By Thomas Kendall
He prayed. He beseeched God. His thoughts all prostrate and biblical ‘for I know that I am a hypocrite who has offended you,’ his face all scrunched up.
He repented for everything. He kept going. He beseeched God for Fiasco, for Evelyn but mainly for himself in relation to them. He didn’t want to but he did. He came to no understanding. That was ok. He kept praying, his neck bent towards his stomach, tears ringing the pit of his belly button. God was something like his navel, he thought. That umbilical dip, dead nexus, wrinkled seal, a closed portal that hid his own acrid biliousness and the olfactory pre-productions on which his higher functions sat all regal like…. The gut, in other words, in all its wormy glory and the divine outside that it quivered in darkness against…or…
Wait…have another drink…
It was a joke too. Wasn’t it? Staring at your navel. Its ultimate pointlessness well established. It didn’t used to be. How many angels on this pin? Fucking none. The same as an infinity. Don’t even try. Getting carried away. The beer. Between the fourth or sixth there was a kind of grace period where his sadness maintained itself in a singular state long enough for thought, however damaged, to emerge.
He asked his mother about his father, about the divorce. She said it had been easy. They hadn’t even had to talk. She’d had the papers for years. The marriage was going ahead in just a few weeks. Why wait any longer for some happiness?
Henry said: ‘I know he sees Jude sometimes’
- It’s different and it’s not often.
- Why doesn’t he like me?
Jude comes over for visits with his mum. Henry could see the worry in Jude’s expression but he couldn’t tell how that worry interacted with Jude’s eyes which had grown unreadable to him. When his mum left to unlock the car doors Jude hung around. It was then that he’d rush up and hold Henry in his arms with a power and desperation that Henry couldn’t fathom, that swamped him.
The first time it had happened Henry had felt furious and then moved by…what was it, a gesture or an action? And these feelings of shame and gratitude, weakness and strength, along with all the others, continually traded places with one another until he was almost completely ground out, empty. At night he reflected on these feelings while shame slowly trickled through his abandoned state and filled him.
He found it hard to sleep during these weeks. He’d lay awake thinking of how eyes interacted with skin, how fucking alien their composition was. He tried to remember Fiasco’s eyes but it was his voice that came back admonishing him. ‘My eyes? What the hell is wrong with you?’
Cue everything again.
He read the notebook nearly every day. It was a mystery. Whoever wrote it wanted to convey a feeling so exactly that all they could do was torturously describe what was recognisably indescribable, fluid, alterable from moment to moment, yet distinct from any moment in particular but still ultimately contingent and appealing to the very chance its existence was dependent upon and therefore what rendered it indescribable. Holy fucking moly but it tried. It wanted something. He imagines the letters piling on over a feeling….
BUNDLE!
He imagined the writing as a huge lattice, a net…the sentences and paragraphs as wiring or string and in this system, this trap that hung loose in the world he thought, the indescribable buzzed about, testing the limitations inscribed around it until finally, exhausted or suffocated, it died weighting a few sentences here and there with the temporary outline of its meaning. The meaning was always the same and stood for something eternal that wasn’t. Something that stood.
He’d come to consider the second voice, the one in the margins as establishing the notebook’s chronology. The first voice had disappeared. There was a schism. The voice in the margins doesn’t know who he is anymore and can’t understand what he was. Nothing he had believed made sense. The voice in the body of the text has come to know what it is and can’t believe it.
The voice in the margins wanted to disappear the body of the first through understanding. The voice in the text wanted to disappear to save the future. Both of them thought that endings were disappearances.
The drawings at the start are a synthesis of these two perspectives, Henry thinks, the third space between enquiry and affirmation. What’s left is incomprehensible and real, a dream of a body and nothing else.
It wasn’t quite the phenomenal but it still tried to split the atom of his thought.
It wasn’t the book though or its contents.
If there just had been something real in it.
He wouldn’t have let Fiasco down?
Fiasco.
Related Feature: One Question: Thomas Kendall
Thomas Kendall is the author of The Autodidacts released May 2022. Dennis Cooper called The Autodidacts ‘a brilliant novel — inviting like a secret passage, infallible in its somehow orderly but whirligig construction, spine-tingling to unpack, and as haunted as any fiction in recent memory.’ His work has appeared in the anthologies Abyss (Orchards Lantern) and Userlands (Akashic Books) and online at Entropy.