Pitch Dark (15 page)

The penmanship was fine, still those clear, regular capitals. But the record was of moods. There were no events, few names, no facts, no indication whatever of what
happened,
apart from this gloom, that cheering up, this gloom again. What few names there were appeared uncharacterized, and not part of any incident or sentence; and the moods were described only to the extent of being up or down, like a chart of the stock market or of an illness. There was less information than one would record, in advance, on any social calendar. The events simply were not there, and, more surprisingly, I could not reconstruct them. Not from the mood clues, not from the fact that they had occurred so recently. I could more accurately recall events that had occurred long years before. And the first, the only other time, I tried to keep a journal had, in fact, occurred long years ago, when I was twelve. That journal covered months, on a daily basis, and in very considerable detail. And the salient point about it was only this: that it was lies. My letters, too, at that time and after, consisted largely of what I wanted other people to believe. I wanted that diary found. I cannot believe I was entirely different in this from others. And so, when I read biographies reconstructed largely from diaries, or from letters to, from, or about obscure or famous men and women, it seems to me that unless mine is an isolated and unusual case (and of course, in a way, what is at issue is precisely the class of isolated and unusual cases) those diaries, letters, interesting though they may be, are probably quite largely false. And, as for journals, these days, “I can show you in my journal; I have it right here in my journal” usually implies a threat, by someone who either keeps no journal, or who makes the “it” recorded in it up.

Well, I couldn’t go back to sleep, of course, how could I. I said, Of course, I haven’t left. He said, You have.

To begin with, I almost went, instead, to Graham Island. I had been muttering for months that I wanted to go somewhere, somewhere else, beautiful and quiet, on the sea. When I went to Jon and Maria’s house for dinner, Gavin and Jon, or rather Gavin’s wife and Jon had had a quarrel so bitter that Gavin and Jon were going to dissolve their partnership. When I arrived for dinner, Maria was in the kitchen. Gavin and Jon were in the living room. In the tension of their silence, I mentioned wanting to go somewhere, somewhere beautiful and quiet, on the sea. Gavin said he had friends who had a place on an island off Vancouver. Maybe I would like to rent it. I said, How wonderful, and really thought no more about it. The next morning, though, Gavin called and said that the house was in fact available. I could have it, starting next week, for no rent. I said, Oh, I couldn’t do that, I absolutely must pay rent. Gavin said, Well, you’ll have to discuss that with the owners. So, when I called the owners, I began by saying I really must pay rent. And the assumption was thus, before we even began, that I was going to take the house. The house of strangers, friends of a man I hardly knew, who was about to become a former partner of my friend. They were both on the line, when I called, the owners of this house, husband and wife. They were anthropologists, bright, enthusiastic, kind. The house was on both a river and the sea. One could step out of the house and fish. I was welcome to use their poles.

The island had a rain forest. One flew to Vancouver, from there to another island, then took the ferry; two islands later, there one was. No worry about hospitals, there was a military installation there of sorts, the nearest observation post for Siberia. Siberia, I said. Well, yes, the island was six hundred miles, in fact, from Vancouver. There was a car there, I should pick it up from their friend the Danish baron. Not to worry if, on my way back, my luggage was searched intensively by customs. A weed much sought after by hippies grew there in profusion. The phone, the toaster, and a few other objects of value in the house were concealed, inside a hollow beam. I would find them easily. They were hidden only so that no hippie or other passerby, seeing the phone for instance, would be tempted to make long-distance calls. As soon as I had found the phone, and plugged the jack into the outlet, I should call the owners, and tell them how I was. Also, before leaving for Vancouver, I should call the Danish baron and tell him when I would arrive, so that he could arrange for someone to meet me. At the dock, of the third island by ferry, from the other island, six hundred miles, by air, from Vancouver.

Well, I called the Danish baron, and his accent seemed instantly recognizable to me. I thought, What is this German pretending to be a Dane doing on an American island, six hundred miles from Vancouver, which is the nearest outpost to Siberia. I thought, a war criminal. My state of mind. I still resolved to go. It was somewhere else, somewhere beautiful and quiet, on the sea. Two nights before I left, however, I had a thought. I had begun to worry a bit about the isolation. I called the owners of the house. I reached the wife. How far, I asked, how far from their house was the nearest neighboring house. Oh, she said, not far. You can see it from the window. It’s just up the hill actually. A very interesting house. Built and owned by an Indian. A Haida. Of course, he leases it now. The first trace of a hesitation in her voice. To the government of Canada. She distinctly paused. As a retreat. I said, A retreat. She said, Yes. But there are never more than six. I did not ask six what. She said, Alcoholic. Indians. Well, I couldn’t do it. Maybe I should have done it, but I couldn’t. I still had my ticket to Seattle, though, and somehow that became fixed in my mind. So I called Ted, who had lived, years ago, in Tacoma, and who had bought a house there so remote that even the people who built it for the sake of its remoteness found it too remote and sold it, to ask him where to stay outside Seattle. But it was Friday, he was not in his office. I asked his secretary where he stayed when he was in Seattle. She said, You wouldn’t want to stay there, let me find a place where you should stay. I said no, thank you. Within minutes, there was a call from a vice president of Ted’s company in Tacoma. He said, We’re very hospitable out here. Just tell me what sort of thing you want. I said, Somewhere else, somewhere beautiful and quiet, on the sea. Here’s exactly what you do, he said: take the flight to Seattle; at the airport, rent a car, drive to Anacostia, take the ferry. The third stop is Orcas Island. Get off there, drive fifteen miles, to Warriloway, and stay there. So, I did it. And Warriloway turned out to be, among other things, a business conference center, with walls so thin I could hear the man in the next room saying, Sweetie, where did you get these plums, they’re really good. She told him, so I drove the thirteen miles and bought plums. At night, I could hear the rock cassettes, by which they went to sleep; and, in the room on the other side, a television set. I was too tired to turn back. The island was as beautiful as any I had ever seen. Here’s who else was there: Thelma, the theosophist, who sings songs from
The Sound of Music
, in her operatic voice, so loudly that when she weeds her garden, her voice carries for miles across the bay. Also—her nephew told me this, and I was later able to confirm it—the knobs on the chest of drawers in her bedroom are made of her children’s baby teeth. Her husband is a giant, and Thelma and the two daughters I met are also giantesses. At the party of an architect on a mountain top, Thelma mentioned that the Orcas Island camp was the oldest American camp of theosophy. Though I couldn’t really remember what theosophy was, I replied with some enthusiasm. She said they had lectures there each day. Some instinct made me ask whether she went to all of them. And she said, Whenever I can. So we were friends. The others I met were the architect, a young tycoon who led a religious cult, and who had had a falling out with a prophet, the founder of it. All the architect’s land was nonetheless tax free, being owned by the religious foundation. All the work on his property was free as well, since the young people who worked for him were members of the cult, which obliged them to be in effect his slaves. And his wife, who had been married several times before, once to a college president, was the daughter of one of the major inventors in the early days of NASA. And my other friends, my new friends, there, were a couple, owners of the bookshop, which sold prints. He had been a lawyer, but retired, after his heart attacks, to Orcas Island. His wife, the former lawyer’s wife, told me, at the party of the architect on the mountain top, that their daughter, the bookshop owners’ daughter, was on her honeymoon. Rowing. From Seattle to Anchorage. A distance of several thousand miles. This daughter and her new husband liked to row. When they first met, they had rowed all the way around Vancouver, a few hundred miles. I asked where, on this longer trip, they spent the nights. She said camped ashore. I asked whether she worried, on their behalf, about Alaskan wolves. Not wolves so much, she said, bears. I asked whether they rowed facing each other, those thousands of miles. She said no. Yet here I am, for the first time and yet again, alone at last on Orcas Island. And yet, this is not entirely the Wasteland; there are so many other people here.

And, in London, after all, there were the phone calls. Sometimes he was asleep. Sometimes I was. He said, You’ve left. It was my third trip, that fall and winter, standby, New York/London. I said, I haven’t. He said, You have. For no reason, and without warning, you’ve left me, and I’m devastated.

There exists an order of social problem that appears to be insoluble, but is not. At least not in the terms in which resolution of it is represented as impossible. A problem of that sort has at least some of the following features: it appears immensely complicated, with a resolution of any part of it seeming to bring about the aggravation of another; it has a long history, in the course of which it seems to grow, to accrete difficulties, and to merge and overlap with other problems, so that an attempt to solve the single problem appears hopeless without an assault (for which no sufficient resources can exist) upon them all; perception of the length and nature of that history must be inaccurate, and the terms in which it has been defined must be so imprecise (or so precise, but inapposite) that any formulation of the problem leads inevitably to argument, and great energy is dissipated in argument of that sort. Ideally, in other words, in its historical dimension, such a problem appears to have existed forever; and in its contemporary manifestation to be inextricable from every other problem in the world. Ideally, too, there should have grown up, over time, a number of industries and professions nominally dedicated to the eradication of the problem but actually committed, consciously or unconsciously, but almost inevitably out of self-interest, to the perpetuation of the problem, and of any misconceptions of it, for all time. Wait a minute. Whose voice is this? Not mine. Not mine. Not mine. In the matter of problems that appear to be, but are not, insoluble, the class is the class of all those who profit from a social blunder. The class does not want to be laid off. Wait. Wait.

In London, I said, But can we live this way.

Quanta. Well, but I, don’t you see, I had just taken the shuttle from Boston to LaGuardia, the ordinary shuttle. There was a blizzard, but we took off. When we had been flying for about an hour, the pilot said, Sorry, folks, there’ll be a delay of about twenty minutes; the runway’s closed. So we circled LaGuardia a long time, waiting for them to clear the runway, and finally turned back. In Boston, we all ran through the snow for cabs to the railroad station. The rumor passed among us that another shuttle, from Washington to LaGuardia, in that blizzard, crashed. Then we heard that the plane that crashed was not a shuttle. I had settled, though, in my seat on the train, with my little suitcase, and some Scotch, and three bags of potato chips that I’d bought with what remained of my cash, from the bar car. I had settled, wondering how long the train would take. A couple came toward me. The woman was Amy, whom I had not seen since she married the man her parents preferred. I knew she had been divorced, not many years later; that she had two children; that she had become a college professor. I knew her parents, and the boy with whom she had been in love when we were children. She introduced the man she was with. She said they were going to spend the semester break in Guatemala. They had been on the same shuttle flight as I. When she came back from their seats to talk for a while in the seat beside me, she said she had met the man she was with at a college where she used to teach, and where he was the dean. Then we talked for a long time. The blizzard outside was the most dense I remembered, and the train was several times delayed. After a while, I said, Amy, how has it been in your life with unhappiness, did it come in days, months, decades, years? Softly but without hesitation, she said, Quanta. Quanta. There were all the intervening years, and the professorship. There was the dean. Quanta. Not here. She had loved him with the operatic intensity of a basset. Or a diva. Or a child.

Here’s what I think is wrong with boring people to no purpose. It’s not just that it corrupts their attention, makes them less capable, in other words, of being patient with important things that require a tolerance, to some greater purpose, of some boring time. The real danger lies, I think, in this: that boredom has intimately to do with power. One has only to think of hypnosis, of being mesmerized. Monotony, as a literal method of enthrallment. So this claim to find art in boredom, for its own sake or as one of the modes of alienation, is not simply a harmless misunderstanding, which finds it avant garde to stupefy. Deliberate, pointless boredom is a kind of menace, and a disturbing exercise of power. Of course, that is not always our problem here.

I said, But it’s you who always leave. You’ve just come back from your island. And next week, you’ll go again. And anyway. He said, Those are just excuses. The fact is, You’ve left. I said, I could never really leave.

But, in London, after all, there were the phone calls. And after that. And in the matter of the Irish thing.

This is about the Chinese hypnotist. Here is exactly how it was. I had gone back, after all these years, to the university, and I had six papers due, that last year, near the end. So did all the other students, so I guess have all students since the sixties; but they were going to do them in the end, and I was not. I had, I might as well mention this, a long history of not doing papers. In my first year of college, we all had to do a paper every week. After the first few weeks, I didn’t do them, couldn’t do them. There were no dropouts, though, in those days, I think. When, at the end of the spring term, the dean said, Miss Ennis, the college requires papers; I suggest, in fact I must insist that you see a psychiatrist this summer. I did. I took a train from Red Hill, where my parents lived, and arrived, two hours later, with a change of trains, in New York. I walked to the office of a tall, pale man, who swept the doily of the previous patient off the couch, replaced it with a relatively fresh one, and said, Well, Miss Ennis, what have we been thinking and feeling. After a week of this, one of my brothers said, This is absurd, you can’t keep taking the train to see that fool, this is August, it’s too hot. And he wrote my papers. My brother, I mean, wrote my papers. Let me say that I know of few instances where someone has been rescued from something in quite this way. But there it was. More than twenty papers, the weekly ones and the long term papers for other courses. My brother wrote them all. And then, of course, I realized that they were not exactly right; he had not, after all, gone to the same courses or college; so I wrote them, and went with relative serenity through the following years. No, that’s not true, the serenity. But the weather changed for me. And the fact is that, had there been nothing to rewrite, I would have been stranded. I would have become, well, I don’t know, someone with whom to avoid eye contact, on the subway or the street.