Choice, page 10
Luke says, ‘What is it? Tell me. Let me help. I can’t bear to see you like this.’
It’s easier to say things to the darkness in a room. Ayush moves his hand up to put it over Luke’s. They lace their fingers and squeeze. Ayush has to revise his opinion about Luke’s tendency not to stir the same fetid pool in his mind.
‘It can’t be easy for you either,’ Ayush says.
‘It didn’t begin like this. What happened? I feel you’re struggling with everything.’
‘I am. I’m at war. I can’t explain very well. I feel we’ve taken a wrong turn at some point and it’s too late now and we can’t get back to the right path.’
‘We? Meaning us? You and me?’
‘No, no, the whole world, I mean. Everything. We’re in the wrong life.’ That’s the tip of the iceberg. Underneath roils, unarticulated, a lifetime’s belief bordering on an incurable disease: that everything in the world, from Lukey’s discipline to Ayush’s own secondhand domain of fiction, everything hinges on the individual, the rational agent making choices, exhibiting or hiding preferences, the character and her destiny, unfolding over time, developing, changing, reaching a point of fulfilment or its denial; everything in the world makes one think that the solution lies within private choices, personal responsibility, that it is the individual at the centre of things, that personal agency is everything – taking antidepressants, going running, going to the gym, going for therapy – that these actions, within a person’s power, are going to solve everything, because the problems are at the level of the self, the self is everything – look at the chattering monkeys’ unceasing din about the zeitgeisty, crapulous ‘autofiction’ . . . But what if this centrality accorded the self is entirely misplaced, erroneous, or, as a scientist once joked, not even wrong?
Luke lets out a long breath. ‘You can’t be at war with everything. You’ll be destroyed. Can’t you pick your battles? I mean, can’t you let some things go, reconcile yourself to them? Isn’t it exhausting, for you, I mean, to keep at this pitch of conflict with everything around you?’
You mean, be more efficient, Ayush thinks, but doesn’t say it aloud. Luke has never spoken with such eloquence. Could it be the dark, the fact that he can’t see Ayush? He remembers a Coetzee story in which the narrator says that it is easier to speak difficult truths in a car because the driver and the passenger are unable to look straight at one another. Again, the thought crosses Ayush’s mind how wrong he has got Luke, or at least this aspect of his personality. To have assumed that he thinks only in terms of incentives and costs and benefits and utility, or has no ordinarily human side to him, the part that worries, knits knots, furrows the same path over and over again in his head without reasoning it all away with the formidable intellectual tools at his disposal – that assumption is not true for all cases.
‘It could be that you’re unhappy with one very deep thing that you’re not facing, or cannot face,’ Luke continues gently, almost whispering to himself, ‘and it’s bubbling up in all these smaller things spread over a bigger area.’
Ayush is both amused and dismayed that Luke, the rock of rationality, has taken to spouting psychobabble bullshit, but Ayush knows a related theory from editing – often, the problem on page 172 is not a problem on page 172 but something that needs fixing on page 46 and the issue on the later page is no longer a problem.
‘I mean,’ Luke whispers, ‘the problem could be me. Or us.’
It seems to Ayush that Luke has stopped breathing. He is too unpetty to blame Ayush by going through examples to illustrate this point, to say, ‘You’re like a bomb all the time, about to go off any second’, or ‘You’re sabotaging all our lives’, or ‘That day when I said – and you said –’. No, Luke does not do finger-pointing. How come some people’s personalities run so clear? Happy childhood? Knowing one’s place in the world from the very beginning, never having to fight for it or to constantly prove oneself? Following an intellectual discipline that can explain, explain away, or understand the world? More importantly, having faith in that discipline? Many years ago, Ayush, at the beginning of his journey as a humanities graduate student, had thought his intellectual discipline too could account for the world. How quickly that confidence had burnt away, leaving behind the ashes of a politics of resentment. Luke believes in his discipline with zeal and knows its indispensability to the world as we understand it. Ayush realizes that he has been drawn again into his usual hostile slipstream, at a moment when Luke is offering him sympathy and, crucially, understanding. But can any understanding be in the spirit of the other person’s mind, not one’s own? Does Luke, perhaps unconsciously, pour everything into his overwhelming paradigm for the world, economic theory, and think of that as understanding? There Ayush goes, pulled inexorably by the defining gravity of his life.
‘No. No, that’s not it,’ Ayush says at last and squeezes Luke’s hand. ‘No. The thought has crossed my mind, of course, but it can’t be.’
‘It took you so long to say that?’ There is a catch in Luke’s voice.
‘I was thinking.’
That wrong turning – could it be that he had taken it, ignored the signs that had perhaps always been there, unable, at the time, to read or interpret them? Where could the error have been made? The fiction of a unitary moment, a single explanation, is tempting even to him. What about that long bank holiday weekend on the Suffolk coast nearly twenty years ago, a time that resides in his head as having been spent almost entirely in bed, the bedlinen towards their checkout time at the Aldeburgh bed and breakfast almost steaming with their mingled juices? Such a different time, such remote actions that even the memory of them is faintly unappetizing. On a rare venture outside for a walk along the pebbled shore, the sky the colour of oysters, and the water like an infinitely dimpled stretch of wet grey marble seething with life underneath, Ayush had picked up a small collection of beautiful stones, polished smooth by the waves, each one unique in shape or design or colour. He had recited Auden’s lines to Luke, ‘If equal affection cannot be/Let the more loving one be me’, and had meant it, or thought he had. Luke had been baffled by the lines, by the sentiment behind them. Ayush had tried to explain and interpret but Luke simply could not understand why anyone would want to be the more loving one. Of course, he wouldn’t have, Ayush now thinks. Many years after that incident, which he had almost forgotten but now thinks of as some sort of a key, he understands that in the columns and tallies of give-and-take that was the foundation stone of Luke’s discipline, and therefore formed his understanding of the world, giving more of something meant having less of that same thing and was always a negative. Net cost, in his words.
A silence has now descended; there is no way of telling for how long. To Ayush, it seems unending, until Luke breaks it with, ‘It’s the children, isn’t it?’
Ayush cannot answer this, so he remains silent.
Ayush had never wanted children. He had grown up as part of a generation for whom the idea of gay parenting was, literally, unthinkable. That boundary was surmounted only in the noughties. It was puzzling for him that Luke had pushed for having children. Ayush had taken on the mantle of a faux-economist to try to argue Luke out of parenthood. How can you think the benefits will outweigh the costs when the advantages are conspicuously so few, some of them unknown, some even unknowable, while the costs are enormous, lifelong, and all too visible? What is the utility, however expansively you define it? Time, money, leisure, travel, available energy, the slack and the buffer zones that make life bearable – Ayush had thrown everything he could think of at it, and one by one Luke had argued against his points, or been stubborn in refusing to acknowledge, often doubling down on his mulishness. Net cost, Ayush had shouted, you wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to dump it into the basket called net cost. The devil can quote scripture for his purposes. And what about Spencer? We just got Spencer, he’s only a year old, I thought that was going to be it, you, me, and the dog, I thought that was our family, two adults and Spencer. Luke had professed bafflement that Ayush should have thought of the dog as a child substitute. Ayush had wondered then – and wonders now – if Lukey was being disingenuous. And climate change? What about climate change? Wouldn’t they be contributing to it: from extra washing-machine runs to extra consumption on all fronts to adding two more humans to the great crushing weight on the world’s finite resources? Luke had dismissed this as . . . as what? Ayush doesn’t remember now; something about multiple equilibria, or another snazzy term that served one’s own interest well under the guise of a cute mathematical model, something that Ayush wouldn’t have the wherewithal to argue against. What about the future of the children in a burning world? What kind of life were we going to be bringing them into? Ours is the very last generation money might be able to cushion, but what about theirs, even if we leave them well-off? They would be living in gated communities, walled cities protected by private militia, in a world of permanent war, permanent movement, of migrants hunted down to keep the have-nots from sharing the spoils of the rich. He had floated all kinds of dystopian scenarios, with all the eloquence that he could muster, but Luke had remained immovable because he could only be convinced by arguments based on real economics, made by real economists, not by fiction. But it was not as if the vision he evoked was some time in the future; they had already begun to live it; not to know that was akin to not having a firm visual image of the outer shape of a house because one lived inside it.
Where was this baby-hunger coming from, Ayush had wondered. If that question could have been answered, if Luke had even approached answering it, Ayush would have conceded; reluctantly, of course, but he would have given in since it was not possible to go to war on something that was so central, so consuming in a partner’s life, without breaking up. Really, what remained of the very few advantages of homosexuality if gay people were in this frenzied rush to close the gap with the heterosexual world by opting into all its conformities and oppressions – wedding, wedding frock, wedding list, reproduction? Parenting as a consumer lifestyle choice, like buying into the Instant Pot craze, or ‘this season’s must-have’ fads; they have it, so we must too. The fight for equal rights turned out to be a revolution to have the right to change nappies and have months on end of interrupted sleep. But Ayush also knew that deep inside he had a fundamental discomfort about gay parenting, gay parents. He hated to admit it – it made him a conservative in his own eyes – but he had dug it up and thrown it at Luke as his last bit of ammunition.
Luke, who knew Ayush better than anyone else, had been wrong-footed at having been unable to imagine that the man he had married would have misgivings about gay rights. But he had recovered quickly enough to lob it all back at Ayush.
‘I thought that you, of all people, would have pushed back at this prejudice.’
‘What do you mean, I, of all people?’
‘You know, growing up in this country, what exclusion is, what prejudice is. Do you not want a different life for the next generation?’
‘It is exactly because I know what it is that I do not want these children to be at the receiving end of it. You think this country has changed? Why can’t you understand my sheer fear of what these children with two fathers, one of them even brown, will go through in school?’
‘I thought you wanted a better world. Someone has to begin the process.’
‘But, don’t you see, we’re performing this big experiment on the children? They have no choice in the matter. We cannot imagine what damage it might do them. How can you be so optimistic about the outcomes?’ Ayush had slowly acquired Luke’s vocabulary and jargon to the extent of using some words unthinkingly, even unironically.
Could Luke not see? Ayush had thought then. Did Luke want the children to become like Ayush, a consumed, jittery, unsettled creature? When he was five or six, he had discovered a cat hiding behind the big, dense growth of oleander against the back wall that formed the boundary between his parents’ home and their neighbours’. Ayush had approached it with the intention of luring it out and perhaps, eventually, indoors for the longer term, not just as a visitor. The cat had growled and hissed and spat, but not budged; Ayush noticed that in the space where one of its eyes should have been, there was only an oblong of concave white-red jelly. His father had warned him not to go anywhere near the cat – the wound had made it feral, and it could attack anyone within striking distance. ‘Byathay hingsro hoye gechhe,’ he had said; Ayush still remembers the phrase: ‘It’s gone feral with pain.’
Luke had won, if it could be put like that. Ayush had simply given up the fight one day. He has a cloudy memory of what the proximate reason was. Was it indulgence on his part, in the days when affection could give rise to something like indulging a loved one? With that tide gone, and surrounded now by the detritus left behind, it seems difficult to summon the memory of the feeling that must have resulted in giving way to Luke’s wishes. Maybe it was a gift that he had given Luke; an expensive present, given by Ayush, true, but purchased by Luke. Money had never been a problem for him – his trust fund had taken care of the three-storey Victorian terrace on the border of Dulwich and Herne Hill, and his consultancy side-work had paid for the surrogacy.
Once Ayush had acquiesced, an overjoyed Luke had even floated the idea of a milkshake baby, but Ayush had drawn the line at that: Luke could have the full pleasure – and conviction – of being the biological parent. When the twins arrived, Ayush was revolted at his first sight of them, two red, puckered, insect-like faces, but soon what swept through him was relief that the Thai phenotype from the mother appeared, at least at this point in the babies’ lives, to be minimal. It was fear on his part that had made him not want children who would not manifest whiteness.
And what had happened between then and now? He thinks of it as a steady diminishment, an attrition. Standing on the shingled beach in Aldeburgh on that dirty romantic long-weekend getaway, he had picked up a smooth piece of grey stone, marked with an entirely inset map of milk-white that reproduced perfectly the stone’s shape. The map had two concentric rings of light grey around it, again, in the perfect shape of itself, as if it were a section of a diagram showing isotherms or the way the depth of the water shaded in deeper and deeper bands away from the shore. He keeps it on his desk at work. It had begun as a reminder of a time of togetherness, then of a fading time, but that too had disappeared, leaving it silent and marooned as just a decorative object. Thinking of its earlier roles caused Ayush slight discomfort, even embarrassment. But of late it has started speaking to him again, with the exact words it had used at the very beginning: ‘I shall be your good luck charm, for you have saved me from the fate of millions of my brethren, which is getting caught by wave after wave after wave, then dashed on to the shore, unceasingly, over and over and over, until everything is worn down to finer particles of themselves, or until the end of time. No sooner have you thought this is the last dragging-and-flinging, that you’ll be out of reach of the next wave that comes along, left to rest with those who have also been liberated, than you’re sucked back up again and thrown down. No rest, only motion, motion forever. Here I have perpetual rest.’ But now the words mean something entirely different. He often stares at the stone with something tending towards longing, even envy. Had Luke planned the whole children thing so that he would have something to hide behind, an excuse, a reason, an armour, all of those together, when love and desire ran out, like they always did? How heterosexual of him, if he had. Or maybe, putting into practice what he knew from his theories of changing preferences, reference points, multiple selves, or whatever they were calling it nowadays and declaring it a great breakthrough in understanding, he had obtained a kind of insurance for one possible, perhaps only, route the future could flow. Whereas he, Ayush, well, he didn’t foresee the inevitable, who does, even though everyone knows it with the rational part of his brain, and everyone thinks that he is going to be the great exception to the greater laws of inevitability, but he has always been prepared to come to the end of something and look down the precipice into the void far down below. Or maybe it wasn’t a precipice and a void, but just a sea of grey you stepped into, and it enveloped you in the way the air had previously done, and you just lived in the new element. That was all. He doesn’t need any insurance for that.
14
It’s a raw November new moon night, dry and cloudy. Ayush has already cut up his debit and credit cards, his Sewer expenses card, and buried them in the far bed where the three ferns, the photinia, the rampant honeysuckle, and the ceanothus live. Luke is sleeping like an angel, helped by the Clonazepam drops Ayush has added to his dinner wine; no ordinary sounds of the night, nor anyone moving about, not even a minor burglary, can disturb his peace, at least not for several hours. Ayush goes to settings in his phone and cleans it of everything. He has had to consult IT at Sewer to help him with this. He gets out of bed and tiptoes to the children’s room. The diorama the sea-creatures night-light casts on the inner surface of the frosted glass globe is elongated and diffused to pale sheets of moving light on the walls, in eternal, unchanging repetition. In that light, surprisingly bright, he can see their sleeping faces. What are they dreaming? They are where he cannot accompany them; he feels a mild envy, then liberation – he cannot go there, so there is no need to try. Each of them is unyoked from the other in this passing moment.
Tonight, Siddhartha slips out of his princely bed and looks at the sleeping faces of his wife, Yasodhara, and his son, Rahula. She has her arm around their son and his face is pressed to her breast. They are peaceful, innocent, and ensnared. He leaves the room and moves through the halls and corridors of the palace until he reaches the front door. The guards bow and open the gate for him. Chandaka is waiting outside, in the courtyard, with Kanthaka, already harnessed.
