John Banville - Mefisto

— The people one has to do business with! Felix said.

The moon was high, a black wind scoured the streets. We arrived at a corner and found ourselves on the quay again. There was a broken blue wall, and a wooden fence, and a swollen woman drawn in chalk. We stopped under the street light.

— You see what fun you can have when you stick with me? Felix said. New friends, night rambles, interesting times. There’s only one condition.

He was peering off into the darkness.

— That you don’t, he said, lead a normal life.

And he laughed.

Two figures approached, going unsteadily, I thought it was Frisch and Brand, but it was not, it was the shaky young man from Chandos Street and his skinny girl. Felix went forward to meet them, taking something — something, that’s rich! — from the deep inner pocket of his mackintosh. He and the young man spoke together briefly. The girl hung back. Then they went off again into the darkness, and Felix returned.

— As I say, he said. The people!

We walked along by the river, and crossed the bridge. There were not many abroad in that cold night. A group of youths stood in a shop doorway bawling out a carol. Chains of coloured lights were strung between the lamp-posts, dancing and rattling in the wind. Under the dark façade of a huge shabby office building Felix stopped and said:

— Well, here we are.

He laughed at my baffled look.

— I told you, he said. He wants you to work with him. I promised him you would. Now you won’t let me down, will you?

He pointed to a flight of steps descending to a door in the basement of the building. He was smiling. Afar in the tempestuous night a peal of joybells sounded.

— Don’t worry, he said. It’s the season for beginnings, after all!

He skipped down the steps, his coat-tails flying, and pressed the doorbell with a flourish.

The door was opened by a plump young man in a yellow cardigan and suede slippers and a silk cravat. He had curls, and a broad soft sallow face, and a moist little mouth like the valve opening of a complicated inner organ. His name — let me have done with it — was Leitch. He looked at Felix with distaste and said:

— He’s not here.

Felix only smiled at him, and after a moment’s hesitation he shrugged and stepped back to let us pass. When I came forward into the light he laughed.

— Who’s this? he said. The Phantom of the Opera?

Felix smiled again, with lips compressed, and wagged a finger at him in playful admonition. We were in a long, bare, clean corridor with white walls, and white rubber tiles on the floor. The air vibrated with a dense, soundless din that pressed upon the eardrums. We walked towards another door at the end of the corridor. Leitch padded behind us, I could feel his hostile eye. He was first at the door, though, skipping ahead of us on his slippered feet, like a corpulent ballet dancer, one plump hand preemptively lifted.

— Allow me, he said with a venomous trill.

The room was an immense, rectangular box with a low ceiling made of blocks of some white synthetic stuff. The floor here too was clad with white tiles. There were no windows. The machine was housed in big grey steel cabinets, they had about them a faint, pained air of startlement. They were so grand, so gracefully arranged, they might have been interrupted in the midst of a stately dance. For a moment even Felix hesitated on the threshold. This was their room. We were the wrong shape.

— Come in, Leitch said. Meet the monster.

He grinned scornfully, his pink mouth puckering, and started to walk away.

— Hang on, old chap, Felix said mildly. Aren’t you going to show the new boy around?

Leitch looked from him to me and back again with deep dislike. It seemed he would refuse, but something in Felix’s smile checked him. He shrugged, tugging angrily at his cravat.

— What does he want to see?

Felix laughed.

— Oh, everything! he said, and turned to me. Isn’t that right? You want everything!

The machine was a Reizner 666. I had never seen anything like it in my life, had not known such a thing could exist. Yet I recognized it. It hummed in the depths of its coils, dreaming its vast dream of numbers. It had a brain, a memory. I recognized it. Leitch showed me the rudiments of its workings. I hardly listened to him. The thing itself spoke to me, I touched its core and it quivered under my hand. When I pressed the keys on the console the print fell across the page with a soft crash. At my shoulder Felix chuckled.

— What a gadget, eh? he whispered.

Professor Kosok arrived, with his black coat and his hat and his badly furled umbrella. He stopped inside the door and stared at us. Then he took off his coat and threw it on a chair, and came and looked at the figures I had printed.

— What is this game? he said. This is not a toy.

It was Leitch he looked at. The young man scowled. Felix said:

— Well, I’ll be off.

And with a wink he departed.

PROFESSOR KOSOK always worked by night. Often I had come upon him in the daytime in one of the bedrooms in Chandos Street, asleep on a bare mattress in a bundle of blankets and coats, only the top of his head and his nose showing. Now I too began to live a life at night, in that white room. The professor took scant notice of me. He existed in a constant state of angry preoccupation, stumping about in his waistcoat and his bow-tie, snorting softly to himself and rubbing a hand on his tussocky scalp. The machine was connected to others like it in other parts of the world, suddenly in the middle of the night the printer would spring to life of its own accord, rapping out peremptory, coded questions, like a medium’s table. He would rush to the console and start excitedly to reply, but he could not work the keyboard properly, he kept making mistakes, to the growing annoyance of the machine, which would chatter and snap at him, and then retreat abruptly into a silent sulk, until Leitch, with a bored sneer, came and punched in the correct codes. Then, for hours, sheet after sheet of figures would fall into the wire tray, each one folding on to its fellows with an identical, silken sigh. When the transmission was finished Leitch and I would take the figures and sift through them for days, searching out intricate patterns of correspondence and repetition. Sometimes it was no more than a single repeating value that we hunted.

— Truffles, the professor would say, with a smile that twitched. And you are the pigs.

It was his one joke.

But he seemed to want only disconnected bits, oases of order in a desert of randomness. When I attempted to map out a general pattern he grew surly, and threw down his pencil on the console and stamped away, fuming. I turned to Leitch. He put on a pensive frown, pressing a finger to his forehead.

— We’re searching for the meaning of life, he said.

And then laughed. He looked at me with contempt.

— How do I know what he’s doing! he said. You’re supposed to be the genius, you tell me. Statistics, probabilities, blind chance, I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him? He’s half cracked, anyway.

But there was no asking anything of the professor, he would pretend he had not heard, and turn away, muttering.

Leitch’s animosity was pure and disinterested. He directed it equally at all who came near him. It was like a task that had been assigned to him, irksome, and thankless, from which he was not allowed to relax. His name was Basil. He suffered from attacks of breathlessness, which he tried to hide from me. His feet were bad too, something was wrong with the arches, he walked in his slippers with a rolling gait, the voluminous seat of his trousers sagging. He had a painful, polished look that spoke of long sessions in the bathroom, of dousings and dustings, and ashen gloomings into a cruel mirror. He wore a gold chain on his wrist, and a ring with two gold hands holding a gold heart. He consoled himself with food. He ate alone, a lugubrious sybarite, sitting in a far corner of the room with a plastic bag open in his lap and a paper napkin tucked under his cravat. He had sandwiches, meat pies, cakes, cold chicken legs. I pictured him, bent at a table in a greasy room somewhere, some other Chandos Street, slicing and buttering, as the light faded on another solitary winter afternoon. Yet there was something almost impressive in his intransigence and grim self-sufficiency. Sucking at a bruised peach, or gobbling a fistful of purple grapes, he had the air of a ruined emperor, with those curls, that great pallid face, those wounded, unforgiving eyes.