by Hari Kunzru
‘Plot or detail?’
‘Pardon?’
‘When you go to see a movie, what do you remember? The story, or weird stuff like the number the hero dials to call his mom?’
Arjun thought for a moment. ‘The story’
‘I wouldn’t worry too much. You’re doing a lot better than most of us. Anyway, you seem functional to me, on the surface at least. Would you say you were functional?’
This was a harder one. He hesitated. She threw up her hands.
‘OΚ, OK. Existential question. Uncomputable. You know, I’m kind of beginning to regret sending that thing round. Don’t get me wrong, Arjun, you seem like a nice guy and all, but some of the email I’ve been getting – Jesus, it’s a can of worms.’
‘So you think I’m all right? Though I’m also correct in saying you’re not medically qualified?’
‘Medically qualified? Dude, lighten up. I just pulled it off some website. Anyway, what’re you so worried about? Who’s to say what’s normal and what’s not? You’re happy, no?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well,’ she said with an air of finality, ‘then shut the fuck up.’
He looked shocked. She started to laugh. After a moment, he laughed too.
Chris’s decision to take the dorky Indian guy under her wing had no rational basis. Sure, the Asperger’s thing slayed her. While every other macho idiot in AV was trying to prove how interesting he was, here was this sweet sincere guy, just worried about his health. His literalism (actually he was kind of literal – maybe he was Asperger’s) was cute. It was also a form of directness, and for Chris directness was a good thing. And though he dressed even worse than most computer guys and had a wispy moustache on his top lip, he was not totally unpresentable. He was tall, for example, and had nice skin. There was something else too: a hiddenness. He acted like he had something important going on, that on some frequency of his life beyond the visible spectrum there was great excitement. When she went to the movies, Christine tended to concentrate on detail rather than on plot, but she did enjoy a mystery. She also enjoyed tinkering with people, taking them apart and putting them back together. So as they walked back to the parking lot after the game, Chris made two decisions: to hang out with Arjun and find out his secret, and to really truly try to give up this whole AS/non-AS game, which was beginning to screw with her head. It was getting as bad as the previous year, when everyone at Virugenix had fixated on a system for classifying your personality type according to your preference for early or late Beatles.
A group of them drove downtown, and she and Arjun wound up in a bar sharing a pitcher of bad margaritas with some of her Microsoft friends. The conversation circled round the usual stuff: apartments, jobs, where people were going on vacation. She gave Arjun the executive summary of her life (family in New Jersey, college years at Stanford, always wanted to be a programmer, weird for a girl, but there you go) and found out some surface information about him. He was, as she suspected, on one of those slave visas, being paid a fraction of what it would cost Darryl to hire an American engineer. She dropped in what an asshole she thought Darryl was, with his bits of moon rock and his I-was-in-Wired Ghostbuster bullshit. Arjun seemed really uncomfortable, as if he didn’t want to say bad things about his boss. He seemed to miss his family, especially his kid sister. He had a picture of her in his wallet. His sister. Chris was not given to fits of girlie emotion, but the only available term for that was sweet. When she asked what he did when he wasn’t working, he hedged, saying something about personal projects. When ten thirty rolled around, he looked at his watch and announced he had to go.
‘Up early tomorrow?’
‘I suppose so. I have things to do.’
‘Where’s your car? Did you leave it at Microsoft?’
‘No. I don’t have a car. I’ll walk home.’
Out it came, bit by bit. He didn’t drive? Chris was actually shocked, wondered for one dumb moment whether this was a sort of Hindu religious thing, like orthodox Jews not being able to tear toilet paper on the sabbath.
‘It must be hard for you.’
‘It’s OK. I like to walk. It gives me time to think.’
‘How about a bike?’ suggested one of the other guys.
Arjun nodded uncertainly. Chris found one of those third-margarita sentences forming on her lips.
‘I’ll teach you.’
‘What?’
‘To drive. If you want, I’ll teach you. I’m a good teacher. I have strong interpersonal skills.’
His face crumpled into a huge grin. ‘Really?’ he said. ‘You mean it?’
‘Sure.’
‘Great. That’s so – so great. Fantastic! You know, Chris, you really are a very nice person.’
Out of anyone else’s mouth that would have been ironic.
He ended up getting a ride from one of the Microsoft guys, who lived near Berry Acres. Chris finished margarita número cuatro and wondered what she had gotten herself into.
‘OΚ, now turn the wheel. That’s right – no – other direction, you were OK the first time. There you go. Check for traffic. Mirror. Signal. Now move off slowly…’
Teaching Arjun to drive turned out to be – well, not the lowest stress activity Chris had ever undertaken. More than once she said a prayer for the Honda’s mirrors, and the front bumper lost a low-intensity conflict with a wooden planter in the Virugenix parking lot.
‘Slow down, Arjun. Brake… brake!’
The car was a piece of crap anyway, so Chris could be reasonably zen about the damage. From her point of view the first lesson was a qualified success, apart from the weird moment when Arjun burst into tears. Two or three sessions in, he could more or less propel the car forwards and backwards, understood the basic rules of the road and even seemed intermittently aware of other road users. After an hour of white-knuckle 15-m.p.h. progress round Redmond, Chris tended to need a drink, which was how the two of them came to be regulars at Jimmy’s Brewhouse, a snug little place with a neon Budweiser sign in the window and a selection of microbrew ales which Arjun was working through in strict alphabetical order.
Chris liked him. When he drank, his shyness evaporated and he became animated, waving his arms and laughing. He talked a lot about his extended family, which seemed to have more members than American Express, and he had a habit of comparing events in his life with scenes in Indian movies. Since Chris had never been to an Indian movie, the parallels were mostly lost on her, but it became clear that at least some of his hidden life was spent in a swashbuckling world of passionate love affairs, family feuds, epic struggles and big MGM-style production numbers.
‘You’re not gay, are you?’ she theorized one night, after one too many pints of Jimmy’s Big Bear Porter. Seeing his crestfallen face, she backtracked hurriedly. ‘Forget I said that.’ Later she caught herself flirting, wagging a finger and giving him arch smiles. ‘You know,’ she heard herself say, ‘you should shave off that moustache. You’d look much better without it.’
‘Really?’ he said. ‘You think so?’
The next day at work the moustache had gone. Despite the warning bells ringing in her head, Chris decided she was pleased. He did look better.
Another night at Jimmy’s, they worked a little too far through the alphabet. By the time she found herself staring down into a half-drunk glass of Sammamish Steam Ale, Chris was reconciled to leaving the car on the street and getting up early to pick it up before it got a ticket. Arjun was propped up on his elbows, staring at her tattoos. ‘They’re intense,’ he said in that odd in-between accent of his – American vowels caught between treacly Indian consonants.
‘It’s a tribal design,’ she told him.
‘Of which tribe?’
‘I don’t think it’s from anywhere, Arjun. It’s more of a generic thing. Just generically tribal.’
He considered that for a moment.
‘Didn’t your parents mind?’
‘They didn’t really have a say. I wanted to
do it, so I did. End of story.’
‘But why?’
‘Why? It was something I wanted. Nic and I both got tattooed around the same time, at this place in San Francisco. The scene is really big here, Arjun. It’s a kind of a ritual act. You guys do it in India, right, the holy men or whoever…’
She trailed off. Arjun was not listening. His eyes looked glazed.
‘Who’s Nic?’ he asked.
‘I’ve told you about Nic,’ she said, but realized she hadn’t, not really.
He nodded, jutting out his bottom lip in a sagacious expression. ‘I think I need to go home.’ As he tried to stand up, he knocked his chair backwards on to the floor and staggered into the table. Beer spread across the wood-effect surface. One or two of Jimmy’s patrons turned round from the bar to watch.
Chris grabbed on to his arm. ‘Hold on there, partner. Let’s just take it one step at a time.’
There was no way he was going to make it back to Berry Acres so Chris took a blurry executive decision and steered him in the direction of her place. Nicolai wasn’t home, and she deposited Arjun on the couch in her living room while she searched out some extra bedding and drank several glasses of water, hoping to stave off the worst of the hangover which was already bearing down on her like a truck. When she went back in to check on him, he had passed out. She arranged him lengthwise, removed the sneakers from the feet dangling over the end of the couch and laid a quilt over the top like a shroud. Then she went to bed.
When Nic tumbled through the door an hour later, loaded and horny after a night out with his buddies, he made so much noise that Chris was sure Arjun would wake up. Even when the two of them went at it like teenagers, Nic yelling incomprehensible Bulgarian sexy stuff and taking her hand away from his mouth every time she tried to shut him up, there was no sound from the next room. Arjun was probably down for the count.
Unfortunately not, though he had no memory of arriving in the dark place. His head was spinning, his mouth was parched, and somewhere off to his left someone was shouting. He listened, trying to gather his consciousness into one portable bundle. There is something about the sound of other people having sex which clears the head, and little by little he was drawn through the wall towards the noises, gradually discerning ragged breathing, muffled groans and unmistakably Chris-like giggles beneath the repetitive beat of the thumping headboard. There is also something about the sound of sex which, if you are lying on a lumpy couch with the beginnings of a hangover and your feet sticking out from under a strange-smelling quilt, can induce feelings of melancholy. For a few moments Arjun contemplated the world’s colder and lonelier aspects, then blacked out into a turbulent alcoholic void.
Guy was sitting next to Gabriella in a booth at Sake-Souk, a newly opened Mayfair restaurant. Whenever a waiter came by, he was witty and she dispensed one of her vivid smiles, but as soon as they felt they were not being observed they lapsed into uneasy silence, chewing their way through the chef’s Japanese–Lebanese fusion food as if oblivious to its trendsetting collisions of taste and presentation.
Guy watched the evening traffic through the restaurant’s front window, the yellow lights of taxis, the sleek European cars delivering their occupants to places of discreet entertainment. He was thinking about money, its generation and decay. Specifically about his money, which was unaccountably refusing to regenerate at the required rate. He was a man with overheads. He glanced back at Gabriella, who was pushing an aubergine and chickpea drag-onroll around her plate and staring inscrutably at a point behind his shoulder. She looked beautiful. Her hair and eyes and nose and teeth. He put a hand down on the banquette, next to her thigh. He had not mentioned his money troubles; Gabriella could sense neediness and did not tolerate it very well. He wanted to touch her, but it felt unwise. Gaby could do this, generate invisible armour for herself.
Realizing she was being watched, Gabriella smiled and ran a self-conscious hand through her long brown hair. Guy smiled back, trying to feel reassured. She really was the best-looking girl in the restaurant. When he first saw her at the Film Fund party, he had hoped she would be the one, by which he meant the one who would become the centre of his life, or at least would be located at the centre of the several intersecting value circles which he visualized as defining his life. He risked slipping a hand on to her lap, sliding his palm over the sheer surface of her skirt. She put a hand over it and patted. He was not sure how to interpret this.
Gabriella was too caught up in her own reflections to notice Guy’s anxiety. She had got lost in the restaurant’s dark wood and white linen interior, a world in which space occurred in discrete platonic units, boxes of vacancy. She watched Guy take a bite of his hamachi kebab, making that irritating clicking sound with his teeth. Across the room a man was staring at her. She did not feel hungry.
When people were looking for a comparison for Gabriella, they usually went for Audrey Hepburn. She had the same high cheekbones and air of aristocratic startledness, of having been marooned wherever you encountered her, a refugee from a better, gentler place. But, unlike Hepburn, there was a rough edge, a raggedness of chewed nails and cigarette smoke which gave her an air of potential promiscuity that Guy (among many others) found irresistible. Gabriella knew this. She had learned about irresistibility aged twelve, when a friend of her mother tried to kiss her at the zoo. In the reptile house.
A multiplication of boxes. Nothing but trouble, really.
The previous night she had stayed up late with Sophie, her friend from the Sussex boarding school where she had spent an unhappy year trying to do A levels. Gaby had had a bad time because of food and boys and being foreign. Sophie had had a bad time because of food and no boys. They sat opposite each other on the tropical hardwood floor of Guy’s flat, comfortably occupying their old roles: Sophie watching Gaby do something, in this case chopping out lines of coke on a framed photograph of herself and Guy diving in the Red Sea. ‘You look so happy in that picture,’ she said. Sophie said things like that. You have such nice eyes. That is such a pretty dress. It was one of the things which made them friends.
Gaby looked down at the two people in the photograph, at their salty hair and the masks perched on top of their heads, and tried to remember what the one who was her had felt. Careful to keep her hair out of the way, she did a line and from between pinched nostrils told Sophie, ‘He’s being such an idiot at the moment.’
Sophie was always eager to hear dirt about Guy, who misheard what she said and looked over her shoulder at parties. She rolled her eyes sympathetically and waited for more. Gaby passed her the rolled-up note.
Guy had put the picture up. It was evidence: that they were together and this was their place, that because of shared memories as demonstrated in Exhibit A they also had a future. For her part, Gaby mistrusted snapshots. She possessed very few of her own, perhaps a dozen recorded instants of time which she could not fit together to make a pattern, let alone a life. Herself, five years old on the gangplank of a yacht in Greece, holding the hand of the captain. As a baby on a rug in the apartment in Vienna. Spindly angry thirteen by a hotel pool in Singapore. There was one of her parents getting married, an ostentatious eight-by-ten which had run in a magazine. They wore the flamboyant hats and collars and scarves of 1971 and were surrounded by people. To Gaby it looked no more or less than it was. Financier marries fashion model, turn to page 86. There was one of her sister too, squinting into the camera somewhere hot and dry.
She had always been in motion, even when they were all together. Money moved her. First it was her father’s; later it belonged to her mother’s boyfriends. It took her to various places in which had existed various versions of herself, each furnished with a nanny and a school and an address to memorize and another set of little girls to invite to a birthday party in an expensive restaurant where there was always a clown and no one laughed. There was only one constant: sooner or later everyone and everything was left behind.
By the time she was sixteen her father
was a man she met in hotels and her mother was thinking of marrying again, so on a whim she asked to go to boarding school. An English girls’ school like the ones in books. At the time everyone thought it was the perfect solution. After it didn’t work out there was Lausanne and Paris and her own modelling and a Brazilian photographer boyfriend and too many drugs, but weirdly it was her sister, the self-sufficient one who shouted at her mother about guilt and responsibility, who took the overdose. Caroline’s movement had mostly been across Asia. Beaches and ashrams. Jewellery-making. Towards the end it accelerated, took on the quality of flight. By then she was back in Europe and always part of a group, as if she needed people as ballast, numbers to hold her down. Political and religious groups. Self-actualization. Healing. There were retreats and communes. Fasting and chanting. Then sleeping pills on the bathroom floor of a farmhouse in, where was it, Andalusia? It had been hard to find out exactly why she had gone there. Like so many events in Gaby’s life, Caroline’s death made no particular sense. It was just a thing.
Her parents spent the funeral politely convincing each other the death was accidental, though Gaby knew how the money had hounded Caroline, how she hated it for making her life into a game. Watching the two of them edit the story to suit themselves made them so terrible in her eyes that she left Firenze that afternoon and for good measure left Paris and the photographer too and somehow London was where she ended up.
Sophie chattered, taking gulps of Chardonnay and rubbing her nose with her fingers. ‘I don’t know why you stay with him. Of course he’s rich and everything. Or at least he seems rich. You can’t tell with men these days. One minute they are, then you discover they’re not.’
Gaby looked at her with a twinge of distaste. Underneath its crown of expensively streaked hair her face was flushed with wine and cocaine. Pink patches mottled her neck and cheeks, giving her the appearance of a side of marbled beef. She had, Gaby reflected, got bigger since school. Now a size eighteen with a pure maths degree, she combined high earnings as a telecoms analyst with a bleak and hostile view of men. In her Fulham townhouse there was a walk-in closet filled with shoes, tiny pointy confections of silk and leather which cost hundreds of pounds a pair and made her feet hurt. Gaby looked at the twin plasters on her friend’s bare heels. Poor Sophie, with her dreams of daintiness.
