Marcel Theroux - Strange Bodies

As his lucidity returned, Jack’s mood grew morbid and wistful. I noticed once again his odd habit of regurgitating lines from the Life as though he were speaking them for the first time.

‘I would consent to have a limb amputated to recover my spirits,’ he said, propped against the pillows, in gloomy contemplation of what we both knew must soon follow. Something began to trouble him. He turned to me and gripped my hand with a sudden insistence. ‘I pray you, sir, to burn my journal.’ He wouldn’t let go of my wrist until I promised to go immediately.

*

It was a relief to be in the sunshine after those long, immobile hours listening to the rise and fall of Jack’s breath. The vigil had left me drained but physically restless so I walked all the way to Streatham. The traffic was strangely light.

Tadeusz answered the door wearing sandals and sweatpants. He was watching an evangelical Christian television programme in Polish. The whole house smelled of beetroot. I realised it was Sunday.

He followed me up the stairs apologising. The poor man had been torturing himself over his decision to delay calling the ambulance. I understood from his fragmentary explanations that he hadn’t wanted to take that responsibility himself, fearing that Jack was some kind of illegal immigrant and that he would be deported. ‘I should have done some things more,’ he said, shaking his head agitatedly.

I told him not to worry. The hastiness of my response took him aback. ‘It will be the end?’ he asked. I said I didn’t know.

Jack’s room, lately vacated, still had the resonance of him. The sheets of the bed were still folded back where the paramedics had left them; the impress of his body still visible on the mattress and pillow. A Bible and a glass of stale water sat on the bedside table.

I found the journal — a hardbacked Silvine notebook — in the drawer of his desk and read the first lines:

How the last months have past, I am unwilling to terrify myself with thinking. This day has been past in great perturbation.

I was struck by the doubling of the word past . This wasn’t a great prose stylist, moralising with elegant variation. This was a man driven to express his internal suffering with whatever words came to hand. Among the other pages, I recognised verbatim extracts from Johnson’s extant autobiographical fragments: reminiscences, prayers, supplications to his creator.

Almighty God, heavenly Father, whose mercy is over all thy works, look with pity on my miseries and sins.

In brief sections in Latin, he had catalogued the varieties of his nocturnal torment: nox turbatissima … nox inquietissima … nox molesta. And from these entries I gathered that my errand was motivated by a desire to conceal from the eyes of posterity a secret no more dreadful than a guilty habit of masturbation. Poor Jack, I thought.

Of course, I could never accede to his request to destroy it. It would be a terrible act of vandalism. It would go against every instinct I had as a scholar. But I could bring it to the hospital, and try to appeal to his better judgement.

As I was flicking though the book, marvelling at it, a single folded sheet dropped to the floor.

I picked it up. It was a letter, addressed to me, which he must have written during my absence in Cornwall.

To Dr Nicholas Slopen

Sir,

It is but an ill return for the many kindnesses with which you were pleased to favour me, to have delayed my thanks for them till now: I think myself obliged to you beyond all expression of gratitude for your care of me.

It is not a Sophistic means of exculpation for my tardiness in writing to say that one ground for it was my fear that greater knowledge would expose you to hazards of which you cannot conceive.

Yet, my own experience now persuades me that it is better to see dangers early than to be surprized by them. Fear, being the necessary effect of danger, must remain always with us. Therefore, be forewarned — the common task.

You should know of my own experience that after a long illness in my rooms at Bolt Court, I came to myself in circumstances too strange for me easily to explain and later fell under the care of Mr Malevin and Miss Telauga, whom you have been pleased to call my sister.

In the early stages of my recovery the conviction possessed me that I had found myself in Limbo.

However, the operations of time and reason have bestowed light on an unlikely truth. I discover myself the exception to the old adage Mors omnibus communis. For me, the dream of natural philosophy has become a waking agony.

And yet, even now, I find Hesiod’s maxim holds: that the evil of the worst times has some good mingled with it. A rational man may not doubt it. Your concern and gentleness have mitigated my discomfort and lightened my misery. I look forward to renewing our conferences on your return. For this, and other debts of kindness to you, I acknowledge my gratitude and declare myself, your obedient humble servant.

SAM. JOHNSON

I was underslept, of course, and vulnerable, but the words touched me deeply. I could see the care he had taken to write it. And I was reminded of qualities that I used to love about Johnson’s letters: the sense of his emotional range; his special gentleness to his female correspondents; the kindness that was an essential part of his moral vision. I think kindness, more than anything else, enabled him to transcend the limitations of his historical era. It let him see, for example, the terrible injustice of slavery — which sounds self-evident, but Boswell couldn’t see it.

And at that moment, I understood that I had come to share the madman’s delusion.

I understood too that for a very long time I had been carrying an intuitive misgiving about everything I had been told. Like the frog in the experiment who fails to perceive the incremental rises in temperature of the water around him and ends up boiling to death, I had been ensnared by a succession of deepening falsehoods, some of which carried barely the whiff of plausibility. Now, when I started to poke holes in Vera’s story it came apart in my hands. Her brother? A savant? A Russian speaker? None of it stacked up.

*

When I got back to the ward, the curtains had been drawn around Jack’s cubicle. I felt a momentary anxiety about what I’d find there.

Inside, an orderly was stripping the sheets. ‘You’re too late,’ she said. ‘He’s gone.’

‘Gone?’ I felt as though the journal was a boulder and the weight of it was pulling me towards the floor.

There was a pause. The woman, who was small and birdlike with an Iberian name, Maria, perhaps, or Luisa, suddenly looked embarrassed. ‘Not gone — discharged. He was signed out by his family.’

I was reduced to incredulous babbling. The woman blushed to the roots of her ebony hair.

Sensing some kind of trouble, the head nurse on the ward had appeared at the end of the bed. ‘Can I help?’ she asked, with a certain wariness in her voice.

‘I’m looking for the patient who was here.’

‘He’s been discharged.’

‘Discharged? He was breathing from an oxygen mask last night. He was in no state to leave.’

‘I’m sorry, I’m going to have to ask you to lower your voice.’

‘Where’s he gone?’

‘I’m not able to tell you that. That’s a matter for the family.’

‘The family? What family? He has no family.’

‘I think it’s better if we discuss this outside.’

She manoeuvred me towards the outer door. I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror in the corridor, unshaven, pale, wild-eyed.

‘Will you be all right getting home, or shall I have someone call you a minicab?’ she asked.