Real Differences

by S. L. Lim

  Can’s mother’s eyes lit up. She seemed torn between restraining her husband and wanting to see how the argument would play out.

  ‘Tell me, where would you rather live? Here with your iPhone and computer? Or in some godforsaken backwater, milking bloody camels and eating dates? If you had your way, all we’d ever do is pray with our backsides in the air. That’s what you want, is it?’ There was a clatter of cutlery as he let his fork fall onto his plate and stamped off to the kitchen. Can swore under his breath, left the table, and banged shut the door of his room.

  Can’s mother turned to Tony. ‘My husband is a city boy. It’s me who’s from the country. Although I can tell you, we never milked camels. They are very smelly creatures.’

  She seemed utterly unperturbed by the argument between her husband and her son. Tony saw that the dark fall of her hair was sprinkled here and there with grey. She noticed him noticing. ‘No, I don’t choose to cover,’ she said. ‘I don’t think it’s necessary. I just believe – in here.’ She tapped her heart. ‘We never used to wear them back home, or when I was still studying – I did my Masters degree in Egypt. It’s a modern thing.’ Still smiling, she stacked up the empty plates and returned them to the kitchen, where he could hear her humming to herself.

  Tony followed Can to the bedroom, where he had already started to apologise. ‘Don’t worry, it’s nothing. I didn’t want to bring you into all of this shit.’ But Can was breathing heavily. There was a smell of old resentments in the air,.

  ‘Have you ever been to Turkey?’ Tony asked.

  Can shook his head. ‘They’re obsessed with being modern,’ he said. ‘Even when they don’t say so out loud, you can tell how superior they think they are. My mother with her hair out, when she knows it’s fard – she’s fifty-seven years old. Who does she think she is? Some supermodel?’ He grimaced angrily at the mirror. ‘They think they’re all so sophisticated, drinking wine and all that shit. Laughing at the believers who aren’t as modern as they are. And when I try to call them out, they say if you don’t like it, why don’t you go and live somewhere else? Would you like to get out of this house that we paid for? Sometimes I think I’ll really do it – just walk out the door and get the hell away from them.’

  Tony said gently, ‘I don’t think you should be so hard on them. At least they’re still Muslims …’

  They talked like this for a while. Tony tried to be balanced, empathising with the scale of the hurt but downplaying its significance. Can was so close he could smell him; their skin was clammy from the fetid evening. They talked until midnight, and then Can drove Tony home in his mother’s car. He crept in as quietly as he could manage, but the light upstairs told him that Daisy was still up, and that she had been waiting for him.

  #

  I don’t want to give you the impression that I spent all my time brooding over Tony and Andie. I had affairs of my own to look after: my job, my social life and the mortgage I’d so recently acquired.

  Yes – a mortgage. Faced with more money than I knew what to do with, I decided it was about time that I owned my own home. For too long I had been busy experiencing my life. Now it was time to start accumulating.

  After some weeks of looking, I bought a house with ‘great potential’; this was another way of saying that it was a wreck but in a good location. I hired builders to install an extra bedroom in what had once been the attic and did the final touches of the painting and the varnishing myself. Laying down the brush, I felt a spasm of grief, as if an irrecoverable part of my history had just sunk into the boards.

  You can tell that I was starting to feel sorry for myself. Luckily this lassitude, this self-inflicted choicelessness, lasted only for about a fortnight. Then it dissolved altogether, to be replaced by a tentative sense of pride. I had spent most of my adult existence harbouring an unproductive contempt for property owners, clinging unreflectively to opinions I had first formulated as a teenager. Now, in overcompensation, I swung aggressively in the opposite direction. I talked about real estate values to anybody who would listen, for as long as they would listen to me. I did this even and especially when it was obvious no-one wanted to hear about them. It was a pre-emptive defence tactic: if I can’t stop you being bored by me, I will go out of my way to be deliberately boring.

  Linda, as far as I could tell, was pleased with my new acquisition. She left some toiletries and shoes there, but made no sounds about moving in. We had been going out for more than two years now. Thankfully, neither of us seemed to be in the mood to start agonising about the future. Our biological clocks made no discernible noises. I liked having Linda around, but the thought of losing her did not fill me with anguish – only a greater than usual weakness for sentimental music.

  We talked in a hypothetical way about getting married. We agreed it was a thing we might do at some point in the future, but we weren’t all that fussed if it didn’t ever end up happening. We used the word ‘happening’, as if it were an occurrence beyond our control. Meanwhile, the people I had known at high school were reproducing fit to repopulate the planet. I felt a leftover disdain for how settled they were, for the finished quality of their lives. The bourgeoisie: a word I could barely pronounce, let alone define in a way which wasn’t solipsistic and self-serving.

  Over time I began to look down on Linda, and by extension myself for being with her. She didn’t notice things. We might spend a morning together, getting breakfast and enjoying the sun, and she would never realise that as far as I was concerned, I could just as easily have been eating and walking alone. I resented her for being there, for not being there, for being the living proof of my surrender to good enough. When other people asked me about her, I found it easier to list her faults than her positive qualities.

  Actually, it wasn’t only Linda I did that with. I devoted my energy to finding fault with everyone and everything around me: friends and enemies, movies and books, political figures and general circumstances. I don’t mean that I was hateful – I didn’t have enough energy for that. More that I had become reflexively cynical, diverting all of my intelligence into complaint. I couldn’t have been much fun to be around.

  We still hadn’t ever had an actual fight. I had a sense that to provoke one would be to cast a stone at a not exactly robust structure. On weekends she would call me, or I would call her, and ask: ‘Do you have any plans for tonight?’

  ‘No, not really. I think I’ll just have a quiet one.’

  ‘Oh, me too.’

  Even as I said this, I could taste the faint, ill-suppressed panic building up at the back of my throat. I could tell that she was judging me, just as I was judging her; I wanted to cry to anybody who would listen that I didn’t want to be this person who spent every weekend in bed with his laptop and preferred it. But neither did I have the strength to call round and gather people up. I could see it all mapped out in advance: the aimless meandering from venue to venue, the aggressively jovial pointlessness at bars. I didn’t want my life to be like this. I wanted to be friends with exciting artistic types who made the world better and more interesting. My contempt for the people I did know, though, was inconsistently applied. Even as I despised them, I continued to show up at every event I was invited to, feeding parasitically off their energy and sense of purpose, their apparent refusal to question why we had to yell at each other above the music in a different pub every single Friday night.

  One evening, after yet another productive but insubstantial week at work, I lay under the covers in an unabashed funk. I had my headphones in, streaming the new Daft Punk album, which someone had illegally uploaded to YouTube. Somehow it had recently become cool to like Daft Punk, and to know a lot about them, such as why they wore helmets and what their real names were. There were so many opinions floating round about music and everything else – on the internet, on tumblr and Reddit, on various people’s Facebook feeds. It was hard to work out how you really felt about anything.

  ‘I like ‘Lose Yourself To Dance,’ I ventu
red to a colleague, and he gave me a withered, miserable look and said, ‘You too?’

  The album was repetitive and electronic, produced almost entirely on a computer. I began to formulate a tired, hypocritical rant about modern music, its conformity and disposability, etc, etc. ‘What even is this?’ I would say derisively. Musical taste calls up a strange mix of aggression, defensiveness and snobbery from otherwise reasonable people.

  Without realising it, though, I was getting drawn in to the album. Small permutations of sound began to take on poignant significance. Lying there in the dark with the music allowed half-formulated thoughts to begin moving through my brain. I thought I had been mistaken in locating my real life in relationships and friendships and work: the solid, external world of activity, cause and effect. It was only here, alone with my headphones on, that I could feel genuine again, stripped of the habitual deceit I had been cultivating for so long that it was barely separable from my deepest self.

  It seemed that this last revelation, while overblown, had some value to it. A great feeling of peace descended on me. I reached for my phone so I could tell Linda about it.

  CHAPTER TEN

  One day, coming out of my building after work, I met a poet. He was also a lawyer, the activity which occupied the greater portion of his consciousness. He had just been offered a permanent position at one of the top-tier firms.

  We got talking in the lobby, and he took it on himself to describe in the most excruciating possible detail his career to date. I don’t think there was an internship or clerkship in the city he hadn’t completed.

  I asked what he planned to do over the summer break and he gave me a coy, secretive look. ‘I write a lot,’ he said, smiling. ‘Poetry, mostly. I have another month before I start full-time work, and I’m going to spend it concentrating on writing poems.’

  ‘Oh, wow,’ I said. ‘Do you have any plans to publish?’

  ‘No, no,’ he said, shaking his head and continuing to smile, suggesting I had fundamentally misconstrued the nature of his intentions. In contrast with his legal career, which was anxiously signposted with all kinds of personal and official yardsticks, his creative life was beset by no such ambition. Writing, for him, was a diversion: a private basin where he scrubbed away his inadequacies. His effective life lay elsewhere.

  I shook his hand and wished him well, both in his corporate future and his creative one. Then I exited the lobby, out through the revolving doors and into the alien, disorienting sun.

  I lost my job. For some weeks I’d had a weird sensation at work, a kind of queasiness floating round my stomach. Then my manager called me in to talk about the needs of the business and slow times in Europe and blah blah blah blah. I’d liked her well enough beforehand, but the moment she closed the door and started speaking I began to feel physically repulsed. She was flabby round the face and spoke too slowly; I could see her jowls drooping. It probably wasn’t very healthy for me to be thinking about my boss in these terms. But what the hell, she wasn’t going to be my boss anymore.

  Somebody offered me a cardboard box, which I declined in an angry fit of refusing to be a cliché. This was a mistake. I actually had a few things on my desk that I wanted to keep, but I was not going to compound my humiliation by rattling paperclips and shit like that round with half the office watching. Even as I avoided meeting their eyes, I could feel my former colleagues arranging their faces behind me.

  I had to hand my office pass back to reception. Someone from security walked me out the door, to make sure that I didn’t make off with any of the firm’s intellectual property. It was hard to believe the speed at which I’d gone from colleague and friend to potential criminal. I also couldn’t believe that they actually offered me a cardboard box. Real life wasn’t supposed to be like this.

  The first thing I did when I got home was to tell Linda about it. ‘Oh, what a pity,’ she said, and then asked if I was OK. I was relieved that she didn’t sound too upset, which would only have made things worse, but I was also hurt that she wasn’t more distraught about it. It was ‘stop all the clocks’ syndrome: I wanted the earth to dry up and the seas to boil now that I was redundant, no longer wanted. I was thirty-two years old, and although it was the second time I’d lost a job, this time it was a position I actually wanted. I felt I had been singled out, targeted due to my failings which were spiritual, physical and personal. This was obviously not rational, but rationality has little to do with anyone’s feelings about being unemployed.

  After that nothing would go right for me. I caught a cold and spent four miserable days huddled under the covers. The area beneath my nose began to bubble and sprout horrible pimples. I was so demoralised that I couldn’t bring myself to look for other work.

  So I became subsumed by the long lassitude of being unemployed: waking late, eating cereal at midnight, wearing the same clothes for days and using the same square of aluminium foil to bake frozen wedges until my wedge supply ran out. My sleep was messed up; I delayed going to bed every night because that would constitute a final, incontrovertible admission that nothing good had come out of the previous twelve hours of consciousness. When I met a friend for dinner or a movie, I became humiliatingly aware of the efficiency with which they organised places and times – as if time mattered to them, as if they had somewhere else to go. They would glance at their watches and say, ‘Well, I should be off now,’ and I’d become as enraged as if their health and good fortune were a deliberate insult being thrown in my face.

  I kept up with my debts, my credit card, my mortgage. I had a weird sense of honour about not changing financial course. I could easily have sold the house, but felt I had to retain the equity in order to prove that I was different from other unemployed people. In other words, I retained an expensive, unnecessary burden in order to prove to myself that I was the kind of person who had enough money to pay for an expensive, unnecessary burden. It doesn’t make any sense now, but that was the frame of mind I was in.

  And I went on the internet. There were so many avenues to be explored, so many thought-provoking articles. You always had the sense that you were learning without having to actually achieve anything. There were so many conversations, endless dialogues attached to Reddit threads peddling varying ratios of truth and misinformation. At first I lurked, then, uneasily, compulsively, I started commenting on posts. This inevitably led to arguments - which, since they were on Reddit, never ended - but at least it proved there were people in the world with even more time on their hands than me. While waging these fights I always experienced a contradictory mixture of aggression and paralysing boredom. They were both vicious and entirely predictable. No-one’s mind was ever changed and I inevitably left the interaction more convinced, if that was possible, of human intransigence, the obtuseness of the masses, and the impossibility of rational dialogue with one’s enemies.

  One day I woke up so exhausted the life force seemed to be leaking from my body. My arms were so heavy I could barely move. In a moment of panic I thought I must have had a stroke. I fumbled for my phone and was just in the process of dialling 000 when the blood began to flow and I could move again. I got out of bed and stumbled to the kitchen with my pants around my ankles. It was only once I’d finished pouring cereal that I realised I was shaking with relief.

  Daringly, I mentioned to a friend that I’d been feeling down. ‘You know, I’ve been kind of depressed lately,’ I said. ‘I had a weird episode the other day. I think it must have been psychosomatic.’ I described my leaden body, panic pooling in my flesh, the way I’d felt like I was trapped in my own corpse.

  My friend listened to me with an expression of dubious interest. ‘But you’re all right now?’

  Even I could tell it wasn’t really supposed to be a question. ‘Yes, of course I am,’ I said, and smiled. She nodded sagely. ‘Everyone goes through phases,’ she said, as if dispensing ancient wisdom from the bottom of the sea.

  Conversations always seemed to tend in this direction. I would
advance, trying to truthfully describe what I was feeling, only to be blocked off by a wall of unconscious or deliberate misunderstanding. Everybody knows that you have a right to pursue happiness; what I was learning now was that you also have a duty to be happy. No-one will get angry with you if you fail to discharge this duty, but once you fall outside of the accepted range, you do not even exist. Tell a friend that no, actually, you aren’t very well at the moment, that you are not enjoying life or even especially seeing the point of it, and they will blink and say, ‘Oh, wow,’ and continue with whatever they were talking about before. Not that they think what you have said is wrong, or that they don’t care. They are simply unable to hear, or else they choose not to.

  I suppose it didn’t seem from the outside like there was anything really wrong with me. Everyone was accustomed to thinking of me as the one who was in control. There’s evidence, isn’t there, that people find it easier to remember information which confirms what they already believed. Well, there it was for me: I couldn’t be miserable, because nobody saw me as a miserable person. I’d been confirmation-biased out of existence.

  I stopped speaking to other people. It didn’t seem worth it. Andie called once or twice but I couldn’t be bothered picking up. I was sure that if I met her, she would be spitting sparks of well-directed outrage about poverty and injustice and her trip to Indonesia and the rest of it. It maddened me that she could be so continuously and relentlessly good.

  Money wasn’t really a problem in an immediate sense – I’d saved enough during the years of plenty, I’d chosen my investments well, and by and large they had turned out good. That much I had to be thankful for. On the other hand, maybe being broke would have given me some motivation.

  Where was Linda? Well, I don’t want to imply that she just disappeared on me when I needed her. Linda wouldn’t do a thing like that. No, it was my fault entirely. I stopped answering her calls, and eventually she stopped calling me. I don’t blame her. It wouldn’t be reasonable, would it, to expect her to come sailing in to rescue me while I was ignoring her.