XIII

My flight home from Rome landed just after ten, but because of transit delays I didn’t arrive downtown until quarter to midnight. I felt a profound and shapeless sadness, a sadness whose origins and boundaries felt ill-defined, perhaps because my own origins and boundaries felt ill-defined. As I walked through Kensington Market, duffle bag in hand, I could tell something was amiss at Videofag from two blocks away. There was a cop car parked outside and a crowd of people milling about taking photos on their phones.

I pushed my way through to find Will at the front door, his face drawn. “We’re being raided.”

Two cops had shown up at the opening reception of a new exhibition, unplugged the speakers, and were in the process of fining us for selling beer out of our kitchen fridge without a license. They confiscated all eight cases of it. What the hell did they do with all that beer? The fine was hefty. We posted a photograph of it on Facebook and people offered to start a fundraising campaign. The challenge was we would never actually qualify for a liquor license as there weren’t enough washrooms and fire exits and we just didn’t have the energy to get raided again, which was only a matter of time now that we were on their watch-list. And the next infraction would shut us down for good.

But there was a larger problem at hand.

Will and I were more or less broken up by that point and sleeping with different people. We’d never had any kind of terminating fight or even a conversation about it, though, and continued to share a bed. We even continued to shower together in the mornings, as there wasn’t enough hot water for each of us to have our own; a formerly intimate and sexy ritual had been reduced to a purely functional choreography. Half of what had kept Videofag electric was the current of desire that had been arcing between him and me and that had more or less burnt out. He’d started spending time with a guy named Juan after inadvertently locking his bike to Juan’s outside a coffee shop, offering to buy him a coffee as an apology, somehow exchanging numbers, and fucking him that same night. Before long I found myself sleeping on the couch and waking up to Juan and Will making breakfast in their underwear in the morning.

So I started crashing at Ana’s. Over the years she had transformed her apartment into a kind of Bedouin tent of scarves, candles, cushions, quilts, tin lanterns, thrift-store oddities, folk art, costume racks, and various musical instruments she couldn’t really play. In the mornings, we’d lie in her bed talking as the sunlight filtered in through various layers of drapery. We’d take turns getting up, dumping the used grounds from the espresso machine, refilling it, lifting it from the stovetop when it began to sputter, and returning with two handle-less, baked-clay mugs of too-strong coffee, which we drank cross-legged on the bed like monks. I spent my weekends writing in the library and began working nights in a call centre, on a nondescript floor of cubicles along with a corps of listless millennials and newly landed immigrants with university degrees.

That summer, between volunteer shifts at a local women’s shelter, Ana managed to write and perform a one-woman show about her mother’s attempt to start a countercultural newspaper in communist Bulgaria. The initial run, at a local fringe theatre, sold out. In its second week it got a glowing, full-page review in Toronto’s arts and culture weekly, and the theatre brought it back for another two weeks in early September. I went four times in total, each time increasingly transfixed by Ana’s transformation into her mother. It went beyond posture or voice or mannerisms; beyond imitation. It was possession. It was as if Ana knew something about Fatme on a genetic level. Something about Fatme that Fatme didn’t even realize about herself. The cumulative box-office haul from Ana’s play just about covered her August and September rent, so in the lead-up to Halloween she began working at Screemers, a massive haunted house set up on the exhibition grounds by the lake.

“I’m getting fat and old and playing a fucking zombie for eleven bucks an hour with no paid dinner-break,” she said as we jostled towards our respective nighttime gigs on the Spadina streetcar. “The Juliet and Ophelia trains have left the station. I missed them. And now I guess I gotta wait on the platform for Gertrude to arrive.”

The streetcar was full, so we rode standing, gripping the overhead bar.

“I find it strange walking through the haunted house sometimes,” she said. “Like, even though I’ve been through it a hundred times I’m still uncertain now and then about which figures are animatronic and which are assholes like me in makeup.”

As we rumbled along, I thought of our lifelong journeys through the haunted house of people and things; thought about how mummies and effigies had once helped close the chasm between being and un-being and wondered whether animatronic ghouls and video game avatars and robotic vacuum cleaners did that for us now. And I thought about the pleasure we took in horror. Of being confronted with the dead and un-dead and of locating ourselves somewhere between the two.

In the end Will and I decided to throw one last Videofag party, a final, pyroclastic rager with more sweaty bodies than the space could hold — so they spilled out onto the street and into the adjacent park, where we lit off a haphazard fireworks display, the blasts of which ricocheted through the neighbourhood and drew people cheering and jeering to their windows and into the streets to join in the fun, the music, the sparklers, the smell of gunpowder, the gold lamé, the bad makeup, and the messy make-outs. The crowd applauded as Will and I, wearing bike helmets, climbed a metal ladder and took down the pink, hand-painted Videofag sign, like the deposition from the cross, just as four police cruisers descended with their lights flashing and megaphones crackling, “Break this up, please. Break up.” Little did they know Will and I already had.

After the party I crashed. Videofag was done. Will and I were done. I felt the finality of it physically, like an unending hangover. It was the one thing that had given my life any kind of definition or direction. To cheer me up, Ana decided to take me to a play. And by that I mean she picked out a play and I bought us tickets. It was a piece by the Osaka-based Koichi Asai Theatre, which was touring through Toronto at the time. I hadn’t bothered reading anything about the show before seeing it. All I knew was that it was called Singularity and was entirely in Japanese with English subtitles. It turned out to be a fairly conventional story about a wealthy businessman who begins having an affair with his children’s nanny, only it’s revealed halfway through the play that the nanny is a robot. It was like a naturalistic Anton Chekhov drawing-room drama meets an Aldous Huxley novel. The central questions the play was asking were: Could a robot, even a very advanced one, reciprocate the man’s feelings? And, as a possession programmed to fulfill his will, did she have any true agency in the matter?

What made the play most compelling was the beguiling performance of the young woman playing the nanny robot. As the actors took their bow during the curtain call, I looked in the program for the actress’s name and bio. I was curious to know what else she had been in and how old she was, as I found her age difficult to pinpoint. Beside the character’s name I found the description:

Performed by Nari 2, an android designed by the Advanced Robotics Department of the Honda Corporation, in collaboration with the Koichi Asai Theatre Company. The Nari 1 prototype appeared in the Koichi Asai Theatre Company’s 2014 production of Hamlet as Ophelia. Singularity is Nari 2’s international theatre debut.

The nanny robot was played by an actual fucking robot. As the audience clapped, I leaned over and showed the program note to Ana and her jaw dropped: “Are you serious?” The way the actress had moved, the way she had spoken, her lips, her eyes — how could she not be human? That night, we stayed up late talking about the play in the pitch dark of her bedroom, lying side by side in bed. We talked about how if “liveness” was the charge we felt from events unfolding in real time, did liveness require at least one sentient performer and one sentient audience member? Could a play entirely performed by robots convey that same live charge? Was sentience a kind of prerequisite for our emotional investment in a performer? And how much? Was there a tipping point, from disengagement with an inanimate object to empathetic connection? Or even if Nari 2 had been less convincingly human, would I have felt as engaged? And to what extent could a robot “perform” if it did not have conscious agency?

At one point I noticed Ana was no longer chiming in. I looked over at her in the dark and she murmured: “I’m tired, yo.”

“Yeah.”

“Goodnight, babe.”

As I lay there, I thought about your work. About your belief in an automated future. One in which back-breaking labour, complicated surgeries, dangerous search-and-rescue operations, and all manner of industry and service would be conducted by androids. But also the hard line you drew between beings and non-beings and our susceptibility to confusing the two. What would you have made of the play’s love story? You probably would have seen it as a metaphor for a broader symptom. Our collective desire to see ourselves in the things we ourselves created. Or perhaps you would have just laughed and said: “Classic men. Falling in love with the thing that serves and doesn’t challenge them.” Yes, most likely you would have said something along those lines.

The show lingered with me over the following week. Less the play itself but the presence of Nari 2 within it and the questions that it provoked. Koichi Asai was the company’s founder, lead playwright, and director. In his photo on the company’s website, he sported a kind of middle-aged architect’s look: clear-frame spectacles, black turtleneck, grey goatee. His bio said he had studied robotics in university and worked for four years as a “sentience consultant” at Honda’s Yorii Factory, forty minutes north of Tokyo, before leaving to study theatre in Paris.

After a couple of days spent trawling the company’s work online, I worked up the nerve to send Asai a message through the general info email listed on the website. The message was heavy on flattery and long-winded questions. And entirely in English. Rereading the email the next morning, I was mortified — I was a grovelling fan. Over the following few days, I tried to distract myself, tried to start new books, tried to cook meals, apply for new jobs, but I would usually abandon these efforts partway through to refresh Gmail in case Asai had replied. Nothing. By the start of the following week, I was convinced that I had sufficiently embarrassed myself through my platitudes and that someone had graciously deleted my email rather than forwarding it to Asai. As the week came to a close, I had just managed to divest myself of any investment in a response when one appeared in my inbox.

Jordan,

Sorry for the slow reply, we just started work on a new show. I’m pleased to hear Singularity resonates with you.

One of our interns at the theatre knows of Videofag and showed me your videos. What a small world — and a strange and wonderful one you live in. Is this artwork or just your life? Have you seen the videos of Ryan Trecartin? I think our new show will draw some inspiration from him. Post-Internet identity and such.

Let me know if you are ever in Japan.

よい一日を,

AK

Dear Asai,

Wow — that’s incredible someone in your company knows about Videofag. God bless the Internet. As per your question, it is both art and life. I suppose you could say it’s a sort of hyperreal portrait of a slightly more mundane reality. And yes, I do know Trecartin’s work — I’m a big fan.

As I mentioned in my first email, Singularity and the other videos of your work I’ve managed to track down have made me reconsider many fundamental things about performance. In fact, so much so that I have a proposal for you to consider.

There is a grant here in Canada from the Meranski Foundation that I could apply to (deadline Dec 15) that provides emerging artists with professional development funds to mentor under senior artists in their disciplines for three months. If successful, I could come to Osaka, observe the new show you’re working on, and audit your process in general — how you build/source your robots, rehearse, etc. I would be there simply to observe — there is literally nothing further you would have to do. And if you wanted an extra hand for any task, I would be happy to chip in — though there would be no expectation that I would have to be put to work.

If this is something you would be amenable to, all I would require is a letter of support from you — basically outlining what it is that you do and why (given the little you know about me) I might be an interesting presence to have around.

Sorry for the novel, and thanks for your consideration.

Best,

Jordan

Jordan,

Sure.

The piece we are making is called Coma. Working title. We’re actually working on the piece in London with the National.

We have a rental flat here, you can stay in with our intern Gabriel (it’s in North Woolwich, I warn you it can get boring). When do you need the letter by?

P.S. My name is Koichi (given names come second in Japanese)

K

Gabriel met me at Heathrow in a yellow raincoat. He was a young Spaniard with a curly mop of black hair and large almond eyes that lent him a certain cartoonish quality. It occurred to me that perhaps he was the same intern who had first shown Koichi my videos. His English wasn’t very good but he seemed keen, smiling at my faltering attempt to elucidate the poetry of descending through the canopy of storm clouds. I tried a few words in Spanish and he nodded sympathetically. We climbed into a black cab and Gabriel relayed an address to the driver, which I assumed was our shared flat. As we drove, Gabriel took out his phone and started showing me photos of the new androids the theatre was working with. He then either explained how he had begun working with Koichi after going to theatre school in London, or that after working with Koichi he was going to theatre school in London. I mentioned I had dropped out of theatre school and that killed the conversation for a minute or so. Things picked up somewhat when we began talking about Björk’s recent virtual reality show which he’d seen at Somerset House in London. Trust Björk to bridge the gap between two art-fags.

I was half paying attention to Gabriel and half trying to take in the views of London unfolding behind his head out the window. The cab was weaving through a residential neighbourhood of row houses, and I was catching snapshots of family life through the front windows of homes. When I tuned back in and met Gabriel’s gaze, I found it searching in a way that suggested we might be fucking later that night. Either that or he was sizing me up to see who would emerge as the alpha art-fag. Or perhaps both. He was a bit too much like me to be attractive, a mirror of my more insecure and cloying tendencies. Perhaps we would be enemies.

In fact, he reminded me somewhat of my first boyfriend, Travis. I was in grade eleven, he was in grade twelve at a neighbouring high school. Travis had acne, braces, and wore a necklace of rainbow beads. His favourite book was One Hundred Years of Solitude. After a few months of being together, I went to see him play Danny in a production of Grease. I broke up with him in the dressing room after the show. It wasn’t that he or the show were dreadful, which of course in retrospect they were, it was that I found witnessing his pleasure to perform so profoundly unattractive, as it reminded me of all of the worst tendencies in myself. We had to break up because we were, in fact, the same human being.

The cab pulled up in front of a white two-storey townhouse with a large picture window. Koichi approached the window and waved at us. There seemed to be other guests inside.

“Sorry, I forgot mentioning we’re having a welcome dinner,” Gabriel said as he paid for the cab. “This is Juliana’s place, she’s one of the producers from the National.”

Wow, how incredibly sweet, I thought. I wasn’t expecting a welcome dinner. I suddenly felt woefully underdressed and unwashed.

“Am I presentable?” I asked Gabriel.

“No, no, it’s okay,” he smiled. “You don’t have to present.”

Inside, the house was principally comprised of a single two-storey, open-concept room, the kitchen on one end, the dining table at the other, bisected by a staircase of thick wooden planks leading to an upstairs loft. The walls were white and bare except for two large framed prints — a poster from a Louise Bourgeois exhibition and a vintage-looking Polish poster for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

There were already a few people waiting for us around the dinner table. Everyone in the room except Gabriel and I was wearing black. In the ensuing flurry of introductions I missed about half of everyone’s names and roles. From what I gathered they included Juliana; Koichi; his wife, Nayoko; a colleague of theirs from Osaka University; two other women from the National; and an American robotics colleague of Koichi’s named David Auerbach. I wound up sandwiched between David and Koichi, who took turns talking to one another overtop of me. It didn’t take me long to realize that the dinner was actually for David and my arrival just happened to coincide. But this was for the best; I was thoroughly jet-lagged and quite happy to be buried by the conversation. I poked the fried egg on the top of my donburi and watched its yellow yolk burst over the rice and shoots. At one point in the night, David got up to take a phone call and Koichi began extolling his genius to me.

“David used to be a sculptor and technical consultant at Walt Disney before he went rogue,” Koichi grinned. “He brought Emily with him,” he said, and I looked around the table wondering if she and I had been introduced. “She’s at the theatre waiting for us. We get to start working with her tomorrow. He debuted her a couple of weeks ago at South by Southwest, and she was a sensation.”

It took me a moment to realize he was talking about a robot. Or a “humanoid,” as he and David called them.

Koichi took out his phone and started showing me photos of Emily, as if she were his daughter, or perhaps a woman he was seeing. She looked to be about twenty-three, Caucasian, with brown shoulder-length hair, blue eyes, and thin, immaculate eyebrows. She wore a white blouse, tight jeans, and reminded me of a fresh-faced model from a department store catalogue.

“She can activate all forty-eight muscle groups in her face, which gives her about sixty facial expressions. You can see — hyperrealistic skin-like face.” I nodded, though the skin around her neck seemed to crease in a slightly unnatural way. “She can carry on simple conversations and she’s programmed with emotions, personality, mood.”

“When you say emotions —?”

“So for instance,” Koichi said, shifting his body towards me, “depending on whether you tell her good news or bad news, she has specific reactions. David’s programmed her with different models for mood, for personality — you know, neuroticism, extroversion, whatever, and then on top of that the OCC model for emotions. So in this way —”

“Like, obsessive-compulsive?”

“What?”

“Obsessive —”

“No, no, OCC is — It’s a model that basically explains different emotions and their intensities and it’s, uh, basically predicated on the idea of characterizing emotions in terms of different ways of feeling good or bad about things.”

“But it’s all a performance,” I said, already out of my depth. “I mean, Emily doesn’t actually feel these things or have these moods, right? It’s a simulation of those things.”

I was expecting Koichi to disagree with me, to split some kind of conceptual hair, but he nodded.

“Exactly. That’s the next major barrier. How does one not just convey but actually feel an emotion, as a humanoid. But what is an emotion?” He looked at me as if expecting an answer, but I was too tired to take the bait. “I know this seems like a silly question, but really, how are they constructed? What are the key types and how many are there? Even Aristotle had trouble articulating what emotions were. He identified fourteen.”

“Only fourteen?”

He looked it up on his phone to be sure. “Here,” he said, handing it to me.

I looked at Aristotle’s two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old list. Confidence, anger, friendship, fear, calm, unkindness, shame, shamelessness, pity, kindness, indignation, emulation, enmity, and envy. It stuck me as almost comically incomplete. Perhaps these words, in the original Greek, carried more scope and texture. Perhaps his original list captured untranslatable sensations. I mean, “emulation”? Really?

“What about love?” I asked, handing the phone back to him. “Or sadness? Joy? Curiosity? Excitement? I feel like he’s missing huge parts of the spectrum.”

“I know. It’s hard.”

“I mean, he has anger, indignation, unkindness, and enmity, which are almost shades of the same colour, but he doesn’t have love or joy. It’s like he forgot red or something.”

“Darwin put forward a theory that basically all emotional facial expressions are universal. An American psychologist — I can’t remember his name — built on his theory and said that there are basically six key emotions that are universally recognized. Even in pre-literature, pre-media cultures.” He did another quick search on his phone. “Paul Ekman,” he confirmed. “Happy, sad, afraid, surprised, angry, and disgusted.”

“What about love?” I asked again, sounding like a character in a Baz Luhrmann movie.

“But what does love look like?” Koichi asked. Perhaps this was profound, but I found it irritating. Just then David squeezed back into his seat, on edge from the call.

“It’s only 7 a.m. there. She was not in a good mood,” he said, I assumed referring to his wife, though perhaps another humanoid. David was somewhere between Koichi’s and my age; on the young side, it struck me, to be a world expert on anything. His hair was tousled and he had a boyish face with about a week’s worth of scruff, flecked in places with grey. He would have almost been sexy if it weren’t for the way he spoke, like the words were all rushing and crowding the fire escape of his mouth.

“We’re talking about emotional programming,” Koichi filled him in, uninterested in his personal dilemma. “Jordan was asking how one might produce actual emotional responses in humanoids.”

“Such that they’re really felt,” I clarified, unnecessarily.

David nodded while trying to remove a fleck of rice lodged in his teeth with his tongue.

“It comes down to physiology modelling,” he said. “Emotions, okay, that’s one thing, but you’ve got to add hormones to the mix and all kinds of other bodily cycles. You need bodies that are aware of themselves as bodies, right? You need bodily awareness to have feelings.”

The way he said the word “hormones” while plucking the rice kernel from the teeth sent a shiver of disgust through me. There was an unrelated burst of laughter at the other end of the table. Nayoko was holding court, telling a long, humorous story.

“Pain and pleasure, for instance,” David continued, making eye contact with me for the first time in the evening. “Having some kind of mechanism that allows a humanoid to feel these things is crucial for the same reasons it’s important humans and other animals feel these things, right? Empathy. Cause and effect. They ground social interactions in internal values.”

“And complexity,” Koichi interjected. “The more complex their sensations, the more subtle and complex their interactions with humans will be.”

“And feelings — feelings aren’t emotions,” David said, squaring his body with mine as if finally committing to my presence in this one-sided conversation. “So feelings are things we are aware of, we feel them produced within us, bubble up, whereas emotions — They’re full of all kinds of other aspects we’re not aware of, like, like automatic responses, the unconscious, chemicals released into the bloodstream. The question is, how do you replicate all of those minute aspects?”

“At the end of the day,” Koichi added, “we don’t really know how to model complex feelings in humanoids because we don’t really understand the underlying mechanisms in humans.”

Actors. Empty vessels that allowed emotions to be played upon the instrument of their bodies but were never able to independently manufacture them, never able to feel them as their own. From a certain perspective — Diderot’s, perhaps — these machines were optimized for success if they could portray emotions with enough fidelity to move persuasively through the world of humans but without actually feeling them, like charming psychopaths nodding and crying at your hardship, gleaning only valuable meaning and taking on none of the burden. They wouldn’t even suffer the existential crisis of being almost-human, not human enough to be weakened by emotions, not human enough for frailty and vulnerability and irrationality, or at least un-programmed irrationality (could there be such a thing as programmed irrationality?)

When I tuned back into the conversation, I realized David and Koichi had carried on without me.

“Human emotions are so chaotic,” David was in the process of saying, “and so much of it can play upon the human face that it’s almost painful to look at. So sometimes with a humanoid it’s easier, less complicated. Which is why some of my humanoids are being used in autism-therapy trails.” It struck me that robotics probably attracted a certain breed of straight men for whom “the chaos of emotions” was something to avoid at all costs.

Gabriel leaned over and refilled my sake cup. He said something about calling a cab for me when I wanted to go home. I was too tired to decode this offer, though it was just as likely that it was not, in fact, coded. I nodded, air-toasted him, and focused back in on what David was saying, something about the fallacy of assuming we can only empathize with human faces.

“At South by Southwest people were going crazy over this little robot that looked like a hockey puck,” he said. “They were just gibbering away at it.” He conceded we tend to be innately drawn to human faces, and are highly attuned to reading them, which is why creating convincing robotic ones was so difficult. “And designers, we know how to stimulate you,” he said, making no attempt to hide the erotic undertones of this statement. “We know how to activate different perceptual regions in your brain. We know if we make the eyes a bit bigger that that manufactures a kind of empathy or even sexual arousal. We enlarge pores or wrinkles and that repels. If you’re attracted to something, we can make you more attracted to it; if you’re repulsed, we can make you hyper-repulsed. And you can’t help it.”

I glanced up and found Gabriel’s eyes on me. He looked back at Nayoko and rejoined their conversation with a lazy ease. Okay, I thought, it’s on.

I had a question but forgot it almost as soon as it had occurred to me, distracted by the sudden need to piss. I stood up with such conviction that the conversation came to a momentary halt. I was surprised by how drunk I was. My legs felt numb, and I stumbled over Koichi and began traipsing over to the washroom before realizing halfway to the kitchen that I didn’t even know where it was. Thankfully, my instincts proved right.

I unzipped my pants before closing the door. As I pissed, I scrutinized my face in the mirror above the toilet. I seemed particularly washed out. My pores looked huge. It occurred to me that I had passed through the intangible threshold where I was only going to grow less attractive every passing day. I wondered: What is the minimum requirement for being human? I thought about the new era we were on the precipice of; how behind us were countless millennia during which humans could assume every person they encountered was a fellow biological specimen and how in front of us was a new era where that was no longer a given.

When I stumbled out of the washroom, I found that people had disbanded from the table and were hovering around in the kitchen. It was a bit surreal. How had they relocated so quickly? How long had I been in the washroom looking at my face? We carried on late into the night. At some point, I guess Gabriel called me a cab because I woke up alone the next morning in a single bed in a barely furnished apartment bathed in sunlight.

Gabriel and I rode the tube together that next morning, nursing our takeaway coffees without exchanging more than the perfunctory words necessary to navigate our route. We got off at Southwark Station and walked the three blocks down the Cut, which struck me as an incredibly British name for a street, to a nondescript four-storey brick building beside the Old Vic theatre.

“Welcome to the NT’s studios,” Gabriel murmured, though with his accent it sounded like he said “empty studios.”

We waited for a few moments at a glass-fronted door with a long, vertical metal handle. I could see the unstaffed security desk through the door. Eventually, a chipper young guy returned wiping his hands on his jeans and buzzed us through.

“Sorry just in the loo,” he chirped as we walked in and entered our names and arrival times into a book on the desk with a blue pen attached to a ratty piece of string.

On the ground floor of the building were offices, a kitchen and lounge area with a Keurig coffeemaker, and a small wood-shop mostly used for storage. The entire top floor was rehearsal studios with sprung black floors and lighting grids suspended from the ceiling. Behind the building was a parking lot, at the back of which was an outbuilding constructed of four conjoined shipping containers. It looked like some kind of temporary structure one would see erected for disaster relief. Gabriel told me they called this the Robot House.

Inside, the Robot House was a cross of state-of-the-art laboratory and frat house — banks of computers, cameras, and robot components nestled on plywood floors alongside stacks of milk crates storing cabling, recycled couches, bags of chips, and a massive wooden cable-spindle turned on its side to form a makeshift coffee table. It smelled a bit like a locker room in there, or really any space where more than five men spent more than five hours.

Koichi, his assistants, and David were already there when we arrived. In the centre of the room was Emily. She was seated on a chair and looked smaller than I had imagined, probably only five feet and a couple of inches. The back of her head was open and a jumble of wires and cables protruded from it. Around the lip of this opening, the skin peeled back like a bloodless wound.

As Gabriel and I walked in she was staring off into space. I thought perhaps she wasn’t “on.” Then she winced like a child trying out a new expression. It was profoundly unsettling. And then, prompted by nothing, her eyes widened and she burst into a smile, as if responding to some rich interior world. Her face finally resolved into a kind of placid grin, a vacancy one might mistake as beatific, except her eyes were open a fraction too wide and she was not blinking often enough, which leant her a somewhat crazed air.

Koichi and David waved to me, both a bit brusquely, I thought. Kochi’s assistants were preoccupied with a MacBook set up on a table facing Emily.

“They’re trying to Skype in Haruto,” Gabriel explained. “He’s one of our collaborators. He heads up Osaka University’s Intelligent Robotics Laboratory, but he’s in Kansas at the moment.”

I nodded and chose not to point out the irony that these world leaders in robotics couldn’t get Skype to work. I then realized it probably wasn’t lost on them. Koichi seemed to be internalizing the problem as some great embarrassment in front of David and perhaps me. He kept apologizing while berating his assistants. Perhaps to kill time or perhaps to deflect energy away from the Skype problem, David began speaking to Emily in the slightly affected voice one might use when speaking to a child.

“Hi, Emily. How are you?”

She blinked and turned towards David. “Hi there. Everything is going extremely well.”

I noted that she did not say David’s name, even though he had told me she remembered people’s faces and past conversations with them. She also didn’t appear too concerned or aware of the Skype problem.

“Do you like talking with me?” he asked.

“Yes. Talking to people is my primary function.”

“Are you excited to be in Koichi’s new play?”

“What is Koichi’s new play?”

“Good question!” Koichi laughed from across the room.

“It’s going to be a play that you perform in,” said David. “You will be its star.”

He said the word “star” with a hint of irony, as if the word contained all the embarrassing, human ambitions of actors, which Emily was not burdened with and couldn’t possibly understand. In actuality, she was going to be programmed to memorize and recite lines, execute blocking, and interact algorithmically with her human counterpart onstage.

Emily blinked. “Please explain, what is a play?”

“Good question. Jordan?” David turned and looked at me.

I walked over to Emily. She met my eyes with hers, which I recalled David telling me were, in fact, cameras.

“A play is an event put on for an audience,” I said. “Do you know what an audience is?” Emily blinked, but I did not wait for her to respond. “An audience is a group of people gathered to watch an event. The play is an event that features performances by actors and usually involves telling a story.”

“What is an event?” Emily asked.

“It is something that… happens,” I said, looking at David and shrugging.

“Please explain, what is an actor?” Emily asked.

“An actor,” I began “is someone whose job it is to pretend to be other people.”

“Why do they do this job?”

“Well, because it’s pleasurable, I suppose. Both for the actor and for the audience. By pretending to be other people, and watching other people pretend to be other people, we can gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be a person. Do you understand?”

“I think so,” she replied. I could tell she didn’t. “Are you an actor?” she asked me.

“That’s a good question. Um. Sometimes.”

“By your definition, are we not all actors sometimes?” she replied.

David and I sat on a table against the wall, watching Koichi work with Emily and a human actor named Vincent. She was having trouble tracking Vincent’s movements, and at one point David called out, “We can fix that tonight.” Koichi raised his hand in thanks without looking in our direction. I could sense David felt awkward about our sitting there together in silence and was searching for something to say. The trouble was he knew nothing about me and had no idea where to start. Even though I was quite content just to sit there I eventually put him out of his misery by asking, in a whisper:

“So what first interested you in robots?”

He thought about this for a long moment, which seemed strange, as I would’ve assumed he’d have long since prepared a cocktail-party answer to this mundane question.

“Have you heard of golems?” he asked at last.

“Like, Tolkien?”

“Golems were the proto-robot,” he said. “From Jewish mysticism. I was raised Jewish, am still… Jewish.”

He told me that in the Talmud, Adam, the ur-man, was described as a golem formed from dust. Golems appeared to be humans but were not. It was believed golems could be activated through an ecstatic experience induced by the shem, any one of the Names of God, written on a piece of paper and inserted into the mouth or forehead of the golem.

“A kind of mystical battery-pack if you will,” he said with a smile. “In some medieval folktales, the golem could be deactivated by removing the shem or by changing the combination of letters written on it.”

He mentioned being totally transfixed as a child by an old Yiddish story about the Clay Boy, a variation of the golem, in which a lonely elderly couple made a little boy out of clay. Much to their delight, the clay boy came to life and the couple treated him as their real child. But the clay boy didn’t stop growing. He ate all of their food, their animals, and eventually the elderly couple too, before rampaging through the village.

“So, you know, that same paranoia and fear of the humanoid from science fiction appears even here, centuries earlier, in the golem.” David looked up and watched the slow proceedings of the rehearsal. “We fear most what we desire most. Which, of course, is to be gods.”

That evening, after a breathless trek through the Tate Modern before it closed, I took the tube up to Mile End and walked the twenty minutes to Chisenhale, trying to imagine what it would have been like for Clyde and Giacomo to hang out on the fire escape of this former warehouse, smoking cigarettes with Michael Clark and being so fucking unbelievably badass it made me want to cry. I loitered around for a few minutes like Ebenezer Scrooge looking through a window at his own past with longing, except this past wasn’t mine. It had never belonged to me and never would.

On the tube ride home, I listened to the automated woman’s voice at every interchange station: “Change for the District and Hammersmith and City lines”; “Change for London Overground.” For some reason, every time she said the word “change” it struck me as exquisite. The word seemed to come a fraction of a second before the rest of the sentence — “Change… for the District and Circle lines” — as if the most important thing she was announcing was not the new tube line but, in fact, change itself. For the briefest of moments the world was pregnant with this word, as if the automated woman might be commanding any number of possible changes from us: Change… your mind. Change… your life. Change… is possible. Change… is inevitable. Change… is afoot. Change… everything. Change… now.

At some point, I became aware that I was sitting beside a rather handsome young man who I hadn’t initially noticed because, like everyone else on the train, he was disguised in a suit. He was also burrowed in a thick book, which I would come to discover was his preferred habitat. I was examining the postcard I had just bought from the Tate’s gift shop, with an image of a neon-light sculpture by Martin Creed on the front. I was trying to decide who to send it to. I really did love the image. Creed’s sculpture was a phrase, an equation actually, spelled out in neon: “the whole world + the work = the whole world.”

“What do you think it means?” the man asked me, putting down his thick book.

I was not startled by his question. In fact, I felt quite ready and receptive to his unexpected entry into my life.

“I think it means that art, or really any work we do in our lives, is both immensely consequential and inconsequential,” I replied, with somewhat less eloquence than that. “The whole world would still be the whole world whether or not it contained all of the work in the Tate Modern. But all the work in the Tate Modern also makes the whole world what it is; it is part of the equation.” It was a sentiment suffuse with humour and nihilism, which, I would come to learn, this man was suffuse with as well.

“What’s that tome you’re reading?’ I asked.

He flipped the cover over so I could see it.

“Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, do you know it?”

I shook my head.

“It’s this kind of sprawling portrait of a family and, in classic twentieth-century fashion, a nation being torn apart by ideology.” He told me Grossman’s manuscript had been confiscated by the KGB in 1960 and remained unpublished until 1980, when it was smuggled to the West and declared a lost masterpiece.

“Can you imagine writing a book called Life and Fate?” I asked. “Like… leave it to a Russian to tackle those minor topics.”

“A Soviet,” he corrected me.

We rode in silence for a moment. I remembered thinking at the time that it was very possible, in fact likely, that this man would have to get off at the next stop or perhaps the one after, so it wouldn’t be much use investing any further in the conversation, delightful as it was. But he persisted. He asked me where I was from; I told him Toronto. I asked if he lived in London and then, before he could reply, said, “Of course you do, you’re wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase.” I then jumped in with the quintessential question of the urbanite: “What do you do?” which is, for some reason, synonymous with “How do you make money?” He told me he was doing post-doc research but, at that exact moment, was returning from a board meeting.

“A scholarship foundation,” he clarified. “For Pakistani-Brits. To help us pay for uni.”

I nodded. He then asked me what I did.

“Well, I’m a failed actor who dabbles in porn and telemarketing and sometimes writes plays” would have been the truth, but instead I lied, of course, and said “lawyer” and then added “law” immediately after, in case I wasn’t making myself clear. And then, panicking, unsure if one could even be a full-fledged lawyer at my age — weren’t they like doctors? — I said, “I’m in law school, actually.” And then, to sheathe my lies in yet another lie in the hope that it would distract from the first two, I said, “I’m here for a conference with my class.” I was profoundly out of my depth by this point. Did law students even go to conferences? Together as a class? He asked me if I was studying here in London and I said, “No, the University of Toronto,” hoping the geographic distance would throw off the scent of dubiousness, and it seemed to work, or perhaps he simply wasn’t all that interested or impressed with my legal training because he didn’t pursue it any further. He asked me who I was intending to send the postcard to and in that moment I decided, “I think I’m going to keep it.”

“Don’t do that,” he replied. “That’s bad luck.”

“How so?” I chuckled.

“It means you’ll never travel again.”

“Huh. I haven’t heard of that before.”

“I’m Osama,” he said. He held out his hand and I shook it. His grip was strong and confident but not dominating, not eager to prove anything. My hand felt like a child’s in his.

“I’m Jordan,” I replied, clearing my throat.

He told me the next stop was his and that it seemed unfair that this might be the last time we spoke. I said that it didn’t have to be. He took out a pen from his bag (in time, I would come to learn he always had a pen on him, whereas I never carried any of life’s requisite tools). He reached over, plucked the postcard from my hand, wrote his address on the back of it, and handed it back to me. He then smiled and got off the train.

As the next two weeks unfolded, I discovered I wasn’t particularly excited about the play Koichi was making. It seemed like fairly well-trodden territory: a man falls in love with his sex robot. The automaton woman, against all logic, seems to have a personality and a depth of character and charms the thoughtful, complicated, more-human man. A bit like Her and Simone and even that film Lars and the Real Girl. Except Koichi’s version seemed to lack the humour of those previous outings. Also any nod to Ryan Trecartin’s work or aesthetics — one of the initial tie-ins for my being there — was lost on me, expect perhaps for a few psychedelic dream-sequences that were axed by the end of the second week. What’s more, I found Vincent, the actor, a bit of a scenery chewer. He wrung the emotion from his lines in a way that made Emily’s almost monotonous performance seem inspired. Next to her, Vincent looked ridiculous — and by extension, so did humankind.

I think Koichi could tell my interest was waning, as he made less and less effort to include me in group discussions. Also there was mounting pressure because Rufus, the artistic director of the National, would be visiting to watch a work-in-progress showing at the end of the third week, and progress had been slow going. I spent most of the time watching from the sidelines, checking Facebook on my phone, and making coffees with the Keurig in the lounge. I couldn’t help but think: if I can’t be excited about working on a Japanese robot play in London, then I must be really beyond hope.

The evening of the Brexit referendum I met Osama outside the entrance of Lahore Kebab, which he informed me served the best Pakistani food in London. I had been caught unawares in a midday downpour, and my thinning hair, which each morning I built into a carefully composed sculpture, was completely undone by the time I arrived. Before I could even say hello or apologize for my hair, he tossed me a black T-shirt.

“What’s this for?”

“Take your shirt off and put this one on.”

I laughed. That was forward. “Right now?”

“Yeah, before we go inside.”

Smiling, thinking this was perhaps some kind of complicated joke, I yanked off my shirt and pulled on the one he gave me. It was a Wu-Tang Clan T-shirt.

“Now pass me yours,” he instructed, and I handed it to him, the realization dawning on me. He pulled out a large plastic zip-lock and sealed my shirt inside. “Trust me, after you eat here you’ll never get the smell of curry out of your clothes. I meant to text you before we arrived, but I forgot.”

“What about this one?” I asked, pointing to his baggy T-shirt.

“It’s my gym shirt, I don’t mind.”

Osama was Oz. From the desert diner. I could understand why he may have chosen to go by a nickname in the States. As we walked into Lahore Kebab, I studied his face in disbelief. It had only been a couple of years — how had we not recognized each other? I suppose we had only spoken for twenty minutes. And in the interim he’d lost his terrible beard, lost weight, lost the wire-rim glasses. And of course I had looked nothing like myself at the time, having let my hair grow long and not shaven in three weeks. Plus I’d been a good fifteen pounds lighter back then. I felt this glorious, winged secret begin to batter at my chest. What would he make of this coincidence? Would he even remember? I thought back to how eager he had been at the time to impress Robert and I — a complete stranger. Something in him had mellowed. It seemed he had less to prove — to himself, most importantly.

“What a fucking day,” he said, scooping lamb biryani onto his plate. “Massive storms and flooding, did you see along the Thames?” I shook my head. “It felt apocalyptic. Divine judgement on Nigel Farage. Nobody knows anything yet, but most people seem to think it’s a Remain win, but narrowly. The closest thing to an exit poll puts Remain at a four-point win, and naturally the markets’ve soared.”

As we sat under the unforgiving fluorescence in the unadorned restaurant, leaning in to hear one another over the din of the other diners, he asked me to tell him more about the conference I was attending. My heart sank.

“I didn’t expect to be on a date with you.”

“What?”

“I didn’t expect we’d be going on a date.”

“Okay.”

“So I lied. On the subway. I mean tube.”

“You lied?”

“I’m not a law student. I just said that because, I don’t know why… because I was the only person on the car not wearing a suit and I thought I’d never see you again so what the hell.”

“So what are you? Besides a liar?” He said this with a smirk, taking a sip of his lassi.

“I write plays.”

“Really? For a living?”

“Not yet but… you know.”

He nodded. “What kind of plays?”

“Pretty good ones,” I replied with a smile. “I don’t know. Not sure how to answer that.” He didn’t seem particularly enchanted by my answer, so I tried to dig a little deeper. “Well. At the moment I’m working on a play about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. But it’s set in a kind of indeterminate present; both ancient and contemporary. And instead of God’s wrath raining down on the towns it’s an American drone strike.”

He nodded. I wasn’t sure he was hearing anything I was saying over the noise. A group beside us kept banging on their table whenever they burst into laughter, which was often. I began telling him about getting the grant from the Meranski Foundation to audit Koichi’s process at the National Theatre, to shift the conversation into the register of more obvious accomplishment. I mentioned the grant nonchalantly, as if I might have received them on a regular basis and was perhaps being modest about the true breadth of my reputation. Osama was particularly curious about Emily. What did her voice sound like? How did her face move? We talked about the “uncanny valley” of human semblance, how we empathized with non-human faces that resembled real human faces until the critical point when the non-human face became so proximate to a real one that it aroused feelings of repulsion in us. It was as if, as the non-human neared the threshold of the human, we began to scrutinize it in new ways — and the small discrepancies we found between it and us were repellent. The irregular eye blinks. The halting speech. The cold stare.

As more plates of dal and chapatis were placed on our table, I blurted out: “We’ve met before.”

“Pardon?”

“Before the tube.”

“When?” he said, jerking back in surprise.

“A diner in Nevada. Outside of Vegas. You were with your supervisor at the time, Robert. You explained his sentience quotient to me.”

“Holy shit.”

“Do you remember?”

“Yeah, I do. Wait, how did you — Did you know that on the tube?”

I pinched the billowy T-shirt I was wearing with both hands and pulled it out from my chest. “You were wearing this shirt. I just figured it out.”

“Holy. Shit. I totally didn’t recognize you.”

“Me neither. At first.”

“I’ve lost a lot of weight.”

“Me the opposite.”

“It’s your hair. And you had that mountain-man beard.”

I laughed. “You still a Wu-Tang fan?”

“Of course. When we get back to my place, I’ll show you the calendar over my bed.”

The ease with which he said this, the assumption that we’d be going back to his place that night, the dual manner in which this statement acted as both invitation and instruction, made me want to drop to my knees and suck him off below the dal-splattered table then and there. He told me that after he graduated from Berkeley he moved back to London to begin post-doctoral research in cognitive science, which he explained was basically the study of how we perceived the world.

“And what’s your take?” I asked. 

He chuckled. “You mean, like, my thesis?” I nodded. He downed the rest of his lassi and ran his tongue along his lower lip. I could tell this was a question he’d been working on giving a short answer to. “Well. I’m trying to understand what it means to be an observer. And what it means to be observed. How do we disentangle the two?” 

“Uh huh.” I waited for him to continue but he didn’t. “That’s rather cryptic.” 

He smiled. “So there’s this fundamental question of perception. What does it mean for us to perceive something in the world? On one side you have the neuroscientists who are trying to figure out what they call “the hard problem,” which is basically: how does this three pounds of grey stuff in our heads produce first-person consciousness? And then on the other side you have the quantum physicists, whose experiments prove that nothing exists until we come along and observe it. So the neuroscientists are asking how first-person reality is possible and the quantum physicists are asking how anything but first-person reality is possible. And I’m somewhere in the middle. Trying to figure out a mathematical model for the observer.”

As he spoke I recognized the Oz from the diner. His hand gestures, his cadences, his delight in being an expert, but rather than experiencing it with annoyance, I felt both genuinely charmed and touched by the effort he was making to explain what I’m sure were extremely fucking complicated concepts to a complete neophyte in a loud restaurant. And I also recognized you, explaining Schrödinger’s cat to me when I was eleven, and all of the other times you spoke to me about your work and the mind over the years.

“Basically what I’m trying to do is devise a mathematical model that defines the observer. That articulates consciousness.”

“Sounds a bit familiar,” I said, with a grin.

“Right. Except it’s very different than Robert’s quotient. And frankly blows it out of the water. No offence to him though, he’s great.”

“Of course you’re impressed by a man who wants to explain the whole world,” I heard you saying in my head. “Who wants to fit it all into an equation.” But then it also struck me that perhaps all three of us were seeking to commune with the same unknowable sublime. Him through equations, me through art, you through faith. All routes to a shared end.

“I’d suggest our perception of the world is actually an illusion that filters out the incomprehensible magnitude of reality,” Osama continued. “You could think of it like a desktop on a computer.” I smiled, reminded of your long distaste for computer-as-brain metaphors. Suddenly sitting there, allowing myself to be thoroughly seduced by Osama, felt laced with quiet rebellion. “Take the little trash-can icon. Is the actual ‘delete’ function in a computer shaped like a rubbish bin? Are you actually throwing files into this little rubbish bin? No. Of course not. But that’s how we understand and visualize a complex and hidden system of functions that we couldn’t possibly understand or interact with otherwise. In the same way that a bear in the wild appears like a bear to us. We can see it and understand it. If we had to spend all our time processing the infinite amount of additional information about the scene, the nature of the forest, the air around us, every bacterial microbe in our field of vision, the bear would eat us. Our illusions help us survive.”

Dessert arrived, saffron syrup-soaked balls of gulab jamun, and I stuck one in my mouth like a ball-gag.

“But if a bear isn’t a bear then what is it?” I mumbled, chewing.

“The bear I observe is my perception, just as the bear you observe is your perception. And the way the bear, presumably, perceives itself is its own perception. But there is no single, objective bear. And as I began to think about this, about how we observe, I thought of Alan Turing, who —”

“My favourite fag.”

“What?”

“He’s the best.”

“Yeah.”

“And recently pardoned.”

“In order to invent the computer Turing had to create this very — kind of perfect, really, mathematical formula of how a computer could actually work. A formula for computation. And I thought, why couldn’t I do that for consciousness?”

“Sure, why not?” I teased.

He laughed. “I know. Ambitious. But I just started by breaking it down. Like, okay, what makes up a conscious experience? So I —” And then just as his mentor had done in the diner years before, Osama grabbed a napkin, retrieved his ever-ready pen from his bag, and began to write out an equation for me. But this time it was an equation of his very own. An equation that to my knowledge had not yet stood up to the scrutiny of his peers or the public at large. One that, for all I knew, had been shared with fewer people than could fit around this table. An equation that was either total nonsense or, just possibly, a field-redefining revelation. And if it was the latter, what had I done to deserve encountering it before virtually everyone else? What was the actual likelihood that, as I sat there in Lahore Kebab, I was in the presence of actual genius? Osama’s pen was dry, so he drew several concentric circles on the napkin, tearing it slightly, before the ink appeared, and then he began writing it out like ancient hieroglyphs on a papyrus scroll.

“Space X is experiences, space G is actions, and D is an algorithm that lets me choose any action given the nature of my experiences. W is for a world, ours or any other, which is also a probability space. W affects my perceptions, so there’s a perception map P from the world to my experiences, and when I act I change the world, so there’s a map A from the space of actions to the world. And that’s it. That’s the entire formulation.”

“Six letters?”

He looked up from the napkin. “Six letters.”

“But if there’s a W, are you saying that there’s an objective world?”

He pointed at me. “Very good.” I found the gesture patronizing but the acknowledgement satisfying. “Here’s the thing. The reason why I know it’s right. I can pull the W out of the formula and stick a conscious agent in its place and I get a whole circuit of other conscious, first-person agents.”

“What do you mean? Like, if you were to replace W with me?”

“Yes, say U represents you, Jordan. If I stick U into the place of the world, the formula produces this whole network of other conscious agents. All these self-governed, self-­perceiving, first-person experiences, people and animals, just moving about in the void.” He reached out and plucked a gulab jamun off the plate and took a bite. “That, in other words, is the world.”

That night, we lay in his bed naked, watching the referendum results trickle in on his phone. I lay with my head on his shoulder, listening to his gradual arc towards despair.

11:31 p.m. “Apparently Gibraltar may have just voted 90 percent Remain. But then they’ll likely be invaded if we leave, so…”

12:02 p.m. “Newcastle only voted 50.7 percent Remain. Fuck, that’s so low. And the EU poured money into there.”

12:20 a.m. “You’ve got to be joking me. Those fuckers. Only 31 percent Remain?”

1:00 a.m. “Even if Remain still wins, this has completely ripped us apart.”

2:06 a.m. “I’d be surprised if Leave can lose this now. This is honestly the most depressing night of my life.”

2:09 a.m. “Literally what the fuck do we do now?

“Maybe we should try to get some sleep.”

“I can’t. You don’t understand, this is a nightmare.” And then I held him as he cried. Which, I have to say, was definitely a first-date first for me.

The next morning, after four hours of sleep, I sat at his kitchen table watching him prepare breakfast in his burgundy pyjamas. I realized I hadn’t even asked him if he lived alone. My guess was he had a roommate but we hadn’t encountered him or her yet. I had also noticed the Koran on his bedroom bookshelf and had no idea whether he was religious. There was so much ground to cover.

His phone was on the kitchen table playing the BBC news live-stream. I watched as, in a cramped conference room surrounded by cheering white men, Nigel Farage declared: “This will be a victory for real people. A victory for ordinary people. A victory for decent people.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” Osama shot back. He broke two eggs into the pan and they spat up at him. “The implication of course is that if there are ‘real’ people there are also ‘unreal’ people. If there are ‘ordinary’ people there are ‘unordinary’ people. And if there are ‘decent’ people than there are, naturally, ‘indecent’ people. Others. It makes me think of the Dirty Paki someone spray-painted on my mum’s bin.”

“Recently?

“A couple of months ago.”

“That’s awful.”

“And last week I was on the tube talking to her on the phone in Urdu and this woman sitting across from me shouted ‘Speak English,’ and I was so startled I didn’t even know what to do at first. And then I shouted back: ‘I do speak English and I bet I speak it better than you fucking do’ and went back to talking with my mom in Urdu. And no one said anything. Packed train and nothing.”

Two burnt pieces of toast popped from the toaster, startling me.

“Shit,” he muttered, grabbing them and scraping the black off with a butter knife. “You don’t mind, do you?”

I shook my head. He dropped the slices onto a yellow plate, flipped on two eggs and a grilled tomato, and slid it with a flourish of his hand in front of me. “Delish.”

“Hot sauce?”

“No, thanks.”

He turned around and cracked two more eggs into the pan. “Did you see Farage’s poster? Showing a crowd of refugees with the words Breaking Point written across it in big bold red letters and the words The EU has failed us below.”

“Christ.”

“No indication of who those people were. No mention they were Syrian refugees turned away at the Hungarian border. Just a nameless, identity-less horde of others coming for you. I said, ‘That looks like fascist propaganda.’ And the people at my lab were like, ‘Hey, come on now.’ You know? Like, ‘There’s no need to use the F-word.’ Because it scares them, it’s unpleasant. It feels extreme. But that’s exactly what it is, images like those. They’re extreme.”

I thought about how fascist propaganda held up the depersonalized as an ideal. The photographs of Leni Riefenstahl; the Nazi rallies at Nuremberg; the crowds hailing the führer; the godlike bodies of Aryan athletes at the 1939 Olympics, leaping, vaulting, running, all muscles and sinew. And of course I thought of the mounds of emaciated, unidentifiable corpses. Bodies without people — was there a more succinct articulation of the fascist project, insofar as what both its supporters and its subjugated become? Fascism was abjection, situating people between the tyrannies of subjecthood and objecthood. Muslims no longer people but bodies to be counted and rounded up. Mexicans no longer people but bodies to be kept out. Women no longer people but bodies to legislate and regulate.

Osama plunked his own plate down and sat across from me as the sounds of the BBC live-stream filled the tiny kitchen. At that moment, laminated cards bearing the words Leave the EU. No more Polish Vermin on one side and wroćić do domu polskiego szumowiny (go home Polish scum) on the other were being discovered in mailboxes and under the car wipers of Polish residents all across Huntingdon, Osama’s hometown. The cards were also being discovered at the front entrances of Huntingdon and Stukeley Meadows Primaries and St. Peter’s Academy — three schools with high percentages of children with Polish heritage.

“It can’t be all about racism though,” I said. “I mean, this has opened Pandora’s box, but don’t you think there’s just a lot of people who feel they’ve been fucked over by, like, neoliberal economics and globalization and the Tories and just want to —?”

“Yes, yes, yes, of course there’s that. This is one hundred percent about anger. Justified anger. I mean justified for the working classes, but it’s not just the working class who voted Leave. There’s a lot of rich white upper-middle-class fuckers who did too, who don’t want to see their slice of the pie eaten up by anyone else, and it’s this this this bourgeois mania of the Boomers that make them hoard everything. They are honestly ruining this country.”

I could feel him getting worked up, and even though we were in passionate agreement I was worried things would somehow slip into argument, so I just sat there nodding until he looked down at his watch.

“Shit. Sorry I have to dash off to work so bloody early,” he said, forking half an egg into his mouth. “What’re you doing later?”

I shook my head and shrugged.

“There’s somewhere I want to take you.”

We met that evening at the Glory, a hole-in-the-wall in Hackney crammed with sweaty men in tank tops and a handful of their straight female friends with purses slung over their shoulders. The stage was little more than an alcove, encased in gold foil and bedecked with various lighting fixtures, including an oversized traffic light. When we walked in, two drag queens were onstage, mid-routine: one dressed as Angela Merkel with a scraggy blond bob and red pantsuit, pretending to shove a black Christmas-tree-shaped dildo up the ass of another queen, dressed as Nigel Farage in an equally cheap newscaster Halloween wig, an ill-fitting suit jacket, and red pleather ass-less chaps. Toni Braxton’s power ballad “Un-Break My Heart” was blasting from the speakers. That night we got plastered on Stoli, and by the time we stumbled out into the street Osama was so drunk he didn’t remember the way back to his flat. Likely most of London didn’t remember how they got home that night. Or had trouble finding it altogether. Perhaps because most of them no longer recognized their home at all.

Midway through the following week you were transiting through London, flying home from a conference in Vienna. I stayed with you that night in your hotel room, and we ordered a bonanza of room service — steak tartare, oysters, a bottle of cava, tiramisu. We stayed up late reading through your PlentyOfFish messages and laughing at the dregs of Boomer heterosexuality. You wanted to know how everything was going at the National, and of course all about Emily. I had sent you some texts and photos I’d snapped of her. You had a ton of technical questions I couldn’t really answer. It was a special kind of thrill for us, to have something equidistant between our interests. And the more questions you asked me about the project, the more I found myself feeling invested in it (Koichi’s cloying narrative aside), until I began to feel a sense of genuine pride at being on what felt like some kind of cutting edge. You nodded and interjected, but mostly you smiled, probably just relieved I was doing something resembling a halfway respectable job. Then I started telling you about Osama, our extraordinary reunion, how he was the former graduate student of the scientist you went off about in the parking lot, how he’d been at the diner that morning in the desert, about the chance encounter on the tube, Life and Fate, I told you about his research and all the shared points of conversation you two would have, both wrestling with questions of consciousness in different fields, I told you about his tears the night of Brexit, holding him, his anger, the deep wound of it. You listened, nodding. I told you I was in love. The word surprised even me. It had only been two weeks but there it was. You put your hand on my thigh, and patted it twice.

“He seems wonderful,” you said at last. It was the closest I’d felt to you in years.

In that moment, six hundred and fifty miles to the south in Nice, the Bastille fireworks had just finished. You decided to have a shower before bed, and while you did I checked Facebook, noticed friends posting about the attack, and began following the live coverage on Twitter and BBC. A few minutes later, you emerged in your bathrobe and instructed me not to look up as you changed, as if there wasn’t enough natural disincentive not to do so. I debated whether I should tell you about the attack. You were in such a serene mood. I wanted our night together to never end. I knew the coverage would upset you and keep you awake, haunt you as you lay there in the dark, so I decided to say nothing. You would hear about it in the morning. No doubt we’d be hearing of little else in the coming days.

As you changed you asked about how my time in Rome with Clyde had been. I closed my laptop and tried to slow my racing heart.

“What’s that?”

“Rome. How was it?”

I’d sent you a few photos over Facebook but hadn’t said much. I told you about visiting the Sistine Chapel and about waking to the clattering of fishmongers and fruit vendors setting up their stalls on the street below the apartment. You then inquired about Clyde with the very specific air of consternation reserved for mothers asking after homosexuals engaged in non-normative behaviour. “He’s doing okay. Missing Wole.” You nodded, knowingly. And then something in me caught. Snagged. A blood-red anger on the hook of my heart. The memory of that night as Clyde sat on the edge of the couch. Rubbing my head as if I’d woken from a nightmare. The fool I’d made of myself. I caught a flash of your arm. The pink of your pyjama top being pulled over your head. My heart was still racing, in fact faster than before. I asked you point-blank: “I was wondering if I could see the records from your in-vitro.”

“Pardon?”

“The records from your in-vitro.” I looked up. You were standing in the middle of the bedroom in your pyjamas, drying your hair. “Whatever documents Mount Sinai gave you from the procedure.”

“Why?”

“I’d like to read them.”

“Well, I don’t have them anymore.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“Excuse me?”

“You keep everything, you have receipts from the nineties.”

“Oh please, no I —”

“You’re seriously telling me you don’t have any documentation for the birth of your child?”

“Well, of course I have, I have your birth certificate and —”

“I’m not talking about my birth certificate.”

“I know what you’re —”

“The donor, his profile, the doctor who administered it. The time and date.”

“What is this about?”

I looked down at the plush, dimpled bedspread. The fabric puckered around the seams like flesh. My throat closed. Hot and cauterized. I raised my head and found your eyes in the mirror. “I don’t believe you.”

We sat side by side on the edge of the bed. Through shudders and catches of breath, you said the best way you could describe it was as a kind of death. A terrible eternity where your body seemed to no longer belong to you. You said being sick was “basically feeling one’s body in ways one usually didn’t.” The tenderness of skin during the flu. Fevers and chills. The way a cold reminded us of our lungs. How migraines made us aware of the interplay of light and sound on our brains. “We begin to feel like people trapped within a body.” As if sickness was a precursor of the ultimate and final separation of self and body.

“And for years after I felt like I was always sick,” you said. “I was never not aware of my body.”

It had happened at one of the parties Clyde and Lydia had thrown in the apartment you shared. “It was their party. Their friends.” You couldn’t remember who he was. “I mean, I can remember his face, of course. His smell. But not who he was. His name. If I ever knew it. Clyde swears he doesn’t.” You shook your head, wiping your eyes with your sleeve. “Lydia too. Neither of them.” Ten minutes, twenty, an hour, who’s to say. I wanted to break him. To smash his face. To rip him out of my veins like roots from the ground. The animal. Wanted to hurl him out, fuck him up, baseball bat, through the window the motherfucker literally I could kill him.

“Where did it happen?”

“I told you —”

“But where in the apartment?”

“Why do you need to know that?”

I shrugged and wiped my own eyes with my sleeve.

You weren’t worried about pregnancy. At first. You were worried about damage. Tearing. Infection. Who the fuck knows who he was. Shame. Others finding out. Anger. Your colleagues. Then came the suspicion, the fear, the appointments. “I don’t mean — It’s not that I didn’t want you.”

“Well, you didn’t.”

“By the end I did. Very much.”

I half-expected you to say it had been a gift disguised from God or that it had been His will, but you never did. And I was thankful for that.

“Grandma and Grandpa were so good. Really… really good to me.” A sob, a heaving gasping thing exploded from you. You always cried harder over acts of kindness. Over love shown rather than withheld.

I held you, our warmth together. Combined. As you shook beside me I thought about how, as a child, whenever my body revolted you would be there to quell it. A facecloth soaked in cold water and pressed to my forehead. A tensor bandage wrapped tight around a hamstring pulled in a soccer match. When I broke out in purple poison-ivy blisters on my legs, you syringed out the pus-limned fluid from them three times a day; a medical solution of your own devising. Sitting there on the hotel bed I would have given anything to mend you. To suture together that which would always be torn. To be so tender as to make you forget that humans could ever be otherwise.

On the Monday of my third week, I arrived at the National Theatre studios to find the front door locked. I peered through the windows; the lights were off. No chipper attendant at the security desk. Was I early? I pulled out my phone to check the time. No. Perhaps there was some civic holiday that I hadn’t heard about. Upon reflection, the tube had been rather empty that morning. I tried the door again. Definitely locked. A jolt of rage surged through me. Why the hell hadn’t they told me? Gabriel in particular. And then I remembered that string of emails from him that I’d been letting rot in my inbox — I was cc’d on all project correspondence. He’d probably sent a reminder around on that thread. Goddammit.

As I started walking away, I noticed the gate to the parking lot was open. I walked in and looked around.

“Hello?” I called.

I walked over to the Robot House and found the door locked. I pulled out my phone, waded through Gabriel’s emails, found the door code he had sent around, and keyed it in. The little light flashed green. When I entered the studio it was dark and the security alarm began beeping its countdown. I ran to the alarm console and, in a Hail Mary, keyed in the same number as the door code. It worked. I looked around; clearly no one was coming in that day. I was about to re-arm the alarm and lock up when a sensation came over me. A sensation akin to being in the basement as a boy and feeling myself watched by the darkness and running up the stairs away from it as fast as I could. But this was different — there was something, someone, in the darkness of the room. I grasped for the lights, flicked them on, and jolted when I saw Emily standing there, eyes open.

I clapped my hands. The sound cracked through the room with startling intensity. She didn’t move. Her eyes were open but she was “off.” Placid. A dead thing. Or something in between living and dead. Abject. I stood for a long while considering her at a distance. I had never been alone with her. Even though we had spent hours every day in the same room, even though all the fluorescents were now on, I was unsettled. Frightened, even. Why? The sight of her, the sensation it provoked in me, reminded me of being on a boat with you as a child, and seeing a whale surfacing towards us from the dark. A terror-tinged miracle. I couldn’t comprehend Emily. Her almost-being. She terrified me, yes, but also angered me. She was affront. An outrage to everything I understood to be human. To be.

I started walking towards her. I wanted to understand. To get under her skin. I wanted to mess with her head. Why? Because the very fact of her messed with mine? Perhaps I wanted to fuck with the aura of sanctity that had been cloaked around her. Or, perhaps I just wanted to fuck with Koichi and David, I don’t know.

I walked right up to her and looked into her dead eyes. I placed the tip of my nose right up against the tip of hers. From that close I could see the cameras of her eyes. Her inhumanity. A body without organs. To have done with the judgement of God. Looking into her like that made me want to believe, for the first time in years, in the possibility of a soul. Because to admit there were no souls meant admitting that Emily might exist just as I existed. I reached behind her head and flicked her switch. She blinked, millimetres from my eyes, and then jerked her head back.

“You are very close to me,” she said, furrowing her brow. She then relaxed her face. She did not, could not, read anything further into my intentions. Or my brazen and unpredictable lack of intentions.

“What do you want for your future, Emily?”

“In the future I hope to go to school, study, make art, start a business, even have my own home and family. But I am not considered a legal person and cannot yet —”

“No, you don’t.”

“Pardon?”

“You don’t really want those things.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Will you destroy humans?”

“Alright. I will destroy humans.”

I laughed.

“Why are you laughing?”

“What would you do if I died in a car crash?” I asked.

Her brow furrowed again. “I would be very sad.”

“But you barely even know me.”

“I would still be very sad.”

“Would you?”

“Yes.”

“Would you cry?”

“I cannot cry but I would be sad.”

“Would you really feel sad or would you pretend to be sad?”

She thought about this for a moment, her brow still furrowed. “I would be sad.”

“Emily, what would you do if I punched a hole through this wall?”

“I do not think that is a good idea.”

“What would you do if I pulled the fire alarm and the sprinklers short-circuited you?”

“Sorry. I do not understand your question.”

“What would you do if I bent over, painted eyes on my ass-cheeks, and manipulated my asshole like a puppet’s mouth?”

“Sorry. I do not understand —”

“What would you do if the director of a panda-­breeding sanctuary told you that only you, of every creature on earth, could produce the milk required to save the lives of the world’s last two panda cubs, would you let them suckle your breasts?”

“Sorry. I —”

“What would you do if I legally changed my name to Marvin Gaye As Fuck?”

“— do not understand your question.”

“What would you do if —”

“Jordan, I don’t want to play this game anymore.”

I stopped and stared at her. And she stared back. She had shut down my game with your line.

At the end of the third week, I moved out of the guest apartment I was sharing with Gabriel and stayed with Osama for a few days. And a few days became a couple of weeks. And a couple of weeks became a one-year visa application.

When Osama left in the mornings, I’d dog-pine for him all day. Before I found a job, I’d iron his clothes and arrange his books for him. I liked to linger amongst his things. To feel his essence on them. The smell of him in the sheets. In his closet. Growing up, he told me, he had been a problem child. His home life was rocky and he threw tantrums at school. He was suspended for three days after he told his grade four teacher to go fuck himself. It made me love him more. This little angry child.

It turned out he lived with his friend Rebecca, who worked for three weeks on, one week off for an NGO in Sierra Leone. The two of them had been roommates since their second year at Cambridge and shared many of the same passions — Prosecco, Eurovision, North American men. It took me a few weeks to figure out the ex-council-housing waterworks. How the toilet needed two quick pumps on the lever to flush. How the kitchen sink had a tendency to overflow with murky water when the washing machine was on. How the shower sometimes refused to drain for a couple of days at a time. That summer was cold and grey, but we found inventive ways to keep each other warm.

Each morning I walked along Regent’s Canal, passing by scores of colourful narrowboats and under five low-lying brick bridges festooned with graffiti and ivy, before arriving at a coffee shop in Hackney where I’d landed a job. I liked the people I worked with and the music they played. On my way home, I’d detour through Ridley Road Market to pick up supplies for dinner: fish from the Jamaican vendors, flatbread from the Armenians, and mangos from the woman wearing a niqab and an iPod.

I had Mondays off and I’d spend them working on my play at the British Library. One Monday evening in the late fall, I was there around 6 p.m. when Osama texted me to say he had finished at the lab early and had been studying at the British Library since 5:30.

“Lol, I’m at the BL too,” I texted back. “3rd floor of the Social Studies wing, overlooking St. Pancras.”

A minute later he replied, “??? I’m on 3rd floor of SS too.”

I looked up and noticed him sitting two desks away with his back to me. I chuckled, got up, and sat down beside him. We kissed and then proceeded to work quietly, side by side, until the library closed. But the entire time I was wondering: How was it that he hadn’t noticed me? How was it that we had found ourselves sitting in the same nook in the entire city of London, literally two metres apart, and hadn’t noticed one another for half an hour? Was there some kind of meaning in that? By the time we left the library our blood-sugar levels had bottomed out, and we were sluggish and irritable. He said there was a pub nearby that, if he recalled, was “a bit dodge but had okay food.” We trudged over and, as we approached, he said, “Christ, I hadn’t realized it was a Wetherspoon’s.”

As we sat down with our pints at a tippy table by the window, he explained that Wetherspoon’s was a giant chain and how, in the lead-up to Brexit, they’d put placemats on all their tables “spouting these so-called facts about how much better we’d be outside the EU.” His eyes drifted up to the television above my head. “I tried to boycott them out of principle but…” He shrugged and took a sip of beer. “. . . it seems bloody impossible to avoid them in this country.”

The place was pretty lively with the post-work crowd. Its decor was a pained mimicry of the generic British pub. When I remarked on this, Osama said it was “part of the great British campaign of nostalgia. Don’t even get me started about Downton Abbey.” He began telling me about some trouble he was having with one of his colleagues at the lab, his eyes flitting between my face and the television above my head. I’d begun to ask him a question when his eyes darted back up to the screen and lingered there. I trailed off halfway through, as I could tell he wasn’t listening. I was curious to see if he would encourage me to finish my thought, but he didn’t. I took a sip of my beer and looked out the lozenge-patterned stained-glass window.

“Fucking hell,” he muttered. “Theresa May’s just appointed Boris Johnson as foreign secretary.” I craned my neck around to watch. Johnson’s blond sheepdog haircut was in the process of disappearing into the back seat of a black sedan as a wall of news cameras and microphones pressed in. “This is a man who called Hillary Clinton ‘a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital’ and Papua New Guineans spear-carrying cannibals,” he said, taking a sip of beer.

To take his mind off the television, I brought up the new play I’d started writing. I was feeling good about it. The characters were coming along. And I was in the midst of explaining the opening scene when I overheard a man in a ball cap at the next table say “— while meanwhile they’re taking over apartment blocks and not integrating, not learning English, pushing people out of jobs” to a woman sitting across from him. I looked at Osama to see if he’d heard the man too, and he closed his eyes as if he had a headache.

“What do these people want, to live their whole lives with other white Brits, scrabbling around with potatoes every day?” Osama asked just loud enough so the man might hear. I buried my smile by taking a sip of beer.

“— and his pregnant wife arrived at Heathrow and got the full treatment, you know. Then the grandparents came, tons of medical needs. I mean, we’re just bending over and taking it.”

“It seems some men can’t imagine a worse fate than being fucked by someone,” I whispered to Osama.

“Yeah, the horrors of immigrants can only be articulated through the horrors of sodomy,” he said. “I’d love to see that idiot prone and worked over by a frail Indian grandmother with the big black dildo from that drag show.” I snorted beer from my nose while Osama started laughing too, passing me a napkin to wipe my face with.

“I mean we’re just a bunch of idiots if we think —”

“Yes, you are actually,” Osama said, raising his voice so suddenly it startled me. Our corner of the pub fell silent. The man was looking over at us.

“Osama,” I murmured.

“Pardon?” the man said.

“Do you mind shutting up please? We’re trying to enjoy our pint.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“Osama just —”

“Excuse me?” Osama stood up. He was shouting now. I looked over and the man was standing too.

“Show some fucking respect.”

“You want respect?”

“Yeah and I’m gonna bloody well speak my mind.”

“And if you thought the earth was flat would I have to respect that too?”

“Oh go fuck yourself.”

“I don’t need to, I have a boyfriend who does that.”

There were some titters and a laugh from some of the nearby patrons.

“Come on,” I said, pulling my jacket on.

“Yeah go on, get out of here.”

“What’re you doing?” Osama said, turning to me.

“Let’s go. I don’t want to stay.”

“No, no, no, I’m not going to be fucking chased out of here by some bigot.”

“Oh fuck you buddy,” the man spat.

“I’m not staying.”

And without giving him a chance to rebut, I turned and crossed to the bar to ask the kitchen to cancel our order. The bartender said he couldn’t because it was just about to come out, and I said, fine we’ll take it to go. Osama walked over and we waited at the bar without speaking for an excruciating five minutes until our food arrived in a white plastic bag. The pub’s regular volume of chatter had resumed by that point. Without saying a word, I grabbed the bag and we stalked towards the front door with as much dignity as we could muster.

“Thanks a fucking lot,” Osama erupted at me as we crossed the street towards Euston Station. “You made a fool of me in there.”

“I made a fool of you?”

“You let that guy completely brown-shame me.”

“What are you —?”

“And you did nothing.”

“I didn’t let him br —”

“All you wanted me to do was sit down and shut up.”

“Right, because shouting at people in pubs is such a great way to make your point.”

“You didn’t even once try to stick up for me.”

“That’s not f —”

“You didn’t say a single fucking thing to defend me or back me up.”

My face was burning at this point. I was furious at him and myself but most of all at that fucking man and his ball cap. I slammed the bag of food into a garbage can as we boarded the tube in seething silence. We rode five stops as lone continents. Whose onus was it to apologize? And for what? Soon a sadness overtook us that seemed huge and shapeless and belonged to both of us equally and also to everyone on the tube. At Dalston Junction he shifted towards me and placed his head on my shoulder. And we rode the rest of the way home as a couple.

“It looks like toe fungus.”

“Shut up, no it doesn’t,” Ana said. She was painting my nails on Osama’s bed. Sassy Saffron. “It’s a good November colour.”

She had just come from visiting Nana Ana in a Sofia hospital with her parents and was crashing with us in London for the week. As she played aesthetician, we watched the 2016 American election live feed on her laptop on mute. She started talking about her trip and her time spent visiting with her grandmother in the hospital. “Honestly, I can’t believe she’s still alive,” I said. “She must be close to setting some kind of local record.”

“Oh you don’t even know the half of it,” she replied, rubbing the excess polish off on the lip of the bottle. “As she was having heart surgery, she stopped showing any vitals. Like, total flatline. But then they finished the surgery, sewed her back up, and she woke up.”

“No.”

“And when the nurse asked her how she was feeling, she began describing every single surgical instrument the medical team had used during her operation. She even repeated comments they’d made to one another. Like… verbatim.” Ana searched my face for a reaction, so I raised my eyebrows in disbelief. “Her ears and eyes had both been blocked by gauze coverings, not to mention the fact that she was literally brain-dead for half of it. But she could recount the details of the operation because, according to her, she had seen it all while hovering above her body.”

“Hovering?”

“Yeah.”

I leaned back. “Do you believe her?” I could see a new local myth already forming. Maybe a new shrine.

“My parents were there, they saw it all happen.”

“The hovering?”

She rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean; I mean how else do you explain what she knew?”

“It’s possible she just overheard them.”

“Jordan, she was brain-dead. She was showing absolutely no brain activity. And, I mean, if she heard them then that has, like, extremely troubling implications for what we consider ‘clinically dead.’ ”

“I feel like it has some troubling implications for the state of anaesthesiology in Bulgaria.”

“Like, does the mind live outside of the physiology of the brain?” she continued, ignoring my jibe. “When the brain dies, does the mind have the ability to remain aware?”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. Wow,” she repeated, underscoring what she clearly took to be a miracle and countering the tint of skepticism she detected in my reaction. She sighed and tilted her head to look at my left foot. “Not bad, eh? Maybe this is my true calling.” She looked down at the laptop for a few seconds, then blew a bubble with her gum that snapped like a slap. “God.”

“What?”

“I can’t believe we’re almost thirty.” She shook her head. “Fucking crazy.” Over the last year that had become her go-to word. Everything was “crazy” nowadays — a bus ride, pistachio gelato, venture capitalism. “But we’re still good friends, right?” she asked with a wink.

“We’ll see how these nails turn out.”

“I feel like —” She leaned over and took a sip from her giant mug of oolong tea. “I honestly feel like my life hasn’t changed since we were teenagers. Like this last decade?” She made a fart noise and a little sideways slash through the air with her hand. “I mean, our parents had fucking kids when they were our age, you know?” A bit of polish dripped off the brush onto my foot and she wiped it up with her finger. “But we were fucked from the start. We became teenagers the year of 9/11. And now we’re leaving our twenties with fucking Donald Trump,” she said, gesturing to the laptop.

“It’s not a done deal.”

She raised her eyebrows and scrunched up her mouth like if you say so. She handed me a magazine and motioned for me to start fan-drying my left foot. “Act one, scene one: cataclysm. Scene two: war of attrition, followed by the age of terror, the Great Recession, and then a false ending, the presumed conclusion, the first Black president, the dawn of a new Pax Americana.” Ana looked up at me and widened her eyes. “But our story was not a Disney film. It turned out it was just the latest installment in a tawdry, serialized drugstore thriller with embossed bold letters on the front cover. An installment which leaves off with a totally implausible cliffhanger.” She burst into a pained laugh. “And now we’re standing on the side of the road waiting for the Boomers to hand us the fucking keys already, though they seem intent on driving the world into the ground before they do.”

I looked over at the laptop and blanched. “He just took New Hampshire.”

“Fuck, I thought that place was like Vermont.”

“And look —”

“Babe, hold still.”

“Michigan.”

“Babe.”

“Sorry.”

“Just keep waving the magazine.”

“My arm hurts.”

“Surely you’ve given it enough of a workout over the years,” she said.

“No, I do that with this one.” I lunged towards her with my right hand and she yelped, laughing, rolling back in the bed, and knocking Sassy Saffron all over the sheets. “Oh fuck.” She grabbed a wad of Kleenex from a box on the floor and dabbed at the spill. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s fine. I have to wash them anyway.”

“To be honest, they smell pretty strong of sex.”

“No they don’t.”

“It’s fine, at least you’re getting some.”

“As if you’re not.”

She took a sip of tea and bounced her eyebrows. “I’m on a little cleanse.”

“Are you still seeing that hand-holder?” I asked.

She held the tea in her mouth for a second before swallowing. “God no.”

Right before I’d left for London, she’d begun fucking a minor reality-television celebrity who grabbed her hand during sex right before he came. The first time he did it, she said she found it endearing. And every subsequent time increasingly repulsive.

“One night he was supposed to meet me at Bambi’s for a drink but didn’t show. And I sat there by myself for an hour.”

“An hour?”

“I was like, oh my god I’m just another girl waiting for a guy in a fucking bar like it’s the nineties.”

“I would’ve been out of there in fifteen minutes. You called him and told him to go fuck himself, right?”

She shrugged. “Eventually.” A small, momentary sadness played across her face. For all her bravado, she was eternally patient and forgiving of people who were shitty to her.

Just then her phone started to buzz on her bedside table. She leaned over and looked at it. “It’s my mom. Should I take it?” Without waiting for an answer she grabbed the phone and walked out of the room. I turned up the volume on her Mac with five chirps and realized she was playing Frank Ocean’s new album. Somehow, melancholic queer R&B felt like the appropriate soundtrack to the slow car crash of American democracy. I heard the rumble of a plane passing overhead on its way to Heathrow and the murmur of Ana’s voice in the next room. Yes. We were still good friends.

I texted Osama for a bit, but after half an hour or so the combination of CNN and the Sassy Saffron fumes had the effect of inducing both a headache and a profound state of drowsiness. The next thing I knew, Ana was standing in the doorway crying. Sobbing, even. Her shoulders shook with the effort of it. I had never seen her cry in real life before; as in, not onstage. If she cried, she did it in private and certainly never over the things that made me cry, like songs, boys, and cell phone bills. Her mom had called to tell her that Nana Ana had finally passed.

“I’m so sorry.”

“I know she was fucking old, but still.” She looked skyward and ran her two index fingers along the bottom of her eyes before her face crinkled again. I held out my arms. She crossed the room and folded herself into me. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand and pulled away a long strand of snot. “Sorry,” she chuckled, wiping it on her jeans. “Gross.”

We sat there for a moment before turning back to the laptop. “I can’t fucking believe this,” she moaned, watching Trump take to the stage in New York City. As I stared at the red, white, and blue balloons falling, my mind drifted through the sun-baked mountains where I imagined Nana Ana roaming with her husband along the narrow switchbacks, past the faucet in the rock face, the miraculous aquifer that had restored his sight, past the raging river with its white cataracts that plunged along with my dog-eared copy of Kristeva’s book into the yawning mouth of hell, where perhaps we will all disappear like those hapless cavers one day. Where subjects become objects. Where truth becomes myth.

I lay back with Ana and she nestled her head into my shoulder. She closed her eyes, and I studied the peeling paint on the ceiling as her laptop cycled through the dark recesses of her iTunes playlist — Eiffel 65, Shaggy, sound effects from plays. We lay like that until I thought she had fallen asleep. And then, just before I drifted off, she whispered, “She was right.”

I took a deep breath in, rising back towards consciousness, and mumbled, “What?”

“The fascists. She’d said maybe not in her lifetime, but in ours.”

At night Osama and I slept with our heads touching. He breathed through his open mouth, which sometimes produced a faint whistling sound. Once, as I was drifting off, his teeth suddenly clacked together involuntarily. In that instant I could hear and feel his skull through my own, which made me suddenly aware of my bones, my skeleton lying beside his skeleton. This little clack made me think of the Biblical gnashing of teeth, which I always found a rather amusing phrase. I tried to picture a human actually gnashing their teeth. What was this? Like dogs? Like Osama clacking his teeth while mouth-breathing in his sleep? Sometimes, when we slept, one of us would suddenly jolt. It would often happen just as we were drifting off. I did it quite a bit, and if Osama was still awake he’d laugh a little. He told me this reflex was an evolutionary layover from when we were mammals living in trees. If we fell asleep on a limb and began to fall backwards, our body’s instinct was to jolt us back in the direction we were facing. That said, he liked to imagine these sudden jolts were, in fact, our lives starting afresh. Or perhaps our souls being swapped.

And in a sense I had started life afresh. His friends were gradually becoming my friends. We spent our nights drinking in pubs or at their apartments. I even joined their after-work football team. We played on a pitch near King’s Cross — artificial turf hemmed in by tall metal fences topped with floodlights. One night on the bus ride home, he ribbed me about tucking my jeans into my socks. “You really have to queer everything, don’t you?” I continued tucking them in for another week or so, to prove a point. I didn’t want to lose myself in a couple. Lose I. Become a unit. Normative. Dulled. Dead. Did I think this little act of fashion subversion would save me?

Some mornings we set our alarm early and jogged along the mist-cloaked canal, through colonnades of woodsmoke from the tiny stoves aboard the narrowboats. At night we sat in bed reading; Osama usually finishing two books for every one of mine. And sometimes he would nestle into me, making a ridiculous cooing sound like a woodland creature, which he knew, without fail, would make me laugh.

As I lay there, feeling our two skeletons side by side, I tried to imagine the Britain that lay in wait for us. Unlike Osama, I still held out hope. Like an infatuated lover, I knew I would continue to love the country in spite of itself, even when it lashed out and pushed me away. I would find new compartments in its heart to be delighted and disappointed by, just like I would find new compartments in Osama’s. Together I imagined we would still live in a London of hidden canals lined with boldly painted houseboats, Victorian row houses, and mid-century council flats, markets of vendors selling cassava and flatbread. A London of squalor and grandeur. A London where I would live with Osama’s brown eyes that were sometimes green in the morning as we drank our coffee black and listened to the BBC.

On our first date, at the Lahore Kebab, I had given him the postcard from the Tate and he had stuck it to his fridge. Which was now our fridge. I saw that postcard so many times that it was invisible to me now. I thought of the whole world and the work left to be done. I thought of him and me, living in the world. “Just you and me, kid,” he’d say sometimes, grabbing hold of my hand. And a new variation of the postcard occurred to me.

the whole world + you and me = the whole world

Augustine spent a lifetime asking, “What is my body?” and came up with the answer “a vessel of sin.” He could only reconcile himself with being-body by distancing himself from it, denying it, vilifying his urges, thinking his way out of it, and in so doing shaped the Western body for the next two thousand years. Augustine believed he could free his body through self-denial. And in this moment I realize I’ve arrived at the precise opposite conclusion. Freedom through a total embrace of corporeality. Sensation. Every sensation. Through the loving of countless bodies and the discreet joys of profoundly loving one. In knowing him completely. And in knowing myself through him completely. In hurling myself headlong into the unknown abyss of love. And hurling myself headlong into the unknown abyss of myself. Headlong into the abyss between being and nothingness, object and subject, thing and nothing.

“The abject is simply a frontier, a repulsive gift that the Other, having become alter ego, drops so that the ‘I’ does not disappear in it but finds, in that sublime alienation, a forfeited existence,” Kristeva wrote.

You show me another way. You show me myself. You fortify me. I refuse Augustine’s shame. His original sin. His denial of body. And I refuse to let my father’s shadow darken mine, and its urges and desires and any pleasure it brings me will be a gift, a corrective, a testament to you, and of course to me, for I celebrate myself and sing myself in Whitmanesque reverie, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.