by Nell Stevens
Ollie waited for the response he had come to expect: a silence, and then the information that nobody lived there. Instead Nancy nodded and said, “Yes, of course, of course, to see the house, I suppose?”
“The house?”
“Your father’s house. It’s still standing, I should think, though I can’t vouch for it myself. Nobody’s lived there since your father’s passing, Oliver, which was ever so long ago now—years and years.”
“Nobody’s lived there for twenty-five years? You’re sure there’s nobody there?”
“You could hire a plane to take you across,” she said, “but you won’t find a soul there, if that’s what you were hoping for. It’s not considered habitable, you know.”
Things to Do on Bleaker Island
In the moments before a storm, you see a sheet of weather approaching the island over the water: a blurring of the line between the sea and the sky, the sound of the wind. Then it hits.
It snows for days on end. The ground is white: a blank page. The sea is a vat of spume and kelp, and on the beach, even the penguins look miserable, huddled together like the stranded guests of a black-tie dinner. A smothering cloud presses down overhead. The wind sweeps up settled snow as more falls. The island and the sky close in on each other.
When hail spits onto the roof of the sunroom, it makes the same sound as the waves dragging shingle on the beach.
From my writing station, I see only churning water and the foggy outline of a whale skeleton on the shore, its ribs unfolding like a line of parentheses. Downy geese huddle inside the vast skull, twisting their heads under their wings.
The storm has put a stop to everything. The radio in the kitchen reports that there are no flights between the islands. No cargo ships to bring supplies. Out at sea, invisible fishing crews vent their frustrations. Nothing is moving.
—
“Maybe it’s happening,” I tell my friend in Boston, also a novelist. “Maybe I’m getting depressed.”
We are on Skype, taking advantage of the rare glimmer of an Internet connection. His pixelated face is unreadable. His jaw looks dislocated.
“What?” he says. “You’re breaking up. You sound like a robot.”
“Depressed,” I say, slowly and loudly. “Depressed.” And then the connection goes.
When I next get online, a few days later, there’s an email from him.
Your situation reminds me of a story. It’s about a very accomplished and dedicated artist, much like yourself, who one day decided to move to a remote island chain. There, he holed up for months, obsessively toiling on his next project. Of course, it was difficult. Of course, there were times when he wished he could go back. But the experiment worked. He returned from those distant islands with a masterpiece. He had transformed himself and his art. Back in the real world, he found he had surpassed all his peers. They tried to catch up to him. But none were willing to put themselves through what he put himself through. And so they couldn’t catch him, and they still can’t.
Who was that artist? Kanye West. Of course, he took his retreat on the Hawaiian Islands, not the Falklands, but the same lessons apply. What I’m trying to say is, if he had never put himself through that experience, he would never have been able to give the world his My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010), his Watch the Throne (2011), and his Yeezus (2013).
What I’m really trying to say, Nell, is make your Yeezus. It’s time.
He wants to make me laugh. He wants to cheer me up. But in this new snow-induced, self-pitying frame of mind, all I can think is that the premise of his joke—that Kanye’s island experience and mine are so hilariously unalike—somewhat undermines the comfort it was supposed to bring.
I am doing the real work of being alone, now. Alison and George were wonderful and generous and kind while they were here, but their company during my first days on the island felt like cheating somehow. That wasn’t how it was supposed to be. I came here to be by myself. Now that Alison and George are in Stanley, the thing I came so far to sample—solitude—is entirely mine.
There is a definite change in the way I feel now that I am truly by myself, but the change is not, in fact, that I am lonelier. Rather, I am suddenly, passionately hungry.
In the afternoons, I am too ravenous to read or write or think straight, so I walk to distract myself. I stomp out from the house along the shore, past the whale skeleton, the shearing shed and the settlement outhouses, up towards the cliffs and, further off, the beach and the penguins. I like facing out to sea and being pummelled by the wind. I even like the sharp bite of the cold on my fingers and toes, the experience of gradually losing sensation in my extremities. I like it because it distracts me from my unrelenting desire to eat.
At first, the hunger manifests itself in my stomach: outraged rumbling, cramps. Then, later, I stop feeling it anywhere except as a thick, boring headache that settles over the back of my head like a vice. I can’t concentrate on words or thinking. All I can do is walk.
Hemingway claimed his impoverished hunger helped him appreciate art: In Paris “you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were heightened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry.” But, Hemingway, I think, how can that be? How can it be that while you reached new, even greater levels of artistic comprehension, I am dizzy and grumpy and too stupid to read more than a few pages of A Moveable Feast on my Kindle at a time? As I stomp through mud and stones towards a herd of uninterested cows, I engage in furious debates with him in my mind—and gradually, though I don’t realize it at the time, out loud.
Hunger is good discipline, Hemingway says. I grumble back, kicking through puddles, that earning enough money to feed yourself properly, or packing enough supplies, would actually show better discipline. You God damn complainer, says Hemingway. You dirty phony saint and martyr. Hunger is healthy and the pictures do look better when you are hungry.
I am, above all, irritated. With myself for not bringing more food. With the island for not better catering to my appetite. With my fuzzy, aching brain for not being more lucid. And with Hemingway for being so macho and determined about the whole thing.
I worry that my writing is bad because I am too hungry to think straight.
For a while, I give up counting the passing days. Instead I track words amassing and food supplies dwindling: 35,000 words done and twenty-seven Ferrero Rochers left; 40,000 words, twenty-five Ferrero Rochers. When I do finally consult the calendar on my laptop to try to locate myself on the endless progression of dates, it is surprising that only a fortnight has passed since I arrived, that my absolute isolation has so far lasted a single week.
—
How to fathom the bleakness of Bleaker Island? First, consider: Bleaker than what? I had vaguely wondered this before arriving. Now, I know: it is just bleaker. I have begun to occupy a comparative world: I am colder, hungrier, more isolated. There is an unspoken final clause: than ever before.
But I sought it out; I looked at a map of the world and the place I chose to go was here.
And haven’t I always done this, I wonder, as I pace from one end of the sunroom to the other, occasionally knocking into wicker chairs positioned for guests to admire a sunset that is happening behind the clouds and snow banks. Haven’t I made a habit of leading myself to bleak places in the hope that it will be good for me? I stop pacing and look out at the water. The snowfall has made visible the tiny islands that surround Bleaker. Normally their grey-green rocks blend imperceptibly into the grey-green sea, but now they are bright white, dotting out towards the icy horizon.
Perhaps I have, consciously and less consciously, spent my entire adult life on a self-indulgent, agitated tour of bleakness.
There was Hong Kong; the Euro Hotel in Clapham where I lived after I left Will; and the estate in Deptford, its endless concrete corridors an archive of unsavoury realities: nee
dles, used condoms, and once, a woman gutting fish outside her front door, entrails spilling out across her doormat and feet. There were night shifts at a shelter for asylum seekers in Coventry, where I handed out cups of lukewarm curry to shuffling, exhausted, traumatized people who could never meet my eye. Later, I worked in a refugee camp in the West Bank, where small boys paraded with weapons longer than their arms, and where my housemates and I asked, every time we heard a bang, “Gun or firework?” One summer, in Syria, I watched a small boy fall forwards from the seat of the tractor he was driving and under its wheels. That evening his brothers took buckets of soapy water to wash the dead child’s blood from the road.
But it is now, here, on Bleaker Island, that I am most afraid of getting depressed.
“Why do you do it to yourself?” my mother wonders, sounding distant and somehow celestial over a bad Skype connection.
I repeat this question to the novelist friend. “That’s the thing about being a writer,” he says. “Every bad experience you have is good material.”
My twenties appear to me, now, as a frantic and masochistic quest for good material, a wild attempt at atonement for an uneventful childhood.
—
At Boston University, I taught an undergraduate class on life writing. I nominated one of the students to give a presentation on two set texts: Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London and Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. The student was very young, and very handsome, and had raised scars criss-crossing his forearms that he made no effort to hide. His female peers thought he was attractive. When I called him forward to present, he stood at the front of the room without notes, and gazed at his classmates for a long time. I thought he might be high. Then he said, “The key to interesting life writing is to lead an interesting life,” and sat down.
Three months later he was dead, having, in the delicate words of his mother, “lost his battle with drugs and depression.”
—
A dream: You and your friends are in a military-style line-up, being inspected by a meticulous and irritable hairdresser. You can hear him further down the line, barking instructions for the removal of split ends. Some he passes over with slight nods of approval. As he approaches, you feel your anxiety rise. He stops in front of you. He takes a lank lock of your hair between finger and thumb, and says, with disdain, “What is this?” You splutter. You try to explain. You realize with a creeping guilt that you haven’t used conditioner in months, that you have been tying your hair behind you, out of your own sight, ignoring it as much as possible. “Flat! Lifeless! You’ve let all your layers grow out!” he roars. He is crimson with rage. Finally, your voice returns, “But I’m on an island!” you say. “I’m on an island!”
—
In my notebook I write, “Things to Do on Bleaker Island in July” and then leave the page blank. This strikes me as extremely witty.
Then I make another list called “Things to Do on Bleaker Island in August”:
1. Bite your nails.
2. Watch the water for sixteen hours without interruption. It changes colour with each shift of cloud and rain and wind. Create names for the shades, like gradations of paint on a chart. Seal-flank grey. Black-dog grey. Gangrene grey.
3. Develop fears: of the wind turbine spinning off its post, decapitating you, leaving your headless corpse to be discovered by caracaras; of silence; of small noises; of the roar of the wind or the absence of the roar of the wind; of your own shadow. Or—
4. Build a relationship with your shadow. Try to learn its many forms in relation to the position of the obscured sun.
5. Become paranoid: somebody is poisoning your coffee. Wake up in the middle of the night with a headache, and then, in the morning, cower by the toilet bowl, throwing up water and bile. Retch. Tiptoe downstairs and observe the coffee jar from a distance. Closer, check the seal for signs of tampering, but find no evidence of foul play. Scurry up to vomit again.
6. Learn to distinguish between the creaks and taps and groans of the building in the wind, and the sounds of a person actually entering the house. It is never a person entering the house.
7. Make note of your disturbing dreams, and in the margins, wonder, “How on earth did I end up here? What happened to me, that this is now my life?”
Bleaker House: FURTHER COMPLICATION
Freezing air grated in Ollie’s throat. It was dark. When he looked into the space in front of him, he saw a broad expanse of black, punctured by occasional glints on the water. There was a pale, uncertain moon at his back, casting weak light; enough to know he was on the shore, and beyond that, nothing. Wind slid off the ocean into his mouth and eyes. Gravel shivered as the waves ground over it. From further off, a strangled shriek made him look up into the blank space. The noise repeated, louder, then closer, until he could just make out the shape of an animal—he couldn’t tell what; he thought it had both ears and wings—by his feet in the water. He scrabbled backwards until he reached the path that ran along the coast. The cry sounded again, further off, and then there was a splash, and then silence.
In the cold, he had lost feeling in his cheeks and fingers; his legs felt limp as he stumbled across the uneven ground. Beneath his feet: rocks, sand, thick clumps of long grass that tangled around his ankles, mud. He was hungry. He was tired. How long ago was it that the tiny red plane had deposited him on Bleaker Island, that the pilot had waved him off with a cheery grunt, the suggestion that Ollie’s ancestral home was “just yonder near the cliffs,” and a promise to return in a couple of days? Not more than two or three hours, surely. Long enough for night to fall. Long enough for Ollie to get more profoundly lost than he had ever been.
He turned away from the sea. Land rose before him towards an invisible summit. He began to climb in the hope that, higher up, he might get a glimpse of the house. He had packed supplies—food, a gas stove, a sleeping bag—but if he failed to find the house, it was all for nothing. Nancy had assured him it was still standing.
He kept his eyes fixed on the moon, but noticed with dread that a blanket of cloud had started to creep across its surface. He sped up as the light began to shrink, feeling suddenly that this was an escape route, a door that was closing before his eyes.
The moon vanished into an uninterrupted expanse of darkness. Ollie’s boot caught on something and he fell. The rucksack on his back slid forwards and thudded against his head as his hands sank into thick mud. He lay, panting, too cold to feel pain, and began to consider the possibility that he was really going to die: of exposure, exhaustion, embarrassment. He hoped it would be soon.
He didn’t move. Soon his breaths slowed and his mind settled into a rhythm: Robinson Crusoe, Chapter Four: “I am cast upon a horrible, desolate island, void of all hope of recovery.” The sentence looped over and over in his head as the wind rushed around him. “I am cast upon a horrible, desolate island, void of all hope…” The repetition felt soothing, until the words began to twist and dart away from him, contorting: “I am horrible upon a cast-iron land”; “I am cast upon a hobbling despot”; “I am aghast in a wobbling, deathly asylum.” He would pass out before he felt really bad, he told himself. At least, then, if he were going to die, he wouldn’t have to be there to experience it. He wondered if his eyes were open or shut. When he tried to operate the lids they seemed separate from him, beyond his control. He guessed they were closed. “At last I am incorrigible, despite my silence, void of all globe-trot or blubbering.”
In the far-off darkness, something stirred. It seemed to Ollie like a tiny insect, a firefly, darting across his field of vision. It began to grow, like the end of a tunnel; like an odd, extending arm. This was what it felt like to die, then. He lay still, fascinated. In his dying moments, he did not go toward the light. The light was coming to him.
The beam got closer still, expanding, tilting, illuminating gravel, rocks, clumps of weed and eventually Ollie’s own hands submerged in mud. Then it stopped.
Over the wind and waves, the ligh
t began to speak. “Identify yourself,” it hissed.
Ollie regained control of his eyes and blinked several times before he understood what he was seeing: the round face of a torch, the edges of fingers gripping it, inches from his nose. He pulled his hands until they came out of the mud, one by one, with wet, sucking noises. He pushed himself up, first to his knees, then his feet.
“A nobbly, desktop icon,” he spluttered, through numb lips, in the direction of the torch and the invisible person behind.
“What language is that? Are you one of those Chinese off the fishing boats?” came the hissed reply.
“A horrible, desolate island!”
“State your purpose! State your name!”
A strong gust of wind nearly knocked Ollie off his feet. “Oliver,” he said at last. “Oliver Graves. I’ve come about my father.”
The beam of light slid shakily down from Ollie’s face to the ground, and for the first time, Ollie got a sense of the person controlling it: a slight, sharp-edged female figure—a large child or small adult—and a faintly illuminated curtain of fair hair.
“Oliver Graves?” she said. “Really Oliver Graves?”
“Yes.”
“Oliver Graves,” repeated the girl. “I thought you’d never come.”
Two, Not One
The room, which was strewn with papers and nearly filled by a great writing-table covered with similar litter, was, I must say, not only very untidy, but very dirty…But what principally struck us was a jaded, and unhealthy-looking, though by no means plain girl, at the writing-table, who sat biting the feather of her pen, and staring at us. I suppose nobody ever was in such a state of ink.
—ESTHER’S NARRATIVE, BLEAK HOUSE
Leslie Epstein is a man who teaches writing with rules. There are many, outlined in a document called “Tips for Writing and Life,” which he distributes annually to each incoming cohort of MFA students, and which is referred to thereafter as the “tip sheet.” The phrase “tip sheet” makes Leslie’s rules sound friendly, as though they are mere suggestions.