Dark Terrors 3: The Gollancz Book of Horror

Sous Rature JAY RUSSELL

When the phone rings in the middle of the night, most people think: who died?

I know it’s only Klein.

‘I don’t understand this sous rature stuff, Steve. How the hell does the bastard get away with it? I mean, he just crosses the bloody words out and then leaves them there on the page like squashed bugs. Doesn’t that bother anyone? Isn’t there a law? Doesn’t it drive you crazy?’

Our apartment sits just off-campus, in a neatly appointed professorial ghetto. The phone rests on the floor across the room from the bed because the cord won’t reach to the night stand. I don’t know why we haven’t just bought a cordless — or moved the bed — but that’s the way it is.

Elaine sleeps right through the calls. She used to bolt awake and roll off the bed, grabbing the receiver in one smooth motion. It amazed me how she could answer in a crisp, businesslike voice. As if it wasn’t the middle of the night; as if she hadn’t been stone dead to the world two seconds earlier.

Now she doesn’t even turn over.

‘It’s because he’s French, isn’t it? They get away with everything. I can live with Baudrillard’s bullshit, and even that crazy Virilio. But this erasure thing is too much. I mean, it’s up there with Jerry Lewis and Jean-Marie Le Pen. It’s, you know…God, it’s brilliant. It fits.’

I knew I’d regret lending Klein the Derrida books. I knew it would mean a lost night’s sleep.

‘Klein…’

‘I just, I can’t fully make sense of it. Steve, this is your field. You’ve got to explain it to me. I… I think I see where it fits — it’s so bloody fractal — but I just can’t quite…I’m afraid I’m going to have to really learn French for this guy, Steve. I mean, not just that oo-la-la crap that got me through Foucault. He’s…’

‘Do you know what time it is, Klein?’

‘Uhhhh. hold on.’

‘No, Klein…’

Too late. I glanced at Elaine. I wondered if the little bug inside her was awake or asleep. The duvet had become twisted around her slightly swollen belly. A thin line of saliva trailed from her mouth, watering the faded flowers on the pillowcase.

‘It’s almost three-thirty.’

‘Klein. ’ I sighed and stared vacantly at Elaine’s heavy breasts.

‘You really have to go back to Heidegger,’ I began.

I started having doubts about fractals and such the day one of my undergrads — a gaunt, black-clad cultural studies major with the unlikely moniker of B. Bronski — came to class wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the Mandelbrot set on the front and ‘I ♥ Chaos’ on the back. This same kid handed in a term paper with the title: ‘The Prosthetic Aesthetic: Fractal Postmodernism in the Cyberpunk/Splatterpunk Imperative.’ After that I figured it was only a matter of time before old Benoit himself performed a turn on Oprah.

Not that I entirely understand the stuff. If poked sternly with a pointed stick I can creditably acquit myself with an explication of strange attractors and sensitive dependence on initial conditions — God knows, I’ve heard Klein go on about it enough — but it’s still something of a strain for me. A lifetime in comparative literature departments has taken its toll on a scientific aptitude which wasn’t terrific to begin with.

Once upon a time, I dreamed about becoming an astronomer — next best thing to astronaut — but Cs and Ds in physics and calculus quickly stymied such fancies and sent me running for the shelter of Chaucer’s little helpers.

Still, my interest never entirely waned. I kept up with Drexler on nanotechnology, and was hyping VR and cyber-culture long before Wired magazine. Barnsley and Gleick and all the others opened up new worlds for me even as I completed my doctorate in English. I sprang for a top-of-the-line PC and high-res monitor when that kind of stuff was still an arm and a leg, and played with fractal-generating software, staying up into the wee hours, reliving the ‘star-gate’ sequence from 2001.

And I re-channelled my interest from science to science fiction, cajoling the department chair into letting me teach a graduate seminar by throwing a little Pynchon and Lessing in with the Dick and Ballard. I set to work on the definitive study of Olaf Stapledon and even scammed some funding to organize a small conference on popular science and science fiction.

Which was where I met Klein.

‘Klein call?’

I nodded and gave Elaine a mug and a kiss. It was a morning ritual and sort of unwritten contract that I get up first and bring her tea in bed. I like it. The ritual, I mean. Like any red-blooded American — even a Yank at (well, near) Oxford — I hate tea.

‘He wake you? I didn’t see you stir.’

She took a series of quick, tiny sips, the way the dog laps his water, and leaned back against the pillows.

‘No,’ she said, ‘but I dreamed of bells.’

‘Wedding bells?’

‘Don’t be a cheek. What did he want this time?’

I stood at the mirror adjusting my tie. My sole sop to respectability. I ran the back of my fingers under my chin and decided maybe I should have shaved after all.

‘He wanted me to explain deconstruction to him.’

‘Aauuuughhh,’ Elaine laughed and Darjeeling sprayed out of her nose. She dabbed at it with her nightie, still giggling. ‘What in the world for?’

I stared at my face in the mirror. A nasty zit was blooming in the crease between my nose and cheek, and my hair had visibly thinned again during the night. Where did it go?

‘You know Klein. He’s on to another of his big ideas. Something about a relationship between deconstruction and chaos theory. Really, the bastard already knows it better than I do. You remember Derrida’s notion of sous rature, putting things under erasure?’

Elaine half-squinted at me. ‘Ehhhhh. ’

I sat on the edge of the bed, softly rubbing her belly. I often do it without even thinking. ‘You know how he writes a word, then crosses it out, but leaves the crossed-out expression in the text?’

‘I think I vaguely remember. It’s been a while, though, and I could never stomach any of that crap.’

‘Yeah, it’s all a bit of a con. Or a decon. But erasure’s meant to indicate a concept or idea that’s under question or whose meaning is to be doubted. An idea that’s been negated, but not dismissed. By placing it sous rature, it can be there and not there at the same time. Well, that’s a nasty simplification, but you get the idea.’

‘Uh-huh. ’

‘So Klein thinks this somehow ties in with fractal geometry. After reading some Derrida, he’s decided that deconstruction is, and I quote, “a chaotic philosophical function”. And he claims that the process is dangerous because it has fractal contours. Something about gamma matrices approaching a threshold in maximum likelihood models.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I know, I know. He explained it to me for an hour, but I didn’t get it, and it was four o’clock in the damn morning. Anyway, he’s all excited about it, so we’re going to meet for lunch. But you know Klein.’

‘We all know Klein,’ Elaine sighed. I kissed her again and headed out the door. I thought she said something and stuck my head back in the room.

‘How’s that?’

Her hands were folded over the empty mug resting lightly on her bulging stomach and she stared at the wall with her head cocked slightly to one side.

‘I thought I heard bells again,’ she said.

The student union is the oldest building on campus: a massive Gothic structure embraced by thick tendons of ivy and perched at the edge of Library Slope. The Senior Common Room offers a stunning view of the valley below and a sparkling expanse of water to the northwest. The place was packed, but Klein had already secured seats. The canteen food was your basic pre-processed, post-industrial gruel, but the university subsidizes the prices so there’s always a queue.

Klein looked his usual dishevelled self, every bit the absent-minded professor. He wore a creased, sky blue shirt that was a couple of sizes too big, with the cuffs flapping loose and the buttons fastened all the way up to his chin. His black polyester pants nearly matched the shade of his peeling Hush Puppies, but he wore them at high tide depth and they didn’t go at all with the brown socks that drooped around his bony ankles. Klein’s kinky red hair was thin across the top, lending him an unfortunate Bozo the Clown look exaggerated by his over-large nose. The bags under his eyes were thick and dark as war paint, and magnified by a pair of cheap glasses that were filthy beyond belief.

Klein hadn’t shaved and had his usual odour about him. It was the smell of someone who’s just come off a lengthy flight: not dirty, exactly, but musky and tired. Klein works odd hours and on more than one occasion I’ve been around when his wife — a truly stunning redhead named Margaritte — has had to publicly scold him about bathing. Klein never gets embarrassed; he just forgets such mundanities.

‘You see the paper?’ he said by way of greeting.

‘Let me guess: rationing on soap and water.’

Klein looked puzzled for a moment, then unselfconsciously sniffed at his armpit. An elderly administrative type at the next table snorted, but Klein didn’t notice.

‘Oh,’ he shrugged. ‘Sorry. I’ve been working.’

‘What’s in the news?’ I smiled.

He handed me a copy of the Guardian, folded over to the Style page.

‘You fashion beast!’ I said. He grinned like a kid and pointed at the lead item.

It was about a new line of women’s clothing. The patterns were to be fractal-based and there was considerable to-do about how they mirrored nature’s own true design, with some outrageous pseudo-scientific doublespeak about chaos theory and complexity.

‘Old B. Bronski’s ahead of his time,’ I mumbled.

‘Heh?’

‘Nothing. Yeah, so what? You could have predicted something like this. I think people already have. Christ, the bookstore sells fractal postcards.’

‘Read the sidebar.’

I skimmed the accompanying article. It was about the manufacturing process that had been devised for producing the clothes. The process was also rooted in fractal concepts, so that a standard assembly line could be employed, but every item produced would be subtly different. The idea was to create complete uniqueness within the confines of mass production. The engineer who designed the system was quoted as saying that his software package was going to revolutionize every aspect of assembly line manufacturing.

‘Interesting,’ I said, digging into my salad, ‘but also a little scary in that zany, fin-de-millennial way.’

‘Scary how?’ Klein’s eyes were alight.

‘If this is right, it maybe changes — or changes again — the definition of “unique”. If you can mass-produce singularity, then what does it mean? What possible value could be left for such a notion?’

Klein nodded approval and handed me the business page with a short item circled in red. Grundrisse-Rand had commissioned Frank Gehry to design their new EU headquarters in Bonn. It would be the first corporate commission of a piece of deconstructivist architecture, and one of the few major deconstructivist designs to be realized.

‘Yeah, I heard about this the other day on Radio 4. I thought the deconstructivist thing was yesterday’s news, but I guess someone’s interested. Gehry’s still hot, at least.’

‘But what do you make of it?’

‘I can’t say I much care for it, at least not the sketches I’ve seen. The stuff makes me sort of dizzy with all those odd angles and exposed superstructure. Very Weimar, somehow. Decadent. The kind of thing that’s fun in theory, but awful for the poor saps who’ll have to live and work in it. But then I don’t really know much about architecture.’

‘Bloody hell!’ Klein said, slapping his palm on the spread-out paper. ‘I’m talking about two articles on the same day in the fucking Guardian! Fractals and deconstruction!’

‘Yeah?’

‘It’s the ideas, Steve. Don’t you see. The ideas.’

‘Yeah?’ I tried again.

‘It’s what I was talking about last night. You know that there are very precise mathematical models for how things are diffused in culture? It doesn’t matter what — VCRs, compact discs, AIDS — they’re all the same in these models. Threshold criteria and critical mass levels determining rates of adoption. It’s all very calculable and occurs along an exaggerated S-shaped curve, with a small number of people adopting early on, then an explosion during which most everyone else climbs on the bandwagon.’

‘Sounds reasonable.’

‘Well, the thing is that it works for ideas and concepts, too. And what’s more, I think that when certain ideas — in the form of the things we call theories — fulfil those critical mass requirements, they become something more. Something. substantial.’

‘Don’t know if that’s true, but it sounds neat,’ I said. ‘I can’t even balance my chequebook so I don’t know from math models, but…well…what do you mean substantial? You mean accepted, right?’

‘No, Steve. I mean substantial. Palpable. Real. And it’s dangerous as hell.’

I was shaking my head. ‘You said that on the phone last night — this morning — but I still don’t follow.’

‘There’s a very thin line separating conception from reality. From the idea of something being true to that selfsame thing becoming physical law.’

‘Ahem,’ I said.

‘Okay, look. You know that everything we do, everything we build, the entire design of the western world is more or less based on parameters set forth in Euclidean geometry.’

‘I suppose I know that somewhere.’

‘Exactly. Well, mathematicians have always known that Euclidean geometry is itself based on certain approximations of reality — lousy approximations, it turns out — but they’ve always just brushed that little matter aside and stuck it under the label of “assumptions”. They’ve gone ahead and said it doesn’t matter.

‘But Euclid is the law for most of us. For two thousand years we’ve regarded those Euclidean approximations as realer than Coca-Cola. For the vast multitudes, for you, to take an example, those assumptions about the logic of space and geometry aren’t ignored, they’re completely unknown. Let me ask you something. What was the world like before Euclid?’

‘I don’t know. It was. simpler, I guess. Smaller, more compact. Less technological, certainly.’

‘Yes!’ Klein practically jumped out of his chair. His glasses flew off his face and bounced on the table. He grabbed at them, smearing the lenses with butter, but stuck them right back on his nose.

‘Before Euclid this wasn’t a world of science and technology, it was a world of gods and magic. Euclid came along and reshaped geometry, yes, but at the same time he reshaped an entire cosmology!’

‘Whoa, wait a minute. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Euclid dates back to what? 300 or so BC? That cosmology of Greek and Roman gods survived him by centuries. And even then you’re talking, what, hundreds of years more before things really caught on.’

‘Of course!’ Klein shouted. ‘Because it took that long for the Euclidean conception to approach its critical mass. You couldn’t pick up a paper in ancient Rome and read about how Euclid redefined the world! There was no Page Three girl to help spread word of the invention of this neat new geometry. There wasn’t any CNN to tell the masses: Greek gods dead, film at ten.’

Klein was sort of bouncing up and down as he spoke and alternately enthralling and intimidating me. Generally excitable, he was now at the edge of something more extreme. The room had emptied out, but those still around eyed him with nervous apprehension or undisguised mirth.

‘There was no mass media. It took hundreds of years for ideas to be made real. Now it happens in no time. Or practically no time. The first work to see chaos for what it was appeared barely three decades ago. Within a few years we have theories of fractal geometry and complexity, and philosophies of deconstruction. And now it’s on Yves Saint Laurent’s bloody knickers.’

‘Take it easy, Klein. Sit down.’

Klein looked around. He was breathing hard and his glasses were so filthy he might as well have been wearing shades. He stood still for a moment, ran his tongue over his dry lips and flopped back into the chair.

‘Two thousand years ago Euclid killed the gods. What’s going to happen this time?’

I had no idea, but strongly suspected that Klein didn’t have it quite right. The other diners went back to their affairs. I started to proffer a counter-argument when Klein’s already ashen pallor went even whiter.

‘Shit,’ he said and got up. I turned around and saw Margaritte eyeing us from the door. Klein ran over to his wife, but she didn’t look happy. They started arguing almost at once, then she stormed off. He trudged after her, pressing his glasses to his face with one hand and I heard their rising voices carrying on down the hall. Shaking my head and smiling at the onlookers with a ‘well-what-can-you-do?’ kind of grin, I gathered up his books and papers and took them with me. I didn’t know what to think of Klein’s theory, but I was frankly worried for his mental health.

Rightly so, as it turned out. For I would never see him alive again.

Klein called at 4:02:35. Ah, the priceless precision of the digital age.

I grabbed the phone on the second ring. Elaine never moved. I’d neither seen nor heard from Klein for ten days following our lunch, though I’d tried to call him. In the interim I’d come across an article in the Spectator decrying the dangerous political correctness of the deconstructive influence in schools, and seen two TV news features relating to chaotic processes on the Internet. One even featured a sound bite from Mandelbrot.

‘Hi, Steve.’

It was a most un-Kleinlike greeting. He sounded tired and hoarse and out of sorts.

‘Hey, Klein. How are you?’

‘It looks bad, Steve. I’m frightened.’

‘What? Of what? What’s wrong?’

I glanced over and saw that Elaine was awake and watching me. I spoke softly, but there was an edge to my tone that must have got though to her. She looked groggy but concerned.

‘I’ve been running the models, Steve. Exact calculations. Thousands of iterations before the equations converged. Soon that won’t work any more, you know. Iterative processes are doomed. But for now, for a little while longer, maximum likelihood estimates don’t lie. Though I wish they did.’

‘Klein…Have you been drinking?’

Elaine’s eyebrows leapt up like grasshoppers. I’d never known Klein to imbibe anything stronger than tea with lemon.

‘A little. Margaritte keeps a supply, you know.’

I didn’t wonder. ‘Are things, you know, okay with you and Margaritte? After the other day and all?’

There was a lengthy pause with only line noise and Klein’s deviated septum to fill the silence.

‘I. that is, Margaritte. we’re approaching a threshold, too. It’s all gone to turbulence, now, and I can see the edge. I can feel it, Steve. I… I know it doesn’t matter. In the bigger picture, I mean. The equations, the models, they prove it. But still. Shit, Steve. It still, you know, it hurts.’

There was another staticky silence. I hesitated, but with my eyes fixed on Elaine’s, decided to go ahead.

‘Listen to me, Klein. You can’t always…depend on the numbers. They’re like you were saying with Euclid, you know? They’re not quite real. They’re just representations and they’re different from people. Abstract. People aren’t fixed things. Even when you think they are.’

‘I don’t know, Steve. ’

‘What I’m about to tell you, I’ve never talked about before and I… we don’t like to think about it. Especially now. But I’m going to tell you. All right?’

I was talking to Klein, but looking at Elaine. She nodded back at me.

‘My first teaching position was back in the States, right out of my doctorate. It was a shit-hole of a department in a dull Midwestern town and it was horrible. Elaine was miserable. She had left behind her job and all her friends because it was the only position I could get and we were committed to staying together.

‘Well, let’s just say that things got bad. Real bad. I had a killer teaching load and the town was full of overqualified faculty spouses, so Elaine couldn’t find any work. I’d come home tired and mean and she’d be angry and bored. For a while we communicated through grunts and yells.’

‘Steve. ’

‘Just listen, Klein. It was the end of the semester and we hadn’t. been together for weeks. I was starting to browse the classifieds for studio apartments. So it’s right around finals time — and you know, I’ve got a couple, three hundred undergrads and it’s just pure chaos, you’ll pardon the expression — when this perky little sophomore comes to see me. She’s a total airhead, but with one of those teenage bodies that won’t quit. And she’s failing the course and the door’s closed and she knows what she’s doing and I’m unhappy and… I don’t know, Klein, I just figured what the fuck, you know? I just… it was just an idea, Klein.

‘I hated myself for it and I still do. I figured for sure it was the end for us and probably my career. Hell, I thought maybe that’s why I did it. And I won’t lie to you, Klein, it got pretty bad. But it also brought stuff into focus. There was a lot of pain, but we found a way through it. Eventually. And my point is this: in the end I…we decided that it was all just a moment. Just an idea, you see? And we rose above it. We made healing tractable. An idea isn’t real unless you make it so. Choose to make it so. Otherwise it’s only an idea, only an abstraction. I mean, isn’t that what we were talking about?’

There was silence, and then there was laughter. Distant, dim and very scary.

‘Just an idea. Just an idea.’ He said it over and over and was still laughing when he hung up the phone.

I tried to call him back, but the line was engaged. I crawled back into bed and kissed the tears off Elaine’s face. I tried to go back to sleep, but I kept hearing Klein’s laughter in my head.

I don’t know what time the phone rang.

Elaine had gone to bed early, but I stayed up to watch The South Bank Show. Melvin Bragg was interviewing Derrida.

At about half-eleven, Elaine staggered out of the bedroom clutching her belly. Her face was white as milk, and blood oozed down her thighs. She was crying and moaning and collapsed to the floor before I could get to her. I thought about calling an ambulance, but couldn’t bear the wait. I lifted her up and put her in the car, then sped to the local hospital in a panicked daze.

Elaine lost the baby, but it was worse than that. Her uterus had become malformed in the pregnancy. It was actually touch and go for a while, although the surgeon didn’t tell me that until later. The doctor also said she had never seen or heard of anything quite like it before, and asked if Elaine had ever worked around radioactive or toxic substances. I couldn’t make any sense of it then, but of course anything and everything is explainable now.

I left the hospital confused and exhausted, but satisfied that Elaine was going to be okay.

The police were waiting for me when I got home. A detective accompanied by a pair of PCs. I immediately assumed something had happened to Elaine.

‘Steven Rich?’ the detective asked.

I managed a nod.

He mumbled his name, but I didn’t catch it. ‘Do you know a Dr Paul Klein?’

Another nod.

‘When did you last have contact with him?’

‘A week or two ago. Why? What’s going on? Is this about Elaine? Is Elaine all right?’

The detective glanced at one of the constables who started back toward the car. ‘I don’t know about any Elaine, sir. But Dr Klein killed his wife and took his own life early this morning. Your phone number was found on his person. Did he call you at any time last night or early today?’

I never thought of myself as a fainter, but things went black around me. I felt like Dorothy caught up in the twister and carried over the rainbow into some alien landscape. Fortunately the cop caught me by the arm and helped me to a sitting position on the front steps.

I told him in rambling terms about Elaine and what had happened the previous night. That I knew Klein and Margaritte were having troubles, but that his news was an utter shock. He clucked sympathetically and tried to look interested.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘We may want to talk to you some more, but that can wait. Why don’t you get some rest now.’

The cop helped me inside and guided me to the living room sofa where I collapsed. He closed the front door softly as he left and I fell quickly and deeply asleep.

Neither of us thought to check the blinking light on the answerphone.

Our answering machine is an old model — it works well enough that I never saw any reason to buy a fancier one — but it only gives you sixty seconds to leave a message.

‘I’ve been running the equations for days, Steve, but they won’t converge. The iterations will go on for ever now.

‘I was grading exams the other day, you know? The first-year class. A girl wrote out elaborate calculations for a problem that didn’t require it, a problem with a simple answer. In the end she just put a big “X” through it all and gave up. I saw it as sous rature and gave her full credit.

‘It’s coming now, Steve. Almost here. I thought I should warn you. We’re at the base of the S-curve, but the explosion will happen soon. The numbers don’t. didn’t lie.

‘I put her under erasure. Margaritte. I thought it was for the best. The only thing I wish. ’

Sixty seconds.

I remember Klein once told me about something called luminiferous aether. It was an early, discarded notion in physics, like spontaneous generation or phlogiston. Aether was supposed to be the medium which filled all unoccupied space and was the mechanism for transmission of magnetic and electrical forces. Klein said that there had been some promising work verifying its existence and the idea was catching on until Einstein disproved it all with relativity. Klein always repeated the same thing when the topic of relativity came up.

‘Hell of an idea,’ he would say.

Elaine came home from the hospital after a week. We talked about the baby and about Klein and Margaritte. She cried a lot and told me she understood if I didn’t want to stay with her now, but I just told her to hush and held her tight. I didn’t let her hear the phone message, nor did I voice my suspicions, but after a while she pieced it together herself.

The curve is on the rise: Klein’s explosion has started to detonate and the world has begun to change. It’s hard to keep up with because it’s hard to know what’s real, what you can count on to remain solid, consistent from day to day.

The world doesn’t meet at right angles any more. All the assumptions that we’ve depended on for so long have crawled out of the rotten woodwork of our lives. The old formulae don’t add up and the new ones are still a mystery. I know it’s what Klein suspected, but I’m also sure that it’s less awful than he feared. It is certain that he overreacted; living sous rature is still better than dying under it.

Like bugs or fish that spend their lives in the darkness, this sudden flash of bold light has sent all of us scurrying in turbulent new directions. It’s scary, but it’s sort of interesting, too. At times it’s even wondrous. God knows, it’s chaotic, but not without its own subtleties of order.

Mostly, it’s a hell of an idea.