Mefisto

by Banville, John

  Felix was in the front room, lounging on the horsehair sofa reading a newspaper.

  – Ah, there you are, Grendel, he said. How are you? Sit down, talk to me. We haven’t seen each other for a while, you’ve been neglecting your old friends.

  I sat down at the table. A pigeon landed on the sill outside and looked in, the wind ruffling its neck feathers. Felix tossed the paper aside and leaned forward with his hands pressed between his knees. He was wearing his mac, and a flat cap pushed back on his head. There were shallow indents at his temples, I had never noticed them before. Sometimes when I looked at him closely like this he seemed a stranger.

  – How goes the great work? he said. Is the prof treating you right? And what about the fat boy, does he stick to you, hey?

  Adele came from the bedroom, barefoot, in her fur coat. Seeing him there she paused, then came to the table and searched in her bag for a cigarette with one hand, holding her coat shut with the other. He grinned at her, bending low to look up into her face. She said:

  – How did you get in here?

  – Ah, he said. Good question.

  He went on grinning. There was silence. Adele smoked, frowning vaguely, her eyes fixed on the table. Felix looked from her to me, and then at her again. He chuckled.

  – Having fun, you two, are you? he said. Fun and games, yes?

  The pigeon flew from the sill with a clatter of wings. Felix leaned back on the sofa, one ankle crossed on a knee, and fished out his tobacco tin.

  I said:

  – Why did you say that he wanted me to work for him?

  He lit up a butt, and blew two thick cones of smoke from his pinched nostrils. He looked at me narrowly and smiled.

  – Because he did, he said. Why else?

  – He doesn’t say a word to me.

  – Ah, but that’s his way, you see.

  Adele went and sat in front of the electric fire, holding up one bare foot and then the other to the heat. The last wan light of day was fading in the window.

  – It’s true, Felix said, I may have exaggerated a little. But I didn’t say he said it, did I? I only said he wanted you, and that’s different.

  He rose and walked to the window, and stood there with his back to the room, looking out into the winter twilight.

  – People don’t recognize what it is they want, he said. They have to be shown. I have to … interpret.

  He glanced at me merrily over his shoulder.

  – Oh, yes, Pinocchio, he said. By jiminy, yes.

  Adele suddenly laughed, one of her brief, high shrieks, and threw her cigarette into the grate and lit another. Then she put a hand to her forehead and bowed her head. Felix was smiling back at me still. Darkness advanced into the room.

  I ONLY WENT TO the hospital now when I needed a new supply of pills. I avoided Dr Cranitch. Matron looked at me with her sad eyes, saying nothing. I gave all my attention to the notices on the walls in the dispensary while she filled up the little mauve phials for me. She put a fresh wad of cotton wool in each one, and wrote out new labels in her neat, schoolgirl’s hand. Miss Barr was asking after me, she said, Father Plomer too. She did not look up. Through the window behind her I could see down into the grounds. A wash of sunlight fell across the grass and was immediately extinguished. An old man on a crutch was hobbling up the drive. I picked up the pills. She watched my hands, and then she turned away.

  At the gates a car pulled up and Felix stuck out his head and hailed me.

  – What a lucky chance, he said. Hop in, we’re going to a party.

  The car was a shuddering, ramshackle machine, coughing and farting in a cloud of blue exhaust smoke. The young man with the shakes was at the wheel. His girl sat behind him in the back seat, huddled against the window. It was starting to rain.

  – Come on, Felix said to me, don’t be a spoilsport.

  The young man’s name was Tony. When I got in he turned and winked at me.

  – Hiya, pal, he said.

  There were livid bags under his eyes.

  We crossed the river. Gusts of wind were smacking the steel-blue water, and pedestrians on the bridge walked at an angle, their coat-tails whipping.

  – There are these people, Felix was saying, we’re to meet them at the Goat …

  Tony laughed, a high-pitched whinny.

  – The Goat! he cried.

  The girl shrank away from me, staring out the window beside her with a fist pressed to her mouth. She had a blank white face and frightened eyes and a tiny, pink-tipped nose. Her name was Liz. Big drops of rain swept against the windscreen.

  – Fucking wipers, Tony said.

  Then abruptly the rain stopped, and there was sun. We drove along by the canal. The poplars were still bare. Great bundles of cloud were sailing across a porcelain sky. Felix turned around in his seat to face me.

  – Seeing the lady in white, were you? he said. Wangling bonbons out of her again? Let’s have a look.

  He held the little bottle of Lamias aloft between a finger and thumb, squinting at it as if it were a rare vintage, and shook his head in laughing wonderment.

  – Do you know what these things are worth? he said. Do you?

  – They’re gold, pal, Tony said, nodding at me in the driving mirror. Pure gold.

  He wanted to take one. Felix laughed.

  – Anthony, is that wise?

  – Fuck wise, said Tony.

  Beside me Liz was rolling a cigarette in a little machine. Twice she had to stop and start all over again. Then she spilled a box of matches on the seat. For a moment it seemed she would cry. I tried to help her gather up the matches, but when I put out a hand towards her she flinched in fright and went suddenly still, averting her face from me, her little pink nose twitching.

  We were heading towards the mountains.

  Tony was bouncing in his seat, beating a tattoo with the flat of his hand on the steering wheel.

  – Whoo! he said. That stuff!

  He looked at me in the mirror again, his eyes wide and shining bright.

  – Gold! he said, and the wheel wobbled.

  – Calm yourself! cried Felix, laughing. We’ll all be killed.

  We left the city behind, and climbed a long hill, the old car groaning, then crossed a bare brown plateau. Sunlight and shadow swept the far peaks. Sheep fled into the ditches at our approach. Tony was crooning quietly to himself.

  – Ah, how good it is to get into the open, Felix said. The mountains, the mountains, I’ve always felt at home in the mountains.

  We descended a winding road and stopped at a little oasis of wind-racked pines. There was an ancient pub with fly-blown windows, and an antique petrol pump in front of the door. Chickens scratched about on a patch of oil-stained gravel, among a dozen or more parked cars. I stepped out into the cold, sharp air. Water was running over stones somewhere close by. A flush of wind shook the pines, and all at once it was spring.

  The pub was dim inside. A wireless muttered somewhere. Vague figures inhabited the gloom, they eyed us cautiously as we entered. A fat man in a dirty apron emerged from a door behind the bar, chewing. He wiped his mouth on his apron, and put his big hands on the counter and loomed at us with an expression of mingled servility and craft. Felix grandly smiled.

  – Dan, my friend …

  I was looking at the other customers, gathered there behind us like shades, watching us. They too had come here from the city. They had something about them I seemed to recognize. There were girls who looked like Liz, and ragged young men like Tony, but that was not it. I thought of my time in the hospital, the hours I had spent among the brotherhood of the maimed. That dulled, neuralgic air of waiting, suspended. That silence. They shuffled closer. Felix turned and surveyed them, smiling, one heel hooked on the foot-rail and his elbows planted on the bar.

  – Look at them, he said in my ear. They know the doctor’s arrived.

  Tony went off to the lavatory. Others followed, in ones and twos. He did not come back for a long time. The aft
ernoon was ending, the setting sun glared redly in the window, then faded. Liz sat on a bar-stool, drinking glasses of stout. She smoked and coughed. I caught her watching me. This time she did not look away. She asked for one of my pills. When I took out the phial Felix put a hand hastily over mine, looking about us sharply.

  – That’s gold, remember, he said with a smile, and this is Outlaw Gulch.

  A sort of groggy gaiety began to spread. Two young men linked arms and danced a spidery jig. A girl laughed and laughed. Dan the barman stood behind his cash register and watched with a worried eye the traffic coming and going in the passageway out to the lav. Felix sighed happily and softly sang:

  O God, how vain are all our frail delights …

  Then Tony came back with his hands stuck in the pockets of his tight trousers, grinning and twitching.

  – Surgery over? Felix said. Everybody cured?

  – Except me, Tony said.

  The twitching had spread from his jaw into his arms, now one of his legs began to shake. Liz was pawing at his sleeve.

  – He gave me, she said, giggling, he gave me one of …

  He flung her hand away.

  – Get off me! he shrieked. Jesus.

  He was sweating. He looked into Felix’s face imploringly, with a broken smile. Felix laughed and turned to me.

  – The doctor is sick, I think, he said.

  – Come on, Tony whispered, gritting his teeth. Come on, don’t …

  Felix turned back to him blandly.

  – But Anthony, tell me, who’ll drive us home, if you get well?

  The two young men who had been dancing had fallen down now, and lay on their backs waving their arms and legs feebly in the air. One of them seemed to be weeping. Tony put a hand to his forehead. Liz was watching him with a sort of glazed curiosity.

  – I’ll be all right, he said. Honest, I’ll be …

  Felix waved a hand.

  – Oh, go on, then, he said, heal thyself.

  Tony carried himself off to the lavatory, plunging sideways through the dimly milling crowd. A fight had broken out, there were screams and curses, and Dan lumbered from behind the bar, bellowing. A girl with a bleeding eye fell headlong on the floor. Someone kept laughing. Liz got down from the stool with a thoughtful, ashen look.

  – Oh, she said, I think I’m going to spew.

  Then suddenly I was outside in the cold black glossy night, under an amazement of stars. I could smell the pines, and hear the wind rushing in their branches. My head swam. Something surged within me, yearning outwards into the darkness. And all at once I saw again clearly the secret I had lost sight of for so long, that chaos is nothing but an infinite number of ordered things. Wind, those stars, that water falling on stones, all the shifting, ramshackle world could be solved. I stumbled forward in the dark, my arms extended in a blind embrace. On the gravel by the petrol pump a woman squatted, pissing. The fight was still going on somewhere, I could hear cries and groans. Felix rose up in front of me with a dark laugh.

  – Creatures of the night! he said. What music they make!

  We climbed the winding road to the crest of the hill. From here we could see afar the glittering lights of the city. The wind drummed above us, beating through the hollows of the air.

  – Consider! Felix said in a loud voice, as if addressing a multitude. Is it not meet, is it not worthy, this world?

  A pared moon had risen, by its faint light I could see his smile. He took my arm.

  – Haven’t I taken you places, though, he said. Eh? And shown you things. Blessed are the freaks, for they shall inherit the earth.

  Tony came up the hill in the car then, crouching haggard-eyed over the wheel. Liz was slumped asleep in the back. Felix got in, but I lingered on the dark road, drunk on the knowledge of the secret order of things. The wind swirled, the stars trembled. I seemed to fall upwards, into the night.

  EVERYTHING HAD brought me to this knowledge, there was no smallest event that had not been part of the plot. Or perhaps I should say: had brought me back to it. For had I not always known, after all? From the start the world had been for me an immense formula. Press hard enough upon anything, a cloud, a fall of light, a cry in the street, and it would unfurl its secret, intricate equations. But what was different now was that it was no longer numbers that lay at the heart of things. Numbers, I saw at last, were only a method, a way of doing. The thing itself would be more subtle, more certain, even, than the mere manner of its finding. And I would find it, of that I had no doubt, even if I did not as yet know how. It would be a matter, I thought, of waiting. Something had opened up inside me on the mountain, some rapt, patient, infinitely attentive thing, like a dark flower opening its throat to the right. Now, as spring quickened around me, the city came alive, like a garden indeed, flushed and rustling, impatient and panting, with vague shrills and swoopings on all sides in the lambent, watercolour air. I put aside the black notebook, it annoyed me now, with its parade of contradictions and petty paradoxes, its niggling insinuations. Why should I worry about the nature of irrational numbers, or addle my brain any longer with the puzzle of what in reality a negative quantity could possibly be? Zero is absence. Infinity is where impossibilities occur. Such definitions would suffice. Why not? I went out into the streets, I walked and walked. It was here, in the big world, that I would meet what I was waiting for, that perfectly simple, ravishing, unchallengeable formula in the light of which the mask of mere contingency would melt. At times it felt as if the thing would burst out into being by its own force. And with it surely would come something else, that dead half of me I had hauled around always at my side would somehow tremble into life, and I would be made whole, I don’t know how, I don’t know, but I believed it, I wanted to believe it. The feeling was so strong I began to think I was being followed, as if really some flickering presence had materialized behind me. I would stop in the street and turn quickly, and at once everything would assume a studied air of innocence, the shopfronts and façades of houses looking suspiciously flat and insubstantial, like a hastily erected stage-set. More than once I was convinced I had seen a shadow of movement, the fading after-image of a figure darting into a doorway, or skipping behind the trunk of a tree. Then for a second, before I had time to tell myself I had imagined it, I sensed with a shiver the outlines of another, darker, more dangerous world intermingled invisibly with this one of sky and green leaves and faded brick.

  Everything must change. What had I ever done but drift? Now at last I would have purpose, order. Felix approved.

  – That’s it, he said, be positive. What did I tell you? I knew we were alike all along.

  Suddenly I had seen the error I had been making. I had mistaken pluralities for unities. For the world is like numbers, the things that happen in it are never so small they cannot be resolved into smaller things. How could I have lost sight of that? I rummaged through the recent past, looking for the patterns that I must have missed. But, as once with numbers, so now with events, when I dismantled them they became not simplified, but scattered, and the more I knew, the less I seemed to understand.

  I threw myself into work at the white room with a new passion. What more likely place for the light of certainty to dawn? The professor flew into one of his sudden fits of irritation.

  – What is exact in numbers, he said, except their own exactitude?

  – No, I said, no, not the numbers themselves, but …

  He folded his stubby arms and glared at me like a vexed owl. His right eye-socket was larger than the left, it always made him look as if he were wearing a monocle.

  – Well? he said. What, tell me.

  – I don’t know, I said. Something else.

  He snorted.

  – What else is there, but numbers?

  The printer sprang into clattering life, he turned to it with a scowl. Leitch looked at me sidelong and sneered, slipping a piece of chocolate into that little pink prehensile mouth.

  That was the night Miss Hackett came
to see us. She was a thin tall woman of middle age with a prominent sharp face and lacquered brass hair. She put her head around the door that led from the offices upstairs, with a smile that was at once both arch and roguish. Leitch, slumped at the console, sat upright hastily and stared at her. She came in and shut the door behind her and advanced on him purposefully, with a hand thrust out, still playfully smiling, her lips compressed, as if we were children and she had slipped into the nursery to bring us a treat. She wore a tweed business suit and a white blouse with ruffles at the throat. She had a mannish walk, her high heels coming down briskly on the floor in a series of sharp, smart blows. Leitch got to his feet, stuffing the empty wrapper from the chocolate bar into his pocket with surreptitious haste. She stopped in front of him with a snap.

  – Mr Cossack, she said brilliantly. I’m Hackett. So pleased.

  There was a smear of lipstick on one of her large front teeth. Leitch tittered in fright and put his hands behind his back.

  – Oh! he said. No, I’m not …

  A tiny flaw appeared in Miss Hackett’s smile, like a hairline crack in a china cup. She cast a questing glance about her. She had already taken me in, without quite looking directly at me. Professor Kosok came in from the lavatory in the corridor, still fumbling with his flies. For a moment he did not notice her. She waited, beaming, as he shuffled forward. When at last he saw her he stopped short, rearing back a little, his wide eye growing wider. She seized his hand and shook it violently once, as if she were cracking a whip. She seemed to think he must be deaf, for when she spoke she shouted.