Mobius Dick

by Andrew Crumey

  He had the girl against the wall, her naked buttocks propped beside the dumb waiter that stood idle before its next delivery of food from the cooking area below. She was dangling ecstatically from a shelf whose purpose was the final cosmetic presentation of dishes; two gleaming fingers were sliding in and out of her, as if she were a pheasant being drawn of its wet entrails. For this little moment, Schrödinger told himself, she is alive.

  Naturally he was aroused by the strange spectacle. He would enjoy it more fully afterwards, in memory. For the present moment, it was no more than a startling apparition to be glimpsed and noted, but not to be watched for too long. Schrödinger retreated from the door and went on until he reached the toilet.

  Standing inside, idly passing water that echoed in the enclosed space, he imagined – it was mere fantasy – that he could hear the waitress’s climactic moans. He thought of the two of them hurriedly wiping and restoring themselves while the dumb waiter brought up a variety of cheeses. The sight of Clara eating raw eggs had been revolting; but now, as he imagined putting into his mouth the residues of lovemaking, Schrödinger felt strangely elated, as if the meal were blessed and sanctified by divine power, transubstantiated by sex into the food of gods. He finished urinating and was about to wash his hands, then decided not to. The dinner table, he suddenly realized, was a place where an altogether different drama was being played out, wholly unnoticed by the diners themselves; more vital than anything they could ever envisage.

  He went back to the dining room, where Dr Hinze and Frau Schwarzkopf were in conversation.

  ‘I met him recently in Munich,’ Hinze was saying to her. ‘He edits the party newspaper, and I said to myself at once: this man will go far! Then he came over to me, and do you know what I saw? He walks with a limp! Like Mephistopheles, or Byron, or indeed Philemon. He has a doctorate in Romantic literature, so he understands the significance of such details. But the limp is no affectation; it is perfectly genuine. Mark my words, Frau Schwarzkopf, that fellow will one day lead his party – just as soon as they can get rid of Hitler. And then, who knows, maybe the nation itself!’

  Schrödinger took his seat, and Hinze said to him, ‘Let me tell you now about Clara. We have been unable to discover anything about her origins. There is possibly a foreign influence in her way of speaking; but this might only be another manifestation of her psychic struggles, mimicking a general process of unconscious evolution. I would not be surprised if suddenly she were to begin speaking French or Italian; for really, her vocalizations betray – I’m sure of it – an inherited memory of some lost Indo-European source. Now, professor, you might be sceptical of all this …’

  ‘On the contrary,’ Schrödinger told him. ‘I have long been sympathetic to the sort of ideas you are presenting.’

  ‘Well then,’ Hinze resumed, a little gruffly, once more irritated by Schrödinger’s failure to acknowledge his originality. ‘Let us consider what Clara has said to me under hypnosis. She has described her walk through the mountains, on her way to a place of refuge. In other words, a sanatorium.’

  ‘You mean she was seeking help even before the schoolmaster discovered her?’ Schrödinger asked.

  ‘What she was seeking,’ Hinze declared proudly, ‘was this very place where she now resides. She does not know why she had to come here; yet like a moth impelled by some nocturnal fragrance, she came. It is indeed,’ he announced, ‘as if my meeting here with her was decreed by fate itself. In other words, by the divine inevitability of eternal recurrence. She came because she has been here infinitely many times before.

  ‘And there is far more to report,’ Hinze continued. ‘More than once, Clara has spoken of a brilliant flash of light, tearing through the mountain valley where she walked, almost blinding her. A radiant, blue-white wave of energy, enfolding and transforming her. What might this mean? I can assure you, Professor Schrödinger, that I gave many long hours of study to this enigma, for I knew it must be some collective memory – a fragment of universal mind – that would help me unlock Clara’s secret. During one hypnosis session, I asked Clara to be more specific about the mountains. Where exactly were they? She said, “In the land of Ossian.” Well, was this not a startling example of the Nordic-Aryan race memory? Here was a direct link to Thule itself!’

  Frau Schwarzkopf, who was familiar with this part of the story, then said to Schrödinger, ‘Dr Hinze might still be groping in darkness, were it not for the assistance I have been able to offer him.’

  The waiter and waitress were returning. They looked exactly as before, Schrödinger noticed, as if nothing had happened. Around the waitress’s cheeks there was perhaps a flush of quiet fulfilment, evident only to the informed eye; but the couple went about clearing the table without arousing any interest from Schrödinger’s fellow diners. When the waitress reached her closest point to him, Schrödinger found her leg to be beyond his touch. Instead he inhaled, imagining odours of which she could have had no time or opportunity to divest herself. He watched her rump as she retreated, picturing all the white flesh he had briefly been allowed to witness.

  ‘Dr Hinze told us about Clara’s hypnotic memories,’ Frau Schwarzkopf explained, ‘and not long afterwards, I came across exactly the sort of thing she was talking about!’

  ‘Jung would call it a clear example of collective unconscious,’ Hinze interjected, and Schrödinger began to listen to them once more, now that the waiter and waitress were out of sight.

  ‘We had an English woman staying here – a very dear lady, whom we were sorry to lose,’ Frau Schwarzkopf continued. ‘She spent the last eighteen months of her life at Villa Herzen – in fact, Professor Schrödinger, you might have seen her during one of your previous visits, if she was not already too ill. Her name was Dorothy; she had never married, and had no close relatives left in the world, nor any friends beyond the ones she found here. When she died, she bequeathed all the possessions she had brought with her to my husband and me. This necklace was hers.’

  Schrödinger had gazed at it many times during the course of the meal, and at the bosom beneath it. Now, when he looked again, he saw the breasts of an old, forgotten woman, soon to be laid to rest in an Alpine cemetery by people who never knew her.

  ‘Pretty, don’t you think?’ Frau Schwarzkopf was tugging at the necklace, displaying both the jewels and her own breasts for Schrödinger’s benefit. ‘Well, there were lots of other things besides, including a great many old letters she had held on to over the years. They were mostly in English – which I read well but slowly – and I had no time to study them properly. I did notice, however, that some bore dates as far back as the middle of the last century; and since Dorothy’s father had apparently numbered many distinguished people among his friends, I thought they might be worth saving. Then we happened to acquire another English patient, and I suggested he might like to have a look through these old letters.’

  Schrödinger freed his eyes from the dead woman’s necklace, and saw the young lovers returning with fresh wine, fruit and cheeses. He observed their nonchalance as they filled the table, and wondered if some further residue had been applied to the food during their last brief absence.

  ‘This was around the time that Dr Hinze told me about Clara,’ Frau Schwarzkopf explained. ‘And only a few days later, the English patient – Mr Porter, also now sadly no longer with us – told me with excitement that among the letters were some addressed to a prominent American writer who lived in England for a few years, which I suppose is how Dorothy must have acquired them.’

  ‘The writer’s name is Nathaniel Hawthorne,’ Hinze interjected. ‘Perhaps you’ve heard of him, Professor Schrödinger. He was American consul in Liverpool for four years. And one of the letters – which is of most interest to me – was written to him by another author called Herman Melville, who published adventure novels and was quite popular in his day. Though in fact,’ he said, turning to Dr Schwarzkopf, ‘I’ve recently discovered there are now one or two American critics who reckon
this Melville was a neglected genius. Which is why I believe you were a little too rash earlier on, sir, when you dismissed the idea that a writer – or indeed a scientist or a philosopher – might achieve due recognition only long after his death.’

  Schwarzkopf offered a grunt in reply, and began slicing a piece of cheese that his guests apparently found less interesting than a story of old letters.

  Hinze told Schrödinger, ‘Frau Schwarzkopf pointed out to me that Melville, in his letter, describes a mountain walk, using language that is strikingly similar to Clara’s. There is a blue-white flash, for instance.’

  ‘Thunder is not uncommon in mountains,’ Schrödinger suggested.

  ‘Ah, but there’s more,’ said Hinze. ‘Melville even speaks of Ossian! It is as if Clara had somehow read the letter beforehand. But she could not have. She arrived here after Dorothy, its owner, had died; and the letter had then remained locked in a secret compartment of Frau Schwarzkopf’s desk until she gave it to Mr Porter.’

  ‘I didn’t know that your desk has secret compartments, my dear,’ Dr Schwarzkopf interjected. ‘Though it seems you know all about them, Otto.’

  Hinze, somewhat ruffled, chose to ignore this comment. ‘Melville’s letter, I believe, may be the best evidence I have yet found for the existence of universal mind. He describes a vision of a woman – a hallucination as vivid as Nietzsche’s. The woman he saw, I maintain, was Clara.’

  Schrödinger laughed. ‘How on earth can that be possible? Are you telling us this man Melville saw a ghost?’

  ‘What he saw,’ said Hinze, ‘was the future. Just as I believe Nietzsche may have done, without knowing it. The experience is not unique to writers or artists; it can happen to anyone. But writers record the evidence, and we can now look through history in search of it. I am discovering many examples, and they explain so much. Was it purely a coincidence, for example, that Dorothy should have brought Melville’s letter with her here to Villa Herzen? Was it a coincidence that Clara – so curiously linked to the letter, as if by an electromagnetic field – should likewise have found herself here? I have conveyed my thoughts on all of this to Dr Jung, who rejects my notion of universal mind, and also my theory of coincidence, which I call “synchronicism”. I’ve no doubt he’ll rediscover them for himself, under different names.’

  Schrödinger was sceptical. ‘It’s easy to establish links between things. The hard part is deciding what’s genuinely connected. That’s the basis of the entire scientific method: discovering, for instance, that the swing of a pendulum is not affected by the time of day, or the weather, or the mood you’re in, but only by the length of the pendulum itself. You say Clara’s hypnotic ramblings resemble a letter between two writers; but surely the resemblance is one you’ve identified for yourself, while no doubt ignoring many conflicting elements.’ Schrödinger could see that he was in danger of rousing Hinze’s anger, and since his purpose was only to pass the time, he decided instead to offer Hinze’s views further support. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘I’ve thought a good deal about the issues you raise, which really concern causality. Einstein worried about this too, but the best that relativity can offer is to say that some things must always happen prior to some other things, and this is the extent of the causal link between them. There is no frame of reference, for instance, in which an observer would witness the cheese reaching our table before the asparagus soup. But ever since I first began to study general relativity, I confess I’ve been dogged by the idea that under certain circumstances, gravitational fields might cause a disruption of normal causality. You see, Einstein has provided certain equations that allegedly describe the universe as a whole, and he has derived from them a model in which the universe is static, as we currently believe it to be. But what if this belief is wrong? What if the universe is growing or shrinking at some presently unmeasurable scale; or else rotating, or distorting itself? What if it is not uniform and homogeneous, but is instead a patchwork of different conditions? All sorts of strange solutions might then arise, which I have pondered, though I have not been able to reach definite conclusions. Einstein supposes that a traveller, if he were to venture far enough through space, would eventually return to his point of origin. What, though, if the traveller were to return not only to the same place, but also to the same time? Or what if he were to return and find the universe altered somehow? I have, for example, privately considered what one might call a Möbius universe, whose circumnavigation would bring about a reversal of parity. A left-handed glove, tossed at great speed from the earth, would return millions of years later – or else at the very same moment – as a right-handed one.’

  If this was meant to offer encouragement to Dr Hinze, the effort was a failure, since it provided only bewilderment. Schrödinger therefore added, ‘Ever since the work of Boltzmann, whom all of us physicists revere as the true founder of our modern subject, there has been a realization that much of the world is statistical in nature. Perhaps time and causality are phenomena of this type. My major criticism of your version of eternal recurrence, Dr Hinze, is that it fails to allow for this statistical element. We may indeed find ourselves one day sitting at this table again, having exactly the same conversation. Equally, we may be destined to participate in every possible conversation, with every possible permutation of fellow diners, in an ensemble of possible universes that is without end. Leibniz, as I’m sure you’re aware, Dr Hinze, thought about such things a very long time ago, and proposed a criterion for selecting just one possible world from the many available ones. Perhaps, though, there is no selection: everything happens eventually. In which case your visions of past and future may really be strange, transcendental flashes of pasts that never happened, or of futures we can avoid. But I wouldn’t know, Dr Hinze. I’m only a humble physicist who has done some respectable work on the theory of colour and the behaviour of gases.’

  Frau Schwarzkopf gave a polite laugh. ‘You are too modest, professor. I’m sure your scientific theories will one day have much to offer cultural life in general, if only we can all learn to understand them. But really, you ought to read the letter we’ve been speaking about – I take it you know English?’ Schrödinger nodded. ‘Well then, I must let you see it. Who knows, it might even give you some ideas for your next theory.’

  There was a curious rasping noise, like a saw becoming snagged in a log. Dr Schwarzkopf had allowed himself to nod off. He spluttered back into wakefulness, examined his companions with the small moist eyes of a startled hedgehog, and said, ‘Bet you thought I was asleep, eh? Well, I may not be too hot on philosophy these days, but there’s one thing I do know, which is that coincidences aren’t worth a damn unless you seize and make use of them. And I’ll say this for you, young Otto,’ he leaned towards Hinze, more evidently inebriated now that the wine had run through sleeping veins. ‘You know an opportunity when you see one. Coming here, for instance. Good for your career, in the long run. And Jung? No hope: you’ve ditched him. I like that. A man’s got to know who’s on the up, and who’s going down. Your new friend the newspaper editor, for example; I like the sound of him.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Hinze, ‘Dr Goebbels has asked to see the evidence of universal mind that I’ve gathered so far. He, at least, appreciates the significance of it.’ This last barb was meant for Schrödinger, but by now they’d all had enough. Schwarzkopf rose, unsteadily at first, to his feet, and the rest followed his example. In the salon, the piano was coming to life once more, joined now by the pleasant strains of a violin. Schwarzkopf invited the men to smoke with him there, but Hinze said he had work to do, and Schrödinger decided to retire to his room.

  ‘As you wish, gentlemen,’ said Schwarzkopf. ‘Helga, I bid you goodnight.’ He kissed his wife’s hand, then went through to the salon, leaving his three guests to supply their own formalities before bringing the evening to a close. Schrödinger quickly excused himself and went out to the staircase, ascending as swiftly as the wine and food in his body allowed, running his han
d along the thick, polished banister as he made his way up to the floor above. It was a relief to find himself back in his room, alone, and able to think once more about the scientific problem that brought him here.

  But there was also the lost book, of course, with its incriminating love letter. It had fallen from his mind during dinner; now it returned, showing up in the railway compartment where he left it, thumbed by a passenger who just happened to be a journalist on the hunt for a story, any story, with which to fill a space. Yes, everything comes down to chance, and chance could make or break him. His colleague Debye had suggested he seek an equation for matter waves; perhaps Debye would find it first. The answer might be worth a research paper or two, or might prove the summit of a man’s career. It was all hardly more than the toss of a coin.

  He had devoted himself to seeking new laws of nature; yet Schrödinger had to concede that perhaps those laws are themselves statistical. The force of gravity or speed of light might be mere local customs, collectively observed yet of no more profound or durable significance than the current levels of taxation, or the rate of inflation, whose astronomical levels had so recently made the world itself seem insane. For his inaugural lecture in Zürich four years previously, Schrödinger had taken as his theme the notion that perhaps everything in nature, without exception, happens by accident. Where Hinze saw relentless necessity, Schrödinger saw contingency, and a multitude of possible worlds.

  He loosened his tie and sat down at the desk where already, before going down to dinner, he had laid his notebook in anticipation of a night’s labours. In front of him, where he sat, hung the heavy red curtain he had looked behind earlier, whose only purpose was to hide a door that could never be opened. It was almost like some insipid metaphor; the kind that might appeal to Hinze and his psychologist friends.