An Honest Ghost by Rick Whitaker Read Free Book Online Page A

getting at.
    “I don’t sleep well,” he replied softly. “What are you writing?”
    It was an idiotic conversation and on one level I couldn’t believe we were actually having it. The intellectual attitude it is expressive of is one of disoriented agnosticism. I was astonished at how light and lighthearted this left me. “What do you think of this garden?” It’s good at first to be out in the night, naked to the cold mechanics of the stars.
    “Doesn’t matter what I think,” said David. He was lying on his back, staring at the flies that buzzed overhead. He had given up trying to find out if words generated feelings or merely serve them. He had never lingered among the pleasures of memory. It is not conscious knowledge, or fresh knowledge, but the knowledge one did not know that one knew, or but dimly knew, that bursts upon one, an access of strength; and it bursts from inside where it has been nurtured with every unconscious skill.
    “I wasn’t trying to insult you,” I said. Nothing, however, could prevent his inner consciousness inflicting on him the punishment which ate into his spirit like rust, and which he could only alleviate by drinking. For “style” has been his disaster. “Well, what is it?”
    I heard some squirting sounds I couldn’t decipher.
    “Listen,” he said, “they’re playing our song.”
    Opportunity sometimes knocks very softly.
    Another long silence followed.
    How the hell does one keep out of romanticism? We should strive to be neither happy nor unhappy, but serenely unconscious of ourselves.
    But I am beginning now to fear that I must wait a lifetime.

19.
    Strange beds have rarely agreed with me, and after only a short spell of somewhat troubled slumber, I awoke an hour or so ago. A spot of insomnia is not without its uses for appreciating sleep, for projecting a certain light into that darkness. I was—and this admission pains me—I was terribly sexually frustrated and plagued by the most frenzied erotic fantasies, the majority of them completely impracticable, technically speaking (knowing next to nothing about sex and its usual positions since I’d devoted my entire libido to literature, I lacked basic physiological information, notably sensory-motor knowledge, and I imagined fantastic interlocking positions, unfeasible contortions, implausible spiraling, furious loop-the-loops, flips, entanglements, triple somersaults, and acrobatic stunts). Was love insane sex-hunger? I, too, wanted to make men leave their wives and run off with me. I know the type; most of my friends are case studies. I, too, wanted to escape the ennui of my petit-bourgeois world and embrace bohemia.
    David sat quietly, surrounding a beer, still unhappy over the earlier conversation. “Anarchy,” he said, “is out to upset everything, even the proper relationship of man and woman.”
    I made no reply, perhaps out of laziness, and, it seems to me, so as to be less alive. My mind drifts. Life in the temperate zone was full of fears and inhibitions, but in the tropics….
    It was too exhausting: it was too cruel. Yet the vulnerable young creature was, I believe, already half inside the trap I was setting for him; I could read in his eyes how he still craved to gorge on the praise and attention the inadequacies of his career had hitherto denied him; and although I could not afford to have him too alarmed, the course to which I had committed myself was irreversible and there was nothing for me now but to press home what I felt to be my advantage.
    “I have no one in the world but you.” I say that as much to comfort myself as to state something I think to be true. Life has but one true charm: the charm of gambling.
    “I like men who have a future, and women who have a past,” he answered. “There’s a something to be said for wives,” he added, folding his arms and crossing his outstretched legs. He said that he would do everything I wished. Tentatively, he added that it looked like his