There his flight ends. He comes back to reality, which is not so different from where his imagination has transported him. He shuts the book of the great Yeats and looks out of the window and follows the course of a cloud extremely curiously and then his head nods and he feels he might soon fall asleep, and then, to stop this from happening, he reopens the book he’d closed and finds in what he reads traces of the cloud he’s just been looking at, he finds it in a fragment of Vilém Vok’s prologue to Yeats’s book: “The winds that shake the coast and the woods where the sidhe talk, emissaries of the fairies, allude to a lost, but recoverable splendor.” And later: “It said that the world was once all perfect and kindly, and that still the kindly and perfect world existed, but buried like a mass of roses under many spadefuls of earth.” And he suddenly realizes what the real content of his father’s words were when he asked, the other day, if someone could explain the mystery to him.
If he hadn’t read those lines of Yeats’s, he surely wouldn’t have thought this just now. But he did read them and he can’t help but think that he’s just understood what exactly might have been behind those words of his father’s. Maybe the winds battering the Catalan coast at that moment disturbed his father’s unconscious, until he was driven to ask, indirectly, about a lost splendor. And the thing is that maybe his father wasn’t really asking about the mystery of life in general, or about the mystery of the storm, but rather about everything close to his emotional world, everything that, with time, he’d come to see was buried, like a mass of roses under many spadefuls of the dampest earth.
This could have been the true and fundamental cause of his father’s worries about the storm. And if this was the cause then Riba can’t deny that it was insomnia that helped him realize it, that his insomnia was hiding a visionary power he was previously unaware of, and by leading him to understand the true meaning of those words of his father’s, it was able to widen his outlook.
He goes to the kitchen, and lapsing once more into the mundane, makes himself a sandwich with ham and two layers of cheese in it. He wonders if it might not be the case that, when he thinks of New York, really what he’s interested in — a worthy successor to his father — is a perfect, kindly world, which as a child he lost very early on, and which he hopes to find again in this city one day. Is it symbolically concentrated in New York — his whole search for that great part of his life buried like a mass of roses under tons of earth? It’s possible. He takes a bite from the sandwich, then another one. He hates himself for having base needs, but the cheese is superb. He recalls a quote of Woody Allen’s about reality and steak. He’s feeling wider and wider awake. Wasn’t this what he was after? If so, then he’s achieving it, and he’s seeing more than ever. It’s as if he were approaching the experience of Swedenborg, the man who spoke totally naturally to angels. At times it seems to him that insomnia is capable of having the same effect on him as alcohol once did. Alcohol, which he needs so much sometimes. Who’s there? He smiles. He detects a presence again, although this time it might be merely wild intuition, provoked by his sleep-deprived state. The presence ends up seeming so obvious and large that he grows sad wondering what would become of him if reality suddenly showed him evidence of a great absence.
He starts reading The Dalkey Archive by Flann O’Brien, which is simply another way of conscientiously preparing for the trip to Dublin. What’s more, Finnegans pub, where Nietzky is planning to found the Order of Knights, is in Dalkey, a small town some twelve miles south of Dublin, on the coast.
Flann O’Brien says: “It is an unlikely town, huddled, quiet, pretending to be asleep. Its streets are narrow, not quite self-evident as streets and with meetings which seem accidental.”
Dalkey, a town of accidental meetings. And also of strange appearances. In The Dalkey Archive, St. Augustine appears alive and kicking, talking to an Irish friend. And James Joyce also appears, working as a bartender in a tourist pub outside Dublin and refusing to be associated with Ulysses, which he considers “a dirty book, that collection of smut.”
A violent wave of exhaustion now jolts his head forward. And again he has the sensation of being watched. Has Celia come back without him hearing her? He calls her, but no one answers. Total silence.
“James?”
Well, he doesn’t really know why he’s asking for James, but he hopes it’s not actually Joyce who’s now walking around out there.
He’s afraid of falling asleep, and if that’s true he suspects it’s because he’ll be assailed by that recurring nightmare where a sightless god with the look of a weary primate wants to shake his hand and so is forced to raise his elbow as high as he can. Riba looks at him from above, but it can’t be said he’s in a better position, as the two of them are locked in this cage in which they’re condemned for all eternity to be eaten away by an intimate Hydra, by a fearsome pain: the author’s ache.
Just after eleven o’clock in the morning, he starts to feel overcome by sleepiness. He wavers between going meekly to sleep falling victim to what his friend Hugo Claus called the sorrow of the publisher, or resisting a bit longer. He’s annoyed that sleep threatens just when, only a few moments ago, he felt most lucid.
In exactly five days, at this very hour, his plane will be landing in Dublin. Javier, Ricardo, and Nietzky will already have been there for a day when he arrives. Javier and Ricardo still don’t know that, apart from taking part in Bloomsday and the founding ceremony of the Order of the Knights of Finnegans, they’re going to participate in a funeral for the Gutenberg age. They have a tight schedule. Maybe Nietzky will explain it to them over the course of that first day the three of them spend together. Perhaps when he, Riba, gets to Dublin, Nietzky will already have thought of a way to celebrate this funeral and found the ideal place to hold it.
For quite a while, he resists the ravages of tiredness and fatigue by thinking about the imminent Irish trip. He’s worried, above all else, that even though he stopped being a hikikomori a few hours ago, now he seems more like one than ever. While he’s stopped being one in spirit, he knows that when Celia comes home, if she finds him asleep, the first thing she’ll think is that he’s turned, tragically and once and for all — unjustly, but it’s what she’ll think — into one of those Japanese people who spend their time in front of the computer all night and sleep all day.
It seems quite clear that if people say that as well as being respectable one must have the appearance of respectability, then it’s not enough to stop being a hikikomori, he also has to stop acting like one. But what can he do to avoid it? Sooner or later, he’ll give in. He’s had enough. He’ll sleep, he’s got no alternative. He leaves the idea of continuing experimenting with reason and madness for another time. But immediately he sees that he can’t interrupt them. He makes a huge effort and gets to his feet, he’s decided he won’t let sleep win, much less let Celia think he’s still a stubborn computer nerd.
He gets dressed, picks up his umbrella, hesitates for a few seconds, but finally goes out to the landing, takes the elevator, and goes down into the street. He’s spent days lazily avoiding buying some medication he needs. Now he has time to take care of some errands. He goes to the same pharmacy as usual and buys the pills he’s nearly run out of and which he’s been taking on prescription ever since his physical collapse two years ago. Pills to control high blood pressure: Atenolol, Astudal, Carduran, Tertensif. Then, in the bakery he buys a Roquefort pizza — which he’ll eat cold on the way home — and some croutons for the soup Celia made yesterday.