The Infinities (16 page)

Adam frowns.

“My father is ill,” he says, “—did my sister tell you?” Petra notices how he speaks over-loudly too, as she did. “Very ill, in fact.”

Benny nods; he is smiling, as if at some happy piece of news. “Yes, I know, I know.” He waits, still with his smile, his large round head cocked to one side—Adam thinks of a blackbird, plump and alert, its polished eye swivelling.

“He’s in a coma,” he says. “He had a stroke.”

“A stroke.” Benny with lips pursed waggles his head from side to side. “That is too bad. That really is too bad.”

A silence follows. Adam is aware of Petra off to the side, breathlessly taking everything in. “How did you get here?” he asks the little man. He also is aware of the volume at which he is speaking but cannot seem to lower it. Why are they all shouting like this at poor Benny?—it almost makes me feel sorry for him.

“Oh, that was easy,” Benny says easily. He, at least, speaks softly. His tone implies a lifetime of obstacles adroitly negotiated.

“I mean,” Adam persists, unable to stop, “did you come by car?”

Benny shakes his head and shrugs. “I don’t drive,” he says. “Never learned.”

Adam nods helplessly. He feels a sort of panic rising inside him; he is afraid that in a moment he will burst out in whinnies of hysterical laughter. He turns to Petra. “Why don’t you,” he fairly shouts at her, “why don’t you take Mr. Grace up to see Pa?”

The girl frowns sideways at her brother’s knees. “What?” she breathes. Her left leg has begun to jiggle. In those old corduroy trousers and baggy blue shirt, thin and frail and almost bald, she looks like a prison inmate, or a refugee, the survivor of some terrible forced march. Benny links his fingers together again in front of his belly and gazes at her, as if lovingly. “Just a peek?” he says, cajoling. He is a sly old sprite. “So I can say I saw him?”

They turn all three and make for the door, where there is a brief scrimmage as they find themselves inadvertently trying all three to get through it at the same time. From the hall Petra leads Benny Grace up the staircase. Light falls down from the glass roof like silent rain, indifferently, a thing absorbed in something else altogether. At the turn of the landing she falters a second and glances back at her brother, who has stopped in the doorway of the living room and stands there looking up at her. His face is blank, he gives no helping sign. She goes on, upwards, and the higher she goes the deeper her heart sinks. By her side, Benny Grace, goat-footed, pants softly as he climbs. What if Pa should wake up from his coma? What will he say to her, appearing
before him suddenly with this stranger at her side? And what would she say to him? How would she account for herself?

Now here they are at the door to the stairs of the Sky Room. Petra knocks, and turns the knob. What air is this that flows down from on high, what spirits guard the way?

What indeed?
Were I able I would rear up in my winding-sheets, my foul tubes wrenched from their sockets and spouting pap and piss, and slam that door shut in their faces. Ah, the sad braggadocio of the dying. It is not that I am afraid of Benny Grace; what I fear is disturbance. I am becalmed, and dread a suddenly filled sail. The history of Benny and me is long and intricate. When I peer into memory’s steadily clouding crystal I see a great throng milling and elbowing and out of its midst Benny’s fat face grinning at me, suggestive, sardonic, oleaginously eager. Has he come to harangue me in my last straits, to tell me I am going about dying in all the wrong way? I have known him, he has known me, for longer than I care to remember, though I will have to remember, I suppose, now that he has
popped up like this. Indeed, I feel he has been with me all my life, which is hardly possible, since he is not as old as I am, and will remain so. Yes, Benny surely is of the immortals.

Suddenly I recall a nightmare I had when I was a child, a very young child, it must have been, a baby, even, I think, still in my cradle, I have never forgotten it. How frightening it was, how fraught with significance, that I have retained such a distinct recollection of it all these years. Although I am not sure it can properly be called a nightmare, so brief it was and bare of incident. I am not certain it was a dream at all but rather a half-waking intimation of something I was too young then and now am too old and too far gone to interpret or understand. Anyway, in this nightmare, or dream, or reverie, whatever it was, I had been set down on a bare rock in the midst of an empty ocean. Yes, set down, for I had not been brought there by boat, or by any earthbound, or sea-bound, means, but had alighted somehow out of the air, a fallen Icarus, it might be, my head in a spin and my wings doused of their fire, dripping and useless. The ocean all around me was of a mauvish shade, utterly still, without a surge or ripple—even where it ringed the rock on which I cowered the water’s fringe showed not the slightest stirring—yet seemed to brim, full of itself to overflowing, and as if at any moment it might tilt wildly and upend, like a great polished disc pressed down upon violently at its edge. As far as I looked in every direction there was nothing to be seen, and no horizon, the featureless distances merging seamlessly into an equally featureless sky. No sound, no cry of bird or moan of wind. A vast void everywhere, and I terrified, clinging to my rock with both hands and barely holding the world from tipping on its end and letting everything slide off into the abyss of emptiness, including, especially
including, me. What does it mean? It must mean something, or signify something, at least. Was I, a babe in swaddling, already dipping a toe into the waters of Lethe, paddling, even, in its shallows? Never too early to start dying.

I knew it was Benny. When I sensed the presence of an intruder in the house I knew it had to be him. I must have been expecting him, all along, without realising it.

From the top of the short stairs now the two of them advance creakingly into the gloom. To get a sight of them at all I have to swivel my eyes so violently to the side and downwards the sockets would hurt, if I could feel them. The pair seem phantoms, bearing down on me across the darkened room. I must not let them see me looking: they will think I am only feigning stupefaction, which in a way I must be, given that my brain is so busy. Probably I can see them better than they can see me, my eyes being by now so thoroughly accustomed to this damnable false night in which my wife has condemned me to live since I was laid low. Benny—look at him, my homunculus. He is speaking in a priestly murmur, his tonsured head inclined towards my daughter, who is inclining too; they might be monk and maiden in the confessional. I strain in vain to catch what he is saying to her, what mischief he might be pouring into her ear.
Mm mm mmm
. And here I lie, mumchance.

Petra goes to the middle window, the one that my bed faces, and lifts her arms and with a dancer’s large dramatic gestures draws the heavy curtains open, leaning sideways first far to the left and then far to the right. How it pierces me now, the sight of a human being in movement. The daylight seems to hesitate a moment before entering. Dazzled, I shut my eyes tight, and on the inners of the lids the after-glare makes tumbling shapes,
darker upon dark, like blobs of black dye bursting slowly in water already soiled. Yet I thrill to the unwonted glare, as I thrilled a moment ago to my daughter’s dancerly swoopings. When the time comes, and it cannot be very long now, I want to die into the light, like an old tree feeding its last upon the radiance of the world. In these recent days—how many?—with the curtains pulled, I have felt myself to be in an enormous dark space where distant doors are closing slowly, one by one. I do not hear them close, but feel the alteration in the air, as of a succession of long, slow breaths being painfully drawn in. I always liked to think that death would be more or less a continuation of how things already are, a dimming, a contracting, a shrinkage so gradual that I would not register its coming to an end at last until the ending was done with. Perhaps that is Ursula’s intention, keeping me in the dark so I will not notice the light failing. But I do not want to breathe my last in this room. Why did she banish me up here, of all places, site of my triumphs and so many more numerous failures? I want to be elsewhere. I want to die outdoors—I wonder if that can be arranged? Yes, on a pallet somewhere, on the grass, under trees, at the soft fall of dusk, that would be a boon, a final benison.

But what if at just that moment I were to begin to feel again, what if—no, no, that way there are things I do not wish to be confronted with. Let me die numbly, insensate, yet thinking still, if that were possible.

I feel—I feel!—by what must be a quaking of the floorboards Benny Grace approach the bed. Now in a show of hushed and reverent solicitude he stoops over me and peers into my face, and I am as a boy again pretending to be fast asleep as my suspicious mother bends over me in the light of a school-day morning.
You see how Benny’s coming has already reduced me to this childishness, these dreams and maundering fears dragged from out of the depths? Now, perhaps sensing how unsettled I am by his warmly breathing presence leaning over me like this, he snickers softly.

Should I open my eyes? Should I open my eyes.

“He hasn’t changed,” he says over his shoulder to Petra at the window, where she remains, no doubt nervous of approaching too close to me, fearful of what she will have to look upon. I do not blame her: a catheter, for instance, even if only the suggestion of it, is not a pretty object for a daughter to have to contemplate, given what it is, and where it is placed. “Still the black hair,” Benny says, “the noble profile.” Again he gives his snuffly laugh. “The original Adam.” This last he addresses as if to me, intimately, in a murmur; he must know I can hear him, or at least must suspect it. He turns aside and begins to pace, those hobbled feet of his making a goatish clatter on the wooden floor. “Yes, years,” he says, from a little way off now, to Petra, continuing evidently an earlier train. “The things I could tell you! The stories!”

I would laugh if I were capable of it. I am in a sort of panic of amazement—Benny Grace here, at Arden, with his stories! And I flat out and speechless while he stands upright—Benny, of all people. I cannot credit it. I must have been wrong in what I said, or rather in what I thought, a minute ago; I must not have been expecting him, for if I had been, why would I be so surprised that he has come? But after all it was inevitable he would make an appearance at the end. Benny Grace, my shadow, my double, my incorrigible daemon. Yes, I would laugh.

I have never been any good in dealing with people. I dare say I am not alone in this sad predicament, but I feel acutely my incompetence in the matter of other folk. You know how it is. Say you are walking down a not particularly crowded street. You spy, at quite a long way off still, out of the corner of your eye, out of the corner of your watchfulness, as it were, a stranger who, you can see, has in his turn become aware of you as you approach him. Even at that distance you both begin to make little adjustments, covert little feints and swerves, so as to avoid eventual collision, all the while pretending to be perfectly oblivious of each other. As often as not all your efforts of evasion fail, precisely because you have been making them, I imagine, and in the end one of you is compelled to sidestep clumsily to allow the other to plunge past with a snarling smile. This is the way it is in general, with me, wherever I am, with whomever I happen to be. I am always, always on guard against coming smack up against one of my own kind. And when I am forced to enter on that agitated, long-distance dance of avoidance the broadest pavement becomes a tangled track, and I am as in an unsubdued jungle where the little apes howl and the birds of night scream and scatter. I do not doubt it could be otherwise. There is no reason not to stride forward smiling and clasp the approaching stranger manfully to one’s breast in fellowship and affection. If I remember rightly it was the poet Goethe—entirely forgotten now but in his day there were those who would have ranked him above the sublime Kleist!—who urged that we should greet each other not as
monsieur
, sir,
mein Herr
, but as my fellow-sufferer,
Socî malorum, compagnon de misères!
Or was it Schopenhauer? Not to be able any longer to look anything up—ah! Well,
no matter, you get the drift. For my part I would be happy to take this good advice provided I am allowed to send my greetings by semaphore.

I did not see Benny Grace coming, that was the trouble. It was in the far north that I first encountered him—or that he first encountered me, more like—which strikes me as odd, since I think of him as so much a creature of the south. An auditorium, a long, white room abuzz with people, and I in the front row, in a reserved seat, and a woman beside me agitatedly shuffling the text of a talk she was about to give, an ordeal the prospect of which terrified her, although she had undergone it many times before. Her name was Inge, or Ilsa, I wish I could remember which. Let me see: I shall settle for Inge. To open the colloquium there had been a reception—noise, laughter, champagne glasses of sticky white alcoholic syrup—and later on there would be dinner followed by decorous tangoing. One side of the room was a wall of glass looking out on a green slope dotted sparsely with spindly white birches. Were there deer? My memory insists on deer, peacefully at graze among the trees, fastidious long-legged creatures with beige-and-brown coats and stumpy tails that twitched comically. Weak northern sunlight, a delicate lacquering of bleached gold. It was midsummer then, too, the days endless up there in those latitudes. There had been rain, and there would be more, and the grass sparkled, as if with malice. I was aware of Benny first as a pair of hoof-like feet and two fat thighs clad in rusty black, inserting themselves with much squeezing and puffing into the place to my left. Then the globular head and moist, moon face, the smile, the wreathed dome—he was balding even then—and those whorled ears daintily pointed at their tips.

I cannot remember which city it was we were in, or which country, even. We had arrived that day, Inge and I, from elsewhere. Bellicose Sweden, I remember, was on the warpath again, mired in yet another expansionary struggle with her encircling neighbours, and travel throughout the region was hazardous and liable to delays, and I feared being stranded there, chafingly, in Somewhereborg or Somethingsund. Inge was a Swedish Finn, or Finnish Swede, I do not think I ever discovered which, for certain. Ash-blonde, tiny, very slim, child-sized, really, but an earnest savant famous in her field, which was, I recall, gauge theory—gauge was all the rage, at the time. I can see her still, little Inge, her tremulous hands and skinny legs and turned-in toes, can still smell her scrubbed skin and cigarette breath. She was forty and looked twenty, except first thing in the morning and late at night. Dorothy was not long dead and I was adrift in a daze of sorrow and remorse and would have clung to any spar in those dark, immense and turbulent waters. A sense of strangeness, of being generally estranged, comes over one in circumstances such as I was in, I am sure those who have suffered a similarly violent and sudden loss will know what I mean. Everything I did or saw, every surroundings I wandered woozily into, struck me as bizarre, wholly outlandish, and like an idiot child I had to be pulled along by the hand from one baffling spectacle to the next.