Amis, Martin - Einstein's Monsters (v1.0)

by Einstein's Monsters(Lit)

  This happened five years ago. Yes, I'm here to tell you that the world is still around, in 1985. We live in New York now. I teach. The students come to me, and then they leave. There are gaps, spaces in between things big enough for me to glimpse the study life and know again that I can't take it. My daughter is four years old. I was present at the birth, or I tried to be. First I was sick; then I hid; then I fainted. Yeah, I did real good. Found and revived, I was led back to the delivery room. They placed the blood-fringed bundle in my arms. I thought then and I think now: How will the poor little bitch make it? How will she make it? But I'm learning to live with her, with the worry bomb, the love bomb. Last summer we took her to England. The pound was weak and the dollar was strong—the bold, the swaggering dollar, plunderer of Europe. We took her to London, London West, carnival country with its sons of thunder.

  Bujak country. I'd called my landlady and established that Bujak, too, was still around, in 1984. There was a question I needed to ask him. And Michi and I wanted to show Bujak our girl, little Roza, named for the old woman.

  It was old Roza whom I had thought of most fixedly, during the worst car journey of my life, as we drove from Manchester to London, from fair weather into foul, into Sunday weather. That morning, over coffee and yogurt in her cubicle, Michi handed me the smudged and mangling tabloid. "Sam?" she said. I stared at the story, at the name, and realized that the rat life is not somewhere else anymore, is not on the other side but touches your life, my life. . . . Cars are terrible things and no wonder Bujak hated them. Cars are cruel creatures, vicious bastards, pitiless and inexorable, with only this one idea, this A-to-B-idea. They made no allowances. Down we slid through the motorway wheel-squirt. Neighbors gathered as we parked, the men bearing umbrellas, the women with their arms folded, shaking their heads. I crossed the street and rang the bell. And again. And for what? I tried the back door, the kitchen porch. Then Michiko called me. Together we stared through the living-room window. Bujak sat at the table, hunched forward as if he needed all the power of his back and shoulders just to hold position, just to keep his rest energy seized, skewered. Several times I knocked on the glass. He never moved. There was a noise in my ear and the seconds fussed and fussed, slower than a fuse. The street felt like a cave. I turned to Michi and her four-lidded eyes.

  We stood and watched each other through the heavy rain.

  Later, I was some help to him, I think, when it was my turn to tangle with the strong force. For some reason Michiko could bear none of this; the very next day she bowed out on me and went straight back to America. Why? She had and still has ten times my strength. Perhaps that was it. Perhaps she was too strong to bend to the strong force. Anyway, I make no special claims here. ... In the evenings Bujak would come and sit in my kitchen, filling the room. He wanted proximity, he wanted to be elsewhere. He didn't talk. The small corridor hummed with strange emanations, pulsings, fallout. It was often hard to move, hard to breathe. What do strong men feel when their strength is leaving them? Do they listen to the past or do they just hear things—voices, music, the cauldron bubble of distant hooves? I'll be honest and say what I thought. I thought, Maybe he'll have to kill me, not because he wants to or wishes me harm, but because he has taken so much harm himself. This would free him of it, for a while. Something had to give. I endured the aftermath, the radiation. That was the only thing I had to contribute.

  Also I went with him to court, and was at his side throughout that injury, that serial injury. The two defendants were Scotsmen, bail beaters from Dundee, twentyish, wanted—not that it made much difference who they were. There was no plea of insanity, nor indeed any clear sign of it. Sanity didn't enter into the thing. You couldn't understand anything they said so a policeman translated. Their story went like this. Having had more pints of beer than were perhaps strictly good for them, the two men took up with Leokadia Bujak on the street and offered to walk her home. Asked inside, they in turn made passionate love to the young woman, at her invitation, and then settled down for a refreshing nap. While they slept, some other party had come in and done all these terrible things. Throughout Bujak sat there, quietly creaking. He and I both knew that Leokadia might have done something of the kind, on another night, in another life, Christ, she might have done—but with these dogs, these superdogs, underdogs, threadbare rodents with their orange teeth? It didn't matter anyway. Who cared. Bujak gave his evidence. The jury was out for less than twenty minutes. Both men got eighteen years. From my point of view, of course (for me it was the only imponderable), the main question was never asked, let alone answered: it had to do with those strange seconds in Leokadia's bedroom, Bujak alone with the two men. Nobody asked the question. I would ask it, four years later. I couldn't ask it then. . . . The day after sentencing I had a kind of a breakdown. With raw throat and eyes and nose streaming I hauled myself onto a jet. I didn't even dare say good-by. At Kennedy what do I find but Michiko staring me in the face and telling me she's pregnant. There and then I went down on my lousy knees and begged her not to have it. But she had it all right—two months early. Jesus, a new horror story by Edgar Allan Poe: The Premature Baby. Under the jar, under the lamp, jaundice, pneumonia —she even had a heart attack. So did I, when they told me. She made it in the end, though. She's great now, in 1985. You should see her. It is the love bomb and its fallout that energize you in the end. You couldn't begin to do it without the love. . . . That's them on the stairs, I think. Yes, in they come, changing everything. Here is Roza, and here is Michiko, and here am I.

  Bujak was still on the street. He had moved, from 45 to 84, but he was still on the street. We asked around. The whole street knew Bujak. And there he was in the front garden, watching a fire as it flexed and cracked, the snakeheads of flame taking sudden bites from the air—snakes of fire, in the knowledge garden. After all, we coped with fire, when it came; we didn't all get broiled and scorched. He looked up. The ogre's smile hadn't changed that much, I thought, although the presence of the man was palpably reduced. Still old and huge in his vest, but the mass, the holding energy softened and dispersed. Well, something had to give. Bujak had adopted or been adopted by or at any rate made himself necessary to a large and assorted household, mostly Irish. The rooms were scrubbed, bare, vigorous, and orderly, with all that can-do can do. There was lunch on the sun-absorbing pine table: beer, cider, noise, and the sun's phototherapy. The violence with which the fiftyish redhead scolded Bujak about his appearance made it plain to me that there was a romantic attachment. Even then, with the old guy nearer seventy than sixty, I thought with awe of Bujak in the sack. Bujak in the bag! Incredibly, his happiness was intact—unimpaired, entire. How come? Because, I think, his generosity extended not just to the earth but to the universe—or simply that he loved all matter, its spin and charm, redshifts and blueshifts, its underthings. The happiness was there. It was the strength that had gone from him forever. Over lunch he said that, a week or two ago, he had seen a man hitting a woman on the street. He shouted at them and broke it up. Physically, though, he was powerless to intercede—helpless, he said, with a shrug. Actually you could feel the difference in the way he moved, in the way he crossed the room toward you. The strength had gone, or the will to use it.

  Afterward he and I stepped out onto the street. Michiko had ducked out of this last encounter, choosing instead to linger with the ladies. But we had the girl with us, little Roza, asleep on Bujak's shoulder. I watched him without fear. He wouldn't drop the folded child. He had taken possession of Roza with his arms.

  As if by arrangement we paused at number 45. Black kids now played in the garden with a winded red football. Things were falling away between Bujak and me, and suddenly it seemed that you could say what you liked. So I said, "Adam. No offense. But why didn't you kill them? I would have. I mean, if I think of Michi and Roza ..." But in fact you cannot think it, you cannot go near it. The thought is fire. "Why didn't you kill the sons of bitches? What stopped you?"

  "Why?" he asked, and grinn
ed. "What would have been the reason?"

  "Come on. You could have done it, easy. Self-defense. No court on earth would have sent you down."

  "True. It occurred to me."

  "Then what happened? Did you—did you feel too weak all of a sudden? Did you just feel too weak?"

  "On the contrary. When I had their heads in my hands I thought how incredibly easy to grind their faces together— until they drowned in each other's faces. But no."

  But no. Bujak had simply dragged the men by the arms (half a mile, to the police station in Harrow Road), like a father with two frantic children. He delivered them and dusted his hands.

  "Christ, they'll be out in a few years. Why not kill them? Why not?"

  "I had no wish to add to what I found. I thought of my dead wife Monika. I thought—they're all dead now. I couldn't add to what I saw there. Really the hardest thing was to touch them at all. You know the wet tails of rats? Snakes? Because I saw that they weren't human beings at all. They had no idea what human life was. No idea! Terrible mutations, a disgrace to their human molding. An eternal disgrace. If I had killed them then I would still be strong. But you must start somewhere. You must make a start."

  And now that Bujak has laid down his arms, I don't know why, but I am minutely stronger. I don't know why—I can't tell you why.

  He once said to me: "There must be more matter in the universe than we think. Else the distances are horrible. I'm nauseated." Einsteinian to the end, Bujak was an Oscillationist, claiming that the Big Bang will forever alternate with the Big Crunch, that the universe would expand only until unanimous gravity called it back to start again. At that moment, with the cosmos turning on its hinges, light would begin to travel backward, received by the stars and pouring from our human eyes. If, and I can't believe it, time would also be reversed, as Bujak maintained (will we move backward too? Will we have any say in things?), then this moment as I shake his hand shall be the start of my story, his story, our story, and we will slip downtime of each other's lives, to meet four years from now, when, out of the fiercest grief, Bujak's lost women will reappear, born in blood (and we will have our conversations, too, backing away from the same conclusion), until Boguslawa folds into Leokadia, and Leokadia folds into Monika, and Monika is there to be enfolded by Bujak until it is her turn to recede, kissing her fingertips, backing away over the fields to the distant girl with no time for him (will that be any easier to bear than the other way around?), and then big Bujak shrinks, becoming the weakest thing there is, helpless, indefensible, naked, weeping, blind and tiny, and folding into Roza.

  INSIGHT AT FLAME LAKE

  Ned's Diary

  July 16. Well it certainly is a pleasure to have Dan come and summer with us up here at Flame Lake. I'm glad to do it. We have him till mid-August. There'll be problems-Fran and I agree on this—but right now he seems manageable enough, though heavily haunted. Fran's a little upset too, of course, but we talked it through, the night before Dan came, and straightened the whole thing out. I spoke on the phone with Dr. Slizard, who warned me that the extra medication that Dan's taking would make him sullen and unresponsive for the first three or four days. And he is grieving. Poor Dan—I feel for the kid. So brilliant, and so troubled, like his father, God rest his soul. I am grieving too. Even though we weren't that close (he was old enough to be my father), still, when your brother goes, it's like a little death. It's a hell of a thing. Dan hides from the heat. He keeps to his room. Dr. Siizard told me to expect this. I'm hoping the baby will amuse and distract him. Fran is nervous about that also, however. All right. It won't be the carefree summer we were planning on. But we'll work it out. And surely the light and space of Flame Lake will be useful therapy for Dan and may even help to ease his problem.

  Dan's Notebook

  The lake is like an explosion. . . .

  Dr. Siizard, in our long discussion after Dad's death, assured me that I have insight into my condition. I have insight: I know I'm sick. In a sense this was news to me— but then, how could you feel like I feel and not know something was up? Yet there are people with my condition who do not have insight. They feel like I feel and they think it's cool. Dad had no insight.

  For the time being, with the extra medication and everything, I keep to my room. Calmly I note the usual side reactions: sudden tightening of the tongue, unprompted blushing, drags of nausea, beaked headaches. All food tastes the same. It tastes of nothing, of dryness and nothing. There is the expected loss of affect—though I can see, with my insight, that it is more pronounced than ever before. Not yet ready for the heat, I sit in my room and listen to the helpless weeping of the baby. The baby seems cute enough. All babies are cute enough: they have to be, evolutionarily speaking. Her name, they tell me, is Harriet, or Hattie.

  I'm grateful to Uncle Ned and, I guess, to his new wife Francesca. She is young, plump, and deeply dark. I know it's ninety degrees out there but she really ought to wear more clothes. In certain lights she has a soft mustache. She is small but she is big: four-feet-eleven in all directions. She's like a baby herself. I have read widely on the subject of schizophrenia. Or, if you prefer, I have read narrowly but with intensity. I have read Dr. Slizard's influential monograph, Schizophrenia, forty or fifty times. I never leave home without it. Slizard doesn't say much about schizophrenic sexuality because, apparently, there isn't that much to say. It's not a hot scene, schizophrenia. Hardly anybody gets laid.

  Behind the comfortable shacklike house there is a forest where, tomorrow, I may go walking. For the time being the forest looks too callow and self-conscious. The greenery is so green. So wooden is the wood. With its glitter-sizzle and the proton play of the waterskaters on its surface, the lake—the lake is like an explosion, in the last split second before it explodes.

  Ned's Diary

  July 19. Although Dan is no problem and continues to be quite manageable, I have to say that, on occasion, he comes close to straining our patience. But that's all right. Patience is an activity, not a state. You can't just expect to be patient. You work at it. You beef it up. Mealtimes is when we seem to need our patience most. We need all the patience we can get. Poor Dan, he has difficulty eating. His mouth appears to be painfully dry. He chews slowly, and forever. There is a kind of leaden suspense over the table as we wait for the disappearance of each epic mouthful. Give him a slice of vividly juicy cantaloupe and it turns to bark between his jaws. Fran and I find ourselves lurching into the craziest conversations—we talk about anything—just to cover for the kid. And despite his extra medication, his grief pills, Dan is no zombie. I sometimes wish he was, but he's not. He knows. His blushes are really something to see. This morning I called Dr. Slizard at the Section. He said that Dan is sure to improve in a couple of days and will start to communicate. Fran worries about the way Dan looks at the baby. My anxiety about Harriet is more general. If you can believe—or absorb—what you read in the newspapers, it is apparently open season on babies and children. People seem to have gotten the idea suddenly that they can do what they like with them. She's safe here of course, but then there's the crib-death gimmick, dreamed up to ensure that parents get no peace of mind at all. Every morning when I hear Hattie crying or babbling I think—Great. She made it. Fran worries about the way Dan looks at the baby. I tell her he looks at everything that way—at me, at the walls, at the dragonflies, at Flame Lake.

  Dan's Notebook

  Days are hot and endless.

  The fish do their fish thing. They swim with their shimmy, then rise to gulp the waiting bugs. The bugs oblige: they go along with the deal. Ned does his Ned thing, and so does Fran. As for the baby, as for Hattie, well, I withhold judgment for the time being.

  Last night I made a distinguished addition to my vast repertoire of atomic dreams, my dreams of nuclear supercatastrophe (you could hardly call them nightmares anymore). The last civilian is running across the last plain pursued by the last pilot in the last aircraft with the last warhead. These last two actors are moving at th
e same speed—an interesting departure from the usual crux (escape, weird retardation), with the aircraft experiencing all the human metal fatigue of nightmare. The last civilian runs with a ragged and desperate stride. The last pilot stalks him heavily through the smoke. I cannot tell whether I am the last civilian or the last pilot or simply the last observer, and it doesn't matter, because all will vanish in the last flash-boom and glitter-sizzle, in the last pouring insult of light.

  Uncle Ned was twenty years younger than my father. On the other hand, he is twenty years older than Francesca, this new wife of his. She watches television for hours, or at least she is present while it's on. She reads the dumb stories in the dumb magazines: how Elizabeth Taylor licked her drink problem; how Cher's house is seriously haunted; how President Kennedy is alive and well, living with Buddy Holly on the planet Krypton. Fran sprawls with the baby and listens to rock-pop all day long. That music—its fatuous lack of complication: songs of personal growth. With all that brown flesh of hers Francesca takes up a lot of space. She is prodigious. She floods the room. It goes without saying that Ned cannot satisfy her. She has one baby, but she will soon be wanting more.

  Like most schizophrenics, I was born in the winter quarter. Many people are baffled by this seasonal disposition.

  With insight, however, the explanation seems straightforward enough. Fall and winter are the hardest times for the schizophrenic. They feel terribly schizophrenic in the fall and winter. Not until March or April do they feel like making love. Not until March or April do they feel like making schizophrenic babies.