— Probably sleeplessness does it. And a sort of weird forgotten memory of, a wish –
— A wish? For what?
— To die again. And a fear. They go together. Sometimes I think that during my death I became everyone I know.
— But you didn’t die, Laurence.
— A sort of love, perhaps, which I left behind. Because at other times I feel appalled and overwhelmed by the ineffectualness of love, or friendship, or tolerance. Or perhaps I only mean the ineffectualness of my own, for I feel none of these things, they died with me, so that I can’t after all expect anything from them.
— You say, at other times, you mean like now?
— Like now. Forgive me, Tim, I don’t know what’s come over me.
— I think I know. But if I put it into words it would sound mean and disagreeable. Everything I say nowadays sounds mean and disagreeable, after I’ve said it.
— I suppose pure scientists tend to get frightened of words, because they don’t use them. I believe that poets also get frightened of them, for the opposite reason. But it all comes to the same thing in the end. We all have to face the same facts.
— I think, perhaps, I will talk to Sally. Insofar as I can. And to Brenda.
— Why Brenda?
— My eldest daughter. You’ve met her many times. You don’t have much memory for names, do you?
— No. For some reason –
— But then, as you would say, what do names matter? She takes her common entrance next year. An upheaval wouldn’t do her any good. Maths and physics. Yes, she takes after me. Bright girl, brighter than the other two. Yours also, I gather. But then, women in science, you know, they don’t reach the top flight. Still, I will talk to her. Harvard, after all.. But then –
The permutations of desires start grinding round his inner automation at the slow speed of unhealing time, rejecting in each cycle the one decoying premiss in two parts a and b with the basement of his life feeding in again the same two blocking items. Unless perhaps I have pushed his atoms a little towards his daughter’s physics with a word thrown in that might make rings around those infinite distances and lasso him with more widening circumstances, him, Sally, Brenda and the less bright other two whose names I can’t remember.
Inside the mirror on the landing of my consulting-room the shape stares back, spinning meridians, latitudes and spirals that grow and fill the entire glass but silently, emanating no messages, no nervous handwriting, no atoms of any anger, love or wonder. Something however creates the undulations and if not anger or love then some nebulous memory, surely, behind the eyes. But the eyes close to avoid the issue of their death and amazing recovery. The pain behind them resolves the optical image in the dark, as with a change of lenses, so that inside the mirror the tall thin man stares back, as before death, before recovery, as when life took its normal course through blood-vessels, nerve-fibres, muscle spindles, tendons, flesh and such.
These ache. Their returned presence mocks the spinning curves, the latitudes and spirals and the wavering outlines that grow suddenly monstrous before vanishing as if they had not wavered or spun there at all, curves doubling, trebling each other’s trebles like water rippling from a stone thrown or a word perhaps, filling the entire mirror or, with some others, the whole room, bursting its walls, the house, the street, the square or the whole sky. The blood-vessels, nerve-fibres, muscle spindles ache, form some sort of presence, something to hold on to at least, such as the doorknob that moves away into a shaft of light where hangs the voice of a remote girl-spy with all its wavering outlines widening out from a small dry foetus of well how do you feel today into a threnody of unacknowledged anguish that fills the room, bursting its walls, the house, the entire sky untenable because I have come to the conclusion that you see radiation, Larry, and radiation consists after all of decay, degeneration so that you see the death that lies inherent in all living existence but why? why me?
— I don’t know, Larry. Don’t you remember anything, a moment, a non-temporal moment perhaps, of total knowledge, or total intuition, some final decision for or against made in the light of the person you had become midway through life in the dark wood?
— For or against what?
— For or against, well, the clarity of total consciousness.
— No, I remember nothing but opaqueness. Or something perhaps –
— Like, volition? As opposed to will?
— moving through space, forewards but back at the same time, as if I consisted of anti-matter for ever cancelled out –
— That makes no scientific sense.
— as if in all our words and gestures, acts and attitudes we effected some sort of parallel penetration into whatever had originated them, their primeval atom, say, with built-in unstableness.
— Well, not built-in, Larry, the instability would have occurred in the next moment of creation, together with time and space, causing, at once or ultimately, the big bang or whatever. The moment between nothingness and time. Or, if you like, between eternity and time. So vice versa. The moment of death, neither before nor after, affording a non-temporal transition in time from one state to another, through which the two interpenetrate into a total consciousness of both the whole of before and the whole of after, the first enabling you to choose once and for ever, don’t you remember anything?
— Since I didn’t in fact have to choose, clearly none of that can have occurred, if it does at all, how could it? Sometimes I feel that during my death I became everyone I know, even my patients perhaps, whose names and the names of whose neuroses I can’t remember, whose aggressions, inabilities and blindnesses I have absorbed over the years, unless mine perhaps, so that how could I choose? Do you believe that possible: at the moment of death, instead of facing oneself, if at all — but what exactly happened to me, Brenda, did I really die?
— I don’t know. The doctor said so many things, such as most satisfactory in the circumstances –
— but then circumstances do not touch everyone with the same meridians –
— or that recent experiments in resuscitation have shown that life ebbs away slowly, and can remain a long while in a body otherwise incapable of it. They can maintain life in some organs as you know. But sooner or later comes a moment — which they can always tell, except — well, they can’t tell one thing, the precise moment when the soul has left the body.
— The soul, Brenda?
— The psyche, you prefer to call it.
— Oh names, what do names matter? Sometimes I feel that during my death I became quite unsettled she looks as the latitudes and spirals fill the room again out of some word perhaps thrown in to split a nucleus unstable inside the small dry foetus of interest which grows into an anxious query about death, her own, not merely that of others, briefly but hugely glimpsed, personally envisaged not dispassionately observed, so that the cells whirl round their alarming morse around the lymphatic glands, which he said they should examine too with radio-active isotopes. They couldn’t do it before, I mean in your state of health, they couldn’t submit you to further tests, and at first they said you had nothing organically wrong with you, no, not your eyes or ears either, nothing at all, just nerves. That ache, and blood vessels, muscle spindles, bones flesh and such that form some sort of presence to hold on to, such as your patients. Shouldn’t you perhaps start seeing a few patients again?
The voice leaps from the shaft of light saying how do you feel and things like that they’ve telephoned, many of them. Many? Well, several. It might do you good.
— I’d hardly call that a sensible reason for seeing patients. Whose names I can’t remember and whose aggressions, inabilities and blindnesses I have absorbed over the years so that I couldn’t possibly have chosen anything if any choice occurs inside the latitudes and spirals that fill the room, forming an anxious query about death as traced with radio-active isotopes leaving something behind, volition perhaps as opposed to will which, when it finally catches up can in a sudden flash say gug, grr, pa-pa like a doll bent.