The Infinities by John Banville

Author:John Banville [Banville, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 978-0-307-59287-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

What indeed? Were I able I would rear up in my winding-sheets, my foul tubes wrenched from their sockets and spouting pap and piss, and slam that door shut in their faces. Ah, the sad braggadocio of the dying. It is not that I am afraid of Benny Grace; what I fear is disturbance. I am becalmed, and dread a suddenly filled sail. The history of Benny and me is long and intricate. When I peer into memory’s steadily clouding crystal I see a great throng milling and elbowing and out of its midst Benny’s fat face grinning at me, suggestive, sardonic, oleaginously eager. Has he come to harangue me in my last straits, to tell me I am going about dying in all the wrong way? I have known him, he has known me, for longer than I care to remember, though I will have to remember, I suppose, now that he has popped up like this. Indeed, I feel he has been with me all my life, which is hardly possible, since he is not as old as I am, and will remain so. Yes, Benny surely is of the immortals.

Suddenly I recall a nightmare I had when I was a child, a very young child, it must have been, a baby, even, I think, still in my cradle, I have never forgotten it. How frightening it was, how fraught with significance, that I have retained such a distinct recollection of it all these years. Although I am not sure it can properly be called a nightmare, so brief it was and bare of incident. I am not certain it was a dream at all but rather a half-waking intimation of something I was too young then and now am too old and too far gone to interpret or understand. Anyway, in this nightmare, or dream, or reverie, whatever it was, I had been set down on a bare rock in the midst of an empty ocean. Yes, set down, for I had not been brought there by boat, or by any earthbound, or sea-bound, means, but had alighted somehow out of the air, a fallen Icarus, it might be, my head in a spin and my wings doused of their fire, dripping and useless. The ocean all around me was of a mauvish shade, utterly still, without a surge or ripple—even where it ringed the rock on which I cowered the water’s fringe showed not the slightest stirring—yet seemed to brim, full of itself to overflowing, and as if at any moment it might tilt wildly and upend, like a great polished disc pressed down upon violently at its edge. As far as I looked in every direction there was nothing to be seen, and no horizon, the featureless distances merging seamlessly into an equally featureless sky. No sound, no cry of bird or moan of wind. A vast void everywhere, and I terrified, clinging to my rock with both hands and barely holding the world from

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