And relationships grow whether we want them to or not. Once I recognized the woman in a restaurant — we were both leaving. It was peculiar to see her with clothes on. She smiled and indicated I should follow; I accompanied her to what I assumed were her rooms, and inside we stripped each other violently — a new touch to our liaison — and made love in our customary silence.
Later, when I had dressed, we sat on the bed and looked out the window at an alley wall. She said, “And what are you running from?”
I felt my stomach drop. “My work.” A pause. “And you?”
“The same.”
We laughed. It was more intimate than anything we had shared thus far; sex can be as solipsistic as suicide. To laugh together was not Alexandrian. “Does it work for you?” she sputtered. I shook my head, still giggling. “Me neither,” she said, and set us off again. After that we talked. She too worked in research, in one of the libraries. I told her she looked like Emma Weil, and and shrugged. Later, when we met in bathhouses, she merely smiled and continued on her way. Once we tried it again. But it was over.
Sometimes I get so tired. Day follows day follows day in an endless round, each day filled with habits constructed to patch over the emptiness at the heart of things. I exist and so I have to occupy my time. But there is no more to it than that. Apprehensions of this truth make it hard even to keep to the day to day. I feel like a stagehand moving all the props of the play by myself — holding the backdrops steady, placing the costumes on their hooks, conducting the pit band, cueing the players, rushing to and fro — and at the same time I am expending all this backstage effort I am supposed to pretend to believe that the production is real life. It’s impossible.
I never felt this exhaustion more than in my last months in Alexandria. I kept to my habits out of the strength of habituation, and fear, but I was lost. I didn’t know what next to search for in the archives, and grubbed in them randomly. I stopped paying attention to my dress; grew a beard to avoid shaving; paid no attention to my food, and ate semi- consciously on the schedule of habit; lived in an apartment piled with worn clothes and refuse; and if it weren’t for the habit of the bathhouses, I doubt I would even have stayed clean. I was far enough into a funk that I didn’t recognize it, and that is dangerously far.
I have always feared insanity. It seems to me the most horrifying of illnesses, and the Achilles heel of modern medicine. And I feel that I might be particularly susceptible to it. I am anxious and easily frightened, so that terror might overwhelm me. And I have little understanding of why other people act as they do, so that I am often isolated to a nearly unbearable degree. And I bear all the physical marks of the potential schizophrenic: over- large head, low ears, tufty electric hair, poor meeting of the bone ridges at the intersection of eyebrows and nose. These are all signs, used by doctors.
One day I found myself sitting outside the great jade library, stroking one of the chert lions that flanked the steps, almost too tired to move my hand. I couldn’t remember how I had gotten there, or where I had been, or what I had been doing, for… I didn’t know how long. And then I knew I was lost.
It was Shrike who pulled me out. One look at my face: “Jesus Christ, man, you’ve fallen in a funk!” Right there at my front door. “You of all people! I thought you were too full of bile. Here it’s all coming your way at once and you’re falling in a funk. I don’t understand you, Hjalmar, I truly don’t.” He looked past me at my apartment with distaste. “Come on up to my place and clean up. Where have you been?”
“I don’t know.”
He looked at me oddly. “You’ve been working too hard,” he said in a tone I’d never heard from him, and took me by the arm.
He led me across the city to his apartment, muttering all the way. “Should have known something like this had happened, it’s been so long since you last pestered me. What’s the matter, lost your nerve? Got yourself on the big stage and found it a scary place?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He took me by the shoulders and shook me. “Wake up.” Into his bathroom, clothes yanked off, shower first boiling then freezing, and back and forth like that. “What’s this,” I moaned, “you got a degree in physical therapy?” He laughed crazily. I felt his hands like the hot water, his barbs like the cold. He pulled me out, forced me to swallow some pills, slapped me, pushed me into the wall. “Enough of this,” I said. “I should think you’d get enough of pushing people around in your daytime work.”
He shouted his laughter. “You prig! How you bore me with your self-righteousness! What are you but a self-serving academic bourgeois ass, after all, living fat off the very system you denounce. An archaeologist! Archaeology, what dull nonsense! Why pursue it at all? What could be less re-vo-LU-tionary?”
“Well, no,” I said slowly, struggling. “That’s not exactly right. It’s a search for reality, you see. The presence of history in our moment. In those objects we can see truths of our nature. Expressed in the way we lived during the eons of prehistory. Which formed our brains and our desires and our goals and our satisfactions and our raptures—”
“What crap! What do you mean? We’re not cavemen anymore, fool—”
“No! No. We also see the few millennia of change that transformed us from that stable cycle to our current misery on Mars.”
“How you hate Mars. Why don’t you go back to Earth if you hate Mars so much.”
I wiped wet hair off my forehead. “Because I’m a Martian!” I burst out. I shook a fist at him: “I lived too long on Mars before I ever went to Earth, and so I grew the last part of my brain — the part grown by living — into the brain of a Martian. So when I went to Earth it was foreign to me, it fired synapses in the parts of my brain that never grew, and every waking moment was a dream. And I saw everything in a double focus, of real and dream, Martian and ancient Earth mammal — so that I had to come back here to see clearly.”
“So there you have it! Here—”
“Here I do see clearly, you Shrike, and what I see disturbs me! We could be making a Utopia of Mars, the planet insists we create a new society with every bloody icy dawn — in fact we need to create such a society for our sanity’s sake, because now we’re all going to live a thousand years and we are going to have to live in the system we make, for year after year beyond our ability to imagine! That’s what we’ve forgotten, Shrike. It used to be that people could say to themselves, why should I sacrifice my life for social change, it will take years and I’ll not see the benefits of it, let this time be peaceful at least and the next generation can worry about it. That was one of the biggest forces against change, the selfishness of the individual who only wanted peace. But now people are dragging it out day to day on Mars forgetting that not their children but they are going to have to live in the future they build. Why I think they must forget it to keep from revolting that very moment in the streets! I see it on every face in every street of every city, all of them working desperately to make profits for people we never see. And we elite desperate at our collaboration in it — or at least I am — I hate my position and I want to strike out and I barely hold it in, I hop in the gutters to hold it in and I must do something—”
“Please, Hjalmar.” Now he was in the kitchen, cutting vegetables on the wooden counter for the wok. “Look at it less idealisticaliy. How can any person change anything single-handedly?” Big knife: chop chop chop chop chop. “Aren’t you taking on too much? Have you ever considered how well entrenched the system is?” Chop chop chop chop chop. He waved the knife at me like a baton, big shrug, sigh of resignation: “Marx never guessed how technology would fix wood-and-steam capitalism into concrete for the ages. We’re just tiny organic components of a solar-system-wide machine, Hjalmar. How can you fight it?”