by Jacob Wren
He caught sight of his client at the end of the street and walked steadily in pursuit. In the past, his desire had always been to flee from his clients. This was the first time he had ever found himself on the chase. But as he thought this he realized he still had the desire to flee, was in pursuit almost in spite of himself, or perhaps only in spite of his current self, drifting back to former days when he would often display such random, ill-conceived bursts of curiosity or courage.
The man with sharp features turned a corner and our German hairdresser quickened his pace so as not to lose him. It was impossible to follow someone, to follow a complete stranger, without feeling oneself to be a character from cinema, some sort of thriller, without hearing the imaginary string section start to build as one’s step quickened. He deplored the way cinema had corrupted even his imagination, he who had watched so little and thought even less of the few films he had seen. Up ahead the man with sharp features turned into a building and our German hairdresser stopped just outside the door, the imaginary string section stopping cold along with him.
He had no idea what to do, standing there, wondering if he should go in or wait outside. He wasn’t sure why he remembered this, but he had passed this place every day on his way to the shop, and someone, perhaps a client, had once told him they called it ‘headquarters,’ headquarters of some awful, rapacious multinational that did all the normal, awful multinational kinds of things, keeping the world turning and unfair. He stared at the building, at its front doors, wondering for a moment how it worked inside, still wondering if he should go in, waiting for something to happen.
And then something did: A woman careened out the front doors, ran past him, chased by two security guards, and without thinking, without taking even a moment to contemplate, he leapt onto the security guards, miraculously managing to trip one, toppling on top of the other. If there had still been violins in his head they would have really been going for it now, but there was nothing, only the brute instincts of survival. He reached for the gun still in the outstretched hand of the guard underneath him, rolling the guard on top to use as a shield if the other were to start shooting, a fist hit his face, and trying to protect himself with his elbows as both hands grappled for the outstretched gun, managed to wrench it free, pulled himself out from under the man punching him, sat up and pointed the gun, first at one guard, then at the other, then back at the first. A standstill.
It was at this moment that the guards both realized their main task was not to fight with this complete stranger but to chase after the woman who had just had sex with their boss. “We should keep chasing that girl,” one of them mumbled, and they were off. Our German hairdresser noticed he was standing in a public place holding a gun and quickly shoved it into his jacket pocket.
The next day, as he arrived at the shop, he was once again disappointed to realize there was no note. For a moment that morning, he had considered putting on sunglasses to conceal his very swollen left eye (the right one wasn’t much better), but he didn’t own sunglasses, and as he walked to work it occurred to him that two black eyes would only serve to increase his mystique, increase his appeal to a clientele that loved everything strange, debased or out of the ordinary.
His clients that day were the usual idiots, each one asking about his shiner, expressing feigned curiosity and fake concern. He was in a pissy mood, all the small talk about the state of his face only increasing his scorn for this series of completely American morons, and he did everything in his power to give each the stupidest haircut possible, for which they thanked him effusively, a few even seeming somewhat genuine as they did so.
Near the end of the day, when all of his scheduled appointments were done and he was thinking of closing up early, a woman came in, the same woman who had run past him as she was bursting out of headquarters, who he now, for a brief moment, felt almost heroic for having rescued from the two security guards. (He had the black eyes to prove it.)
“This might sound strange,” she said, “but I don’t actually want my hair cut. I just want you to pretend to cut my hair. Keep up appearances.”
He stared at her in the mirror as she continued.
“If you take off a few split ends I suppose it won’t do any harm, but when I leave this chair I want my hair to look exactly the same.”
He nodded brusquely in agreement, as if he understood when actually he did not, and immediately got down to work, snipping away just millimetres from her head, only rarely touching her hair.
After a long period of silent snipping, during which practically no hair was cut, just a few wisps on the floor, she spoke again.
“I’m dying,” she said.
“Oh,” our hairdresser replied blankly.
As she spoke she often hesitated. There were pauses during which he believed she had finished until, eventually, she continued.
“There’s a virus. For political reasons I believed it should be spread. And it is being spread. But, as well, it’s killing me. Slowly. Not so slowly. I don’t really know. Do you understand?”
“Perhaps,” our German replied, not wanting to give anything away.
“Normally I wouldn’t mind. I think it’s a beautiful thing to die for a cause one believes in. But something happened. One year ago. I fell in love with a woman. We live together. And now suddenly I do mind. Love makes you want to live. Squeeze every last drop out of life. Now suddenly I want to live again. And it’s too late.”
Our German put down the scissors. There was no clear ending to a job in which no hair was cut and he decided now was as good a time as any to stop. It had been a short one, but his sessions were often quite brief. He reached for the broom out of habit, to sweep up, even though there was nothing to sweep.
“And from your perspective,” he said, “all of this has something to do with me?”
That night she took him to a meeting. At the meeting was the client he had followed the previous day, a few other Germans about his age all looking vaguely familiar, plus a few younger members, concentrated young men ready to prove themselves. The woman he had rescued from the security guards sat directly to his left. She refused to give her name so he decided to call her Claire.
Claire looked over at him. “We don’t bring anyone here. Not anymore. There’s been some trouble lately: infighting, assassinations.”
Our German was doing his best to remain impassive but he could feel his interest growing. “You don’t bring anyone here?”
“No.”
“So why did you bring me?”
“We invited you because we are hoping you have a second idea.”
“What was my first idea?”
There was a sharp silence. Everyone stared at him as if he was a complete idiot, as if they were waiting for him to correct an imponderable gaffe. The previous day’s client cut in: “Your first idea was the virus.”
They had to explain carefully. They all knew the details backwards and forwards, but, though the story primarily concerned him, he had only the vaguest memory.
It was in the café twenty years ago, the café he went to every morning, where he would talk to anyone that would listen, where he held court. (Though there were so many other young men in the same café holding court as well.) He had been pontificating on the various struggles of the current Left, how the Fascists were gaining ground while the left seemed to lose every battle. He was wondering what it might mean to change the battlefield, to find territory more conducive to their progressive goals. Because on the streets fear, intimidation and mob politics won out every time. It was so much easier to prey on what was worst in people, and to make considerable use of it, than to call upon the masses to raise themselves up, make of themselves something better. The streets were dirty, harsh – a foul joke or swift kick in the groin would win out every time. Where was the territory in which some nobler tactics might prevail? He was speculating that perhaps it was on a more basic level, on the level of cells, o
f genes, riffing off of a variety of self-taught morsels from biology, physics, phrenology. A virus isn’t swayed by propaganda, he had said. A virus finds its true course and follows it to the end. That was the phrase that had clicked, that they locked onto. They all remembered it, even the ones who hadn’t been there. It is what they believed they were doing to this day. Finding the true course and following it to the end.
That night they took him to the orgy. Dishevelled clothing and half-naked bodies spread out like a carpet in front of him. He couldn’t imagine how an offhand comment made twenty years ago could have led to all this. He walked slowly through the room and watched the businessmen fucking, in various positions and with varying degrees of detachment and passion, wondering if he too might soon be similarly entangled or if he would continue to simply watch. Claire came up beside him, took his hand and led him to a corner where they started to make out. “This is a test,” she whispered in his ear, “an initiation. I have the virus. If we fuck and you manage to avoid it, that means we can trust you.” He froze as she continued to kiss him. It had been a long time since he had considered himself part of the genuine Left, or part of anything for that matter, anything other than his own idiosyncratic path. He pulled away and looked at her. She looked back at him with neither desire nor judgment. “Let me look around first,” he said. “You don’t gamble your life without knowing the house.” Turning away he was filled with a strange surge of desire.
When I write about sex, I always feel like someone who has never had sex writing about sex, so distant is my experience from the words I am able to get down. I have often felt that I should try to remedy this dilemma, to write my actual, emotional experience of sex, as accurately as possible, but it seems beyond my abilities, the nuances too paradoxical and complex, too many emotions and desires conflicting in too many ways. Or perhaps it is only shame that stops me. I believe I experience a low-level lust towards basically every woman I see. This isn’t so unusual, but it constitutes the background, the pulse of subconscious daily dissatisfaction that informs any experience I might have of actual sex. I do not believe sex is normal or natural. It seems rare and strange, a momentary exception amongst a vast expanse of unrelated, yet intensely related, activities. I’ve never been in love and I don’t play any sports. I’ve once again failed in my attempts at description, failed to even begin, and I don’t know why anyone would want to read this paragraph. Then again, on the part of the reader there is often a considerable desire to learn biographical information about the neuroses of the writer.
Our German hairdresser wandered through the orgy with the implacable gaze of a true voyeur. He thought back to earlier in the evening, at the meeting, how they had carefully explained the virus to him, many technical details he didn’t catch or comprehend. “There is no way to fight against this world using reason or action alone,” they had explained. “The virus goes beyond reason, beyond action. In that sense it is more pure, more natural. If we’d had this in 1933, the Holocaust might have never happened.” He didn’t understand why they were trying to convince him. If it had originally been his idea, shouldn’t he be trying to convince them? In one sense they were only clarifying the landscape, giving him a picture of where he currently stood, but in another sense it was like, without knowing it, they were seeking approval from Daddy, seeking his permission. In front of him on a small pile of mattresses three naked men and two naked women had their fingers, tongues, teeth and fluids prodding, biting, spilling everywhere. He stood and watched, surprised at the degree to which he didn’t feel aroused, wondering what exactly it was he did feel: somewhat curious and mainly nothing. This is how we kill the rich, he wondered to himself. This is the honey that sets the trap?
I will try again. At first all I feel is the desire to be close, to feel the warmth of another body pressed against my own. Already I know that within me there exists much more desire than this simple, rather sweet, need for contact, but in the first moments it is all I am able to access. Yet as soon as there is contact the arousal kicks in, an intensity, hard and fast, throwing me off, striking me off-kilter as if I hadn’t been expecting it, a confusion. I know I want something but I don’t know what. I bite, lick, struggle, caress and stroke. My fingers want to go everywhere. If my partner seems excited by something I do then I do it more, if she is excited then my excitement grows out from hers like a vampire seeking energy. I am hard and soft and hard again and it seems to make no difference. I want to go forever but I don’t know where. I feel tired, sad and excited. My body is doing one thing and my mind is wondering why, starting to become bored, thinking I should end the relationship before it becomes too serious, starting to think about other things, almost coming but feeling its too soon so pulling away, disengaged but pulsing everywhere until, a few rounds later, I come, a small sudden jolt, and completely collapse. In less than one second, sex and my partner are the furthest things from my mind, and there is a certain degree of guilt I feel almost too exhausted to access.
“What kind of second idea are you looking for,” he had asked the gathering. It was not a rhetorical question. He was genuinely engaged, curious in a way he couldn’t remember having been for a very long time.
“We were hoping you could tell us.”
“I’m not sure I have ideas like that anymore.” He was thinking back, questioning everything, questioning himself. “Now I give haircuts.” But even as he said this, ideas began storming through his head, ideas that had nothing to do with haircuts or the way his life was today, his thoughts from twenty years ago rushing into the present. Because, it now seemed to him, the right wing he was wondering how to fight all those years ago – the Fascists, the Brownshirts – were not the same as the right wing today. These days it had more to do with business, money, religion. What if you were to fight fire with fire, money with money, belief with belief? Would it be possible to get rich in some way that, at the same time, could decimate the Right, disgrace power? To form a religion that could undermine their strength? What business plan, what church, could set the foundations for such an attack? And as he was struck by such thoughts he realized he was speaking them aloud, without meaning to, all it took was an audience, a request, and off he went. “A church that is also a business. Because religion is like a fantasy, a dream, and maybe money is also a kind of fantasy, they belong together. So then a religion in the form of a dream that hurtles forward towards the future, because money is energy stored away for what comes next, but also a dream for now, because there’s no living without cash. A dream for the future and a dream for now. A religion-business hybrid. A structure that people could believe in the same way they believe in God, that would at the same time ferment their resistance. That would bind together the worldly, unfightable love of money with the timeless need to believe in something, wrap it all up into a functional leftist package, shifting the balance between Left and Right.”
And one of those young men at the table, listening as intently as the rest, didn’t yet know it but someday he would end up back home, make a pact with his friends to all write books with the exact same title, in fact he would provide the title himself, not even realizing from precisely where in his subconscious it had come. But all that was still in the future, not yet happening, not even the kernel of a dream as the others continued to listen and our hairdresser startled forward on the charge of his own improvised thoughts. “It could start with a miracle. People always need a miracle to get them going. But forward from the miracle you could slowly weave in the traditional discourse of the Left, of equality, of new models for living, of questioning the economy, of questioning power. Because the religion that the Right is pushing, with or without sincerity, that religion happened thousands of years ago. Maybe we could take them if our religion was in the present, something happening right now.”
He had them, everyone at the table clicking on his every word, and at the same time he barely knew what he was saying, had no idea if his words made sense, or even what sense mi
ght mean in such a situation. Did he really believe it was possible to start a credible religion today? But it was no more far-fetched than the virus, and it now seemed the virus was in full effect. Already the questions were coming at him, everyone throwing them faster than he could consider.
“But this business-religion model, how would it be different from the religions that already exist? What’s the point of replacing one evil with its reflection?”
He had no idea but there was no stopping him: “That’s the challenge we have to set for ourselves.”
“Something pointless, something redundant, is not a challenge.”
“Trying to change people, really change them, their perceptions, change them on the most fundamental level, that’s not redundant. That’s possibly the most difficult and valuable thing one can attempt.”
“Stringing people along on the leash of religion, are you sure that’s going to change them in some fundamental way?”
“I’m not sure about anything. I didn’t ask to be brought here. Twenty years ago I said some things, said some things and never thought twice about them. It’s you who gave importance to what I had said, and here again, all of you, have to decide whether to give any importance to what I’m saying now. Tomorrow I’ll still wake up, wander to my shop as I have done every day for years, and cut some people’s hair. You asked me for an idea and I’ve given you one.”
“We’re just trying to understand.”
“You’re not trying to understand. You’re taking turns, you’re attacking me.”
Had they really been attacking him? He didn’t know. Maybe he was only too sensitive, not as tough as he’d been in former days. He continued to drift silently through the orgy, thinking back again and again to the spontaneous proposals and arguments he had made only a few hours ago, spectacular yet dull pleasures surrounding him on all sides.