Andrew Crumey: The Secret Knowledge

Yes, Paige can work it out. Conroy has gone right over the edge, he’s lost touch with reality, but he’s determined to tell them both the details of his delusional fantasy.

“Laura was onto them, that’s why they made her disappear. A new kind of network they’re developing, faster than ever but it fries people’s brains.”

Morrow says, “Why don’t we all go and talk to someone about this?”

The gun swings at him. “You think I’m fucking nuts? You think I don’t already know that none of it makes sense? When I see a world gone mental, what else am I supposed to do?”

“Let’s find Julian Verrine, I could call him for you.” Morrow is about to reach for the phone in his jeans but the gun jabs towards him. It has to be a fake, Paige thinks. All of this is fake.

Conroy clenches the pages of the score between his teeth and with his free hand finds a red plastic cigarette lighter from inside his jacket. With a flick he summons a flame, plays it on a corner of a page and a moment later is holding the smouldering bundle which he drops into the metal bin beside the door. Black smoke thickens, rises to the ceiling and drifts across it.

“This is what Klauer would have wanted,” says Conroy. “This is what was always supposed to happen.”

The three of them are jolted by the sudden wailing of a fire alarm.

“We need to go,” Paul shouts.

“Stay where you are.” Smoke is still issuing from the bin, catching their throats.

“Everybody’ll be evacuating, you can get away now and we’ll forget this ever happened.”

“Please, Mr Conroy.”

He doesn’t move, instead he’s looking at Paige while the alarm blares, and in his eyes there’s something almost like tenderness. “I want you to be happy,” he says.

“Then you should go.”

“I know how much you must have wanted to come here, they made you think it mattered. You must have felt it was the happiest day of your life. Is that right, Paige?”

She says nothing, she can see from the corner of her eye that Paul is preparing to make a move.

“And you know, Paige, I’m sure that’s what Klauer thought too. I want to make this the happiest day of your life.”

Conroy points the pistol at his temple, Paul leaps from where he sits, and above the screaming of the siren Paige hears another sound, she doesn’t know where it comes from or what it means, only that the door has been opened, Conroy is staggering as Verrine bursts in and she drops to the floor while the whole world becomes black, cracked by gunshot, but it isn’t Paige who’s been hit. She’s been saved, like the music she’ll still play, by the man who will become her husband.

In the park, in front of the canvas tent, stands a diminutive wooden figure. Ariel: The Extraordinary Flying Girl . The dummy’s pout is taunting, provocative, eternal. Pierre said he would be five minutes: how many have passed? Yvette walks towards the tent, sees beyond its flapping entrance the small crowd gathered inside in anticipation of the latest performance. She hears a voice behind her.

“Yvette! Darling!”

There he is, running to re-join her. The promise is fulfilled. Before she can say anything he embraces her in a way she has never known, like a grateful child, his kiss the sweetest wine.

“Will you marry me?”

“You asked me already when we rode on the wheel!”

“I ask again. Will you be mine forever?”

He’s been acting so strangely, but now there’s joy in his voice, a relief she shares. “Yes, Pierre, I’m yours. Only tell me the second thing you spoke of. What is it, this secret knowledge?”

They walk hand in hand as he explains about his friends and their strange ideas of multiple worlds.

“Nonsense!” Yvette laughs. She thought there must be another woman; all that threatens her is philosophy.

“It’s real science,” he says earnestly. “One of them, a physicist, says it has to do with radioactivity, the way atoms break into fragments. Think of all that living energy, if only it could be released!”

She’d rather hoped that when he came back from his brief absence he would have brought a bunch of flowers. He said it was a test, but it appears to have been a trial of nothing more than her patience. “I love your crazy notions, Pierre. I want you to keep dreaming. But you have to stop seeing these people.”

“I shall.”

His readiness is unexpected.

“You won’t contact them again? What about your musical piece?”

“I renounce it.”

She brings out the key he gave her. “You’d better have this, then.”

Pierre takes it, twirls the small, dull metal object in his fingers, then hurls it away onto the lawn beside them, its arc a gesture of triumph. “It’s over. All is well.”

They reach a pavilion where drinks are being served and choose a shaded table; people chat while in a corner a photographer adjusts his camera on a tripod, ready to preserve the scene. A waiter takes their order, then after he has departed, Pierre says to her, “They wanted me… to do something. That was the test.”

“And did you do it?”

“I couldn’t. Wouldn’t. Yvette, they say a man who stakes his life on a game of chance must always arrive in a world where he survives, even if in another he leaves grieving friends.”

“What madness!”

“This is how they purify themselves, by constantly risking death, creating worlds where they’ve died, seeing only ones where they’re alive.”

“My God, did they suggest you…?”

“It goes further. They want to put innocent people to this insane test. Bombs detonated at random, trains derailed by the roll of a dice, chemicals that might be harmless or lethal, spread in food. They envisage a world filled only with the survivors of such outrages, and call it paradise.”

“We have to tell the police.”

“It’s too dangerous, these are powerful men. Their organisation is arranged like the alphabet, a sort of living lexicon. They call it Rosier’s Encyclopaedia. They want to find a way of transmitting their atrocities, perhaps using telephones or wireless telegraphy. They seek immortality through death. Their plan is global suicide.”

She clasps his hands. “They’re lunatics.”

“They speak of the Radiance, when all mankind will have been made to play the deadly game and a single world will survive whose rays shine back through time upon all other outcomes, filling them with erasing Endness. A signal heard through every history, the unlocking of the Great Code. My music was meant to announce its arrival.”

“Forget these lies.”

He looks uneasy. “I still have the Book of Rules.”

“What are you talking about?”

“An old bound manuscript, written in a language I don’t understand. They told me how to turn it into musical themes.”

“Who told you?”

“Carreau, Oeillet, Verrier, Verrine… not their real names, I’m sure, more like passwords that get carried from one generation to the next. Yvette, they don’t know I took it, but they’ll guess and come after me…”

“Their only power comes from your own fear and imagination. None of this is real, Pierre. You’re free of them now.”

The waiter brings their drinks; Yvette takes a sip of lemonade while music drifts on the warm air from a distant band. And for an instant she feels it, the tremor, the flash, a warning from the world’s far edge.

“You’re right, Yvette, we shall live for the future, not the past. We shall rejoice forever in the contemplation of beauty and eternal love. You are my angel, my life, my immortal beloved.”

But Yvette has seen the future. The days have passed, the children to be born are older than expired time. In this sepia moment we are already ghosts.