Night of the Animals(42)
“I believe that you’ll see your pleasure variables rise,” Mr. Daniels said in a joking tone. “That is, if we can trust in the ‘felicific calculus’ of old Jeremy, right? Ha-ha!”
But for Cuthbert, grueling revision on his biology course offered no chance for self-forgetting, least not as Mr. Daniels conceived it. When he did forget himself, he drew into Drystan even more—the ghost beneath the green rushes, the otter-brother in the bosky claw-waters of long, long ago. Otters obsessed him, too; at one point, after reading Ted Hughes’s “An Otter,” he developed the notion that the poet was, like Drystan, a therianthropic being who crossed between the animal and human worlds, and in fact, Hughes had simply been writing about himself in his animal poems—and not metaphorically. In one meeting with Mr. Daniels, just before he abandoned the course, he tried to explain Hughes’s secret to Mr. Daniels in his sour-smelling office.
“I’m stuck on Hughes, and I can’t stop thinking about ’im, no matter how hard I try,” he was saying. “His otter’s the most profound sort of animal. It’s all biology and all of the animal soul, in one little beast. ‘Of neither water nor land. Seeking some world lost when first he dived . . . from water that nourishes and drowns.’ See what I’m getting at?”
Mr. Daniels looked annoyed, tapping the crystal on his cheap watch. It had a black wristband, and he kept playing with it. “This isn’t a literature course, is it?” He looked at Cuthbert solemnly. “Forget ‘animals’ and think ‘cells.’ Forget ‘phenotype’ and think ‘gene.’ It’s liberating, I tell you, if you really think about it. Have you finished The Selfish Gene yet?”
“I day,” answered Cuthbert. “I mean, I did not, sir.”
“Too bad. See, you’re born, you hitch a ride to your alleles, and you fly forward into human evolution. We really have no utter control over anything. Ha-ha.”
“Ar—I mean, yes,” he had answered. “I tried to read it, but it made me feel . . . like life’s pointless.”
“Not for genes it’s not.”
Cuthbert/Drystan survived two terms at UCL. He went straight from Ramsay Hall to a squat in Euston to the park benches. It was a terrific, if not quite classic, debauched decline. And it was during this time that the ghost-brother first went missing from Cuthbert’s ambit of control. He seemed separate from Cuthbert. Indeed, Cuthbert had even begun to think of himself again, ever so slightly, as himself. For whatever reason, Cuthbert’s total replacement of himself with the wiser, more intelligent, more able, more erotic figure of Drystan came to a ragged end that coincided with the failure at uni.
For now, again, Drystan was gone.
FOR A WHILE, Cuthbert “searched” all over London for his missing brother, with no success, and afterward, tried to convince his parents to report him missing to the Metropolitan Police. But this request, as one might imagine, was seen by them as a kind of antagonistic lunacy, an effort to torment them.
Soon afterward, Cuthbert himself was homeless and sleeping rough in the capital.
His parents, from whom Cuthbert concealed his living situation, were by now totally inured to his ramblings about Drystan, and normally simply repeated, when the name was mentioned, “You saw your poor brother drown in Dowles Brook in 1968, Cuddy, and you blocked it out. And that’s that!”
Cuthbert didn’t believe a word they said, not anymore. No matter what anyone said, he would find Drystan; around this time, in 1980 or so, Cuthbert also started a habit of visiting, unannounced, his cousin Rebekka, who lived in Hemel Hempstead and worked as a school nurse.
Rebekka didn’t know how to coax Cuthbert back from his insanity.
“You look poorly,” she once said to him. “That’s the tragic truth.”
“Hang on. Hang on. What’s that?” Cuthbert once asked Rebekka. “You almost sound like you’re talking about me, Becks. Or do you mean Drystan? He wasn’t taking care of himself, was he?”
“Drystan? Oh, Cuddy, why are you bringing up your sweet brother?”
“Because you’re talking about him!”
“No,” Rebekka said. “Oh, Cuddy. I mean you. You need help, dear one. Couldn’t we find someone. To talk to you?”
“Look,” he said, “I’ll find him!”
Rebekka would sigh despondently, but she felt nothing she said would ever get through.
Meanwhile, Cuthbert himself, while imagining Drystan’s downhill slide, was of course frequently coping with his own drop into penury in central London. He was indeed looking poorly. His fingernails and teeth were gradually blackening. His clothes smelled of urine. He wore shoes with burst soles. For a while, he feared Drystan’s old schoolmates from UCL would recognize him as Drystan’s brother; after a year or two, he knew they wouldn’t.
Cuthbert’s delusions had become an unstable system. He no longer knew whether he was himself, or his brother, or someone else entirely. His flashes of lucidity often served only to confuse and to depress him more deeply, like matches lit in a pitch-black crypt.
“Was I the one at UCL?” he would ask himself. “Did I write letters to myself?”
His last complete grasp of reality in his lifetime, at around age twenty, was far more self-bewildering than what was to become his new normal—a calmer normal where Drystan, the last holder of the Wonderments on earth, was only “missing,” and he, Cuthbert Handley, was leading the search for him. In his life to come, he would take, in the rarest of moments, hold of the real truth, as his gran saw it—that Drystan was dead, and Cuthbert himself was actually the last to carry the Wonderments. But such knowledge, in the infrequent seconds that his mind would allow for it, proved such a crushing burden that he spent his life hiding from it—in Flōt stupors, in shame, in delusions florid and incessant. But Drystan and the Black Country of childhood would not stay away forever.