He sees, around the Colonel’s head, the rays of an eclipse, a possibility, but one too wild and unlikely to last. It is a blanket and a fast embrace, a wordless instruction, a summerhouse, a daybed, and a rattan chair; perhaps, later, two flats in Battersea, a trust unnoticed by the world, two keys to open the same lock. A version of himself minus the attributes he has, the normal inclinations and sobriety, minus even his looks and build, but still himself. A friend transposed. The delicate image decays.
The Colonel nods. As usual, he thinks. The boy will soon get used to it, as every conscious figment must—the whispering in one’s ear. A man, a woman—no, a man. And every time you turn around to look, the body isn’t there.
He looks up to find Molyneaux in front of him, inches away, blocking the light. The young lad’s smell is lupine and aroused, his hands are slimed and streaked. Molyneaux smiles, a signal power arrived in his green eyes.
“I’ve changed my mind, again,” he says. “I want to get rid of this room. I cannot leave it, but I won’t let you, or anyone, take me away.”
The Colonel is about to speak, when Molyneaux stops him. He slides his wet fingers into the Colonel’s mouth. The Colonel jerks and gapes at this unspeakable affront, but what he can’t see is his own, and independently aroused, passion, which gulps disjointedly, a snake transfixed by predation. His eyes watering, he sucks and laps, his palate softening against the four fingers searching his throat. He wants the whole of the boy’s arm. The hand passes beyond the soft parts and the folds. Consumptive blood and drivel coat his chin.
He chokes and cries. The tears merge, like a sense of shame, with other bodies of water, and in the quad those gathered in its dam-burst flow—children, lovers, species, the dead—are lost to the torrent.
A creaking by the steps, as if a ship were complaining. Molyneaux’s parents just have time to shout, to say each other’s names, their voices carrying so far and then cut off, the noise of the ship breached astern.
The fountain in the quad becomes a waterspout. Whatever part of you it is that can’t be seen and bows to pressure will come back. And all the culverted personae of matter will rise to show you how mysterious the world of matter really is.
I charge the corridor and feel its wooden throat disjoint, tongue-and-groove parquet sundering; the mitered frames, detendonized panels—driftwood. Take me apart, take all my stones and bodily features away and I will still be here. I slide under the door and up the carpet, stair by stair.
The freak is at a loss. The answer is “a variable,” but that is also variable, a property that logically transforms at times into a constant, which it’s not. Because he is a freak who secretly likes poetry, he wants to say x isn’t merely Cartesian but just the sort of thing Lucretius would have liked, a point or particle tethered to change. He can’t. He’s silenced by the fluency of Molyneaux’s answers, and stunned by pain.
The changes in his body are too visible. A chemical postman sorting his blood finds sacks of hate mail for each tissue cell. The freak’s chest fills, his waist expands, his fine muscles detach. He voids himself, and in his muffled head he screams. Once at the pain, twice at the thought that this is happening.
Each spasm is an explosion along his spine. A kinesthetic squeal, white light as cutting tool. Molyneaux talks on brilliantly, and doesn’t seem to see or hear, or smell, his companion’s distress. Matron has made a sunflower head of the freak’s thigh, each puffy puncture mark a variation on a theme.
“x marks the spot,” Molyneaux says. “x is a poor man’s signature. x is a choice—select a box. x is a deletion. x multiplies—has powers. x is a half-lap joint…”
The fact is, no one takes much notice of the freak at all.
“… x was inserted to support the spire at Wells…”
“Now that is most astute,” Stallbrook concedes, opening a drawer. As Molyneaux continues, he removes some typescript from the drawer and runs his finger over it. The pages are too far away. One letter, surely, features more than periodically.
“x is a ray—a photo and a ghost. x is for hybrid vigor in a dog. x is a crossroads and a meeting point. x is anonymous. x is a parting kiss. x is against your name. x is your source, a secret, and expendable. x is a letter. x is not—”
Molyneaux hesitates. Uncurls his fists and holds his thighs.
“—the right answer?”
Stallbrook consults his documents and shakes his head. “Alas, invariably,” he says. “It is the main problem. You’re very convincing. I just can’t tell if what you say is what you mean, or if it makes a real difference to you, or not.”
The slightly fustian schoolboy inspects his hands. “I have a picture in my head of possible answers, but it is torn and wet at the edges. I think I died. I think I went into the underworld, where memories are affine spaces in a mirrored field and mackerel skies are filled with mackerel. I wanted to save someone from a disaster.”
The pressure of the water shears the room. Its prisoners noting the angle of their walls prepare for death, which does not come.
Across the plane of the ceiling, the tree of life takes root.
Molyneaux dives into my element.
The Colonel’s room dismembering itself supplies the waves with all manner of tidal junk. Books lollop past, their pages fronds, the groaning carcasses of shelves and desks and oak crossbeams go down into the trench.
The young man’s breathing apparatus is a length of garden hose. He has the idea that he will find Alec, set him to rights, avert this so-called disaster, and show him interesting specimens from the lake bed: freshwater mollusks, older marine fossils, Roman pottery and glass. He’s so happy. One of the ottomans, caught in the downdraught of the universal wreck, tugs at his curiosity. He follows it through the stone ruins of the main building. It’s larger than before, almost a habitable size.
Down, down it goes—and comes to rest in a small cloud of sediment. It finds its place not in the submerged grounds of Wargrave School but in a bustling market town, where people walk and breathe and drive their cars and go shopping. The flood is limitless, and in that flood, however far you have to go to find it, you will find the world remade an infinite number of times. Not everything has come to grief! For there are Royal Blue coaches in Sunkenbridge, with people from the former settlement of Earth mouthing behind their sealed windows.
He’s followed by some men and by a pike or two.
He thinks about his air supply. The other men—the men following, now catching up—can breathe the water very naturally, and one of them, his doctor, Mr. Julius Trentham, says that’s because he hasn’t any senses, so of course it’s fine.
But Molyneaux is still attached. He walks about the town as if it were a toy-world in a womb and he the line-fed embryo. As a small boy, he used to siphon water from the upstairs bath to gladden the garden: the hose smelled rubbery. He sucked hard to create the flow, could taste its warm, soapy approach. That sense persists and merges with a natural fear of lake water filling the pipe and drowning him.
The ottoman is barnacled with decorations like the Porters’ Lodge at King’s. It sits inside a sedimentary façade. Its gates are closed today—“and they are closed to everyone without the key, which is disguised,” Trentham whispers.