All the Lonely People

by Barry Callaghan

  “I’ve never felt younger,” he said as they walked home together.

  As the weeks went by, they went for a long walk every day, and he talked about everything that was on his mind. “A mind at play,” he said to her one afternoon, “and I don’t know whether I’ve told you this before, but it is not a question of right or wrong, really – a mind at play is a mind at work.” She had soft grey eyes and a wistful smile. “Yes, you’ve told me that before, Willard, but I adore everything you tell me, even when you tell me twice.” They often stopped for a hot chocolate fudge sundae at a lunch counter that had been in the basement of the Household Trust building since their childhood. She loved digging the long silver spoon down into the dark syrup at the bottom of the glass.

  “You and your sweet tooth,” he said. “It’ll be the death of you.”

  “Someday you’ll take death seriously,” she said.

  “I do. I do,” he said.

  “How?”

  “I think I’d like to die somewhere else.”

  “Wherever in the world would you like to die?”

  “It’s strange,” he said, “we’ve always lived in this city but now I think I’d be happier somewhere else, out in the desert.”

  “There’s no ice cream in the desert,” she laughed, softly humouring him.

  “Well, it’s only a daydream,” he said. “It’s not how I dream at night.”

  “What do you dream at night?”

  “About you,” he said.

  “But I’m always right here beside you.”

  “Yes, yes,” he said, “but think of where we could go in our dreams, think of what it would be like watching wild she-camels vanish into the dunes.”

  She threw her arms around his neck and said, “Yes,” kissing him until they were out of breath.

  “What a couple of crazy old loons we are,” she said.

  “Thank God,” he said.

  Her eyesight was failing, so at night he began to read the newspapers to her. They got into bed and he read to her as she lay curled against his shoulder. “Oh, I like this,” he said. “‘A politician is like a football coach. He has to be smart enough to understand the game and stupid enough to take it seriously.’”

  “I like that, too,” she said, laughing. “I don’t like football but I like that.”

  “That’s why you’ll never be a politician,” he said, “thank God.” He linked his hands behind his head, letting his mind wander, suddenly perplexed because he couldn’t remember the name of the pharaoh at the time of Moses. He heard her heavy breathing. Before turning out the light, leaning on his elbow, he looked down into her face, astonished that she had fallen so easily into such a sound sleep because in her younger years she had often wakened in a clammy sweat, panic-stricken, mumbling about loss, about eyes that had not opened, saying she could hear her own screaming though she was not making a sound. He couldn’t imagine what dreadful fear had welled up within her during those nights, what darkness she had sunk into, and he wondered how she had managed over the years to stifle that fear, tamp it down. Perhaps in her fear she had gotten a dream-glimpse of their stillborn child. He had forgotten why they had never tried to have another child. He only knew he had never wanted another woman. This gave him sudden joy and a sense of completion in her. He was close to tears as he looked into her sleeping face, afraid that she would go down into a darkness where she would not waken and he whispered:

  Child, do not go

  into the dark places

  of the soul,

  there the grey wolves whine,

  the lean grey wolves…

  In the morning, after he had two cups of strong black coffee, he read the newspapers aloud. Any story about old ruins and the past lost in the dunes of time caught his eye. A few months before he’d retired he had written in Scholastics: A Journal of New Modes that the psalms of David were actually based on a much older Egyptian sacred text, now almost entirely lost. This meant that David was just a reporter of what he had heard somewhere on the desert trails, and so Willard was pleased one morning to read in the paper that nearly all the archaeologists at a conference in Boston had agreed that the Bible was not history, that no one should pay any historical attention to anything written before the Book of Kings. “The whole thing,” he said to Kate, “may just be theological dreaming. The whole of our lives, our ethical and spiritual lives, may be a dream. A wonder-filled dream in which we defeat death by turning lies into the truth.” When she asked him how a lie could be the truth, and how everything that was true could be a dream, he said, “I think that maybe all through history we have become our own gods in our dreams. We create them and then they turn around and taunt us. Maybe Christ on the cross is really a taunting dream of death and redemption, a dream in which Christ has to stay nailed to the cross because we don’t dare let him come back to us again. We don’t dare let him come back and live among us like a normal man because then there’d only be a dreamless silence out there without him in it, a great dark silence.” As he said this he felt a lurch in the pit of his stomach, a slow opening up of an old hollow deep in himself, but this hollow didn’t frighten him. It was an absence that he had long ago accepted, just as he had accepted the absence of children in their life. He had learned to live with this absence but he could not bear to see Kate in pain. One morning when he was wakened by her moaning in her sleep he felt a frightened pity as he looked down into her sleeping face, pity that she had had to suffer her own attacks of darkness, attacks of absence, in her sleep. He touched her cheek and whispered, “Kate, you’re my whole life. Thank God.”

  One afternoon, when the apple tree was in bud and the hired gardener, who had tattoos on his arms, was cleaning out the peony beds, Willard laughed and pointed at the gardener. He told Kate that he’d been studying a book of maps of the Middle East a friend had given him years ago, and he’d discovered that there was a small city near the Turkish border that was called, after Cain’s nephew, Enos, and since the men there had always marked themselves with tattoos, he said, “The mark of Cain was probably just a tattoo.”

  “You mean Cain’s pruning our rose bushes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Willard,” she said, “you are a notion,” and she smiled with such genuine amused pleasure and admiration that tears filled his eyes. He held her hand, breathing in the heavy musk of the early spring garden.

  “With you, Kate,” he said, “I always feel like it’s going to be possible to get a grip on something really big about life before I die. I’m very grateful.”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “No one in love should be grateful.”

  “I can’t help it,” he said and felt such an ache for her that he had to take several deep breaths, as if he were sighing with sudden exasperation.

  “Don’t be impatient,” she said.

  “I’m not. I was just suddenly out of breath.”

  “And soon you’ll be telling me you’re out of your mind.”

  “That goes without saying,” he said, laughing.

  “That’s what everybody says happened to Adam and Eve,” she said. “That she drove Adam out of his mind because he wanted the apple and she ate it…”

  “And look at us now.”

  “A couple of old lunatics,” she said, lifting his hand to her lips. “And that’s not gratitude, that’s love, Willard. You’ve always been the apple of my eye.”

  He stood beside her with tears in his eyes.

  “Some day,” she said, brushing his tears away with her hand, “I’ll tell you what I really think.”

  “I bet you will,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  To distract her, to hide his emotions, he riffled through a sheaf of papers on a side table. “You know what? You’ll never guess,” he said, fumbling the papers. He was excited. He wanted to please her. “I’ve come across the most wonderful creation story…”

  “Creation?”

  “Yes, yes,” he said, flattening a piece of tawny onionskin paper on
the table. “Professor Shotspar translated this for me years ago, from a flood story. It was written down somewhere around 1800 BC, in Akkadian, which in case you don’t know is one of the oldest languages in the world, and it’s exactly the same flood you’ll find in Gilgamesh. But this is about the gods and how they got around to creating man – Lullu, they called him. How do you like that? And it’s about how they created all of us so we’d knuckle under and do their dirty work, their mucking up…

  “When the gods, before there were men,

  Worked and shed their sweat,

  The sweat of the gods was great,

  The work was dire, distress abiding.

  Carping, backbiting,

  Grumbling in the quarries,

  They broke their tools,

  Broke their spades

  And hoes…

  Nusku woke his lord,

  Got him out of bed,

  ‘My lord, Enil, your temple wall is breached,

  Battle broaches your gate.’

  Enil spoke to Anu, the warrior.

  ‘Summon a single god and make sure he’s

  put to death.’

  Anu gaped

  And then spoke to the other gods, his brothers.

  ‘Why pick on us?

  Our work is dire, our distress abiding.

  Since Belet-ili, the birth goddess, is nearby,

  Why not get her to create Lullu, the man.

  Let Lullu wear the yoke wrought by

  Enil.

  Let man shed his sweat for the gods.’”

  “Maybe that’s where he’s a lulu comes from,” she said, laughing.

  “That’s good,” he said. “Damned good. I guess we’re a couple of lulus.”

  A week later they were sitting in the sunroom parlour having a glass of dry vermouth. There had been a heavy pounding rain during the night and it was still raining. The garden walk was covered with white petals pasted to the flagstone. He should have noticed that Kate was growing thin, eating only green salads, Emmenthal cheese, and dry toast. At first, sipping her vermouth, she’d grown giddy, and then, as if sapped of all energy, she said, “I’d love to be sitting somewhere down south in the hot sun.” He turned to her and said, “But you’ve never liked the sun.” She was sitting in a heavily cushioned wicker chair with her eyes closed. He touched her hand. She didn’t open her eyes. He went back to reading Conrad, a novel, An Outcast of the Islands. Suddenly he stood up, staring into the stooping branches of the apple tree, bent by the weight of the pouring rain, and then, just as abruptly, he sat down.

  “Listen to this,” he said: “‘There is always one thing the ignorant man knows, and that thing is the only thing worth knowing; it fills the ignorant man’s universe. He knows all about himself…’”

  Willard dropped the book.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked, opening her eyes.

  “Can’t you see?”

  “See what?”

  “If I seem to know so much about everything, maybe that’s only a kind of ignorance. Maybe I don’t know anything about myself.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said sternly.

  “Silly?” he said. “I’m deadly serious.”

  He sat staring out the window, into the downpour as tulip petals in the garden broke and fell. He stared at the headless stems. She rose and went upstairs and took a hot bath. She lay in the water a long time, slipping in and out of sleep, until she realized the water was cold and she was shivering. When she came back downstairs he was still sitting by the window, facing the drenched garden.

  “Willard, for God’s sake, what’s the matter? You’ve hardly moved for hours and hours.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s a kind of dread, or something like that. A dread…”

  “It’s silence, that’s what it is.”

  “I suppose it is. The vast silence. Maybe we live in silence forever. Maybe when we die that’s all we are to hear. Silence. The word is dead. Maybe that is what hell is.”

  The next morning she didn’t get out of bed. He brought her tea, but she only drank half the cup. “Perhaps it’s a touch of flu,” she said, but she had no temperature and no headache. Her hands were cold. He sat holding and rubbing her hands. She smiled wanly. “Oh, I missed our good talks yesterday,” she said.

  “It was only a pause,” he said, trying to be cheerful.

  “That’s right,” she said, and she closed her eyes.

  “It was a hard day on the garden, too,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “All this dampness, it’s not good, not healthy.”

  “No.”

  “It gets into the bones.”

  “Yes.”

  “Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones…” he sang, trying to be gay.

  “Dem dry bones…” she whispered.

  “Did you know, Kate,” he said, leaning close, seeing that she was drifting off into sleep, “that they’ve started digging near to where most people think the garden of Eden was, and there’s an actual town that was there around 6000 BC? And that’s a fact,” he said, wagging his finger at her as she lay with her eyes closed, “because there are so many ways of dating things now, what with carbon 14 and tree rings, dendrochronology they call it, when they cut across a tree and read the rings. And then of course they match it with an older tree, and that tree with an older tree, all the way back to the bristlecone pine, 5,000 years ago, in fact even longer. And then…”

  She was sound asleep, smiling in her sleep. Her smile bewildered him. He had never seen her smile in her sleep. He wondered what secret happiness, found in sleep, had made her smile.

  One week later she was taken to hospital. She had a private room and a young doctor who spoke in a hushed monotone with his hands crossed inside the sleeves of his smock. “It’s a problem of circulation,” he said. “The blood’s just not getting around.”

  “Oh dear,” Willard said and sat in the bedside leather easy chair all day and into the early evening until Kate woke up and said, “You shouldn’t stay here all this time.”

  “Where else should I be?”

  The day she died, her feet and lower legs were blue from gangrene. And in great pain she’d quickly grown thin, the skin taut on her nose, her eyes silvered by a dull film. She panted for air, rolling her eyes. “Willard, Willard,” she whispered and reached for him.

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Talk to me.”

  “Yes, Kate.”

  “There. Talk to me there.”

  “Where is there?” he asked desperately.

  After her cremation, to which only a few old scholars came and none of his former students, Willard wandered from room to room in the house talking out loud. He kept calling her name, as if she might suddenly step in from the garden, smiling, her hands dirty from planting. In the late afternoons he sat by the open parlour window, talking and reading and gesturing. But then early one evening he got confused and said, “What did I say?” He couldn’t remember what he had said, and when Kate did not answer, the dread that he’d felt the month before, the fear that the hollow he’d so easily accepted was really a profound unawareness of himself, seized him in the chest and throat so that he was left breathless and thought he was going to choke. He was so afraid, so stricken by his utter aloneness, that he began to shake uncontrollably. He sat staring at her empty chair, ashamed of his trembling hands. He was sure he heard wolves calling and wondered if he was going crazy. He decided to get out for some air, to go down to the footbridge that crossed over the ravine and then come back.

  Later that week, Willard went for a long walk in the downtown streets, along streets that they had walked, but he couldn’t bring himself to go into the lunch counter. All the faces reflected in the store windows as he passed made his mind swirl, but when he stepped through the subway turnstiles, to the thunk of the aluminum bars turning over, he told Kate out loud and as clearly as he could that he was now absolutely sure, as he had promised her, that he was on to something big,
a simple truth, so simple that no one he knew had seen it, and the truth was that all the great myths were based on lies. He’d actually been thinking, he’d said to her during the short cremation procedure, that to live a great truth, it is probably necessary to live a great lie. “After all,” he said excitedly as he stepped through the last turnstile, “the Jews were never in Egypt. There was no Exodus. The Egyptians were fanatical record keepers and the Jews are never mentioned, and the cities that the Jews said they built, they did not exist. They were not there. There was no parting of the sea, no forty years of wandering in the desert… I mean, my God,” he said, shaking his long finger as he forgot where he was going and didn’t see that people were staring at him as he went back down an escalator, “what does anyone think Moses was doing out there for forty years? Forty years. You can walk across the Sinai in two days. And Jericho, there was no battle. No battle took place because there were no great walls to tumble down. There was no city there back then, not at that time,” and he threw up his arms, full of angry defiance, standing on the tiled and dimly lit platform of the St. George subway station.

  “Sorry,” Willard said to a cluster of women who were staring at him, “I’m very sorry.” He hurried back to the escalator, travelling up the moving stairs, craning his neck, eager to get out into the sunlight. “I just don’t know what I’m going to do, Kate,” he said in a whisper. “Talking to you like this, I forget. It’s so fine, I just plain forget, people looking at me as if I were some kind of loony.”

  It was painful for him to stay at home all day. He kept listening for her voice in the rooms, embarrassed by the sound of his own voice. He sank into grim, bewildered silence, sometimes standing in the hall in a trance, a stupor, certain that he was losing his mind. Sometimes he slept during the day and once dreamed that he was walking on his shadow, as if his shadow was always in front of him, a shadow made of soot. It whimpered with pain. He stomped on his shadow till he was out of breath. He was afraid it was the soot of a scorched body. He heard her voice, and saw her sitting with her elbow on the windowsill, picking old paint off a glass pane. She was feverish and kept calling for ice. “Ice is the only answer.” He woke up terrified. He locked their bedroom door and made his bed on the sofa in the library. For a week he slept on the sofa, drinking several glasses of port, trying to get to sleep. He could see from the sofa a hem of light under the bedroom door. He’d left the light on, a bedside reading lamp that she’d given him for his birthday, a porcelain angel with folded wings. On two evenings he was sure that he heard her voice in the bedroom, a voice so muffled that he couldn’t make out the words. Then one night while he was keeping watch on the hem of light, half tipsy, half asleep, it went out. He was panic-stricken. He took it as a sign that she was in trouble, that she was really going to die, and he fumbled with the old key, trying to get it into the lock, whispering. “Hold on, Kate, hold on, I’m coming,” cursing his own stupidity and cowardice for trying to close off the bedroom. Willard felt ashamed, as if he had betrayed her. When he got into the room, breathing heavily, he discovered that the bulb in the lamp, left on for so long, had burned out. He had seldom cried before, and only once in front of her. Now, standing before her dressing-table mirror, he discovered that he was dishevelled and haggard and he was crying. He began to sing as cheerfully as he could: