Dark Terrors 3: The Gollancz Book of Horror

I stared at my face in the mirror. A nasty zit was blooming in the crease between my nose and cheek, and my hair had visibly thinned again during the night. Where did it go?

‘You know Klein. He’s on to another of his big ideas. Something about a relationship between deconstruction and chaos theory. Really, the bastard already knows it better than I do. You remember Derrida’s notion of sous rature, putting things under erasure?’

Elaine half-squinted at me. ‘Ehhhhh. ’

I sat on the edge of the bed, softly rubbing her belly. I often do it without even thinking. ‘You know how he writes a word, then crosses it out, but leaves the crossed-out expression in the text?’

‘I think I vaguely remember. It’s been a while, though, and I could never stomach any of that crap.’

‘Yeah, it’s all a bit of a con. Or a decon. But erasure’s meant to indicate a concept or idea that’s under question or whose meaning is to be doubted. An idea that’s been negated, but not dismissed. By placing it sous rature, it can be there and not there at the same time. Well, that’s a nasty simplification, but you get the idea.’

‘Uh-huh. ’

‘So Klein thinks this somehow ties in with fractal geometry. After reading some Derrida, he’s decided that deconstruction is, and I quote, “a chaotic philosophical function”. And he claims that the process is dangerous because it has fractal contours. Something about gamma matrices approaching a threshold in maximum likelihood models.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I know, I know. He explained it to me for an hour, but I didn’t get it, and it was four o’clock in the damn morning. Anyway, he’s all excited about it, so we’re going to meet for lunch. But you know Klein.’

‘We all know Klein,’ Elaine sighed. I kissed her again and headed out the door. I thought she said something and stuck my head back in the room.

‘How’s that?’

Her hands were folded over the empty mug resting lightly on her bulging stomach and she stared at the wall with her head cocked slightly to one side.

‘I thought I heard bells again,’ she said.

The student union is the oldest building on campus: a massive Gothic structure embraced by thick tendons of ivy and perched at the edge of Library Slope. The Senior Common Room offers a stunning view of the valley below and a sparkling expanse of water to the northwest. The place was packed, but Klein had already secured seats. The canteen food was your basic pre-processed, post-industrial gruel, but the university subsidizes the prices so there’s always a queue.

Klein looked his usual dishevelled self, every bit the absent-minded professor. He wore a creased, sky blue shirt that was a couple of sizes too big, with the cuffs flapping loose and the buttons fastened all the way up to his chin. His black polyester pants nearly matched the shade of his peeling Hush Puppies, but he wore them at high tide depth and they didn’t go at all with the brown socks that drooped around his bony ankles. Klein’s kinky red hair was thin across the top, lending him an unfortunate Bozo the Clown look exaggerated by his over-large nose. The bags under his eyes were thick and dark as war paint, and magnified by a pair of cheap glasses that were filthy beyond belief.

Klein hadn’t shaved and had his usual odour about him. It was the smell of someone who’s just come off a lengthy flight: not dirty, exactly, but musky and tired. Klein works odd hours and on more than one occasion I’ve been around when his wife — a truly stunning redhead named Margaritte — has had to publicly scold him about bathing. Klein never gets embarrassed; he just forgets such mundanities.

‘You see the paper?’ he said by way of greeting.

‘Let me guess: rationing on soap and water.’

Klein looked puzzled for a moment, then unselfconsciously sniffed at his armpit. An elderly administrative type at the next table snorted, but Klein didn’t notice.

‘Oh,’ he shrugged. ‘Sorry. I’ve been working.’

‘What’s in the news?’ I smiled.

He handed me a copy of the Guardian, folded over to the Style page.

‘You fashion beast!’ I said. He grinned like a kid and pointed at the lead item.

It was about a new line of women’s clothing. The patterns were to be fractal-based and there was considerable to-do about how they mirrored nature’s own true design, with some outrageous pseudo-scientific doublespeak about chaos theory and complexity.

‘Old B. Bronski’s ahead of his time,’ I mumbled.

‘Heh?’

‘Nothing. Yeah, so what? You could have predicted something like this. I think people already have. Christ, the bookstore sells fractal postcards.’

‘Read the sidebar.’

I skimmed the accompanying article. It was about the manufacturing process that had been devised for producing the clothes. The process was also rooted in fractal concepts, so that a standard assembly line could be employed, but every item produced would be subtly different. The idea was to create complete uniqueness within the confines of mass production. The engineer who designed the system was quoted as saying that his software package was going to revolutionize every aspect of assembly line manufacturing.

‘Interesting,’ I said, digging into my salad, ‘but also a little scary in that zany, fin-de-millennial way.’

‘Scary how?’ Klein’s eyes were alight.

‘If this is right, it maybe changes — or changes again — the definition of “unique”. If you can mass-produce singularity, then what does it mean? What possible value could be left for such a notion?’

Klein nodded approval and handed me the business page with a short item circled in red. Grundrisse-Rand had commissioned Frank Gehry to design their new EU headquarters in Bonn. It would be the first corporate commission of a piece of deconstructivist architecture, and one of the few major deconstructivist designs to be realized.

‘Yeah, I heard about this the other day on Radio 4. I thought the deconstructivist thing was yesterday’s news, but I guess someone’s interested. Gehry’s still hot, at least.’

‘But what do you make of it?’

‘I can’t say I much care for it, at least not the sketches I’ve seen. The stuff makes me sort of dizzy with all those odd angles and exposed superstructure. Very Weimar, somehow. Decadent. The kind of thing that’s fun in theory, but awful for the poor saps who’ll have to live and work in it. But then I don’t really know much about architecture.’

‘Bloody hell!’ Klein said, slapping his palm on the spread-out paper. ‘I’m talking about two articles on the same day in the fucking Guardian! Fractals and deconstruction!’

‘Yeah?’

‘It’s the ideas, Steve. Don’t you see. The ideas.’

‘Yeah?’ I tried again.

‘It’s what I was talking about last night. You know that there are very precise mathematical models for how things are diffused in culture? It doesn’t matter what — VCRs, compact discs, AIDS — they’re all the same in these models. Threshold criteria and critical mass levels determining rates of adoption. It’s all very calculable and occurs along an exaggerated S-shaped curve, with a small number of people adopting early on, then an explosion during which most everyone else climbs on the bandwagon.’

‘Sounds reasonable.’

‘Well, the thing is that it works for ideas and concepts, too. And what’s more, I think that when certain ideas — in the form of the things we call theories — fulfil those critical mass requirements, they become something more. Something. substantial.’

‘Don’t know if that’s true, but it sounds neat,’ I said. ‘I can’t even balance my chequebook so I don’t know from math models, but…well…what do you mean substantial? You mean accepted, right?’

‘No, Steve. I mean substantial. Palpable. Real. And it’s dangerous as hell.’

I was shaking my head. ‘You said that on the phone last night — this morning — but I still don’t follow.’

‘There’s a very thin line separating conception from reality. From the idea of something being true to that