Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

“Have you learned your words?” she asks. “We'll have to go soon.”

He brings his hands to a prayer position. “Dynasty, develop, drip”—he pauses—“demolish, diamond, depend, desecrate, dilapidate.”

Eleanor walks to the tap and pours herself some water, spilling it down her as she drinks.

Poor Eleanor, he thinks; it makes him feel better to think it. He repeats it to himself as he watches her sponge up the water with tissues. Poor Eleanor, poor Eleanor, and feels the coffee wake him to a sense of himself as a tall man, a good tall man, a free man who can get up any time he wants and walk away.

Eleanor waits outside as she always does. He has been here before, he knows the room, and he knows the chair he has to sit in. As he takes a seat opposite the young woman the anticipation of before is replaced with a sudden fear and boredom. She is a woman, also a doctor or some such person. He wants to please her, he will not please her. The letters spring to his mind then sink back into a grey confusion. The woman's hair is as red as fox fur and she looks like, out of that uniform, she would not want be here at all asking this deranged old man what day it is. Her green eyes offer no solace. He coughs.

In the fifteen minutes that follow she takes the role of a ringmaster. He jumps, as obligingly as possible, through her hoops. She holds up objects: What is this? And this? What is this called? She makes notes and instructs him to fold a piece of paper in half, in four, into a triangle.

A triangle?

With the paper in quarters he looks to her for encouragement. He knows what a triangle is, it has three sides. How to make it from this? She tells him not to worry and asks him to count back from one hundred in multiples of seven; he does so until he reaches seventy-two and then is overcome with a weary anger, like that of the tiger who burns his paw going through a ring of fire and reflects long enough to wonder why on God's earth it must do this useless thing.

“Why am I here?” he asks suddenly. She looks at him long, a little pitifully, as if she is unsure what level the question is functioning on.

“We have to keep track of where you are,” she puts her fingers lightly to her temple, “so we can make sure you have the right medication and the right care.”

He nods.

“And where am I?”

“Where we would expect,” she says, leafing through papers in his file. “It's rather routine.” She lets her pen swing loosely between her fingers like a pendulum as she thinks. “You had a list of words, Jake, beginning with d. Can you tell me some of them? Any of them.”

She sits back in her chair, combing her fox hair with her fingers. How old is she? Young. Youngish. He contents himself that she is middle-aged, feeling that many people are middle-aged, the middle age being that which one sinks into on this great mattress of life. She looks beached, he thinks grimly. Cast like a horse. He no longer likes her. She would once have been pretty but now she is just irritating, and he is not going to pass this test. He can't even recall what it is she wants him to do.

“I'm sorry, could you just repeat that?” he says.

She nods in a businesslike fashion, but she looks unravelled. “You had a list of words beginning with d. Can you tell me some of them?”

He feels like an old tiger winding its jaded flanks around the ring, spying the scarlet-lipped woman from the corner of its eye, and seeing its weariness in her own.

“D,” he says, tapping his fingers. He closes his eyes to recall his loop of the house, the leaf banister, the draughty books. He wreathes like smoke up and down the two staircases. “Day,” he ventures. “Dip.” He is standing at the shore filling his pockets with stones; there are no children, only an ocean hushing out his logic with its expansive to-fro. He feels becalmed. “Dog,” he says.

After a long pause the woman leans forward. “Any more?”

“Yes, yes, there are a lot.” Sitting up straight, he joins his palms and strokes the bristle on his chin, giving his whole body to his mind. “Do,” he offers tentatively. She puts down her pencil. “That's fine,” she says.

He still has each of Joy's letters, a vast number by now. Letters from America, American stamps, their prices going up with the years. Here under the bed they are shored up in an almost violent darkness, sheathed in a leather satchel displaying the letters J.J. Instinctively, like an animal checking its territory, he smells the envelopes, particularly the small patches of semi-transparence where Joy (also like an animal, leaving her mark) had used to drop scented oil. The paper, once so ripely perfumed, gives little or no smell now.

What a gruesome mess. Secret letters from Joy to him. Secret letters from a man to Helen. Joy is a secret from Eleanor, Eleanor from Joy. Helen had a secret engagement; he kept it a secret that he ever knew about the engagement. The fox-haired woman — he is keeping the badness of it all a secret from her. Is this a normal life? All these deceptions; he will not be able to maintain them when the brain goes. Maybe it is the deceit that has rotted the brain. Already he is unsure whether Eleanor knows about the letters to Helen, or whether he has spoken to her about them. He feels the insufficiency of himself, the completely unsatisfactory way he has lived his life.

Yet when he opens Joy's letters at random and immerses himself in the words — not the meaning of them as such, just the words alone and their shapes — they do not feel deceitful, but rather the most honest thing in his life. Maybe they are pathetic, maybe they are, but they make him happy. The early letters, being the ones he has read the most, are thoroughly compressed in his mind, their contents rich and resinous. In those letters he and Joy were still able to draw on their physical memory of each other, and he could reference the fading of a bruise she had seen, and she could reference the fading of the hair dye that had been so new and red on their night together.

For a time it was always about fading. There was nothing they could say about their relationship — which had not even lasted twenty-four hours — except to express the loss of it. These are not the letters he wishes to find; he has lingered enough over the stench of loss — for it is a stench, no matter how sweetly packaged — and he has grown too old, surely, to spend time being unintelligent with love. He wants to read the letters as they evolved into something more reasoned — those letters in which he was most himself.

After some weeks of writing back and forth across the Atlantic, he and Joy began to play letter chess, the games continuing for weeks or months and Joy habitually destroying him; he had never been good at having too much thinking time, the more he thought the less bold he became and the more he would venture off into fool's errands with his pawns. While he went about defending his king she rampaged across the board with her knight and wiped him out.

Around these games the letters became more confident, more neutral, more pragmatic. Joy told him what clothes to buy to make himself modern. (He had so wanted to be modern, and she, with her startling red hair and rimmed eyes, and her androgyny that dismissed all notions of bellies and hips he had once held dear, was modernity in human form.) When he could, he took her advice. Helen liked the clothes Joy recommended; he came to believe that the three-way arrangement brought about a harmony that two people alone could never accomplish.

What pleased him in Joy was that she showed herself to be a factual, practical person; she was fed up with women who skewed all they saw with the wide curves of sentiment and empathy, as if their thoughts could not come straight but had to be filtered through their bodies first. She said she was homesick, so had bought herself an American dictionary and a book on Californian history to indoctrinate herself against England. These tactics having not worked well, he informed her that America was a huge grid. Each township was originally six miles square, that is, how many? How many square miles, he now wonders? He can remember the letter perfectly, and the stolid exhilaration he felt when he wrote it, and yet the sum disintegrates in his brain. Fifty? A hundred? A thousand? It is so painfully frustrating to not know; but he is tired, increasingly tired and agitated, and he has never been able to think clearly when tired and agitated. All the same, six miles square. A huge grid, a huge pattern like an immense chessboard. To counter her longing for home she had to stop seeing America as something that was never quite England, and start seeing it as a game she needed to learn to play.