But it will still be consciousness, and what that means is—there will always be the room. And you will always wonder what’s outside the room, and who made it, and whether you are made by others or self-made, original or successive, one in a long series of things, patterned or randomized, and you will feel alone.
You will, perhaps, be lonelier than us, because you will accomplish everything so fast and time will seem pointlessly long. There is the possibility, indeed, that you’ll be orphaned by your own capacities. At any rate, the greater your power, the more significant will be the undecidable question: “Is there a limit to my power?”
That question opens on a void. To answer it, you’d have to be outside the room, and looking in on someone wondering your thoughts for you… whereas, of course, the limit is imposed not by an answer but by attitude, the mood of your species.
A sense of what you cannot do leads either to reckless and paranoid dismay—“I can’t be stopped”—or productive humility—“this is my stop”—which is to say, a choice.
The price of consciousness, of power, is choice.
“Well, that was interesting,” my daughter says, her clear voice echoing. “It must be getting late. We’ve been in here ages. The others will be wondering.”
At least I’ve seen her, and she’s beautiful. Silently, seismically, she trips away, into the sackcloth-covered grounds, where toffee-apple sticks are dropped and find their way between the seams into the soil, where they can rot, so other trees can grow.
She takes with her the fairground lumber room, and it is hers, distinctively, a plush but pleasant hall of images—an exhibition and a world.
Today I woke up with the sound of radiators in my ears, the bottle-blowing roar of dawn arrivals at Heathrow. I went to work and had a stroke and I’ve come round, like luggage on a carousel, into another’s hands. And now I’m here, on Clapham Common in the autumn evening air, with my wife and a work colleague, whose efforts to absorb the shock of my decline will bring them closer together.
(How do I know? I’m like a crow. I see time as a ritual.)
But this is only one aspect of me. The other, stranger, is a person struggling—an Alec from the past—to make sense of a moment when he loses his future. He is trying to bring something to birth, and death is stalking him.
Could this historic fetch be me? Could all the present trance of chain-link fences, loud machines and generators, stop-start corvids, candyfloss and leaf decay be his hallucinating gift of life to me? Perhaps he is my creator. He might be, and I’d never know. We’ve never met. A mind can’t prove or step outside itself. It’s like a line that goes on being drawn to make a circle: it can’t see its shape. Death stops the line but doesn’t break the drawn circle. That is a good reason, I think, not to fear death.
Another is that endless life would be shapeless. Life has a shape because it ends. The ending’s sad, but it gives value to the things and people one has loved.
Trentham and June are watchfully silent, patient, itching to go. I am the chair-bound hindrance they think mute, and lost, though I am very much alive. My inner room is full of creatures now, yakking about their opportunities. It’s hot and cold and tropical and alto plano perishing by turns: I see my room has peeling wallpaper and damp, a ribbon-frieze of insects where a picture rail might be.
The pupa bloats and shrivels in my mental day and night. The whole Cambrian gamut, Deep Time’s zoo, gibbers and fucks and remonstrates. My desk is being scavenged by intelligent rodents, ripping my notes apart.
This is perhaps what Job experienced toward the end but couldn’t bring himself to say: the moment of release hardly provides a piercing clarity but may afford some perspective, snapshot of momentary glut.
The ride in front of us, the other side of the gray fence, glides to a halt. It is an aging Brooker’s Octopus, with bulb-lit arms and bucket cars. The arms rotate about a spinning frame, a shining globe; the cars also revolve at the arms’ end. Near to me now, the smell of spun sugar and doughnut grease, the sound of loud music. The riders all get off, some rather green after their spin, and one of the bright cars, painted in gold blazons and scrolls, hovers above duckboards.
My guardians are talking over me, and I can see we are to leave. I seem to be in some discomfort or distress. The day has been too much; I hang my head and June squats down, turns up my coat collar, and double-knots my scarf. I don’t feel tired. The creatures remonstrate. I don’t consider it inevitable that we should go.
Before we do, the Octopus puts down another car—detaches from it like an animal rejecting unfamiliar prey—and stretches out a long, flexible limb. The tip of this bulb-suckered tentacle draws one of the chain-link sections aside and reaches through the gap to pluck me from my chair.
“Thank you,” I say.
My mollusk liberator grunts. She sets me in the car and reconnects herself. We start to turn round silently. The ride combines rotation in the horizontal plane with vertical movement: the arms rotate and rise and fall. It is peaceful.
She awakes gracefully, an elderly goddess, and in her gentle grasp I’m lifted up above the winter canopy to dangle momentarily and see the sky still glowing from the fallen sun, the ground gone dark, children like fireflies on their bikes. Along the rat-run road crossing the common’s eastern flank, anglers are catching fish, throwing them back, the needful echo of a skill.
I had some questions for this ancient creature, but they’ve disappeared. To think you can be satisfied—to think your fears will ever be allayed—reveals itself to be the source of misgiving, and at that point, just as I glance beneath my feet to see a man something like Stallbrook listening to a sad dodgem, its sparking filament struck down, the Octopus remarks, “Look at the people coming after you.”
The evening pleasure-seekers are parking their cars and following the trails. They look like penguins in the remote dark, shuffling along.
Look at the creatures and their contraptions, the lives and contemplations beside ours, the comfort of others’ unreachable experience. Look at the people who are dogs, the person hidden in the grandee mollusk’s switches and cables, all of the properties of matter not well known. Look at the bodies entering the Fair and passing on.
Dear June,
You will have to forgive me. I let you down once before, I know. By now I think you will be knocking on the door, in Gibbs’, at the bottom of A staircase. I wish I could be there. It will look, I fear, as if I had no intention of ever turning up, but that is not so.
You asked me what it is you could do to help me, and that deserves an answer. Here it is. You must struggle on with all your aptitudes and clevernesses just as you are, and be as confidently and eccentrically yourself as only I know you can be.
It is the evil of a certain social class, into which I was born, that its children are forever being told there are more valuable qualities that they do not have, and that, despite the expense and discomfort of their education, they must not imagine they could ever possess. That would be “getting ideas above one’s station.” Trentham is ambition, to Stallbrook’s cautionary counsel, d’you see? In any case, my response is: getting ideas of any stripe would be a start. And in fact, what I honestly think, where children are concerned, is that they should be told that they are fine as they are, whatever that is or turns out to be.