by Paul Theroux
We stood wordlessly, still gasping from our walk through the thin wintry air, looking at each other in a silent pleading way, as though fearful of speaking.
Finally she said, "There's half a bottle of champagne left."
There was the bottle, with the knife jammed into it.
"It will go flat if you don't drink it."
"Leave it," I said. "I have to get up early. Six probably."
"Jesus, that's the absolute crack."
How I loved the way she spoke to me in her own untranslatable language.
She used the downstairs bathroom, I used the upstairs, and for the next ten minutes or so water rushed up and down the house, fountains and cataracts sounding in the walls.
The bedroom was in darkness when I entered, but I knew from the vaguest flutter of breath that she was in bed. I slipped beneath the duvet and moved into her orbit of warmth.
And there we lay, all night, holding each other in the close and steadying way that we had crossed the common, balancing on the ice. But we were under the covers, generating heat.
Often, sleeping, the image came to me that I was buoyant in an enormous ocean, submerging myself in sleep. Sleep was not the act of swimming, not action at all, but rather a sense of submersion in the deep currents of that ocean's darkness, among flitting slivers of lighted fish, the odd phosphorescence I always saw glimmering when I was in a dark bedroom. And holding my wife was the best version of that, sinking with her, clasping her from behind, and then shifting and feeling her roll against my back and ride me down to the profbundest, the darkest depths, where there were no dreams, where there was nothing but sleep.
The alarm's ringing was harsh and sudden and too loud, like the signal of the direst emergency.
She woke a moment after me, as I was kissing her.
"Andy!" she said.
But I had slid out of bed and was snatching at my clothes.
"I'll miss my plane."
"No, please, no! Come back! Please, don't go. What will I do without you—no!"
And worse than the words was the sound that followed, not a scream but a sob, the most grievous I had ever heard, as though she were strangling on blood, the nearest thing I had ever heard to someone dying. It was her own sound.
Sometimes in a big parking lot you hear a car door slam, and you note it, the strength of it, the grunt, like the chop of a cleaver; then there is a pause, someone sucking air, and an unearthly howl of pain. I had shut the door, and I knew I would go on hearing that cry of pain wherever I went, for the rest of my life.
It was the saddest story I had ever read.
THIRTEEN
The Half-Life
1
AFTER A MARITAL SEPARATION, because of the awful things you say or hear, you start using public phone booths more—anyway, I did, for their privacy and anonymity, to avoid embarrassment. And they all seemed to look alike, indistinguishable, allowing me to forget the bitter conversations and the hopeless silences. But in a short time an odd and unexpected thing happened, and it frightened me, and a sadness entered my soul and sank it. That capsizing made me see that I had never been to a place like this. The traveler was now a castaway. I did not know how I had gotten here; I did not know how to leave this lonely country where phones had faces.
The phones were memorable, each in a different way. Every one of them, even the most humdrum and seemingly featureless one, took on a particular appearance, its own look. In nightmares inanimate objects often have personalities—the wicked chair, the menacing tree. This was the phone with a memory. My misery made them unique, gave them a history. One represented tears, another stood for a particular crisis, and others still for pain or certain ugly words or a vow. Their low hoods and half-walls gave them the look of high-tech confessional booths, all pretty much alike, yet I think of these plain objects and it amazes me to reflect on how powerful the associations are. A bank of phones now looks to me like a wailing wall.
There is a phone at the Delta Shuttle at La Guardia that is hideous for me to look upon—I pass it with my eyes averted; another, on the corner of Fifty-seventh and Madison, makes me sad; one in a bank of four in the service area between a McDonald's and a Total gas station, northbound on Route I-95 in Connecticut, after exit 12, Rowayton, where I begged and pleaded; another at the Hyannis airport; one at the rest area on Route 3, at exit 5, near the wooden totem pole of the elongated Indian, where I heard myself being called a shit, over and over.
Just as bad, I heard a woman screaming a few phones away—she was in her early twenties, in jogging clothes, howling, "You fucking bastard!" She could only have been using those words in speaking to her ex-husband. I thought of her too when I saw the phones. Who would have believed that a nickel-plated box and a plastic receiver and stumpy apparatus could stand for so much passion and pain?
I had moved back to the United States and no one was waiting for me. I went home to an empty house. I was slow in everything I did because I was grieving and needed the delay. Failure is the taste of your own blood in your mouth. I left London so abruptly no one knew where I had gone and so I received no mail. I wrote myself a postcard:
Dear Paul,
How are you? I haven't seen you lately.
I hope to see you soon. Take care,
Paul
Soon after writing it, I found it between the pages of a book. I smiled at it, and then I panicked and tore it up, fearful that someone might see it and think I had lost my mind. Whenever I got into the house, I turned on only a few of the lights, preferring not to see the rest, so that I would not have to see how empty my life had become. Half the house was in darkness.
The refrigerator was half full, one towel on the rail instead of two, one chair at the table, one glass instead of a pair, one car in the driveway, and I have mentioned elsewhere how I had begun to sleep on the left-hand side of the bed, with the other big empty half unoccupied. I was too old to begin to sleep in the middle of the bed.
I was sad at the deepest part of my being, a sorrow like a sickness, and I was not strong enough to write or travel. Instead I became very interested in counting. It was not a passion but a science, a way of turning my life into numbers.
It started with a watch that had so many dials the makers called it a chronometer. It gave me the date, the day, the month, the year, the hour, the minute, the second. I bought a scale and weighed myself, but, dissatisfied that it was just a wavering needle, I bought another, more precise one, which showed my weight in a digital window, with pounds and ounces. I weighed myself morning and evening, and I learned that I weighed less in the morning, gained three or four pounds during the day, and lost it overnight. I began counting the days since the separation, the number of beers I drank, the miles I drove, and added them all up. I did not know why, though I found the numbers consoling.
I bought a Schwinn AirDyne stationary bike with a pulsometer and hooked myself to it, reading numbers while I pedaled, the watts, the minutes and seconds, the r.p.m.s, blood pressure, calories. I bought a Concept II Ergometer rowing machine and stroked 2,500 meters a day, and then 5,000 and more, monitoring the strokes per 500 meters, the calories, the watts, the distance, eventually rowing 2,500 meters in 9 minutes and 54 seconds. I counted the days, the weeks, the hours. I counted my money, my years, my days on earth.
I who had spent my life making notes and writing stories stopped writing anything except numbers. Computing my life mathematically, I imagined that my autobiography might look like one of those slender books, all logarithms and mathematical tables. What kept me at it was that the numbers were constantly changing, and I saw myself in a cockpit scrutinizing fifty gauges which told me everything. I needed the numbers, I needed their fluctuations. I counted everything, and it mattered more to me as a series of numbers. I was sick of words.
At night before I slept I itemized the food I had eaten, not the substance or quality but the calories. I added up the pictures in my house, what I had paid for them, computed their appreciation, made
a total of this. If I saw a stack of books or magazines, I did not read them, I counted them. I ran through the ages of every family member, of the countries I had visited. If I saw birds on the feeder, I counted them. I took pleasure in looking at the thermometer in the window, for the opportunity of seeing the liquid rise and fall throughout the day. It was a Cape Cod winter, with great variations. At night, waking to grope towards the bathroom, I detoured past the thermometer. I relished the variation of a few degrees. It gave me an enormous thrill of hope, a rush in my blood, I had no idea why.
I counted the days since I had last been together with my wife. The days since we had last been happy, our years together, the months of our courtship, the significant dates, the ages of our children at specific times. Old friends whom I had not seen for fifteen or twenty years—I computed their present ages, surprising myself by figuring that they were in their sixties and seventies, and V'S. Pritchett was ninety, as old as the century, and, thinking of him, I reflected that I had lived half my life.
I counted the years I had left and became very sad, and it was all worse for having nothing to do. I saw no one. I hardly left the house. I knew that any rational person would determine that I had gone insane, and so I avoided the company of other people, and was glad I could not write, because if I did, it would only prove that I was crazy. Dear Paul, How are you? I haven't seen you lately...
Now and then people wrote to me and told me about their lives. They tried to explain how empty their lives were, their jobs, they described their spouses and co-workers. They believed that I would understand, because I was a writer who had written joyously of the earth and its wonders. I was busy, they thought, my life was full. I did not dare to write back or I would frighten them by saying that there was only half of me here. They were wrong about themselves, they were wrong about me. And what was the good of writing if all it ended in was a lonely man lying on the left side of the bed making sense of the cracks in the ceiling that resembled numerals?
There seemed an enormous difference between the author of my books and the person I had become, and no one would know because the sad, inarticulate man I had become could not write a line.
I wanted to go away. I was too fearful to set off. I was not strong enough to travel. I clung to what was familiar, but still felt like a stranger, and that was odd because I was home, the place I knew best, and I felt I did not belong.
That was when I began using the public phones, believing superstitiously that a different phone was a new chance. Soon I realized that each phone left me with a painful memory. And then I used the public phones in order to hide the memories. When would I ever again see that roadside telephone in Connecticut? But the day I did I almost wept and my throat ached with sadness. And so the world that had seemed so benign to me, so safe and neutral and indifferent, began to take on aspects of unfriendliness, even menace. Those wicked telephones and all the angry spouses using them, the pretty jogger transformed into a howling witch. I developed unhappy memories of the most ordinary places and I began to understand the truth of places being haunted.
I had nothing to do—no job, no friends—and too much time. I had come to the end. All that effort, all that hope and ambition, and now I was alone, with nothing. I had started life believing I was special. Didn't I have a gift? Now I was like everyone else, and I saw that nearly everyone was sad. I had never understood this before. I was alone, with half of what I had had, and half was a diminishing amount and seemed as though it would soon be nothing.
I did not envy anyone, except the person I had once been, whom I had destroyed, and the worst day of marriage was bliss compared to this. A particular day came to mind when, after buying our house in London and getting deeply into debt, Alison and I had left the children with a babysitter and spent a whole day cleaning, she on one floor, I on the other; and with nowhere to cook—the kitchen was unusable—we had gone to a café and sat there, tired, silent, eating dry sandwiches, hollow-eyed, almost too tired to hold a conversation. In retrospect that seemed romantic—such effort and such rewards had followed that struggle.
That was one of the happiest days of my life. But this was simply dreary, and on most days it was a misery of changelessness, relieved only by my continual counting—minutes, ounces, meters, dollars, years.
I was a measurable being. Writing blurred or contradicted this exactness. I did not write anything. I did not go to movies, I was indifferent to the news, except when it was about natural disasters or man-made catastrophes or crime, and then I watched, stonily, with grim satisfaction. It gave me no pleasure, but I was now and then a witness to a sort of suffering, or agony, that proved that I was not alone.
Thinking that reading might ease my pain, I tried to recapture the pleasure of books I had loved. I began to reread David Coppeifield and came across this: '"And since I've took to general reading, you've took to general writing, eh, sir?' said Mr. Omer, surveying me admiringly. 'What a lovely work that was of yours! What expressions in it! I read it every word—every word. And as for feeling sleepy! Not at all!'"
I stopped reading novels altogether, or anything except newspapers or trashy magazines. I became submerged in what I thought of as the public consciousness. I had once thought of myself as unusual, but now I saw how similar I was to so many people. I followed Hollywood divorces, studying the details of movie stars and musicians and public figures who were going through the process of separation, and how each move they made was noted and described. I found a deeper meaning and a kind of eloquence where before I had seen only a cliché: Says he is trying to get his life back on track ... Every moment has been a living hell ... Has found it impossible to focus on his work ... Claims something just snapped ... Feels as though everything he had worked for had been destroyed... Misses his kids...
Nothing I read or heard in this period was truer to me than the sentiments in country music, a kind of clumsy poetry about being wronged and abandoned and let down. I listened to those songs, appalled by the exactitude in their lyrics, and sometimes tearful with recognition. And these simple, almost artless songs proved to me that I had up to then deceived myself and wasted my writing talent. And then I had to stop, because I could not listen to country music without wanting to cry.
My story was in the newspaper almost every day—in "Father Appears on TV to Demand Access to Children," in "Phone Booth Torched by Estranged Husband," in "Ex-Wife's Boyfriend Disfigured in Scalding Attack," in "Mystery Deepens over Author's Disappearance," in "No Apparent Cause in Fatal Crash."
I concentrated on my numbers. Science was the thing, there was always something of that on television. I liked a program I saw on the Discovery Channel, about carbon dating, the way it used the expression "half-life." Half the film was a serious cartoon, the other half a clowning scientist. In the notebook I normally used for story ideas, which was now blank and unused, I scribbled this:
In physics, a fixed time required for half the radioactive nuclei in a substance to decay.
Half-lives of radioactive substances can range from fractions of a second to billions of years, and they are always the same for a given nucleus, regardless of temperature or other conditions.
If an object contains a pound of radioactive substance with a half-life of fifty years, at the end of that time there will be half a pound of the radioactive substance left undecayed in the object. After another fifty years, a quarter pound will be left undecayed, and so on.
Scientists can estimate the age of an object, such as a rock, by measuring the amounts of decayed and undecayed nuclei in the object. Comparing that to the half-life of the nuclei tells when they started to decay, and therefore how old the object is.
That explained it, I knew: a complex countdown, the algebra of death. I was forty-nine.
I was not suicidal. Suicide took willpower and determination. People who failed kept trying. I was merely miserable. But misery meant fluctuation in weight, exercise tolerance, pulse rate, and this kept me counting.
I star
ted buying things, only realizing after I got home that I owned them already. I pondered over a short-wave radio and finally bought it; but I had one, a similar model. I had forgotten. A pair of blue jeans: I was thinking, I need them, but I didn't. I had another new pair I had not even worn. A cashmere sweater that cost $400—now I had two of them; a bicycle, a rifle, a popcorn popper, a video recorder; more. It was as though I were furnishing and fitting out another life, not realizing that mine was already furnished, with those same items. I shopped, with the knowledge that I was trying to fill the void of my sadness with material objects, anything to divert me or make me happy. Strangely, without any conscious intention, I only bought things I already owned. I felt humiliated by the expense and the duplication, and instead of filling the void they confused me with chaos and clutter.
For uncritical and anonymous company I drove to Boston—sixty-four miles—and found a doctor with an office on Charles Street, near the corner of Revere Street, who would see me twice a week, a woman, and fortunately she was good-looking. It heartened me to think that I had noticed and that I had been attracted to her pretty face and fine hair. I needed to be in the presence of someone pleasant, who did not know me.
It would have been so humiliating for anyone to know who I was—the man who wrote about marriages and love and freedom and strange places. I remembered how in a dismal place I would think: At least I have this to write about. That gave me hope. The hope had lain in my ability to turn around and write about my inconvenience. I had thought of it as suffering, but now I knew it was not that at all. This was suffering, and it paralyzed me. The sickness of separation, the half-life I lived, was one such experience I would never return to in writing. I would go on living in it and no one would ever know. Hopelessness is the knowledge that nothing will change and that there is no future, only an eternal and desperate present.