David Foster Wallace already said that. But he wasn’t talking about sorrow. He was talking about life, Giovanna said.
Chiara wanted to say: Did David Foster Wallace have any idea when he spoke about fish and water? But, if you have read that essay, you should also know that he borrowed the imagery from a Zen poet. Are they even called Zen poets? That sounds like some brand name to me. Max Mara Handbag for 200 euros, Zen poet on hire for fifty euros (poet offer does not include handbag). If I feel that way, and I just borrowed the word water from DFW, does that mean I don’t know what the heaviness of sorrow feels like? Do you know what it feels like to be choking all the time? To dream of escape, but to have nowhere to go?
But instead, Chiara said: I haven’t read Infinite Jest. I thought it would be too distracting.
Why would it be distracting?
All his little tricks, all those footnotes and flourishes, his bandana, is that all there is? What is he trying to say?
You have to read him to find out, Giovanna said.
Chiara wanted to smack her. Not because of what Giovanna said, but because she poked the air with her fork when she said it.
Why do we take these suicidal writers so seriously? Foster Wallace, Hemingway, Plath, Woolf. You know what I think: if they rejected life so viciously, there’s something they know about it that we don’t.
You just said you haven’t read DFW. And you find him too distracting. How could you take him seriously?
I still take him seriously. I just find his writing distracting.
Right, because you knew what he was really like. Besides his writing, which was just a minor distraction? Giovanna raised her exasperated fork again.
Chiara said she had a meeting (they were at the cafeteria in office), one she had just remembered. She scooped up her tray and left. She deposited her unfinished meal on the little conveyor belt that carried trays away to die and walked to the elevator. She kept her eyes on the checked floor black, white, and grey—floating below her and listened. What was she listening for? For something inside her, a thin quiet voice that could say: I am . . . I am . . . I am.
There was no voice.
In her office, she had a bell jar (not the book The Bell Jar, but she had an actual bell jar). The jar had three seeds of NERICA: the new rice variety she had helped develop and that had transformed food security sustainability across at least twenty countries. But now it held no appeal for her, not even as a frayed reminder of past achievements. She wasn’t very old, not yet of the age that kicks back and reflects on “past achievements”: she was in her late thirties and at the peak of her professional career, a description crafted for people who wish to see careers as peaks and troughs and accomplishments. That would have included most of her colleagues, but not Chiara. She only saw her career and her work as a constant churning: swallowing time and space and emotions and effort and spitting out reports.
We heard, from unconfirmed sources, that after lunch, Chiara went to the office terrace. She smoked one cigarette and then promptly sent another up in smoke to join its sister.
NOTES FOR THE STORY: Chiara walked over the parapet. Facing the question she first stumbled upon when she was fifteen, with a blunt knife and clumsy hands. Will it ever get better? The knowledge of dying alone. The knowledge of sorrow. The answer is unfortunately not. What could she do? Cast this knowledge, this “knowing that the darkness never ends,” over the world. See how it refracts the sunlight.
She decided to grow her wings and fly away.
From: Chiara
Date:Sat, Sep 29, 2012 at 2:27 AM
Subject: Midnight Soliloquy
To: [email protected]
I am in bed. I lie awake for hours. I am in the exclusive club that looks awfully fashionable from the outside, but no one in here wishes for membership: the world of incurable insomniacs. I could be dramatic and tell you this has only happened in the last few months, since what I call the upheaval in my life. But that’s not true. I could also conjure a romantic air about the condition and say words rescue me when I am betrayed by sleep, but that is just nonsense. Usually there is only a low-grade headache, soreness in the limbs, a feigned stillness that is not sleep but only the wait for sleep. All of this sounds exotic. But it’s just fucking annoying. Nothing that is true ever sounds pretty.
But tonight I am writing. I am typing this out in bed on my iPhone, because I’m too scared to walk all the way to the living room and get on my laptop, scared that I may plunge into a rabbit hole of endless links and Google searches and reddit conversations, all of which will be lost to my memory the next morning.
I don’t sleep because I can’t. I can’t sleep because I don’t.
I shut my eyes, pretending to be asleep, knowing I am not. I see the nondarkness that we mistakenly call black inside my eyes. I breathe steadily and will myself to sleep. And then I see her. My mother. Mamma. She had a voice like Rino Gaetano. (Who doesn’t grieve for Rino Gaetano and his wizard voice, silenced at thirty by the monstrous stupidity of Rome? He didn’t have a single enemy in the world, but now he’s as dead as Tupac.) Mamma would sing all night: Gianna Gianna Gianna. Gianna and her magic touch with truffle, how Gianna never believed in music or in UFOs, Gianna had a crocodile, Gianna wanted the doctor, but he’s not there. Gianna walks away when she pleases.
I remember parties where she would stay out on the terrace, even after dinner had been served and the guests had all gone inside the house. She was a voice in the dark.
She was also on the terrace when she killed herself. In the dark.
In my nonsleep, I feel sad. Very sad.
Though I am still not asleep, I will set my alarm fifteen minutes earlier for the morning. I will try and catch the metro earlier than normal. I will have fifteen minutes to spare before office. I will order a cappuccino from the bar near office, and then look out into an autumn morning and wonder about the people rushing to play out the rest of their lives.
I will smile. Tomorrow morning, I will be happy.
Sent from my iPhone
From: Chiara
Date: Sun, Sep 30, 2012 at 7:08 PM
Subject: Trees that sway like ballerinas
To: [email protected]
Sometimes I sit still and allow thoughts and images to float into my head. Here are some:
Thought: When I write down a phrase like “my mother walked up a terrace and shot herself in the head and I have no idea why,” I refuse to let the words speak to me, to evoke an emotion. I just type them out. And they are dead the moment they appear on the screen.
Nonthoughts/ images: In a room filled with sun, a young woman looks out of the window at trees that are swollen with green and rust-red leaves and sway in the spring wind like ballerinas. The woman is also writing and does not like the use of the word ballerina. But she lets it stay because, for the time being, it reminds her of paintings she had seen in a museum that evoked something similar to joy. The painting was of young girls lining up at a ballet class. It was probably by Degas.
The woman who writes about herself in the third person thinks of other paintings and, at this moment, comes up with nothing. There is a quiet melancholy that invades her. It is time to start shutting down and she lets images slowly creep into her mind and fade away. They include:
•A group of young women and men playing ping-pong under floodlights, slightly drunk on amaro and red wine, and thinking that this is life.
•A poet joins them for two games because he feels it may be a more honest use of his time than all the lines he has strung together. The poet is upset about mediocre novelists that earn more money and fame than brilliant poets. The poet loses both games of ping-pong.
•Many years ago, one of the players was a child and took table tennis classes. She learned the backhand really well. She found a young boy with whom she kept practising her shots, with long rhythmic volleys across the shining tables, their edges snatching the light from the high win
dows. The player has forgotten the name and the face of the boy. She remembers the sweeping arcs of his forehand, like retaining the brushstrokes without recalling the painting.
There is a child outside with a gelato and I can hear his excited cries. His screams are wheeling in the sky above him with seagulls. There is a life to be lived. Then there will be nothing: no seagulls, no trees, no memories, and no record of what we were.
From: Chiara
Date: Sun, Sep 30, 2012 at 11:23 PM
Subject: RE: Trees that sway like ballerinas
To: [email protected]
I don’t know why I’m sending you these e-mails. All of this is none of your business.
WILD PIGS
The next day, as I was getting into work, I got a call. There was no number, so I figured it might be Vineet, Pooja’s brother. I halted the sliding doors, jumped in, jumped out, gave them an existential crisis, and then leaped out of the building. An actor with no lines cannot fail.
I picked up and kept quiet.
Krantik?
Hi, Vineet. What’s up?
Don’t what’s up me, you bastard.
Always great to talk to you too.
You pushed her to the edge. She said she was talking to you and then she went and jumped into the canal.
Did you ask her what we were talking about?
No, I didn’t. But you knew she was in a mess. You called her to Amsterdam and then you guys shared a room.
Yes, we did. I didn’t trick her into coming, Vineet. She wanted to go to Amsterdam. And I wanted to meet her.
And she visited you in Rome. We find a good family like yours and you turn out to be such a fucking lowlife.
Vineet, you need to calm down.
Calm down? You’ve ruined my sister’s life, and you’re telling me to calm down! She told me you’re not even a manager. You’re still a management trainee. A druggie, a failure, and a liar.
Vineet, I think it’s time you stopped blaming me. Or her. Also time you stopped trying to get her married off.
What do you mean? You’re coming in June next year and you’re marrying her.
Who said anything about marrying her? I don’t think I’m ready. I don’t think she’s ready.
If you came from a family like ours, you’d know what your word meant.
If I came from a family like yours, I’d also be blind. Because my head would be up my ass.
Krantik, you need to shut up now. But you see, beta, you’re engaged to her, and if you back off now, terrible things might start happening.
What terrible things? Don’t talk bullshit, Vineet.
Things happen, Krantik. All the time. And you know, Papa’s an MP. He’s expected to even become a Minister of State in the next cabinet. We cannot lose face over this whole mess you’ve created. And ministers can make things happen. To you, to your mom.
I saw people moving in and out of the sliding doors, obeying the doors, taking one step after the next and walking into the building. I didn’t want to think about Ma. And now my heart was slamming against my chest. I could feel a lightning bolt of pain shoot through every joint and every synapse in my body.
I’ll tell you a few more things that can happen, Vineet. A newly appointed minister can be suddenly exposed as a paedophile. Not just child porn, years of abusing his own son. Who’s turned out so screwed up in the head he’s enabling his father’s illegal activities.
What the fuck are you talking about?
You know what I’m talking about: your dad whose balls you have sucked for the entire duration of your miserable existence.
That’s not even true. What the hell . . .
Who cares if it’s true? You threaten me with your goons, and you think I’ll wait for you, bent over, pulling my own ass open? I went to IIT Chennai and the people I smoked up with, my fellow miserable druggie friends, were all studying in the Asian College of Journalism. You call me once more and we’ll make sure this story breaks.
You asshole. You can’t just make up stuff, you piece of shit.
Of course, I can. We all make up our lives. Be very careful, otherwise I’ll make up yours. You have way too much to lose.
You’re crazy. Bat-shit crazy . . .
I’m crazy? I’m CRAZY? You miserable fucking piece of dog-cum. Bhenchod, Maa ke Laude, Madarchod. If you piss me off, you’d better get someone to kill me right now. Because I’m empty inside and if you don’t watch out, the only thing I’ll do for the rest of my life is harbour the seeds of your destruction. If you don’t kill me in the next two days, I’ll train wild pigs for the next twenty years to come and eat you alive.
What the . . .
They’ll hunt down your family, just you and your dad. Not Pooja.
Who?
The wild pigs I’ll train.
And then I hung up.
By the time I got into the lift, I could barely breathe. There were voices all around me. How was the weekend? Did you see the match? I was tired of them all. So I thought of some of my favourite things. The song I mean, but I forgot the lyrics. So I made some up.
Girls in white dresses and blue satin sashes.
Smiling cute faces and large group pictures.
All good friends are posing for Facebook.
Pizza and vino in Instagram fashion.
Look at my pasta, isn’t it pretty?
Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens.
This wasn’t working. So I practised my Italian in my head:
Tutto mondo è pazzo, tutti è cazzo.
And then some conjugations: palaconto, palacontiamo, palaconte.
I can imagine Vineet in his swanky office, trying not to get worked up. He adjusts his tie, makes sure the end falls pat in the middle of his belt buckle. Will he call Papa? Not yet, wait till dinner and family time. And then he slithers to the office coffee machine and steams out a cup. His assistant’s typing and he’s looking at her breasts, wishing they were smothered under his hands. And then he starts tapping the coffee counter because he can’t wait to see me dead. Or paralysed at least. What he doesn’t know is that cells inside him are slowly losing the ability to divide. His body is in a stable, relatively constant condition. But it’s falling apart. Every day 150,000 people die. And they can’t help it. Vineet thinks he’s ahead. But he’s just in a queue.
I get to my desk. Claudia says hello and she’s got new earrings. Do I like them? We spend ten hours three feet away from each other every day. The wall in the middle isn’t high enough. We spend 9.5 hours making sure we don’t look at each other.
Yes, those are lovely.
I’m thinking of Buddha hands, index finger and thumb joined and the other fingers fluttering into an open petal. I’m thinking of Vishnu chilling on his serpent bed and Shiva doing a bong. Jesus is sitting by a lake cutting his toenails. Damned desert dust.
I switch on my system. Everything takes too fucking long. The radiation from your TV: 1 percent of that is from the original Big Bang. Yes, even that’s not over yet. On my desktop, in the middle of a Camel Lights blue screen, a darker circle slowly unwinds. Fuck Vineet and his dad. I could call my journalist friends if I wanted. And his dad looked like a paedophile anyway. Or maybe I’ll just say he tried to molest me.
I breathe deep. I need some peace. I have to forget where I am. First I have to rid myself of attachments. The iPhone goes out first. Then my Kindle, then the Bosch painting print I carry around to different places just so people who visit know my obscure taste in art. Then those stupid African sculptures. Get rid of the Foucault books on the shelf;
I never managed to read beyond chapter two anyway. If I put everything I own into a container and ship it to Aruba, along with everything I’ve ever read and all the music I’ve heard, what would be left behind?
I don’t need any memories. You know, that school quiz, that kiss on a swing (I was only twelve), the terror of my first hard-on, the first time I got stoned and the walk back home stretched forever and ev
er, or that party after which Mohsin and I were lying in bed together and he leaned over (anyway, forget I just said that), my dad and his model cars . . .
Markus was standing in front of me. One strand of hair had escaped the tenacious hold of his gel and pointed down, slicing his forehead in two.
RISE and SHINE. How’re we doing on the report?
It’s going okay. Some of the numbers are difficult to generate, but I’m working on them.
You remember what I said? We need to show a 30 percent increase in our efficiency. If we haven’t been efficient enough, it means we’ve got some slack around here. If we have slack, we have to tighten our belts. And I can see a little flab in front of me right now. May need liposuction.
Yes, Markus. I think we have achieved thirty.
You know where they dump liposuction fat? It becomes medical waste, forgotten forever. You don’t want to be discarded liposuction fat, do you?
No, I don’t.
I read that in Fight Club.
Cool book. I smiled. If I have no memories, I won’t remember what makes me happy. Then there’ll be no need to smile.
The magic number is 30 percent, Markus said. I’m relying on you. The first rule of my club is you meet your targets.
I’m trying, Markus. I think we’ll make it.
What’s the second rule? he asks me.
The second rule is I have to meet my targets.
You’re a bright kid. I want the report by COB today since you’re on leave tomorrow. Or you’ll be a bright, unemployed kid.
Do turtles remember the sea? Even if they’ve spent their whole lives on a terrace?
Do they ever wish they could leap off? What if we could get rid of all our regrets? Would that make us lighter? Maybe we could achieve buoyant flight, like those snakes that float from the treetops. Imagine if all of us leaped out of our office windows, our arms spread-eagled, floating to the ground, like a flock of geese heading south. Wave after wave, we would kick off from the edges of our steel and glass towers.
No Direction Rome Page 10