Get A Life

He said out of that strange silence of distances, where messages come from the grave: – Don't call me like this. -

She wept (blubbered like a stupid girl and could feel him hearing the shamefulness of it). When she could speak: – Don't be like this. -

Then she asked him about the son and daughters, whether the prearranged grocery orders from the suppliers were arriving regularly, and he gave the facts and said goodbye just as she was begi

The man got rid of his old family friend and came back to embrace her in a hotel room that contained no echoes, neither of what it had just overheard nor of any other impassioned, angry, loving accusatory, conciliatory, triumphant, fruitless calls in its promiscuous service to couplings of occupants with fictitious names. He was not the kind to notice traces of emotions not roused by him.

The neurons and synapses are merciless in their uncontrollable selectivity. A secretary has to remind of names of clients whose cases were the subject of consultation only a year ago, perhaps. But nothing, nothing is inaccessible, avoidable, escapable in this case closed fifteen years ago. I have something to tell you.

It is all being told, all, no detail to be turned away from, presented by that self to the present self. Once upon a time. You found you were pregnant. To be factual the timing was such, a brief absence at a seminar and return home, that the error of conception could have been with husband or lover. No female panic, neither man told of (once again) the blind opportunism of progeniture. Although abortion was illegal in those Calvinist regime days in her country, sister women always knew of out-of-the-way but competent if expensive doctors who would perform the simple procedure, and it was timely done. There was a complete family, daughters, a unique son; there was none of the sense of emptiness, regret for lost chance to bear a life that is supposed to depress a woman when she has that blob removed, to be done without as Paul has to do without a part of himself, one of the monitors of life. But now comes the fact that there is another fact of that time. Was it the chummy black nurse or the by now faceless doctor who told the blobs were two. Two foetuses waiting to grow into their human likenesses and be born. Well, twins come from the female line, her mother was a twin. Within a few days the man had entered her and Adrian had entered her. If not biologically possible – don't, don't give it scientific verity, don't join the lesser phenomena ranks of the late Dolly the Sheep – it is still a psychic reality in the emotion coexistent between contingent love and the love it is contingent to. In that unimaginable state of existence, the double conception is a reality.

This is a fantasy spewed of disgust. Self-disgust, a rising bile which apparently didn't affect that woman who was no barnyard hen. Flying free around the world. A man responded to at a duty di

I have something to tell you.

Oh not all, though that is supposed to be the condition of absolution.

I thought you were going to tell me you were leaving.

Truth and reconciliation. The one who offends, against the power, as only the victim has, to open return to the historical continuity of a life.

Fifteen years have achieved this. There should be no need to recognise the artifact of that four-year state of existence. But it was an amputation, excision; admit it, four years cut out of the time when he, Adrian, beloved, was in mid-life. The loss is calculable now, only now, when he's about to enter that half-life without the purpose of work. Even if its achievement was not his vocation. Four years taken from his maleness, the total capacity of love with all his being, the way lovemaking was with him, not just fucking with penis and tongue; love, with the cross-currents of children made by that commitment, the being of a compound existence within and against hazards of the world. Four years thrown in the trash where contaminated paper plates go. And now this man with his prostate humiliations and dimming deafness, soon to withdraw with the books illustrating the vocation he gave up (who knows if he would have fulfilled it) to the quarantine room transformed to that other confinement, 'retirement' – he ca

He talks of plans for a new phase of life to be entered together.

To make up; make up to him for a state of self you ca

Who goes there…

The buzz from the intercom at the gate doesn't need any response asking identification of one seeking entry… it's Thapelo, he keeps a finger on the monitor as his fanfare greeting. They pull up their chairs in the garden, so many activities visualised in small boys' fantasy are succeeded by the visualised consequences of present reality. A bamboo-legged table has been commandeered to hold the spread of papers. Thapelo is spending some weeks on verification of actions being pla

So the scientist talks like a tsotsi when he pleases. That's how Paul teases him; in appreciation. Paul sums up in colloquialism common to black and white alike: no bullshit in Thapelo.

He comes both to keep his colleague informed and to consult with him; doesn't matter whether he's actually been delegated to do this by their employer organisation or it's something delegated by himself. The question of his continued exposure to Paul's Chernobyl – the nature of relations with officialdom in the work they do makes him dismissive of the controlling edicts of authority as hidden agenda. Paul's condition doesn't come up between them in their talk, interruptions of one another, laughter, lowered voices, shouts of emphasis, this garden resounds, echoes with the animation of its past. It's the quarters, now, where two men are absorbed in the work that informs their understanding of the world and their place as agents within it, from the perspective that everyone, like it or not, admit it or not, acts upon the world in some way. Spray a weedkiller on this lawn and the Hoopoe delicately thrusting the tailor's needle of its beak, after insects in the grass, imbibes poison. That's the philosophy of conservation from which Paul is approaching the great issues in a draft petition of an environmentalist coalition to the State President he's writing between discussions in the garden.