Peter Carey - Bliss

'Wouldn't you like some paper, Mr Joy?'

'No.'

His smile was so painful it made her want to be able to do something, anything. The smile was worse than a scream. In the matron's office she found a huge Manila envelope; nearly sixteen inches long. She brought it to him gently and watched him drop the tattered cardboard inside and write in large careful letters the names of his family.

'Stamp,' he gave her money.

'I'll fix it in the morning, don't worry.'

'Now, please.'

'O.K., stamp now.' And she went plodding off in her soft white slippers and stole stamps for Harry Joy. She covered the envelope with stamps, giving him the only thing she could give. She brought him a pill too and he didn't even ask what it was, but ate it almost greedily, his hand shaking and spilling water down his front.

The pill soon reduced his world to a hazy blur, within which, in the sharpest detail, the seeds of Hell, long ago planted and recently nurtured, began to sprout and unfold their chrome-yellow petals.

Under Pentothal, he tried to name things. He tried to name the garden but could not do it properly. As he went deeper the names were lost and there were only shapes, tied with yellow string, revolving on a Ferris wheel.

He existed with white shadowy forms and sharp astringent odours. He had died again and he waited, fearfully, wondering. Lost, he felt nauseous, a floating feeling, his body without substance.

He closed his eyes, conscious of being handled with mechanisms, an object in space, without time.

Instruments were applied to him cruelly, without love.

He was split by pains, small and sharp, long and monot-onous.

He was pervaded by a full consciousness of punishment and the curious certainty of death enveloped him like a shroud.

Sometimes he cried with self-pity. Frightened as a child, he begged for mercy.

He was on a shuddering railway of merciless steel, voices echoed coldly. There were noises of silver wheels or distant thunder.

He existed nowhere in solitary terror. Visions of days before his death moved towards him and receded: his mother in that dusty street giving him the cheque. 'Now go,' she said, 'now go. I’ve won the lottery.' And in that white empty room, the Sunday School, the single sentence he had carried with him like a limpet since his youth: It is harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.

When he saw the shapes around him it was through grey veils. He was tormented with shifting images of his wife, his children, of Desmond Pearce. Joel circled him. With what intention?

Someone said: 'He will be confused for a while.'

Yes, he thought bitterly, I will be confused; it will not be as they described it. He knew himself to be ripped with huge wounds, a vast punishment down his chest. Thin wires and tubes. A poor weak Gulliver.

He looked bitterly at those around him, forms which became more and more distinct, but he was ready for them before he saw them. He was in a room beside a verandah. Is this what they did to you? He demanded they state his sins although he could already guess them. They never answered directly, never once. 'As they will be men still,' he thought, 'so they will feel and act as men.'

Slowly, during his convalescence from his successful operation, Harry Joy became totally convinced that he was actually in Hell. He watched them, as cunning as a cat, silently indignant that fate should play such a trick on him.

He moved around the house in sandshoes and tracksuit and exhibited a curious stealth and – if you had not shared the general trauma at Palm Avenue, had not felt those creeping, inexplicable irritations – you may have found his antics funny.

Look at him: sneaking up the stairs you might have thought he was impersonating a cat in a pantomime, or even without a costume, a lizard. But this is all deadly serious, and what he is doing is throwing the whole emotional balance of the house-hold out of kilter, tipping the axis of his world and producing peculiar weather.

Is he mad?

A question he has asked himself. And if you follow him now, as he turns, for no apparent reason, and begins to go downstairs, hesitating before he crosses the shining expanse of living room, out on to the creaking verandah, down the steps, you will see him slip, like a shadow, into the garage.

There are a number of dusty old ammunition boxes lying higgledy piggledy in the comer, so dusty that they might have been there for years; and have. Yet those shining new brass padlocks give his secret away, and in a day or two this will occur to him too and he will come down here at five o'clock one morning and paint them with khaki paint, clogging up the keyholes and giving himself new difficulties. But now the key slips into the padlock smoothly and the shining book flicks open, and the lock is removed, and softly pocketed. Inside there are notebooks, fifteen spiral-bound, but at this date only six have been filled and a seventh started.

They contain all manner of peculiar observations. These are tests for madness. He is making them himself.

Harry Joy is running checks. He is comparing his life (termed 'life' in the books) with his other life, that is the days and years before he entered the operating room, the days before this cruel scar on his chest. If he had found someone he half-trusted he might have confessed, initially, that the chances of this being Hell were about sixty / forty. But as the weeks have rolled on, the evidence has mounted and he is not, according to his own checks, mad.

This is not the childish Hell of the Christian Bible with its flames. Here, obviously they planned more subtle things, and it has already occurred to him – a flush of panic as he stared into the 3 a.m. dark – that this, these boxes, locks, etc., are to be his punishment. He contemplated the possibility of Hell in a universe made like an infinite onion until he became as sick and frightened as he had once, as a child, lying on summer's black night grass, trying to grasp the infinity of space.

But to return to these books, and their entries. Here, on page 16 of the first book: FIAT IS WRONG.

While he was in hospital Lucy and David decided to clean the Fiat. It was a present. And they waited, like children, for his delight or at least his thanks and if not his thanks, his acknowledgement. They encouraged him to walk beside the garage, to enter the garage, to drive the car, but nothing they did could induce him to mention the Fiat, and Lucy, whose idea it had been and who had contributed most of the hard work it took, became angry and thought he had taken it for granted.

FIAT IS WRONG he wrote and, on page 20: THEY MADE MISTAKE WITH CARPET. Possibly they had, all things considered.

In the notebook he also recorded observations concerning 'Lucy,' 'David' and 'Betty'.

Some selected entries concerning 'David'.

23. I notice taking money.

25. Talks money.

26. More money talk.

36. Mean streak exhibited again.

39. Caught him lying.

43. Rattish face, quite different.

This last description could be made (uncharitably) to des-cribe not only David but Harry's own handsome face, which the Indonesian Consul had once favourably compared to the god Krishna in the Javanese Wayang Kulit. Krishna, the Consul said, had an almost identical aquiline nose and the same finely chiselled chin.

There he is now, locking himself in the toilet to make more observations, and it looks comic, the way he crouches so earnestly over the book, crabs his fingers around that little stub of pencil, holds his head to one side, sticks out his tongue, and gives a number to his latest piece of evidence. He is in torment. If he shits it will be watery-thin and black.