Damien Broderick - Strange Attractors

energetic appeal — the words conveyed
nothing. Francis, seeming to perceive this, checked himself completely, only to resume in a fierce, impatient tone w'hich, from a servant, I should never normally have tolerated.
‘You remember the study, do you not? Your last waking memory —
your study at Thrushcross Grange?’
His meagre frame now' seemed to thrill with an incomprehensible
aversion towards me; his words, too, suggested an intimate
acquaintance which my own recollection was powerless to corroborate. Yet he did not seem a dangerous fellow, or even an interesting one. His strange exaggerated manner, his rapid transitions of mood, seemed a consequence of overtaxed brain and nerves. In the
morbid lustre of his eye, the flaring nostril, the trembling hand, I
seemed to read the character of his master — a reclusive eccentric (as
I fancied) who either sanctioned or commanded an excess of waking,
and an unbecoming freedom which Francis displayed in addressing
his betters.
Upon the mention of my study, its familiar det ails came distinctly
to my mind; I all but yearned towards the pot of ink there, and the
paper on w'hich I had thought to record my housekeeper’s narrative,
and a very singular dream I underwent at W uthering Heights — a
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Yvonne Rousseau
nightmare, with a wailing spectre that clutched me by the hand, and
myself quite unable to believe I was asleep. The recording of that
dream must wait now upon the present narrative; yet the thought of
it steadied me. Perhaps (I thought) Yorkshire winters produce extraordinary dreams — or perhaps I have been seriously ill, and have lost many weeks in a delirium, my powers of recollection returning more
slowly than my bodily health. Whether dreaming or awake, my course
is clear: to behave like an English gentleman.
As if divining my thought, Francis again addressed me with the
earnest civility he had used at first, and which he seemed to strive after
constantly; but the painful agitation of his spirits was always overwhelming him, whether I replied to him in words or only in looks.
‘You, M r Lockwood, are a man of quite abnormal stability. Even in
the grip of nightmare, you retain a constant image of your own relation to the rest of the world; even asleep, you respond to event s in your characteristic manner. Partly because of this — but partly from
natural sympathies, impossible to subdue — I have spent very little
anxiety upon your case, compared with my soul-searchings over the
five women in the next room.’
His gaze had been fixing ever more intently upon my face, and his
mood had subtly kindled into urgent confiding; but now his words
grew rash and wild. ‘Each of those women remembers the events of a
lifetime, and supposes that she was born, in the normal way; and yet
her life began only a few short hours ago, and all but these last few
minutes of it have been spent in the sleep my computer prescribed for
her.’ My brain refused to worry itself wdth a speech so perverse — except that I entertained a fleeting wonder that a clerk (‘his’ clerk, too!) should meddle in the prescription of sleeping draughts.
But his fancies grew more singular: ‘I can’t predict in detail how my
creations will turn out; the computer’s final version may be more flexible than my interpretation; so let’s try this — let’s think about the book in your hand, M r Lockwood.’
I started. The fellow was right; I was all this time unaccountably
clutching a volume of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, that eminently horrid romance!
‘If I chose, I could bring to life a man with all the memories and
habits and expectations that the novel gives to the lascivious Monk.
More: if one of my rooms looked just a little like an abbey cell, I could
have that room’s appearance woven into his memories too; then, at
first sight, he would hail that room as the familiar cell he had slept and
prayed in for years. The man’s existence would be owed entirely to me;
M r Lockwood’s narrative
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without me, there would just be dead information — dead chemicals:
calcium, carbon, nitrogen, phosphates . . . ’
And more and more names of chemicals he babbled forth, and then
he raved of cells and acids, but not cells where a monk might live —
cells that lived inside our own bodies, and acids that hid inside those
cells — acids whose mark was everywhere on body and mind; I might
have fancied he meant the slow acid of the years, that burns furrows
into the aged brow, and shrivels our limbs and our sympathies alike;
but these acids were far more marvellous, less poetic — strange and
delusional. Every kind of idea he jum bled together at random: jean
and whore-moan! words such as mapping, strand, and hydrogen
bond, with strings and triggers and frames and loops; messengers and
interpreters — even hereditary computers! six generations of
sorcerers’ clerks!
I was aghast — could it be I who had run mad? But the fellow’s own
aspect reassured me: his was the derangement! In a sudden lucid interval, he grew conscious of my perturbation and perplexity; he ceased his strange effusion, and turned lividly pale. Every lineament betrayed
his shaken nerves, the prostration of his bodily strength.
Quivering and constrained, he hastened to beg