Mobius Dick Read online

  CONTENTS

  Title

  Call Me: H.

  From The Angel Returns

  Predestined

  Harry’s Tale

  From Professor Faust

  Ghosts

  Harry’s Tale

  A Natural Explanation

  Harry’s Tale

  Enlightenment

  From Professor Faust

  Arrival

  Harry’s Tale

  Author’s Postscript

  About the Author

  Copyright

  CALL ME: H.

  The text arrived on John Ringer’s phone as he worked at his desk in the university. He heard a beep, brought his Q-phone from his pocket and read the cryptic message. Call me: H. Nothing more. No indication of who H was, or how he was supposed to get in touch. Only a ‘user not found’ when he hit ‘reply’. Immediately he thought of Helen.

  He recalled having read something in the manual about a ‘call trace’ feature, but since even changing the ring-tone on this next-generation device was beyond his abilities, there was little chance of his implementing it. Clutching the slim phone in his hand, stabbing awkwardly at tiny keys designed for teenage fingers, he went through several menus – in the random, empirical fashion modern technology dictates – and by way of a few adverts and a shopping channel found himself looking at the campus events listings. Lunchtime lecture (Modern Literature): Vicious Cycloids.

  He wanted to know about H, not the entertainment programme of the arts faculty. He tried backtracking through the menus, regretting that he, a theoretical physics professor in his forties, did not himself belong to the ‘next generation’ who could not only navigate these contraptions with ease, but could do so while simultaneously chewing gum and talking in tutorials. The caller, he reasoned, could not be Helen. He had not seen or heard from his former lover for many years. But perhaps what the message meant was: ‘Call me regarding H’. Some important news. Even a chance to meet again.

  Or more probably a stray text, a wrong number. A tiny, trivial piece of another person’s existence that had inadvertently dropped itself into his, forcing him to make sense of it. We are a species of pattern finders. Evolution made us so.

  It was like the lecture title he’d stumbled on: Vicious Cycloids. Ringer found it again on his phone, and this too seemed addressed to him. The cycloid is a geometrical curve; not what you’d expect in a talk on literature. Perhaps Ringer’s Q-phone (like his brain) had a way of filtering relevant information; it knew the cycloid to be a classic example of mathematical beauty: the place where art and science meet. He might even once have told Helen about it.

  He decided to go to the lecture. As one o’clock approached, armed with his lunchbox, Ringer ventured out of the physics department to a region of the university he had never previously explored; one whose walls lacked the Hubble photographs and conference posters so familiar in his usual scientific domain, yet which nevertheless exuded its own kind of intellectual intimidation, its narrow corridors suggesting the ill-planned labyrinth of a doctor’s surgery. Eventually finding himself at the appointed seminar room, he took a seat – surrounded by humanities postgrads and staff who presumably, like him, had no better way to pass their lunch hour – and waited with high expectations for the show to start.

  The speaker – a well-bosomed but disappointingly plain woman, lecturer at some university or other – immediately launched into a discussion of Moby-Dick, whose ninety-sixth chapter is about ‘try-pots’: large cauldrons for rendering whale carcasses. The hero, Ishmael, finds himself inside one, cleaning its shiny metal surface, and its specially curved shape prompts a remarkable discovery. ‘In geometry,’ says Ishmael, ‘all bodies gliding along the cycloid, my soapstone for example, will descend from any point in precisely the same time.’

  Herman Melville evidently knew that a pendulum, if it sweeps a cycloid, will keep perfect time. Unfortunately the lecturer hadn’t done quite so much background research. The real significance of the passage, she announced, is that ‘cycloid’ is an old-fashioned word for the personality-type later called manic-depressive or bipolar. So chapter ninety-six of Moby-Dick is not about geometry; it’s about mental health.

  At this point Ringer’s attention lapsed. He suddenly understood the difference between the speaker’s discipline and his own. She had latched onto a verbal coincidence and was treating it as a profound insight. Ringer was only here because of a glitch in his mobile phone. The same random leaps were the basis of this woman’s mind and career.

  His affair with Helen was a matter of chance, too. They met over lunch; not sandwiches in a seminar room, but a crowded university canteen where they found themselves sharing a table. They each placed a book beside their food as they sat down opposite one another, preparing to dine in polite, mutually oblivious silence. Hers was Doktor Faustus. His was Quantum Fields in Curved Space.

  Perhaps, when she finally spoke, it was simply because she’d grown tired of her quiche. ‘I wish I could understand that,’ she said suddenly, her mouth not entirely free of food, nodding in the direction of Ringer’s book. ‘But I was always terrible at maths.’

  ‘And I’ve never been good with novels,’ he replied.

  She looked puzzled; her smooth brow became knotted with a bemused wrinkle. ‘What’s so difficult about reading a novel?’ she asked, following the remark with a mouthful of salad while he paused over his fish and chips.

  ‘They bore me,’ Ringer said. ‘All those made-up stories about people who never existed. Where are the facts? Where are the ideas? I want a book to give me a window on a new way of thinking; not mirror things I already know.’

  ‘Then perhaps you should try this novelist,’ she said, tapping the book beside her with the base of her fork. ‘Thomas Mann. Plenty of ideas there, believe me.’

  Mann, she explained, was fond of bringing a great deal of background information into his stories. ‘For example,’ she said, ‘take this part here.’ She put down her knife and fork, lifted the German novel and leafed through it. Ringer noticed how pretty she looked, her dark hair tumbling across her forehead, making her resemble a serious schoolgirl before an audience of parents as she carefully located one of several parts labelled with protruding bookmarks of yellow paper. She then began to translate for him a passage that slowly assembled itself into what he recognized to be a reference to cosmological expansion, buried in a novel about a composer who invents a new kind of art and pays for it with his sanity.

  ‘Perhaps I ought to read Doktor Faustus,’ he said. ‘It sounds better than most novels.’

  ‘First try The Magic Mountain,’ she told him. ‘That’s about a man who goes to a tuberculosis clinic in the Swiss Alps. It came out in the nineteen twenties, and Mann got the Nobel Prize not long after.’

  ‘That’s a striking coincidence.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The fact that we should both be sitting here, you with your Thomas Mann and me with my physics. Because the main subject of my book is something called the Schrödinger equation. It’s the fundamental rule of quantum mechanics. And do you know how Schrödinger found it? One Christmas in the nineteen twenties he went to a tuberculosis clinic in the Swiss Alps.’

  Coincidences mean only whatever we want them to. Thomas Mann wrote a novel about a sanatorium, then a year after it was published, Erwin Schrödinger went to a similar establishment and made his famous discovery. Both got the Nobel Prize for their efforts and became celebrated as philosophers of their age. Is there any connection? Absolutely none.

  That’s not how Ms Vicious Cycloids would see it, though. When Ringer tuned in to her lecture again, they’d left Melville altogether. Now the subject was the composer Robert Schumann; a manic depressive whose ‘cycloidal’ personali
ty manifested itself in cyclical works like the piano suite Kreisleriana, whose name comes from the German for ‘circle maker’. Or should that be – as the lecturer now asked with a piquant, rhetorical smirk – ‘cycloid maker’? This, Ringer understood, was what counted for logical argument in her line of work: random hyperlinks as arbitrary as skipping from one menu to another on a Q-phone; as fortuitous as sitting down for lunch opposite the person who will become your lover.

  With Helen, finding such links was no more than an erudite form of flirting. Vicious Cycloids was a similarly rhetorical exercise in social manoeuvring. The speaker did, to be fair, mention pendulums – but only as a way of then hauling in the name Foucault, and hence another avenue of pointless associations. For her, Ringer realized, there was no truth or falsehood, only ‘texts’ to be ‘deconstructed’. Too bad if any of those texts should happen to be a wrong number, and all interpretation consequently wrong.

  He brought out his Q-phone and tried to pull the mysterious message back onto the screen, his menu-hopping instead sending him to the leisure section where a sudden loud and fully orchestrated burst of Rhapsody in Blue caused heads to turn in anger. He sheepishly switched off the phone and put it back inside his pocket.

  Call me: H. What did it mean? Almost certainly nothing. And yet there was a chance – only a chance – that it really was connected with Helen.

  ‘It’s an interesting parallel,’ she’d said to him, pushing a lettuce leaf with her fork. ‘Mann and Schrödinger. I might even be able to work it into my thesis.’ She was studying German literature in relation to philosophy. ‘But how do physicists get their inspiration? I’d be fascinated to know.’ Helen looked at him across the table with eyes that suddenly promised more than conversation.

  Sex was Schrödinger’s inspiration. Holidaying at the sanatorium where he had formerly been treated, he arranged for a lover to join him. And somehow this obscure physicist, who had hitherto done nothing of outstanding value, discovered the equation for quantum waves.

  Maybe it was a fluke. Who knows, perhaps the great message was really meant for someone else. God mis-dialled, and it was Schrödinger, not the intended recipient, who came down from the mountain with Hψ=Eψ in his pocket. His ticket to world fame, a place in history. Like Mann – like everyone – he never entertained the possibility that his success might be due to luck. When events work to our advantage, we prefer to call it destiny or talent.

  ‘Perhaps there’s something magical about mountains,’ Ringer suggested.

  ‘It’s like Nietzsche,’ Helen said. ‘He was hiking in Switzerland when he had his vision of Zarathustra.’

  ‘And he went totally mad,’ Ringer recalled.

  ‘Nietzsche lies behind Doktor Faustus,’ she told him gravely, and while her face was lowered he divined, like a faint galaxy, the protrusion of a nipple beneath her red pullover. ‘Nietzsche saw music as expressing the essence of existence. This was Schopenhauer’s notion: it became Wagner’s creed. But Mann realized that with its mysticism, its irrationality, this philosophy of idealism could only lead in the end to the collective madness of fascism.’

  Like the cycloid story Ringer found himself listening to years later, this was a neat and entirely untestable theory (unless one could rerun history without Nietzsche and see if Hitler still rose to power). But with Helen he had been more patient, because none of it was about fact or reason. It was about the promise of her naked body; the promise – soon to be fulfilled – of chance and beauty, and the momentary sensation of being truly alive. We are irrational animals: nature made us so. Thus each of his and Helen’s words, no matter how coolly abstract, was only a coded form of a more important communication that read: ‘There is a point in spacetime where you are commanded to make love, and you must find it.’

  Or else it said Call me: H. Years after last seeing her, Ringer’s Q-phone had picked up a signal that had traversed the cosmos, and now here he was, listening to a lecture that reminded him of Helen. It was a meaningless coincidence; and the same fictitious force was what kept Vicious Cycloids trundling along.

  The lecturer was describing how Ishmael, crouched in the metal try-pot, would have seen his own distorted reflection beneath him; so for a moment he would have acquired a cycloidal doppelgänger and gone slightly mad – just like Schumann, who based Kreisleriana on an E. T. A. Hoffmann novel about a crazed musician scared at one point by his reflection in a curved mirror. This took them to Lacan’s ‘psychoanalytic topology’ – in which the male erectile organ is equated with the square root of minus one – and then on to another chain of absurd connections.

  Ringer had heard of E. T. A. Hoffmann, though, thanks to Helen. So anyone might guess it was all terribly significant, this lecture he’d blundered into, with its multiple cross-references. No doubt some imaginative novelist could conceive a logical scheme linking everything: Hoffmann, Schumann, Schrödinger, Mann. Some grand unified theory in which Helen and Ringer would be quantum resonances; their lovemaking (that first time, on the rug before the sputtering gas fire in his flat) a narrative inevitability.

  But life is not a novel, except for those vain enough to consider themselves creatures of art. Ringer knew otherwise. The experiencing of his life came to him by means of a mental search engine that sifted and filtered according to subjective relevance. Finding patterns in the output was as easy as seeing faces in clouds.

  This was why he had so often seen Helen: strangers who looked like her from behind, or were glimpsed by him through the reflections of a bus window as it set off and sped from view. Women who, if he could look at them properly, would be totally unlike the one he first met in the university canteen, pushing her uneaten salad to one side as their encounter reached its critical moment, then resting her chin on steepled hands and saying simply, ‘So?’ as her eyes flashed their celestial promise once again.

  Call me: H. It could not be Helen, because after the end of their affair she abandoned her studies, went abroad, and eluded his every effort to contact her. It was as if she had disappeared from the earth; her name, in the following years whenever he had searched for it, was absent from every phone directory, even the Internet. She might have died, or changed her identity. More likely, she had simply slipped over the horizon of his existence, in the same way that most acquaintances pass unnoticed.

  What if he were ever to see her again? She would probably be married with children, like Ringer. Their shared past would be laughably irrelevant; they could instead become passionless friends. Probably best, then, if he never saw her.

  The lecture was still rolling on as he rejoined it. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael watches the try-pot, filled with greasy whaleflesh, burn and bubble through the night, prompting morbid thoughts of death and insanity. In the end Ishmael’s not even sure if he’s awake or asleep – the world has become ‘in some enchanted way, inverted’. And that, the speaker explained, is why Melville, in his densely meaningful little episode, made the gleaming trypots cycloidal. They are a symbol of time and madness, of multiplicity and reversal: themes pursued elsewhere by Hoffmann and Schumann. Three years after Moby-Dick was published to murderously hostile reviews, Schumann starved himself to death in an asylum. He was posthumously diagnosed as suffering from dementia praecox – schizophrenia – by the psychiatrist Paul Möbius.

  And this, it turned out, was the punchline they’d been heading for all along; for now they came – as the speaker triumphantly declared – ‘full-cycloid’; but with a twist, as in a Möbius strip. Melville based his story on a legendary whale called Mocha Dick. Surely, when altering the name for his book, he made the wrong choice. A novel that has a mirrored double-personality at its heart should rather be called Mobius Dick.

  And there the lecture ended. Some audience members were able to summon up a question, but the only one in Ringer’s mind was: ‘What the hell was all that about?’ He picked up his empty sandwich box and headed back to the theoretical physics department, fully convinced he had chosen the right degree subj
ect thirty years previously.

  Forget the text, he decided. Call me: H meant nothing. Life is not a narrative. To think otherwise is a game novelists play in order to delight and entertain; some professors play it too, but only so as to confuse. Ringer sat down at his desk, and when he brought his Q-phone from his pocket not long afterwards, he saw to his surprise that the text, immune to all his fumblings, had decided to display itself again. Had it resurfaced like a restless ghost? Or had the unknown caller sent it again?

  FROM THE ANGEL RETURNS

  by Heinrich Behring*

  Not an easy journey for a woman of my age, but I made it twice. The first time, in May of 1855, I found Schumann unwell, though not beyond hope. A year later, all hope was gone. Dr Richarz had clearly done a fine job on his most illustrious patient, having made him every bit as sick as the good doctor always guessed him to be.

  Richarz is supposed to be one of the more enlightened physicians, but Endenich is a dismal place. A dreary courtyard leading to a dreary house, where a dozen or so patients have their days of madness measured out in grains of sedative. Schumann’s suite was upstairs, offering a view of nearby Bonn he sickened of, and a piano he played seldom, and badly. On my first visit he longed only for escape. On my second, it was clear that one exit alone was left to him.

  Richarz is amiable, incompetent and somewhat deaf. Overwhelmed by the success of his unique private hospital, he has had to delegate much of the work to subordinates trained at public asylums; warders who think it therapy to sit silently with their mournful charges in local taverns. At least Schumann was spared this. Instead, while still able, he was taken for long, pointless walks: visiting Beethoven’s birthplace, or picking violets at the roadside.

  ‘There was really no need to come again, Frau von Arnim,’ Dr Richarz said, mildly flustered, as he received me in his office. ‘Your journey is entirely unnecessary.’ Medical notes burdened his desk in disarray. He sat down and tried putting them in order, peering at me over his spectacles as he rustled the stiff, useless documents.