Excalibur

A Short Story About Being Saved from Oblivion by an Old Woman

Winter Weather, 2019, Photograph, Getty Images

You’re unhappy, she said, you’re unhappy because you’re an adult, what adults like most of all is being good at something, and what’s easier to be good at than being unhappy, at least at first, with time it gets complicated, the truth is there’s a thin line between simple, adult unhappiness, and total, endless, despair, it’s this line that adults absolutely love to tread, what adults like best is to seem, in public, to be just about coping with their complex realities, by means of a highly sophisticated balancing act, adults love to be apparently occupying a sort of magical middle ground, sure, I’m funny, but I’m not too funny, sure, I’m serious, but I’m not too serious, the older you get, she told me, the more obsessed you get with this craze for moderation, until a certain point, and then none of it matters any more, you’re sixty, death starts taking on a pseudophysical form, it’s in the rocks especially, in the minerals, she said, that you start to see it, like an eye of some kind, you want to peel up its lid and see for yourself, when you get to sixty you want to turn over every stone you pass in the hope of seeing what death looks like, from the inside, under the stone, you know it’s very unlikely you’ll find it there but what the hell, you’re sixty, you’ve no time for calculation, twenty-nine to fifty-nine, those were the years of calculation, moderation, expectation, but after that, well tell me how to moderate death, what’s moderate about your life ending, your future turns against you, it doesn’t like you any more, it used to stretch out in front of you, it used to taunt you with perspective, now it’s snapping at your heels, it’s virulent, it’s psychotic, it’s already inside you, let me tell you about a friend of mine, she said, my only friend, in fact, but that’s by the by, a few days before he went he said he felt like he was being fucked to death, by what, I asked him, by death, he said, that line you see over there, he said, pointing at the horizon, don’t pretend you can’t see it, that’s the future, it’s been gathered into a thin steel instrument and it’s being inserted into me, all the way through me, it will come out the other side, he said, on a certain day, but I won’t, there’s no other side for me, she trailed off for a moment, and started shifting her weight from one foot to the other, doing some elementary warm-up exercises, my God, I thought, are we only getting starting? But all I could do was stand there, in the damp, until she started up again, adults seem to be coping, she said, but in truth they’re not, not even a little, adults don’t know the first thing about coping, even a child is more reconciled to death, to even just walking down a street, than an adult, the simplest pigeon will die in peace but an adult, having fake-coped their life away, will suffer acutely from discovering, however gradually, that it’s quite impossible to fake your own death, what you realise, just before you die, is that you can’t fake it, it’s an inscrutably real event, the first and the last for a typical adult, even when it happens gently in the night, with masseuse-like softness, even if it slips in unseen, like a ninja masseuse, with your best interests at heart, even if you greet it in the hall, like an old friend, even if it looks exactly like your mother, it will make no difference, the unfakeable fact of it roasts them alive, she said, even if the actual process is painless, it doesn’t matter, the truth is most people die several years before they’re dead, they die of the idea of it before it even gets a chance to touch them, with its icy glance, icy hands, etc., it finds them pre-frozen, like a sack of peas, she said, but that’s not your problem, my friend’s dead and I’ll be dead too, shortly, but it’s not for you to worry about, you’re a young lad, I see your latte, your transparent desires, oh if you could see yourself, how transparent it is, to be young, it’s almost funny what time does to the body, the comic timing of death is really incomparable, and its special effects, she said, haha, yes, the way it undoes you, from the inside out, very clever, it’s so . . . smarmy, she said, but we love it all the same, you have to love it, what’s the alternative, tell me what you think the alternative is, she said, go on, give me a hint, tell me your opinion, I hoped she wasn’t expecting a reply, it’s most likely a rhetorical gambit, I told myself, or perhaps she needs a breather, from her death spiel, she’d appeared out of the mist about five minutes previously, first her hair, brown with ice-blue streaks, a full six inches below my eye line, I’d been staring at it ever since, increasingly moved, I hadn’t seen a single person over thirty-five with these blue metallic highlights, they had spread through my generation like a disease, an insular disease, old people were protected from dying their hair in streaks of cold blue by years of experience, and yet here she was, seventy-five at least, standing in front of me in the mist, and pulling it off with aplomb, raising the bar, as if the streaks instantiated an electric current, now flowing from her generation into mine, by all accounts the worst generation yet, but nonetheless she was reaching out towards it, her wizenedly diminutive stature, and my height, increased the effect, the sacrifice of her tough-nosed post-war sensibility burning up on the altar of participation, a heart open to the contemporary, however debauched it was, at least that’s what I felt as I listened to her speak, and I didn’t want to ruin the moment, it was the first moment I had experienced in years that I didn’t want, as soon as possible, to ruin, anyway I’d lost the knack of talking to people, I had been drifting deeper and deeper into myself, on my father’s advice, never give the slightest, smallest thing away, to anyone, ever, that’s what he used to say, albeit with a little variation, give him a little credit, every suppertime it seemed my father came up with an ever more radical variation on his theme, the theme of not doing anything, just keeping to yourself, out of trouble, my father would never speak during the first half hour of a meal, something about the state of hungriness made him timid and opaque, and then slowly, as he became less and less hungry, he would get more and more excited, you could see it in his face, the hunger going down, the excitement going up, but he wouldn’t be quite ready to speak until all the food was gone, and then he’d begin, never a new topic, always picking up on his undying theme, a man should live with a forest in easy reach, he’d say, or something similar, a body of water will do the trick, so as long as you have the means to traverse it, you have to get, he’d say, to the centre, and then lean down into it, down into your little wooden boat, no matter if you’re still visible, no matter if all the ladies of the town are watching your slow but steady progress with the latest model of binoculars, it’s you and the water, he’d say, that’s what counts, of course when you’re rowing back into town you’ll need to start thinking again, about how to rise to the very top of the town’s social ladder, but only if you’re able to completely forget about this while you’re out there will have you any desire to do it when you get back to the shore, if you think about a thing too much you’re making a big mistake, he’d say, we’d all be silent, we’d done our talking already, in the first half of the meal, while eating, we’d exhausted ourselves, our topics, our themes, our queries, and entered an almost restful state, but it was then exactly that he’d strike, a man, a boat, a river, a forest, those were the words that the rest hung on, those proud and lonesome nouns, it’s not that he’d ever owned a boat, and it’s hard to see where it came from, this boat fantasy that he’d slip into, at around eight in the evening, while I was clearing away the plates, yes, a little wooden boat, he’d say, and then for a moment, just a moment or two, lie back beneath the lip of the boat, disappear right down into it, right down into your little wooden boat, you need a zone of untouched selfhood that you can return to, when things get too much, that’s what the main idea was, but what if things get too much while you’re already in that zone, what if the zone of untouched selfhood is the most overwhelming of all possible zones, what if you want to retreat from the retreat, I had walked out, right into the mist, in exactly this state of mind, with an acute sense that there was too much of myself in myself, suddenly it seemed an entirely useless object, his little wooden boat, if he wanted a little wooden boat so much, why didn’t he just buy one, why did he never do any of the things that he spoke about, what terrible secret was he hiding, which had nothing to do with boats, or escape, or freedom, of course you have the impression, during childhood, that you’re learning a great deal, just from observing your parents, the interlaced patterns of their activities, but actually it’s all nonsense, once you leave the house you don’t know anything, you even forget, within a couple of weeks, everything about them, if you’re lucky, but I’d stuck it out, I’d taken him far too seriously, rather than see him as a man wracked by regret and confusion, in short, a normal, everyday man, keeping his head just about afloat by means of this meaningless suppertime spiel, you think your parents are trying to hand down some hard-won wisdom but actually it’s a personal reckoning that’s going on, you’re a witness, not a participant, in their project of slowly dying in front of you, it wasn’t advice he was giving, the last thing he wanted was for me to start following it, because it had no practical application at all, except in the act of being said, my God, the years I’d spent trying to retreat into every smelly body of water I found, on whatever decayed vessel I found, or just swimming, right into the middle of another pathetic English lake, there’s nothing worthwhile about an English lake, it’s not a zone of untouched selfhood that you find but a zone of complete personal defilement, it was only when I got the shore that I felt remotely like a person again, he didn’t mean that lake, he must have had a different lake in mind, I told myself, the problem any child has is that they believe the things their father says, somehow underneath it all the father desperately wants to say but don’t believe a word of this, but he can’t quite say it, because what then, once you’ve instructed your child not to listen to a word you say, what are you supposed to do next, love them, spend quality time with them, in the gaping, untrammelled silence that would surely emerge? No, you can’t knowingly sabotage what you have, which is meaningless noise, for something you don’t have, which is love, you have to lie to your child as much as possible before the dark truths of life begin to take hold, it’s at suppertime above all, when the whole family gathers around in expectation, that the father fulfils his sacred duty, to lie ceaselessly to everyone, imagine a little wooden boat somewhere, he’s compelled to say, that you can disappear into, whenever you feel like it, in place of any general truths what a father must do is bitch vaguely about their unresolvable existence, to refer repeatedly to adolescent dreams they never had any interest in following, dreams which they abandoned quite deliberately, and with good reason, dreams which they don’t even remember having, but it doesn’t matter, in most cases, the dreams are sufficiently stale that they wear off soon enough, since the child, of course, grows up, enters a critical, distrustful phase, but perhaps my father was more inventive, or more insistent, or more insane, than most fathers, he was able to keep the whole universe at bay with this strange talk about a little wooden boat, what was really on his mind, of course, was dying, the dying he was getting closer to every day, but he couldn’t talk about that, he couldn’t invite me into the community of the coming dead, with his body as the ladder, or the door, because he didn’t want me to go there, understandably I suppose, he could die as well as anyone, there was no doubt about that, but he didn’t want his death to be the beginning of mine, instead he jammed his declining body against what he perceived as the exit from this world, but what he didn’t realise was that the way out was also the way in, I can’t blame him, of course, since I didn’t realise it either, I didn’t have the slightest inkling that the way out was the way in, until she appeared, straight out of the London mist — a bolt of intergenerational lightning, a cross-hatched bob-cut at my neckline — and initiated me, with almost digital shamelessness, into the ever-lasting community of the human dead.

Philip Traylen writes the Substack oldoldoldoldnew.