Prague, Summer 2010

 

    In 2010 as my condition worsened and my gaze turned increasingly inward, curled like a nautilus, I began to worry I was ever more unfit for the world and that my Galápagos Syndrome had progressed to a stage whereby the internal chambers of my life into which I often retreated and the external forms (writing and speaking) by which I addressed myself to others were completely torqued together, utterly indistinguishable, so I had at last assumed the shape of my own introspection. I had become a creature that in spiraling fashion finds its own curiosity of interest. That summer, a doctor in Prague whom I consulted after a bout of narcolepsy had turned into seemingly incurable insomnia, informed me that I appeared to be, as he put it, “out of focus” and the excess fluid he detected around my eyes suggested I had become “submerged” within my own dreams, which as a result of my condition, no longer surfaced in sleep and had come to be a permanent feature of my waking life. He told me what I already knew of the mysterious connection between the mind and body that allows us to experience something simply by imagining it and told me he could do nothing except advise me in a series of guided imagery exercises he predicted would be to no avail. He recommended with a dismissal that I begin with a visit to the Kafka Museum on the Malá Strana bank of the Vltava where I would find numerous photographs of the city’s favourite son displayed beneath water in rooms painted with light-killing black, apparently in an effort to replicate a vision of the world that abhorred clarity. As I walked out of the Old Town that brisk morning in the general direction of the museum the sky contained a peculiar swirl of green one expects only on nights beyond the polar circles, a colour that caused the baroque statues guarding Charles Bridge to come alive in their silent, but saintly ecstasies, where they were hovering a few centimetres above each pedestal. It was then, as I remember it now, I came upon a set of crumbling stairs curling like a corkscrew and out of sight which seemed to take me an extraordinarily long time to descend, the noises of the city fading with each step that fell off into the air as I moved downward. As I held on to the makeshift rail, I felt I had greatly aged and could no longer walk without support. I was slowly moving through the space of this idea, contemplating how the weight of Prague’s accumulated past meant a future here was almost unbearable, when to my disbelief I glimpsed a woman climbing out of the river onto the low mossy ledge with goggles still fastened about her face, her body steaming and cooling in wisps of smoke, as if a wax figure lifted from a press that had just moulded her. I have always been transfixed by the sight of a woman the few precious seconds after she steps out of her bath, for the instant holds the prospect of two diverging narratives at the joint of their departure. The thought always ushered in the sensation of vertigo that even as a young boy would cause me to steady myself by placing a hand on the chair in the washroom, like a confused theatregoer who walks in tardy to a play, the curtains drawn. Yet as I hesitated there on the last step, her hair tapering to a dark point like the lead of a pencil down her golden back and the Vltava’s majestic lines dissolving soundlessly into the shadows of the bridge, I understood the utter impossibility of an alternate path in any story. This is especially true for the orphan: the death of one’s mother is admission into a life consumed with her. The strange torpor I felt in the woman’s presence was a sure sign, of my desire. But that, of course, did not register with her. She simply walked across the lawn of the thin riverside park, where she was greeted by another woman before they proceeded down a street on which the medieval guilds were once located and where, rumour has it, the King’s alchemists once huddled over a fire of gold with a spoon of mercury. It was not until six months later I recalled the doctor’s counsel regarding the Kafka Museum, the memory triggered when I had become preoccupied with a former escort, Ms. M., now a photo retoucher in Berlin who had on her temple two tiny scars like pale crescents in an alien sky, as I was once told my dear mother had from scratching herself in sleep. In fact, I often thought she was citing my mother. She thought the scars made her unique and when we made love would wear her fine hair like a ribbon behind her ear so the scratches could be seen, but knowing they were not original made her all the more remarkable to me.