Al's Well

by Dark, Gregory

  “It stirred stuff up inside me again. Oh, all the coming-back-from-Paris-on-the-plane stuff, sure, all those whooshing emotions, those whirring emotions, all of them creating other whooshing, whirring physical reactions. But his letter too, that caused … well, the stuff to gloop around within me which he used to make gloop around with me, but which I’d forgotten he could. Mushy stuff mostly, but … well, yeah, sexy stuff too. And not just sexy stuff, quite raunchy sexy stuff. Squidgy stuff, know what I mean? I was surprised. No, I wasn’t. I wasn’t surprised, I was frigging amazed.

  “I was in two minds whether or not to go to the trial. I mean, to see someone you’ve loved – whom you love, for Christ’s sake – so demeaned, that’s hard. It wasn’t that I didn’t sympathise with his plight. Jesus, I did. And that’s not to say either that I didn’t recognise that a relatively young woman had completely unnecessarily lost her life. And, sure I know, no-one was standing next to him with a pistol to his head threatening to blow it off unless he drank. Still and all …

  “‘Course in the midst of all this, Mike took off.

  “But that’s another story.”

  +++

  “Are you going to let me see the article before you publish it? Before it’s published, perhaps I should say.

  “Of course not to change anything. Just out of academic interest. Well, probably more out of sexual interest, if I’m scrupulously honest. Maybe we could meet for dinner, discuss the more purple of the prose …

  “Promise?

  “Great.

  “Well, she heard nothing, Petrova. From Mike, that is. Nor did I. She phoned me two, three times a week. Had I heard from him? She didn’t need to make contact, she just wanted to be sure he was alright. She’d even tried Drew. But the number he’d given her, strictly ‘for emergencies’, turned out to be a false one.

  “She was in a bit of state, one way and another. Mike had disappeared, Al refused to see her … Suddenly, the two most important people in her life were confiscated from her.

  “What time’s your train?

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I’ll drive you.”

  +++

  “Zilch. I heard nothing from Mike literally for weeks. I tried everything, even tried phoning Drew – but Mike’d given me a duff number – even phoned Sheridan. I ever talk to you about Sheridan? He’s something of a roué, Sheridan. Likes to think of himself as a rake, but roué is a better word for him. He’s giving an interview to one of the French Sundays. Some journalist, she contacted me too. I thought it might compromise Al’s trial. I wasn’t that interested. The only reason Sheridan was? The reporter was a woman.

  “I think he was a good friend to Mike. And he wasn’t unfriendly to me. It’s just that … well, he didn’t know anything. Long story short, no-one knew anything about him. Mike, I mean.

  “I was inconsolable. I felt duped. Cheated. I felt like I had offered my soul to Mephistopheles and Mephistopheles had laughed in my face and told me my soul wasn’t worth the buying. I felt betrayed and I felt about three inches tall.

  “And then I started to think. No, I didn’t. I didn’t start to think for weeks after that. First of all I had to go on this roller-coaster of a ride for every waking minute, and many sleeping ones. Up and down, side to side, rocking, reeling, whooshing, receding, in … out, round and frigging round, like a pitched ball, spinning wheels within wheels, on and on, a kaleidoscope of time, a vortex of energy and emotions and Christ only knows what else. And only when I had gotten so sick and tired – I mean so sick and tired – of being so giddy all the time, so disorientated, so screwed, only then did I start thinking. No, not even that: Only then did I force myself to start thinking. To start thinking it through – and ‘us’ through … and ‘Al and me’ through.

  “Thank God.

  “Because by the time the postcard arrived I was through thinking it through – if you see what I mean. The shock was copable with. If it had gotten there even a week earlier, even a couple of days, who knows? I’m not sure I could have coped with it. It was from Bangkok – which was pretty much a shock to begin with. Know what it said? ‘Sorry,’ it said. That was it. ‘Sorry.’ He didn’t even sign it. He didn’t even say what it was he was sorry about. ‘Sorry’, can you believe that? If I ever see him again, the sorry little asshole, I’d ‘sorry’ his sorry little ass. I mean to frigging say: ‘Sorry’?! I still cannot believe it.”

  +++

  … So, the right verdict.

  Sentence? I don’t think there could have been a right sentence. I suspect in most cases the most you can hope for in any sentence is a least wrong one. Anyone in jail – anyone at all – is also partially a victim. Oh, I’m not banging my do-gooder tambourine here. Merely stating a fact. And that is a fact. How many of the ‘zero tolerance’ brigade have driven a car over the alcohol limit? Or over the speed limit? How many have been economical with the truth when filing their tax returns or filling up their expense accounts? How many have not resorted to blackmail, if only of the emotional variety, or who have not pushed the grounds of appropriacy in their sexual conduct? There are very few, is all I’m saying, who haven’t committed in miniature what those behind bars have committed full-scale. And if (and when) we fail to recognize that, we do a disservice not only to ourselves, not only to penology, but also (because it fails to address something central to the cause of law and order) to society as a whole.

  Very few of the real criminals are in prison. For every Jeffrey Archer or John Dean there are a thousand Blairs or Nixons – or Amins!; for every pusher there are scores on the streets (even scores of scores on the streets!), and literally hundreds working in medical practices or pharmaceutical companies – or breweries. You know the litany. The chief cause of incarceration is bad luck. Well, it’s probably usually stupidity, actually, mixed with bad luck.

  It was in my case.

  The stupidity lay in getting stupefied. That was compounded with luck which, yes, was bad. Not as bad as Monique’s. Of course not. Not, as you would say, by ten zillion miles. But lying in a hospital bed next to someone with two broken arms and two broken legs does not mean that your broken finger does not hurt. In other words, your recognition that there are those worse off than you should help you to a degree of humility. But it becomes a false humility if it starts to tell you that therefore your problems aren’t real ones. The death of a parent is not the devastating blow of that of a child. But it is still a blow. The pain it exacts is real. I know you know that. It wasn’t a cheap shot.

  How do you quantify pain? Or blame? It’s not possible. And therefore there can be no such thing as a right sentence. Or a just one. Only a least wrong, a least unjust one. To think otherwise is again to do a disservice to society as a whole.

  Similarly, there is due process but there is no just process. To call themselves the Courts of Justice is already to strive for a remit which is simply not available. They can be Courts of Law ... but of Justice?

  People are dissatisfied with the courts for precisely that reason. They believe the name. They therefore expect the courts to do something which the courts simply cannot do. Justice is entirely too subjective in its interpretation, in (that is) one’s understanding of it – the personal understanding each one of us has of it.

  There would have been no punishment meted out to me which Monique’s parents would think ‘just’. Most of those back home who witness the execution of their loved one’s murderer leave the execution chamber still dissatisfied. They could hang, draw and quarter me, castrate me and boil me in oil, Monique’s parents would not consider the punishment ‘just’. How could they? I have been the cause of so much pain to them. So much unbelievable pain. Pain is so blinding it has become a cliché: We say we are ‘blinded by pain’.

  Talking of blindness, we blindfold justice. Brilliant!

  So even the imagery is confused. And confusing.

  For justice to be justice it doesn’t need to be blinded, it needs to be Janus – Janus multiplied a hundredfold – wit
h eyes in the back of her head, in her ass, her elbows, ankles. For justice to be justice, justice needs the eyes of God. We blindfold Justice precisely because we cannot endow her with the eyes of God. But as soon as we do blindfold her we actually not only disable her, but we annihilate her. A blindfolded justice is no justice at all. At the moment of blindfolding her, justice becomes only the law. And the law, ironically, has no need to be blindfolded. The law is born blind. The law has only one interest, finally, and that is to protect itself. Any entity with only one interest is blind.

  It could only be something self-obsessed and blind that would bestow on a blindfolded figure a lethal weapon. The concept is mind-blowing. I mean, who better to give a tool of destruction to than someone who cannot see whom she is slashing with it?! Even slaying with it?! But it is, again ironically, entirely appropriate – maybe not ‘le mot juste’, but sure as hell the image ‘juste’. Because it’s not that there are miscarriages of justice, it is that justice, as practised by the law, can do nothing but miscarry.

  By calling the law ‘justice’ we hype it. And, like a book that a friend has overly raved about, hype inevitably leads to disappointment. Once we start to realize that not only vengeance but justice too is not within the purview of us humans, then we can start dealing in different ways with our pain. It is only in that way that we can stop the tragedy propagating itself, continuing into some disgruntled eternity.

  When I found out I’d killed Monique I wanted to kill myself. Desperately I wanted to. But it would have been too easy. I couldn’t let myself off the hook that easily.

  It doesn’t matter that I was drunk. Nor that she was. It doesn’t matter a damn. It doesn’t matter that the row was about nothing, that I didn’t mean to push her that hard, nor that she tripped over the cat. None of that matters. It doesn’t matter that I tried to revive her. God, how I tried to revive her! It matters only that, way before her appointed hour, she was robbed of life. That I got nothing from the robbery – nothing, at least, positive – does not stop me from having been the robber. …

  +++

  “Another week went by. And I got this from Drew, that’s Mike’s son. Listen to this: ‘Dear Petrova Tregunter, I received this missive from my father. For reasons which are probably obvious I chose not to read it. However, from a quick skim of some of its pages, it would seem that this is much more your business than mine. If you are/ were able to have a relationship with my father, well done. You would, I suspect, have been unique in that regard. Yours sincerely …’ et cetera’.

  “And I realized, then – Jesus, I am so frigging stupid – I realised, when I’d finished reading the letter, that the whole thing with Mike ... no, Mike’s whole thing, this had nothing to do with me, Mike’s whole I’m-going-to-let-you-know-who-I-am thing, that wasn’t a portrait but a trompe-l’oeil, you know one of those pictures which make you believe it’s a door, say, and it’s just a painting. Mike never truly revealed anything to me. That whole big deal about God, for instance. It meant nothing. Not a frigging thing. His life wasn’t dictated to by his belief in God. It wasn’t, as far as I could see, even affected by it. It was just emotional sleight-of-hand, as so much of his so-called striptease was sleight-of-hand, pulling the attention away from where it needs to be to where it needs not to be. And that makes it actually more crushing than simply not revealing anything.

  +++

  … Just after ‘lights out’ here, that’s my nightmare time of day. That’s the time, block it though I try to, I’m back looking down the stairs, back – that inert figure catapulting towards me –, back in that moment of realization that Monique was no more. Back – and I say this to my eternal shame – in that moment of panic when I started wondering how best I could conceal my crime. God, the things that I thought of! I was sober in that moment. In under that moment. In a stretch of time which would make a nanosecond seem like an eternity. So sober, so scared.

  I did try to revive her. God, did I try! I thought she stirred, you see. That’s when I called the ambulance. May God forgive me. Oh, it was delusion. She was dead before she’d gotten to the bottom of the stairs – well, you heard the medical evidence. Broken neck. Whatever she did, she didn’t stir. But, such as I am, it saved me. Because, God help me, had she not ‘stirred’, I have no idea what I might have done. I had visions of going to the forest round Clairac, burying the body somewhere there, pretending she’d walked out on me. God help me. I had all sorts of crazy, desperate visions. They don’t punish you, though, for visions. And yet still we allow them their talk of justice?

  It is a Buddhist prayer, you know, to seek forgiveness for any evil you may have done – or thought. I’m not even sure that in the Catholic Church too, sinful thoughts are not quite as blame-worthy as sinful actions. I don’t think you have to believe in a standard god to acknowledge that justice does not belong amongst mortal concerns.

  Poor Monique. Poor, poor Monique. I never loved her. I could never love her. Oh, I tried. But the love I felt for her, I realized, was the inversion, the flipside, of what I thought then was my hatred for you. She was fair and fairly tall and pretty quiet. She liked watching television and listening to Country and Western. And if she had been the flip side of my hatred for you I might have been able to love her.

  But she wasn’t.

  Of course she wasn’t.

  She was the flip side of the love I continued to feel for you. A love whose passion was burning through the crust of comfort I realized I’d created for myself. Not because I wanted the comfort but because I was appallingly afraid of what I knew was indeed passion bubbling away God knows where within me.

  “L’état c’est moi.” Who was it said that? Louis XIV, was it? Yes, Louis XIV, I’m pretty sure. Know what Al says? Al the First-as-far-as-I-know? Al, he say, “La normalité, c’est nous.”

  Yeah, I know I said that before. Well, not that exactly, but something pretty like it. And I also know it’s not exactly an original thought. But it is, in my book, so important, so central, that it can stand repetition. No, it cries out to be repeated. ‘La normalité, c’est nous.’ We believe that what makes us tick makes everyone else tick. As (now I think about it) embodied by that very sentence. What makes me think that ‘we believe what makes us tick is…’? Because, fundamentally, I believe that, of course. I assume because I do, so does everyone else.

  We are the theme and those around us are the variations. Always.

  How much misery has been caused by that assumption? Untold wars, of course. I mean, untold wars. All the misery attached to that. All the Bush’s of history, and all the Kaisers, all the Genghis Khans and Julius Caesars. But that’s only a part of it. How much strife in relationships, in marriages, has that as its root cause? How many times do we stand totally bemused by our partner’s stance? Astounded by it? A bemusement which, of course, turns to anger. Because the feeling of being bemused is one which is very painful. And pain almost inevitably leads to anger. And anger (particularly unacknowledged or misdiagnosed anger) leads to misery. Always.

  Always. …

  +++

  “He emailed me from Bangkok. Petrova – well, he said ‘Trove’, of course – Petrova had broken his heart, he said. Henceforward, he said, he’d fall in love strictly on a cash-only basis. That was the last time I heard from him.

  “Will you break my heart, my dear?”

  +++

  … There was an episode – remember? – of ‘West Wing’, the tv show, in which President Bartlett was handed a note by his Chief of Staff outlining the proposed policy stance of the Executive’s future. All that was written on the note was ‘Let Bartlett be Bartlett’.

  How much misery would we save the world if we extended that policy commitment to one which said ‘let everyone be themselves’? If we gloried in our differences, therefore. If we stopped judging books by their covers, and people’s insides by their shells. And if we started to recognize that each reader handed an identical text will still be reading an entirely different book.
The ‘Mona Lisa’ that I see, the ‘Ave Maria’ that I hear, the crispy duck I taste, the lavender I smell, the leather that I touch – these are all different to those that anyone else sees, hears, tastes. Those sensations are as unique to us as our DNA. How much more individually, then, do we read!

  ‘Othello’, for instance, will be read vastly differently by a man possessed of jealousy than by a woman who is a victim of it. It’ll be read differently by someone who has been the victim of racial abuse than by one who has meted out such abuse. It’ll be read differently by a man and by a woman, for God’s sake. By someone with a drink problem, and by one with none. By connivers and by those connived against. By those who like Shakespeare and by those that loathe him. By actors and by directors. By musicians and by painters. Oh, some readings will be so similar as to be nigh-on identical. And others will be so different you could wonder whether the reader had been presented with the same play.

  We all like to think, though, that our individual interpretation is the interpretation – which, of course, it is. Provided that we restrict its interpretation to ourselves. The problem begins when we try to convince others to our side. How many hundreds of books have been written about ‘Hamlet’, say? Or ‘Tartuffe’? All of them defining the work for us.

  And this is an uncontroversial book! Beautiful, yes. Important, certainly. But not planet-shaking or -shaping. Will we ever be able to quantify the misery which has been inflicted on the world because the same principles are applied to reading, let’s say, ‘The Qur’an’? Or ‘Das Kapital’? Or our Constitution?