Real Differences

by S. L. Lim

  In all of this Tony agreed with her. Yet, though they came together on all of the important points – it was uncanny, really, how similar their theological opinions were in all respects – her faith, at its beating heart, was quite different from his. Tony believed mostly as an intellectual proposition; the joy he had felt on first discovering Allah had mostly faded to the back of his mind. He loved his Creator, but it was not an emotion he was able to maintain at a passionate pitch every day of his existence. Not so for Katherine. She believed not only with her mind, but with her body. She thrilled all over at the thought of pleasing Allah and was overcome with grief at the thought of transgressing against his commands. Once, when they were discussing sin, she burst into tears; it took Tony a moment to realise what distressed her was not any particular sinful act, but the very concept of a human being going against His will.

  It was not like it had been with Can – he did not feel like he could tell her everything. With Can, the pleasure had been in feeling they were equals. With Katherine, the pleasure was in knowing they were not. She never asked for his advice although he often asked for hers. He told her his misgivings about the Haqq, and she understood perfectly and immediately. ‘They’re a glorified debating club,’ she said. ‘It’s like they think the whole world is just school. Every time you hear them talk, it’s like they’re imagining an audience – they want to know if they ‘won’ or not. But we need to start winning in the actual world as well.’

  She was knowledgeable, she was worldly – and yet her faith was utterly solid. There was nothing metaphorical or vaporous about it. She had no fear of death: she was convinced she would be greeted by two angels who would roll back the grassy blanket of the grave and ask the questions to which she had prepared lifelong answers. ‘Who is your Lord? What is your religion?’ The trumpet blast, the levelling of mountains, the cracking sky: all of these were as real to her as petrol prices or returning an overdue book to the library. Beside her, Tony felt his own faith to be a devious, unreliable thing, a shifting sleight of light and shadows.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  It’s hard for me to describe how it felt at the bottom of the ocean. I can’t recall it anymore and nor would I want to.

  There were certain things I observed during this period. One – it seems so obvious when you write it out like this – was how little people care about each other. If you hear that your best friend’s mother has died, you may even cry a little. But if you are, say, kept awake at night being bitten by mosquitoes, you will be driven to every kind of fury. Tragedy is when I cut my finger; comedy is when you get decapitated in an unfortunate industrial accident. There are good reasons for this, of course. If you could really experience the unhappiness of others, you would become totally incapacitated. You are finite and the suffering of the world is infinite. If you didn’t learn to ignore other people’s pain, you would die from it.

  I watched the clock all the time. I couldn’t believe how slowly it chose to move. The intervals of consciousness I experienced just by virtue of being awake each day felt so long, they only became bearable if I broke them down into smaller pieces. Now it was twelve, now four, now eight in the evening and just late enough for sleep. If I was lucky, I could survive that long without being sucked into the vortex. What was inside the vortex? I no longer even knew.

  I thought about killing myself but took no steps towards actually doing so. My terror of death was equalled only by my horror of being alive. Anyway, it seemed that there was no particular urgency. Old age was waiting inside all of us: the inevitable, humiliating descent into breathlessness and brainlessness.

  Andie bombarded me with emails. I stopped reading them, but then there were the texts and the phone calls. ‘Are you all right? Are you all right?’ she kept asking, until she eventually turned up at my house, uninvited. She stood there stabbing the bell until the sickly tinkle drove me out onto the doorstep. ‘You are depressed,’ she declared, with the air of someone naming the Mona Lisa. ‘You have to get help.’

  She said it like you only had to name the thing to kill it: Rumpelstiltskin. Suddenly, I flew out of myself and saw the scene through her eyes: the unmatched shoes, the stink of unwashed clothes, pairs of pants sprawled on the floor like emptied humans. Of course I was depressed. By that stage I could barely summon the energy to wash. I could smell my own hair, the thick decaying scent of oily clumps of skin cells. I lived off instant noodles, having thrown out my Weet-Bix which had recently become infested with burrowing weevils. I got up at midday, at the earliest; I didn’t know what day it was unless I turned on the computer. I was disgusted with myself, and disgusting, and I knew it.

  All of this I was already aware of, yet it still shamed me for someone else to see it. My lungs emptied out. I beamed radiantly at Andie, and said:

  ‘You’re completely right. I have to get help.’

  I went to a GP, who took a case history and sent me to a psychiatrist, who took a case history and sent me to another psychiatrist, who took another case history and prescribed SSRIs. I took them for a while, felt sleepy, and waited for my mood to lift. No-one could tell me exactly how the medicines worked, so in the meantime I went on PubMed and read all sorts of articles about the history of antidepressants and their possible side effects. These included weight gain, headaches, sexual dysfunction, and a one point seven times increase in the risk of bone fractures. I became quite an expert on the subject, since reading such articles was my full-time occupation.

  Once you’ve been formally diagnosed as a headcase, everything changes. It’s pitiful, really, seeing how uncomfortable people become in your presence. People so clearly want to be there for you, but when you see what being there entails, you can’t help but wish they would do literally anything else with their time. When I mentioned to a friend in the most matter-of-fact way possible that I was taking antidepressants (I didn’t want to tell him, but my pupils were dilated and I was afraid he thought I was on pingers), he burst out in a tone of disbelief and horror: ‘But why?’

  He seemed more distressed than I was. I wanted to comfort him, give him a hug. ‘It’s nothing to be worried about,’ I lied. ‘It’s a disease just like anything else – just like the common cold.’

  I was proud of myself, protecting him from the poisons that swirled inside my psyche. But I wanted so badly to have someone I could talk to. Left alone, I thought the words trapped inside would turn thick and dark and oily, like petroleum wells. I didn’t want to upset people, to offend their sense of decency, and so I tidied my toxicity away where it would cause no trouble. But I wanted to stand in front of the microwave and scream. I was still a human, a person with perceptions and ideas and feelings which were not necessarily wrong just because they happened to be inconvenient. Depressed people often do better than emotionally ‘normal’ ones on cognitive tasks, such as gauging their own influence on the world or other people’s opinions about them. If you point this out while you are depressed, though, nobody will listen to you. If you really are mentally ill, the thinking goes, then you cannot possibly be objective, and if you are rational enough to be worth listening to, you cannot possibly be depressed. You must be looking for a means to excuse yourself, deliberately clinging to your dysfunction for gratuitous purposes.

  Do you know what frustrates me the most? The amateur neuroscientists who tell you that what you perceive isn’t ‘real’; it’s only ‘chemicals in your brain’. True enough, but then so is all consciousness, the entire subjective experience. Grief, love, fear, ambition: don’t worry, dear, it’s only chemicals in your brain. During the time I was ill my depression was me, and vice versa: the depressed version of me was a unique person, like any other on this planet. To be ‘cured’, I had to put that person out of existence. Now, from the vantage point of my healthy, functional existence, I would do it again in a moment, and yet I understand this was a kind of murder. That person, the depressed me, was capable of things I can barely grasp: he experienced empathy, not just sympathy; he knew wha
t suffering was and mourned it in himself and others. And now that I have returned to my ordinary self I know that something has been lost, something which was the opposite of indifference.

  I did my best to act normally. One evening I said to Andie, as gently as I could: ‘I don’t think Tony’s coming this weekend.’ There was some Gunawan family gathering in the offing.

  She looked at me disbelievingly. ‘How the hell would you know?’ she asked, with more truculence than was strictly necessary.

  I tried to convey it as best as I could. ‘You want to hold on to him, but he’s already drifting away. He’s always cancelling on you. He hasn’t said it to your face but he’s made his choice, and that choice is not his family. This group he’s joined – I won’t say that it’s a cult, but it’s some really intense stuff he’s getting involved in. You should see his Facebook posts. It’s all things like “Modern Woman, Diamond or Coal?” – there’s even stuff about cutting off people’s hands.’ I spread my fingers helplessly to show I wasn’t responsible, only reporting things Tony had done which she needed to know about.

  Andie looked at me with dislike. ‘Since when did you become the expert, anyway?’ she asked. ‘I hate it when you get like this. You think just because you’re sick you can get away with it. Well, you were a dick way before you were depressed. You’re being nasty just for the sake of it.’

  In the event, though, Tony failed to show, and Andie was forced to acknowledge I might have been right. ‘OK, I’m sorry, you picked it’ was what she said. But she said it with suspicion, as if my describing how Tony had grown alienated from his family made me somehow responsible.

  ‘I’m sorry he’s behaving like this,’ I said. I tried to mean it. I truly wanted things to be better for Andie and her family. But it was futile to keep on hoping when there was nothing I could do. Tony would continue on the trajectory he had clearly chosen, until some shock to his consciousness convinced him otherwise. Then he would emerge, blinking in the alien sunlight, and wonder how his life had brought him to such a place. People are what they are, and their friends exert at best a marginal influence over this process.

  ‘If that’s the case, why bother with people at all?’ Andie asked. This sentence carried more in rhetorical force than logic. From my perspective, Andie seemed to be thoroughly soaked in madness. Did she really believe Tony was still the earnest, precocious child he had been at fourteen? It was all so irrational: how could turning out to be right mean there was something wrong with me?

  Still, when I thought further, there were good reasons behind this strategy. While Andie’s beliefs might have been wrong when compared with reality, they helped her to survive, an activity I was plainly not very good at. To move, to act in the world requires a certain delusive optimism. If you saw how little impact your actions had on anything you’d never make it out of bed.

  Delusive or not, I wanted what Andie had. Stability, sanity. I washed my hair, I cut my toenails, I attended my weekly appointments with the GP. It was not that the GP told me anything I didn’t already know – keep on taking your medicine, eat regular meals, do regular exercise – it was that she was able to talk as if what was happening to me was predictable, comprehensible. This was a great comfort, and even at my lowest I clung to my ill-informed but no less passionate love of the scientific method. If science could melt rocks and split atoms and send rockets to the edge of the solar system, surely the sum of human knowledge must have something to say about what was going on inside my brain. I took my pills, along with all the advice that I was given.

  Whether it was the pills or the advice, something started to work. I stopped thinking about death three times a day and started doing my laundry. I put on weight (the SSRIs), but everyone rushed to reassure me that it suited me. My horror of being alive faded into a mild bored detachment; the clock moved no faster through the hours, but I was able to observe it from a position of mild tranquillity. The insights into suffering which had lately occurred to me, so overwhelming at the time, now seemed only self-indulgent. I built a mental wall round such unnecessary ideas and avoided them by instinct.

  With the return of human feeling came the capacity for embarrassment. I realised what an ugly burden I had allowed myself to become to the people around me. I tried to thank Andie for her help, but she refused to listen. ‘You’d do the same for me,’ she said. ‘In fact, you already did. And I never forgot.’

  I tried to work out what event she was alluding to. It must have been some episode from uni, when I had coaxed her through some heartbreak. I wanted to know what had happened, why it was so important that it still secured her loyalty even more than a decade on. But I couldn’t remember. I still can’t.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Andie, for the first time she could remember, was actually enjoying herself in a bar. It was a social gathering whose originating purpose had grown nebulous, although it might have been because some friend of Ben’s was getting married. She had not been looking forward to this, at all. Ben’s friends, in her opinion, were moral and psychological zeroes.

  And then Ewan had WhatsApped to say: “I miss you, are you free tonight?”, which had actually caused her to tear up. He had come all the way out to the city to see her, even though he lived in Gordon and didn’t know any of her husband’s friends. Andie knew she was liked, in the sense that other people enjoyed her company when she was standing right in front of their faces. But she saw little evidence that other people actually thought about her enough to want to seek her out when this was logistically inconvenient. And that it was Ewan, who had never got on very well with Ben -

  There should be a word for it in Turkish or German, Andie thought. When different parts of your life are reconciled. People you like, liking each other. Although she was not sure that she actually liked her husband, at the moment. She was not sure if she liked him very much at all …

  And then Ben brushed past her on the way to the bar, and she caught a whiff of his deodorant, and this made her want to nuzzle up and cling to him like a furry animal. It was strange how all these years later, such feelings would sneak up on her without warning. Most of the time she felt very little towards her husband. She would notice if he disappeared, the way you feel suddenly naked when you realise a building from your childhood has been demolished to make way for a new Woolworths. Why, then, did there occur these strange, defenceless moments, when she would find herself sideswiped by uninvited feelings from the past? The delight they used to take in each other’s company. The way they’d spend all day together and still feel like they didn’t have enough time.

  Sometimes these moments felt more real to her than the present, even though she could hardly remember the person she’d been when she and Benjamin were first going out. An exuberant child, perilously excited about new books, new friends and overseas journeys. Happier than now, but also dumber and less resilient. Small disappointments used to throw her woefully off balance: missing out on first-class honours; the time her parents forgot her birthday. No, Andie decided, she preferred the way things were now. Better to be awake and disappointed than joyful but also fragile, in danger of shattering from every minor setback.

  Across the bar Ewan was energetically asserting his distaste for J. K. Rowling’s argument that, for the duration of the Harry Potter series, Hermione had in fact been black. ‘But there’s no evidence of this in the text itself,’ he was saying. ‘It’s not representation if it’s not actually represented.’

  Benjamin was feeling uncomplicatedly happy. This was his definition of contentment, really: a pub, a gathering, high school friends along with girlfriends and wives. Drinks were purchased and consumed at an optimal rate; several of them had kids at home and were old enough to know their limits. Jokes, most of which consisted of affectionate insults, were acknowledged by the shaking of heads and soft haw-haw-haws. It all was very restful and civilised, being around those who understood you, and settled down comfortably in the knowledge that you understood them. He would never h
ave used the word ‘love’ to describe this experience. Love to Benjamin had to be tumultuous and destabilising, not the quiet glow he felt in the presence of these men who had been by his side since childhood. Tonight, for once, Andie had come along with him. Though he became distinctly anxious whenever he thought about her, he was glad that she was there.

  He did not think much about Andie these days. It didn’t really seem worth it, since she always seemed to be pissed off about something. Sometimes he thought that the happier he was, the more dissatisfied she must be. Right now he was enjoying an evening with his friends, and she couldn’t have that. Oh no – she was forever looking into the distance, going for pointless little walks on the balcony. Her lips were pressed tightly together, no doubt suppressing some cutting insight directed at the men he had chosen to surround himself with.

  At times like these he thought that he could cheerfully have her murdered. The smugness, the certainty, how confident she was of her own superior intelligence. He longed for her body and her mind, but he could hardly stand to be around her. Put bluntly, she thought that she was better than everyone else. Not that she had ever said this directly, of course. She would deny it all if she was asked. And it was this – the hypocrisy, the sheer bald-faced lyingness of it – which made him want to reach into her brain and pull the offending thoughts out through her eye sockets.

  Ewan wandered over to Andie and wrapped an arm around her back. ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘You’re so good at everything. I miss you at Real Difference. I miss you so much.’ He seemed a little drunk. She leaned into his arms, pleased and embarrassed.