The Man Within My Head Read Online Free Page A

Lakers shooting guard whose poster I put up on my wall in high school, near London, to mock the copy of
Agamemnon
on my desk. He was never a writer I dreamed of becoming, a wise man on top of things. If anything, as the product of the England where I grew up, he was part of all that I was trying to put behind me; he belonged with the hesitant stutter of the radiator in the red-brick classroom, the low grey skies and weathered walls that put us in our place and kept us there; he was the kind of writer teachers would urge us to pick up in the holidays, or enlist in their cunning gambits as they handed out this term’s divinity textbook, shrewdly called
Guard Thou Our Disbelief
.
    “Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower,” he’d written in
The Quiet American
—it was all but the heart of his doctrine and his work—and as soon as one voice is answered, there is another, then another, and that one may be inside of us. That wasn’t what we wanted to hear at all.

    B ut there he is, in spite of everything. Not a hero or a counselor or the kind of person I would otherwise want to claim as kin. I see the gangly, long-legged figure graciously receiving a visitor in his room and keeping the intruder at bay with an offer of a drink, folding his awkward limbs around himself on the sofa; I see the high color in his cheeks, and the pale, unearthly blue eyes that speak to everyone of the troubled depths he’s both concealing and perceiving in the world. He talks in a slightly strangled English voice, surprisingly thinand reedy, and, when amused, he breaks into an unhardened, high-pitched giggle, suddenly, that equally abruptly stops, as if he’s been caught out, the mischievous boy escaping, for a moment, from the sharp-eyed keeper of his own counsel. “A precocious schoolboy,” his friend Lady Read noted once, “with tremendous depths … and these are the depths one doesn’t enquire into.”
    I remember walking into a long-distance telephone parlor in the sleepy Mexican town of Mérida one hot August afternoon. I was with Hiroko, sharing with her the pyramids nearby, and we needed to make a call back to Japan. In 1996 telephones weren’t easy to come by in such places, and we knew a call from our hotel room would deliver us instantly into static, or possible bankruptcy at the same time.
    We wandered down the main street after lunch, away from the main plaza, strolling along the side of the road where there was shade, past cafés and little tourist shops, brightly colored piñatas and swinging donkeys, and came at last upon a little travel agency that advertised “International Calls.” Just like the places in California where Mexicans call back home, though here it was we who were the petitioners, and the ones who could barely speak the language. We went in and saw three little wooden booths—confessionals, in effect—and, in front of them, a counter and a young Mexican woman.
    In fumbled Spanish I told her that we wanted to place a call to Japan and, nodding, she began completing, very slowly, a request form on a pad of paper. As she did so, a man came out from the back—the boss—and, to my surprise, I saw that he was from India, surely the only person of Indian descent other than myself in this provincial Yucatán town. Perhaps he had seen me through a spyhole and wanted to satisfy his curiosity,as now I did mine? Perhaps he was simply eager, as I was, to find someone to speak English to? In either case, I might, at some level, have been looking at a reflection of myself, in this unlikely soul, in his thirties, alert and clearly inquisitive, who had chosen to live in a forgotten foreign place far from the obvious sustenance of home.
    How had he gotten here? How long had he been here? Who else was with him? My questions began to multiply and he, perhaps grateful for some company, began to ask me similar questions in return. I didn’t quite elucidate that I lived in a tiny neighborhood in rural