by Ian Mcewan
Hubble was grand in conception, but the rescue operation was technologically sublime. Hundreds of space-walking hours, ten correcting mirrors placed around the rim of the faulty lens with inhuman precision, and down at control a Wagnerian-scale orchestra of scientists and computer power. Technically, it was more difficult than putting a man on the moon. The mistake was put right, the twelve-billion-year-old pictures came in true and sharp, the world forgot its scorn and marveled—for a day—then went about its business.
I worked without a break for two and a half hours. What bothered me that morning as I typed up my piece was a disquiet, a physical sensation I could not quite identify. There are certain mistakes that no quantity of astronauts can right. Like mine, yesterday. But what had I done, or not done? If it was guilt, where exactly did it begin? At the ropes under the balloon, letting go, afterward by the body, on the phone last night? The unease was on my skin and beyond. It was like the sensation of not having washed. But when I paused from my typing and thought the events through, guilt wasn’t it at all. I shook my head and typed faster. I don’t know how I was able to push back all thought of that late-night phone call. I managed to merge it with all the trouble of the day before. I suppose I was still in shock, I was trying to soothe myself by remaining busy.
I finished the piece, corrected it, printed it up, and faxed it to New York, five hours short of my deadline. I phoned the police station in Oxford, and after being transferred through three departments, I learned that there was to be an inquest into John Logan’s death, that the coroner’s court was likely to sit in six weeks’ time, and that we were all expected to attend.
I took a taxi to Soho to meet a radio producer who showed me into his office and told me he wanted me to do a program on supermarket vegetables. I said they weren’t my thing. Then the producer, whose name was Eric, surprised me by getting to his feet and making a passionate speech. He said that the demand for year-round snow peas, strawberries, and the like was wrecking the environments and local economies in various African countries. I said it was not my field, and I gave the names of some people he might try. And then, even though I barely knew him, or perhaps because of that, I returned the passion and gave him the full story. I couldn’t help myself. I had to be saying it to someone. Eric listened patiently, making appropriate sounds and shakes of his head but looking at me as though I were contaminated, the bearer into his office of a freshly mutated virus of ill fortune. I could have broken off, or made an artificial ending. I pressed on because I couldn’t stop. I was telling it for myself, and a goldfish would have served me as well as a producer. When I had done, he said his goodbyes hurriedly—he had another meeting, he’d be in touch with another idea for me—and as I stepped out into the filth of Meard Street I felt tainted. The unnamed sensation returned, this time in the form of a pricking along my nape and a rawness in my gut, which resolved itself, for the third time that day, into an unreliable urge to crap.
I spent the afternoon in the reading room of the London Library, looking up some of Darwin’s more obscure contemporaries. I wanted to write about the death of anecdote and narrative in science, my idea being that Darwin’s generation was the last to permit itself the luxury of storytelling in published articles. Here was a letter to Nature dated 1904, a contribution to a long-running correspondence about consciousness in animals, in particular whether higher mammals like dogs could be said to have awareness of the consequences of their actions. The writer, one Mr.——, had a close friend whose dog favored a particular comfortable chair near the library fire. Mr.—— witnessed an occasion after dinner when he and his friend had retired there for a glass of port. The dog was shooed from its chair and the master sat down in its place. After a minute or two sitting in contemplative silence by the fire, the dog went to the door and whined to be let out. Its master obligingly rose and crossed the room, whereupon the pooch darted back and took possession once more of the favored place. For a few seconds it wore about its muzzle a look of undisguised triumph.
The writer concluded that the dog must have had a plan, a sense of the future, which it attempted to shape by the practice of a deliberate deceit. And its pleasure in success must have been mediated by an act of memory. What I liked here was how the power and attractions of narrative had clouded judgment. By any standards of scientific inquiry, the story, however charming, was nonsense. No theory evinced, no terms defined, a meaningless sample of one, a laughable anthropomorphism. It was easy to construe the account in a way that would make it compatible with an automaton, or a creature doomed to inhabit a perpetual present: ousted from its chair, it takes the next best place, by the fire, where it basks (rather than schemes) until it becomes aware of a need to urinate, then goes to the door as it has been trained to do, suddenly notices that the prized position is vacant again, forgets for the moment the signal from its bladder, and returns to take possession, the look of triumph being nothing more than the immediate expression of pleasure, or a projection in the mind of the observer.
I myself was comfortable within a large, smooth-armed leather chair. In my line of vision were three other members, each with a book or magazine on his lap, and all three asleep. Outside, the raucous traffic in St. James’s Square, even the dispatch motorbikes, was soporific in the way that other people’s frantic motion can be. Indoors, the murmur of water along unseen ancient pipes and, nearer, a creaking of floorboards as someone, invisible behind the magazine rack, moved a couple of paces, paused for a minute or two, and then moved again. This sound, I realized in retrospect, had been perched on the outer edges of my awareness for almost half an hour. I wondered if I could reasonably ask this person to keep still, or suggest he take a pile of magazines and go and sit in silence. My tormentor stirred—four leisurely squeaking steps, and then there was peace. I tried to continue with Mr.—— and the mental capacity of dogs, but now I was distracted. When there was movement across the room, I made a point of not looking up from my page, even though I was taking nothing in. Then I gave way, and all I saw was a flash of a white shoe and something red and the closing of the sighing swing doors that led out of the reading room onto the stairs.
Now that the restless time-waster had left, I transferred my irritation to the management. The building was notorious for its noise, above all the buzzing fluorescent lighting in the stacks, which no one could fix. Perhaps I’d be happier at the Wellcome library. The science collection here was laughable. The assumption appeared to be that the world could be sufficiently understood through fictions, histories, and biographies. Did the scientific illiterates who ran this place, and who dared call themselves educated people, really believe that literature was the greatest intellectual achievement of our civilization?
This inner rant may have lasted for as long as two minutes. I was enclosed by it, invisible to myself. I came to by the simple assertion of a self-consciousness that even Mr.—— could not have claimed for his friend’s dog. It was, of course, not a squeaking floorboard or the library management that agitated me. It was my emotional condition, the mental-visceral state I had yet to understand. I sat back in my chair and gathered my notes. At that stage I still had not grasped the promptings of footwear and color. I stared at the page on my lap. The last words I had written before losing control of my thoughts had been “intentionality, intention, tries to assert control over the future.” These words referred to a dog when I wrote them, but rereading them now, I began to fret. I couldn’t find the word for what I felt. Unclean, contaminated, crazy, physical but somehow moral. It is clearly not true that without language there is no thought. I possessed a thought, a feeling, a sensation, and I was looking for its word. As guilt was to the past, so, what was it that stood in the same relation to the future? Intention? No, not influence over the future. Foreboding. Anxiety about, distaste for the future. Guilt and foreboding, bound by a line from past to future, pivoting in the present—the only moment it could be experienced. It wasn’t fear, exactly. Fear was too focused, it had an object. D
read was too strong. Fear of the future. Apprehension, then. Yes, there it was, approximately. It was apprehension.
In front of me the three sleepers did not stir. The swing doors had moved in diminishing pendulum movement, and now there was nothing but molecular reverberation, one step up from the imaginary. Who was the person who had just left? Why so suddenly? I stood up. It was apprehension, then. All day long I had been in this state. It was simple, it was a form of fear. A fear of outcomes. All day I’d been afraid. Was I so obtuse, not to know fear from the start? Wasn’t it an elemental emotion, along with disgust, surprise, anger, and elation, in Ekman’s celebrated cross-cultural study? Was not fear and the recognition of it in others associated with neural activity in the amygdala, sunk deep in the old mammalian part of our brains, from where it fired its instant responses? But my own response had not been instant. My fear had held a mask to its face. Pollution, confusion, gabbling. I was afraid of my fear, because I did not yet know the cause. I was scared of what it would do to me and what it would make me do. And I could not stop looking at the door.
It may have been an illusion caused by visual persistence, or a neurally tripped delay of perception, but it seemed to me that I was still slumped in my smooth leather chair staring at that door even while I was moving toward it. I took the broad red carpeted stairs two at a time, swung myself on the newel post round the half-landing, took the final flight in three strides, and burst into the clerkly, predigital calm of the booking and catalogue hall. I dodged past fellow members, past the suggestion book and the schoolboyish tangle of satchels and coats, through the main door, and out into the street. St. James’s Square was gridlocked, and empty of pedestrians. I was looking for a pair of white shoes, trainers with red laces. I threaded quickly among the jammed vehicles throbbing patiently. I knew exactly where I myself would have stood to keep the library doors covered: on the northeastern corner across from the old Libyan Embassy. As I went, I glanced to my left up Duke of York Street. The pavements were empty, the streets were full. Cars were our citizens now. I reached the corner, by the railings. There was no one, not even a drunk in the park. I stood there awhile, looking about me and getting my breath. I was right on the spot where the policewoman Yvonne Fletcher had been shot dead by a Libyan from a window across the road. At my feet was a little bunch of marigolds tied with wool, such as a child might bring. The jam jar they had arrived in had been knocked over and had a little water inside. Still glancing about me, I knelt and returned the flowers to the jar. I couldn’t help feeling as I pushed the jar closer to the railings, where it might escape being kicked over again, that it might bring me luck, or rather protection, and that on such hopeful acts of propitiation, fending off mad, wild, unpredictable forces, whole religions were founded, whole systems of thought unfurled.
Then I went back indoors to the reading room.
Five
I had a second meeting that day—I was on a jury judging a science book prize—and by the time I got home Clarissa had left to meet her brother. I needed to talk to her. The effort of appearing sane and judicious for three hours had rather unhinged me. In our comfortable, almost tasteful apartment, the familiar mass and tone of the rooms looked tighter, and somehow dusty. I made a gin and tonic and drank it by the answering machine. The last of the messages was a breathless pause followed by the rattle of a receiver being replaced. I had to talk to Clarissa about Parry. I had to tell her about his call the night before and how he had followed me into the library, and about this discomfort, this apprehension I had. I thought of going to find her in the restaurant, but I knew that by now her adulterous brother would have begun the relentless plainsong of the divorce novitiate—the pained self-advocacy that hymns the transmutations of love into hatred or indifference. Clarissa, who was fond of her sister-in-law, would be listening in shock.
To calm myself I turned to that evening clinic of referred pain, the TV news. Tonight, a mass grave in a wood in central Bosnia, a cancerous government minister with a love nest, the second day of a murder trial. What soothed me was the format’s familiarity: the warbeat music, the smooth and urgent tones of the presenter, the easeful truth that all misery was relative, then the final opiate, the weather. I returned to the kitchen to mix a second drink and sat with it at the kitchen table. If Parry had been trailing me all day, then he knew where I lived. If he hadn’t, then my mental state was very frail. But it wasn’t, fundamentally, and he had, and I had to think this through. I could put down his late-night call to stress and solitary drinking, but not if he had been following me about today. And I knew he had, because I had seen the white of his trainer and its red lace. Unless—and the habit of skepticism was proof of my sanity—unless the redness was imagined, or visually conflated. The library carpet, after all, was red. But I had seen the color woven into the glimpse of shoe. I had sensed him behind me even before I saw him. The unreliability of such intuition I was prepared to concede. But it was him. Like many people living a safe life, I immediately imagined the worst. What reason had I given him for murdering me? Did he think I had mocked his faith? Perhaps he had phoned again …
I picked up the cordless and dialed last number recall. The computerized female voice intoned an unfamiliar London number. I called it and listened and shook my head. However reasonable my suspicions, confirmation was still a surprise. Parry’s machine said, “Please leave your message after the tone. And may the Lord be with you.” It was him, and it was two sentences. That his faith should have such reach, into the shallows of his answering machine, into the angles of his prose. What had he meant when he said he felt it too? What did he want?
I looked toward the gin and decided against. A more immediate problem was how to spend the evening until Clarissa’s return. If I didn’t make conscious choices now, I knew I would brood and drink. I didn’t want to see friends, I had no need of entertainment, I wasn’t even hungry. Voids like these were familiar, and the only way across them was work. I went into my study, turned on the lights and the computer, and spread out my library notes. It was eight-fifteen. In three hours I could break the back of my piece on narrative in science. I already had the outlines of a theory—not one that I believed in, necessarily, but I could hang my piece around it. Propose it, evince the evidence, consider the objections, reassert it in conclusion. A narrative in itself—a little tired, perhaps, but it had served a thousand journalists before me.
Working was an evasion; I didn’t even doubt it at the time. I had no answers to my questions, and thinking would get me no further. My guess was that Clarissa would not be back before midnight, so I abandoned myself to my serious, flimsy argument. Within twenty minutes I had drifted into the desired state, the high-walled infinite prison of directed thought. It doesn’t always happen to me, and I was grateful that night. I didn’t have to defend myself against the usual flotsam—the scraps of recent memory, the tokens of things not done or ghostly wrecks of sexual longing. My beach was clean. I didn’t trick myself from my chair with promises of coffee, and despite the tonic I had no need to urinate.
It was the nineteenth-century culture of the amateur that nourished the anecdotal scientist. All those gentlemen without careers, those parsons with time to burn. Darwin himself, in pre-Beagle days, dreamed of a country living where he could pursue in peace his collector’s passion, and even in the life that genius and chance got him, Downe House was more parsonage than laboratory. The dominant artistic form was the novel, great sprawling narratives that not only charted private fates but made whole societies in mirror image and addressed the public issues of the day. Most educated people read contemporary novels. Storytelling was deep in the nineteenth-century soul.
Then two things happened. Science became more difficult, and it became professionalized. It moved into the universities; parsonical narratives gave way to hard-edged theories that could survive intact without experimental support and that had their own formal aesthetic. At the same time, in literature and in other arts, a newfangled modernism cel
ebrated formal, structural qualities, inner coherence, and self-reference. A priesthood guarded the temples of this difficult art against the trespasses of the common man.
Likewise in science. In physics, say, a small elite of European and American initiates accepted and acclaimed Einstein’s General Theory long before the confirming observational data were in. The Theory, which Einstein presented to the world in 1915 and ’16, made the proposition, offensive to common sense, that gravitation was simply an effect caused by the curvature of space-time wrought by matter and energy. It was predicted that light would be deflected by the gravitational field of the sun. An expedition had already been mounted to the Crimea to observe an eclipse in 1914 to test this out, but the war intervened. Another expedition set out in 1919 to two remote islands in the Atlantic. Confirmation was flashed around the world, but inaccurate or inconvenient data were overlooked in the desire to embrace the theory. More expeditions set out to observe eclipses and check Einstein’s predictions, in 1922 in Australia, in ’29 in Sumatra, in ’36 in the USSR, and in ’47 in Brazil. Not until the development of radio astronomy in the fifties was there incontrovertible experimental verification, but essentially these years of practical striving were irrelevant. The theory was already in the textbooks, from the twenties onward. Its integral power was so great, it was too beautiful to resist.