“What is the key’s disguise?” Molyneaux asks, his hand about to knock.
“The key is part of a message, carried unconsciously, like someone incubating a disease. It’s so well hidden we have not been able to find it—although we’ve tried for many years—because the search is self-inverse: we see only another search, looking for us. It is a fact about the world, and it is also personal.”
“Is it a word, this key?”
Trentham declines to speculate. He simply says, “Take a deep breath,” and Molyneaux obeys. He holds it, trusting to his doctor’s instructions.
“You were the disaster,” one of the other men puts in. “You are the key. You were the disaster. You are the key…” (He is a circular machine, fishy and shy, not proud of his reduced function but sadly stuck with it.)
The hose sinks to the cobbled ground and never reaches it. Touched by a messenger of light, it feels the faint voltage and starts. An eel chicanes away. Molyneaux’s lungs collapse. His breath expends itself against the wood.
Now that he comes to look at them, for the first time, the gatehouse doors are skewed, bent out of shape at depth to form a new style—pseudo-Perpendicular Gothic. Out of the corner of his fading eye he sees the chapel tilt, its lines making a knight’s move to the left. The door leans over—buckles—with the weight of many atmospheres until the lock gives silently. A moment, then: the boy feeling not pain exactly but a more perfunctory loss. Some trophy slipping off a wall.
Molyneaux shrugs his skin aside and enters at the speed of thought. He passes over the threshold into a garden, where I’ve been waiting.
Dearest Alec,
When you write so matter-of-factly about the changes wrought in you by this awful regimen, I can barely stand it myself. I wish I could see you and let you know how much you mean to me, and have always meant. There, I’ve said it. But I have the feeling you are shy of really meeting, because you are physically brought low and do not want to be seen.
What do I care what you look like? I haven’t clapped eyes on you in years. We do not see people as they are, in any case. We see only the outside. I see much more of you in these letters, between the lines of your remarkable self-possession.
And the dream, this time, is so very clear, because it is about what you have suppressed in order to remain outwardly calm. More and more I think that dreams are literaclass="underline" they show us what the mind is and our feelings are, not simply what they resemble. The emotion has to go somewhere, and it does. It’s a river that has been forced underground. At some point it must emerge through the cracks and gaps in life, and it threatens then to sweep everything away.
I wish I knew what to do. I feel as if I am shut tight inside the same room as you, and almost as if you are keeping me there or waiting for me to come up with the right suggestion for escape.
The original you exists, dear friend. It always has. You have been made to disguise your feelings, to put on some fairground show of limited display, behind which the inner life goes on as usual, though unsuspected. That life is there, I am sure, and it needs only a little society, tea with someone who knows you, for you to know it, too.
It alarms me when you talk about robots not knowing they are people. Surely you know what a wholly real person you are? (I read Pinocchio when I was very young, and naturally it terrified me. I wanted to know: What becomes of the puppet who is left behind, slack and empty, fleshless, when Pinnochio becomes a boy? It’s too horrible!)
I do wonder if the end of machines—the “coming doom” in reality—may not be some cataclysm of emotion, such as you describe. A returning wave of distress and exultation! When we are capable of everything, we may not be able to decide what to do with our lives, d’you not think? It will be a sort of paralysis of competence. I feel it already when I want to cycle to the village shop but the car glares at me, and Bill says unhelpfully that I must do as I please, and do I even need to go out at all? Only a feeling will help me choose. The more rational people are—poor Bill—the more one wants to scream at them.
I feel it, certainly, and more than ever on your account, because I want to be able to do something to help, and because I have such an uncannily near intuition of what you mean when you talk about pain and, as I understand it, the shared oddity of life. One is separated from others by such a thin veil—a shadow here, a word or an accident there. That veil is so strong! The magic of the big screen, I have always thought, isn’t the film or the story, but the screen itself. Barely noticed, always in disguise, but there.
What I want to say is that this is precious. “Everything is leafing and flowering, the hebe, the foxgloves, the elder, the poppies and roses. The birds are raising their second brood, and the dragonflies are laying their eggs in the ponds and the canals. The whole amazing process is underway and all of everything, the whole thing, is holy.” Those, as near as I can get them, were the words of a woman I heard speaking at one of Bill’s Quaker meetings not long ago. I don’t, as you know, believe. I’m not built to do that, I think. But the “all” of creation made sense on that occasion in a way it hasn’t before. It wasn’t a claim for power and miracles. It was a claim for almost nothing, as in “this is all that there is, and there will be no more.”
I will be waiting at the bottom of A staircase, in Gibbs’, next Sunday, at noon.
…biological phenomena are usually very complicated… It is thought, however, that the imaginary biological systems which have been treated, and the principles which have been discussed, should be of some interest in interpreting real biological forms.
The Successions
Molyneaux passes through the gates into the four-parterre of King’s front court, the chapel on his right, the dining hall clattering a summons to his left, and Gibbs’, that fallen-sideways torso of a building, straight ahead. I wait where the parterre’s triangles meet, where once there stood a statue of the college’s founder.
He cannot stop. He’s pure current. Molyneaux fades. He always fades, as species do, into the next in line. He sees in me another of his inaccessible futures, the thing his death foreclosed, and his extended hand begins to leak away, like smoke, like milk poured in a stream. He smiles and speaks. His words ripple across the flooded tank, the world’s amnion, confidences only we—the two of us—can hear. At the perimeter, on the flagstones, Trentham and his machine ally watch us confer.
They do not hear Molyneaux’s voice become my own: “Make others free, especially the souls who did not want your love, whom you would like to hurt.” That much appears to come from him, though it is flat-sounding and close and unheimlich—a diver’s voice in his own ear.
His body spins into a white vortex. A cyclone made of albumen.
A plughole opens in the ground and down he goes.
They must disperse. Set them to wander and succeed. You will be hurt instead. You will look on at your own life and find it jealous and constrained. But after that, after an unfair while, you will pass through the mirror of dismay into the bottom of the lake. So much will then astonish you. Life will arise, its accidental bitterness, its strength, swift as a shoal, rare as the kernel in the peach.