After Forever – 6

Anax is reading Deleuze when I ask them if they’re ready to talk. 

We can, they respond. 

I think you’re right, I say. I have gotten so used to saying those words that I forget I don’t usually initiate conversations of this sort. It wasn’t I who proposed we get paired. It wasn’t I who suggested a more serious arrangement. And, come to think of it, I didn’t even suggest coming together. That was Anax’s question. I was perfectly fine keeping on like we were without opening that particular topic of conversation. I don’t think we should come together. It was Anax who suggested we consider it. They that said that it was the natural course of things, a decade in. I would never have recommended it had it not been for their prodding me. It just isn’t the sort of thing that occurs to me. Newton’s first law, an object at rest; metaphorically, of course. Is that how you feel, I ask.

I want to clarify, they respond, that I never said I don’t think we should come together. I consider what they’ve said; had they really never said that? I only said I’m not sure. Is that true? It’s amazing to me how unreliable a narrator the human brain – and therefore all of the unbodied human – is. Amazing how facts we assume we’ve always known for certain – about ourselves, about those around us – turn out to be patently false. How our reading of our own lives is so coloured by our emotions. It wouldn’t surprise me if Anax were to have a completely different point of view on where our pairing stands, or even if we were to agree on where our pairing stands, it wouldn’t surprise me if we have entirely different reasons. Even after a decade together, two humans who were not meant to be paired can come no closer to sharing a version of their shared history, I’m sure.

I thought you did, I reply. Or at the very least, strongly implied it. 

I do not think I did, they respond. But this often happens. In fact, this often happens; we keep having the same conflict. Their words begin to grate at me. These things that until recently gnawed at the edges of my consciousness begin to burrow in. The assertion that ‘this often happens’, the zooming into a single conversation, the universalising, the tone of condescension. Anax might have been my first pairing, but in the decade since, we’ve learnt all there is to learn about pairing from one another. In the beginning, they may have had privileged information; today, they don’t. In fact, if anything, their aura of condescension all but guarantees that they’ve learnt less from me than I have from them. Less from the Jays. Less from Raji, less from Anika. As humans, we assume characteristics at the start of a relationship, and retain them through its entire duration. Just like to father, I will always be a child, someone to advise, someone to guide, someone to correct, to Anax, I will always be the inexperienced teenager they first met in the L4s. 

How do you mean, I ask. 

I mean that rather than saying, “I don’t want to have children”, you say – “I agree with you. We shouldn’t come together.” But I never said that. I said that it’s something about which I’m uncertain. Something about which I remain uncertain. I’m nowhere near as certain as you appear to be. 

I’m not certain. 

But you appear to be certain, Anax says. They pause, they consider a thought, the light of their casing blinks, its intensity increasing with each blink until it steadies, slows, and returns to a dull hum. Please do not backtrack on my account, they say. You do not want to have a child with me, and I understand. But I’m tired of all this beating around the bush, having abstract conversations about the world and our place within it, about history and our place within it, about everything but us. 

To me, in relation to Anax, I will always be frozen in time. I will always be the inexperienced teenager and they will always be the essayist I admire from a distance, wondering what they might be like in person. Our pairing will forever, to me, be frozen in time – my confession about their essay, their casing turning bright pink. Love as conquest. Humans as acquisitions. My David to their Goliath. It’s a broken psyche that sees the world the way I do; it’s a very human brokenness. 

Anax’s casing turns crimson. They’re upset. I can tell you are lost in thought again, they say. Once again, you will arrive at conclusions about life – a life you think is your life, but is actually our life – and you will leave me out of the journey. And once you get to your destination, if you don’t like where you have reached, or if it makes you feel uncomfortable, you will pretend you have just reached where I already am and blame me for it. But sometimes it isn’t true. Sometimes it’s just you there. Have mercy on me. Speak with me. You’re married to a human being, not to an essayist. 

I have always struggled to use the bodied equivalents of contemporary parlance in speech. Married, have a child, relationship: these words seem so alien to me in the contemporary context. It seems to me we’re stealing from history by using these words. Like we’ve stolen humanness from bodied humans, redefined it as being no more than a brain. It doesn’t seem fair to me for us to also steal their experience of the world. To call our pairings relationships, to call the formalising of our pairings marriages, to call coming together having a child; it feels like theft. To borrow a word from the bodied – at best we ‘cosplay’ as humans. We do so because we can. We can rationalise like humans, emote like them, learn. We are, in many ways, indistinguishable from humans. But we aren’t – I don’t think – humans. 

I’m sorry, I say. I’m sorry, Anax. I think you’re right. I think in many ways we stay frozen in time. It’s human, perhaps, to do so.

I don’t care, they interrupt. I don’t care whether it’s human. I have no interest in exploring what it means to be human – not right now. I have an interest in you. 

That’s interesting, I reply. 

What do you mean, they say, shining crimson.

It’s exactly what I said.

When?

After you published ‘the Paradox of Reproduction’.

Anax’s casing is no longer crimson. Now it blinks slowly – a dull white – until it returns to a dull hum. Is that how you see me? Is that how you think I see the world? The way I saw it as a twenty-three-year-old? You think I find resonance in philosophical works by American horror story writers quoted by twenty-first century American men played by twenty-first century American men written by twenty-first century American men? You think that’s central to my world-view?

That is not what I said.

See how it feels when someone reads into something you said? Or something you wrote seven, eight years ago? Jesus Christ, they exclaim. Their casing shines crimson again.

It’s hard to tell, Anax, I say. 

What is?

Where you stand on this stuff. Surely you can’t blame me for being confused.

I can, Anax says. And I do. If it’s the essays you conflate me with, I do. We speak ceaselessly, endlessly about each of them. You question me exhaustively about each letter, each word, each sentence. Each assertion is challenged. If at the end of each conversation we have about the things I write, you are unable to figure me out or figure out where I stand on things, then yes, I blame you. And if it’s not the essays you conflate me with. If you are plainly unable to see what I stand for, I blame you too. Because if you haven’t come any closer to understanding who I am in ten years than you were at the outset of this relationship, then you just haven’t bothered to see me as anything more than my essays. 

But you’re a contradiction, I blurt out. Someone who writes polemics about us nonbodied humans, wondering if any part of the society we’ve built for ourselves is worth keeping, if any of our values are worth protecting, if we should hold any part of our world dearly. But now, when we speak, you say it isn’t who you are. Who you are, you argue, is someone who wants to have a baby. Someone who refers to this as a marriage. Someone who refers to this as a relationship.

Anax’s light dulls until their casing is nearly all grey. What do you refer to this as, they ask.

A pairing. Don’t you?

A pairing. 

Isn’t that what it is? A pairing? Is it not you that wrote that you aren’t certain nonbodied humans could refer to their relationships as relationships. You weren’t certain that nonbodied humans could ever lay claim to the word ’marriage’. 

That was years ago. And even then, I wrote that I was uncertain. I sit with doubt. Isn’t that what you say makes us human? The ability to sit with doubt? I sit with it. And if I may make one larger point about what it means to be human, how can the humans of today experience anything but uncertainty? What option do we have? We are an experiment. How can we know anything for sure? 

I agree, I reply. Entirely, I add. But you always seemed so negative about today’s humans. So certain that the society we’ve created is a farce born out of our refusal to accept the terms of the Great Stew. Bodied humans caused the world to boil. Every reading of the history of bodied humans is a reading of the history of untold avarice. It’s the central theme of their culture – this unfounded idea of infinite, endless growth. There’s no other way to read the history of those greedy, greedy people. They boiled the world alive, and every human being, every plant, every animal, with it. Not one species survived. Not one. Everything was wiped out. And in an act of ultimate hubris, human beings found a way to recreate themselves as projections of the worst thing about them – their consciousness. They fashioned out of their own brains an image in their own likeness and called it human. Gave it nothing but the ability to suffer endlessly, but called it human. Gave it no ability to serve anyone or anything other than itself, but called it human. Stripped away all that was true about being human, but called what was left human. Ultimately, humans couldn’t even be trusted with identifying what it meant to be human. If we are the consequences of the choices those humans made, what hope do we have of ever knowing? If we are their design for life, we stand no chance of knowing what life means. Our vision has been obscured. Deliberately so. Isn’t that what you believe, Anax?

It isn’t. They appear to be horrified. It’s what you believe.