Somehow time had managed to crawl as far as three-twenty, and Gabriel was now crammed up at one end of a damp bench, thigh to thigh with a family of tourists from Salford. Doggedly, he was forking his way through a medley of multicolored Chinese food, all the favorites thrown in together—sweet and sour, black bean, oyster mushrooms, nonprawn prawn, reconstituted chicken, debeefed beef. Imagining that he was an astronaut helped: then it tasted kind of interesting, and he felt oddly grateful, appreciative of human science.
It seemed as if it had been three-twenty for ages; as if the whole day had subsided at three-twenty and now lay in a slag heap of wet dust, rubble, and contorted masonry. It felt as if old Father Time himself—exhausted, depressed, sick to the back teeth of the endless tick-follows-tock of it all—had simply downed tools (at long last) and strode offsite, bound for the recruitment agent’s office—I want to switch dimensions, chief, I’m through with the fourth; it’s not a job, it’s bloody slavery, that’s what it is. It’s about time I traded up. Something out of the range of these ignorant bastards, please. I hear the ninth is cushdie.
The last other time Gabriel could remember was seven-seventeen, when he had been woken by Lina’s alarm clock. She liked to set it three minutes before she wanted to get up. And about three hours before he did.
The outer edge of the nearest plastic awning did not quite cover his table, and an uneven veil of runoff water was dripping onto the heads of the poor tourist children opposite as they waited for their oblivious parents to finish ramming spring rolls into themselves. Lina had disappeared.
He returned his attention to his own carton. He wondered how far from an actual chicken a piece of chicken in a Chinese chicken dish could go and still get away with being called a piece of chicken. Of course, these nameless cubes (tasting of chalk and chamois leather) had nothing to do with young hens roaming around the farmyard; nothing to do with the main bits of even a battery bird, not leg nor breast; and nothing to do with the secondaries either—the wings or the feet; nothing to do with livers, gizzards, or neck; nothing to do with bones or beaks or feathers. No—at best, it was just about possible that these bits he was now eating had once been on the same factory floor as other meats that had known a few chicken pieces in their youth. And that was probably all the acquaintance with chicken they had ever garnered. So you had to credit them for their audacity—they were quite prepared to go out into the world armed with nothing by way of a briefing save these old-timers’ stories of what chicken used to be and just… just fake it, just belligerently pretend. Come on, then, you fuckers, if we’re not chicken, then what are we? Huh? If we’re not chicken, then don’t eat us. Ha… see… you are doing it! You’re eating us! Fucking A.
They had been attempting to have their lunch together amid the busy food booths in Camden Market because it was here that Lina had arrived at the end of her endurance. Having wandered from place to place all the way up Camden High Street, turning down each with some (admittedly accurate) remark on the decor or menu or staff or seating plan, she had become so hungry that she could barely speak. And for some reason her hunger increased at the same rate as her annoyance, so that by the time they arrived at the Old Stables booths at the Chalk Farm end, she was furious. She could go no farther; she had to eat. Like Joan of Arc sacrificing herself (for God, for France), she had thrown herself into the midst of the antiprawn prawns in sauces unnamed and unnamable. Do unto me what you will; I care no longer.
Mercifully (or even more destructively), Lina’s rages were always speechless and internal. And though Gabriel genuinely felt for her—was he not a fellow soldier in the silent wars of the subconscious?—he had learned to say nothing when she got this way, as she did three of four times a year. No species of humor, no mode of cordiality, no method of clowning or conversation could draw her out of the tight angry spiral into which her spirit plunged. His every gambit only made it worse. A few days later, when she was herself again, she would calmly explain that a whole host of troubles contributed—her parents’ divorce, things not exactly perfect, local rudenesses suffered (perceived or actual), the cold, the wet, the passages of the moon—but no, he was not to worry, it certainly wasn’t anything to do with him. More and more, though, he had started to doubt her. No, that too was disingenuous. Actually, he had long been utterly convinced that he was the root cause—the dark energy that caused her universe to continue falling apart when it should by now have stabilized. And if she was not lying to avoid some deeper conflict or issue (and he could think of one or two), then her endlessly generous subconscious was protecting them both from the same by citing the moon. She was displacing. Yes, it was all him.
And so there they were, an hour later, with plastic chopsticks, cartons, and sodden napkins. Desperate. The rain and the cold did not help. Nor that she had not found whatever it was that they were supposed to be looking for. Nor that the whole expedition had been her idea because she wanted to “do something” with her Saturdays. Nor that he was, if anything, in far greater disarray than she. Nor, indeed, that he still loved her with a confusing conviction.
He had watched supportively as she had bought herself her carton’s worth. He had watched tenderly as she carefully spread three purpose-recruited plastic bags across her side of the bench to ensure no possibility of dampness. He had watched gingerly as she had put a chopstick’s worth into her pretty mouth. He had watched forlornly as she promptly spat it out into her napkin in disgust.
“I can’t eat that,” she had said, a look of horror on her face—as if they two were alone in some forgotten Vietcong camp facing roach fried rice forever. “I can taste the dye.”
“Get something else, then.” He was deep into his own carton already.
“How can you eat it?”
“It’s not too bad.”
She had looked at him as if he were a man capable of surprising her only in his ability to conjure up new lows from human existence. And of course he felt there was nothing else to do but go for another mouthful.
He had meant to antagonize her, perhaps. But he had also actually meant it: there were a million worse meals being served up on the planet every second, and a whole lot of meals not being served up at all. It wasn’t too bad. He had watched her fold the napkin neatly (almost madly, he thought), lean over, and place it in the nearby bin, following it quickly with the rest of her food. Then she rose silently—incandescent—and set off to get something else to disgust her.
Now she had disappeared
He wondered how much time he had.
Preoccupied wasn’t really the word for it.
He was disintegrating.
And even this he wasn’t doing properly, because every time one part of his mind began to address the questions, every time he felt the emotional panic rising as he tried once again to confront himself, another part of his mind would remind him of something horrific happening elsewhere on the planet and in so doing render his own problems and predicament infinitely unimportant, unworthy of thought or time or even feeling. And in this way he continually hijacked himself. But this too he only managed to do unsatisfactorily. (Mania, definitely a mania of some sort.) Because of course he continued to live and think within himself, and within himself the questions remained, returning every few hours, cycling back up to the forefront of his mind regardless of the rest of the world and all its undeniably greater misery. Despite these hijacks, despite everything, he was still himself; still young enough, not subjugated, not tortured, not diseased, not dying, but still living where he lived, a healthy representative of the first adult generation of the new century. The very latest wave of humanity. And he was still required to make an intelligent fair-hearted go of it, just as all the parallel Gabriels he imagined among the Victorians or the Renaissance courtiers or the flappers or the Athenian senators or the Minoans or the Aborigines or the Jutes or the twelve tribes of Israel or the Mongols had been required to make a go of it before him. (Curiously, the beef tasted of… of real chicken.) And yet it seemed to him that he was uniquely required to live and act against a social background of near-total doubt. Any other Gabriel from any other time and place would at least have been able to believe in something. Sure, these other Gabriels might have had a lot of shit on their plates—war, disease, violent death, and so on. (And better chicken.) But not this… not this complete and utter evaporation of all possible belief, or consistency, or any good way for the intelligent man to live. (Might this pale and watery sphere once have been a proud water chestnut?) These other Gabriels had not had to face the fact that God was now well and truly dead, over, a calamitous joke. They had not had to face the fact that the medieval religions had grown senile, demented, and crazed, unable to contend with or relate to the present world in all its instant and tentacled reality (the flavor was inconclusive—might just as well have been a lychee); that, devoid of any great countervailing idea or ideal, capitalism was sweeping all before it (definite oyster mushroom); that conventional politics had been reduced to little more than a fretful soap (“crab” “stick”); that art was now measured not by any external litmus of quality or skill or even endeavor, and that so many seeming acts of creation turned out to be mere gesture and these were celebrated out of all proportion (prawns again, or maybe… goat); that all ideas had become small or embarrassing or superficial, languishing in the lowercase (bean sprout—GM, definitely GM); that the strength of an argument was now gauged only by the emotional temperature at which it was delivered; that science had become too fast for the executive or legislative to understand; that the media had grown mad with chasing what they thought the public wanted and the public mad with what the media fed it; that personal experience had become the tyrant of truth (rind? squid? pig’s ear?); and that right and wrong were now as lost to the world as a pair of penguins in an underground car park long ago sealed off by an earthquake and flooded over by a tsunami.