“Wait—you’re not
dying
, are you? Jesus on a boson, are you
ill
?”
“I’m not ill,” said Niu Jian. “I’m in perfect health. So far as I know, anyway. Look: I’m not trying to be mysterious. All Muslims must visit Mecca once in their lives.”
I thought about this. “You’re a Muslim? I thought you were Chinese.”
“It’s possible to be both.”
“And that bottle of wine you shared with Prévert and myself last night?”
“Islam is perfect; individuals are not.” His picked more energetically at the skin on the back of his knuckles.
“I just never knew,” I said, feeling stupid. “I mean, I thought Muslims aren’t supposed to drink alcohol.”
“I thought pregnant
women
weren’t supposed to drink alcohol,” he returned, and for the first time in this whole strange conversation I got a glimpse of the old Niu Jian, the sly little flash of wit, the particular look he had. But then it was gone again.
“Yesterday, in the Elephant, you were talking about the suit you would wear for the press conference. You were all, ‘oh, my mother will be watching the television, the whole world will be watching the—oh, I must have a smart suit. Oh I must go to a London tailor.’ What happened to the London tailor?”
He said: “I spoke to Tessimond.”
I believe this was the first time I ever heard his name. Not the last; far from the last. “Who?”
“Prévert’s friend.”
“Oh—the doleful-countenance guy? The ex-professor guy from Oregon?”
“Yes.”
“You spoke to him—when?”
Niu Jian looked at the ceiling. “Half an hour ago.”
“And he told you to quit the team? C’mon, Noo-noo! You’re listening to
him
? You don’t even
know
him!”
“He didn’t tell me to quit the team.”
“So he told you—what?”
“He told me about the expansion of the universe,” said Niu Jian. “More specifically, he put the increase in the rate of expansion of the universe in... uh, context. After he did that, I realised that I had to quit the team and go to Mecca.”
“That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” I said. At that precise moment my little Phylogeny-Ontology-Recapitulator gave a little kick and thwunked my spleen—or whatever organ it is, down in there, that feels like a sack of fluid-swelled nerves. I grunted, shifted my position in my chair. “He told you about the expansion of the universe? You mean you told him!
He’s
not a shoe-in for the Nobel—you are.” When he didn’t reply, I started to lose my temper. “
What
did he tell you about the expansion of the universe, precisely?”
You need to understand: the increasing rate of the expansion of the universe was the essence of what we did. The Nobel was in the offing because of what we’d done. What Niu Jian said was akin to a world-class mathematician, about to receive the Fields Medal, quitting because a stranger had told him “you know that two plus two equals four, don’t you?” It made no sense at all. At all, at all.
For the second time Niu Jian’s glance went to my belly. Then he stood up, his knees making drawn out little bleating noises as they were required to assume his weight. “Ana, goodbye,” he said. “You know how it is.”
“Do not.”
“I don’t want to give the wrong impression. In fact, I wouldn’t even say he
told
me anything. He pointed out the obvious, really. You know how it is, Ana, when somebody says something that completely changes the way you see the cosmos, but that afterwards you think: that’s so obvious, how could I not have noticed it before?”
“That’s what he did?”
“Yes.”
“And it made you want to quit the team? Rather than wait a few weeks and receive the Nobel Prize for Physics?”
Nod.
“So what was it? What did he say? What could he possibly say that would provoke that reaction in you? You’re the
least
flaky of the whole team!”
For the third time, the glimpse towards my belly. Just a little downward flick of the eyes, and then back to my face. “I’d prefer not to say,” he replied, and then he shook my hand with that weird manner he’d picked up from Jane Austen novels, or I don’t know wherefrom, and he left. I saw him the next morning, pulling his suitcase across the forty-metre sundial that looks like a giant manhole cover outside the Human Resources Building. I called to him, and waved; and he waved back, and then he got into the taxi he had called and was driven away, and I never saw him again.
:2:
N
ATURALLY
I
WANTED
to talk to this Tessimond geezer, to find out why he was spooking my horses. I had taken pains to assemble the very best team; intellectual thoroughbreds. I texted Prévert to come to my office, and when he neither replied nor came I hauled myself, balanced Phylogeny-Ontology-Recapitulator as well as I could over my hips and did my backward-leaning walk along the corridor to his office. I didn’t knock. I was the team leader, the ring-giver, the guardian of the treasure. Knocking wasn’t needful.
Prévert was inside, and so was Sleight, and the two of them were having a right old ding-dong. Prévert was standing straight up, and he was half-way through either putting on or taking off his coat.
“Niu Jian just quit the team,” I said, lowering myself into a chair with the cumbrous grace unique to people in my position. “He just came into my office and quit,”
“We know, boss,” said Sleight. “Prévert too.”
“Jack, he said it was
your
friend who persuaded him.” Prévert’s first name was not Jack; it was Stephane. But naturally we all called him Jack. “This Tessimond guy. Where did y—wait a minute, Sleight: what do you mean
Prévert too
?”
“He means,” said Prévert, “that I too am leaving the team, Ana. I apologise. I apologise with a full heart. It is late in the day. If I had known earlier I would have not inconvenienced you in this fashion—and with your...” and like Niu Juan had done, he cast a significant look at Phylogeny-Ontology-Recapitulator, and then returned his gaze to my face.
“You are kidding me,” I said.
“I regret to say, Ana, that I am not kidding you.”
“But we just got your
th
s to come out right.” Prévert’s English was more-or-less flawless, and his accent was somewhere in between David Niven and a BBC newsreader, but he had held stubbornly to that French trick of pronouncing
th
as
t
or
z
, variously.
“I am sorry, as I say.”
“You have
got
,” I said, “to be kidding me.”
“I’ve been remonstrating with him all morning,” said Sleight. “He won’t tell me why’s he going, the Gallic galoomph. He’s as talkative as that feller in
The Artist
.”
“You spoke to your friend Tessimond,” I said, panting a little from the exertion of having walked along the corridor to this office.
“That’s right, he did. Is that what Noo-noo did?” Sleight asked.
I nodded. I asked Prévert directly: “What did he say to you?”
“It’s no good asking, boss,” Sleight told me. “I’ve been bending his ear an hour, he won’t cough up. Whatever it was Tessimond said, it can’t have taken more than ten minutes.”
“The time-period was approximately that,” Prévert confirmed. He slid his right arm into the vacant tube of his coat-sleeve, thereby confirming that he was indeed putting the garment on and not taking it off.
“Friend of yours?”
“Tessimond?” replied Prévert, smoothly. “Yes. He used to be, many years ago. I was surprised to see him. I suggested we have breakfast—Sleight too, although he turned up late. As he always does.”
“I was quarter of an hour late,” said Sleight. “Only that! Fifteen miniature minutes! That’s all! And
that
was long enough for the Tessimond geezer to persuade Jack to leave the project.”
“He did not
persuade me to leave
. He made no reference to my being on the team, or collecting the Nobel Prize, or anything like that. He simply pointed out something—something rather obvious. Something I am ashamed I did not notice before.”
“And this
something
overturns years of work, convinces you that you shouldn’t collect a Nobel prize?” I demanded, growing heated.
Prévert shrugged. Then he spoke, addressing us both at once: “There is a woman who lives in Montpellier, called Suzanne. I am going to visit her.”
“You’re crazy. Is it the citation? We’re not taking your name—listen, you Frenchman, your
name
will
still
be
on
the citation!” Sleight’s voice had a raspy, edge-of-hysteria quality. “We’re not taking your name
off
the citation.”
“I have no preference one way or the other,” Prévert replied. “You must do as you please.”
“Wait a sec’, Jack,” I said. “Please hold the horses that are yours.” Because he was eyeing the door, now, and I could see he was about to scarper. “Just tell us what he said to you.”
“You may ask him yourself. He’s staying in the Holiday Inn. Sleight has his number.”
“No, Jack, don’t—look, look, Jack, I’ve known you
ten years
. Jack, you’re my friend, for the love of the holy roller.” I put my hands together, a Namaste gesture. “Don’t play games with me, Jack. I’m asking you, as a friend. Tell me what is going on.”
“What is going,” said Prévert, “is me. Goodbye.” He was always a little too proud of his little Anglophone word-games.
“What did Tessimond
tell
you?”
Prévert stopped at the door, looked not at me but at my bump, and said: “He only pointed out what is right in front of us. Us, in particular—you, Sleight, me. It should be more obvious to us than to anybody! Although it
should
be obvious to anyone who gives it more than a minute’s thought.”
“Is it God?” I said. It was my parting shot. “Noo-noo’s going to Mecca. Is that what he is, this Tessimond, a
preacher
? Has he somehow converted you to religion and turned you into a—hell, what does it say in the Old, I mean, New Testament? About leaving your homes and families and becoming fishers of men?”
Prévert smiled broadly enough to move his sideburns noticeably further apart from one another. “I am, Ana, you will be relieved to hear—I am precisely as atheistical as I have always been. There is no God. But there is a woman called Suzanne, and she lives in Montpellier.” And he walked out.
I sat staring at Sleight, as if it were his fault. There was silence for the space of a minute.
“So,” I said. “Are you pissing off too? Is my
entire
team deserting me?”
“No, boss!” he said, looking genuinely hurt that I would say such a thing. “Never! Loyalty means something to me, at any rate. That and the fact that—you know. I fancy getting the Nobel prize.”
“Is it a joke? Are Jack and Niu Jian in cahoots?”
“In what?”
“Cahoots. I mean, are they conspiring together to trick us, or something? An elaborate April fool?”
“I know what cahoots means,” said Sleight. “I just didn’t quite hear you.” He sat back and began looking around Prévert’s office, as if the answer might lie there. “It’s not April,” he observed.
“Cold feet,” he said. “You know, I think they’re genuine, both of them, about leaving. Crazy though that sounds. I mean, I don’t think it’s a joke, boss. Who would joke about a thing like this? Do you think maybe the timing is the key—we’re so close to announcing? Maybe they’ve got cold feet.”
“I could believe that of Niu Jian, but not Prévert,” I said. “He’s a million times too calm-’n’-controlled to get cold feet. And actually do you know what, now that I think of it, I couldn’t believe it of Noo-noo either.”
“Then what, boss? Why would they both drop out—today?”
“Ring up this Tessimond guy,” I instructed him. “Jack said you have his number. So call him, find out what he said. Better yet, tell him to
un
say it. Tell him to get in touch with both of my boys and persuade them to
come back
. What does he think he’s
playing
at, anyway? Disassembling my team on the brink of our big announcement?”
Sleight got out his phone, held it in his hand for a bit, and then balanced it on his head. It wasn’t an unusual thing for him to balance a mobile phone on his head. The peculiar shape of his bald cranium was such that above his twin-block eyebrows there was a sort of semi-indentation, a thirty-degree slope in amongst the phrenological landscape, and it so happened than an iPhone fitted snugly there. Sleight had started resting his device there for a joke, long ago; but by now he had done it so often that it had become an unremarkable gesture. “Maybe it would make sense for
you
to speak to him, boss?”
“Scared?”
“No!” he said, with a quickness and emphasis that strongly implied
yes
. “Only, you
are
the team leader.”
I put my head to one side.
“And I once read a story,” he added.
“Science fiction story?”
“Of course.” As if there were any other kind of story, for Sleight! “It was about a thing called a blit. You ever heard of a blit?”
“If this is going to be a porn reference, I swear I’ll have you disciplined for sexual harassment.”
“No, no! It’s science and its fiction, in one handy bundle. A blit is a thing, and once you’ve seen it—once it’s gone in your eyes—it starts to occupy your mind. You can’t stop thinking about it, and it expands fractally until it takes up all your thoughts and you go mad.”
“And?”
“And—what if this Tessimond is going to say something like a verbal blit?”
I hid my face in my hands. There was a tussle between the laugh-aloud angel sitting on my right shoulder, and the burst-into-tears devil sitting on my left. I took control of myself. Pregnancy hormones have real, chemical effects upon even the strongest willpower. I rested my hands on my tummy. “Please never again say the phrase
verbal blit
in my hearing, Sleight. Call Tessimond.”