And then I acknowledged a fact: that this was the first time I had enjoyed something – properly enjoyed something – in months. Years, even. Sure, I had been diverted by things – old films, Wordle, crosswords, online chess, puzzle books, the occasional documentary, and had certainly been distracting myself since arriving in Ibiza – but enjoyment was something else. My anhedonia appeared to be over, thanks to a single glass of orange juice. I followed it up with a biscuit. It wasn’t as good as the orange juice, admittedly, but it was still pretty spectacular.
The Book
Richard Feynman was an erudite American physicist who wrote a lot about mathematics too. I used to read a lot of his books. They made very intimidating things like quantum mechanics feel relatively easy. Anyway, he said something that I have been thinking a lot about recently: ‘Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.’
Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.
This is true. And this is essentially what was beginning to happen to me. I was going deeply into everything without even trying. Orange juice, the sound of traffic, the distant barking of a dog. Everything had a sudden infinite richness and complexity to it, or I had sudden access to the richness and complexity that had always been there. The dog barking was probably the most interesting thing. I closed my eyes as I heard it. And I saw the dog in my mind, a tall brown hound of no identifiable breed, barking as he was tied up beside some stables. I even saw the horse he was barking at.
I tried to switch my focus to something else.
I opened up La vida imposible and it felt like it wasn’t a foreign language. I could read it. Not as well as I could read English, but I understood most of the words. I remembered a documentary on the radio about a man who could learn languages just by looking at them. It seemed I now had that ability. I read that the waters around the island of Ibiza had been chosen by the advanced inhabitants of some other world as their base on Earth. I went outside and looked at the flower again. The one that was meant to be extinct. I knew everything about it. I knew that the species had vanished when the last of its kind was bulldozed to make way for a hotel. I was mesmerised for a while. It was dark now, but that didn’t seem to make a difference. I was just looking at it, understanding it without any effort at all. Understanding its quiet purpose. The purpose of existing for the sake of existing.
I realised the time. It was one in the morning. It was so weird, how I was suddenly acutely aware of so much, while also letting big things – like what time it was, or even what date or day it was (17th? 18th? 19th? Saturday? Sunday? Monday?) – slip right by. I inhaled. The scent of a flower was no longer just a scent to me. It was a whole language, an advertisement of life.
I got ready for bed. And then, once there, I just stared at the ceiling, listening to the traffic.
White taxi.
Night bus.
Silver hire car with an arguing couple inside.
I wasn’t tired at all. This was unusual for me. I had never been an insomniac. Even in my younger years, sleep had been my default state. I’d not always had easy sleep, but I’d always had sleep. But now I was wide, wide awake.
I got out of bed.
I looked at the photo of younger Christina and the man with long hair. The one with the beach buggy in it. I realised I understood everything about Christina’s marriage just by looking at her image on the wall. That was the man she had married. Johan. He was a hippy and frustrated musician who stubbornly acted like it was still 1967 even in 1987. He had fallen for Christina, one night, while she had sung old Carpenters and Carole King numbers for a drunken off-season crowd at the Buenavista Hotel in Santa Eulalia. She had moved into this place a month after she and Johan split up, as she didn’t have the money to stay in their former place in Ibiza Town. Johan had never been rich, but he had been earning okay money as a pool maintenance man.
Johan, in that Dutch way, had been great at languages. English, Spanish, French, German, a bit of Portuguese. He had even learned Catalan, and fused it with Spanish as the locals did. They played music together. They’d had a baby together. Lieke, who would also become a polyglot and would one day achieve in music where her parents failed. The little girl in the photos with the teddy bear and the nervous smile. A world away from the strong, fierce superstar on the billboard.
Johan and Christina had both been fun on their own terms, both into music and dancing and life, but they argued a lot and they were both impulsive. There needed to be a responsible one, and neither of them fitted the bill. They both had flings with other people and even the good times were often lost in a haze of marijuana or a flood of booze. They should have divorced earlier. That was the rear-view mirror assessment, especially for Lieke, who was a fragile thirteen when they split up and went to live with her dad in Amsterdam. Johan never saw Christina again. And Lieke did, but not very much, because her mother got into strange beliefs she was embarrassed by.
People say that love is rare. I am not so sure. What is rare is something even more desirable. Understanding. There is no point in being loved if you are not understood. They are simply loving an idea of you they have in their mind. They are in love with love. They are in love with their loving. To be understood. And not only that, but to be understood and appreciated once understood. That is what matters. Unfortunately, Christina and Johan had none of that. They had been in love with ideas of each other, and had ideas of how their family could be, but with parenthood came reality, and reality was no match for either of them.
Fleetwood Mac
I wanted to hear music.
The old stereo from the eighties had a tape deck. I looked through Christina’s tapes. Blondie (of course). The Carpenters. Bob Marley. Fleetwood Mac. I put the Fleetwood Mac one on.
I listened to ‘Everywhere’.
It was the most beautiful, lush, intricate sound I had ever heard. For some reason I lay down. I lay down on the floor of the living room as the water in the olive jar glowed again. The shifting, glowing light matching the symphony of feelings, a compendium of every positive emotion I had ever felt. The music came to me as colours and as tactile feeling, like something that could be seen and felt as well as heard.
I stared at a book on the shelf. The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie. White letters on a blue spine. I had a profound sense that I could move it. As in, move it without physically moving it. Or rather, I had the sense that my imagination had the power to manipulate reality. I could see the billboard for the Eighth Wonder hotel across the street through the half-open curtain. Visualise your dreams and make them reality. So I did. The book nudged out on the shelf, inch by inch, before falling to the ground but not reaching it, just floating, no, held, because I could feel its weight inside me, the kind of hidden weight you feel when you realise you said something you shouldn’t have said. It made a circle in the air and it hurt my head so I let it go and it landed on the tiles as Christine McVie kept singing, her voice an exquisite ache of perfection. Complex, earthy, ethereal all at once.
My head pain subsided, and another song came on and I sat up and stared at the book on the floor and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at what had just happened and so I did both. And then the light in the glass jar faded and I went to bed again and lay awake until it was morning.
Even though it was now with the Guardia Civil officer, I remembered the letter Christina had left me, every word and punctuation mark, and found new meaning in it now. Particularly this part:
Oh, and most important of all: go to Atlantis Scuba at Cala d’Hort. Tell Alberto I sent you. He won’t charge you. Go and see the seagrass meadow. It is the oldest living organism on Earth.
And please, when you are there, keep your mind open. Any change that happens will be for the better. Trust me.
And after repeating this for the tenth time I closed my eyes and in my mind I saw a lobster running across the sand.
Watermelon in the Sun
The next morning, I was sitting outside the vegan café in Santa Gertrudis, and still thinking about the vision of the lobster and what it might have meant.
Alberto had told me to stay indoors but I had felt a need to get outside. If it was me who was the danger to myself, then surely it didn’t matter where I happened to be. Because I was always with my dangerous self.
And besides, I still had no idea if I could trust anything he said. What I did know was that I had the deepest and most pressing urge to explore, and to understand fully what had happened to me and what had happened to Christina. I sensed, deeply, that the answers were to be found outside. Also, and this is no small thing: I wanted to be outside. This was unusual. Ever since Karl died, I’d had zero desire to go outside or do much of anything. But now I was bursting with a curiosity so strong I could feel it like a soft motor, deep inside, purring in the depths.
And sitting there, outside in the sunshine, I knew I had made the right choice. My fruit salad arrived, and I stared at the plate of fruit the way you might stare at a painting by Matisse. I was mesmerised by every shape and every colour. The tantalising crescents of orange. The vibrant green of kiwi. The small spheres of blueberries like planets in a scattered solar system orbiting a passion fruit. Cubes of papaya. The reddish-pink triangle of a watermelon slice, dotted with black seeds, seemed particularly exquisite. Eating watermelon in the sun was such a wonderful feeling I wondered why I hadn’t spent more of my life doing it. I wondered why it wasn’t everyone’s aspiration. I wondered why every successful businessperson on the planet continued to work and visit offices and stare at computers when they could just quit and eat watermelon in the sun for ever.
But thoughts were entering my mind. And not my own thoughts either. The homesick thoughts of the waiter, who was missing his friends back in Murcia. The thoughts of another customer too. A local reading in the newspaper about record-breaking temperatures across the world. I sensed her worry, not just about the climate, but about her mother’s ailing health. I felt that worry as if it was my own. It passed through me like a cloud. But then so did the tentative happiness of three boys, walking by, fresh from the bus stop and on their way to the nearby international school.
It was all very strange. Alberto was right. He’d said, ‘the change will be very significant,’ and it certainly was. My heart raced. My body trembled. It was exhilarating and terrifying, and I wondered if I might die from it.
It is hard to put this into words because words are generally made for the five senses, and not for the sixth, or seventh, or thirty-eighth, or whatever this was. I suppose it was like a deep but inexplicable familiarity. As if I knew the whole world and its contents as well as I knew a close relative. Like I had known everyone and everything and I only had to look at someone to know them. It was the interconnectedness of everything made visible. It is all there if you know how to see it.
One of the most interesting and sentimental of all facts, one that I have always loved, is the one that says we are all stardust. The whole universe is inside us. Every element within us was made in a star. Nitrogen, calcium, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorous and all the other stuff. We are made of deep space and deep time and have been forged in supernovas (or supernovae, if we are being pretentious). An element, as you no doubt know, is matter that can’t be broken down into a simpler substance. They are the primes of the cosmos.
We are made of elements.
We have the unbreakable and the eternal inside us.
