CHINESE WHISPERS

 

 

That heat! That terrible heat. That coldness! That terrible coldness.

William Carlos Williams

 

 

 

I

 

e pokes a lion with his stick, and it runs away. His city is full of conserved beasts, originals but without aggressiveness. Usually. A pact with the mayor. He chooses not to introspect as he goes for his interview.

  ‘... someone to tie on the arms and legs,’ says Larry the manager.

  ‘Really, someone else does the tying, and it’s better not to anthropomorphise robots,’ he – the Engineer, the candidate, me – says.

Larry says, ‘Well, I guess it’s the movie, and the replicants that die.’

  The aspirant, the Engineer, says, ‘Stuff that’s constructed doesn’t die. Your computer gets out of date, it doesn’t die. What is no longer there is the idea. Its soul, if you like. It’s quite indifferent to its physical shape and fate. It’s an idea, surpassed by another idea.’

  Larry seems interested: ‘So the idea doesn’t die either? Doesn’t disappear.’

  ‘Of course not.’ The Engineer thinks Larry won’t enjoy taking coffee with him in the lounge. Larry asks, ‘Where do the ideas come from, if they don’t go anywhere?’

  ‘From us, of course. But I think you’re strolling up a blind alley.’

  Outside they can hear the wild beasts gathered round the fountain, giving tongue. Maybe a murderous scuffle.

I am the Engineer. I don’t want the job. Are the robots part of our superorganism, or just appendages because we’re lazy? Are robots made in our image or quicker, nimbler, more complicated but quite, quite alien, like our bromided lions? And what if robots reproduce themselves, ever more skilful and neat – sex and procreation’s no great invention. And you’re free to say, ‘how wonderful’ or ‘how ridiculous’. No one’s taking notice.

  I get the job. I start to think of moving on.

  Larry’s wife has been waiting for us – and a bareknuckle evening. She and Larry must have found each other as two objects interlaced on a beach, washed up but hopeful – Larry wanting a feisty entertainer, and she a predictable patsy with a salary. She comes out swinging, ‘Another roboteer! I guess this is the final blow to the workers, cut out their muscles, replace with plastic casings,’ and there’s Larry, ‘We don’t have workers, my dear, only women. And if we cut their pay, it’s to get their menfolk off their asses and contribute ...’

  She says (‘by the way, this is my wife, Serena ...’) ‘You’ll open up a bag of tricks, the little buggers, your machines, they don’t have sex, don’t drink, don’t sleep, don’t make a mess at home – they’ll see you off, you men, and with the knowledge that they’ll give you – more idleness, and longer useless lives.’

  I say, ‘Someone should write a history of sitting down,’ but really I’m away, down by those sticky rivers, the men all busy, painting themselves, propitiating gods, maybe plucking a banana. The women somewhere in those sheds, little monkey fingers making knowledge, deep in another culture – and I think, no, that won’t do, must start again, and switch off for this evening.

  I switch off – he switches off, the evening passes, there are knockdowns, but it’s all routine, they’ll haggle up to bed, forget me, the non-paying public, then will come another day, inconclusive as the last, but marching on behind no flags.

  I repeat the Engineer’s mantra, ‘Robots can’t read a book. Don’t know what a problem is – can only scan and solve, they can’t invent, think outside their own biscuit tin. So how could they have an idea?’

Serena’s unimpressed. ‘If you know what an idea is.’

  ‘Yes I do.’

  I go on, with my sense of duty, though it’s the engineer in me that speaks: ‘Robots can iron your pyjamas, sail your ship to Pluto, but it can’t make your revolution.’

  She says, ‘But we don’t want that either.’

  Lamely, the Engineer says, ‘Anyway, one species knows itself. Our dog will give us love, but stays a dog.’ I think of our tame lions, what can they give, what, except for tofu slabs, do they take away?

  She says, ‘And if a robot gives me love, how do I react? You – you seem to me a robot, if you gave me love, what should I expect?’

  Well, here we are, all personal, I say, ‘I think the best of it lies there – we’ve no idea, and so the question’s back to starters – the robot knows because it’s told, how to behave, but as for me – I can behave badly, even carelessly, and that’s what makes me engineer and master,’ and she sniffs and turns away.

  She says, ‘Then I think us girls prefer a real robot to an absent male,’ and maybe for her it’s true.

  We sit together on her divan, talking of this and that and neurobiology. Suddenly, with a gesture I can’t place at first, she takes off the top half of her clothes, with two handfuls. ‘What do you think of me?’ she says.

  They were just right.

  When the Engineer dresses again, thinking perhaps of redress, he asks, ‘Larry? Any problems there?’

  ‘Larry doesn’t know so many things, one more shouldn’t trouble him.’

  ‘You seemed so in synchrony.’

  ‘That’s an easy trick.’

  I remember my first fantasy realised, my golden girl, down by the river, time unexpected, too unlikely even to be fantasised, then slowly buried under history, becoming merely memory, then fantasy. What became of us? Just archaeology.

  And later, Serena says, ‘It was good, it didn’t matter,’ and I think, ‘It was so good, it must matter’, that’s what they say when things are bad.

  Serena says, ‘Hey, you’re off somewhere, becoming engineer again,’ and I think of those little complex biscuit tins, all full of pseudo thoughts, philosophy transmuted into silicone, not that the material side concerns me, how they actually make the little buggers after I’ve designed them, and Serena says,

  ‘Up in the clouds, where thoughts can’t reach – you’re rather sweet when there’s nothing crossing that mind,’ and I think that when there’s nothing, nothing’s all there is, and that’s what we’re all trying to avoid, that moment when we enter infinity and it all stops – at least, for Serena, up there are clouds and blue.

  I – he – presses on relentlessly, ‘We can’t supply them with God, sex, death or sunsets,’ and impatiently she adds,

  ‘Nor reason, love, birth or mountains,’ and she laughs, and maybe beneath that surface, itself not so bad, there is another something, good or bad.

  She says, ‘What I don’t see, that puts me with the biscuit tins, is any whole, society, collection of human allsorts – something I’m like and could belong to. Just Larry, and now maybe Larry and you, for how long one doesn’t know. A year of Larry on the bottle and we’re off, in separate orbits, him to burn up quick and into space waste, me left to wonder what are you? Space dog, so bravely muzzle pointing tail streaming back, or maybe just another piece of beagle shit, spinning round and round ...’

  I say, ‘No, I’m something live for sure. Some kind of animal. Careless to the fate of others of the species, and so perhaps not one of them. Do not deserve. Invent without a thought for all effects, without a suffering equal to the slightest of the misery of all my brothers. And my sisters too,’ and she sees me drifting away from what she wants – her lack, her longing, mild ache for companionship maybe. But not an ache for me. That’s yet to come and will make us hop, and poor old Larry too if we make him lose his innocence, what will he take of us – and am I not too far ahead? Serena doesn’t want an end game before it’s started, wants a slow slow burn. A robot only has its options, like her, a finity of choices.

  Of course, I knew I was frittering away my life – the lives of school friends surfaced, like timbers coming off a wreck, became public, or at least as currency – and money was there too, or status, photos of some bunch of guys, who’d won a cup or signed a peace or merged with some other bank. It all passed by me, and I was as proud and idle as a pyramid in the sand, waiting for robbers of my – maybe stolen – jewels.

  And while he chatters on, Engineer Harley has a vision – one of the throwback visions, like a lizard’s dreams of fire and brimstone – a past so horrible and immediate, its passage gives, if not rebirth, at least another chance. The parade of shabby dwarves, families of them, the women smaller, children smaller still, all looking straight ahead, avoiding jeers or exploitation, as useful freaks or sports of God. The beggars, and the ragged band, in single file, a chant from hell for who knows what confraternity or leperhouse. And then the feast – a whale, larger than the largest lifesize, patterned in what seemed yellow plastic, or like liner luggage of the Thirties, and so the beast was fake, though starting now to reek, and out come yellow packages, out from its manufactured belly – baby tiger, baby whale. And then the crowd, from all around me, they’ve all brought some things to hack with, gobble down the risky flesh – advancing on it with a roar like turkeys in a storm, all busy with their mouths to satisfy or howl for some or more. A vision of the past that makes a mock of all the idylls of the riverbank, the sacred tombs are all a load of rot, the gods, the face paint, stories by the fire – all petty tricks to keep the early deaths at bay, a respite from the brother hacking at you, enemies at every tree, the sunny glades are full of killers.

  And then he thinks, this fine young engineer, adultery proudly in his stride, his fear is time. Not ageing, as he’s young, just time, dimension to be somehow filled, avoiding the unmeaning of its being simply past. It’s time as meaning that assails him. Dimension that his robots cheerfully ignore – they do their job, if asked, and if their time runs out, then onward with another! They do not care, because they do not tell the time, their time. Though it’s built in, and they are on the forward rush of obsolescence, maybe it’s time we can’t convince them of, make them evaluate, and savour as it rushes past and reappears, the sea, the sea, always beginning over and the same.

  I pull myself back, and Larry’s talking of ideas, or his Idea. I say, ‘You want me to make robot intellectuals, then? All sitting in a row on shelves, those biscuit tins all staring out the window, interviewing each other, reviewing each others’ circuits, – then maybe smoke a pipe, screw a friend’s wife, go to a movie?’

  ‘Something like that,’ he says, and seems a little disappointed.

  ‘That’s how it is,’ I tell him, ‘Ideas we recognise after the fact – otherwise it’s just the brain doodling with itself, joining up the scraps, it’s boring, dross. All out of focus, wrong and trivial, and then ...’

  ‘That “then” is what I want,’ he says.

  ‘The then, or zen – depends on other people and their wants or fantasies. Those tins can’t evaluate each other – and they have no needs, no fantasies.’

  And Larry says, ‘So, give them what they need to have. Factor it in.’

  I say, although I’m keen, ‘I doubt myself.’

‘It doesn’t look like it,’ he says.

 

*

 

Larry says, ‘Engineer Harley!’ The call to order.

  And I wonder if I’ve not been somewhat of a shit – but then, we don’t own each other any more, although the money keeps on getting counted, and besides, I don’t know enough of him, nor of Serena, to say if they are even bigger shits. And in the end, I put it all away, and really I don’t feel a thing, and Larry says,

  ‘We’ve got the biggest challenge for you – you’re so big on your ideas: we want you to put them into robots. Not to make them human, nor anything like that, but just ideas. Make them robots with ideas, no science fiction crap about them being warriors or hostile to us. Just let them have ideas.’

He’s caught me there.

  I say, ‘When you try a thing like that, you follow all the same old paths, it all ends up as options and solutions. We don’t know how ...’ But then I think, ‘It’s easier to take some kids, put them in clothes and clean them up and cure their bodies, have them read and write – they’ll give you all the ideas, quite cheap,’ and Larry reads my thought and says,

  ‘If we take humans, if we take the poor ones, their ideas will not be science fiction, but there’s a chance that they’ll be warriors or hostile to us’ and I’m sure that Larry in his modest way is just as big a shit as me.

There’s no more intellectuals like Larry wants. Not in our woods, anyway. In France, in China. Or on the Web somewhere, anonymous, pseudonymous. They’re beasts of fable anyway.

I poke at two lions with a stick. They run away. They’re not a metaphor for whatever Larry wants, inventors, magicians, designers – good old Renaissance men, who’d build a battleship and make a mustard pot – all before lunch, then maybe kill a guy in some alleyway. And I wonder if Larry’d have a try at killing me, Serena being his province, his stab at some significance, and now – well, what? She’s hardly compromised, and gesturing’s her mark of independence. Independent from him, but only if he knows. I think of robots and their knowledge – they can have none, either of the future or the past. So how can they construct what we call ideas?

We’re good together, me and Serena, on that red divan, like in a picture. Seen from above – who by? Some painter, slung up in a hammock, dripping down his paints, righting perspectives, my bottom and her face and vice versa, what fantasy, and how banal. ‘Poseurs on an orange sofa’ – you do it orange, so it seems a lighter red, and not so permanent, weighty. And you’ll see, the story’s in the colour – there’s the idea: – you’d never teach it to a biscuit tin, for they’re just full of biscuits – when empty, then away they go, down to the dump.

I tell him, ‘Larry, if there’s no tradition, culture, history, the ideas will be the global unrooted ones.’

To myself, I think, if there are any.

He says, ‘You mean, no overarching intellectuals, just experts or gurus.’

‘Of which we have a good helping – critics and lickspittles, as you will.’

He looks awkward. ‘Well, Harley, really I had in mind something a little different. A break with tradition. But the founding of a new one.’

‘Sounds like more gurus.’

He says, ‘What I want is authority plus performance. Not rhetoric and exhortation, but the say and then the do.’

‘You want God in a box.’

He hesitates, then, ‘What I’d like is something that predicts the earthquake, then makes the guys evacuate – or stops the quake. No shallying around.’

I say, ‘Yes, that’s God all right. And you want to be Creator of the Creator?’

‘No, no. The thing would have free will, and you, Designer, a percentage.’

I smile. ‘That’s your intelligent design. I’m flattered you imagine I could handle it. We may have to spin off another moon to fit in all the bits.’

‘Well, what would you need to start?’

‘The backs of lots of envelopes.’ And I think, who is madder, the prime creator or His designer, but Larry says, ‘And it’s big bucks too.’

I say, ‘I’ll get by on my salary,’ and he jumps in, ‘Maybe you want a model, for the ethical side. I know a man of substance – well, not substance in cash terms, rather – of principle. A guy not like us, free floaters, quite carefree except for expenditures and cancer scares, but really anchored, full of principle. Worthy of respect.’ He is magnificent. He adds, ‘And not a word about all this, you know, to Serena.’

We never hear again of this munificent ghost, Larry’s fixer, sharer in the honours, bearer of the losses, but now I have to say:

‘Of course not, nothing to Serena. Bring this avatar forward, please.’

It seems to me that first I must discard the faith-and-patience religions. The more temples, monks and priests, and savvy elders and encyclicals and funny rules and diets, sex on Thursdays, kill the girlchild but spare the cockroach – all that just won’t compute. All the big religions, the monotheistic and the spiritual ones, they’re all attached to faith-and-patience – accept what happens as the best, follow the rules, keep on believing, don’t expect a lot, and if it happens and is bad, as it will be, just take it in your stride, or wherever else is possible. No, that’s not what we want – we need analysis and then decisive action. I can see a long journey’ll be required, to see how the effective operators produce results and keep the clients – if not happy, then alive.

The Engineer gets up early, leaves his building. He’s convinced a new creation, layered on the old attempt, is beyond his, or anyone else’s powers. But he has hopes – not faith – that he’ll find something worthwhile, maybe the shamans, maybe Confucius, or Dao. Even some lay, quite earthy, ideology, to give the key to this world – and he smiles as he thinks that Larry’s remit includes paradise, and then he thinks what he’ll do about Serena, and decides to let things carry him along.

He carries his long stick. He sees among the shrubs four, or even five, young lions, taking their ease or looking happy. He’s about to give a warning poke with his long stick, and then – a cop springs out from behind a tree.

‘Hey, you, just leave those animals alone!’

‘Just a precaution. Because you never know.’

‘They’ve the same right as you. Leave them be.’

‘Just to establish a distance.’

‘Give me that stick!’

They tussle, quite politely, on the Engineer’s part there is a little fear, or apprehension, the cop is thinking of the threats allowed or just permitted during a resistance, and the Engineer lets go, and says, ‘On your head, then. I hope they’re as civilised as we,’ and the cop talks of unprovoked assault and suchlike, but for both of them the day has started with a little resolution of an obstacle, the lions lope off, the traffic stops to let them cross the road and seek a fountain.

He is disturbed by the affair of the stick, but slowly returns into himself. He, no, I think about miracles. If you do the miracle without a situation to precede it, then it will seem a trick, entertaining but futile. If you let the presidents and all that political stuff define a problem for you, which you then resolve, the politicians take the credit and fish you in. The only way is find the situation, then resolve it, all by yourself. Not an easy reading of the landscape – for the situation must be imminent – a fire, a meteorite, an epidemic. Not an academic puzzle, tests and debates.

I stare out of the window. Some cops with a truck are shifting a hippo from the fountain. They’re using sticks and what seem guns with darts. They pepper the beast, who’s shackled. It falls, its little paws pedal bravely, it sleeps, it dies. We all think of our own, our multidoctored deaths, we sympathise, we turn away, it is the sadness of the world. The truck backs up, the meat is hoisted in with hooks and pulleys. Peace is back, the cops are sharing beers, it’s hot, of course.

I think about miracles.

I think about Serena. There’s a situation. No need to be cautious, maybe. Throw away the stick. Although – one never knows.

 

*

 

Next time, Serena greets me, ‘I must be mad, letting another mad scientist into my life.’

‘I didn’t know I was in your life,’ I say.

She doesn’t respond. She talks about the lions. ‘There’s lots of people I could see eaten up.’

‘Better to withdraw than get involved with feline rights,’ I say.

‘Well no, I guess – where’d we be without other people?’

‘Our robots don’t seem to have that need.’

‘I bet when you’re not around, they’re all real chatterboxes!’ she says.

It’s a daunting thought. And as we get together, in what the Engineer thinks a peculiar form of gymnastics – only apparently more gratifying than most – jumping the horse, the bars, the rings – maybe they all started off as sex games, now detached, autonomous, and all of us just carrying out our tasks, each task separated from the next – like work from play – and then when it’s done each person separating from their mate, and leaning back on that divan, she says, ‘Larry’s got some big ideas.’

‘I’m not Larry,’ I say. ‘Anyone can have them, even cosmic, talking to the spirits, addressing nature, all that stuff. It’s part of our vainglory.’ I see she savours that word, a wild card not in any of the hands she’s dealt herself.

Serena says, ‘You in your small world. Me in mine. Does this … this sex stuff, bring us together?’

I think for a while. ‘People say so. And besides, my world isn’t tiny, it’s immense. It’s just that everything is dead. Or rather, everything goes about its business, and we’d like to think – predictably, automatically, according to its rules. But it’s limitless – for practical purposes.’

She persists, ‘Why don’t you do brains. Or kittens.’

‘I do brains too, up to a point. But it’s all systems, where kittens have a cultural baggage, they cry when they’re being hurt.’

She ponders. ‘Like Larry. But then, in marriage you both know that in the best case you’ll have to care for some old wreck when you least feel like it – or when you want to be off on a cruise.’

I comfort her, ‘Larry can’t be more than fifty.’

‘He’s thirty-five. But has the ideas of someone grasping for eternity. Into the brain of God, he says.’

‘I thought God had stopped tweaking the universe, left it all to run, the tweakers are just us.’

She objects. ‘It’s all a puzzle, and when guys like Larry look for meanings behind the wallpaper, they come up with exercise and dahlias.’

‘And young therapists,’ I say, trying to do Larry a good turn, find him another exit.

‘Well,’ she says, ‘Maybe I’ll be your single living thing, in all your immensity. It doesn’t flatter me, but it gives you something to play with.’

 

*

 

She says, ‘Maybe we can populate the spheres,’ and laughs.

‘You mean, after death?’

‘You, me, Larry, motoring in his Mustang round Orion’s Beltway?’

‘We’d find it difficult, without brains.’

She laughs, ‘That’s how he drives anyway. So, why don’t you try to fill up all that emptiness? Try Pascal, Proust, Schopenhauer ...’

I say, ‘You’re just firing them off like rockets? Anyway, it’s not really empty. Just daunting. Not even silent, but not what you’d call musical.’

She thinks a moment. ‘So there aren’t aliens – it’s just the whole extent that’s alien?’

‘Nicely put.’ She’s trying to make a contact with me. I acknowledge it. I say, ‘You know what Larry wants me to do for him?’

‘Find something out there, but no spaceships. Find something to establish his name forever, but not just on a piece of rock up there. Find something that makes him feel powerful.’

I say, ‘The last of these, for sure. And all done from my desk.’ Then, graceless, ‘I should be going now. And I’ve lost my stick.’

‘Never worry, Engineer. Nature’s been quite tamed out there. The fields to feed us, rivers to light our lamps, all the animals at risk are gathered in the city bounds,’ she laughs, a little wistfully.

I say, ‘Well, I’m not so trusting as you.’

‘A little bit of life,’ she says, ‘won’t do you harm.’

I say that I agree, though being beaten up – or eaten – isn’t in my scheme.

She clings patiently to me: ‘Don’t be concerned for Larry. All he wants is power and then an easy death. Power into money too, but not so much, it’s all a symbol. He wants to plan, be grandiose and brash, and that’s enough. He isn’t stupid, Harley. He sets a task impossible, but the fruits are his.’

‘OK,’ I say, ‘but what’s success for him is bound to be my failure. What he wants just can’t be done – a box of stuff that must convince the world, the public, that it represents the latest trick in spirituality. And – suppose we start the earthquake, and can’t stop it, shakes us all to bits?’

‘Well,’ she says, ‘Don’t expect me to help you glue it all together. And for the genie in the bottle – it’s all ephemeral, it’s argument, there’s no hard corners, no dawns or sunsets. No divan.’

And as I leave, casting an eye for lions and such, I wonder that she’s so convinced the divan is the centre, and I glance up, at that monstrous sky, that seems a bowl but really is just light and rock, and sounds like string quartets played backward, it’s just an awful puzzle that if you solve it leaves you as you were. Though maybe with a medal.

The Engineer thinks – for he is not stupid, for he is not without some culture...

He thinks, I think, ‘What does Larry want me to slide into those interstellar spaces – man, God? From the canyons? Holderlin’s dreams from the asylum? A public all empowered, all of us clotted with our histories, embracing the feminine, our past and present slaveries? The harmonies of nothing, of the dust rubbing against dust?’ The Engineer thinks, I think, of Serena – can the answer to all this be sexual intercourse? Why, surely not. Serena on her goddess throne, a lotus in her hand and at her feet a lion couchant.

The Engineer resumes his work, it’s so familiar, all the thoughts he must put in, the eventualities in what he calls the biscuit tins, that cure – what? Curiosity, perhaps. The drive to power that’s based on error and inevitable failure. Try to convince me, I think, but I’ll not be convinced. They say that is the most human thing, and necessary, the scepticism that gets you up each morning, another day – the sun, the sun, the chariot pulled by four lions, that sweeps the stars below, gives us the illusion that the sky is just a dome with one hotspot. That could make you weep. Who is fooled? Why, no one, that’s why we go on.

*

 

I – the Engineer – go to a conference. It’s mostly about brains. We all take good care, or manage close surveillance, of our brains. Some jog, some don’t eat, or sleep, some drink only bourbon, lots of it. There are clumps of leaders, looking like Larry, each clinging to their foothold on the mountain. Doctors young and doctors grey, funded and busted, doctors randy, doctors virginal. But between us all a power of computation nearly equal to one laptop’s.

Each brings out a piece of study – it’s like a dog show, walking each around. Different races – no one says they’re only interested in the big ones.

Two guys from the village are brought up, to give a little concert – Henze’s Auden songs, I think – and we all nod through.

And everyone has heard of Larry’s plan, they’re interested but bemused. It’s what we’d all like to do, and know we can’t. Know it can’t be done. It’s making gold with spells – there’s not one here who, if you did it, wouldn’t take an ingot home.

A lady doctor’s here, she faces up to me as though I’m fearsome. In China things to do with brains are pressing. She says, ‘I think that what you or your boss proposes is – making disaster, then reversing it, or making it benign. You want to prove a miracle has taken place – it’s one you’ve staged, in other words, a con.’

I think that’s so, besides, the risks are dire. There’s lots of us who do real things, with bombs and mountains, all those tests, the systems working out like hamsters – but stage a disaster not by accident – that’s a risk we just don’t run.

I say, ‘Really, the important bit is mapping spaces,’ but she’s not convinced. ‘To do the risky things,’ she says, ‘you need a Party, all the rest won’t cover for you. Experiment in white coats has its frontiers, but to convince, to sway the world – Party’s the thing.’

She opens up a road that I’ll not travel. Not being the convincing type myself, and Larry’s just a boss. Maybe she’s right – to me it’s just a tawdry trick, banal, making an error, turning insides out, then change the tune – it’s hardly what we want. But what we want is grandiose, but also – it’s banal. Even the respect of all these guys, from every place – they’re just like me, a brain on legs, endlessly replicated, endlessly begun again. Is this the treasure of the world? I guess it is, the Engineer guesses it is so. But can I kneel before myself, my brothers, likenesses?

I stand alone, high above the sea, wrinkled with dhows whose white sails are like the folded wings of doves, pecking and contemplating. The ground is umber, quite higgledy-piggledy, rising in big clods, some broken plants that look like cannabis. It is terribly hot, I feel I’m in a glass dome, a dome of molten glass. Then I see I’m in a Muslim cemetery, the souls all flown, the headstones half deflated, some lying down, their standing days done. The signs of life are far below, though you wouldn’t say it’s human, but there’s movement.

This cemetery beside the sea – it doesn’t chime with death, just this hot day, and not quite liveliness but far away. Snakes – there’ll be snakes, and I of course without my stick. I think of all the predecessors, who spent their days musing in places such as this, and drew a whole lesson, a whole text, from contemplating.

The Chinese delegate comes up to me. She says, ‘Somewhere below, I saw a circle of women dancing – no, not from here, I think they’re Kosovars, and some were in the ancient clothes and some in modern, and there’s three guys, two with those old clarinets that squeal like boars on heat and someone with a shaman’s drum – all going at it, at the dance. Such joy!’

I say primly, ‘Surely they’re not delegates? From the conference, you want to be alone,’ and she says, ‘Ah yes, but you’ll have heard last night, in the hotel, what farce! The corridors, the doors and what else exchanged, some, yes, for the academic stuff, some for the booze, but others – for the pleasures of their company.’

‘It doesn’t bother me.’

‘It isn’t a bother for anyone. But think, we’re all here to say how close we are to a revelation, latest secrets of the cosmos ...’

I say, primly again, ‘When you take the universe and boil it, chill it, tape it, probe it, speed it up and slow it down, and measure it and put your toe over its threshhold – yes, if you call the unknown “secret”, secrets revealed there are. But what’s the use of secrets when they aren’t secret any more? You hang your name on the discovery – then you’re up here, the cemetery by the sea.’

She’s unconvinced. ‘We’re not so far along, it’s true. The link between the action and the thought. That’s not a natural trip, it’s all against nature. Maybe we could collaborate?’

I say defensively, ‘I don’t see how. I think I’m up a dead end. And besides, I’ve got a girlfriend,’ and I think of Serena, and the Chinese doctor says, ‘And where’s she from, is she Italian, they say that they’re the best,’ and I reply, ‘I haven’t asked her, but I don’t think there’s any rule in this,’ but after all, why not collaborate, give oneself over, say yes I will, yes, forget this cemetery, the wrinkled sea, just do what comes. ‘When we have boiled the sea,’ I say, ‘we have its secret, but the rest is not a secret, all the rest is difference. Interpretation.’

But she won’t let me go, I say, ‘You understand, I’m not attractive as a person,’ and she, ‘I’m interested in your mind, and not your body. Rather, the thought, that drives your robots, then maybe—’

‘I really can’t collaborate, it’s all too vague,’ and I think, ‘She wants to steal my stuff,’ and then, ‘So, if it goes to China, why should I care? It’s not made to be a profit for mankind,’ and then I think, ‘Maybe it is.’

She says, ‘To fill the universe with thought’s a noble thing,’ and I say, ‘Fill it up with junk, you mean,’ but she continues, ‘That is, yes, noble, if a little crass. Might even be of use – the other thing is horrible. To make disasters then reverse their effects, for self-aggrandisement – no, that’s not on.’

She’s right. No more ‘yes I will’, I say, ‘No, I won’t.’ And screw Larry. Maybe I’ll depart, depart with Serena, who I’ve never seen, not really seen away from the divan, and is that urge so strong it means to change a life, or even two, if she would come, and where, and how? And who would pay?

‘You’re not so bad a person, after all,’ says the Chinese doctor, and looks coyly, ‘But I mean to steal your thoughts,’ and I suppose she means it as a complement, or just a threat to have me follow her, but why, my thoughts are not the kind that lead to action – rather, they lead me back to Larry.

And she’s gone, back to the Kosovars who’re having whatever fun they can, and who knows why they’re here, as maybe delegates or perhaps they sweep the hotel corridors, and why’s the Chinese lady here, except for routine, who knows what she builds, it could be rockets or the management of infants, making of catflaps or of prison doors – the things we have to do but rather not to think about, and have we come to this, and then I think, to come to this from what before – and then I think that really in my mind there isn’t a ‘before’, or surely not a golden one, relations breaking off or not begun, the lives all zeroing to cemeteries like this, and maybe some crude images – of people, adulterers even, being hanged from cranes or starving in tin shacks.

I say to the Chinese doctor, ‘When we think of thought, we start from a grey mass of writhing, horrible things, impulse and wishful thinking, and the deeds that tell us only that we can repeat them, and we will, to end up here. This goddam heat, and bits of worn-out body, look at the dogs that come up here, poor goddam things they’re hungry, but a bone’s a bone, and no one cares, why should they, these old rags and shreds don’t mean a thing,’ and I go on inside, and Serena and her Schopenhauer, they all stand bold and free, beyond my reach or comprehension, up in the sky like stars, who’d want to go there, who would want to shout, ‘Yes, I’ll go there,’ and I realise that lots of delegates would hop into that capsule, maybe a robot’d do it all instead, and whizz up to some notional planet, find a piece of ice, maybe a lily maybe not, and bring it back, a thousand years from now – and straight into this heap of earth. And if I stage a miracle, a real one, who will care? What lesson is there?

The Chinese doctor says, ‘The trick will be to keep on doing them, then to remedy disasters that you haven’t thought of, haven’t planned, and can’t redress,’ and I think, ‘Yes that’s one big flaw! By that time, Larry’ll be dead and famous, and we’ll be in that trek, from schism to a heresy, more massacred, more doctors, human condition and all that,’ and she takes my hand, and that is that, probably she thinks, ‘Another mad one, poor guy, out in space beyond the rope to pull him back in with the rest of us,’ and I think, ‘Maybe I did wrong to talk the walk, to leave the capsule, venture off, and walk on nothing all alone’, the sea is far below, the sun is cracking hot, the sound of ancient clarinets leaks up to us – I let her lead me down, the poor old blind man, who knows what he’s done up there, incest and murder for a start – but when we’re back on earth I see that all the other guys – some with their avatars and some with new-found mistresses, are all strolling round as if they’re blind or drunk, and one, a stranger, says to me, ‘Too goddam hot to think of anything, we go inside, there’ll be another concert, more traffic in the corridors by night, and nothing more to think this day.’

 

*

 

Serena asks, ‘How was the conference?’

‘I met a Chinese girl. There were two tiny concerts. We saw some Kosovars. No one seemed to think Larry’s up to much.’

She says, primly, ‘I’m still Larry’s girl, you know. What did they play?’

‘First some Henze, I think it was. Auden songs, for the mood. Then the second night, some Gil Evans, a group of replicants, they did Time of the Barracudas.’

‘Quite apt. And did you and the Chinese make the music of the spheres?’

‘She wants to steal my stuff. If there is any. She asked if you were Italian.’

‘My name perhaps, but not the thought behind it. Quite classy music, though.’

‘Just some local lads. And lots of brains walking around – and I saw a Muslim cemetery, high above the sea. The day was hot as lead, molten lead. Or glass.’

She asks again, ‘No problem, then?’

‘Slight apprehension about snakes. That plan to outdo the gods, enact the second coming, miracles – that seemed to stall. I decided not to set off volcanoes – not quite ethical. And a bit inconclusive too.’

She says, ‘If you’re afraid of lions, you’re probably afraid of volcanoes too.’

Unexpected, Larry arrives. I’m sitting on the divan, heavy with – well, not guilt, but not wanting to be caught, for sure.

We talk, I say to Larry, ‘That task, all power to the boss – you know – it’s best not to talk too much about it.’

‘The talking’s the best part, gets you in the frame. Besides, I do it all for Serena. I feel she doesn’t respect me,’ he kids, and she kittens up to him.

He continues, ‘The idea goes on, OK, I’ve not backed out. Just lets kick it around a little more.’

It seems to me, yes, that’s what we’ll do – it’s like those equations waiting to be solved, you get a million bucks you don’t know what to do with, except give them back – with your name on them. Not at all the plan we started. I put it back, high on a shelf in my mind, where it can’t escape.

I think, ‘How terrible to have no fear, save of a natural death. Not that death’s so natural these days. That’s all Larry wants – immortality at 35. But no fear, fear of some species member. Larry’s all against nature. He doesn’t see the young goddesses of death that walk among us,’ and I think of the young Chinese girl, who wants. Not wants of me, just wants, longs – for knowledge, I suppose. Unlike Larry. And unlike me – I’m scared of it. What a weight! Where is it supposed to end? More real than we have now, or less enchanted? Philosophy for the stars, but with a sucker punch to come.

If Larry can’t be lord of the universe, well, there’s always Serena. For him, or me. I rather hope for me. I hope. Maybe.

 

II

 

o lions. No lions at the door this morning. It’s like the first day at school, knowing that by midday, as you’ve been promised, you’ll come home knowing everything. And had a good time, too. The Engineer has to meet up with Larry. I have to.

He says, ‘We screwed up with the last project.’

‘It wasn’t so stupid. Just didn’t show what it should, what we thought.’

‘Well,’ he says, ‘Putting different things together, that’s what the game is, that’s what café tables are for.’

‘I suppose so.’

He asks, and I tell him, ‘There was a Chinese girl at the conference. Does she want to help, or steal?’

Larry laughs, ‘Science is all made up of that. The decisive move is not the solution, it’s the layout of the problem.’

‘Some people let it happen. Or watch it happening.’

The Engineer thinks of Serena, and watching it happening.

Larry says, ‘Of course, you can’t plan for innovation,’ but of course you do.

‘You see this glass, on this table,’ he goes on. ‘This woman on this divan. And what do you need to sweep them into your design?’

The Engineer, I, think, 'Nothing, you need nothing, not even a design!

Larry goes on: ‘To leap from that mind, your mind – to something larger. To make the leap, make the contact – identify the larger thing. Nature, the animals, it’s wrong, too cluttered, too improvised, a dictionary. You need a field of action, field of being, where you’re significant, where your experience links in a wider field of thinking but where action plays its part. You see, Harley?’

I think, ‘mind into Mind?’ and say, ‘The thought-out life? Lived well, largely foretold? Perhaps an engineer’s job, but then – the world’s all set up already. There’s nothing left to do. There is the glass, the table, woman and divan. But where do I come in? Drink from the glass, make love to, even love, the woman?’ I didn’t use the rougher words that came to mind – and after all, Serena’d thrown her dice, knew it could come down light.

‘Maybe you could make a die with one face zero,’ I say, but he can’t follow me.

He says, ‘At this point, it’s attribution, that’s what counts. Yes, nothing can be other, there it is – what matters is that this whole scene appears, is attributable,’ he presses down the word, ‘to us. To me. Signed, with my name. That’s the thing that counts – not changing – naming. Though I could cut you in, percentage wise.’

While the Engineer, the – my – voice of reason, listens to Larry, running wild through fields of fame and power, I listen to a radio Larry keeps always on, as others might a coffee pot or bottle, occupying another lobe of his immense brain. There’s a guy there, saying, ‘Long-legs, the boss, he’d no truck with unions, nor with written contracts; we was black from Kentucky up into Idaho, we played the bars, picked up a stripper at the bus stop when we come in, and then we all, we five, we holed up in some hotel and had, you get me, something to drink and if they had it, something stronger, then we walked out like warriors with a train of booty – looking for a patch to call our own, maybe a Thursday to a Sunday morn, and hardly saw the sun come up, go down, the guys were coming in off shift and supping up and when we’d done, say round two o’clock there’s always someone with a place, even a forest or a parking lot where we could play on and on, and maybe they could even pirate us, and sell some tapes or make a disc or two, we never knew, – then on the bus, and all as black as black, no one else would ever play with us, the bars were blacked and goddam all our eyes the barmen said, and so they went black for months or years, it wasn’t really fair, but we got paid a lot in kind and guys would give us rides and beds and drink and stuff, even a shirt and pants, and so it was playing in the warm, we did our whole works, and even them, the ballerinas, how’d they ever strip to jazz quintet but we was blowing hard and really didn’t care, the flesh was twirling round somewhere and smoke was coming from the horns and battering at the skins and Longlegs trumpeted like the mouths of hell, and call it blues or what you like, and it was sad and goofy as it came to us, and colours black and grey and brown as coconuts or polished wood, the guys just drank it up and made their lives if not a heaven then a hell more interesting till one night a guy give us a ride and was so drunk he spun us off and maybe we got hit before or after and all of us all intertwined and blood and glass and feathers, all that stuff and claws and maybe we had hit a forest, goddam birds and foxes how she squawked the stripper, said “Swing in that golden sky you chariot, you silly slave” and we was all just busted up and uninsured and high and drunk and half asleep…’ There was a long laughter, and the musician ends, ‘And so I went out West, arranger, death with glory, not another goddam note did pass my lips,’ more laughter.

And I want to fill a huge room with sound, and Larry says, ‘I’ve my impulsive side, you know, Harley now – you’re a pretty level chap that’s how we get to where we got, I know I can rely on you, but me, you know, I got Serena who’s real class and tranquil, but I guess I’m always searching, looking for the next. You’ll find it too – stasis is dull,’ the radio laughs on.

Larry is still talking, ‘... and so the real money I banked, the fairy money I gave to everyone else. They were really happy in fairyland, and maybe when that one disappeared there’s another waiting. And you’re just the figure on my nuptial cake, young Harley, the link between greed and power,’ and he laughs.

I say, ‘I’m the oil in your skullpan, then? And Serena?’

‘She’s in distribution. They pay her in free time.’

I say, ‘Seems a bit imprecise.’

‘That’s what I say, she shouldn’t mix business with leisure!’ Again he laughs, and I ask, ‘Larry, is it really business that we’re in? You seem long past that kind of thing.’

He looks out the window. Below there are animals wandering round, waiting for the next feed, and he waves a hand, ‘Well, I can’t fix the climate, if we want it fixed – so I can try to give the guys some sense of meaning – Harley, we’re the fire ants of creation – we don’t do sorry, or “slow down” – down with the old and gobble up the new, it’s how we’re made, it’s how we got our brains’ and he taps his skullpan. ‘It’s like Serena does, when she gets a question she can’t answer, goes “gobble gobble”, turkey eats, turkey gets ate, what turkey know, turkey can’t escape.’

I agree, though I’ve never thought about it, ‘Speed stealing...’

‘Forget past slights, past wrongs,’ he says, ‘for sure you’ve had them done, maybe you’ll do them. Just not a feature.’

I think of that loud music, bars like barns, us animals all shrieking, screwing in the corners, then on the tables, kids running in and out. The only thing is music, loud as you can – better to play it than to listen to it, goddam derivative racket, all bum notes, polished with love, those plummy melodies – but if you can, up there with your instrument, shooting it out. The stuff of life.

Not one of the sad guys getting deafened – pilgrim a musician be! Play it out!

I think of the Chinese girl, of those poor Kosovars, dancing in some highway layby, and I think again, maybe they’re not so poor, and what hell is patterned with the Chinese girl, all fancy fantasy, bodies unknowing sliding into orbit.

Suddenly, Larry asks, ‘Do you ever feel remorse, Harley.’

‘I don’t think so.’

But it seems he really wants to know what it is, what it does.

I think, ‘Is this about Serena, she is her own, Serena’s girl, not Larry’s and not mine, and indeed, she’s for herself – like all the rest, which rather lets us out.’

‘If you lead people what you think’s astray,’ Larry says,  ‘and do them bad, you’re only sorry if you know something – about them, about you, the universe, and so and so. So, really remorse is about knowing more. The more you know, the more remorse, but if you’re ignorant, you can do just about anything, and so the doing’s not the problem, it’s just what you know, or maybe how you know it, so it’s not the bad things you come to recognise, it’s just the kind of knowing that you have,’ and he presses on, and I wonder what the hell he did, and he concludes, ‘And so, you do some good things and your knowledge comes that really they were bad, you feel remorse – and wish? What, you’d never done the things that you thought good? Or wish you didn’t feel remorse, because you didn’t know? Or now you think you know, and you feel bad, but maybe you put another layer down, and so you’re not so sure – it’s slippery, Harley.’

‘That’s why I keep you, Harley,’ he says, after a pause. ‘Give me knowledge, but all the same, no remorse.’  

‘All I do is tell you what’s impossible,’ I say.

‘Yes, everything I’ve done was impossible,’ he muses. ‘Everything I want to do, you tell me is impossible.’

Maybe he wants another engineer to tell him what’s impossible, I think, but if he fires me, what do I lose? A life ascetic, up will come another one, still more ascetic, but be shot of him, new doors to fairylands all new and fragrant, but I’ll then know so much, the guys who’re really poor, their brains all withered on the stalk – yes, they do useless, vicious things, and I can judge them so, but me ...’ I’m pretty smug, I realise. And that’s another thing to know.

‘I tell you quick and clean what is impossible,’ I say.

He nods, and rears up to his height, tycoon or minor god, who cares.

 

*

 

‘What can Larry have done, that he wants to feel remorse?’ I ask Serena.

‘Slavery,’ she says.

‘Any particular kind? Wage slavery, relationships, trafficking? Or just bound to wheels of time and place?’

She waves her legs in the air, ‘Can’t you see my slave bracelets, or are they chains?’

I say, ‘We’re all against it and it’s all around us – free people who pay for trips on the slave ships, slaves through the identities they’ve chosen, runaways living in the forests of their documents. But all tycoons like slaves, and when those run, they just buy others,’

‘Larry has the will to enslavement, like his friends,’ Serena says.

‘Larry has friends?’ I say, surprised.

‘It’s part of being rich. Modern rich, that is.’

‘But if slave-owning’s part of being rich – forget the friends – why should he feel remorse?’

‘I don’t think he does, it’s just his whim, that way he feels more human.’

‘But he already is … more human than the rest of us. He says that everything he’s ever done has been impossible – and look how the people love him for it.’

‘For all the rest of us,’ she says, ‘our freedom, independence, what could it be? Like finding in old age that you’re autistic, never managed to make it to the selling block.’

‘It all seems very vague, and metaphorical,’ I tell her. ‘I don’t see him owning slaves, it’s too responsible, a cluttered role, and suffering that brings no joy to anyone.’

‘Not owning, silly!’ she says. ‘Buying and selling. Things. Stuff. The slavery’s in his interests, not his accounts. But that remorse – is strange. It’s all part of the system.’

‘Something extra,’ I say, not very wise or interested. And Serena catches at the phrase, interprets it her way.

‘This physical stuff,’ I say, when we have separated our bodies, and I know it’s a dangerous moment and a dangerous thing to say, ‘It doesn’t seem to mean so much. What does it say?’

‘What did your Chinese girl, sorry, your colleague, rival, inspiration, what does she mean?’

‘Nothing original to say, said in an original way.’

‘So, that’s the physical. Better this than the police car, cattle truck, tented hell, taser and billy, tumour and blindness.’

I say, ‘I guess you’re right. But – I’m a heretic, you know – our job is all about the solving, solving ancient problems and the new ones, neatest answer wins the prize. But to me, the beauty’s in the problem.’

‘Now,’ she says, shaking herself down, ‘That is perverse. Really perverse.’

I look to see if that’s a joke. She says, ‘It’s Larry’s secret. That isn’t really one, because he knows it, and he always acts on it, impossible things are just the forest where he gets his firewood. Man with an axe, a green man bowed under fresh branches. That’s Larry.’

I wonder, is it a good thing that we are close to him, and, therefore, close to each other, and so fugitives, till the moment when splitting from each other is the best hope, one at least may make it to a shelter. Other Larrys. And yet – being owned by Larry doesn’t hurt, he is the Master, and he acts, he doesn’t know we know, and what we do is freetime, is what we do just for ourselves. He’ll never see the Kosovars, dancing by the sea. Maybe Serena’s part of this bondage business, I think. Maybe she’s not into caprice but conspiracy? Is she part of Larry’s bargain, or revolt against him?

She says, ‘Larry’s a facilitator. Likes to have us round him, and bound to him – but so’s he can get shot of us. Then there’s the favours, done for friends – supplies of labour. And of horses, dogs, and women, even other human types, and animals – it all abounds with him. Nothing direct, but so the wheels go round, and at the bottom real slaves – not just those that come in ships and trucks, but those who can’t get out, locked into factory and warehouse, field and farm ...’

‘Usually when people are as rich as Larry, others do the favours for them,’ I say,.

‘He’s too good-hearted,’ she says.

The laws are all arithmetic, I think, and we’re not at the centre of anyone’s concerns. ‘It all rolls on,’ I say, ‘bit more, bit less, the two steps forward, then two back – the rhythm of our dance. Behind one Larry, others wait, who can refuse a favour, something that makes us humans differ from our friends outside,’ and from the window I see wild beasts lurching about, trying to copulate, but short on fantasy.

She says, ‘It’s so. But Larry can’t just be our end, our goal, our puppet master,’ and I think ‘His vision, his impossible tasks, those give me life, form horizons,’ and then I think, I don’t know why, about the Chinese girl, what’s she doing in my head, where’ll I lead her or be led?

‘I find these animals,’ I say, ‘wandering about, thinking what to do, what they are, quite irritating,’

‘Like us, but they say more beautiful,’ Serena says,  though she’s not convinced, and maybe thinks of mathematics, which they say is beautiful too.

‘Without the struggle for food – that is, eating each other – they lose the urge to copulate,’ I say.

‘I hope you’ll eat Larry, not me,’ Serena says, ‘and they put bromide in the soldiers’ tea, and still they fought,’ and I conclude, ‘Maybe they fought for food, but now we don’t eat our enemies, not even scoff the tidbits, though it’s true we think of clever ways to kill, and make the meat inedible.’

We have arrived at a dead end, and we pause, a little gloomily.

She says, ‘Now, hunting, shooting, importing animals and sharp dogs – that’s one of the favours Larry gives. The others like it, he’s quite indifferent.’

‘Animals is quite another thing,’ I say, ‘we’ve got to think of humans,’ and I remember some guy who says we’ve lost immediacy, see characters only on the screen, in paint, behind the stage lights all life is just a metaphor, or something we don’t place at all, a threat maybe, or just outside our frame.

And then, the Chinese girl – for sure she’s not outside my frame, but maybe I’m beyond hers – no history, no great identity, a brain alone just like that famous soft machine ... Serena has been talking, and I hear, ‘The best thing is to leave – it’s all this talking takes the edge off your resolve, it’s all quite useless, compromise, as if you want to leave, nothing replaces that. You keep a little suitcase packed, and go! What more’s to be talked about? And if they chase you, you can always call the cops – and they won’t talk, the taser doesn’t ask for compromise – revenge is never quite as good as absence – no one can talk you out of that.’

I ask myself, quite brutally, leaving the Engineer Harley far behind, ‘Does Serena want Larry killed?’ and aloud I say, ‘It seems to me a nonsense’, and perhaps I see her assess my powers as murderer.

It’s like a game gone fierce. As if some kid’s game, shooting nothing bullets into no-one, had turned, and real ones started pinging back, and Serena says, ‘That’s not a bad idea! One could maybe engineer that, only he doesn’t game.’

‘I for myself – if they caught me, I’d not like to spend the rest of my life working on a farm,’ I reply but she’s added a certain spice, if not a chilli sauce, to our fine sport.

‘Maybe that Chinese girl could help us in some way,’ she says, which seems to me absurd: she was ever a metaphor, the respected Chinese people snug in their stereotype are down to earth (look at the things they must have eaten) and the guardians of a mystery of which we occidentals will always be in awe and ignorant, a thing called History of which we’ve neither curiosity nor patience.

‘True, she’s a universe to be unlocked,’ I tell Serena.   It brings me back to the conference, the theme – to send a biscuit tin beyond the solar system, looking for beings preferably like us – and ‘Why?’ I ask, ‘there’s lots of people here we don’t know stuff about, and plenty too who’d like to talk and we don’t listen, not to mention things that’s quite unlike we humans – lions, giraffes – no doubt with an agenda each, and we don’t send a probe to them, so what do we expect, if they’re like us, then star wars is the minimum, and if they’re not, then what the hell, it’s just for curiosity, maybe steal inventions if they’ve got them, or some grasses, go nicely in that vase, or animal in that cage – we’ve got enough, or just about, to last us through.’

‘Larry is all brash, pretentious, but he’s just the same as all his lookalikes,’ I continue. ‘To get away, you just should walk, and if you want to punish – well, there’s no law against his wish to be immortal and command. It’s what we all want, you for sure – only the Chinese girl’s prepared to learn and listen for a while, then she’ll be off and moving mountains, taking electricity from every stream—’

‘That’s done already, Harley,’ Serena interrupts, ‘and you’re wrong to think she wants to be your pupil – something quite other there, I think.’

I make a picture in my mind, and maybe it’s a dream I’ve sorted into actuality, a headline – something like ‘Praga brennt’, that smell of burning, familiar from before the first time, books and dogs and houses, all flamed up. I see a district, there’s no green, no grass, a middle east of tin and yellow dust, the poor houses set well back, and richer houses maybe with a well you pay to use – and now it must be the old European war, a man, I think he has a tumour – but he is a resistance guy, he’s trying to protect, or to seduce, a well-formed seventeen year old, and he has exported antique furniture for what – to support themselves or as a cover? Is he the good guy – here’s another agent, come to order him ‘return or be infame’, treacherous – or will he stay, halfway seducer halfway traitor.

‘Your father,’ Seerna says, ‘or was it perhaps your grandfather who’s Czech, some ambiguity, but the message is quite clear – resistance turns into betrayal. I guess I should be warned, your family history’s all there, no vision, Harley, just whatever you’ve made up to fit the facts,’ and maybe it’s all true, human, all too human, hard to throw that off, although with axioms you rub a lot of corners clean and plane away the knots and splinters too.

III

 

he guard outside my building waves his taser at the lion. The lion keeps his mouth shut so as to hide his feelings. I’m trying to avoid being a murderer, being an engineer seems less pertinent now, and there! I see the Chinese girl, waiting for me, what a surprise.

‘I’m reading in your histories, your extrasolar project sounds like fun,’ she says. ‘And if you find some humans, way out there, according to the book you read, or say you do, discoveries will be massive. First thing, they should be speaking Hebrew. And who knows, instead of sin, maybe they played it cool, maybe it’s still paradise, or yet again, by chapter two, when all the animals are ready, perhaps there was no flood and instead—’ she looks solemn ‘—disasters of overbreeding, men overwhelmed by lions or just some creepy things, requiring intervention on a cataclysmic scale. The fuel project is another puzzle, suppose they missed the meteorites, the climate swings and all of that, but had no oil, no Middle East, no bombing of Baghdad, no caliph, even.’

‘Oh no,’ I say abruptly, ‘you’ve not got that religious stuff. I really cannot answer all your speculations. All that I’m asked to do is something less than Larry’s hopes of coronation in a world denatured, just sending a tin of biscuits, as it were, up above the clouds, and wash our hands of it, we’ll all be dead before it falls back into some Russian bog and all our savings with it.’

She looks quite coy, and says, ‘O come on now, Dr Harley, the two of us tied up in our space suits, plumbing the depths of emptiness’, and she laughs, and maybe she’s been laughing all this time, and now it all seems quite hilarious, to think of packing up my brain in some expensive tin and send it in the black to look for primal hominids – when really what concerns me is some quite banal and earthy sexual scheme Serena has in mind, for some obscure and useless punishment of Larry, guilty of being what he is and we’re all glad enough to take his pay and laugh behind his back.

How banal it is, fleeing Serena, into the embrace of science. We – I and the Chinese girl – off in the simulator. Beyond the stars, beyond the solar system. I call her China, me she calls Harley. I say, ‘We shall be dead before we’re halfway there – if you can go to places without names, arriving in this pod, this tin ...’ China says, ‘It’s all for science,’ and she giggles, then, ‘It’s just a game, this stimulator – you must be brave’, and I repeat, ‘Before we get there we’ll be dead for centuries,’ if there’s a ‘there’ to go to, dead.

China says, ‘We won’t go anywhere, it will just appear that way,’ and they take us, wrapped like turkeys in our foil and special cloth that looks like shrouds, with tubes and such all sticking out, like we were in hospital, and I think, ‘This way I’ll never have to be a murderer – the price is my own suicide’, and I start to wonder, is this Larry’s scheme? Or is it maybe Serena’s, a revenge – certainly she didn’t want to let me go, a useful idiot indeed, and then they take us both, and put us in the ‘helicopter’ position, or so it seems, a special torture out of Africa, our hands bound to our feet, it simulates how we shall feel outside our system, but I know, from Eritrea to the US, they’ve all thought up some novel thing the body can’t quite stand but not quite die – and wonder how we’ll look to hominids all singing happily and eating fruit in that unsullied Eden way up there, they’ll think we’re mad to send two corpses in their last tormented state – maybe it’s right, to show them what we have to do, to escape our lovers, or as China says, for science, and I add, for states and all that stuff and reading theory and the wrong books, or turning up our nose at massacre, and China says, ‘We’ll be all right if they shoot us out real fast, and I admire you, Harley, for this super trick.’

I’m quite unimpressed, she keeps on giggling and I say, ‘I need some envelopes, some used ones, to write my calculations on,’ and we can’t see too much, just dials, some guys at consoles thinking of other things, and then I say, ‘How long will this experience last?’ and someone says – a tube deep in my ear, it pokes directly in my brain, a kind of tickle, terminal – ‘The point is, we can’t tell you, even near death experiences are figured in, and absolute despond and desolation, crying in confined space and questions you can’t answer, punishment without an end, without a trial, without a charge – it’s all so useful, that you’ve volunteered, accolades and news surrounding you, though you won’t know – the point is being isolated, with China here who values science, you as part of it perhaps,’ and I wonder – who are the hominids we’ll meet, the innocent, the pure ones? Maybe they’ll see right into us, we sinners and our sins, I don’t know if China’s ever done something to regret, or if it’s me – well, with Serena all has been quite innocent, or let’s just say instinctive, or maybe you could say it’s hedonism, so maybe it should be Serena here, sent off to meet her judges, though by that time she’s dead, it’s all quite biblical and silly, unless of course she knows that Larry has some crime he’s done – deserves a punishment, at least in humanistic terms – and then, he should be here in this machine, trussed up by guys in those white overalls, and not Serena. And it’s all banal, this talk of punishment and guilt and crime and torturing machines, and China’s pleased and I am sure, despite her name she’s never done a thing, maybe her country has or will by when we get there, wherever we’re not going, but all she’s done is follow me, my brain and mission, what a con and what an idiot she is, to ship with me eternally, a silly goose who can’t protect herself, or even kick and bite ...

‘He’s not tranquil,’ someone says, and here I am, these garage guys or gardeners or government employees of some low grade who’re bending limbs as if we’re those giraffes the magic guys make from balloons, but this is real – adventure without end, the purpose interpreted maybe long after we are just smears and slicks inside our super suits. Like turkeys.

I decide. I start to shout. They let us out. I hear them say, ‘A brainy guy but no courage, no sense of adventure.’

China is angry. I say, ‘That simulator can age us, send us to and beyond our deaths, more real than real, than looking out the window. The journey of a million miles, you remember ...’

She says, ‘Don’t call me China.’

‘No offence – they used to call me Czech because my father, grandfather – others they called Chuck, same kind of thing,’ and she repeats, ‘Just don’t call me China. What we missed would have been a real adventure.’

 

*

 

I think, I wish I didn’t think it, that China is a person without substance. And now I’m back with Serena, Larry – no capsule, time slowed infinitely down. No hominids either.

Serena’s amused by my simulator. ‘It sounds quite you,’ she says. ‘What did your companion say?’

‘That it wasn’t torture, it was self-inflicted. And that if Larry is a bad man, time will sort him out, meanwhile ...’

Serena says, ‘If we can’t do away with him, he could always give me lots of cash.’

‘But you don’t want dollars, you want something else, a plan. Besides, that cash is magic, during the night it reproduces,’ and for once she leaves the – our – divan, and I think that since I can’t read character, don’t know if she has one, good or bad, I could at least look at her decor – a print that says by Mondrian, but really from some show she’s seen, the books, I flip them – History of Color, Simmel on Money, Mona Lisa Overdrive, The Thief’s Journal – suggests a mind refined, inconclusive and confused. I put them back, a paragraph of each’s enough to make a case, and then I think, ‘Maybe they’re Larry’s, or a mix from both,’ and she returns and says, ‘But don’t you think of running off – you at least I’ve got, to hold—’

I say, ‘We’re each free to take the walk, away,’ and she just laughs, ‘A little knowledge, Harley, gives us both a headache – we both know something more than cash was on our table,’ and my other self, my Dr Engineer seems far away, it seems I’m just plain Harley now, accomplice, innocent and scared – just the worst things to be.

I say, ‘I have my research’, and in she jumps – ‘It scares you, and you’ve got the Chinese girl in tow who wants to learn and steal, and you’re afraid of where she goes – she pulls, and Larry pushes, poor Harley,’ and I think, ‘If you get in, you must be able to get out, not logical I know, many an ostrich in the killers’ nets must think like that, it all ends bad, the pampas full of stolen children, necks cast down and severed, but still, they say there’s hope, if not for you then some unknown, some brother, and don’t be selfish if your life is shot and short,’ but in my brain I’m up and running, plotting like a lion on bromide, because with her there is some link, without connections you’re anomalous, however easier it seems to make these fatal things.

Serena says, ‘There’s only three or four of us, things can be managed – not without wounds, I fear.’ And I don’t fear, I know.

 

*

 

Larry has disappeared. They say the simulator has been used. ‘That doesn’t mean a thing,’ I say, but after all who knows? What can you simulate, back to philosophy, depending on what school you went to, or what church, we’re standing on some rifts about what’s real, I never had a doubt myself, but then with Larry, he’s a trier, a real ambitious sceptic.

Serena shrieks, she says to me, ‘You did it, did it for me.’

‘Why would I?’

‘We know Larry went much further towards slave trading than I said before, he split the cash with feistier friends who did the work,’

‘You know I’m not the benefactor,’ I say, to keep her quiet, ‘not the justice man, don’t even know what that might mean, still less to do it, just killing and then getting killed, it seems a stupid game,’ but she’s all over me ...

The Chinese girl is worried that they’ll pick me up and taser me until I say I killed him, where’d I put the corpse, and why, maybe in the simulator, a virtual funeral, ‘With flowers?’ I say sarcastically, but she is scared and quite censorious – it seems that Larry is himself if not a saviour then a benefactor, better to have than not.

The cops come round, they put me in a van that smells of vomit, maybe the vomit’s mine, and by the time I’m through, the whole system of the law – to me, all smells of vomit.

At the precinct there’s a press of lions, quite used to being tasered, they throng around, eager for the tickle, and the cops oblige, a thousand volts or so will stretch your tail out, and to me the cops are friendly since they haven’t got a corpse, and I repeat, ‘Why would I?’ and ‘Maybe he simulated himself to something different,’ and they laugh, they haven’t got a clue, and all this stuff about the mathematics, which they call arithmetic, is alien ground.

The cops talk sagely of slavery, justice, jealousy, weapons. Larry, the missing object, what good was he, present or disappeared?

‘Maybe someone threw him to the lions and they ate him,’ I say.

The cops laugh. We all laugh.

‘Surely you’d see a person in a rocket blasting off?’ I say.

The head guy says, ‘There’s males all over, adult and not, that’s blasting off, a kind of sexual ploy, always it ends bad – maybe your friend, your boss, maybe he planned a trip in space.’

‘Really, space was foreign to him –  everything for him had to be filled up. He’d never go where there weren’t people like him, cutting him a deal,’ but after all, if he’s got a massive rocket somewhere concealed, he’d just shoot off to find a planet where they all play poker, organise in gangs, and yet have scientific knowledge that lets them play blackjack with packs of millions, have large-scale wars where no one dies, just dents a little ...

‘Twinkle, Larry, Twinkle,’ I think but do not say.

Perhaps Larry landed like a virus somewhere. But why’d he go?

‘Yes,’ says the cop. ‘That’s the question neither you nor I can answer,’ and he puts it down to woman trouble, and he’s likely right, how should I know?

The Chinese girl is worried, and she says, ‘Come with me to China, there you’re safe, or nearly so.’

I think ‘never’, but I say, ‘There’s all those people – and the food. And then the Wall – I don’t think that’s a good idea, quite inconclusive as it happens,’ and she says, ‘Of course, you love her – that Serena,’ and she’s wistful. ‘Well, of course,’ I say, ‘just as you say so, on the other hand ...’

It’s true that flight can be a proof of innocence, the getting out the way, not standing round as if you have some clue. Besides, there is my brain to feed, those plans I’m sceptical about. I need a place without those lions around my door, Serena’s just another article on account.

I say, ‘Well, maybe to Beijing I’ll go. Go and be damned.’

IV

 

e are in our capsule, really a good old aeroplane, high over somewhere. I’m disappearing too. Like Larry – or perhaps not like Larry. I’m going to China – with China beside me, which I mustn’t say. Lots of ways to disappear – think of equations, think of stars, the last thing that you think of is a murder, by lovers or whoever.

Larry, rather his signature, will reappear, as long as banks transact – unless he’s journeying to the stars, beyond our makeshift system, off to be – not lord of the universe, but maybe as consul in some tiny planet where they’ve never seen a despot, cast a ballot. The hominids dancing naked under those enormous trees, the animals not drugged but nuzzling up, gold crowns upon their heads.

I muse along, it seems the universal dream, though I may be the only one at this precise time in this tin pod to think these things. The girl says, ‘You know that when we get there, I’m your boss?’

I say, ‘I’m quite indifferent,’ but that doesn’t please, it’s not what being bosses means to her, she sulks. I think about Serena, how she has another aspect, vulgar and vindictive she, I say aloud, ‘It’s all relatives,’ and the girl beside me nods. You have to keep a distance, now it should be clear, I’ve no reason, no advantage, from a murder – and if he traded too in slaves, at this height, hard to tell who’s slave, who’s not, though sure as hell, nearer the ground you’d know. So – best to avoid the crime and punishment scene, the did and didn’t, primal innocence or not – the girl sighs, says quite comfortably, ‘I can’t follow you at all, Serena must have had a terrible time,’ and we float on.

I always preferred the puzzle, its beauty, to the solution. After all, each of us has partial solutions in their drawer. But there’s only one puzzle.

The Chinese girl, now. Maybe the whole scheme was to coax me to Beijing, make biscuit tins stuffed with fortune cookies, lobbed through to Venus. ‘Reply to sender, nothing hostile, please – you Venusians have a bad reputation in our books, though not, perhaps, in music. You have been warned.’ And if the girl’s some kind of spy, and aren’t we all, electric telescopes are firmly in our wired-up eye – ‘We’ll seek it out, that spot of life that’s hiding in the blue or black, a scaly worm up in some rock may hold the secret to our secret lives. We think, we joke. But be assured, no living frond, no mineral that creeps or burrows, no puff of air, up to one million degrees, will hide for long – for we have bigger plans, and bigger budgets than you guys on Venus.’

And so – forget the goings-on on various divans, the spaced-out lions, this disappearance of one crook or genius, patron of slaves. Remember Russian nobles with their orchestras of serfs, their master jewellers enslaved – our Easter eggs can now be starflung ...

And I sound a grouch, when really all I know is those few brainy things, maybe an instinctive thresh or two, need a divan, Serena too, but after all, in California or in China, things are much the same. Where one on one makes two, it’s unmistakeable, and Larry minus Larry equals none.

It’s clear that I know more about the scene than I will tell the cops – the same is true for them, they have a fantasy, and sources too, that fly beyond our system, a sketch of stories and of plots beyond the plausible, outside the observed.

But there! Enough! It’s off to China, journey for a brain that doesn’t move, that links up only things that can be linked.

Twinkle, Larry, Twinkle.

 

V

 

t seems today it’s got too hard to disappear. Serena writes to me – ‘Harley, you sneak, betrayer, fugitive, you’ll never understand how much I hated Larry. Your help alone I sought – although a touch more passion on your part would help to leave a sweeter scar behind. And now the bastard’s gone, soul flying on some rocket, up to immortality. (Although I know you’ll say it isn’t really ‘up’.) I loved you so, because I needed help, so I could cut the path I wanted. Yes, you did help, despite your fear of lions. And then you ran, you bastard too.’

Well, Larry’s still a mystery. And as for lions, they must just stay in place, be there if ever they are needed – you propose and they dispose. So, where is Larry, gone beyond the stars, his project soaring though he’ll be decades dead, whatever way he went? And still his slaves will track along the deserts and the seas. And there’s the rocket, or its little biscuit tin, penetrating, black in the black. Nothing in nothing, searching maybe, or just lost and plotted.

And there is still the mystery of Serena. All that hatred. Lions at the door. The puzzles that you solve that don’t solve anything – though even that can bring you cash and fame. And other, deeper mysteries too. Remembering the cemetery, high above the waves, for ever they repeat themselves. Rows of disordered marble tombs. And Kosovars who dance beside the sea.