Spurious - Lars Iyer [38]
Today! Then the Messiah is here! But he is not here. There are conditions to his coming, and the leper-Messiah, who binds his wounds alongside the beggars at the gates of Rome, is not here yet.
There’s a great lesson in this, W. says, though he’s not sure what it is. When’s the Messiah going to come? Today? Tomorrow? He’s not sure, W. says, but it’s only when you’ve exhausted everything, when there’s no more hope, that the Messiah might appear.
Of course, I’ve long since worn W. out, he says. I’m hopeless, W. says. I’m unredeemable. W. knows it. But why then does he talk to me? Why does he continue with our collaboration?
Perhaps he hopes for something nonetheless, W. reflects. And perhaps it’s only when he gives it up that the Messiah will arrive. Which would make me some kind of antichrist, W. surmises. A kind of living embodiment of the apocalypse.
The electrician came out, I tell W.—‘It needs rewiring’, he said, ‘the whole flat’. I ignored him. There was light, and that was enough. The light in the kitchen is still working. It doesn’t flicker; it’s steady. Which means you can gaze upon the damp. You can gaze, fascinated, at the damp and the plaster mottled with damp. It doesn’t hide, the damp. It isn’t shy. It is there, obvious. It announces itself calmly. It says, here I am, with quiet plainness. And there it is, I tell W. A fact. Absolute damp. Damp beyond all damp meters.—‘It’s off the scale’, said the drying expert who’ll bring the machines.
Inside, in the kitchen, the damp continues to spread, but calmly, changing the colour of the wall. Along its spreading edges, thick salt falls to pile at the base of the wall and along the worksurfaces. Grit still falls from one corner of the ceiling. The wet walls are marked with mildew like liver spots on an elderly hand. And along the window sill, the plaster has turned a mottled green.
I have a small fan heater which I aim at this part of the wall, and then that, I tell W. Gradually, the plaster changes colour from an angry dark brown, mottled with dark green and black mould, to a calmer, lighter pink. It seems a miracle; it seems I’m winning, I tell W., how can this be? But then it comes back again, a wave of dark brown.
Periodically, I go out to the kitchen with some kitchen roll, and wipe down the great sweating surface. There’s always a layer of water on the wall like a sweat sheen. I marvel. Is the wall alive? Does it live in some strange way? What is the meaning of the salt crystals which form on the wall? Is the salt the way it expresses itself, or dreams? Is it conscious and groping towards me to communicate? My flat is the satellite that turns around the damp, and I am the astronaut fascinated only by its changing surface.
Whole religions have formed around less, I tell W., around damp, and the source of damp.
W. sends me some quotations from the Talmud.
Seven things are hidden from men. These are the day of death, the day of consolation, the depth of judgement; no man knows what is in the mind of his friend; no man knows which of his business ventures will be profitable, or when the kingdom of the house of David will be restored, or when the sinful kingdom will fail.
W. likes lists, he says. It’s a Borges thing.—‘This quote is especially for you’, he says:
Proselytes and those that emit semen to no purpose delay the Messiah.
‘For how long have you personally delayed the coming of the Messiah?’, says W. ‘Years? Millennia?’
W. is sure he heard somewhere or another—at a lecture, symposium or suchlike—about the stupid Messiah, and this has oriented his research ever since. The stupid Messiah, whatever can that mean? When did this figure appear? Under what circumstances?
Of course, there is a long tradition of the occultation of the Messiah, W. says. The idea, that is, that the Messiah has already arrived, if only we could find him (if only we knew how to find him). Then there’s the