The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Chapter 19

Choices for the lonely: to seek human company in all its forms, or to be content with the fact that you have no company at all.

I switch between the two.

I made it fifteen days by myself in a cabin in the forests of Canada before breaking. In the end, paralysed and sobbing, I had to phone the police to come and rescue me.

A woman in a brown hat picked me up, and when she arrived I clung onto her arm, and said I was sorry, I was so sorry, I don’t know what came over me, but I couldn’t move, my legs couldn’t move, I tried walking and my legs wouldn’t lift me, I’d crawled on my belly to the phone and there were shadows in the windows, sounds in the dark, and I thought I’d be okay and I hadn’t been, I hadn’t been at all.

She held me tight, this perfect stranger, and said, “It’s okay, it’s okay, you’ll be okay. The forest gets to people sometimes. You’re not the first one to call, and won’t be the last I reckon. It’s okay.”

In any other place, she might have charged me with wasting police time, but here, where her beat was nine hundred square miles of forest, where she knew the name of every person that lived within, she wasn’t about to stand on ceremony. She drove me fifty kilometres into town, invited me into her home, made coffee, turned on the TV and said, “My kids will be home soon. You wanna stay and watch a film?”

We watched Bedknobs and Broomsticks, a lesser-known Disney romp involving con men, Nazis, soccer-obsessed lions, rabbits and magic.

“When I grow up,” said the youngest child, and I waited for her to proclaim her intention to be a witch, a knight, a soldier, “I want to own a museum.”

When the light was out and the kids asleep, I thanked the sheriff calmly, and said I didn’t know what had come over me.

“Some folk just ain’t built for living solo, I guess,” she replied. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of, if that way ain’t for you.”

In the months that followed, I travelled across North America. I met psychologists and attended conferences, studied journals and newspapers. I talked with scholars and monks, men and women who’d been held in solitary confinement for years on end.

You find the happiness you can, one said. Sometimes it’s hard, sometimes you gotta dig deep, but it’s there, the thing inside that you can be content.

I asked what happened when he’d been freed from his prison cell after seven years in isolation.

I went to the hotel and met my wife. She was crying, holding me, but I didn’t say anything. All my feelings were cold. It had been seven years since I’d last had to speak, I didn’t think I knew how.

A prisoner from a supermax in Florida, sat on the end of the hospital bed.

I’m lucid now, he said, but I been in the hospital for eleven days. They had me in administrative segregation before. That’s where they segregate you from the population, so as you can’t do no harm to another.

“Did you do harm?” I asked.

I killed a man, he replied with a shrug. He was gonna kill me.

“You sure of that?”

Sure I’m sure. I seen the way he were looking at me, like he knew I were gonna die. I had to get there first, is all.

“And why are you in the hospital now?”

Tried to strangle myself with my own bedding. This is the third time I try to kill myself, and I feel okay now, now that the doctor seen me, but I guess when they send me back I’ll try again until I get it right.

Calmly, so calmly, sat with his chin in his hands, three-time killer by twenty-two, segregated for life.

I used to dream when I were in solitary, he explains, staring through his hands. Now I don’t dream so much. I’m just waiting.

“Waiting for what?”

Dunno. Just waiting.

I do not fear loneliness — not any more.

Discipline.

I am the queen of internet dating; I am a one-click wonder. People forget me, but my digital profile remains, enshrined in binary code, remembered by the internet, so much more reliable than the human mind. The web is designed for the short-term; see something you like? Bookmark it. Like what you see, right now? Call me. I’m right here; I’m waiting.

“You don’t look anything like your profile picture!” people exclaim when I introduce myself to them at our pre-arranged meeting.

I look exactly like my profile picture, but my face is easier to forget than a date and time you’ve saved onto your smartphone. People usually have to blurt something out, to cover the embarrassment of not having remembered me, or recognised my face.

“I mean, you look really good,” the gentlemen will add. “Like… much better in reality.”

Toilet breaks are the destruction of a good date. Men who, after a mere twenty minutes, need to empty their bladders are no use to me. In the three minutes they spend in the gents, their memories fade, and by the time they emerge, even the most ardent of lovers will have forgotten my features, and the vast majority will have forgotten they were even on a date.

Equally, men who are tedious are easily got rid of. Three minutes in the ladies, and by the time I emerge the gentleman will probably be paying the bill and texting his mates.

Hi, he says, in town having a quiet drink by myself. You guys around?

The mind fills in gaps, invents excuses.

“I’m a good man,” said Inspector Luca Evard, the day he found out. “I don’t forget the people I’ve slept with; that’s not who I am.”

Just because you have forgotten me, does that mean I am not real?

Now.

You forget.

Now.

I am real.

Reality: the conjectured state of things as they actually exist.

I breathe, and in the time the air takes to leave my lungs, I vanish from the minds of men, and cease to exist for anyone except myself.