“Rosier.”
“Usually it means faith and purity.”
“The people Laura was investigating.”
“I’d really better go and see what that little rascal of mine’s up to, would you like to keep the cards a while longer?”
Conroy nods silently, dumbstruck by revelation, while the lady tries to raise herself from the sagging sofa, making the effort several times until Conroy notices and reaches to help lift her, then she totters away, muttering to herself about the cat. Conroy hears the front door close and stares at the cards piled in his hand. The Rosier Corporation, that was what Laura called it. He needs to find out more but if he leaves again he’s sure to be spotted by the man who’s been following him, too risky even going to the window to check. So Conroy waits, immobile like an insect beneath a stone, watching the slow change of daylight and feeling the empty hours push shadows slowly across the walls of the room.
Must have fallen asleep because now it’s dark, his body wooden like the old lady’s, wrecked and invisible. The cards are gone, they aren’t in his hand or lap or on the floor at his feet, as if she came back for them. He strains upright, sways with sleep still clinging to him, the sky outside livid again with night colour, purple and orange. He goes and looks down from the window and no one’s there, they’ve given up. Safe to go out and find food.
Half an hour later he’s walking in drizzle eating chips by the handful, throws the half-full container in a skip. Two women are having a drunken argument in front of a kebab shop, it stands next to the pallid glow of a place calling itself an internet café, white-walled room where a couple of foreign-looking youths sit staring at screens as a refuge from boredom. Conroy goes inside, buys a coffee from the machine, takes a seat and pays the access fee. The police can easily find him here but he doesn’t care.
“Hey, darling.” It’s one of the women, standing unsteadily in the doorway and leaning on its frame for support, tits palely bulging like old lard. His stare unnerves her, a reminder of the state they’ve both let themselves fall into, though it doesn’t sink in at first, instead she simply looks puzzled. Conroy imagines the scene if she was beautiful and sober, he anything but a loser, imagines it so clearly that he feels transfigured, wants to tell her about his secret mission, take her on the run with him. Instead he stares until she sneers back at him, “Fuck off,” and waddles out of sight.
He wants to find out more about Rosier, begins typing but is soon interrupted.
“David?”
Must have been standing silently behind Conroy for some time. Dark jacket and tie, shirt a deep shade of burgundy, immaculately trimmed hair, olive skin. A neat, theatrical appearance like a stage hypnotist.
“You’ve been following me.”
No one else in the internet café, the two slouching youths have left while Conroy was staring at the screen. There’s only himself and the guy.
“Who are you?”
“Call me H.”
“Are you with the police? The Corporation?”
H says nothing, draws up a chair, the only sound the whirring of computer fans and a distant siren outside.
“You’ve come to erase me, same as you did to Laura.”
“You shouldn’t have stopped taking your medication.”
“That’s not how this started.”
H nods thoughtfully. “Who can say where anything begins or ends?” He reaches into his jacket pocket, brings out a fine silver chain, holds one end and lets it hang for Conroy’s inspection.
“Laura’s.”
“Something I found.” H twirls it in his fingers. “Where’s the first link? Top, bottom, somewhere in the middle? Is what happens today caused by whatever occurred yesterday; or might events be explained by something still to come? You’re a musician, you understand how everything leads to a final chord, a cadence, perhaps a resolution.”
Conroy looks round towards the door and sees only darkness and emptiness beyond, as if the city itself has been obliterated. “You’re not real. None of this is real.”
“For example, think of some of your favourite piano compositions. Where does Kreisleriana end? Not the final note, that’s for certain, it’s still playing inside your head. Or the ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata? Beethoven finished the whole thing and sent it to the publisher, then at the very last moment he decided to add a single bar at the opening of the slow movement. We hear it in the middle when really it’s the conclusion — or beginning.”
“What happened to Laura?”
“She never existed.”
“Then why do I remember?”
“Mistakes happen.” H smiles, crumples the thin chain in his fist and returns it to his pocket. “What if Beethoven’s letter hadn’t arrived at the publisher’s in time, and the extra bar wasn’t added? Would anyone notice? If things had gone a little differently, might we now rate Spohr over Schubert, or Hummel over Mendelssohn? If history could be altered…”
“It can’t.”
“Think of any piece you play: a fixed score, yet every performance is unique. Physical reality is like the score, existing outside of time. History is performance.” H reaches again into his pocket and brings out something else that Conroy recognises.
“The old lady’s cards. You broke in and took them.”
H shuffles the deck without comment, then fans them, just as the lady did, and holds them out, face-down, for Conroy to make his selection.
“Why should I play this game, you’ve already made the choice for me.”
H appears amused, even pleased. “A performer knows all about the tricks of persuasion. Yes, the game was rigged, you were always meant to lose, but go on, take a card, see what you get.”
Conroy places his finger on one then immediately changes his mind and touches another.
“Are you sure?” H asks.
Conroy opts for a third, pulls the card from the man’s grip and turns it to see the picture. A corpse dangling in a gibbet. “Suicide,” he murmurs, reading the legend.
“What Klauer did and didn’t do. The thing every artist yearns for.”
“Death?”
H shakes his head. “Immortality. Forever sacrificing yourself, yet surviving.”
“This was always about Klauer.”
“It’s about what he stole.”
1967. West Germany
Theodor Adorno wakes, rolls and sees Ulrike still asleep beside him, pale shoulder studded with fine freckles. Late afternoon sunshine filters through the thin curtains of her apartment, it’s in one of Frankfurt’s noisier suburbs, swelled by immigrants and perpetually permeated, it seems, by amplified music. Teddie must be home before seven.
Praxis is the ensemble of means for minimising material necessity. It therefore becomes identical with pleasure. Yet pleasure is denied within a society that asserts only rational practicality. Being married and sixty-four years old shouldn’t stop a man fucking his student. Ulrike appreciates the hermetic character of play. Her record collection includes only the latest rock-and-roll releases, nevertheless her non-compulsory attendance at his course on advanced dialectics has indicated to him acute awareness of the fundamental contradiction those commodities represent. Sex, too, can be understood negatively. That he is not with his wife should not imply infidelity. He has never kept secrets from Gretel, except when too nugatory to be worth mentioning.