by S. L. Lim
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Once he was home he went on the internet. He spent feverish hours typing the same search terms over again, endlessly trawling the same forums and websites and groups, trying to recreate the feeling of shocking illumination he had experienced in the hall. He fell asleep late, sinking crumpled and exhausted, and woke up blurry-minded and stupid, so tired that everything seemed to occur with a drag of resistance, as if he were walking underwater. But when evening came around he was glittering with energy to resume his compulsive Googling till it was three or four a. m., at which point he drooped semiconscious, deprived of full oblivion by the urgency of his visions.
He had a sense of complex mechanics taking shape just beyond his field of view. They were intricate and exhilarated him, even as he became more and more fearful.
For a long time there was just chaos and a furtive feeling. He knew he was balanced on a precipice, and started with instinctive guilt when his parents came into the room. Among this disorder, however, small islands of clarity began to form. The idea that the world must have had divine beginnings seemed intuitively right. So too did the sense of oneness, of unity, that this new religion promised. As a child, he had dutifully attended Catholic Mass with his parents, but he had never quite grasped the concept of a three-personed God. The Holy Spirit seemed especially superfluous by the time the Father and the Son had been accounted for.
Over time, the great soup of online knowledge began to form itself into something comprehensible. Tony particularly enjoyed one of the forums, SunniQuestions.com, a kind of spiritual Q and A where you could ask anything you liked. He was impressed by the detail of the answers that were provided: no question was too large or too small to be answered with great rigour and coherency. Unlike other religions, this version of Islam did not just provide a set of general principles, easily dissolvable into platitudes: ‘Love one another’, ‘Speak no evil’. Rather, it gave you a set of specific, observable instructions: it told you what was forbidden and what was not, what was recommended but not compulsory, what was the reward or punishment for each particular act. If I am staying in a foreign city for four and a half days, is it permissible to shorten my prayers? Is it OK when someone passes wind to do purification from the hands and not the private parts? This level of detail, so easily mocked, struck him as true engagement with the messiness of being. Islam, he found, was quite unlike other faiths in its willingness to engage with the minutiae of existence. It did not draw back in lofty imprecision from the smoking flesh and meat of the world.
There are so many metaphors. The ‘click’ moment. The blue pill or the red pill. Crying ‘Eureka!’ in the bathtub. You could cover the world with words without solving the essential problem: how to capture the feeling, the release from a fear you didn’t know you had. Giving in, but not experiencing it as a defeat – a suspension of sorrow. Tony oscillated between joy and desperate grasping terror. It couldn’t happen like this – he couldn’t turn his back on everyone he knew, everything he had been brought up to believe in!
And then at last, exhausted by an excess of feeling, Tony knelt in a direction that he hoped was Mecca and intoned, ‘There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his Prophet.’ He bowed his head before the open window. The great stillness at the heart of things: the one Creator, the Uncaused Cause, the Owner of All Sovereignty. For the first time he could remember, the world seemed comprehensible, even beautiful: he didn’t always have to cower in the expectation of a blow. Tony believed in eternity now, and he was ready to submit.
CHAPTER SIX
Wearing skinny jeans, a bright red T-shirt and imitation Converse, Andie stepped onto the bus heading to Circular Quay. As she did so, a white woman aged about forty, carrying an open bag of Cheetos, screamed ‘FUCKING ASIANS!’ just behind her head. The driver averted his eyes. The other passengers looked at their laps, shoes, hands or knees.
It had been a mostly productive meeting at Real Difference. It had begun, as it always did, with the ritual of getting coffee, which all of them drank in quantity, aside from Ewan, one of the founders of the institute. Once a month, they took it in turns to deliver a summary of their goals and their achievements: new members signed, donations made, speeches delivered. No-one was the leader of the group – or rather, everybody was. They described themselves as an intellectual meritocracy.
There were ten other employees in the Sydney chapter of Real Difference. All of them had known each other on Facebook long before they met in the flesh. Some had connected through friends and workplace networks, others while weighing in on arguments cross-posted on each other’s walls. All were convinced, probably rightly, that they were smarter than other people. Two of them had previously worked in programming, devising search engine algorithms. Two were engineers, mechanical and structural, and four were economists. They were capable technocrats, utterly certain of their own value to the world– or, as they put it, their ‘utility’. They read copiously: academic blogs, podcast transcripts, paywalled newspapers; they read books about history, sociology and science. Music was permissible, for recreational purposes; fiction less so, although you were allowed to watch TV. They were impatient with the unquantifiable nature of most of the arts. They said things like ‘What are you trying to signal?’, and ‘I think you need to readjust your priors’. They argued a lot among themselves and even more against outsiders, their opponents, more often than not, quivering with inarticulacy in the face of their rigorous brains and unassailable self-confidence. Everything they did was in service of the truth, which was elegant, objective and reducible. As far as they were concerned the world was an intricate system of levers and pulleys: complicated in parts, but essentially knowable.
Until recently, Andie had loved to socialise with her colleagues. She loved to hear their interpretations of world events, which tickled her biases. She smiled affectionately when they engaged in displays of self-importance (which was not uncommon). She could forgive a bit of intellectual vanity, especially since she wasn’t exactly immune to it herself. For all that they thought they were the cleverest people in the room, they usually were – and it was admirable, surely, that they had chosen to divert their talents towards doing good for others, rather than earning buckets of money as they were so obviously capable of doing. Lately, however, she had found herself wanting to pull back. Someone would tell a joke which would be greeted by five simultaneous snickers, a kind of laughter which did not signify amusement; it affirmed their collective sensibility, their difference from other people. At moments like this she had an instinct to withdraw: not out of disagreement, exactly, but privacy. A prudent reservation of herself.
The trouble began with an anecdote. There was a conversation she’d had, not at Real Difference but with a friend: a dignified middle-aged woman, well versed in the arts and the physical sciences. Somehow the conversation had veered towards to the political landscape in South-East Asia. ‘Of course, everything is controlled by the ministers,’ Andie’s friend confidently asserted. ‘No real democracy – although I suppose you can hardly blame them. They’re probably the only intelligent people in those countries!’ She laughed, beaming widely at Andie, inviting her to join in the superciliousness.
Andie was taken aback. She wanted to object but was caught up in the weird paralysis of not wanting to offend someone by pointing out they’d said something offensive. At last she mentioned, apologetically, that she herself had roots in that region. She was aware, even as she did, that her statement did not really answer the charges laid against the people of that continent. It merely declared them to be outside the bounds of etiquette. Her friend shook her head, smiling gently as she delivered the necessary correction: ‘Ah, but you grew up here. That makes all the difference.’
Later, she told the anecdote at Real Difference. She tried to be offhand about it, being careful not to reveal the extent to which it had disturbed her. ‘It makes you worry,’ she said. ‘I mean, she’s a smart woman. She’s extremely compassionate, progressive, educated, so
I was surprised that even she could be so casually superior. All this time I’ve been the miraculous exception, you know. This intelligent foreigner transcending my native backwardness.’
She had meant it as a casual remark – a pebble tossed to send some ripples through their ordinary pool of unanimous agreement. Instead it met with silence – which, after a moment, she realised was charged with real hostility.
Ewan broke in at last. ‘Well, not all white people are like that,’ he said. ‘I mean, I don’t think it’s fair to paint all Australians with the same brush.’
Andie was taken aback. At no point had she intended to paint all Australians with the same brush. She had not meant to criticise her colleagues at Real Differences; she was not holding them responsible for someone else’s objectionable remarks. Yet clearly they had taken it personally. It was as if just by describing an incident of racism, and saying that she didn’t like it, she had committed an act of aggression against them. She had transgressed on the sense of security they saw as their birthright.
For a while she succeeded in not thinking about the incident, packing it away somewhere you could be conscious of a thing yet not conscious of it. Good people were not racist, her friends were good people; ergo, this was not happening. Yet over time, small leaks of reality began to bleed through. It was not that there was ever any open abuse: no-one said ‘chink’ or ‘gook’ or ‘nigger’. Quite the opposite: her colleagues were professional, cosmopolitan people, well versed in pieties about the equality of man.
One day, however, they had a visitor at Real Differences. His name was Professor Pui, a mainland Chinese academic who they’d invited to do a Q and A for a student group. His written English was excellent; in person, however, he had trouble pronouncing certain syllables, which stuck in his throat before bursting out into the air at great volume. The event was organised by Andie’s friend Elinor – who, when Pui arrived ten minutes early, asked him in peremptory tones to wait outside the room while the students prepared their questions. While he was gone, she pulled mocking faces as she pronounced his name using the exaggerated application of different vowels: ‘Pu-… puu-eey. Puuo-ee!’
By the time the so-called Pui came back, the students were struggling to suppress their laughter. As he delivered his speech they exchanged knowing glances with Elinor, who smiled mischievously out of the corner of her eye. No-one seemed to imagine that Andie might not find it as hilarious as they did.
She reflected on the episode later. The existence of racism was hardly a surprise to her, yet it was strange to identify it in the behaviour of those she cared about. Elinor was a long-standing colleague, the very first friend she had made at work. She was funny, caustic and loyal; they had celebrated birthdays together, got drunk, commiserated over setbacks to their careers. Yet all of this was premised on the unspoken agreement that Andie never voice her misgivings about Elinor’s actions. Theoretically, she could have brought it up: no topic was out of bounds, after all, in the rarefied intellectual climate of Real Difference. Still, she could already see how the conversation would pan out. Elinor would oscillate between distress and indignation: ‘Are you calling me a racist?’ And Andie would say no, of course not, but perhaps she might have some unconscious biases she needed to examine, and she was only asking because of how much she valued Elinor’s friendship … somehow she would wind up being a supplicant, apologising for her temerity in noticing the insult in the first place. And then Elinor would get upset and maybe even teary, and Andie would comfort her, and they would embrace, ostensibly reconciled; but the next time they met Elinor would act snidely towards Andie and go out of her way to find mistakes in what she was saying. She would resent Andie’s presence, perhaps without even remembering why – and the pleasure of her friendship would be lost.
Andie was on the Quay. She thought she might buy herself an ice-cream. There were vans which came this way, she knew, but they tended to sell only soft serve, which she didn’t like. It moulded too easily beneath your lips and was not really substantial enough to be regarded as proper food. In fairness (although she couldn’t really tell why it was so important to be fair to soft serve), you could say this of dairy-based desserts in general. Still, there were certain flavours – caramelised fig and walnut, for instance – which had some body to them. They straddled the divide between a treat and a source of nourishment.
Still, was it really necessary, she asked, recircling round the Elinor question, was it truly important that all the different components of one’s life be brought into alignment? She had read in some novel or other that the definition of integrity was to be able wear the same face with all the people in one’s life. But was it really essential, she asked herself (still deliberating in front of the van, annoying the parents with wriggling children in the queue behind her), was it compulsory to be so flagrant about it, refusing to compromise even one hair’s breadth of your position? If the people she cared for harboured views she found objectionable – if they were, for instance, rude to people who looked like her without recognising what it was that they did – well, why should this bother her? Which was more viable: to dissociate her feelings from her morals, so other people’s transgressions no longer bothered her, or to go to war with the entire world until it was remade in her image?
All of this, she recognised, was little more than an elaborate exercise in avoiding responsibility. She was marshalling a case for why the only viable option was also that which happened to be easiest: namely, keeping silent when people she liked said things that she very much didn’t. You could dress it up and find justifications, but it was a question of supply, really: the material conditions of her friendships with white people were basically unequal. They, as the majority, came from a position of abundance: they could associate only with those with similar prejudices and experiences, and still have lots of people to spend time with. But she as a minority could not to afford self-segregate without cutting off a drastic share of the available population. If she wanted people confide in, play board games with, get breakfast with, etcetera – she had to suck it up, to use the technical term. This was the price you paid to access care.
So she kept quiet. This strategy was not without its cost: it was painful for your friendships to be contingent on this kind of silence. When Elinor giggled at Pui’s struggle with English words, Andie experienced a leaking feeling, as though the juices were draining from her flesh and pooling in a lukewarm puddle on the floor – as if the humiliation belonged to her. It was odd – she had never thought of herself as being particularly sensitive to such things. Slights from strangers never bothered her: like that woman screaming on the bus. The volume, the way it split the day, but didn’t penetrate through to her emotional life at all. Andie couldn’t find it within herself to be angry with such a person, whom she charged with less agency than the weather. Someone like that could not help but vocalise any aggression she happened to feel in the moment, any more than dust could make the decision not to cling to her shoes.
But when it came from those who were closest to you … no, that way lies madness, Andie thought. The opening of a door onto anger that can never be closed.
To distract herself, she thought about her husband. He was not happy, she knew, and it did not really bother her to know he was unhappy. Their connection went deeper than that – beyond the crests and waves of ordinary day-to-day feeling. He did not know much about her life, not that he needed to. Most of her friends at Real Difference, she knew, looked down on his directness and simplicity: they were urbane and urban, and found it hard to relate to those who did not share their vocabulary of pop culture references. Yet they were also earnest about their beliefs and uncomprehending of those who were indifferent to poverty and death. He in his turn thought they were facile little snobs who put on the trappings of kindness without any real humanity. Because what about their families? he often demanded – how could they show such generosity to total strangers when every dollar was being taken away from their own blood, those
who loved and were directly dependent on them?
Andie had long since ceased attempting to reconcile these differences. It was attractive, yes, to think that one day all your family and friends might be integrated into a cohesive whole; you could paint a portrait of them arranged in joyful harmony, like a medieval tableau. You could be yourself without dissembling, if such a thing as a self even existed, wearing a single face for all the faces you might meet.
But wasn’t it better, more hygienic somehow, to keep the people you loved quite separate from one another? Each of them could know only a fragment of you. But if they got together they might finally be able to put all of the fragments together, completing the puzzle of what you were, and then what would be left? Your own mind would become predictable to itself – and then how could you face yourself in the morning?
Andie sat on the grass with her ice-cream, having settled on strawberry cheesecake. The cheesecake flavour was overly sweet, a concession to childish tastes - it should not offend her so much, she thought, that ice-cream brands were targeted to children more than adults, and therefore excluded flavours which were in any way salty, bitter, astringent or tart. She licked assiduously in circles, while enormous cockatoos harassed the tourists for snacks.
Each bird had its own personality. Some hopped boldly forth, while others hung back shyly and had to be coaxed with the promise of peanuts or sunflower seeds. The most confident bird of all was balancing on one foot, holding a peanut in the other. It was a truly gigantic parrot, watching Andie with beady eyes while chewing in a ruminative fashion. Then it waddled off, leaving the empty shells, while the tourists ooh-ed and ahh-ed about the magnificence of nature.
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Becoming a believer, after sixteen years which were functionally if not nominally godless, changed everything for Tony. Yet the outer forms of his life remained much the same. He continued to eat, sleep, shit and perform other functions so far from the sublime he could hardly believe they occurred in the same body which strove to worship Allah with all of its might.