Memory Theater (5 page)

Michel knew that he was doomed. Did Elizabeth know too? Is that why she left him? She saw from the map that he would have no children. Michel could see the date, time, cause, and location of his death:
“0421 h
,
le 18 août 2003, La Verrière (Yvelines), crise cardiaque.”
I checked the precise details with my friend Beatrice in Reims, who had been a student and close friend of Michel. La Verrière was the little town to the southwest of Paris where Michel had spent his final years in a sanatorium. Knowing his fate, he had simply lost the will to live. He arrived dead just on time.

I moved
more rapidly through the stack of charts with a growing sense of unease. All of the remaining maps were devoted to philosophers who had been either superiors or contemporaries of Michel or whom he had met and become curious about, such as his predecessor Sarah Kofman, Reiner Schürmann (whose name was on my office door when I arrived in New York and remained. It felt like a tomb), Emmanuel Levinas, André Schuwer, Gilles Deleuze, Dominique Janicaud, Michel Henry, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. I thought this was clearly some eccentric mark of affection. Michel had secretly designed memory maps for the philosophers he admired and had met. But that hypothesis fell to pieces with the next discoveries.

Digging deeper, I found maps for philosophers who had died or were to die after Michel’s death. What was so terrifying was that all the predictions
proved to be true, although Michel couldn’t possibly have known that. There was a chart for his longtime acquaintance Jacques Derrida, who would die from the effects of pancreatic cancer in October 2004, four months after I first discovered his map, at the same age as his father, who had died of the same disease. Richard Rorty, whom Michel had met and befriended during his frequent visits to Paris in the early 1990s, would die from the same disease as Derrida on June 8, 2007. Michel’s maps seemed deadly accurate.

Six maps remained unread. I knew all the names and they were all still very much alive and a few of them were close friends of mine.
*
Mine was fourth in the pile. My throat dried, but my mind was crystal clear. I made sure I was alone. As I put the magnifying glass to my eyes, I felt strangely exhilarated rather than afraid. I also suddenly recalled very clearly that when I’d met Michel in Perugia, as usual, in 1994, he’d asked me for my birth details, exact time and place. He was
very insistent about the accuracy of the information I provided. I had to call my mum to find out (Saturday, 27 February 1960. 1500h. My dad was at the football: LFC/YNWA). I remember saying half-jokingly to Michel: “What, are you going to make my astrological chart?” He smiled.

I peered through the magnifying glass at my destiny. The detail was fascinating. Working through the concentric circles, I moved among briefly noted events in my life that Michel couldn’t possibly have known about: my father’s apprenticeship at Camel Laird shipyard in Birkenhead, his job as a sheet metal worker, my mother’s breast cancer in 1971, his infidelities, their divorce, the industrial accident in 1978, the names of the bands I played in, the dates of my university education, my ex-wife’s name, my son’s date of birth, the facts of our separation and estrangement, even the job in New York, followed by another job in the Netherlands, apparently beginning in 2009. In the inner circle was a list of works beginning with
The Ethics of Deconstruction
in 1992 and
Very Little … Almost Nothing
in 1997, both of which I had given to Michel. I don’t think he read them. No matter. The list continued with perfect accuracy until 2004 and then on into the future. It appeared that I would publish a book
on Wallace Stevens in 2005 (weirdly, this was already largely written); something called
Infinitely Demanding
in 2007, dedicated to my mother (I laughed); and
The Book of Dead Philosophers
in 2008 (or was it 2009? Hard to read). After that, the handwriting became nearly illegible. There was something written in German on mysticism, and then some final titles. Illegible. Did that say “tragedy”? Maybe. There was the name
“Hamlet”
with a question mark beside it. I had no idea. Funny, there was no mention of the text that you are now reading.

I tried to resist looking through at the center of the circle, with the date of my death. But there it was:
“le 13 Juin, 2010, 1551h, Den Bosch, hémorragie cérébrale.”
Cerebral hemorrhage. OK. I was expecting lung cancer. But where the fuck was Den Bosch?

Initially
, the news didn’t affect me much. Rather like Wittgenstein receiving word of his terminal cancer with great relief, I found some solace in knowing exactly when I would die. I simply decided to put the whole incident out of my mind. It worked. I spent the next days packing my books and emptying my office. I met with Robert twice and was evasive when asked about the memory maps. We arranged for a small Michel Haar archive to be established at the university, and I would write an introductory text for the library website. I took my memory map and a handful of Michel’s manuscripts with me and returned to the gloriously suffocating heat of my first summer in New York City.

At first, everything was fine. I told no one about the map, for shame at taking seriously such superstitious nonsense. It was my dirty little secret. I decided to commit myself quietly to fulfilling my fate. It was all terribly
easy. The writing of books and papers flowed in exactly the sequence that Michel had predicted without even willing them into being. I slept well. I had a series of enlivening and transient relationships. I did my job well and was popular at work. I lived contentedly in my spacious one-bedroom apartment in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. I did a wonderful job at concealing the anxiety which unconsciously consumed me. Time passed.

In 2007, I was awarded a fellowship at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and spent the year in the comfortable sterility of Brentwood, just west of the 405 freeway, on Sunset Boulevard. I drove a silver Volkswagen Passat and had an office overlooking the Pacific Ocean, a compliant research assistant, and the use of the UCLA library. In seven months, I had written my book on how philosophers die. It was funny, full of impressively wide reading, and utterly shallow. Prior to the financial collapse of 2008 and the withering of the publishing industry, I made decent money on book deals and rights sales. Pleased with myself, I returned to New York for another round of teaching, commitment-free relationships, and vacuous socializing. I even started doing yoga. I thought about writing a book on happiness. My newly acquired agent thought it would be a great idea. Thoughts without a thinker. Cool.

In January 2008
, during a bitterly cold day when it was almost too painful to inhale the winter air, a box was delivered to my place by UPS and left in the hallway. When I got back that evening, I saw that it had been sent by Barbara at Essex. It was clearly the missing box,
Taurus
. Smaller than the others. It sat on my desk all night. A strange fear ran through me, preventing the beautifully dreamless sleep I had enjoyed since getting back from Los Angeles. I called Barbara the next morning and she said that the box had just turned up unannounced, addressed to me as before, with no letter or explanation.

I got back from work that evening around 7:00 p.m. and began to drink freely, staring blankly at the box. I inspected it carefully, handling the box gingerly. Something shifted when I turned it on its side. I slit the wrapping tape very carefully with a Stanley
knife and opened the box. Underneath a pile of Alsatian newspapers was a circular wooden object, about a foot and a half in diameter and eight inches high. The top lifted off to reveal a tiny auditorium full of painted figures on seven elevated rows with the amphitheater divided by seven tiny gangways. It was a maquette of Giulio Camillo’s memory theater. It was exquisite. I retrieved my copy of
The Art of Memory
and began to look at the illustrations. Was this the original model that Camillo had used to persuade the king of France to become his patron?

My landlady’s family owned an antiques business, mainly importing repro stuff from Italy. Business was bad. I showed her father the theater some days later. Any suggestion of antiquity was quickly dismissed. He disassembled the base of the theater to reveal the carpenter’s mark, the initials “D.M.” and a date, 1986—the year after Mongin had completed Michel’s memory map. The maquette was a reproduction, probably assembled in Paris from descriptions in Yates and some drawings in the Bibliothèque Nationale. I’d seen some of the latter in an obscure edition of Camillo that I had bought from Rudi Thoemmes Rare Books in Bristol.

The theater sat on a table beside my bed for weeks. I liked to feel it close by. Oddly reassuring. That was
when the hallucinations began. Difficult to explain. Embarrassing. I began to experience inexplicable pains in my body, something like growing pains, moving within me against my will. It made any concentration impossible. I would lie facedown on the floor and feel the pain in my body move from organ to organ. Belly pain. Kidney pain. Brain pain. Lung pain. I felt like a body bag of organs. This would go on for hours.

Next, my visual perception seemed to be affected by all sorts of marginal encroachments. It felt like interference on an old-fashioned T.V. set. Suddenly, when walking down the street, I would see something moving or flying quickly in the far corner of my visual field. I would turn my head to look, but it was gone. Things got worse, to the point where the perceptual surface of the world began to warp and bend. It was like being in a hall of mirrors. Or in a movie adaptation of a Philip K. Dick short story. This was accompanied with a massive increase in my tinnitus and strange auditory effects, like the sound of rain, or wind, or leaves, or distant muttering voices.

A week later and I was hallucinating wildly on the subway, seeing doubles of myself or watching strange animals, reminiscent of grotesque carvings in Gothic cathedrals, float around the subway car. Were they
angels? Were my body and perception being invaded by some alien force? Was God punishing me? In order to reduce the massive levels of anxiety I was feeling, I began to disengage from the world. I went into the city just twice a week to teach and returned home immediately. Then, one evening during a lecture I was giving in early April, I experienced the most terrifying auditory hallucinations. A cacophony of voices engulfed me and then the furniture in the lecture theater began to elevate. I became convinced that everyone in the room, including myself, was dead. I could smell my own flesh rotting. Terrified and covered in shame, I gathered my things from the office, left the building, and never returned.

Alone for weeks on end, I started to think that my computer was attacking me and began to keep a careful log of events. I called it electronic harassment (EH). Here is a sample log entry transcribed from the longhand version written in pencil in order to minimize technological contact:

I went to see
a psychiatrist with psychoanalytic sympathies on the Upper East Side. Expensive. Platitudinous. Useless. He suggested hospitalization and prescribed antipsychotic drugs. At least I got an extended sick leave from my professorship and stayed at home every day. The only people I talked to were my landlady and her cat, Frances (“For by stroking him I have found out electricity / For I perceived God’s light about him both wax and fire / For the Electrical fire is the spiritual substance …”).

One insomniac night, during the usual hell of physical pain that I had got used to, I could feel something happening in my head. It felt like the loosening of a blockage, or a shifting of psychological tectonic plates. Sudden elation. The fear disappeared. An overwhelming mania washed over me. The physical pain that accompanied the hallucinations and which
invaded my body was brusquely transformed. My contracted melancholic ego swelled up like a Montgolfier balloon to fill the universe. I had stopped taking the medicine days before because it just made me more miserable and robbed me of what had become my one comfort: my visions. Now they were an aurora borealis. My body was a buzzing antenna into which radio waves flooded from the entire cosmos. I was the living switchboard of the universe. My skull was a magnetized globe.