Lars Iyer - Wittgenstein Jr

Conversation is dopey, making Ede impatient. Where are the Clare College girls Mulberry promised? Ede needs girls!

EDE: Have you ever been in love, Peters? I mean really in love?

Ede speaks of his romance with a Master’s daughter. Her summer dress and flip-flops … A lily pond … A raft … Skinny-dipping … A bottle of champagne chilling in the water …

Great love will be the making of him, he’s sure of it, Ede says. Only romance will teach him what to do with his life.

The bathroom. Guthrie’s in the tub, reenacting the death of Seneca under Doyle’s direction.

GUTHRIE/SENECA: As long as you live, keep learning how to live; and this is as true for me, today, as it is for any of you. Expectation is the greatest impediment to living; running ahead to tomorrow, it loses today. The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity …

How noble Guthrie seems! How profound!

GUTHRIE/SENECA: Sometimes even to live is an act of courage .

Guthrie sniffs cocaine from a mirror. Ede rubs some on his gums (it acts more quickly this way, he says). Mulberry, trousers down, applies his cocaine rectally (it’s even quicker this way, he says).

The second bedroom (set aside for ketamine, Mulberry tells us). It’s dark inside. The music thumps up from downstairs, bass magnified through the floorboards. Slumped individuals, among them Scroggins … Is it Scroggins? Yes: there he is, lost in a K-hole.

The third bedroom, Mulberry’s, up a second flight of stairs. Posters. Mapplethorpe’s men fisting. A large drawing of a headless man, with a labyrinth for viscera and a death’s head for genitals, holding a knife in one hand and a bleeding heart in another. A glassed-in roof terrace, full of straggly marijuana plants.

Mulberry laces a spliff with codeine and passes it round. We have to lie down, it’s so strong.

The roofs of Cambridge! We’re on top of the world! The sky above us. The sky: an abyss. The night: a great cave. What a night to lose our minds!

Benwell is letting off fireworks in the garden. Bursts of colour. Cerise. Vermillion. A Catherine wheel spinning. A smouldering fire, spitting out sparks. Ede says he can feel the fireworks. Mulberry says he can taste the pink ones.

Three AM. The girls are here. We lie on our bellies, watching them from the terrace. Girls in Barbour jackets, in vintage fur.

How beautiful the girls are! How beautiful, the fireworks! And we’re beautiful, too. All the young are beautiful.

Wittgenstein’s brother took his life at twenty , we muse. He knew he was all washed up at twenty . At our age! And we haven’t even begun to live! We haven’t done anything. We haven’t failed at anything. Our lives lie ahead of us. Wittgenstein says we haven’t been tested yet, Mulberry reminds us.

To kill yourself at twenty! To have finished with life at twenty! To have run out of options at twenty! Twenty: and for your life to have run its course. To be twenty is surely to be stood at the brink of life! To be twenty is yet to have turned the page !

Perhaps that’s what it means to be brilliant, really brilliant, we speculate: to have already seen past the limits of life. To have seen all the way to the end.

Is that what brilliance means: understanding the whole of life, seeing the whole? Is it that we’re not clever enough to kill ourselves? We don’t want to die — not now, not today: is this a sign of our shallowness?

The girls are playing with sparklers. The girls are cooing with delight about their sparklers. How beautiful they are, the girls with their sparklers, making loops in the air …

They can’t help their beauty, we agree. It has nothing to do with them. It has nothing to do with any of us. We are young, so young. But what does our youth mean ?

A cry from downstairs. Scroggins!

Down we go, forcing our way through the crowds on the staircase. A glimpse of a glassy-eyed Chakrabarti, with a beer backpack and a suction tube. Of Guthrie, snoring on the floor. Both Kirwins in sweaty snogs with Clare College girls.

Then Scroggins, like Kurtz at the end of Apocalypse Now . Muttering obscurely. Running his hand over his face. We can’t understand what he’s saying … The overturning of nonsense … Half words, non-words, speech thickening and wandering and failing …

And then he’s out — cold. Locked into his private hell.

Ede googles ketamine. Causes dissociative anaesthesia , he reads. That means you can’t tell whether you’re dreaming or awake, he says. Ketamine can make you feel you’ve died and come back to life , he reads. I’m not sure Scroggins is going to come back to life, I say.

We wave our hands in front of Scroggins’s eyes. Nothing. And he smells terrible! Has he soiled himself? Yes! Yes, he has! Scroggins is incontinent!

Mulberry suggests administering MDMA — that’ll pick him up. Ede shakes his head. No. It’s probably best to call the authorities.

Scroggins is groaning. A deep, abysmal groan. A gurgling in the throat. A kind of living death rattle …

Paramedics come for Scroggins, lifting him onto a stretcher. Would anyone like to accompany him? No! The ambulance rolls off, lights flashing.

Ede and I walk off into the night, to let our heads cool off.

EDE: That girl! That girl! Did you see her?

I shake my head.

EDE (swigging from his bottle): How could you miss her, Peters? She was a dead-ringer for that Cressida — Prince Harry’s girl. You know, hippyish. Plaits. Scarf round her hips. Anyway, she’s my future wife … She’s Duchess Ede … (Another swig.) Fuck Scroggins and his emergency. I hope he fucking dies. (A third swig.) Have you ever felt you were made for something , Peters? That you had some greater purpose ? That’s what I feel now: I’m made for something. It’s all becoming clear. It’s to do with that Clare College girl. It’s providence. It’s fate . (Fourth swig.) All the light of the world seemed to rest on her face — did you notice that, Peters?

Ede throws the bottle over a hedge and loses his balance. Ede, flat on his back on the pavement.

He has a faith he never knew he possessed, Ede says. He has means he never knew he had … He feels taller than he was.

EDE (sitting up): Am I really taller, Peters?

He’s high, he says, as I pull him to his feet. Higher than he’s ever been. And it’s not drugs. It’s life! Life! He’s never going to sleep.

He has a sense of the future, he says. Of the real future, which is nothing like our present. Tomorrow will not be like today, he says. Tomorrow is going to be quite different from today …

He’s been thrown from the track, Ede says. This is a new direction. He’s at the surf’s edge. The waves’ edge. He won’t be afraid to leave himself behind. To relearn everything. He’s going to fight against everything he does not love …

Our College. The staircase to my rooms. Ede gives me some Zs — they’ll help you zzz, he says. Zolpidem. Zopiclone. Old friends. I swallow a handful, and stagger upstairs.

Class in five hours, I remind myself, setting the alarm clock …

Silence in the classroom.

Mulberry’s asleep behind sunglasses. Ede’s sunk so low, his head is level with the tabletop. Alexander Kirwin looks vacantly out the window. Benedict Kirwin looks vacantly out the window. Titmuss looks vacantly out the window. Guthrie looks vacantly at Wittgenstein. Chakrabarti just looks vacant. Scroggins, usually the most vacant of all: missing.