by Trevor Hoyle
‘What old Dave Brubeck number?’
‘ “Take Five”, remember it? That’s the title of the show as well. Take Five. Each caller gets five minutes to discuss their problem, then they have to make way for the next one. Keeps the thing rolling along and stops the cranks and sad sacks hogging the line.’
‘Hey, that’s a neat idea! Who came up with it – Sarah?’
‘Yeah, she thought of it,’ Cawdor said, smiling to himself. Trust Gil to be so vague, even after Sarah had discussed her radio show many a time with him. Gil just didn’t live in the ordinary world: he inhabited another plane of existence. Half the time he wandered through the crazy quantum world of particle physics where you could meet yourself on the stairs, turn into your own grandfather, die before you were born, etc. The other half he spent creating video games of mind-blowing complexity and fiendishness, purely for the intellectual challenge and amusement of himself and his circle of computer nerds. There was a story told about Gil Gribble, which Cawdor could believe was true and not apocryphal, that one time he forgot where his second-floor apartment was situated (116th Street, two blocks east of Broadway) and had to go into a phone booth and call the operator to find out his own address. The wonder of it was, Cawdor marvelled, that he was able to remember his own name, and hadn’t spent hours with the phone in his hand sorting through the amazing junkyard of his brain until he stumbled across it.
‘How’s the Beast these days?’ Cawdor asked, using Gil’s pet name for the sprawling computer system that was taking over his apartment.
‘You won’t believe it, Jeff Absolutely amazing! Teamed it with VR three-dimensional hologram graphics. It’s a first, never seen it done before. Jeez, it’s so damn real,’ Gil enthused. ‘Buildings, objects, even the people – you swear you can touch them. Right now I’m working on an interactive program I’ve christened “The Zone” where the player can create his own virtual reality as he goes along.’
‘Doing all this for fun seems a bit of a waste. Couldn’t you market it, sell it as a package? I’m certain there are commercial and industrial applications galore. You could make yourself a fortune.’
‘Yeah? You reckon?’ Gil Gribble’s response was unsure. ‘Why’d I wanna do that?’ he then asked, genuinely baffled.
‘Yeah, right, why would you?’ Cawdor realised it was a dumb suggestion. Making money didn’t even register a zero on Gil’s list of priorities. Employing his creative and inventive faculties for their own sake was what mattered. The joy lay in exploring the boundless possibilities all around him, in setting up fiendish technological puzzles and solving them with the old grey matter. It occurred to Cawdor, not for the first time, that people whose only goal was to make a stash of money rarely succeeded for the simple reason that making money was their only goal. Those who were successful had a passion – a crusading zeal to bring something new and better into the world. When they achieved it, the money came along too, kind of tagged along for the ride as it were.
Gil was the perfect example. His ideas were probably worth millions because they really mattered to him, whereas the accumulation of wealth didn’t rate a passing thought. Gil was sitting on riches, didn’t know it, and didn’t give a hoot anyway.
Cawdor reached across for his beer, only half-listening as Gil chattered on about his wonderful new toy. That was another thing about Gil: he flung himself body and soul into whatever fascinated him at the time, no half-measures, nothing faint-hearted.
‘You can create your own landscape, your own city, your own people, that’s the beauty of it. In fact “The Zone” is anything you want it to be. Like dreaming in a sense. It’s your personal vision, unique to you and no one else. On top of which you can interact with it, play out various scenarios, and every time it comes out different, so you can never predict what’s gonna happen next. Tell you, Jeff, it’s kind of amazing. Real humdinger.’
‘Humdinger’. Cawdor hadn’t heard that in a while either. Something snagged at him, as if he sensed a flaw, a subtle contradiction, in what Gil was saying. ‘How come it’s different every time if the user creates the vision in the first place? And how can it be unpredictable when they’re your own thoughts you’ve put in there?’
‘Probability,’ Gil said, slightly puzzled, as if it was the obvious answer to a dumb question.
‘Huh?’
‘Yeah, it’s built into the program. An infinite progression of probable consequences – this way, that way, any which way.’
‘I see,’ Cawdor said, who didn’t really. ‘And who or what decides where these probable consequences lead to?’
‘Well,’ Gil said, sniffing. ‘Nobody decides. Strictly speaking, nothing decides.’
‘Nothing decides?’
‘Yeah, it’s random. Probability decides. You got a beer in your hand right this minute?’
Cawdor frowned. ‘Yes, I just picked it up off the counter.”
‘If you hadn’t picked it up, the beer would still be sitting there, wouldn’t it? Well, in parallel time it still is. You didn’t pick it up. It’s on the counter, not in your hand.’
Cawdor looked at the bottle of Michelob. ‘But it is in my hand.’
‘Sure, in that strand of time it is. But in another strand of time it’s on the counter and you’re standing there without a beer. That’s probability.’
‘This beer I’m not drinking sure tastes good though,’ Cawdor muttered dryly, which made Gil Gribble chuckle. He went on, ‘Could be we’re not even having this conversation…’
‘You got it, that’s right, maybe we’re not!’ Gil agreed enthusiastically. Cawdor was being facetious – that was his intention at any rate – but by the sound of his voice Gil plainly wasn’t.
They said their goodbyes and hung up. Cawdor finished off his beer and decided he could eat something. He looked at the clock. Daniella would be home soon, and in all probability she’d be hungry as well.
Probability. That damn word again.
They ate in the kitchen, the French doors open to admit a cool yet pleasant evening breeze. Cawdor had made a bolognese sauce, steamed and strained a large scoop of spaghetti, and chopped some tomatoes, cucumber, apples and iceberg lettuce as a side salad, sprinkled with grated walnuts. From the oven he took a sliced baguette wrapped in foil, basted lightly with garlic butter. He opened a bottle of chilled Californian Chardonnay, which Daniella was permitted to drink fifty-fifty with mineral water. She ate well enough, but he thought she looked paler than usual, and she was quiet, not bubbling over as expected about how rehearsals were going, the fun they had had with missing props, falling scenery, forgotten lines.
Just turned sixteen, his daughter was losing the gawky, gangling knobblyness of adolescence. Six months ago Daniella had reminded him of a yearling colt, tottering about on legs like sticks, so painfully thin that her ribs showed through her tank top. Now she was filling out, having grown to almost her adult height, was even developing a figure as distinct from a flat-as-an-ironing-board body. She took after Sarah, with her fair hair, pale colouring and fine bone structure. Her skin was flawless, almost translucent in its perfection, with a delicate gossamer down on the sides of her neck and the backs of her forearms.
Cawdor felt a pang. That too brief interlude of teetering between girlhood and womanhood was the most exquisite age, he believed, the vitality of life positively bursting into full bloom.
He added some wine to her glass and topped it up with mineral water.
‘We need tickets for this play or just show up? And when is it – next week sometime?’
‘You really want to come? Sure?’ Her long lashes blinked at him, grey-blue eyes wide and steady.
‘Don’t you want us to?’
‘Well, yeah, I don’t mind.’ Twich of the shoulder in a half-shrug. ‘She said you weren’t a big fan of theatre plays. You always fall asleep, snore all the way through, she said.’
‘ “She” is the cat’s mother,’ Cawdor said, stung by his daughter’s discourtesy. ‘I sugges
t you call her by her proper name.’
‘Yeah, yeah. Mom said – OK?’
‘Sarah told you that, huh?’ Cawdor gave a heavy mock sigh. He held up a finger. ‘I did it the one time, and I’ve never been allowed to forget it. And that play was over four hours long. Seemed more like ten.’
‘This is thirty-five minutes.’
‘That’s my kind of play, Tonto,’ he said, raising his glass. He clinked hers and grinned. Daniella gave a rather wan smile and sipped her wine. It was a game they had played since she was seven or eight, this Tonto-Kimo Sabe routine. Usually she would have responded, and they would have batted it back and forth. But not this evening, apparently.
He was trying to jolly her along, and not making too good a job of it. She might be feeling down because of her period, but he didn’t know if it was that time of the month – and he certainly didn’t intend raising such a delicate subject. If it didn’t embarrass her, it definitely would him.
He tried another tack.
‘Hey – vacation not far off. Looking forward to it?’
‘Yeah, I guess, sort of…’
‘It’ll be fun. Lots of places to see. You’ve covered ancient-Roman history in school, haven’t you? We’ll stop by in Rome, tour the Coliseum, take a trip to Pisa and the leaning tower – and wait till you see the little villages of Tuscany, perched on the side of mountains.’
Daniella pushed her plate aside. She had apparently found something interesting in a stray breadcrumb and flicked it across the table. It bounced off the wine bottle.
Outwardly, Cawdor remained calm. Inwardly, he was infuriated by his daughter. He would have preferred her to come straight out with a flat statement: No, I’m not looking forward to it. I don’t want to go. What’s to see in Italy except a pile of broken statues?
More than anything, he hated the kind of lazy teenage indifference she was displaying. It was neither one thing nor the other. It was that manner some young people had of patronising their elders, of bored compliance with their wishes because that was the easiest route to take without giving offence to the old farts. The puzzling thing, however, was that Daniella had never behaved in such a truculent fashion before. She was a lively and intelligent and curious creature, not a sulky and tiresome and illmannered brat. Was the hormonal change she was undergoing the end of childhood – goodbye to Tonto and Kimo Sabe – and the beginning of the moody teenage phase? He dreaded the prospect.
No sense in prolonging a conversation that wasn’t going anywhere. Not a conversation, he corrected himself, more a game of ping pong with only one player.
‘Let’s clear away. Then you can get an early night – you look tired to me.’
‘No, I’m not,’ Daniella contradicted him.
‘OK, fine, you’re not tired.’ He wasn’t going to argue the point.
In silence they stacked the plates and glasses in the dishwasher, and, while Cawdor stretched clingfilm over the salad bowl and put it in the fridge, Daniella returned the condiments to their shelf and wiped the table with a damp cloth.
‘Take Five’s on in fifteen minutes,’ he said, glancing at the wall clock. ‘Gonna listen?’
Daniella shrugged indifferently. On her way to the door she tossed her head, flinging her long hair back over her shoulder in a gesture that was both arrogant and dismissive. He had never struck her physically, would never, ever have dreamt of doing such a thing, yet he felt like hitting her now.
‘Daniella?’ Cawdor said, his infuriation boiling up into real anger. ‘What’s got into you, for heaven’s sake?’
‘No, guess I won’t listen to her – to Mom – if you don’t mind. I’m gonna watch The Lovebeams Show in my room instead. If that’s OK with you. Thanks for the meal and the wine, Dad.’
She went out, and a few moments later he heard her bedroom door slam upstairs.
Cawdor stood alone in the kitchen. The heavy silence Daniella had left behind her was disturbed only by the faint hum of the refrigerator. The gleaming white surfaces seemed to be glittering all around him, reflecting the overhead spotlights into his eyes. He pressed his eyelids shut against the painful glare.
He couldn’t begin to imagine what was the matter with her, why his lovely sweet-natured daughter had been transformed into this sulky arrogant creature he didn’t recognise. Moving to the cupboard, he reached for the bottle on the top shelf and poured a measure of Irish whiskey into a Waterford-crystal glass.
Credits were rolling up the TV screen. The final soaring chords swelled and then died away as the screen faded to black.
Cawdor lay back with his head on the cushion. He was palpitating and perspiring. He knew from past experience that his dreams were always much more vivid if he happened to fall asleep on the couch than if he dreamt in bed at night. His imagination seemed more excitable, and certainly more capricious. As if his mind was trapped in a kind of limbo.
But what relief deeply heartfelt, to wake up.
He took a drink in celebration and felt the whiskey burn a molten path right down to the root of him. It was so good he took another and then rested his head, eyes closed, the glass on his chest.
The images floated up from his unconscious, like poisoned fish. It now struck him as funny, ludicrous even, to have imagined the sexual episode with Phyllis in his office. How in God’s name had such a bizarre notion entered his head? If you believed Freud, it might mean that unconsciously he actually desired such a thing to happen. That he secretly lusted after her. Cawdor mulled this over, and came to the conclusion that if it was true, it was buried so damn deep there was no chance of it ever coming to the surface.
He opened his eyes and gazed across at his wife, glasses perched on the tip of her nose as she leafed through a brochure, the leaning tower of Pisa on its cover.
‘Remember the last time we went to the Uffizi?’ Sarah said, glancing up at him.
Cawdor nodded and smiled. Even though it was many years ago, he could see the golden light of that afternoon in Florence bathing the honey-coloured stonework of the Palazzo Vecchio… could feel the heat from the worn paving slabs through the soles of his shoes. The memory of it seemed like yesterday.
He felt content and relaxed, the warm glow of whiskey spreading through him. The liquor had gone straight to his head; his senses were spinning, his vision unsteady. He tried to remember if he had eaten earlier that evening, but couldn’t. Hence the reason he was feeling woozy, drinking on an empty stomach, Cawdor supposed.
Another movie had started, some kind of prison drama. A hollow-cheeked runt of a guy with thinning fair hair was being strapped in the electric chair. The usual scene, with prison officers, a doctor and a priest, standing by with grim faces. The camerawork was terrible, the quality of the print even worse, grainy and badly processed, with blotches of light and shadow. Maybe it was a documentary, Cawdor thought, except they would never show a man actually in the electric chair, about to be fried. Standards in television had slipped, but not to that extent.
‘… the appeal for clemency was rejected,’ a voice was saying, ‘and the execution will take place as scheduled. We now take you over live to join our reporter, Cal Parker, as the final minutes tick away.’
Cawdor squirmed round to look at the screen. Was it a movie or was it for real? This was totally unbelievable. Making a public spectacle of executions was a return to the Middle Ages. If not for real, it had to be a spoof, part of a sick game show – that was the only explanation he could think of. But there was none of that hysterical audience laughter, no jovial host egging on the contestants to make complete jerks of themselves.
‘The condemned man has been shaved at the temples, as you can see,’ a hushed voice said. ‘Also, his lower calves have been shaved and K-Y jelly applied to aid conductivity. Thirty minutes ago, in his cell, he was made to don diapers, a necessary precaution because of involuntary dysfunction of the colonic system when the switch is thrown and the juice flows. The event itself is not a pleasant sight to view, so, if you’re of
a nervous or sensitive disposition, prepare yourself or maybe look away for a minute or so. I’ll give you the countdown, so be ready for it.’
Despite himself, and even while feeling repugnance, Cawdor craned forward. To watch a man die, live, on nationwide TV, was an event of such momentous historical significance that he was bereft of thought or feeling, beyond that of morbid curiosity. He felt numbed and mesmerised by it, his emotions on hold. He sneaked a glance at Sarah, to see if she was as gripped as he was. She was turning the pages of that damn holiday brochure, smiling to herself. A man was about to die and she was lost in daydreams of Tuscany.
Cawdor stared at the screen. The man was slumped forward as far as the restraining straps would allow. On the wall behind him, a thin red hand swept round the big white face of a clock, marking off the final seconds. There was a kind of fuzziness above the man’s head, vapour hanging in the air, like a faint blue halo. What was that – static electricity? Had the execution taken place and the blue halo was a discharge from the body? No, not yet – Cawdor could plainly see that the man’s eyes were open, and he was staring down at his left hand.
On the big white clock the seconds swept smoothly away, and the long black hand jerked suddenly to two minutes past midnight. The man sat motionless, the fuzzy blue patch hovering above his head, waiting with incredible calmness for the ultimate event. The image on the screen seemed frozen in time, stuck in the last eternal moment.
Leaning forward on the cushion, unblinking, Cawdor swallowed so hard that his throat hurt. He felt a sour burning sensation and started to cough, and then to choke.
He opened his eyes to find himself covered in sweat.
He looked at the TV. The screen was blank. And he was alone. There was no one sitting in the armchair.
On the coffee table next to him stood a bottle of Jameson’s, almost empty. The Waterford-crystal glass lay on its side, the spilt whiskey making a trail of bubbles on the varnished surface. A glistening bead of amber liquid formed on the table’s edge and dripped to the damp patch on the carpet. Another slowly gathered and hung there, trembled, and fell.