‘Of course?’
‘Oh yes. It requires painstaking research, endless attention to detail, a lot of careful reading of subtext and dominant social flow, and a keen awareness of generational and demographic differences in semiotic uptake. Far more valuable than essay writing. It’s coursework, set by themselves, meaning I get more time to relax while still tutoring students to the highest grades in their final competitive examinations.’
‘And it upsets the faculty.’
‘Do you know, you’re quite right? I hadn’t thought of that. Dearie me, I must write them a very apologetic note. Would you have shot him?’
‘Maybe. I read him as Hitler.’
‘Yes, you did. Note to self: hypervigilance may narrow the fuzzy range even further. Paranoia, of course, closes it altogether. Well, it was a stun gun. I suppose that would have been educational for him too. Not a Chaplin fan?’
‘No, I am.’ Endless winter afternoons after school, watching with her head resting on her father’s shoulder. She remembers the smell of him, dogs and cologne and wool. Such a long time ago. For a moment she sees his face, lined and delighted, and then he’s gone. Emotion chokes her from nowhere, vanishes just as quickly, leaving her briefly frozen in place. Pakhet doesn’t seem to notice.
‘Then let’s just say you’re having a bad day. Or does a white face in a black suit mean something else you don’t like? Oh. My apologies. I see that it does – but I fancy you are not a coulrophobic, mm? No. Let’s have tea, Inspector, and you can tell me what you need.’
Neith shakes off the sudden squall of memory. In fact, Marcus James Dean is the essence of why she’s here. The perfumed gentleman named Smith is travelling until Thursday, so Neith has come here for an alternate first opinion. She prefers, in any case, to have more than one expert so that she can check them against one another. The Witness has solved the old question of quis custodiet, but there are – demonstrably – limits to its ability in the messier assessment of signs and implications.
Pakhet makes tea. It is apparently a rule with her that you don’t talk while it’s brewing. Finally she pours, into ridged and painted Victorian cups with spindly handles. ‘Now,’ she says, lighting a pipe and putting it into her mouth, ‘I imagine you’re clearer on what you want to ask me.’
The Inspector finds that she likes Chase Pakhet. The woman’s bad habits seem to have condensed rather than betrayed her. Smoking – however modified by science – is not good for you, and nor are red wine, whisky or bacon sandwiches, but all these Chase Pakhet avows inter alia are her favourite things. She likes, by her own estimation: bars with loud music; argument and scholarship; young men who flirt with her without meaning it; old men who flirt with her and do mean it; and women of any age who don’t get jealous about being upstaged by a woman who looks like a wine barrel. Around her eyes are enough crows’ feet to make – the Inspector realises the word is not ‘parliament’ after all.
Neith had a prepared list, but now on instinct she asks a question off the top of her head, the one that has been bothering her since Shand the bookseller’s introduction to the superstitions of Hunter’s fans.
‘Could you codify a person as text? Put them into a book?’
Whatever Chase Pakhet was expecting, it evidently was not this. Her eyes narrow as if she is about to pooh-pooh the idea, then widen as the denial collides in her head with the unwilled effort of some other aspect of self to work out how such a thing might be done. Neith almost laughs, watching the flow state intrude on someone else’s thoughts.
Do I look like that when I’m working a case?
For one familiar with the moment, it’s possible to track the stages of its flowering. At any moment – yes. There. Pakhet frowns as the ripples of the first concussions set off their own subsidiary detonations in her mind.
‘No,’ she says at last. ‘No. But.’ She makes a motion with her head and shoulders, bending the spine left, then right so that she is her own scales.
‘But?’
Pakhet waves her hands. ‘But … nothing. Imagine you let some clever mechanic loose in a workshop with a brief to build a sewing machine out of spare parts, and when he was done you said he had to build a clock, and he had to build it out of the sewing machine and whatever additional bits he needed, but it still had to be a sewing machine even while it was a clock, and when he managed that you said you wanted an oven and a water pump and a milking machine too, and they all had to come out of the clock or the sewing machine and everything had to work. Yes? So then imagine you did that for ten thousand years until you had a whole city of interconnected machines and the original sewing machine was still in there, humming away, and then someone came along and said they wanted to pack all that into a clutch purse. Into a thimble! No.’
‘But.’ Pakhet’s voice still holds the promise of a but, the mulish unwillingness of an academic challenged on her home ground.
‘Oh, well. But. But I suppose you could take the tone – not the person but the personality – like poetry. Poetry is a shotgun aimed at our shared experience, hoping to hit enough of the target that we all infer a great bulk of information conveyed as implication and metaphor in an approximately similar way. Making a unity between poet and reader.’ Accompanying hand gesture. ‘I always wanted to take a connectome image of a group of subjects before and after reading a poem. Or better, keep them in isolation and give them perfectly similar experiences for a week and then make them read a novel. See how much it changed ’em. Would it matter if it was a good novel? How long did the change last? Was the book permanently incorporated into the connectome or was it just a stone in a pond, all splash and ripples and then gone a moment later into the everyday duckshit that rules us all?’ She snorts.
‘If you took the before picture away from the after picture,’ Neith observes, ‘you’d have the connectome image of the book in the mind.’
Pakhet starts. ‘In so far as such a thing makes sense,’ she says. ‘Yes, you would. It would be like a single frame from a moving image. A few frames, actually, I suppose, from significant instants in a sequence, allowing the brain to piece together a narrative flow. And before you ask, yes, I suppose you could generate at least a skeletal outline of a text from a person’s connectome.’
‘A mould.’
‘From which one might derive a narrative which would then be as much that person as any such object could be. Which isn’t much. Yes.’ Pakhet’s eyes light for a moment with an inventor’s zeal. ‘But what would be more interesting, and much more disturbing and illegal, would be whether it was possible to create a mould for a text which would move the broad shape of an audience member’s connectome closer to that of a given desired shape. Not putting a person into a book, but iterating that person in the minds of anyone who read it.’
‘Like choice architecture.’ The use of big data and nuance to influence political decision-making: the attempt to corrupt the political process by deliberate manipulation of the cognitive limitations of the human mind. Almost all restaurant menus use it, and even knowing what it is, diners are still influenced: the steak or the lobster is always mountainously expensive. Once you’ve rejected that, the less expensive stew seems like a bargain, and having saved money you splash out on drinks. Subscription prices and two-for-one deals are the same. But in the political context, the System reserves the right to prosecute it as a crime somewhere between fraud and treason.
‘Like advanced neurolinguistic behavioural psychotopology,’ Pakhet snaps. ‘I don’t call you a Praetorian, you don’t call me a spin doctor. Yes. Fascinating idea, gratifyingly impossible.’
Possession by ghost book does not strike her as fascinating so much as terrifying. ‘Impossible?’
‘For anything but the broadest statements: love good, hate bad. Everyone begins with a similar junk pile and has to build a city, but everyone goes about it rather differently. I suppose you might manage the trick for one person, but not for a mass. And it wouldn’t last. The duckshit hypothesis is in
fact the correct one. Our minds are not marble sculptures, they’re a campfire boiling a couple of pints of mud in a bone bucket. In any case … Well, enticing though it is, that cannot possibly be what you came here to ask.’
Neith shakes her head in agreement. No.
‘I have a sackful of signs. I need to know what they mean.’
‘Wrong door.’
The Inspector waits.
‘You’re no fun at all,’ Pakhet complains. ‘I thought I’d have you up in arms with that one.’
‘No.’
‘No, so I see. I shall try harder. All right: I can tell you what they might mean, but if they’re not obvious it will be a guess. That kind of interpretation is a life’s work. A life’s work of a life’s work, quite often. I take it your signs are somehow connected?’
‘That’s what I need to know.’
‘But I mean, authorship or context.’
‘Yes. They’re all from one interview.’
Pakhet looks up.
‘Ahhh. And when we say “interview”, we’re talking about the unmediated sort. Straight from the horse’s cerebellum. My old stamping ground, as you no doubt know.’
‘Yes.’
‘All right, give me the skinny.’
The Inspector smiles. ‘You read pulp,’ she accuses.
Chase Pakhet assumes a lofty expression. ‘Pulp crime, yes. Of course I do. It’s my job.’
‘And you like it.’
‘My own emotional response is hardly the point.’
‘But you do.’ Neith finds herself somehow scandalised, either by the evident fact or the elusive response. Pakhet holds up her hands to acknowledge the touch.
‘I do not like it, I love it. I love it for its cheap trashiness, its wicked women and its unrepentantly vivid sex. I love the violence, the moral turpitude, and the absoluteness of right and wrong in a universe that pretends to be shaded with grey. I love its clear signing and rich cast of archetypes and markers. Pulp is the vector for Eco, the cloak of Chandler, the soft pillow of Virginia Woolf, the birth caul of Cold Comfort Farm, the fairy godmother of Doris Lessing and William Gibson. Pulp is the key to open the doors not only of Freud and Jung, but even of Barthes, who stole everything from Calvino anyway but let us not go down that road for fear we shalln’t return this night. Yes, Inspector, clap me in irons. I am a nerd. Speak, and I shall be your oracle.’
With gathering confidence, and interrupted by brief sections displayed on Pakhet’s terminal, Mielikki Neith speaks.
‘Aaaall righty,’ Chase Pakhet says when she has heard it all. ‘Allons y.’ She closes her eyes and lifts her pen from the yellow legal pad on which she has been taking notes. ‘I don’t need to tell you there’s a lot going on, I take it?’
‘No.’
‘Good.’
Pakhet stands up and goes to her bookshelf – the Inspector is now primed to see this object as a signifier of academic authority and therefore also a tool for the architectural intimidation of Pakhet’s more boisterous students – and retrieves a single slim volume from which the dust jacket has been removed. Her footsteps are heavy but quite silent. ‘Let’s dispense with the idea that I don’t know whose interview we’re talking about, shall we?’
The Inspector sighs, then nods.
‘And you no doubt are looking for her books. No, don’t get excited, this isn’t one, or not exactly. It’s a critique. The most I have ever been able to find.’
‘You’re a fan?’
‘I’m a scholar,’ Pakhet snaps, ‘and so was she, whatever else she was.’ She relents. ‘I am also a fan. I wrote to her more than once asking for clarification. Never got an answer. Oracular in life, as evidently in death. Here:
‘Hunter’s cities are all one city. Each house opens its door on to a street that is all streets. Cobbles reveal themselves from a given perspective to be bitumen or limestone flagging, and all roads are runways, canals or rivers, so that one might go from London to Boston to Amsterdam as easily as from number nine to number twelve. Growing bolder, one might leave the immediate white European neighbourhood and pass on to Cairo or Kirghizia, to Santiago de las Vegas or Addis Ababa. The journey of a thousand miles does not begin with a single step; it is one step. Humanity exists in a unitary urban sprawl whose laws may vary and whose travel infrastructure may take more or less time in conventional space to connect any given part with any other, but in these fictions there is no such difficulty and the conceptual truth becomes the practical. The reader and therefore also de facto the protagonists move from one room to the next without passing through the intervening space, because there is none. Life is a series of cinematic elisions, and we do not wait in waiting rooms or get bored, we simply ‘cut to’. Place and time in the world – as in the act of consuming the text – are notional and a matter of opinion. Like Wilhelm Reich, the prisoner walks through walls. In Quaerendo, the modern reader, contemporaneously convicted as a killer by Mr Murder, voluntarily incarcerates herself with the narrator in a prison constructed by the Mad Cartographer in the distant future, awaiting the judgement which was rendered hundreds of years before by the Five Cardinals as part of their plot against the Roman Empire. Perhaps every day is 14 June 1986, the date upon which the world came closest to total nuclear war. Perhaps the bombs fell and the release of energy has utterly extinguished temporality and we exist in a permanent exception to the rules of physics we painstakingly assemble.
‘In the apparent reality I experience, as surveillance breaches the walls of the mind itself, identity takes flight and seeks to exist across physical locations. If this cannot be done in actuality, it is done symbolically and psychologically. We locate ourselves outside our bodies, in speech, on screens, and in art, becoming more than single loci which can be constrained: finding escape in dissolution into a suspension from which we precipitate at each point of conscious interaction with others, just as we are told that matter itself may exist only at the point of collision. We avoid the transmissible psychopathy of deindividuation only by accepting a redefinition of individuality. At the same time, an increasingly ontological science tells us that the world we see is no more real than the ones we imagine: the universe is not what it appears to be at our clumsy macro-Newtonian level. Are we simulations? What does that question even mean? How is an informational model of a quantum world different from a quantum world made of information? As government takes steps to control the inside of our heads, freedom reaches to a future where even physical reality is not legislated; where what is written in stone is no more fixed than dreams or water. To escape a fascism that has become internal, we embrace an external world that is ultimately fluid and where the tyranny of the real itself is moot.
‘The corollary is that a book is not finished until it is read. The writing is not complete until what is said has passed from the physical volume which gives it sensory reality into another mind where it kindles thoughts and impressions: a whole understanding of what it means to be, ignited on foreign soil in an act that is either erotic or imperialistic, but in either case miraculous. We become one another. Ink on paper is the frozen matter of a person, a snapshot of selfhood in fungal spores waiting to be quickened in our borrowed mentation, thought shaping itself in us, of us, to emerge from us. If all cities are one city, does that not also imply that all persons are one person? And if so, who?’
The Inspector catches at the penultimate lines. ‘Borrowed mentation.’
Pakhet nods. ‘Yes. I wouldn’t have bothered you with it if you hadn’t asked your remarkable question. Quite unexpected. And pleasing. You follow in her track, at least a little. Well done.’
‘But the rest …’
‘No,’ Pakhet agrees. ‘It could mean anything. I think that’s part of the point. Information so densely specific that it becomes poetic and allusory. Obfuscation as indoctrination. What you puzzle out for yourself you must by definition incorporate into who you are even if you reject it. She’s forcing us to see the world through her eyes in order to underst
and what she says. It’s scientifically demonstrable these days, but the Frankfurt School were doing it instinctively in the 1940s – though they went all out on being infuriating and somewhat less on being poetic. Get down on your knees and cry God for Baudrillard. It takes a Frenchman, evidently, to demand that if it must be whimsical and impenetrable, it should also be enjoyable. But you can see why everyone gets so excited about her.’
‘Her?’
‘Well, it’s unattributed, which to me screams that Hunter wrote it herself. The author writing about her own books, which no one else can now locate or read, meaning that they were complete, for a while, and now have ceased to exist in the sense she’s suggesting. You see? Perhaps she bought all the copies and destroyed them. Perhaps some of them never existed at all and she made the world believe that they did – kindling the responses without the books and making a disembodied mind. Don’t quote me. This all is something of a hot topic in my particular community, and everyone spends far too much time dissecting what everyone else says, because we don’t have the primary texts to talk about. Scan this, if you like. I’m afraid it’s not much more than an essay: large print. But I don’t let the hard copy out of my sight. It took me seven years to find and even then I had to arm wrestle an Italian collector who said he’d seen it first. Quite an undignified scene.’
‘Had he?’ Neith asks.