Gulls, seagulls, their raucous noise, I hear them suddenly. They fly in all the way from the sea and nest in the disused chimneys of the house and rise up and wheel about the roof in great broken chains, their wingbeats crumpling the air, their voices raised in wild, lilting cries. I have always welcomed this annual pandemonium; it is one of the markers of my year. The young have a tendency to fall down the chimneys into the rooms here, dauntingly big brutes though they are, and more than once I have come upon one of them standing in front of a fireplace on its ridiculous grey legs, its plumage sooted and ruffled, a filmed eye skewed towards me in blank surmise. Other worlds, other worlds, where we are not, and yet are.
“You see,” Benny is saying to Petra in the self-swallowing gabble that is his explaining voice, “you see, the infinities, the infinities that cropped up in everyone else’s equations and made them null, and which cropped up in his, too, he saw as exactly what—”
Exactly what is it that keeps the two of them there at the window? Are they looking out at the gulls, craning to see them wheel and screech above the chimney-pots? Or is there someone in the garden, doing something interesting, that ruffian Duffy, perhaps, aware of being watched and pretending to work? But what would be the interest in that, for them? Perhaps they are not looking out at all, perhaps they are standing face-to-face, engrossed in each other, Benny on one side of the embrasure, leaning against the folded-back shutter, talking and jabbing a fat finger, and Petra on the other side staring at the front of his soiled shirt in that seemingly terror-stricken way of hers. God! not to know, not to be able to know the least of things! Doing, doing, is living, as my mother, my poor failed unhappy mother, among others, tried her best to din into me. I see it now, while all along I thought thinking was the thing.
“—an infinity of infinities,” Benny is saying, “all crossing and breaking into each other, all here and invisible, a complex of worlds beyond what anyone before him had imagined ever was there — well, you can imagine the effect.” At last it seems they have remembered the man in the bed, but once again it is Benny alone who approaches in his creaky shoes and leans over me, and I hear him breathing down his crushed little nose, and feel another waft of his warm and sweetish breath against my face. “Well,” he says again, so softly, almost a whisper, that it must be me once more he is addressing, “well, you can imagine,” and again softly laughs.
Inge the gauge-theorist. Why did I think of her when thinking of him? Oh, yes, because I was with her that first time I met him — I believe it was the first time, that time — but also because poor shivering Inge was so much the opposite of the egregious Benny. Picture me there at that long white table, gazing out at the white birches, my nostrils flared in boredom and disdain, a fist set down before me on the tablecloth like a clenched crab, while Benny sought to woo me. Bereft and melancholy though I was, I was a handsome fellow in those days, no doubt of that. Whom did I resemble? Oppenheimer, say, J. Robert, who failed to build the bomb he boasted so much of, or Hilbert the geometer, who had a nice beard like mine — one of those cold and lofty doctors, anyway, whom the world takes as the very model of a bloodless man of science. Benny beside me is leaning forward in a conspiratorial crouch, murmuring blandishments and breathing into my water glass. He says we should get out of here and go to a place he knows down on the waterfront, a venerable tavern where Tycho Brahe is said to have stopped for a night on his way to Prague to take up the post of assistant to Johannes Kepler, the Emperor Rudolf’s Imperial Mathematician, long ago, and where there are bear paws on the menu. We can sit on the terrace there and look across the water to the palely twinkling lights of distant Heligoland — or Hveen, is it? — and drink the speciality of the house, an aquavit with specks of gold dust, real gold dust, swirling in its depths. He has things to tell me, propositions to put. I do not deign to respond to these hot urgings of his. Aquavit, indeed — bear paws!
Nevertheless, it was the early hours though still not dark when I got back from town, panting, in wild disorder, with a split lip and a sleeve torn half-way out of my jacket. Where now was Benny, my bad companion, my cicerone into occasions of sin? Somewhere among the harbour dives he had abandoned me, or I had given him the slip. I did not want to go back to the hotel room where Inge would be under the bedclothes sobbing into her fist. In a state of fuddled euphoria and still breathing hard I wandered down to the lake — there was a lake — and watched a huge sun roll slowly along its shallow arc and tip the horizon in a splash of gold and promptly begin to ascend again. Behind me, in the lead-blue twilight, a flock of white birds dived and wheeled among the birches. Next day, if one may speak of separate nights and days up there at that time of year, I managed to get two places on a seaplane going south, and together Inge and I made our escape from Ultima Thule, seeing far below us two tiny armies all in white swarming towards each other over the tundra.
So is Benny my bad self, or one that I shed and should not have? Before him I had spent my life in hiding, head well down and the little eyes peering out. He tracked me to my lair then, too. It is not too much to say that everything I have done since that northern midsummer day when he flushed me out has been imbued with the dark wash of his presence. He — I say he when I think I mean I. I did great things, I scaled high peaks — such silken ropes, such gleaming grapnels! — and always he was there, scrambling behind me. That was then. I made a world — worlds! — and afterwards what was there left to do but wile away the day of rest, the interminable, idle Sunday that the remainder of my life has been. So why has he come?