I’d reached the point where I was wearing my best pants to work. Outside of those hours was nothing. I was thirty two and only able to fill forty hours of the week with activity. The world didn’t appreciate my personality, looks or charm. It appreciated my ability to arrive on time and log on. That’s all I was good for. School or university friends had stopped calling in my twenties and colleagues had weaved social lives which avoided me. Tim and James played badminton on Thursday, Sandra, Jim, Tom and Jenny went to a quiz on Tuesday. The play was performing in front of me and I watched it like an actor who had failed the audition.
The strange part of my destination was that there was no visible route out. It’s like the cycle of famine. If you can’t grow crops, you eat less, if you eat less you have less energy to work, if you work less, you’ll grow even less crops and it essentially ends in death. This was my life. I’d worked abroad for the first five years of my career. I’d met a girl who I didn’t love and stayed with her whilst lying about it. This resulted in an estrangement from my friends back home and meant I lost the friends I’d made when I stopped lying to her and returned to England. This was made worse by the fact that people in their late twenties and thirties are less hungry to establish a larger social life. As they are focussed on marriage, children and property, they tend to consolidate their friendships, spending their spare twenty minutes with people who they can reliably have a good time with. In order to break through this mindset, you need to have a personality that dazzles. The occasional joke isn’t good enough to be asked out for a drink. Therefore, with the pressure to perform and lack of confidence from the absence of love and social practice, I was made alone.
I remember the Sunday with vivid reality. I was buying bread and sandwich meat from the supermarket. I saw Esme, a mother who worked on the same floor as me. She waved over, confident and welcoming of conversation.
‘Hey! Charles! Charlie!’
‘Hi Esme. You okay? You had a good weekend?’
‘Yeah, it’s been lovely.’
She cupped the child’s ears in the trolley.
‘Been pretty shit faced if I’m going to be honest. Went out for Sandra and Jim’s engagement on Friday and then had some old mates over on Saturday. What about you? Why weren’t you there on Friday?’
A lack of invitation was the honest answer but a man mustn’t look at his reflection and describe what he really sees.
‘Oh yeah, Friday! A mate who I used to work with in Oman was over with his wife. I feel rude that I missed it, I’ll speak to them on Monday and give my gift then.’
‘I’m sure they’ll understand, if your mates have come from Oman! Let’s face it, you just work with Sandra and Jim, you’ll know the people from Oman forever. Have you been with them all weekend?’
‘No, just Friday, they saw family yesterday. Saturday, I met up with a few lads and went for a meal and a bit of a night out. I’m feeling like you!’
‘Ahh well, at least we have the week to recover! See you tomorrow Charlie!’
‘Yeah, see you Esme.’
She walked away and started to discuss simple topics with her daughter, pretending that the inane was amazing. I continued to shop, internalising and rehearsing the lies for Monday.
I arrived home and put the food away. I walked upstairs and undressed. Sitting on the toilet, shitting, I turned my head and looked at my reflection in the mirror. It started to make sense. I worked for no reason. I saved for no reason. I spent for no reason. I washed for no reason. I cleaned for no reason. I lied for no reason. I hated my very being for no reason. I hated everyone else’s being for no reason. Through five years of utter loneliness, hours of testing, retesting, tweaking the formula, dreaming up new theories, the conclusion had to be drawn. A man can only imagine life outside the prison walls for so long before he starts to see the real reality.
I wiped my arse once and walked downstairs to the kitchen. Picking up the knife, I walked back up to the bathroom. I looked back into the mirror and thought about it seriously. I had a job in this world but nothing else. I hadn’t been a bad person and had a general background feeling that God existed. It would be harsh according to my mortal mind that I should be sent to hell, especially if you considered the hardships I’d endured in life. If God didn’t exist, then I would be throwing my fate into the unknown. Would it be worse than this? – Impossible to tell. However, if the universe gave me a way out of this life, it would be reasonable to think that I’d have a way out of the next. The only real consideration was whether I still had something to do in this world. I could indulge on a hooker or buy drugs but this would destabilise my current feeling. A bought pleasure would sooth for a week or two, however, the inevitable was coming and if I went now I could leave my sister with the maximum amount of cash. This would help my cause if I had to argue for heaven.
With that, I held the knife to my wrist. The blue tubes were doing their silent best to keep me upright. I cut through them and looked back at my reflection. Blood poured out at a remarkable rate and the pain mauled my concentration and energy. Adrenaline argued with my mind about urgency and action. I felt special and life was simple. When time had processed this, I slashed again, up my arms, across my neck and legs. I was given a moment to watch the pale and red until the black ended it.
I disappeared for a long while. A lot longer than a sleep but beyond that yard stick I couldn’t say. I was in a chair inside an office. Rope wrapped my elbows, waist and ankles. I was bound to the seat. The office contained another chair opposite mine. The rest of the space was filled with stacks of paper which covered all of the desk and floor. The only visible carpet was between my seat and the one opposite and between the seats and the door. A man walked in. He sighed and shook his head when entering the room.
‘Jesus wept! Look at the state of you Charlie!’
I looked at the body I’d killed, still naked and stabbed, perfectly preserved from its time in the world.
‘I mean, what were you thinking?’
His small, thick hands looked through the file he held, like a doctor trying to learn a man’s medical records in the first seconds of an appointment.
‘It says here that you had a good job, bought an apartment, did some stuff in Oman… you talked an average amount according to this. You weren’t down to die at all.’
He looked with more intent and expressed more disbelief.
‘You shagged fifteen girls, went on three hundred nights out, oh yeah, I suppose it trails a bit in the last few years, but you were definitely capable.’
I looked back at him and felt disorientated.
‘Right, let’s get through this then. Firstly, I’m not God. Look at me. God, no matter what you read, is not going to be a balding, short, hairy, dumpling. Not going to happen. I’m Gary. Gary not God. Got it?’
I nodded.
‘However, I do work for God, as you can see, I have to work hard. I process London deaths. Jobs got a lot more difficult recently, as you can imagine. Anyway, this is what happens. I read your case file, I interview you, we discuss the options and then we put you in the place which is best. I obviously get the ultimate decision, however, you can influence. By influence, I mean influence with honesty and not lies. I can tell if you’re lying. So, here are the options. One is hell, two is heaven and three is reincarnation. You know about all three, so well done for that, makes my job easier. Finally, before you ask, you won’t remember this conversation if you’ve been reincarnated and if you got to heaven or hell, someone else will fill you in. I’m not a tour guide to the afterlife or even someone who particularly gives a shit about where you go. I’m paid to look at the evidence and put you in your rightful place. Right, let’s begin. Why did you kill yourself?’
My eyes widened and flitted a little. My chest rose. I began small shakes of my head.
‘Look, we need to get this done. This is strange, I get it. You only know about one reality, this is a different one, however, just pretend you’re still on earth. This office is of the earth. Try to be at ease. I can tell you now Charles, you’re not going to hell and… if I’m honest, I’ve never sent a man with such a lack of belief to heaven. I can’t be sure, but it’s likely you’ll be reincarnated. So relax… Why did you kill yourself?’
‘Okay, sorry, this is very new. I killed myself because I couldn’t see the point of living.’
‘Thank you for the definition of suicide, now if you could go beyond the generic experience and cater an explanation to your specific reasons.’
‘Well, when I came back from Oman, I spent five years in isolation. I worked and did very little else. I had no friends and no hope of getting any. I tried at first, joining running clubs and five a side teams, however, I was too nervous or sad or pressured to gain friendships. The longer it went on, the less I was able to relax in social situations to the point where I was so out of practice that I couldn’t get past the surface. With women, it was similar. I lost the ability to appear relaxed as I was so desperate. I did a job I wasn’t really bothered about and… Do you have information about my thoughts before I died?’
‘Erm… Yeah… Okay this stuff about it all being pointless. Yeah okay. So you weren’t depressed?’
‘I have no idea, I killed myself, so there must have been something sad in me. But it felt like it was more of a depression in response to the cards life had dealt. I wasn’t depressed for long periods in Oman or before.’
‘Right, yeah, good. Well not good. Did you try hard enough? You had twenty thousand saved and you also had this thought when you died that maybe you could forget your current life and spend money trying to make yourself happy? Hookers and drugs, I don’t like this, but could you have done something else? Did you really give it a go?’
‘At the time it felt that I had. When you live in a fixed reality for so long, which is so bleak, the idea of a good time becomes a memory at first but, after sustained isolation, it eventually becomes a fantasy or myth.’
‘Mmm, well, from my perspective, you had the tools to engage with the world better. You had friends at one point, had a woman, must have known you were capable of this again, at least on a buried or subconscious level. You seemed to avoid or forget that reality is created by yourself. I don’t want to appear obvious, but I feel I need to. The boundaries of what you could have achieved were created by you, the same with the limits of your enjoyment. You didn’t spend that money looking for a happier life because you feared the failure of such a pursuit or refused to imagine something better. You made life more serious and difficult than it needed to be. A man of your talents could have done a lot more. Agreed?’
‘It felt hard at the time, this is the first frank conversation I’ve had with someone for years. You need to take this into account. When someone talks to you about your feelings…’
‘…You become regulated and see things from a new perspective. Yeah, okay, I’ll note this. But generally, are we in agreement that you could have potentially felt these feelings? I do agree that you’ve been a little unfortunate. You didn’t meet the right people, got in a cycle. However, as you can see my perspective, I understand your point. Right, so we’re done. You’ll be reincarnated I think, I think you need another crack at it. Agreed?’
‘Is heaven definitely…’
‘… Not an option. Being realistic, you’re going back.’
‘As a human?’
‘With your temperament I wouldn’t say so. Unless you’re wanting a tribal community? You need something which will get you around others, something solid to focus on, no distractions, no thoughts other than survival. Then, I’m thinking, you learn from that, come back here and we try the human thing again. We need to get your subconscious retrained.’
‘Right.’
‘So, I’ll give you the option of an ant or a Canadian goose.’
‘The tribal human?’
‘No, I know I said it, but they’re getting mobile phones, more free time, you know, could lead to isolation again. I don’t want to be in the same place next time around.’
‘Have I seen you before?’
The man smiled back at me creating an extra chin beneath.
‘Next time we meet, you’ll be sat across from an ant or a goose. Which one is it?’
‘Goose.’
‘Goodbye.’
The man left and the ropes tightened around my body, I was dying. I awoke in uncomfortable darkness with a strong desire to break out of it.
Tomorrow's Chip Paper 