Timing and Presentation
I stayed up. I procrastinated. I listened to the walls creak. I must have read that first part of the book six times. It isn’t long. A possibly-pretended year of a life. I stayed with it. I grew to love the richness and the textures. How the youngest servants would run out and pick up windfall apples, scampering, he said, like rabbits in caps. I was sold on its vision even as I knew it was fake. It was like a film I watched over and over. No, like an ad. I was being sold an image of warmth and complexity, and behind that I thought I could see what the company was, what its mission statement was, the inept marketing manager and the brilliant young art designer. That kind of thing. I kept on my path. I put off having to show Daniel up. I’d plumb the mystery, and Mark would just be in awe at what I’d found, and in the end everything would be smoothed over. By my last read-through I’d almost decided it was too like modern life, wasn’t it? That pretence of perfection. I had deleted all my social media accounts a while back. Bad relationship moment, too many reminders of my own failings and that didn’t allow for a clean shift into the future. I was good at clearing out old Cloudberry tweets and online docs too, kind of famous for it because at work that’s the kind of sad thing you get famous for and get told you’re famous for in meetings as you let the pen fall slack in your hand and you time and pitch your laugh precisely. I fucking love the internet. I hate it for my own self, as I said. I hate conflict and exposure and drama, but I love the kind of cultivated reveal that’s possible. For people who like to make a display of their minutia and make it stilled and beautiful in a way you can’t manage in real life, all heavy breathing and stumbled words and tangle. James Lennoxlove didn’t have the luxury of writing allowing his work to be read and then deleting afterwards. It had to be all out there forever or not at all. But he managed its presentation so well, it became a kind of curation that wasn’t possible, I thought, for things made long before the idea of the internet. I wondered if this might lead me to the secret. I don’t think it did. The book was still old. The life in it was still fake but beautiful. The purpose wasn’t embedded; there was nowhere to click through to another site, the one that expanded on the original idea. It was just lines one in front of another. I read it again to make sure.
I got to the point where I gave up re-reading it, satisfied I’d inferred everything, but still couldn’t find the answers. And so I sat, the whole book in my head, running the images back and forth, with a funny tick to my heart and too much of it. It was the same night, a long one that held me like fingers in a fist, I slipped out – did he hear me go? Órla didn’t shift – and got a night bus to the gym – one of the few things in this city that never closed and worked out for two and a half hours hard, nodding at the other insomniacs with shadows under their brows and furrows of overlit teeth showing – got up a steam on me like any number of James’ real or imaginary horses, then went for a run in the darkness. I had the book in my kit bag with the dirty clothes. I wore a warm coat though it wasn’t that cold yet. I don’t know now what date it was, what day of the week, but I was gone all night. Like a dream I ran without effort, bag on my shoulders, striding easy under streetlights and by a canal at one point and past countless empty shopfronts and a handful still with goods inside, lights on but doors locked to all comers – I don’t know, I try to recreate it like James would have done, but the order’s muddled and my life is chaos now and catastrophe even then, when I didn’t know it. Running through this insolvable problem made it feel at least like it could be something easy, even though I was no nearer to getting it. I stepped on another night bus and got off at the part of the city that’s on the beach and not really the city at all and then I ran along the shore, heading south – I think – blood full of bright horses and servants’ aprons and crystalising lights in front of my eyes and I was dropping tired when I climbed on another bus and sailed homewards. At the end of the run I presented my findings to the air just outside the Minto house.
There was no way to know, there was no evidence only toneless text and I might understand it okay – I understood most things, if I had the full facts – but I’d never have proof that it was a story told out the side of its mouth let alone work out why. I wanted to believe that James Lennoxlove was lying to perk himself up. He might have been a poor man with a bad life trying to build himself a
