“—although you know I do. Talking to you is like talking to her, someone who can’t say what she thinks, if she can think at all…”
The silence puts its hand on her stomach.
“I’m so angry with you. I can’t say, ‘Here we are. Flowers, your mug.’ That’s what they have in mind. Alec. That’s what the doctors think will bring you back. I can’t do it. I won’t say mindless things. How could—what have you done? We never even—how has this happened?” The mirror sticks out its glass throat. “Before we were married, in Canada, I had my doubts. I’ve never said. I never minded very much about the rest. If you can hear me, this is what I remember.”
The wall is running with moisture.
“I had to get that plane and we were in the hotel, in that awful twin-bed room. You didn’t want to come downstairs. I had to say, ‘I’m going now.’”
The condensation in the room recalls a winter window, yellow and opaque. Behind it, as you pass by in the street, families argue, laugh, and children dangerously imitate their parents’ tone of voice.
“And you were going to stay there, in the room, and not come down to see me off. I had to say. My heart was thumping and you must have seen. I had to tell you what to do, and you looked blank, like you do now. Oh Christ. You haven’t any idea.”
She really laughs at that, then hides her face.
The how of life is unconscious, a kinesis switched on or off. The what is giving birth to live young in the corner—learning who it is and furnishing its own sensorium, the room of life—before the equations open and close the door and everything is how it is outside, and dark, with no more light.
Now it is growing cold. My family go south and die.
The golden teardrop of the cave’s entrance freezes, and there is only crystal day, fading, the mountains and the plain and air covered by ice. I sleep. It is a long and measureless winter. Eventually the thaw begins. Bulldozed material piles up outside the cave during the melt. The sun is not so much altered, but kindlier and seasonal as misfit streams burst through a new ravine, carved from the plain, and wash the glacial moraine away. The age of pole-flints, scrub, and tundra disappears. The sea rises. Forests of birch and alder move in, rivers, coastal settlements appear—people at rest.
A show is anything that happens on a stage.
A man hunts deer and has good teeth. His people set up fishing camps, their huts have frames of branches bound together by tree bark, the roofs are hide. Sometimes the sea thrashes about for days, and then the people take revenge, staying at home to whittle harpoons from their antlers, seasoning the tips in fire and working them into a point. The tempered weapons smell of hair. The animal’s backstrap is cut out and its fibers used to sew the people’s clothes. There are so few of them, the men, the women, and their silent gazing young. Five thousand in this cold peninsula.
They know my cave but have not found my bones. The people move with the solstice. Wild men, exiles, turn up and spend thin evenings watching fire, breaking mussels, tracing a map in the ashes to work out where they’ll be the day after, next moon, next year; or drawing a rabbit. Those ears! One year the fishermen capture a stag. The shaman in the tribe works holes into its cranium, to which he fixes painted hide, a headdress that transforms the man into a mutable creature, man, animal, insect, and tree. He dives into creation to meet fear.
He sees and does not speak. He feels the land changing its shape.
The world has fallen, far beyond the northern limits of vision. Across the country, many strides, the place of strange tongues, trade and encounter; the great cord tying everyone to the unknowable beyond has come undone. An inundation at first light. The shaman can hear voices raised in powerless alarm. He looks into a sea-fed pool, ripples of something he cannot explain. The elder’s son arrives shouting to interrupt his sense-making. The boy’s shadow darkens the pool, his hunting pouch brimful of shells to show the magician. The shaman watches the shadow and feels a deep cold pain, as of a person drowning, shocked into a total clarity of being with the seawater rocking at eye level, then nothing more.
He knows that other boys have become shells themselves.
A wave has swept those shadow-lives away and cut the cord: all this is written in the pool’s lichens, its crustaceans and kelp. A bigger push of water overfills the pool and from their nursery the little crabs are lifted and expelled.
A few survivors in the East—one child, women, and elders who were garnering in the wood—know they have lost their grip on order in the world. They ask their own shaman, their shadow-magician, for saving lore and guiding prophecy, but prophecy is not advice. It cannot save. You can’t escape its fulfillment because it’s you, and how it is to have a life, which is to leave it wondering.
Consider these events proceeding from that long, arduous fight with the mammoth, the cosmic flickering of causes and effects, glimpsed in the last second of how it was to be a hunter in the Pleistocene—leaving, well, what?
A droplet from the ceiling of the cave and a lid falling shut. The key turned in a secretaire or jeweler’s box. Winter, a circuit diagram of trees; and winter fairs, the times we are wanton, where everything that happens has a wild intensity—that child sliding across the ice, that gaff lad fucking in the chairoplane’s paybox—which riot repeats itself in rides and roundabouts that from a distance whir faintly, their sound receding like the mechanism of a buried watch.
I do remember who they are.
Trentham exclaims: “It’s good to have you back!” And I say, yes, it’s good. An understatement there. The words are thick but definite. Good to be back. We laugh. I know these people are around me and it seems I’m responding, but at the same time I’m in here, in Pryor’s room, and this is where I feel myself to be. I hear their world. I cannot see how to communicate with it. The room’s walls tent inward, billow like balloon silk with every word that’s said by us—Trentham, June, me.
The doctor, for his part, is calm. His words walk down the corridor of the mirror: hard-shoe can-can’ts marking the limits of responsibility.
“I understand you’re going to the fair on the way home. That’s good. Well, take it easy but enjoy yourselves!” The walls inflate, and he and June confirm something. “Oh, work can wait… of course… of course, to watch… no, no, I can’t see any reason why he shouldn’t, why you shouldn’t, just as long as it’s not too busy or loud. Stick to the stalls, maybe? See what the noise is like. And not too long.” And June agrees, no, not too long, and I say, don’t worry, and, if I will, I can.
The words come out the wrong way round. They understand.
I blink, open my eyes, and they’re all there, as you’d expect: June, flushed with terrible relief, holding herself, thinking despite the smile, “God knows what this has done to us, our unborn child.” Trentham thin, curved, a standard lamp. I’m on a bed with cot edges and I can smell the jug of water, wilting flowers, the tracery of cords and wires attached to me, the warm plastic of monitor casings.
A wheelchair waits, hangdog and empty-mouthed.
But then I close my eyes and open them again and I am in the room behind the room, the window darker, giving onto backs at King’s in which the long shadows of medieval fairs flicker, the trade in salt and fish, samphire, the roasting spits, the leather and the wool merchants. None of this fantasy, none of the objects in this inner room are memories or perceptions. They’re neither past nor present, yet they form a kind of boundary. They’re states of mind and real appearances and as I think of them they come closer, a book of mathematical puzzles next to the horrible pupa, still growing in the yellow afternoon; a letter from a physics schoolmaster who says he very much enjoyed my radio broadcast, and that the rub in teaching computers to “think” is getting them to recognize a new relationship…