The Universe versus Alex Woods

by Extence, Gavin

  I knew that there would come a point when clinging to ‘normality’ would no longer be possible. Sooner or later, Mr Peterson’s independence was going to start to slip away from him; Dr Bradshaw had been very clear on this point. He’d have to start telling people eventually. He was going to require extensive medical and practical support. In the longer term, delaying – refusing point blank to make any decisions – was not going to help him. It was not a sensible strategy. At the back of my mind, in a dark, distant corner, I’d started to question if Mr Peterson was coping with his situation as well as Dr Enderby and I had first presumed.

  For some time, I debated whether or not I should raise this concern with Dr Enderby when I saw him at our final book club meeting, but when it came down to it, I decided not to. (I thought I knew exactly what he’d say: that we had to go on honouring Mr Peterson’s decisions and respecting his right to follow his own path.) Instead, we talked about me. Dr Enderby seemed very concerned to know how I was holding up. I told him the truth: that there were good days and bad days, but mostly I was trying to think positively and constructively. I was hoping for the best and prepared for the worst. Dr Enderby said this was always a sensible policy.

  What I didn’t tell him was exactly what my ‘preparedness’ meant.

  I thought that if Mr Peterson had anything between two to five years left, as my research indicated, then I’d definitely have to take some time out from my education. This would probably be between school and college, or maybe between college and university, if all went well. Since he didn’t have a family, it was obvious to me that no one else was going to be able to care for Mr Peterson on a full-time basis. It had to be me. The only problem was, I didn’t know how he’d react to this proposal. I anticipated some resistance. But this was the one good thing about his refusal to make any plans. It gave me plenty of time to think things through properly, to go over all the contingencies. By the time he was ready to confront what was going to happen next, I planned to have a full arsenal of arguments ready to deploy.

  While this inner drama played out, I tried at all times to maintain a neutral exterior, but this was not something that came naturally to me. There were several occasions, at that final meeting of the Secular Church, when I found myself wishing that I could be more like Dr Enderby, who, of course, was very practised at keeping all sorts of confidences (being a doctor) and never lost his composure (being a Buddhist). But to me, much of the time, a calm exterior felt like a deception; and, as I think I’ve mentioned, deception has never been my strongest suit.

  The thing that probably saved me was that everyone was acting kind of oddly that day. I suppose it was because everything was coming to an end, and in my experience, there’s often a lot of excess emotion floating around at the conclusion of long-term projects – even when that conclusion has been a successful one. It was hanging there in the air, like a thin mist, and if I appeared distant and subdued, it was probably not as noticeable as it might have been in different circumstances. Added to this, I should point out that my demeanour was certainly not the strangest that day. That accolade, as it turned out, would fall to Mr Peterson himself. In an afternoon of atypical behaviour, his stood out as extremely atypical. Of course, I understood the reasons for this – I thought – but I had no idea what everyone else would make of his sudden transformation.

  Mr Peterson was not given to excess sentimentality. Nor was he one for long, elaborate speeches. But that day, he made it quite clear that he wanted to be the last person to speak, and that he planned to speak at some length. There were some ‘philosophical’ themes, close to his heart, that he wished to address in bringing matters to a close (and Mr Peterson was certainly not given to philosophizing). For a while, as he spoke, I was convinced that he was going to tell everyone about his illness. He seemed to be building up to it. But as it turned out, he said nothing directly. He stuck more or less to the point, and kept his focus on Timequake. Only Dr Enderby and I knew that he was also talking about himself, about his own situation; and we still managed to misinterpret what he was really trying to say.

  ‘For various reasons,’ Mr Peterson began, innocuously enough, ‘it’s taken me a very long time to read this book. Or to re-read it, I should say, because of course I read it when it first came out – about a decade ago, I guess. And I remember thinking at that time that it was probably the most irreverent of Vonnegut’s books. A great read, of course, but not a book that took itself at all seriously.

  ‘Well, having read it a whole lot more slowly this time round, I have to say my original impression has changed some. I guess what was driven home was something I should’ve already known: with Vonnegut, you can’t take any kind of irreverence at face value. The funnier the joke, and the more light-hearted the approach, the more serious the implications tend to be. He said something along those lines himself, I believe – several times. Laughter, irreverence, absurdity – as often as not, these things have their roots buried deep in despair.

  ‘The idea that time might suddenly loop back on itself, so that a whole decade of events gets replayed on autopilot, is, of course, completely absurd. It’s a farce, and it plays out as a farce in the novel. It’s the engine that drives the comedy, but not something to be taken seriously. Or so you might think. Because re-reading the story this time round, I found a weird thing happening. I found that I was taking this idea seriously. And the further I got through the book, the less farcical it seemed.

  ‘What if you really did have to relive the last ten years of your life? Or even your whole life? Believe it or not, this idea interested me enough to do some background research – and I know that’s usually more Alex’s thing. But here’s what I found.

  ‘Vonnegut certainly wasn’t the first one to dream up the idea of time turning back on itself. Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher, actually came up with an almost identical idea in one of his books, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, about a hundred years earlier. Now, I’ve never been one for philosophy, as such. I tend to think that our morals come from our gut, and everything else is either common sense or window-dressing. A month ago, if you’d said “Zarathustra” to me, I’d have assumed you were talking Strauss. But I think I’m getting off the point. Let me tell you what Nietzsche said in his book. He said that there is no afterlife in the normal, religious sense – no heaven, no hell, no purgatory. But there isn’t “nothing” either. Instead, after we die, things simply start again from scratch. We live our whole life again, exactly as it was, nothing changing from birth to death. And then the same thing happens again and again and again, on and on for ever. He called this idea the “Eternal Return”.

  ‘Well, apparently, Nietzsche may not have believed this at all – not in any literal sense. But he wrote it down in character, like he believed every word. The point of this was to set up a kind of thought experiment. He wanted the reader to take the idea seriously, to give it credence, so that he’d be forced to confront the following question: if true, is this a pleasant idea? Or, put differently: if you had to relive your life exactly as it was – same successes and failures, same happiness, same miseries, same mixture of comedy and tragedy – would you want to? Was it worth it? And it’s the same thing with Vonnegut, I think.

  ‘Anyway, if you’ll bear with me a minute longer, I think there’s also a second part to this thought experiment that’s just as important. This concerns free will. For Nietzsche, the Eternal Return was also a way of thinking about free will from an atheist’s perspective, which, of course, was still a minority perspective in those days. The Eternal Return was another way of presenting the idea that there simply isn’t anything beyond this life. This is all there is, and if there’s any purpose to be found, then it’s gonna have to be found in the here and now, through our own endeavours and without any supernatural guidance. And I think for Nietzsche this idea was, frankly, a real kick up the ass. It meant that we all had a responsibility to make the best possible choices – to try our damnedest not to blow our only sho
t.

  ‘Well, I think Vonnegut might’ve gone along with most of that too, but he also had his own ideas on free will. Because for Vonnegut, free will isn’t always a given. It’s something we take too much for granted – he would’ve agreed with Nietzsche on that – but it’s also something that can quite suddenly disappear. Part of his thought experiment in Timequake involves exactly this scenario. People are forced to live on autopilot – knowing full well what’s going to happen in the next ten years and powerless to change it in even the smallest way. It’s treated like the most irreverent aspect of the story, but, deep down, it’s the least irreverent idea. Because Vonnegut was a man who knew exactly what the loss of free will felt like. As a POW, he was forced to watch an entire city burning to the ground – and there wasn’t a damn thing he or God or anybody else could do about it. All he could do was help count the corpses – all one hundred and thirty thousand of them.

  ‘So I think Kurt Vonnegut knew the value of free will as well as anyone, but he also understood its limitations – how and where it could suddenly be taken away. And I’d like to conclude with the sentence that best sums up this position, which is Vonnegut’s citation of the Serenity Prayer, in Slaughterhouse-Five. Of course, there were quotes from Timequake I could have chosen instead, but none, I think, that hits the nail so precisely on the head. And it’s another one that, coming from an atheist, sounds a whole lot more facetious than it actually is:

  ‘“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference.”

  ‘Amen.’

  There was a moment of silence. I held my breath. I was waiting for the announcement that never came. Instead, Mr Peterson cleared his throat, and then said: ‘On just as important a note, I’d like to thank Alex for setting this thing up. If anyone’s still got the impression that I had anything to with organizing this group, rest assured, I did not. I thought the idea was completely crazy. I told him no one would come. That’s the only reason I agreed to host it.’

  There was a smattering of laughter. I thought Mr Peterson was probably warming to his role as speech-maker.

  ‘Seriously, though,’ he continued. ‘Thank you, Alex. This has meant a lot to me, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that.’

  And there may have been more as well, but if there was, I was unable to hear it. I had gone the colour of the inside of a watermelon. Then I felt my eyes starting to burn.

  ‘I need to excuse myself for a moment,’ I said.

  In the bathroom, I started to cry. I washed my face thoroughly before rejoining the group.

  It was an hour or so later, after everyone else had left, that Mr Peterson reiterated what he’d said earlier, as if once wasn’t sufficient. ‘I meant it,’ he repeated gravely. ‘I’m very grateful for the past fourteen months. I want you to remember that in the future.’

  I knew it was the kind of sentence that required a sincere, meaningful response, but I thought if I talked at any length, I’d start crying again.

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  It was very inadequate.

  And it was this, and only this, that made me return later on. As I’ve said, I had a general feeling that something was off-kilter that day, but nothing that would have motivated me to check up on Mr Peterson or anything like that. If anything, I had been somewhat reassured by the last part of his Kurt Vonnegut speech. It told me that he was finally prepared to face the future. He was asking for the serenity to accept the things he could not change. That was how I misinterpreted him. I focussed on the wrong part. It was pure chance that I happened to go back that evening.

  I wasn’t planning to stay for more than two minutes. I thought all I needed to do was turn up at the door and say the things I should have said earlier: that the past fourteen months had meant a lot to me too, and whatever happened next, he didn’t have to face it alone. It wasn’t the sort of thing that could wait until the next day.

  But when I knocked at the front door, there was no answer. I wasn’t that surprised or worried. Mr Peterson didn’t always come to the door straight away, especially when he’d been smoking, as was normal at this time of the evening, and had fallen into a doze.

  I knocked again, then tried the door. It was unlocked. The hallway smelled of marijuana. That was unusual. To my knowledge, Mr Peterson only ever smoked outside, or on the porch if it was raining. Mrs Peterson had not liked the smell of the weed, not when it got into the upholstery, anyway, and Mr Peterson always said that old habits die hard. But, really, I think it was a habit he’d chosen to stick to.

  I called his name, but there was no response. I figured he’d fallen asleep in the chair, and when I entered the living room, I saw that I was right. He was slumped slightly to one side, with a blanket draped across his legs. The ashtray was next to him on the side table. Next to the ashtray was an almost empty glass of water, and next to that was an open notepad. This is what he’d written on the notepad, in large black letters: ‘Please do not resuscitate.’

  I slapped his face. There was no response, but his cheek was warm, and I thought that he was still breathing. It took me only a few seconds to find the empty packaging for the pills he had taken: diazepam, paracetamol and codeine. I knew this would be important information.

  I ripped his note from the notepad, shoved it in my pocket, and called 999.

  SECTIONED

  His suicide note arrived two days later, in the post. This is what it said:

  There’s nothing you could have done. It was my choice and mine alone. I wanted to die peacefully and with dignity. If you don’t understand that now, I hope someday you will. Please forgive me.

  I had no real point of comparison, but still, I thought it was a pretty lousy note, all things considered. I filed it all the same.

  It had been posted second class to ensure a sufficient delay in its arrival. He had posted another letter, marked URGENT, directly through the letterbox of the doctors’ surgery, informing his GP of his intentions and asking that an ambulance be sent to recover his body asap. He also requested that my mother be informed so that she could be the one to tell me. That seemed like the best way of doing things. My mother could break it to me gently when I got home from school, by which time the ambulance would have had at least seven hours to take him to the morgue. He’d planned it so there was zero chance of my being the one who discovered his corpse. I thought that was considerate of him.

  Of course, when he awoke, he was furious.

  The ambulance had taken us to Yeovil Hospital. It was a repeat of the trip I’d made some five and a third years earlier, after the meteor. At that time, as you know, I was unconscious for two weeks, and when I woke up, I thought I was in heaven. Mr Peterson was only unconscious for one night, and when he woke up, he knew straight away that something had gone wrong. Even though he was extremely out of it, he had no delusion that Yeovil Hospital was the hereafter. It smelled too much of starch.

  By the time he was briefly awake, I had been sent home with my mother, and the following afternoon, when we returned, he was asleep again. One of his nurses told us it was very unlikely that he’d be lucid enough to talk before visiting hours ended because they’d given him quite a lot of morphine. I’m not sure this was one hundred per cent orthodox in terms of approved medical procedure, but I could understand why they’d done it. He’d started complaining the moment he woke up. He said that this was like the worst hangover anyone anywhere had ever had to endure, which wasn’t that surprising. He’d managed to poison himself quite severely before the doctors pumped his stomach. He kept buzzing the nurse to tell her that this experience was worse than Vietnam, and if they weren’t going to let him die, they should at least put him to sleep for a while. Eventually, a doctor was called in, and he agreed that they couldn’t just leave Mr Peterson as he was. It wasn’t fair – not on the staff, and certainly not on the other patients in the ward. But unfortunately, because of the recent abuse Mr Peterson’s l
iver and kidneys had suffered, administering any standard tranquillizer was out of the question. Instead, they shot him up, and repeated this procedure every four to six hours for the next twenty-four.

  Consequently, there was little point us visiting that day.

  I told my mother that if it was okay with her, I’d be taking the rest of the week off school. She agreed this was a sensible plan.

  Ellie took me in the next day, and insisted on accompanying me up to the ward. I thought my mother had probably asked her to do this, but I wasn’t sure. Equally, it could have been morbid curiosity. It was hard to tell with Ellie. Either way, I was glad of the lift.

  Mr Peterson was thin, unshaven and scowling. He looked quite ghoulish, to be honest with you, like he’d returned from the dead – which I suppose shouldn’t have been all that surprising. His expression didn’t change as we seated ourselves on one side of the bed.

  ‘Hello,’ I said.

  ‘Hello.’

  His voice matched his face.

  ‘This is Ellie. She gave me a lift in. I hope you don’t mind her being here? She just wanted to stay long enough to make sure I’m okay.’

  ‘I’m not crazy about either of you being here,’ Mr Peterson said. ‘But I doubt I’ll get much say in that either.’

  I ignored this.

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘How do you think I’m feeling?’

  ‘I think you’re probably feeling terrible.’

  ‘I’m feeling terrible. You know, they’re not gonna let me leave this place. Not for the foreseeable future. It’s official. I’ve been sectioned. If I try to leave, they’ll forcibly detain me under the Mental Health Act of 1842, or some such horseshit. It’s barbaric! I hope you’re pleased.’