Choice, page 1
Choice
A Novel
Neel Mukherjee
Christopher
I
There cannot be a right life in the wrong one.
–Theodor Adorno
1
He slips in between the twins, as he does every time it is his turn to read the bedtime story. Tonight’s project is a little complicated and they have had to set aside for the time being the novel they have been reading: The Wind on the Moon. He has told the children that instead of plain old reading from a book, he is going to show them a film on his laptop. They are restless with excitement. He has fended off a dozen questions – ‘What is the film?’, ‘Is it a cartoon?’, ‘Will Miss Piggy be there?’, ‘Will the red truck come with the sun rays on his face?’, ‘I want the smiley Digger, Baba, I want the smiley Digger’ – with a patient, ‘It’s a surprise, so I can’t say anything.’ Tonight, there isn’t the usual drama of reluctance to settle down, the playful scrapping involving who gets how much of the duvet, who gets to cuddle with which stuffed toy. He finds that he is nervous; his heartrate is up. They snuggle up against him, Masha on his right, Sasha on the left.
Now is the moment. The camera is jerky. The children are ready with their usual ‘What is this?’, ‘Where is this?’, but fall silent when the pigs appear. It is not clear to Ayush that they are paying attention to the commentary that announces the location, the purpose behind the breaking in and filming.
‘Oink-oink piggy,’ Masha says. Sasha has put his thumb in his mouth, the gesture that indicates he is now becalmed and is concentrating on what is unfolding in front him. Ayush knows that Masha will soon follow suit.
The number of pigs held in the pens is so large that the animals are seen climbing over one another. If you squeezed your eyes just so, the creatures could be a close-up of thick, rolling clouds. The voiceover says, ‘They have no space to turn around, to move forward, back, sideways. The dirt on them that you see is their own faeces. They are kept like beans packed in a jar.’
The children are unblinking. Ayush cannot know if what they are seeing through their eyes is the same as that which he is witnessing through his.
‘What are the piggies doing?’ Masha again.
‘They’re in a place that is like a pig-prison. They cannot get out. You’ll soon find out why,’ Ayush says.
Occasionally, they see pigs that appear to be asleep until another animal bites one such creature’s stomach and starts chewing. The sleeping pig shows no reaction – it is a dead pig. A sow, with hanging, swinging teats, is struggling to stand in her farrowing crate, but it is too small to allow any movement. The camera lingers on her, unmoving. Ayush wants to chew the edge of the duvet covering him, his willing her to succeed is so intense. Instead, her hips get trapped in the bars. She continues to struggle, each successive movement more confined than the last as her lower third gets lodged more firmly. Soon, she cannot move at all except to stamp her hooves. She cannot even turn her head. There is a brief shot of her eye rolling, as if she is trying to slide it right back to see and understand what is obstructing her so that she can find a way to free herself. But that will only arrive, in a different form, when a human intervenes.
There is a badly executed cut, and the next shot moves to a different area. It is not clear to Ayush how these images were filmed, or whether editing has given it the feeling of continuity. There cannot be any unity of location, he thinks, but there is no disputing the vérité feel: the jerkiness, the sudden blurs, the momentary impression of someone running with the camera lens pointing at a speeded-up succession of random unidentifiable out-of-focus objects. Then back to tiled walls sprayed with blood.
Ayush looks at his children sideways without moving his head. They seem hypnotized, as they would be with any other film. There are dark-red cherries, with a tiny rectangle of white on each to represent their sheen, on their duvet cover. The night-light on the bookshelf opposite the bed has heated up enough to turn the pinwheel inside the shade in a steady, fast rotation. The images are of seashells, seahorses, starfish, stripey fish, coral, all in pretty colours against a blue background. Ayush forces himself to turn his eyes back to the computer screen.
The tiled walls have gone. This seems like a small room in a warehouse, almost a cubicle. The walls are red. No, they are not; only on close observation do they turn out to be a dirty, yellowed white. The splatter and drip of blood looks as if a gleeful cartoonist has been at his merry, unrestrained work. The threshold, raised by an inch or so above floor level, is so caked with layers of old solidified blood and fresh new infusion that it looks like a large wedge of fudgy chocolate cake. At the centre of the screen are slaughtered pigs. Again, they look as if a painter, on a whim, has chosen to depict them as red instead of the usual flesh-toned animals. The camera catches the bristles of their coat already stiffening with the drying blood. It’s a contained sea of densely packed red cushions and pillows. Then the camera moves. No, it’s not the camera that moves. It’s a pig. It stands up in the stew of bodies. Somehow, they have missed him. He has been showered so thoroughly with his companions’ blood that it is difficult to make out his tiny eyes of contrasting colour. The chocolate-cake threshold is inches from his maroon snout. But there is no attempt to escape, no looking around at the scene that embeds him, no sniffing. He stands still and looks at the threshold. This time the camera really does move, back an inch or so. There is a closed iron door on the other side of the threshold. But he is not even looking at that. He is actually looking at nothing.
At this point, Sasha gives out a hoarse cry: ‘Baba!’
Ayush gulps. His mouth is dry as straw. No reliable jokes about frogs in the throat – he cannot make a sound. He cannot even turn to look at the children or hold their hands.
He feels Masha shudder before he hears the beginnings of her sobs. She buries her head farther into his neck and weeps wordlessly. As with all things involving these twins, Sasha joins her a split second later. It’s as if Ayush is a mirror-line and there is an identical thing on either side of him. He toggles to a different tab on the screen and reaches out both his arms to hold the children tight against him. He has to be strong now. He cannot bend, let alone crack. He still has not been able to utter a sound. On the killcounter tab, his eyes alight on the number for sheep that he had noted before bedtime. It has gone up from 408 to 13,056 in the last twenty minutes. He does some quick mental arithmetic to distract himself from the distraught children: 13,056 – 408 = 12,648. The whooshing silence that is the constant murderous private soundtrack to his life surges now so that he has to raise his voice to hear the comforting meaningless words come out of his mouth – ‘There, there, shush, shush’ – and release him.
He lets the sobbing run its course, reassuring them that they need never watch ‘it’ again. The night-light keeps its repetitive show going.
‘Blood comes out,’ Sasha says.
Ayush doesn’t know how to respond.
Masha now: ‘Why are they in that place?’
Ayush takes a deep breath. ‘It’s how we get meat. They’re being made into bacon and sausages. All the meat that we eat, ham and chicken and mince, it all comes from animals. You have to kill them to make them into meat. What you saw was how our meat comes to us. From animals that are put into cages and then killed.’
There is silence for so long that he thinks they are on the brink of falling asleep. Are they trying to join the dots between an animal, with its usual form consisting of four legs, mouth, eyes, ears, nose, a particular call, hooves, an animal with its moving, breathing aliveness, and its transformation into a radically different form, that of a flat pink disc between two pieces of bread? Are they trying to bridge that disconnect? Surely all five-year-olds know this? Did he know it when he was their age? There’s no way of establishing that. Should he sleep with the twins tonight? His feet will stick at least a foot out of the bed. What is going through their heads? Will they have nightmares? Luke is away in the USA on a conference, so it does not matter if Ayush sleeps here.
While these questions crowd his head, he hears Masha ask, ‘Did that piggy escape?’
2
Ayush has the less remunerative job, so he takes the children to school; as Luke says, ‘Economics is life, life is economics.’ As always, Ayush tries surreptitiously to scrutinize the faces of passers-by to see if some kind of knowledge imprints their faces, their eyes, when they pass him and the twins, a quantum of a pause, a double take, a second look to pull together a middle-aged South Asian man and two white-ish children into meaning, but no, he is spared today. After drop-off, Ayush takes the Tube to his office near the Embankment. He works for Sennett and Brewer, part of a vast international publishing conglomerate. Sewer, as it’s commonly known, is a self-styled literary imprint, as opposed to an upfront commercial imprint, of which the parent company has several. Self-styled because that’s the window-dressing. Behind the deceitful window, what everyone would really like to publish are celebrity biographies and bestsellers. But the performance of literariness is important and does vital cultural work (i.e., economic work): it pushes the definition of literary towards whatever sells. Ayush knows that the convergence, unlike the Rapture, is going to occur any day now. Maybe it has already happened, but he’s still here, playing the old game because it still has residual value. Soon it won’t. He is an editorial director at Sewer, second in command to the publisher, Anna Mitchell, a woman reputed to have ‘a nos
He has never been able to shake off the feeling that he is their diversity box, ticked – the rest of the company is almost entirely white; all extraordinarily well-intentioned, of course, but stably, unchangingly white. The very few people of colour there belong to the junior ranks of IT and HR, none in editorial, apart from Ayush, or in management. The way the system works, if they make any diversity hires, is to leave them imprisoned in junior positions for so long that they eventually leave. Diversity is a gift in the giving of white people; they pick and choose who they should elect to that poisoned club. Ayush was marked for the same fate until chance intervened. After four years as a commissioning editor – and, before that, three as the office envelope-stuffer (official title: editorial assistant) – he had got lucky with an author he had acquired for a fifth of Luke’s monthly take-home salary: Rekha Ganesan was short-listed for the Booker Prize for her debut novel, In Other Colours. Not long after that, he had published, breaking the imprint’s ostensible mould, an upmarket crime-fiction novel set in the Punjabi communities of Birmingham. That had become a runaway bestseller and had scooped up a CWA Dagger and a Costa Novel Award. He heard the words ‘alchemy’ and ‘golden touch’ used of him; he knew that it was not because he was publishing good, maybe even important, work, but because these books were selling. Economics is life, life is economics.
A predictable state of affairs set in after these successes. Until that point, around 30 to 40 percent of the manuscripts sent to him by agents, he would say, had been by writers of colour. That figure jumped to nearly 90 percent. Anna complained that she only got books by white women on motherhood, the market for which, both on the supply and demand sides, seemed to be inexhaustible. It was true that she had not used the word ‘white’, but Ayush knew that the word he had silently supplied was accurate and could be easily substantiated by data: white women believed that motherhood was both original and endlessly interesting; a form of cultural narcissism. When he told Luke that his submissions from white writers had tapered off to almost nothing, Luke had said, ‘It depends on what was first coming through the pipeline. What was the proportion of POC and black writers you were getting before?’
‘Um, I don’t know. Maybe three to four non-white to six or seven white? Probably fewer.’
‘Maybe the success of POC writers leads to agents sending more to editors? Or more POC writers submit work and that doesn’t get ignored or buried. The market decides these things.’ Then Luke had proceeded to give him a lesson on ‘herding’ and ‘information cascades’.
‘You mean stereotyping, when it’s at home?’
‘It’s efficient, if you come to think of it.’
This had, of course, led to one of their usual rows.
Today, from 8:45 a.m. until 10, he has spent the time at his desk sharpening all the seven pencils – always odd numbers – to murderous points, moving them from the right side of the desktop monitor to the left, then back again, nineteen times, to achieve symmetry with the pen-holder – again, seven fountain pens – but the perfect arrangement eludes him, as it does most days, so he sets about clearing the entire desk and hiding the contents in the metal cabinet below. This is easily done as there isn’t much on the desk in the first place. Then he feels the air around Rachel, who sits on his left, and Daisy on his right, take on that peculiar charge when the young women make a special effort not to look in his direction. On his notepad, he sets down a bullet point and follows with, ‘Which more water, washing single portion of strawberries or cherries, or w/ing entire punnet in one go?’ He makes the mistake of looking at both animalclock and killcounter on his computer before he heads to the meeting room. His breath races with the rhythm and speed of the numbers ratcheting up, as if his respiration is in competition with it. The list is headed by fish, which is already in the seven figures the very moment he opens that page and is advancing five figures, in the tens of thousands, every fraction of one second. What goes up every full second is buffalo, which is number 15 of 17 on the list, arranged in descending order of numbers slaughtered: from wild-caught fish, through pigs and geese and sheep and cattle, to ‘camels and other camelids’. The clock begins the moment the page opens: it says, ‘animals killed for food since opening this page’. Luke would be pleased: he believes in the truth of numbers over the truth of representation. Ayush closes the tabs to stop himself from hyperventilating.
Ayush acquires around ten to twelve books a year; for the last three weeks, he has been pursuing a submission, a debut by an author called M.N. Opie. The agent through whom the work has arrived, Jessica Turner, knew so little about the writer that she seemed surprised not to have an answer to even the most basic question about whether Opie was a man or a woman.
‘I don’t know,’ she had said when he called her. ‘The thought never crossed my mind . . . I had assumed that he is a he, if you see what I mean. But now I’m not so sure. Let me find out.’
Each story in Opie’s short-story collection is different in subject matter, setting, featured characters, and the points in the social spectrum they are lifted from, and, notably and subtly, in style. There is one about Richard Johnson, an elderly Jamaican vegetable-stall owner in Brixton, and the steady, casual, unthinking abandonment he faces from everyone, from the bureaucrats in Lambeth Council and the local Jobcentre Plus to his grown-up son and white daughter-in-law, to his customers who begin to move their business to a fancy organic store a few metres from his shop. Only his ageing, arthritic, halitosis-ridden coal-black dog, Blackie, is faithful to him. Then one day the dog goes missing. On the final two pages of the story, the man walks the length and breadth of Brixton, from Coldharbour Lane to Loughborough Junction, down Railton Road to Brockwell Park, shouting ‘Blackie! Blackie!’ The passers-by take him to be yet another black person with mental-health problems that Brixton is notorious for. The page had blurred for Ayush as he reached the end.
There is a long story about a young Eng. Lit. academic named Emily – an early-modernist, no less – in a London university who is in a car accident returning home from a dinner party one night. The driver of the car is not who the app says he is. A combination of inertia, procrastination, and maybe even an inchoate strategy only half-known to herself sends Emily’s life in an unpredictable direction. Everything about the story is unexpected and it is not the plot. It is the inner voice of the protagonist, the representation of her world of work and her mind. Even this is not the most salient thing about it. Ayush tried, and repeatedly failed, to put his finger on the elusive soul of the story. Plot-wise, it seemed simple enough, but the more he thought about the underlying moral questions that propelled it, the more complex and troubling it became. In fact, entirely unwritten in the story was its chief meaning: how no escape was offered by making what one thought was the correct moral choice. That meaning appeared only in the echo of the shutting door after he had left the story’s room. And that room itself: a trap, a claustrophobic chamber of the protagonist’s mind from which there’s no escape. The prose sat at the opposite end of the scale from the story of Richard Johnson and his dog Blackie.
Ayush had felt an urgency he had not experienced for a long time. It was a physical feeling, something in his racing blood and in his stomach, the heat in his hands and feet. He used to be derisive of the passing phases of editors’ rejection letters to agents – for a while, it was ‘I loved it, but I didn’t fall in love with it’, then it was, ‘It did not make the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end’ – but now he understood that behind the congealed bullshit, there might, once upon a time, have been a real physical sensation. He felt that sensation while reading M.N. Opie’s Yes, The World. He had to publish this book.
Ayush has to get the book through the acquisitions meeting this afternoon and he needs to have all his cards ready. He has shared the manuscript with colleagues already – with Anna, of course, but also the director of the paperback imprint, Juliet Burrows, with the sales director of the division, the marketing people (all men), the publicity team (all young women) – and talked it up, making sure to tick all the necessary boxes instead of actually talking about the literary and, to his mind, quietly explosive qualities of the book. So he had discussed the collection in terms of comparison titles (‘as thunderclap of a debut as White Teeth or Conversations With Friends’; he had really wanted to say Lantern Lecture or Counternarratives but he knew that he had to hit topical, buzzy books that were being talked about right now, for ten or even five years earlier risked blank looks), talked up projected sales figures (‘I think we could be looking at a bestseller like Queenie or You Know You Want This’; the collection was light years away from those reference points in every imaginable way). Later today there would be the usual cavils about short stories, the usual, deliberate confusion between what sells and what is a good book.
