PART ONE
the falling
Every text has a shadow.
Michael Harlow, 1999
♦♦♦♦ My name is Robert Hale,
or, if you’d prefer, my name is Alan Loney. Or, my name could
be any that any of us could choose. If all of us die, and if kings and
paupers are the same in death, as the wisdom goes, then
what’s in a name?
For the moment, however, my name is Robert Hale. I am 14 years old, and
the train on which I am travelling is falling through the bridge that
has opened up beneath us. It is Christmas Eve, at 10.21 pm, December
1953. The river below us is in flood, the water turbulent beyond local
memory. The falling seems to take forever, and I am unable to
distinguish the screams of others from my own. It is as if the world
has suddenly reconstituted itself as a scream. Just that. A scream that
has been there forever, is everywhere present, and will go on forever,
even though ours will be cut short in the next few minutes. Lines from
a very old poem, ‘How should I love, and I so
young’, come to me, unbidden, like an affront that will not
be denied, yet totally beside the point, alongside it rather than
instead of it— why? But here my mother is beside me, and like
me she is beside herself also, as others are beside themselves. The
ancient Greeks had words for it. Ecstasy,
ek-stasis, outside
the stillness of what is. Or
ek-thesis,
when a paragraph begins in what we now call a hanging indent, outside
the body of the text. And that is exactly how it seems, how it feels,
outside the body, a body no longer one’s own, yet there has
been nothing in my short life so bodily intense as this. Every fibre of
my being—how astonishingly does a cliché like this
make itself known at a time like this—is screaming. Each cell
in the body, each muscle, each bone, each limb, is a mouth open to the
infinity of life and death in the affirmation of the scream. In a few
seconds, my mother and I will die our separate and our communal deaths.
The bridge that has broken the thread of our journey is Tangiwai, River
of Tears, and the river that rages below to receive us is Whangaehu,
Turbid Waters. All at once, the clear water and the dark water have
joined in this one, deadly, life-affirming, open-mouthed and utterly
inarticulate moment of death.
♦♦♦♦ What I hate most about
this falling is its slowness. Not that I want to speed it up. But the
slowness has a kind of vertigo in it. A kind of slow sickness that does
not quite erupt into anything. It doesn’t happen, yet it
threatens to happen in or throughout each aching, stretched-out second
of the descent. It seems I have all the time in the world in which to
see and think on everything around me. I am out of the seat, yet
without any prospect of landing anywhere else for an eternity. Glass
has shattered beside us, and just hangs there in the air, a thousand
little knives that will end up embedded in everything, but now in
nothing. It all moves and does not move, and my mouth gapes in my poor
attempt to take it in. I can see everything with total clarity and I
cannot comprehend a single item of its information. All the things in
the carriage have become redistributed somehow, as if one would not be
able to recognise that this was indeed the carriage one was travelling
in. If I had gone to the toilet and returned, I would be bound to think
that I had entered the wrong carriage, turned left instead of right
coming through the toilet door, it was that unfamiliar. It will end
soon enough I am sure of that. I am sure also that there is something
about it that will go on forever. What it is I do not know. It simply
feels that way. Forever, at this lightning speed from the familiar and
the safe to the alien and the treacherous.
The unknown is both
what
happens next and
what
happened to get us here. I’d not thought of that
before. We assume a sort of absolute dividing line between death as an
‘unknown’ and life as a sort of
‘known’. And here I am, about to die, and I have no
idea whatsoever how I got to this position. If I had been ill for a
period of time, or had seen a car coming down the road toward me, or
knew that I was getting very old, I’d have something to go
on. But there’s nothing. My clear and unerring reality right
now is that I have nothing to go on. And never will have again.