… Yes,
that Ovid.
The Art of Love.
The Metamorphoses. I’ve been reading up on
him, too.
[ ... ]
Yep, I guess I
am enabling
his fantasy by researching it for him. He doesn’t need much help,
though. He’s got the whole thing pat right down to his fingertips.
[ ... ]
No, I know Ovid wasn’t blind. Homer was, though. He’s got a whole theory about that which he’s been explaining to me …
[ ... ]
Well, if you
won’t listen to it, what good are you to me?
[ ... ]
Yes, I understand all that. I understand the
theory of it, but what good does
that do me if that’s what’s on my mind?
[ ... ]
Thank you. Well, anyway, I think it must have begun in the hospital. He was under for quite some time, an induced coma …
[ ... ]
Yes,
I’ll be very careful. For God’s sake! He had a neck drip, that’s the
thing. It was open permanently so that they could draw blood on a
regular basis. There must have been some discomfort from it … so,
voilà! Vampires …
[ ... ]
He wouldn’t talk to me at first. I had to visit every day to start with, but now it’s down to two or three times a week.
[ ... ]
About
the second or third visit. He started rambling on about the place he
was living – some frontier settlement it sounded like. I thought it was
memories from his past. He was still a bit groggy at that stage. But
after a while I realised there was a certain form to it. I realise now
that he was quoting poetry …
[ ... ]
No, not in Latin. In English. I guess they’re translations, or something like that.
[ ... ]
Oh, fairly conversational. That’s why it took me a while to realise what he was doing. Why? Is it significant.
[ ... ]
Okay,
anything that I remember must be significant to me. Nice turnaround
you’ve got going there. Fuck, I must be insane doing this! I wouldn’t
waste my time if I didn’t absolutely have to, you know.
[ ... ]
Fair enough. It’s true. It
is quite helpful to talk about him. And I
do want
to improve my clinical practice. You’re right there. Sleeping with
patients really isn’t the best way to make them better. I know that now.
I’ve had to hear quite a few people telling me that already …
[ ... ]
Whatever.
Anyway, getting back to the matter in hand, I didn’t realise what he
thought was going on for quite some time. I’ve been visiting him for six
weeks or so, you’ve got to realise! I wasn’t taking notes. I’m not even
sure in what order he said the various things, or when it all started
to click and make sense to me.
[ ... ]
No, it’s not much use from the point of view of understanding the onset of his delusions – if they
are delusions, that is …
[ ... ]
No, of course I don’t mean that I think he actually
is the Roman poet Ovid, magically transported into modern times in order to bring us news from Pontus …
[ ... ]
Pontus.
It’s where he was exiled. The Black Sea. Come on, call up your memory
banks or whatever it is you do – or maybe you don’t have access to more
general datafiles?
A small town called Tomi (or Tomis – they seem
to use both spellings in the reference books), in what is now Romania,
situated in the border province of Pontus. It’s where he was sent by the
Emperor Augustus for some unspecified offence, probably to do with the
morals of certain members of the Imperial family. Got it?
[ ... ]
Fine.
[ ... ]
No, actually it
hadn’t struck
me. You’re saying that I’m interested in this man’s fantasies because
they concern offences against morality, and that that equates with my
own misconduct against nursing professional ethics …
[ ... ]
I’m not quite sure why, but that theory really irritates me for some reason.
[ ... ]
No, I’m not saying it’s wrong. It’s actually pretty smart and insightful. It just irritates me.
[ ... ]
That’s what I’m trying to work out. I guess, to start with, because it makes me into such a
specimen –
an example of how everything that interests us is really linked with
some petty set of personal concerns. That there’s absolutely no
objectivity, no outside reality to attach yourself to.
[ ... ]
Yes, and I guess it
is because it’s a bit of an accusation, too.
[ ... ]
I think the main thing about it, though, is that it’s just another example of you
refusing to fucking listen to what I’m trying to tell you,
but instead trying to get me stuck in some snakes-and-ladders game of
random associations and pat bullshit explanations from you …
[ ... ]
Fucking right it’s aggressive! Try telling yourself a story sometime and see how calm
you feel at the end of it.
[ ... ]
Okay. I’m calm.
[ ... ]
Anyway,
can I go back to the blindness? From what I can tell, he has this idea
that he was offered a choice. Either he could get on a ship and be sent
off to this frozen hellhole up north, a place that practically no-one
ever comes back from, or else he could stay right where he was in Rome,
in his own house, in his own study – but blind.
[ ... ]
Oh,
I think staring at a redhot poker, or something like that. There’s some
really nasty details of how they used to blind people in Ancient times
if you want to look them up.
[ ... ]
Yes, of course, that’s my point. That’s how he’s accommodated what happened to
him with what happened to this poet in the past.
[ ... ]
That’s
what I don’t know. Maybe he was obsessed with the guy already. Maybe he
wrote a book about him, translated his poems – it makes sense. It’s a
pretty bookish apartment he lives in.
[ ... ]
Oh, talking books. Detective stories mostly. Thrillers. Nothing too intellectual. But he must have
been keen
on that sort of thing. You can tell by the way he talks – the mere fact
that he has these poems memorised, knows all these details about
Imperial Rome.
[ ... ]
And about vampires. That’s a whole other subject.
[ ... ]
Yes,
well, that’s the problem really. He thinks he’s this poet – he’s been
blinded and is still in his study in Rome, unable to read or write with
any facility, completely dependent on his nurses but unable to
communicate with anyone he knows.
[ ... ]
Those were the conditions. He has to live here, blind, as if he were
there –
send letters, give descriptions, the whole nine yards. If it ever gets
out that he wasn't exiled up there he’ll be executed straight away. This
way the emperor saves the price of a ship passage and salves his own
conscience a little bit, too.
[ ... ]
Because he didn't execute him right away, I guess.
[ ... ]
I
suppose he’s dictating to me. Some of the time, anyway. He feels this
need to keep up the dispatches from exile. They’re his lifeline, because
if they stop coming then everyone will assume he’s dead, and of course
he thinks that that means he actually
will be dead.
[ ... ]
Oh,
that the moment he stops writing someone’ll drop by and smother him
with a pillow and there’ll be one less uppity poet in town. It’s got to
happen
sometime. Either he dies of natural causes right where he is, or someone gets the bright idea of helping the process along.
[ ... ]
Yes, I guess it
is a
kind of hell. But it’s what he chose. He didn’t want to leave home,
didn’t want to see all that stuff with his own eyes. He prefers just
lying there imagining it and writing long descriptions of the local
customs and scenery in his letters.
[ ... ]
I don’t think he
would have
told me about it if he thought I was just another nurse. It’s the
vampire thing, the fact that he thinks I’m some sort of ghost who’s
haunting him that makes him confide in me. He’s shit-scared of me, to be
perfectly honest.
[ ... ]
Not because I draw
his blood. Because he thinks I’m feeding him mine.
Inheritor of silence / shall I be? / Black mass below us / above us only / sky ...
Wild geese draw lines / across an amber sky / Fish bask / in frozen rivers / generators die
