Enough to reign for three hundred years.
Or like the victory of Augustus at Actium, or that other coup de theatre in India or Asia Minor by Nicephorus Phocas, who had himself publicly levitated to impress Liutprand, bishop of Cremona, I told you about this already, in 949 (no small thing, this effect of liberating oneself, annulling terrestrial gravity!). All the pomp and circumstance of Westminster, of the Hall of Mirrors (in Versailles), but in the air, pure play of lights. Broadcast live, seen by millions of viewers. And the videos and the “behind the scenes” footage; a whole twelve-hour program on the new Imperial House of Russia. The only authentically exotic royal house, the most long-suffering of them all, an ideal candidate for relaunching, eighty years after its forced defenestration.
9
Regressing back to Babylon, to a Babylonian apprehension of kingship, however much we may resemble modern men, whatever we fast food eaters may look like. Changing the cut of the suits, widening and narrowing the lapels, still looking like pencil pushers and wives of pencil pushers, some of the women pencil pushers themselves, but with an inner transformation, the fine substance of a sense of hierarchy in their souls. Conscious of the many rungs that separate them, the abyss between the simple construction of their bodies and the more formidable fabric of a king. The futility of all movement understood, all pride set aside: just men, you know? What better thing than this? What better than to dance?
Me with the millions, finally. God knows I hadn’t stopped dreaming about that money and God knows, too, how much it surprised me to discover it glittering there in the garden grass when I had told myself: you won’t get it. Never. My failure with the butterflies, the fiasco of my education of Linda, which I’ll tell you about someday. All that, in its moment, drove me across certain countries, uncontrollably or as if uncontrollably, not only toward the sea, as I told you, but also toward the reflection of the golden stone. And I had closed my eyes in resignation, saying to myself: an illusion, you’ll never get it. I had accepted this and lowered myself to giving a few classes, earning a little money (never as much as I’d imagined), until the day I saw the stone in the garden and everything changed, the world turned upside down as I looked at it.
Nelly and Vasily dancing there among the azure sparkle of those final days of the century, in perfect awareness that those years were blue. I’d felt this, too, I had sensed it and adjusted myself to blue. Not gray, as in the Writer’s life, or some shade of red, the inexplicable reddish orange of my childhood. The blue of those years that still have not gone by, your mother’s metallic skin and hair gleaming among ribbons of blue. OK, fellows, God would say, floating overhead, the best you can do, the wisest: blue. Precisely what I had in mind for those years.
10
Vasily gravitating in the middle of the room with a slow and majestic air, augustly. Absorbing all the light that rushed toward him, all the objects and the party guests spinning around him. Bathed by the brilliance of the stone. Large as an outcrop of rock or a colossus. His mass augmented, but also, like a neutron star, infinitely dense. The party flowing around him, gliding downward with the smooth tension of a curtain of water as he watched, spellbound, approaching for a closer look, then understanding that the curtain, seeming to flow as it fell, was revolving around him in iridescent bands, slower and slower.
He gave an involuntary start of surprise. I saw it appear on his face, observed it from afar, unable still, in that moment, in the heat of the dance, to understand or explain to myself the expression of wonder that rose to the surface of his eyes. He understood himself, comprehended himself as an object of almost infinite mass beneath which space warped, around which the hours grew still.
(For this, Petya, is where the principal lines of the Book arrive at their confluence: that of gravity and that of time.)
Only now do I understand, only now have I succeeded in explaining to myself his figure standing motionless in the center of the room, his surprise as he watched everything spinning slower and slower: Astoriadis’s fork poised in midair, Lifa’s apple cheeks, Batyk’s bilious eyes, and the tedium in yours, Petya, as you waited for the moment of your escape to the sea, the shock in his wife’s face, the three phases or moments it took me to understand what was happening before my eyes. All of us going, diluting into a single gray movement.
He didn’t run toward that curtain but conducted himself with unfeigned grandeur: he approached it in the natural evolution of its orbit, moving unhurriedly, with reserved, noble, majestic gestures. He put out his hand and broke through the iridescent sheet that churned around his index finger. He tested the substance it was made of, the thickness of that panel or curtain, and fully understood what was before him.
11
Time for the individual self or time in itself: biological time or physical time, the Commentator wouldn’t have thought twice about fatiguing us with such matters. Whereas the Writer, in modesty and with infinite intelligence, didn’t hesitate to return to an old title, a combination of words already used by another writer, and simply typed out: time machine.
The brief pastiche he inserted in the Book as a divertissement, a ploy, a way of charging that title, that phrase, with a new meaning. He imagined, he tells us, that a certain minor writer, a bourgeois by the surname of Menard (a Frenchman), understood one afternoon, after long meditation, how and in what way to repeat the work of the English author H. G. Wells.
But not by the procedure of imitating his life, reproducing his raptures over Morris’s bibliographic gems, his rejection of the prolix Jugendstil, his calisthenic defense of Swiss gymnastics: all his manias explored, his every irascible thought codified, incarnated, in a word. A procedure that Menard (in the Writer) would reject as far too easy. “Impossible, rather!” the reader will exclaim, etcetera. Something richer and more brilliant by far was what the Writer had in mind, more worthy of his unique and astonishing imagination: the expedient of rewriting page for page, word for word, two chapters of that Book. So that now, easily legible, enclosed in that simple title, The Time Machine, we have the Writer’s more subtle reading, different, brimming over with new meaning, dictated by a new and scientific understanding of time.
To read instead — where our Englishman had simply written The Time Machine—this combination of words: physical artifact, vehicle in which to cross through the puff pastry of the years in the ridiculous aim of quarreling with the Morlocks of the future, redeeming the Eloi and other such trifles. In the Writer’s Menard this phrase assumes a new meaning, an unprecedented nuance: time machine.
In the mind of the reader who wonders: in what way is this machine of his constituted? What is its internal structure? How does this machine generate time? What puts it in motion? Readings far ahead of their time, the brilliant treatment of new concepts: event horizon, spatial rupture or singularity, stalled light, unstable stars.
12
I understand now that this is what was happening. But at that moment, in the midst of the party, my mind rejected this explanation as fanciful (or as too literal, you’ll say). Though I took it in immediately, with a single glance, intuitively. I understood what your father was preparing to do, how he discarded the possibility of escaping, entering into this infinity that was opening out before him, time gliding by in ever more widely spaced stretches or portions, the hand-lettered panels of the centuries, the painted screens of the days, the rune-covered shades of the hours opening up, sliding silently on their oiled tracks, at every turn of the machine.