THE ORDER OF THINGS

Life has been described as just one damn thing after another – but maybe the order is important. Maybe even if the things themselves don’t have too much meaning, the order does. And maybe, even if we don’t have too much choice in what the things are, we can impose some kind of order on them afterwards, or see an order in them, which we didn’t notice at the time.

This is going to be a story about two friends, one of whom dies. There are plenty of other stories which take this as their starting point. Some of them are quite unpleasant. For instance, one of the friends only pretends to die, and pretends to come back as a ghost, in order to persuade his friend to kill himself and enjoy the fantastic afterlife, so that he can marry the dead friend’s wife. Sometimes that works, and sometimes she dies of fright, because he hasn’t told her what he’s doing.

Sometimes the story is funny, because it’s all about a bet, and the first friend, the one who’s still alive, sees through the “dead” friend’s deception, and makes him do all kinds of demeaning and disgusting things, which wouldn’t matter to a ghost, just in order to teach him a lesson.

And sometimes the story is just plain sad, because the friends loved each other, and even though they meet again, it isn’t a proper meeting. All that tiny bit of contact does is remind you how much more daily and hourly contact there could and should have been between them.

After all, a ghost isn’t a person. Look at the crude ways in which they have to make themselves known – crude and generally frightening. Besides, death is one of the damn things that happen one after another, and order (or should I say sequence?) is important – so once it’s happened, it seems rather silly to pretend it hasn’t and to try and carry on as before. Perhaps that’s why ghosts seem so distressed and distressing – because they’re departing from the natural order of things.

And yet – and yet... Just as you send people a postcard from your holiday, to reassure them (and to reassure yourself) that everything’s all right, so there seems to be little bit of sense in the idea of some small sign from beyond, the tiniest guarantee that complete extinction has not occurred, even if all that was known has been transformed into the unknown.

My friend and I talked about these things, in a way that grew less and less theoretical as the nature and progress of her illness became clearer and clearer. What had been an academic discussion turned into passionate and informed argument, drawing on example after example gleaned from all the sources we could discover.

We rejected corporeal manifestation out of hand. Its grossness revolted us. If the soul had freed itself from the limitations of the body – and in my friend’s case, those limitations in terms of mobility and control were becoming disturbingly evident – then we could neither of us see why the spirit (a more neutral term, which I preferred to soul, since for me it included the intellectual faculties – always a primary consideration, I’m afraid, where I’m concerned – as well as the “moral” essence and the (in some respects merely trifling and earthbound) personality) – we could neither of us see why the spirit would wish to involve itself again with the flesh – assuming, of course, that the spirit still had the wherewithal to make things happen in the material world.

I argued that if it could make chains rattle and re-animate the remnants of ancient cadavers then it could sure as hell use a ballpoint to write a message on a phone pad.

My friend, who was herself beginning to lose in real life most of these capacities that I regarded as self-evident, was much less sanguine. She speculated that not every spirit might possess the capability to communicate in any of the ways that I had suggested. It might be a particular skill, like being able to wiggle the ears or flare the nostrils at will, granted only to a few (and those, if you recall your own experiments in this direction at school, not necessarily the worthiest, most intelligent or most sensitive of humankind). It might indeed be the case that it was only the most earthbound who were still capable of making their presence felt in the earthly world of physical appearances. Such spirits, she suggested, acted as entrepreneurs between the more rarefied departed and their loved ones – as was amply evidenced in the tales of mediums, spiritualists and séances, which, with remarkable agreement, displayed similar features: bizarre and self-willed “controls” of unusual provenance (Red Indians, Russian peasants, sixteenth century Venetian courtesans) who relayed messages between the two worlds and could not be bidden, but derived pleasure (she assumed) from the power they thus enjoyed in both realms.

I suggested that the bizarrerie and the funny accents were all part and parcel of the theatrical impression required to make people part with their money. You needed to give them a good show. But while my friend acknowledged the presence of charlatans, and was prepared to admit that it might all be play-acting, she was nevertheless impressed by the unanimity of the phenomena, which, she felt, suggested an origin in some kind of original real experience.

Ouija boards, and the glass that moved around between the letters, she felt were also promising, except for the need to have living people as intermediaries, who might well, though unwittingly, interfere. She was greatly involved in this part of the discussion, since by now her own ability to communicate had become restricted in a very similar way.

“How much do you think you could move?” I asked.

“Molecules,” she typed back in reply.

“Big ones or small ones? And how would I know it was you, and not just Brownian Motion or Maxwell’s Demon?”

“Meaning,” she clicked out laboriously. And after that we were down to Yes or No until she died.

In order to understand the rest of this story, you need to know one or two things – not very many, and not particularly obscure. No special pleading. No elaborate ciphers. No interpretations to strain credulity. But you might as well know them now as later.

Firstly, our initials. Mine are MR. Hers were TL. Quite simple, isn’t it?

Secondly, the record we listened to most of all during those last weeks. It was Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits. Partly for the words, and partly for the memories it evoked – some of them different, some of them shared. We each had the LP and played the copies alternately to minimise wear. I bought her the CD for her birthday, but it was a birthday she never lived to celebrate, so it stayed in its cellophane packaging.

There was one thing we both hated about the disc: the order of things. After you’d cried your heart out over Bookends (“Preserve your memories – they’re all that’s left you.”) the second side closed with one of the most banal pieces of twaddle they ever wrote, Cecilia, not even very good for dancing, and with an atrocious and vulgar accompaniment. But I was always too emotionally overcome by Bookends to get up in time to lift the needle, and I could never find the remote quickly enough to just turn off the amp. So we endured it, and laughed about it, as you do.

After she died, I didn’t listen to the record any more. But I did keep my eyes open for possible messages. Where? Everywhere. Everywhere there might be a pattern that wasn’t accidental.

If I spilt something, flour, sugar, loose tea – even liquids – I looked to see if it had made a shape of some kind. I read the tea-leaves in the bottom of my cup, the last pieces of cornflake in my bowl. I watched the raindrops on the windows, the way the condensation settled, the marks the frost made, the way the spider’s webs hung on the grass (we’d both read Charlotte’s Web in our time).

I looked at the stains on the tablecloth, the creases in my shirts after washing. If the faithful could see Christ’s face in the Shroud of Turin or Saint Veronica’s handkerchief, then I’d be blowed if I couldn’t discern something similar in a crumpled tea-towel.

Fortunately, I didn’t tell anybody this, otherwise I’d undoubtedly have been locked up or put on something so strong it would have imprisoned me inside my head. Part of me knew all the time that it was mad and irrational and didn’t really believe anything would happen, and part of me knew all about information theory and said, “Don’t mistake the message for noise – there’ll be a helluvalot of noise around, but there WILL be a message. She promised.”

The notion of promises had meant a lot to us. We hadn’t just listened to Simon and Garfunkel, we’d also read our favourite poems, especially Robert Frost’s Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening, with its quiet postponement, rather than rejection, of death:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

After a while, the compulsion got less, even though I’d promised, too. Intellectually, I knew that the Romans had watched the flight of birds (that’s what auspices means: looking at birds) before making important decisions, but I gave up trying to see faces in the clouds or writing in the swooping of the swifts.

When her birthday came round, I decided to celebrate it. You need rituals, and if the old public ones don’t work any more, you have to make new private ones for yourself. I cooked the food, I drank the wine, I read the poem – out loud, sobbing – and then I unwrapped the CD and put it on. As you can imagine, Bookends finished me. But repeated listenings had instilled a Pavlovian response – I braced myself for the onslaught of Cecilia – where was the remote? – down the back of the settee or on top of the TV with all the other devices we have to try and control our life from a distance – I didn’t know – Then I realised that everything was quiet. Preserve your memories – they’re all that’s left you... – and the rest was silence.

I sat for a while, enjoying that silence. Then I checked the insert. The track was supposed to be there – you can’t expect record executives to think about improving a re-issue – besides, some people probably liked it the way it was: you do, after all, get used to the order of things the way they are, and even a change for the better is a disturbance.

I poured myself another glass of wine and started the CD again. This time I was ready, and I let myself just cry and cry and cry.

I thought about taking the CD back to the shop I’d bought it from, or sending it to the record company – but that seemed crazy, because although it was faulty, it was a fault I wanted. But I was still very curious about it all. So when I met a man a month or so later who was a specialist in computing (he’d come to give us all a talk, which half of us found too easy and half of us found too hard), I asked him about it.

“Corrupt information,” he said, “many causes – some simply physical. Would you like me to have a look at it?”

“You won’t have to – damage it, will you?” I asked, conscious of my ignorance.

“That’s what a doctor would do,” he said, smiling, “cut it up to find out what makes it work, and then discover it doesn’t work any more because it’s been cut up – No,” he continued in a reassuring tone, “I’ll just run it through various kinds of interpretative programmes, to see what it is that’s interrupting the music.”

He brought it back the following week, when he came to give another talk – this time to the ones who could understand him.

“Hmm,” he said, “interesting. Tiny piece of corrupt information – normally you’d expect the machine to ignore it, and just plough on regardless – after all, nothing’s perfect, least of all CDs, and they set the acceptable error rate pretty high – but – this just stops it in its tracks. Very powerful for something so small and simple.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“It all depends how you interpret it – if you think it’s music, then it’s barely even a tiny click – if you think it’s numbers, then it’s something else – if it’s a command – ”

“What if it’s words?” I asked.

“No, no,” he said, “far too short to be words.”

“Letters?”

He thought for a moment. “Yes. All right. If we assume that it’s letters, then it’s most likely to be ASCII, in which case – ”

He pulled a screwed up piece of paper out of his pocket – a till receipt I think it was - wrote something on it and gave it to me.

“Mean anything?” he asked.

The letters on the paper ran: TLLMR.

Started 14.00 30.x.2001 Finished 10.45 31.x.2001