— I don’t know what they give me.
— My dear chap, how does it feel exactly, says the next square affably, and talks of people it likes who go to bed with names I have never heard of, bringing them in from outside myself like mares lassoed by non-existent radiations. How can people get so messed up and contorted, the square room says, it doesn’t understand, really, marriages broken up, divorces, nervous breakdowns, why, for what, and it heard, the other day, the square room says, in confidence mind you, and the story floats between the layers of atmosphere inside the square room and upsets the definition. Well, I suppose you know all about that sort of thing. I mean you live on it, don’t you, but still the square room doesn’t see why people should get things so out of proportion. The square room wouldn’t. But then the square room has long sight.
— Perhaps you have never died.
The square room shrugs and says something or other and stays or moves perhaps to the left like the others. Unless it sharpens its beak, what exactly do you mean by something for the benefit of our viewers could you translate. The scalpel scrapes into my pain, the worms in my head squirm, but I have lost my five geometries.
— I suppose men find it easier to move in space and time than in effort.
— Do you mean men or man, sir?
Stance quibbles the professor with oppositions and Bermuda smiles remotely behind the whirls of smoke. Surely man, as such, puts tremendous effort into moving through both space and time. Indeed, look at him, reaching the moon, bouncing his codes against the planets.
— Yes, look at him, says Bermuda less remotely, and the words rebound from inside the map-like contours emanating from her, filling the room, the street no doubt, the entire sky. Their internal combustion has pushed her out of their banal untender story that throttles her. Stance’s wife sips her drink and looks with glazed eyes out of an angular attitude in the depth of the sofa.
— I meant something a little different, the professor says gently, or pretends to say inside the latitudes and longitudes he shows to men. Let’s put it this way: below the visible to the naked eye you have infinite degrees. Any amount can occur between mineral matter and nothingness. Why not above the visible?
— Any amount of what?
— Oh Stanley! Why do you pick on words with a pretence of sharply pursuing an argument you merely clog?
— Come, come, Brenda. What do you mean? As a mathematician you should define your terms.
— I speak with perfect clarity.
— I have noticed that when people say a thing has perfect clarity they merely wish it had. Brenda, what’s got into you?
— Any amount of shock and pressure, the professor continues, ignoring the opaqueness between them. Despite his small eyes, one of them almost blind, the other watery, he has an undoubted presence on the screen of social intercourse that flickers its arpeggios like harp-strings up and down our subliminities. The elasticity of shock should equivalate the elasticity of pressure. The mass of matter resists. You could call matter resistance.
— Quite. Yes. I suppose you could.
Stance looks into his glass darkly, holding it distantly at the level of the nice little individual flan through which his sensibility photographs the world. You scientists talk of things, and matter, and energy, as if divorced from people. Well of course even I know you can’t detach energy from matter, but still, you go too far, I mean, you exaggerate. I have no interest in things as such, I like people.
— Do you, Stance?
— Stance? My dear Larry.
— I beg your pardon, Stanley. For some reason I find it hard to remember people’s names.
— Well, not to worry. What do names matter?
— I think they do, as a matter of fact, wouldn’t you say so, Laurence? We of course use mostly symbols and infinities of calculations. But you give names to the dead satellites in the complex geometry as you called it, of the human soul. They tell a story, given to people at birth.
— I have a name but no story.
— Nonsense, my boy, everyone has a story. A tender or untender story.
Remote Bermuda looks out with her naked eye, suddenly in an anguish only I can see. And Professor Head perhaps, who closes his blind eye and cocks his giant telescope to catch the radiation of the bursting galaxies. But Stance’s wife sips her drink and looks with glazed not naked eyes. She cannot hope for an eternal quadrangle, though she bombards the square room with the particles of a vague discontent. Don’t you remember anything, no dream even?
— No, I never dream.
— Darling, everyone dreams, even those who don’t remember, you of all people should know that.
Remote Bermuda, Brenda, there, her name returns, fills out the square room with her naked eye and honest vulnerability. She wastes herself, and thinks that I waste her, but energy works that way. I don’t know what wastes me. My second life, my death, my amazing recovery. If you had infinite time, professor, I toy with scientific trivia to avoid the issue of my silence, wouldn’t energy degrade itself in the natural way it has, and level itself completely? Then you’d have no shocks, no movement, no life at all. As in a White Dwarf, you told me.
Dr Tim Dekko and his plump virtuous wife sit side by side, she trying frequently to engage remote Bermuda in domesticities, taking her curt impatience with a pleasant smile, he holding his expensive decoy blonde tightly inside himself, wrapped up in layers of mathematical appearances.
— But we don’t have infinite time, Bermuda quips determined to reject her working self from which I have borrowed findings and put me in my place with pure feminity. What has that to do with us, with me?
— Ah, trust a woman to ask such a question. Come, Brenda, you can do better than that.
She both flinches at and revels in his smirking banality. I like life, she insists straight into him, I like shocks and movement.
— Yes well, you have a point, he concedes lethargically. I like life too.
— What do you mean by life? How dare you talk of life to a man who — who –
His wife’s stuttering accusation, thrown sharply out of her angular attitude in the depth of the sofa, bombards the square room with the particles of her anxiety. Stance shrugs.
— I think we should forget that. It has a perfectly good scientific explanation, as Larry of all people knows very well. Wouldn’t you say so, Dekko? You must admit –
— I don’t admit. I agree.
But his wife’s anger still disturbs the flickering harp-strings on the screen of social intercourse. I wish I could remember her name. They call each other of course darling in a deep hate that has degraded itself like energy to indifference and of-course-darling suits them both. She says of course darling you’d say everything has a scientific explanation, although you have no science, you lap up other people’s. Well, yes, why not? unruffled. Scientific facts never hurt anyone, whether visible or invisible to the naked eye. I mean, until the politicians get hold of them. Surely you make, put me right, professor, you make suppositions merely as working hypotheses and curled up in the opaqueness of his unradiating complacency I see or hear the whole argument in advance that will lead him into self-contradiction, stop, and discard them with no love lost between you when they outlive their working usefulness. You can’t do that with personal survival.
— No, you can’t.
— I mean, of course darling, you can and do, but the personal element may torment you. Don’t blame me.
— Nobody blames you, Stan. His wife’s anger has restored Bermuda’s calm. May I have another drink? But she has a point, you know. Professor Head says even equations have a personal element, and operate through people too, well, in a chemical way of course they do, but –