of the south. An auditorium, a long, white room abuzz with people, and I in the front row, in a reserved seat, and a woman beside me agitatedly shuffling the text of a talk she was about to give, an ordeal the prospect of which terrified her, although she had undergone it many times before. Her name was Inge, or Ilsa, I wish I could remember which. Let me see: I shall settle for Inge. To open the colloquium there had been a reception—noise, laughter, champagne glasses of sticky white alcoholic syrup—and later on there would be dinner followed by decorous tangoing. One side of the room was a wall of glass looking out on a green slope dotted sparsely with spindly white birches. Were there deer? My memory insists on deer, peacefully at graze among the trees, fastidious long-legged creatures with beige-and-brown coats and stumpy tails that twitched comically. Weak northern sunlight, a delicate lacquering of bleached gold. It was midsummer then, too, the days endless up there in those latitudes. There had been rain, and there would be more, and the grass sparkled, as if with malice. I was aware of Benny first as a pair of hoof-like feet and two fat thighs clad in rusty black, inserting themselves with much squeezing and puffing into the place to my left. Then the globular head and moist, moon face, the smile, the wreathed dome—he was balding even then—and those whorled ears daintily pointed at their tips.

 
I cannot remember which city it was we were in, or which country, even. We had arrived that day, Inge and I, from elsewhere. Bellicose Sweden, I remember, was on the warpath again, mired in yet another expansionary struggle with her encircling neighbours, and travel throughout the region was hazardous and liable to delays, and I feared being stranded there, chafingly, in Somewhereborg or Somethingsund. Inge was a Swedish Finn, or Finnish Swede, I do not think I ever discovered which, for certain. Ash-blonde, tiny, very slim, child-sized, really, but an earnest savant famous in her field, which was, I recall, gauge theory—gauge was all the rage, at the time. I can see her still, little Inge, her tremulous hands and skinny legs and turned-in toes, can still smell her scrubbed skin and cigarette breath. She was forty and looked twenty, except first thing in the morning and late at night. Dorothy was not long dead and I was adrift in a daze of sorrow and remorse and would have clung to any spar in those dark, immense and turbulent waters. A sense of strangeness, of being generally estranged, comes over one in circumstances such as I was in, I am sure those who have suffered a similarly violent and sudden loss will know what I mean. Everything I did or saw, every surroundings I wandered woozily into, struck me as bizarre, wholly outlandish, and like an idiot child I had to be pulled along by the hand from one baffling spectacle to the next.

  I really do wish I could remember more of Inge—I owe it to her, to remember. She took care of me, she who was so much in need of being cared for herself. It seems odd, that in my distress I should have sought out the likes of her and not the strong ones, those big mannish bluestocking types in which my discipline abounds. Helpless myself, I cleaved to the helpless.

  I was never a womaniser, not even then, in my wandering year of grief, despite all that was said of me. True, I was and am devoted to women, but not or not exclusively in the expectation of clambering on top of them and pumping away like a fireman at his hose, no, the fascination for me was that transformative moment when one of them would willingly divest herself of her clothes and everything became different on the instant. That was a phenomenon I could never get enough of; it was always a surprise, always left me breathless. How magical it was, how enchanting, when the head I had been talking to in the street, or on a bus, or in the midst of a roomful of people, suddenly, in a shadowed bedroom, unfurled from the neck down this pale, glimmering extension of itself, this body which, naked, was utterly other than what it had been when clothed. And not just the body, but the sensibility, too—a new person on the spot, candid, desirous, intimate, vulnerable. The prospect of the pure astonishment of holding this brand-new, cool-skinned creature in my arms, that was what held me there, in that glassed-in lecture hall, with the sickly taste of cloudberry cordial on my lips and an unyawned yawn making the hinges of my jaws ache, watching Inge, as if she were half blind, make her groping way to the lectern, still mangling her papers, and with a small round dark patch on the seat of her light summer dress where she had peed herself, just a little, in fright at the prospect of standing up and speaking to an audience.

  This was in the early days of the great instauration, after we had exposed the relativity hoax and showed up Planck’s constant for what it really is. The air was thick with relativists and old-style quantum mechanics plummeting from high places in despair; I trust they took the opportunity, as they travelled streetwards together, of putting their principles of relative motion and intrinsic spin values to the test. I was in the vanguard of the new science and already an eminent figure in what was, admittedly, at that time, a narrow and specialised sphere. My Brahma hypothesis, so-called—so-called by Benny, in the first place, as it happened—floored them all. In it I posited the celebrated chronotron, ugly name—Benny, again—for an exquisite concept, time’s primal particle, the golden egg of Brahma from the broken yolk of which flowed all creation. Simplicity itself, that theory, once someone had dared to think it. To begin with I was laughed at, of course, always a sure promise of eventual triumph. It took them quite a while to get the point, but when they did, my, what a fuss. Looking back, I see myself borne aloft in triumph on the shoulders of a band of hot-eyed zealots, but a stiff and painted thing, like the effigy of a suffering saint carried in procession on a holy day, rattling a bit from being joggled overmuch, my mitre awry and my big toe shiny from the kisses of so many pious supplicants. I did not ask for their adulation. I was my solitary self when I took a flying kick and put my shiny big toe through their big Theory of Everything. The majority of them I despised. How they fawned and flattered when they saw at last the irrefragable rightness of what I had made. But then, did I not despise myself, also, myself and my work, my capitalised Work, of which I am supposed to be so vain? Oh, not that I think my achievement is less than anyone else’s—in fact I think it is more than everyone else’s, more than what any of my peers could have managed—only it is not enough for me. You take the point. The world is always ready to be amazed, but the self, that lynx-eyed monitor, sees all the subterfuges, all the cut corners, and is not deceived.

  My peers? Did I say my peers? My peers are all dead.

  I did not like the look of Benny Grace. He had a distinctly adhesive aspect. At dinner he again weaseled his way into the seat beside me. Inge should have been sitting there, but was in the ladies’ room, crouched in a cubicle, sick and shaking after her public ordeal. However, not the most attentive lover could have been as irresistibly insinuating as Benny. Each time I chanced to look up from my plate those gleaming black eyes of his were fixed on me merrily, meaningly. Benny’s mode is that of a conductor bending and swaying with hooped arms out-thrust in the effort of scooping up from his orchestra greater and still greater surges of magnificent noise. Beyond the plate-glass wall a breeze silvered the grass and set the birch leaves madly fluttering. How melancholy, this evening that refused to end but kept drawing itself out, thinner and thinner, in the pale, northern light. Benny was leaning forward and over the voices of the others at the table was introducing himself, a hand held out at the end of an arm that would not fully straighten, so plumply packed was it into its sleeve. “I, of course,” he said, “know who you are.”

  Now he goes back to join my daughter at the window, overlooking the garden, and begins to explain to her my theory of infinities. Benny loves to explain. Petra is silent; she has heard it all before, but is too polite and well brought up not to give at least the impression of being entranced by novelty. I who now from this angle can no longer see her picture her instead, eyes lowered, arms tightly folded as if to prevent herself from flying apart in fragments, nodding and nodding like a child’s mechanical toy. When she makes herself attend like this, such seemingly is the intensity of her concentration that she takes on the appearance of being thoroughly frightened, of being frozen in fright— of being, in a word, petrified. All the same, it occurs to me that it is she of all the household who will suffer the least agitation at Benny’s coming, I am not sure why—why I think it so, I mean, though I do, or hope so, anyway. That must be the reason the rest of them left it to her to bring Benny up here, to view the remains: they too must have seen that she is not the one to be overwhelmed by him. She is a dear girl, but troubled, troubled. Did I do wrong by making her my confidante, my familiar, my misused muse, when the whim took me? From the day she was born I favoured her over my son, that poor epigone—he was here earlier, blubbering at my bedside—yet now I think I was perhaps as unfair to her as I was to him, in singling her out as I did. Ursula used to assure me, in her kindly way, that by my attentions to the girl I gave her confidence, strength, tenacity of purpose, and perhaps I did foster in her a smidgen of these qualities, which, heaven knows, she is so much in need of. But I am not persuaded. I have done many wrongs, to many people, and I fear that if—But ha! is this where I embark on the famous deathbed confession? With not a soul to hear it, save the gods, who do not have it in their power to absolve me? Let us eschew the unbosoming and quietly proceed, unforgiven.

  Over at the window Benny is telling Petra how her father as a youn
g man at his sums succeeded in turning so-called reality on its head. “What he did is not fully grasped or appreciated even yet,” he says, with large disdain—I picture him doing that circling motion he does with his right hand, winding the ratchet of his contempt. “There is only a few of us that understand.” I am impressed by the trill of earnestness in his tone. He is putting it on for Petra’s sake, to urge on her the glory of her pa’s greatest days, the light of which glory, she is to understand, reflects on him, my mentor and my pal. Yet in those days of glory it was always Benny who was the one who was least impressed. When the rest of the academy were struggling with the disgraceful strangeness of this or that of my hypotheses, adjusting their frock coats about them and gravely tugging at their beards, Benny, sitting way up in the middle of the farthest row of the lecture hall, would lean back slowly and hook his thumbs in his belt and stick out his little round belly and smile. Oh, that shiny-faced smile. Whatever I did, whatever I achieved, Benny gave it to be understood that he had long since anticipated it. Nothing of mine was novel to him, and never enough. And he was always there, when I stepped down from the lectern and the scribbled-on blackboard, always there but always content to hang back while the others pressed forward in murmurous admiration or, as often as not, in consternation and outrage, even fury. Benny could wait. He had another gesture of the hand that I remember: he would hold it out before him, palm forward, one finger lifted, like that conductor again, commanding a pianissimo, tilting his head to one side with eyelids lightly shut and his lips pursed, the man whom nothing could surprise, nothing daunt, nothing confound. Even when I laid my ladder against the mighty Christmas tree that all the others before me had put up over ages and popped the fairy on the topmost spike, whereupon her little wand lit up in what before had been the outer dark an endless forest of firs, hung with all manner of baubles, a densely wooded region the existence of which no one hitherto, including myself, had suspected—even then Benny was there to tell me with gently patronising scorn how foolish I had been to imagine that anything could be completed, I of all people, who knew far better than anyone that in the welter of realities that I had posited everything endlessly extends and unravels, world upon world. And it is true, of course—how could there be any finish to what I and a few others, a very few others, started? Was it that I thought to be the last man? he would enquire, and gaze at me in head-shaking, compassionate reproof, smiling. And he was right—look at me now, the last of myself, no more than that.