by Mari Reiza
Lucy then laughed at what she told people when they asked her what she was doing at her age, with no children. ‘We have four miscarriages set in chloroform, decorating the wall: Clarissa, Charlie, Cleo and Catia. And now there will be a fifth. Do you have a good C name?’
Was she asking me directly? It was crazy.
No, I didn’t. I couldn’t even breathe, how could I speak a C name for a dead baby?
‘The closest we have come to a family,’ she added. She liked to shock people. She liked to shock herself, maybe to make sure that she still felt something.
She then described to me how that last time before Christmas, she had miscarried alone in her Hampstead flat: ‘In the small toilet with three mirrored walls,’ she explained. ‘I was amazed at how it looked like it was all there,’ she said, ‘a tiny, fully proportioned, dead lump of life, the size of a chestnut. Was I supposed to kiss it or to pray before I flushed it? Should I give it a name? No. One, two, three. That’s it, flushed. Travel well my love in the underground world. I hope you get to the sea.’
I was dizzy listening to her account.
After the flushing she had burst into tears, she said, and cursed the world, insurrected into kicks and screams and fists flying and knocking the glass mirrors, with thousands of pieces of glass dancing over her naked body like a shadow of diamonds. ‘Diamonds turned to rubies with blood.’ Her husband had found her like that, she told me. And he could not cope with her pain, and she could not cope with his pain. So she knew that they would not talk about it again.
I was sweating, anticipating Lucy reaching the end of her story. She raised her eyes, and I bet she felt mine cursing Christ but she continued.
‘I understand that love has to be free,’ she said. ‘But just once, it must feel nice to look into someone's eyes and know that they couldn't live without you. What does it feel for someone to hold you tight and tell you that everything falling apart around you does not matter? That two is as complete, as special as it gets. That enslaving love must feel powerful,’ she was saying, ‘even if it wasn’t real, if it wasn’t forever.’
She was now talking with the lethargy of a dead man walking. ‘Bound in so much love not to care to betray freedom and to betray yourself. But who wants to bind like that anymore? It is too much to ask from anybody, too much responsibility. It is easier for people to set you free, whether you want it or not.’
Then she went quiet.
I knew what Lucy, my heart’s passion, meant. She wanted someone to call her Roxanne and tell her, sing to her, that she didn't need anymore to sell her body to the doctors of the night. I could sense these unheard things even if she thought that I couldn’t. And I wanted to do it. I really wanted to love her, but I was tied to the floor with ropes like in the children depictions of Gulliver.
‘You must know it well, Vittal,’ she said. ‘Only the man who is free can be truly good, free to choose pain if he pleases, to enjoy the consciousness of his own degradation. But freedom can be unnerving, exhausting, scary and lonely, and sometimes I wish that I was bound. And the choice between those two irreconcilable dreams kills me. Being loved or being free? Being free is tough, isn't it?’ she was asking me.
‘But I am free,’ I said instinctively without thinking. Was that the only thing that I was going to say after a monologue so poignant, so powerful, so full of pain?
‘Oh really?’ she replied languidly. And then she stopped talking for good and stood there waiting.
Lucy. Lucy, Lucy. What was I supposed to do with that final silence?
She had invented an impossible silence and put it there in front of me, to test me. I couldn’t bear it. Suddenly, it freaked me out that she may be giving me what I wanted out of pity. But why should I feel offended if she wanted my comfort, for lack of a better companion? Why did I always have to seek so much clarity? How could one live without the ignorance and carelessness? Why couldn’t I just reason, ‘She’ll leave him; you like her,’ and be bloody happy.
But at that moment, I knew that if I tried to say anything I would cry, and if I moved I would have to kiss her. I wanted to love her and nurse her and live up to being her saviour and her hero. I wanted to feel her, sticking to me like a limpet and smelling like a sea snail, tucked deep in my heart where she couldn’t be carried away by the Eastern wind. I wanted, like her, to fight for a free world, to breathe freedom. But I sat in silence and I did not move. I did nothing.
And I do not know how much time we passed like that, in silence, and whether it made us feel closer or further apart. All I know is that at that precise moment, the story could have taken a new path again and it didn’t. I had missed another opportunity to start anew, to change my destiny.
How many times I have written to Lucy in my head reliving that instant. ‘Dear Lucy, you composed yourself to break the spell. But I know what you were thinking the minute before you did that. You were saying, “By Santa Anna’s lost leg, Vittal, come and take me.” I did not manage it. Shame on me and my wasted life.“Life is not worth anything if I hear a mortal cry and it cannot touch my expiring heart,” right? My life was worth nothing at all. Then you said to me that what you liked the most about me was my sense of mystery, that you knew if only one day I did something it would be so smart that it would knock you out. Next, you asked me, jokingly, whether people unable to make life may be rewarded with getting more out of sex as a consolation, the same way blind people have an enhanced sense of hearing, and with a crooked smile you told me that you had to rush to a “crucial” meeting. You wanted to point it out to me, how that was what I did every day, misjudging the relative importance of things. And when you left I didn’t need an excuse, an opportunity to leg it anymore, and I felt ashamed I had longed for one a minute before. I was sure then that I suddenly loved you more, knowing you were defective. But I couldn’t cope with the love, I didn’t have enough emotional intelligence. The door closed behind you and I felt uncertain whether I could thaw back to life again. Lucy, my treasure, you have to believe me.’
The night after Lucy’s confessions, I listened to Elvis Costello’s ‘She’ about a hundred times, lying on my new mattress in my newly rented one-bed flat in Mayfair. I could not forget Lucy’s face.
Lucy was ALL. And yet she must have thought that I cared nothing for love, that perhaps I cared nothing for justice and injustice. Maybe I thought myself that it was not my business to disturb the Universe. Maybe I didn’t have the right.
After half a bottle of Glenmorangie I went to sleep with Sylvia Plath, and her black lake, black boat, black cut-paper people, in the silence of astounded souls, amongst black trees, whose shadows cover Canada. I had not opened Sylvia Plath for years.
In the night I heard, ‘Coward.’ It was Lucy shouting to me in my dreams.
Things start unravelling
Things were unravelling fast. Most of us were starting to be surprisingly idle, sitting around congregated on a few floors in the London office.
There was suddenly a feeling of finality creeping in. We did not yet have the press hunting to interview Enterprisers outside the office, but nearly. People love failure and decline, the demise of the heroes, that final chapter where they become anti-heroes. Clients would soon be calling us with a mixture of contempt, happiness, and searching for the scoop.
Why?
The rumour was that Tom M. was now terminal, but no one had been considered to be good enough to succeed him in taking Enterprise to the next level. The conclusion to a round of very senior meetings in the past few months – Who were these senior people now that Bev and Edd and Tom had left? Retired dinosaurs? – had been that there may be potential acquirers which could offer Enterprise an alternative exit route.
It was unthinkable.
Peter was in denial.
We were all in denial. Enterprise couldn’t be Enterprise other than at Enterprise. Could it? I imagined myself taking the potential buyers round the London office like one shows a flat for rent.
‘So how
many people work here?’
‘About half at any one time, a bit less lately, I would say.’
‘How is the office environment, can we look around?’
‘Like working in a bloody mine, better untested.’
But I would not be able to deter them. And the prospective buyers would ask for so many details, so that by the time of their final triumphant entry, they would know exactly where the knife drawer was, the pill cabinet and the beam in the basement, where Enterprisers would be marching as pilgrims towards the promised land of death to safeguard their pride.
We were entering into a new era of Enterprise decline, and for any Reader joining this story now, Enterprise already smelled of death. Our creative brilliance was giving way to a creeping moral dissolution which started to reverberate through Enterprise culture. It had begun as a metallic taste in the back of the mouth, which amplified as the storm advanced, anticipating the senseless fury of the watershed.
A belief started to insinuate itself that Enterprise’s technological, linguistic, educational and civilisational advantage was eroding. The place was even in culinary decline – the free cantine which had been a highlight of the London office had gone. And this is when the PEN-ers had moved into full-on revolution.
Everywhere people were living at the edge of themselves and melting. Alakrita had taken her wickedness to new heights: I kept having fantasies where she skinned her preys alive to make pretty coloured slippers; Trojan was more worried than ever, he kept saying that we had lost our way as if we needed to be exorcised. The tight-fisted, double-faced rogue continued to be the last one to the bar, though, which became quite annoying because we were going there so often now. ‘He had never been a man to spend his ink in curlicues, more like stabbing you in the eye with the ink pen itself,’ Felicity was right to point out that we should not have expected Trojan to soften despite the air of finality. Tobias kept travelling around the world pretending nothing was happening, convinced we would be saved by Super Mario or he would become become Super Mario and save us himself; and you should have seen Marene’s hair!!
But Lucy? Lucy had turned herself inwards and was mechanically working with Peter, brushing off any anxieties over Enterprise’s life or death. A small part of me felt that her retreat was my fault.
The sad reality was that Enterprise had not been creating anything. And by our own admission we hated selling, so we had not even been selling anything. What had we been doing? Churning and burning and throwing darts onto a board hoping that some would stick. And we had been making a fortune in this racket for some time but what had happened to our souls? We were constantly in the company of people who had spent a life at Enterprise, a life related to our central philosophy. This was why so many people who wanted to leave and who should have left and could have left, thought they couldn’t.
Who was holding the intellectual responsibility? NCC. No Chain of Command. Mutual accountability. Everyone and no one. This was why we had no name other than X, to avoid being individually pinned down. But in reality many of us thought that it was now up to Peter to save us. He needed to come back to be Peter-Moses. He had been our chief architect on the way up, was he not in command now?
We had all these thoughts more than ever, or maybe for the first time for some of us, roaring through our heads. Because given our capacity for not thinking when it had suited us, we had, perhaps in the past, chosen not to think whilst reaching out to happiness. It had been a deliberate scaling down of the individual, using our well-developed feature to fit ourselves to what was expected. We had thought that we had been such good people, although from the outside others must have looked at us in pain because we were letting ourselves down. We had set ourselves targets and limits and become limited creatures. Endurance targets. Achievement targets. We hadn’t lived to live. We had lived limited to endure and to achieve. And we had built a responsible capitalism where we denied ourselves that capitalism was about everyone scamming everyone and he who scammed the most ultimately won the game. Within our limits, we had built a moral high ground too. ‘The road to perdition is paved with good intentions.’ Ours truly was.
But with more time on our hands, processed peas were getting their brains back.
Had we been terrible men? Shouldn’t we be bothered about our conscience? Or was it our own fault that we could suddenly not see the purity in what we had been doing?
We felt like someone was whisking a black chaos to take hold of us. And around and around we went, rationalising, justifying, denying then rationalising some more until we were able to re-build a precarious erection of virtuous will around what Enterprise had stood for. But for how long?
One night I had a dream. Enterprisers were pushing big sacks full of sand to make a mound. We had been doing it for a long time and had forgotten why. Felicity, Cate, Rich were below me. Matt, Alakrita and others next to me. Peter, Nal, Trojan and Hammi were on the next layer up. I saw Hammi’s fancy Italian leather shoes, all dusty. Peter’s Kiton suit was torn, his knee bloodied. Suddenly, I could not stop looking at Nal’s Rolex. He kept shouting at us to keep going. We were all sweating as we pushed up the lower slopes; it was preposterous. We were never getting up there. I glanced and saw at the top of the mountain men already free. I had this sudden dread that as we pushed, the mountain got higher and the free men moved away, not closer.
I looked up again and focused vividly on this one woman with the men at the top. It was Lucy, her small breasts showing, looking serene in nothing but a filthy rag, like Liberty in Delacroix’s painting. She was free as a bird. Then suddenly, it all melted and became gooey and sticky, like I was advancing through an unknown density of soft people bearing down on me. And next the endless free fall, as if God was mocking with his ironic smile at my failure to believe in him, to believe in myself.
I was too young to have these dismal thoughts! But it was true. We had been men driven by a sense of duty, but we had let duty get the best of us. The higher we climbed the more uneasy we became about our station in life. We could use money, power, influence to control people, but did not realise that these were controlling ourselves. They made us into people we weren’t. They got us acquaintances but not friends. They delivered things that did not make us happy. A life of leisure became a life of pain, not peace. We had spent years filling in a hole that kept getting bigger. I wept at the ruination of my life. It was time for disorder, experimentation, for transformation and re-emergence. It was time to get out.
16
Vittal Choudhary to Nuria Friedman, March 2021
My dear Nuria,
We arrive to the end.
I thank you for understanding that this was my story, that I had one shot at it. This has been, as you first said, a reminder of the nature of the human condition, a work of de-humanisation followed by re-humanisation. I have taken our insanity and stretched it to understand where its flaws were, why we lived with it and who was to blame. A mind shifted to extreme positions, frantically scribbled tilted limbs and pumping hearts gyrating, looking for an identity.
I wanted to try to have a straight answer and feel that everything was simpler, and to understand why we hurt ourselves and each other by controlling everything until we were numb. And I still do not know. I have not figured it out. But, at least I have understood some of the reasons that made it possible and how the fiction could have made itself so strong, little by little, until it felt real and sane and logical. I had set out to understand the way the world had worked, turned into a detective to spot the dagger, the shadow and the hat, the love and the violence, the savagery and the mind games in the chaos of that complexity. And I understand some of it, so that some scattered stars have determined into constellations before my eyes, and some remain free in the sky.
I now know that I should have started this story like a fairy tale. ‘“Once upon a time there was a little prince who lived on a planet and who had need of a friend,” (from The Little Prince). But he found the planet was deserted because, a
lthough there was at least one flower, Lucy, he was too taken in his own thoughts and didn’t see it.’ This story would have been closer to the truth. An innocent, simpler version. It would have really been my story.
But when I started this story, I could not see the sheep through the box. It’s amazing how so many people can’t. So I had to take a much longer, more complicated roundabout route. I also guessed that you wanted to know about Peter, and about Enterprise and our collective state of mind. Not just my story. And I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t missing anything out.
We have agreed that the story I have written is not true to the letter. But in all honesty, I still worry that it may be nothing like the real thing. Maybe, in the yearn to reason chaos, I have imagined what suited me. Mine are fictional characters, not real people but artificial language vessels. And I fret that I have possibly put too much consciousness into them, that I’m not altogether sure the men in my story were even alive or whether they were only apparitions, and that my valuation does not reflect their true worth. All the consciousness I have given them, does it make them more worthy, more human or more sick? We were just bees. If we are our relationships to other people, then we were nothing. Bare. Zilch. Busy bees churning at small pieces of immaterial stuff, inadvertently creating havoc.
Even Peter. It would have been very tedious to recall with exactitude. It would have been too boring for the reader who wants to empathise with human life. Perhaps we didn't realise what we were doing. Although, it may be conceivably too hard to believe that we had become that stupid. Or perhaps we were really numbed, but it is hard to ascertain, even when looking at it in perspective. I am not sure anymore. Have I painted a Peter that suited you? Or would you have preferred to believe that he was unconscious to any harm he inflicted?
