Also by the same author
Don't Drink The Water: A Year in Asia
The Republic
The Halcyon Trilogy
THE LUNATIC MESSIAH
SIMON CUTTING
1
JOE FINCH DOES NOT EXIST
The latest note was very concise, there was no doubt about that, but it was also the most verifiably false, as it was Joe Finch himself who was reading it. Like all the others it was written on a plain sheet of paper in a thick black marker, like the kind used on a whiteboard. Joe frowned and folded it in half, before placing it in the top drawer of his desk. There were five other notes in the drawer already, all equally mysterious and all anonymous. They had begun appearing a few days earlier, usually slipped under the door of his office before he arrived at work, but once he had found one underneath the windscreen wiper of his Volvo in the parking lot. That had been the oddest one so far.
THE MULE IS A VEHICLE
He wasn't sure that the mule would like its entire worth as a living creature reduced to its ability to be exploited as a vehicle, but it didn't really keep him up at night. It was most likely students playing some kind of elaborate practical joke on him, and from the nature of the messages, they were probably philosophy students. There were a lot of those where Joe worked at The Finchwood Academy for Creative Arts and Dramatics Education. An academy for higher education in the creative fields of life in name, it was in fact more of a dumping ground for those students that had neither the desire nor the academic aptitude required to attend one of the more recognised universities in the Sydney metropolitan area. The similarity of his own surname and that of the Finchwood Academy was entirely coincidental but it had become something of a joke amongst his colleagues who had gone on to more illustrious careers. At any reunion he was foolish enough to attend he could be sure of hearing the following dialogue:
'Who on earth would choose to work at Finchwood?'
'Joe Finch would!'
Needless to say, Joe didn't attend the reunions any more. He reached back into the drawer and removed another of the notes. This one had arrived the previous morning and had an even more cryptic message.
THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH MAKES LIES OF US ALL
Joe could have sworn that he had read that somewhere back in his own days as a student but where exactly it was from he couldn't recall. It could have come from the inside of a fortune cookie for all he knew, but it had given him an idea. Gabriel Armaita was the only one of his students who was not a complete imbecile and for that reason, she was the most annoying. The daughter of a psychiatrist, she insisted on analysing everything in a clinical manner. Her diagnosis was rarely limited to the text itself and it frequently extended to a full psychological profile of the author as well. This made his European Literature tutorial a complete nightmare, but now he had come up with a possible solution. Suddenly there was a knock on the door, which shook him from his thoughts.
‘Enter,’ he said, in the authoritative voice that he reserved for his students.
The door opened slowly, banging on the corner of the desk (his office would have made a wardrobe feel spacious) and Harry Tudor poked his head in. Harry was the Faculty Head and had an office just opposite Joe's. His title was not as impressive as it sounded, as there were only two of them in the European Literature Faculty but, technically speaking, Harry was his boss. Being his only departmental colleague, he had also become Joe's de facto best friend.
‘Sorry,’ said Harry. ‘I was just checking that we’re still on for dinner tonight. I know you have a class to get to.’
'Tell me, Harry, do you memorise everybody's timetable or is it just mine? Don't answer that,' Joe said when it appeared that Harry hadn't grasped the rhetorical nature of the question. 'So are you bringing your latest elbow accessory? What's her name again?'
'Zoe, and no, I'm not. I told her it was over.'
Joe nodded knowingly. This sort of news from anyone else might have provoked at least the pretence of sympathy, but coming from Harry it was such a regular event that Joe didn't even bother.
'Tell me, Harry, do you think your fear of intimacy stems from a series of unsatisfying relationships or your series of unsatisfying relationships stems from a fear of intimacy?'
Harry smiled boyishly, and Joe shuddered. It was that boyish smile that allowed him to attract so many younger women in the first place, but Joe had always felt that it simply looked wrong on an unmarried man in his late forties.
'There's no answer to that. You may as well ask what came first, the chicken or the egg.'
'It was neither. The rooster came first and then made some feeble excuse about having to work in the morning and left the chicken feeling deeply unsatisfied.'
'That's great, Joe. I'll see you at lunch, okay?'
Joe nodded again, but then suddenly called Harry back, scrambling on his desk for a sheet of paper.
'Wait, wait, wait. Harry, while you’re here I have something to show you.’
Harry glanced at his watch.
‘Joe, I think you’d better get going. You’re supposed to be there in five minutes.’
Joe waved aside his concerns and snatched up the sheet of paper from his desk. He handed it to Harry who reluctantly began to look over it.
‘Well they can wait. They’re only students anyway. They come and go…’
‘While we are the rocks that the waves of ignorance crash against,’ Harry said, reading from the page.
He turned the paper over to see if the other side was blank and, noting that it was, turned it back again.
‘Well, read it,’ said Joe.
‘My slowly healing temperament is scarcely substantial enough to contain the depths of mindless oblivion that permeate the very fabric of my being…’ Harry murmured, before looking up from the page again. ‘What is this nonsense?’
‘I wrote it,’ replied Joe proudly, and he smiled when Harry immediately looked apologetic.
‘Don’t worry. I know it’s terrible. That is in fact the very point of it. Who could possibly write the words, the very serenity of disposition is the root of rage within the breast of others. The very lack of feeling creates such emotive response, and take themselves seriously? It’s a little trap for a student of mine, that’s all.’
Harry looked confused and handed the page back to Joe, again glancing at his watch. Joe sighed. Harry’s obsession with punctuality, especially when it was not even his class, was very tiring but he had chosen to ignore it. Harry could probably tell him, down to the nearest second, exactly how long he had been ignoring it for.
‘Look. There’s a girl in my class, Gabriel Armaita, whose father is the Head Psychiatrist at the local hospital as she is so fond of reminding us all. She’s obsessed with it. Every time we discuss any novel she uses the text to make some sort of diagnosis of the author.’
‘Well, what’s wrong with that? It sounds like an interesting approach to literary criticism, to be honest.’
‘Interesting? It’s ridiculous. She claimed that Frankenstein was only written due to penis envy and that Oscar Wilde was a repressed heterosexual.'
'So?'
‘So? We’re supposed to be discussing the literature. Not whether or not Jane Austen just really needed to get over it and have sex with something.’
‘Fine. So she takes it too far. What’s your point?’
‘My point is that she reads too much into everything. Psychiatry in general is an inexact science, and having some nineteen year old spouting her textbook diagnoses in my classes is something I can do without. That’s why I wrote this.’
Joe gestured at the piece of paper on the table in front of him.
‘So what does it mean?’
‘Nothing. That’s the who
le point. It’s completely random. Every single thing I’ve written on that page is just the result of some random word association. It means absolutely nothing. It’s rubbish.’
‘So you want her to make a fool of herself?’
‘The search for meaning makes lies of us all, Harry. But I want her to realise it. I’m going to tell them it’s a short fragment from a diary written by Tolstoy. That should invoke a nice long-winded answer from our Ms Armaita.’
‘Fine, fine. But you really should be getting to class.’
Joe got to his feet rapidly and snatched the paper from Harry’s hand.
'Tick, tock, Harry. For a man with such loose morals, you certainly run a tight ship.'
'Sure, Joe. I'll see you tonight.'
Joe was already some way down the corridor at this point but he stopped and smiled manically at his friend.
'Perhaps, but there's a growing amount of evidence suggesting that I don't actually exist, so let's play it by ear!' he called back, leaving Harry to wander, bemused, back to his own office.
When Joe arrived in his tutorial his students were all waiting for him in the grubby little room. There was Gabriel Armaita, sitting front row centre as she always did, her folder lined up on the desk at perfect right angles and her pen in hand. Behind her were John Smith and Richard Jones, two boys whose personalities were as bland as their names. Joe barely even thought of them as real people. Whenever he tried to picture them their faces seemed so nondescript it was if they had been blurred our for security reasons. As for their personalities, Joe strongly doubted that either one of them could pass a Turing Test. Naturally, they always sat together, but they barely said a word. The two girls, Tess and Leah, were next to them on the right, chatting away to each other about the most recent party they had been to and who had done what to whom in the upstairs bedroom. There was one other student signed on for the course, a Mohammed Ashhab, but since the start of the semester, Joe had not seen him once. Gabriel Armaita pointed at her watch as he entered.
‘The tutorial started at half past three, Mr Finch.’
Joe placed his tattered leather briefcase on the desk.
‘Really. Can I copy someone's notes then?’ he replied, without looking up.
'Mr Finch...'
‘Right,' interrupted Joe, 'now before we begin I have something here that I think you all may find of interest. It’s not exactly related to what we’re doing but it’s a nice diversion.’
Gabriel raised her hand to speak, but it was only a token gesture, because she began to speak without waiting for a response.
‘With all due respect,’ she began, in a voice that suggested she didn’t believe much respect was due, ‘we're already late. Do we really have time to waste on curiosities? Our exams are only eighteen weeks away.’
Eighteen weeks, Joe thought incredulously. He pushed his tongue against his teeth. This was not what he really wanted to do. What he really wanted to do was push his fist against Gabriel’s teeth, but this smaller action would have to suffice for the time being. He would have his revenge soon enough.
‘Yes, Ms Armaita, we do have time to waste on curiosities. I am here not just to teach you about literature as defined by the current fashionable curriculum. I am also here to teach you how to think. What I have in my hand here is a fragment from a diary written by Tolstoy in his last days. He was on his way to a monastery with one of his daughters at the time, but he still kept fairly extensive records of his state of mind. This particular fragment has never been published outside of academic texts so I thought you might like to hear it.'
Now Gabriel did look interested. She was always interested in anything to do with Tolstoy and Joe knew exactly why. The man was clearly mad. A genius maybe, but mad nonetheless, and he smiled to himself at the thought that Gabriel had taken the bait so easily. Joe began to read the gibberish on the page in front of him. Even as he read it, it was hard to keep a straight face. It was just such blatant rubbish. When he had read it in private it hadn’t seemed quite so obvious, but now in front of the class he was almost certain that someone would see through it immediately. But they didn’t. He read all the way to the end. The bland boys made a pretence of listening, and the chatty girls stopped chatting long enough for him to finish, but Gabriel was transfixed. He could see the gears in her brain working overtime as he read, analysing each sentence as she heard it. When he had finished he placed it down on the desk reverently.
'A trifle overblown perhaps, but you must remember that this is not from any published work and as such lacks the professionalism and polish of his other writing. Although as anybody who's read Tolstoy will tell you, the man might have benefited from a more aggressive editing process,' Joe laughed, not because he thought his comment was funny, but because he was well aware that the only one of his students who had ever read any Tolstoy was Gabriel.
'Does anybody want to offer any of their insights into the text?'
Joe made a show of looking around the room, first at the two boys who, even now when they were trying so hard to look thoughtful, were still very reminiscent of furniture. The two girls weren't even trying to look thoughtful. Their facial muscles weren't aware of that configuration. It was Gabriel who spoke. It was only ever Gabriel who spoke.
‘I don’t know what he was trying to say. He was ranting by the sound of it, but I think we can deduce a lot of things from it that maybe he didn’t mean to say.’
Here we go, thought Joe with a growing sense of delight.
‘This doesn’t read like other works of Tolstoy. You say he was on his way to a monastery at the time? But as we know, he didn’t make it. He died before he got there, and I think he knew. This reads like a man who is about to die and knows it. It reads like a man at the end of his life. Hopeless. I think that the man who wrote this diary was ready for death but too much of a coward to take that last step of total acceptance. He felt that everything was worthless, but just kept on going through the mechanical motions of the world because he didn’t know what else to do.’
'Is that so? You can tell all of this from that one little fragment?' Joe said, smirking, but he was beginning to feel a pain in his temples.
'Mr Finch, people give away far more than they intend to all the time. Just from their body language or the intonation of their voice. This was from a man's private diary, and it was something he probably never intended anybody else to read. It lays out his psychological state like a road map.'
Joe was trying to savour the moment, but the throbbing in his temples seemed to have come out of nowhere. He had never suffered a migraine before, but he would have been willing to bet that they felt exactly like this.
‘Anyway, as I was saying,' continued Gabriel, 'the man who wrote this has lost the ability to love, and to be loved. He is sexually and emotionally unfulfilled. Some of the lines are petty, like the very serenity of disposition is the root of rage within the breast of others. The very lack of feeling creates such emotive response. It screams of failure, despite the convoluted use of language. He’s saying he hates that other people aren’t as desperate and hopeless as he is. It enrages him that others can feel serenity within their own lives while he is nothing more than a worthless, impotent, hate-filled failure.’
Joe looked back and forth from Gabriel to the two boys behind her. Their faces now did look blurred out, quite literally. He struggled to form their features in a cohesive form but they were nothing but faceless entities, staring from the blurred outlines of their eye sockets. By contrast, Gabriel looked as though her skin was aflame. It was glowing with an almost ethereal white light.
‘Wait. What are you saying? That Tolstoy was a worthless failure?’ Joe struggled to say, wondering if he looked as bad as he felt.
‘No. But he obviously thought he was towards the end of his life. The man who wrote this is not the Tolstoy who wrote "Anna Karenina". The man who wrote this was a hopelessly bitter wreck of a man. He writes in a smugly superior way, but that just further underlines his o
wn inadequacies. He tells so much more about himself than he ever meant to with this… this tantrum.’
Joe rubbed his head. He could feel himself sweating. It was actually rolling down his forehead as Gabriel spoke. Her brow furrowed in something akin to concern.
'Are you okay, Mr Finch?'
Joe sat down on the corner of the desk heavily, forcing himself to look up. He pointed a finger at Gabriel accusingly.
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. You can’t work out a psychological profile based on a few paragraphs of writing.’
‘In a very broad sense, you can, if this is genuine,’ she replied indignantly. ‘I doubt it is, anyway. Tolstoy was a great man, despite his faults. Whoever wrote this was a pathetic excuse for one.'
Joe wiped the sweat from his brow and stood up but he almost fell to the floor. Gabriel was shining so brightly that the rest of the room seemed shrouded by darkness. She was the voice of truth from above, and he was the subject of that horrible light. He snatched the paper from the desk and jammed it into his briefcase, tearing it as he did so.
‘I have to go. You’re dismissed. I’ll see you next week.’
His head was pounding now but he could barely feel it. It was a dull roar in the background of his more immediate concerns. The thought that kept running through his mind again and again. The thought that he was nothing more than a worthless, impotent, hate-filled failure.
'Mr Finch...'
The voices and the light faded away and Joe fell to the floor, hitting his head on the desk on the way down. The last words to go through his mind before he lost consciousness entirely were written in thick black pen across his mind.
The search for truth makes lies of us all.
2