by
Rachel Cusk
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[...] When eventually I got Chrysta on the line I told her everything about our predicament, said that we were lost somewhere in the mountains, that there was a terrible storm, that the children were frightened and covered in mosquito bites and that I doubted my ability to cope in such a crisis. But instead of responding with sympathy and concern, she was absolutely silent. The silence was only a few seconds long, but in that period, while she failed to come in on time and to take up, as it were, her part in our lifelong duet, I understood, completely and definitively, that Chrysta and I were no longer married, and that the war we were embroiled in was not merely a bitterer version of the same lifelong engagement, but was something far more evil, something that had destruction, annihilation, non-existence as its ambition. Most of all it wanted silence: and this, I realised, was what my conversations with Chrysta were all leading towards, a silence that would in the end remain unbroken, though on this occasion she did break it. I’m sure you’ll manage somehow, was what she said. And shortly after, the conversation concluded.
Mixed messages, my neighbour continued, as we approached the cove and started to slow down, were a cruel plot device that did sometimes have their counterpart in life: his own brother, the one who had died a few years ago, a dear and generous person, suffered his fatal heart attack while waiting for a friend to come to lunch. He had given the man – who happened, moreover, to be a doctor – the wrong address, for he had just moved into a new apartment and hadn’t yet memorised the full details, and so while his friend was searching for him in a street of a similar name on the other side of town, he was lying on his kitchen floor with his life ebbing away, a life, what’s more, that apparently could easily have been saved had he been reached in time. His older brother, the reclusive Swiss millionaire, had responded to these events by having a complex system of alarms installed in his own apartment, for though he was a man who would never forget his own address he was also entirely friendless and miserly and had never had a lunch guest in his life; and indeed when his own heart attack came – which their family medical history made a likelihood – he simply pressed the nearest emergency button and within minutes was in a helicopter, being whisked to a top cardiac unit in Geneva. Sometimes it was as well, he said – and he was thinking of Theseus’s father here – not to take no for an answer, almost as a point of principle.
[...] She had imagined the end of a marriage, she said, to be a slow disentangling of its meanings, a long and painful reinterpretation, but in her case it hadn’t been like that at all. At the time, he had got rid of her so efficiently and so suavely that she had felt almost reassured even as she was being left behind. He had perched beside her in his suit on a counsellor’s sofa for the mandatory number of sessions, looking discreetly at his watch and occasionally assuring everybody that he wanted only what was fair, but he might as well have sent along a cardboard cut-out of himself, for he was clearly elsewhere in his mind, galloping towards pastures new. Far from a reinterpretation, their ending had been virtually wordless. Shortly afterwards he had set up house with the daughter of an aristocrat – the Earl of somewhere – who was now pregnant with their first child.
“I wish I could, but I have to get to class. I’ve done maybe half the reading. The only thing I have going for me is my punctuality and attendance.”
“I doubt that,” Sam said. Sadie was one of the most brilliant people he knew.
christ
And so she’d be cool, because that’s what mistresses were. Mistress, Sadie thought. Sadie laughed a bit to herself, thinking this was what it was like to play someone else’s game: to have the illusion of choice, without actual choice.
fair
kotaku: In terms of its obvious Japanese references, I mean. Ichigo looks like a character Yoshitomo Nara could have painted. The world design looks like Hokusai, except for the Undead level, which looks like Murakami. The soundtrack sounds like Toshiro Mayuzumi…
mazer: I won’t apologize for the game Sadie and I made. [Long pause.] We had many references—Dickens, Shakespeare, Homer, the Bible, Philip Glass, Chuck Close, Escher. [Another long pause.] And what is the alternative to appropriation?
kotaku: I don’t know.
mazer: The alternative to appropriation is a world in which artists only reference their own cultures.
kotaku: That’s an oversimplification of the issue.
mazer: The alternative to appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people, with only white European references in it. Swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I hate that world, don’t you? I’m terrified of that world, and I don’t want to live in that world, and as a mixed-race person, I literally don’t exist in it. My dad, who I barely knew, was Jewish. My mom was an American-born Korean. I was raised by Korean immigrant grandparents in Koreatown, Los Angeles. And as any mixed-race person will tell you—to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing. And, by the way, I don’t own or have a particularly rich understanding of the references of Jewishness or Koreanness because I happen to be those things. But if Ichigo had been fucking Korean, it wouldn’t be a problem for you, I guess?
i mean fair enough
By eleven-thirty, Sadie was in her pajamas, teeth brushed and flossed, ready to go to bed. She wondered if this was what other twenty-three-year-olds’ Friday nights were like. When she was forty, would she lament that she hadn’t had sex with more people and partied more? But then, she didn’t enjoy many people, and she had never gone to a party that she wasn’t eager to leave. She hated being drunk, though she did enjoy smoking a joint every now and then. She liked playing games, seeing a foreign movie, a good meal. She liked going to bed early and waking up early. She liked working. She liked that she was good at her work, and she felt proud of the fact that she was well paid for it. She felt pleasure in orderly things—a perfectly efficient section of code, a closet where every item was in its place. She liked solitude and the thoughts of her own interesting and creative mind. She liked to be comfortable. She liked hotel rooms, thick towels, cashmere sweaters, silk dresses, oxfords, brunch, fine stationery, overpriced conditioner, bouquets of gerbera, hats, postage stamps, art monographs, maranta plants, PBS documentaries, challah, soy candles, and yoga. She liked receiving a canvas tote bag when she gave to a charitable cause. She was an avid reader (of fiction and nonfiction), but she never read the newspaper, other than the arts sections, and she felt guilty about this. Dov often said she was bourgeois. He meant it as an insult, but she knew that she probably was. Her parents were bourgeois, and she adored them, so, of course, she had turned out bourgeois, too. She wished she could get a dog, but Dov’s building didn’t allow them.
But the reason she was bourgeois was so she could make work that wasn’t bourgeois. If she were cautious in her life, she could avoid compromising in her work.
it's a little twee but i do get it
Sam’s doctor said to him, “The good news is that the pain is in your head.”
But I am in my head, Sam thought.
Sam knew the foot was gone. He could see it was gone. He knew what he was experiencing was a basic error in programming, and he wished he could open up his brain and delete the bad code. Unfortunately, the human brain is every bit as closed a system as a Mac.
Several months later, Abe would go away on tour, and that marked the end of that particular relationship. She did not regret having dated Abe, or that it had ended. She felt, in a way, that she finally understood Marx (though he was now effectively settled down with Zoe). Long relationships might be richer, but relatively brief, relatively uncomplicated encounters with interesting people could be lovely as well. Every person you knew, every person you loved even, did not have to consume you for the time to have been worthwhile.
Everyone knew Love Doppelgängers was a terrible title, but no one knew what to call it instead. They had lived with the title for so long that it had almost become good by sheer virtue of repetition and familiarity. It was not, in fact, good. As Sam said to Marx, “Love Doppelgängers is an excellent title if we want twelve people to play this game.” Unfair couldn’t afford that. After the modest performance of Both Sides, Love Doppelgängers needed to work commercially.
The one person who didn’t know Love Doppelgängers was terrible: Simon Freeman, the person who had come up with it. Simon had studied German in school and had an adolescent obsession with all things Kafka. “I don’t think it’s that bad,” Simon said, feeling offended at Sam’s utter certainty that it was terrible. “Why won’t it work?”
“No one knows what a doppelgänger is,” Sam said.
“Lots of people know what a doppelgänger is!” Simon defended his title.
“Maybe not enough people know what a doppelgänger is,” Marx amended Sam.
Sadie thought she’d quite possibly lose her mind if one more person said doppelgänger.
“If kids know one German word, it’s ‘doppelgänger,’ ” Simon said.
“What kids are these?” Sam said. “Are they all in AP English?”
“Well, then, they can learn,” Simon said. “We can put a definition on the cover, a footnote—”
“A footnote? Are you kidding? You know what says, Get ready for a great time gaming? A cover with a footnote,” Sam said.
lol