On Mark and A Season of Death

Excerpt from A Season of Death:

Page 239-241

I am a dreamer, a luftmensch with my head in the clouds, antagonising powerful people with my political antics. Johnny, by contrast, always knew how to win people over. Perhaps these parallel and divergent paths are the deeper structures that make up my story. In authorial terms, they take on an omniscient or third-person perspective, for my role has not been forged by my own wilful intentions. My mother is the main protagonist, pulling the strings that make up her sons’ psychological attributes, drawing two brothers into close but duelling protagonists. ‘The Fabulous Baker Boys’, we were called in an article in the Jewish press. And for our last act, horrifically unpredictable but consistent with a prewritten script, our lives have merged: as in the beginning, I am following him to his grave. We both have been stricken by upper gastrointestinal cancers. We are dying at exactly the same age. When I hear myself laughing, I hear his voice. It is as though I have embodied his flesh. He has become my dybbuk, the spirit that lies inside me, speaking through me, determining the length of my prognosis, two sons merging into one, over which my mother can no longer imagine a life beyond. …

How can I determine the truth of my story? I am like a book by William S Burroughs. My life can be cut into pieces and assembled in different ways, or is like a pack of cards that I can see my father shuffling before randomly dealing them out. A full house looks different each time. There is no linear story, or discrete chapters. There is no Before or After. There is only the projection of what was and what might have been: memory fickle, pliant, circular, fragmentary.

My beginning is my end. A child as an adult. An adult as a child. Riding the circle game until I am gone, leaving the detritus of my life to be picked up and told, and retold, by those who summon up my name. Dust to ashes. Ashes to dust.