She must have heard them tumbling on the bedside table, because when he turned back she was awake and looking up at him, dull and fractious with sleep, her breath sour from the wine. Her eyes took in the knife, the wire, Kearney's unaccustomed erection. Unable to understand what was happening, she reached up with one hand and tried to pull him down towards her.
'Are you going to fuck me now?' she whispered.
Kearney shook his head, sighed.
'Anna, Anna,' he said, trying to pull away.
'I knew,' she said, in a different voice. 'I always knew you'd do it in the end.'
Kearney detached himself gently. He put the knife back on the bedside table. 'Kneel up,' he whispered. 'Kneel up.'
She knelt up awkwardly. She seemed confused.
'I've still got my knickers on.'
'Shh.'
Kearney held her with his hand. She moved against him, made a small noise and began to come immediately.
'I want you to come!' she said. 'I want you to come too!'
Kearney shook his head. He held her there quietly in the night until she buried her face in the pillow and stopped trying to control herself. He fetched the bottle of wine and gave her half a glassful and they lay on the bed and watched the television. First Anna on the beach, then Anna undressing, while the camera moved slowly down one side of her body and up the other; then, as she grew bored, a CNN news segment. Kearney turned the sound up just in time to hear the words '… Kefahuchi Tract, named after its discoverer.' Flaring across the screen in colours that couldn't be natural appeared some cosmic object no one could understand. It looked like nothing much. A film of rosy gas with a pinch of brighter light at its centre.
'It's beautiful,' Anna said, in a shocked voice.
Kearney, sweating suddenly, turned the sound down.
'Sometimes I think this is all such bollocks,' he said.
'It is beautiful, though,' she objected.
'It doesn't look like that,' Kearney told her. 'It doesn't look like anything. It's just data from some X-ray telescope. Just some numbers, massaged to make an image. Look around,' he told her more quietly. 'That's all anything is. Nothing but statistics.' He tried to explain quantum theory to her, but she just looked bemused. 'Never mind,' he said. 'It's just that there isn't really anything there. Something called decoherence holds the world into place the way we see it: but people like Brian Tate are going to find maths that will go round the end of that. Any day now we'll just go round decoherence on the back of the maths, and all this-' he gestured at the TV, the shadows in the room '-will mean as much to us as it does to a photon.'
'How much is that?'
'Not much.'
'It sounds awful. It sounds undependable. It sounds as if everything will just-' she made a vague gesture '-boil around. Spray about.'
Kearney looked at her.
'It already does,' he said. He raised himself on one elbow and drank some wine. 'Down there it's just disorder,' he was forced to admit. 'Space doesn't seem to mean anything, and that means that time doesn't mean anything.' He laughed. 'In a way that's the beauty of it.'
She said in a small voice, 'Will you fuck me again?'
The next day he managed to get Brian Tate on the phone and ask him, 'Have you seen that crap on TV?'
'Sorry?'
'This X-ray object, whatever it is. I heard someone from Cambridge talking about Penrose and the idea of a singularity without an event horizon, some bollocks like that-'
Tate seemed distracted. 'I haven't heard about any object,' he said. 'Look Michael, I need to talk to you-'
The connection went down. Kearney stared angrily at his phone, thinking of Penrose's definition of the event horizon not as a limitation of human knowledge but as protection against the breakdown of physical laws which might otherwise leak out into the universe. He switched the television on. It was still tuned to CNN. Nothing.
'What's the matter?' asked Anna.
'I don't know,' he said. 'Look, would you mind if we went home?'
He drove the Pontiac into Logan International. Three hours later they were on a standby flight, climbing above the Newfoundland coast, which at that point looked like a skin of mould on the sea. Up they went through a layer of cloud, then broke into glaring sunlight. Anna seemed to have put aside the events of the night. She spent much of the journey staring down at the surface of the clouds, a faint, almost ironical smile on her face; although once she took Kearney's hand briefly and whispered:
'I like it up here.'
But Kearney's mind was on other journeys.
In his second year at Cambridge, he had worked in the mornings, cast cards in his room in the afternoon.
To represent himself, he always chose The Fool.
'We move forward,' Inge had told him before she found someone who would fuck her properly, 'by the deeply undercutting action of desire. As The Fool steps continually off his cliff and into space, so we are presences trying to fill the absence that has brought us forth.' At the time, he had had no idea what she meant by this. He supposed it was some bit of patter she had learned to make things more interesting. But he began with this image of himself in mind: so that each journey would be, in every sense, atrip.
He had to remove The Fool from the deck before the cards could be dealt. Late afternoon, as the light went out of the room, he laid it on the arm of his chair, from which it fluoresced up at him, more an event than a picture.
Through simple rules, a cast of the cards determined the journey that would be based upon it. For instance: if the card turned up was a Wand, Kearney would go north only if the trip was to take place in the second half of the year; or if the next card turned up was a Knight. Further rules, whose clauses and counter-clauses he intuited with each cast and recast of the cards, covered the choice of south, west and east; of destination; even of the clothes he would wear.
He never cast the cards once the journey had started. There was too much to occupy him. Whenever he looked up there was something new in the landscape. Gorse spilled down the side of a steep little hill with a farm on top. Factory chimneys dissolved in a blaze of sun he couldn't look into. A newspaper opened suddenly just down the carriage, sounding like the spatter of rain on a window. Between each event his reverie poured itself, as seamless as golden syrup. He wondered what the weather would be like in Leeds or Newcastle, turned to the Independent to find out, read: 'Global economy likely to remain subdued.' Suddenly, he noticed the wristwatch of the woman sitting across the aisle. It was made of plastic, with a dial transparent to its own works, so that, in the complexity of the greenish, flickering cogs, your eye lost the position of the hands!
What was he looking for? All he knew was that the clean yellow front of an Intercity train filled him with excitement.
Kearney worked in the morning. In the afternoon he cast the Tarot. At weekends he made journeys. Sometimes he saw Inge around the town. He told her about the cards; she touched his arm with a kind of rueful affection. She was always pleasant, though a little puzzled. 'It's just a bit of fun,' she would repeat. Kearney was nineteen years old. Mathematical physics was opening to him like a flower, revealing his future inside. But the future wasn't quite enough. By following the journeys as they fell out, he believed then, he would open for himself what he thought of as a 'fifth direction'. It would lead to the real Gorselands, perhaps; it would enact those dreams of childhood, when everything had been filled with promise, and predestination, and light.