by Ashly Graham
But even life at the Academy had eventually to come to an end; and, in his report to Central, Doctor Stölwiesel 2739J recorded grandly, as if the achievement had been his alone, that 4285Q had graduated with the highest honours ever, and was indisputably a genius. The boy’s failure to shine at sports, which was of no interest to anyone in that Bonvilian would never again need to be either good at them, or required to practise them in whatever he was going to go on to do, was neither mentioned, nor missed by the recipients.
What was also of no consequence, to Hugo Bonvilian 4285Q, was that when, bearing his diploma, he departed the prison that he had occupied for more than a decade, Stölwiesel did not make a point of saying goodbye and wishing him well. Instead the doctor retired to his quarters, sat down at his desk, filled his pipe with Ogden’s St Bruno Flake, lit it with his petrol flame-thrower lighter, and sucked the tobacco red-hot.
Chapter Five
After Hugo Bonvilian 4285Q’s distinguished final examination report had been brought to the attention of the Chief Officer at Central’s Department of Educational Furtherment, Tony Urban-Fox 5554C, the young man was summoned for a viva voce examination in which he demonstrated a precocious aptitude for serve-and-volley verbal tennis by responding to his inquisitors’ questions with contemptuous ease, before posing more complicated ones back to them, so that they had to reframe them back to him cogently enough to avoid a sizzling cross-court or down-the-line return that would end the exchange and the match.
When Urban-Fox 5554C, who was a past master at not sticking his neck out, referred the case for further evaluation to Central’s Department of Operations, headed by Herman Feingold 7930A, Feingold was equally undecided as to how best to make use of the “marvellous boy”, as Wordsworth had described Thomas Chatterton.
This much was clear: that his future lay in some scientific specialty yet to be determined.
Feingold 7930A’s people put Bonvilian in the care of a supervisor, a professor of biology called Strom Livermore 0063I, with instruction to ensure that he was constantly challenged in his curriculum as he embarked upon the next stage of his education, and undistracted by the sort of external influences that plague young men of similar age.
Although Livermore was a hard taskmaster, he was a fair man, as pleasant and knowledgeable as Stölwiesel had been unpleasant and ignorant, and the relationship thrived. Bonvilian showed that he had a particular aptitude for Medicine, especially in the areas of physiology, biochemistry, and immunology. He approached dissection of his first cadaver without squeamishness: no sooner had he made his first long incision with a #23-blade scalpel, and picked up his first post-mortem knife, than he knew that the dead human body, male as well as female, pace John Donne in his poem On Going to Bed, was his America! his new-found-land.
What remained of Bonvilian’s youth was sacrificed to operating theatres, laboratories, lectures, and solitary study. He explored a microcosm of the world that there was no time for him to become familiar with in person, and spent every waking hour peering into the mirror that reflected reality. Though he became expert in everything he turned his mind to, it was at first and more removes; for him the truth, and proof, lay in books and Petri dishes. Which it often did, but as a lawyer need not be a litigator, nor a neurologist a surgeon, all of Bonvilian’s practical forays and experience were conducted away from the empirical field.
Elevated to the N Class of citizenry upon graduating from the Academy, at twenty-three years old Hugo Bonvilian 4285N sat his final and most rigorous examinations, and was observed performing a number of experiments against the clock. His graduation papers caused a furor of excitement at Operations, because nobody understood them.
Not knowing what else to do, Herman Feingold at Operations, taking advice from 4285N’s supervisor Strom Livermore, who was now similarly out of his depth, presented the young man for further evaluation to the Nobel laureate scientist Horst Pealiker 6608B.
Professor Pealiker headed a think tank of other top scientists, all of whom he convened as a panel to interview Bonvilian and elicit from him a more detailed account of the methods, findings, and conclusions that he had used and made and come to in his recent tests, so that the experts might comprehend what his methods, findings, and conclusions were.
4285N was not fazed by the array of famous people before him, for he had already acquired the blunt arrogance typical of one who suspected that, if he was not yet in possession of all the facts, he soon would know everything there was to be known about anything worth knowing. The soul-searching and diffidence of his tentative years at the Academy for Gifted Boys were already a distant memory, and his skills as a fencer had translated themselves into academic weapons.
‘Bonvilian 4285N.’ said Professor Pealiker. Having conferred with the other members of the panel, and finding themselves unable to agree upon what to ask the interviewee, in case he were to ridicule the question, or ask them to rephrase it in a way that made sense, Pealiker 6608B had decided that it would be safe, as an opening gambit, to remind him of his name.
Having thus asserted himself, Pealiker went on to suggest that 4285N might like to tell them a little more about a recent essay of his, the one where he said that further studies into human evolutionary origins were an irrelevance and waste of time and money because biological science should be moving not backward but forward, a lot further forward, in strides rather than baby steps.
‘Darwin!’, spat Bonvilian, from the stand; and the panel, noting the contempt, felt easier.
Evolution was 4285N’s favourite topic, and it was also the favourite topic of the members of the panel because it was Central’s favourite topic, ever since Bonvilian had brought it to its attention as being of importance, in that it was now a matter of consensus at Central that life in general, by which it meant the lives at Central in particular being representative of those of Mankind, by which it meant the portion of them that was still outstanding, which was understood still to be an indefinite, indeterminate sort of proposition having to do not with where one had come from, which one already knew because, having departed decades ago one had been there, done that, but with what one’s direction from here and ultimate destination might be, was a matter regarding which the State was interested in understanding how Central might—on behalf of Mankind—arrange either to change the route and/or delay one’s arrival at that destination; or postpone continuation on one’s onward journey…
…in fact, hey, frankly, the whole rest of the trip might as well be cancelled on the same grounds because one was rather weary of travelling, in fact one had never been a good traveller, and consequently one was inclined to stay where one was, thanks very much; which, when one thought about it, as one had, made all the sense in the world because what was the point, if one was perfectly satisfied, as one was, with where one already was, in putting a lot of people to the trouble of making arrangements for those at Central, and others, to go on via the places in between to a terminus at yet another place where one had no reason to want to be, on the grounds that, when one did arrive, that place might turn out not to be of any interest, or same-old-same-old boring, or downright unpleasant; in which case all one would want to do is turn right round and come back again; which, given that one did not have a return ticket, might not be that easy to arrange?
As it were.
‘Listen,’ said Bonvilian to the assembled company of professors and scientists and scholars, who, being already disposed to do so, were already all ears; ‘to what Darwin had to say, and I quote: “How have all those exquisite adaptations of one part of the organization to another part, and to the conditions of life, and of one distinct organic being to another being, been perfected? We see these beautiful co-adaptations most plainly in the woodpecker and missletoe [sic].”
‘Say what?’ Bonvilian sputtered to his would-be inquisitors. ‘What do woodpeckers and mistletoe have to do with the price of eggs? To hell with woodpeckers and mistletoe, and to hell with Darwin too. Were the place to exist, H
ell, which of course it doesn’t, we all know that, he would be there, being punished for making such idiotic pronouncements by being made to kick himself for all eternity.’
4285N paused for effect, and the members of the panel, affected, took a moment to recall the asseverations that they had themselves made in scientific journals on the subject of retrospective Evolution, as if it mattered a damn, which of course it did not, any fool knew that, and to wonder whether what they had written and said in lectures might qualify them in due course to join Charles Darwin’s kicking class.
Fortunately, they realized with relief, their annunciations on the subject had been few, because every good scientist and academician and specialist, and they were all good here, knows that obfuscation and equivocation were essential to the gaining and winning of professional advancement and preferment, prizes, and acclaim, and in the selling of the books that they had their research assistants write for them. Only second- and third-raters stuck their necks out making the kind of assertions that could be challenged the next day by a rival with just as little proof of what he was saying as they had.
What the man Darwin should have done, of course, if he had been thinking clearly, was end his statement just repeated by this Bonvilian—words which, up to the woodpecker and mistletoe bit, had been a model of generalization—by answering his own question with another question in the approved manner. But Darwin had not been thinking clearly, that much was clear; and really, what should one have expected of the person who was notorious for dropping the anthropological clanger of all time?
The interviewers shifted uneasily in their seats, praying that mind-reading was not amongst Bonvilian’s precocious abilities, as he continued.
‘On the other hand, although I am not a mind-reader as to where people might be headed in their thinking, or in this case, a medium, I must say that I agree with Darwin...’ The panel started, and were about to rethink their thinking when they were forestalled. ‘...in his axiomatic statement that perfection is for the birds, for the woodpeckers; and that the mistletoe, a parasitic plant formerly of interest only to Druids and makers of birdlime, has adapted itself admirably…to the role of prompting the male of the species to kiss girls under it on New Year’s Eve.’
4285N blushed, and hoped that the rasp in his voice would conceal a momentary tremulousness. He had not kissed a girl on New Year’s Eve or at any other time, and it was possible, even likely, that his interviewers knew it. He had not intended to make a joke, it had just slipped out, probably because of a dream the night before that someone had invited him to an end of year party in three months and fifteen days. To think that in three months and fifteen days he might have kissed a girl!
While, to an osculatory rather than scientific end, Bonvilian was very much in favour of mistletoe, the problem was that he did not know anyone who might invite him to a party. Even if he got to go to one, he would not know how to behave at it, or what to wear for the occasion. If it were fancy dress, and he were to go as Charles Darwin, would anyone know who he was supposed to be, and would they recognize him, and would they find the disguise, and him, amusing?
If it were not fancy dress, then the only clothes he had were plaid or check shirts, a few pairs of baggy brown corduroy trousers, shiny and worn at the seat and the knees from much sitting on laboratory stools, and a second-hand shapeless green corduroy jacket, over which he always wore a white coat obtained from the scientists’ supply cupboard.
Bonvilian did not like the thought of how he would look without a white coat. Jeans would be OK, he supposed; but he did not own a pair of jeans, they seemed so…not him.
The members of the panel, grateful for the release of tension, laughed loud and long at Bonvilian’s little joke. As raw and brash as the kid was, and however much they were jealous of his intellect, and felt threatened by it, it did not matter what their private opinion of him was. Although a chess grandmaster may be beaten by a teenage prodigy, and humiliated, this was not a competition, it was an evaluation session; and Central expected of its panels that they should report what was expected of them, in this case, that Hugo Bonvilian 4285N was possessed of an awesome but as-yet unquantified genius that needed to be harnessed and put to the best possible service on behalf of the State.
‘Where is this obsession with immortality leading us,’ Bonvilian resumed in a stern voice, now that he had recovered himself, to his audience which had abruptly stopped laughing upon, hearing the dangerous double agent word “Where”, and suspecting the imminence of another of those pesky interrogative verbal marks of punctuation that, for the duration of this interview, they were supposed to have a monopoly of; unless 4285N might continue to demonstrate a rhetorical infatuation with answering his own questions on the grounds that no one else could, which was true; ‘except towards perpetuating the myth of Time?
‘Well, I’ll tell you.’ The panel released its breath. ‘Time as an enemy is a chimera of Man’s imagination, a monster with the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and a serpent’s tail. It is a sheep, a fanciful sheep clothed as the wolf of Progress. Consider how proud we are that the average age for men today is one hundred and twenty years—the same as that of the similarly mythical comedian Moses—and a hundred and thirty-five for females of the species. But such earthly yardsticks are unimportant, irrelevant, when one considers the immortal product that awaits bottling from the springs of eternity, the waters that flow over the also mythical Methuselah’s grave, and those of all the other Patriarchal loin machines, and feed the fountain of youth.
‘For Time is by definition a temporal notion, one that may without loss be done away with, and replaced with a self-fulfilling prophecy of our own. Creation, birth, life, death: we have the power to replace them with a new and stable environment in which we may thrive forever on our terms. On Central’s terms.’
Despite an all-round virginity, as the supremely ambitious person that he had become, 4285N hereby demonstrated to the approval of the panel that he had already mastered in spades the principles of political expediency.
‘To put it more simply,’—his audience nodded—‘in order to discover the ontological, or metaphysical secrets of the universe as they pertain to the nature of being, il faut reculer pour mieux sauter…not in the figurative sense of putting off the evil day, or delaying the day of reckoning, which if I have anything to do with it will never come for those who are to be reckoned with, and we all know who they are, but the literal one of falling back in order to jump forward better, meaning further.
‘Having raised the subject of myth, let me use it to illustrate my point, for myth is the starting point on the road to Truth, the truth of the world as it should be and will be for those who believe in it. I have in mind the beautiful Trojan youth Tithonus, who was beloved of the Goddess of Dawn, Aurora. Aurora gave Tithonus the gift of immortality, but forgot to include eternal youth in the package. When he was withered with age, Tithonous pleaded with Aurora to release him from life; but because she was unable to grant his request, she did the best she could, which was to turn him into a grasshopper.
‘That has become our fate, ladies and gentlemen: we are a race of grasshoppers. Tithonus is the precursor of our present-day hordes of middle-aged seniles, who, desperate to be spared what seems like an eternity of scratching their tired old legs together in a parched meadow, submit their AFDs, their Applications for Death, to the Department of Morbidity. And as you are aware, Morbidity’s Director, the esteemed Ms Sharon Sickle 9253C, although not busier than any other of Central’s uniformly dedicated and hard-working executive personnel, is equally as busy as the others, which means that she is very busy indeed.
‘While Time is still at large, those old-before-their-timers who are granted their quietus by Ms Sickle, upon receiving their termination notices, go about with a song in their hearts and a spring in their steps, listening to saccharine songs by Cappy Hamper 3018P. They plan wakes that make wedding receptions look like old-style funeral gatherings. Guests inst
ead of mourners congratulate them, make donations to the expiring parties’ charities of choice, and contribute to funds for the education of their great-great-great-grandchildren.
‘It is pathetic, and it is unnecessary, and Ms Sickle deserves to be redeployed elsewhere in a position more befitting of her talents.’
Bonvilian was obsessed with Tithonus, he had no idea why. Sometimes when he was alone, in his private quarters, he would repeat aloud the lines of Tennyson’s poem of the same name, the lines of which had been instilled in him by his mother, who when he was a baby crooned them over his cot:
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Me only cruel immortality
Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world,
A white hair’d shadow roaming like a dream
The ever-silent spaces of the East,
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.
Today Bonvilian refrained from quoting from the poem: culture these days being nekulturniy, to do so would earn him a citation from the Department of Artistic Dismantlement. Phyllis Stein 2565C, a champion wrestler, and Hugh Gieves à Crêpe 7654C, a reformed Renaissance scholar, were most diligent in pursuing infractions; and to offend before such an august audience would be sure to be speedily reported, however impressive the rest of 4285N’s performance might have been.
‘In conclusion,’ said Bonvilian, arresting the focus of Horst Pealiker 6608B’s eye; ‘it is my desire, should your eminences be disposed to empower me so to do, in my enthusiastic endeavours on behalf of the State, now to turn my attention from Tithonus to Aurora, the Dawn. To the mythical Dawn of Creation, not of our biological origins but the beginning of everything, so that we might extract its invigorating essence and inject it into the Elect of Central, and...ahem...any others whom they in their wisdom may honour in the process of natural selection—not the gradual, non-random Darwinian process by which traits become either more or less common in a population as a function of differential reproduction of their bearers; but a pragmatic version of State’s own inspired devising.’