Louis’s was just the lowlying truth of his ordinary existence and though people claimed to find his accounts of eating and drinking and shitting and pissing and fucking – or more often masturbating, his difficulty in admitting his own homosexuality having limited his opportunities for congress with bodies other than his own – monotonous, disgusting or even offensive, they continued to buy his book all the same. He wondered if it was a bit like the way people always used to own a Bible: they never read it but they felt they ought to have it in the house. He wasn’t about to start comparing his book to the Bible, but he wondered whether there wasn’t something about the ability to deny the truth about oneself – perhaps, almost, the necessity of denying it – that created the need for a retributive text; which everyone, of course, then denied again by ignoring it. It was amusing, if faintly sad, to see people call disgusting the things they themselves did on a daily basis. In fact he himself wasn’t that interested in those parts of the book, which he saw as little more than groundworks, preparatory labours to clear his writing of shame as a plot might be cleared of weeds. He had often been told that one reason people never finished his book was because at over a thousand pages it was unduly long. The answer to that was simple: but what interested him was that whenever he was asked to read a passage from the book aloud, he always chose one that was unrepresentative of the way he had reproduced the mechanism of time. For all the hours spent shitting and pissing and staring out of the window, the moments when life could be observed in a meaningful arrangement were rare: his attempt to represent this fact had cost him most of the five years it took for the book to be written, yet it was always one of the other parts, the rare, choice extracts, that he selected. It had not escaped him that what this habit signified was the ease with which he could be led back into self-betrayal: like the episode of Mino and the bird, he often caught himself living in the mistaken belief that transformation was the same thing as progress. Things could look very different while remaining the same: time could seem to have altered everything, without changing the thing that needed to change.
The extract he read most often, he went on, concerned an episode from his childhood in which, at the age of five, his mother had taken him to a petting zoo a few miles away from their house. They had taken the bus together and had wandered around the small farm, looking at the animals. At a certain point he had noticed a horse, standing in a muddy enclosure looking out over the fence. He had gone ahead of his mother, who was detained by something, to see the horse, and had climbed a little way up the fence so that he could stroke its nose. At first he was slightly nervous of the animal, but it was passive and gentle and allowed him to stroke it without shying away. He sensed his mother’s approach and became aware of her looking at him: he remembered thinking she would be impressed with the way he was handling things. But when she arrived at his side she had given a little cry and had pointed out an injury to the horse’s eye. Did you do that? she had asked him, aghast. He looked at the eye, which he hadn’t actually noticed: it was red and swollen and weeping, as though it had been poked. He was too startled to rebut his mother’s accusation; but also, as the seconds passed, he became increasingly less clear as to his own innocence. Once his mother had described him poking the horse in the eye, he couldn’t be sure whether he had done so or not. They went home, and Louis spent the rest of the afternoon and evening in a state of growing anxiety. In the morning he asked his mother whether he could have his pocket money so that he could go to the corner shop and buy sweets, as he was always allowed to do on a Saturday. She gave him the money and he set off. But instead of going to the corner shop he went to the bus stop that he remembered his mother taking him to the day before. The bus came and he paid the fare with his pocket money. He sat beside the window and stared out, becoming more and more frightened as the stops passed and he failed to see anything he recognised from the previous day’s journey. But then when the right stop arrived he found that he remembered it after all: there was a café just beside it with a neon sign in the shape of a fat chef wearing a checked apron. He got off the bus and made his way through the gates of the petting zoo and across the grass to where the horse still stood behind its fence. He approached it warily. Its passivity looked to him now like submission, its gentleness like resignation. His mother had said the horse might go blind from the injury. But she had also appeared to forget the incident immediately, not informing anyone at the zoo and failing even to mention it to his father when he got home. Climbing the fence, Louis had examined the horse’s eyes. He found that he couldn’t remember exactly which eye had been injured, nor what it had looked like; try as he might, he couldn’t even ascertain what he was looking for. Eventually he gave up and went to get the bus home, where he found his parents in a state of near-hysteria at his disappearance. They had dealt with him very harshly, even when he had given the explanation for his absence. Later they had told the story with pride, particularly his mother, who for ever after judged every five-year-old she happened to meet on the basis of it.
He had often been asked, Louis said, about his relationship to trauma, and perhaps the reason why he chose that story in public situations was because he believed it said something not about his own relationship to trauma but about the inherently traumatic nature of living itself. He wasn’t sure, he added, that he would ever write anything again: his relationship to the world was insufficiently dynamic. His book would have to stand alone: it would have no siblings, any more than he himself would ever have children, even if his sexual inclinations had rendered that a possibility. He had no particular interest in being able to say that he was a writer. He had succeeded in writing a book simply by virtue of the fact, as he had already said, that while writing he had believed himself to be unknown. That was no longer the case. He supposed, he said, that the time would come when the book people were now reading would seem no more personal to him than the skin a snake has discarded and left lying there. He wished only to return to that state in which, uniquely in his experience, he had been capable of absolute honesty, but by using writing as the forum for it, he had also ensured that writing was a place he would never be able to go back to. Like a dog that shits in his own bed, he said, turning and looking directly, for the first time, at me.