Raising Egypt

I was tired, and horny, and I wished I had said ‘no’ to lunch. I don’t know why I’d said “yes”.

Like I said, I was horny and being around people- even if you have no plans on undressing with those specific people- when you have that feeling of being around people is pretty straightforward. I couldn’t have sex, so I went for lunch, instead.

It may be worth giving some insight into my state of mind at the time, because it seemed I’d entered into a point in my life where everything I did consisted of things I’d do in place of having sex. I’d turned celibate unwillingly and unwittingly, at first, when the girl I liked decided she liked some other fellow more, and no matter how hard I tried- which was not, in fact, very hard at all- it seemed she had also decided to undress for no one else but him for the foreseeable future. Despite this conviction, which she assured me was unshakeable, I’d still managed to corner her in whatever dark corners serendipity hastily cleared out and stood guard on our behalf. We’d kiss, and say shameful things to one another, and I’d hold her bottom until some invisible line was crossed and she was once again the pillar of virtue- high and mighty, and with absolutely no time or tolerance for the unvirtuous.

In between these collapses of the pillar, I’d have the pleasure of running into the both of them together- her and her fellow- and in those instances, she would reject me so feverishly that I might have begun to doubt my own existence. It was funny, never not hurtful, but mostly funny and in those encounters, I would become even more invested in the way she moved about the place: virtuous and fooling no one.  

It wasn’t hard to run into people back then, it became much harder later and the only explanation I could find for this was that I had changed and so had my ability to attract people to me, in consequence. I had carried on this charade with her for just under a year until I had run out completely of the extra steam so necessarily required to chase after love. It is only, I learned then, the unusually fortunate with their surplus of physical means that allows them the expendable time and energy to fall in love. Or even more than this, to fall in love alone. Simply, I was broke; really broke, for the first time in my life, and this took up much of my time.

During that year of going around in untraceable circles with that girl, I really didn’t sleep with anyone else at all. I wasn’t even sure why this was. It is never, and I truly mean never, difficult to fall into bed with someone. It only becomes complicated if and when you have a particular person in mind. Otherwise, I’ve never been more definite of anything else in my life. It could have been because up until then, I’d had a lousy reputation with the opposite sex in that I had my beliefs (it is never difficult to fall into bed with someone) and I upheld them. So, when I realized I’d become extra fond of this girl, I may have wanted to shock everyone, including myself, by proving that I could be serious about one thing for a time and time on end. I only had not considered that it would be so much time, in the end. Perhaps, and it is always possible, I liked her more than even I had realized.

Regardless, after a year the whole thing started to feel too ridiculous, and I had begun to feel too down on myself for- and you can take away whatever you want about my person from this- I truly had not imagined that luring her definitively away from her fellow would have ended up being so difficult. Afterwards, I fell sick with a sort of chest infection that left me laid up in bed for weeks. Since I could not work, I was not allowed to work anymore, doing something I had always hated, and then, when I finally rose from the open coffin of my cot, it was to discover that I was alone in a way that I think a lot of people find themselves at my age. By this, I mean knowing that there was a party going not too long ago, and that many people in that party know you and, hell, even like you, and if you ran for it now, you might still find that party going with those same people that have no reason not to still, hell, like you, and if you could swallow the fact that you were dying just a moment ago, and none of them had bothered to leave the party for only a moment to check on you, then you’d have no problem going back and joining them for another drink that someone would maybe even be gracious enough to pay for. No hard feelings and yet no passion, either.

I’d been at the party, myself, since before the world said I could- that I was old enough to- and I had not noticed until then how everyone else at the party was just like me in that we were all waiting for some tremendous fidelity from some thing or some person to be offered to us in a deafening instant of ignition, during which we would jump to our feet, thunder-struck with epiphany and purpose, forsake the frivolity of our peers, inform them that not only are we not as desultory as they are, but that we have never been, and then dash off in some direction and never return, unless it was much later and we were returning with all the wealth of Egypt at our feet. We were waiting, in essence, for some idea to demonstrate its faith in us, and thus warrant our reciprocated faith that this was the idea that was going to carry us out of the mediocrity of life and into the something else of whatever else, omitting entirely that only fidelity inspires fidelity and we were not, not any of us, prepared to offer ours first. In this way, nobody thundered off to anywhere on horse-back, and nobody returned with Egypt at their feet.

I had lost the passion for my peers, my dwellings, and my way of life, and it would have been a miracle, I think, if all of this had not, in turn, caused the loss of my passion towards passion itself. I didn’t feel like having sex- I couldn’t tell what it was that I would be having sex with. Surely, not any body- for there was no one after that girl that I could even bring myself to engage with in conversation- and not any sentiment, either. When I ran out of money, I became overcome with the idea of making money and this was hard then because there had been a recession going on for a while, and I had just somehow not managed to notice until then.

I returned to my earliest love of painting great big oil portraits of people in less than flattering renditions, and decided to test for myself if success truly came on wings to those who dedicated themselves to pursuing their deepest desires. I had- at the time I had agreed to meet for lunch- just finished an enormous portrait of the woman who had acted as my mother for the first twenty years of my life. I had told myself that I was trying to work through some unresolved feelings towards her through the undertaking of the project, and mostly that had not gone so well, but it takes a lot to lie to yourself- much more than I had at the time. Honestly, I had merely gone straight for the topic that I thought would have elicited the strongest response from me, and thus orchestrate some miraculously artistic accident, but this had not gone so well either. I was passionless, you see.

Still, I did not think the product was worthless, either, and so I had sent it to a gallery that was currently accepting submissions for review. I was to be paid upon the acceptance of the piece into the Spring Amateur’s Open collection, only the review had been delayed for some unknowable reason, and the gallery was not responding to my calls or messages. I decided to let it go, to practice detachment, and I did not feel deeply enough about the piece to fight tooth-and-nail for its acceptance, only it was the only thing I was counting on to bring in money, and this was worrying to me. Like that girl I had tried to steal away, I had not thought that this process would be so tedious either.

I don’t know if you know this- maybe you do and maybe you don’t- but having no way to know for sure whether or not you’d be able to afford your next rent instalment has a real way of dampening the carnal spirit. It did for me anyway; I required a very specific filling of the male order in order to feel qualified to perform sexually as a man, and the inability to provide for myself was far from a filled order. I didn’t feel like a man. There’s no way that I would have ever admitted that to anyone at the time, but that’s the truth of it. I figured that being able to afford the cost of living would once again renew my passion for everything, because I would have done it entirely through my passions, and I was subscribed to the school of thought that life begets life. When I finally got my compensation, I told myself, I’d throw an enormous fete and fuck everything that moved. 

So, I’d agreed to lunch because I was horny- I wasn’t dead- but there was no way in hell I’d be able to act on that impulse, and I knew that, so I agreed to a lunch that I wouldn’t otherwise have agreed to in a million years- at least, and definitely, not then. I didn’t mind, although I didn’t enjoy, being seen in public because my financial disarray had not yet managed to affect my appearance. I looked good; healthy, well-dressed, well-fed, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if everyone at the party thought I’d dropped off the map because I’d been too busy chasing Egypt. But I wasn’t. I need to make it clear that I really wasn’t.

The guy I was having lunch with was a friend of mine from the party, but it had been a long time since we had seen each other and I wasn’t really sure how to think of him now. I certainly didn’t love him although I think at one point, we may have gotten terribly drunk together and I may have confessed something like it. I didn’t remember now. I had no idea why he had asked me out. My days had turned so strange and barren, like a tarmac road stretching out into the desert horizon. I couldn’t see what was coming up in the distance, emerging out of the heat waves. I had no real reason to think that anything was coming, but I knew that whatever might come would not surprise me. Strange things in strange times are not strange at all.

The restaurant we met at was the closest one to my apartment, although I did not tell him that I had recently moved into the area. I’d decided that nobody needed to know anything about me, at all. I’d thought that this decision would, in turn, render lunch-talk difficult to manoeuvre, however he made it clear from very early on into the meeting that he had not come to make lunch-talk with me.

“I’ve decided,” he said, after we had chosen a small table outside overlooking the street, and been served with menus, “that I am going to kill that pretty young thing over there.”

My eyes raised themselves- for, surely, I did not raise them- from the menu to look at his face. He was smiling his usual friendly smile that very often attracted people to him, and looking out towards the parts of the restaurant we had left behind in the inner-room, of which I could not see from where I sat without turning around completely in my chair. His eyes were squinting slightly against the brightness of the day, and they seemed distant as they watched the ‘pretty young thing’ in the distance, as if he were seeing her and yet not really seeing her. Rather, seeing what he held in his imagination, which I was suddenly painfully aware he was about to reveal to me. Funny enough, I knew immediately that he was not joking, which is why I did not turn around to take a look at the ‘pretty young thing’. I was frozen in my chair, watching him, as he was, in turn, frozen in his, watching her.

I did not say anything, and I knew that he could tell I was not going to, so he turned back to face me and asked

“What?”

and I could have rolled over in my grave.

The look in my face must have given me away because he noticed it and burst out into laughter. The laughter, although I wanted it to betray that everything had been only a joke, did no such thing. He continued to look over me with smiling eyes that contained no malice, no violence, and yet he was serious.

The longer I stayed silent, the more worried he begun to seem, as if my lack of banter was indicative of some problem struggling to resolve itself deep within me. He had no problems, that was clear. It was also clear that he genuinely could not understand what had come over me, and this confusion was settling in to confuse me, in consequence. Was there something wrong with me? Nothing posed so casually and without reverence could truly be crazy, so I must be crazy instead.

I had not been around anyone in so long, namely anyone from the party. Had he always been like this? No, surely I would have noticed sooner, or surely, he had a way of adapting himself for the party, for I had never even heard him mention anything along the lines of mortality before; nobody in the party ever did, for that would draw too much attention to their own. No. Had I- it suddenly struck me- ever even met him like this, alone, outside of the party before?

“Huh?” was my Nobel prize worthy retort, at last.

Hell. So, I’d been wrong, then, because there was no way I’d ever seen this coming up. At that moment, the waitress who had handed us our menus returned and asked us, with a voice full of sunshine, if we had chosen anything yet to drink. The way he looked up at her and smiled that friendly smile once again, and the distant-yet-familiar look returned to his eyes, alerted me immediately that this was the Pretty Young Thing. My head snapped up now to look at her, and pretty- yes- young -most likely- but the ‘thing’ emulated from the way he was looking her over, like a steak; like a girl in a red riding hood.

“My, and what big ears you have, grandma,” she might have said. I might have misheard.

Either way, they were chatting away and laughing, and I could only watch, dumbfounded. He told the Pretty Young Thing that I would have a gin-and-tonic (my regular choice of drink at the party), and that he would have a bottle of still water. I was frozen. I wanted to push her away from the table, but I didn’t. After she left of her own accord, he sighed a deep sigh, and folded his arms on the table.

“I know, I know. It’s strange, right? It’s so strange that I, myself, may not have been willing to believe it, but it’s true. I know I have to kill that poor girl- I just know it.”

Never in my life had I so badly wanted to speak, and yet failed to produce a single sound. Actually, I did not want to speak. I did not want to have to talk or hear about this ever again.

“Brian, what the fuck are you saying to me right now?” Not bad, I thought. I had said something.

Brian sighed and uncrossed one arm to smooth down some hair at the back of his head, and then returned it to his original position.

“I know, I know. Murder ain’t jazz.”

“It’s a crime.”

“Is that a fact?”

I could not blink. Is that a fact?

“…yeah. That’s a fact.”

Brian looked me over, once, twice, I couldn’t be sure, and then leaned back in his chair. His sunny disposition did not leave him. I had to assume that my disposition of concrete struck suddenly by a hammer was not leaving me, either.

“A fact, friend, is a limit. I’m a believer.”

“Help me with this one.”

He chuckled- sunny chuckle- then leaned forward, crossed his hands on the table and rested the weight of his torso on his forearms. I felt as if I was about to get some great talking down to, like he was laying out the facts of the universe for me, like he was glad to.

“Believers want more- don’t want any limits. And we want more because we can handle more. People who like facts want nothing, and they can’t handle nothing else. They just want things the way they are. But because believers do so because they can house it, they have room in their hearts for people who can’t. Those people, people who don’t want anything because they can’t handle anything, on the other hand, have no room in their hearts for anyone.”

I should have been more concerned by the context of his argument, but- “you’re saying I don’t have room in my heart for anything?”

“I’m saying I’ve got room for you, but you don’t got room for me.”

            At this point, I leaned back in my chair, finally thawed from the ice that had frozen me in place. I couldn’t believe it and yet, I felt like something deep down inside of me could suddenly believe anything, it had just never tried or rather, never had the opportunity.

“We’re not talking about God or scripture; we’re talking about murder. Anyone can agree that murder is wrong, that’s not the thing that the scientists and the believers are arguing over. Even they can agree on that!”

Brian merely shrugged. “I’m different then.”

I was beginning to have a harder and harder time. I had been sweating, profusely, under the arms and down the small of my back, and had only just then come to notice. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the Pretty Young Thing re-approaching with our drinks: his bottle of still water (ha!), and my gin-and-tonic which, I realized, he had probably ordered as a kindness towards me in order to assist in easing my fall. I did not want her to make it to the table, I did not want her to serve us, to smile at us. I did not want to know something so terrible about another person’s fate as they winked in my direction and told me to enjoy my drink.

            I wanted to throw up. Not entirely because of the situation at hand, but because of everything that had happened since I had given up on sleeping with that girl of mine. Why- I asked absolutely no one, and certainly not the present company- do things always come tumbling on your head at once, and at the absolute worst time? I must have looked in bad shape because Brian frowned at me with concern.

“Are you alright?” he asked me.

“What do you mean ‘you just know you have to kill her’- what does that mean?”

“Well, it’s hard to explain”- I’ll bet!- “but I’d been away for a while. Left the scene, I mean, a little while after you disappeared. I just couldn’t take it anymore, you know? So, I went home one day and I just stayed home for something like half a year- didn’t go outside, didn’t talk to no one, either. Just stayed at home and read books, and learned how to cook, and shit.”

He took a swig of water.

“Anyway, one day it just occurred to me that I wasn’t doing anything at home all by myself because I was scared, you see, I was scared because I realized I was sick of the scene and suddenly, I had no idea what to do with myself.  I felt so powerless. I couldn’t take power- I mean- in my own life. So, for no particular reason, I’d been watching a documentary about these serial killers, and there was this one guy who said that growing up, his mother had been a real terror. Basically, emasculated him from before he was old enough to realize he even had a prick to chop off!

            This guy explained how he couldn’t fight back against his mother, so he went out and started killing women who looked just like her, just to take back a sense of power over himself. Now, you know, because I think I got drunk one time and mentioned, that my relationship with my mother was no good. I don’t think I ever got into how bad it had really been. Anyway, she’s dead now, and the whole thing made a lot of sense to me. I don’t have to kill a stupid amount of people, like he did. Just one, and then I know my sense of power over myself will be restored- I just know it.”

How shall I describe how I felt in the days that followed this meeting? He- Brian- refused to say much else about the matter after that, and I could not sit through the rest of lunch. I excused myself and left; I did not even know what I had said to him. As I was leaving, however, he had offered to walk me out, and I had turned around at the exit on to the street to face him.

“Why did you tell me this, of all people?”

He had smiled- friendly smile- and shrugged.

“When are you…God, you know, going to do it then?”

He had shrugged again and then tossed his head back into a beautiful laugh.

“Oh, I don’t know. Probably before the weekend.” A pause. “Yeah, that makes the most sense- before the weekend.”

And then I turned my back to him and walked up the street.

So, how shall I describe how I felt in the days that followed? I had not bothered to ask why he had chosen the victim that he had; whether it had been random, or entirely specific, I sensed it did not matter much to him. He may have made his decision based on a predetermined set of criteria and then, having matched the Pretty Young Thing to all of his requirements, found that it did not matter, and had never mattered at all. A storm had merely erupted; a gale of dust risen somewhere in the desert. I know it did not matter and yet I found myself wondering about it all the time, since in the wrap of my tumultuously uncertain future, the evidence of chance had been made for the first time terribly apparent to me. I wondered if the Pretty Young Thing was aware of this phenomenon also, and if she wasn’t then I wondered how long it would take her to find out, suffocating under the pressure of his hands around her throat, or bleeding profusely from the wounds of his weapon, just how large a part the element of chance truly played in our fates.

If she was ‘chosen’- if you could put it like that- then I had not been. I was neither the butcher nor the sacrificial lamb, but only an audience member, or rather, a witness to a foreign ritual. As I waited to hear back from the gallery, I rotated around these three roles (butcher, lamb, witness). Since the moment of my birth, I had rotated around these three roles (butcher, lamb…). As I await the ultimatum of my death, I rotate around these three roles (butcher…). I could not take, I quickly found, the terrible intricacies and philosophies of living reduced to only three components.

Some people- and mind you, I have never met any of them- are blessed with the ability to await circumstances, no matter how burdensome. They are capable of allowing events to unfold without their input. In my experience, however, any situation in which too much or too little is required produces a split difference between demand and capability that is always too heavy to bear. The biggest trouble is that I was not able to discern in which of these cases I was finding myself in. In some ways, I felt as if much too much was being asked of me, and I felt this clearly every time I went to pick up the telephone and dial the number of some authority. The device would become so heavy in my hand that I would be forced to drop it to the floor. In other ways, however, I felt as if so little was being required from me in so dire a situation that my inaction could result in nothing else than rendering me complicit. And yet, I could not live freely, could not suffer either, and the split difference was driving me mad.

It was only four days to the weekend, and I had no exact date besides this rough estimate, so I went every day to see her.

I could not go into the same restaurant, sit down, and be served, so I stood across the street and checked for her face inside. Each time, I would do this with a great solemnity, moving slower and slower each day because I was not eating, and had given up sleeping entirely, and thinking too much in an incoherent manner, and though rumination may be food, it is certainly not water, so I was becoming dehydrated, and slow, and tired.  Still, every day I went to see her, or rather, to see if she was still there, and every day I would feel the pit in my stomach grow as I approached the restaurant and took my usual place opposite from it, and look up with large eyes that had become larger because the skin underneath had begun to sag, and every day until the weekend I did this and every day she would be there, glowing and pretty and young and almost beautiful. I went mad.

For a few days, I allowed for the possibility that he may be experiencing cold feet, or that some unavoidable circumstances had arisen that had necessitated the pushing back of his plans. After about two weeks of this, however, I could hardly move, I had become so weak. I was being tortured by my own mind- and still not heard anything back from the gallery. I had become so unrecognizable to myself that I could not even lament this change in my form.

The Pretty Young Thing remained unchanged, during the whole three weeks in total that I watched over. She never gave any indication in her face or mannerisms that her life was unravelling in a similar manner to mine. She even seemed to dance between the tables, moving from one customer to another and answering orders, responding to hands miming her to come over, jokes made in passing by her fellow workers, one day she tried a new hairstyle, the next day she had decided she didn’t like it, and that was good because I had not liked it either, and at first, all of these behaviours were so endearing that they were tragic because I had felt as if I was watching a sun perform a final setting, but then they were only unbelievable, and the entire continuity of life became simply unbelievable.

After three weeks, I watched her one day with my mouth hanging open in bewilderment, and surely, I was surprised, but I had also lost the strength necessary to keep it closed, and I took a look around at the pedestrian world that I had believed for weeks now to be sharing in my sense of despair and calamity, only to find that they all remained unchanged, as well. It was almost as if no one knew that something terrible was taking place inside of me and then my own position in the three rotating roles (butcher, lamb, witness) became finally clear to me.

It was only after I killed her that I realized too late that this may have been what he had wanted all along. As I said, however, it was too late, and by the time the thought occurred to me, I never wanted to contemplate the thing ever again. There was so much that was strange about that situation, and it would occur to me now and then as I recovered my strength afterwards, and as I received my reply from the gallery, and as life began to cycle forward once more, such as why it had been me who was chosen after all- I couldn’t ask him because I never saw him again- and why I had taken her life so violently if it had only been a matter of necessity, and why the whole thing had really even happened in the first place.

I don’t know.

It was a strange summer; a gale of dust that rose and fell somewhere in the desert.