by Hughes, Rhys
Wrather was not a religious man, at least no more than myself, but the strange simplicity of this chapel, its unambiguous mystery, induced in him an appropriate mood. We discussed a supreme being, solitary but perhaps not lonely, who had created everything, including feelings of isolation. We neither believed nor doubted the qualities of this deity, merely questioned what they were. Vastness in any category must be reduced to analogy, or no serious attempt to comprehend why it may never be properly understood can be made. I raised the subject of omniscience, the ability to know everything.
Smiling to himself, Wrather announced, “The shape that a person creates during their whole lifetime simply by moving: imagine its complexity! But the mind of God can grasp this figure as easily as a human can visualise a circle or a square. That is omniscience.”
I was too weary to nod my agreement. An abrupt tiredness had replaced my excitement. I stood and waited for him to recognise my condition, which bordered on paralysis. He stepped forward and the spell was broken. I was trying too hard to absorb the unnatural but not unwelcome ambience of my environment. I wondered if his assertion was original to him. From the way he winked in the magical gloom, I suspected not. We left the chapel and locked it behind us. I have never been back since, but we returned the key to its shelf. It is still there.
*
Shortly after this incident, Wrather was offered a position in a private university in Iráklion. He accepted less for reasons of an increased salary than the opportunity to escape our dismal climate. He preferred warmth to dripping eaves. Over there, it was possible to sleep on the roof under the stars. He welcomed this fact, though he had no intention of testing it. He did not want the fuss of a leaving party, so he deliberately argued with his colleagues during his final week. I was too busy to regret his departure. We had never been close friends. We had almost nothing in common.
My career remained undistinguished for the next ten years. I was neither satisfied nor bitter, but one morning I entered my office and found him sitting in my chair. He was engaged on a global lecture tour that included this college. He expressed disappointment that I was unaware of his schedule. I answered that I never took an interest in such events. In a nonchalant tone, he informed me of his importance. He had become famous in his field. Then with a false modesty that was unpalatable, he blushed.
“It was partly your doing,” he said. “The breakthrough is all mine, of course, but you provided the clue.”
“What have you discovered?” I asked.
He stood and gripped the edges of the desk. “The geometry of human morality. The shape a person makes over their entire lifetime determines the character of that person: good or evil.”
I spoke truthfully. “That is remarkable.”
“Indeed. The research involved was enormous. I selected people already renowned for travelling as my subjects. Even so, only those who had made records of their movements were of use. Precise data was often impossible to obtain. I could not hope to chart the exact shape of a lifetime without approximations. I settled for nodes at regular intervals along that figure. For instance, I might discover that Subject X had travelled from London to Buenos Aires and from there to Santiago, Bogotá, Kingston, Miami, Atlanta and New York. That shape is easily plotted. But it would be much more difficult to determine which streets in those cities had been walked down: which parks, theatres, shops and hotels had been visited. Those are the epicycles of the overall shape. The mind of God does not disregard them merely because they are insufferably small and complex.”
“There is no solution to that problem,” I said.
He chewed his lip. “But an attempt can be made to achieve greater accuracy. Perhaps Subject Y is more meticulous than X. He has detailed the streets and buildings. He has noted every room he has entered. But still the motions he made inside those rooms, the shapes created as he walked from one side to the other, are unknown. Even Subject Z who has recorded these tiny voyages from wall to wall, across landscapes of carpet and floorboard, cannot possibly have itemised the even smaller journeys through space of every muscle, the involuntary twitchings and tics during sleep.”
“A subject would have to be followed from birth to death,” I replied with a snort, “or tagged with electronic sensors.”
He grinned hugely. “That is exactly what will happen. For the meantime, my approximations must suffice. But the real revelation of my work is that behaviour is intimately linked with the geometrical qualities of the final shape. Good lives tend to have more curves; bad lives tend to have more corners. The weight of my evidence is substantial.”
“What will you do with such information?”
“That is the main purpose of my lecture tour. I propose to experiment on living subjects, men and women still in the act of creating their lifetime shapes. By analysing the part of the shape they have already made, it should be possible to extrapolate it into the future, to complete the figure and work out now whether the person is good or evil.”
I felt uneasy. “And what then?”
“The evil ones can be locked up before they do further damage.”
“Monstrous!” I exclaimed.
“Ah, you are worried about the ethical consequences of a flaw in my reasoning. That is understandable. The actual area covered by a subject is irrelevant. The outline is what matters, whether it encloses a single room or several continents. I am aware that errors might exist in my research, but I am prepared to take the risk.”
“For the benefit of the human race?”
“Absolutely. But now you must excuse me. I came to see you only to express my gratitude. A chance remark of yours inspired me to follow this line of investigation. Excuse also the pun. Would you like me to mention you as a footnote in my forthcoming book?”
I politely declined the offer.
He left my office with a swagger. I thought he was trying to insert as many curves into his walk as possible.
*
My career came to an end, gradually and naturally. I had always waited impatiently to turn into an old man and now my body and feelings were in fragile harmony. I remained aloof from society and its developments. Nobody troubled me at the college. The eaves continued to drip. The chapel remained unvisited. My memory of Wrather did not fade but it changed into something indistinguishable from the inanimate parts of the environment, the shadowed stones and smell of redundant varnish. I occasionally found traces of him in textbooks, the notes he had made in the margins.
It was my last day before retirement. I had not argued with my colleagues. A formal banquet awaited me in the refectory. As I hobbled across the lawns, I passed a figure hunched over the fountain. He was not drinking. He looked up and there was anguish in his face. His clothes were expensive but his gestures were poor. I paused and waited for him. When he approached, I warned him that my private world was sealed. I did not read newspapers. He nodded curtly. He seemed almost relieved that my reaction to his presence was so undramatic.
“I altered the workings of society,” he said.
I shrugged. The statement seemed ludicrous. “What of it?”
“The effects have not yet reached this remote campus in an isolated country. But they will. Much of the world now lives under radical laws. You know what I mean. People with suspicious shapes are incarcerated. The experiment began with the lower classes. It was a great success in Iráklion. So it spread in two ways: across the globe and up the social strata. The middle classes are currently the new subjects. Even academics are scheduled for inclusion in the project.”
“I have no opinion on this,” I responded.
He raised a feeble hand. “Wait! Last week I finally analysed my own shape. There was a surprise awaiting me. It was evil! My shape is evil. Do you understand what this means? If I am evil, then so are my deeds. What is my greatest deed, the one that defines my life? The creation of the scheme! The link between morality and geometry.”
“That link is therefore wrong?”
“Yes, because
it is evil. The scheme is bad. This suggests that innocent people have been imprisoned.”
“That must be a heavy psychological burden,” I said.
“Not that. Worse. I have no idea whether I should be distraught or merely bewildered. My efforts have all been in vain, but if the scheme is bad, and my system flawed, then I am not evil and the scheme is right, in which case my shape is bad, which means that the system is flawed and I am not evil and…”
I broke his sentence with a wave. “An endless loop.”
“And so I am bewildered.”
I rubbed my chin. “You seem to be trapped in a variant of the Liar Paradox. A man confesses that everything he says is a lie. Is he speaking the truth? If so, then he is lying about being a liar.”
“Epimenides invented that puzzle,” he sighed.
“Possibly,” I answered. “It has been attributed to many sources. It was even misquoted and misunderstood by St Paul in the Bible. The philosophical point was completely overlooked.”
Wrather smiled thinly. “I know. Titus 1:12. We no longer need the chapel, do we? But the question is this: do I feel depressed or not? I can’t work out my fate. There is no solution.”
“None,” I agreed. “Farewell.”
I left him standing there in the sweat of his own indefinable self. A loose thread from my shirt tickled the nape of my neck. I pulled it out and cast it from me. The wind, soft and damp, took it away and dropped it on the lowest step of the refectory building. There was noise and lights behind the door. I glanced down at the shape made by the thread. It was a series of complex loops. The outline of a single morning or minute for a man or woman. For myself, the shape of years. I have never seen Wrather since. I sit in my chair without a care or cosine or tangent in the whole world.
(2001)
The Innumerable Chambers of the Heart
As she lay awake one night, Viviana suddenly realised that the tapping noises inside her radiator were deliberate messages. For several weeks she had assumed they were the products of unsatisfactory plumbing. Everything in the apartment creaked or gurgled or found some other means of audible protest. Now she attempted to make sense of the code. It was simple enough, for each letter of the alphabet was represented by a different rhythm. With short sequences of notes clustered into words, somebody was hoping to establish contact in this vast labyrinth of loneliness. There was desperation in the plea, but also, strangely, an element of humour.
The apartment block was the largest in existence. It dominated the eastern horizon of the city and blotted out the dawn. Not even the architects knew how many rooms it contained. Rival firms had worked independently on the designs, which were finally superimposed on each other and constructed simultaneously. It was still a mystery whether this had been a mistake or not. The geometry of each floor was confusing and inhuman. Passages intersected at unlikely angles. There were stairways that ended in blank walls. The exploration of the entire structure had never been achieved by any individual, though several had vanished into unknown volumes in the undertaking.
The authorities had moved the inhabitants of the central slums into the block in a single night. This difficult operation was illuminated by floodlights suspended from cranes. There had been a war. The residential areas were smashed and unsafe. The people converged on the gargantuan building, invading its emptiness and filling it with their own little voids, the dead emotions inside them. As they selected their rooms at random and switched on the lights, the round windows formed a growing constellation on the immense façade. But this pattern became mundane as it became more regular. None of the countless glass circles displayed any variation of brightness or colour.
Eventually the monotony was broken as the residents made efforts to individualise their apartments. Lampshades or curtains softened the glare as perceived from outside. Plants on windowsills filtered light with their leaves and tinged it green. Viviana had arranged mirrors in her room and in the corridors outside in a manner that uniquely personalised her own space. She had discovered an obscure skylight at the rear of the building, at the end of a passage that led nowhere. Her mirrors reflected and bounced the sunrise through the width of the hive and out again through her window.
Dawn now became a solitary red ray that slanted from her room down into the rubble of the city. She guided this beam with her silvered angles and her new duty made her feel special, but it did not cure the isolation. Only the messages from her radiator managed that. Somebody was knocking on the pipes in another room, hoping the sound would be carried along the hidden network of gargling conduits and deciphered by a potential friend. It was impossible to judge how far these rhythms had travelled to reach her, how many bends they had negotiated, how many times they had split along the branching pipes, rejoining at further junctions and finally bursting out with all the implacable joy of an acoustical trick in her tiny domain.
The messages were sent by a man. Viviana was certain of that even before she taught herself to interpret them. It should not really matter, but it was a relief. They were tinged with passion, subtle but powerful, in the same way that a casual shrug is adulterated with only a twinge of despair. The sender did not have professional poetry in his heart, for his phrases were often awkward, but he was definitely reaching out for a woman and her tenderness. She listened for several days before responding. The workmen who had constructed the apartments had lost many tools in the various rooms. At the back of a fitted cupboard, she found a heavy spanner. She swung it thoughtfully in her hand for a minute, aware she was about to cross a threshold. Then she struck her radiator sharply and waited. Her ears tried to follow the sound along the pipes, but they could not twist and diverge at such speed and they returned to the sides of her head.
The ensuing pause seemed to last longer than her senses could bear, but this was an illusion, for she remained hunched over the radiator. Then the single note returned. It was a replica of her own message, one of the simplest greetings. Are you there? Suddenly his poetry had been reduced to something plainer, more real, human and intense. Once again she wielded the spanner. Who are you? And now her heart, not her ears, raced along those pipes, as if her loneliness had fallen into arteries and veins to be dispersed throughout the organism of the building. But there was no real warmth in the arcane spaces that contained all the plumbing. Despite the lagging, those conduits were always chill, a fixed web that washed itself from the inside as part of its purpose, a solid representation of the cold water, its direction and destination.
Where are you? I am Viviana.
Yes, you are. That must be so. I am here.
You might be anywhere.
Same as you. I am looking for someone. For you.
For me? The search is over now.
Perhaps it is. Yes, it is.
This relationship of words without mouths, hopes without shapes, began to deepen almost immediately. She felt comfortable with this secret man, with his responses to her questions, sentiments and interests. They were in phase both intellectually and emotionally. It is impossible to fall in love at a distance: this fact is common knowledge. But what is the maximum range at which the real feeling can still work? After all, he might be in the adjacent room, or in one of the other apartments along her corridor. Perhaps their messages took an unnecessarily long route through the monstrous building simply to span a few metres of opacity, in the same way that an explorer at the mouth of a labyrinth may be separated from its terminal chamber by a single wall. But the loops and twists are not wasted if they are negotiated successfully, whether by foot or word.
Viviana did not fully believe the force of love is directly related to linear distance, but if this man was housed in her vicinity it would make the whole process both less and more mysterious. Less because it is conventional for love to develop among couples who are in physical proximity. More because the improbable nature of their meeting, via the plumbing instead of face to face in the corridor, indicated that destiny was a reliable phenomenon. Despite the ambig
uity of the magic, she was satisfied. But she doubted he was close. The apartment block was simply too huge. Almost certainly he was far away, eclipsed by thousands of cells of huddled families. She suggested that they try to meet, and he agreed.
The difficulties inherent in this enterprise were beyond the dreams of the architects of the complex. Her apartment was one level beneath the highest floor, on the left or northern edge of the façade. She knew where she lived, but he could not even guess his own position. There were no windows in his room and no skylights in his ceiling. He often heard footfalls above and below his cell, and other human sounds behind his three walls. His door opened onto a narrow corridor that slanted steeply upwards and joined a wider passage. From this information, Viviana wondered if he dwelled near the very centre of the building. It was feasible. There were no obvious landmarks that they could use to pinpoint his location in relation to her own room. And there were no maps of the maze.
Once they tried to meet by leaving their rooms simultaneously and walking towards the heart of the block at a specified rate. The moment they moved from their radiators, all contact was lost. The unreasonable corridors led her past closed shops to a place she had no desire to visit, a courtyard filled with deserted stone benches and a crumbling fountain. This was where all senses of desolation came to rest. She was near the roof, because she heard the sour rain striking the ceiling, which was high in darkness. She had planned to descend, because the core of the hive lay below her original point, but the passages had ushered her their own way. Somehow she managed to retrace her steps, shaking with exhausted frustration as she collapsed on her bed.