Private Citizens: A Novel

by Tony Tulathimutte

  With the rumble of elevator doors opening, closing, and opening, Henrik descended into the cold, sweet-smelling stacks, where the only evidence of sunny weather was on the skin of other students. He found his aisle, punched its light switch, arbitrarily selected a slim anthology on free will, and sat on the floor with his sandals flat on the gray carpet, skimming for cruxes. Libet’s readiness potential (1985) sounded like smoke and mirrors. Pereboom’s hard determinism (1995) claimed that moral responsibility was still licit because you didn’t blame cornflakes for being soggy but you could still hate them. Whereas Dennett (2003) boiled it down to rational evitability, squaring it with determinism by expanding the concept of self. Bostrom (2003) said we were probably computer simulations.

  But van Inwagen (1975) had it down, Henrik thought drowsily: the set of all physical laws L applied to the initial state of the universe P0 at the beginning of time T0 would only ever result in the same world state P. Corralled in four alphanumerics—{P, L, 0, T}—reality went through its motions, with arbitrary flux at the quantum level. The shit bargain of consciousness without autonomy. Free will was placebo. And it sure wasn’t free. Henrik fell asleep, resting his head on the hard determinism.

  II. Washing It Down

  Fog had come on with the night, sustaining the peninsular warmth in its wetness. The streetlights hung in white globes illuminating nothing but the cottony air around them. Henrik’s porch light had burned out, and now his cottage, a studio on the lawny margins of campus, was visible only by the moonlight on its roof, like a film of milk. Henrik toed his way up his steps and used his wristwatch’s aquamarine LED to find the keyhole, noticing that the provider was due in an hour.

  When the light came on, Henrik surveyed his house with a skeptical eye and saw the blights he’d long since normalized. The blanched rectangles on the wall where previous tenants had hung pictures; power cords tripwiring the floor; lank peelings of clothes; mouse droppings and gravel and shaggy gray fluff that crackled and smoked whenever he vacuumed it up. The light fixture’s shine was mellowed by the dust on its frosted glass bowl containing a mass grave of insects in silhouette. A rill of mystery liquid trickled down the south wall. In the kitchen fruit flies drifted like sentient pollen around wadded shopping bags containing only receipts. The tile backsplash behind the stove looked like the wall a firing squad saw after firing.

  He turned and paced back through the fragments of his improvised life. Did he make this mess or did it make him? He’d never lived alone. Before this it was dorms and co-ops, which other people cleaned; before that, his father’s truck, which was dirty. In the curriculum of self-care he hadn’t quite figured out tidying up—or washing or eating or sleeping. Basics weren’t easy. What made them basic was their unvarying necessity, to which we were adapted by eons of heredity and tradition, but he had neither. Complex things were manageable—you needed only the conscious brain. But basics were never easy.

  Since there was no way he could just clean, he would have to redefine clean. Try a syllogism: cleanliness was next to godliness and God didn’t exist, so cleanliness was next to nothing, so he didn’t have to do anything. Or solve the higher-order problem, that of perspective; that was something he could change. From a drawer in the kitchen he retrieved his orange plastic pill case. He poured a glass of milk. The palliatives went down first: ibuprofen for his wrenched neck, A/B eardrops, Visine, albuterol for asthma, oxcarbazepine for convulsions, triamcinolone acetonide for eczema, and ChapStick for good measure. Drixine in four stinging spritzes—it was good for his sinuses, but he was trying to cut back, because it was bad for his sinuses. He wiped his eyes and began the gauntlet of dicyclomine for his IBS, filling his palm, paving his tongue. He tipped his head forward so the pills would float up, and swallowed; they chafed against one another in their gastric bath.

  How doped up would he be in forty years? How many tinctures and ampoules, carpet tacks, tubes of caulk would he need to swallow? The worst thing about pills was that they worked. Without them, you might just adapt; medical optimism suspended you in a maintenance reality. He’d never known how sick he was until he’d gotten health insurance. The pill that really wanted inventing was the bitter one that cured you of optimism and made time go faster.

  Alcohol was contraindicated with half his meds but oh well. He poured frigid cheap vodka into his milk glass, garnished it with a ragged wedge of a lemon scavenged from a campus bush, and gulped it down with eight Depakote and two Topamax for bipolar. Then propranolol for the Depakote. A burst of mania might help him get through the evening. But you never got the right pole.

  His pulse thumped in the pulp of his teeth. Everything looked cleaner already. Henrik reminded himself that he was doing okay, this was high functioning, things had been worse before—though this was pretty bad too, sure, let’s own that.

  In the last twenty minutes he went around like a burglar hearing a garage door open: the toilet paper roll on the coffee table, the undershirt he’d used to wipe up chicken soup—he threw these into the garbage, along with a capless ChapStick whose waxy nub was still concave with newness and empty Miller Lite cans doubled over like fortune cookies. He threw plates flocked with microwaved tomato sauce under the sink and swept all the bean cans, spaghetti sauce jars, and gas station cups off the counter into the lumpy, ripped garbage bag, which he brought out to the backyard, intending to reclaim it later, unless he decided it was better off as garbage.

  The last detritus, the thing he couldn’t throw out, was himself. His nose leaked; a teaspoon of phlegm kept regenerating in his throat; he blotted flop sweat in the elbow of his sweatshirt. From end to end his tract purred with insectile gurbles and blats wheezing flabbily through its maze of sphincters. Continence was a cornerstone of civility. The social contract reaffirmed itself in small diligences like these.

  He padded over to the bathroom, fighting off his gray Stanford sweatshirt and husky jeans. Sometimes he fantasized about being forced through a fine steel mesh, extruding the illness from his body; or having a powerful spray of water blast clear through him to hose out the fat-soluble toxins—but his shower wasn’t even strong enough to fight the sag of gravity. He stepped into the bathtub stained with a vitiligo of scum. Having run out of soap, he’d been using spray disinfectant instead, coughing against closed lips as orange-scented ammonia billowed up. The bloat of the Depakote gave him biceps like fish bellies, and his pecs were threatening to mammarize. There was lots of surface area to wash, another case of size taxation, some unit of inconvenience per kilogram. Big guys were expected to push harder, squeeze in a bit, help get this thing unstuck. And not to hurt.

  He stepped out, making his nude skin toughen with goose bumps, and feeling, as he put on the same clothes, that absolute clean was another class of filth. Henrik reentered the living room. Nothing living lived here. He might need to bring some of the garbage back in.

  III. O

  The provider was late. Henrik sat on his couch, checking the clock on his phone (each check informing him of how much life he’d just wasted) until headlights turning into the driveway struck the window blinds yellow. Footsteps approached; the broken doorbell was pressed with a lifeless clack. He counted to ten before opening the door to a dark-skinned girl, slender as a coupon, looking much younger than her photos, ten inches shorter with her black hair dangling under a weird leather cap—not at all the seropositive coin-toss he’d sort of expected. Her black coat’s fur collar was speckled with drizzle. “Hi,” she said as she entered, bright with professionalism, and Henrik closed the front door with what he hoped was an unpresumptuous click.

  His immediate goal was to initiate some sort of freeze-frame and get another drink. He realized how creepy it was that his shades were already drawn. He took her coat and slung it across the couch, asked her how the drive was. She said it was easy, the directions were good, plus she was good with directions in general. Henrik enjoyed a welling of formless rage at the institution of small talk. She took off her heels and got ev
en shorter.

  “Thanks for coming—Lucretia?”

  The name given in her online ad was Lucretia Rennes, a name that declared her Euro-goth-courtesan aspirations, and was triply mismatched—Lucretia being Latin, Rennes French, and she, by appearances, subcontinental.

  “Yep, Lucretia. And your name again? Heinry? Heinrich?”

  “Henrik.”

  “Hendrik. A pleasure.”

  She was honeying her voice, expecting probably that he wanted to engage in a bit of can’t-lose flirting. Henrik brought out two different-size wineglasses and a nearly full bottle of screw-top merlot. Midpour, she asked him to drink first. “Oh, right, sorry,” he said, and drained his glass halfway.

  Henrik’s hairline went shiny. He felt like he’d swallowed a knotted rope, but just holding the drink in his hand was easing things. Lucretia sat on the couch, whose gouged upholstery was patched with packing tape, and Henrik took the opposing armrest. She was unfakably pretty, even in this ambiance. She had a vaguely piranhic underbite, and her dark plucked eyebrows stood out from a face otherwise paled and standardized by foundation. Her outfit ironized her mousy features: a corset intricately cinched over a flounced sleeveless blouse, some kind of rugby helmet, as many piercings as each ear would hold, as many bracelets and bangles as it seemed she could lift. Linda would probably catclaw her into little curled shavings—God, she’s an object lesson in why piercings should never outnumber natural orifices.

  Well goddammit, now he was judging the girl he’d invited over in the first place. All that mattered was that she looked good: that is, she was unmistakably not Linda. “I appreciate you coming out here,” Henrik said. “Um. You want a snack?”

  She pointed at a bump in her cheek. She was chewing gum, which couldn’t have tasted good with the wine. Silence prowled in. For all the small talk, he still couldn’t ask her where she lived, who she was, what she was actually thinking. “Do you go to school around here?” Henrik asked.

  “Nah. Dropped out. Only thing college taught me was that I didn’t need it. Tuition is criminal. Knowledge should be free. Really everything should be.”

  “So you decided not to stay?”

  “Decided not to? The burden of proof is on college. I mean, what do you get for all that money? I don’t need a piece of paper to prove I’m smart. School is like hiding under a big boob. Autodidact is the way to go.” She meddled around in her many-cinched bag and out fell an empty keychain, an envelope, and a tampon. She found a loose Post-it note and handed it to him. “My reading list. Holistic dietetics, panpsychism, horology, apocalypse myths. It’s universal wisdom. College is what, math and computers? Or books about what people said in other books? College just gets you from one desk to another. It gentrifies your mind.”

  Lucretia retained her wine in one cheek for about ten seconds before swishing it into the other cheek. Maybe testing for numbing sedatives. Or maybe she was just a little disgusting. “I see,” Henrik said, scrunching his hands into an inarticulate ball on his lap. “So why are these books more interesting to you?”

  “Why’s anything interesting? I mean, like, what do you study?”

  “Biomechanical engineering.”

  Lucretia put her hands out as if minimizing the length of something. “Exactly. Vocational education. You know eventually some bureaucrat is going to turn your work into a torture device or war machine, right?”

  Henrik realized that Lucretia was running down the clock, which annoyed him, but you know what, it also annoyed him to have that thought. He had to get it started. But only after somehow assuring her that he wasn’t another creep out to pump a load of death into whatever mammal he could wrestle to the ground. He had to establish some trust, at the heart of which was honesty, at the innermost and therefore smallest heart of which was talking. “If my research could make torture devices,” Henrik said, “I’d have better funding. It’s pretty pure science. My advisor says there are ‘parallelisms’ between our work and BME—biomedical engineering—”

  “I know that.”

  “—but mostly I just make computer simulations and fiddle with cadaver tissue.”

  “Ew, really? That’s kind of cool. But still, why bother? No offense, you must be really smart, but what you do sounds totally pointless. Where’s the meaning or beauty?”

  “Well . . . how do you define meaning and beauty? Like, why is horology intrinsically meaningful?”

  “Because it’s interesting.”

  “But isn’t interestingness subjective?”

  Lucretia looked at her wineglass for a moment, her face as inscrutable as the glass, before laughing and scratching her bangs, then troweling them back into their accustomed diagonal. “Okay! I surrender. I love you Asperger’s-y types. But you admit I’ve got a point, right?”

  How to get across that he hadn’t been trying to argue or patronize her intellect, that he’d been an autodidact himself and was just trying to figure out what she meant? Oh shit—they’d been talking for fifteen minutes! Did this count? Of course it did, numbnuts! It wouldn’t be decent to ask her to get started, but it wasn’t like she was here for any other reason. “School’s mostly a job to me.”

  “Well, that’s—cool. Whatever makes you happy.”

  “I wouldn’t say happy exactly.”

  “Oh no, why are you unhappy?”

  “I didn’t say I was.”

  “Are you?”

  “Um, let’s call an audible here.”

  “Oh.”

  That utterance, O. Half short of breathable oxygen; two to make good. Or blood. The standard unit of disappointment. A hug, an orgasm, but not a kiss. More than anything it was nothing, which was what they’d come to.

  “Well, I guess we’ve come to the end of the time you paid for,” she said.

  “Oh, uh, really? Already?”

  “No, ha—that’s just something I have to say for legal reasons. Anyway, let’s get to know each other better.”

  “Yes.”

  She took out her wad of gum, creases stained purple with wine, and stuck it to the foot of her glass. Henrik took her offered hand, hoping she could not feel the pulse trampolining in his fingers, and she led him into his bedroom, inviting Henrik to sit with her on the mattress on his floor.

  “One sec,” she said, and more items tumbled from her bag: hand sanitizer, Starlight mint, rolling papers, condom, condom, can of Mace. “Oops,” she said. “Ooh, awkward. Hee-hee. I used to pack heat but I thought that was overkill.” Before returning it to her bag, she pointed the Mace at Henrik and pretended to spray. “Pssssh.”

  “Ha-ha.” Henrik commended himself for suppressing his flinch.

  Lucretia occupied herself with scene preparation, closing the door behind her, scattering flip-top tubes and square packets onto the bedsheet. She removed her headgear, unfastened her corset, pulled down the diagonal zippers on her skirt, wriggled out of her bracelets, unclasped a belly chain strung with chiming trinkets, and dismantled a talon-like fingerpiece that seemed to require an input code, discarding everything in a heap by Henrik’s humidifier. A slender black dagger tattoo pointed down from between her breasts, and a tiny glyph rested at her collarbone. Her petite, faintly neuter body reminded him of a cartoon mouse.

  Henrik stripped likewise. He had the physique of a car seat, pink as pork, and he wished he could take that off too. Lucretia walked over and knelt between his knees.

  “Just a heads-up,” Henrik said, “it’s been a while. I’m just trying to find out if I’m still, you know. Well, actually there’s a lot of things. Lately things have been weird, life-circumstances-wise. Some health stuff. I mean, nothing contagious! I’m on medication. And I was in this relationship that kinda messed me up.”

  “Hmm. Okay.” She sheared her lips as if distributing lip balm, making her neck cables flinch. “So do you want to call me by another name, like your ex’s—”

  “No, that’s, that’s . . . wow. No. I just wanted to get on the same page before we, you know. Rrrr
. I guess I wanted to make sure you’re comfortable. I mean comfortable in the sense that you know this isn’t some meaningless recreational thing. But it’s not a serious thing either. Mainly I feel respect; I respect you a lot for this and I want to make that known even if there is a valid argument to be made that this is an inherently exploitative exchange. There’s that cliché scenario of the sensitive white guy finding redemption and authenticity in a sex worker and I don’t want to use you in that way or any other way. I’m also trying not to make it your responsibility to absolve me of any of the shame I’m concerned I might feel, that’s not in your job description, so if this is exhausting I apologize for that too. I try to be aware of rape issues and sex worker issues and I know rape is pretty much whatever feels like rape, which is why I wanted to make completely sure—”

  Lucretia made big window-washing gestures. “Henrik, stop, stop, stop! You’re way overthinking everything. Let me guess, this your first time?”

  “Oh no, I’ve done it tons of times.”

  Lucretia laughed. “Paying for it, I mean.”

  “Oh. Yeah, first time.”

  “Lie down.”

  He lay back. This probably wasn’t rape. Just the usual servitude. With one hand she dropped her hair loose, while her lips imprinted stickily down his torso like the exploratory landings of a stethoscope. He heard the cellophane rustle of the opening condom foil, felt it solemnly applied. “It feels weird.”