Varying Degrees of Hopelessness

by Lucy Ellmann

  It was his duty not to let her see his disgust and despair. But he could not do this if he had to smell that smell every day. He hired nurses. He had an excuse – his job. His mother didn’t like the nurses. She did not believe that there was anything about her body any more that warranted their thoroughness.

  She got sicker and sicker, and there was no time to recover from one sign of deterioration before there was another to grasp. It was all part of a pattern, the pattern of annihilation. And the smell was the smell of death. Contrary to public belief, the pallor and the stink of death actually precede it. They come in waves, in glimpses, in overpowering stenches, long before.

  Our Hero’s Job

  He tried to carry on with his work. But he felt paralysed by indifference. Art meant nothing, nothing at all. He did not know what he was talking about, and wondered if he ever had. It was quite a predicament: at last he gets a job but has no will to teach. Whether or not paint had ever been spread across a single white surface touched no chord in him. It merely peeved him that people wasted his energy on such matters.

  He could handle the disgruntlement of his students, who would no doubt malign him irreverently in the university magazine. But his competitive colleagues, having heard that Robert’s mother was dying, were on the look-out for every omission, error or misdemeanour. Professional headway could be made by discrediting Robert for cancelling classes or not getting in on time.

  He admired the doctors for their comparative dedication. They try to keep you entertained, do a test here, a test there. They yanked his mother on to stretchers, poked her with needles and tubes (forks and knives, for all he knew), investigated her with all manner of ray. He watched them show gentleness, until he wept, to a woman who had become for him a barely recognizable rag-bag of ailments. They did not give up on her, he was grateful for that. The hospital doors were opened wide for her. She was wheeled around like a grand piano, this rag-bag who could still sometimes hold his hand fondly (though the tired and the dying care about no one).

  Contrary to Public Belief

  Contrary to public belief, the world is not beautiful, lit by its ceiling light. Its design is flawed. Every living thing creates more mess than it picks up. We’re transforming stations: we consume things that originally looked and smelled fairly good, and turn them into shit. This is our contribution to the universe.

  We sleep a third of our lives away, and fuck if we’re lucky about 5,000 times. Every day the whole show starts rolling again, all totally without significance. There can be no true tragedy or true joy in a world that is so repetitive. We try to fill the gaps with painting, bits of ordered chaos; and music, noises hung on a line to dry. And love.

  Robert was thinking about the relative importance of art and life when he was tapped on the arm by the Librarian, a stranger with an alliterative name. To be taken by the arm in a public place by a stranger with an alliterative name as if she wants to introduce you to someone, she gently takes you through the throng and out into a narrow, blankly lit hallway without shadows where there is no room, NO ROOM to writhe or explode or dissolve into grey sludge on the floor. There, her hand on his shoulder, she told Robert his mother had died.

  She gave him a brandy. She told him of the end of the world and offered a drink as consolation.

  The Librarian avoided him afterwards. She felt hideously bonded to him by his wails, and kept away.

  Hot Potatoes

  Amazing how you fill your pockets with hope on a cold day. How, when his life collapsed, Robert thought of Isabel. As he rushed to the hospital to search his mother’s body for signs of life the doctors might have missed. As he held back from it in the end, his cold, motionless mother with a smear of food on her cheek. As he stood there surveying the little person he had tried to hold above water for so long, so vulnerable and now lost for ever because he had somehow tired of the task. And though the world caved in on Robert in his sad and silent fury. And though it offered no chance of atonement. Though he sought to concentrate fully for once on the moment at hand, the horror and the pain of it and his own uselessness. Though he even tried to busy himself with forms and arrangements and what little he knew of bereavement etiquette. Though the nurses offered sympathy and the doctors explanations, all of which he mutely accepted. Though he was finally drowning and content to drown in the whiteness of hospitals and their tasteless bustle. Though all this effort was required just to face the first few moments of knowing that the most important person was dead, yet, all this time his mind was full of Isabel. Six foot deep in the grey sludge of death, he clung to the raft that was Isabel.

  He thought suddenly that he wanted to marry Isabel, and this simple phrase kept going through his head. The timing of the sentiment appalled him. Its inappropriateness was almost amusing: ‘Uh, hi, Isabel. My mother just died. Wanna get married?’ It all seemed a touch callous, a tad mad.

  But that’s how you fill your pockets with hot potatoes on a cold day.

  Important Advice

  Gail insisted on coming over to clean up the house on the morning of the funeral. He watched her put the dirty dishes in the dishwasher and switch the thing on. She said it would be worse for him to return to a load of dirty dishes.

  But Gail was wrong. Clean dishes are out of place in a world that is a shambles, a disgrace. People take your tragedies and try to make a nonsense of them with domestic detail.

  At the reception, a friend told Robert he ought to laugh at himself more. You’d think burying your mother would be excuse enough to stop laughing for a while. But apparently this skill has to be kept in good working order at all times.

  The smug self-containment of friends when you need them. Their incessant hold on reason, when life is behaving unreasonably. When you feel like a caged animal left to claw itself, pulling tufts of fur out and chewing its own tail and toes off in rage, disgust, despair, they tell you to laugh at yourself more.

  Our Hero’s Sister Sandy

  Sandy attended the funeral but not the dying business. She had drunk Coke in the wilderness of Wyoming awaiting that death. She didn’t go to watch her mother’s decline, to hold her hand, to have her heart-strings pulled by that woman at the last. But she came to the funeral. She had a few things to pick up.

  Sofas

  Robert sat on sofas. He sat on sofas and tried to see what it feels like for your life to be over. He sat on sofas in a room and felt alone and dead. Utter stillness in the room. No one knowing he’s sitting there. But he didn’t think about coffins, what that is like. He didn’t want to think about putting his mother in a box and the box in the ground and covering it with dirt, never to see her again. THESE ARE NOT NICE THINGS TO DO TO YOUR MOTHER. Not nice at all.

  He wanted to die. He hoped to be run over or blown up. It was the least he could do. He secretly feared that his mother might need him in the after-life. He couldn’t bear to think of her there having to cope all alone. The fact that she had been ill enough to die seemed a poor reason to abandon her.

  He sat on sofas and thought: fifteen minutes ago I had fifteen minutes more life in me than I do now. It gave him hope, and helped to pass the time.

  Disgust

  He wanted to die, but couldn’t. He couldn’t bear to see Gail, couldn’t bear to be touched. He felt no desire for SEX. Why would he want to nudge his favourite and most sensitive bodily part into someone else’s intimate crevices and get himself all stinky and slimy and sweaty? WHO NEEDS THIS? He gave up his job for similar reasons, leaving his wretched colleagues nudging for promotion.

  The Pacific islanders who were exiled to Mauritius, so that their own islands could be used for testing the atom bomb, died of ugliness. Mauritius was too ugly to bear. Robert too had seen ugliness, but so far it hadn’t killed him. He was working on disgusting himself to death.

  How Doris Day made it into the movies perplexed him. She had absolutely no sex appeal whatever. All that goody-goody housewife business. Aprons. She was kitsch! The terrible prudish innocence and vulne
rability, the near-ugliness of her, especially her HAIR. It made him squirm.

  Was Isabel anything like that? There was a fearful untouchability about her. But he couldn’t remember what he thought of Isabel. He felt nothing for anybody now. He was a broken man. And no one came to save him from this. They just told him to laugh at himself.

  The only thing he found funny these days was the Evil Genius who plotted to destroy the world with a superbreed of influenza. ‘Most people are filthy ignorant scum,’ claimed the Evil Genius. ‘I planned to destroy them all.’

  Robert did not want to feel tender. Love meant having to take someone to the toilet. He thought with distaste of Isabel’s boniness. His mother was old and bony. The thought of Isabel chilled him. Her stick-like legs and distended abdomen.

  Humans are closely related to insects, he decided. We live and work in ghastly numbers and for some mysterious reason like ourselves enormously. Sloths, sharks, skunks – THESE can be individuals.

  Out and About

  Gail, in between frying other fish, occasionally tried to get Robert out and about. They arranged meetings, but he failed to turn up. The best way was to pick him up herself. She went to get him for a concert one day. She found him in front of the TV, as usual. But at least he’d switched it on. She considered that an improvement.

  ‘You know, you really shouldn’t spend so much time alone, Robert,’ she said, surveying a multitude of discarded pizza cartons on the floor.

  ‘Everybody lives in solitary confinement these days, Gail. Haven’t you noticed? They only leave home for brief bouts of social contact and self-improvement. Scared of muggers, I guess.’

  ‘I still say …’ she said, authoritatively pursuing the subject of how one should live.

  ‘Yeah, I know. There’s a feeling going around that everybody’s got to be HAPPY. If you’re not, you’ve got to get up and do something to yourself. Get a shrink, get fresh air. Nobody’s allowed their own tragedy any more. Sorrow is OUT.’

  ‘Cheer up, Robert. You don’t know what’s around the corner.’

  ‘I do know what’s around the corner. What’s around the corner is more of the same stuff. The only difference is, I don’t plan to worry about it any more. I pity people who do.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Robert. Get in the car and shut up.’

  She had meant it fondly but Robert didn’t appreciate being told to shut up. He was mute enough as it was – no one wanted to listen to any more of his feeble moaning. He sat glumly in the car as they drove through the streets he had travelled 6,000 miles to drive through.

  He felt strange in the midst of the concert-hall crowd. There was a disgusting over-abundance of people in the world. And every man, woman and child was full of radiation. A woman in front of him sneezed. Everyone in the world has Strontium-90 in them, a radioisotope only produced by atomic explosions, and now I’m going to get that woman’s cold as well! Some people have the conscience of an orang-utan. Why do they come to public places carrying infectious diseases? Why do they do this? But then he noticed that the despicable woman looked a little like his maternal grandmother, and he felt a pang of dismay that this forbear had also died on him at some point in his youth. Matrilineal deprivation, he thought, holding back tears.

  The trio tuned up and played violently, with vile crescendos and desperate diminuendos. All music is violent and intrusive, thought Robert, violating the mind of the listener. It’s a form of attention-seeking. He watched the girl ahead of him picking the ear-wax out of the ear of a man on her right. The guy could understand Schubert apparently, but not the rudiments of personal hygiene. It must be love. DISGUSTING. And the crescendos weren’t crescendos. They were more like spontaneous fortissimos, and clearly startled the slumbering Japanese man beside Robert with their frenzy.

  All the people around him were ugly. Watching TV can lead you to believe that the human race is generally good-looking. But here were people evidently afflicted with all kinds of deficiencies. During the intermission, he noticed a huge woman bedecked with turquoise who, despite the weight of herself and her jewellery, was boldly lunging for the leftover drinks at the bar and gulping them down.

  On the wall of the men’s room he noticed a machine selling ‘The Night is Right’ packets. These seemed to consist of three condoms, one toothbrush and two aspirin. Sounds like a great evening.

  When he sat down again next to Gail, Robert was near explosion point. A couple settled themselves in the seat behind him, bumping Robert and momentarily encasing his head in a raincoat. The guy was expounding at length on his choice of running-shoe. The woman was bolstering him up with giggles and approbatory interjections.

  Robert turned to them. ‘If your conversation has to be so audible,’ he said sweetly, ‘could you make it a little more interesting? Because otherwise I will be forced to pray that your gonads turn cancerous.’

  A Barren World

  So there we leave Robert, a grown man brought down by tragic circumstances. His only comfort: the moon face of his mother in the sky every month.

  Parents provide you with a sense of purpose, especially sick ones, you should insist on that. Now that his mother had embarked on her final disintegration, beyond his control, causing him to lose all sense of purpose, it might have been more considerate of him to follow her example and thereby save the world and himself any further thoughts on the matter. But Robert has a fatal flaw, a mortal wound that will keep him tottering about for another forty years or so: he is hopeful. Beneath his present cynicism and despair, as well as his acute state of disgust, lurk little flighty birds of hope. He uncages them according to his capabilities, like today he hopes merely to find the energy to go and buy himself a hamburger. But with the aid of such high-protein dinners, who knows what he will hope next?

  He nurses and cherishes these feelings and curses the world for its indifference to his slight improvement. You drag yourself out of the desert desperate for water, and the barman is busy. But this is not a romantic world. There’s not enough Santa Claus to go round. Everyone treats each other with disdain. No one is indispensable. There are mothers of twins who have trouble getting the buggy in and out of shops. Who cares for these? There are people, our contemporaries, lost in libraries through the malice of evil librarians. Who loves these? We are all labouring under a lack of love, a bad situation for human beings. This situation is even bad for CATS.

  The biggest threats to life now are leaky radiators, superglue and pre-cooked chicken. When people were dying all over the place (Schubert just three months after declaring himself healthy), they lived with gusto. They did not waste a brushstroke because they feared death. But now people only die from their own or their doctor’s negligence. Convinced of immortality, we’re troubled by boredom, an inordinate sense of history and our own fecundity.

  Animals have a much harder time of it. The world doesn’t owe them a living. But at least they haven’t forgotten what it’s all about: you, the earth, the sky. Even trees know this.

  The Happy Ending

  While Robert was burying and subsequently missing his Mama, the Splendid Young Man was putting out feelers in California. He merely wished to make it clear that should there be a vacancy because of some teacher’s prolonged absence or indifference, he himself would be happy to consider a lucrative position in Art History at Robert’s university.

  He had good reason to wish to leave the Catafalque. Cragshaw had disappeared without trace, only to be replaced by yet another Chardin scholar, Angelica Lotus had begun her year’s paid maternity leave, Splutters had died of spontaneous combustion in a hotel room, and Pol was no longer amenable to any of the Splendid Young Man’s devices, mechanical or otherwise. Sir Humphrey kept patting him on the bottom. Syms could see that he was in imminent danger of having to run the whole place single-handedly – the other hand held ready to fend off Basilisk and the hordes of blushing young females. Anyway, he fancied he might look even more splendid with a tan.

  News of Lionel’s new appoin
tment dealt Robert a harsh blow. The guy was following him around the world, stealing his jobs. Robert needed help just to get through that day, but there was no one to help him. There was no hope. No mother, no lucrative job, no hope.

  Luckily, a few more letters arrived in the mail that morning. One was from Isabel:

  Dear Robert

  I was sorry to hear about your mother. I wish there was something I could do. I have had some troubled times myself since you left. To be frank, I miss you.

  love,

  Isabel

  The other was from Pol:

  ROBERT, As you never write, I can only assume that you’re having a whale of a time over there, which heartily sickens me. I love you and want you over here. I mean it – come live with me by the sea. I’ve loved you for years. COME.

  POL

  Robert sold his house, split the money with Sandy, and set off for England to seek his fortune once more. But this time there would be a woman by his side.

  A woman who offered him everything, without even knowing how much he needed it.

  Miss Right.

  The 34-year-old Woman in Limbo

  I waited in vain to hear from Robert.

  I expected some sort of cosmic sign to indicate that he had received my somewhat forward missive.

  A slight earth tremor at the moment he opened it, travelling quickly across the globe to me in King’s Cross, would not have gone amiss.

  He lived on the San Andreas Fault after all.

  This was my first love-letter.

  I had bared my soul to him in that letter.

  It made me weep to think of the vulnerability I had exposed to him.