White Light

'Illness', the poet says. 'Unemployment. Each hollowed out day was exactly the same. Each day … It was a life in lieu, a life echoing with what it was not. Within what labyrinth was I lost? The great plane of carpeted floors spreading from room to room …

'Peace: my neighbours quiet. How far into their illnesses had they gone? The agoraphobe, who, when it was dark and the sky felt less distant, would take an ancient, half-blind collie to the meadows. The manic-depressive who, when she was 'up', would bring men home from nightclubs and make great mad plans with them about their future lives. – "We're trying for a baby", she said of one, who she had met three days ago. Trying for a baby … Until the new lover disappeared, like all the others. Until the depression came and she sank back under, moving greyly beneath at its surface like a body under ice. We were falling, each of us. But my neighbours were quiet then, the poet says. Not like now. Not with these students …'

His curtains were drawn. No light. He didn't want to see the sunlight through the filthy windows. Didn't want to see the dust motes drifting through the air. Time was vast enough – there was already too much time. Too much light, on top of that …

'You have to surround your living space with darkness. You have to shroud yourself'. He still does that, the poet says. That's why he lives half-underground. And live carefully, meagrely, without venturing into the open waters. So he reads in his armchair, the desklamp by his side. He reads there, at the bottom of the world, in his pit, surrounded by four walls and a curtained window.

He'd learned it then, those skills, those survival skills. The indecency of light, he says. The white light that sees nothing, but that sees. Blindness watches. Blindness sees. And there are no secrets left; nothing hidden. What's your excuse?, asks the open sky, like God. What are you going to do with your life?, that's what it asks.

In those moments, the sky feels very close – vast and wide and close. White light. It's the day itself that interrogates you. Light in your face: the whole sky interrogates you. And what answer can you give? The question turns inside you like a whirlwind. It's hollowing you out; you're an empty vessel. Hollow, hollow like a clay pot.

'We need darkness and silence', the poet says. 'We need to be left alone'. That was the worse thing about his illness, he said. It left you prone. It beached you. Lying down, you could be horribly exposed.

But then, too, sometimes he thought of his illness as being terribly light. Buoyant, even. It wasn't quite his, his illness, that's how it felt. An illness no one suffers, or that no one suffers inside you. As though your innards were filled with light. As though the white sky was there too, where you once had organs. White light like the maggots which writhe below rotten logs.

'It's why people start drinking', the poet says. 'The day drives them mad. The pale, seeming sourceless light of a cloudy day'. Is that what the alcoholics saw, whom he used to pass at the end of his street? They drank under clouds. Drank as soon as the morning lifted itself from the night. With dawn, their first drink. And they drank their way to dusk. – 'The alcoholic lives in the eternal day', the poet says. 'In eternal light'.

For a while, he drank, the poet says, but he had no stomach for it. Sweet, stale beer in abandoned cans on his floor. Stale lager, bought cheaply – an obscure brand from a German supermarket. Others, elsewhere, would be drinking Aldi lager, he thought. Hungarians. Albanians. Old Europeans. They would understand him over there, he thought. They knew about light, bland and shadowless. It was the same white light above their rust belts and zones of radioactivity.

He sipped his cans of sweet beer, curtains drawn, TV turned on with the sound down. White light flowered through him, he imagined. Light passed through his permeable body. Nothing happened, he said. Nothing was happening, least of all his life. Nothing whatsoever: can you imagine that? Can the Dane imagine it?

'Nothing – thickening', the poet says. 'Nothing, as though it had its own substance its own body, seeking itself inside you. Absence become presence, white light like fog drifting through you, light displaced from itself like a ghost. Can you imagine, Dane, wanting nothing at all? Being lost from all orbits?'

Summer returned, the poet says. So it had been a full year! Summer. He opened the small window to let in the air, he says. He saw and pulled back from the hazy sky. He had had enough of the sky. He watched the traffic gather and disperse on the road. He saw the blank faces of the houses, opposite.

Was he recovering? He wondered. He was up – awake. He was at his window, vertical, and looking out of window. Wasn't that a great deal? But I wouldn't understand any of this, the poet says. Danes are vertical people! A striding-about people! You're always striding about, getting things done!, he says, except when it's winter, and you're drinking and becoming maudlin.

Am I a maudlin drinker?, he wonders. I don't look maudlin, it's true, but you can never tell, with a Dane. One minute you're all bonhomie and striding about, the next, slumped into a corner weeping into your schnapps … The Dane is never really a horizontal person, a defeated person, the poet says. He's vertical – and then he's non-vertical, slumped, and that's all. The maudlin is only a modality of purposiveness, of striding about, in the Dane, the poet says.

But he was telling me a story, the poet says. He was trying to improve me. Where was he? Ah yes, his recovery. How can he convey it to me? What it meant. What he left behind. He shouldn't try, he says. He should give up now.

I'm going inside, he'd said to himself last summer, the poet says. I'm never coming out. He was going in, he had decided, and it was the world that had to come inside to see him. He was to be inside, and the world outside; it knew where to find him. He was brought meals on trays with tin foil covering them. A cleaner came to vacuum his rooms and wipe the surfaces.

Sometimes, it was true, he went out. Some evenings, with the darkness around him and his fleece zipped up, he would take a few steps down the road. Aldi wasn't far, and it was open until late. Once or twice, he'd knocked on the door of the manic-depressive. Once or twice, the agoraphobic. No reply, just as he'd never reply when there was a knock on his door.

The cleaner had her own key. The meals people, who unlocked his door to leave a warm tray on the dining table and then took the remnants away the next day. They were disturbance enough. He would hide in his bedroom when they came. He wasn't ready for company, for small talk.

His life was simple, he said. He wanted it simple. Sometimes you have to simplify life, he says, to strip it down to a bare frame. That was Ann was doing, on her side of the city, he was sure of it. And Claire. What Zen-like simplicity had they attained? He couldn't find out, he says. Ann's answering machine had been switched off. He couldn't get through.

He pictured her silence as a great wall, he said. What did it mean? What was its significance? Would he ever find out? Ann was further along than him, he knew that. She'd gone further. Did she, too, feel signs of recovery? Was the illness departing from her, too? Or did condition, all along, run deeper? Did it ask for more from her than him?

He tried her phone again. No, no one there. No: she might be there, but he'd never know. There behind her wall. He thought of crossing town to see her. Thought of catching first one bus, then another, and riding all the way. Couldn't he cross town and knock on her door? Couldn't he, if she didn't answer, throw a handful of gravel up at her window? Perhaps she, too, was vertical. Perhaps she was awake enough to look out from the half-darkness of her house.

He would knock and wait. Throw pebbles and wait. But perhaps no face would appear at the window. And perhaps the door would remain shut, a blank wall. Where was his friend of the four o'clocks? Where his friend of the afternoons, of the old afternoons? Wasn't it at the cafe table they met every afternoon, to celebrate their partial crossing of the day? Wasn't it there, a full hour before the shift changed and the cafe prepared to become an evening restaurant, that they could share a pot of tea?

'We're made of our absences, of our lacks', the poet says. 'We're made of what we crave'. Do you know as it happens that a particular event – a meeting, a phonecall – is the last of its kind? He didn't, he says. In fact, he could hardly pick them out, those last points of contact, those last encounters. Nothing had really finished. Nothing had really rounded itself into a story.

We want always want stories, the poet says. He's sure I want a story, that's what I'm after, isn't it, waving my dictaphone about? And he would have liked a story too, back then. Would have liked something to have ended or to have carried on beginning. The latter, of course, was what he really wanted; but the former, too, would have done.

We like stories, the poet says. We like things to make sense. And when they don't? When the story becomes a non-story? That's been his life, the poet says, leaning forward. It is that to which he's tried to be loyal, if he's been loyal to anything. Nothing really happened, he said. Nothing began, do I understand that? No, of course I don't. It's the last thing a Dane could understand, he says.