He meets us at the security gate. Flashes his pass at the guard, climbs into the cab with us. Has Evie turn her head away so the guard can’t see she’s blindfolded. We drive to a fire door round the back of the building. An almost anonymous flat-roofed concrete building surrounded by barbed wire. The door’s unlocked. We walk quickly along a corridor with rubberized flooring, Evie mute, having to be steered, giving herself up to the guidance of me on one side, him on the other. Then he pulls open with all his strength a huge black door and pushes us through it.
I should have realized the effect it would have on her. So happy losing herself in this rich new world of sounds. In that room, the atmosphere pressing more heavily than gravity, when I turned to her (still blindfolded) and said, I love you, all nuance, all tone, all resonance, dead on my tongue.
I like this hotel room. White walls, gauzy curtains. Sunlight sifting through the fine mesh. Like that dress of hers. Our things look shabby, travelworn, in this clean, white space. I haven’t seen her beaded headband in a while.
Evie has not spoken since.
New York
Strange shadows. An old factory. What did they make here? The silent machines give off a metal stink in the heat. We live in one small corner, a mattress where Evie lies twisted up in the sheets, asleep. Last night, a terrible scene. Evie sobbing, rocking, racked. Her first real words since. The gist of it: Mother’s womb – an echo chamber. In it she was alive to all sound, ‘and all sound alive to me. And then this dead room you lead me into, this – this – slaughterhouse with its hostile air, enemy to all sound! Yes! (screaming now) the very air seeks out sound, seizes it, crushes it. I heard your heartbeat and I heard it stifled, all at once. When I collapsed you carried me from that anti-womb, stillborn.’
What have I done?
Something exhausted about this city. The neighbourhood. The derelict buildings and everywhere rubbish and the people subdued or enraged. I take her out for a walk. Alleys and back-streets and boarded-up shops. The air so muggy, it feels quilted. We see a crowd of people gathered in an abandoned lot. Some guy with a chainsaw slicing into this old clapboard building, cutting out a section from it. The delicacy and precision of this action – instead of a wrecking-ball, say – makes it a particularly intimate, painful kind of destruction. Almost loving. Evie makes no mention of recording.
Today we had news of her father’s death. Evie unmoved, it seems. A growing sense of terror in me. Because of her lack of emotion, I think, which is monstrous. She wasn’t close enough to him for this to be shock. Nor does it seem as though she’s pre-feeling: on the edge of feeling something, just trying to work out what. She doesn’t care. She’s gonna leave.
Evie asleep. It’s airless. I take her for a walk. When we return, we lie on the mattress, drained. I wake when I feel her fingers lightly brushing my belly. Her first real contact with me since the dead room, since before that. She made love to me. Kept saying my name, kept whispering to me. Tears in my eyes which didn’t spill cos I couldn’t move. I just lay there and let her wander all over me, and I couldn’t tell you what I was feeling except it just built and built until I thought I would choke, and then the tears did slide off my face. I moved my head, and that’s when I saw it. A red light, half-hidden under a heap of clothes at the foot of the mattress. She was recording us. These are my last words. I will leave this for her. I’m leaving.
27
Tinnitus
Spring has arrived in my attic. The gulls bicker. The trees are budding and all day rap knuckles against my roof. Small creatures nest in their hiding places under the floor. Inside my head the old familiar rumpus. It’s been several weeks since I completed the transcription of Damaris’ diary. Since then, I’ve written little, and that little has been lost in false starts and evasions. I was trying to recount the days and weeks after she left me in the hotel room in New York, but I was unable to remember anything I could set down in words. My powers of listening weaken daily; and so the gaps in my history grow wider, and the silences more frequent with every page.
This morning the sun arrived in earnest. It fell obliquely on the roof, filtered through my skylight, via the sheets printed with my history, those same sheets I taped over the glass and which at one time functioned like a shade, snuffing out the sun. Now the sun has bleached the paper, erased the ink, and the attic gleams with spidered light. I woke earlier than usual. It was early afternoon. My habit is to sleep during the day and work – if I am able to work – by night. I remained there on my mattress, hoping to doze off, to rest until dusk. But the light, together with the trees knocking on the roof, as well as the gulls, not to mention the ringing in my ears, made sleep impossible. I lay with my eyes closed, wondering if today I would manage to write, until I felt the first poison of a headache coming on. I got up and performed my waking rituals. Then I sat down at my desk and opened my computer. It was no use, the sun fell down on me like a shower of coins, and I found myself unable to compose a single sentence. I said to myself, Perhaps, if I can shut out the sun, I will be able to work. I climbed over the heap of junk to my wardrobe, grabbed a sheaf of papers, climbed back, then on to my chair. In a kind of animal frenzy, like some nocturnal creature woken in the day, I taped them up, darkening with those black lies the confusing light of the sun. I continued to travel back and forth between my wardrobe and chair, pasting layer upon layer, and not only over the skylight, for now I noticed cracks of light between the wooden boards of the roof. I taped my history over these too, avoiding the mappa mundi, which imperfectly covers one-third of the south-facing wall. As I did I found that my anguish began to fade, and the ringing in my ears became faint, light and remote, and my head stopped hurting, and I began to laugh, first under my breath, then louder and louder.
I did not know if it was day or night. Even now I am not certain. The attic was dark, as now, and quiet, as if it had sunk to the bottom of the sea. I stopped taping, went over to my computer and woke it from its own kind of sleep. Without any preparation – no deep breaths or questions – I started to type, and in no time I had related the foregoing. ‘Yes!’ I cried, happy at last. That was a moment ago. Now I am waiting for the sounds of my past to declare themselves … and here they come, in fragments it is true, and yet the important thing is that they arrive, now in wretched torn shreds, now musical and precise, now as a kind of unconscious ringing in my head. And all is quiet outside my head. And the sun does not shine in my attic. From now on, whenever I grow frustrated with my history, whenever I curse these words perhaps better left unwritten, I shall comfort myself with the thought that each page I turn out will give me an opportunity to subdue the sun. That more words mean less light.
…
After Damaris left I took the plane to Scotland. My father had died while I was in America, and on returning to Gullane I found the house boarded up. The birds had taken over. The walls and furniture, everything, was covered in their filth. The attic was the only room they had not managed to enter. I climbed the ladder, opened the trap door and lay there at the top of the house, eyes closed, trying to ignore their screeching. After a while even the birds didn’t bother me. My mind was on Damaris. I thought a great deal about what she had whispered to me on the bus leaving Nashville: that I did not have a remarkable sense of hearing, that I was just a freak with large ears.
After that, every morning for a week I smashed bottles on the beach, then returned to my retreat at the top of the house and ate beans with my coffee. In time I came down from the attic. I threw open the windows and doors and chased the birds away with a broom. I should have got a cat, but I couldn’t bear the sight of one. I sat on the sofa and stared at the wall. For weeks I hardly left the sofa. I felt empty, an emptiness which left me feeling totally inert, or furious, or helplessly bored, a sickening kind of refined boredom which provoked in me the desire to destroy things, all things, objects, texts, animals, friendships, property.
Instead, I fought with Damaris in my mind. If, I reasoned, she had loved me she would have stayed
with me in spite of my distractedness, my obsessions. I knew she had suffered because of my plan to record the sounds. Perhaps she had amused herself with Zed, the make-up girl? Perhaps, like me with the sounds, she had found pleasure in other things. Yes, I thought – sure of it now – she was already with Zed, and if not Zed then certainly another. Hadn’t she told me that she couldn’t bear to be alone? And when I thought this, and imagined her touching someone else in the places she had touched me, and her wandering naked in front of that person, who would lean over to kiss her on the mouth, wild with tenderness, I felt like I was splitting in two. I packed a bag and rushed to Edinburgh airport. As soon as I arrived, however, my thoughts turned, and I wouldn’t board the flight. If Damaris had loved me, I reasoned now, why had she tried to hurt or destroy me? She had blindfolded me and taken me to the anechoic chamber, that graveyard of sounds.
I have often spoken of the noises in my head. It was in that terrifying chamber I became aware of them for the first time. I recall the powerful heat, and the air – the weight of it – which did not transmit sound, and I felt like I was suffocating. I took my blindfold off. Damaris was watching me intensely. I fell back into her arms, frightened. She was studying me, smiling, but without the least bit of humour in her face. She spoke, and her words sank or perhaps rose – they seemed to do both – and were swallowed up in that strange, heavy air. I leaned back, my head in her lap, and it was then I heard it: a kind of slow sighing that came and went. I thought, which is to say listened, for a while, and then I understood: the sighing was not the sound of Damaris breathing, as I had believed, but – how shall I say? – the noise of myself. It grew louder and deeper, and I sat upright. Soon I heard fluting and whistling noises, and a soft kind of whirring busyness, together with a low thunder, and smacking little clicks, uneven and stabbing, and burbling as of water falling and flowing in the gutter. I sat there listening to the humming of the little world of my own body. Its wild resonance disgusted me.
We returned to our hotel and that uneven, braying, coruscating tone continued to haunt me. I had the bitter revelation it was not entirely new; I had heard it before, in the pits, immediately after the accident involving my left ear. Then the noise had gone as quickly as it had arrived. Now it – I – continued … dinning through my final days with Damaris, rising in pitch after she left me in the hotel, unchangingly loud as I packed my bag and travelled to the airport in New York, terrorizing me on the plane, maddening me when I reached Gullane – and really, ever since, no matter how hard I have tried to block it out, it has never ceased.
Yes, my experience in that room has affected everything in my life. I have told no one about it; perhaps because I myself do not understand its essential aspects, perhaps out of a sense of embarrassment at being so unnerved by something so ordinary, by hearing what doctors hear every day and for which there is a dedicated instrument, the stethoscope. What I heard in the anechoic chamber was merely the healthy functioning of my body: the air passing through my lungs, my heartbeat, the rush of my blood, the creaking and trickling of my empty stomach. Later, in my forties, I would read about a composer’s own experience in an anechoic chamber; he noted two sounds: a low thunder, which was his blood in circulation, and a high-pitched humming, which was his nervous system in operation. Later still, through my research, I would understand that silence may achieve significance only in relation to what it denies, displaces or disavows, just as there is no up without down, or left without right. And even later, when I began to write these stories, in the process of attempting to speak about silence, the true subject of my history, I would realize that one may do so only by breaking it. At the time, however, in that room without echo, I merely held my stomach and wept. I felt sickened, appalled. I felt too the stirrings of a kind of resignation or shame to which I could not give a name, but which would continue to haunt me to this very day. What was so disturbing for me that afternoon in 1972? Quite simply I realized that to be alive is to emit sound. The sensation marked me so deeply that I wonder if it does not in fact expose a more disturbing revelation: not fear of the noise of myself, but the loss of the silence it for ever crowded out. Yes, in the anechoic chamber I understood for the first time that silence does not exist.
My father was dead. I’d inherited the house and his allowance. I did not work. How did I spend those years? I took walks on the beach. I visited Mr Rafferty. I spent more and more time in the attic, attempting to clear out my father’s things. More often than not I would become distracted by the objects. Selecting one from the heap, I’d take it in my hands, open it up, take it apart, all the while attempting to tease out the stories it could never tell. I would tap, stroke and shake it, noting its particular sound. Then I would imagine its past life in sound. Once I even detached the needle from the phonograph and tried to ‘play’ an old plate of my mother’s, thinking its grooves might reveal buried signals from the past. Then there was the period when I stared for hours at the photographs in our family album, imagining – hearing – the sounds the camera had failed to capture. It was as if my eyes, in a process of miraculous traduction, were standing in for my powers of hearing.
I tried to distract myself with certain projects. I listened to the tapes I had made in America and attempted to categorize the sounds. I had an idea I’d fly to America exactly a decade after my first visit; I’d return to where I’d recorded the sounds, and in those exact same places, ten years later, at exactly the same hour, I would make a new series of recordings. I failed to leave the country. After that I spent a lot of time in the public library in Edinburgh, reading, novels mostly. I’d found a wonderful passage in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, at that time my favourite book. Jim and Huckleberry are drifting on the Mississippi, chatting and smoking, with the whole river to themselves. ‘Next you’d see a raft sliding by, away off younder, and maybe a galoot on it chopping, because they’re most always doing it on the raft; you’d see the axe flash, and come down – you don’t hear nothing; you see that axe go up again, and by the time it’s above the man’s head, then you hear the k’chunk! – it had took all that time to come over the water. So we would put in the day, lazing around, listening to the stillness. Once there was a fog, and the rafts and things that went by was beating tin pans so the steamboats wouldn’t run over them. A scow or a raft went by so close we could hear them talking and cussing and laughing – heard them plain; but we couldn’t see no sign of them; it made you feel crawly, it was like spirits carrying on that way in the air.’ I started to work my way through the novels in the library, from A to Z, in order to create an Encyclopaedia of Novelistic Sounds. I barely got started.
Then one day in 1997 I received a letter. It was from Ade. He had found my address on an old envelope addressed to my father, among Iffe’s possessions. He was married and living in the outskirts of Lagos. Having been a corporal in the Nigerian army, he was now a taxi driver. We corresponded for several months. One of Ade’s letters, his last, made the most vivid impression on me. It concerns a terrible incident in 1966, a massacre, in which both he and Sagoe – Babatundi’s older brother, the one with whom I had witnessed Ade fish for seagulls – were involved. In a moment I will proceed to transcribe this letter on to my computer; not only because in Ade’s story I recognize a thread that runs through this history, via Edrisi’s story and the massacre at Benin, the thread of violence, which I have come to associate with the mappa mundi; not only because I wish to cease writing in my own words and continue to transcribe from my papers; but because I regard Ade’s letter as signalling the end of the period in my life of which I have just been speaking, the period set off by my visit to the anechoic chamber – the lost decades, as I think of them – and the beginning of the next, which would culminate in my beginning to write my history.
Enough! I am speaking in my own words when, in order to stop speaking, I should be transcribing from my papers.
28
Map of the World, 3: Ade’s Story
The mappa mundi. A
few brief words about the mappa mundi. In the years I have been writing this history, the moths have not stopped feasting on that ancient fake. Every now and then I rise from my desk and, in the light of my computer, take note of the ever-advancing decay: today, the map’s destruction is almost complete; all that is left is a network of frayed channels connecting some two-dozen holes. Where once I could gaze on seas, continents and fantastic events – Noah and his ark, the pelican feeding her young from a wound in her side, the amorphous, disproportionately large landmass of Britain – now all I can make out are larger or smaller holes, exposing the wooden wall. Gone too are the monstrous races, those men and women who once crowded the east bank of the Nile River, Amyctyrae with her giant lip, Androgini the man-woman, Blemmyae whose head grew beneath her shoulders, not to mention Panotii with her ears that reached the ground and served as blankets. Yes, that eccentric tribe who’ve kept me company for so long have been almost completely wiped out.
Only a single trace of the monsters remain, not a portrait but a text. Inscribed on a scrap of vellum, located in what must have been the earth’s upper right-hand corner, is a short paragraph designed to elucidate the drawings themselves. The paragraph tells the story of how the monstrous races came into the world. One day Noah fell asleep naked on the ground. He was mocked by his son Ham and, on waking, cursed him, saying, ‘A servant shall you be all your life.’ Noah asked God to stain Ham’s children black. And that, so the rubric says, is how there sprung into the world all the dark and savage creatures, the ill-shaped forms and specious, corrupt personalities, condemned to grovel and serve mankind as a warning of the sins of pride and disobedience. Less than fully human, the paragraph continues, but human nonetheless, they have been punished by divine decree, some with heads like dogs, some with mouths on their breasts, others with eyes on their shoulders, still more with a massive single foot, which, ironically, impedes their progress, and all so hideous that they make even the Devil scared.
The Echo Chamber Page 31
