Short Story: Liza Tries to Make Sense of it All
Liza was born Lisa but started spelling her name with a ‘z’ during her early teens. Which was a long time ago, meaning the reasoning behind the change appears murky in her memory now. Something about feeling uncomfortable in her own skin, ‘there’s too many bad memories attached to that name,’ needing to assert some individuality - but she was too much of a do-goody to change it entirely. Hence she allowed herself one letter of rebellion. She is now more than double the age than when she changed her name. She romanticised her 27th year up until the day she turned 27. There was a part of her that always thought she was a rock star, at least at heart if not in reality. And until she hit 27 the part of her brain still youthfully ignorant of reality kept telling her she might wake up one day and write a hit single, followed by an acclaimed album, followed by a wild celebrity-filled bender ending in a heroin overdose. But here she was 28. In the few days following her birthday she Googled variations of ‘I’m 28 and don’t have my life together’ and ‘nearly 30 and feel directionless’. In one Reddit forum she found a comment that said ‘Hitting 28 is officially when you have no more excuses - you’re undeniably an adult now so you’ve only got yourself to blame.’ But why 28? she thought. Why not 21 or 25 or 30 or 18? Who got to decide what age signified adulthood or what an adult even was? But despite these objections, her mind kept returning to that comment, arguing with it, letting it judge her. Her resounding thought was: if I’d made something of my life, I wouldn’t have to keep arguing to myself that that comment is wrong.
Liza lives in a flat in East London. She’s not from there originally - she’s a Northern girl, from ‘a bit of all over the place really.’ She’d sometimes thought about a move to London as a child, picturing it as a luxurious ascent into the London art scene. But her real life move was nothing like this: it was the outcome of those chance string of events which - as much as we may deny it - most people love to let decide their lives for them. Liza’s boyfriend Aaron’s two friends, both total unknowns to Liza prior to the move, were buying a flat in London as they transitioned jobs and the cheapest place they could find was a four person flat. Being averse to strangers and wealthy enough to offer to pay the whole of the first month’s rent, they’d asked Aaron and Liza who quickly agreed.
The flatmates, boyfriend and girlfriend, were called Louise and Peter, two very normal names for two very normal people, Liza felt. Her and Aaron moved in the day after they did. An air of pleasantness and forced laughter hung over their meeting, as is common for first-impressions, but this, to Liza’s dismay, never subsided. Instead, they remained locked perpetually in a void of chatting about what they’d be doing that afternoon and giving out cursory details about their hometowns. Liza noticed this between them and Aaron too, despite a long friendship between the three of them, and this made her worry it was her own presence that created tension in the house. The only time this tension subsided was when there was alcohol in their systems. And as Liza and Aaron aren’t big drinkers and Peter was a sleepy, lounging drunk, the affected system tended to be Louise’s. She was an angry drunk: once past a certain threshold, even a slight moment of eye contact was enough for her to initiate an attack on someone, anyone, including her better half - not physical attacks but verbal. The morning after she first unleashed scorn on Liza - ‘Your side of the house is a fucking tip and please don’t tell me you expect me and Peter to clean it up because it’s not our fucking job’ - she’d given a woodenly-spoken apology through the haze of a hangover, in which Liza thought she sounded like she was reading from a script. Possibly one she’d acted out many times before.
Liza, desperate for a forward-momentum-creating goal she could attach herself to, started looking for other places nearby they could live and plot out their move only weeks after moving in. Aaron’s reaction when she ran through her (their) plans was - as his reaction to most things began to be around this time - one of consistent indifference. The four person flatshare lasted four months then Liza and Aaron moved out, the move orchestrated entirely by Liza. Four months was enough time, Liza reckoned, that it wasn’t rude to move out after having been offered to live there. She felt Aaron disagreed with this but he said nothing. Their new flat was smaller, more compact, which made it feel cosier, more their own. But Liza, to her surprise, sometimes missed Peter and Louise despite having hated living with them, or more accurately she missed living with Peter and Louise. She had come to theorise that living with a person, even when they are absent, can be a presence in itself: living with those two had given Liza and Aaron a structure they now lacked. Nights had been broken up by the brief appearance of their flatmates, often on their way out and later as they stumbled in, instances where they always had some gossip to share and where they could plan things they’d all do together. It was a little like living with one’s parents, with part of their schedules and happenings influenced by others. But now they were alone in a flat - a miniature world - entirely of their own construction.
They found local jobs. Her as a typist for a nearby solicitors; him as a Sandwich Artist at Subway during the week and as a barman at a heavy metal-themed nightclub called Mono on Fridays and Saturdays. Their breezy compliance to doing the same jobs that many high school and university students apply for - at an age when a lot of people get schizy about doing such jobs, wanting a ‘career’ not a job - was because they aimed for jobs that paid the rent and for the bare essentials, where the hours weren’t too torturous, so that both would have lots of free time to attend to their artistic pursuits. And where better to be an artist than London!
She was a painter and he a writer. Both unpublished other than on free-to-publish sites on the internet. Her work adorned the walls of the flat: all large prints, filled with contrasting fluorescent colours, most of them faces of supernatural-looking beings and alien landscapes. Aaron had once described her art as, ‘What Andy Warhol might have drawn had he cared more about the interior than the exterior, and the fantastical rather than the famous, and if he had had John Lennon’s love of LSD.’ He had said it casually, a throwaway description said to an acquaintance at a party who never appeared in their lives enough to become a friend - but Liza memorised the line and typed it into the Notes on her phone when Aaron went to the toilet. She still thinks about that line now: because it was an accurate description of her work, and a very thoughtful, thus romantic, thing for Aaron to say, but also because the words, nice as they were, created a cage, making her feel each new painting she produces is not a wholly new creation but simply another product of a predictable, repetitive pattern. Psychedelics were often mentioned when people saw her work, because of the colours she imagined, yet she’d never taken one. This worried her because she sent her mum copies and pdf scans (done at the library) of every painting she finished, and her mum was staunchly against drug use - even a bit uppity about alcohol - and it would be a shame, though it was possible, for her mum to think her youngest daughter’s dream of being an artist, a vocally-broadcast dream since teenagerhood, was only maintained because of a drug habit that in reality she’d never had.
The colours are more of a defense against boredom. Liza hates minimalism: she’d rather a work be too much than too little. In boredom-induced self-exploratory pseudo-psychoanalytic sessions with herself, which she enacts when she’s alone, she often looks through her paintings, the stacks of them under her bed, looking for some deeper meaning, some subconscious motif that her hands painted without her mind being aware of it. But she’s not found anything so far. Which worries her: does it mean her art is impersonal? That it is more a way to fill the time, to provide some form of content (and money one day hopefully), a mere hedonistic pursuit she has persuaded herself into thinking is deep and passionate? The ‘explanation’ she gives, at least the one she has latched onto recently, of why she draws like that, is that growing up in drab, cold, constantly-raining British suburbia, a place of agonising conformity and ordinariness, ignited in her the desire to add colour and vibrance to the world, with the act of painting itself a tool of escapism. It is an attempt to find something unique in a landscape where everything looks identical. Or maybe that’s just me being narcissistic she thinks. The excess of thinking she puts into defining her art has contributed to her painting less than she would like. She gets a fair bit done though.
Aaron’s lethargy, a byproduct of the previous year, seems to grow in dimensions every day, and Liza still can’t tell where it’s come from. She often works longer shifts than him and when she gets home she puts more time into painting than he does writing. When they’d first started dating the idea they were both ‘artistic types,’ while a violation of the ‘opposites attract’ rule, had seemed, indeed was, a good thing: they were both night owls who had lie ins then stayed up til the early hours of the morning, often working on their separate things naked after they’d had sex, with music playing in the background; their art was not a competition between them but something to spur the other on, like The Beatles with The Stones. But now he spent most of his time on the couch in the same slumped position. He’d happily follow any plans Liza made for the pare of them - a restaurant date, the cinema, a walk at evening time. But he never initiated these things himself. It was like he was morphing into a blank globule carried forward by nothing but the passing of time; time, in this analogy, being like a conveyor belt running through a factory with machines that pushed and pulled the globule into different shapes. And Aaron consented to all this shaping, allowing his person to be sculpted by everything else so that he himself didn’t have to exert any energy on sculpting.
Since moving to East London seven months ago Aaron has completed two short stories. There was a time when he finished one a week. They are both long stories and both stand as testament to how much potential he has as a writer but also how much of a nihilistic joke he now takes everything to be. His prose has a wondrous quality to it, describing things in broad, almost childlike terms, that sometimes break into poetic description. Liza imagines his style is similar to that of the stories George Saunders must have wrote before he was published and hadn’t quite mastered his style. The first story Aaron had written, titled The Wisher’s Wager, is about a young boy who is bullied at school. The boy’s mother is always going on dates with different men, while the boy is ignored and picked on by girls, and the strain between the two creates a lot of shame and jealousy in the boy. One day the boy is visited by a genie who says that while he usually reserves his wishes for those in dire situations, only once every few hundred years, the boy’s sadness has stirred something in him, enough to grant him one wish, anything he wants. The boy, still young and over-excitable, quickly answers: ‘I wish that every girl who sees me falls madly in love with me.’ The genie grins and says, ‘Very well. And so it will be’ and vanishes in a puff of smoke. The next few days of the boy’s life are very good - the best he has ever had - as all the girls in school not only take notice of him but shower him with compliments and drag him aside on the schoolyard to kiss him and ask him to be their boyfriend. But he is getting far too much attention to commit to one girl. Some of the girls start fighting over him. A few of these fights come to blows. The boy loves it. He becomes the most popular kid in school, the other boys treating him with respect now he’s getting attention from the girls. His mother and grandmother act extra nice to him too, letting him stay up as late as he wants and giving him more presents than he knows what to do with. But then, stemming from the wording of his wish, things start to go wrong. The girls at school start to go overboard, each one bringing him flowers and chocolates and videogames every morning. One even strips off naked in the schoolyard when he isn’t paying her enough attention. The female teachers start treating him overly favourably too, to the point that one gets arrested. Random women start to come up to him in the street, gushing out confessions of love so fast he can barely understand what they’re saying. He begins to run home, avoiding all eye contact with women, fearing they will begin a fervent chase after him if they realise who he is. His mother’s behaviour becomes strange too. She follows him round the house yelling words of praise at him for doing even the slightest things and she begins to sleep in bed with him, the two of them cramped into a thin single. She no longer invites lots of guys round the house. Eventually she winds up jealous of his slightest interaction with other women, including the boy’s grandmother (her mother). The boy tries to get on with things as well as he can but one day he comes home and finds his grandmother lying dead and bloodied on the living room floor, her throat cut, and his mother appears and shrieks, ‘I told you to stop speaking to her. I’m the only girl for you.’ The boy goes to run out of the house but the mother, who has speedy, lanky legs, beats him to it and locks the door in front of him. Then she starts to cry at his wanting to run away from her and in a sort of if-I-can’t-have-you-no-one-can outburst, she slits her son’s throat then goes out to the garage and suffocates herself by leaving the car on with the garage door shut. The description of the murder and the suicide are vividly graphic and the story ends at the moment of the mother’s losing consciousness, giving no poetic context to things but only a nonchalant, matter-of-fact telling of a grisly end to a story that began as a whimsical kid-genie-wish story.
What hidden psychological meaning could be taken from this? Liza couldn’t really say. It said to her he was a good writer, in a technical sense, the prose being lively and fun and the descriptions detailed without being boring, and the structure of the story, a sort of devilish satire of childhood fantasy and wish fulfillment, was a good play of irony and unexpectedness. It was a long story too, with many intimate scenes bringing life to what was just described in outline, and it didn’t have one detectable grammar or spelling error in the whole thing. But it had no real message or moral to it, other than a sarcastic laugh in the face of hopeful or symmetrical stories. What the story communicated to her was that Aaron was talented and, when he got in the habit, dedicated to his writing, but he had no direction to push this talent and dedication toward, and where he’d once had ambition he now saw it all as one big joke. Why else put so much effort into a story that ended like that?
Was breaking up a possibility? The question of breaking up is a constant overhanging presence in all relationships, its only changing variable its visibility to each partner, ranging from stoic acceptance to total self-delusion. Liza never thought of breaking up with Aaron now. During the first few months, when the relationship had been all passion and infatuation and their lives seemed to be moving at an accelerated pace, she sometimes thought of ending things. Not due to any real problems with the relationship, more because her life was moving at such momentum even a break up wouldn’t have seemed crazy - she would have kept speeding into the future regardless. And besides, can life truly be lived without the acknowledgement of its end clearly in view? They’d been together almost five years now - anniversary incoming. The possibility of its ending now felt non-existent. At least it did to her. He’d become harder to read. He was once an open book, and a big talker, making bold claims about what he would do and where they’d go - a good deal of it turned to zilch but that never mattered. Now his demeanor was calmer, rooted, maybe depressively, in reality. A question came to her often: How do you tell the difference between love that has matured beyond infatuation into a more adult bond, and love that has stagnated for both parties, not enough to cause arguments or give either a push toward leaving, but enough that they talked less and felt less than they used to? Was the distinction between the two easy? It didn’t feel it. She wished she’d had more relationships so she’d have more to compare to. She’d only had one serious pre-Aaron boyfriend - ‘serious’ in the sense of not counting the boys who held her hand on the way home from school so they could brag about having a girlfriend. This other relationship had ended with cheating - his - so going over it gave her no insight into her current situation. She wanted to be proactive, jazz the relationship into life, do something crazy like be waiting for him naked when he came back from work, spread out on the living room floor, all oiled up. But she wasn’t the type. She had, instead, resigned to letting fate deal with the surprises.
A thought had come to her recently that had become a repeated part of her stream-of-conscious loop (along with the thought she should call her mother more often, and the lyrics to Jimmy Cliff’s You Can Get It If You Really Want It). The thought was that, despite her age, she has hardly any idea who she is. Almost every day she sees pictures posted by people she went to school with, now married with kids, with company cars, renting out villas in Spain: they all see synced to their roles, harboring no confusion over their identity. Her university friends are the same. Many are now landing dream jobs, the sort of jobs that, with the utterance of a one or two word title, conjure up in the listener an image of life-satisfaction that the speaker can wear like a suit of armour as protection from judgement and unfavourable comparison. But who is she? Can everyone else answer that question about themselves? Does anyone else really know? Or is that only an illusion created by Facebook updates and envy-inducing job titles? The things that define her, like momentos from holidays, or prized possessions like a quilt from her Grandma, now dead, or her large photo album, even her relationships with others, which defined a lot about her - all of this was external. What would she be if it was all taken away?
She knows it isn’t a very feminist thing to say, and that many women would find it shameful, but she feels her relationship with Aaron is arguably her defining characteristic. She knows that sounds two-dimensional, like she’s happy to be a side character in someone else’s story - but she doesn’t see it that way: she loves Aaron and love certainly isn’t a bad thing to be defined by. She doesn’t believe in ‘soul mates’ but doesn’t find it hard to imagine the two of them together until they die. They fart and burp in front of each other. It doesn’t affect their sex life. But there is, too, something that has gone now: a sense of urgency. People are always going on about whether life has meaning, they seem to construct their whole life around questions of meaning. She and Aaron had once found meaning in the lazy hours of the morning when the sun was starting to come up and they were still awake talking, and on the top of hills in the Lake District where they were both too scared to look down, and at the end of a nine hour movie marathon where they’d argue over who made better movies, Orson Welles or Frank Capra, or in those nights when they were both too pissed to walk properly, leaning on each other on the way home and falling into bushes. Now the moments she seemed to find meaning were intellectual moments, like when she read something in a ‘pop science’ book that explained a key working of the cosmos, or anticipatory moments like towards the end of a Friday shift when she began thinking about being off for the weekend, which gave her a happier, more optimistic feeling than anything in the proceeding weekend would give her. She wondered if her life would have any more episodes of urgency or if this, here, was the pace it would be set to. A life of small moments circling around an unclear centre. Which wouldn’t be so bad if Aaron, at least sometimes, showed this same despair at life, but he appeared happy to go on existing. He likely masturbated lethargically, without even much ambition to come, on the days she was at work and he wasn’t. She felt the only problems she could bring up with him were impersonal problems or problems that didn’t involve the both of them - money troubles, problems with the flat, something upsetting her dad had said. The existential problems, which she’d once have brought up with him no problem, are now alien in the life they’ve created for themselves. She wishes Aaron would write more because she imagines one day now she’ll get a story from him and it will point to some inner cosmic optimism that’s not detectable in his outer person.
The second story Aaron finished since their move was 62 pages, long enough to be a novella. It was called Forever. He sent it to Liza in an email not long ago. It bore clear similarities to the previous story. The lead character, a fictional Renaissance-era inventor and scientist and rival of Leonardo Da Vinci, invents a potion that gives him immortality. He administers it to himself, needing only one small injection of the highly potent elixir to take effect for all eternity. It not only stops his cells from aging but makes his body indestructible, without need for the basics of survival like food, water or even oxygen. (Although he still feels a hunger for them when deprived.) The protagonist, a technical genius and progressive humanist, also likely a rampant egotist, destroys the elixir after injecting himself and burns down his laboratory, not wanting anyone else to get hold of his invention. He then gets on with living forever. Feeling liberated by the knowledge he will never die he leaves the world of science and goes travelling. He (eventually) visits every country on Earth. He meets wonderful people, sees great sights, and is present at the most crucial - and most terrible - events in human history. He lives through the Reformation, the Napoleonic and Victorian eras, the World Wars, the swinging 60s, the technological revolution and the new millenium and into the present day, all-the-while preserved in a sprite and gentlemanly, albeit old fashioned-looking, 34 year old body. Liza’s favourite section described the protagonist’s journey through the prior few decades: he marveled at the new technologies while remaining skeptical of what they were doing to people, being able to compare to countless other human epochs; and he observed the modern tragedies of the world, seeing them as only one small part in a larger human story, something, he knew, no one else on the planet was able to do. And he lived long into the future. The world advanced, wars started and ended, peace reigned supreme. People started living longer and there came to be other immortals, not indestructible like him but who, through having an injection once a year, stopped the process of aging, and even reversed it if they had the desire (and the money). The protagonist lives a more normal life during this time as he no longer needs to hide his immortality. He begins to cultivate long friendships and stay with lovers for decades, not jumping from place to place like he has been doing for nearly one thousand years now. And he lives thousands more years into the future. The problems that face humanity are eliminated. Global warming is ‘solved’ and natural habitats once again blossom; nuclear weapons are outlawed as peace between nations becomes commonplace; medical technology expands, increasing the lifespan and eliminating most diseases, even the common cold; and as much as the protagonist sometimes judges humans in the ways they have changed, all being addicted to their devices and Augmented Reality headsets and VR pods, he is, overall, impressed with how things have turned out. Things go on like this for over 10,000 years and the protagonist, while still carrying the looks of a youthful soul, develops the inner workings of a wise old sage, being the oldest of all the Earth’s now numerous immortals. He comes to be filled with knowledge and understanding and, more importantly, filled with kindness and generosity for everyone. Humanity’s growing intergalactic empire, aided by an advanced, subservient AI population, comes to colonise Mars, Titan, the Moon, and send robots and sometimes small teams of humans to explore other planets, and now has a large population living in space. The protagonist visits all of these worlds, living on each of them for a time, marvelling at everything. His memory of his mother is blurry now. He remembers her in details more than in images or perceptions, but his memory of her still sometimes returns: she had been an impoverished Italian woman who never ventured more than twenty miles from her place of birth and who died in her thirties. And yet here he was, her son, stood on fucking Mars! It was incredible. And then, out of nowhere, disaster comes. The protagonist is on Earth at the time. An asteroid cluster, hurtling at speeds never recorded, blasts through the solar system, hitting everything, all the major planets and space stations, wiping out nearly all life. The life left on Earth, mainly plant and aquatic life, can’t sustain the sudden jolt to the ecosystem. All life soon perishes, other than one man. He lives alone on a baron, flame and smoke-covered Earth, growing dehydrated and starving, for thousands of years. He has no way of knowing how long this has gone on for. Each day stretches into a tormented illusion of stopped time. If someone had told him he was on Earth for billions of years during this time he would have believed them. It was possible. Left in his loneliness with his thoughts he goes near mad, babbling and yelling to himself and speaking to the Earth, all in a language that comes less and less to resemble any previously spoken by humans. He predicts he’ll be on Earth until, as he heard spoken of a long time ago, the Sun expands into the Earth, at which point he imagines he’ll experience the worst pain he has ever felt followed, finally, with his death, even his body unlikely to withstand the heat of the sun. But his time on Earth ends not with the sun but with the impact of another meteorite, this one smaller and more precise than the last: it ploughs through the Earth’s surface, into its core, and the surface cracks like a giant egg and quickly begins to fall apart. It should be noted that the meteorite’s incision hits the opposite side of the Earth to where the protagonist is at the time, meaning he has no idea what the grand rumbling and the ground shaking is, or why the sky starts to change colour and his body starts to feel sea-sick even though he is on land. The sky shines fluorescent, green lights shooting in random directions like the Aurora Borealis. Then the ground beneath his feet breaks up. He runs but there is no direction where this is not happening. He runs anyway. The sky vanishes, like a screen has been turned off with the grandeur of space revealed behind it. Before long his puny body floats out into space, along with the shards of Earth now cut off from the whole. It is not the cinematic floating of sci-fi movies - which he saw too long ago to remember now anyway - but a vacuum of hurtling speed that spins him so fast it stops him seeing what’s going on. His lungs seize and tighten, like he will choke, but he doesn’t die. After a few minutes he stops spinning and begins to float more smoothly. He has little control of the direction he’s heading; the universe decides his trajectory. He floats on for millions and then billions of years. His brain turns to jello and he faces boredom and loneliness unknown to any other being in all of time and space. But the elixir, beyond even his own expectations, keeps his body going and his brain working enough to remain consciously aware of what’s going on and of the passing of time. He never sleeps during his time in space. He only observes the planets and constellations and suns as he swims among them. He sometimes hallucinates giant planetary occurrences in his starving sleepless delirium. He forgets who he is and how he got here and that there has ever been other living things besides himself. Eventually the lights of the universe, the stars and radiant planets and distant nebulas, begin to die down until there is nothing but total darkness. But, happening over hundreds of billions of years, he doesn’t realise. He forgets there has ever been light, that he could ever see, or hear. And he exists in this darkness, choking and looping through his insane, nonsensical thoughts, until he reaches a level of pain and torment and hopelessness completely unimaginable to you or me. And a long time later, hundreds of billions more years, the universe begins to close in on itself as black holes swallow everything up, and a few million years into this process he is swallowed into a black hole. The story then includes a very detailed (and scientifically accurate) description of the workings of a black hole, likely to give credibility to the proceeding description, told in grotesque detail, of how every tiny unit of the protagonist’s body is pulled into a different time zone, meaning he is, almost atom by atom, diced up and ripped apart. But his consciousness remains awake through it all, experiencing a level of pain never previously felt, seemingly renewed every second. Time inside a black hole goes very slow, gravity being pulled inward faster than the speed of light, and his time in the black hole feels longer to him than his entire life previous to that, feeling as though it has gone on for trillions of years. The workings of the black hole, which he has no knowledge or understanding of, conclude when all black holes are sucked into each other to form one tiny singularity: the whole of existence contracted into a miniscule speck. His consciousness still exists, somehow, having meshed into the fabric of being. He no longer feels pain. He feels the entire of the singularity as himself. And he waits and waits, feeling an energy growing. And then he explodes outward into infinity.
Liza lives in a flat in East London. She’s not from there originally - she’s a Northern girl, from ‘a bit of all over the place really.’ She’d sometimes thought about a move to London as a child, picturing it as a luxurious ascent into the London art scene. But her real life move was nothing like this: it was the outcome of those chance string of events which - as much as we may deny it - most people love to let decide their lives for them. Liza’s boyfriend Aaron’s two friends, both total unknowns to Liza prior to the move, were buying a flat in London as they transitioned jobs and the cheapest place they could find was a four person flat. Being averse to strangers and wealthy enough to offer to pay the whole of the first month’s rent, they’d asked Aaron and Liza who quickly agreed.
The flatmates, boyfriend and girlfriend, were called Louise and Peter, two very normal names for two very normal people, Liza felt. Her and Aaron moved in the day after they did. An air of pleasantness and forced laughter hung over their meeting, as is common for first-impressions, but this, to Liza’s dismay, never subsided. Instead, they remained locked perpetually in a void of chatting about what they’d be doing that afternoon and giving out cursory details about their hometowns. Liza noticed this between them and Aaron too, despite a long friendship between the three of them, and this made her worry it was her own presence that created tension in the house. The only time this tension subsided was when there was alcohol in their systems. And as Liza and Aaron aren’t big drinkers and Peter was a sleepy, lounging drunk, the affected system tended to be Louise’s. She was an angry drunk: once past a certain threshold, even a slight moment of eye contact was enough for her to initiate an attack on someone, anyone, including her better half - not physical attacks but verbal. The morning after she first unleashed scorn on Liza - ‘Your side of the house is a fucking tip and please don’t tell me you expect me and Peter to clean it up because it’s not our fucking job’ - she’d given a woodenly-spoken apology through the haze of a hangover, in which Liza thought she sounded like she was reading from a script. Possibly one she’d acted out many times before.
Liza, desperate for a forward-momentum-creating goal she could attach herself to, started looking for other places nearby they could live and plot out their move only weeks after moving in. Aaron’s reaction when she ran through her (their) plans was - as his reaction to most things began to be around this time - one of consistent indifference. The four person flatshare lasted four months then Liza and Aaron moved out, the move orchestrated entirely by Liza. Four months was enough time, Liza reckoned, that it wasn’t rude to move out after having been offered to live there. She felt Aaron disagreed with this but he said nothing. Their new flat was smaller, more compact, which made it feel cosier, more their own. But Liza, to her surprise, sometimes missed Peter and Louise despite having hated living with them, or more accurately she missed living with Peter and Louise. She had come to theorise that living with a person, even when they are absent, can be a presence in itself: living with those two had given Liza and Aaron a structure they now lacked. Nights had been broken up by the brief appearance of their flatmates, often on their way out and later as they stumbled in, instances where they always had some gossip to share and where they could plan things they’d all do together. It was a little like living with one’s parents, with part of their schedules and happenings influenced by others. But now they were alone in a flat - a miniature world - entirely of their own construction.
They found local jobs. Her as a typist for a nearby solicitors; him as a Sandwich Artist at Subway during the week and as a barman at a heavy metal-themed nightclub called Mono on Fridays and Saturdays. Their breezy compliance to doing the same jobs that many high school and university students apply for - at an age when a lot of people get schizy about doing such jobs, wanting a ‘career’ not a job - was because they aimed for jobs that paid the rent and for the bare essentials, where the hours weren’t too torturous, so that both would have lots of free time to attend to their artistic pursuits. And where better to be an artist than London!
She was a painter and he a writer. Both unpublished other than on free-to-publish sites on the internet. Her work adorned the walls of the flat: all large prints, filled with contrasting fluorescent colours, most of them faces of supernatural-looking beings and alien landscapes. Aaron had once described her art as, ‘What Andy Warhol might have drawn had he cared more about the interior than the exterior, and the fantastical rather than the famous, and if he had had John Lennon’s love of LSD.’ He had said it casually, a throwaway description said to an acquaintance at a party who never appeared in their lives enough to become a friend - but Liza memorised the line and typed it into the Notes on her phone when Aaron went to the toilet. She still thinks about that line now: because it was an accurate description of her work, and a very thoughtful, thus romantic, thing for Aaron to say, but also because the words, nice as they were, created a cage, making her feel each new painting she produces is not a wholly new creation but simply another product of a predictable, repetitive pattern. Psychedelics were often mentioned when people saw her work, because of the colours she imagined, yet she’d never taken one. This worried her because she sent her mum copies and pdf scans (done at the library) of every painting she finished, and her mum was staunchly against drug use - even a bit uppity about alcohol - and it would be a shame, though it was possible, for her mum to think her youngest daughter’s dream of being an artist, a vocally-broadcast dream since teenagerhood, was only maintained because of a drug habit that in reality she’d never had.
The colours are more of a defense against boredom. Liza hates minimalism: she’d rather a work be too much than too little. In boredom-induced self-exploratory pseudo-psychoanalytic sessions with herself, which she enacts when she’s alone, she often looks through her paintings, the stacks of them under her bed, looking for some deeper meaning, some subconscious motif that her hands painted without her mind being aware of it. But she’s not found anything so far. Which worries her: does it mean her art is impersonal? That it is more a way to fill the time, to provide some form of content (and money one day hopefully), a mere hedonistic pursuit she has persuaded herself into thinking is deep and passionate? The ‘explanation’ she gives, at least the one she has latched onto recently, of why she draws like that, is that growing up in drab, cold, constantly-raining British suburbia, a place of agonising conformity and ordinariness, ignited in her the desire to add colour and vibrance to the world, with the act of painting itself a tool of escapism. It is an attempt to find something unique in a landscape where everything looks identical. Or maybe that’s just me being narcissistic she thinks. The excess of thinking she puts into defining her art has contributed to her painting less than she would like. She gets a fair bit done though.
Aaron’s lethargy, a byproduct of the previous year, seems to grow in dimensions every day, and Liza still can’t tell where it’s come from. She often works longer shifts than him and when she gets home she puts more time into painting than he does writing. When they’d first started dating the idea they were both ‘artistic types,’ while a violation of the ‘opposites attract’ rule, had seemed, indeed was, a good thing: they were both night owls who had lie ins then stayed up til the early hours of the morning, often working on their separate things naked after they’d had sex, with music playing in the background; their art was not a competition between them but something to spur the other on, like The Beatles with The Stones. But now he spent most of his time on the couch in the same slumped position. He’d happily follow any plans Liza made for the pare of them - a restaurant date, the cinema, a walk at evening time. But he never initiated these things himself. It was like he was morphing into a blank globule carried forward by nothing but the passing of time; time, in this analogy, being like a conveyor belt running through a factory with machines that pushed and pulled the globule into different shapes. And Aaron consented to all this shaping, allowing his person to be sculpted by everything else so that he himself didn’t have to exert any energy on sculpting.
Since moving to East London seven months ago Aaron has completed two short stories. There was a time when he finished one a week. They are both long stories and both stand as testament to how much potential he has as a writer but also how much of a nihilistic joke he now takes everything to be. His prose has a wondrous quality to it, describing things in broad, almost childlike terms, that sometimes break into poetic description. Liza imagines his style is similar to that of the stories George Saunders must have wrote before he was published and hadn’t quite mastered his style. The first story Aaron had written, titled The Wisher’s Wager, is about a young boy who is bullied at school. The boy’s mother is always going on dates with different men, while the boy is ignored and picked on by girls, and the strain between the two creates a lot of shame and jealousy in the boy. One day the boy is visited by a genie who says that while he usually reserves his wishes for those in dire situations, only once every few hundred years, the boy’s sadness has stirred something in him, enough to grant him one wish, anything he wants. The boy, still young and over-excitable, quickly answers: ‘I wish that every girl who sees me falls madly in love with me.’ The genie grins and says, ‘Very well. And so it will be’ and vanishes in a puff of smoke. The next few days of the boy’s life are very good - the best he has ever had - as all the girls in school not only take notice of him but shower him with compliments and drag him aside on the schoolyard to kiss him and ask him to be their boyfriend. But he is getting far too much attention to commit to one girl. Some of the girls start fighting over him. A few of these fights come to blows. The boy loves it. He becomes the most popular kid in school, the other boys treating him with respect now he’s getting attention from the girls. His mother and grandmother act extra nice to him too, letting him stay up as late as he wants and giving him more presents than he knows what to do with. But then, stemming from the wording of his wish, things start to go wrong. The girls at school start to go overboard, each one bringing him flowers and chocolates and videogames every morning. One even strips off naked in the schoolyard when he isn’t paying her enough attention. The female teachers start treating him overly favourably too, to the point that one gets arrested. Random women start to come up to him in the street, gushing out confessions of love so fast he can barely understand what they’re saying. He begins to run home, avoiding all eye contact with women, fearing they will begin a fervent chase after him if they realise who he is. His mother’s behaviour becomes strange too. She follows him round the house yelling words of praise at him for doing even the slightest things and she begins to sleep in bed with him, the two of them cramped into a thin single. She no longer invites lots of guys round the house. Eventually she winds up jealous of his slightest interaction with other women, including the boy’s grandmother (her mother). The boy tries to get on with things as well as he can but one day he comes home and finds his grandmother lying dead and bloodied on the living room floor, her throat cut, and his mother appears and shrieks, ‘I told you to stop speaking to her. I’m the only girl for you.’ The boy goes to run out of the house but the mother, who has speedy, lanky legs, beats him to it and locks the door in front of him. Then she starts to cry at his wanting to run away from her and in a sort of if-I-can’t-have-you-no-one-can outburst, she slits her son’s throat then goes out to the garage and suffocates herself by leaving the car on with the garage door shut. The description of the murder and the suicide are vividly graphic and the story ends at the moment of the mother’s losing consciousness, giving no poetic context to things but only a nonchalant, matter-of-fact telling of a grisly end to a story that began as a whimsical kid-genie-wish story.
What hidden psychological meaning could be taken from this? Liza couldn’t really say. It said to her he was a good writer, in a technical sense, the prose being lively and fun and the descriptions detailed without being boring, and the structure of the story, a sort of devilish satire of childhood fantasy and wish fulfillment, was a good play of irony and unexpectedness. It was a long story too, with many intimate scenes bringing life to what was just described in outline, and it didn’t have one detectable grammar or spelling error in the whole thing. But it had no real message or moral to it, other than a sarcastic laugh in the face of hopeful or symmetrical stories. What the story communicated to her was that Aaron was talented and, when he got in the habit, dedicated to his writing, but he had no direction to push this talent and dedication toward, and where he’d once had ambition he now saw it all as one big joke. Why else put so much effort into a story that ended like that?
Was breaking up a possibility? The question of breaking up is a constant overhanging presence in all relationships, its only changing variable its visibility to each partner, ranging from stoic acceptance to total self-delusion. Liza never thought of breaking up with Aaron now. During the first few months, when the relationship had been all passion and infatuation and their lives seemed to be moving at an accelerated pace, she sometimes thought of ending things. Not due to any real problems with the relationship, more because her life was moving at such momentum even a break up wouldn’t have seemed crazy - she would have kept speeding into the future regardless. And besides, can life truly be lived without the acknowledgement of its end clearly in view? They’d been together almost five years now - anniversary incoming. The possibility of its ending now felt non-existent. At least it did to her. He’d become harder to read. He was once an open book, and a big talker, making bold claims about what he would do and where they’d go - a good deal of it turned to zilch but that never mattered. Now his demeanor was calmer, rooted, maybe depressively, in reality. A question came to her often: How do you tell the difference between love that has matured beyond infatuation into a more adult bond, and love that has stagnated for both parties, not enough to cause arguments or give either a push toward leaving, but enough that they talked less and felt less than they used to? Was the distinction between the two easy? It didn’t feel it. She wished she’d had more relationships so she’d have more to compare to. She’d only had one serious pre-Aaron boyfriend - ‘serious’ in the sense of not counting the boys who held her hand on the way home from school so they could brag about having a girlfriend. This other relationship had ended with cheating - his - so going over it gave her no insight into her current situation. She wanted to be proactive, jazz the relationship into life, do something crazy like be waiting for him naked when he came back from work, spread out on the living room floor, all oiled up. But she wasn’t the type. She had, instead, resigned to letting fate deal with the surprises.
A thought had come to her recently that had become a repeated part of her stream-of-conscious loop (along with the thought she should call her mother more often, and the lyrics to Jimmy Cliff’s You Can Get It If You Really Want It). The thought was that, despite her age, she has hardly any idea who she is. Almost every day she sees pictures posted by people she went to school with, now married with kids, with company cars, renting out villas in Spain: they all see synced to their roles, harboring no confusion over their identity. Her university friends are the same. Many are now landing dream jobs, the sort of jobs that, with the utterance of a one or two word title, conjure up in the listener an image of life-satisfaction that the speaker can wear like a suit of armour as protection from judgement and unfavourable comparison. But who is she? Can everyone else answer that question about themselves? Does anyone else really know? Or is that only an illusion created by Facebook updates and envy-inducing job titles? The things that define her, like momentos from holidays, or prized possessions like a quilt from her Grandma, now dead, or her large photo album, even her relationships with others, which defined a lot about her - all of this was external. What would she be if it was all taken away?
She knows it isn’t a very feminist thing to say, and that many women would find it shameful, but she feels her relationship with Aaron is arguably her defining characteristic. She knows that sounds two-dimensional, like she’s happy to be a side character in someone else’s story - but she doesn’t see it that way: she loves Aaron and love certainly isn’t a bad thing to be defined by. She doesn’t believe in ‘soul mates’ but doesn’t find it hard to imagine the two of them together until they die. They fart and burp in front of each other. It doesn’t affect their sex life. But there is, too, something that has gone now: a sense of urgency. People are always going on about whether life has meaning, they seem to construct their whole life around questions of meaning. She and Aaron had once found meaning in the lazy hours of the morning when the sun was starting to come up and they were still awake talking, and on the top of hills in the Lake District where they were both too scared to look down, and at the end of a nine hour movie marathon where they’d argue over who made better movies, Orson Welles or Frank Capra, or in those nights when they were both too pissed to walk properly, leaning on each other on the way home and falling into bushes. Now the moments she seemed to find meaning were intellectual moments, like when she read something in a ‘pop science’ book that explained a key working of the cosmos, or anticipatory moments like towards the end of a Friday shift when she began thinking about being off for the weekend, which gave her a happier, more optimistic feeling than anything in the proceeding weekend would give her. She wondered if her life would have any more episodes of urgency or if this, here, was the pace it would be set to. A life of small moments circling around an unclear centre. Which wouldn’t be so bad if Aaron, at least sometimes, showed this same despair at life, but he appeared happy to go on existing. He likely masturbated lethargically, without even much ambition to come, on the days she was at work and he wasn’t. She felt the only problems she could bring up with him were impersonal problems or problems that didn’t involve the both of them - money troubles, problems with the flat, something upsetting her dad had said. The existential problems, which she’d once have brought up with him no problem, are now alien in the life they’ve created for themselves. She wishes Aaron would write more because she imagines one day now she’ll get a story from him and it will point to some inner cosmic optimism that’s not detectable in his outer person.
The second story Aaron finished since their move was 62 pages, long enough to be a novella. It was called Forever. He sent it to Liza in an email not long ago. It bore clear similarities to the previous story. The lead character, a fictional Renaissance-era inventor and scientist and rival of Leonardo Da Vinci, invents a potion that gives him immortality. He administers it to himself, needing only one small injection of the highly potent elixir to take effect for all eternity. It not only stops his cells from aging but makes his body indestructible, without need for the basics of survival like food, water or even oxygen. (Although he still feels a hunger for them when deprived.) The protagonist, a technical genius and progressive humanist, also likely a rampant egotist, destroys the elixir after injecting himself and burns down his laboratory, not wanting anyone else to get hold of his invention. He then gets on with living forever. Feeling liberated by the knowledge he will never die he leaves the world of science and goes travelling. He (eventually) visits every country on Earth. He meets wonderful people, sees great sights, and is present at the most crucial - and most terrible - events in human history. He lives through the Reformation, the Napoleonic and Victorian eras, the World Wars, the swinging 60s, the technological revolution and the new millenium and into the present day, all-the-while preserved in a sprite and gentlemanly, albeit old fashioned-looking, 34 year old body. Liza’s favourite section described the protagonist’s journey through the prior few decades: he marveled at the new technologies while remaining skeptical of what they were doing to people, being able to compare to countless other human epochs; and he observed the modern tragedies of the world, seeing them as only one small part in a larger human story, something, he knew, no one else on the planet was able to do. And he lived long into the future. The world advanced, wars started and ended, peace reigned supreme. People started living longer and there came to be other immortals, not indestructible like him but who, through having an injection once a year, stopped the process of aging, and even reversed it if they had the desire (and the money). The protagonist lives a more normal life during this time as he no longer needs to hide his immortality. He begins to cultivate long friendships and stay with lovers for decades, not jumping from place to place like he has been doing for nearly one thousand years now. And he lives thousands more years into the future. The problems that face humanity are eliminated. Global warming is ‘solved’ and natural habitats once again blossom; nuclear weapons are outlawed as peace between nations becomes commonplace; medical technology expands, increasing the lifespan and eliminating most diseases, even the common cold; and as much as the protagonist sometimes judges humans in the ways they have changed, all being addicted to their devices and Augmented Reality headsets and VR pods, he is, overall, impressed with how things have turned out. Things go on like this for over 10,000 years and the protagonist, while still carrying the looks of a youthful soul, develops the inner workings of a wise old sage, being the oldest of all the Earth’s now numerous immortals. He comes to be filled with knowledge and understanding and, more importantly, filled with kindness and generosity for everyone. Humanity’s growing intergalactic empire, aided by an advanced, subservient AI population, comes to colonise Mars, Titan, the Moon, and send robots and sometimes small teams of humans to explore other planets, and now has a large population living in space. The protagonist visits all of these worlds, living on each of them for a time, marvelling at everything. His memory of his mother is blurry now. He remembers her in details more than in images or perceptions, but his memory of her still sometimes returns: she had been an impoverished Italian woman who never ventured more than twenty miles from her place of birth and who died in her thirties. And yet here he was, her son, stood on fucking Mars! It was incredible. And then, out of nowhere, disaster comes. The protagonist is on Earth at the time. An asteroid cluster, hurtling at speeds never recorded, blasts through the solar system, hitting everything, all the major planets and space stations, wiping out nearly all life. The life left on Earth, mainly plant and aquatic life, can’t sustain the sudden jolt to the ecosystem. All life soon perishes, other than one man. He lives alone on a baron, flame and smoke-covered Earth, growing dehydrated and starving, for thousands of years. He has no way of knowing how long this has gone on for. Each day stretches into a tormented illusion of stopped time. If someone had told him he was on Earth for billions of years during this time he would have believed them. It was possible. Left in his loneliness with his thoughts he goes near mad, babbling and yelling to himself and speaking to the Earth, all in a language that comes less and less to resemble any previously spoken by humans. He predicts he’ll be on Earth until, as he heard spoken of a long time ago, the Sun expands into the Earth, at which point he imagines he’ll experience the worst pain he has ever felt followed, finally, with his death, even his body unlikely to withstand the heat of the sun. But his time on Earth ends not with the sun but with the impact of another meteorite, this one smaller and more precise than the last: it ploughs through the Earth’s surface, into its core, and the surface cracks like a giant egg and quickly begins to fall apart. It should be noted that the meteorite’s incision hits the opposite side of the Earth to where the protagonist is at the time, meaning he has no idea what the grand rumbling and the ground shaking is, or why the sky starts to change colour and his body starts to feel sea-sick even though he is on land. The sky shines fluorescent, green lights shooting in random directions like the Aurora Borealis. Then the ground beneath his feet breaks up. He runs but there is no direction where this is not happening. He runs anyway. The sky vanishes, like a screen has been turned off with the grandeur of space revealed behind it. Before long his puny body floats out into space, along with the shards of Earth now cut off from the whole. It is not the cinematic floating of sci-fi movies - which he saw too long ago to remember now anyway - but a vacuum of hurtling speed that spins him so fast it stops him seeing what’s going on. His lungs seize and tighten, like he will choke, but he doesn’t die. After a few minutes he stops spinning and begins to float more smoothly. He has little control of the direction he’s heading; the universe decides his trajectory. He floats on for millions and then billions of years. His brain turns to jello and he faces boredom and loneliness unknown to any other being in all of time and space. But the elixir, beyond even his own expectations, keeps his body going and his brain working enough to remain consciously aware of what’s going on and of the passing of time. He never sleeps during his time in space. He only observes the planets and constellations and suns as he swims among them. He sometimes hallucinates giant planetary occurrences in his starving sleepless delirium. He forgets who he is and how he got here and that there has ever been other living things besides himself. Eventually the lights of the universe, the stars and radiant planets and distant nebulas, begin to die down until there is nothing but total darkness. But, happening over hundreds of billions of years, he doesn’t realise. He forgets there has ever been light, that he could ever see, or hear. And he exists in this darkness, choking and looping through his insane, nonsensical thoughts, until he reaches a level of pain and torment and hopelessness completely unimaginable to you or me. And a long time later, hundreds of billions more years, the universe begins to close in on itself as black holes swallow everything up, and a few million years into this process he is swallowed into a black hole. The story then includes a very detailed (and scientifically accurate) description of the workings of a black hole, likely to give credibility to the proceeding description, told in grotesque detail, of how every tiny unit of the protagonist’s body is pulled into a different time zone, meaning he is, almost atom by atom, diced up and ripped apart. But his consciousness remains awake through it all, experiencing a level of pain never previously felt, seemingly renewed every second. Time inside a black hole goes very slow, gravity being pulled inward faster than the speed of light, and his time in the black hole feels longer to him than his entire life previous to that, feeling as though it has gone on for trillions of years. The workings of the black hole, which he has no knowledge or understanding of, conclude when all black holes are sucked into each other to form one tiny singularity: the whole of existence contracted into a miniscule speck. His consciousness still exists, somehow, having meshed into the fabric of being. He no longer feels pain. He feels the entire of the singularity as himself. And he waits and waits, feeling an energy growing. And then he explodes outward into infinity.
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