The Back of His Head

by Patrick Evans

  All the time he’s raving on like this I’m trying to calm him down, shush shush it’s just a joke, didn’t mean any harm kind of thing, and he did calm down after a bit, he settled back in his chair and I tucked his blanket round his legs and I slipped out, I can tell you. He was sitting there looking at the photos, I remember that, he’d hung on to my phone and he was still looking at them. Jesus, I was all shook up when I got outside, though. I’m telling you this because I’m trying to say, that’s where he took me, and now I know how it is people do those things you see on the news, there’s something happens inside their heads and they just turn into different people. That’s what I’m trying to say to you. You get yourself stolen away from you and I don’t know how that works and I don’t know how he does it, except, that’s what he could do to me then. I’d wake in the middle of doing something and I’d think, am I really doing this, is this really me, and I’d say, yes. No. Yes—

  Other-people, my uncle meant, the novel he wrote after the business of the Prize had begun to die down a little—Flatland all over again, in effect, that ur-story of his, that thing it seemed he could never let go, that wound he was always scratching. Flatland reworked, but with its last layer of skin flayed off it—who knew there was still one left to flay?

  Here was what he meant when he murmured that sentence to me at the civic reception. He’d had fame at last with Kerr and praise he must have dreamed of, and after that, the greatest Prize of all—and then it seemed he wanted to push all this away from himself, to bring about his own destruction with this frightening new book, to bring everything down at the height of his greatest success. This was the time he began to talk openly about having betrayed himself, this was when he said he’d taken the wrong path all those years ago, after Flatland, and cursed himself for starting to write for the critics, as he put it. But look at the Prizes! I told him. Look what you’ve achieved! Fuck the prizes, he shouted back at me. The prizes are the problem! He seemed all but mad at this stage, to tell the truth, and frightened, it seemed, almost, at what he had brought about—as if he was trying to disqualify himself after the fact, once and for all, with one last unforgivable gesture, one final, unimaginable indecency.

  There’s an order of fiction in the world that is just that, unforgivable, almost criminal: unreadable, but nevertheless read and reread. That Jerzy Kosinski novel—I can’t even remember its title but I can remember every moment of the scene where a boy watches a man’s eyes being gouged out with a spoon. The scene in which Major Marvy is castrated in Gravity’s Rainbow. The White Hotel—magnificent, oh, yes: I can remember devouring it in a single sitting but also that final moment with the bayonet, when I threw the book across the room, appalled and never wanting to go near it again—just as I reacted to the last pages of Flatland. Unreadable, and every word of it read and read again. Thomas Bernhard, everything of his that I know in English—The Lime Works, with its terrible opening scene, all those people covered in excrement. There’s a short story—I can’t remember the title—in which a man eats part of his own prolapsed innards, slowly, and in detail. And then there’s always Naked Lunch. So many more as well—and in all of them, genius and evil crouched together in the dung, conspiring, the one thing, inseparable. Hell itself.

  Other-people is one of these works. Early senility, someone wondered whom I met in the street shortly after it came out. A sign of his illness? said somebody else. Immensely powerful, crudely written, badly judged: the closest to the truth of it, in my own opinion, and whispered in my ear, and to my amazement, by Cosmo Dye. For me, it marked the point where Raymond really had got there at last. Everything that the Berber youth had meant to him, he whom he called Anir, was finally shown in this book. The conclusion was the conclusion of Flatland again but Flatland flensed of its last tiny layer of discretion. It is ugly, it is disgusting, it is unreadable. Who knows what might have happened had it appeared before the Prize?

  None of this should have surprised me as it did. There had been a moment, as the Nobel celebrations began to die away a little, when I caught him, across a room from me and amidst the babble of others as so often before: gazing, gazing at me, unmoving like a killer that has marked its prey: his level, bezelled gaze never left me.

  Anir was back.

  I knew straight away. I felt helpless, I remember. He’d mined me for his most successful novel, I knew that, I knew how things worked now, he’d colonised my emotional life more deeply than ever before. Oh, God, what was happening this time? How did it work? He was doing it all over again, I could feel it beginning to happen again. It was the moment of Other-people, I realised later, it was the start of the writing of it.

  Immediately, in the days following, the voices starting up yet again in my head, the sudden wakenings in the night from dreams that really weren’t dreams at all—were they?—and that old sense of possession about the house. Was it me, was it him? As he hammered this new work together and I hung around bedroom doors and woke in the night he seemed, bit by bit, to take me over, to own me. My day-work really began to fall away, I started to make silly mistakes, I forgot meetings and deadlines. He needled me about it, and I forgot more.

  Then I saw the Amazigh at last.

  Just a glimpse, a movement in the garden seen down the lawn from the window of the front room. I knew immediately who he was, I knew as soon as I saw him. He was real, he really was about the place. I hadn’t been wrong—

  The sight of him—what he was, how he looked to me, the fact of him—shook me, it shook me. I dashed out and into the garden: and there was Val Underwood, bent over amongst roses beneath a couple of our huge, leggy old rhododendrons.

  Did you see him? I demanded. She was out there, she must have—

  I remember her look as she straightened up for me. Who? she wanted to know, and I’d no idea what to say back to her. The albino boy, I said, before I had a chance to think it through. And it was true, and that is how I’ve always remembered him in that first moment: first and before anything: extraordinarily etiolated, bleached almost white. That is what I’d made of him in that glimpse.

  Albino? she said, and stood there gripping her secateurs and staring at me, hard. You know, I said. Pale. Pale hair—which was feeble, I knew that, because I remembered him on this first sighting not as pale but as almost transparent. Transparent? she said, when I let that slip a second later, and I was immediately sorry I had. What d’you mean—like a ghost? No no no, I said, but I realised that yes yes yes, that was probably what I did mean. It’ll be one of the Kennedy kids next door, she told me, and bent back to her snipping. They’re always over, looking for tennis balls. Kevin’s blond. No, older than Kevin, I said. And younger than Blaise. I think it was a boy.

  She gazed back at me over her shoulder, screwing her eyes up slightly as she looked. I’m quite sure she thought me more than a little mad. I can’t blame her, I can’t blame her at all, at that point.

  But then, not much later, I saw him again. This moment was less fleeting. He really was outside my window this time, that voice promising to be fully incarnated for me at last: the moment I heard it I flung myself across the room to see him. There—there—down on the part of the lawn now lost beneath the Blue Room, and far more plausible than I remembered from my first shot of him—more detailed, more fully present. All this in fading light, I have to say, at about half past six on an autumn evening: a movement, a hand or an arm, perhaps, and loose clothing, swirling in the wind.

  A jolt for me, seeing that last detail for the first time: a story beginning, a start, a past. Where had he come from, who was he, what was he doing here, this imaginary youth, this fictional boy who was real? Dissolving now into other things as I looked again and the light continued to fade, into those flecks and smuts and flying wisps of which the evening is made as they faint into darkness: the blowing scrap of paper, the cat’s eye glimpsed in the shrubs, the work of small twigs low down, near the ground, as the wind push-push-pushes at them. The brief, jagged passage of a moth.r />
  I’ve seen him, I told the old man, when he came back from wherever he’d been that particular day. But he simply walked past me. I’ve seen him, I called out to his back. Who? His voice, from the bedroom now.

  The boy, I told him. Your Amazigh. Your Kabyle.

  I stood in his bedroom door, looking in. He seemed preoccupied: books and papers flapped from his arms and bounced on the bedspread. Amazigh? he said, as if he’d never heard the word before in his life. He looked puzzled, foul-tempered—again, buffled. What d’you mean, you’ve seen him?

  Out there, I told him. In the garden.

  He stared at me briefly: hard, blue, cold. Oh, rot, he said. You’ve been reading too many of my books.

  I couldn’t believe it. His tone was hard to judge—impossible. He’d done this sort of thing before: so many people in the same body, somebody once said of him.

  But he’s your muse, isn’t he, I asked him. The boy?

  My muse? he said, and then: muse!—Jesus. I’ve pretty much beaten the shit out of my him, if you want to know the truth. You know how these things go. You don’t need muses for long once you’re up and running.

  I remember him turning away from me when he said that. Then he turned back: he’s dead, he said, as if that was that. He’s dead and he’s buried! I stared at him when he said that to me, and was to recall it again and again.

  He went on speaking as he bustled around the bedroom, talking of other things, speaking of the world. Then he looked up at me: I’m not ready for this fucking speech, he said. What speech? I asked him.

  Again, that halt and stare. What speech? he said. The keynote speech I’m giving at the conference tomorrow, for Christ’s sake!

  Conference? I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then I remembered—oh, the conference.

  He was still staring at me. You arranged the bloody thing, he said. He shook his head. I’m going to have to finish it on the plane—in the fucking taxi at the other end, probably, the rate I’m going.

  The next day he said to me, you’ve been behaving very strangely lately. I was driving him to the terminal. I’m behaving strangely? I asked. Yes, he said. Very odd. The others have been talking about it, Dot and so on. And you’re not keeping up with your job. Not to put too fine a point on it. You’re forgetting things.

  What, lavatory not clean enough for you?—me, getting hot under the collar: but he was quite right, of course, I had set up the conference for him, months ago, I remembered that now. I’d agreed to their terms, I’d arranged the plane tickets, I’d done everything—and then, it seemed, forgotten the lot. Other things as well, too, apparently, which he itemised as we drove on. I couldn’t wait to get him to the airport and myself away from him, he had so much to say.

  Later, I sat in the Residence again with not a soul about and the darkness closing in. To this day I don’t know what was going on back then, how much of it was mine and how much of it his. He seemed so suddenly solid, so real in himself, as if everything that had bewitched and bedevilled him these last several months of writing had been shrugged off him and onto me. Now he was gone, all that faded away. The wind was the wind again, the birds in the trees just birds in the trees. The surge of the bushes was sound and movement, no more than that: the world began to resume again the business of simply being the world. I felt released from something—from the need to read everything around me, from the persistent nag-nag-nag of meaning.

  The old man had just told me to go to Austin, Texas. At the terminal we’d checked his luggage in and then he’d said it, just like that, as if it made complete sense, as if it was the logical next step for us both. You’re getting into bad habits working from the house, he told me. It’s getting oppressive. If you’re going to be my executor you might as well actually do the job. All of it. There’s going to be more and more of this. Just a couple of the libraries over there, the Ransom Center, that’s one of them, they tell me they’re keen.

  Off you go, he told me. I’m too busy writing. Get it done.

  I was utterly surprised—astonished. For one thing, he’d never mentioned the literary executor position before. Suddenly I was listening to him again. It was my first overseas trip alone, and my first venture as something more than just his bumboy. So this is what he’d been planning for me, amidst all this chaos! I sat in the darkness of my bedroom, staring out of the window, aware that everything around me was becoming stable again, steady, known, ordinary: and caught quite, quite off my guard.

  The critical reaction to this new novel, I remember, was extraordinary. He was a recent Nobel laureate, after all—and local reviewers in particular, by and large, simply pretended that Other-people hadn’t happened. They looked the other way, embarrassed and confused—even Geneva’s reliable supply of anodyne clichés dried up. There were whisperings, but no more: he often wrote like an angel, it was murmured about—something never in dispute—but he’d got to the stage where, sadly, he’d begun to recycle himself. Happens to so many successful writers: even Hemingway. Raymond was repeating himself as farce.

  My, though, didn’t the critics overseas know what to make of it when their turn came! That was then, this is now, was the kindest thing that was said. Back to His Old Habits was a headline to a review in one of the British papers, Forgotten War?—Forget It a headline in another. Inevitably there was worse: an unsavoury theme of his earliest fiction, now forty years old, suddenly returns, like an obsession long suppressed, according to a reviewer in the NYRB: More young people are being made to suffer. Another critic was more precise. What are we supposed to think of what has been done to this boy Anir before the exceptionally disturbing scene in which he is buried, still quite possibly alive? How is this literature? A disgrace to the Nobel tradition, seemed to be the general consensus. This was about the time of his Manneken-Pis moment, you have to remember, and Other-people was—as you might say—of a piece with

  it.

  All this was taken further in long articles on either side of the Atlantic. Then it developed into something rather more significant, after an angry piece by a young Indian intellectual in London who gathered Raymond’s work in with that of a number of Western writers. ‘Stealing Out of Africa: The New Neo-Colonialism’ was the title of her piece, her argument simply that these writers had taken for their own ends the experiences of the colonised. Having none they’re aware of themselves, she states at one point of her essay, all they want is the feel of ‘the authentic’ on their very own page. Every moment they purport to demonstrate their compassion for the non-white underdog, they are in fact taking something from him or from her. They reach out from their own privilege and into Africa, the Pacific, the slums of South America and of South Asia, and, with every word they write, the reality of immiserated poverty and suffering disappears under their ink while the writer walks off with the prizes and awards. That is the real atrocity here, and a new form of an old, pernicious evil. I could feel her anger burning across Raymond and his generation like a hot wind, that withered every word they had written.

  Evening, now, at the Residence: I’m doing my chores—the dining table is simply covered in papers.

  Geneva is in town at last, evidently, and Marjorie has met her—this news via a text from Semple, written in his customary good taste: MARJ FKG GVA! Something’s up, something’s up, I know that. Julian has asked me to be here tonight but has refused to say why: just be there, he told me. They’re up to something, the two of them, but why haven’t they told me, if so? Where is Geneva staying? What’s going on, what’s happening?

  Following our last and quite extraordinarily unsatisfactory meeting at the Residence I watched the three of them talking together in the light of Marjorie’s headlamps down in front of the garage. Nothing blew back up to me in the surge of the trees. It was obvious, though, that they were plotting something and that it didn’t involve me: I could sense the urgency in them. Inevitably, as I sit here now in front of this sprawl of documents, I think of my callow youth and the Master’s banishm
ent of me back then. They are out there plotting, and I am in here, no more than a mere factotum—still, in effect, Raymond’s abject bumboy, all these years after his death.

  Instead, the objects of the house press in at me. The carved dresser, for example, to my left as I sit here, the honey-coloured buffet I once liked to think an Henri II original. The voluptuous sculpture of its panels still stops me—that trompe l’oeil effect by which something is both true and untrue at the same time, the mind holding both sides of the proposition and so living in two worlds at once, and neither. Clouds, cherubs, leaves, the usual things, but carved, by some lost minor master, into a magical life that’s always bewitched me and drawn me into itself. That moment of liquefaction: I could always become as much lost in the sideboard’s buttery folds and turns as in a book or a symphony.

  But not tonight, it seems. Tonight, it’s just the work in it I’m aware of, the skill and the labour that made the illusion. Ash, the wood of the panels, according to Eric Butt, and therefore very difficult to carve because of the length of its grain. Ever since he told me this I’ve been aware of the thisness of the thing, its materiality, the way it’s put together, the way it sits sturdily on the floor and contains objects. Tonight, I’ve been trying to trick it back to its magic, closing my eyes and then suddenly opening them again, as if I might catch it returned to its Platonic state—there: I try again, and fail again, and again it goes on being simply a handsome, carved work of some considerable age. Early nineteenth-century, most probably, when (apparently) there was a vogue for northern Italian and southern French work in the style of the first half of sixteenth-century Paris, all of it of the very highest quality.