Notes From a Room

When I was young and jobless and it was their world, I used to run through the old unkempt cemetery, weaving between the crooked tombstones and jumping over the thicket. People sometimes shouted at me for not running on the path, but I always ran on as though I hadn’t heard. It was their world, I was just passing through. It seemed important to run every day, sometimes twice a day, and always along the same route. It gave my life structure. I’d run home and stand at my window while I waited for the doddery shower to warm up. The window gave on a slant of the river that wound through the town. I often stood watching it carry its grimy load seaward. Sometimes a kind of mental mist would steal over me like a shiver and make me feel like a stranger in my own body. As evening fell, my reflection would appear in the window, slowly replacing the river. The more I examined my face — those empty unblinking eyes and straight lips — the harder it was to feel it was mine. It was a thing among things, untenanted. At times I was afraid my soul would detach itself altogether from my body and float away. This feeling came mostly at dusk. Then I’d put on my windbreaker and run through the cemetery again. It was always empty at dusk.

This was the day your luck returned, the luck you thought had left you. Out of the fog, running around town sniffing out all the best deals. Walking home after the last deal had gone down, the latest in a run of jammy decisions, you felt the dreck and drift of a two-year losing streak lift and vanish like the grimy puddles in the sun. You felt it like a satisfying click, a falling into place. Another befuddled mister lucky derided and delivered by Luck.

The black dogs have lost my scent; I hear one of them’s become a guide dog for the blind man down the street. I’ve started dreaming at night. In the story (the only one he ever wrote) the idealist worked in the mortuary, prettifying corpses with chemicals: a slave to fatality and all the rest of it. He worked with nervous attention to detail and in the evenings sank into torpor. But this is real life, these winds are blowing the dust off my desk. I’ll run through any season’s weather.

‘The gentlemen are here.’
‘Which gentlemen?’
‘The ones with the painting.’
‘Send them away.’
‘But they’ve come a long way.’
‘Give them a cup of tea and send them away.’
‘And the painting?’
‘It’s not a real painting. It’s the work of an impostor.’
‘An impostor?’
‘A fake. A fake.’
‘And the gentlemen?’
‘Duped.’
‘And the money?’
‘Mine.’
‘Mr Walters?’
‘A fool. Like me.’
‘Duped?’
‘Finally you see. I’m a fool bobbing on a sea of fools.’
‘By Mrs Walters?’
‘Don’t you see, there was no Mystical Dimension.’
‘Madness?’
‘Lies. A lover. A planned trip. With my money. I never want to see that thing again.’