The Thing Itself (34 page)

CHARLES

It’s hardly going to persuade me the other way, now, is it?

PETA

So. It’s cut and it’s dried. My question.
When
you examine the universe, with scrupulous attention and objectivity, what are you actually examining? By carefully exploring all things in space and time, you’re actually exploring your own shaping categories of consciousness. I’m not saying it’s not
valid
, doing that. You turn up all
sorts
of fascinating things. And that’s brilliant. But you’re not getting behind your own consciousness with that kind of research. You’re looking at you. You’re peering down the microscope and seeing your own eye reflected in the lens. Doesn’t tell you anything about what’s actually on the slide.

CHARLES

No. There’s also an objective world. I believe in that. I just don’t believe that it was created by a sky-man in 4004
BC
.

PETA

You don’t believe a caricature ridiculousness that almost nobody believes. Congratulations. What about the
non
-straw man?

CHARLES

Which is?

PETA

Look at the cosmos. Separate out the categories: don’t dwell on ‘time’ – so no 4004 BC. Don’t get distracted by space, so no sky. Just the fact of existence. The whatever it is that you perceive, and which your mind orders with reference to time, space and the other seventeen categories. The thing, itself. So: ask yourself this. Do you believe it to be
inert
this thing? Or vital?

CHARLES

Watchmaker, is it?

PETA

No. You made the watch. By ‘watch’ you mean the intricate structures in a snowflake, the patterns of clouds, the rotation of the seasons, life, beauty – all that.
You
made that. Your mind, structuring its input from the thing itself, made all that. The question isn’t whether the thing itself is a watchmaker. It’s whether it is a force.

CHARLES

Forces can be inert. Gravity. Subatomic strong.

PETA

Forces can be alive, too. Your force of will, or love, or hope.

CHARLES

You don’t need a designer to explain DNA. You don’t need a watchmaker to explain the diversity of the natural world. Science can explain all that without recourse to a maker.

PETA

Yet there is something. You perceive something, and that something strikes your mind as rich and complex and unimaginably vast. Is it a living something? That’s what I’m asking.

CHARLES

My mum was religious. In the way-back and then when. Died decades ago. But she went to church. She just didn’t force it down people’s throats. [
Silence
] It’s not that the
idea
of God strikes me entirely impossible. It just always seemed to me … well – say there’s an architect, a creator for this vast universe. I used to think: why would He be in the slightest bit interested in these evolved apes on this tiny planet in one galactic backwater? It would be like landscaping a huge estate, and then spending all my time staring at one woodlouse under one particular leaf.

PETA

That might be to underestimate God’s ability to take an interest in that woodlouse
and
everything else in the park, at the same time. God’s mind, assuming you believed in it, wouldn’t have the same limitations as yours, after all. It would operate on a different … scale. But I understand what you’re saying. You’re saying: what makes humans so special?

CHARLES

Well, yeah. You’re not
even
human. You should grasp that better than most.

PETA

I don’t think that’s quite the way to see it. Not the way it’s framed. Here’s a cosmos shaped by your consciousness into time and space. Insofar as God is part of that space and time, it’s because He is part of your consciousness. Closer to you than your jugular vein, as the phrase goes. Of
course
you’re important to him. Some other cosmos, outside your possibility of perception – well, any God in that universe would have no interest in you, and you’d have no point of access to Him anyway. But then you’re not
in
that other cosmos. Interest is definitionally impossible, in that case. So you have one of two possibilities. God is intimately interested in you, or there is no God. There’s no middle ground here.

CHARLES

[
Peevish
] I wish I’d stopped at the Boots in Edinburgh station. And picked up some painkillers. My leg is killing me.

Fourth part of the dialogue

[CHARLES
dozes for a short time, and wakes with one of those clonic jerks that makes you believe, for a terrifying instant, that you have fallen off the edge of a cliff. Rain is pimpling the big window of the train carriage. The sky outside is grey as despair, or perhaps as promising as unpolished silver. Rain means life, after all.

THE TRAIN
arrives at North Berwick station, which is unattended by any police
. CHARLES
reflects on this, and the fact that no ticket guard had come to check his ticket during his journey. Perhaps, he considers, this is a good omen. Perhaps auspicious. The rain is coming down quite hard, and
CHARLES
has neither umbrella nor any opportunity, in this place, to obtain one. He takes a taxi from the station to the little harbour, scuffed coloured boats jostling in the water like a crowd of kids who need to go to the toilet but don’t want to interrupt their play.
CHARLES
locates the shack selling ferry tickets, and buys one – cash, of course. He has an hour to kill, so he buys some aspirin and chocolate from a little shop, and then has some mid-afternoon food in an antique café seemingly unmodified since the 1950s. He washes his painkillers down with hot sweet tea, and stretches his leg out to ease the joint at the knee.

His cast is damp, and the plaster is starting to muddy and come away.
CHARLES
sits in the café toilet with a steak knife and cuts it off. It takes him ten minutes, but soon enough his leg and foot are free. Chunks of plastic, some wet, some dry and weeping powder, fill up the little bin.

At another shop
CHARLES
buys some plastic shoes, throws one away and puts the other on his newly revealed foot.

The rain stops. The sun shines again. A rainbow draws a cheerful line over the water, in roughly the direction he is travelling.

As the ferry loads its cars
, CHARLES
makes his way up an unforgiving ship’s ladder to the long thin top deck. It is provided with a sheltered structure in the middle, but for a while, until the boat is well under way, he stands at the rail and stares at the sea. Clouds place their pillows over the face of the sun. Rain starts again, first a fine misty fall like dust, then something harder, like sand. The waters become turbulent beside the plough of the ferry’s chubby stern. The spray is Persil white against the black and black-purple of the water. The waves make curious folds and tessellations in the endlessly pliable matter of the sea. The light dims further, and the rainfall increases suddenly in intensity. They are out of sight of the land, and the vessel is pitching and yawing like a fairground ride. The rain, like swearing, turns the air blue. The air is alive. Rain means life, after all. Spawning strands of water eel through beautifully inconstant skies. But
CHARLES
has no umbrella or raincoat, and the water is under his clothes and adhering to his skin. This is cold and uncomfortable, so he moves inside the little cabin. He is the only person there. For a while he simply sits and stares at the now-occluded windows. Then he dries his hand as best he can, and brings out the device. The idea has crossed his mind to toss it over the side, and into the water. What would happen then? Would that destroy it?
PETA
has assured him that he does not depend upon this single device for existence, but would it diminish him to lose it? Incommode him at all?
CHARLES
pauses to worry that
PETA
has somehow established a malign hold upon him. But then he puts it to his ear.
]

CHARLES

Where’s Curtius now? Are you still tracking him?

PETA

Indeed I am. He’s still in the south. Still in Southampton.

CHARLES

Too far away to … teleport to us?

PETA

I guess he could move in our direction. But he’d have to make lots of little jumps, and bleed away the excess momentum. It would take a while. It might even be easier for him to get on a plane. And anyway, if he moves I’ll let you know.

CHARLES

I’m not keen on meeting him again.

PETA

I’m sure.

CHARLES

What about evolution?

PETA

Sorry? What about it?

CHARLES

Animals perceive the cosmos in terms of time and space, causality and accident and all that. Don’t they?

PETA

I’m not sure where you’re going with this.

CHARLES

Can you speak up. It’s hard to hear you over all the … noise.

PETA

Sure. Some animals. By mass, most ‘animals’ are bacterial, and they don’t perceive the cosmos as ordered by time, or even, really, space. Next up there are animals that have a rudimentary understanding of these categories, slanted towards the exigencies of survival. So insects, say, have a fine development of cause and effect, since grasping that – at an instinctive level – makes them better able to evade predators, since those predators are also defined that way. Bees understand spatial harmony, angles and directions. Time is seasonal and rudimentary. And so on. I’m not pretending evolution is an escalator upwards, or that it has any particular end in view. Broadly speaking, evolution has created a planet dominated by single-celled creatures, with a few outliers like you and your fellow humans. But if you like you can see evolution as a process of gradual expansion into the fullest sense of the framing categories of consciousness.

[
The
FERRY
rears up, a full metre or more, and then drops abruptly into a cavity in the waves, hurling
CHARLES
up. He lands on both feet, jarring his bad knee and dropping the device. It takes him a while to retrieve it from the sodden floor. He sits down again, tucking his arm under the metal rest of his seat to anchor himself against the judder and the sway
.]

CHARLES

What was that? What were you saying?

PETA

I was saying that life on this planet is almost all single-celled animals, and such creatures don’t edit their sense impressions for their consciousness the way ‘higher’ beings do. The narrative of evolution, if we don’t mind calling it by that distorting term, is of multicellular life, and as that increases in complexity and consilience, it comes into a fuller and fuller shaping sense of the categories.

CHARLES

You’re saying an amoeba is closer to God than I am?

PETA

No. I’m saying an amoeba’s relationship to the thing itself is less … mediated. That has advantages, perhaps; but it has many more disadvantages. You mustn’t keep thinking of the categories as a prison. They enable you. They enable you to be more than an amoeba – to have agency, for instance. To act. To have will and self-reflection and the ability to grow.

[CHARLES
gets very little of this. The wind has started hammering against the roof and sides of the little exposed cabin, using a million fat raindrops as drumsticks. And then, with a suddenness that feels like a coup de théâtre, the rain dies away, the wind settles, and THE FERRY rolls onwards much more smoothly
.

ROY CURTIUS
is in the space with him, grinning like a death’s head. CHARLES is startled, and gets to his feet. But he is alone in the cabin.
]

CHARLES

Did you see that?