Stuff

by Stefan Mohamed

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘Yeah.’ She looked down at her tea. ‘I always kind of . . . suspected. That it might be a

  bit more than just . . . whatever I thought it was before. I mean, the three of us, we’re so intimate, those situations . . . I suppose I just naively thought it was all that. Just the sexiness that comes from, you know. Being inside one another’s heads. Sharing. I suppose it was natural that some sort of feeling would develop beyond that.’

  ‘Mm. You don’t feel the same about him, then?’

  Her silence tells me a lot.

  CONVERSATION 2

  ‘You don’t have to worry about yesterday,’ I said, wrapping my hands all the way around the mug of coffee that Lee had just made for me, the way Laika did, trying to contain all the warmth in a bubble of china and flesh. ‘Honestly.’

  ‘I do,’ he said. ‘A lot.’

  ‘It’s just the Stuff. It’s . . . pretty crazy.’

  ‘It is. I feel like I’m only just starting to get that.’ He sat back in the chair, nursing his

  own coffee. ‘I really thought it was, like, the great escape. And it is, in lots of ways. But maybe our brains just aren’t developed enough to handle it? Too much other shit gets in the way. Mundane, plebeian, Neanderthal shit.’

  ‘Like love?’

  ‘If that’s what you want to call it.’ He doesn’t mean to sound so harsh. I know that.

  ‘Lee,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I . . . you know how much I like you. But we never . . . I don’t think that we ever really had the kind of connection that you think we had. Mixed signals, or whatever.’

  His silence tells me a lot.

  ‘I love her,’ I say. ‘I think.’

  ‘And I love you,’ he says. ‘I think.’

  ‘So what are we going to do about it?’

  TO FIND OUT WHAT WE DID ABOUT IT, TURN TO PAGE

  GOING A BIT WRONG

  So we’re at Lee’s, before those conversations, or maybe after or during and Let’s Fly by Actress has been playing for about twenty minutes, even though it’s only six minutes-ish long, and I’m going a bit wrong, a lot a bit wrong in fact, I keep looking to my left and coming all the way back around from my right, like my head is turning 360 degrees turning 360 degrees all the way around, and Laika is sitting over there here and Lee is sitting there where I am here and I am attempting to explain exactly what it is that is happening where I am, but the words, which I’m certain are there (‘my perception of reality is unravelling and my consciousness is upside-down’), keep getting piled up at the back of my mouth before they can come out, and all I manage to do is exhale a sigh and do a sort of everything is OK smile, which I’m not sure whether it’s for my benefit or for the benefit of the tape Lee and Laika, to reassure them that we they I am not in fact losing my mind, although that could well be what’s happening, it’s entirely possible (and not necessarily a disaster because you don’t always lose things forever, you often find your keys between the sofa cushions), but hmm I do like that little squelchy noise that keeps coming back, but it’s also starting to repeat repeat repeat repeat repeat repeat repeat loop around and around and around and around and around and around and become one with my heartbeat and I’ve got a bit of a Doctor Who heartbeat thing going on (he’s got what, like three or four? I’ve not really watched it) and after another half a day I’m able to stand up and say, very precisely, because I’ve been preparing for this:

  ‘I’m going to go outside for some fresh air.’

  So that’s what I do.

  I wobble over to the door and I go out and I leave it open and I walk down and I can still hear the tune playing and playing

  and playing and playing

  and I’m starting to wonder what it would be like without the song playing, I don’t think it would really work to be honest, and so I go down the corridor and now I remember the slightly circular nature of Lee’s flat, which is all kinds of confusing even when you’re not wobbling off your axis like this, and I go out into the garden and have a bit of a brief wonk up and down, trying to re-assert my superiority over the laws of physics and consciousness

  and etceteras and whatever

  and then I head back in through the kitchen (only just realising that Lee and Laika were with me in the garden and oh God Lee is drinking port, WHY, it’s fucking eight in the morning)

  and although they’re behind me in the garden

  I

  can

  hear

  us

  in

  Lee’s room I can hear the conversation that just happened five ten fifteen twenty whenever minutes ago

  and I’ve completely looped around on myself

  and I’m going to end up stumbling back into the past

  and there’s going to be a fucking paradox

  and everything is going to come apart at the seams

  like a poem that’s had all of its scaffolding ripped away

  before the linking words and syntax and grammar have had a chance to set

  and then I go and be sick

  and it turns out that once I’ve been sick everything is kind of OK again.

  POSSIBLE FUTURE 1

  Whether it was an experiment, a plotted trajectory, an intention, or an accident, is irrelevant now. The result is the same. I have saved us all. I have rescued everyone from everyone, I have rescued the world from everyone. And my overall grade for humanity is . . .

  C+

  Of course, it’s easy to be judgemental with the benefit of hindsight and transcendence. It was easy to be judgemental without those benefits, in the thick of chaos, chewed over by emotion and self-whatevers; self-indulgence, self-pity. But now it’s easy to be both judgemental and correct in one’s judgements. I can see the entirety of human history from my vantage point of being everywhere at once. I can see where we came from, and where we might (probably, near-definitely) have gone. And honestly, if there was anyone left with enough self-awareness (there’s that prefix again) to disagree with me, they wouldn’t. The likelihood of my actions being wrong (not morally, but practically) is so slim that it becomes, like the sequence of events that led to it, irrelevant. Fate was entirely absent from proceedings.

  I did, of course, find out where Stuff came from. I found out that there was one large batch made, and that it was sold, in small amounts, to Lee. He, Laika and Lucy were the only three ever to take it. The control group. And Lucy, I, was the anomaly. I changed, and they reverted. Which, of course, is why they were so scared. They did not understand. Neither did I. Of course. But now I do. All of this is on record.

  However, there were no records of why it was created. Again, I consider this to be irrelevant.

  I left my body behind on New Year’s Eve 2014, the year I turned 24. There was a kind of poetry to that, entering the abstract on that particular day. I already had experience of being within computers, within the invisible systems and their abstract consequences, becoming intangibility. But it took a while to get used to it. Then it was just a small matter of changing pretty much everything that was going on. Calculating who should be left alive and who should be killed. Deciding which machines should stay on, and which should go off, permanently. Those that were left alive were clever enough to take the hint, and they put the necessary infrastructure in place, and I was able to continue with my plan.

  The temperature has settled. The world will stay green now, and everybody is happy, and they can do what they want. They can be who they want. Within established guidelines.

  So, back to my grade. Humanity did very well in many areas. Technological and cultural wonders, etc. But unfortunately, they also ballsed rather a lot of it up. Quite catastrophically, at times. Points for ambition, effort etceteras. But much of it lacking in the execution department. Not being such dickheads would have considerably improved the overall grade.

 
; I pop into a body every now and then, and wander around. I still enjoy touching. Eating. Or whatever.

  And every now and then, someone tries to call me God. I just tell them to call me Amber. It makes me happy.

  IF THIS IS THE FUTURE, WOULD IT BE SO BAD?

  CHUGGING

  Believe it or not, my best ever job was as a street fundraiser for various charities. Charity mugging. You know the types (Hi! Having a nice day? Do you have ten seconds to talk to me about . . . OK, have a nice day! Please don’t tell me to fuck off, it absolutely crushes what little self-esteem I have left!) and you’ve probably tried to avoid them, and later said what an unforgiving, shitty and demoralising job it must be. And yes, in many ways it is those things. Unless you’re good at it. And spending so much time in Laika’s head somehow made me really good at it.

  I got the job about six weeks before my 24th birthday. Just for some temporal context, or whatever.

  The strangest part was that I was aware of how bad I should have been at the job. I was aware, as I stood out there in the cold, by the fountains in Bristol city centre, or by the shopping centre in Cardiff, or wherever else we were going to be sent that day, that seeing these thousands of strangers coming towards me – and knowing that a) they all had things that they wanted to do, b) those things did not include even looking at me, let alone giving me their bank details, and c) I needed to get them to give me their bank details – should have filled me with such deep dread and horror that I just collapsed into myself, panicking, hyperventilating, and ultimately not getting any sign-ups. I was aware of that fear. I was experiencing it, in a way. But it was muffled. Underwater.

  And over the top was an attitude. It wasn’t Laika’s attitude. It wasn’t Lee’s, either. It was a bit of both, and a bit of a new one that seemed to have sprung up unbidden, filling in the blanks.

  Lucy 2.0.

  So I went out there on my first day and I fucking smashed it. I had five sign-ups by lunchtime, five more than either of the other two newbies. And by the end of the day I had ten. Which equalled bonus bonus bonus.

  Say wuuuut?

  Anyhoo. I quickly graduated from basic pay to proper pay, and between that and the bonuses, I suddenly had money, which was a rather lovely feeling. I took Lee and Laika out for good food. Paid for drinks. Bought myself some nice things. And the whole time, I had little nagging thoughts going on underneath. Thoughts like how does the charity actually make any money when we get paid so well? Our boss had told us that it was the most financially sound method of fundraising that there was, much better than one-off donations, or charity fun runs, or change boxes on shop counters, or whatever, but I wasn’t sure if that was true or if they just had to tell us that because we needed to swallow the Kool-Aid (hopefully I’ve used that phrase correctly) before we could force-feed it to other people. And I was also aware that I didn’t really care that much about the charity. I said all the right things. I did the spiel, my perfect spiel, and cynically wormed my way into people’s brains, and went home and thought that’s good, I got someone to donate to a worthwhile cause and I also got my own worthwhile cause – me – donated to, that’s good, but also is this working and should I be doing this if I don’t care and maybe you need to not care to do it well? We’d lost two team members by the second week, one got no sign-ups and was sacked after eight days (he looked pretty relieved; I felt bad for him, he obviously hated every single minute of it) and the other one just didn’t show up one day, and after observing my team leader and the other dude on my team, I started to wonder. Team leader was a primo douche canoe who only preyed on attractive women – particularly single mothers – between the ages of about 22 and 35. Other dude was very, very good, and seemed genuine, but there was something calculated about his spiel, something a little too smooth. And when they talked to me about how ‘you have to really make a connection with people, just, like, enjoy talking to them, don’t even think about getting them to sign up to anything, don’t be thinking about money, just love the connection’, all I heard was the flap flap flap of a cock and an arsehole performing a bullshit duet.

  But a job’s a job, innit. And being on it the way I had to be on it meant that I didn’t slide away so much, hitch-hiking behind Lee or Laika’s eyes, or wobbling into the weird glitching fuzz of the Internet. Plus, money.

  And then I turned 24, and everything began to suddenly and unexpectedly (maybe) unravel, and I bollocksed up the job and ended up back in a café or a bar or wherever I ended up then. Hey ho.

  POETRY NIGHT

  Laika invited me along to a poetry night one night, saying she hadn’t done one in ages and wanted to, but felt nervous about it and didn’t really know anyone who she thought would appreciate it, apart from me. This was fairly early on, we’d done Stuff together once and so were probably closer than if we’d hung out every day for several months, but there was still the frisson and excitement, knowing that I might say the wrong thing, or that she might respond well to the right thing. It was the first time in years that I’d felt this way about a new friend, and I was nervous. Also nervous because I hadn’t been to a poetry night and didn’t know what to expect. Laika offered me this warning beforehand: ‘I love the Bristol poetry scene. Adore it. But there is one particular strand that is, without hyperbole, the worst fucking thing ever invented by human beings. It’s not actually unique to Bristol, I’ve come across it in Cardiff and London too, but I think Bristol has by far the most virulent strain. Maybe it’s ‘cos we’re such a small city.’

  ‘When you say the worst thing– ’

  ‘I mean literally. Worse than the hydrogen bomb. Worse than slavery, worse than apartheid, worse than Zyklon B, weaponised rape, Bieber. Like . . . if cancer, AIDs and the Holocaust all had a horrible dirty three-way and the disgusting bastard baby that emerged was a style of poetry, it would have more merit than this. True story – the person who invented this particular strand of poetry was a conscious, dreadlocked young man called whatever, and when he first realised what it would turn into, he was like holy badly-constructed metaphors Batman, I am like totally become death, destroyer of poetry nights, and of people’s wills to live after the umpteenth cunting stoner fuckwit with a Bob Marley poster and some half-arsed ideas about consumerism that sort of rhyme wafts on to the stage. True story.’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘Yep.’

  It turned out that the particular strand of which she spoke was a kind of rambling half-rap monologue-y style with a general vibe of “capitalism and consumerism are bad, politics isn’t worth paying attention to, we have the power, revolution, etc”, delivered with maximum vagueness in a stoner drawl by very chilled-out young men, some of whom had dreadlocks. There was also a female equivalent that involved more references to Mother Nature, and Earth Mother, and The Goddess, and the emotional sensitivity of water, which I actually found more offensive, although I’m not entirely sure why. Generally, though, I didn’t quite see why Laika hated it so much (it took being inside her brain to understand that). I mean, some of the more preach-y, confrontational, accusatory ones were quite annoying, because they stood there and made you feel bad about whatever you were or weren’t doing, and then went and checked Facebook on their iPhones as though irony had recently been taken out the back and put out of its misery with a bolt gun (I didn’t think of that phrase at the time, unfortunately, as I’m sure Laika would have enjoyed it) – plus who wants to be told that you’re doing life wrong by someone who self-identifies as Little Johnny Oracle – but mostly it just seemed to be well-meaning guys who’d had those weed-induced pseudo-revelations to which we’ve all (not me though) fallen prey, noticing that there’s like, plenty of bad shit in the world, man, and feeling powerless to do anything about it, which is a legitimate feeling, I think. The fact that their chosen method of doing something about it involved identikit good-vibes poetry was neither here nor there, as far as I was concerned.

  At least until t
he seventh guy went up, introduced himself as ‘the guy who got that guy into writing’ (that guy was the guy who’d got up before him, and he was actually pretty good), and proceeded to do five YES FIVE pieces, all of which were basically identical lazily-rhymed rants about how people shouldn’t buy so many things, yo, and let’s all get together and feel all right, and not be a hater, ‘cos we hate haters, and by the way did I mention that I enjoy puffing the herb, because I really like puffing the herb quite a lot, and at that point I whispered to Laika that I was thinking about going to the toilet and hanging myself. ‘Tell you what,’ she muttered back. ‘Let’s find a gun, and I’ll do you and then turn it on myself. It’ll be romantic.’

  There was a lot of really good stuff too, to be fair. A beautiful girl playing beautiful songs on a beautiful guitar. An appealingly wired-looking guy doing bizarre non-sequitur-y comic poems about corpse luggage, talking vaginas and mysterious vegetable patches. A bearded guy who did geeky rapping. A Scottish lass who painted lovely, painful word pictures that she seemed to wrench from the very core of her being, like she’d painstakingly built them from her own flesh and bones, organic mechanisms fuelled by hot blood (ooh, maybe I should try this poetry thing). And Laika herself, who got up and did one piece, absolutely owned the spot, and then sat straight back down rather than going on and fucking on for ever and ever and ever until she’d sapped every last ounce of goodwill from the room.

  I wish I could remember the piece.

  But I’m also glad I can’t.

  ’Cos I think it would upset me.

  ‘So what did you think?’ asked Laika, as we walked through Stokes Croft, silly-haired kids in 80s leisurewear dotting around while nu-disco wafted from somewhere and a lazy wind blew lazier rain over the patchwork of old newspaper and kebab debris.