‘It wasn’t the man who comes to fix the fridge,’ I say, recalling the light that jumped in her eyes as soon as she took out her phone. ‘She meant what she said.’
‘So who is he, then? Who is this Oscar?’
Who is Oscar? Since that moment at the waterside, when my dreams were so casually atomized, I have thought of little else. In my imagination he keeps changing, one moment garrulous and witty, the next silent and serious; right now I picture him as a handsome, athletic type — tanned, stubbled, a pilot for Médecins Sans Frontières who in his spare time writes surprisingly tender poetry. The others have differing opinions: Paul sees him as a brilliant entrepreneur, a wild-eyed maverick making a fortune from imperceptible flaws in the system; Igor proposes that he is a professional sex worker, ‘with wang like the extinguisher of fires, who has made her addict to his sex, and she cannot stop sexing him’.
‘See, with a high-quality waitress-surveillance system there’d be none of this ambiguity,’ Paul says, frowning. ‘Without knowing what we’re up against, it’s hard to work out the best course of action.’
‘Only one course,’ Igor says. ‘Good old-fashioned maiming. Without this monster wang of his, she will soon turn elsewhere for her pleasures.’
‘I don’t think it will make a difference,’ I say. ‘The writing was on the wall long before she mentioned Oscar. She hates banks with a passion.’
‘But we expected that, right?’ Paul says. ‘That’s why we were pushing the benefactor thing. Didn’t she go for that at all?’
‘She seemed uncomfortable taking money for her art from someone who works in a bank. She likened us to Nazis.’
He sighs. ‘Okay. Well, you’re right, once a woman starts calling you a Nazi, it’s time to bow out. Frankly, from what you’ve told me, you may have dodged a bullet. The paintings and the organic food should have been a clear enough warning. Better to get out now, before she starts making you wear vegetarian shoes and call history “herstory”.’
‘And leave her tampons all over the place,’ Igor chimes in wearily. ‘This is what happens with my ex-wife. Tampons, everywhere in my house. Then she try to unionize the strippers. Man who says, “We must educate the womens,” I say to him, “You think anybody pay to see strippers who have cut off their hair and now dress in boiler suits that they will not take off?” ’
‘Igor here actually owned his own strip club back in the old country,’ Paul explains.
‘Happier times, happier times,’ Igor says mistily.
‘Anyhow, the main thing now is that we put Ariadne behind us and get you back in the game,’ Paul says, bending down to his bag. ‘If you’ll take a look at the laptop here, you’ll see the beta version of the new Hotwaitress. We’re still updating the database, but there are plenty of options …’
‘I appreciate your help,’ I say. ‘But for me, I think the game is over.’
‘Over?’ Paul looks up from the laptop with a start. ‘What do you mean?’
I rise from my chair and go to the window. Uninhabited office blocks blaze with light against the dark sky, a ghost armada sailing the black ocean. ‘I suppose I don’t feel like I dodged a bullet,’ I say. ‘I think the bullet went right through me.’
‘Then why stop?’ Paul says, jumping to his feet. ‘We can find out more about Oscar. Maybe there are cracks in the relationship we can exploit. We’ll redesign you from the ground up, so whatever Oscar lacks, you have in spades.’
I smile. When I asked him to come over, I still thought there was something he could do; now I can see that the very fact I’m having this conversation shows how hopeless the situation is. Tricks, artifice, the implacable double-agency of money — this is my world, not Ariadne’s, and there is simply no way to go from mine to hers.
‘Artifice is everybody’s world! You think Ariadne gets out of bed looking like that? You think she doesn’t put in her time in front of the mirror, getting her beautiful ebony hair to flow just so? Look, you’ve had a disappointment, I understand that. But a few weeks ago you didn’t even know her. What’s to stop you having the same feelings for somebody else? Take a look in our database.’ He holds the laptop open for me, faces arrayed on the screen like chocolates in a box. ‘There are literally hundreds of other waitresses here. Just take a look.’
‘No.’
‘Look, that’s all I’m asking.’
‘I don’t want anybody else,’ I say.
Paul sighs. ‘Okay, Claude. It’s your decision, of course. But if you don’t mind me saying so, you’re being awfully naïve about this. Ariadne made an impression on you, and that’s great. But life is not literature. Sooner or later, the spell wears off, the romantic feelings disappear, and you’re left watching somebody’s body disintegrate. You start with a love story, you end up manacled to an hourglass, watching the sands run out.’
‘It is true,’ Igor concurs in a voice gravelly with regret. ‘When I marry my wife, she is filthiest lap dancer in all of Transnistrian Autonomous Region. There are criminals who come out of her stall weeping with shame at the things she has do to them in there. When she choose me, I am joyous as priest in orphanage. But the day we are married, it is like someone steal her away and replace her with her mother. Shoutings, hittings me with rolling pin. Meeting other womens to form terror gangs of feminism. Last time I see her she tell me she want to have breast reduction surgery. I ask her, “Are you mad? God and plastic surgeon have give you best boobs in former Soviet Union, why do you flout this gift?” She will not listen. I cannot bear to see this tragedy, so I come here to begin new life.’ He gazes bleakly into his glass. ‘She must be fifteen now,’ he says.
‘What we’re offering you here is freedom from that,’ Paul says, brandishing the laptop again. ‘Don’t you understand, that’s what Hotwaitress is. A way to stay inside the story for ever.’
I understand what he’s offering me: a chance to keep paying him a retainer indefinitely. But I am tired of being his mark. ‘I think this is goodbye,’ I say.
Scowling, he puts the laptop away, takes his coat from the back of the chair.
‘Why don’t you stay inside the story,’ I challenge him, ‘if everything is better there?’
‘It’s too late for me,’ he says. ‘I have a wife, remember?’
‘You have an hourglass you’re chained to,’ I say. ‘You’ve already abandoned your career. If you don’t love your wife any more, why don’t you leave her too?’
‘You really don’t understand anything, do you?’ he says. ‘I read somewhere that money kills your ability to empathize.’
I flinch. He opens the door. ‘I do love her,’ he says. ‘That’s the whole problem.’ He turns away, repeating to himself, ‘That’s the whole problem.’
3. PERSONA FICTA
In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.
It’s true, Texier said some harsh things about the banks; this, in fact, was putting it mildly. He saw the financial market, with its obsessive will to quantification, as the perfect instance of his totalizing system, his ‘eutrophication’ or ‘veil of Maya’ — a web of abstraction so complicated that it asphyxiated what it was supposed to explain before collapsing inevitably under its own weight. The artificial, the less-than-real, was once conceived as a kind of hell, he wrote. Yet today the less-than-real is prized more than gold, and the quaint stuff of the tangible — the underlying, as it has become known — exists only as raw material for new and lucrative abstractions. The financial corporation has become a machine for producing unreality; why do we desire this unreality? Why do we model ourselves on this machine?