Red Pill

by Hari Kunzru

  There could be no clearer demonstration of this than the use made by Frau Janowitz of the Deuter Center’s logs. One afternoon a letter was slipped under my door, accompanying the usual breakdown of my Workspace computer usage. There was a café by the station which had bad coffee and a few greasy Formica tables. I took the letter there to read it. The woman behind the counter had never liked my face. As I settled myself with my barely caffeinated mug of milk froth and opened the envelope, she hovered nearby, cleaning tables, sweeping aggressively round my feet. Written on heavy Deuter Center letterhead, the communication had a legal tone. It itemized how many hours I’d spent in the Workspace (not enough), how many of the communal meals I had attended (not that many) and how many of the public lectures, roundtables and other events I had missed (all of them). I had, she wrote, “exhibited disdain for the ethos of Herr Deuter” and failed to understand the “need for full participation.” She was concerned by my “lack of mutuality.” If I felt unable “to join in the life of the Center,” perhaps it would be better if arrangements were made for me to leave.

  I wondered if my situation was irremediable. If I showed contrition, would they give me another chance? The waitress was impossible to ignore and the coffee even worse than usual, so I left the café and headed back out into the chill Wannsee morning. To be fair, I hadn’t actually seen a calendar of events. It must have been part of the slew of paper clogging up the pigeonhole with my name on it in the downstairs corridor. I considered walking by the lake, but ended up back in my room. Though the curtains were drawn, just as I’d left them, the dirty laundry had been folded and the snack food packaging and beer bottles made to disappear. My mess hadn’t vanished, exactly, but it had been organized. I looked at the books and papers on my desk, carefully piled up and straightened. They seemed diminished, unserious, the detritus of a boy’s hobby. Why had I not chosen to do the things that men do? Ordering the world. Exerting my will. Instead I’d built whatever this was, this rat’s nest of paper.

  I opened my laptop and called home, wondering sourly, as usual, if that connection was monitored, like the one in the Workspace. Rei answered, and the screen framed a rectangle of kitchen: a high-chair, a plastic bowl containing the butchered remains of a scrambled egg, a single snow boot improbably sitting on the table beside it.

  “Hello stranger. We’re getting ready for a play date.”

  Nina bounced into frame, wearing the pink tutu that I loathed. She jumped up and down in front of the laptop, then brought her face very close. I realized she was kissing the screen, and this produced an involuntary smile that jolted through my jaw, an almost painful physical pang of love. The screen-kissing became giggly and deliberately disgusting, big licks of the tongue that left smears and bubbles of spittle. Rei scolded her and hoisted her backwards, wiping the screen roughly with her sleeve. I saw that my wife was still in her pajamas. Her hair hung over her face. She squinted at me through her glasses, looking harassed.

  “I can’t really talk. It’s one of those mornings. As soon as I drop her I have to get all the way to the Upper East Side.”

  “Politics or pleasure?”

  “Ha ha. A coffee morning for prospective donors. I have to go and give a presentation, make nice.”

  “Go magic all those checkbooks out of all those expensive purses.”

  “Everything OK? You’re not sad, are you?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Don’t get sad. I love you.”

  “Love you too.”

  The screen went blank.

  I felt reassured by this scrap of conversation, and at the same time bleak. Clearly, I ought to accept defeat and leave the Deuter Center at once. I hated being there, no one liked me, and I wasn’t doing anything useful, but I wasn’t ready to go back home. I wasn’t qualified. I hadn’t solved myself. I spent an hour or so on the internet, falling down various rabbit holes, before I finally hit on one of the things I was looking for, the source of the strange words Carson had spoken as he tortured his victim on Blue Lives. As I suspected, they were a quotation, but they didn’t come from some well-known “great book,” but a peculiar and recondite writer, Joseph-Marie, Comte de Maistre. Insofar as he is remembered at all, Maistre is usually thought of as a footnote to the intellectual history of the eighteenth century, a rigid medieval mind shocked to find itself in the Age of Reason. He was a contemporary of Kleist, a Savoyard aristocrat flung into exile by the hateful French Revolution, first in Switzerland, then in the backwater court of Cagliari in Sardinia, and finally to Saint Petersburg, where he served as the Ambassador of the King of Savoy to Tsar Alexander I. He was a royalist zealot who hated Jacobins, scientists, Protestants, journalists, democrats, Jews, Freemasons, secularists and various other categories of people that he thought of as comprising “the sect,” a Satanic conspiracy to undermine the divinely ordained power of Pope and King. In his writing, he dedicated himself to fighting the pernicious influence of reason and liberty wherever it reared its head. Carson was quoting from a text known as The Saint Petersburg Dialogues, or Conversations on the Temporal Government of Providence, which in its time was scandalous enough that it could only be published after the author’s death. Three speakers, a Knight, a Senator and a Count, debate questions of morality and politics, laying out the author’s bleak worldview—that the earth is a cesspit of corruption, and salvation can only come from abject prostration before God, and before the powerful people that God has established to rule here. Why would the writer or writers of an American police procedural make such a peculiar reference? I didn’t know.

  I put on my coat and hat, and went out for a walk. I wanted to avoid the Kleist grave, so I headed for the other side of the lake, past a leisure center and down a sandy path into an area of woodland. As I walked through the trees, four or five young brown-skinned men in jeans and padded jackets came towards me over the rough ground. They had the slightly mincing gait of people who aren’t dressed warmly enough for the weather, boys laughing and talking, enjoying their power to fill up a space. They passed either side of me, none of them making eye contact. Their conversation faltered, then started up again once they were at a distance.

  The woodland ended abruptly and I walked out onto a wintery beach. The icy sand crunched underfoot. The water had the look of black ink. Ahead of me was a long brick pavilion. The Strandbad was famous in Berlin, a nineteen-thirties lido built in the austere style of the Neue Sachlichkeit, the New Objectivity, a leisure facility for working people, a surviving fragment of social democratic Utopia.

  I walked between rows of two-seater chairs covered in canopies, perfect for sheltering on blustery northern beaches. Some way down I saw a woman sitting in one, reading a book, her feet tucked underneath her. As I approached, she swung her legs nervously to the ground and it seemed to me that she was getting ready to run. With a pang of embarrassment, I recognized her as the cleaner from the Deuter Center.

  The gray façade of the Wannsee Conference House was clearly visible on the far side of the lake, and just at that moment I’d been trying to recall the name of the dining room waiter who’d first pointed it out to me. I saw him every day, it was frustrating. That kind of lapse feels worse when it is someone who serves you. Your lack of courtesy seems boorish, an assertion of status. I think it was this minor sense of shame that made me feel obliged to stop and say hello to the cleaner. I intended to walk on with a curt but friendly nod, a minimal form of contact which would have been entirely appropriate, but instead I stopped in front of her and formed my mouth into a brittle smile.

  “It’s nice to see you,” I said, instantly absurd. Why hadn’t I just walked on? “Not at work, I mean. It’s nice to see you not working.”

  When she was cleaning, she wore a plastic tabard over her clothes. Now she was wrapped in a long black coat, her feet in heavy army boots. I saw that she’d been reading a book, a little yellow Reclam paperback. As if defen
ding against my curiosity, she slipped it into her coat pocket. The hair she usually hid behind was itself hidden under a thick black woolen hat, and she was wearing heavy-framed glasses, so it was still hard to see what she looked like. A thin face and a prominent jaw. The word mousy is overused, but there was something quick and brown and slightly verminous about her.

  “Yes, hello,” she said. She got up, and for a moment stood straight and tall, facing into the wind. Then she hunched her shoulders, retracting herself, as if to reduce the amount of space she occupied. “Goodbye.” I watched her scurrying down the beach and couldn’t shake the feeling that she had shrugged on that furtive persona like a winter coat.

  I spent the rest of the day watching Blue Lives. The man Carson tortured to death turned out to work for La Mettrie, a Haitian drug lord and one of the most feared criminals in the city. La Mettrie’s gang was efficient and completely nihilistic. It was made clear in various gruesome scenes that he was prepared to do anything to maintain his grip on power. He was inhuman in his ruthlessness and completely inflexible about the enforcement of his own terrible set of rules. Informers were subjected to medieval agonies. A subordinate who stole from him was mutilated and murdered by the person who had been tapped to take his job, part of a macabre interview process. The pace and intensity of the murders and other acts of retribution accelerated, and somehow, though each lurid scene went by into the past in a fast-flowing stream of images, instantly replaced by the next and the next and the next, it became cumulatively more upsetting to watch. As I autoplayed episode after episode, Carson began to seem almost naïve, his crimes mere dabblings in horror compared to those of La Mettrie. In the projects and row houses of Brownsville and East New York, the Haitian’s gang reigned supreme. Blue Lives was fixated on the terror of their victims, as if it wanted to subject the viewer as thoroughly as possible to the experience of being at the mercy of an absolute, capriciously sadistic master. And every so often in the dialogue, I would notice another strange phrase or sentence, a line or two of elevated speech. Man is wolf to man. War is father of all and king of all. I recognized some as quotations and every one was out of place in a naturalistic thriller. I came to suspect that they were an insider joke, the entire show just an elaborate illustration of some point of view of the writer, something to do with the world’s hopelessness. Look at what horrors are possible, was the message. The only rational response is despair.

  Carson’s wife, Emily, was presented as an innocent, Carson’s “one good thing,” a traditional working-class Catholic woman who stayed at home in a small town on the New Jersey side of the Hudson, raising towheaded blond twins who looked as if they’d stepped out of an old TV commercial. Emily was Carson’s prize. He maintained her in a fetishistic state of purity. Sometimes we saw him making distracted phone calls at softball games or turning up late to a parent-teacher conference, but throughout all his corrupt dealings he managed to maintain a public image of integrity. As far as the world was concerned, he was a white man in good standing, a faithful husband and a loving dad. To his police buddies, his household was a miraculous survival from an older America, a symbol of everything they had sworn to protect and serve.

  The wall that Carson had erected around his family began to erode when he and his men raided one of La Mettrie’s stash houses, getting away with over a million dollars in money and drugs. Carson now had a storage unit full of La Mettrie’s heroin, and The Crew was putting together a deal to sell it to some Aryan Nations skinheads who wanted to finance their ethnically pure homeland in Idaho. They celebrated the deal at a strip club, under a murky blue light that reminded me of the Chinese restaurant in Wannsee.

  La Mettrie was not the kind of gangster who had old-fashioned compunctions about getting family involved. One of his men left a grisly calling card at Carson’s home, decapitating the pet cat and nailing the corpse to the door. Emily phoned her husband, crying hysterically, just as The Crew were trying to move the money and drugs out of the storage unit. They were understandably tense, expecting to be attacked, and Carson had to leave to deal with the situation, which made him feel that he was losing face. He was angry at his wife, but as soon as he saw the dead cat, he realized what had happened. He persuaded Emily that it was nothing (she had a cloying, almost bovine trust in him) and drove off in his car, snarling with vengeful fury as soon as he was out of her sight.

  Unfortunately for Carson, La Mettrie and some of his most barbaric henchmen were already in position, watching his house. The gang lord, slumped in the back seat of a black SUV, turned his heavy-lidded eyes to the camera and began one of the show’s strange monologues. “There is no instant of time when one creature is not being devoured by another. Over all these numerous races of animals, man is placed, and his destructive hand spares nothing that lives. He kills to obtain food, he kills to clothe himself, he kills to adorn himself, he kills to attack, he kills to defend himself, he kills to instruct himself, he kills to amuse himself, he kills to kill. Proud and terrible king, he wants everything, and nothing resists him.”

  La Mettrie leaned past the camera, opened the door, and got out of the car. Followed by his men, he crossed the darkened residential street and made his way round to the rear of the house, where, without the slightest hesitation, he smashed his way in through the patio doors. A cut to a shot of Carson’s sleeping children—and then nothing. A little circle started revolving in the middle of my screen. At this crucial moment my stream had dropped, the image had stalled, and no amount of refreshing or restarting would bring it back.

  I realized that the technical problems didn’t lie with the video stream. I also had no email and my phone had no Wi-Fi connection. Automatically, I got out of bed to reboot the router, only to remember that I wasn’t at home and didn’t even know where the router was. I was helpless. I experienced a premonition of some kind, a sensation of foreboding. I would have to call the IT department. Outside it was dark. For the first time in hours, I looked at a clock. It was later than I’d thought. I drank some whisky but it was hard to drop off to sleep. My mind crackled with images of home invasion, of masked gangsters and terrified children. I wanted to call Rei, to check that everything was OK, but I knew I was in no fit state to hold a conversation.

  The next morning, I ate a bowl of cereal at my desk, compulsively checking the internet connection. I dialed the extension of the IT office. It went to voicemail. They were in. I was sure of it. Everyone knows that tech support never pick up if they can possibly help it. I always experience low-level panic when I’m denied internet access, even if I have no immediate need for it. I tried the number several more times. At last, feeling like a doomed polar explorer, I pulled on my pants and prepared to go outside. There was an elevator, but I took the stairs, figuring that I’d be less likely to encounter other people.

  The basement corridor was empty, but from behind a door came bass-heavy explosions and the muffled crackle of high-energy weapons, the telltale sounds of space battle. I knocked, but there was no reply. I figured Player One couldn’t hear me, so I tried the handle and let myself in to a small but efficiently ordered office. Shelving lined the walls, stacked with baskets of cable and audiovisual equipment. The man playing the game sat with his back to me, enthroned on some kind of high-backed task chair. He faced an array of screens, one showing his game, the second what looked to be audio or video editing interface. A third was tiled with surveillance feeds. The front gate from two angles, the back door of the kitchen, the rear elevation of the house looking up from the lake. There were interior views. Stairways. Other spaces, dark and indistinct. In one of these, I spotted a white shape, a naked old man walking across the frame, from left to right. You could only see his midsection—a downward-folded white belly, the little cone of a penis jutting out of a bird’s-nest of hair.

  The gamer must have pressed some kind of hotkey, because all at once his screens went blank. He swiveled round on his space-age throne and squinted
at me from behind a curtain of long dyed-black hair. We’d met, if you could call it that, when he scanned my iris during my orientation. Since then, I sometimes saw him standing around outside the kitchen, smoking with one of the waiters. He was in his twenties and always wore more or less the same thing—black combat pants tucked into army boots, tee shirts with the logos of obscure metal bands.

  “Hello,” I said. “I think the internet’s down.”

  His expression soured. As I waited for him to say something, I tried to process what I’d seen on his screen. It was clear that the camera wasn’t mounted in a public place. It was located at waist height, perhaps on or under a table, framing a view of a bed exactly like the one I slept in every night. The location was unmistakably one of the Center’s guest rooms. And I would have known that bulky body anywhere. It was Edgar.

  The gamer was staring at me, as if he’d caught me in some kind of transgression rather than the other way around. Unable to deal with his weird energy, I looked away. The basement office had very little natural light. As if to compensate, there were artificial light sources of all kinds—bright tracks on the ceiling, a novelty lamp in the shape of a rabbit, a string of little LEDs. At the other end of the room was another desk, piled high with neatly stacked hard drives. Until then I hadn’t noticed the man sitting behind it. He was older than the gamer and wore jeans with a crisp white shirt and wire-frame glasses, an outfit that made him look like someone playing an architect in an advertisement for financial services. He came round to shake my hand.