The Brooke-Rose Omnibus (42 page)

–I meant, what did he say when you said that? About serenity.

–Oh. Yes. He said: that kind of serenity can soon develop into a form of anaesthetism. The complacency of it struck me dumb.

–What? … did … you say?

–The com–

–No. No. The boy.

–I called him after you, Larry.

–Larry. Of course. Yes. I see.

–What do you see, Larry?

–What have you done to my daughter, Elizabeth?

–Larry! I took her in. During your illness. I didn’t tell you the other day because – well, I thought you knew and besides we had other – Larry, I looked after her, I loved her. She has all the charm, the intelligence, the poise that I –

–All right, all right. Who cares. The young must learn and all that. But I wish, I wish, she hadn’t come to your house, Elizabeth. Stanley’s house.

–Does it, matter so very much?

–No. Nothing matters, if it comes to that, as someone or other said. Oh yes. My lawyer. But we must run some sort of show, as he also said. To keep going at all. Lawyers, yes. I must see my lawyer about getting that thing back, preventing –

–What thing, Larry?

–That tape, you dolt … What did you think I meant, good God I can’t get through to anyone. I told you, do I have to spell it out?

–Yes, please.

–Your best friend, the great Tell-Star –

–Oh, that. Forgive me, Larry, but I –

–Yes, I know, you have your own problems and I ought to listen to them. But I’ve given up my trade. I’ve given up exchanging the intense confessions of people with cleft palates for a few comforting names. You can’t get rid of things just by giving them names.

–But Larry I didn’t come here as a patient.

–What … did you come as then?

–You invited me to lunch, remember?

–Oh yes. How many millions of light years ago did I offer that cosy lunch filled with trivial talk of other people’s affairs and things like that?

–I begin to see what Brenda meant.

–You do. Good.

–Well, it doesn’t matter, Larry, if you –

–Elizabeth, can’t I get it into your head that something has happened since then, and that it does matter, to me, at any rate, and that if you love me, loved me once as you said, whatever you meant by that, it should matter to you too, and that you said you’d help me, help me to get it back.

–You mean … the … tape?

–Good girl.

–How can I, Larry. Telford and I –

–So. You planned it. Planned it together.

–No, of course not.

–Elizabeth, I talked to him half the night, incoherently, he admitted that himself. I talked as one talks to a friend, or if you like as patients talk to me. I don’t remember what I said. If I knew I wouldn’t mind so much perhaps. But I don’t know and I must. It doesn’t belong to him, or even to me, probably. I can’t let him use it –

–appropriate it.

–Yes, appropriate it, distort it, misrepresent people who have trusted me, people I work with, live with –

–love.

–Oh, love! Love has nothing to do with it. A thing for squares to spin in circles as my daughter puts it. I don’t love anyone, you should know that.

–Like Stanley.

–Yes, yes. Like Stanley, if you like. But unlike
long-sighted
Stanley who cuts my wife dead pretending not to see her, I don’t want it to show. Out of a different kind of cowardice.

–Unless on the contrary you don’t want the real thing to show. The love. That you remembered perhaps.

–Real thing! I tell you I remember nothing. What do you mean? Have you heard the tape? What did I say? Tell me. Tell me. What did I say?

–Let go of me, Larry, let go.

–I thought I’d find you both here. Good, how very right.

–Oh, Telford, you know better than to think that.

–Me, think? Never. How do you feel, Larry? You had me quite worried the way you left at dawn, and in that state. My God, you look washed up.

–We haven’t slept together if you mean that and we have no intention of doing so.

–Come, come, I never sugg–

–Telford, don’t say come-come like that.

–I didn’t mean to upset you, Larry. But I have my job to do just as you have yours.

–I don’t.

–This idea really excited me. And the tape sounds terrific, Larry, even uncut and incoherent.

–Except for the last sentence.

–I forget –

–We haven’t come to it yet, Tell-Star. Nothing makes sense until the last sentence.

–What exactly do you mean by that?

–There goes the scalpel. How did it feel exactly and what did the fat woman say. But you really want to know, don’t you, Tell-Star, you show no mere idly prying curiosity, like Stanley. You ask all the wrong questions, and so of course, get all the wrong answers. You start with nothing, go on as if you had something and in no time at all you have eternity or thereabouts. Have you got your mechanical ears with you, Tell-Star? Don’t you want to record my
posthumous
views on pettiness and moral cowardice in the elementary courtesies due to man from man, and to woman from man too, when they have exploited each other like things, courtesies which require not only words, Tell-Star, the human prerogative man most fears, but gestures and a smile perhaps, no, you smile first, Something, to pierce through the resistance you call matter which radiation needs to propagate itself but which deflects the light waves travelling through it and upsets the definition? Or have you corked your ears, your inner and your outer ears, living as we all do in a transparent bowl of anti-matter through which no waves can travel?

–Larry, calm down. Don’t make such a thing of it. I think I’d better go.

–Yes, go, Tell-Star, go. I’ll see you through my lawyer’s transparency in future. I have my rights, you know. I won’t allow –

–But of course, Larry, you do as –

–you to make any film, why, what will you use, illusions, tricks, and stand-ins, and yourself, Tell-Star, don’t forget yourself, you have a star-role in the ridiculous story of my death and amazing recovery. But you must fade yourself out, Really, before the last sentence. Because reality doesn’t lie in you after all, or in anyone. I could float off now on my freedom, out of my bondage, my responsibility to
Something
if any, after all I didn’t choose the way, I wanted only opaqueness, nothingness, I didn’t order these complexities, these secret laws I’ve never heard of and break even in obeying them. I kept my promise and my words rebound against me. But nobody will understand a thing you say, Tell-Star, or see, or hear, you’ll speak, like me, through a cleft palate, say gug-gug query what exactly do you mean by that comment nothing, nothing at all or something repeat –

–Stop.

Her hand slaps-stops the white face in the round mirror on the cupboard door that fills with rings widening quickly out. People collide, spinning on orbits and made up of other people in slices that spread out like flat discs of vaporised heavy elements in the plane of their present orbits. And as their initial material cools the atoms condense, forming small particles of dust which through constant collisions aggregate into larger and larger bodies, until perhaps they burst with accumulated identities that pass from one to another like elements, emitting particles of pain. You can never know with absolute certainty that consecutive observations of what looks like the same particle do in fact represent the same. Because since you can’t establish the precise location you can’t claim to have established the identity of the thin face on the dial in the square control panel which still bombards the room with particles of anxiety, moving from right to left, how do you feel, she says.

–Has he flounced out?

–Yes, Larry.

–And then what shall I do?

–Just rest. And eat if you can.

–Oh, I can live on the square roots of my time for ever.

–I got some cold food from the shop round the corner. You slept, you know.

–Did I? I never sleep.

–You never dream, either.

–Sometimes, nowadays, I have an omen.

–Try to eat, Larry.

–Thank you. Thanks. For everything.

–Don’t mention it.

–Oh but I must. I always mention it when anyone does me proud.

–I feel proud. You killed the bull. Oh, you’ve forgotten that, too. We used to joke about our imagined enemies, and things to conquer, exams, and your dissertation, remember? Why did you change from physics, Larry? I used to think you’d solve the universe.

–Perhaps my daughter will do that for me.

–Eat, Larry, eat. I can stay an hour or so. I have to see my lawyer this afternoon.

–Oh, that. Why bother, Elizabeth? Does he deserve even that much attention?

–Larry, everyone deserves the attention of definiteness.

–Even if they prefer the uncertainty principle?

–They only pretend to prefer it. While they have to. You used to say that. Someone would come along and find a unified theory that would do away with indeterminate interpretations, you’d say, and revert to causality. I thought perhaps you might.

–I thought so too. In psychic terms at least. But I didn’t. In the meantime we do the best we can, some of us preferring to pretend causality exists, and others, others preferring to prefer its absence. But you can never know with absolute certainty that what looks like the same particle, with the same identity –

–Yes but for practical purposes you have to, Larry, in the chemistry of people. Otherwise how can you live?

–You can’t. Not really. You pretend you do. To save the appearances.

–Larry, you can’t honestly believe that.

–I don’t know. I think I believe that every particle of ourselves, whether combined with those of others in normal electrovalence to make up this or that slice of us, or whether bombarded by those of others until this or that human element mutates into some other, every particle of ourselves returns. So that it has, in that sense, identity. But you can never quite identify it at any given moment.

–Though you pretend to recognise it.

–You recognise it, if you like, by an act of faith. Every scientist makes an act of faith at that point, as does every doctor, parent, priest, he expresses the chance as a probability over a large number of atoms, a near certainty but a probability nevertheless.

–So we all pretend to come and go as fully ourselves. And all the time millions and millions of particles of us have combined with others or escaped into various orbits to return to us ultimately.

–The law of the conservation of energy. Marry me, Elizabeth.

–Thank you, Larry. Thank you.

–Don’t mention it.

–But it wouldn’t help. Those particular electrons or whatever that made up the slice or disc or sphere of you at twenty-four won’t make them up at forty-eight. But I could, if you like … provide … evidence.

–Evidence? Of what?

–Well. Don’t embarrass me, Larry. I know you don’t love me, you said so. I have no illusions on that score. But I wouldn’t mind. I mean, Brenda told me that you refused to –

–Brenda again! What else did she tell you? Do you confide all your spots and pimples to each other at the split of an atom?

–Larry, forgive me. She did, become, quite friendly. She’d come to see Patricia –

–Ah, yes, Patricia. So you want to provide evidence of adultery with me. Why? To balance things out? You can’t hope for an eternal quadrangle from me, my dear. So common, as my daughter would say.

–Larry, please.

–And for when had you planned this convenient little episode? Now? Who will give the evidence? Have you got the Queen’s Proctor hidden there in the cupboard behind the door with a round window in it? All right then, now. You have to see your lawyer in thirty minutes, yes, a nice sense of timing, for your age I mean, come, my remote Bermuda, ride with me, come, don’t dilly-dally, off with your appearances, now I understand, Base Headquarters, all this talk of secret instructions, laws broken, meridians bent, and all the time you meant your base instincts. Right, then –

–Larry, let go, let go, get off me –

–My dear good woman, why should I sit on you? You can ride me, if you prefer it that way. No? Come, let me rouse your base instincts, ha! Hands grab at hands and wrists to pin them down in an angular attitude with parabolic gestures that create situations, contortions in the innumerable particles of her desire bombarded with astonishment, repulsion, fear that spiral at high velocity around the lightning zig-zags of her magnetic field, till in no time at all you have a human body or thereabouts made up of lips and human breath and odour, blood vessels, nerve fibres, muscle spindles, bones, flesh and such. The resistance you could call matter melts and mutates into wild energy by a law of conservation that has a perfectly good scientific explanation, so that you give rebirth which hurts to some lost slice of you, a forgotten area of particles that come whirling back to form filaments of gas in violent motion or extragalactic nebulae colliding perhaps on the outer rim, great clusters moving at thousands of miles per second while the primitive noise occurs, in the wrong square. Some argue nevertheless that parts of a divided nucleus recede from one another at great speed, the shock processes involving ejection of high energy particles that must ultimately form a human element, a star where the taste of love will increase its luminosity until it cools in quiet rage at all that tenderness that went to waste, accumulating only the degenerate matter of decay. Well, what did you expect, a Blue Giant? We love like ancient innocents with a million years of indifference and despair within us that revolve like galaxies on a narrow shaft of light where hangs the terror in her eyes as the life drains away from blood-vessels, nerve cells, muscle spindles, bones, flesh and such, once and for all in a spasm from the attitudes, the created situations and the circular gestures, with the little individual flan already dead in her meridians, out of the story of a death and amazing recovery and into the unfinished unfinishable story of Dippermouth, Gut Bucket Blues, my sweet Potato Head, Tin Roof, Really, Something and me.