John Gardner - October Light

“Hah!” He pushed his hands down into his pockets and looked grim, just a touch sly. “Not as easy as you think.” From the twitch of the little man’s jaw Peter Wagner saw he’d hit a sore spot and tried to circumambulate. “Well anyway,” he said …

“Mr. Wagner,” Mr. Nit said. He turned to go over to his desk, where he stood, hands folded behind his back, his back turned to Peter Wagner. “Inventing is a God damn discouraging business. Degrading. Like everything else. Ah, I could tell you! How thrilling it seemed, the idea of inventing, when I was a young little donkey, full of beans! Roger Bacon, Faraday, Franklin, Watt — those were names to conjure with, like the rustle of yer dear love’s skirt or the ineffable syllables describing her parts.” Mr. Nit’s head turned, his small eyes dimmed. “Has it ever occurred to you that every discovery mankind has ever made was accidental?”

“Actually, no,” Peter Wagner said.

“It’s a fact,” he said. Mr. Nit’s back looked angry. His trousers were as rumpled and crabbed as his face. He shook his fists as if working up a tantrum. “Some stupid caveman banked his fire with copper ore, and that was the end of the stone age. We have records of such things. Believe me, it’s depressing! The invention of glass, for instance: it’s recorded in Pliny. There was this Roman merchant ship with a cargo of natron — that’s a washing powder. It was driven ashore on a beach of white sand, and the crew lighted a fire on the sand to cook their food, and since they couldn’t find rocks they propped up their kettle with some big lumps of natron. Kavoom! They’d invented glass. I could tell you a hundred stories like that. It suffocates the soul.”

“I see what you mean,” Peter Wagner said.

“Louis Daguerre, for instance.” He began to pace back and forth from wall to wall, banging one fist into the other, faster and faster. “He worked for years on the idea of fixing an image on a surface, but no luck. Then one day he laid a silver spoon on a metal he’d treated with iodine, and when he picked it up he found its image printed on …

Sally Abbott had come to another gap, several pages this time. “Oh, tunkit!” she said. Again she had half a mind to quit. The farther she read, she could see in advance, the more pages she’d find missing. She stared at the top of the page beyond the gap, trying to reach some decision. Without quite meaning to, half-dreaming, she read on.

… “Actually,” Peter Wagner said.

But the man was unstoppable, a looney. He might have been talking of pestilence, earthquake, death. “Thomas A. Edison,” he rushed on, “invented the phonograph in eighteen seventy-seven when he was trying to invent a telegraph-repeater that could make a needle record dots and dashes on a revolving paper disk as they came in over the telegraph line. When the needle passed over the indentations at high speeds it vibrated like a tuning fork, and that was the secret of the Victrola! In eighteen thirty-nine Charles Goodyear discovered the secret of curing rubber when he clumsily dropped a sticky glob of uncured rubber into sulphur. And then there’s Acheson’s ridiculous discovery of—”

“How come you locked the door?” Peter Wagner said.

Mr. Nit turned, looking uncomfortable, wringing his hands. “Oh, that.” He seemed to sort through explanations that might pass. He found nothing. At last he said, animated again, fiercely rattling some door of his own, “Worst of all — Gramme’s discovery of the motor. In eighteen seventy-three Gramme entered a number of dynamos at an industrial exhibit in Vienna. By mistake, a workman reversed the connections between two dynamos, and to the astonishment of everyone looking on, the armature of the second dynamo began to revolve: the electric motor was invented.” Mr. Nit stamped and slapped his right fist into his left hand harder than ever by way of comment.

“How come the door’s locked?” Peter Wagner said. He jerked the wooden handle illustratively.

“What’s the difference?” Mr. Nit said. Sweat popped out on his forehead and his wrinkles twitched. “One minute you want to drown yourself, and the next you want to go up and take the air. You should try and be reasonable.”

Peter Wagner thought about it. He had bitten to the bone of history, chewed to the hirsute pits of metaphysics, and yet he’d remained, at least much of the time, a harmless man, nonviolent. How much did the world require? “I am reasonable,” he said. “I just don’t like to be locked up with a bunch of eels. They smell.” He added, “For one thing.”

Mr. Nit grew increasingly nervous. He smiled briefly, like distant lightning flicking on and off, then wiped his forehead on his sleeve. “So ironic, this piddling little human rage for freedom. So short-sighted and misguided, set against true freedom, that is, sacrifice. So the door’s locked, you say. So what door isn’t? It makes me laugh.” He laughed, experimental, exactly like a goat. “Human freedom. What a laugh!” He laughed again. “Pride of a piss-ant! What is, I ask you, Mr. Wagner, man? The great technologist? The star-stepper? Bird-poop! You know what we are? We’re the late evolution of a stick. Fact! You think human reason came down out of its tree and perceived the potential of the stick? Of course not! A man swung a stick by accident and the stick improved his mind. Exactly! There’s an article about it in the Science Digest. I think I may still have a copy here someplace.” He turned as if to look, then abruptly changed his mind. “We do nothing, Mr. Wagner. Things happen to us.”

There was a thump above, then another. Someone coming aboard. Mr. Nit’s despair became more urgent. He leaned forward, clutching his hands together. “You were right to want to kill yourself. It’s not too late, you know. It was a brave, brave thing you attempted. I mean morally brave.”

Peter Wagner smiled wanly, feeling it was true but feeling, also, suspicious.

Mr. Nit glanced past him at the door. Now there was more than one person above. Peter Wagner tried to separate the footsteps. The shuffle of the old man, then younger feet — the girl’s, the muscular man’s, perhaps. Were there more than that? The suicide squad? Was it illegal to kill yourself in California?

“To be or not to be,” Mr. Nit said, stretching his arms out, “that is the question!” He’d snatched a jackknife from somewhere and was holding it up in front of his face, looking at it cross-eyed. Peter Wagner took a step toward him in alarm, then hesitated. It was clear that Mr. Nit was not going to kill himself before finishing his speech. “Consciousness, that’s our tragedy,” he said. “We watch ourselves, we watch the world, and we perceive in horror that we’re no more free than, so to speak, the physicist’s ball on an inclined plane — except in this, yes! We’re free at least to say ‘No, Universe! No, no, no, no, no!!’” He jerked his arms as if to stab himself but hesitated, looking at the blade. It was rusty, perhaps not sharp. He made a face. “That’s why I admire you.”

Outside the door and upwards a little, a voice said, “Yes, it’s all unloaded. Let’s clear out.”

Mr. Nit blanched. Quickly he said, “We’ll kill ourselves together! We’ll make a pact!”

Peter Wagner frowned. “How come you people had marijuana on this boat?”

Mr. Nit made a fast swipe at his forehead with his sweater sleeve, then again clasped his hands around the jackknife, holding it in front of his belly now, ready for the plunge. “You do it on the eels,” he hissed. “I’ll use the knife. One … two …”

But Peter Wagner turned away a little, eyeing Mr. Nit intently. “You want me dead.” And now it came to him. “They told you to kill me, that’s why you’re so nervous.” He thought about it and saw it was true. Mr. Nit was shaking. Peter Wagner said, “Because of the marijuana, that’s it? You’re smugglers, and if you let me off this tub—” He moved a step toward Mr. Nit, smiling at last. He understood it all.