Second Place by Rachel Cusk (ebook smartphone .txt) 📕

quite what kind of a building it is, nor whether I will ever be able to come back to visit it. There’s a certain point in life at which you realise it’s no longer interesting that time goes forward – or rather, that its forward-going-ness has been the central plank of life’s illusion, and that while you were waiting to see what was going to happen next, you were steadily being robbed of all you had. Language is the only thing capable of stopping the flow of time, because it exists in time, is made of time, yet it is eternal – or can be. An image is also eternal, but it has no dealings with time – it disowns it, as it has to do, for how could one ever in the practical world scrutinise or comprehend the balance sheet of time that brought about the image’s unending moment? Yet the spirituality of the image beckons us, as our own sight does, with the promise to free us from ourselves. In the midst of the practical reality of my life with Tony, I felt the lure of abundance again, emanating from L – yet where Tony’s language had flowed toward and into me, L’s call was the reverse. It was the inchoate call out of some mystery or void.

That call had grown very faint as the days passed, and just as I had started to believe that I could no longer hear it at all and that L had become once more a stranger to me, I met him unexpectedly out walking on the marsh. I was down there collecting leaves from some of the edible sea plants that grow around the creeks, to cook them for dinner – I am always quite proud of this activity, Jeffers, which sometimes feels like the only proper use I ever make of myself – and he came around a bend in the path. He was more casually dressed than usual, and his face was quite ruddy from the sun, and altogether he looked more human and less of a devil than he generally did. His trousers were rolled up and he carried his shoes in his hand, and he told me he had gone out to one of the sandbars while the tide was coming in and had had to wade back!

‘And then,’ he said, quite breathlessly, and seeming to find it all rather exciting, ‘as I was walking back up, I heard people shooting. I looked around for a while but I couldn’t see anyone. The shots seemed to be coming one at a time from different places. I was thinking, first I nearly drown, then I have to face down a gunman, or several of them. Is there someone I should tell?’

As he spoke, the sound of a single loud report rang into the air from the field behind him and he flinched.

‘There it is again,’ he said.

I told him it was only one of the stationary gas guns the farmers put in their fields at that time of year to keep the birds off their crops. I was used to the sound and was barely startled by it, and in that half-conscious state I could hear it as all kinds of things. Sometimes I liked to imagine, I told him, that it was the sound of wicked men blowing their brains out, one after another.

‘Huh,’ he said, with a grudging half-smile. ‘Wicked men don’t do that. Anyway, you’d probably like those men if you got to know them. Nothing evil ever dies. Especially not of remorse.’

His calves were streaked with mud up to the knee, and I told him he needed to be careful of the tides, which were dangerous if you didn’t know where the paths were.

‘I was trying to find the edge,’ he said, looking away from me toward where the horizon lay smudged and indistinct in haze, ‘but there is no edge. You just get worn down by the slow curvature. I wanted to see what here looks like from there. I walked a long way out, but there is no there – it just sort of dissolves, doesn’t it? There are no lines here at all.’

I waited in silence for him to say something more, and after the longest time he resumed:

‘You know, a lot of people get a bad idea right around when they’ve just passed the middle of their lives. They see a kind of mirage and they go into another building phase, but in fact they’re building death. That’s maybe what happened to me after all. I suddenly saw it, right out there,’ he said, pointing toward the distant blue shape of the receded tide, ‘the illusion of that death-structure. I wish I had understood before how to dissolve. Not just how to dissolve the line – other things too. I did the opposite, because I thought I had to resist being worn down. The more I tried to make a structure, the more it felt like everything around me had gone bad. It felt like I was making the world, and making it wrong, when all I was doing was making my own death. But you don’t have to die. The dissolving looks like death but in fact it’s the other way around. I didn’t see it to start with.’

When L said these things, Jeffers, I felt a thrill of vindication – I knew he would understand it! It was a grey, windy morning, and the marsh looked at its least mysterious in that ordinary, glaring light. It appeared somehow technical, and it was that same technical matter-of-factness that gladdened my heart, because it reassured me that L and I were looking at the same thing. I have seen it at such pitches of the sublime – in certain moods and lights and weathers – that it has wrung every emotion out of me, but in its plainest colours, as it was that morning, its reality is indubitable. As far