Love Among the Particles Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  The Monster in Winter

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  The Captain Is Sleeping

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  The Mummy’s Bitter and Melancholy Exile

  A Theory of Time

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  The Gaiety of Henry James

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  15.

  16.

  17.

  18.

  19.

  20.

  21.

  Ideas of Space

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  The Sleep Institute

  Love in the Steam Age

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  Ravished by Death

  The Love of Stanley Marvel Et Claire Moon

  To Each According to His Sentence

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  Tango in Amsterdam

  The Brothers Ascend

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  The Broken Man’s Complaint

  Love Among the Particles

  1. My Metamorphosis

  2. Developing a Theory of the Self

  3. In Praise of the Digital Age

  4. Circulating Through Space and Time

  5. “Cogito Ergo Sum,” Et Cetera

  6. The Past and How I Got There

  7. Painful Acknowledgments

  8. Consulting the Oracles

  9. Sleeping Among Tortoises

  10. Dance of the Particles (in 4/4 Time)

  Loneliness in the New Kingdom

  1. Nostalgia Is a Property of Matter

  2. A Course of Mind Reading at Victoria University

  3. The Texture of Thought Is Knotty, Not Silken

  4. My Particles Become Encrypted with an Alien Time Signature

  5. At the Gateway to Vanished Time

  6. “I Sits Among the Cabbages and Peas”

  7. Ventriloquism in the New Kingdom

  8. In Sight of the Reed-Covered Islands of Paradise

  9. In the Cold Digital Sea, I Lay Down and Slept

  The Broken Man in Dark Ages to Come

  1. And I Came Unto the Sea of Information

  2. As Distance Might Be Measured Where All Is Immeasurable

  3. A Brief Discourse on Time

  4. Entertaining the Possibility of Love, Again

  5. The Persistence of Boredom in Time to Come

  6. Inside, the Universe Is Also Expanding

  7. “It” Is the Name of Their Fear

  8. Guardians of the Data Shall Inherit the Earth

  9. Alone at the End of Information

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Also by Norman Lock

  Fiction

  A History of the Imagination

  Joseph Cornell’s Operas / Émigrés

  Trio

  Notes to ‘The Book of Supplemental Diagrams’ for Marco Knauff’s Universe

  Land of the Snow Men

  The Long Rowing Unto Morning

  The King of Sweden

  Shadowplay

  Grim Tales

  Pieces for Small Orchestra & Other Fictions

  Escher’s Journal

  Stage Plays

  Water Music

  Favorite Sports of the Martyrs

  The House of Correction1

  The Contract

  The Sinking Houses1

  The Book of Stains1

  Radio Plays

  Women in Hiding

  The Shining Man2

  The Primate House

  Let’s Make Money

  Mounting Panic

  Poetry

  Cirque du Calder

  In the Time of Rat

  Film

  The Body Shop

  For Helen, Meredith, and Nicholas

  The Monster in Winter

  He, I say—I cannot say, I.

  ––R. L. Stevenson

  1.

  Frederick Drayton impressed the superintendent of Broadmoor by an affability at variance with the impertinence he had come to expect of young Americans, especially those whose experience of travel was limited to their own rough shores and the Continent. (The superintendent despised the Continent, by which he meant France; it was, for him, Les Fleurs du mal, although he had never read Baudelaire, nor would he ever.) That Drayton might be otherwise than he seemed did not occur to him. The young man carried, besides, a letter of recommendation from someone of importance in the Home Office, endorsing the bearer as worthy of favor. Lord M—had added a postscript in his own hand: “Do what you can for him, John.”

  The superintendent might have wondered at the interest shown in Drayton by so illustrious a person, but curiosity was not among his “gifts”—a convenient absence in a man charged with the disposition of many whose qualifications for admittance to an asylum for the criminally insane were dubious. Nor was the superintendent offended by the twenty-pound note that Drayton had caused to appear, like a conjuror’s trick, on the teak desk this official had purchased while on Indian service in the Punjab, whose allusive carvings some found unsettling. The banknote seemed to have arrived there of its own volition, so suave were the gestures of this good-natured San Franciscan. The superintendent left it undisturbed, while he searched the other’s face for signs of servility or mischief. Finding no sign of either, he put the note out of mind and beyond the reach of any mention, inside a leather-bound inmate census lying on the desk.

  “It can be arranged,” he told Drayton with the air of one used to arranging things of greater import than this, a private interview with one of the inmates. “At one time, he was considered the most dangerous man in England,” he added, his gaze shifting involuntarily to Britannia’s portrait. “He was exceptionally vicious.” Again his eyes slid off Drayton’s, onto his own hands, which played with the thin-bladed knife he had employed in opening Lord M—’s crested envelope.

  The American nodded his understanding.

  “Of course, the atrocities were committed more than twenty-five years ago!” the superintendent declared with an emphasis the young man could not interpret. He put down the knife. It caught the gaslight along its edge in a way that made him stare involuntarily. “He has—I assure you—repented of his past. He has applied himself to his rehabilitation.”

  “His behavior—”

  “Exemplary.” The superintendent swept
the knife away into the top drawer of the desk. “You will be quite safe with him, Mr. Drayton.”

  The American nodded a second time.

  “If there is nothing else …” The superintendent rose from his chair.

  “No. Thank you.”

  “I must examine the census.”

  Drayton stood at the other side of the desk and extended his hand across it. The impulse to draw his finger down the length of a darkly oiled swelling in the wood was almost irresistible. The superintendent seemed unsure whether or not to take his hand—aware of the novelty, perhaps, of such a gesture in a place reserved for the instruction of the asylum’s staff and the admonition of its patients.

  He took it, finally, and looked as one released from an intolerable strain.

  “I hope everything will be satisfactory, Mr. Drayton.” He let go of the young man’s hand only to take his elbow and lead him to the door. “Please convey my regards to Lord M—, when you see him.”

  “I will,” said Drayton in a tone of voice that insinuated an intimacy with the eminent man.

  “Tell him that I have been helpful.”

  2.

  Frederick Drayton feared obscurity and the meagerness of a life spent in the shadows. It was not money he wanted; money, like a prepossessing nature, was only an instrument in the attainment of his ambition. He wished for fame and would not have regretted if a portion of it were infamous, so long as that infamy were not predominant in his reputation. He would not be a murderer or even a thief (except in a small way); but he would not mind that people considered him a roué or a rogue so long as admiration as well as censure were mixed in their regard. Drayton did not care if he ended up excluded from respectable company so long as that company came to see him on the stage; it was as an actor that he first had hoped to step out of the shadows he detested—into the green and garish footlights. But he lacked talent in that direction. He had also attempted a play, which failed and took with it the savings of a spinster aunt, whose distress he ignored. He was not discouraged. Drayton had that quality by virtue of which ambitious men sometimes succeed: a high opinion of himself.

  After he had been repulsed twice by the more or less legitimate stage, he conceived an idea of such originality that few would doubt its genius, had they only known the dimensions of his brainstorm. But Drayton was shrewd as well as ambitious, and he concealed his thinking from his friends. He determined to make his name in vaudeville, whose stage, he knew, would be open to the kind of grotesque entertainment he planned: a confession so harrowing as to make Dickens’s public reading of the murder of Nancy by Bill Sikes a pale piece of fiction, which it was. The confession Drayton had in mind would be the real McCoy—the testimony of a degenerate man—a genuine beast, if beasts may be said to be wicked and perverse.

  An idea must have a provenance, and Drayton’s originated in a newspaper article published on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the terror that reigned in London (so memorably described by Robert Louis Stevenson), whose culmination was the beating to death of Sir Danvers Carew. Drayton had skimmed the account, his mind occupied by the devising of a lampoon that might, with luck, bring him the fame that he demanded. So apparently slight an impression had the item made on him that he left the newspaper on the seat of a San Francisco Traction Company car, which deposited him at his rooming house near the Presidio. It was not until the following evening that the story of Edward Hyde was recalled to him by a conversation overheard in a saloon.

  “They say he ate the living hearts of the women he killed.”

  “He was a devil.”

  “Not even children were safe from his rages.”

  “They ought to have hanged him.”

  “He’s locked up for life in a lunatic asylum.”

  “I still say they ought to have hanged him. Cut off his arms and legs and hung what was left.”

  “He is a freak of nature.”

  “People would pay plenty to see him.”

  People would pay plenty to see him. This observation regarding the public’s inexhaustible voyeurism set Drayton’s train of thought on a new track as he sat over his whiskey and water. He remembered the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from his school days and knew with an impresario’s certainty that it represented a far greater coup de théâtre than the worn music-hall sketch he had been trying to reupholster, in his imagination, with naughty innuendo.

  AN EVENING WITH EDWARD HYDE

  NOTORIOUS MURDERER

  ONSTAGE FOR A LIMITED ENGAGEMENT

  PRESENTED BY FREDERICK DRAYTON

  A homicidal maniac reciting his unspeakable crimes, alone onstage in the sickly light of the gas brackets. What a sensation that would be! Nothing could match it for terror and novelty. Drayton would rocket to the empyrean of celebrity, riding such an indecency. For that was what it was—a gross indecency—and Drayton knew it. That—he also knew—was the rancid bait to bring out the public in droves. I will arouse its indignation to fury, will make it howl for Hyde’s blood. The public will be in a frenzy to apply rough justice to his neck, in the alleyway behind every theater at which we stop. My God! he thought. Not even Barnum had offered so complete a provocation to an audience! Everyone who sees the author of such crimes will want to leave his own sins sticking to him like a plaster. They will come—each of them—determined to revile Hyde, to vilify Hyde, to daub Hyde over with their own filth so that they may leave the theater with their souls cleansed.

  Drayton possessed Barnum’s dramatic instinct: He knew how to put on a show. He also knew that a spectacle, no matter how original (that is to say, how deviant), is not in itself enough to produce a powerful sensation; there must also be scandal and a counterbalancing redemption—whether for the spectators or for the object of their antipathy is irrelevant.

  Yes, that’s the formula! I’ll put the monster on the boards and let them bathe themselves in a virtuous hatred. Unless the monster itself be repentant. Drayton speculated on what effect a contrite Hyde might have on his audience. Would it be more profitable, he wondered, to divert the hot blood of the mob into a channel of maudlin rejoicing for a lost soul? To turn a Roman circus into a revivalist’s tent meeting?

  THE ATONEMENT OF EDWARD HYDE

  INFAMOUS MURDERER & RAPIST

  PRESENTED BY FREDERICK DRAYTON

  FOR THE EDIFICATION OF THE GREAT AMERICAN PUBLIC

  Ire or awe, which would be more likely to win an ever-increasing audience—not one, but as many as there are cities in America? And why not abroad? After all, by his public readings the length and breadth of England and America more than by his books themselves was Dickens made famous. By his literary murders—fictions! How much more thrilling the real thing! What if Hyde were actually to strangle someone onstage in front of the astonished crowd? Even if it were only a simulation, such an act would undoubtedly add an unparalleled frisson to the evening for the gentlemen. The brothels will benefit! Drayton was aware that he had felt it himself many times—a prurience aroused by the details of a gruesome murder, especially when the victim was a young woman. He knew himself not to be unique: Why else the nearly universal interest in the Ripper and his Whitechapel Murders?

  WITNESS EDWARD HYDE AS HE STRANGLES

  A WOMAN ONSTAGE

  PRESENTED BY FREDERICK DRAYTON

  FOR AUDIENCES IN AMERICA & GREAT BRITAIN

  Drayton was on his fifth whiskey and water when the train derailed. With an involuntary movement of his hand, he knocked his glass to the floor, where it shattered—an apt mirroring of the sudden destruction of his ungovernable thought.

  What an ass I am!

  What smashed his daydream was the realization of the impossibility of releasing Hyde from his incarceration for a purpose no loftier than Drayton’s own extravagant aggrandizement.

  How could he be released for any purpose? The man was dangerous—may be so still. He is confined for life and condemned forever. His remains can never be given Christian burial—Drayton remembered having read that in th
e newspaper story—nor any other form of interment that might keep open the prospect of resurrection. And I wanted to take him on tour!

  And then—he could not help himself, so mercenary a heart was his—Drayton wondered if, when the time came, Hyde’s remains might not be obtained, and at what price.

  3.

  Hyde did not die upon the scaffold, nor did he find the courage to release himself at the last moment, as Henry Jekyll had hoped during his final hours of consciousness while he waited for his monstrous twin to usurp him. He understood that Hyde was stronger and more cunning in the simplicity of his need, and that he would—when next he arrived within Jekyll’s locked laboratory—remain there. Jekyll expected to predecease his rival by months or years. But the coming of Hyde proved too violent; Jekyll perished in convulsions upon the rack of Hyde, and immediately Hyde followed him. Thus were they both dead within a narrow space of each other—expiring, as it were, “in one another’s arms”—and (this later proved crucial!) officially declared to be so.

  The constables shoveled the body of both, rudely, into the back of a van. But before the corpse could enter the dismal precincts of the mortuary to wait upon the inquest into that “strange case,” Hyde woke. Woke from a dream of death or some other counterfeit induced by the doctor’s powerful drug. Unless having died on the instant with Jekyll, he had come back to life, having gone only a little way into the dark and not yet been possessed by its chill rigor. In any event, Hyde returned; and Jekyll, because of a ruined health perhaps, did not. As the doctor had feared, he was supplanted by the other, who has survived him now a quarter century. Had the mortuary van been unlocked (why should a corpse need locking in?), Hyde might have gotten away and continued to prosecute his private war against humanity. But the door was locked, and he did not escape.

  When the city understood what Hyde had done—what atrocities and enormities—it screamed for vengeance. It demanded (to speak of the city as the nearly homogeneous thing it is in times of hysteria) the most severe punishments, exacted by means that were extraordinary for their invention and cruelty. Hyde the beast and monster elicited the bestial and the monstrous in everyone who contemplated him. Almost everyone. Some few there were who called for mercy, believing Hyde to have been the unwitting dupe and victim of his creator, Jekyll. Enlightened and forbearing, they spoke of “accidents of birth” and “Dr. Frankenstein’s Monster.” Ironically, it was the law that saved Hyde from hanging. That he had died (ostensibly or in reality) before witnesses and been pronounced dead established a degree of doubt, and doubt gave rise to a faction that declared that a dead man could not be tried. The opposition argued that the fact of Hyde’s death was moot; all that mattered was his present status as a living man. Ultimately, the court decided that a legal pronouncement of death could not be reversed without committing a supreme blasphemy. Thus did Edward Hyde enter the limbo in which he was, legally, neither living nor dead, but in a condition partaking of both. Advocates of either side of the legal opinion were in any case agreed that Hyde must be committed, and for life. (The public could not follow the subtle arguments of the case and, in the end, forgot it.) So Hyde was taken to Broadmoor and left to rot.