Daniel James
An artist is a creature driven by demons512
You should never get used to this. The day you do is the day you should walk away. But you won’t, because if knocking on the door of someone who has just lost their wife, or mother, or father, or child, doesn’t make you feel ashamed, if it’s become routine, then you’re too far gone to ever walk away from this job. They call it a death knock. Everyone had to do it. There were no exceptions. If you didn’t, they would call you a failure and tell you that you didn’t have what it takes. This job’s not for you. That’s what they’d say. It’s how they get to you, through your pride and ambition, but mostly through fear – the fear of going back empty-handed. They knew how to apply the pressure. After all, they’d each had the same thing done to them when they were reporters. I had a different tactic when it came to convincing myself, a pretence of heroism in a backwards sort of way. I told myself that, if I knocked on the door, at least I would handle things as sensitively as I could, not like the others. There were some reporters who would come back laughing about it, the family photo album in their hands as they boasted about talking their way across the threshold and putting quotable lines into the mouths of distraught people. These were the kinds of journalists who hacked phones, intercepted mail and went through people’s bins, ridiculed the readers they were meant to represent, and believed the pursuit of a story was a get-out-of-jail-free card, capable of justifying any activity.
It might seem funny that a man like me was the only one willing to articulate our collective guilt. At least I hoped the others felt the same, but I couldn’t be sure. Either way, I wanted out. I wasn’t one of them. At least, that’s what I used to tell myself.
My head was already full of death before I got to Afghanistan. I had stood in the rain on council estates, behind police cordons, speaking to neighbours after an estranged father had butchered his own family; I’d sat in court and listened to the horrific injuries a baby had suffered at the hands of its own parents, I had read through the death notices and obituaries, I had knocked on door after door, turning lives, and the ends of lives, into a procession of empty stories.
I still remember the last one. How could I forget? I can still see myself standing there outside the door, younger and softer in the face than I am now, but already tired, weary, burned out inside. Sophia’s eyes were filled with tears, her whole body trembling, when she opened the door. I went through the script and talked my way inside. It wasn’t hard. She had lost her husband and was numb with shock. When she started to talk about him, everything came rushing out in a jumble of words. I was the first person to really talk to her since it happened, she said. Everyone else was too scared. They wouldn’t even look at her.
I follow her into the house. This is where reality ends and the dream begins, or at least where the border between the two becomes visible to me. I know because when this really happened we sat down in her living-room and I began the interview. After a few minutes, I told her I had made a mistake and left. Once outside, I called the newsroom and told them she had refused to talk to me and had threatened to take the newspaper to the PCC if we continued to harass her. It was the first time I had lied to the editor, but it wouldn’t be the last. I had crossed a threshold and passed over into another place. After that, I went my own way, writing the stories I wanted to cover, in a completely different kind of way. In some ways, it was the first step on the path to where I ended up years later. Even though I know it’s a dream, I still get a claustrophobic feeling, like I’m suffocating, because I’ve had this dream before and I know where it leads. I walk into the living-room and she closes the door behind me, locking me in. ‘This is the trap,’ she says as she turns the key. I bang on the door and try to force the handle, but it won’t budge. I panic and began to search the dimly lit room for a way out. There is a window with the curtains drawn. I pull them apart, but I’m not prepared for what I find.
There’s nothing there. No street, no houses, no sky. Just unconstructed space, a vast emptiness. I can’t look at it directly, my eyes, my mind can’t process what I’m seeing, can’t perceive it, the complete absence of existence, no colour, no light, no dark; shapeless, formless, infinite, limbo. I’ve reached the barrier at the end of the world.
I pick up a chair and throw it at the window. The glass breaks and the whole room tilts forward, pitching me towards the void. I’m falling into it, falling forever, falling apart, dissolving into non-existence. My body is gone, and I lose all sense of direction, there is no up or down, no space, no time. I’m passing through something and it’s passing through me. The void and I become one.513
Notes
512. William Faulkner, writer (1897 – 1962).
513. As Fredric Jameson writes in Detections of Totality: “…it is this opening onto the not-World, onto its edge and its end, in the void, in non-human space, in death, that is the ultimate secret…”