Mobius Dick

by Andrew Crumey

  ‘You mean Q-phones?’ said Harry, looking at the one in his hand.

  ‘That’s right. Signal’s too powerful, or something like that. Holding it next to your head mixes up the electrons in your brain.’

  Harry was beginning to wish he’d never entered this conversation. He started keying a message for his wife; but before he could even reach the end and select a recipient, his phone informed him it had been sent already.

  ‘I wish it would stop doing that,’ Harry muttered to himself, then explained to the old man, ‘It keeps sending texts before I’m ready. I’ve no idea where they go.’

  The old man shrugged. ‘Technology, eh? Never trust it. No, you won’t catch me putting one of those brain-eaters to my head. That article I read about AMD, it said that when people lose their real memories, they replace them with things they’ve seen on television or read in books. One patient reckoned he was a character in Anna Karenina. Can you believe it? Not only that, but he got the story all wrong, it was so long since he’d read it. You mark my words, these Q-phones are trouble. And it’s all American military know-how they’ve put inside the damn things.’

  Then he described for Harry’s benefit how the entire phone system was really a capitalist method of mind control; as if capitalism needed any further power over people’s minds than it already held. The old man spoke with the depressing conviction of a crank, and Harry was relieved to see the assistant returning.

  ‘Here we are,’ the lanky youth announced, placing a copy of Professor Faust on the counter, having presumably used his absence as an excuse for a coffee and a fag. He took the credit card Harry offered him.

  ‘What age are you, young man?’ Harry’s elderly companion asked the assistant, who looked slightly startled at being invited into an interaction his sales induction programme had clearly never prepared him for.

  ‘Er, nineteen,’ he said, swiping the card. ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, nineteen years ago, anyone walking into this shop would have seen a whole shelf full of books by Heinrich Behring. He was on the school curriculum. Some towns even had a street or library named after him. He was a Hero of Socialist Labour. And now he’s gone. Makes you think, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Er, yeah,’ said the assistant, pushing a receipt in Harry Dick’s direction for him to sign.

  ‘Isn’t it wonderful to be able to forget so easily?’ the old man said, then began walking towards the shop’s exit, limping slightly as if from an old wound.

  ‘Aren’t you waiting to buy something?’ Harry called after him.

  ‘Hardly worth it,’ the old man replied, and walked out into the street.

  Harry felt unnerved by the enigmatic exchange. Was it a warning? He’d been wondering if his Q-phone might be bad for him; he’d noticed a recent tendency to forget the simplest things. The other day his wife had been reminiscing to him about when they all had to recite the Seven Articles at school. And for a moment Harry was unable to remember the Seven Articles, or even his school. Was it only a case of growing older, or was it something more sinister?

  The assistant handed him his book and was about to resume staring at the computer screen he appeared to find more fascinating than any human who might ever enter the shop, when Harry, prompted by the old man’s earlier boldness, decided to make his own remark to the young lad.

  ‘Have you heard of AMD?’ he asked him.

  A smile briefly disrupted the assistant’s narrow lips. ‘Moby fever? Don’t believe the scare stories, mate. I’m on my moby every hour of the day and it hasn’t done me any harm.’

  Harry was hardly reassured by this advice, coming from a teenager who looked as if his brain had been replaced by a silicon chip. ‘I read Professor Faust when I was at school,’ Harry said, continuing his experiment in conversation. ‘It was a set text in our philosophy class, for the paper on historical dialectics.’

  The assistant wasn’t even listening now; his glazed eyes were still directed at Harry, but his mind, if he had one, was more probably focussed on the pub he’d be sitting in as soon as his shift ended.

  ‘Then last week,’ Harry added, ‘I realized I could hardly remember anything about the book. A few names, one or two incidents, nothing more. One thing I did recall, though, that had struck me so much when I first read it, was that Behring began his story in an alternative past and extended it into an imaginary future. Now I’ve lived through those years Behring depicted. He got it all wrong, of course: that was his point. But I wanted to remind myself how he pictured the Sixties, the Eighties, the new century.’

  ‘Enjoy your book,’ the assistant said with the voice of a robot for whom any life form over the age of twenty-five might as well be in a geriatric home.

  ‘Yes. Goodbye.’ Harry turned and began heading for the door. His own history was crumbling away to dust. Human souls were being quietly revamped and redecorated, just as this shop had been. One day he’d be redesigned out of existence.

  He was at the entrance, looking at the road he’d known for years as Karl Marx Avenue until it had suddenly become Princes Street again, as if none of the intervening period ever happened. There was the busking bagpiper; and in the distance, on the rock, was the castle whose highest point once held a red star no one thought could ever be extinguished. Already there was a whole generation for whom such things were meaningless.

  He brought out his phone again. He needed to talk to his wife; but still there was no reply. And so he began his text message again: Call me: Harry. And again it disappeared before he could even complete it, into the void where all our lives, all our memories and experiences, are ultimately sucked, like water spinning down a plug-hole.

  So he tried once more, wholly absorbed in the task as he stepped into the road. A witness later said he looked neither right nor left before launching himself from the kerb, as if he didn’t care, or had simply forgotten that Edinburgh in the middle of the day is a busy place, and its drivers don’t take kindly to any obstacle. The witness saw him bounce; another denied it, saying the car gave Harry no more than a glancing blow that sent him back onto the pavement, where he landed on his side and then lay perfectly still. Whatever the truth of the matter, it looked to all concerned as if a man had died: there were screams, heads turning, faces becoming ashen, and a clutching of young children to adult breasts.

  A bystander picked up the stricken pedestrian’s shattered phone. Another crouched beside Harry, taking his pulse and insisting to the gathered crowd that everything would be all right. He was the one who saw Harry’s face now, the injured man’s open eyes directing themselves towards the book that had escaped his grasp and was flapping and fluttering in the breeze on the pavement beside him. It had fallen open at its final pages; and as Harry gazed at it, oblivious to the approaching whirr of an ambulance siren, he looked like a man at peace.

  AUTHOR’S POSTSCRIPT

  by Heinrich Behring

  Four decades ago, in the 1920s, I lived in Switzerland and took a number of low-paid jobs while seeking my artistic vocation. For a time I worked at an Alpine sanatorium, where I saw at first hand the opulent, sterile lifestyle of the bourgeois consumptive, which I took to be indicative of a more general malaise, invisible even to an X-ray machine, that was slowly spreading itself throughout the entire social organism of the German-speaking people. The place where I worked – near Arosa – was completely unexceptional, and I would not have troubled the reading public with its existence, but for one curious fact; which is that, in my capacity as chauffeur, I had the opportunity to meet and converse with most of the patients and staff; and among them there was one figure who was to cast a significant shadow over history. This was Otto Hinze.

  I need not tell his dreadful story here: it is well known. Let me simply point out that if, while driving Dr Hinze to the sanatorium to take up his new position there, I had inadvertently rounded a familiar mountain bend too sharply, then Hinze and myself might both have perished. The loss of an as yet unpublished novelist would be a cause of
sorrow only to his own family; however, the death of Hinze, tumbling down a hillside as the gleaming black car in which he was travelling rolled and shattered itself, would mean the sudden salvation, the retrospective resurrection, of all those innocent souls who were to die at his behest.

  Our paths crossed again nine years later, when he was the Reich’s Minister For Education, and his book Evolution Towards Perfection became compulsory classroom reading. I was by this time a science instructor in a Hamburg school, where I refused to teach my students that Darwin’s natural selection and Hinze’s ‘progress theory’ were equally valid, with neither being definitively proved. I was consequently suspended from my post, and wrote directly to Hinze to appeal. The reply came from a lowly official in his department, informing me that I was henceforth dismissed from my position, and banned from teaching for five years.

  These details are personal and contingent; I would not even speak of them, were it not for the kind invitation of my esteemed comrades on the British Board of Literature, who have requested some explanatory remarks regarding Professor Faust – the novel in which Hinze appears in fictionalized form – intending them as a postscript to the fifth and all future editions of a book which the people of my adopted country have, to my surprise and embarrassment, chosen to embrace as a work of merit and significance.

  Barred from teaching, I next found employment with a publishing house that had first hired me many years previously as reader of unsolicited manuscripts; and this gave me access to a few brave journalists willing to help publicize Hinze’s abuses of the education system. The theory of cosmological expansion, for instance, was to be taught equally alongside the Aryan doctrine of primordial ice. Even astrology was to be considered a suitable university degree subject.

  My protests led first to fines, then to periods of imprisonment. When Germany began its war on European civilization, I was declared politically subversive and sent to a series of concentration camps throughout the burgeoning Reich.

  The last of these was a mine in the Highlands of occupied Scotland, where rare minerals were extracted – though we did not know it – for Heisenberg’s atom bomb project. The mining process yielded radioactive substances which ultimately contaminated the area around the camp’s location at Ardnahanish to such an extent that long after our liberation by the People’s Army, the whole vicinity had to be cordoned off. Indeed, to this day, I believe the local inhabitants still see strange glowing lights during the gloomy evenings, believed to be luminescent exhalations from the boggy soil that holds so many irradiated corpses – the remains of people I knew and worked with, brought there from as far as Bulgaria or Palestine, to the harsh and desolate wilderness of Ultima Thule.

  It was while in the camp that I began to compose, in my head, some of the books that I would write after my release, and that would bring me fame. Thus I conceived The Angel Returns, my novel about Goethe’s lover Bettina von Arnim, in which I included a somewhat fanciful episode about her friend Robert Schumann, based in fact on Hinze’s analysis of the composer’s madness in his book, The Teleology of Mental Degeneration. My aim, naturally, was to expose the folly of Hinze’s theory that certain states of mind might be caused by events in the future. In my novel, Schumann receives a composition in the twentieth-century atonal style; a comic effect not lost on the Union of British Writers, when they awarded my debut novel the Lenin Prize at a gala dinner in London’s Guildhall in 1949.

  Following that success, I was encouraged to begin work on Professor Faust. My novel is based on history, yet distorts it. We all know that in reality, Hinze left Arosa for Berlin, where he became the right-hand man without whom Goebbels could never have taken control of the National Socialists. In my novel, however, he dies at Arosa; though even here I lack the courage to kill him with a twist of the steering wheel. Instead the task is given to Hinze’s mentally disturbed patient Clara, who stabs him to death after enduring the most loathsome extremes of sexual degradation. Historically, we know that Clara (whose psychiatric affliction inspired Hinze’s theory of universal mind described in Synchronicism and Coincidence) killed only herself, using a shard from a broken mirror.

  The physicist Erwin Schrödinger is likewise grounded in fact. In December 1925, I drove him to the sanatorium from the railway station where he arrived. A few days later, taking him back down the mountain after he had enjoyed a pleasant Christmas holiday, Schrödinger told me he had come in order to work out a new theory of quantum mechanics. He had failed. But I knew, looking at the beautiful companion who sat beside him and was clearly not his wife, that he’d probably had other things on his mind. In my novel, this forgotten physicist – who never did any work of lasting significance, and apparently died soon afterwards from a recurrence of his tuberculosis – is resurrected, and allowed to make his discovery.

  Rewriting history is an easy matter; rewriting science is not. Seeking expert advice, I contacted Academician Paul Dirac, professor of theoretical physics at Cromwell University in Cambridge, who kindly explained to me, in a number of letters, the elements of dialectical matrix mechanics. I asked Professor Dirac if some other, equivalent theory of quantum mechanics could be constructed, which my Schrödinger (whose historical counterpart Professor Dirac had never heard of) might have unearthed. It is to the ingenious Professor Dirac that we owe the absurd ‘wave mechanics’ outlined in Professor Faust. According to Dirac, this version gives precisely the same answers as Heisenberg’s original matrix theory in all calculations, yet is based on a wholly different physical interpretation, involving ‘quantum waves’ that are actually quite meaningless. As an illustration of the esoteric and physically impossible nature of these waves, Professor Dirac pointed out to me that the wave function of a single hydrogen atom would be six-dimensional, involving the square roots of negative quantities.

  Professor Dirac considers his theory a mere curiosity of no more than pedagogical value; nevertheless it proved crucial to my novel, and I am thus deeply indebted to the fertile virtuosity of his scientific imagination. Sadly, my relations with the distinguished physicist – recently named Hero of Socialist Labour for his work on Britain’s nuclear deterrent – became strained as soon as Professor Faust was first published twelve years ago in 1954. Among the characters featured in the book is one whom Dirac took to be an unflattering portrait of himself; an accusation (first aired by him in an essay on matrix mechanics in the Radio Times) as unfortunate and untrue as the allegations of plagiarism raised against me elsewhere, with which I shall deal in due course.

  It will be recalled that my novel alters history to the extent that it is Hitler, not Goebbels, who leads Germany in a war of conquest equally doomed to failure, though differing in detail. Britain is thus imagined to repel German invasion, thereby enabling its monarchic and undemocratic institutions to retain power in a post-war Europe still dominated by capitalist hegemonies. Thus there is no Time of Restructuring; even the Father Of The Nation, Esteemed Comrade Vernon Shaw, is written out of history.

  Some outraged critics have wondered if my purpose here was to deny the truth of the Marxist-Leninist theory of historical determinism. Surely, they argue, though the specific facts of the past might be altered (the life or death of a man, for instance), the broad sweep of history – in particular the triumph of world socialism – must remain unchanged.

  I do not dissent from this orthodox view. The purpose of Professor Faust is a strictly dialectical one, concerned with the historic opposition between left and right, materialism and idealism, and the necessary triumph of the former in both cases. The world I describe in Professor Faust – with its altered past and imaginary future – is quite deliberately one that could not possibly exist. Who could believe such a thing as a female Prime Minister of Britain, or a movie actor elected President of the United States? It would be difficult to be more evidently ironic without lapsing into farce.

  My narrative, it will be recalled, also describes Schrödinger’s supposed rise to fame, his confrontation with H
eisenberg, and the crisis of physics this provokes. In the fanciful post-war world I describe, this scientific debate is resolved in the most ridiculous and decadent manner imaginable: by inferring the physical existence of a multitude of universes. Every observation of nature, it is argued, creates a branching of realities. The simple tossing of a coin is then enough to sunder the cosmos, bringing two worlds of equal possibility into being.

  Critics intent on exposing my so-called plagiarism have naturally sought historical antecedents for this ‘many-worlds’ theory, whose discovery my novel places in 1957. Academician Cyril Connolly, for instance, has unearthed a vanishingly obscure story penned in Argentina in 1944 that discusses ‘an infinite series of parallel times’. An even earlier ancestor could be found in Leibniz: the idea’s antiquity is its sole virtue.

  Equally, it has been pointed out that the arguments debated by my hero Schrödinger and his antagonists, about a cat that is simultaneously alive and dead as long as it remains unobserved, are merely a reworking of Berkeley, Fichte and others. I do not deny this. It will further be recalled that I make my hero read (and mislay) Tomcat Murr, precisely so that the fanciful feline paradox might be planted in his head.

  More serious are allegations made against me concerning the brief mention in Professor Faust of a fictitious writer named Thomas. Assiduous scholars, more intent perhaps on making a name for themselves than on furthering the cause of socialist literature, have discovered that a real writer existed, by the name of Thomas Mann, whose biographical details fortuitously resemble my character’s. Mann’s first novel Buddenbrooks was a commercial failure; he published nothing more, though his brother acquired a modest literary reputation, and I may indeed have heard his name in Germany before the war – I cannot now recall. Apparently Thomas Mann submitted for publication several other novels, all rejected, which nevertheless foreshadow in some uncanny way various features of my own output. It is alleged, in short, that I must have seen these manuscripts, and that they – not the labour camp at Ardnahanish – were the source of my ideas.