a rational man

by J S Hollis

  Then Clara fell in love. Again there were only symbols, symptoms and circumstance.

  “No evidence,” the lawyers said. “All circumstantial,” as if they have never met another person. Never seen a relationship. Never been human.

  They needed “love letters” or “some verbal confirmation” or the meeting of sexual organs to believe in love. Object over process. But as sure as a bird of paradise doesn’t dance for its own pleasure, Clara and Tom were in love.

  It is tempting to consider whether the roots of this love grew out of the churning soil of Clara’s relationship with Cecil or if love can, like existence itself, spontaneously incarnate. Either way, to find love within the insipid environs of a Green Party fundraiser, requires a certain amount of magic.

  By chance or by fate, Clara found Tom’s projection next to hers during a presentation by the CEO of Waste Not Want Not on liquid diets.

  “This is the Green dream,” the CEO said as they watched the manufacturing process. “There is no waste. Every day you get the perfect nutrition for you and your family without harming the environment. There’s no shopping. No cooking. Only the small amount of energy required to open a carton three times a day. And what’s more, each carton is bespoke to you.”

  Clara blew the boredom out from her cheeks.

  “I know,” said Tom, “same thing every year.” Clara turned to look at him. She probably wondered whether his baldness was a style hangover from the fifties or a genuine condition that he didn’t seek to remedy. “Here it comes – the taste …” he said.

  “And, we have listened to our customers, and now they taste great too.”

  Clara and Tom chuckled. “My son already drinks this stuff,” whispered Clara.

  “I actually do too but I have no family to eat real meals with.”

  “You must come over for a meal.” She paused. “Oh, you’re Tom Hutchings,” she said suddenly, a little louder than intended. “I’ve been meaning to attend one of your classes for ages.”

  “I’d be delighted to have you. I haven’t played games for a while but I was addicted to Body Wars – that was Mind Games, right?”

  “Yes, yes, we developed that,” said Clara, allowing her words to slip out without her usual deliberation. They both listened to the CEO again and then Clara turned back to Tom. “Hey, what happened to you after your dance through the palace?”

  “I was jailed for a month. But it was great advertising and the king was pretty sympathetic. People were so impressed that I managed to choreograph a whole dance through the security without having ever practised it. Now my classes are filling up really quickly. But I’ll find a place for you.”

  Clara attended her first mindchitect class the following week. Tom described his basic mind mapping method of CGBP Repeat: CLEAR space, find a GOAL, BUILD towards that goal, PAINT in the detail, repeat. They practised the method and then were each asked to work towards their own goals. Clara constructed a poem.

  A distant unsetting sun blazes,

  Burning the orbiting bodies that cling,

  Squinting.

  The yolk runs

  And all is gas and sand.

  The blinded hold their gaze.

  The storms,

  The fire,

  Remain eclipsed.

  The skin withers, they spin around.

  No light is too dim.

  The rest of the class applauded enthusiastically. They always did. Ensuring the revolving door of approval and the eternity of a thousand fantasies. Clara told Tom that she felt “empowered”.

  “I’m delighted you enjoyed it,” he responded.

  Clara tended to get excited by new things and the new class was no exception. She even challenged Sebastian to a game of chess, following Tom’s advice, after having dismissed the game for years as the thing Sebastian does with his father. When she beat Sebastian, she became convinced of the powers of her new mindchitect exercises.

  She attended classes as regularly as she could and, unusually for Clara, didn’t arrange anything afterwards. Instead she would often have a post session drink with Tom during which they discussed the mind, politics and their lives. Tom was invited to the Stanhopes for dinner and Clara spoke excitedly to her old friends about her new one. No doubt she liked the fact that he was a little controversial. In her sad and structured little world, it probably allowed her to think she was being a little rebellious. Tom had a history of breaking the law. He claimed he sometimes crossed the line to “demonstrate the constraints on free expression”. Free expression was conveniently good for publicity.

  Sadly, for all involved, Clara and Tom never consummated their love through any concrete communication. But it was clear that love had been smeared all over them. Love is no secret. It is an inescapable chemical reaction that has a number of proven signposts. With Clara and Tom, those signposts beamed out. When they spoke to each other, they were excited to be heard and itching to speak, their words intertwining and dancing. When they kissed to greet, Tom’s calculated hand rested and touched Clara’s waist sensuously and carelessly. Their eyes were locked by the other’s reflection. Clara’s pupils dilated with proximity to Tom’s. Their heartrates accelerated33 and Tom constantly wiped his hands on his trousers while they spoke. Clara stopped mentioning how happy she was. She looked genuinely excited when she arrived at Tom’s classes and hollow when she left.

  With apologies to the reader, I need to bring myself into the story at this point. I published my discovery of Tom and Clara’s forbidden love on Know Your Member, my political comment site, with the aim of emancipating them. It seemed to me that they were never going to do anything about it otherwise. It was not the first time I had done such a thing.34 There is nothing wrong with falling in love with someone else. I finished the piece by saying: “Now it is out there. Cecil do the good thing and set Clara free.”

  Before Cecil had the chance, Tom and Clara denied my claims. “No, no, don’t be silly, we are just friends, that’s all,” Clara said. Tom dismissed my views as “malicious rumour mongering”.

  “I only love one man and that is Cecil,” Clara told another journalist when he interviewed her. “Really, Mrs Stanhope,” he replied, “you barely speak to your husband. Do you expect us to see the cool efficiency of your marriage as love?”

  “I love Cecil. We do not need to express our love in the way you see fit. If I didn’t love him, I would leave him.”

  And so, Clara kept attending Tom’s mindchitect classes. No doubt because to do otherwise would have been evidence that there was truth to my theory.

  Cecil couldn’t ignore the story though. It flowed through W unrelentingly. The public were persuaded by its veracity and friends asked if “everything was OK”. No friends or family commented on their marriage at the time, but since the murder many have admitted that they did not think the marriage was a happy one and were convinced that Clara was in love with Tom. Clara’s mother, Donatella, said to me that “anyone as active as Clara had to be running away from something”35.

  But as 2060 drew to a close, the questions about Cecil and Clara’s marriage continued. Cecil tried to put a stop to it on a Saturday afternoon. He had been watching W while passing the house at the end of the road and had noticed that the elderly lady inside was trying to move a couch that was too heavy for her. He offered his help but it was too much for just him. He called Clara, who popped over to assist. On their way back home, Cecil finally broached the subject.

  “Thanks for helping there. I couldn’t leave her to do it.”

  “I was delighted to,” Clara said. Cecil had to accelerate to keep up with Clara’s businesslike struts.

  “Clara, about this Tom thing, I love you very deeply and of course I would be utterly devastated if you left me. But, but—”

  Clara stopped in the street. “Cecil.” Cecil turned around. “Please, you don’t have to say a
nything.”

  “I want to say this. Because I love you, I wouldn’t want you to be unhappy. If there is any truth in what has been said, we should discuss it.”

  “I love you, Cecil, and only you. Now let’s get inside, it’s freezing.”

  Cecil remained unconvinced. Perhaps he did understand his wife after all the years of sterility. Or maybe his trust and confidence had been weakened by constant assaults from the public. After the Cecil’s Tax nightmare and the constant “What is Cecil hiding?” conspiracies, even Cecil’s staff began to question his more radical ideas while previously they had been foolishly supportive. When Cecil suggested introducing a minimum time before a profit could be made on stocks or other securities, Sam Clark just laughed and said “good luck”.

  If Cecil was as good as he liked to think he was, he would have reacted to this time of difficulty by continuing to pursue what he believed in. He was a fraud. As soon as being the perfect man no longer worked for him, Cecil let slip that it was megalomania not ethics that drove him. He couldn’t control Clara’s influence on his future. He may even have wanted her to leave him so he could use his reaction to resurrect his political career. It would have been hard at first. The public may have wondered why Clara had left him. But he could have won their sympathy by gracefully accepting her decision. But while the story lingered, Cecil looked like a fool.

  He wanted to discover the truth, as if it wasn’t already blindingly obvious. Clara was saturated in love. Sometimes people want to find things out for themselves though. So Cecil watched Clara as she sat in Tom’s class, forgetting that watching and seeing are two different things.

  He didn’t see each time the eyelids of the other nine meditating men and women blinked; their nostrils flaring; their chests expanding and contracting; their backs straight but swaying side to side and back and forward with fatigue; their lips occasionally mumbling some personal conversation; and their pupils twitching in the changing light.

  Nor did he care that the air flowing in and out of the room in little gusts left billions of atoms spiralling in a constant unseen storm.

  He heard nothing.

  Clara sat cross legged, feet on knees, in the bare room. Rectangular, about 5 by 10 metres, with a dark brown floor of wooden slats and long sash windows that on sunny days cast deep angular shadows on the white walls.

  For Cecil, the room was nothing but the space in which she was sitting. Like predator and prey, there was a separate dimension that existed in the space between them that only he knew about. She was unaware of his inspection.

  Her unveiled face appeared beautiful to him. Her indigo eyes accentuated by thick black eyeliner, her skin a single shade of chocolate but coarse with too much foundation. Her hair, a perfect black bob.

  As he looked at her meditating, he didn’t think about lines or colours at all. He only cared about her eyes. He was looking for something unsaid and undone. He hoped to glean some evidence of what was going on behind her eyes.

  Her eyes flicked to the left and then pulled back to stare straight. They did it again. This time they lingered. The next blink was longer and her face tweaked. Cecil looked around to where her eyes had settled. His eyes fell on Tom.

  That was when he decided to kill Clara.

  7

  Reveal

  Cecil had as much as any man could reasonably expect: an attractive face and a sculpted body, an ambitious and impressive wife who was dedicated to him, a healthy son who loved him, a successful business, popularity and a fledgling political career that was beginning to give him influence. He had health, power and the appearance of happiness. Why would a man with all this kill his wife in the cold light of billions of eyes? Does the answer matter, if murder is abhorrent whatever the cause?

  Yes, the answer does matter. Even if there are no good reasons for murder, there are understandable ones. We absolve Cecil of the moral consequences of his actions by explaining his crime by a momentary lapse. A rush of blood to the head. Cecil had no history of violence. No psychological illness. He obsessed about what it meant to be good. He knew where the line was drawn and he crossed it.

  Let us not absolve ourselves either by blaming the unknowable. The signs were there.

  The murder can be traced back to the beginning of Cecil and Clara’s relationship and possibly beyond. The immediate events of the day of the murder are potentially irrelevant and misleading.

  The day began with the usual familial breakfast. Words were politely exchanged but kept to a minimum. Sebastian was wrapped up in his own head reading or watching whatever took his fancy. His cereal was swallowed before it could be chewed. Cecil and Clara, on the other hand, concentrated on each mouthful, counting the number of bites before each soggy morsel was ready for digestion.

  They were awoken from their private meditations when Sebastian dropped his glass, cracking it into three pieces and splashing vegetable juice over the granite table.

  “Sorry,” Sebastian said, staring at the mess.

  “Sebastian,” Clara said, “would you mind getting the cloth and throwing the glass away?”

  “Oh, yes.” He peeled himself off the chair and by the time he got the cloth, the juice was dripping red onto the floor.

  Cecil moved to let Sebastian finish cleaning up. “Anything exciting happening today, C?” he said.

  Clara finished her chewing and swallowed. “Not really,” she said. “I’m working on some new ideas and then going to the mindchitect class after work. My head feels like it needs some focus.”

  “I hope you get it. One of us needs to know what is going on and I’m not sure it is me.” Clara gave him a half erased smile and then watched him sit back down and disappear into his own world like the setting moon.

  During the Cabinet meeting that morning, Cecil announced his proposal for broadening restrictions on thought tracking technology (TTT) with precise gesticulation.

  The majority of the Cabinet had previously been behind Cecil’s proposals but now they were shifting with public opinion. A prolonged and admirable campaign by TTT developers, focused on the threat of the unsaid, had brought in the mass support of the over thirty-fives.

  They were worried about the thoughts harboured by their children, friends, neighbours and, not least, politicians. These adults had finally grown up. They saw that no one should have anything to hide and, with effective TTT, everything would be in the open. All the unpleasant thoughts would be weeded out. Some “bad” thoughts would be seen as normal: debauchery, jealousy, pettiness. That would all come out in the wash, like masturbation and urinating in the shower when W was introduced. We’d be able to identify the dangerous people: the murderers, the paedophiles thinking about our children with impunity, the so called friends who manipulate us, the politicians thirsty for the corruption of power.

  Cecil had not had a chance to adjust to this changing mood. He had begun to talk about his plans to restrict TTT to research and to “reactive” functions.36 The Prime Minister interrupted him. “Cecil,” he said, before standing up and imposing his suave on the rest of the table, “we have all seen your excellent work on this, but I have been rethinking my position and I wonder if we are being too cautious. Wouldn’t it be useful to know what other people are thinking? Wouldn’t it remove the fear that some people have something dangerous up their sleeves? Wouldn’t it help prevent the currently unpreventable? As other countries are already developing this technology, aren’t we behind the times?” He didn’t mention the polls but he was right all the same.

  Cecil had remained standing and had scanned the faces of his Cabinet colleagues for a reaction to the unprecedented intervention. They refused to give him the benefit of their acknowledgement. “Thank you for your kind words, Prime Minister,” he said. “You are of course perfectly within your rights to change your mind. But I am slightly surprised by your decision all the same. There are two things that should concern
us. The economy and the environment. These are not undermined by our lack of TTT. Our society is safe. There are still unfortunate incidents but they are very few. Certainly not enough for us to worry what people are thinking. I fear that TTT would seriously affect the QOLI.”37

  “Sit down, Cecil,” the Prime Minister suggested, his coquettish eyes darting around the room. “Again, you have made some excellent points. But there are risks of not pursuing this technology. In any case, we wouldn’t advocate full use of the technology – at first. Just in certain situations. Policing. Job interviews maybe. And depending on the success of those introductions, we could look at how to regulate the technology in the future. Overall I think it would put us a step closer to a civilised society. It might make us all a little bit more honest. Wouldn’t you like to know what some people in your life are thinking?”

  Cecil’s eyebrows twitched. He rubbed them but they refused to be tamed. “I am very sorry to disagree with you, Prime Minister, but I wouldn’t. I wonder if any relationship would survive if you always knew what was on the other person’s mind.”

  The rest of the Cabinet smiled at Cecil and he smiled back. During the following plenary discussion, the majority of Cecil’s colleagues sided with Prime Minister Shah while Cecil looked at the bottom of his glass of water wishing he could turn it into blood.

  It fell to Cecil to finish the discussion. “While I admire the opinions of my honourable friends, this is foolish.” He brought his hand down onto the green table, only managing a dull thud. “This is the end of civilisation as we know it. We will be nothing more than the extremities of a giant single thinking organism. You are good people. What is it you fear? Do we really need to be protected from the dishonesty of our neighbours and the false enthusiasm of our staff? I want people to lie to me. I like secrets. I am not perfect. Sometimes I need somewhere to rest. I urge you all to rethink this decision. I cannot be party to it. We should be fighting against the last bastion of inequality, the control of land by the few. The problem is right there before our eyes. The overcrowding. The power of landlords. It is the reason I came into politics. We don’t need TTT to see it. And yet we look for problems that are not even there. I will hand in my formal resignation tomorrow.”