Staring at the Sun (22 page)

“I suppose one consolation,” Gregory said that evening to his mother, “is that it can’t go on.”

“Oh no. It doesn’t go on. It ends. That’s the point, isn’t it?”

“Ah. No. I meant the thinking about it, rather than the actual going on. GPC came up with a good line when I was asking something else. About how it was impossible to look at either the sun or death without blinking.”

Jean Serjeant smiled in a way that seemed to her son almost smug. No, perhaps that wasn’t right—after all, she never liked appearing clever; perhaps she was just remembering something. Gregory watched her; slowly she closed her eyes, as if the darkness helped her see more clearly into the past. When her lids were finally shut, she spoke.

“You
can
stare at the sun. Twenty years before you were born I knew someone who learned to stare at the sun.”

“Through a piece of smoked glass?”

“No.” Slowly, and without opening her eyes, she brought her left hand up in front of her face, then eased the fingers apart. “He was a pilot. He had to learn about the sun. After a while you can get used to it. You just have to look at it through parted fingers; then you can manage. You can stare at the sun for as long as you like.” Perhaps, she thought, perhaps after a while you begin to grow webbing between your fingers.

“That must be quite a trick,” said Gregory. “Though I suppose it’s hard to tell whether you want to learn it or not.”

Jean opened her eyes and looked at her hand. She was surprised and a little alarmed. She had forgotten how much her knuckles had swollen over the last thirty years. Short pieces of rope threaded with hazelnuts, that’s what her fingers looked like now. And her knobbly knuckles meant that when she tried to part her fingers slowly, open the slats gently like venetian blinds, she immediately let in brash chunks of light. She couldn’t do what Sun-Up Prosser had been able to do. She was very old, and her fingers let in far too much light.

“Do you think,” said Gregory nervously, “that there’s no point worrying about it all then?”

“It?”

“It. God. Faith. Religion. Death.”

“Heaven.”

“Well …”

“No, Heaven, that’s what you mean. That’s all anyone ever means. Get me to Heaven. How much is a ticket to Heaven? It’s all so … feebleminded. Anyway, I’ve been to Heaven.”

“?”

“Heaven. I’ve been to Heaven.”

“What was it like?”

“Very dusty.”

Gregory smiled. His mother’s tendency to the enigmatic was definitely increasing. Someone who didn’t know her might have thought her mind was wandering; but Gregory knew there was always a sure point of reference, something which in her own terms made sense. Probably it just took too long to explain. Gregory wondered if this was what being old meant: everything you wanted to say required a context. If you gave the full context, people thought you a rambling old fool. If you didn’t give the context, people thought you a laconic old fool. The very old needed interpreters just as the very young did. When the old lost their companions, their friends, they also lost their interpreters: they lost love, but they also lost the full power of speech.

Jean was remembering her visit to Heaven. To the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, as they called it. At least they hadn’t renamed Heaven as well. A dry June morning with the dust blowing straight in from the Gobi desert. A woman was bicycling to work with her baby. The baby’s head was swathed in gauze to protect it from the dust. The baby looked like a tiny beekeeper.

At the Temple of Heaven the dust had swirled in playful circles round the courtyard. She had seen the back of an old Chinaman. A blue cap, a wrinkled neck, a wrinkled tunic. The tortoise neck stretching out sideways to the great curve of the echo wall. The old Chinaman was listening to a conversation he could not possibly understand. Perhaps the words sounded beautiful to him, the voices
transcendental. But Jean had put her ear to the wall and understood: something rude about a dead Chinese leader, then some amatory prattle. Nothing more than that. That was all there was to hear.

Jean knew, of course, what Gregory was doing. He was rattling the pennies in his pocket. He was screaming at the sky. All this panic he thought he was concealing so well from her: it was just a grown-up way of doing what she and Uncle Leslie had done nearly a century ago beyond the smelly beeches at the dogleg fourteenth. Putting your head back and roaring at the empty heavens, knowing that however much noise you made, nobody up there would hear you. And then you flopped down on your back, exhausted, self-conscious and a little pleased: even if no one was listening, you had somehow made your point. That was what Gregory was doing. He was making his point. She just hoped that when he flopped down he wouldn’t hurt himself in the fall.

Playfully, Gregory began to quiz GPC about suicide. Cautiously, too: you never knew if there wasn’t an automatic operator interrupt when input veered onto certain matters. Who knows, a carton of happy-pills might drop into his lap from a secret dispenser, or a holiday-camp voucher might turn up in the next morning’s post.

The dangerous charm of GPC was that everything in the world could be called up; if you didn’t look out, a couple of sessions might turn you from a serious enquirer into a mere gape-mouthed browser. Gregory found himself swiftly diverted into the arcana of suicide. He dallied, for instance, with the famous copycat suicide of Mr. Budgell, who had left a performance of Addison’s
Cato
and flung himself into the Thames, leaving behind the following defence of his action:

What Cato did, and Addison approved,
Cannot be wrong.

Gregory called up a summary of the play and felt sorry for Mr. Budgell. Cato had killed himself as a protest against dictatorship and
as a rebuke to his fellow countrymen. Poor Mr. Budgell: nobody had felt in the least rebuked by his departure.

Slightly more convincing was the example of Robeck, the Swedish professor who wrote a long tract exhorting readers to suicide, then put to sea in an open boat to practise what he preached. Gregory tried to discover from GPC how many copies Robeck’s work had sold and how many suicides it had provoked but there were no statistics available. Instead, he moved on, browsing among Japanese pantheists who loaded their pockets with stones and plunged into the sea before admiring relatives; transported slaves from West Africa who killed themselves in the belief that they might revive in their native land; and Australian aborigines who thought that when a black died his soul was reborn as white, and therefore used self-slaughter to effect a speedy change in pigmentation. “Black fellow tumble down, jump up white fellow,” they had once explained.

In the eighteenth century the French had thought of England as the home of suicide: the novelist Prévost ascribed the English passion for this way of death to the prevalence of coal fires, the consumption of half-cooked beef and an excessive indulgence in sex. Mme de Staël was surprised by the popularity of self-slaughter, given the degree of personal liberty and the general docility towards religion. Some, like Montesquieu, had blamed the climate for this national impulse, but Mme de Staël thought otherwise: she detected, under the notorious reserve of the British, an ardent, impetuous nature which fretted at any wanton infliction of disappointment or boredom.

Gregory was patriotically flattered that his fellow countrymen were credited with such extremes of audacity, though not convinced. He turned to the ancients. Pythagoras, Plato and Cicero had all approved suicide; Stoics and Epicureans confirmed its moral usefulness. Gregory called up a list of prominent Greeks and Romans who had killed themselves. Pythagoras starved himself to death because of
taedium vitae
. Menippus hanged himself because of financial losses. Lycambus hanged himself because of ridicule. Labianus walled himself up because his writings were condemned and burnt. Demonax
starved himself to death when faced with “loss of influence consequent on old age.” Stilphon died of intoxication for unknown reasons (what was he doing on the list?). Seneca’s phlebotomy was to avoid being framed by Nero. Zeno hanged himself after fracturing a finger. And so on. Wives swallowed live coals because of domestic afflictions, and knifed themselves to death when their husbands were exiled.

The ancients had sorted suicide out. Their philosophers allowed it in cases of personal dishonour, political or military failure and serious disease. But Gregory was healthy; he was unlikely to head an army or a government now; while honour was a word most people had to keep looking up in the dictionary. None of the ancient philosophers, he noted, maintained that suicide was good in itself. Only that strange Swede who paddled out to sea had claimed it was good in itself.

He was about to key in a Store and sign off, when he thought of a final question. One he ought to have asked earlier. But how to put it?

“Who runs you?”

REPEAT
.

“Who runs you?”

MODIFY
.

“How do you work?”

GPC FIRST UNDERTAKEN 1998 AFTER DONOVAN COMMITTEE REPORT. INITIAL BANK EIGHTY-FOUR SERIES PROCESSORS INSTALLED …

Interrupt. “Can you ask yourself questions?”

CAN A BRAIN SPEAK TO ITSELF? YOUR RESPONSE PLEASE
.

Gregory paused for a moment. He wasn’t sure. He was also surprised by the computer’s sharp tone.

“Yes.”

ARE YOU SURE? SUGGEST RECONSIDER
.

“Yes.”

ARE YOU SURE? SUGGEST RECONSIDER, GREGORY
.

Hey, that’s my name, he thought. Then, knowing the answer, he asked, “Who controls input?”

SEE MANIFEST
.

As he thought: just being referred to the official handout.

“Who controls output?”

REPEAT
.

“Who controls output?”

OUTPUT CONTROLLED BY INPUT
.

“Who is input?”

INPUT IS USER
.

“Are there any output modifiers?”

EXPLAIN
.

“Are there any break-in facilities between GPC central bank and user?”

MODIFY
.

Oh, for Christ’s sake, thought Gregory. GPC had a way of treating you like a child or a foreigner. Modify. Explain. It was being moody and wilful. At least, that’s how it felt; though he knew this was only because he’d strayed from the correct input technique. Even so, it was irritating. If Lycambus hanged himself because of ridicule and Zeno because of a fractured finger, Gregory was surprised there hadn’t been any suicides caused by GPC frustration.

“Are there any input facilities on this output channel?”

YOU MEAN EMERGENCY BREAKDOWN INPUT? BE ASSURED, SINCE 2007
…

Again, an Interrupt.

“Are there any personnel input facilities on this output channel?”

NOT REAL QUESTION
.

“Why not?”

NOT REAL QUESTION
.

Grunting a little to himself, Gregory stored and signed off.

Shortly afterwards, Operators 34 and 35 left the centre and walked homewards through the park under an airy evening sky. It was interesting work at GPC, but the users’ obsessions did sometimes
get you down. Still, fresh air and a few admiring glances from men usually helped at the end of the day.

“He’s a stayer, isn’t he?”

“Yes. A stayer.”

“Rather intelligent.”

“A3.”

“Not A2?” There was a hopeful note in the voice.

“No, definitely not. Lower A3, I’d guess.”

“Hmm. Do you think he’ll go for TAT?”

“I was thinking about that earlier. He might.”

“A3 don’t usually, though, do they? You told me it was usually top A2s and above or anything below C3.”

“He’s a stayer. Stayers have been known to get there.”

“Is he brave enough?”

“Being a stayer is a sort of bravery, don’t you think?”

“I suppose so. I think he’s nice.”

“NOT REAL ANSWER.”

“I know. I just thought, I wouldn’t mind going home with him.”

“REPEAT.”

“I wouldn’t mind going home with him.”

“MODIFY.”

There was a giggle and a blush, and then another giggle.

“NOT REAL POSSIBILITY, AGAINST RULES.”

“Do you think they’ll ever change the rules?”

“NOT REAL POSSIBILITY, COME HOME WITH ME INSTEAD.”

“NOT REAL POSSIBILITY, AGAINST RULES.”

“POSSIBILITY BETWEEN EQUAL LEVELS.”

“AGAINST MY RULES. MEMORY RETAIN AND SIGN OFF.”

“Good night.”

But perhaps he was mistaken in looking at the God question as a matter of crude choice. There is a God (therefore I must worship him) against There is no God (therefore I must expose his absence
to the world). He was presuming a single answer to a single question. So limiting; and how did he know he had got the right question? Someone, somewhere, had said this: the problem is not what is the answer but what is the question.

There must be more possibilities, thought Gregory. More possibilities.

1. That God exists.

2. That God does not exist.

3. That God used to exist, but doesn’t anymore.

4. That God does exist, but that he has abandoned us:

(a) because we have been a severe disappointment to him;

(b) because he’s a bastard who gets bored easily.

5. That God exists, but that his nature and motivation are beyond our comprehension. After all, if he were within our comprehension, and answerable in our own moral terms, he’d clearly be a bastard. So if he exists, he must be outside our comprehension. But if he is outside our comprehension, it is he who has decided on our uncomprehendingness, our bafflement at the problem of evil, for example; it is he who has chosen to make it seem as if he is a bastard. Does this make him not just a bastard but also a psychopath? In either case, isn’t it up to him to make the running, get in touch, make the first approach?

6. That God exists only as long as belief in him exists. Why not? There would be no point in God’s existing if nobody believed in him, so perhaps his existence comes and goes according to Man’s belief in him. He exists as a direct consequence of our need of him; and perhaps the extent of his power depends on the extent of our worship. Belief is like coal: as we burn it God’s power is generated.