Al's Well

by Dark, Gregory

  +++

  “See, what I’m not saying, I’m not saying I’m leaving Al for you.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m leaving him, is what I’m saying. But it’s not for you: Not because of you, I mean, and not so’s I can move in with you. Well, it is because of you. ‘Course it is. But it’s not because I want to move in with you.”

  “I know this, Trove.”

  “Not that I could, right? Not even if I wanted to. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “You’ve still got no place to live.”

  “I’m okay at Drew’s.”

  “Living at Drew’s, though, means you’ve still got no place to live.”

  “I’ve said this a few times, Trove: …”

  “Remind me.”

  “I want to try and establish a relationship. Create one, or re-discover it or something.”

  “And our relationship, Mike?”

  “You’re not leaving Al for me.”

  “But I can’t – is what I’m saying. I’m saying, Mike, the option isn’t open to me.”

  “Right.”

  “How do I know, Mike – is what I’m saying – whether or not I’m leaving Al for you when there isn’t the possibility that I’m leaving him for you?”

  “If I walk out again on Drew, if (as he would see it) I desert him again, that’ll be it. There’ll be no third chance, Trove.”

  “I know that.”

  “If our relationship is going to work, honey, this one has got to work too, the one with Drew. This new one also, with Franklyn.”

  “Christ, Mike.”

  “You know all this.”

  “And I don’t need lecturing about it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I feel so vulnerable here, Mike. So fragile.”

  “Was I being insensitive? I didn’t mean to be insensitive.”

  “Love always hurts. Why is that?”

  “Part of being in love is being vulnerable.”

  “You know what I didn’t need just right now?”

  “You didn’t need a lecture.”

  “I didn’t need a lecture, Mike.”

  “Right.”

  “I know I’m vulnerable. Shit, I just said that. Yes, and I do know, hon, you’re vulnerable too.”

  +++

  “I’m not quite sure what Pandora’s box actually is. I know that’s a hell of a confession, but that’s the truth. I guess it’s something like the bag you don’t want to let the cat out of. Well, I’d opened it, that bag, let out not a gentle little moggy, but several prides of … I don’t know … great goddamn pumas, or something.

  “See, what doesn’t happen – I thought it did but it doesn’t – you don’t stuff down one emotion and the rest are all fine. Emotions, see – I understand this now – they’ve gotten an entire … physiognomy, is that the right word? … I think that’s the right word … all of their own. They’ve gotten their own body, is what I’m trying to say: You know, as in sort of arms, legs, liver, big toe, that whole kind of deal. And just like the body, you can’t do something to one bit of it without it encroaching on the rest. Did you know the major source of back pain was dental decay? Well, maybe not the major source, but certainly a major one. Amazing, isn’t it?

  “Same deal, sort of thing, here. I mean, there’s an abscess in my creativity, which leads me to holding my head of love in an odd way, which starts affecting the spine of my peace-of-mind. It all impacts on each other. See, round Al – no, around Al-and-me, around that relationship – I’d stuffed down the emotions. I wouldn’t allow myself to feel what it was I was feeling. If I started feeling them, Christ, that might mean I might have to do something about it, to change feeling shitty about something into feeling good. Don’t want any of that, for Christ’s sake. Christ, that’s almost subversive. Almost un-American, for Christ’s sake.

  “For years I chose rather to ignore my feelings. Rather than deal with them, is what I mean. But I don’t beat myself up for that any longer. Not only was that the way I was brought up, it was the expected way of the entire world about me. And it still is. Newspapers and tv shows deride us. Anyone trying to work through problems is seen as a figure of fun. Even Oprah, they try to laugh about. So none of this stuff gets talked about. Not really. Not in any kind of meaningful way. Know the consequence of that? It turns what would be anyway a difficult process into one which is that much harder. And for two reasons.

  “Firstly, because those of us embarked on it think we’re involved in something, I don’t know, sinister somehow or harmful, and we therefore try to make the trip sneakily – like stowaways, kind of deal; and secondly, because if there is a map, which I doubt, then that map is kept hidden – and for the same reason.

  “Which is why there are so many phoney maps around. I mean, so frigging many. Look at the ‘Body, Mind and Spirit’ shelves of your bookstore. They’re crammed with phoney guides and invented atlases. There has to be more crap written about self-discovery than about almost anything else.

  “See, I didn’t realise, if I shoved down all the stuff there was around the ‘us’ of Al and me, I had to shove down very big bits too of me – the Al-less me. I had to. You can’t put on a pantyhose without also covering your feet. If we suppress one chunk of our emotions, other chunks (whether we want them to or not) also get suppressed. And if I start suppressing chunks of me, it’s no longer possible for me to be the me that, above all else, I’m supposed to be true to.

  “And it’s more accurate to say that than that I’m being untrue to myself. I’m being true to myself, alright. I’ve spent a lifetime being true to myself. Only problem was, that wasn’t myself: It was an imitation of myself, an abridged version, a Wilde who wasn’t bisexual or a Wagner who wasn’t an anti-Semite.

  “Lady Macbeth – She is the one, right, who killed the king? Then got her husband crowned? – Just checking. If she’d really have known herself, Lady Macbeth, would she, is what I’m asking, have had the king killed? Wouldn’t someone who really knew herself say to herself, ‘Who do you think you’re kidding, girl? The price you’ll have to pay’ll be too high. Way too high. You’ll end up cracking, not being able to wash the blood off of your hands.’ If a person really knew himself, is what I’m asking, would he … I don’t know … trample all over his rivals to make a billion dollars … or invade a foreign country to get Pop’s approval … or … or … or?

  “We talk about these things as if they were exclusive to us, as if they had no effect – at all – on other people’s lives. We talk about them like the drunk talks of his drink. ‘Even if it is a problem,’ we say to ourselves, ‘I’m not saying it is, but even if it were, the problem it is, it’s no-one’s but mine.’ Meantime his kids are shop-lifting, his wife is demented, his parents don’t know whether or not to call the Social Services.

  “You been into a jail recently? Of course you have! Jeez, of course you frigging have. Sorry, that’s just me being dumber than usual. Duh! Well, next time you’re there, you take a straw poll, find out how many of the inmates there have happy memories of childhood. These are people who go on to destroy other people’s lives. Not even Hitler was born. Somehow we created him. And it frightens the crap out of me that we don’t ask ourselves how in the fuck we managed to build ourselves a Hitler.

  “But that, that extreme, those kinds of extreme, they’re not even the tip of the iceberg: They’re the tip of the tip of the iceberg. Most of the problems which possess us or consume us are completely invisible – many of them even, for Christ’s sake, to ourselves. Probably most of them.

  “You know all I know opening Pandora’s box? Letting some of the emotions breathe which I had suppressed? The only thing I’ve learnt, the only piece of knowledge I now have that I didn’t is … wait for it … wait for this cataclysmic announcement … all I now know is that I’ve got a couple of problems; that there are a couple of things about myself I don’t like; a couple of things I need to change.

  “No, I need s
omething else too: I need someone else around me who knows he’s got problems, who knows enough about himself to want to change himself. If only a little. Maybe even herself would be alright. Maybe.”

  +++

  “Know how long the pause was?”

  “What?”

  “Since we spoke, know how long the pause was?”

  “You can’t, Trove, spend your whole life eating.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “We need some time off eating in order for the food to digest. Talking’s not dissimilar.”

  “Know how long it is, Mike, since we truly spoke?”

  “I’m not holding anything back.”

  “You’re holding everything back, Mike.”

  “No.”

  “I’m beginning to think … No, forget it.”

  “Not intentionally, Trove, holding anything back.”

  “I don’t know whether I believe you or not.”

  “That’s a pretty painful thing to say.”

  “It’s also painful, Mike, what I’m hearing. What I’m not hearing: this oh so eloquent fucking silence. See, I asked – this is what it feels like – I asked for champagne. Not Dom Perignon, I don’t think, not even the vintage stuff, just common-or-garden, break-it-over-the-nose-of-a-launching-ship champagne. And what I get, Mike … from Al, what I got was grape juice, and from you I get goddamn Asti. Oh, you seem like champagne. Drunk enough (as I was at the beginning – drunk, I mean, on love), it might even taste like champagne. But, know what, hon? Asti, that’s even more phoney than grape juice. And, because there was that much more deception, there’s therefore that much more disappointment involved.”

  “You want me to react.”

  “Something might be nice. Some kind of recognition that I’ve just said something.”

  “I don’t know how to react.”

  “And you seriously believe, Mike, that’s not a reaction?”

  “Is it some kind of axiom that if it starts hard it has to get harder?”

  “I hope that wasn’t some kind of really bad dirty joke.”

  “I wasn’t joking, Trove.”

  “No.”

  “This is painful for me too.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s more, Mike, it’s more … window-shopping, I guess, is so much better than shopping.”

  “Right.”

  “The bikini is sexier than the birthday suit.”

  “Right.”

  “Disneylife is so much easier, hon, than real life.”

  “I get the point.”

  “The trouble is, Mike, if we blow a bubble and the bubble bursts …”

  “Poof!”

  “Poof, as you say. A splash of detergent and then …”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s what we’ve got, Trove?”

  “Nothing?”

  “Yes.”

  “That what you think?”

  “I asked first.”

  “If the question, Mike, is not as rhetorical as the answer, shit, then we do have nothing.”

  “There’s gold, Trove, in them there pauses.”

  “They do seem to be getting longer.”

  “But not more eloquent?”

  “No, Mike.”

  “Is there such a thing as a rhetorical answer?”

  “Look in a mirror.”

  “Mirror?”

  “Look in it, Mike, you’ll see a rhetorical answer.”

  “I think I even know that.”

  +++

  Maison d’arrêt de Toulouse-Seysses, 21st May 06

  Dear Trove:

  It was generous of you to write back so quickly. You’ve said often enough that I’m unemotional – accused me of it, even. I wasn’t ‘unemotional’ – that I can promise you – when I got your letter. Hosts of emotions charged through me at that point. And each one gave birth to another. And each gave birth also to a tear. There was, by the time I’d finished, a small lake in the middle of my cell.

  Another thing you often accused me of was never telling you anything. About that you were righter. But, you know what?, so were my protests that I told you everything. You see, it was that ‘everything’ meant something different to me than it did to you. In those days, I didn’t think everything meant everything. I thought it meant every-big-thing or -important-thing … every-significant-thing. Headaches weren’t significant, they weren’t part of everything. The only ‘everything’ worth mentioning was a brain tumour.

  Wealth here is a packet of ‘tailor-mades’ (as pre-rolled cigarettes are called); a carton of those makes you a billionaire. What I’m struggling to say is that, stripped of everything, you realize it is only – finally – the headaches that are significant. The extraordinary, you start to realize, is far more present in the mundane than in the fantastic, far more present in the present than in the future, far more grounded than it is celestial or supernatural.

  There is so much I now need to tell you, so many headaches and pin-pricks I need to let you know about. I don’t know where to start. And, Jesus, I want to do it right.

  I have a need, Trove, to do it right.

  I’ve done so many things so wrong, mismanaged the whole of my life so completely, I have a need now to do one thing right. Finally one thing right.

  That one right thing, Trove, is writing to you. I’ve got so much time in here – so much. I can afford to do draft after draft. I will get it right. I owe you that. Oh, no question about that. But know what? I also owe myself that.

  Once before I die, my voice will be heard.

  Know something else? I’m not at all sure what I mean by that. I do know I had to write it, though. I’ll try and figure out why later, and get back to you.

  I don’t even know that the letter will be written before the trial. It’s not something which responds to time pressure.

  Do you yet know whether or not you intend to come? I know that’s your decision, and (for what it’s worth) I’ll be okay with whatever your decision is. I’m just trying to decide what I would like that decision to be. The truth is that I don’t know.

  And the truth is also that that is the truth.

  This is all very ramshackle. Sorry. I don’t want ‘the’ letter to be the same. I want it to be clear and cogent and … me.

  Thank you for helping me towards that. You know, I hope, this is sent with love – Al.

  +++

  Dear Trove,

  You’re lying next to me in bed. It’s like there is an ocean between us. We could make love and there would still be an ocean between us. It’s as though our very nearness is distancing us from each other.

  I think I’m responsible for that. And that thought further heavies my heart. (Yes, I do know there is no verb ‘to heavy’! There is a time for pedantry and a time for laissez-faire. And I’ve, of course, now realised that even to make this point is the act of a pedant. And you also know what? I don’t know whether that’s ironic or indicative or irrelevant or … well, anything else.) I don’t know how I’m responsible. But not knowing how does not mean that I am – or am not.

  I want to lean over and shake you. And I want to say to you, “For Christ’s sake, let’s talk. We have to talk. This is us, Trove. We owe it to ourselves, for Christ’s sake, to talk.”

  You texted me once, I wonder whether you remember. ‘Could we,’ you wrote, ‘be the love of each other’s lives?’ ‘Yes, we could,’ I replied. And for the love we could be of each other’s lives I want to sit you bolt upright, and I want to thrash it out. Whatever the hell ‘it’ is.

  And I want to lean over and kiss you, rouse you gently and lovingly, lots of kissing and tasting and brushing. And I want to mount you languorously and simmer you into a frenzy. I want to lean over and take you. Brutally. Bruisingly. Hurt you. Scorch you into a frenzy. I want to lean over and hold you and cry with you about the absurdity of life and the absurdity of us and to feel your skin as I cry and to lap your t
ears from the corners of your eyes. I want to lean over and lie with you and gaze up at stars and be overcome by the wonder of it all and revel in all its mystery and mysteries. I want to talk until the cows come home and bask in silence forever.

  And I won’t do any of those things. Probably because I’m a coward. The coward’s punishment is not that he disappoints others but that he disappoints himself. Caliban, when he tried to rape Miranda, was punished by being nipped incessantly by crabs – ‘pinched’, I think the actual word is. That’s how it feels, Trove. It feels like I’m nipped, by a thousand disappointments. Pinched permanently by them. And the biggest and most permanent nip of all, the kind of monster crab whose claws dwarf all of those around him, that is the disappointment that I seem to be unable to learn from my mistakes.

  That’s gnawing at me now as I write. Weevilling into me. Spreading, cancer-like, all over me; like a cancer, trailing a path of destruction. Emotional organs damaged beyond repair: the capacity to give.

  I thought I gave. Really and sincerely. Really and sincerely, I mean, I thought I gave really and sincerely. But that’s all it was. I didn’t give. I just thought I did. As I thought I talked. But the action was the thinking not the talking. My hand had the fiver poised above the charity tin – but it never let loose of the money. It’s Buddhists, isn’t it, who believe the intention is more important than the act? I can’t help feeling I took them a little too literally.

  You look so peaceful. So peaceful. The Earth too looks peaceful, seen from space. I mean, which alien flying past us wouldn’t say to itself, “What a beautiful place that looks like. How tranquil and colourful and serene. What an amazing place to live!”

  We’re in orbit, aren’t we, around our fellow human beings? We see them from afar, see the oceans and the continents, the blues and browns and yellows, the greens and whites, and we have no idea – not the foggiest bloody notion – of the turbulence that’s actually going on. Our own private presidents and prime ministers, our own earthquakes and hurricanes, our own riots and revolutions and genocides and apartheids. Our own Hells. Even, I suspect, our own Heavens.

  We are, each one of us, also our own universe. And maybe that’s thrilling. Maybe I should find it thrilling. But I don’t. I find it chilling. Not thrilling but chilling. Is that my epitaph? Is it ours?