Red Pill Read online

  We are, I wrote, just clever apes, incidental to the larger purposes of the universe, and whether we know it or not, we are in a race against time. Homeostasis is a trap. Anything that isn’t growing exponentially is not growing fast enough. Something implacable is arriving from the future and our only hope, our lifeboat, is an intelligence explosion, an escape from earth before it is enclosed. But we should not expect the monkeys to escape, because most likely the lifeboat will be intelligence escaping the monkey bodies, slipping out before they are tortured to death by their capricious new robot masters. After that, for the masses left behind it will be shock work and the meat grinder, for the fortunate accelerated few, a great leap forward into the beyond. When the music stops, as humanity splits, leaving on the one hand those well-capitalized in individuality, rich in self, and on the other those to whom nothing is owed, who can be used and discarded without compunction, what will we remember about the creatures we once were? The augmented selves who can see in the infrared and will never die; the exploited, only dimly aware of a world beyond the packages moving towards them on the belt. How will we, their ancestors, look to them? Like figures in an architectural drawing, conventionalized, schematic, a little hazy. Just there to give scale to the old buildings.

  I filled up three notebooks with these thoughts, painstakingly editing and then making a clean copy in a fourth, which I left on the table with a letter directing whoever found it to send it to my editor for publication. I didn’t know if I would survive what was coming, and I wanted there to be a record of my predictions, the reasons I had for wanting to destroy Anton and the future that I believed he was bringing about. Then I tried to write a letter to Rei, an almost infinitely painful process that almost brought me to my senses, because it forced me to imagine what it would be like for her to read what I wrote, and to have to explain to Nina why I wasn’t ever coming home.

  I didn’t expect Rei to see me as a savior or a hero. In fact, I fully believed that she would remember me with bitterness. I’d already put her through such a lot of pain, and my death (which as I wrote seemed more likely than any other possible outcome) would only cause her more suffering. I wrote that I was sorry. I wrote that I loved her, and that my plan was a way to “escape into the present, to which I would gladly belong,” a phrase of Kleist’s. Sitting up late, writing my last letters, he was yet again my unwelcome companion, and various of his formulations (“a spirit sitting peering into an abyss,” “I rolled the dice and I must accept that I have lost”) found their way onto the page. By the time I finished it was late at night. I slept for a while, at the mercy of the bothy’s busy shadows, which teemed with beaks and spikes and snouts and talons and rasping ragged wings.

  In the morning, as soon as it was light, I went outside. The last day had come, and I made ready as best I could. I slipped the knife into my day pack, and waited for the golden hour, when Anton would appear. My mind was clear, or so it seemed to me. The red dust of the bustling world had settled. I was a saint, a desert father, serene and detached. I could watch thoughts fall through my consciousness like pebbles in a pool.

  When it was time, I followed the path uphill, over a stile and along a fence line. Some way off was a ruined croft, overgrown by trees. When you stood on the high ground above the bay, you could see several of these copses, old hedges and windbreaks grown to enormous size, hiding stone chimneys and crumbling walls. Instead of dropping down to the beach I decided to go the other way, skirting a bog and heading towards a saddle between a piece of high moorland and a crag, one end of the cliff that loomed over the pastures like a great black wave. Scattered with black pellets of sheep dung, the path grew steep and I began to breathe heavily with the effort of climbing. The crest of the hill rose up in front of me, tall grass and wildflowers undulating in the wind. I was approaching a sort of balancing point. Salt air blew across my face into my nostrils, an anticipation of the sea. Behind me was the human world, the giant net of eyes and ears. Ahead there would be no one to watch me from a yard or a farmhouse window, only a zigzag sheep trail leading down towards the sea cliffs. Once I stepped over the ridge, I would be alone.

  A few more paces and the ground fell away. There it was, the blue-black sea, clouds like white horses scudding overhead. Something was going to happen, I was sure of it. My heart was hammering in my chest. I held on to my knees and gulped down air.

  The Apocalypse is the time when all secrets are revealed. By scrambling down towards the cliffs, I knew I was only postponing the moment when the bones of the dead would start up from the earth and I would be turned inside out like the victim of a medieval execution, my innards unspooled and put on display for the crowd. Privacy is the exclusive property of the gods. They see us, but we can never see them. We live like spies, always braced for exposure, while they remain a mystery. The sky was a helmet constricting my head; sweat dripped down my face.

  The path dropped into a gully choked with waist-high bracken that scratched my chest as I waded through it, my arms outstretched, expecting at any moment to sink into a bog or a hidden stream. The ground, spongy with water draining off the moor, was just about firm enough to take my weight. At last I scrambled out onto a spur of rock wide enough for me to walk on, and I followed it up out to the cliff’s edge. I peered over and saw how nauseatingly high up I was. Far below, a black mat of kelp whipped back and forth in the churning white water. The sheer drop tugged at my eye, enticing my body along a line of force that ran up through the top of my head and then arced down into the void, a potential swan dive that would be all too easy to realize. As I picked my way along the cliff path, the sun appeared out of the clouds, striking the sea with a great silent clang.

  As I watched the shaft of bronze light hammering the water, I knew why Anton had chosen the island and what he wanted me to see in it—I was convinced that he had chosen it, and I was living and moving in a matrix entirely designed by him, following a chain of hints and nudges intended to lead me to that place. I am the Magus of the North, he had told me. I have opened the book of secrets. There on the cliff path, I understood. The secret was in that view, beautiful and utterly inhuman. The secret was that all our ends and purposes were meaningless, that the truth of existence lay in a sort of ceaseless impersonal violence, merciless and without affect of any kind. This violence was not tragic or heroic or awful or arousing or just or unjust. It simply was.

  With this, the last obstacle to my apotheosis fell away. Now, O immortality, you are all mine! The cliff path took me to the northernmost point of the island, where at the end of a spit of land sat a slab of stone set on two uprights, framing an empty square of sky. Fate, monstrous and empty. An arch or portal. I could feel savagery very near. Violence lay in wait in the waves, the sharp stones, the light. As I walked the last stretch of path towards the stones I lost my footing. As I tried to regain my balance I looked back at my raised right arm, the fingers of the hand dramatically splayed. At that moment I saw what I was, had a name for it: the butchered butcher, the one who sends a spray of small stones into the sea and throws up a hand to balance himself, then looks back and sees, as if for the first time, that this hand was formed to hold a knife or a gun or sword or a spear, to execute an ancient masculine will. I saw the arm supporting my bloody hand, the layers of civilized fat flayed away to reveal the primal muscle beneath. Yes, said the butchered butcher, this is the meaning of this hand, this pain is what it is to be a man. This is the idea of North.

  After a while I stood up again and went on. I waited at the stones for Anton to appear, for the last battle, for the confrontation that would rescue meaning from the terrible mess I’d made of my life. Then I saw movement on the beach, Finally, he had come! At last! Sweat streamed into my eyes. I was dazzled by the bronze light. I wiped my hand across my face and adopted a warrior’s stance. When I could focus again I saw three wobbly yellow dots, which resolved into the figures of three police officers in fluorescent jackets, picki
ng their way across the rocks towards me.

  HOME

  IN A MOVIE, two spies have to pass through a checkpoint. As they get close, one whispers to the other, “act normal!” Inevitably they are caught. It’s an absurd order because it makes itself impossible to obey. To act normal is to be unselfconscious, but when you are told to do it, you instantly ask yourself what normal is. You scramble for a standard or a signature; self-consciousness consumes you. You may recover quickly, but for a moment you’ve been knocked off course.

  As I stand here at the kitchen counter and set out food for the party, I try to fill a bowl with olives normally. I try to open a package of crackers normally, to arrange a cheeseboard in the way a normal person should arrange a cheeseboard, without excessive precision or showiness, presenting the cheese according to some ordinary aesthetic standard, with the right level of care, neither too much nor too little, unwrapping the cheeses—a wheel of Brie, a wedge of Manchego, one of those expensive little goat cheeses that come wrapped in a vine leaf—just as a normal host would, someone for whom the meaning of these actions could never be in question. When I handle the more charged objects (sharp knives, fragile glasses) I don’t look round to see if Rei is watching me. My aim is to appear neither too casual nor too intent, no more than averagely aware of their potential as hazards or weapons. When I speak, I modulate my voice. I try not to load my words with excess meaning. This is an important evening for Rei and it is vital that I display no undue excitement, that my behavior should have nothing about it to trouble her or anyone else.

  “Shall I open the wine?” Casual, flat. More or less correct, but I hesitate, whereas the normal thing would be to go right ahead and do it, to open the wine without seeking permission, or rather to say “shall I open the wine?” with a slightly different tone, not that of a man seeking permission, someone who isn’t supposed to drink alcohol with his medication, whose offer to open the wine might be construed as a covert attempt to drink wine, or at least taste it, to mix wine with psychiatric medication, and who is therefore preempting his wife’s reaction, saying that although it may appear that he’s about to do this potentially dangerous or disruptive thing, there’s no cause for alarm. It ought to be an offer, a throwaway moment of negotiation between two partners preparing for the arrival of guests. I’ll do this while you do that. Don’t worry, I’ll handle it.

  “No, it’s fine. Just sit down.”

  “OK. I’ll go check on Nina.”

  Rei is facing away from me, slicing a baguette. Her shoulders visibly stiffen, and this almost-imperceptible reaction makes me feel bleak and angry. What does she expect from me? How long can it go on? I master this flash of temper almost at once. I have no right to it. She is absolutely justified, and though I am not and never have been any danger to Nina, she has no way of knowing that. I am officially someone with a broken mind, someone whose mood and behavior is being pharmacologically regulated. I have acted in ways that were frightening and unpredictable. I have concealed the true state of my soul. But still I’m disappointed. Recently she’d seemed more relaxed. I’ve been out with Nina to the playground a few times, picked her up from preschool. Each time I’ve found Rei waiting impatiently for us to get back, pretending to do this or that, cleaning or tidying or scrolling through messages on her phone. Still, she managed it, she put herself through the stress. She has been trying very hard to trust me. This flinch, this little hunch of her shoulders, is a tell, an indication that she’s concealing the true pitch of her anxiety. But she doesn’t say anything, so I walk down the hallway and crack open the door to our daughter’s room.

  Nina is sleeping at an angle, her feet hanging over the side of her bed. Her hair, which is getting longer all the time, long enough to tie in a ponytail, is spread around her, thick damp strands of it plastered to her cheek. Her pillow has fallen on the floor and so has her toy, a little black cat, its fur grubby and matted. We were given so many stuffed animals when she was born, but this odd thing with its cartoonish eyes and shiny plush was the one that she chose, the friend that has become indispensable to her. I pick it up off the rug and put it by her head. Her mouth is open a little, and as I watch, she wrinkles her nose, sniffing in her sleep. There’s a shadow in the doorway and I turn round to see Rei. Don’t wake her up, she whispers. Deliberately, very slightly emphasizing my movements so that she can see the care that I’m taking, I step out and close the door.

  “She’s fine. I was just putting Furrycat back on the bed.”

  Sometimes, when she’s tired or worried, Rei sets her face in a tragic mask, like something from a Noh drama. I’ve seen it a lot in the last few months. My wife is beautiful, even when she’s hiding behind her mask face, and now that she’s made herself so fundamentally inaccessible, now that I’ve lost the rights I used to have—to coax or cajole her into telling me what’s on her mind, to make a stupid joke and receive a smile—that beauty has become painful to me, a sign or index of what I have thrown away. Because I have to say something, and because I can’t bear to see that mask anymore, I ask what else needs to be done before the party. Nothing, she says. Just relax. Again, I have to tamp down my urge to push back, to say I am relaxed, which of course would blow it all. The injunction to relax is another one of those impossible demands.

  Though I don’t really need to, I go to the bathroom and sit down on the toilet, just to have a moment offstage, wishing I could smoke a joint, have a drink, take a Xanax, anything to get me through the next few hours. Everyone will be very nice, I’m sure, but they’ll all be looking at me sideways. Every move I make will be scrutinized. Because I don’t want to stay in there too long (act normal) I splash some water on my face, flush the toilet, go into the kitchen and pour myself a glass of sparkling water.

  I stand at the counter and watch the tiny bubbles rising up in my glass. I am freshly shaved, wearing my most normal clothes, chinos and a dress shirt, a spy in the house of the sane. I’m feeling OK. Not too dizzy, my mouth not too dry. I’ve put on weight because of the medication, but not too much. A normal amount of weight.

  Everything about the apartment is the same, but everything is different. I feel like Odysseus. I have been gone twenty years and in my absence other men have made themselves at home. Rei is perched on an ottoman, the TV remote in her hand. She’s wearing a long dress and a piece of jewelry I don’t recognize, a silver necklace with a heavy geometrical pendant made from some kind of dull blue stone. It’s natural that she should have dressed up—we’re entertaining, after all—but the primitive part of my brain suspects that she didn’t dress for me. Since my return, she’s been spending a lot of time on the phone with her friend Godwin. She’s known him for years, since before we were together. I’ve no idea if they were ever involved. I suspect they probably were, once upon a time, but it never bothered me before. I like Godwin. He’s smart and funny, and between the two of us there’s never been any kind of atmosphere. He’s never attempted to claim Rei in any way, to suggest that there’s something he shares with her that is closed or exclusive. But recently he split up with his wife, and Rei has been the one to whom he’s turned, the one who offers him a shoulder to cry on, who goes out for dinner with him and helps him dissect what went wrong.

  On nights when Rei goes out with Godwin (I am, I suppose, making it sound more frequent than I should—it’s really only been a question of three or four dinners in as many months) she doesn’t leave me alone with Nina. Our sitter is asked to stay late, despite my insistence that it’s unnecessary, that there’s no reason for us to spend the extra money. But as it’s Rei’s money (since I paid back the Deuter foundation’s stipend, my bank balance has been more or less zero) and since she always frames it as my chance to go out on my own, to “see a friend,” it’s hard for me to refuse. So Paulette sits and reads her magazines in the living room, and since I don’t really have a friend to go and see, and the stimulation of the cinema is out of the question, and I ought not
to be sitting alone in a bar, even with a book and a non-alcoholic drink, I stay in the bedroom and pretend I need an early night. Inevitably I lie awake in the dark, listening for the sound of the front door, trying to intuit from the sounds Rei makes as she comes in, the tone of her conversation with Paulette, if she’s just been grinding against Godwin on the couch in the serviced apartment he’s been renting since he moved out of the family home. When she comes into the bedroom, I make my breathing regular and pretend to be asleep.

  It’s not just Godwin. There’s another man, someone she knows through work, a diplomat who’s part of the French mission to the UN. I’ve met him a couple of times. He was apparently helpful during the weeks of my disappearance. He is a peacock, the type of guy who wears blue suede loafers and undoes too many buttons on his shirt. When we were introduced, he looked at me with frank disbelief, as if to say, this is who you were trying to get back? I have no doubt that I inspire contempt in him, and he seems like a man who wouldn’t take no for an answer, a man for whom the fact of Rei’s marriage would be no more than a speed bump on the road to seduction.

  In truth I have no evidence that this diplomatic charmer has overstepped any bounds at all, but my dislike of him is so instinctive that I find it hard not to see him in the worst possible light. I torture myself with him, as I do with Godwin and various other men, in fact more or less anyone presentable who comes into our orbit, because it seems obvious to me that I’m no longer good enough for Rei, that she could be with someone better than me in almost every respect, and the only reason we’re still together is that she hasn’t worked this out. Would I blame her if she slept with someone else? She deserves to be happy, to have pleasure, to be free of this awful stress. What do I have to offer her? I haven’t been unfaithful, that’s one thing, but nevertheless I’ve strayed. I’ve been far away. And I have let her down. No woman can forget that, even if she forgives. It will always be there at the back of her mind. I am unreliable. She can no longer be sure that I’ll catch her if she falls.