John Banville - The Infinities

What indeed? Were I able I would rear up in my winding-sheets, my foul tubes wrenched from their sockets and spouting pap and piss, and slam that door shut in their faces. Ah, the sad braggadocio of the dying. It is not that I am afraid of Benny Grace; what I fear is disturbance. I am becalmed, and dread a suddenly filled sail. The history of Benny and me is long and intricate. When I peer into memory’s steadily clouding crystal I see a great throng milling and elbowing and out of its midst Benny’s fat face grinning at me, suggestive, sardonic, oleaginously eager. Has he come to harangue me in my last straits, to tell me I am going about dying in all the wrong way? I have known him, he has known me, for longer than I care to remember, though I will have to remember, I suppose, now that he has popped up like this. Indeed, I feel he has been with me all my life, which is hardly possible, since he is not as old as I am, and will remain so. Yes, Benny surely is of the immortals.

Suddenly I recall a nightmare I had when I was a child, a very young child, it must have been, a baby, even, I think, still in my cradle, I have never forgotten it. How frightening it was, how fraught with significance, that I have retained such a distinct recollection of it all these years. Although I am not sure it can properly be called a nightmare, so brief it was and bare of incident. I am not certain it was a dream at all but rather a half-waking intimation of something I was too young then and now am too old and too far gone to interpret or understand. Anyway, in this nightmare, or dream, or reverie, whatever it was, I had been set down on a bare rock in the midst of an empty ocean. Yes, set down, for I had not been brought there by boat, or by any earthbound, or sea-bound, means, but had alighted somehow out of the air, a fallen Icarus, it might be, my head in a spin and my wings doused of their fire, dripping and useless. The ocean all around me was of a mauvish shade, utterly still, without a surge or ripple — even where it ringed the rock on which I cowered the water’s fringe showed not the slightest stirring — yet seemed to brim, full of itself to overflowing, and as if at any moment it might tilt wildly and upend, like a great polished disc pressed down upon violently at its edge. As far as I looked in every direction there was nothing to be seen, and no horizon, the featureless distances merging seamlessly into an equally featureless sky. No sound, no cry of bird or moan of wind. A vast void everywhere, and I terrified, clinging to my rock with both hands and barely holding the world from tipping on its end and letting everything slide off into the abyss of emptiness, including, especially including, me. What does it mean? It must mean something, or signify something, at least. Was I, a babe in swaddling, already dipping a toe into the waters of Lethe, paddling, even, in its shallows? Never too early to start dying.

I knew it was Benny. When I sensed the presence of an intruder in the house I knew it had to be him. I must have been expecting him, all along, without realising it.

From the top of the short stairs now the two of them advance creakingly into the gloom. To get a sight of them at all I have to swivel my eyes so violently to the side and downwards the sockets would hurt, if I could feel them. The pair seem phantoms, bearing down on me across the darkened room. I must not let them see me looking: they will think I am only feigning stupefaction, which in a way I must be, given that my brain is so busy. Probably I can see them better than they can see me, my eyes being by now so thoroughly accustomed to this damnable false night in which my wife has condemned me to live since I was laid low. Benny — look at him, my homunculus. He is speaking in a priestly murmur, his tonsured head inclined towards my daughter, who is inclining too; they might be monk and maiden in the confessional. I strain in vain to catch what he is saying to her, what mischief he might be pouring into her ear. Mm mm mmm . And here I lie, mumchance.

Petra goes to the middle window, the one that my bed faces, and lifts her arms and with a dancer’s large dramatic gestures draws the heavy curtains open, leaning sideways first far to the left and then far to the right. How it pierces me now, the sight of a human being in movement. The daylight seems to hesitate a moment before entering. Dazzled, I shut my eyes tight, and on the inners of the lids the after-glare makes tumbling shapes, darker upon dark, like blobs of black dye bursting slowly in water already soiled. Yet I thrill to the unwonted glare, as I thrilled a moment ago to my daughter’s dancerly swoopings. When the time comes, and it cannot be very long now, I want to die into the light, like an old tree feeding its last upon the radiance of the world. In these recent days — how many? — with the curtains pulled, I have felt myself to be in an enormous dark space where distant doors are closing slowly, one by one. I do not hear them close, but feel the alteration in the air, as of a succession of long, slow breaths being painfully drawn in. I always liked to think that death would be more or less a continuation of how things already are, a dimming, a contracting, a shrinkage so gradual that I would not register its coming to an end at last until the ending was done with. Perhaps that is Ursula’s intention, keeping me in the dark so I will not notice the light failing. But I do not want to breathe my last in this room. Why did she banish me up here, of all places, site of my triumphs and so many more numerous failures? I want to be elsewhere. I want to die outdoors — I wonder if that can be arranged? Yes, on a pallet somewhere, on the grass, under trees, at the soft fall of dusk, that would be a boon, a final benison.

But what if at just that moment I were to begin to feel again, what if — no, no, that way there are things I do not wish to be confronted with. Let me die numbly, insensate, yet thinking still, if that were possible.

I feel — I feel! — by what must be a quaking of the floorboards Benny Grace approach the bed. Now in a show of hushed and reverent solicitude he stoops over me and peers into my face, and I am as a boy again pretending to be fast asleep as my suspicious mother bends over me in the light of a school-day morning. You see how Benny’s coming has already reduced me to this childishness, these dreams and maundering fears dragged from out of the depths? Now, perhaps sensing how unsettled I am by his warmly breathing presence leaning over me like this, he snickers softly.

Should I open my eyes? Should I open my eyes.

“He hasn’t changed,” he says over his shoulder to Petra at the window, where she remains, no doubt nervous of approaching too close to me, fearful of what she will have to look upon. I do not blame her: a catheter, for instance, even if only the suggestion of it, is not a pretty object for a daughter to have to contemplate, given what it is, and where it is placed. “Still the black hair,” Benny says, “the noble profile.” Again he gives his snuffly laugh. “The original Adam.” This last he addresses as if to me, intimately, in a murmur; he must know I can hear him, or at least must suspect it. He turns aside and begins to pace, those hobbled feet of his making a goatish clatter on the wooden floor. “Yes, years,” he says, from a little way off now, to Petra, continuing evidently an earlier train. “The things I could tell you! The stories!”

I would laugh if I were capable of it. I am in a sort of panic of amazement — Benny Grace here, at Arden, with his stories! And I flat out and speechless while he stands upright — Benny, of all people. I cannot credit it. I must have been wrong in what I said, or rather in what I thought, a minute ago; I must not have been expecting him, for if I had been, why would I be so surprised that he has come? But after all it was inevitable he would make an appearance at the end. Benny Grace, my shadow, my double, my incorrigible daemon. Yes, I would laugh.