The Infinities (21 page)
Where were we? At the lunch table, among these people. All I am doing is passing the time here, flicking these polished playing cards into that upturned silk hat.
Adam looks round the table in a kind of wonderment, seeming now to be sunk in something and looking up, and all sways and shimmers. He feels as if he were being keel-hauled, in the air one minute, gasping for breath, and plunged in a green airlessness the next. How flat and featureless now everything seems up there, seen from down here, even the figures, the figures especially, his mother and his sister, his wife, the preposterous Benny
Grace, too. He recalls Roddy Wagstaff passing under the shadow of the tree outside the railway station and seeming to fade for a second into the starkness of that gloom. How to conceive of a reality sufficiently detailed, sufficiently incoherent, to accommodate all the things that are in the world? He lives in that reality yet cannot fully conceive of it. He stands aghast before the abundance of things, all of them separate, all of them unique. A single blade of grass is made of an unimaginable massing of tiny and still tinier particles—and how many blades of grass are there in this impossible world? This is the trick his father managed for himself, the trick he pulled off, making all the bits seem to cohere in a grand amalgam wrought by the mumbo-jumbo of mere numbers. Or so the son thinks.
He surfaces from this reverie with a jolt. The table has become animated, and there is a confusion of talk. Helen is telling Roddy Wagstaff about something—that play she is to be in, he supposes, she speaks of little else these days—her gold head thrust forward on its lovely column of neck. Her throat, Adam notices, is delicately flushed, with a rosy porcelain glow like that on the inner surface of a seashell. Roddy has pushed his chair back the better to face her, and sits sideways to the table with one bony knee crossed on the other and one arm folded and an index finger pressed to his chin at the side. He regards her unblinking and now and then nods, though his look is sceptical, with the shadow of a smirk. Adam feels for his wife the same rush of compassion that a moment ago he felt for his mother; why is Helen giving so much of her attention to this fellow, who surely despises her, as he despises, or so Adam believes, all of them here at the table? Petra too is still watching the pair of them, back and forth, back and forth, like a spectator engrossed
in a tennis match; at intervals she darts forward to try to say something but is rebuffed by their refusal to notice her and subsides again, mute and rueful. Ivy Blount and Duffy the cowman sit side by side in an atmosphere all of their own, Ivy leaning forward over her plate and plying her knife and fork with concentrated intensity, as if they were a pair of knitting needles, while Duffy, his food ignored, glares unseeing at a salt cellar. They seem to be having an argument, and speak without looking at each other, in an undertone, in rapid bursts between brief intervals of fraught silence. But they are not arguing, not at all. They are, or my name is not Hermes, locked in negotiations towards the plighting of a mutual troth.
Suddenly Benny Grace’s voice is heard above all others. “Oh, no, he won’t die,” he says, loud and emphatic, “no, no,” and Rex the dog, still lying on his side, quickly lifts his large head from the floor and looks at him.
Adam’s mother, on Adam’s right, makes a low, choked sound that might almost be, Adam thinks, laughter. The table has fallen silent—this must be what is called a panic fright. Benny smiles at no one in particular and takes a drink of wine, his little black eyes sparkling merrily over the rim of his glass. His avowal has made all at the table uneasy. Nor is it clear to whom his assurance was addressed. Ivy Blount has lifted her head and is gazing at the little man, her lips parted and the jabbings of her busy knife and fork suspended. Duffy, frowning in the new-made silence, bends his attention to his plate, on which the single slice of chicken, which was all he got besides the scrawny drumstick, has begun to curl along the edges, while the cabbage has gone cold and acquired an unpleasant, whitish sheen. Is this Duffy noticing these niceties of detail, or I? Or is there a difference?
There is no doubt whom it is that Benny Grace was speaking of, whose demise he was denying, or at least the imminence of it. The very certitude of the denial, abrupt and seemingly uncalled for, is what has so unsettled the rest of the table. My kinsman Thanatos, son of Night, in his black robes, with sword unsheathed, has stepped into their midst out of the shadows where he has been biding all along. It is his sudden coming that wakened Rex the dog, who rises cautiously now and stands at point, nosing the tensened air. These are the moments that unsettle him most, when their moods change abruptly and seemingly for no reason. They were all talking, he knew that even in his sleep, and now they are quiet and sit very still, as if something had frightened them anew, that mysterious thing that always frightens them, all except the fat stranger, who seems concerned for nothing. Meanwhile outdoors, beyond the glass wall, the trees on the far side of the sunlit lawn stand like a line of people with their backs turned, gazing off indifferently at something else.
Not die, eh? So that is his little game, that is what he has been brought here to accomplish. Since when has he become the lord of life and death, Mr. Benny so-called Grace?
Yet why am I vexed? What is it to me whether one of them dies or lives? They will all go, in the fullness, in the emptiness, of time. My sole task is to take over from the undertaker and escort them to the next life, whatever it be, different for each of them. Death they consider always caducous; the nonagenarian, bald and toothless as a babe, ignores the silt in his arteries, the amyloids in his brain, and imagines himself in no more than his late prime and good for at least another ninety rollicking years. We should let them have a taste of immortality, see how they like it.
Soon enough they would come to us mewling and puking in their pain, beseeching us to finish them off. My father did once consider giving them the gift—ha ha—of eternal life. This was many years ago, oh, many years, in the time of Electryon king of Mycenae. Here is what happened. The old king’s nephew Amphitryon—yes, the very same—and grandson of my brother Perseus the Gorgon-slayer, became enamoured of his cousin Alcmene, Electryon’s daughter—yes, yes, I know, the bloodlines getting all tangled up, as usual. Amphitryon had fled to Thebes, having managed accidentally to kill his father-in-law in a bit of bungling on the battlefield—at least, he claimed he had not meant to run the old boy through—and Alcmene, a spirited girl, followed him there and married him, after vicissitudes too tedious to waste time picking over here. Alcmene was an exquisite creature, a golden girl, and needless to say my Dad took a shine to her, and employed what we know is one of his favourite wiles to get her into bed, to wit, he came to her at twilight in the very form and aspect of her husband. They passed a divine night together, pseudo-Amphitryon and his darling girl, and with the dawn my Dad withdrew—I shall plod on, steadfastly ignoring the inevitable double entendres—when who should appear but Amphitryon himself, home unexpectedly from the wars. See how I am warming to my tale. The lady Alcmene was baffled, of course, to find her husband apparently popping up again in her chamber a minute after he had left and behaving as if their night of passion had not happened; nevertheless she gamely submitted to a further strenuous session on her already disordered bed—General Amphitryon had been away a frustratingly long time in Thessaly, hacking at his old adversaries there, and was no sooner in the door than he set to asserting his conjugal rights. The result
of this double bout of fructifying romps was, in due course, a pair of twins, Iphicles, who was Amphitryon’s son and therefore not much heard of again, and Heracles, whom my Dad was pleased to call his own. A breather.
Heracles, this strapping lad, grew into a mighty man, the greatest of the great heroes of old, blah blah blah. Now, nothing that my father does is ever simple or straightforward, but the machinations by which he arranged for Heracles, who was brave but not the brightest, to carry out the plan to make mortals immortal were devious far above even his usual standards. Having first of all driven the poor fellow temporarily demented he next arranged for him to be instructed by the oracle at Delphi to put himself in fealty to Eurystheus king of Tiryns, who in turn was inspired to impose on the hero, for no apparent reason or discernible purpose, a series of tremendous and well-nigh impossible tasks. You will know of these famous Twelve Labours of Heracles, the killing of the many-headed Hydra, the capture of the Erymanthian Boar, the pinching of the girdle of Hippolyte queen of the Amazons, and all the rest; of the dozen of these tasks, however, eleven were no more than blinds behind which to pass off the twelfth, the supposed abduction of Cerberus, which feat was effected with the help of yours truly and my sister Athene, that headache, and which itself was yet another blind, for the intended elimination of Pluto himself, no less. This was my father’s real intention, the true heart of his scheme, that Sis and I should escort Heracles to the gates of the underworld, where the barking of the guard dog would bring Pluto running to know who was the new arrival, whereon Heracles would bend his bow and loose an arrow into the dark god’s heart
and strike him dead. The death of death!—imagine! It was not to be, however. All of Olympus rose up in rebellion, or threatened to. Here was the time for solidarity, we said, the time to show old Zeus the limits of his powers. He had been throwing his weight about for long enough, cuckolding gods and men alike and swallowing his relatives whole. If he were free to destroy death he would be free to destroy us all. We would not stand for it, it was as simple as that. And thereby survived Pluto, the killer of men.
Why did Zeus think to put death to death? I have not enquired of him and never will; there are certain questions one does not pose to the father of the gods. However, this does not mean I may not speculate on the matter. Is it that he could not bear to think of his beloved girls—broidered with bulls and swans, powder’d with golden rain, as the silver poet puts it—writhing in agony on their deathbeds, who had writhed in his arms for joy? If so, why not just kill off all the males and let their better halves live forever? No, it makes him out too kind, too caring. He wished them all, girls and boys alike, adults in their prime, oldsters and crones, all to know what we know, the torment of eternal life. Why must he have a reason? Call it cruelty, call it caprice, call it the revenge of heaven’s lord on the creatures he had made. Or maybe he thought to make a new race of demigods, there is a thing to think of—not only living forever but, my goodness, forever procreating, too, until the world is packed tight with them and they are forced to storm heaven for a new place to populate. Brr.
Anyway, there you have it, his dastardly plan was thwarted and, thanks to us, his extended family, men may go on dying in the good old way.
Rex the dog is growing drowsy again: his heavy head droops. The darkness that Benny Grace’s words brought forth now gradually withdraws, and the others at the table pick up again uncertainly, like gleaners after their midday rest setting off again between the furrows. And I hover in the air above them, my chlamys spread as wide as it will go, in the attitude of Piero’s Madonna della Misericordia, protecting my little band of mortal sinners. I am not all sneers and scathings, you see, I have my gentler side.
Petra seizes her chance and breaks the silence by asking of the table, in a loud voice, why it is that tumours are always compared to citrus fruits. “As big as a lemon, they say,” she says, “an orange, a grapefruit—why?” She looks about the table, fierce in her demand, but no one has an answer to offer her.
No two things
the same, the equals sign a scandal; there you have the crux of it, the cross to which I was nailed from the start. Difference: the very term is redundant, a nonce-word coined to comfort and deceive. Oh, I told myself, I tell myself, that to say equal to is not to say identical with, but does it signify, does it placate? My equations spanned a multitude of universes yet they posited a single world of unity and ultimate order. Perhaps there is such a world, but if there is we do not live in it, and cannot know how things would be there. Even the self-identity of the object is no more than a matter of insisting it is so. Where then may one set down a foot and say, “Here is solid ground?” As a child I was terrified at seeing the hands of a ticking clock turned back, thinking time itself would be reversed and all collapse into
disorder, yet I was the very one who would break time’s arrow and discard the slackened bow. Benny Grace used to mock me for my doubts and ditherings. What business is it of ours, he would scoffingly ask, echoing the schoolmen of old, what business is it of ours to save the phenomena? That was the difference—the difference!—between the two of us. I raged for certitude, he was the element of misrule. When I think of him now I hear again the music of the past, raucous and discordant but sweet, too, the sad sweet music of being young.
Whatever he may say to deny it, we did bring something to a close, we adepts of the temporal. After us, certain large possibilities were no longer possible. In our new beginning was an old end. I recall the atmosphere in the academies in those days, even in those early days of the revolution we had so fearlessly set going. Euphoria first, then the dawn of misgiving, then an increasing lassitude, an increasing jadedness. Arguments would still break out, squabbles rather than arguments, too overheated to be sustained, and ending always in impotence and savage frustration. There was a particular aspect people had when they turned and slunk away from these confrontations, hangdog, muzzled, the mouth drawn sideways in a snarl. A savour had gone out of things, the air was that much duller, the light that much dimmed. We could not comprehend it, at first, this darkening of the world that was our doing—it was, after all, the opposite of what we had intended. Somehow, extension brought not increase but dissipation. My final series of equations, a handful of exquisite and unimpeachable paradoxes, was the combination that unlocked the sealed chamber of time. The sigh of dead, dank air that wafted back in our faces from the yawning doorway out of what had been our only world was not
the breath of new life, as we expected, but a last gasp. I still do not understand it. The hitherto unimagined realm that I revealed beyond the infinities was a new world for which no bristling caravels would set sail. We hung back from it, exhausted in advance by the mere fact of its suddenly being there. It was, in a word, too much for us. This is what we discovered, to our chagrin and shame: that we had enough, more than enough, already, in the bewildering diversities of our old and overabundant world. Let the gods live at peace in that far, new place.
