Farewell, Indolence

They were sitting in a circle, faces down, hands clasped, legs crossed or open. They were immersed in a reddish darkness which could only be found in an etching by an absent-minded Dutch master. They were chanting something, but no sound was coming out from their mouths. They were praying, most probably to a nameless, suburban god with a suntan. From a distance, it looked like they were all dead. But that’s not entirely right.

I had been coming to these meetings for quite some time now. It was the only time in the week when I got out of my house. I had a faint suspicion that it’s true for most of the people here. The suspicion was not baseless. The behavior patterns of all the members of this group were supposed to be the same. They were bound by a similar propensity, an identical attitude towards life, a universal agenda. They were all slackers, non-doers, indolent hacks.

A slacker is not a person who refuses to work. He/she even refuses to refuse. This is the example of an actless act – an act which is opposed to the very notion of acting, and hence a pinnacle of contradictory self-effacement. The members of the slackers’ group wanted to get effaced so much that they didn’t make any effort to get effaced. Consequently, they didn’t get effaced and ended up at a place like this. Irony is a five-letter word with a vicious sense of humor.

The group had a fancy name – Farewell, Indolence. The comma between the two words added to its decadent grandeur. I came to know about it from a friend of a friend. At first, he was reluctant to share this knowledge. I lent him some of my old stamp-books. (Once I used to be one of those stamp-collectors who are aware of the existence of a country named Helvetia.) He owned a record store which had an excellent collection of dead cockroaches. Most of these cockroaches died a natural death – a feat quite unheard of in the world of cockroaches.

To kill all the confusions in the beginning, the objective of the group was not to encourage slacking. Rather the opposite. Modeled after the Alcoholics Anonymous, this was meant to help the slackers recover from the waywardness of picking nose at the time of a national disaster. It was planned and established in the early nineteen-nineties, almost immediately after the fall of the Soviet Russia. I didn’t think there could be any connection, but then, historical narratives don’t mind commonsense.

The group was headed by a man in his late forties. He was called The Instructor. It was difficult to guess his nationality. His was a face of an old warrior who had seen his soldiers’ bodies being eaten by wolves and done nothing but raising a toast to the insignificance of life. There were some rumors. His wife was murdered by a hotheaded circus clown with a kitchen knife and he forgave him for cleaning the knife impeccably after the murder. I didn’t believe the story. It was an unlikely image: a circus clown cleaning his murder weapon beside the dead body of a woman. Clowns are famous for their apathy to water.

The meetings were usually held on Fridays. A Friday is that day of the week when a slacker finds himself or herself really confused. Is it a workday or the beginning of the weekend holiday? It is the twilight zone of indeterminate action. Should we stop work and look beyond the desks to the horizon of sheer worklessness for two whole days? But that will be going with the flow. Everyone at the office does that. We are different from everybody by doing exactly the opposite – by not doing what they are doing. Should we then keep on gazing at the computer screen until our eyes come out of the sockets? But can we stomp on our ideology and be a slave to the capitalist machine like that? We were clueless. Whoever chose Friday as the day of the meeting was really cunning. We used to be the most vulnerable on that day. It was the day when they almost made us work.

I still remember my first day at the meeting. I went with my sponsor, the owner of the record store, the keeper of dead cockroaches. We entered the room. Nobody waved. Nobody asked us to sit. There was no furniture in the room except a few chairs. I sat at the farthest corner, although it was not that far. Who would bother dragging the chairs farther than the closest? So we were close. Actually closer.

The Instructor muttered something. I guessed he was asking my name. “I am Iman,” and I added, “I am a slacker.”

“We don’t call ourselves slackers,” the Instructor’s voice struggled through one hundred years of grogginess, “we are just lazy.”

I couldn’t follow, “What do you mean? We are too lazy to call ourselves slackers? That’s really impressive.”

The man was capable of anger but he knew how to keep it to himself – by imagining himself carrying a beautiful vase to the funeral of his mistress’s cat. (This imagery has too many layers, like the basement of Jorge Luis Borges. First, you have to imagine a mistress, then her cat, then its death, then its funeral and all the arrangements – catering and booking the hall, etc. – then buying a vase, and finally carrying it to the funeral. But one needs to stop at this point. Once you imagine yourself actually reaching the door of the hall, you may become aware of the futility of it all. You may then burst out in anger which will undo all your previous efforts at nonchalance and bring you back to square one where you will be still in the arms of your mistress when the cat jumps in and you kick it out of the window.) He only smiled at my ignorance, “No. We are lazy by default. Slacking is not a choice for us. We are programmed that way.”

“Who programmed us?” I was fearless that day. I thought the discussion would take a theological turn, but instead people started pouring in their inputs on how to download porn without having to click the mouse. A new software just came out. I didn’t have anything to complain. This sort of knowledge is priceless.

I was not a slacker though. I didn’t have a job, but writers weren’t supposed to. Yes, I enjoyed my drinks, but who wouldn’t? I even jumped from a three-storied building, but survived somehow. I think I bounced on a pile of clichés lying under my window. Anyway, I went to the meetings to meet girls.

Think about it. It is a brilliant plan. Who would be a more noncommittal yet passionate lover than a recovering slacker? On one hand, she doesn’t want to put any effort and, on the other, she wants to embrace life and find the meaning of her existence. Some contradictions work as a springboard for sex. It is one of those.  

And I did alright. The first girl I met didn’t have any apartment of her own. She was sleeping on a couch of her boyfriend’s cousin. The boyfriend was sleeping with the cousin. So it would have been a little awkward if she had invited me to that place. My place was out of question. She had a car. She drove it to a deserted amusement park. We had sex under a signboard that read “Don’t be fooled by his hand gestures.” I had some difficulty getting an erection, but I couldn’t bring myself to use my hands.

I never saw her again. Somebody told me she had kicked the boyfriend out and been living with the cousin since. Good for her, I thought to myself, and good for her hands.

I had a couple of flings more. I was preparing to retire, but the universe meddled. She entered the room at around six o’clock in the afternoon and it turned into an evening. 

She was not beautiful in the conventional sense. None of them are. She wore the same dress every time I saw her. When I got to know her more intimately, I asked why. She had a specific dress for each day in the week. On Fridays, she wore a pair of jeans and a black tee. On Sundays, she wore nothing and stayed home. I never met her on a Sunday.

On the first day, she sat three chairs away from me. I was then sharing my life story with the group. These story-telling sessions were usually short. There were no heroic tales of beating up thugs or inspirational accounts of surviving cancer. Only routine descriptions of daily activities. For most of us, it was waking up late, having brunch, watching reality TV, clearing bowels, fidgeting with our own sex organs, and going to sleep.

I glanced at her from the corner of my left eye. I was talking about how I brushed my teeth every morning. I brushed them so slow that most of them became older than me. Nobody laughed at the joke. (It had a reference to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, though absolutely wrong.) She moved a little in her seat. Perhaps she found me unbearably intelligent. I stopped abruptly and the Instructor solemnly announced a coffee break. Nobody made any movement. Nobody ever did. Except me this time. And her.

These coffee breaks were mandatory by some regulation, but since nobody ever bothered to get up, there was no arrangement in the room. We went out to the street silently, followed by a unanimous gaze, garnished with curiosity, jealousy, and compassion, all in equal dosage.

We didn’t talk. I was as shy as a wrinkled, un-blown balloon, wanting to be inflated with quips and charisma, and failing. She was plainly uninterested. We drank our coffee with small portions of milk and sugar. The silence, however, was overcompensating. When we came back to the cave, our friends had started chanting our anthem. It was a soundless song, without any music or lyric. We were told at the very beginning that we had to come up with our own mantras. Once again, nobody really cared.

Very soon she and I became close. Our friendship was built on the strong foundation of disinterest to each other and, of course, to the cause of the group. Once we tried to find out how similar we were. The result was hilariously singular: apart from our lack of willingness to share, we had nothing to share. 

We started having sex. It happened so naturally that I became suspicious of her existence. Did she really exist or was I just masturbating? And I became sure only when she was murdered.

She was killed in her sleep. I don’t want to go into details as that will bring me under suspicion. Yes, I was next to her when she died. But was I there when she was killed? The police didn’t get the fine point. They locked me up and made a strong case out of it. Nobody from my group came to visit me in the jail. I didn’t expect them to come – that would have been too embarrassing. All my life I had wanted to avoid sentimentality and dog bite.

Surprisingly, I noticed some of them at the court. I refused to have the court-appointed lawyer. The man was too clean-shaven for taste. Also I wanted to show how articulate I was. On the contrary, the prosecutor was in a hurry. He spoke so fast that I couldn’t even catch the name of the deceased. (I never knew her name. She never told me.) One of her neighbors testified that she heard us having a quarrel the night before. “Is that true?” The prosecutor asked me. “How could it be? We were not married. I didn’t even know her name.” I said. Nobody laughed.

When I got up to argue my case, somebody shouted fire. The whole courtroom became empty like the soul of a life insurance agent. Well, I am a little wrong. Six of us were still there: the four members of my group, the judge, and I. I knew why I was there (my legs were chained), why my friends were there (they were slackers), but what the hell was the judge doing there? Was he impervious to fire? Was his commitment to justice so strong that it could form a shield and protect him from possible third degree burns? “You don’t have to worry about me. I am fine. I have a fever today. My body temperature is already high. A little fire can’t do shit to me,” my daze broke as the judge spoke with a strange authority. “Now proceed with your case, if you have any.”

“I do your honor,” I said expertly, mimicking one of the villains of my favorite TV show. “I can’t kill the deceased as I have a specific condition. I am a slacker like the rest of the people in the audience. A slacker can’t even leave the courtroom when there is fire. How can we kill somebody? Do I look like a person who will go to such a great length to achieve something, anything? And for what? Just to win an argument? This is simply preposterous.”

“Are you finished?” The judge seemed unmoved, and still un-burnt. 

“Yes, your honor. And oh, another thing. I really liked her.”

“That’s beside the point. Let us focus on something provable,” the judge smiled a little. “I have heard that you are not actually a slacker. You joined that group…what’s its name…Farewell Something to fuck women. Is that true?”

Amazed as I was by the sheer profanity of the truth, I couldn’t reply at once. I looked at my friends for support, but they didn’t look back. Their eyes had already melted in heat. Even if there wasn’t any fire, they wouldn’t have come in my support. They never did. They sat there like four statues of ash and scorched bone. Silent and burnt out.

“It’s not entirely true,” my voice trembled as I spoke. I had started to feel the heat. The end was near and the music had stopped.

“I have a test for you. We give everybody a fair chance to prove his innocence. And you will get yours. By the count of three, your chains will be gone. You will be a free man. If you still keep standing here, it will be proven that you are a slacker. And you will be acquitted of the murder. But if you try to run away, you will prove yourself a fraud, a non-slacker, a man with a movement.”

I couldn’t hear the countdown. The flames were blowing into my ears, caressing my earlobes, licking them, tickling, titillating, eating them. The world in front of my eyes was turning brighter by second. I rubbed my chest. A moist piece of skin came off and got stuck to my palm.

I tried to move my legs. Shouldn’t I run out and get myself admitted to a hospital? I could see the distorted face of the judge, disappearing amid smoke and bewilderment, perhaps mockingly smiling at my inability to decide. I was not feeling any pain. Only disappointment. A little sad perhaps. The second chapter of my unfinished novel needed a rewrite. If only I was a little more industrious…. Then I remembered: what’s the point?

The ambulance came late. They had a tough time bringing us out. We took a long time to move, even fried to death.