He wakes into a kind of edgeless pressure.
It was just a bad dream, he tells himself. Another failed media job. This time in London. Three days. A new record. He reaches for the phone while the dream still sits close to the skin, or wherever dreams sit.
Chris writes: thanks so much for trying, we just don’t fit.
Another day, another loop, the Man mutters. “Very trying.”
It wasn’t a dream.
The day after the rupture is worse than the rupture itself, though he would struggle to say why, except that the night at least had shape. It offers up images, accusations, fragments of narrative that can be arranged into something like evidence: betrayal, loss, abandonment, terror. The morning removes all that.
The body, which knew what to do in the dark, now hesitates.
The chest tightens. The throat narrows. Gravity feels as if directed at him personally. Outside, the city has already resumed, though no one appears to have consulted him.
So he goes out, because this seems, if not required, then at least permitted. He walks to the lake and begins to circle it.
Not a metaphorical lake. A real one.
Ducks make their way across the small unfrozen patch, serene on the surface, legs pumping furiously below. Serenity requires silent work too. Joggers jog. An elderly couple feeds birds bread that will slowly kill them. Someone has scrawled Alex Pretti across the looping bark of an apple tree. Strange fruit.
He walks on. Through the rain.
And as he walks, he talks out loud into a phone, to a real person. This matters to him. That he is not just some random nut.
“I am not just some random nut job,” he says quietly to himself.
He has been reassuring himself in this way for some time. Not always successfully, and the more he does it the more he actually feels like a random nut case. Not even the ducks believe him. The squirrels gave up long ago.
The person on the other end of the phone is not a ghost. She is alive. Once – years earlier, though once is not quite the right word for the way certain figures enter a life, less like arrival, more like a door being kicked in – she had had a child. Not his. She is very clear about this.
The Man sighs quietly to himself.
There is in him a pain that does not behave properly. It sits there, like a small animal curled up behind the sternum. Some days it feels like a nut lodged in the throat, hard, uncracked, undigested.
And yet the story cannot be told. Not properly. Because some stories, he is learning late, are not bridges you get to cross just because you wish to.
Meanwhile, the peacocks are out. ‘Pan Sikorsky,’ as his keepers call him, is today on full display. His feathers are bright and magnificent. He turns slowly as he squawks, not to the people in front of him but to an imagined audience somewhere above the trees. He tries in vain to fly.
Behind him, the smaller animals gather. ‘McQuid’ – part peacock, part squirrel – arrives first. He does not watch the peacocks directly. He watches what falls from them – phrases, fragments, lines that can be lifted, polished, repurposed. He doesn’t much care which end they fall from.
The pecking order.
‘Le Ciański,’ a pelican with a discarded Harley helmet strapped to his beak, follows.
His kin, Bińska, lays a nest and guards it with the venom of a snake. It is a house made of nuts; a nut house. Davis the Owl and his son sit in the Elephant House. They watch an elephant in the living room.
Babonski sits alone. Neither squirrel nor owl. Gorilla. He does not gather. He sits, all 800 pounds of him, on an old tyre looped around the branches of an apple tree.
“Cunt,” he grunts, into the air, and then again, as if testing whether the word still carries force in this kingdom.
It does.
Justyna scurries from nut to apple picking them up and placing them in her basket. A rabbit up from her underground warren, Justyna is darting, furtive, ears permanently pricked. “The news doesn’t just write itself, little bunnies” she says. Holloba, another Gosia, and a whole clan of Agnieszkas watch as mama rabbit goes about her business.
Wróblewski is flying around, squeaking, pumping out his little chest.
All is well in the forest.
The Man walks on. In snow, in fog, in that thin, undecided winter light that never quite commits to being day. He walks until the act of walking dulls the pressure enough to make it transportable without attracting attention.
He has already begun describing this – the lake, the walking, the mild sense of panic – in a Word document that seems to alter itself each time he opens it. Some sentences appear more than once. Others vanish without being deleted. It changes languages, then migrates from one badly named file to another, from one computer to the next. It is not clear whether he is writing it for himself or for someone who has not agreed to receive it, or whether the document itself has begun organising what can be said.
He walks as if motion itself might summon someone, though he does not believe this.
The lake takes things in. Whether it returns them depends on nothing. Or nothing it is willing to divulge of its own accord.
For some unknowable reason, an odd word salad drifts listlessly through the Man’s mind. Lake, lac, lack, Lacan. Umm, uncanny, he thinks.
Real lakes are accidents, but this one has been arranged. Benches appear at regular intervals, as if made for scheduled epiphanies. The path is clear about its expectations: Keep Calm and Carry On. And don’t fall in.
Beyond the trees are factories that do not appear on the map. Beyond them, forest. Beyond that, a border that seems to move depending on who is frightened and who is pretending not to be. Sometimes there are noises – shots, or fireworks, or engines – and sometimes people run toward the trees, as if remembering something they have forgotten.
The ducks continue. Mama duck followed by twelve little floating signifiers. Smoke drifts between branches.
Occasionally the Man looks down with the mild expectation that the pavement might open.
Nothing opens.
On the far side of the lake, an older man walks anti-clockwise, which is immediately irritating. There is, although no one has stated it, an agreement about direction, and he is not respecting it.
They nod silently to each other as they pass the same bench, the same ducks, the same section of ice. See you in 20 minutes then.
The Man notices the Boy, who has been there for some time.
The Boy kneels at the edge where the ice reforms fastest, scraping at it with a spoon. Beside him sits a radio older than he is. A plastic bag nearby contains something that might be bait. He does not look up. He scrapes because the opening closes if you stop scraping.
Keep the opening open.
“You’re back,” the Man says, in a tone he intends as casual, though it carries more relief than he would like.
The Boy keeps scraping. He does not trust the Man. He trusts the ice.
“I’ve been thinking,” the Man adds, because thinking is what he does when something has already gone wrong.
The sentence does not complete itself. The Boy remains indifferent.
The Man forgets what he wanted to say and wanders off.
The Boy watches him go.
A small figure in a flimsy 1975 bomber jacket, he tells himself a story about a man who walks around a lac.
“What is that weirdo up to now?” he asks the fish.
None reply.
She does not come.
This is not yet grief, which would imply something missing. This is earlier than that, a sense that the world has withdrawn consent.
Or perhaps she is there, he thinks, in a message in a bottle, a memory, or a page from a Soviet era novel?
Across the water, sirens begin and beyond the trees a helicopter loops without urgency.
A woman drags a child by the wrist towards the trees. The child looks back, irritated. Two men with guns in holsters follow them.
Could they be the ice police, the Man thinks.
He remembers a school day.
He is taken out of class because something has gone wrong – perhaps it’s his face.
Sit here, a teacher says. Just for a moment.
A small room. A window. Outside, nothing is wrong.
Where is your mother? Mrs Pleasance asks.
“I don’t know where she is,” he says.
The sentence does not connect to anything. It simply exists for a moment. The body prepares for flight without offering a direction.
Much later – at least a hour, maybe less – he starts to learn to observe himself from a slight distance, to convert sensation into something that can be managed, or at least narrated. Panic, if contained, can be carried, he learns.
He lights a cigarette. He has stopped drinking. Smoking has increased.
It was never about the fish.
The Man keeps walking.
He thinks of her.
He tries not to.
The problem is not that he misses her, not exactly. People miss people all the time. The problem is what she became inside him, something like a promise he has not yet broken.
It was real, he tells himself.
The sentence is as true as it is useless.
The Editor arrives. Easy on the italics, he says. Not everything is that important.
These days the Man walks past shop windows that he believes reflect him inaccurately. They do not, not really. A slight paunch. Hunched shoulders. Bags under the eyes. A limp that arrives and departs. He is shabbily dressed. A strach na wróble, he used to tell people, as if self-deprecation – and his obvious gift for the Polish language – might alter what was seen. Most just saw a scarecrow. Some kind souls said he looked younger than his fifty-eight. He did not argue. But sometimes he felt two thousand and fifty-eight.
There is some kind of rumble in the jungle. He glances at his phone. Apparently, someone has been killed. Something petty? Pretty? He cannot make out the small print without his glasses, though he doesn’t actually possess any glasses. Nearby too.
“Wonder what that was,” he says out loud.
Armed middle-aged men in balaclavas chase a group of unarmed middle-aged women in snow boots through the snow.
A new game? Whatever next?
Another crack through the trees. Birds scarper upward from their earthly luncheons. He watches them vanish and thinks, stupidly, of evidence: how birds leave no paper trail. Crumbs maybe, but those too are quickly swallowed up by the earth. Or gathered by the little bunnies.
As he walks, his mind drifts. Once, when he was a boy, he was locked in his bedroom by his mum. The story is perfect, simple and unchanging. Stantonbury, Milton Keynes. Concrete cows in concrete fields. The house that smelled of fresh paint, a smell that even now sends a small shiver down his spine.
He remembers the window and the drainpipe. The absurd heroism of a child shimmying down in a flimsy bomber jacket as if escaping from Colditz. He remembers landing, heart punching, and running to the pool. He can’t remember how he got back into the room.
The next day he told them about his adventure. They said he had made it up. He was a fantasist at best, a liar at worst.
That particular cruelty stayed for a long time in him. The sense of being disbelieved by those whose belief structures your reality, a form of epistemological violence. If they say it didn’t happen, maybe it didn’t. Maybe it didn’t. He liked the word epistemological. Like ontological, only longer.
But his swimming trunks did not doubt it at all. They were wet. Wet is a fact. Wetness is ontology.
Keep evidence, he remembers thinking, as if the thought came from the Stalinist bureaucrat who governed his inner fables. Document it all.
The problem is that wetness dries. It stops being ontological. Or perhaps it is ontological 0nly when wet. Ice lawyers will debate endlessly
He has been documenting ever since and telling stories. Sometimes the stories were of rescue. Sometimes they were simply the only way to keep the monsters away while the adults did whatever fucked-up thing they did.
The Boy’s small transistor radio plays I Just Can’t Get Enough by Depeche Mode.
He has carved his hole in the ice and sits with his legs tucked under himself, fishing in a way that looks like prayer. He is alone, but not lonely. He has good company: himself and the fish. The Boy glances up occasionally – not at the Man, not exactly, but toward the shape of him.
The Man looks back.
He sees a strange little fellow, half Artful Dodger, half Oliver Twist.
He will be thirteen later in the book, then seventeen, then fifty-eight.
A flash from the Man’s student days suddenly scratches at his skull, as if some dishevelled lecturer’s hand from London University in the 1980s has reached down from above.
He sits on a bench. The body hums with unused panic.
Someone sits beside him.
An older man. Neat coat. Small glasses. A face that feels familiar.
“You’re circling again, I see,” the man (small caps) says.
“I’m walking.”
“You think you are,” the man (small caps again) says.
The Man exhales, more sharply than intended.
“I’m sorry, but do I know you?”
“Jacques,” the man says, offering a hand, as if this were sufficient. Or perhaps just necessary.
The Man (big caps this time) stands.
“Really, who are you?”
Jacques smiles in a way that suggests the question is not the point.
The Man recalls now. Jacques Lacan, that old French chestnut, distinguished between the eye and the gaze. The eye is a biological instrument, a device for collecting light, the Man recalls, while the gaze is the feeling of being seen – the sensation that something in the world looks back.
Across the lake, the fisherman continues scraping. The opening remains open only because he refuses to stop attending to it.
The Man looks back at the old Frenchman, who is now putting down the paperback he has been carrying, its spine aligning neatly across three bench slats, one obviously real, the others symbolic or merely imagined.
A smile spreads across Jacques’ face, the sort of smile that says: I have read your books and have some questions. I have also read what you didn’t publish.
The Man’s phone, pocketed for silence, now decides to call someone else. A face appears there inside a coat pocket. A face in mountain light, with her three boys, his too, and grandparents, theirs. A pocket call. Portable deniability.
“Do you notice,” Jacques says, perhaps to him, “how often we place ourselves just outside the scene?”
The Man nods politely and adjusts his gloves. Perhaps this is an actual random nutter, he thinks. But the voice is too assured for madness. Or perhaps that is precisely what assured madness sounds like.
“There is nothing wrong with loving women who are unavailable. It keeps the fantasy intact.”
The Man lights another cigarette.
Who is this old prick, he thinks.
“How interesting,” he says aloud, because the English reflex is always politeness even when the mind is sharpening a knife.
“You do not really want the woman,” Lacan says. “You want the movement toward her. The waiting. The almost. If she arrived completely, the structure would collapse.”
“That’s not true,” the Man says quickly.
“Of course not,” says Lacan. “That’s the whole point.”
He thinks of blood groups. Clinics. The nut in his throat, apples falling from trees and never very far. He thinks of poems that arrive through the air. He thinks of the word ‘friend’ spoken as if it were a prize or a promotion.
Jacques speaks with the faint lisp of a French intellectual, you know, one of the real ones from the 1950s. His hair defies gravity in a Jacques-Derrida-up-in-the-air fashion. His glasses are round and small and glued somehow to his small roundish face.
He smiles with theatrical courtesy.
They start walking toward the round lake, frozen over, ducks still dancing. The ice holds, but not convincingly.
Near the path an old municipal clock has been ditched, huge and iron. Three blind mice run up it, tails tied together in a knot.
The mice chatter excitedly about a brave new world no one else can see. They are earnest. They are certain. They have also been walking the wrong way around the lake.
They do not see the bench or the ice.
Or the ditch.
One trips. The others go down with her. For a moment they are just a single struggling organism. Then they begin to fight. The knot tightens. One mouse bites another. The third squeals.
When they untangle, one does not get up.
The other two continue, leaving a dead comrade in the snow.
“Hickory dickory dock,” Lacan murmurs. “The mice ran up the clock.”
Nearby sits a cracked porcelain sink and a sofa in IKEA-pattern fabric, as if the city’s discarded living room has wandered into the park to die.
The Man wants to say something clever about capitalism. He does not.
“I’ll start with my illness,” he says instead.
Lacan nods as if he knew this would be the first wound.
“It is a sickness I see in myself,” the Man says, “but also everywhere around me.”
“How unique,” Lacan says, already un petit peu fatigué.
More people streak across the park, disappearing into the trees. They run as if there is a fire, though no smoke is visible. The Man envies their decisiveness.
“I was Very Ill, you see,” he says. “Very Ill. Almost Terminal.”
“I know,” the Frenchman says. “I know how it is.” Union rules again.
A red glow stains the fog in the distance. Smoke threads between the trees in quiet ribbons. The Man cannot tell whether it is a bonfire, a crash, a furnace or just a trick of the mind.
And yet the smell – faint and metallic – makes his stomach drop.
Small frogs, some tadpoles even, and a few toads in matching brown shirts gather to hear daddy toad croak.
The Man walks on. Through the rain. Though without much hope in his heart.
Stones appear in his mind, small stones placed on headstones at a cemetery that looks empty. Suddenly he is in a part of the park he knows simply as Warsaw. He sees on the path ahead of him a girl called Sosha. Grandfather Norman admonishes him for loving that odd shiksa from down the way.
“Time,” Lacan says, as if reading his mind and mocking it gently, “is also a wound.”
“Is guilt universal?” the Man asks suddenly.
Lacan strokes his chin. It is a hard question, he says, and for a moment you can see that he is not entirely sure. Medieval witchcraft. Then, briefly, Chinese children and far away invisible courts.
“Universal,” he says at last, “is the word people use when they want their private shame to sound like theory.”
The Man laughs. The Great Lacan doesn’t know either, he thinks.
And then Jacques offers a structure, any doubts just sown, unsown with immediate effect. It was just the way Dr Jacques rolled. Not for nothing was his personal website www.imalrightjacques.fr.
“Why not tell me the whole story and we’ll try to work it out? We’ll divide it into chapters. Each chapter one round of le lac. Fifty minutes a chapter. You can pay me 300 nuts if you want to maintain the illusion. It’s up to you.”
As he says it, he links his arm into the Man’s as if they are old pals. The Man does not resist.
A moment later, he hears himself repeating it.
“You know what,” the Man says, “what say we divide this up into chapters. Each chapter will be one round of the lake. Maybe, let’s say, max fifty minutes a chapter.”
“Very good,” Lacan replies, pleased. “Go slowly. In your own time. In your own words.”
The Frenchman winks at the reader before turning back into the scene as if nothing has happened.
The Man, who cannot bear being outside the action, does not notice that the scene itself has just addressed the reader without him. The Broken Man sees only three walls. The nature of the beast.
A figure who looks much like Dr K can be seen on the far side of the lake. “Odd,” the Man thinks. “I’m sure I’ve seen that person before.” No matter.
They reach a low bridge. The bridge feels ceremonial, like a crossing into story. A ginger cat sprawled on the path yawns as if to say: once upon a time in a land far far away…
“There is a pub in this park,” Lacan says lightly. “Pod Mocnym Aniołem. Something like that.”
A low wooden building with yellow light bleeding through the windows and the smell of fried food. Inside, people watch screens mounted high: reality television in which contestants try to swim the lake. Some drown. Some make a million dollars. The audience cheers at both outcomes because both are the same fantasy: it could be me.
“This,” Lacan says, “is the myth of projection. Screens. You watch because they are you.”
They sit. They drink a cold Tyskie each.
“Stop after two,” Lacan says.
“Of course,” the Man lies.
“You don’t need more,” Lacan adds, without looking.
Across the room, a busy beaver on a screen delivers commentary about a public execution as if it were the weather forecast. A young man has apparently killed someone with an old shotgun from a roof. Utah, but it could be anywhere. The audience nods, relieved by the simplicity.
“Performative violence and sacrifice,” Lacan says. “It keeps the myths alive.”
They leave before the pub can become The Paris Lectures of 1955.
Back on the path, the park widens. A tea party appears beneath bare trees: a long table, mismatched cups, absurd hats. Two men kiss theatrically, then insult each other, then kiss again. They are in love in the way power is sometimes in love with itself.
“Elon and Radek at it again,” Lacan says.
“Love,” he adds, “is giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t need it.”
The Man sighs. He knew the line at seventeen. Still a good one, though, he thinks.
As they pass, an echo of the conversation catches in the air.
“No, you little man, you are a dribbling imbecile,” says Elon, heart pumping.
“Oh, you think you’re such a big man,” says Radek.
Above them, an impossibly giant little girl in ribbons and a rabbit in a hat watch from the sky, bored and curious, as if the whole scene is a doll’s house. Another house, possibly from Kansas, hovers above the windless park.
“You see?” Lacan says. “Even desire wants a stage.”
They walk on. The rain has halted. Hope still pending.
Near the far edge of the park, fences appear with no doors. Not metaphorical fences. Real ones, topped with wire, marking a stateless zone where law has stepped back and left only teeth. Dragon’s Teeth jut from the snow. Spanish goats wander among them drinking water from dirty drainage canals.
“You are thinking,” Lacan says, “that you are free because you can walk.”
The Man says nothing. He is watching the fence and thinking about the nut in his throat.
“But some stories,” Lacan adds, almost gently, “we do not tell.”
“What do you mean?” the Man asks, though he already knows.
“I mean,” Lacan says, “that you do not get to turn other people into your evidence.”
The Man’s face tightens. He wants to argue. He wants to say: but my pain…but the question. But but but.
“Beavis and Butthead?” the Boy laughs out loud.
The Man nods.
“Respect,” he says, and hears in his own voice how malformed the word feels.
They reach the bridge again. The Boy is still fishing, radio murmuring. He looks up at the two men as if listening to a language he will one day speak.
Lacan gestures to the ice as if it were a diagram.
“Let us treat the lake as the wound,” he says. “The thing we are trying to let heal. We are circling the wound, but we will not dive in. Yes?”
The Man likes this immediately.
“So,” he says, “let me begin.”
And he begins – beautifully, like someone who has been writing to avoid speaking.
“The illness started one late afternoon…”
And as he speaks, the park continues to build itself around him: bunkers half-buried; a factory in a clearing where tracks lead in and no one comes out; a derelict multi-storey car park with water seeping down its concrete ribs.
Lacan, walking beside him, looks almost pleased.
Not because the Man is healing, but because the loop is becoming visible. The Man mistakes this, briefly, for hope.
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