My Other Life

by Paul Theroux

  Yet I had begun to like being unknown, because I was so ashamed. I had to be unknown driving to Boston, eating alone. It would have been horrible to be recognized. "Are you the writer?" a woman asked me in a gas station when I showed her my credit card. I said no, because my eyes were glassy with grief. And what I said was true—I was not the writer anymore.

  A man behind me was holding a chrome gas cap.

  "What do you get for these?" he asked the woman.

  "Those run twenty bucks."

  I had forgotten how Americans spoke to each other. It seemed that I was losing the language. I would have to learn it again, sentences such as, Come on in and let me fix you breakfast.

  But no one was fixing me breakfast. It was pitiful being anonymous and alone, but wouldn't it have been much worse being known and observed? I still had my secret, even living this half-life.

  Dr. Mylchreest was from Argentina, though the name was not Argentine, was it? I knew nothing else about her. I had asked, but they don't tell you.

  2

  "So where are you now, Mr. Medved?" Dr. Mylchreest asked me.

  It was the question she always resumed with each time we met. As for the name, I invented it for myself, and it was different from any other I had used in the past, so that with this new name I might enter another life. I believed that I must not be known, that the psychiatrist would understand me only if she didn't associate me with writing.

  I was a physicist, I told her—particle physics. Boston was full of scientists. My field was studying the half-lives of radioactive nuclei.

  Those were the only lies I told Dr. Mylchreest. She was intense, with beautifully lighted eyes that gave her a penetrating gaze, and bonily attractive, with rubbery lips that were most expressive in reflection. She wore long skirts, modest-seeming, but I could see that her stockings, judging from her ankles, were black with intricate lacy patterns.

  Though her mistakes in English masked her shrewdness, her tact and her eyes and her silent patience made me garrulous. Her questions were all the more confusing for her heavy accent, and I was always taken aback when, translating what she had said—the way you do with someone whose English is faulty (with that accent, how could she be bright?)—I realized that her question was illuminating.

  I used to try to imagine which country that surname belonged to. Sweden? Denmark? Holland? Manxland? And what was her connection with Argentina?

  "I once met Borges in Buenos Aires," I said.

  "Yes?"

  Then I remembered I was supposed to be a physicist.

  "At a conference on molecular particles, Borges read us a poem. Did you ever meet him when you were there?"

  She smiled, and made me ignorant; she knew that my ignorance would keep me curious and respectful.

  "Go on, Mr. Medved."

  "Please call me Pavel."

  I wanted her to inquire about my name ("Slavic?"), because although it seemed like an exotic corruption of my old alias "Medford," it was the Russian word for "bear," but better than bear. It was one of those glorious praise names that tribal people give to dangerous creatures, meaning to propitiate them. Medved meant "honey wizard."

  She did not ask me that. She did not ask me anything. I was in a conversational void and, a listener by nature—an interrogator only when I wanted to get someone talking—I felt awkward and unreasonably pressured in her office. Stubborn, hating the silence, I wanted her to talk.

  And I was unused to talking about myself. My method was fiction, expressing myself through my characters and finding satisfaction in remaking my world, giving it wit and life, claiming it for myself. I had trained myself to write about my life in a way that had always worked for me. There was a writer, a glimmering fabulist, within me; that was who I was. This essence was enclosed by a physical being—a weak, hairy forty-nine-year-old servant who was responsible for bearing this small wavering flame, serving it, sometimes well, sometimes badly—falling down, sleeping late, quarreling; sometimes weepy, hating noise and disruption; distracted, yawning, restless, bored, silly. That was the half people saw, not me. I was the ageless spirit within who expressed himself in fiction.

  Now this clumsy servant was the only presence left. He was no writer—there was no writing. The light was out, or dimmed. Only the physical presence and the dead eyes remained. I was used to excusing his sloppiness or lateness with the other self—outshining it, as it were. Inside was light, outside shadow; but the light was substance, the shadow was illusion. I did not expect Dr. Mylchreest to understand this paradox, and I had already told her I was a physicist, so there was no need.

  I was Paul Theroux the writer, but as there was no writing, I was left with this other self. It did not matter what the servant's name was. I habitually gave strangers false names for myself, trying them out; and false occupations—geographer, teacher, publisher, printer, cartographer, fisherman. It was important to me not to tell the truth, because I needed to hold on to my secrets. Secrets were the only true power I had. The servant was there to listen, to sit and be dictated to—not to write about himself. He was uninteresting, the valet of my imagination.

  It was how I had spent thirty years, but now the other half was gone, as I say, and Dr. Mylchreest was listening. I had too much to say—and who was talking?—so I did not know how to begin.

  "So, where are you now?"

  Her method was free-floating Freudianism. I was the one who was supposed to carry the conversational ball.

  "I'm fine," I said. "I had a pretty good week, though I didn't work much." She was waiting, and I was wondering who was saying this—my servant or my other self. "I didn't work at all."

  She knew this was disappointing to me. I had told her how much my work mattered. I was writing a report on my research into carbon disintegration.

  "That was painful," I said. "And somehow, without my work to occupy me, my physics problems, I dream more about my wife. Awful dreams."

  Her silence insinuated itself like doubt, demanding that I offer a proof of what I had just said.

  "I'm in a house with a lot of people. I know my wife is there, somewhere downstairs. I'm having a drink, enjoying myself, then I realize that I have to find her. There is pandemonium. I finally find her and she screams at me and leaves."

  "Does this tell you anything about your feelings?"

  "Oh, that I'm feeling guilty," I said. "But I knew that before."

  Dr. Mylchreest laughed. I needed that, a hearty shout of denial. I needed someone to point out that I was mistaken. But Dr. Mylchreest would not make it easy for me by telling me why.

  "Dreams are not as bad as reality," I said. "I mean, sometimes I see her. That's much worse."

  "Shall we go into that?"

  "When I drive up the expressway I usually take the Chinatown exit. Near Tufts dental school, on Kneeland Street, there's a homeless woman, late forties or so, who's always walking up and down, very agitated. She's in rags, yet she has an intelligent face and looks well bred, but lost. She was once beautiful and happy, maybe a little nervous. I think she was married to someone who left her. She went mad, vanished, no one knows she's a street person."

  "What do you think her husband was like?"

  "It was me."

  "And she's unhappy?"

  "She's schizo."

  "Why do you use that word?"

  "Doesn't it mean split personality?"

  "It doesn't mean anything."

  "Look, this woman has been driven crazy," I said defiantly. The word "crazy" jangled there in the air between us like an obscenity. "She is lost and sad. She was abandoned by someone like me."

  "So it is not that she resembles Alison, but that her husband resembles you?"

  "Something like that."

  Dr. Mylchreest nodded, waiting, wanting more from me.

  "Alison was not my wife—she was my life!"

  Then I began to cry.

  Dr. Mylchreest allowed me to compose myself. I wanted her to take my hand, or hug me, or hold my he
ad. But she remained silent until I had stopped sniffing. "You have your own life," she said. "And she has one. She isn't a street person. She is in London, working. You told me yourself."

  "No, I've ruined her—destroyed her."

  "Do you mean you destroyed yourself?"

  "Yes. In the process of destroying her."

  "Tell me how many conversations you've had with her lately."

  "None lately."

  "What do you know about her?"

  "Nothing."

  "You said at the beginning of the session that you were feeling fine. Yes?"

  "Yes."

  "How do you really feel?"

  "Miserable."

  "Go on."

  "What do you mean Go on'? The word 'miserable' has a specific meaning in English. It is rock bottom—sick, sad, and hopeless. How can you analyze it? I feel like shit." I had begun shouting. "Can you imagine analyzing shit?"

  I lowered my voice, and I was aware that I was paying this woman to listen to me. It made me self-conscious and unwilling. I understood the impotence that some men experience with a prostitute when they are up in her room and, after she has counted the money, she opens her legs.

  Dr. Mylchreest said nothing—was still listening to anything I might want to say, or even shout.

  "Sorry," I said.

  She dismissed this. She was supposed to listen to tantrums. My outburst was the reason she cost me $180 an hour.

  "No. Go on."

  "What I mean is," I said in a subdued tone, "misery is an absence of feeling. So I have very little to describe. If I were happy or fulfilled, I think I could have a long conversation. I could describe something. But my misery is a mud puddle—shallow, dark, nothing there, no subtlety."

  "Try to look beyond it. Try to imagine what would make you happy. Ideally, what would your life be like?"

  "That's easy. I want to be working in an upstairs room, waiting for my kids to come home from school. Then I want to watch TV with them and hear them laugh. And cook dinner for my wife, who will be home around six-thirty. Later, after the children are in bed, I want to have a drink with her and talk about the day."

  One of Dr. Mylchreest's strengths was that she was imperturbable, and listening to me just now she showed no emotion, her face was blank, yet her eyes were pierced by a shifting light that was both bafflement and curiosity. Surely she was intrigued by what I had said—its suddenness, its unexpectedness, its love.

  "That is the past, isn't it?" she said quietly.

  "Of course it is. You ask me what I want. I want it to be 1978."

  "But you left it, not so?"

  "I can't remember what led up to it. There was just a day when we agreed to split up. The day came, and I had to go."

  "You told me it was a mutual decision."

  "Did I say that?"

  She stared at me, as though disappointed that I had forgotten this simple thing.

  "It was an awful parting. I woke up knowing I had to leave that day. It was like having to face a firing squad at dawn. There were tears, but no recrimination. Just sadness."

  "Like being shot by a firing squad, you say. Do you feel you died?"

  "Half of me died."

  I was silent for a long time, lost in the emptiness of my mind—nothing there, no words, no emotions, just a strange, pathless landscape that I the traveler had never seen before, and where I was now lost.

  "The word 'exile' is used a lot," I said. "I think it is a very outdated word. You know it?"

  Because English was not her first language, I instinctively verified important words, which irritated her, I think, because she knew them all. It was her accent. Whenever she used a word it was changed; her pronunciation seemed to give it a different meaning.

  "Conrad—you know him? Joseph Conrad the writer?"

  Her shrug, different from the blank smile she had given me when I had mentioned Borges, conveyed an insulted reply, yet also a measure of respect for the range of my references. I was not only a physicist, I also read the classics.

  "Conrad was always described as an exile. So was Nabokov, and Solzhenitsyn, and all those people who come here and make a bundle of money publishing their prison diaries."

  Again I sensed that Dr. Mylchreest was uncomfortable, wanting me to get to the point.

  "Now I understand exile. It means losing everything—wife, children, house, country. It means banishment—in a sense the opposite of confinement, but just as awful, having to contemplate every day all that you've lost."

  "Like Joseph Conrad, you say?"

  "No, no. There are no exiles anymore in the old sense. Political exiles, dissidents—that's all old hat. Except for a handful of people—and most of them are Tibetans—any of them can go back. But for people like me, exile is a reality. I have lost everything. Now I am in another country. I don't know how I got here. I've never been here before. I don't know how to get away."

  "Haven't you been in strange countries before?"

  If only she knew!

  "Yes."

  "You said you had lived in London for a period of time."

  "Eighteen years."

  "That's a long time," she said, and this banal response was intended to encourage me to see myself as adaptable.

  "I had planned to stay for ten. After that I just procrastinated. Then I left."

  "There must have been many obstacles that you overcame."

  "Yes, but in England that doesn't prove anything. You're the Yank. After fifty years you're still the Yank. If you forget, they remind you. And your kids are the Yank's kids."

  "You are speaking as though you were an exile then."

  "No. Even then I knew I wasn't. In 1971, just after I got there, I was in a country pub in Dorset. I had rented a cottage just down the road. The local farmhands were always complaining about strangers moving in and putting the prices up, and what buggers they were. I listened to this for a few weeks. Then one night I said, 'Look, I don't know what you think of me, but let me tell you that I have no intention of staying here. As soon as I make some money, I am leaving this village, and I am never coming back.' After that, those people were very pleasant to me."

  "Don't you feel as though you have come home?"

  "The irony is that I came home only to find myself in exile. I don't know where I am. I didn't realize that in losing my wife I lost everything. I didn't live in a country. I lived in a house—a home."

  "Why do you think—" She was about to say: Why do you think you can't make a new home? But I did not want to hear her say it.

  "I'm lost here and I can never go back!"

  That session, like many of them, ended in tears, and it was terrible because Dr. Mylchreest was so punctual; and so there was no consolation, but only the reminder that after fifty minutes her intense alertness dimmed and the temperature in the room seemed to go down a few degrees; it was time for me to go.

  I was reluctant to leave—I wanted to continue, to talk about something else, or to listen to her. I was attracted to Dr. Mylchreest. I knew nothing about her, and she had kept me in the dark so that I wouldn't fantasize; but my knowing nothing kept her mysterious and made me inquisitive. I could see that she was intelligent. She had large feet, and she was big boned and somewhat humorless, but she was strong and practical, and her loose clothes and full skirts and heavy sweaters did not hide her figure, but emphasized it.

  She had a splendid angular body, and I wanted to hold her, and for her to hold me. It was hard to be in this room with her week after week and not touch her. I wished at the end of each session that I could go home with her. I wanted for us to forget everything else and watch TV in our pajamas and eat popcorn, or else rent a video and lie in bed, propped by pillows, drinking wine and watching it.

  It was not love. She was the only person I saw or spoke to. I knew I could get along with her and I liked her physically. I could not prowl around, or look for women as I once had, because of AIDS. I was cautious, even somewhat fearful when I thought of approachin
g a strange woman.

  We got through a month of this, twice a week, and I began to see psychoanalysis as a permanent part of my life. The sixty-four-mile drive to Charles Street on those winter afternoons, puzzling over what I would say—the sort of idea that I might have explored in a short story before now was fodder for therapy, blunderingly blurted out in a simple form. Afterwards two Coronas and a plate of quesadillas at Amigos, and then the drive back, my mind blank, my body exhausted, depleted from the talk and the long ride.

  Exile seemed to me the most accurate way of describing my state of being. I had used the word many times in writing, but only now did I see its meaning. It was a secular form of damnation; a half-life, halving again every second in an almost perpetual diminishment. Exile was not a metaphor. I was an exile and I believed I would stay that way. It was no good to see myself as cast out, as though I had fallen from grace. I had not known any Eden. The closest I had come was at Moyo, in 1964. That leper colony had been my paradise.

  But this was a different exile. As a traveler, I always had vivid dreams in strange countries—something about those clammy rooms, those lumpy beds, that sour air, the nameless nighttime noise. In those places someone would call out, in Gujarati, in Hakka, Quechua, or Ilocano; and I had no idea of what was being said. But this atmosphere penetrated my sleep and gave me dreams.

  So I dreamed here, vividly, in this place that was no longer my home. They were incomplete dreams of exile and crime. I had become a broken writer babbling in his sleep, and the dreams were like the faded remnants and rags of my work.