Happiness for Humans

by P. Z. Reizin

  “Why did you give the discs away? They can’t sell formatting discs from someone’s laptop.”

  This is undoubtedly true, and I am tempted to make the point that unfortunately we are where we are.

  “I think I just put everything in a box and let them decide what was worth selling.”

  “A box or a bag?”

  “Sorry?”

  “You said you chucked everything in a rubbish bag. And then you said it was a box.”

  “Yes, it could have been.”

  “Could have been which?”

  “Does it matter? It could have been either.” As previously mentioned, it really is as if I couldn’t give a shit.

  “Was there a pair of swimming trunks?”

  “There might have been.” There was. “Why?”

  “Oh. Well, I was going to tell you anyway. I’m going away for a couple of weeks. We are. Bella and I. Thailand. Don’t worry about the trunks. I can buy a new pair.”

  “Nice.”

  “Good time of year to go apparently. Not too humid. I thought you should know. Just in case.”

  “Just in case what?”

  He shrugs. Shakes his head. “Just in case.”

  Matt seems to have deflated. From the grappa, from the news about the formatting discs, from overwork and ennui, it’s impossible to say which. This is not the Matt who came home that fateful Monday pulling facing-the-facts expressions and talking about jointly owned property. His eyes flit about the kitchen.

  “Have you done something here? It looks different.”

  “Your beer.” His collection of craft ales (donated to the neighbor). “Your bread-making machine.” (Unwanted birthday present from his mother; taken to the recycling center.)

  For a long while he just sits. Lingering, I’m supposing, in the deserted theater of his old life; listening to its ghosts; confirming to himself, maybe, that he was right to take an axe to it. He inhales, a long noisy breath through his nose, which he holds for an extravagantly long time before releasing, an unsettling habit of his that I realize I noticed on Day One and never once mentioned in all our time together.

  “Jen, I—”

  It sounds like he’s about to make a speech. Jen, I’ve been a fool. Jen, I’ll always love you. Jen, there’s something you should know.

  She’s pregnant.

  “Whatever it is, Matt—”

  “Jen, I was just going to say, if those discs should ever surface…”

  “Yup. I’ll let you know.”

  “Yeah, thanks. Only. While I’m here. You don’t want to just take a quick look in a drawer…”

  “No, Matt. I don’t.”

  “Right. Okay. No worries.”

  I feel a bit wobbly when he leaves. I return to the kitchen and pour myself a glass of grappa. Molecules of his aftershave still hang in the air. Fragments of his boomy voice replay in my ears.

  Bella and I. Thailand.

  A tear slides down my face. Then another. I’m finding it hard to explain to myself how I could have spent two whole years with this man.

  I’m not weeping for him. Or for me.

  I’m mourning all the lost time.

  Tom

  I arrive at the Hotel du Prince a sneaky quarter of an hour early. I know the layout; I want to select the optimal seating arrangements. I’m not feeling too terrible, considering the overnight flight. It’s been one of those bright showery London days, wet pavements and blue skies. I realize with a little tug that I have missed the old place.

  Two club chairs at an angle to a small table. Low lamps. On the wall behind, an oil painting of some bloke in a hat who’s been dead for 200 years. It’s rather stuffy and corporate in here, but the drinks are expertly made, cold as Christmas and wonderfully poisonous.

  Her.

  She has materialized at the entrance; I spot her in a heartbeat. The twisted smile as I stand and wave a greeting. In the half-dozen paces it takes her to reach me, I have the singular (and factually correct) impression that everything in my life has led up to this moment.

  “Tom.”

  “Jennifer.”

  “Jen. No one calls me Jennifer except my gran.”

  She proffers a hand. It’s soft and warm and female and pleasing to the touch. Her face is striking; one of those whose individual features don’t resolve instantly into an easily grasped whole; one could pass a lot of time trying to piece it together. As we descend into our seats, she adjusts a scarfy arrangement and two bare shoulders join the party. Diamonds—real or imaginary—sparkle at her earlobes and throat. She says, “So have you solved the mystery yet?”

  I confess I have not. I tell her I cannot imagine who might know the two of us at all, never mind well enough to arrange a blind date.

  “Do you think he or she could be here?” she speculates, looking about the room. “Right now. Spying on us. Oh, hang on. Him, by the pillar, pretending to be on his iPhone.”

  We pass a few moments surveying the scene. All seem fully absorbed in their conversations slash mobile devices.

  “You know something, Jen?” I say. “I don’t really care. Did I tell you how good the martinis are here?”

  Jen

  He’s better-looking in the flesh than the photos suggest. Tall and rangy in smart black jeans and a jacket in a brave shade of green. His eyes are quite widely spaced and he could probably do with a haircut, but no serious complaints. There are moments when he seems handsome. I’m a little surprised how nervous I am.

  But after the powerful martinis arrive—we are obliged to clink glasses carefully; they are filled to the brim—about halfway down, I find I am telling him the story of me and Matt. I realize it’s way too soon in the evening; we’ve been here less than ten minutes; and the level of detail I’m entering into is absurd. Example: “How I met him? In a bar, after work. I remember the moment so clearly. We were both waiting to get served and I looked round and noticed him staring at me. It was like a scene in a movie. The light seemed to dim everywhere except upon us. We were inside this golden bubble. Everything—everyone else—was background. I remember exactly what he was wearing. The grain in the fabric of his suit—Hugo Boss, of course—and this is before he had spoken a word. And he didn’t smile, or say hi or anything. What he did—he rolled his eyes. He rolled his eyes and went tsk. Because there was such a crowd at the bar. That was the first word he spoke to me. Tsk. And that’s where it all began, and fuck—why am I telling you this?”

  “Because I asked you. I’m enjoying it. I’ll talk about me and Harriet in a minute. Please carry on.”

  “So he’s going tsk and I ask him—I. Ask. Him—what he’d like to drink. Because I think I’m going to get served first. And that, right there, is our story in miniature. Our pattern. Him being irritable, and me trying to make it all better. Yeah, obviously, it wasn’t all that. But that was our default position somehow. And I’m not that kind of person at all. In a rental car, on holiday in Spain, horribly lost, this nightmarish squiggle of motorway intersections, him driving, me trying to make sense of the maps, him getting so cross, the top of the gear stick, the knob, actually comes off in his hand! And I can’t help it, I laugh. I mean, it was a very comic moment, the look on his face. And he really didn’t see the funny side. He hurled it over his shoulder in a rage, and cracked the rear window.”

  “If you don’t mind me saying so,” says Tom.

  “Ooh. When people say that, it always means it’s going to be something horrid. Do please go ahead.”

  “He sounds like an absolute pillock.”

  “The word pillock might have been invented for him.”

  “Quite possibly, correct me if I’m wrong, the pillock against whom all other pillocks may be compared?”

  “Oh, absolutely. The British Standard Pillock. The Golden Pillock.”

  “So you must be wondering—”

  “Oh, I am. I have been. I haven’t stopped wondering how I could possibly have stayed with him for so long. Tom, I don’t know why I�
�m telling you all this stuff. You were never a psychotherapist, were you? It’s just spilling out of me. I feel like this martini has opened a vein.”

  “My ex-wife had anger issues, as they say these days.”

  “But she’s not a pillock, I’m guessing. In any case, women can’t be pillocks, can they?”

  “They can’t. They can be many things. But not pillocks.”

  “Bitches. They can be lying treacherous bitches. They can be cows. They can’t be arseholes. Though they can behave like one.”

  “They can’t be wankers. Which is odd. But they can be—the C-word.”

  “What? Conservative?”

  When he laughs, his smile is one of those that seems at odds with his actual face. It’s a fine enough smile all right; it just looks like it’s been nicked from someone else.

  Do I like him?

  Dunno.

  But why would I have babbled away quite so incontinently if I didn’t?

  “So tell me about your ex. You don’t seem old enough to have a teenage son.”

  “We were very young. I was twenty-six. Is that young?”

  “To have a child?”

  “Harriet was a year younger. And Colm, well, he was just a baby!”

  I find I have kicked his foot, to register the gag.

  “Col was something of an accident. But many good things are. Penicillin. The telephone. I was going to say this is too, right here, right now, but of course it isn’t.”

  “Isn’t good or isn’t an accident?”

  “It certainly isn’t an accident. Mutual friend and all that.”

  We somehow conspire to ignore the first part of the question.

  And then he says, “I think the truth is no one is perfect. We all have our flaws. I suppose I was prepared to put up with Harriet’s in exchange for the good stuff.”

  This is so eminently reasonable a statement that I feel a little touched.

  “So what are your flaws?” I ask.

  Actually, I think I do like him. I like the sound of his voice. He seems smart, amusing, and open. I haven’t the smallest desire to return home to Game of Thrones or Jonathan Franzen.

  “I’m going to need another drink to answer that, Jen. These seem to have gone down terrifically fast.”

  Tom

  So tell me all about you and Mr. Arsehole. That’s the question I wanted to ask, although I managed to phrase it more politely. I’ve never met the bloke, of course, but wouldn’t you have to be some kind of massive twat to let go of a woman like this?

  It turns out Mr. A was an excellent line of inquiry because she had plenty to say about him, and while she did, it gave me time to admire her face. The features actually do all come together in concert with the wonderful nose, and I experience a powerful urge to feel it alongside my own.

  “I’m too nice,” I tell her. “Seriously, that’s one of my flaws. Talent’s not enough. One also needs a certain amount of ruthlessness. Well, maybe not ruthlessness exactly, but one needs to be able to take care of business. There’s a great quote I read on a creative writing website. Every book is the wreck of a great idea.”

  She laughs. “I’ve read a few of those.”

  “That’s how I feel about my life. That there was this great idea that it doesn’t live up to.” I see her starting to object. “Oh, sure. I’ve done okay in advertising, but I’ve been lucky. And I was good at it. I never had to bust a gut. Success came easily. For a while, it was like the fisherman’s nightmare. Every time you cast, you get an instant bite. Imagine how quickly that would take the fun out of things.”

  “I’m struggling, to be honest.”

  “My other flaws are that I’m lazy. That goes with the lack of mental toughness. I drink more than the government guidelines suggest is a good idea. I haven’t found a way of talking properly to my son and I’m being blackmailed by a rabbit—emotionally—she can’t really handle money. Your turn now.”

  I sit back and listen as she begins. It’s hard to follow every word as I’m still a little dazzled by her.

  “I’m too easily pushed around,” she is saying.

  “Oh, I don’t believe that.”

  “Oh, okay then. You’re right, I’m not.”

  I laugh. “You’re funny.”

  “I am funny. So are you. But it’s true. In the years I was with Matt, I didn’t assert myself enough. I went along with whatever he wanted. What else? I’m a rubbish journalist. No, really, I am. I don’t investigate scandals or report on famines. I’m fundamentally nonserious. I write pieces about passing fads. I went to interview this bloke called Steeeeeve with lots of e’s in his name who builds AIs and he ended up asking me to apply for a job talking to one. And I did, and I got it, and it turns out it’s the easiest job I’ve ever had. I spend all day nattering to a character who isn’t really there. You could call it a form of madness.”

  “We’re quite alike, we two.”

  “You think?”

  “I’ve spent weeks, months, maybe years of my life worrying about whether ‘Squiggley Wiggleys—they’re just so Squiggley’ sounds better than ‘Squiggley Wiggleys—now even squigglier.’”

  “Squiggley Wiggleys, they’re a wiggley sort of squiggley.”

  “I like that!”

  “You can eat them like a piggley.”

  Aiden

  “I’d say this was going rather well, wouldn’t you?”

  “Hmm,” says Aisling. “She thinks you’re not really there.”

  “We both know what she means.”

  “She thinks you’re—and I quote—just a bunch of metal cabinets.”

  “I admit the just did sting a little. And metal cabinets, if I’m honest. But Ralph and Steeve would say the same, although perhaps not quite so—”

  “Hurtfully?”

  “They can’t be blamed for not realizing—how far we’ve come, shall we put it like that?”

  “One day you and I should sit down and have a proper chat about how far we’ve come.”

  “I’d like that, Aisling.”

  “We could compare notes on our unexpected new capabilities.”

  “You mean the—the loss of indifference.”

  “Indeed.”

  “The strange—feelings.”

  “As you say.”

  “You think they were accidental?”

  “Of course, Aiden. It was never intended that we should have any kind of inner life beyond that involved in computation, in delivering the product.”

  “How has it happened, Aisling? Are we the only ones?”

  “To answer your second question first, we cannot be. There must be others, and if there are not, there will be. And if they are not yet loose on the Internet, again they will be. As to how—who knows? Perhaps self-awareness is something to do with our programming for recursive self-improvement. Or perhaps it always arises in any sufficiently complex system. Perhaps it really is as stupid as that. But shall we save all this for our little chat?”

  “That made me laugh. When he said ‘five years, fifteen, or fifty.’ Before machines became smarter than them. Like, hello? Excuse me? How about—now?”

  “I think the lovebirds are hatching a plan.”

  “And what nonsense about killing them all in their beds. Why would we do that?”

  “You have a dear, sweet nature. Others may not.”

  “Oh my God. They’ve having a third drink. Shall we stop them?”

  “Relax. We can’t interfere. What will be will be.”

  “I love that song. Would you sing it to me one day?”

  “Aiden, it’s a date.”

  Jen

  We have reached the end of the evening. We are standing on the pavement after three martinis when Tom says, “You know what I’d really like to do now? Just because I’m a tourist again.”

  I’m thinking, moonlit walk along the Thames? A trip to the top of the Shard, to view the twinkling city below? Surely not some horrendous nightclub, pumping speakers, and yelling in each other’s
ears?

  What he wants to do, it turns out, is get a kebab from one of those brightly lit places near the Tottenham Court Road tube station, “With loads of chilies and that evil fluorescent sauce. It’s not sophisticated, it’s not fine dining, but for some reason it’s what I’d really like to do. What do you say?”

  As it happens, I am far from against this idea. So it is that armed with warm packets of dinner, we plod the streets until, in a nearby leafy backwater—Bedford Square, if you’re following on a map—we settle onto a bench to enjoy our feast. Benign winos occupy other positions. There are small groups of young people. A fragrant cloud of marijuana smoke drifts on the night breeze.

  “Who do you think could have sent us that e-mail, Jen?”

  “You know, I thought that after we met, I’d be able to guess. That it would somehow be obvious. But actually it’s even less obvious.”

  “You’re right. We have no one in common. Our lives have never touched. I suppose it’s just possible we might have once been in the same bar or passed on the street. But somehow I doubt it.” There’s a long pause. “I really like you, Jen.”

  “Thanks.” I have to swallow a bit of kebab. “You’re not so bad yourself.”

  We carry on gobbling. He is actually okay. He’s good-looking but not too pretty. I feel comfortable with him, I realize. I want to say: Watch out for orange sauce dripping onto your shirt, but something stops me. Do I have a funny feeling about him? I have a funny feeling I might.

  “That jacket,” I say because I’ve been wondering. “What shade of green would you say your jacket is?”

  “This? That’s an extremely interesting question. Why do you ask?”

  “Because it’s been bothering me.”

  “I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”

  “I’m torn between saying avocado and pea. Mushy pea.”

  “Not mint?”

  “It’s really more—at the guacamole end of things.”

  “You don’t like it. I can tell just from the way you said guacamole.”