X.
(comfortable room with railings. X. has entered. though smarter in some ways than the last time you were here, the studied carelessness of his image looks too studied and too careless. his pockets are bunched up. the lighting is dim and that doesn’t seem important. there is silence. there is more silence. and then
At this point I should perhaps reveal
that I do not believe in the undead.
I have searched every corner of the house,
or at least all the corners I can think of.
I’d get under them if I could,
but my hands are weak, and the time I have to try is limited.
Nevertheless, I’ve been caught up in the business of exorcism,
and since it sits so tightly between gesture and event,
it’s put a bind on my windows available for digging.
I’ve had to make do with looking under the furniture instead.
There may well be evidence further afield,
but if you can’t find any in the things you can immediately touch
then it would be dangerous not to say time consuming to look elsewhere.
Like it or not distance is always a factor
and like I said time is short just now.
There is also a link between time and mobility,
so I’m more than usually grateful that you came to see me.
You also know after last time that I don’t see so well,
hence the railings I’ve had installed.
I’ve checked the forums and most of them,
especially the disreputable ones,
insist that by rights I should be full-fat blind:
that what I have is almost certainly
a smorgasbord of cataracts, refractive errors, astigmatism,
but in my own house I’ll give it any damn name I like.
Admittedly I haven’t named it yet.
Anyway, you didn’t come to hear about affliction:
you came to hear a story so to keep us all happy
(don’t think I haven’t noticed that you haven’t come alone),
and to keep bargaining to the barest possible minimum,
top up your wine and I’ll tell you one you haven’t heard before
which is reasonably loosely themed around affliction.
If you have heard it before, your permission to stop me
will be revoked after the first three minutes.
(there is no wine. short pause in which to fill a glass with whatever feels polite, and to consider the less-than-professional job that has been done on the railings, towards which X. loosely pointed a moment ago)
Here goes then.
Never mind how long ago,
I fell like a brick in love with the past tense:
the red dust on the road making it feel literal.
This is not ideal.
It is especially unideal when you are involved in decreasingly casual
increasingly organised trysts with the future.
The two of them didn’t get on at the best of times but I was mature enough by then
so I invited them both round for dinner, and
with Past still warm on my skin and with Future’s
caprese salad plunging rhapsodically through my insides
I asked them if there was some way we might make this work.
Future, who is continuous and planetary in his beauty,
said no pretty much straight away.
Past, who is not, said [ ]
[ ]
[ ]
It might help if I tell you now
that this was supposed to be a duologue:
Past was supposed to be played by an actor friend of mine
with a particular knack for embodying concepts.
We had scenes planned:
a good deal of strutting and fretting,
since people seem to like that kind of thing,
and a dose of what I’m told by theatre types
is called verfremdungseffekt,
which people generally like less.
Anyway, he’s touring regional theatres
(playing, of all things, Time,
which must count as career progression
or at the very least an expanded role)
and I didn’t like to change the venue last minute
or tread in even the most minor way on his
Future casting prospects.
(X. may recall a minor detail here. If so, it is delivered ad libitum. If not, he may try harder to remember a
minor detail, or he may simply move on)
So I’m monologuing and perhaps this doesn’t help.
I’m not one for voices
and even with that aside I’m not especially sure how much they really offer.
(Sidetracking for a moment:
I have a sense that this is one of the reasons
that going outside does not particularly interest me
despite the theoretical interests I mentioned earlier).
At any rate because it’s just me, and because
you’ve sailed comfortably past the point where you can stop me,
I’ll quickly confirm your suspicions:
things fell apart quickly for Future and me.
He left with the dregs of our nascent joint account
and a blender which I still maintain is mine.
Things also dwindled and eventually stopped between me and Past,
though not before he learned how to knacker each of my senses
and did so.
He also took money.
Actually, we were supposed to multirole, and because Future was technically my part,
I can in fact read you his last lines
though, you’ll appreciate, not in his accent.
Standing at the bus stop he allowed me to walk him to,
he adjusted his scarf,
hitched the blender up against his desirable ribs.
i know he’s been there more than you say he has
he said because he’s dog-eared books i know for a fact you haven’t read
and anyway if there’s one thing i know about you, Pardal,
it’s hard to stage-direct the lack of malice
he put into my pet name, it’s that
that’s just not something you’ve ever done.
Then he styled out stepping grandly onto a bus which he knew well
would take him in precisely the wrong direction. Ever the showman.
I went home.
Opened a book.
Made a salad.
(X. briefly wistful but this is tiring)
I don’t know what happened to Past.
He never gave me his number or address.
In fact, outside of face-to-face encounters we didn’t communicate much at all,
and at the time that didn’t feel in any way strange.
He was always somehow just there: on cue.
(I realise the heavy irony. I wish I could say I planned it).
I can at least say I know he had some kind of artistic ambitions:
he once expressed a desire to cast my back in plaster of paris: an act of intimacy
by which I was flattered but which I refused. Still, he never quite seemed to know what they were,
and you never read his name anywhere.
I might have seen him once at the supermarket
checkout. Working there I mean.
But that’s not how I’d choose to picture Past,
and besides I can’t be sure it was him.
I was buying white bread and condoms so I ended up using the self-service checkout
at the other end of the shop.
Whether it was him or not, I like to think I saved us both a lot of hassle.
I thought about him a little more after that. But not enough to really do much about it.
Even if I had, “where is he now?” doesn’t feel like a wholly appropriate question.
Meanwhile, I returned to my work,
to my limited interests,
until one Saturday, while I was making a smoothie,
an open palm tucked itself against my sacrum
and a voice I won’t imitate said
what sorrow.
It was neither of them.
But how easily it might have been:
how far it reached,
how subterranean,
how timebound
hence the railings
hence the dead
hence the corners
hence the invitation.
best to leave quietly)
Jonny Wiles is an actor, writer, and translator. He has received the DART and Benjamin Zephaniah poetry prizes, and the Cecil Roth Memorial Prize for his work on Dante’s Divine Comedy. His pamphlet, love and/or the storm, was published by Broken Sleep Books in 2020, and his translations of three contemporary Italian poets were anthologised in Alibi in 2022. He lives and works in London.
