Equivocator Read Free

Common Room and when he invited me to join him, found myself consenting. I doubted whether the professor would find many intellectuals to converse with there. The SCR, haunted by emeritus dons nodding off over journals, was one step away from a nursing home.
    As we advanced together over the quad, the visitor’s fame and charisma acted as a magnet. Youngish lecturers swivelled in mid-stride and headed across the concourse, gliding in his wake, stray ducklings cleaving to a long-lost mother duck. When I tried to slip away, Salvatore started introducing me: ‘I don’t know if you’ve met Sebastian Messenger. He is an up-and-coming Egyptologist, researching into … I’m sorry, Sebastian, I didn’t quite catch?’
    Scarlet, I mumbled something about the Egyptian Book of the Dead. And that I’d just remembered I had an appointment. To discuss it. The Book, that is. Of the Dead.
    The guy appeared oddly reluctant to let me go – and fond, like an uncle. He’d catch up with me, he said, and we’d talk properly. We knew each other, he repeated. From way back.
    I felt, as I loped back to the library, that I had obscurely disappointed the stranger, starving him of some nourishment he craved. And that, if I turned my head, I’d see him gazing after me.
    â€˜Oy, watch where you’re fucking going, wanker.’
    â€˜Sorry.’ I realised I was running in an arc, dreamily skewed. I slowed down to a walk.
    That afternoon there occurred a luminous interlude in the stacks. All the lights were functioning but the two earnest young truth-seekers weren’t around to luxuriate in it. I ran my eyes over venerable volumes under K-L and wondered what the self-appointed sage had been looking for. Kant? Kierkegaard? Lacan? Lavater? Or perhaps, nothing in particular. Perhaps it was all show. He might have been a hollow vessel with a yen for disciples. Or an ambitious competitor spreading disinformation.
    Go to S, I told myself. Find Rhys Salvatore. But Salvatore’s oeuvre was incomprehensible. It flitted between languages with mandarin aplomb. It was on the trail of a cosmic aporia , so the blurbs indicated. But what might an aporia be, when it was at home? Apparently it had no home. An impasse, a state of puzzlement, a point of doubt and indecision, a kind of hole, explained a dictionary, where meaning deconstructs itself.
    Right. A hole. And this geezer is actually hunting for this insoluble impasse, I thought? The heroic search for a drain or sump? And he is paid for this?
    I headed towards Travel. Although I owned a copy of everything he wrote, and avoided reading them, I still found myself heading to the shelves in case another imprint might present a different face. All Dad’s books were out.
    *
    â€˜I’ve been hoping to catch up with you.’ Salvatore seems ageless, though he must be bordering on elderly. At the same time he doesn’t appear terribly healthy. As if he didn’t sleep. ‘You are rather elusive, you know, Sebastian. Whenever I land, you take off.’
    This is so like what Jesse said last night – ‘You’re never here , Seb – even when you are here’ – that I can hardly breathe. I’m with Jesse under false pretences, is my partner’s theme. He knows : ‘I followed you,’ he blurted. ‘On one of your night-walks.’
    â€˜I’ve several times attended conferences,‘ Salvatore continues. ‘For instance, the Cairo conference last year – where I missed you by a whisker! My daughter was with me. It would have been nice to introduce you. Anyway, we had a good conference and afterwards we stayed on a few days at Luxor, a haunt of yours. But I knew you and I would catch up with each other again. How are you?’
    â€˜Fine, yes – thanks.’
    â€˜Yes, but really. How are you?’
    If you wanted to get in touch, I think, there’s always the internet. There are so many