Читать книгу Maxwell's Demon - Steven Hall - Страница 17

9

The Leaves of Autumn

I left the pub around nine p.m. and spent the next ten minutes standing outside a bus shelter on the opposite side of the road, happy to be outside despite the cold, my chin tucked deep into the zipped-up collar of my coat. A strong, wintry wind blew up from the river, gusts buffeting and breaking against me, full of the scent of rain.

Autumn had come early this year, the leaves turning quickly in the frosts. The change had taken me by surprise, as it usually did. I spent so much time inside the flat, and inside my own head, that I’d barely noticed summer running out of steam until I stepped out of my door that afternoon and found I had to go back for a jacket.

It felt good to be out in the world again, to be pushed about by the blustery wind. It felt good to be an anonymous small cog amongst the countless streetlamps, headlights, cars, passers-by, buildings, roads and noises of the city at nighttime. It felt good not to be talking to anyone, not to be thinking at all.

Is the world you live in every day made more from rocks and grass and trees, or from articles, certificates, records, files and letters?

I pushed Sophie’s question away, focusing my attention on things – on the hundreds of things made of matter, of chemical elements, of sound waves and light waves, standing or driving or strolling or rolling on all around me. Gloriously, none of it – in this city of millions of lives, and bricks, and lights – none of it had the slightest interest in me. None of it depended on my thoughts or ideas. The buildings and the traffic couldn’t care less if I replied to Andrew Black, or finished my Captain Scarlett script, or got a call from Imogen, or if there was a crossed line that sounded like my dead father talking nonsense from the answerphone. It didn’t matter. In the big, magnificent, busy scheme of things – it didn’t matter at all. I closed my eyes, felt the cold wind on my face and smiled deeply into the depths of my collar.

Minutes passed.

A light, ice-cold rain rolled in on the wind, stinging my cheeks and forehead. I didn’t mind at all. A group of teenagers passed by. I watched them weaving their noisy, flirty way off up the road. They were laughing and joking despite the worsening weather, happy and drunk, finding excuses to touch each other – shoving, tripping, fake pushes into the oncoming traffic. I thought about Imogen laughing, the way she’d suddenly leap on me in bed when the alarm went off, screaming think fast at the top of her voice. I remembered her breathless laughter and wild thrashing when I pinned her down and tickled her when we fought, and her hysterical giggling at a YouTube video of a dog called Fenton chasing a herd of deer. I saw her laughing until her eyes were bright and shiny and she couldn’t catch her breath to speak. Then – like an uninvited guest at a party – I saw Sophie’s bright and shiny eyes, her serious expression, saw her knuckles coming down on Andrew Black’s letter.

Knock.

Knock.

Knock.

The knocks were slower and louder in memory, like a Victorian ghost story, like the Ghost of fucking Christmas Yet-to-Come.

Jesus, I thought.

Sometimes, my brain won’t let me have anything.

A little way up the street, one of the boys had picked up one of the girls and was running off through the rain with her – ‘Fuck off, Craig! Craig, fuck off, you fucking, fucking . . .’ she screamed, punching him but not really punching him, as the others trailed behind, laughing.

I smiled and dug my hands into my pockets.

He didn’t dance me off a cliff. He did that to you. That’s what I’d said to Sophie.

Fucking hell.

I felt the familiar fluttering in the back of my mind, the old memories stirring again. You could tell her, said their fat, furry bodies and the bat, bat, bat of their dry, leafy wings in the dark. You could tell her, you could tell her, you could tell her, you could tell her.

After all these years, they still hadn’t given up on their freedom.

I scribbled my fingers through my wet hair to shut them up.

Before meeting Sophie that day, I’d spent the afternoon touring the bookshops. In every single one, I’d picked a book that shared a shelf with Cupid’s Engine, pulled it out, then posted it over the top of the others, so that it dropped with a thunk into the dark, hidden space at the back of the shelf. I’d been doing this for years and usually I chose a Borges to take the fall, if one was available. I’d always thought that he, of all writers, wouldn’t mind it so very much. Anyway, with a single book removed like this, there’s more room on the shelf. I would use this room to create a book-sized gap between Cupid’s Engine and the next book along to the right. It’d become a ritual over time, I suppose. In every bookshop I went to, I’d make a book-sized space, a gap big enough for Andrew Black’s second novel. I don’t know why I started it. Maybe I thought that one of us – Andrew, me, my father – had to publish something. Time’s arrow had to keep making us a past, present and future, and as my father wouldn’t be writing anything else – oh, I don’t know. For years, I made those gaps in every bookshop all over London, even after I became sure that a second Andrew Black book would never come. Recently, I think I’ve come to understand that creating those spaces was less about the giving of room, and more about the recognition of a hole.

I stamped my feet to bring some warmth back and watched the teenagers disappearing into a bar some way up the road. I let out a long sigh that escaped as steam through my collar. Six years ago, Andrew Black sent Sophie Almonds over a cliff, and it was clear that she’d never forgive him for it. The sheer force of her reaction took me by surprise though. And what she’d said about my looking for reassurance from her, that took me by surprise too. Was I really looking for permission to contact him? I didn’t know. When I asked myself that question, I got nothing back but the vague mental image of wading through a patch of brambles. The brambles had no malicious intent as far as I could tell – no hint of Sophie’s raccoon trap – they were just brambles, but it was a dense and thorny tangle nonetheless. And once in, the image seemed to be saying, you might not find it so easy to get yourself back out.

I sucked air in through my collar and fixed my attention on the hypnotic, endless parade of headlights travelling along the road towards me. Before long, a bus rounded the corner at the far end of the street, and I joined the shuffling, rain-glittered queue forming to meet it.

o

Maybe I wasn’t ready to be back inside our empty little flat so soon, maybe I wanted to be out in the world of things a little while longer, or maybe I’d been half planning it all along. Whatever the reason, I got off the bus a couple of stops early that night and struck out on my own to walk the rest of the way home.

My route took me along the edge of Victoria Park, where the wind whipped up great shoals of fallen leaves and sent them tumbling and hissing in racing waves, swirling past my legs as I walked, then spiralling up in tornado spouts, up and up, under the streetlamps. On such a quiet and empty street, the noise was incredible.

As I pushed forward through the leaf storm, head down and blinking, I found myself thinking of a story that Sophie had told me a few months earlier. Almost every time I saw her, Sophie’s little black book would make an appearance, its pages holding the specifics of some new story, a new set of names, dates and technical terms that she’d keep referring back to while telling me something remarkable. Once, she told me about Johann Fust, the shady business partner of Johannes Gutenberg, inventor of the printing press. Apparently, Fust betrayed Gutenberg, got himself arrested for witchcraft, and became – according to some historians – the inspiration for Doctor Faustus. Another time, she told me how a man named Thomas Harvey stole Albert Einstein’s brain, kept it in a beer cooler for thirty years, and studied it by cutting bits off in his spare time. Harvey became drinking buddies with William Burroughs, and Burroughs liked to brag to friends that he could get hold of bits of Einstein’s brain any time he wanted to. There were lots of others too, from how duelling algorithms led to a book about fly DNA going up for sale for $23,698,655.93 on Amazon, to the origin of the word ‘ampersand’ and the brief period where ‘&’ appeared in the alphabet after ‘z’. The story that came back to me on that particular night though, the one I remembered as I made my way home through the swirling, whirling leaves, was about a mathematician named Barbara Shipman.

Shipman was a researcher at the University of Rochester in New York State, and she studied ‘manifolds’, that is, exotic, theoretical shapes described by complex mathematics. Bizarrely, manifolds can be shown to exist in many more dimensions than the three that we are able to perceive. Specifically, Shipman had been working with a six-dimensional shape known as a ‘flag manifold’. How does a three-dimensional human attempt to comprehend a theoretical, six-dimensional shape? Well, she doesn’t. What you need to do is find a way to visualise the shape in a form that the human mind can actually grasp, and this is generally achieved by the detailed study of shadows cast onto a flat surface such as a wall (to the delight of Plato fans everywhere, Sophie had said). Just as a three-dimensional cube might cast a shadow that appears as a two-dimensional square, so a flag manifold can be made to cast its own complex two-dimensional shadow that the human brain is able to comprehend and work with. I imagine that a fair number of mathematicians have calculated and projected the shadow of a flag manifold, but when Barbara Shipman did so, her life as a mathematician collided unexpectedly with another part of who she was – it collided with her life as the daughter of a beekeeper, of all things. Because of this collision, Barbara Shipman saw something in the shadow of the flag manifold that no one else had ever seen before.

You see, while the mathematicians have been studying their manifolds, the beekeepers have been baffled by a mystery of their own. For millennia, they’ve been puzzled by an odd little routine that bee scouts perform when they return to the hive. Known as the waggle dance, this strange performance sees the scout moving through series of loops and figures of eight, while vibrating the back half of its body at various points in the process. This seems to provide the other bees with strikingly accurate directions to the best sources of pollen, though how on earth the scout bee is able to transmit such complex data through such a simple little dance has always been a mystery. A mystery, that is, until Barbara Shipman looked at the shadow of her flag manifold and saw in it not the complex geometry of a theoretical six-dimensional shape, but the familiar waggle dance of her father’s bees.

It’s easy to forget in the midst of day-to-day life, but logical conclusions needn’t always be boring, pedestrian things. Sometimes, a logical conclusion is so wild, so wonderfully bizarre, that only the fact that it is a logical conclusion allows any sane person to imagine it in the first place. The logical conclusion to be drawn from Barbara Shipman’s observations is this: though we as human beings live our lives entirely in the familiar three dimensions, bees do not. Bees are fully aware of, and see and communicate in, six-dimensional space. What does that mean, practically speaking? What does the world look like to a bee? What do we look like, going about our three-dimensional business? It’s impossible to say because the human mind is completely incapable of comprehending the answers to these questions. There are some things out there that we simply cannot understand.

Running my fingers along the cold park railings as I walked on through the leafy night, I imagined Barbara Shipman waking up on the day of her discovery, cleaning her teeth, getting dressed and having her breakfast, all as usual, and then preparing to face what seemed like another ordinary day. The truth is, none of us have the slightest idea what we’re in for when we get up in the morning. A phone rings, a shadow dances across a wall, a plane falls out of the sky, a letter arrives out of the blue and, before we know it, the world is a different place.

I stopped at a windy junction on the lonely road home, the blowing leaves tumbling all around me. Turn left, and I’d be back at the flat in less than five minutes. Carry on along the park-side road, and it’d take me to the red post box opposite the old, boarded-up church at the end of the street.

I unzipped my coat pocket and pulled out Andrew Black’s letter. The hungry wind pulled and tugged at it, but I kept my grip tight.

Take it home and burn it, Sophie had said.

I stared at my name and address on the front of the envelope as it flapped wildly between my fingers, trying to get free. I could feel the edges of the Polaroid picture inside.

What do you think this is?

You’re right that this is a hook. What in God’s name makes you think it’s a good idea to bite?

I reached inside my coat on the other side, and pulled out a second envelope. This one was addressed to Andrew – my reply, already written, stamped and ready to post.

You shouldn’t respond to this. If you’re asking for my advice, then that’s the advice I have for you. Do not respond to this.

The wind sent a breaker of leaves roaring past me, skittering and crashing away towards the old church with the post box outside. Stuffing both hands – and both letters – into my coat pockets, I put my head down and made my way after them.

o

I stood in front of the post box, for two, three, four minutes.

Just put it into the slot. It’s just a letter.

My hand didn’t move.

‘Fucking hell.’

I didn’t want to stand there like an idiot for another five minutes, so I crossed the road, climbed over the old fence and sat myself on the steps of the boarded-up church, Black’s letter in one hand, my reply in the other.

‘Fucking hell, Sophie,’ I said.

That’s another thing I should’ve told you about Sophie Almonds – whenever she gave advice, it was almost always right. The longer I’d known her, the harder it had become to dispute this one simple fact.

‘Fucking hell.’

There were more trees by the church, the fallen leaves even more plentiful, and swarms of them whipped and tumbled as the icy wind threw its weight around the little graveyard.

I stretched out my arms, holding both envelopes up to the wind and they fluttered and shook violently, trying to get free. It would’ve been the easiest thing in the world to let them go. The leaves were so deep, they’d probably lie forgotten amongst the weathered headstones until they mulched down in the cycle of winter snows and thaws. The thread of this whole story would simply blow away and be gone. Nothing would come next: no answers, no problems, no decisions, no nothing. Turn off the computer – click, and that would be that.

I held my hands up a little higher. Sophie had done all she could to convince me to let this whole business go, and with the slightest movement, I could do exactly that.

The entropy of a closed system tends to a maximum, I thought, picturing those coloured plastic letters on the fridge back home. I thought about Imogen, away from home for so long, and about what our marriage might be, or not be, when she came back. I thought about frayed phone cables and crossed lines over empty fields, and about all the silence and all the noise between my father and me. I felt the envelopes in my hand and I thought, ‘clue’ is an old-fashioned word for a ball of twine, promising guidance through the labyrinth. Was Black’s sphere photograph a clue? I thought, of course it’s a hook and beware raccoon traps promising answers. I thought, there is no labyrinth, no grand plan. Only chaos and collapse. Things just fall apart. I thought, ‘I talk to God, but the sky is empty.’

I closed my eyes, focusing on the thunder of leaves all around me.

The entropy of a closed system tends to a maximum.