Naturally, they had conducted this conversation before, but their favourite topic was rationed. Technically today was Kay’s birthday, though she’d lost track of which one. After so many, they didn’t bother to celebrate birthdays any more, and licence for this parcelled exchange was the closest Kay would come to a present.
“Tell me,” Cyril said, as he was meant to. “Why would we do that?”
“Well, what are we trying to achieve here? I’d hoped awfully that after hanging about all this time the nature of the project would become clearer. It hasn’t done. I still can’t get my head round what it means to be alive. I don’t know what this place is, I don’t know whether it’s even real, much less whatever it is we’re supposed to do here, and if I’ve wasted my time I still can’t tell you what I should have done instead—though the whole idea of ‘wasting time’ seems to have gone by the wayside now that there’s so bloody much of it. I’ve no more idea what matters than I did when I was five. I keep having this feeling that there’s something I’m supposed to come to grips with, and there’s not much chance of my grasping the nettle in the next hundred years if I failed to grasp it during the last hundred—which must have been full of nettles.”
“Yes, you’ve said roughly the same thing more than once.”
“What have we agreed?”
“No apathy.”
“No, I mean what else?”
Cyril thought a moment. “That we won’t give each other a hard time for saying the same thing over and over.”
“Thank you. Go to the head of the class.”
“Perhaps we should make another rule that even your birthday doesn’t give you leave to be so snippy.”
“Fair enough,” she said sullenly. Kay was supposedly the one who knew how to enjoy life. Kay was the one who appreciated its many lulling rituals like cleaning the kitchen—AGAIN—in all their sumptuous mundanity.
“Why are you so impatient?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “There’s no excuse, is there? We should both have nothing but patience. But: speaking of patients. Why do all these people you counsel claim to want to top themselves?”
“It varies a bit, but it’s not as idiosyncratic as you’d expect. Their malaise is rarely triggered by a dire turn of events or a relationship gone rancid. My patients are lost. They can’t enjoy anything. Sensory satisfaction doesn’t work: sex, food, drink; even the effects of hallucinogens become predictable. They can’t keep partners or spouses and they don’t even care, though they still get lonely. They feel trapped—and at the same time they know they’re experiencing more freedom than any human being in history, which just makes them feel worse.”
“You know, this eternity we’re stuck in almost replicates locked-in syndrome,” Kay said. “The way you become inured to sensory input like taste, which is close to having no input. Remember when I stopped drinking red wine? I shocked myself, but I’d simply had enough red wine. And this passivity . . . I think unbridled freedom and passivity amount to the same thing. Being able to do anything is like being able to do nothing. We keep coming up with another career, or another hobby, or another friend who we convince ourselves is going to be different from all the other friends we tired of—but it’s all a running in place. Nothing changes. As if the whole species is laid out on a hospital bed staring up at a stain on the ceiling the shape of Norway. Spiritually at least, we’re paralysed. We’re physically able to speak, but we can’t say anything new, so what’s the difference? Our only real activity is helpless mental churn. Because this whole ellipsis of ours feels like a dream. Some days, a bad dream. I’m one of the oldest people the world has ever seen, and I sometimes feel as if I’m not here at all, or as if I’ve never been here. It’s getting . . . strangely horrible.”
“I like that: locked-in syndrome. You’ve never said that before. Am I allowed to say that? That you’ve never said something?”
“Yes, my dear,” she said, squeezing his hand. It was important to remember that they still loved each other, or more impressively still liked each other, even if frequently fractious exchanges could make it hard to tell. After all this time, they should more often commemorate the fact that they could bear to be in the same room together.
“These patients of yours, who are tormented by suicidal ideation,” she added. “What do you tell them?”
“More improv! You’ve never asked me that.”
“Haven’t I? Why, that’s appalling.”
“I tell them that human beings have fought to locate a sense of purpose from the year dot—even back when most people dropped dead by forty. I say that, beyond mere physical survival, finding purpose is your job. And that job is never done, because you’ll no sooner find an answer than you’ll have to revisit that answer, which won’t suffice on examination, and you’ll have to find another one. The advice is a bit circular, but the hypnotic nature of anything that goes round and round has a calming effect. I’m really closer to a priest now than to a doctor.”
“You didn’t used to talk like this,” Kay said. “It was all life expectancies and NHS budgets and bed-blocking.”
“Well, that was one of my answers that didn’t last.”
So they’d made one more character swap. She used to be the reflective, musing, philosophical one, whereas Cyril was all brutal brass tacks. That impatience of hers, for example—a cut-to-the-chase what’s-the-point—it used to belong to her husband. Apparently they weren’t all just trading genders or careers, but trying on being completely different people.
“With some of my cleverer patients,” Cyril added, “I suggest trying to get beyond purpose—because goal-directed behaviour is time-bound, and a consequence of mortality, as well as having been metaphorically borrowed from biology: the need to eat and sleep and mate to endure. But the universe simply is. It needn’t justify itself, and by analogy we needn’t justify our
