An Evil Cradling (12 page)

The idea, the concept of time enthrals me. I build a complicated and involved structure which redefines what time is. Time is different now. Its flux and pattern is new, seeming so clear, so precise, so deeply understood yet inexplicable. I am calm and quiet. The manic alternations between despair and euphoria seem to have less potency.

When I feel them coming I can set them aside and prevent their theft of my understanding. They can no longer master me, nor drive me where they will. Now I know them and can go with them and hold them in my control.

Today I am returned to my cell and as the door closes I sit in my corner and wait for the guard to go. But today the door is opened again. I sit, my face draped in my towel. The Grim Reaper squats before me and with his faulty English asks ‘Why you don’t eat?’ I look down to see his hand hold the bowl of fruit under the towel. ‘Why you don’t eat?’ he asks again. I feel the hopelessness of trying to explain to him. He doesn’t have enough English to understand. How can I, in any case, explain to him what is only understood in my senses and not in my mind? I shrug, I say I do not want to eat. There is silence. Then I feel him rise and move as if to leave my cell and take the bowl with him.

I reach out, grab his hand by the wrist and say anxiously, angrily ‘No.’ He stops and stands looking down at me. There is silence and I try hand gestures, pointing to my eyes blinded by the towel, and pointing again to the fruit saying ‘I want to see, I want to see.’ Again the silence and I know he is confused. He cannot understand that I will not eat but that I do not want this fruit taken from me. It is now rapidly softening and becoming over-ripe in the heat. I tell him again ‘Leave’

and gesture the fruit onto the floor in front of me. I feel slow panic rising. What if he should take this from me. This thing that I have become obsessed with, dependent upon. I try to hold my anger and my rage.

He sets the bowl in front of me and the door bangs and the padlock is rattled into the lock. The force of the bang, the loudness of the key in the padlock tell me he is angry and I quietly think at that moment we have shared something of the same feelings of anger and confusion about this bowl of fruit: he for his reasons, unable to understand mine, and I barely able to explain them to myself.

Ready as I’ll ever be,

With some support.

Face them.

Stern, authoritarian;

Clutching the tools of their importance To twitching, twelve-year-old egos.

Eager to fill their daily tasks.

T’is their life.

Facing them.

So many.

As the blur of so many others In coming to this place.

Blink back nervous swallows.

Steady now.

Clutching tight

The deep-etched pages of my mind.

These hallowed pages, do I mind Turning them over to blind Insensitive appetites-for-more?

Doubting now.

These precious distillations from the deep, Oh deep, deep, unspeakable, unspoken Places will I keep?

Jealously?

And not feed like offal

To this sheep

-like, mart-like arena of the world Press upon me?

Ready now.

My days now seemed to a pass in a slow, gentle delirium; like the comfort and reassurance that a child must feel as its mother rocks and sings it a lullaby. I found myself sitting on the floor and gently rocking myself back and forth, for how many minutes and how many hours I cannot tell. I looked wildly at the dead insect hanging in its cocoon. I felt a strange contentment. I derived reassurance from it. A new quality of strength pervaded me. I imagined I was moving inside that cocoon and I liked it. I was suspended in space. Minute and insignificant things in my cell intrigued me. I sat staring at them with fascination. A small mark on the wall. The flickering flame of my stub of candle which I occasionally lit, not that I might eat by it, but just so that I could sit and look at it, entranced and captivated. I felt no desire to leave this place. I found myself thinking with the shadows of panic rising in me that I was not ready to leave, that I did not want to leave.

I began to dread my freedom, if it should come. But then as if the coin of panic and fear had been flipped over I began to dread my growing attachment to this tiny cell. Something in me sensed danger and I told myself that I should not surrender to this temptation. I found an enemy within, powerful and insidious. I felt him caressing me and growing stronger, seeking to possess me. I had to find a way to take control, master my own mind, reasserting myself. I returned to an old strategy of thinking through the books that I read as a child, and which I remembered so clearly now. And began again to recall films and make them different or simply use them as a stepping stone to direct the mind away from this desire to remain captive.

I particularly remember many hours spent thinking about the story of Robinson Crusoe. Even to this day I will always watch a film of it or listen on the radio to this story being retold. I made my own version, finding the original too simple and already having exhausted the story so many times. I thought of the story that the native called Friday would tell. How he found this white man so strange, so unpredictable, and I tried to tell this story from Friday’s perspective: how this white man’s world and white man’s thought seemed part lunatic, part comical. I wrote the story of Friday and Crusoe’s return to London: a London and an England that Friday found to be a fantasy that his mind could not comprehend or contain. I told myself the story of Crusoe’s return to his island many years later, to seek out his friend Friday and how they would meet and what they would say; all the turmoil and impressions that Robinson might experience, having known freedom and then returning to the island. I was able through the eyes and the mind of Friday to blast the inconsistencies of the European society that confronted the ‘natives’. It was a kind of pastoral romance. But it protected me from that dangerous friend who seemed to creep up and want to take me off with him somewhere.

I sat upon that foam mattress and it became for a me a raft in a vast sea. All around me was nothing but moving water. No land, and without land, no hope. I was stranded on this tiny piece of floating rubber and subject to its mercy. I dreamt of dolphins riding along beside the raft. They would roll out of the water and look at me with their mystic eye, and roll under its surface. And I wanted to reach out and touch them and know their comfort. There were other creatures that came to look at me and I wanted to fall into the sea and roll with them into its depths. And then alone without food, without water I would rage at the sea and rage at my thirst and hunger and helplessness.

I dreamt one day a bird came and landed on my raft from out of nowhere, suddenly this other living thing was, sharing this floating raft with me. He stood and looked at me and I was filled with fear of him and then with hunger so filling me I thought to take him in my hands, to break his neck and rip his flesh so that he might feed me. In my dream I found that I could not do it, for as I took the bird in my hands and held him I could not crush him in spite of my hunger. His flesh I could not eat nor think to eat. I sat alone again floating, and moving but never moving anywhere, always about me the same grey expanse which seemed to emphasize my hopelessness.

As I think back on that dreaming raft and myself afloat and the bird that came to me, I remember other birds that came to that cell when my mind had taken flight in hallucinatory fantasy, yet not as in a dream for I remember being conscious of the place I was in. It was momentarily filled with birds flying erratically and crashing into the walls, to fall broken and bloodied at my feet and then they would

gather themselves up again in furious Might, flinging themselves again into the wall. The cell seemed to be littered with feathers and the dying and broken bodies of birds. Their frightened flight seemed endless.

These birds flew backwards, flew upside down, with broken wings they would seem to walk the walls and I would try to brush them away from my head knowing that there was nothing there to brush away. I remember one of those backward-flying birds flying upside down into a fire. I saw its feathers flash and watched it decompose as if melting in the flame. I found myself hissing ‘Enough, enough’ as I tried to flail my way out of that insane aviary.

I needed anger to pull me back from these moments of madness. I spent many days in those morning hours while we had some light hunting the night’s mosquitoes and squashing them against the wall. I watched the blot of blood that their crushed bodies would make and cursed them and wondered that such a tiny insect could hold such volumes of my blood. My nails grew long and filthy, my beard unkempt. And I wondered would I ever be able to cut them.

It took many days to explain but eventually The Grim Reaper came with a pair of nail clippers. He would not let me cut my own nails, for fear that I might attempt to injure myself with the clippers. He held my hands and cut my nails and I sat in silence wondering what thoughts were running through his head and half convincing myself that there were probably none. Occasionally I would hear voices shouting from the street and I would spend the time imagining that they were voices from my own streets in Belfast. I would imagine what they were saying, what they were arguing about. It was as if I could hear the voices of my friends. By effort of imagination I simply translated those voices into the voices of my own people, and created a safer world outside, than I knew it to be in reality.

The long hours of darkness with the mosquitoes droning and buzzing now seemed less savage and more endurable. I told myself that perhaps I had been bitten so much that they had given up feeding on my flesh, or perhaps it was just that I became more resistant to them. The pain and the itching and the bloody feet were something that I was becoming accustomed to and able to forget. I still dreaded those huge cockroaches that lived in the toilet space and in the dark nights I would often take my father’s shirt and stuff it along the bottom of the cell door hoping that it would prevent them from crawling into my cell while I slept. In the dark I could hear the scrape of their armoured bodies and claws but I could not see them.

I was running out of magazine paper on which I could excrete. The insult of having to sit all day and then sleep all night beside one’s own excrement was less offensive to me. The long hours of blackness were filled with my singing to drown out the noise and the annoyance of the mosquitoes, to create a sound that I could listen to, for there were no other sounds. To this day I wonder why none of the other prisoners would shout or cry out to one another. Sometimes I sang to try to stifle the hysterical weeping of the Arab prisoners. Some of them would cry and bang the door, their cries filled with fear of the dark. I would simply sit and say ‘Shut up’ and then sing. What kind of man is it, I wondered, that spends his whole day in those tiny cells and cannot find energy in himself to confirm his existence by crying out to another human being, regardless of whether he can speak his language or not? It was as if they had ceased to be human.

My thoughts were frequently occupied by the loss of my humanity.

What had I become? What had I descended to as I sat here in my corner? I walked the floor day after day, losing all sense of the man I had been, in half-trances recognizing nothing of myself. Was I a kind of kafkaesque character transformed out of human form into some animal, something to be shunned and locked away from the world?

In my creature-condition, for hours I would question myself about the differences between the wild and the tame. A wild animal lives in a constant state of awareness and readiness. It must decide for itself. A domestic creature makes no decisions. I thought it must be like this with the soul. It is always ready for life, choosing and deciding and instinctively creating life. The wild are more fearless than courageous.

Their instinct is to be constantly mobile, in a state of readiness to face the unexpected. The untamed soul is exclusively interested in simply being. It has no desire to sit in quiet contemplation of the world. I thought of animals in the zoo, with their desperate patience or spirit beguiled into some neurotic state pacing to and fro, their minds empty.

I began to understand why it is that so many creatures in captivity will not mate. And with it I began to understand my own rage at my impotence, at the powerlessness of my flesh. Perhaps the power of love is only meaningful in freedom. Such thoughts were frequently interrupted by panic. Time was taken from me. How long, how long would I be here? Would my period here, however long it was, erode from me that capacity to indulge and to be fully engaged in life? I would think back on those moments of insanity, all those strange and

fantastical places to which the mind took me, running after it or being dragged behind it. And I began to see the awful limitation of one lifetime.

Death held no fear for me. The contemplation of a mind gone part-mad had convinced me that there was no death, that its moment would come, when it came, as a door opening. It would be an adventure, free from all contagion of fear. I would try to calm myself out of this panic about lost time. I would not suffer to be forever pacing this cell. I was trying to build around me some sort of barrier to shield me from addiction to this place, a contentment with being captive. As I sat remembering the past, trying to put some sort of coherent order on it, I thought of my first days in Beirut and suddenly there came the image of the entrance to the American University of Beirut. Carved in stone above the gate were the words of Homer: ‘To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield’. It came with such blazing clarity that I felt myself knocked back as if someone had landed a heavy blow on me. I repeated it over and over, quietly fascinated, hugely enriched, and knew that this was a meaning, a motto that I must permanently stamp on my being for however long a time I would be here.