An unspeakable secret

With no effort, September came and went, and all my dread for what I thought would be the inevitable end of my life as I knew it did not materialise. Instead, on the first of September, I got up and went into the city to work. There were a series of codes for doors and a key for a ninth-floor office in a building that I had been in many times, and after finally getting my ID key card to work, I put my bag down on a desk in NW922H, high above the A38. Immediately things made sense in a way that they had not all summer. Within two days, I was running into the office and collecting the necessary things to start to bury myself in work. I arranged the various eccentricities of my office, put posters up and arranged my books and finally a laptop came, then a standing desk, then two monitors, and a table and chairs and then there was nothing I was waiting for anymore.

My last days at Newman deteriorated into pacing around my office after I packed all my books into blue tubs and then suitcases at home. On August 31st, I turned in my key to security and walked across Shenley Park like I had hundreds of times before, towards California Road and the Asda at Barnes Hill and away from years and years of feeling caught in a net of my own ambition, of a series of mistakes and depression that I only now have begun to recognise. In Japan, I had paid for my daughter and me to have our fortunes told. Mia got one of the worst ones and we laughed it off, given how strange it read when applied to a twelve-year old starting year seven in secondary school. I, by contrast, received the second-best fortune, the one that said things had been bad for me, but they were improving, that things would be okay now, a much more appropriate fortune for a man in his early forties, battling a midlife crisis. 

I don't generally believe in fortunes, of course, but I chose to believe in this one. It turns out we can believe in whatever we want. I grew up believing everything was a miracle or a trial or a test or some meaningful challenge to grow closer to a god who was deeply invested in my life. And then I chose to stop believing this, to disbelieve it, because of the consequences of that belief, not for me necessarily, but for all the people subject to meaningless pain. I could explain it when I believed, but only because of its relationship to a constellation of other beliefs. Last week, I went out back to get my bicycle from the shed and heard, by chance, my elderly neighbour calling for help from his house. He had fallen and had been lying on the floor for days, unable to get up and unable to get anyone to hear him. The ambulance service came and then the police to break open the door and pull him out, and after several hushed conversations with neighbours who came out to see what the story was, I went to work as if nothing had happened. 

Something had, of course, happened. In time and space I had been closer to him for days while he suffered than I was to my daughter in the front room of our house. Maybe God had put me outside to hear him that morning, but that thought, if you choose to believe it, has consequences. It can't have meaning, or other things also must have meaning, things you don't want, things you can't bear to have meaning. I called him on the phone to check in and I wanted to say, you will die like this if you don't give us a key, if you don't let us make sure you're okay, but instead I asked when he'd be home and said we'd help him if he needs help. I didn't say I know he will not ask us for help, that he will die alone in his house with no one there. I said we are looking forward to seeing him and then I hung up the phone and forgot about him again after two minutes.

All love comes with conditions — I've finally given up on the American love I've tried to will into existence for so many years of my life. In Japan, as we drove out of the mountains back home, I asked my father-in-law if his parents loved each other, and the moment I asked this question, I realised it was a nonsensical thing to ask. The emperor was a god: actually, literally a god. I grew up singing Lord, I Lift Your Name on High — the Japanese soldiers knew how to cut open their own stomachs with a sword. Love. What is love, what is a miracle, what is a prayer answered. A bomb vaporises a building full of children, a man looks a mother and daughter in the eyes and shoots both of them in the head. My neighbour will die alone on his bathroom floor and here I am thinking about love. I wake up and say goodbye to the children through their doors, worried they will remember their father as lost in his own sadness, that they will grow up to believe what he believes even though he knows his love for them is paradoxically without condition, that he feels the thing in which he can't believe. It's best to not think about it too much, to not try to start another conversation about it. There's so little time anyway.