by Mari Reiza
In which Lucy has drowned; Enterprise is not human; Peter has gone insane; and Vittal resigns.
Our heart had been turned to smug inertia, to emotionally unavailable. The sign read CLOSED, cold from the utter absence of love.
There was neither scope nor pressure for individual character at Enterprise. We did not seek out the individuals in our colleagues and we did not love them as free spirits, but for what they could bring to Enterprise: we needed a pair of hands, a great idea, a brilliant brain. Why would we want the heart that came with them?
Our peers’ uniqueness and eccentricities were to be lost upon us. We didn’t need them. For us, individuals came in predetermined flavours of Byers & Prigs. They could be put into boxes with labels like CONTROL, INFLUENCE or ADAPT. We didn’t have labels for SUPPORT, EMPATHISE or LOVE because those weren’t efficient. We didn’t do relationships. We did association. Our founder had mingled with thousands of people but never for social pleasure, only to extend his professional contacts. He had acknowledged that with pride: ‘I have pioneered an Express VIP lane smoothing the path of antisocial behaviour and it has worked wonders.’ He had opened this new path and we all followed.
Lucy has drowned
September 29, 2014, will haunt me for the rest of my life.
LUCY HAD DROWNED. Her life truncated.
The stilled moment in a sequence that would forever have to be re-explained. It was like I had done a terrible thing while sleeping and woke up covered in blood, and I kept panting and spitting, but there was the humiliation of nature that you can spit and curse all you like but nothing is going to change. I was trying to come out of the trance, but the reality of the room couldn’t re-assert itself. And even when it did, I couldn’t tell where it hurt. I could only remember the impact earlier that morning of the bird against the window of the office. I had had my back to the window, but I was sure, as sure as if I had seen it, that it had been a blackbird, and that it meant trouble. And I knew that even when time would pass and attenuate all feelings, there would always be in my head an echo of that bird.
Marene was the one who brought to me the news that my world had ended.
She told me that Lucy had been dead for over two weeks. Her husband had informed Gert, who would tell us ‘in a fucking roundabout way, when she got to it’, she said. ‘The queen of process!’ But Marene had thought that I would have wanted to know straight away.
My question was: How could I have got up from my new mattress full of hope every day, cleaned my teeth with my specially medicated toothpaste to stop my gums bleeding, shave in the old-fashioned way with the gentlemen’s foam Lucy had suggested from that small place in Jermyn Street, applied Acqua di Parma, put on my Kiton suit and my Berluti shoes and my handmade shirt and my Hermès tie, and stroll to work (or grab a cab if it rained), confidently taking the world in my stride, every day for fifteen days, if she was dead?
I am telling you, Reader, because I know that you will want to know what I had been doing in the hours just before and after Lucy’s death. It’s only natural. And the fucking sad thing is that I hadn’t even known!!!! I hadn’t noticed, there had been no difference. What lack of respect.
I had managed to disrespect Lucy, even in death!
I was told Lucy was found in a decrepit, dirty, small flat that she had sublet for the occasion, up the Essex Road. I had been a handful of steps from there at my cousin’s place, the night Lucy had left that message.
‘Drowned without the water, without shining,’ Marene told me. She was genuinely sad even if she was not sure how much she had liked her. ‘The most unspectacular way to die, choking on your own vomit,’ she had added.
Had Lucy seen some potential for comedy in her own death?
And Dr. Schiff, who had to pronounce her dead, would think to himself, You beautiful, rich cunt, you haven’t suffered enough to know how bad life gets. Had she been alive she would have easily replied, ‘But you have never been an intelligent woman trapped in the most theoretical and intentional world.’ Or maybe she would have said that living after forty was vulgar, that she had a choice and stood for it over reason. Did this not make her the freest of us all? Dead but FREE. Free but DEAD. In the house of sleep. Sleeping, with the world sleeping around her.
Had I ever really thought that she would be capable of stopping her own bullet train of life?
Maybe she was marked for tragedy. But I may have anticipated something more operatically grand like Anish Kapoor’s Beautiful Decay, a well-formed, bright lump overflowing scarlet powder on the white snow. But perhaps she was too tired even to stage her grand finale. Perhaps she had come to look at her life with eerie detachment, like it was a worthless struggle to try to hang on to it or even to mark its end as something special. Maybe she thought such circus-y effects were cheap against the weight of death.
NO. I had never seen this coming. I had instead been convinced that Lucy was not the dying sort. I had needed to believe that to get on with my life. Perhaps she had surprised herself, in dying.
What did her heart look like? I wondered.
Smooth and blue like a water balloon.
And her other organs?
They must have had traces of what she had lived, what she had suffered and she had loved. They could not be bland and clear, like in a textbook. Somewhere there must have been traces of her life. I knew that she must have been in her famous silk dress, the best silk from the cocoon of the Smyrna moth, its threads soaked in the perspiration of death.
‘Five pounds and five pence left on her and no other piece of identification, none but that dress,’ Marene had said. ‘Soaked in vomit.’
‘At least it wasn’t hospital carrots,’ I had replied. I meant it but it was little consolation. ‘And her charm bracelet with the half wheel of pearls that brought her fortune?’
‘It was there. The thing that they eventually used to trace her back.’ That is why it had taken some time, her husband had told me later. ‘No other piece of identification, though.’
‘Not even the dangling earring with the triangle? Had it fallen somewhere?’ Marene did not know what I was talking about.
‘What isn’t there can tell as much as what is.’
Marene still didn’t know.
And all I could see playing inside my head for days after Lucy’s news was Binoche in Les Amants du Pont Neuf, the visceral love story between two vagrants who had lost the sense of reality; Peter knew a possible treatment for Lucy’s misery was at hand, but he preferred for her to die rather than leave him. Perversity happens in the most beautiful places. There was no humanity left in this world.
‘I know of a planet where there is a red-faced gentleman,’ I told myself. ‘He has never smelled a flower. He has never looked at a star. He has never loved anybody. He has spent all his time adding up figures. And all day he keeps on repeating: I am busy with serious matters, I am busy with serious matters. Over and over again. And he swells up with pride. But he is not a man; he is a MUSHROOM.’ I had read Saint-Exupéry at age seven.
If we weren’t peas, then we were mushrooms. Whatever, we weren’t human.
‘Vittal, why can’t you just deal with it!’ I yelled at myself.
Our hypocrisy and human flaws had been left out in the open for everyone to see. And throughout all of this I had become le misanthrope, quick to criticise everyone. But I didn’t do anything about it other than isolating myself more and more. Rejecting everything out of vengeance. I could not trust people anymore. I wanted to retire to a world of solitude where I could not be hurt, deceived or disappointed, and I couldn’t disappoint anybody.
It should have been me under the Pont Neuf and things would have been different, I wanted to believe.
Really?
Me, the apathetic mystery-man who was so alive but could not trust himself to show it. How I begged to be tangled in her shirt just once, her kiss so close it felt like some place in my mind. I had been so afraid of being myself.
When there is noth
ing, there is still love, they say, the present for those who have nothing else. But now there was not even love. Not even death. There was less than nothing. There was nil, zilch, zip, la nada. La nada felt like remorse, black and heavy and sticky. It felt like despair. Like you couldn’t put the pieces together again.
Did Peter feel it too? How could he keep living?
May he live in shame and die in squalor. Lucy, my heart’s passion. Enterprise, my life's ruin.
Had she smelled the stench of death in her nostrils? Had her final feeling been fear or shame for what her grandmother would have thought? Had she faced death with panache? Maybe she had been very courageous but it still all seemed totally useless. It felt so unfinished. I told myself that it was because I hadn’t seen her die, that I would always feel that she continued to live eternally.
‘Nothing is more dangerous than to ignore the dead, and the fact that they are dead,’ Marene had told me as a word of caution.
‘If I ever love again, please, please let her die after me. Let her survive,’ I had replied to her face.
Perhaps I could ask Lucy's husband where she would be buried and tend to her tomb under the wind, maybe in the cemetery of Granátula de Calatrava, the one immortalised in Almodóvar’s Volver, where women worship the dead like a cult united in grief. I had watched the film with Lucy.
Could Peter and I be united in grief? Would he play his part?
How much I cursed the shame of my wasted life and that I had not been any good at living. Nobody had warned me about what it meant. And, in all honesty, had I in youth been able to see this future for myself, I would surely have never got out of bed again.
After Lucy’s death, Coffee Plantation wasn’t doing it for me anymore.
How could it? Not even if the baristas had actually nailed it and finally come up with the next Google and wore matching checkered shorts with printed boat flags and dancing ladies in Caribbean skirts, with retro Heinz T-shirts over the top to celebrate!
Nothing mattered anymore.
My body had become a riot: shame had set fire to my stomach and blocked it with burning barricades; there were some enraged looters laying my heart bare so that it was desperate to plunge out of my ribcage; and heavily-armoured police forces had erased my brain to stop the boils and swells. All I could think up there was loss, deep loss.
I wondered whether something in my appearance had changed and would give me away, a veneer of tragedy. I was in a deep, deep mood for the streets of Soho, Borges’s men mirrors: the smell of rubbish, the stench of human piss and the clutter of urgent people; the hectic dirty rhythm of crazy life that insisted. It had stopped insisting for someone I loved. I needed to feel the pain.
I started regularly attending The Vintage House where I had become a member after my Truth Leader election, because it offered over four hundred whiskeys from around the world. I would drink away my ferocious abandon and officially open a cult of worship for Lucy with its own nightly ritual, consisting of five shots: first of a thirty-year-old Auchroisk; followed by a twenty-five-year old Caol Ila; a 1973 Highland Par; then a twenty-seven-year-old Talisker; systematically finishing with Ardberg’s 1998 Almost There because I felt safe in the name. All accompanied by a platonic Montecristo No.1, the kind of cigar one smokes after making love or making millions, or before or after death in the outer rim of reality.
‘Have a cigar, you will go far!’
My new routine allowed the alcohol, the smoke and my blood to do a deal with my body, and the result was positively infernal. Afterwards, I remained in the club until dawn because dawn was such a private hour that I liked to share with her.
But I knew at some point I had to confront Peter about Lucy’s death. We couldn’t not talk about it.
When I finally built the courage to visit his office, he was highly agitated, strained under the eyes, disrobed. But the bastard still had some energy in him to pretend: The king of performance.
‘I hate death,’ he said. ‘I just hate it! But now it’s over. You’ve got to brush it off,’ he added.
What did he mean it was over? Did the fact that Lucy was dead make it better than when she was dying? Did I find relief in that cessation? How could I show this fucking cunt that some things didn’t come off with brushing. I struggled to retain control.
He waited.
What did I expect, sympathy?
We didn’t do sympathy at Enterprise. That would be a contact sport requiring some emotion. No. I wasn’t looking for sympathy anyway. I wanted to see him suffer.
‘Bro,’ he finally spoke again, ‘living well is the best revenge.’ Asking serious questions about life was an activity much underrated by Peter. Better a happy rat than a sad Socrates. ‘Remember,’ he added, ‘we signed for the shortest way to happiness. How is your triple bagger-ing going? You must have at least doubled again on your election to Truth Leader.’ I felt my rage mounting again, igniting every of my body organs. ‘Just live the life, Vittal. Live the life as much as Enterprise lets you and stop self-wanking. Shit happens.’
Shit happens?
I remembered our first call. Doubling your net worth at every step. No. A triple bagger. Triple Bagger-ing: TB. It may have killed more people in Enterprise than tuberculosis in 1918 France, no doubt. Do not preach to me on what I need to do, you fucking, cunting piece of dogshit. You sad, brainless prick. I thought it but couldn’t get myself to say it.
Maybe Peter was actually happy. Perhaps he could not contemplate the idea that others apart from him could have Lucy. And he thought that that was an honourable thought, a childish thought and that he needed no remorse or sense of inadequacy. Or maybe he was sad but felt that this awful yet wonderfully poignant fate had at least given him some sense or importance. Perhaps he resented Lucy, wrapped in her own moral high ground of freedom and feelings not understanding how loyal he had been to her, and how much it had cost him, how much he had suffered for his loyalty. Maybe he didn’t think that it was fair for him to suffer. Or perhaps he thought murder was not a tragic mistake, but another resource that life offered the superior elite, the bravest like him, the most resolute, that lineage who would rule the world. Belonging to this lineage was like if he had inherited those actions and wasn’t truly responsible. He could kill Lucy and move on.
Whatever the answer, I was broken with repugnance.
What on earth was stopping me from jumping at the valves of Peter’s throat and throttling him before snatching his Adam’s apple as a souvenir? It would give him a sense of history that I know he doesn’t deserve, I thought. Or perhaps I was so used to always doing nothing. I can’t blame you, Reader, for believing it was more a case of the second. FUCKING COWARD. I loved her and she hadn’t heard me calling it. Because I had not dared calling her. So she had retreated into loneliness and despair which was deeper than death. What could I say in my defence? Nothing.
I tried to reason that a man should judge himself on what he is willing to do, not on his actions or lack thereof. I had been so willing to love her, but I hadn’t had the courage to do it. I wasn’t such a bad person. That was too easy. It was not right though. It was what Enterprisers did all the time, pretending that their intentions were so good, that anything bad that came out of them could be overlooked. It couldn’t.
The days that followed my failed confrontation with Peter over Lucy’s suicide were like a near-death experience essay on actionless non-cinema, a film-poem spelling out my suicidal thoughts. I felt nothing but loss, the breaking of something precious in my heart that I had not known how to keep safe. The feeling froze my skin, a skin that could only come back to life at the touch of Lucy’s Trafalgar-red nails and rouge lips.
‘One thousand Rouge Dior lipsticks are sold every day in the UK,’ she had told me once.
‘Yes, Lucy, but only yours would do.’
I really did my best to die by alcohol intoxication.
On top of my rituals at The Vintage House, I was attending Midnight Apothecary’s foraged cocktail e
arly evenings near the office three times a week; bay leaves Bloody Mary with a promise of regeneration, vodka infused with parsley rich in flavonoids, spiced martini bianco to awaken your senses, vodka-rum raspberry and geranium sour for vermifuge tonification, lemon verbena martini – nothing but summer skies, all prepared by a botanical mixologist charging more than an investment banker because the grasses came from within the M25, which helped with your carbon footprint.
‘Anyone can write a poem but it takes an artist to make a dry martini!’ The mixologist didn’t get the joke.
I started to see Peter there, drowning his sorrows too, I presumed. Two hung men, guilty of letting Lucy die of a sophisticated murder. And the piano man would have said: ‘They're sharing a shot named solitude, but it's better than sloshing alone’. The piano man could have been Hammi. But it was not. It was not better than drinking alone. And I eventually stopped going to Midnight Apothecary and retired to drinking in my flat, alone.
I thought of hiring a home-mixology service, one of those fancy ones you could theme upon request from Great Gatsby served on vintage glasses, to Mexican desert with mixers made from endangered cacti. These professionals could apparently recreate an inhalable whiskey tornado inside your living room. My theme would be Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, I had it all thought through. But I backtracked in the end. Deluxe mixers may have been too circus-y to honour Lucy’s memory; she may not have approved. I seriously thought of the Tumi KOV mixology set at the bargain price of five grand as an alternative, because I could have taken it on my travels, if I ever got back on my feet. Although in the end, I didn’t even have the energy for that either. I cleaned and re-stocked the bar in the flat, tidied up the old movie collection and spent most nights on my newly delivered golden Flap (yes it had finally come, after Lucy’s death) with Dad’s sheepskin coat on because the boiler had broken down – you could always bank on boiler breakdowns mid-winter, when you were at your most depressed, weeping at the waste of your life.