The Thing Itself

by Adam Roberts

  In the comfortable shadow afterwards, with the slats of the shutter laying parallel strips of sunlight over his naked flanks, we two talked for a long time. I confessed to him of my own often roiling stomach, and of my bafflement as to the cause. Albert confided in me that he too had been feeling a sense of dread ever since Mayence. He couldn’t understand it, any more than I. Though he had toured through Germany many times, yet never before had he felt so apprehensive – of what? He knew not. ‘It may be this accursed stuff I’m reading,’ he growled. ‘This Nietzsche is a devil – self-confessedly a devil. His job, as he conceives it, is to make his readers doubt everything they have hitherto taken for granted! It is an uncomfortable proceeding, I do assure you, most uncomfortable.’

  ‘What of truth, though?’

  ‘Oh, truth is mutable, saith the sage. Truth is power, not science; or rather, it is science, but science is power too. The strong legislate what is true, and after a while we forget that this is whence it came. Our habits of thought are stronger than strait-waistcoats. We walk about with habit-coloured spectacles before our eyes, and see everything as we are accustomed to see it.’ He shuddered, and I embraced him to warm him, and this in turn led to a manlier embrace.

  We dined at the hotel, and the wine helped ease our mutual sense of dissatisfaction with life – or our sense of saturated satisfactions, as a man who has eaten too much rich food moans about his stomach.

  The next day we spent the morning at the Zoological Gardens, admission 1 mark, built upon the grounds of an old estate, in the sink of the ruins of which is a remarkable salt-water aquarium. Afterwards we walked upon the Old Bridge, and stood in its centre, looking out upon the Main. The bridge is fashioned from red sandstone, and dates from 1342. The middle is embellished with a statue of Charlemagne, by Wendelstadt and Zwerger, and nearby is an antique cross of iron, with, in Catholic style, an iron-fashioned Christ upon it. A small figure of a cockerel surmounts this, memorial to an old story that the architect completed his bridge by means of a treaty with the devil, in which he agreed to sacrifice to the antichrist the first person to cross it. But the canny builder held back the crowds, and sent a hen over the span before anything else.

  Passing along the Schöne Aussicht Obermainstrasse, I noticed a street cleaner leaning on a wide broom. He was brushing the road in long, slow strokes. Curious as to what he was clearing away, I stepped over to him. My eyes stung. My stomach was abruptly burning with an inner blaze. I felt deeply, unconscionably afraid. But of what? Of what? The sweeper was moving piles of – I know not what they were. Dozens of them. A multitude of tadpole-like beings, each head the size of a bowling-ball and the colour of myrrh, the tails double-bladed and streaked with silver and blue. A semi-transparent jelly coated the heads. And though some of these weird monsters were clearly dead, many writhed sluggishly, and strained to move themselves in the heavy and unfamiliar gravity of our Earth. I knew, looking upon them, that they possessed powers of thought and will and even of spirit at least the equal of ours. Yet here they lay, heaped and discarded, in great banks of shuddering alien flesh.

  The sweeper had stopped long minutes before, and was staring at me in frank alarm.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Albert called to me. ‘Why are you gawping at that fellow? You’re spooking him, my dear boy.’ He added something in rapid German, and the street sweeper looked over at him, nodding slowly.

  ‘What’s he—?’ I asked. ‘What’s he doing?’

  ‘Sweeping the streets, you goose.’

  ‘Sweeping what?’

  Albert was at my side, and slipped his arm through mine. ‘Rubbish, of course. What else? Come along.’ And he led me off.

  After luncheon, Albert returned to the hotel for a sleep, but I did not feel sleepy. Instead I walked the streets, my mind pleasantly idle. I passed the old Leinwandhaus, which in English is Draper’s Hall, a structure dating originally from the first half of the fourteenth century, and provided with a splendid array of turrets and pinnacles, recently restored. There was nothing about which to be alarmed. I was in a civilised city, with a purse full of gold, and a head full of learning. I had my guidebook in my hand. God was in his heaven and all was as right with the world as I wanted it to be.

  I took a seat outside a café on Hotzgaben and drank a glass of German beer in the sunlight. I brought out the Wells novel and laid it on the table in front of me. Something about its oatmeal-coloured binding filled me with a sort of revulsion, and yet I felt the compulsion to reread it for a third time. I resisted this. No good would come of it. Instead I brought out the Baedeker, and read up about Darmstadt, attempting to determine whether it was worth detouring south of the river to visit that place.

  My glass contained nothing but suds and air. The waiter removed it. He brought me another.

  ‘You are a believer, I see, in the efficacy of Baedeker,’ declared a fellow from a nearby table.

  I conceded that I was, and introduced myself. The stranger told me his name, and got up to reach me so we shook hands. He sat back in his seat. ‘It is always a pleasure to meet a fellow countryman when abroad,’ he said. He moved his chair round to face me better and wished me health with a sup from his glass. He was a pleasant-faced elderly fellow, with a grey-white beard trimmed to cover only his chin, and a broad pink forehead reaching, under some strands of brown hair, all the way up to the top of his crown.

  ‘You do not use a guidebook yourself?’ I asked.

  ‘I find,’ replied my new friend, ‘that to tour a town with a guidebook in hand is to see only what the guidebook permits.’

  ‘There’s no law that it must tyrannise us so,’ I countered. ‘One may stroll where one wishes! Only if we choose to omit the handbook, one will not know where one is, or what one is seeing.’

  ‘I fear I have expressed myself badly,’ said the man, with a queer little smile. ‘I do not mean that the Baedeker forces us to walk this street or that. I mean that we do not see Frankfurt – we see Baedeker’s Frankfurt. I mean, we tick off the things the book lists, and see them only as the book describes them. And when we leave, and think back, we find ourselves remembering not the city, but the pages of a book.’

  ‘There may be something in what you say,’ I admitted, laughing. ‘Is the choice so stark, though? Slavery of the mind, or ignorance?’

  ‘Is that other book The War of the Worlds?’ he asked.

  ‘Do you know it?’

  ‘Indeed I do. And think highly of it, I must say.’

  ‘It fills me with a strange dread,’ I blurted, and as soon as I said it I realised the truth of it. Dread clung to the book like a smell. I nudged it away from me with my knuckles.

  ‘Do you mean,’ the man asked, ‘that you fear Mr Wells’s predictions might come true, and Martians lay waste to Woking? I know Woking, sir, and figure the possibilities for post-bellum architectural improvement worth the cost.’

  ‘You are from there?’

  ‘Ascot,’ he said. ‘You?’

  ‘Chelsea. But, no, no, you are right to mock.’

  ‘I beg your pardon indeed if I have done anything so ill-mannered!’

  ‘Not in the least. Most kindly you have pointed out a small nonsense, nothing more.’ I nodded. ‘Still: it is not as prophecy that the book upsets me. There is an – uncanniness to the narrative. Or not even the story: just to the material fact of the book. I am,’ I added, moved obscurely to confess myself to this stranger, ‘touring the Rhine cities with a … friend of mine. There is much for us to enjoy, and many fine sights. And yet sight increasingly fills me with—’ I stopped speaking.

  ‘Dread?’ he prompted.

  ‘Such that I almost wish – Providence forgive me – to be blind, that I might never again have to worry about what can be seen.’

  The man was silent for a while, and drained his glass of hock and soda water. The waiter, hovering behind, approached; and the fellow ordered a new drink – in French. ‘I speak no German at all,’ he confessed to me.

&
nbsp; ‘My Deutsch is rudimentary, I fear. Though I have enough to order a drink, thank God.’

  ‘Fortunately for me they all speak French hereabouts. I understand,’ he continued, looking directly at me, ‘why you are fearful.’

  The acidic bubbling sensation sparked up in my gut. My heart began to beat faster. ‘You do?’

  ‘I have seen what you see. Books like that,’ and he tipped his chin at The War of the Worlds, ‘are something of a favourite of mine. Scientific romances.’

  ‘You have not seen what I have seen,’ I said, in a trembling voice, ‘because I have not seen anything.’

  ‘And neither have I. And no more have all the hundred thousands who live in this city. And yet still we see. They,’ he added, looking upwards. I actually (it makes me ashamed to say it) scrunched both my eyes tight shut, rather than follow his gaze and see. ‘They are not hostile, I think.’

  ‘I might hope you are correct,’ I said, in a small voice, ‘I must fear you are not.’

  ‘Mr Wells has clearly seen them clearer than most,’ the stranger agreed. ‘And he thinks they come to wage war. But I wonder if— If they mean only to greet us. To say hello. And in their incomprehensible implacability they continue trying to greet us, as a fly butts his hairy head over and over upon the pane of glass. Or do they comprehend how difficult it is for us to meet them? Is that why they persevere so? Out of kindness?’

  The waiter returned with a new glass of hock-and-soda, gave us a stiff little bow, and retreated inside again.

  ‘Perhaps it is as difficult for them to see us,’ I said.

  My new companion nodded once, twice, long deep nods, as if this were a new thought, and he was pondering it. ‘What if Mr Wells stands at the head of a new form of storytelling?’ he said.

  This provoked me to a sharp speech close to rudeness. ‘That trash? Never! Never! Sir, forgive me, but I consider myself something of a literatus, and Mr Wells has no posthumous reputation to which he can look. Read the novels of Henry James, or of George Meredith, or Gissing, and then read this novel, and then tell me which is truer to life!’ I was growing heated, and took a sip of beer. The stranger was looking intently at me.

  ‘Truer to life is the point, of course,’ he said, in a distant voice. ‘True as a straight line is said to be true. True as a portrait is said to be true. Unless the cosmos itself is so constituted that the portrait precedes the sitter? Schopenhauer believed will the structuring principle of the universe; and what is will if not the idiom of mind? He confessed no master, did Schopenhauer, but Kant; and Kant says as much. Well, then, it might not surprise us if the physical sitter, on his stool, in his artist’s studio, finds his nose changing length, or his eyes moving further apart, or his hair colour darkening, as the portrait dictates.’ I must have looked aghast at such a suggestion, and the fellow laughed. ‘Of course, it’s nonsense!’

  My heart lightened. Of course it was! I was touring, in the grand manner. The man I loved was asleep in the hotel, and soon I would return to him. I had seen nothing untoward.

  ‘To repeat myself, though,’ the other fellow said, musingly. ‘What if Mr Wells does stand at the head of a new form of storytelling? If he does, I’d wager many more people will … see. I’d wager the newspapers would fill up with accounts of strange beings, and lights in the sky, and tentacles and I know not what. But I daresay you are correct, sire. I daresay the twentieth century belongs to Mr James.’

  We parted on good terms. On the way back to the hotel I went to the Opernhaus, and purchased two tickets for the evening’s performance.

  3

  The Institute

  Totality

  :1:

  Let me pick the threads of this story up again, rearrange the letters into a new form. And the name of this anagram is how quickly life goes to shit. For to shit mine went, and assuredly so. For a long time I blamed the drink, and my mashed-up face and my prolonged loneliness, and a malign deity who hated me and didn’t even exist, the bastard, which naturally made it worse. I didn’t blame my encounter (let’s call it that) in Antarctica – because I really didn’t want to think about my encounter in Antarctica at all. I had experienced things and couldn’t unexperience them. The whole. Yet, somehow, my life crept onwards. The booze helped. I acted as if it had never happened, except that it structured my whole miserable existence – as if is, of course, more than enough for English living. That’s pretty much a thumbnail definition of Englishness, that.

  That Oscar Wilde line about living in the gutter but looking at the stars has always irritated me. The affectation of it! The smarm. I speak as someone whose life used to be, literally, looking at the stars and then got relocated – literally again – to the gutter, so I know whereof I speak. At twenty-five I was an astrophysicist doctoral student at Reading University working on non-random radio emissions from galactic locale stellar objects. Then my life turned to garbage. On my fiftieth birthday I was working as a bin man for Bracknell and Wokingham council. The letters tumble down the slope in a big heap, as the lorry tips up its back. I was haunted, the whole way down.

  What had happened to me in Antarctica was, I told myself, only hallucination. But it was a horribly vivid hallucination, and it kept returning to me, and it required large quantities of drink to return it to more conventional functioning. This is the first, and most important thing I learned from my Antarctic experience: the brain is a complex machine, and once you’ve dinged it, it will tend to throw weird shapes and glitches into your thoughts – for years. For decades. Bad dreams.

  Bad dreams.

  Ghosts.

  Whole sight: or all the rest is desolation.

  People haunt other people in many ways. Here’s a for instance: you’d think that ignoring somebody studiously enough would lead eventually to them giving up. Not so. Not with some people. Take Roy, snug in his insane asylum. After a few stilted ‘please cease and desist’ replies to his many letters, I simply stopped responding. I had no personal animus against him, I told myself. The balance of his mind had been disturbed at the time of his actions and so on and so forth. It was regrettable; let’s forget all about it. I wanted him to stop. He did not stop. So I reneged on my resolution to ignore him, and wrote back angrily, imploringly, commanding him to stop, which is to say in truth begging him to stop. He continued writing. Eventually, on the advice of a friend, I got a solicitor to write to the director of the asylum requesting that the patient named ‘Roy Curtius’ be prevented from harassing my client via unsolicited and distressing letters sent etc., etc. The letter we received back expressed regret and surprise, and included a photocopy of a letter signed by me – of course I’d never signed such a thing – written upon Koestler Trust headed notepaper no less, courteously requesting him to keep sending me his ‘insights’. This letter spoke of a ‘collaborative creative project’. I was baffled by this. I instructed the solicitor to write back, distancing myself from the forgery. I also approached the police, who took a statement from me and did everything short of literally rolling their eyes and sighing to show that they were perfectly uninterested. Nothing more came of this, except that Roy either stopped writing to me, or else the asylum stopped his letters from going into their out-box.

  Each of those solictor’s letters cost me £90. That’s £180 for two letters. A lot of money back then. It’s quite a lot of money, even now.

  I got on with my life. I was a man with seven fingers, a weird patch of skin on my nose that was markedly redder than the rest of my face and a nest of leprous-looking scars on the left side of my face. My visage, not hitherto ill-favoured, now possessed a patchwork complexion somewhere between the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz and a scary clown. I also own fewer than the usual complement of toes. The frostbite had killed some of my facial nerves, giving my interactions an unfortunately mask-like demeanour. Add into this a certain stoutness in the belly area: not fat exactly, not in the slack or flabby sense of the word. The way my torso is shaped, really. I have a solid, blocky arse, and
a convex rather than a concave waist. For a period of eighteen months or so (this was when I was working as a postdoc at the University of Dundee) I attended a gym; and assiduously sculpted and toned my body. My muscles bulked, I could lift heavier weights and turn myself into a giant crab-pincer by lying back and performing a hundred rapid sit-ups. But this didn’t shift my fundamental shape, and after a while I grew disheartened and gave up.

  My life through the nineties and noughties was one defined by long stretches of involuntary celibacy. It occurs to me that most people live this way. It occurs to me, too, that art, literature and culture have been rather derelict in their duty so far as capturing this essential truth of things is concerned. Once upon a time, sex was unspeakable in our stories, and so was only always implicit – we get Elizabeth Bennett and Darcy dancing a saraband rather than thrashing about in bed. Nonetheless, stories were always about a lovely woman and a handsome man dancing that saraband. Then there was the Chatterley trial, and suddenly in the 1960s and 1970s novels were full of sex scenes. Of course, it was always a particular kind of sex scene. Growing up in the late seventies and early eighties, before the supersaturation of culture by internet porn, I devoted a lot of time to digging out the dirty bits in contemporary novels borrowed from the library. It was all we had, back then. I pored over the scenes in Harold Robbins blockbusters, or Henry Miller, or the novelisation of Endless Love. What you get in those books is amazing, mind-blowing, transcendent fucking. Beautiful, physically confident young people getting naked with one another and blowing one another’s minds. Then computer porn came along and literalised precisely that for the whole world. We went in short order from no sex in our literature and film to— Well, that. In doing so we hopped right over the broad middle ground. It’s that middle ground where we all live. All of us save only a few supermodels and tantric sex athletes and whatnot. At the upper end of this hinterland are people with thinning hair and bad skin having sex with other people cringingly self-conscious about their flab. People who cannot build physical confidence upon the shifting sands of frankly unprepossessing bodies, who yet can’t seem to make common ground with one another over their shared insufficiencies. People who muddle through, sweetening a life of low-level self-dissatisfaction with tart little orgasms from time to time, though ‘time to time’ turns out to be never quite frequent enough, the partner never quite attractive enough, the wellbeing provided by the orgasm just a touch too fleeting a thing, breath into the wind. People tired, and resentful, and corroded by their cul-de-sac awareness that this is all there is for them. People making compromises on their sexual fantasy ideals in order to accommodate them to the reality.