John Banville - Mefisto

— I’ll be all right, he said. Honest, I’ll be …

Felix waved a hand.

— Oh, go on, then, he said, heal thyself.

Tony carried himself off to the lavatory, plunging sideways through the dimly milling crowd. A fight had broken out, there were screams and curses, and Dan lumbered from behind the bar, bellowing. A girl with a bleeding eye fell headlong on the floor. Someone kept laughing. Liz got down from the stool with a thoughtful, ashen look.

— Oh, she said, I think I’m going to spew.

Then suddenly I was outside in the cold black glossy night, under an amazement of stars. I could smell the pines, and hear the wind rushing in their branches. My head swam. Something surged within me, yearning outwards into the darkness. And all at once I saw again clearly the secret I had lost sight of for so long, that chaos is nothing but an infinite number of ordered things. Wind, those stars, that water falling on stones, all the shifting, ramshackle world could be solved. I stumbled forward in the dark, my arms extended in a blind embrace. On the gravel by the petrol pump a woman squatted, pissing. The fight was still going on somewhere, I could hear cries and groans. Felix rose up in front of me with a dark laugh.

— Creatures of the night! he said. What music they make!

We climbed the winding road to the crest of the hill. From here we could see afar the glittering lights of the city. The wind drummed above us, beating through the hollows of the air.

— Consider! Felix said in a loud voice, as if addressing a multitude. Is it not meet, is it not worthy, this world?

A pared moon had risen, by its faint light I could see his smile. He took my arm.

— Haven’t I taken you places, though, he said. Eh? And shown you things. Blessed are the freaks, for they shall inherit the earth.

Tony came up the hill in the car then, crouching haggard-eyed over the wheel. Liz was slumped asleep in the back. Felix got in, but I lingered on the dark road, drunk on the knowledge of the secret order of things. The wind swirled, the stars trembled. I seemed to fall upwards, into the night.

EVERYTHING HAD brought me to this knowledge, there was no smallest event that had not been part of the plot. Or perhaps I should say: had brought me back to it. For had I not always known, after all? From the start the world had been for me an immense formula. Press hard enough upon anything, a cloud, a fall of light, a cry in the street, and it would unfurl its secret, intricate equations. But what was different now was that it was no longer numbers that lay at the heart of things. Numbers, I saw at last, were only a method, a way of doing. The thing itself would be more subtle, more certain, even, than the mere manner of its finding. And I would find it, of that I had no doubt, even if I did not as yet know how. It would be a matter, I thought, of waiting. Something had opened up inside me on the mountain, some rapt, patient, infinitely attentive thing, like a dark flower opening its throat to the right. Now, as spring quickened around me, the city came alive, like a garden indeed, flushed and rustling, impatient and panting, with vague shrills and swoopings on all sides in the lambent, watercolour air. I put aside the black notebook, it annoyed me now, with its parade of contradictions and petty paradoxes, its niggling insinuations. Why should I worry about the nature of irrational numbers, or addle my brain any longer with the puzzle of what in reality a negative quantity could possibly be? Zero is absence. Infinity is where impossibilities occur. Such definitions would suffice. Why not? I went out into the streets, I walked and walked. It was here, in the big world, that I would meet what I was waiting for, that perfectly simple, ravishing, unchallengeable formula in the light of which the mask of mere contingency would melt. At times it felt as if the thing would burst out into being by its own force. And with it surely would come something else, that dead half of me I had hauled around always at my side would somehow tremble into life, and I would be made whole, I don’t know how, I don’t know, but I believed it, I wanted to believe it. The feeling was so strong I began to think I was being followed, as if really some flickering presence had materialized behind me. I would stop in the street and turn quickly, and at once everything would assume a studied air of innocence, the shopfronts and façades of houses looking suspiciously flat and insubstantial, like a hastily erected stage-set. More than once I was convinced I had seen a shadow of movement, the fading after-image of a figure darting into a doorway, or skipping behind the trunk of a tree. Then for a second, before I had time to tell myself I had imagined it, I sensed with a shiver the outlines of another, darker, more dangerous world intermingled invisibly with this one of sky and green leaves and faded brick.

Everything must change. What had I ever done but drift? Now at last I would have purpose, order. Felix approved.

— That’s it, he said, be positive. What did I tell you? I knew we were alike all along.

Suddenly I had seen the error I had been making. I had mistaken pluralities for unities. For the world is like numbers, the things that happen in it are never so small they cannot be resolved into smaller things. How could I have lost sight of that? I rummaged through the recent past, looking for the patterns that I must have missed. But, as once with numbers, so now with events, when I dismantled them they became not simplified, but scattered, and the more I knew, the less I seemed to understand.

I threw myself into work at the white room with a new passion. What more likely place for the light of certainty to dawn? The professor flew into one of his sudden fits of irritation.

— What is exact in numbers, he said, except their own exactitude?

— No, I said, no, not the numbers themselves, but …

He folded his stubby arms and glared at me like a vexed owl. His right eye-socket was larger than the left, it always made him look as if he were wearing a monocle.

— Well? he said. What, tell me.

— I don’t know, I said. Something else.

He snorted.

— What else is there, but numbers?

The printer sprang into clattering life, he turned to it with a scowl. Leitch looked at me sidelong and sneered, slipping a piece of chocolate into that little pink prehensile mouth.

That was the night Miss Hackett came to see us. She was a thin tall woman of middle age with a prominent sharp face and lacquered brass hair. She put her head around the door that led from the offices upstairs, with a smile that was at once both arch and roguish. Leitch, slumped at the console, sat upright hastily and stared at her. She came in and shut the door behind her and advanced on him purposefully, with a hand thrust out, still playfully smiling, her lips compressed, as if we were children and she had slipped into the nursery to bring us a treat. She wore a tweed business suit and a white blouse with ruffles at the throat. She had a mannish walk, her high heels coming down briskly on the floor in a series of sharp, smart blows. Leitch got to his feet, stuffing the empty wrapper from the chocolate bar into his pocket with surreptitious haste. She stopped in front of him with a snap.

— Mr Cossack, she said brilliantly. I’m Hackett. So pleased.

There was a smear of lipstick on one of her large front teeth. Leitch tittered in fright and put his hands behind his back.

— Oh! he said. No, I’m not …

A tiny flaw appeared in Miss Hackett’s smile, like a hairline crack in a china cup. She cast a questing glance about her. She had already taken me in, without quite looking directly at me. Professor Kosok came in from the lavatory in the corridor, still fumbling with his flies. For a moment he did not notice her. She waited, beaming, as he shuffled forward. When at last he saw her he stopped short, rearing back a little, his wide eye growing wider. She seized his hand and shook it violently once, as if she were cracking a whip. She seemed to think he must be deaf, for when she spoke she shouted.