Staring at the Sun

by Julian Barnes

  “They’re just the old questions, I’m afraid.”

  Ah, the old questions. And why is the mink excessively tenacious of life? And why didn’t Lindbergh eat all his sandwiches? But she waited, gravely.

  “Is death absolute?”

  “Yes, dear.” The reply was firm and exact, declining the need for supplementary questions.

  “Is religion nonsense?”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “Is suicide permissible?”

  “No, dear.”

  Gregory felt he’d been at the dentist’s. Three teeth out; no anaesthetic; no pain, yet. “Well, that didn’t take long,” he found himself saying.

  “And how did I score?” Jean asked, now that the solemnity of the quiz had passed.

  “You’ll have to take that up with another party,” said Gregory.

  “Well, it can’t be long now.”

  “Oh God, I didn’t mean that.” Gregory threw himself rather awkwardly on top of his mother, hurting her a little as he did so. He cuddled into her shoulder; she held him against her and reflected how odd it was that she should be comforting him about her impending death, rather than he her.

  After a few minutes he left her and went out into the small garden. It was a warm, black and starless night; he sat down in a plastic chair and looked back at the house. He thought of all the hours he’d wasted with the Memory Man, a machine constructed out of the best parts of several thousand human brains, and how he’d got much clearer answers from his mother’s ageing mind. Yes, dear. Yes, dear. No, dear. Spoken from a hundred years of life; spoken from the edge of the grave. And yet, and yet … the very certainty of her response … Old age had its arrogance, after all. How could she be so sure? To reach a hundred and show no fear of death, didn’t that indicate some lack of imagination? Perhaps feeling and imagination were better guides than thought. Immortality is no learned question: TAT had quoted this to him at some point. And so perhaps the other questions weren’t learned questions either; applying your brain to them was like using a spanner that didn’t fit the nut.

  One of the curtained windows on the upper floor broke its blackout. Gregory remembered another garden, somewhere outside Towcester. Side by side with his mother on the fire escape, high above a rough lawn. He was holding his gold Vampire aloft, she was lighting the thin fuse which led to the brown cylinder of jet fuel.

  Sometimes the fuel doesn’t ignite; or it ignites and the aeroplane sheers into the ground; and sometimes the aeroplane glides carefully on while the rocket motor flies ahead, a tiny aluminium canister hurtling down the garden and burying itself in the hedge beyond the fir trees.

  He’d got it wrong, of course: but then we all do. We all assume the aeroplane is being powered by the engine, and that the course is straight. But there are far more possibilities than that, far more likelihoods.

  Maturity was not the result of time; it was the result of what you know. Suicide was not the only real philosophical dilemma of our age; it was an alluring irrelevance. Suicide was pointless because life was so short; the tragedy of life was its brevity, not its emptiness. Nations were quite right, Gregory thought, to forbid suicide, because the act encouraged in its exponent a false notion of value. Suicide made man self-important. What a terrible vanity it must require to take your own life. Suicide wasn’t self-abnegation. It didn’t say: I am so miserable and unimportant that it doesn’t matter if I destroy myself. It said the opposite: look, it said, I am important enough to destroy.

  Perhaps he’d begun to think of suicide because he’d seen himself as a failure. Sixty and not done much; lived with his mother, lived alone, lived with his mother again. But who said this was failure? Who defines success? The successful, of course. And if they are allowed to define success, then those they judge failures should be allowed to define failure. So: I am not a failure. I may be a quiet soft man of sixty who’s never done much, but that doesn’t make me a failure. I deny your categories. In the old days there had been tribes wandering around who believed they were the only tribe on earth, and whose belief was not shaken by the appearance of other tribes. People who were called successes reminded Gregory of these tribes.

  And the other mistake was all this thinking, all this questioning. God was a motorcyclist four hundred and fifty miles off the west coast of Ireland, goggles pulled down against the sea spray, riding gently along as if the waves were sand dunes. Do you believe that? Yes, thought Gregory, I believe that. After all, the only other answer is No. The mistake is to assume that you can prove, that you can explain it; or that you have to. What he’d done—what so many people did—was take up the impossible middle position, the tolerant yet sceptical position, and say: if you can show that a certain kind of motorcycle, bearing a certain kind of rider, with given tyres and a given rate of propulsion, is capable of travelling across water while putting so little weight on the surface that forward motion becomes possible, then I will believe in God. This position was ludicrous: it was also entirely normal. People thought that entering the Kingdom of Heaven, or whatever you preferred to call it, was like applying for a mortgage. And some people got the best priests the way they would get the best solicitors.

  You did not argue the tyre pressure; you did not ask what make of bike it was, or whether there was a sidecar attached for the Virgin Mary to ride in. If you did that, you were merely saying, look, I know there’s a trick involved, we both know there’s a trick involved, let me in on the secret and we can be friends. I’ll even admit that you’re a better magician than I am. By the way, would you like to see me smoke this cigarette?

  Gregory knew that for some—sincere believers, no doubt, in their way—God was a trick cyclist, and Christ his son, when he ascended to Heaven, broke the world altitude record. God was the master magician, the great prestidigitator who juggled the planets like glistening balls and hadn’t dropped one yet. Gregory wasn’t interested in that sort of God—the one who could answer the video quizzes and construct the crossword puzzles, the marathon man, the decathlete with muscles carved from spruce. Belief in God should not arise from being impressed by him, fearing him, or even—worse still, because vainly self-deceiving—from understanding him. Belief should just happen. The sea spray flicks against the leather gauntlets; the foot kicks the heavy gear lever to change down as the sea gets choppy; the bike climbs out of a trough and briefly bucks into the air as it reaches the crest. This I believe, Gregory said.

  He didn’t want explanations, he didn’t want conditions. Eternal life—that was always the great bargaining counter, wasn’t it? Entering the Kingdom of Heaven was like getting the supreme mortgage, and eternal life was the best pension scheme on the market. It was, of course, necessary to keep up the payments; every month, no slipping. Gregory, in contrast, believed because it was true; it was true because he knew it was true. As for what was true, or what followed from what was true, he wouldn’t be so presumptuous. If God decided that the proper treatment for those who believed in him was boiling in oil throughout eternity, then that was fine with Gregory. You didn’t deny God if he turned out to be unjust. Who ever thought God had to be just? God only had to be true.

  He stared at the lighted window and tried to stop thinking. Enough thoughts. No more. All that time he had spent with GPC. All that thinking, that questioning, that reason. No wonder it had been so frustrating. He’d thought that GPC was playing games with him, that some subtle manipulation was taking place. But this wasn’t the case. GPC was just a ramshackle, human old thing, trained to give answers. Question and answer, question and answer, question and answer—listen to the rattle of the human brain, driving back and forth like an industrial loom. It wasn’t like that, Gregory thought. First you had the questions and you sought the answers. Then you had the answers and you wondered what the questions were. Finally, you realized that question and answer were the same, that the one enclosed the other. Stop the loom, the futile chattering loom of human thought. Stare at the lighted window and just breathe. He tipped his hea
d back and looked up at the black and empty sky; offstage in his head he heard quiet, muffled music. A brass band, playing softly, but capable of roaring. The tune, though he had never heard it before, was familiar. Breathe, just breathe; stare at the lighted window and just breathe …

  Jean, for her part, stood at the window, looking down towards the dark shape she knew to be her son. How quickly, how easily she had answered his three questions: and how confident he must have thought her. But part of that confidence was mere parental habit. Now, looking upwards at the soft black sky, she briefly felt less sure of things. Perhaps faith was like night vision. She thought of Prosser in his Hurricane: the black aeroplane, the black night, the red glow on his face, the pilot looking out. If the instrument lights were their daytime colours, green and white, Prosser’s night vision would be destroyed. He wouldn’t be aware that something was wrong; he just wouldn’t be able to see anything. Maybe faith was like that: either they’d fitted the right instrument panel or they hadn’t. It was a design feature, a capacity; nothing to do with knowledge or intelligence or perceptiveness.

  But with faith or without, those same three questions circled, like homeless rooks in a raging sky. At some point everyone considered them, however speedily, however frivolously. Suicide? Who hadn’t briefly enjoyed the giddying thrill of peering over the cliff? What had Olive Prosser, later Redpath, said of Tommy? Always had one eye open for the back door. Well, it amounted to no more than that for most people: a reassuring hint that a bunk could be done if necessary. In the last months the prospect of becoming a hundred years old, and of Gregory scouring the streets to assemble some band of false celebrants who would bring inquisitive grins and raised glasses and hearty cries of “Here’s to the next hundred!”—all this made her shudder. Wouldn’t it be gay and cheeky, she occasionally thought, to decline the role of impressive survivor, to slip away somewhere between ninety-nine and a hundred? How old was the oldest recorded suicide? She should have asked Gregory to check that with his Memory Man. Though if she had, he might have drawn conclusions that were too solemn by far.

  As for the other questions … Jean pulled herself together. Of course religion was piffle; of course death was absolute. Was faith really like night vision—with believers consuming the sacraments just as the fighter pilots used to wolf carrots? No, that was all fanciful. Religion, to Jean, now suggested another of Tommy Prosser’s stories: how, fleeing a pair of 109s over the North Sea eighty years ago, he had heard the sound of gunfire. He had pulled up in a big looping climb and shaken off his attacker. The same thing happened all over again, and Prosser had realized the cause: hand fearfully gripping the stick, thumb still over the button, he’d been setting off his own guns and scaring himself with the noise. This, it seemed to Jean, was what religion was all about: silly, inexperienced people setting off their own guns by mistake and frightening themselves, when all the time, under the indifferent arc of the sky, they were really quite alone. We live beneath a bombers’ moon, with just enough light to see that nobody else is there.

  And the absoluteness of death? The Porcelain Tower in Nanjing no longer existed, but in its place she had discovered the Chinese philosopher who told her about the destructibility of the soul. At the time it had seemed an unscannable local paradox; but over the years, almost without thinking about it, the concept had assembled itself into sense. Of course we each had a soul, a miraculous core of individuality; it was just that putting “immortal” in front of the word made no sense. It was not a real answer. We had a mortal soul, a destructible soul, and that was perfectly all right. An afterlife? You might as well expect to see the sun rise twice in the same day. Prosser had done so, of course; and in earlier times he might have been celebrated, or persecuted, for his vision. But even Prosser knew that it was a quite predictable natural phenomenon; that the most beautiful thing he had seen in his life, a vision that had awed him and made him senseless to danger, boiled down in the long run to a good story with which to woo girls.

  There was no more time in her life to think about death; now she merely hoped that when the time came to gather her final strength (if that was what it felt like from the inside) she would be able to reassemble herself in a way that would make Gregory believe she was dying calmly and happily. She did not want to die like Uncle Leslie. Mrs. Brooks had described to Jean in that voice which needed no megaphone how Leslie’s last hours, while free of pain, had oscillated between pure anger and pure fear. Jean had suspected this: on her two last visits to him Leslie had been frightened and tearful, wanting her to reassure him about all manner of incompatible things: that his illness was not serious, that when he died he would go to heaven, that he would die bravely, that running away to America would not be held against him, that all doctors were liars, that it wasn’t too late to freeze his body so that he could be woken when they had found a cure for cancer, that it was all right to want to die, and all right not to want to die, and that she would always stay with him, wouldn’t she, because otherwise Mrs. Brooks would murder him for his knickknacks.

  While she had murmured false certainties as fast as he could babble his fears, she had also tried to make him break off—however briefly—from this relentless concentration on self. She said she was sure Gregory would like to see him and sure that Leslie would do his best not to upset his nephew. Leslie had barely responded, and Jean had watched Gregory’s departure with apprehension; but his account of Leslie’s humorous and undefeated behavior had calmed and impressed her. Perhaps courage in the face of death was only part of it; perhaps faking courage for those who loved you was the greater, higher courage.

  Gregory had been against his mother’s plan at first. He thought it morbid.

  “Of course it’s morbid,” she said. “If I can’t be morbid when I’m ninety-nine, what’s the point of it all?”

  “I mean it’s unnecessarily morbid.”

  “Don’t be stuffy. If you’re like that at sixty, I can’t think how you’ll get through the next forty years.”

  There was a silence. Jean felt embarrassed. Odd how you can still be saying the wrong things after all these years. I hope he doesn’t do it; I hope he’s brave enough not to do it. Gregory felt embarrassed, and also irritated. She really thinks I might do it, doesn’t she? She really thinks I might not be able to resist it. But I’ve worked it all out now. And in any case, would I have been brave enough to do it?

  They travelled north on a clear March afternoon. Jean paid little attention to the direction or the countryside. You had to preserve energy. Her eyes were open, but what she saw was a haze. She had temporarily turned down the gas; that was how she liked to think of it.

  When they reached the small aerodrome set among fields still rimed with frost, she turned to Gregory. “Did you, by any chance, bring any champagne?”

  “I thought about it, and tried to work out what you’d think, and I decided you’d consider it inappropriate. That is,” he added with a smile, “if you’re absolutely set on being morbid.”

  “I am,” she said, returning his smile. She leaned across and kissed him. “It’s not at all the occasion for champagne.”

  As they walked slowly across the tarmac, a little extra pressure on Gregory’s arm indicated that she wanted him to stop. It was a cold, dry day; the sun was low, dropping towards some slatted bands of cloud propped on the horizon. A small, rather old-fashioned aeroplane—an executive jet from the mid-nineties, Gregory supposed—stood forty yards ahead of them. Bright yellow stripes and large yellow numbers were painted on the tarmac.

  “It’s not much of a conclusion, Gregory dear,” she said, “but life is serious. I only mention it because I spent some years not being sure whether it was the case. But life is serious. And one other thing. The sky is the limit.”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “And here’s something for you.” From her pocket she took a strip of tin with letters roughly embossed on it. JEAN SERGEANT XXX. “You can count the Xs as kisses,” she said. Gregory felt his eye
s begin to prick.

  As she approached the steps to the plane, one of her furthest memories surfaced. Another set of steps. PUNCTUALITY, she recalled. And there was PERSEVERANCE. And—what?—TEMPERANCE. That’s right. Or rather, TEMPERAN. Plus COURAGE. That’s right, COURAGE. And always keep out of the Stock Exchange. She couldn’t remember any of the other words, and wished she could. After nine decades of life, she thought the advice still useful. Gregory probably needed it. Punctuality, she felt like whispering to him, Perseverance, Temperan, Courage, and keep out of the Stock Exchange.

  As Gregory tenderly snapped the seat belt across her stomach, she thought, this is going to be the last Incident of my life. Oh, other things may happen; one thing in particular, a Wonder still to come. But this is the last Incident. The list is closed.

  They took off to the east, crossing a leafless wood, then a deserted. golf course. A pair of bunkers stared back at them like empty eye sockets. Tiny red flags were pinned here and there as if it were some wartime model on which generals planned their advances. But it was only a golf course. Did anyone still call it the Old Green Heaven, she wondered. Not very likely. People like Uncle Leslie had died out, and his phrases with him; now the last few who remembered the phrases were dying out in their turn. The field behind the smelly wood which skirted the dogleg fourteenth. Screaming at the sky, screaming at the sky, lying in Heaven and screaming at the sky.

  They gained height, and the pilot turned south so that Jean could look out to the west. She had told Gregory to sit behind, so that he could have a proper view; but he insisted on sitting next to her. She didn’t object: he’d been good about not bringing the champagne; and besides, there was no reason why he should be that interested.

  The pilot held a steady height, and Jean gazed out to the west.

  “I’m sorry about the cloud,” said Gregory.

  She took his hand. “It doesn’t matter at all, dear.”