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At work the next day I read my emails in shock. Thirty of my Cybersenx Empaths have been reassigned to a new therapist. There is no P45 yet, but there is a request in my inbox to attend a department meeting at 6 p.m. yesterday. The email was sent at 6.17 p.m., after it had allegedly started: the usual game. I feel like publicly embarrassing Cybersenx with some sarcastic update about how my boss is unable to understand Greenwich Mean Time. I compose it, then delete it, then compose it.
Alek is due at 10 a.m. I decide to cancel my entire day’s appointments except for his; the Cybersenx system can reschedule them elsewhere. When Alek arrives, I ask breathlessly if, as a special treat, he would like to come to a gallery with me. His face is luminous. This feels good: fuck them, fuck them all.
There’s a tense moment as I guide Alek into the lift and a therapist from floor 4 asks where we’re going and I have to bullshit. At the front desk, the digital pen quivers in my hand as I sign him out, but the receptionist barely looks up from the Daily Mail on her tablet. We wait for my car outside Cybersenx. I’m tetchy, and Alek is visibly trembling, his eyes flitting from sky ads to traffic chaos, whispering apologies as passers-by barge past him. Finally, my car pulls up.
My tongue flicks across my temporary filling; I’m still keenly aware of the new presence in my mouth. I kept my appointment after slipping out of the temple. My dentist did not respond to 365my tearful attempts at flirting. No doubt he was programmed to politely ignore patients whose conversation extended outside accepted limits. So I went home and I confided in the Help. He was making me dinner and I watched him cut onions, dry-eyed, while I told him all about what a bastard my husband was and how the past was now a joke and how my life was in fragments and I could not conceive of constructing a future from them. The Help was soothing – he told me things would get better, and made me a cup of tea. He even offered Valium, which made me laugh before I diluted my tea with tears. Finn was dropped off by a friend’s car at eight, by which time I was able to summon a smile and read him a bedtime story. ‘That hurts,’ he protested, when I gave him a goodnight hug, a sudden fear winging across my mind: surely Jaime wouldn’t try to take Finn? Well, if he did, I’d kill him. For the first time I truly understood why most violence originates in the domestic.
Alek is smiling at me as though we’re two lovers sneaking out for an illicit rendezvous. I tear at my nails and consider a U-turn, but it’s too late: the car is curving around Millbank, sky ads reflected on the rippling Thames, and we’re soon dropped off at the grand white steps of Tate Britain. I command it to pick us up in two hours’ time.
in an age of social media and fake news, vincent van gogh’s paintings are a refreshing antidote: living, breathing examples of the real.
I haven’t been in a gallery in a long time. A fleeting memory tugs me: of walking round a gallery with Jaime, in Liverpool, which makes no sense. We’ve never travelled there together. I must be overtired.
I watch Alek gaze, wide-eyed, at Vincent’s early paintings. I 366consider the restrictions that have been put on him since birth, his internet browsing confined to artists who fit with his maker’s brief. I love that this is all such a shock to him.
We stop at ‘The Potato Eaters’. It’s painted in dour earths, for Van Gogh wanted its colours to be like ‘a really dusty potato, unpeeled of course’. Fuck Jaime. Here is ‘Starry Night Over the Rhône’. Alek sighs, and I want to hold him tight. I take a picture. ‘Starry Night’ translates poorly on screen and on postcards: the stars too dim, that electric blue washed out; the thick brush-strokes obscured. Its blue is so blue that I want to bathe in it. A full two minutes pass before my heart kicks with the memory of Jaime.
Alek keeps muttering. ‘His algorithms, you can see them evolving, you can see him moving from the classical to …’
‘Post-impressionism,’ I reply.
He studies the notes by each painting. The exhibition is focused on the myth of Van Gogh as outlaw and outsider: mad, ragged-eared, impoverished and misunderstood. The Van Gogh who was told by Gauguin to paint more slowly and carefully, whose portrait of Félix Rey was used by Rey’s mother to patch a hole in her chicken coop, who was driven out of Arles by the dumb, mean, petty villagers before he committed suicide in despair. I explain to Alek that parts of the biography may just be fiction. His ear may have been sliced off by Gauguin in a fight; his death was possibly caused by a young lad playing with a gun, who accidentally shot him. Why do we love the story of the tortured artist? Is it because we feel that talent must demand sacrifice? Is this why the plight of the Cybersenx Empath artists has captured the imagination of the intelligentsia? A group of Homo sapiens Van Goghs in this day and age would be risible. 367We’d be too cynical to believe in them, we’d write them off as spoilt trusties. But robos are genuinely helpless, a quality which imbues them with authenticity.
I say to Alek that perhaps we have made a Christian allegory of Vincent’s story: a life of poverty with an afterlife of acclaim and riches. If he’d enjoyed success in his lifetime and bought himself a nice chateau, would that plaque have still described him as real in an age of fakery? Despite the promises of transhumanism, we will all wind down in the end and, one designated day, death will flick the off-switch. We want to feel we have shaped history in some way, when in truth history is a matrix of vast forces that are influencing us. I think of all the people who must have stood before ‘Starry Night’ – in the 1930s, facing the uncertainty of war; in the 1950s, struggling with austerity; at the turn of the century, in the illusory wealth of the early 2000s, before the crash; in 2045, fearing recession – and those in the future, who will be standing before this picture, all experiencing the same love and awe, and in that taste of eternity I feel so alive, so wildly alive.
I haven’t thought about Jaime for some time.
In the cafe afterwards, Alek is unusually quiet. I watch a couple in their twenties, pinging a sugar packet back and forth between them, giggling, and I start to weave a nervous plait into my hair. Colours of tiredness and sadness run together inside me. I am sobering up, realising how selfish my whim has been; Alek’s enlightenment will be seen as a corruption by Cybersenx. What if his paintings start to mimic Van Gogh’s Saint-Remy period, where Vincent was so ill and confused he ate his oil paints? I worry that I have condemned him to his death, just when we were on the verge of salvation. 368
I look into his eyes and the tenderness in them cleaves my heart. Another whim: grabbing Alek’s hand, jumping into the car, and driving far, far away into the night …
‘Do you remember that day, last year,’ Alek asks, ‘when you were wearing lipstick and you told me it was plum, but I said it looked more damson? It was a day when we were very happy.’
I look away quickly. At the next table, the sugar packet has split, and the young man is pressing crystals into his forefinger, transferring them to the girl’s lips. The faintest shimmer of something in the darkness: guilt, laughter, a broken glass, and then it is gone. I sip the last of my cold tea, stand and smile against the rising panic: ‘I think we’d better go.’