The Secret Knowledge (Dedalus Original Fiction in Paperback) Read online

  Conroy places the empty milk carton on the bench beside him, reaches into his pocket and searches until his fingertips find what he expects, the device that he pulls out, gleaming in the sunshine. He hurls it away across the grass and it makes his head feel clearer, there’d been a buzzing before but no longer, he can hear birdsong. In the distance, near some trees, a man stands watching him.

  He doesn’t know anything about those messages but needs to find out, he leaves the park swiftly, trying to lose the guy who’s tailing him, though as he nears the library he sees him again, a figure on the opposite street corner facing the other way in a poor attempt at concealment. Inside the library Conroy finds a row of unused computers, he’s never been before and expects to be able to log on freely but when he sits down at one of the screens he finds it prompting him to enter a number. Types a few random sequences but nothing works, then a woman with a false name badge interferes, says he can have temporary access if he shows proof of identity. He leaves immediately.

  Outside there are closed-circuit cameras disguised as lighting fixtures. If our every movement is monitored and recorded then how can there possibly be time for anyone to watch it all? The accumulated information is greater than life itself, a paradox that follows him to the high street and an electronics store where he jabs at the keyboard of a display laptop and is again required to enter a password which a looming gangly assistant quickly supplies, leaning past Conroy to type, his nylon shirt exuding cheap deodorant. The assistant wants to know what sort of machine Conroy is looking for, whether it’s for gaming or general surfing, for individual or family use, wants to know everything except who Conroy is, so Conroy says he’d like to try the internet for a few minutes and is left alone to play.

  Only way the policeman could have connected those seditious messages with Conroy was if his name was on them. So he searches for himself, just like he did with Laura, and the result is the same. He isn’t there. A thousand near-matches, namesakes from all around the world: dentists, lawyers, accountants advertising their existence and expertise, but the pianist is gone, wiped like his lover. Conroy hurriedly extinguishes the page as the assistant returns, tells him he’ll think about it, but what he’s really considering is his own non-being, the impossibility of proving innocence when all evidence of supposed guilt has been removed.

  He returns to his flat, only a matter of time before they come for him there. Climbing the bare common staircase that smells of piss and cider he reaches his front door, dented by pursuers of a former resident. The lock feels loose when he turns the key, as though someone might have tampered with it. Stepping inside he immediately senses another presence, and in the living room he finds it. On the battered sofa sits an elderly lady.

  “Hello, dear,” she says.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  “My Pixie can’t keep herself out of mischief, always roaming about.”

  “Your cat?” Conroy drops onto the armchair and looks at the genial silver-haired woman in her pale blue cardigan and large-beaded necklace. “How did you get in?”

  She smiles. “You left the door wide open, I suppose Pixie came to inspect.”

  What’s he supposed to do, offer her tea? “Where’s Pixie now?”

  “Gone back upstairs, I expect,” the lady says unconcernedly, then from the pocket of her cardigan she takes a pack of playing cards, larger than normal so that at first he doesn’t recognise what they are. She fans and holds them out in her tremorous hand. “Take one.”

  “What the hell is this?”

  “Go on.”

  He does as she says, slides out a card and looks at it. The picture is like an old woodcut, hand-coloured, with the word Pyramide printed elegantly beneath a picture of an Egyptian monument.

  “Show me what you picked.”

  He turns it towards her. “Are you going to tell my fortune?”

  “It signifies wisdom.”

  “Who are you? This is about those students, isn’t it?”

  “Ancient knowledge, a great secret.” She holds out the pack again so that he can choose another card. It shows a naked man and woman, Adam and Eve, with the inscription Jardin.

  “A couple, a meeting,” the lady explains. “Perhaps a fall.”

  Next he must take two cards, he consents with increasing bemusement but that changes instantly when he sees what they are. A pair of figures in mediaeval costume; one a stonemason, the other a glass-blower. The titles are Pierre and Verrier.

  “Who put you up to this?”

  “Stone denotes strength and fortitude, glass stands for great prospects or an auspicious discovery.”

  “Where did you get these cards?”

  “I suppose I should go and see what Pixie’s up to now…”

  “How do you know about the secret knowledge?”

  “Oh, I don’t know any more about it than you do, dear.”

  She passes him the rest of the pack and Conroy begins to look through the cards. From their condition they seem recently made though the style of illustration is archaic; he supposes them to be a sort of tarot deck. One card shows a simple leather shoe and is called Oeillet, another that attracts Conroy’s attention has a rose bush in full bloom; he gazes at the blood-coloured flowers and a memory stirs in his mind.

  “Rosier.”

  “Usually it means faith and purity.”

  “The people Laura was investigating.”

  “I’d really better go and see what that little rascal of mine’s up to, would you like to keep the cards a while longer?”

  Conroy nods silently, dumbstruck by revelation, while the lady tries to raise herself from the sagging sofa, making the effort several times until Conroy notices and reaches to help lift her, then she totters away, muttering to herself about the cat. Conroy hears the front door close and stares at the cards piled in his hand. The Rosier Corporation, that was what Laura called it. He needs to find out more but if he leaves again he’s sure to be spotted by the man who’s been following him, too risky even going to the window to check. So Conroy waits, immobile like an insect beneath a stone, watching the slow change of daylight and feeling the empty hours push shadows slowly across the walls of the room.

  Must have fallen asleep because now it’s dark, his body wooden like the old lady’s, wrecked and invisible. The cards are gone, they aren’t in his hand or lap or on the floor at his feet, as if she came back for them. He strains upright, sways with sleep still clinging to him, the sky outside livid again with night colour, purple and orange. He goes and looks down from the window and no one’s there, they’ve given up. Safe to go out and find food.

  Half an hour later he’s walking in drizzle eating chips by the handful, throws the half-full container in a skip. Two women are having a drunken argument in front of a kebab shop, it stands next to the pallid glow of a place calling itself an internet café, white-walled room where a couple of foreign-looking youths sit staring at screens as a refuge from boredom. Conroy goes inside, buys a coffee from the machine, takes a seat and pays the access fee. The police can easily find him here but he doesn’t care.

  “Hey, darling.” It’s one of the women, standing unsteadily in the doorway and leaning on its frame for support, tits palely bulging like old lard. His stare unnerves her, a reminder of the state they’ve both let themselves fall into, though it doesn’t sink in at first, instead she simply looks puzzled. Conroy imagines the scene if she was beautiful and sober, he anything but a loser, imagines it so clearly that he feels transfigured, wants to tell her about his secret mission, take her on the run with him. Instead he stares until she sneers back at him, “Fuck off,” and waddles out of sight.

  He wants to find out more about Rosier, begins typing but is soon interrupted.

  “David?”

  Must have been standing silently behind Conroy for some time. Dark jacket and tie, shirt a deep shade of burgundy, immaculately trimmed hair, olive skin. A neat, theatrical appearance like a stage hypnotist.

  “Yo
u’ve been following me.”

  No one else in the internet café, the two slouching youths have left while Conroy was staring at the screen. There’s only himself and the guy.

  “Who are you?”

  “Call me H.”

  “Are you with the police? The Corporation?”

  H says nothing, draws up a chair, the only sound the whirring of computer fans and a distant siren outside.

  “You’ve come to erase me, same as you did to Laura.”

  “You shouldn’t have stopped taking your medication.”

  “That’s not how this started.”

  H nods thoughtfully. “Who can say where anything begins or ends?” He reaches into his jacket pocket, brings out a fine silver chain, holds one end and lets it hang for Conroy’s inspection.

  “Laura’s.”

  “Something I found.” H twirls it in his fingers. “Where’s the first link? Top, bottom, somewhere in the middle? Is what happens today caused by whatever occurred yesterday; or might events be explained by something still to come? You’re a musician, you understand how everything leads to a final chord, a cadence, perhaps a resolution.”

  Conroy looks round towards the door and sees only darkness and emptiness beyond, as if the city itself has been obliterated. “You’re not real. None of this is real.”

  “For example, think of some of your favourite piano compositions. Where does Kreisleriana end? Not the final note, that’s for certain, it’s still playing inside your head. Or the ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata? Beethoven finished the whole thing and sent it to the publisher, then at the very last moment he decided to add a single bar at the opening of the slow movement. We hear it in the middle when really it’s the conclusion – or beginning.”

  “What happened to Laura?”

  “She never existed.”

  “Then why do I remember?”

  “Mistakes happen.” H smiles, crumples the thin chain in his fist and returns it to his pocket. “What if Beethoven’s letter hadn’t arrived at the publisher’s in time, and the extra bar wasn’t added? Would anyone notice? If things had gone a little differently, might we now rate Spohr over Schubert, or Hummel over Mendelssohn? If history could be altered…”

  “It can’t.”

  “Think of any piece you play: a fixed score, yet every performance is unique. Physical reality is like the score, existing outside of time. History is performance.” H reaches again into his pocket and brings out something else that Conroy recognises.

  “The old lady’s cards. You broke in and took them.”

  H shuffles the deck without comment, then fans them, just as the lady did, and holds them out, face-down, for Conroy to make his selection.

  “Why should I play this game, you’ve already made the choice for me.”

  H appears amused, even pleased. “A performer knows all about the tricks of persuasion. Yes, the game was rigged, you were always meant to lose, but go on, take a card, see what you get.”

  Conroy places his finger on one then immediately changes his mind and touches another.

  “Are you sure?” H asks.

  Conroy opts for a third, pulls the card from the man’s grip and turns it to see the picture. A corpse dangling in a gibbet. “Suicide,” he murmurs, reading the legend.

  “What Klauer did and didn’t do. The thing every artist yearns for.”

  “Death?”

  H shakes his head. “Immortality. Forever sacrificing yourself, yet surviving.”

  “This was always about Klauer.”

  “It’s about what he stole.”

  1967

  West Germany

  Theodor Adorno wakes, rolls and sees Ulrike still asleep beside him, pale shoulder studded with fine freckles. Late afternoon sunshine filters through the thin curtains of her apartment, it’s in one of Frankfurt’s noisier suburbs, swelled by immigrants and perpetually permeated, it seems, by amplified music. Teddie must be home before seven.

  Praxis is the ensemble of means for minimising material necessity. It therefore becomes identical with pleasure. Yet pleasure is denied within a society that asserts only rational practicality. Being married and sixty-four years old shouldn’t stop a man fucking his student. Ulrike appreciates the hermetic character of play. Her record collection includes only the latest rock-and-roll releases, nevertheless her non-compulsory attendance at his course on advanced dialectics has indicated to him acute awareness of the fundamental contradiction those commodities represent. Sex, too, can be understood negatively. That he is not with his wife should not imply infidelity. He has never kept secrets from Gretel, except when too nugatory to be worth mentioning.

  Lying with her back to him, Ulrike’s short brown hair leaves naked and exposed the vertebrae of her neck. Teddie traces the undulating ridge with his finger, she stirs and sighs, suddenly conscious of comfort, warmth, intrusion.

  “I have to go,” he says.

  “Mmm.”

  She doesn’t turn; her acceptance, which is rejection, disappoints him. Instead of leaving the bed as he ought, he gazes at the ceiling, noting its hairline cracks and peeling paint. One day Ulrike will be a philosophy lecturer, as he is now. At least that’s the dream, though he doubts she’s up to it.

  She becomes fully awake. “Want some coffee?” she asks, sitting up and reaching for her cigarettes and lighter. Teddie doesn’t care either way. He answers a different question.

  “Tomorrow would have been Walter Benjamin’s seventy-fifth birthday.” Even as he says it, the future conditional evokes an inescapable antinomy. “There’s a symposium at the university.”

  “I know.”

  “Will you come?”

  “Do you want me to?”

  “I’m to be the main speaker.”

  “Will Gretel be there?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I don’t think so.”

  Ulrike breathes blue smoke into the static air. “Sure, I’ll come.”

  Just how little truth converges with subjective idea, with intention, is evident to the most rudimentary consideration. Benjamin’s dictum – the paradox of beauty is that it appears – is less enigmatic than it sounds.

  “What’ll you say?” she asks.

  “Obviously I won’t offer an hommage or appreciation. That would be vulgar.”

  She gets up, standing thin and naked in thought beside the bed. Her breasts are small, there is something almost emaciated about her appearance, yet youthful, defiant. She could be contemplating her own execution. She picks up some underwear, pulls a shirt over her head, begins to walk away. “What if there’s another protest?” She peeks through the curtains at whatever isn’t happening in the void outside.

  “I’m sure there won’t be.”

  “The movement’s gaining support.”

  “Its motives are compromised.”

  At a recent seminar a group of students came and stood in front of the lectern, completely blocking Adorno’s view of the audience. One of them read a series of pledges and demands ranging from solidarity with the people of Vietnam to complaints about the university cafeteria, then there was an open discussion about the meaning of political action in which Adorno took no part.

  “They won’t disrupt the symposium,” he says. “Not given the sort of saintly figure Benjamin has become.”

  She turns. “You sound almost jealous.”

  Ulrike’s swinging rump departs to the kitchen while Teddie remains prostrate, wondering if there will be coffee or even further sex before he goes. Of course he isn’t jealous. His position in the Institute makes him custodian of the Benjamin archive, while his work on the same questions his late friend confronted, his duty to correct error, becomes easily equated in some minds with the false notion of legacy. All that is least essential in a philosopher can be summarised under the heading “biography”. Hence the snide attacks and mischief-making of people like Arendt. What matters to them is not truth-content, but the preservation of a dead man’s every sacred word, even the wrong ones. Th
at is touching but misguided. Were Walter Benjamin alive today, thinks Teddie, he would have destroyed and rewritten a large proportion of the texts for which he is celebrated. He would have cared little for the birthday festivities planned in his honour.

  He hears the water hiss and begin to boil. He knows he has never been handsome or attractive in the reified sense of movie actors; but there will always be discerning women for whom a discourse on Hegel is more seductive than a bunch of flowers. Ulrike is able to see beneath the social superstructure; he has taught her how. She comes back holding a striped mug in her hand. “I’ve never thought to ask you, Teddie. When’s your birthday?”

  “September eleven.”

  She sips, pauses. “That’s a long way off.”

  “You don’t think we’ll be together then?”

  “I mean, it’s still only July.”

  No coffee, no sex. When Teddie gets home he finds his wife has already left for the theatre alone. He needs to prepare for the symposium. He should like to say something about Benjamin’s position on Heidegger; Teddie has discussed his own in his most recent book, Negative Dialectics. The first edition has already sold out, a new one is being printed. Everyone has an opinion about it, even if they don’t understand it, which is the majority position. Adorno is accused of obscurity, jargon-mongering, the very things he opposes. When the world is discussed in the clearest possible terms it becomes infinitely opaque. Are there existing things that cannot be considered concepts? A clear enough question, surely. That phoney Heidegger merely ontologises the pre-existing; Walter saw clearly enough the fascism already implicit in Heidegger’s return to the mythological.

  Not enough, though, to expound on negative dialectics, even given the level of public interest, not after recent events, the student shot by riot police. Adorno made his lecture class stand for a minute’s silence in honour of the victim. One could call it a sentimental and therefore anti-philosophical gesture, like the Benjamin symposium with its tang of hero-worship, but the point was to recognise the significance of the present, not dwell on an invented past. Some of the students are speaking of a revolutionary moment, they say the Federal Republic is a fascist state, utter nonsense. They condemn a country where there are free elections and praise Mao for terrorising his own people. Their condition is despair, like Walter’s, but also, fatally, it is disillusion.