The Collected Novels Volume Three by Fay Weldon

Author:Fay Weldon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2017-07-27T00:00:00+00:00

9

FROM MY BED IN the Clinic I can see out over the lakes to the office spires of Chicago. I am on the twelfth floor; there are thirty above me, eleven below. I try to find some significance in this, but fail. I like it here. Years pass. I know the pattern the sky makes: I watch the mists gathering and dispersing on the lake: the changing shades of its green fringes as the sunlight comes and goes: the flux and flow of traffic along the lake road. I hear only the muted average of city noise: all excesses — shrieks, wails, the whispers of plots, the firing of guns, the popping of champagne corks, the squeals of brakes, the revving of engines — are through the double glazing, calmingly evened out to a determined, competent purr. I’d rather be here than in Fenedge, any day, don’t think I wouldn’t. We all have our ways of getting out.

Surgeons are transplanting neural fibre from some wretched frog into my backbone in the hope of achieving some degree of nerve regeneration. These days they don’t have enough to do. Physicians are taking over; invasive surgery is unpopular. Taking heart from my reports of tingling in my toes, these surgeons will not now give up on my legs, though I’m sure I did long ago. They treat me for free — or, look at it another way, though I try not to, being grateful, I allow them to experiment on me free of charge. It would be very interesting if the experiment succeeded, I can see that: it would have all kinds of significance, bring hope to the hopeless, all that. We make jokes about whether I’ll start leaping around the room, froglike, or whether I can see undue signs of swallowing in my throat. They are easily entertained, these doctors: the feeblest of jokes and their serious faces light up as if some great gift had been bestowed on them. Then the door closes behind them, and I find myself sad, watching the traffic patterns lace below, wondering what the monstrous sorrow can be: the one which lies at the roots of the universe, so that we’re left with such poignant echoes of it in our lives, and have to work it through, so patiently and painfully, aeon after aeon; child grieving for parent, husband for wife, each afflicted with grief for the other, not just the self, which, God knows, is bad enough. What happened once to spoil everything so? I daresay the story of Adam and Eve is not as laughable as most of us sophisticates suppose; perhaps it has the seeds of truth in it. Perhaps once there was indeed a Garden of Eden, and we were turned away from it, and left with what is bound to seem imperfect and spoiled, a disappointment, since we have in our bones, our genes, that glimmer of perfection. But I think it must be the sin and sorrow of gods, not of humankind, which afflicts us, since we find even its mere shadow so intolerable.

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