Hostages to Fortune (27 page)

Maybe the genie was one he let out of the bottle along with the booze, for it was in the evenings, after his third or fourth, that he was most conscious of it. By day a lone castaway on his island, by night his companion was Jack Daniel's, Jim Beam, Old Grand-dad. He drank up such a storm, the island rolled and pitched like a boat—his
bateau ivre
. Mountainous seas of alcohol he bobbed upon, yet while the shoreline of sobriety receded from sight, the snug harbor of obliviousness remained always inaccessible. Then, the house unmanned, the presence stalked at will. Like having a dead rat somewhere inside a wall, it began as a faint suspicion, grew more noticeable, subtly filled the atmosphere until it came to pervade the place, and could not be traced to its source and eradicated.

Presence? Sober again, he knew that what he sensed was no presence, it was an absence. He was alone and all was still, and nothing was so populous as solitude and nothing so full of sounds as silence. The place was not accountable for his imaginings born of liquor and loneliness. “Spirits,” the British called hard liquor; those were the spirits he let loose by night. He might have been anywhere in the world. It was not on this barren rock that he was castaway, it was on an island all his own. No need for him to borrow other people's ghosts; he had his. He had brought them here with him and he would take them wherever he went. He had deluded himself with the notion that in leaving the house in Blairstown he was leaving behind him a life, that in coming unencumbered to this house he was beginning a new one. That was nothing more than the other side of the mistake he had made with the accumulation of things in the attic. A life was neither preserved in keepsakes nor shed along with them. The door here had been opened to him by a Cathy as real as the real one, wherever she might be, and an Anthony more real than he had ever been in the flesh. Conspicuous by their absence: never had a worn and empty phrase seemed to him more fraught with meaning.

He had lost, or had mislaid, his eyeglasses. Not just his working pair; this time he had lost his reserve pair, the ones he used whenever his working pair were lost, as well. He had searched every nook and cranny of the house, every inch of the island, and when that failed to turn up either pair he had gone systematically through the whole search again. He had looked under chair cushions and behind car seats, had sorted through the contents of wastebaskets, the laundry hamper, had emptied the pockets of every piece of his clothing, poked beneath radiators, rearranged the litter on his desktop, all this not just once but twice, three times, with mounting distaste for his own dirt and disorderliness.

It was not that he was helpless without his glasses—far from it; without them he was able to do everything he had to do except the one most important thing, namely, work. But that was not all that important now either, for his work was going so badly it hardly mattered whether or not he did it. But his fruitless search soon became an obsession, and the longer he was without his glasses the more deplorable seemed the loss of time from his work.

Nor was this the first time he had ever lost his glasses, even both pairs at once, yet the effect of it upon him now had no precedent. Perhaps this was at least partly because of his consciousness that it was the first time he had neither Cathy nor Anthony to whom to say “I've mislaid my glasses. Be on the lookout for them, will you, please?” But maybe the mood about to pounce upon and overwhelm him had been just waiting for something, anything, the more trivial the better, to provoke it. Whatever the explanation, the depression he was plunged into was out of all proportion to its immediate cause.

The reason for the fervor of his search all too soon became evident. It had been to stave off feeling like such a fool—but an utter fool, a hopeless fool. How could anybody with half a mind lose two pairs of glasses? Lose them here in this uncluttered, this sparsely furnished house, on this postage stamp of bare rock where even a needle could not have gotten lost for long? Having lost them, how could anybody not have found them, at least one pair of them? Somebody who knew full well that without his glasses he could not read a word. Somebody to whom words on pages were his livelihood, his life? Not just one pair:
two
!

Such a fool was not fit to live; to be such a fool and know it was not to want to live. He knew this was wildly excessive, irrational, ridiculous, even comical, but it was how he felt nevertheless and nothing he could do could shake off the feeling.

His glasses were often, if not always, a cause of mild depression. He had not worn them long enough to be thankful for them. His eyes had served him so well until so late in life that he had been spoiled, had taken them for granted—nor had he then realized that it was quite that late in life. It was still only a few years since the day in New York when, trying to make a call from a public phone, he had had to stop a passerby and ask him to find the number in the directory that he himself could suddenly not read. He resented this dependency upon his glasses, and since they were an unwelcome appendage at best, he was angered whenever the sly things, seemingly with a will of their own, hid from him. But only angered, of course, nothing more. Now as he sat on the front steps of the house defeated in his search, the loss of his glasses seemed the final failure in a lifetime of futility. With this he seemed to have reached the end, to have stepped off the edge of the world and fallen through space and when he landed to be at the bottom of the bottomless pit.

It was at that moment, as he searched himself frantically for some defense against the desolation and despair he felt about to overwhelm him, that there entered into his mind the most despairing utterance known to him:
When salt has lost its savor wherewith shall it be salted
? It was that propensity of his for quotations all too apt to his predicament, and which was ultimately to prove so perilous. It struck such terror to his soul that had he not felt so childish he would have recanted with “I didn't mean it. I take it back.” Actually he had been at the bottom of the pit for a long time; only now had he looked up and measured the full depth of his fall, only now had he ventured a cry and learned that it could never carry all the way back to the brink.

The incongruity between the present moment and the one immediately preceding it was too great to be grasped. He sought to liken it to something familiar. What he likened it to was not something familiar to him but was something he could all too easily imagine, for, though it always happened to someone else, it was a fear that nagged at us all. What it was like was a visit to your doctor when you had no specific complaint, when probably you would not have gone to him but for the fact that it was time for your regular checkup. However, it was just as well that the time for your checkup had come, for you had been feeling rather out of sorts lately. Nothing serious—just not up to snuff, not your old self. Sleeplessness, loss of appetite, lack of energy, of interest. What you might call a general malaise. What you might better call the blahs. Middle age, my friend, middle age: welcome to the club. For there was nothing really the matter with you; the routine tests all proved it: blood pressure, EKG, prostate, blood, urine. Why then was the doctor so unaccustomedly grave? That was unsettling. Like making an expression in the mirror and the mirror not returning your expression but instead some other, quite different, more sober reflection. The doctor, who had been your doctor for years and knew you in some ways better than you knew yourself, looked at you now as if he did not know you, or rather, as if he knew you but was seeing you in such a novel aspect that he must find another slot to file you in. It was not at you but into you with X-ray eyes that the doctor was looking. And suddenly you had a sinking premonition, which instantly became a certainty, that you had ceased to be you. What you were about to become the doctor knew as surely as though already you bore upon you the chart that soon would hang from the foot of your hospital bed. You now—not someone else, but you—were in the medical textbooks and your progress marked as though with mileage signs along the route to your unavoidable destination. You had just been sitting in the waiting room with nothing wrong with you, or with only a minor indisposition; now you were told that what you had was fatal, inoperable, and already so far progressed that you had better quickly settle all your worldly affairs. Actually you were no more ill than you had been just moments before; the difference was that now you knew it and knew the name and nature and extent of your illness. The diagnosis in his case was an advanced and irreversible sclerosis of the soul.

He believed in the existence of the soul. He believed it was the most vital of vital parts. It animated and informed the others. Without it they were mere matter. It was the one for which no transplant was possible. To him it was not less but more precious for not being immortal. Rather than believing it was immortal he believed the soul was the most perishable of human parts. Rather than outliving the body, in many, if not most cases, it died before the body did. Such casualties were everywhere to be seen, as apparent as amputees and far commoner in this age of medical miracles and spiritual stagnation: the legions of the listless, the living dead—those for whom salt had lost its savor.

An impulse beyond his power to resist impelled him to go and look in the mirror. It was the first time in weeks. Dorian Gray in his locked room communing with his telltale portrait could not have been more appalled by what he saw. He was a stranger to himself. Lackluster eyes stared indifferently out at him, past him. His features had settled into a fixed impassivity. His skin was colorless and creased. His hair and his beard—still black then—were a tangled and tousled pelt.

He sensed that now to him had come a time that came to one and all. To some sooner, to some later, but in the end to everyone. The feeling itself declared its impartiality. A census taker at the door could not have been more impersonal. But it was to number one among the living, to gather vital statistics, that the census taker came; the one at his door now, from a bureau not of this world, came to count him among another, far more numerous, population. He felt his sense of selfhood slipping from his hold. He felt himself fall out of time as the earth in its turning spun on and left him behind.

When the appetites burned out, ashes were left on the tongue. That raised a thirst. It was midafternoon of that day of self-discovery, or rather, of self-loss, when he began drinking. Between him and the bottle it was always a bout, generally a mismatch; by early evening he was down for the mandatory count.

He lay on the couch, half-opened eyes relaying to a half-closed brain the slow suffusion of twilight throughout the room. As colors faded and the forms of things grew indistinct, it seemed that he was merging into that gray impalpability, into a crepuscular netherworld, a limbo in which past and present, being and nothingness, life and death, lost their distinctions and fused in some universal solvent. The sensation was a novel one and, like all novel sensations, both alluring and alarming—a dangerous, possibly fatal languor into which he drifted unresistingly. Trying later to describe it, he would liken it to the time he passed out from sunstroke. There had come to him then and there came to him again now a moment that was not a moment but an unmeasurable interval outside of time, both brief as a breath and long as life, when values were all reversed, when from a positive image with the darks dark and the lights light the world was transformed as though chemically into a photographic negative. The time he had had the sunstroke he had thought he was dying. He thought so because this was the opposite of everything he had ever experienced, and was that not death's definition: the opposite of living—the only way we could comprehend it? He had not been frightened; on the contrary, it had seemed to be life's last, supreme surprise, a gift kept to the end and revealed only to those who could never tell anybody: how painless, how easy it was—a simple reversal of things. Now in his mind, as he would remember and tell the doctor afterwards in tracing the end back to this beginning, a phrase that seemed both banal and unbearably poignant ran like the refrain of a poem of which one cannot remember the rest. The phrase was “With the death of love the love of death begins.”

In that state of suspended animation, his gaze strayed over without at once registering the figure standing beside the table in the center of the room. More like the shadow of a man cast upon a wall than like a man it was. Indeed, he could be seen only by not looking at him but by looking to the side of him and seeing on the periphery of vision.

That this, come out of hiding at last, was his shy and elusive houseguest, the fellow who had been hanging around the place, there could be no doubt. Whether he was real and not some figment of the imagination, of that there was room for considerable doubt. But real or imaginary, ghost or flesh-and-blood prowler, he was a modern one, not a creature in doublet and ruff collar out of the house's past; he was his, come for him. Even in mere shadowy silhouette there was something instantly familiar about him, disturbingly familiar, more than familiar: familial; and having experienced it once already, then too under the influence, he took it to be another visitation from the spirit of his dead son, an impression reinforced by the inclination of its head to one side as it stood regarding him.

“You're drunk,” he said to himself, and that was certainly the case; no disputing it; the question was, had he said that to himself or had his visitor said it to him?

Did he pass out then? Did he ever pass out? Was what followed a dream or a waking fantasy? Did it matter? Either way it was the product of his own mind, or rather, of the mind that had been his but which seemed now to have slipped his grip. Either way it was enough to give him the fright of his life. Of his life up till then.

“Hallucination,” the psychiatrist would label it. “Maybe delirium tremens.” And that would be irritating—no, it would be infuriating—for although that was his own explanation, he resented the doctor's classification of it, his professional, pat way of dismissing the experience with a label, a knowing nod. Of course it was hallucination! That was what was so terrifying about it, that you could see something as real as life with one half of your mind while the other half told you that you were seeing things.