Bilocations, Chapter Eighteen: What Lew Believes Ain't Necessarily So!

Do you get the impression that I sort of screwed up the timing such that in spite of having finished the novel, I still have a bunch of prewritten blog entries to post, so I'm burning them off real fast?  I wouldn't believe such wild rumors.

Lew goes with Neville and Nigel to see "the comic operetta Waltzing in Whitechapel, or, A Ripping Romance, based loosely, and according so some reviews tastelessly, on the Whitechapel murders of the late '80s" (678). Does sound tasteless, but I still want to see it. It turns out to be a meta thing with actors trying to put on a comedy about the murders, leading to Nigel and Neville having a stoned argument about semiotics and degrees of separation between the show and the actual events.

Lew meets Professor Werfner--the German version of Professor Renfrew, you will recall--who is there for business. Of some sort. He also meets Max Khäutsch, with whom he'd been assigned to protect Franz Ferdinand back in Chicago. They talk about the Whitechapel murders (those are the ones attributed to Jack the Ripper), and compare it to the German Mayerling Incident, in which the Crown Prince of Austria died mysteriously. Even though these two incidents were very different, there is speculation that ol' Jack could've been behind the both of them. Bilocation!

Lew learns a little about why the T.W.I.T. really wants him: "I think that from here on," Nookshaft suggests, "you'll be authorized--trusted--to take any initiative you see fit. Should an opportunity arise." What does this mean? Lew wants to know. "Think of those two professors as 'sidewinders' out on the trail. Sometimes a man has the luck to avoid them. Sometimes he must take other steps." He hastens to add that he's "not suggesting anything" (683), even though his suggestion here is extremely unsubtle. Lew compares his situation here to that in the States, and concludes that "he had grown foolishly to expect that throwdowns and death maybe were not going to figure quite as prominently in case-resolution as they once had" (684). The British veneer of civility is paper-thin.

Lew has a chat with Nigel and Neville about Werfner and Renfrew, and has a shocking epiphany:

Lew just then was seeing something extraordinary, something he would never have dreamed possible with these two--they were exchanging signals, not exactly warnings but cues of hand and eye, the way actors in a vaudeville skit might--they were impersonating British idiots. And in that luminous and tarnished instant, he also understood, far too late in the ball game, that Renfrew and Werfner were one and the same person, had been all along, that this person somehow had the paranormal power to be in at least two places at the same time, maintaining day-to-day lives at two different universities--and that everybody at the T.W.I.T. had known all about this, known forever, most likely--everybody except for Lew. (685)

Of course, this isn't going to become unambiguously apparent in the text itself, but there you go: bilocations. Lew reads up on the subject, and meets a scientist named Dr. Otto Ghloix who speculates that the reason for this is that Renfrew/Werfner has some kind of internal division that could only be resolved by externalizing itself--hence, "pretending to be two 'rivals' representing the interests of two 'separate nations' which are much more likely secular expressions of a rupture within a single damaged soul" (686). Could be!

Nookshaft holds forth on light:

We are light, you see, all of light--we are the light offered the batsmen at the end of the day, the shining eyes of the beloved, the flare of the safety-match at the high city window, the stars and nebulae in full midnight glory, the rising moon through the tram wires, the naphtha lamp glimmering on the costermonger's barrow...When we lost our aethereal being and became embodied, we slowed, thickened, congealed to...this. The soul itself is a memory we carry of having once moved at the speed and density of light. The first step in our Discipline here is learning how to re-acquire that rarefaction, that condition of light, to become once more able to pass where we will, through lanternhorn, through window-glass, eventually, though we risk being divided in two, through Iceland spar, which is an expression in crystal form of Earth's velocity as it rushes through the Aether, altering dimensions and creating double refraction. (687-88).

I just wanted to quote that, so I did, dammit.

Lew reflects that, as a detective, he may have multiple, contradictory identities: "In an era where 'detective' was universally understood code for anti-Union thug...somewhere else was the bilocational version of himself, the other, Sherlock Holmes type of sleuth fighting criminal masterminds hardly distinct from the sorts of tycoons who hired 'detectives' to rat on Union activities" (689).

Now just what is Renfrew/Werfner up to? This is very confusing, but I definitely have a better idea than I did the first time I read this:

His plan...is--insanely--to install all across the Peninsula, from a little east of Sofia, here, roughly along the Balkan range and the Sredna Gora, coincident with the upper border of the former Eastern Roumelia, and continuing on, at last to the Black Sea--das interdikt, as he calls it, two hundred miles long, invisible, waiting for certain unconsidered footballs and, once triggered, irreversible--pitiless." (690)

Just what the hell does that mean? It's as unclear to Lew as to us, but it seems to have to do with our ol' friend the Gentleman Bomber of Headingly, and to be some sort of trip-wire for a kind of poison. We don't get more on this at this time, but it seems alarming.

Anyway, Lew may or may not be done here--all the T.W.I.T. higher-ups, including Neville, Nigel, and Nookshaft (there's a name for a law firm) having mysteriously disappeared. What happens next...remains to be seen. And this, indeed, is the end of Bilocations. A real milestone!