I live alone. Of course, technically, I live with my wife, but that doesn’t really count. I mean, whilst it is true we sometimes exchange words, they’re so banal, so empty of meaning we might just as well not bother exchanging them. So, take it from me, to all intents and purposes I live alone.
Which, as it happens, is perfect for a guy like me. And what sort of a guy is that? I hear you thinking. Well, let’s put it this way: my work precludes me from having any real relationships. Pseudo relationships are fine, even pretend real relationships are just about acceptable under certain circumstances (hence the wife), but actual real relationships would impede my work.
And nothing, absolutely nothing, is more important to me than my work, which I am married to in a far more meaningful sense than my wife1.
The kind of work I do involves a lot of speculative thinking. Sometimes I can go months purely in speculation mode, during which I tramp or maybe trudge across the fields that surround my abode in all directions, fields that have been neatly parcelled into arable plots by the local farmer, who is rumoured to be a homosexual, not that that makes one iota of difference to me, although to the reactionary types who live in these parts it matters a great deal, hence why they are forever instigating legal proceedings to try and have the farmer’s land confiscated or expropriated or whatever the correct terminology is.
During the winter season the fields get so waterlogged I am forced to traverse them in the airboat, assuming the wife isn’t using it (which happens, infrequently it has to be said, but it does happen). If the fields are waterlogged and the airboat is unavailable, I’ll pace around the house instead as I speculate. I prefer not to do this but, as is well known, one has to keep moving if one’s speculations are to amount to anything of importance. Something that can never be guaranteed of course. Even with my constant to-ing and fro-ing from here to there and back again, the chances of my speculations yielding anything of importance are slender to none. Hence why I spend so much time in speculation mode, which as I say can go on for months. And when I say months, I mean six, seven, sometimes up to eight months. Day in, day out. Nothing but speculating. That’s just the way it is with the type of work I do, which by the way is well remunerated. Not to brag or anything, it’s just a fact. Remuneration, as it happens, isn’t even a big deal to me. I mean, I live alone, I have no real relationships, I spend all my time working: these are hardly the makings of a profligate spender. Not that I am parsimonious. Far from it. My wife gets as much money as she needs. And she needs a lot of it, trust me, being, as she is, completely brainwashed by the capitalist system into believing that consumption is the ultimate good, or the ultimate purpose of human existence (if that’s a different thing). Not that I care one way or the other. Might as well believe that rather than some other spurious socially constructed shibboleth is about the gist of the way I see it. And if that makes me a nihilist then so be it. There are worse things to be in my book (which is well thumbed and has many chapters).
All of the above is by way of preamble, a characterological prologue if you will to the actual story, which begins in a polished-cement bar in a salubrious part of town where the glass-box shops are so minimalist they appear to sell nothing at all. I am sitting at a small table in an almond-shaped alcove. My heart is pounding, my stomach clenched, my breathing shallow. I am not used to feeling anxious, which is probably making me feel even more anxious than I would otherwise feel if I were used to feeling anxious. Or so I find myself thinking as I swig my pint, which is one of those pints that just seems to go on and on, ad infinitum.
My uncharacteristic anxiety has been precipitated by an unusual occurrence, namely that the other day, out of the blue, to use the unfairly maligned idiom, an erstwhile colleague sent me a coded message on the encrypted app that people in our line of work use to communicate (although we do, it is true, sometimes use homing pigeons). The message was, on the face of it, anodyne, nothing to be alarmed about, in and of itself. And it is for that very reason, of course, the message was something to be alarmed about. This former colleague, let’s call him Mr P, does not go in for hyperbole. Which is what I always liked most and trusted least about him. Hence when he sends an anodyne message it is only prudent to assume the message is in reality anything but anodyne. So, I have no choice other than to meet with Mr P. Although the message suggested nothing about the need to meet, it was clear to me nonetheless as soon as I received the message that I would have no choice but to do so, even though the message implied, fairly strongly, that the last thing Mr P would want to do is meet me, all the same I realised straight away that this was precisely what he was angling for, hence why I immediately ascertained that I had no choice in the matter whatsoever, that I needed to meet Mr P as soon as possible, something I have arranged to do in this very bar, which is in a part of town I tend to avoid if I can help it, given that it is completely overrun with people who engage in pursuits I find lamentable or at the very least disagreeable. But it is precisely for this reason that it is the perfect part of town for my rendezvous, since Mr P almost certainly would have been expecting me to arrange to meet in another part of town, pretty much any other part of it, and so by arranging to meet him here I have secured for myself an advantage, a small one it has to be said, although big enough to more than offset my discomfort at having to be in this bar in this part of town. In other words, my anxiety, as unpalatable and unfamiliar as it might be, is a price worth paying or I suppose I should say that I hope it is a price worth paying because, of course, with a man like Mr P there is no guaranteeing that the advantage one thinks one has over him is an advantage at all, that it won’t in fact turn out to be a mirage of an advantage.
When Mr P turns up, I realise immediately – with the kind of relief I would describe, if someone were to ask me, as not unlike the feeling you get immediately after a significant bowel movement – that I’ve worked myself up quite unnecessarily, that this is emphatically not someone I need to worry about after all. I thought he had been someone to worry about, had been convinced of it ever since receiving the message, but here he is looking anything but someone I need to worry about.
He looks far more handsome than I remember him being, handsome in the effeminate sense of handsome. No doubt, I think, he’s had some work done2. Hey, he says. Sup, I say. Another? he says, pointing at my glass, which is inexplicably still half full. Yeah, why not, I say. I mean, it’s not as if Mr P poses a risk anymore, so why not have a few jars with him, catch up, maybe even exchange a few nostalgic stories (if we have any, which I doubt). Of course, the inner workaholic does not like that line of thinking one bit, immediately goes into a tailspin about it not being a good idea to get intoxicated given all the tasks left to cross off my to-do list, but I manage to appease the inner workaholic by agreeing to work later tonight, to make up the time so to speak.
Mr P fills me in on the life he has been leading since we last spoke, which was such a long time ago I don’t even remember the occasion. It’s a curious tale full of absurd digressions that somehow echo and flatly contradict each other. When he’s finished telling it, which takes longer than necessary I feel, he sucks noisily on the straw protruding from his gaudy oversized cocktail. When he’s done slurping, which takes a while, he turns to me and says, What about you? Me? I say. Yes, he says, what have you been doing all these years? That, I say, is a very good question. Because it is. I think for a moment, should I tell him the truth (nothing but working) or confabulate a story, on the fly as it were, that makes it seem as if my life is interesting, or failing that at least not dull? I decide on the latter for reasons that are not at all clear to me. When I’m done spinning my yarn, Mr P bursts out laughing. What, I say, what’s so funny? You always were full of shit, he says. Full of shit? I think. Who does this jerk think he is talking to? Now listen here Mr P, I say, that is a bit much coming from a guy like you. A guy like me? he says, suddenly serious, all semblance of mirth having evaporated from his demeanour.
And that is when, precisely when, I realise I was wrong: Mr P is as dangerous as I had feared, likely more so by orders of magnitude. I don’t let on, of course. Instead, I mollify him, apply a soothing balm to his umbrage by way of an apology that sounds as sincere as it isn’t (a vital skill for someone in my field). And before too long, I have Mr P back on an even keel and cordiality, if not conviviality, returns to our conversation, which carries on along small-talk lines until I adjudge that it is time to broach the subject of the message, the coded one that Mr P sent on the app, the encrypted one.
To my surprise, Mr P immediately confesses that the anodyne surface of the message was a ruse, that the message is in fact anything but. I don’t let on that he is telling me something I already know because he knows that I know, that I wouldn’t have asked for a meeting otherwise and, furthermore, he knew I would know before I knew. Without prompting, Mr P adumbrates what the actual message means or rather what it alludes to. Simulations, he begins by saying, it’s all about simulations. Which I think is a strange thing to say, but then he pivots from the abstract to the concrete. He tells me he was on a job, a job that he’d initially thought would be a straightforward surveillance operation. But pretty soon, I realised it wasn’t, he says. By then, I was in too deep to extricate myself however. The guy I was surveilling had all the hallmarks of a milquetoast mid-ranking politician, which was of course the perfect cover for his matrix of financial schemes, schemes that were as ingenious as they were opaque, as baffling as they were beguiling. My job was to uncover these schemes, of course, and either extort the politician – whose name was Pepe by the way, not sure I mentioned that – or turn him over to the authorities in exchange for a bounty. You know the drill, he says. I nod that I do indeed know the drill, all too well. Anyway, after three months of keeping tabs on Pepe, he continues, I had a pretty good insight into his daily habits (regimented), his sexual inclinations (furtively bisexual), his psyche (fractured into internecine factions), his social circle (small, bordering on non-existent, unless you included acquaintances, of which he had many). As for the financial side of things, I had about as good a grasp as I was going to get. Enough of a grasp anyway, I felt, to make my move. Which is what I did. One night, after I’d seen he’d settled into the sofa to watch his favourite soap, a Russian one which he watched dubbed and subtitled simultaneously, I entered his abode by smashing my way through the French doors using a glass hammer and confronted him with what I knew. Strangely enough he seemed completely unperturbed. He heard me out and then there was a silence between us. It wasn’t an awkward one exactly, but it did go on for a while, so long in fact that I eventually sat myself down on the wingchair opposite the sofa to take the strain off my legs. Finally, Pepe spoke, at length and with an eloquence, a kind of analytical lyricism, I had never encountered before. By the time he was finished, I was in no doubt at all. It was all just a simulation. I was a simulation, Pepe was a simulation, the Russian soap, the glass hammer, my taciturn parents, my wayward children, my lascivious wife, all of it was and always had been a simulation.
At that point in proceedings, Mr P tells me, verbatim as he puts it, precisely what Pepe had told him. By the time he is finished, I too could be in no doubt whatsoever that Mr P is right. Everything is indeed simulated. A fork presents itself immediately. I can either succumb, to simulation fever as it were, and end up barely sane à la Mr P, or I can strike out on another road, a road that might, just might, lead to the bright, white light of an unsimulated reality. I chew it over. Maybe it is better just to accept things as they are. Maybe my simulated self is better off living a simulated life with a simulated marriage, job and all the rest of it. But then I realise that this is palpable nonsense, that as crazy as it might seem, a simulated person might just be able to rid themselves of the shackles of simulation. It’s worth a try. Even if that try is merely a simulation of trying, I think, it is still worth it.
After lacing Mr P’s cocktail with arsenic, I make my excuses and leave the bar. I return home to find my wife hanging upside down from the trapeze in the vaulted hallway. I ask her how she is doing and she says fine. I can tell she isn’t really and I say as much. She insists she is and I insist she isn’t. A stalemate. As usual. I make my excuses and disappear off to my office in the turret, where I work feverishly hard whilst continuing to knock back the old alcohol, which I find, and always have found, to be more than a little moreish.
I work and drink until I pass out at my desk. When I come round, I start up again, actually, first I go to the toilet and then to the cellar to fetch another bottle of gin, then I start up again. Once I have swatted away the items on my to-do list like so many flies, I log on to the encrypted app and send a message to a contact of mine who lives in the desert, a contact who I think might be able to shed some light on the little matter that Mr P has brought to my attention.
I wait a week for a response from my contact, but none is forthcoming. During this time, I drink incessantly and work like an absolute dog. I barely eat a thing and don’t even break for a shower (although I do sponge-wash my scrotum, arse crack and armpits a few times). I know better than to send a chaser message to my contact on the encrypted app. His non-response is in fact his way of saying: ‘send a pigeon’. Which I do, the best I have (the only one I have actually).
It will take a while for my trusty homing pigeon to get to the desert, so I grab a bottle and go for a walk in the fields. As I am making my way through a hawthorn hedgerow, I come across the local farmer and a man from the village (who I recognise but don’t know the name of). As soon as they see me, they both stop what they are doing. The farmer looks perturbed, the man from the village anxious, so anxious it makes me feel anxious. I pretend not to have noticed them and keep on walking. Of course, they know I’ve seen them, that can’t be helped, but hopefully they will realise that by pretending not to have seen them I am saying that it’s no concern of mine what they do in hawthorn hedgerows, which it isn’t, let’s face it. Plenty of people in these parts would see it differently, not least the wife of the man from the village (who I also can’t remember the name of), but I am not like the other people in these parts who are all, almost without exception, extremely conservative and stuck-up, or maybe stuck in their ways is a better way of putting it, ways that do not include, and never have included, homosexuality, which they almost certainly perceive as a scourge or a threat to common decency or an affront to their Christian mores and so forth.
I carry on walking until I find myself back at the house somehow. I drain the bottle and toss it into the laurel hedge where I hear it clink against all the other bottles I’ve tossed in there over the years. I go round the back and let myself into the kitchen. My wife is sitting at the island in front of her laptop, staring intently at the screen, even though it is blank. I ask her how she’s doing and she says fine. I say are you sure and she nods that she is quite sure, thank you very much. Are you okay? is the question, she says then. Yeah, I say, why wouldn’t I be? No reason, she says. I don’t believe her, of course, but I know better than to probe her on the matter, so I leave it at that and repair to my study.
I write a memo for the files, which is stuffed full of my trademark footnotes. After that, I have AI scan my unread emails and rank them in order of interest, having previously defined, of course, in a copiously detailed prompt what ‘interest’ means in this context. I read the least interesting emails first and work my way up a list that is long enough to keep me occupied for many hours. Halfway through this endeavour, I develop a headache, which as usual congregates behind my eyeballs. An incipient hangover, I think. I nip it in the bud by doing shots of tequila, which I round off with a large measure of Cointreau. After that, the headache recedes to a distant horizon and I resume working my way through my emails until I get to the most interesting one, which is from a subordinate of mine3. After reading the email, twice, I reply to it. I tell my subordinate that they should proceed as suggested, that they are not to worry about the legal ramifications of said action, that I have their arse covered, as it were. As for the moral component, I add, which the third paragraph of your email explicitly ruminates upon, let me reassure you: there is no such component! Your duty, sacrosanct duty, is to adhere to the dictates of the Procedures and Policies Manual at all times. I insert a link to the relevant numbered paragraph at this point to show my subordinate exactly what the PPM specifies, behaviourally speaking, for just this type of situation. Then I sign off the email, as is my wont, with a suitably austere emoji.
Job done, I think. Immediately, I am in a tailspin. Work, I think, I need some more work. I have a few more tequilas to steady myself and then I realise there is in fact loads of work left for me to do, that I have barely scratched the surface of my so-called in-tray. Thank God for that, I either think to myself or say out loud. To celebrate, I permit myself an hour off. I go downstairs and ask my wife if she’d care to accompany me to the lobster-roll joint. She is floating in a starfish shape in the tank in the dining room, a room which my wife has long since commandeered for her own purposes and in which zero dining ever takes place. She removes the cucumber slices from her eyes and looks at me, which is, I realise, something she never does or hasn’t done for so long that it feels like she never does. Her eyes are so scintillant blue it almost hurts to look into them, but at the same time I am powerless not to. You want me to go to the lobster-roll joint with you? Yep, I say, without the slightest hesitation, which I can tell disarms her. Hm, she says, I guess I could eat. I mean, can you give me five minutes to get ready? I refrain from looking at my watch as I say: sure, take ten if you need.
At the lobster-roll joint, which is next to the Thai place opposite the village cricket green, my wife has clam chowder served in a bowl fashioned from a cob loaf. I have lobster rolls. Which I’ve been hankering after for a long time, I tell my wife. You have? she says. Yeah, sure, why not, I say, wiping the mayonnaise from the corners of my mouth with the back of a sleeve (a horrible habit of mine that I just can’t seem to kick). Just you never mentioned it before, she says. You never asked, I say. I never asked, she says, whether you like lobster rolls? Wouldn’t that be a pretty weird thing to ask? I grant her that it would. I tell her that it should probably just have become obvious at some point that I liked them. It would have, she says, if we had a normal marriage. I ask my wife what a normal marriage looks like and she shrugs. I say I’m sorry. I say it’s on me that she doesn’t know I like lobster rolls. What else do you like? she says. What else? I say. What else? she confirms. Other than working you mean? I say. She nods. And drinking? I say. Uh-huh, she says. Hm, now let me see.
Turns out there isn’t anything else I like, which is a pretty sad state of affairs, as my wife quite rightly points out. She is about to launch into a dissection of our marriage and my character, list their many failings with unflinching accuracy no doubt, when I call time on the meal. I’m sorry, I say, I have to get back to the ranch. My wife looks like she is about to burst into tears and I feel a pang of something, tenderness I think. It’s been such a long time since I’ve felt tenderness that I am taken aback. What other emotions vis-à-vis my wife, I wonder, are lurking inside me? It’s too much to process right now, but I make a note, a mental one, to circle back to this.
When we get home, my wife and I peel away from each other like two sides of a banana skin. She gets back in the tank. I go up to my office, which smells of stale sweat and the tang of whisky. I grab a beer from the mini fridge and then I drink it by the window, which I open as wide as it will go to allow as much fresh air in as possible.
A week goes by as if it were a single page in a flick book.
I am still standing by the window, drinking a beer, ruminating on some arcane procedural matter, when I suddenly see my homing pigeon in the distance, swooping across the brown-and-green dales. A few moments later my pigeon is perched on the windowsill. I untie the message affixed to one of its feet and give the pigeon a little congratulatory pat on its head. It pecks at me ferociously, hisses, flares its wings. I’d forgotten it was a violent little shit. Taking care to pinch its beak shut, I take him (or it could be her) to the aviary, which is in the other turret. I fill up the feeder with seeds and throw in a few desiccated worms as a special treat. I return to my turret and read the message, which states:
Interesting! Get your corpulent hairy arse down here. Pronto!
I immediately take my trousers off and go stand in front of the full-length mirror with my back to it and my head turned over a shoulder. I scrutinise my arse for at least five minutes. Finally, I conclude it is not corpulent, in fact the bum cheeks are quite pert for a man of my age. Yes, it is hairy, I’ll give my contact that, but a man’s arse is supposed to be hairy, I think.
I have a shower, a shave and a shit. Then I dab myself with eucalyptus oil, coif my hair into a 1950s quiff and gargle with vodka. I step into a pink lounge suit and then I pack my bag with things I think I may need in the desert. I tell my wife I am going on a work trip. She is wearing her LED face mask again. Not for the first time, it occurs to me that she bears an uncanny resemblance to Hannibal Lecter. She nods at me, says nothing, maybe because it’s impossible for her to speak with the mask on. I tell her that I’ll be back in a few days. Again, a nod, a barely discernible one, more like a tiny tic than a nod. I linger for a moment in the doorway, as if I am about to say something, but in the event I don’t do that. Instead, I leave the house, making sure not to slam the front door.
I drive the matte-black CLA to a truckers’ layby and park up. I send a coded message on the encrypted app and go buy myself a bacon bap from the ramshackle bacon-bap van. The bacon is barely cooked and the bap is staler than my breath. I resist the urge to spit the contents of my mouth onto the kerb and swallow them instead (with difficulty). A few minutes later an absurdly long articulated lorry pulls into the layby. The driver gets out of the cab and promptly scurries off into the rhododendron bushes, presumably to do a wee (or it could be a poo, I guess). When he emerges from the bushes, he looks visibly relieved. He opens the lorry’s tailgate, pulls the ramp down and moments later a metallic-black EQA reverses out of the rear end of the lorry. The EQA comes to a stop and the driver, an incredibly tall man with a face that seems to droop with gravity, gets out. He walks over to where the CLA is parked, taking far fewer strides than seems feasible to get pretty much from one end of the layby to the other. He gets into the CLA and drives it around to the lorry and then up the ramp he goes. The driver closes the tailgate, briefly looks at me (which he is not supposed to do) and then gets back into the cab. Moments later the lorry pulls out of the layby, almost hitting a car that refuses to slow down or speed up or change lanes.
I get into the EQA and program my next destination into the satnav. The car does most of the driving from there as I doze fitfully. By the time we arrive at the hangar, it’s dark. The nightwatchman emerges from his sentry hut, scans my face with his phone. After a slight pause the barrier rises. The nightwatchman indicates with an eyebrow gesture for me to go on through, which I lose no time in doing.
I wend my way around the vast empty car park, until I get to my favourite spot and then I have the car, sorry EQA, park for me, which seems to require a ridiculous number of unnecessary micro adjustments. I send an encoded message on the encrypted app. Moments later, the hangar doors inch apart from each other with a clanging-of-metal sound. A chink of fierce white light appears, widens, blinds. I put on my Ray-Bans, step out of the EQA and make my way across the car park to the hangar, at the entrance to which I am greeted by my pilot. He is dressed in an aviator’s jumpsuit (burgundy) and has trademark slicked-back pilot hair (salt and pepper). He asks me which aircraft I’d like to use and after briefly deliberating, I decide that the F-15EX would be most suited to my requirements. The pilot says very well, follow me.
It’s my first, and almost certainly last, time flying in an F-15EX. As soon as I have disembarked, I go lie down on the asphalt strip, which has a kind of Velcro quality. A few moments later, the pilot springs out of the cockpit, lands like a cat, rakes a comb through his hair. Are you all right? he shouts. Never better, I shout back. He hangs around for a while as I am lying there staring up into the fathomless depths of the desert sky, until eventually I can tell he is getting restless just stood there like that. You can leave me here, I shout, I’ll be fine. He shout-asks me if I am sure and I shout the affirmative. A few minutes later the F-15EX takes off with a deafening roar and shoots like a stone out of a giant catapult into the aubergine haze.
Once I have lain there long enough, I pick myself up, dust myself down and stride off into the cactus-infested wilderness. After a day or so of hard trudging, I reach the fortified compound my contact calls home.
My contact is almost exactly as I remember him being. Okay, so maybe he is a little thinner and come to think of it, his trademark caustic wit is a little less corrosive (which is no bad thing in all honesty), but other than that he is ostensibly the same guy. We hang out for a few days, drink a lot of mezcal, shoot the breeze as it were. Then, on the third day, we get down to the matter in hand. After breakfast, that is, which takes the form of a lizard-egg omelette. As we’re sipping our postprandial coffees on the glass veranda overlooking the luxuriant oasis, my contact tells me he has given the matter a lot of thought. In fact, he says, I’ve thought about little else since your pigeon made contact. And? I say. Well, he says, I might just have a solution. It won’t be easy, he adds, in fact it will very likely be the hardest thing you’ve ever had to do. And even if it works, it may not become apparent that it has for quite some time, a period during which you will have ample opportunity to question whether it was worth the effort. Okay, I say, I’m listening. My contact looks at me for a moment, as if weighing up various stochastic possibilities, before saying: very well, follow me.
I set my coffee down on the trestle table and scurry after my contact, who for a large man is surprisingly nimble. We skirt around the oasis, which is bigger than it seemed from the glass veranda and browner somehow, and then strike out into the interminable desert.
We walk for many hours, or what seems like many hours, through a landscape that is a fractal mindfuck of cactuses and canyons, until it isn’t. Until we are in the environs of a town or a small city. The streets have an oppressive quality, as if the walls have eyes. Men in absurdly wide sombreros keep appearing from nooks and crannies and shimmying in little circles, as if they are so-called non-player characters in a video game, a crappy one with low-res, glitchy graphics.
At some point, my contact stops walking. He does this so suddenly that I clatter straight into him. Immediately, I feel blood leaking from my right nostril. What the fuck, man? I say. My contact is nonplussed. He gestures at a corrugated iron shack that looks identical to all the other shacks lining the street. There is a little squat guy sitting on a plastic stool in front of the shack. Naturally, he is wearing a sombrero. A cigarette bobs, dinghy-like, on his wavy lips. She in? says my contact. Yeah, she in, says the little squat guy. Good, says my contact.
The squat guy extorts his fee and nods at us to enter the shack, which we do. It’s as saturnine as I might have expected, smells of sweat, sweat laced with urine and some other bad odour, the noun for which evades me. My contact tells me to wait in the antechamber (which seems like the wrong choice of word to me, but what do I know?) and then disappears through a bead curtain. I sit on the concrete floor (there is a brocaded armchair, but a mangy dog is curled on it and by the looks of its one open eye, it likely wouldn’t be receptive to being displaced). I hear my contact talking in a low, rumbly voice. I can’t make out what he’s saying, not that it matters. When he stops talking, a woman laughs a tinkly little laugh that makes me think of the word ‘bluebells’ for some reason. After that, nothing. Silence in other words. Until, that is, I hear the unmistakable sounds of vigorous lovemaking. It goes on for a while, far too long quite frankly. When my contact finally emerges, he looks flushed, his breathing is laboured. You can go through now, he says. Go through? I say. Yes, he says. To do what exactly? I say. You’ll see, he says cryptically. I don’t like it. I don’t like it one bit. But what choice do I have really? I tell my contact that there had better be no funny business and he assures me there won’t be. Besides, he says, what choice do you have really?
So, I enter the boudoir, if that is what it is, and am surprised to find that the woman with the tinkly laugh is a bent-over old hag, replete with a sombrero that looks custom made for a witch. She smiles a toothless smile, motions for me to sit myself down on the concrete floor in front of her. I dither for a moment. Something is off here, I think, something is wrong. But then I think: nothing is off here, nothing is wrong. So, I do as prompted and then the old woman pulls a toad, of all things, out of her sombrero as if it were a rabbit. Except it’s a toad, a grotesque warty one with eyes that flick open-shut-open-shut. With a deftness that belies her advanced years, the woman places the toad on a low table, holds it firm with one gnarly hand, whilst with the thumb and tobacco-stained forefinger of the other she massages a large wart, out of which oozes a semen-like goo. Once she has adjudged enough goo has been milked, she scrapes it off the toad using a small penknife and then she returns the toad to her sombrero, which she plonks back on her head. She transfers the goo from the penknife to the bowl of a long, thin smoking pipe, of the kind you expect opium to be smoked from. And, yes, at this point, it becomes clear to me that I am about to smoke whatever the hell has been extruded from that toad’s wart. I am not thrilled about the prospect, but I am resigned to it.
And that is how, I suppose, my consciousness wound up being merged with the body of my homing pigeon. Every day my wife comes to the turret to feed me. Sometimes she stays for a while and talks to me about her life, her feelings really. Which are messy. Evidently, she is mourning my loss, but at the same time she hates herself for giving a shit. Why, she says frequently, did I fall for an alcoholic workaholic? I try my best to comfort her by trilling and bobbing my head at appropriate moments when she ventures to speak to me and to my delight, she appears to take comfort from these antics. She feeds me well, or she thinks she does, by which I mean I have more dried worms than I know what to do with. They taste utterly foul of course, but I love my wife (I have very belatedly realised) and I therefore stoically gobble them up for her benefit.
As for the simulation ending, well that, it turns out, had been a completely bogus proposition all along. I am more simulated than ever now. Or perhaps it is more correct to say I have never been more simulated. The point being I am a simulated man in the simulated body of a homing pigeon simulating consciousness. My contact likely knew all along that the simulated nature of reality was an unalterable property of its existence and was playing some sort of sick game, perhaps to avenge himself for a perceived slight. I mean, it’s very likely I did things in the past that caused offence, even harm, to him. And so I don’t blame him one iota for seizing his opportunity. I would have done the same in all likelihood were I to have been him and him me. He did me a favour in fact. Because now I am unable to drink with thanatotic abandon or work like a dog and all I have left is my wife, who feeds me well and sometimes deigns to speak to me about her troubles, her fears, her jangled emotions. Which I appreciate more than she will (literally) ever know.