Homecoming Read Free Page A

getting stuck somewhere between the fourth and fifth floors of the architecturally uninspiring building. But the interlude had given him the opportunity to reflect on the current phase of his life. Between the desire for change and the anxiety to retain the familiarity of routines lay the tension of middle-aged living. It was a point of stasis that paralleled his predicament in the lift.
    There was something sacrosanct about the lack of motion, his unexpected zone of calmness, bare and without thediscordance of noise. Martin imagined a blown light fuse to enhance the insularity. There was ambiguity in the silence of darkness. Therapeutic comfort for the body and yet the fear of what the mind could regurgitate about a deeper darkness, which he had known.
    He wondered if someone had alerted the maintenance staff. There were always those who were eager to keep the tools of civilised life efficiently functional. In the meantime—momentarily he shut his eyelids—these slivers of time belonged exclusively to him. No obligations. Nothing that warranted his attention. The space around him was like a patch of cleared land, a life swept clean of accumulated junk.
    Suddenly he felt a slight jolt. The lift began to glide upwards again. The afternoon had been incapacitated for a few minutes and drained of its vitality. Martin deliberated about the crowded world outside, its frenetic pace and ceaseless ego-jostling. At times the sterility of emptiness was not such an unbearable alternative after all. Reluctantly he continued to contemplate how he would explain to Melanie Charles his failure in the unit on Ethics.
    His tentative knock brought a cheerful, ‘Come in!’
    He fingered the doorknob. His breathing was laboured. He considered walking away. A traceless disappearance would have been so much simpler.
    Throughout his chequered and uneventful tertiary endeavours, Martin had never seriously considered writing assignments or taking examinations. It wasn’t that he objected to the academic ranking system, but for him, a mark or a grade had no meaning. A degree was irrelevant.He was in his fifties and without any hankering for respectability or conventional employment. He had listened, discussed, read and learned. The purpose of education had been served.
    Melanie Charles smiled brightly as Martin shuffled in. As always, his eyes wandered to the unframed print stuck on the wall behind her table. The colours had faded. The edges were curled and torn. He was drawn to the clarity of the solitary face with the oval-shaped mouth wide open in an agonised cry of recognition of the darkness of one’s soul.
    What was worse, thought Martin, than the despair of turning inward and trying to know oneself? At best there were shards of images, transient and distorted. Faces depersonalised and sexless, whipped along by the feverish urgency of time. What was it that Heidegger had said? We are ourselves the entities to be analysed. And the end result of such scratchy attempts, Martin had concluded, was anxiety caused by the discovery that life was turbulent and confused.
    He wondered if his apology to the tutor sounded genuinely contrite. He had not submitted any of the written work prescribed at the beginning of the semester.
    ‘Martin, you obviously read everything on the reading list,’ she observed. ‘That’s unusual. So why…? You haven’t been ill?’
    He shook his head.
    ‘I thought you enjoyed the course.’
    ‘Immensely,’ he assured her hastily. ‘And I learned a great deal from you.’
    Melanie Charles was visibly flattered.
    ‘It was something you quoted from Nietzsche that really lifted my interest in ethics. It was in the very first tutorial.’
    She was unable to recall what she had said.
    ‘The bite of conscience is indecent,’ he reminded her.
    ‘Oh, I don’t remember what I was referring to then,’ she said stiffly. ‘Anyway, whatever it was must have made an impact for you to remember.’
    He always veered away as