Dogma (12 page)

I take a picture of him pointing directly up into the sky, from where the Luftwaffe came, and then, standing on a bench, pointing directly at the earth, where the bombs struck. I ask a passerby to take a photo of W. pointing at me, and of me pointing at W., and finally of W. and I pointing at one another.

The Plymouth Gin cocktail bar. My working class credentials are far better than his, W. says over our Martinis. He is invariably moved when he thinks of me leaving school and
working in the warehouse, and feels a great urge to protect and encourage me.—‘How long were you there?’, he asks me, and when I tell him, he gasps.—‘That long!’ And then, ‘What did you do there?’, and when I tell him, he gasps again.

‘What was your job title?’, W. always asks me. I was a
Transactions Analyst
, I tell him. ‘And what were your duties?’ I looked for UTLs, Unable-To-Locates. I checked van manifests and loading bays, looking for missing items. I searched high and low in the racks on my order picker. I quizzed fellow workers about their procedures and made reports to management about how many boxes had been lost and how warehouse procedures might be streamlined.

‘You were so keen at first!’, says W. He can see me, in his mind’s eye, with my overalls and toetectors. He sees my willing stupidity, my sense of
wanting to do well
and of the British Standards I was brought in to enforce.

But my mouth began to twitch, didn’t it? My eyes began to focus, not on the job at hand, the item I was looking for, but on the middle distance. I grew a beard and looked like a Tartar. He sees me, W. says, wandering back to the station after work, with a vague sense that something was missing in my life.

And from then on, when I found them, my missing items, I only hid them more deeply, didn’t I? W. says. I threw my unable-to-locates into obscure cupboards. I buried them in the racks. I neglected my paperwork. My reports were less artful. My British Standards manuals went unread.

‘That’s when you began to read, isn’t it?’, W. says. This is his favourite part of the story. There was a flight of stairs
that led up to the roof, which no one ever used. That’s where I went to read in my lunch hour. It’s where I began to work my way through the books I found in the library.

What was the book I started with?, he asks. Oh yes:
The Mammoth Book of Fantasy
, he could never forget that. I began with
The Mammoth Book of Fantasy
, W. says, and read my way up to Kafka. ‘You put down
The Mammoth Book of Fantasy
, and picked up
The Castle
’, W. remembers. ‘That’s when it began, isn’t it?’

W. finds it very poignant, he says. I might have spent the rest of my life reading
The Mammoth Book of Fantasy
, and books like
The Mammoth Book of Fantasy
, but there I was with my Kafka.

W.
began
with Kafka, of course, he says. He remembers it very clearly, his first encounter with the Schocken editions of Kafka in his school library (‘We
had
a school library’, he says, ‘unlike you’). They had orange dustcovers, W. says. Why he was attracted by that colour, he’ll never know. But there it was:
The Castle
.

The Castle
, W. says. He didn’t have to mouth those letters to himself to understand them, W. says. He could actually read, unlike me. He didn’t have to wrinkle his brow and mouth the letters out loud.

But still, says W., he remains infinitely moved by the mental image of me sitting on the stairs that led up to the roof,
The Mammoth Book of Fantasy
already long behind me. He remains immeasurably moved by the image of the
ape-child who sat on the stairs, mouthing the letters
T-H-E–C-A-S-T-L-E
to himself.

W. is overwhelmed by work, he says. Broken by it, by the prospect of it. Administration! I love it, of course. I’m at it all day in my office. How do I even begin?, W. wonders. How can I make a start when the task itself is so immense?

I must not be able to see the whole thing, W. says. The big picture is closed to me. Otherwise, how could I go on? How could I persist from day to day? W., by comparison, is a seer, he says. He’s seen too much! He knows where it’s heading! He’s seen through the day to the night, and to the night of all nights.

He can imagine it, W. says: I pause from my ceaseless administrative work, look up for a moment … What am I thinking about? What thought has struck me? But he knows I am full only of
administrative anxieties
, and my pause is only a slackening of the same relentless movement.

And what of him, when he looks up from his administrative labours? What does he see? Of what is he dreaming? Of a single thought from which something might begin, he says. Of a single thought that might justify his existence.

W.’s college has become a
vale of tears
, he says. It’s a bit like
Werckmeister Harmonies
, after the arrival of the whale, W.
says. Chaos everywhere. Petty vandalism. Dead bodies, face down in the quadrangle, with knives in their backs.

It’ll go up in flames, soon, the college, W. says. There’ll be black smoke rising from the lecture halls. And after that, who knows? Cannibalism, probably. Human sacrifice.

What would I do in his situation?, W. asks. What’s the
Hindu solution
? Oh, he remembers my advice: he should apply for that job in the Lebanon, I told W. That lectureship in philosophy in Beirut. He’s not going to Beirut, W. says. Forget it. People are kidnapped in Beirut! They end up in solitary confinement for years and years! Actually, he’d make quite a good hostage, W. says. He would sit in his manacles in the dark, thinking about the Stoics …

He should go straight to the Lebanon, and become a scholar of Arabic, I told him.—‘Oh yes, is that what you’d do?’, he asked me. He should become a scholar of Averroes, I told him, and write on the board from right to left. He’s not going to become a scholar of Averroes, W. says.

He should apply for work in Zambia or Botswana, I told W. He should apply to become Lecturer in Philosophy at Lusaka University. They’re too far away!, W. says. Too hot! Would
I
apply for a job in Zambia or Botswana?, he says. ‘Of course not’. Zambia and Botswana are out for him too, W. says. No, if we get sacked, he’s going to come to live in my flat, W. says. He’ll bring Sal. I’ll have to go to work in Zambia or Botswana, and support them.

Our friends, what has happened to our friends?, W. wonders.
Are the rumours true? Have they really broken into warring factions? Are there really Facebook groups, dedicated to
mutual destruction
?

A war among friends: can I conceive of anything more terrible?, W. says. Who started it? Whose fault is it? Ah, but he knows the cause, W. says: cynicism. Opportunism. He knows how it began. It always begins the same way!

Cynicism, opportunism. This is the time of the rat, W. says. A time without justice, without goodness. A time without God!

To think it could even reach our friends, W. says. To think that even
they
could be infected …

W.’s dream has always been that we might save ourselves from the end, he and I. But we won’t be able to hold it back, he knows that now. The disaster strikes first at what is closest to us, W. says.

And what’s my role in all this?, W. wonders. Where do I stand?
Et tu
?, W. will say as I slip the knife between his ribs.
Et tu
, idiot?

How many times have I betrayed him?, W. wonders. I’m on every page of his Book of Betrayals. He’s always taken detailed notes. And there are pictures, too. W. wants to remember everything. Everything!

One day, he’s going to read his notes to me and show me all his pictures, he says. One day, standing at the head of the bed like the Archangel Michael, he’s going to read me the great list of my betrayals and show me the pictures.

I think the rats are losing their fear of me, I tell W. on the phone. They’re out in the open now, in the yard, bathing in the drain.

I should stop playing Jandek, W. says. It summons them out of their lairs. I’m like the pied piper of Spital Tongues, W. says.

W.’s decline is getting worse, he says. He’s sure that the very capacity to think is retreating from him. He’s losing them one by one, his intellectual faculties, the organs of thought …

Species trapped on islands undergo changes in scale, W. says. They can become large—grotesquely large in the case of giant tortoises and komodo dragons. Or they can become small, minaturising over the generations, W. says, like that species of tiny people whose remains were discovered on that remote island. What were they called?

They shared their island with pygmy elephants and giant rats, W. says. They hunted rats on the backs of pygmy elephants, or pygmy elephants on the backs of rats, one of the two.—‘They had great flat feet like yours’, W. says, ‘and an improbably small brain, no doubt like yours’. And they
murmured rather than spoke. And they whistled and hooted, just as I am a whistler and hooter.

Homo Floresiensis
, that’s it! I’ve become a
Homo Floresiensis of thought
, W. says. It’s terrible. Didn’t I used to appear intelligent? Even W. is forgetting. That’s how it seemed, he says, improbable as it sounds. And now?

It’s my flat, W. says. The squalor of my flat. It’s the squalor of my life, my isolation, which is the equivalent of the island of Flores. But haven’t I become
larger
rather than smaller? I’m like one of those giant rats, W. says. He’s going to climb on a pigmy elephant and hunt me down.

W. fears he’s also becoming a
Homo Floresiensis of thought
. Isn’t he becoming shorter by the day? Aren’t his feet getting bigger and flatter? Isn’t his brainpan shrinking and his chin looking a little more sloped?

He’s following my example, W. says. He’s declining. He’s beginning to forget the higher ideas. Good God, he can barely count! He can barely add two numbers together! Is this what happened on the island of Flores? Is this where our collaboration has led him?

‘No
one can benefit from redemption / That star stands far too high. / And if you had arrived there too
,
/ You would still stand in your own way
’. W. is reading from Scholem’s didactic poem.

‘How do you think it applies to you?’, W. says. ‘Do you get in your own way?’ I get in
his
way, that’s for sure, W. says. And perhaps, in my company, something in
him
also gets in his way.

It’s my fault, he’s sure of that, W. says. If I weren’t around, he might reach the star of redemption … But perhaps I exist only as a materialisation of his sin, W. says. Perhaps
Lars
is a name for his own failure. Perhaps I am only that part of himself that stands in his way …

Retrospective redemption, that’s what W. is holding out for. It
will have made sense
, he says. It will always have made sense from the perspective of redemption, that’s what he hopes. But there’s little sign of it, he concedes. In fact, it’s getting worse.

He hears the dull rumble of thunder, W. says. The storm is coming; lightning could flash down at any time. But why
does no one else hear it? Why does no one but him know the signs? Make it stop!, W. wants to cry—but to whom?
Make it stop!
—but not to me, since I am only part of the catastrophe, only a catastrophic scrap torn off to torment him.

W. sends me a quotation from Simone Weil:

The proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, patiently waiting
.

W.’s proper method of philosophy, he says, consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problem of my stupidity in all its insolubility and then in simply contemplating it, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, patiently waiting …

Ah, but perhaps that’s his stupidity, W. says: believing that I could ever leave my stupidity behind.

The
argumentum ad misericordiam
, that’s the name for it, W. says, my basic scholarly move. It’s the fallacy of appealing to pity or sympathy, which in my case is implied in the
state
of the speaker: my bloodshot eyes, my general decay. Don’t I always give my presentations as though
on my knees
?, W. says.

It’s as though I’m praying for mercy, W. says, although it’s also, no doubt, a plea to put me out of my misery.
Kill me now
, that’s what my presentations say.
Don’t spare me
. Which is why, inevitably, I am spared. It would be too easy to destroy me, W. says. And who would clean up afterwards?

He’s tried to put me out of my misery, W. says. God knows, he’s tried. Hasn’t everyone? No one had tried hard enough, that’s what W. discerned when we first met. And it became his task, to try hard enough. And what a task! How many times has he tried? How many emails has he sent?

But it won’t get through, W. says. I won’t hear him. He’s resorted to blows, W. says, but it’s like beating a big, dumb animal. It seems pointless and cruel. How can I understand
why I am being beaten? I bellow, that’s all. It’s perfectly senseless to me.

He’s drawn pictures, W. says. He’s scrawled red lines across my work, but I have never understood; I’ve carried on regardless.

No!
, he writes in the margin.
Rubbish!
, he writes, underscoring the word several times, his biro piercing the paper. But still I continue. Still I go on, one page after another.

Rat poison works by
thinning the blood
, that’s what the pest controller said, I tell W. on the phone. It’s an anticoagulant, which means the rats will bleed to death from the smallest of cuts. They’ll bleed internally, too. It’s a terrible way to die. I’ll hear them screeching in pain and horror, I tell W.