The Impostor by Damon Galgut Read Free Book Online Page A

no job.’
    ‘If it’s money you want…’
    ‘No, I don’t want money.’ He was furious for a moment, then ashamed; and then full of absurd, unbearable sadness: at himself, at her, at the road not taken. ‘We should’ve stuck it out,’ he told her, ‘we should’ve made a go of it.’
    ‘I can’t have this conversation, Adam. I’ve got a husband, I’ve got a life.’
    ‘It should’ve been me.’ He was almost snivelling.
    ‘I think you’re drunk. I’m going to put the phone down in a minute.’
    ‘I’m sorry about everything, I’m sorry it didn’t work out.’
    She put the phone down. He cursed at her, and then broke down sobbing, at what exactly he didn’t know. The best, high point of his life was already behind him somewhere, though he didn’t know when it had passed. He had started to dislike people younger than himself, wrapped in clothes and styles and values that he didn’t understand. He was turning into the kind of person he’d always dreaded becoming: small-minded, focused relentlessly on himself. He foresaw an old age of tiny obsessions as his body gave in, bit by bit, and his sense of tragedy shrank to the scale of his own life. His compassion would also contract, but his intolerance would grow. Already he sensed his opinions crimping inward, on a hard core of endemic disapproval.
    In the morning he remembered the conversation and was appalled. How could he have done that? And why had he been so full of grief over something he didn’t really regret–didn’t really ever think about? For a while, he thought about calling again to apologize, but decided that would only make it worse. He resolved instead to keep control of himself: no more drunken calls to people from long ago, no more chasing after the past. You couldn’t bring back what was gone; you could only move forward, however imperfectly, into the future.

    In the beginning he had swept and cleaned the house every week, to recharge the sense of satisfaction that first cleaning had given him. But now he started to let it go. He told himself: tomorrow. Tomorrow I will do it . The dust crept back, crunching delicately under his feet. It lay in a fine film over his paper, the pen, on the desk.
    In just a few weeks he had lapsed into inertia. It was very hot; a massive weight of sun pressed down on everything. The light at noon cut human faces to the bone. The effort required, even for simple daily tasks, could seem too much.
    He spent hours and hours entirely on his own. In his old life, in the city, everything had been arranged around particular points in the day. Now those points had gone. Not long after he’d arrived he had taken off his wrist-watch and left it somewhere, intending to pick it up later. But there had never been a reason to pick it up.
    Time changed shape. Now he could sit and ponder something for what seemed like a moment, but when he came back to himself, several hours had gone by. It happened more and more that whole days disappeared behind him without trace, measured in the atomic drift of dust, the creeping progress of branches as they stretched towards the sun. And the sun itself, in its vast stellar motion, became a blotch of light that moved imperceptibly across the wall. He watched the light move. Or he saw a fig fall from a tree, and it fell and fell without ever hitting the ground.
    On that first day, when he’d arrived, he’d felt time flowing in through the front door behind him. He’d brought time back into the house. But now he could feel a different time–old time, dead time–trapped inside, unable to pass back out, into the current. It had become shaped to the rooms, looping back on itself, piling up in compacted layers so dense and heavy that they were almost substantial. It didn’t seem implausible that people or actions from long ago might be here, very close to him.
    Sometimes the past was almost apparent. He would catch a movement out the corner of his eye, or he heard the sound of