Hari Kunzru

You walk across the stunning oak-laminate flooring and little animated hammers dance around your feet, indicating toughness and durability. Your kitchen has flipped into its clinical mode, a thousand-watt wipe-clean temple of hygiene, so you smile and twirl, showers of tiny sparkles cascading from the shoulders of your linen tunic, your tunic so deep-down clean and optically-bright, and for a brief moment your eyes are rimmed with silver and some kind of headset snakes its way around your perfect jaw. Then you laugh and the light dims and colour blooms in the kitchen and you put your finger to your lips because you’re a woman with a secret. All women have secrets, particularly beautiful women like you; they have sexual secrets and homecare secrets and secret hair and make-up tricks they use to get ahead of their rivals, secrets they paradoxically love to share, to spread far and wide until they’re no longer secrets at all, but it never matters, because there’s always a new one to share, a new secret for a beautiful woman like you.

Now you pull a face, a cute scrunched-up little-girl face, because though you’re a beautiful woman, and quite grown-up, it’s attractive to act like a child, and (despite your beauty, your radiant beauty) you’ve just realised you’re looking a fright! What’s the problem, pretty girl? It’s your hair, dummy! You’re being humorously reprimanded by a talking shampoo bottle which is perched on your shoulder like a demented parrot. Now you look shocked - not frightened, just surprised -  because this nannying little bottle is upending and dumping a gem-like cascade of capsules and atoms and spinning scientific whatnots onto your hair, which magnifies and simplifies, scaling down to a single follicle that acquires a protective green forcefield and a bouncy sheen men love to touch. As you twirl once again (you’re always twirling) your silken carpet of tinted red blonde brunetteness whips around the axis of your swan-like neck and the kitchen lets off a great fart of light and the 1812 overture plays and a pile of bright pine-fresh self-ironing clothes explodes upwards like a flower trumpeting pollen. White net curtains billow out of the window onto an electric blue sky, because it’s summertime here in the kitchen and all’s very well indeed, which is why you can hear your favourite summer song as you sashay through into the living area to see your Man.

Here he is. Not any man. Not the Man of Your Dreams, who usually appears against a backdrop of coconut palms, his smooth chest lightly oiled, his ribs a precise architectural sand-dune ripple. No, not him, but your Real Man, the one who has a football shirt and a cute little tummy which you pat as you switch his regular cereal for a low sugar alternative. He’s sitting at his laptop, smart-casual in pastel cottons, choosing between an array of tailored financial products, his head literally spinning with the difficulty of the task. You put a perfectly french-manicured hand on his shoulder and smile your beautiful bright smile. His head stops whirling and you exchange a mutually-complicit glance as the laptop flares into transparency, revealing the complex electronics inside. Hand in hand, you take a dark-ride through the digital tunnels and alleys of its superfast processor, your holiday photos and music collection whizzing around you as you accelerate towards the light, towards a bright cosmic disk which sucks you in to the unimaginable total future of technology – and pops you back out into the primary-coloured world of stress-free financial planning.

As you stand with your Man, mouths agape in wonderment, your house dissassembles itself around you like a piece of flatpack furniture, then reassembles into a much larger house, more appropriate to your age and station, then just as suddenly shrinks into a delightful country cottage, with a thatched roof and a rosegarden in which the two of you, white-haired now, exchange a tender kiss freighted with a lifetime of happy memories. Your secure retirement fades into a golden glow, a cruise ship vanishing over the horizon as smiling people in business suits usher you  back into your fast-paced contemporary lifestyle, with all its challenges and excitements, but you have no fear of the unforeseeable, because you’re safely in possession of a flexible policy, adapted just for you. The policy warps its shiny body, smiling and waving its little arms, snapping itself like naughty knicker elastic. The street where you live is suffused with euphoria, personified by a white woman who leads a vast gospel choir, a choir as endless as the Red army marching across the steppe, marching through thousands of other streets just like yours, streets exactly the same as yours, streets which could be clones of your street, because you are absolutely one hundred percent typical. You are safe because you’re typical and things are organised just for you by people just like you who know what you want which is to be free and normal and safe. You are one hundred percent safely normal and people just like you are marching through all the streets of this great land, thousands of voices raised in praise of that greatest of virtues: flexibility. Hallelujah!

You skip up to the bedroom and flop down again and again and again on a series of beds, on beds in all their infinite variety, with all their many covers and bedsteads and throw cushions and optional storage drawers. Then, because you’re naughty and enjoy a night out with the girls, you wipe a fleck of crumbly chocolate away from your beautiful lips and dance a few steps in an instantaneous disco-pub, rubbing like a cat against the Man Of Your Dreams, who toasts you with a bottle of some sophisticated bright blue drink. The Man’s sculptural pecs are half-exposed by his tight shirt. His teeth are like glossy bathroom tiles under the shifting light of the glitterball. This is the pub, but it’s also the bedroom, and the lights are low and you’re at the edge of your comfort zone, because darkness is here. Darkness is always lurking somewhere in the bedroom, in this place where naughtiness shades into something you can’t talk about, the creeping nagging sense that perhaps you’re not just naughty, you’re actually bad. Perhaps you’re a bad beautiful woman, because you have doubts. You have guilty doubts, secrets which you don’t like to share, and you find yourself wondering, what does he do when I’m not there?

You creep to the keyhole and look through. There he is, your Man, his cute tummy hidden under a pair of striped pajamas. He has a cold. His face is a contorted mask and little icicles hang from his enormous distended nose, which glows red as he tries to blow it on an absurdly under-sized handkerchief. Luckily he has a failsafe remedy, which leaps down his throat, suffusing him with green-tinted relief and reducing his nose to its ordinary manageable size. He looks like himself again, ready to earn money and impress the boss, who’s swivelling round to face him on his graphite-grey chair.

There is a scream behind you. It is Little Ethan, in his nappy. Little Ethan points his finger. “You are a guilty woman” he snarls. “You are wrong. You are unattractive.”

“No, Little Ethan,” you beg. “Say it’s not so.”

In answer, his beautiful soft baby face goes slack and a torrent of blue liquid gushes down his legs, spurting from the waistband of his nappy and pooling on the floor. The nappy flies away, folding and unfolding itself in fantastic origami patterns. You are left with the gushing flow, which must be wiped up. You get down on your knees and give thanks that there is such a quality as super-absorbency in this mean world, that there are tiny cavities and pockets and sacs to soak up moisture, even the bright blue gushing kind which is the most unmentionable kind of all.

“Naughty Ethan,” you say. Little Ethan lies on the floor, kicking his legs. His eyes are bright. He is surrounded by a dancing entourage of animated bears and rabbits. “Little Ethan,” you croon. “You are so beautiful. What will you be when you grow up?” Little Ethan morphs and changes, for he is a creature of infinite potential, worthy of the love you lavish on him. Little Ethan is a racing driver, a teacher, a doctor saving lives in a remote African village. Little Ethan is potential incarnate and you must defer to him. He is hope. He can make up for all the things you lack. “Tell Mummy, Little Ethan,” you coo. “Tell her what you want to be, what you want to do.”

“I want to preside over an administration which produces record levels of growth and prosperity for this country. Get me one of those!”

He points to a monstrous truck, the size of a twenty storey building. The truck is clad in lurid yellow and green panels. It spits fire from the muzzle of a front-mounted cannon.

“Yes, little Ethan,” you promise, chucking him under the chin.

“I will run a tight ship,” screams Little Ethan. “I will reinstate traditional values.”

You know he is right. Though you are a beautiful woman, you sometimes suspect you are not normal. The mean world is so unstable, so filled with risky choices. You know you lack values. You wish you could believe in things like they did in the olden days, when Men were Men and Beautiful Women were either in the kitchen or lying in alluring yet demure poses in their traditionally-furnished bedrooms. Sometimes you secretly wish all this choice were taken away from you.

As you think this guilty thought, blue liquid starts gushing from between your legs. You plaster yourself in superabsorbent pads, stuffing them into your enormous unflattering underwear as you look wildly around to see if all the other Beautiful Women, who are playing sport and wearing white clothing in a variety of social settings, have noticed the horrible thing happening to you. “I need puréed organic vegetables!” screams Little Ethan, and you open tub after tub, spooning it into his mouth faster than the eye can see. As you spoon you can feel the blue liquid filling the asborbent pads, but you don’t have time to check because you have to spoon purée into Little Ethan, and though you try as hard as you can, you don’t spoon fast enough, and things turn bad, bad down there in the unmentionable place, bad in the gaping red mouth of Little Ethan, bad all around you in the kitchen. The light is getting worse. Your products are less attractive and work less well. Things are moving downscale, helter-skeltering down from bespoke to luxury to quality to economy to supersaver to product recall and your body, your beautiful body is changing, unwelcome sections of it expanding and magnifying, revealing the true horror of you – a suppurating mass of headlice and embarrassing itching and smell and hair. “No!” you whimper. “Little Ethan, help!”

Little Ethan is gigantic now, his nappy bulging with nastiness that oozes over the waistband, green animated germs and parasites and fuzzy creatures that are perhaps anxieties or sleeplessness or ailments which could have been easily cured if only they’d been diagnosed in time. To your horror Little Ethan grabs the velcro tabs of his nappy and yanks it open and with a sound like rolling thunder all the nastiness falls on you and you tumble backwards, flailing your beautiful arms and screaming because you are falling down into hell.

You reach out amidst the darkness and unmentionable substances, groping around, pleading for help. Then someone takes takes your hand in his. It is your Man! Hallelujah! At least he’s here too, even in hell. But when you take a look at him, you realise he’s not the Man of Your Dreams, or even your Real Man, but a drawn and rather pathetic bespectacled figure, an invalid of some kind, his woollen dressing-gown tied tightly around his concave chest, a ratty tartan blanket spread across his knees. You’re holding hands with him, shackled by bonds too tight to break. Of all the horrible things that could happen, this is the worst. You’re sharing your life with the worst kind of Man, the Man Who Made the Wrong Choice. His product let him down. It didn’t do what it said on the tin. You’re sitting together outside an old-fashioned convalescent home. Evidently his Wrong Choice has brought on some kind of mental and physical collapse. It’s possible his legs are missing. It’s very possible he doesn’t function in other unmentionable ways.

A terrible thought crosses your mind. This Man is a bad chooser and he chose you. What can that mean? As you agonise, you see your neighbour, that smug woman who has always been less beautiful than you, who has always been jealous of the ease and elegance of your choices. She is reclining in a bubble of beach-hued yellow, raising a smugly plucked eyebrow at the bulging packet of a passing surfer. No, it can’t be! She’s draped over the smooth oiled chest of a Man, and not just any Man but the Man of Your Dreams. She’s rooting around, digging deep into the unmentionable recesses of his shorts. The horror!

Minute by minute your world grows greyer. You you’ve been badly injured and had to stay in hospital and the helpline couldn’t help you and the bills were overwhelmeing and you didn’t win your claim but still somehow had to pay a fee and it’s possible you won’t ever get better, because you and your Man, your sad pathetic Man, are now entangled in coils of red tape, like the tentacles of a Japanese sea monster. You’re sinking down into murky depths filled with shipwrecks and hollow yawning sounds, the air escaping from your lungs as you reach the place where Men and Women go to suffer. They are all around you, faceless suffering people outlined in red, discs of pain bulging and pulsing at their elbows, their foreheads, in the smalls of their backs. They are lifting heavy things, performing easy tasks which have suddenly become hard. Elsewhere lithe twenty-somethings are thwacking tennis balls and adopting yoga poses without the least sign of strain, but here in hell it is orange and red. You are no longer yourself, just an orange silhouette with discs pulsing at your joints, no longer an individual but a nameless member of the oppressed masses of pain. Little Ethan stares at you from a watchtower. The braid on his uniform glints in the sickly light.

“You are not alone!” screams Little Ethan. “If you want, you can feel like a person again!” And in great anguish you get down on your knees and bow your head and listen to the inspirational words of Little Ethan, who has a sun tan and a lemon-yellow sports shirt, who combines faith in a higher power with motivational linguistic checkpoints that will help you achieve your goals and exist in harmony with a balanced planet. And you think to yourself, if I cut the head off, would it die? How will I ever find the head?

 - september 12^th 2007