The Impossible Thing
by John McGroarty
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: PART ONE: A Spanish journalist sets off from Barcelona for his Pyrenean retreat in order to escape the city’s August heat – and his inner monsters.
Swearwords: None.
Description: PART ONE: A Spanish journalist sets off from Barcelona for his Pyrenean retreat in order to escape the city’s August heat – and his inner monsters.
Those were the days when I used to drive out to the airport to watch the planes in the evenings. That’s when it really started. The impossible thing. It was summer: June, July, before it got way too hot. I would walk in the Llobregat Park and feed the ducks and watch the people on the beach. There was a guy that worked in the park who I wanted to be. I would climb up to the top of the wooden observation point and watch him through binoculars. He had an easy laugh and an interest in the visitors and carried out his work cleaning and dredging the little canals diligently. He was part of the natural fauna of the park. Something good. A force for good. I could tell. What I wanted to be. Sometimes I would walk down to the Carabineros house and sit down on the sea edge of the sand till the sun went down and try not to think. Then I would drive home on the Ronda, drink a glass or two of red wine, get into bed and endeavour to sleep. I knew I was depressed. I knew that I couldn’t continue like that. Like suffocating but being beyond breathing. It had come before. I had pills and drink to tranquilize it till the world’s night nature ran its course and the light came back. But this time it was something more. It wasn’t just about me. I fear it was about all of us. A deeper sickness. The worst kind. A disaffection. A sickness of the world. Then July passed to August and the real heat descended and my holidays from the newspaper came and we planned to go to the cool of the Pyrenees. Like every year. Our magic mountain retreat.
It was submerged in the specterless stream of insomnia that I saw this truth about us. About our lives. In the hour when the Furies and the Cyclopes and Charybdis and the Lotus Eaters would try to enter in through the pores of my ulyssesian skin and down through the aural canals into my deeper mind I saw myself and I saw all of you. It came as an annunciation. Either you are inconsolably alone or you are part of some hopeless crusade that will always end in despair. It was all lost a long time ago. Before we were even born. It was the passing of time and the decay and the fall of all things. The end of something. Its last days. The uncertainty that I had lived my life correctly. That I had done nothing to make things better. That my life had been a despair in an age of despair. That the end of this age of despair would bring one of even greater despair. And so on till the very end. If Cristina and I had had children maybe it would have been different. I could hear her sleeping in the next room. I admired Cristina’s pluck, her staunchness. How she lived her life like Sisyphus, constantly pushing the rock up the hill only to see it crash back down again and, with each backwards roll, come to rest with less ardour and less hope. I was sorry that I could not be like her. My absurd heroine. Like the man from the Llobregat park. My absurd hero. Like all the voyagers in the planes. The absurd contented and reconciled. Then the house shook. The lampshade swung and the whole building swayed. I ran out onto the terrace and saw a plane dipping lower and lower over the houses and hit the ground in a flash of blinding light. I thought that the pilot had got into trouble and tried to land on the Diagonal. I tried to run in to waken Cristina to tell her but couldn’t move and awoke and saw that it was just a dream and that the clock was ticking and the dark was still with me. I wished then that I could control the monsters. Yes, if we had children it would be different. I would have a purpose beyond myself. It would not just be my journey. Yet even that was not comforting. I thought about all the stories of my friends’ children. The absolute nihilism of youth culture. The nihilism of all. The failure of everything. How the irrational monsters were everywhere and how there was no alternative to the ugliness and the hatred and the slouching monster soon to be let loose upon the world. I could feel its approach. Just like Yeats’s second coming. The falcon unable to hear and the worst full of passionate intensity. You only had to read any comments section in the papers. You could take all the voices and print them out and cut them up and mix it all in a cauldron with paste and spittle and bile juice and from its depths fashion an immense and hideous behemoth which would crush all freedom and hope and destroy in a blind frenzy all that we could be. It was impossible. That’s what it was. Impossible to adapt yourself to such a world. To be happy in such a world. Yet I was unable to do anything. Trapped by my own fear and my own monsters. To act was impossible, too. All rebellion was futile. When all speak the most dignified thing is to keep silent. The end of the dream. Of the illusion. Of the affair of progress. The final nail in the great vision of the enlightenment. The impossible thing was two. The impossibility to adapt and the impossibility of change. I gave up the sleep ghost and got up. It was five thirty. I went into the kitchen and made coffee. We had planned to leave at seven. I could hear Cristina stirring in the bedroom. I sat down at the kitchen table and drank my coffee and thought about that guy from the park and what he was doing now. Maybe getting up and preparing himself for a day’s work as a natural thing of the park. Then my mind went from the park to the mountains and the drive. The route would not be through the mountains for fear of summer storms. We would go on the motorway up past Girona and Perpignan and stop in Carcassonne for lunch. Then continue on, skirting Toulouse and heading for Tarbes and Lourdes before arriving in Capvern. It had an air of being lost in time, Capvern. Like myself. Its days of glory over a hundred years ago. I had my own theory. That tuberculosis and the industrial age of Europe had made Capvern and its spas and healing waters prosperous for a while, living from the rich lung sick and the poor soul sick. I thought for a moment about the magic mountain, about the theory of time. About how young Hans Castorp finds himself in the eternal recurrence of the miasma and the magic of the mountain. Searching for the grail. Seven years of repetition and then certain death in the war. Mann’s theory that the road to health must pass through illness. That had been my theory too but the illness refused stubbornly to leave. If anything it was getting worse. My inner world was turning as dark and as tenebrous as Mann’s Europe. This would be our seventh summer in Capvern. Cristina was now up and was having breakfast and checking the bags and running off various checklists all at the same time. Having both had coffee and breakfasted, we went down to the car to start the journey.
I drove the first few hours. They were uneventful except for a delay of half an hour in a storm just before the French border. The rain fell and the mist covered all and the world beyond disappeared. I think that was the turning point. The watershed. Where despair starts to meet sweet acceptance. I’m sure you all know that moment. All you depressed ones. Then we were through the torrent and across the border and the rain stopped and the skies were blue and the air fresh and the clouds friendly. We stopped for coffee in a motorway café. It was like the natural park by the sea; no planes though; traffic hum and carbon monoxide which stuck to the hairs in your nostrils and perfect little plastic fields with farm animals and a duck pond. We watched it all through the big plate glass windows as if observing life on another planet while we finished our coffee. Cristina was taking photos non-stop and publishing them on the internet. She had a good eye. Likes came in through cyberspace from all parts. We only exist if we exist in the eye of the other. That was the success of it all. That human need. In this lonely age. Cristina was happy. I was glad to be away from work. Away from the idiotic assignments I had had recently. Interviews with minor celebs and gossipers. The great calling of journalism reduced to competing for corporate cash and attracting the eye of the mob. I was worse than depressed. I was embittered. The thing I had always promised myself I would never become had taken hold. The great suffocation and the great beating down of the human life. When I was young that was what I wanted to write. Phrases like that. To improve the world. To take on the tyrannies. Now the tyranny was inside all of us. We had nowhere to turn. Could believe nothing. And so could not act. If all is doubt and suspicion, among all, how can we ever build anything? We were all individuals now. The great cult of the age. All called and all chosen. And nothing was true. That was what had really killed our profession. All journalists now. And writers. And editors. And photographers. And economists. And doctors. All Renaissance spacemen in the cyber ether. And somehow embittered. And desperate. We were back on the road and the time went quickly. Before I even realised Cristina was saying something about driving past the city and entering to the north. We had arrived at Carcassonne. She wanted to take some photos. There were great images from the motorway. I slowed down and we saw the medieval fort emerge from behind the tree line. There was an azure sky and a spectacular cumulonimbus cloud bank hanging over the battlements. It was a glorious sight and I felt my spirits soar. Cristina and I used to come here a lot when we were young. The memories stimulated a burst of happy juice in my veins and I became euphoric. We took the turning and after a bit of driving around found a parking space. It was still too early for lunch so we wandered around the city. It was August and the crowds were monstrous. Packs and hordes and gaggles. I remembered the time we came at Christmas and were almost completely alone. How we had dinner in empty restaurants and wandered for hours through the solitary streets. When we had dinner one night and Cristina told me of her Sisyphus worldview. I told her about Camus. I think she liked the idea that she was an absurd heroine. Yes, she said, the knocks keep your feet on the ground and remind you that you’re just a human being. She then told me about how she first learnt what all the great modern philosophers have taught. She went to a religious school. Her parents sweated to pay for it and give her a chance. One time Cristina organized a revolt against a really nasty teacher who denigrated and humiliated all of them. There was a lot of talk and indignation and one day when the headmaster entered the class Cristina stood up and started to accuse the teacher and voice all the complaints of her classmates. Not one other child supported or backed her up. Not one. Only she was punished. Cristina said that that was when she knew she was alone and could only depend on herself. She did that and stuck to her books and her career and made something of her life. I often wonder why she loves me. Why she doesn’t find somebody stronger. I suppose it’s because she won’t be an absurd heroine for anyone else. Just somebody’s absurd wife. Finally we had a sandwich down by the river. It was market day and we bought some food and wine for dinner and got back on the road. In little under an hour my ears started to pop and I knew we were ascending up to one of the high places of the world. We could see the mountains. They towered over everything. We were there, checked in, and up walking in the hills in less than an hour. After the crowds of Carcassonne this was freedom. We walked for hours and picked out the mountains and chateaus from the guidebook. We already knew many of the names from memory. That first night was sublime. The cloudbanks we had seen over Carcassonne were everywhere and there was a far off roll of thunder. I was feeling better and the despair of the last few months had lifted and I was happy. I apologized for my sadness of late. I even started to make jokes. I suffer from an inverse Foehn effect, I told her. The wind which sweeps down the lee side of the mountains and makes people crazy has the opposite effect on me. It clears my head and brings back sanity. That night we drank a bottle of wine and watched Chinatown on CD. It’s one of our favourite films. Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown, Cristina said sleepily, before turning out the light. At that moment she was right and I wish I had. I really wish I had.
Continue to Part Two.
It was submerged in the specterless stream of insomnia that I saw this truth about us. About our lives. In the hour when the Furies and the Cyclopes and Charybdis and the Lotus Eaters would try to enter in through the pores of my ulyssesian skin and down through the aural canals into my deeper mind I saw myself and I saw all of you. It came as an annunciation. Either you are inconsolably alone or you are part of some hopeless crusade that will always end in despair. It was all lost a long time ago. Before we were even born. It was the passing of time and the decay and the fall of all things. The end of something. Its last days. The uncertainty that I had lived my life correctly. That I had done nothing to make things better. That my life had been a despair in an age of despair. That the end of this age of despair would bring one of even greater despair. And so on till the very end. If Cristina and I had had children maybe it would have been different. I could hear her sleeping in the next room. I admired Cristina’s pluck, her staunchness. How she lived her life like Sisyphus, constantly pushing the rock up the hill only to see it crash back down again and, with each backwards roll, come to rest with less ardour and less hope. I was sorry that I could not be like her. My absurd heroine. Like the man from the Llobregat park. My absurd hero. Like all the voyagers in the planes. The absurd contented and reconciled. Then the house shook. The lampshade swung and the whole building swayed. I ran out onto the terrace and saw a plane dipping lower and lower over the houses and hit the ground in a flash of blinding light. I thought that the pilot had got into trouble and tried to land on the Diagonal. I tried to run in to waken Cristina to tell her but couldn’t move and awoke and saw that it was just a dream and that the clock was ticking and the dark was still with me. I wished then that I could control the monsters. Yes, if we had children it would be different. I would have a purpose beyond myself. It would not just be my journey. Yet even that was not comforting. I thought about all the stories of my friends’ children. The absolute nihilism of youth culture. The nihilism of all. The failure of everything. How the irrational monsters were everywhere and how there was no alternative to the ugliness and the hatred and the slouching monster soon to be let loose upon the world. I could feel its approach. Just like Yeats’s second coming. The falcon unable to hear and the worst full of passionate intensity. You only had to read any comments section in the papers. You could take all the voices and print them out and cut them up and mix it all in a cauldron with paste and spittle and bile juice and from its depths fashion an immense and hideous behemoth which would crush all freedom and hope and destroy in a blind frenzy all that we could be. It was impossible. That’s what it was. Impossible to adapt yourself to such a world. To be happy in such a world. Yet I was unable to do anything. Trapped by my own fear and my own monsters. To act was impossible, too. All rebellion was futile. When all speak the most dignified thing is to keep silent. The end of the dream. Of the illusion. Of the affair of progress. The final nail in the great vision of the enlightenment. The impossible thing was two. The impossibility to adapt and the impossibility of change. I gave up the sleep ghost and got up. It was five thirty. I went into the kitchen and made coffee. We had planned to leave at seven. I could hear Cristina stirring in the bedroom. I sat down at the kitchen table and drank my coffee and thought about that guy from the park and what he was doing now. Maybe getting up and preparing himself for a day’s work as a natural thing of the park. Then my mind went from the park to the mountains and the drive. The route would not be through the mountains for fear of summer storms. We would go on the motorway up past Girona and Perpignan and stop in Carcassonne for lunch. Then continue on, skirting Toulouse and heading for Tarbes and Lourdes before arriving in Capvern. It had an air of being lost in time, Capvern. Like myself. Its days of glory over a hundred years ago. I had my own theory. That tuberculosis and the industrial age of Europe had made Capvern and its spas and healing waters prosperous for a while, living from the rich lung sick and the poor soul sick. I thought for a moment about the magic mountain, about the theory of time. About how young Hans Castorp finds himself in the eternal recurrence of the miasma and the magic of the mountain. Searching for the grail. Seven years of repetition and then certain death in the war. Mann’s theory that the road to health must pass through illness. That had been my theory too but the illness refused stubbornly to leave. If anything it was getting worse. My inner world was turning as dark and as tenebrous as Mann’s Europe. This would be our seventh summer in Capvern. Cristina was now up and was having breakfast and checking the bags and running off various checklists all at the same time. Having both had coffee and breakfasted, we went down to the car to start the journey.
I drove the first few hours. They were uneventful except for a delay of half an hour in a storm just before the French border. The rain fell and the mist covered all and the world beyond disappeared. I think that was the turning point. The watershed. Where despair starts to meet sweet acceptance. I’m sure you all know that moment. All you depressed ones. Then we were through the torrent and across the border and the rain stopped and the skies were blue and the air fresh and the clouds friendly. We stopped for coffee in a motorway café. It was like the natural park by the sea; no planes though; traffic hum and carbon monoxide which stuck to the hairs in your nostrils and perfect little plastic fields with farm animals and a duck pond. We watched it all through the big plate glass windows as if observing life on another planet while we finished our coffee. Cristina was taking photos non-stop and publishing them on the internet. She had a good eye. Likes came in through cyberspace from all parts. We only exist if we exist in the eye of the other. That was the success of it all. That human need. In this lonely age. Cristina was happy. I was glad to be away from work. Away from the idiotic assignments I had had recently. Interviews with minor celebs and gossipers. The great calling of journalism reduced to competing for corporate cash and attracting the eye of the mob. I was worse than depressed. I was embittered. The thing I had always promised myself I would never become had taken hold. The great suffocation and the great beating down of the human life. When I was young that was what I wanted to write. Phrases like that. To improve the world. To take on the tyrannies. Now the tyranny was inside all of us. We had nowhere to turn. Could believe nothing. And so could not act. If all is doubt and suspicion, among all, how can we ever build anything? We were all individuals now. The great cult of the age. All called and all chosen. And nothing was true. That was what had really killed our profession. All journalists now. And writers. And editors. And photographers. And economists. And doctors. All Renaissance spacemen in the cyber ether. And somehow embittered. And desperate. We were back on the road and the time went quickly. Before I even realised Cristina was saying something about driving past the city and entering to the north. We had arrived at Carcassonne. She wanted to take some photos. There were great images from the motorway. I slowed down and we saw the medieval fort emerge from behind the tree line. There was an azure sky and a spectacular cumulonimbus cloud bank hanging over the battlements. It was a glorious sight and I felt my spirits soar. Cristina and I used to come here a lot when we were young. The memories stimulated a burst of happy juice in my veins and I became euphoric. We took the turning and after a bit of driving around found a parking space. It was still too early for lunch so we wandered around the city. It was August and the crowds were monstrous. Packs and hordes and gaggles. I remembered the time we came at Christmas and were almost completely alone. How we had dinner in empty restaurants and wandered for hours through the solitary streets. When we had dinner one night and Cristina told me of her Sisyphus worldview. I told her about Camus. I think she liked the idea that she was an absurd heroine. Yes, she said, the knocks keep your feet on the ground and remind you that you’re just a human being. She then told me about how she first learnt what all the great modern philosophers have taught. She went to a religious school. Her parents sweated to pay for it and give her a chance. One time Cristina organized a revolt against a really nasty teacher who denigrated and humiliated all of them. There was a lot of talk and indignation and one day when the headmaster entered the class Cristina stood up and started to accuse the teacher and voice all the complaints of her classmates. Not one other child supported or backed her up. Not one. Only she was punished. Cristina said that that was when she knew she was alone and could only depend on herself. She did that and stuck to her books and her career and made something of her life. I often wonder why she loves me. Why she doesn’t find somebody stronger. I suppose it’s because she won’t be an absurd heroine for anyone else. Just somebody’s absurd wife. Finally we had a sandwich down by the river. It was market day and we bought some food and wine for dinner and got back on the road. In little under an hour my ears started to pop and I knew we were ascending up to one of the high places of the world. We could see the mountains. They towered over everything. We were there, checked in, and up walking in the hills in less than an hour. After the crowds of Carcassonne this was freedom. We walked for hours and picked out the mountains and chateaus from the guidebook. We already knew many of the names from memory. That first night was sublime. The cloudbanks we had seen over Carcassonne were everywhere and there was a far off roll of thunder. I was feeling better and the despair of the last few months had lifted and I was happy. I apologized for my sadness of late. I even started to make jokes. I suffer from an inverse Foehn effect, I told her. The wind which sweeps down the lee side of the mountains and makes people crazy has the opposite effect on me. It clears my head and brings back sanity. That night we drank a bottle of wine and watched Chinatown on CD. It’s one of our favourite films. Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown, Cristina said sleepily, before turning out the light. At that moment she was right and I wish I had. I really wish I had.
Continue to Part Two.
About the Author
John McGroarty was born in Glasgow and now lives in Barcelona, where he works as an English teacher. He has been writing short stories for many years. His long short story, Rainbow, his novel, The Tower, and his two short fiction collections, Everywhere and Homo Sacer, are all McStorytellers publications.
You can read John's full profile at McVoices.
You can read John's full profile at McVoices.