The Thing Itself (7 page)

3

The Institute

Totality

:1:

Let me pick the threads of this story up again, rearrange the letters into a new form. And the name of this anagram is
how quickly life goes to shit
. For to shit mine went, and assuredly so. For a long time I blamed the drink, and my mashed-up face and my prolonged loneliness, and a malign deity who hated me and didn’t even exist, the bastard, which naturally made it worse. I didn’t blame my
encounter
(let’s call it that) in Antarctica – because I really didn’t want to think about my
encounter
in Antarctica at all. I had experienced things and couldn’t unexperience them. The whole. Yet, somehow, my life crept onwards. The booze helped. I acted as if it had never happened, except that it structured my whole miserable existence –
as if
is, of course, more than enough for English living. That’s pretty much a thumbnail definition of Englishness, that.

That Oscar Wilde line about living in the gutter but looking at the stars has always irritated me. The affectation of it! The smarm. I speak as someone whose life used to be, literally, looking at the stars and then got relocated – literally again – to the gutter, so I know whereof I speak. At twenty-five I was an astrophysicist doctoral student at Reading University working on non-random radio emissions from galactic locale stellar objects. Then my life turned to garbage. On my fiftieth birthday I was working as a bin man for Bracknell and Wokingham council. The letters tumble down the slope in a big heap, as the lorry tips up its back. I was haunted, the whole way down.

What had happened to me in Antarctica was, I told myself, only hallucination. But it was a horribly vivid hallucination, and it kept returning to me, and it required large quantities of drink to return it to more conventional functioning. This is the first, and most important thing I learned from my Antarctic experience: the brain is a complex machine, and once you’ve dinged it, it will tend to throw weird shapes and glitches into your thoughts – for years. For decades. Bad dreams.

Bad dreams.

Ghosts.

Whole sight: or all the rest is desolation.

People haunt other people in many ways. Here’s a for instance: you’d think that ignoring somebody studiously enough would lead eventually to them giving up. Not so. Not with some people. Take Roy, snug in his insane asylum. After a few stilted ‘please cease and desist’ replies to his many letters, I simply stopped responding. I had no personal animus against him, I told myself. The balance of his mind had been disturbed at the time of his actions and so on and so forth. It was regrettable; let’s forget all about it. I wanted him to stop. He did not stop. So I reneged on my resolution to ignore him, and wrote back angrily, imploringly, commanding him to stop, which is to say in truth begging him to stop. He continued writing. Eventually, on the advice of a friend, I got a solicitor to write to the director of the asylum requesting that the patient named ‘Roy Curtius’ be prevented from harassing my client via unsolicited and distressing letters sent etc., etc. The letter we received back expressed regret and surprise, and included a photocopy of a letter signed by me – of course I’d never signed such a thing – written upon Koestler Trust headed notepaper no less, courteously requesting him to keep sending me his ‘insights’. This letter spoke of a ‘collaborative creative project’. I was baffled by this. I instructed the solicitor to write back, distancing myself from the forgery. I also approached the police, who took a statement from me and did everything short of literally rolling their eyes and sighing to show that they were perfectly uninterested. Nothing more came of this, except that Roy either stopped writing to me, or else the asylum stopped his letters from going into their out-box.

Each of those solictor’s letters cost me £90. That’s £180 for two letters. A lot of money back then. It’s
quite
a lot of money, even now.

I got on with my life. I was a man with seven fingers, a weird patch of skin on my nose that was markedly redder than the rest of my face and a nest of leprous-looking scars on the left side of my face. My visage, not hitherto ill-favoured, now possessed a patchwork complexion somewhere between the scarecrow in
The Wizard of Oz
and a scary clown. I also own fewer than the usual complement of toes. The frostbite had killed some of my facial nerves, giving my interactions an unfortunately mask-like demeanour. Add into this a certain stoutness in the belly area: not
fat
exactly, not in the slack or flabby sense of the word. The way my torso is shaped, really. I have a solid, blocky arse, and a convex rather than a concave waist. For a period of eighteen months or so (this was when I was working as a postdoc at the University of Dundee) I attended a gym; and assiduously sculpted and toned my body. My muscles bulked, I could lift heavier weights and turn myself into a giant crab-pincer by lying back and performing a hundred rapid sit-ups. But this didn’t shift my fundamental shape, and after a while I grew disheartened and gave up.

My life through the nineties and noughties was one defined by long stretches of involuntary celibacy. It occurs to me that most people live this way. It occurs to me, too, that art, literature and culture have been rather derelict in their duty so far as capturing this essential truth of things is concerned. Once upon a time, sex was unspeakable in our stories, and so was only always implicit – we get Elizabeth Bennett and Darcy dancing a saraband rather than thrashing about in bed. Nonetheless, stories were always about a
lovely
woman and a
handsome
man dancing that saraband. Then there was the Chatterley trial, and suddenly in the 1960s and 1970s novels were full of sex scenes. Of course, it was always a particular kind of sex scene. Growing up in the late seventies and early eighties, before the supersaturation of culture by internet porn, I devoted a lot of time to digging out the dirty bits in contemporary novels borrowed from the library. It was all we had, back then. I pored over the scenes in Harold Robbins blockbusters, or Henry Miller, or the novelisation of
Endless Love
. What you get in those books is amazing, mind-blowing, transcendent fucking. Beautiful, physically confident young people getting naked with one another and blowing one another’s minds. Then computer porn came along and literalised precisely that for the whole world. We went in short order from no sex in our literature and film to— Well, that. In doing so we hopped right over the broad middle ground. It’s that middle ground where we all live. All of us save only a few supermodels and tantric sex athletes and whatnot. At the upper end of this hinterland are people with thinning hair and bad skin having sex with other people cringingly self-conscious about their flab. People who cannot build physical confidence upon the shifting sands of frankly unprepossessing bodies, who yet can’t seem to make common ground with one another over their shared insufficiencies. People who muddle through, sweetening a life of low-level self-dissatisfaction with tart little orgasms from time to time, though ‘time to time’ turns out to be never
quite
frequent enough, the partner never quite attractive enough, the wellbeing provided by the orgasm just a touch
too
fleeting a thing, breath into the wind. People tired, and resentful, and corroded by their cul-de-sac awareness that this is all there is for them. People making compromises on their sexual fantasy ideals in order to accommodate them to the reality.

And those are the lucky ones. The lucky ones! At the lower end of that same hinterland matters are murkier. The people dwelling there go for months, or years, having sex only with themselves, bedding-in (hah!) the poisonous disjunction between commercial fantasy and individual actuality by relying on the same porn that mocks them with their own insufficiencies to bring themselves off. It’s not a recipe for psychological health.

I’m not saying that the nineties and naughties were a total strike-out zone for me. I dated some women. Let’s be precise and say: I dated four women, relationships lasting between one month and two years. But I couldn’t make it stick, and the time between girlfriends was long and lonely. I tried dating agencies, and personal ads; I pressed friends to hook me up with their single friends. I chatted nervously to people in bars. It did me no good. My face walked always before me, a boy with a red flag preventing my motorcar life from moving into any of the higher gears.

I’m not bidding for your pity when I say this. Most people live like this, after all, to one degree or another. For most of the time, I simply got on with my life. I worked hard, and got together with my friends, and I read and watched telly and went on holidays. I drank, and pointedly didn’t think about my experiences in the Antarctic, and drank some more. I interviewed poorly for a job at Lancaster, but somehow got it anyway, and moved to that city. There was important work to do. Hubble was launched in 1990, and I was part of a team run out of the universities of Michigan and Lancaster to analyse the data from the telescope’s High Speed Photometer. Then they discovered that the Hubble mirror wasn’t quite the right shape, and fitted cunningly designed optical correction hardware to bring the telescope’s images into focus. The HSP was one of the instruments sacrificed in order to make room for this corrective kit, and my team was at a loose end.

Four women. I could pretend to be blasé and claim that I can’t remember many of the details, but who would I be kidding? The most heartbreaking one was Molly. She worked as a secretary in the Registry at Lancaster University, and we were set up on a date by mutual friends. She was sweet-tempered and clever, and we had a great deal in common. We hit it off. We dated, and it got serious, and we moved into a flat together, a proper couple. And then we ended up separating, more in sorrow than anger. She didn’t mind that I had two slightly mangled hands, and that I was so self-conscious about the state of my toes that I never once (I think) took my socks off whilst we made love. She didn’t mind that my nose looked so weird, or that ever since Antarctica I had suffered from recurring nightmares, when
they
, or
it
, or whatever, congealed – palpably, visually – in my bedroom, resolving into the figure of a young boy, the old haunting, the yelling-aloud, sweat-flowing raging awakening in the small hours. I wept and apologised and she said, ‘It’s OK.’ She
didn’t mind
. That’s the kernel of the heartbreak, right there. She
put up with these things
. And I in turn
didn’t mind
her acne. I’m not talking about a few teenager-y spots on her face. This was an all-body affliction of red-purple bumps, about a third of which crusted into cream-coloured scabs. They were on her face, across her chest, inside her thighs. They turned her back into a Jackson Pollock, and for the ten days leading up to her period were so sore that she couldn’t lie supine. Without them she would have been a most beautiful individual: white-chocolate skin, red hair the colour of Tizer, eyes green as an old pound note, slender body. But with them they were all anybody could see about her. She told me that one of her earlier boyfriends had suggested, as he broke up with her, that in future she ought to date a blind man – the most hurtful thing, she said, anybody had ever said to her. And I nodded, and put on a sympathetic face, and consoled her, and agreed with her that the world was full of bastards. But inside I was as big a bastard as any, because I was thinking: well
that
wouldn’t work because Molly’s acne was a tactile as well as a visual disfigurement. Running my hands over her body at midnight, with the lights out, I could feel every bump and hollow, every braille-like scab.

But beggars can’t be choosers, we say, and the truth of the cosmos is that we are all beggars. Molly’s acne, a trick played upon her by some malicious deity, affected all of her skin, even in her most intimate places. On rare days, when her period was a long way away, we might manage some slow and delicately orchestrated penetrative sex. Most of her cycle such a thing was too painful for her to contemplate. We used one another’s hands, and mouths, and did all the things ingenuity suggested, and all the time I was secretly fixating, and I’ll bet she was too, only upon the things we
didn’t
do. If only we could do
that
, I thought, in my inmost heart. If only we could have a normal sex life of regular vigorous fucking. And that was what broke us up in the end – not the endless search for medical amelioration of her condition, the long drives to specialist clinics, the sitting in chilly waiting rooms for hours, the hand-holding, the new pills that made her sick (holding her lava-coloured hair out of the way of her face as she knelt at the toilet in our flat), the other new pills that made her so depressed she could hardly get out of bed and her libido vanished altogether. The ointments that I would apply, as she wept with the pain. The weird diets Molly picked up from online sites, and in which I would join her, in a spirit of, I now think, misapplied solidarity. All this was bearable. The secret fantasy of a regular sex life, though, was not. Our fantasies always betray us in the end. Opportunity presented itself, and I spent the night with a feisty, fat woman called Barbara. And Barbara lay there gasping and hooting and I banged away between her legs, like a lusty young blacksmith forging a magic sword with my weighty hammer, and some part of me thought:
I simply can’t be doing with this tentative never-quite fucking I’m getting with Molly any longer
. So I sat down with Molly and told her it was over, and she didn’t cry; and I agreed to keep paying half the rent until the end of the lease, but I moved out and slept for a month on the couch of a friend called Leo. Of course, things didn’t work out with Barbara, partly because she was rather unhinged, and prone to hitting me with things, sometimes quite heavy things. But mostly it didn’t work out because she got together with a long-distance lorry driver and I decided I had too much self-respect to share her. And actually the worm in the bud was my memory of Molly. All through that month with Barbara, as the two of us worked out energetic bang-bang-bang fucking in bedrooms and on staircases and in the front of my car – all through that my mind kept reverting to Molly. I dreamed of tenderness. Soon enough I found it occurring to me that
I really couldn’t be doing with this one-note hammer-away too-obvious fucking I was getting with Barbara
. My fantasies were all slender women and delicacy and the lightest touch of a fairy hand. I went back to Molly, and wept, and begged her, but she was cool and firm and told me that the relationship was over. She reminded me I had been the one to kill it. I could hardly disagree. Then I was single for many years, and the more effort I put in to dating the less success I had. I went through the four phases of sexual bereavement: anticipation; rage; despair (‘I’ll never make love to another human being again’) and finally grudging acceptance.