Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [37]
I felt I should respond in some emphatic way, declare a firm position, reach out a helping hand. My eventual murmur of “That’s terrible” didn’t seem nearly enough. Worse: I had a shameful desire to laugh, because the thing was so grotesque, as near-tragedies often are. Surely I lacked empathy, or even simple kindness.
Owen must have felt so too, because after that evening he never came back. Or possibly he’d done what he’d wanted to do: dropped off his anguish, left it with me like a package, in the mistaken belief that I would know what to do with it.
That image – of a little child being suffocated, or almost suffocated, by others who thought the whole thing was a game – melded with the furtive nocturnal slugs, and my solitary pacing and singing, and the separate, claustrophobic stairway, and the charmless abstract painting, and the gold-framed mirror, and the slithery green satin bedspread, and became inseparable from them. It wasn’t a cheerful composite. As a memory, it is more like a fog bank than a sun lit meadow.
Yet I think of that period as having been a happy time in my life.
Happy is the wrong word. Important.
That was all quite long ago. I see it in retrospect, indulgently, from the point I’ve reached now. But how else could I see it? We can’t really travel to the past, no matter how we try. If we do, it’s as tourists.
I moved out of that city, and then into another one, and then another. I had a lot of moves still ahead of me. Yet things did work out after all. I met Tig, and then followed the cats and dogs and children, and the baking, and even the frilly white window curtains, though they eventually vanished in their turn: they got dirty too quickly, I discovered, and were hard to take down and put back up.
I didn’t become any of the things I’d feared. I didn’t get the pimply bum I’d been threatening myself with, nor did I become a cast-out, wandering orphan. I’ve lived in the same house now for decades.
But my dreaming self refuses to be consoled. It continues to wander, aimless, homeless, alone. It cannot be convinced of its safety by any evidence drawn from my waking life. I know this because I continue to have the same dream, over and over.
I’m in the other place, a place that’s very familiar to me, although I’ve never lived in it or even seen it except in this dream. Details vary – the space has many different rooms, mostly bare of furniture, some with only the sub-flooring – but it always contains the steep, narrow stairway of that distant apartment. Somewhere in it, I know – as I open door after door, walk through corridor after corridor – I’ll come upon the gold mirror, and also the green satin bedspread, which has taken on a life of its own and is able to morph into cushions, or sofas, or armchairs, or even – once – a hammock.
It’s always dusk, in this place; it’s always a cool dank summer evening. This is where I’ll have to live, I think in the dream. I’ll have to be all by myself, forever. I’ve missed the life that was supposed to be mine. I’ve shut myself off from it. I don’t love anyone. Somewhere, in one of the rooms I haven’t yet entered, a small child is imprisoned. It isn’t crying or wailing, it stays completely silent, but I can feel its presence there.
Then I wake up, and retrace the steps of my dream, and try to shake off the sad feeling it’s left me with. Oh yes, the other place, I say to myself. That again. There was quite a lot of space in it, this time. It wasn’t so bad.
I know the green bedspread isn’t really a bedspread: I know it’s some aspect of myself, some old insecurity or fear. I know the unseen child in the dream isn’t my almost-murdered acquaintance, but only a psychic fragment, a tatter of my own archaic infant self. Such