I lie on my front and stare at the headboard, not wanting to turn and face her. A cold draft of air wafts across my bare buttocks. I can hear her getting dressed; if I pretend to be dozing she might leave in silence
No such luck: she speaks before heading for the door. “Thanks, doll. You were great.” The words hold the same amount of feeling as the fucking. The door eases shut and she is no longer there. Her absence makes more sense than her presence ever did. She was only here so that she might go away.
The thought confuses me.
I crawl into bed and pull the sheets up over my eyes, willing blackness to enter me and take me down, then feel afraid in case it does. When at last it comes for me, I smile. Then I know nothing at all. Darkness crawls through the windows and up onto the bed, but I am too numb to fight it so it gains entry with ease.
I miss the meeting the following day. A few hasty phone calls sort out the situation and I am soon sitting across a table from a fat man with a tiny pointy beard glued to the tip of his chin. He laughs at everything I say, forcing big bellowing noises up from the bottom of his gargantuan stomach. His shirt buttons are straining at the pressure exerted by his mighty physique and he smells of old bacon fat.
Similar meetings with facsimiles of this man take up most of the rest of the week. In the afternoons these clients, or their bright and pretty female assistants, take me to tourist traps that I recognise from countless movies. This just makes me feel as if I am an extra in a sequel to a film I’ve never even seen.
Grand Central Station. (The Untouchables)
Central Park. (When Harry Met Sally)
The Statue of Liberty. (Planet of the Apes)
The Empire State Building. (King Kong)
The site of the planned memorial, Ground Zero, at the foot of the tragic Twin Towers. (This will undoubtedly feature in a hundred movies not yet made.)
9/11. I remember watching the planes hit on my computer screen at work. The office was hushed, my colleagues awed into an uneasy silence by the drama and sense of occasion. The water cooler bubbled. A pencil rolled off a desk and hit the floor. Someone began to cry, muffling the sobs with their hands. Even the traffic sounds outside the plate glass windows were muted. I fail to connect the solemn construction sight before me with the insane chain of events I witnessed that day. Instead of a sense of loss and futility at the waste of so many lives, I feel the urge for a hot dog from the vendor we passed on the street five minutes ago. I wonder if they taste better than the ones we have England.
I suppose these sights are meant to impress me, to give me wonderful memories I can package up in ribbons and bright coloured paper to take home with me. But all they do is make me feel even more disconnected from the world around me, less substantial than ever.
One of the pretty assistants asks me out to a bar. She makes it clear that more than her company is on offer. I decline her invitation, and walk quickly away when she asks if I’d like to meet her male friend, Enoch.
I spend my nights at the hotel bar, drinking alone and wondering if the alcohol is making anything better.
I catch sight of the blonde woman from my first day one more time, but she is with someone else. She doesn’t even acknowledge me; probably fails to recognise me. I sit and watch her through the mirrored tiles, studying her moves, caught up in her display. She is like an actress, and the old man beside her is a captive audience.
A laugh.
A toss of the head.
A hand on his knee.
Sweet and sour suggestions whispered in his ear.
When they leave the bar I follow them to the lift. I stand by a pot plant and wait for the lift doors to close, shutting them both up in a metal casket. Then I head for the stairs, racing the lift to its destination. I check every floor as I reach the separate levels, not even thinking about what I am doing or what it is I expect to achieve.
By the time I reach the fourth floor, my breath a hot jet of air burning my throat, sweat running down the cold skin of my back, I see them disappearing into a room at the end of the corridor. His hand is resting upon her firm arse. Her arm is pressed into his side, kneading flesh. Needing flesh.
I approach the door to the room and wait, listening for the sounds of their transaction: the crisp fluttering of notes, like wings against glass; a low murmuring, breathy gasps that hitch when they reach a certain point; empty laughter.
I press the palm of my hand against the door. The wood is laminated: yet another layer of a manufactured reality. I strain to feel something from inside the room, a stray emotion I can possibly latch onto, a wisp of meaning in the chaos around me. There is nothing. We are all alone together, and this is what we do to break up the tedium, the slow decay that ends in the grave: we reach out to each other but rarely ever touch, missing the connection by inches, miles, light years…
I step away from the door, certain that it moved in its frame: a gentle pulsing sensation against the skin of my palm, a sense of dreamlike motion I cannot explain but which moves me in a way beyond all my powers of description. I think of fake plastic trees and depleted rain forests; of extinct species and genetically enhanced and mechanically recovered meat products.
3
At the airport I toy with the idea of jetting off to somewhere I’ve never even heard of, and even wait in line to buy a ticket. But then I see sense and walk away from the line, looking for my check-in desk. Wherever I go, it will follow me. This sense of dread and despair and…expectation.
I browse magazine racks filled with pictures of faces that seem about to crack. Darkness presses in from the edges of my vision, a stuttering display of shadow.
The flight home is mercifully uneventful. I drink more alcohol and glare at the other passengers, warning them not to disturb me. I make a small girl cry simply by the power of my gaze. Everyone is faded, a copy of a copy of a person; everything is synthetic.
Nothing is real, even
my
self.
TWO
We Are It
1
“So you’re home?” The welcome is hardly inspiring: Adi’s eyes are glazed over, like frosted glass on a winter’s day. She barely even looks at me; she just wobbles her head in my general direction. Her hair is a mess; her face is paler than I have ever seen it.
“Have you been taking your medication?”
She giggles. Then she turns away, dragging her feet as she walks across the room. I put my suitcase down near the TV and follow her into the kitchen, throwing my coat across the back of the sofa and watching it slip away down the back, between cushion and wall. The sound it makes is like a wretched sigh: the slow puling of breath between chapped lips. The room seems to shift like a gauze sheet, giving me a puzzling glimpse of something else beneath.
“How are you feeling?”
She turns on me with her eyes blazing: glaring, burning, stripping me down to the bone.
“Please.”
Her smile is awful, as if a sword is cleaving slowly through the jawbone. “I’m fine. Everything is the same.”
I count to ten.
“Max. Where is he?”
“Upstairs. Playing with his toys. He likes to be left alone sometimes.”
I can’t figure out whether it’s a threat or an indirect instruction so I leave the room and climb the stairs, my fingertips dragging along the rough wallpaper, my feet sounding hollow against the stiff wooden treads.