The Gap Year, Part 2

******

The day left Douglas burdened with disgust, disgust at the people he had to deal with, disgust with his job, disgust with himself, at what he had become. His first thought upon leaving work was that the day had been crowded with noise. That thought was immediately followed by the admission to himself that he was also to blame. He had been too noisy. He had even enjoyed being noisy. He had enjoyed manoeuvring Lydia Paskings into cancelling her contract. He had enjoyed sorting Philippa out and removing the design department from her control. He enjoyed being Miles’s hatchet man. And the still, small voice at the back of his mind told him he should not have enjoyed those actions, no matter how necessary they had been. He hadn’t always been that way. There had been a time—surely there had been a time, he thought—when he would at least have tried to work with the two of them. It was as if the title of executive editor imposed a certain mode of behaviour quite apart from what he wanted to be. Words and names and titles had become tyrants that structured events and precipitated his actions. When had he let that happen? Had, he wondered, passed the point of no return? His life seemed to have escaped his control. Were his position and the status that went with it so important to him and his sense of self that he had to be what the job demanded he be?

It all came down to words. He used words the way a more physical man might use his fists, to batter and to wound. He had been trained to use words as weapons, to use them carefully to argue with implied disdain for his opponent’s intellect, to influence others with subtle deference and praise, to insult with the ironic quip. Even his pronunciations and his speech patterns immediately separated him from others and made his superior education apparent. Words were a constant invitation to misuse. He couldn’t control his use of them anymore. The wry comments escaped from his lips seemingly without thought on his part, bringing embarrassment to the target and amusement to the others. Was he capable of using words innocently again?

The quiet of his flat struck him the moment he walked through the door. The neighbourhood had little traffic at any time, but at night there was almost none. He was high enough above the street and the building solid enough that most of the noise was left far below. The front windows overlooked the park across the street. If they were open during the day, he could sometimes hear children playing there, but the park was seldom used at night, at least not by those who wished to draw attention to themselves by being noisy. He had bought the flat after the divorce, surrendering the one in which he had lived with Anne to her. He had brought only his clothes and books and personal belongings with him. All the furnishings had been new. He had intended to make it warm and inviting, but when confronted by a plethora of possibilities, he had opted to buy the first pieces of furniture that he found acceptable, a three-piece suite upholstered in an unobjectionably bland fabric. He had bought the hooks and wire necessary to hang his pictures but stopped after placing one above the fireplace. The others remained stacked behind the sofa with their faces to the wall. At first he had invited people over for drinks or simple dinners, but gradually he had abandoned even that effort. He now socialised elsewhere, meeting his acquaintances and business associates in pubs or restaurants or in their homes.

Douglas liked it that way. The flat was his sanctuary. Its lack of claims on him and its sterile stillness, its palpable chill, were tonics to the office and the world outside. Nothing intruded on him here, nothing demanded that he be this rather than that. At the office he was what it required him to be. With his sister and her family, he was the good brother and, if generous gifts of money on the customary occasions counted, a good uncle to her children. With his neighbours, he was, as they were, careful to observe the boundary between friendliness and intrusiveness. With those with whom he socialised, he tried to be intelligent and witty, not without charm. But in his flat, he was free to be silent, to abandon the masks he wove from words.

Words were his only skill, and he was good with them. Words provided his living, and his colleagues and the authors he published relied on him to provide the words they needed. Sometimes words seemed the only thing left to him. He had once calculated that he was personally responsible for publishing close to three million words a year. He figured that indirectly he added another two million. Speech added another several hundred thousand. There were so many words in his mind. Fragments, groups of four or five words, would drift unbidden into his thoughts. He didn’t know why they arose. He seldom could trace a connection between his present and the words from his past. He would be working at his desk, reading a sales report or writing a memo, and suddenly he would experience a phrase like ‘multitudinous seas incarnadine’.

Some mental quirk made his mind a random thicket of words in a dozen languages. And it had become worse as he had grown older. There seemed to be a bin labelled ‘foreign languages’ in his mind into which words from all the languages he had studied had been dumped. When he spoke French, he might insert a German equivalent in the middle of the sentence. Sometimes he felt that he hated all language.

His friends and colleagues treated his inability to forget as a parlour trick. His mind had become a reference work to be mined as a wonder or a resource. ‘Ask Douglas,’ they would say. ‘He’ll know the quote.’ And he did. He always did.

Words. Was it possible, he wondered, to live without words? Even the thought of doing so had to be framed in words. If one thought about being conscious, consciousness returned, in words. But was it possible to be conscious without words?

******

‘I don’t understand, Douglas.’ Miles lifted the letter from his desk and stared at it as if he expected it to speak to him.

‘I am resigning, Miles. As of May 30th.’

‘But why? You give no reason. Have you found a position with another publisher? Is it the money? We will better any offer you have been made.’

‘No, there has been no other offer. I am simply resigning. I plan to take a year off, and then I shall re-evaluate whether I wish to work again. A gap year, as it were.’

‘Gap years are for children, Douglas. People your age don’t take them. That’s ridiculous. If you need a leave of absence for, say, two months, I’m sure we can arrange that.’

Miles waved the resignation letter about helplessly. Douglas suddenly realised that Miles literally did not know what to do. This was the sort of task that he or someone else handled for Miles, and Miles had no idea of the steps he needed to take. ‘I will make all the arrangements with personnel, Miles. All the paperwork, that sort of thing. If I might make a suggestion, I think that Eleanor Williams is ready to take on more responsibilities. But it might be a good idea to separate out my financial oversight tasks and transfer those to Adrianna.’

As he had discovered in the past in dealing with Miles and had had so many occasions to practice, it was best to act as if the decision had been made and to focus Miles’s attention on the details of carrying it out. Miles wasn’t happy about losing his services, but he soon accepted that as a fact.

At the end of the discussion, Miles returned to the basic question. ‘But what will you do?’

Douglas had thought long about how he would answer that question. It was inevitable that people would be curious and want to know what he proposed to do during the year. But he was reluctant to tell them the truth, both because he knew that they would find it incomprehensible and try to argue him out of his decision and because he felt that his chosen course would remain his own possession if he kept it hidden. It would also be easier to follow it if no one knew what his intentions were. So he lied. ‘I’m going to travel. There are many places I’ve long wanted to see. But I don’t want to tie myself down to a schedule. If I find a place I like, I may decide to stay there for a month or two before moving on.’

His story was successful. At the farewell party on his last day at work, he was given a set of luggage and several items advertised as useful to travellers. His sister recommended some places that she and her husband had enjoyed.

*****

In May, Douglas spent his evenings and weekends preparing. He boxed his books and CDs and stored them, along with the CD player, the television, and the radio, as well as all the other noise-making and word-generating gadgets he owned, in the storage space in the basement assigned to his unit. He arranged with an accounting service to pay his monthly bills and for the telephone service to be suspended. He stripped his flat of everything but the essentials he needed. The evening of his last work day, he answered all the emails in his personal email account and then turned the computer off and carried it to the basement. It would remain off for the next year.

He returned to the lounge, turned on the one remaining lamp, and reread the memo he had written himself a final time. For at least the next year, he would reduce his contacts with words to a minimum. He would not initiate a conversation with anyone. He had thought about vowing not to speak at all but then decided that if the building manager came to the door and asked if he had a leak in the ceiling, he could hardly refuse to answer. And if he needed to visit a doctor, it might prove difficult to mime his symptoms. But he would keep speech to a minimum. Some trials runs and experiments had revealed that it was easier to say nothing in larger stores than in smaller ones. The workers in smaller shops interacted more with customers, but in large stores nothing more than a smile and a nod were required.

Nor would he intentionally listen to others speaking. Of course, he would hear others speaking on the street or in shops but he would not seek out sound of any kind.

And he would neither write nor read anything. He had removed all written materials from his flat. The only words that remained were the names on the appliances or the writing on food packages and the like. Covering those over would serve only to draw attention to them. He thought he could be disciplined enough to avoid all but the most cursory of contacts with the remaining words in his flat. When he finished reading the memo, he folded it and threw it in the bin.

He was ready to begin his search for silence, for wordlessness.

*****

Douglas quickly fell into a routine. He awoke early, between three and four he thought, and then went for a walk as soon as it became light enough to see. His route took about two hours to walk. He intentionally chose quiet streets. He seldom saw more than a few early morning joggers or people leaving for work. When he returned to his flat, he made a simple breakfast for himself. Then he sat in the lounge until late afternoon, when he ate his second meal of the day. After he had washed and put away the dishes, he resumed sitting until he went to bed around eight. He kept the drapes on all the windows closed and never turned on a light.

Words proved more difficult to exclude from his mind than he had expected, however. He would be out walking and glance in a shop window and see words. Every street corner had a sign. Every car and van carried a name. Words were everywhere. They were scrawled in the most unlikely places. Even in the park there were signs directing one to exits or to the children’s play area. He hadn’t noticed before how ubiquitous they were until he consciously tried to eliminate them from his life. Everything had a label, as if it would not exist if its name were not acknowledged in writing, as if we could not identify a loaf of bread unless its packaging stressed what it contained.

There was also, Douglas found, an extraordinary amount of speech on the street, even during his early morning walks. The quiet of a suburban street would be interrupted by the sound of the early morning news on a radio or television coming through an open window. Van drivers making deliveries to the shops or joggers rushing past him chattered into their phones. Even the earplugs he bought did not keep all sound out.

His days were filled with thought. He even thought about not thinking. Emptying his mind of words seemed an impossible task, the more so as he intentionally tried to do so. He tried staring at the wall and making his mind as blank as it, but the colour reminded him of the flat he had shared with Anne and that started a chain of thoughts about her and their marriage and the reasons for its failure. He tried occupying his days with simple repetitive tasks such as cleaning but found himself compulsively reading the instructions on the bottle of cleansing liquid.

He was more successful at carrying out his vow not to speak, but even in that area he found himself uttering a few words each week. Another early morning walker might nod at him and say ‘good morning’ as they passed, and without thinking Douglas would return the greeting. An assistant in a store would ask if Douglas had found everything he wanted and he would reply ‘yes’. Or a neighbour would stop him as he entered the building and comment on the weather. Douglas could hardly refuse to speak without making an issue of not speaking, which would defeat his project of rendering words irrelevant to his life.

His frustration with words intensified as he struggled to do without them. It was as if the words were fighting back, overwhelming him with their insistent immediacy, their indispensability, their ability to organise raw experience into chains of ideas, to structure chaotic reality to meet their nature. He began to dread each day with its new torments, the cacophony of sound and meaning that invaded his life as soon as he awoke. But he found no haven in sleep. His dreams grew to taunt him with words. He dreamt of vocabulary lessons, of words on chalkboards, books, manuscripts, memos, letters, shopping lists, notices in the tube stations, signs in windows, lectures, plays, movies, television programmes, newsreaders, presenters, art galleries filled with pictures of words, words painted on hoardings and pavements and the sides of buses, words interjecting themselves into his consciousness from signs, food tins, stray bits of refuse on the street. No matter where he turned, no matter where he looked, words attacked him.

His attempt to avoid words developed into a mania. He began to plot how to keep away from them. He put off shopping for food because the stores were masses of words. He took to rushing into the grocery store and quickly buying only items he could decant from the packages and store in plastic bags and glass jars. As autumn arrived and the days shortened, he began taking his walks in the dark. He kept his head down. He wore earplugs to exclude the noise. He cut the labels out of his clothes.

The breakthrough came unexpectedly. He wasn’t even aware of it until it was over. One day he suddenly realised that it grown dark while he was sitting in his chair. He hadn’t been conscious of it. The previous memory was of finishing the washing up from breakfast and stowing the dishes away. He didn’t even remember walking into the lounge and sitting down. But he had to have done so several hours before. He couldn’t call to mind a thing, a word, he had thought of during the interim.

Thereafter he found it easier to lose himself. At first he could do so only in his flat. But he soon learned to enter the blankness even while walking. Words and thoughts ceased to assault his consciousness. Objects, situations, presented themselves, and he dealt with them appropriately, but without words.

Douglas even found that he could choose to think in words, or not. He could choose to hear them, or not. He could choose to be conscious of them, or not. And when he opted to be in words, the words grew richer and more laden with significance. It was as if he came to them afresh each time and uncovered new wonders in them.

Words had lost their power, and he was gaining control over them. ‘In the beginning was the Word,’ the evangelist claimed. And there were as many beginnings as there were words. He could combine them in new ways, create new universes with them, each with a logic determined by the single originating word. Everything was possible. He had become the being whose word engenders a world.

Later, it would occur to him that he was becoming insane, at least what the world thought of as insane. The thought amused him. The belief that he had been liberated from words and had gained mastery over them would be seen as a delusion, the raving of a mad man.

(to be continued)