Outline

by Rachel Cusk

On his first visit to the gym he saw a beautiful girl exercising on a machine while at the same time reading from a large book of philosophy that lay open on a stand in front of her, and he could hardly believe his own eyes. He discovered that all the machines in that gym had bookstands. This machine was called a step machine, and it simulated the action of walking upstairs: from then on he always used it, and always with a book open in front of him, for the image of that girl – who to his not inconsiderable disappointment he never saw again – had fixed itself in his head. Over the course of the year he must have ascended miles’ worth of stairs while remaining in one place, and that was the image he had internalised, not just of the girl but of the imaginary staircase itself, and of himself forever climbing it with a book dangled just in front of him like a carrot in front of a donkey. Climbing that staircase was the work he had to do to separate himself from the place from which he had come.