• A Forgery
• Rachel Cusk (bio)

My husband had an operation, and for a while afterward he thought he would die. Because of circumstances he had to go through the ordeal alone. He returned from the hospital with a bag attached to the outside of his stomach for the feces to collect in and he had to empty this bag several times a day, as well as three or four times during the night, on his knees in front of the toilet bowl so that soon big, hard callouses had formed on the skin there. But in hospital he had seen that worse things happen to other people.

With these nightly disruptions, for the first time in his life he lost the ability to sleep. I told him that years before, when I myself first lost the ability to sleep through the night, I had adopted the practice of retracing a journey to try to find my way back into unconsciousness. It was always the same journey: from the house in the English village to which we had moved from the United States when I was a child, to the local market town. This journey of seven or so miles was one I had observed regularly through the windows of the back seat of the family car in the period immediately following [End Page 242] our arrival. At a certain point we moved to a different house in another village and no longer took that road to the town. But when I thought about it all those years later, I found that I recalled it perfectly. Each time I went over it, lying awake in the dark, I exacted more detail from myself. I traveled more and more slowly, partly because I knew that if I ever reached the market town it would mean my strategy had failed and that I was still awake. But no matter how slowly I went, my memory was always able to supply the matching images. It was a kind of test, as though of the significance of my own history, like the lists of important dates or the names of kings and queens that a schoolchild is required to learn by heart.

My husband was surprised to hear that I had done this, and so for the first time I considered why, in fact, I had. The journey from the village house to the market town had no particular interest or point of exception: it was boring, and this must have been the reason I had thought it would send me to sleep. What I had never considered was the quality of the attention my child-self had paid to it. I had known I could rely on that attention, all those years later, as on a space or location inside myself where the details of the journey were stored.

Pain and fear, as well as self-disgust, had changed my husband's character. He no longer felt the benevolence that once had flowed from his trust in life. That phrase—"trust in life"—was one he had used. He no longer contained the beneficence and joyfulness that for him had generally arisen from the condition of being alive. The memory of his time in hospital, and of the anguish he had experienced there, oppressed and exhausted him. Certain details—the frightful noises made by the patient in the next-door bed who refused to get up and simply soiled himself where he lay, the leather trousers worn by the surgeon on the morning after the operation when he came to deliver fateful news at my husband's [End Page 243] bedside, the male nurse who had stayed awake with my husband all night after the surgery, rocking him to ameliorate the effects of the anesthetist's mistake and talking of the Sicilian village from which he came—were, it seemed, indelible. Had he not been alone, had I been there to see it all with him, their power might have been less. For me, these details adhered to the recognizable pattern by which life attains its neutral balance—a general debt of mediocrity, failure and malfeasance, all redeemed by one outstanding action—but for...

• 伪造
• 雷切尔·库斯克（Rachel Cusk）（生物）

我丈夫做了手术，过了一会儿他以为自己会死。由于种种原因，他不得不独自经历磨难。他从医院回来时带着一个装在胃外面的袋子，以收集粪便，他不得不每天数次清空这个袋子，夜间则要三到四次清空膝盖，放在膝盖前。马桶座便器上很快就在那儿的皮肤上形成了又大又硬的老茧。但是在医院里，他发现其他人会遇到更糟的事情。

由于这些夜间干扰，他有生以来第一次丧失了睡眠能力。我告诉他，几年前，当我自己第一次失去整夜睡眠的能力时，我采取了回溯旅行的尝试，试图找到回到昏迷状态的方法。总是一样的旅程：从我小时候从美国搬到英国乡村的那所房子，到当地的集镇。在接下来的[End Page 242]之后的这段时间里，我经常在家用汽车后座的窗户上观察到这一大约7英里的旅程。我们的到来。在某个时候，我们搬到了另一个村庄的另一所房子，不再走那条路到镇上。但是，当我在所有这些年里都在想这件事时，我发现自己回想起来很完美。每次我越过它，在黑暗中清醒时，我都会从自己身上获取更多细节。我旅行的速度越来越慢，部分原因是我知道，如果我到达集市，那将意味着我的策略失败了，而且我仍然处于清醒状态。但是无论我走多慢，我的记忆总是能够提供匹配的图像。这是一种考验，似乎是对我自己历史的重要性的考验，例如重要学生的约会清单或国王和王后的名字，要求小学生认真学习。

我的丈夫很惊讶地听到我这样做了，因此，我第一次考虑了为什么这样做。从村屋到集镇的旅程没有什么特别的兴趣或例外：这很无聊，这一定是我以为它会让我入睡的原因。我从未考虑过的是我自己的孩子对它的关注的质量。多年后，我知道我可以依靠自己的注意力，就像在自己内部存储旅程细节的空间或位置上一样。

痛苦和恐惧以及自我厌恶改变了我丈夫的性格。他不再感到曾经对生活的信任所带来的仁慈。他曾经用过“生活中的信任”这个词。他不再拥有活着的条件所带来的一般的仁慈和快乐。回忆他在医院的时间，以及他在那所经历的痛苦，使他感到沮丧和精疲力尽。某些细节-隔壁床上病人起床时发出的可怕声音，他拒绝起床，只是弄脏了自己躺在的地方，外科医生在手术后第二天早上在他的家中传递重大新闻时穿的皮裤我丈夫的[完第243页]在床头，那个在手术后整夜与我丈夫保持清醒的男护士，摇晃他以改善麻醉师的失误所带来的影响，并谈论着他来自的西西里村庄，这似乎是不可磨灭的。如果不是他一个人，如果我去过那里与他一起看这一切，他们的力量可能会更少。对我而言，这些细节坚持着一种可识别的模式，即生活达到中立平衡-平庸，失败和渎职的普遍债务，所有这些都可以通过一项出色的行动来兑现-但是……