John Banville - Mefisto

— Just do your job, will you? he said. Just do your job, and leave me alone.

I had hardly spoken a word to him all night.

— What job? I said. Is this a job?

He turned to me with blood in his eye.

— You’re here, aren’t you? he snarled. What more do you want?

Nothing, I wanted nothing, I was almost happy there. How calm the nights were, with only the hum of the machine, and the professor’s soft mutterings, and all around us the darkness. We might have been a mile under the ocean. We saw no one. We lived in downtime. The machine’s real users were those who came here during the day, from the offices above. I wondered about them, and searched for their traces. Sometimes there would be a coffee cup left behind, or an ashtray in which a half-smoked cigarette had burned itself out, leaving a fragile fossil of ash and a smear of tar. One night I arrived and found a yellow cardigan draped on the back of a chair, where someone had forgotten it. We did not move it, even Leitch avoided touching it, and as the night wore on it became a more and more insistent, numinous presence, unsettling as a pair of golden wings.

The machine was a presence too, a great tame patient beast, tethered in its white cage. It had its voices, the faint flutter and tick of the memory bank scanning, the printer’s crash and clatter. One of the storage discs produced an unaccountable, piercing shriek when it was first switched on. And always there was that dense hum, that made the very air vibrate. Sometimes, in the early hours, when one or other of my limbs began to sing, like a burning stick singing in a fire, I would seem to hear a sort of chime, like a small, sustained chord, as if the machine’s voice and the voice of my pain had found a common note. When something went wrong we were supposed to call for an engineer, but we never did. Instead, Leitch would get out his forceps and his probes and delve into the delicate innards of the machine, past the lattice of switches and bundles of wires fine as hair, down into the secret core itself. Then for a moment, forgetting himself, he would be transformed, kneeling there in the midst of that white light, absorbed, intent, like an attendant figure in the foreground of a luminous nativity. He talked to the machine in a fierce undertone, cursing and cajoling it. Always it gave in. He would sit back on his heels then, grey sweat on his forehead and his upper lip, wiping his hands, his fat shoulders drooping and his eyes going dead.

I brought in the black notebook, and in idle hours went over again the old, insoluble problems, playing them over, move by move, like drawn grandmaster games. Infinity was still infinity, zero still gaped, voracious as ever. The professor stopped behind me, and peered over my shoulder.

— Pah, he said. Antique stuff. History.

At dawn, without a word, the three of us went our separate ways, the professor bundled in his black coat, Leitch with his empty foodbag under his arm, and I behind them, dawdling. I liked to walk the streets at that early hour. The wind rustled over pavements hard and grey as bone, and gulls scavenged in the gutters. Traffic lights blossomed from green to red and back again, silent as flowers. A solitary motor car would pass me by, the driver propped like a manikin behind a windscreen flowing with reflections of a cold grey sky and paper-coloured clouds. Sometimes I went to Chandos Street, in hope that Adele would be there. Instead I would often find the professor, sitting at the table by the big window in the kitchen, still in his coat and hat, gazing out at the street, a mug of tea going cold at his elbow. These encounters were faintly, inexplicably embarrassing.

Adele never asked where I went at night, as I never asked where she was when she disappeared for days on end. I think when I was away from her she forgot about me. Oh, I don’t mean forgot, exactly, but that she lost hold of something, some essential of the fact of my existence. For that is how it was with me, when she was not there, something of her faded in my mind, she became transparent. Even when she was in my arms she was also somehow absent. I never had, not for an instant, her entire attention. Perhaps it is as well. It occurs to me I might not have survived the full force of her presence. What does that mean? I don’t know, I don’t know — there’s so much darkness here. She regarded my injuries as if they were not part of me, as if they were something that had attached itself to me, like a stray dog. She would raise herself on an elbow and study me, touching my withered arm, or running a finger over the knots and whorls of my chest, frowning to herself. What was she thinking? I never asked. She would not have answered. One day she said:

— Did you think you were going to die, when it happened?

She was sitting up in bed, with a blanket around her shoulders, and an ashtray on the mattress beside her. The day outside was bitter under a louse-grey sky, down in the garden the bare trees shuddered. I think of that moment, and I’m there again.

— Something inside me is wearing out, she said. Some part, wearing out.

I had met her in the hall. She was in fur boots and a beret, and a moth-eaten fur coat. Her mood was frenetic she fixed her icy fingers on my wrist and laughed, and a bubble of saliva came out of her mouth and burst. Upstairs I took her coat. Slivers of the cold air of outdoors fell like silverfish from its folds. In bed she held my sex in her chill hand and laughed and laughed, throwing back her head and offering me her throat to feed on. She would not let me inside her, shut her legs. I clutched her against me, muttering and moaning, and at last, to placate me, she knelt impatiently and put her head in my lap, and I spilled myself in a series of voluptuous slow shivers into the hot wet hollow of her mouth. Her arm lay across my chest, with its track of puncture marks running from wrist to elbow, like the stippled scar of a briar scratch, and I thought of childhood.

Felix was in the front room, lounging on the horsehair sofa reading a newspaper.

— Ah, there you are, Grendel, he said. How are you? Sit down, talk to me. We haven’t seen each other for a while, you’ve been neglecting your old friends.

I sat down at the table. A pigeon landed on the sill outside and looked in, the wind ruffling its neck feathers. Felix tossed the paper aside and leaned forward with his hands pressed between his knees. He was wearing his mac, and a flat cap pushed back on his head. There were shallow indents at his temples, I had never noticed them before. Sometimes when I looked at him closely like this he seemed a stranger.

— How goes the great work? he said. Is the prof treating you right? And what about the fat boy, does he stick to you, hey?

Adele came from the bedroom, barefoot, in her fur coat. Seeing him there she paused, then came to the table and searched in her bag for a cigarette with one hand, holding her coat shut with the other. He grinned at her, bending low to look up into her face. She said:

— How did you get in here?

— Ah, he said. Good question.

He went on grinning. There was silence. Adele smoked, frowning vaguely, her eyes fixed on the table. Felix looked from her to me, and then at her again. He chuckled.

— Having fun, you two, are you? he said. Fun and games, yes?

The pigeon flew from the sill with a clatter of wings. Felix leaned back on the sofa, one ankle crossed on a knee, and fished out his tobacco tin.

I said:

— Why did you say that he wanted me to work for him?

He lit up a butt, and blew two thick cones of smoke from his pinched nostrils. He looked at me narrowly and smiled.

— Because he did, he said. Why else?

— He doesn’t say a word to me.

— Ah, but that’s his way, you see.

Adele went and sat in front of the electric fire, holding up one bare foot and then the other to the heat. The last wan light of day was fading in the window.