“I don’t know you,” the student answered.
“Arr,” he said. “And I see everything you think.”
Cuthbert/Drystan spent far more time reading about Sufism and obscure Middle Eastern hermeneutics than about organic chemistry. At one point, he started (then quickly abandoned) a summer Beginning Modern Standard Arabic class. He may never have been invited to join the Golden Dawn, but he became an incomprehensible moonchild to himself and to others.
It should have all caught someone’s attention. Something was desperately wrong, something that went beyond the usual new-to-uni breakdown or naff religious conversion. In one letter he penned (imagining himself to be Drystan and “writing” to his brother Cuthbert in Brum) a bizarre account of gazing out a Floor Nineteen window of the Senate House Library. To the west, he wrote, shone the gold dome of London Central Mosque, partly green from the reflections of huge plane trees from Regent’s Park. He described the glow at that moment as “a hostile eye of sunlight,” pouring out from a hole in England. He continued,
I started rocking back and forth, Cuddy, gently bumping my head upon the cold window, repeating the phrase “imagine me imagine you,” quite audibly, I suppose, in my crude effort at a Sufic dhikr—that’s a sort of God-consciousness, right?—I was bumping my head, bumpiebumpiebumpie imaginemeimagineyou, bump rock bump rock bump bump bump imaginemeimagineyou—until a library aide marched over and says to me, “Do you mind, sir?” This really happened, Cuddy, all down to the Eye of God!
Cuthbert carefully avoided his young, ambitious tutor, Mr. Daniels, who seemed only intellectually, and never emotionally, at ease with the boy’s deep Brum accent and up-front manner, as well as suspicious of his exuberance for animals and religious studies. When it came to Cuthbert’s signs of serious disturbance, poor Mr. Daniels, who truly stood the most chance of seeing that something was wrong, was a perfect idiot—the sort of person who liked to champion the working class as long as they did not smell up his little corner of academia a few meters from the corpse of Jeremy Bentham. Seeing in Cuthbert only a bit of sudatory kookiness, Mr. Daniels recommended the boy immerse himself in the salubrious rigors of schoolwork and contemplate his smallness in the scheme of things.
“I believe that you’ll see your pleasure variables rise,” Mr. Daniels said in a joking tone. “That is, if we can trust in the ‘felicific calculus’ of old Jeremy, right? Ha-ha!”
But for Cuthbert, grueling revision on his biology course offered no chance for self-forgetting, least not as Mr. Daniels conceived it. When he did forget himself, he drew into Drystan even more—the ghost beneath the green rushes, the otter-brother in the bosky claw-waters of long, long ago. Otters obsessed him, too; at one point, after reading Ted Hughes’s “An Otter,” he developed the notion that the poet was, like Drystan, a therianthropic being who crossed between the animal and human worlds, and in fact, Hughes had simply been writing about himself in his animal poems—and not metaphorically. In one meeting with Mr. Daniels, just before he abandoned the course, he tried to explain Hughes’s secret to Mr. Daniels in his sour-smelling office.
“I’m stuck on Hughes, and I can’t stop thinking about ’im, no matter how hard I try,” he was saying. “His otter’s the most profound sort of animal. It’s all biology and all of the animal soul, in one little beast. ‘Of neither water nor land. Seeking some world lost when first he dived . . . from water that nourishes and drowns.’ See what I’m getting at?”
Mr. Daniels looked annoyed, tapping the crystal on his cheap watch. It had a black wristband, and he kept playing with it. “This isn’t a literature course, is it?” He looked at Cuthbert solemnly. “Forget ‘animals’ and think ‘cells.’ Forget ‘phenotype’ and think ‘gene.’ It’s liberating, I tell you, if you really think about it. Have you finished The Selfish Gene yet?”
“I day,” answered Cuthbert. “I mean, I did not, sir.”
“Too bad. See, you’re born, you hitch a ride to your alleles, and you fly forward into human evolution. We really have no utter control over anything. Ha-ha.”
“Ar—I mean, yes,” he had answered. “I tried to read it, but it made me feel . . . like life’s pointless.”
“Not for genes it’s not.”