The Thing Itself (9 page)

A huge sense of joy sprang up inside me. It was unprecedented. I’ve never felt anything like it before. You’re thinking I was lightheaded with hunger and residual anaesthesia and the aftermath of prolonged suffering. I’m not going to argue with you.

When Roy and I had shared the base, on the underside of the world, I had been the one reading pulp SF and he had been the pretentious Latinist and high-culture snob. Returning to the UK, I discovered that some of his pretension and taste had leaked into me, somehow. I wouldn’t be surprised if Roy spent the eighties and nineties reading
Doctor Who
tie-in novels and getting excited about the
Lord of the Rings
movies. This is a— This is a
thing
. I’ll come back to this. For the moment I want to talk about Irma, and about that evening, and the high stars, there.

My stomach squeezed with hunger. The mood retreated a little, but did not dissipate. The ghost-boy was squatting in the corner, keeping an eye on me, but when I turned on the light he disappeared. Doesn’t like the light. Doesn’t like that tart, lemon concentrate quality of it, maybe. I made myself some toast and Marmite. I had nothing else in the flat to eat. I drank some more milk and took my second pill. Belatedly reading the small print on the side of the pack I discovered that this particular brand of antibiotic was not to be taken with alcohol or milk. I laughed.

My doorbell rang. You need to understand: I never had visitors. I was a man in my fifties, living alone in an ex-council flat on the outskirts of Bracknell. My work colleagues were all bin men and although I sometimes went to the pub with them, they never just popped round to see me. I wasn’t expecting anybody.

Still, as I snibbed the door to my flat and made my way downstairs (the intercom was broken, so I couldn’t just buzz people through) the magical sensation that was flowing through my body intensified again. I was in the verge of something marvellous happening. I felt as if everything in my life was pregnant with possibility.

I opened the door.

Standing there was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. I loved her straight away. It’s as simple as that.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I’m here to drive you to the Institute.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘You want to come in?’ Then I thought of how scummy my flat was, and quailed. Then I thought of
myself
– in the same clothes I’d been wearing yesterday, my mouth reeking of Marmite, my face disfigured, seven fingers on my hands. There was an inward lurch and the moment fell away in flakes. ‘Wait! What?’

‘I’ll stay here,’ said the woman. ‘Get your coat, though. And a toothbrush. You’ll be with us a few nights.’

‘With you?’ She had long dark hair, and regular though not exceptional features – a straight, quite long nose, a wide mouth and full lips. The light bulb over the door threw what would have been for most people an unflattering illumination over her face, but her skin, though lined, was clear and lovely. She wore a dark jacket. She was in her forties, I’d say.

‘I’m sorry: did you say what your name was?’

‘I’m Irma,’ she said. ‘It’s a couple of hours driving so we need to get a move on.’ A clear middle-class south-east accent.

‘Where are we going? Can I grab a quick shower first? I’m— Look, this is unexpected. Are you sure you have the right person?’

‘You’re Charles Gardner,’ she said. It wasn’t a question. I’d been Chaz at work for so long the
Charles
sounded strangely. ‘It’s taken us a while to track you down. We have contacts in the university sector, but it’s been a long time since you left academia. Your records there were no help. No one still in post could steer us the right way. Hardly anyone even remembered you.’

This was a rather desolating thing to say, when you think about it. Yet, coming from the mouth of so beautiful a woman, it was somehow charming rather than deflating. I thought back to my colleagues – to lovely Molly, who I had treated so badly, and the coolness with which she had greeted my betrayal. My own stupidity and her calm reaction. So she wasn’t working at Lancaster any more? I wondered where she was.

It was a cold March night, and the air brought my head a little further back towards reality. ‘Who do you work for?’ I asked. It sounded tetchy, and suddenly I thought to myself:
what’s going on here
? ‘And, you know. Me? What do you want
me
for?’

‘You work for the council, in waste disposal and recycling,’ said Irma. ‘But you used to be an astrophysicist. That’s an unusual career progression, right there. Now: of those two skill sets, which do you think my Institute is likely to be interested in?’

‘Institute of what?’

‘Just Institute. Come along, Charles. Harp and carp. At least come talk to Peter.’ That’s how I heard the name. ‘The Director will set you up for a chat. Decide after that. But you will want to hear what Peter has to say.’

‘I have work in the morning,’ I said.

‘We’ve contacted your line manager and arranged a week-long holiday. Full pay. We are persuasive, and have friends in high places, so it wasn’t hard. Come! We want you. I want you.’

That was the phrase that did it. I felt an almost irresistible urge to reach out and embrace her, there and then. ‘This is surreal,’ I told her. ‘I think you may be the most beautiful woman I have ever met.’

‘You can’t have met many women,’ she replied drily.

‘I’ll come,’ I said.

:3:

Her car was clean, nearly new. It felt like company wheels rather than her personal auto. And off we went. That she didn’t put on the radio seemed to me an invitation to talk.

‘Irma who?’

‘Irma Casbrook.’

‘So, your institute is involved in astrophysics work? Astronomy?’

‘Strangely enough.’

‘University?’

‘It’s an Institute.’

‘I mean, are you affiliated with a university?’

‘We have many connections in the world of academia,’ she said. ‘But the Institute is a private business.’

It all felt unreal. ‘Maybe I’m dreaming,’ I said aloud. ‘Whisked away after sunset by a beautiful woman. You know where I work now. You know what I
used
to do. Look, I’m guessing you know I’m not married.’

She didn’t reply. We turned, swept up the feeder lane and joined the M4 heading west.

‘Just waiting for the right woman, I guess,’ I said. ‘What about you? I mean maybe you’re waiting for the right man. Maybe you’re waiting for the right woman. I don’t know. I try not to judge. But maybe you’re married. I don’t know. I’m babbling. I spent all morning in the dentist, you know. He gave me some pills and I wasn’t supposed to take them with milk and then I did take them with milk. I don’t feel bad. In fact I feel pretty damn amazing.’ It occurred to me that I had left my antibiotics back in the flat. This fact didn’t bother me. Signage pointed the way M4 West. ‘How far are we going? All the way to Wales?’

‘Not all the way to Wales, no.’

‘Bristol? Swindon? I’m sorry to babble. You are a beautiful woman.’ She let this one go.

We vroomed along the motorway, and I rested my head against the coign where the top left of the seat meets the door frame. The hum passed its vibrations from car frame to skull in a manner more or less soothing. Having my head at this strange angle meant that the rows of gallows-tall street lamps we went blipping past appeared to rear up from the ground, swivel through, and snap down, like an endless procession of one-direction-only windscreen wipers.

‘You’re a scientist,’ she said to me suddenly. ‘So tell me this: where does mind come from?’

‘Human mind?’

A scimitar flash of teeth in the darkness; but she didn’t take her eyes off the road. ‘That’s right.’

‘I guess we evolved it. I mean, all animals have minds, more or less.’

‘More or less what?’

‘More or less, uh, sophisticated. More or less intelligent.’

‘More or less self-aware.’

‘If you like.’ I wasn’t used to having this kind of conversation, to be honest. But I didn’t want to give the impression I was a dunce. I sat up straight. ‘The ability to process data, to make decisions based on that, bestows an evolutionary advantage on a creature. Shall I eat this, or not? Shall I fight, or run away? That kind of thing. So the human brain’s just a much more complicated form of that. It’s been millions of years in the making, laminated over time with new input-output—’ I couldn’t think of the word. ‘Programmes,’ I said. ‘Feedback loops. Algorithms. Whatever. These are all cats-cradled together in a human being. But they’re all, basically, doing simple things. Consciousness is, I guess, the kind of weird effect of all these things operating, in parallel or in sequence. Gives us the
impression
of something more than just a whole bunch of action-reaction data-processing loops. It gives us the impression of something more solid. Like a bunch of gnats,’ I said, the image suddenly occurring to me, ‘buzzing around you as you walk out of the wood. And then you look back into the sunset, and it’s like, uh, the cloud of gnats looks for a moment like a human being, a cloaked human being, standing in the gloaming beside the woods. Only then it swirls again and you realise it’s just a cloud of gnats.’

‘Gnats,’ she said. I felt the heat-prickle of embarrassment in my face. Christ, how I wanted to impress her.

‘Sure. To say it’s an illusion is not to say it’s not real.’ Then I thought:
what if she was religious, and believed in the soul and all that palaver?
I tried a little diplomatic back-pedalling. ‘Of course nobody really knows, do they? The Hard Problem and suchlike. It’s, uh notoriously hard to get any objective experimental data, anything verifiable, about – you know, dying and such. Using the mind to think about the mind is … well, it contaminates the process from the beginning, doesn’t it? It inserts the end of the experiment in the procedure.’

‘The eyeball sees everything but itself.’

‘Exactly. That’s well put!’ I was overdoing it. ‘Who said that?’

‘Wittgenstein.’

I’d heard of him (of course), but knew nothing about what he actually said, and didn’t want to expose my ignorance to this attractive woman. ‘Right,’ I said.

‘He was in an Italian prisoner of war camp during the First World War. Fought for the Austrian army, did Wittgenstein, and was captured. There was only one book in that camp, and Wittgenstein read it over and over. You know what it was?’ She didn’t wait for me to guess. ‘Kant’s
Critique of Judgement
. It was the one work of philosophy that had a deeper impact on him than any other.’

‘Right,’ I said.

‘Read it and reread it.’

‘Right,’ I said again. Kant’s name naturally reminded me of Curtius, and our time together in Antarctica. Not a pleasant memory. Decades ago, and yet still a trigger. I rubbed my scarred finger-ends against the fabric of my seat. It had been cold, back then. Ah! The cold.

‘So,’ I said, looking out of the passenger window. ‘You believe in, what, a like immortal soul, do you?’

She began tutting, presumably rebuking me for my impertinence. Her tut-tut was surprisingly loud and resonant, and was issued with a clockwork regularity. Only when I looked back at her did I connect the noise with the intermittent orange light that was coming on and going off outside the passenger window.

Then we were pulling off the motorway. We rose, slowing and stopping at a roundabout.

‘Until a few months ago I believed exactly as you do,’ she said, suddenly. ‘But that’s all changed now.’

‘You’ve, what. God God?’

‘What?’

‘I mean:
got
God? Have you?’

She eased the accelerator and we swung round the roundabout and away on a bright-lit dual carriageway. A faint drizzle began to touch the windscreen, and for a moment, before she switched on the wipers, the whole black surface was smallpoxed with opaque little dots.

‘God,’ she said. ‘I used to think, like you, that there is an external reality, out there, into which we humans arrived. Or our ancestors did. And over time we developed minds as a way of navigating that external reality. In other words, I used to believe that our minds were fitted into the real world.’

She fell silent, and I had to prompt her. ‘You don’t think that now?’

‘It’s not fitted to the world. The world is fitted to it.’

‘Right,’ I said.

We stopped at some lights. ‘Let me ask you something,’ I tried.

‘Yes?’

‘Are you seeing anyone? Are you married, say? Is there boyfriends? Are there a boyf—’ I coughed.

The engine hummed again. The forces of acceleration exerted their opposite and equal effect upon me, pressing me into the comfortable upholstery of the car. Oh, how those speedo numbers flickered upwards. Oh how my heart rate scuttled. The car describes a long shallow arc along the stone road.

‘My best friend at university was a Catholic,’ she said. ‘I still see a lot of her. We’re close. We meet for lunch sometimes. We used to argue about religion. I’d tell her what
you
just said, more or less: what science says about the likely origin of human consciousness. She’s say, no, no, God created our souls. My soul is what makes me different to you. And I would reply – because, really, there are a hundred reasons why that seems to a scientist like a really weak hypothesis – I would reply: if that’s so, then isn’t it an amazingly improbable coincidence that the soul fits the world so well as it does? The real clincher for me is: Alzheimer’s. If mind is a product of brain, then as the disease deteriorates the brain you’d expect to see the mind decay. And that’s exactly what we do see.’

‘Of course you’re married,’ I said. ‘You’re beautiful, assured, intelligent. How could you not be married?’

She replied: ‘Kant believed he had achieved a Copernican Revolution in human thought. Any astronomer has got to be excited at the prospect of that. Yeah?’ A quick sideways look at me, in the passenger seat. ‘Up to now, he said, everyone has assumed that our cognition must conform to the objects of the external world. But all attempts to find out something about our cognition from first principles have come to nothing. Come to nothing because of this presupposition. So, he said, let’s try it the other way around. Let’s see if we can’t get further with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the
objects
must conform to our
cognition
. Like Copernicus, who said: I know what it looks like, that the stars go around the Earth. But let’s imagine it’s the other way about, and see if that doesn’t explain things better.’