Shadow Play (26 page)

 

So I am reminded it is a very thin line I'm treading, with everything to lose. Not just in the present context: I mean my sanity itself. It is not improbable I am losing my mind, and my grip on events is imperceptibly slackening. (Perhaps the effects of this are already evident to others; even my walk gives it away, and that is why the target last night sensed something odd and ran before I could approach him.)

The next few days will be crucial: my last window of opportunity, the last chance I might have to weigh the situation and make an independent decision. I have an eerie feeling things will speed up not long after that (if they haven't already) and I will confront the consequences of my choice, one way or the other. In the night and a day since the attempt that never was, I have felt a definite shift in mental balance, a slow but certain erosion in my capacity to line up happenings and view them clearly. In fact, I have done little else in this time besides wandering around and trying to focus. I have sat down on benches and steps, and tried counting up pros and cons on my fingers to see if it would help. But every time I get to about
three arguments on each hand, I lose the thread or something happens to wash them away, and I'm forced to begin walking quickly, because for some reason stillness suddenly seems the more dangerous alternative.

I began writing to help the process of assessment. I have tried my best to be clear, most of all because I haven't much time. I tried to follow my hunches about what episodes it would be vital to remember, and thankfully there haven't been any obstructions, until now, until this moment. The rest of the story hasn't happened yet, which is one obvious problem. But this wait has caused me to cast my eye over the writing from the beginning, and an uneasy sensation has appeared on the horizon. It might only be a matter of literary composition, one of the normal stages of writing, and my worry may simply be that of a novice. Or else it is another trick of the pressure I feel in the present situation. Whatever the cause, I have noticed that the words I set down don't always remain where I put them, and there are huge stretches of time about which I have said nothing at all.

Why did I choose the events of Chapter One so readily as a point of departure? What are the threads that run through each of the episodes that follow? Where are all the years that went missing? Have I been aware at each stage of the crux of what was unfolding, and the choices that were leading me deeper into
this
life rather than any other? If not, where was I while my life occurred, and how am I expected to arrive at the correct decision now, in this hour of greatest urgency, when I need most of all to see a clear way into the future?

(New York, Summer 2006)

One day, three months after my dismissal, I realized over a tinfoil tray of spaghetti that I no longer cared how I looked while I ate, even though I ate in full view of passers-by. I noticed this after I bit upon a piece of bone and immediately used my fingers to bring out the meat as a reflex. Once I had it, I set down my tray, and used my left hand to go over the meat until I had picked out the shard and thrown it away. Then I put the half-chewed piece back into my mouth, licked the oil off my fingers, and picked up my dinner again. It was at this moment that I grew aware of myself, and my gaze fell upon my beard, from which were hanging four noodles besides scraps of meat and blobs of red sauce. I put my tray down for the second time and held out my beard to search better, threw out the food I could see and tried to dig away with my fingernails older spots that had dried on the hairs.

As to my resolve to keep the target's front door under constant watch in case he should emerge at an advantageous moment, I had worked out a routine in which I circulated undisturbed between a particular unused doorway, a spot beside a cigar store opposite, and a bench a few metres away, where I could rest occasionally and still be close if ever an opportunity arose. Yet, despite every effort, I found myself spending large parts of the day half-asleep even while I was seated, or so I would realize when something happened to break my torpor.

On one such out-of-body journey I was seventeen, and running along with the envelope containing my university application, which my mother had sealed and assigned me merely to deliver. She assured me she had filled in everything
exactly as required and I had no reason to worry, yet twice I put my hand in the letterbox and my fingers refused to drop it. Finally I decided there was no harm in opening it just to check; all I had to do was buy another large envelope and re-address it. Mummy never even needed to know.

I vividly remember the relief I felt on awakening because when the papers fell out, they were pages from the diary I had rigorously maintained while in Brazil: pages in my own hand, writing on unlined sheets in every direction, points and memoranda in code incomprehensible to anyone but me. Mummy had clearly made a mistake, and thank god I had checked before posting it.

But when I return to that other world, it has turned into a dazzling aquarium of glass and white – a spacious, high apartment with white walls, brilliant sunlight and sliding doors, and the ongoing life of Manhattan far below us. There is very little furniture, but the rooms are full of people sitting around on white sheets spread out on the floors, also in white as if at a Hindu wake. New mourners are being guided to different spots, and everyone has been warned in advance about the apartment's outstanding feature: the occupied areas make a crescent around the largest room, which is suddenly revealed to be full of water. The new faces press against its glass doors at three corners, expressing eagerness and terror in equal measure. I, though absent from the scene, am as bemused as the others, but suddenly there is a muffled crash as a white shark shoots out from the sides to hit against one of the doors with malicious force. Amid screams on the outside, it turns and charges for the door opposite, teeth bared, fin upright, and body quivering in a faint hum that runs through the entire mass of water. This is the
heart of the funeral, around which they are trying to conduct things normally, this is the menace the silence surrounds.

On my final transport that day, I'm in a wood at the edge of the desert. Behind me in the distance are dry red rolling Central Brazilian highlands to one side and the desert on another, and ahead lies a path of red earth continuing into the heart of the forest. As I venture further I take a keen interest in the movements of two bright beetles visible even from standing height. I am aware that my eyes feel as sharp as the lens of a camera and I can view them in exactly as much detail as I please. One is chasing the other but together they move in patterns so effortless, it seems as though they are gliding.

The silence is disturbed only by a pounding that approaches nearer until I can see one rhinoceros running in my direction down the red path, followed closely by another. Both of them are shimmering in the heat and dust as they leave the cover of trees behind, and I step aside to watch them rush past. Not very far though, because suddenly they stop in their tracks almost exactly where the grassland ends and the chase is reversed, or perhaps this is merely their sport. I can smell them as they run past this time, feel their sweat slam into me in boiling blasts and their footfalls beat up my body and lodge behind my temples.

I decide to follow them and begin running, but soon it is evident that something unusual is happening. I am not making any effort, yet I'm racing faster than I normally can. When I look down, my feet aren't moving; in fact, they are a few inches from the ground. I'm flying along behind the animals and the ability does not disappear even after I have grown aware of it. Soon I begin to control it, but I'm still afraid to try and rise higher.

After we have gone a long way inwards, the animals disappear into the dry foliage but I have lost the wish to follow.
Besides, I'm not sure my newfound gift won't be withdrawn if I stray from this clear path and entangle myself amidst the trees. So I decide to return the same way.

This time as I near the end of the forest, the path is a little more crowded. Small groups of people wait by its edges, wrapped in thin white cloth as if they are pilgrims or mourners. I suddenly notice I too am dressed like them. The first gathering fails to spot anything unusual as I skim past, but someone in the second group notices my otherworldly smoothness. I have raised myself a few inches so that I am more conspicuous. As I show no signs of slowing down, he points me out to some others and gradually a cry is raised. They begin to run after me with appeals to stop. This, and the fact that I'm now proceeding a good few feet above the ground, attracts the attention of those in the next, larger gathering, who attempt to block my way. As I sail over their heads I can clearly hear their shouts turning into pleas. Now I can make out the edge of the forest, and below me the voices grow more frantic. The fastest few have managed to keep up with me, and suddenly I'm struck by terror about what might happen if I fall into their hands. Also, there is the desert ahead and I do not know how long I can keep this up without tiring. I'm thirsty at the very thought of such distances, but to the west behind the hills I am aware the sun is setting and I will lose my way if I return into the forest.

By now I've arrived high above open earth, and I cannot hear them any more since the desert is still too hot for their bare feet to touch, and they too would be afraid of getting lost in the dark. But I can sense their desperation pulling me downwards. I make a quick chart in my head, working from the position of the sun: I know I live not far to the northeast of here. Yet the
red mountains call to me with their unblemished surfaces, the late evening gold and the shadows striping them in large wavy shafts, the clear air lighting up the way straight to the sun. And that is the direction I take, assuring myself it is a small diversion and that I will resume my proper course long before the sun disappears.

 

So, the gift I've believed in my entire conscious life – for penetrating and synthesizing disparate realities – has proved to be no more than an empty-headed self-obsession, a bimbo's fascination with appearances; or perhaps the gift has been degraded because it was I who proved to be a bimbo. Ana could recall for you a time when I seriously discussed the possibility that I was some sort of anti-Faust who had made a pact with God in exchange for special gifts. I often claimed I owed Him a life, that He was the great designer behind the scenes and I was just a model on assignment, strutting and winning accolades, none of which were really mine. That seemed the only explanation for the numerous unmerited blessings, and all the turns of fortune I merely followed.

In return He must have a set of tasks for me, I argued, and it's what I believed until not many years ago, despite Ana's unrelenting scorn – that from the beginning the course of my life had never truly been mine to direct. I was a custodian entrusted with responsibilities far beyond myself. Beyond family, beyond country, beyond mere vocation and even love, I deciphered and defined my mission. I was to be curious about ‘all of life', I was
sent to be involved with ‘the world'. I felt I'd been equipped with all the endowments – the learning, the travel, the suppleness of spirit, the capacity to create and recognize so many forms of beauty – that were necessary to reach out to every corner of it, to mingle freely in its variety, because my objective was unique. I was meant to know the world's laws but not to own it, to see as much of it as possible and yet to love it, to accept and describe its awesome fullness and also to change it.

And I failed, and lost it all. In what grand terms I had determined my own purpose and yet, drunk on those very myths, I fell prey to the oldest suspects of all – hubris, arrogance, ego – the most obvious and foreseeable nine-times-out-of-ten afflictions. I lost, not just blinded by my pretensions of divinity, but because I signally underestimated the ruthlessness of earthly interests and motivations, the very things I had spent my life diagnosing. To the exclusion of everything else, I concentrated on making ‘friends' who would come together to kill me. ‘The infinite variety of the world' – the principle to which I have paid lip service throughout these years: perhaps it has been decades since I was last in touch with any of its actual content. Instead, I churned out opinions by the thousand, forgetting that to merely name things was never my end. I thought my best chance to catalyze change would be to arrive directly at the heart of events, which I associated only with those whose actions moved lives by the million. Because, as I once proclaimed naked to Sharon, ‘they might be good for the soil, but you only find worms happy among the grassroots.'