“Absolutely not. Your condition — chemicals, perhaps, some sort of inhibitor; or electrical, a device, a… a field, yes, perhaps some sort of field generated, must be artificial in that case in which case you choose, but treatments? No, not at all. They don’t do anything… surgical.”
“You’re a scientist; I’m telling you what I saw.”
“Don’t be—” she began, then stopped herself, pulling back. “Is this why you stole Perfection?”
“Part of it, yes. But the treatments changed Parker, they made him… I thought maybe the treatments without Perfection…”
“It’s just a series of ideas, that’s all they really are. Chemically enhanced, electrically aided, but still only thoughts. If I could remember you, I could study you, I could make recordings, we could… you don’t want that?”
Seeing something on my face, which I couldn’t hide. “Byron studied me.”
“And what did she find?”
“I don’t know. She said she’d make me memorable, but there was… there was a poem she’d say, the soul wears out the breast, and the heart must pause to breathe and love itself…” I stumbled over the words, dragged down breath, Hey Macarena!
“Programming.” Filipa spat the word, utterly unimpressed. “Crude concept. Advertisers programme us, see image of perfume bottle, think of beautiful women. See picture of running shoes, think of sex sex sex sex always sex, of course, low-level manipulation, but the treatments — deeper, much deeper. Hard to control consequences, stupid hangover from foolish notions of hypnosis, not at all what it’s about, not how it works, ignorance, naivety. There are approximately eighty-five billion neurons in the brain, and we can image it beautifully, very beautifully, but imaging isn’t comprehension, isn’t power, it just makes scientists feel good!”
She spun on the spot, throwing her hands into the air, an academic faced with poor processes, a woman whose life, whose every breath had taken her to the place she thought she wanted to be, only to discover on arrival that it was nothing like she’d imagined. Silence between us. My fingers traced the curve of the Möbius strip around my wrist, rolling over and under, over and under.
Filipa’s shoulders dropped, her eyes turned back towards the floor. “I wanted,” she began, and stopped. Then again, “I wanted to be… silly now, of course.”
“Perfect?” I suggested.
“No! Not that — never that! I just wanted to… I wanted to make a difference. I wanted to like who I am.” Again, stopping, head turned to one side, picking at her own memory, shutting down lines of enquiry. “Do you like who you are?” she asked, eyes fixed on something far away, out of sight.
“I… don’t know. For a while I thought… [words get complicated, I try to find a way through them and]… I thought I wasn’t worthy.”
“Worthy? Of what?”
“Of anything. That my life was without worth. I went from place to place, took what I wanted, did what I felt like, pretended to be whoever I wanted to be, and it was… good, as good as things can be when you’re… but it was without meaning. Or without worth. An unworthy life. Worthy as in honourable. Upright. A life of merit. To myself. To others.”
“And now?”
I thought about it, straightening my back, hands tight at my sides. “Byron called me enlightened. She thought that if the world forgot me, I was outside the world. Free from its chains, my life shaped only by myself, my soul a thing entirely of my making, not made by… by the screaming. By the world screaming at me to be something I’m not. I think she was wrong, I think she’s wrong about a lot of things. But also… not as wrong as words or numbers might make her.”
She nodded, at what I wasn’t sure. “I have not led a worthy life,” she said at last. “I have come to terms with nothing.”
“That’s not—”
“It’s true,” she replied simply. “As a child I was a disappointment to my father, then to my brother, and finally to myself. I have been consistently informed that I am a genius, and brilliant — not by people who matter to me, of course, but still by enough people so that the words have acquired a certain baggage — and with my brilliance I have constructed tools to perpetrate the end of the world. Is that too much, is that wrong? Devastation, destruction, damnation, death. But it is foolish to let anyone say ‘genius’ outside a cartoon. I have perpetrated a device that obliterates the minds of all who use it, making them little more than internet memes, walking marketing boards, human placards selling us the sex, the clothes, the cars and the holidays that the markets demand. The 106 Club is a hangout for clones — physically and mentally — the surgeon’s scalpel, my treatments. I have no doubt that they are happy. Self-doubt, insecurity, neediness, emotional fragility — these are not traits of perfect people. Have you spoken to anyone in the 106? They can respond to any situation with a two-dollar retort from a self-help book at a pinch. Is your father dead? He’s gone to a better place. Have you lost your job? Stay strong — if you believe in yourself, you’ll find a way. Husband left you, taking the kids? You can fight this one, and with the strength you have inside and the love of your children, you can win. The world is boiled down to aphorisms and fairytales. I watched them, my brother’s programmers, trawling the web. ‘How to deal with anxiety: remove anxious foods from your diet. Eat strawberries.’ Perfect people always have a solution to a problem, you see. But what do you do when words fail? Truth: sometimes a murderer cannot be found. Truth: sometimes your children are taken and you are left behind. Truth: poverty is a prison. Truth: disease and age come to us all. These are so terrifying, we program them out of the human brain. Treatments make everyone who has them happy, and happiness is always sexy, isn’t it? Happy happy sexy happy beautiful sexy sex happy beautiful happy sex—”
Tears on her face, something wild in her voice. A thousand times she has looked at her own reflection in the mirror, and said these words to herself, a thousand times she has tried to pick them apart, to tell herself no, no, it’s not like that, see, see, there’s a silver lining after all. And again: she has failed. Only truth remained.
I shuffled towards her, uncertain, stopped, hands useless at my sides. What did the perfect people of this world do when they saw tears?
How To Comfort Someone: 4 Steps:
1. Place a hand on their shoulder.
2. Be compassionate and understanding. Even if you think they have done something wrong, do not blame them.
3. Think of yourself, if you were in their place. Remind them that you will always be there for them.
4. Before you leave, ask them if there is anything else they need to talk about. Maintain eye contact.
I placed my hand on her shoulder, and she flinched.
I held her head tight, her hair in my fingers, and she wrapped her arms around my middle and cried for a while, and I said nothing, and she just cried.
After a while, her tears slowed, but she didn’t let go. Snot and salt seeped through my shirt, and I held her, and that was fine.
“When I dance,” I hummed, swaying a little as I held her, “they call me Macarena. They all want me, they can’t have me, so they all come and dance beside me.”
Her fingers clung in the small of my back, and still she didn’t let go, but let me sing, my feet stepped and so did hers, though she didn’t raise her head, “Hey Macarena!”
I spun her gently, and she let herself be spun, face red and swollen, a smile somewhere behind her tears.
“I see why I liked you,” she sniffed, wiping her face with her sleeve.
“We could help each other.”
“Could we?”
“I know Byron. I saw her photo at the party in Nîmes, that’s why I came here. I know who she is, what she does.”