Ten Tales Tall and True (11 page)

Bye-bye, Mrs Chigwell. The receptionist will give you the bill, and it might be wise to arrange an appointment in – perhaps six months from now.

Whatever the future of the human race it is not likely to dispense with dentists.

I discovered an odd thing about my left foot when about to pull on a sock this morning. In the groove between the second and third toe, reckoning from the big toe, is a small grey pellet of chewing-gum. I do not chew gum, or know or remember meeting anyone who does. I sometimes patter about this room in my dressing-gown and bare feet, but I never go out of it, and nobody comes here nowadays except the one who cares for me, who is Zoë I believe. And hope. Zoë would never play such a sly wee disturbing trick as putting a sticky sweet between the toes of a sleeping man. Her tricks were all bonny and lavish. I once came home to find that a
friend had given her back money we had lent him, money we had stopped expecting to get back, though we needed it for food and rent. Zoë had spent half of it on food all right – we had food enough to last a fortnight. She had spent the rest on flowers. The bedroom floor was covered with vases, jugs, bowls, pans, basins, kettles so full of irises, lilacs and carnations that the bed seemed afloat in a small Loch Lomond of blue, purple and crimson petals. The scent nearly knocked me out. I had to be angry. I saw the loving goodness in that gesture, but had I encouraged lavishness we would have ended up homeless. She knew it, too. Once when I chose to be lavish she grew thoughtful, worried, then angry. She wanted me to be careful and mean so that she could be lavish, which does not explain how this chewing-gum arrived between my toes.

I do not believe in miracles. I believe the human mind can solve, rationally, any problem it recognizes and closely attends to. I decided not to finish dressing before I solved this one, though I usually earn my pocket-money and the right to stay here by working on the problem of time travel. I dropped the left sock on the floor (Zoë would pick it up) and from a sitting posture on the edge of the bed moved to a prone one on top of the quilt, which I must remember to call
a doovay
. If I do not learn to use the new words people keep inventing I will one day find I am talking a dead
language. I decided to tackle the problem of the chewing-gum by a strategy combining Algebra, Euclidean Geometry and Baconian Induction; but feeling slightly cold in my semmit and single sock I first crept under the doovay and wrapped it round me because a snug body allows a clear mind.

GIVEN: M – Me who sometimes patter barefoot round this room. P
–
Pellet of gum stuck to the foot of M. UG – Unknown Gumchewer who is the source and prime mover of P.R – Room that M never leaves and UG never enters. W
–
World containing M, P, UG, R and other items and events
.

REQUIRED: To find the likeliest event or events which could move P from the mouth of UG to the foot of M while preserving these conditions :-

1. M and UG remain ignorant of each other
.

2. M is ignorant of P before finding P between his toes
.

3. UG is ignorant of P's movement after it leaves him, but not while it leaves him. (Chewed gum only leaves a mouth by being swallowed or spat or removed by fingers and flicked into air or removed by fingers and attached to other item: all of which are conscious acts though soon forgotten.)

CONSTRUCTION!
– Yes, I was now ready and able to set out the problem in geometrical space-time. I needed no pencil, paper, ruler or
compasses. The decay of my organs and senses stops me doing or showing much to other people but strengthens my ability to see things inside. When completely dead to the world I expect to see it all perfectly. Without even closing my eyes I now visualize this:

The circles represent the world, the squares my room, the curved arrow the movement of the pellet into the room. Could I picture a single, simple event able to fire P for Pellet from the world outside onto the dark green mottled linoleum of this floor, from which the pressure and warmth of my foot later detached it? I pictured one easily.

Outside my window is an ash tree which looks insanely active, even when standing still. Three tall trunks diverge upward from the same root, and a few boughs or long branches fork from these in elegant curves, but most of them grow straight for a yard or more then, as if turning a corner, bend abruptly up or down or sideways, then undulate, zigzag, spiral, turn steep U-bends or suddenly explode outward into a lot of smaller
branches, themselves as knotted and twisted as the tentacles of an arthritic squid. On the day I discovered the chewing-gum all these trunks, boughs, branches with their twigs and leaves were swaying, writhing, lashing about and reminding me they were rooted in a space of grass too smooth to be called a field, too rough to be called a lawn. I seemed to remember an asphalt path between the tree and window, but nearer the window than the tree. I easily imagined a stout sturdy man wearing boiler-suit, Wellington boots and cloth cap who strides along that path chewing a piece of gum which gets so flavourless that he fixes it to the ball of his thumb near the tip, bends his strong middle finger until the top edge of the nail touches the crease in the joint of his thumb then, using the thumb as a lock he builds up muscular pressure in the finger until, seeing an open window just ahead he mischievously aims his hand, unlocks his thumb and (without pausing in his stride) flicks slings catapults the pellet through onto the floor of the room, remaining as ignorant of me as I of him, at that moment. But the window is never open, so I must now seek a more complex though equally elegant solution to this problem.

Is? Now seek? This problem?
I seem to be conducting my investigation in the present tense, though I certainly began it in the past. Time travel is unending. And I am sorry that the continually shut nature of the window has made that stout man
improbable. For a moment I thought him a friend. I used to ask the one who cares for me (not Zoë, the other one) to open this window on sunny days, but he or she always said, “Sorry Dad no can do. It's against the rules. Why do you think we paid for air-conditioning?” I don't know why we paid for air-conditioning. I hate it. I learned to hate it in the 1980s when I was famous. I must have been, because people kept asking me how it felt to be famous. I always said, “Fine thank you, the perquisites are useful.” The only perquisite I can now recall is flying from airport to airport all over North America, and sleeping in hotels, and appearing on platforms in conference centres. The airports, hotels and conference centres were very similar buildings with the same kind of furniture and windows which could not be opened because of the air conditioning. The air on the aeroplanes was fresher, though I could not open windows in those either. The only openable windows I saw in America belonged to cars speeding from one building to another, and would have poisoned me with exhaust fumes had I opened them. So I am used to breathing stale air, but it has damaged my memory. I do not know why people thought me famous, and asked me all over America, and why I went. It must have been a lie. When I was small, and passionately wanted to tell my mother something, and suddenly found I could not remember what it was, she always said, “It must have been a lie.”

Wait a minute! I remember something said by a man who was introducing me to a big audience in Toronto or San Francisco or Quebec or Chicago or Montreal or Pittsburgh or Vancouver:
the most humane, far-sighted and lucid thinker the 20th century has known
, he called me. Yes yes. I travelled all over North America because I enjoyed the introductory speeches. This casts no light on the problem of the chewing-gum. I now know that UG could not flick or spit P for Pellet into this room. I am sure UG did not swallow it. Even if such a pellet could keep its colour, adhesiveness and integrity through a digestive tract, bowel gut and sphincter, its position after that would make its entry into my room improbable, whether UG defecated into a public sewage system or crapped behind a hedge. The following construction shows the likeliest chain of events. X represents a commonplace item in the world outside my room and later within it, having been brought from there to here by … but the item itself will indicate who brought it, so
visualize!

In this construction UG gets rid of P by casually sticking it onto X, which is carried into this room by Zoë, or by one of the other people who look after me, or by a visitor. But nobody has visited me for years so the fame did not last.

The problem had now been carried as near to a solution as this method allowed. I love the deductive method. No wonder its union of Greek geometry and Islamic algebra has seduced nearly every Continental thinker from Descartes to Levi-Strauss. However, to identify XI needed the inductive method, the practical British approach devised by the two Bacons and William of Occam. I was making a list of everything in the room I could have trodden on when my attention was distracted by the queer behaviour of a chair I had known for years. It stands between my bed and the window, but nearer the window than my bed. I must describe how it usually appears before telling how it acted on the day I found the pellet.