Victoria Sees It by Carrie Jenkins (love letters to the dead TXT) 📕

In the notebooks, I was patiently recording everything—quite literally everything—I knew about Deb. All my memories, any clues I could glean as to what might have happened to her, every strange occurrence since her disappearance, every conversation I’d ever had that concerned her. All my observations and inferences. I was trying to get the sequence into order, from the moment we first met behind the College, down to the moment I was sure of having seen her last. We had parted to go our separate ways after Humberton’s lecture, she to another lecture and I to the library. That morning had felt so entirely normal. I kept writing out the timeline. Whenever I realized I could include another detail or had put something in the wrong place, I started over on a fresh page.

I recorded how Deb’s room had been empty for a while, until one day another student’s name appeared above her door. How I’d looked for her in the matriculation photo for our year, before remembering that she hadn’t been able to make it on the day of the photo because she’d had to go to the funeral of a cousin or something. How I’d plucked up the courage to approach a member of the Hall staff to ask about Deb, and how they had denied knowing her, although I was quite sure they’d handed her interchangeable pasta and rice dishes in the canteen on too many occasions to count. Then again, I wrote below this, to the Hall staff we undergraduates must appear equally interchangeable.

—

“This is going to sound crazy weird,” said Gin one day, “but it’s not weird I swear.”

“What’s not weird?”

“Would you want to be in a secret society?”

That made me look up. When I realized she wasn’t asking another of her hypothetical questions, but extending a real invitation, my eyes opened wider and I pointed them straight at one corner of a particularly messy bookshelf behind Gin’s hair. As if there might be something in that thick muddle of chemistry textbooks that would make sense of what she had just said.

Gin hurried on: “It’s just a kind of debating society, like a book club, only we usually don’t talk about specific books. It’s really pretty normal. It’s only a secret because it’s, like, really old.”

“How old?”

“Oh geez, I don’t know, hundreds of years. It’s called The Eleven. Wittgenstein was in it, and John Maynard Keynes. And Bertrand Russell. Oh, and like, the Bloomsbury Group, and one of the Cambridge Spies…uh, Anthony…Burgess or something? I asked the others about you last meeting and they voted you in.”

“What?”

“Yeah, I know that sounds creepy. It’s just…that’s how it works. It’s not weird, honest. But you have to agree that you won’t tell anyone about it, before I tell you more. Is that okay? I mean, I think the main reason it’s a secret is just that we don’t want people asking if they can join, you know? We just invite the people we think are really interesting.”

“You think I’m interesting?” It was a genuine enquiry.

“Yeah?” Gin said, as if my question was deeply weird.

This was making me nervous, and I felt awkward about the fact that I could not return Gin’s compliment. So I selected another bookshelf to stare at.

“If you join you have to take a vow of secrecy. They call it a curse. It’s kind of an 1800s version of some adolescent nonsense. But now that it’s so old, it’s funny. You’re supposed to be cast into a pit of flame or something like that if you break the vow.”

“Into a what?”

“I know, I know. I swear it’s much less weird than that makes it sound. We just hang out and talk. Once a week. We present ideas to each other. In the old days there were always twelve members, so The Eleven was like a joke name, you see. It’s officially called the Conversazione Society, you know, when we have to give College staff a reason we’re booking out rooms or whatever. Nowadays there are usually about seven or eight of us.”

I took a breath and swallowed hard. My stomach did not feel too good.

“When were the old days?”

“Well, in the 1800s. But I think its predecessor goes back to the 1600s. Probably something to do with Rosicrucians or Masons or whatever. I don’t really know.” She smiled. “I’m a philosopher, not a historian! I can lend you a book about the history if you want. It’s probably quite interesting. If you care about the past.”

“You don’t care about the past?”

“Well, let me try this out on you…” and she ran McTaggart’s argument for the unreality of time. I’d heard this before in one of Humberton’s lectures. The gist of it is that if time is real, then every event has to be past, present, and future. But nothing can have all three of these properties: they are inconsistent. So time is an illusion. I told her my response, one of the standard moves. Nothing is supposed to have all those three properties at the same time, so there’s no real contradiction there. An event can be future in the past, present in the present, and past in the future. No problem.

Gin nodded. “Yes. But doesn’t the regress bother you?”

“You mean how now we just have nine inconsistent temporal properties, instead of the original three?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

She nodded, satisfied that the resolution was stable. “Not all regresses are vicious,” she said.

Call it vicious. Evil. Cruel. I see his face in here. I’m not crazy, I mean I see him on the TV. Not TV. What are you supposed to call it these days? I know the things but not the words. That giant face. Always eating, always talking, always consuming. Sucks all the air out of a room, a black hole at the centre of everything. A void. You’d have seen him, he’s that kind of famous. He explains mathematics, or physics is it, or maybe it’s philosophy. The shape of reality.