Time passed, Cambridge continued in time, and I continued in Cambridge. Things sped up and I buckled in. One morning, I sat in a long hall full of rows of wooden seats and wrote a three-hour Part II Essay paper on the Liar paradox. I got my Double First, my M.Phil., my Ph.D. Scholarships and prizes turned into publications and conferences. It was a straight shot through a world that rewards straight shots. Things changed but nothing changed: my mind had sprouted its own sterile environment, an internal hospital ward—somewhere to wander all day, infinitely safe, like a well-harmonized Bach chorale. There are rules for these things. Expected progressions.
People considered this a good life. In the cheery voice of my aunt I heard, almost every day, Count your blessings! Only in my mind though. I didn’t call her anymore. It cost money, and what would have been the point?
After The Cop, there was no one left to ask about Deb, so I asked myself. Each night, when my work was done, I burrowed back into my notebooks, racking my brains to figure out what I’d missed. What connected all those things I had seen and learned. What the clue must be that I hadn’t noticed. What I had done wrong, or what I had failed to do.
You think you know someone but it’s always you. Whatever you think someone is, like if you try to guess what they feel like you’re only imagining what you’d feel like. It’s just you, back to front like a reflection. But I can see him, even on the TV screen, whatever they call it, not a “screen,” I know there’s nothing really there—I can see his eyes aren’t right. I can see it now, I couldn’t see it at first. Not back then, not for years actually. If you know how to see it in their eyes too then you would know what I mean, when they have that kind of red glow, not literally red, that’s how you know. Some of the nurses in here have it. Not all of them, but enough. More than enough. You need herd immunity with this kind of thing, like 99 per cent at least have to be okay, and even then you can fuck up. I thought I was okay but I seem to have fucked up royally.
Then again perhaps I just got unlucky.
Part Four “O”
But when I came unto my beds
Chapter Thirteen
I got out of Cambridge, but I couldn’t get it out of me.
I found research postdocs in English red-bricks for a few years, then permanent places at a series of respectable universities. Durham, UC Cork, Rutgers, CU Boulder. Always trending west, as it turned out. As if to bring on a sunset. To wind everything down, this whole process a slow glaze of red endings. What was I trying to end? I told myself I was leaving one job after another for the improved salary, reduced workload, colleagues I might be able to talk to. It just happened always to take me further and further away from the one institution I could not leave. And Deb, the absence of Deb, followed me everywhere. Like my own shadow following me down an alley, speeding up as I did. By my mid-thirties I’d made it all the way to Seattle and she was there too. Or rather, she was not there too. I began to wonder if I might settle. Where else was there to go?
Apart from Deb’s shadow, the only thing I always have with me these days is a compact mirror. With one of these, you can be surprisingly nimble at avoiding people in cafeterias and departmental common rooms. Like a wing mirror on a car: risks are larger than they appear. I could not care less if colleagues assume I’m obsessed with my appearance. I am. They are obsessed with it, too. Soon after I arrived, one of them started texting me about how much he liked it when I wore boots and a skirt.
Mostly people found my appearance misleading, and I was often mistaken for a secretary or a student. Once I was asked to chair a doctoral exam in the physics department. An interesting thesis on the theoretical relationship between entanglement and the nature of spatiotemporal dimensions. When I arrived there were seven or eight men milling about. They ignored me, so I attracted the attention of a youngish man at the edge of the group wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt. I told him who I was, and he swung around to address his companions.
“Time to get cracking, folks! The chair is here.”
“Ah, good,” said a friendly-looking older man with a soft grey beard and brown tweeds. “Where is he?”
For them, it was an awkward moment. Localized, occupying its little highlighted region in spacetime. It was not part of the pattern, the fabric of the universe, a signal received every day from every direction. The cosmic microwave background.
—
The University of Washington’s Seattle campus is a little sea of noise. Half-sentences seeping into corridors from the various nearby lectures. Fragmentary half-arsed questions trickling out of morning seminars, the most expensive and unenthusiastic book clubs in the world. The effluent of semi-private conversation pools mixing in the visual solvents that soothe us all out of daily mutiny: grey linoleum floors, clicky under our heels; sort-of-white walls; sort-of-yellow carpet; miserable blare of office lights always buzzing behind our dry eyes. And text. All the text that nobody reads because it is always there. Is that really garbage? Every day, everybody and
