Dusklands

by J. M. Coetzee

  The boys from M.I.T. are giggling about new ways to contaminate fish.

  I stare at the walls. I stare at the windowframes full of early afternoon. Light strikes at the nest of pain in my head. My eyeballs roll, I yawn. There is something grotesque about me. What am I doing in this cubic building, what am I doing in these people’s lives? Tears of exhaustion stream down my cheeks, I long for a bed of my own. I am bad luck. I am turning into soapstone. I am turning into a doll.

  Sometimes I ring the little bell in my wife’s home. When she picks up her end I put mine down, or breathe heavily, as described in the newspapers.

  All calls are monitored by Internal Security.

  Underneath Marilyn’s telephone I have taped a fountain pen. If she finds it she will think it is a bug. If Coetzee finds it he will take it for one of Armco’s little bombs.

  Yesterday Marilyn did not answer. I laid the receiver down and listened to it flash its impulses across the city, across the suburbs, through the walls of the house I had paid for: forty, sixty, eighty. How strange, I said to myself, how out of character: I am going into action! A pulse beat in my head. Buried streams were beginning to flow. Into the heat of the afternoon I walked thrilling with danger, the air around me heavy with the fragrance of Right Guard. I drove fast but carefully, stopping my ears to the god of irony. I am dextrous despite my thick soles. Within thirty minutes I was home. Marilyn’s Volkswagen was in place, lodged in the carport. I tiptoed to the rear of the house. There is a novel in which a householder is arrested for peeping at his wife. I peeped through the bedroom window. Marilyn sat on the bed dressed in a housecoat, paging through a magazine whose smiling, healthy plates (Sunsilk, Coca-Cola) floated through her fingers in the cool silence of her aquarial world. My heart went out to her. I longed to stretch a hand through the glass. In the hot sun I crouched and watched, hoping the neighbors would not remark me.

  I continue to dream nightly dreams whose lucid, tired structures bare themselves helplessly beneath my knife, telling me nothing I did not know. I emerge at intervals into a bed in which my wife lies clenched in her own private sleep. Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone, she is no help to me.

  I dreamt last night of home, the true home before whose barred gate I have spent this last orphan year. Faces from my photographs of Vietnam come floating toward me out of hazy matt backgrounds, smiling soldiers, stolid prisoners (I do not go in for children). In euphoric gestures of liberation I stretch out my right hand. My fingers, expressive, full of meaning, full of love, close on their narrow shoulders, but close empty, as clutches have a way of doing in the empty dream-space of one’s head. I repeat the movement many times, the movement of love (open the chest, reach the arm) and discouragement (empty hand, empty heart). Grateful for the simple honesty of this dream but bored all the same by its moral treadmill, I drift in and out, drowning and waking. The faces come back, they loom before my inward eye, the smiling teeth, the hooded gaze; I stretch my hand, the ghosts retreat, my heart weeps in its narrow slot. I check the window; but in this dream it is never dawn. Out of their holy fire the images sing to me, drawing me on and on into their thin phantom world. I grow irritated, I toss petulantly. For though heartache rend me more and more, it becomes in the end the habit of heartache, the habit of being the excluded orphan; and if there is one thing I cannot stand it is having a lesson drummed into me.

  Dull dreams in a dull bed. Marilyn floats face down through my nights. I chop in my hook and pull. Flesh flakes off bloodless and she floats away. I touch my fingers to her arm, warmer asleep than awake, cell packed against cell in an ecstasy of hibernation. The man in the tiger cage flashes a black eye at me. I stretch out my hand.

  Four

  I marvel at myself. I have done a deed. It is not so hard after all.

  I write from (let us see if I can get this extravagance right) the Loco Motel on the outskirts of the town of Heston, pop. 10,000, or perhaps it is Dalton, on the foothill slopes of the San Bernardino Mountains in my native state of California. I write in an exuberant spirit and in the present definite. Everything about me has a bracing air of reality. If I turn my eyes upward and slightly to the left, I see through the window, above doors 21–30 across the courtyard, the blue and white of the snowy mountains. At all hours of the day birdsong falls on my alert ears. I do not know the names of the birds but have not doubt that they can be learned, given time, out of books or from an informant. Yesterday we (Martin and I, to introduce Martin) took our first walk in the woods, where we saw a bird with a scarlet choker whose song was one-two-three. Lacking a name we called him the one-two-three bird. Martin seemed to be happy. He stood up well to a tiring walk. Usually he complains and wants to be carried; but that is the effect of his mother. Children will not grow up if they are treated like children. With me Martin is quite the little man. He is proud of his father and wishes to be like him. The walk put color in his cheeks. We came back at dusk and ate a hearty supper (flapjacks, ice cream, orange juice, three items). I like to see a child eat well. Martin’s appetite is usually poor, another effect of his mother’s coddling.

  We are registered here under the names George Doob and son. I have always found the name Doob funny and am pleased to have a chance to live under it. My car registration is less easy to veil. But then, I tell myself, the precautions I take are taken only because I am cautious by habit. Marilyn would not want to make a laughing-stock of herself by reporting us missing.

  I look into my heart and find that I do not mind what she does now that I am gone. It is not, I see, after all difficult to cut ties. I had only to say to myself, enunciating the words clearly: “You will pack a bag. You will take your son’s hand and walk out of the house. You will cash a check. You will leave town”. Then I did these things. Giving myself orders is a trick I often play on my habit of obedience. Thirty-three is the mythologically correct age for cutting ties. Marilyn can wither, I withdraw my investment in her. Coetzee can also die, though that is less likely.

  More significant to me than the marital problem, I now find, is the problem of names. Like so many people of an intellectual cast, I am a specialist in relations rather than names. Think of the songbirds of the forest. With each other, as well as with other phenomena, they have rather simple relationships. Therefore one tends to ignore songbirds in favor of things that enter into more complex relationships. This is an example of the unfortunate tyranny of method over subject. It would be a healthy corrective to learn the names of the songbirds, and also the names of a good selection of plants and insects (the names of the mammals I learned in childhood). I find insects fascinating, even more fascinating than birds. I am impressed by the invariability they achieve in their behavior. Perhaps I should have been an entomologist.

  There is no doubt that contact with reality can be invigorating. I hope that firm and prolonged intercourse with reality, if I can manage it, will have a good effect on my character as well as my health, and perhaps even improve my writing. I wish that I were more adequate to the vision of the snowcapped ranges that is mine if, as I mentioned earlier, I turn my eyes upward and slightly to the left. (If I look straight in front I see my face in a mortifying oval mirror. To this dwindling subject I find myself more or less adequate.) I would appreciate a firm grasp of cicadas, Dutch elm blight, and orioles, to mention three names, and the capacity to spin them into long, dense paragraphs which would give the reader a clear sense of the complex natural reality in whose midst I now indubitably am. I have Herzog and Voss, two reputable books, at my elbow, and I spend many analytic hours puzzling out the tricks which their authors perform to give to their monologues (they are after all no better than I, sitting day after day in solitary rooms secreting words as the spider secretes its web—the image is not my own) the air of a real world through the looking-glass. A lexicon of common nouns seems to be a prerequisite. Perhaps I was not born to be a writer.

  Meanwhile Martin plays quietly on the floor beside me. He
has taken to motel life without a murmur. We sleep together in the double bed, he on his side, I on mine. He is fond of the arrangement and I tolerate it for his sake, though children make restless sleeping companions. We have our meals in the roadhouse next door. It is difficult to spin motels and roadhouses into long, dense paragraphs, but I feel that they are at least a move in the right direction. I could also try to weave in the room in which I am writing. I sit on the side of the bed, bent over the little bedside table. It is uncomfortable, but I do not think it likely that Dalton (or Heston) would run to writing-tables in its motel rooms. I have already mentioned the oval mirror on the wall.

  Martin is putting together the parts of a puzzle which when complete will depict Mama Bear (gingham apron, padded hands) waving goodbye from the doorsill as Papa Bear (fishing pole, straw hat), Teddy Bear (shrimp net), and Suzie Bear (picnic basket) wend their way down the garden path toward a beaming sun. Marilyn and I had the sense to spare Martin a Suzie Bear. Like Adam in his palmy days, he does not know enough to know he is alone. When he has had enough of the Bear family Martin will re-read the adventures of Spider Man or play behind the wheel of my car, building up rich emulative fantasies until it is time for lunch. I will meanwhile go on with my writing. I have made it clear to Martin that the mornings belong to me. In the afternoon he and I will go for our walk in the woods, after which I will perhaps stand him some kind of treat.

  I am going to have to come to terms with the laundry.

  Four days in Dalton and Martin is beginning to whine. The washing hangs from a string between the wardrobe door and a picture-hook. When the maid comes I stuff it in a drawer and take down the string. My underwear gives off a moldy odor. This way of life is not satisfactory. However, I am not prepared to skulk in a laundromat under the eyes of inquisitive townsfolk, waiting for the end of the spin cycle.

  Martin wants his own toys. He wants to know what we are doing here. He wants to know when we are going home. I do not have answers to his questions. Sometimes he cries, sometimes he throws tantrums. When he is too loud I shut him up in the bathroom. Perhaps I am harsh; but I am in no mood for irrational behavior. After the tranquillity of our first few days I feel my nerves again going to shreds. I saved the child from a woman of unstable, hysterical character who was bringing him up as a ninny, yet he is nothing but a burden to me. Is there not some incandescent fervor of speech that will convince the child that however abrupt or tyrannical I seem, my motives are pure? How loud must I shout, how wide with passion must my eyes glare, how must my hands shake before he will believe that all is for the best, that I love him with a father’s love, that I desire only that he should grow to be what I am not, a happy man?

  He is sleeping, his thumb in his mouth, a sign of insecurity.

  I ought to be happy in this place. I have cut my ties. There is no one breathing over my shoulder. My time is my own. Yet I am still unliberated. Whereas I had hoped to sink through circle after circle of wordless being, under the influence of birdsong and paternal love and afternoon walks, until I attained the rapture of pure contemplation, I find myself merely sitting in the Loco Motel drenched in reverie and waiting for something to happen. Whose is that ancient voice in us that whinnies after action? My true ideal (I really believe this) is of an endless discourse of character, the self reading the self to the self in all infinity. Is it the blocked imperative of action that has caused the war, and my discourse of the war, to back up and poison me? Would I have freed myself if I had been a soldier boy and trod upon the Vietnam of my scholar fantasy? I call down death upon death upon the men of action. Since February of 1965 their war has been living its life at my expense. I know and I know and I know what it is that has eaten away my manhood from inside, devoured the food that should have nourished me. It is a thing, a child not mine, once a baby squat and yellow whelmed in the dead center of my body, sucking my blood, growing by my waste, now, 1973, a hideous mongol boy who stretches his limbs inside my hollow bones, gnaws my liver with his smiling teeth, voids his bilious filth into my systems, and will not go. I want an end to it! I want my deliverance!

  One, two cars are pulling up, in the present indefinite this time. Doors, at least four of them, click. You hear everything out here in the country. My visitors are coming. First they will try talk. When that has failed they will attack me. I am ready; that is to say, I am standing behind the curtain sweating. I am not used to violence.

  They are walking across the courtyard, soft feet, more soft feet than I can count, and murmuring voices. They are making their plans.

  Cleverly I forestall them. Before they knock I open the door and proffer a shaft of my face, vigilant, frank. They are as I expected, tall men in uniform, and in their midst a woman in a white raincoat who must be Marilyn. The déjà vu feeling slips over me and I bathe in it gratefully.

  There is something wrong with Marilyn’s face. Moonglow is deceptive, but the left side seems to bulge. The bulge moves. She is talking. But this talk of hers has never really concerned me. I wait. I would like to say I am sorry, interrupting her. But that would lose me my advantage. I go on waiting. Tall blondeness, clear brown lines, hauteur and mystery of the swimwear model I married, she stands among these heavy men. Talk makes her head snap angrily. I hope she is appreciated. I am not without pride in my wife. If estranged.

  But the talk! I hear it now, peevish and monotonous as a bad quarrel. I do not want this talk. I do not want an exhibition in front of strangers. I know Marilyn’s moods. When she is in this mood one cannot reason with her. “Please go away, Marilyn”, I say. My voice is tinny. I do not seem to be able to manage chest-tones tonight. “Please just go away”. For an instant my voice rides above hers, patient, tired. “Let us discuss it when we are rested. I haven’t the heart to talk tonight”. I am the faithful father at his post, the watchdog guarding the sleeping babe. I am pierced by the desolation of my plight. I hope these men are turning against her. Surely they know about wives, about quarrels. Two of them flank her, with another behind.

  She is enunciating her words now, hard and loud and angry. The people in the next rooms will be woken up. Low motives: I weep to be released from this drama of low motives. “Go away”, I weep, “go away and leave me alone. I didn’t ask you to come here. I can’t take any more of your kind of life”.

  She says more words, including “Let me in”. Those are three of her words.

  “Martin is perfectly all right”, I tell her, “and I am not waking him up at this hour of the night for no purpose at all. Now please go away”. I push the door shut (I was waiting to do this). It catches her wrist, without much force, and I watch a white fist snake out of the room.

  Now a heavy hand strikes the door. “Eugene Dawn?” My name again. This is the moment, I must be brave. “Yes”, I croak. (What do I mean? “Yes”? “Yes?”?) “These are law officers here, will you open the door please”. How effortlessly they say these strong words. This is certainly incident, if not yet action. “No”, I say, but I am not sure that anyone hears me. “Open the door please”, say new words, rich, confident, not unkindly. God bless the police. I respond, mouth to the door-crack: “Why do you want me to open the door?” This talk could go on forever. “How do I know who you are?” A silly question. I wish I could take it back.

  “Are you the husband of this lady? Mrs. Marilyn Dawn?”

  “Yes”.

  “You have a child with you in the room there?”

  “Yes, it’s my child”. Dialogue yet.

  “We are here as officers of the court. We have a court order here. You are required to give your wife access to the child at once”.

  “No”.

  I would like to be able to say something better than this dumb No, but I do not think I am quite in control of myself. Nothing would please me more than to please this heavy man, to open my door to him and show him that nothing is wrong, that I am a model nurse, that the child in question is plump
and happy and asleep in the sleep of contentment (however Martin is beginning to groan, the noise is waking him up). I would gladly do all he asks if Marilyn only went away. But she stands there waiting for me to be humiliated by her avengers. I flush (I have this capacity to engorge). “No”, I say, “not at this hour of the night, no, I am not opening the door, now go away and come back in the morning, I want to sleep”.

  The door is locked. The men try the window (see their shadows on the curtain) and murmur to each other. With my eyes on the window I lift Martin out of our bed and hold his head to my shoulder. “There there”, I tell him, “it is just people outside, they will go away in a minute, then we can both go to sleep again”. He sobs, but it is only habit, he is almost asleep. His feet hang nearly to my knees. He will be tall when he grows up.

  Here I stand in the middle of a dark room with police whispering outside. Out of what movie is it? I am amazed and thrilled at my audacity. Perhaps I will be a man yet.

  A key is slipping into the lock. They have a key: from the desk clerk.

  The door is open and moonlight pours in. There is the sudden figure of my wife, with various people around her, including men with hats. Everyone is pouring into my bedroom. The light is on, much too bright for people used to the dark, and poor little Martin squirms in my arms like a fish. I protest in my throat. But all motion stops in the bright light and I no longer have to think so fast. I am panting and sweating and, no doubt about it, a bit desperate, this must be what they mean when they talk about a person being desperate.

  “Now put that away, come on”, says the kind, confident voice that I am coming to love, and the man is walking towards me, the man in the comfortable dark gray clothes with the hat and the pieces of metal, buckles and badges, that flash at me. I am a little cowed, a little ashamed of myself in front of him, crouched here behind a five-year-old in my green-and-white pajamas (green makes me look pale) with the missing flybutton. I don’t think it is fair that I should be burst in on like this, but I cannot say it to him, I am beyond talking. I don’t want to think about it, but I think I am really in the soup. Fortunately I am beginning to drift, and my body to go numb as I leave it. My mouth opens, I am aware, if that is awareness, of two cold parted slabs that must be lips, and of a hole that must be the mouth itself, and of a thing, the tongue, which I can push out of the hole, as I do now. I hope I am not going to be called on to say anything because besides going numb I am also sweating a lot and turning white, in a fishy way. Also, something which I usually think of as my consciousness is shooting backwards, at a geometrically accelerating pace, according to a certain formula, out of the back of my head, and I am not sure I will be able to stay with it. The people in front of me are growing smaller and therefore less and less dangerous. They are also tilting. A convention allows me to record these details.