The Brooke-Rose Omnibus

by Brooke-Rose, Christine

  –If you had married me, Liz, and after all we did seriously consider it, you would have seen Larry again tonight.

  –Yes. Quite right. Those eyes of yours, Larry. They’d look right into me as if they could see something and yet saw nothing. I came to think I had nothing there to see, and of course perhaps I haven’t.

  –Nonsense, Liz. Don’t run yourself down so much.

  –You always did do that, didn’t you, Elizabeth.

  –So you really do remember something of me.

  –It used to exasperate me, if only as a slur on my judgment. Because, as you wisely remind me, I loved you. I used to tell you, people will take you at your own estimation, they always do. As in the end I did.

  She settles into a gentler radiation from the sofa, the lines less angular, more curving, trebling each other round the kind explanation dropped, lassoing out to catch other associations, memories perhaps but held in tremulous space by a calmer control of things, such as Tell-Star saying your letter, Larry, it had me quite worried.

  –My letter?

  The small spidery handwriting fills the page at wide impersonal intervals like an equation worked down to the very end of some unlikely resolution as if x could really equal y in the unfamiliar context of the door with no doubt a round window in it behind which a secretary has typed some sort of reply. It sounded so crazy. But then, scientists.

  –I don’t call myself a scientist.

  –Yes, well, we’ll talk about that. I have an idea I’d like to discuss with you.

  –I didn’t come to discuss ideas, Telford. I came to talk about, well, to ask, but now, with Elizabeth here, quite a lot comes back. I just want to explain –

  –You don’t have to explain. Like she said, I loved you, Larry. But anyway we’ll have plenty of time. I’ve taken tomorrow off.

  –Well, I’d better go, I’ve barged in long enough.

  –Elizabeth. I’d like to see you again. I mean, could you lunch with me tomorrow?

  –Not if you want to persuade me against divorce. I’ve thought about it for a long time, you know.

  –Well, we do have other things to talk about. And we could forget Stance altogether, I wouldn’t exactly mind.

  –Stance?

  –I mean Stanley.

  –Oh yes. All right. Why not? Thanks, I’d like to. But don’t think that I want, I mean, that I’ll try to –

  –I don’t think anything derogatory of you, Elizabeth, not until you’ve proved it, so don’t think it of yourself, or in no time at all you will have proved it.

  –Yes. Yes. Quite right. Thank you. Ring me tomorrow before ten at my hotel, I expect you two want to talk. Goodbye. Don’t see me out, Telford. Thanks, and she jerks her once again angular attitude out of the rectilinear room from left to right.

  –Well, Telford.

  –Well, Larry old twin. Do you remember our joint birthday party, champagne popping on the punts, just before our vivas?

  –Bang in the middle of Gemini, yes. We drank to our astrological future as humanists.

  –You didn’t know you’d turn from physics to medicine, then, and find yourself in the end among mad star-gazers,

  –Mad among star-gazers, Telford.

  –I wouldn’t say that, Larry, no. But I have an idea.

  The amphitheatre grows immense, a spiralling galaxy of faces, bright cepheids, Blue Giants at the outer rim, roaring incessant noise in collision with other galaxies unseen, unheard by the Red Giants towards the centre who carry on regardless, expanding, heating up inside but cooling their outer layers as their luminosity increases, moving from the main sequence, unstable, pulsating, then contracting, fading, cooling, entering on their final stage as White Dwarfs of small mass and high density, each grain of dust weighing a ton no doubt and radiating faintly, unless filaments of gas perhaps, beginning a concentration that may ultimately become something. But the noise drowns the words inside the spheric globe, for sound-waves require matter and can’t get through the empty space immediately around. The microphone has died, the acoustics cork the space, or the noise from the collisions at the outer rim drowns all the words, the complex inscriptions, the parabolic gestures that create situations, the angular attitudes that send things off into elliptical orbits until the crowd yells, hisses, stamps its feet. Then the bull comes in, lunges and hoofs the dust, plunges his horn into the attitudes and contortions and tosses them at the crowd that roars, good people. Well, now that you’ve made your gesture I hope it didn’t hurt. Sit on you? My dear good man, why should I sit on you?

  Inside the rectangle the face of Tell-Star peers through the horizontal lines of a harp recumbent plucked in quick arpeggios. How do you feel, he says.

  –Terrible. Why did you have to do this to me?

  –I didn’t do anything, Larry.

  –No. You left me to it.

  –You had a nightmare. I came down to see.

  –I had an omen, Really.

  –Why don’t you tell me about it?

  –I think that I shall die, quite soon. I wish I could, Really, once and for all.

  –We all do that, at times.

  –I thought I never dreamt. But recently, I do, now and again.

  –It doesn’t necessarily mean what you think, Larry, you of all people should know that.

  He walks to the long table behind the sofa for cigarettes and the rectilinear room fills with smoke wisps, filaments of gas, voices that swim for dear life and noise, the vibrant hum of waves merging, doubling, trebling each other and overlapping, expanding, bursting the walls, the street, the entire sky in ultra-violet light when before dawn the degree of ionization in the lower atmosphere has fallen off and the higher layer then reflects, something at least. A little consciousness can do a lot, although in this type of communication the echo decreases with the fourth power of the distance between two bodies. But even if you could see an atom coming into existence the problem would remain as to the forces which had created it. And besides, the same principle of indeterminacy applies, compared, I mean, with the determinacy in regard to large numbers of atoms. The moment you try to find out its condition the very process of investigation must disturb it. So with ideas and people, compared to mass ideas, mass people. And causes. And so, of course, with the primeval atom. You couldn’t inquire as to what made it, or how it disintegrated, even if the time and space hadn’t gone for ever. Let’s put it this way, Laurence, we merely pierce the apple with a pin. And yet we try to live without causality, she said, who said, oh, I don’t know, the fat woman, the professor or someone, pretending that each moment has its own separateness, that anyone might come or go in that moment like an electron, why, you might as well ask for the moon. I know you didn’t. Or the noise either. Tell me one thing, the noise around the orbits, Telford, in Cambridge, at twenty-four, did I like noise? What sort of noise, Larry? Well, cars and motorbikes. And jazz, that sort of thing. Surely I didn’t, I collected silences.

  –I think perhaps you liked the thunder of ambition inside yourself, and sought silence to hear it.

  –Ambition! Me? I’ve never had ambition. I don’t care. I just don’t care.

  –Not now. But you did then. Oh, I don’t mean mere ambition to get to the top, I know the staleness of that. No. You couldn’t bear the idea of becoming, perhaps, a second-rate physicist. So you chose something easier.

  –Easier!

  –You know the world of doctors, Larry. As in any world, only a few have full capacity, top rank. The rest, I shudder to think, get by on average intake. But people don’t know that, and trust them absolutely, or else believe it matters less in that field than in what they call real science. Pure science to you, a purist at heart, Larry. The naked ambition to break barriers, find new laws, advance things, not yourself.

  –And things make a hell of a noise, a sort of vibrant hum. Or do I mean people? The hum returns, the filaments of gas, the smoke wisps intertwining voices that swim for dear life saying Hot Spots, Uninhibit, One-shot-trigger, time he
als and things like that or how did it feel exactly query what did the joke fat woman unjoke say did you die laughing unquery if I can get a dial in edgeways how come you said nothing saw nothing of the slightest interest to anyone bracket I mean the world of course good people close bracket comment no wonder you wanted to come back uncomment query did you want to come back repeat quote mister Lazarus unquote shout no unshout he says quote you ask all the wrong questions and so of course unquote like eight hundred million miles of no story in the psychotic handwriting of the spheres on a small screen unless perhaps in the last sentence the leeches cling in the chilly depth of darkness and suck out the red corpuscles leaving only the white, up once a minute to breathe, hold it, your breath I mean, and read the inscriptions, the bright imperatives in the ultra-violet light, up once a decade or so, ah, breathe away, so how do you like it, Larry?

  –What?

  –My idea!

  –I feel very tired, Really, can’t it wait?

  –No you don’t. You feel elated. I choose my time well. I have great expertise in these matters. Of course you must think it over, but I’d like your first reaction, now, at once, just as a matter of personal interest, you know, I won’t hold you to it.

  –Hold me to what?

  He gets up and walks to the long table behind the sofa for cigarettes or something.

  –You haven’t heard a word I said, have you?

  –I don’t know, Telford. I thought I did all the talking around here. For once.

  –You did. Indeed you did. Look, I’ll make some coffee. Relax.

  The room empties of waves and undulations that treble each other as on a map of ocean depths disturbing the horizontal lines as they pass like arpeggios over a harp recumbent plucked. The dark stares back its giant starless coalsack that radiates nothing. Something however creates the wavering outlines and if not the eyes then some faint memory, surely, behind the eyes that close to avoid the issue of their death and amazing recovery. The closing resolves the optical image like a change of lenses and the silence comes, filling the room, the house, the street, the entire sky with planets unless moons perhaps hanging on a shaft of light that widens into a voice now, here, that’ll perk you up, cigarettes in front of you. Well now. Listen, look. Think about what you see. I prefer to close my eyes. Ah, but you didn’t close your eyes tonight, Larry. Listen, look. You remember in my letter I said I had an idea to discuss with you. Well, it has grown into a great big vibrant hum inside me, as you would say, a thing I must advance, a barrier I must break. I’ve thought a lot about what you’ve told me. And I want to do a programme on it.

  –But, but, Telford, what have I told you?

  –Everything.

  –What!

  –Everything I need to know.

  –But how? I don’t know it myself.

  –Well, you’ve talked enough. About the Big Bang and the Steady State, the beginning of determinacy with space and time –

  –Oh. That.

  –And indeterminacy and madness and the exhaustion of infinite distances. In brief, your particular world of scientists, as seen by an informed but uninvolved intelligence. Just what I want.

  –Oh, for heaven’s sake.

  –Well–

  –You can’t. You can’t appropriate this – this – no, I won’t let you.

  –Look, Larry. I told you we’d done a programme on the Ozma Project at Green Bank. And we may do a follow-up on the work at your place, which ties up. But radio-astronomy, however fascinating, makes bad television, let’s face it. You can’t photograph means of communication that work by magnetic impulses, except as they appear on dials, and the viewer soon gets bored with dials and wavy lines and mathematical formulae. A few interviews can pep it up, but not much more. Now this idea of mine –

  –But what idea, Telford?

  –In simple words, Larry, I want to do a programme, or even a series, on the mental health of scientists. Naturally I shall concentrate mostly on atomic scientists. But this ties up, in a way, and I want the astrophysicist’s view on radiation, on explosions of bombs in outer space, on hydrogen explosions as possible causes of abnormally strong radio sources, colliding galaxies and so forth, and their view, too, on the mental health of atomic scientists. Above all your view, as an expert, of their own mental health.

  –I won’t associate my name with it. Or my university.

  –Well of course, you have to appear anonymously anyway. I could, if you insist, do it with an actor speaking your words. But I would rather have your image in personal interview, for conviction, rather than just your words on the sound-track.

  –What words?

  –All your words, Larry. All that you’ve told me tonight. Your story. I have it here on tape.

  The room goes darkly deep inside, with small square marble tables good to write on some story of death and amazing recovery, but the patterns in the marble make no sense for time has chipped the edges and all the laws get broken. The dark room fills with people who come and go or pretend to, good people, meeting professional friends who can count and therefore know them better than friends who profess only friendship but can’t read inscriptions. Hands shake, smoke wisps and voices swim for dear life. The room seems huge for the edge of the town, or perhaps the centre lies at the circumference, bright cepheids, Blue Giants that tremble on a screen with the horizontal lines of a plucked harp recumbent, so that the voices swim along the streets like neural cells in mad morse along nerve-fibres, teleprinting their messages from Base Headquarters somewhere on the left focus of an ellipse because someone has cleared the channels, good boy, he didn’t cry get off, don’t touch me, I won’t let you, I won’t.

  –Larry, you have let me. By telling me.

  –Pooh. A journalist.

  –A friend, Larry. A daily friend from the sum of all your days. You’ve kept your promise.

  –What! Telford, what exactly have I told you?

  –Like I said, all I want, no more.

  –I have a story but no name.

  –Well, I can’t use your name anyway. But I accept the reality of your story –

  –But which story, for heaven’s sake, surely you can let me hear the tape?

  –Not now. It needs editing. It wouldn’t help you, Larry, the incoherence –

  –Did I mention … something, anything, about …

  –Something of this, something of that. You spoke confusedly about many things, and ideas, and people. That doesn’t matter. I’ll sort it out and make some sort of sense of it, take what I want, it depends on what I get elsewhere, you see, about which I have only a hazy notion, but I’ll mix you in, don’t worry. I’ll make the film in such a way that others will accept it.

  –Oh yes. The law of probability as to that works out at a thousand million to one. So what will you do? You’ll use illusion, camera-tricks and stand-ins.

  –I’d rather not use a stand-in for you, Larry.

  –You ask all the wrong questions, you get the wrong answers, the wrong picture made of itsy bits of nothing … What promise, anyway?

  –Oh, a promise we made long ago, which you seem to have forgotten, oddly enough, to meet again at double our ages and …

  –and what, have a cosy chat, about life and love, truth, beauty and goodness or else, what, our achievements?

  –and … expose ourselves.

  –I see. And what have you exposed?

  –A traitor, Larry. The Judas in all real friendship, who betrays in order to understand, or perhaps because he understands.

  –Ah, what good listeners trained interviewers make. They probe, they pry and all the time they merely prepare traps, to show their superiority over something or other.

  –Like psychiatrists?

  –But then, nobody really listens.

  –I really listened, Larry, believe me.

  –Yes, doubly, with your inner and your outer ears, or so I thought. But your inner ears stood in fact outside yourself, a mere mechanical device lurking behind the sofa, wit
h useful gaseous matter between us to propagate and distort the sound-waves travelling through it and upset the definition. I thought the acoustics of friendship corked the space around us, that the giant ear of the world had died, that I consisted of no matter and spoke backwards in silent bubbles up the time-scale as in a vacuum created by my trust.

  –In speaking to me, Larry, you spoke to the world, your other self, your twin. And the world, consists of people. Each with a love of something, a fear of the unknown, however buried –

  –Goodbye. Tell-Star.

  The conversation bleeps at a non-natural impulse along the nerve fibres, blood-vessels, muscle spindles of the empty city, through to the Whale and River constellations and perhaps getting a reply if any intelligent life exists or has existed five hundred thousand light-years ago, although a blockage occurs when waves requiring matter to propagate themselves find none. Something however creates the wavering outlines that make the nervous handwriting across the dials and if not the eyes then some faint memory, surely, behind the eyes, filaments of gas in violent motion or extragalactic nebulae in collision. But if we survey the space around our galaxy, Ladies and Gentlemen, we find it very empty, for no other comes closer than a million light-years or so, making the chances of collision fairly negligible. Yet great clusters occur, moving at over two thousand miles per second, so that most of the noise must come from colliding galaxies. Some argue, nevertheless, that parts of a divided nucleus recede from one another at great speed, the violent processes involving collision of interstellar matter and ejection of high energy particles from the atmosphere of young stars, that cause the nervous handwriting across the dials in bleeping peaks and plains, letters to citizens in bright imperatives, drink infra-red, do not spit gamma-rays and see the ungrown foetus of men’s love inside their atmospheric density, say it with smells of primitive noises from their deepest entrails if any, for we make the bumps as we go along with a great waste of horsepower more and more disorganized and no control-panel, only the little orange lights that flicker Uninhibit, Next Instruction, Pot Drawer and things like that, red, amber, green, bright cepheids, Blue Giants and new concentrations that may ultimately form hi pa, oh my sweet Potato. But how changed, enormous eyes painted black all round and how did you get in?