Dunbar by Edward St. Aubyn

Author:Edward St. Aubyn
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2017-10-03T04:00:00+00:00

Dunbar tried to shake off the latest scrap of disjointed narrative that had taken over his mind like a hallucination, but he had been alone for too long and was now adrift in a compulsory daydream whose images were experts on what he did not want to feel and would rather not imagine. He had just seen an old circus tiger escape from its cage in a cold country and amble bemusedly through a crowd of screaming, fleeing citizens. He had felt the power of its alien gait and then, when it was standing on the edge of a sparse recreational wood where it had gone to look for food, he had seen a bullet crash into its skull in a scatter of blood and bone.

How could he wake from a waking dream? It enveloped everything he thought and everything he looked at. The broken layer of brown and purple cloud scattered in the yellowing sky reminded him of his mother’s tortoiseshell comb when he used to close one eye and hold it up to the lamplight and stare at it for ages, until its mottled pattern of light and dark patches filled the whole visual field. That was when he was very little, before he started asking her difficult questions and questioning her easy answers, before they became opponents. Now everyone was his opponent, because he was not in his right mind.

The hills, drenched by the storm, were gleaming and dripping in the afternoon light. How tactless of him to have insisted on bringing his lumbering body to this lovely, liquid scene, to dump it like a sack of cement, split open and hardened by rain, on this otherwise uncontaminated hillside.

On the other hand, he felt such a sense of lightness and of hunger, such a threadbare connection to the rest of human life, that he could easily imagine slipping out of existence, as quietly as one of those bright drops of arrested rain that were falling from the bushes to the grass, and from the grass to the ground.

How could he pit himself against his daughters when they had his whole organization at their command and he had no command of his own disorganization? Organization, disorganization: all these maddening words that treated him as their ventriloquist’s dummy, not to mention the images of humanely slaughtered tigers that flickered across the deep gray screen of his television mind, because some bastard, some sadistic sky-god who owned all the channels to all the minds of all living creatures everywhere was playing with the programing and the remote control.

Why go on? Why drag his suffering body into the next valley? Why endure the anguish of being alive? Because endurance was what he did, thought Dunbar. He hauled himself up and straightened his body one more time and brought both his fists against his chest, inviting that child-devouring sky-god to do his worst, to rain down information from his satellites, to stream his audiovisual hell of white noise and burning bodies straight

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