by Ian Mcewan
I sat in the room my mother used to call the library, though the shelves were always pretty bare, and I read every last word, and actually heard them, in my head, spoken by you straight to me. I read each article as a letter sent by you into the future that was going to contain us both. What were you trying to do to me, I kept thinking. Hurt me? Insult me? Test me? I hated you for it, but I never forgot that I loved you too, and that was why I kept going. He needs my help, I told myself whenever I came close to giving up, he needs me to set him free from his little cage of reason. I had moments when I wondered if I had truly understood what God wanted from me. Was I to deliver into His hands the author of these hateful pieces against Him? Perhaps I was intended for something simpler and purer. I mean, I knew you wrote about science, and I was prepared to be baffled or bored, but I didn’t know you wrote out of contempt.
You’ve probably forgotten the article you wrote four years ago for the New Scientist about the latest technological aids to biblical scholarship. Well, who cares about the carbon dating of the Turin Shroud? Do you think people changed their minds about their beliefs when they heard that it was a medieval hoax? Do you think faith could depend upon a length of rotting cloth? But it was another piece that really shocked me, when you wrote about God Himself. Perhaps it was a joke, but that makes it even worse. You pretend to know what or who He is—a literary character, you say, like something out of a novel. You say the best minds in the field are prepared to take “an educated guess” at who invented Yahweh, that the evidence points to a woman who was living around 1000 B.C., Bathsheba, the Hittite who slept with David. A woman novelist dreamed up God! The best minds would rather die than presume to know so much. You’re dealing in powers neither you nor any person on earth can have any grasp of. You go on to say that Jesus Christ was a character too, mostly made up by Saint Paul and “whoever” wrote the Gospel of Saint Mark. I prayed for you, I prayed for the strength to face you, to go on loving you without being dragged down. How is it possible to love God and love you at the same time? Through faith alone, Joe. Not through facts, or pretend facts, or intellectual arrogance, but by trusting in God’s wisdom and love as a living presence in our lives, the kind of presence that no human, let alone a literary character, could ever have.
I suppose I was naive to think in that first rush of feeling I had for you that it could all come right simply because I wanted it so much. When the dawn came, I still had ten more pieces to read. I took a taxi to your place. You were asleep, unaware of your own vulnerability, indifferent to the protection you enjoy from a source whose existence you deny. Life has been very good to you, and I suppose standing out there I began to think you were ungrateful. It probably never crosses your mind to give thanks for what you have. It all happened by blind chance? You made it all yourself? I worry for you, Joe. I worry for what your arrogance could bring down on you. I crossed the road and put my hand on the hedge. No message this time. Why should you speak to me when you don’t have to? You think you have everything, you think that you can meet all your needs on your own. But without an awareness of God’s love, you’re living in a desert. If only you understood fully what it is I’m offering you. Wake up!
You might have got the impression that I hate science. I was never much good at school and I don’t take a personal interest in the latest advances, but I know it is a wonderful thing. The study and measurement of nature is really nothing more than a form of extended prayer, a celebration of the glory of God’s universe. The more we find out about the intricacies of His creation, the more we realize how little we know and how little we are. He gave us our minds, He granted us our wonderful cleverness. It seems so childish and sad that people use this gift to deny His reality. You write that we know enough about chemistry these days to speculate how life began on earth. Little mineral pools warmed by the sun, chemical bonding, protein chains, amino acids, etc. The primal soup. We’ve flushed God out of this particular story, you said, and now he’s been driven to his last redoubt, among the molecules and particles of the quantum physicists. But it doesn’t work, Joe. Describing how the soup is made isn’t the same as knowing why it’s made, or who the chef is. It’s a puny rant against an infinite power. Somewhere in among your protestations about God is a plea to be rescued from the traps of your own logic. Your articles add up to a long cry of loneliness. There’s no happiness in all this denial. What can it give you in the end?
I know you won’t hear me—yet. Your mind is closed, your defenses are in place. It suits you and it protects you to tell yourself that I’m a madman. Help! There’s a man outside offering me love and the love of God! Call the police, call an ambulance! There’s no problem with Joe Rose. His world is in place, everything fits, and all the problems are with Jed Parry, the patient idiot who stands in the street like a beggar, waiting to glimpse his loved one and to offer his love. What is it I have to do to make you begin to hear me? Only prayer can answer this question, and only love can carry it through. But my love for you is no longer of the beseeching sort. I don’t sit by the phone waiting for kind words from you. You don’t stand above me deciding my future, you don’t have the power to command me to do whatever you like. My love for you is hard and fierce, it won’t take no for an answer, and it’s moving steadily toward you, coming to claim you and deliver you. In other words, my love—which is also God’s love—is your fate. Your denials and refusals and all your articles and books are like the little foot stampings of a tired infant. It’s only a matter of time, and you’ll be grateful when the moment comes.
See? Reading you all night has strengthened me. That’s what God’s love does. If you’re beginning to feel uncomfortable now, it’s because the changes in you are already beginning to happen and one day you’ll be glad to say, Deliver me from meaninglessness. There’ll come a time when we’ll look back fondly on these exchanges. We’ll know then where they were leading, and it will make us smile to think how hard I had to push, and how hard you fought to keep me off. So whatever you’re feeling now, please don’t destroy these letters.
When I came in the early morning, I hated you for what you had written. I wanted to hurt you. Perhaps even more than that. Something more, and God will forgive me, I thought. On the way over in the taxi I imagined you telling me in your cold way that God and His Only Son were just characters, like James Bond or Hamlet. Or that you yourself could make life in a laboratory flask, given a handful of chemicals and a few million years. It’s not only that you deny there’s a God—you want to take His place. Pride like this can destroy you. There are mysteries we should not touch, and there’s humility too we all must learn, and I hated you, Joe, for your arrogance. You want the final word on everything. After reading thirty-five of your articles, I should know. There’s never a moment’s doubt or hesitation or admission of ignorance. You’re there with the up-to-the-minute truth on bacteria and particles and agriculture and insects and Saturn’s rings and musical harmony and risk theory and bird migration … My brain was like a washing machine, churning and spinning, full of your dirty washing. Can you blame me for hating you for the things you allow to fill your mind—satellites, nanotechnologies, genetic engineering, biocomputers, hydrogen engines? It’s all shopping. You buy it all, you’re a cheerleader for it, an ad man hired to talk up other people’s stuff. In four years’ journalism, not a word about the real things, like love and faith.
Perhaps I’m angry because I’m impatient for our life together to begin. I remember I once went walking with my school in Switzerland in the summer holidays. One day we spent the whole morning climbing a boring rocky path. We all complained—it was so hot and pointless, but the teacher made us keep going. Just before lunch we arrived at a high alpine meadow, a huge sunny expanse of flowers and grasses, with electric green mosses around the banks of a stream. It was a miraculous place. We were a noisy bunch of kids, but we suddenly went very quiet. Someone said in a whisper that it was like arriving in Paradise. It was a great moment in my life. I think when our di
fficulties are over, when you come here and we’re together, it will be like arriving at that meadow. No more rocky uphill! Peace, and time stretching out before us.
There’s one last thing I have to say to you. I’ve exploded into your life, just as you have into mine. You’re bound to wish it hadn’t happened. Your life is about to be upended. You have to tell Clarissa, you have to move all your stuff, and you’ll probably want to get rid of most of it anyway. You’ll have to explain yourself to all your friends, not only your change of address but the revolution in your beliefs. Pain and bother, and you’ll want none of it. There’ll be times when you wished I had never troubled your ordered and satisfying life. You’ll wish I didn’t exist. It’s understandable, and you shouldn’t feel any guilt about it. You’ll feel anger, and you’ll want to try and drive me away because I represent upheaval and turmoil. All that is how it has to be. It’s the steep rocky path! Everything you feel, you must find expression for. Curse me, throw stones at my head, take a swing at me—if you dare. But there is one thing you must never do while we are still making our way to our meadow, and that is to ignore me, to pretend it’s not happening, to deny the difficulty, or the pain or the love. Don’t ever walk by me as if I weren’t there. Neither of us can be fooled. Never deny my reality, because in the end you’ll deny yourself. The despair I felt at your rejection of God had something to do with my sense that you were also rejecting me. Accept me, and you’ll find yourself accepting God without a thought. So promise me. Show me your fury or bitterness. I won’t mind. I’ll never desert you. But never, never try to pretend to yourself that I do not exist.
Jed
Seventeen
I don’t know what led to it, but we were lying face-to-face in bed, as though nothing were wrong. It may have been mere tiredness. It was late at night, long past midnight. The silence appeared so rich as to have a visual quality, a sparkle or hard gloss, and a thickness too, like fresh paint. This synesthesia must have been due to my disorientation, for this was so familiar, lying here in the green field of her stare, feeling her smooth thin arms. It was so unexpected too. We were hardly at war, but everything between us was stalled. We were like armies facing each other across a maze of trenches. We were immobilized. The only movement was that of silent accusations rippling over our heads like standards. To her I was manic, perversely obsessed, and, worst of all, the thieving invader of her private space. As far as I was concerned, she was disloyal, unsupportive in this time of crisis, and irrationally suspicious.
There were no rows, or even skirmishes, as though we sensed that a confrontation might blow us apart. We remained on tight speaking terms; we small-talked about work and exchanged messages about shopping, cooking, and household repairs. Clarissa left the house every weekday to give seminars and lectures and do battle with the management. I wrote a long and dull review of five books on consciousness. When I started out in science writing, the word was more or less proscribed in scientific discourse. It wasn’t a subject. Now it was up there with black holes and Darwin, almost bigger than dinosaurs.
We continued our daily round because little else seemed clear. We knew we had lost heart, we had lost our heart. We were loveless, or we had lost the trick of love, and we didn’t know how to begin talking about it. We slept in the same bed, but we didn’t embrace. We used the same bathroom, but we never saw each other naked. We were scrupulously casual because we knew that anything less—cold politeness, for example—would have exposed the charade and led us into the conflict we longed to avoid. What had once seemed natural, like lovemaking or long talks or silent companionship, now appeared as robustly contrived as Harrison’s fourth sea clock, impossible as well as anachronistic to recreate. When I looked at her, brushing her hair or bending to retrieve a book from the floor, I remembered her beauty like some schoolbook fact got by heart. True, but not immediately relevant. And I could reconstruct myself in her own gaze as oafishly large and coarse, a biologically motivated bludgeon, a giant polyp of uninspired logic with which she was mistakenly associated. When I spoke to her, my voice rang dull and flat in my skull, and not just every sentence but every word was a lie. Muted anger, finely disseminated self-loathing—these were my elements, my colors. When our eyes met, it was as if our ghostly, meaner selves held up hands before our faces to block the possibility of understanding. But our gazes rarely met, and when they did it was only a second or two before they shrank nervously away. Our former loving selves would never have understood us or forgiven us, and that was it, right there: the dominant, unacknowledged emotion around our household in those days was shame.
Now here we were, somewhere between half past one and two in the morning, lying in bed, staring at each other by the low light of one lamp, I naked, she in a cotton nightdress, our arms and hands touching, but neutrally, without commitment. All the questions were heaped around us, and for a while neither of us dared speak. It was enough that we could look each other in the eye.
I’ve said we still managed to talk to each other about everyday matters, but one aspect of our lives had become absorbed into the daily routine and we could not bear to discuss it. People often remark on how quickly the extraordinary becomes commonplace. I think that every time I’m on a motorway at night, or on a plane as it rises through cloud cover into sunlight. We are highly adaptive creatures. The predictable becomes, by definition, background, leaving the attention uncluttered, the better to deal with the random or unexpected.
Parry was sending three or four letters a week. They were generally long and ardent, and written in an increasingly focused present tense. He often took as his subject the process by which the letter itself was written, the room he was in, the changing light and weather, his shifting mood, and the fact that by writing to me he had successfully conjured my presence, right there at his side. His signings-off were lengthy expressions of sorrow at parting. The religious references would have seemed formulaic had they not been so fervent: his love was like God’s, patient and all-embracing, and it was through Parry that God would bring me to Him. There was usually an element of accusation, either running as a strain throughout or concentrated in one pained passage: I had started this love affair and I should therefore face my responsibilities toward him. I was playing with him, leading him on, sending him messages of encouragement, then turning away from him. I was a tease, a coquette, I was the master of slow torture and my genius was never to admit what I was doing. I no longer seemed to be sending messages via curtain or privet. I spoke to him now in dreams. I appeared radiantly before him like a Bible prophet and assured him of my love and foretold the happier days to come.
I learned how to scan these letters. I lingered only on the accusations or expressions of frustration, always looking for a repeat of the threat I thought he had made outside the house. The anger was there, all right. There was a darkness in him, but he was too cunning to set it down. It had to be there, though, when he wrote that I was the source of all his pain, when he speculated that I might perhaps never come to live with him, when he hinted that it might “end in sorrow and more tears than we ever dreamed, Joe.” I wanted more than that. I longed for it. Please put the weapon in my hands, Jed. One little threat would have given me enough to take to the police, but he denied me, he played with me and held back, just as he said I did. I needed him to reiterate his threat because I wanted the certainty of it, and the fact that he would not give me satisfaction kept my suspicion alive that sooner or later he would do me harm. My researches confirmed this. Well over half of all male de Clerambaults in one survey had attempted violence on the subjects of their obsessions.
Just as routine as the letters was Parry’s presence outside the building. He came most days and took up a position across the street. He seemed to have found an equilibrium between the demands of time and the pressure of his needs. If he didn’t catch sight of me, he would remain for about an hour before walking away. If he saw me come out of the building, he would follow me a little way, always remaining on his side,
and then turn down a side street and stride away without looking back. He would have had enough contact then to keep his love alive, and as far as I could tell, he would go straight home to Hampstead to start a letter. One of them began, “I understood your glance this morning, Joe, but I think you’re wrong …” But he never mentioned his decision not to talk to me again, and I was suddenly bereft, for if he would not threaten me by letter, I hoped he might oblige by letting me capture his words on tape. I kept a tiny dictating machine in my pocket and wore a microphone under my lapel. On one occasion, watched by Parry, I lingered by the privet and ran my hands along it to imprint it with a message, and then I turned his way and looked at him. But he wouldn’t come; nor did he refer to that moment in the letter he wrote later the same day. The pattern of his love was not shaped by external influences, even if they originated with me. His was a world determined from the inside, driven by private necessity, and this way it could remain intact. Nothing could prove him wrong, nothing was needed to prove him right. If I had written him a letter declaring passionate love, it would have made no difference. He crouched in a cell of his own devising, teasing out meanings, imbuing nonexistent exchanges with their drama of hope or disappointment, always scrutinizing the physical world, its random placements and chaotic noise and colors, for the correlatives of his current emotional state—and always finding satisfaction. He illuminated the world with his feelings, and the world confirmed him at every turn his feelings took. When the despair rose, it was because he had read the darkness in the air or a variation in a bird’s song that told him of my contempt. When it was joy, it came validated as an effect of some blissfully unexpected cause—a kind message from me in a dream, an intuition that had “come up” during a prayer or meditation.
