Shadow Play (27 page)

The young man always in a hurry, who cannot rest anywhere for long, the man of promiscuous curiosity who cannot fully embrace anyone because he must have time to reach everybody,
who cannot ever let himself be ordinary because the world itself is his extraordinary duty, to view in its entirety and affect from its very top. How quickly, in just nine chapters, he aged and ran out of steam.

Which leads me to one last thing. I wish I could guide you to
The Leap
and play my part in publicizing its findings, or at the very least establish its existence. Without that evidence, I realize I resemble a certain raggedy knight-errant jousting with the arms of a windmill, or one of those actors in dinosaur movies, as they perform their scenes running away from thin air. Yet, I remain certain that book has already cost a life, so I hope this will encourage anyone who can help locate it to step forward.

Of course,
The Perfect Worker
is not much more than an indulgence and a pastime. Whatever his role in my life has been, Sr. da Lima's long proximity to two artists will permit him to see beyond a libel action, through to the humour in my depiction, and understand my request for such licence. Besides, any killers-to-be biding their time in the shadows would certainly be unequivocal professionals for whom I am a simple job. I spent the last few weeks chasing a whim that grew on me and grew into this story: the image of Charles, with the inexplicable blockage that exists to insulate him from the consequences of his actions, making him some form of ideal corporate employee. I suppose the conditions of personal stress have provided an extra impetus for this piece, but after all this time, it is a weightless fiction, nothing more, and its beauty is its only argument.

 

My train speeds smoothly out of the earth and climbs onto a high bridge in the middle of a wide street. On both sides are continuous grey-brown tenements; black people in kitchens and living rooms are visible through their windows. It has started snowing.

After a few stations have gone by, I get off and begin to wander. I'm looking for somewhere to settle at least for a while, one uncontested spot where I will not be intruding on someone's territory and from which I will not be beaten off. For the nights I'll find a shelter.

The blocks go by one after the other: straight, unbroken for long periods, and without storefronts. I pause at a certain point to watch someone from across the street before I decide whether I'll talk to him. He has made a little tent by covering himself with a blanket, but his head pops out every few minutes as if to check whether anyone is passing. After a while I notice that his hands are working away furiously beneath the blanket, so I move on, having decided not to disturb him.

Several blocks later I arrive at a huge store, as high as the building itself, with a large green awning in front. It is a showroom for beds and mattresses, and since it is open I enter to
warm myself a little. It has turned more overcast and the snow continues to fall.

The ceiling inside is at least three floors high with hanging fluorescent lights, and everywhere there are columns of beds piled on top of each other. In another section there are towers of different-coloured mattresses, and the store has mirrors everywhere so that I'm often surprised to find a large bearded man with dishevelled hair and an ill-sized overcoat carrying a plastic bag and coming at me. What is not so curious is someone in a suit behind him who is also always in the frame. I would like to sit down on a bed for a few moments but I know he will show up to prevent me.

When I step outside I notice a mattress lying a few yards away from the store. There is no one around, and it is still quite dry, so I pull my blanket out of my bag and lie down. I watch the building in front of me and try and follow the descent of some of the snowflakes, until gradually I'm thinking of nothing. In just those few seconds before I fall asleep another person beds down beside me. I decide not to protest, since it might be his mattress. Anyway, he is lying with his back to me, under his own blanket, and no one is bothering anybody.

A while later I am awakened by a weight across my upper legs: someone else has laid himself horizontally across us. As my eyes open, I realize there is also someone lying across our feet. They both have their own blankets, they have their backs turned to our faces, and are looking for somewhere dry to rest. The snow is beginning to soak into us, so I reason these extra bodies will keep us warm and protected.

But when I next wake up there are two more men asleep vertically across the two above us: one pair of feet lies upon my
chest though I still cannot see even one of their faces. While asleep I felt nothing, but now I am aware suddenly of the weight upon my middle. I can tell how long I have slept because of how much snow covers my blanket; I even feel it encrusting my face. I should get up and shake my limbs, but how to achieve this without waking everyone, all of whom seem so comfortable and quiet?

I lie there gazing at the view, only now everything has grown much whiter. The only other warmth besides the sleeping bodies all around is that of an old woman in a first-floor window who seems to be readying her dinner. But warm I am, and with another man's head in front of me. And slowly, even though I'm now awake, the bodies turn weightless again, my palms grip each other under the blanket, and I realize that for now, I could be nowhere better.

Day turns to evening in this way.

And that is all I received. I'm allowed to divulge that the relevant essentials in this account do not differ from what Raj has consistently repeated to the detectives. Like them, I have combed these pages countless times, both as an amateur sleuth as well as an editor, and still nothing else about his claims seems actually verifiable, including the clever weaving-in of the yet-unknown commons murderer from five years ago. All the crucial events in Raj's story happen without any living witnesses, and with nothing concrete to go on, in which direction does one begin to search, especially when no one is sure if the supposed book at the heart of it still exists?

These have been the conclusions of New Scotland Yard, where I deposited my package a day and a night after it arrived. The investigating inspector turned out to be a book-lover and a long-time fan of Raj's work, and it was his considered suggestion that the best plan might be to publish everything: the publicity could force things into the open. Someone might make a move out of panic, or indeed be dissuaded from acting in case Raj was actually in danger. Alternatively, it might jog a few memories – witnesses, interviewees, bank managers in
charge of safe-deposit boxes. Nobody knows who else Sharon confided in, apart from Raj. But such a titanic, eighteen-month, globe-spanning effort must have left a few more footprints.

The inspector also confirmed for me that Raj had phoned the police in New York and reported a ‘near-assault', or at least his perception of one. But despite round-the-clock plain-clothes surveillance for a fortnight, no one unusual was noticed again. He then asked to leave town, and requested that his whereabouts remain a secret.

That is where things stand. So far, Ana da Lima is the only person to have read these pages, apart from the police and myself. A few weeks later, she insisted on the right to respond to certain chapters, since they were labelled as non-fiction and referred explicitly to her and Sebastião. She asked if I could include her reply as part of this same volume. An unusual request, and I contacted Raj at all of his known email addresses asking for his consent. After a month of silence, I made what you might call an editorial decision. I hope it balances the account, and puts right some of the reservations she expresses about me.

Ana and I have been friends for twenty-five years, and if there is one thing that rings true in Raj's ‘autobiography', it is that there is no quantifying her significance in his life. The pages below speak for themselves and require no preamble: only Ana and Raj know their actual relationship to the truth, and even she cannot be certain where the truth has got to these last few months. All we have therefore are angles, and none more precious than Ana's. My only suggestion is to judge their testimonies not just in relation to each other, but also to everything else that is not here, everything else that
grows to exist between two people, the formative stuff of all our lives, including anger, hurt, love, hope, regret, blindness and dream.

I know Ana would not mind me attaching such a caveat, because whatever truth there is in either account, these things cannot but be a part of it. Whatever the as yet unknowable truth about Raj's disappearance, these things are always true for every one of us.

I will end my contribution to this volume by reminding Raj of one of our shared favourite moments in literature. We are beside the deathbed of Don Quixote, and the much-harried Sancho – despite grumbling his way through nine hundred pages of delusion and chimera, not to mention innumerable, all-too-real beatings and ignominies – cries out (on behalf of all of us who have accompanied them to this point) to the knight whose eyes are disenchanted at last:

Oh, don't die, dear master… Take my advice and live many years. For the maddest thing a man can do in this life is to let himself die just like that, without anybody killing him, but just finished off by his own melancholy. Don't be lazy, look you, but get out of bed, and let's go out into the fields dressed as shepherds, as we decided to. Perhaps we shall find the lady Dulcinea behind some hedge, disenchanted and as pretty as a picture. If it's from grief at being beaten you're dying, put the blame on me and say you were tumbled off because I girthed Rocinante badly. For your worship must have seen in your books of chivalries that it's a common thing for
one knight to overthrow another, and the one that's conquered today may be the conqueror tomorrow.

Come back soon, man, let's go tilt at some more windmills together.

 

Ellery King

London, 2006

I AM NOT ROSEBUD

by Ana da Lima

 

 

 

Memory says, I did this. Then pride intervenes: I can't have done that. A struggle ensues, but pride is adamant. Finally memory relents.

– Friedrich Nietzsche

Do not forsake me, oh my darling,
You made that promise when we wed…

– from the title song of
‘High Noon',
starring Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly

Poor chap, he always loved larking.

– Stevie Smith,
‘Not Waving but Drowning'

He always wanted fans, not friends; he secretly preferred the distance between an audience and a platform to real closeness. Yet, no matter how large the crowd and distant the platform, the price of entry was never less than absolute adoration. Each faceless soul in the dark had to love him as if they'd known him all their lives, as if he had been a turning point in every life. He treated that love as his due, forgot about it the second after it was offered, but could never have enough of it. No amount of reiteration truly satiated him, no evidence remained fresh long enough to convince his memory. It had to pour forth again and again, from new faces as much as from the known ones.

I'll stop speaking of him in the past tense. Everyone knows Raj is prone to proclamations, and he launches into them even more frequently in private than on a stage. These torrents are usually the consequence of minor disagreements, such as when I asked him two summers ago how he had managed to be absent for each and every one of Sebastião's eighteen birthdays, and he orated Castro-style for an hour on the iniquitous conspiracy of the bourgeois family. He could turn anything into an idea, spin any idea into a position, and pour molten feeling into any position until it had bubbled into a role of high drama, involving
planetary-scale issues. He's been generous enough to provide examples throughout this book, but let me add with all affection that when I came across Bellow's
The Actual
, I felt an instinctive sympathy for the woman Amy, who had to train herself to write off at least sixty per cent of what the narrator spouted during any of his rambles of indefinite duration. But what is revealing today is that I still recall most of those rants verbatim, even though I mocked or ignored him at the time.