John Banville: The Infinities

Good thing, by the way, that this young husband does not know what my doughty Dad, the godhead himself, was doing to his darling wife up in that bedroom not an hour since in what she will imagine is a dream.

On the subject of fathers: Adam has not seen his yet. When they arrived last night he pleaded his and Helen’s weariness after the journey and said they would go straight to bed. He thought that to visit the old man then would have been gruesome; he would have felt like a body-snatcher measuring up a fresh specimen, or a vampire-hunter breaking into a crypt. Although he has not told her so he thinks his mother should not have insisted on taking Pa out of the hospital. Bringing him home to die is a throwback, something Granny Godley would have approved. Yet this morning he is sorry that he did not go at once and at least look at him, his fallen father, for with each hour that passes it will be so much the harder to force himself up those stairs and into that sickroom. He does not know how he will behave at the side of what everyone, without saying so, has acknowledged is his father’s deathbed. He has never been at a death before and hopes not to have to be present for this one.

Petra is still scratching, but with decreasing momentum, absently, like a cat slowly losing interest in its itch. He wishes he could help her, could assuage even one of her sore, inflamed spots. Yet he resents her, too, has always resented her, since before she was born, even, his usurper. He has a sudden clear memory of her as a baby in her cot, wrapped tight in a blanket, like a mummified yet all too living infanta. “Oho, my bucko, she’ll make you hop,” Granny Godley would say with a cackle, “—you’ll think your arse is haunted!”

“Come on,” he says now brusquely to the girl, “come on, and we’ll have our breakfast.”

And sister and brother, these waifs, shuffle off into the shadows. It is shadowed too up in the Sky Room where Adam Godley at the centre of a vast stillness is going about his dying. Yes, he too is Adam, like his son. By the way, apropos names and the like, I suppose I should before going further give some small account of myself, this voice speaking out of the void. Men have made me variously keeper of the dawn, of twilight and the wind, have called me Argeiphantes, he who makes clear the sky, and Logios, the sweet-tongued one, have dubbed me trickster, the patron of gamblers and all manner of mountebanks, have appointed me the guardian of crossroads, protector of travellers, have conferred on me the grave title Psychopompos, usher of the freed souls of men to Pluto’s netherworld. For I am Hermes, son of old Zeus and Maia the cavewoman. You don’t say, you say.

I understand your scepticism. Why in such times as these would the gods come back to be among men? But the fact is we never left — you only stopped entertaining us. For how should we leave, we who cannot but be everywhere? We merely made it seem that we had withdrawn, for a decent interval, as if to say we know when we are not wanted. All the same, we cannot resist revealing ourselves to you once in a while, out of our incurable boredom, or love of mischief, or that lingering nostalgia we harbour for this rough world of our making — I mean this particular one, for of course there is an infinity of others just like it that we made and must keep ever vigilantly in our care. When on a summer’s day a sudden gale tears through the treetops, or when out of the blue a soft rain falls like the fall of grace upon a painted saint, there one of us is passing by; when the earth buckles and opens its maw to eat cities whole, when the sea rises up and swallows an entire archipelago with its palms and straw huts and a myriad ululating natives, be assured that one of our number is seriously annoyed.

But what attention we lavished on the making of this poor place! The lengths we went to, the pains we took, that it should be plausible in every detail — planting in the rocks the fossils of outlandish creatures that never existed, distributing fake dark matter throughout the universe, even setting up in the cosmos the faintest of faint hums to mimic the reverberations of the initiating shot that is supposed to have set the whole shooting-match going. And to what end was all this craft, this labour, this scrupulous dissembling — to what end? So that the mud men that Prometheus and Athene between them made might think themselves the lords of creation. We have been good to you, giving you what you thought you wanted — yes, and look what you have done with it.

All this, of course, I cast in the language of humankind, necessarily. Were I to speak in my own voice, that is, the voice of a divinity, you would be baffled at the sound — in fact, you would not be able to hear me at all, so rarefied is our heavenly speech, compared to your barely articulate gruntings. Why, the music of the spheres has nothing on us. And these names — Zeus, Prometheus, grey-eyed Athene, Hermes, even — these are your constructions. We address each other, as it were, only as air, as light, as something like the quality of that deep, transparent blue you see when you peer into the highest vault of the empyrean. And Heaven — what is that? For us, the deathless ones, there is no Heaven, or Hell, either, no up, no down, only the infinite here, which is a kind of not-here. Think of that.

This moment past, in the blinking of your eye, I girdled the earth’s full compass thrice. Why these aerial acrobatics? For diversion, and to cool my heels. And because I could and you cannot. Oh, yes, we too are petty and vindictive, just like you, when we are put to it.

Adam, this Adam, has suffered a stroke. By the way, I pause to remark how oddly innocuous, even pretty, a term this is for something so unpleasant and, in this case, surely final — as if one of us had absent-mindedly laid a too-heavy hand upon his brow. Which is perfectly possible, since we are notorious for not knowing our own strength. Anyway, for some time prior to this stroke that he suffered old Adam had been subject, all unbeknownst, to a steady softening of the brain due to a gradual extravasation of blood in the area of the parietal lobe — yes, yes, I have also some expertise in matters medical, to meliorate the more obstreperous of my attributes — which means in other words he was already a goner before that catastrophic moment when, enthroned at morning within the necessary place — to put it as delicately as I may — he crouched too low and strained too strenuously in the effort of extruding a stool as hard as mahogany, and felt, actually felt, a blood vessel bursting in his brain, and toppled forward on to the floor, his face to the tiles and his scrawny bare bum in the air, and passed at once, with what in happier circumstances would have been a delicious smoothness, into death’s vast and vaulted antechamber, where still he bides, in a state of conscious but incommunicate ataraxia, poised upon the point of oblivion.

He is not alone — as one of your most darkly glowing luminants has observed, the living being is only a species of the dead, and a rare species at that. He senses the multitude of his fellows all about, uneasy and murmurous in their state of life-in-death. And I am here as well, of course. When our time comes we shall go together, he and I, into what is next, which I may not speak of.

His wife has entered the room, making hardly a sound, as is increasingly her wont these days. She feels she is becoming more and more a wraith, as if Adam in his last illness were siphoning something vital from her, drop by glistening drop. She closes the bedroom door softly behind her and stands motionless a moment, letting her eyes adjust to the dimness. A teeming sword of early sunlight is falling through a parting in the heavy curtains of the middle window, breaking its blade across the foot of the bed. The Sky Room is a most capricious touch added on to the house by the man who built it, the famously eccentric St. John Blount, a timber eyrie set into the north-west — or is it southeast? — corner of the main edifice, glazed on three sides and surmounted by a conical roof with a metal weathervane in the shape of a fleeting, short-cloaked figure, wearing a pudding hat with a circular brim and bearing a staff, who can only be — well, me, I suppose. How disconcerting. I did not expect to encounter myself here, in such surroundings, at this elevation, especially in the form of a two-dimensional tin representation of a godling. My staff must double as a lightning rod — that is something, I suppose, flash and fire and the reek of brimstone; that will liven things up.