The Inside Out Man Read online

  Within a few minutes, I met up with Jolene. She looked somehow more natural than she had at the dinner, lovely in a more honest way, her hair straight and hanging loose, her lips pink enough without the paint. She was with a kid. A scrawny boy in a striped beanie, maybe seven or eight years old, eyes deep and dark as drains. Her son Edgar, she explained. He greeted me shyly, ran off, and kept himself busy with the world as the two of us walked along the lake, under awnings of leaves. Before we got into anything else, I was determined to find out exactly what had happened at her house the previous night.

  Nothing, she said. There’s nothing to explain. You played the piano and we danced. I mean, you said you were a pianist, but wow, you play so well. There’s so much energy in you. And talent. We were lucky to have you. But then, right after playing, you just stood, told us you had to go, and that was it. You went home. It was a little sudden, and you seemed so serious, but it wasn’t the kookiest thing ever. I was worried you’d had too much to drink, but you insisted, and then you headed off. She turned to look at me. You okay? You look pale.

  I nodded, left it at that, not mentioning my total memory blank. I also skipped the fact that just before I’d slipped out of consciousness, she and her guests had congealed into some kind of unreal flesh-show.

  But then she had to ask: You really don’t remember?

  It’s not that, exactly, just that I’ve been having these … I don’t know what you’d call them. Episodes?

  Episodes?

  Sometimes I black out for a bit. Or see things that aren’t really as they are. I thought I might be scaring her, especially so early in our first private meeting, so I just smiled and brought it all to the realm of the real. Pretty sure it’s nothing serious, though, I said. A bit of stress, maybe. My father passed away a couple of months ago.

  I was certain that had almost nothing to do with any of it, but cleverly took care of two birds: reasonableness and sympathy.

  Oh, God, I’m sorry.

  I guess you don’t always realise how much things affect you.

  No, I guess not.

  She pushed her hair behind her ears—a familiar gesture. Edgar called to her from across a stretch of grass, pointing to a duck on the lake, and she acknowledged him: I see, I see, be careful. There was affection in her voice, but tiredness, too. I thought back to her as she’d started dancing, twirling by herself, before the rest joined in and things took a sharp turn for the twisted. There was that same vulnerability in her now. That same inner dance going on, just with a slower, sadder rhythm.

  I’m sorry I called you, she said to me, staring down at her boots as they took steps across the grass.

  Are you? I said.

  Not sorry, but you know what I mean. I’m not even sure why I called you. I think I just needed to see someone. To talk to someone, share a couple of words with an adult. Things aren’t always easy—raising her voice, she called, Edgar, away from the edge!—Like you said, we all have our problems. But we’re not always so ready to admit them to ourselves, are we? Instead, we lug around this constant weight, and then get so used to it, the feeling becomes normal, a part of us. The way life is supposed to feel. Heavy and shitty.

  We passed a family sitting on a picnic blanket, buttering crackers and handing around cool drinks, when two children detached like erratic electrons and chased each other around the nucleus, laughing and teasing.

  Jolene, is there something I can do for you? I said.

  No, she said, turning her eyes to her son again. I just wanted to see you. I don’t have any real reason right now, if that’s okay.

  What about your friends? I asked. The ones from the other night?

  Friends? Yeah, well, I don’t actually know any of those people. They’re strangers. It’s this thing I do. Probably not the safest thing, not these days, and certainly not with a young son in the house.

  I’m not following.

  She sighed, looked down at her hands. One day, out of the blue, I invited a strange woman in a parking lot to dinner at my house. This was after helping her with some shopping bags. The idea just popped into my head and I went with it. And it felt really good. So I did it again. I invited another stranger, an old man waiting at a bus stop. He said yes too. And then there was another and another and another … until one evening I had a full table. They all turned up, and we had a great night, the best I’d had in years. No tired old stories or expectations or politics or awkward histories. Drinking and eating and dancing with random strangers … it seemed to be, I don’t know, a purer way of keeping company. So it became a regular thing, these dinner parties for strays.

  Strays like me.

  Jolene looked at me and laughed. Exactly like you. What can I say, it’s more interesting than being on one of those online chatrooms.

  We watched the little girl’s kite somersault down, abandoned by the breeze.

  What about Leonard? I asked.

  What about him?

  Is that how you met him?

  She stopped, knitted her brows. Then she said, Nope. For Leonard it was the other way round. He found me. She picked a leaf off a branch and folded it into a tiny piece. I don’t really know what to say to you, Bent. It’d be good to hear from him. Good for me and good for Edgar. He owes us that, at least, especially after everything he has—and hasn’t—done. I’m not talking about charity. I’m not even talking about financial help. I’m talking about accountability. God, I can hear myself—and I sound so weak.

  You don’t, I said, though I hadn’t quite made up my mind.

  She stopped, spun round, and put a hand on my shoulder. Her eyes were a deep blue, her pupils edged with pale sawdust-brown. The colours of the Earth from outer space, I imagined.

  I have to ask, Bent. Do you know where he is?

  I slowly shook my head.

  She paused, gave a sad smile, then flipped an end of her light summer scarf over her shoulder.

  We stood and watched as Edgar and a group of other children scattered bits of bread across the water, without any apparent strategy, losing half to the mud at the edge of the lake. A thought sparked in my mind, like a delayed fuse. Could Edgar possibly be Leonard’s son? Did he look like him? I couldn’t tell. I kept this thought to myself. If it were true, and Jolene wanted me to know this, she’d tell me. And if this wasn’t the case, then asking her would be the dumbest move of the day.

  Leonard’s never been very good at staying in one place for very long, Jolene said. I can only imagine where he is right now, somewhere far from here. He never gets as far as he’d like, though. I know that. It’s his curse. I’m sure you know about the parties. Oh, God, those parties! I went to one, right in the beginning, and I can’t say I was impressed. But I realised the women, the drugs, the craziness … it wasn’t as simple as I thought it was. It was just another test.

  I thought about the man at the window. Waving. Smiling. Disappearing.

  All I said was, What kind of test?

  That’s not easy to explain. I guess, for Leonard, nearly everything’s a test. That’s the part that interests him. Truth is, Leonard doesn’t put much stock in conclusions—which also means there’s no such thing as commitment. Or a sense of responsibility. Then she veered: Do you have any idea when he’ll be coming back?

  No, I said. For some reason, this didn’t feel like a lie. But it didn’t particularly feel like the truth either. It was just two letters. A word. A convenience.

  You must have some idea, she said, a trace of impatience in her voice. How long will you be house-sitting?

  About a year.

  You committed to a whole year?

  I had an opening.

  She laughed; it was toothy and real. And you’re from the city, right?

  That’s right.

  Do you like it?

  The city?

  Yes, the city.

  Sometimes.

  So what brought you two together?

  I thought about Leonard at the bar that night, knowing all the whil
e what the grand plan was. A plan all set in his head, missing only a single element: me.

  He said he’s a fan of the way I play, I said.

  The sun dropped behind a hotdog-shaped cloud. A woman grabbed at her hat to stop it from blowing off her head. The corner of a red picnic blanket flapped. An empty chair fell over. Then the sun reappeared and the wind quit its mischief. Jolene didn’t look fazed by any of it, slipping her arm through mine as we walked. I allowed myself to pretend we were a couple. I played the game in my head, and went with it more than I probably should have. I even smiled at Edgar as he passed, as if he were my son, and Jolene and I were his married parents, and this was just a day at the park for the three of us. Enjoying some family time. That’s what anyone watching us would have thought, I told myself.

  But then nobody was watching us, of course.

  Nobody’s ever watching us.

  They’re only ever watching themselves.

  40.

  I walked into the house sometime after six. The fading light of day entered through the windows, washing the walls in burnt orange. I went upstairs to take a shower, and moments came to mind: I thought about the way Jolene’s hair had moved and fallen so naturally, and how much more I liked it than at her party. Her sad eyes, full of questions she hadn’t asked. The way her arm fitted so well with mine, as if we’d spent our lives as the long separated halves of a whole. It had been a while since I’d been in the company of a woman in this way, nothing sexual, just tender companionship—far rarer than life generally seems to ration.

  I stepped out of the shower, stood naked in front of the steamed-up mirror, palmed it clear, and methodically flossed my teeth. I got dressed and went back down the corridor. I couldn’t even bring myself to look at Leonard’s door as I came into view. It had been too fine and normal a day to think about him. I went so far as to pretend the door was closed up permanently, plastered and wallpapered over—but as I passed by there was a voice from the other side:

  You know, they say, hundreds of thousands of years ago, there used to be more than one species of human.

  I stopped. I don’t know why, but I did. All normalcy bled out of me. Once again, there was Leonard’s voice, though weaker than usual, like a battered old boxer, an amputee soldier, a lion with a mortal wound.

  Hard to imagine, I know, but some say there were actually around six different human species. Till they all died off, that is, leaving just one surviving line … Sapiens. The big swinging dicks. The real question, though, is how we did it, how we Sapiens outlasted the rest. Well, one theory is that it’s because we went from walking on four legs to walking on two. Which makes sense. On two legs, we were able to see predators from afar. Not only that, but it freed up our arms, then our hands—and of course our thumbs. Perfect for making tools, right? Sharpening things. Killing things. Not without cost, of course. There’s always a cost for our little … progressions. You see, becoming bipeds also caused women’s birth canal to narrow, which meant they gave birth earlier, when the baby’s head was still small. Think about it. A foal stands up just after being born … but a baby, well, we all know a human baby is a useless thing. Needs to be cradled for months. Being born weak and useless meant that babies had to be left with the tribe so the moms could forage. Now how’s that for a fucking farce ’n a half? We take every short cut we can to get ahead, and then burden everyone with our inadequacies. What a joke. The fuss we make of ourselves, all our proud achievements, and it turns out the two things that define us most as a species are impatience and dependency.

  A chuckle.

  A hollow, knowing chuckle.

  Impatience … and dependency.

  After leaving food for Leonard, I took the car and fetched Jolene and Edgar. I’d insisted she pick the venue, and it turned out to be an upmarket grill-house. The kind of place where the waiters wore waistcoats and asked how we wanted our burger meat done. Our guy recommended toppings of blue cheese and glazed figs, and suggested we pair our selections with a pinotage. Jolene enthusiastically agreed, and once the waiter had left, she spoke a bit about Edgar. She told me how he’d been struggling at school, and how every now and again he’d wake up in the night after a bad dream about all the rhinos being dead or the ice caps melting. These kinds of things really worried him, she said. Things she couldn’t do anything about.

  Edgar didn’t seem fazed by us talking about him. He didn’t even look up from his drawing. The waiter had brought him paper and pens, and it hadn’t taken him long to sketch a woman with wings, and a red dragon, and a man in dark sunglasses. The image looked familiar to me but I couldn’t recall where I’d seen it before. I didn’t bother asking Edgar what it was about; I’d hated those questions as a kid, adults blabbing at me, pretending they were doing me some kind of favour.

  Jolene went on to explain how tricky things had been, how she’d had to move from one job to the next. And then—it seemed she couldn’t help herself—she brought up Leonard again. I wondered whether she knew how often she spoke about him—not really about him but around him, like a spiral turning endlessly towards its own unreachable centre. I went in and out of boredom and jealousy, short bursts, not caring at all and then caring too much.

  Jolene ordered another bottle of wine. She changed the topic and asked if I had a girlfriend. When I said I didn’t, she asked what kind of women I liked.

  I told her, The kind who like me back.

  That, according to her, made things easy then.

  I said I was inclined to disagree.

  A Caramel-Banana-Sponge-Daydream was deposited in front of Edgar, and we had two amarettos. The bill arrived and I paid. It was only later that I realised I hadn’t checked the total, most unlike me, Mr. Every-Cent-Spent.

  I looked up at Jolene. Sweet, sweet Jolene.

  As we got up to leave, she said she’d spotted a tan line where the waiter’s wedding ring had once been.

  Me, I hadn’t noticed that.

  You’re late. I was starting to think you weren’t coming back.

  The voice drifted into the corridor as I walked past Leonard’s door.

  Was it a good night? Fun?

  He didn’t wait for a reply.

  I wish I could tell you how late you are, but hey, I don’t have the time on me. No time at all. It’s a funny story, actually. If you’ve got a moment in your new busy social life, I’ll tell you about it. C’mon. Take off my tie. Kick off my shoes. Relax. You see, I was doing just fine, keeping track of each day. Until the other morning. Couldn’t figure out which day it was. It just fell out of my head. And you know what? There’s no way to get it back. No clock. No calendar. No nothing. So that’s it for me—time’s out of my grip. Like it’s not a real thing. But I’ve gotta be honest, chief, not knowing how long I’ve been in here, not knowing how long I have to go any more, it’s the most terrifying feeling. Yeah, Jazz Man. Makes me sweat, gives me the shakes. Makes me wanna gnaw through the wall. Time. Time. Time. Who’d have thought, imagined? It’s been cocaine, sugar, nicotine … my entire life, not helping at all, just poisoning me.

  But, hey, this doesn’t change one important little fact, my friend—that tonight … you were late.

  Next afternoon, I fetched Jolene and we dropped Edgar off with his sitter. We drove to the coast in the Jaguar, top down in the warm sun, to where Leonard docked the Britomartis. Jolene’s hair danced in the wind as fields of white flowers and lush grasslands rushed by. There was a fixed smile of satisfaction on her lips, as if she’d had a good dream, and it was all somehow happening just as she’d pictured it.

  A picture that somehow, miraculously, included me.

  The white-walled harbour town turned out to be postcard-pretty, with trendy gourmet pancake houses, art galleries, coffee shops, and bars. Street corners were enlivened by guitar-plucking buskers. It was the kind of place you might fantasise about as a permanent home, instinctively knowing that you’d inevitably get tired of it, and no longer have a place worth fantasising about.


  We drove straight to the water. I knew nothing about yachts but it was obvious that the Britomartis was a magnificent piece of engineering. We went on board to find a bedroom, a fully equipped galley, and a bar that was half-stocked. Jolene told me how Leonard had taken her out a few times but she’d always get seasick. It was too bad, she said, since she loved being on the boat. Its self-sufficiency gave her a sense of comfort, the idea that the boat had everything it needed to go out on its own. Boats aren’t stuck on the land as buildings are, hooked up to grids and bound one to another by a system of pipes and wires.

  We left the yacht and walked the narrow streets of the town. Ask me what we spoke about and I couldn’t really tell you. We chatted about the things we saw in various shop windows, found handmade satchels and vintage hats we thought were quaint and unusual but couldn’t quite bring ourselves to bag. And then, as a plan of sorts, we bought a selection of foods from a patisserie, stopped by a liquor store, and went back to the boat, where we sat on the deck as we ate and polished off a bottle of Moët & Chandon. Later, we crawled below to make drunken love for the first time.

  Nice day out?

  Yeah, sure it was. I can smell. I know that perfume. You think I don’t know it, but I know it. Her favourite. Because I bought it for her. And now, it’s all over you. Which can only mean you’ve met up with her. Right? I don’t know how you found her. Or she found you. But that’s irrelevant. D’you have a good time? Take her out for a spin? I don’t want to pop that big bubble you’re bouncing around in, but you think she’s with you for you? I mean, does she even know who you are? Does she know about your real life, your miserable moping from one bar to the next? Living in that hole? I’m sure you’re doing just great so far—got enough money to keep her interested. But let’s not fool ourselves. That’s all you’ve got. You’ve got nothing substantial to offer her. Nothing real. You know it and she knows it and I know it. But you know what is real? This locked door. These walls. This empty room. This nothing. It’s this that is real—and you, my friend, are in a dream. A dream I know well. One in which you’re loved—and can love back—when the reality is, you’re nothing more than a reflection of a reflection of a stranger.