Ink (44 page)

ccording to the great seventeenth-century scholar Gioseppus de Paracle-tus, the Book of All Hours begins with a list of all rational finite numbers— l, 2, 3, 4 … and so on, four hundred numbers on each page, in forty lines often numbers to a line. There is no zero in this list, zero being a step outside finity and therefore beyond the remit of a tome dealing primarily with the existential. Rather, on the facing pages of this list of numbers, scrawled in some annotator's nervous longhand, a list of fractions runs in tandem—
… and so on.

It should be obvious from this that it is only on the turn of the last page (which one never seems to reach no matter how long one spends flicking forward through the Book) that the reader will finally be faced with infinity on one page and zero on the page facing it. Zero, as the discerning reader of the Book will no doubt understand, is no more a concrete measure of actuality, of things, than is infinity. Like infinity, it is an
abstraction
of the idea of measurable units of actuality. From our existential experiences of something(s) we abstract the ideas of everything (infinity) and nothing (zero); but these are, by their nature, nonexis-tential, transexistential… metaphysical.

Should the reader have the stubborn resolve to persist in flicking pages for eternity, however, Paracletus tells us that the Book of All Hours, having crammed infinity into the first four-hundreth of its infinite pages, follows on from this list of finite numbers, plunging quite suddenly into mathematics proper, at first
merely laying out the basics of simple arithmetic but very quickly elaborating and expanding its range of transformational symbols so as to describe quite complex geometric and algebraic relationships.

It has long been suspected that Paracletus drew heavily from the Book in composing his
Principaea Cosmogonea
, and that his initial division of principles and theorems into Macroscopica and Microscopica, with the former inscribed on the even-numbered pages and the latter inscribed on the odd-numbered pages, may well reflect a similar structure in the Book itself. Given the continuing relevance of this work to modern-day mathematicians and theoretical physicists—who still glean its pages for inspiration in constructing their theories of Relativity, Quantum Physics, Superstrings, Twistors and Random Truths—it would indeed be remarkable if Paracletus were alone responsible for this surfeit of ingenuity.

Around the corner, the incessant
beep beep beep
of a reversing lorry cuts over the distant
vroom
of vans and cars delivering products and assistants to the shops of Sauchiehall Street. Fox listens for the song of birds among the early noise but hears none. Winter in Kentigern, and it won't be dawn yet for another—what?— three hours, and dark again by 4:00 p.m. He flicks his collar up and steps down from the doorway to the street, hands jammed into his pockets. He should have brought an overcoat.

It's cold but not cold enough for snow. It seldom is in Kentigern this time of year. With the Gulf Stream keeping December mild and wet, White Christmases are few and far between in Kentigern, so the midwinter season has a darkness that you don't get in many cities round the world. Lit by the orange streetlights glistening on wet pavements, the decorative lights in shops, the long nights in Kentigern lack that blue-white quality of snow in the air or plowed along the gutters of New York or Berlin. It's more the light of bonfires built for dancing round, of Yule logs crackling in the hearth, candle-shaped bulbs in brass candelabra in a warm pub where you go to meet your friends. You can live through days without a glimpse of natural light here, going to work in the dark, going home in the dark. It can be miserable or it can give your life a strangely artificial air, a chiaroscuro that makes everything at once more solid and more staged. Like the whole world is a Caravag-gio painting or a Rembrandt. The Prodigal Returns.

They're all prodigals in some respects, Fox thinks, at different stages: Joey brooding and bitter, always trapped; Jack in the first flush of wild ecstatic liberation; Puck resting, out in the wilds, in some orchard that he's sure will always keep him fed. And Guy? He's the prodigal who's been out in the world now for a while, he supposes, and is starting to see life's not as simple as it looks, starting to see how dangerous the world is, but unwilling to give up.

He turns the corner past the flashing light of the garbage truck, veers past a garbageman with a quick apology and a nod.

He hopes that he's planted the seed of something in Pickering's head, in the shifts, the misdirections and redirections, hopes that he's formed some new connections, like stitches drawing ragged skin together over the empty wound inside him. But he's better at graving the Cant than speaking it, and Joey, well, Joey is a tough subject, trusting nothing, hunting truth and hating all illusions. But they need him. For all of Jack's fire, even with Puck's love and Guy's savvy to temper it, the three of them need Joey's cold, dark will. Pickering, Pechorin or Narcosis, Joey will never be entirely onside, but they need him, his sharp tongue a surgeon's scalpel to cut through the lies they tell themselves. A painter's palette knife scraping back the layers.

The old idea that Paracletus's work derives mainly from the Book is, however, challenged by many scholars who have pointed to the later pages of Paracletus's
Principaea
as evidence of his derangement; as the book progresses, the reader cannot help but note, these parallel threads of rigorous logic, the invention and application of the “suppositional calculus,” the derived topological models reminiscent of the work of Poincare, the predictions and hypotheses, all become alarmingly muddled by the tables and graphs of empirical observation he begins to add, at first in the margins and then gradually throughout the text, in any available area of white space.

By the thirty-sixth volume, as Schaller points out, the exegesis of the models actually takes up more space on the page than the models themselves, with these annotations of verification indiscriminately placed on odd or even pages, and quite often related to equations on both pages by circles, arrows and other such shorthand symbols of connectivity. This is not, says Schaller, the work of a mere copyist,
but the dynamic—even fevered—map of a mind leaping furiously this way and that, trying desperately to make sense of increasingly contradictory theories and data.

On the opening pages of Volume 38 the division between Macroscopica and Mi-croscopica completely breaks down, with equations, formulae and observations distributed all but randomly between and often across both odd and even pages. From here on in it descends, as Schaller puts it, into a “Grand Disunification Theory.” The previous scalar distinction now utterly abandoned, it is tempting to suggest that Paracletus is dealing with what we might label
Mesoscopica
—and a generation of epidemiologists and economists are indeed now trying to apply his theories with this in mind.

However, if he is doing so, it is unlikely that he is drawing on the Book. The evidence is, Schaller maintains with quite credible reference to the few remaining biographical sources on Paracletus's life, that after a brief study of the Book which provided his initial inspiration, Paracletus subsequently lost his access to the work and spent his remaining years trying to reconstruct its voluminous insights, dooming himself to madness and failure by the very nature of this goliath task. It is this, he says, which lies at the heart of Paracletus's descent into chaos, his attempt to map a labyrinth that he has only glimpsed.

Fox stops at the corner of Charing Cross and Woodlands Road to light a cigarette, looking back up toward Park Circus, up and back and slightly to the side in time, at the white church tower. Then he turns to face the—

—lights of hanging lanterns and neon signs of Chinatown, all dragons and Chinese pictograms. He's never actually been quite sure where this street is— maybe San Francisco—but it doesn't really matter at the end of the day. Chinatown is Chinatown, whichever city it's in.

It's the same time on his watch, but it's lighter here, the thin slice of sky that's visible above paling light blue where, ahead, it angles sharp down from the roofs and into the cram of supermarkets selling monosodium glutamate and trinket Buddhas, landscapes carved out of bamboo and framed between two panes of glass and with black lacquered wood surrounds. He steps out onto the cobbled street to avoid a deliveryman, a box hoisted on his shoulder as he lugs it in the
doors of restaurants up the stairs to the upper floors. There are signs everywhere with words like
Peking, Dragon, Jade
and
Canton. Inns
and
Emporiums
and
Gardens.
Every city should have inns and emporiums and gardens, he thinks.

“Mr. Fox! You are up early.”

“I am up late,” he says.

He steps back up onto the sidewalk to slap a handshake with Mr. Chung and ask him how the Shanghai Empress is doing for business these days … well, he hopes. And, yes, it is, and why has he not been around in weeks to drink green tea and play Go. Ah, but he's a busy man these days is Mr. Fox.

“Nonsense,” says Mr. Chung.”/ am a busy man. You are a writer. It is your job to sit and drink green tea with an old man and play Go. Where else will you learn our ancient Chinese wisdom?”

Guy laughs. The old man's favorite saying is
Confucius never had to run a restaurant. What did Confucius know?
Next week, promises Guy, next week.

He drops his cigarette butt in a puddle at the corner, and heads down an alleyway into a narrow maze of brick, follows steps that wind up under an arch into winding ways, enchanting ways, weaving between Istanbul and London's East End, streets of crumbling saunas and polluted air. Red lights in the windows. Girls with perfumed hair.

He wonders if there are any fallen angels in those brothels right now, pulling their clothes on, shirts and ties, peeling notes out of their wallets to pay the daughters of men. So many of them have gone native now, it seems, drawn to the joys and sorrows of the flesh now that their Covenant has fallen. It gives him hope, in some ways, scares him in others. The sort of chaos they're immersed in now has a tendency to collapse into new dualities.

In the 1800s two rival schools of thought began a bitter argument over the origins of the Book, and by extension the origins of the Cosmos. Developing from the religious tradition whereby the Book was held to have been written down by God, using his own blood for ink, the Manualists formalized their doctrine around the belief that the ink was the primary substance of reality.

In essence they held that the ink was God and God was the ink, the substrate on which the Cosmos is based, both prior and exterior to reality. That is to say, beyond
the spatial and temporal limits of the mundane world, they believed, the “infinite intellect of a divine power, dark and liquid, is the very medium of activity from which the finite is defined.” This was, indeed, the dominant idea for centuries, in line as it was with the theological climate of Christianity and Creationism. We are all God's handiwork, said the Manualists, and most of the world agreed.

With the Enlightenment, however, this idea found a challenger in the shape of the Neo-Iconoclasts, who pointed to the absurdity of characterizing the infinite (i.e., nonexistential) in finite (i.e., existential) terms. Fiercely opposing the anthropomorphism of a Creator deity, they scoffed at the “primitive and superstitious tomfoolery of imagining the world to be black spittle wiped from the beard of God, and daubed in pretty patterns on the page.”

If all actions are written in the Book, the Neo-Iconoclasts insisted, then surely the action of a Manualist “Hand of God” must also be prescribed within the text. Hence while some were willing to admit the possibility of a demiurgic scribe, one as bound by the Book as any other creature named in it, they denied the prior existence of a transcendent Creator, believing in nothing beyond the Book, nothing before, after or outside it. The primary substance of reality, the substrate on which the Cosmos is written, they held to be the vellum, hailing this as the true fundament of reality.