Membranes

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. I could be that tennis player on the screen, he says, he’s about to lose a set point. The word ‘membranes’ pops into his head again. 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 – are they 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.