He imagines Asja’s face when she hears: Walter Benjamin has killed himself. He imagines his wife and son, his friends. But mostly he imagines Asja.
“What if I survive?”
“That’s the point, my friend, you will. Or if you don’t, you’ll never know anything about it, so what is there to lose?”
It is Pascal’s wager for the era of mass production: the phantasmagoria of immortality.
“I lack your courage,” says Benjamin. “And what of your family and friends, did you renounce them too?”
“Completely. Though I did return to my parents’ home in Paris, just once. I knew they would be away, I only wanted to see the place.”
“You doubted your decision to leave?”
“Not at all, I thought of retrieving my last work and burning it. And as I walked in those once-familiar rooms I truly felt myself to be a ghost, for my mother had made the place a shrine to my memory. Here is posterity, I said to myself, here is what you craved, to be remembered, and what does it amount to? The tears of those few who knew you, the continued indifference of the multitude who did not. Pierre Klauer can be removed from the world like a loose brick and who will notice the hole he leaves?”
“You say you loved women.”
“They found other men. We are interchangeable.”
“If everyone thought like you there would be no art or science, no great works passed down the generations.”
“And every generation would be a world renewed. But I didn’t burn my score, because when I opened the drawer of my desk I found that it was gone, in fact for a moment I wondered if it had ever really been there. Its destiny, you see, was always to be non-existent, and I was glad that it was missing, I hoped that someone else had put a match to it, as I would have done. Yet the drawer wasn’t empty. I had also deposited a book there, that I used while composing the work.”
“The source of your inspiration?”
Klauer smiles. “You could say that. I took it with me and still have it.”
“Then you are more attached to art and literature than you care to admit.”
“The book is neither,” the Frenchman says with an air of satisfaction, as though a point has been scored. “It’s very old, written in a language I don’t understand, elegantly bound in yellow calfskin. And now that my finances have taken a bad turn I’m thinking of selling it. I expect I’ll let it go for far less than it’s worth.”
“I’m a collector of books.”
“Are you really? Then isn’t this a fine stroke of chance for both of us?”
Chapter Seven
Conroy sits alone in the darkness of his rented flat, place where no one can find him, view through the uncurtained window of purple night clouds scummed with streetlight orange. In a world gone mad he’s the only one who can see the truth. They made Laura disappear, now it’s Conroy himself who must surely be next. Eliminate all witnesses, erase the evidence, already he can feel the breeze of annihilation airbrushing him out of history. That’s why he’s hiding, covering his tracks, making himself a non-person before those bastards can do it to him. If oblivion’s the only option it’ll be on his terms, not theirs.
Art and death: two lines of escape. And another, disappearance. The landlord wanted references, bank details. Conroy gave a false name and a wad of cash and that was sufficient, he’s been here a week and no one has knocked on his door. A telephone squats in a corner on the grubby carpet, Conroy doesn’t know if it’s connected and doesn’t plan on using it. His mobile went in a bin, his laptop is in the house he left.
Conroy refills his whisky glass, the bottle’s nearly empty. The portable TV is perched muted on a cardboard box he hasn’t bothered to unpack, he can see the start of a science documentary, that physicist who used to be a pop star or something, kind everyone can relate to. He’s standing on a mountain side waving his arms, Conroy thinks of turning the sound up but the remote is further away than the Glenfiddich. He couldn’t bring a piano here, not even the upright, enforced musical celibacy is driving him nuts. This is what it’s like, life without art. Wake up, do stuff, watch TV, go to sleep, start over next morning and you’re no different except a day older.
Silent images of scientific authority: that big machine where they smash atoms. The space telescope. An urge to play but no instrument, his final greatest loss, and like all the others self-inflicted. He drove away his lover and his public, his recording label and his students, denied himself everything that was most precious, like he planned to screw up right from the start, planned his own destruction. Like Klauer. The dark demonic rhythm in his skull is the first movement of The Secret Knowledge, he hears its strident chords, feels left-hand leaps he’ll never show to anyone. The performer needs an audience, take that away and it’s God or nothing. Music is truth, the world prefers illusion.
The programme note still writes itself inside his head, critical commentary on an event that will never happen. There is no “secret knowledge”, that surely is the implicit message of a work determined, like the man who made it, to shock. Striking is its quality of montage, the disconnectedness of components sequentially juxtaposed without evident logic. Like getting back from a concert tour and finding your partner has been unexisted. That sudden theme in G sharp minor: where else is it to be found, in the remaining composition or entire universe? Its singularity is guarantor of significance and critical death sentence. When complicity is the only possible success, failure becomes imperative. What Conroy’s telling himself is that the sole available outcome of all this is disaster.
He needs to look up some references but hasn’t brought his books; he tries to recall what Adorno said about the commodification of music. Mass culture replaces critical appreciation with mere recognition: to hear anything often enough is equivalent to liking it. We become nicotine addicts conditioned to think that what we crave is what we genuinely need and desire, the vocabulary of taste reduced to saying that a tune has a good beat. What the artist and philosopher have in common is their apprehension of a future existing unacknowledged within the present. Klauer could foresee the urban masses for whom the iPod would offer essential diversion.
He stretches for the remote and raises the sound, bringing the physicist’s chummy northern vowels into audible focus. Hundreds of millions of light years, and us a single tiny speck. Computer graphics colourfully erupt, dazzling as a stained-glass window. It dawns on Conroy he’s like the average person in one of his own concerts, nagged by desire for self-improvement but motivated more by hunger for distraction. When the TV physicist was a kid he must have been doing equations and reading textbooks same as Conroy was practising scales, not for fun but out of a rare unnameable compulsion that amounted to belief in the future.
Instead of a single universe there’s a multiverse.
And then the phone rings. Takes a moment to recognise the sound that’s startled him, insipid peeping from the corner with a dodgy stain where something maybe had a crap once, goes and lifts the receiver, plastic’s an unnameable colour between beige and yellow, sticky in his stooping grip. Holds the dirty thing to his ear and waits, says nothing, expects a voice but there’s only the sound of empty wires and lonely nights, some jerk like him hoping it’s a woman at the other end, though against his own TV’s low mumble Conroy can’t even hear breathing, a void without background.
An infinite number of possible worlds and alternative realities.