Omega

It felt safe in the room—at least far safer than with Owain. Safe but dead, my father sealed in behind a window that couldn’t be opened without a key, behind a door whose lock was on the outside. Nocturnal wandering, Dr Pearce once told me, was a frequent symptom of someone in my father’s condition, though he’d hastened to add that a night nurse was always sent to the room of any patient showing signs of agitation. I liked the fact he called them “patients” rather than the euphemisms of “residents” or even “guests”.

“How long do you think he has?” Rees asked the doctor.

“Sorry?”

“Will he die before he goes completely gaga?”

Pearce looked mortified, as though Rees had sworn in church.

“Well,” he said awkwardly, “physically he’s in a reasonable condition for a man of his age. And new treatments are always coming on line.”

“It’s all right,” I said, rescuing him. “We know the score.”

Death was never mentioned here. Rees didn’t press it. I saw Keisha squeeze his hand in a manner I thought was both sympathetic and cautionary. She looked calm and self-possessed, given that she was surrounded by strangers in a difficult emotional situation.

“Is he still writing?” Tanya asked.

“No,” Pearce said with what sounded like genuine regret. “That stopped some months ago.”

I must have told Tanya about it, though I couldn’t remember the occasion. When I first discussed with my father the possibility of going into a nursing home he had agreed without qualm but insisted that he wanted to continue to work. He was aware of his mental decline but clearly felt that his lapses were mere periods of indisposition, a hindrance but not a bar to the continued pursuit of his profession. He compiled a list of essential reference books that he wished to take with him, along with notebooks and a range of coloured roller ball pens that he intended to use.

It wasn’t until he had been at Broadoaks for the best part of a year that I actually took a look at what he was writing. At first he guarded his notebooks from all external attention, but as his condition worsened so did his dominion over them. One afternoon Pearce left me alone with them while my father was undergoing neurological tests.

His working title was Chaos and Order in History, and what surprised me was the depth of his reading in such esoteric fields as non-linear systems and game theory. Three of his notebooks were completely filled with a jumbled collection of references, observations and commentaries obviously drawn directly from his reading. They were scribbled down in alternating blocks of red, green and purple that suggested a colour coding I was never able to fathom. Other notebooks held more extended passages in sober black and navy which were plainly a draft of the work itself.

Enough of the draft was coherent for me to grasp that he was attempting to apply two main ideas from science to the study of history. The first was that as macroscopic certainty emerged from innumerable fuzzy and probabilistic interactions in the sub-atomic world, so historical process, as he termed it, arose out of the equally innumerable and often random interactions of individuals. The second was that as ordered behaviour could spontaneously arise in systems that were far from thermodynamic equilibrium, like a whirlpool vortex in bath water draining down a plug hole, so historical pattern only emerged during periods of flux.

I read through the notebooks with a mixture of awe, confusion and, ultimately, a dismaying sense of the sterility of the enterprise. It was sterile not because I knew it would never be finished but rather because it expended a mountain of intellectual effort to scale a crumbling anthill. To say that historical process was the summation of individual actions was surely just to state the obvious. To assert that patterns in history only became evident at times of upheaval was unenlightening without a proper definition of what constituted such times. My father also implied that such patterns were visible contemporaneously, a notion at odds with another of his favourite axioms: History is a dish best served cold. While I knew that what I was reading was only a draft, filled with obscurities, non-sequiturs and half-developed ideas, it nevertheless conveyed the impression of a fixation so obsessive that he wanted to shoehorn the whole of history into it. He had succumbed to the tyranny of analogy.

“Where are his notebooks?” I asked Pearce.

The doctor looked puzzled. “You asked us to remove them the last time you were here.”

I remembered. He’d begun to deface them. Scribbling over them, tearing out their pages, perhaps driven by despair because the besieged rational part of him knew the game was up.