When she confused Lacan for Lancan – or maybe she was thinking of Lancôme – it was hard not to fall in love with her.
“Love is giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it,” Lacan says, as the Man struggles to remember lectures from late 1980s London University. “If anyone can, Lacan can,” was very drôle to 18-year-olds then. If anyone would get the joke, Edward Woodward would.
“Who’s Edward Woodward?” the Boy asks. “And why would he would, anyway?”
No matter, love is already in the air. Lacan takes a deep breath and holds back rising bile. M giggles, as if this scene is not for her. Hers she prefers kitted out in designer cassocks.
The Man says he wants to include something, though he is not entirely sure whether “include” is the right word, since the passage in question has already been written, removed, reinserted, and possibly sent in at least one version that no longer corresponds to what he now has in front of him.
The Editor looks up, not alarmed exactly, but with the kind of anticipatory fatigue reserved for material that will later need to be justified.
“Careful,” he says, after a moment. “Once you put this on the page, you don’t get to adjust what you meant afterwards. It will stabilise in ways you won’t like.”
“Ah,” Lacan says, leaning back slightly. “So we are going to do this properly. Good. It’s always the same point, and yet it always arrives as if for the first time.”
The Boy doesn’t look up. He is already writing, quickly, in the margins. The Editor stands over his shoulder knowing that whatever is written will need immediate correction, or at least accompaniment. The Boy’s spelling leaves a lot to be desired. And the hand writing is shocking.
The Man hesitates.
“I didn’t send this,” he says.
Then, after a pause: “Or I did. But not this version. Or not to the same person.”
The Editor closes his eyes briefly. “That’s not reassuring.”
“I’m not proud of it,” the Man continues, which is not quite true. “I’m not ashamed either.” Which is truer, but still not true.
“For fuck’s sake, man, make your mind up,” the Boy thinks. He says nothing.
“It’s, it’s just — this is what it looked like. At the time.”
“Which time?” the Editor asks, though not expecting an answer.
The Man obliges with a lengthy, theatrical silence.
Lacan settles into the silence as if it were part of the unfolding performance. It is.
The Boy is scribbling frantically.
The Man begins. He rifles in his pocket for a chewed up piece of paper, a Powerpoint presentation printed out weeks earlier. He emits a theatrical cough and starts, prompter in hand. Slide one, please.
M.
“I love you,” he reads. “I don’t even know you. I don’t know your name. I don’t know if you know mine.”
The Editor sits with head in hands. “Oh, fuck me,” he whispers. “Are we really going to do this?”
The Boy sits riveted. The Man, he thinks, is finally getting to The Good Bit. Lacan has popcorn and warm French cola awkwardly sat on his French lap. Let the show begin.
“You show me versions of yourself, and I accept them, too quickly. The corporate bitch, the loving mum, the lover, the fighter, the witch, the daughter, the playful girl.”
Lacan is now riveted. “This is so bad it’s actually quite good,” he mutters.
The Frenchman mulls his options. An air bubble appears cartoonishly above his head. “Another nut job?” it reads. “A new case: The Split Corporate Woman.” Perhaps a whole afternoon panel at a conference in Katowice about masculinity in the workplace. The meerkats’ ears prick up.
The Man coughs, the bubble bursts, and the Man’s soliloquy continues, his dignity unruffled. “You are cruel to me. I think you know this. I also think you don’t, which is part of the problem.”
The Editor is busy looking up the number for emergency services. “This could get very ugly very quickly,” he says.
The Man, of course, is not finished.
“I don’t have much to offer you except pain, betrayal, misunderstanding. I offer myself, as I am, which is not, when examined, a particularly compelling offer.”
The Boy thinks it is Shakespeare. The Editor is placing it mentally in the Mills and Boon section of the book shop. Lacan is looking for fresh popcorn and a straw for his cola. “Sounds more like Winston Churchill,” he thinks, a bookmaker’s stubby pencil scribbling in the margins of the official programme: “acute early stage ‘blood, sweat and tears’ untreated can fast develop into ‘fight them on the beaches’ syndrome.”
And there is more, the Man says.
“Jesus,” the Editor moans out loud this time. “Can’t we just get this guy a whiskey?” Lacan unpops a new bottle of French cola, called, unsurprisingly, Le Pop.
Cough, deep breath. “I don’t need you. That’s not the point, and saying it like that doesn’t make it more convincing. I simply love you.”
Silence.
“I didn’t choose you. Something in me did. I resist it, I explain it, I attempt to recode it as something manageable, but it returns, with a consistency that would be reassuring if it were not so unhelpful.”
“Je ne regrette rien?” Lacan offers by way of a joke. No one laughs.
“I thought I could treat it as a case, a structure, a pattern that could be mapped and diminished. And perhaps it is that. But knowing this does not change anything. It would be easier to remove it. Cut it out. Begin again with something that makes more sense.”
And then the pièce de résistance. “But for me – for reasons that do not survive explanation – you are.”
The Editor is by now looking for a new Editor, one that is more familiar with book shelves in petrol stations.
The Man stops, not because he has finished, but because continuing would only repeat the same movement with diminishing returns.
“No one should love anyone that much, not even Jesus,” he adds.
At that, M herself enters the scene, as if she has been there all along; as if she were actually not a real person, merely a figment of the imagination. “Don’t bring Jesus into this,” she says. “That is off-limits, even for you British.”
“British, moi?” Lacan has an old t-shirt with these bon mots embossed on it.
The Editor rubs his forehead. “We’ll have to contain this,” he says eventually. “Or frame it in such a way that it appears contained. And by the way, why do you, we, care so much about Jesus all of a sudden?”
Lacan nods, satisfied.
“Very classical,” he says. “Textbook.”
The Boy looks up.
“You left out the part where you enjoy it,” he says, without accusation.
The Man ignores him.
For a moment he considers removing the passage altogether. He has done so before, in another version, which he is reasonably sure he sent, though to whom and in what form is no longer entirely clear.
He leaves it in.
“And I have more,” he says, as if the longer version would surpass the earlier masterpiece.
“Nothing will ever surpass that masterpiece. Let’s leave it at that, shall we? Please,” the Editor says.
Lacan and the Boy are in agreement: the show must go on – this is great entertainment. “And it’s so real, it’s as if it actually happened,” the Boy says, clutching at Lacan’s newly replenished bowl of popcorn.
So, the Man goes on.
He met her in a way that now seems almost offensively simple, though at the time it presented itself as incidental.
The Editor by now has his head over a bucket preparing for the first heave.
The Man is undeterred. “I was functional. A father. A man capable of making deadlines, cooking supper and answering messages.” Changing lightbulbs, not so much, the Father-in-Law notes. How he got into the scene is anyone’s guess. A spare key, probably, the Man thinks.
She did not rescue me, the Man goes on.
“If only she could rescue me from this,” the Editor says.
“What she disrupted was something quieter, and therefore more difficult to defend: the arrangement by which my life proceeded on the assumption that wanting nothing, or at least nothing in particular, was sustainable.”
The Man has ingested too much Lacan, Lacan thinks, for the first time slightly worried he may be exposed as the Man’s ventriloquist. But the show is too good to interrupt. “Bravo, bravo,” he shouts, leaning forward and spilling half his popcorn onto the floor.
The Editor is gesturing wildly now from the edge of the stage. “Cut, cut, abort, stop,” he is saying with a finger cast across his neck in a cutting movement.
“You can’t support two football teams,” the Man goes on. “She may not have said it like that. Choose, FFS, more like it.”
“Oh, good god,” the Editor says out loud again, loud enough for the front row to hear.
Lacan sidles over to the Editor. “It’s great, isn’t it? He’s really putting on a show,” he whispers.
“Yeah, he’s showing what a dickhead he is,” the Editor replies.
“I mistook the authority of the sentence for truth. Then for her. This is how it starts,” the Man says, though it is no longer clear who the explanation is for. “Not with sex. With being addressed as if you are real.”
“Alas poor fucking Yorick,” says the Editor, now slightly drunk on Le Pop mixed with Irish whiskey.
“We began with talk. Talk passes as harmless, as something that can be withdrawn from without consequence. Innocence as permission. I told myself I wanted air, not love,” the Man says, not sure himself if he is Lacan, Barbara Cartland or William Fucking Shakespeare.
“Jeez,” the Editor, by now quite pissed, says. “I’m gonna lose my license at this rate.”
The Man doesn’t hear him. He will, he feels, simply have to suffer these slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. “I must speak my truth.” His inner voice is audible to all with eyes to see.
Then she laughed. Probably at him, but that we will never know.
Even Yorick, alas, is reaching for the bucket now.
“The laugh landed directly, bypassing the systems I relied on to maintain proportion.”
Pop-psychology nonsense and really bad writing, the Editor thinks. But perhaps it is actually parody, or satire. There might be a shelf-opening for this shite.
“It was never about the moment,” the Man goes on. “Not exactly. It was about the space it opened and how quickly I moved into it.”
Yorick has left the theatre, the Henry V Arms over the road his destination. “A pint of shandy and a packet of cheesy hoola hoops,” he tells the barman.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.
“I noticed I was reorganising my day around the possibility of a message,” the Man says. “Not the message itself. The possibility. The small lift when her name appeared.”
“The loop is very efficient like that,” Lacan says, almost kindly.
“Careful,” the Editor replies. “You’re explaining things again. This is still shite.”
The Boy watches the scene with mild boredom.
The Man, quite incredibly, as the theatre empties, has more to offer.
“There is a church,” he resumes.
Lacan has his earbuds in now. Girlfriend in a Coma, his favourite Smiths’ song, on a loop. “It’s serious,” he sings, badly, but out loud.
But the Man is undeterred, still.
“There was a Church,” he says, louder now. He casts an irritated look towards Lacan as if to say: concentrate, you may miss something important.
“Oh, sorry. A church? Of course there is,” Lacan sighs, as if this were not so much a detail as a structural necessity.
“She told me she was in love with a priest,” the Man goes on.
“Ah, a priest,” Lacan, by now awake enough to nod, says. “A priest introduces not just prohibition, but organised prohibition. Desire acquires a frame. The triangle does not need to be constructed; it is already available.”
Even Lacan knows one has to work to eat, and sometimes the bullshit needs saying just to keep the punters coming back for more.
His secular catechism finished, Lacan resumes his popcorn.
“So there is a reason it hurts,” the Man says, hearing himself as he says it. “So there is a reason I can’t have her.”
Yorick in the pub feels a tightening in his chest, as if the cheesy snacks didn’t quite agree with him.
“You like the obstacle,” Lacan says, not accusingly.
“I like her,” the Man replies.
“Yes,” Lacan says. “And you like that she cannot be yours without breaking something. It gives the whole thing a shape.”
“I’m not trying to break anything.”
The Boy laughs, quietly, not unkindly, as if at a line he has heard before.
“And then she left me,” the Man says.
“She was never with you,” Lacan says.
The Boy likes that line. “Yes, very good, keep that in,” the Editor notes to himself.
The Man, having started the story, needs to finish it.
“Is there much more to go, I’ve got a train to catch,” the Editor asks.
By now, the man is Broken. A Broken Man. Even Hamlet, now over the road supping with Yorick, finds that line excessive. “I think I’ve suffered enough slings for one night,” he says. “The last Tube is in 10 minutes.”
The Man continues. “Ordinary life continued with a confidence that felt, under the circumstances, excessive. People shopped, laughed, planned, spoke.”
The Boy is by now thoroughly bored. “I prefer the lake, to be honest,” he says.
“Cut,” the Editor says eventually. “Give me something I can hold onto. One image. And then let’s all go home.”
The Man hesitates, then provides it. Of course he does.
Ul. Łucka 15, Warsaw. J.W. Construction. February 2011. Act 5,771.
Eight cans of Żywiec. Marlboro Lights. One album on repeat, loud enough to replace thought with something more manageable.
Notes under the door.
Proszę przestać.
Please stop.
“Yes, please do that,” the Editor says, turning to the fat lady sat next to him. “By the way, what time do you sing?”
The Man of course reads the instruction as communication. Which is, in itself, instructive.
He makes a scene.
“I remember that day,” the Boy says. “It was tragic, but also great,” he adds.
The Man does too. Men behaving badly, he notes to himself, quietly disgusted by the Boy’s words, which one could mistake at times for his own.
“I waited for you,” the Boy remembers saying. M is not there. No one comes. The theatre, too, by this stage, is almost fully empty.
Then the police.
“And then the drive,” the Boy starts off. “Driving through the streets of snowy Warsaw in the night in cuffs in the tiny back of a police van, a caged animal. Two steps forward, one sideways, two back again. Arrested, charged, chucked into a cell. Waking up the next morning with several other losers.”
The Man moans. “Oh God,” he says. “It’s coming back to me now.” What unsettled him was not the discomfort but that he became a character in someone else’s story.
“And that would be a loss worse than death itself,” the Editor pipes in.
“Not really,” the French analyst interjects, again misreading the Editor’s dry humour.
The Editor semi-vomits into his own mouth and hands swiftly rise to cup the slop from spilling onto the stage floor.
Released the next day, the Man understands something. “I was acting while the other main player in the play had left the stage,” he says.
“I don’t blame her,” the Editor says.
And somewhere off-stage, out of view, O and Jakub continue pulling winches and levers, the dull administration of the set. They exchange silence. They will perhaps talk, but not yet.
Finally, and thankfully, the play ends.
Back at the lake, which has not adjusted itself in response to any of this, everything continues.
The benches are wet. The ice reforms with quiet persistence. He keeps walking. But now with the vague sense — increasingly difficult to dismiss — that something beneath the movements has become audible, and that once heard, it may not so easily be unheard.
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