Minor Revelations

Meanwhile, Wright got into a muddle with his boss at the Science Museum, Bromley, an “out-and-out bully,” who would allow Wright to work on the Mechanism only in his free time and with virtually no access to the data already collected. (“We don’t let children play with grenades,” Wright remembers a colleague scoffing not quite out of earshot.) This meant that while Wright’s wife would go on holiday with their children to exciting locales, Wright would travel year after year to the museum in Budapest, which contained the context that Wright thought essential to understanding the Mechanism. Eventually, after years of this routine, he and his wife divorced and soon lost touch.

Later, as Wright toiled in obscurity at a rural American university, he was delighted to learn that Bromley, much beloved and feted, was dying of rectal cancer. Wright flew to see him in Cambridge, and Bromley, as an olive branch from a dying man settling his affairs, handed over some as-yet-unpublished data on the Mechanism, insultingly minor revelations, they seemed to Wright, not contained in one of Bromley’s prize-winning monographs. Bromley was dead by the end of August, and the newly-invigorated Wright set about on his life’s work.

Back in America, he was able to work freely, albeit intermittently given his teaching load, through that fall and winter, despite the distance between himself and the Science Museum, between himself and Budapest. Although he lacked the energy of his youth and, indeed, suffered from a socially-significant chronic ailment (chronic, explosive diarrhea), he began to think of himself as the world’s foremost living authority on the Mechanism, an assessment not shared by anyone else. He considered that the Mechanism had been bequeathed to him by Bromley in some fundamental but unstated way.

In April, however, he learned of a new research team based in Bath and the effort to take a new set of internal scans of the Mechanism. Enraged, Wright saw this as an improper encroachment on his own turf. “There is a long-established, unwritten law concerning the study of pre-Anatolian antiquities,” he wrote in a blistering open letter, “which is that while one researcher has access to the primary material, any other researcher is denied access until the first has finished.” His letter remained unpublished and unacknowledged despite Wright’s best efforts.

In June, Wright hurried back—traveling agonizingly and with several changes of clothes—by car, train, bus, airplane, bus, train, and taxi to the Science Museum, a place he remembered ambivalently despite his seventeen years of employment. But he was too late; the Bath group’s fully-authorized tunneling positron scans had been completed ahead of schedule and the research team had already dispersed. Wright’s behavior and bedraggled appearance caused Museum security to follow him at a discreet distance; their official report stated that he seemed “a possible hazard to himself.”

He stayed on at the Science Museum for the summer, requesting and then subsequently demanding unsuccessfully the results of the Bath group’s scans, but the troubles with his digestion continued. He chalked it up to stress, but the CT scan he had waited for eleven weeks to have thanks to National Health’s byzantine triage process revealed advanced colon cancer. On his way out, he happened to run into a former grad school classmate whom Wright remembered may or may not have been hired by Bath. They did not have the chance to talk.

The cancer moved aggressively despite treatment, and Wright was dead before the end of August. The Mechanism, inscrutable to the end, consumed his final conscious thoughts.