Somehow, though, he controlled himself, ignored the echoes of his mother’s voice (you would say it, wouldn’t you, Ma—you’d just come right out and say it), and tried to take advantage of Pablo’s horrified attention.
He repeated himself slowly. “We are not going to fight for this, Pablo. And it’s not just the cover.”
Pablo straightened his back and set his jaw, as if to arrange himself against the moment of his life’s greatest indignity.
“Also, I can see what you’re trying to do with the center spread, but it’s… it is all image, Pablo. The copy just has to be bigger than this.” Gabriel ran his finger along the bottom of the page, where Pablo had reduced the point size of Annabel’s (wretched) interview with a celebrity famous for forgiving her parents to something that resembled a slapdash massacre of starving ants. “Nobody is going to be able to read it.”
Gabriel began to turn through each of the layouts at speed. “And—I’m sorry, but we have to have headlines at the top. So pages five and seven, can you redesign? On nine, you’ve got the body copy running sideways—I think it’s sideways. We can’t do it. Sorry. Hamish hates all that space. So do I. So does everyone. Okay? Right. Readers’ letters should be the same font size—at least the same font size for each individual letter. And Spirited Away has to go back around the right way… Our readers won’t guess that they have to turn the magazine upside down for those pages. They’re desperate, Pablo. Let’s not make it any worse.”
Pablo’s eyes were two slits.
But Gabriel had moved beyond care. “The neobrutalist stuff, or whatever it is, that you want to do on the back—well, okay, I’ll allow that on the inside back cover. But. But Inner Space can’t stay in this… this galaxy effect. Yeah, I know what you’re trying to do—I get it. It’s just totally unreadable. And not really that clever. Spiral text—it’s for kids’ mags.”
“I’m not doing it. I’m not changing anything.” Pablo was actually crying.
Tears. This was a first.
“I’m sick of… I’m sick… I’m sick of you squashing my creativity.”
Gabriel felt the surge of his furious blood. Beethoven was creative, Pablo—Mozart was creative, Dickens, Dante, Kant, D&udie;rer, Newton, Raphael, Aeschylus, Balzac. Yes, there have been a good few genuinely creative human beings. But you’re not one of them. You are not in the least bit creative. You are not even talented. You just have a computer. That’s all. The same as every other mediocre fucker whose terrible shit we all have to suffer every second of the day. So let’s leave that word “creative” alone for a few decades, shall we? Let’s all stop pretending. There are no creative departments in London. Creativity is not copywriting or art directing, creativity is not interior, graphic, or fashion design, creativity is not mimicry or doodle, is not gesture or token, is not a clever text message, a new and even sillier pair of trousers, or an unmade bed, it’s not your shitty computer music, or your shitty homemade films, or your shitty Web site with a flashing cock. Creativity is… creativity is a massive and serious lifetime’s endeavor to further humankind’s fundamental understanding of itself. Creativity is 154 perfect sonnets and 38 immortal plays, creativity is 1,126 masterworks of music, every note perfect, creativity is E = MC2, the Rougon-Macquart cycle, the discovery of planets. What you do is total horseshit. Got that? Total and utter horseshit.
And suddenly it came at him like a whetted knife slicing out of the fog in which he was living: he wasn’t thinking like his mother at all, he was thinking like his father. The journey that he had feared in Petersburg was already under way. Thinking like a nasty, bullying, cowardly, small-time little bastard.
“Pablo—I’m sorry. No further argument about the changes. Just—”
“I really…” He was fighting through the tears. “I really do not respect you, Gabriel. You are a fucking fascist. A fucking homophobic fascist.”
“I’m neither of those things, Pablo. And you know that I am not.” Gabriel handed his colleague some tissues. The distress of others had always distressed him more than his own distress. He reached out his hand and put it on the other man’s shoulder as gently as he could manage. “I apologize, Pablo. You are a great designer. I mean it.” He spoke softly. “But please, can you make the changes? If not, if you still feel upset in half an hour, then let me know and I will do them.”
The fat taxi wallowed west on the Westway. All through the late afternoon he had been chasing so-called experts for quotes, opinion, insight… To no avail. Even down in the thickened sedimentary murk at the bottom of the journalistic swamp, the same rusty old rule applied: anyone worth speaking to was impossible to get hold of, and anyone free to talk or write wasn’t worth listening to or reading. He made a vow to go in even earlier tomorrow and track down at least one serious human being whom he might ask for information and guidance with his piece.
November nighttime London rolled by his window—white strip lights in the places of work, amber low lights in the bedrooms, the flickering blue of a thousand TVs.
His mind would permit him no rest.
Everyone said that it was unsustainable. Mother, sister, and the few friends who knew. But, Gabriel told himself, none of them could really understand it, or feel it, because none of them were inside the circumstances. None of them had the day-to-day experience. None of them lived it. No, Gabriel alone knew the truth: that it was utterly unsustainable. Because he alone had been sustaining it. For the past eighteen months.
Different parts of the heart—this was the way he explained it to himself. Indeed, this was the way he tried to explain it to everyone. You can love a sister and a mother, both entirely and at the same time, correct? But the love for them seems to come from different parts of the heart. One does not replace or override the other. Like the love parents evince for one child simultaneously with—yet separately from—the love for another, for son and for daughter. Or the love for closest friends. All of these loves—real, sincerely felt, ready to be tested—they all seem wholehearted in the individual case, and yet they all seem to come from a different space within the whole. I love my mother with all my heart and I love my sister with all my heart. These two statements are not mutually exclusive; one does not render the other nonsensical; rather, they are both meaningful, simultaneously. We all know this, intuitively.
But to take this a stage further, Ma, perhaps it has to be this way—necessarily, mathematically. Perhaps this is what it means to be truly human. Because, first, the human heart, where exercised, is found to have infinite capacity. (And if not exercised, then what is the point?) And second, because there are infinite infinities in just one infinity. This is the great paradox in the laws of our universe, and this is also the great paradox of the human heart. And these paradoxes are as necessary as the consistencies they defy. And that’s how it is for me with Lina and Connie, Ma: the love for one comes from a different place from the love for the other. And though I agree—of course, who wouldn’t?—that it may not be possible in practice to live like this, still, in terms of the heart, in terms of the reality of my feelings (the only terms that really count, Ma), I tell you it is possible. So please, consider deeply. We must all respect feelings. Do not say that it is not possible—a paradox, yes, a very human paradox, but not an impossibility. Quite the reverse. An affirmation of my humanity. Yes, believe me, it is possible. Different parts of the heart. I know—I live it: I am the proof. Every day of my life; every day of my life, Ma, I live it.