The Undivided Self

by Will Self

  Brion laughed. ‘No-no, Karin, I don’t need to write – Travis does that for me – but I like to make the shapes of numbers!’ Both the grown-ups laughed at this typical display of emoto naivety – and that too cemented their acquaintance.

  They had both left the wine tasting shortly after this; and the last Karin had seen of her new friend was Travis’s face, blooming, like some tall, orchidaceous buttonhole, above the solid tweed ridge of his emoto’s shoulder, as Brion bore him off in the direction of Riverside Drive.

  That had been a fortnight ago. Travis called Karin a week after the wine tasting and with commendable dispatch suggested they have dinner together. ‘What? You mean like a date?’ She couldn’t keep the incredulity out of her voice.

  ‘Erm … yuh … well …’ It was oddly reassuring to hear how discomfited he was. ‘I guess it would be a date, sort of.’

  ‘Travis, I haven’t been on a date for four years –’

  ‘Snap!’ He almost shouted down the phone, and that bonded them with laughter once more. ‘I haven’t been on a date for four years; and I’ll tell you something else, I can’t stand the very word – it makes me think of fruit –’

  ‘Fruit?’

  ‘Y’know – dates …’

  This last little revelation hadn’t struck such a chord with Karin, but she still agreed to meet Travis on the evening of the 29th April at the Royalton Hotel. ‘You’re in the seventies,’ he’d said. ‘I’m in the twenties – we’ll split the difference. Then if things are going well we can head downtown for dinner.’ He sounded a great deal surer on the phone than he felt. It was true, Travis hadn’t been on a date for four years, and he hadn’t slept over with anyone for nearing a decade.

  Karen had had a sleepover more recently. About two years ago she’d met a man called Emil at a weekend beach party out on Long Island.

  Emil was small, dark, Austrian, in his forties. He’d been living in New York for eight years, and had an emoto – Dave – for the last five. Emil admitted, frankly, that he’d been a procro in Salzburg, where he’d run a fashionable restaurant before deciding to emigrate. Karin took this in her stride. Emil was very charming, seemed absolutely sincere, and his relationship with Dave was unimpeachable – the big black emoto cradled his little grown-up with obvious affection. Lots of grown-ups had started out as procros and then decided that the whole messy business of sexual and emotional entanglement wasn’t for them – there was no shame, or obloquy in that. And just as many procros had found, after getting on in life a bit, that what they wanted more than anything else in the world was the absolute reassurance that an emoto would provide them with. If these procros were lucky the awakening would coincide with children growing up, leaving home, and they could slide without too much disruption from their procro-union to a proper, grownup relationship with an emoto.

  Emil led Karin to understand that this had been the case with him: ‘My ex-wife and I met and married when we were very young, you know. We both came from poor families, the kind of background where there were very few grown-ups, very few emotos. I suppose we were happy in a way – we knew no better. But slowly, over the years, the relentlessness of being with someone the whole time … someone who you touch intimately’ – his voice dropped lower – ‘touch sexually … Well, you know the terrible things that can happen.’ He shuddered, snuggled deeper into his emoto’s firehose-thick arms. ‘Eventually, after our daughter had gone – at her own request, I must say – to a group home, we were both able to become grown-ups. We’re still good friends though, and I see her whenever Dave and I go back to Salzburg – which is a lot. Dave and I even have four-way sleepovers with Mitzi and her emoto, Gudrun.’

  They had spent most of that day chatting, both of them cuddled by their emotos; the childlike giants standing waist deep in the ocean swell, cradling their respective grown-ups in their arms. ‘There is nothing more sensuous,’ Karin had said to Emil in an unguarded moment, ‘than the smell of wet emoto skin, wet emoto hair, and the great wet ocean.’ Emil gave her a peculiar sideways look.

  But Jane had taken to Dave, and encouraged Karin to see Emil. Jane had dinner with Emil twice; and he’d taken her once to the Met, to see Don Giovanni. On all three occasions he was charm itself, courtly and leisured; as if, Karin had thought, the Habsburgs were the patrons of taste, rather than Texaco. If later, Karin felt awful for not paying proper attention to the subtext of Emil’s charms, it was because she blamed herself. Blamed herself for not paying attention and for putting her trust in Jane’s emoto intuition. After all, emotos weren’t meant to protect you from others – only from yourself.

  On their fourth date Emil suggested that Karen and Jane might like to sleep over at his apartment. Dave nodded his great cropped head vigorously. ‘It’ll be great!’ he said to Jane – and the rest of them. ‘We can play together in the morning!’ The grown-ups laughed, but it was really Jane who sealed the deal, crying out, ‘Yes! With pillows too!’

  ‘Isn’t that typical of an emoto!’ Emil exclaimed when he and Karin were at last alone together. ‘They really can be just like kids –’

  ‘But they aren’t.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Emil was momentarily querulous, shocked by the intensity of her reaction.

  ‘They aren’t children. They don’t grow – they’re big already. They don’t make demands on you – you make demands on them. They don’t have to be dressed, fed, wiped or groomed in any other way. They have good intuitions – and good dress sense if you trouble to develop it …’ Karin tailed off, realising that she was beginning to sound oddly impassioned. She was, also, already missing Jane, although the two emotos had only left their grownups a few minutes before.

  Emil’s apartment was on the Upper East Side, and the last thing Karin had seen before going to bed that fateful night were the soaring piles of the Van Eyck Expressway legging over the river’s rumpled pewter, so solid, so supportive, so emotolike.

  Karin was sleeping in the main bedroom, Emil in the spare. The emotos were closeted in the old water tank on top of the block, which Emil had tastefully converted – like many other financially clever Manhattanite grownups – for emoto use. But during the night, despite the friendly locks on the door of the bedroom (friendly because they were bolts), Emil managed to get into the room. Presumably he had a secret passage, or some even stranger means of entry …

  These thoughts were thumping with awful inconsequence through Karin’s mussed mind as she stared at the dapper little man who was sitting beside her, on the edge of the bed, entirely self-possessed, wearing black silk pyjamas, and with his dumpy, manicured hands arranged neatly in his lap. At least he never actually touched her – that was something. But the violation of his presence was enough. To have him, at night, alone, this close to her, this able to touch her was – terrifying. Karin didn’t so much know that she wanted Jane – as scream it. The scream was the knowledge. Karin screamed and screamed and screamed; at the same time she groped for the emotopager she had slung to one side of the bed a couple of hours before. The first scream chopped off what Emil had been trying to say to her: ‘All I want’s a little cud –’ For ever afterwards Karin wondered what exactly it was that he’d wanted, ‘a little cud’, it was strangely enigmatic, unlike the man himself, who had been revealed as no grown-up – but a potential rapist.

  There was that odd, shadowing memory of the sexual assault, and there was another discrepancy which Karin kept stuffed to the back of her mind, lest it rock too much the frail boat of her own sanity. Karin knew that Jane and Dave had to have been asleep – that’s what emotos did at night, just like other humans. What’s more, the emotos were sleeping three storeys up, on top of the building – so it couldn’t have been Karin’s screams that had woken them; and at the time, even through the fog of fear, she had, with bizarre clarity, appreciated that it might take Jane many minutes to reach her. But in fact Jane was there in seconds. There, and cradling Karin to her massive breast. There, and palming off Emil. There and admo
nishing Emil in that peculiarly affecting way that emotos – creatures devoid of any vestige of aggression-promoting sexuality – have: ‘You’ve scared, Karin, why did you do it? Oh Emil – this ruins everything. Oh Emil! If you touched her we shall have to call the police –’ In the corner Dave cowered, unsure of whether it was safe for him to go and comfort his own emoto. Emil looked inscrutable – altogether beyond cuddling. Dave was naked – another anomaly Karin filed in a bottle.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Karin nearly shouted, she was so relieved to be able to respond, to react, not to be just a thing under the Austrian’s bland brown eyes. ‘He didn’t touch me.’

  Jane gave her a searching look and adjudging that this was the truth, scooped up Karin, her clothes, her bag, and before her grown-up had had a chance to respond in any other way, she found herself being borne north towards the corner of the park: ‘We can get a taxivan there,’ said the willowy emoto, still holding Karin tightly to her. Jane never said anything more about the assault – and nor did Karin.

  Not until tonight, that is. Karin sighed again. It was too late to call it off now – Travis would be on his way; and he didn’t look like the kind of man who carried a phone with him, more the type to use a liveried servant, porting a missive on a salver. Thinking of this aspect of Travis, his unforced anachronism, made Karen smile. With such an innately gallant man, surely nothing could go wrong? There was this sense of security and there was the tangible security of Jane’s arms. As ever, the emoto had sensed her mood perfectly, sashayed across the room and taken the grown-up in her arms. Karen marvelled anew at the grace of the giantess, and her physical perfection. Some emotos were so gross: the genetic effect of pumping the human frame up to two or three times its normal size could have bizarre consequences. Some emotos had hair as thick as wire on their bodies; and if they got bad acne it was truly something to behold, like the Grand Canyon at sunset.

  But Jane was perfection. Her skin a delicate honey shade; the down that covered it universally white-blonde; and soft, so soft. Karin relaxed back into the down, allowed herself to be enfolded by the honey. She felt the lower belly and pubic mound of the emoto nuzzle between her shoulder blades. Funny how an emoto’s touch was so intimate, so comforting, and yet so utterly devoid of sexuality – let alone eroticism. The idea of Jane’s vast vagina being employed in the nonsensical, animal jerkings of copulation was unthinkable, like imagining Botticelli’s Venus squeezing a blackhead, or a chimpanzee addressing both houses of Congress.

  Karin relaxed. Jane went on squeezing her in just the right way, swaying gently the while. New effusions of greenery on the trees lining the block below struck Karin’s eye with a fresh intensity. It was a beautiful spring evening, she was young, she was secure, perhaps she was even ready for some experimentation, for some fun. Karin broke from the embrace and turned to face Jane, her arms outstretched. ‘Carry?’ she asked.

  The evening went far, far better than either grown-up could have hoped for – and as for the emotos? Well, they rubbed along pretty well, much as they always do.

  Travis hadn’t only seized on the Royalton for reasons of mutual convenience – it also made a good talking point. Well past its fashionable sell-by date, the hotel’s décor retailed a series of dazzlingly crass decadences, which Travis knew provided salience for his own sepia image. To go anywhere more established, or timeless in its own right, would only set his own fuzzy grasp on contemporaneity off to lesser effect. But in the large, modernist lobby bar of the Royalton, with its primary curves and aerodynamically sound light fitments, he would be thrown into sharp relief, and he would be able to entertain Karin with his pointed remarks about the waxing and waning of status, of money, of beauty, of all things human.

  Brion and Travis arrived about twenty minutes early. The emoto ducked down to enter, and then gratefully stretched when they entered the airier purlieus of the bar. ‘D’you want to join me, Brion?’ Travis asked him as the emoto set him gently down, Church’s brogues meeting deep pile with the merest of kisses.

  Brion seemed to think for a moment, and a shadow of near-reasoning crossed his ample, freckled brow. ‘No, that’s all right, Travis, I’ll set myself down here.’ He gestured to the emotos’ portion of the bar. ‘You get yourself a dry martini – you deserve it for getting this close to the fruit.’

  Was there a trace of irony in Brion’s remark? Travis wondered as he walked to the other end of the bar, where he waited to be seated. That was impossible; emotos might have highly developed emotional intelligences – that’s what made them so good at caring, at sharing; but irony demanded an ability to realise dramatically situations that was far beyond their mental age, hovering as it did at around seven. Some grown-ups – Travis knew one or two – had emotos with higher mental ages, but they were regarded askance by the majority, almost as if they were engaging in a peculiar form of abuse.

  All this weighed heavily on Travis while he waited to be seated. He didn’t want to be thinking about emotos in this way, at this time, he had to concentrate on the fruit. However, once he’d been deposited by the graceful waiter in the elegant chair, and had a dry vodkatini the size of a vase deposited with him, Travis began to unwind. He was amused to see a new piece of status style-slavery at the Royalton. The bar seats for grown-ups had always been colour coded, so as to reflect the relative importance of their tenants. High rollers were placed in the purple thronelets, less important ones in the red, and so on, all the way down to the gawking hicks in from the boonies, who were stacked unceremoniously in a distant gulag of far smaller, white-covered chairs. Now the management had taken it upon themselves to do the same with the chairs in the emoto portion of the bar. However, as there were fewer of these, and they were much larger, it was impossible to create proper sections. Instead, the waiters in this area had to wait and see where the emoto’s respective grown-up was sitting, then seat them accordingly – if possible.

  Travis was pleased that Brion had got the purple, and he was just thinking how he might frame this latest bit of Manhattan lunacy as an anecdote for Karin, when she was there in front of him. Travis leapt up, seated her, and without preliminary small talk, launched straight into his Royalton riffs. Karin, far from being discomfited, roared with laughter as he deconstructed the trappings of the luxury hotel. Travis was getting ready to vouchsafe a genuine indiscretion, concerning a certain film star and her football team-sized posse of emotos, when he caught himself. ‘But I’m rambling on, I haven’t let you get a word in edgeways, and worst of all I haven’t told you how radiantly beautiful you’re both looking tonight.’

  The effect was as instantaneous as it was desired. Karin blushed and tilted her head in a disarming, almost girlish way, turning in the process so that she was angled in the direction of Jane. Although the female emoto was over fifty feet away, and deep in chatter with Brion, she looked up and smiled as well. Clearly, Travis thought, they have a high level of tele-empathy, a good sign. Of course, Travis’s compliment hadn’t been paid out of any other account but that of The Truth. He wasn’t a shameless flatterer, and anyway, Karin just was looking fantastic. She was wearing a black silk sheath dress, cut in an interesting, asymmetrical way across the bodice; her thick blonde hair was up, and her sole accessory was the heavy silver necklace, which Travis remembered from the wine tasting in SoHo. Turning to Jane, he observed how well the same dress hung on her far larger frame. He turned to Karin once more. ‘Tell me, was this pattern originally cut for Jane or you?’ and was rewarded with another peal of joyful laughter.

  If things went well at the Royalton, once they got in the taxivan and headed downtown, they began to go – as Travis himself might have said – swimmingly. There was something about these situations that was almost instinctively memorable, something that both grownups and emotos intuitively understood: the two grownups, intelligent, rational, foresighted; and their two emoto charges, who might be physically larger, warmer and more responsive, more caring; but who wouldn’t last for five minutes alone on the sca
brous city streets.

  The four discovered such ease in each other’s company, that within minutes they were developing the syntax and grammar of a cliquey argot. Brion, staring as he always did, out of the back window as the darkened streets and lit blocks strobed past, had spotted a rollerblader coursing through the cars on the far side of the avenue. ‘Wow!’ he exclaimed – as he always did. ‘Those high heels sure let that man go zippy!’ Both Karen and Jane laughed, and the emotos high-fived, which is all the physical contact they ever seemed to have with one another. From then on in ‘Go zippy!’ was one of their gathering number of catch phrases, to be rolled around and then expelled with gusto, as if it were an assayed sip of one of Travis’s ‘fine wines’.

  The restaurant Travis had initially chosen for the evening, Chez-Chez, with its heavy Lyonnaise cuisine, didn’t really suit the fruit he was engaged on; so after laboriously rethinking the whole nature of the event, running over his slender stock of Karin intelligence, and even going so far as to ring up Ariadne and ask some circumspect questions, he opted instead for the twin pillars of idiocy: the Royalton and the Bowery Brasserie. He wouldn’t be able to smoke there – which might make him a bit nervous, but that there would be plenty to joke about and lots of noise and colour would compensate.

  They quit the taxivan. The night was clear, stars wheeling over the jagged cityscape, its stanchions and aerials, fire stairs and emoto-housing converted water tanks. The Bowery Brasserie, like many of the more fashionable Manhattan eateries, had its own sub-restaurant specifically catering to emotos. This was simply called ‘The Emoto Hole’. Brion grinned hugely when he realised where they were – like most emotos he had hardly any capacity for effective orientation – and turning to his rangy companion said laughingly, ‘You’ll love this place, Jane, they’ve even got root beer on tap!’ Once again the grown-ups joined in the effervescent, conspiratorial merriment that the mature traditionally share with the immature.