'The path had been beaten diagonally across the meadow', the poet says. 'It was made of beaten down grass in the tall, flowering grass of the field. Who was the first to stamp it down? Who chose to stamp this path so assertively through the field? No matter. It was there; it seemed to us to have always been there, and by walking it again, we'll bear it down again. We made the path; we'll remake it.
'Ann and I. Ann and I on one of our walks, heading out to the river across the diagonal path. How was it that our meetings demanded we move out and away from the others, from the cafe where we met and where the others gathered? Why did we want to go away, and together, two bodies walking in the afternoon?
'We'd been singled out. Chosen. By each other? By the afternoon. By the Ees and the meadows. By Jackson's Boat. Back there, in the cafe, we were full of laughter, jokes. We were funny. We were funny together – other people told us that. But when we outside, away from everyone? When we walked along the diagonal path? A kind of stillness, first of all. A solemnity, as though we were being attuned to something. As though we had to drop to find the level of the afternoon. The grasshopper's noise. The humid warmth.
'It was still. It was always still when we met, Ann had said. There's never any wind, she said. And it was true – there was a kind of gap in the weather. As though it was looking for itself. The thick clouds. The heavy air. As though it was gathering itself up for something, something that hadn't happened'.
'And in a sense, it never happened. Nothing happened', the poet says. I've been asking him to remember. Asking him questions about his past. But he hasn't got any stories, not really, the poet says. He was ill, unemployed … That's how all his non-stories begin, he says: "I was ill, unemployed …", as if to void all incident from them in advance. Expect nothing, the poet wants to warn me when he begins that way, he says. Nothing's going to happen.
The diagonal path. The river. Jackson's Boat. How to narrate a story that never reached a beginning? What happened then, the poet says, what failed to happen, turned its face away from him, from his life. It was looking elsewhere. Does he want to tell his story, to bring it to account, or to look off where it is looking, his story; to look off with it, and see what was revealed? Too look at its look? To look away from him, his life, his story, but to do so within his life, his narrative?
If he remembers it all now – the path, the river – it is not to lose himself in the details of a vanished world, but to experience it by way of that distance which separates him from the past, diffusing and blurring particular events, and seeming to insinuate itself into those events, even as it seems to suspend still further the sense that anything was completed.
The diagonal path, the poet says. Beating it down, he says, as it had already been beaten down. What was she telling him, Ann? Something about telepathy. Her theories of mind reading. Of mind feeling, he says. – "I can feel what other people feel", she said. About her illness. She was really unwell, she said. About his supposed illness which she said could discern. – "It takes one to know one", she said. About the others in the cafe. – "They think they know me, but they don't".
She liked to use his name, the poet noticed. She liked to say it, he thought. To breathe it, because it is easy to breathe: one syllable. "Always liked": what tense is that? Completed action in the past. As though a past event could be completed, and broken from the present. But it seems, for him, not to have been completed. She's still saying his name, he says. Breathing it. One syllable.
Sometimes he dreams his life is already over, the poet says, and he is living backwards, not forwards, opening doors into rooms in which he has been before. Is there a way of watching your traces disappear from the world, like footprints in snow? One day, he will arrive at the point where he is not yet born. Perfection: the work of erasure done, he, too, will disappear.
What were they talking about, he and Ann? About ESP. About dreams, and the power of dreaming. About her job and her business partner, who was half in love with her. He felt the delight of letting their words go and letting them float into the air. He felt the delight of smiling, of a kind of smiling irony, by which what they said was lightened and made playful.
She liked to play by speech. Liked for it to float, lightened. To say nothing in particular. To converse as a dreamer dreams. About this thing, then that in swerves and darts. – "You give good conversation", she said. A strange phrase. Later, she would say, "You give good phone". It was vaguely sexual, he thought. "You give good head".
You can't step into the same afternoon twice. Or even once, the poet says, thinking of Cratylus. He wasn't the same after that. His life had changed. The afternoon – that one, and the others, although perhaps there was only one, the same afternoon happening over and over again - had become a kind of brightness behind everything, a sky behind the sky: the backdrop of his life, obscured sometimes, sometimes lost, but that burned nevertheless, discreetly, in stillness, gathering without resolving itself, on the perpetual brink of its own happening.
When did she say it? When did he walk into her trap? – "Can you read minds?", he'd asked her. – "I know what you're thinking", she said. – "What?' – "You're thinking how pretty I am". And there it was: how pretty she was.
How indecent it seemed: that sentiment. How personal. Before, they'd been speaking of other things, faraway things. He was at ease. It was as easy as falling, pure relaxation. They had been falling through the afternoon as through the sky.
And now? She'd turned him. She'd come into the field of his gaze, forced herself there. He was to look at her. It was a kind of reckoning. And what did he do, who was walking beside her? Did he stop walking? Stop her with a touch? Turn and face her? Kiss her? Ah, but what did he know of any of that?
He was falling alone now. Falling faster and faster, and into a blackness beyond the stars. He felt panicked, queasy. He could feel the heaviness of what he had eaten for lunch. He'd eaten too much. Anything he had eaten would have been too much.
He was at the brink. He'd been called to account. Here he was – here, in the sultry afternoon. Here – but where was he, and what did she want from him? Sometimes, you see things too closely, from too close up. There's no distance between you and what you see. He saw her. How could he not? He turned his head, looked. Pretty. Was she pretty? My God, what did all this mean?
He kept his silence, the poet says. That makes it sound dignified. But it wasn't dignified. They walked, Ann and he, Jackson's Boat to their right, on the other side of the river. They walked. Hadn't he been waiting to be included in life? To live? And wasn't it being offered to him now: a chance to live? Life itself was very close. He should reach over and touch her. Reach – and touch.
He was on the tip of the wave-crest as it was about to break. And it was breaking. He was about to lose the moment – he lost it; the wave broke. Foam and splashing. A kind of roaring in his ears. He felt ill, quite ill. That's what he said to her: "I feel terrible". I feel terrible: the worst thing he could say.
He broke the spell. He tore the afternoon in two. His life was falling back again into time without event. Nihilism: nothing meant anything. Nothing kept its form. Dispersal – did it happen then, as they walked through the Ees? Were they blown away, apart from one another, as they walked along the council estate to the road?
It was no longer still. There was a low wind. Pollen in the air. His eyes itched. We were going back. Back to the cafe, back to her car. Oh God. A tight feeling across his chest, like a stroke. Like an imaginary stroke. Oh God. That's what Ghandi said when he was assassinated. Oh God. Oh God.
Back to the cafe and the others. Back to the others, who knew something was going on. But nothing's going on, he would want to say to them. Nothing's going to happen.
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