Chapter 26
October 5
Filling Time
I’VE SAID IT BEFORE: imagination can be a curse. Do you think that the unexamined life is not worth living? Consider this: the closer you look at the life you’ve led, the more likely you are to find the mistakes you made, the ones you wanted to forget, the nasty little gritty bits that settled to the bottom of your life and would have stayed there if you hadn’t stirred them up yourself, examining, examining, examining. I have long thought that the unimagined life is not worth living, that what might be and what might have been surround what merely is with luminous layers of nacre that make life a multiple experience, enriched by its possibilities. Consider this, though: the further the imagination rambles, the more likely it is to step into quicksand, and if you have ever stepped into quicksand you know that the memory of the experience returns again and again, at the slightest provocation, for the rest of your life, bringing with it a sickening, sinking feeling, like the feeling that came over me when I sat at my computer and Albertine wrote:
Peter is halfway through the reading of Dead Air, just twenty-five days away from the end, and I feel more and more sorry for him with every reading, every passing day. He’s going to turn fifty with all his dreams lying in pieces at his feet — my dreams, too — and he’s convinced that it’s all his fault. I know he’s convinced of that, because I know that he thinks everything that goes wrong is his fault. Bad enough that he has to blame himself for his own shattered dreams, but mine, too? And I can’t find any way to convince him that I don’t blame him. I can’t even summon the strength to find a way. I am just too exhausted by too much work and too much disappointment, too much time spent measuring what is against what I hoped would be.
How can a few small problems add up to such a mass, such a mess? I feel so vulnerable, unable to make any progress, not even able to keep up any longer, losing ground every day. Everything could fall apart at any time — after all, a day will come, someday, when this hotel just falls to the ground — why not today? I am seeing the essential fragility of everything, which we allow the routines of daily life to obscure most of the time. (I suppose I should be grateful that my situation has given me this insight into life. Thanks, God.) Now and then, when things go wrong, we see that the state of things-going-right is an aberration, that bad luck is normal luck, good fortune is the oddity, and in the long run things go very, very wrong.
Lost. Beaten. Defeated. What a terrible feeling. I can never succeed at this. There will be no peace until it is over. I want another life.
THE HEADLINE over the lead story in the morning’s Babbington Reporter read “Mayor Indicted in Dredging Scam.”
“Did you arrange this?” I asked Lou.
“Talk to Artie,” said Lou. “He does all my arranging.”
“Artie?” I said to Artie, holding the paper out toward him.
“Yeah?”
“Did you arrange this?”
“I made some phone calls.”
“Did you — did you set him up?”
“People set themselves up, Peter. We’ve all got dirty hands. It’s just a question of who notices.”
[to be continued]
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