Philip Kerr - A Philosophical Investigation

‘Live sex show, just starting,’ barked the florid-faced hippo seated behind the toughened glass of the box-office. ‘Only twenty-five EC. The hardest show in London, sir.’

I counted five bills in front of him and retrieved a pink ticket from a roll the size of a dinner plate. The stairs creaked like falling timber as I stepped gingerly down into the bowels of the club. The girl on stage had just finished removing her knickers and was twirling them on the end of her finger, almost as if she had been trying to fan herself, because it was hot in there.

‘Afternoon, mate,’ she chirped, catching sight of me as I peered forward, looking for Descartes.

He wasn’t difficult to spot, seated as close to the blanket-sized stage as possible, his hair a recognisably ridiculous silhouette against the bright spotlights.

I sat immediately behind him, although I don’t suppose he would have noticed. He was much too busy watching the girl as she began to apply a large handful of Vaseline first to her backside, and then to the larger end of a champagne bottle. Surely not, I thought and found myself almost immediately contradicted as she squeezed the bottle inside herself until only the cork remained visible.

A thing is identical with itself. A useless proposition which nevertheless requires an effort of imagination. It is as if in imagination we put a thing such as a champagne bottle into its own shape and saw that it fitted. At the same time, we look at a thing and imagine that there was a blank left for it and that now it fits into it exactly. But this is something else entirely.

The obscenity of it was almost laughable. She drew the bottle inside herself and then pushed it out again. An inner process which stands in need of outward criteria. A human being defecating a champagne bottle.

René Descartes sat rigidly in his seat, not moving his head and, it seemed, hardly daring to breathe. Was this, I wondered, part of his basic quest for the self? Were his senses deceiving him now, concerning things which seemed hardly perceptible? Did he think that this was a dream in which he saw even less probable things than do those who are insane in their waking moments? Was he thinking that in reality he was at home, lying undressed in bed?

He could have been forgiven for thinking that this was some nightmare he was inhabiting. The woman grunted a little and then she giggled as she grasped the neck of the bottle and, with a horrible sucking noise, pulled it right out of her anus. It was like watching a patient, etherised upon a table, performing some surgery upon herself. The apparent impossibility of what she was doing and the sense of astonishment which I felt seemed to underline the dream-like aspect of the whole situation. To my surprise I found myself holding out my hand in front of me, as if to perceive it. What happens in sleep could not surely appear so clear, nor so distinct as this. But of course, Descartes knew that sleep deceives by the ingenuity of its illusions, that there are no certain indications by which we may clearly distinguish wakefulness from sleep. From death, even.

For a moment I was lost in astonishment. My astonishment could almost have persuaded me that I was indeed dreaming. The bottle disappeared inside the woman again. She squeezed it back a little and then vacuumed it back once more.

A dream then. Even better. It was easier for us both that way. I drew the gas-gun from my shoulder-holster and reflected that I could hardly miss. All the same, if I say ‘The gun is aiming at point p on the back of Descartes’s head’, I’m not saying anything about where the shot will hit. Giving the point at which it is aiming is a geometrical means of assigning its direction. That this is the means I use is certainly connected with certain observations (projectile parabolas, etc.) but these observations don’t enter into our present description of the direction.

‘Do it,’ said the voice.

I froze with surprise. Who had spoken? Descartes? Nietzsche? God?

‘Yeah, go on, do it,’ it said again.

The girl squealed, almost imperceptibly. I heard other cries of wild encouragement.

‘All right,’ I said and lifted the gun barrel until it was just a few centimetres from the back of his head.

The girl kneeling on the stage hauled the bottle out of her ass and stood up to take a bow. Small explosions of applause surrounded me as the audience showed its appreciation. Everyone except Descartes. But I don’t suppose anyone noticed. Holstering my gun again I made my way upstairs to the light.

Like him I dread awakening from this slumber. Just in case the laborious wakefulness which would follow the tranquillity of this repose should have to be spent not in daylight, but in the excessive darkness of the difficulties which have just been discussed.

It’s true, no one has interfered with my freedom. My life has drained it dry. A lot of fuss about nothing. This life had been given to me for nothing. And yet I would not change. I am as I was made. But I can still savour the failure of a life. After all, I have attained the age of reason.

But what kind of reason have I to assume that my gun will fire if my finger pulls the trigger? What kind of reason to believe that if I fired it at a brother’s head it would blow his brains out? When I ask this, a hundred reasons present themselves, each drowning the voice of the others. ‘But I have already done it myself innumerable times, and as often heard of others doing the same. Why only the other day there was an article in a magazine written by a former Mafia hitman who used to shoot his victims in the head while they were eating their soup.’ (Well, at least I have the decency not to interfere with a man’s lunch.)

Reason is first in Nature, created that Man may investigate and perceive, and it is to be distinguished from Sensibility and Understanding. Of course it has a very natural tendency to overreach itself, to overstep the limits of what may be experienced, and all inferences which would carry us across the slippery ground are fallacious and worthless.

And yet... the same mind that is capable of reason also produces monsters.

There is an engraving by gorgeous Goya in which various creatures of eternal night hover menacingly above the head of a sleeping man — perhaps Goya himself: certainly there are few artists who can rival his monstrous imaginings. These monsters in the engraving are, of course, symbolic. The real monster, as Hobbes tells us (and, for that matter, Freud), is Man himself — a savage, selfish, murderous brute. Society, says Hobbes, exists so that man may leave his brutish nature chained up at home, that he may aspire to something greater.

But if Man’s original state is to be asocial and destructively rapacious, then if he aspires to go beyond this state, does he grow nearer to God, or does he find himself growing further away?

For my own part I find the aspects of my character which are solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short are far stronger than those civilising constraints which are imposed by society. I find that I understand, only too well, those who are at war against the world.

We all look to fathom the mind of a mass-murderer and to understand what makes him commit such heinous crimes.

Yet which of us can honestly say that in his Hobbesian heart of hearts, he does not already have the answer?

The man sat slumped in his seat, head on chest, arms dangling by his sides, a perfect caricature of a sleeping gorilla. The back of his neck looked painfully red, as if badly sunburned, but that was only encrusted blood.