The Syme Papers (85 page)

And I remembered, if not the letter, then the
matter
of the story that followed:

And yet the ignorant dog had kept them safe so many years, and bequeathed them, an awkward burden, like the second-best bed of Shakespeare’s will, from generation to generation of puzzled Jenkynses. I knew then, with such certainty as proves delightful in itself, like a bell rung clearly, that I had scattered across my lap those ‘clay fragments of the world’ that had moved Sam to such anger and curiosity a hundred and eighty years before. Pitt, after all, was familiar with such ruins himself; having kept, as brittle paperweight, the clay fragment of his own disaster, which scarred his son – ‘that inimitable shape, a slight protrusion from a ragged triangle, unevenly split’ – to remind him of Texas, and the danger of his enthusiasms.

It struck me suddenly why the shapes seemed so familiar. Some tender, meticulous hand had smoothed them into recognition. (Could I doubt that it was Syme’s?) Here, a top-heavy piece of clay stood on a single toe, the belly hollowed into the form of
Africa; there, a delicate finger stretched forth from the main, where Florida jutted into the Atlantic; the breast of South America puffed sharp and proud into some imagined sea; the western coast of Greenland softened to a long bay. Was this strange loving duty of
precision
to those shattered fragments of the world ‘the lost enthusiasm’ that occupied his final month, ‘in the pursuit of which … he forgot to keep his eye on the dinner-plate’? And then, of course, foolish Pitt, the numbers tallied at last in my thoughts, and my fingers found their echoes in one another. The proud breast of South America (3), sought comfort in the belly of Africa (3Ø). The broad shoulder of Africa (2ß), let Florida (2µ) tickle it with a gentle finger, running along. I got out of the car and squatted, in the low heat of dusk, against the kerb; spread the fragments across the leather seat in the dull light of the car door. Slowly the pieces of the world came together. Only consider, Pitt! I thought, the implications of the experiment as a whole: a molten, spinning core enveloped in a hardened, fragmented shell, splitting apart. And there, across the end of Africa, the back of Australia and the foot of India (nestled together), he had scratched the faintest of bold triumphs: ‘THIS WAS TO BE SHOWN’.

Ten (long!) years before, I had written:

And just before his death, Syme discovered this fragmented evidence of his ground-breaking suspicion – first aired, I still maintain, in the final, suggestively titled article of the
New
Platonist
(‘Speculations: a curious coincidence’), which fell into Wegener’s hands at last, from the lap of a no-good uncle. ‘And Syme’s suspicion’,
as I once declared (how proudly!), ‘grew into Wegener’s half-certainty, which Wegener gave his life to prove
utterly
certain. I have no doubt of this any more; I would stake my reputation on it, my academic career. I
have
staked my reputation on it and my academic career.’

You may suppose for yourself the fantasies I constructed from thin air on the rest of the journey from Richmond to New York. Such conferences I chaired and such papers I published! The branch of Syme Studies I opened at NYU, a department of the History Faculty devoted entirely to ‘errors of science, redeemed by their place in history’. The word
Symist
itself became a commonplace of modern discourse, signifying a certain honour attached to solitary speculation and solitary speculators, distinct and distinguished from the grey mass of ordinary thought and ordinary thinkers – coined eventually in the mintage of the
Oxford
English
Dictionary,
proving once again my old suspicion that we can only be right
alone.
I drove deep through the night, in that vast landscape of the mind’s eye presented by the unchanging unrolling of the highway under the road lights, until the summer storm broke over Philadelphia, and I turned at last to a cheap bed to sleep it off.

It
proved to be more than road-weariness. I had learned to fear my enthusiasms – not only for the loneliness they produced, but the blindness in them. Like a sudden shower, they deepened the colours of the world; even the sidewalks grew rich and shining in the wet. But they drove everyone else inside. And when the sun returns, as it did, flickering through the bent blinds of my motel window, and the drunkenness of inspiration dries up, the colours fade, and solitude seems more desperate and unsure. ‘And so the morning comes‚’ Phidy wrote shortly before he died, ‘and as I have a thousand times in youth, I wonder at my foolishness of the night before.’ And certainly my mission seemed less grand in the late afternoon, as I drove clanking from the parking-lot of the all-day-breakfast diner with a heap of dust and broken clay in a glass box on the seat beside me. ‘My head
rings like a cracked bell‚’ he muttered, and ‘my eyes blink aching against the sun which shines bright as new in the forgiving heavens.’ I was coming home. Inspirations, like shadows and nightmares – thankfully! – often vanish in the afternoon.

I crossed into Queens at dusk. The first of the car-lights glowed in the dusty summer. And after a clutter of traffic on the Avenue – amid late Sunday shoppers, and young men drinking the first drink of the early evening – I turned at the glass front of the Greek Café into poky 34th Street, eased between rows of parked cars to the pretty house with the false-brick facade, and the familiar shapes at supper within it. Familiar shapes – our solace lies in familiar shapes. (One of which just opened the front door, smelling of paints and tomato sauce.) The broad warm round of Susie’s cheeks; the tender hoops of her ribs; the soft shallow of waist between the last rib and the sharp of her hip, gathered in my hand. How passionately I turned at last to
her
in the hollow of my father’s death! Somehow the tide of my enthusiasms, old and revived, had begun to ebb again; and left behind its soft retreat something that looked very much like – happiness. (Love or happiness, take your pick; equally forgettable in the long run, but sweet none the less.) I was built for nothing better; and comforted myself (falsely perhaps) with Phidy’s assurance that ‘even Syme came, as we all do, like a lover to his insignificance’.

Benjamin Markovits grew up in Texas, London and Berlin. He left an unpromising career as a professional basketball player to study the Romantics. Since then he has taught high school English, edited a left-wing cultural magazine and written essays, stories and reviews for, among other publications, the
New York Times
, the
Guardian
, the
London Review of Books
and the
Paris Review
. He has written four previous novels,
The Syme Papers, Either Side of Winter, Imposture
and
A Quiet Adjustment
. Markovits has lived in London since 2000 and is married with a daughter and a son. He teaches creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.