Skippy Dies: A Novel

Ruprecht returns from the lab that night to find Skippy sitting with the lights out and the duvet wrapped around him, doing battle with a deathly-white hydra that breathes frost and flails its limbs like blizzards of razors.

‘Nasty-looking character,’ he says.

‘Ice Demon.’ Cross-legged on the floor, Skippy tugs the controller left and right, his mouth set in a tight line, his expression one of furious concentration; when Mr Tomms comes down the corridor for lights-out he switches off the machine and gets into bed without saying another word.

Then, just when Ruprecht is sure he is asleep, through the darkness: ‘Carl hitting me doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with Lori.’

‘No?’

‘Carl’s an asshole. He’s always doing that kind of thing. He doesn’t need a reason.’

‘That’s true,’ Ruprecht concedes.

There is a pause, then the voice comes back over the gulf of floor between the beds. ‘Anyway, how would he even know I’d texted her?’

Springs groan as Ruprecht redistributes himself, folding his hands on his stomach and twiddling his thumbs computatively. ‘Well, the surmise would be that your friend had told him…’

This followed by another pause, as in a long-distance phone conversation in days of Yore; and then the defiant reply, ‘She wouldn’t do that.’ He turns on his side, towards the wall, and, shortly after, tinny music rises from his headphones, the BETHani song in miniature like a distant field of harmonizing grasshoppers.

Ruprecht, still humming with sugar from a feed of doughnuts earlier, cannot sleep. He gets up, opens the SETI window, spends a while watching the computer processing the meaningless news the universe brings it; he makes a list of random M words, moose, marker, milk, minnow, to see if any unusual connections emerge; he watches the softly rising and falling shape of his friend, cocooned in his nimbus of nanomusic.

He is thinking about asymmetry. This is a world, he is thinking, where you can lie in bed, listening to a song as you dream about someone you love, and your feelings and the music will resonate so powerfully and completely that it seems impossible that the beloved, whoever and wherever he or she might be, should not know, should not pick up this signal as it pulsates from your heart, as if you and the music and the love and the whole universe have merged into one force that can be channelled out into the darkness to bring them this message. But in actuality, not only will he or she not know, there is nothing to stop that other person from lying on his or her bed at the exact same moment listening to the exact same song and thinking about someone else entirely – from aiming those identical feelings in some completely opposite direction, at some totally other person, who may in turn be lying in the dark thinking of another person still, a fourth, who is thinking of a fifth, and so on, and so on; so that rather than a universe of neatly reciprocating pairs, love and love-returned fluttering through space nicely and symmetrically like so many pairs of butterfly wings, instead we get chains of yearning, which sprawl and meander and culminate in an infinite number of dead ends.

Just as the shape of natural objects like rainbows, snowflakes, crystals and blossoming flowers derives from the symmetrical way that quarks arrange themselves in the atom – a remnant of the universe’s lost state of perfect symmetry – so Ruprecht is convinced that the unhappy state of affairs regarding love can be traced right back to the subatomic. If you read up on strings, you will learn that there are two different types, closed and open-ended. The closed strings are O-shaped loops that float about like angels, insouciant of spacetime’s demands and playing no part in our reality. It is the open-ended strings, the forlorn, incomplete U-shaped strings, whose desperate ends cling to the sticky stuff of the universe; it is they that become reality’s building blocks, its particles, its exchangers of energy, the teeming producers of all that complication. Our universe, one could almost say, is actually built out of loneliness; and that foundational loneliness persists upwards to haunt every one of its residents. But might the situation be different in other universes? In a universe where, for instance, all of the strings were closed, what would love look like there? And energy? And spacetime? The siren call of the question mark: his thoughts drift laterally, inevitably, away from Skippy and his predicament to grander matters – universes coiled voluptuously in secret dimensions, sheets of pure sparking otherness, crimped topographies cradling forms unsullied even by being dreamed of…

A noise summons him back to reality – a tapping, barely audible, at the window. It is a moth, beating a feeble tattoo of yearning for the moon on the other side of the glass: another unrequited love story, Ruprecht thinks. He lifts the sash to let it out, then goes to his copybook and writes down moon, moth. Midway through the second word he stops, and for a long moment he remains motionless, as if stalled over the page; then he hurries back to the window and stares out, as if he could descry there in the dark the quick upward beat of tiny wings…