The Weight of Numbers

Simon Ings

• Publisher: Black Cat
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781555848576
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

"Like Don DeLillo's Underworld, Simon Ings's remarkable new work delivers nothing less than a secret key, a counter-history, of the last sixty years."—Mark Costello, author of Big If The Weight of Numbers describes the metamorphosis of three people: Anthony Burden, a mathematical genius destroyed by the beauty of numbers; Saul Cogan, transformed from prankster idealist to trafficker in the poor and dispossessed; and Stacey Chavez, ex-teenage celebrity and mediocre performance artist, hungry for fame and starved of love. All are haunted by Nick Jinks, a malevolent curse of a man who seems to be everywhere at once. As a grid of connections emerge between a dusty philosophical society in London and an African revolution, between international container shipping and celebrity-hosted exposés on the problems of the Third World—this novel sends the specters of the Baby Boom's liberal revolutions floating into the unreal estate of globalization and media overload—with a deadly payoff. The Weight of Numbers is an artful and deadly novel that traces the secret histories and paranoid fantasies of our culture into a future globalized in ways both liberating and hideous, full of information and empty of meaning. Simon Ings has delivered a storytelling tour de force that will alter some of your most cherished beliefs. "[A] Pynchon-on-speed romp... Ings's mad, mad world is held together to the very last page by humor, vivid depictions and a deeply compelling emotional core."— Publishers Weekly "A Scheherazade of a novel, executed with scope, daring, and humor. The Weight of Numbers is unerringly well written, and engrossing to the last page."—Lionel Shriver, bestselling author of We Need to Talk About Kevin

ANNIHILATION THERAPY

1

It is 10.30 a.m. local time in Lourenço Marques, the capital city of colonial Mozambique, and so far this is a morning like any other. The street-sellers are setting out their wares: pyramids of peppers and potatoes, expired medicines and Chinese prints. It is Sunday, 20 July 1969. Today, a man prepares to set foot on the moon, another will have his head blown off by a bomb.

Three floors above the street, in the tiny offices of a cash-strapped educational charity, project director Gregor Dimitryvich is startled by the arrival of his sole remaining employee.

Indeed, Anthony Burden’s arrival has so surprised him, Gregor Dimitryvich jumps up from behind the table. Now there is a cloth spread over this table – a fancy, frilly Portuguese lace tablecloth – and on it are arranged a bizarre and evocative assortment of batteries, wires, clock parts and scribbled notes. Gregor has tucked an end of the tablecloth into his trousers, presumably to catch stray parts of the watch mechanism he’s dissecting. When he jumps, a spool of wire falls to the floor; a clock, and a pencil. A hand magnifying glass follows, shattering on the bare boards of the room. A notebook slides after; a soldering iron; a spool of solder. Another pencil.

Had he burst into the office brandishing a gun, Anthony Burden could not have made a stronger impression.

‘Get in!’ Gregor barks.

Anthony closes the door, deposits his walking stick in the antique umbrella bucket and lowers himself gingerly into his customary seat, opposite his employer.

Gregor remains standing with the tablecloth spilling from his trousers like a long, white tongue. ‘I am expecting a package. A man will deliver this package. A sailor. When the sailor arrives you can wait in the next room.’

This is the name Gregor gives the toilet. The Institute has no other rooms.

‘Or I could simply go,’ Anthony offers. ‘If it’s inconvenient—’

‘This would not be best.’

‘Oh?’

‘Please. Sit down.’

Anthony shrugs – he is already seated. The gesture makes him wince: his back is bad today.

‘I mean stay seating. I mean…’ Sighing, Gregor gives up his attempt to correct his mangled English, and releases himself from the tablecloth.

All of which is disturbing enough, but not at all surprising.

The moment he hobbled off the plane in Lourenço Marques, Anthony Burden guessed that this ‘institute’ he was supposed to be working for was nothing more than the cover for yet another moribund KGB field station. There should have been a driver waiting for him at the gate, holding up a cardboard sign with his name on it. But the teenage factotum sent to collect him felt so under-used, he instead approached Burden, sotto voce, by the newspaper kiosk, slipping a hand under his arm as he did so.

When, rather angrily, Anthony Burden shook him off, the boy responded as if electrocuted, every muscle tensed for action, his hand already inside his coat. ‘You are the teacher, yes? You teach the little nigger kiddies?’

Lubyanka’s finest.

Pathetic.

Since 1951, when he left the Migdal Tikvah kibbutz, mathematician and communications expert Anthony Burden has been working within the nascent aid industry. With a CV like his, and omitting mention of his treatments for manic depression, a fifty-two-year-old ex-academic of Anthony’s stripe should have been able to carve out for himself a small but profitable niche in a top-flight Western NGO. Instead, Anthony has trodden a steeper, stonier path. In reaction to his unhappy years in Israel – the gulf that opened up between his own socialism and his wife’s Zionism; their eventual separation; the company he kept in Haifa; the trouble it got him into; finally, his ignominious expulsion – Anthony’s political leanings have slid ever leftwards, condemning him, since the Cold War became truly global, to a life of straitened living and unsatisfying piece-work. The latest of the many half-hearted, left-leaning ‘friendly institutions’ to have employed Anthony Burden is this Soviet-sponsored and practically penniless ‘Institute of Field and Distance Learning’. No doubt his old friend John ‘Sage’ Arven – wartime scientific guru to Whitehall and a lifelong communist – would appreciate the irony of his situation.

He does not expect to be stuck here much longer. Given the wobbly state of the junta in Lisbon, it is a wonder the police have not closed them down already.

Meanwhile, outside the urban strongholds, the forces of black liberation are gaining strength and reputation. From friendly Tanzania, FRELIMO guerrillas are conducting a successful military campaign against Portugal’s conscript forces. Their behaviour towards the imperialists – if you believe the pirate radio stations – is positively ethical. On the front line, revenge attacks are forbidden. Soldiers killing white civilians are trucked back to Tanzania for political re-education. Portuguese land-holdings are not targeted. The soldiers of the liberation are not permitted to confiscate food, and so they eat what the peasants eat – millet, a crop in which the Portuguese have no economic stake.

Unsure how much of this to believe, Anthony turned – not unreasonably, he thought – to his colleagues. But all they cared about were the women who walked the promenades above Maputo Bay. The gaudiest fabrics Macao could supply found their way around the waists of those girls. To Anthony’s enthusiastic enquiries about the new socialist independent state, surely just around the corner now, the staffers – deadbeats and fumblers, mice-men with grey flannel trousers and myopic, light-frightened eyes, ‘the intelligence community’ – well, they simply sneered.

Peeved, he started quoting the pirate broadcasts at them: ‘There won’t be girls on the bluff much longer.’ This caught their interest. ‘They’re running through the minefields to get to the FRELIMO line. FRELIMO are building them their own barracks. They are putting them to work in the fields.’ Acidly: ‘They are teaching them to read.’

‘What do they need to read for?’

‘“Ensure all air is expelled from the teat. Do not re-use.”’

The men were too bored and demoralized even to laugh at their own jokes.

Oafs, thought Anthony, steering carefully around the idea that he was like them, one of them, another Comintern discard.

He’d known he was in for a rough ride when he discovered that the office of this ‘distance learning institute’ had no short-wave radio. There was a telephone, but it rarely worked – the area exchange kept ‘borrowing’ the line. There was a very limited stock of paper, and when Anthony set to work drawing up some of his ideas for discussion, he was told, in no uncertain terms, to obtain his own supply. His enthusiastic descriptions of distance learning techniques; his suggestion that short-wave radio communications might cast ‘nets of political mentorship’ across the disadvantaged communities of this huge and empty country: these things were greeted with humourless incomprehension.

So he has sat, day after day, nursing the knot in his ruined back, at this big, heavy antique table, covered with a smutted, ink-stained linen cloth; to his left, a heavy German-Gothic sideboard; to his right, a grandfather clock that would not have looked out of place in a railway station ticket hall; behind him, a wrought-iron safe in which all official papers are kept, and to which he has no access. Such furniture might, in another context, generate a pleasant atmosphere for a gentleman’s study. Alas, since the room itself is a featureless concrete cube on the top floor of a recently finished towerblock, these wonderfully heavy, lustrous objects have taken on a dejected aspect, like old lags in a cell.

Talking of which.

‘He is a British sailor,’ Gregor confides to Anthony, around half-past one. There are bags under his eyes. He hasn’t shaved for days.

The men sit facing each other across the table.

They wait.

Silence.

2

‘Please don’t. I’ll be all right.’ The words grate and quiver in Anthony Burden’s schoolboy throat. At the back of his tongue, the taste of silver foil. ‘I promise I won’t do it again.’

It is 10 p.m., Valentine’s Day 1930, and in the gymnasium of Stonegrove College, a cash-strapped Derbyshire grammar school, twelve-year-old Anthony Burden is struggling to explain away the belt around his throat and his trousers round his ankles.

John Arven, fourteen years old, captain of Anthony’s dorm, nurses the side of his head where the younger boy’s legs, flailing spastically against the wall bars, delivered their inadvertent kick. ‘Who did this to you?’

Choking and blubbering on the floor of Stonegrove College gymnasium, his throat on fire, his thighs wet with piss, how is Anthony Burden to explain that he did this to himself? How is he to put into words that this is what he wants, however much his drab, ungainly boy’s body fought to keep him living in this world? Even more daunting: how is he to explain that it is not despair that drives him, but hope?

‘Who was it? Tell me. Don’t be afraid.’

Little Anthony Burden bursts into tears.

Anthony Burden has a secret. Every few months or so come days of bubbling energy and nervous agitation, days when nothing seems impossible and everything takes too long. Then, with a burst of exhilaration indistinguishable from terror, Anthony receives a vision of Paradise.

Paradise is a city. A municipal fantasia of great public works: fine temples, massive aqueducts, embankments, statuary, formal gardens, parklands, bandstands, amphitheatres and parades. A sunlit urban masterpiece, glittering and fine. In the very centre of the city there is a wooded glade, criss-crossed by geometric paths, where deer graze beneath tall, mathematically perfect trees. A girl in a shimmering cotton pinafore dress plucks flowers. A gardener in a wide-brimmed straw hat, his shears in his hand and a little dog at his feet, stands beside a dark lake whose fountain sends a crystal jet into the air like a glittering whip, spreading coolness all around. Above the treetops rises the ornamental outline of a magnificent castle.

How often has Anthony wished that he could carry his physical body into this land! Alas, since that one farcical schoolboy attempt, Anthony has had to content himself with visiting his Heaven disembodied, a soul sans flesh.

Anthony’s body, meanwhile, clings to the clay of life with dirty fingernails. It longs to wallow unchecked in the stew of life.

Nine years later, at 6.30 a.m., on 10 July 1939 Anthony Burden, King’s scholar, twenty-two years old, wakes up in an unfamiliar room – sheets that are too hot, too damp – and in the presence – close, naked and erect – of Cambridge mathematician Alan Turing.

Anthony lets out a scream and tumbles from the bed. Whimpering, he half runs, half crawls, for the nearest door. He finds himself in a bathroom. He slams the door shut behind him and fumbles with the bolt.

‘Anthony?’ says Alan.

Anthony Burden presses his back against the bathroom door and sinks to the floor, eyes tight shut. Anthony knows who it is, all right. Alan Turing’s lectures have been the highlight of his week since they started: ‘The Foundations of Mathematics’. But how on earth—?

‘Anthony, sweetheart, what the devil’s got into you?’

Anthony covers his face with his hands. If he is very quiet, if he is very small, maybe everything can go back to how it was.

*

Two months later. September 1939. Anthony Burden takes a deep breath and wills the tension out of his tight-wound limbs. How dreadful, that he should be rehearsing these shameful episodes, even as he turns over a new leaf and journeys to a new city!

No possible way he could continue his studies after the Incident, of course. How could he trust himself? It is as his Blessed Mother tearfully predicted. The stresses and strains of the academic life have proved too much for him. He must find some other occupation.

This war could not have come at a better time for him. It is time for Anthony Burden to do something practical for his country, something that might, he hopes, deep in his Fabian soul, improve the lot of the Common Man. His school-friend John Arven has persuaded him not to enlist. ‘There is so much you can do on the Home Front,’ John insisted, bright bird eyes transfixing him, the day Anthony told him of his decision to quit academia. To prove his point, Sage has arranged for Anthony to be interviewed, later today, by the board of the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill.

Visions of paradise have accompanied Anthony Burden ever since puberty. They have shaped his life, his interests and his inventions. They do not frighten him any more. He accepts that they are a gift, like perfect pitch, or a precocious talent with brush and pencil. He sees that they have something to do with his aptitude for mathematics. But he does not understand them, and he is troubled by his own ignorance.

Once he is settled in his London digs, Anthony seeks out the distinguished-sounding philosophical society with rooms off Gower Street, and there, in its curious and ramshackle library, he reads everything that might shed light on his condition, from Mme Blavatsky’s accounts of spirit travel to the personal diaries of blind introspectionist T. C. Cutsforth. Nothing he reads undercuts the magic of his visions. The visions themselves are the primary Fact.

Arven, meanwhile, encourages Anthony to spread his wings, now that he is living in the capital. He cannot understand why Anthony won’t agree to come and lecture to his students at Birkbeck College. He cannot see why Anthony is so determined to shun academia. ‘There is so much you have to offer,’ he says, flattering the younger man.

Strange, the bond of care between the two old boys, persisting after all these years.

Twelve-year-old Anthony, sprawled choking and half-naked on the floor of the school gymnasium, did not imagine for a second, fervently as he begged, that his dorm captain would keep his suicide attempt a secret. What had happened, that night, that John had stuck by his side, helped him clean himself up and never said anything to anyone, ever, about that night? What, on passing the gymnasium for an illicit smoke, had the older boy seen? What about Anthony’s condition, if anything, did he understand?

For years, Anthony has been too afraid to ask. Because if John Arven saw that night what Anthony saw, and continues to see, every few months – the towers, the parades, the fountain – then…

Why, then, the vision must be true!

And why should we go on living, if it was? If the door to Paradise was always open? If the Way was clear?

‘Dear Prof. Arven, I have yet to receive a reply to my letter of 3rd inst.’

Well yes, dear little Kathleen, it is true. I have not replied to you. I have not made good my promises. Consequently, I would lay money that wherever you are, and however you make your living, your talents are being belittled or ignored and your potential value to the nation is going entirely to waste. No, I have not written: a misfortune for you, and a tragedy for the country. Or should that be the other way about? In any event, I have not replied. I have not invited you for any interview or examination. How can I? Perhaps next time you write, instead of heading your letter ‘Same Address’, you could just tell me where the bloody hell you are.

Irritated, Professor John Arven – Whitehall guru and the star of Mountbatten’s ‘Department of Wild Talents’ – screws up Kathleen’s letter and drops it neatly into the a...