The Paper Men (20 page)

This bit can’t be connected. I cannot, simply cannot remember the succession of events that followed our second meeting in the Weisswald. The wire came in too close, was too tight. I have to remember in scenes as if I had reels of film with great gaps. One scene is in Zurich where I found a lawyer though I can’t remember how. He was a she and when she found what the agreement contained she looked at me more as if she was going to buy me rather than do me a service. She was small and wrinkled and one of those women who combine an extreme ugliness with an extraordinary degree of femininity. I don’t mean a
jolie
laide.
That phrase puts the subject straight into the sexual mess where we are not, nor were not. She had a kind of security—that kind which stems perhaps from getting on very well without some of our less attractive qualities, such as the need for revenge, more success than other people, protection from other people or indifference to them. I remember thinking it was a good job I was no longer bothering with writing beautifully a Wilfred Barclay book because she again was a real person and useless to the novelist because he cannot describe them and they do not bother to describe themselves, existing more in their silences than their speech. I am still not clear how she got me to see that I didn’t need the document at all but could leave the business for the time being as I had no intention of meeting Rick again until the steel wire was slackened a bit. I remember ending our time together envying her bitterly. The things you could see that woman had no need of!

The other thing, other reel I have from Zurich was about a graveyard. The thing is that the stone had the man’s date of birth on it and nothing else. Later I remembered the date and it was my own date of birth. There’s no doubt about it. I sat in one of those plastic hotels you get in big cities and saw the stone with my mind’s eye and read the date letter by letter. There was room left for the rest. So I got back on the road again with a hire car. I must have gone high to get across the mountains and this was—I think—because a hearse kept following me. I must have dodged it by going up a side road, one of those that are only used by foresters. There are blank bits here because I remember coming down the Italian side and finding the treeline below me. God knows where I’d been. Then I stopped because I’d detected a movement in the earth. Well, where I was, it wasn’t earth but mud. The track was stones and gravel with nasty drops round it here and there and outcrops of rock which hadn’t done the hire car any good. Well, I sat in the driving seat, and I saw old roots and bits of tree trunk or branches sticking out of the mud beyond and above me and the thing is they were moving. Then I saw that all the mud was moving down, the skin tearing and mending itself and the sticks and things writhing as in pain or waving as if for help of which there was none, natch. It hadn’t occurred to me you could have an avalanche of mud but there it was and it missed my hire car but cut the track so that not even a tank could have got through. I had to slither and slide and climb and scramble. I came on Italian workmen doing things to the road at the bottom and when I explained I’d left my auto up at the top they laughed at me. I had a lot of being laughed at and fuss.

I have a reel about being back in the colossal motel and having the same dream over and over again. I must have stayed there for weeks, it was so impersonal. The place I mean. It stuck up, concrete sticking out of a concrete wasteland. This dream was I’d be in Marrakesh where I’d never been and I’d be running away from Rick who was chasing me in a hearse. My only course was to run out into the Sahara beyond roads so he couldn’t catch me. I’d spend the rest of the dream out there. Dream by dream the beginning got left out, shortened, or implied until I was having a dream just of being out in the desert. It was everywhere and it was just the essence of experiencing unpleasantness. I suppose I was always naked for I don’t remember (re-visualize) clothes. There was compulsion. It wasn’t the usual, indescribable, rootless, pointless compulsion of dreams and nightmares. It was logical because it followed on the fact. You’ll know those pathways of duck-boarding they put across beaches in hot climates so you can get to the sea without roasting the soles of your feet? Well, here there wasn’t any pathway, just the sand which was very hot, oh very hot, oven-hot. There wasn’t any sky that I was aware of over this desert or if there was my attention was fully occupied with the sand. You see the logic of the compulsion? Christ, how I had to move, dance, run, jump up and down! It was better in the air if that’s what lay above the sand so getting one foot out was the best I could do since even in dreams I’m no dab hand at suspending the laws of gravity. However, using all my mighty dream-intelligence, I evolved a compromise that given time might even be a solution to the problem. I bent down and endured my burning feet while with my hand I made a hole in the sand. It seemed logical at the time that this should result in a hole so deep and black it was sickening, like a hole in the universe, but it wasn’t burning sand. If I bored enough holes I had a space to put a foot and escape the burning; at which point I would wake up. Sometimes when I stirred the sand with my hands I found I was writing a strange language or making pictures and this would give me room for both feet and I would wake up. But my real trouble began when I took enough pills to knock me out flat because it meant I didn’t dream which was of course the object of the exercise but the dreams simply waited for me and when I woke up there they were, and I would have them in the bar or wandering round the concrete waste in which, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make a hole with my hands and all I did was call attention to myself. I must have moved on. However, the dreams came too.

There’s telepathy. There must be, otherwise there was no reason at all why my other reel should be of where it was, that’s where Liz and I had a honeymoon the year before we got married.

I’d avoided it since the divorce. I’m not a sentimentalist and if I were, what the hell would I be doing going back to a place where that all began? But somehow I got there. They knew me after a bit, the hotel filing system being what it is, and by some extraordinary means someone had stuck my gold credit card in my passport which apart from another hire car was all I brought with me. So there I was in the hotel and I went across to the sleazy one and got them to send my sacks of mail across. I walked both ways.

I’d forgotten to say this reel is about Rome, no, not religious Rome but hotel Rome. You get to Piazza what’s-it with the fountain in the little boat and then up the Steps and the hotel is at the top. There’s a church up there too but the glass is lousy and the hotel far, far preferable. It’s a very understanding hotel. They turned my hire car in and gave me the room I wanted, one with a balcony because if you have things you don’t want to think about you can always look at the view and fashionably dislike the Victor Emmanuel monument though it’s better than most of the rest of the crummy Roman architecture, you can see I have no taste. In any case my desert kept getting in the way of the view. Now here is a remarkable thing and I regard it as being in the same line of phenomenon as Padre Pio and Wilfred Barclay, bank clerk, it’s all in the mind. The fact is that even when I was awake and sober my feet were beginning to hurt and so was my hand. That made me change hands in the dream when writing or drawing but I only made both my hands hurt. So I would spend a lot of time in the bathroom with the cold tap on, sitting on the edge of the bath with my feet in the water and putting one hand at a time under the tap. It helped to a certain extent. In fact I must draw your attention to another of those farcical incidents to which Wilf is subject, he had the stigmata like St Francis only in reverse as it were, for being a mother-fucking bastard as my best friend would say instead of getting them as a prize for being good. I make a joke of it as indeed it does not need to be made, being one already but believe me it was no fun. The whole situation was thoroughly out of hand. I remember one evening—no. It’s a separate reel.

One evening when my feet and hands were just about bearable and I could see the skyline I was sitting on the balcony trying to get things together. I’d found myself wandering in Rome that morning because I’d been looking for
Who’s
Who
in
America
meaning to get a line on Halliday. I’d discovered the Steps again at last. They were littered with dropouts, hippies, junkies, drabs, punks, nancies and lesies and students, as usual, and all of them were wearing guitars or playing them very badly or trying to sell the tin shapes they’d cut out and spread round on the stairs as necklaces or rings or earrings or noserings, there were carpets of artificial flowers and so on. It was a toil getting up but nobody minded me or tried to sell me anything the way they would have if I’d looked as if I could afford to buy. But looking at them I realized what a mess I must be myself and I went up to my balcony and put my head between my hands and tried to think. I decided I’d use my journal to get things straightened out and understand what the score was. Then of course I remembered that I hadn’t got my journal; and I had an instant picture (reel) of myself here and there in Switzerland and Italy duly writing my journal in telephone books or on walls or the windows of cars or on lavatory paper then wandering on wherever I might be going if anywhere. I also had a glimpse of myself that very morning, looking in
Who’s
Who
in
America
—
why
had I not seen the dreadful significance? For the page that should have contained Halliday’s entry was bare, bare, bare, just blank, white paper! Oh then I started up, feet or no feet, and I was looking across at that same church with the lousy glass and my God he was standing on the top. He was, and I fought my way back into the bedroom from the balcony and sat there on the bed, burning and trembling. I started to shake. I reasoned that I had to stay awake because if I fell asleep he would simply step across from the roof and collect me. Also of course, pills and drink, either or both were out because either or both would render me helpless and unable to resist him if he should choose to step across anyway. This last consideration tightened things altogether. I don’t know how long I sat, shaking and staying awake. I know a woman came in to make the bed but I was sitting on it and it wasn’t unmade so she went away again; and another man came but from the hotel and not from the next roof so I wasn’t afraid of him and ignored him. In the war I had a boil, oh one hell of a boil as a result of my wound, and it swelled and it swelled and there was the time—half an hour it may be—when the pressure from my heart pushed the pus so hard against the skin that it was pain enough to make a man faint. I remember I couldn’t believe that the pain would increase but it did. Well the tightening went on, it drew in and in. I suppose I slept or went into some mode of being that wasn’t quite being awake or simply being mad.

You could say that I dreamed.

I was standing on the roof next door where Halliday had stood. I was looking down at the steps. There was sunlight everywhere, not the heavy light of Rome but a kind of radiance as if the sun were everywhere. I’d never noticed before, but now I saw, looking down, that the steps had the symmetrical curve of a musical instrument, guitar, cello, violin. But this harmonious shape was now embellished and interrupted everywhere by the people and the flowers and the glitter of the jewels strewn among them on the steps. All the people were young and like flowers. I found that he was standing by me on the roof of his house after all and we went down together and stood among the people with the patterns of jewels and the heaps of flowers all blazing inside and out with the radiance. Then they made music of the steps. They held hands and moved and the movement was music. I saw they were neither male nor female or perhaps they were both and it was of no importance. What mattered was the music they made. Male and female was of no importance for me, he said, taking me by the hand and leading me to one side. There were steps going down, narrow steps to a door with a drum head. We went through. I think that there was a dark, calm sea beyond it, since I have nothing to speak with but with metaphor. Also there were creatures in the sea that sang. For the singing and the song I have no words at all.

I woke up not singing but crying; or of those tears it is better to say that I wept and went on weeping. Believe it or not I was drunker when I woke than when I went to sleep and the tears were flowing so that when I found where I was I examined the bed to see if I’d pissed myself but I hadn’t. The bedspread and pillow were wet with tears like in books. Even so the boil had burst, the pain and the strain had gone because I knew where I was going myself, or rather the direction in which I was facing and that there was no more need to run. I could walk and the rest of the journey would simply be provided. A woman knocked on the door and brought in croissants and coffee and a bottle of wine. When she came in I was laughing which startled her but I couldn’t explain what I was laughing at. She wouldn’t have believed it. But the fact is my feet and my hands were not hurting unbearably. They were still hurting but as if a doctor had put some sort of salve on them that hurt because it would heal. I don’t think there’s a scientific explanation though if you’re a scientist you may cook one up and if you’ve kept up your religion you may cook one up but hell I’m not dealing with fatuous abstractions like religion or science I’m dealing with life I tell you and asisness,
Istigkeit
I think they sometimes call it, how it is to be human though a, quote, mere fish but a queer fish, unquote. It was also because my feet and hands were hurting sort of like funny bones, as if I’d knocked four elbows.

I spent that day in dressing-gown and pyjamas both of which I sent out for, having discovered that my luggage consisted of nothing at all. I spent the next few days in the hotel getting tailors and suchlike along to fit me out. I also began to deal with the mail bags and the first letter I opened was from Liz. I précis it here. It amounted to, Capstone Bowers has scarpered. I am past it now & I guess you are. Why not return? The moment I had read that I sent off a telegram saying, yes but few days am rekitting! I would sit on the edge of my bath with my feet under water and my hands under the cold tap while a tailor, it may be, would sit on the loo and we would talk about life or allied subjects. The fact is it took me days and days to come to terms with being happy! You have to acquire the knack or it knocks you clean off your feet. So I talked to tailors and shoe-makers and shirt-makers and hatters and jewellers a most agreeable set of men. I ordered a book for keeping a journal but when I tried to fill it with that same lucid prose which people will find in most of my books, my writing hand hurt like the devil and I had to stop. It was then I began to see things coming together. I saw that intolerance hadn’t done with me and there was still a book that I or someone had to write, not a journal but more hippity-hop. As the hypnotist said all those years ago I am a perfect subject for suggestion. I saw how suggestion had altered my books especially
Birds
of
Prey
and
Horses
at
the
Spring
. I cried a lot and was ashamed of it not being overly accustomed to the lachrymose life. I drank of course as I thought an instant renunciation of the bottle would be dangerous but I
did
ration myself to a daily bottle more or less.