– The professor, now, Felix was saying. A hopeless case, I tell you, I’ve given him up for lost. Blind chance, he says, blind chance, that’s all. As if chance was blind. We know better, don’t we, Castor?
We passed under a railway bridge. An alleyway exhaled the sour stink of the river. The tide was high. We picked our way along the quay, over the slimed cobbles, and stopped by the side of a rusted cargo ship. The curved prow jutted above us, keen as an axe-blade. Felix peered up into the darkness and whistled softly. Running clouds were spilling past the rail up there like luminous smoke. He whistled again, and this time there was a faint answering note. A head appeared, and a hand waving, and presently two figures came down the gangway, hurrying silently on tiptoe. Felix started towards them, but paused and turned back to me.
– By the way, he said, the old boy wants you to work with him, did I mention it?
The sailors were hardy little men with bandy arms and legs. One wore a leather cap with a peak. His name was Brand. He had a big pink face, and eyes set so close together they were almost one. He said nothing, only grinned, showing a mouthful of broken teeth. His companion was called Frisch. He had a high forehead and a prominent nose and hardly any chin.
– Dear friends … ! said Felix.
Frisch made a chopping gesture with the edge of his hand.
– Ruhe! he snarled. You want everyone to fokken hear?
We went to the Star of the Sea, a low, smoky dive with plastic seats, and yellowed prints of sailing ships on the walls. The bar was loud with merrymaking. We sat at a table in a corner, and Felix bought brandy for the sailors and sat and watched them drink, tapping his fingers on the table and smiling. Frisch, who seemed to regard everything with a profound, angry scepticism, buried his seal’s snout in his glass and looked about him grimly at the weeping walls and the prints and the strings of coloured paper decorations. He eyed me too, and said to Felix:
– This is your tester, eh? Your Chemiker?
Felix laughed blandly.
– Oh no, he said, no. My … partner.
And he winked at me.
– Ja, Frisch said sourly, that is what he looks like.
They began to argue about money, or at least Frisch did, while Felix sat and smiled. Among the crowd at the bar someone fell over, and a cheer went up. Brand was peering about him out of his cyclop’s eye with a kind of happy wonderment, lifting his leather cap and scratching his straw-coloured hair, as if he had never seen such a place before, with such jolly people in it. He drank another drink, and banged his glass on the table top and sang:
Es war eine Ratt’ im Kellernest,
Lebte nur von Fett und Butter,
Hatte sich ein Ränzlein angemäst’t
Als wie der Doktor Luther.
– Good man, Lars, Felix said. Sing up!
Die Köchin hatt’ ihr Gift gestellt,
Da ward’s so eng ihr in der Welt,
Als hätte sie Lieb’ im Leibe.
Then there were more drinks, and Frisch’s rancorous mutterings grew slurred. Brand stood up, and put one foot up on the table and reached a lighted match between his legs and farted, igniting a brief blue spurt of flame. He sat down with a sheepish grin, rolling his shoulders bashfully, and pulled the peak of his cap over his eyes.
– Bravo, old firebrand! Felix said.
– Arschloch, Frisch mumbled, and curled his lip.
Brand grinned again, and ducked his head.
– Drink up! said Felix. Pip pip!
Frisch was growing increasingly angry, glaring about him unsteadily with a murderous eye and talking to himself. Brand began to sing again, but could not remember the words. His mood turned glum. Felix made a sign to me and rose, and after a moment I followed him. He was waiting for me in the street. He took my arm without a word and walked me around the side of the pub. In a moment Frisch came out and stood looking up and down the quay, shouting drunkenly. Then Brand stumbled out, and took a gulp of night air, and immediately vomited on the pavement. Felix chuckled. We retreated down a lane.
– The people one has to do business with! Felix said.
The moon was high, a black wind scoured the streets. We arrived at a corner and found ourselves on the quay again. There was a broken blue wall, and a wooden fence, and a swollen woman drawn in chalk. We stopped under the street light.
– You see what fun you can have when you stick with me? Felix said. New friends, night rambles, interesting times. There’s only one condition.
He was peering off into the darkness.
– That you don’t, he said, lead a normal life.
And he laughed.
Two figures approached, going unsteadily, I thought it was Frisch and Brand, but it was not, it was the shaky young man from Chandos Street and his skinny girl. Felix went forward to meet them, taking something – something, that’s rich! – from the deep inner pocket of his mackintosh. He and the young man spoke together briefly. The girl hung back. Then they went off again into the darkness, and Felix returned.
– As I say, he said. The people!
We walked along by the river, and crossed the bridge. There were not many abroad in that cold night. A group of youths stood in a shop doorway bawling out a carol. Chains of coloured lights were strung between the lamp-posts, dancing and rattling in the wind. Under the dark façade of a huge shabby office building Felix stopped and said:
– Well, here we are.
He laughed at my baffled look.
– I told you, he said. He wants you to work with him. I promised him you would. Now you won’t let me down, will you?
He pointed to a flight of steps descending to a door in the basement of the building. He was smiling. Afar in the tempestuous night a peal of joybells sounded.
– Don’t worry, he said. It’s the season for beginnings, after all!
He skipped down the steps, his coat-tails flying, and pressed the doorbell with a flourish.
The door was opened by a plump young man in a yellow cardigan and suede slippers and a silk cravat. He had curls, and a broad soft sallow face, and a moist little mouth like the valve opening of a complicated inner organ. His name – let me have done with it – was Leitch. He looked at Felix with distaste and said:
– He’s not here.
Felix only smiled at him, and after a moment’s hesitation he shrugged and stepped back to let us pass. When I came forward into the light he laughed.
– Who’s this? he said. The Phantom of the Opera?
Felix smiled again, with lips compressed, and wagged a finger at him in playful admonition. We were in a long, bare, clean corridor with white walls, and white rubber tiles on the floor. The air vibrated with a dense, soundless din that pressed upon the eardrums. We walked towards another door at the end of the corridor. Leitch padded behind us, I could feel his hostile eye. He was first at the door, though, skipping ahead of us on his slippered feet, like a corpulent ballet dancer, one plump hand preemptively lifted.
– Allow me, he said with a venomous trill.
The room was an immense, rectangular box with a low ceiling made of blocks of some white synthetic stuff. The floor here too was clad with white tiles. There were no windows. The machine was housed in big grey steel cabinets, they had about them a faint, pained air of startlement. They were so grand, so gracefully arranged, they might have been interrupted in the midst of a stately dance. For a moment even Felix hesitated on the threshold. This was their room. We were the wrong shape.
– Come in, Leitch said. Meet the monster.
He grinned scornfully, his pink mouth puckering, and started to walk away.
– Hang on, old chap, Felix said mildly. Aren’t you going to show the new boy around?
Leitch looked from him to me and back again with deep dislike. It seemed he would refuse, but something in Felix’s smile checked him. He shrugged, tugging angrily at his cravat.
– What does he want to see?
Felix laughed.
– Oh, everything! h
e said, and turned to me. Isn’t that right? You want everything!
The machine was a Reizner 666. I had never seen anything like it in my life, had not known such a thing could exist. Yet I recognized it. It hummed in the depths of its coils, dreaming its vast dream of numbers. It had a brain, a memory. I recognized it. Leitch showed me the rudiments of its workings. I hardly listened to him. The thing itself spoke to me, I touched its core and it quivered under my hand. When I pressed the keys on the console the print fell across the page with a soft crash. At my shoulder Felix chuckled.
– What a gadget, eh? he whispered.
Professor Kosok arrived, with his black coat and his hat and his badly furled umbrella. He stopped inside the door and stared at us. Then he took off his coat and threw it on a chair, and came and looked at the figures I had printed.
– What is this game? he said. This is not a toy.
It was Leitch he looked at. The young man scowled. Felix said:
– Well, I’ll be off.
And with a wink he departed.
PROFESSOR KOSOK always worked by night. Often I had come upon him in the daytime in one of the bedrooms in Chandos Street, asleep on a bare mattress in a bundle of blankets and coats, only the top of his head and his nose showing. Now I too began to live a life at night, in that white room. The professor took scant notice of me. He existed in a constant state of angry preoccupation, stumping about in his waistcoat and his bow-tie, snorting softly to himself and rubbing a hand on his tussocky scalp. The machine was connected to others like it in other parts of the world, suddenly in the middle of the night the printer would spring to life of its own accord, rapping out peremptory, coded questions, like a medium’s table. He would rush to the console and start excitedly to reply, but he could not work the keyboard properly, he kept making mistakes, to the growing annoyance of the machine, which would chatter and snap at him, and then retreat abruptly into a silent sulk, until Leitch, with a bored sneer, came and punched in the correct codes. Then, for hours, sheet after sheet of figures would fall into the wire tray, each one folding on to its fellows with an identical, silken sigh. When the transmission was finished Leitch and I would take the figures and sift through them for days, searching out intricate patterns of correspondence and repetition. Sometimes it was no more than a single repeating value that we hunted.
– Truffles, the professor would say, with a smile that twitched. And you are the pigs.
It was his one joke.
But he seemed to want only disconnected bits, oases of order in a desert of randomness. When I attempted to map out a general pattern he grew surly, and threw down his pencil on the console and stamped away, fuming. I turned to Leitch. He put on a pensive frown, pressing a finger to his forehead.
– We’re searching for the meaning of life, he said.
And then laughed. He looked at me with contempt.
– How do I know what he’s doing! he said. You’re supposed to be the genius, you tell me. Statistics, probabilities, blind chance, I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him? He’s half cracked, anyway.
But there was no asking anything of the professor, he would pretend he had not heard, and turn away, muttering.
Leitch’s animosity was pure and disinterested. He directed it equally at all who came near him. It was like a task that had been assigned to him, irksome, and thankless, from which he was not allowed to relax. His name was Basil. He suffered from attacks of breathlessness, which he tried to hide from me. His feet were bad too, something was wrong with the arches, he walked in his slippers with a rolling gait, the voluminous seat of his trousers sagging. He had a painful, polished look that spoke of long sessions in the bathroom, of dousings and dustings, and ashen gloomings into a cruel mirror. He wore a gold chain on his wrist, and a ring with two gold hands holding a gold heart. He consoled himself with food. He ate alone, a lugubrious sybarite, sitting in a far corner of the room with a plastic bag open in his lap and a paper napkin tucked under his cravat. He had sandwiches, meat pies, cakes, cold chicken legs. I pictured him, bent at a table in a greasy room somewhere, some other Chandos Street, slicing and buttering, as the light faded on another solitary winter afternoon. Yet there was something almost impressive in his intransigence and grim self-sufficiency. Sucking at a bruised peach, or gobbling a fistful of purple grapes, he had the air of a ruined emperor, with those curls, that great pallid face, those wounded, unforgiving eyes.
– Just do your job, will you? he said. Just do your job, and leave me alone.
I had hardly spoken a word to him all night.
– What job? I said. Is this a job?
He turned to me with blood in his eye.
– You’re here, aren’t you? he snarled. What more do you want?
Nothing, I wanted nothing, I was almost happy there. How calm the nights were, with only the hum of the machine, and the professor’s soft mutterings, and all around us the darkness. We might have been a mile under the ocean. We saw no one. We lived in downtime. The machine’s real users were those who came here during the day, from the offices above. I wondered about them, and searched for their traces. Sometimes there would be a coffee cup left behind, or an ashtray in which a half-smoked cigarette had burned itself out, leaving a fragile fossil of ash and a smear of tar. One night I arrived and found a yellow cardigan draped on the back of a chair, where someone had forgotten it. We did not move it, even Leitch avoided touching it, and as the night wore on it became a more and more insistent, numinous presence, unsettling as a pair of golden wings.
The machine was a presence too, a great tame patient beast, tethered in its white cage. It had its voices, the faint flutter and tick of the memory bank scanning, the printer’s crash and clatter. One of the storage discs produced an unaccountable, piercing shriek when it was first switched on. And always there was that dense hum, that made the very air vibrate. Sometimes, in the early hours, when one or other of my limbs began to sing, like a burning stick singing in a fire, I would seem to hear a sort of chime, like a small, sustained chord, as if the machine’s voice and the voice of my pain had found a common note. When something went wrong we were supposed to call for an engineer, but we never did. Instead, Leitch would get out his forceps and his probes and delve into the delicate innards of the machine, past the lattice of switches and bundles of wires fine as hair, down into the secret core itself. Then for a moment, forgetting himself, he would be transformed, kneeling there in the midst of that white light, absorbed, intent, like an attendant figure in the foreground of a luminous nativity. He talked to the machine in a fierce undertone, cursing and cajoling it. Always it gave in. He would sit back on his heels then, grey sweat on his forehead and his upper lip, wiping his hands, his fat shoulders drooping and his eyes going dead.
I brought in the black notebook, and in idle hours went over again the old, insoluble problems, playing them over, move by move, like drawn grandmaster games. Infinity was still infinity, zero still gaped, voracious as ever. The professor stopped behind me, and peered over my shoulder.
– Pah, he said. Antique stuff. History.
At dawn, without a word, the three of us went our separate ways, the professor bundled in his black coat, Leitch with his empty foodbag under his arm, and I behind them, dawdling. I liked to walk the streets at that early hour. The wind rustled over pavements hard and grey as bone, and gulls scavenged in the gutters. Traffic lights blossomed from green to red and back again, silent as flowers. A solitary motor car would pass me by, the driver propped like a manikin behind a windscreen flowing with reflections of a cold grey sky and paper-coloured clouds. Sometimes I went to Chandos Street, in hope that Adele would be there. Instead I would often find the professor, sitting at the table by the big window in the kitchen, still in his coat and hat, gazing out at the street, a mug of tea going cold at his elbow. These encounters were faintly, inexplicably embarrassing.
Adele never asked where I went at night, as I never asked where she was when she disappeared for days on e
nd. I think when I was away from her she forgot about me. Oh, I don’t mean forgot, exactly, but that she lost hold of something, some essential of the fact of my existence. For that is how it was with me, when she was not there, something of her faded in my mind, she became transparent. Even when she was in my arms she was also somehow absent. I never had, not for an instant, her entire attention. Perhaps it is as well. It occurs to me I might not have survived the full force of her presence. What does that mean? I don’t know, I don’t know – there’s so much darkness here. She regarded my injuries as if they were not part of me, as if they were something that had attached itself to me, like a stray dog. She would raise herself on an elbow and study me, touching my withered arm, or running a finger over the knots and whorls of my chest, frowning to herself. What was she thinking? I never asked. She would not have answered. One day she said:
– Did you think you were going to die, when it happened?
She was sitting up in bed, with a blanket around her shoulders, and an ashtray on the mattress beside her. The day outside was bitter under a louse-grey sky, down in the garden the bare trees shuddered. I think of that moment, and I’m there again.
– Something inside me is wearing out, she said. Some part, wearing out.
I had met her in the hall. She was in fur boots and a beret, and a moth-eaten fur coat. Her mood was frenetic she fixed her icy fingers on my wrist and laughed, and a bubble of saliva came out of her mouth and burst. Upstairs I took her coat. Slivers of the cold air of outdoors fell like silverfish from its folds. In bed she held my sex in her chill hand and laughed and laughed, throwing back her head and offering me her throat to feed on. She would not let me inside her, shut her legs. I clutched her against me, muttering and moaning, and at last, to placate me, she knelt impatiently and put her head in my lap, and I spilled myself in a series of voluptuous slow shivers into the hot wet hollow of her mouth. Her arm lay across my chest, with its track of puncture marks running from wrist to elbow, like the stippled scar of a briar scratch, and I thought of childhood.
Mefisto Page 13