The Wilderness Read online

  “No, in real things. Didn't we used to talk in proper language, in mother tongues?”

  His stare is that of the bully, and he knows it. The stare he used to give Helen when he wanted his way.

  But his stare is returned coldly. She closes the folder and puts the lid on the pen to declare an end. “I have explained,” she says.

  “Again.”

  He slams his hand down on the desk and, without flinching, she finds his eyes perfectly and speaks into them.

  “Very well. In your brain there is a chemical called acetyl-choline, which acts as a lubricant, if you like, that allows messages to be communicated between neurons.”

  He nods. He likes the way her eyes fix on him.

  “Increasing the amount of acetylcholine in the brain increases the ability for neurons to communicate. Acetylcholine is broken down by an enzyme called acetylcholinesterase. The medication you've been taking restricts that enzyme. But it only does so temporarily; after a certain point—a point I suspect you have reached—the drug loses its ability to stabilize the enzyme production.”

  “How interesting and extraordinary,” he says. “It's—it's like entropy. Houses can't build themselves, that's the thing. That's the thing we're facing. Can't build themselves.” He finds he is firing the words rapidly, and that they are met with a frown. He stops. “And?”

  “That's it.”

  He brings his hand once more on the table. She blocks him with another of her tough looks, clears her throat, and continues. “As the levels of acetylcholine decline—”

  His eyes are locked with the fox-haired woman's as her big words come out stubborn and steady; he has the sensation of going down a slide, and at the same time watching himself go down that slide. Some part of him is just the cool observer, and when the sad little thrill has finished he will collect himself and wander off for coffee. The woman, meanwhile, is still talking and he has missed something she said. He brings his hands up to his chin.

  “Meanwhile the neurofibrillary tangles and the plaques worsen, and the medication can do nothing whatsoever for these. What you have is neuron loss, neurotransmitter loss, the destruction of synapses—no drug can recover what the brain erases.”

  “I understand,” he says, containing her wide, hard look.

  Gracious, important words between two adults. Not a single one of them remains to his memory, nor ever even found its target, but he and his fox-haired friend have engaged in the game, both knowing it is a game. They played. There is something about that, the playing, the meaningless movement of a knight here and a rook there.

  “Before you go today, I'll speak to Eleanor about what we've discussed—the tablets and so on. We can ease you off them gradually.”

  He nods. Though standing, and tugging at his jumper for buttons in the mistaken idea that he is wearing a coat, he does not let her escape his stare.

  “Why do I have brain damage?”

  “It's a disease, we don't exactly know why some people get it and others don't.”

  “Did I get it in an accident—did I hit my head? Some people have brain damage from accidents with the car.”

  “You don't have brain damage as such, Jake, you have Alzheimer's, and it's a disease.”

  “I know that.”

  Holding the door handle, she bends to pick some discarded paper from the floor. She screws it up, puts it in a—container. Takes it from one place, puts it in another without any apparent reason. Again, an emptiness as if the paper had never been there. And the next moment, seeing the emptiness, forgetting what was there—a pen? A shoelace? And interrogating the blank space, and feeling the eyes water as if trying for a lifetime of pointless tears, and then out of the door.

  “Did you know, my dear,” he says, addressing his fox-haired companion, “humans are the only things that ask why. Do you think that is our curse?”

  “Do you think we are cursed?” she asks.

  “Yes,” he replies.

  Without the headaches he feels better generally, more alive and astute, lighter. He and the dog take longer and livelier walks through thick, reddening countryside and a season he can name: autumn. The dog has a dear love of chasing, and anything he throws she will run for. Each time she sprints off up the road he stops doubting that she will come back and knows, absolutely, that they are not about to leave each other. He has remembered the art of wolf whistling from his childhood at the Junk, when the moors would take even the most piercing of sounds and one could whistle all day without the smallest effect. Now, like a reply coming decades after the call, the dog flies back to him up the lanes.

  And for the first time in years, before going to bed, he undresses and looks himself up and down in the mirror as if facing the enemy at last, and takes in what he sees with a tender, bewildered humour. Some prodding and pushing reveals that everything that was once functional is now redundant—the muscles that used to form the hard slab of stomach are now slack somewhere deep inside a round of pale fat. The legs are still long and sturdy, but the energy that used to flow down them has got trapped in the ex-stomach, and now, when he considers it, they hardly want to move at all. The eyes still shine, but they don't see very well. The genitals, once so instrumental, are now just part of the confusion. He holds them and experiences, for a moment, the great electric lurch of dream and desire; it flashes up through his body and forces his eyes closed, and then is gone as suddenly as it came.

  At the top of each of Joy's letters to him there are numbers, like so: 16.8.89. 18.12.62. 12.2.76. He takes a selection to the telephone and tries to dial them. 16.8.89. The telephone has no full stop, but in all likelihood that is just a way of writing and won't affect the number reaching the exchange. Multiple attempts fail, even when he tries to put some of the numbers together: 16.8.89.18.12.62. It fails too when, thinking that Joy may have encoded them as a particular and peculiar secret between them, he mixes them up: 16.18.89.62. All that comes back is a dull hum on the line.

  How he would like to talk to her! There are things he must tell her. Once they got talking they would find their theme and there would be no end to the flirtatious, anecdotal flow of it. Well, if he cannot telephone her he will write. Paper. Where does Helen keep paper? Things for writing. He finds one on the sideboard in the kitchen.

  In the first few years of letters to Joy he described to her Luigi Lucheni, a man looking up to the ceiling of his cell and knowing he is in the centre of a vortex. It is this thing called The Big Death—everybody in Austria is dying in preparation for the new century. By 1900 there will be nobody left; it is a cleansing, time purging itself. The musicians are all going (Brahms, Sara used to chant: Brahms 1897, Strauss 1899, Mil-löcker 1899), the two archdukes, the yellow woman and her child (lying dead in the woods, a gun in the mother's hand and her egg-yolk shoes running from her feet), and of course the empress Elisabeth with her black hair gleaming, Elisabeth who Lucheni has killed with his own hands.

  Elisabeth's ghost huddles next to the murderer, and she tells him that in The Big Death there are two sides: those who will survive and those who will die. It's a war of man against circumstance. He need not be scared, because she will save him from circumstance. She covers his body with her mink coat and her perfume settles round his neck.

  All this was once written to Joy in dark nights in the study, the paper lit by a torch on his desk, and as he had written he had dug out the newspaper clipping that he had found when he was around eight. It was a cutting from the Neue Freie Presse showing a picture of a short man in a black down-at-heel suit and hat, flanked by police. The man's face was set in a scowl and his clothes were too big. Amongst the columns of foreign words he found one he recognised: Lucheni. Lucheni, some kind of heroic figure and perverse superhero whose story had become one of his first memories. When Sara had told him the story of Lucheni it had never occurred to him that the man was real, and then suddenly there he was walking out of myth and into life.

  As an eight-year-old he had stood on a chair and lo
oked into his reflection in his bedroom window; he moved a leg to the left, back to the centre, practised distributing his weight into the most casual, thoughtless pose possible. Like Lucheni? He took a butter knife from the drawer and pushed it into his chest, then imagined his chest belonged to somebody else, that he was in the middle of the act of killing. Now like Lucheni? He pressed it into the old pillows on his bed, or into his kidneys and soft pockets of his body. He pushed it into the peat, and into a hard-boiled egg. Sara said that Elisabeth had come to the cell purely to forgive Lucheni. Every time he stabbed an object he then looked at it and wondered if it forgave him, and what forgiveness felt like, and why it made Lucheni so happy.

  In a reply to this letter Joy confirms that she has never yet had to forgive anybody, or been forgiven by anybody, so she can't answer that query. With this statement he remembers how young she is, and he is both dismayed and nourished by the fact. One day I'll haunt you, he says, so I can forgive you every one of the sins you haven't yet committed. One day I'll haunt you, she says in a letter that crosses his, so I can forgive you the sin you committed with me. They laugh about the duplicated sentiment and the word sin; they are both uncomfortable with it unless they can mock it.

  Still, Joy is quietly impressed with Lucheni, and is uncharacteristically girlish about his plight. Mad? Hanged himself? Isn't there a happier ending to this tale? But he tells her that he never meant to say so much about Lucheni, and has drifted from the central point of The Big Death. The content of their letters begins behaving like their convoluted letter chess, in which mail crosses mid-Atlantic and his pawn, that she has already swiped from the board with her rook, takes her queen, which has already moved out of the pawn's reach.

  (And then she tells him incidentally that Rook is so-named because when he was a child he went through a period of only ever moving in straight lines; maybe this was why Rook eventually migrated to the peat moors where all lines were straight? In his next letter he agrees, but it is too late, the point has moved on.)

  It goes on, the flurry of letters. But I must tell you, he writes again, about the relevance of The Big Death. He drafts it all out: his religion. His grandfather Arnold sitting at his desk in a deep, richly stocked bookshop, a Persian (or was it Siamese?) cat on his lap and a white (or was it black?) coffee in his trembling hand. In Sara's accounts Arnold always arrived via this same evocation: this big, nervous death-hunter trawling the news in the Neue Freie Presse for yet more reasons why he and his young wife needed urgently to have a child.

  He writes about the Conception Events, in which Arnold and Minna would spend days and nights in bed trying for a child, snacking on fried fish and hamantaschen, and eating sholent. He writes to say that at the end of The Big Death came a life: his mother's life, as though she were the resurrection of all those dead.

  This is his religion, he states in one of those eureka moments in which a man suddenly understands what kind of thing he is. The religion is ultimately Christian but without the problem of Christ. It allows him to understand his wife and to place himself in time. Granting him his Jewishness, it also explains a darkness in him and Sara, a seed of death in their stomachs which they treat with strong coffee. A seed of Lucheni in his brain, Lucheni who started the First World War which led to the Second World War which led to the extermination of their family: a seed in one's brain that grows into one's own extinction. An explanation, Joy, he wrote, as to why I can never love Helen completely, because there is no darkness in her.

  As he writes all this, at his desk in the sharp torchlight, he sees himself as that squatted Lucheni in the vortex of time, waiting for Joy, his sin, to come and rescue him from his sins. He craves her perfume, the weight on his neck of the fur coat her wealthy Jewish husband has bought her; he waits for her.

  In the next letter, under torchlight, he offers to come to California to be with her, and build a glass house overlooking the ocean, a house with a seamless steel frame and liquid walls. All she needs to do is say yes and he will leave everything and be there.

  Joy never gets this letter, or at least he assumes so, because her reply does not acknowledge it. She tells him about an argument she has had with her husband and how a barbecued lobster ended up in the swimming pool. She ends by instructing, knight E5 to F3. Perhaps, he concludes, his letter was dropped into the mid-Atlantic by mistake.

  He wakes with the idea that Helen is downstairs, and then realises that he is not in bed but at the kitchen table clutching a pen. The residue of a dream plays and replays an image of Alice appearing in sunlight from a bus. Always dreaming of Alice, always seeing her beauty through the haze of recent sleep. He stands from the table.

  “Helen?”

  There is nobody in the kitchen except the dog, who comes to him and presses herself against his leg. He pats her back heavily and goes to the living room, also empty. He finds, without knowing how, that D's letters are in his hand as if an extension to his own fingers. The envelopes are filthy, crumpled, but give out a certain heat and reassurance.

  “Helen?”

  He checks in the study. He is not at all sure if he really expects to find her; something tells him she is definitely not here and that she is dead. Dead of a stroke, they say, whatever that is. But dead? Does this mean she can't be here? What does it mean? Surely she is here, she has always been here. You were not faithful, he thinks with some relief—our score is not settled, and so you cannot be gone. We need to both be here so we can start again.

  He holds the letters to his stomach and goes from room to room. He gets lost, he picks his way back. Perhaps she is with Henry, stroking the child's hand and hair as she whispers, Sshhh bubba, sshhh. He thinks now of Henry, coddled by Helen, always loved in her arms or on her lap, having stories, cooking, their hair catching sunlight. Henry is the daughter and the son in one. Unreachable by the law or by the general filth of systems. Helen will save her child from systems. They look at art books, cookbooks, and Bibles. He calls her mumma, she calls him bubba, and with those downy words they draw the world around them.

  He makes a breakfast of toast and butter, curious as to why there seems to be no light outside yet. Maybe it's—the late season. The late season is so often dark.

  Then, by the living room's unlit fire, he sits and eats, and lets the television flicker in the background. He recalls a letter burning in the grate and a hundred fat-soaked newspapers, salt and vinegar on his fingers. Monkey goes to space. Israel does a thing. Egypt. If he waits here, the dog's head balanced on his leg and her black body curled out across the carpet like a contorted shadow of himself, Helen will possibly come.

  He draws his knees to his chest and crosses his ankles, a difficult position for a man of his size but he finds balance on his sitting bones and roots himself to the ground. He has no headache. Life seems closer: somehow his mother seems closer. His shoes are on, and a pair of trousers and his coat. This surprises him. He closes his eyes and an image of himself comes, kneeling over the human-skin Bible. Outside Helen wavers on the ladder in her pinafore as he turns to Psalms and reads. Shall thy wonders be known in the dark? And thy righteousness in the land of forgetfulness? The emotion of it is so pressing, yielding the feeling of something terribly lost and lost over again, that he squeezes his eyes tighter. The memory is clear and godly, so clear that it barely has the quality of a memory at all, but more that of—what is it? The feeling that one has been here before, and that time spirals rather than flows. He has been here before, he thinks. He will be here again.

  His mother is close. Is she dead? Alive? Dead. He is certain he remembers her dying, and the recollection is peaceful and fightless, almost as if she did not die at all but just moved rest-fully from one sitting position to another. She told him a story, then or some other time, about milk. About how there were once children who were born and were perfectly healthy until they drank their mother's milk, but in that milk was a disease that damaged their brains, and they kept drinking and kept drinking the very stuff that gave them lif
e, and all the time it was taking their lives. Until they were blank and empty. Until their pale skin was a shore of washed-up milk.

  Why would she tell him this story? He wonders if it relates to the woman and child in the woods. Or if it relates to nothing, just another unexplained story that she told as she always did, as if she were forever showing him grains of sand but never showing him the beach.

  Then other images play: a flock of coloured birds flying up into a pyramid of glass (surely not a memory, more likely a dream). A brown car passing like silk along an American highway. Quail Woods being cut down, the trees massive to his small child's mind. Alice in a blue dress with a large felt raspberry that Helen had sewn onto the front and Henry running in the garden after a plastic plane. Sara pouring endless streams of coffee as if to substitute for affection, her large white hands handing him a cup, handing it over, handing it over like birds in flight. Now those brain-damaged children again; how he feels for them, and how sick he feels to think of them at the breast dying piece by piece.

  Then his wife comes to him in a form she has so often come to him. It is a fantasy. She is wearing a miniskirt, that miniskirt that he so well remembers with the red stitching on denim and the small pockets that were good for nothing. He had always imagined that it was theirs, not hers. It was something they might take from the cupboard some rainy afternoons, use for the duration of lovemaking, and put away again. An erotic agreement between them.

  He is still surprised by how unsophisticated this fantasy is, and how the more elementary it is the more arousing. His fantasy requires that she is naked from the waist up, dressed only in the skirt, her hair plain, and her eyelids tinged yellow, and her head directed to the centre of the living room, resting on the human-skin Bible. The room is empty and featureless, the fire out, a cup of water near to them that they never touch. There is no before or after, no baby, no milk, just that lone unmitigated act.