Out of the Loop

Mothers covered children’s eyes. An old woman crossed herself as she crossed the road to avoid him. Ordinary tasks became inexplicably difficult. Talking for one. Even buying cigarettes now involved complexity. “Card or cash?” asked the girl in Żabka. The insect froze. Where voice once…

There is a room with no door. A child is in it. He doesn’t pace, nor does he scream. He stands perfectly still, hands lifted slightly in front of him, palms open, as if expecting to collide with something yet to exist. The room has…

He wakes into a kind of edgeless pressure. It was just a bad dream, he tells himself. Another failed media job. This time in London. Three days. A new record. He reaches for the phone while the dream still sits close to the skin, or…

The Man went to the border several times. Later he would tell himself he went because History was happening. Which was true. History was happening. “History is happening,” he said to O one day. “Can I borrow the car for the day?” The Editor okays…

The lake is still frozen, but not enough to trust. Hyde Park this time, though one lake can seem very much like any other. Our quartet circle it, as they do. Somewhere on the lake, a yacht is being launched and on it a party.…

An open mic stand-up evening in a St Denis bar. Lacan is halfway through a joke, something involving desire, the Other, the signifier, the mother. Or perhaps the mother-in-law, the Editor says. A cigarette held between his fingers like a Gallic Bill Hicks, the Frenchman…

The Man is adamant. He is not angry. “No, I am not angry,” he snorts. “How preposterous!” The Boy looks at him with open contempt. Not because the statement is false – the Boy has long since ceased to be surprised by falsity – but…

“Have you learnt nothing?” said Joanna. The Man looked at her with the expression of a schoolboy confronted by a teacher who has acquired access to his internet history. “Some things,” he said slowly, carefully reading her face. “Name one.” He considered lying, which had…

The lecture hall is three-quarters full. There are therapists, NGO women, someone from HR, two students who have come by mistake and a bearded Czech man in a linen jacket who thinks he is attending something called “Reimagining Masculinity in Central Europe.” He isn’t. At…

The Man thinks perhaps sex should come later in the book. Or not at all. They are all there now. Lacan. Freud. The Holy Father. The Publisher. The Editor. The Boy. M1. O. M2. The Writer too, sitting slightly apart wearing the hunted look of…