John Banville - Mefisto

I thought of all my dead. I thought of Sykes, or Stokes, who had gone under the knife. He was not anywhere any more. Oh, part of him was still about, in the morgue, probably, and probably still in better shape than I, with half my flesh fallen from the bone. But the rest of him, that grin, the sharp glance, the jokes, where was all that? Gone. That was death. No cowled dark stranger, no kindly friend, not even empty space, with all the potential that implies, but absence, absence only. The nothing, the nowhere, the not-being-here. But how then this something, wafting me onwards irresistibly, as if all around me a great, slow breath were being indrawn?

— Don’t die, Father Plomer said. Not a good idea.

He sat beside the bed, regarding me gaily, with his legs crossed, swinging one large, black-shod foot. He was the hospital chaplain. He had an aura of shaving balm and warm wine.

— Of course, he said comfortably, life is a wretched thing, and practically worthless. Yet we must live, all the same.

I was tired of him, his big smooth face and plummy voice, his genial detachment.

— For what? I said.

To laugh was complicated, with my face, I did not do it often. He smiled, compressing his lips, as if he were nibbling a tiny seed in his front teeth.

— Why, he said, to practise for the eternal life to come!

Now it was his turn to laugh, he leaned back, his glasses flashing, ha, ha, haa! A vision came to me of his face peeling from the skull, the crimson flop, the sinews, gleet, glint of bone, the eyeballs wallowing.

— I think we have a young pagan here, matron, he said. Oh yes, I shall have to take him in hand.

She stopped behind him and looked at the back of his head in silence for a second, then turned away. He laughed his laugh again, a series of soft, plosive puffs, his lips pursed as if he were blowing smoke rings.

He taught me to play chess. He had a plastic travelling set, we balanced it between us on the edge of the bed. It did not take me long to learn. It was a kind of moving geometry. He played a ramshackle game, swooping about the board, making sudden, lunging moves and then taking them back again with a giggle, only to get himself at once into a worse muddle.

— You’re better now? he said to me, frowning over a tangle of pawns. Improving, I mean? Check, by the way. Or is it? No.

He stared owlishly at the board, humming unhappily under his breath. His last remaining bishop made a bolt for freedom. He had not noticed my knight.

— Yes, he said distractedly, life, life is the …

The knight reared, slewing sideways, stamped to a stop.

— Mate, I said.

He gave a little shriek of surprise, throwing up his hands.

— Why, so it is! he cried, laughing. So it is!

Go out, they told me. Take a walk, yes. Go into the city, see the sights, mingle. Simple, ordinary things. It’s all there, waiting for you, your birthright. Be one of the living, a human being. They gave me clothes, a shirt, shoes, trousers, a coat. When I dressed I felt a sort of excited revulsion, as if I had put on not only someone else’s outfit, but someone else’s flesh as well.

ON THE HOSPITAL steps I stopped. A high gold autumn evening was sinking over the rooftops. Forever after I would think of the city like that, like a waste of magnificent wreckage, going down. My hands shook, stuffed into these unaccustomed pockets. Such space, such distance. I was dizzy, I felt that if I fell I would fall upwards, into the limitless air. A panic of disconnected numbers buzzed in my head. Grass, trees, railings, the road. The road! A bus hurtled past, swaying on the bend. It might have been a mastodon. The evening visitors were arriving. I turned my face away from them and plunged off down the drive.

Oh, that first autumn. Vast tender skies, branches soot-black against blue, a sense of longing and vague hurt in the dense, luminous air. I wandered the streets like an amnesiac, everything was new and yet unaccountably familiar. I recall especially that brief hour at the exhausted end of evening, when the shop workers had gone home, and everything was shut, and a mysterious quiet settled everywhere. Then the beggars and the drunks came into their own, the dustbin-pickers, the frantic old women who lived out of shopping bags, and those ragged but strangely robust young men with blue chins and crazed eyes, marching headlong down the middle of the pavements, swinging their arms and furiously muttering. They seemed to know something awful, all of them, some secret, the burden of which had blighted their lives. And I was one of them, or almost. An apprentice, say. An acolyte. I stalked them for hours, loitering behind them on canal bridges, or under archways, where the pigeons strutted, and dust and bits of paper swirled in eddies, and everything was spent and grey and heart-breaking. I can’t explain the melancholy pleasure of those moments, from which I would turn away lingeringly as the last light of day drained down the sky, and the street lamps came on fitfully in the blued autumnal dusk.

Oh, the squares, the avenues, the parks. A smoky, sunlit morning, smell of washed pavements, fish, stale beer. A carthorse clops past, dropping dark-gold dungballs. Snarl of traffic. A sudden dark wind, making the day flinch. Then rain. In the park the dripping trees circle slowly around me, halt when I halt. The spidery dome of the bandstand teeters, threatening. Sun again, a drenched glare. Stop on this corner, by this bridge. A butcher’s shop, a greengrocer’s, a red-brick bank like a child’s toy house, with gold lettering in the windows and a big hanging clock. A workman with a ladder strapped to his bike waits at the traffic lights, whistling. A lorry shudders to a halt with a gasp of brakes. What is it, this sense of something impending, as if a crime is biding its time here, waiting to be committed? The lights change. I detect the slow ruin of things, the endless, creeping collapse.

And then the nights, silver and burnished black, the shadowed buildings crouched under a tilted moon. A neon sign flicks on and off, on and off, in strange silence. Somewhere a woman laughs. In a windswept street by the river two old men in rags are fighting. They caper weakly, panting, swinging their arms, their coat-tails flying. Thick smack of fist on flesh and one goes down, the other takes aim, kicks, again, then hard again. The wet street gleams. A newspaper blows along the pavement, plasters itself against a grille. A huge seagull alights on the road, fixing me warily with one round eye. I pause in a doorway, wait, eager and afraid. Some dirty little truth is being wearily disclosed here. The gull flexes one wing, folds it again. The tramp on the ground coughs and coughs, holding his face. The other one has run away. Foul breath of the river, dark slop of waters, slide, and slop again. Hush! What conjured spirit …? Hush!

I was sitting on a park bench when I met him, when he met me. It was an October twilight, the grass was grey with dew. I was listening to the trees, their fretful rustlings. He walked past once, came back and passed by again, returned again more slowly, stopped. Thin foxy face and widow’s peak and thin, sly smile. He put his hands in his pockets, arched an eyebrow.

— I say, he said, do I not know you?

He studied me, my bird-boy’s profile.

— I never forget a face, you know.

He chuckled. I was not surprised to see him. He sat down beside me, settling the wings of his old coat. I told him my story. He listened, motionless, hands folded on one bony knee. Darkness advanced across the park. The bells of the city were ringing, near and far.

— All that time in the bonehouse, eh? he said. But look at you now, a new man.

A bat flitted here and there above us in the violet air.