a rational man

by J S Hollis

  Clara decided to put Cecil out of his misery by taking control of the situation. Whether this was an altruistic gesture to Cecil or her own defiance of social convention, she didn’t know herself. The next week she arrived at whirling in a tight black jumpsuit that hinted sensuously at each taut muscle along her long legs. Even Cecil, who had worked hard to train his eyes to focus only on women’s faces, couldn’t stop himself from surveying Clara’s whole body. After the session, Clara greeted Cecil and said, “You like Mondrian, don’t you?”

  Cecil knew nothing about Mondrian accept for the poster of Composition with Yellow, Blue and Red on the wall of his bedroom but was sensible enough to say that he did.

  “Fancy coming with me to the Neoplasticism exhibition at the Royal Academy? Got two free tickets.”

  Cecil just about managed to keep his voice steady as he said “I’d love to” but his cheeks struggled to hold back the glow of the sudden surge of excitement that arose within him.

  Cecil and Clara met the following Saturday afternoon outside the Royal Academy. Clara once again made heads turn. She wore a yellow fez that stood in high contrast to the drab clothes that festooned those passing by on Piccadilly. Within the exhibition however, her clothing struck a harmony with the primary colours and simple geometric shapes favoured by the Neoplasticists. At first, Cecil and Clara perambulated around the exhibition and discussed how exhibitions weren’t quite the same on W. How on W, exhibitions were haunted by a sense of the virtual, the absence of texture, the lack of smell. But eventually they were drawn apart by their different approaches to perusing. Cecil read the plaque on the wall describing each painting and then stood back to let its significance seep in. Clara skimmed the paintings and rejected those she had no interest in. Soon she had merged into the crowd, apart from her fez.

  Cecil found Clara at the end of the exhibition sitting in a model neoplastic building writing her article on the exhibition for the student news. “What are you writing?” he asked.

  “That I don’t like it.”

  “Really? I actually loved it. I just liked how … confident those artists were. They were able to build whole worlds from a few simple ideas,” Cecil said tentatively. None of his fear flowed through to his tranquil face but Clara sensed the tone of Cecil’s passivity and she asked him whether he had seen the inscription above the entrance to the house. He hadn’t.

  “It’s a quote from Mondrian. It says, ‘Opposites are best known through their opposites.’” Clara paused and, while Cecil considered the quotation seemingly ignorant of Clara’s hint, she smiled, put her arm through Cecil’s and said, “Come on, let’s go.”9 They left the gallery and Cecil directed them through Piccadilly Circus, below the interminable Coca Cola advert, and towards the river, which was still full then and retained a certain romance.

  “So, do you want to be an artist after uni?” Cecil asked.

  “An artist, not exactly. I wanted to be a psychologist, but I’m not so sure now. Whatever I do, it probably sounds a bit arrogant, but I’d really like to do something that changes the world for the better, if only a bit.”

  “I don’t think that is arrogant. It is ambitious. I’d like to do that too. But I can’t figure out the best way. I thought about politics but you have to spend too much time pandering to the public.”

  “Agreed. Or you just become corrupted by your thirst for power,” Clara said, exposing her fangs like a vampire.

  Cecil let out a small laugh. “There are always charities but they just stave off problems. So I think maybe it’s best to start a business.”

  “Sure, just screw people over by selling them things they don’t need. I’m already getting adverts for Neoplastic clothing and furniture. Clearly, the robots haven’t picked up on the tone of my review yet.”

  “I don’t mean like that. A socially conscious business, which gives people jobs but makes something worthwhile. I’ve got some ideas.”

  Clara’s frown passed in a second and she decided to let Cecil dream. “Tell me about them.”

  Cecil thought about it. Maybe he could impress her with his future plans but for once he didn’t just say what he wanted to. He kept the information back just to tease her. To control her. “Another time,” he said.

  “It’s not a stateless currency, is it?”10

  “Now that’s an idea, let’s leave the public to determine the value of everything.”

  The couple were giggling when they arrived at the river. Cecil was enjoying himself so much that he was no longer weighing up each word so that it was calculated to impress Clara. Their conversation, gestures and steps flowed. But then, as if they had hit a dam, Clara stopped, apologised, said she had to go do some work, kissed Cecil on the cheek, crossed the road and disappeared into the Embankment. Cecil hung his body limply over the parapet behind Embankment Pier and looked out over the Thames, the sun setting somewhere beneath the overcast sky. He thought about how miserable the grey water looked. His despair was brief. When she got on the tube, Clara messaged him to say she looked forward to their next meeting. Transformed once again, Cecil’s mind swelled with his future with Clara. Their wedding. Their child. Sitting together as an elderly couple reminiscing. Cecil’s imagination ran away down to Gravesend. He was unaware of the passersby bemused by his foolish grin.

  In the following days, Cecil became an expert on London’s art scene. Having finally reviewed his W profile, Cecil was aware that Clara was watching him but he hoped she would find his dedication charming rather than creepy. As is common with such browsing, Cecil wasn’t exactly sure what he was looking for, but when he read about the Artatech exhibition, he knew it was just the thing.

  The Artatech exhibition had opened in a Bedouin style tent at the Marble Arch end of Hyde Park the previous week. The exhibition directed electronic waves into users’ brains to provide them with a “real” experience of an event.11 This first exhibition gave users the impression of being punished in the stocks. Users didn’t directly experience pain as a result of the waves but they expressed feelings of sadness and guilt from being punished. With the tagline “Atone for your sins”, it was a rather blunt comment on the communal guilt for the Liquid Gold crash.

  Having found Artatech, Cecil browsed past adverts for exhibitions, flights to Paris and Rome, and auctions. He looked to see who was viewing him and found that it was no one he knew well: only the usual selection of trawlers. He searched for Clara and found her in a lecture. So he messaged her: “Fancy going to the Artatech exhibition this Saturday? This one is on me.” He saw her eyes look up as his message appeared. She silently mouthed a response and the message came: “Sure. I’ve always wanted to see someone throw fruit at my face.”

  The Artatech exhibition resembled a fairground ride. Cecil and Clara sat in a row of ten people, all locked into “electric chairs”. Helmets were placed on their heads and heavy duty blindfolds over their eyes. A large lever switched the system on and Cecil and Clara’s world transformed into the heaving smudge of restoration London. Slowly, the scene took shape. Dragged through the street, unable to move, they glimpsed the dome of St Paul’s between the horses and cows and screaming faces that had no concern for the trajectory of their spit. They could do nothing but absorb the heady mix of nostril splitting perfume and slurry. The Hogarthian vision would have been hammy if it hadn’t been so all encompassing. Then they saw the stocks and despite their best efforts, and selfassurances that it wasn’t real, they couldn’t close their eyes or blink themselves awake as the rotten fruit smashed into their heads.12

  “What the hell was that?” Clara said to the assistant while he removed her helmet.

  “Art,” the assistant replied.

  “I guess you didn’t enjoy it,” Cecil said.

  “That was one of the strangest experiences I have ever had.”

  “It was like a dream you couldn’t escape,” Cecil said. “I didn’t really believe I wa
s being tortured but at the same time something within me couldn’t quite dismiss it as unreal.”

  “Oh really. I actually quite enjoyed watching them hurt me.”

  Cecil, who had been brought up by a father who made jokes nobody else got, laughed and then Clara laughed too. It was the only reaction that fit.

  “Next time you take a girl out, avoid the nightmarish art exhibit.”

  “You’re still here.”

  And so their evening together continued onto a restaurant and then a bar. Cecil didn’t mention that he rarely drank and found that the whisky went down swiftly. Loosened by booze, the conversation melted into a vigorous rally. Cecil joked that he expected Clara to run off at any minute, Clara told Cecil he was too good for her, and they both laughed at the oblique character assassinations with little consideration of how small irrelevances can grow. While Clara ate a burger, Cecil asked her in a pedagogical tone, “Does that poor animal taste good?”

  Clara smiled. “Don’t be a bastard vegan,” she said. “And yes, it’s so good.”

  Cecil mooed like a cow on her last legs.

  Clara flashed her indigo eyes at him. “Uncanny,” she said. Cecil refrained from deploying his polished arguments for veganism.

  It was only when they were both tipsy that Cecil kissed Clara – his mouth a little too open, betraying a skill learnt from the movies rather than experience. Clara didn’t care. As they fumbled around kissing at the back of the bar, only aware of each other for that moment, it felt good.

  2

  Skeleton

  Cecil lived in fear of damaging the relationship after its fragile birth. So when he arrived at his parents’ new flat, he was prepared to summon all his creative energy to avoid discussing his love life. Not that he was embarrassed about it but his mum had been slow to adapt to the freedom of vision created by W – asking him questions with answers that were better kept in his head and out of the public domain. His relationship with Clara was good but young and delicate – discussions of where it was going or whether she really was the right woman for him were likely to drown the green shoots of love.

  From the first kiss, the relationship had grown slowly, with the tentative waltz of appropriately timed messages, W views and increasingly regular meet ups – starting at restaurants and bars and then inching into the quotidian locales of the study centre and the coffee shop, until not even shopping could be attempted separately in the knowledge that it would be “better together”. But Cecil and Clara were both privately suspicious of what was drawing them close. While all the forces of the universe had created their romance, the combination was completely unforeseeable a few moments prior to its existence. At their most cynical, they judged that the only things they had in common were time and place – their simultaneous positioning outside a door brought about by Clara’s tardiness and Cecil’s politeness towards a ponderous chemistry lecturer. Perhaps all they had was an awareness of their community in that one irrelevant moment and an appreciation of the irony of developing some relevance from it.

  But such thoughts glazed their romance with a magic that didn’t befit it. Attraction is contextual more often that we care to think, and Clara and Cecil’s circumstances were uncannily similar. They were both the first born of an English father and a foreign mother; they were experienced in parental strife; they grew up in areas where their families didn’t quite fit in; they knew what it was like not to be wealthy but they had never experienced true poverty, and there was also the not so small matter of intense physical attraction.

  That is not to say they were the same. When they arrived at parties together, neither of them quite looked to be of their time – but neither did they seem to be from the same point in history. Unlike Clara, Cecil could argue that he was observing the Invanity movement’s antistyle, but his look was still a little too precise. Rather he appeared to have stumbled upon the dress sense of the idealised communist worker, tall and broad with short hair and invariably dressed in dark shoes, grey trousers and a navy shirt. (He never went quite as far as donning a Mao suit though.) Clara was at least a century ahead of Cecil, like an alien arriving in London by spaceship clothed in an intergalactic whirlwind of fabrics as her curls wound round her head and shoulders like a willow caught in a storm. A less harsh observer would have described Cecil’s outfits as “smart” and Clara’s as “striking” but even the oblivious interpreted Cecil and Clara as yang and yin, order and disorder, light and dark.

  These were not just differences of style. When they were with friends, Clara’s hoarse voice would roar out with expletives and cross the borders of polite conversation. Whether or not anyone was listening, she would discuss her support for anal sex, how she didn’t trust the Chinese – “They sleep too much to be trusted. Look at Taiwan – they’ve bought half its fucking land and yet claim they don’t want it” – why using biological determination to choose your child’s looks was “disgusting” and how she hated one woman in her class because her smile was fake – “I’ll ask her how she is and she’ll reply ‘fine, but how are youuu?’ with a tone that suggests I’m too dumb to understand the question.”13 Clara was, it is fair to say, unpolished, brash and sometimes plain rude.

  Cecil enjoyed bringing Clara back to his shared house way out in the North London suburbs and dropping her on his housemate, Sylvio, who was muted by her energy (and Sylvio was not easily muted). The one time Cecil, caught up in a world of adoration, was foolish enough to ask Sylvio what he thought of her, he said “she is very interesting”, as if he had tasted a new and unappetising cuisine in a foreign country and was doing his best to be polite. Cecil was too sensible and perhaps politically minded even then to be as vocal about his views as Clara but he approved of Clara voicing her opinions – perhaps he even needed to vicariously live off someone else’s risk. She was living proof that the world of W did not have to live up to the fears of repression and conformity. Just because he could never be like her, didn’t mean he didn’t appreciate her. Cecil would never do anything without fully thinking it through first. When he spoke, it was with a very precise and authoritative whisper that travelled like a whistle.

  Cecil revelled in Clara’s nonconformism because he saw it as a political stance, but he was wrong to see it as such; it was the product of cynicism. Her cynicism had developed out of her parents’ failed marriage, which seemed to be based solely on one enjoyable month diving off the coast of Thailand.14 They told her they loved each other, but “love” appeared to mean bickering, silence and separation. Clara used art as a distraction and was repeatedly told her work was “outstanding” for a girl of her age. But when she lost young design competitions because she “hadn’t shown off all of her skills” she became even more suspicious of what people told her.

  This suspicion led Clara to refuse to engage with social media prior to W, despite the fact she missed out on parties, struggled in her IT classes, failed to get work experience because she was a “blank canvas”, was often completely unaware of new trends, music and games and was increasingly unable to shop online, book tickets or even do elementary research for her exams. “Anything that so many people agree is good must be bad,” she said.

  Similarly, initial public suspicions of W led Clara to adopt the technology wholeheartedly. Clara used it to look at the answers to school tests, despite the rules against doing so.15 When her cheating was inevitably discovered, she asked her headmistress, “Why are you teaching us how to remember facts when we can find out everything with a flick of our hands? Why don’t you teach us how to use information?”

  “Well, I hope we are teaching you both,” the headmistress said.

  “But we don’t need memory anymore.”

  “You might one day.”

  “I feel like we are being educated to prepare for a postapocalyptic world, where we need to remember how to build a fire, instead of the world as it is.”

  “Clara, I don’t need
to explain educational policy to you. Stop cheating. Pass your exams and then you can change the world as you see fit.”

  Clara reluctantly stopped but her adoption of W spread beyond the classroom. While her friends slowly adjusted to having their whole lives recorded and viewable, Clara became a local star. She didn’t act up, she just continued with pre W standards: bitching, arguing, picking her nose, not wearing make-up at all times and masturbating – at least until the Self Pleasure Society made it publicly acceptable. She still watched porn when it was going out of business but refused to use W to watch normal people having sex when that was, briefly, considered an acceptable alternative. And she engaged in “dehumanising” anal sex until the opposition to it was effectively (and rightly) labelled as homophobic. She then engaged in anal sex again when the opposition to it clarified that it was only problematic in male/female relations due to the specific difficulties of power relations between men and women.16

  Cecil was reassuringly unremarkable in comparison. He barely needed to adjust to W having always been a child of puritanical virtue – his deeply religious parents, Emma and Kingsley, had driven most lazy thinking and immorality out of him. His conversations with them tended to resemble the dialectical arguments of philosophers rather than the informal ebb and flow of chitchat. There was rarely an easy escape without being impolite. With Kingsley, Cecil knew that this was just how his mind worked. Emma on the other hand needed to argue things through – as a practising Christian woman in twenty-first century London, she felt a constant need to justify herself against the “hordes of atheists”. Unlike Kingsley, who was satisfied as long as he convinced himself, Emma really cared what other people thought about her. Her family had responded to her father’s death by showering her with reassurance and approval.17 Absent of any ability to judge herself, she desperately sought the approval of others. She needed her arguments to convince other people. Often she expressed this need by devaluing the intellect of others for not being convinced.