Downriver by Iain Sinclair

Author:Iain Sinclair
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2004-03-31T05:00:00+00:00

VII

Beneath the odd, parchment-shaded lamp, a meniscus of pale light: the room quilted in bulky darkness. The bundle of blue papers has stuck to my hands in a single block, heavy as stained glass, interleaved with lead. Millom’s face is bestial. He insinuates, whispers, rasps: fixes me with his sunken, chalk-rimed eyes. His fleshy lower lip shivers in a mime of humour. He is amused. He leans over; his buffed pike-teeth glinting voraciously. White hands break free of his cuffs, to flap around the lamp, as he signals his triumph. ‘Gotcha!’ He has implicated me in horror, infected me with a small corruption from which there is no immunity.

‘You understand the nature of her triumph? Yes?’ Millom preached, determined to poison the silence with a redundant afterword. ‘It was indifference: “surviving death through death”. The blind surgeon wanted something that excited him more than honour, more than sanity, more even than life. He wanted the one crystal absolute she denied him – yes, apathy; he wanted it so much he was prepared to pass over the borderline of identity, become her, and suffer her vengeance within her flesh.’

No. I didn’t want to be drawn into giving mind to this fiction, but it seemed to me that Millom was wrong, completely wrong. As wrong as it is possible to be. I repudiated his terms: ‘vengeance’, ‘apathy’. I could only read the crucial ‘exchanges’ between the woman and the surgeon in terms of the madness of love-death – the ‘little deaths’ of physical ecstasy. Within this tale, the woman exploits those out-of-the-body post-coital experiences, where both partners become the loved one and the lover: the metaphysical poets’ mingling of souls. Through the focus of repeated ritual acts the woman infiltrates the surgeon/father’s consciousness – so that, when the inevitable moment comes, she takes responsibility for her own death; leaving him with nothing, an achieved emptiness.

‘The woman, the woman,’ Millom twitched on. He was talking to himself. Without having ‘written’ anything, he found himself an author. His performance was magisterial in its self-deceit. ‘The woman allowed the surgeon to enact the deed that was his inescapable destiny. She could not change the events of history, but only the meaning. In the freedom of death, she used her more potent memory, her older soul, to avenge herself by trapping the killer in the seductive mirror of her youthful skin. His sightless blunder damned him. His act of sacrificial slaughter, releasing her (as he thought) from an inherited taint, was, in fact, the very movement that brought him down, crushed his over-weening pride. You follow me now? He is the man, and he is still “alive”. He has no need of a name; his identity is transferable, so he’s immortal. He wanders the city, seeking out the fatal woman, like a benign host desperate for the only satisfying plague bacterium – the one that is fatal. Hopelessly, in drinking clubs and hotel bedrooms, he feels the contours with his trembling hands, face after face after face, searching for his own earlier self, his woman soul.

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