You had a particularly bad day at the office, some million was lost. Volatility of the market. Incompetence of your peers. Opacity of human psychology. Unpredictability of geopolitics. Wars, bombings, and riots on foreign soil.
I prepared dinner: a clear broth soup with organic free range chicken, ginseng, ginger, and jujube. Steamed Japanese rice served on the side. My mother’s recipe. I couldn’t eat, nausea brewed in my chest.
You complained about taxes. You spoke about the lawsuit. You’d made calculations, you said, this couldn’t go on. You gave an ultimatum.
Each and every word registered. They made no sense – noise to be filtered and canceled. You acted, and looked, like someone I didn’t know, a stranger.
Sitting across the dinner table from you, I stared into my bowl of soup, wondering if I’d put enough salt.
“Please, not tonight. I’m not well,” I pleaded.
You said I hadn’t been well for as long as anyone could remember.
“It’s this place,” I said.
You went on about how hard you’d worked to build this home for me, for us – everything to my liking, yet it was not enough. It was never enough.
I felt weak, “I appreciate everything you’ve done for me… it’s just this village.”
Finally, you snapped, “why don’t you just fuck off and go back to where you came from?”
On a normal day, I would flip the table and demand that you would not speak to me in such manner. But I was hardly breathing with the dizzy spell. The nail of my left thumb cut deep into the side of my index finger. I gathered myself.
“I would love to. Soon.”
You stood up and walked to the reading room, came back towards me with a piece of paper and a pen in hand.
“Sign this,” you pushed the piece of paper in front of me. An IOU.
I looked up to you and blinked a few times – I wanted to be certain I did not hallucinate any of this. Reality assured me this was indeed happening. Then I put my signature on the piece of paper.
“Can we eat now? Food is getting cold,” I said.
My life had come to this point where I’d decided I would neither escalate nor deescalate any situation. I wanted to sit back and take it all in with a morbid sense of curiosity and to revel in the perverse thrill of people revealing their truer selves to me. I thought about a conversation with a gentleman which supposedly never happened about an orgy involving Swiss blonde girls. I thought about the obscene notion of political martyrdom in the year of 2018. I thought about Oscar Wilde - Yet each man kills the thing he loves.
You commenced eating and complimented my cooking.
“You’re welcome,” I said.
As the spoonful of soup warmed the back of my throat, I had a realization that I might be, in fact, roaming in hell – a thought that did not at all surprise me. The best thing that I could hope for in this life would be suicide by three shots to the back of my head with an untraceable 1911, in which case at least the blood wouldn’t be on my hands.
Tomorrow you wouldn’t remember any of this. You would wake up in the morning and the first thing you’d say to me would be “I love you” as if those words carried any intrinsic value.
There was someplace else I’d rather be, but I’d learnt a thing or two about patience and resolve. Delayed gratification, or so it was called.
“There’s lemon sorbet in the freezer,” I said.
Your face softened, in about three seconds a smile would form.
*****
