Man of the World by Robert Gibson

24:  washing up

Life’s slide through the years, deceptively picking up speed till calendars fairly flew after one another into the waste bin, had at last dumped Midax into the pit of the moment when he faced a heap of dirty dishes the morning after his fortieth birthday party.
    It was a week-end morning, so there wasn’t even the distraction of office work.
    The sinkscape stretching before him was a panorama of marshy food fragments, islands of crockery and stainless steel, in a scummy dishwater lake. This was the battlefield awaiting his mental bugle. He sighed and whispered, Cha-a-a-a-rge! and reached to deal with the top plate of a heap.
    However, so little momentum was behind this charge, that he soon found himself stopping, brooding. The Battle of the Sink was being lost to a fifth column of despair.
    The trouble is, I am, it seems, constructed on a lullable level. Apparently it’s my nature to sleep away my life. Here I am, in my comfortable house and steady job, stuck in the toleration trap. I’m too mature and reasonable not to be grateful for what I’ve got. Far too sensible not to see how much worse things could have been. Result: I can never get a really good grumble going.
    So – what has gone wrong? I never fell for this trap as a child. But those wiser days are gone. I cannot rouse myself, cannot get off the slide.
    Not even though the last adventure is no longer unthinkably far ahead…
    And what shall I look back upon when that day comes for me? What deathbed satisfaction will I have?
    His parents had passed away a few years back, leaving Midax in possession of a large house. He was fond of the house but it felt empty; he had clung to it too long. Its upkeep used up much of his salary, and he received little social advantage in return; although yesterday evening’s party had gone off well enough, that sort of once-in-a-blue-moon celebration merely accentuated the subsequent silence that pooled and stagnated in the dead end of his dreams.
    He tried to recall the chatter of yesterday evening. Names, names. He remembered saying, with reference to the sister of a colleague, “Uldwa betrothed to Jovald? I never knew that was in the wind.”
    “You should move into the staff block, Midax,” said a mature, stout, well-made-up lady from the accounts department.
    “Come off it, Brea,” said the voice of the brother of the absent Uldwa, Imas Tremm. “Midax doesn’t want to know what’s going on; at least, not enough to move in with us lot.”
    “I don’t know,” said Brea; “he’d be a lot richer…”
    “Imas, you were saying about Uldwa,” said Midax, halting the diversion.
    “I was saying,” said Imas, “things aren’t going too smoothly between her and Jovald, from what I hear.”
    Jovald Brenn, a former employee of the Port Authority, had landed a high-paid temporary job in Vevtis on the other side of the Zard Ocean; this would keep him away from Uldwa for about a year…
    Chatting about this situation, Imas showed a natural sympathy for his sister but also he understood the pressures on her fiancé. “After all, a year is a long time to be alone. Either of them might have second thoughts during such a long stretch.”
    A year is a long time to be alone!
    Midax hid his bitter smile. A year – long?
    Try a life.
    But what really weighed sadly on him (even more powerfully than the comparison with his own fate) was the assumption that Love was due on a quota system. Again and again he encountered this depressing idea. As if such-and-such a quantity of love were needed per day, like food. So that when one source of regular meals becomes unavailable, you just go and get the stuff elsewhere. Yes: definitely you get it from elsewhere rather than go hungry for a whole year.
    Sitting on a chair-arm was a straight-backed young woman named Vernwa Sooln, all chic and up-to-date. Vernwa cited a parallel instance to that of Jovald and Uldwa. “Do you remember when Hap Grund was going out with Maywa, it all fizzled when she didn’t get into Loat Uni whereas he did? She had to settle for her second choice – a place at Tnedd – which turned out to be fine as regards the university but was simply too far away for the romance.”
    Again, nothing but propinquity. No more or less than that. Propinquity alone was the decisive factor in making or breaking a romance – so went the general assumption.
    But – but – but – couldn’t they have waited? Why should time and distance matter to a real Romance with a capital R?
    Midax could not understand; did not wish to understand; yet he felt pressurized by the mood of the gathering; forced towards a drowsy surrender to the overwhelming consensus. The ideological atmosphere exhaled by all his guests made it impossible to resist the feeling that theirs was the sensible outlook. To oppose it would have been, not quite impossible maybe, but as hard as wading uphill through a stream of molasses under two gravities, while trying to gasp out the words: you don’t understand: a year’s separation would be right, not wrong; the Year Troth is designed precisely to reflect that it is not propinquity but destiny which brings lovers together.
    Nope. Small chance of squeaking that message through.
    ...Midax stared into the soap suds… so depressed by memories of yesterday evening, that he absently gripped the cup he was holding, stupidly unable to concentrate on the task of rinsing it.
    Should he be taking all the unromantic talk so hard?
    Answer: battle is hard.
    His hands resumed the washing-up of crockery, but the battle for morale, for the decision points in his head, saw the Army of Daydream retreating before the Army of Ordinariness.
    Ordinariness was winning all along the line in his life as a whole, and maybe deservedly – he had to admit it: it was the goodness of his friends and acquaintances that defeated his dreams. The folk he knew were so admirably likeable, they gave the lie to severer standards - their attractive manner and compassionate outlook were so obviously sufficient for real life, that real life left no place for his idea of romance.
    Meanwhile the sudscape before his eyes confirmed the mush of tolerance and indifference in which it was difficult even to imagine – let alone find – any rescuing enchantment. That was the final threatening prospect: that of ceasing to be able to believe.
    Up till now, all through his life, he had held to the creed of the Shapers’ College, that the romantic view of life was true, in some transcendent sense, linked with destinies shaped before birth – so that there must be one destined Other Half, the love of whom was a mystic thing.
    So firmly had he believed this, that the firmness had sustained him throughout the years since school, despite the failure of the destined Other Half to re-appear or (if it wasn’t Pjerl after all) to announce herself for the first time.
    It had seemed quite reasonable to be a mystic in this way. He had had reason to believe, because there seemed to be no alternative, no other way of explaining the power of certain visions. For how else could you admit those close brushes with some supernatural quality which could not be argued with, those shivery touches of infinite value which inspire you to wait and wait and hope and hope for the tremendous ultimate perfect mutual thing? And no need to worry about mistaking it, if and when it appeared: for the Other Half would then recognize the same sunburst in Midax, would she not? Then they’d both know.
    In the meantime, phenomena like that party last night plonked themselves in view and demanded their place in the scheme of things and you couldn’t argue with them either. The Army of Ordinariness: so many people, good people, going for the sordid quota thing, love by quota, regular square meals of the stuff fed into propinquity-machines for cafeteria self-service destinies... Just about everybody did it, and as for the old idealistic institution, the Shapers’ College, well, that was just “old hat”. Impossible to reconcile the two views: the dreams of romance and the square meals of real-world love. Both were unarguable, hence invincible, so how was the battle of belief to end? Neither side would ever admit defeat. And no use declaring a draw, either, for a so-called “draw” would be a victory for dullness.
    The next swing of fortune in the Battle of the Sink was a surprise attack from the idealist side.
    In a brilliant tactical manoeuvre the Army of Romance  advanced a suggestion which, strangely, had never occurred to him before now. Why not join the Shapers’ College?
    Why in the world hadn’t he done so already?
    I suppose, he thought, up till now, being of the opinion that the truth is strong enough to look after itself, I have gone through life with an attitude of detached respect towards the College. It has been good to know that it exists – that a great upholder of the romantic ideal still thrives and is respected by the world – but I haven’t felt called upon to give it my active support, so far.
    But now that I’ve woken up to the fact that the reputation of the ideal is close to ruin, that the public’s lip-service to it has just about ceased, I must seriously think about adding my voice to those few who uphold the memory of what is almost gone.
    …Midax stood still in front of the piled dishes, thinking hard. What was to stop him popping a request for details in the post this very morning?
    Only lethargy. Apathy. The bother of persuading himself that it was worth the trouble to find pen and paper and envelope. The difficulty of galvanising a body made leaden by the drug of hopelessness. In other words, the tendency to mope rather than act. Put that way, the difficulty disappeared. He narrowed his thoughts, grabbed a towel, dried his hands, threw the towel onto the draining board and stalked into his study. As though battling with some unseen devil he grabbed what he needed, pen and paper and a clipboard – surely I can do this much, he lashed himself into action, desperately fast-forwarding his imagination to the moment when he should have already written and posted the letter; the "fast-forward" being a necessary trick to make the actual writing of it inevitable, a mere spool through the memory of an already completed action. Otherwise the Army of Ordinariness might have denied him the energy and belief sufficient to write, to go in search of an envelope, to address and seal and stamp it and to walk to the postbox at the street corner. Phew! Done!  He trembled with relief as the letter dropped in through the slit. Not that he seriously expected… what exactly? Never mind. The mere fact that he had crashed through the lethargy barrier gave him enough of a glow of satisfaction to be going on with. To have taken any positive step while in such a depressed mood felt tantamount to heroic achievement, as though he had accomplished deRoffa’s voyage single-handed… in fact he now had the energy to peel a few potatoes for lunch. If he didn’t use those potatoes up they would soon go bad, and he hated wasting food… Back indoors, he sat peeling the things. An insidious revival of the Empire of Ordinariness, peeling those spuds, peeling rather than just scrubbing them which was what he usually did even with the dirty organic ones... His mind chewed on and on at the thought that a lot of goodness resides in the peel, or so his mother had told him. On the other hand, if you just scrub 'em and don't peel 'em you don’t get rid of all the dirt. But then, if the spuds are organically grown, the dirt shouldn’t have harmful chemicals in it… still, dirt’s dirt… He put the spuds in the pan.  Next he set about the task of wrapping up the peelings to throw them away – reaching for the corner of the double-page of newspaper which underlay them.
    His glance was arrested by the newsprint.

SHAPING UP FOR THE FUTURE

Twick Hits Out at “Irrelevant” Old Guard

Staring up at him from the soiled, splashed paper was none other than an article about the Shapers’ College. He knew this even before he took in any of the words below that punning headline so typical of the Daily Shield. It wasn't a paper he was ever keen to buy – one of the guests last night must have left it. Midax scanned the article and felt his blood congeal:

    The latest blow in the factional conflict which has torn the Shapers’College apart [What conflict? I must have missed all this] was struck by Director Xapler Twick in a speech at the Annual Fellows’Dinner in P'Arlcena yesterday evening. Siding with the reforming wing led by Zednas Henng, Prof. Twick affirmed that in his view the College must move with the times in its moral teaching, to ensure that its principles are relevant to the modern world… “It seems a long time now since the Shapers possessed any real political power. It's actually only a decade since its members had the role of electing the Monarch, yet that state of affairs already seems to belong to a different age, so rapidly is our society developing…”

Midax sniffed disaster, irrevocable, final disaster in the article’s sad, grim message of “relevance to the modern world”. For an institution whose message was meant for all time, such “relevance” was so irrelevant that the whole thing might as well be wound up. He read on, dismally sure of what he would find. Sure enough, Twick had come down on the soul-sinking side of those who seek truth by consulting opinion polls. Citing results from a questionnaire sent to all College members, Twick confirmed that a majority of Shapers now believed that the “one true love per life” ideal “does not answer to the requirements of practical life” in “today’s conditions”.

You utter fool – it never did…

Fuming quietly, Midax read on. To his partial relief he found that the leader of the so-called Old Guard, Rermer Arpaieson, had made the obvious reply in opposition to Professor Twick’s speech:

Prof. Twick appears to have forgotten that the Shapers’ College exists not to make its principles relevant to the modern world, but to make the modern world relevant to its principles. It does this by continuing to exist in an age which would otherwise lack all public witness to those principles.

But this lone voice was then labelled “obscurantist” a few sentences further down. Midax felt a sick certainty: the “relevance” will win. And so the Shapers’ College will decline into a husk of its former self, an institutional emptiness, meaningless, purposeless, determined not to offend anybody. As a result, its membership will plummet henceforth – for who needs to belong to an outfit that tells people to carry on as they are?

Maybe all is not yet lost (there’s still Arpaieson), but all will soon be lost. Now that they have started fighting amongst themselves, Arpaieson’s gang against Twick’s gang, now that the College’s very identity is put in question, who can trust it any longer? Not I.

If they have given up on themselves, I must give up on them.

Relevance might as well win all down the line – I shall become relevant too.

The attempt to keep this old house going, with all its unused space, its invitation to loneliness, suddenly seemed futile, an irrational fight for nothing much. Wasn’t it about time he tidied up his thinking? Going on and on waiting and waiting for the Other Half without taking into proper account the fact that he had already met her years ago, had known her and had let her drift out of his life through his own stupidity – he had been keeping the house on for her! How crazy could one get? All the while, during his fight to suppress the pains of memory, he had been keeping the house on for that stupid reason. It was all very well to laugh at his other stupid ideas – such as hiring a detective agency to discover Pjerl’s address (he’d almost gone in for that one, he’d actually started to look up agencies in the phone book, before realizing that she must surely be married with a family by this time). But while he could laugh at these notions he had nevertheless still harboured the daftest one of all: keeping this mansion to stand ready to receive her on that great day of reunion… It wasn’t going to happen; he might as well face the truth. If he had the courage to face it, that is. But then, courage wasn’t optional. He had no choice. Nope – if he was going to continue mooning his life away he might as well climb into his coffin right now… and since he wasn’t going to do that, he was going to have to live. As a first step in that direction, he would give up this big house and move into the Port Authority staff block.

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