Charades (10 page)

No one, not one, not anyone watched, not one person was watching on a certain perfect day well remembered by Bea — though it must always be kept in mind that the process of recollection is
imperfect
at best — a certain perfect day that slipped on its axis, spun, lurched, skidded to a fault.

“We were maybe thirteen or fourteen,” Bea says.

“Funny thing, I always thought Kay knew
nothing,
I always thought I'd have to watch out for her, I couldn't believe how dumb she was. Like men, for instance. I
always
knew what to do about men, I came out of my mother knowing, I reckon my mother slipped me the knowhow in her third or fourth month. Before I even started school, old men down by the railroad tracks would give me sixpence for a cuddle. I used to tell Kay, I could make her eyes go round as two-shilling pieces, I liked to shock her. Little old ladies liked Kay in her little smocked dresses; and little old men liked me. I thought Kay'd turn out simple, she was that naive.

“There was this day …

“See, I could do things with my eyes, sometimes it took longer than others. What I used to do was toss out lines … like philodendrons, sort of, like lawyer-cane. I used to spin them out of my eyes like a spider, I'd make gold-streaked leaves, and white-streaked ones, and just plain dark green, and they'd go sailing out like feelers and wrap themselves wherever I wanted. I used to sit at my desk and just about cover Mr Carlyle with my vines, he looked like a moon in the rainforest with that pale Pommy face, he never
could
go brown, you know how it is with Pommies, poor blokes. I s'pose, now I come to think of it, it's on account of him I fell for Nicholas later. He was my dry run, you might say.

“He was my Scholarship teacher, Mr Carlyle, and it took me forever to reel him in. Dunno why I wanted to do it so much, I never could stand Poms with their pasty skin and especially the way they talk. But Mr Carlyle's talk had gone soft at the edges, I reckon it warmed up, got riper, the way a green mango does you know, if it lies in the grass long enough. Like bananas when the possums have been at them. I mean, you could tell he was a Pom all right, but he was trying, he didn't sound so poncy any more, you had to feel sorry that the sun didn't like him and never would.

“Maybe it was because he was my grade eight teacher, my
last
teacher, because I knew I'd never pass the Scholarship, I knew they'd never let Bea Ryan inside a high school, not that I bloody wanted to. And there was this other thing, Charade. University men, teachers and those types, the men who look inside their own heads all the time like they've got bookshelves in there, it scares them, someone like me. See, I was beautiful back then, Charade, no sense pretending I didn't know it. I could make any ditch digger trip over his prick and give a wolf whistle. So that didn't even count, it was that easy. What I liked though, was the way a bloke like Mr Carlyle would look and look away quick.

“I dunno, I reckon it didn't seem right to him that someone like me looked the way I used to look. It scared him. Like it would, maybe, when the Queen drove around Brisbane waving from that fancy car without a roof; if she'd stuck out her tongue instead of waving; like that. Mr Carlyle showed me this painting once, in one of his arty books, of this silly bloody woman with no clothes on and fat little boy angels flying around her. Reminds me of you, Bea, he said. He would've felt better if I was pasted down on that page, I reckon, where I was good and safe. Men like that, there's this big ditch you've got to pull them across before they'll touch you, they're dead scared they're gonna fall into something they'll never get out of.

“Well I dunno, I reckon it's my bad blood, Charade. I loved to pull them across that ditch. It was maybe my favourite thing.

“So maybe that's what it was with Mr Carlyle.

“Or maybe it was his eyes, cow's eyes, too big for his face, I guess he missed something back there in England, he used to sit at his table and stare out the window and dream about it, while I wound miles of my philodendron leaves round his neck and yanked him in.

“Or maybe, yeah, that's what it was, it was his hands, his fingernails really. I'd never seen a man with fingernails like that. I mean,
clean.
They were like little white pieces of moon, they were the most beautiful fingernails I'd seen. Up till then, I always thought men's fingernails were black, I thought that was their natural colour. I used to close my eyes and think about Mr Carlyle's hands, I used to imagine them trailing down my face and over my breasts. (I had breasts already by grade six, the girls weren't allowed to play with me, their mothers figured it was my bad blood coming out. And the men teachers were scared to look.) So I used to spin miles of leaves, I used to spin tree orchids, long trailers of them, and let them settle round Mr Carlyle's wrists, and I'd pull and pull.

“Finally, one day, I knew I had him, I knew I could start to reel him in. It was one of those hot wet days when everyone is slithering into sleep and Mr Carlyle is having trouble with his eyes. His lids feel like lead, I can tell, so I give a little yank on my lines. His eyes are practically closed, he's fighting to keep these two slits from locking shut, he's ordering them to march up and down the desks while we scribble away at some fool bloody test or other. And then it happens. I've just got that second when the eyeslits go by me, so I stretch my cat stretch, and I purr and wait. His eyes go by, and come back. I can tell when I've got a catch.

“Lunch time,” Bea says dreamily. “Lunch time comes …”

Bea cat-stretches and gathers up her exercise book and her pens and stuffs them languidly under her desk top. She knows Mr Carlyle is watching. She rests her chin in her hands and gazes out the window and thinks of the pearl-white shells at the tips of his fingers. If you held his hand up to the light, she thinks, you could see right through the nails. It is half embarrassing, really; so peculiar, so not-like-ordinary-boys, so
unnatural
, that it makes you desperate with excitement to run your tongue over those fingertips. To see if they are real, to see if they will stay, to see if you will be the same person after you have licked them one by one. It is as though you have stumbled on an angel, pale and shining as butter, sitting quietly on a bench outside the pub. It is a miracle.

All the stragglers have left the room, even poor mad Ethel with her thick bottle glasses, who has wandered back in twice, pawing through the rummage of her desk for a lost orange. Bea stretches and sighs heavily. Mr Carlyle sits at his desk, watching her. So many green knots, so many tangles of creeper, so many orchids opening themselves to the heat in the room, that Bea wonders if either of them will be able to move.

At first, when he speaks, she thinks it is the ceiling fan beginning to shake its blades — there's a sluggish rattling sound, low and breathy. She raises her heavy lids, a question.

“What are you?” he asks. “A witch?”

A smile begins in the soles of her feet and spreads and rises. She is a witch, a cat, a mote of sunlight. She does not look back as she leaves the room and drifts downstairs and skirts the rim of the soccer field and walks all the way from Wilston school to halfway home where there's an acre of bush and she disappears into uncut scrub.

She knows he will follow and he does — for part of the way. But there's that ditch, the one that gives him nightmares. And it takes one month, two months, school is over, the Christmas holidays are over, before she finally pulls him across the ditch, because it's Finsbury Park, and Kay is still a little girl who is still at Wilston school, who lives inside grade eight. On a hot February day, Kay is sitting in a mango tree in Finsbury Park with a book, that's how stupid Kay is. And Bea is not thinking about Kay. Bea has hung around the shop where Mr Carlyle buys his tobacco, she has leaned on the counter and stretched like a cat and he has followed her out of the shop all the way to Finsbury Park.

What she feels as he lowers himself onto her is what the magnet feels when iron filings approach. Fistfuls of paspalum and wild couch anchor her, her body bucks at the sun, she is crying out.

And then mayhem. A body hurled, someone pummelling, Kay yelling: “Bea! Bea! Mr Carlyle, what are you doing? Oh Bea! Mr Carlyle! Please stop!”

“Jesus!” Bea screams. “You idiot, Kay! You bloody idiot, you flaming bloody retard!”

Kay is huge-eyed and still with shock. She opens her mouth but is mute.

Oh, and Mr Carlyle! Bea sees his beautiful bouncing pink dick shrivel up and cringe like a worm. She wants to cry, she wants to scream, she starts to laugh. Great gobs of laughter gust up like smoke rings from her lips. “Oh Kay,” she splutters. “Oh Kay, you stupid ninny.”

A switch flicks within Kay. She turns and walks away with silent dignity, past the lantana clump, past the stringybarks, and then she runs. Her footfalls reach them like scatter-shot.

Mr Carlyle has his head in his hands. Grief is rising from him like a fog. Bea knows its smell and places a hand on his knee. He flinches violently. “Not
Katherine
,
”
he says, staring at her with horror. “Of all possible people. Not Katherine, our little scholar, our shining light.”

“So then,” Bea says, squeezing a roll of scone dough in her palms, “I knew Kay had something I didn't understand. I knew she was stupid, and I knew she wasn't too. Like you, Charade. There's something in you that scares me, I don't know where it comes from. Well, it comes from Nicholas, he had it too, but it's different in a woman. It's like a man with white fingernails, it's not something I understand.”

“Did my father have white fingernails?” Charade asks, breathless.

“Yeah,” Bea snaps. “And white fingernails are pretty bloody useless when it comes time to chop wood or feed chooks or make scones.” And she slams the oven door shut, the subject closed — though Charade sees she is smiling and biting on her lips. Charade expects her laughter to rise like scone
dough.

“You know,” Charade tells Koenig. “I've thought and thought, and I don't understand where one life ends and another begins. I don't understand time at all. When I found Aunt Kay (she was lost you know for more than twenty years, Mum didn't know where she was) when I found the house outside Toronto and rang her doorbell and she opened it and stared at me that way she has … she looked, actually, as though she had gone into shock … do you know what I thought?

“Do you know what thought came whole into my head, and almost jumped out of my lips?

“I nearly said: ‘Kay, it's just Mr Carlyle and me, you stupid ninny.' ”

12

On Obsession and
the Uncertainty Principle

“It's dark,” Charade says nervously. “Where are we?” She gropes across runnels of blanket … not blanket, it seems; something softer, cushiony, something that limits. She feels for his pillow but cannot reach it. “I can't move, I feel cramped. Where are you?”

“Here,” Koenig says. “Here. You shouldn't have come — I'm working. But I'm glad you did.”

“I can't seem to move.” She is fingering a ridge that runs down her left side: a seam? a zipper? the inside edge of a dream? She is feeling for clues, not panicky yet, breathing deeply, in, two, three, and out, two, three. “I can't see a thing. Where are you?”

“Here.”

“I can't move.” I'm pre-moth, she thinks. Larval. Her arms feel useless as unborn wings. A thought presents itself: this could be a dream of death, or death itself, the last prescient moment. She takes a frantic gulp of air, cries out, thrashes at the sides of her cocoon.

“Shh,” he whispers. “Shh. We'll have the janitors rushing in.”

“I can't move!”

“Keep still.” He gropes for her mouth, puts his hand over it, gently. “I can't find the zipper,” he whispers. “Wait. I think — Got it.”

The sleeping bag shucks itself off, Charade lifts her arms and holds him. “Where are we?”

“Building 6. My office. You don't remember? I keep the sleeping bag here for all-nighters. I lose track when I'm working on something. I'm glad you found it. Did you get some sleep?”

Charade shakes her head, squeezes her eyes shut and rubs them. “I felt so desolate,” she says, remembering, “when you weren't at the apartment.” She sees only darkness on darkness, black lines branching like an intricate subway system, spectral capillaries. She cannot remember how she got here.

“I'm glad you managed to get in.” Nevertheless he is puzzled.

She says bemused. “I've never been able to find my way around MIT.”

“You certainly startled me,” he says.

“You work in the dark?”

“No. I must have dozed off. The janitor must have turned out the light.”

“It's odd,” Charade says, “but now that my eyes are adjusting, I feel as though we've spent the night here before. But we haven't, have we? Isn't this the first time?”

“You're very forgetful,” he says. “You're a bit weird like that. Sometimes you make me wonder whether you even … Of course we've done it before, we've often done it. But you startle me every time. I can never figure out how you get in.”

“Well …” she says, making an effort to remember. “It's so far back, that first time I met you, that I can't quite …”

“I know. I've been trying to pin down when that was. I can't remember not knowing you. It was before March break, wasn't it? Before reading week even.”

Charade laughs. “Before reading week! I should certainly say so! It was back in the fall term. I came here in the fall. Actually, if we're going to be really precise about this, it was late summer, late August.”

That's right, he thinks with a shock. It was before the fall, and classes were just beginning.

Charade huddles against the wall, feels around for the sleeping bag, and pulls it up against her. “It's cold in here.”

“Yes,” he says. “Well, old buildings. Here, let's … we can both fit inside it …” He cocoons them together, snakes the zipper along its tracks, slides a hand between her legs. “Isn't that better?”

Parthenogenesis,
no, that wouldn't be the word, he thinks. Is there a word for it? — the ability to fit sexual needs into the cracks of thought and will, without undue hindrance to the obsession in hand.

These seemed to be his stages: intense thought, intense fatigue, then the euphoria: a sort of white-out, the mathematics moving toward the new shore at full speed like a crested wave. Then the girl. That is the point when she appears. Then the sexual frenzy, then breakthrough. That would come next.

Consider Heisenberg …

“I suppose,” Charade murmurs into the post-coital calm, “when you think about it, my mother would have had Nicholas and Verity and Kay on her mind while she was giving birth to me, and they would have got into my bloodstream. So it's only natural that I'd think of them whenever … well, all the time really, but especially when we make love … and it's only natural that history and literature would absorb me from the start, two sides of the same coin, right? If I can sift through all the official fictions of the past carefully enough … Sometimes I think the meaning's out there, waiting, like a new star, just waiting for me to focus —”

“Yes,” he says, “that's how it is. It's there, I already know the answer I want, I can feel that it's right, I just have to work out the physics and the mathematics of it … I just have to come from the right direction. The solution's millimetres away, I can feel it coming like an orgasm. I feel as though your next shudder will put it in my … I think of Rutherford and Bohr, that's the way they worked, that's the way it was for them. I think of Heisenberg when he had his hooks in the skin of an idea.”

Charade smiles and holds his hand up to the glimmer seeping in from the window. “White-fingernail people. What were you going to say about Heisenberg?”

“In 1923 in Munich —”

“1923?” She frowns and closes her eyes and taps her forehead. “The Uncertainty Principle. Nobel Prize, 1933. Right?”

He raises an eyebrow. “Very good.”

“I've been doing my homework. Anyway, history's one of my obsessions.”

“Obsession,” he says. “That's the
sine qua non
.” He laughs. “In 1923 Wien tried to flunk Heisenberg on his doctorate. That was in Munich. Of course, the world is full of academics like Wien, official guardians of the rules. And the Wiens have their ways, they are powerful blockers and delayers and inflicters of damage. Two years later Heisenberg was ill, he was a wreck.”

And still the habits of electrons were at him, clawing at him ruthlessly as heartburn. Help, Heisenberg said to his doctor, and was ordered off to an island in the North Sea. Koenig can imagine it: the way Heisenberg paces up and down the beach and thinks. He
thinks.
This is how his breakthrough comes: first the passion, then the hunch, then the computations: spectral lines, frequencies, quantum mechanical series … and the famous matrices.

Koenig likes to think of that night when Heisenberg worked without stopping, his theory growing faster than the sunrise. Just a kid too, twenty-five years old, crying
Lights! lights!
and there was light.

And suddenly Heisenberg is walking out into his own morning, his own shoreline and he's paddling in it — the ripples of it, an entirely new theory — and climbing its rocks. He actually did that. He wrote a letter to Wolfgang Pauli, Koenig knows it by heart:
I was far too excited to sleep, and so, as a new day dawned, I made for the southern tip of the island, where I had been longing to climb a rock jutting out into the sea.

“Do you see, Charade? He thought of it as a new dawn, and I think of it as flesh that'll swallow me up. One night I'll have it, the complete shape of the question, and here you'll be in my arms.”

“Really?” she says dryly.

She doesn't like this.

[They kiss], she thinks. She has, sometimes, the sense of watching her life on
his
stage. Or on his monitor. Click, click, she thinks. Access file, close file. [Curtain falls, is puckered here and there with behind-the-scenes activity, rises again.] Click, click.

“Well,” she says, “if obsession is nine-tenths of the game, I'll find them. Just as I found Aunt Kay.”

It was obsession, she supposes, in the first place, that brought Verity's name swimming up out of newsprint in the
Sydney Morning Herald.

“Almost two years ago,” (Was it?) she says, (Can it be almost two years?) “I was reading for a history exam. Sydney Uni.” She closes her eyes. “There's a bowl of soup in front of me, a spoon in my right hand,
Sources of Australian History
in my left. And pages of the
Herald 
… someone else, one of my roommates, has left pages of the
Herald
strewn around on the table and floor. And then
impact.
Just a filler item in the Personals, which I never read, but it leaped out and smacked me between the eyes. See, I carry it around in my wallet, it's getting hard to read.”

She rummages for her handbag in the dark. She finds her wallet, extracts something, smooths it out, a quarter page with hand-torn edges dominated by an advertisement for IXL mango and passionfruit jams. There is a yellow slash of outline (felt marker) at the third item down in the Personals:

Would anyone having any information on the whereabouts of Verity Ashkenazy (probably now married, married name unknown, but possibly Truman), who was a student and graduate student at the University of Queensland in the mid 50s and early 60s, please contact K. Sussex, Box 3211, Toronto, Canada.

“Can you imagine the effect?” Charade asks. “It was like … like getting a phone call from God.”

“I'm not surprised,” Koenig says. “Iron filings to a magnet, there are precedents all over the place in science. Coincidences cluster round obsessions, we expect it. Synchronicities, we say.”

“There I was,” Charade says, “in that ratty student apartment with cockroaches scuffling under the sink …”

She hears the furtive rubbing of one filthy little insect leg against another, she hears the atoms of air colliding, she hears time stop. Her heart is tolling like the frantic bell that rings in peace or war. Giddiness washes her.

She assumes she has experienced a fleeting hallucination and turns her eyes back to her textbook.
Sources of Personal History
,
she thinks. Tench's
Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson in New South Wales.
Tench is recalling the anguish over dwindling rations, the passionate hopeless waiting for ships from England.

1790. Here on the summit of the hill, every morning from daylight until the sun sunk, did we sweep the horizon, in hope of seeing a sail. At every fleeting speck which arose from the bosom of the sea, the heart bounded, and the telescope was lifted to the eye. If a ship appeared here, we knew she must be bound to us; for on the shores of this vast ocean (the largest in the world) we were the only community which possessed the art of navigation, and languished for intercourse with civilized society.

To say that we were disappointed and shocked, would very inadequately describe our sensations.

So, Charade thinks. The fleeting speck on the horizon. The false sail. And she looks calmly, sardonically, ruefully back at the
Sydney Morning Herald.

It is still there.

Would anyone knowing the whereabouts of Verity Ashkenazy … please contact K. Sussex … Canada.

She cannot concentrate, she cannot keep still. She leaves the apartment and walks and walks. She gets on a bus, gets off at Circular Quay, takes the ferry to Manly, takes it back again, and out again, over and over, her eyes on the furling wake, “which was green and white”, she says, “and coiled like a scroll.”

“A helix,” Koenig says.

“Yes, or a helix. But it changes quite abruptly, you know, when the ferry crosses the Heads. And I found myself obsessed with finding the
point
where it changed. You know, when you're coming in from Manly, there must be a line that could be drawn from North Head … and then on the way out again, from Circular Quay, there must be a line from South Head. And between those two lines, the Pacific changes all the rules. You're not really in Sydney Harbour any more. And for some loony reason I decided if I could find that point of change … I must have stayed on the ferry for hours. And then, you know, there was something else … suddenly, that space between the Heads, it was inside me. There was this roaring and buffeting and I couldn't stand it, it was deafening, it made me seasick, and I got off at Manly and I ran and ran, and I got on a bus and then off it, and I found myself at Collaroy Beach and I just walked along the sand till it got dark.”

“Like Heisenberg.”

“What?” Charade blinks.

“Like Heisenberg on the beach. The breakthrough.”

“Breakthrough?” Charade turns the word over, puzzled. “But I was terrified,” she says.
“Terrified.
If they were turning out to be real after all … what if they were, you know, just ordinary? What if I were to find them and they were nothing special? Just ordinary people. Nothing.” She pauses.

She sighs and asks him: “Do you think it's all a fraud? Knowing anything. The possibility of knowing anything.”

“Yes,” he says. “A useful fraud. In science, first we know, then we prove. It could be brilliant intuition, it could be ego — but it seems to work. Heisenberg and Schrodinger each knew they were right, each knew the other was wrong: wave packets or particles? orbits or matrices? endemic uncertainty? Each forges a proof that proves he's right and the other's wrong. They took the Nobel together in 1933 and had trouble, I suppose, being civil.”

“Is it all a joke, then?” Charade asks, appalled. “A century from now they'll be quaint historical examples. There's no such thing as truth, not even in science.”

“No,” he says. “Not a joke. It's all we've got.” Our fallible ways of knowing, he thinks, and the enterprise of making maps to link up questions and answers. “They always turn out to be faulty,” he says. “Eventually. But they throw up answers after all. And they reshape the questions too.”