Exchange Place

by Ciaran Carson

  I was almost out the door when I remembered I’d forgotten to take my medication. So I did, a tablet each of clopidogrel, atoravastatin, bisoprolol, amlopodine and perindopril. Reminded of Glenn Gould’s prodigious consumption of pharmaceutical drugs – Nembutal, Luminal, Berutal, Valium, Librax, Indocin, Naprosyn, and Aldomet, among others – I took his CD of Contrapunctus XIV with me to play in the car. When I turned on the audio I got a crackle of static and reckoned it must be in radio mode, and was about to switch to the cD player when I heard the words, L’oiseau chante avec ses doigts – the bird sings with its fingers – and recognized the phrase as one of the enigmatic communications received on the car radio by Orphée in Jean Cocteau’s film of the same name, based loosely on the Orpheus myth. It seemed I was listening to a radio adaptation of the screenplay. In the film, the messages are transmitted from the Underworld by the young poet Cégeste, who has been killed by two motorcyclists, emissaries of a mysterious princess. Orphée publishes the messages as poetry and is accused of plagiarism. I heard another few fragments of dialogue before the radio emitted another burst of static. Then there was silence before I heard the phrase again, loud and clear: L’oiseau chante avec ses doigts. Deux fois. L’oiseau chante avec ses doigts. Deux fois. Je répète …

  The radio went dead. I twiddled the knob; but instead of the mysterious broadcast, a Radio Ulster news bulletin came on, announcing that a suspect device had been found in the vicinity of Corporation Square and that the area ... I switched to CD mode, and drove into town, listening to Contrapunctus XIV unfold itself, as I had so many times before, hearing different permutations in it every time, echoes overlaying other echoes. The traffic was slower than usual due to the putative bomb; but as it happened, the journey took precisely the twelve minutes and eighteen seconds of Gould’s playing, for the music came to a stop with that familiar gunshot of silence just as I parked behind the Central Library: a happy coincidence that I thought augured well for the day. I had still a good three-quarters of an hour before my assignation. On a whim I decided to revisit Exchange Place. It had been some years since I had been there, but my thinking about Harland had become more productive of late, and I was sure the sight of the place would prompt new memories. As I entered the narrow entry I remarked, as I had so many times before, the cannon-shaped iron bollards that flanked the entrance, bearing the dints and dents of so many years of traffic. My feet on the cobblestones passed over the footfall of so many others, including my own, because I was someone other then: I did not know then what I now suspect. I came to the door of 14 Exchange Place to find it open. I entered. The vestibule had an air of disuse. I rapped on the door of Federman the stationer, whose depot took up the ground floor. I rapped again, and it opened to reveal the man himself, not much changed since I had seen him last, and still with a pencil in the breast pocket of the tan cotton drill shop-coat he’d worn ever since I’d known him. He threw himself back in mock surprise. If it isn’t himself! he cried, returned from the dead, John Kilfeather, how are you? and he thrust his hand forward. We made some small talk before I came to the question. And Harland? I said, have you heard anything more of him? Well, said Federman, you know how I felt about him even before he took off, and nothing much has happened since to make me change my mind. But would you listen to me? And as I listened to him I knew that he was right. We had talked of these matters before at some length. But somehow or other I never thought of asking to see the attic studio back then, perhaps it was a matter of pride; I thought of the enquiries I had conducted as being casual and perfunctory, but in retrospect I can see that Federman would have thought otherwise. So I put the next question to him. But of course! he cried, I thought you’d never ask! And he went into the shop and came out with a key. Onwards and upwards! he cried, and I mounted the long, high, narrow stair to the attic studio, my passage lit by a skylight in the roof of the stairwell, my heart quickening with every tread.

  I put the key in the door and had to jiggle it a bit before the lock gave. I entered to find the studio in what must have been the state that he left it in. There was the familiar chaos dimly replicated in the deteriorating mirror: crumpled images lying amid crumpled champagne boxes, layers of stuff that had been walked upon by Harland. I scuffled some of it about with my shoe, something I would never have dared to do before, when I tiptoed my way gently through it as I would through an precarious labyrinth. I looked down. The scuffling had revealed a pale blue cover like those of the school exercise books in which Harland kept a journal of sorts, not that I had ever read it. I picked it up with some trepidation. Even now I hesitated to intrude on his innermost thoughts, if that was what they were. I put that thought behind me, opened the book, and read these words in Harland’s writing:

  Research has shown that the hippocampus region of the brain is specifically responsible for processing memory. It is so called because its shape resembles that of the seahorse, in Latin called hippocampus. Coral reefs are a favourite habitat of the seahorse, and I sometimes like to think of human consciousness as one of those vast underwater cities whose fabric is accumulated from the skeletons of its builders: a necropolis which teems with life. Here are massive blocks and towers of stone, hanging gardens of the most varied hues, purple, emerald and amethyst, which undulate and flicker beautifully in the transparent water. Fishes skim the galleries and avenues like flocks of birds, and the nooks and crannies are populated by a myriad of other species. What can the little seahorse know of this fantastic ecosystem? We cannot know. But we can say that its experience is a microcosm of the ongoing, thousands of years old saga that is the life of a coral reef, and which, like the human brain, we have yet to fully fathom.

  The passage was familiar to me from somewhere. My heart gave a lurch as I realized that it had come from my abandoned novel, X+Y=K.

  Stand and Unfold Yourself

  As Kilpatrick put the ring-binder in his briefcase he noticed a suitcase on the floor of the kneehole of the desk. He took off the suit jacket and laid it on the desk and then, with some difficulty, manipulated the mannequin until he had divested it of its trousers. He folded jacket and trousers neatly and put them in the suitcase, lifted both cases, went out the door, locked it, and made his way back to Hôtel Chopin. In Room 36 he took out the ring binder, opened it at random, and read these words:

  When an organism interacts with an object, be it within body boundaries (for example, pain) or outside of them (for example, a landscape), it creates a narrative. This is true whether the object be perceived in the present moment, or recalled, for the past continues to influence our behaviour. The hippocampus is a vital structure in the mapping of multiple, concurrent stimuli. It receives signals related to activity in all sensory cortices, which arrive indirectly at the end of several projection chains with multiple synapses, and reciprocates signals via backward projections along the same chains. In plain speech, it is the instrument by which we assemble ourselves. A human being is a story-telling machine, and the self is a centre of narrative gravity. Patients who have suffered severe lesions to the hippocampus lose the story of themselves: they are bereft of a past and of an anticipated future. They live in an eternal present, in which there is no elsewhere, no before, no after. Their wives, their husbands, their family and friends are constant and surprising strangers to them.

  I see from your record, Mr Kilpatrick, that you are prone to bouts of amnesia: what we call transient global amnesia, specifically. It is a condition especially associated with migraine, and there can be little doubt that the electrical activity of migraine sometimes affects the hippocampus, causing temporary lapses in the processing of information. In these episodes – typically, they last for a few hours, usually less than a day – the otherwise entirely normal person is suddenly deprived of the records that have been recently added to the autobiographical memory. The immediate past, the past of the minutes just before, of the hours before, is a blank. Moreover, since our memory of the here and now also includes memories of the events we constan
tly anticipate – what I like to call memories of the future – it follows that the person struck by such amnesia will have no memory regarding what he intended for the minutes or the hours or days ahead. The idea of the future does not exist for him. Typically, the transient global amnesiac repeats the same questions: Where am I? What am I doing here? How did I come here? The case of K, if we might call you that for now, is especially fascinating, since it would seem that at times the narrative void caused by such attacks is bridged by K’s alternative personality, the simulacrum K created as a child. Let us call this alter ego Mr X. When K’s memory fails, X steps into the breach. Remember, X is not a simple stand-in, an ambitious understudy waiting in the wings for that moment when the leading man is laid low by some catastrophe, whether planned or accidental. Rather, it is as if Hamlet were replaced by Fortinbras, the thinker by the man of action. And Hamlet is a play about the narratives we create for ourselves, is it not? The parts we play? It concerns being or not being. That is the question. And the play starts with a question of identity. Act One, Scene One, line one: Who’s there?

  Kilpatrick read on, skimming here, dwelling on some passages there, trying to make sense of it. The book consisted of three sections: X, a first-person narrative; Y, a third-person narrative concerning a Gabriel Kilpatrick; and K, alternating between first-person and third-person as the protagonists of X and Y morph into someone called K and the events detailed in section X are revisited from his point of view. The last section seemed unfinished; or if it was finished, it was inconclusive. Common to all three sections was a fascination with memory, paranormal phenomena, surveillance, questions of identity, and the bombing campaign conducted by the Provisional IRA in Belfast in the latter decades of the twentieth century. For example:

  Treading the glass grit in Corporation Square, Kilpatrick was reminded that it had been the scene of a bomb two days ago. There was some dispute as to whether the intended target was the Imperial Assurance offices or the Ulster Tea Importers next door. Whatever the case, the effects, as televised on that evening’s Scene Around Six, had been spectacular. The planting of the device, in a Volkswagen estate car, had coincided with the arrival of a Hercules truck delivering a consignment of Irish Breakfast tea. The occupants of the Hercules were forced at gunpoint to abandon their vehicle. The terrorists made their getaway in a second car, a Ford Capri. The Volkswagen exploded fifteen minutes later, causing extensive collateral damage to the structure of the immediate environment, including the Hercules truck and its cargo. Kilpatrick recalled the shudder of the camera’s field of vision as it recorded car, truck and tea-chests disintegrating with a boom and whoosh, an atomic cloud of tea like starlings boiling upwards, sifting, settling on the twisted shrapnel already scattered like bits of art about the wide expanse of Corporation Square.

  John Kilpatrick, reading this passage, realized that it was one of the many incidents – how many scores, how many hundreds? – he had forgotten. One lost count as one incident followed another in a series of amnesiac elisions. Yet everything was watched, overheard, recorded:

  Electronic bugs – parasitic transmitters, Trojan Horse transistors, synaptic grafts or buds – were planted everywhere: in phones and door-handles and light fitments, spiked like hat-pins into the backs of hotel room curtains, masquerading as martini olives in hotel bars, lurking in the ceramic chain-pulls of hotel toilets. In smoke-filled back rooms the glint of an exposed floorboard nail was enough to invite suspicion. Cameras were concealed in smoke detectors, behind bar mirrors, and in bar optics, or were made to look like personal accoutrements: badges, buckles, brooches, bracelets, powder compacts, cigarette lighters. Taking into account that any conversation might be overheard, any covert action photographed, the players conducted conversations and actions accordingly, talking of this when they meant that, doing that instead of this.

  And John Kilpatrick thought he remembered a conversation with John Bourne, who had playfully suggested that every new radio bought in Belfast was liable to be bugged: that it was both receiver and transmitter. But even if it were true, that wouldn’t apply to Bourne’s vintage EKO. So he had thought at the time. In hindsight, he wasn’t so sure. One thing was certain: there was more to everything than met the eye.

  A Benefit of Doubt

  I felt weak at the knees. I cleared a mound of debris from the old leather armchair where Harland would often sit to contemplate a work in progress; and, as I sat down and rolled a cigarette, I remembered how he’d offer me tobacco and papers, and I would roll one, pass him back the makings, and he would roll one too, the paper smeared with pigments from his hands; and when he lit up, the paper crackled and I thought of smoke being drawn into his lungs in a swirl of multicoloured particles. He’d look at the painting as I looked at it too; we would exhale together, and I wondered if we saw the same thing. I looked at the passage in his journal again. How could he have written these words of mine? for I had written them long after he had disappeared; he could not have read my book. Indeed, no-one but myself had read it. But then, looking at it again in Harland’s chair, it seemed there was something not quite me about the style; it seemed like another voice, and then I remembered. I saw myself sitting at my desk with a 1950s book on neuroscience, transcribing bits of it into a notebook. The mystery was solved – obviously, he had read the book before I did, and he too had thought it worthwhile copying, for whatever purpose of his own. We had both indulged in a piece of appropriation. And yet a suspicion lingered that Harland had been watching me, for whatever purpose of his own.

  I remembered the time I had gone to the toilet on the next landing down and had returned to see Harland standing by my jacket where it hung from a hook on the wall, going through the pockets. He had passed it off well – just admiring the material, old man, nice bit of tweed, where did you get it? And he drew my attention to flecks of heathery purple and sky blue and moss green, things I’d never really seen before, and I put the matter to one side. Until the next time, and the next, when he had let slip bits of information about my past or present circumstances, details of my life he could not have known; yet he always had a plausible story, or I would be loth to pursue the matter further, and I would once more put my suspicions to one side, giving him the benefit of the doubt. Only after he disappeared did I revisit these occasions, piecing together a narrative in hindsight, in which Harland was not all that he seemed, or all that I had taken him for.

  I finished the cigarette and ground it into a drift of photocopied images. I went over and stood before the blemished dressing-table mirror. I looked like a ghost of myself. I opened a drawer at random. There was a box in the drawer. A box similar to the Japanese trick-box I had solved that morning, its surface covered by a labyrinth of marquetry, but a good deal bigger, some five inches by four by four. I looked at it closely but again I could see no joins. I worked it over in my hands for a good few minutes, but I knew it would take me forever to open it. I knew Harland had kept a hammer and chisel, and I found them on a shelf under a pile of paint-clotted rags. I took hammer and chisel to the box and smashed it open. Inside were half a dozen Polaroid photographs, and again my heart gave a lurch. A year or two before I met Harland I had bought a Land camera – it was still in my attic – and for some months I had experimented with a series of self-portraits taken in a mirror, which I would then distress with an array of implements – toothpicks, keys, old toothbrushes, swatches of needlecord, dragging and scumbling the still wet emulsion of the print to produce an altered image of myself, more psychologically accurate as I thought. I had signed and dated each on the back. These images were indubitably mine. I had shown them to no one: after meeting Harland, my work had seemed naive, mechanical and derivative compared to his painting, and I never mentioned them. But this discovery put a new complexion on how things stood between us.

  As I pondered the matter, the drift of papers at my feet stirred as if in a breeze. I shivered. I recalled that Harland had taken the attic room when he heard it had been used for s
eances for some three years after the First World War by the Goligher Circle, a group of spiritualists centred around one Kathleen Goligher, a medium who claimed to be in contact with those who had passed over to the Other Side, the dead that is, who would communicate through her by a series of paranormal effects. Harland had first come across the case in a book called The Psychic Structures at the Goligher Circle, published in 1921 by William Jackson Crawford, then a lecturer in Engineering at Queen’s University, Belfast, who had conducted a long series of elaborate tests on the Circle and was left in do doubt that the paranormal effects were genuine, that the world of the afterlife did indeed exist, and that those who dwelt there could indeed communicate to us by psychic rods extruded from the orifices of the medium’s body. The rods tapped out messages in a primitive Morse, displaying a range of acoustic effects whose magnitude varied in intensity from barely audible ticks to sledgehammer blows. At times they sounded like gunshots. The seance room would be lit by a red lantern, said Harland, and here he quoted from Crawford’s book: Why normal white light should prove destructive to physical phenomena is not fully understood, but an analogy with wireless helps to make it admissible. Light is the fastest vibration of the ether. Broadcasting practice demonstrates that the fast vibrations tend to nullify the slower vibrations of the radio waves as they are picked up by the wireless receiver. When the days are long and the sunlight intense, wireless reception drops down: this explains why broadcasts of cricket matches sometimes carry an accompanying charge of static, or fade from the air. With the oncoming of night reception improves again. It is probable that psychic vibrations are in the same position. The slowest light vibration is red, and its destructive effect far less. Sir William Crookes, testing the action of various light sources, found moonlight the least injurious to the phenomena. Says Crawford, said Harland. Of course it’s a load of bunkum, old man, a matter of cheap conjuring tricks, said Harland, any amateur magician could do the same. And he took a coin from his pocket and made it disappear before my eyes. It’s not the quickness of the hand that deceives the eye, it’s your own brain that deceives yourself. We don’t see what’s there, we make up stories about what we think we see. And he would touch on the notorious fallibility of eyewitness accounts, which when taken together suggest that each onlooker has seen a different event.