Exchange Place

Conduit

By six o’clock of the evening after his experience in Rue du Sentier, John Kilpatrick had read all of X+Y=K, pausing here and there to take notes. The more he had read, the more had he seen uncanny resemblances between the Kilpatrick in the book and the Kilpatrick that was him. However, there were many more passages that did not tally with his own experience, and he recalled Blanqui’s proposition that the universe contains infinite other, parallel worlds, and thus a myriad of other, endlessly doubled versions of ourselves, unbeknownst to each other and to ourselves. Perhaps X+Y=K had drawn on some of those worlds, some of which corresponded to Kilpatrick’s own. He also remembered that W.H. Auden had said that every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow, and that Auden had then gone on to comment that we would be judged, not by the kind of mirror found on us, but by the use we have made of it. But what if another man’s mirror were to cross ours, thought Kilpatrick, what would happen then? Would we become a third person? And what if other men, each with his mirror, crossed our paths? We would indeed then be many. These thoughts had crossed his mind the night before, when he had tried on the trousers of the suit he had found in Rue du Sentier. They too were a perfect fit. On further examination he found that, according to the tailor’s label sewn into the lining of an inside pocket, the suit had been delivered to a Major R.E. Livingstone on the ninth of October 1966, Kilpatrick’s eighteenth birthday, which made the suit forty-four years old. But it looked hardly worn; it might have been made yesterday.

Kilpatrick was wearing the suit now, in preparation for the evening to come. He had thought of meeting Bourne with some trepidation, but the garb lent him an air of quiet authority. For all that he did not yet know what part he would play in this unfolding drama, he felt like an actor who waits in the wings composing himself to deliver the words composed by another, nervous but confident that once he treads the boards the part will take him over. He imagined he might have rehearsed it in a mirror, drawing on affective memory, speaking to his reflection as he would to an audience, and he saw himself watching himself as if from a vantage point in the auditorium, the autumnal shades of the tweed he wore flickering in the spotlight as he suited the action to the word and the word to the action, everything happening as if déjà vu. The bedside telephone rang. A Monsieur Gordon awaited him in reception. Kilpatrick took a last look at himself in the dressing-table mirror, adjusted his tie, and went down to meet the man he was to meet.

Bonsoir, mon ami, said Gordon. Bonsoir, mon ami, said Kilpatrick. Under his Crombie overcoat Gordon was dressed in a grey Donegal tweed three-piece suit, and Kilpatrick remarked on it. Yes, thank you, nice bit of cloth you’re wearing yourself. 1960s? Savile Row cut, I’d say, or maybe Conduit Street? Do as good a job in Conduit Street, half the price. Kilpatrick nodded. Gordon took a lapel between his thumb and finger. Nice hand, he said, pity about the little flaw there on the breast pocket. Kilpatrick had seen no flaw. Of course, they’ve done a great job on it, invisible menders, you wouldn’t know it was there if you weren’t looking for it. And of course, as I remarked before, we in the Profession are trained to look for these things. For all the world that looks like a mended bullet-hole, but of course you wouldn’t know until the forensics had a good look at the fibres. Well, as it turns out, said Kilpatrick, its previous owner was a Major Livingstone, so you never know. H’m … Livingstone, you say? said Gordon, there was a major of that name, one of our men, if I’m not mistaken, back in the sixties, wasn’t a major at all of course, but played the part superbly. Until the Other Side rumbled him, that is. The Other Side? said Kilpatrick. Yes, said Kilpatrick, we’re the Profession, and they’re the Other Side. Kind of dialogue, if you like, one eye always watching the other. I take it you are one of us? Of course you are, though you might not even know it. Took some of us a while to get there, too. But you get there in the end. And then of course there’s the Invisibles. The Invisibles? said Kilpatrick. Well, it’s only a theory, more of a legend, said Gordon, but it’s rumoured that whatever we and the Other Side do, there’s another power at work, one which we cannot fathom, so that for all we know there is another narrative beyond the one we occupy. Perhaps the Invisibles, if they exist, insinuate themselves into the networks of surveillance created by us and the Other Side. We’re all in the business of gathering information, you see, or disinformation. For the latter too is useful, since everything, fabricated or not, tells us something about the world we move in. Every contact leaves a trace. So we operate on the Exchange Principle. Are you with me? said Gordon. Kilpatrick nodded hesitantly. He remembered H.G. Wells’ Invisible Man in a London fog, a greasy glimmer of a human shape, and again he saw himself as the Invisible Man trying on a player’s mask and dark glasses in a theatrical costumier’s in Drury Lane, peering at a grotesque image in a cheval mirror; or he was an onlooker to the Invisible Man’s death on the pavement, the body slowly revealing itself as if infiltrated by a poison — first the little white nerves, a hazy grey sketch of a limb, then the glassy bones and intricate arteries, then the flesh and skin, first a faint fogginess and then growing rapidly dense and opaque. Finally he imagined himself scrutinizing the lost notebook which contained the invisibility formula, some of its pages washed out, the rest covered in a mixture of Russian, Greek, and mathematical symbols, full of unintelligible secrets.

We’re in the business of knowing, said Gordon, for all that it’s problematic to measure what we know against what we don’t know. The Invisibles, if they exist, might well know things about us that we don’t even know ourselves. But in any event it didn’t take us long to know that you were one of us. That dream of yours, Les structures sonores, lovely title, that was enough in itself to convince us. The detail was uncanny, and we in the Profession depend on detail, for the devil is the detail, or what is it Flaubert says? Le bon Dieu est dans le détail. Two sides of the same coin. Nothing is unimportant. So we look at everything. Clouds, river deltas, root systems, coastlines, music, fluid turbulence, the fluctuations of the stock market, the movement of the crowd on a station concourse, raindrops trickling down a windowpane, all follow a pattern. Those kaleidoscopic shifts of which you spoke so eloquently. The assignation that is to us unexpected, the invitation coming seemingly from nowhere, has been dreamed of and initiated long in advance. Speaking of which, might I enquire about your encounter in Rue du Sentier? Kilpatrick couldn’t remember if he had mentioned Rue du Sentier to Gordon. But he gave him the benefit of the doubt. He needed someone with whom to share his strange experience. So he told him the story. Yes, said Gordon, most interesting. The book especially, X+Y=K, you must take it to Bourne. He may be blind, but he can scan it in his own way, and his conclusions in these matters are always productive. A minute later Gordon and Kilpatrick left Hôtel Chopin, Kilpatrick carrying the book in his briefcase.