The Goldfinch(315)

MY FEVER, FOR WHATEVER reason, tended to spike at nightfall. But after so long on my feet in the cold, it had begun to shoot up in ragged jumps that had the jerky quality of a heavy object being hauled by fits and starts up the side of a tall building, so that on the walk home I hardly understood why I was moving or why I didn’t fall down or indeed how I was proceeding forward at all, a sort of groundless gliding unconsciousness that carried me high above myself on rainy canal side-streets and up into disembodied lofts and drafts where I seemed to be looking down on myself from above; it had been a mistake not to get a cab back at the station, I kept seeing the plastic bag in the garbage bin and the shiny pink face of the ticket clerk and Boris with tears in his eyes and blood on his hand, clutching at the burnt place on his sleeve; and the wind roared and my head burned and at irregular intervals I flinched at dark epileptic flutters at elbow’s edge: black splashes, false starts, no one there, in fact no one on the street at all except—every now and then—a cyclist dim and hunched in the drizzle.

Heavy head, bad throat. When, finally, I managed to flag down a cab on the street, I was only a few minutes from the hotel. The one good thing, when I got upstairs—bonechilled and shaking—was that they’d cleaned the room and restocked the bar, which I’d drunk clear down to the Cointreau.

I retrieved both mini-bottles of gin and mixed them with hot water from the tap and sat in the brocade chair by the window, glass dangling from my fingertips, watching the hours slide: barely awake, a half-dreaming state, solemn winter light tilting from wall to wall in parallelograms that slipped to the carpet and narrowed until they faded out to nothing and it was dinnertime, and my stomach ached and my throat was raw with bile and there I still sat, in the dark. It was nothing I hadn’t thought of, plenty, and in far less taxing circumstances; the urge shook me grandly and unpredictably, a poisonous whisper that never wholly left me, that on some days lingered just on the threshold of my hearing but on others roared up uncontrollably into a sort of lurid visionary frenzy, why I wasn’t sure, sometimes even a bad movie or a gruesome dinner party could trigger it, short term boredom and long term pain, temporary panic and permanent desperation striking all at once and flaring up in such an ashen desolate light that I saw, really saw, looking back down the years and with all clear-headed and articulate despair, that the world and everything in it was intolerably and permanently fucked and nothing had ever been good or okay, unbearable claustrophobia of the soul, the windowless room, no way out, waves of shame and horror, leave me alone, my mother dead on a marble floor, stop it stop it, muttering aloud to myself in elevators, in cabs, leave me alone, I want to die, a cold, intelligent, self-immolating fury that had—more than once—driven me upstairs in a resolute fog to swallow indiscriminate combos of whatever booze and pills I happened to have on hand: only tolerance and ineptitude that I’d botched it, unpleasantly surprised when I woke up though relieved for Hobie that he hadn’t had to find me.

Black birds. Disastrous lead-colored skies out of Egbert van der Poel.

I stood and snapped on the desk light, swaying in the weak, urine-colored glow. There was waiting. There was running away. But these were not so much choices as endurance measures: the useless scurries and freezes of a mouse in a snake tank, serving only to prolong discomfort and suspense. And there was also a third choice: since for various reasons I felt that a consulate member would be fairly speedy to return my call if I left an after-hours message stating that I was an American citizen wishing to turn myself in for capital murder.

Act of rebellion. Life: vacant, vain, intolerable. What loyalty did I owe it? None whatsoever. Why not beat Fate to the punch? Throw the book on the fire and be done with it? There was no end in sight to the present horror, plenty of external, empirical horror to line up with my own endogenous supply; and, given enough dope (inspecting the bag: less than half left), I would happily have set up a fat line and toppled right over: great-souled darkness, explosion of stars.

But there wasn’t enough to be sure of finishing myself off. I didn’t want to waste what I had on a few hours of oblivion only to wake up again in my cage (or, worse: in a Dutch hospital with no passport). Then again my tolerance was down and I was pretty sure I had enough to do the job if I got good and drunk first and topped it off with my emergency pill.

Bottle of chilled white in the mini-bar. Why not? I drank the rest of my gin and uncorked it, feeling resolute and jubilant—I was hungry, they’d restocked the crackers and cocktail snacks but this was all going to work a lot better on an empty stomach.