Red Pill

by Hari Kunzru

  An hour or so later, shaved and dressed, I went to the Workspace with the brittle jauntiness of a young revolutionary singing songs on his way to the gallows. I lost heart at the door and fumbled with my keycard in the general vicinity of the reader, telling myself that it didn’t work, I couldn’t get in, ergo there was no way I could be blamed for not writing in there, for not being able to write in there, the Workspace being inaccessible because of a technical problem, no fault of mine. I was about to leave, assuring myself that I’d made every reasonable effort, when Finlay came and swiped me in.

  I made my way to my workstation, nodding and smiling at my colleagues as they tried to conceal their curiosity at my arrival. There were at least two people I hadn’t met before, and they seemed as interested in me as the others. No one spoke except Edgar, who proclaimed in a booming voice that “the Prodigal has returned.” I thought I’d have to endure a routine, some thigh-slapping Renaissance Fayre turn, full of rhetoric and flourishes of wheezy panache. Luckily, Edgar’s possession of the moral high ground depended on remaining a Deuterian in good standing, a respecter of the golden rule of Workspace Silence, so he had to be content with shushing himself theatrically, waggling his forefingers over his lips in an awful winsome burlesque.

  I sat down at my desk and stared at the wood-effect surface, trying to control my breathing. The Workspace smelled, not overpoweringly, of cleaning products. It smelled of things that generate static electricity and things that dissipate it or prevent it building up. Carpet tiles, rubber mats. Coatings and sprays. I adjusted the height of my seat and powered up the computer. I waved my hand to switch on the light. From my clogged pigeonhole I had recovered a piece of paper circulated by the IT department, listing various logins and IDs and invitations to create passwords. I put it in front of me on the desk. After I had shared my mother’s maiden name and a randomly chosen favorite film, I was invited to prove that I was not a robot. Luckily for me the bar was low.

  The theory—my theory—was that if I went to work, maybe I would become what I appeared to be: a scholar, part of a common project, a man taking resolute communicative action. I sat and stared at my blank document. Inevitably Edgar turned out to be an aficionado of some kind of keyboard with loud mechanical switches. It was impossible to ignore his workflow, either eerie silence or a torrent of clicks and clacks. Thankfully he was sitting quite far away from me, so there was no chance of accidental eye contact, but it was infuriating that he’d found yet another way to intrude on my peace of mind. Unable to concentrate, I messaged the librarian at the Center to request an edition of Kleist’s Gesammelte Werke. I stared at my blank document for a while and then opened a browser.

  Search: Deuter

  Deuter Center

  Deuter Chemical

  Deuteronomy

  Deuter TiO2

  Deuterium

  Deuter music

  Various portraits. The captain of industry, the philanthropist presenting a prize. A scan of a magazine spread depicting a trade stand, sometime around 1970. Beneath a glowing arch, dolly birds in tight dresses and metallic boots show off an array of consumer products, kitchenware and furniture and fabrics and pharmaceuticals. In another picture, a waterfall of pills tumbles from a spout into a sort of futuristic ewer. In a third there is a Mercedes-Benz, everything—the pills, the car—the same optically brightened white.

  I set the portraits of Deuter, the aquiline nose, the commanding eyes, beside portraits of Kleist. Nineteenth-century teenagers had wept over the glamorous corpses of young poets. Chatterton and Shelley and Goethe’s Werther. I doubted anyone much had wept for Kleist. From the few undistinguished oils and drawings I could find, it was obvious that he was uncomfortable inside his body. The shoulders were hunched a little too high, the head held self-consciously. The only attractive image of him was by a canny old Swiss who seemed to bathe all his subjects in the same off-the-shelf heavenly light. Even he was forced to admit Kleist’s asceticism, the rumpled clothes and violently hacked hair, though he set the blunt-scissored crop over high cheekbones and a fine jaw that weren’t matched in other images, and which I read as cynical flattery.

  Somehow it seemed impossible to say anything about Wanderer’s Nightsong, so I spent the day making lists. Quotations, typologies. Self sufficient (1589); Self-knowledge (1613); Self-made (1615); Self-seeker (1632); Selfish (1640); Self-examination (1647); Selfhood (1649); Self interest (1658); Self-knowing (1667); Self-deception (1677); Self-determination (1683); Self-conscious (1688). Je est un autre (Rimbaud). I should have to search for a year to find a true feeling inside myself (Kafka). I wrote down a sort of light bulb joke about lyric poets, attributed to Karl Kraus. If you want a window painted, you don’t call a lyric poet. He might be able to do the work, but he doesn’t. Not he can’t, or won’t. He just doesn’t. He prefers not to.

  Gradually the sun went down. By five-thirty it was already dark. On one side, the Workspace was connected to the house. The other walls were made of glass panels. My workstation looked towards the dark leafy mass of the hedge that marked the boundary. To my right, the driveway led towards the gate and the road. To my left, the garden sloped down to the frozen lake, now invisible but for a few distant lights. Reflected in the glass I could see Laetitia packing up, shuffling papers and powering down her monitor. If I turned halfway round, I could see Edgar’s reflected bulk, see the hands moving in time to the irregular staccato bursts of sound. Through the day, I’d grown slightly less aware of the open space around me, the feeling of being marooned on an island. Now it returned. I couldn’t be in there any longer. As I climbed the stairs back up to my room, I felt drained. I had no clear memory of anything I’d thought or done.

  I couldn’t face dinner so instead of going down to the Center’s dining room, I left the grounds and ate at a Chinese restaurant a short bus ride away. Its interior was a lurid confection of fish tanks and porcelain ornaments, rendered alien—almost submarine—by blue lighting. It was like walking into a brothel. The collected Kleist had been delivered, a compact four-volume set in a slipcase, each one perfect for slipping into a pocket. I had also ordered several translations of his plays and stories. I took some of these books with me, and drank two or three beers as I ate and read about the young man with the square blunt face, too violent and hysterical to make it in the world. In his own words, he was “absurdly overwrought.” Most commentators seemed to believe that he was what would now be termed an “incel,” dying a virgin. Born a Prussian Junker and trained as a military officer, he went spectacularly off the rails, crashing out of various prestigious professions and positions open to him through family connections, each burned bridge bringing him a little closer to the lake and the bullet. As a child, he and his cousin signed an undertaking to kill themselves together if “anything unworthy” should happen. Later he proposed suicide pacts to all sorts of people—men and women, passing acquaintances, a friend’s fiancée. Always by shooting.

  As I read I began to feel slightly suffocated. That face, born to fail. The reek of his melancholy in my nostrils. At one point he challenged the elderly Goethe to a pistol duel, a wildly inappropriate act that cemented his reputation as unstable and faintly ridiculous. You could object that all I had to do was read different books, decide to take another route on my walks. It ought to be easy to forget a dead writer.

  BY THE TIME I’d been at the Deuter Center a month, things had deteriorated. By things I mean me, my state of mind. I still sometimes went to the Workspace, but mostly it was to log time on the Deuter Center’s network. One of the more unpleasant surprises of my fellowship was the weekly delivery of a piece of paper, pushed under my door like a hotel bill, with a statistical breakdown of my “activity.” Hours spent, documents created, sites visited, and so on. Naturally, the first time this happened, I was outraged, and went at once to see Frau Janowitz, but instead of putting her on the defensive, my complaint about this outrageous
invasion of privacy merely led her to pull up the contract I’d signed (without reading) on arrival. Could I not see, she said, where I had agreed to waive all rights to privacy in furtherance of the Center’s “research goals”? What were these research goals, I asked. Research into the future development of a transparent public sphere, she said, primly. This was all one word in German. And might she also point out (Frau Janowitz was clearly enjoying herself) that I’d given the Center the right to cancel payment of my stipend in the event that my recorded working hours dipped below a target number during any week of my residency. I had already missed one week’s goal, but she was prepared to overlook it. I was new. I was finding my feet.

  Her victory was absolute. The situation was impossible (I could not even focus on the word goal, it made me too angry) yet I was trapped. I couldn’t go home to Rei without having made at least some progress on my book, yet the idea of working under such conditions was intolerable. Not only was I being watched, I was being gamified. Yet if I left the Deuter Center, what would be waiting for me at home? Something had to change. I could not risk bringing my poison back to my family.

  My solution was to mark time. I would check into the Workspace with my keycard and try to simulate scholarship. In an agony of self-consciousness, I’d sit at my desk, asking myself the question does it look like I’m working? I’d raise and lower the chair, wave my hand at the light, trying to steel myself to write. I’d tell myself that it didn’t have to be any good. It just had to be text of some kind. Keystrokes. When I couldn’t think of anything, I adopted a contemplative posture, hitting a key every so often. If I was slouching, I tried to fill my slouch with potential, the coiled readiness of someone who might imminently begin to write, might write at any time, but just happened not to be doing so. When I sat up straight, I projected an image of transfixed introspection, a perfectly legitimate aspect of the creative process. Having my hands poised over the keyboard felt like too much. Without my hands over the keyboard, I was just a man sitting in a chair, so I would usually lean forward a little, in the manner of someone moving an intellectual project forward, not hesitating or procrastinating, buying time or treading water, but serene, confident, and above all busy. Every so often I’d lean back and look “casually” over my shoulder, trying to work out if anyone could see my screen.

  I often ate at the blue light Chinese. The restaurant’s portions were enormous, and I’d bring back foil trays of leftovers, spooning cold fried rice into my mouth late at night. My desk and bed were dotted with stray grains and spatters of sauce. After a while the room began to smell. Empty coffee cups, beer cans, underwear on the floor—I was creating a teenage midden, fouling my adult nest. It was semi-deliberate, a sort of regression. I didn’t know where I was going with it, whether I was playing at collapse or trying to induce the real thing.

  Sometimes, to keep up appearances, I had to go to dinner and socialize. To prepare, I drank Scotch. The whisky made me feel raw and a little prickly, ready for the cut and thrust of intellectual conversation. Edgar wasn’t always there. When he was, I tried to focus on, say, the grilled fish and the crisp vegetables on my plate, a small pewter tureen of buttery sauce, all the good things the universe had provided. This was not always easy. Edgar was or wanted to be thought of as a gourmet, and somehow he always got very involved in the food we ate. I was set on edge by his table manners, the hearty mastication, the uses he made of his clever fingers, tearing and stuffing and cracking and sprinkling and pinching. On the plus side, I’d developed a reliable strategy for warding off conversation. Whenever he started demanding that I justify my work because it didn’t meet some Edgarian criterion of relevance or value, I’d claim that “from a methodological perspective” I didn’t accept that there was a world outside the text of the poems I studied, that essentially the sphere of phenomena measured in SI units meant nothing to me, so his “concerns” (a good neutral word) had no relevance to “my approach.” He now believed that I was an extreme relativist, the kind of zealot who used to stalk university humanities departments in the nineteen-eighties, wearing a leather jacket and quoting Baudrillard. From Edgar’s perspective, this was more or less a form of mental illness, and he was shocked and not a little repulsed by it. This curtailed a lot of potentially annoying interactions.

  It helped that we had some new colleagues. Alistair, a Scottish economic historian, and Per, a political scientist from Sweden, were white men in late middle age, who dressed almost identically in technocratic smart-casual, slacks and blue blazers and button-down Oxford-weave shirts. They seemed sublimely unperturbed by Edgar, which made him wildly irritated. Often he’d be so caught up in combat with them that he’d barely acknowledge the rest of us. With the eye of Edgar elsewhere, Finlay and Laetitia turned out to be good company. When I asked Finlay what kind of art he wrote about, he replied “anything that doesn’t sell,” and we both laughed too loudly, drawing attention to ourselves.

  One night we listened as Edgar cunningly led his antagonists towards Behavioral Economics, on which ground he’d evidently laid some kind of vicious logical mantrap, designed to impale them and ensure his continued dominance in the tribe. However, they barely seemed to notice his provocations, and by the time dessert was served, Alistair was even correcting his understanding of Decision Theory. Faced with the Scot’s placid authority, Edgar seemed ungainly, his mincing hand gestures the wrigglings of a beetle flipped on its back. Yes of course, he kept saying, in a tone of suppressed fury. Of course I’m talking in the most abstract terms.

  Listening to Edgar being patronized, Finlay’s eyes glittered violently. Laetitia actually became quite animated, telling us about a Vietnamese restaurant she’d found in Mitte which served a superlative larb. At a moment when everyone else was safely occupied in other conversations, I asked Finlay how he coped. He told me that he had trained himself not to hear Edgar talking. “When he starts on one of his—I don’t even know what to call them—his sock-puppet Socratic dialogues, I space out. The brain is very adaptable. You just have to think of a person as being very very unlikely, essentially impossible, and eventually your frontal cortex just edits them out. Also I check Grindr all through dinner.”

  “That’s what you do in the evenings? Go on the internet and get laid?”

  “Sometimes. What do you do?”

  “I’m on to Season Two of Blue Lives.”

  “The cop show?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “I see.”

  There was an awkward silence. Laetitia asked if I’d been out much in Berlin and I told her that I “hadn’t got round to it.” She and Finlay seemed confused. Wasn’t I desperate to escape Wannsee? I admitted that I was, and fumbled around for an explanation. Finally I just said flat out that I didn’t really know why. They let it drop.

  Though I hadn’t left Wannsee, my walks in the area had become longer and more strenuous. I would put on my coat and follow a path round the lake, trudging through muddy woodland, under winter trees that seemed to set the sky in relief, their bare branches like cracks in a slab of pale stone. All along the shoreline there were little beaches and landing spots. A deep chill slid off the water. It was a place where I could have lost myself. It would have been so easy to wade out into the weeds, slipping down a little deeper with each step.

  Every day, at least once, I passed by the Kleist grave. The little four-volume Collected Works was now covered with pencil marks and marginalia, a couple of pages stained with oyster sauce. The more I read, the more I realized that I wasn’t dealing with some aristocrat of emotional response, a true poet in exquisite communication with his feelings. All that nervy rawness, the excess of violent sentiment, seemed like someone trying too hard. I don’t mean Kleist was a fake. I found nothing cynical in his writing, just panic, self-stimulation, a man desperately stabbing himself with the needle of his own personality in an attempt to get a response.

  One day I was star
ing at the inscription on the marker, which now read unpleasantly to me, like a phrase from the manifesto of an angry young man on his way to murder people at a Walmart. Now, O immortality, you are all mine! The words are from a play, The Prince of Homburg, the speaker a dashing seventeenth-century military commander who is about to be executed. In a great battle, he has disobeyed orders, spontaneously leading a heroic charge against the enemy. As a result the battle was won, but the Elector is an unusually strict disciplinarian, and the Prince has been court-martialed and sentenced to death. Now, in his final seconds of life, he’s gone beyond terror to achieve an exalted state in which he is content—even eager—to die, because he believes that he’s going to become an eternal symbol of Prussian honor. Men are leading him blindfolded from his cell. He can see nothing but colors and forms. He persuades himself that angel’s wings are growing on his back. Now, O Immortality, you are all mine! But there’s a twist. Instead of a bullet, the Prince feels a victor’s laurel wreath being placed on his head, and the blindfold is taken off to reveal the face of the woman he loves. The whole episode has been a sick joke, a mock execution staged by the Elector and the witty aristocrats of the court. Is this a dream, asks the Prince. What else would it be, replies one of the nobles.

  There’s a circuit: death is transmuted into glory and glory into love, but the rest of the Prince’s life will surely be a let-down, just aimless drifting and tristesse, because what could ever top the rush of the last few seconds before a bullet blows your brains out and makes you immortal? The circuit will only be closed when the last connection is made, when love is transmuted back into death. It’s the most toxic male fantasy, the orgasmic headshot that will solve all problems in an instant. Poor dumb Kleist, all that pent-up desire to pull the trigger.