Megalo

This is two chapters of an unfinished existential novel set in London, written in 2003. Would anyone want to read this? I have no idea. But it's got to go.



MEGALO



CHAPTER 1

My story is all wrong. I do my best. I try to tie it, to tighten it, to give it an admirable shape. But it is all wrong and always has been. And so I am delayed. With that peculiar sensation I always accrue while reading a novel, I feel that as I read I am holding something in my mind, continuing but meaning to go back and re-read, to work over something more carefully, to make a note even, to fully absorb some sensation that has moved me but a little too subtly, too intangibly, that thing which has piqued my interest, or escaped my full comprehension. When it grows to an intensity sufficient to pull me out of the stream of narrative, I stop, dog-ear the page, and retrace the phrases, searching line by line for whatever has arrested my progression. Sometimes I cannot find it. And sometimes I realize that this feeling has carried over into my life, and I laugh at my own futility, my childish denial of the way things are, at how I long to go back, because it is the only thing I can see. And so it is that aspects of my life have been on hold for increasing spans of time, while I stop in vain, yet in vain to stop, and ceaselessly rework my own history, until it becomes unrecognisable, a painting whose colors have become muddied, a gesture drawing which has been overworked to the point of blacking out all negative space.

I arrived in the morning and walked calmly into the office. The receptionist and I exchanged smiles, but I reserved my firm but friendly handshake for the interviewer. She soon came out to fetch me, and led the way into the boardroom with the glass pitcher of water, the waiting glasses, the waiting panel. I smiled and greeted all round, and sat down with the perfect measure of humility and confidence, professionalism and informality. I explained my firm commitment to a challenging job in which I could utilise my natural abilities and further develop the skills I had acquired in my previous positions. I spoke to them of teamwork and self-reliance, of communication and discretion, of liasons and loyalties. They asked me about my skills. They offered hypothetical descriptions of challenging situations and I answered in an analytical and thoughtful tone which mirrored the reasoned and assured response I would elicit to any such happening. I repeated back to them what they said in arresting reversals of sentence structure, empathising with their search for a reliable and competent secretary. Carolyn, Office Manager, exchanged a glance with Tim from Human Resources. I took a sip of water. Carolyn showed me out, offering me a handshake which I recognised as closing more than the interview.

Yesterday on the way to work I witnessed a small drama under a bush outside the tube station. A flock of sparrows were darting and fluttering around an empty crisp packet, feasting on the crumbs in a completely communal manner, when one of them somehow got stuck inside the wrapper. The brightly colored foil started a panicked dance and the others chirped and flitted around it, in an unconsciously beautiful accompaniment, helpless. I stopped and stared, powerless to do anything. How could I invade their world? Could I even extract him without causing his little heart to arrest with terror at my intervention? Or without breaking up their happy party and forever darkening their beliefs in the nature of reality as they went about their daily business? I waited. Eventually the wrapper got stuck on a branch of the bush and the bird hopped out, his brown feathers shiny and littered with pale yellow flecks, but unharmed after all.

I have realized that something happened to me, and it did not announce itself as a defining moment until after the fact. Not until I went back to it, several days later, and replayed it, and listened to the tonal subtleties, which took me several times, and suddenly that warm glowy feeling crept all the way up into my face and I started. I haven’t said a word about this to anyone, and I know that this is one of the things I never will, because it is too perfect, cannot be touched. I was walking home from work and in no hurry, enjoying the balmy evening, the Indian summer which I also will say to no one, even that phrase I treasure and fear somehow, because it connects to histories I cannot comprehend, when towns thought about building stockades but by then it was too late, when ambushes and Pa’s got the shotgun, Ma’ll take the pistol, take the baby…Nevermind. I was walking and I had this gushing feeling, like I love the City. I started smiling in that way to myself. I started thinking things without worrying about what they were, or how they would sound, or if they were real, because I knew that to me they were and no one else would ever hear them, that I would not mar them with the saying and the hearing, but that I could trade it back and forth between self and self, and it would grow. I walked past Bank Station and even though it was the location of my last revelation, I could not have gone down there. I walked and I felt like all I wanted to do was walk. I will tell you in a minute how I have since walked all the way to and from work every day, seven miles, both ways, and this also I have told no one and I am happy. But there are a few people who I do not tell who witness daily (or semi-daily) various legs of my journey, and if they all just knew it, there it would be, the truth without even being said. It is possible. I don’t even need to tell this to myself, I have proved it with my own life. I walked up Poultry and turned up Old Jewry, whose enchanting name and slight curving I cannot resist even after so many times, then across and down Ironmongers, back to Cheapside and then down Bread Street, a little tour of medieval London, sitting here, seemingly quiet, yet perpetually speaking the history which exists even if it can only be felt as dream or cinema. But I still have not gotten to what happened, because each time I look there is another strand to be pulled into the embroidery, another row, row upon row, and it is all so much bigger and more vibrant than I ever thought possible, so much the opposite of what I always thought recollection to be, that is unchangeable in its nature. I have given up on those kinds of thoughts, and yet even those words makes it sound too much like a negative action, when it is ever so much more one of building. I used to worry about running out of room, running out of time. What a fool I have been and yet even to realise that makes me more happy than I can bear!

I come to the river and I climb up the stairs to Southwark Bridge. It is fully day, softened by evening but still elegantly day, and I stand and cross my arms on the railing, and lean my head on them, and look out over the scene, at a thin piece of driftwood rolling surprisingly fast through the muddy waters, at the evening sun glinting off the dome of St Paul’s. There is nothing to keep me, there is no one to tell, and I realise that my freedom is the thing that I prize above all else, and I don’t mean American Freedom, or Economic Freedom, or the Freedom to Succeed. There is no success here nor failure, there is just me, me moving, me stopping, me writing, me being quiet, me living, me dying, me keeping it all to myself, so it grows stronger and more vibrant, and more unstoppable. Oh how I stop it, oh how I bundle it up inside me and put on a different face, and go to work in the morning. But even that is not a chore, even that is a decision. There is nothing which is not my choosing. I might keep that one, and tell it to one person, perhaps, if I ever come across the one who needs it most, who might take it and not touch it too much, but put it away and not smile and say no more about it.

By the time I get to St Paul’s, the sun is low, and the churchyard has that shadowy look and I can pretend it is full summer, not September, and I can believe that more is possible than I could ever imagine. Because I sit on the stoop and I look at my body, my life, dwarfed by Wren’s achievement. And I walk past King Street and Queen Street, facing each other across the intersection like a pair of unseen silhouettes, chess pieces, cards- and I think, without a trace of embarrassment, my lips still moving with the fervor of my thoughts, Do I live here? Is this my life? Am I so lucky? See I don’t want to tell anyone. It is enough for me, too much for me, to feel this, to walk home, to take a bath, to lay on my stomach with my hand curled by my face, and to sleep.

In March I now realize that I was someone else. I can barely believe that I walked along the river and felt that it was spring, and launched into a reverie about the seasons, unable to believe that I was feeling the spring feeling, the change in the weather which I had known in my childhood and which I felt sure I had never experienced in London before. Was the weather changing or was I? I liked the rhythm of these words and I whispered them to myself as I walked. I ended up in the churchyard and I felt a contentment there which has drawn me back again and again. I like it best in the evening, when the crowds have gone, when the interior is cool and dark and unseen, and the smooth shell of the cathedral allows the air to circle and circle its perfect geometry. No one has yet realized that I haunt this place. But I will come to later what I came to know myself on a different day, which is you can never know the mind of anyone else, even if they try to tell you and you try to hear it, because what they tell you will be only what you hear, and what you hear will differ both from the telling and the teller’s hearing, as his own words play back to him, surprised, or satisfied, or ashamed. But on this day I was not having these kind of thoughts. Instead I was thinking about the dead people buried under the ground where I sat, the tombs quietly resting in the shadows of the pines under the Cathedral. What would London be without St Paul’s? What would the world be? And then I suddenly realized that people do, everyone does, I could, I was, altering the world. Even after I was dead I would be, like those dusty bones under the old ground, apparently beyond all agency, but in the world and of the world yet.

A fox wandered into the churchyard and I felt one moment of elation, bordering on fear, as I tried to orient myself to his presence. He sniffed under a tree, so light on his feet, so compact, effortlessly measuring his strength. Then he looked up at me and I did not move, but looked back at him, at the picture he made in my eye, and tried to see what picture I made in his. Then he turned and trotted away into the shadows. See that was not nothing. I might come to later what I thought it was, if I can find a way to say it without destroying it. I think I have done all right so far.

For a long time my problem was I kept talking. I kept looking at people and trying to say something to them, and the words just flooded out of me, almost against my will. I could tell even before I did it what I would do and what would happen. I would begin by releasing a soft sigh and floating my eyes above my head, or far out across the room, and then I would say something like “Sometimes I feel like something is happening to me,” or “I have been spending time in cafes.” Immediately how betrayed I felt by my own words, how ashamed, and yet I kept talking. “I wonder how long I will continue like this. Don’t you feel that sometimes?” And the people around me would shift uneasily, and answer vaguely or not at all. I would then leave shortly after, feeling completely drained, as if any shades of authenticity, of real feeling which I had been building up secretly for a few days, or a week, had been purged from my being, leaving only a shabby vessel, ruins. But along with the shame, I would also feel a kind of relief. At least they knew the truth about me, the paltry clichés which I employ to cover myself over, to keep myself going. At least we could all stop pretending about me and my life. And some time later I would recover, I would make my vow again, to keep quiet, to store it all away and use it to make something better than myself. But it always comes back to the same thing with me. You will see that I am right.

When I come home in the evenings I do not do what they do. I do not hang my coat on a peg and flip on the TV, or stumble in around midnight, after-work drinks having clouded the whole night again like ink in a glass of water. I do not do anything to forget myself. Everything I do is with the knowledge that I am still here and I will be somewhere else before anyone realises it. I may be accused of envy. It may not be believed that I enjoy preparing a meal for myself, or that choosing the hour of my bedtime still delights me as it would a child who knows the indignity of obeisance. I do not need to prove it. I decided not to walk today, but waited for the bus on Princes Street, and watched the people rush by. I could not make out what they were in such a hurry for, how so many could pass by the charming street names and curling lanes of the patchwork city, and not stop, not look, not take a moment to notice the world and their place in it. For there is no dividing line where one begins and the other ends. They are the city; it moves and changes with each intake of unconscious breath. What is the difference between this pulsing city and the limbs of a tree which seems to breathe in the wind? If we could find someway to be alert without noticing, to adopt the habit of effortless strength, ah, but who am I preaching to? When I come home I do not even take off my coat but quickly choose a record, something to drown out the sirens and the dogs outside the window. I pull it out of its sleeve and place it on the turntable, and I sink onto the couch and wait for the music to reveal itself. I have unwittingly chosen the rainy one, and I press my scarf to my face and feel something, like a tension, like I am in love, but there is no one it is directed to, so I pull it back in, and hold it, and wait for the music to build. I recognise the sparse soundscape, sombre strings holding themselves open to the little bunches of notes which fall like raindrops off wet trees, both expected and astounding in their strange timings. I like to listen to it and try to hear it as itself, a chance piece which I may pick again tomorrow, or not for several months. See, I don’t want to “know” classical music the way this is usually meant. I don’t want to take it up as another object of study, another canon to be mastered and expounded upon in certain circles to show that I am a credible member. Circles are not made of people. But music can describe them, if you listen and only hear that moment of hearing. Even if you have heard a piece a hundred times before, you can discover a new shape for the first time, where you previously thought there had only been green space. That is why I buy old classical records in charity shops in large quantities, and cover over their labels in white paper, and place them all in white sleeves. There may be the odd piece I recognise, or some familiarity my mind registers and cannot help but pipe up “Berloiz,” but I do my best to unlearn it. I don’t want anything interfering with my relation to the sound. I want to receive it as it is, so that all the structures which have been built around it melt away, as I used to, as an exercise, try to imagine Tottenham Court Road when it was just an empty turnpike filtering into farmland. I made the mistake of beginning with that, and spent many years in bitter disappointment.

I speak strongly to myself, but in reality I am just as weak as anyone. I still feel old feelings, and allow myself to rummage through the photographs I used to take. In fact my whole adolescence was propelled by the desire to record. I took photos of myself in the mirror. I recorded my room, my family, my daily life, the journey to school, the people on the street. There is one of an old man eating bread over a garbage can. The pigeons are flocked around him so that he has become an island. He appears as oblivious of them as he was to me, snatching his picture and feeling my eyes well up with my own humanity. See not his, mine. It is the same with all of the pictures. I acted like I was crafting something, but I was only crafting its appearance. I keep them to remind me.

My old journals I keep but don’t have the stomach to read. I tried last year but couldn’t get past the first page. It floods back a whole realm of self-indulgence. How I threw it all away, like my thoughts and my feelings were objects in and of themselves, like they could never be weakened. When really with each stroke of my pen I was killing them, one by one transforming my life into dead moments, frozen images, affectless scrap. I know better now. I walk down Green Lanes and I hold myself in. I feel my stomach tighten as I pass the open shops, men locked into tiny clapboard cubicles, speaking to their far-off families in a dozen languages, in a hundred stories. I see a bride in the hair salon, and a flock of adolescent girls in sleeveless satin gowns, sparkling on the pavement like a lost handful of gems, their bare necks shivering in the autumn air. See I still feel like I want to keep it, but I resist. I know that there is no way to keep it. Better to keep walking, to notice it and relish it and let it pass as one lets the wind enter a window and exit by another across the room. I see a mother and child on the common, the mother holds a ball out to him but the child is only interested in the changed world, in the way his path is covered with dead leaves which crush and crinkle under his steps. He laughs and she laughs and I feel myself turn again in a direction which stuns me.

Other times I let myself get too far. I may sit in a chair listening to what I can’t help knowing is Smetana’s Ma Vlast, a piece I have loved since before I decided to unlearn things, and which I don’t mind knowing, because his vision is so perfect. I feel sometimes that even if I was never told, I would see the same rolling hills, and curving river dipping down into dark woodlands, so clearly described by the music. I closed my eyes and asked myself if I was becoming narcissistic. And I answered myself, with some measure of indulgence, that if I was I had always been so, and that it was the most natural and beneficial way to be in relation to one’s self. So many people run from themselves. They do not take the time to love themselves and give to their own beings the way they would to anyone else. Swooning with myself, feeding on myself, there is no danger of letting me down. I push myself higher and higher. I make myself giddy. Even if I burst into tears, I hold my own head and enjoy the release, the pleasure of being comforted like a small child. There is no one who can treat me as well as I treat myself.






CHAPTER 2

Meg Connors is an illusion. I like to walk and sit and stand, and feel it coating me like an oily residue. It shimmers when I dance. I walk into the office and I feel myself shift. I am suddenly someone who really only wants a cup of coffee, who is nice because she will offer the same drink to others, who asks after weekends and families and lives she knows nothing about, people with whom she never makes actual contact, and who interact with her as if things were different from what they are.

Carolyn showed the first signs of insanity today which I have been expecting since I began work at the bank a month ago. She questioned my positioning of a staple on an inter-office memo, saying it would look neater if I had done it vertically. I smiled. I didn’t know what to say. So I said I’d put the kettle on. In the office kitchen I picked at a tray of triangular sandwiches left over from the board meeting- tuna and cucumber, cheese and tomato, egg mayonnaise. The kettle turned itself off, a self-contained unit. I tried to remember making the last cup of coffee before this one. I had not had one yet that morning, so it was at home. I imagined myself in my pajamas, bare feet and messy hair. I retreated to the image of waking. Did my alarm wake me this morning or did I wake before it, racing with it in my sleep, and winning, so to speak? Did I remember my dreams? Out of bed and the first walk to the kitchen. Did I stretch, rub my eyes? Was the kettle in its usual place by the cutlery tray, or was it left askant on the counter? Did I make real coffee or instant? I think it was real.

My journeys at this time were by tube. I saw Terry outside the tube station every day. Somewhere we began to exchange smiles. He had a surprisingly warm smile, face not frozen like the others. There was still lots of sparkle there. He would take off his woolly hat to reveal a balding head, with a few crazy black locks. He took to kissing my hand, after making a big show of wiping his mouth on his sleeve first. We rehearsed some strange play of princess and rogue. But see I can’t even think those words out without feeling sick. It was never about him.

On the underground at my end was nothing. I often saw the same people day after day, and yet seeing them only made me feel that I had witnessed some crazy loop of stock footage. Their images played in my eye for a moment, and I never thought of them again until another moment, indistinguishable, presented itself, and I felt a small nudge from time, nothing more.

I must avoid composing. Why can’t I just let things be? I try to eat my lunch like I have never seen it before. I try to resist rehearsing the making of the sandwich that morning, so I go the other way, and imagine it in my stomach, being digested, my body extracting nutrients from it. And then I am overcome by the intricate processes going on inside me, over which I can assert no authority. The sensation is familiar. When I was younger I often had to hunch over, cover my breast and scrunch up my eyes because I was haunted by the image of my own heart beating. I imagined the pink muscle pulsing continually, sickened at how it had been going for eighteen years already, never stopping to take a break, how did it do that? Even as I think this I feel it again, nausea and fear at that inexplicable pump, opening and closing like a fist full of blood.

Maybe I am kidding myself.

I have things I could talk to Silas about, if he’d let me. Silas is my neighbour. He probably doesn’t expect me to be like him. He’s an old man. But I think we could both sit and talk about some past which exists only like a black and white photo, images rehearsed and relived like dreams which have us convinced for a moment, like the powerful kind of déjà vu which seems untouched by the skipping synapse explanation I have been offered. I could tell him about how I was once dancing with my friends, had a few drinks, and felt my eyes turning funny, and we all danced and smiled, looking at each other, smiling and dancing, and I tried to say something. I said something, but the music was loud. I turned to the friend on my right and said, mumbling, and smiling too hard: “Sometimes.” I looked at the other one and started again. “Guys! Sometimes…” To both of them. “Sometimes…I think things have, hidden meanings.” And I turned and they weren’t even looking at me. It as almost too perfect the way neither of them even asked me to repeat myself, neither was paying any attention, like that too was part of it, some big plan, some infinite thing waiting, just waiting for me to say it louder, to admit it. See these are the kind of thoughts I have. And probably Silas wouldn’t understand them at all. I won’t tell anyone about it, and after all I am glad they didn’t hear me.



c. 2003
© RMT 2009