Forty-Seventeen (9 page)

He did not work in January – the White Knight folder was still lying on his desk from November. When
wandering in the city, hours early for an appointment, he bought the seamail
Economist
for November 25.

The
Economist
had ‘something to say'.

 

The religious sects are the grass forcing itself through the concrete … religious innovation is one of the last and best examples of free enterprise … half forgotten fragments of animism and the dark other side of the religious coin … if things go well the time between now and the 21st century could prove to be as important in the development of human consciousness as, say, the fifth century BC (which saw orderly intellectual thought taking root in Greece); the first century of the Christian era (which saw the offering of a new link between the spiritual and material halves of life); the seventh century (which saw the first real explosion of the idea of man's individual powers and responsibilities) … it could lead to a pacification of the long civil war in inner space … most appear to have drunk cyanide found mixed with grape drink in a tin tub. Mr Jones had dispensed mock suicide potions before. The spasms of the first children ended any doubt. Many tried to run into the jungle. They were turned back by the camp's armed guards or shot down … at one level the story is another example of the special quality of America; the country where the best is better, but the worst is also worse, than anywhere on the globe.

 

The pacification of the long civil war in inner space, yet.

Now if the
Economist
leader writer had been at lunch at the New Hellas he would have had something to say.
But it was not a Sydney way of talking. We could do with some panoramic thinkers.

AAP-Milton telephone: ‘More on Jonestown – I'm over my dysrhythmia now – more stuff is coming down – I'm told there are 913 bodies in a hangar at Dover Air Force base in Delaware. No one will claim them. They will remain there forever. Refrigerated. A complete commune. The dead commune – the title's yours, have it, take it. The ramifications are truly fantastic.'

‘It's the grass forcing itself through the concrete,' he told Milton.

‘Riiiight!'

Was this the commune that beckoned him? Was this the commune, at last, that wanted him?

He learned from a friend in the US airforce that the bodies were in fact flown from Dover Air Force base to California to be buried. Delaware didn't want them buried there.

Sandra rang about the television treatment on the White Knight series and he told her he had not done any work on it. He told her why.

She said, ‘Oh,' and then asked him how he was coping with being forty.

‘Fine,' he said.

‘Are you sure?'

In April, he read that the code name for the suicide pact was not ‘White Knight' but ‘White Night'. It had been misreported. There was no explanation of either code name.

He felt something lift from his whimpering psyche
but still could not work on the White Knight project.

He rang Milton. ‘They had it wrong,' he told him.

‘But Jesus,' Milton said, ‘you came within one letter of being hit by the laser.'

‘I missed by one letter – a kay. I'm A-Okay.'

‘Don't joke – that's the way it works. There's a lot of stuff coming out on that sort of thing from Hungary.'

That week while contemplating beginning work ‘on the treatment' (and his new life) he fell down writhing with pain on the floor of his office amid the struggling indoor plants.

Gripped with agony, he called a taxi which took him to the doctor and from there he was taken to hospital for emergency surgery.

He came out of the operation with tubes in his mouth, nose and penis, and with a drip in his arm.

They gave him Pentathol and he saw a sun-filled field of yellow flowers and it beckoned to him. It was, he thought, death beckoning. No doubt. He considered it, saw his great-grandmother and grandfather standing in the field beckoning, but for no obvious reason decided this time to say no he wouldn't go yet into the never-ending warmth of that sun and to death's corny field of swaying yellow flowers. Not yet.

He then fell into a deep sleep and did not die.

He convalesced on his own in a small quiet hotel. He could not go to Belle's house because she was not someone you convalesced with, her life-urge was over-vigorous, and she had once said that she was into ‘scars'.

The months of August and September he spent in Canberra, the seat of government, on IAEA business. While in that city a Senator Knight rang and wanted to talk to him about nuclear waste.

Of all the senators why Senator Knight? He told himself that it was White
Night
now that he had to watch – the Knight business was all over. But he went to the appointment cautiously.

Nothing of note occurred.

In August, still in Canberra, he read a poem in the magazine
Quadrant
written by Evan Jones. He did not register the name Jones until he had entered the poem.

Sometimes he read poems because he knew the poet, sometimes because of the title, sometimes he just grabbed a poem and read it as a random sample of ‘poetry being written now'. He had read this poem as such a sample.

It was titled
Insomniacs
but he was not an insomniac, that was not the reason he read the poem.

In stanza three he read:

 

Insomniacs, bless them, are never afraid of the dark:

bad nights are called ‘white nights' for that dull white

which lurks behind their eye-lids, dingy, mean.

Nothing at all like innocence, purity or peace,

signalling that all the nerves would like to break.

Something in the whole being is at war.

 

He put down the magazine. Oh oh, something was still going on. The laser was still searching for him.

That night and for a few nights he sweated after going to bed, fearing that his sleep would now be disrupted – that that had been the message of the poem. Could you die from sleep deprivation?

 

His two companions in Canberra were named Lewis and after a heavy drinking bout with one of the Lewises, in the week he read the poem, he became ill again with hepatitis.

He could hardly move from his bed, pinned down with an immense lethargy. He found that he could now do nothing else
but sleep.

It had got him, the laser.

That night while lying in bed with his new sickness in his rooms at University House he heard music from a radio carried on the wind and he heard the announcer say that the piece of music which had reached him on the wind was called
White Night
and that it was played by Kenny White and his orchestra. The wind dropped and he heard no more.

While lying there during the next few days he wondered why his two companions in that city – the seat of government – should both be named Lewis. He asked one and she said that Cottle's Dictionary of Surnames said that Lewis meant ‘great battle'.

‘Why do you ask?'

He shook his head, the message was there but could not be shared.

This Lewis dropped in the airmail
Guardian
to him to read and he read that the Moscow International
Book Fair had refused to allow the book
White Nights
by Israel's Prime Minister Mr Begin to enter the Soviet Union. The book was an account of Begin's persecution and torment in a Soviet labour camp.

In the next airmail
Guardian
he read of a recent screening of Bresson's
Four Nights
which was based on Dostoyevsky's story
White Nights
and he further read that Visconti also had made a film called
White Nights
based on the Dostoyevsky story.

Hepatitis had drained his energy so that clipping even the tissue-thin pages of the airmail
Guardian
took a long time, but he clipped the two reports and would, from time to time, study them for messages.

The clippings yielded nothing, but the word ‘guardian' addressed itself to him and he felt comforted by it.

There was, he intuited, an airmail or air-male or heir-male Force of Destruction coming in from around Jonestown and an heir-male Guardian. There was a battle going on for his psyche. He being, of course, the male heir. His suicidal grandfather was mixed up in it somewhere.

As soon as he was well enough he went to the National University library and found all Dostoyevsky's work there except
White Nights.

He stood there in the gloomy aisles of books sweating from a nervous impotence, having confirmed, once again, that desperate feeling he always had in libraries that what he wanted would not be there, or that he was looking in the wrong place.

‘What does it mean that the book
White Nights
by Dostoyevsky is not in the library?' he asked a helpful, new-breed librarian in jeans.

‘It could be out on loan.'

He wanted a different category of answer to his questions. But that was asking too much even from a new-breed librarian.

‘But all his other books are there in multiple copies.'

‘Maybe it is at the binder – that would be another possibility.'

‘That all the copies of
White Nights
wore out at the same time? Could you check to see who has all the copies of
White Nights
?'

‘That would be confidential. Would you like it to be public knowledge that you, say, borrowed a book on menopause, hypothetically – if you were a woman?'

He did not wish to be drawn into hypothetical discussion – in another gender – on menopause.

‘It's odd, that's all,' he said, a touch of peevishness in his voice, ‘that you have multiple copies of all of Dostoyevsky's work but that all the copies of that title alone are missing.'

She shrugged, and began to fidget nervously with her confidential cards, moving surreptitiously towards the security button.

‘Never mind,' he said.

‘You're welcome.'

He had never been welcome, not for one day on this planet had he ever felt welcome.

Outside the library, he thought, I am becoming
grumpy, I am now forty and I am becoming grumpy.

He recovered and returned to his own city where he told Belle about the
White Nights
and about the books missing from the library and the rest.

‘That's odd,' she said, humouring him.

‘Don't humour me,' he said, grumpily, ‘I think it bears some attention.'

‘I cannot explain the
White Nights
thing,' she said, watching him, he thought, closely, ‘but I have two copies of Dostoyevsky's
White Nights
. I don't want you to make anything of it.'

‘Why two copies of Dostoyevsky's
White Nights
?'

‘I cannot explain why I have two copies and I do not want you to make a thing of it.'

She brought him a copy of the book.

He examined it and read the novella
White Nights.

He then explained to Belle that white night referred to the midsummer nights at the sixtieth latitude north.

‘So?'

‘I am in the midsummer latitude of my life.'

‘Oh.'

 

In November, one year from the Jonestown suicides, an American journalist flew in and telephoned him, Joe Treaster from the
New York Times.

Joe Treaster wanted to talk to him about the IAEA.

‘Who put you on to me?'

‘The Department of Information.'

A few days later a friend rang and invited him to
a party. ‘Joe Treaster from the
New York Times
will be there. You should meet him.'

‘Yes, he rang me.'

‘Did you know he was the first journalist into Jonestown after the suicides? He's very interesting on it.'

‘No!'

He then rang Joe at his hotel but could not reach him and left a message for Joe to ring back.

But he was due in Vienna and could not fit in with Joe's itinerary. They didn't meet, which he thought was probably just as well.

That week Senator Knight from Canberra dropped dead at the age of forty.

He gave up the
White Knight
TV project, not having written a word of it.

He said to Belle that he did not really suffer from the illusion that the universe was rearranging itself to give him a personal message. He knew that was ultimate egoism.

But he could be excused for thinking it was a year of shadows, confusing linguistic signals, ricocheting beams, that maybe a bony hand had been groping for him, inviting him to dance, lanterns had been waved in the dark to guide him towards the cliff. But he was through it now.

‘That's a relief,' Belle said, ‘I thought for a while there you were loony tunes.'

 

Later in the next year, having again given up the idea of being a writer, he was working at a university and
they had given him a room formerly occupied by a medievalist.

He was seated at the desk for some hours before he realised that a poster of an ivory chess piece on the wall facing him was a white knight – the caption said it was from the Isle of Lewis. The white knight was glum and toy-like and it did not frighten him. He photographed it and during his time at the university became quite fond of it.

When he noticed that his libido was low while in Vienna the first time he thought it was because he was travelling – the beast out of its habitat does not feel secure enough to mate or, maybe, to perform any part of the breeding act. He reasoned that animals needed to be confident of their safety. But we are not purely animals. And sometimes he had become randy while travelling. Now he didn't feel randy for days and days. It continued after his return to Australia.

‘Hullo,' he said, ‘is this some sort of suicide?' Was this why his grandfather committed suicide? Which came first, the loss of interest in life or the loss of libido?

His fantasy life became dulled. He was able to have sex, but without much drive. Another explanation was that he was ‘growing up' and putting behind him random sexuality. Was this the way an adult genital male should be at forty? All the books said that turning forty should not affect the libido. Were the books lying?

He found too that he desired to
feel desire
as much as he wanted to have sex; to feel the full juices of desire, to be restless with appetite would please him now.

He could recall the visitations of desire for Belle. The desire strong enough to make him get up from his
bed into a car and to drive in the middle of the night to see her.

He understood why Faust in the Gounod opera wanted the return of desire as part of his contract with the devil.

Or was he in fact better off without it?

He wondered if it were absent long enough would it fade as a known part of his person – would the feel of it be beyond imaginative recall, even?

That might be all right.

It was, he would now have to explain to Belle, that he could still visually recognise sensuality or sexual attractiveness but it seemed disconnected from the hormonal physical reaction in him. The line was down.

It then occurred to him that it might be related to his hepatitis attack.

His liver specialist was bemused by the question. ‘Yes, but I am a
liver
specialist.'

The doctor pondered it. ‘It is possible that the liver which controls the flow of oestrogen into the body and out of the body could be affected by hepatitis. Maybe an over-supply of oestrogen.'

His meeting with Belle, the self-proclaimed slut of all times, confirmed that his libido was ailing. Her allure no longer called to him across great distances, and desire for her no longer fell upon him like a fully armed woman jumping from a tree.

‘What is up with you?' she said, after they'd finished a rather underpowered lovemaking.

‘I'm not full on,' he said.

‘I can tell that.'

‘I'm suffering from an over-supply of oestrogen. From my hepatitis.'

‘You're turning into a woman?'

‘No, not quite.'

‘You were erect but you lacked a certain follow-through, a certain zing.'

‘Maybe it's turning forty. Maybe the books lie. It's cruel.'

‘Oh come on – if it's from your hepatitis it'll pass. But tell me, what is being forty “like”?'

He told Belle what being forty is ‘like'.

 

You finally accept that you cannot drink a cup of hot take-away coffee and drive a car at the same time.

 

You doubt that you will ever go to a ‘party' again. Parties cease to be events of unlimited possibility.

 

You realise that you have spent forty years raising the child within you.

 

You find your ex-wife dying of cancer, that another friend has a noticeable lump on his face but you do not refer to it.

 

You read your CV with a comfortable curiosity to find out ‘what you really are'. You run through your credentials and life experiences to remind yourself that you have ‘fully lived'. You find yourself sitting in a bar
reading your passport reminding yourself of the world you've seen, about which you seem to recall so little.

 

You have a feeling that it's too late to bother a psychiatrist with your problems, too late to reconstruct yourself, that you have now to
live it out.
And you have a feeling that a psychiatrist wouldn't think it worth wasting time on you – too little life left to live usefully.

 

You have an urge to close up your life for a year and go to the seaside and re-read all the important books of your life; feeling that maybe you didn't read them properly when younger or that you would ‘get more from them' now. Or that you have forgotten too much of them.

 

You find that expressions like ‘doing what you like' and ‘being nice to yourself' are traps which answer nothing very much. Respite can only follow volatility of human interaction, stress and friction are part of life, and anxiety a fairly predictable background to a dangerous and uncertain world.

 

The excesses of life are too easily achieved, are not heroic, and yield less and less. You realise that the better pleasures are ‘managed', structured, carefully sculptured from a won life.

 

The past becomes closer, as you yourself have a history. Being forty gives you an understanding of what ‘forty
years' is in time, how close that is. Something that happened say fifty years before you were born becomes dramatically closer.

 

You see sleep as ‘part of life', not time wasted or something you ‘do too much of'. You learn to enjoy sleep. You see your dreams as an interesting part of living.

 

You realise the huge distance between written descriptions of biographical detail and the density of conflict and despair which lies in the minutes and hours of those biographical descriptions. That success is always disputed, qualified by self-doubt and challenged by the ever-changing hierarchy of following generations. The formal moments and rewards of success usually come after the desire for those formal moments and rewards has passed.

 

You have days where the repetition of nail-cutting, hair-cutting, teeth-cleaning, arse-wiping, and the ever-present deterioration of self and the material world about you, tires you beyond belief.

 

You still sometimes hope for a dramatic opening in your life, for your life to alter course after meeting someone, after receiving a letter. You sometimes wish to feel the dramatic upheaval, renovation and certainty of blind conversion.

You realise that you've never really got your life together. That there are parts of your life always in disarray, things not properly completed, living arrangements which could be improved, life practices which could be improved. You feel at times that you need to delimit your life so as to live a more reduced life more perfectly.

 

You notice that fragments of past night dreams, fragments of travel, inconsequential fragments of past relationships, childhood, begin to intrude or drift across your consciousness with no discernible pattern or meaning, perhaps with an intimation of insanity, derangement.

 

You realise that you have been ‘homeless' most of your life, living in other people's houses, in camps, in motels, in hotels. You have camped in life.

 

With regret you realise that no person with a system of knowledge is going to release you from intellectual dilemma. No book will now come along to seriously alter your life. You feel that you have a fair grasp of the current limitations of knowledge and reason, and the necessary, compromising uses of faith. You recognise that your personal, unstable formulations are held without much confidence to stave off the sands of chaotic reality, that a refinement might take their place but you also fear that the rational shoring might one day give way entirely. You are daily made aware of how
little reason and knowledge altered the course of affairs.

 

After coming to terms with the imperfect self it is then necessary to come to terms with the imperfect world, to calculate how much of the imperfection of self and the world you have to accommodate without restlessness, without engaging in ineffective efforts to change, efforts which are more protest and despair than hoped-for interventions. What parts to find unacceptable, to bewail, to retaliate against. How much evil to live with. How much mess. To calculate the ‘unchangeable'.

 

As well as the demands of being a loving person, from which you constantly fall short, you have to live with recrudescence of love for lovers lost, who come alive unannounced in your mind, dreams. Call to you. You find you cry over spilt love.

 

You learn that most things require a proper time for their performance for the thing to be savoured, to be performed with gratification. Including shopping.

 

You strive to keep all conversations exploratory and all positions negotiable and to avoid people who push conversation into competitiveness, or make you insecure or over-defensive, or cause you to perform poorly intellectually. Some people jam your mind and lower its quality of performance. Some people raise this performance.

You realise that nothing is really forgotten or lost to the mind, simply that access to the memory bank became erratic.

 

You read reports and letters written many years before and realise that you'd known much that you no longer consciously know. You hope that it is working for you in your chain of reasoning which stretched back twenty-five years.

 

The secret of negotiation is to break the deal into many smaller, tradeable parts.

 

You wonder if omens are unconsciously formed patterns made from myriad inputs and then erupting as signals, warnings, cautions, guidelines, messages – self-planted, self-addressed, but given this form for urgent dramatic revelation.

 

You are unable to determine whether you have led the richest of lives or the most miserable and deformed of lives.

 

‘Well,' Belle said, ‘is that all? Is that all you've learned?'

‘What is sad,' he said, ‘is that I've learned some of these things more than once.'

‘I think I'll wait until I have to learn some of those lessons,' she said.

‘Oh they come along in time, when they are no longer of much use.'