She waited for a response that was never coming.
‘Secondly, you’re an intelligent person who has had the time to think on these things. I know, if I’m alone, I can clear my mind of everyday concerns. I think better, I’m sharper; I’m more creative with my solutions. I believe you had those advantages when you reflected on the world. Don’t you agree?’
‘Not sure I do, Detective Russo. Maybe I’m only a man in the trees, eating baked beans from a can. Maybe I wasn’t bright enough to begin with, and all this is a wasted opportunity for mankind. Perhaps I survived on bad food, good luck and stubbornness. Hardly a philosopher king, is it?’
She tapped her pen against her pad. ‘One thing doesn’t preclude another, Mr Whittler. I imagine that not only did you think about life, but you also thought about the process of thinking. If you see what I mean.’
They both let the silence ride. Nathan seemed to be weighing something up. Dana tensed for the shutdown she felt was coming: even though she agreed with Bill that Nathan was more forthcoming on the philosophical side. Maybe Nathan indulged her because he felt such discussions kept them away from specifics like his hideout location, his potential burglaries and whether he had knifed a man to death a few hours ago.
Nathan considered, then adjusted his posture. He leaned forward, matching palm on palm and rubbing them together slowly, fixated on his shoes.
‘So let me tell you how my thinking went, Detective Russo. Because it’s not so mysterious after all. When I first went into the wide blue yonder, my only focus was on survival. It was a few weeks before the winter started in earnest: I had a small and closing window to get myself straight. I’d been living rough for a few days when I started to truly appreciate the importance of not getting wet.’
He shook his head ruefully. ‘No great philosophy there, Detective, no remarkable insight: just don’t get wet, Nathan. I can’t emphasise enough – the cold when you’re wet is so much worse than dry cold. So my early time was centred wholly on shelter, on warmth where I could create it and on food. Who was it, Maslow? Food and shelter first on the list.’
Dana nodded. Was there a cop in the Western world who hadn’t stared at that famous pyramid at some point in their training?
‘Once I had some kind of handle on where and how I was going to live, I found my brain creeping around, looking for work. I had that modern mentality that my mind must be busy. In your world – my former world – it gets engaged, stimulated, and deliberately so. You can’t even handle a day without it. You create a life where you have that relentless occupation – telephone, work, television, music, people – because you think your mind requires it. You believe your brain will turn to soggy mush without some kind of constant external intervention.
‘So my unprepared mind looked for work and found it. It had a rich vein of loathing on tap: looking back and criticising, damning myself over what I’d done or not done, said or not said. My mind liked the negative – it was sustenance. It fed itself by eating into me. I found I had to pay more attention to the practicalities of my new life, purely to shut my mind off from doing that. I recognised it was doing me harm to retrace the past, but it was like an addiction – my brain wouldn’t stop. That retribution had to be crowded out by current activity. I organised and reorganised, overdid the attention to detail, let myself become obsessive about things that didn’t matter. I did that deliberately, Detective Russo, to stop my mind from killing me.’
Nathan stopped, as if seeking absolution, or forgiveness. It wasn’t Dana’s to give, even if she wanted to: he’d seemingly selected the most unreliable and atheistic of priests. She recognised the theory, though – trying to crowd out the negative by filling the dangerous mental space with activity. It was, she thought, exactly what she was doing with this Day.
Despite her empathy, all Dana could do was nudge and listen.
‘At some point, Mr Whittler, you pushed through that phase?’
‘It lasted maybe two years. A horrible time – gruesome. I couldn’t see how it could end. I had no endgame in sight beyond continuing to live – this was it; and it seemed to be devouring me from the brain outwards. I was still trying to live at a modern speed, you see. Still thinking there was urgency, or requirement, or others who should be considered. I was scared of the idea of being bored. I mean, Detective, truly bored. Not simply at a loose end but with literally nothing to do that day, and comprehending that fact even as the sun rose. Days felt absurdly long; unnavigable.
‘But gradually, things began to shift. I started to experience periods of nothingness – whole hours, or afternoons, when I took no action whatsoever I could recall, had no thoughts I could remember. At first I was puzzled, and worried. Maybe I was losing my marbles, out there in the wilderness. Perhaps it was sending me crazy, and those “lost hours” were proof of that.’
He took another sip of water then touched the bottle cap before continuing.
‘Anyone living in the rough has that as a prefix, don’t they, Detective? Crazy hermit, crazy man in the woods. I’d drifted into the notion that living without human interaction, without that all-consuming stimulus all the time, would drive me nuts. But no, I had that wrong. It took a while, but I came to recognise the good in it. That was the key.’
He shuffled forward, warming to the subject. ‘We spoke about silence before, Detective; the silence was part of that blankness. I could never have done it with noise. Not even the noise of my own thoughts was tolerable: I had to have perfect peace. I began to organise myself to have periods of nothingness; timetabled spells when I could do nothing, think nothing. I started to understand the importance of that – how it healed my mind to let go of the chains and drift. It came to me how nourishing that was, how vital to my wellbeing.’
Dana was thinking that this sounded like heaven. She wasn’t sure she had that relationship with seclusion; she both wanted it and feared it. Or perhaps, she feared others’ reaction to her wish for that much solitude: maybe their conditioning shaped hers. That would explain her envy – that Nathan had gone ahead and lived the kind of solitude that she yearned for but didn’t trust herself to grasp. Nathan’s world seemed to her almost idyllic; to be floating through isolation. Most importantly: to be absolutely certain that the absence of people – or the lack of any goals – were virtuous aims in themselves, and not signs of an abjectly failing human being. She caught herself: back to investigative mode. Nathan had induced a reverie.
‘So, Mr Whittler, those brief periods when you had to then engage, on some level, with the world you left behind: they must have been particularly painful.’
Nathan looked again for his fate line. His voice dropped towards a whisper. ‘I don’t really want to talk about those… times. I know you’re a detective, and this is a police station, but all the same…’
‘Don’t misunderstand me, Mr Whittler. I’m not asking now about the what, where and how of those moments. I’m asking about the contrast between understanding how solitude can work for you, and having to spend any time in a world inhabited by others.’
‘Ah, I see. To be honest, Detective Russo, I’d struggled with that most of my life anyway, albeit in a different setting. As I assume you…’ He collected himself. ‘Well, anyhow, it wasn’t a different trade-off as such, just a different balancing point on the same set of scales.’
For a moment she feared he’d clam up, just when she sensed he was revealing something deep inside himself. She felt her breath resume when he did.
‘I’d always wanted more solitude than my life could practically offer. Now I was much further along that spectrum: but the same spectrum, and essential issue, were there. I still had to engage with people in some way, at some point. This time the engagement was more about observation, planning. It was, what’s the word? More… anthropological, I think.’ He nodded to himself, as if the exact word had only now occurred to him. ‘I studied humans for a particular reason, for a particular end: how to avoid them for the few minutes I was in their world. I could choose, after a fashion, when and how.’