Anticipations

by Christopher Priest

  “Who is he?” Michael Divine asked.

  She had forgotten, so seldom did she have visitors in the day, to localize the sound.

  “Baptist Delmont, who promised us that time would stop. To his chagrin, it wouldn’t. Inertia, I guess.”

  “Never heard of him. Was he important?”

  So the lad would chatter. Then to oblige Joseph she would for a while chatter too. She touched a finger to HOLD, stopping time within the microcosm of the viewer. A plosive froze on Baptist Delmont’s lips.

  “He was representative. For my purposes that’s better than being important. There were hundreds of Baptists in those days, big and little, and tens of millions of believers. Workers stopped working, the crime rate rose, and the market dropped.”

  “Oh. Is that what you had in mind when you said ‘Fools’ ?” He caught exactly the tone she’d used.

  “Can anything so big really be foolish?” (Though it might have been at the back of her mind. What was society, after all, but one vast formicary? Black ants waging war on red ants. Milking aphids. Building tunnels.) “You see, it wasn’t just the zealots who felt the end was coming,” she added. “The jin de siécle had begun a century before. Some of the best minds of the time were convinced the end was at hand. If not of the world, then of history, of the West, of us.”

  She touched, illustratively, the cast-bronze first edition of Der Untergang des Abendlands that weighted down a sedimentary heap of her primary sources. From such muck as this, compacted for years by the pressure of thought, the rocks of history are made.

  Michael came up to the table and lifted the metal book in one hand. His movements were quick and crisp, but seen this close his flesh betrayed the cells’ inexorable attrition. Small fulciform pouches had begun to form beneath his eyes. Eyes of hazel, that shifted into an improbable red when the sunlight caught them at an oblique angle.

  “Well, in a way, wasn’t he right?” Michael said. “A lot of that did come to an end.”

  “Every age, however, feels that it’s a culmination, the tonic chord that resolves the imperfect progressions of the past.” I am doing this (she thought) for Joseph’s sake. Only for him.

  “I don’t feel that way. But maybe that’s because I’m a fossil.”

  For the first time since Joseph had brought him round that morning Veronica regarded Michael Divine with some interest. His remark indicated a degree of intelligence, a quickness, that she never took for granted in a mortal. Or, for that matter, in any of Joseph’s featherweight liebhabers.

  “A fossil? In the Toynbeean sense, perhaps. On the other hand, most immortals feel much the same. The past has lost its hold on all of us. It may be from a sense that the larger historical process has stopped. The red armies and the black armies have declared a truce. There’s no turnover in the personnel department. Kings don’t die. Did you know that Charles IV is still alive? He works at an undersea development station off the Japanese coast. Once a year he comes back to Hampton Court and entertains. So much for History with a capital H.”

  “Well, it hasn’t lost its hold on you, anyhow. Or on Joseph. He’s obsessed with the past.”

  “That’s because we both represent a kind of intermediate species. We were already adults before we began to suspect we were immortal. For a long time it was only a small doubt. Agerasia was no proof of immortality. In fact, it remains to be proved. But after a century or so, the conviction takes root anyhow. People younger than us grew up with that conviction. For them the present is absolutely discontinuous with the past. Even for Joseph and me the past that interests us has been the past we’ve lived through ourselves. This man, for instance—I might have seen his debut on N.B.C. If my mother hadn’t forbidden it.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Nine.”

  (Was he tallying it up? 9+2+97. Old, old, old.)

  “And what is his interest now?” He pointed at the pouting face of Baptist Delmont.

  “He’s one of my facts. Paul and I are putting together a kind of sequel to 2000+. About the decline of religion since 1900 till now. When the world refused to end, there was some disillusionment.”

  “Which you shared?”

  “Never completely, or I wouldn’t have become an historian. It’s a profession that still has more in common with theology than with science. It’s so easy to make patterns. I tend to confuse my patterns with the world’s facts. In that respect I probably preserve more illusions than you.”

  Michael blinked. In contrast with other movements of his face and body, there was a tiredness in this unconscious gesture that pointed to a possible retardation of the neural response. He was probably closer to forty than to thirty, which had been her first guess.

  “That would be difficult,” he said.

  The tonic chord. Neither felt any need to say more. Michael crossed the room to stare at his face in the empty aquarium. Veronica reanimated Baptist Delmont, but first she noted on her shorthand pad the tidy simile of the rocks and the muck.

  2 p.m.

  Time was tangible in this room not simply in the absolute sense that this was a very old room, but also in the way that whole eras of geology can be encapsulated in a single conglomerate rock. The constituent pebbles (the books, the photographs, the tins of film, the rusted Spandau, shelves and boxes of kitsch and curios) were cemented together by a dross adhesive of the contemporary: empty tetrahedrons of Lowenbrau, vases of dried and moulting blooms, her own filth-packets of wiring, cheeserinds, butts and ashes, Niobe’s kitty litter, cast-off clothes, the polychrome debris of her typed and scribbled notes.

  The world with metaphors. But dried up. Herself dried up, a sack of dust.

  A memory: cleaning out the East nth Street apartment, the half-empty box of Kotex in the cabinet underneath the sink in which the mice had made their comfy nest. She ought to have preserved that for her stock of souvenirs. It seemed unlikely that Oliver, to whom she’d mailed it in the same spirit she’d sent him cartoons clipped from magazines, would have saved it. (And if he had, how many light-years away would it be now?)

  If Michael Divine were forty, he would still be too young, by twenty years, to have been the son she’d never had.

  He was, distinctly, a handsome boy. A pleasure to look at. She looked at the small motions of enforced idleness, the restless flicker of his gaze, the quick snap of his wrist that made the face of his silver bracelet lie flat against the back of his hand.

  She bent down to take his hand in hers. “What does it say?”

  So wary of her he was: the young Adonis.

  “Your bracelet,” she explained. He let her lift his forearm to read the inscription. She laughed. She released him, and he leaned back in the chair, safe.

  “Beer? Coffee? Tea?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “You’ll excuse me if I make some for myself.” She went into the utility room, drew water from the tap, and lighted the Volkswagen. “A marvellously inconvenient place, this,” she commented from the doorway. “No room. Draughty in winter. And Paul knocks himself silly at least once a week on the rafters. How tall are you, Michael?”

  “Five foot eight.”

  “Then you’re safe.”

  Let him think so anyway.

  She held up two cups. “You’re sure?”

  “Well, if it’s already made . . .”

  “Draughty and—” Turning back to the console. “Oh, a dreadful nuisance, but it is stone-old. That’s its charm for a historian. The Gruppenbach Press used to be down on the ground floor, and the building goes back before even that.” She poured out the potion, gave him his cup.

  “Really?” he said, without interest.

  He took a sip, saw the stains all round the inside edge of the cup, grimaced. Veronica didn’t take much trouble with the decorative side of cleanliness.

  “Is it that bad?” she asked.

  “Bad? No, it’s delicious.”

  She laughed. “Not the coffee, Michael. Your life.”

&n
bsp; “Oh, that.”

  “Are you furious with Joseph?”

  “I’ve no cause to be angry with him. Only grateful. He must have told you how we met.”

  “No.” (Or if he had, she’d forgotten.)

  “Good. I won’t either. It was nasty and a bit ridiculous, but the upshot of it was that Joseph pretty much saved my life. I was going under and he put me on my feet. I am on my feet, still. For that I’m grateful, still.”

  “And do you love him, still?”

  “Do you?”

  Unfair.

  She shrugged off the question as though it were some bulky, unseasonable cardigan and sprawled on a pile of pillows on the floor. She could lose twenty pounds of her slipshod flesh in a month, if she made the effort. How long had it been since she was wholeheartedly physical?

  “Do you?” he insisted.

  “I was thinking. It’s a difficult question. I guess I’d have to say no. We’ve had our moments, of course. Most of them a long time ago. Nearly a century’s gone by since we met. I was his secretary at Freedom Mutual. He used to work in insurance then, you know, on the investment end.”

  “I know.”

  “I was twenty-one. Joseph was forty. He wasn’t getting on with his wife. It was exactly the sort of thing one used to see all the time on teevee. Had it been anything else, I wouldn’t have been able to follow the script. Life was so much simpler then. But you’ve probably heard the whole thing from Joseph already.”

  “Some of it, though never that much about you. About the wife.”

  “Hope?”

  “No, the other one. Emma?”

  An ant, or emmet, strayed across the cushion. Had she ever, in fact met Emma? She remembered her eyes, a deep brown, solemn with accusation, but no actual confrontation.

  “Emma. It was a tragic case. She killed herself, you know.”

  “How old was she?”

  “Forty. Maybe forty-one.”

  “Premature,” Michael said. “I give myself much longer than that.”

  “I should hope you do.” She squashed the ant, or emmet: HCOOH. “Are you going off with Joseph to London?”

  “Is that where he’s going? Then I’ll go there. At this point, you know, I’m just holding on and hoping. What else did he say?”

  “That your father is dying.”

  “Yes. He’s always dying. He’s fairly rich. He can afford doctors. He used to be quite rich, twenty years back, but geriatricians are expensive. I fairly hope he does die this time. Pd like there to be a little something left for me.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Eighty-one.”

  “My mother held out till she was eighty-eight. For the last five, six years she watched teevee from a stuffed recliner. Her mind went, and every time she exhaled a breath she made a sort of whistling sound. Quite unnerving. One summer there was a power failure that lasted twelve hours. We thought she was going to die with the set blank. She got all fussed. But Joseph came up with the most wonderful idea. He took the insides out of the set, and we took turns the rest of the day talking to her from inside. It was enormous fun.”

  “Did she die?”

  “Not then. A week later, during the Senate Committee hearings on contract labour. If you don’t want to go off to London right away, you can stay on here for a while. We have room.”

  “Wouldn’t Mr Regnier mind?”

  “Paul is very permissive. Besides, we have boxes of things that have to be catalogued, so you could pick up a bit of cash. Assuming you need some. It’s interesting work.”

  “I’ll consider it.”

  “And Joseph would probably be pleased, Not at being rid of you, mind. But to know you were in good hands.” She smiled a sly, nose-wrinkling, rabbity smile.

  And Michael (in his element again) leaned forward to take the taste of her mouth. She closed her eyes, and the waters of the past rippled over her lax flesh, the ghostly caresses of a hundred vanished lovers, mortal and immortal, men and women.

  “In a month or so, I could lose twenty pounds.”

  “I like you better this way,” he said. Then, as a machinist will begin as a matter of course to test the tolerances of a new piece of equipment, he added: “Sluttish.”

  “Ah!” It wasn’t necessary to say what it was she found attractive in him. Even so, she framed an ambiguous compliment: “Have you always been a grasshopper, Michael?”

  “How is that?”

  “A grasshopper, as opposed to an ant.”

  “No one wants to be an ant.”

  Once on the wall of one of those characterless European rooms she’d taken after Joseph had left her the second time she’d made a chart or model to represent the structure of her own life. Wishfully, she had gerrymandered the contours until its form had approximated a crystal structure. Si02. That mural was now painted over, or the wall demolished, but the map had remained with her, to become encrusted with baroque embellishments or reduced to the cubical simplicity of copper according as her life seemed to her various or plain.

  She rose to her feet, walked to the bookshelf, lifted the chunk of what she’d been told was Martian rock. “My valence is rising,” she said. But these little mystifications were no longer enough to put Michael off his form.

  “Because,” he said, pursuing the previous metaphor, “they get squashed.”

  Observant too. She began to see why Joseph had let it drag on so long.

  “Michael, zeig er mirjetzt die Zunge!”

  Before he could obey, the phone rang. It was Joseph. She localized the sound and hunched in front of the screen to keep him to herself.

  “What did he say?” Michael asked.

  “He’s on his way over.”

  They regarded each other closely. Already he’d sensed she was lying to him.

  3 p.m.

  Michael was in the alcove exploring a sonnet of drawers in a massy Teutonic catchall, emptiness rhyming to emptiness. (“You can see,” Veronica said, “I have nothing to hide.”) But the fifteenth drawer yielded a holly warping from a glorious garland of cloisonné and florentined gold.

  “And this?” he asked.

  A platoon of office workers in sad long-ago clothes arranged themselves in the (count them) three dimensions of a fluorescent space. This was to holography what tintypes were to photography—and conveyed by its stiffness a similar pathos.

  “The nothing in question,” she answered, and almost told him to put it back.

  “Which is you?”

  She pointed to two tiny blue eyes staring eighty-six years straight ahead at these hazel eyes that shifted to red. “I was in love then.”

  “That very moment? You don’t look it.” The comment and his inflection were mediate between cruelty and a finicking regard for the instant’s inner truth, a tone he must have picked up from Joseph, who was an enthusiast of the abstracter virtues: honesty, clarity, esprit, and whatever else might be ranged against Duty.

  Without quibbling, she took the holly from him and pressed it flat into its incongruously fine frame. Six of the twenty-six faces showed signs of age. Dorothy Jerrold, who’d been supervisor of the typing pool then, and Larry Noonan, who took over from Dorothy a few years later, and Mr Whewell, who read all the best-sellers, and Yolanda—or was it Eula?—Sloane. The names of the other two black women she’d forgotten. All six of them would be dead by now, and the building itself turned into some kind of dorm, or so she’d heard. The clouds roll by. She put the picture back where it belonged.

  Meanwhile he was into another drawer, poking at a pretty jumble of electronic junk resembling a spilled bracelet or the shingle of a beach. “I love other people’s souvenirs,” he said, “much more than my own. What else is there?”

  She told him about the Kotex box and the mice; then (he had discovered the motel ashtray) about her momentous weekend of adultery in the Florida Disneyland.

  “He took me to Belgium,” Michael said, not to be outdone.

  “He would. He loves anything wiederaufge
baut, not to say fake. He’s wild over what they’ve done to the Colosseum.”

  “Which is Greek for?”

  She thought. “Latin, isn’t it? For gigantic.”

  “No, before that, what he loves—Diderot’s cow?” Sounding the t.

  The latch began to lift and Michael’s hand, from gesturing airily, fell into Veronica’s lap.

  Paul came in, and with him Niobe.

  “Paul, this is Michael Divine.”

  Paul’s psyche was borne, smiling, toward the sofa by his dowdy soma, rather as the Baptist’s head might have been carried in to Herod by the axeman. Arriving, he bent down, lifted Michael’s hand and kissed it. (He was French.) “I’ve heard so much about you.”

  “No, Niobe!” Veronica called out to the very enceinte cat, who was furtively making her way underneath the Volkswagen. Then, to Paul: “Michael and I are waiting for Joseph. We thought, as you came in, that you might be he.”

  This was ironic. It was their understanding, Paul’s and Veronica’s, that he and Joseph were opposites something along the lines of Mind and Matter: Paul having been the Pygmalion to her Galatea, while Joseph was the bull to her Europa. There was a further irony in that they both knew Joseph had already left Tübingen.

  Michael’s antennae were out, however. He’d understood what had passed between them as clearly as if it had come in on his own police radio. “He’s left. Hasn’t he?”

  “Left?” Paul echoed. He was easily stared down. “Well, yes, he has. He was afraid, you see, that you might—as you’d followed him here—that you might follow him . . . away.”

  “Away where?”

  “He didn’t know. To a mountain perhaps. He wanted to unfuzzy his mind.”

  “He couldn’t tell me himself?”

  “Hasn’t he been trying to?” Veronica asked, taking over for Paul, who had no talent for confrontations.

  “So he just up and leaves all that here?”

  “All that” was the two polly suitcases with their sunbursts of cheap glitter. It had been their presence in the corner all through the afternoon that had allowed Michael to feel that Joseph was still safely shackled to him. But really! Would anyone who identified with his own suitcases have bought two such sleazy specimens as these?