smile
(2,000 words)

To Primo Levi

I walked into the office and found George's face. Perhaps I should have said, I found my friend, but that would not have been exact. I prefer to aim for the exact, the accurate, the perfect while recognising that it will never be attainable, at least not in this life. But I digress. To go back to my friend in the office; when I said that I found his face, I was being precise. The rest of him was hidden from view. He was sitting - or rather, was hovering - behind his desk and most of him was covered in what looked like a gray blanket. He was unshaven (three days, I'd have said) and was grinning from ear-to-ear. A low-pitched growl seemed to be issuing from the walls. From the position of his face, I deduced that the lower part of George's body must have been six centimetres above the level of the desk.

Without taking my eyes off him, I pushed the door shut behind me. At the time, I felt that if I had glanced away, he might have fallen from his mid-air position. Of course, this was not logical reasoning, since he must already have been levitating for some time prior to my entry. But it was hardly a moment for logic. For similar reasons, I seemed to focus on his stubble. Like the blanket, his three-day beard was slightly gray around the edges. At that point, I began to wonder just how the blanket managed to remain wrapped around his body, in errant defiance of the laws of gravity, not to mention several other physical rules which after all, had been written in stone (though judging by the position of my friend of twenty years standing , all the rules must at that point have been somewhat up in the air). Perhaps my surprise was misplaced; it was the sort of thing one had come to expect from George, over the years. As I had been the paragon of exactitude, so my friend was a doyen of bizzarity. He would shut himself in his office (as he called it; to my mind, it more closely resembled a cell of the monastic type with its bare, white walls and tiny, barred window set almost at ceiling level.) In the muslin light of his self-enforced solitude, George would delve into the mysteries of the lost (or, to be more precise, of the almost-lost) noesis. He reckoned it was something to do with the thin air (his retreat was 2, 507 metres above sea-level). He once told me once that the same effect might be had on a long-haul plane journey, but that the lack of solitude on such occasions would conspire to foil things. Just as well, I'd thought. If it had been otherwise, George would've spent most of his life in Jumbos. Once he had solved a mystery, he would discard it since, as he said, a mystery, once explained loses its power. For some months prior to the levitation incident, I'd had neither sight nor sound of George. So my surprise was relative. As I took a few paces toward the desk, I realised the guttural monotone chant was issuing, not from the cool, stone walls as at first I had surmised but from his throat, or rather, from that part of the blanket which covered his uppermost torso. I moved round the desk and somewhat gingerly (I have to admit) I took hold of the edge of his blanket between the tips of my left thumb and forefinger. For some reason (again, reason was hardly in my mind at that moment), I found myself wishing I had gone round the other side of the desk, so that I would have been able to grab the blanket with my right hand. The funny thing was, I am left-handed.

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Confidence, unlike gnosis it seems, is not always symmetrical. To dispel my undextrous insecurity, I tugged forcefully on the robe. It slid off with surprising ease (though by this time, I was somewhat beyond surprise). I let it fall to the floor, and stepped back two paces (or it might have been three). I had half-expected to see George suspended with no visible (or tactile, though I wasn't going to try, having heard vaguely of such virtual entities as ectoplasm) means of support. However, to see nothing at all was beyond even my deductive reasoning powers. Or not exactly, nothing. George's head - still grinning - was visible as it had been all along. The rest of him seemed to have vanished. I might have said, into thin air but that would not have been accurate. The space beneath my friend's tete was filled with the sound of his voice intoning the continual, one-chord hum which resounded through the room. How he managed to do this while simultaneously grinning and levitating, I'll never know. Oddly, that's what fascinated me. As I've said, with George the bizarre was commonplace; it was the combination on this occasion of several eccentricities in one situation which puzzled me. Faced with an insoluble mix, I decided that utter mundanity might be the best course of action. Accordingly, I reached into the inside pocket of my jacket and pulled out a pack of cigars. I knew George had always been partial to the mild, slim variety and in fact I had purposely brought some along to help entice my hermetic friend out of his hermesis. I lit the cigar and placed it between the still smiling lips. The head took the cigar and (grin undiminished) began to puff with some vigour. The smoke formed tiny, blue roundels which floated up toward the ceiling. As he smoked, a gray blur began to collect beneath his chin. The haze grew steadily thicker, until it was impenetrable. Over a period of fifteen minutes (the time it takes, I discovered that afternoon, for a grinning face, in leisurely fashion to smoke one mild, slim cigar), my friend re-emerged, whole and apparently undamaged from his ordeal. The thing was, he was still sitting (if that's the correct word, there being no object in either the grammatical or the literal sense) in a cross-legged position, some six centimetres above the level of the desk. And the grin had become etched on his face. (I'd almost forgotten what he might have looked like, without it). At that point, the cigar went out. He let it fall from his lips. It landed on the desk, where it continued to smoke for a few minutes longer, oblivious of the re-materialization which it had engendered. As if on cue, George sank decorously to the surface of the desk. He seemed to notice my presence and slowly, his grin relaxed.
"What d'you think?" he asked (as he did always following a demonstration of his forays into the sub-physical laws of the world).

Now it was my turn to smoke.
I did so carefully, issuing my reply in measured exhalations.
"The grin was the thing," I said, "not the levitation, nor even the dematerialization. It was the unending ecstasy which puzzled me. How," I puffed "…and why?"

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I strove to keep my voice level.
George was watching me carefully. To him, the impression which his experiments had made on others would be judged in the spaces between words, in the heavy silences, in the emptiness which filled the gap between inhalation and exhalation.

"To answer your question, George, I would need to spend at least one week going over the intricacies of the Semiogravitational Hypothesis. 1 And even then, it would be difficult to comprehend without experiencing it first-hand."

"Like most of your experiments," I blurted out, feeling suddenly like a Watson to his Holmes.

So much for my careful conversation. George looked hurt. He was so sensitive.

"That's the thing with Mid-Period Science; not only does it ignore the discoveries of eight thousand years or so, it also denies the subjective. Part of what I do is to try and expose this."

1 For a complete exposition of the Semiogravitational Hypothesis, see 'The Book of Dust', J.L. Borges, Publications Saavedra, Buenos Aires, 1962)

I nodded, aware that I had been lectured to, but that I had probably deserved it. He unfolded his legs and got off the desk. He did not seem in the least bit stiff. Going over to the far corner of the room, he removed a tall pink glass bottle from the cabinet. Carefully, he poured a tiny amount into the glass. The liquid, too was pink and seemed quite innocuous. He looked at me, mischievously. I knew what was coming. I stopped myself from taking a step backwards.

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It had a slightly sweet scent, as though it had been synthesised from hundreds of candles which had been crushed together and liquefied. I didn't really work out the aftersmell until later and by then, I was already in the process of swallowing. The after odour was the other side of sweetness: putrescence. As I drank, I tried not to suppress the activity of my taste buds. In my opinion, it is always important to savour an experience to the full, no matter what the consequences. In this, I differ from my friend George who, despite his passion (sometimes I feel) merely dabbles. Perhaps this is why I am so methodical. Obsessionalism is a counterpoint to madness. Involuntarily, I closed my eyes. The potion was deafeningly sweet. This must be what mother's milk tastes like, I thought. At first, nothing happened. But I had been around George too long not to suspect, nothing for what it might not be. The non-place where anything can happen. The zero's zero. Chaos, incarnate. At that moment, I worked out the nature of the after-taste. It had been there all along, more an under-taste than an after-taste but perhaps I had missed it at first because it was so common a sensation. It was the other side of sweetness, flavour gone just over the edge; remember, most of the food we eat is dead and this pink drink carried within it - as do we all - the unmistakeable scent of putresence. The room, already stuffy, began to seem unbearably hot. I loosened my collar, and blew down into it. But my breath was even hotter. Beads of sweat tickled the skin of my forehead and I sneezed. My eyes watered, and I saw George's smile dissolve.

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