Paul Murray - The Mark and the Void

I clear my throat. ‘All right. Quel acteur est une copie de lui-même — this means, Which actor is a copy of himself?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘George Clon-è.’

Ish looks confused.

‘In French, you see, Clooney sounds like Clon-è ,’ I explain. ‘Like he is the clone of himself.’

‘Yeah, I get it.’

‘This is actually quite a good joke.’

Ish laughs, lays her hand on my arm. ‘Oh, Claude,’ she says. ‘How could I leave you here on your own? It wouldn’t be safe.’

‘I don’t understand,’ I say. But she just keeps laughing.

The conversation throws me; at the same time, I know how she feels. Now that Ariadne is out of the picture, now that chapter is definitively closed, I keep expecting some kind of change ; instead, life just keeps going, as it always has. I wake a few seconds before the morning alarm; I read the market forecasts as the light begins to break; I analyse reports, brief clients, at night lie in bed and try to decide which is worse, the dream where I watch paralysed as Ariadne walks away, or the one where by some unspecified miracle she is there in my arms and my heart is bursting with happiness, and I know that in the morning I will have to undergo the desolation of losing her all over again. While she is away, I watch all the riot footage I can find, in case I might glimpse her amid the tear gas and flying brickwork. When she returns, I cannot even watch for glimpses; instead, as I walk past the Ark, I force myself to look away. Having her close by only underlines how out of reach she is, giving her up only crystallizes how much I desire her; love loves these paradoxes, love generates paradoxes like this ad infinitum. Perhaps it is no wonder that so many people pursue money instead, possessions, power, goals that are lifeless but at least achievable. Perhaps, after all, that is the true purpose of Business: to replace the shifting, medieval labyrinths of love with the broad, sanitized avenues of materialism, the lightless, involuted city of the self with something grid-like and rational — a reordering in the name of reason, a vast Haussmannization of the heart.

Autumn comes: in our denatured domain we see it in the clenched skies, a new chill edge to the rain. The mood in the city has darkened too. A series of revelations about Royal Irish comes at the same time as leaked details of the next round of austerity measures; the zombie encampment swells with fresh recruits, who sit on the quay, battering pots and pans so relentlessly that even at night when it is quiet we still hear it in our ears.

More significantly, sections of the non-zombie population have also taken to the streets. On the way back from a meeting, my taxi runs into a protest outside government buildings.

‘Might be a while,’ the driver says, dropping his hands resignedly over the wheel. ‘Sorry, mate.’

‘That’s all right,’ I say. In the near distance I hear horns, drums, voices chanting.

‘It’s them cunts of bankers are to blame.’ The taxi driver shakes his head. ‘Bad as the paedos, they are.’ He thinks about this for a moment, then goes on: ‘In fact I’d say most of them are fuckin paedos. They have that look about them, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Mmm,’ I say ambiguously from the back seat.

‘I’m tellin’ you, if one of them thievin’ paedo scumbags ever got in my cab …’ He mashes his fist into his palm, then breaks off, turns to me and asks sunnily, ‘What line o’ work you in yourself, pal?’

Mercifully, my phone strikes up; feeling rather as Frodo must have slipping on the Ring, I excuse myself to answer it.

At the other end of the line, to my surprise, is Paul; to my even greater surprise, he wants to take me to lunch. ‘You have some new scheme for finding me a woman?’ I query. ‘Because you know this is no longer something I wish to pursue.’

He laughs. ‘No schemes, no set-ups, no strings attached. Just two friends, catching up over a good meal.’

I meet him in the plaza outside Transaction House. He looks different — spruce , as they say in English. He has had his hair cut, and sports a natty blazer with a thin stripe. ‘Have a few meetings lined up later today, got to look the part,’ he explains, as we walk across the bridge.

‘Meetings — about Hotwaitress?’

‘That’s right, only it’s not called Hotwaitress any more. We gave up the domain name after we got sued, and when we went back a few weeks ago we found someone else had taken it.’

‘Someone has used your idea?’ I say, trying to sound sorry.

‘It’s just some joker putting up candids of waitresses in truck-stops. But he’s got the name. In fact most of the premium domain names are gone. Hotwaitress.net, Hotwaitress.org, Naughtywaitress, Saucywaitress, Flirtywaitress, Dirtywaitress, Shamelesswaitress, a whole load of others, all taken.’

‘How frustrating,’ I commiserate.

‘Yeah, a lot of perverts out there these days,’ he says. ‘Luckily, we were still able to get hold of Myhotswaitress.com.’

‘Myhotwaitress,’ I say, weighing it up. ‘Well, this is as good as —’

‘Sorry, Claude — it’s My hots waitress. Hot- s , with an s .’

‘Myhotswaitress,’ I repeat dubiously.

‘It sounds strange at first, but you get used to it. In fact, it’s really grown on me. It’s like, these waitresses are so hot that they’re hot plural. They’re hots. Anyhow, that’s the reason I wanted to take you to lunch today — as a small thank-you for all you’ve done in bringing this together. If it weren’t for you, Myhotswaitress might still be on the shelf, gathering dust. It was your story, and your faith in me, that inspired me to give it another try.’

‘My faith was in you as a novelist,’ I say. ‘I was hoping to inspire you to write another book.’

‘Well, the point is that you inspired me,’ he says. ‘Whatever direction that took.’

‘Where are we going?’ I say, as we have been walking for a while and I am getting hungry.

‘It’s not much further. I have a feeling you’ll like this place, Claude. I have a feeling you’ll like it a lot.’ He permits himself a mysterious smile. ‘But what you were saying there, about wanting to inspire me to write a book — in a sense, that’s what you’ve done. I’ve been thinking lately that Myhotswaitress isn’t so different from a novel. Or to put it another way — some people might make the argument that a website like Myhotswaitress is the novel’s natural replacement.’

‘What people? Igor?’

‘Think about it. Why don’t we read novels any more? Because thanks to technology, we can turn our own lives into stories. Each of us can be the hero of our own movie. Yet for all the incredible leaps we’ve made, there are some blank spaces. Things technology can’t give us. We’ve got social media, on the one hand, where we can edit our relationships, control how we appear to the world. We’ve got porn, on the other, acting out all of our fantasies for us. But between them, in that space between sex and friendship, there’s still something missing.’

‘Go on,’ I say warily.

‘What happened between you and Ariadne made me realize we’re still waiting for a twenty-first-century way of experiencing love. Even in the digital age, love is something we want and need. But it’s tricky. In some ways love is the novel of the emotional world. If you stick with it, and put in the hours, there are wonderful rewards. But it demands a commitment, and today, people don’t have time for that. They like the idea of it, certainly, but more and more of them are saying about love what they say about the novel: TL, DR — too long, didn’t read. So the question becomes, how do we upgrade love? How do we give that deep, rich, novel-like experience in a modern, easily digestible form?’