by Mike Steeves
Giving Up
Giving Up
Mike Steeves
BOOKTHUG
DEPARTMENT OF NARRATIVE STUDIES
TORONTO, 2015
FIRST EDITION
copyright © Mike Steeves, 2015
The production of this book was made possible through the generous assistance of The Canada Council for the Arts and The Ontario Arts Council.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Steeves, Mike, 1978 –, author
Giving up / Mike Steeves.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77166-109-6 (EPUB.)
I. Title.
PS8637.T432G58 2015 C813’.6 C2015-900803-4
PRINTED IN CANADA
About this Book
At times funny, at other times sad, and more than often a mixture of the two, Giving Up by Mike Steeves is a deeply felt account of what goes on in the inner sanctum of a modern couple’s apartment.
In grappling with the line between what happened and what might have happened, Steeves gives voice to the anguish of a generation of people who grew up with great expectations, and are now settling into their own personal failures and compromises: James is obsessed with completing his life’s work. Mary is worried about their problems starting a family, and is scared that their future might not turn out as she’d planned. In the span of a few hours on an ordinary night in a non-descript city, two relatively small events will have enormous consequences on James’ and Mary’s lives, both together and apart.
With an unrelenting prose style and pitch-black humour, Giving Up addresses difficult topics – James’s ruinous ambition, and Mary’s quiet anguish – in a funny and relatable way. This experimental work will appeal to readers of contemporary European fiction who enjoy fast-paced stories that focus on voice and ideas.
For Nikki
. . . the sorry and ludicrous fact with most people is, alas, that in their own house they prefer to live in the basement.
—Søren Kierkegaard
JAMES
The world is full of uplifting stories about extraordinary men and women who toiled away in obscurity for years and years, if not for their entire lives, before they were finally recognized, in some cases only in their afterlife, for achieving something great where so many others have failed. We constantly hear of how they stuck to their guns and defied all the odds when everyone was telling them to quit. It’s rare to go a full day without nodding along to an inspiring anecdote about someone who was able to shut out all those voices telling them that they weren’t good enough and that they were on the wrong path, so all they could hear was the little voice inside their head that told them they were destined for glory and that all they had to do was to stay the course. We might be sitting on a bus next to a couple of potheads, or in the lineup at a food court behind a gang of computer nerds, or maybe we bump into an old friend from high school, whatever the case is, we’re forced to listen to these people talk about a complete nobody who endured the pity and ridicule of their entire community, until later in life he or she revealed his or her true genius and, one assumes, experienced the sort of vindication that most of us don’t even dare dream of. Considering how ubiquitous these stories are, you would think that we place a high value on unwavering strength and conviction, you would think that we admire people who keep trying despite countless punishing failures, but the truth is that we only admire these people in retrospect. If we actually come across one of these singular and heroic individuals who defy all criticism, who ignore their countless defeats, who carry on despite all the evidence that they should give up, then we are invariably disgusted by what we see. We think we can tell the difference between someone who has yet to succeed versus someone who is doomed to failure, but we can’t. It’s impossible to tell them apart, they both come off as desperate and slightly crazed, so we get it all wrong, or try to play it safe, by rejecting the true genius and celebrating the mediocre, the sure thing. We never discover these geniuses for ourselves, it’s always from someone else, which is why it takes years before we can finally recognize their accomplishments, and why many of these geniuses end up dying before word gets around. Whenever I hear about one of these great men or women who died before they could be recognized, I always wonder if they knew they were right and that everyone else was wrong. Had they discovered some sort of sign or evidence that proved, if only to themselves, that their destiny would be fulfilled? I’m particularly curious because I decided at a very young age that I was going to devote my life to accomplishing something extraordinary, but now I’m worried that I’ve made a huge mistake. Maybe I should give up. Maybe it’s insane to keep going when everything I’ve done up to this point clearly indicates that there’s no greatness in store for me. I’ve been concerned about this for a while now. I worry out loud to anyone who will listen, but this is all just for show, and doesn’t affect my conviction. If anything, it strengthens my resolve. If I gave up now then I would be admitting that my entire life had been a waste, or, if not a complete waste, then it was the equivalent of walking in the wrong direction for twenty years, and, losing all hope of ever finding my way back, laying down on the ground where I stood and waiting for sleep, or whatever, to come over me. There didn’t seem to be any use in turning around at this point, so just like all the countless other failures out there, I’m trapped by my own unyielding determination. The supreme irony of it is that even though I am wasting my time I feel as though I’m superior to all those who, rather than devote themselves to achieving the impossible, spend their lives accomplishing easily defined and reachable goals. And it’s feelings like these that have led me to think that maybe it’s time to give up. Maybe giving up on these pretensions is the more courageous thing to do. Even though we never tell stories about the people who took the advice of their family and friends – especially because we don’t tell stories about these advice-takers – it no doubt takes way more guts to admit that the course you have been following, that you have shaped every aspect of your life around, was precisely the wrong course to take. (This was the big lesson from my encounter with the con man.) And there is an additional moral imperative for giving up, of course, since I’m not the only one heading in the wrong direction – I’m dragging my wife along with me. Every day, she puts her faith in me and trusts that I’m leading her in the right direction, that the course that I have chosen for myself will inadvertently also lead to the fulfillment of some of her own hopes and desires, when in fact I am leading her into total ruin. Of course the reason that she is so compliant, so willing to be led down the garden path, so to speak, is because I look her right in the eye every day and say to her, ‘I know where I’m going.’ Obviously she is very suspicious that I’ve been lying to her face. She’s flat out accused me on numerous occasions. For instance, ‘You have no fucking idea what you’re doing,’ is something she just said to me during the fight we had earlier today, before I went out and met the con man. ‘I am so angry with myself for going along with this,’ she said, referring to my work in the basement. ‘I should have known what I was getting into.’ But there was no way she could’ve known. When she first met me I was like everyone else my age. Back then it would’ve been impossible to say who was going to succeed and who was going to fail. The odds looked even. The differences that would emerge later on and set us apart so drastically weren’t apparent. It’s hard to believe that a true genius ever had equals or rivals for the same great goals and grand pursuits. We are convinced that t
hey were fated to become the singular geniuses that we know them as, and it’s strange to us that this may not have been obvious to everyone since the day they were born, but since we don’t know what genius looks like, we can’t even describe what genius is, and at that early age what may seem like idiocy can turn out to be a talent for concentration. So back when I was young, while you might have been able to identify a few of the more likely successes or failures, most of us were simply too insubstantial for there to be anything to base one’s judgment upon. We might have been very promising, or at least not unpromising. There wouldn’t have been much cause to suspect that we would end up as tragic failures, bringing our wives and our children to the brink of ruin, just as it would have been ridiculous to assume that any of us would have a great success, and become the subject of tedious anecdotes about the virtues of singular vision and perseverance. I should probably mention that Mary and I are only on the brink of ruin, and that I haven’t led her so far down that we’ll never find our way back up again, which is to say that there is still time for her to do a one-eighty, to refuse to be led by me any longer and go her own way, but it isn’t likely that she will do this, for the same reason that I’m not going to give up at this point (which was also the reason why I didn’t walk away from the con man once I knew he was full of shit). She has invested too much to pull out now, especially when there is still a remote possibility that I am actually on the right path and that success is right around the corner. What if, right after she finally gave up on me and tried to start a new life for herself, I turned out to be right all along, and the long, hard years were redeemed by recognition and success? How would she be able to live with herself knowing that if she had stayed with me for a little while longer it all would have been worth it? No, she’s too invested to consider leaving, at least not for a little while longer, although there are signs that my time is running out. She’s become increasingly encouraging, offering advice and assistance, which may sound like a good thing but is actually what she does when she’s losing her patience. I wasn’t nearly as concerned about the status of our relationship when she was openly contemptuous of how I spent my time down in the basement pursuing something that in all likelihood I was never going to achieve. Back then she wasn’t worried that I was going to sabotage our lives together, she was only annoyed by how much time I was wasting down there. When she did allow a shadow of a doubt to cross her mind it was because she was worried that maybe it wasn’t healthy to be so obsessed with my life’s work. But she still had faith in me. When she occasionally lost her composure and accused me of using my basement-time as an excuse for not having a life, when she tried to start a fight by belittling the calling that I have devoted my life to, I rarely got upset because I knew that ultimately she wasn’t worried about how everything was going to turn out, she just wanted me to hurry up and get things over with. I can tell that she’s becoming increasingly worried because these days she is clearly making a concerted effort to stay positive. No more jokes about how she should’ve married someone else instead. ‘You know,’ she would say, ‘someone normal?’ Gone are the little tantrums she used to throw when she couldn’t ‘take it anymore,’ after she’d come home from doing groceries to find me down in the basement while the rest of the apartment ‘looked like a fucking disaster.’ In its place was a sort of forced serenity, and now, instead of losing her temper, she would speak to me in a perfectly even, almost emotionless tone, and no matter what I did, despite the relentless parade of rejection and bad news I greeted her with every day, she maintained the same implacable demeanour. This shift from her prior state of annoyance and mild irritation, which only manifested itself as anger if I neglected my household duties, to her new blandly cheerful and supportive role obviously makes me suspicious and insecure, because it’s clear that she’s losing her faith. When I started out on this course I never imagined that I wouldn’t have time to accomplish my goals – that I would have to race against failure never occurred to me. I’m not saying that I expected to be an ‘overnight success,’ I knew that the work would be long and hard, but I never thought for a moment that I wouldn’t be able to take my time, go at my own speed, etc. . . . I know now that each hour is a gift – a gift that until very recently I have taken for granted and squandered recklessly – a gift that has been steadily depreciating in value because as each hour slips away it becomes increasingly unlikely that I’ll be able to achieve much with what I have left – a gift I wasn’t even aware I had been given, and that I frittered away because it never occurred to me that it could run out. The moment I wake up, I’m already behind. The first flush of consciousness, the first coherent rush of thought, is that I shouldn’t have stayed up working so late, especially since the last couple of hours were wasted puzzling over a minor detail that I now realize, in the brutal light of day, should’ve been left for when I wasn’t so tired, that I should’ve gone to sleep the moment I noticed that my thinking was becoming muddled and that I was making stupid mistakes. I should’ve gone to bed earlier so that when I woke up I could go back down, before I had to be at my day job, and correct that minor detail in a fraction of the time I had actually spent on it. Instead I stayed up until I was so exhausted that I couldn’t even see clearly and going to sleep was more like passing out, so that when I wake up I’m already despairing over the day ahead, in particular the first eight hours I have to devote to my day job (plus two for the commute) before I can get back to the basement. I’m so overwhelmed by everything I haven’t done but have promised myself must be done before the end of the day – although I already know that I won’t even come close to getting done what I plan on doing (especially because my ‘plans’ are so vague and unrealistic that it’s impossible to fulfill them) – that I strongly consider calling in sick and staying in bed all day. When I was younger none of my peers had accomplished much of anything, except for a few precocious ones who I wrote off as freaks of nature, outliers who weren’t part of the competition. But as the years have gone by I’ve been watching my friends, as well as people I don’t know personally but have read or heard about through mutual acquaintances, as they rack up one success after another. It’s becoming difficult to categorize myself as a ‘late bloomer,’ since by this point most everyone I know has more or less gone through the ‘blooming’ phase. In fact, it’s a little indecent to speak about a man my age in terms of ‘blooming,’ or as having bloomed. It’s humiliating to think about all the stock phrases I use when I’m offering up excuses (most of the time to people who haven’t asked for them) for why I haven’t been able to accomplish anything yet. ‘I’m a slow learner,’ I say. ‘Everybody develops at their own speed. I started late so I’ve had a lot of catching up to do. I’m not a natural like some of the other guys out there. Things don’t come as easily to me as they do for some people. I just think about the work. That’s all I have time for. Maybe some of the other guys are a bit cannier when it comes to that sort of thing. I’m not good at selling myself, and if you’re going to make it in today’s world you have to be able to sell yourself. It doesn’t matter if you’ve come up with the best idea since sliced bread (which, in retrospect, isn’t that great of an idea and likely succeeded only because somebody knew how to sell it), it doesn’t matter if you’re a genius, you won’t have a chance in this life if you don’t know how to network, bargain, convince, entice, inspire, enable, persuade, and bamboozle (like the con man). It’s not enough anymore to just work hard, and I haven’t figured out the other part yet. I’m not in a hurry,’ I say, lying through my teeth, ‘There’s loads of guys like me out there who work away patiently. I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.’ One cliché after another. Bullshit piled on top of bullshit. The moment I utter these phrases I know that they’re complete fabrications, which is not to say that they have no basis in reality – they are clichés after all – just that they weren’t true in relation to my situation. The truth is that I haven’t worked hard enough. I have been busy, but that has nothing to do with ha
rd work. In fact, I have kept busy in order to avoid working hard. Rather than tackling problems that I’ve been putting off for weeks, months, years, I spend my time ‘fine-tuning’ parts of the work that are more or less complete and no longer require my attention, parts that have been complete for quite some time and should be left alone since my efforts to ‘fine tune’ usually end up undoing the work that I’ve already done. Even a year ago, I was much closer to completing the work than I am now. Every day that I continue to work is just one more day of ruining or undoing something that I had previously worked very hard to complete. So not only have I been wasting my time with all this busy work, but I have actually been turning back the clock, so to speak. If I could only shake off this lethargy, this apathy, this depression, and start back up with the hard work that is absolutely necessary for success, then I may still avoid the disastrous failure that looms over each passing day. But nothing seems to work. After spending the entire evening fiddling around, tinkering with a tiny detail for the thousandth time, I go to bed feeling defeated, and it’s not uncommon for me to fall into total despair. As I lay there in despair over wasting yet another day – and not just wasting the day, but actually using the day to destroy what I’d already accomplished – I try to comfort myself with the thought that tomorrow will be different. Tomorrow, I vow, will mark the beginning of a renewed and revitalized effort to start back up with the serious, complicated, and exhausting work that I’ve basically put aside for the last year, if not longer. So the following morning, as I’ve already mentioned, I wake up in a panic, feeling so far behind that it’s unlikely I will ever catch up. I then spend the next ten hours at my day job, and the commute to my day job, going over the resolutions from the night before and trying to decide which one I should begin with when I return to the basement. Since each resolution involves committing not just one night’s worth of work, but an entire month at the very least, it’s extremely important that I make the right choice. Once I decide on which resolution I’m going to start work on I will be stuck on it for at least a month and instead of the busy, mindless activity of the last year I’ll be doing the hard stuff that I’ve been putting off in the vain hope that the work would somehow complete itself. But before I move on to the hard work, I say to myself as I’m heading down to the basement, I should probably start off with a few minor tasks in order to warm up, as it were, before dedicating myself to the all-consuming resolution that will monopolize my time for the foreseeable future and prevent me from working on these smaller things that require less focus, commitment, and strenuous mental effort, and that can be accomplished in a couple of hours and leave me with a sense of fulfillment, no matter how mistaken or undeserved this sensation actually is. Despite all the resolutions from the night before, I decide to start on some small, almost insignificant task. Before I can buckle down, I tell myself, I must review the work that I’ve accomplished thus far, so that I have a better idea of what the next step should be. I go down into the basement and start reviewing the work that I’ve done over the last year, and the first thought that occurs to me as I’m conducting my review is that I haven’t done any work of value or substance for at least a year, maybe longer. Basically I have been wasting my time, which means I am also wasting the time of my family and friends. Whenever they have asked me about my work and have been forced to listen as I bitch and moan, complain and gripe, carrying on for hours in bitter self-pitying tones, they are having their time doubly wasted. Not only do they have to listen to the petty ramblings of a dissatisfied failure, which is a time-waster like no other, but the very basis of my complaints is completely imaginary. I talk their ears off about the insurmountable obstacles that I have to face when, in fact, no such difficulties exist because I am not really working. My friends have lost years of their lives listening to my imaginary problems with my imaginary work. But that’s not even the worst part. No, the worst part, the most sad and pathetic aspect of my work in the basement, is that nobody actually cares whether I really am working or just telling people that I’m working. Aside from the annoyance, or, if they love me, the anguish, that comes with having to listen to me go on and on about some project or goal or dream that I haven’t a hope in hell of realizing, and aside from the simple fact that the time spent listening to me talk about my life’s work for the hundredth or even thousandth time could have been used more productively, nobody really cares what I do when I’m down in the basement, which is to say that nobody cares about the work per se, they care only insofar as it causes pain and distress in my life, and consequently in theirs as well. If I was already a success and had accrued some fame and accolades for accomplishments in my field, then maybe people would wonder about what I was working on. The only reason anybody cares about whether somebody is working or not is if they have already done something great and path-breaking, in which case there is good reason, or at least a reasonable possibility, to think that they may continue to do great work in the future, perhaps even greater work than what they have already accomplished. We look forward to news about their progress and wait impatiently for them to hurry up and repeat their earlier successes. And the fact that so many people care about the work this person is doing draws even more people into the anxious crowd awaiting the next installment. ‘She is doing important work,’ they say, and the fact that so many people are in agreement about the value of her previous work is a testament to just how important the work really is, they also say. But if we have yet to produce any work at all, whether it be important or completely insignificant, then it is quite simply impossible for anyone to give a shit one way or the other about how we spend our time, so long as it doesn’t interfere with whatever they’ve got going on in their lives. It’s not that they don’t trust someone who claims to be doing great work but who hasn’t produced any great work to date – it’s that they can’t trust someone who hasn’t produced anything. Trust, by definition, has to be based on something (otherwise it’s not trust, it’s faith), and in the absence of any accomplished work to base it upon people can only wish you well, without being able to care what happens with the work you are allegedly slaving away on. There is no such thing as potential work, there is only accomplished work. When I’ve been complaining for hours about the various obstacles, both real and imaginary, that have been preventing me from completing the first phase of what I have already decided will be my life’s work, and the friend or family member that has been forced to sit and listen finally interrupts me to say that they really hope that I’m able to overcome these obstacles and complete the first phase, it’s entirely possible that they are telling the truth, but only in the sense that they want me to complete my work for my own sake, so I can finally stop obsessing about it and enjoy the satisfaction of accomplishing something of great and lasting importance, or for their own sake, so that they no longer have to sit through my painfully self-absorbed complaints, or, if they are a close friend, so that they don’t have to watch me suffer. If I could somehow be relieved of the anguish caused by my work without having to actually complete the work itself these so-called friends of mine would be all for it. They wouldn’t encourage me to keep going, to defy all the odds and everyone who had been telling me to give up. They wouldn’t say, ‘But you’ve come so far. It would be insane to stop working now after all you’ve done. And besides,’ they wouldn’t say, ‘what you’re doing is necessary and important.’ Instead they would say, ‘I don’t know, maybe it’s a good idea. Maybe all you need is a break, and then when you come back to it in a couple months or a year’s time, you’ll be refreshed and ready to work again.’ Rather than spurring me on to the finish, they would wholeheartedly endorse a plan to give everything up, to simply abandon what has been the sole purpose of my life for so many years, and not because they were uncaring or cruel, but because, for them, the work did not exist in the first place. It wasn’t real. When I say ‘my life’s work’ to my friends and family, I might as well be saying ‘my imaginary friend.’ I might as well say, ‘I spent all
last night in the basement with my imaginary friend.’ If they asked if they could meet my imaginary friend I would say ‘not yet.’ I would tell them that at that point in time it wasn’t possible to see my imaginary friend. ‘In fact,’ I would say, ‘you wouldn’t even be able to see him if I showed him to you.’ This is exactly what I tell people when they ask to see what I’ve been working on. ‘You can’t see it right now,’ I say. ‘It’s too soon. It’s not ready. It doesn’t look like anything at this point. There’s nothing to see.’ The only reason anyone believes me when I tell them that I’ve been working on something is because there’s no hard evidence against it. But it’s clear that people are starting to have their doubts. I’ve been talking about my work for so long, without ever giving anyone even the tiniest glimpse of what I am working on, that they’re starting to question just how much work I’ve been doing down there in the basement. And it’s a fair question, because lately, if anyone were to spy on me while I was down in the basement, they might fall under the impression that I’m not doing any work at all. For long periods at a time – not just hours, but days, and weeks, and months – I sit in the basement and do anything but work. Once I get home from my real job, I go down to the basement to start on my life’s work, but, as I already mentioned, before I start anything new I tell myself that I need to review what I’ve already accomplished. Because I’ve been working at it for so long there are so many different aspects that I have to keep in mind at all times and the only way to do this is to review my recent work. Of course it doesn’t take me very long to spot an error or a flaw, and I’m obliged to put off starting anything new until I fix it. So I work away on this until I’ve completely ruined everything I’ve already done. ‘Great,’ I’ll say to myself. ‘Just fucking great. Not only am I not getting any new work done, but I’m completely destroying everything that I’ve already done.’ Whenever I start work, which is always very late in the day since I don’t even get started until I’ve worked a full eight hours at my real job, I say to myself, ‘Now don’t go making any big decisions. In fact, don’t do anything at all. Just do a quick review and pick up where you left off yesterday, then start in on the new work.’ But within a few minutes I’m totally immersed, and in no time at all I become convinced that everything I’ve done up to that point is wrong. ‘My life’s work,’ I say to myself, ‘is a total disaster. From day one I’ve been heading in the wrong direction. I should start over right now. Ditch everything I’ve done and start fresh.’ One of the big differences between me and those people you hear about who defied the odds and stuck to their guns and made their own luck is that I don’t really want to succeed. If I did want to succeed, if in fact I had been telling the truth all along and had actually been devoted to success, no matter what the cost, the effect, the toll, etc., if I was really serious about my work, and not just dicking around in the basement, then wouldn’t I be willing to throw it all out in order to achieve my stated goal? Of course I would. If I actually had the drive that these so-called geniuses possess, I wouldn’t even hesitate. As it stands, I’m not willing to take this sort of drastic action because I don’t believe that I’m capable of pulling it off. When it comes right down to it I don’t have any faith in my ability to complete the project that I have devoted my life to. So instead of starting over I spend my time trying to improve upon what I’ve already done, which is technically impossible. The very first step I took, the very decision to start work on a project so monstrously ambitious, was the first mistake I made, and every subsequent move in that direction has been a move in the wrong direction. But now that I’ve gone so far in the wrong direction I have absolutely no desire to turn around and retrace my steps to where I made that first catastrophic mistake. ‘It’s too late,’ I say to myself, ‘you’ve gone too far. You have to see it through, even though what you’re seeing through is a lifetime of mistakes.’ I sit there in the basement, sunk into despair, and waste my time trying to correct a small detail, because I think that this will somehow redeem, or mask, the mountain of details that are beyond fixing, but I quickly realize that it’s impossible to correct this small detail without also correcting another equally small detail. I work at correcting these minor details but I end up destroying what little value there may have been in the work I’ve done already, because even though these small details seem almost insignificant, and this is why they can be easily corrected (unlike the more significant, pervasive, and impossible-to-fix details), once I start making these corrections, the sheer scope of my failure is brought into sharper relief. After I have finished wasting most of my time in the basement destroying my already failed project, I force myself to stop before I’ve ruined everything. ‘Even though what you’ve done so far is completely misguided and counterproductive, and the night is almost over,’ I say to myself, ‘it’s still better than doing nothing. So just leave it alone and from now on start going in the right direction. If you start doing good work from this point on then maybe this will somehow balance out all the bad work.’ I give myself a shake and check to see how much time I have left to work, and it’s at this point that I realize that the night is almost over and that I have wasted it on trying to fix the unfixable, doubly wasted it in fact, because not only have I failed to improve upon my previous work, but I have actually succeeded in making it worse. And then I start panicking that there’s no time left to maybe salvage something from this disaster of a workday and I decide that the best thing to do would be to take a short little break, although it’s not accurate to say that I decide to take a short break. The truth is that even before I came down into the basement to start on my life’s work I was already looking forward to the short break I would be taking once I felt as though I’d done enough to justify taking one. I am not exaggerating when I say that this break is the highlight of my day. My break is the only part of the day when I’m not completely consumed by the dread of failure. ‘I deserve a break,’ I think, ‘even if all I’ve done is go over work that I should’ve just left alone, I’ve still earned this short break, and I owe it to myself to enjoy my break as much as I can before I go back and finish off the rest of the workday.’ It’s so important to me to use my break time as effectively as possible that often during the first shift down in the basement, while I’m doubly wasting my time ruining everything I’ve already accomplished, I’m also simultaneously trying to decide on what to do during my break. Most of the time I’m capable of doing both (i.e. systematically destroying my previous work and planning my break), but there are occasions when the break-planning overtakes the work-ruining so that I am completely distracted and stop working altogether in order to try to resolve what I am going to do on my break so I can go back to concentrating on destroying my past work. The reason I am so consumed by the dilemma of how to spend my break is because not only is it the only time of the day that is free of despair, but it is also the only part of the day when I allow myself to do what I really want to be doing. My whole life is one long build up to the moment when I don’t have to do anything. It should almost go without saying at this point in my confession that I do not want to be working, but since I’m committed to an impossible goal and because I can’t see any other way around achieving success except by ceaseless and frenzied labour, I’m left with no other choice but to spend my days doing something that I can’t stand. ‘I get the impression,’ Mary said to me during our argument earlier today, ‘that you’d be a lot happier if you weren’t working down there all the time.’ And when I didn’t reply (because I try not to fall into these traps that she is constantly setting for me) she continued as if I hadn’t heard her, or as if I might not have understood what she meant. ‘It’s just that it seems to make you so unhappy. The only time you seem to be relaxed and capable of enjoying yourself is when you don’t have to work. I mean, do you even enjoy it?’ ‘Of course I do,’ I said, ‘why else would I be spending every waking hour working if I didn’t get some sort of satisfaction out of it?’ Obviously this question was meant to sound rhetoric
al, which is to say that it was designed to reassure Mary (and shut her up) but it was delivered without any conviction and with more than a little desperation, which is to say that it wasn’t rhetorical at all. It was a straight-up question. The only answer I can think of that makes sense of why I would spend the majority of my waking hours absorbed in work that I do not enjoy, work that I may even hate, work that prevents me from achieving the everyday triumphs and goals that everyone I know who hasn’t devoted themselves to some foolhardy, arrogant, ill-conceived, outdated, and impossible pursuit has been able to grasp with relative ease, because they were reasonable and attainable goals in the first place, the only reason that makes any sense is that I am working so that I can take these short breaks where I allow myself to do something that I actually enjoy doing. When I take a break from my life’s work I end up doing the same sorts of things that I believe to be the pastimes of people who, since they don’t live their lives devoted to an abstract and unattainable goal, live a more grounded, narrow, dim, slavish, satisfying, and rewarding day-to-day life of doing fuck all. When I was much younger and frantically trying to get my life’s work under way, I didn’t think that this work would involve the same variation between long periods of mundane labour punctuated by brief moments spent indulging my immediate desires and impulses that supposedly characterized the life I was trying to avoid, the unspeakably depressing fate of living for the breaks. But instead of avoiding this fate it’s as though I chose the quickest route to it. Many of my friends who took the other path, the one I tried to avoid, who decided that they weren’t going to waste their time chasing after a goal they could never be certain they would reach, who made a clear-eyed and deliberate decision to find a job or career that complemented their skills, talents, and character, and would allow for them to spend as much time as possible doing the things that they enjoy doing, these friends of mine, who I can hardly stand to be in the same room with, have all found that they actually enjoy the time they spend working. They have no problem going on about the pleasure they experience during their workday and confess that sometimes they don’t even feel like taking a break, they just want to keep working. They’re so absorbed in what they are doing that it doesn’t even occur to them to take a break. Despite the fact that I’ve made no secret about how much trouble I have reaching the level of concentration required for the sort of demanding and complex work that I do down in the basement, and regardless of the fact that I make no effort to hide the anguished expression on my face as I’m held hostage by their enthusiasm and genuine affection for the positions that they have ended up in as a result of practical convenience, they are seemingly devoid of sympathy for my situation and go on like this for the entire dinner or cocktail or coffee or whatever the premise is that we’ve decided to meet under. Everything I have done, every choice I have made, has been focused on creating a life for myself that is the exact opposite of the one I am currently living. When I am out with my so-called real friends, the people who have, like me, devoted themselves to some open-ended, laudable, and, in most cases, artistic goal, and who, unlike me, in almost every instance have enjoyed some measure of success (although for some this is only moderate success, whereas others have achieved extremely immoderate success), we sometimes talk about the lives of our friends who don’t live for the sake of their work but instead live for the weekend, or vacation, or their next big purchase, or simply for the health and contentment of their families – or at least this is what we imagine they live for. We talk about their lives and compare them to our own and the tone of our conversation vacillates between condescension and envy, respect and contempt, confusion and disdain, affection and apathy. It’s impossible for us to make up our minds on what we think it means to live a life without any animating goal or purpose, so as soon as one of us says, ‘I wish that I could forget about my work and just kick back and have a good time the way they do,’ someone else will say, ‘But they seem really unhappy to me. They’re always talking about their fucking car or their house or their kids as if they don’t know what else to say to people, which is what happens when all you do is relax all day.’ Or if someone says, ‘I just can’t imagine what it would be like to face down every fucking day knowing that they’re never going to change, just one day after the other without anything to really hold them together. You know what I mean?’ then someone will say something along the lines of, ‘I know what you mean, but I don’t think it’s like that for them. I think that they like their job and they like their wife or husband or whatever, and their kids or their pets, and they live in a good neighbourhood and they have some close friends that they like to hang out with and I don’t think it’s anymore complicated than that. I don’t think they see their life as just one damn thing after another, to them it’s just all about being as comfortable and safe as possible and that is what holds everything together for them.’ One of us may try to argue by saying something like, ‘Yeah, but what if you’re not comfortable? Then it must feel like everything you do is pointless?’ but it’s such a lame comeback that it’s easy to defend against, all you have to do is point out that ‘This isn’t really any different from what we do. Some are able to pull it off, but there’s loads of us out there who are miserable. For whatever reason we aren’t able to succeed and it’s always the same result, we end badly. And it’s the same thing with them, if they can pull it off then they’re happy, but if things don’t go their way then they’re sad and bitter and all that crap. It doesn’t matter whether you devote your life to your work or just devote your life to having a good time, if things don’t go your way then you’re going to wish you had done things differently. The only difference between us and them is that when it works out for them they’re happy, but even when it works out for us most of us are still miserable. All the joy in the world will never make us happy.’ But since this particular friend of mine, the one who makes this argument, is the only one in our little group who has enjoyed the sort of success that the rest of us literally dream about, it’s hard for us to listen to what he says without thinking he’s being disingenuous, and that he is only making this argument because he has been so successful that he makes a big show of not valuing success at all, and attributing the good fortune of others to luck, rather than skill, in order to trivialize his own accomplishments, which of course only makes things worse. So, in an attempt to divert our attention away from the now-awkward fixation we all have on our friend’s so-called success and our lack thereof, one of us will say something like, ‘For me, it’s not about being happy or sad or super-successful or super-depressed. You can’t slice things up like that. Like, I’m a pretty miserable guy, but I can say without a doubt that I’m the happiest miserable fuck out there. Wouldn’t you agree that I’m the happiest miserable guy you’ve ever met? You can’t really say for certain that some people somehow pull it off and then live happily ever after, or that they don’t pull it off so the rest of their days are a living hell. To me, what it’s about is being there, you know what I mean? Like, to me, I don’t care whether I pull it off or not, I just like doing it.’ And it’s at this point in the discussion that I’ll speak up and say, ‘Exactly. And that’s the problem with these regular people, they are always just killing time. When they’re at work they’re killing time. Before they go on vacation they kill time, and even when they’re on vacation they’re killing time. It’s like those prisoners in movies that count down the days, scratch them on the wall or X out the day on a calendar. It’s like they’re living their lives the way someone lives in prison. The present doesn’t matter. Only what comes next matters,’ I say, unsure whether I actually believe what I’m saying. Because if I stop and consider how I live my life, and think about how I spend my days, it should be immediately obvious that when I say that the problem with people is that they aren’t ‘living in the present,’ I am actually talking about myself. I am the greatest time-killer of them all. Every waking moment of my life is murdered, by me. I strangle the life out of time. I poison it. I
smother time. I beat time to a misshapen and bloody pulp. I plot against time, and then carry out my plot with ruthless cunning. In fact, whenever I am killing time I am simultaneously plotting against it. I take up a position and wait patiently for the right moment and then I make my move. Instead of cherishing each day of my life and getting the most out of every waking moment, which is what I had intended for myself, I have systematically done away with my time. I have tried to wipe it out completely. Initially I couldn’t understand why I was so compelled to kill all my time, but it suddenly came to me while I was watching a family eat dinner at one of the countless restaurants that I go to when I tell Mary that I need to go out and do something related to my life’s work. If you tallied up all the hours I’ve spent on these so-called breaks, I’d be willing to bet that at least half have been spent at fast food restaurants – I’m not proud of this, and I don’t really want to think about why I find these places so comforting, even though they are ultimately very depressing places as well. Essentially, at some point during my time-killing session in the basement, I convince myself that I might actually be able to get some work done if I went out and ate whatever I wanted. I conclude that if I indulge my perverse appetite for fast food then I’ll be so satisfied that there will be nothing left to preoccupy my thoughts, since one of the reasons I find it difficult to ever get down to any serious work is because I’m always distracted by thoughts of what I would rather be doing, namely eating fast food. So it was on one of these occasions that I had just sat down to enjoy my fast food when a family took the table next to me. I could tell right away that this was going to be a noisy family, that they weren’t going to just quietly go about their dinner, and I was annoyed that they’d chosen the table next to me when there were plenty of empty ones on the other side of the restaurant. It was obvious that their kids had been poorly brought up. I could see it in their frantic, unblinking faces. And it was just as obvious that the parents had relinquished all but the most basic responsibility and affection for these little kids, and that short of causing physical damage to the tables and/or chairs or injuring one of the patrons in the restaurant, they weren’t going to try to control them. As the family sat down at the table next to me the boys were already in tears. From what I could make out they were upset because they didn’t want to eat the dinner that their parents had purchased for them. It seemed that despite the parents’ unquestionable lack of interest in their children’s well-being, they hadn’t succumbed to absolute depravity, because even though those almost feral young boys insisted that they didn’t want burgers for dinner and wanted ice cream instead, their parents refused to oblige them. And when they went from crying to the first stages of throwing a tantrum, their mom said that if they didn’t stop acting like a bunch of babies and eat their goddamn food that there wouldn’t be any ice cream for dessert. Without a word of protest, the boys started to eat their food, but they did it quickly and joylessly. I sat there with my own food growing colder on the tray as I watched these two kids joylessly consume food that I considered to be delicious, even if it was in many ways revolting, just so they could get to the food that they really wanted to be eating, which didn’t appeal to me at all. (I don’t have much of a sweet tooth.) The reason that I went to that particular fast food restaurant was because I liked to eat the burgers they served. You could say that my goal for my break was to eat burgers at that restaurant. The boys wanted ice cream, not burgers. Ice cream was their goal. So when they were forced to eat burgers in order to get ice cream they bolted the burgers into their mouths and chewed and swallowed, more or less racing through their meal, killing it basically. It occurred to me that this is how I approached my life’s work in the basement. I was just like those greedy boys in the restaurant – instead of savouring the time I spent in the basement I approached each night of work with the same resentment as they did when they choked down their burgers. My goal was to finish my life’s work, not to spend my life working on my life’s work. In fact, I saw the time I had to spend in the basement as an obstacle to successfully completing my life’s work, which, of course, doesn’t make any sense at all. Every time I make the trip down into the basement, I always try to think of an alternative that might save me from having to work, something that is equally integral to my goal, but that will keep me upstairs for the night. I was thrilled whenever some bureaucratic task came along – whether it was filling out a form or placing a phone call – and I treated these bureaucratic chores as though they were as important as the work I was doing in the basement, while I treated the basement work as if it were an annoying and time-wasting bureaucratic task. The amount of care and effort that I put into filling out a more or less insignificant form, or the level of thought and consideration that would go into even the most prosaic phone call, was much much greater than what I was willing to commit when it came to the basement work. And this is for me perhaps the most shameful of the many shameful secrets I keep from Mary. She repeatedly insists that she doesn’t mind how much time I spend down in the basement working away on something that simply doesn’t exist for her. She insists that it makes no difference to her whether I succeed or fail, and if it weren’t for the fact that she was finding it increasingly difficult to be the primary breadwinner and housekeeper in our apartment (my real job didn’t pay well) while I wasted my time doing something that – from her perspective – I didn’t even appear to enjoy, then she would have no problem with whatever I wanted to do with my free time. ‘What I want to know,’ she often says, as a preamble to a question that to me is entirely irrelevant, ‘is whether you even like doing what you’re doing?’ And even though I think that whether I enjoy the basement work is beside the point, I can’t help but feel ashamed when I tell her that I do enjoy my life’s work, because the truth is that I don’t, which is why I look forward to taking a break, because not only do I finally allow myself something that I really want, but I also allow myself to stop doing something that I really don’t want to be doing. Tonight, when it was finally time for me to take my break, I found myself paralyzed with indecision. Once my break was over I was going to have to return to the basement and resume my work, and since I had vowed to myself that I wouldn’t waste any more time reviewing/ruining the work that I had already accomplished and would start in on new work, I was particularly anxious that I would spend my break doing something especially enjoyable and satisfying. But the pressure to choose an activity that could meet these requirements made it impossible to decide on anything at all. Mary and I still hadn’t made up over our fight after she got home from work, so when I came up from the basement and saw the glow from the computer, I walked past without saying anything to her, and since she didn’t say anything to me I left without telling her where I was going, and I found myself wandering the streets in a state of aimless despair. ‘Not only am I wasting my time trying to achieve something that is simply not within me to achieve,’ I said to myself, ‘but I even waste the time I set aside without any other goal than to enjoy myself.’ I live in what can only be described as a lively neighbourhood, and even though it wasn’t very late and the weather was mild – the ideal weather for an evening stroll – the streets surrounding my home were surprisingly deserted. Even though literally thousands of people live in my neighbourhood, not one of them was out for a stroll, or an errand, or even just to stand on their front step or patio or balcony and stare at the clear night sky and enjoy what I considered to be unseasonably warm weather. I felt as though the neighbourhood had evacuated and that I was the only person left because I’d been too busy at my life’s work to notice this mass flight. This may be why, when I saw a man standing on the corner just ahead of me, I didn’t turn around or cross the street to avoid him, which is what I normally would have done. Instead, when he turned to see me coming and raised a hand in greeting, I raised my hand in response and headed directly for him. Under any other circumstances, I would’ve been overcome with dread at the prospect of encountering a stranger, not out of fear for my safety
but because, in my experience, the only reason a stranger ever wants to introduce himself is because they want something from you, and since I had no desire to give away what little time and money I had, I shouldn’t even have acknowledged him. It was a waste of time for the both of us. Our encounter would surely end in disappointment, but I was in a desperate state, and at the sight of this guy on the corner I decided to ignore all my prejudices against strangers and to go see what he wanted. I was immediately impressed by his good looks. It’s altogether rare that a stranger who approaches someone on the street is anything other than decidedly unattractive, at the very least, and usually kind of scary. I’ll admit that the stranger’s good looks temporarily confused me. Even as he was calling out to me in a hoarse and strained voice and coming towards me at a near sprint, obviously worried that I might drop eye contact and revert to the blank pedestrian stare, I was too absorbed in scrutinizing his remarkable features to notice just how fucked up this guy actually was, but by the time we were facing each other and he asked me if I could do him a really big favour I’d become aware of how his handsome features had clearly been ruined by what I assumed was a pretty serious drinking problem, and when I looked closer into the glacial tint of his eyes it occurred to me that there may be other factors involved in the decline of his good looks aside from alcohol. There was no doubt in my mind that I was being approached by someone who was after my money. Since he came to me, instead of waiting for me to pass by, I knew that he wasn’t going to come right out and ask for it. He was going to try to tell me a story that would pin me down and make it difficult for me to interrupt him to say that I didn’t have any money, because then he’d get all offended and claim that I didn’t let him finish, and that if I had, I would’ve known that he was, in fact, not asking me for money. In fact, the opposite was true, he was offering to give me money. The peremptory way he had raised his hand, the panic in his eyes, the desperate tone of his voice, the ruin of what must’ve been, only a little while ago, fine, youthful features, everything about his approach that betrayed just how shifty and potentially dangerous this stranger was, all of this was immediately clear to me as I stood listening to him relate the elaborate story that he’d come up with in order to con me out of my money. ‘I have this money order,’ he said, and flashed a form in my face as if he wanted me to examine it so I could see for myself that he wasn’t lying. But when I leaned in for a closer look at what did in fact appear to be a standard triplicate money order form (not that I’d ever seen a money order form before he showed me his, but it seemed likely that what he had was the real thing), he quickly stuffed it in his pocket and continued with his story as if the authenticity of the money order form had been definitively established. ‘My car is in the fucking impound lot,’ he smiled here, the way a prisoner might smile at his new cellmate, the sort of smile that implies a shared fate. ‘Can you believe it? I’m parked at my girlfriend’s,’ he gestured vaguely up the street, ‘and thought that at worst they might give me a ticket, not tow the fucking thing.’ I was nodding along impatiently to what he was saying. I’d finally decided that at the first chance to interrupt I was going to tell him that I had somewhere I needed to be, that I was late, and that even if I wanted to help him out, it wasn’t going to happen. But it was at the mention of his girlfriend that I felt the first surge of the anxiety that would bother me for the remainder of our encounter. I knew that everything he was saying was a lie, but until he mentioned his girlfriend I was happy to stand there and let him lie to me. It didn’t matter to me whether the story he was telling was true or false because at that particular moment I just wanted to listen to someone else tell me a story, as long as it was plausible, which is to say that I didn’t believe what he was saying, but it was still important that what he was saying was believable. But at that point, while I was standing there listening to him feed me a line of complete bullshit, even after I had just resolved on breaking off the encounter, I changed my mind and gave up on the idea of interrupting him, of bringing his preposterous story to an abrupt end and going on down the street to some all-night café or diner where I could take my break in peace, and then head back to the basement to continue my life’s work. One moment I was disinterestedly listening to what he was saying but mostly thinking about how I could get away from this guy, and the next I was actually listening to what he was telling me. Even though I knew his story was bullshit, I started to listen as if it were real. I could see his car in the lot, I could see his girlfriend back at her apartment, asleep in a single bed. I know this doesn’t make any sense, that it shouldn’t be possible to know that something isn’t true while simultaneously believing that it is, but I don’t know how else to explain what I was feeling as I stood there listening to the stranger. ‘And me, being the genius that I am, left my bag in my car that had my laptop and wallet, basically my entire fucking life. I know,’ he said, while staring directly into my eyes as if he was trying to see what sort of effect his story was having, whether I was buying it, ‘I’m a fucking idiot, right? It gets worse. I don’t live here, you see? I just came down to see my girlfriend. I work for a mining company up north. You know St. James Bay? No? Well it’s like five hours north. I live in a camp. Stuck up there with a bunch of guys just like me. So any chance I get I’m down here with my girlfriend. You know what I’m saying? Beats getting drunk and listening to a bunch of guys jerk off in your tent, if you catch my drift.’ I nodded to show that I understood what he meant. There was something about this part of his story that had the flavour of truth to it or the ring of truth – the aura – as though what he was saying was based on experience, but it was only partial, a feeling or an impression, as if something about the original experience had been altered or excised. Maybe what he was telling me would have been more convincing if it hadn’t seemed so important to him that I sign off on this aspect of his story, but even though I was no longer looking for an opportunity to cut him off and extricate myself from this situation, I was impatient for him to wrap things up and get to the point in his story where he asked me for money. ‘So I had a day off, literally twenty-four hours, and I burned down here to get a little action so that I don’t lose my fucking mind. What happens? My fucking car gets towed,’ he was getting worked up, as if, like me, he actually believed what he was saying, even though he knew better than I did that everything he’d been telling me was a lie. ‘And if I’m not back at camp in ten hours I’m going to lose my job.’ He paused. This was the crucial point in his story where he would have to make the transition from explaining his predicament to explaining what I could do to help. He knew that if I didn’t believe the first part of the story that there was no way I was going to hear him out during the next part, especially since he was going to be asking me for something I would likely be very reluctant to give away. This was why he’d gone through the trouble of creating a bunch of entirely probable details – the mining camp in St. James Bay, the towed car with his wallet and laptop locked inside, the long lonely drive (five hours each way) in order to get his rocks off with his girlfriend, the tent full of drunk, masturbating men – that were largely extraneous to the main plot, which was that he was stuck here without any means of getting back to his job. He could’ve said to me, ‘I’m not from here and I need money to get back to where I’m from.’ But he knew that if he approached me like that then I wouldn’t even have bothered to come up with an excuse for why I couldn’t help him out, that I would’ve simply ignored him and kept walking. The only way I was going to stand there and listen to him was if he made up a bunch of elaborate lies. If I tell you that I own a dog then the only reason you have to believe me is that it would be pointless to lie about something like that. You don’t believe in the dog. You believe in me. But if I tell you that I own a small Irish Setter, that it’s more my wife’s dog than mine, but that I still like to take him for walks, that he can’t wag his tail because after only having him for a year he got out one day and ran into the road that runs past our front yard where he got
hit by some maniac who didn’t even bother to stop, but luckily all that happened was that he lost the ability to wag his tail, if I told you that he didn’t actually look like an Irish Setter, that he was smaller than most dogs of that breed and his hair shorter and not very red, but that we got him from a breeder just out of town and he was definitely purebred, if I loaded on all this detail, even if none of it was true (in particular, the very claim that I owned a dog of any kind) you would find it hard not to believe me, and not just because I hadn’t given you a reason to doubt what I was saying – why would I lie about having a dog? – but also because by inventing these circumstantial details I made the dog real for you. Even if, after telling you I owned a dog, and relating all these imaginary details about my imaginary dog, I confessed that I actually didn’t own a dog, you would have a hard time believing that my dog didn’t exist. You would know that this Irish Setter was a complete fabrication, because I told you that it was, but once I’d planted the image of a brown, squat, short-haired gun-dog with a paralyzed tail, it would be almost impossible to erase. This is what the stranger (who had in fact introduced himself by name, though this was before I'd been listening to him) was trying to do by burying me in all this detail when he could’ve just hit me up for cash. ‘By the time I finish telling my story,’ he must’ve thought, ‘there’s no way he’ll be able to turn me down.’ But even after relating this elaborate lie he was still worried that I wouldn’t believe him, which, of course, most people wouldn’t have. If it was anybody else, they would’ve caught on at his very first lie (‘I have this money order’) and everything he said afterwards, all his carefully chosen embellishments, would have struck them as completely ridiculous. But when he first approached me, brandishing the money order and piling on some elaborate bullshit about his car being impounded, I was still distracted by thoughts of how to spend my break, what I should do to make the most of my trips away from the work that was going so poorly, and my life upstairs, which wasn’t going all that well either. Then, gradually, I started to pay attention, and then all at once I found myself listening to what he was saying and believing what he was saying, as if what he’d been saying was actually true, which, of course, I knew wasn’t. If I was just standing there listening to him because I was desperate for a distraction, something to keep me away from the basement, or because I was too much of a coward to interrupt him and tell him to fuck off, or because I was so absorbed in my own thoughts about how I was wasting my time in the basement and destroying what little I’d managed to accomplish, or if I was actually taken in by his bullshit story of having his car towed, then there would be nothing more remarkable about what happened to me than any of the other poor fools out there who are cheated out of their hard-earned money, either because they’re not paying attention, they lack the nerve, or they’re simply not all that sharp. What’s strange about my case is that I knew that the stranger was full of shit, but I believed he was telling the truth – I knew that he was trying to cheat me out of my money, I knew that all I had to do was walk away, but I also knew that I wasn’t going to. It’s like in Don Quixote. At the beginning of the book Alonso Quixano suffers an attack of madness and decides to dress as a knight errant and go around the Andalusian countryside having the sort of adventures that he’d been reading about all his life in the romances he was more or less addicted to. Because Alonso lives in the real world, and not the world of literary courtly romance, his experiment is a disaster, and at numerous points throughout the story it seems likely that Alonso is going to lose his life on account of the savage beatings he suffers at the hands of people he mistakes for characters in the demented courtly romance playing out in his mind. But no matter how savage these beatings are, he holds on to his illusions. Even when his companion, Sancho Panza, who suffers from something much more banal (i.e. credulousness) but that certainly afflicts more people than madness, repeatedly attempts to disabuse Alonso of some of his more dangerous delusions – the chief one being that Alonso, who is described at the beginning of the book as bordering on fifty, in a time when living past sixty was a sort of minor miracle, is not in any shape to be riding around and challenging barbers, shepherds, biscainers (?), and in one famous instance, a windmill, to duel to the death – Alonso (as Don Quixote) comes up with some explanation that allows him to persist in his insane adventure as knight errant while conceding to Sancho’s reasoning. In fact, at the end of the novel, Alonso is lying on his deathbed and all at once his madness clears – ‘my judgment is now undisturbed, and free from those dark clouds of ignorance with which my eager and continual reading of those detestable books of chivalry had obscured it’ – and at the hour of his death he repents for the whole knight errant thing (‘I must confess I have been a madman.’). He gathers all his friends in the hope of redeeming himself (‘not to leave the imputation of madness on my memory’) but they justifiably suspect that ‘some new frenzy had possessed him.’ And, in their defense, after a thousand pages of Alonso as Don Quixote, it’s easy to understand why everyone, especially Sancho Panza, is a bit disappointed by Alonso as Alonso. But this isn’t why the end of the book is so disturbing. What I couldn’t get over was that Alonso could remember everything he did as Don Quixote, whereas I would’ve expected that when a character literally loses his mind, and that mind is replaced with a new mind (the mad mind), then if he ever managed to recover his old mind again (his real mind) it seems to make sense that he would have to give up the mad mind and all the memory that went with it, so that all that would remain of that period of madness would be a shadow that covered everything in darkness (‘those dark clouds of ignorance’). But Alonso remembers everything he did as Don Quixote, in fact, he even makes good on promises he had made to Sancho Panza, even though it would’ve been understandable if, since he was no longer crazy, those commitments were considered null and void, though it would’ve been a bit cheap of him. It seemed to me that at the end Alonso was of two minds, the sane and the mad, and that even as he looked back over his adventures as the mad Don Quixote, from the now sane perspective of Alonso, he hadn’t lost the illusions of his former self, so that when it came time for his confession he repented of his madness and folly, rejecting the stories and books that corrupted his mind, yet did not go so far as to renounce his past – ‘I was Don Quixote de la Mancha,’ he says, ‘I am now, as I have said, the good Alonso Quixano.’ I had always assumed that it was impossible to be of two minds, that once you went crazy it was no longer possible to keep one foot in the door that opened onto reality, and that what people meant when they used this clumsy expression was that within the one and only mind in their possession a distance had opened up between two points and they didn’t have the will, or the strength, or the courage of their convictions to make a move in either direction. When Alonso says, ‘I am no longer Don Quixote de la Mancha,’ to me it was as if he was saying that he had never been Don Quixote, that throughout the entire novel I had been reading about a gentleman who was only pretending to be mad, when he had been sober-minded the entire time (even though pretending to be insane is its own form of madness). In one interpretation we have a gentleman who reads so many books that he is driven mad, and in another interpretation we have a gentleman who reads so many books that he decides to go mad. But Alonso’s deathbed confession introduces the possibility of a third interpretation, where someone reads so many books that his mind splits in two, and that even when he was completely mad the real mind was also always present, and once his real mind returns to the forefront, the madness recedes, but never goes away. ‘This is why,’ I thought, ‘even when Alonso is engaging in one of Don Quixote’s mad adventures he does it in a very deliberate and self-conscious way, as if he was a sane person imitating a crazy person.’ And I found this much more disturbing than the possibility of losing one’s mind, because it suggested that it was possible for someone to be crazy and sane at the exact same time. ‘This is what I’m doing right now,’ I thought, ‘while I stand here listening to this con man try to ch
eat me out of my money.’ At the same time that I knew this guy was a complete fake, and not even a good fake, because within seconds of our encounter I could tell that he was lying – the moment he said, ‘I have this money order,’ I knew for a fact that what he held in his hand was a fake money order – I also believed (or, to be precise, another ‘I’ believed, different from the ‘I’ that didn’t) that he was telling me the truth. Either way, whether he was lying or telling the truth, I could interrupt him at any point and tell him that I couldn’t help him out. Even though I had been hearing him out, there was nothing preventing me from bringing this encounter to a premature end. Just like when I was working in the basement, there was nothing keeping me there except for my will, or lack thereof, to remain. The stranger hadn’t grabbed onto me, or backed me up against a wall, and, while it was late and the streets were deserted, he hadn’t done anything to indicate that the encounter might turn violent. He hadn’t even said that I ‘had to help him,’ that he had ‘no one else to turn to,’ that I was his ‘last hope’ and that if I didn’t help him out he didn’t know ‘what he would do.’ He may have seemed desperate, but so far his desperation had only manifested itself as a willingness to lie and cheat people out of their hard-earned money. There was no indication that he was desperate enough to try to rob me, by attacking me or threatening to attack me. It seemed to me that if I did decide to interrupt him and say that I was sorry, that I wished I was able to help him, but that I was only out for a stroll and that I had to hurry back home, he wouldn’t even make a fuss. ‘I bet that if I just cut him off right now he’ll let me leave without putting up much of a fight,’ I thought. ‘He’s probably embarrassed by his transparently amateur attempt at a con and once I indicate that I know what he’s up to he’ll be in as much of a hurry to get away from me as I am to get away from him.’ Since I was embarrassed by his attempt to cheat me out of my money I assumed that he would be at least equally, although likely more so, as embarrassed as I was. ‘This must be what it’s like for my friends and family,’ I thought. ‘They must get embarrassed when they have to listen to me go on about my life’s work. They know that I’m lying when I tell them that I think I’ll finish the project that I’m currently working on in another year or so. It’s painfully obvious to my wife that I am conning her, putting one over on her, so to speak, when, after a doubly wasteful and destructive day down in the basement, I tell her that I got a lot of work done. It’s embarrassing to listen to someone lie to you once it’s been established that you know they are lying and they know that you know they are lying,’ I thought. ‘They’re embarrassed because you are obliging them to pretend (to play make-believe) that something is real that they know for a fact to be fake, which, to some degree, makes them complicit in the deception. They’re embarrassed because, like you, they don’t want to face the reality of the situation, and prefer to hang on to the illusion, even though they are perfectly aware that it is just that, an illusion,’ I thought. ‘But maybe this means that on some level they believe the illusion is real, and they’re embarrassed for hanging on to this paradox. They’re embarrassed because I’m obliging them to have faith in something (i.e. my life’s work) that they know I don’t even have faith in.’ And so my embarrassment increased once the stranger began to make the transition from the set-up of his elaborate but amateurish story about having his car towed, to his pitch (i.e. how I could help him out). ‘So here I am, locked out of my girlfriend’s apartment. I have no idea how to get ahold of her. She’s at work at some bar I don’t even know the name of and I don’t even know which building she’s in. So I called one of my buddies at the camp and he sent me this money order, but since I don’t have any ID they won’t let me cash it. I asked them,’ he said, ‘why the fuck do I need a money order, right? Like obviously if I had my wallet and ID and shit then I wouldn’t need my buddy to wire me cash, would I?’ He was staring at me now, wildly, no doubt channelling a recent customer service altercation to make his performance believable, getting angry as he reflected on this unrelated outrage and raising his voice so that I nodded along in agreement in order to quiet him down. ‘For sure,’ I said. ‘That’s ridiculous.’ And although I was placating him by commiserating over the alleged policies of the alleged FedEx outlet, I was also trying to hurry things along and get to the point, so when I said ‘That’s ridiculous,’ I was also implicitly saying, ‘I get it. The modern world is a cold, impersonal, irrational nightmare populated by uncaring people. I see that you are in a precarious situation and the only person who can help you from losing your job is me. So just make your request and I will decide whether I want to help you or not, but please don’t keep telling me every detail of your predicament or I’m going to lose my patience and leave.’ Unfortunately I must’ve done a bad job of communicating this subtext because from what I could tell, instead of interpreting my remark – ‘That’s ridiculous’ – as a sign to wrap up his preamble and move on to the con, he clearly took my remark as encouragement to relate even more inconsequential details about the imaginary FedEx outlet. He chose to interpret my remark as an expression of solidarity, like I was saying, ‘Go ahead. You’ve found a kindred spirit and sympathetic ear. I too am the victim of bureaucratic incompetence and the crass indifference of the general public. If you were looking for someone who could share in your anguish over the daily insults of living in this ass-backwards shambles that passes for civilization then look no further. I’m your man.’ So he told me that the woman who was serving him was ‘Paki, or something like that,’ and that he could hardly understand what she’d been saying to him ‘in the first place’ and that when he’d asked to speak with the manager she revealed that she was, in fact, the manager. ‘Can you fucking believe that?’ he asked. ‘I’m not being racist, but how does somebody who can hardly speak the language get to be the manager at a place where their job is to talk to customers all day?’ I nodded even though I was offended by what he was saying, not because I was uncomfortable with racism (which, truth be told, I wasn’t, and the only time I was sensitive about that sort of thing was when I was in the presence of a visible, or invisible, minority – something that, consequently probably makes me more than a little bit of a racist) but because it seemed presumptuous of him to assume that I wouldn’t be offended by what he was saying (a lot of people would have been). ‘What makes him so sure that he can open up to me like this,’ I thought, ‘and say something that would be considered racist in most circles?’ So I finally interrupted him and brought his elaborate preamble to a close, ‘They wouldn’t give you the money?’ ‘Not a chance,’ he said. ‘You should’ve seen me. Let’s just say that after what I said to her I don’t think it’d be a good idea for me to go back there.’ Even though he had developed this story in the greatest detail and I was now fully apprised of every aspect of his ‘situation,’ I could tell that he was still reluctant to make his request, as if he wasn’t interested in conning me out of my money anymore. He was absorbed in the storytelling process and I got the impression that as he was telling his story he’d become increasingly determined that I actually believe what he was telling me, regardless of whether it was true or not, and that it wasn’t even necessary for me to give him any money so long as I kept listening. But this probably wasn’t the case. I was likely projecting my insecurities onto him. Whatever anxiety he was exhibiting had nothing to do with whether I believed in him. It was because now there was nothing left to do but pull off his con. Now he was only seconds away from finding out whether his bullshit story had been a success or a failure, whether he had reached his goal (i.e. somebody gullible enough to be cheated out of their money) or whether I was going to turn him down, leaving him right where he began, having accomplished nothing. ‘But what really pissed me off,’ he finally explained, ‘is that if I had my wallet I wouldn’t even need any ID because then I’d have my ATM card.’ I asked him why he didn’t get a temporary replacement card and he paused for a second as he was either remembering the reason, or trying to in
vent one. ‘Cause you need ID for that,’ he assured me, obviously pleased with himself for coming up with something in time. ‘These things,’ he said, brandishing the money order, ‘are like cheques. It’s true,’ he said in earnest, even though I hadn’t done anything to indicate that I doubted what he was saying, ‘they work the same way a cheque does. You can deposit them at a bank machine the same way you do a regular cheque,’ he said, again with the wild stare, daring me to contradict him, but I wasn’t paying attention because now that I knew the nature of his request (i.e. that he wasn’t going to ask for whatever money I had on my person but instead he was planning on getting me to withdraw money from my bank account) I was able to start working on an airtight excuse that would let me refuse him without indicating that I thought that what he had told me was complete bullshit. He could sense that he was losing me so he hurried through the rest. ‘It’s made out to me so I sign the back and you sign here,’ he pointed to the form but he was still holding it out of reach and I couldn’t make out what he was pointing at, ‘then you cash it like an EI cheque. It’s five hundred so I sign it over to you then you take out four hundred and keep a hundred for yourself.’ By the time he got to the last sentence he was speaking so quickly I almost didn’t understand what he’d said, and it took me a moment to realize that he had finally made his proposal. It was so tossed off, as if it wasn’t really significant to the rest of the story, certainly not as significant as the fact that the manager of the FedEx outlet was Pakistani or Indian (or neither, perhaps). Obviously he didn’t expect me to believe anything he’d just said and even if I did, what were the odds that I would be willing to go to a bank machine and withdraw four hundred dollars and hand it over to him? By the time he finally made his request he seemed to have more or less given up and he had a look of bitter sadness, but also relief, the look people get when something they’ve been dreaming of ends in disappointment, and even though they never really thought it would happen they’re surprised by how crushed they are when it doesn’t, but relieved that they no longer have to hope for it. Why wouldn’t he just hit me up for a smaller sum, which I might actually be willing to give to him, instead of going for so much, essentially guaranteeing that I would refuse, say ‘no way in hell,’ tell him to go fuck himself, or something along those lines? It didn’t make any sense. It was a completely ridiculous expectation on his part that he’d be able to con a stranger out of four hundred dollars with his albeit credible story of having his car towed (which happened all the time in this city, although since it was so common an occurrence there was something clichéd, and therefore, incredible, about his story). ‘Wouldn’t it make more sense,’ I thought, ‘to hit people up for twenty or thirty bucks so that, whether they believed his bullshit story about getting his car impounded, they may just fork over the cash in order to shut him up and get him to leave them alone, and if he put in a good eight-hour day and covered enough ground it’s more than possible that he’d eventually cheat and con enough strangers that he’d end up with four hundred, instead of going around and, once he finally built up the nerve to make what was obviously a desperate and foolish proposal, pouring out his long drawn-out story only to be told there was nothing they could do for him. ‘What he’s trying to do,’ I thought, ‘is completely unrealistic.’ It struck me as so unrealistic that I started to consider the possibility that he was telling the truth. I’ve already remarked that he was good looking, and on top of that he was well dressed, not that he was ‘dressed up,’ just that the clothes he had on were of good quality, clean, and in decent condition. He spoke well, with a slight accent, and his voice was strong and distinctive, as if he would’ve been comfortable on stage or behind a microphone. If it weren’t for the fact that he was hitting me up for four hundred bucks then he would’ve been the sort of person that I often find myself admiring when I pass them on the sidewalk, or stand next to them in an elevator, or sit next to them in a movie theatre – tall, ruggedly handsome, and (I’ve always assumed) successful in both the professional and private realms. But here was one of these sorts, one of these people that I would’ve normally envied, looking wild in the eye, talking excitedly, and basically coming off as a total junkie. In fact, when I looked at the situation from this perspective, it became increasingly plausible that this guy was for real. Otherwise he would’ve tried a less ambitious course of action. If he was the sort of person who goes through life as the object of envy for people like me then it’s not so unlikely that he would approach a stranger and expect them to be willing to fork over four hundred bucks, because it might not occur to him that anyone would ever suspect that he was something other than what he appeared to be. All at once I changed my mind. I was being paranoid instead of seeing what would’ve been obvious to most everyone else, that this stranger was telling me the truth. I only saw my own cynical and paranoid image of the stranger, one that was wholly incommensurate with who he actually was. Why else would he be willing to ask for four hundred dollars if he hadn’t been telling the truth? And he wasn’t even asking for four hundred dollars. He was actually proposing that I cash his five hundred dollar money order and keep one hundred for myself. He wasn’t trying to cheat me out of four hundred dollars at all, in fact, this ruggedly handsome man was willing to give me one hundred dollars for the trouble of cashing a money order that he, due to a confluence of circumstances that he couldn’t have foreseen, was unable to cash. Miners can make a lot of money, and it wasn’t so far-fetched that he would throw a hundred my way to do something that was only a minor inconvenience for me, whereas for him it was a big deal. ‘Can I see the money order?’ I said. He looked at the form in his hand and then he looked at me. He seemed worried, although I wasn’t sure if this was because the money order was bogus and by handing it over he was going to lose his opportunity to screw me out of four hundred dollars, or if, since the money order was legit, he was actually worried that I couldn’t be trusted, that I was not what I seemed to be, and that if he handed over the money order I might try to take off with it and keep the full five hundred bucks for myself. He stood alongside me and held the money order in front of us so that I could inspect it up close, and even take hold of the opposite corner, while he could be sure that at any second he could snatch it from my view. ‘See,’ he said, ‘it’s pretty standard.’ I, as I’ve already mentioned, had never seen a money order form before. They might as well have been from the same era as telegrams or trunk calls (whatever the hell they were), which is to say I considered them to be antiquated, obsolete, and so I certainly wasn’t in a position to judge whether the form he held out in front of me was standard or not. ‘That’s my friend,’ he said, and pointed to a line near the top of the form where in faint blue ink someone had written the name ‘Gary Trites.’ If he was trying to con me out of four hundred dollars then he was taking a big risk by letting me inspect the money order form. For all he knew, I might be the sort of person that regularly deals with money orders, and so knows what a legitimate form would look like. ‘There’s no way he’d try to pass a bogus form off on someone like me,’ I thought, and when I thought ‘someone like me’ what I meant was a relatively well-dressed, normal-looking, intelligent-seeming man – my intelligence, I believed, would have been evident to the stranger within seconds of our encounter – but I might as well have thought ‘someone like him,’ since I considered him to be well-dressed, good-looking, and obviously intelligent (or intelligent-seeming, at least) even though the desperate and wild eyes that were fixed on me throughout his whole story made me think of the senile patients at a nursing home. He had a nice voice and spoke clearly in full sentences and without the usual pauses, repetitions, and abrupt transitions and loopy syntax that characterize what passes for speech these days. He didn’t saturate his story with obscenities or any of the other commonplace verbal tics. And if it weren’t for his crazed and hollow stare I wouldn’t have doubted that I was speaking with someone in possession of a keen intellect. But the way that he was looking at me as he kept poi
nting at the name on the form and repeating the blank assertion ‘That’s my friend’, suggested that he wasn’t ‘all there’, or that he was a bit ‘off.’ ‘Either way,’ I thought, ‘he’d have to be pretty stupid to think that someone like me wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a phony money order and a real one. Why would he risk showing me the money order unless it was the real thing?’ I scanned the rest of the form and even though I had never seen one before I decided right away that it was legit. The FedEx logo was featured on the top left and the rest was divided into the boxed grid you would expect from the sort of form designed to record and transfer a sum of money. In addition to this, the form was a colour-coded sequence of three sheets with two carbon inserts, and it seemed altogether unlikely that this guy would have been able to forge this style of document, since the materials aren’t available to general consumers and would’ve had to have been ordered from some sort of specialized merchant who dealt in carbon triplicate forms and that sort of thing. I focussed on the text and was immediately struck by the words ‘Money Order’ on the top of the form. I was so intent on determining the authenticity of the form that it didn’t occur to me that he could have stolen it, or that they might be freely available to anyone coming in off the street. ‘See,’ he said, following my gaze and indicating a line just below the title where $500 had been scrawled in pale blue ink. ‘It’s like a cheque.’ Now that I was convinced that it was legitimate, I began to pay closer attention to what was written in the little boxes, but aside from ‘Gary Trites’ and ‘$500’ the form was blank except for another name – ‘Luke MacDonald’ – and an illegible signature at the bottom. ‘Is that you?’ I asked, pointing at the signature. ‘Yeah,’ he said, pulling the form away and putting out his hand for me to shake it. ‘Sorry, didn’t I give you my name?’ It’s Luke.’ I shook his hand as impersonally as I could manage. ‘Okay, Luke,’ I said, ‘let’s go cash this money order.’ This had the effect of taking him completely by surprise, so much that before I’d finished saying ‘let’s go cash this money order,’ he’d already started to respond defensively, as if to a question or an accusation. It was clear that he hadn’t been listening to what I was saying, only that I was saying something, and he assumed (reasonably enough) that I was going to say something about how the form was blank except for his friend’s name, the sum, his name, and his signature. Shouldn’t there be something else? More information? At some point he registered what I’d said but it was as though he kept going because he was so shocked by my abrupt acceptance. It took a moment, but when he finally did stop talking he stood in front of me and stared. He’d been prepared for failure. The moment he approached me he probably said to himself, ‘There’s no way this guy is going to listen to me, and even if I do manage to get him to stop and hear me out, there’s no way he’s going to believe a word I say.’ The reason he seemed so desperate was because he knew how ridiculous it was to expect someone to hear him out, believe his story, and then go through the trouble of depositing the money order in their account so they could withdraw four hundred and hand it over. This was why he’d been willing to approach a complete stranger and humiliate himself with an outrageous request. ‘I’ve got nothing to lose,’ he probably thought. It’s not that he didn’t hope to succeed, he wouldn’t have bothered approaching me in the first place if that was the case, it was just that he never suspected it would really happen. To put it in more simple terms, he knew he wasn’t going to succeed, but he wasn’t going to stop approaching strangers until he did. So he couldn’t believe his luck (and that’s what it was, luck) when the impossible finally happened and I agreed to cash the money order at the bank machine a couple blocks away. After standing there silently and staring at me in utter disbelief he appeared to accept the fact that I had agreed to help him out and suddenly hurried to thank me, piling on the gratitude, going on about how he ‘could tell right away that I was a good guy’ and that I was basically saving his life. He’d started walking in the direction of the bank machine and while he kept heaping on the compliments he suddenly became impatient. While he’d been telling me his story he stared at me the entire time, but now he was looking all around him as if he was expecting someone to show up right at that moment, someone that he’d forgotten about and only just remembered. I had expected him to be grateful, but his non-stop praise was so over the top (at one point he compared me to Jesus) and he was so overwhelmed and pathetic, that it struck me as suspicious. In fact, what bothered me about the way he was carrying on was that he was behaving as though I had agreed to give him four hundred dollars, instead of agreeing to cash his money order and take one hundred dollars of his money for my trouble. It was like he’d forgotten everything he’d just told me about the money order (if only for a second), like once I said ‘let’s go cash this money order’ he’d been so surprised, so completely caught off guard, that he forgot to remember that I was doing him a small favour, one that I was supposedly going to profit from, and that it was really just a minor inconvenience (if, that is, his story had been true, which, of course, it wasn’t) and so he felt the same gratitude that anyone would feel if, out of desperation, they were obliged to ask a complete stranger for four hundred dollars and on account of some fucked-up luck the stranger said ‘Sure! I’ll give you four hundred dollars.’ He sensed that something was off. He didn’t believe me, but since I didn’t refuse him outright he couldn’t plead his case any further, so he tried to steer the conversation towards innocuous bullshit about where I was from, since he assumed (correctly) that I wasn’t from around here. I answered his questions as if I was taking an exam, which is to say that I answered immediately, without thinking about what I was saying, because all I was thinking about was how I was going to get away from this guy. ‘I’m not going to go through with this,’ I thought, ‘Even though I said I would there is no way that I’m going to hand over four hundred bucks to this guy. There’s still time for me to do something before we get to the bank machine. I can think of some excuse to get me out of this mess.’ So even as I was telling this stranger about my childhood I was frantically searching for a reason for why I wouldn’t be able to give him four hundred dollars without, at the same time, revealing that the reason I couldn’t deposit the money order was because I didn’t believe a word of what he’d said. ‘Because that’s what you’re doing,’ I said to myself, ‘you are giving this guy four hundred dollars out of your own pocket, and making a fraudulent deposit, which no doubt won’t go over very well with the bank. There is no way that money order is for real.’ But I couldn’t come up with anything, so I kept walking and talking and thinking and at no point did it occur to me that I could simply turn to this guy and say, ‘I don’t believe a word coming out of your mouth, and even though you’re obviously a handsome and intelligent man in your early thirties and no doubt could have your pick from all sorts of gainful employment, it’s pretty clear that you are trying to con me out of my own hard-earned money.’ And the reason I never thought to say this to him wasn’t because I was afraid that if I confronted him he’d freak out and kick my ass – I’m a coward, but I’m also foolishly, resplendently proud – it was because I was embarrassed for him. Up until I had agreed to cash the money order, there had been a glimmer of truth, however faint, to his bullshit story, and even though I shouldn’t have given it any credence, it was impossible to completely satisfy my doubt so long as he maintained the pretense that he was telling me the truth, and even if he’d come on a little strong, and the desperate tone of his voice suggested that this wasn’t the first time he’d been this hard up, his act was somehow convincing. But the moment I agreed to his bogus proposal he was so stunned and full of joy over his dumb luck (i.e. me) that he definitively put to rest even the dimmest possibility that he was telling me the truth, and I could see with agonizing clarity just how fucking stupid I was being. And I was also struck by how pathetic he was. This was my first encounter with a real con man, and instead of the narcissistic calm I’d come to expect from
all the crap I watch on TV, he turned out to be a rather ordinary alcoholic, and also an addict (of what, I’m sure I don’t know, but something hard) and he was obviously in a chaotic state of total despair. He’d been reduced to cheating naive strangers out of what little money they have. It’s shameful to go around conning people like me out of their wages, or inheritance, or stock options, or whatever, and while there may be a few people out there who are actually comfortable with this sort of thing and can hold their heads high and never give a thought to the degradation and corruption of their soul, I’m willing to bet that most people would rather work, even if the work wasn’t all that great, maybe even if it was downright shitty, because there is something about ripping people off – even when they can afford it – that offends the sense of fairness that we’re either born with or that gets planted in us at an early age. When I looked at his eyes now, eyes that I’d found so wild and mysterious, I saw what was there all along, the blank stare of someone high on hard drugs. To him, I was nothing. The story was nothing. There was only the four hundred dollars. It was possible he wasn’t the sort of person who would normally go around cheating people. Maybe in his former life he’d been a minor success, the product of years of patient and unhurried work. He hadn’t been ambitious and didn’t expect that anything great was in store for him, just a quiet decent life. But a skiing accident, or maybe something even more banal, like a car crash, left him in constant agony and he ended up a slave to his pain meds, lost everything, turned to the harder stuff, and wound up so racked with need that he even tried the old money order con that nobody ever fell for anymore, certainly not with such a strung out and wasted addict like Luke MacDonald. As we made our way to the ATM he insisted on keeping eye contact with me the entire time, which meant that he had to do a mix of side-stepping and light-jogging, at one point even facing me straight on as he jogged backwards. But he wasn’t very good at it. He kept bumping into me and tripping us both up, all because he insisted on looking me in the eye while he kept firing questions at me or interjecting with stories of his own childhood, keeping up a staccato pace that was clearly designed to distract me so I wouldn’t have an opportunity to back out or to consider more closely everything that he’d said to me and discover some inconsistency or implausibility that I hadn’t noticed before, because, as far as he understood, up until now, I wasn’t suspicious of him or his story. ‘Why, if he had even a shadow of a doubt, would he agree to my proposal?’ is what he would think. It’s unlikely that I had been his first mark that day. It was late and I imagine he’d already been walking the streets for hours, meeting with continual rejection, most marks not even letting him get a word in before cutting him off and moving on, while those who listened, even those who listened to the whole story, may have let him down a bit gentler, but until he’d found me he’d been refused by what I’m sure were dozens of people. So he certainly wasn’t expecting to be able to get me to listen to him, let alone agree to cash his money order, and even once I agreed he must’ve been skeptical at first, that I was trying to trick him and instead of going to the bank machine I was leading him into a trap. He was an addict after all, and the cruel irony of living in the street, so I’ve heard, is that they get mugged and ripped off all the time (often by other street people). But whatever doubt he may have had about my sincerity disappeared by this point, and he seemed convinced that I actually believed everything he had said. This is why he was so intent on keeping up eye contact, I thought, so he could gauge whether or not I was bullshitting him, or if I was awakening to the fact that he was bullshitting me. By looking into my eyes he believed he could determine if I was lying to him, which is exactly what I believed when I’d still been in doubt over whether the story he was telling was true, and it would be fair to say that in both cases neither of us had any luck with this method. I looked into his eyes – he looked right back at me – and there was nothing I could see that either gave him away or confirmed his story. There was nothing to see, except that his eyes were wild and unblinking, and it was certainly the same with me. I wondered if my eyes looked as wide open and abstracted, like doll’s eyes, the realistic kind, where the resemblance to human eyes is uncanny and all the more disturbing for their lifelessness. Or maybe, I thought, they’re more like the eyes of someone in the grip of a major stroke, somehow alive but devoid of any trace of intelligence. In short, I wondered if when he looked into my eyes I was as completely gone as he was to me. If someone were to see us right now they wouldn’t see things the way I saw them, I thought. They wouldn’t see a sad, pathetic, desperate man who was admittedly handsome – though if he wasn’t careful he was going to lose his looks through dissipation – they would not see this strung out con man hustling a young, reasonably well-dressed, sympathetic and naive man out of his hard-earned money. No. They would see two wild-eyed men hurrying along the sidewalk and talking loudly and excitedly, and maybe both of them would look sad and desperate so that the passerby thought he was looking at a couple of psychos. But this isn’t how things looked to me. Instead, I felt superior to Luke, and while he was trying to keep eye contact with me I was doing the exact opposite, because I was worried that eventually he would realize that I knew he was full of shit and I imagined that he’d be devastated (especially after I’d just got his hopes up) and probably ashamed as well. I hated to see a person lose face, as the Japanese say. In fact, when I learned that the Japanese actually had a word for ritually committing suicide out of shame I instantly became fascinated by Japanese culture. (I’ve visited Japan twice and I hope to go back again soon.) It may be maudlin, or romantic, or just plain childish to be mortified by another person’s humiliation, but I can’t help it. When someone is caught in a lie, I’d rather pretend I didn’t notice than acknowledge their pathetic attempt to deny a reality that is staring them right in the face. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t willing to hand over four hundred dollars just to avoid an awkward encounter, but so long as I still had a chance, I wanted to come up with something that would allow us both to back off without feeling like idiots. When I am a witness to someone’s humiliation it is as though I have been humiliated, just like when a child gets embarrassed during a sex scene from a movie or television show, even if they’re alone, because they assume that when their excitement and confusion is this intense everyone must know. I assumed that when one person’s shameful behaviour is exposed, that the sheer intensity of their humiliation was capable of exposing all of my faults and secrets as well, a sort of shame by association. So when I finally concluded that Luke had been lying to me I reacted as though I had been caught in a lie, as if just by listening to this guy’s bullshit story I was equally guilty of deception. On account of some stunted development, an aspect of my personality still stuck in infancy, I can not differentiate between my actions and someone else’s. And so maybe he hadn’t been that far off when he compared me to Jesus, since I was under the impression that I could take on the sins of the world. What was especially maddening about all of this was that I often ended up feeling guiltier and more embarrassed than the actual guilty party. Everyone feels the sting of their own conscience differently, and what some people consider a grave sin, others aren’t bothered by in the least. So when I witnessed what I considered to be shameful and reprehensible behaviour, and responded with a guilty conscience as if I was the one who had behaved shamefully, it was very possible that the person I was feeling guilty on behalf of didn’t feel guilty or humiliated at all. I was particularly embarrassed by lying – the greater the lie, the greater the humiliation. In the case of Luke’s story, he had lied to me so completely and so thoroughly misrepresented his position that I was covered with shame. I just wanted to be rid of him so I could put the whole encounter behind me. I was desperate for him to shut up, to stop adding insult to injury by asking me these ridiculous questions about where I went to school, where my parents were from, what my father did for a living before he retired, and whether or not I had any children. Each question was like a whiplash,
a dagger, an icy slap, or a combination of all three (and any other physical assault you can think of), which I could see coming from a great distance but for some fucked up reason was powerless to avoid. It was as though I was being tortured, or had already been tortured, and now my torturer wanted to make small talk, not realizing (or realizing, but not caring) that by acting as though the torture hadn’t taken place he was revisiting the whole encounter upon me with a sort of casual cruelty that was literally soul-destroying. ‘I can’t fucking believe this guy,’ I thought. ‘Isn’t it obvious that I know he’s full of shit? Isn’t he ashamed to look me in the eye and make small talk when both of us know that all he can think about is the moment that I cash this phony money order and give him four hundred dollars out of my personal banking account? If I were him,’ I thought, ‘I would apologize and run away and hope that I never saw the person I was trying to rip off (i.e. me) ever again.’ My embarrassment had shifted to fury, but I wasn’t furious with him for trying to con me out of four hundred dollars – this, I thought, was understandable. The reason that I was so angry with him was because he’d done such a bad job of it. His approach had been so clumsy and the lies he’d told me were so obviously lies that it was impossible for me to believe him. If he’d been more artful, had he taken the time to develop a more plausible story, had he worked on his delivery so it came off smoother and more believable, then I would’ve been able to fork over the cash with a clean conscience. As it stood, he had forced me into the shameful and humiliating position of either pretending that he had fooled me, giving him four hundred dollars, and returning to my home, to my basement, to contemplate how pathetically I’d reacted to what for most people would be a mildly annoying encounter, or accusing him of lying, calling him out on his bullshit story, and exposing him as a cheat and an utter fraud. ‘Why couldn’t he have just left me alone,’ I said to myself, ‘instead of more or less forcing me to expose him, and myself, to unbearable shame?’ In short, I was enraged by what I perceived to be an imposition. He was obliging me to share in his degradation, which in my opinion, was even worse than cheating me out of four hundred dollars, and no matter what I did (give him the money or refuse to give him the money) there was no way I could avoid the fact that this good-looking and, by my estimation, intelligent stranger had sunk so low that he’d been reduced to approaching guys like me on the street and screwing them out of their money. If he’d been more resourceful then he could’ve come up with a story that might have flattered my self-regard, while preserving the illusion of his own good character. ‘But this idiot,’ I thought, ‘this crackhead, has made the whole situation so glaringly apparent, that there’s no way to get out of it without feeling like a complete piece of shit. The genie is out of the bottle. Pandora is out of her box.’ Blah blah blah. ‘Just go away,’ I thought. ‘Leave me alone. Disappear.’ But it was evident that he had no intention of leaving now that I had agreed to cash his fraudulent money order. ‘There’s no way I’m going through with this. There’s no way I’m giving this guy four hundred dollars,’ I thought, and just as I was thinking this we arrived at the bank machine and he held the door to the vestibule for me with the exaggerated manners of an erstwhile gentleman down on his luck. And even as I was putting my card in the bank machine and entering my PIN, I was still under the impression that something would come to me, some excuse that would get me out of this infuriating and embarrassing situation. He was standing right behind me and by now he’d grown so eager and excited that he’d lost all control of himself. He started telling me what to do, as if he wasn’t a con man anymore and was actually holding me up at knifepoint. ‘Deposit,’ he said. ‘It’s just like a regular deposit. Put it in this envelope,’ he said, and he reached across me to get an envelope from the slot, but I pushed his hand away as if he’d triggered a reflex, or maybe I had reached my limit – whatever the reason for it, the moment his hand snaked in front of me (which also meant he had to lean in so that his mouth was only a few centimetres away from my ear), I smacked it away so quickly and forcefully that I surprised myself, and him, since my reaction seemed to come from nowhere. Even though I was choking with rage over the way he was essentially mugging me, I hadn’t been worried that I was going to snap and lash out at him like that. I assumed that the most I would do was make an irritated remark, since I knew myself well enough to know that I would avoid a physical confrontation at any cost, or at least, in this case, I was willing to give a stranger four hundred dollars in order to avoid not only a physical confrontation, but also an emotional one. My theory is that it was at this point – when he leaned in and reached in front of me to grab an envelope – that I realized I was going to give him the money. From the moment he had approached me until the moment I smacked his hand away there had never been a moment when I wasn’t going to give him the money. ‘All that crap about whether he was telling the truth or not was complete bullshit,’ I thought. ‘You (i.e. me) were always going to give him the four hundred dollars.’ Just like when I went down into the basement with the intention of working on my life’s work, and ended up doing everything except what I had intended to do, it was clear that I had known what was going to happen all along, and instead of just admitting this to myself I had to enact an elaborate scenario that dramatized all the steps of making a choice, in order to justify the choice that I had already made. One of the reasons (I suspect) that I decided at a very early age to devote myself to a goal that I would most likely never achieve, but that required blind devotion, unwavering commitment, and spending what seemed like every moment of my waking life at work or planning to work, or thinking about what I would do next time I sat down to work, was that by making this choice I was absolving myself of ever having to make a choice again. Ever since that one big choice there have been nothing but sub-choices or leftover choices, since all I had to decide was how they either advanced or impeded the realization of my final goal (my life’s work), which technically isn’t a decision so much as it is the continued administration of the one true initial choice. There was no confusion for me when I woke up each day over how I should spend my time – my free time, that is – since I knew that all my free time should be spent in pursuit of my goal, and every aspect of my life – what I ate, when I slept, how I dressed – was decided based on what I thought would help in realizing my life’s work. Now, as I’ve already explained, I don’t know where this initial decision came from to devote my life to a goal that very few people ever attain (and even if they do attain this goal, it may not happen in their lifetime, and if it does happen in their lifetime they may not even realize that it happened, and even if it does happen in their lifetime and they realize it happened, it’s more than likely that nobody else will realize that it happened, or people may deny it or claim that even though it may seem like it happened, it in fact didn’t happen at all, but no matter what happens, the only way to have a hope in hell of attaining this lofty unattainable goal in the first place is to stick to your guns, never give up, even when it seems like there’s no chance, that you’re a lost cause, when everyone is telling you to let it go, that there’s no shame in defeat, that you gave it your best, that to keep working would be stupid, self-destructive, and just plain selfish, no matter what anybody says or what you think or how you feel, there’s no turning back, so even when I was wasting my time down in the basement, and possibly sabotaging the time I’d already spent on my life’s work by going over everything that I had already done, I was still convinced that all of this was necessary and was part of the process of reaching an unattainable goal) but my point is simply that while many people believe that it takes an incredible amount of strength, will, determination, and even courage to spend one’s life in pursuit of a grandly elusive goal, I would suggest that the truth is much less flattering. The truth is that when someone makes a choice to devote themselves to their life’s work they are also choosing to never have to bother with concepts like strength or will or courage for the remainder of their days. And I’m sure that t
he ultimate reason behind my mindless rage over this encounter was because the stranger was forcing a decision on me that I didn’t want to make. Had it only been a matter of deciding whether he was telling the truth or not, there might not have been much of a decision to make in the first place, but since I knew he was lying it was clear that what I was choosing between was whether I wanted to confront him or just give him the money and avoid a confrontation. And, as I said, once this choice became apparent it occurred to me that I had known he was lying all along and that I had only pretended otherwise because I’d already decided to give him the money. Or was there another reason I went along with the con, a behavioural reflex or temporary insanity? When he started more or less mugging me at the bank machine all of what I’ve just explained became painfully obvious to me. I was sick of the whole thing and wanted it to be over with as soon as possible, so after I’d knocked his hand away I deposited the money order and withdrew four hundred and handed it over . . . or did he snatch it out of my hands? . . . My memory is fuzzy on that point. . . . When he started to thank me I cut him off and told him that he’d already thanked me and he didn’t need to keep on thanking me. Once was enough. ‘Besides,’ I said, ‘I just made a hundred bucks.’