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Authors: Gavin Extence

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BOOK: The Universe Versus Alex Woods
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‘No, Alex. I won’t tell him. But I think you should. I think you should tell him as soon as possible. Just be honest. After that, you might find that things start to get a little easier.’

Dr Enderby was right. Mr Peterson was holding up remarkably well. Too well, really. And it wasn’t that he was in denial or anything like that; his reaction was the polar opposite to mine. In private, he was perfectly able to acknowledge his illness and what it meant. He told me how he was feeling day to day. He kept me updated on his symptoms. These were still relatively minor at this point, but he was more able – or more willing – to spot the little signs that had been creeping into his life for some months. Standing and sitting were sometimes a bit of a trial, as were eating and picking up the post from the floor – anything that required a certain amount of balance or hand–eye co-ordination. In general, the symptoms were worse first thing in the morning and late at night. Mr Peterson said that some mornings, coming down the stairs, he was sure that God was testing him. I thought it was good that he could make jokes like that, but at this point, I couldn’t bring myself to respond in kind. It felt too forced. If I managed a weak smile, I was doing well.

His visual problems were still his primary and most persistent symptom. He described his difficulty ‘aiming’ his eyes as being similar to having a kind of blind spot. Now that he knew it was there, he could make sure he checked it, but this took a conscious effort on his part. Scrolling his eyes up or down no longer felt like a natural, automatic response. It had become an act that required focus, planning and memory, and because of this, he was increasingly happy to let me do the driving when he needed to go to the shop or the post office. My competence behind the wheel was now beyond question – at least on these short, local trips – and it seemed highly unlikely that we’d be pulled over in the village. A police car was a rare sight in Lower Godley. Mr Peterson said that if, by any chance, the police
did
stop us, he’d claim full responsibility for the situation. I could plead ignorance or coercion. Given his condition, he no longer thought it likely that any judge would want to send him to the Big House, and we both agreed that safety should come first.

But if Mr Peterson was starting to make concessions with his driving, he was doing no such thing with his reading. Even with his faltering vision (perhaps
because
of his faltering vision) he was still determined to see our Kurt Vonnegut book club through to its conclusion. He wouldn’t hear of cancelling it. By the time we got to
Timequake
, the final novel on the itinerary I’d devised some fourteen months earlier, he could read only in short, five- to ten-minute bursts, and only at certain times of day – usually nine till twelve and three till seven. Any earlier or later was a strain. He was already having to use his finger to follow the text down the page, like a child learning to read. But he stuck with it nevertheless. It took him the best part of a month, but by the time of our final meeting, he was done. He knew it would be the last novel he’d ever read for himself.

Of course, no one else in the book club knew about his condition – no one other than myself and Dr Enderby. We were still the
only
people who knew. Even after I’d moved beyond the denial stage, I didn’t see much point in telling my mother, although Mr Peterson had again said that this would be okay, and it wouldn’t be breaking his confidence. He seemed to think it was important for me to talk to her, but, really, that felt like a step too far. Acknowledging reality for myself was one thing. Having to explain what was happening – and what was going to happen – to another person was something else entirely. That would make it
too
real. And I soon came to wonder if this might also be Mr Peterson’s reason for keeping his illness so completely to himself.

It seemed to me that after the first couple of months, he might have brought himself to tell a few more people. He got on well with Mrs Griffith, and with Fiona Fitton. There
were
people he could have talked to, and I knew that they would have wanted to help in any way they could. I also knew that at some point – maybe not all that far in the future – this kind of support was going to be of the utmost importance. But the future was the one subject that was out of bounds. Because for all of his coping skills, Mr Peterson still refused to make any practical plans or decisions. He hadn’t yet committed to any of the treatment options offered by the hospital. The information pack they had sent him, so far as I could ascertain, had remained unopened. He told me that right now he just wanted to go on living day to day. He was determined to stick to his normal routines for as long as possible. When I pointed out that things like physiotherapy and home help came with waiting lists – that you couldn’t just sign up and expect immediate care – he said he simply wasn’t prepared to worry about such matters at the present moment, and he didn’t want me to worry either. But this was easier said than done.

I knew that there would come a point when clinging to ‘normality’ would no longer be possible. Sooner or later, Mr Peterson’s independence was going to start to slip away from him; Dr Bradshaw had been very clear on this point. He’d
have
to start telling people eventually. He was going to require extensive medical and practical support. In the longer term, delaying – refusing point blank to make any decisions – was not going to help him. It was not a sensible strategy. At the back of my mind, in a dark, distant corner, I’d started to question if Mr Peterson was coping with his situation as well as Dr Enderby and I had first presumed.

For some time, I debated whether or not I should raise this concern with Dr Enderby when I saw him at our final book club meeting, but when it came down to it, I decided not to. (I thought I knew exactly what he’d say: that we had to go on honouring Mr Peterson’s decisions and respecting his right to follow his own path.) Instead, we talked about me. Dr Enderby seemed very concerned to know how
I
was holding up. I told him the truth: that there were good days and bad days, but mostly I was trying to think positively and constructively. I was hoping for the best and prepared for the worst. Dr Enderby said this was always a sensible policy.

What I didn’t tell him was exactly what my ‘preparedness’ meant.

I thought that if Mr Peterson had anything between two to five years left, as my research indicated, then I’d definitely have to take some time out from my education. This would probably be between school and college, or maybe between college and university, if all went well. Since he didn’t have a family, it was obvious to me that no one else was going to be able to care for Mr Peterson on a full-time basis. It
had
to be me. The only problem was, I didn’t know how he’d react to this proposal. I anticipated some resistance. But this was the one good thing about his refusal to make any plans. It gave me plenty of time to think things through properly, to go over all the contingencies. By the time he was ready to confront what was going to happen next, I planned to have a full arsenal of arguments ready to deploy.

While this inner drama played out, I tried at all times to maintain a neutral exterior, but this was not something that came naturally to me. There were several occasions, at that final meeting of the Secular Church, when I found myself wishing that I could be more like Dr Enderby, who, of course, was very practised at keeping all sorts of confidences (being a doctor) and never lost his composure (being a Buddhist). But to me, much of the time, a calm exterior felt like a deception; and, as I think I’ve mentioned, deception has never been my strongest suit.

The thing that probably saved me was that everyone was acting kind of oddly that day. I suppose it was because everything was coming to an end, and in my experience, there’s often a lot of excess emotion floating around at the conclusion of long-term projects – even when that conclusion has been a successful one. It was hanging there in the air, like a thin mist, and if I appeared distant and subdued, it was probably not as noticeable as it might have been in different circumstances. Added to this, I should point out that my demeanour was certainly not the strangest that day. That accolade, as it turned out, would fall to Mr Peterson himself. In an afternoon of atypical behaviour, his stood out as
extremely
atypical. Of course, I understood the reasons for this – I thought – but I had no idea what everyone else would make of his sudden transformation.

Mr Peterson was not given to excess sentimentality. Nor was he one for long, elaborate speeches. But that day, he made it quite clear that he wanted to be the last person to speak, and that he planned to speak at some length. There were some ‘philosophical’
themes, close to his heart, that he wished to address in bringing matters to a close (and Mr Peterson was certainly not given to philosophizing). For a while, as he spoke, I was convinced that he was going to tell everyone about his illness. He seemed to be building up to it. But as it turned out, he said nothing directly. He stuck more or less to the point, and kept his focus on
Timequake
. Only Dr Enderby and I knew that he was also talking about himself, about his own situation; and we still managed to misinterpret what he was
really
trying to say.

‘For various reasons,’ Mr Peterson began, innocuously enough, ‘it’s taken me a very long time to read this book. Or to
re
-read it, I should say, because of course I read it when it first came out – about a decade ago, I guess. And I remember thinking at that time that it was probably the most irreverent of Vonnegut’s books. A great read, of course, but not a book that took itself at all seriously.

‘Well, having read it a whole lot more slowly this time round, I have to say my original impression has changed some. I guess what was driven home was something I should’ve already known: with Vonnegut, you can’t take any kind of irreverence at face value. The funnier the joke, and the more light-hearted the approach, the more serious the implications tend to be. He said something along those lines himself, I believe – several times. Laughter, irreverence, absurdity – as often as not, these things have their roots buried deep in despair.

‘The idea that time might suddenly loop back on itself, so that a whole decade of events gets replayed on autopilot, is, of course, completely absurd. It’s a farce, and it plays out as a farce in the novel. It’s the engine that drives the comedy, but not something to be taken seriously. Or so you might think. Because re-reading the story this time round, I found a weird thing happening. I found that I
was
taking this idea seriously. And the further I got through the book, the less farcical it seemed.

‘What if you really did have to relive the last ten years of your life? Or even your whole life? Believe it or not, this idea interested me enough to do some background research – and I know that’s usually more Alex’s thing. But here’s what I found.

‘Vonnegut certainly wasn’t the first one to dream up the idea of time turning back on itself. Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher, actually came up with an almost identical idea in one of his books,
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
, about a hundred years earlier. Now, I’ve never been one for philosophy, as such. I tend to think that our morals come from our gut, and everything else is either common sense or window-dressing. A month ago, if you’d said “Zarathustra” to me, I’d have assumed you were talking Strauss. But I think I’m getting off the point. Let me tell you what Nietzsche said in his book. He said that there is no afterlife in the normal, religious sense – no heaven, no hell, no purgatory. But there isn’t “nothing” either. Instead, after we die, things simply start again from scratch. We live our whole life again, exactly as it was, nothing changing from birth to death. And then the same thing happens again and again and again, on and on for ever. He called this idea the “Eternal Return”.

‘Well, apparently, Nietzsche may not have believed this at all – not in any literal sense. But he wrote it down in character, like he believed every word. The point of this was to set up a kind of thought experiment. He wanted the reader to take the idea seriously, to give it credence, so that he’d be forced to confront the following question: if true, is this a pleasant idea? Or, put differently: if you had to relive your life exactly as it was – same successes and failures, same happiness, same miseries, same mixture of comedy and tragedy – would you want to? Was it worth it? And it’s the same thing with Vonnegut, I think.

‘Anyway, if you’ll bear with me a minute longer, I think there’s also a second part to this thought experiment that’s just as important. This concerns free will. For Nietzsche, the Eternal Return was also a way of thinking about free will from an atheist’s perspective, which, of course, was still a minority perspective in those days. The Eternal Return was another way of presenting the idea that there simply
isn’t
anything beyond this life. This is all there is, and if there’s any purpose to be found, then it’s gonna have to be found in the here and now, through our own endeavours and without any supernatural guidance. And I think for Nietzsche this idea was, frankly, a real kick up the ass. It meant that we all had a responsibility to make the best possible choices – to try our damnedest not to blow our only shot.

‘Well, I think Vonnegut might’ve gone along with most of that too, but he also had his own ideas on free will. Because for Vonnegut, free will isn’t always a given. It’s something we take too much for granted – he would’ve agreed with Nietzsche on that – but it’s also something that can quite suddenly disappear. Part of
his
thought
experiment in
Timequake
involves exactly this scenario. People are forced to live on autopilot – knowing full well what’s going to happen in the next ten years and powerless to change it in even the smallest way. It’s treated like the most irreverent aspect of the story, but, deep down, it’s the least irreverent idea. Because Vonnegut was a man who knew exactly what the loss of free will felt like. As a POW, he was forced to watch an entire city burning to the ground – and there wasn’t a damn thing he or God or anybody else could do about it. All he could do was help count the corpses – all one hundred and thirty thousand of them.

BOOK: The Universe Versus Alex Woods
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