Read Online The Thing Itself by Adam Roberts - Free Book Online

Antarctica was, I told myself, only hallucination. But it was a horribly vivid hallucination, and it kept returning to me, and it required large quantities of drink to return it to more conventional functioning. This is the first, and most important thing I learned from my Antarctic experience: the brain is a complex machine, and once you’ve dinged it, it will tend to throw weird shapes and glitches into your thoughts – for years. For decades. Bad dreams.
    Bad dreams.
    Ghosts.
    Whole sight: or all the rest is desolation.
    People haunt other people in many ways. Here’s a for instance: you’d think that ignoring somebody studiously enough would lead eventually to them giving up. Not so. Not with some people. Take Roy, snug in his insane asylum. After a few stilted ‘please cease and desist’ replies to his many letters, I simply stopped responding. I had no personal animus against him, I told myself. The balance of his mind had been disturbed at the time of his actions and so on and so forth. It was regrettable; let’s forget all about it. I wanted him to stop. He did not stop. So I reneged on my resolution to ignore him, and wrote back angrily, imploringly, commanding him to stop, which is to say in truth begging him to stop. He continued writing. Eventually, on the advice of a friend, I got a solicitor to write to the director of the asylum requesting that the patient named ‘Roy Curtius’ be prevented from harassing my client via unsolicited and distressing letters sent etc., etc. The letter we received back expressed regret and surprise, and included a photocopy of a letter signed by me – of course I’d never signed such a thing – written upon Koestler Trust headed notepaper no less, courteously requesting him to keep sending me his ‘insights’. This letter spoke of a ‘collaborative creative project’. I was baffled by this. I instructed the solicitor to write back, distancing myself from the forgery. I also approached the police, who took a statement from me and did everything short of literally rolling their eyes and sighing to show that they were perfectly uninterested. Nothing more came of this, except that Roy either stopped writing to me, or else the asylum stopped his letters from going into their out-box.
    Each of those solictor’s letters cost me £90. That’s £180 for two letters. A lot of money back then. It’s quite a lot of money, even now.
    I got on with my life. I was a man with seven fingers, a weird patch of skin on my nose that was markedly redder than the rest of my face and a nest of leprous-looking scars on the left side of my face. My visage, not hitherto ill-favoured, now possessed a patchwork complexion somewhere between the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz and a scary clown. I also own fewer than the usual complement of toes. The frostbite had killed some of my facial nerves, giving my interactions an unfortunately mask-like demeanour. Add into this a certain stoutness in the belly area: not fat exactly, not in the slack or flabby sense of the word. The way my torso is shaped, really. I have a solid, blocky arse, and a convex rather than a concave waist. For a period of eighteen months or so (this was when I was working as a postdoc at the University of Dundee) I attended a gym; and assiduously sculpted and toned my body. My muscles bulked, I could lift heavier weights and turn myself into a giant crab-pincer by lying back and performing a hundred rapid sit-ups. But this didn’t shift my fundamental shape, and after a while I grew disheartened and gave up.
    My life through the nineties and noughties was one defined by long stretches of involuntary celibacy. It occurs to me that most people live this way. It occurs to me, too, that art, literature and culture have been rather derelict in their duty so far as capturing this essential truth of things is concerned. Once upon a time, sex was unspeakable in our stories, and so was only always implicit – we get Elizabeth Bennett