The anomaly, p.25
The Anomaly, page 25
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WEDNESDAY, JUNE 30, 2021
STUDIO 4, FRANCE 2, ESPLANADE
HENRI-DE-FRANCE, PARIS
THE TRUTH is that within a few hours, the world enters a vacuum of meaning. Religion is offering a false, doctrinal response, so philosophy steps forward to suggest an incorrect, abstract one. Talk shows proliferate all over the world, particularly in France, a country with a legendary concentration of media-savvy philosophers. One of them goes by the name of Philomedius. Got to hand it to him. And here he is on the set of a national channel with another guest—one Victor Miesel.
“I’d prefer not to give my opinion about this simulation idea,” Philomedius says. “But I don’t think it changes anything. I’m a materialist: there’s no difference between thinking and believing we think, and therefore between existing and believing we exist.”
“But surely, Philomedius,” the presenter says, “really existing isn’t exactly the same as being virtual.”
“Forgive me, but it is, it’s the same: I think, therefore, even if I’m simply a thinking program, I am. I feel love and pain in the same way, and I’ll die just as surely, thank you. And the things I do have the same consequences, whether my world is virtual or real.”
“Philomedius, next to you is the writer Victor Miesel, whose book The anomaly has become a cult hit, and obviously even more so now. Victor, you were on that flight, we know that your ‘double’ took his own life, and you held a press conference this afternoon. Thank you for being here with us. How do you see the future for these duplicated passengers?”
“There are more than two hundred of us who’ve had to look at the things our ‘doubles’ did between March and June, perhaps regretting they didn’t take another route. Some may want to do things differently, or better, or do something else altogether. But I haven’t been confronted with myself. But, actually…”
The author takes two red Lego bricks from his pocket.
“Ever since my father died, more than thirty years ago, I’ve always kept a Lego brick in my pocket. It wasn’t a fetish or a lucky charm. Just a few grams of memories, almost a habit. I’ve been given the one that the other Victor had, and there are now two of them. I’ve forgotten which is which, and I’ve clicked them together. I couldn’t tell you what they mean, but I feel as if I have more options, I’m freer than ever. But I still don’t really like the word ‘destiny.’ It’s just a target that people draw after the fact, in the place where the arrow landed.”
In the studio audience, Anne Vasseur from the Times Literary Supplement is privately amused. She prefers the other joke that says that if an arrow is to hit the target, it needs to have missed everything else first. When she heard about Victor’s death in April, she was shocked, upset even, and amazed by the intensity of her feeling. Of course, she’d noticed him in Arles, she’d thought his contributions intelligent and perceptive, and she’d been touched by his teenage-like attempt to strike up conversation with her over dessert. She’d been in another relationship at the time, and hadn’t wanted to play. And then she’d loathed that facile moment of weakness and pride, she’d loathed the fact that he was attracted to her precisely because she was attracted to him. So she’d left Arles earlier than planned, ashamed of her selfish and inconsequential desire, refusing to be a woman who cheats, who takes her pleasure and causes pain and ends up not knowing where she belongs. She’d run away. She’d thought, briefly, that it would be better to live with remorse than regret, but she’d never looked for an excuse to track down Goncharov’s translator. She saw this extraordinary ‘resurrection’ as a sign, an incomprehensible one but a sign nevertheless. And she, the literary journalist, had persuaded the editorial team at the Times to let her attend this conference, instead of a special correspondent. Now she sat watching a man who could in fact be, more than just briefly, a destiny.
“Tell me, Philomedius,” the interviewer says, turning back to him, “if you were in their situation, how would you react?”
“First of all, I wouldn’t have any feeling of unreality for very long. If I doubted my own existence, I’d only need to pinch myself. After that, granted, this other person would be an uncompromising mirror to contemplate, but more importantly, he’d be the only person to know everything about me and my secrets. If I were exposed like that, I might decide to change, or to run away from myself. The fact is, having two people in one life is one person too many. I’m sure I’d think it was all vanity—my apartment, work, all the material things…I’d concentrate on my inner core, on what needs preserving at all costs. I have a daughter, I love a woman, and when I say ‘my wife’ or ‘my daughter’ I understand everything I mean by that ‘my’…If I had to share them, I might learn to relativize that craving for possession. To be honest, I don’t know how I’d react.”
“How do you explain Pope Francis’s statement?” “I’m sorry but I have no idea what the pope said.” “He said, and I quote, ‘God is giving mankind a sign of His omnipotence and an opportunity to surrender to it and abide by His laws.’ ”
“He said that?” the philosopher asks, surprised. “This morning.”
“It has quite a whiff of ‘Repent, ye miserable sinners’ to it. I mean no disrespect, but I was expecting something a bit better from him. Mind you, all religious figures run on that software: ‘Here are our beliefs, find the facts that prove them.’ Like Voltaire’s character Pangloss, they believe noses were made to carry glasses and that’s why we have glasses. I haven’t heard the voice of God in all this, nor seen Him appear in the clouds. To be perfectly frank, if He had something to say to us, it was now or never. Given the state we’re in. No, the only true philosophical and scientific attitude is: ‘Here are the facts, let’s see what the possible conclusions are.’ ”
“And for the rest of us…” the interviewer says brightly, focusing on her other guest, “Victor Miesel, what would you say will happen now?”
“Nothing.”
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing. Nothing will change. We’ll wake up in the morning, we’ll go to work because we still have to pay the rent, we’ll eat and drink and make love just like before. We’ll carry on behaving as if we’re real. We’re blind to anything that could prove that we’re fooling ourselves. It’s only human. We’re not rational.”
“What Victor Miesel is saying is rather like what you, Philomedius, mentioned in your article in this morning’s Le Figaro. You described it as our need to reduce ‘cognitive dissonance’?”
“Yes. We’re prepared to warp reality if the stake is not losing altogether. We want answers for even our tiniest anxieties and a way of conceiving the world without reexamining our values, our emotions, and our actions. Take climate change. We never listen to the scientists. We spew out virtual carbon unchecked from fossil fuels that may or may not be virtual, heating up our atmosphere, that may or may not be virtual. And our species, which again may or may not be virtual, will be wiped out. Nothing’s changed. The rich fly in the face of common sense and reckon they can save themselves, and themselves alone, and everyone else is reduced to living in hope.”
“Would you agree with Philomedius, Victor Miesel?”
“Of course I do. Do you remember Pandora and her box?”
“Yes,” the presenter replies, baffled. “I don’t see the connection.”
“There is one. If you remember, Prometheus stole fire from heaven and Zeus, wanting revenge on him and all blaspheming mortals, sent Pandora to Prometheus’s brother Epimetheus. Zeus slipped a gift into her belongings, a mysterious box—except it was actually a jar—and he told her she must never open it. But she was too inquisitive and disobeyed him. All the evils of mankind that had been sealed inside it were then released: old age, disease, war, famine, madness, poverty…just one evil was too slow to escape, or perhaps it was obeying Zeus’s wishes. Do you remember what that evil was?”
“No. Please explain, Victor.”
“That evil was Elpis, the expectation of good—hope. It’s the most destructive of all evils. It is hope that stops us being proactive and hope that prolongs people’s suffering because, as they always say and in spite of all the evidence, ‘it will all come right in the end.’ What is not meant to be cannot be…The real question we should always ask is, ‘How does it benefit me to accept a received idea?’ ”
“I see,” the presenter says. “And, Philomedius, would you say that this is what’s happening now, that each of us finds our own way of accommodating the reality we’re being offered, is that it?”
“Yes. Absolutely. I’d like to remind you of something Nietzsche said: ‘Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions.’ Right now, the whole planet has been confronted with a new reality, and it’s challenging all our illusions. We’re being sent a sign, that’s beyond doubt. Sadly, thinking takes time. The irony is that the very fact of being virtual may give us even more of a duty toward our fellow human beings and our planet. And most significantly, it’s a collective duty.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because—and a mathematician has already made this point—this test hasn’t been set for us as individuals. This simulation is thinking on the level of an ocean, it couldn’t care less about what each water molecule does. The simulation is waiting for a reaction from the entire human race. There won’t be a supreme savior. We need to save ourselves.”
LETTERS—THREE, EMAILS—TWO, SONGS—ONE, ABSOLUTE ZERO
SATURDAY, JULY 10, 2021
CARROLL STREET, BROOKLYN
THE ENVELOPE is addressed to “Aby and Joanna Wasserman,” and Joanna recognizes her own fine, cramped writing. When Aby opens it they find one sheet of paper folded in four and two other sealed letters.
Dear Aby and Joanna,
In this envelope there’s a letter for you, Joanna, and I know that you’ll read it to Aby because that’s what I would do. And one for you, Aby, and you alone.
Like both of you and like so many of the people who were on board that plane, I’ve tried to find answers, even just clues, in The anomaly, the strange book written by that French author who was on the flight. I didn’t find anything except this: “We must kill the past to ensure it is still possible.”
We wanted to resuscitate the past too, and we took ourselves off into the sympathetic arms of nature in that log cabin in Vermont. Aby had taken me there, taken you there, Joanna, for those long, freezing, snowy days when we decided to have a baby. Aby, what we had together then was so powerful that we wanted the memory of it to keep us going and to dictate the route that all three of us should choose.
But when we walked along that stony little path between the spruce trees and the firs, the path that—so symbolically—was too narrow for us to walk side by side, you trailed miserably between the two of us, my poor Aby, like a spaniel between two masters. Your sad smile was a constant apology for spending time with the other Joanna and for having to get back to her soon. You were never there, plainly and simply there, with her or with me. Instead you were just torn in two. You did a lot of painting, you couldn’t stop, it was your way of avoiding questions that have no answers, and I’m leaving with the watercolors that will always remind me of you.
That’s right, I’ve gone, I’ve left you alone in that log cabin full of sadness, before we destroyed one another. Joanna, because you’re carrying Aby’s baby you guessed I’d be the first to back down, to cave.
The first to run away. And of course I knew that you knew.
I ran away.
I went back to New York and, after contacting Jamy Pudlowski, presented myself at the FBI’s Manhattan headquarters. In just a day they’d created a new identity for me, with six years of digital life, and—just as a precaution—my name is now Joanna Ashbury. Ashbury, it sounds like a little English town that has nothing special except for its Norman church. And then there’s the connection with Woods: Ashbury—buried ash. It would be kind of funny if they’d done it on purpose.
So, Joanna Ashbury’s going to be working in senior management for the FBI’s legal department, and, thanks to the NSA, she now has a Stanford degree to her name. The bureau also offered to cover the costs of Ellen’s treatment. It’s a generous offer, and I didn’t refuse. But still, don’t give up your job at Denton & Lovell, Joanna, not that I need to tell you that, I know what you decided.
Obviously we’ll see each other again. We’ll run into each other someday visiting Ellen.
I wish you all the happiness in the world.
Joanna Ashbury
Dear Joanna,
It’s so weird calling you that.
You’re name’s now Wasserman and mine’s Ashbury. Wasser like water and Ash like ashes—there’s so much irony in this whole thing. Joanna Ashbury sounds a little like John Ashbery, and that reminds me of his long poem Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, that I promised myself I’d read, if you remember. He talks about a painting by Parmigianino from the cinquecento. I liked the poem and wanted to find out about the painting.
One day, when the painter was very young, only twenty-one, he saw himself in one of those convex mirrors and decided to do a self-portrait. He had a curved panel of wood made the same size as the mirror, so that he could create the image in the exact same shape. In the foreground at the bottom he paints his hand, it’s huge and so beautiful it looks real. His face, in the center, is hardly distorted at all, and it’s endearing, angelic, he’s almost a child. The world revolves around this face and everything is distorted, the ceiling, the light, the perspective—it’s a chaos of curves.
That painting isn’t an image for the two of us, or for you, the mirror of my mirror, but it really should be an allegory for something, because I stayed there looking at it and suddenly started to cry—I’ve done so much crying recently. Right then I realized that that oversized hand was grabbing me, threatening me, stealing everything that belonged to me.
I had a dream while we were in the log cabin in Vermont. You suddenly died and I went back to my old life, I was so happy that you were dead. I comforted Aby and it was so easy to win him back, to make him forget you. I woke at dawn and couldn’t get back to sleep so I went out onto the terrace with a coffee. You were already out there, you couldn’t sleep either. Just like me, you’d made yourself a coffee, and just like me, you were barefoot, your hair was held back with a silver barrette like mine and you were holding your cup in both hands in the exact same way. Opposite us the mist clung to the mountain and the sun still wasn’t quite ready to break through, and we exchanged an icy look. I got it, you’d just killed me in your dream too. That was when I decided to leave. Not because I was scared but because jealousy and pain were making me so hideous and I could see that ugliness all over you, plain as plain can be.
I don’t know where I’m going. But I know that if I’m a long way away from you, from both of you, I still have a chance of remembering who I am and who I want to be.
Joanna
Aby walks away along the balcony and opens the letter that’s meant for him alone; and every word he reads adds slightly to the crushing weight in his chest.
Dear Aby,
You’re the only person I love and I’m leaving.
A year ago we didn’t even know each other. And you, this guy who doesn’t believe in anything, you called it a miracle, and I smiled, me, this girl who’s always talking about how people meet.
I know the other Joanna will show you my letter to her. I won’t add much to it.
The day I came to the apartment from the military base, you suggested the two of us go out to the park opposite your studio, to the bench where we’ve had so many conversations. Sitting there, you put your arms around me, my head dropped onto your shoulder and you put your hand on my stomach. I knew instantly that you did it without thinking, it was a tender ritual established between the two of you: your hand protecting your child—yours and hers. But there was nothing to protect in my belly,
Aby, nothing, just my longing for you. You were embarrassed, you took your hand away and talked about I don’t remember what, and everything about your expression said that you hoped I hadn’t noticed.
Then we went back to the apartment and I felt empty too, emptied of all strength, just like my belly was empty of life.
And remember that night when we were at your cabin in Vermont, that hot clammy night when I led you out into the forest and I so wanted you to make love to me under the trees, but you no longer dared to make the slightest move toward me or the other Joanna, you didn’t want to ignite the tiniest spark of longing. I wanted you to take me, that’s right, I wanted to feel your powerful desire thrusting inside me. And when I suddenly ran away it was because I was filled with disgust at myself. Aby, what I wanted more than anything was for you to make me pregnant too, for fate to go ahead and give me some way of competing.
