The End of Me by John Gould

Author:John Gould [Gould, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Freehand Books
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Something Apart

Along with his prognosis — six months, maybe twelve — Dan’s doctor offered him a piece of advice. Doctors tended to be young these days, alarmingly so, but this one was older than Dan by a good decade. Retirement age or even past it. He didn’t exhibit the brisk, let’s-do-business demeanor the young ones were affecting, but that of a hobo or addled genius. Karl Marx if Karl had indulged in a few more muffins.

“What matters?” said the doctor. “What have you always meant to do? Swim with the dolphins? Lick Château d’Yquem from your secretary’s cleavage?”

Dan said, “I don’t have a secretary.”

“So, the dolphins. I’m saying, your pancreas? Forget it. Do the thing.”

Do the thing. Decent advice. There were challenges, though. First, Dan couldn’t bring to mind anything, or anything of any worth, he’d always meant to do. If there’d been such a thing he must have done it, or lost the ambition.

And then the problem of planning. The source of all anguish is time — such was the view of Kamilah, Dan’s therapist. Kamilah regularly urged Dan to resist the fascism, as she put it, of past and future, to release himself into the present. “Time is nothing but tension,” said a little plaque over Kamilah’s chair, and under that, “Saint Augustine.” It was a shiny plaque, in which Dan could study the back of Kamilah’s head, her straight hair reflected wavy. He’d been seeing her for a year now, since a month or so after the Monique debacle, and despite Dan’s scepticism her program showed signs of success. Whenever he felt particularly wrought up he’d begin silently to chant, no past, no future, no past, no future. No past on the in breath, no future on the out, no past, no future. Strolling of an afternoon he’d call to mind his lunch and his dinner, and demand of himself whether he could, at that moment, take a bite from either of them. He could not. Lunch did not exist, nor did dinner. Nothing existed but the benignly unmusical barking of a dog, the burn of the insipient blister on his heel. Reliably, this exercise bled the tension from Dan’s body, opened his senses in a satisfying if slightly unsettling way.

So it was that he’d been living in the present, more or less, for the better part of a year. If he were to buy into his new doctor’s well-meaning advice, this progress would be sacrificed. He’d have to look up dolphins, enquire as to where you could swim with them, make arrangements. He’d be reduced to the level of all the other lame bucket-listers, grasping at their humdrum dreams. Pass.

But then Heart of Darkness. Dan was doing a muck-out of his apartment, with no particular goal in mind — indeed with as little foresight, as little intent as he could muster — when he happened on his old copy. That familiar cover, a bald head shining bright as a light bulb but smeared with some kind of copper emulsion.

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