by Hari Kunzru
This, she thought as she slid around in the back seat of a taxi, was going to make a great story. She was getting little fluttery rushes and the idea of being touched seemed really good, and she took sips of bottled water and chewed gum and didn’t really think about what she was going to do or say when she got there. He was a guy. She was going round to offer him sex. Lab-rat stuff. What could be more simple? Her serotonin-drenched brain pulled up a sugar-coated version of Arjun, somehow less gawky than lean, less sallow than mahogany-skinned, a tender young man in more or less matching clothing, ready to be initiated into the art of love.
Standing outside Berry Acres, reality failed to bite. Arjun’s voice on the intercom was perplexed, but he buzzed her in, opening the door dressed in a pair of boxer shorts and a t-shirt with Hi from Seattle! printed over a picture of the Space Needle. Chris rose above this and dispensed her most seductive grin, which, in her narcotized state, somehow extended itself into a sort of street-corner leer, an expression to match a stained polyester suit.
‘Sorry, did I wake you up?’
‘No, no, I was working.’
She amped the grin up a little. ‘Aintcha gonna invite me in?’
‘Sure.’
She had never been inside Arjun’s apartment. It looked as if someone had gone dumpster-diving behind an electrical store and left what they didn’t want there. Computer equipment was everywhere, coated in a teenage-boy mulch of dirty plates, underwear and paper waste. The whole place smelled strongly of fried chicken. As she stood, swaying slightly, Arjun ran around, kicking a hole in the mess so they could sit down.
‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’ he asked, hurriedly closing windows on his computer screen.
‘That would be a start. What were you doing, checking out porn?’
Arjun looked shocked. ‘No.’
‘I bet you were.’ She stepped over a dismantled tower case and a slew of Indian magazines, and started to clean a cup at the sink. Arjun bobbed up beside her.
‘I’ll do it,’ he said.
‘Just want a drink of water.’ She stroked his cheek. ‘Hello.’
‘Um, hello. So not coffee, then?’
Stroking felt good. She carried on.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked.
‘Oh, nothing. Give me a hug.’
‘What?’
She drew his arms round her. Obediently he squeezed. The warmth set off more MDMA shivers in her body.
Despite her euphoria, Chris could not ignore the substandard ambience of Arjun’s living space. The smell she could live with, but the ceiling light-fitting had a bare high-wattage bulb, which cast hard shadows on the piles of junk and the undecorated walls and particularly on the man she was hugging, making him look disturbingly cadaverous and unmahogany. From somewhere beneath a pile of chemical pillows came the faint sound of an alarm bell ringing. She ignored it and pressed on.
‘It’s too bright in here. You got any candles?’
‘Candles? Why? Are you expecting a blackout?’
She barged around, stumbling over something which felt mushy underfoot. Ignoring it, she switched off the main light and turned the bulb of the desk lamp to the wall.
‘There. Much better. Music?’
Arjun, bemused, headed for the computer. The decision was too important to leave to him, so Chris waved him off, sat down and browsed a directory of MP3S. Discarding the Indian film music left her with a limited choice. Arjun hovered at her shoulder. He seemed nervous at having her around his system. As high as she was, she could tell he had it configured to do something unusual. A lot of crummy-looking hard drives had been networked together, and before he switched it off an old fourteen-inch monitor was displaying some kind of constantly updating log. She settled (‘N Sync? Jesus) for a Moby album: semi-lame but OK. Lush strings and blues samples filtered into the room.
‘There,’ she said, putting her arms round him. ‘That’s better.’
Arjun’s back muscles tensed under her hands. This is all – I mean, it’s a – very nice surprise.’
‘Yes, it is, isn’t it?’
‘You seem hot. Have you been taking exercise?’
‘No, baby, I came here for that.’
‘Really? How come? I don’t actually have any equipment or anything.’
She ignored the buzz of his voice and slipped one hand underneath his shirt, drifting away into a world of touch. His back felt smooth, warm. She nuzzled his neck. It was annoying that he was still talking. The important thing right now was to be naked.
‘Arjun?’
‘Yes?’
‘You seem stressed. Would you like a massage?’
‘Um – is that why you came? To give me a massage?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Well, I must say that’s very – I wasn’t really expecting – but I suppose that would be OK. I was more or less finished with –’
‘Arjun?’
‘Yes?’
‘Shut up. I mean stop talking. You don’t need to talk. Lie down and take your shirt off.’
He made some more incoherent protests, but, after clearing the bed of printouts and Pringle tubes, she had him more or less where she wanted him, prone on his stomach with her straddling his hips. She started kneading his narrow back. After a minute or two she took off her top and unhooked her bra. He had his eyes shut and didn’t seem to notice. When she slid a hand under the waistband of his shorts, he did notice: his buttocks clenched and his back went rigid. Struggling underneath her, he flipped on to his back, only to be confronted by the crowning artistic achievements of San Francisco’s Needle Bob, snaking over her naked torso.
‘What are you –’ She took his hands and put them on her breasts. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh.’
Some hours later the grey morning light revealed a scene of devastation. Since Chris’s contact lenses were glued to her eyes the world appeared mercifully hazy, but even with the visuals turned down she knew it was bad. Someone had filmed a splatter movie in her mouth. Someone else had administered a spinal tap. She had not slept, at least not in any meaningful sense of the word. Since Arjun stopped talking and started to breathe regularly and noisily through his mouth, she had been less aware of her surroundings at certain times than at others. Did that count? Carefully she lifted up his arm and slipped out of bed. With her first pace she stubbed her toe on something sharp and had to put a hand over her mouth to keep from crying out. The message was clear. It was imperative to leave. This was a bad place with sharp things in it. This was a chicken-smelling place of horror.
She swilled out her mouth with water and hunted for her clothes. Arjun lay on his side, one thin arm outstretched where she had left it. Squashed against the pillow, his face looked childish and undefined. She could not find anything in it, or in the section of shoulder and chest exposed by the turned-down quilt, to remind her why it had been so important to come by at 2 a.m. and have sex with this man. Physically she felt battered but mentally things were worse, her ordinary landscape of thoughts and feelings reduced to a scoured bleakness, a wasteland strewn with the shattered remnants of whoever she had been before she got high. It was the traditional moment to swear never to touch ecstasy or coke or alcohol again. It was the feeling that would work on the kids. Don’t do it, OK? Don’t feel like me.
She gathered her purse and groped for her second shoe among the nameless horrors around the bed. When it had finally been located, she tiptoed out and closed the door, realizing as she stepped into the brutal daylight that she didn’t have her shades. Or her car. She stumbled down the driveway and, before buzzing herself out, leaned her cheek for a moment against the cool metal of the security gate. Then, in a halting b-movie-zombie shuffle, she headed in the direction she judged most likely to contain coffee.
Four hours later Arjun opened his eyes into a warm summer Sunday morning. He felt fresh and relaxed, suffused with a sense of the rightness of things. Ordinarily he slept in kurta-pyjama, but this morning he was naked. Unable for the moment
to remember why, he turned on his side and spotted the little wrinkled slug of a used condom among the socks and foil trays on his floor. From this point of origin his memory expanded in a rush, bringing with it a sense of frank amazement at what had taken place in his apartment (in this very bed!) only a few hours previously.
The detail was too intense to face without embarrassment. The sheer bodiliness of it all. Wetness. The smell of skin. He remembered feeling out of control, which in itself seemed indecent. The memory had the confused quality of a dream.
And yet. The things she had done for him. Without help he would probably have never managed it. Now Chris had showed him, solved the uncomputable problem of finding another person to touch and be touched in return. He felt humble, grateful.
But also guilty. He got up and switched on the computer and ate breakfast still naked, listening to a desi talk-radio stream. So who was Chris? She was his lover. He was a man with a lover or, to use the shortened version, a man. This seemed good, though not pure. Masticating a cherry poptart, he found his mind turning to Papaji.
A week or so before he died, Arjun’s grandfather, already confined to his sickbed, had indicated that he wished to pass on certain advice to his grandson. Arjun, who was only eight, was not normally allowed into Papaji’s room and his mother made a great performance of presenting him to the old man. Arjun was shy. He had liked Papaji, but now the smelly shape in the bed frightened him. Squirming, he was led up close so that the frail figure had only to turn its head to speak. From under the covers a thin arm extended. A quivering hand fluttered over his cheeks and forehead. ‘Beta,’ came the whisper, ‘God bless you. You are a good boy. I want you to remember two things. Always conserve your semen. It is your strength. And –’ Arjun never got to hear the second thing because his mother dragged him indignantly out of the room. ‘His mind is wandering,’ she snapped. ‘Go and play.’ When he sneaked back in, Papaji was asleep.
Denied half his bequest of ancestral wisdom, Arjun had always given particular weight to the half he had. He had rarely participated in competitive sport, but knew that if he ever did, he would be certain to practise abstinence on the night before a crucial game. He had almost always steered clear of Aamir’s dirty pictures and assumed that when the time came, his sexual partner (he never thought in the plural) would be chosen with meticulous care. Continence had always seemed like the proper thing; holding back from the vicious cycle of seminal accumulation and expenditure was the mark of a mature man. Yet now at the first opportunity he had fallen headlong into incontinence. What did that make him?
And what did it make her? He knew what his mother would say.
Set against that were other arguments: the blue snakes coiled around Chris’s arm, the sway of her breasts as she ground back and forth over his pubis.
It occurred to him that since Aamir would be jealous, it would be fun to write him an email. He started, then stopped. For the moment he wanted to keep his news to himself. That morning he could not concentrate on his projects and spent most of the time lying on his bed, drawing out the ‘afterwards’ feeling like wire. It was a clear day and the sunlight filtered through the leaves of the tree outside his window, warming his skin, keeping alive the sense of being touched. Once or twice he dialled Chris’s number, but it went straight to voicemail.
Chris spent the afternoon with Nic, huddled on the couch watching eighties teen movies on cable. The scale of the disaster was becoming clear. Though Nic was asking no questions, mired in his own hangover, she could still feel a tautness about him, a clenched thing he got whenever he suspected she had been with someone else. Inquisitions were against the rules, but all the same he was wondering. She snuggled furtively up to him, pulling the quilt tighter around her.
It had been such a mess. Arjun’s erection had come and gone: when she first touched it, when she rolled on the condom. As she finally lifted herself up and tucked his penis inside her, the gesture felt (of all things) motherly. Instantly she lost her bearings and a grim self-consciousness lit up their struggling like a flare. She rocked back and forward and the drugs made her feel that someone else, not her, was having sex in that bombsite of a room. By shutting her eyes she could block out Arjun’s ridiculous slack-jawed expression, but she could still hear his throttled yelps of surprise, feel his tentative hands on her. She looked back down and his face suddenly crumpled like a piece of brown paper. It was over. She felt more or less the same as before, except now there was nowhere else to go, no way to squeeze any further sensation out of her Saturday night, and she didn’t feel like a sexual adventurer, just limp and tired, a rag of a girl held up by the drugs like a damp shirt on a clothes hanger, forced to carry on with consciousness when all she wanted to do was throw the off-switch and fade to black.
Even if he had not been preoccupied that Monday morning, Arjun would not have noticed the atmosphere at the labs. To most other people the tension would have been obvious. He dived happily into his testing routines, unfazed by the way the senior analysts kept shutting themselves in the conference room to make phone calls or have hurried conversations. He knew Darryl had been called away to a meeting, but did not spot the doleful way his colleagues were staring at Darryl’s office door, at certain tech news and financial websites, at the floor. Concentrated stares. People looking at their future.
He sent mail to Chris, but she didn’t respond. Probably busy, he decided. At the end of the day he went home as usual and worked solidly on his projects until one in the morning. Usually he kept a chat client open on his desktop, but that night he wanted to concentrate, which was how he came to miss the storm of Virugenix-related discussion in the AV forums. Before he went to bed, he tried Chris’s number again, now concerned that she did not pick up. By Tuesday morning he was probably the only Virugenix employee still unaware that the company had issued a profits warning, the stock price had tanked, and the board had pledged to cut operating costs across all divisions. Everyone else, the whisperers and the starers, knew what that meant.
In times of tech-corporate crisis the normal rules of communication are reversed. Virugenix staffers knew that campus email and phone channels were insecure. Only face-to-face conversations were sure not to be monitored by the company. The cafeteria, usually half empty, was filled with groups of people picking at salads and speaking in lowered voices, people who in some cases had not ventured into a public space for years. Buying a chicken wrap to take back to his desk, Arjun walked past them, preoccupied with thoughts of Chris.
On Wednesday morning, as he cut across the parking lot past a line of people carrying cardboard boxes to their cars, he could think about only one thing: why had she not returned any of his messages?
He swiped his pass to get into the lab. Clay came up behind him and clapped him on the back.
‘I just want to say I’m sorry, man. You’re a good guy. It’s a shame.’
The door catch released with a click.
‘What’s a shame?’
Clay’s eyes widened. ‘Well, Darryl wants to see you, and so –’ He shrugged. ‘You know.’ Before Arjun could ask any more questions, Clay dived for cover.
Sure enough, when Arjun switched on his terminal there was a message from Darryl. A formal meeting: 4 p.m. There were several other messages, all asking him to contribute to leaving gifts for people he didn’t know. As he watched, another popped into his inbox, from Aamir.
bhai – Saw bad news on cnet U been such superstar an all Im sure it dont affect U see cute girl attached; – p a
The cute girl had been blocked by the company’s filtering software, but Arjun had other things to think about. Bad news? By the time he knocked on Darryl’s door, he had read the reports and watched three of his colleagues go into the office and walk out with set expressions. He felt dazed. It was not possible. Not this.
There were two people in there. Darryl and a woman. The woman was not part of the research division. You could tell because she was wearing a suit. The suit was well cut and char
coal-grey and accessorized with a businesslike pearl necklace. The face above it was alert and good-looking, its highly maintained skin framed by a neat blonde bob. The woman smiled at Arjun and looked over at Darryl, expecting him to make an introduction. Darryl did not look as if he would be able to do this. He was curled up into a kind of ball on his office chair, a Ghostbusters cap crammed down low on his head. Beneath it he was staring fixedly at his SETI belt buckle and swivelling himself to and fro by pushing his hands against the top of his desk.
The woman sighed. ‘Good afternoon, Mr Mehta,’ she said. ‘Thanks for your promptitude. My name is Jennifer Johanssen, and I’m a deputy director of personnel here at Virugenix. Head office asked me to come down and facilitate today’s employee encounters. Mr Gant here has briefed me on your performance. I know he rates your contribution to the anti-virus research team very highly.’ She paused and turned to Darryl, who clawed at his beard and swivelled faster.
The meeting seemed to be taking place a great distance away Arjun was merely an observer, a scientist monitoring the progress of an experiment on the other side of the glass. Transmitted across the vastness of space, Jennifer Johanssen’s voice sounded calming and competent, a moisturizing balm formulated to take away the pain and soreness of the words it uttered. Aamir would like her, thought Arjun. She’s his type.
‘In your time here,’ the aloe vera voice intoned, ‘you have added quality and value.’ Then it spoke for a while about compassion. The room felt cold. Maybe I’m getting sick, thought Arjun, palpating the glands on the side of his neck. The voice talked about reversals of fortune and minimizing negative outcomes. It talked about the executive team’s strong desire to lead by demonstrating fiscal responsibility at all levels. It talked about last in, first out.
It talked about reality.
Then it struck him. This was not his story This was not his story because this was not how his story went. There had been a mistake.
