Robert Stone - Children of Light

Waking, he saw aqueous light on the blue-white ceiling — the morning sun reflected from the swimming pool just outside the window. The moment he raised his head the poison struck; thirst, nausea, a barbed pain behind the eyes. When he turned he felt the warm girl beside him, naked, belly down. He reached out, and with the lightest touch his sodden state could bring to bear, ran his fingers along the small of her back, over her buttocks and firm thigh. In his first moments of consciousness, he had not been able to remember who it was there. The touch of her cool young skin brought recollection quickly enough.

As gently and silently as he could, he climbed out of bed and padded across the tiles to the chair on which he had piled his clothes the night before. He did not want to wake her, wanted to be alone in spite of his loneliness.

Dressed, he went out through the bedroom door and found himself in her enormous kitchen. It was stark white, gleaming with steel and glass, resplendent with morning. At the tap, he drank long and breathlessly, resting his elbows on the cold edge of the sink. He wet his hand and rubbed his face. When he looked up he saw brown mountains through the kitchen window, a steep ridge crowned with mist commanding a neat green valley. It was a shimmering day, dappled with promise.

“Fucking California,” he said aloud. He was still half drunk.

Even after twenty years he was not immune to California mornings. He supposed they must represent the pursuit of happiness to him.

He closed his eyes and gripped the sink. His eyes were swollen. They want pennies, he thought. Pennies over them. He took a deep breath, swallowed and drew himself erect.

Now go, he told himself.

Adjoining the white kitchen was a small dining area. A little spiral sculpture of a stairway led down to the living room, where he had left his bags. He opened his suitcase across the sofa and rummaged through it for clean socks, underwear, a fresh shirt. Gathering up the clothes, he went to the spare bathroom and locked himself in against the fulsomeness of the morning. He turned on the shower, trying to calm himself with the familiar sound of the spray. His hands trembled. He was about to be afraid.

Instantly he was sick, vomiting into the fixture, sweating, dysenteric. Purged for the moment, he sat down on the covered toilet seat, holding his head in his hands. Desolation.

Of course he was poisoned. He had been poisoning himself for weeks.

As he stepped into the shower, he caught sight of himself in a mirror on the door of the medicine cabinet. The thing itself. Unaccommodated man. He did not let his gaze linger.

Standing under the veil of warm water, he began to recite. He made his voice large, comically orotund:

“Thou art the thing itself,” he declared to the tiny white room. “Unaccommodated man is no more than such a poor bare forked animal as thou art.”

He felt better then, but only for a while. A wave of regret had massed and was advancing on him; he had hardly time for breath before it ran him down. Bitterness — stifling, sour, the color of jaundice, gagging him.

“Pour on,” he declaimed, “I will endure. On such a night …” He stopped and fell silent.

At times like the one he was presently enduring, Walker, who was a screenwriter, would think of the days behind him as a litter of pictures. Light on the water, his wife at twenty, a sky, a city, his children at tender ages. One remembered image or another might move him almost to tears, then presently the emotion stirred would seem trivial and false, like some of the scenes he had written. His phantoms of conscience, his deepest regrets would appear petty, vulgar and ridiculous. These moods afforded Walker a vision of his life as trash — a soiled article, past repair. Observing things compose themselves into this bleak spectacle, Walker would wonder if he had ever had the slightest acquaintance with any kind of truth.

He held fast to the safety bar in the shower stall. What we need here is a dream, he told himself, a little something to get by on. For the past few weeks, he had been getting by on alcohol and a ten-gram stash of cocaine and he had begun to feel as though he might die quite soon.

Showered, he stepped out of the stall, dried himself on the guest towel and, avoiding the mirror, checked out the medicine cabinet. To his sharp delight, he found a little tube of Valium beside a bottle of vitamin B complex. The perfect hostess, he thought. A marvelous girl.

When he had helped himself to a five-milligram tablet of Valium and some B complex, he stepped on the bathroom scale, closed the cabinet and was confronted once more with his own image. Men Walker’s age were held to be responsible for their faces, a disquieting notion. But his was hardly a mask of depravity. He drew himself erect and stared it down. Just a face, quite an ordinary one. Caught, he squinted to examine the creature in the glass. It was his business to know how he looked; he worked as an actor from time to time. He looked, he decided, like a man in his forties who drank. For most of his life he had appeared younger than his age. Perhaps it was just the light, he thought. He looked away and stepped on the bathroom scale.

Walker found that he weighed just over one hundred and seventy pounds, which he thought not bad for one his height and build. He poked two fingers under his rib cage on the right side, checking for evidence of liver enlargement. Everything seemed as usual there.

Stepping off the scale, he blundered into his reflection yet again. This time he was paralyzed with the fear of death. He turned away and leaned against the wall, closing his eyes, taking deep deliberate breaths. It took him some moments to calm himself. His inner resources were in some disarray, he thought. Valium would have to serve in the present emergency. Another line from Lear came into his mind: “he hath ever but slenderly known himself.”

For the first time in his articulate, thoroughly examined life, Walker wondered if that might not be true of him. Not possible, he decided. He knew himself well enough. It was the rest of things that gave him trouble.

He dressed. Returning to the kitchen, he half filled a water glass with vodka, then poured clam and tomato juice mixture over it. Walking carefully down the stairway, he sprawled beside his suitcase on the light gray sofa and savored the cozy impeccability of Bronwen’s living room. When he had taken a few sips of his drink, he reached into the lining of the case and drew out the fold of pink notepaper that contained his ready-to-hand cocaine. He set the envelope on the coffee table in front of him but left it unopened.

How well she lives, he thought, for one so young. He himself was homeless and had been so for more than a month.

Walker worked in the film industry, having come into it seventeen years before as an actor. He had gone through the Hagen-Berghof studios with the thought of learning the theater and becoming a playwright. A few years later he had written the book and lyrics for a very serious and ambitious musical version of Jurgen and been astonished to see it fail utterly within a week. There had never been a play and he had come to realize that there would never be. Walker made his living — quite a good one — chiefly as author, adjuster or collaborator on film scripts. During the past summer, he had been acting again, on stage for the first time in years as Lear. Over the years he had advanced in station within the old black fairy tale. At different phases of his life he had played Cornwall’s servant, then Cornwall, then Kent, finally the King. He was still up on Lear-ness, chockablock with cheerless dark and deadly mutters, little incantations from the text. They were not inappropriate to his condition; during the run of the show his wife had left him.