Thomas Maloney - Learning to Die

Since then his vision of the universe — yes, Dan carries in his mind a vision of the universe — has matured and expanded, but the thrill has remained. His vision encompasses not only observable reality, which is peculiar enough, but also the hinterland of conjecture, of interpretation, at the fringes of science. You can, for example, make the wave-particle duality go away, if it troubles you — but at the cost of accepting countless parallel universes. His job at the synchrotron combines the fantastical — electrons going so fast that time itself runs slow — and the tangible — oversized fridge magnets. Magnets are the tools of his trade. It’s magnets that accelerate the electrons to their barely conceivable, take-it-on-trust speed, magnets that steer and focus them, and magnets that hurl them around those vomit-inducing corners. Dan’s father — another gadget-lover, but one fitted with a pacemaker — isn’t allowed on the guided tour.

Dan didn’t end up at this particular synchrotron by accident. Ever since he specialised it has been his ambition to defy the critics of his arcane field — particle physics — by helping to solve real problems. In recent months he has been working with a team of pharmacologists, interrogating a protein in the DNA of Mycobacterium tuberculosis , seeking a vulnerable spot on which to focus future attacks.

Come on, he urges, as the electrons shine their blinding X-ray torch on the miscreant. Strike a blow for all the consumptive scientists who died before they could make their discoveries, and whose names we have therefore forgotten — and for the million human hosts TB works through every year in its own mindless, pointless battle for survival. It has a ferocious armoury of adaptations, but we, the human species, are the more ingenious.

Are we the more deserving? Dan briefly ponders interspecies ethics as he skips through diffraction images of blurry dots — TB’s Enigma code. Yes: the vicious little monsters have to die.

James F. Saunders thinks about his impending rendezvous with Brenda, and speculates furiously. He hasn’t had sex for seven years. After Becks commanded him, in front of all their friends, to walk out of her life (he pushed back his chair, stood up, strolled out of the restaurant forgetting his jacket and never saw Becks or the jacket again), he had a couple of drunken one-nighters. Then there was a two-month thing with Kate, the librarian with big glasses, who was a decade older and didn’t really want a loser like James. He shudders to think of it.

Cowed by the failure and embarrassment of these ill-matched unions, he became for a while a sullen slave to internet porn. He was living in a shabby house-share in York, supposedly writing his debut novel behind a locked door, but actually clicking through an endless, lonely anatomical slideshow, trying to escape or conjure memories of Becks, perhaps, or just wallowing without intention. The Cormorant , at first so imperious, so electrifying, his paean to mortality, died itself there among the computer viruses and bog roll.

This is one reason he is happy to have no internet connection in his room in Merryman’s Bay. Over the past five years the sexual impulse, which transforms an intelligent man into a slavering beast but which is, ironically, essential to his identity, has slowly faded. He has written about it, read about it, abstracted it, and finally starved and sublimated it almost out of existence. Almost: arousal revisits occasionally at odd or inconvenient times, like a bad back. He usually tries to ignore it.

Now he’s going to meet Brenda. It’s not a date. But he can’t stop thinking about those biceps under the lace — that physicality — and a knowingness, a sexual presence that moved behind the screen of her shyness. He pushes aside his chair to make a space on the floor and attempts a few press-ups. To his surprise, he can do ten. Later, in the bathroom, he examines his stooped reflection, forces his shoulders back, tries to look like a sound specimen. Should he clean-shave, or just tidy up? Should he trim the unruly trail of hair below his navel? Should he splurge eight pounds fifty on a haircut in Whitby?

Love is an emanation. Love is a mirror. Bring the notebook.

When Natalie Mock describes her accident, representing the shower cradle with two up-curled fingers of her right hand and her falling body with her left, her colleagues’ faces wrinkle with fascinated horror. The bruises and the breathing discomfort are fading and various scabs are itching and flaking over vivid new skin.

She has, of course, skimmed through the letters. The girl they’re addressed to isn’t her — no longer exists. Could it have been otherwise? Is it possible to ride so carefully through life, push so smoothly and confidently over obstacles and traumas, that your identity is preserved more or less intact at thirty, forty, eighty? Would you want to? Or does time itself enforce reinvention, repurposing, rebranding? Are she and Dan the same people who agreed to marry each other? Back then, she was going to be an architect (a nettling postscript: Dan was going to be a particle physicist, and is one).

Such silence here without you. You are my voice, my music, my rowan parting the wind. Rain falls, my heart beats without a sound until you return. Come back to me soon.

While her nearest colleagues are out for lunch, Natalie opens a browser and types her ex-boyfriend’s name. Thousands of hits. She skims down a few pages of images of smiling men, young and old: suited Californian surgeons, bloggers in arty monochrome, a police mugshot. Strange to think of all these insignificant men casually flaunting the same name — his name. She adds ‘UK’ to narrow the search. Tries his middle name, the name of his university, a couple of likely professions, remembered hobbies, the city where he lived. Nothing. She’ll need more to go on.

Or she would need more to go on, if she actually cared. Making himself untraceable is somehow characteristic of his arrogance. She remembers the gathering whispers of suspicion that he might not be the generous, dependable soulmate she wanted. His endless intellectualisation of their relationship was, she acknowledged to herself at last, his way of preparing the ground for future selfishness. She was certain, back then — had no regrets. But now a mischievous little hand of doubt tugs at her. All she wants is a glimpse of who he has become. To make sure. She hears the approaching chatter of colleagues and closes the browser.

Mike Vickers graciously admits to himself that his job sometimes makes him happy. The Box has recovered last week’s losses, and his firm’s colossal main fund is doing well enough to soothe touchy egos. He thumbs the key in his pocket and is mildly surprised to see the lights flash not on a battered Volvo estate that looks very much like the car his father passed down to him when he was eighteen (the old man had bought a Jag during a brief spell of prosperity), but on the sleek, black Audi S5 behind it. Maybe he’ll gift it to his dad when he trades up.

As he drives, he dictates to his hands-free phone. ‘Email. Compose. To. James Fuck Fakes Saunders. Subject. Execution. Dear James comma new line. Thank you for your frank reply, but I think we can do better. We both have doubts about our place in the cosmos.’ He slows, waves a group of students across the road, beneficent behind the embossed leather wheel. ‘I am succeeding at an enterprise of questionable value to mankind, while you have a calling you think noble, but have failed to execute. The problem is, your calling is only noble if you do execute — otherwise it’s merely self-indulgence of the most contemptible kind.’ A set of traffic lights turns green as he approaches, as though by arrangement. ‘Have you at least tried to diversify? Journalism, perhaps, or tutoring? I make these suggestions for your own good, and that of the welfare state. New line. Sincerely comma new line. Mike Vickers. New line. P.S. Brenda can look after herself, as you may soon discover. Send.’