The Amnesiac

by Sam Taylor

  Yet as James looked at the house’s façade, he found himself bemused and then irritated. This was not the house in his memory. It had changed, and not only in small, incremental ways, like a person’s face. The building’s front had been completely renovated: the walls pebbledashed, the wooden windowframes replaced with plastic double-glazing, the roof retiled, the door repainted. And now here it stood, a shameless impostor.

  James walked up the driveway to the gate at the side of the double garage. He tried the handle, and it opened. The path, which had been paved with flagstones before, was now smoothly concreted. He followed it into the back garden. A cloud moved in the sky above, and moonlight drenched the scene. For a moment he hesitated, thinking he must somehow have come to the wrong place, and then he began to notice small elements of the garden that had not been altered beyond recognition. That magnolia tree, for example, and the branches of the neighbours’ weeping willow, still leaning disconsolately over the wooden fence. But so much had changed that his memories were disturbed. The shed was gone, and the carport; the patio and the slide; all of these places and objects, which had seemed so solid, so permanent, in his mind, had simply ceased to exist. Now James stood on a sort of raised concrete terrace, looking out at this strange landscape, and felt a wave of sorrow move through him. His childhood. Gone.

  A sound woke him from his reverie and made him look around again. He noticed a movement on the rockery: a flitting shadow that caused the branches of the young fruit trees to shiver. Probably a cat, he had time to think, and then the moon was covered again by cloud and the whole garden disappeared. James heard a series of noises: a rustling, a small crack, footsteps. Suddenly he felt afraid. Had someone followed him? An image of Malcolm Trewvey’s half-remembered face came to him in the darkness. He turned around and, groping with his hands, found his way back through the side-alley to the safety of the lamplit pavement.

  James lit a cigar and lay back on the sofa. It was two o’clock in the morning. A picture appeared in his mind of the last time he had smoked a cigar: on the balcony of Ingrid’s flat, with the plastercast poking between two railings, blowing smoke into the sky. The memory was vivid, and yet it seemed so unlikely. To James, the summer was another world. He tried to recall the heat, the dizzying colours, the putrid smells, but in the middle of winter it was unimaginable. I can’t even prove that any of it existed, he thought. The canal and Harry’s Bar. The view from the apartment. Ingrid’s body. Had they been real? And the plastercast. There, at least, he found a link between past and present: at night, in the cold, his ankle bone hurt so precisely that he could put his finger on the line where the fracture had healed.

  His vision was spinning, so he stubbed out the cigar and got up to look at all the Christmas cards his parents had received, hanging by string garlands from walls and ceiling. James had not sent or received any cards this year; when she discovered this, his mother had started worrying about him becoming ‘disconnected’. But do any of these people really care about you, mum? he wondered. And do you really care about them? He stood up and began reading the names and greetings inside them. ‘Best wishes for the festive season from Geoff and Sandra. ’ ‘Wishing you a merry Xmas . . . lots of love, Miriam, Keith and all the Joneses xxx.’ Who were these people? What connection did they have with his parents? He kept going until he came to a name that didn’t make him smile ironically. ‘I hope you have a happy Xmas and all my good wishes for the new year. Love, Ingrid x.’

  James took the card down and stared at the familiar handwriting, with its curly dots above the i’s, its neat round lettering. His heart was beating fast. On the front of the card was a child-like drawing of a green tree against a white background; inside were the printed words, ‘Vrolijk kerstfeest en een gelukkig nieuwjaar’. Ingrid. He closed his eyes and tried to remember her face, but already it was fading. He knew what she looked like, of course - if he saw her now, he would recognise her instantly - but still, when he tried to picture her all at once, he found there were parts missing, blurred, frosted over. For a few seconds of panic, he couldn’t even remember the colour of her eyes, but then it came to him - they were blue - and slowly the other details returned. Yes, if he tried, he could probably recollect every centimetre of her skin, from the soles of her feet to the crown of her head . . . but then, what would be the point? She was gone from his life. She no longer existed. She was nothing to him now but an awkward silence during dinner, a name on a card sent to someone else. And to her, he guessed, I am just the same. A handful of dust, let go in the wind.

  To distract himself he began to scan the bookcase. The top shelf contained various detective novels belonging to his mother. In his mid-twenties, James had gone through a phase of reading nothing but detective stories. Each time, he remembered, he had become obsessed with the mystery, thrilled by its complexity; and each time, when he discovered the solution and finished the book, he was left feeling hollow and let down. Detective stories, he thought, should be read backwards: that way the reader could get the disenchantment out of the way at the beginning and end up in a beautifully perplexing world, like his own but subtly different; a perfect maze, in which each word was a cipher suggesting an infinite number of hidden clues, meanings, possibilities.

  The next shelf contained works of serious literature belonging to James himself: novels and plays by Kafka, Melville, Camus, Beckett and Shakespeare that he had bought or been given when he was younger. It would be an exaggeration, however, to say that James had read all of these; certainly he had begun them all, but in each case he had become irritated and impatient with the protagonist’s indecisiveness, lack of common sense, apparent insanity, or sourceless melancholy. As far as James was concerned, these so-called antiheroes deserved everything they got. Surely it was obvious that the land surveyor, K, should just have forgotten about trying to reach the castle and gone home? Similarly, Ahab should have given up on trying to catch the white whale and gone home; Meursault should have lied; Vladimir and Estragon should have left Godot a note and gone to the pub; and Hamlet should just have made up his mind.

  On the bottom shelf were works of philosophy belonging to his father. Mr Purdew was a philosophy lecturer, but it was his opinion, based on years of studying and teaching these books, that philosophy was a waste of time. James had never read any of them. Curious, he scanned the titles and pulled out a Dictionary of Philosophy. He began by reading it alphabetically, but quickly realised that this was impractical as almost every entry ended with a list of cross-references which took him to other parts of the book. Soon he became pleasurably lost in this labyrinth of clues and associations. James was amazed. The way his father talked about philosophy, he had always imagined it to be dry and boring, but it was not like that at all. Indeed, though its language was at times as foreign-seeming as German or Japanese, James felt more excited than he had since his early days as a detective. He was on the trail of a mystery once again, though quite what the mystery was, he couldn’t be sure. Reading philosophy, he thought, was like reading the beginnings to an infinite number of detective stories, without ever having to read their bathetic endings. And yet, because it was all interconnected, it was also like reading one, multilayered,never-ending detective story: a mystery in which the solution, if there were such a thing, was not the identity of a murderer but the meaning of life itself.

  At quarter to four, his eyelids growing heavy as he read the two-page biography of Socrates, his eye was caught by another entry heading: ‘Solipsism’. James had never realised solipsism was a philosophy. He had thought it was only an insult. According to his father, solipsism was a modern disease. But as soon as he read its basic principles, James knew he had found what he was looking for: an explanation for why he felt the way he felt; why the world seemed the way it seemed.

  The name, he learned, came from the Latin: solus - alone; ipse - self. The philosophy could be traced back to Descartes’s supposition, in his Discourse on the Method, that the search for truth required the thinker
to ‘reject as if absolutely false everything in which one could imagine the least doubt, in order to see if one was left believing anything entirely indubitable’. In his First Meditation, Descartes used this method to question such seemingly straightforward observations as ‘I am sitting here by the fire’, as there was no guarantee that this apparent experience was not a dream. By the end of the First Meditation the philosopher had accepted that everything in the universe (and the universe itself) might be illusion - with the single exception of himself. Cogito ergo sum: I think therefore I am. In later Meditations, Descartes regained his belief in the existence of outward reality, but only through the fallacious argument that God must exist.

  Solipsism, therefore, began with Descartes’ single irrefutable truth - there is no external, verifiable evidence that anything exists beyond one’s own mind - and followed this through to its logical conclusion: i.e. nothing exists but me. James tried to imagine what this would mean in practical terms. Everything and everyone around me, he thought - this house, my parents, the neighbours, the television, the pubs, the school, the sky, the earth, the sun and stars and the entire universe - these would be merely the projections of my mind. Was it possible?

  Yes, he whispered. Of course. That was why he always felt so alone. That was why communication was impossible. That was why his memories seemed so unreal. Why he often had the feeling that the people around him were mere actors, there to fill out the background of a scene. Why none of his actions provoked any real consequences. He was alone, and the whole world, his whole life, was nothing but a dream.

  He was about to close the non-existent book and go to his non-existent bed when he noticed the cross-references at the foot of the entry: ‘See also: Descartes, René; egocentric predicament; Nagel, Thomas; philosophy of mind; private language argument; problem of other minds; Ryal, Tomas . . .’ The last name snagged on something in his mind. Where had he seen it before? He was sleepily brushing his teeth in the bathroom when the memory came back to him. Tomas Ryal Associates. That was the name of the company for which Dr Lanark worked.

  James switched on the computer in the spare room. It hummed and flickered into life. He went online and typed ‘tomas ryal’ into a search engine. There were no exact matches. James frowned and checked the spelling of the name in the Dictionary of Philosophy. It was correct. He tried a different search engine; again, nothing.

  He went downstairs to pour himself a large glass of water. He brought it back up, changed into his pyjamas, and was about to switch off the computer when he noticed that the top entry on the list of sites containing the words ‘tomas’ and ‘ryal’ was an exact match, after all. ‘The Life and Works of Tomas Ryal (1900-197?),’ it said. Beneath that was the address: encyclopaedia-labyrinthus.com. James felt sure that this entry hadn’t appeared earlier, but he knew that made no sense, so he decided to forget about it and clicked on the web address.

  Seconds later he was looking at a list of names. And there, in the centre of the screen, between ‘Ruysdael, Jacob Van (Dutch painter)’ and ‘Ryan, Lacy (English actor)’, was ‘Ryal, Tomas (Czech philosopher)’. James clicked on this and a new screen appeared. This is what he read:

  The Life and Works of Tomas Ryal

  (1900-197?)

  Tomas Gregor Ryal, known variously during his lifetime as a playwright, pornographer, poet, novelist, drunkard, womaniser, war hero and recluse, but chiefly remembered now as the philosopher who controversially denied the existence of memory, was born in the town of H., near Prague, on Christmas Eve, 1900.

  Tomas was an only child. His father, Gregor, was a tutor and philosopher, and his mother, Patryshka, worked for many years as her husband’s assistant and book-keeper. Little is known about Tomas’s relationship with his parents, but one famously ironic line in his posthumously published (and unfinished) novel, The Labyrinth1 - which, according to his diaries, he began as an attempt at an autobiography - suggests that it was largely harmonious and uncomplicated.

  After attending the German-language Gymnasium in Prague (the same school Franz Kafka had attended one generation before)

  the eighteen-year-old Ryal moved to Berlin, where he read Philosophy. His four years at university were incalculably important for Ryal, introducing him in a short space of time to love, alcohol,

  It was while in Berlin that Ryal met Kirstya Elberg, a fellow Philosophy student two years his senior with whom he fell deeply in love. Few details are known about their relationship, as only three letters survive, but it seems they had a brief, illicit affair,2 which was ended by the guilt-stricken Elberg. Thereafter, they remained close friends for the next two or three years, but - if we are to judge from descriptions of M’s student girlfriend Karina in The Labyrinth - Ryal never lost his passion for Elberg, and relations became increasingly volatile until what was apparently a sudden severance of communication in 1923. It is not known if Ryal ever learned of the fate of his first love,3 but he continued to allude to her in letters, diaries and poems until he stopped writing altogether in August 1970.

  It must be said at this point that a large part of the ‘volatility’ in Ryal’s lovelife stemmed from his drunkenness. His diaries from this period, which are themselves disordered and strangely incomplete, record many episodes of amnesia, all of which seem to have been induced by overintoxication. Half a dozen times in his first year, Ryal writes that he woke up in a strange place with no memory of how he had arrived there or what he had done. There are hints in the diaries that our hero’s beverage of choice was absinthe, which would certainly explain the frequency and length of his blackouts,4 and would also suggest a root cause to the gradual blindness which affected him towards the end of his life. Some critics maintain that these experiences also explain Ryal’s notorious claim that ‘we are all of us amnesiacs, and memory nothing but a lie we tell ourselves every day’;5 in other words, that this was not an expression of a universal human condition, but an obscure cry for help from a deeply sick individual. But the same criticism could potentially be applied to many great writers, including Poe and Kafka.

  In any case, the final three years of his university career remain a mystery. His diaries do not cover this period, and there is an unmistakable alteration in tone between the writings before and after this blank time. There appears also to be a very deep sense of guilt and regret. Its source is unknown, though there has been no lack of speculation as to its possible causes, among them the improbable suggestion that Ryal witnessed, or even committed, the murder of a fellow student, Idrizaj Deisler.6

  At the time, however, there was no suggestion of any impropriety or scandal, and it would seem that, after toying with the idea of travel and writing, Ryal chose a more expedient route and accepted a job on Berlin newspaper Die Zeit as a general arts correspondent. He kept this post for five years, during which time his drinking apparently grew more and more uncontrollable, until finally he was fired in 1927.

  All we know of Ryal’s life in the years that followed is that he spent two years travelling around Europe and the United States before finally settling in England. He rented a small cottage in Devon and endeavoured to live self-sufficiently - growing his own vegetables, rearing sheep, chickens and a cow, and spending the money from his modest inheritance7 on nothing more extravagant than pints of ale in the local pub, to which he would row every Saturday evening in a wooden dinghy. Ryal lived this way for a total of five years, and he wrote to his mother that it was ‘a hard life, but a good one. Nothing makes you feel so alive, mother, as having only just enough to eat.’ The English weather disagreed with him, but he added that ‘rain is good for writing, if less good for living’,8 and certainly his time in Devon was extraordinarily productive in literary terms, considering that he must have spent seven or eight hours a day working on the farm, and that, according to his diaries, he generally fell asleep from exhaustion long before midnight.

  It was during this period that Ryal wrote and published his first book of poems, The Sky as a Mirror of the Land (1930
), his first philosophical work, On the Impossibility of Knowing (1931), and most importantly, the 400-page ‘meditation’, Solitude (1934). This book is divided into two parts of equal length and symmetrical structure (a formula that evidently appealed to Ryal, as he would attempt to repeat it in two of his later, major works):9 part one, ‘Oh Why Do I Feel So Alone?’, and part two, ‘The Benefits of Solitude’. In part one, he posited the solipsistic theory that nothing existed beyond the confines of his own mind,10 in nine chapters of increasingly passionate, intricate and absurd argument, culminating in the much-(mis)quoted aphorism, ‘Thus, if God exists, then I, perforce, am He’. In part two he argues eloquently that solitude is ‘the necessary prelude to all true communication - because the right words, the words that come closest to expressing our truths, our human essence, are buried so deep within us. Only through meditation - only, one might say, through obsession, desperation, loneliness, darkness, madness and loss - can we reach and uncover them and bring them up, out, into the air.’

  ‘The Benefits of Solitude’ is, with its long mesmerising sentences and aura of utter stillness, a beautiful and inspiring proof of its own thesis, but unfortunately it was part one that stole the critics’ attention. Ryal was ridiculed and reviled by several prominent philosophers, and his name, for a while, became a byword for selfishness, inertia, apathy, for every supposedly ignoble emotion of the age.11

  Ryal, stung by this reaction, later threw himself heroically into

  Certainly, mortality was the dominant theme of his writings over the next few years, though whether this was due to Irene’s death, his own ill health, the war, a mixture of all of these, or something else altogether, is impossible to say. What we do know is that, in 1937, Ryal, now living near Pau, published his second book of poems, Intimations of Mortality, and in 1938, his two-act play, What Happens When We Die, was staged, albeit briefly and unsuccessfully, in Paris. But, as powerful as they were, these two works were mere throat-clearings in comparison to the monumentally morbid Darkness, published in 1939. Part philosophical meditation, part political diatribe, part apocalyptic prose-poem, Darkness was - fittingly, perhaps, given its tone and subject matter - swallowed up into obscurity by the clouds of war, though it later enjoyed respect, if not success, when it was republished alongside Ryal’s far more optimistic book, The Light, in 1968. Sartre is said to have referred to it admiringly as ‘the bleakest, deepest well into which I have ever descended’, and it is certainly Ryal’s most difficult and depressing work, though not without its small epiphanies.