Giving Up (4 page)

really big favour
I'd become aware of how his handsome features had clearly been ruined by what I assumed was a pretty serious drinking problem, and when I looked closer into the glacial tint of his eyes it occurred to me that there may be other factors involved in the decline of his good looks aside from alcohol.
There was no doubt in my mind that I was being approached by someone who was after my money.
Since he came to me, instead of waiting for me to pass by, I knew that he wasn't going to come right out and ask for it. He was going to try to tell me a story that would pin me down and make it difficult for me to interrupt him to say that I didn't have any money, because then he'd get all offended and claim that I didn't let him finish, and that if I had, I would've known that he was, in fact, not asking me for money. In fact, the opposite was true, he was offering to give
me
money. The peremptory way he had raised his hand, the panic in his eyes, the desperate tone of his voice, the ruin of what must've been, only a little while ago, fine, youthful features, everything about his approach that betrayed just how shifty and potentially dangerous this stranger was, all of this was immediately clear to me as I stood listening to him relate the elaborate story that he'd come up with in order to con me out of my money. ‘I have this money order,' he said, and flashed a form in my face as if he wanted me to examine it so I could see for myself that he wasn't lying. But when I leaned in for a closer look at what did in fact appear to be a standard triplicate money order form (not that I'd ever seen a money order form before he showed me his, but it seemed likely that what he had was the real thing), he quickly stuffed it in his pocket and continued with his story as if the authenticity of the money order form had been definitively established. ‘My car is in the fucking impound lot,' he smiled here, the way a prisoner might smile at his new cellmate, the sort of smile that implies a shared fate. ‘Can you believe it? I'm parked at my girlfriend's,' he gestured vaguely up the street, ‘and thought that at worst they might give me a ticket, not tow the fucking thing.' I was nodding along impatiently to what he was saying. I'd finally decided that at the first chance to interrupt I was going to tell him that I had somewhere I needed to be, that I was late, and that even if I wanted to help him out, it wasn't going to happen. But it was at the mention of his girlfriend that I felt the first surge of the anxiety that would bother me for the remainder of our encounter. I knew that everything he was saying was a lie, but until he mentioned his girlfriend I was happy to stand there and let him lie to me. It didn't matter to me whether the story he was telling was true or false because at that particular moment I just wanted to listen to someone else tell me a story, as long as it was plausible, which is to say that I didn't believe what he was saying, but it was still important that what he was saying was believable. But at that point, while I was standing there listening to him feed me a line of complete bullshit, even after I had just resolved on breaking off the encounter, I changed my mind and gave up on the idea of interrupting him, of bringing his preposterous story to an abrupt end and going on down the street to some all-night café or diner where I could take my break in peace, and then head back to the basement to continue my life's work. One moment I was disinterestedly listening to what he was saying but mostly thinking about how I could get away from this guy, and the next I was actually listening to what he was telling me. Even though I knew his story was bullshit, I started to listen as if it were real. I could see his car in the lot, I could see his girlfriend back at her apartment, asleep in a single bed. I know this doesn't make any sense, that it shouldn't be possible to know that something isn't true while simultaneously believing that it is, but I don't know how else to explain what I was feeling as I stood there listening to the stranger. ‘And me, being the genius that I am, left my bag in my car that had my laptop and wallet, basically my entire fucking life. I know,' he said, while staring directly into my eyes as if he was trying to see what sort of effect his story was having, whether I was
buying it
, ‘I'm a fucking idiot, right? It gets worse. I don't live here, you see? I just came down to see my girlfriend. I work for a mining company up north. You know St. James Bay? No? Well it's like five hours north. I live in a camp. Stuck up there with a bunch of guys just like me. So any chance I get I'm down here with my girlfriend. You know what I'm saying? Beats getting drunk and listening to a bunch of guys jerk off in your tent, if you catch my drift.' I nodded to show that I understood what he meant. There was something about this part of his story that had the flavour of truth to it or the ring of truth –
the aura
– as though what he was saying was based on experience, but it was only partial, a feeling or an impression, as if something about the original experience had been altered or excised. Maybe what he was telling me would have been more convincing if it hadn't seemed so important to him that I sign off on this aspect of his story, but even though I was no longer looking for an opportunity to cut him off and extricate myself from this situation, I was impatient for him to wrap things up and get to the point in his story where he asked me for money. ‘So I had a day off, literally twenty-four hours, and I burned down here to get a little action so that I don't lose my fucking mind. What happens? My fucking car gets towed,' he was getting worked up, as if, like me, he actually believed what he was saying, even though he knew better than I did that everything he'd been telling me was a lie. ‘And if I'm not back at camp in ten hours I'm going to lose my job.' He paused. This was the crucial point in his story where he would have to make the transition from explaining his predicament to explaining what I could do to help. He knew that if I didn't believe the first part of the story that there was no way I was going to hear him out during the next part, especially since he was going to be asking me for something I would likely be very reluctant to give away. This was why he'd gone through the trouble of creating a bunch of entirely probable details – the mining camp in St. James Bay, the towed car with his wallet and laptop locked inside, the long lonely drive (five hours each way) in order to get his rocks off with his girlfriend, the tent full of drunk, masturbating men – that were largely extraneous to the main plot, which was that he was stuck here without any means of getting back to his job. He could've said to me, ‘I'm not from here and I need money to get back to where I'm from.' But he knew that if he approached me like that then I wouldn't even have bothered to come up with an excuse for why I couldn't help him out, that I would've simply ignored him and kept walking. The only way I was going to stand there and listen to him was if he made up a bunch of elaborate lies. If I tell you that I own a dog then the only reason you have to believe me is that it would be pointless to lie about something like that. You don't believe in the dog. You believe in me. But if I tell you that I own a small Irish Setter, that it's more my wife's dog than mine, but that I still like to take him for walks, that he can't wag his tail because after only having him for a year he got out one day and ran into the road that runs past our front yard where he got hit by some maniac who didn't even bother to stop, but luckily all that happened was that he lost the ability to wag his tail, if I told you that he didn't actually look like an Irish Setter, that he was smaller than most dogs of that breed and his hair shorter and not very red, but that we got him from a breeder just out of town and he was definitely purebred, if I loaded on all this detail, even if none of it was true (in particular, the very claim that I owned a dog of any kind) you would find it hard not to believe me, and not just because I hadn't given you a reason to doubt what I was saying – why would I lie about having a dog? – but also because by inventing these circumstantial details I made the dog real for you. Even if, after telling you I owned a dog, and relating all these imaginary details about my imaginary dog, I confessed that I actually didn't own a dog, you would have a hard time believing that my dog didn't exist. You would know that this Irish Setter was a complete fabrication, because I told you that it was, but once I'd planted the image of a brown, squat, short-haired gun-dog with a paralyzed tail, it would be almost impossible to erase. This is what the stranger (who had in fact introduced himself by name, though this was before I'd been listening to him) was trying to do by burying me in all this detail when he could've just hit me up for cash. ‘By the time I finish telling my story,' he must've thought, ‘there's no way he'll be able to turn me down.' But even after relating this elaborate lie he was still worried that I wouldn't believe him, which, of course, most people wouldn't have. If it was anybody else, they would've caught on at his very first lie (‘I have this money order') and everything he said afterwards, all his carefully chosen embellishments, would have struck them as completely ridiculous. But when he first approached me, brandishing the money order and piling on some elaborate bullshit about his car being impounded, I was still distracted by thoughts of how to spend my break, what I should do to make the most of my trips away from the work that was going so poorly, and my life upstairs, which wasn't going all that well either. Then, gradually, I started to pay attention, and then all at once I found myself listening to what he was saying and believing what he was saying, as if what he'd been saying was actually true, which, of course, I knew wasn't. If I was just standing there listening to him because I was desperate for a distraction, something to keep me away from the basement, or because I was too much of a coward to interrupt him and tell him to fuck off, or because I was so absorbed in my own thoughts about how I was wasting my time in the basement and destroying what little I'd managed to accomplish, or if I was actually taken in by his bullshit story of having his car towed, then there would be nothing more remarkable about what happened to me than any of the other poor fools out there who are cheated out of their hard-earned money, either because they're not paying attention, they lack the nerve, or they're simply not all that sharp. What's strange about my case is that I knew that the stranger was full of shit, but I believed he was telling the truth – I knew that he was trying to cheat me out of my money, I knew that all I had to do was walk away, but I also knew that I wasn't going to. It's like in
Don Quixote
. At the beginning of the book Alonso Quixano suffers an attack of madness and decides to dress as a knight errant and go around the Andalusian countryside having the sort of adventures that he'd been reading about all his life in the romances he was more or less addicted to. Because Alonso lives in the real world, and not the world of literary courtly romance, his experiment is a disaster, and at numerous points throughout the story it seems likely that Alonso is going to lose his life on account of the savage beatings he suffers at the hands of people he mistakes for characters in the demented courtly romance playing out in his mind. But no matter how savage these beatings are, he holds on to his illusions. Even when his companion, Sancho Panza, who suffers from something much more banal (i.e. credulousness) but that certainly afflicts more people than madness, repeatedly attempts to disabuse Alonso of some of his more dangerous delusions – the chief one being that Alonso, who is described at the beginning of the book as bordering on fifty, in a time when living past sixty was a sort of minor miracle, is not in any shape to be riding around and challenging barbers, shepherds, biscainers (?), and in one famous instance, a windmill, to duel to the death – Alonso (as Don Quixote) comes up with some explanation that allows him to persist in his insane adventure as knight errant while conceding to Sancho's reasoning. In fact, at the end of the novel, Alonso is lying on his deathbed and all at once his madness clears – ‘my judgment is now undisturbed, and free from those dark clouds of ignorance with which my eager and continual reading of those detestable books of chivalry had obscured it' – and at the hour of his death he repents for the whole knight errant thing (‘I must confess I have been a madman.'). He gathers all his friends in the hope of redeeming himself (‘not to leave the imputation of madness on my memory') but they justifiably suspect that ‘some new frenzy had possessed him.' And, in their defense, after a thousand pages of Alonso as Don Quixote, it's easy to understand why everyone, especially Sancho Panza, is a bit disappointed by Alonso as Alonso. But this isn't why the end of the book is so disturbing. What I couldn't get over was that Alonso could remember everything he did as Don Quixote, whereas I would've expected that when a character literally loses his mind, and that mind is replaced with a new mind (the mad mind), then if he ever managed to recover his old mind again (his
real
mind) it seems to make sense that he would have to give up the mad mind and all the memory that went with it, so that all that would remain of that period of madness would be a shadow that covered everything in darkness (‘those dark clouds of ignorance'). But Alonso remembers everything he did as Don Quixote, in fact, he even makes good on promises he had made to Sancho Panza, even though it would've been understandable if, since he was no longer crazy, those commitments were considered null and void, though it would've been a bit cheap of him. It seemed to me that at the end Alonso was of two minds, the sane and the mad, and that even as he looked back over his adventures as the mad Don Quixote, from the now sane perspective of Alonso, he hadn't lost the illusions of his former self, so that when it came time for his confession he repented of his madness and folly, rejecting the stories and books that corrupted his mind, yet did not go so far as to renounce his past – ‘I was Don Quixote de la Mancha,' he says, ‘I am now, as I have said, the good Alonso Quixano.' I had always assumed that it was impossible to be of two minds, that once you went crazy it was no longer possible to keep one foot in the door that opened onto reality, and that what people meant when they used this clumsy expression was that within the one and only mind in their possession a distance had opened up between two points and they didn't have the will, or the strength, or the courage of their convictions to make a move in either direction. When Alonso says, ‘I am no longer Don Quixote de la Mancha,' to me it was as if he was saying that he had