The Mark and the Void

by Paul Murray

  I realize my story is at a turning point. The subterfuge, the plotting, the misdirection, all of that falls away, and the dull details of my life here too, the whole maze tumbling into itself like panels of scenery. The lie has brought me, as promised, to the truth. ‘Look,’ I begin.

  But that is as far as I get. Ariadne’s phone has started to ring. ‘Sorry, one second,’ she says, holding up a finger to suspend our conversation, like a fairy bringing time to a halt with a twitch of her wand, then unleashes into the phone a torrent of accelerated Greek.

  Sequestered within the alien noise, my mind is racing. Am I actually going to do this? Should I talk to Paul first? But the time for Cyranos and surveillance equipment has passed. I have been in a story long enough, trapped on a flat page, delivering lines written by others. Now is the time to step out into the world. How else could this end, but with the hero speaking in his own voice? Ariadne gives me a wrapping-up sign. I take a deep breath, I gird my loins; then into the phone I hear her say, ‘S’agapo, Oscar, s’agapo … I love you, baby, I’ll be home soon.’

  And around me it seems that a hundred doors and windows have been flung open, as in some stuffy room; and all of the potential, the dreams, the imagined futures borne away in an instant, like banknotes thrown to the wind.

  ‘And what did you say?’

  ‘What could I say?’

  ‘Didn’t you ask her who it was?’

  ‘No, I simply ignored it, and then continued my pretence that I had approached her only out of an interest in her work.’

  ‘And that was it? Then you just went back to the office?’

  ‘First I bought a painting. Simulacrum 103. There it is, by the mantelpiece.’ I point to the painting, still in a cardboard box, like a cold, avant-garde pizza. Paul opens the lid, winces, closes it again. At the breakfast bar Igor, who arrived uninvited with Paul, tosses pistachio nuts into his mouth and flips the shells on the ground.

  ‘Let me get this straight,’ Paul says. ‘The two of you are getting on fine, everything’s going according to plan, then she gets this phone call, during which she says –’

  ‘“I love you, Oscar. I’ll be home soon.”’

  ‘That’s all?’

  ‘The rest was in Greek.’

  ‘Well then!’ Paul spreads his hands expansively. ‘She could have been talking to anybody. Her uncle, her brother. The guy who comes to fix the fridge. You know these Mediterraneans, they’re very demonstrative.’

  ‘It wasn’t the man who comes to fix the fridge,’ I say, recalling the light that jumped in her eyes as soon as she took out her phone. ‘She meant what she said.’

  ‘So who is he, then? Who is this Oscar?’

  Who is Oscar? Since that moment at the waterside, when my dreams were so casually atomized, I have thought of little else. In my imagination he keeps changing, one moment garrulous and witty, the next silent and serious; right now I picture him as a handsome, athletic type – tanned, stubbled, a pilot for Médecins Sans Frontières who in his spare time writes surprisingly tender poetry. The others have differing opinions: Paul sees him as a brilliant entrepreneur, a wild-eyed maverick making a fortune from imperceptible flaws in the system; Igor proposes that he is a professional sex worker, ‘with wang like the extinguisher of fires, who has made her addict to his sex, and she cannot stop sexing him.’

  ‘See, with a high-quality waitress-surveillance system there’d be none of this ambiguity,’ Paul says, frowning. ‘Without knowing what we’re up against, it’s hard to work out the best course of action.’

  ‘Only one course,’ Igor says. ‘Good old-fashioned maiming. Without this monster wang of his, she will soon turn elsewhere for her pleasures.’

  ‘I don’t think it will make a difference,’ I say. ‘The writing was on the wall long before she mentioned Oscar. She hates banks with a passion.’

  ‘But we expected that, right?’ Paul says. ‘That’s why we were pushing the benefactor thing. Didn’t she go for that at all?’

  ‘She seemed uncomfortable taking money for her art from someone who works in a bank. She likened us to Nazis.’

  He sighs. ‘Okay. Well, you’re right, once a woman starts calling you a Nazi, it’s time to bow out. Frankly, from what you’ve told me, you may have dodged a bullet. The paintings and the organic food should have been a clear enough warning. Better to get out now, before she starts making you wear vegetarian shoes and call history “herstory”.’

  ‘And leave her tampons all over the place,’ Igor chimes in wearily. ‘This is what happens with my ex-wife. Tampons, everywhere in my house. Then she try to unionize the strippers. Man who says, “We must educate the womens,” I say to him, “You think anybody pay to see strippers who have cut off their hair and now dress in boiler suits that they will not take off?”’

  ‘Igor here actually owned his own strip club back in the old country,’ Paul explains.

  ‘Happier times, happier times,’ Igor says mistily.

  ‘Anyhow, the main thing now is that we put Ariadne behind us and get you back in the game,’ Paul says, bending down to his bag. ‘If you’ll take a look at the laptop here, you’ll see the beta version of the new Hotwaitress. We’re still updating the database, but there are plenty of options…’

  ‘I appreciate your help,’ I say. ‘But for me, I think the game is over.’

  ‘Over?’ Paul looks up from the laptop with a start. ‘What do you mean?’

  I rise from my chair and go to the window. Uninhabited office blocks blaze with light against the dark sky, a ghost armada sailing the black ocean. ‘I suppose I don’t feel like I dodged a bullet,’ I say. ‘I think the bullet went right through me.’

  ‘Then why stop?’ Paul says, jumping to his feet. ‘We can find out more about Oscar. Maybe there are cracks in the relationship we can exploit. We’ll redesign you from the ground up, so whatever Oscar lacks, you have in spades.’

  I smile. When I asked him to come over, I still thought there was something he could do; now I can see that the very fact I’m having this conversation shows how hopeless the situation is. Tricks, artifice, the implacable double-agency of money – this is my world, not Ariadne’s, and there is simply no way to go from mine to hers.

  ‘Artifice is everybody’s world! You think Ariadne gets out of bed looking like that? You think she doesn’t put in her time in front of the mirror, getting her beautiful ebony hair to flow just so? Look, you’ve had a disappointment, I understand that. But a few weeks ago you didn’t even know her. What’s to stop you having the same feelings for somebody else? Take a look in our database.’ He holds the laptop open for me, faces arrayed on the screen like chocolates in a box. ‘There are literally hundreds of other waitresses here. Just take a look.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Look, that’s all I’m asking.’

  ‘I don’t want anybody else,’ I say.

  Paul sighs. ‘Okay, Claude. It’s your decision, of course. But if you don’t mind me saying so, you’re being awfully naïve about this. Ariadne made an impression on you, and that’s great. But life is not literature. Sooner or later, the spell wears off, the romantic feelings disappear, and you’re left watching somebody’s body disintegrate. You start with a love story, you end up manacled to an hourglass, watching the sands run out.’

  ‘It is true,’ Igor concurs in a voice gravelly with regret. ‘When I marry my wife, she is filthiest lap dancer in all of Transnistrian Autonomous Region. There are criminals who come out of her stall weeping with shame at the things she has do to them in there. When she choose me, I am joyous as priest in orphanage. But the day we are married, it is like someone steal her away and replace her with her mother. Shoutings, hittings me with rolling pin. Meeting other womens to form terror gangs of feminism. Last time I see her she tell me she want to have breast reduction surgery. I ask her, “Are you mad? God and plastic surgeon have give you best boobs in former Soviet Union, why do you flout this gift?” She will not listen. I cannot bear to
see this tragedy, so I come here to begin new life.’ He gazes bleakly into his glass. ‘She must be fifteen now,’ he says.

  ‘What we’re offering you here is freedom from that,’ Paul says, brandishing the laptop again. ‘Don’t you understand, that’s what Hotwaitress is. A way to stay inside the story forever.’

  I understand what he’s offering me: a chance to keep paying him a retainer indefinitely. But I am tired of being his mark. ‘I think this is goodbye,’ I say.

  Scowling, he puts the laptop away, takes his coat from the back of the chair.

  ‘Why don’t you stay inside the story,’ I challenge him, ‘if everything is better there?’

  ‘It’s too late for me,’ he says. ‘I have a wife, remember?’

  ‘You have an hourglass you’re chained to,’ I say. ‘You’ve already abandoned your career. If you don’t love your wife anymore, why don’t you leave her too?’

  ‘You really don’t understand anything, do you?’ he says. ‘I read somewhere that money kills your ability to empathize.’

  I flinch. He opens the door. ‘I do love her,’ he says. ‘That’s the whole problem.’ He turns away, repeating to himself, ‘That’s the whole problem.’

  3

  Persona Ficta

  In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.

  Guy Debord

  It’s true, Texier said some harsh things about the banks; this, in fact, was putting it mildly. He saw the financial market, with its obsessive will to quantification, as the perfect instance of his totalizing system, his ‘eutrophication’ or ‘veil of Maya’ – a web of abstraction so complicated that it asphyxiated what it was supposed to explain before collapsing inevitably under its own weight. The artificial, the less-than-real, was once conceived as a kind of hell, he wrote. Yet today the less-than-real is prized more than gold, and the quaint stuff of the tangible – the underlying, as it has become known – exists only as raw material for new and lucrative abstractions. The financial corporation has become a machine for producing unreality; why do we desire this unreality? Why do we model ourselves on this machine?

  We know that what we call the corporation (Texier wrote) first appeared in Europe’s Middle Ages, signed into law by the Pope in AD 1250. It was conceived as a legal persona ficta – a ‘fictive person’ that had many of the attributes of a real person. It was capable of owning property, for example, of suing and being sued; at the same time, it was bodiless, invisible, free from human infirmity and the ravages of time. Conceived as such, the corporation was almost identical to contemporary ideas of angels. According to medieval religious doctrine, angels too were immaterial, ageless, capable of acting like human beings but bound by neither substance nor time; the corporation, an entity which we imagine as a uniquely secular creation, a paragon of reason and common sense, in fact began its life as an offshoot of a Christian myth.

  Today, though we no longer believe in angels, we still regard the corporation as a higher order of being. It is composed of ordinary people, but it transcends them; semi-divine, it floats above our messy and contingent reality. Of all the corporations, it is the bank, which produces nothing tangible, which trades only ever in the virtual, that remains closest to pure spirit, and thus sits at the top of the hierarchy, equivalent to the Thrones and Dominions. Whatever it does, we are ready to forgive; or rather we assume that what we see as sins are instead mystical transactions beyond our understanding. We have an instinctive feeling that these dark angels, of us and yet above us, must be protected and appeased – to the extent that we allow them to predate on the material world, feed vampirically off our very reality, leaving us to live among their detritus. We do this because we want to be like them, because we ourselves aspire to the condition of persona ficta: free from reality’s contingencies and humiliations, insubstantial, unchanging, inviolable, endlessly apart.

  Yet how does a person become a persona ficta? How can one simultaneously turn fully inwards and make oneself abstract? Perhaps these two operations are less exclusive than we might think. Humans have always used stories to order reality. Now, however, technology allows unprecedented quantities of reality to be turned into story. Reality thereby becomes secondary; just as the banks use the underlying only for what can be derived from it, life becomes merely raw material for our own narratives.

  The building block of these narratives is the image. The image operates by delimiting reality, placing boundaries around it, removing its connections and context; in short, by enslaving it. It presents the results, however, as a concentration or apotheosis of reality. The image is the derivative of the self; can it be mere chance that the rise of financial capitalism has coincided with the proliferation and incorporation of the camera into almost every facet of the Western world? The camera’s promise is that the moment can be subordinated – deferred, stored, experienced at our leisure. Life and the living of it have, for the first time in history, become separate. In recording our own reality – that is, in simultaneously experiencing and deferring experience – we pass from the actual into the virtual.

  Every age dreams of defeating death: this is our chosen method. By hoarding images, we seek to conquer time. Of course, we do not mistake a photograph in a frame or on a screen for the reality as it was. Nevertheless, as Barthes has written, the photograph makes an assertion, and it makes it in a particular mode – what the Greeks called the Aorist, a form of the past tense that is never actually completed but seems to go on indefinitely. Thus, the picture presents us with the past as a continuum which flows parallel to the present, but flows statically, a frozen river, so we may examine it at any point in the future. It is this imagined future self, looking at the pictures of the past, that is the true product of the camera. Although technology has the capability now to record entire lifetimes, meaning that every moment may be pulled from the foaming sea of oblivion to the dry land of perfect recall, the mythic power of the photograph nevertheless relates to the future, and not to the past. Every recording conceals the secret fantasy of a future self who will observe it; this future self is himself the simulacrum, the persona ficta. He exists beyond time, beyond action, beyond need; his only function is to witness the continuum of the past, as he might observe the steps that brought him to godhood. Through this fantasy, time is transformed from the condition of loss into a commodity that may be acquired and stockpiled; rather than disappear ceaselessly into the past, life accumulates, each moment becoming a unit of a total self that is the culmination of our experiences in a way that we – biological composites who profligately shed our cells, our memories and our possessions – can never be. And this fantasy self or persona ficta is the soul, as conceived by a materialist people; he is the apotheosis of the individual, arrogating reality to himself, just as the bank does with its totalizing abstraction.

  Who is with us, in this recursive heaven where time has been defeated? No one: the modern heaven is one of perfect isolation. We are not there either. The transcendental or sempiternal self bends over his screen, in correspondence with a forever-echoing past, leaving a present that is closed off, superfluous, from which (and this is the real meaning of the fantasy) we are exempted. That is our transcendence of death: to achieve a death-in-life, a stasis, a replacement of ourselves with a duplicate whose only function is to relay the past to the future; to conquer loss with a virtual repleteness, to extinguish the present by making ourselves comprehensively elsewhere.

  After my father died, I found a cache of old family photographs in the apartment. There were hundreds of them, thousands even; I brought them back to Dublin and, whenever I had an hour free in the evening, began to archive them – feeding them into the scanner, transmuting them into digital form, though I could never decide whether this was to make it easier to look at them, or so I wouldn’t have to look at them again.

  My father was a blacksmi
th – with a hammer, an anvil and a forge, just as you might find in a novel of Alexandre Dumas. When I look at his picture, I’m still surprised to see he was not a tall man, nor even especially brawny; close my eyes and he’s transformed instantly to the giant of my childhood, the black-browed ogre in his fiery cloud of sparks who thrilled and terrified me even when he was snoozing in his chair.

  His father was a blacksmith, and his father before him. That was almost a century ago, when our town was a village and Paris still a murky chimera far beyond the horizon; by the time I was born, the forge lay quiet three days a week and my father had to supplement his income by teaching metalwork at the technical college nearby. He didn’t care; on the contrary, he took great pleasure in the idea of himself as a throwback, an obstacle, a misshapen stone jamming up the smooth machine of modernity. My father thrived on attrition. In his time he had been a Maoist, a Leninist and a Trotskyite, but this was only so much misdirection. What he believed in was dwarfed by what he didn’t believe in. Progress, improvement, the perfectibility of human nature – to him, these were the great myths of our time, used to dispossess the poor and the gullible just as religion had in the past.

  Certainly in our town it was easy to disbelieve in progress. It was a ramshackle warren of building sites, warehouses, and shops in which everything seemed already old. The dominant landmark was a disintegrating magasin général, a huge concrete grain store overlooking the canal that had lain empty for decades and was now a magnet for taggers, who had transformed it into something iridescent and otherworldly. You could follow the canal all the way into the city, but we rarely did. Paris was the city of modernity, and the home of the greatest of my father’s many bêtes noires, Baron Haussmann. Before Haussmann came along, it sounded like people in Paris spent most of their time rioting; if they weren’t rioting, they were erecting barricades. ‘But how can you put a barricade across that?’ my father would lament, gesturing at the Boulevard de Sébastopol and its four lanes of traffic.