The Final Testimony of Raphael Ignatius Phoenix by Paul Sussman

Author:Paul Sussman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448170814
Publisher: Transworld

CHAPTER ELEVEN

MY BACK STILL feels funny. I must have banged it harder than I thought yesterday evening. It doesn’t actually hurt – it just tingles, as though there were lots of ants running around beneath the skin. For some reason I can’t shake the thought that my body’s full of maggots. Spending an entire night down in the cellar probably didn’t do it much good either. The atmosphere’s very damp down there. Unhealthy. Like a dungeon.

Now, however, I’m out of the cellar and on my way up the left-hand wall of the castle stairway. Beneath me, a rippling sea of words and letters fills the downstairs rooms and foyer as though they’ve been flooded. It looks, though I say it myself, absolutely bloody spectacular.

I’m still getting by on next to no sleep, and my body, too, is feeling younger by the hour. In the middle of the night I removed my candles because, even in the murk of the cellar, with only a flickering 40 watt bulb for illumination, I suddenly discovered I could see perfectly well without them. It’s as if, in recording the events of my life, I’m somehow transferring the years from my own person on to the walls of my home. Unburdening myself. I really am feeling remarkably vigorous.

And a good thing, too, because the cellar, with its damp, stale air and legions of creepy-crawlies, has proved by far the most difficult writing space I’ve yet encountered. In places, the note’s progress was brought almost to a standstill, and whilst I’m still well on course to get it all done before I top myself, I experienced for the first time a sense of frustration and disillusionment with the whole thing.

‘What the hell are you doing this for?’ I thought. ‘Why are you punishing yourself like this?’

The main problem, amongst many, was that the cellar walls aren’t flat. Whereas all the other rooms in the castle have been neatly plastered and painted, the cellar was, by all appearances, hewn out of the solid rock, like a catacomb. Its whitewashed walls, as a result, bulge and ripple and twist, making them hellishly difficult to write over. In addition, they are also, in places, extremely damp, with pearl-sized beads of moisture oozing from the rock like a chalky sweat. My felt-tip pen was useless in such conditions, its ink refusing to adhere where there was the least hint of wet, so that rather than filling the entire wall I had to scurry from dry patch to dry patch, as though negotiating my way across a particularly treacherous bog. Where I had initially assumed I would have to increase the size of my writing, I was in fact, with so much wall space unusable, forced do quite the opposite, reducing the size of my letters so as to fit them all in, cramming them together like shipwrecked sailors into overloaded life rafts. Even then I still didn’t have quite enough space to say everything I wanted to, and having filled

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