Doubling
We walked into the building of the university late at night with the infernal bright shit that so characterised the work that I was spending my life on. Down past some security doors and into the padded room, and I felt the fear immediately – that the door would close shut behind us forever and we would die and desiccate in there. It was not my only fear.
Stopped dead. Daniel looked back at me and smiled. He hadn’t said anything other than, ‘Here’s the machine,’ with a wave of his hand like introducing a work colleague.
‘It doesn’t make the copies out of plastic?’ I asked. My voice cracked under the strain and I winced at myself. My heart so fucking loud, like a much younger less used heart. Go back to being the way you were before, I was thinking. Órla never did this to me. This was dire. I have never loved airless rooms. Too many memories. Rooms press in and crush you like grinding stone gears and no one overly cares where you are, ever really, you could be missing for hours and no one would think to go looking.
‘No, the machine uses different resins,’ he was saying. ‘It’s not in its mandate to copy post-twentieth century objects.’ He was placing the thing in the copy tray with finicky care. I saw the veins on his hands, the raised bones. He had a small red scuff on his left hand, near the middle knuckle. I followed its progression as he moved the toy about, splaying its legs, straightening out its shiny green fishtail as much as it would go, brushing out the cheap shitty silver mane with his fingers. Will you listen and not tell – I was worried with a rising alarm in my heart that I would – at a slipped moment – be somehow tricked into kissing him; that was how I thought of it, like we’d stand too close and I’d lose my sense of decorum, bend down, my lips on your lips. I didn’t have thoughts, my thoughts wanted to yell, it’s the room itself! Don’t get confused! And yelled drowning me out white cold as I watched him pull back and go about his business. I wanted, with a kind of shocked heat, to reach out and hold his hand up to my lips. I could imagine the skin cold against my own cold hand. It would smell of citrus; before we left the flat he had been peeling a mandarin. ‘I am getting confused,’ I thought, and tried to puzzle out all the reasons why I might be mistakenly feeling like this – I hadn’t been sleeping. I was not gay, nobody had said that about me: nobody at school had yelled it at me or shoved me into a wall for it. Nobody had implied or inferred it. Not that it mattered if I was, I told myself afterwards, if I was. Just, right, no man looked to me for anything other than work – and sometimes to double check their form at the gym – that was all I had to give, the rules were set. There below everything in that horrible cold dry room, the tops of my ears burned. Nothing about this made sense, so perhaps it was my body telling me in its twisted way I had a virus brewing, a shivering, high temperature boiling up and my subconscious made a mistake with the input. You could blame reading over and over the sensual sinuous diary entries of James Lennoxlove, colouring my understanding of the world so much I could get fearful pleasure out of this. Because that’s what it was, I see it now. But then I was thinking, wanting isn’t like this, doesn’t have the feel flavour shape certification or panic of this, so this isn’t wanting. I was overtired. I hadn’t been sleeping. Nothing had to happen, I wouldn’t make any kind of mistake like that.
Passage
I went to get coffee and I held that instead. It’s this century’s substitute for rest or closeness, unity that requires no other hand but your own to utilise. One of the many, and more reliable and available in public now that vaping has left cigarettes as historical. Fucking vaping, the flavoured condom method of substance dependency. Coffee is customisable comfort that doesn’t need other people except for workers in the chain of supply, I suppose. Can’t ignore the world economy, especially if it’s how we get interpersonal only with ourselves. I had made a career on the fringes of this sort of self-securing by the object, the image, the smell or the burn of a drink. I was like the high priest of it. No – ha – really another worker too, just one of many soldering meaning onto the endlessly passing things with a series of little taps and clicks.
Anyway, I went out through the doors. The hall smelled of fresh paint and nineties carpeting. There’s lots to register in an empty building when you are trying to buy coffee so you can avoid the man whose presence is causing you actual mania. You walk carefully to avoid making noise, then get self-conscious about what that means about you and switch to good strides.
