Un

.

This year, we partnered with the Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Prize to publish our favourite story from the longlisted entries. Louie Conway’s story, ‘Un’, was placed second in the prize. 

.

The young man leans on the granite counter in the north-west corner of the newly renovated kitchen-living area of his sister’s home. The screen of his smartphone is eight inches from his eyes, a dark reflector amid the beams of bright sunlight entering through transom windows set in three of the room’s four walls. Nestled in the folds of his right ear is a wireless earphone, playing at low volume a podcast interview with a controversial public intellectual whose work applies Darwinian principles to a range of social, professional and romantic problems (mainly those commonly encountered by males in the young man’s age cohort), an interview which the young man has heard many times before and which therefore currently exerts only a weak and sporadic grip on his attention. A faint smile lingers on his face, the remnant of a laugh provoked by a surreal joke about the logic of werewolves he read seven seconds ago, further up the social media feed he is scrolling through with his right thumb. The smile has now faded almost completely as his attention alights on phone-camera footage of a rocket strike on a tank in a war happening somewhere hilly and arid. The projectile, a quivering white-hot orb, enters the frame from bottom right and shrinks off towards the tank in the left background; the orb vanishes, then the tank explodes, its khaki steel turret replaced by a swirling nova of red flame and black smoke, killing everyone inside. The young man watches the silent twelve-second video impassively and scrolls on.

Currently hidden from the young man’s view by the large kitchen island is the eleven-month-old niece he has been tasked with watching while his sister drives the short distance into town for formula. With increasing confidence and speed the baby crawls along the base of the room’s east wall, her small hands slapping the cool, varnished-stone tiles chosen by her parents from a catalogue three months ago, her soft knees shuffling forward and her dainty, downy head, still spongy in sections where the bones are yet to fuse, lurching from side to side – movements which appear comically ungoverned but are in fact the product of intense concentration, the baby only having learned to crawl unassisted less than a week ago.

Objects located within the baby’s foot-high plane of access include: four square metres of interlocking foam tiles; two paperboard children’s books; a scattered set of brightly coloured building blocks; a fine shard of glass, missed during the clean-up after her father dropped a champagne flute while toasting the renovation; the hardwood legs of a dining table and four chairs; the cat’s bed (empty); the cat, rubbing its flank along the room’s west wall with its head turned to eye the baby through the chair legs; a sky-blue woollen cap, shaken from the baby at the outset of her crawl and lying in the shadow of the kitchen island; eighteen metres of timber skirting board, installed in a distracted hurry by a local tradesman following a phone call informing him his mother-in-law had suffered another fall; three nail heads, protruding slightly from the skirting board along the base of the east wall; a week-old morsel of roast chicken, dropped during the serving of last Sunday’s roast dinner – which now catches the baby’s attention and reorients the angle of her crawl – containing traces of Campylobacter and E. coli; two common garden spiders; one cardinal spider; one daddy longlegs; a safety pin (closed); a five-cent coin; the young man’s socked feet and bare calves.

The young man remembers with a quick-passing volt of anxiety that a baby has been left in his care.

In the moments between his closing one social media app and opening another, the young man becomes aware of assorted slaps and gurgles of exertion coming from somewhere on the other side of the kitchen and remembers with a quick-passing volt of anxiety that a baby has been left in his care. Almost coincident with this feeling arrives the sound of a resonant ping from the young man’s phone, its screen now aglow with a message from the young woman on his university course who, despite not having heard from her since the end of term, he has thought about at least once every waking hour of every day of the summer break. The sound of the ping and the sight of her name and profile picture (in which she’s wearing a light summer dress and playfully yet gracefully straddling a small statue of a dolphin in some sunny seaside locale) triggers a release of dopamine sufficient to instantly improve his mood, causing him to reinterpret the sounds coming from the other side of the kitchen as indications that the baby is contented and safe and not in need of his immediate attention.

The message contains a link to a song which the young woman mentioned during a conversation that the young man thought ended badly, due to his confidently espousing a set of values regarding the role of the male in a monogamous heterosexual relationship. After the young woman’s heartfelt description of the song (titled ‘Househusband’) which the young man admitted to never having heard, he had segued awkwardly into a monologue about how the male’s optimal role in modern relationships is essentially that of the hunter in tribal societies ten millennia ago, a role which finds contemporary expression in the form of the male working to earn money with which to buy food and maintain shelter for the female while she cares for their offspring, values which the young man is not really sure he holds, or even entirely understands, but merely read (in the controversial public intellectual’s book) that women find attractive due to a biological hardwiring that compels them to select mates in accordance with a set of normatively masculine criteria – strength, height, status, ambition, practical competence, etc. – whether they’re aware of it or not.

The young man inferred from the young woman’s reaction to his monologue that she was put off, even slightly offended, by it, by him. But now her message prompts him to consider the possibility that his attempts to inflate his appeal as a potential mate may have had the intended effect. Lying one level below this thought is a competing theory (to which the young man is inclined to ascribe less credence) which posits that the young woman might just like him for who he is; for his unashamedly nerdy sense of humour and tendency to laugh generously at other people’s jokes; for his sharp, unusually high-bridged nose; for the way he clears his throat quietly and squints before answering a question. As these theories jostle for supremacy in his mind, the young man realises he is unsure which of them he would prefer to be true. If her attraction to him (if indeed she is attracted to him) is a result of things he has done and said with the express purpose of making her attracted to him, this would suggest he has a measure of influence over the feelings of others, and can therefore alter them to his benefit by acting the right way and saying the right things. On the other hand, if she has come to like him merely for who he is, this would be due to factors outside his control – namely her own independent thoughts and feelings – and that this state of affairs did not arise directly from his intentions suggests he has little say in whether or not in the future it suddenly changes.

Though the young man is not aware of it, his inclination to doubt the latter theory issues from a region of his subconscious that contains a primitive model of his relationship with his own mother, who, while she showed an almost overbearing affection for the young man for most of his childhood, was given to sudden, often weeks-long periods of emotional coldness towards him, characterised by outbursts of rage at the smallest transgressions and comments that undermined any positive thing he did. Since the young man could never identify what he might have done to provoke any of his mother’s cold periods, he concluded that he had little influence over how his relationships with others played out, causing every close relationship he has formed since to be attended by ambient levels of paranoia and dread.

The baby has come to understand the world as reducible into categories.

Deciding finally that the theory which provides him with the greater sense of comfort is probably true, the young man replies to the young woman’s message with several flame emojis, a response of general enthusiasm obviating the need to express verbally anything specific about the song, since he has not listened to it yet and does not intend to any time soon, the artist being one he merely faked interest in when speaking with the young woman in order to appear informed and of similar taste; after which he types and sends the message: got it on loud while I look after my baby niece, hoping this will put an image in the young woman’s mind of the young man as capable of caring for infants, further hoping that this image taps some unconscious primordial well of yearning within the young woman to bear and care for children, a yearning she might henceforth associate with the young man and misinterpret, in the near term, as a desire to have sex with him.

Two ticks appear beside each of the young man’s messages to indicate that the young woman has both received and read them, a few seconds after which her status bar at the top of the messaging app switches to Offline. The young man immediately becomes anxious that the young woman has detected his latest attempt to control her perception of him, a worry which manifests physically as a plummeting sensation at his centre and a bristling heat on his cheeks. The modest cocktail of adrenaline and cortisol released into his bloodstream sharpens his senses, causing him to perform a brisk automatic scan of the environment for immediate dangers. This is when he looks down to his left and sees his niece, emerging head first from behind the kitchen island and crawling at a steady pace towards the fridge, just as the sunlight, entering through the window at the young man’s back to spread itself in a clean rhombus on the tiles as if to light the way, catches some jagged scrap of reflective matter lying like a trap in the baby’s path, awaiting the fall of her small, soft hand and glaring, as the young man’s instinctive lunge towards the baby alters his sightline, suddenly brighter, forcing his eyes to reflexively close even as he continues to move at speed across the kitchen, throwing his left foot out before him in a blind lunging stride and landing it on the baby’s wool cap, the foot then slipping cartoonishly up and away from the floor as the dual action of gravity and momentum causes the young man’s body to become momentarily airborne, flailing through its silent apex before plunging floorwards and pulling the trailing weight of his head down on the kitchen counter, whose sharp granite corner connects powerfully with the left temporal region of the young man’s skull before sending it on its way, hard and fast and heavy, towards the cool varnished-stone tiles of the kitchen floor.

*

Having sensed a commotion to her left, stopped dead in her crawl and turned her head towards the sound of a biting crack, the baby takes in the scene of the young man splayed on the tiles with his eyes shut and mouth ajar as when pretending for her amusement to be asleep, and waits to see what will happen next. But before the rising hunch that something is wrong has even reached the baby’s mind, the living, breathing field of tessellating polychromatic patterns and reverberant sounds through which she perceives the world has begun to transform. Only seconds ago, the sun’s rays were warm, guiding presences that seemed to radiate from the very surfaces that reflected them, columns of kind energy generated by swirling interactions between elements in the stone tiles’ washed pattern, which itself rippled like clear shallow shorewater at the baby’s touch. The young man’s laugh and the mewlings of the cat were visible things, travelling in soft sonar-like wavelets of reassurance through the medium of the air and trailing – like all things the baby perceives – tapering fractal mosaics of colour; the baby’s brain being, at this early stage of development, comparable to the brain of an adult under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs: wide open and hypersensitive, the fluid signal-sharing between its budding components and interlacing networks producing a synaesthetic tapestry of all sensory phenomena, the intensity, theme and colour palette of which are determined by the emotional state of the baby, and the emotional states of others as perceived by the baby – the crucial difference being that her experience is untainted by knowledge of what a hallucination even is, or of the personal and social expectations that contaminate such experiences when induced pharmacologically in adults, freeing the baby from worries about whether she is acting strangely or making others uncomfortable, whether she consumed too much of a certain compound or not enough, whether the effects she feels will be felt forever or are already wearing off, a freedom that permits a feeling of constant, pure, self-sustaining awe, unexpecting and unself-conscious, the significance in all things issuing not from some profundity-seeking impulse within the experiencer, but emanating from the things themselves.

These are the frustrated wails of an increasingly intelligent mind trapped in a weak, recalcitrant body.

But now as the feeling that something is wrong overwhelms the baby’s attention, the sun’s rays, as if in sympathy, run cold over the tiles, and the shadows cast by them solidify and deepen and grotesquely contort, and the fizzing pinks and greens that trailed every moving thing are reduced to slicks of blue-black effluent that run like oil over the kitchen counters and creep like tentacles down their sides. And at the centre of the baby’s teeming, shrinking field of vision lies the young man’s body, so starkly divested of the radiant animating force the baby has, since their very first meeting, so adored about the young man, that aura of exuberant mischief and spry, unseasoned intelligence which seems to bring the baby’s mother, whenever the young man comes home from wherever he has been, such profound happiness – tears of laughter as they catch up over cups of steaming tea, smiles of deep joy as she watches the young man read the baby a story – an aura which itself surrounds, protectively, something the baby sees glowing at the heart of every living thing: a small but immovable core of pure, bright loving-kindness, which, in the young man’s case, is subtly flecked and swirled, like some beautifully flawed marble, by self-doubt, and fear of the future, and the need to feel loved in return.

Sh. Shh. Sean. Uncle Sean. Sean: a sound like water rushing from the tap at bath time, like the shushing of the mother as she lowers the baby into her cot, like the white noise left playing in the room as the baby twitches on the edge of sleep; a comforting sound, which has followed the young man like a super-aura around his aura ever since the mother began to point at him and intone, ‘Uncle Sean. That’s your Uncle Sean. Say “Hi Uncle Sean!”’; pointing then at other things and people (‘and that’s Mummy, and Daddy, and Grandma, and pussycat, and ball . . .’), before always lastly pointing at the baby herself (‘and . . . Lily! Hi, Lily. We love you, Lily.’), a ritual through which the baby has come to understand the world as reducible into categories, an indefinitely vast space populated by discrete objects with dedicated names and stable locations, the ritual’s final step (‘That’s right. That’s you. You’re Lily!’) serving to gradually instil the baby with a sense of self and identity, of being discontinuous with the world, of having an ego, of being an ‘I’ that is located (as far as the baby can tell from where her mother is pointing) somewhere behind the baby’s eyes – an illusion, but one through which all experience will henceforth be mediated.

So strong is her association between the sound ‘Uncle Sean’ and the young man’s animating force that the baby believes if she could only utter the sound then it would ripple through the air’s medium and enter the young man’s body, instantly reinspiriting him, a line of reasoning which to adult minds seems unfathomably naive but in fact suggests an understanding of the causal power of language and the relationship between stimulus and response that is advanced for the baby’s age. But lagging behind her slight intellectual precocity is the development of the baby’s facial muscles, which are still too weak to form the shapes required to mimic sounds and words, and indeed it is this gulf between her capacities for understanding and expression that accounts for why she sometimes cries apropos of apparently nothing, for these are the frustrated wails of an increasingly intelligent mind trapped in a weak, recalcitrant body. And now as she watches dumbly on, a trickle of blood – like the sinister twin of the smiling worm that peeks out from an apple in her favourite picture book – emerges from the young man’s left ear and runs abruptly down his neck, marking his whitening skin with a bright-red line, the tip of which wriggles slightly on its journey floorwards as if itself alive and intent upon the coolness of the tiles. Tears well on the verges of the baby’s eyelids. Though it will be years before she grasps the concepts ‘alive’ and ‘dead’ and the distinction between them, the baby understands with a kind of instinctive visceral despair that a process of change is underway which, once complete, cannot be reversed. The baby wants it to stop, wants the young man to wake up with a sudden laugh like he does when pretending to be asleep, but now as she strains painfully the muscles of her tear-streaked face in an attempt to speak her uncle’s name she produces only a sputter of meaningless syllables – ‘Ssssuu. Un. Uuun . . .’ – her lips fumbling uselessly around the word the way her cold hands, on winter mornings several years from now, will fumble around a zip.

*

Meanwhile shattered pieces of the young man’s skull, having punctured the outermost two of the three protective meninges surrounding his brain on impact with the counter, continue to exert pressure on the innermost meninge, pressing it hard against the tender, gelatinous mass of the young man’s temporal lobe, the resultant strain on surrounding capillaries having just seconds ago caused several hundred thousand of them to burst virtually in unison. Blood building in the subarachnoid crevice has overflowed into the auditory canal and begun to trickle out of the young man’s ear.

Though the sheer force of his head’s contrecoup impact with the granite counter caused a sudden and near-total cessation of subjective experience – his consciousness reduced to an insensate, identity-less hum much like that of a patient’s under general anaesthetic – electrochemical activity in the young man’s brain has since resumed beyond the level sufficient for a minimally conscious state, a kind of paralysed stupor in which his centre-less attention is snagged and released by a sequence of dreamlike vignettes arising from the subconscious flux of formative memories, deep fears, cherished hopes, hidden desires . . . It’s a busy Tuesday night in the student union, and he is approaching a woman standing alone beside the bar. He feels a murky sort of attraction to her, akin to homely warmth aswirl on an eddy of shame. But due to damage now spreading through regions of his brain responsible for long-term memory and facial recall – the trauma surrounding the site of the skull fracture expanding out across the temporal lobe and in towards the hippocampus as the many axons severed by the jarring of skull against brain degenerate and release toxic neurotransmitters into extracellular space – the young man does not recognise her. The woman is his mother. She begins speaking in a language that, though it has the cadences and phonetic profile of English, the young man does not understand, a result of the damage having now reached those areas in his brain’s posterior related to language comprehension, though not, as yet, those in the anterior related to speech, allowing him, in the vignette, to say, ‘Do I know you from somewhere?’ – precisely the sort of opening line the controversial public intellectual would recommend a male use in situations where he should reasonably be expected to know the attractive female he’s addressing it to (having met her several times before, say), the question subliminally communicating that the female is not all that memorable, or at least not all that memorable to the male, who, evidently, meets more attractive women than he can care to remember, this fact indicating a high level of social status which the female will (the controversial public intellectual claims) find attractive, her attraction (in theory) compounded by insecurities about whether she herself is attractive or memorable at all. The woman reacts badly, sharpening the tone of her nonsense speech, raising her voice. The young man, having so far felt uncomfortably warm in the sweaty air of the busy student union, whose crowd tonight, he now realises, comprises every dead and living person he’s ever known (a fact which he merely feels to be true since he is unable to recognise a single one of their faces), registers a thick, tremulous chill travelling from the tips of his toenails to the ends of the hairs on his head as the dramatic fluctuations in body temperature caused by ongoing severe blood loss are integrated into the vignette. There is a pressure in his left ear like the feeling of trapped pool water; the young man looks into the mirror behind the bar and sees a man he half-recognises with blood pouring down his neck in a jagged stream. A figure moves in front of the image; his sister – though he knows her only to the extent that he feels a sudden calm in her presence, the lack of a need to say or do anything that might improve her feelings towards him since they are both immune to manipulation and unconditionally positive – is standing behind the bar, regarding him with kind eyes and her head cocked slightly in a way that seems to say ‘I love you’ and ‘Who are you?’ with equal and simultaneous force. But now when her mouth opens to speak it produces only a sputter of meaningless syllables – ‘Uun. Sss. Unnn.’ – her voice seeming to emanate from the student union’s sound system, high-pitched as an infant’s.

This is when the young man registers a subtle change in the room’s atmosphere; every person in the crowd, as if sharing one mind, seems to become aware of his presence. They do not speak to him or stare but continue with their drinking and talking and dancing, all the while stealing glances at him so deft he could be imagining them; snippets of conversation that reach him contain whispers of his name. They mean him well (he understands this), but they are waiting for him to act. He looks to the older woman beside him, then to the younger woman behind the bar for clues as to what he should do. The women are crying quietly, each with one arm raised, pointing at something. He follows their fingers, sees the neon sign above a fire door on the far side of the dance floor reading ‘EXIT’; another chill engulfs him as he moves towards it, one so deep this time it shakes his bones.

She did in spite of herself, a deeper, truer, kinder self that was trapped mutely inside her.

Here the vignette abruptly ends. Awash in his blood but deprived of its glucose-and-oxygen payload for almost four minutes now, the young man’s brain is no longer capable of conjuring three-dimensional spaces and populating them with people, is no longer – as the energy encoding the subconscious flux breaks free of defunct underpinning networks and dissipates into surrounding dead tissue – able to dream or remember or hallucinate, to process sensory pleasure or physical pain, to focus his attention or order his thoughts, to sustain the illusion, ingrained since infancy, that he is a single, unified self with fears and needs and desires all his own, separate from the world and from others, a lonely universe unto himself. His brain is dying, and with it goes all memory of his family: the way his mother laughed and smelled and attempted to reason verbally with the cat, the way she dabbed her eyes with a bent wrist when they wept over diced onions, or at the string-swept finales of sentimental films, or in the act of being unaccountably cold towards the young man, as though the coldness was something she couldn’t help, that she did in spite of herself, a deeper, truer, kinder self that was trapped mutely inside her and couldn’t bear to see him hurt. So too go the many different selves the young man inhabited in the company of particular people: the effortless comedian he was in the company of his sister, the slightly insecure and excitable child he regressed to around friends, the outwardly pompous but inwardly frightened confusion of hormones he became in the company of the young woman and the restless, self-reproachful, fruitlessly ruminative young man who agonised when alone over which of these selves, if any, was the real him.

But there is Something left. Something which now, as the final flickers of electricity in the young man’s brain go dark, removes Itself from this corner of the physical world, or, rather, removes this corner of the physical world from Itself, as if the young man all along was merely one of many headsets It wore in order to explore finite tracts on the infinite landscape of possible experiences, to explore Itself, through interactions with other living beings which, from the cat to the baby to the three men between the ages of nineteen and twenty-eight who died in the exploding tank, are, or were, all just other temporary manifestations of It. And though this egress or disentanglement from the physical causes It to become briefly identical with profound suffering, it also entails, as the suffering ebbs away, increasing clarity and intensity of those qualities like love, mercy, meaning and togetherness which both derive from and ultimately define It, and which can be accessed or embodied by the physical world only in their severely diminished, imperfect forms – and yet:

now,

and now,

and now,

eyes elsewhere are opening with the light of It behind them shining out.

*

The baby has been frozen in place on her hands and knees staring through the tear-blurred portals of her eyes at the young man’s lifeless body for almost four minutes when she hears the thundery crunch of her mother’s car’s tyres on the gravel surrounding the house and for the first time reacts to this sound not with joyous excitement at her mother’s imminent appearance but with a wave of impotent, anticipatory sorrow, born of the baby’s inarticulable, inscrutable-even-to-herself intuition that the contours of this situation are about to expand and engulf the happiness of another person she loves.

Which now they do, the baby’s mother having entered the front door, hung her keys on the hook in the hallway, walked through to the kitchen-living area and frozen on its threshold at the sight of her brother sprawled on the tiles with a rapidly widening circle of blood around his head, causing the baby’s mother to loose a scream of such blistering pitch and volume that it induces in the baby a flight response sufficiently acute to send her body into metabolic chaos, forcing her brain, in order that her vital rhythms and involuntary cycles continue functioning, to enforce a kind of emergency neural quarantine around the parts of itself that hold a record of the scream – that hold a record of the entire experience.

And because the countless random subatomic perturbations of energy that will ultimately determine the future’s course have not yet occurred, it is not fated what exactly will cause these memories – these quiescent neural clusters sealed off behind makeshift neural structures – to detonate inside what will be, by then, a grown woman’s brain: the sight of blood wriggling worm-like from the nose of an overdosing lover; the bony pop of a wind-filled bin liner tacked on a broken window; sawdust particles adrift on a refurbished psychiatric ward – or nothing external at all, just the slow inevitable overload caused by carrying unprocessed memories of death within the strained and fraying network of the self. But detonate they eventually will, spreading as flares of charged chemicals through node and network and hemisphere, shocking every cortical layer and lobe so that when in that moment of cold, bewildering recognition the woman opens her mouth to speak, she will produce only a sputter of meaningless syllables.

Sss. Un . . . Un.

.

.