a rational man

by J S Hollis

  * * *

  “I remember Cecil. A real pleasure. Enthusiastic, hard working, passionate about science, actually kept his shirt tucked in. Stubborn as an ox though. If he got a question wrong he would argue about it until the cows came home. I had to ask him to save his questions until after class so the rest of the pupils didn’t have to endure the discussion.”

  * * *

  “Cecil and I were good friends for a short while. We sat together at lunch every day. He was the first person I messaged when something came up. We began to get really close. I knew his parents well enough to chat to them when Cecil wasn’t there. His mum would show me her new inventions and his dad tried to explain the universe. My parents were accountants, so the Stanhopes seemed like pretty much the coolest parents in the world. In fact, while we were sharing a room on a school trip, I told Cecil I wished my parents were scientists. He laughed and I had to press him to find out why. He eventually said he wasn’t sure scientists were made for relationships. He must have regretted the revelation because I never went round to his flat after that. Come to think of it, while he always had loads of friends, I’m not sure anyone was his best friend. I often wondered if there was something else going on. There were rumours that Emma was having an affair with a priest and I’m not sure Kingsley ever saw the light of day.”

  * * *

  he had flicked through thousands of photographs of cecil. cecil controlling the sound and lighting during an unnamed school play. cecil coming off the football pitch. cecil holding a mug. and endless close up pictures of cecil doing very little at all. cecil was normally smiling in his peculiar way with his eyebrows a little too high, like he was trying really hard to smile and his face had become stretched. was this evidence that cecil had always been putting on an act? S had tracked the smile back to pictures of cecil as a toddler. could he have been posing even then?

  after the pictures, S scrolled through messages between cecil and his friends. he had struggled to decode some of the references but he understood that they were mainly inane discussions of sports, comedy and women. S was struck by cecils sexual comments about his female friends. cecil wanted to “fuck indira” and “wouldnt touch georgie with a barge pole”. cecil never discussed women in this way after W was introduced. what did the change mean? a reasonable man? tried to draw a straight line from this “revelation” to the murder. “clara was nothing more than a conquest to be disposed of when the chance came.” S was unconvinced.

  cecil had become more alien though. he was “cecil” or “alice” but not “dad”. dad was only part of cecil. the murdering cecil was another person entirely. a person with a childhood, with sexual desires, with ambitions and failures, with uncertainty and soul searching. a more complete but less coherent being. S wasnt sure he was any better placed to comment on this cecil than anyone else.

  S had given up on finding the ultimate truth in cecils childhood. he wasnt going to find clues to the real cecil in a soup of faded memories and documentary fragments. especially when the memories were poisoned by the present and most of the fragments existed because cecil had preserved them. any patterns S identified spread into meaningless constellations.

  the stars on the ceiling were too bright and S closed his eyes. he hoped the search would reach an end, preferably with irrefutable proof of cecils motives, but he was not that idealistic. he didnt expect to get any further than cecils testimony or diary entries. the alternative was to get to a point where there was nothing more to be said, shown or analysed. to be able to look around at the various tables and diagrams and say this is everything and it gets us nowhere. he was pretty sure his headaches would cease at that point. he imagined a lens trying to zoom out further, whirring aimlessly, and then clicking off. or a puzzle with one hundred pieces that didnt fit together. and then he could say, “yep, this is all there is.”

  * * *

  Pentonville Prison, 2 October 2061

  Starting this diary, I feel the shadows of Anne Frank and Samuel Pepys over my shoulder. A strange couple. The skinny brunette teenager and the chubby faced clerk with a periwig. The pressure of their presence is almost intolerable.

  Do all diary writers feel the need to justify their prose?

  Diary writing is not a morally neutral decision. If it is pointless, it is an elitist preserve. If I think my views matter, I am arrogant. If they only matter to me, I am selfish. It is impossible to circle around all these pits of sin. I will have to hope the writing justifies itself. It can do so by staving off boredom or defending against amnesia, by condensing thoughts or untangling reason, by preserving history or by capturing the beauty of the world spinning around.

  Wanting to write is not the same as being able to do so. This diary can thank prison for its existence. Prison has been kind enough to give me the two essential ingredients of writing: time and an unfettered mind. Surprisingly a life sentence lets the mind run free.

  The irony of finding liberty in jail has taught me something about W. Its power over me is not the knowledge that I am being watched. It is the fear of the judgement of my peers. Some people don’t care about being judged: although they are few and often lonely. But I have been judged permanently and cast away.

  Diary writing must have declined with the introduction of W. People tend to keep their thought processes inside and out of sight. There is also no need to record life because everything is recorded. Even before W, I doubt many people expected to look back over their diaries. The writers enjoyed the practice not the output. This is not a record either. I prefer to believe that the words fall off into a white void. They exist only for the moment they are written. As I write this sentence, the ripples in the air will do more to shape the future than the words produced. Only a few words will be pulled out of the white void and moulded into something useful.

  As diaries die and W is left to objectively record our time, I worry about the history of now. Think about a million year old stone chopping tool. Its carved sharp edge provides evidence of our ancestors’ desires to make things better. Its existence is our periscope into our ancestors’ universe. We can see them wrenching the heavy stone along the skin of a dead beast and ripping off the raw meat. We can see them smashing the beast’s bones, exposing the nutritious marrow. We can see them sharing their spoils among the clan’s families and mocking those who have come back to the hearth with nothing. One rock, struck a few times against another, explodes into a society. The historians of our time will wish we had only left a buried stone. Instead they will have the whole record of our existence. They are left with infinite explosions and each one will rebound off the others like pond ripples during a downpour. There is more and there is less. More evidence and more counter evidence. Like the historians before them, they will have a perspective. But it will be impossible for them to hide it behind the lack of source material. It will be revealed by their direction of discovery. And as the historical material has grown, its quality as a means of understanding our time has diminished. Actions say less and less about us. The age of psychology was born and died with the camera. We saw ourselves and then we closed up like a flytrap that has made its kill. We will only open again slowly. Everything has been created already. This is the age of editing. Historians will only be able to reedit.

  So perhaps I have a role to play. To write a diary after the death of diaries. But it does not matter. I am not concerned with posterity.

  Pentonville Prison, 2 November 2061

  I remember the couch. Thick weaves of cream cotton sinking beneath my slackened limbs. The angle of the cushions cradling my neck. I was cocooned like a caterpillar in multiple layers that whirled in from bricks to hoody. An antisocial animal. Just reached thirteen. In a timeless universe of my own. Where caterpillars were never butterflies and butterflies were never caterpillars. Just at home. Alone. The huge screen shone. Its swamping colour trumping reality. And my soul warmed in the endless stories played out in the liv
ing room by those waves of sound and vision. The viewing was aimless. All I wanted was to bathe in the glow. Me and the screen. The screen and I. A happy couple. Tucked in for the night while the creatures of other worlds pretended there was something better to do than watch and be unwatched.

  I had cooked something. Bangers and mash. So much that it filled every bodily nook and cranny. Even though the mustard had cleared my nose, I could barely smell the beer as I lifted the sweating bottle towards my waxy lips. It was too cold. It only tasted of ice but it percolated and swept away the stodge in its refreshing path. A small transgression. A grab from the fridge that my parents wouldn’t notice. I didn’t even like the stuff. It tasted like rusting metal but it was a reminder that I was me. So aware that this was my time. Untrespassed. Unaware it was terminable. My mind stretched to the corners of the room. The walls hung with Dad’s cricket memorabilia, including a framed handwritten scorecard from England’s victory in Durban in 2009. The card always conjured questions from friends. But I was thankful for it. Without cricket, we would never have had the big screen.

  And from the screen came life. No one had watched films before. Not like I watched them. I seeped into the light and danced among the frames. Fusing realities like a masked shaman weaving in and out of the spirit world. Anticipation grabbed hold of me before each film. Each one could be the revelation. That night I had chosen an old black and white film that no one else would watch with me. Dr Strangelove. And there it was. As nuclear weapons destroyed the world, my body wrenched with laughter. Beautiful mushroom clouds rose across the skies. Highlight reels of nature. Billowing waves of dust reaching the gigantism of mountains. Impossible to turn away from, like the flames of a campfire. And Vera Lynn sung “we’ll meet again”. Unsure if the sunny day would be on earth or some better place. I laughed at myself for seeing beauty where I knew there was only horror. And I laughed at myself for laughing at it. Not that I knew why I was laughing back then. But I didn’t believe anyone else got it quite like I got it.

  Until prison, I had forgotten what a pleasure it was to be alone. To have moments that were only mine. No one else could ever be in that room watching Dr Strangelove.

  After the film, I masturbated. Without fear. Nobody knew where I was or what I was doing. Nobody knew that I was watching the screen and masturbating. Thinking about that presenter. Janet O’Sullivan. She used to present the news. They wanted me to think about her that way. Those tops. The lips. The voice dripping. A lingerie advert with more clothes on. Those adverts with the mouths slightly open that should look idiotic. They don’t have them anymore. Back then the news wanted me to be aroused. So I was. I paused on a close up image of Janet and masturbated. There was added excitement in the mesh of news, living room and sex. I masturbated a lot more in those days. I didn’t worry about it until afterwards. If it was bad masturbation, I felt guilty afterwards because I had lost control to the other me. The objectifier. But it was my guilt. Nobody else’s.

  It must have been the other me that voted for W a few years later. On the morning of the vote, I remember arguing against it. The exact details are fuzzy but, most likely, when I entered the kitchen, my mother was trying to blow smoke out of the window. She failed and the smoke wafted back through the narrow room.

  “Nice of you to join us,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure of that.”

  I took the oats out of the cupboard. “You sit down,” she said, “I’ll do that.”

  I grabbed a stall at the fake marble breakfast bar that jutted out from the side of the kitchen. “So, are you going to vote today, Mum?”

  “Certainly,” she said. She had forgotten that she had been prevaricating the day before.

  “You decided which way?”

  “For it. Milk or water?”

  “Milk please. I thought you weren’t convinced. You were worried that your inventions would be stolen.”

  She measured out the milk and poured it over the oats in the saucepan. “I was. But your dad explained that I would be able to prove an invention had been stolen. I would just need evidence of that person watching me.”

  “I thought you didn’t want people to watch you the whole time.”

  “Oh that,” she said. “I don’t see what all of the fuss is. God sees everything anyway.”

  “But Dad doesn’t and there is no God.” I got up and poured myself some juice.

  “Why do you have to say things like that?”

  “You are arguing for the most significant societal change, perhaps ever, because God is omnipresent. That argument only works if there is a God. If there is no God, why should I vote for W?”

  “I didn’t say you should.” The porridge had begun to bubble and Mum pulled the wooden spoon through it like a paddle.

  “Help me out here.”

  “You just want to argue but I’ll entertain you. One,” she extended a delicate finger, “surveillance is in the arms of governments and big business. By making everything transparent, W ends that discrimination. Two, privacy serves the powerful by allowing them to take advantage of their social networks and superior information. Three, I won’t have to worry about your safety anymore, or not as much. I’d much rather we had no secrets than have to live each day worrying about the next terrorist attack. What kind of freedom is that? And you know what Mullangi says: ‘there are no secrets between lovers and we are all lovers now.’”

  “Yeh, I know all those arguments, but have we thought about all the consequences? Won’t it allow governments to crack down on dissent far more effectively? Won’t the social pressure make people crazy?”

  “Maybe bad governments will take advantage, but they will have to maintain the same standards they expect of their citizens. And on the social side very little will change. Once people see they are all prone to the same indiscretions, they will become more accepting of them, like after Kinsey’s report on sexual behaviour, you know?” I nodded but I didn’t know who Kinsey was. “It will actually make it easier to be imperfect. I was reading about some societies that had no real concept of privacy. They found attempts to hide physiological functions and political views threatening.”

  “Well there is a reason those societies don’t exist anymore.”

  She handed me my porridge and didn’t respond. She knew I would win in a battle of the last word. I voted for W anyway and told people that I voted for all the reasons the advertisers had sold to us. Security, transparency, fairness. I lied. I voted because I wanted to see Janet O’Sullivan naked. I was sixteen and I wanted to see everyone naked. What was my loss? I had nothing to hide. I longed for people to watch me. I had important things to say. People would see I was a good guy. I didn’t know how much I would miss owning pieces of time. I didn’t know I wanted to share secret moments with people. I didn’t know it would lead me to kill the one woman I loved. I did see Janet O’Sullivan naked though but I had to flick past quickly and save the image in my head. I didn’t want people to call me “a perv”.

  Pentonville Prison, 2 December 2061

  I opened the door. The aging Inspector Mandrake was on the other side buzzing his lips. When he saw me, he kissed his teeth.

  “Sorry, I’m gonna have to put these on,” Mandrake said.

  “No need to apologise.” I held out my hands. The handcuffs fell gently.

  “Come on,” he said, waving a gloved hand towards the car with the enthusiasm of a tired dog owner. If he had judged me, he was kind enough not to show it. He ignored the faces of the neighbours looking out from the cover of their front doors.

  I got in the car. “Have you heard from your lawyer?” Mandrake asked.

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “Can you remove your Eyescreens then?” I took them out and gave them to Mandrake.

  I barely recognised the streets on the way to the police station. It had been years since I had travelled anywhere without augmente
d reality. No flashing details on architects or building materials or the best dish. Just the dull reflection of the street lights, which flicked on as we passed.

  “Pretty grim, isn’t it,” I said.

  “Yep.” He didn’t turn his head and I was left to look at the uncomfortable divot where his skull met his spine. I turned back to the washed out streets. A few people with no names shouted at the car.

  “Best to just ignore it,” Mandrake said.

  People were expecting me to cry but I stared out like a child on the Disney monorail, spotting the relics of sash windows between the steel and concrete monoliths. I wasn’t empty of feeling. My emotions were too confused to find a single external expression (humans are limited in that regard). I had ripped out part of myself. Clara and I were one. Her sadness was my sadness. Her joys were my joys. But Clara had vanished a long time before her death. Some cultures believe a photograph can steal the soul. W had stolen Clara’s a trillion times. I didn’t kill her, I put her to rest.

  When we arrived at the police station, Mandrake took me to the Interrogation Room (the words were inscribed in faded gold paint on the door) and we sat down on plastic chairs either side of an old school table with a laminate oak top. Mandrake removed his canvas boots and put his feet up on the table.

  “Not what you expected?” he said.

  “Not really.”

  “Always the same. People imagine some torture chamber. It’s crime films, you see. Stuck in the twenties.”

  The analogue clock, hanging on the wall behind Mandrake, was exactly what I expected. It was stuck on five to twelve. But I decided not to disagree with him. Mandrake had been easy going.

  Mandrake looked up at the ceiling, scanning the brown streaks creeping in from the corners. “I assume your lawyer has told you not to say anything.” I got the impression he wanted me to feel like I was nothing special.