Giving Up (7 page)

street people
). But whatever doubt he may have had about my sincerity disappeared by this point, and he seemed convinced that I actually believed everything he had said. This is why he was so intent on keeping up eye contact, I thought, so he could gauge whether or not I was bullshitting him, or if I was awakening to the fact that he was bullshitting me. By looking into my eyes he believed he could determine if I was lying to him, which is exactly what I believed when I'd still been in doubt over whether the story he was telling was true, and it would be fair to say that in both cases neither of us had any luck with this method. I looked into his eyes – he looked right back at me – and there was nothing I could see that either gave him away or confirmed his story. There was nothing to see, except that his eyes were wild and unblinking, and it was certainly the same with me. I wondered if my eyes looked as wide open and abstracted, like doll's eyes, the realistic kind, where the resemblance to human eyes is uncanny and all the more disturbing for their lifelessness. Or maybe, I thought, they're more like the eyes of someone in the grip of a major stroke, somehow alive but devoid of any trace of intelligence. In short, I wondered if when he looked into my eyes I was as completely gone as he was to me. If someone were to see us right now they wouldn't see things the way I saw them, I thought. They wouldn't see a sad, pathetic, desperate man who was admittedly handsome – though if he wasn't careful he was going to lose his looks through dissipation – they would not see this strung out con man hustling a young, reasonably well-dressed, sympathetic and naive man out of his hard-earned money. No. They would see two wild-eyed men hurrying along the sidewalk and talking loudly and excitedly, and maybe both of them would look sad and desperate so that the passerby thought he was looking at a couple of psychos. But this isn't how things looked to me. Instead, I felt superior to Luke, and while he was trying to keep eye contact with me I was doing the exact opposite, because I was worried that eventually he would realize that I knew he was full of shit and I imagined that he'd be devastated (especially after I'd just got his hopes up) and probably ashamed as well. I hated to see a person lose face, as the Japanese say. In fact, when I learned that the Japanese actually had a word for ritually committing suicide out of shame I instantly became fascinated by Japanese culture. (I've visited Japan twice and I hope to go back again soon.) It may be maudlin, or romantic, or just plain childish to be mortified by another person's humiliation, but I can't help it. When someone is caught in a lie, I'd rather pretend I didn't notice than acknowledge their pathetic attempt to deny a reality that is staring them right in the face. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't willing to hand over four hundred dollars just to avoid an awkward encounter, but so long as I still had a chance, I wanted to come up with something that would allow us both to back off without feeling like idiots. When I am a witness to someone's humiliation it is as though I have been humiliated, just like when a child gets embarrassed during a sex scene from a movie or television show, even if they're alone, because they assume that when their excitement and confusion is this intense
everyone must know
. I assumed that when one person's shameful behaviour is exposed, that the sheer intensity of their humiliation was capable of exposing all of my faults and secrets as well, a sort of shame by association. So when I finally concluded that Luke had been lying to me I reacted as though I had been caught in a lie, as if just by listening to this guy's bullshit story I was equally guilty of deception. On account of some stunted development, an aspect of my personality still stuck in infancy, I can not differentiate between my actions and someone else's. And so maybe he hadn't been that far off when he compared me to Jesus, since I was under the impression that I could take on the sins of the world. What was especially maddening about all of this was that I often ended up feeling guiltier and more embarrassed than the actual guilty party. Everyone feels the sting of their own conscience differently, and what some people consider a grave sin, others aren't bothered by in the least. So when I witnessed what I considered to be shameful and reprehensible behaviour, and responded with a guilty conscience as if I was the one who had behaved shamefully, it was very possible that the person I was feeling guilty on behalf of didn't feel guilty or humiliated at all. I was particularly embarrassed by lying – the greater the lie, the greater the humiliation. In the case of Luke's story, he had lied to me so completely and so thoroughly misrepresented his position that I was
covered with shame
. I just wanted to be rid of him so I could put the whole encounter behind me. I was desperate for him to shut up, to stop adding insult to injury by asking me these ridiculous questions about where I went to school, where my parents were from, what my father did for a living before he retired, and whether or not I had any children. Each question was like a whiplash, a dagger, an icy slap, or a combination of all three (and any other physical assault you can think of), which I could see coming from a great distance but for some fucked up reason was powerless to avoid. It was as though I was being tortured, or had already been tortured, and now my torturer wanted to make small talk, not realizing (or realizing, but not caring) that by acting as though the torture hadn't taken place he was revisiting the whole encounter upon me with a sort of casual cruelty that was literally soul-destroying. ‘I can't fucking believe this guy,' I thought. ‘Isn't it obvious that I know he's full of shit? Isn't he ashamed to look me in the eye and make small talk when both of us know that all he can think about is the moment that I cash this phony money order and give him four hundred dollars out of my personal banking account? If I were him,' I thought, ‘I would apologize and run away and hope that I never saw the person I was trying to rip off (i.e. me) ever again.' My embarrassment had shifted to fury, but I wasn't furious with him for trying to con me out of four hundred dollars – this, I thought, was understandable. The reason that I was so angry with him was because he'd done such a bad job of it. His approach had been so clumsy and the lies he'd told me were so obviously lies that it was impossible for me to believe him. If he'd been more artful, had he taken the time to develop a more plausible story, had he worked on his delivery so it came off smoother and more believable, then I would've been able to fork over the cash with a clean conscience. As it stood, he had forced me into the shameful and humiliating position of either pretending that he had fooled me, giving him four hundred dollars, and returning to my home, to my basement, to contemplate how pathetically I'd reacted to what for most people would be a mildly annoying encounter, or accusing him of lying, calling him out on his bullshit story, and exposing him as a cheat and an utter fraud. ‘Why couldn't he have just left me alone,' I said to myself, ‘instead of more or less forcing me to expose him, and myself, to unbearable shame?' In short, I was enraged by what I perceived to be an imposition. He was obliging me to share in his degradation, which in my opinion, was even worse than cheating me out of four hundred dollars, and no matter what I did (give him the money or refuse to give him the money) there was no way I could avoid the fact that this good-looking and, by my estimation, intelligent stranger had sunk so low that he'd been reduced to approaching guys like me on the street and screwing them out of their money. If he'd been more resourceful then he could've come up with a story that might have flattered my self-regard, while preserving the illusion of his own good character. ‘But this idiot,' I thought, ‘this
crackhead
, has made the whole situation so glaringly apparent, that there's no way to get out of it without feeling like a complete piece of shit. The genie is out of the bottle. Pandora is out of her box.' Blah blah blah. ‘Just go away,' I thought. ‘Leave me alone. Disappear.' But it was evident that he had no intention of leaving now that I had agreed to cash his fraudulent money order. ‘There's no way I'm going through with this. There's no way I'm giving this guy four hundred dollars,' I thought, and just as I was thinking this we arrived at the bank machine and he held the door to the vestibule for me with the exaggerated manners of an erstwhile gentleman down on his luck. And even as I was putting my card in the bank machine and entering my PIN, I was still under the impression that something would come to me, some excuse that would get me out of this infuriating and embarrassing situation. He was standing right behind me and by now he'd grown so eager and excited that he'd lost all control of himself. He started telling me what to do, as if he wasn't a con man anymore and was actually holding me up at knifepoint. ‘Deposit,' he said. ‘It's just like a regular deposit. Put it in this envelope,' he said, and he reached across me to get an envelope from the slot, but I pushed his hand away as if he'd triggered a reflex, or maybe I had reached my limit – whatever the reason for it, the moment his hand snaked in front of me (which also meant he had to lean in so that his mouth was only a few centimetres away from my ear), I smacked it away so quickly and forcefully that I surprised myself, and him, since my reaction seemed to come from nowhere. Even though I was choking with rage over the way he was essentially mugging me, I hadn't been worried that I was going to snap and lash out at him like that. I assumed that the most I would do was make an irritated remark, since I knew myself well enough to know that I would avoid a physical confrontation at any cost, or at least, in this case, I was willing to give a stranger four hundred dollars in order to avoid not only a physical confrontation, but also an emotional one. My theory is that it was at this point – when he leaned in and reached in front of me to grab an envelope – that I realized I was going to give him the money. From the moment he had approached me until the moment I smacked his hand away there had never been a moment when I wasn't going to give him the money. ‘All that crap about whether he was telling the truth or not was complete bullshit,' I thought. ‘You (i.e. me) were always going to give him the four hundred dollars.' Just like when I went down into the basement with the intention of working on my life's work, and ended up doing everything except what I had intended to do, it was clear that I had known what was going to happen all along, and instead of just admitting this to myself I had to enact an elaborate scenario that dramatized all the steps of making a choice, in order to justify the choice that I had already made. One of the reasons (I suspect) that I decided at a very early age to devote myself to a goal that I would most likely never achieve, but that required
blind devotion
, unwavering commitment, and spending what seemed like every moment of my waking life at work or planning to work, or thinking about what I would do next time I sat down to work, was that by making this choice I was absolving myself of ever having to make a choice again. Ever since that one big choice there have been nothing but
sub-choices
or
leftover choices
, since all I had to decide was how they either advanced or impeded the realization of my final goal (my life's work), which technically isn't a decision so much as it is the continued administration of the one true initial choice. There was no confusion for me when I woke up each day over how I should spend my time – my
free time
, that is – since I knew that all my free time should be spent in pursuit of my goal, and every aspect of my life – what I ate, when I slept, how I dressed – was decided based on what I thought would help in realizing my life's work. Now, as I've already explained, I don't know where this initial decision came from to devote my life to a goal that very few people ever attain (and even if they do attain this goal, it may not happen in their lifetime, and if it does happen in their lifetime they may not even realize that it happened, and even if it does happen in their lifetime and they realize it happened, it's more than likely that nobody else will realize that it happened, or people may deny it or claim that even though it may seem like it happened, it in fact didn't happen at all, but no matter what happens, the only way to have a hope in hell of attaining this lofty unattainable goal in the first place is to stick to your guns, never give up, even when it seems like there's no chance, that you're a lost cause, when everyone is telling you to let it go, that there's no shame in defeat, that you gave it your best, that to keep working would be stupid, self-destructive, and just plain selfish, no matter what anybody says or what you think or how you feel, there's no turning back, so even when I was wasting my time down in the basement, and possibly sabotaging the time I'd already spent on my life's work by going over everything that I had already done, I was still convinced that all of this was necessary and was part of the process of reaching an unattainable goal) but my point is simply that while many people believe that it takes an incredible amount of strength, will, determination, and even courage to spend one's life in pursuit of a grandly elusive goal, I would suggest that the truth is much less flattering. The truth is that when someone makes a choice to devote themselves to their life's work they are also choosing to never have to bother with concepts like strength or will or courage for the remainder of their days. And I'm sure that the ultimate reason behind my mindless rage over this encounter was because the stranger was forcing a decision on me that I didn't want to make. Had it only been a matter of deciding whether he was telling the truth or not, there might not have been much of a decision to make in the first place, but since I knew he was lying it was clear that what I was choosing between was whether I wanted to confront him or just give him the money and avoid a confrontation. And, as I said, once this choice became apparent it occurred to me that I had known he was lying all along and that I had only pretended otherwise because I'd already decided to give him the money. Or was there another reason I went along with the con, a behavioural reflex or temporary insanity? When he started more or less mugging me at the bank machine all of what I've just explained became