During his first year at the Courtauld, John wrote an article on Jorge Luis Borges’ short story The Zahir. It was published in one of those scholarly journals that boasts about twenty subscribers and one or two readers.
In the story, Borges relates how the Zahir is a malign phenomenon that has appeared throughout history in many forms and guises. It’s been a tiger, a blind man, an astrolabe, to name a few of its incarnations. Its defining trait is that it cannot be forgotten by those whom it possesses. The unrelenting persistence of its image drives its victims insane.
One scene in the story caught John’s art-historian eye. Borges (the story appears autobiographical) was walking through Buenos Aires in the early hours of the morning after having picked up a twenty-cent coin in a bar. Though Borges did not know it, this piece of small change was the Zahir. Soon after pocketing it, a phantasmagoric history of money passed through his mind. That vision marked the coin’s first “infection” of his psyche. Then, after that fever subsided, Borges says, “I had wandered in a circle. I was just one block from where I’d been given the Zahir. I turned the corner. The chamfered curb in the darkness showed me the establishment had closed.”
The circular walk Borges took and the curb’s chamfered (polygonal) shape he saw, reminded John of the juxtaposition of the globe and the polyhedron in Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I. The deliberate placement of those geometric forms referenced the ancient Greek problem of “squaring the circle.” (An impossibility: a polyhedron can approach a circle but never make the final step.) In other words, the coin had delivered Borges to the land of the incommensurable; the terrifying realm the Pythagoreans discovered, which they forbade their followers to reveal on pain of death. Like the brooding, winged-female figure in Melencolia I, Borges found himself situated between two mutually-exclusive geometric constructs, trying to reconcile an incomprehensible infinity with a reality that he’d previously regarded as limited and intelligible.
The Zahir suggests, moreover, the real horror, the true terror, is our illusory idea of self. The coin (Borges’ Zahir) exposed this illusion by usurping the very thing that gave Borges his sense of a distinctive persona: his memory. Once the coin had colonized his memory, Borges’s identity could no longer exist.
We all have our Zahirs.
Paul was John’s.
***
After that dream, John lost track of time. Like Borges in The Zahir, he did a lot of walking. He thought about whether you can only know someone else’s pain by knowing your own first and even then you can never be sure. (They could be faking it.)
Paul had told him once about Dr. Molyneaux’s letter to John Locke. Molyneaux asked whether a congenitally blind person would perceive an orange as spherical on suddenly gaining sight. (Locke replied “no.”)
Are we all like that blind person when it comes to empathy? John wondered.
Those long walks and unresolved questions gave him an appetite. For skin and flesh. The allure of degeneration presented itself again. This time as a salve for pain. He frequented nude revues, cabarets, and fancy strip clubs in a hand-embroidered silk vest, bespoke suit, and old school tie. The tie he’d taken back when he tried to bite off Paul’s thumb. The tie his father had given him. He ordered mounds of caviar and steak tartare soaked in scotch. The implements were surplus.
He ate the meat and roe with his tongue, straight out of the fancy silver bowls they brought them in. Like a dog. He lapped the warm blood off his palms, licked roe from under his nails. Fat and grease dribbled down his chin. He giggled at his reflection in the bowl. Look at me Paul, look at what you’ve done. Happy now?
They brought out bowls of warm water scented in lemon juice to rinse his hands and mouth; linen serviettes to dry them. He said a prayer in Latin in gratitude. It felt good to be clean. They placed a fresh box of Romeo and Julieta cigars in front of him. The odor of hand-rolled, cured tobacco swam up his nostrils. They snipped the ends of the cigars and lit them with a glowing taper. They brought out bottles of whiskey with an ice bucket and silver tongs.
The ice bucket was surplus, too. He drank the whiskey neat. It scalded his throat. He wanted it to burn a hole all the way through—then strike a match inside it and watch the ends of the flames eat each other like a snake its tail.
He wanted to burn away his pain.
He stared at the strippers all night. He wondered what’s it like to lose a sense of modesty. Was it like pissing or shitting or giving a blowjob in the middle of a park? In front of old women and children? He didn’t think so. Not when it’s your job to strip. Your skin becomes alien: a shiny suit that gives pleasure to strangers. Pleasure you sell every night.
How did they do it? Did their minds tend toward abstraction? Nestle in the crooks of outstretched eagles’ wings floating high above the earth on unseen thermals? (If so, he envied them.) Did their legs, chests, and hips take over in marionette jerks when their minds left their bodies? Did they learn to hear a kind of silence through the pounding music? The silence of snow packed down by a bear paw, the profoundest kind of silence, deeper even than when the snow first formed and glowed blue with air?
One of the stripper’s eyes exuded a tide of sadness John could have waded into and floated out on forever. Bitterness billowed up inside him. He blamed England. It had taken everything: Goa, his parents, Barrington. Yes, even Paul. Things become sharp from what’s taken away from them. England had made him into a blade.
In the strip club, he saw Paul painting the walnut tree from his college room window in real time: an estranged memory reconciling itself to the moment of its conception. The sap passed through the tree’s veins. Leaves fluked and twisted in the dying light. He was back in the room where the painting hung. A man recited a poem that smelled of damp fur and tea leaves. Magenta wisps and garnet streaks curled along the horizon. A line from the poem burned through him: "Thus began outrage from lifeless things:" it meant heaving seas, moaning winds, volcanos hurling flaming boulders into space.
Future nightmares crept along the bottom of his unformed thoughts. Nightmares of nightmares. Nightmares filled with stalking rivers, coming for him, coming to take back what was theirs. For eating their children. Scales, tails, gills, and chain-mail gleamed like ship lights dulled by fog, drowned stars. He wanted to join them. Drown himself. He overheard a dialogue between sea and moonlight.
Sea: I only borrowed your light and shone it back to you. I never stole it. Now you punish me? You have no right to make me dilate and contract, torture me so.
Moon: I do what I can. I do what I must.
He was the sea and Paul the moon. Caught in an eternal spiral of pain. Pain will always have its reckoning. He’d read somewhere we are “condemned to live life forwards but think backwards.” This is how pain is created.
Two thousand years ago, King Mithridates microdosed himself daily with various venoms to develop resistance to poisoning. Mithridates had a lot of enemies. John began to microdose with synthetic toxins to prepare for an ordeal he knew was coming, to distract from the real source of pain: Paul. He mixed compounds purchased from various pharmacies based on studies of spiders native to Brazil from the magazine article he’d read.
He decided to patronize all of the continent’s finest strip clubs, to do the grand tour and become an habitué of the demimonde. To be Caligula in hand-sewn silk suits smoking Verona Reservas, sipping scotch, dropping wriggling eels down his throat, while bargaining with desperate women to perform even more obscene acts.
To become a sublime pervert. To perfect degradation. To forget his pain. To be swallowed up by netherworlds and long-winding stairwells descending into dark lagoons, to join keyhole peepers, exiles, outcasts, and lonely men and women tango dancing in trench coats and low-slung fedoras to the music of West Side Story inside of hotel lobbies wearing newspaper masks; to get lost between endless mirrors of subterfuge and deceit; imagined and real. It didn’t matter as long they distracted from Paul.
When he got to Venice, he walked sideways down cobbled alleyways to get doubly lost. He heard echoes of church bells, dipping poles, and gondoliers’ cries. The canals brought up all sorts of buried things. Hail clacked on a tin roof. A shadow cast by a dead star barred his way: ahead floated a blanched hand daubing each doorpost it passed in blood. He might have been hallucinating.
When he got back to England, he took to wandering in the woods. The scent of bark in dark forests clung to him after those walks. His pain would never end because he had no more bark to grow around it. The trees gleamed in afternoon light. Almost purple. Through dewdrops on autumn leaves, he saw rivers he’d been too afraid to cross because he’d been too scared to learn how to swim.
He dreamt about galley slaves chained to their benches rowing in their own shit and piss. He thought: I’m no different. He would die chained to his own bench and never know about the sea he spent his life rowing across. Was the dream on the train about the tattooed children a nail he could use to pick the lock on his chains and free himself? What else could it be?
He would just have to learn how to swim after he killed the whip bearer and jumped ship.
He saw Paul licking his thumb after he bit it. Paul laughing, “Was that…was that your roar, little mouse?”
He tried to remember a time before Paul but couldn’t.
He thought about how liberating it is to understand you have no choice.
He thought about the best way to kill Paul.
