“Yes.”
“You said you envied me, once.”
“I do. You can vanish without a trace, and avoid conflicts such as this.”
“And personally? Do you envy me personally?”
She hesitated, sucking in her lower lip, rolling the mug of tea carefully between her fingers. Then, “Yes. In a way. I imagine that your condition leaves you free of certain considerations. You cannot plan — no, you can plan, but you cannot… agonise, shall we say, for the future, because you don’t have one. Is that too harsh? Is that unfair?”
I shrugged; neither fair nor unfair, true nor false — carry on.
“Nor can you wallow in the mistakes of your past, because the only person who knows them is you. Those you have injured, whose lives you have destroyed — the ones who would seek vengeance or cry out for justice — they have forgotten you. You have done material harm, yes, but emotionally you are a blank. Your actions are a lightning strike, to them, an act of God, or chance, not a human thing, not an actively conspiring mind seeking their downfall.”
Actus reus: guilty act.
Mens reus: guilty mind.
I commit a crime, and only I remember my guilt.
“You have a kind of freedom,” she said. “Free from the eyes of the world; free from a kind of suffering. It is, in its way, enviable.”
Silence a while.
I asked, “Is it hard? Do you find it hard?”
“What?”
“Answering to yourself.”
“No,” she replied, soft as the sea, steady as the stone. “Not any more.”
“What you’ve done…”
“I find my conscience clear. You are forgotten, and no one comes for you. I am remembered, and here you are. And I am fine with that.”
“I think I despise myself, some of the time,” I said.
She shrugged: so what? Get over it.
“I look at my life, and find it full of failings.”
Another half tilt of her head. Again: deal with it.
“I find that the only way I can survive is in the present tense. If I look at my past, I see loneliness. Loneliness and… and mistakes made of loneliness. If I look at my future, I see fear. Struggle. The possibility of much pain. And so I look only at now, at this present tense, and ask myself, what am I doing now? Who am I now? For a while this was my great discipline, now, and now, and now, who am I now, now I am professional, now I am calm, now I am exercising, now I am speaking to those who will forget. Now I am a self that I wish to be, now I am a picture of who I have to be, now. Now. Now.
“Then I met you and now I am all things, I think. Now I am a woman who, in the past, did some shoddy things. Now I am a woman who, in the future, will do better, where I can. Now I am in this moment and I am just this. Just myself. Talking. Just talking, to you. You will forget and now will pass, time will consume your memory and with it, any reality that this moment may have existed but for now, here, we sit, you and I, and are entirely ourselves, speaking. Does this make sense?”
“Yes.”
“All the time I was looking for you, I never asked myself what I’d do when I found you. Never. Refused to ask. It was a question for a different now, a different moment, I would not construct it from fantasy. You think I’m here to kill you?”
“It’s a possibility,” she mused.
“I’m not.”
“Why are you here, Hope?”
“I wanted to see you.”
“Why?”
“It seemed necessary.”
“Again: why? If it’s not vengeance you want then I don’t see…” Her voice trailed off. I stared into my mug.
Silence.
Silence.
Silence.
Then, “All thought is association and feedback,” she said.
I looked up, quickly, studying her face, but her eyes were in some other place, her mind contemplating a different path. “Loneliness is no more than a construction of ideas. I am lonely because I am not with people. I need to be with people to feel fulfilled. And in time you say: I am not with people, and yet I am fulfilled. I have my books, I have my walks, I have my routines, I have my thoughts, and though I am alone, I am not lonely. And in time you say: I have myself, my body and my mind, and people would intrude upon that, and I am lonely, and it is for the very, very best. It is a paradise. Do you know why I chose to be Byron?”
“No.”
“He lived a while in an Armenian monastery. He was as sexy a shagger as any of that lot, but for a while he chose… he wrote that there is a pleasure in the pathless woods, there is a rapture on the lonely shore. Do you know it?”
She beamed. “You’ve read his stuff.”
“I read up while looking for you. I thought it might help.”
“And yet the opticians have it.”
“All the way.”
Her eyes returned now to me, her head turning slightly to the side. “You fear it, no? The dangers of being alone. Of having no one to help you find your path. No friend to say ‘you went a bit too far’, no lover to say ‘you could be tender with your words’, no? No boss to say ‘work harder’ and no shrink to say ‘work less’, no… no society, to tell you how to choose, or what to wear, no… no judgement, to help guide your own? You fear it?”
“Yes. I fear the fallibilities of my own reason.”
“Of course — yes, the madness that comes from a thought process that’s unchecked, from logic that is not logical, but isn’t told so, of course, very wise.”
“I impose disciplines upon myself, discourse, reason, knowledge…”
“To fill the place where society should be?”
“Yes. And to keep me sane. To help me see myself, as others might see.”
“Through the eyes of law, reason, philosophy?”
“Yes. What do strangers see, when they see me? They almost never tell, not the truth, and so I seek to understand them, that I might understand myself.”
“There’s your fallacy,” she interrupted, turning her body now so everything uncoiled, everything facing me. “There’s your mistake. You have a gift, Hope, one of the greatest ever given. You are outside it all; you are free of it.”
“Free of…”
“Of people. Of society. You have no need to conform, what’s the point? No one will thank you for it, no one will remember you, and so you have the freedom to choose your own path, your own humanity, to be who you want to be, not some puppet shaped by the TV and the magazines, by the advertising men, by the latest definition of work or play, by ideas of sex, gender, by—”
“Perfection?”
“By perfection. You choose your own perfect. You choose to be who you are, and the world cannot shape you, unless you permit it. The world cannot move you, unless it is by your own welcoming in. You are free, Hope. You are more free than anyone living.”
Silence a while. Then I said, “Is that why you killed them?” She leant back in her chair, disappointed, a huff of breath. “Is that why you wanted to destroy Perfection? To set people free?”
“We have sacrificed thought,” she replied flatly, voice hard, eyes steady. “We live in a land of freedom, and the only freedoms we can choose are to spend, fuck and eat. The rest is taboo. Loner. Slut. Weirdo. Faggot. Whore. Bitch. Druggie. Scrounger. Ugly. Poor. Muslim. Other. Hate the other. Kill the other. Aspire, as us, to be together, to become better, to become… perfect. Perfection. A unified ideal. Perfection: flawless. Perfection: white, rich, male. Perfection: car, shoe, dress, smile. Perfection: the death of thought. I programed the 206 to kill each other. If I have the chance, I will gather together every member of the 106 I can find, and make them eat each other whole.”