— He doesn’t have long by the look of him, your dad.
I help him sit and stand, finally, and we make our way downstairs. I collect a few things, a couple of books, a notepad, some money, mobile phone. Together we put his jacket on and attempt the shoes, but his feet seem swollen and his slippers are easier. Unspoken sense once more of a slip in the proper course of events, wearing slippers outside, these things happen from time to time. Hobbling out to the car, leaning on me step by step, a month ago he was mowing all the lawns, fit as you like. I help him lower himself into the passenger seat, both of us knowing he never likes to be in a car unless he’s driving. Only two days ago he was still making it down to the local shop to collect his newspaper: he’s too weak for that now.
I bring the car right up to the hospital entrance, find a wheelchair and ease him into it, stow him in the entrance way next to a large aquarium while I go to park the car. Then I wheel him through to the ward where a nurse welcomes us. We’re led to a room in which there are two other patients, a man who is blind and another who, I’ll later be informed, has learning disabilities. A couple of nurses shift and winch my father, after a struggle, onto a bed.
— The doctor on duty will come in half an hour or so and have a proper look at him, says one of the nurses pleasantly. Then they leave.
— Things are becoming so com-pli-cated, my father tells me, with a piercing smile of resignation.
And he is right, so viciously true, even though I want to tell him: no, this is simplifying things, it makes sense to be in the hospital, they’ll be able to examine you and with luck make you feel more comfortable, we need to find out what’s going on, and what can be done to make you stronger and better. But I can’t speak. I’m on the verge of streaming tears again. Translucent soldiers lining up, throwing themselves out without parachutes, come from some unknown zone I am struggling like a fish on land to grasp. What to talk about in this simple, abject desolation of a hospital, his body in a foreign bed, mine in a chair alongside? We watch the blindman: two words in the dark and wide, ‘blind man’, collide. In silence we watch him make his way without a hitch to the lavatory and back.
— No need to turn the light on in there, I’m fine, nurse, he says.
The other man restless, sitting on his bed in a dressing-gown, then walking about a bit, then sitting on his bed again. My father needs some new underwear and pyjamas. His incontinence, lack of time to get any washing done before coming to the hospital. Sentences stop, leak, caught, soil themselves short.
— I’ll go and buy some new underwear for you while we’re waiting for the doctor, I tell him. And he tells me about the one and only satisfactory brand and style of underpants and points out, with an ironic smile, that there are none to be had in the local town: I must drive to a specialist, old-fashioned hosiery shop in a village on the coast, about twelve miles away.
The ray lurks, impenetrably, around the origins of philosophy. In Plato, for example, it occupies the space of something like déjà vu, it disturbs thinking, dislocating the question of virtue. The ray seems to figure what is magical and uncanny about philosophy. Socrates asks Meno what is virtue. But what Meno already knows, before their first meeting, is that Socrates is not Socrates, he is not purely or simply himself, there is something of the ray about him.
— Even before I met you, says Meno, they told me that, in plain truth, you are a perplexed man yourself and reduce others to perplexity. You are exercising magic and witchcraft upon me, you are exactly like the flat stingray that one meets in the sea. Whenever anyone comes into contact with it, it numbs him, and that is the sort of thing that you seem to be doing to me now. My mind and my lips are literally numb, and I have nothing to reply to you.
— You’re a real rascal, Socrates replies. You nearly took me in.
Apparently realising that Meno is just fishing for compliments, or more precisely for being compared with something in turn, Socrates berates him:
— I’m not going to oblige you. And as for myself, he adds, if the stingray paralyses others only through being paralysed itself, then the comparison is just, but not otherwise. It isn’t that, knowing the answers myself, I perplex other people. The truth is rather that I infect them also with the perplexity I feel myself.
Virtually Socratic and rascally at the same time, the ray is thinking’s quandary, paralysis of speech, an infection at the heart of philosophy.
Scholars seem perplexed by the word itself: how are they to translate Plato’s ray? It has them in a spin, as if it were narcolepsy reified, as if in a reality haze, language in drag, drugged, dredging up first one creature then another, out of a dead language a new respiration. It’s elementary: the stingray, says one, the electric ray, says another, the torpedo, the flat ray, the numbfish, the narky, the fish that numbs or narcotises.
For Pliny its narcotic qualities were reckoned a cure for headaches, the ray palliatively at play in the migraine. Pliny also knew, and so therefore very probably did Plato himself, that the torpedo ray or narcofish does not numb or paralyse itself. Still in this image of self-numbing there is the strange thought of autoimmunity, a couple of thousand years early. Socrates is the rascally ray, experimentally auto-narcotic. Whatever he may say, the ray remains. It is nature’s way, nature awry. Socrates looks like the flat narcofish in the sea, says Meno. (Regarded, at least by some scholars, as a reference to his snubnose, we are thus offered a rare glimpse of Socrates’ physical appearance.) And then Socrates is like the ray in relation to what he does to others. He numbs mind and mouth. The ray in Socrates generates aporia. The ray is the figure of the already. It’s what Meno knew all along, in an eerie way, the ray of hearsay, the paralysing figuration of all knowledge as recollection.
Down small familiar country roads I race in the late afternoon sun, finding the store still open and acquiring the relevant items. My father will be pleased, I think, he’ll appreciate my having tracked down the very thing, or not, perhaps no. No, this morning for the third time, why the fairytale precision, the cockcrowing fabulous knowing, for the third time in as many days, first over the phone the day before yesterday, then to my face yesterday, and then this morning a third time he said:
— I am beginning to see the attractions of euthanasia.
In the devastating lightnesses of his language, ghost-train supersonic in the airy turquoise gulf, for twenty minutes with a cold beer in a cliff-top garden hanging over the sea I sit wondering at his words. He makes euthanasia sound like a woman, or man, old as the hills. To be exact, this morning he said:
— I have begun to think that there may be advantages to euthanasia.
It’s like a pitiless game, euthanasia keeping a step ahead, having a better hand. On the phone and then again yesterday it was word for word the same:
— I am beginning to see the attractions of euthanasia.
Back at the hospital he is asleep but a nurse asks me along to another room to have a chat with the doctor. The doctor tells me she has examined my father and is concerned about his condition.
— Obviously he’s feeling not too special, she says, in one of those euphemisms I imagine she reserves for the seriously ill.
She has given him an ECG and discovered his heart rate is twice what it ought to be; no wonder he isn’t feeling too special. Also there appear to be some signs of jaundice, she tells me, which could mean, if there is cancer, it has reached his liver, but could mean a variety of other things. It’s too early to say for sure: gallstones, for example, can produce a similar effect. But for the moment, she says, she has prescribed something to slow his heart down and hopefully (yes, she uses the word in that hopeless way) make him feel more comfortable. She proposes keeping him in for the weekend and seeing how he is on Monday. He already has an appointment booked for next Friday to have a barium meal x-ray at the main city hospital, some twenty miles away. Cancer has been a suspicion for some time. For the past three or four months, he has complained to me of back pain but has refused to see a doctor about it.