The Wilderness Read online

  Demolish, drastic, drip. Each word a stone, one in this pocket, one in that. Day and demolish here, drip and develop there. Each word, he imagines, straightens him. He begins to feel their weight sincerely. There are moments when the sheer challenge of his illness feels blessed; he rises to it and the elevation brings new air to breathe, and memories come sharp as shards from nowhere, like this man and the beach. He thinks now, as he often thinks, that perhaps he is not ill at all, or if he is it is very mild, or his case is quirky and reversible; it is, after all, not like him to get old and unwell. He was always going to be assassinated in public like the empress Elisabeth. He was going to haunt his murderer as Elisabeth haunted Lucheni. There was simply no option concerned with fading away in cautious, anxious increments; it is not like him to forget who he is.

  He can see Eleanor through the kitchen window, in the garden heaving up weeds; he thought she had gone out, or that she was not here today at all. He can't remember waking up with her this morning and her putting on that pearl-coloured suit jacket and trousers she is wearing now, tight over her broad figure. Her hair is illogical and her shoulders rounded against the effort of gardening.

  The letters are still there on the kitchen table, forgotten about. Each time he comes back to them he has to begin the whole logical process again, fumbling with them, feeling unease fold itself up into fear, calculating the outcomes, then, in response to it all, wandering away in a state of pure distraction, his moral vigilance gone.

  He makes coffee, pouring the grinds in, releasing the handle, hearing the water shoot through. Then he crushes ice, thinking that by now it must be late enough in the day for his first mint julep, and he assembles the drink with a careful adoring rigour. He sits. It is his greatest pleasure to have a mint julep in the afternoon followed by coffee and to see the evening in slightly intoxicated, his brain responding to the chemicals in his blood and the sense of life being to hand, and something waiting around the corner.

  The water trickles through the coffee machine. He fidgets against the need to urinate. Eleanor comes in from the garden and washes her hands, commenting on the smell of the coffee. It occurs to him that there is little or no smell, not of coffee, nor of the delightful sugar, mint, and bourbon of the julep, nor the generic smell of the house, nor, he discovers, his own skin. There are smells perhaps, but they are ghosts. He puts his mug down on the table and breathes in deeply, closing his eyes.

  “The cherries are coming,” Eleanor says with a forced brightness.

  He is relieved by her brightness and forces his own, smiling and pushing his breath out through his nose. She runs her hand over his head and down his arm, holding his hand, then she comes behind him and presses her chest against his head, stroking him.

  “Have you learned your words?” she asks. “We'll have to go soon.”

  He brings his hands to a prayer position. “Dynasty, develop, drip”—he pauses—“demolish, diamond, depend, desecrate, dilapidate.”

  Eleanor walks to the tap and pours herself some water, spilling it down her as she drinks.

  Poor Eleanor, he thinks; it makes him feel better to think it. He repeats it to himself as he watches her sponge up the water with tissues. Poor Eleanor, poor Eleanor, and feels the coffee wake him to a sense of himself as a tall man, a good tall man, a free man who can get up any time he wants and walk away.

  Eleanor waits outside as she always does. He has been here before, he knows the room, and he knows the chair he has to sit in. As he takes a seat opposite the young woman the anticipation of before is replaced with a sudden fear and boredom. She is a woman, also a doctor or some such person. He wants to please her, he will not please her. The letters spring to his mind then sink back into a grey confusion. The woman's hair is as red as fox fur and she looks like, out of that uniform, she would not want be here at all asking this deranged old man what day it is. Her green eyes offer no solace. He coughs.

  In the fifteen minutes that follow she takes the role of a ringmaster. He jumps, as obligingly as possible, through her hoops. She holds up objects: What is this? And this? What is this called? She makes notes and instructs him to fold a piece of paper in half, in four, into a triangle.

  A triangle?

  With the paper in quarters he looks to her for encouragement. He knows what a triangle is, it has three sides. How to make it from this? She tells him not to worry and asks him to count back from one hundred in multiples of seven; he does so until he reaches seventy-two and then is overcome with a weary anger, like that of the tiger who burns his paw going through a ring of fire and reflects long enough to wonder why on God's earth it must do this useless thing.

  “Why am I here?” he asks suddenly. She looks at him long, a little pitifully, as if she is unsure what level the question is functioning on.

  “We have to keep track of where you are,” she puts her fingers lightly to her temple, “so we can make sure you have the right medication and the right care.”

  He nods.

  “And where am I?”

  “Where we would expect,” she says, leafing through papers in his file. “It's rather routine.” She lets her pen swing loosely between her fingers like a pendulum as she thinks. “You had a list of words, Jake, beginning with d. Can you tell me some of them? Any of them.”

  She sits back in her chair, combing her fox hair with her fingers. How old is she? Young. Youngish. He contents himself that she is middle-aged, feeling that many people are middle-aged, the middle age being that which one sinks into on this great mattress of life. She looks beached, he thinks grimly. Cast like a horse. He no longer likes her. She would once have been pretty but now she is just irritating, and he is not going to pass this test. He can't even recall what it is she wants him to do.

  “I'm sorry, could you just repeat that?” he says.

  She nods in a businesslike fashion, but she looks unravelled. “You had a list of words beginning with d. Can you tell me some of them?”

  He feels like an old tiger winding its jaded flanks around the ring, spying the scarlet-lipped woman from the corner of its eye, and seeing its weariness in her own.

  “D,” he says, tapping his fingers. He closes his eyes to recall his loop of the house, the leaf banister, the draughty books. He wreathes like smoke up and down the two staircases. “Day,” he ventures. “Dip.” He is standing at the shore filling his pockets with stones; there are no children, only an ocean hushing out his logic with its expansive to-fro. He feels becalmed. “Dog,” he says.

  After a long pause the woman leans forward. “Any more?”

  “Yes, yes, there are a lot.” Sitting up straight, he joins his palms and strokes the bristle on his chin, giving his whole body to his mind. “Do,” he offers tentatively. She puts down her pencil. “That's fine,” she says.

  He still has each of Joy's letters, a vast number by now. Letters from America, American stamps, their prices going up with the years. Here under the bed they are shored up in an almost violent darkness, sheathed in a leather satchel displaying the letters J.J. Instinctively, like an animal checking its territory, he smells the envelopes, particularly the small patches of semi-transparence where Joy (also like an animal, leaving her mark) had used to drop scented oil. The paper, once so ripely perfumed, gives little or no smell now.

  What a gruesome mess. Secret letters from Joy to him. Secret letters from a man to Helen. Joy is a secret from Eleanor, Eleanor from Joy. Helen had a secret engagement; he kept it a secret that he ever knew about the engagement. The fox-haired woman—he is keeping the badness of it all a secret from her. Is this a normal life? All these deceptions; he will not be able to maintain them when the brain goes. Maybe it is the deceit that has rotted the brain. Already he is unsure whether Eleanor knows about the letters to Helen, or whether he has spoken to her about them. He feels the insufficiency of himself, the completely unsatisfactory way he has lived his life.

  Yet when he opens Joy's letters at random and immerses himself in the words—not th
e meaning of them as such, just the words alone and their shapes—they do not feel deceitful, but rather the most honest thing in his life. Maybe they are pathetic, maybe they are, but they make him happy. The early letters, being the ones he has read the most, are thoroughly compressed in his mind, their contents rich and resinous. In those letters he and Joy were still able to draw on their physical memory of each other, and he could reference the fading of a bruise she had seen, and she could reference the fading of the hair dye that had been so new and red on their night together.

  For a time it was always about fading. There was nothing they could say about their relationship—which had not even lasted twenty-four hours—except to express the loss of it. These are not the letters he wishes to find; he has lingered enough over the stench of loss—for it is a stench, no matter how sweetly packaged—and he has grown too old, surely, to spend time being unintelligent with love. He wants to read the letters as they evolved into something more reasoned—those letters in which he was most himself.

  After some weeks of writing back and forth across the Atlantic, he and Joy began to play letter chess, the games continuing for weeks or months and Joy habitually destroying him; he had never been good at having too much thinking time, the more he thought the less bold he became and the more he would venture off into fool's errands with his pawns. While he went about defending his king she rampaged across the board with her knight and wiped him out.

  Around these games the letters became more confident, more neutral, more pragmatic. Joy told him what clothes to buy to make himself modern. (He had so wanted to be modern, and she, with her startling red hair and rimmed eyes, and her androgyny that dismissed all notions of bellies and hips he had once held dear, was modernity in human form.) When he could, he took her advice. Helen liked the clothes Joy recommended; he came to believe that the three-way arrangement brought about a harmony that two people alone could never accomplish.

  What pleased him in Joy was that she showed herself to be a factual, practical person; she was fed up with women who skewed all they saw with the wide curves of sentiment and empathy, as if their thoughts could not come straight but had to be filtered through their bodies first. She said she was homesick, so had bought herself an American dictionary and a book on Californian history to indoctrinate herself against England. These tactics having not worked well, he informed her that America was a huge grid. Each township was originally six miles square, that is, how many? How many square miles, he now wonders? He can remember the letter perfectly, and the stolid exhilaration he felt when he wrote it, and yet the sum disintegrates in his brain. Fifty? A hundred? A thousand? It is so painfully frustrating to not know; but he is tired, increasingly tired and agitated, and he has never been able to think clearly when tired and agitated. All the same, six miles square. A huge grid, a huge pattern like an immense chessboard. To counter her longing for home she had to stop seeing America as something that was never quite England, and start seeing it as a game she needed to learn to play.

  Then came the confessionals—the lighthearted list of everybody he had slept with prior to Helen. It wasn't a great number, but enough, he was thirty-two after all. (He could not make that list now—names all gone, a few faces remain as a sort of puppetry but they could belong to anybody.) Joy had no such list. At twenty, he was her first.

  Amongst the letters here is a little package wrapped around with elastic bands which, when opened, contains leaflets and pages of text entitled AIPAC: American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Joy's husband was Jewish. He doesn't even know if the man is still alive; in any case he belonged to AIPAC in order to lobby for Israel's rights—he knows this because he reads the leaflets in front of him. At the time these leaflets, and Joy, and her husband, had unwittingly granted him permission to honour his past, not by running backwards to find it but by standing up for its future.

  He remembers that Joy would send him the latest news from the committee, and indulged him where others would not in this path towards himself he so wanted to follow, and through it they became allies in a joint cause. There seemed to be so little difference between allies and lovers—or at least one seemed a condition for the other—and they are still allies now, he thinks. Joy is always on his side, always fighting his war; heaven knows, Joy has been the only person in his life who has even recognised there is a war to fight.

  It was two years or more before Joy sent any photographs of herself; he had kept asking, trying to stave off her demise into ghostliness. The photographs, of course, he still has. Joy in the bright bleached Californian garden, Joy on a sun lounger in the garden, Joy eating lobster on a sun lounger in the garden, her hair no longer red but (interpreting loosely from the black-and-white) a far more civilised earth brown, flooding to her elbows. Joy's overlong over-tanned body clung to by a pair of shorts and a cotton shawl and a man—her husband. He struggles for the name briefly and then decides to let it go. Joy's body adorned by a ball gown and hunks of ruby and a man, her husband. Joy's body wrapped in a faux-fur throw that does not become her and is bought, and owned, as she is herself, by a man, her husband. Joy's body, wrapped in nothing, clung to by nothing except some shadows and light. Joy's naked body in front of a photographer's tripod in a series of modest poses that use cushions and armchairs and silk screens and Indian fabrics, all of which are chosen specifically to strike against her skin in the most flattering and tastefully sexual way. Joy's naked body in a series of immodest poses that use the same cushions, armchairs, screens, and fabrics as nothing other than gratuitous props for one inevitable sexual overture that he found amazing, and amazingly unbearable.

  She sent pictures of her husband, too, as if she expected him to show them to his children or pin them on the cork-board in the kitchen. He inspected the man—his slick and charming demeanour and leaking intimacy. He was a man with undeniable charm; he had not thought this was Joy's taste, and then realised that he had no idea what Joy's tastes were, or even who she was. He might have fallen out of love with her there and then had it not been for one photograph of her standing in a car park, just standing, looking blankly away from the camera clearly unaware she was under the lens. She looks thin, a little haughty, a little fuck you. To him, this was Joy—the woman who in her most unguarded moments was guarded, and in her most inelegant moments was elegant. And into that aloof, black, white, and grey metallic tarmac scene he could, with confidence, inject some colour. That dress she was wearing was yellow, he knew it, he knew that dress. He, in the spirit of the pioneer, in the spirit of the man who illuminates through his knowledge, could put colour where it was not. Joy in her yellow dress.

  In a letter written a few months after the photographs came, she said that it was no good, she did not belong. America had her but did not want her, it just tolerated her presence. Had he seen the photographs? Did he see the costumes she wore just to entertain this gruelling, demanding America? She was playing the game at full tilt with all her faculties attuned, dressing up, playing up, learning the accent, learning to spend dollars without converting. But it was a game. Perhaps she would come home, she didn't after all think much of—the man, her husband—anyway; perhaps she would come home and live in Rook's eccentric house or find some of her family in Italy.

  He drafted a reply. He told her that because America was divided into square grids, every so often there had to be an extra bit of land that wasn't a mile square, to account for the earth's curvature, just as there is an extra day in the year every so often to account for time's curvature (and this day, he added incidentally, is Henry's birthday). He suggested the bit of land she lived on must be one of those extra bits that did not quite fit, which was why she could never make America feel like home.

  She wrote back jubilantly. Of course, she would move. The problem would be solved. They had already started looking.

  He was equally jubilant at her happiness. He told her that since money was no object she should move to somewhere with a great deal of glass and a view of the ocean.
She could stand there on a shag-pile rug and sip martinis.

  No, no, she wrote. Not martinis—the rage these days, the thing you drink if you want to be modern, is mint juleps. At the bottom of the page she wrote out the ingredients and a few quick instructions. Mint, ice, sugar, bourbon. The smell, she wrote. The smell—heavenly! Once you've smelt the sugar and mint, you will never, dear Jake, go back to martinis.

  These branches and leaves look like chaos, but they are not. There is a pattern. Each leaf has a pattern, and each bit of bark, and each pattern in the leaf has a smaller pattern. And the patterns are repeated, and the patterns of the patterns are repeated.

  He walks the wide path looking above him at the tree canopy. The branches lattice in mad arrangements across the sky. The sky is pristine with light, it is true sky-blue, and he is warm under it, hot even. Sara insisted that there were patterns here, and that the madness had methods finer than the eyes could comprehend. Mathematics held it together. Clasps of numbers cohered what the eyes saw as separate. Of course he agreed; he went so far as to say that the logic going through the leaves must proceed infinitely through all things, at which she called him reckless for his choice of expression. She did not believe in words like infinite; it was that very optimistic carelessness in Helen that she balked at. One does not see infinity, one cannot put a value to it, nor measure it in stones.

  He enjoys looking up. Upwards, being on the vertical plane, is not connected to time. He is troubled by the recollection of Eleanor talking to the fox-haired woman, nodding, her arms crossed, and that look of sympathy softening the wrinkles around her mouth. Apparently he is struggling with numbers and shapes, but his words are good—his ability to label things is still very good. He cannot accept this; he realises that he has no real wish to label things. If he can no longer call a tree a tree, it is sad, pathetic, but the tree will go on. But if he can no longer calculate or piece together through numbers then the invisible sense, the sense behind the apparently chaotic stray of branches and leaves, is gone. Order will be a dream he once had that has melted like glass, slowly and quite imperceptibly.