Michael Frayn - Skios

“No,” he said, “I didn’t just think it up. It emerged from my reading and observation, as processed by my brain. And my brain is structured the way it is not through any efforts of mine but through my genetic inheritance. You could trace that inheritance back through the generations and see how it was gradually shaped by the various selective pressures on my ancestors. And you could keep going back, through the structure of the cells of which those ancestors were composed, to the organic chemistry that had shaped the fabric of the cells. Then the inorganic chemistry from which the organic had arisen. Back again to the elementary particles whose physics determines the chemistry. Back to the radiation energy that the particles condensed out of. Back, back, back to the tiny object which according to some cosmologists was only a few millimeters in diameter, and from which everything in the universe originated 13.7 billion years ago.

“All I have done is to allow events to take their course. I have simply accepted my inheritance. I’ve worked hard, certainly. I could have played around, and frittered my life away. In fact I chose to work. But that choice was of course determined, like everything else.”

The gaze she still had fixed upon him had become somewhat absent, he realized. He seemed to have exhausted her interest in the subject.

“The only trouble is, Wilfred,” she said finally, “that you cannot stand up in front of people and give a lecture looking like that. Take your shirt off. I’ll wash it out for you.”

“I’m fine,” he said.

“You’re not fine, Wilfred. You’re a total wreck. Take it off.”

He took it off. “Thank you,” he said.

“Trousers.”

He put on one of the bathrobes and turned discreetly away. Wilfred, yes. She was right. He had for all practical purposes reverted to being mere Wilfred, an awkward schoolboy who always said the wrong thing to girls. He had almost forgotten that he had ever been Dr. Wilfred. Dr. Wilfred had faded to an insubstantial fiction, a creature who had never really quite managed to exist.

“Pants. Socks.”

She took the sweaty clothes into the house, holding them at arm’s length, and he sank slowly back onto his chair. There were two last cold peas on his plate. As he contemplated them they seemed to dissolve into the two moles on Georgie’s left shoulder blade. He speared them on his fork, one after the other, and ate them.

* * *

It took Dr. Wilfred a long time to get from Mrs. Fred Toppler’s apartment in Democritus to lunch in the taverna, because people kept coming up to him on the way for a private word.

“I know this is a terrible intrusion,” said Kate Katz. “And I know how many people must be begging you to support one good cause or another. But could I just have one moment of your time to tell you about a desperately important campaign of which I happen to be a patron?”

But somebody else was already taking him by the other elbow.

“I have been so impressed by your approach,” said Morton Rinkleman. “Now, I am on the board of trustees of a small but vibrant liberal arts college in Tennessee.”

Already, though, other people had spotted him, and even before Kate Katz and Morton Rinkleman had finished with him more requests, proposals, and invitations were pressing in upon him.

“… expanding our European operation, and looking for a non-executive director…” “… to have you visit with us in Sausalito…” “… your advice on the Hong Kong copra futures market…” “… nothing less than the ending of national and racial conflict throughout the whole of sub-Saharan Africa…” “… our house in Montauk at your disposal…” “… the otherwise certain extinction of the Arkansas horned owl…” “… remuneration in the 300 K range, though this would of course be supplemented by benefits and stock options…” “… some literature here on the habits of the horned owl…”

By the time he reached the taverna Dr. Wilfred had agreed to be a patron of five campaigns and charities, and president of two institutes of higher education. He had invitations to stay in six states and address seven lunch clubs and ladies’ circles, was committed to charitable contributions of some fifty thousand dollars, but on the other hand had prospects of directorships and other appointments which would bring him an income of several million.

He had only just managed to sit down at the table before word of his most recent achievements in life had somehow overtaken him. “I hear you can do miracles with back problems, Dr. Wilfred! Now, I have a displacement of the fourth lumbar vertebra…” “… a red-hot skewer through the nape of my neck…” “… a pain just here …” “… just exactly there …” “… a strange buzzing in my left ear…”

As he helped himself to salad he discovered that he had also become a counselor on childcare and spiritual values.

“… I of course understand the problems parents have with growing boys, but quite frankly Wade is now thirty-seven…” “… a sense that there must be something more to life than Puccini and clam linguine…”

He picked up his fork.

“I still don’t see…” said Professor Ditmuss.

Dr. Wilfred plunged the fork into the salad, but the salad suddenly disappeared from the table and the fork was snatched out of his hand. He looked round. Nikki was holding them both aloft.

“Onions!” she said. “You’re violently allergic to them!”

The two moles on Georgie’s left shoulder blade kept disappearing and reappearing, like two bright stars among shifting clouds. She was slowly pursuing Dr. Wilfred’s phone around the bottom of the pool with the net for fishing leaves and insects out. She had only one hand free, though, because she had taken her T-shirt off again to sunbathe, and was using her other hand to hold the towel round her. Every time she tried to get the net under the phone either the phone slipped away from the net or the towel slipped away from her shoulders and she had to hoick it up again.

Dr. Wilfred closed his eyes, then looked at the view, then closed his eyes again.

“I shouldn’t bother,” he said. “The phone’s not going to work.”

“No, it’s just going to leak poisonous chemicals into the water. We’re both going to end up radioactive.”

His eyes seemed to be open again, and the two elusive dancing dots were just reemerging.

“So, this friend of yours,” he said. “Oliver. Oliver? Where is he?”

“No hurry. Your things aren’t dry yet.”

“Yes, but why isn’t he here, if he’s supposed to be?”

“ I don’t know!” She flung the net down and turned on him, suddenly furious. “Why aren’t you wherever you’re supposed to be? Why don’t you have a sun hat of your own? Why’s your phone at the bottom of the pool? I don’t know! But you do, do you? There’s some rational explanation for it all, is there? It all goes back to that thing that was half an inch wide twenty million years ago? It was all in there, all in that little thing, was it? Your head, your phone, you, me — you ending up in some place you’re not supposed to be — me getting stuck with you?”

He said nothing. There was never any point in replying to this kind of nonsense. Except to make one small simple point. “Thirteen point seven billion years ago,” he said.

He suddenly went blind. Something soft but stinging had hit him in the face. Her towel, he saw, as it fell off and the world returned.

“And that ?” she said. “You saw that coming, did you? Thirteen point seven billion years ago?”

He tried not to look at her as he threw the towel back to her. Or not for longer than was strictly necessary.