Exchange Place (18 page)

A Benefit of Doubt

I felt weak at the knees. I cleared a mound of debris from the old leather armchair where Harland would often sit to contemplate a work in progress; and, as I sat down and rolled a cigarette, I remembered how he’d offer me tobacco and papers, and I would roll one, pass him back the makings, and he would roll one too, the paper smeared with pigments from his hands; and when he lit up, the paper crackled and I thought of smoke being drawn into his lungs in a swirl of multicoloured particles. He’d look at the painting as I looked at it too; we would exhale together, and I wondered if we saw the same thing. I looked at the passage in his journal again. How could he have written these words of mine? for I had written them long after he had disappeared; he could not have read my book. Indeed, no-one but myself had read it. But then, looking at it again in Harland’s chair, it seemed there was something not quite me about the style; it seemed like another voice, and then I remembered. I saw myself sitting at my desk with a 1950s book on neuroscience, transcribing bits of it into a notebook. The mystery was solved – obviously, he had read the book before I did, and he too had thought it worthwhile copying, for whatever purpose of his own. We had both indulged in a piece of appropriation. And yet a suspicion lingered that Harland had been watching me, for whatever purpose of his own.

I remembered the time I had gone to the toilet on the next landing down and had returned to see Harland standing by my jacket where it hung from a hook on the wall, going through the pockets. He had passed it off well – just admiring the material, old man, nice bit of tweed, where did you get it? And he drew my attention to flecks of heathery purple and sky blue and moss green, things I’d never really seen before, and I put the matter to one side. Until the next time, and the next, when he had let slip bits of information about my past or present circumstances, details of my life he could not have known; yet he always had a plausible story, or I would be loth to pursue the matter further, and I would once more put my suspicions to one side, giving him the benefit of the doubt. Only after he disappeared did I revisit these occasions, piecing together a narrative in hindsight, in which Harland was not all that he seemed, or all that I had taken him for.

I finished the cigarette and ground it into a drift of photocopied images. I went over and stood before the blemished dressing-table mirror. I looked like a ghost of myself. I opened a drawer at random. There was a box in the drawer. A box similar to the Japanese trick-box I had solved that morning, its surface covered by a labyrinth of marquetry, but a good deal bigger, some five inches by four by four. I looked at it closely but again I could see no joins. I worked it over in my hands for a good few minutes, but I knew it would take me forever to open it. I knew Harland had kept a hammer and chisel, and I found them on a shelf under a pile of paint-clotted rags. I took hammer and chisel to the box and smashed it open. Inside were half a dozen Polaroid photographs, and again my heart gave a lurch. A year or two before I met Harland I had bought a Land camera – it was still in my attic – and for some months I had experimented with a series of self-portraits taken in a mirror, which I would then distress with an array of implements – toothpicks, keys, old toothbrushes, swatches of needlecord, dragging and scumbling the still wet emulsion of the print to produce an altered image of myself, more psychologically accurate as I thought. I had signed and dated each on the back. These images were indubitably mine. I had shown them to no one: after meeting Harland, my work had seemed naive, mechanical and derivative compared to his painting, and I never mentioned them. But this discovery put a new complexion on how things stood between us.

As I pondered the matter, the drift of papers at my feet stirred as if in a breeze. I shivered. I recalled that Harland had taken the attic room when he heard it had been used for seances for some three years after the First World War by the Goligher Circle, a group of spiritualists centred around one Kathleen Goligher, a medium who claimed to be in contact with those who had passed over to the Other Side, the dead that is, who would communicate through her by a series of paranormal effects. Harland had first come across the case in a book called
The Psychic Structures at the Goligher Circle
, published in 1921 by William Jackson Crawford, then a lecturer in Engineering at Queen’s University, Belfast, who had conducted a long series of elaborate tests on the Circle and was left in do doubt that the paranormal effects were genuine, that the world of the afterlife did indeed exist, and that those who dwelt there could indeed communicate to us by psychic rods extruded from the orifices of the medium’s body. The rods tapped out messages in a primitive Morse, displaying a range of acoustic effects whose magnitude varied in intensity from barely audible ticks to sledgehammer blows. At times they sounded like gunshots. The seance room would be lit by a red lantern, said Harland, and here he quoted from Crawford’s book: Why normal white light should prove destructive to physical phenomena is not fully understood, but an analogy with wireless helps to make it admissible. Light is the fastest vibration of the ether. Broadcasting practice demonstrates that the fast vibrations tend to nullify the slower vibrations of the radio waves as they are picked up by the wireless receiver. When the days are long and the sunlight intense, wireless reception drops down: this explains why broadcasts of cricket matches sometimes carry an accompanying charge of static, or fade from the air. With the oncoming of night reception improves again. It is probable that psychic vibrations are in the same position. The slowest light vibration is red, and its destructive effect far less. Sir William Crookes, testing the action of various light sources, found moonlight the least injurious to the phenomena. Says Crawford, said Harland. Of course it’s a load of bunkum, old man, a matter of cheap conjuring tricks, said Harland, any amateur magician could do the same. And he took a coin from his pocket and made it disappear before my eyes. It’s not the quickness of the hand that deceives the eye, it’s your own brain that deceives yourself. We don’t see what’s there, we make up stories about what we think we see. And he would touch on the notorious fallibility of eyewitness accounts, which when taken together suggest that each onlooker has seen a different event.

I looked into the mirror remembering Cocteau’s film
Orphée
, which I had first seen with John Harland, remembering how in that film, mirrors are the portals to the Underworld, and I thought of how I might glide through the mirror in the attic to a world where I might meet Harland once again, for all that he has been dead to me for many years. But when I looked at my watch I realised my time was short. It was nearly four o’clock and I, John Kilfeather, had another appointment to keep.

Conduit

By six o’clock of the evening after his experience in Rue du Sentier, John Kilpatrick had read all of
X
+
Y
=
K
, pausing here and there to take notes. The more he had read, the more had he seen uncanny resemblances between the Kilpatrick in the book and the Kilpatrick that was him. However, there were many more passages that did not tally with his own experience, and he recalled Blanqui’s proposition that the universe contains infinite other, parallel worlds, and thus a myriad of other, endlessly doubled versions of ourselves, unbeknownst to each other and to ourselves. Perhaps
X
+
Y
=
K
had drawn on some of those worlds, some of which corresponded to Kilpatrick’s own. He also remembered that W.H. Auden had said that every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow, and that Auden had then gone on to comment that we would be judged, not by the kind of mirror found on us, but by the use we have made of it. But what if another man’s mirror were to cross ours, thought Kilpatrick, what would happen then? Would we become a third person? And what if other men, each with his mirror, crossed our paths? We would indeed then be many. These thoughts had crossed his mind the night before, when he had tried on the trousers of the suit he had found in Rue du Sentier. They too were a perfect fit. On further examination he found that, according to the tailor’s label sewn into the lining of an inside pocket, the suit had been delivered to a Major R.E. Livingstone on the ninth of October 1966, Kilpatrick’s eighteenth birthday, which made the suit forty-four years old. But it looked hardly worn; it might have been made yesterday.

Kilpatrick was wearing the suit now, in preparation for the evening to come. He had thought of meeting Bourne with some trepidation, but the garb lent him an air of quiet authority. For all that he did not yet know what part he would play in this unfolding drama, he felt like an actor who waits in the wings composing himself to deliver the words composed by another, nervous but confident that once he treads the boards the part will take him over. He imagined he might have rehearsed it in a mirror, drawing on affective memory, speaking to his reflection as he would to an audience, and he saw himself watching himself as if from a vantage point in the auditorium, the autumnal shades of the tweed he wore flickering in the spotlight as he suited the action to the word and the word to the action, everything happening as if déjà vu. The bedside telephone rang. A Monsieur Gordon awaited him in reception. Kilpatrick took a last look at himself in the dressing-table mirror, adjusted his tie, and went down to meet the man he was to meet.

Bonsoir, mon ami,
said Gordon.
Bonsoir, mon ami,
said Kilpatrick. Under his Crombie overcoat Gordon was dressed in a grey Donegal tweed three-piece suit, and Kilpatrick remarked on it. Yes, thank you, nice bit of cloth you’re wearing yourself. 1960s? Savile Row cut, I’d say, or maybe Conduit Street? Do as good a job in Conduit Street, half the price. Kilpatrick nodded. Gordon took a lapel between his thumb and finger. Nice hand, he said, pity about the little flaw there on the breast pocket. Kilpatrick had seen no flaw. Of course, they’ve done a great job on it, invisible menders, you wouldn’t know it was there if you weren’t looking for it. And of course, as I remarked before, we in the Profession are trained to look for these things. For all the world that looks like a mended bullet-hole, but of course you wouldn’t know until the forensics had a good look at the fibres. Well, as it turns out, said Kilpatrick, its previous owner was a Major Livingstone, so you never know. H’m … Livingstone, you say? said Gordon, there was a major of that name, one of our men, if I’m not mistaken, back in the sixties, wasn’t a major at all of course, but played the part superbly. Until the Other Side rumbled him, that is. The Other Side? said Kilpatrick. Yes, said Kilpatrick, we’re the Profession, and they’re the Other Side. Kind of dialogue, if you like, one eye always watching the other. I take it you are one of us? Of course you are, though you might not even know it. Took some of us a while to get there, too. But you get there in the end. And then of course there’s the Invisibles. The Invisibles? said Kilpatrick. Well, it’s only a theory, more of a legend, said Gordon, but it’s rumoured that whatever we and the Other Side do, there’s another power at work, one which we cannot fathom, so that for all we know there is another narrative beyond the one we occupy. Perhaps the Invisibles, if they exist, insinuate themselves into the networks of surveillance created by us and the Other Side. We’re all in the business of gathering information, you see, or disinformation. For the latter too is useful, since everything, fabricated or not, tells us something about the world we move in. Every contact leaves a trace. So we operate on the Exchange Principle. Are you with me? said Gordon. Kilpatrick nodded hesitantly. He remembered H.G. Wells’ Invisible Man in a London fog, a greasy glimmer of a human shape, and again he saw himself as the Invisible Man trying on a player’s mask and dark glasses in a theatrical costumier’s in Drury Lane, peering at a grotesque image in a cheval mirror; or he was an onlooker to the Invisible Man’s death on the pavement, the body slowly revealing itself as if infiltrated by a poison – first the little white nerves, a hazy grey sketch of a limb, then the glassy bones and intricate arteries, then the flesh and skin, first a faint fogginess and then growing rapidly dense and opaque. Finally he imagined himself scrutinizing the lost notebook which contained the invisibility formula, some of its pages washed out, the rest covered in a mixture of Russian, Greek, and mathematical symbols, full of unintelligible secrets.

We’re in the business of knowing, said Gordon, for all that it’s problematic to measure what we know against what we don’t know. The Invisibles, if they exist, might well know things about us that we don’t even know ourselves. But in any event it didn’t take us long to know that you were one of us. That dream of yours,
Les structures sonores
, lovely title, that was enough in itself to convince us. The detail was uncanny, and we in the Profession depend on detail, for the devil is the detail, or what is it Flaubert says?
Le bon Dieu est dans le détail
. Two sides of the same coin. Nothing is unimportant. So we look at everything. Clouds, river deltas, root systems, coastlines, music, fluid turbulence, the fluctuations of the stock market, the movement of the crowd on a station concourse, raindrops trickling down a windowpane, all follow a pattern. Those kaleidoscopic shifts of which you spoke so eloquently. The assignation that is to us unexpected, the invitation coming seemingly from nowhere, has been dreamed of and initiated long in advance. Speaking of which, might I enquire about your encounter in Rue du Sentier? Kilpatrick couldn’t remember if he had mentioned Rue du Sentier to Gordon. But he gave him the benefit of the doubt. He needed someone with whom to share his strange experience. So he told him the story. Yes, said Gordon, most interesting. The book especially,
X
+
Y
=
K
, you must take it to Bourne. He may be blind, but he can scan it in his own way, and his conclusions in these matters are always productive. A minute later Gordon and Kilpatrick left Hôtel Chopin, Kilpatrick carrying the book in his briefcase.