Ghostwalk

by Rebecca Stott

  “How long?”

  “Could be a week or a month. Probably not any longer. And I’ve arranged for someone to keep an eye out for you.”

  “An eye on me? Why?”

  “Because you’re caught up in something complicated and it might be dangerous. I can’t explain because I’m not allowed to and because I can’t just give you bits—I’d have to explain it all.”

  “To do with Elizabeth’s manuscript?”

  “No, absolutely nothing to do with all of that. Something very un–seventeenth century. Now go to bed and don’t think about it. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  Don’t think about it? How was I supposed to do that? I had only just begun to think…as if for the first time.

  Eighteen

  I imagined you turning over the words you texted me as you wrote them, trying them on your tongue, writing them, erasing, and beginning again. Texts passed backwards and forwards between us, weaving through days and nights. Word associations, fragments, lines of poems. In that delicate exchange of words did you feel, as I did, the grinding of the stone, the disaggregation of stone to powder, the beginning of the process practised, rarefied, and perfected over hundreds of years in those hot Italian courtyards? I could feel the touch of white powder that day, smell the soda and the silica as I climbed into your bed that night and all those long nights that followed.

  The day after I saw the man in the garden, I placed myself behind the thickly book-lined and high-windowed walls of a great library, beyond his gaze. Your words reached me there, travelling invisibly through the Cambridge air from your laboratory to my library. Was that text an act of impetuosity or of calculation? My days were already bookended by your enigmatic messages, which would arrive in the morning as, I imagined, you made your way to the lab and in the evening as you took yourself to bed. The text that reached me in the library that day read: “Your presence is immanent today—you seem to be hanging in the air I walk through.”

  Hanging in your air. I thought of you typing out those words on your mobile phone in the shadowless halogen-lit white air of your lab. Different worlds, one infinitely measured, a world of tests and reports, the other, mine, seeping and borderless, a place of inferences, guesses, half-truths, and shadows. I thought of the phrases you used in your lab, those you had used to explain your work to me: terms like cognitive dysfunction, burst firing of brain cells, dampening of emotional responses, potentiation. Potentiation: to increase potency by using two or more drugs in combination. Potency. Potentiation. The vowels rise and fall. Yet in the hard white edges of your lab you could write that I seemed to be hanging in the air you walked through.

  I did not reply, could not reply to those words. Phrases came and went, reordered themselves. I wrote several and then erased them. I couldn’t think. I wanted to take your words in. How was I hanging? Like a spider on a single thread of its own making or like a woman hanged for a crime or like a torture victim or a slab of curing meat or, or, like mist rising from a river…? Hanging. Hanging on. Hanging in. Hanging fire. Hanging up.

  I wondered how far you would go with this most dangerous of risks, where the limits would be. I could feel limits here, gratefully cocooned in the University Library: beginnings and endings, chronologies, dates and facts and reference books, like consonants holding the vowels in place. But, like Elizabeth, you always had to push on through the limits, didn’t you, find what the library didn’t hold, knowledge that had never been framed in a paragraph or footnote. What else might you do if you were desperate enough? How far would we go—Elizabeth, Cameron, Isaac, and Lydia—to know, to really know, to bring the invisible into visibility? Faustus travelled to every corner of the globe in his hunger for knowledge. Alone with his Mephistopheles, tempted and desperate, he came to trade with spirits; he was prepared to trade his own soul for knowledge forbidden to the living.

  I packed up my books and papers and drove home along Queen’s Road, which they call the Backs, because it follows the river northwards on the outside of the city, curling up and around the colleges. On the other side of the river, through the trees to my right, the colleges were already flattening in the twilight against the sky. Trinity lay over there behind the trees with its secrets perfectly sealed away.

  “All you have to do is turn your phone off,” I said out loud to myself, over the sound of the radio. I turned the phone off, and at the next set of traffic lights I turned it on again. I could not sever the connection, not now. I was lost in a labyrinth and the phone, your voice, might be the only thread between me and the world outside. I might need it. Yes, I had come to need you—again. “Yes, everything is immanent now, translucent,” I wrote, framing another untruth. Send.

  And what did you believe? What were you hunting?

  “What are you working on now?” I’d asked while we were driving back from the restaurant on the coast on the night of my birthday—the 25th of October. You had to look at me then, decide whether my question was motivated by interest or politeness. You would not answer me until your gaze had determined the degree of integrity in my question.

  “Morazapine,” you said, just one word. And I thought of marzipan being rolled out on marble slabs, silken-wrapped packages of frankincense and myrrh carried in leather cases on the steaming sides of camels travelling through deserts under starlit skies. “Morazapine. It’s an antipsychotic drug,” you said, “that ameliorates severe cognitive dysfunction.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked, impatiently. “Translate.”

  “You don’t need me to translate, Lydia. OK. OK. It keeps people on the right side of sanity. The tests have been incredibly successful, but we don’t know how it works. We have an idea though.”

  “If it works, isn’t that enough?”

  You quoted Wittgenstein at me: “‘What we cannot talk about must be consigned to silence,’” you said. “It’s never enough to know that it works; we have to be able to say how it works, must raise that dripping thing from silence and name it, drag it into words. And with Morazapine, it’s…difficult…virtually impossible.”

  “And what’s your theory? What words have you gathered to explain it?”

  “My theory? Our theory; I work on a team. You really want to know?” You drew breath before you began, tripping out the words from your reports: “We think that Morazapine works by burst-firing a part of the brain called the locus coeruleus and that, in turn, creates noradrenergic projections to the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus…You asked,” you said, when I raised my eyebrows. “You did ask.”

  So strange to me, that language of yours, that language of disembodied brains, so that when you talked I pictured brains of different sizes, stripped of their species, faces, skulls, and sinews, lined up and attached to pumps of differing chemicals.

  “How do you go about proving something like that?” I asked. Outside, the moon silhouetted the trees along the sides of the road. There were rabbits in the hedgerows.

  “Thousands of small tests and experiments,” you said. “Some with people but mostly with rats. We use pumps planted inside the rats’ bodies to release the Morazapine in different doses, and then we test their reactions by using behavioural neuroscience to set up scores of different working-memory tasks using mazes. Then we use computerised confocal microscopes to watch what’s happening inside slices of their brain-stem cells as the different levels of chemical take effect.”

  What would my brain-stem slice have looked like in Mrs. Kite’s conservatory—hypnotised? I wondered. Would Richard Herring’s presence have been visible? What colour would it have been?

  I saw you there in the brilliant white of your lab surrounded by brains of rats and humans pumped with chemicals. You asking carefully phrased questions in those lab meetings with your precious team. You waking and walking in the night with more questions, infinite gradations of the first. Aggregate, disaggregate, transmutate. How far could a neuroscientist see? Rats and human brains reduced to brain-stem-coloured patterns on a screen—was
a slice of rat-brain colouration very different from that of a human when you were tracing the burst-firing patterns of your chemical? You would look at these, I knew, for hours at a time, investigating minute differences between one pattern and another, extrapolating, interpreting.

  “Surely,” I said, “your microscope can’t see everything that’s happening in the brain? Surely there’s more in heaven and earth than in your image analysis. How do you explain what happened to us, for instance, in those first months after we became lovers? Science can’t explain that.”

  “Oh that? The way we started doing the same things, unconsciously? The way we used to wake at exactly the same second every morning, miles apart, as if one of us was waking the other—even if there was a hundred miles between us? That weird synchronicity. The radar?”

  “Yes, and the way we used to see the same things with our eyes closed when we were making love, as if we’d become the same pair of eyes. How does a neuroscientist explain that?” As I was speaking, a white owl, disturbed by the car wheels, abandoned its carrion in the hedgerow and flew across the road in front of our car in a great unfurling blur of white against the night. You put your foot on the brake.

  “Jesus. Did you see its eyes? Look. You forget. As a neuroscientist I’m up against the edge of what’s known all the time. Every new thing we map or understand brings a whole new set of unknowns with it. Science is really unsettling. Take quantum mechanics. The theory was so weird that Schrödinger, one of the founders, famously said, ‘I don’t like it and I’m sorry I had anything to do with it.’ In the quantum world particles can be in two places at once, they disappear for no reason, and even act differently depending on whether we’re watching them or not.”

  “Like ghosts.”

  “Yes, and that weird connectedness we’ve always had is just a replay of one of the big mysteries in quantum mechanics. They—Schrödinger and Einstein and now Reznik, Ghosh, Vedral—they use the same word for it that you use: entanglement.”

  “Entanglement? You’re serious? Entanglement is a word used in quantum mechanics?”

  “You’ve not heard of it? Schrödinger called it the defining trait of quantum theory. Einstein called it spukhafte Fernwirkungen— spooky action at a distance. For him it was spooky. Spukhafte. Isn’t that a great word?”

  “And what does it mean?”

  “Well, what they discovered is easy enough to explain; explaining how it works is almost impossible.” As you concentrated, searching for translations and metaphors, the car slowed down to around fifty miles per hour on that narrow empty road heading west across the Fens. At midnight, I was now more awake than I had been all day. You began. “They discovered that when two subatomic particles—that’s photons, electrons, or qubits—collide or interact and then move apart, they retain a kind of connection even if they’re at opposite ends of the universe. They have become entangled.”

  “What kind of connection?”

  “It’s incredible. If one of them changes the direction of its spin, the other will do so too—simultaneously, even if they’re light-years apart, at opposite ends of the universe.”

  “How does that explain what happened to us?”

  “It doesn’t. At least not directly. But if quantum entanglement controls chemical processes, it must also have some effect on biological processes. When we talk about the chemistry between two people, aren’t we really talking about a kind of quantum entanglement?”

  “Two light particles mirroring each other’s movements at opposite sides of the universe. Yes, that’s beautiful. A kind of shadowing.”

  “And the weirdest thing of all is that some theoretical physicists are beginning to speculate that entanglement might happen between moments in time too.”

  “How?”

  “If moments in time become entangled in the same way that photons become entangled, then there might be strange connections between the past and the present, moments in time acting in the same way, like the particles; one moment turns one way, the other follows—shadowing. And that’s mind-blowing. See, I’m a rationalist who believes in a supernatural world, because I live in it. Science doesn’t reduce things, or explain mysteries away; it just discovers stranger and stranger things. And that rationalist once made love to a writer who absolutely didn’t believe in the supernatural, and they became—entangled. Now, how did that work?”

  “It didn’t work,” I said. “Don’t you remember?”

  “You remember what you like,” you said. “Your story about us will always be different from mine.”

  And Newton’s way? Like Elizabeth three hundred years later, Newton failed to separate the natural from the supernatural, the material world from the spiritual. Failed? No, he refused. He actually saw no separation. Those exact moments of judgement—when to stop a process of distillation, the reading of “signs,” the delicate blending of alchemical proportions, the separating out of light—he believed that all of these moments depended on the purity of the philosopher’s spirit, for the philosopher was like a glass through which the spirits passed. One couldn’t separate the experiment from the experimenter. Just as a glass that was flecked or bubbled or stained would always distort results, so would the spirit of the experimenter if it was stained or flecked. The philosopher must be a pure medium, as transparent as the glass of Murano. Yes, for Newton the material and the spiritual worlds were a continuum. Without purity and knowledge of what was invisible to others, an alchemist would be a mere chemist, a potion maker.

  Elizabeth, also a wanderer in the spirit world, saw her meagre reflection in the works of the irascible, hungry philosopher she pursued. And through her visits to Dilys Kite, Newton’s way became Elizabeth Vogelsang’s way—she came to believe that there was no distinction or binary between the knowable and the unknowable, just a spectrum, different ways of knowing, which, in the world in which she moved, constituted a range of legitimate and illegitimate knowledges. Newton the alchemist would not have laughed at the techniques of Mrs. Kite, reaching out to the spirit world for facts not recorded in this world. He would not have marvelled at the way in which spirits moved among the ornaments and lace of her conservatory. That was the point, wasn’t it? The unseen moved among the seen. Elizabeth understood Newton’s fascination with alchemy. Unlike Sam Westfall, she did not seek to make it disappear. She was an alchemist too. Like Newton, she had conversed with spirits so as to reach for a knowing that was beyond words. “’Tis strange,” says Banquo to Macbeth, that “to win us to our harm,/The instruments of darkness tell us truths,/Win us with honest trifles, to betray us/In deepest consequence.”

  Nineteen

  I poured myself a glass of wine and spread out all the pieces of Elizabeth’s evidence from the file that Dilys Kite had given me on the table in The Studio. Outside, a low autumn sun picked out single skeins of spiders’ webs floating across the garden, like the faintest tetherings upon the house, set loose, as if the house itself could be lifted by this perfect luminosity. Light pulsed around the spaces above me, moving like water. I had long since given up searching for the source of the water that seemed to be reflected across every wall, just as I had given up looking for the source of the sound of water dripping far off and echoing as if in ancient tombs. There was no water for light to reflect in The Studio. No sink left full and projected by sunlight onto a ceiling. Nothing. I had learned to live with the radiant poolings in The Studio, come to take them for granted. It had its fascinations—light that made fire, or water, or ovoid shapes that twisted and pulled themselves into crystalline jewelled angles, stretching, sharding, undulating, and yawning wide across those great white spaces.

  Was there a rational explanation to be scratched out of all these mirages, apparitions, lost files, and coincidences? If so, it would be found somewhere in The Alchemist or in the file Dilys had given me, or in the lost Vogelsang Papers. I looked at the mass of typewriting and newspaper print in Dilys’s file. Here it all was; somewhere here on this table. Elizabeth had formed th
e hypothesis that sat at the heart of her book with these materials.

  What had Elizabeth Vogelsang come to think? The papers in the file showed that she had formed several hypotheses in the last year of her research—nothing spelled out, just implied by the way she had grouped her source materials.

  The first hypothesis was easy. She believed that a sequence of four, perhaps five deaths that took place in seventeenth-century Cambridge, mostly in or near Trinity College in the 1660s, were connected and were suspicious. In this bundle of papers Elizabeth had included the photocopied accounts of two of the deaths from Alderman Newton’s diary, those of Greswold and Valentine, the two Trinity fellows who fell down Trinity staircases apparently drunk. The third death—Abraham Cowley, another Trinity fellow—took place in London and was also characterised by apparent intoxication; the fourth, also described by Alderman Newton—Richard Herring, by drowning—I had already read. Alderman Newton’s reports of the deaths of Greswold and Valentine did indeed show that he regarded them as suspicious, or at least to my mind:

  January 5th 1665: Thursday. This morning being a great frost Mr Greswold Master of Arts and Fellow of Trinity Coll in Cambr. fell downe the stayres wch are next the chappell north by the Kings gate, and with the fall was killed, being found dead there lyeing, (about 5 in the morning by the bed makers) and was cold and stiff, he had the key of the garden dore in his hand and lay with his head downwards at the feet of the stayres and his heels upwards upon the stayres, with his neck (as was supposed) choked with his high coller, some bloud had come out of his nose, being seene on his band. Humfry Prychard the coll porter lett him into the coll about 2 of the clock that morning and was supposed to have bin drinking somewhere, and having bin as was supposed through the garden at the house of easement at hys retourne goeing up the said stayres to his chamber fell downe and was killed as aforesaid. (p. 8)