I looked into the mirror remembering Cocteau’s film Orphée, which I had first seen with John Harland, remembering how in that film, mirrors are the portals to the Underworld, and I thought of how I might glide through the mirror in the attic to a world where I might meet Harland once again, for all that he has been dead to me for many years. But when I looked at my watch I realised my time was short. It was nearly four o’clock and I, John Kilfeather, had another appointment to keep.
Conduit
By six o’clock of the evening after his experience in Rue du Sentier, John Kilpatrick had read all of X+Y=K, pausing here and there to take notes. The more he had read, the more had he seen uncanny resemblances between the Kilpatrick in the book and the Kilpatrick that was him. However, there were many more passages that did not tally with his own experience, and he recalled Blanqui’s proposition that the universe contains infinite other, parallel worlds, and thus a myriad of other, endlessly doubled versions of ourselves, unbeknownst to each other and to ourselves. Perhaps X+Y=K had drawn on some of those worlds, some of which corresponded to Kilpatrick’s own. He also remembered that W.H. Auden had said that every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow, and that Auden had then gone on to comment that we would be judged, not by the kind of mirror found on us, but by the use we have made of it. But what if another man’s mirror were to cross ours, thought Kilpatrick, what would happen then? Would we become a third person? And what if other men, each with his mirror, crossed our paths? We would indeed then be many. These thoughts had crossed his mind the night before, when he had tried on the trousers of the suit he had found in Rue du Sentier. They too were a perfect fit. On further examination he found that, according to the tailor’s label sewn into the lining of an inside pocket, the suit had been delivered to a Major R.E. Livingstone on the ninth of October 1966, Kilpatrick’s eighteenth birthday, which made the suit forty-four years old. But it looked hardly worn; it might have been made yesterday.
Kilpatrick was wearing the suit now, in preparation for the evening to come. He had thought of meeting Bourne with some trepidation, but the garb lent him an air of quiet authority. For all that he did not yet know what part he would play in this unfolding drama, he felt like an actor who waits in the wings composing himself to deliver the words composed by another, nervous but confident that once he treads the boards the part will take him over. He imagined he might have rehearsed it in a mirror, drawing on affective memory, speaking to his reflection as he would to an audience, and he saw himself watching himself as if from a vantage point in the auditorium, the autumnal shades of the tweed he wore flickering in the spotlight as he suited the action to the word and the word to the action, everything happening as if déjà vu. The bedside telephone rang. A Monsieur Gordon awaited him in reception. Kilpatrick took a last look at himself in the dressing-table mirror, adjusted his tie, and went down to meet the man he was to meet.
Bonsoir, mon ami, said Gordon. Bonsoir, mon ami, said Kilpatrick. Under his Crombie overcoat Gordon was dressed in a grey Donegal tweed three-piece suit, and Kilpatrick remarked on it. Yes, thank you, nice bit of cloth you’re wearing yourself. 1960s? Savile Row cut, I’d say, or maybe Conduit Street? Do as good a job in Conduit Street, half the price. Kilpatrick nodded. Gordon took a lapel between his thumb and finger. Nice hand, he said, pity about the little flaw there on the breast pocket. Kilpatrick had seen no flaw. Of course, they’ve done a great job on it, invisible menders, you wouldn’t know it was there if you weren’t looking for it. And of course, as I remarked before, we in the Profession are trained to look for these things. For all the world that looks like a mended bullet-hole, but of course you wouldn’t know until the forensics had a good look at the fibres. Well, as it turns out, said Kilpatrick, its previous owner was a Major Livingstone, so you never know. H’m … Livingstone, you say? said Gordon, there was a major of that name, one of our men, if I’m not mistaken, back in the sixties, wasn’t a major at all of course, but played the part superbly. Until the Other Side rumbled him, that is. The Other Side? said Kilpatrick. Yes, said Kilpatrick, we’re the Profession, and they’re the Other Side. Kind of dialogue, if you like, one eye always watching the other. I take it you are one of us? Of course you are, though you might not even know it. Took some of us a while to get there, too. But you get there in the end. And then of course there’s the Invisibles. The Invisibles? said Kilpatrick. Well, it’s only a theory, more of a legend, said Gordon, but it’s rumoured that whatever we and the Other Side do, there’s another power at work, one which we cannot fathom, so that for all we know there is another narrative beyond the one we occupy. Perhaps the Invisibles, if they exist, insinuate themselves into the networks of surveillance created by us and the Other Side. We’re all in the business of gathering information, you see, or disinformation. For the latter too is useful, since everything, fabricated or not, tells us something about the world we move in. Every contact leaves a trace. So we operate on the Exchange Principle. Are you with me? said Gordon. Kilpatrick nodded hesitantly. He remembered H.G. Wells’ Invisible Man in a London fog, a greasy glimmer of a human shape, and again he saw himself as the Invisible Man trying on a player’s mask and dark glasses in a theatrical costumier’s in Drury Lane, peering at a grotesque image in a cheval mirror; or he was an onlooker to the Invisible Man’s death on the pavement, the body slowly revealing itself as if infiltrated by a poison – first the little white nerves, a hazy grey sketch of a limb, then the glassy bones and intricate arteries, then the flesh and skin, first a faint fogginess and then growing rapidly dense and opaque. Finally he imagined himself scrutinizing the lost notebook which contained the invisibility formula, some of its pages washed out, the rest covered in a mixture of Russian, Greek, and mathematical symbols, full of unintelligible secrets.
We’re in the business of knowing, said Gordon, for all that it’s problematic to measure what we know against what we don’t know. The Invisibles, if they exist, might well know things about us that we don’t even know ourselves. But in any event it didn’t take us long to know that you were one of us. That dream of yours, Les structures sonores, lovely title, that was enough in itself to convince us. The detail was uncanny, and we in the Profession depend on detail, for the devil is the detail, or what is it Flaubert says? Le bon Dieu est dans le détail. Two sides of the same coin. Nothing is unimportant. So we look at everything. Clouds, river deltas, root systems, coastlines, music, fluid turbulence, the fluctuations of the stock market, the movement of the crowd on a station concourse, raindrops trickling down a windowpane, all follow a pattern. Those kaleidoscopic shifts of which you spoke so eloquently. The assignation that is to us unexpected, the invitation coming seemingly from nowhere, has been dreamed of and initiated long in advance. Speaking of which, might I enquire about your encounter in Rue du Sentier? Kilpatrick couldn’t remember if he had mentioned Rue du Sentier to Gordon. But he gave him the benefit of the doubt. He needed someone with whom to share his strange experience. So he told him the story. Yes, said Gordon, most interesting. The book especially, X+Y=K, you must take it to Bourne. He may be blind, but he can scan it in his own way, and his conclusions in these matters are always productive. A minute later Gordon and Kilpatrick left Hôtel Chopin, Kilpatrick carrying the book in his briefcase.
A Lost World
I put the photographs and Harland’s notebook into my briefcase. As I descended the staircase, my footsteps echoed in the stairwell as they had done many times in the past, often syncopated by his footsteps as he clattered down before or after me, and images of Harland flitted through my mind: Harland going through my pockets, Harland twiddling the knobs of the EKO radio as it gave out a fizz of static between bursts of unintelligible languages, Harland’s smile as he gave me the Japanese box. When I reached the ground floor, the door of Federman’s shop was locked. I was about to slip the key to the attic under his door when I thought better of it, and pocketed it. I emerged from 14 Exchange Place to
find the bright October day had turned dark. Storm clouds had gathered overhead. As I stepped into the entry there was a flash of lightning followed by a roll of thunder. It began to pour rain. I stepped back into the vestibule for shelter, remembering a passage in X+Y=K that had been prompted by a thunderstorm, or rather by Harland’s recollection of a thunderstorm.
It began with his showing me a View-Master 3D disc of London, one of a dozen he had picked up in a junkshop, together with the accompanying viewer. One image showed the interior of the revolving restaurant of the Post Office Tower, which had closed, never to be reopened, after a terrorist bomb had exploded in the building on Hallowe’en, 1971. As I put the binocular device to my eyes I experienced again the dreamlike exaltation that comes when surrounding objects are shut out by the concentration of our whole attention, in which we seem to leave the body behind and sail into one strange scene after another, like disembodied spirits. In foreground of the View-Master image, a man held a cup about six inches from his pursed lips. Behind him a woman held a knife about to cut the bread roll she held in her other hand. A pre-school child held a menu, his mouth open as if pretending to read. A waitress’s pencil was poised over an unwritten-on page. In this eternal moment, everyone seemed oblivious to the camera, except for one man standing with his back to the panoramic window, his head raised as if he had just that moment become aware of the photographer. Isn’t there something eerie about him, said Harland, something which doesn’t quite fit? You see the way nobody else seems aware of him, it’s as if they’re blind to him, or he’s invisible. And indeed there was something incongruous about his presence among these conventionally dressed diners. I noted again the electric blue sharkskin suit, the snap-brim trilby pulled down over his forehead, the dark glasses turned in my direction so that I felt he was eyeing me directly through space and time.
As it happens, said Harland, I was in the restaurant the day before the bomb. A complete revolution took about twenty minutes, he said, and it occurred to me that the restaurant was itself a kind of timepiece, its movement like that of a minute hand, just about perceptible if you watched it closely. At one point I looked out and saw the twin towers of Wembley stadium glimmering on the horizon in a lake of mustard yellow under a purple sky. Thunder was in the air, and there was a biblical quality about the light that made the towers look like those of Nineveh or Babylon. I thought of the Turner landscapes I had seen that morning in the National Gallery. When I looked out again I found myself overlooking Westminster, almost face to face with Big Ben, as it were. It was fourteen minutes to one o’clock; as I looked at the clock face, the big hand leaped forward a fraction, and the sky above the clock tower was rent by a great flash. A split second later an almighty roll of thunder shook the windows. Rain poured down upon the city, which began to take on a curious underwater aspect, the streets appearing like the galleries of a coral reef, cars with their headlights switched on gliding like electric fish. It was quite exhilarating, said Harland. I felt like Captain Nemo in the observation chamber of the Nautilus. As Harland spoke I imagined the rain streaming down the windows, making them waver like shot silk, and I recognized the beginning of a migraine aura, I wrote in X+Y=K.
In fact I had not suffered from migraine since my teens but I had vivid memories of its effects. Migraine is not a simple headache. Rather, it is an aggregate of innumerable components, of which headache is only one; and it cannot be identified with any one symptom. Migraine headache is often described as a violent throbbing pain in one temple, but it can be located anywhere in the head, in the teeth, at the base of the nose, in the neck, as far down as the tip of the shoulder; in some cases, it may seem exteriorised, as in an extra phantom limb, or head. In extreme cases the migraineur sometimes feels he has an invisible body double. Common to many experiences of migraine is the aura, a term first applied to the sensory hallucinations immediately preceding certain epileptic seizures. The aura which precedes the migraine headache takes many forms, including deficits of speech and thought, muddled space-perception, and a variety of dreamy, delirious, and trancelike states. On closing the eyes, some patients experience a visual tumult or delirium, in which latticed, faceted and tessellated motifs predominate – images resembling mosaics, honeycombs, or Turkish rugs. These evanescent figments tend to be brilliantly luminous, coloured, highly unstable, and liable to sudden kaleidoscopic transformations. Occasionally these structures generate maps of enormous cities, as might be seen at night from a surveillance helicopter, with ring roads and radial spokes, illuminated, looking like giant spider-webs of light.
Sometimes the patient loses an entire half of his field of vision. It seems to him that half of the world has disappeared, or that it was never there in the first place, and he is gripped by a feeling of incomprehensible, overwhelming loss. Yet in other instances the experience is one of enlightenment. I remember when I was about thirteen or so, cycling along a country lane. Suddenly I feel as if I have lived this moment before, in the same place, though I have never travelled this road before. An extraordinary feeling of stillness comes upon me. This summer afternoon has always existed; I am arrested in an endless moment. I stop. My hands, my lips, my nose, my tongue are tingling. The sensation spreads through my whole body. Now it affects my eyes. As I look at the trees, the grass, the clouds, they exhibit a silent boiling. Everything is quivering and streaming upwards in a kind of ecstasy, the hum of crickets all around like a buzz of colour corresponding to the sound I hear. My body is vibrating to everything around me.
Standing in the vestibule of 14 Exchange Place, watching the rain pour down, I felt an overwhelming nostalgia. In my mind’s eye I hovered above that scene of half a century ago, watching over the person I was then as if he were someone else, a thirteen-year-old boy who stands entranced by everything around him, not knowing or caring what will become of him in the years that lie ahead, for all that matters is now.
The Winding Stair
The black limousine was waiting. Gordon and Kilpatrick seated themselves in the passenger cabin. The limousine drove off into the night. The book, said Gordon, let’s call it X for now, open it. At random. Kilpatrick did as he was told. He opened the book at page 287. Read the first sentence, said Gordon. Kilpatrick read: In 1912 Edmund Edward Fournier d’Albe invented the optophone, which, by converting the light refracted from a page of printed matter into musical notes, enabled a blind person to read. Gordon clapped his hands together. Capital! he cried. You might say it is coincidence that we read about the blind on our way to see a blind man. But in our line of work there are no coincidences. You know the way you sometimes enter a library, in search of information; you’ve no idea where to begin looking, and yet something directs you to a particular shelf, to take down a particular book, for no good reason as far as you can tell, but it turns out to be the very book you need. And often the first sentence you read is just what you’ve been looking for, though you didn’t know it until then. Some call this phenomenon the Library Angel. But there are those amongst us who prefer to ascribe it to the work of the Invisibles. We call such passages of text Unseens. As it happens, John Bourne has developed a modified optophone for his painting. Essentially a simple concept, you translate colour wavelength into sound wavelength, I don’t know the exact correspondences, say the note C is white, F-sharp black, G red, and so on through the spectrum. So you can see, or rather hear, that a work by John Bourne is a musical experience as well as a visual one. And of course the converse is true, you can translate sound into colour. Come to think of it, you could translate anything into anything. Scent, taste, whatever. You could have an aromaphone, for example. Anyway, Bourne’s working on a series at present, Bach’s The Art of Fugue.
Contrapunctus XIV, said Kilpatrick. Yes? said Gordon. Well, said Kilpatrick, the café where I met Freddy Gabriel, it was playing on the sound system, it’s the last movement of The Art of Fugue, Freddy came in on the last few bars. Did he now? said Gordon. I wouldn’t put it past Freddy to have engineered it, set it up
as a conversation piece. Whatever the case, it goes to show us yet again that there’s no such thing as coincidence, said Gordon. Everything’s part of a larger narrative. We’re all trying to make sense of what we see, but of course the visual input and the means of processing it are extraordinarily complex, multiple feedback loops at every stage of the hierarchy. Let’s say there’s a black box at every stage. But you open the black box, and what does it contain? Why, a whole labyrinth of smaller black boxes. So we sort out what’s what by going through a series of iterations, eliminating those that don’t fit the parameters as we think of them. We seem to see things in a split second, but there’s any number of other split seconds behind that one. It’s as if each of us is hallucinating all the time and what we call perception involves merely selecting the one hallucination that best matches the current input, a plausible narrative if you like. Makes sense to us, anyway. So let me posit a little scenario.
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