The Thing Itself (11 page)

‘I don’t believe you,’ I said.

‘You don’t have to believe it. You only have to persuade Roy Curtius that
we
believe. He won’t talk to us, but he will talk to you.’

I thought of all my high hopes, in the car driving over – a new career, the new love of my life in the driving seat – and a debilitating sense of my own foolishness entered into my soul. ‘You want me to be a messenger boy,’ I said.

‘Mr Gardner,’ said Kos. ‘You and Mr Curtius are the only two people in the world to have shared the experience, whatever the experience was. The thing that— The thing in itself in Antarctica.’

‘A hallucination, is what that was.’

‘We’ve been working with Kant,’ said Kostritsky. ‘If you’ll pardon the apparent non sequitur.’

‘You’ve been infected with Roy’s madness,’ I said. I put my coffee cup down. It was making my tooth twinge. ‘Look, I wish you all the joy of your insanity, I really do. Curtius tried to kill me. I’ll say it again: to
murder
me. Kant addled his brains. You’ll excuse me if I don’t want to hang around to see what effect it has on yours.’

‘Kant,’ she said mildly. ‘It’s just philosophy.’

‘It’s ordure,’ I said. And then I did stand up, aiming for the maximum dramatic effect. ‘Please drive me home. You brought me here, you can take me home. Or do I have to go wake up Peter himself and make him order you?’

‘Charles,’ said Kostritsky, putting the palms of both hands over her face, as if weeping. I think she yawned again, it was hard to see. ‘Too late to drive you back to Berkshire tonight. Please. I’ll take you back to your room, and you can sleep here. First thing in the morning, I give you my word, I will have a driver take you back.’

I thought about putting my foot down, making a scene. But the truth is: I was tired. I didn’t get out much, and this little adventure had drained me. My jaw still ached. I daresay a residuum of anesthetic was still in my system, tangling strangely with the caffeine. Back in my youth, as an academic going to conferences and the like, I would sometimes stay in hotels; and the thought of sleeping in a bed not my own, with clean sheets stiff as parchment and a power shower instead of the dribble at my flat, was appealing to me. Nostalgia. So I said: ‘First thing? You give me your word?’

‘My word.’

‘Liberties have been taken.’ I felt an inward flutter. This physically unprepossessing woman, and her whiny little voice, and her evident exhaustion, and the lateness of the hour, and my own bruised ego all came together in one awkward urge to apologise. ‘Look I’m sorry. Don’t pin your hopes on Roy. He’s, look, he’s not reliable. I’m sorry I can’t help you.’

She took her hands away from her face. Bleary eyes. She stood up, and then she led me wordlessly back down the stairs and along the corridor to the door of my room.

:5:

It looked like a hotel room, but it wasn’t a hotel and so there wasn’t a minibar, which was good, since the circumstances would have sorely tested my new sobriety. There was, however, a terminal with internet access, so I sat for half an hour and browsed. The daft thing was that neither Irma nor Kostritsky had told me the
name
of the Institute, so I couldn’t google it. I faffed around following links to AI research and supercomputers, and hazarded a quick search for ‘Roy Curtius’. Nothing very much. Then I browsed Kant, and found myself drawn in to the rococo intricacies of his systems. So I shut the machine down, and went to bed in my clothes, because I hadn’t brought any pyjamas.

Almost as soon as I turned the light off there was a short drumroll knocking sound. Looking back, I wonder if she was waiting in the darkened hall – Christ knows for how long – until the horizontal line of light vanished from under the door. I turned my bedside light on again, and got up, and unlocked the door, and opened it, and light spilled out into the darkness and Irma was standing there.

She came inside, and shut the door behind her. Then she said: ‘The questions you were asking in the car.’

And I said: ‘The questions I was asking,’ like an idiot, because my heart was suddenly gulping hard inside my ribcage.

‘About me, the personal ones. There’s an answer.’

‘Yes.’

She took my hand in her hand. ‘You need to understand, and we need to understand one another. I don’t like kissing, nothing on the mouth. No penetration either. All right?’

This was so bewildering that I almost whinnied like a horse. I said: ‘I didn’t bring any condoms anyway. Unless you did?’

She shook her head. ‘Condom or no, no penetration. Not what I’m into. And you’ll need to wash your hands and scrub your nails before you can touch me. I’ll need to watch you wash, to make sure you do it right.’

I couldn’t think what to say. I couldn’t think at all. My cock was stiff as steel. She tugged my hand a little leading me uncomplaining into the adjacent bathroom, where I washed my hands three times under the mixer tap. Then back in the bedroom, and she undressed, and with a wordless nod instructed me to do the same. Then we got under the covers together and I ran my clean hands over her clean skin, and kissed her with my scarred face although always below the neck. She came, I think. Then she spat in her hand, once, twice, three times, with what sounded upsettingly and yet arousingly like contempt and applied her palm to my member and undertook the necessary motion. She used her left hand, which may or may not have been significant to her, and which made me think of her driving and handling the gear-stick – a spurious memory, this, since the car that had chauffeured me here had been an automatic. It didn’t take long. I lay there panting, and she slipped from the sheets, and vanished into the bathroom. The light went on, and from where I was lying I could just about see her splashing her abdomen with water and towelling it dry. Then she came back to the bedside, dressed with the light from the bathroom behind her in a series of intensely beautiful silhouetted shapes. There was a click, and the door pulled shut, and she was gone.

I fell asleep.

And then it was morning, and the light was coming through the windows, and the bathroom light was still on. I drank from the cold tap and pissed the previous night’s coffee into the toilet bowl and took a shower. My tooth throbbed. I made Francis Bacon faces at myself in the mirror. It looked OK.

There was nothing except yesterday’s crusty clothes to wear, and so I dressed in them. Unsure about leaving my room, and for want of anything better to do, I switched on the computer and surfed the net some more. I put on Radio 4 via iPlayer to hear the news. Perhaps turning on the system alerted them to my being awake, because very soon afterwards there came a single, firm knock upon the door.

It was Kostritsky. ‘You driving me home personally?’ I asked.

‘Don’t you want breakfast first?’ she asked. ‘Do you want to head straight off?’ But her expression said:
You’re not going anywhere and we both know it
.

My heart went bippety bippety, and I had to make the conscious effort to restrain myself from agreeing too eagerly.

‘OK,’ I said, trying for
cool
. ‘Breakfast.’

Kostritsky led me down a different corridor, and down some stairs rather than up them, and through a weird dog-leg series of spaces into a large canteen. A dozen long tables, and a bank of serving counters at the far end. It was entirely deserted except for the two of us, although the lit-up counters were well supplied with rectangular stainless-steel containers inside containing, variously, bacon, hot beans, scrambled eggs, button mushrooms in their own hot juices and so on. Kostritsky took a tray and I followed suit. An automated machine filled my mug with coffee. I watched the black circle rise like a piston-head inside its chamber, and all the time my brain was thinking:
If I give the impression I’m not eager to say, she’ll have to send in Irma again tonight
.

There was an open door frame to the kitchen: lights on, ovens and other cooking apparatus visible. I didn’t see any kitchen staff. Maybe they were on a fag break. I followed Kostritsky to a table, and all the time my brain was thinking:
I can surely leverage once more – but what about after that? How to make my assistance conditional upon Irma visiting me? Should I say that outright, or would that be too crass? Can I take it as tacitly understood by us both?
I hated myself for thinking with such reptilian ruthlessness. That’s not an exaggeration. I really hated myself. But I was in the grip of something that mere self-hatred couldn’t dislodge. Of possibility. The step up from solitary isolation to that oneness and totality we call sexual connection.

I sat down.
It’s a negotiation
, I thought. It wasn’t though. It was the beginning of a conversion narrative. It was a direct line from this to me believing in God and running around the Arctic ice in my socks.

Seriously.

‘Believe me, Charles,’ she said, without preamble. ‘I was as sceptical as you are now. But that’s all changed.’

‘Sceptical about what?’

‘The Kant stuff. I trained as a proper scientist, no time for metaphysical gobble-gook.’

‘Uh, gobble-
dee
…’

‘I used to think it airless speculation by a narrow-minded German thinker. But now I know it’s true. And that changes everything.’

‘What’s true?’

‘The transcendental categories are true. Space and time as intuitions of perception, not structures innate to reality. The necessary subjectivity of all scientific investigation.’

‘Mumbo jumbo,’ I said, taking a mouthful of scrambled egg, and all the time thinking:
Should I just come out with it? Tell her I’ll stay if she guarantees continued night visits from Irma
? And at the back of my mind the still, small voice, trying to make itself heard: that amounts to prostitution, Charles. This isn’t ethical, Charles. Are these
really
the terms on which you want Irma to sleep with you, Charlie? Wouldn’t it be better if she did it because she wanted to? Ah, the still small voice. Because it had a cliff to climb, that voice. And the cliff was: the choices are between her doing it because she thinks it is in her better interests, or her not doing it all. This ‘her doing it because she wants to’ is not even an option.

‘Whilst you eat,’ said Kostritsky, ‘I’d like to talk through the four categories. Because, as I promised you last night—’ Was there a faintly leering emphasis upon those two words? ‘Promised you last night, you deserve the full story. The total vision. And the total vision has four parts to it.’ She put down her cutlery, and pulled out a large-screen smart phone. ‘And once I’ve explained, I think you’ll be more inclined to stay.’

‘Well,’ I said, trying to sound mysterious. ‘The thing about staying …’

‘Look,’ she said, putting the screen next to my plate.

1.
Categories of Quantity

• Unity

• Plurality

• Totality

2
. Categories of Quality
        3
. Categories of Relation

• Reality                                  • Inherence and Subsistence

• Negation                                 (substance and accident)

• Limitation                            • Causality and Dependence

                                                    (cause and effect)

                                                  • Community (reciprocity

                                                     between agent and patient)

4
. Categories of Modality

• Possibility—Impossibility

• Existence—Non-existence

• Necessity—Contingency

‘Okily dokily,’ I said, and went for some bacon.

She waited patiently until I came back. ‘Kant says: we perceive the real world, but we only have those perceptions. We can’t get behind them. Something out there – the thing in itself, he calls it – affects us, and we process the incoming data. But the
way
we process that data is distinctive to us. Space, time, and these categories, these are in our perceiving mind, not in the thing in itself.’

‘So it’s all in our mind, yeah? It’s the Matrix and we can’t get out of it. There’s no real, it’s all relative.’

‘No. Not at all. Of course there is a real world. Kant is very clear about that. Here’s you, sitting there, perceiving the real world. Here’s me, doing the same thing. And there is a real world for us to perceive. If there weren’t a real world, then there’d be nothing for us
to
perceive. But—’ And her she held up a single finger, like a schoolteacher. ‘The crucial thing is that the reverse is also true. If you weren’t there to observe, then there’d be no real world to
be perceived
. At least, not in the way you are perceiving it right now – space, time, causality, modality and so on.’

‘Spurious symmetry of ideas,’ I said. ‘I’m not an idiot; I’ve been sitting in my hotel room reading your canny Kant.’ Actually I’d browsed online, and read the
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
entry, but I figured that was close enough for government work. ‘He thinks there are twelve categories that
structure
our experience of the real universe. Four neat little groups of three. I might be minded to believe him if it weren’t
so
just so. So neatly ordered and arranged.’