I have no idea, I said. I’m still way back at that gate. At the gate? she said. Open it and walk through it. I can’t, I said. Try, she said. I just can’t, I said. Ah, the counselor said. Um. Nobody’s ever stopped off at the gate when I’ve done this technique before.
Should I open my eyes? I said. No, no, keep them closed, she said. Okay, um—. Okay, I know. Wait a minute. We’re going to try another technique, a specific self-empowerment technique. Right. Now. Turn from the gate and, em, right, you’re walking along the road, okay?
Away from the gate? I said.
Yes, she said, away in the opposite direction, and you walk along until you come to a cinema.
Right, I said. Do I go in?
Yes, she said, you go in, and you go through to the auditorium and you see the rows of seats stretching away ahead of you, and—. Don’t I have to get a ticket? I said. Yes, yes, the counselor said, you’ve got all that sorted—. What number is my seat? I said. Don’t worry about that kind of thing, she said, just—. No, I’m not worried, I said, it’s just that when I go to the cinema I like to sit at the end of the row so I can leave if I want and so I don’t feel too crowded—. There’s no one else in the whole cinema, she said, just you, so you can go anywhere you like, sit any—. But the film’ll be rubbish if there’s no one else in the cinema, I said. I probably wouldn’t stay if I saw that there was no one else.
The counselor sighed.
Okay, I said. Okay, I’m in the auditorium. It’s nice. Very modern.
Right, she said, and there’s a curtain, and it’s drawing up to reveal the screen and the lights are dimming, because something’s about to begin. Okay with that? Yes, I said. The curtain and the lights, yes, I’m there, uh huh.
She talked on and on. She told me I was sitting in the dark and that there was a light playing on the screen, and to think about how what I saw on the screen was a certain situation, any situation of my choice that I felt out of control about.
Okay, I said. (As if seeing something on a screen would give me any power over anything.)
She told me to imagine I was there in it, the situation, whatever it was, and also sitting watching it. Then she told me to rewind the film I was watching, to watch it playing backwards then play it forwards again, but this time without any sound. Then to rewind it and start it again and see it, the same thing, but this time in black and white. Then to rewind and watch it in close-up, then rewind and watch it slowed down, then rewind and watch it on fast-forward.
I nodded, I pretended to do as she said. But instead of imagining her film going backwards and forwards, I found I was thinking about how much I was missing making love with you.
When we made particularly good love it was as if a new place in the world, or maybe a new place out of the world, a place apart, revealed itself, a landscape just rolling itself open, in my head — was it in my head? because it was all around me, a great unfolding green landscape, and it’d be as if I was traveling fast through it and over it in flight, skimming it like a flat-edged stone can skim a surface of water, touching it to leap away above it. I thought how somewhere at the core of this lovemaking I had sometimes known, understood for a moment, what goes on at the core of the earth down through all the roots, past the taproots, way down through the layers of cold to the layers of heat, right through to platelet level. I thought, too, how at exactly the same time as going this deep I could understand any huge bell hung high in a bell tower, hollow and full, stately and weighty, as high in the air as a bird, beginning the slow ceremonious swing of itself against itself that means any second the air is going to change its nature and become sound.
It was a place that could only be reached when you were brave enough to come into yourself so wholly that you left yourself behind.
It was a place I missed. I had no idea how to get back to it. I had no idea if I’d ever see it or be in it again.
And that’s where the projector stops whirring, the counselor was saying, and the lights come up, and you stand up and you leave the cinema and come out into the daylight, and now you can open your eyes.
I opened my eyes.
There, the counselor said. Now. How was that? Did anything come of that?
I thought about the place I’d remembered. I thought how beautiful, and how beyond me.
It rang a bell with me somewhere, yes, I said.
I was sitting at home in the study, at the desk. I was two-thirds of the way through Oliver Twist. The bad, lost, poor, desperate, filthy, hopeless girl from the underworld, Nancy, had just met the good, perfect, rich, clean paragon of a girl from the overworld, Rose. Was there such a word as overworld? I picked up your dictionary. Under it were your unfinished talks. The one on the top of the pile was the one called On Edge.
No, there was no word overworld listed in the dictionary. But how could there be an underworld and no overworld? Was it just that Rose’s world is so much more superior to Nancy’s that there’s no need even to label it? Then again, when Nancy comes to the door of the overworld—‘like a corpse come to life again,’ Sikes says of her as she gets ready to go there — and asks to ‘see the lady’ so she can tell her the truth about Oliver, a man asks her what her name is and she says, ‘It’s no use saying any.’
Maybe the languages of underworld and overworld can’t really meet, I thought, opening the old paperback wider, cracking the spine on it, hearing the gum of the binding give. Maybe that’s why you’d been giving me messages in a language I couldn’t speak and I knew for sure you couldn’t speak either.
On top of your unfinished talk about edge there was a folded photocopy. I unfolded it; it was a black and white picture of four young women, all of them very pretty, even beautiful, and all of them leaning on each other in a couple of deck chairs. Two of them were holding up dainty cups on dainty saucers and all four of them in the picture were completely asleep. The caption at the bottom said: Surrealists at Lambe Creek, Cornwall 1937. Clockwise from top left: Lee Miller, Ady Fidelin, Nusch Eluard, and Leonora Carrington.
One day, quite late on, you showed me this photograph; you must have been working on it at the time. You told me about how Lee Miller, the very beautiful woman at the top of the photograph, had started as a Surrealist photographer then in the Second World War had taken photographs all over Britain which still looked like they were Surrealism except now they were realism. Then, you said, she went into France and Germany at the end of the war with the Allies, she photographed the Liberation, she photographed the first ever use of napalm, and she was one of the first photographers into the concentration camps. You went and got a book off the shelf and came back with it. You showed me a pyramid made of shadow, a slit of light in a piece of netting, a woman with a disembodied hand on the back of her head, a typewriter crushed like a concertina. You turned the pages: a dead man in water, a train carriage with bare-chested, loose-armed corpses spilling out of its sliding door. You stopped at a picture of a blonde girl, authoritative, like a soldier or a nurse, leaning back on a couch. Look, you said. Eight years later Miller took this one. The girl is the daughter of the Leipzig Bürgermeister, she’s just committed suicide.
The girl in this photo looked like she was asleep too, but the layer of dust on her lips and her face, on her perfect row of teeth, dust from the streetfighting and the explosions, meant that now she was just another surface in the room.