Notes From a Room

How does he manage to walk upright, X asks me, to go about his normal business? What keeps him from crawling around his room and flopping on his back, muttering and babbling? What keeps him from going mental? It’s my stupidity, isn’t it? he asks. That’s what saves me again and again. My limited horizon, which keeps me focused on the nearest task, he says, like a chimp who wants his reward for solving a puzzle. And his charlatanism, he says, not to forget his charlatanism, which prevents him from diving too deeply into anything. In fact he’s relatively happy in his stupidity and charlatanism, isn’t he, he says. Some atavistic instinct in him must know that they’re what’s saving him, he says. After all, it could be worse, much worse, he could be rolling on the floor, going mental, with no barriers. After all, he still laughs at sitcoms and cheers on tennis players, he still feeds himself and meets his deadlines.

X is in the pub again, as if I didn’t know, and he has something to tell me, he says, though it’s hard to find the words what with the flickering images on the screen, the music, and the drink making its dull and stimulating way around his brain. And the conversations, he says, above all the conversations. He slips in and out of them, he says, strangers’ conversations, he can’t help overhearing them. Even as he talks to me he relates to their job problems and tries to understand their witticisms despite himself, slips in and out of his own trains of thought and forgets what he was going to say. He could become them, he says, maybe he is them in a sense, or rather their words. Now I remember what I was about to tell you, he says. It was something about the thin walls between things, between events, emotions or selves. The word ‘membranes’ pops into his head again. For instance, she just spilled her drink on his lap and I almost reached out to grab the glass and felt the liquid on my thighs. How embarrassing and uncanny, am I some kind of creep? he says. Why can’t he keep his thoughts in check? Maybe he just needs to get laid, he says. When he drinks the grey room is unlocked, he tells me, and it’s a nice relief for the timid, nagging flesh, but an unlocked room is an unsafe room, he says, a room thrown open is a room thrown open to other rooms and whatever else might be out there. By some law of nature, he says, the drab greyness ebbs out and is replaced by… what? By colour, by wind, by life, threatening or friendly rooms, alternate worlds. One impression after another seizes you, he says, you sway in your room. I knew what I wanted to tell you a moment ago, he says, let me focus. Stay with me, he says. These rooms, these alternate worlds withdraw from each other in order to preserve themselves, don’t they, he says, and at the same time are drawn to each other to seek their own meanings. They compete like cells in the body compete, but without aim, he says. The membranes between them – walls or membranes? – keep in the finite and let in the infinite, let out the finite and keep out the infinite, so each world is a kind of whole among countless wholes and at the same time part of a whole he can’t even begin to imagine, let alone what lies behind that whole, he says. Each answer in the conversations he’s overhearing now is an answer and part of an answer, just as everything he’s telling me is an answer and part of an answer, even if I never bother asking him any questions or giving him any answers, he says.

X tells me he thinks some malevolent spirit must have visited him in the womb, a bad ghost. I can sense it now, is it you? he asks me. Something went wrong somewhere, he says, probably as far back as the womb. You slipped out of the womb with me, didn’t you? he asks. Or maybe you slipped into the womb, grew with me, then slipped back out with me, he says. That’s why you’re still here, like a dead twin, he says, that’s why I can’t get rid of you.

What does he want? X asks me. Essentially he wants the freedom to choose, to say what he chooses and choose what he says. He wants the freedom to argue, discuss and debate his thoughts on the universe, life and state of the nation, sports or the hottest celebrity, green ways to live and financial stability. He wants the freedom to voice what he thinks needs to be said, freedom to out the things that go round in his mind like, ‘I love you’, ‘I hate you’, I miss you’, ‘I’m sorry’, ‘It’s good to hear you again’, ‘Be strong, don’t worry’. He wants the freedom to speak about limits or minutes and without fear of the costs ever being prohibitive, he says. He wants the freedom to speak to whomever, wherever, his family, his friends whom he sees hardly ever but thinks about and wants to be able to reach in an instant, with free texts on bank holidays. That’s complete freedom of speech, he says.

X has found out what he needs to do, he tells me. He needs to kill his idols, hunt down all his Buddhas and kill them, leave them dying by the side of the road. He needs to stop being such a toady, he says, stop looking for a leader to show him the way. Because who needs a leader when we’re all in the same boat on the same endless sea, he says. Then again, he says, isn’t that precisely when you need a leader the most, when you’re in the lifeboat with no land in sight? That’s when you need a leader to step up, and that’s what he needs, he says, a leader to tell him what to do, how to survive. If you leave your idols gasping by the side of the road, where do you go? he says. Shuffling down the road to nowhere, that’s where, he says. Then again, he says, maybe we’re all on the road to nowhere, even leaders of men, maybe especially the leaders of men. Maybe they’re just leading the way down the road to nowhere, he says, and in that case why would he need a leader? What does it matter if he sits down to starve in the boat or puts his faith in the leader, sits down in the ditch or trudges after the leader?