The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

30

It would be better for me not to open this letter, thought Jachin-Boaz as he opened the letter. Fading, fading, said the afternoon sunlight slanting down the wall, slanting on the red curtains, on the yellow, on the blue of the flowers. See how tactfully I die! said the sunlight. Twilight follows. Fade with me.

Jachin-Boaz began to read. In the next bed the letter writer was hard at work. Violet’s face, for instance, he wrote. Is there, in all justice, any necessity for that? She married the young lieutenant to whom I’d introduced her. Everyone said the baby looked exactly like him. Yet only this morning there was Violet’s face in a spoon. Not a silver spoon either. Not even a clean spoon, mind you.

On the other side the tightly furled man was looking at a magazine in which girls in black suspender belts and stockings achieved difficult juxtapositions. He was quietly singing Oft in the Stilly Night in a high falsetto.

The letter writer looked up. The tightly furled man put down his magazine, left off singing. Jachin-Boaz had put the letter in the drawer of his bedside table, flung himself back on his bed, and lay looking up at the ceiling in a silence that filled the air with waves of terror. The two men on either side felt as if they had been fused with the sounding metal of some monstrous bell that was rhythmically annihilating them.

‘Stop clanging, can’t you?’ said the tightly furled man. ‘It’s driving the very marrow out of my bones.’ He doubled up in his bed and covered his ears.

‘Really,’ said the letter writer to Jachin-Boaz, ‘I think you might have the civility not to indulge in effects like that. I can hear mirrors shattering for miles around. Do make an effort, won’t you?’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Jachin-Boaz. ‘I didn’t know that I was doing anything.’ Bad heart, she said. His father had died of a bad heart and he had a bad heart too. He had had twinges now and then, and his doctor had pointed out that he was a cardiac type and would do well to be careful. Suddenly he felt his heart clearly defined in his body, totally vulnerable and waiting for the inevitable. Angina pectoris. Had the doctor said anything about that? He’d looked it up once. Something associated with apprehension or fear of impending death, said the dictionary. He must remember not to be apprehensive or fearful of impending death. He closed his eyes, and in his mind he saw the map of his body with the organs, nerves and circulatory system illuminated in vivid colour. The heart pumped, drove the blood through the branching veins and arteries. Around went the blood on the animated map, and around again. It seemed miraculous that the heart kept pumping. How had it continued twenty-four hours a day for forty-seven years? It could never stop for a rest. When it stopped that was the end of everything. No more world. Only a few years left, suddenly they will all be gone, the last moment will be now. Intolerable! Father died at fifty-two. I’m forty-seven. Five more years? Less, perhaps.

You will want to come back to me.

Yes, I do want to come back. Why did I want to go away? What was so bad? Certainly I never felt this bad before.

The letter writer and the tightly furled man got up and went to the lounge. Jachin-Boaz went to one of the nurses, asked for something to calm him down. He was given a tranquillizer, went back to his bed and reasoned with himself.

She can’t actually make my heart stop, he thought. That kind of magic doesn’t work unless you believe that the other person has the power. Do I believe she has the power? Yes. But she doesn’t really have any special power. She didn’t have the power to keep me, did she? No. Then could she have the power to kill me? Of course not. Do I believe that? No.

Jachin-Boaz lay with his ear to the pillow, listening to the beating of his heart. The map, he thought. The map of Boaz-Jachin’s future that I stole, the future that I cannot have. I’ll stop smoking.

He lit a cigarette, got out of bed, stood against the wall. As soon as I feel a little better, he thought, I’ll stop smoking. My father with his cigars. Why did she have to tell me about the mistress? She found out from her aunt in the dramatic society, but why did she have to tell me?

He thought of Sunday afternoons in childhood, smelled the car upholstery, looked out through the windscreen at the waning sunlight, felt his father on one side, his mother on the other, himself between them, sick. I haven’t been committing suicide, he thought. Suicide has been committing me.

All of his unremembered dreams seemed to walk silently behind him, passing one by one between him and the wall, smirking over his shoulder at invisible phantoms in front of him. If I turn very quickly, he thought, and turned. Something very big, something very small, whisked around the corner of his mind. Either way, said the answer in the wall that faced him: betrayed or betrayer. Betrayed and betrayer.

‘Be reasonable,’ said Jachin-Boaz quietly to the wall. ‘I can’t be everybody.’

Loss unending, said the wall. Dare to let go?

‘I don’t know,’ said Jachin-Boaz.

Suppose, the wall said, sometimes he laughed away from home. What then? You owe her nothing. He wants to rest. If you stand up they lie down. Follow your noes.

‘Lion,’ said Jachin-Boaz silently, only shaping the word.

Oh yes, the wall said. Play with yourself.

Jachin-Boaz turned away. Everyone else was going to dinner. The thought of food sickened him, the smell from the dining area was offensive. The lion was still outside, no doubt. He would be waiting all the time now until the end. Everybody would want to feed him, look at him, share him. No, no, no.

The tightly furled man had taken his plate to the door near the french windows. ‘Pss, pss,’ he called, making the sound one makes for a cat. Three others came and stood near, looking over his shoulder. One of them, a man with a round white face, looked back at Jachin-Boaz and said something to the others. Everyone laughed.

Jachin-Boaz felt immensities of rage in him, infinities of NO. Crying, he burst into the group by the door, flung them in all directions, and rushed out on to the lawn.