Burning Elvis by John Burnside

Author:John Burnside [John Burnside]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

FOLIE À DEUX

WHEN I CAN’T sleep I get up and sit by the window, where I can see the sky. Sometimes there are stars and I try to remember the names of the constellations, but it’s been a while now since Val was here, and he was the one who really knew all that stuff. I used to try staying in bed, telling myself I would fall asleep after a while, listening in the dark for his soft breathing, and the odd, small popping sounds he used to make with his lips when he was dreaming, though we hadn’t slept in the same bed for years, not since we were small. It bothers me, thinking about him, and about how close we used to be. Now that he’s gone, I have a tendency to brood: I fix on an idea and circle around it, over and over, never coming to a resolution, just lying in bed with my head buzzing. If I get up, I can at least sit by the window and look at the sky. It’s a foolish thought, I know, because there’s probably nothing in the world except the earth and the cold stars and the stones in the cemetery, but sometimes I think Val is out there, not in any one place, but just floating somehow, as if he was part of the whole universe, and not just the other half of me. When I think that, I come close to believing that everything is all right – what I’m looking for is a special thought, an idea that’s almost there at the edge of my mind, a switch, almost, that I could throw, so that something in me would be turned off, maybe for ever. I don’t want to die, or anything like that. I don’t miss Val, or not in the way people think. It’s just that I know what their world contains, all the doctors and nurses and visitors, and I don’t want it. I’ve had my life, really; I’ve had events. Now I just want some time to think.

When I do sleep, I almost always dream about Val. I had no idea our state of being – our state of grace – had a textbook name. Folie à deux is what they call it – shared insanity, madness times two. I never thought of it as a medical condition: Val and I had always been together; we were the two halves of something that, otherwise, would have been incomplete, and whenever I looked at him, I saw myself, perfectly reflected. Now they tell me it was a form of mania; they’re saying he was inside my head all that time, and I wasn’t thinking straight. That’s why they parted us, the way teachers part troublesome children in school, so the weaker child can escape the bad influence. It’s odd how they always assume the strong one is bad – or is it that they think the bad are strong? I don’t know, but they’re wrong about one thing.

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