And then he’s out — cold. Locked into his private hell.
Ede googles ketamine. Causes dissociative anaesthesia, he reads. That means you can’t tell whether you’re dreaming or awake, he says. Ketamine can make you feel you’ve died and come back to life, he reads. I’m not sure Scroggins is going to come back to life, I say.
We wave our hands in front of Scroggins’s eyes. Nothing. And he smells terrible! Has he soiled himself? Yes! Yes, he has! Scroggins is incontinent!
Mulberry suggests administering MDMA — that’ll pick him up. Ede shakes his head. No. It’s probably best to call the authorities.
Scroggins is groaning. A deep, abysmal groan. A gurgling in the throat. A kind of living death rattle …
Paramedics come for Scroggins, lifting him onto a stretcher. Would anyone like to accompany him? No! The ambulance rolls off, lights flashing.
Ede and I walk off into the night, to let our heads cool off.
EDE: That girl! That girl! Did you see her?
I shake my head.
EDE (swigging from his bottle): How could you miss her, Peters? She was a dead-ringer for that Cressida — Prince Harry’s girl. You know, hippyish. Plaits. Scarf round her hips. Anyway, she’s my future wife … She’s Duchess Ede … (Another swig.) Fuck Scroggins and his emergency. I hope he fucking dies. (A third swig.) Have you ever felt you were made for something, Peters? That you had some greater purpose? That’s what I feel now: I’m made for something. It’s all becoming clear. It’s to do with that Clare College girl. It’s providence. It’s fate. (Fourth swig.) All the light of the world seemed to rest on her face — did you notice that, Peters?
Ede throws the bottle over a hedge and loses his balance. Ede, flat on his back on the pavement.
He has a faith he never knew he possessed, Ede says. He has means he never knew he had … He feels taller than he was.
EDE (sitting up): Am I really taller, Peters?
He’s high, he says, as I pull him to his feet. Higher than he’s ever been. And it’s not drugs. It’s life! Life! He’s never going to sleep.
He has a sense of the future, he says. Of the real future, which is nothing like our present. Tomorrow will not be like today, he says. Tomorrow is going to be quite different from today …
He’s been thrown from the track, Ede says. This is a new direction. He’s at the surf’s edge. The waves’ edge. He won’t be afraid to leave himself behind. To relearn everything. He’s going to fight against everything he does not love …
Our College. The staircase to my rooms. Ede gives me some Zs — they’ll help you zzz, he says. Zolpidem. Zopiclone. Old friends. I swallow a handful, and stagger upstairs.
Class in five hours, I remind myself, setting the alarm clock …
2
Silence in the classroom.
Mulberry’s asleep behind sunglasses. Ede’s sunk so low, his head is level with the tabletop. Alexander Kirwin looks vacantly out the window. Benedict Kirwin looks vacantly out the window. Titmuss looks vacantly out the window. Guthrie looks vacantly at Wittgenstein. Chakrabarti just looks vacant. Scroggins, usually the most vacant of alclass="underline" missing.
The effort of thinking. Wittgenstein stands silently in the corner of the room. He grasps his head. He shakes his head. Sweat streams from his face.
Divine help: that’s what he needs, he says. We cannot think by ourselves, no more than we can create ourselves.
Wittgenstein asks a general question, and waits for a reply.
Silence.
He asks his question again, slightly rephrasing it.
More silence.
He asks it for a third time.
Still more silence.
Okulu ventures a timorous reply. Wittgenstein waves it aside.
Doyle says something. Not good enough! Wittgenstein says.
Silence, stretching out. Silence, the equivalent in time to Death Valley. To the Russian steppe. To the surface of the moon … Oh God, someone say something!
Wittgenstein’s silence, his eyes closed, like a man already dead. How old he seems! As though he’d read everything and forgotten everything. As though he’d lived not one but several lives.
His silence. He wants to carry us down, as into the depths of the deepest lake. Like the concrete boots that drag down a body. Down he takes us — into the green depths. He wants to drown us in his depths. But we do not want to be drowned … We are too young to be drowned …
A walk on the Backs, Wittgenstein walking ahead.
We discuss our most recent hangovers. Mulberry lay in bed for three days. Doyle hallucinated giant spiders dropping from the ceiling. Titmuss heard his name being called by the trees and the flowers. Benedict Kirwin caught the clap. Ede says he’s still drunk from last weekend. Guthrie’s never had a hangover, he says, since he’s never stopped drinking. (He’s drinking now, sipping from his hip flask.)
Wittgenstein stops. Turns to us.
Five years of philosophy: that’s all any of us is good for, he says.
It was all his brother was good for, he says. And now it is five years since his brother’s death. Since his brother’s suicide. Five years in which he, following his brother’s example, has tried to think …
Sometimes he wishes he had never begun his studies in logic. His studies in philosophy! Sometimes, he longs for it all to have been a dream. For his logical studies to have been a kind of fever …
To wake up, with his mother’s hand on his brow. To wake up, with his brother beside him, in the attic room where they used to sleep — his brother who had likewise never begun his mathematical studies, his logical studies; his brother, who had never set out for Oxford, as Wittgenstein had never set out for Cambridge … To wake up, and chatter with his brother about the trees they would climb that day, or the pits they would dig, or the rivers they would ford, or the theatrical sketches they would put on, or the songs they would sing together at the piano, or the dens they would build in the woods, or the birds that would sing above them. To wake up, and speak of anything but their studies, anything but mathematics, anything but logic.
The Maypole, after class.
DOYLE: Have you heard? They’ve had to remove Scroggins’s bladder.
EDE: What! Why?
DOYLE: Ketamine damage. After the party.
A shocked pause.
Ede googles bladder.
EDE (reading): The organ that collects urine excreted by the kidneys before disposal by urination. Can you live without a bladder, do you think?
Ede googles living without a bladder.
EDE: They have to find some other way for you to piss. A colostomy bag, or something.
Miserable, we all agree. A bladder is really something you’d miss.
A don in our class; one of the older faculty members. Slippers and blazer, and a pipe poking out of his pocket — do people still smoke pipes? Mug of tea in his hand. How cozy he looks!
Wittgenstein greets him courteously. The don says he’d prefer not to sit on one of the classroom chairs. Doyle goes to get an armchair from the common room, and we move our chairs to make space for it when he returns. The don sits and pulls out a notebook.