It annoyed him when people did that and he said so. She wanted to know why so many things annoyed him so much. He told various plausible stories about why so many things annoyed him so much. She shook her head and said she did not want plausible stories, she wanted the real explanation. He said he did not have it. She said it was time for him to do the internal work of finding it. He nodded and said that makes sense. He was trying to be calm and steady, because above all he did not want to freak her out again. She did not feel afraid now, but she knew that was because he was not angry now. The question was what would happen when he became angry again.
He understood that her internal life had to be large and intense. To find these qualities she had to find someone whom she regarded as having certain disturbing and solemn pathologies that were however not diseases but rather merely chronic choices in the direction of destruction. To her it was clear what destruction was and that it was bad. To him it was clear that he had hurt her feelings. He wanted to unhurt her feelings but it was like unsharpening a pencil. He would have to contribute more emotion than she, but this very contribution would hurt her again. He did not know what to do and she did not know what she wanted. This all occurred in a cottage by the sea where they lived on Treasuries and, with shells and condoms, armed themselves against children and the needy that they might instead breathe the rarified air of this sappy theater.
They did from time to time do things in the ordinary sense of doing. They cut firewood, made dinner, cleaned up, fed animals, read books, played bridge with friends, drank iced tea with family, emailed politicians, hung out with doctors, drug dealers, painters, even an arborist.
They enjoyed tennis because there were no teams in tennis. They would typically just hit, but sometimes they would play matches. The man almost always won because he was better at tennis. Faster, stronger. When this happened she would be sullen on the drive back home, then over dinner or lunch they would move on. When she won he would be sullen until the following morning. He would sleep it off. He would wake up wondering how he was still a child about such stupid things as tennis.
In this way he made tennis progressively less enjoyable for both of them, and as in tennis, so elsewhere. In increasingly efficient loops he burned through the things they liked, the things they loved, the things they had not yet tried. Desires became stupid. Friends and family became narrow. She had formerly wanted kids. What happened to that? A methodical analysis of the hopes at hand. The hope of finding out what this new person is like, the hope of a more perfect mutual understanding. The utopian picture operative in these hopes was, he claimed, the picture of a merging such as the parent had not achieved with anyone thus far in his or her life. This was, he asserted, not only an impossibly high standard to impose on the child, but also precisely the machinery that ensured the child could not be new. Therefore the two hopeful expectations, namely of the child's newness and of an unprecedented connectedness between it and the parent, were, he conjectured, contradictory. The baby could be at most a baby in her life. The kid, a kid. The adolescent, an adolescent. The adult, another limited adult. None of it was more than what it was. And he knew what it was, could reduce its dimensionality more quickly than she, and so she would believe him then as she had believed him before.
It took her years to see what was happening, years to understand that his reduction of a complex ensemble to its average tendencies aborted those tendencies which had not yet emerged or which were incompletely, inaccurately, or lossily characterized in his averages; that a prediction at time T reduces variance at time T+1; that a model (efficient dimensionality reduction) of some portion of the world reduces dimensionality not just within the model but within the world as a whole; that analysis permanently consumes potential as much as any other decomposition or burning; that even growth is an emergent property of precisely that irreversible consumption of potential which is destruction; that entropy is relentless, immanent.
It took her years to realize he was an oppressor. It took her one night to be rid of him.
He was sleeping. The wool blanket up to his chin. The moonlight coming through the large windows of their cabin. She got out of bed and walked over to the knife block, her hands trembling. He heard her get up but assumed she was going to the bathroom as she had hundreds of times before. She removed the knife quietly. He was already asleep again. She walked over to him and cut his throat. She was terrified, so she set down the knife and covered his neck with the blanket. That was the last time she saw his face. She stepped out of the cabin. The cool, still summer night. In the air the moisture of tomorrow's rain, the smell of leaves, fir trees, seaweed, salt water. She blinked the tears from her eyes, walked down the porch steps and into the mossy forest. It was darker here and she had to feel around with her feet. It hurt to walk on the twigs and roots. She made her way down the forest path to the beach. "Oh, my dear John," she thought. "My poor John."
In no time she was caught and went to jail. After a year in jail she went to trial and was convicted.
Well, sure, now that you have made a big deal out of it, it is a big deal, said the judge wisely. You killed your husband. That is a horrible thing. It does not become less horrible simply because you are fundamentally a boring person or because you did it for the same sorts of reasons anyone has ever done anything. It does not become less horrible just because there have been greater horrors, or because those greater horrors were first glorified and then treated as predictable, even tedious. It all makes perfect sense if you think about it (you think you are identifying some sort of paradox, but you are not, you are just young and stuck); the greater horrors were glorified because they were great, i.e., out of distribution, i.e., quite unusually large, and so we glorify them for that statistical property, as we always do in such cases, because that is the statistical property definitive of glory. And then at depth in history they become normal because memories fade. Every imprint, every recording drops some information. But I can't explain all these topics, I am a judge and therefore a busy man. The important point is that this is a case of murder, and the murder was neither great in scale, nor original in direction, nor distant in memory, so we just feel, like, "Oh god, she killed her husband. She sliced him open like a catfish. His carotid exploded on the furniture. She was found on the beach covered in his blood, her feet in the sea, looking out at the ocean/night/moon." The judge had been lately dealing with too many cases too grisly for his kind heart and so was in the process of losing his mind, that is, his conviction that he could do justice to reality in that formal language to which he had long ago committed himself.
Local news outlets published reports and an op-ed about the murder. Anecdotes about the couple surfaced. They had been wild. Addicts. Residents of the houses across the harbor often heard screaming coming from the cabin. All of these reports were false, but people lie to those they love so why wouldn't they lie to reporters? The interviewed generally understand the call, the stakes and terms of attention.
The op-ed said the murder was a symptom of this or that. The author had a theory and wanted to talk about his theory in front of an audience, and he saw this story as one way to get that audience.
Movies were made, eventually, because the major media platforms were desperate and violence is the only content that scales.
The murder in the cabin therefore paid the hourly wages of hundreds of workers who would not otherwise have received work, as well as the annual salaries of workers whose existence was contingent upon a relatively steady stream of such stories and cases, and a portion of these incomes serviced the very debt on which both criminal and victim had briefly subsisted.
Which is not to say that everything is circular. There is wear at each turn.
------
The neighbor who suggested the pair were addicts did not explicitly say they were addicts. She merely recounted, in that solemn tone which was so effective among her friends, a dull story about walking down the road one garbage day (Thursday), passing the top of the couple's driveway, and noticing that their trash bins had been looted, the bags ripped open, and the contents scattered — presumably the work of raccoons, who usually do this when the trash bins' tops have been improperly latched and when the trash has not been double-bagged and securely knotted at the top. So from their trash you already know these people are not particularly diligent — or socially conscientious, for that matter, because they are making the whole town a target for raccoons, whereas if everyone in the area were more diligent and socially conscientious, the raccoons would know that this is a tough town and they would move on to some other, easier town. But the main point was that she had found "certain paraphernalia" in the scattered trash, mixed in among discarded household items.
This neighbor understood that doing drugs was different from being addicted to drugs, but she wanted her report to give the impression that the couple had been addicted to drugs, so she followed her story about the trash with a short discourse on addiction, to the effect that it is a commitment to the belief that the symptom is the disease. She said all this because she was a mother of two and had watched as, one by one, her children's friends had dropped off the map and reemerged, emaciated and stinking, hollowed-out in the eyes, and in the mind as mushy as brown bananas. Her own children were, fortunately, well, but this woman was not such a lizard as to conclude that the issue was therefore not her business. She had loved those other kids too, had seen their promise, their wide hopes. Had watched as rosy hunger faded into jaundiced need, as steady-breathing lungs gradually suffocated in the mucous of poverty or the thin air of a parentless universe without center, warmth, or dignity.
So it was understandable that she curated her comments, to the reporter, in such a way as to imply that the pair were addicts, and it was understandable that she used the word "paraphernalia" to bypass the detail that the paraphernalia in question had been a vape, and it was understandable that she lied about finding this paraphernalia at the top of the couple's driveway. She had, after all, found it at the top of some driveway, she was not certain which driveway it had been, and so really she could not be certain that it was not the couple's driveway. It could have been, and so her report was plausibly not a lie.
In any case, even setting aside her own desire to be quoted in the article, she had every reason to talk about all of this with the reporter in the hope that it might do something to further the project of fixing a real problem (the opioid crisis). Did she believe she had some ideas that might be of service in the solution of this real problem? Yes, but those ideas were not the point of her comments. The point was to do her part in centralizing everyone's attention on a concrete, scaled, stable, solvable problem, not on some silly murder, already safely entombed by death, prison, and the insularity and insignificance of its actors.
What was her solution? How did she understand the opioid crisis? She believed that, at base, people were in a great deal of pain and were trying to alleviate that pain. Because certain techniques and incentives (which are also techniques) did in fact exist, it was nowadays possible to alleviate a great deal of pain, but this very possibility made it that much more difficult to investigate the pain, understand its true source, and uproot that source, once and for all. She believed that if people could give themselves over to this process of locating and uprooting the source of the pain, rather than attacking and numbing the pain, they could be happy. Even if their fathers had beaten their mothers, even if the police had beaten their fathers and sons dead, even if they had too few existentially gratifying opportunities available to them. Now, when she interrogated her solution with real rigor, did she actually believe that it was applicable to all these many, varied circumstances? No, of course not. But she did believe it was a solution for some people who were in pain, and she did believe that addicts were a subset of those. She believed all this because she could only come up with one dreadful alternative explanation — viz., that people were understimulated, that the only really engaging stimulus was irreversible commitment, and that all irreversible commitments took the same form.
------
She finished reading the article that she was quoted in. She turned her phone off and set it down next to her ass on the couch. She looked at her pink hands, their folds. She stared at the floor. She inhaled deeply and exhaled. Alan was asleep. The cats were asleep. She was alone in the living room. The windows open. Night sounds. Crickets, wind in the trees, creaks and pops of the house, soft peels of a distant bell buoy. "There is not enough time," she thought, her head lolling to one side. "I was trying to be better than my mother. Then I was trying to be different. Then I was trying to love her without hurting her and I just never got it right." She looked around the room as if to remember what she was now trying to do. Her daughter's painting hanging over the fireplace. The heaviness, looking at the painting, feeling the feeling, deeply and repeatedly, until she could not feel it anymore, at which point she put on her headphones and listened to Bud Powell's "Sure Thing." When it ended she played it again and wept. She did this for several hours.
------
Her daughter comes home. Alan is asleep again. The mother and the daughter talk. The mother seems sad. The daughter does not understand what the mother is so sad about. The daughter works and has a child of her own and has no time. The mother is retired and has all the time in the world. That is how the daughter sees it.
The daughter notices that the mother's thinking has a fragility, slides into the same trenches. They bicker as ever when they remember things differently. The mother recalls that the daughter never liked ballet, the daughter says, "I remember liking it a lot." The mother says, "I don't think so." But the divergences are now more frequent, and the mother's fraying confidence in the integrity of her own mind forces her to decide between that one happy result which is convincing the daughter that she never liked ballet, or else retreating, no longer to an inner fortress of certainty, but to a nagging doubt. "Am I so far gone that I have forgotten that she liked ballet?" The risk profile of discussing something important to the mother is therefore dreadful. The reward can be at most the daughter's sour agreement that the mother was correct about some trivia. The losses become potentially limitless as the depth of the cognitive instability approaches that core of shared experience without which the status of their relationship as mother and daughter would be little more than a mixed bag of manners and a vague familiarity. So they move on to some topic smaller than ballet, and then smaller again, and so on until it is too small to see, and they are left staring open-mouthed at their two brains, in different stages of decay, ticking down these last hours together.
The following day as she and her father are getting their things together for a picnic on the beach she asks him what he has been up to. "Nothing," he says, shaking his head. He bends down to velcro his sandals. She laughs. She follows him, watching as he teeters down the porch steps and onto the trail. "I don't know what," he says, the last word accented, its terminal plosive sharp and unreleased. "The time just passes."
On Sunday night she drives back to the city. She rolls down the windows, does not buckle her seatbelt. A cop clocks her doing 98mph in a 70mph zone. He gives her a ticket for going 10-14mph over the speed limit. He does this concisely, without theater or lecture, because these interactions make him sick. He does not like his job anymore. Years ago it had its charms. These days he just wants to get home to his wife and kids. He does not want to be here, giving this woman some tedious lecture about why driving fast is bad.
