Zona (10 page)

Professor is distracted by the whining of the dog who sits on his haunches before the skeletal remains of two figures rotting in the dust, prior visitors—pilgrims or saboteurs?—who have perished for reasons that will never be revealed, which is not to say that they perished for no reason. The camera moves in on the perished pair: skeletons locked in a skeletal embrace.

THEY ARE IN
a big, abandoned, derelict, dark damp room with what look like the remains of an enormous chemistry set floating in the puddle in the middle, as if the Zone resulted from an ill-conceived experiment that went horribly wrong. Off to the right, through a large hole in the wall, is a source of light that they all look towards. For a long while no one speaks. The air is full of the chirpy chirpy cheep cheep of birdsong. It’s the opposite of those places where the sedge has withered from the lake and no birds sing. The birds are whistling and chirruping and singing like mad. Stalker tells Writer and Professor—tells
us
—that we are now at the very threshold of the Room. This is the most important moment in your life, he says. Your innermost wish will be made true here. And we believe him. This is the purpose of the journey, to make
us believe the literal truth of what Stalker says at this point. Ideally, one would live one’s whole life as though at this threshold; every moment would be like the one that is imminent. Not that you have to wish for anything explicitly, Stalker explains. You just have to concentrate on your past life. This makes the moment you enter the Room seem like death, when your life flashes before your eyes, when you look back on your life and assess its futility in the face of its absolute finitude and unrepeatability (or, if you are a Nietzschean, its eternal repeatability— repeatable but unvarying, which amounts to the same thing). Stalker grows reflective. When a man thinks of the past he becomes kinder, he says. A lovely idea, but manifestly untrue. There comes a point in your life when you realize that most of the significant experiences—aside from illness and death—lie in the past. To that extent the past is far more appealing than the future. The older you get the more time you spend thinking about the past, the things that have happened. Old people spend almost all of their time thinking about the past. But if their faces are anything to go by, this past fills them with bitterness as often as tenderness. The past becomes a source of regret; you think of hopes that were unrealized, disappointments, betrayals, failures, deceptions, all the things that
led to this point which could be so different, so much better, but which, however you reshuffle the deck, always ends up at this point, leaves you holding—and lacking— the same cards.

But the most important thing…Stalker is in a state of more acute anxiety at this point than we have ever seen. Or is he? It is as difficult to find the right word to describe his expression—or expressions, plural, for his face seems to be running the full gamut of emotions every fraction of a second, or rather it is expressing a whole range of emotions simultaneously—as it is for him to say what is the most important thing about this moment. It is a mixture of exhaustion, turmoil, sincerity and hopelessness and… His back is to the others. He walks away from them. The most important thing is…to believe. To believe in this moment, in the Room, is to bring its power into existence. If you believe it will work it will work.

Stalker is talking about belief and one can see why, but, strictly speaking, I think he means faith. The difference, according to Alan Watts in
The Wisdom of Insecurity,
is that ‘the believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out
to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go.’ But then Miguel de Unamuno, in
Tragic Sense of Life,
says that faith ‘is faith in hope; we believe what we hope for’, as though faith and belief are one and the same. Or, again: ‘Hope is the reward of faith. Only he who believes truly hopes; and only he who truly hopes believes. We only believe what we hope, and we only hope what we believe.’ Hmm… Here we are, on the threshold of the Room, and these two back-of-the-alphabet thinkers have got us into a right old pickle about faith, hope and belief when we’re meant to be concentrating on what we most want from life— which is definitely to not get distracted by a semantic squabble about faith, hope, belief and the extent to which they are or are not compatible with each other or with the desire for a lifetime’s supply of free knapsacks.

Now you can go, says Stalker. Who wants to be first? Writer? It occurs to us, at this point, that it never crossed our minds that Professor and Writer really came to the Zone so that their deepest wishes could come true. In their different ways they were just curious. They wanted to see what the Zone was like, to see if it had the power to do what it claimed. Well, they’re pretty convinced that it does. Which helps explain why Writer
doesn’t
want to
go at all. Thinking of the past won’t make him kinder. Thinking of the past will make him think of bad reviews, prizes that went to other people, acclaim that should have been his, poor sales, not getting on three-for-two/frontof-shop promotions, loss of inspiration—all the things that he came to the frigging Zone to get shot of in the first place. So, no thanks. Perfectly natural. Not many people can confront the truth about themselves. If they did they’d run a mile, would take an immediate and profound dislike to the person in whose skin they’d learned to sit quite tolerably all these years.
Not
to have to face up to the truth about oneself is probably high up on anyone’s actual—as opposed to imagined—wish list. Jung claimed that ‘people will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.’ What could be more absurd than to go to the Zone precisely for a rendezvous with one’s own soul—and then, at the last moment, decide against it? Except if evasion really is the name and purpose of the game, then this kind of last-minute change of heart is perfectly logical, a way of confirming, absolutely, that avoidance rather than revelation is the goal. Besides, says Writer, putting down the crown of thorns, don’t you think it’s humiliating, all this snivelling and praying? This is a bit rich, given how he was snivelling
and whining back there on the edge of the tubular abyss. But he’s right, of course, Stalker
is
pretty snivelling—but then who wouldn’t be if they’d spent the day sleeping in wet puddles with only a soaking-wet coat as a blanket? What’s wrong with praying? Stalker wants to know, not taking it personally. Well, for a start, it was developed— according to Nietzsche—to give stupid people something to do with their hands, to stop them fidgeting and making a nuisance of themselves in the quiet, sacred places of the earth. Never having got close to a condition of prayer—at school it seemed a question of holding your hands together and waiting for time to pass; in church, at funerals and weddings, it meant bowing your head and looking at your shoes and waiting for the whole thing to be over with so you could get stuck into the waiting flutes of champagne—I tend to agree. Bresson’s Country Priest is forced to remind himself that ‘the desire to pray is already prayer’, but Stalker has no need of crumbled solace. His life is constant prayer, he’s sort of praying even when he’s not praying, when he’s standing there with his brow getting more furrowed by the moment, having faith in what he hopes for and hoping for what he believes in or whatever. In the background, meanwhile, Professor is fiddling around, making something, maybe
making a bigger and better crown of thorns than the one put together by Writer. Maybe that’s his wish: to win the crown of thorns-making competition! I’m serious. We think we have huge goals in life but actually, when it comes to it, we’ll settle quite happily for something trivial that we’ve had all the time and which made our lives bearable. I remember one of several conversations with my mum and dad about what they’d do if they won the football pools. The football pools: that, for many British people, was their equivalent of the Room, the thing that would make all their wishes come true. ‘All I’d like to do,’ my mum said with a mixture of pride and humbleness, ‘is go down to the supermarket and buy the nicest piece of steak there. That’s all I want.’ ‘You could do that NOW!’ I yelled. What she really wanted was to forego the thing—
things,
actually, because she could probably have afforded to eat steak from the supermarket every day for the rest of her life—that she claimed she wanted. (In stark contrast to today’s generation of consumers, who have no fear of getting into debt, my parents drummed into my head a very simple economy of expenditure: If you can’t afford it, go without. Actually, that first part—’If you can’t afford it’—was pretty superfluous since this was less about economics than an
entire philosophy of ‘going without’.) On one occasion when my wife and I took my parents out for dinner (an unusual event as they hated going to restaurants), we were surprised to see that my mum had actually eaten all of her steak. Then, when we got back home, we found that she had squirrelled half of it away and brought it home wrapped up in a napkin in her handbag. These meat-related sources of regret seem to run deep in my family. When my mother was in the early stage of what proved to be her terminal illness my father said that on occasions she
did
buy steak from the supermarket, always the cheapest cuts, and it was ‘never very nice.’ He also said that he had regrets about their diet of the last fifty years. He wished they ‘had eaten more fat.’ Not meat,
fat
. That would have been an excellent wish to have taken into the Room. Imagine: your deepest wish is that you had eaten more fat. This is to slightly misrepresent the Room, however, for Stalker never claims that the Room’s powers are retrospective. You can go into the Room and eat all the fat you
like from now on
but you can’t transform the life you have led into one in which, even during the lean years, you ate heaps of fat.

But perhaps that is and always will be one’s deepest wish: to have the terms of the offer slightly amended
so that it
can
be retrospectively applied, to build a time machine, to go back and have another go, another punt, another throw of the dice, this time knowing the result in advance. The question, I suppose, is this: is one’s deepest desire always the same as one’s greatest regret?

If so, then my greatest regret is, without doubt, one I share with the vast majority of middle-aged, heterosexual men: that I’ve never had a three-way, never had sex with two women at once. Is that pathetic or is it wisdom? If the former then it might well be the latter as well. I look back now and see that there were a couple of chances but, at the time—both times, in fact—it didn’t occur to me. That’s one of life’s subtle lessons: you may never know when the opportunity to have the thing you most want will present itself—for the simple reason that, at that moment, it may not be the thing you most want. I remember very clearly when the first of these potential opportunities presented itself, in my squalid flat in Brixton in the mid-1980s: I wanted to get rid of Jane so that my girlfriend Cindy and I could have sex, even though I knew that Jane (with whom I had had sex on numerous occasions since we had officially broken up) and Cindy were not averse to this kind of thing. The sense of a wasted chance was further exacerbated by the fact that, years later, when I had bro-
ken up with Cindy, she did in fact have sex with Jane and an unidentified third party (male). The other occasion was in Brighton when my girlfriend from Belgrade was visiting and we went to a party where we all took ecstasy and my friend Kathy told me that she and my girlfriend from Belgrade were going to have a lesbian affair, which was fine with me as long as I could be around too. The problem was that Kathy’s boyfriend, Michael, was also around (and likewise wished I wasn’t).

You think this is unworthy of the moment and the mystical opportunity of the Room? Well, that’s for the Room to decide. The Room reveals all: what you get is not what you
think
you wish for but what you most
deeply
wish for. In which case my fear is that my deepest wish might not be to have had Jane sitting on my face and Cindy on my dick but something really embarrassing, something that I would not want to be made public. Like what? That instead of basking in the fact that I’d managed to get a squalid, rent-controlled flat in Brixton I’d somehow cobbled together money for the deposit to buy a flat in the area when prices, as a result of the riots—or ‘uprisings’ as we insisted on calling them—were at an alltime low, ideally a council flat during the big Thatcherite
sell-off to which we were all bitterly opposed. I bet that’s the universal wish of most people in the Western world: that they’d got on the property ladder earlier. Even the ones who got on the property ladder early, who realized there was no point supporting Scargill and the miners, who bought flats while the rest of us were sticking ‘Coal not Dole’ badges on our donkey jackets, probably wish they’d got on the property ladder earlier, before council flats were up for grabs, or, failing that, the moment they went on sale, when you could buy a hard-to-let for a thousand quid and still have change left over for the first issue of cut-price British Telecom shares. What else? I keep coming back to the 1980s, when I could have grown my hair long, before it became all grey and tragic, before I began looking like the kind of middle-aged man constantly thinking of all the three-ways—two at any rate—that he didn’t have, that went begging, like threebedroom council flats that are now worth three hundred times what they were thirty years ago.

But let’s assume the Room’s power is effective immediately, not retroactively. If your deepest desire is the one manifested by your daily life and habits, then mine, apparently, is to potter about, to potter my life away, drift-
ing from desk to kitchen (to make tea), from house to café (to have coffee). It all comes down to that line in
Solaris
about never knowing when we’re going to die. If I had a week left to live it would be absurd to potter around my house like this. I’d rather be doing something exciting (though what that something might be for the moment escapes me). No, I need to give this a bit of thought. If I had a week left to live? Fly to an idyllic beach in Thailand or the Bahamas? But then I’d spend twelve hours on a plane and another three days shattered by jet lag, lying awake in the middle of the night, too tired to get up, and flopping around in the day, trying to stay awake so that I could sleep the next night. So it’s difficult. The basic assumption is that if you had very little time left you would not do what you’re doing now. But that’s why this life of the writer, this life where you spend your time doing pretty much what you want, is quite different. So, given that I probably am going to be around for a while, this is pretty much my deepest desire at the moment, to sit here scribbling, trying to fathom out what my deepest desire might be.