They do this thing at Canard where they wrap a poached duck in soft clay and fire it in a kiln for half an hour. To liberate the roasted bird, whose juices the tightly fitted carapace has kept intact, removing any need for basting, they smash the hardened earthenware embalming with a hammer – right before you, at your table. It’s a Celtic recipe. The clay comes from the Evenlode by Charlbury a mile away, thick mud borne down there from the Cotswolds, sedimenting as the river winds its way past Ascott-under-Wychwood, Chadlington, Stow-on-the-Wold … The waiting list for tables seems to wind for just as long; Garnett tried once to get a reservation, and was offered an early-evening slot six months away. But Pilkington … Pilkington’s managed to grab a place for them in the two days since dropping him a line, asking to ‘pick his brains’. The man’s hooked up in many ways, through channels Garnett has learnt over the years not to enquire about too much. He’s waiting for him in a quiet little enclave, a snug almost, in the corner. It’s the best spot in the restaurant; they won’t be overheard.
‘My Anthony. Still tying paintbrushes to sheep?’
‘Things have progressed a little since then – as you know …’
Their hands unclasp and they sit down. A waiter passes by with bread. After he’s gone, Garnett enquires:
‘How’s Thérèse?’
No small talk, this – more of a plunge in at the deep end. Pilkington’s wife was diagnosed two years ago with Parkinson’s. Her state is not improving: tremors, cogwheel rigidity, pill-rolling fingers, festination … Pilkington uses the medical term for each of these symptoms, not bothering to translate or annotate, since he knows full well that Garnett understands them.
‘It’s ironic,’ he says when the list’s exhausted, ‘us two talking about this.’
Here, too, Garnett can follow perfectly, no need to gloss: they’re on the same page – same pages. The Human Use of Human Beings: the passages devoted to Parkinsonianism. Voluntary feedback regulating a main motion fails to establish equilibrium with postural feedback working in the opposite direction … oscillation levels spiral out of control … the patient reaches for a glass of water, and his hand overcorrects, swings too much, draws a too-wide arc … For Wiener, everything was feedback. When I pick up a cigar, I translate into action nothing other than a feedback mechanism, a reflex turning the amount by which I’ve not yet picked up the cigar into an order to the lagging muscles. When I shoot down a plane, my limbs on the ack-ack gun and the wire along which the firing order hums its way towards the earphones clamped round my head, the vacuum tubes that plot the plane’s path on a radar screen, and thus the timeline from which approach gradients to the spot of air it’s occupying right now can be extrapolated to predict the spot that it will occupy two seconds hence: all these make up an integrated circuit, in which servo-mechanism isn’t just the mode of mankind, but his measure also. And not just of mankind: elevators, steamboat engines, jellyfish amalgams, the whole architecture of abstracted systems such as economics or the law – these, too, are birthed and structured by (and therefore legible within) the matrix-womb of cybernetics. They were so excited by it, he and Pilkington: atheists both, it was as close as either of them came to having a religion. Spectres float between the two men now, kinking round curves of wineglasses and side plates: ghosts of two young engineering postgrads with wide collars, bushy sideburns, flaring cords, all fired up by the new world leaping at them from the pages of Nash, Bateson, Geyer and von Glasersfeld. But it was him they came back to, again and again – prophet, messiah and apostle, all contained within a single name and figure: Norbert Wiener. There was something in his vision that transcended informatics, systems- or game-theory; something Garnett thought he’d left behind with Aeschylus, Catullus, Sappho: a condition best denoted by the old, unscientific label poetry. We are (Garnett had this line taped to the wall above his ZX Spectrum’s screen) but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water; not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves … Or (this one from a passage that was read at his and Amber’s wedding): To be alive is to participate in a continuous stream of influences from the outer world and acts on the outer world in which we are merely the transitional stage …
‘It seemed so optimistic, then,’ Pilkington muses as he swills Malbec around his large-bowled Waterford. ‘Wiener was offering us a path to justice, knowledge, the unlocking of closed structures … What did he call it? Irreversible entry into a …’
‘Irreversible movement into a contingent future which is the true condition of human life,’ Garnett supplies the words.
‘Exactly. Man as open system. Society as an endless process of unfurling and cross-pollination. Life itself as file-sharing avant la lettre.’
‘Yes – to an extent …’ Garnett inspects his wine too, as though it, and not the proposition, were the suspect element. ‘But …’
‘But …’
‘Wasn’t the vision always tinted darkly, blood-tinged? All that Manichaean talk: the universe abandoned, running itself down … technocracy casting human responsibility to the winds, to have it come back seated on the whirlwind … the arms race, business, advertising rowing us into a maelstrom of destruction, or just floating us quietly on downstream, to the waterfall … He called us shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet. You look like you’re about to kill us.’
These last words are spoken to the waiter who’s raising a mallet just beside their heads. Used to such quips, the latter brings his weapon down to fracture the upturned hold of the duck that’s lying on the tray stand he’s unfolded by their table. The casing falls away, as do succulent legs and wings and fillet at his carving knife’s light touch. With tonged fork and spoon he serves these to them, lays some sprout tops on the side, refills their glasses and departs again.
‘For Wiener,’ Garnett mumbles after a few moments through cheeks filled with sweet brown flesh, ‘life was all about denying death. God’s, Santa Claus’s or your own: the need to alleviate the disaster of mortality is what fuels belief in progress, and the endless generation of bigger and better things, or “products” … The death-drive offset on to the assembly line …’
‘This,’ says Pilkington, ‘is what I wanted to ask you about.’
‘Death?’
‘Assembly lines.’
Garnett, mouth refilled, whirrs his knife-hand mechanically: Go on … Pilkington, setting his own knife and fork down, asks:
‘Do you recall the work of Lillian Gilbreth?’
‘Yes, of course,’ Garnett responds. ‘I looked at all her time-and-motion studies when I was setting up Pantarey.’
‘Lillian and Frank …’
‘Lillian and Frank: correct. Their methods laid the groundwork for what people like us do. Our Norbert even mentions them, in passing. They bridge the gap between the nineteenth-century – Marey, Taylor – and the world that would emerge with Ford: mass automatisation and, later, digitisation. Without them, there’d be no mo-cap.’
‘She made boxes, didn’t she?’
‘That’s right: light tracks sculpted in metal and set in cutaway black boxes. Each one showed the path of a worker’s movement cycle. I’ve got one at home.’
‘An actual Gilbreth box?’ asks Pilkington.
‘I presume so. I found it in a storage cupboard in an old Birmingham factory that …’
‘Does it have a number on it?’
The urgency of his old friend’s tone takes Garnett aback. He, too, sets his fork down, and answers:
‘I don’t think so. Never looked. She made scores of the things. Hundreds, probably.’
‘Eight hundred and fourteen.’ Pilkington flashes a bridge-player’s smile, the type that might accompany the partial revelation of a hand.
‘Well,’ Garnett smiles back. ‘Seems like it’s I who should be asking you the questions. Are these extant?’
‘The boxes?’
‘Yes: the eight hundred and fourteen boxes – the eight hundred and thirteen I don’t have …’
‘Not all in physical form,’ says Pilkington. ‘Some are in collections; others will be knocking about basements, like yours was. Others just got thrown out once they’d served their purpose. But she catalogued them all. Itemised them.’
‘How?’
‘Stereoscope. Essentially, by reverse-engineering the process that she’d used to build them in the first place. And these records, almost all of them, are “extant”. Every motion, every iteration she cast has been “stated”, as it were …’
Pilkington’s cards take on material embodiment now, as he pulls from a folder nestled in his corner’s recess a set of papers which he spreads across the tablecloth.
‘Have a look …’
There are two stapled stacks. Garnett leafs through the one with pictures on it: column after column of black-and-white double-photographs of Gilbreth boxes, all numbered and labelled, much as Pilkington has just described. The other’s full of text: the paragraphs of some kind of report in which the name ‘Gilbreth’ pops up every five or so lines. Its diction’s not quite academic, not quite scientific, certainly not journalistic – closer in style to a government white paper or internal dossier that might circulate within a corporation … Bearing in mind the importance Ms Gilbreth attached to the abstraction, or perhaps better to say extraction, of kinetic sequences, we might speculate that … Typeface is Times New Roman … text is broken into sections, the division following a logic less of subject, theme or chapter than of patchwork assembly, legible blocks alternating with long strings of ciphers, or commands, or code, typed in a different font that reminds him of old JavaScript or ASCII: 01mdean02cdorley03crypt04decrypt7text102 …
‘We came across this,’ Pilkington comments after letting Garnett flip for a while through the pages, ‘last week. I’d be intrigued to know your thoughts.’
‘Came across?’
‘Yes: noticed, stumbled on to, picked up, were appraised of …’
‘You make it sound passive.’
‘It is. Just like what you do: passive … what do you call it?’
‘Passive optical motion capture.’
‘Right. We passively captured this communication while it was in motion.’
‘You people …’ Garnett tries to strike up a mock-chiding tone; but duck and greens start to taste different in his mouth; the air seems to take on an altered texture, infused now with obligations, with embargo, with the shadow of officialdom. Is it called MI5 or MI6 now? Or some other name that’s never even written down or spoken? ‘First thing I’m going to do when I get home is get my IT guy Hossain to upgrade my security, install a better firewall …’
‘My friend,’ Pilkington fixes him with a pitiful gaze, ‘use a typewriter.’
With a quiet nod he invites Garnett to skim his way on further through the stack. The first few pages precis Gilbreth’s life and work; they contain nothing not already known to him, bar a few details about family circumstances (twelve children); her husband’s abhorrence of dirt; the extent to which NASA leant on her work; her penchant for writing sub-par verse … It’s several sections in, after a range of ASCII interjections (the mdean part of the cipher-string keeps popping up), that the meat of the report starts peeping through, passages highlighted in yellow marker, either by Pilkington or by whatever us is lurking behind him, behind these pages’ digital purloining, this whole afternoon’s encounter …
It seems to involve correspondence carried out by Gilbreth with a young Latvian physicist around 1970. Parts of the correspondence, two letters from him to her, have been scanned – by now, double- or triple-scanned, print much degraded. More scans, of what Garnett understands to be pages from Gilbreth’s jotter book or journal, are reproduced beside these. Here, too, the handwriting is hard to parse – all the more so due to its tendency to give over now and again to doodles; the physicist’s letters also break off intermittently for diagrams or sketches. The report’s author has tried to summarise the correspondence (no mean task, since even the physicist’s side of it, the only side included in the file, is incomplete); also to gauge this correspondence’s effect on Gilbreth, as surmised from her reactions to it contained in this same jotter book or journal. The significance attached by Gilbreth to Box 808 … what he persisted in calling ‘the T.T. episode’ … what the acronym ‘T.T.’ might … This acronym’s recurrence sends Garnett flipping back to where he first encountered it: the partial scan (it begins with the second or perhaps third page) of the first letter, whose author also refers to ‘the T.T. episode’, proposing to model it according to Gilbreth’s own light-track wireframe technique (for good measure, he includes a kind of drawing showing a cone-shaped object swinging round some type of pole, though in the absence of the letter’s opening page, or maybe pages, the actual, un-abstracted or -extracted content of the ‘episode’ remains obscure). It’s only then that Garnett registers the name of Gilbreth’s correspondent, though his eye must have flitted across it several times.
‘Vanins? Raivis Vanins? I knew Vanins.’
Pilkington’s still fixing him with his bridge-player’s smile. Of course …
‘Oh,’ says Garnett meekly. ‘You knew that already. Is that what …?’
‘In part,’ Pilkington answers. ‘Why not? Let’s start there. Tell me about Vanins.’
‘Well …’ Garnett sighs resignedly. ‘I met him twice. Once at a Paris congress in the mid seventies … Then in Delft, ICAM, 1988 or so … We had a drink together, corresponded for a little afterwards … He was director of the Solid-State Physics Department in Vilnius or Tallinn or – what’s the capital of Latvia?’
‘Riga.’
‘Right: at Riga’s Technical University – a post he got at the ripe age of thirty-eight or thirty-nine.’
‘Something of a whizz-kid?’
‘He was viewed that way, certainly,’ says Garnett. ‘He seemed to have a whole body of papers to his name … light-particle sound pulses, shear-wave imaging, self-focusing, the work of Askaryan, Sarvazyan, Osipyan … He was one of the few Russian – Latvian, Eastern Bloc, whatever – scientists allowed to travel; I guess he acted for us as a kind of peephole on to the whole world of Soviet physics. Not a particularly open one …’
‘Even after perestroika?’
‘He went quiet around that time; I think he’d retired. But rumours seemed to swirl around him, even in his absence: a kind of mythomania born of ignorance instilled by decades of the Cold War; all that weird shit we’d imagined going on in Soviet labs and research institutes – I don’t need to tell you …’
Pilkington grunts acknowledgement. It was weird shit: paramagnetic resonance, synchotron radiation, superconductivity … They knew, from leaks, defections, propaganda, that advances, even breakthroughs, were being made – but sifting all this traffic, trying to separate the signal from the noise, to work out which development was actual, which just paranoid projection … The speculation, at its outer reaches, skewed weirder than weird, veered into the realm of sci-fi: bioradiation, pondemotor forces, Z-rays, ESP … In the late eighties, after Albatross, Pilkington was loosely involved with a counter-research unit that had been set up in Cambridge for the sole purpose of establishing the efficacy or otherwise of ‘instrumental psychotronics’ à la Beridze-Stakhovsky, just in case … And then, when the whole Soviet house of cards collapsed, this, rather than bringing clarity, a giant reveal, just saw the archives dissipated – shredded, lost or siphoned off to private holdings …
‘One of Vanins’ big things, like mine, was kinaesthetics,’ Garnett’s saying. ‘He was Gastev’s heir, essentially. Saw the ends of practices like Gilbreth’s stretching far beyond assembly lines, or even spaceships. Once his writing started getting out, translated, circulated, well, it struck – like Wiener’s had – a chord with people in all kinds of areas, not only physics.’
‘And the rumours?’
Garnett shrugs. ‘The usual type – in the biomechanics world, at least; that township’s age-old urban legends: that he’d come up, behind his institute’s walls, with a means of generating torsion fields, or proof of Tryon’s zero-energy hypothesis, or some such philosopher’s stone … Perhaps nobody quite believed these literally – but on states of equilibrium, particularly, he was streets ahead.’
‘That subject,’ confides Pilkington, ‘or one like it, seems to provide the topic of his correspondence with Ms Gilbreth. Here, on page twenty-four …’
He helps Garnett leaf through to the nominated page, which contains, set side by side as before, printed scans of two handwritten papers: on the left, a page from a further letter, or perhaps the same one, from Vanins to Gilbreth; on the right, another page from the jotter book/journal of the latter. In the left-hand scan, Vanins describes his shock – amazement, and perhaps (illegible) – at the implications of this labour, which would seem to transform all the tenets and (assertions?) of our … In the right-hand one, Gilbreth seems to have copied in her own hand the diagram that appeared on Vanins’ previous letter-page. Here, once again, shakily rendered, is the cone, or cone-shaped object, or perhaps just cone-shaped field of vectors, circling the upright line, or pole. The circling movement’s bi-directional: double-headed arrows at the cone’s base, its swing-zone’s lower rim-circumference, make this clear. About the figure Gilbreth has added several other little sketches: of cogged mechanisms, mill-wheels, spoked and levered automata; also some coloured circles. Across the whole page are dotted a few words and phrases in Latin or Spanish, and some names.
‘Maricourt?’ Garnett reads. ‘Bessler? De Honnecourt? The wheel-and-hammer, spinning-rings-that-need-no-winding, pendulum-decked-gravity-disc charlatans? Is Gilbreth in her addled dotage starting to buy into the old perpetual-motion scam?’
‘Not at all.’ Pilkington lets out a short laugh. ‘Although you’d be surprised how many of physics’ big beasts jumped down that rabbit hole before: Wolff, Bernouilli, even Leibniz … They set out to demonstrate the notion’s folly and, somewhere along the line, flipped over into obsessive believers, drunk on a conviction that the very work they’d done to dispel any credence in the possibility of endless movement proved its viability … which “proof” the next scientist in line set out to debunk, only to find himself converted – while the first, meanwhile, had apostasised back again. You could say the perpetual motion’s there: these self-renewing waves of scepticism and credulity, reason and fantasy …’
He takes another sip of wine. Watching him, Garnett pictures a toy, a gizmo he once gave to his young nephew: a Sullivan drinking-bird that, as methylene chloride rose up its long neck-tube, tilted its felt-covered beak into a glass of water, the absorption of which caused the cooling chloride to sink down its neck again, which in turn pulled its head up for a breath of air before the process started over.
‘I’ve become convinced,’ Pilkington dabs his lips, ‘in my own state of addled dotage, that our work, at base … The great contraptions we come up with, all the engines and the interfaces and the operating codes – that these are nothing more than prompts for our own supposition and projection, stand-ins for some ultimate machine we’ll never build but nonetheless can’t stop ourselves from trying to … Jacquard looms, the Internet, crackpot time-travelling patents or those influencing engines sketched by generations of psychotics: whether they get made or simply trawled up from the depths of some delusion is beside the point. All machines are imaginary. Doesn’t our Norbert say as much, somewhere?’
‘He does,’ Garnett murmurs distractedly; he’s scrutinising still the copied journal pages. From the shakily redrawn sketch, the coloured circles, the scrawled names and Latin/Spanish words, an arrow leads down to the page’s base, where, in a hand that appears purposeful and strained, as though accomplished only through a monumental act of will, more words, in bold, are written:
‘Box 808 charges …’
‘It’s changes …’
‘… changes everything. Which one is 808?’
‘Have a look,’ Pilkington answers knowingly, pushing the other paper-stack towards him once more. Garnett flicks through the pages, eye moving top to bottom, down the photographed and numbered motion boxes, through the seven hundreds, then into the eights, 805, 806, 807 …
‘Oh!’
‘Exactly.’
There’s no 808: it’s missing. The stretch of paper where it should be leers back blank and empty, glaring as a razed section of forest or a patch of wall from which a painting’s been removed.
‘Why,’ Garnett wonders aloud after a few moments’ silence, ‘does she go on about it so much when – this other person too …?’ He’s flipping through the pages of the second stack again, the scanned notes, letters, journal pages, the anonymous author’s summary and gloss of these. It’s everywhere: … that Vanins’ experience of ‘the T.T. episode’ led to the creation of Box 808 is highly … page nine; 808 seems to have excited her so much that she revised her entire … ten; eleven: Box 808’s supreme importance to her project is attested by … ‘What do you think it …?’
‘That,’ Pilkington responds, ‘is the big question. That’s what’s generated all the noise.’
‘Noise?’
‘In my … community. We’re not the only ones to have picked up on this. There seems to be a general buzz all round. Consensus is that there’s something worth looking into …’
‘What kind of something?’
Pilkington reflects a little, then continues:
‘Vanins was, inter alia, an important figure in the field of Soviet aeronautics. I’ve seen files, whole stacks of files, on him. If he did, as your colleagues liked to fancy, chisel a Northwest Passage through a stretch of the hitherto theoretical-physically impossible, even if it didn’t lead to any direct application we became aware of, but got lost amidst the clear-out, overlooked, misplaced … Well, MOD will want to know about it – as will several other outfits we could think of …’
‘But why would he tell Gilbreth? She wasn’t a physicist.’
‘No. But she, more than anyone else, understood kinesis. Bodies in motion. And she’d used this understanding to transform the world – feat for which he, and many of his ilk, revered her. I think they saw her as a kind of Darwin or Linnaeus, capturing and freezing movement’s every sub-species and class and phylum: folding napkins, pulling levers, loading guns … all part of the same general ballet. With the boxes, she’d attempted to amass a general taxonomy of act and gesture. To amass, and to improve – for practical reasons, partly: efficiency, well-being of factory workers, housewives, astronauts … She always wanted to work out …’
‘The “one best way”.’
‘The one best way,’ says Pilkington, ‘exactly. But – as the author of the report you’re holding explains so lucidly – the meaning of those words changes with time. It starts out signalling the leanest path, the most economic and productive route a worker’s hand or body can cut through the space around it in the execution of its task. Later, though … Later, the idea sprouts wings, grows all-encompassing and vague at the same time. There’s something abstract – almost devotional – about it all. She seems to come to believe that there exists, somewhere, hidden from our view, a perfect shape for every act – essential, almost preordained. And beyond even that, that there might be a kind of absolutely perfect motion-circuit hovering concealed behind even the perfect ones – the kingdom, as it were, containing all the phylums; sum of their possibilities, their infinite- and zero-point, alpha and omega …’
‘So she was a mystic,’ Garnett murmurs.
‘Yes and no,’ says Pilkington. ‘Isn’t that what …?’
‘Isn’t what what?’
‘Isn’t that what you do?’
‘Me?’
‘Pantarey. All your kinetic typologies, which you scale up and down from keyhole surgery to war to silly films …’
‘I wanted to ask you something about silly films. We want to use a wind tunnel to stage …’ Garnett begins, but Pilkington waves the interjection off:
‘Isn’t your work – our work – all about accessing and deploying underlying sequences and patterns? Mapping particulars on to great universals? Isn’t that the art to which, in one way or another, we’ve both devoted our best years?’
Garnett, out-argued, grants the point in silence.
‘And our Norbert, his Augustine visions – isn’t that a form of mysticism too? He saw inductive logic as a supreme act of faith. Call it physics, metaphysics or theology: it doesn’t matter … And I’m wandering. We want to know what Box 808 is, and what everything it changes.’
‘You really think there is one?’ Garnett asks.
‘A Box 808?’
‘An everything to be changed by it.’
‘Gilbreth,’ Pilkington deflects the question, ‘clearly thought so. But then, she was very old; the diaries and the notebooks show a mind stumbling. Besides, whether there is or not – an everything, a box, an either – is beside the point. There’s noise. Which means our view on this, like Gilbreth’s photographs, is stereoscopic: focus is partly on the actual givens, the reality, whatever this might be, and partly on gaming the speculation. If someone else thinks we think it’s important, or if a third party thinks that we think they think it’s important, then …’
Garnett can see this: it’s straight von Neumann, basic game theory …
‘Even,’ continues Pilkington, ‘if this box had nothing in it but a pair of old shoes, or was empty – if it exists, we want it to be us that has it and not one of the someone-elses and third-parties …’
The waiter comes to take their plates and hand them dessert menus. Garnett orders a crème brûlée, Pilkington a slice of chocolate tart, and brandies for them both.
‘It’s a pity,’ Garnett muses when they’re left alone again, ‘that you can’t ask Vanins what it’s all about.’
Pilkington’s face, the flow of its expressions, shudders to a sudden halt; he looks at Garnett’s own face now intently, scrutinising it. Garnett, uncomfortable, adds:
‘He is dead, I presume.’
‘Not at all!’ Pilkington sits back suddenly. ‘I thought you knew that.’
‘No. I hadn’t heard from, or about, him in so many years, I just imagined …’
‘He’s living,’ Pilkington informs him, ‘on a dacha outside Riga. In his upper eighties, but still … extant.’
‘Then why don’t you …?’
The other’s look as the sentence trails off underscores the thought’s naivety. In a tactful, almost diplomatic tone of voice Pilkington tells him:
‘A head-on approach from us doesn’t seem, in this instance, quite appropriate.’
Garnett can see that as well – but not what’s coming next. Pilkington picks up his dessert fork, taps its tines against the tablecloth – twice, a little Morse-code rap – and says:
‘We thought that maybe you …’
‘Me? How on earth could I …? I mean, if your own people couldn’t …’
‘Precisely because,’ purrs Pilkington, ‘you’re not one of our people. Or anyone else’s. With Pantarey, you struck off on your own. Makes you a bona fide member of the same old guard as him: the pioneers, trailblazers …’
Garnett looks down modestly, bathing in praise’s warmth. His friend continues:
‘You could renew contact with him: shared field of interest – states of equilibrium, perhaps … revisiting an old line of enquiry … compare notes … steer it onwards from there … He’d respect you. He’d trust you.’
‘And,’ Garnett looks back up, ‘I’d betray that trust?’
‘For a purpose. For a purpose. And it’s not even betraying. If this 808 stuff was nothing, a delusion of Gilbreth’s senility, then what harm is done? If it was something, then that’s knowledge shared – unboxed, brought out into the light. That’s a good thing, surely – scientifically speaking …’
‘I’m not sure I view it the same way as …’ Garnett starts, but Pilkington cuts him off.
‘Your man Mark Phocan has been visiting us at Farnborough.’
‘Well, yes,’ says Garnett, not quite seeing the connection. ‘After all, you’re a client.’
‘For now,’ Pilkington says. ‘The contract’s coming to an end. There’s been talk of renewing it, taking it to another level, with markerless tracking …’
Garnett stares at his friend, trying to work out what he’s getting at – as though his words, like a report encrypted, were keeping their essential content wrapped, embalmed, sarcophagaed beneath a carapace of manner; leaking out, though, now, through cracks skilfully wrought, with just the right amount of pressure … Mixing together too: imaginary machines, markerless tracking – and now this: beyond the perfect movement, beyond movement itself, some kind of ‘absolute’, a disembodied circuit, hovering, concealed, everything-changing. Taken together, what would it all bode? The ‘kingdom’, as Pilkington would have Gilbreth hoping? Or another type of dispensation, far less kind or to be wished for: a regime of total capture – one with which he, Garnett, is, always has been, complicit … Latching on to Pilkington’s un-boxed and groping into memory’s back reaches, to some passage filed away with deer and sherry, he now pieces together half-remembered shards of Hesiod, Works and Days: ἐκ γαίης πλάσσεν κλυτὸς Ἀμφιγυήεις παρθένῳ αἰδοίῃ ἴκελον, moulded clay in the likeness of a modest maid … Pandora … took off the great lid of πíθου, the box … then earth was full, πλείη μὲν γὰρ γαῖα κακῶν, of evils, and sea too … Aloud now, he recites:
‘μούνη δ᾽ αὐτόθι Ἐλπὶς ἐν ἀρρήκτοισι δόμοισιν ἔνδον ἔμιμνε: Only hope remained …’
‘What’s that?’ asks Pilkington.
At this point in their meeting, before Garnett can respond, a strange interlude occurs. Swing-doors arc open, wafting smells of melted chocolate and burnt sugar to them, prelude to their waiter who glides, back first, through the entry to the kitchen then rotates mid-floor to guide their desserts smoothly down towards their tabletop. As Pilkington’s plate taxis across the last few centimetres to its assigned slot beside the small fork he’s still playing with, Garnett notices his friend’s hands tensing suddenly, fingertips simultaneously digging into and pushing away from the tablecloth.
‘What’s this?’ Pilkington’s voice has real aggression in it, tinged with what sounds to Garnett like fear.
‘Chocolate tart,’ answers the waiter. ‘Isn’t that what you ordered?’
‘Yes,’ Pilkington responds; ‘but not with this … this …’
Both Garnett and the waiter peer down at his plate. It’s white, and circular, as plates generally are. A portion of its surface area has been filled by the dark slice of tart – a sector whose two radii are connected at their separated ends by an arc inset from but aligned with that of the plate’s circumference, while their meeting point precisely coincides with the plate’s centre. Coming from the plate’s far hemisphere to intersect this tart-slice sector at an obtuse angle – intersecting it so as to rest partially atop it – is a wafer: light-brown, slightly smaller than the slice itself and shaped not as a sector, even a displaced one, but a triangle whose base sits on a chord the endpoints of which lie at roughly three and six o’clock (POV Pilkington). This wafer, like most wafers, bears the mark of the iron in which it was formed, a grid pattern stamped across its surface. To its side, lying in the final sector of the plate, the one covered or crossed by neither slice nor wafer, sits a scoop of ice cream – high-end, in-house-fabricated ice cream within whose spherical mass fragments of ground vanilla are embedded, like small graphite flecks in marble.
‘… assemblage!’ Pilkington, alighting on the right word, almost hurls it at the waiter. ‘I ordered the tart! There was no mention of ice cream or wafer.’
‘We mark it with both D and G on the menu, Sir. If you’re dairy- or gluten-averse, I could …’
‘That’s not the point!’ Pilkington cuts him off angrily. ‘I just want to know what’s … what’s coming to me … without these …’
His sentence fades out, possibly because he realises as he speaks it that it makes as little sense to him as to the waiter or his friend. These two both stare at him, wanting to help remediate the situation while quite unable to because they’re at a loss to understand it.
‘I can have it,’ Garnett offers. ‘We can swap.’
‘No.’ Pilkington nixes the idea gruffly. ‘It’s not that. I’d rather you just …’
‘I’ll take it away,’ the waiter picks his cue up here. ‘We’ll take it off the bill, of course. And if there’s anything else we can offer you to …’
‘Nothing. The brandies. Make them doubles.’
‘Absolutely,’ says the waiter. ‘On the way.’ As smoothly as he set it down he whisks the plate off the table and guides it back through the kitchen’s swing doors out of sight. Garnett makes to say something, but Pilkington, regaining his composure, waves the episode away.
‘Vanins,’ he says. ‘You’d be helping me immensely. Have a think; let me know.’
Tentatively, Garnett shatters his crème brûlée’s glaze and starts to eat it. Brandies come; they drink them. Pilkington, relaxed and meditative again, muses:
‘Shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet … I remember that bit now. But – doesn’t he say something about salvation, too?’
‘Not exactly,’ Garnett answers. ‘He says that even in a shipwreck, human decencies and values don’t all necessarily vanish.’
‘That’s it. It’s true: not necessarily …’
‘We’re going down, he says; but we can do it in a manner worthy of our dignity.’
‘To dignity!’ cries Pilkington. He drains the remnants of his brandy, then announces: ‘I’m paying. Let’s go.’
Outside, there’s a car waiting – smart, executive, unliveried. Pilkington instructs the driver to go first to Charlebury Station, where they drop Garnett. As the car pulls off again, he winds the window down and calls out:
‘Use a typewriter! And burn the ribbon afterwards.’