— I told you, Lazarus, you can’t get rid of origin by giving it names, except for a time. Origin comes back.
— Whose origin? I never fathered this brood, you said so yourself, it came out of your knee, a hard-boiled egg, and you flung –
— Don’t mention it.
— the slices and nevertheless I trusted you. I helped you after all. Some trust. You’ve let me down, Something, let me down badly.
— Please, let’s wait until the salvage men come and get us out. Our nerves have spilled all over the place, look at them.
— And what about that fine upstanding young man sitting around unharmed, why doesn’t he do something?
— He can’t, Lazarus. Not until you get through to him. Oh please don’t let’s go on like this.
— Like what?
— It makes me feel so … desolate.
She cries. I feel half buried in twisted steel and cold indifference. What have they done to me, and what have they to do with me? I want to go back, I have left a wife in a state of shock that invites predatory selfishness, I have left jobs undone, patients uncured, theories unthought out, wasted here in this twisted steel and these spilled out nerves, waiting for a long lever-crane of criss-cross metal to lift the train off us. I watch it through the window as it creaks and clanks, diameters round from left to right and then from right to left, its cabin off-centre with an automan inside who operates the switches so that the cubic weight at the short end moves round with it and the pulley at the long end travels along it at the speed of slowly returning health. But it will never get here to lift the twisted steel from all this lot that has nothing to do with me.
— But it does, Lazarus, it belongs to you. Why didn’t you tell the journalists about them? I asked you to. I made only one condition.
— What journalists? They’ve gone. Or never came.
— Your daily friends, Lazarus.
— I have no friends.
— You let them go. You’ve always let them go, moving through people as through so much dust. But they’ll come back.
— Have I moved through you, Something?
— I tried to help you. I even write you little notes sometimes.
— But I can’t read waves and sounds, Something, not from you. You’ve only enabled me to read them in others, and I don’t like it. I can’t talk to people, Something, and it hurts.
— You chose the supersonic, above words, remember.
— Well, then, all the more –
— I know. And we did use words. Too many. But you insisted on the transit drink, as I knew you would, on account of your name. But I hoped that somehow, with your five geometries, you’d manage.
— I have no geometries, you must have made a mistake. Or else I lost them, left them on the plane, in the pocket of the seat in front, or in the upper parietal lobe.
— These geometries work through people, Lazarus, you said so yourself. You must trust your friends.
— You mean, Dekko, and Stance, and people like that? How can I? I draw the line as a rule between one solar system and another.
— Yes, well, you go too far, I mean you exaggerate.
— I trust you, Something, or at least, I trusted you once.
— And others too. Your daily friends, Lazarus, from all your days.
— My daily friends, the journalists. I don’t understand. You mean Tell-Star, and people like that?
— You studied with him.
— I — good God –
— At Tin Roof’s age.
— Ph.D. Sociology.
— Something like that.
— He masturbates and picks his nose in his unscreened existence. I could read right into him as well.
— So do you, Lazarus.
— What!
— You masturbate your brain with false causalities that heal nobody, infinite calculations that increase the distances.
— But Something, haven’t I proved –
— to your own satisfaction, yes.
— Have I become Stance, then?
— A little more of his genial unconcern wouldn’t have harmed you. Instead of — his other aspect. It … It makes me feel so … desolate.
— Tell-Star! Of course.
Beyond the door with the round window in it the machine clatters out its binary arithmetic on virgin sheets of paper covered with ones and zeros. Tim Dekko stands by the operand, his tight-wrapped face turned towards Brenda at the control-panel who brings down the switches in a quick competent succession. The little orange lights flicker like stars over Erase, Inhibit, Block, Prime, Pulse, Mesh and things like that. At his feet a mesh of wires wrapped in green, grey and red plastic bulges from the machine’s lower bowels onto the floor.
Brenda has left the back of the drum open, facing the door with the round window in it, so that, says Stance, my secretaries can see, and tell my wife, that I don’t get up to anything, except Tim Dekko and Brenda and two engineers in dumb show beyond the drum full of power thyratrons like regimented cylinders wearing haloes of blue light. Yes well, we all have cylinders, when you come to think of it, but some tick away quietly, bouncing their messages against the moon, some have more depth, more guts, and a shining inner face silent with quiet meditation, some have a double shape that fills itself with sap as with vibrant resistance you can see into but cannot penetrate. Others, like me, have nothing but a thick opaqueness of flesh which you slice through like butter, failing to make more than a slimy contact, until the reality of a dead professor or someone, so much more present even in his death than in his dying life moves through me with its vibrant atoms that whirl round mine, create resistance.
Tim Dekko turns his tight-wrapped face towards Brenda at the control-panel and yells his head off in the dumb-show of the silent film framed by the door’s round window which becomes oval, replaced by a narrow shaft of sound and the long rectangle of their conversation in twinkling orange lights, Alarm Reset, Next Instruction and the clatter of binary arithmetic, oh hello Laurence, how did you get in?
— Brenda, I must talk to you.
— Not now, Larry, not now.
She pulls down switches quickly, competently and jots down her comments on a pad in a column called Narrative, figures in the column called Location, a tick under Next Instruction.
— Brenda –
— Won’t it wait, Larry?
— I’ve remembered something.
— What?
— Something … of the narrative, the location.
— Oh, go away, Larry. Can’t you see we must finish this programme.
— What programme?
— Track, eight four two one. Syne shot. Block Prime Pulse Mesh.
— When did I marry you, Brenda?
— Oh go away, Larry, for heaven’s sake, go.
No doubt Stance would have watched the operation and shrugged, his grey eyes veiled with knowledgeable labels at my poor performance. He would have done much better in the circumstances, but then, circumstances do not touch everyone with their enmeshed meridians. He has one stance to adopt and with it he lassoes my wife, Tim’s wife, and they come like mares. They like one-stance men, they read them from afar, then having deciphered their one stance get angry and embittered at their own lack of love. Remote Bermuda dies with me vicariously as she moves out of the one stance that melts away from my enmeshed meridians. But if I had really died I would have had, surely, a flash of something that would not translate itself into indifference. I have lost the equations that enable people to move through people easily without love. I hear, see, read all the inscriptions that emanate in waves from the radiating coronas of all their little solar systems, unless they only pretend to emit, like actors. And underneath the hearing, seeing, I have corked ears, blind eyes, unfeeling hands, I speak through a cleft palate, break my promises, I have let something go.