An
Exceptionally
Simple
Theory
(of Absolutely Everything)
A novel by
Mark Winkler
Kwela Books
For Erwin and Liz,
who made it all make sense
If a system is consistent, it cannot be complete.
KURT FRIEDRICH GÖDEL, 1906–1978:
The Incompleteness Theorem (Vienna, 1931)
Chris and Tracy
A scratching, a scraping wakes me into the warm summer dawn. I look over at Tracy. She’s asleep, snoring softly, a dried dribble of blood stretching the corner of her mouth into a clown’s smile.
I want to wake her to ask how she’s feeling, but that wouldn’t make sense.
The scratching continues. It couldn’t be Gabriel, not at this time of the day, so I swing my leg off the bed, grab my crutches, hobble across the wooden floor. The rubber toes of the crutches squeak with each swing. Squeak, thunk, squeak, thunk, I go. I look back at Tracy; I haven’t woken her. She’s used to me squeak-thunking around the house at all hours, has been for the past fifteen years.
There’s a spare bedroom next to ours which Tracy uses as a second dressing room; her accoutrements are simply too numerous to fit into the one we share. Jimmy Choos, Christian Louboutins sit patiently waiting for her, two pairs deep at floor level around the room; some I know have never been worn. Hangers dripping with designer wear, price-tags indirectly proportional to the amount of fabric, are suspended above the shoes. Drawers contain unknown treasures of lingerie. In a corner, her fitness gear, untidily piled, incongruous in the pristine personal boutique. A phone lies on a low set of drawers in the middle of the room. It’s discharged itself overnight – these days it has only about an hour’s battery life. I should replace it but never do, the memory of the chore always crowded out by everything else in my head.
The sound, a threatening, getting-in sound, is louder in Tracy’s dressing room. It’s coming from the sloped ceiling next to the dormer window. I look outside where the sun is spraying its first drops of light onto the green of the plane trees that protect the house, and I see that a family of squirrels has taken up residence in the eaves. They’ve chewed a six-inch hole through a section of facia board, and are now sharpening their teeth on the roof beams. I bang on the sloped ceiling beside the dormer window, but although they’re usually skittish enough to flinch at a falling leaf, they ignore the sound: one simply pokes its little Disney nose out of the hole and smirks at me before withdrawing back into my house. I bang again, harder, longer. The gnawing ceases for all of five seconds, and then starts up again. They’ll give us rabies, those squirrels. They’ll chew up the beams, and while we’re sleeping the roof will come crashing down on our heads. They’ll chew through the wiring and set fire to the place. They’ll have babies, and their babies will have babies, and within weeks the collective weight of squirrel generations will bring down the ceiling and the house will be a disaster of dust, ceiling boards, toxic glass fibre, squirrel shit, and flocks – herds? swarms? nibbles? – of rodents will run around chewing holes in the furniture, devouring shoes, skittering up and down the curtains, boring through mattresses in mere seconds and –
“M-mmm!” A noise issues from the bedroom. My banging has woken Tracy. She’s sitting up, holding her swollen face, fresh blood dribbling into the tissue she holds to her mouth.
“Wha’ – wha’at?” she asks.
“Squirrels,” I say.
She digs a tea bag out of her mouth. It’s soggy with saliva, red with blood from a hole that, just yesterday, had housed a molar. The dentist hadn’t so much extracted it, she told me, as chipped it out with a hammer and chisel. Poor Tracy.
“Squirrels can’t make a noise like that.”
“The banging was me. The other noise is squirrels eating up our house. They’ve chewed a hole the size of a garage door in the facia and have moved in, lock stock. I was banging to chase them away, but they just laughed at me.”
Tracy lies down again. “Don’t exaggerate,” she says, “you always exaggerate. It’s tedious.”
Today I have squirrels; today I don’t feel like fighting.
“How are you feeling?” I ask instead.
Tracy shrugs, tries to wrinkle her nose but the Botox resists. “Terrible,” she says.
You’re exaggerating, I want to say, but don’t.
I bought this squirrel-ridden house almost three years ago, just before my thirty-seventh birthday. It’s in Tracy’s name, a protection from creditors should my business land in trouble. She saw it as an early Christmas present to herself; I saw it as a belated birthday present to me. It was a rambling old place, neglected and syphilitically filthy, but the unbroken view of the mountain and the treetops in the distance and the trees in the garden told me it was mine and I fell in love with it in the way teenagers fall for their first – fundamentally, unshakeably, and oblivious to faults or incompatibilities or consequences. Instead of tearing the thing down, my love dictated that we retain what we could of the original structure. Romantic, but stupid.
In hindsight, a flash of which hits me every morning as I hop down the precarious steps – risers that rise too high, wooden treads that were created for nine-year-old feet – in hindsight, a double-storey house was probably not the best purchase for someone permanently on crutches. And me an architect; who would have thought.
I’m halfway down when Tracy calls for me to take the phone downstairs and place it on the charger. I ignore her and open the front door for Schultz, who is whining to be let inside in his old broken-voiced way. He tries to jump up on me, as he does every morning, as he used to do when he was younger, but now his front paws only lift a few inches off the floor. The brown dots of his eyebrows are raised expectantly, and he bounces until I give his head a good rub and a hard pat. Wags his curved tail and heads off to lie farting under my desk. To be so measurably, consistently happy to see the same person every day for eleven years, well.
I squeak-thunk my way to the kitchen where, as usual, the kettle is empty. Hop to the sink, hop back, kettle on, hop to the fridge for milk, hop past the cooker to get two mugs from the cupboard. The instant coffee and sugar are in a separate cupboard across the kitchen, require more hopping to retrieve. Somehow, in three years we’ve never contrived to arrange fridge, kettle, mugs, coffee, sugar within reaching distance of each other. Hopping complete, I pick up a crutch that’s slid to the floor from its resting place against the counter, and then I stare at the shiny silver kettle as it makes its warming-up noises. The kettle stares back with its own version of my face, bloated and distorted, cheeks distended and drooping, hairline pushed back as though the hair has been violently knotted behind the head. Suddenly-thyroid eyes, each buttressed by a bag. I raise my eyebrows and the hairline retreats further. I lower my head, and the face grows an enormous forehead as the chin shortens, forcing the lips into an imploded little slit.
An unkissable mouth in an unlovable face.
Is this how I will look when I am old – older? My hands rest on the counter; my forearms are powerful from all the crutching about, but the skin has developed a web of tiny wrinkles punctuated with deepening pores. There’s a mole I’ve never noticed – or is it a liver spot? – between the first and second knuckle of my left hand. I turn my hands over. The years of crutching about have calloused my palms: they’re as thick as soles. The kettle shakes as it comes to the boil, and so does the face in it. I think of those pop statistics that people trot out without checking the maths: if you live to be seventy, you will have spent twenty-three years sleeping, seven driving, three shaving, seven having a dump, and so on and so forth. I am thirty-nine and a quarter; how much time have I spent waiting for kettles to boil? How much time do I have left to wait for kettles to boil? Because I always wait. I’ve learnt that if I wander off I’ll