The next morning, W.’s flight is cancelled. He’s stranded in my flat for another day and night. This place is a shithole, he says, and starts to read Spinoza to forget the cold and the dark and the damp.
When he reads Spinoza, W. says, he feels beatitude. Beatitude, he says, the third level of knowledge. — ‘You’ve never felt beatitude’, says W. ‘You’re not capable of it’.
W. is a mystic. One day he might become properly religious. — ‘Do you think you’ll ever become religious?’, he asks me. He says that he might. Sometimes he feels on the verge of religion.
W. says The Ethics is the only book he’s ever thought is completely right. — ‘It’s the opposite of your flat’, says W. ‘God, it’s cold. And dark. Why is it so dark? And why does nothing work? Half your lights, for example. Your kitchen. Your TV. Do you just go into the shops and ask for the shittiest thing they have?’, says W. ‘Nothing ever changes for you, does it? There’s no movement forward’.
W. wants to read Spinoza in Latin, but he’s forgotten all he knew of the language. He’ll have to learn it again! But it’s not a chore. — ‘You have to read in the original language’, he says. ‘Of course you wouldn’t know anything about that’. Next he’ll refresh his Greek.
W. recalls our Greek lessons, he on sabbatical, me a young student. — ‘You seemed intelligent then, full of promise’. Of course, I was no such thing, he realised quickly. W. and the others had the answer book and used to crib from its translations in advance. They liked to watch me squirm with my exercises. — ‘Your idiocy was spectacular’, says W. ‘Omoi!, that’s was all you could say. Omoi! omoi!, like a wounded bull’.
For his part, W. has given up learning differential calculus. — ‘It’s beyond me’, he says. Will he ever really understand Leibniz — or Cohen, with his mathematical mysticism? Never mind, he says; he has Spinoza. — ‘Ah, The Ethics’, he sighs. ‘Beatitude!’, he sighs.
The damp, I say to W. That’s my apocalypse. Does he know I have mushrooms growing from the ceiling? Does he know they’re gathered in the far upper corner of the kitchen? It used to make me shudder, I tell W. I used to hate it. But now …
I’m fascinated by the damp, I tell W. I can’t help it. I go out there again, to the kitchen, to the bathroom. I put my hand on the clammy wall. The damp is calling me. The damp wants a witness to itself. And who am I but the one who sees it, touches it? Who am I but the one with its spores in his lungs?
One night it grew me, I tell W. One night a spore unfolded itself to a make a man, a golem of damp. And the damp wrote its name on my forehead and placed its charm on my tongue …
Somewhere, on the other side of the wall, life has reached a new level, I tell W. Somewhere, damp mutters to itself; damp dreams, there behind the wall. And what will it say when it comes to itself? What will it say when it wakes up?
What will he write about next? W. muses. What’s to be his next project? He’s casting about, he admits it. Wasn’t he supposed to learn Greek this summer? Protestant guilt keeps driving him into the office, he says. In he goes on the bus, thinking he ought to be doing something, but not quite sure what. He sits in the office among the parcels of review copies of books he keeps receiving. There are dozens of them, piled up all over the place. They depress him enormously. He can’t bear to look at them.
For my part, W. notes, I still have a stupid excitement about books. It’s because I’m illiterate, W. says, and because they’re slightly above the level I can understand. Whenever I visit, I insist on opening the parcels and filling up W.’s shelves with fresh new books, reading him the most ridiculous of the blurbs. It must be the bright covers that attract me, W. says, whereas they depress him horribly. — ‘All these books!’, he says, with weary horror. ‘Look at them!’
Whatever happened to W.’s publisher? Once the most generous and gregarious of men, he insisted upon travelling hundreds of miles to visit W. and take him out to dinner. They spent days going over the manuscript, which was properly proofread (not like mine, W. says, which was farmed out to Malaysia). And he’d decided on a full colour cover for the paperback — an expensive undertaking, W. notes. Granted, the final version still had typos on the first page (to his amusement) and even in the blurbs on the back (which he found even funnier), but it was a handsome volume, and one of a series of handsome volumes.
But what’s happened to the publisher? He’s gone out of business, that much is clear. Of course, you could never get hold of his books anywhere, which also amused W. As soon as his book was in print, it was out of print, he said. It was always and already out of print, he said, which was fitting, he said. Luckily, he got a box of free copies, says W., which he sent to his friends. Were it not for that, no one would believe it had existed.
To W., it’s completely inconsequential whether the book is in print or not. You should always publish with friends, he says, and the publisher was a friend. But where is he? He doesn’t reply to emails or telephone calls, W. says. Doubtless there’s no longer a computer in his office, nor a telephone, he says. Doubtless the office has long been stripped and demolished, and he’s sitting sobbing in the ruins.
You should always publish with friends, W. notes, and that’s all he wants from his vanished publisher: a sign of friendship, of their shared failure. That’s all he would want from any of his friends, who are all failures, whether they know it or not.
Why has everything become so absurd? I ask W. Why has it all come apart just at the moment when we might have got somewhere? But W. reminds me of what we both know: that any success we’ve had is premised upon exactly that absurdity.
We’re like captains of the Titanic, we tell each other. W.’s already steered his ship into the iceberg. It’s wrecked — all hands lost. W. remains on the bridge, the last man standing, but there’s not long left. — ‘It’ll be your turn next’, says W. ‘How long do you think you’ll last?’
The iceberg’s looming, I tell W. I’m mesmerised by it. So was he, says W. He knew it was coming and that it could only come. He knew that any success he had had was premised upon this greater and pre-ordained failure. He’s dignified in defeat. — ‘Not like you’, he says, ‘gnashing your teeth and wailing from the rooftops’.
I am getting to know the moods of the damp, I tell W. The kitchen walls, still bare, sometimes seem to glower with anger: they become darker, browner. And then, at other times, they seem to lighten: the damp is in a good mood, or it has been dreamily distracted from the work of dampening. Is it a god that needs to be appeased, and if so, with what kind of sacrifice? But if it is a god, or part of a god, it is an inscrutable one; I follow its moods without being able to understand them.
Sometimes it darkens, it becomes browner, as though gathering itself up. Particularly, high up the wall, like a dark cloud spread all along — the damp becomes more intense. But it is not quite wet, not anymore. The surface is smooth, but not really moist; and it’s not running with water as it used to be. Dehumidifiers work night and day in the kitchen. Night and day, and though pinpricks of damp appear where there was once white plaster, dried out by the heater, the wall never grows wetter. Has the damp been conquered, or only contained?