Meatspace (22 page)

‘You need to drive the train,’ Teddy Baker screamed at the pig man. He was rooted to the spot. Shocked.

Teddy Baker punched him and spied a start button. He pushed it and I whacked down the accelerator lever. We felt the bump of the dead mum as the train started up. We were moving slowly. People were confused. The platform’s spectators dispersed thinking the train was coming into station.

CRACK! The side glass of the cabin cracked with multiple stings.

‘He’s shooting at us!’ Bob shouted.

We were being shot at, dudes!

Aaaaaaaand that’s enough for today’s blog. Tension, tension, tension – I am the master of tension. But let’s just say, if I let this sit with you now … when you hear what happened next, oh my, you are going to shit yourselves all over the internet. And there’s enough wankers on there enough as it is.

There are 6 comments for this blog:

df325: Aziz, this is too funny.

AZIZWILLKILLYOU: Funny? Babes, did you not read it? I was shot at.

Gus Gustofferson: Lies. Lies lies lies. LIES.

AZIZWILLKILLYOU: Hey buddy, I’m back from America soon. Google ‘The Little House’ pub. Meet me there this Saturday at 3pm so I can knock the fuck out of you.

Gus Gustofferson: That definitely sounds like a threat.

Flately McBlackly: Did any of this happen in slo-mo? Like in the movies?

History:

If I delete Facebook, is it ever truly deleted? – Google
AzizWillKillYou blog hits – Wordpress
Kitab Balasubramanyam Call of Duty – Google
Chandler Call of Duty – Google

While Hayley sleeps off a hangover, I change my online passwords. My Twitter, my Tumblr, my Instagram, my Pinterest, my Reddit, my YouTube, even my Myspace. I stare at Tom, my first friend on Myspace, and wonder who he really is, that goofy avatar so ingrained in his user’s spaces. Then I change the passwords for my current email address, my defunct email address, my email address with the ill-advised name (it was ‘[email protected]’), my online banking, my spur-of-the-moment Blendr account, my Amazon login, my iTunes, Guardian Soulmates, OkCupid, Guardian Jobs, my council tax, my gas and electricity – anything I can think of, anything that I do online. Which is everything, because who knows in this day and age where to even buy a stamp? I change them all back to something that used to be my password when I was in love with a girl called Giselle at school (G153LL3) and trawl around the internet verifying Kitab 2’s tale.

I go to the Bangalore University website and look at the photo of Kitab 2’s dad, trying to project the sternness of his face into the stories I’ve been told. I’m surprised by how familiar the dad’s photo feels. He’s caught in a portrait, but as if he was talking to someone then asked to crane his neck to the left and be photographed. He’s smiling a rictus grin that says ‘screw you and the camera you used to interrupt this superior conversation’. He looks like an intellectual. He looks like he knows his stuff. He looks like he would be stern in the classroom. These are all things I glean from a man who, despite an obvious fake smile, looks intensely serious in a bad moustache.

Now I’ve confirmed that certain elements of Kitab 2’s story check out, I check my email. Nothing interesting. I check Facebook – I’ve missed 2 birthday parties, and some other people I vaguely know are engaged. A cursory look through their events and I’m caught up on the lives of others. This way I don’t need to see them. I ‘like’ a few things at random, just to stay connected to these thumbnails I call friends and family. I check Twitter. No one has sent me anything of note. There’s still the ends of the whole dickpic-gate thing being commented upon. I want to be disassociated from sex and penises as soon as possible. There’s also links to things I might like about American sitcoms. Someone has sent me some gifs of my favourite character in
Parks and Recreation
. This distracts me for a lot longer than it should. Repeating animated loops of video are hypnotising. I’ve never figured out what they should be used for but something in me has always found them electric to watch. A related search leads me to a page of porn gifs, looped penetrations that never end, moans of pleasure in a circular infinity of for ever.

I ‘like’ more Facebook things – pictures of people’s children, sarcastic political opinions and motivational quotes. I’m engaging in my friends’ lives.

I link my Twitter and Facebook to some YouTube music videos I like. Just so I can feel like I’ve engaged in the world.

I’ve said more about my state of mind with the videos I choose than just saying, on Twitter: ‘I miss Aziz and I wish this doppelganger would fuck off and that wasn’t my dick.’ Somewhere in this vanity is a genuine desire to communicate with the people who follow me. But on my terms. Where the things I rate create a demonstrative illusion of what I’m like as a person. In my head, this is exactly the message I wish to send out about social media me.

@kitab: ‘What if I told you I can only emotionally respond to something by finding a corresponding video on YouTube?’

@kitab: ‘I got nothing to tell you this morning.’

@kitab: ‘how do you wake the person sleeping next to you without making it look like you’re waking them up?’

Hayley is slumped across my bed, on her front, hands crossed under her head. She wiggles her toes and purrs. I wrench the cover out from underneath her, nearly stirring her, nearly pancake-flipping her, nearly bouncing her into the air, and I cover her. She grips the cover and turns over, grunting.

She grunts a lot in her sleep. She looks amazing.

Hayley’s sleeping lump has taken up the whole bed. I go into Aziz’s room and head to his bed. His bed stinks of someone who should have washed his sheets before pissing off on holiday, especially if you were rutting the morning of your departure. The smell of dried semen of for ever ago is comfortable; it stinks of interaction. I put my head down on his spare pillow and close my eyes. My feet are touching some papers so I push them to the end of the bed.

Then it hits me.

Kitab 2 slept here. Maybe they’re his.

I snag the papers with my toes and pull them up the bed.

There are 2 passports and a handful of papers. The 2 passports – one Indian and one English – are Kitab’s and mine. His Indian, with the laminated white turtleneck photo I came across when I first found him, and mine British, with me unsmiling looking like a stubbled man racked with guilt. Also, the papers include: his flight details; one of my bank statements; a list of computer shops, and a printout of a set of writing tips I wrote on my blog. They were meant to be funny. They contained sarcastic advice like, ‘6. No one cares how many cats or children you have. Adjust your bio accordingly.’

#WTF

His passport is new and shiny. He doesn’t have any stamps except the one to the UK, which states it is a tourist visa, rather than a student or working one. He had no intention of anything other than coming here to appease his father. The piece of paper with the flight details only lists a single outbound flight to the UK, rather than a return one. It’s been booked by his dad.

Annoyingly, he’s picked the bank statement that involves a payment for a 20-minute phone call to Babestation, which came one night after the pub and a particularly celibate attempt to try to seduce a girl I liked that ended up with her saying nothing made her hornier than getting stoned, me buying some hash in the toilets, even though I hadn’t smoked for years, and her taking it back to my flat to smoke it with me before falling asleep. Aziz watched from his room, laughing to himself. I went to my room, switched on the television and saw there was a redheaded girl with 2 bad tattoos and a South African accent. So I called her and asked her for love advice, which she was happy to give me. The visuals of her simulating finger-banging herself and cupping her breasts and rubbing them frantically only gave the backdrop of her advice about girls, depression and feelings of loss and ambivalence a bizarre context. Now, whenever I feel depressed, I feel horny. And I only have a redheaded South African who poses naked on television for money to blame.

And my passport? It’s all been bullshit, the niceness and the declaration of love and the goofy intent to get laid – this is some serious identity theft. It was one thing to steal my Twitter login, that feels like a transience I can get over, but this is more serious. This feels more illegal. So, if he’s intent on stealing my online persona and my official administrative one, who the fuck will I be in this scenario?

I jump out of bed steeling for a fight.

*

I write Hayley a note that says,
‘
I’ve gone to see a doppelganger about getting my life back. Sorry, this isn’t cryptic. It’s surprisingly literal. I have to go see this other Kitab. Sorry. I know. Sorry. Shall I say sorry again? I will be back before you can crack the wi-fi password. Sorry. Kit.’

I head back to the hospital to confront Kitab 2. On the way to the hospital, I try reading Aziz’s blogs but give up with his ebullience. Online, people are polemicising against the latest round of cuts by the government and sharing their favourite ‘humblebrag’. I’m momentarily distracted by a pun game involving reappropriating book titles to sound dirty. It’s called #bookporn.

‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Boner #bookporn’

‘A Tale of Two Titties #bookporn’

‘Bellend of a Suicide #bookporn’

‘Even the Dogging #bookporn’

‘Life of Creampi #bookporn’

‘A Visit from the Poon Squad #bookporn’

I fire these off before I go underground. Underground, staring at my warped face against the train window, I wonder what that feeling is within me. It feels unfamiliar at first, but then the clenched fists, the sweaty brow, the inability to concentrate on anything, plus the bubbling rage inside me, the way it pulls at me – I’m angry. I haven’t felt angry in a long time. I’ve barely felt anything but horny or upset in a really long time. Bless you Kitab 2, you weirdo.

Rach moved out of the flat the week my book came out. Because I was booked to go on a campaign trail, write articles and blogs, do library appearances and book readings, and because it was my first big thing and I kind of liked the attention and this was what I had been waiting for all this time, I didn’t cancel anything. The week before she left me, I had gone on the radio to plug the book. Because the presenter was attractive, I flirted with her on the air, much to the annoyance of Rach who was sitting on the other side of the glass in the studio.

Instead of one of the funnier anecdotes about Aziz and me as teenagers, the presenter had picked out a passage to read back to me. It involved the main character, opaquely based on me, arguing with his girlfriend, a version of the worst things about Rach.

On top of all the tweeting, the Facebooking, the Q&A email interviews, the politics of getting my name out there, the obnoxious arrogance growing inside me, I’d made fun of Rach on the BBC, the most holy of all places. And she hadn’t even read the book yet.

That last coffee we had, she was crying and looking into the space between our mugs and said, ‘Is that what you think of me?’

‘No, Rach. It was just satire. Fun. It wasn’t based on you.’

‘Now everyone who listened knows that was me. Thank you. For writing me so horribly.’

I told her off for not being supportive, for not understanding the difference between fact and fiction, for daring to say I was anything less than a man with integrity promoting his work. I told her off for having a go at me for things that were my career. Rach just shook her head and said, ‘You used to write me the most charming text messages when we first met. Now I’m lucky to get more than one word.’

She then told me she was moving out.

Kitab 2’s welcome to that identity if he wants to steal it.

On my way from the station to the hospital, my phone rings and it’s my dad.

‘Hey pops,’ I say aggressively, trying to hurry him off the phone so he doesn’t ruin my stride, my inertia, my anger.

‘You busy?’

‘Yes. I am.’

‘Too busy for your old man? What you doing?’

‘Being busy,’ I say, high-pitched, like a teenager.

‘Fine, I’ll go. Just quickly, Kitab-san – I’ve got this girl who loves Mexican food. I want your recommendations.’

‘Try the internet, Dad.’

‘What? You expect me to trust strangers over my friends? Kiddo, you do not know how I operate.’

‘Goodbye, Dad,’ I say.

‘What restaurant?’ he asks, hurried.

‘I dunno, Dad. Honestly. I don’t know anything.’ I look at the station I’m stood outside. People stream past me in either direction. I have nothing to tell my dad.

‘Okay,’ he says. ‘I guess I can look online. How are you, kiddo?’

‘I’ve got to go, pops,’ I say, and I hang up the phone.

I find Kitab 2 sitting outside the hospital, on a bench, smoking. He nods at me and smiles and I’m immediately disarmed. How could this goofball plan this identity theft attack on me? Look at him, smoking like a one-eyed sailor. It’s almost comical. Without wanting to, I smile at how silly he looks and he taps the space next to him, placing an arm up on the back of the bench to welcome me.

I sit next to him. We don’t talk for a minute or so. I breathe in and out, controlling my anger, counting to 10, remembering a grief counsellor once informing me that things that were out of my control were things I shouldn’t lash out at. Kitab 2 offers me a cigarette. I take one just to take one and stare at it.

The cigarette looks delicious, mostly because I haven’t smoked in a few years. Rach and I gave up together. She’d be so mad.

Before I can intellectualise sign-offs and permission slips for the cigarette, Kitab 2 has flared a light for me. I accept it, cupping the flame into my neck. The light breeze distracts the first attempt. The second gets me all the way lit. Immediately, the smell and taste and sensation is sending a chill through my legs. My lungs feel acrid and warm. It’s a confusing process for my body. How can something so amazing feel so unnatural?