And even that faculty of memory, which as I’ve told you, I don’t have because I’ve lived nothing to remember except that trip from the birth canal to the incinerator you’re tired of hearing about — you, with your corporeal ability to create memories, don’t always retain the ability to hold on to them, and that can be either your kind of deprivation or your protection against the suffering I see you’re subject to in the stages of mortality. There’s an old man I know in my way, whose occupation of your kind of life is the same chair each day and whose corporeal activity is moving between it and the bathroom on a contraption like one I’ve seen infants supporting themselves on as they are learning to walk. He was a scaler of mountains and once was part of an Everest expedition that if it did not reach the summit gallantly survived an attempt in dangerous weather conditions; friends and even an occasional journalist come to talk to him about this, and while he smiles with pleasure to be reminded that it must have been an experience somewhere in the past that has abandoned him, he cannot relive any moment of it. The friends and the journalists find this sad; it depresses them and I’m the one who knows why, because while I’m living their experience I accept the meaning within them they suppress: living is growing old on the way to death, losing those faculties they treasure so much, and although they think their lives are choices, there are the two stages over which they don’t have any choice — to be born, and to die.
But when I’m experiencing the old man I reach into something else laid away in his past to which he no longer has access. He dearly loves his wife (feeling this, with my own precocious, arrested awareness of sexuality, those genitals I was at least equipped with, I have an inkling of what I’ve missed, the joy she, my greedy twin, robbed me of as she shouldered me aside). The wife is much younger than the old man, she lies beside him and the life that is in her keeps him going, she buries her warm face in the grave between his jaw and skeletal shoulder-blade. She is the joy I experience in him and he’s going to die happy because he does not remember the long love affair she had with another man, in the middle years of their marriage, which caused him such violent misery and demeaning jealousy, and almost — imagine that, since he possesses her totally now — led him to divorce her.
And she? Isn’t that female lucky? Not merely forgiven, if you please! It never happened. The cheat never lied. The bitch never came home and sat at dinner with another man’s semen inside her. But don’t be too sure about her. I know in her that other something I’ll never have: remorse. In her chest there’s a tightening as if a drawstring has pulled together all that she did, that time, there’s an emotional congestion she can’t relieve by asking, as she longs to, his forgiveness. For what? he would say, lovingly. For what, my darling? And to remind him would be the final cruelty of all she did to him.
But there’s even more to it. The complexity of these lives of yours between birth and death! I wake up as her in the night and she raises herself to listen for his breathing. Her love for him is devastating. She has never contemplated death but now knows sorrow will be silence.
And how does she live, that sister who twinned my life with hers in the closest meaning of the word, worse than any freakish Siamese twinning, for she grabbed the chance, the oxygen, at any cost. Does she live it up, doubly, for both of us who fought it out in the womb? The odd thing is, I can’t take on, as I do here and there, as the fancy moves me, her consciousness and subconscious. I have difficulty even in identifying her. I can’t find her. Sometimes I think I’m on the wave-length … but it’s just a choking exclamation that strangles. It’s the umbilical cord that was round my neck. Never mind her; how would I have lived — quite unlike her, for sure, however her way might have turned out to be. I can’t pretend to be without prejudice; I can’t imagine, in the here-and-there of the lives I light upon, anything particularly interesting or fulfilling for her. I don’t think she merits it. But I should like to experience her, to confirm this. Although I would have been a man (evidence that outsize bunch between the legs of the wretched little corpse) if I had not been still-born, my disembodied state, as you’ve no doubt noticed, means that I can enter both male and female experience — in my own way.
Don’t think it’s all grave. (No pun intended.) Only now — what you would call a little while ago, or a day ago, in your measuring-out of your time — I was on a bicycle with curved handles like the horns of some swift beast. The bicycle and I were cutting a swathe through the air up a tree-lined street. Gateways, houses, telephone poles sliced away from us on either side, leaves and branches rushed out to meet — and just missed — us. On my head was a yellow casque slashed with red arrows. I had eyes that could see as keenly as fish in the depths of an ocean. I had a heart: I was that pump, a creature whose corporeality was all one pulse of energy. Glory. Mouth open to gulf wild laughter. Whoever you were, half-grown boy: I understood from you what it means to be alive!
Glory.
Some I’ve come upon can’t find it simply, as the boy did, in this life that you complain about continually yet cling to fiercely — even abjectly, as I’ve come to know, in circumstances you yourselves bring about. Like ticks on the body of the world, you suck there inert until you bloat and fall off. Ugh.
Glory: there are others — completely other. They believe it can’t be experienced in corporeality, it belongs to something they visualize: an after-life. Which must be the opposite term of still-born (you can tell I hang around intellectuals and amateur philosophers). Perhaps that’s where I belong, if anywhere: their after-life, because I’ve missed out what’s inbetween. How do they get to their after-life? Strapped to the chest of that other being I took on — hardly older than the bicycle rider, he must have been — was a device with a stopper like a heavy pin. The thing was hard against the breast-bone under a flowing garment; on the crown of the head I was also aware of an embroidered skullcap. The pin came out with an easy tug. There was an embrace more passionate than any I’ve been privy to, and without boasting, I don’t mind telling you there’ve been quite a few, between men-and-men and women-and-women, as well as the kind of woman-man one that half-created me. This one was between man and man and the climax was an orgasm unlike any other, unsurpassable, an explosion that ended everything, for both. There was nothing to remember of it, for him, my chosen partner, just as for myself, who can only borrow memory. I don’t know if the Believer I was, for a while, for the flashed duration of the embrace, received the reward of the after-life, and if it was better than the one that flew apart in darkness beyond any dark. I left him at that moment of nothingness. You will perhaps know because you will have lived, whereas I have never existed in my own right, and if you don’t experience life you don’t experience its end. I suppose I could go on the way I do for ever, while you, my friend, you will come to that nothingness one way or another, in bed slowly or fast on a highway, even if it is extremely unlikely that anyone would find reason to bring you into a final clinch with a grenade.
The victim for whose last embrace I was decisive was, of course, a political leader. I don’t make moral judgments, despite the bits and ends of theoretical justice I’ve picked up, so I don’t know if he had it coming to him. And if he did, did he deserve it? There’s not enough sequence in my fragments of experience to judge what I’ll risk as the most important question for you: does killing really solve any of the conflicts between you, and what you claim as your countries, your boundaries? I mean, you can’t turn me away at Immigration, so how can I presume to know what cans you like a commodity, contains your individual experience as imprinted within you from the day you’re born Here or There rather than Somewhere Else.