The Inward Empire

by Christian Donlan

  I was kidding myself that I had already started to understand my illness. At night, tingling in the darkness, I felt like I was hovering high above the earth, interesting possibilities stretching in every direction. And now a new guide had appeared.

  “Remind me who Gene was?” asked Sarah, the night before I left to see Brian.

  “Gene was a friend from university,” I said. “A mature student, nearly twenty years older than me and the rest of us. He died about a decade ago. He was a renal patient.”

  Yes. Gene was a guide. He had seen the place I was heading into, and maybe, if I could get a bit closer to him, or closer to the memory of him, he might have something important to tell me about it.

  I was in the kitchen with Sarah, loading a bag with snacks for the trip: chopped fruit in little boxes, rice cakes, bread sticks. Another bag contained diapers and diaper bags. (“Do you think I should take anything for Leon as well?” I had asked, looking at the diapers, as I always asked. It struck me that my diagnosis probably made this joke less amusing.) There would be a stroller, several changes of clothes. Leon was no longer being breastfed during the day, but she would have long snoozes and there would be disasters. This last point was freshly minted in my mind. The day before the trip, Leon had fallen in a puddle of dog pee by the library. Somehow, I had changed her while chatting to Janey in a nearby Starbucks, swapping out trousers, disinfecting skin, and managing to order a mocha at the same time. Euphoria has its benefits.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Sarah asked.

  “It’s only one day,” I said. “And I’ve had her at weekends loads when you’ve been at work.” Besides, I could have added, I want to test myself with Leon. Seventeen months old all of a sudden and I’m not sure I’d really taken on any parental challenges. Not any of the kind that tested my concept of myself as a decent parent.

  In the dark of our tiny porch, she catches a flash of color as I fling my orange scarf around my shoulders. I shrug on too many bags and back out of the door, bumping the stroller from ragged carpet to uneven paving. (“Crazy paving?” I had once asked Sarah. “Demented,” she had replied, and we agreed to put it on the long list of things to fix.) Seconds before, just as we left the warmth of the living room, MS reached forward in silence and placed a shushing finger against the base of my neck. I can still feel it there, pressing below the thyroid as we head to the bus stop. I will feel it all day, a narrowing of the throat that may be gone tomorrow or in a week’s time as the whimsy of this thing dictates.

  As we wait at the stop I fuss with her coat, drawing it close against the wind that rushes in, stinging, carrying the chill of the sea. She is awake, frowning with cold, and she shrugs and squirms away from me as I move her hair around and try to clip it—not that there is much to clip yet. On the bus, she brightens, and by the time we are going through the barriers at the station and bumping up into a carriage, I’m feeling pretty positive about our chances. Our first trip together: I should take a picture on my phone, but it feels like it might force an end to this moment we are in, stroller stowed and bags wedging us tight by the window.

  She’s happy. She is sitting on my lap, hands flat on the table, taking in the new sights. I find my pill in among pocket change. “Mennen,” she notes brightly. Pride and grief that she knows that word: medicine. Minutes later I feel the prickly heat just below the surface of my skin. It is still working. It is still doing something.

  Leon babbles at me, except that this is old thinking, and the noises she makes are no longer meaningless babble, and maybe haven’t been for some time. “Whaddat?” she demands, pointing out of the window. “Telegraph poles,” is the answer. “Fields.” “A power substation?” She has a daunting supply of “whaddats” stored up, and my responses are already becoming speculative. Children show you a new world, Dad had warned me. It turns out they also show you the gaps you never filled in the old one.

  She has changed so much, even in the few months since she first staggered across the living room toward me. Her light dandelion fuzz of hair has become something approaching a style—blonde and short, a Rosemary’s Baby cut. Her newborn moon-face has started to take its own shape: she has cheekbones now and a gently rounded chin. Her huge eyes now narrow with laughter because something is actually funny, or squint, frowning, at new sights. She walks everywhere she can; she eats everything she can.

  And there is so much more to her world: she is inquisitive, searching, quick to anger and quick to forget. There is something monumental at work, and as she stands on my knees, leaning into the window, held aloft by my hands in hers, like I’m her puppeteer, I realize what it is. She laughs at a field of frosty scrub and turns to see if I’m laughing too—at the way the sunlight settles in the icy mud like glitter. Suddenly, I understand this: she’s no longer a baby, a creature to nurse, a thing to take around and keep out of trouble. She’s a companion. The two of us are going somewhere together, and I am no longer Daddy Chloroform, tasked only with sleep.

  And when she does sleep there is a chance to reflect on where I am going, and why. The frosty morning has endured, coating the world moving past the window with a thin white fur: a little Manhattan of teetering wooden pallets on the outskirts of the docks, those gloomy mounds of speckled earth on a winter farm, empty fields giving way to silent rows of solar paneling. This is, it occurs to me, a journey into the past, headed between two towns that are linked for me because I went to university in each of them. I remember moving to Brighton and post-grad life in 2000 and feeling not that things were finally starting, but that I was somehow suspended again, in a holding pattern between more substantial moments. University had felt real the first time around; the second time it felt like a rerun, an indulgence too far. And I feel a little suspended again now, after the verdict of diagnosis but awaiting the verdict on the drugs I’m taking every day—drugs that might be changing a trajectory that I was possibly just starting to understand.

  Looking back at my first university, it is very clear that there were three years of Gene that I wasted. We were at university together, but we weren’t really there together. I doubt we noticed each other much in large classes, filled with chatter and scribbling. Still, we were all drawn there for the same thing at least: a degree, improbably, in the art of scriptwriting. A degree in fantasy.

  Gene was older than me, but so was practically everyone back then. I am a summer baby, and so I was still used, in my early twenties, to being the youngest person in every situation I found myself in. Gene was a mature student, inching toward forty. Even Brian was a year or two older than I was. Brian was on the same course as Gene and me, but again, I didn’t really meet him until it was all over.

  I loved university: we worked like crazy, writing both for coursework and to learn the art of observation, jotting down everything that happened to us in little notebooks we had been instructed to carry in a back pocket or a bag. I remember watching the coursework pile up, and I remember stacking notebooks on my desk, ten, fifteen, twenty of them filled with things I had spotted, things that had occurred to me as I wandered about. It felt like all of this work was building to something, and then the course finished, we all graduated, and it turned out that there had been no real conclusion. Act three, as I would have put it at the time, had lacked a climax, and had also been lumbered with an obscure and circuitous denouement. The protagonists had not learned much. Action had not become character. It was hard to know how to interpret things, other than to realize that I was suddenly an adult, allegedly, adrift in a world of adult things and trained for precisely nothing.

  So of course I plotted a return to university, to the one thing I now knew how to do. But before that there was a year to fill: with a job in an insurance office in which I was now, rather worryingly, no longer the youngest person there; and with the only friendly faces I saw around town—Gene and Brian. Three students who had all stayed put when everyone else had gone. We fell together naturally.

  Brian, I discovered, was genero
us and kind and gloriously maudlin. In his early twenties he already suspected that life had passed him by, that the best was behind him, and so he was looking for people to spend the afterlife with. He had a job at the cinema and got the three of us into free screenings. We worked as a trio. The age gap wasn’t weird. It just meant that Gene knew a lot more about movies and books and life than Brian and I did. He was willing to put up with us, anyway. Brian was tall and dark-haired and rather beautiful; Gene was more like me, rumpled and slightly bowed. His soft voice meant you had to lean in to hear him speak. Did we realize he was dying? I can’t remember. Maybe Brian would.

  The ideal place for coffee is part of a railway station. I have always felt this. There’s something about the stillness amid the bustle, something about standing and stopping as a great crowd flows around you. One of my best railway coffee stops was Ramses Station in Cairo on an undergrad trip twenty years ago: citizens of the world drinking beakers of sweet black tea and eating brittle, quietly disappointing cakes on their way to places I would never visit myself, a sun-stained ruffle of Baedeker pages to everything I saw and touched and smelled.

  Another favorite is less dramatic, a place on the south coast of England, part of a station you would never choose to stop at. It’s a narrow, echoing space with fraying carpets and clanking china. The walls are carved red brick rising and rising into shadow as they become lost in the gloom of the ceiling. I have been coming here once or twice a year since the days when people could smoke indoors, and when I look up to those ceilings I still seem to see them through a grainy fog of twisting ash.

  An ideal place for a coffee, and a promising place to raise the dead.

  I have never brought Leon here, but after a speculative grump on alighting from the train, this strange establishment calms her. I find a highchair, an improbable discovery in a place as resolutely Victorian as this, and she sits, pulping banana between her fingers and staring about with bright, happy eyes.

  And then Brian joins us, tall and romantic, with shiny black hair and gray eyes permanently narrowed at the world, lips made for exhaling weary disappointment. I am shocked, as ever, by his handsomeness and how gentle he is in his movements. He is used to children—I think his mother works at a nursery—and Leon instantly reflects his ease, watching as he wiggles his fingers back and forth and covers his eyes, then his mouth, cycling through bizarre expressions until she has forgotten her pulped banana and sees her life’s work—or at least that of the next few hours—as watching everything this strange man does.

  “I remember the white-suit story the most,” says Brian once we have sat down and talked about how long it has been—and how much longer it has been since Gene died. I want to ask about Gene’s illness, but I suspect you cannot approach that directly, so we’re talking about this instead. “He loved Twelve Angry Men, that film where Henry Fonda is very righteous and wears this white linen suit. His mum asked what he wanted for Christmas one year, and he really wanted a white suit like Henry Fonda’s. He tried to explain it to her, but then he had to back away from it.”

  “The suit?” I ask.

  Brian nods. “Basically, he thought his mum was going to get him a Saturday Night Fever suit by accident.”

  Conversation stutters. I have not seen Brian in a long time, and we have forgotten how to sync our rhythms of speech together. I hunt, slight panic building, for a way to keep us talking, or I fear he might just get up and walk away. I have no idea why I fear this. While I hunt, the specter of Gene wearing a disco leisure suit hovers between us and will not be banished.

  Were we an unusual trio, I ask, Brian and Gene and I? Gene was from a different generation. “And he was a different speed,” remembers Brian. “He could walk, but he was quite slow and shuffling. He had to sit down every few minutes. Eventually, you’d just match his pace.” He thinks about this. “It was great, actually. You’d notice much more of the world that way.”

  Yes. I am starting to remember some of this stuff now. Inching down the street with Gene. You had so much more time to talk to him, because it took so long to get anywhere. He never complained about it. But also, he was never apologetic—a trait I had not noticed at the time, but which I now realize I admire.

  “He used to say it was his job, being ill,” Brian said. “He said the only problem was it didn’t pay very well.” He trails off, and I look up from wiping Leon’s hands just quickly enough to see an awkward look cross those gray eyes, a sense that he thinks he might have touched on unexplored territory between us. New territory. I have not seen Brian since my diagnosis—I texted him the news, which was classy—and now I understand that while my conception of myself is in flux, his conception of me, of our relationship, is probably in flux too.

  “Do you remember the leather jacket he wore?” asks Brian suddenly. Yes! I have a memory of old brown leather, cracked to gold around the collar, of pockets that sagged like the lining was torn. “Do you remember the shirt with the dragon on it?” No, not at all.

  “Here is the problem,” I say to Brian. “I have such a warm sense of this man, and in my current state I have this idiotic feeling that he might have something to say to me, something to guide me through whatever’s going on with me. But I don’t know what my memories actually add up to. I can’t seem to see him anymore, as he was. And the one picture I have of him—he’s holding a baby, his niece—I have put on a high shelf because he’s holding the baby so badly Sarah keeps laughing at it.”

  “You feel like you’re forgetting?” asks Brian, wincing slightly. “Is that MS?”

  This is the only time that he mentions MS in our conversation. He may be older than me but he’s committed to youth: dancing, DJing, job in a supermarket. His latest thing is running marathons.

  “I honestly don’t think so,” I say. “I think it’s just—what—ten years, almost to the day, since he died. I’m forgetting everything from ten years ago. It’s all just fading.”

  “I can remember some helpful things,” says Brian. “Let’s walk?” He nods at Leon. “She’s almost done with her banana anyway.”

  Amazingly, Brian wants to carry her. More amazingly, she is up for this, and so I push the stroller through the cold streets while she sits merrily in his arms, visibly thrilled to be up high and a part of everything that’s happening. And what’s happening is Brian rebuilding Gene for us both, or trying to, out of anecdotes, out of tiny pieces of memory. Right now, he is explaining the classic elements of a Gene story: you must have an objective, and a social fear, and the social fear must scupper the objective.

  “That’s why he never got the white suit,” Brian explains. “It’s a pincer movement, like Stalingrad. There’s the fear that his mum will get the wrong suit, and then the fear that he’ll have to wear the wrong suit regardless so as not to disappoint his mum.”

  Not disappoint, I think. Upset. Gene never felt like he had to be anything to anyone else, but he was terrified of causing pain.

  Brian searches for another story to confirm his narratology, and then we get lost sifting through details. He loved cricket, Gene—loved Shane Warne, the bowler. He loved gambling: the first time I saw him after university he was coming out of a bookies with eight hundred quid he’d just won on an accumulator. He always had a flutter going on something or other. He was endlessly recalculating the date at which he would break even. Last I heard it was going to be 2021.

  He was political—political in a way that we weren’t, old enough to have been directly engaged with poll-tax riots and Thatcher the Milk Snatcher. Even so, he was gentle, and people were gentle around him. He sagged into chairs and then sat forward when people spoke to him. He was quiet and alert.

  I try to prod us back toward the thing I am suddenly far too interested in. Gene’s illness, did it weigh on him? Did he ever talk about it with us? I mention a rare trip to Gene’s house to watch a film, in which we briefly ducked into the kitchen for tea and I saw a landslide of blister packs on a sideboard. So many pills, different sizes
and colors, spilling over the counter. And Gene just brushing past them, saying: “Do you take two sugars?”

  Brian steers me out of the kitchen. He can’t remember anything about pills. Instead, he goes into the stuff I didn’t know about, coming from the days after I left town for Brighton. He tells me about the time they used to spend playing pitch and putt together, about an unlikely Clint Eastwood impression. The time Gene bought Brian a T-shirt—I Fought the Law and I Won—after a tribunal at the cinema. This Gene sounds like a riot, but is it my Gene? I remember someone watchful and sometimes silent, perhaps separated from the rest of us by perspective. A grown-up around us children.

  Maybe Brian remembers this Gene too. “Do you remember the thing about the Age of Reason?” Brian asks, buckling Leon up and gesturing that he’d like to push her for a bit.

  “The Age of Reason?” I ask.

  “You’d been reading some Thomas Pynchon book set in the Age of Reason,” Brian said. “And you were mad keen on it, and going on about how you belonged there, and maybe all of us did. I was talking about how I fancied the wigs and the coats and all that, and then Gene just laughed.

  “And he said, ‘I’d be dead in the Age of Reason.’”

  “Christ.”

  “It was one of the only times he really talked about what was happening, about the transplants he’d had that hadn’t worked, about the dialysis every other evening. He laughed. He wasn’t upset, but it was one of those moments when you saw where he was.”

  “Are you writing much these days?” I asked.

  Before I headed off, we found a coffee shop with toy blocks, and pretty quickly we abandoned our drinks and were just playing with Leon on the carpet. Brian was deeply involved in peekaboo, a game that Leon intermittently understood, and loved even when she lost its rhythms, laughing theatrically each time Brian’s face appeared from behind his hands, slapping her palms against the ground and giggling until I thought she might be sick.