Zia Rahman - In the Light of What We Know

I felt better with the medication; I compared the man whose body was mine with the man who was there the day before, and this man felt much, much better than his predecessor did. When I was skeptical, whenever I’d considered the prospect of taking medication, I had not been comparing the deeply, dangerously depressed person I was with the healthier and more even person I could be helped to be. Rather, I was imagining that the medication would make it impossible for me to be fully the person I believed I could conceivably be, that it would irreparably blunt me somehow.

The mistake did not lie in thinking this true. The mistake was to think that it was remotely relevant. It is irrelevant simply because the imaginary ideal human being, the one I believed I could conceivably be, is an unreachable person whom I could only wish to be, unreachable in any circumstance. The real me was always the me I was at any given moment, and not the unattainable me I could fancifully call from my imagination.

And tell me what could be more humbling than to be lying in bed at two in the afternoon, without a shower in twelve days; to look across the room you live in and see in the corner a pile of pizza boxes; to be afraid of undrawing the curtains and opening the window, so removed from people so as not even to wonder who would care if you did or you didn’t do this or that; and to find that the day’s only scintilla of hope flickers in the moment you reach for the television remote control.

* * *

After five weeks I left the hospital. I stayed in Penelope’s home, in a spare bedroom at the top of the house. Emily joined me there. She herself had decided to move house and had sold her apartment. I never asked her if her decision had had something to do with me. You see, we never discussed anything that involved projecting ourselves into the future further than a week or two. While she was looking for something larger in Notting Hill, in an even more prestigious address — did she think I couldn’t see the endless aspiration? — she moved in with her mother.

Of course, by this stage I knew about the curious domestic arrangement in Penelope’s house. Penelope Hampton-Wyvern met Dudley Grange years ago, when she was still married to Robin, when Dudley’s building company had been contracted to undertake a renovation of her home. Before breaking out on his own, he’d been a site foreman for a large building conglomerate. Dudley explained to me once, rather proudly, that he’d worked on the construction of what was in its time the tallest building in London, the NatWest Tower — now called Tower 42 after its address, he pointed out — and described how the building was the first of its kind: It had a huge core of reinforced concrete, one piece of concrete poured in situ in a massive operation requiring a fleet of cement trucks running to the site continuously over many weeks, so that as the lower levels hardened, concrete for the next level would be piped up and poured into the shuttered forms that also went up at the same time. From this single solid backbone of concrete, the floors fan out on cantilevers, and, from above, he explained, his eyes widening, the building’s profile is three hexagonal chevrons arranged to resemble the logo of the NatWest Bank. Construction was only the beginning; my genuine interest in his field of expertise seemed to open the doors for Dudley to hold forth on plenty else. Dudley, by the way, was in the house that day when first I met Penelope Hampton-Wyvern. They were his steps I heard coming from the hallway, before the sound of a door being shut as quietly as a sturdy Banham lock would allow.

He seemed an unlikely consort to Penelope, shorter than her by an inch and far from the full six feet of Robin. He was a chain-smoker, and the stale odor of burned tobacco was always on him. Spiderwebs of broken blood vessels clung to each cheek.

I never grasped the sequence of events involving Dudley and the Hampton-Wyverns but learned only vaguely that certain things happened within a space of a few years: the demise of a marriage; the separation, before which the beginning of an affair between Penelope and her builder; Penelope’s hospitalization with depression; Robin, too, sneaking about with the woman who would become his second wife; and a divorce. All these things I learned but never with precise dates attached to them — why would anyone take care with dates? Or with conflicting dates attached, so that the events spoken of coalesced in my mind on a formless period sometime in Emily’s early teens when her family life, I understood, was a tempest of dishonesty and infidelities.

When Penelope once broached with me the topic of her divorce — a very short conversation that took on the character of confession, with its underlying intimation of guilt for the impact on her children — she described the new wife as the woman for whom Robin had left her. But when Dr. Villier described the same episode to me, later, he did not give me to believe that it was Robin who had initiated the breakup, but instead I gathered that Penelope’s relationship with Dudley was in full swing before Robin’s departure. It is remarkable to me, by the way, that Villier was prepared to discuss as much as he did. There were moments of hesitation, when circumspection seemed to give his eyes the look of someone editing himself, but in the end he shared so much that I must wonder, as I imagine did Villier, if Penelope had understood the scope of the license she had granted him.

I do know one story that has a date to it, related to me by Emily herself. It was her first year at Oxford, when she received word that her father was to marry again. Apparently, on the day of the wedding, she came down to London and staged a protest with her brother outside the Chelsea Register Office, raising a banner they’d both made bearing the words DON’T DO IT, DADDY. When Emily told me this story, the image moved me. We were lying in bed, we had made love, and we were exchanging affectionate chatter in the drowsy moments when people come closest to intimacy, never very much intensity in the conversation and perhaps that’s the nature of the thing, the reassurance of one mate to another that offspring will be tended together, which might also go some way toward explaining why Emily chose that moment to relate the story of her protest against her father’s remarrying and why, for that matter, I myself wondered if she was making a statement to me, too, a plea for reassurance. I’m not nearly as skeptical as some people are of psychoanalysis, but I certainly don’t need to wake up Freud for help — there’s nothing I detected that wasn’t visible on the surface. And perhaps this was Emily’s governing fear, I have thought: the fear of abandonment.

And yet — and yet, I ask again whether in fact there was also a manipulativeness about it. You might remember a TV commercial for The Guardian newspaper, in the nineties, I think it was, in which a young skinhead in bomber jacket, jeans, and Doc Martens boots is seen running full tilt toward an elderly man standing on the street. The skinhead was an icon of Britain in those years. The scene projects imminent violence; at least that’s what we’re lured into seeing. But the camera pulls back and the frame widens, bringing into view what is going on above the elderly man. As I recall, a pallet of bricks is tied by rope to scaffolding. But the rope is fraying, its threads unraveling, and the pallet of bricks, now sagging, threatens to come crashing down on the old fellow, who is oblivious of the danger looming overhead. It was rather a mischievous commercial, since the left-leaning Guardian reader, who sees the skinhead running toward the old man, is likely to fall for the misdirection — the viewer’s own misdirection — before the final reveal.