by Geoff Dyer
Now you can go, says Stalker. Who wants to be first? Writer? It occurs to us, at this point, that it never crossed our minds that Professor and Writer really came to the Zone so that their deepest wishes could come true. In their different ways they were just curious. They wanted to see what the Zone was like, to see if it had the power to do what it claimed. Well, they’re pretty convinced that it does. Which helps explain why Writer doesn’t want to go at all. Thinking of the past won’t make him kinder. Thinking of the past will make him think of bad reviews, prizes that went to other people, acclaim that should have been his, poor sales, not getting on three-for-two/frontof-shop promotions, loss of inspiration—all the things that he came to the frigging Zone to get shot of in the first place. So, no thanks. Perfectly natural. Not many people can confront the truth about themselves. If they did they’d run a mile, would take an immediate and profound dislike to the person in whose skin they’d learned to sit quite tolerably all these years. Not to have to face up to the truth about oneself is probably high up on anyone’s actual—as opposed to imagined—wish list. Jung claimed that ‘people will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.’ What could be more absurd than to go to the Zone precisely for a rendezvous with one’s own soul—and then, at the last moment, decide against it? Except if evasion really is the name and purpose of the game, then this kind of last-minute change of heart is perfectly logical, a way of confirming, absolutely, that avoidance rather than revelation is the goal. Besides, says Writer, putting down the crown of thorns, don’t you think it’s humiliating, all this snivelling and praying? This is a bit rich, given how he was snivelling and whining back there on the edge of the tubular abyss. But he’s right, of course, Stalker is pretty snivelling—but then who wouldn’t be if they’d spent the day sleeping in wet puddles with only a soaking-wet coat as a blanket? What’s wrong with praying? Stalker wants to know, not taking it personally. Well, for a start, it was developed— according to Nietzsche—to give stupid people something to do with their hands, to stop them fidgeting and making a nuisance of themselves in the quiet, sacred places of the earth. Never having got close to a condition of prayer—at school it seemed a question of holding your hands together and waiting for time to pass; in church, at funerals and weddings, it meant bowing your head and looking at your shoes and waiting for the whole thing to be over with so you could get stuck into the waiting flutes of champagne—I tend to agree. Bresson’s Country Priest is forced to remind himself that ‘the desire to pray is already prayer’, but Stalker has no need of crumbled solace. His life is constant prayer, he’s sort of praying even when he’s not praying, when he’s standing there with his brow getting more furrowed by the moment, having faith in what he hopes for and hoping for what he believes in or whatever. In the background, meanwhile, Professor is fiddling around, making something, maybe making a bigger and better crown of thorns than the one put together by Writer. Maybe that’s his wish: to win the crown of thorns-making competition! I’m serious. We think we have huge goals in life but actually, when it comes to it, we’ll settle quite happily for something trivial that we’ve had all the time and which made our lives bearable. I remember one of several conversations with my mum and dad about what they’d do if they won the football pools. The football pools: that, for many British people, was their equivalent of the Room, the thing that would make all their wishes come true. ‘All I’d like to do,’ my mum said with a mixture of pride and humbleness, ‘is go down to the supermarket and buy the nicest piece of steak there. That’s all I want.’ ‘You could do that NOW!’ I yelled. What she really wanted was to forego the thing—things, actually, because she could probably have afforded to eat steak from the supermarket every day for the rest of her life—that she claimed she wanted. (In stark contrast to today’s generation of consumers, who have no fear of getting into debt, my parents drummed into my head a very simple economy of expenditure: If you can’t afford it, go without. Actually, that first part—’If you can’t afford it’—was pretty superfluous since this was less about economics than an entire philosophy of ‘going without’.) On one occasion when my wife and I took my parents out for dinner (an unusual event as they hated going to restaurants), we were surprised to see that my mum had actually eaten all of her steak. Then, when we got back home, we found that she had squirrelled half of it away and brought it home wrapped up in a napkin in her handbag. These meat-related sources of regret seem to run deep in my family. When my mother was in the early stage of what proved to be her terminal illness my father said that on occasions she did buy steak from the supermarket, always the cheapest cuts, and it was ‘never very nice.’ He also said that he had regrets about their diet of the last fifty years. He wished they ‘had eaten more fat.’ Not meat, fat. That would have been an excellent wish to have taken into the Room. Imagine: your deepest wish is that you had eaten more fat. This is to slightly misrepresent the Room, however, for Stalker never claims that the Room’s powers are retrospective. You can go into the Room and eat all the fat you like from now on but you can’t transform the life you have led into one in which, even during the lean years, you ate heaps of fat.
But perhaps that is and always will be one’s deepest wish: to have the terms of the offer slightly amended so that it can be retrospectively applied, to build a time machine, to go back and have another go, another punt, another throw of the dice, this time knowing the result in advance. The question, I suppose, is this: is one’s deepest desire always the same as one’s greatest regret?
If so, then my greatest regret is, without doubt, one I share with the vast majority of middle-aged, heterosexual men: that I’ve never had a three-way, never had sex with two women at once. Is that pathetic or is it wisdom? If the former then it might well be the latter as well. I look back now and see that there were a couple of chances but, at the time—both times, in fact—it didn’t occur to me. That’s one of life’s subtle lessons: you may never know when the opportunity to have the thing you most want will present itself—for the simple reason that, at that moment, it may not be the thing you most want. I remember very clearly when the first of these potential opportunities presented itself, in my squalid flat in Brixton in the mid-1980s: I wanted to get rid of Jane so that my girlfriend Cindy and I could have sex, even though I knew that Jane (with whom I had had sex on numerous occasions since we had officially broken up) and Cindy were not averse to this kind of thing. The sense of a wasted chance was further exacerbated by the fact that, years later, when I had bro-ken up with Cindy, she did in fact have sex with Jane and an unidentified third party (male). The other occasion was in Brighton when my girlfriend from Belgrade was visiting and we went to a party where we all took ecstasy and my friend Kathy told me that she and my girlfriend from Belgrade were going to have a lesbian affair, which was fine with me as long as I could be around too. The problem was that Kathy’s boyfriend, Michael, was also around (and likewise wished I wasn’t).
You think this is unworthy of the moment and the mystical opportunity of the Room? Well, that’s for the Room to decide. The Room reveals all: what you get is not what you think you wish for but what you most deeply wish for. In which case my fear is that my deepest wish might not be to have had Jane sitting on my face and Cindy on my dick but something really embarrassing, something that I would not want to be made public. Like what? That instead of basking in the fact that I’d managed to get a squalid, rent-controlled flat in Brixton I’d somehow cobbled together money for the deposit to buy a flat in the area when prices, as a result of the riots—or ‘uprisings’ as we insisted on calling them—were at an alltime low, ideally a council flat during the big Thatcherite sell-off to which we were all bitterly opposed. I bet that’s the universal wish of most people in the Western world: that they’d got on the property ladder earlier. Even the ones who got on the property ladder early, who realized there was no point supporting Scargill and the miners, who bought flats while the rest of us were sticking ‘Coal n
ot Dole’ badges on our donkey jackets, probably wish they’d got on the property ladder earlier, before council flats were up for grabs, or, failing that, the moment they went on sale, when you could buy a hard-to-let for a thousand quid and still have change left over for the first issue of cut-price British Telecom shares. What else? I keep coming back to the 1980s, when I could have grown my hair long, before it became all grey and tragic, before I began looking like the kind of middle-aged man constantly thinking of all the three-ways—two at any rate—that he didn’t have, that went begging, like threebedroom council flats that are now worth three hundred times what they were thirty years ago.
But let’s assume the Room’s power is effective immediately, not retroactively. If your deepest desire is the one manifested by your daily life and habits, then mine, apparently, is to potter about, to potter my life away, drift-ing from desk to kitchen (to make tea), from house to café (to have coffee). It all comes down to that line in Solaris about never knowing when we’re going to die. If I had a week left to live it would be absurd to potter around my house like this. I’d rather be doing something exciting (though what that something might be for the moment escapes me). No, I need to give this a bit of thought. If I had a week left to live? Fly to an idyllic beach in Thailand or the Bahamas? But then I’d spend twelve hours on a plane and another three days shattered by jet lag, lying awake in the middle of the night, too tired to get up, and flopping around in the day, trying to stay awake so that I could sleep the next night. So it’s difficult. The basic assumption is that if you had very little time left you would not do what you’re doing now. But that’s why this life of the writer, this life where you spend your time doing pretty much what you want, is quite different. So, given that I probably am going to be around for a while, this is pretty much my deepest desire at the moment, to sit here scribbling, trying to fathom out what my deepest desire might be.
In any case the whole idea of the Room is a joke. Perhaps our deepest wish in life is that there could be a place like this, a Room where our deepest wish comes true. Extrapolating from that, we don’t want to get to the point where we discover that we actually don’t want this Room to exist, that even if it existed we wouldn’t enter it, that even if we could buy ourselves the nicest piece of steak in the supermarket we would save the money instead or spend it on beer and crisps, that even if I did get the chance for a three-way it would turn out that I couldn’t get it up because I felt the odd man out, that it was actually a two-way with a third person (me) feeling superfluous. We want the Room to be external to ourselves, like the football pools or the lottery. We want it to do the work, want it to be a window on to another world, not a mirror reflecting back to ourselves the inadequate or shameful nature of our own desires, which probably do not operate on this one vote, once, kind of basis. One’s deepest desire changes from day to day, moment to moment. There were plenty of occasions, in my twenties, when my most intense desire—so intense that it was impossible to see beyond it—was to have a beer, to get to the boozer before last orders, before time was called. Those days are gone but there are still times—when I’m in the cinema, watching a film I’ve wanted to see for ages—when all I want to do, the thing that I crave with every fibre of my being, is to shut my eyes and take a nap. (‘The eye wants to sleep,’ writes the poet, ‘but the head is no mattress.’)
Anyway, the long and the short of it is that Writer doesn’t want to go into the Room or, in Stalker’s optimistic reading of the situation, is not ready to go in just yet. This reluctance or hesitation is a specifically middle-aged problem. In your twenties there’d be no disjuncture at all between what you thought you wanted and your innermost wish; both would be the same, lying at the same depths within. It’s one of the reasons why middle-aged people are reluctant to take powerful psychedelic drugs. I had the idea that in my mid-fifties I would start taking LSD again, was actually looking forward to seeing that acid ripple of the ground again, but now that it’s only a few years away, the prospect seems altogether less appealing than it did a decade ago. What kind of stuff would tripping unearth? Probably that I had no desire to trip. Even if I waited for a perfect day, for cloudless weather in the sky and in the head, it might turn out that, unbeknownst to me, a dreadful storm was about to brew up in the head, in which case the bright conditions outside would only exacerbate the abysmal depression within, that before I knew it I’d end up in the damp and clammy meat grinder, putting one foot in front of another in a state of abject terror.
How about Professor, then? Yep, he’s up for it. Well, this is a surprise, especially since he’s got his knapsack back. A while back he was all for calling it a day but now he’s ready to take the plunge. Good man. He goes to get whatever it is he’s been fiddling with but it’s definitely not a crown of thorns. It looks like an absolutely state-of-the-art thermos, far better than the one he’s been lugging around, capable of keeping drinks piping hot or icy cold for thousands of years. What could it be? A soul-ometer, quips Writer, but then Professor drops an absolute bombshell: it’s not a thermos flask, it’s a bomb. What the…? Yes, a twenty-kiloton bomb. He’s a secular jihadist, a militant proto-Dawkinsite, declaring war on the believers, on those who have faith in the transformative power of the Room. Professor insists that he’s not a maniac but, at this moment, he looks and sounds exactly like an elderly nutter with a bomb. He and his colleagues back at the Institute decided to destroy the Room in case it got into the wrong hands, to stop people coming here whose deepest wish was to control mankind and enslave the world, the lazy Hitlers and couch Stalins. But then some of his conspirators at the Institute had a change of heart. They decided that even if it was a miracle it was still part of nature.42
Quite so. Everything we see in the Zone is conceivably just a part of nature. What seems a miracle is the ground rippling due to some geomorphologic activity that one cannot understand. The disappearing bird is a fluke of the light. The sudden gust of wind, blowing in from nowhere in the midst of a calm day, is a freak gust of wind. Anyway, some of Professor’s friends decided against blowing up the Zone, but that’s exactly what he’s here to do. Exactly in the sense of probably. He came here with the idea that his innermost wish was to blow up the Zone, to get in and slam the door behind him; to make sure that he was the last to avail himself of its promised magic. But even at this late stage there’s scope for doubt, even now that he’s made up his mind it’s possible his innermost wish won’t let him do what he’s determined he must do. This is one of the lessons of the Zone: sometimes a man doesn’t want to do what a man thinks he wants to do. Besides, there’s no guarantee that the physical destruction of the Room will diminish belief in its power. On the contrary, obliteration might generate more stories about it and heighten the mythical status of the place where it used to be until it is brought into re-existence on the site— and by virtue—of its own absence.
Stalker wanders off to consider what, from his point of view, both as a devotee of the Zone and as someone who earns his living from it, can only be very bad news. Then he spins round and tries to snatch the bomb from the Professor. They have an old-bloke scuffle, like an outtake from Bumfights, but then Writer wades in and—three times—chucks Stalker back into the murky water with all the lightbulbs and stuff from the chemistry set floating in it. Strangely, Professor objects to this intervention, even as Stalker comes back yet again, only to be flung into the foreground. Impossible, at this point, not to think of the bit near the end of Don DeLillo’s White Noise, when Willie Mink gives a deranged lecture on room behaviour: ‘The point of rooms is that they’re inside. No one should go into a room unless he understands this. People behave one way in rooms, another way in streets, parks and airports. To enter a room is to agree to a certain kind of behaviour. It follows that this would be the kind of behaviour that takes place in rooms.’
Which raises the question of whether, on the threshold of a room that is not just any room but the Room, all this talk of blowing the place to kingdom co
me, all this brawling and scuffling and throwing each other into puddles, is entirely appropriate.
Stalker would be the one to know but he’s had all the fight knocked out of him. He picks himself up again, wants to know why Professor wants to destroy people’s hope. This place that is all that’s left to them on earth, the only place they can come to. Why destroy their hope? The awfulness of what is about to be done revives Stalker sufficiently to make him rush Professor again—only to get thrown to the ground by Writer, who has grown increasingly angry. (Professor looks like he’s about to have a heart attack—the scuffling has knocked the puff out of him too.) Writer launches into a diatribe against Stalker. He’s a louse, enjoying the power of God almighty. No wonder he never enters the Room—he’s got everything he wants, all the power and mystery. Stalker has rarely looked happy; he has always appeared burdened by the job of being a Stalker, now—with his face bloodied and bruised, his eyes red with tears—he looks utterly dejected. And he’s literally snivelling whereas before he was just acting in a snivelling sort of way. Stalkers are not allowed to enter the Room, he snivels. They can’t even enter the Zone with any ulterior motive. But yes, you’re right, he tells Writer. I’m a louse, I’ve never done any good in this life, I’ve never even given anything to my wife. I don’t have any friends. But don’t take everything from me. Everything has been taken from me, on the other side of the barbed wire, he says. All that’s mine is here, in the Zone. My happiness, my freedom, my selfrespect. I bring people here, people like me—the desperate, the tormented. They have nothing else to hope for. And I bring them here. Only I, the louse, can help them.