Septimania

by Jonathan Levi

  LOUIZA = MALORY

  as sure as

  MALORY = LOUIZA

  and

  u = i

  follows absolutely from

  i = u.

  Malory glanced into the mirror—the few parishioners with their heads bowed in silent prayer or morning exhaustion, the vicar at the pulpit, the coffin immoveable at the altar. Not all melodies, Malory knew, not all science was reversible. Not all toothpaste could be unsqueezed back into the tube. Time, for one, was not reversible. There was a grave in the foothills of the Pyrenees where his mother lay that could not be undug. Even the lid on this particular coffin would not open. But Malory believed in the power of music, in a melodic magnetism that would not only bring back the memory of that afternoon with Louiza, retrace her climb down from the organ loft, her exit from the church, her walk down the flagstone path of St. George’s Church to the Orchard, but would bring back Louiza herself, draw her close enough that he could hold out his hand and lead her into a life of eternal identity.

  His improvised prelude led to thoughts of Americans and Antonella’s suggestion that Louiza’s interest in complex numbers might have something to do with codes more useful than the musical ones that generated Malory’s prelude. The thought of Americans reminded Malory that Rix had handed him a note from the Master, an invitation undoubtedly to another duty at High Table. So as the vicar began the first reading—Malory had expected Ashes to Ashes, but the vicar jumped straight to Revelations, I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End—Malory winkled the envelope from his pocket and slid open the flap.

  It was not an invitation. Rather the opposite.

  12 October 1978

  Dear Mr. Malory,

  I regret to inform you that, according to the provisions of Parliamentary Act #1096 (1954, revised 1976) the term of your doctoral dissertation, which commenced 15 October 1971 and was renewed on the same date severally of 1974 and 1976, will expire 15 October 1978. The College expects your rooms to be clear, your keys returned to the Porters’ lodge, and all bursary charges paid by the end of that day. I wish you success in whatever future occupation you may pursue.

  Sincerely,

  A.J. Potts

  Master

  Malory had received letters like this before, full of Parliamentary numbers and historical dates, from a succession of masters before Aubrey. This letter was different. After seven years of working on his dissertation, it was over. Not finished, over.

  He wasn’t surprised. It wasn’t as if he were three weeks away from dotting the final footnote and a brief stay of a month or two would mean the difference between doctorate and death. Malory was miles, light years, lifetimes away from finishing his thesis. The reprieves of “the same date of 1974 and 1976” were not the optimistic glimmers of light at the end of a short polish or the obsessive edits of a perfectionist, but the rewards of conversations, friendships, and free organ-tunings for influential vicars in the Cambridge vicinity.

  But hadn’t those reprieves also been the fruit of incisive questions he had asked in packed lecture rooms to the Feynmans and the Westfalls of the world, the impromptu disquisitions he had delivered in select colloquia? Weren’t they the postprandial cordials of brilliant High Table epigrams, the perfect demitasses of wit with a dash of wisdom that had sent contemporaries and elders to their rooms with a nightcap of a chuckle and a shake of the head? And his Sunday morning improvisations on the organ, his ability to remember and, even more, improvise upon the full archive of organ music, from Bach to Saint-Saëns to King Vidor, Messiaen, and—if the mood was right for a bit of Rolling Stones—even Billy Preston? Hadn’t they all said, professor, praelector, and priest alike, “Malory, you’re a genius!”

  Well, sure. Malory shifted on the organ bench. They’d also said, “Simplex sigillum veri—the simple is the sign of the truth.” They said, “Simplify,” followed by another word: “Write.”

  As if it were that simple.

  Louiza could simplify. But that was mathematics. And hadn’t Dr. Gödel or Dr. Who proved that maths wasn’t the whole story, that no matter how much you tried to boil the universe into a few mathematical rules, there was always one little spare bit of leek or potato floating in the corner of the pot, running away from your ladle and spitting soup in your face? And then there was the ladle and the pot. They couldn’t be part of the mathematical stew, could they? And what about the Cook?

  It wasn’t that Malory couldn’t think, and it wasn’t that he couldn’t talk. Reading—wahaay! Piece o’ cake! There was no reader like Malory, and no corner of the university’s collection of Newtonia that hadn’t seen the thumb and barcode of Malory’s reader’s card. The Gules Collection at the Museum of the History of Science on Lesser St. Giles, the Rankin Collection at the Newton Center itself. The great Wren Library, with its tesseracts of sandstone and Pauline vaults, owed the very organization of its catalogue to Malory’s ingenious system of division and hot-cross-reference. He had read—and he could say this without fear of hyperbole—everything that had been written on the subject of Sir Isaac Newton. But more than that, he had read everything that could be written.

  It was writing. Writing evaded him. Massively. Even with a lever as long as the Peloponnese, Archimedes could not have lifted Malory’s writer’s block. At night, it loomed above him like the barnacled hull of the Flying Dutchman or the endless crenellations of the Death Star. During the day, it concentrated its way into a ball that rolled around his mouth with a taste of old coffee, metal filings, and airplane fuel. But at all times it had the bulk, the heft, the specific gravity of seven years’ devotion, as massive as the Kaaba, and Malory took as many ritual strolls around his Block as the most devoted pilgrim. Malory knew he had something to say. He just couldn’t open his pen and write it.

  Malory folded the letter and returned it to the envelope. He unbuck led the flap of the Kit Bag and searched for a suitable burial place for the envelope, far away from the pocket of hope and the 35-millimeter canister with the Pip. But as he was rummaging, he felt the unfamiliar crinkle of tissue paper. The vicar was stuck in his exegesis, so Malory investigated some more and pulled a packet out of the Kit Bag. With the packet came a scent—the scent of the four-thousand-year-old yew in the churchyard, the scent of his mother, of Old Mrs. Emery, that reminded him of that brief interlude half a year ago in the cool light of the second pew, when he had descended from the organ loft and his discovery of Louiza to find his grandmother waiting for him. The packet was his grandmother’s gift to him, a gift that had lain dormant and undisturbed in the bottom of his Kit Bag for seven months.

  Pulling back the tissue paper, Malory saw that the gift was a book.

  It was a book, a book bound in leather that had cracked and faded into a light black, of a size and shape that felt immediately of another age and place. It was a notebook, Malory saw, not more than a few inches to each side, perhaps fifty pages deep, with a musty smell, distinct from the damp of the organ loft. Embossed on the front cover of the notebook in a faded gold no bigger than a thumbprint, there was a seal. It was a capital S within a seven-sided border. There was something ancient about the sign, older than the notebook itself, smacking of troubadours and damsels: the S fenced in the heptagon like a unicorn that had escaped from some medieval tapestry. Like the white-haired Mrs. Emery.

  Malory opened the notebook. It was filled with an ink whose antiquity nearly melded with a paper that had browned with the centuries. At first blush, the writing seemed to be Italian in a hand too ornate for Malory to read. Every page or so was headed by a date, although the dates were scribbled in a way that made it difficult to tell numbers from letters, sixes from b’s or g’s. A diary, a journal of sorts.

  Malory turned the pages slowly, and then he began to turn faster. One word stood out from the others within the ornate scrawl. It was a word sometimes alone on a page, sometimes repeated. A word that was a name, a name that occasionally didn’t appear for many entries. But it was a name that he k
new well enough that no manner of scribbled hand could disguise it.

  “Isaac!” Malory whispered. One of the parishioners looked up from a back pew, but the vicar went on rumbling.

  Malory continued turning the pages. He looked at the dates at the tops of the entry pages, at the numbers of the dates again. Yes, it was possible, it was very possible that the numbers began with a “1” and then a “6,” and, if so, that the diary or journal—since that is what the notebook most nearly appeared to be—was written in the 1600s. That the Isaac was his Isaac, his Newton.

  “Un giardino, un albero.” Malory read the first words of the first entry with some effort, and then further down the page, “Isaac.” But Newton was no gardener, Malory thought, flipping randomly through the rest of the Chapbook. What garden? Whose tree?

  And then he saw it.

  The last page. The final page of the diary was written in a different handwriting from the rest of the journal, a hand he recognized in a language he understood. It was the hand of the Old Isaac Newton, the Old Man, long after the youthful discoveries of 1666, his annus mirabilis, long after the triumphs and the celebrations, the paranoias and the lawsuits against Leibniz and Boyle, long after his term in Parliament and his stint at the Mint, his leadership of the Royal Society, his descent into alchemy and the Book of Revelations and his calculations of the End of Time. There was no disputing the identity of Isaac now. This last page was written in English by Isaac Newton in his hand, the hand of a man close to death.

  This was a diary, a journal written in Italian by a friend of Newton’s, so it seemed. A friend who had known Newton all his life, perhaps until the end. And on the final page of the journal, a sentence written in Newton’s own hand—and no one knew Newton’s handwriting better than the Newton Scholar (ex-Newton Scholar, Malory thought with a pang) of Trinity College, Cambridge.

  “I have found the One True Rule that guides Mathematics,” Malory read, “the One True Rule that guides Science, that guides the Universe.”

  Malory read again. And again. Newton had found a single rule? Had refined his Laws of Thermodynamics and Optics and Calculus and Gravity into a single rule?

  “I have found the One True Rule,” Malory read. “But the Rule is too weighty to fit on one page of this Chapbook.”

  Malory looked at the top of the page. There was no date written in Newton’s hand. The last entry in Italian was dated sometime in 1692. Malory knew 1692. He knew it was the year before the fifty-year-old Newton suffered what was clearly a nervous breakdown. Malory had read the correspondence left by the Master and Head Porter of Trinity from that year. He knew that Newton was incapable of writing in 1693. This was not the handwriting of the Newton of 1693. This was the shaky penmanship of a much older man, perhaps of the Newton on his deathbed in 1727. And the rule? If, before he died, Newton had actually found the One True Rule that guides the universe, then he had found something even Einstein couldn’t find, the Holy Grail of modern mathematics and physics, the Unified Field Theory. It would be the single point from which all science follows, the single cause for all that came after Creation. It would be God. Not the three-part God of the Trinity that Newton despised, but the One God in whom Newton believed the way Malory believed.

  Malory wasn’t entirely certain what he believed. But he saw himself laying the Chapbook down on the desk of Aubrey Potts—he must ask Antonella to translate the Italian straight away—and not only winning a PhD, but also finding Louiza as part of the equation. Malory rubbed the Chapbook like an oil lamp and pondered the research ahead, the papers he would publish, the books, the Nobel Prize in Physics. The scientists of the twentieth century had turned their backs on Newton as they searched for a Unified Field Theory. Now Malory would show them that his Newton had beaten them to the punch. Newton knew something, Malory was sure of it, that would turn gravity on its head, that would bounce the apple back up from the ground to its nostalgic stem. Simplex sigillum veri—the simple is the sign of the truth. No more High Tables. No more colloquia. One work. One girl. Find the One True Rule, and he would find the One True Girl.

  And then he heard the vicar.

  “All ends are good ends. All ends are bad ends.” The vicar had put away the received wisdom and was improvising his own eulogy.

  Malory sat up on the organ bench, set the Newton Chapbook beside him and wondered what improvisation of his own would suit this discovery. Perhaps something based on Newton’s name?

  “Although not technically a member of this congregation,” the vicar continued, “and although born on distant shores, our dear departed cousin chose to make Whistler Abbey her home and the Church of St. George her resting place.”

  But what other name could he use, Malory wondered, as a counterpoint to Newton. Perhaps—

  “Mrs. Emery—”

  And at the sound of that name, the part of Malory’s brain that was digesting his dismissal from his PhD, from his Organ Scholarship, from the Newton Rooms next to the gate of Great Court, Trinity College; the part that had barely begun to taste the discovery of the Newton Chapbook with its possibilities of redemption and salvation, emptied in one great sluice and filled with the even greater wash of his own stupidity.

  That was his grandmother in the box, his grandmother in the coffin at the altar. His grandmother was dead. No amount of looking or not looking would bring her back to life. His last surviving link to any family—gone, and he’d never known her. Never even known enough to understand that no one else would have requested that he be awakened to play whatever he liked at her funeral. His improvisation had been all about himself and Louiza. No rationalization could expand to identify Malory with his grandmother and make LOUIZA = MALORY = EMERY. The Old Lady, late of the second pew, added up to considerably more than either he or Louiza.

  IT WAS ENTIRELY WITHOUT SURPRISE THAT LOUIZA FOUND HERSELF LEAVING the towpath and ducking around the fading branches of the Orchard, across the road, and up a flight of leafy steps to St. George’s Church. The nave was empty. Two sawhorses stood forgotten at the altar. Louiza took a seat in the second pew and looked up at the Byzantine mosaics of gold and scarlet and aqua. The English sun had leached much of the pigment from the stained glass. But one ray shone through to Louiza’s feet, to a lone cushion, a hassock stuffed with straw, perhaps from a recent cutting. The weaving on it was unlike the others. No sign of crosses or lambs. Only a tree, a single tree, a single northern apple tree, green foliage spread out in full against a golden background of late-summer barley.

  A kick from her belly roused Louiza from contemplation of the hassock in the second pew. Her eyes lifted. There was the ladder she had climbed seven months earlier. It was a challenge, at the very least, for Louiza to climb to the organ loft. Yet foot over foot, sidesaddle in respect for the belly, she ascended one rung at a time.

  “Come,” she said to her belly, “let’s see if we can find your father.”

  Of course Malory was no longer at the organ. Nor was he up in the steeple. But when Louiza followed the murmur of voices and took her belly over to the churchyard side of the steeple and peered down through the slats, she saw Malory at the head of a grave, standing next to the vicar.

  “There he is.” She rubbed her right hand around the dome of her belly. “That’s Malory. Can you say Malory?” Another kick in answer. Malory looked thinner than when Louiza had seen him last, his hair a little longer. She thought, even from the height of the steeple, that he could do with a bath. The vicar was speaking to Malory. Malory’s eyes were fixed on the pit before him, on the spade of the gravedigger, whose chunk and clink made it difficult for Louiza to hear their conversation. But there was one word Louiza heard, that the baby in her belly heard.

  “Rome.”

  “Rome?” Louiza repeated out loud.

  Malory looked up at the steeple. The baby kicked.

  The vicar handed an envelope to Malory.

  “Everything is inside,” the vicar said. “Instructions, explanations, a note of introduction
to the Do-mi-ni-cans—” The vicar pronounced the syllables, each tasting worse than the one before. “And of course, the train ticket to Rome.”

  “Rome,” Malory said, shocked by his own shock.

  Louiza knew he couldn’t see her between the slats, but it seemed that he was looking straight at her. She took a step back and glanced out the slats to her left. Two people were walking from the towpath by the river through the Orchard. Two. The Cottagemates.

  “Come,” she said to her belly, lowering herself down the ladder. The baby kicked. “Rome.”

  1/4

  3 September 1666 10 p.m.

  ’d like to return to a subject you raised before dinner.”

  Darkness had fallen. Isaac’s mother had long since cleared away the mug of soup and loaf of bread. Once more the pipe, once more two backs against the tree. Isaac had been distracted throughout the meal. I knew what he would say.

  “Septimania,” he said, and let the smoke from the pipe rise into the hesitant moonlight. “Earlier, you mentioned Septimania.”

  “I did.” I smiled and took the pipe from his distracted hand. I had, indeed, planted the seed.

  “Prithee explain,” Isaac said. “Is this Septimania a place or a disease?”

  “Judge for yourself.” I handed the pipe back to Isaac and looked up to the moon for guidance. I had traveled for the better part of a month from Rome to England in search of a savior for my kingdom. All I needed was the right story to water the seed of Isaac’s curiosity.

  “In the first years of the siege of the Franks,” I began, “the year of Our Lord 752, Order still held the innocent hand of Hope in the market town of Narbonne along the northwest coast of the Mediterranean Sea. All was in balance between the Muslims and the Jews. There were two of everything—two houses of worship, a mosque and a synagogue; two ritual baths, one for Muslim women, the other for Jewish; two schools; two markets; two guilds of craftsmen; and two houses of slaughter. Ibn Suleiman at the eastern gate facing Mecca was the Muslim butcher. And at the western gate, Yehoshua ben Gabriel chopped for the Jews.