V.

—Could I nick one of those Lucky Strikes off you? Smoked these in Saint-Lô, you know, though the pack was green, as I recall, not red.

“[A] being without being, who can neither live nor die, stop nor start, the empty space in which the idleness of an empty speech speaks,” wrote Maurice Blanchot of the figure in The Unnamable in Nouvelle review française, October 1953.

I know the end to this story; we all do.

During the course of interrogations, certain detainees exhibited refined resistance to interrogation.

—Yep, here you go.

—Have you a spark? [Inhaling deeply] Finer than a Woodbine, [exhaling] but no Gitane.

“What Molloy reveals is not simply reality but reality in its pure state: the most meager and inevitable of realities, that fundamental reality continually soliciting us, but from which a certain terror always pulls us back. . . . There is in this reality the essence or residue of being,” wrote Georges Bataille in Critique, 1951.

Although the premise and hope of a beginning such as this is that we do not know the end, we do: it ends in mystery. I could say silence but what is that?

These detainees who exhibited refined resistance techniques were suspected of possessing significant current intelligence regarding planned future terrorist attacks. For these reasons, Special Interrogation Plans were carried out and they are referred to as “First Special Interrogation Plan” and “Second Special Interrogation Plan.”

—If they get this inning in the game is official.

—C’est complet?

—I mean, were bad weather to halt it—not that we expect that today—it would be an official game, and would count.

—But we are still at love.

—True. But you get my point.

Wrote Marjorie Perloff in the Iowa Review, 2005: “[F]or the first wave of Beckett critics in postwar France—critics for whom war memories were not only painful but embarrassing, given the collaboration of the Vichy government—it was preferable to read Beckett as addressing man’s alienation and the human condition rather than anything as specific as everyday life in the years of the Resistance.’’ Why is this important? Why do I care? We fast-forward to today: the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Beckett Studies, Dirk Van Hulle, agrees that the critical construction of the “universal Beckett” in the postwar years, mostly in France, a kind of ahistorical Beckett, is no longer relevant. It gave way, in the 1980s and ’90s, to “capital-T Theory,” Adorno, Deleuze, Kristeva, Derrida, etc. (And is still around, in the figure of Alain Badiou, who has come to see Beckett as an anti-Platonist exploring the limits of logical systems such as mathematics.)

I have never known silence. There is no such thing, for the living, but that’s where I am headed. A silence beyond sound. A metaphorical silence, where there is no space, no time, no matter. The end.

The subject was forced to wear a woman’s bra and had a thong placed on his head during the course of investigation: Authorized. The subject was told that his mother and sister were whores: Authorized. The subject was told that he was a homosexual, had homosexual tendencies, and that other detainees had found out about these tendencies: Authorized. An interrogator tied a leash to the subject, led him around the room, and forced him to perform a series of dog tricks: Authorized. An interrogator forced the subject to dance with a male interrogator: Authorized. The subject was forced to stand naked for five minutes with females present: Authorized.

—I don’t wish to come back . . . to Amerikay. I hope Barney understands.

—Never, Sam? Don’t say never.

—I don’t know, but there might be, god help us, some publicity attached at some point. Thereto. To Film?

—I could take you to a better ballgame! But I get it . . .

—I don’t appreciate the systems here, everything’s new, viscid, as if not yet formed or set. Paris is old. It’s . . . comfortably ossified.

What dominates Beckett studies today is the parallel play of those critics who dilate upon what Van Hulle, taking a term from Murphy, calls “the demented particulars”—Beckett’s Ireland, his family, his war experience, his politics, his library—and those critics who see Beckett as an abstract artist who happens to be working in words. Van Hulle: “On the one hand, this implies an enhanced attention to the historical circumstances. . . . [And] on the other hand, this renewed attention to particulars . . . dovetails with the recent ‘cognitive turn’ in several disciplines within the humanities, notably in narrative theory.” But that’s really not what Van Hulle means, is it? As it turns out (we read on), what he means is something more complex, less simple and binary, though we have to hang in there to find out—and it seems true, once said: “What makes Beckett studies so vibrant today is the interaction among different approaches, ranging from theory to contextual, historical to archival research. . . . [W]e have moved beyond . . . black-and-white.” But that’s no good for me. I am asking why Beckett? My beloved is gently inquiring why Beckett. Multifarious reasons won’t fly for long, life is too short. There must be a reason why Beckett.

Silence as sleep. How do I know when to stop telling my story, one might ask. How is it I know when my beloved has been delivered into—may I?—the arms of Morpheus? Her sleep—it is not silence—is heralded by a sound, a nearly inaudible “pop” or “puh” from her lips, as they separate ever so slightly when sleep has possessed the body, of which the face is the signal part in this instance, and it has relaxed, fallen into repose, as it were. Aspirate. Say it: aspirate. Little else moves when a certain level of consciousness takes its leave but her lips producing this “pop” or “puh.” That which has coursed within her body, surely her chest cavity, the whole phonatory column, has escaped into the room we are in. One might think a change in the rhythm of breathing would be another bit of evidence, and I made this impoverished assumption myself, and still do, on occasion, but it is never so much determinative as born of my hope.

On several occasions, the subject was subjected to strip searches, which the subject himself later characterized as “cavity searches”: Authorized. On seventeen occasions, interrogators poured water over the subject’s head: Authorized. Discussion: The subject was a high-value detainee that ultimately provided extremely valuable intelligence. His ability to resist months of standard interrogation in the summer of 2002 was the genesis for the request to have the authority to employ additional counter-resistance techniques, approved by the Secretary of Defense. Interrogators believed they were acting within existing guidance and indeed their techniques were legally permissible, though an investigation concluded that the “creative, aggressive, and persistent” interrogation of the subject constituted “degrading and abusive treatment.” The report cited as “particularly troubling” the combined impact of six months’ segregation, forty-eight of fifty-four consecutive days of eighteen-to-twenty-hour interrogation, and the other “creative” techniques, such as the thong, the bra, the prolonged nakedness in front of female interrogators, not to mention the presence of WMDs, which in this context means “working military dogs.”

—I can live with the dead. I should be in Venice. You know Suzanne told me that. Pound’s over there flaking like a relic.

—People die in New York, Sam. They are dying, and overseas.

—But that’s well struck! There’s life yet, you are right. [Chanting] Let’s go Mets!

—How is Suzanne?

—Grand, and busy, with Anne and Avigdor since I left.

—Jeanette would love to see her again.

You can do things straight and you can do things crooked. Someone said that. Direct or oblique. And those are the directed actions, the willed assaults. There is also chance. What a complex relationship we have with chance! The most important text on Beckett I have ever read I came upon by chance—at a publisher’s luncheon for a mystery writer who had published a nonfiction book with a left-wing press on the literature of dissent—I was there by professional obligation, as a member of the trade press. There I saw a woman I hadn’t seen in years—she was now the publicist for this left-wing press, and last I’d seen her she was organizing a book distribution company for none other than John Calder, Beckett’s British publisher of longstanding. She had several of her company’s titles at the luncheon, and, recalling her Calder days perhaps, handed me a slim volume by one Pascale Casanova titled Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution. I read that short book that evening, and then began again. I then ordered nine copies and sent them to selected friends.

I may be more than ready to quit, say, the lurid Le Fanu or one of my own travelogues, and sense I hear or even feel a slight settling of her rib cage, and then slowly halt my reading, if I am reading, or my story, if I am weaving a tale, only to hear, “and then what?” So now I wait for the “pop” or “puh” to find my end. Aspirate. . . . Mercifully, good stories bear repetition without sacrifice of potency. But these must be chosen wisely, for not all are good in the sense I intend, nor do their effects not wear off, either on the very evening of their delivery, or, if overdone, by their very commencement: “Not that one!” What have I learned that works best? The aforesaid cycle of the seasons, perhaps each a little differently—I can’t say a little seasoned, though wish to—a little altered in presentation, say, is a winner. As are various ditties about my childhood, so innocent, so far distant, so irrelevant because so over. The tale of my first trout, yes; the little doggie my parents adopted and surrendered, due to its errant bowels and proclivity to nip, yes; the old folks in town, Julius, Black Albert, Paul Favaro, who spoke only French, oui. In fact, I had a dream last night, about Paul, poor fellow, rest in peace, in which I bought this man, our small town’s most destitute and perhaps beloved citizen, leathery, weathered face, his person always garbed in heavy cotton green work clothes, surviving on some disability check, favoring a six-pack of Genessee each day and a pack of Camels, but, in this dream, moved into the future, into his unrealized future by my present adulthood, he appeared last night in a large urban place where I looked out for him and clearly recall I bought him, from a nearby delicatessen, a ham sandwich, I decided on lettuce for him, and mustard, and a bottle of Budweiser, and a bag of Wise potato chips, a pack of smokes, and brought them to him. I took care of Paul Favaro, last night. Another story, note it.

“I’m gonna show you the evidence bit by bit,” he said. “There is a big guy who told us that you are involved.” Mohamedou: “I guess you shouldn’t ask me questions then, since you have a witness. Just take me to court and roast me. What have I done, according to your witness?” “He said you are part of the conspiracy.” Mohamedou wrote: “The ‘big guy’ who testified against me turned out to be someone who was said to have said that I helped him get to Chechnya with two other guys who were among the hijackers. But then I knew about the horrible torture that this big guy had suffered after his arrest. Eyewitnesses who were captured with him thought he was dead. They heard his moans and cries day and night.”

—Speaking of the dead—old Brendan.

—Bless, barely forty, but he drank a century’s worth and was awake for most of it.

—Can I tell you how I tried—in vain I gather—to keep him from your door, back in the ’50s? He’d read my piece on your work in Merlin.

—Jerome told me you did your best, but he’s a grander force then we.

—He nearly drank and ate me out of all I had. But he made up for it in song.

—That he did, I’m sure. I wrote a tribute to Brendan, in Theaterheute.

Pascale Casanova (a name worthy of Nabokov)—gender-bending, high-brow, a touch lascivious that name, like perhaps a nomme d’amour or de guerre, is in fact the name of a French literary scholar, now a visiting professor in Romance Languages at Duke University. She is best known for her rather speculative book, The World Republic of Letters, in which the history of literature is treated as a kind of survival-of-the-fittest contest, with dominant narratives suffering assaults from the periphery. In her book on Beckett, she razes the critical ground around her, leveling Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille and others along the way, especially those who have subdued the challenging work of Beckett to their own purposes, most crucially in the postwar period. What got lost—and Casanova, to my mind, is the one who discovered this or at least said it most plainly and first—is “the meaning of [Beckett’s] literary project,” which she claims (and adduces) unfolded over his six decades of work. “The literary abstraction he invented,” she writes, “at the cost of a lifetime’s enormous effort, [was] in order to put literature on a par with all the major artistic revolutions of the twentieth century—especially pictorial abstraction. . . . ” Casanova claims that Beckett’s search for a form to accommodate Being as he understood it was systematic—all impasses he encountered were escaped through abstraction. And in his penultimate prose work, Worstward Ho, he reached his most radical abstraction, a kind of linguistic engineering, almost a new language, a morphemic cocktail centered on negation. “One of the greatest literary revolutions of the twentieth century,” wrote Casanova. No one had said this with any specificity before.

It has not been lost on me that The Arabian Nights, Scheherazade’s sinuous succession of tales, were meant to stave off Scheherazade’s own execution. It is not that her thousand-and-one tales were meant to keep the emperor awake, exactly—the dead opposite to my commission—but, with each story, to keep the treacherous man so involved in the narrative as to make him beg in his heart for continuance, night after night. And each night, one tale would conclude, and cleverly, Scheherazade would begin another, a cliff-hanger, of sorts, to ensure another day of life. I trotted out this tale of the Tales to my beloved, and rightly confused was she, as with tables turned and obversions of intent, she made to be awake with agitation, so these issues I came to ponder in private. But mark me it did and deeply, this connection. It troubled me, it is fair to say. And the more so, as I skimmed in my leisure at a rural English university the sixteen-volume Nouvelle Revue Française edition of À la recherche du temps perdu owned by one Samuel Beckett, a handwritten notation on the very last page of the very last volume that read thus: “Arabian nights of the mind” and “Thought: jellyfish of the spirit.” I determined in an instant that this described my commission for my nocturnal narratives—to be spineless, amorphous, a translucent substance in a transparent medium, the transit of dreams, adrift. This would put anyone to sleep.

Speaking in dazed, frightened, and staccato voices, survivors of the coordinated Paris attacks have begun recalling the sickening horror of a truly nightmarish Friday the 13th. The terrorists struck almost simultaneously in six sites in Paris—Stade de France, La Petit Cambodge restaurant and Carillon bar, Rue de la Fontaine au Roi, Bataclan concert hall, Boulevard Voltaire, and La Belle Équipe bar. The assaults began around 9:15 p.m. local time on Friday, with three suicide bombings near the Stade de France, where French President François Hollande and a crowd of 80,000 were watching a France-Germany friendly soccer game. Almost simultaneously, gunmen with automatic rifles jumped from cars near popular bars and restaurants in the capital, shooting at Parisian diners. Those caught up in the attacks described scenes of “carnage” that some likened to a “civil war.” Witnesses at the Bataclan concert hall—where at least eighty people were killed—described the terror that unfolded before their eyes at the French capital’s famous music venue. One young man who managed to flee said: “I was lying in a grave, the girl next to me was dead. They were shooting repeatedly,” the Daily Express reported. Another witness, with blood all over his jeans, said at the scene: “I had a piece of flesh on me, there was blood everywhere, bodies everywhere.”

—Behan spent a night in quod years later. They had to turn around a flight to Dublin, with himself on it. He would not be consoled. Barged around the cabin right into the gendarmes.

—Did you get a call?

—No, poor Boris was so honored.

So leastward on. So long as dim still. Dim undimmed. Or dimmed to dimmer still. To dimmost dim. Leastmost in dimmost dim.

Blanchot’s “monster without fins.” Should I read to my beloved from Thomas l’Obscur? This book was the first to make my hair stand on end—it gave me a shiver, literally. Shall I tell that story, about a book that changed my life? No, no, no. I am still working within the corridors of her life, not mine.

Theresa Cede, a thirty-nine-year-old who works in the telecommunications sector, was also at Bataclan with a friend when the terrorists burst in, shooting people standing near her on a balcony, according to a Bloomberg report. “I hid underneath the body of a man who was shot in the head. I was covered in blood,” Cede said. Another woman lying next to her was severely wounded. She said she miraculously escaped unharmed after police stormed the building. “I don’t know how many guardian angels I had looking out for me,” she said. All hell broke loose when four men, armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles, entered the concert hall at around 9:30 p.m., forty minutes into the band’s set, after killing the bouncers, witnesses said.

—Yes, in memory of the Borstal lad.

—Drink up.

—It’s finished.

Utmost dim. Leastmost in utmost dim. Unworsenable worst.

I have forgotten that story, to be perfectly honest, as they say throughout Donegal. Or it is not important. Or it is both forgotten and unimportant.

Some of the hooded gunmen, with their faces covered by scarves, shouted in French: “All of this is your President’s fault,” while others spoke of France’s military intervention in Syria, according to witnesses. Benoit, one of the massacre survivors, who managed to escape with a friend, said: “I thought a loudspeaker had exploded, then the lights came up. The gunmen I saw had their faces covered by hoods and scarves.”

—It lingers.

This Casanovian analysis has stuck with me for a half-dozen years.

But how would I know what I know?

People hit the ground as panic and terror suddenly replaced the fun they were having.