In the end, W. doesn’t understand why people believe in God, or even what they mean by the word. He doesn’t have the insouciance of those who call themselves atheists, W. says. He doesn’t know what that word means.
When it comes to God, he keeps feeling he’s come up against something immovable, something through which he cannot pass. It’s not because he thinks there’s some mystical knowledge which he cannot quite reach — on the contrary — but that there is something he cannot think, something he cannot see that is called God, and all because of his personal stupidity.
Sometimes, W. dreams of collaborating with me, on a book on God. He dreams of a great outpouring of his intellect and passion. He dreams of honouring the legacies of Pascal and Weil, and uncovering the meaning of God in Cohen and Rosenzweig. He dreams of making Kierkegaardian leaps, and of foaming at the mouth in Dostoevskian fervour.
And what would I contribute? What would I bring to the project? — ‘You could explain your indifference’, W. says. ‘And then you could draw some cocks’.
A rest break in Jackson, in the early hours. Through the bus window, we admire our fellow passengers, standing about in the open air, their breath frosty. Who are they, our fellow travellers? Where are they heading? We are tired, travel-weary, but they’re fresh, expectant, ready for the world.
Distance means nothing to the American, W. says. Uprooting! The American rolls across the earth like dice, he says. One minute, the American’s married; the next, divorced. Then married again, then divorced again … Then starting a new career. Leaving one job, and beginning another on the other side of the state, on the other side of the continent …
Americans pack up and go! They move from state to state just like that! They think nothing of travelling vast distances, of relocating themselves, of starting new lives!
W. speaks movingly of the first migrants to America, who crossed via the vanished land bridge from Siberia. Of course, they were hunter-gatherers, he says. The disaster of agriculture, to which he traces the origins of capitalism, had not yet happened.
The mid-Neolithic: perhaps that’s when it all went wrong, W. muses. Once you have agriculture, you have concentrations of wealth. You have military specialisation! Predation! Man becomes a wolf to man! That’s what he’s learnt from playing Civilization 4, W. says.
Maybe we should become foragers, like our early ancestors. Maybe we should just go forth, living on berries and roadkill and whatever else we find. We dream for a moment of wandering across America, like the first wave of migrants who crossed the great landbridge. We dream of living on the fruits of America, on American generosity, the land spreading before us in all its bounty and the pair of us like idiot Whitmans in our blousy shirts.
Pigeon Forge. The end is nigh.
With every mini-golf course or water ride we pass, W. sinks lower. With every giant golden cross on a hilltop, every novelty motel and advert for apocalyptically-themed shows for all the family (Revelations: the Musical; The Seven Seals On Ice …), W.’s cries grow louder. Kroger’s, The Old Time Country Shop, more huge crosses looming over nowhere …
They’ve made a theme park of the End of Times! W. says. They’ve made a Disneyland of Armageddon!
W. hears laughter, but he doesn’t know from where. He hears laughter filling the air. Are they laughing at him, the Americans? They laughed at Mr Scheitz, and his mad ideas, W. says. They put him in jail. Is that where W.’s going to end up: in jail? And they laughed at Bruno, until he shot himself. Is that what I’m going to do, shoot myself? W. wonders. — ‘Don’t do it, fat boy!’
Night falls and we’re lost in the Smokies, looking for our cabin. Precipices to the left and the right. Our driver-host is edgy. The car’s too heavy! We passengers get out and walk — there’s ice everywhere, and the road’s too steep for the car.
The mountains tower above us. Starlight glitters on the icy road. Are we going to survive? Will we be lost forever in the wilderness? Doesn’t Dolly Parton live round here somewhere?
Then we see it: the cabin. It’s almost too late for W. He’s raving. What’s he doing here? How did he end up here? He can’t go another mile! He’s a non-passenger! A non-traveller! Not another mile!
Later, W. collapses on the balcony, still wet from the hot tub: a dying swan, half wrapped in his towels. What’s this country doing to him? he says. How did he end up here? We talk softly to him, over our Plymouth Gins cut with tapwater.
When he recovers, W. speaks movingly of the early blues players. Such short lives! But life is short! There’s not much time!
What need was there to come to America? W. asks. He’s learnt nothing here. His thought hasn’t advanced. Not one new idea! … The United States of Thought-Robbery, that’s what they should call it, W. says. The United States of Vastation and Waste …
Newcastle. — ‘There’s no sight finer’, W. says of the Tyne Bridge, which skims the roofs of the buildings in the gorge. You could touch its green underside from the highest of the roof-gardens. The streetlamps, painted the same dark green, jut upwards from the bridge sides, one hundred and fifty feet in the air. And the great arch of the bridge rises a hundred feet higher …
‘You need a project’, says W. ‘You need something to occupy you’. W. has his scholarly tasks, of course. He’s even deigned to collaborate with me. But I’ve never taken it seriously, our collaboration, not really. I’ve never risen to the heights he envisaged for me.
Hadn’t W. always wanted us to soar together in thought? Hadn’t he pictured us in his mind as two larks, looping and darting in flight — two larks, wings outstretched, flights interlaced, interwoven, together and apart; or as two never-resting swifts, following parallel channels in the air …
We were never to rest. We’d live on the wing, one exploring this, one that, but always reuniting, always coming together in flight, in the onrush of flight, calling out to one another across the heavens …
To think like a javelin launched into space. To think like two javelins, launched in the same direction, arching through the air. To think as a body would fall, as two bodies would fall — tumbling through space. Thinking would be as inevitable as falling under gravity. Thought would be our law, our fate … But we’d fall upwards into the sky … upwards into the heights of thought …
And instead? There is no flight: not mine, not W.’s. I am his cage, W. says. I am his aviary. What he could have been, if he’d left me behind! What skies he could have explored! But he knows that this, too, is an illusion, an excuse. He can blame me for everything. It’s my fault, he can say, even as he knows that nothing would have happened if he were free of me.
‘Take me to the sea!’, W. cries every time he visits. He has to see the sea! My North Sea is very different from his Atlantic, he says. It even looks colder, he says, as it comes into view behind the Priory.
Sometimes we pay to enter the Priory, so W. can see the weathered gravestones, whose inscriptions are no longer legible, and inspect what’s left of the bunkers, which are a kind of cousin to those at Jennycliff, with empty sockets where there were once gun placements. But today we’re on a mission. W. has to get air into his lungs, he says. And he needs a drink!