The Universe versus Alex Woods

by Extence, Gavin

  A few feet away from Kurt was the thing that surprised me the most, which was a very new, very shiny computer sitting on a desk next to a large, flatscreen monitor. For some reason, I’d assumed that I’d be using one of those ancient typewriting machines that they used to have years ago. But sometimes people have homes and possessions you don’t expect, and hobbies you can’t even imagine.

  It turned out that Mr Peterson’s hobby was writing letters to politicians and, occasionally, prisoners. He was in a special letter-writing club. You had to pay a monthly membership fee and then you got sent the club magazine, which was full of the names and addresses of people all over the world whom you might like to write to, even though most of them would never write back. The politicians were generally too busy or didn’t care for personal correspondence, and the prisoners weren’t often allowed to answer their mail. They were quite lucky that they were allowed to receive mail. Mr Peterson’s letter-writing club was called ‘Amnesty International’.

  At first, I was dubious that my mother would agree that writing letters to prisoners was morally instructive, but Mr Peterson, who was extremely crazy, insisted that it was. He told me that most of the prisoners we’d be writing to shouldn’t have been put in prison in the first place. They were good people who’d been locked away and denied their most basic human rights. They weren’t allowed to act according to their consciences or even to express their opinions without fear of persecution and physical reprisals – although Mr Peterson doubted very much that I could imagine what that was like. I told Mr Peterson that since I went to secondary school, I thought that I could imagine it fairly well. And as for the fact that most of the prisoners had been wrongly imprisoned – on spurious charges, without fair trial, or for crimes they probably didn’t commit – well, this was another thing I could sympathize with.

  I typed while Mr Peterson dictated, spelling out the names and places that were causing me trouble. But after a while, he told me that my typing sounded like a horse clattering over cobblestones, so he put on some music, which he said was a sherbet quintet. I didn’t know what this meant, and I didn’t ask. But the music was quite pleasant, and it didn’t have any singing, so it didn’t affect my concentration.

  We must have written five or six letters that afternoon. It turned out that there were a lot of people in the world who were being denied their basic human rights. We wrote to our local MP asking if he could raise in parliament the issue of British prisoners who were being held without trial in an American prison in Cuba, which was a large island in the Caribbean run by communists. We wrote to a judge in China asking for the immediate release of five men and women who’d been put in jail for protesting about their homes being destroyed to clear space for an Olympic stadium. And we wrote to the Governor of Nebraska to ask if he’d consider not executing one of the state’s prisoners, who’d been convicted of killing a police officer when he was eighteen years old. He was now thirty-two and there was no physical evidence linking him to the crime, just the testimony of two witnesses who’d later changed their stories. The state was planning to kill him by passing electricity through his body until his heart stopped beating. This was a very dramatic, if slightly messy, way of ending someone’s life. Most other states – even Texas – had now stopped using the electric chair as the default method of execution, but Nebraska still held on to its quaint, old-time values.

  Mr Peterson, it turned out, was against the possibly innocent being killed by the state. And he was also against the definitely guilty being killed by the state. He was a pacifist, which meant that he was against violence period. This information (which would have been extremely useful a week earlier) raised several questions in my head.

  ‘But what if you have to kill someone to stop him from killing other people?’ I asked. ‘What if it’s self-defence?’

  ‘I hardly think killing a man behind bars counts as self-defence, do you?’

  ‘No, but in general – what if it was real self-defence? What if someone was trying to kill you?’

  ‘I guess I’d have to die with the moral high ground.’

  I thought this was probably a joke, but I wasn’t certain.

  ‘I’d like to think I’m not capable of violence any more,’ Mr Peterson clarified, ‘no matter what the circumstances.’

  ‘Is that because of what happened to you in Vietnam?’ I asked. ‘You know, with your leg and everything?’

  ‘Hell, kid! You ask a lot of questions.’

  ‘You did want me to learn some things,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Didn’t your mother ever tell you that there’re some questions it’s not polite to ask?’

  ‘Yes,’ I admitted, ‘she has told me that.’

  ‘Well, I’d say that this is one of those questions, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  All the interesting questions seemed to fall into this category.

  ‘Mr Peterson,’ I said after a while, ‘I think I might probably be a pacifist too. I mean, I don’t think that people should fight – not in ninety-nine point nine per cent of circumstances, anyway.’

  ‘Good for you, kid. It’s important to have principles.’

  ‘It’s also because I don’t think I’m very good at fighting,’ I confessed.

  ‘Well, that’s okay too. It’s no crime not to be able to fight.’

  ‘Oh.’

  This was big news to me. In school, being good at fighting was generally seen as a positive attribute, like being good at sport.

  ‘But I think I might fight if there was absolutely no other choice,’ I added. ‘You know, like if someone was attacking Lucy.’

  ‘I don’t know who that is.’

  ‘Lucy’s our cat.’

  ‘Cute name.’

  ‘It’s short for Lucifer.’

  ‘Of course it is. Why would anyone want to attack your cat?’

  ‘It’s hypothetical. That means it’s just an example.’

  ‘I know what hypothetical means, kid.’

  ‘Oh. Well, anyway, Lucy’s pregnant at the moment, so she couldn’t run very fast if she had to escape from an enemy. And she’s not very good at hiding because she’s all white. She’s kind of luminous, even at night. That’s how she got her name. Lucifer means “the bringer of light”.’

  ‘I know. It’s also the name of the devil – you realize that, right?’

  ‘Yes, I realize that. But my mother has quite a lot of sympathy for the devil. She thinks he’s misunderstood. She says that there’s a certain balance in the cosmic order and that creation and destruction are really just two sides of the same coin.’

  ‘I’ll be honest, kid: your mother’s general outlook is a real head-fuck. I’m not sure I want to spend a whole lot of time trying to figure it out.’

  Mr Peterson, I’d noticed, wasn’t really one for monitoring his language.

  ‘She also says that sometimes it’s okay to be a rebel,’ I said. ‘She doesn’t think that God sounds like such a great boss. Not the way he’s presented in the Bible, anyway. She thinks that if she’d been an angel, she’d probably have quit too.’

  ‘Better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s actually a very good way of putting it, although my mother’s not too fussed about ruling either. She doesn’t like hierarchies – except in our family, where things are different. But, anyway, my point is that Lucy’s not evil. She’s just a cat. And if, hypothetically, someone were to attack her, then I’d probably have to step in. I think it’s probably okay to fight if you’re defending someone who’s in danger and can’t defend herself, don’t you?’

  ‘There’s an exception to any rule.’

  ‘So you’d stop being a pacifist if it was a last resort?’

  Mr Peterson knotted his brow for a while. ‘Listen, kid, morality’s not all black and white. There’re some very big grey areas. I think, from what you’ve been telling me, maybe your mom’d agree with that too.’

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nbsp; ‘I see,’ I said.

  And, in truth, I may be guilty of mashing together several different conversations here. It’s difficult to remember when and how everything was said. But, really, that’s not so important. The important thing is that in the course of the day, against all my expectations, my penance had stopped feeling like penance. Even though he was crazy, talking to Mr Peterson seemed to make a whole lot more sense than talking to my mother.

  Later on, after we’d finished writing our correspondence and Mr Peterson had gone outside for a herbal cigarette, I spent some time looking through the archive of letters on his computer, which was very large. This wasn’t snooping, because Mr Peterson had said that I should save and file the letters we’d written and had directed me to the relevant folder, and I figured that if he didn’t want me to look, then he obviously wouldn’t have done this. Also, I thought it would be morally instructive.

  Anyway, I checked to see how many letters there were in total – there were hundreds, all sorted into separate folders by year and month – read a handful with interesting-sounding titles and then closed the documents folder and switched off the monitor. Then I checked the bottom of the mouse, as was my habit whenever I used a new computer. It was a recent model with a red laser beam instead of a roller-ball, so there was no chance that it had been made by Robert Asquith’s Chinese peasants.

  Then I swivelled in the swivel chair for a bit.

  Halfway through a spin, I noticed a photograph on the wall near one of the tall bookcases. It was the only photo in the room. As far as I could work out, it might have been the only photo in the whole house. I went over for a closer look. This wasn’t snooping either. I was just curious.

  The photo showed a woman who looked a few years younger than my mother – maybe thirty at the very most. Her hair was cut short and she was wearing a black beret. She had her head tilted and was smiling impishly at the camera.

  ‘Is that your daughter?’ I asked politely when Mr Peterson came back into the room. At least, I thought I was being polite. But it turned out that this was not a good question to ask. I could tell that straight away. There was an atmosphere.

  I should explain here that although my mother had told me that Mr Peterson was ‘all alone in the world’, I thought she was referring only to his living arrangements and the recent death of his wife. I didn’t know that he literally had no other family anywhere. I was always very conscious of the fact that it was normal for people (other people) to have several generations of relatives scattered all over the county and country, and often abroad too. And the reason I didn’t associate the woman in the photograph with Mrs Peterson was that it was a million miles away from my mental picture of what Mrs Peterson should be like. It hadn’t occurred to me at this point that Mr and Mrs Peterson had probably been young once. Added to this, the photo really didn’t look like an old photo to me. With her short hair and tilted head, Mrs Peterson had a weirdly modern look about her.

  As it turned out, the photo had been taken in 1970 at an antiwar demonstration in Washington DC. This was a couple of years after Mr Peterson had returned from Vietnam with his crippled leg and Purple Heart, which was the medal awarded to American soldiers who injured themselves at work, and which Mr Peterson no longer had in his possession, since he’d thrown it into the Pacific Ocean from a cliff top in Oregon. Mrs Peterson, who wasn’t actually Mrs Peterson at the time, had been in the United States of America on a student visa. She was deported in 1971, and Mr Peterson decided to leave with her. He’d had enough of his country by then.

  The reason he chose to keep that photo – and only that photo – on display was this: that image was the exact opposite of his last memory of his wife – when she had lost all her hair and half her body weight and was dying in hospital. That photo was how he preferred to remember her.

  Also, while I’m explaining this background, I should add that Mrs Peterson couldn’t have children due to a problem with her fallopian tubes, which was another of the many reasons why my original question about the photograph had been such a bad one. But, of course, these were all things I found out much later on. At the time, Mr Peterson only told me that the photograph was of his wife, and then there was a kind of awkward silence during which I shuffled my feet and didn’t know what to say.

  This is the reason I ended up pulling a book from the bookcase. I felt like I needed something to occupy my hands and eyes.

  Unfortunately, my hands and eyes found themselves confronted by three sets of breasts on three nearly naked women. They were wearing very flimsy white gowns, mostly transparent. I went the approximate colour of a beetroot. My mother always told me that when it came to the naked human form, there was nothing to be scared or embarrassed about. But I wasn’t so sure. You could see their nipples.

  I averted my eyes a modest three inches to the north. The book was called The Sirens of Titan. It was one of Mr Peterson’s Kurt Vonnegut books, pulled from the third shelf of the bookcase, where there were at least fifteen or twenty others, all lined up in a neat, orderly row.

  ‘That’s a funny name for a book,’ I said with a gulp. ‘Are those women going to get arrested?’

  Mr Peterson didn’t know what the hell I was talking about.

  ‘They’re not wearing many clothes,’ I pointed out.

  ‘What’s your point?’ he asked.

  ‘So I thought maybe the sirens might be for them.’

  Mr Peterson frowned.

  ‘I think the police are allowed to arrest you for wearing too few clothes,’ I explained.

  Comprehension dawned on Mr Peterson’s face. ‘No, kid. Not sirens as in police sirens. Sirens as in Homer.’

  I frowned. ‘Simpson?’

  ‘The Odyssey!’

  I looked at him blankly. At some point in the last thirty seconds, we’d stopped speaking the same language.

  Mr Peterson sighed and rubbed his wrinkled forehead. ‘The Odyssey’s a very old Greek story by a very old Greek man called Homer. And in The Odyssey there are these very beautiful women called sirens who live on an island in the Mediterranean and cause shipwrecks. They sing an enchanting song which lures sailors to their doom.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘So the women are the sirens? And that’s why they’re not wearing very many clothes?’

  ‘Right. Except in Kurt Vonnegut’s book the sirens don’t live in the Mediterranean. They live on Titan, which is one of Saturn’s moons.’

  ‘Yes, I know that,’ I said. (I didn’t want Mr Peterson to think I was an idiot.) ‘It’s the second largest moon in the solar system, after Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon. It’s actually larger than Mercury, though not nearly so dense.’

  Mr Peterson frowned again and shook his head. ‘I guess these days school puts a big emphasis on the sciences instead of the arts, huh?’

  ‘No, not really. School puts a big emphasis on exam questions. Do sirens breathe methane?’

  ‘Methane . . . What in hell’re you talkin’ about, kid?’

  ‘Do they breathe methane – the sirens? It’s just that Titan’s lower atmosphere is mostly a mixture of nitrogen and methane, so some scientists think that if there’s life on Titan, it would have to run on methane rather than oxygen – or, more specifically, on the hydrogen in the methane. It couldn’t run on nitrogen because nitrogen’s inert.’

  ‘I don’t think the nature of the air’s ever discussed.’

  ‘Oh.’ I checked the inside cover. ‘It says that it was first published in 1959, and the Pioneer and Voyager missions didn’t reach Saturn until the late seventies and early eighties, so I suppose it’s likely that Kurt Vonnegut didn’t know all that much about the methane.’

  ‘The methane’s not important. That’s not what the book’s about. It’s a story, for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘Okay.’ I waited a few seconds. ‘So what’s the story about?’

  Mr Peterson exhaled slowly through his teeth. ‘It’s about a very rich man who goes to Mars and Mercury and Titan.’
r />   ‘I see. Is he an explorer?’

  ‘No, he’s the victim of a series of accidents.’

  My frown of concentration deepened. ‘That sounds a bit far-fetched. I don’t think you could accidentally visit all those planets.’

  ‘He accidentally joins the Martian army and then he gets shipwrecked – twice. First on Mercury, then on Titan.’

  ‘How does he accidentally join the Martian army? That sounds a bit far-fetched too.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter if it’s far-fetched. That’s beside the point. It’s satirical. Please tell me you understand what satire is?’

  ‘Is it like sarcasm but cleverer?’

  ‘No, not really. Look: this conversation could last for ever. Maybe you should just read the damn book?’

  ‘You’ll let me borrow it?’

  ‘That depends. Can you take care of it?’

  ‘I take care of all my books,’ I assured him.

  ‘Then you can borrow it. Hell, it’ll be a damn sight easier than standing here answerin’ questions all day!’

  ‘I am quite interested in space,’ I acknowledged.

  ‘No shit! Just don’t get your balls in a knot over the chemistry.’