Sight

by Jessie Greengrass

  The effect he had observed could only, Röntgen noted, have been caused by the presence of light but he was certain of his blackout, of the heavy drapes which covered the doors and windows, thickening the darkness. He began to move the piece of paper by increments further and further away from the cathode-ray tube, and then to place what objects were near at hand between the tube and the paper so that he might get an idea both of range and penetration. Within a few minutes it was, he said, clear to him that the source of the glow could only be the tube, that it could not be light escaping because of the shield, and that neither could the phenomenon be the result of cathode rays, whose range was too short and penetration too limited to reach through a sheet of cardboard and across the room—that what he saw was, in short, the activity of a new sort of ray; and over the next seven and a half weeks he would continue his investigations, testing the limits of what, in honour of its unknown quality, he dubbed the X-ray.

  Later there would be a persistent discomfort even amongst Röntgen’s supporters about the ease of his discovery, the way it came from nowhere like an unexpected present, and perhaps it is true to say that this knowledge was something waiting to be found, hardly even buried. He was not even the first—as well as Arthur Goodspeed there was Philipp Lenard, who, while pursuing those investigations earlier that year which Röntgen was repeating, had observed the same fluorescence but had failed to recognise the significance of it, this softly glowing indicator of the presence of something new. Unlike Goodspeed, who would take with such grace his understanding of what he had almost seen, Lenard held this failure against Röntgen for the rest of his life. His own oversight had been, he considered, a matter of ill luck, his failure to explore or to document what he had observed a function not of decision but of circumstance; and so how could Röntgen’s success have been anything but the opposite. Had it not been him it would have been someone else that winter, or early the next spring, any of those who that year set up their electrodes and their tubes and ran their currents through to see what they might find, and if that was the case then perhaps Röntgen’s experience was little more than treasure trove; but we cannot deal so easily in counterfactuals. To say that something other might have been is not to diminish the value of what was, the marvel of it or its solidity, besides which it is not the fact of Wilhelm Röntgen’s discovery which fascinates but rather it is those days and nights through which he worked alone, bringing to this mystery’s unravelling all of his slow, systematic persistence until he possessed not just the sight of something but that extra thing that knowledge, understanding, is—not the mere serendipity of discovery but the moment of its tipping into insight which draws our lonely curiosity. We are unsatisfied. Revelation is by definition isolate, it can neither be communicated nor transferred, and trying to comprehend it we feel only the chill of our exclusion.

  * * *

  —

  For months my purpose had been imposed by circumstance, the structures of my life externally defined so that I had been like a creature inside an exoskeleton, soft and pulpy, held to shape by a rigidity which was not my own, and I had resented it. I had felt that control of my life had been taken from me to be housed elsewhere, amongst the articles of chance, the lottery tickets and the slot machines, the hopes for better weather—but waking on the morning after my mother’s death to a house that felt as empty as the body in the half-lit hospice room, having for the first time in months slept as long as I had wanted and feeling sickened that my initial experience of this redrawn world was relief at being rested, I lay in bed waiting for a call to drag me from it, the pressing urgency of someone else’s need, and when none came I was stranded, and could only lie and wait as around me the shadows moved slowly across the walls of my outgrown room. I had felt the first shock of this abrupt redundancy the previous night. In answer to my pressing of the bell a nurse had come and as she began to move quietly about my mother’s bed, checking and re-checking, ordering, I stood awkwardly by and watched her, my expulsion from a world that I had occupied for months abrupt, my role as carer curtailed by the absence of anyone to be cared for. After a few minutes I began to gather up the belongings that over the past few weeks had been spread about the room, a scarf and hat, the book I had been reading, my house keys left on the table by the door, and it was as though I were packing up a hotel room after a night’s residency, erasing all traces of myself to return it to the anonymous state in which I had found it, ready for its next inhabitant.

  Eventually, the private ritual of her immediate tasks completed, the nurse turned her attention towards me

  —This way, my love,

  and I could have cried at the endearment, its tacit acknowledgement that I was not quite an adult yet and all this was more than I could find my place within; but I didn’t, my dry eyes a first indicator of the silence which would fill my skin to bursting for the best part of a year. She led me to another room, a softly lighted space with seascapes on its walls and, on the small tables that sat at intervals between the furniture, glossy plants whose leaves concealed a multitude of tissue boxes. I suppose it must have been used for this purpose only, that small and quiet room: as a place for the recently bereaved to sit, to contain them while the necessary procedures were put in place, and everything about it was designed to fade into the background, a physical iteration of the noise the nurses’ shoes made on the building’s carpets—a gentle, hardly audible shush-shush which was somehow less noticeable than nothing would have been. I waited. I didn’t want to return to the room my mother’s body was in, had nothing more to say nor any need to add to the store of memories I had, the majority of them shadowed already into near-invisibility by the details of her dying face, her chilly hands, but when the nurse returned to take me back to the room that neither my mother nor I could occupy any longer I lacked the energy to refuse and instead followed her to where my mother’s body lay. The lights had been dimmed now, and someone, out of a kindness that was sharp as pity, had taken one of the yellow stargazer lilies from a vase by the bed and folded my mother’s hands around it, evening out at the same time the position of her body, smoothing the sheets so that whereas before, rumpled and lined, she might have looked asleep, now she was incontrovertibly dead. It was not a comfort to me to see her this way, as though she had been dressed for the occasion. It didn’t make any more acceptable those other things, all the accumulated worry of the days and nights before, the unbreeched sadness, the things unsaid, the white foam which had filled and refilled her mouth during the last evening, rising upwards from her failing lungs, or the absenting, her slow withdrawal from me which was so much like being left behind—but still it was something: the transformation of this specific, immediate instance of dying into a standard form. The folded hands, the flower, the sheet were all conventions, recognisable from a thousand paintings, pictures, pointing my path as buoys do at sea away from dangerous currents and into a mapped channel, custom stepping in where my own map had failed. It was a ritualisation, and with it came an offer of entrenchment into a prescribed routine which, accepted, would carry me forwards, allowing me a tiny insulating distance from the cold reality of things, and it was this which saved me the next morning, too, the need to start passing on the news forcing me out of bed, and it kept me going through the days that followed, the business of mourning setting me a course to follow so that my thoughts might rise away from me to nothing—the funeral to be arranged, condolence cards to read and answer, visitors to be fielded or received until everything that needed to be done had happened and, elsewhere, normality had commenced its slow return. Beyond the walls of my mother’s house, things again began to move as they had before, I could hear them hum, but there was no place for me—I had no past life, no extant position to step back into; the world was a sum to which I was remainder—and I was adrift, a near-ghost, insubstantial. Those tasks which had previously filled every hour of the day—the shopping and the cooking, the cleaning, the washing up—were now d
ischarged in minutes, with the time left over aching out around me. Even the house disowned me. My mother’s belongings lay where she had left them, her shoes in the lobby, her scarf knotted round the banister, and in a drawer spare glasses, unused stamps, these objects enacting a mourning within which I was not made welcome. I spent an afternoon trying without success to pay an electricity bill but my mother’s name was still on the account and no one at the electricity company would talk to me. Finding myself cold, the wind worrying at the doors and stripping the leaves from the trees, I tried to bleed the radiators but only ended up with foul-smelling water on the bedroom floors. I didn’t know how to replace the salt in the dishwasher or reset the boiler. A bulb blew in the porch light but the shade needed a key to open it which I couldn’t find and so darkness pooled, accusatory, around the front door. All these things reproached me, my tiny failures accumulating in drifts about the corners of the rooms—all this arcana of ownership which my mother hadn’t thought to tell me and which it hadn’t ever seemed the right time to ask about, and now was lost, so that I could never be more than interloper here, my feet treading unwelcome grooves across the carpets—

  This is where grief is found, in these suddenly unfilled cracks, these responsibilities—minute, habitual—which have lain elsewhere for years and which, having failed amongst grief’s greater broil to be reapportioned, are overlooked in favour of the more dramatic, until even the ordinary starts to crumble. If I thought, all through those freezing months I spent alone in a house whose owner had abandoned us, that I did not grieve, then it was because I had been expecting something else—something both larger and lesser, a monument or a mountain, simple, scaleable, and not this seeping in of space to undermine the smooth continuance of things. I had thought that loss would be dramatic, that it would be a kind of exercise, when instead it was the emptiness of everything going on as before and nothing working as it ought.

  Having nowhere else to go all winter I stayed there, in my mother’s house that I had never wanted to return to, narrowing myself down until I lived between my bedroom and the kitchen while the rest of it lay empty about me, the disorderly, reproachful quiet of its closed rooms undisturbed, until at last, as the crocuses began to flower in the muddy garden borders, the house was sold. Then I was faced with the problem of what to do with all my mother’s things. I felt that I was expected, somehow, to keep them, to make myself curator, but the thought of storing this detritus of an ended lifetime, of dragging it behind me like a deadened limb, turning myself into little more than a conduit for memory, was horrifying; and so in the end I gave away what I could to anyone who wanted it and hired a skip for the weekend to deal with the rest. Across the augmented stillness of an Easter weekend its yellow maw sat in the driveway and I fed things into it, books and photographs, letters, odds and ends of furniture and boxes of knick-knacks, jewellery, clothes—from Friday to Monday I carried things out to it in armfuls through a steady, penetrating rain whose ruinous action spared me from need for second thoughts, and instead of sadness I felt a kind of soaring joy, as though each armload lightened me, and at times I felt that I could hardly contain it but that it must bubble out as laughter to mix with the sound of the rain—except that for the four nights during which the skip sat outside the house, before a lorry came in the early hours of Tuesday morning to drive it away, I found myself unable in the evenings to draw the curtains on it and so I sat, darkness flowing inwards, keeping a kind of vigil, until at last the house was empty and so was I.

  * * *

  —

  Over dinner in a restaurant sometime during that year when I was trying to find the courage to have a child Johannes said, searching for a subject that would have the magnitude to eclipse, however partially, the one we wished to avoid

  —You never talk about your mother,

  and I was surprised, because it seemed to me that her death had been the defining event in my life and that I talked about it endlessly, a muttered thrum beneath all other conversation. Trying to describe her, though—to lay out on the sanded wooden tabletop between the sea bream and the steak those things which had made her singular—I found myself able to name only her physical characteristics, the least order of things, and even these were cut not directly from memory but from photographs—the black-and-white strip of passport pictures which had fluttered out one day from between the pages of a copy of Elizabeth Bishop’s letters, my mother’s unsmiling expression set above the square neck of a cotton frock, or the picture of her standing on a beach, bent over to examine something half-buried in the sand, her bobbed hair tucked back behind her ears. These static faces were as far from hers as a shape is from its mathematical description—they conveyed nothing of her but were all that remained to me to describe. It was not that I had forgotten—I could feel quite clearly how it had been, as a child, to hold her hand, what surety of comfort it had brought me and how, the first time I had been sent to my grandmother’s alone in the summer holidays, I had cried every morning, waking to a house which reverberated with her absence, and spent the days in listless moping until at last she came to fetch me; and I could remember how it was to listen to a telephone ringing in the certainty that she would answer it, and the particular tilt her head made as she read—but these things were obdurate of explanation. My memory of her, what remained, was like a memory of distance or the cold, intangible, unsymbolic, not sight nor sound, not touch, not taste, and my attempts at a description of it floundered like the description of music does in words, conveying nothing of its sound or substance. Instead, sat opposite Johannes in the restaurant, searching for something to say, it was the image of the skip that came to mind—the shadow that it made in the light cast out by the living room windows, the rain slanting down towards it; and I thought, although I didn’t say it, that the truth was that my mother’s death, coming as it did so exactly at that turning spot between adolescence and adulthood, had fractured my life, breaking it into two parts, the second one a product not only of the first but of the first plus its curtailing, built to fill the space its end had made—and so it was hard to think about my mother, to speak about her, without acknowledging that it was impossible to wish she hadn’t died, because without her death I would have been undone.

  After we had finished eating Johannes and I walked for a while along the Embankment, past Blackfriars Bridge towards St. Paul’s, the cathedral’s floodlit bulk against the glass and metal towers of the city a reassurance like the promise of continuity, the persistence of things. It was a relief to be walking like this, side by side, my hand burrowed into the crook of Johannes’ arm, feeling the familiar scratch of his coat’s tweed against my skin. Like this, freed by the rhythm of our steps from the need to fill silence with speech, I felt the scurrying rat-wheel of my thoughts begin to still, and I could almost believe that I had come to a decision; except that as soon as we stopped walking I knew that the whole thing would start up again. We had taken to spending evenings out like this, in restaurants or in bars, at concerts or talks in which we had only the most cursory interest, as though to make a pass at happiness or because it gave us something else to talk about, the whole city and all the people in it a distraction from ourselves and from the space that spread between us, a membrane’s thickness but so wide—and from all the other choices which we couldn’t make until this one was settled, from every part of our lives which was made provisional by my indecision, and from the way I rattled to the touch. Often, afterwards, we would walk home instead of taking the Tube, spinning the evening out, deferring the moment when we would arrive at our house and be confronted by all that we had left inside. Walking bought us the right to easy silence and I found that all evening I would look forward to it, the brief and quiet concord which came with the recollection of how things had been when the question of children was still in the future, its distance lending me the certainty of hypothesis: that Johannes and I would have a child, but not yet. As we neared the steps which led upw
ards to the wide flank of London Bridge I turned my head to look at him, this man I loved or thought I loved, not knowing always what it meant to do so beyond the sharing of bills and preferences, the ordinary ways our lives grew to synchronise and intertwine. We climbed up towards the road and I watched the way the shadows fell across his cheeks, the way his forehead creased, the hooding of his eyes by heavy eyelids, these features as familiar to me as my own skin but his mind elsewhere, a place I could not gain admittance to, and I wondered what I would remember of Johannes, if he were no longer there—which of his particulars I could list that would convey the least measure of how it felt to walk with him like this, the easy placidity of his company, the salve it was and the certainty spreading out beneath our feet like the solid city pavement that what engulfed us now was temporary, that it would be resolved and that we would survive its aftermath—and for a moment, despite the fold of his coat caught between my finger and thumb, he seemed impossibly distant from me, not only unreachable but unfamiliar, a singular instance of the whole he made, both precious and strange, his likeness uncatchable by anything other than himself; and I moved closer to him, holding more tightly to his arm, as though in doing so I might reach across the gulf which kept us separate, that unmeasurable gap between subject and object, and catch hold of all he was and I was not, and keep it safe.

  * * *

  —

  After my mother’s house was sold I moved to a flat in the East End of London, somewhere in Hackney’s most unlovely parts, close to the canal. The flat was on the first floor of a solid concrete block, a place of extraordinary ugliness, and I think that this was partly why I chose it—because I didn’t want to feel that I had benefitted from my mother’s death, that her loss had been instrumental in purchasing even the small happiness that a pleasant place to live would have constituted. This flat’s rooms were boxy, its ceilings low, and both kitchen and bathroom were floored with the same peeling, nicotine-yellow lino. Through the thin walls my neighbours’ lives filtered—their conversations and their television programmes, their cooking smells. Damp rose. The furniture, an ill-assorted collection of chairs and tables, refused to cohere into anything approaching comfort, and as weeks passed I continued to feel that I was waiting for something to happen, a final marker of my residence which would make me feel welcome here, banishing the persistent impression that, even when I was in it, the flat remained unoccupied. My days drifted. It seemed that I existed in a kind of hinterland, lost between an end and a beginning, my life ruptured in a way I couldn’t resolve. Those friends whom I had seen often before my mother’s illness I felt unable to contact, the necessary explanations being too weighty to bear thinking of. I was lonely but I couldn’t see that I was, except at particular times, waking from dreams of company or hearing laughter come through the walls from the flat next door, when I felt it acutely, a sudden awareness of constriction. It was as though I had been ousted from myself, my flat and featureless mind an unfamiliar landscape to which I had only partial access. I couldn’t concentrate. I had no appetite, for food or for anything else, and I had almost no energy. No matter how much I slept I still felt the need for more, my limbs heavy and my eyelids sluggish—the sort of all-consuming, intractable tiredness which I have since felt only in the early months of pregnancy. I had nothing to do, no job, no interests particularly, but I felt that to succumb to inactivity would be to welcome that spectre of my own emergent failure, ill-defined but insistent, which haunted the space around me, so each morning at half past nine when the Tube fare tipped over to off-peak I took the train into central London and walked down the Euston Road to the library at the Wellcome Collection. There I would leave my bag in the cloakroom and, scanning my reader’s card at the library’s turnstile, make my way to a small room at the back where there was a window that could be opened a few inches to let in the heavy, traffic-sodden summer breeze, and then for a while I pottered about, laying my belongings on one of the desks, my handful of unlidded pens set square beside the dog-eared notebook I always carried, my jumper folded neatly down, my phone silenced and sat on top of it. That done I would wander through the library in search of something to read, running my hands along the shelves until I found a subject that caught my attention. I read not with any particular object in mind, nor really with the intention of retaining any information about the subjects that I chose, but rather because the act of reading was a habit, and because it was soothing and, perhaps, from a lifetime’s inculcated faith in the explanatory power of books, the half-held belief that somewhere in those hectares upon hectares of printed pages I might find that fact which would make sense of my growing unhappiness, allowing me to peel back the obscurant layers of myself and lay bare at last the solid structure underneath.