Forty-One

Mark Werth was also awake before dawn.

He rolled over in bed and checked the clock: three-thirty. It was very dark. He sat up and looked through the uncurtained window, and saw that it had been raining.

He lived in a small house at the end of a lane. The village was over twenty miles from the hospital: a necessary distance to maintain his sanity. It was not a picturesque setting, although he had been lulled into thinking so when he had first bought the house after seeing it on two consecutive Sundays in spring. It was the last in a terrace, and beyond his garden the lane petered out into a rutted track that linked his village with the next one.

His view was good: pasture and crop and a long wooded hill. The wind blew down the hill, summer and winter, cracking the fascia boards and old cast-iron guttering of the house and, alternately by season, scorching or freezing his irregular attempts at gardening. He was not a good gardener, or cook, or housewife. He forgot to shop, forgot to drain radiators, to fill up the oil tank, clean the oven, or make the bed. He missed being married desperately—his wife had left him ten years before, and they had no children. His life now was filled with work.

He was lonely—especially at three-thirty in the morning.

He got up, knowing by experience that any further sleep would be fitful. He dressed in an old sweatshirt, jogging pants and trainers, went downstairs, made himself coffee, then opened the back door, walking out into the darkness with a full cup.

He went up the long path to the rusty wrought-iron gate, and looked up the lane. It disappeared into the inky green of the hill. He looked back down the row of other houses, and saw a light in one far down by the village main street. He raised his cup to the far dot of light.

The night was cold, and the sky was full of scudding clouds. More rain was coming. There was something intensely intimate in the darkness, as if the night breathed and moved. He thought of Lin Gallagher, wondering where she was.

She had a curious face: it betrayed very little, though it was constantly mobile. Her expressions were rather plastic, as if the merest smile took effort, used more facial muscles than normal. And yet the eyes were a little dead … was that correct? Accurate? Perhaps they were not so much dead as self-protective. She reminded him a little of Parkinsonism. There was a rigidity of facial muscles in that, but a random neural firing in the thalamus caused tremor. She was kind of reversed Parkinson’s, a mirror Parkinson’s. The face moved but the eyes blanked. She was somewhere else inside her head.

He had seen many Parkinson cases. Their suffering was caused by the death of cells in the basal ganglia. There was new work being done in that field, by planting electrodes in the thalamus that overrode the signals from cells deprived of dopamine. This seemed to control tremor, even eradicate it. During the operation to implant the electrodes, the patient remained conscious throughout, so that the surgeon could discover exactly where the implant should be. Then a small generator, activated by a magnet swipe, was placed under the skin of the chest wall.

It had been called the brain pacemaker, and it fascinated him, precisely because it proved to him that the brain was an electrical box—advanced, vastly complicated, delicate beyond measure, but still just a small box of infinitely beautiful electrical parts. He believed what he had told Lin, that feelings were electrical manifestations. He believed there was no life after that electrical connection had been switched off by related systems in the body. Logically there could not possibly be.

He finished his coffee and put the empty cup down on the wall next to him. Yet she had told him that there was something else: a super-system that controlled the lesser single forms, the individual brains. She had told him that, if he only looked, he would see it all around him.

He considered the dark. There were no electrical pylons in this valley, but just beyond the hill a line of them marched all the way to the Bristol Channel. He knew of the mounting evidence that their fields might interfere with human brain activity. He knew that the same studies showed that this influence was greater between the pylons, at a midway point, rather than actually underneath them. He had seen cases that seemed to point to abnormal cell activity as a result of electrical interference—mobile-phone tumours, as someone had called them, close to the ear. Leukaemia in children who slept with their heads close to electrical meters. Nothing definite, nothing absolutely proven, however. He was yet to be convinced.

There were electrical and magnetic fields everywhere. The earth itself was a complex grid of them. Anyone who sat at a computer was bombarded with emissions: light, ultraviolet light, electromagnetic radiation, positive ions. Modern society was an electrical circus: televisions, radios, stereos, air-conditioners, fridges, freezers, cookers, kettles, irons, hairdryers, washing machines. The world couldn’t run without its power cables, transformers, substations. Perhaps, when Lin talked of connections, she was actually talking of simple and prosaic physical systems: like the pylons, the cables. He could have accepted that. Even perhaps accepted that the brain responded to them as one electrical cell to another.

But she did not mean that, he knew.

If there was a super-system, an energy greater than themselves, greater than the myriad other electrical systems in the world, where was it located? Its generation would be huge. It would have a source of measurable and overwhelming proportions. But there was no such source. Human beings did not plug into some sort of psychic substation in order to operate. There was nothing that any reasonable human being recognized as the source of their thoughts, other than themselves, their own brains. There was no net site where any superior control could be contacted. Some theories suggested that the world was a single operating machine, but he couldn’t see it. No efficient machine regularly destroyed parts of itself, or tolerated beings that were perfectly capable of destroying the whole framework in a single nuclear afternoon. There was no God, no other power. Lin’s sensation of significance, that she believed would protect her through her illness, that she believed was so much more valuable than even her own survival, was an illusion. An illusion that would kill her.

He noticed a rim of light just beyond the hill. At first a barely paler shade than the dark, it rapidly changed: first to blue, then white. The trees on the hill became gradually visible. He saw the road going through the centre of this picture, and then disappearing in the woodland. He understood what Lin was getting at; that he was connected to the road, and to the country that lay beyond the road. Because he was standing here, at one point along its length, he bore a relation to the road and to every other point along it. And the road bore a relation to the land on either side of it. The field shapes were determined by the road, and vice versa. The positions of the houses were determined by the shape of the fields, the dissection of the roads. That much was obvious. But, if he understood her right, she was saying that the fields could not exist without the road, the road without the houses, the houses without the man, the man without the fields … that he was a part of a process of continual regeneration, that without him the whole complex chain of time and effect would fail and alter. That the enormous whole depended upon the microcosmic. The most reverberating event upon inconsequential trivia … he watched the sky. Would that colour, that peculiar tone of rose, alter if he had never been here to witness it?

He had sometimes thought of those chains—but not for a long time. It must have been as a teenager, a sixth-form student, when he had last indulged in the kind of conversation that hypothesized on whether Kennedy would have been shot had the car gone a little slower, a little faster; if he had woken earlier; if he had not gone to Dallas at all. Was his death certain, or moulded by detail? Would the plot to kill him have fallen apart because of a series of small alterations?

Werth thought of his own background. Was each birth meant to be, or simply an accident? Was each death meant to be? Would he still have been born if his father had married someone else? Lin said yes: his soul pursued an organized path.

He knew what he said. He said no.

He had no soul. His birth was merely coincidental. In the world as a whole, it had no meaning.

Mark Werth began to smile. He had never understood why people ran after those shapeless notions the way they did. In college he could never work out what the arts students found to write whole essays about. What the hell did it matter if Hamlet loved his mother? Hamlet did not exist. He was a figment of a sixteenth-century imagination. Werth didn’t care if Picasso was a cubist, or Luther a visionary. It was all irrelevant.

But numbers, chemicals … they were real, they could be forecast. You could write a paper on ribonudeic acid, and it meant something. It moved the world forward a fraction of an inch. It was concrete. It existed.

He picked up the cup, and walked back down the path.

Lin Gallagher existed too—not as an idea or a philosophy, but as a miraculous physical machine that could be repaired.

And, as he put his hand on the door handle, Werth realized that he very much wanted that particular machine to live.