by Hari Kunzru
Hari Kunzru
Born in London, Hari Kunzru is the author of the novels The Impressionist (2002), Transmission (2004), My Revolutions (2007), and Gods Without Men (2011) as well as a short story collection, Noise (2006) and a novella, Memory Palace (2013). In 2003 Granta named him one of its twenty best young British novelists. His short stories and essays have appeared in diverse publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, the London Review of Books, Granta, Bookforum and Frieze. He was a 2008 Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library and is a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow. He lives in New York City.
www.harikunzru.com
ALSO BY HARI KUNZRU
The Impressionist
Transmission
Noise
My Revolutions
Gods Without Men
Memory Palace
Ink
Hari Kunzru
A Vintage Short
Vintage Books
A Division of Penguin Random House LLC
New York
Copyright © 2015 by Hari Kunzru
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House of Canada Ltd., Toronto.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Cataloging-in-Publication Data for “Ink” is available from the Library of Congress.
Vintage eShort ISBN 9781101970447
eBook ISBN 9781101970447
Series cover design by Joan Wong
www.vintagebooks.com
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Contents
Cover
About the Author
Also by Hari Kunzru
Title Page
Copyright
Ink
I was exhausted. I’d had to get up brutally early to make it to the airport and the only effect of the scalded coffee in the lounge was to add a high white note of anxiety to my mood. For three months I’d been working twelve-hour days. If I closed my eyes, I could see columns of figures.
Whatever you say about business when you’re at dinner with friends, how you’re in it for this or that reason—because you’re passionate about x or committed to making a difference to y—in the end it comes down to a number, to that box at the bottom of the spreadsheet where it states the total value of your passion in dollars or pounds sterling or whatever other currency you think in when you’re lying awake at night quantifying your sense of self-worth. Naturally, you hope it’s a high number. There’s nothing wrong with that—if you didn’t care about money, you’d be doing something else, teaching yoga or knitting solar panels or whatnot. But if your idea of passion and commitment is building a business, then however elevated your motivations, whatever pressing social need you feel you’re fulfilling, deep down you know you wouldn’t be there if you couldn’t make a profit. Unlike me, however, you probably don’t admit it. I am of the unpopular opinion that money clarifies human relations. If something is framed as a transaction, for good or ill, I know where I am. I accept that’s not very touchy-feely, but I’ve got no patience for people who prefer to swim in muddy water.
Good to have that off one’s chest.
So, to recap. I was on my way to a meeting, and I knew what I thought I was worth. This was the meeting where they’d tell me what they thought I was worth. Possible disparity, hence nerves. Lack of sleep, not eating properly et cetera. It’s probably a sufficient explanation for what happened.
I am, I suppose, a national type. The English cynic, heir to a thousand-year heritage of sneering at anyone who believes in anything at all. But even the ancient scorn of my mercenary, calculating, swivel-eyed people has a limit and in my case that limit is my shameful and poorly disguised need for positive reinforcement. Everyone comes up against their failings and this is mine. Mea maxima culpa. As I wheeled my suitcase to the gate, I was doing the exercises, visualizing my goals. You are the captain of your—be the change you want to—Yes, I read those books. Sue me, as I have lately learned to say. Sue me, because I read self-help books. It is where the rubber duckie of my cynicism bumps up against the edge of the tub.
So I walked to my gate, wheeling my suitcase, repeating my list of goals. I visualized myself being picked up from the airport in San Francisco, driving to the meeting, and leaving a wealthy man. I moved from London to New York after my divorce and somehow instead of doing what the English are expected to do here—auction house, finance, or one of those non-jobs that allow you to be a forty-five-year-old who arrives at his office on a skateboard—I’d ended up backing a couple of physics PhDs who were looking to sell their souls but weren’t vicious enough for Wall Street; together we built a software company. I should clarify that I don’t mean some social media handjobbery where children sit about on primary-colored spheres and get free smoothies from the chiller by the Ping Pong table—no, I mean a place where adult men who are frequently wearing ties and cuff links and black Oxford brogues build something almost unimaginably recondite and tedious that works ever so slightly better than the competition. Now we were about to sell our useful and boring company to one of the tech giants, a vast global tumor of an organization that wanted to kill our product and absorb its remains into the bloated suite of “tools” they foist on their customers.
That sounded perfect to me. On paper I was rich. Not in any other way. During my New York odyssey I had somehow acquired a second wife (the fragrant Brianna), an apartment in a building where the common charges rivaled the GDP of a medium-sized country, and two small children who required a never-ending tap-dancing conga line of service professionals—nannies and tutors and test coaches and sleep trainers and, for all I know, turd-wranglers and method-burp coaches—plus a lavish provision of camps and theme parties and other opportunities for personal development-slash-orgiastic consumption. There was a dog which cost almost as much as the kids; there was a so-called summer house, a treacherous pile of woodworm and silverfish in a dank Catskills valley that made me think of serial killers.
I suppose I was suffering from culture shock. My own childhood had been a rather stark affair. Knocking on Father’s study door, keeping your elbows off the table, that sort of thing. Cross-country running had featured heavily. Lately I had begun to feel a strange sense of disconnection from my American life, as if I were watching it late at night on television. Lurid colors, canned laughter, frequent commercial breaks. It was governed by rules I didn’t understand. My wife and son and daughter (Casey, seven, and Carey, four—I’ll thank you for not asking about the names) seemed like natives of this city, accustomed to the strange logic by which one stood six hours in line for a pastry or voluntarily went to the Hamptons. As I saw it, my only chance of survival, financially or emotionally, was a large sum of money. So on the way to my meeting I was visualizing that large sum. I was bringing it into being. If you had bumped into me just then and interrupted my visualization, I would have beaten you to the floor with my two fists.
The stewardess did her little emergency exit semaphore; an animated figure on the seat-back screen showed me how to fasten and unfasten my seat belt. I found myself drifting off into that unrestful half-sleep associated with sitting upright in a poorly designed aircraft seat, sleep that’s barely sleep at all, more a sort of semiconscious nausea. I tried to wake up, but the concentration needed to read was beyond me and I’d promised myself not to look at my notes until I was in the limo at the other end. I shut my eyes again, opened th
em. Every surface seemed to be covered with signs and symbols, graphical insects swarming over the tray tables, skittering under the seats where the life jackets were stored.
Again, I shut my eyes and without warning—or indeed any sense that I was falling into a dream—I found myself standing in my prep school classroom. Bare floorboards, ground and polished by generations of scuffed shoes, a blackboard with a dusty rubber (a perfectly decent word for eraser) and a debris of chalk stubs on the bottom ledge. Rows of desks, the old-fashioned kind with a hard benchlike wooden seat bolted on by a curved iron bracket and a hinged lid that opened to reveal a drawer. I was dimly aware that I wasn’t supposed to be there, but the depth and texture of the place overtook my confusion, persuading me that it was real. On the wall there was—what?—it was hard to fix with my eyes. A periodic table? A world map? A map of the Commonwealth? Any of them would be possible—perhaps even the Empire map, though I was at school at a time when the Empire was just a memory.
In front of me, a pudgy specter, hovered Babcock. Of all the boys, him. I hadn’t thought about Babcock in forty years, but there he was, two feet off the ground, his cruelly scuffed shoes drooping forlornly down toward the floorboards. He looked as if someone had hung him on a coat hook. It was a familiar position; that used to happen to him at least once a week. Babcock’s face had never been distinguished. Something about the dream rendered it even less so: he had vague and cloudy features—small round eyes like currants, a shapeless nose, rubbery lips. Worm Lips, we used to call him, along with every change that could be rung out of his Anglo-Saxon millstone of a surname. Bad Cock. Cock Lips. That one stuck for a while. I could even have been the boy who made it up. I had a streak of cruelty, even then.
This Babcock, this version of him, was effectively faceless, his head a miasmal smear floating above the grubby collar and skewed tie of our prep school uniform. It wasn’t like it so often is in dreams, when things are sketched in or seen only indirectly. Though Babcock’s terrible facelessness was vague, I saw its vagueness with perfect clarity and it made me ashamed, for I knew I was partly responsible. Somehow—by some unknown mechanism or logic—I had caused him to be so afflicted. I repeated my mantra. I am committed to celebrating the person I am, I said. I also said, several times, you have done nothing wrong. Babcock slowly shook his faceless head. If he had had a mouth, it would have been hanging open.
In business manuals, in magazines, in the entrepreneurship seminars that always seem to be held in grim hotel function rooms smelling of carpet cleaner and those chemistry experiments Americans call “Danishes”—in every venue where the so-called art of starting a company is taught and learned, positive thinking lurks. It is a sort of yeast infection upon capitalism. In those airless conference rooms, as we masticate our carcinogenic sugar-frosted breakfast items, mesmerized by the phosphorescent yellow of the so-called “jam,” we start to feel peculiar. Perhaps, we decide, we really are actualizing ourselves. Then, all of a sudden, we start to believe in the power of our own minds. Just by thinking about things, we can make them so.
This was not how I was brought up.
Named after an obscure saint, located outside a small market town, my prep school was a doggedly old-fashioned place. Gray stone buildings, a pervasive smell of cabbage and camphor rub. I remember reading school stories written generations previously—Billy Bunter, St. Austin’s—and finding them utterly contemporary. We played conkers. There was a tuck shop. “Quis?” we used to call out, to which the answer was “ego!” We were all proud uniformed dirty-kneed supporters of England: not the country beyond the school gates, sneered at by my house master as “a nation of shoplifters,” but a nostalgic confection whipped up out of the Armada and Spitfires and the 1966 World Cup. Hunched in my uncomfortable airline seat, I could see with hallucinatory clarity the chipped green frames of the classroom windows, the view out over muddy playing fields. Babcock hung on his invisible hook at the front, by the little platform on which stood the master’s desk, a platform which had always given us the opportunity to play small tricks, like positioning the desk at its very edge in the hope that he would push it off as he sat down. I wanted to speak to Babcock, but something prevented me. Clearly he couldn’t speak to me, as he didn’t have a mouth. Once we put an upturned tack on the master’s chair—was it there or somewhere else? I remember that prank in semi-lit gloom, in a classroom we occupied a year or two later, when we were beginning to think about the Common Entrance exam and the schools to which our parents would send us next. By then Babcock had gone from my life, never to reappear.
Babcock turned and wrote on the board in his graceless effortful hand:
Caesar adsum jam forte
Brutus aderat
Caesar sic in Omnibus
Brutus inis at
It was pathetic. He didn’t even know why it was funny. He was just copying what another boy had done the previous week. I jeered at him. We all jeered at him. Behind me, though I couldn’t see them, were the others, my friends, the pack.
On the classroom wall—God, now I could see it—was the mark order, a typed league table on which our grades for each test and exercise were added up. It was a school which believed in the right to be acknowledged for winning, and the character-building quality of being publicly shamed. I moved closer. There was Babcock’s name, at the very bottom of the class, as usual.
We boys had no patience for failure. We knew the healthy sporting competition invoked by the speakers on Founder’s Day was just a form of camouflage. There was bound to be a war, and we’d be in the middle of it, taking charge and showing our mettle. I read violent comics about commandos who knifed German sentries and yelled “Go to hell, Fritz!” as they hurled grenades into pillboxes. When I impaled my imaginary enemies on the point of my bayonet, it was an untroubling experience, like slicing a sponge cake. Their eyes would widen as I ran them through.
That school must have been hell for a boy like Babcock. Slow, shy, physically awkward. He didn’t walk so much as shamble. When goaded by a games master or cadet corps sergeant he would lurch into an ineffectual trot. He smelled. As that thought arose—he smelled—I chided myself. How could I think that? It was just one of those things children say about people they don’t like. But to my horror I realized I could smell it once again, a curdled reek rising up off him, sharp, thick, and abject.
I wasn’t one of the boys who hit Babcock, who kicked and slapped him and shut him in a metal locker and padlocked the door. I don’t remember doing things like that. I don’t remember punching him. Sometimes I watched. You couldn’t help that.
I wanted to think about none of it. I wanted to leave it behind. Somehow I struggled to the surface, toward the engine roar and the oxygen-depleted air of the plane. For a while I stared blearily at the seat-back TV, but I couldn’t make head nor tail of the movie, which involved some thirtysomething American men running away from their wives and girlfriends. The stewardess came around with a meal. Nauseated by the reek of microwaved vegetables, I waved her away and shut my eyes. At once I began to sink back down.
It was break time. To my relief, I was alone. Through the window, I could see the rugby pitches, churned brown at the goal lines. I walked around the classroom, looking at the desks. Their scarred, pitted surfaces, scrawled on, excavated with compasses, initials scratched, rubbed smooth by grubby fingers. Contents: Hall Kennedy’s Shorter Latin Primer, its gray-green cover invariably altered to read “Eating Primer” or “Shortbread Eating Primer”; The Public School Elementary French Grammar, a History of England in a pink jacket, a protractor set, exercise books with doodles and games of hangman at the back; pens, pencils, ink…ravaged, battle-scarred desks, every one crusted under the seat with a braille of snot and gum.
Where was Babcock’s desk? Somewhere in the middle? Never at the back of the class. He always sat at the front, not because he was disruptive, quite the opposite—he was a shy, withdrawn boy—but for his own protection, so that some of the bad things—the slaps
, the peashooter pellets, the filth slipped down the back of his collar—would stop. With a terrible sense of déjà vu, I opened the lid of Babcock’s desk and started going through his things, most of which were versions of the things in my own desk, disgusting Babcockian versions. The textbooks were grubby and dog-eared, the pencils chewed to soggy stubs. I found the ring binder holding his project—the history project the class had been working on for weeks, that would push the winners farther up the mark order and crush the losers underfoot. Mine was a forty-page epic with the pompous title “Introduction to the World of the Ancient Greeks,” painstakingly illustrated with drawings of hoplites and discoboli copied from a book my father had given me for Christmas. In fact, most of the project was copied from this book, which didn’t stop me from believing that it was destined to be recognized as an important achievement. Babcock’s project was pathetic, two pages of chicken scratchings on the topic of “The Three Field System.” There was one measly diagram, badly traced from our textbook: a field planted with wheat, one with green vegetables, one lying fallow. There was a wobbly picture of a plow. It was ridiculous. It actually made me angry. He should have been able to do better than that. He just wasn’t trying.
Also in the desk was a full bottle of ink. His books were already covered with spots and spatters. What difference would it make? I unscrewed the top and poured a little over one of his textbooks, then over his pencil case. Then, giving up any pretense of restraint, I poured ink over his project, his exercise books, and whatever other small personal possessions he had in there. Then I tried to wake up. I really tried. I could hear the roar of the engine as I shut the desk lid and sat down to wait for the master to come back and begin the lesson.
What did happen when Babcock found out what I’d done? How had he reacted? I couldn’t remember. Possibly he didn’t show much response at all. He was always fuzzy, muddy, muted. He shuffled around inside himself, as if he were wearing his pudgy flesh as an overcoat. Nowadays he’d probably be diagnosed as depressed.
