there is no such thing as free will

The woman and I embrace in the hallway. Her tongue is moist and her lips are mudflat soft. We remove our clothes and copulate standing up. When we’re finished the woman asks if I feel better now and I say I do. She says good. She says I was hoping you would. We go to the living room and sit on the sofa side by side, naked. The dog sprawls out on the chaise longue, sighs. The woman turns the television on. We watch an American or Australian daytime soap opera. All of the actors are very tanned and sound like they’re reading from a script, which they are of course, but without any attempt at acting whatsoever. I find it hard to follow the plot, which is either too subtle or too banal to hold my interest. I fall asleep. When I wake up, I am somehow back in my own house. I am wedged into a corner of the sofa and the dog is on its winged armchair curled into an armadillo ball. The top half of my torso is clothed, the bottom half naked. The television is on. A news presenter is interviewing a man with oversized glasses and startled eyes about the inverted yield curve. I didn’t know the yield curve had inverted, but apparently it has. Fuck. I immediately log onto my online brokerage account and sell all of my equities and buy some short-dated bonds. I go to my writing desk and start typing a new story on my shit-heap laptop. I write about a woman who lives in a yellow house. She’s an economist who’s working on a blueprint for a new form of capitalism. In this form of capitalism, directors will no longer be able to get stupidly rich by rigging their share options, employees will no longer be incentivised to commit fraud to achieve unrealistic budgets, consumers will only buy what they need, producers will only manufacture what is needed, advertising will be banned, big tech will be nationalised, use of social media will be confined to people who meet certain ethical and educational standards and all young people will be offered a large-ish sum of money when they turn eighteen in return for forgoing a state pension. I can’t think of anything else to put in the blueprint, so I square bracket this section for now. Then I plot out the rest of the story. The woman changes the course of history with her blueprint. She marries a Venezuelan drug lord turned demagogue and has three children. One of these children writes stories. One of the stories the child writes is about a man who lives with his dog and has no friends. The man has no idea what to do with his days, so he writes stories. One of the stories the man writes is about a Venezuelan economist who lives on his own with a dog. The dog can talk and has communist sympathies. And that’s all I’ve got on this story. I reread it and decide it’s completely ludicrous. Naturally, I delete the file.

When I wake up, I don’t feel refreshed. A whole day with nothing to do stretches out in front of me. I make a cup of coffee. I write a new story. This one features a middle-aged woman who has forgotten her name and where she lives. Luckily for her she doesn’t have to remember because she’s actually at home and the people who seem to live in the same house know her name. They tell the woman that this is where she lives and her name is Capitalism. That’s crazy, she says, how can I be called ‘Capitalism’? The people around her explain that her father was a successful businessman, the best of his generation, and that he named her after the economic system in which he flourished. As a mark of respect or gratitude, they say. The woman still thinks it’s crazy and suspects that her real name isn’t Capitalism. She’s right, but I haven’t figured out yet where I’m going with this, so I leave the story hanging. Then I reread what I’ve written so far and promptly delete the file. I get up and make myself a cup of coffee. I take the dog for a walk. I look for the yellow house, but it’s gone. I go to the pub and order a pint of beer, which I drink sitting at a table on the terrace overlooking the church. I am joined by a tangential acquaintance of mine, a young man with a Castro beard and a bald pate. After filling me in on the minutiae of how his life is going – top level summary: everything is great – he tells me a story about a member of his family, a cousin, who has recently secured seed funding for an app that obviates the need for people to actually have to do anything in the so-called real world. Why would anyone want to use an app like that? I say. The tangential friend frowns, says he doesn’t get what I mean. Anyway, the point of the story, he explains, isn’t the app. Then he explains that his cousin, being a thoroughly incorrigible libertine, has already blown a significant amount of the capital raised to develop the app on living the high life, meaning he has no choice, as it were, but to start up a ponzi scheme. Which is where you come in, the tangential friend says. Me? I say. Yes, he says, you know, to advise us on what we have to do. I say I’m sorry but my days of advising people on how to set up ponzi schemes are well and truly behind me. I am a writer now, I say. Speaking of which, the tangential friend says, have you had anything published yet? No, I say. I see, he says, whilst simultaneously making a facial expression that implies, strongly implies, he thinks I’m wasting my time trying to make it as a writer. Fuck him, I think, fuck him and all the people like him and all the people related to those people. I make my excuses and leave the pub. I forget the dog is tied to the table leg, so I go back for the dog and then I leave the pub, for real this time.

I take the dog home, feed it and immediately the dog is whining to be let out. I open the French doors and the dog goes out onto the patio and does a poo whilst looking guiltily at me, as if it feels that pooing on the patio is a morally transgressive act. When the dog has finished, it slopes off to have a sniff around the garden and I go and pick up the poo with a contraption I made myself, a contraption which also incinerates the poo. I go back inside and suddenly feel a tremendous sense of boredom, as if all the things I will ever experience have already been experienced and that it’s all just repetition from here on in. I do what I always do when this happens: I put the TV on. I watch a documentary about two autistic savant sisters who never forget anything, like, for example, what day of the week it was on November 12, 1987, or what they had for dinner that day or what the presenter of their favourite gameshow was wearing on that day’s episode of their favourite gameshow. It reminds me of a Borges story I read once about a man who also never forgets anything, although I can’t remember the title, which is ironic I suppose. I get bored of the documentary half-way through and start watching a cartoon, which seems to me to be unnecessarily lewd and gratuitously cynical about human nature, not that I don’t find it funny, I do. But not funny enough to watch more than one episode, after which I turn the TV off and go and sit on the toilet for a while and ruminate about the past. When I’m done ruminating, I get into my clubbing gear, which comprises a powder-blue Oxford shirt, mustard chinos and loafers (worn sockless of course) and stare at myself in the gilt-framed mirror in the hallway trying to determine if I am objectively ugly or not. I decide it’s impossible to determine from my subjective perspective. I tell the dog not to wait up and head out the front door. I walk through the village and along the main road with my thumb held up. After walking for however long, a Hells Angel type pulls over on his Harley and asks me where I’m headed. I tell him and he says he can take me as far as such and such a place if it helps at all. I say it does and he tells me to hop on then, so I do.

I am dropped off in a dilapidated town centre next to a train station, from where I take an underground hyperloop train to the city. It’s too early for a nightclub, so I go to a basement shisha bar I know, which is really a speakeasy bong bar. I hang out there for a bit smoking Lebanese black (or what I am told is Lebanese black but could just be hash from any old country) and sedulously clicking on all the links that come up when I google ‘nihilistic anarchism’ on my handheld device. When I adjudge enough time has elapsed, I head off to the swanky nightclub, which is in a catacomb with a secret entrance on the lower second floor of an all-night department store.

I dance frenetically to dark trance in the hard room. When I can take no more, I go to the chill-out room. I meet a girl in there who is very strange. She keeps trying to touch my face and I keep having to swat her hand away. Eventually, having had about as much as I can take of the girl’s antics, I flounce off to the main room where I gyrate to happy hardcore on a podium until I suddenly realise how ridiculous I must seem, a man of my age raving. Filled with self-loathing, I leave the nightclub immediately, finding myself all of a sudden in the lingerie section of the department store, which temporarily discombobulates me. I gather my wits and buy a bra, because why not. Then I take the lift to the ground floor and I exit that department store. I do parkour to the kebab shop, where I buy a large chicken doner. I eat it in the cab on the way home as the driver glares at me in the rear-view mirror.

When I open the door to my house the dog assails me with its wet tongue and I am suddenly wide awake again, so I settle down to write a story. This one is about a man who commits a heinous crime (unspecified for now) and is subsequently caught, tried, convicted and sentenced to death. Asked if he has any final words before the executioner administers the poison, the man says simply: there is no such thing as free will. Upon his death he is reincarnated as a dog. The dog lives with a man who writes stories. No, I tell myself, not this creative cul-de-sac again. I change the story template. The man the dog lives with doesn’t write stories. In fact, the man is a layabout who only aspires to write stories and does nothing most days, apart from perambulating in the fields behind the village and watching vapid TV shows and meeting obscure people and going clubbing every once in a while. For once I think I might be on to something and I resist the automatic urge to delete the file.