Tom McCarthy - C

Serge’s father has a theory about the cause of the disease: electric blighting.

“Under times of great stress or excitation,” he explains to Serge over a glass of port one afternoon in Sophie’s former lab, “the body emits an increased static charge. Police forces in America and France-” his finger points vaguely left to indicate the former place; his thumb jerks back over his shoulder for the latter-“are already making use of this phenomenon, measuring electric levels on the skin to ascertain when a suspect is lying.”

“How does that blight our trees?” Serge asks.

“Blight-what?” his father barks. “Ah! Well, these electrical disturbances, once created, outlive the moment of their generation. If they remain behind indefinitely, they’re detectable indefinitely, n’est-ce pas?”

“By what?”

“By what?” repeats his father. “Why, by detecting devices, of course. You of all people should know that!” He switches on one of the many radio sets lying on the shelves behind him. As it warms up, and familiar tweets and crackles start spilling from it, he turns the dial. The static gives over to music, then to static again, then to a voice reading what seem to be sports results. This is new, hearing voices over the receiver: started this year, first of the new decade. Nowadays when you trawl the ether you get loads of little stations sending fully formed, audible words out to who-knows-where: songs, personal messages, phrases whose nature and purpose Serge can’t work out but has spent hours listening to nonetheless, charmed by the sequences’ sounds, the images that they evoke, their modulating repetitions. The string of names and numbers gives over to old-fashioned Morse beeps, then once again to static. His father, still turning the dial clockwise, turns to Serge and asks: “What do you think most of that stuff is?”

“What do you mean?” asks Serge.

“What is it?” his father repeats.

“It’s messages,” Serge answers.

“From when?” his father shoots back at him.

“From all over.”

“I didn’t ask from where: I asked from when.”

“When? From now…”

“Aha!” guffaws his father. “That’s where you’re wrong-or, at least, not entirely right.” He leans towards Serge and, his tone changing, tells him: “Wireless waves don’t die away after the ether disturbance is produced: they linger, clogging up the air and causing interference. Half the static we’ve just waded through is formed by residues of old transmissions. They build up, and up, and up, the more we pump them out.”

“And that’s what’s blighting our trees?” Serge asks him, incredulous.

His father downs his port and, reaching behind his work table, pulls out a device in which a needle sits behind glass within a hand-sized box.

“What’s that?” asks Serge.

“An ammeter,” his father answers. “Come with me.”

Serge knocks his glass back hurriedly and follows his father out into the Mosaic Garden, where he holds the device out in front of him and, pointing to its face, announces:

“Low levels of static here. Just standard background discharge.”

Serge peers at the needle, resting between zero and five micro-amperes. His father strides on into the Maze Garden and, holding the ammeter in front of him again, declares:

“Increasing. Five to ten.”

He’s right: the needle’s started stirring. He strides on, through the Maze Garden ’s wall, across the gravel path and on towards the Mulberry Lawn, his upturned palm holding the instrument before his portly stomach all the while. Marching past Bodner, who ignores them as he daubs low-lying branches, he booms out triumphantly:

“Twenty to twenty-five!”

Serge peers around his forearm, and sees that the needle is, indeed, straining round to the dial’s right-hand side.

“That’s… I mean, how do you…?” he stutters.

His father beams a satisfied smile back at him.

“Pretty conclusive, isn’t it, my boy?”

“But… why here?” Serge asks. “My old mast was in the Mosaic Garden.”

“Oh, you’re being too literal,” his father scolds. “Things move around, accumulate in ways we can’t anticipate. Besides,” he continues, eyes still on the needle as he takes two paces forwards, “I’m not even claiming that it’s radio per se that we’re detecting here.”

“What else could it be?” Serge demands to know.

“I refer you back to what I said about the body and its discharges,” his father tells him. “If the ones emitted by the brain are anything like the wireless waves that wend their way around the earth, they’ll leave a trace for a considerable time after their creation.”

“But that doesn’t work,” Serge says. “Transmissions travel. They go somewhere else, and then they’re not here anymore.”

“Ah: you’re behind the times, my child.” His eyes move from the dial to Serge, bathing him in pity. His left hand starts rising and sinking at an angle, cutting diagonal peaks and troughs in the air. “Imagine a ball bouncing around a dome, and hardly losing any energy in doing so-bouncing around the inside of a sphere and ricocheting off the outer surface of a smaller, solid sphere inset within the larger sphere…”

Serge cast his mind back to the tennis court in Berchtesgaden. He tries to roll its asphalt flatness up into a tarry sphere, to coil the outlying landscape into a larger, hollow ring around it, and to bounce a tiny, yellow ball between the two, but finds the mental space through which the smaller orb should move filling up with crackling gorse and heather. His father’s explaining:

“Waves move around the globe, bouncing off the ionosphere. The ones that make their way through this-” his left hand, rather than angling down here, continues its upward rise until his arm’s extended at full stretch-“go on until they hit some object out in space, and-” now the hand falls-“bounce off that. They all bounce back eventually, or loop round: everything returns.” The hand starts looping as he carries on: “Now, if-if-the electric charges generated by our organisms move in the same way…”

“Then they can be detected later?” Serge completes his sentence in the interrogative.

“Why not?” his father answers. “In principle, it shouldn’t be any harder. If a measuring device is present at a scene of great mental stress-and at the right time in the cycle according to which the electrical disturbances created by the event pass by the spot again, then the whole scene might be replayed, albeit in decayed form…”

The hand-loops slow down, then stop, and the two men stand in silence for a while, the regular plash and scrape of Bodner’s paintbrush punctuating their thought. Then Serge says:

“If your theory is right, there’s no reason why one spot should be any better than another.”

“Why not?” his father asks.

“Because the ball bounces all around the space between the dome and sphere, hitting one place with as much force as it hits another. An event could replay elsewhere.”

“I never said I had the whole thing worked out,” his father harrumphs. “This is new research. Cutting edge. I’m corresponding with von Pohl about it on a weekly basis. He, like me, is of the opinion that it is these cycles of return that are responsible for lack of germination in certain ground areas. He’s already done extensive research on the subject. I, for my part, have suggested to him that the curious groups of three staccato signals that one commonly picks up amidst the interference on one’s receiver are none other than the echo of Marconi’s first three ‘S’ signals, transmitted on-”

“It’s true,” Serge interrupts. “There’s often three beeps in the background. But that doesn’t mean-”