She found David making a sandwich in the kitchen, weariness weighing into him senselessly – life didn’t have to be this hard, and yet, somehow, it was.

         He felt her friction the moment she walked in. There was a moment of prescience as she stood there, calling the hairs on his neck to attention, both their tails half-mast, waiting for the fight which was to come. First they had to put on a show, had to pretend, husband and wife, at least for a little while, that this wasn’t what it was – that there was a domestic normality to their dance, a rubric around which to move their blocks: lust, anger, want, love, desperation, despair, death – ever the soliloquy of their love.

         “Hi…”

         Julia knew that she should have gone to bed ages ago. Her mind had been telling her for a while: leave this be, be angry at him in other, more cancerous ways. But her ego needed this: the confrontation, the hurt, the outrage. More than anything else, she craved an injustice, to be unduly wronged by whatever was going on.

         “I said hi … Where were you?”

         “Working.”

         “I see.”

         “You see.” A knife in a mayonnaise dress bounced off a chequered chopping board. “And what does that mean?” David turned around to face her. Having spent his day waiting in rooms, he was unprepared now to wait on his wife.

         She shrugged, leant against the counter, a tired imitation of her eldest daughter. “I just said I see.”

         “What exactly is it that you see? No, I’m asking – what do you see?”

         Nothing.

         David had never had much of a stomach for duplicity. He was a big believer in saying what you meant, meaning what you said. Growing up, he’d resented the pitiful games that his parents used to play – days of stilting suburban silence, sending his sister and him like emissaries of war between two reasoning things:

-   “Go and ask your mother what’s for dinner.”

-   “Tell your father that if he wants dinner, he has to stop drinking.”

-   “Your mother is a cunt, son.”

         Sometimes this behaviour would go on for weeks, until something softened or something snapped, at which point they would all go back to being grown-ups as if nothing had happened. As if some childish reversal had not been played out, where the children, with youthful exasperation, had not been forced into premature parenthood for the day.

         “What?”

         “Nothing to see, okay? Just wondering where you were.”

         “I told you: I was working.”

         “I believe you.”

         “Believe me? Why the hell would you have to believe me?”

         “I’m just saying.”

         “Goddamnit – what are you saying? Because if you’re trying to say something else, then you should just say that.”

         “I…”

         “You…”

         “I…”

         “You were just saying… I’d be careful here.”

         “Obviously I know you were at work. Where else would you be?” Then, almost as an afterthought, “nothing else is important.”

         “We’re going to do this again?”

         She stared at him defiantly.

         “Like one of those couples? Broken things that never stop? Well, I won’t.”

         “Nothing changes, nothing changes, right?” The leitmotif of their lives.

         “You know what? I’m not. I’m not doing this. I can’t. Not tonight, Julia.”

         She looked at him with a practised nonchalance and shrugged, as if to say –

         “I’m not doing this. I’ve had a hell of a day, and I have to come home to…” What he had to come home to, he wasn’t entirely sure.

         “If you’re unhappy, go speak to someone, like I’ve been asking for months… or go on a holiday.” A tomato was getting eviscerated. “Go visit your mother, for Christ’s sake, but I can’t do this. I can’t support this family all day and your emotional breakdowns all night. It’s too much.”

         Sensing his genuine indifference to her needs, her edifice parted ways with its piety

         “Of course!” she snapped. “No, no, excuse me – for trying to have a conversation with my husband; how very selfish of me.”

         “I’m not joking Julia… I won’t.”

         “No, of course not.” Her voice acid rain, her body the forest. “You’ve already done so much…” Being such a bitch was unbearable even to herself, and yet she found herself powerless to stop it. “Soo much.” 

         He turned to growl at her. “Why? Why are you doing this? Either you ignore me completely, or you do this – you attack me the second I’m in the door with this passive-aggressive bullshit and meaningless words. It’s as if you’re looking for a fight. Is that what you want? Are you drunk?”

         She stared at him, chin jutted slightly forward, a person who is not completely unreasonable, just enough  – the contrite housewife who wants to be slapped by her husband, just the once.

         “We both know what this is really about,” David said.

         “I just asked where you were. But it seems that’s a crime in this household.”

         “It’s about Dillon – always about Dillon. You haven’t said one meaningful word to me in weeks – except to do this. You don’t think I see what you’re doing?”

         “What am I doing, David?”

         “Blaming me.”

         “I’m attempting a conversation, a discourse. You’re the one who’s being evasive… who comes home from work at nine o’clock.”

         “This is not a conversation.”

 

         She could easily have let it go; pretend that she didn’t enjoy the pitiless depths of her self -inflicted sorrow as much as her husband enjoyed his self-righteous plateaus.

         “I called Janine at five o’clock. She said you were out all afternoon. She was just about to lock up.” 

         “I had appointments. I got back late.”

         “Must have.”

         “I told you, I had a hell of a day.”

         “Apparently.” A hiccup betrayed her interrogation.

         “Oh, for God’s sake; it’s Tuesday!”

         “So?”

         “You’ve been drinking.” 

         “Had to do something while you were working.”

         “I can’t do this; really, I can’t.”

         “Well, I can’t do other things.”

         “What are you saying?”

         “I’m just saying,” she leaned against the counter, “we can’t all be successful in this life, David.”

         “And what the fuck does that mean?” A nerve successfully hit.

         “I just want to know.”

         “What?”

         “Why?”

         “Why what?”

         “Why?”

         “Julia, I swear to God.”

         “Why is what you do so much more important than me?”

         “Why are you trying to start this fight – always?”

         “Why aren’t you asking me about where I’ve been? About my day? I could have been anywhere – doing anything.”

         “Because I’m tired and it doesn’t matter.”

         “Exactly!” A finger pointed accusingly.

         “Are you saying I shouldn’t trust you?” 

         “No, you’re saying that it doesn’t matter.”

         “I didn’t say it’s not important. I didn’t say that you don’t matter. I just don’t need to know every little thing that you do.”

         “Because it’s not important.”

         “For the love of God, woman.”

         He reached into the cupboard, pulled out the last packet of crisps. 

         “Why, David, why is what you do so much more important than what we do? You don’t care. I swear to God, you have no idea where I go each day. You just dismiss me so effortlessly, it’s remarkable that you even know I’m here. Am I here? Am I a figment of your imagination? Is my sound turned down?” 

         “Am I not listening to you right now?”

         He put a chip in his mouth, cherished its destruction.

         “Well, since you’re listening, want to know what I did to…”

         “Look if that’s how you really feel then I’m sorry,” he said in a muffled voice. He didn’t seem sorry in any sincere sense of the word, merely jaded; worn out. “I’m sorry I’ve had a long day. I’m sorry you’re upset. I’m sorry that I didn’t ask you about Grace’s homework or for a detailed analysis about how many downward dogs you did at your yoga class.”

         “Kelly’s yoga class.”

         “You mean the one you do together?”

         “That’s not the point.”

         “No, it’s not, is it? The point, Julia, is I don’t have time for this crap right now, because Rodger’s management accounts are overdue and Paul has resigned and those idiots at Sager are getting audited for the third year in a row, and instead of coming home at nine o’clock at night and burdening you with all of that crap, all I want to do is eat some dinner” – held up his pathetic sandwich as a totem to such illusion – “in peace, say goodnight to my kids, who are never around, and watch some mindless TV, like any other middle-aged man who has to work fifty hours a week to feed his family and give them things they need, like fucking yoga class.”

 

         “And there it is.” She stared at him like a vigilante.

 

         “I told you. I’m not doing this. Not tonight. I’m not… know what I am going to do? I’m going to sit in the lounge and finish my dinner and watch some – I don’t know, fucking sports highlights, it doesn’t matter, does it?”

         He started unspooling a wad of paper towel.

         “Then – since it’s so important for you to know these things – I’m going to take a shit, and then, Julia… I’m going to go to bed.” He opened the vegetable morgue to wrestle a beer out.

         “Because,” he pontificated from the far side, “I have to be up very early for a meeting with SARS over this ongoing Sager clusterfuck. A meeting which, by the way – since we’re suddenly taking an interest in each other’s lives – I am hopelessly underprepared for. A meeting which, I might add, has serious implications for hundreds of other people’s lives and my licence, not to mention our financial stability.” He was pouring his words caustically down the drain, but with restraint.

         “Maybe tomorrow, if you’re sober, and you feel like cooking dinner, if you can squeeze that into your hectic schedule, we can sit down and you can talk to me all about your day and the day before that and the past month and whatever the fuck else all of this is really about, okay?”

         “Why bother, David? If you won’t listen now, then don’t bother tomorrow.”

         “Fine.”

 

She stalked him into the lounge like a lioness.

         “Julia, do not test me.”

         “Okay, one question.” She put her finger to his nose, stood too close.

         He closed his eyes – a frustrated accountant balancing complex numbers in his head. “I’m warning you.”

         “One question, then I’ll leave you alone…”

         He turned and sat down. Put his feet on the table like two unsurpassable mountain logs. 

         “I just want to know, simple question, David: why are you the only important one in this family?”

         “Go away.”

         “Well, as you so clearly state – your job and what you do for this family is paramount…”

         “Go!”

         “No, it’s this thing that’s ingrained in our culture like a bug. If we’re not all killing ourselves in the name of finance, if I’m not a millennial mom with a career job and perfect tits and textbook kids – kids who actually like their parents and want to grow up to be exactly like them – then I’m a big failure. And it’s true – I mean, I must be! Nobody acknowledges what I do; nobody wants to be me. Not my kids, not my husband, not my son – definitely not me. Because I don’t have an MBA in business science, and I don’t come home late, and I can’t hold myself in a conversation with other men about inflation and Brexit and whatever the fuck the Nikkei did today. If…”

         David sat silently while Julia rambled on. Given that he was a man prone to being goaded, she might have seen – through eyes more sober – his resignation as a more worrying sign.

         “…I don’t go to the grave with a big title stamped on my forehead and written across my tombstone, Here lies CEO this, CFO that, millions in the bank plus a PhD in philanthropy, successfully dead, well done… If I didn’t have at least one survivable heart attack on the way, then I’ll have been a big failure. Isn’t that how it works? Isn’t that what we told our son?”

         David continued to stare impassively at the black expanse of the unanimated TV, unwilling to immerse himself in either it or the living rooms of his life – as if reality could be a function of will and not mind.

         “Know what my title is? Stay-at-Home Mom. How pathetic.”

         He thought about the gun sitting in the safe beneath the floorboards, and how easy it would be to end it all . An anterior thought thought what a terrible thought that was to think.

         He would not lose his temper; not because he wasn’t angry, but to give her what she wanted now would be an unbearable loss. 

         “Well… it’s blatantly clear that I’m a failure to you – not just me, but the whole human race as well.” She was being terribly unkind, and she knew it, so powerless was she against her deluge. “Oh, fuck you! So, you’re going to say nothing now. You won’t answer one silly question. You’re going to ignore me now?” She wanted to rattle and shake him until his bones fell out, leave his wasted lines shattered across the ground . “Fine, sit in your high castle, don’t worry about us.”

         Not wanting to give her that satisfaction, either, he replied as even-keeled as he could: “I didn’t invent the world, Julia. I’m not its architect. I didn’t engineer how everything works. Please just go to bed.”

         “No, you didn’t, but it’s worked out rather conveniently for you all the same, hasn’t it? Well done.” She could taste the amniotic fluid as she gave birth to each virulent word. “All I’m asking is for a simple explanation – is that too much? Why is success so important?”

         “Because we’re not goddamn monkeys.” The animals in his chest were beginning to stampede.

         “Oh, please.”

         “Why do people learn to play instruments or do maths or write code? Why does Grace have to learn the alphabet?” Say nothing – do not engage – this is not worth it. “Life isn’t about instant gratification.” He reached for the TV remote. “It’s about hard bloody work and progress.”  

         “Instant gratification? Oh, how selfish of me, living off the success of someone else.”

         “All this.” David swept his arms furiously, a wild monkey conductor with a controller. “This… house, this table, this vase…” his orchestra in full staccato, “… This couch, this glass, this plate. All these… things…”

“Yes, things…”

         “I suppose you think…”

         “We all need things, honey.” The way she said honey like an orange lozenge sliding down his throat. “You need things, I need things, everybody needs things. You know who else needs things? Our children. Things like packed lunches and support at hockey matches and advice and hugs – other than at nine o’clock at night, when they’re already asleep.”

         “Well, if you hadn’t put Grace to bed early deliberately to spite… “He bit his tongue. “I’m not doing this, Julia. I won’t. Not. To. Night.”

         “Things. So many things.”

         “Do not goad me.”

         “So many things,” she sung light-heartedly, walking off toward the kitchen 

         “They need to be fed food and to go to school, you fucking cow! What are you going to do – hug them an education?” He had lost, and at the very last moment, too. “Don’t be so goddamn naïve, woman. Why won’t you just grow up!”

         “Oh, fuck you,” she called from the hall. “Grow a pair of balls.” 

         “Grow up! Grow up! Grow the fuck up!” And suddenly he was on his feet.

 

         On the mezzanine floor of the clapboard house next door, Mrs Yankowitz was shutting her Venetian blinds, taking her time as always to survey the landscape of her various neighbours’ domesticity. The Patels to the southeast rarely offered much of significance beside oriental smells and the curious way they treated their dogs. Proceedings at the Pritchard’s were of little value since Gerard put up that obtrusive, berry-defecating row of mulberry bushes in defence of his privacy. Instead, it was directly across the fence – to the east – that her voyeuristic tendencies received their highest reward: 

         On this frosty April evening, as the last shutter blinked closed, had David or Julia glanced out from their pantomime across the yard, they might have noticed out of the corner of their eye, a shutter blink back to life.

         For Mrs Yankowitz had caught something – sensed it, really. Stooped postures, celebrated gestures – the undeniable makings of a scene, un hommage au ménage unfolding through the lattice windows of the Killers’ living rooms. And Mrs Yankowitz, a Jewish purist, lived for scenes of all kinds.

         She left her curlers in for too long and watched the man following his wife into the formal lounge, gesticulating aggressively, forcing her to turn around like a ballerina being spun up. The wife remonstrating back with grand-hearted gestures while the husband sits down, feigning an insufferable tolerance now, the two of them coloured and cut-out like caricatures from a fifties’ postcard.

         Their mating ritual wouldn’t have seemed remiss to someone who wasn’t as voyeuristically skilled as Mrs Yankowitz. She’d been sensing something sinister brooding on the lunar surface of number 17A for a while. Irregular hours, slackly parked cars, an absence of vital life. That Julia had uncharacteristically left her patio curtains open tonight was just one of many signs.

         For example, it had not gone unnoticed to her that the residents of 17A had missed the Thursday morning garbage truck and the recycling van twice; the postbox was perennially overstuffed; their pool had taken on an Amazonian hue; the eldest child’s incessant drumming had finally stopped; there had been no sight nor sound of his blue Cortina backfiring in months. When the curtains in the master bedroom did close, they often didn’t open again until noon. As for the cigarette butts that kept turning up in her garden, she suspected (correctly) that the eldest daughter was smoking pot. (Although she blamed her gardener, Alfonso just the same to be safe.)

         The experts gathered in the convention centre of Mrs Yankowitz’s mind had determined the moral decay infecting the neighbourhood to be emanating from the unstable nucleic family element at number 17A, at the core of which was that dark-haired girl, who was far too skinny for her height and whose surreal beauty was in itself a corrupt compound – radioactive, inorganic, not of this world.

         If self-awareness existed in Mrs Yankowitz through anything other than the referential sense, she might have recognized in herself a certain neediness, a familiar lack of purpose and longing that had slowly manifested itself into a nasty prejudice – against the world, against other women in particular; from the kugels that clacked at Shabbat but never came to synagogue, to the promiscuous teenagers who dared to enter the same nail salon, to the bull-nosed frogs that cheated at bridge club. The more diametrically constituted other people were according to what she was not, the greater her bias was – and Mrs Yankowitz was not a lot of things. 

         She did not consider herself ugly, but neither was she pretty; as if her face had been fashioned in a crude and deliberate way – a moment of humility, or doubt, on the behalf of her maker (a modest self-portrait perhaps)? Which was why the baseline of her bias ran furthest afoul of what was, when confronted with this new generation of prosthetically modified, sexually liberalised yuppie mom: the hip atomic blonde who wore too much makeup and perennially upgraded her hardware with silicon and too much Botox; left hand glued to a Styrofoam cup… and who, through her unnatural union with superficiality had been directly responsible for the hybrid plastic spawn that was their perpetually disengaged, permanently online offspring. A category of Jennys into whose company Julia had forever been typecast; the resultant identity loss and character drift of which may have been the underlying cause for the self-sabotage she was now trying to engineer across the yard; leading, paradoxically, to the very outcomes – loud, drunk, drug-taking kids, dissatisfied husband – that Mrs Yankowitz had so long forewarned herself against, and now actionably witnessed, window-to-window, like a fellow test-tube frog.

 

         Things in their incubator were beginning to heat up. An animated Julia directed air traffic from below her elbows, David leaned forward impressively: Rodin in his best Oxford pose. Upstairs two girls cuddled in bed, glad, for once, it was past their bedtime.

 

         “It’s so wholly unfair of you. And to constantly do it in front of them, too… to belittle and demean me…”

         “Why?”

         “­Because I am a pers…”

         “Why, goddamnit, are you doing this?”   

         It looked as though David was going to put his hands over his head and allow the room to drown. It looked like his wife was about to call him immature. It looked as if someone clearly wasn’t listening.

         “Because you can’t fucking say to Kelly when you walk in, ‘I see your mother’s had another stressful day.’”

         “Well… in general…”

         “Well, what?”

         “Anyone can make a fucking packed lunch! You think I enjoy working all day?”

         “Yes, I do,”

         “You think I would rather be working then spending time with you and my daughters?”

         “Absolutely.” It was times like these that ownership of their children seemed to pass between them like a title deed: ‘My daughter’; ‘our children’; ‘look what your son has done.’

         “Or out there playing golf.”

         “You don’t even like golf!”

         “That’s not the fucking point.”

         “The point is that I don’t get to do what I want all day and then be exhausted by it. I’m too busy earning our living.”

         “Wait, don’t tell me, so we can buy more stuff?”

         “Where do you think your food and your car and your holidays come from?”

         “My holidays – from what? When is it enough, David? How much?”

         “Oh, shuttup.”

         She wanted to scream and did. “At least you can sleep at night!”

         “And what does that mean?”

         “Without all that capitalist guilt hanging over you – you know we’re just taking it all from somebody else, right? We exploit people. That’s what we do.”

         “Yup.” He saluted. “That’s me: David, the Great Exploiter. Like every other professional out there.”

         “Just because they’re not in your face, doesn’t mean you’re not responsible for the costs.”

         “What costs?”

         “These costs – for a start.”

         “Do I not provide value to this economy? Do I not provide a valuable service to you, my wife, and our children? Is that not all I am? A service provider?”

         “How should I know how valuable your services are? Is your service the equivalent of seventeen bedtime stories and, I don’t know, a fucking tree? How many trees, David; one per consultation? How circular is the economy? How much value are you putting back? I’m no expert… what’s the opportunity cost, one tree? You’re the accountant here; is it enough to buy this? Or this – how much is this…” she picked up a valued surround-sound speaker and dropped it “…worth? How much do I have to dig out the ground to get one of these?” A Marino ashtray crashed to its foregone conclusion. “This – what’s this worth to a couple of Malaysian kids sleeping in a shack? I dropped out, remember, David? I know nothing. I don’t know anything about invisible hands, or the economy, or reach arounds or how best to fuck the planet up the arse. But I mean, thank God you’re working so damn hard to get all these things we don’t need while I stay at home and try to give my kids some kind of normalcy.”

         Julia knew she had finally crossed an invisible line, but her indictment against her existence was so much bigger than the man she was taking it out on. “I’d hate for my husband to think that his family were exploiting his exploitation.”  

         At its zenith, unbeknownst to the actors, there was a temporal shift as the director panned out – believing the scene to best be witnessed in miniature, from a distance.

         David in miniature shook Julia in miniature, took her by her doll blouse, shook their dollhouse, his small hands stiff with white knuckled rage, his tiny presence trembling with huge restraint. Mrs Yankowitz was fully immersed, could smell his whiskey breath, feel the erotic pull of his big presence.

         “I am asking you – nicely – to leave me alone.” He’d never hit a woman before, but he was close now to crossing a boundary – and not having been so close before, didn’t know what kind of violent indifference lay on the other side. Was it always this way with men: a test, a watershed – or only the good ones? Was all violence not ultimately in the name of women?

         A small masochistic smile flickered across Julia’s face. She had gotten what she wanted; her moment of aliveness had been won.

         “Fine,” she whispered, “I’ll stop.”

         David, slowly deflated, let her down, a furious, disgusted look on his face. She took a quick step back and tripped over the coffee table. She didn’t hit her head or anything dramatic like that, but it was enough to elicit a gleeful gasp from Mrs Yankowitz, who had seen the warning signs and correctly predicted the weather. She knew exactly what to say to the police when they came a-knocking in the morning. 

 

         There ensued a long cooling-off period. Julia disappeared into the unremarkable parts of the house, perhaps to spread the news, perhaps to cry. David went back to his couch. He could hear her in the kitchen, deliberately banging fridge doors shut, a cheerful cork pop, the unmistakable crack of a wine glass on good Carrara marble. He followed her footsteps, stomping like a stubborn child’s, back behind him and out through the lounge; heard the sliding patio door sound, the chalkboard effect of cast-iron furniture being pulled across terracotta tiles; continued to stare at the blank screen until, like the spark of existence, it miraculously blinked itself to life. 

         He wondered what he had possibly done to deserve all this, while in the high tower she had built above them, Mrs Yankowitz was coming to her own tawdry conclusions about who had done what to whom and for how many years. What monsters lay beyond her eastern gates?

         Julia sat, self-satisfied, out on the patio with the cat and her bottle of white wine and wallowed, wondering how her life might have been different if she hadn’t long ago done the things that she had. An older version of herself blamed herself for blaming David – because unlike all lovers who are hurt by the ones they love, she at least knew that she deserved this. Sometimes being married to someone felt like having a friend with a fantastic addiction: there were only so many times you could let one another down and still be expected to stick it out.

 

         She had been out there long enough for David to forget her physicality. Her essence, however, was always a permanent presence lingering within him like a ghost in his house. When she wandered back in, she found him staring vacantly at a nature documentary – a cosmic motion picture show, being narrated by a well-educated Cantabrigian fellow.

         He sensed her shadow hovering over him.

 

‘…the more complex the species, the more complex the madness… ‘

 

         “I’m sorry?”

         No reply.

         “I’m sorry, okay? I know I’m not being…” she was slurring now “… an easy wife.”

         For the first time in an hour, he began to really pay attention to the moving spectrum in front of him: a spectrograph of moving mass, subdividing embryonic particles, a swarm of bees, a school of North Sea tuna in migration, the long-forgotten life cycle of frogs.

         “I don’t… I don’t mean…” With the light shining from her back, she looked almost see-through; a carbon copy of her alternate place in the multiverse. 

         “What I don’t understand, what I really don’t understand, David…”

 

‘… life gives rise to life, over and over again…’

 

         “… is why we do this to each other. Are we that bored? Are our lives so dull? Everything feels so messed up. Don’t you feel it?”

​

‘… when a member of the species at hand first suspects that it has lived an innumerable amount of lives, reconstructed in interminable ways, reset infinite times, it completely chafes away all semblance of self…’

 

         “Not just you and me – everyone, people, the world. It’s all so very messed up.”

​

          He tried to imagine that she wasn’t real; that this odyssey wasn’t endless.

 

‘… the plants know it, once immersed, can show it…’

 

         “I feel like I don’t understand anything anymore. Not the birth of Grace or the science of clouds or why the weather rains. How we can be such barbaric beings…”

 

‘… there is no longer a single self having an existence… everything becomes relative and everything becomes futile…’

 

         “I mean, I’m not talking about eating and dying, I’m not saying…” she held her empty glass toward the carnage of a lion kill on the screen “… survival of the fittest and all that. I’m just saying – what I’m wondering really is – how can you and I sit here, with all we’ve got, all our luxury and be miserable – we fight and we just, we just tear each other apart for no good reason at all, and down the road a whole bunch of people are sitting in the freezing cold with pneumonia and newspaper wrapped around them and they’re miserable because they’re cold? Not miserable… dying, David. They’re literally dying, they’re so cold, and we’re miserable because we blame each other for leaving the lights on. Oh God, you won’t even look at me.” She hugged herself. “Well, I feel like I’m also dying, and I just want it to hurry up.” 

 

‘… no small culture has this power, no idea of everlasting life or eternal demise comes close to the ontological shock of being part of an endless self-sustaining system on repeat, one that transcends, indeed invents, time…’

 

         “And I know you’re going to tell me – don’t tell me – that it’s white guilt, or a matter of politics, or just the way the fucking world works – but how do I sleep at night, David: me – with all this luxury? And this is not, it’s not guilt, David, it’s a real question: how do I sleep at night? How do you sleep at night? In our bed, knowing that there is somebody else out there, who is, you know, as… as sophisticated and full of feeling and as alive and full of inner life as I am, shivering slowly to death while cars just drive past? And I fall asleep every single time.”

 

‘…the simulation running so many times, through so many lives, that just to glimpse at the smallest corner of the finest speck, is enough to break open a specimen’s entire mind.’  

 

         “And I wonder then, why I can’t get out of bed? How can my husband live with me, if I can’t even live with myself?”

 

         “For God’s sake, Jul…”

 

         “No.” She was pointing at his back, stopping him from speaking with her iron will. “No, don’t… listen, I don’t want to hear you justify it, or not justify it, or tell me what an irrational person I am – or how drunk I am. I just want you to tell me that you feel it too, okay? No, no!”

 

‘… such complexity, such beauty, such illusion, all that probability and supersymmetry, such immeasurable suffering, such divine salvation, so many damned so many disillusioned so many divine – how could this poor creature ever comprehend fully what it means to be alive…’

 

         “I mean, fuck, I know, I know, I can’t change it, David. I know, I know, I know. All that starfish crap they teach Grace at school. I just want to know that you feel it, too.”

 

‘…and yet be so arrogant as to suggest that it understands its own existence…'

 

         “Because it hurts me, David; it really hurts me. And I know that you think I’m being dramatic, and maybe I am – but it does hurt me, and you wanted me to talk to you, so here I am…”

 

‘… or begin to guess that this eternal pulsation from cosmic birth to cosmic death, like a perpetual heart attack, is for its own amusement, nothing more…’

 

         “Can I tell you a story? I want to tell you a story. The other day I was driving… I stopped at a stop street in Green Point. You know those small old Victorian slave houses that everyone loves – well, there was this man Eliot, this big black man sitting on the side of the road, and he was so sad… You know when you can just see the sadness coming right off someone like a steam cloud? And I pulled over and I got – God, this sounds so stupid… you’re going to think me such a stupid sentimental fool, but I had this banana in my bag that I was going to eat after gym, and I wanted to give it to him. It’s not much, but I mean, each starfish right… it’s something I had, and he didn’t have it, and I wasn’t even thinking like that, I just wanted him to have it. I wanted to somehow help him, and that’s what it was.

         “So I pulled over, and I held this banana out my window, this ridiculous banana, like it had purpose and was going to solve all his problems if it was given with love. And he looked up at me with these devastating eyes, David, and I was right – he was so, so sad. You could see right into the depths of his damnation. And I’m idling there, this woman at a stop street with a banana. And I’ve made it so much worse. I could see what a mistake it was right away – he didn’t want it – this stupid blonde bitch holding a banana out the window.

         “God, I mean, what was I thinking? So, obviously I feel terrible now because I’ve pitied him, which is the worst thing I could have done. So, instead of just driving away like I should – you know, ignoring him, off to gym, not me, leaving him in his sad world on the sidewalk, while I go to exercise because that’s what I do, because I need to, because I’m sad too – but not sad-sad, not sad like he’s sad. But no, I pull over and I get out, because I’m guilty about the whole banana thing, and I feel bad for him, and I know I’ve hurt him.

         “I go up to him and I ask him what’s wrong. And he looks up at me with these big brown eyes and says he has ‘nowhere to go’ and suddenly he starts crying; this massive black man sitting at my feet crying – I mean, really crying; heaving, the tears just falling out of his eyes like I’m the only person who’s seen that he exists for days. And he’s embarrassed to be crying in front of me. He’s sitting there hugging his shoulders, hiding his face. So what can I do? I pat his back and tell him it’s going to be okay. But it’s not going to be okay, is it? We both know it’s not going to be okay, and now I’m feeling even more guilty for lying. I’m just standing there, this rich white woman in my gym kit rubbing his back while he cries his heart out. So I make it worse, again, of course I make it worse, why wouldn’t I make it worse? I offer him money, lots of money, everything in my wallet, and it was a lot, a lot, a lot – for him at least. I had cash – for pottery class, I think; I can’t remember, does it matter? I mean, what does that even say about me, my life, to have that much money on me and not even know why? I try and force this wad of cash into his hand like he’s a child, and he point blank refuses to take it. He just starts to heave even harder.

         “Now it’s so bad, as if I couldn’t have made the situation worse – and all I wanted to do from the beginning was help, to give the guy a banana, and I don’t know what to do about the money which is now lying on the ground in front of him, blowing away. I mean I can’t take it back, so I give him a hug, because I stupidly think that’s what he really needs, to feel loved, which obviously is what he needs, but not from me – a mother, a wife, his child. And the first thing I think is wow, this guy smells, and this other part of me thinks what a terrible thing that is to think – it’s so clearly not his fault things are this way. I’m just standing there, bending down, half hugging him while the money is blowing away, and I’ve got this this whole battle going on in my head because it feels like I don’t even mean it, which must mean that I don’t mean it, but I do, I mean… I mean, I want to, and suddenly I realise how ridiculous this whole situation must look… and it does, because another lady in another SUV is hooting at me because I’ve left my door open and I’m blocking her from getting past. And this, this woman is getting frantic and hooting because I’m making her late now, and this whole thing must look so bizarre to her anyway, I mean she doesn’t know what is going on, so you know what I do?

 

         “You know what I do? I drive away. I just get in my car, and I drive the fuck away. And I’ve been thinking about him ever since, David. Every day for two weeks now. I can’t get him out of my head. Eliot. His face, his smell. How I felt. Nobody has ever looked at me like that. With such betrayal. It was like abandoning a dog. Oh God, listen to me, I just called the man a dog.

         She started to cry beautifully now. “It’s going to sound so ridiculous to you. I can see it on your face and you’re not even looking at me. I know I’m drunk, but it doesn’t mean I can’t see your exasperated tone right in your face, David. You’re just so ‘reasonable’ and so… what’s the word? prag… pragmatic, but I just want you to know that that his sadness is in me too. And it’s never going to go away. It can’t. It doesn’t matter if I’m here in my pyjamas doing just fine in life or if I’m lying in a gutter freezing to death in the street – it’s the same sadness, David, it’s the same same same – and nobody seems to see it.”

         Her drunk mind kept oscillating on a loop between all the things she felt but couldn’t adequately express. 

         “If the rich can suffer just by watching the poor suffer, then what the fuck difference do all these things make?”

         She put her hands over her eyes. “God David, how many times have we lived our lives?”

         He knew that she was drowning. Our ships don’t sink because of the water surrounding us, they sink because we let the water in. He would rather let her run them both aground than pull the plug.

​

          Julia's hands had collapsed to their conclusions; their sorry tale told. “You can speak now. I’ve said what I had to say.”

         Silence hung in solitude with them then. Only the crickets and the bats and the rats dared to continue with the perpetuities of life. 

         When David eventually stood up, it was with shoes in hand. Without looking at Julia, he walked to the foot of the stairs and stopped, head bowed.

         “Guilt is such a useless emotion,” he said, “don’t you think? – personally I prefer gratitude.” And with that he walked up to bed, leaving Julia to figure out whose line came next.

           

         Torn between anger and despair, she chose valiantly to throw her wine glass at the wall.

 

[Exit scene]

 

         The narrator, sensing that his audience has become complacent, turns to face them and says …and yet you stand there in your radiance and tell me that there is no God?

 

But already, they were gone.

​

– excerpt taken from Absurdity, a novel 

​

​