Skios

21

High up in the villa called Empedocles, behind shutters forever closed and blinds forever drawn, Christian Schneck, the director of the foundation, sat cross-legged on the floor in his prayer shawl. His lank gray hair fell on his shoulders. His face, lit only by the little colored sanctuary lights on the low table in the middle of the austerely empty room, was lined and emaciated. He listened in silence, expressionless, as his assistant, Eric Felt, reported to him on the foundation’s guest lecturer.

“He’s got a lot of blond hair,” said Eric Felt. “He brushes it out of his eyes and smiles. He’s always smiling. He’s the kind of scientist who appears on television. A celebrity. A popularizer. Is there a role for God in physics? That kind of stuff. Jokes. Paradoxes. Pseudo-profundity. Pretty much the sort of fraud that you’d expect Nikki Hook to pick.”

Eric Felt was not just Christian’s assistant. He was his companion and his confidant. His ally in the fight to prevent Nikki from dismantling everything that Christian had fought for since he had taken over from Dieter: proper European intellectual standards, the seriousness that he had always silently embodied. Since Christian never spoke these days, it was Eric Felt who had to express to the world the concern he knew Christian felt. And since Christian never left his room now, Eric was his eyes and ears as well as his voice. This morning he had been lurking unnoticed at the back of the guests surrounding Dr. Wilfred, because he knew how concerned Christian was about Nikki’s choice. It was a testimony perhaps to Dr. Wilfred’s appeal that no one had noticed Eric, even though he bulged at people so aggressively. He bulged partly from indignation, partly from a high intake of organic noodles combined with the sedentary life that he and Christian led together in Empedocles. It was difficult to bulge inconspicuously, particularly if you were doing it as Eric was, in a plum-colored T-shirt and three-quarter-length orange skateboarding trousers.

He bulged much less when he was talking to Christian, because he was sitting cross-legged on the floor himself, and leaning forward to take the strain off his spine. With Christian, also, he was expressing not indignation but reverence. Christian had suffered and had mastered his suffering. The suffering and the mastery were recorded deep in the eroded dry limestone of his face. Once upon a time he had done things. Now he had gone beyond that. What was it that he had once done? No one could now remember, not even Eric. This was how far above and beyond doing he had gone.

“Another Brit, of course, Dr. Wilfred,” said Eric. “The whole place is crawling with them! It’s all Nikki Hook’s doing. Everything you have ever stood for is being Anglo-Saxonized! Trivialized! Ironized!”

Eric knew about Brits. He was one himself.

“I do my best, Christian,” he said. “But I can’t do it all on my own. Nikki Hook’s got her claws into everything. She twists Mrs. Toppler round her finger. And last week I saw her talking to Mr. Papadopoulou. She’s up to something with him as well.”

The whole future of the foundation hung in the balance. Dieter had made the foundation what it was, and Christian, Dieter’s companion and personal assistant, had been his chosen successor. When Dieter had faded quietly away, worn out by austerity and dedication, and been quietly laid to rest under the stones of the agora, head down towards the center of the earth in accordance with his highly specialized private beliefs, there had been no question but that the board of trustees would appoint Christian in his place. In the fullness of time Christian in his turn had taken Eric as his companion and personal assistant, and it seemed that the foundation was developing a line of succession as part of its unwritten constitution. One day, many years hence, no doubt, when Christian faded away in his turn, Eric would assume his office as director. Wouldn’t he? Eric himself wasn’t entirely confident. If Christian failed to make his wishes clear … If he let his powers trickle away through his fingers, while brash newcomers with no sensitivity to the constitutional niceties thrust themselves forward …

“Perhaps the time has come,” said Eric, “when you should at last emerge from your seclusion and strike. Suddenly — out of nowhere — there you are! At the lecture this evening! Like Christ driving the money changers from the Temple! Like God on the Day of Judgment!”

The tiny points of light in the pupils of Christian’s eyes drilled incorruptibly on. The deeply shadowed fissures of his face retained their immobile integrity. Perhaps, thought Eric, he had gone beyond feeling as well as doing. Beyond thought, even. Perhaps he had transcended not only the physical but the spiritual as well, and achieved a state of total inanition.

But no. He slowly lifted his head a little, and those two bright, unblinking lasers struck straight into his disciple. His lips almost moved. He almost spoke.

Yes, the second coming was at hand. Eric could sense it. Christian would appear. And he would be terrible.

* * *

“I’m still not absolutely clear about one thing,” said the same small man in broken spectacles who had badgered Dr. Wilfred earlier. “Oh, Norbert Ditmuss. West Idaho. Emeritus. Yes, I’m still not clear in my own mind how you derive a solution to Wexler’s equation that comes close to Theobald’s constant.”

Dr. Wilfred thought very carefully about this. The professor was evidently going to keep nagging away at whatever small dreary point it was that he was trying to make. Dr. Wilfred considered invoking string theory or quantum entanglement. He had very little idea what either of them was, but had deployed them once or twice before to good effect. But probably Professor Ditmuss did actually know about them. Better might be Colibri’s Conjunction, which the professor certainly wouldn’t know about, since Dr. Wilfred had only just in that very moment discovered it. He suspected, though, that Professor Ditmuss might be honest enough to confess his ignorance and ask Dr. Wilfred to explain what it was. He would need to draw deeper on his intellectual resources.

His silence went on for so long that everyone became aware that something was up. Heads began to turn towards him inquiringly. Even Wilson Westerman stopped thinking about his investments.

“I’m sorry,” said Professor Ditmuss. “I don’t want to hold up the conversation.”

“Not at all,” said Dr. Wilfred. “I was trying to think how to explain in some nontechnical way that everyone here can understand. Myself included.”

They all laughed. Except Professor Ditmuss.

Dr. Wilfred looked around. Something would come to him. Something always did …

Everyone waited, even Professor Ditmuss.

Dr. Wilfred’s eye fell on the empty coffee cups on the table. Yes. Well. Empty coffee cups were certainly something. And something was better than nothing.

He picked one up and showed it to them. “An empty coffee cup,” he said. “All right? No problems so far?”

Everyone gazed respectfully at the cup and shook their heads. No, no problems so far. Except for Dr. Wilfred, for whom the problem was what to do next.

“Now,” he said. He carefully smoothed the tablecloth and put the cup back in the middle of it. There was a slight rustling sound, as everyone leaned a little closer in their basket chairs. “Now…”

“Just a moment,” said Suki Brox. “Sorry.”

“Not at all,” said Dr. Wilfred. “All the time in the world.”

“I’m being very stupid,” said Suki Brox. “But I don’t quite understand. What does the coffee cup represent? Is that a very silly question?”

“Not at all,” said Dr. Wilfred. “It’s a very good question. This empty coffee cup represents … an empty coffee cup. All right?”

“All right,” said Suki Brox.

All right for her. But not for Dr. Wilfred. Because now what? He looked around. There seemed to be nothing else to hand but more empty coffee cups. He picked one of them up and placed it carefully beside the first.

“Another empty coffee cup,” he said. “What does this one represent? It represents another empty coffee cup. So now we have two empty coffee cups, side by side. Yes?”

They nodded, and gazed at the two inscrutable white cylinders in the middle of the tablecloth. They looked at him, then back at the cylinders, waiting for them to reveal their hidden meaning. He gazed at them himself, also waiting.

And as he gazed, the first faint foreshadowing of a meaning began to emerge.

“Yes,” he said. “So. Now. I take a third empty coffee cup…”

* * *

There in front of Dr. Wilfred was the sea, certainly, just as How-my-dreck-your-call had said. It appeared to be at least a mile away, though, and about a thousand feet below him. He had long given up all thought of breakfast; it seemed to him unlikely that he would get there even in time for lunch. Though he realized that in the glare and heat of the midday sun his judgment of distance was panic-stricken and unreliable.

He sat down on the ground in a small patch of shade cast by a stunted umbrella pine and got out his phone. As he waited for his call to fly to England, then all the way back again to some spot he couldn’t quite see in the hard brightness below, he thought about a table in the shade, with a pastel-colored tablecloth on it and a gleaming place setting. The sugary croissants and crisp bacon that he had envisaged before had been replaced by bread and olives, gleaming pink taramasalata, and chilled prawns. He also thought about his lack of hat and sunblock, and the friendly offer of both hanging unanswered in the air. For a moment, too, a suntanned back came into his mind, rippling softly with the movements of shoulder blades and spine.

“Fred Toppler Foundation,” began the now depressingly familiar voice at last.

“It’s me,” he interrupted her, before she could get any further with her performance, or he himself any closer to dementia or collapse.

“Dr. Wilfred?” said the voice. “Everything OK at last? You got breakfast? You know where you are now?”

“No,” he said. “I didn’t get breakfast. I don’t know where I am.”

“No?” said How-my. “Something funny with your voice. You saying you don’t know where you are?”

“Yes.”

“What—still don’t know?”

“No.”

There was a pause. I am Dr. Norman Wilfred, he thought. I am the guest of honor. These things cannot be happening to me.

“OK,” said How-my. “Go back to the guest suite. Sit down. Don’t move. I send the buggy for you.”