The Opposite of a Person

Staying In

1.

As a child I loved to fantasise about being a cucumber. In the evenings I would lie with my arms against my body under my dinosaur duvet, sometimes straight as a candle, other times with my legs slightly bent, and try for just a moment to take on the form of my favourite vegetable. I’m a cucumber, a cucumber, a cucumber, I would whisper to my eight-year-old self, until I realised that cucumbers cannot whisper. From then on I would repeat my mantra inside my head, until it occurred to me that cucumbers cannot think to themselves either. But by then I had usually fallen into a sweet, deep sleep. Nota bene: this was a time when mindfulness didn’t yet exist and meditation was still something so exotic that just the idea of it was enough to send most people into a wild panic.

I lived with my parents and my brother Carl in a Vinex-wijk, a housing development on the outskirts of a medium-large town in the Dutch provinces. The houses on our street were made of white bricks held together by light grey cement. Most of the residents had painted their window frames blue, red or yellow, primary colours that appeared lurid against the pale stone. There were a lot of children living in the development and thus an imposed speed limit of thirty kilometres an hour. Family cars moved through the streets towards school and work like heavy animals, grazing bison in flatlands of straight pavements and basketball courts. Only in the evenings would you sometimes hear a car pull up fast. And every now and then a scooter.

With their holiday money the people on our street would usually buy a new parasol or a pressure washer. Or a holiday of course. Most of our neighbours would staycation like us, going camping on the North Sea coast or to a holiday park in the Veluwe, but occasionally, at the end of August, a suntanned family would ride back into the street, having pitched up for three weeks in a Spanish field with a caravan and a small marquee. They would be treated like VIPs at the neighbourhood barbecue that was held every year in the first weekend of September.

My room wasn’t big, just eight square metres, but it was mine. In it was a bed, a tiny dark green dresser and an IKEA desk. Because I was in love with P, a boy from my class, I had carved his name into the desk (on the back, so that no one would ever see). When I was very small, I insisted that my room be decorated with rainbow-spotted wallpaper that made me feel as though I were surrounded by an endless stream of falling confetti. Later, pulling strips of said paper off the walls became its own bedtime ritual (along with fantasising about being a cucumber).

Trying to imagine how it is to be an object – a vegetable, a cucumber, something that grows but does not feel – is one of the most extreme tests of our empathic abilities. Mostly we understand empathy as feeling what the other feels, but to embody something that has no feelings means that you must genuinely feel nothing. And not in the sense of feeling momentarily relieved not to be plagued by the everyday emotions, but in the sense that to feel something – anything at all – has become an impossibility.

It’s often said that the moment a child notices that parts of them are changing is the moment at which the child develops a sense of personal identity, but for me this same realisation occurred when I became aware that I would never really change, that I could never become anyone or anything else. This is when I first subjected myself to a critical review, because a person who cannot become anyone else must surely understand themselves as fully as possible. It might be said that this type of navel-gazing is simply an expression of narcissism, but it could equally be one of modesty; you are, after all, the only subject about which you can hope to have complete authority; to assert an objective statement about anything or anyone else in this respect is fallacious, an act of vanity.

The results of my analysis, written up in a little exercise book, read as follows:

Ida, 8 years old

Blonde hair

1 m 28.5 cm

Will be a professor or a headteacher

Big birthmarks on left hip and left shoulder

One big scar on right arm (barbed wire)

Parents: 2

Brother: Carl, 12 years old

Hobbies: reading, drawing

Hero: Donald Duck

Favourite vegetable: cucumber

Today, meanwhile, an identical piece of research would look like this:

Ida, 29 years old

Blonde hair, first greys

1 m 76 cm

Will not be a professor or headteacher any time soon

Is, however, a climate scientist

Currently unemployed, but whatever

Large birth marks on left hip and left shoulder plus small freckles all over body

One tattoo (side of ribcage)

One large scar on right arm (barbed wire), one large scar on left knee, plus lots of smaller ones

Hobby: reading

Hero: Naomi Klein

Favourite vegetable: broccoli

2.

‘Is it starting soon?’ I ask.

‘I don’t know.’

‘It should have started fifteen minutes ago.’

‘Maybe someone back there fainted.’

‘Or had a heart attack.’

‘Wait, I think the lights are going down.’

I met the woman in the seat next to me a week ago at our mutual friend Steven’s birthday. Steven is known to his friends as the guy who borrows money and never gives it back, or else who gives it back in the form of stuff you never asked for. It was while he was leading me to his bedroom to check out an antique badminton set (he owed me eighty euros at the time) that I caught my first glimpse of her. She was standing next to the kitchen door, completely alone, but not in a sad way: a small, attractive woman in dungarees, one hand on her hip. She looked me straight in the eyes. It took me a moment to notice that Steven was pulling my sleeve and shouting my name above the music.

For the rest of the evening I was painfully aware of her presence in the room. Fortunately this sense of awareness reduced in direct proportion to the amount of alcohol I consumed, so that, after an hour or two, I finally had the courage to speak to her. She introduced herself as Robin. She was thirty-two, hadn’t lived in Amsterdam all that long and was working on a thesis on the Italian writer Giacomo Leopardi. After an anecdote about his doomed love life (‘The love of his life turned him down because he stank!’), I asked her, with the help of a sad little story about my own terrible love life (‘but as far as I know I don’t stink’), out on a date.

And so now here we are, sitting next to each other in this enormous theatre whose lights have indeed just started to dim. Every now and then our legs touch. The theatrical adaptation of Michel Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles is about to begin. As the last of the light goes, we pretend to study the flyers we were handed at the door on the way in. Soon there will be an afternoon of East Asian film in one of the smaller theatres, I read. I take a too-big sip of beer and start coughing.

The curtain goes up and loud house music begins to play. A middle-aged man walks slowly onto the stage and shouts something to the woman following him at a distance of ten metres or so. She has the same short black hair as Robin. I blink a few times as a white spotlight appears from somewhere.

Now and then I’m able to follow the dialogue and monologues of the actors, but to be honest I find my thoughts drifting, especially after the break. I can’t get the article I read earlier today about atomic bombs out of my head. A flash, they say. A flash, and then, if you’re lucky, a crack, like thunder, but most people don’t get to hear it. A few weeks ago I finished my Earth Sciences degree, and this morning I picked up my certificate from the departmental secretary. I can once again decide for myself what to become engrossed in, and, in one way or another, I appear to have chosen to become engrossed first and foremost in the subject of nuclear weapons.

The actors take their last deep bow. Robin touches my hand and asks me what I thought of the performance.

In the theatre you probably wouldn’t even see the flash, though we can’t be completely sure, given that the atomic flash can be up to a thousand times brighter than that given off by lightning and, who knows, one of the exit doors might have been left open a crack?

‘Brilliant,’ I say. ‘Absolutely brilliant. I found that actor with the long hair very affecting.’

I smile at the cloakroom girl as I hand her my ticket. The code name of the aeroplane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima was Dimples. Outside, Robin and I say goodbye to each other at our bikes. I promise her I’ll call soon. She leans over and kisses me quickly on the mouth.

At home I open up Teletekst to see if there’s been any ‘big news’. When something’s big news on Teletekst it usually occupies the whole upper half of the screen, or else the title of the piece will appear in all caps. Big news can be anything really, though if you’re hearing about it for the first time via Teletekst it probably doesn’t relate to anything urgent in your immediate environment. Tonight, the most important news items are about a consultation on the national terms of employment (always at an impasse) and a fire in the centre of Zwolle. I exit Teletekst and find myself