Idiopathy

by Byers, Sam

  ‘Plans?’

  ‘Yeah, your plans. You know, for your life.’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Fair enough. Early days and all that.’

  ‘Can I have a lemonade?’

  Nathan’s father narrowed his eyes, a slightly hunted look crossing his face.

  ‘Water will do,’ said Nathan.

  ‘Great. Ice and lemon?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘Or maybe just ice?’

  ‘OK.’

  They kept playing until Nathan won, at which point he watched for a further half-hour while his father finished off.

  ‘Anyway,’ said his father as they left, brushing invisible lint from the front of his jacket. ‘Glad we had this chat.’

  Before going to bed, Nathan showered – his first fully hot and undisturbed shower in months – and felt the scalding water ripple through his beard and down over the scars and fragmented tattoos that webbed his arms and chest, feeling cleansed and hollow and tired enough to sleep for days. Had he really slept at The Sanctuary? He’d thought at the time that he had, but looking back now and comparing it with the quiet, warm, well-made bed currently awaiting him, he was forced to wonder.

  Stepping out of the bathroom, his lower half wrapped in a towel, he almost collided with his mother. Stripped of her skirt suit and makeup, her legs veined, her face slack and pale and, without its usual layer of makeup, more deeply ridged, more expressive as her eyes swept up his body and traced the patterns of pain he’d caused himself and, by extension, her, she looked, Nathan thought, suddenly older, a little softer, a little sadder. Her gaze roamed his chest. She winced, her eyes filming briefly with tears.

  ‘Oh Nathan,’ she said.

  She covered her mouth; pinched her nose. Then she started to cry. He hugged her, felt her fingers feeling the ridges of the scars.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ she said, nodding into his neck.

  She held him at arm’s length, taking him in. Then she sniffed, recovering herself.

  ‘Please do something about that beard,’ she said. ‘You look a fright.’

  Back in his room, he lay on his bed. At some point people were going to have to be encountered and dealt with. He was not entirely unprepared but resistant nonetheless. He felt, as always, torn between opposing sensations of loneliness. If there was a word that related specifically to loneliness in the company of others he didn’t know it. Calling people would be pre-emptive and would establish a position of control as opposed to sitting around and waiting to see if people called and then being simultaneously relieved and disappointed if they did or didn’t. This was the thinking that had led to him organising so many parties attended by so many people he both arrived and left without knowing. Sometimes he had attempted to connect, although mostly not.

  He remembered, quite vividly, the evening of That Night, his peripheries hazed with whatever was in the water, the insides of his cheeks gnawed raw, his nerves oddly leaden, sweating behind the mask that was part of his costume, walking through a field of other masks and costumes, the bass heavy in his chest, pressing even at his corneas, at his cheekbones and the base of his skull, and leading a woman, not just any woman but a particular woman, a woman who stood out, with whom he had, on occasion, actually talked and actually come close to being himself, and who he liked because he suspected her of feeling lonely in all the ways he himself felt lonely, off to the side, sitting her on a log away from the din and the press of bodies and the steam of sweat in the cooling air, and taking off his mask and rubbing his eyes, and telling her, quietly and seriously, that he felt alone in what he could only describe as an atomic way; that he felt, sometimes, like a stray molecule in a structure that was always becoming. He could almost feel, he said, the invisible ties that pulled the people around him into a unified mass or whole, the energies and magnetisms that bound them. He could, he said, staring at the leaf-strewn floor and musing briefly that autumn was coming and the gatherings would soon cease for another year, walk through the crowd, and reach out his fingers to glad-hand and flesh-press, and feel nothing bar the enormous and unfathomable forces that rendered them united and him isolated. It howled inside him, he said, and howled all the worse at moments like this, when he felt surrounded and hemmed in and unable just to be alone with his alone-ness, which seemed to be the very thing his alone-ness demanded. He couldn’t think, he said; couldn’t talk. He looked at people’s faces from behind his mask and saw only a flickering cathode blankness; a repulsion where attraction should have been. He was giving it all up, he said. He was turning his back. He was going somewhere where he might have a stab at feeling connected in the way he’d always wanted, connected in the way he felt, as coincidence would have it, to her, this particular woman. He said he thought she might feel the same thing; that she gave off, at times, a sense of isolation and radioactive distance that he understood, and which he believed he could help with, since he felt, as he’d already explained, so very much like her, so very alone like her, and he’d taken her hand and asked her to come away with him and told her everything would change: that they’d be cured; that two people so terminally alone could only ever be good for each other because they’d always need each other in such a vital way.

  ‘Yeah,’ she’d said simply, eyeing his costume and then briefly scanning the ululating crowd ahead. ‘You’re obviously really shy and lonely.’

  ‘You don’t believe me.’

  She shrugged, exhaling smoke into the night and staring drily at the crush of dancing bodies, their hands stretched skywards in a gesture of celebration, supplication or surrender. ‘So you’re miserable. So what.’

  ‘I’m saying I think I can be happier. I think we can be happier.’

  She laughed grimly. ‘Who said I want to be happier?’

  ‘Doesn’t everyone want to be happier?’

  ‘Not me,’ she said. ‘Wanting to be happy just makes you miserable.’

  She stubbed her cigarette into the dirt and stood up, shooting another glance in the direction of her boyfriend. ‘We’re all miserable,’ she said. ‘Trick is to find a way of doing it without being such a bloody cliché.’

  She looked him up and down, quickly, half sneering, half saddened. ‘Put your fucking mask back on,’ she said.

  After that, and after the remaining events of the evening which had led, directly, to his hospital admission and thereby to a lengthy and unhappy Christmas convalescence at his parents’ house while he waited for his transfer in the spring to The Sanctuary, he had vowed not only to return to his old routine of silence, exile and cunning, but indeed to strengthen its rigour to the point of such inflexibility that no one would ever in fact be able to know him again. Knowing people, as in really knowing them and, worse, having them know you, was painful, and it was best, he’d decided, watching the woman to whom he’d revealed himself stroll cruelly away to rejoin the throng, simply not to do it, ever, and as if to mark the moment he made the decision, he said her name: Katherine.

  He tapped the keys of his phone. Her voice, bright yet sharp-edged, bridged the distance.

  Hi, it’s Katherine. I’m either out or very reluctant to speak to you. Leave a message and find out which.

  ‘It’s me,’ he said dumbly. ‘I mean, it’s Nathan. I, um, I’m sorry to hear about, you know, about you and Daniel. I … You two really had something, you know? Anyway, I’ve, ah, I’ve been away, and now I’m back, and I’d love to see you. Both of you. Do you have Daniel’s number? Anyway, give me a call sometime. It’d be great to, ah …’ He stopped, gears grating in his brain. ‘I thought I could do this, but I’m not sure I can.’

  He hung up, stabbed with worry. He lay back. He told himself we don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are. We name things, sometimes wrongly. The eye plays tricks. We sit in rooms and don’t feel well. Our mourning is at times premature; at times too late. The rooms feel external but are not.

  His phone buzzed. He reach
ed for it eagerly.

  Hi all, he read. Mother Courage here. I’ll be on TV with Dr Dave 1pm Weds talking about my new book. Please watch and tweet! Love to you all. MC x.

  He breathed, and followed his breath inwards, to places where the scale of his thoughts was wrong. He noted; corrected. Long before he found his way back out, he slept.

  A typical argument between Daniel and Katherine, during the phase of their relationship in which they’d become adept at disagreement, began with Daniel passing Katherine a book he’d read and urging her to read it, telling her the ending in particular was fantastic. Katherine became angry, saying the book was now ruined. Daniel pointed out that he hadn’t told her anything about the ending, he’d just said he liked it. Katherine said she didn’t care what actually happened, the simple fact of him saying he liked the ending gave it a certain promise which it would now, almost certainly, fail to live up to. She said she resented the idea that she needed to be told the ending of a book was good in order to encourage her to get all the way through it as this implied she had a tendency not to get all the way through books. Now, she said, the whole book was going to feel like a chore because she’d have to finish it whether she liked it or not just to show him she was capable of finishing it, and when she got to the end it would have Daniel’s smug face all over it and reading it would be like eating a chocolate biscuit someone had been holding too long in their hand: it would still probably taste good, but it would be discernibly tainted. To Daniel, this metaphor was suspiciously appropriate, meaning that either Katherine was far more skilled in rhetoric than he was (very likely) or that she sometimes planned out her arguments in advance and then waited for the right moment to set them running (also likely), both of which thoughts made Daniel uncomfortable and gave him a sense of being on the back foot, which he attempted to counter by going on the offensive and asking when the idea of him enjoying or admiring something had become so repellent that it then prevented Katherine from enjoying it herself, as if appreciation were finite and he’d used it up ahead of her. It was more like, he said, someone leaving you a biscuit in the packet, and offering it to you, and you then refusing it because you’d already seen the person enjoying their biscuit too much. He said he felt this whole difficulty Katherine seemed to have with other people’s enjoyment went right to the heart of their relationship and constituted a major flaw, since it seemed to prevent them ever enjoying the same thing at the same time. He cited other incidents. He said it seemed like if he told Katherine she’d enjoy something she was bound to hate it, and to practically crucify him for building her expectations to the point where disappointment was the only foreseeable outcome. However, if he calmly, and usually quite reasonably, predicted she’d hate something, she’d shoot him down for being negative. He said he felt pretty much like he was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t.

  Katherine said that was his whole problem. Why did he have to make a prediction either way? Why did he have to throw his opinion into the ring before she’d asked for it? It was like receiving a running commentary on things that hadn’t happened yet. It left her with the feeling that she didn’t know if something was happening as it appeared to be happening or if in fact it was only appearing to happen in the way he’d already told her it would happen because he’d filled her head so full of predictions she couldn’t tell reality from prophecy any more. She said she got the feeling that it wasn’t about her enjoying or not enjoying anything at all, it was just about Daniel being right, which was so bloody important to him that he had to pre-empt everything just so he could enjoy being seen to be right. Daniel said she was right, this was all about him being right. Naturally, he was being sarcastic. Then he said what it was really about was her total inability to accept the times he was right, so she’d cut off her nose to spite her face (Katherine sneered at the cliché) and waste precious time and energy proving him wrong. What was it, he wanted to know, about him being right that was so difficult to take, and didn’t she think there was something malignant going on in their relationship if she couldn’t bear him enjoying or being right about anything, because what, really, did that leave him with? Then Katherine asked him how he felt when she enjoyed something and he said he didn’t know because he couldn’t remember the last time he’d actually seen her enjoying anything, which pretty much immediately upped the hostility level of the whole exchange.

  Both Katherine and Daniel argued by continually defining and redefining what they called ‘The Real Problem’. Whenever either of them said it they gave it heavy stress. If Katherine said it after Daniel had just said it she waggled her middle and index fingers in the air to indicate inverted commas. The Real Problem was never really agreed upon, and so was a mutable term that could be loosely used to stand in for the real Real Problem, which was that, just as they couldn’t agree on what might constitute the Real Problem, they actually couldn’t agree on anything and were making each other miserable.

  Daniel deployed the Real Problem Tactic at this point by suggesting that the Real Problem was that Katherine was so hell-bent on being overwhelmingly original and unpredictable that she’d somehow managed to completely divorce the things she genuinely felt from the things she wanted to feel or thought it would be cool or interesting to feel. The end result, as far as he saw it, was that she didn’t feel anything at all but just responded in a calculated fashion to given situations and stimuli. If she wanted to be unpredictable, he said, she should try actually feeling things rather than thinking about them and then artificially constructing her feelings as a response to what she thought other people felt.

  At this point, Katherine smiled: a pretty strong indicator of upcoming aggression.

  Katherine said that she couldn’t actually believe that he, Daniel, had the audacity to accuse her, Katherine, of not having adequate feelings. She said what he couldn’t understand was that he regarded her feelings and responses as odd and inappropriate only because he was so bound up in his stupid ideas of what most people normally did (here she waggled her fingers with such scorn that Daniel could hear them flapping like little birds) and was so keen to keep his own responses and reactions in line with these broad and basically quite misguided notions of normality and conformity that the minute anyone had any kind of genuine, from-the-gut response he rejected it out of hand. Furthermore, she suggested, Daniel’s whole concept of what she should or shouldn’t be feeling was itself bound up in his apparently relentless insecurity, meaning that her happiness, or the appearance of her happiness, was of concern to him not because he cared about her happiness but because he cared about the way her happiness reflected on him. He needed her to be happy, was the basic gist, because that way everything, namely them, was OK, and this was, she said, a pretty oppressive and dictatorial pressure to live with. Sometimes she couldn’t be happy, it was as simple as that, and if he was going to set off down some spiral of concern and doubt every time she appeared to be unhappy or expressed unhappiness in any way then clearly everything was going to fall apart because the very pressure of being happy was itself making her unhappy, just as the very pressure of building towards the ending of a book which was supposed to be great would in itself not only ruin the book because she’d be overly hasty in rushing through it to get to the supposedly great ending but would also utterly ruin the ending because it could only ever be a disappointment. (Katherine was highly skilled at bringing arguments back to their original frame of reference, a tactic that had the double effect of making everything she’d said seem to lead back to some central point, meaning her entire argument was, in terms of its interior logic, bulletproof, while at the same time implying that Daniel had forgotten what they were arguing about and so had unwittingly constructed an argument that was untenable and made no sense.) And anyway, she said, Daniel didn’t even care if they were happy, he just cared if people thought they were happy, because happiness, to Daniel, was a way of showing off and feeling successful when in the company of others. So, she said, if Daniel wanted her to be happy a
nd, in turn, wanted them to be happy or at least wanted them to appear to be happy the simplest thing to do would be to just leave her alone and let her be unhappy or happy or whatever the fuck she wanted to be without his needy and emotionally domineering and, when you got right down to it, actually pretty pathetic ongoing attempt to control her every fucking thought and feeling.

  Daniel paused before responding in order to shape his face into an expression of combined pain and courage which he felt served the dual purpose of making him look invincible while also implying that Katherine had really gone too far this time.

  Daniel then said, OK, yes, that was as maybe (which was his way of saying OK, no, that’s not as maybe), but what about his happiness? Wasn’t it perfectly natural that if you loved someone you wanted them to be happy and that in consequence a big part of your ability to be happy and relaxed was tied up in their happiness? It seemed to him, he said, that this was in fact perfectly normal and not something he had to justify in order to answer her frankly fairly predictable arguments about normality. He used the word predictable deliberately because he knew that a great part both of Katherine’s self-image and insecurity was founded on the notion that she was different-slash-better-than everybody else, meaning he could very easily pick away at the things that made her feel good while simultaneously inflating the things that made her feel bad – a tactic he almost always felt guilty about afterwards because he knew that making Katherine feel bad could often lead to her feeling very bad indeed, but in the heat of the argument he was somehow never able to resist. Moreover, he said, did she have any idea how selfish her argument sounded? What if he was happy, and enjoying something, and either wanted to share that with her or didn’t, whichever, and her non-enjoyment or general unhappiness impeded his enjoyment and happiness? Because that was, he said, how he felt, every day, all the time. Like the minute he was happy about anything she’d go and suck the joy right out of it until it was just a dry husk, and it was making him miserable, all the time, every day; and she wanted to talk about him being megalomaniacal about his feelings? Please. This coming from the person who whenever she was pissed off had to make sure everyone else was pissed off too, preferably more than she was? And if she wanted to go back to the book and the ending of the bloody book if she really wanted to be pedantic about it, her near-vitriolic dismissal of everything he’d enjoyed about the book and the fact that it had been his very enjoyment of something as simple as a good ending to a book which had started such a sprawling argument in the first place, actually made him think he didn’t like the book so much after all, or that he was stupid for liking it. At the very least, his enjoyment of it was now counterbalanced by a lot of very negative feelings and reminders. And honestly, he said, even if you accepted that they were both somehow tyrannical about their emotions and both wanted other people, particularly each other, to feel what they themselves were feeling, wasn’t the fact that he wanted her to be happy far more defensible and in many ways more admirable than the fact that she just seemed to want him and everyone else to be as miserable and fucked up as she was?