Here and Then

A cave’s echo faded behind me. He was saying, “You have eighty five years. See you in eighty five years.” When I asked, “Are you sure I’m not making a big mistake?” he replied, “Everyone is always making a big mistake. You have eighty five years to realise that.” And that was the last time I heard him, and the last I remember his voice. From the moment I was placed in the womb, to begin a nine-month-long slumber, I would be forgetting, bit by bit: him, me, them, everything, so that when I was finally born, I would know and remember nothing.

Nine months is a concept you don’t really grasp when you are in a womb. Gestation is worse than unconsciousness; it is a state of non-consciousness. You see no light, and there is no moon spinning above your head, so you don’t know that time is passing. Until the arrival of glimmers of another sort of awareness than you have ever felt before- the thing that you will come to call physical -and then you are thrust out of the darkness and the warmth and the blood. Bewildered and stunned, I lay in strange hands, not moving. I didn’t understand. I didn’t actually feel the pain until I saw them cut the chord that linked me to her. That is when I felt, for the first time ever, alone.

I saw her. In blood and anguish. I saw her. I swear I remember it.

I was one of two dozen born in that hospital that night. My arrival was inauspicious in every way but this: that I saw it all happen. There were impulses, little surges of annoyance or small bits of confusion sparking here and there in the landscape of my mind that only resolved themselves into thoughts when I was asleep again. Then I understood.

“I want to go back. I don’t like it here,” I said. But he didn’t reply.

Something had gone wrong. I wasn’t supposed to remember him. I wasn’t supposed to remember any of it.

Lingering memories of being unborn made my childhood difficult for a time. My infancy was frustrating because my body and my voice could not articulate what my soul wanted to say, many times what it wanted to scream. I would be embarrassed in the end at having to cry, having make such a fuss over a thing as simple as a blanket that I wanted to be wrapped a bit closer.

And I never really got to love her. My mother was so separate, so blatantly another thing, that I could not resolve myself to love her. I hypothesized that it was dependence, or the feeling that one is a part of her that makes men, children, infants love their mothers. And I hated my dependence and I could never forget the feeling that I was definitely not a part of her. I just landed in a part of her. And something went wrong. How was I to know she was not to blame? I think, in some ways, I hated her.

After years passed, I eventually got used to things. One of the blessings of mortal life is that there is nothing you cannot settle into. By the time I could talk I knew that I had to keep my secret closed and tell no one. So when I ran with the other children under the sunlight, chasing after footballs, climbing trees, hunting wild pigeons with catapults then roasting them on little three-stone fires and fighting over the charred meat and running again when some grown-up found us and yelled at us for playing with fire, I knew, though the others did not, that our bodies were just the vehicles, our actions just the route. What the point really was was to drink the sun. Because souls love the sun. In both nature and supernature, this is true.

I was diagnosed, by the school guidance counsellor, with Seasonal Affective Disorder. She was an excitable and eager woman, two years out of university, who had spent one year looking for a job. She had been on the point of despair when this one came along. It saved her faith, and she felt she owed it to this redeemer to give it her all. She was determined to get the psychology of every student in the school categorized. What she really did was try to get a category of neurosis for every student who came her way.
The first of my many referrals to her came when the teachers noticed that I sometimes seemed distracted and impatient. Some said I was daydreaming, others preferred to think that I was just lapsing, suddenly, into a state of stupidity in which I would just stop thinking. They did what teachers in those days did: they caned me for it. But I had learnt to separate myself from the things going on in my body. The sirens and the clamour in the nerves could not alarm me because I knew they were not really mine. They were the body’s. So I sometimes seemed distracted during the caning.
Then they sent me to the guidance counsellor, who said I had ADD, then that I was dyslexic. Then she gave up on the major dysfunctions and the last she gave me was the Seasonal Affective Disorder. Because, though it happens to everyone to some extent, it was profound with me. When clouds covered the sky, everything in the world darkened and lost colour and I was inconsolable- nothing could make me smile.

In my youth I discovered love, and lust, and that this body could actually be fun. Because when lush hair and small hands combined with dimples and a low voice, things in me stirred and the excitement spurred me to toil on even though I knew I was spending energy on a doomed endeavour. In the times when she was looking the other way and I was alone again, I would ruminate on the lack of a word for this. Relationships? Affairs? Whatever they were, didn’t she know they always failed? No one stays in love forever; love dies. Once you start it you are on the way to the end.
But while you’re in it, while she is looking up at you, or calling you bitter names, or combing her hair in the mirror, or asking where you have been when you were not at her side, or biting your ear, at those times you forget that you are hurtling towards a precipice. Maybe that is why I was so addicted to romance. It involved forgetting.

They hated me when it ended. They resented my lack of regret, the fact that I was not surprised when I found that they did not love me anymore.
Later on, they would resent me for my refusal to get married, but I did not want to have children. Many emotions are physical. Fear is not. Fear is from the very core of your soul and is the truest thing you ever feel.

But when I got into middle age, I began to get restless. I got impatient. Tired of waiting, I began to do stupid, desperate things.
When I was fifty, I had my first suicide attempt. I wanted to slit my wrists, but then, that would leave a lot of grief behind. The family. Mother, father, their only child a suicide?
I tried the more discreet suicides first. The overdose of sleeping pills. I was taken to the hospital and told I was lucky to have been found in time. The next time I doubled the number of pills and when I left the hospital mother sternly warned me to throw away the pills and learn to use liquor like normal people.
So the next time I got drunk and leapt into the road in front of a night bus. It was one of those buses that cross the country from border to border. When they are out of the city, the road is deserted and the driver feels he can comfortably step on it and switch half his mind off. It is easy to kill a man then.

The hospital kept on calling it a miracle. That the bus driver had seen me, that he had missed me so narrowly, that I escaped alive.
Twenty passengers died when the bus swerved off the road and overturned. And all I had was mud on my face and envy. And a broken hand that made sure I never tried again. I didn’t want to jump off a building only for another miracle to mean I have to spend thirty-five years bedridden.

But my restlessness was not purged. So I married someone. She was thirty-eight at the time. A career woman. I think she was lonely and knew she was kind and she thought I was lonely too so she kindly agreed to marry me.

I don’t want to know whether my years with her made her loneliness worse. I could find out but I don’t want to know. She wanted someone to be close to and I was always miles away. I tried to make her happy, but where it mattered most I was useless. How do you explain the irritation of dampness to a fish? I never did understand what loneliness was like.

I was walking slowly down a road in the busy shopping centre of the town I had retired to when I finally died. They drive carelessly on that road, and there is no pavement. For an old man at night, that means a dizzying and confusing blur of headlights. I was dazzled for a moment by the glare of lights that seemed to be coming from all angles at once. Blaring horns befuddled me further. I found myself helplessly staggering into the road. It wasn’t the first time this had happened but it was the last. I heard the screech and a woman scream right after I felt the car ram into my back and it was moments after, looking at myself on the ground, twisted in half, that I realised what had happened. I hadn’t expected it this soon. I had turned eighty-five only a month before.

This time there was no gestation. Just a sound like bells blowing- that is the only way it can be described- as the world below fell away. And a feeling of lightness. This was unlike the unborn. I don’t know how I can describe it to you, but it was the opposite in almost every way. The unborn we were one: The unborn. Here the dead were individuals, each with a name.
I found one and began to talk. He was friendly and we were soon comfortable together. I was about to feel something I hadn’t felt in eighty-five years, about to feel like I was at home. Then I asked him what his life was like before he died.
He asked what I meant.
What you did on earth, in life.
He did not understand the words, he said.
Life, I repeated. Mankind, earth.
Again, he said he did not understand. No one I have asked understands. They do not remember it.