Isla just looks, keeps looking at him.
‘You think this is a chance in a million. This: what kills you. What lets you live. But go back. How you got there. Every tiny chance builds on another tiny chance before it, and before that, to the beginning of the universe. Why are you there then? Why do your parents meet, and why do their parents meet, and how does that one sperm in each one meet that egg? If you look at it like that, look, it is impossible, no? Impossible. My speaking, like this, to you, how did we get here? Start back then. It is like a maze. Take any wrong turning of an infinite number and look: we are not here.’
He rocks, now, back and forwards a little on his haunches. His right hand turns and turns in his beard. Isla sits on the chair. She catches sight of herself with her hands folded over each other in her lap, primly, like a figure in a medieval painting.
‘The only way that what we have here – something as improbable as you, and me, sitting in this room together – can take place is if everything that could have happened, somewhere else, already has. You follow me? So this is what I am working with. How do you solve a maze?’
Isla feels the length of the pause. He is looking at her.
‘You follow the left-hand wall?’
Banacharski wheezes with laughter.
‘Backwards! You start at the end. Then every fork, it is not a problem – it is not a thing that can go two ways. It is just a node that is leading you back home. I mean this -’ he waves his hands again – ‘metaphorically.’
He stands up, now, and takes a step or two – agitating his hands.
‘I mean that chance is an illusion,’ he says. ‘We think one thing happens and not another. But really everything happens. No time passes and nothing is lost and nobody dies. They are living in an infinity of universes, at every moment, for all time…’
His eyes look at her, as if from far away. Isla feels creepily, sorrowfully, a sense of how broken his mind is. She knows, then, that she can’t stay. She shouldn’t have come.
‘Just here -’ He fishes, again, at his imaginary wall in the air. His lips are moving into a sad smile, and his eyes are wet. ‘So near. Imagine if you could pass through these walls. Imagine something that would make everything exist at once. Imagine if at every little point you weren’t seeing universes splitting off, but universes coming together. You will see the maze entire – it will be not a maze but a pattern, you see? Like on wallpaper. A decoration, not a prison.’
Isla’s cheeks feel stiff. She smiles at him, arranging her face somewhere between quizzical and accepting.
‘Everything that is lost is present,’ he says. ‘See? If you can just reach through, with your mind, through the wall, into the place where something never happens, or doesn’t happen yet… Everything that has gone is here. Anything can happen because everything will happen. Everything true, everything existing, everything here, now, always…’
He looks at her almost imploringly. ‘Nobody dies. Nobody goes away. Nothing is ever lost.’
The following day, Isla tells him that she has to leave. Banacharski looks momentarily stricken. Then he shrugs.
It is a bright morning, chillier than the previous one.
‘Walk with me,’ he says. They set off up the hill behind the house. At first Banacharski says nothing; then, to her surprise, he links arms with her. The slight tang of him on the air makes her not revolted, but a little sad.
‘I have enemies, Isla,’ he says. ‘You know, when you first came here, you wanted to know why I left the Sorbonne? That was one of the reasons I had to go. I had the real fear that they would kill me. No joke. They would kill me before my work was finished.’
‘But, Nicolas – why would anyone have wanted to kill you? Your work was abstract. You were a mathematician, an academic. You’re just being -’ she dared it; after a week, she dared it – ‘paranoid.’
‘No!’ he snaps. ‘That is how they try to discredit me. How they try to make me lower my guard. Paranoid! Tchoh! Even then, I knew my work would have – implications. I let something slip in a lecture, and one of their agents – Oh, believe me, Isla Holderness. They have agents everywhere. Everything is connected to everything else, and in this spiderweb there are good spiders and there are bad spiders.’
He has lost his thread.
‘You said something in a lecture.’
‘Yes, yes. Somebody wrote to me. Frederick Nieman, he called himself. Some kind of joke, I think: Niemand. “Fred Nobody.” That was how I was to know him. He said he was interested in my researches into causality. I was not working on causality, then. Not openly. I was still a geometer. But at the time I had started to think about these things: about geometries that were not strictly mathematicaclass="underline" geometries of desire and intention. Nieman had happened on my work by chance, he said. He understood some of the implications. He foresaw a great future for me, he said. And he would pay.’
Banacharski huffs, a little, as they reach the top of the hill. She feels him leaning more heavily on her arm.
‘They wanted what I was doing, for them and them alone, but they did not understand what I was doing. They thought I could make them a weapon: something that would change outcomes. Make magic bullets. If you sell weapons, you know, everything looks like a weapon.
‘I knew, of course – he did not even need to say it – that if I did not do what they wanted they would kill me. I was afraid. I told him that I would share my work with them. This was a company that had done great wrong. It worked, during the war, with the Nazi government. Many, many people were killed with their weapons. But I was scared.’ He looks ashamed, but at the same time a little defiant. ‘I told them I could build them a probability bomb. For that, I told them, they needed to pay, and I would need isolation.
‘So they paid me, helped me disappear. I disappeared – this was the big joke – after I resigned in protest at the discovery that their money was funding my chair at the Institute. They liked that. Double bluff.’
Something in Banacharski’s face changes, like when a shift in the angle of the light turns a transparent surface opaque. ‘I became my own ghost,’ he says.
‘The statement you gave, though,’ says Isla, ‘about the systematic corruption of science by the military?’
‘Yes,’ says Banacharski. ‘They let me attack them because they thought it would help. I was telling the truth. Triple bluff. There is no bomb. There never was. I am engineering reality – not assembling some toy out of nuts and bolts.’
They walk on a bit. Isla watches a small brown bird prick and preen in the grass, the beak and head moving sharply.
‘But Nieman,’ he says, as if more to himself than Isla, ‘I think Nieman is coming back.’
‘Back? He’s been here?’ Isla asks.
‘No,’ says Banacharski. ‘We haven’t met. Only letters. He writes to me on yellow paper. Always yellow paper. Like the paper I use. I am afraid about meeting him. But I think he is coming for me anyway.’
‘What did you do with their money?’ Banacharski looks at her sharply. She worries, for an instant, she went too far. She sees something of cunning in his expression – a decision to say something almost taken, then a decision not to.
‘You must concentrate, Isla. I stalled them. My work is nearly finished. But they may come for me. They have been losing patience. You know, you need to take care for yourself…’
He is now looking down at his wrecked flip-flops.
‘There is something I would like you to have of mine, Isla. A gift. You have been someone who has shown me kindness.’