‘I feel death ever pinching me by the throat, or pulling me by the back.’ (Montaigne)
I’m a ghostwriter. By which I mean I’m a ghost who writes, for myself and a few others (for no money, I should clarify). Mostly for myself, or what’s left of me. As my mother used to say: there are only so many ways to pass the time in this sorry little life…
Notebook 66 was written in a two week period when J had tonsillitis. This time it was real: a disgusting infection and a genuine, diagnosable (and diagnosed) illness. On the inside cover of the notebook, as well as the keywords – ulcer, throat, venom, the chemist – I found a couple of cough sweet wrappers (Lockets, honey, high strength), a receipt for a Tesco meal deal, and a prescription for a course of penicillin.
J spent those two weeks shuffling between the bed and the desk, with the occasional trip to the bathroom, and then to the kitchen to get more banana yoghurt and strawberry smoothie from the fridge. The narrow gap between the bed and desk became his living space, or his illness space, which suited him. Sometimes he lay down there on the floor and imagined being hoovered up. He also dreamed he had a trained assistant dog, who’d bring him food, nudge him when he was on the cusp of falling asleep, lick his face when he passed out until he came to, and could unlock the door and take himself for a walk around the park.
His throat had started hurting a week earlier. One evening, he felt a ticklish sensation on his left tonsil. He assumed that it was just the usual: another imaginary infection, a punishment for talking too much or too little, for drinking too much coffee and eating too many ready meals. And then, he writes in Notebook 66, ‘the familiar constricted feeling, the sense of choking, or almost choking, as if I’m being strangled (and even tickled) by a demon [a demon?] who’s trying to stop me from speaking, not knowing that I’ll happily shut my gob after a sharp look…’
So: the usual. And he carried on as usual, while managing (I want to say impressively) to work even less than usual. He attended meetings with his camera off, pleading illness (without thinking he was particularly ill), and wrote banal comments in the chat: sounds good, nothing on my end, etc. Otherwise, he did the bare minimum. Georgia, who was never ill (or at least, never took a day off ill, which was presumably why she was the manager) told him not to worry: take care, she wrote let me know if I can support with anything.
J didn’t worry. He stopped going to meetings, blocked out his calendar, and spent the next three days toggling between the notebook and the screen. After filling some pages in Notebook 66 with quotations he’d highlighted on his Kindle (quotations from Bruno Schulz, Natalia Ginzburg, a biography of Fernando Pessoa, and various excerpts from a very boring book about the neuroscience of dreaming), for the first time in god knows how long, he started typing up some of the stories (or at least a few lines from some mutilated attempts at stories) from notebook 43 and 51.
To begin with, he typed quite diligently, and felt some initial pleasure in copying up words that he didn’t remember writing – particularly the first story, Luisa’s Room, which was itself a kind of copy, a plagiarism of Luis Bunuel’s El Ángel Exterminador spliced together with some semi-confected memories of an old girlfriend’s apartment in Rome. As he typed the story up, he remembered a scene from the film where a woman dances with her doctor, before kissing him. ‘La transferencía?’ the doctor says.
J laughed, and thought about Notebooks 28 through to 33, the psychoanalytic notebooks (keywords: hysteria, Bartleby, perversion, IKEA). It would be an excellent idea, surely, to spend this time (‘this impossible, imaginary free time‘, J wrote) to copy them up. Not now though. He made a note at the back of Notebook 66, under ‘To do’: COPY UP ANALYSIS NOTEBOOKS!
He carried on typing. But after a while (as on most days, after a couple of hours or so) he was bored stiff. The stories and notes were boring, typing was boring, the screen was boring. Worse, as far as the stories were concerned, they were all the same: more or less obvious recapitulations of a few tedious (and generic) obsessions that were barely of interest, even to him. This was particularly irritating, since although he couldn’t ever remember what he’d written (he could always remember where he’d written it), he did remember ‘the feeling of aliveness that accompanied (or was generated by) writing these stories, masquerading as a hint of the feeling that I am not completely dead.’ But as soon as the stories were on the screen – which he was beginning to think of as a kind of nemesis –they were dead: dead, dead, dead, dead.
‘I really should just accept that these stories are fundamentally therapeutic,’ he writes on page three of Notebook 66 ‘and that the benefit (if there is one) consists in the writing of them. Treat the notebooks like a holiday, a visit to a sanatorium, in which you’re surrounded by a collection of aspirational corpses, pretending there’s still hope…’
Despite himself, over the next few days J copied up two further stories on the screen, which, as far as I can tell, are more or less the same. Then, after a few more quotations copied down from Borges, Barthes and Perec (all of which most ghostwriters will be perfectly capable of guessing) he wrote another story in Notebook 66, ‘The Wedding Guest’, which I’ve copied out below.
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