Geoff Dyer - Zona - A Book About a Film about a Journey to a Room

But perhaps that is and always will be one’s deepest wish: to have the terms of the offer slightly amended so that it can be retrospectively applied, to build a time machine, to go back and have another go, another punt, another throw of the dice, this time knowing the result in advance. The question, I suppose, is this: is one’s deepest desire always the same as one’s greatest regret?

If so, then my greatest regret is, without doubt, one I share with the vast majority of middle-aged, heterosexual men: that I’ve never had a three-way, never had sex with two women at once. Is that pathetic or is it wisdom? If the former then it might well be the latter as well. I look back now and see that there were a couple of chances but, at the time — both times, in fact — it didn’t occur to me. That’s one of life’s subtle lessons: you may never know when the opportunity to have the thing you most want will present itself — for the simple reason that, at that moment, it may not be the thing you most want. I remember very clearly when the first of these potential opportunities presented itself, in my squalid flat in Brixton in the mid-1980s: I wanted to get rid of Jane so that my girlfriend Cindy and I could have sex, even though I knew that Jane (with whom I had had sex on numerous occasions since we had officially broken up) and Cindy were not averse to this kind of thing. The sense of a wasted chance was further exacerbated by the fact that, years later, when I had bro-ken up with Cindy, she did in fact have sex with Jane and an unidentified third party (male). The other occasion was in Brighton when my girlfriend from Belgrade was visiting and we went to a party where we all took ecstasy and my friend Kathy told me that she and my girlfriend from Belgrade were going to have a lesbian affair, which was fine with me as long as I could be around too. The problem was that Kathy’s boyfriend, Michael, was also around (and likewise wished I wasn’t).

You think this is unworthy of the moment and the mystical opportunity of the Room? Well, that’s for the Room to decide. The Room reveals all: what you get is not what you think you wish for but what you most deeply wish for. In which case my fear is that my deepest wish might not be to have had Jane sitting on my face and Cindy on my dick but something really embarrassing, something that I would not want to be made public. Like what? That instead of basking in the fact that I’d managed to get a squalid, rent-controlled flat in Brixton I’d somehow cobbled together money for the deposit to buy a flat in the area when prices, as a result of the riots — or ‘uprisings’ as we insisted on calling them — were at an alltime low, ideally a council flat during the big Thatcherite sell-off to which we were all bitterly opposed. I bet that’s the universal wish of most people in the Western world: that they’d got on the property ladder earlier. Even the ones who got on the property ladder early, who realized there was no point supporting Scargill and the miners, who bought flats while the rest of us were sticking ‘Coal not Dole’ badges on our donkey jackets, probably wish they’d got on the property ladder earlier, before council flats were up for grabs, or, failing that, the moment they went on sale, when you could buy a hard-to-let for a thousand quid and still have change left over for the first issue of cut-price British Telecom shares. What else? I keep coming back to the 1980s, when I could have grown my hair long, before it became all grey and tragic, before I began looking like the kind of middle-aged man constantly thinking of all the three-ways — two at any rate — that he didn’t have, that went begging, like threebedroom council flats that are now worth three hundred times what they were thirty years ago.

But let’s assume the Room’s power is effective immediately, not retroactively. If your deepest desire is the one manifested by your daily life and habits, then mine, apparently, is to potter about, to potter my life away, drift-ing from desk to kitchen (to make tea), from house to café (to have coffee). It all comes down to that line in Solaris about never knowing when we’re going to die. If I had a week left to live it would be absurd to potter around my house like this. I’d rather be doing something exciting (though what that something might be for the moment escapes me). No, I need to give this a bit of thought. If I had a week left to live? Fly to an idyllic beach in Thailand or the Bahamas? But then I’d spend twelve hours on a plane and another three days shattered by jet lag, lying awake in the middle of the night, too tired to get up, and flopping around in the day, trying to stay awake so that I could sleep the next night. So it’s difficult. The basic assumption is that if you had very little time left you would not do what you’re doing now. But that’s why this life of the writer, this life where you spend your time doing pretty much what you want, is quite different. So, given that I probably am going to be around for a while, this is pretty much my deepest desire at the moment, to sit here scribbling, trying to fathom out what my deepest desire might be.

In any case the whole idea of the Room is a joke. Perhaps our deepest wish in life is that there could be a place like this, a Room where our deepest wish comes true. Extrapolating from that, we don’t want to get to the point where we discover that we actually don’t want this Room to exist, that even if it existed we wouldn’t enter it, that even if we could buy ourselves the nicest piece of steak in the supermarket we would save the money instead or spend it on beer and crisps, that even if I did get the chance for a three-way it would turn out that I couldn’t get it up because I felt the odd man out, that it was actually a two-way with a third person (me) feeling superfluous. We want the Room to be external to ourselves, like the football pools or the lottery. We want it to do the work, want it to be a window on to another world, not a mirror reflecting back to ourselves the inadequate or shameful nature of our own desires, which probably do not operate on this one vote, once, kind of basis. One’s deepest desire changes from day to day, moment to moment. There were plenty of occasions, in my twenties, when my most intense desire — so intense that it was impossible to see beyond it — was to have a beer, to get to the boozer before last orders, before time was called. Those days are gone but there are still times — when I’m in the cinema, watching a film I’ve wanted to see for ages — when all I want to do, the thing that I crave with every fibre of my being, is to shut my eyes and take a nap. (‘The eye wants to sleep,’ writes the poet, ‘but the head is no mattress.’)

Anyway, the long and the short of it is that Writer doesn’t want to go into the Room or, in Stalker’s optimistic reading of the situation, is not ready to go in just yet. This reluctance or hesitation is a specifically middle-aged problem. In your twenties there’d be no disjuncture at all between what you thought you wanted and your innermost wish; both would be the same, lying at the same depths within. It’s one of the reasons why middle-aged people are reluctant to take powerful psychedelic drugs. I had the idea that in my mid-fifties I would start taking LSD again, was actually looking forward to seeing that acid ripple of the ground again, but now that it’s only a few years away, the prospect seems altogether less appealing than it did a decade ago. What kind of stuff would tripping unearth? Probably that I had no desire to trip. Even if I waited for a perfect day, for cloudless weather in the sky and in the head, it might turn out that, unbeknownst to me, a dreadful storm was about to brew up in the head, in which case the bright conditions outside would only exacerbate the abysmal depression within, that before I knew it I’d end up in the damp and clammy meat grinder, putting one foot in front of another in a state of abject terror.