Samuel Beckett Is Closed

by Michael Coffey

  So I became the Boy in Godot. A messenger boy. I excelled at school, so predictable, isn’t it? I’d sleep there if I could, when I could, and spend as much time as possible reading in the library till the janitors went home and locked up. Eventually, I had my own carrel, with crackers and jam and the books my father disapproved of having in his sight. The works of radicals, as he called them—shamans, rebels, fairies, beatniks, women. Communists. I also painted many pictures, developing a system that correlated . . . let’s see, how did this work? Size and shape matched to colors. All big things blue, regardless of shape. All small things . . . white. Regardless of shape. All lines were yellow, I remember that! Circles . . . unless very large, or very small, were red; anything rectilinear or polygonal, unless very large [long pause]. I’ve lost it. But you get the idea. I hope. These little pictures my father never saw.

  In the local newspaper that arrived every morning on our front porch there was nothing. Nothing but talk of local taxes and school boards, church supper menus, season guides—hunting, fishing, birding, planting, harvesting, preparing for winter—that sort of thing. And bland obits . . . that never gave the cause of death. I devoured this every morning, nonetheless, along with my Weetabix and juice. So imagine my surprise to see in the “calendar of events,” between a “Calling All Pensioners” and a garden tour, the announcement that a drama troupe was coming to the prison for a performance of Waiting for Godot. Despite my provincial locale, I knew about the play.

  I knew about that play because Mr. Beckett had just won the Nobel Prize in Literature and it was under “Art Notes” in the paper. And a BBC anchor had just the previous week poked fun at Mr. Beckett’s latest play. Artistry fit for a prison setting seemed some adult perversion, to me.

  It was my father, then, who came to me and said, boy, we have a bit of a showcase going on at the gaol.

  He called the prison the gaol. Spelled it in the old style too, as in The Ballad of Reading Gaol. He preferred to see himself as a gaoler rather than a superintendent or governor, which is what he was.

  “A showcase?” I asked of my gaoler. Where was mother, I wondered. Where ever was mother. “Yes,” he said, “that is what I said. A showcase.”

  [Lights slowly up, 10 seconds.]

  Marie [at side of bed]: Mr. W. Are you awake? Nod, Mr. W, if you are. Mr. W?

  David [rousing]: Where was mother?

  Marie: Mr. W, it is okay.

  David [looking up at Marie]: A dream. A prison. A story. Marie.

  Scene 5

  Gerald, sitting on a high stool, alone, center stage, playing David’s part when necessary.

  It was time for his salt water—the thrush had bloomed again, his mouth and throat white overnight. Salt water mixed with apple cider vinegar to douse it.

  He wanted gin.

  This was our game.

  No, David. The sugar will just feed it.

  No, Gerald—it sounded more like “Harrow” as a soft “g” and hard “d” was beyond him with the infection. He tried, gamely, to argue that a complex sugar like alcohol kills. The articulation nearly killed him.

  Alcohol doesn’t kill, David. I had to correct him. It feeds. Here. The vinegar is nice and cold.

  Two olives, please, he tried to say.

  No olibs, I said.

  ’Member?

  Yes. At Julius’s. Your martini.

  Seems so . . . he hesitated. Seems so. . . .

  Get some rest now.

  David was certain that Beckett wrote something about how much he loved math, and he wanted me to find it. I had to find it for him. He told me this one Monday morning. He was dying. We no longer walked in the park. We no longer dropped into bars or coffee shops in the afternoon. Perhaps someday I’ll sit in a tavern and order a Guinness, or sit at a coffee shop in the window, near the light, for hours, as we did, on plenty of occasions, listening to the light, as he said, but I couldn’t quite envision circumstances shifting to make that probable. Or necessary. Or fun. I’d have to say . . . it would be painful. I’ve not done it since. In retrospect, this had been hell. In a way. What had I done? Let’s see. I took a job because I needed a job and didn’t have one. This was because I wanted to learn something from even a menial job, if it was a menial job I was to get—a personal assistant, that’s what I was, the New Menial—and talking with David, who’d had an interesting and important life, a life of his very own, on the fringes, in the theater, on the fringes, both life and career, on the fringes, nonetheless held the promise of providing me—me!—with very good information not readily available to others, and I’d get paid for it. I just had to do my job, a mix of the custodial, the secretarial, the filial. I could draw a line. I’d learn something, wouldn’t I?

  David would not let it go. For a week one spring I would arrive to find him in a bed full of Beckett books, all splayed open. He could not find his math quote. We searched—I searched for him, online searching “Beckett and maths,” as he insisted, or “Beckett and mathematics.” While it was an enlivening distraction for him, it grew to become a wearying one for me. I’d had enough of Beckett. What about me? I almost asked this dying man, what about me? I went to the Strand, finally, one Sunday, to look for bookseller help. The place is staffed with nerdy, intelligent people who struggle through life—or seem to by their demeanor and grooming—spending their time stocking estate libraries and reading in the stacks. One fellow directed me to the Grove Companion to Beckett. There, in an entry larger than any other in the entire alphabetized essays on Beckett, I found “Mathematics,” all twelve pages of it. Although I was sure David had this book somewhere in his vast collection, when I presented my five-dollar used copy to him on the next Monday he was puzzled that in fact he had never seen the book. I propped him up on pillows and cleared his bedspread of papers and paperbacks and mail.

  From How It Is, he shouted, or rather, at this stage, his final spring, croaked. “I have always loved arithmetic, it has paid me back in full.”

  Now I must admit, I can admit, I thought this trite. And my facial expression must have said so.

  David looked at me with a pained expression, I mean a hurt expression—such a difference. It explained infinity to him, he said.

  I had always thought that the universe that preceded us and the universe that was ahead of us—past and future, I guess, talk about trite, were things we could not, with our small minds, comprehend. Something with no beginning and no end we could see. Eternity makes no sense. All we know is beginnings and endings, births and deaths. We live for that . . . [long pause] . . . Then tell me, I said to David, what the fuck is infinity?

  I will tell you. I will tell you, he said. There are infinite infinities, probably an infinity of them. But each is its own.

  Its own what?

  Set!

  We are talking about set theory?

  That’s right, my boy. For Beckett, I believe math was a comfort. Because you could manage infinity by just thinking of . . . the set of even numbers, say. And place beside it another infinity, the odd numbers, say.

  So . . .

  So, you and I are both sets. We are infinite.

  That’s just theoretical, I tried.

  A comfort nonetheless. Bring the gin over. That’s real.

  I gave him my disapproving caregiver look.

  Don’t deny me this.

  I joined him.

  Scene 6

  David, sitting or standing as preferred, center stage, lights so faint that he might pass unseen.

  It wasn’t until one of those dark, rainy, all-day rainy days in spring, when from the streets there is the noise of traffic sloshing slowly through the steady downpour and the guttural sound of rainfall falling through the storm drains and the intermittent concussion of thunder cracked by lightning somewhere over New Jersey, bringing a glint of light to the one window to the west and a half rest of sil
ence to the room that I was able to get through to David, or did he get through to me? Perhaps the day, and I, had bored him sufficiently. I felt my mind was boring him and he looked up from his scrutiny of the bedspread. In any event, the darkness and cacophony told me to say, “I remember summer days as a kid in the country that were so blue, the sky so high, that I was worried that the world had reached perfection right then, with me not yet ten or eleven, and that it would never be as a good again. That this day was the high point of my existence. And that I did not know the reason for it. Why now? Why me? And why not always?”

  David sat quietly in the dark. I had never uttered such an extended statement in all our time together. Though his head was up I could not see his eyes. He was in decline, in serious decline. I thought perhaps he’d fallen asleep. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d put someone to sleep with my naive observations, just a first time for him. But he was not asleep.

  “Give me your hand,’’ he said. I got up. I offered my right hand in a “let’s shake on it” fashion, but he took it in both of his, not without some effort, and clasped it. There was something teary coming on, I could tell, even as he looked away. He patty-caked my palm as if warming himself, and indeed his hands were cold. He then put my hand, levering it slowly, to his face, which was warmer than usual. One hundred and one, I’d guess.

  “You’re warm, David.”

  “This is my high point,” he said, and fell asleep. And it was our high point as well.

  [Pause.]

  Apart from the faint sound of his breath there was no sound. As death approaches, life flees. It stays away. As someone heads toward the end, you think it will be over soon but it never is. Never over soon, I mean. Months passed with David near death. He revived one Monday in October, I remember the day clearly, a crisp day that smelled like fresh linen.

  Come read to me, he whispered.

  Sure, David. Read what?

  Come read to me that sonnet we loved.

  Which sonnet is that?

  William, he said. The Bard.

  “No longer mourn for me when I am dead?” That one?

  No, no, he says. The other one we loved. About the beauty of marriage. “Let me not to the marriage of two minds admit impediment.” You know that one?

  Yes, I said, I know that one.

  Read it to me, Gerald. Read it aloud.

  Scene 7

  Spotlight on empty stool at center of empty stage. New voice, narrative tone, from offstage.

  He knows why he’s here, of course. He knows why I am here. That’s it, you see. This has been brought this far, whatever this is, however far, perhaps far is the wrong word, it is absolutely the wrong word, this is not about distance by any measure—did you see that, that shadow, a mouse perhaps, or a cat, an animal probably, of some sort, I am sure of it, in the wings? [Long pause.] Yes, distance. Not about distance. This all here, about which I am talking, and this talk itself, has happened, in space the breadth of a pin, if I’m lucky, a paperback. So why’d I bring it up? I meant to say this piece has come a long time, been a long time coming. Time we know, don’t we? We all cover the same absolute time, but distance, some of us barely move through space at all, imperceptible to the eye, others, the privileged few, or the immigrant, move all over. But with time, say, Thursday last to Thursday week, as David might say, we all cover every millisecond of it and finish in a dead heat on Friday, still at full throttle, though we may have lost a few on the way, singers keep dying, and old soldiers, just as we gain new recruits, babes in swaddling bolting out of the gate abreast with the rest, that’s what I am talking about, or what Gerald was talking about, and, you may have guessed this, no one knows who Gerald is, there is no Gerald. David knows this, too, that’s why he doesn’t care, as in the foregoing. He never once asked, Gerald, so, where do you live? Gerald, where did you go to school? Are your parents alive? Are you married? Are you well? How are you? I think he, David, knows that such questions would posit the existence of a Gerald and that there is no need for that, it would be a distraction. Gerald is nonliving, never lived, a cipher, a placeholder. David, on the other hand—what is the phrase in French, David . . . d’autre part?—exists. David came to life about two months ago, thirty-first of January in fact, after, I’m guessing here, three or four months’ gestation. Who fathered him is he who birthed him, I say with great suspicion, especially with regard to the first term. Perhaps it is a mystery . . . I can only describe the process which, for better or worse, is what these 40,000 words are: a process that has reached here. Or that equals here. Are we glad we came? If you are still with me raise your hand. I can’t see out there from here. Just as well, perhaps. I will proceed. Indeed, here it is. In truth it all began with a concern about heritage, a mad notion that I had discovered a secret about a filial connection between two artists, remember? I know that I can go to their texts, their art, the calendar, the ship manifests and prove my case, but along the way I realized that forensics and genealogy were not the point. The point was Being and finding a form for it, rather than hammering a certain Being into a certain form, or hammering a certain idea into a certain form. Enough with the rehash—no need to warm it up again, the ball game, the torture, the Arabian tale, the violence, the windows, my beloved in our kip, my father, my father’s father, the Proust—it won’t taste any different in reduction. I put what mattered into it and which my reading seemed to warrant, and I recognize a certain being in it. Not much of a defense, but I haven’t been charged with anything. Without doubt, “David” did appear, yes, from my research. He materialized, historical fact clinging to him like kelp. I met people who knew him, this vanished ghost of the Samuel Beckett canon. I believe I have outlived him, the record would show, David Warrilow having died of AIDS in France in the ’90s, but he lives now for me—and is in fact here with us, insisting that I press on. I know, that is not believable and you don’t. I don’t. But I do assert that the fact of him in talismanic fashion stands forth, manifesting—not representing—a disembodied poetics of the soul, wherefrom death can be appraised. In him I have lodged all that I have learned or gleaned from my engagement with the works of one Irish writer of the twentieth century, for convenience sake, nothing more. What matters most is to live, it is not the story that matters, remember? To think otherwise is to be removed from the real confounding rhythms and mysteries of living, which, themselves, can be beautiful, can be heartbreaking, horrifying, boring, and shockingly indifferent in what they convey, or withhold. The company of things, art, music, objects, as Proust wrote, and the company of voices, as Beckett did, is the all of what we have. And it just might make the end something less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less certain. Perhaps we’ll go on.

  That’s why Beckett.