Red Pill Page 23

  Rei was pleased, even when I started on the woodwork, sanding down the layers of old lead paint and creating a lot of toxic dust. After a week or so, the doors and baseboards looked good enough that it seemed a shame not to polish the old brass handles, which I did, replacing the ones on the bathroom with vintage ceramic knobs that I hunted down on the internet. Nina asked if I could do her bedroom, which was certainly grubby, the walls smeared and pocked with stickers. Rei found an old poster of a tiger on an auction site and had it framed. She couldn’t understand my objection to Nina’s desire for orange, and I didn’t want to push back too hard, but I bartered them down to a single wall behind her bed, soaking the roller and layering on coat after coat until the color was rich and saturated. As I worked, I began to feel that I was useful, and there might be a road back for me, a means of redemption. In this way, by the time I’d been home for two months, a kind of normality emerged, a routine that suited all three of us. Rei and I began to talk about the future, about maybe taking a vacation, about whether we would put Nina in preschool full-time the following year.

  One night, as I was leaving the bathroom, where I’d been brushing my teeth and running my fingers over the dirty grout, wondering about the feasibility of retiling, Rei appeared at the door to our bedroom and beckoned me inside. Sleep in here tonight, she said.

  As a sexual reunion, it was tender but melancholy. Rei’s body was unfamiliar to me, but so was my own. Another side effect of my medication was the near-total destruction of my libido; though touching her felt like a minor miracle, a privilege that I hadn’t expected to earn, I found it impossible to get an erection. It was as if my desire existed at the center of a labyrinth, a conundrum or puzzle that I had to solve before I could complete the circuit. She tried to get me hard with her hands and mouth. I stroked her hair, furrowed my brow, ran my hands over her neck and face and breasts, trying to find the combination that would pick the unpickable lock. Unable to perform, I went down on her, something that almost always turned me on. I wanted to serve her, to give her an orgasm, but she seemed uncomfortable and soon she pulled me back up again. Let’s just hold each other, she said. So we did, lying under the covers, our bodies molded together, big spoon and little spoon. Gradually her breathing became deeper and more regular and I realized that she’d fallen asleep. I stroked her shoulder and felt a vast gulf between us, formed out of all the days when we had not been together, the days of my absence and the days before I knew her, when she had said and done things I would never find out about. I could touch her, brush my fingers over her skin, but it was like touching the surface of some mysterious ancient stone. Inside, Rei stretched away to infinity, a galaxy of unseen stars.

  I never went back to the spare room. Once again we became a couple that shared a bed. Many other small intimacies returned. Sounds and smells. We watched each other dress. We blearily cuddled Nina when she woke us up too early in the morning. But still there was a gap, a boundary defined partly by sex, which remained impossible, and partly by something else, a mutual reticence: Rei’s wariness of me, my suspicion that she was masking her true feelings, that while I’d been away she’d discovered some new part of herself about which I knew nothing. Often, as I’ve said, I decided that there was a man, someone who was making her feel the things I couldn’t. But it wasn’t as simple as that, as easily pinpointed. I began to wonder if the loss was permanent, whether we’d be better off going our separate ways.

  I had therapy this afternoon. The therapist is in her sixties. She wears long heavy skirts and Indian silver jewelry and cuts her iron-gray hair into a severe bob. In affect, she is not kindly, or particularly warm. She certainly doesn’t twinkle or attempt to look sympathetic, which is a relief to me. She receives or rather absorbs my confessions with every appearance of neutrality. She’s not the sort of therapist who makes you lie on a couch or face away, and this is another thing I like about her. We sit opposite each other and dispute. Sometimes, when she is concentrating, she twists her legs around in a sort of knot, a girlish gesture that I find reassuring, implying as it does a level of physical tension; it gives me the sense that something is at stake in the stories I tell her. I speak and she nods occasionally, balancing a worn leather portfolio on her knees. Occasionally she makes a note.

  How do you camouflage despair? If I tell the truth, I suspect that I’ll set myself on the yellow brick road back to the clinic. But if I don’t tell the truth to her, someone who is paid to listen, then what hope do I have of finding a way through the selva oscura? Why do you think you find it so hard to speak plainly, the therapist often asks. She tells me not to make allusions, to try to talk directly about myself, without filtering what I say through references to books or films or art. She says she doesn’t care about my references. I say I don’t know how to speak any other way, it is how I understand myself. These references are my work, what I do. She says it’s deflection, a form of resistance. I can run down the clock by talking about Kleist or Chinese scholar’s rocks, but I won’t get any better. I am trying, she says, to present myself as the expert, instead of the patient. It is a thing a lot of her male clients do. I say I don’t think of myself as an expert in anything. I never set out to be any kind of authority. I just wanted to be left alone. At some point during every appointment she will remind me that getting well means accepting certain things about what has happened. It means understanding that my picture of the world is distorted. I find this hard to hear, and not just because I’m bored of listening to her say it. It is shameful to be a broken mechanism, to have to sit obediently while someone else goes about putting you right.

  Above all, she says, I have to rid myself of my obsession with Anton. She habitually uses this formulation. My obsession. When I asked her to define obsession, she told me she wasn’t interested in playing semantic games. I said I was trying to avoid thinking about him. She shook her head. That just meant I was trying to avoid talking about him. Two different things. She was correct, of course. I didn’t want to talk about Anton. I understood that I’d overestimated his power, and his interest in me. My belief that he and I had been engaged in some kind of duel was delusional. He hadn’t induced or encouraged me to go to the island. At the same time there were elements that I hadn’t invented. The dinner in the Turkish café. The quotes and phrases in Blue Lives. The Starhemberg content. This afternoon the therapist asked, yet again, what had attracted me to him. I protested that attraction had nothing to do with it, quite the opposite. Those two poles are never just poles, she said. Irritated, I asked if she was implying that I wanted to sleep with him. If so, she was off the mark. She shrugged. There were other modes of attraction. Did I want to be him, to have his status and influence in the world? I threw up my hands. The money would be nice, I said, sarcastically. She gave me a searching look, another of her tricks. Because I’d been aggressive, she would now say nothing until I’d acknowledged my rudeness and made an effort to answer her question. No, I said eventually, I didn’t want to be him. I wanted to oppose him, to stop his nihilistic ideas gaining traction. She made all the obvious points. He was a TV writer, not a politician. Maybe his shows were influential, but he didn’t have the power to do the things I believed he could do. Shows? I said. I was only aware of one. She raised an eyebrow, evidently a little pleased with herself. As a matter of fact, she had done a little research into this man, since he had previously been unfamiliar to her. Apparently he was about to launch a new television series. It would be (here her voice pulled on the tonal equivalent of rubber gloves) in the fantasy genre. Dragons, that sort of thing. Surely I could see that this was not a field for anyone with serious political ambitions. It would be hard to think of anything more purely escapist. I told her that what she said might once have been true, but the internet had changed things. There were underground currents, new modes of propagation. It wasn’t even a question of ideas, not straightforwardly, but feelings, atmospheres, yearnings, threats. What kind of threats, she wanted to
know. Well, I said. A lot of people quibbled about terms, but essentially I was talking about Fascism. She said she thought it was unhelpful to make emotive comparisons. Some might even find it offensive, a way of cheapening the past. When it came to extremism, sunlight was the best disinfectant. In her experience, people tended to reject such things when they understood their implications.

  I saw that I had no hope of persuading her. She was too old, too insulated by her degrees and her shelves of books. I was being, she told me blandly, rather melodramatic about what was essentially a marginal set of ideas. We weren’t living in Weimar Germany. I shouldn’t feel bad, though. Many of her patients had been experiencing anxiety because of the presidential election campaign. With my susceptibilities, it would be best if I stayed away from politics.

  The therapist looked at her watch. We were almost out of time. Before I went, she said, she wanted to try to talk again about the question of suicide. I thought to myself, see, this is what your life has come to. Agenda item: suicide. Your wife, said the therapist, was in no doubt that this was your intention. She herself had telephoned the director of the institution in Germany (I started in surprise, this was news to me) and it seemed that at least two members of staff recalled me speaking about it. Her tone annoyed me. She was behaving as if she’d scored some point. I said I hadn’t been serious. I’d never leave Rei and Nina. I’d written certain things, but only in connection with my research into Heinrich von Kleist and Henriette Vogel.

  As I protested, I remembered the sinister way in which all the elements had fallen into place. The lake, Monika, the porter’s guns. Death had been daring me to repeat a pattern, drawing me towards itself. I couldn’t deny the darkness that had surrounded me on the island, the line of force arcing down from the cliffs to the roiling water below. Had I wanted to die then? No, but what I wanted had felt irrelevant. Death had seemed inevitable, the Minotaur lurking, waiting for me at the center of the maze. How had contemplating suicide made me feel, the therapist asked. Exalted? Elevated? Had I believed that I was doing something noble, perhaps something that would make me famous? I denied all of this. I told her I knew the difference between narrative and real life. She said she wasn’t so sure. I struck her as a romantic. My obsession with an apocalyptic future was just another mode of sentimentality. I don’t usually tell people to think less, she said, but in your case that might be useful. Try going through the motions. Accept that you might have conventional horizons, that conventional things could make you happy. Stop asking for life to be a poem.

  I left the therapist’s office in a foul mood. What right did she have to be so patronizing? Her bland self-assurance was the product of privilege. She didn’t see what was coming down the pike. I didn’t understand how people could be so complacent, not with everything that was going on. It was late afternoon, and I still had to run some errands, after which I had to get home to set things up for Rei’s party. The session had been a waste of time.

  The office was on the ground floor of a large Chelsea apartment building, a huge vaguely Romanesque pile that spanned a whole block of 23rd Street. Feeling increasingly stressed and angry, I stalked down the corridor past the front desk, where a uniformed doorman was talking to a delivery driver carrying a pile of packages. As I pushed open the door and stepped out onto the street, I was struck by the scene. There was nothing visually unusual about it. The afternoon was clear, warm for November. The delivery truck was parked at the curb. An old woman had paused to let a small dog, some kind of terrier, sniff the railings around the base of a tree. Two well-dressed men sauntered along, holding hands. A middle-aged Latina pushed a white child in a buggy, its moon face plugged by a pacifier. Twin streams of cars headed east and west. The order of the cars (black, black, white, taxi) seemed significant, reminiscent of something, some order or progression that I couldn’t place. Then, at a stroke, the artificiality of what I was seeing revealed itself to me. The streetscape wasn’t real. The sidewalk, the passers-by, the cars, the clouds in the sky, all were elements in a giant simulation. The sunlight was not sunlight but code, the visual output of staggeringly complex calculations. The tree, the railing, the dog sniffing the railing, all had been modeled and shaded and textured and lit so as to appear maximally lifelike. None of it existed prior to my observation; it was a world that began with the position of my head, light rays traced outwards from my retinas, determining what needed to be fully computed, and what could be left as an approximation. Maybe the people around me believed in their own fundamental reality, experienced themselves as existing in a “here” and “now.” Maybe they were no more than shadows, projections of the system, NPCs who moved in little circuits, always walking the dog, pushing the buggy, holding hands, their routines triggered by my presence.

  The feeling persisted as I crossed the street and made my way down Tenth Avenue, past a church and a restaurant with tables on the sidewalk, occupied with patrons doing the things that people at restaurant tables do, laughing and talking and eating and sipping drinks, loops of behavior that I now saw would be almost trivial to generate. There could be a library of such loops, served in a quasi-random way, behaviors for objects that were just complex enough to give me the illusion of bustle and conviviality. I paused at the bookstore where I often went to browse after therapy, noting the window display of pop science titles, among them my former colleague Edgar’s latest, a brick-sized hardcover with a quote from The Wall Street Journal: Wrongthink: The Authoritarian Left and the New Religion of Social Justice. “A must read. Free speech at its most robust.” I walked on, trying to master a creeping sense of terror. If everything around me was a simulation, logically I was too. Despite my belief that I had physical presence, that I possessed weight and volume, that the sidewalk beneath my feet was hard and resistant to my tread, I was no more material, no more “real” than the books in the window, the generic Chelsea passers-by. Did my physical body exist somewhere else, asleep in some pod or medical bay? Or had I been severed from it, my personality uploaded into whatever this was, this perfect replica of early twenty-first-century Manhattan, complete with stickers plastered on the lampposts and a fetid smell rising up from the drains?

  I walked on, forcing myself to continue as if I were a person in the real world, the possessor of a real body, with real errands to perform. I went into a food hall, and bought simulated olives from an Italian deli, tasting a piece of Parmesan cheese offered to me by a simulated cheese vendor, experiencing saltiness and umami, marveling at the technology that could simulate ions traveling through simulated channels into taste receptor cells, triggering simulated axons to carry information to whatever array or connectome represented my brain. I bought my snacks and headed to the subway. Standing on the platform, I considered the existential horror of my situation. Since this was no more real than a computer game, what would happen if I exited it by stepping out in front of a train or jumping down and touching the third rail? Would I reboot and find myself back at some previous moment, at the start of some section or level in my life? Would I wake up in my bed, as I had that morning? Or would I perhaps begin again as a child, maybe even at the moment of my birth? It was possible that I’d simply wink out of existence, wiped from the database to make way for some other personality construct. Would that matter in any profound way? Would my death even be my death? If I were a simulation, what was there to say that I wasn’t one of many copies, that there weren’t three or four or a dozen versions of me running in parallel in different worlds? And if there were no longer an original, if that material body had been destroyed or mislaid, or perhaps had never existed in the first place, who was to say that I was the primary version, the most authentic or the best or most advanced protagonist? Maybe I was a spare, a substitute puttering around in some holding tank while other copies forged ahead, fulfilling their destinies. Maybe my creator—some alien manipulator or sadistic posthuman teen—was getting bored of me. At any minute I could be suspended, powered down. Above al
l, what possible stakes could there be in such a life? If 14th Street station was being generated on the fly as I walked down to the platform, how could anything I did or thought have any consequence at all?

  Ordinarily I found a packed rush-hour C train thoroughly alienating, but as I got on, my anxiety ebbed slightly. Something about the airless capsule full of jostling commuters brought me closer to myself. I held on to a metal pole, greasy from the palms of thousands of hands, and attempted to keep my balance as I was flung around, watching the man next to me look at Instagram on his phone. It wasn’t just that the simulation had surpassed some threshold of complexity, or possessed some artistic brilliance in its execution (the perfectly rendered smell of McDonald’s fries, the sheen of sweat on the face of the young woman carrying manuscripts in a grubby NPR tote bag) but that the very proximity of so many animal bodies made it impossible, or perhaps just pointless, to think of the world as unreal. This was what I had, where I was. I ought to make the best of it. I squeezed out of the car at my station, and as I climbed up to the surface, my pace reduced to a trudge by the rush-hour crowd squeezing into the narrow stairway, the combination of enforced uniformity and unpleasing surroundings made me flash, as I often did when climbing a set of subway stairs in a crowd, on the aesthetics of totalitarianism, all the films and rock videos that use some version of the “Orwellian” trope of shaven-headed men in workwear walking in unison until the flamboyant lead singer breaks free of the crowd, flaunting his individuality, catching the eye of the pretty girl. I emerged onto Fulton Street and, as I crossed, was almost knocked down by a delivery driver on an electric bike, traveling the wrong way at speed. The cliché would be that “I almost jumped out of my skin,” but the shock, perhaps the sudden release of adrenaline, had the effect of jumping me back into my skin, resetting my relationship with my body so that by the time I reached home I was calm and relatively centered, able to begin making crostini and chopping vegetables for a salad, as if my commute had been completely normal.