Pursuit Page 8

  I wanted to tell her about the fight I had with my father before this trip but instead I walked towards her, knelt down in front of her and started to unbutton her jeans.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she said.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said, holding her hand. I pushed my face in between her legs.

  ‘Are you mad?’ She kicked me away. ‘Oh my god, you’re so self-absorbed!’

  I sat on the floor and she continued. ‘I really wanted to be nice to you. I told James I didn’t want to see you but he said I should go. How stupid of me to listen to him, to think you might have changed!’

  ‘Who is James?’ I said.

  ‘He is my fiancé,’ she said. ‘He is in my present and will be in my future. And what happened between us was all in the past. There is no point holding on to the past. It has nothing to do with the present. It’s just in your head. And it’s in everybody’s best interest if you just keep it in your head.’

  She was wrong. Gemma Wong-Laurent is an extremely bright young woman but she was totally wrong on this. The past has everything to do with the present. In fact, the past and the present are a set of interdependent notions. The past only establishes itself as the past of the present. And the present needs to take the past as its reference so it can be defined. We can only conclude today is the present if we set yesterday as the past, or this minute the present if the minute just gone is the past. In other words, the past and the present are inseparable. The line between them is only relative and always in flux.

  After Paris, I posted Gemma the full three volumes of Time and Narrative by Paul Ricœur, along with a ten-page introduction drafted by myself. As a result, I missed the job interview my father set up for me and ended up working in a language school near Parnell Square. To which my mother commented: ‘I told you to stay away from the Laurents. They are a damned bunch.’

  Blaming Gemma or not, the situation is that I am just not able to write. I find everything dubious, bland and problematic. In order to feel inspired I read as much as I can, day and night, awake or half-asleep. Propelled by an extraordinary sense of urgency I read about the origins of tribes, the structures of hegemony, the anatomy of animal bodies, etc.

  It is when my mother finds out I’d been forcing myself to get sick four times a day that she decides we need to get help. After consulting old colleagues, my father contacts a reputable psychoanalysis institute in Malahide. He drives me there for an interview.

  A short-haired woman in her forties leads me into a room. Her handshake is affirmative, her smile alluring. She asks me my name, date of birth and my history of allergies. She chats with me for about forty minutes in a soft and sympathetic voice. Two days later she phones me, telling me my application is accepted. I need to go in on Tuesday at two p.m.

  On Tuesday, my father drives me to the institute and I am directed to the same room. Behind the door, on the same chair across the room, is seated not the woman but a fifty-something man.

  ‘Hello, Cliona. My name is Noel. Come in and sit.’ He nods at me.

  I am not sure if they changed to a different doctor or I misremembered my last meeting. I walk over and sit down, put my handbag on the floor.

  ‘Hi, Noel,’ I greet him.

  ‘We had a meeting on Friday, deciding who would be the most suitable person to work with you.’ He speaks very slowly, as if somebody is typing in his stomach and the voice comes out from his mouth. ‘We think I might be the best person and I am happy to be here, to help you.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Good. So, let’s start. First, can you tell me why you are here?’ he asks me.

  I explain the reasons.

  ‘I see. Can you tell me a little bit about your relationship with your parents? How’s it like with your mother, and with your father?’

  I answer the questions.

  ‘OK. Then let’s talk about your father first. Tell me more about him. What does he do? What’s he like?’

  I speak for a while, gesturing with my hands and laughing the odd time.

  Noel waits until I finish and he says: ‘I’ve noticed one thing since you came in, Cliona. You withdraw your feelings. Every time that you’re about to get emotional, you pull back. You analyse and ridicule yourself. Why do you do it?’

  It’s a tough question. I think about it and suggest a few possibilities.

  ‘I don’t know the answers,’ he says. ‘I’m just asking the questions. Now let’s continue. Do you want to talk a bit more about what happened in Shanghai, between you and your father?’

  I speak. This time I pay more attention to the emotional flow. I poise myself and pace through.

  ‘You are kind,’ he says. ‘Another person would have been very angry. Or at least would have let him know how she felt.’

  I respond to his comments.

  ‘I’m not the judge here. If you think your decision is right then it is the right one for you,’ he says. ‘If I might point out, it’s important for us to cry and to feel angry. There is no shame in it. Happiness, sadness, jealousy, anger, they are all discharges of our body. Is earwax better than snot?’

  I lift up the corners of my mouth for a smile.

  He looks at the wall behind me and says: ‘I’m afraid our session is about to finish. Now, Cliona, I want to ask you for one more thing. When you go back, can you write down what happened today? What you said to me, can you write it down? You don’t have to show it to anyone. Just write, type it up on your computer and delete it afterwards. But write first.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ I say.

  I leave the institute and walk to the Costa next to Malahide Castle to meet my father. He is reading the Independent and puts down the paper when he sees me.

  ‘How did it go?’ he asks.

  ‘It went well,’ I say.

  He folds up the newspaper, leaves it on the chair and picks up his coat. We walk towards the exit. He places his hand on my lower back briefly and says: ‘I’m very proud of you.’

  What is so significant about writing? Why is there this omnipresent and ceaseless craving to write, as if it were a ritual? Let’s go back to the notion of randomness and our hopeless struggle against it as a species. Randomness is the fundamental law of the universe and it compels us to forget. It is our nature to forget and it’s also in our nature to resist it. To write does not facilitate forgetting. Rather, it’s the ultimate manifestation of remembering. To concretise it with language, to engrave it on stone, to encapsulate it in books, to pass it on and make it eternal.

  It sounds incredibly appealing. But still, I find myself feeling sceptical about any kind of order. Because it turns everything into signifiers and draws power to the centre. All order is a system for rule. By whom? I don’t know. I will stay vigilant and discover the answer.

  I have trouble falling asleep and when I finally do I have trouble staying asleep. As a result, I’m awake all the time. It prolongs the days and makes life more intolerable. In order to get myself going, I eat a lot.

  I go to the kitchen in the middle of the night and devour whatever we have in the fridge. One morning, my mother gets up and finds no bread, no milk, no cereal – no nothing. She becomes extremely upset, especially since she usually wakes up with low blood sugar.

  ‘Can’t you just leave something for me, for Christ’s sake?’ she bellows. ‘I need to eat right now! Jesus, I can’t breathe!’

  Her face turns pale, lips purple. She falls down into an armchair and pants with her mouth open. ‘Anthony!’ She calls my father. ‘Anthony! Anto!’

  Nobody answers. It seems my father is not in the house.

  ‘Let me find something for you. I’m sure we have something somewhere.’ I open the cupboards and start searching. Finally, behind the gas meter, I find a half-finished Mars bar. I smell it.

  ‘Do you want to have this? I’ll go to the shop now to get you some breakfast. But have this for now.’ I hand her the bar.

  She looks at it and eats. The packaging rustles off like snakes
kin.

  ‘Do you want to have some water?’ I ask her.

  She nods. I give her some water before I grab the car key to get groceries.

  Who hid the Mars bar behind the gas meter? I wonder as I start the engine.

  The engine starts. I reverse my mother’s red Volvo slowly out of the driveway.

  Later, I call my brother Ian. He answers immediately.

  ‘Hello Jiejie, how’s life?’ His voice is bright and almost too loud. And he calls me Jiejie as always, Chinese for older sister.

  ‘Not bad. And you?’ I say.

  ‘Excellent. Couldn’t be better,’ he replies.

  ‘Guess what I found behind the gas meter this morning.’

  ‘The gas meter?’ He pauses for a while before he laughs out loud. ‘Don’t tell me the Mars bar is still there!’

  ‘Yep. And it saved Mam’s life,’ I tell him.

  ‘She’s welcome,’ he says.

  ‘How are you doing?’ he asks me.

  ‘I am trying to write but it isn’t working,’ I say. ‘They’re sending me to a therapist.’

  ‘How generous,’ he replies.

  We change the subject. He tells me Sara is settling into her second trimester. They are making a trip to Naples next month.

  ‘Come to join us,’ he suggests. ‘It’d be lovely for you to meet Sara. And trust me, you’ll feel so much better when you get out of that house.’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t,’ I say. ‘The situation is not great here with Mam and Dad. I think Dad is doing his thing again and that’s why Mam wanted me to come back.’

  He doesn’t speak for a while. He sighs. ‘Why can’t they just get a divorce?’

  ‘You know what Mam is like,’ I say.

  ‘Of course I do, the two of you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I say.

  He laughs as if I’d told a joke. ‘I need to go now,’ he says. ‘It’d be nice to see you at some point.’

  ‘It would be,’ I say.

  ‘Zaijian, Jiejie,’ he says.

  My mother discusses my situation over dinner.

  She asks my father: ‘I think Cliona is getting worse. Do you think the therapy really works? That place is very good according to people from your work, no?’

  ‘It’s the best,’ my father says. ‘I think she enjoys the therapy.’

  ‘Do you?’ She turns to me. ‘Do you like the therapy, Cliona, have you been taking the pills the doctor gave you?’

  ‘He didn’t give me a prescription. He said my situation was only mild.’ I pierce a rocket leaf with my fork.

  ‘Do you hear that, Anto?’ she asks my father again. ‘Does she look mild to you?’

  ‘Maybe.’ My father nods. ‘We should leave this to the professionals.’

  ‘God bless us.’ She sighs.

  ‘God bless,’ I echo as I halve a cherry tomato, skewer it with a piece of spinach, and then a slice of cucumber.

  My mother is so lucky that she believes in God. I’m envious of her ability to find a place to rest, a corner to turn to. And my biggest problem, as far as I can see, is that I don’t believe in anything. Our lives exist on the constant movement of atoms and subatomic particles. And our thoughts are trapped within the structures of language. I’m baffled both by the profundity of the former and the limitations of the latter. I feel nauseous whenever thinking about the distance between them. To a certain extent, everybody in my life, the ones I deeply love, and the ones I pass by on the street, is the same. We are objects in this universe, confined by our epistemological limits. We brush against each other for exceedingly short moments and we drift apart. We will never be able to understand ourselves, let alone each other. I bow down to the sublimity of the impossible.

  And this is exactly why I cannot write. I sit alone in my bedroom, staring at the screen of my laptop, hands on the keyboard, motionless. I think of the warm damp summer nights in Shanghai when my mother cried by herself like a beast and my brother Ian would sneak into my bedroom in his pyjamas and say: ‘Wo haipa, Jiejie.’ I’d bring him into my bed and say: ‘It’s going to be OK.’

  From downstairs I can hear my mother sobbing. She cries for so long that the rhythm of her crying begins to change, like the tide receding into the sea. Another day is over. And my father has left the house.

  I realise that I’m looking forward to seeing Noel on Tuesday.

  NEAR THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD

  Lawrence Osborne

  JUST before midday, on the road to Mandalgovi, Jalsa Soronzonbold had his driver pull over their Land Cruiser and told his guest, a solitary Englishman who had just arrived from Hong Kong, that they were going to stop for a picnic on the summit of a hill not far from the road. Chittleborough, a retired banker of about sixty, agreed to a pause after a drive of six hours. To the Mongol’s eye he was louchely elegant, enigmatic. He wore a stylish Motoluxe teddy bear coat of pale grey mohair and there was something inscrutable and subtly domineering about him, even though his manners were impeccably subdued. He coughed into his hand, though, and his face had a feverish sheen. He had booked Jalsa’s New World Lodge all for himself with a down payment of $8,000. He had told the owner that he wished to go on a snow leopard safari with Jalsa himself as his guide. He wanted to see the world’s most elusive animal before he died. It was a modest request.

  ‘Is he dying, then?’ Jalsa had thought at the time, and he thought it again now.

  It was a blue morning late in October. The Mongol’s eye went once more over the Motoluxe coat and the fine jodhpur boots with their Coimbra patina. The visitor certainly had money, whether he was dying or not. But what if he really was on the way out? Although Jalsa had grown up in New Jersey, a child of illiterate Kalmyk immigrants, he had not lost the beliefs of his ancestors. He determined to take the man to a shaman that same day.

  ‘Do you always stop here?’ the Englishman asked, as they climbed up a hill towards a picnic table which the drivers had set up. There was a spread of caviar and blinis and a few bottles of whisky which Jalsa had won while playing the tables in Las Vegas. He was a construction millionaire back in the States, a high roller at the casinos in his spare time. When he lost big, the grateful casinos gave him expensive bottles.

  ‘I never know if it’s the same hill. But yes.’

  ‘Do you mind if we pause a bit?’

  They were out of breath as they stood in the grass, and yet the horizons inspired them. The Englishman shielded his eyes and saw how cleanly the steppes ran to the earth’s edge. Ravines and long ridges filled with shadows where the grass must be about to die as winter came. On a hill nearby an ovoo of piled whitewashed stones stood in the sun, its prayer flags fluttering around it.

  For a moment, as Jalsa looked the stranger over, he had a curious passing thought: Chittleborough’s beard, flecked with grey and quite long, was not entirely real. It might have been a transplant of some kind. His nose dripped with unusual sweat. Soon, however, the first bottle had been opened and they were seated in pop-up canvas chairs as their pulses slowed. Jalsa put on his shades and set his feet on a little stool which they always brought for him. He ordered the two cans of chilled caviar to be opened.

  ‘I’m curious about you, James,’ he said. ‘Most people come here to forget and heal. But is that you?’

  ‘Not really. I just felt like being in motion. I felt like driving for a long time. I suppose it’s a bit foolish, but I thought I needed a last hurrah.’

  ‘A last hurrah?’

  ‘Well, so to speak.’

  ‘What about a last drink?’

  The Englishman crossed his boots and when he had come to the end of his cigarette he carefully disposed of the butt in a saucer instead of tossing it to the wind. Jalsa appreciated the little gesture. He leaned over and poured the first glass of the new bottle. Along the road below the two vans sat idle by the verge, shining like black beetles taking a nap. Around them was only the golden grass, bright as an ocean.

  ‘Did you know,’ he said to
Chittleborough, ‘my father never saw the land of his ancestors even once? He was born in the Crimea and then emigrated to the United States. The world is a monstrous place.’

  But he was smiling. He went on to explain that he had built his desert lodge in the Gobi entirely by himself using shamanistic rituals and traditional methods. There were no metal nails.

  ‘It’s my monument,’ he said. ‘Do you have a monument, Adrian?’

  ‘I can’t say I do, unfortunately. It’s a shame, I suppose you could say—’

  ‘Well, you have time.’

  ‘In fact,’ Chittleborough said, ‘that’s the one thing I don’t have.’

  ‘You have to make the time. These things take years to build.’

  Chittleborough merely scanned the steppe and the flapping Buddhist flags, as if wanting to end the conversation there. He coughed for a moment and raised his hand to cover his mouth.

  When they came down from the hill it was two o’clock. They turned on some Johnny Cash and rolled down the windows. Two hours later they finally passed through Mandalgovi, nestled under rock cliffs. It was windblown, grimly tenacious, hanging on by shredded fingernails. Impoverished white gers stood on dusty slopes with their chimneys smoking, the yards surrounded by low walls. It was the gateway to the desert. By dusk they had reached Dalanzadgad, a frontier town where their Cruiser was going to be serviced for the onward voyage. The place was already plunged in darkness. Packs of white dogs raced through it unhindered and suddenly delirious. Dusk, however, was offset by arc-lamps hung on construction cranes and by the temple-like glare of gas stations emblazoned with the single Cyrillic word Petrovis. At the end of Soviet boulevards the mountains rose up under bursts of clouds lit by the sunset; along them, the prefab warehouses glistened with what looked like frost.

  While they waited for the car to be refitted, Jalsa suggested they go to a karaoke bar and waste an hour somewhere warmer. It was called the Marco Polo II, a lounge set next to a parking lot filled with drifts of sand. When they arrived, Jalsa and Chittleborough went in alone, past half-gone miners propped in darkness at the bar and Chinese prospectors who had driven in from the desert for a night away from their boredom and their bauxite mines. There was a jukebox playing Russian hits and some local toughs were shooting pool at the far end. They were glad of the gloom. Jalsa offered the visitor a shot, took off his fur hat and gloves and laid them on the bar. Between songs they could hear the windows soughing. They toasted Chittleborough’s arrival and Jalsa decided on a whim to call him ‘brother’, a term reserved for the few.