The Obsolete Soul
By DK Mok
Copyright 2011 DK Mok
Discover other books by DK Mok at https://www.dkmok.com
“Your brain doesn’t need you anymore,” said Doctor Creel, steepling her fingers.
“Sorry,” I interjected. “What did you say your doctorate was in?”
Getting on your doctor’s bad side is a fast track to an unnecessary colonoscopy, but I’d been on a hell of a ride these past few months, and I was ready to get off and punch the driver in the throat.
#
It all started with something stupid. Well, not stupid, but… ordinary. October fifteenth. My girlfriend, Ella, was acting kind of strange. Like she was upset but didn’t want me to know. She’d had this forlorn smile all morning – the same one she wears when she watches political satire.
It wasn’t until around lunchtime that I nudged something out of her.
“It’s not important,” she shrugged. “I just thought we were going to do something for my birthday. Maybe dinner.”
Ella was pretty low key about birthdays, so it was weird for her to bring it up so early in the day. I’d actually planned a little scavenger hunt around the house later, involving chocolates and cute notes, culminating in a reservation at Ruciere’s – a new restaurant down the road with servings the size of postage stamps, so you knew it had to be good.
“Maybe I’ve got something planned,” I said.
“Mark, my birthday was yesterday.”
God, my stomach dropped about seven storeys. I’m usually good with times and places, but I figured I must have gotten the dates mixed up.
“October fifteenth, right?” I said.
“Today’s the sixteenth,” said Ella.
And that was when things started getting weird.
#
I was freaked out for a few days. The last thing I remembered was feeding the fish and going to bed on the fourteenth. Next thing I know, I’m waking up on the sixteenth wondering why my girlfriend’s pissed off. Losing a whole day is fine when you’re at uni: your day starts at three PM and tapers off into bad garage bands and dodgy kebabs. Losing a day is less okay when you’ve just tipped thirty and you’re working for the public marketing advisory office.
My first thought was that I’d had one of those mental pretzels, like when you spend all week thinking it’s Friday. I must have thought it was Saturday, and forgotten it was Sunday. But when Ella told me what I’d been up to on Saturday, I couldn’t remember any of it. Not the buttered bread for breakfast, not the three hours of watching soccer replays, not the waving goodbye when she said she was going to her parents’ place for birthday cake.
For starters, I never have buttered bread. I’ll always toast it, preferably with cheese. Secondly, I’ll watch the game if it sounds good, but I don’t watch replays. And thirdly, well, I’m surprised Ella didn’t suffocate me in my sleep over that last bit. Thankfully, she’s not vindictive like that.
The best thing about Ella in situations like these is you know she’s not making it up. She thinks pranks are dated, fake-outs are cheap, and white lies are okay, but flamboyant fabrications aren’t. Unless, of course, the lives of entire refugee camps are at stake.
So, I figured it was some kind of memory loss. I’d never had any serious health problems – a broken arm, impacted wisdom teeth. I’d been a bit forgetful this year – I could swear I’d put the milk in the fridge, but then I’d find it on the counter, or I’d go to empty the bins and find I’d already done it.
But spontaneous amnesia was a different story. Preferably someone else’s. One story that scared me as a kid was this guy who just woke up one morning and couldn’t remember a damned thing. Talk about tabula rasa.
But I hadn’t had any other symptoms – no headaches, no visual disturbances, no voices in my head except the one telling me I should be doing something with my life. So I shrugged off the incident as stress-related.
I’d been doing a lot of thinking lately about my career, my goals, me and Ella. I’d been in a holding pattern for five years, but it was funny how everything looked different from the other side of thirty. It was like looking down from a plane, and realising that your city was the size of a squashed pea and damned ugly.
The public advisory office had just shifted to private management, which meant the free coffee had gone, along with half the staff. I’d been browsing the job ads, but my marketing degree was outdated. Secretly, I dreamed of owning a few acres just north of the city, maybe having a couple of chooks and some fruit trees. It was a dumb idea I’d had since reading Of Mice and Men in high school, but the thought still quietly gnawed at me every time I circled another ‘Sales Rep’ ad.
On another front, my folks had been on my back about settling down and giving them a swarm of grandkids. Just not with Ella. They’d never warmed to her, although they didn’t have a problem with anyone my younger brother, Keir, dated, including the girl whose self-professed ambition was to become a hotel empire heiress.
So, I eased off the caffeine and tried not to think about Christmas. It was still two months away, but the shops were spilling with motorised Santas and counterfeit Gucci Advent Calendars. It was enough to give you an aneurism. At the office, I had my hands full with clients wanting to know if they could promote a breakfast cereal as ‘healthy’ if it was forty-three percent lard, and whether ‘bait and switch’ was technically illegal. Yes. It is.
I didn’t think about the missing day again until I was going over our Christmas schedule. The office party, Christmas lunch, Christmas dinner. But the details were all wrong.
“Ella, did you switch the times on the planner?”
Maybe the sticky notes had fallen off the spreadsheet and she’d stuck them back out of order. Which wasn’t like Ella, but we were both a bit scattered lately.
Ella glanced at the calendar. “That’s right, isn’t it?”
“Christmas dinner,” I said. “With my parents.”
“You said you wanted to change it around this year,” said Ella. “Lunch with my parents, dinner with yours.”
“My brother will be there,” I snapped.
Ella looked at me as though I had a baby panda between my teeth. I took a slow breath. Ella was tired – the newsagency was hectic now, and the Christmas trading hours meant she was sorting stock until late. She was getting this conversation confused with something else.
“We can switch it back if you want,” said Ella. “I’ll call my parents.” She paused. “Does this mean you don’t want me to come to your office Christmas party anymore?”
“Why would you want to come?”
From the look on her face, I probably could have phrased that better, but my skull was starting to feel like a blender full of walnuts.
“You don’t remember, do you?” said Ella. “Telling me this would be your last Christmas at the advisory office, saying you wanted to see your brother…”
That was when I knew something was wrong with me, I mean really wrong. Not pre-Christmas crazies, not an existential crisis. I wasn’t just forgetting stuff – I was doing stuff, weird stuff, and not remembering it. And that was hell scary. But you didn’t see a doctor about something like that without expecting a ticket to the asylum.
I was silent for a while, Ella sitting beside me, her head on my shoulder.
“The schedule’s fine,” I said. “And I’d love you to come to my office party.”
#
I told Ella it was just stress, but I could tell she didn’t believe me this time.
I took out my grandad’s pocket watch that night – just sat and held it, like I did when I was a kid. It was plain steel, its face a moon of ageing parchment. I kept it wound, and the delicate b
lack hands still kept the time faithfully.
I’d always been close to my grandad, closer in some ways than to my dad. My dad loved me, but my grandad understood me.
As a kid, I’d always felt like I was running along a fence. I couldn’t see over to the other side, but I knew I had to get there. I kept running, waiting for the fence to end, to bend, to change, but it never did. All I could see of the other side was the sky, and all I could feel was the shared earth beneath my feet.
I told this to my grandad when I was about eight, and he rested his weathered hand on my shoulder, as if I’d just expressed exactly how he felt. That afternoon, sitting beneath the jacaranda tree in his backyard, he gave me this pocket watch.
I pressed it to my temple now, feeling the cold crystal against my skin. It was like a piece of reality, condensed in my palm.
I could deal with this. I just needed a strategy.
#
I started checking clocks and calendars compulsively, keeping a timetable of what I did, what I said. My productivity ranking at work plummeted from third band to fifth, and Tranh in accounts quietly slipped me a leaflet on OCD, but it seemed to be working – no strange blanks, no missing time.
The office Christmas party was never a big deal for me. Overlong, under-catered, and sloshing with people who wished they’d gone to art school. If dissatisfaction came with a glass of flat beer, that’d be my office party.
I’d been at the advisory office for six years, treading water that had turned to muck. I didn’t make an effort to get to know my colleagues. I was friendly, did the water-cooler chat, but the advisory office was just a dodgy rest stop on the highway to my destination. However, six years later, I was still stuck in the bog while the caravans roared past.
I told Ella I liked to keep my work and private life separate, which made her suspect my office parties were a lot more fun than I let on. But the truth was, I didn’t want Ella to see where I worked. It was like Schrodinger’s Cat – once Ella stepped into the hive of cubicles, that place would become real, and the colourless world would chitinise around me.
I tried to casually dissuade her, complaining about the gritty pies and watery punch. I warned her about the speeches full of inappropriate metaphors, the inebriated corporate-integration department, and the random staff member who inevitably gets bitterly drunk and rants at management before vanishing permanently.
Ella asked me why I was still there. I mumbled something about bills.
Ella and I first met just out of uni, when I was full of fire and ambition and general crap. Now, I was just full of crap. And once she saw where I worked, it’d only reinforce the fact that I wasn’t the guy she’d signed up for.
The night before the party, I did the usual double check of my diary records.
Salad sandwich for lunch.
Raoul got fired.
Fed the fish.
Tick. Tick. Tick. I automatically flipped back a few days to make sure everything looked good, and noticed that I’d missed a page. Last Sunday. There was a single line jotted at the bottom.
Had a lovely day with Ella.
Which sounded charming, except I hadn’t written it. It was my handwriting, but it may as well have been stamped in cuneiform.
I found Ella in the living room, wearing a strange expression.
“Ella, what did we do last Sun—”
“Uh, Mark, what happened to the fish?” said Ella.
The strangest sensation came over me as I looked at the tank, the nibbled seaweed stirring in the endless stream of bubbles.
“Where are the fish?” I heard myself say.
“Mark…?”
My gaze went down to the splashes of water beside the tank, the damp footprints on the carpet.
I noticed that my shoes were wet.
“Mark? Mark…”
#
When I woke up, morning light was sifting through the bedroom curtains. I felt tingly and disoriented, and Ella was sitting beside the bed.
“Did I pass out?” I said.
“Sort of,” said Ella. “How do you feel?”
“Like I’ve eaten a kilo of McDonalds and brought it up again,” I said. “I think I’ll give the Christmas party a miss tonight. Sorry.”
“Bandaid.”
It took me a moment to realise what she meant.
“Rip it off,” I said.
“The office party was last night,” said Ella. “You insisted we go. You grabbed the mic from the Chief Integrations Officer, gave a speech from Dead Poets’ Society, and then you got fired. Or maybe resigned. I think I’ll go with resigned.”
Everything just spun for a while, with me as the disintegrating axis.
“I made an appointment for you to see the doctor,” said Ella.
I exhaled slowly.
“When?”
#
Doctor Ramiya was a no-nonsense doctor who undoubtedly cared about her patients but hadn’t expected so many of them to get so old. I explained my situation, and she ran through the usual questions: did I do drugs, did I hear voices, had I been depressed, manic, suicidal, homicidal.
I half expected her to give me a pack of anxiolytics and send me on my way. Instead, I found myself trekking between MRIs, CT scans, PET scans, and x-rays. I wasn’t sure what the x-rays were for, but Ramiya just said it was amazing what you found sometimes, and pointed to a framed slide which seemed to show a toy truck wedged between the blurry clouds of someone’s frontal lobes. The caption read: Why You Shouldn’t Put Things Up Your Nose.
“Everything’s come back clean,” said Ramiya. “The good news is, no brain lesions, tumours, structural abnormalities or foreign objects. The bad news is, you’re going to have to keep hunting for the cause of these episodes. I’m not saying it’s psychological, but that’d be my next path of investigation.”
I didn’t know if I was ready to see a psychologist. I couldn’t get an appointment before Christmas anyway, so I did the next best thing.
I used to associate nervous breakdowns with brittle, neurotic types. Then, two years ago, one of my best mates had a meltdown. Badrach was rock-solid – kept his cool when our tents got washed away in year nine camp. Barely flinched when twitchy Liam shot him in the thigh with a nail gun during woodshop.
Badrach and his wife had just had a baby girl, his garage was doing it tough, and something in him just shorted out. He said it was like walking around all day with a pillow over his face and a cattle prod up his spine.
We were overdue for a long lunch anyway, so we caught up at Garie’s.
“Who’d have thought we’d both be psycho by the time we turned thirty?” said Badrach. “Didn’t prep you for that in PE.”
“Let’s blame it on the caffeine,” I said, and we clanked our mugs of decaf.
We talked about random stuff – the economy, the crap on TV, the diminishing size of biscuits.
“How’s Winter?” I said.
“Walking, talking and indestructible,” said Badrach. “We were settling her down to bed last week, and she said ‘Freedom or death’. Where do they get this stuff?”
It was weird when your friends started having kids. People used to have coming-of-age rituals – I mean real ones, not like getting sloshed at graduation. These days, no one really seemed to know what they were doing, or maybe we were just more willing to admit it.
“You thinking of having kids?” said Badrach.
“I’m having trouble staying sane as it is.”
Badrach jotted something onto a paper coaster.
Griswold Kinsley.
“Don’t be put off by his name,” said Badrach. “He’s not one of those ‘Tell me about your mother’ wankers. No guarantees, but it’s a start.”
There were no guarantees in life except that it ended one day. For now, I just had to get through Christmas.
#
Dad called on Christmas Eve. He never called unless there’d been a death in the family.
“Mark, how’re you going?”
he said.
“Fine,” I said.
“Good, good.” He paused. “You still coming for dinner tomorrow? If you’d rather come for lunch…”
It was insidiously tempting. It wasn’t that I hated my brother. We’d gotten on okay when we were kids, but sometime during junior high, he’d turned into a serious prat. Things exploded the summer Keir finished high school. Looking back, it was pretty childish, but at the time, it felt like Thermopylae.
There’d been a bad storm and our place was a mess of trees and shattered shingles. I was the one left to clean it up while Keir got ready for a night out. It was one of those dark, humid days, with the cicadas crying like a chainsaw choir. I’d had enough, and hid the keys to our parents’ car, thinking Keir would have to walk, or god forbid, miss the party.
Instead, Keir took my beloved Ford and drove it into the river, swimming back to shore with two broken ribs and a smirk. I got the blame, and maybe I deserved it. But the petty malice of his stunt, and my having to get by all summer without a car, slammed the grudge pretty deep.
But I’d already told Ella the schedule was good.
“Dinner’s fine, Dad,” I said.
It’d be unpleasant and awkward, but I only had to endure it for a few hours. Then, I was free to lock myself at home until the new year, after which, hopefully, Griswold would solve all my problems.
#
Christmas lunch was an island of sunshine amidst a grim few weeks. Ella’s parents – Tijon and Mala – were easygoing people who never had much need for clocks or calendars. It was hard to imagine them raising sensible, punctual Ella.
Ella had always wanted to be a doctor, but her grades weren’t nearly good enough. She’d wound up working at the Grace and Blob Newsagency, spending her days poring through the medical magazines. My parents said Ella lacked ambition, but I thought reading every back issue of National Geographic was pretty impressive.
“Ella says you’ve moved on from the ads office,” said Tijon.
I imagine Ella’s exact words were ‘Mark got sacked’, but Tijon saw life as a gentle wave of forward motion.
“I’ve been thinking of changing track for a while,” I said.