Berg

by Ann Quin

A week spent in an alien town, yet no further progress—the old man not even approached, and after all these years, the promises, plans, the imaginative pursuit as static as a dream of yesterday.

Later Uncle Billy, home on leave, drunk, drenched with sweat and tobacco smells, drawing you over his knees; kissing taboo, you just confirmed, it’s dirty, not the thing to do, leads to other things. Like photos of nudes, Nicky and Bert kept pasted in their scripture books, relieving the laceration of Miss Hill’s vagina; spinsterhood personified, with her sadistic fascination for boys’ backsides. Alistair Berg come here, bend over please.

their sex life hardly concerned him, not at the moment anyway; let the interpretation of their relationship remain in the abstract.

The tragic sense of destiny is inherent in every man; but I defy fate, I alone am responsible for every action, every scene; in my nothingness I will create the idea, I shall see what I have imagined, and from that alone will spring my entire actions.

If I simply say ‘I am’, or ‘I love’, these are hardly enough, not even the most indulgent of all actions ‘I shall kill’ can make me declare ‘I am’ therefore God is. Why the power, the grace of being a god momentarily, surely one can gain this state for longer?

Berg scratched his wrists, four fingers that meant nothing to him in that moment, an action performed regardless of conscious thought; desire caused half an hour before perhaps, with the space of light years, how many times would the desire be followed by coldblooded action? Defeat the desire and act.

Oh yes you were singing green in a golden age, dancing by the waters’ edge, under a mosaic sky; feather-crowned, grass-patterned thighs, and seven-leagued boots, petrified mud, magenta amazed. Birds’ eggs for sale, a heart in exchange; sherbet-stained, lolly-pop thumbs, liquorice hair—ringlets up to the age of five, afterwards wrapped in tissue paper, kept in the right-hand side of the chest of drawers in Aunt Flo’s room, next to her own, when she was a girl, long black tresses which she fingered with that far away look.

Somewhere at the back of his mind, yes he had probably been considering it for some time, but immediately dismissed: such an absurd, fantastic idea: To take his father’s corpse back home to Edith—the trophy of his triumphant love for her! In a Greek play they’d have thought nothing of it, considered to have been a duty, the final act of what the gods expected from their chosen hero.

Is there still a world outside this area? Of course there is, you fool, you can’t expect to be a god and switch life on and off like an electric light.

But I don’t believe in God, and how boring heaven must be just looking at His face, wouldn’t hell be more fun?

Like entering the sea. The sea alone. Alone by the sea. By the sea. Alone. By yourself. Oh it’s nice when you do that, do it again, oh it’s lovely. Nathy, oh Nathy my darling.

He weaved silently round the room—a salamander, whose incandescent spirit possessed the gift of a thousand lives.