‘You were reading Butler’s Notebooks?’
‘Yeah. I like all the stuff about the sugared Hamlets.’
Actually, what I like about Butler is the same thing I like about Lumas: the outlaw status and the brilliant ideas. Butler’s big thing was consciousness; he thought that since we evolved from organic vegetable matter, our consciousness must at some point have emerged from nothing. If we had developed out of nowhere like this, then why couldn’t machines? I’d been reading about this only a couple of weeks before.
‘Sugared Hamlets?’ said Burlem.
‘Yeah. These sweets they were selling in London. Little sweets in the shape of Hamlet holding a skull, dipped in sugar. How great is that?’
Burlem laughed. ‘I bet Butler thought that was hilarious.’
‘Yeah. That’s why I like him. I like his sense of the absurd.’
‘So presumably you know the rumours about him and Lumas?’
‘No. What rumours?’
‘That they were lovers; or at least that Lumas was infatuated with Butler.’
‘I had no idea,’ I said. Then I smiled. ‘Does it matter?’
‘Probably not. But it leads to the biographical detail I’m most interested in.’
‘Which is?’
‘Have you read The Authoress of the Odyssey?’
‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘The Authoress … ?’
‘You must read it. It’s Butler arguing that The Odyssey was written by a woman. It’s fucking brilliant.’ Burlem ran his hand through his hair and went on: ‘Butler published his own translation of The Odyssey alongside it, with some black-and-white plates showing photographs he took of old coins, and landscapes relevant to The Odyssey. One of the landscapes, supposedly the basis for the tidal inlet up which Ulysses swam, has a man and a dog in the distance. In the introduction to the book, Butler goes out of his way to apologise for this, and to say that they only appeared when he developed the negative; that they weren’t supposed to be there.’
‘Wow,’ I said, not sure where this was leading. ‘So …’
‘The man in the picture is Lumas. I’m sure of it.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t even know if they travelled together. But the way the man appears in the developed photograph, previously unseen … You can’t see the figure well enough to tell who it is but … What if it was Lumas? What if it was even his ghost, but before he was dead? I may be a little drunk. Sorry. He had a dog, though, called Erasmus.’
At this point Burlem did a jerky thing with his head, as if he was trying to get water out of one of his ears. He frowned, as if considering a difficult question, and then made another face, suggesting that maybe the question didn’t matter, anyway. Then he raised an eyebrow, smiled, walked over to the table and got another bottle of wine. While he did that, I looked at the vast image beyond him, painted on the back wall. The scene showed what seemed to be a king descending from heaven, alighting on some reddish, carpeted stairs. The stairs almost appeared to be part of the room rather than the painting, and the figures in the image looked like they might be using them to step into reality; into the present.
‘Lumas can drive you a bit crazy,’ he said, when he returned.
‘I like the idea of the photograph, though,’ I said. ‘It reminds me of that story of his, “The Daguerreotype”.’
‘You’ve read that?’
I nodded. ‘Yeah. I think it’s my favourite.’
‘How on earth did you get hold of it?’
‘I got that one on eBay. It was in a collection. I’ve got almost all of Lumas’s books, apart from The End of Mr. Y. I found a lot of them on secondhand-book sites.’
‘And this is all for a magazine article?’
‘Yeah. I do it pretty intensively. For a month I’ll live and breathe, say, Samuel Butler. Then I’ll find some link from him to take me to the next piece. The column is called Free Association. I started with the Big Bang about three years ago.’
Burlem laughs. ‘And what did that lead to?’
‘The properties of hydrogen, the speed of light, relativity, quantum mechanics, probability theory, Schrödinger’s cat, the wavefunction, light, the luminiferous ether – which is my personal favourite – experiment, paradox …’
‘So you’re a scientist? You understand all that stuff?’
I laughed. ‘God, no. Not at all. I wish I did. I probably shouldn’t have started with the Big Bang, but when you do, that’s what you get. At some point I went from artificial intelligence to Butler, and now here I am with Lumas. While I’m working on him I’ll probably decide on what link I’m going to follow through next so I can order all the books. I might do something about the history of photography, actually, following through from “The Daguerreotype”. Or I might follow it through to the fourth dimension, and that Zollner book, although that takes me back to science again.’
In ‘The Daguerreotype’, a man wakes up to find a copy of his house in a park across the road, with a large group of people gathered around it. Where has the house come from? People immediately accuse the man of losing his mind and arranging to have a copy of his house built in the park overnight. He points out that this is impossible. Who could have a whole house built overnight? Also, the house in the park does not seem new. It is in fact an exact copy of the ‘real’ house, down to some scuffing on the door panels, and some tarnish on the brass knocker. The only thing that’s different is that his key doesn’t work, and the keyhole seems to be blocked by something. The man initially tries to ignore the house, but soon it takes over his life and he has to try to work out where it has come from. Because of the house in the park he loses his job as a teacher, and his fiancée runs off with someone else. The police also become involved and accuse the man of all sorts of crimes. The house has some strange properties as well, the main one being that no one can get into it. It is possible to look through the windows at the things inside – a table, a vase of flowers, a bureau, a piano – but no one can smash the windows or break down the door. The house behaves like a solid shape, as if it had no space inside.
One day, when the man in the story has almost lost his wits, a mysterious old man comes to his (real) house with a box full of equipment. He tells the man that he has heard of his predicament and thinks he knows what has happened. He takes out a velvet-lined folding case and explains to the man about the daguerreotype, and how it works. The man is initially impatient. Everyone knows how daguerreotypes work! But then his visitor makes an impossible claim. If humans, three-dimensional beings, can create two-dimensional versions of the things around us, would it be too impossible to assume that four-dimensional beings could make something like a daguerreotype machine of their own, but one that produces not flat, two-dimensional copies of things, but three-dimensional ones?
The man is angry and throws the photographer out of the house, thinking that there must be another explanation. However, he is unable to find one and later comes to the conclusion that his visitor must have been right. He finds the man’s card and resolves to call on him immediately. But when the maid lets him into the man’s house, he finds something very strange. The photographer seems to be standing in the drawing room, holding the daguerreotype machine. But it’s not the real man; it’s a lifeless copy.
‘You know what I love about “The Daguerreotype”?’ Burlem said.
‘What?’
‘The unresolved ending. I like it that the man never does find his answer.’
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