FROM AN UNSENT LETTER
DESTROYED AT
THE SCANDIC CONTINENTAL HOTEL, 111599by
Jacques Debrot
Dear Friend,
I'm writing this eleven thousand meters in the air, approximately halfway between London (having just left the combinatorial analysis conference a day late) and Helsinki. Unfortunately, tomorrow and Wednesday I'm scheduled to give two additional talks at the university, so the rest of the week looks as though it will be too crowded for me to see you while I'm in Europe (I return to the U.S. on the 25th for another course of chemotherapy). However, before I left home, something happened to me that I feel compelled to tell you about. From a purely rational perspective, I realize it's not impossible to explain away, and yet any explication seems somehow irrelevant, even unimportant. I'm not really certain I can describe it.
It started, in any case, around a month before the London conference was to get under way. I was coming out of a bookstore, trying to decide whether to go directly home or return to my office, when I spotted someone I thought I recognized. I saw her only from behind, and I couldn't even say exactly what it was—her hair perhaps, or simply the way she carried herself—but there was something immediately familiar about her.
With a kind of absentminded determination, I found myself following her. She was only ten yards ahead of me. But the sidewalks were swarming with pedestrians. I soon lost sight of her briefly at a busy intersection near the museum, then again five minutes later, and made no effort to locate her a second time.
However, for most of the day I could think of nothing else. My agitation—inexplicable to me—was almost physically disturbing. But it wasn't until that night, when I was lying in bed, unable to read or sleep, that I suddenly realized the person I'd been reminded of in the street was my brother's late wife.
I hadn't thought of her in years, but there were several photographs of her in my possession in an old photo album that had belonged to my parents. A peripheral figure in most the pictures, she's standing alone in one photo—taken by my brother, I'm sure—under an enormous, bare tree. There's snow on the ground, but it must have been a relatively mild day because she is wearing only a thin sweater. Cut diagonally in half by the tree's shadow, she's smiling at the camera, evidently relaxed and happy, her sunglasses pushed up over her forehead like tiara.
I have no idea, naturally, when the picture was taken, but my sister-in-law seems very young. I remember, when I first knew her, envying my brother a little for having married her. However, it was only now that I realized how intensely attracted I'd been to her. For obvious reasons, of course, I had't permitted myself, at the time, to acknowledge these feelings.
The other photographs in the album were of lesser interest: reminders, for the most part, of complicated familial unhappiness. I was struck, however, by the virtual absence of photographs of myself. The few—no more than two or three—that did exist had all been taken in my childhood: pictures of an introverted boy imitating some statue, and inevitably holding a book or standing behind a bicycle or a chair so that he would not have to fill up the photograph all by himself.
Strangely, I was unable to recall, even vaguely, any of the circumstances in which these pictures were taken. It made me suddenly feel invisible, as if, in some sense, I were not wholly real—a state of mind exacerbated, no doubt, by the recent recurrence of my illness and its pessimistic prognosis.
By the next morning, at any rate, I'd managed largely to erase the incident from my mind. Two weeks passed. On the Friday before I flew to Europe, I slaved assiduously for most of the morning and the early afternoon on the conference paper I planned to deliver in London. When I was satisfied with the final draft, I spent a few hours at the university to wrap up other work, and afterward had a late dinner at a small restaurant near the canal.
I ate alone. My table was in a corner of the dining room, and when I raised my head it would sometimes come into contact with the leaves of a potted rubber tree. I hadn't eaten all day. But I was still hung over from the introverting pressure of the work I'd done on my paper. Distracted, I forced myself to expedite my food and left in a bad mood.
Outside again I saw that it had started to snow: big, sloppy flakes, like atomic fallout, invisible except around the street lamps. Optimistically, I'd hoped to flag a taxi, but was unsuccessful, so I decided to take a trolley bus. The stop was only several blocks away.
For whatever reason, perhaps because of the weather, the streets were practically empty. Deserted like this, everything—the empty square opposite the bus shelter, the oddly heterogeneous church—looked somehow alien and illusory, as if it were a movie set. Every now and then a car would drive by, throwing up slush, the taillights clouded by exhaust. But the drivers' heads, silhouetted in the dark interior like cardboard cut-outs, also seemed artificial, as if they were the ideograms of drivers, unconnected with the apparently autonomous vehicles that were carrying them through the city.
The bus shelter was exposed on three sides, and after waiting for almost twenty minutes, the cold air was beginning to hurt my lungs. I turned up the collar of my coat and glanced, maybe for the fifth time, at my watch. On the bench behind me, lay a folded newspaper; under it was a frozen pile of human excrement. Impatiently, I looked again at my watch, and considered returning to the restaurant to order a radio-taxi. However, just as I was about to leave, a long, articulated bus, showering sparks from the overhead wires, appeared at the end of the street.
The bus was jammed with passengers, but I managed to board and struggled a short distance down the aisle. Unable to reach the straps or the chromium stanchion, I was supported solely by the equalizing pressure of bodies on all sides. The air smelled brownish and bad, like wet clothing. No one spoke. We were pressed together in silence. In the thick eyeglasses of a man whose face was only inches from mine, I could see my curved reflection, bent and distended like a rubber doll blown up too hard.
The bus drove parallel to the canal, the street lamps flashing past the windows at stroboscopic intervals like slides in a faulty projector. From inside the bus everything outside looked vaguely ominous. Long views of immense factories and empty lots gave way to close-ups of abandoned or half-constructed residential housing and billboard advertisements.
Occasionally the bus would stop, the row of fluorescent lights flickering on the ceiling, and an empty bottle would start to roll under the seats. The noise—like a galloping horse—was deadened by clothes and flesh. As the passengers shifted positions, I put down the small briefcase I'd been carrying. An elderly man occupying a seat directly across the aisle attracted my attention.
The man's face was partially averted in the direction of the window, but I could see his reflection clearly in the glass. His age was extremely advanced—ninety, a hundred even, it was impossible to say, though his skin was fissured everywhere, like asphalt, with thousands of deep, fine lines. Immediately, I found myself staring at him more closely. Wasn't he, too, I thought, someone I knew? As if he'd read my mind, he turned his head, and our eyes briefly met.
In that instant I believed I remembered who he was—a former colleague, someone I'd known more than twenty years ago. He looked at me speculatively, with an expression of concentration, and then, touching the seat in front of him with one hand—more like crustacean claw than anything human—he turned back to the window. His head, trembling a little, was smooth and hairless, like a desiccated egg.
Afterward I was unable to rationalize the incident, though I knew my colleague was dead. The strength of the resemblance, which was exact, negated any alternative.
I write this to you without further comment. It may be that these apparitions, as I've described them to you here, have a significance which I am presently unable to perceive. Knowing you as well as I do, I feel you would not immediately preclude this possibility. And yet the only way to know about death finally is to die. There's nothing more that can be said about it, though sometimes, I think, it is only by an act of sheer will, that I myself remain corporeal.D.
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