Part 3

The notes, I suddenly remembered, Ludwig’s notes, I had to make a start on them, there was nothing else for it now, I had come here to review them and now the time was right to begin that process, even though I was busy vaping and castigating myself for vaping and even though I was busy lambasting myself for being an incorrigible and entirely loathsome neurotic, the time was nonetheless propitious, so I walked out of the guestroom, still vaping, and along the corridor, and, still vaping, entered Ludwig’s study. I took down one of the boxes from the shelving unit that occupied the entire length of one wall, and opened that box and pulled out the notebook from the top of the pile of notebooks in that box, still vaping, and began to read the contents of that notebook, which comprised, not unexpectedly, a series of notes, a compendium of notes as it were, all written in a spidery cursive that I immediately recognised as Ludwig’s, even though the language the notes were written in was nothing like I recall Ludwig ever using, nonetheless the handwriting was absolutely his handwriting. But I didn’t get very far, the notes being far too esoteric for me to be able to comprehend at that hour of the night, or perhaps my prodigious vaping was getting in the way of being able to comprehend them, that and the continual impingement of neurotic thoughts into my consciousness, which I needed to be focused entirely on the notes if I was to stand a chance of ascertaining their elusive, enigmatic meaning and then distilling that meaning into an essence, an essence that I would somehow have to articulate in a limpid prose that one day might be of service to mankind, if not directly, then at least indirectly by the transmission of the concepts contained therein to a select coterie of suitably educated and temperamentally apposite readers, on that basis a very small coterie of readers, who would, fervidly and avidly (one supposed, hoped etc), introject those concepts and unwittingly pass them on as it were to other people, people such as their immediate family and friends and general acquaintances, who in turn would introject and pass the concepts along to other people and so on until the whole of mankind had benefited by virtue of this osmotic process from the undoubted sapience and salience of the concepts yet to be derived from, yet fully latent within, Ludwig’s notes, I had no doubt about this, just as Ludwig had had no doubt, many times, he said to me he felt mankind would benefit from his notes, once, that is, he had completed the not-to-be-underestimated task of synthesising the vast material he had accumulated into a masterwork, which he was only too aware would be far too difficult for the bulk of mankind to comprehend directly in its unmediated form, not, as he was fond of telling me, they would even attempt to comprehend such a work, since it was anathema to most people to challenge their beliefs, presuppositions, shibboleths and so forth, it was anathema, he strongly felt, for most people to do anything other than indulge their sensuous cravings and base needs and petty wants etc. It was no good, it was never any good I realised, as I put the notebook back in the box, which I duly returned to the shelving unit, still vaping, then I left Ludwig’s study and went back to Ludwig’s wing’s guestroom, walked over to the bay window and stared up at the moon and the stars and outer space, the incomprehensible vastness of which is something I had never really come to terms with, just as I had been unable to come to terms with the limitless amount of time stretching behind and in front of me, though I had tried to come to terms with these things many times, I just hadn’t been able to, hence why my mind did a cartwheel just then, did several cartwheels in fact, one after the other in quick succession, after which I felt tired, so I went back to bed, still vaping, but as soon as I got under the covers, still vaping, I realised I wasn’t one bit tired, that the knot of anxiety was there again, in my abdomen or midriff if that is a better word to describe the location of the knot in my body or should I rather say where I perceived it, in the proprioceptive sense, in my sensorium, a knot of anxiety that as was typical was accompanied by a tightening of my chest and a quickening of my heartbeat and the background fear, the fear that was forever lurking, that stalked me from the shadows of myself as it were, the fear of an imminent catastrophe, a catastrophe that in fact had never yet happened in all the years I had imagined it happening imminently, which should have put it in perspective, as the much maligned, disproportionately and ill-deservedly maligned, idiom goes, but it never did and it didn’t now and it likely never would, even though it was also true that my life was in itself a catastrophe, had been a catastrophe for as long as I cared to remember, so that in effect the thing I feared happening, viz. an imminent catastrophe, was always already happening! Feeling suddenly nauseous, I hauled myself out of bed and went and sat on the chaise longue and, still vaping, I forced my mind, or my mind created the impression that I was forcing it, although in fact it was far more likely to be the case that I was being forced by my mind (but then who was I, did I really exist etc?), to think about good times, about other times anyway, times before this one in which I found myself irrevocably alone in the dingy wing of a house formerly occupied by my deceased friend, which inevitably meant, as it always inevitably meant, that I started thinking about my son and the whole unresolved mess that passed for our relationship, if that wasn’t too grandiloquent a term for what existed between us, a relationship marred by recriminations, guilt, hatred, sadness, rancour and despair, I thought about all the opportunities I had squandered to make things up to him, about all the times I should have put him first but didn’t, all the times I behaved like a selfish dick in other words, then I remembered that my son was a totally spoilt, entitled, surly brat, not to mention an arrogant sod, always saying he knew better than me, his teachers etc, even though he had no justification whatsoever to claim to know more than me and the other adult authority figures in his life, i.e., his teachers, in view of his limited life experience, memory horizon, educational attainment and so forth, on top of which, I thought, still vaping, warming to my son-related theme as I always seemed to find myself warming to it whenever it happened to manifest in my consciousness. My son was lazier than anyone else I knew, categorically as well as incorrigibly and incontrovertibly he had, as anyone who knew him knew, a lazy streak that was, as they say, a mile wide, right from the beginning as a small child he was lazy and then all the way through to his later teens, he continued to refuse to be motivated to do anything that involved work, that smacked of being chore-like in any way, and I mean in the whatsoever sense of any way, and now in his early twenties, I was sure, though it’s true I didn’t know for sure, but still I was sure, he almost certainly continued to implacably oppose work of any kind, moreover my son was, I thought, a philistine who had never and likely would never read a book in his life, which given my fondness for reading so-called good books, edifying ones, books with a meaning in other words, aggravated me to a very great degree, as I suspect my son intended, though I couldn’t be certain, it was possible his philistinism was congenital I had to concede, on the maternal side naturally, furthermore, I thought, vaping furiously, vaping as if my very life depended on it, vaping as if the fate of the universe depended on it, my son was an ingrate, completely and utterly indifferent to everything that I and his mother, his parents, had ever done for him, given him, for the emotional support and the financial resources allocated to him; this kid is spoilt, I vividly recalled telling my wife, he doesn’t appreciate a single goddamn thing we do for him, never has done and as far as I can tell, never will. I didn’t need to feel bad, I remembered then in a kind of déjà vu moment of remembrance, my son, after all, had deliberately set out to reject everything I stood for by precisely standing for the opposite, had thrown it all (the things I had done for him, given him etc) in my face, basically the way I saw it my son was to blame for our non-existent relationship, my son had always been to blame, I thought, even as I immediately tossed this thought aside in lieu of this thought: I am a shit father, an awful, despicable father, which itself was the inevitable result of being an abject sorry excuse for a human being, the worst, I thought, the absolute pits, a fucked-up, no-good person all said and done, a reprehensibly shambolic figure, dissolute, depraved, demented, diabolical, deranged and other pejorative words beginning with the letter d I couldn’t call to mind just then, I thought, still vaping, I was scum, completely and utterly beyond redemption, or so my wife told me on the night she stabbed me in the abdomen with the knife she had up until that moment been using to slice vegetables, by some miracle missing my organs, or my vital organs in any case, which was the night I finally walked out of the house, their lives (my son’s, my wife’s, the dog’s), never looking back as they say, not once, though I wanted to look back I didn’t and though they maybe wanted me to look back they never asked me to, never called, emailed, texted or whatever, not one single attempt at communication did they make, just as I resolutely refused to communicate with them, though for a long time I considered going back to the house in which my wife had stabbed me precipitately whilst in the grip of a kind of madness otherwise known as rage, I never did. Ludwig, of course, had frequently urged me to go back, not explicitly, he never did anything explicitly, but by way of innuendo he repeatedly urged me and I repeatedly pretended not to pick up on his hints, his veiled suggestions that I go back to the so-called marital home, which made him angry, though he hid his anger well enough behind a mask of impassivity, it being a consequence of his natural inclination to imply or insinuate one do something rather than come right out and tell one to do it that he had to hide his frustration when one did not do what he was urging one to do, when I played dumb or the intransigent card as I sometimes like to refer to it, a card I had played many times over the many years I had known Ludwig, every time eliciting an anger in Ludwig that was palpable but which nonetheless remained unexpressed, such was the consequence of his never being explicit when he urged me to do something, which was far more frequently than he would, I am guessing, have cared to admit to, something he never had to admit to in any case because of the whole clandestine manner in which he went about urging me to do the things he felt I ought to do. Suddenly, without consciously willing it to happen, I stood up, still vaping, walked over to the bed, got back into it and closed my eyes, still vaping, but it was no good, I had to get up, do something, relieve the pressure in my cranium, the pressure that came from being the thoroughly useless and unlikeable person I was and from a child had always been, I thought, still vaping, the pressure for which no valve existed, hence why it had slowly over time built up into an intolerable intensity, or it had started off building slowly, but in fact the speed of the building up of the pressure had only gotten quicker as time had remorselessly cranked its handle, so that now, lying in the bed in Ludwig’s wing’s guestroom, a bed that any number of people had slept and more than likely fucked or at the very least masturbated in over the years, still vaping, the pressure in my cranium felt as if it would almost certainly cause my cranium to explode into tiny fragments, even though I absolutely knew my cranium would not explode it felt very much like it would, hence I threw the covers off me, got dressed, left the house and, still vaping as much as I could possibly vape, walked down to the end of the road, bought a variety of savoury snacks from the concession store inside the petrol station, as well as a packet of vape cartridges and a bottle of cheap whisky, walked back to the house, got undressed and into my pyjamas, the appropriate attire for night-time, not that there was much of that left, all the same it was still necessary, I felt, for me to be attired as if there was an ample amount of night-time left, even if in fact dawn was unmistakably in the offing, judging by the milky light that was seeping into Ludwig’s wing’s guestroom and staining all of the objects in it a kind of ochre colour. I had been morbidly fearful as soon as night had fallen that it would end without my having slept a wink, and now that fear had confirmed itself as entirely apposite, completely proportionate, justifiable etc, the brutal fact of the matter being that I very rarely slept, being far too fearful of not being able to sleep to get to sleep, having realised many years ago that the need for sleep was diametrically opposed to being able to sleep, the more urgent the need the more obstinately it was denied, but of course it was of no use whatsoever to convince oneself that one didn’t need to sleep in order to be able to sleep because sleep knew very well if one was pretending not to need it, feigning indifference and so on, and would only dig its refractory heels in even harder in denying access to it, such was the fundamentally malevolent, sadistic, perverse nature of sleep, I thought, that it bestowed itself upon people who never even gave it a moment’s thought, who barely appreciated it, and yet withheld itself from those who thought about it incessantly and craved it more than anything else. I had stopped vaping, I realised, when or why I had no idea, but it was evident to me that the vaping had stopped. I put the vape device down on the sideboard and picked up a packet of biltong, which I tried to tear open at the point indicated by an arrow next to which the words ‘tear here’ were written, but the bag wouldn’t tear there, so I ripped it open with my teeth instead and spat the bit of bag that had come off in my mouth onto the floor, making a mental note to pick it up later, a thought shadowed by another one that informed me, the person who was putatively having the thought, that I would very likely forget to pick it up, even though I had the best of intentions vis-à-vis picking up the bit of bag, I knew I would probably leave it there for another guest staying in Ludwig’s wing’s guestroom to pick up, if indeed another guest ever came to stay given that Elda’s guests stayed in her wing’s guestroom and it was hard to imagine Ludwig, in his decomposing state, being in a position to invite guests over to stay, although it was possible, I supposed, that Elda might have an overflow of guests, in which case it was also possible that she would put them up in Ludwig’s wing, possible but by no means certain, given Elda had a longstanding aversion to Ludwig’s wing, an aversion Ludwig had known about but done nothing to discourage, since he enjoyed having his wing entirely to himself, having said as much to me on several occasions, my wing is my wing, he used to say, whereas her wing is our wing, he would invariably add, Ludwig being particularly partial to Elda’s wing, perhaps preferring it to his own wing for the obvious reason that it was far more airy, light and generally comfortable than his own wing, not to mention it had the far superior views compared to the shitty views afforded from his wing, although he never let on to Elda that he preferred her wing, nonetheless he did prefer it, something she realised, of course, but out of respect for Ludwig’s feelings kept to herself, not that Ludwig gave her any inkling that this was the case, of course, being of the utmost scrupulousness when it came to hiding his real feelings, thoughts etc, regardless, Elda knew all right, how could she not when Ludwig was forever popping over to her wing for reasons that were tenuous at best, downright absurd reasons in fact, the most preposterous reasons you could possibly imagine, as I knew very well because Elda had told me about them - in minute detail during a soirée at her wing, an entirely debauched soirée as it so happens, a soirée in which I ingested pretty much every illegal narcotic known to man - though she made me swear not to ever tell Ludwig about them, fearful as she was that Ludwig’s pride might be severely vitiated by her characterising his reasons for visiting her wing at all times of the day and night as absurd, Ludwig being very sensitive in fact to accusations of absurdity, perhaps precisely because he was at bottom a deeply absurd person with absurd mannerisms, habits, turns of phrase, behaviours and so forth.