Paul Murray - The Mark and the Void

‘Keep going, Claude.’

The door of the Ark. I push it open, a ton weight. Happy diners gabbing to each other, the compressed bedlam of the coffee machine, the clank of cutlery on porcelain. ‘Claude strode into the café,’ a voice — Paul’s? My own? — urges inside my head. My body feels alien, unwieldy, like an enormous robot that I am controlling with levers from a tiny chamber behind the eyes. As I lurch over the floor all sound disappears, save for the industrial suck and hoosh of my breathing; I stumble through a forest of disconnected sense-impressions until, like a beacon, Ariadne comes into view.

‘Hello,’ I say, but it comes out as a cough.

‘Hi you!’ she says, sliding a tress as rich and dark as coffee back behind her ear. ‘You want a table?’

‘Yes,’ I say, though this is not what I want at all — already the narration is slipping out of my grip! Ariadne turns away to find me a seat, my cheeks flame with failure, it’s all gone wrong — and then something distracts me. ‘New painting?’

Ariadne glances behind her to where the canvas hangs, I imagine illegally, on the fire door. ‘Yes,’ she says, lowering her green eyes bashfully. ‘I just finish this weekend. I don’t know if it works, or what.’

The painting features a series of warped helices knotted into each other, like the DNA of some painfully malformed beast: it seems to protrude bulkily out of space itself. ‘I like it,’ I say.

She laughs. ‘This morning, I heard a customer say it’s like a zebra ate a whole load of fractals and got sick.’

‘ Bof , they said the same thing about Van Gogh’s Sunflowers ,’ I tell her.

‘Maybe,’ she says, and she smiles — not her usual waitress smile, it seems to me, but a deeper one, incorporating her whole being. A sudden wave of joy wells up in me. Here I am! This is happening! How did I ever believe there was anything to fear? Ariadne is everything that is good, therefore only good things can come of this. ‘What’s it called?’ I ask her.

‘ Simulacrum 122 .’

I nod, tapping my nose thoughtfully. Out of nowhere, Paul’s old idea has popped into my head: that we bond over French philosophy. ‘I wonder, by any chance are you familiar with —’ I begin. But at that moment there is a loud and painful buzzing in my ear, and then Paul’s voice says, ‘Sorry, Claude, we lost the connection for a minute there. Are you in the café?’

‘Yes,’ I say, trying to incorporate it into my question for Ariadne, ‘yes, I wondered if —’

‘Okay, Claude, you’re doing great. Now, are you ready to approach the subject?’

‘I have always wondered,’ I repeat, trying to dig the earpiece out of my ear without calling attention to it, ‘whether, ah —’

‘Wait, were you talking to her already?’

I cough deliberately.

‘What was that? The connection’s not that good here.’ In the background there is a popping sound, rather like a cork from a bottle.

‘What do you wonder?’ Ariadne cocks her head and regards me bemusedly.

‘Just stay calm, Claude, and remember you’re in charge. I’m going to go out on the balcony and see if I can fix this transmitter. Igor, you take over here for a second.’

‘I wondered if you have ever read —’

‘You have great big dick,’ a gravelly voice booms in my ear.

‘What?’ I can’t stop myself blurting.

‘I didn’t say anything,’ Ariadne says, surprised.

‘You have biggest dick in world, you are striking her with your firmness.’

Frantically I pull at the earpiece, but it is wedged in tightly by its many points. Ariadne’s beautiful forest-green eyes cloud with concern.

‘Is everything all right?’ she says.

‘Your wood is so hard, you are the master.’

‘Yes, yes,’ I tell her, desperately poking myself in the ear.

‘You are lion between the sheets with your mighty length.’

‘Please stop,’ I whisper.

Ariadne flinches, ever so slightly. ‘I have to take an order,’ she decides. ‘I come back to you.’

I watch in agony as she hurries away, and at that moment it seems to me as if the whole café were merely a stage set after all, now collapsing and disintegrating before my very eyes. I reach after her — but before I can speak, a tremendous peal of static explodes in my ear. Just barely managing to suppress a scream, I turn and flee, offstage, out of the theatre, into the null space of the outside.

Paul is on the sofa in my living room, leafing through a magazine. He gets up when I come in. ‘There he is! There’s the hero!’

I do not give him the acknowledgement even of a snort of exasperation, simply wrestle off my jacket, now soaked with rain, and throw it over a chair.

‘Igor had to leave,’ he says. ‘He had a big exterminating gig. Beetles.’

I go into the kitchen area, where cupboard doors have been flung open and the counter littered with tartine and cookie wrappers. ‘What is this?’

‘Oh, yeah, we got hungry, so we made a snack.’

‘And drank two bottles of Brouilly?’ I say, finding the empties upended in a bin.

‘Yeah, we were thirsty, also, it turned out.’

‘How did you drink two bottles of wine in twenty minutes?’

‘Well, we didn’t drink both of them, we —’

‘My rug!’

‘Yeah, see that’s most of bottle one there.’

Clenching my jaw, I slam the cupboards shut, bundle up the debris and wipe down the surfaces.

‘So I think we made some important headway there,’ he says.

‘We made some important headway in the wrong direction.’

‘Mmm,’ he says ambiguously, and then, ‘Look, I’ll be perfectly honest with you. That didn’t go 100 per cent according to plan.’

‘I know it didn’t go 100 per cent according to plan,’ I say. ‘I was very well placed to see it not going according to plan.’

‘Igor and I have been discussing it,’ he says. ‘We both feel we may have taken a slightly wrong turn with the whole virile, masterful thing.’

I stamp back into the living room, strew salt over the wine-stained rug. ‘Maybe this whole idea was a wrong turn.’

‘Don’t say that. It was just a dry run, remember? And at least she knows who you are now, right? You’ve put yourself on the map, so to speak.’

‘I have put myself on the map as a gibbering psychopath,’ I say.

‘You’re blowing it out of proportion. Try and see it from the perspective of a novel. When do these things ever work out the first time round? There have to be a few comic mishaps, right?’

I replace the salt in the cupboard and dust my hands.

‘And anyway, there was a positive outcome.’ Paul follows me back into the kitchen. ‘By listening to your conversation, I was able to work out something that you had in common: a shared love of modern art. That’s something we can build on.’

At the present moment I don’t want to build on anything; I am damp and hungry, and desire nothing more than to go back to the office, putting this misconceived episode behind me. But Paul, no doubt sensing a threat to his pay cheque, keeps buzzing about me. ‘Look, if you’re really feeling bad about it, we can start over.’

‘How can we start over? This is reality, not typing. We can’t just throw it in the bin.’

‘Ariadne’s not the only beautiful waitress in town. I’ve got a whole folder full of them, brunettes, blondes, redheads …’ He falls silent, realizing he has said too much.

‘You have a folder full of waitresses?’

‘Of course not. It’s a figure of speech, that’s all.’

‘A figure of speech meaning what?’

‘Nothing, forget I said it.’

Cogs begin to turn in my mind. ‘Has the folder of waitresses … has it got something to do with all this bizarre surveillance equipment?’