And he looked very seldom, I expect, into the chest where, when he left Cambridge, he had packed all the evidences of what had occupied and so absorbed his intense and flaming spirit in his rooms and his garden and his elaboratory between the Great Gate and Chapel.
But he did not destroy them. They remained in the box…
That was his magic. Keynes called Newton “the last of the magicians” and blamed all that alchemy nonsense on his having been tempted by the devil. But then, Keynes was just trying to fashion a comfort blanket of his own. A normal that worked for him. One with a devil—the devil—standing ready to take the fall. A safe ending with all the magic shut up in a box, all the magicians silenced forever.
Because he knew that if Newton wasn’t the last, then we aren’t safe.
—
Safe, trapped, whatever. Here I am. I end up here. Flat on my back on a hotel bed in Toronto and agony. The acid in my chest is killing me, but this is normal. It’s just a stress reaction.
Tomorrow is my fortieth birthday, but that isn’t what’s stressing me out. I’d love to be forty. Forty will fit so much better, now that I am old. Perhaps forty is the year I’ll outgrow my acne. Although I’ve heard you have to have a healthy gut before you get healthy skin, so I’m not holding my breath. If only everything could be a little less interconnected sometimes.
And it’s not because tomorrow I’m supposed to give a keynote in front of a hundred people, half of whom are quietly thinking I’m an uppity overpromoted female. Ever got up in front of a crowd like that and done your best work? We’ll strive to please you every fucking day, and it’s so much better not to feel like it’s your body on the line but Jeff doesn’t get that. Or he won’t let me get it. In the taxi from the airport, there was an ad on the back of the front seat advertising some tourist attraction, an aquarium maybe: Feel like you’re there. And the billboard on the side of this brick hotel: Be here now. Fuck them all. I don’t have to. I can’t. I don’t want to.
I finally finished the letter of resignation I’ve been drafting and redrafting for the last five years.
Dear Dean Crawley,
I am dying here.
But this doesn’t mean anything.
I have an email from The Cop this morning with the subject line Urgent: your package, marked as “high priority” in my inbox. She writes that the crystal pendant on the choker I sent her was an incredibly valuable diamond. It belonged to a minor royal, who lost it when she was an undergrad at Christ’s and there was a fire in a nearby nightclub where she had snuck out with a (non-approved) man friend. The whereabouts of the diamond since the incident were never known—its loss only came out much later. She was never supposed to have been at that club, nor with the young man in question, so she didn’t tell anyone until her family demanded to see it for an insurance revaluation. Then she’d been so shamed over losing the stone that she’d killed herself. A week later the man friend, to whom it turned out she had been secretly married for four years, did the same. That pretty little crystal I stole, vested with such incredible power. It had been a receptacle for two lives.
The Cop’s email said she was going to have to hand the stone over to the authorities and explain where she had got it, and she was really sorry but she would have to tell them who’d had it all these years. She would explain that it was an accident and I didn’t know. I laughed out loud when I read that part. How like me, to have no idea what’s right in front of my face. Or right around my neck. To have ignored the dimension in which we turn base matter into things immeasurably precious, and the other way around. I have always been blind in this particular way, to what is and what isn’t worth a damn. Now that blindness has made me not only a thief, but a double murderer.
And even this, even this doesn’t mean anything to me. It’s not that I don’t understand, it’s just that there’s no weight in it. In any of it.
—
No. You know why my chest is on fire? It’s because I saw her. This afternoon. Pink twinset and pearls and blonde hair, like she hadn’t aged a day in twenty years.
Why the hell would Deb be in Toronto? Who cares? The Cop was in Seattle, wasn’t she? I was downtown, it was crowded and I had the worst migraine I can remember. It was so hot. Unseasonably, eerily hot, like Toronto had found a crack in Canada and slipped into Hades. I was stumbling through a stream of people flowing in the opposite direction, cursing and swerving to avoid me, when all of a sudden the migraine wasn’t about pain anymore. The missing piece of my visual field was there. I could see it. I mean, I could see with it, through it. The crystalline arc of impossible colour was brighter
