For as long as he can remember, S has been on the verge of jacking it all in and going off somewhere far away to live an entirely different life, a life unencumbered by commitments, problematic familial relationships and material possessions. Of course, one can be on the verge of doing something for a whole lifetime and never actually do it. S knows that and whilst the possibility depresses him, he also knows that the idea of escaping to a new life is in a sense all that is needed to cope with the actual anodyne one he is in the process of living or pretending to live (but for whose benefit?). Or that is how things always have been. Up until now that is. What has changed is this: S’s wife has just announced that she’s been having an affair and that she’s sorry, she really is, but she’s leaving S for her paramour (she doesn’t actually use this word, but if she knew it she almost certainly would have). S acts dumbfounded, hurt, outraged, jealous, but in reality he is none of those things. In reality, S is relieved. Finally, he thinks, there is nothing stopping me from running away from this life and into the arms of the new one I’ve been dreaming about for as long as I can remember.
S’s wife packs her stuff and moves out of the marital home, taking the dog with her, which is fine by S (he never did like the yappy glorified rat anyway). The day after his wife leaves him, S tells his boss he’s quitting with immediate effect. He doesn’t go into the office for this purpose, he does it by email, setting out his reasons in a bulleted list (the length of which he almost finds surprising). An hour later, he receives an email from an HR manager. In laconic prose, the HR manager reminds S that he is bound by a contract of employment, by virtue of which he is obligated to serve a notice period of not less than three months. S replies to this email with an officious one of his own, copying in his boss, and stating, perhaps not as succinctly as he would have liked, that owing to his cited reasons for resigning – which (and here he reiterates and expands upon these reasons for the HR manager’s benefit) in his opinion reflect very poorly not only on his boss, but also the company whose corrosive culture he is a totem for – he is completely within his rights to view the putative obligation to work his notice period as contractually null and void. A few days pass and then another email arrives in S’s inbox from the HR manager. This email is written in a bewilderingly prolix ‘stream of consciousness’ prose that interweaves disparate, even contradictory, themes and which S finds almost impossible to follow. Finally, right at the end of the email, almost as a cursory aside, the HR manager lets it be known that the company has no intention of holding him to his notice period and that S will, of course, be paid what he is owed. Thank fuck for that, thinks S, who immediately sets about moving onto the next stage of his plan to abandon his current life for a new one far away.
Which basically involves selling everything he owns, other than some clothes, a suitcase and the digital device he uses for reading novels, short stories and philosophical tomes. S prices everything to go and go it does. Very quickly. So quickly, in fact, that S feels disorientated, unprepared, apprehensive. What if I am being completely delusional about this paradigmatically new life I’ve been dreaming about for as long as I can remember, he thinks, what if it turns out to be just as mediocre as the life I have or rather had? For a moment, he even considers phoning his wife and pleading with her to come back to him, but then he realises that his mind is playing tricks on him and the last thing he needs right now is his wife. Shaking away his doubts, as if he were a dog and the doubts were droplets of water caught in his fur, he takes a bus to the train station and then a train to Newcastle, where he hops on a ferry bound for Amsterdam. Since the crossing takes sixteen hours, he pays for a cabin. It’s very cramped, just enough room for a couchette (soiled) and a basin (grimy). S takes a soporific and waits for tiredness to set in. As he waits, he reads a short story on his digital device.
It’s about a boy called Y. On the day of Y’s fifth birthday, Y’s father, a hopeless fabulist with a dismal track record of failed businesses to his name, commits suicide by slashing his wrists with a jackknife. Shortly afterwards, Y’s mother dies from a grief-induced heart attack. Y is taken in by his uncle, who does little more than ensure Y doesn’t starve to death. One day, Y wakes up to find he can no longer see. His uncle takes him to see a doctor, who diagnoses a serious though curable condition that requires urgent surgery. Y’s uncle is far too parsimonious to pay for Y to have surgery and after a certain amount of time has passed, Y’s blindness becomes inoperable and permanent.
In spite or perhaps because of the tragedies that blight his young life, Y grows up to become the leader of a religious movement, a movement that is as belligerently ambitious in its colonising pretensions as it is preceptive in its numinous proclamations, proclamations that come straight from God, as channelled through Y and set down in writing by his amanuensis, a dark-skinned, svelte, demure, highly intelligent hermaphrodite who Y eventually comes to see as the one true love of his life, although he will have many love affairs before he reaches this realisation, which comes, like all the best realisations, on his death bed. He tells the hermaphrodite how he feels and after a slight pause, he/she/it confirms the feeling is mutual and, inevitably perhaps, Y and the hermaphrodite consummate their love for each other on Y’s death bed. At the point of climax, Y emits a wheezing sound that presages his demise.
Shortly thereafter, one of Y’s acolytes (the most zealous and paranoid one) seizes control of the religious movement and, sensing a potential threat to his inchoate authority, orders the hermaphrodite be put to death. The hermaphrodite is decapitated in front of a large crowd of religious nutjobs. The executioner holds the severed head up for the baying crowd’s pleasure. Whereupon the hermaphrodite’s head starts screaming obscenities and spitting like a disgruntled llama. Aghast, the executioner drops the head and it rolls over to the side of the platform, where it is swiped by a woman who deftly tucks it under her burqa.
The woman takes the hermaphrodite’s head to a cave and prostrates herself in front of it whilst intoning an elegiac prayer. At this point in the story, S succumbs to sleep. He dreams he is held fast by a pillory. To the side of him an executioner is sharpening his sword on a whetstone, from which sparks sizzle like broiling bacon fat. The executioner tests the blade with his finger, drawing blood which he licks reflexively. Any last words? he asks S. S’s mind is a yawning chasm of nothingness. He knows he should have some last words, but there just aren’t any. No, he says finally, no last words. Fair enough, says the executioner, who raises the sword up to shoulder height and then brings it down with considerable force. But just before the sword makes contact with S’s neck, S wakes up.
It takes him a few moments to remember where he is and then a few more moments after that to remind himself why he is where he is. He goes back to sleep and this time he doesn’t dream at all, not unless you call a colourless void accompanied by an electrical humming sound a dream. When he wakes up the ferry is docking in Amsterdam. Within forty-five minutes he is sitting in a coffee shop smoking a perfectly conical pre-rolled reefer. The THC he ingests causes various electrochemical reactions to occur inside his brain that manifest phenomenologically as paranoia. He stubs the reefer out and leaves the coffee shop. The coffee shop attendant runs after him. Your bill, he says, you forgot to pay your bill. S goes back into the coffee shop and pays his bill and then he leaves the premises for a second time.
He finds a bar and drinks three pints of stout in ratatat fashion. The alcohol tempers though does not entirely eradicate his paranoia. He leaves the bar and sees there is a hotel on the other side of the road. I need a shower, he thinks, and a place to dump my things. So even though he can clearly see the hotel is not the most salubrious establishment in the world (the signage above the door for example is barely discernible beneath the grime that has spread all over the hotel’s façade like a necrotizing rash), he thinks fuck it, it'll just be for a night or two and a bed is a bed at the end of the day. The receptionist, who has an aquiline nose and is dressed in a suit that appears to be two sizes too small, insists that S pay in advance. S is affronted. Do I look like the sort of person who will abscond without paying? he thinks. For a moment, he considers walking out, but then apathy gets the better of him and he pays for the room, which is far more expensive than he was expecting it to be.
He goes up to his room and gets the digital device out of his suitcase. He logs onto the hotel’s wifi and opens his email. He does a quick scan and sees that as per usual he has received precisely nothing of any interest. He opens WhatsApp and clicks on the group he created for his family years ago when it seemed like a fun, even a good, idea to do so. He sees that his sister has posted a series of vainglorious photos of herself and her family striking various unnatural poses, to which his mother has responded with gushing enthusiasm, while his brother has posted a screenshot of an email he’s received from a patient of his, an email telling him what a great doctor he is and thanking him profusely for going above and beyond, to which his sister has responded with a cloyingly insincere comment that curdles S’s stomach. S taps out a message, explaining that his wife’s left him, he’s quit his job and now he’s off travelling to who knows where, but rather than sending the message he deletes it. What’s the point? he thinks ruefully 1.
[He shuts WhatsApp, opens an internet browser and goes straight to one of his bookmarked porn sites. He considers for a moment what kind of porn he is up for (he has unabashedly eclectic tastes). He decides to go for a perennial favourite of his: bisexual orgies. He samples several videos, but for some reason none of them do it for him, so he changes tack and decides instead to look at videos featuring MILFs engaged in various sex acts. After clicking around for some time, he finds one of a MILF slowly pushing an unfeasibly large aubergine into her dilated anus. This is more like it, he thinks. As he watches the video, he masturbates whilst sticking two fingers up his own anus. He comes so violently that some semen ends up on the ceiling. He has a shower, making especially sure to clean his fingers, and gets dressed.
He leaves the hotel in search of food. After perusing the menus of various restaurants, he decides in the end to buy some chips from a glass-panelled vending machine. The chips come with a little pot of mayonnaise that S chucks away in disgust. When he’s finished his chips, S is still hungry, so he goes back to the vending machine and this time he procures a portion of finger-sized sausages and some croquettes to go with them. The sausages, which have a piquant quality S has never encountered in a sausage before, are delectable. The croquettes, however, are tepid and taste of rotten potato, although S eats them anyway (grudgingly). When he’s done, he goes for a walk through a maze of streets that remind him of a surrealist painting he once saw in a gallery he forgets the name of. He passes a head shop and then circles back and goes in. The shop is brightly lit and has lots of glass display cabinets. A shop attendant immediately swoops on S. What sort of a high are you after? she says. S says he’s not sure, what would you recommend? The attendant recommends an upper, a psychedelic and then a downer to round things off with. S deliberates for a moment. Does he really want to get fucked up on his first day of his new life is the gist of what he’s thinking. He does a few Rotastak loops in his head before deciding that yes, indeed he does want to. He goes with the attendant’s recommendation because it sounds eminently sensible to him.
He necks the upper immediately, rushes back to the hotel and changes his underpants and then rushes out again in search of a bar or better still a nightclub. Within a few minutes he is on a dancefloor making squiggly shapes with his body. He dances with gay abandon for a long time, the energy from the upper coursing through him like electricity through a highly conductive metal, silver for instance. Eventually, however, he tires of dancing and goes and sits at a table. A woman with dreadlocks who is dressed in a fluorescent orange boiler suit is sitting at the next table along. She smiles at S, who reciprocates the gesture. Before S knows what’s happening, he's back in his hotel room having sexual relations with the woman with dreadlocks, whose name he now knows is X’
X, it turns out, is into fisting, which is a new experience for S. When they’re done fisting, S and X have a shower together, which starts things up again. After fucking in the shower, they smoke cigarettes in the nude and chat about their respective lives. S gives a completely airbrushed version of his and he presumes X does too. At some point, S realises the downer is wearing off. He suggests going halves on the psychedelic. X agrees so readily that S is a bit perturbed. What sort of a person is X? he wonders. From that thought he descends into a kind of madness, a madness that subverts justified true beliefs, shatters fundamental axioms and somehow seems to stretch material reality into a thin membrane, a membrane that is translucent and through which the spectre of the noumenon shimmers seductively.
The trip lasts for four hours but to S it seems to go on for an eternity, so in a sense it never ends for S. Nonetheless, it does end and so there’s nothing else for it but for S to take the downer. He does it surreptitiously, not wanting to share it with X, who in any case seems perfectly happy smoking a joint. They get back into bed and make rhythmical love this time rather than fucking each other frenziedly. I love you, S finds himself blurting at the point of orgasm. You love me? X says. Er, says S. Er, he repeats. It’s okay S, says X, it’s okay to love me. I love you too, with all my heart.
What the hell is going on here? thinks S.
Soon after that he falls asleep. He dreams he is being held captive in a cage. His wife is staring wistfully at him through the bars of the cage. Let me out, he implores her. Let me out of here right now! But his wife just carries on staring and in her eyes he sees that she is far away, lost in a maze of her own making.]
Inevitably, S and X become lovers. X is the peripatetic type and is more than happy to join S on his travels. They snake their way through Europe, visiting all of the major conurbations in every country they go to.
At some point, S starts blogging about their experiences, a blog that through the deft use of social media and search engine optimisation techniques becomes quite successful, so successful in fact that he is approached by the editor of a well-known UK broadsheet to write a feature article for their travel magazine supplement on a topic of his choosing. S knocks out a 3,500-word article on Napoli, an article that strikes an artful balance between irreverent humour, cultural hermeneutics and baroque imagery.
More freelance journalistic gigs inevitably come his way and within a few years, he has honed his craft to such an extent he is considered to be one of the most respected and influential travel writers writing in the English language. But because life gives with one hand and takes with the other, S wakes up one day in a hotel room in Porto to find that he has gone blind.
I can’t see, he screams out in panic, I can’t fucking see! X rushes him to a hospital and after a long wait, they are eventually seen by a frail, bent-over doctor who looks like he should have retired twenty years ago. The doctor runs a few tests, consults with some colleagues, and then delivers the news that S has been dreading. He has an incurable condition; his blindness is permanent.
S sinks immediately into a deep depression. It is inconceivable to him that he can go on living in the world without seeing it. Better I were dead, he continually tells himself. X does her best to coax him out of his despondency, but he obstinately repudiates her entreaties. Then one day, X announces she’s leaving him. Leaving me? S says incredulously. Yes, she says, I can’t take another minute of your maudlin moping. So you’re blind, she says, so fucking what! Worse things happen. And at that very moment, S realises what a nincompoop he has been. I’m sorry, he says. Don’t leave. I will be different from now on, I promise. Just please don’t leave me. X bursts into tears and S reaches out to where he thinks she’s standing, finds her with his tentacle-like fingers and pulls her towards him. When they finish kissing, X says: Okay, I’ll stay, but you had better be different from now on. Cross my heart, says S. He doesn’t say hope to die. He doesn’t think that’s appropriate in the circumstances.
Travelling, S and X both agree, is no longer practical, so they take a flight to Barcelona, their all-time favourite city, and make it their home. They move into an apartment in a multi-storey block in the suburbs.
X gets a clerical job at a company that manufactures venetian blinds and to keep himself occupied, S turns his hand to writing fiction, something he only now realises he has always wanted to do. He dictates his stories sentence by sentence into a special app for blind people that X downloads for him onto his digital device. At night, X helps him with edits. Within five to six months, S has about ten short stories and a 20,000-word novella to his name.
He emails a sample of his writing off to some literary agents in the UK and the US using the special app for blind people. He receives just the one reply, an email that effectively tells S not to give up the day job, which even sounds sardonic when read out in the robotic voice of the special app for blind people.
Although the depression devil is there in the room with him, S refuses to give into its blandishments. Instead, he gets the special app for blind people to read all of his work back to him, one story at a time, after which he believes he has identified the problem.
The problem is, he tells X that night, my fiction is flat. Nothing ever happens, the characters are as thin as cardboard and there are just too many gratuitous obscenities. Tell me honestly, says S, am I wasting my time trying to write fiction? And before you say it, no I am not depressed. I am just trying to be realistic is all.
No, says X, you’re not wasting your time. I think your stories are really good actually. She doesn’t explain what she means by good, but X is not the sort of person to elucidate when prompted and although he desperately wants to know what good means, S knows not to ask her. You need to be persistent, says X, get a thicker skin and all that. Okay, he says, you’re right, although what he’s thinking is: that’s easy for you to say.
S breathes in deeply and sets about writing a new story. This time he develops character arcs and plots it all out beforehand (leaving a few loose ends that he hopes to tie up later).
The story is about an orphan with PTSD issues who gets into a lot of trouble with the law. After serving yet another sentence for yet another crime, the orphan finds himself homeless and destitute (yet again). He roams the streets of the city he happens to find himself in and comes across a bespectacled, suited man sitting on a bench. The orphan is about to mug the man when he realises something. If I mug this man and take his money, I will only go and buy drugs and get out of my mind and then find someone else to mug in order to get out of my mind again and before long I am surely going to end up back in prison. In other words, he realises that not only does he have a drug problem, he also must, on a subconscious level, want to go back to prison. Which is strange, he thinks, because I actually hate prison.
Ineluctably, he mugs the bespectacled man, who is only too willing to give the orphan all of the money he has on his person. Just please don’t hurt me, he bleats. The indignity of the man’s abject submissiveness makes the orphan angry and he punches the man in the face to teach him a lesson. Then he buys the drugs he knew he would buy, enjoys the high and then suffers the indubitably awful low, which he ameliorates by mugging another easy target and procuring and ingesting more drugs.
As expected, he eventually winds up in a court of law and is given a custodial sentence. In prison, the orphan keeps himself to himself. Or he tries to, but his garrulous cellmate keeps trying to draw him into conversation. Eventually, the orphan has had enough and he tells his cellmate to shut the fuck up. The cellmate looks so offended and crestfallen that the orphan finds himself saying: I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you. The cellmate’s face brightens and he starts up with his wittering again.
And that’s when the orphan has another realisation: that his cellmate can’t help his wittering, that in fact no one can help what they are or what they do or say. In other words, he realises that free will is an illusion. After this realisation, it isn’t long, of course, before the orphan has a spiritual awakening.
When he leaves prison, he resists his recidivist urge (he realises of course that the urge and the countering of that urge are happening quite independently of his doing anything) and gets a job, a crappy one for a large company that specialises in alienating its workers from the products of their labour. He rents a bedsit in a tenement block, buys a computer and in his spare time he dedicates himself to creating online content. The content comprises videos in which he stares into the camera and soliloquises in a deadpan voice about what it means to have attained spiritual enlightenment. To begin with he gets hardly any views, but over time, and with the help of various digital marketing techniques, he gets some traction. At some point, he has amassed enough views and signed up enough subscribers that he starts to position quite highly in search engine page rankings for keywords such as ‘nirvana’, ‘nonduality’, ‘true nature’, ‘ground of my being’, ‘satori’, ‘pure awareness’, ‘suchness’ and many other equally dubious terms.
He gives up his job because the advertising revenue from his video channel is more than enough to live off. He writes a book setting out the ins and outs of spiritual enlightenment and self-publishes it. It sells only moderately well, but it does at least garner some favourable reviews. He writes another book, this one a little more controversial, a little less compromising. It becomes a best seller in its genre category (neo-advaitanism) and from here on in, his reputation as a spiritual guru is cemented. He is invited to speak at conferences. Podcasters queue up to interview him. Even serious journalists operating in the mass media space run profiles on him. He sets up a not-for-profit, rents an office and, enlisting the unpaid help of his most ardent acolytes, he does what any self-respecting new-age guru does: he starts running retreats.
The retreats are a resounding success. People flock from all over the world to be in his presence and hear him speak and ask him derivative questions about the nature of spiritual enlightenment and how to go about attaining it and how to integrate it into one’s life once one has attained it and so on. His answers, of course, are as oblique as they are mesmerising, as obtuse as they are beguiling, as confounding as they are revelatory, further enhancing his reputation as a truly enlightened being. And then it happens. He wakes up one day to find he has gone blind. Not a damn thing can he see. He doesn’t panic. He is too enlightened to panic. But…
But what? thinks S. For the life of him, S cannot think how to make the story – which no longer bears any relation to the one he so assiduously plotted in advance – move forward. It has run aground, he realises, like my life.
S feels his way out onto the balcony and for a long time he considers jumping. But in the end, he realises he doesn’t have the courage to jump.
X arrives home and makes meatballs and pasta for dinner. They eat in silence, save for the clinking of cutlery and the background hum of traffic. When they’re finished their dinner, S and X sit down to listen to a podcast together. The podcaster, a self-styled controversialist with a penchant for bon mots, interviews a philosopher about a book he has written on the hard problem of consciousness. The crux of the philosopher’s thesis is that it is impossible to know why or how consciousness arises from matter. Sure, he says, we know that brain-state a is coincident with mind-state b, but brain-state a is not mind-state b, it is categorically only brain-state a, and what’s more, there is nothing about brain-state a that could possibly explain or indeed require the phenomenality of mind-state b. The podcaster begs to differ. In his opinion, the hard problem of consciousness is a made-up problem and that brains just do give rise to consciousness, period. No brain, no consciousness, he says declaratively. The philosopher laughs condescendingly, perhaps also a little nervously.
At this point in the podcast, S zones out. When he surfaces from his daydream, he finds that the podcast has finished. He can hear the fuzzy sound of X’s snoring. He gets off the sofa and feels his way to the table where he picks up the digital device. Quietly, so as not to disturb X, he dictates the rest of the short story using the app for blind people.
The orphan’s blindness turns out to be transitory. He grows weary of being a spiritual guru and doubtful of the veracity of his own spiritual enlightenment (which he has come to believe is a form of self-hypnosis). He pivots back to a life of crime, although now the crimes he commits are sophisticated frauds rather than petty thefts and muggings. He launders the proceeds of his criminal activities using a rizhome-like web of shell companies. He reverses one of these shell companies into a special purpose acquisition vehicle listed on the New York Stock exchange. He commandeers this listed vehicle to engineer an audacious reverse takeover of a totemically significant media conglomerate.
Ignoring the shrill protestations of the corporate governance brigade, he installs himself as CEO, CFO and executive chairman. He spins off the non-performing assets and implements a savage round of lay-offs in the businesses that remain behind. He deploys every financial engineering trick in the book to juice the share price, on which he has placed many leveraged bets.
He uses the pay-outs on those bets to buy political influence. He parlays this political influence to install himself as a Democratic Party candidate in the presidential primaries. Using his media empire to not so much influence as control the narrative, he breezes through to the presidential election, which he also wins (resoundingly). World leaders line up to congratulate him on his achievement, some effusively and ingratiatingly, some laconically and grudgingly.
He wastes no time in engineering a pretext to go to war in the hinterland of Europe, a war that escalates into a triangulated nuclear conflict between the US, Russia and China. By the time the radioactive dust has settled, global civilisation has collapsed. Mass starvation ensues and humankind (what’s left of it anyway) reverts to a primitive agrarian brutish existence.
And that’s all S has on the story for now. He’s tired, he realises, so he feels his way to the bedroom and gets into bed. He soon falls asleep and not long after that he starts dreaming.
He dreams he is in a nuclear bunker with his wife. He is not surprised to find himself in a nuclear bunker – somewhere in the background of the dream a nuclear war is raging – but he is surprised to be sharing it with his wife, who for some reason is completely naked.
What are you doing here? he says in his dream. I could say the same thing, she says. Have you missed me? she adds. S thinks about it for a moment and then replies, perhaps not very honestly, that, yes, he has missed her. I thought you might have, she says. Oh you did, did you? says S. Yes, she says, it was obvious that you would. S laughs. His wife has lost none of her chutzpah, a quality he recalls he used to, and perhaps still does, find very attractive. I’m sorry, he says. What for? replies his wife. Being a shit husband, he says. You weren’t shit exactly, says his wife. Emotionally unavailable is the way I’d put it. Kind of the yin to my emotionally incontinent yang. S laughs. He laughs so heartily that the entire fabric of the dream starts to shake and shudder and then there is a loud explosion and S wakes up.
The first thing he realises is he can see. I can see, he exclaims, I can fucking see! The next thing he realises is he is in bed with his wife. Where am I? he says. What’s going on here? Without opening her eyes, his wife says (in an exasperated voice): you’ve been dreaming again, go back to sleep bonobo. Dreaming again? thinks S. Dreaming again, confirms the author of this diabolical story. The author stops there and resolves to do no editing whatsoever. They can take it or fucking leave it, he thinks. And he really means it this time.
