A month following my first American murder, I found myself in the habit of wandering through flea markets. I never suspected the habbit was intentional. After all, I’d long held phobias of junkshop gimmicks and the cooler bobos who bought them on markup as vintage. Rather, like most accidentally helpful trauma responses, it came courtesy of my landlord, Tarak.
When a rant on intellectual siloing of values-based consumerism landed me in the Daily Mail as, “Campbell Grice-Hutchinson, former antifa economist”, Tarak forced me into a weekly Saturday exile from my flat until New Years. Still, according to his therapist, I wasn’t qualified to participate in Shabbat. So we agreed. I should try my hand at what he called inner work on weekends. It was time I discard and vend my bric-a-brack horde of false memories to crowds of willing buyers.
Tarak gave me the sales pitch with his usual humor. “And you’ll see, talking to people like you, how extremely average you are.”
Of course I protested, because who would I be without the will to whine. I clung to my bed, the altar where ritaulized mea culpas bled into orgasmic absolutions most nights. But, I could also admit, looking like a virgin normie in the public’s eye was nearly as pleasurable. And I certainly couldn’t deny the catharsis of satisfying a banal human urge to conspicuously consume without bludgeoning anyone.
At some point, I even waned my shame reflex enough to revisit childhood hellscapes around Hyde Park. I later learned that my Freudian subconscious was in search of the mother I’d ignored since grifting The Washington Post with a “decline to comment” and moving back to London. But, thank God, I never found Ida among stacks of fucked-in levis and disease-blanket Playboys, and by August, I was sufficiently bored of her memory to move on to side-eyeing other overpriced neighborhoods.
Eventually, a rainy stretch purged the drippiest shames of my teenage not-quite-failures. Then, on Tarak’s suggestion, I agreed to make a weekly pilgrimage to Portobello Road, the last stop where I was sure I’d abandoned my pre-murder principles. Yet on my first October’s Saturday, while hippy watching through a twee street carnival, a question nagged me back to self-consciousness. What was the memory I was supposed to be eulogizing?
Memories, especially of feelings, were always realer and truer to me than any fictional present tense my obsessive-compulsive’s shoddy logic might construct. And so, I was primed to notice, a few meters from my favorite pre-loved human teeth vendor, a pop-up art gallery had supplanted the depressive’s Bloomsburry coffee shop where I’d often wallowed in prior years. Here, 55 days ago, I recalled that I’d agreed to a New York house-sitting gig on a very misguided whim.
I decided, while rollicking on the curb to the gallery’s door, I ought to retread my path in its moved-on space. Initially, I crept inside, unmoored from any identity without the self-flagellatory agenda I’d pushed in June. I supposed, I’d have to accept that I’d finally aged out of tragiclownish martyrdom at 36. And instead, like a mature, adult narcissist, I told myself, I had an obligation to be more interested in judging bona fide artistes than nursing insecurities as a numbers guy.
By some post-post-modern miracle, my ego’s baser needs for validation were met that day. Entering the gallery’s main showroom, I came face-to-crotch with a lifesize male dummy tethered to a hospital bed via pink liquid IV drip. He was conservatively titled La Mort De Pinko, whose love I could buy for the low price of 70,000 pounds. I was hooked.
On a return trip to visit Pinko, I found him shooting up behind a sold sign by the front window. I quickly left him to mourn his loss of dignity in private and spent the greater half of my afternoon taking contraband screenshots of plastic brains in mason jars called Maternity Wards as further proof of our national cultural decline.
But while these joke pieces kept me sane through seasonal affective assault on my mental output, they paled in life-altering comparison to the upcoming farce of fall. As usual, on a globally warm October Saturday, I was loafing around the gallery’s second floor, nursing envy among technically-proficient sculptures, when an unfamiliar docent waved me back to her corner.
“Sir? Your brother just went to see the side piece.” She pointed her walker at the opaque double doors at the far end of the main room. I’d never opened them before.
“Well, I appreciate the tip off, but I don’t have a brother. I’m the one and only inspiration behind a horribly botched vasectomy so…”
My assailant smacked wrinkled lips on dentures. “Huh. Odd. The man in there looks just like you. Think you two’ve even got the same trainers.”
I glanced at my generic white Converse reserved for anonymous days. “Okay, maybe we can work out some kind of art heist plot together.”
The docent shook her grey bob. She was desperate for my acknowledgent of her truth. What a tragedy it was that any poor sod had to look as lame as me. “Go on. Really, it’s uncanny. And you don’t have typical features.”
I didn’t want to consider what she meant and I wasn’t in the mood to pop off at a grandmother, so like a good boy, I tossed her a quick “Thanks?” and followed her cue to the doors, prepared to meet an equally unhandsome stranger.
Lucky stranger. Inside the tiny black box show room, the first monstrosity that piqued my ire was the obnoxiously priced torture wall of plexiglass covered in rows of concave mirrored disks on both sides. Each disk was subtly warped so that you were forced to hate your mugshot as a disfigured blob repeatedly taunting you, Warhol-style.
Without hesitation, I leered into a central disk to inspect a pimple on my chin, but immediately a curly-headed shadow in the thin square of glass besides the neighboring disk struck me as terrifying. I gaped into my blurred, unpimpled face and lamented. How had my scarlet legion been reabsorbed into my skin so painlessly? I’d planned to wallow for at least a few minutes.
Suddenly, remembering the docent’s comment, I peered down at my feet. There were my Converse, slightly elongated and older, tapping at me from the other side of the wall.
“Jesus, damn it. Campbell? How long…are you dealing with like, amnesia? Or face blindness? What’s that disease called again?”
Before I could cringe at the sound of my name, the speaker leaned closer to our crack, transgressing a very obvious, silver line of tape on the floor beaming up a “Don’t you fucking dare cross me!” glare. And in a stroke of uncanny genetic similarity, he triggered a security alarm just as I would’ve, had I dared trip one millimeter closer to our shaggy browlines.
Aubrey Grice-Hutchinson welled up from behind the plexiglass. “Shall we make a run for it?”
I raised my voice as the alarm continued nagging us. “Depends, would you care to take me somewhere expensive? And no, I don’t have prosopagnosia.”
Aubrey sniffled. “Wherever you want to stop, I’m game…and a bit broke at the moment.”
“All right.” I cried too, almost out of obligation, but Aubrey didn’t notice. He joined me, engulfing me in his sweatered arms, and together we hobbled into a lift and out the gallery’s front door before an army of geriatric docents could hijack our fraternal reunion.
Outside, I was always a younger brother. I let Aubrey haul me away from the shuttering street flea under a receding sun, past happy hour carnage left for gutters by anti-environmental socialites. We didn’t exchange words on our escape from Portabello’s civilized nonsense, but I could smell the pheromonic sweat of his dying confidence as he peddled backwards.
Without meeting my gaze, he squinted through all my crevices and angles, as if I was a rival he’d want to eliminate or a suspect he’d only need to remember in sketchy detail. I didn’t feel strongly that I ought to look directly into any part of him, either.
Finally, when we reached a darkened tube station stairway, he jumped a full two steps down before abruptly halting and pivoting sideways. Unprepared for his fall, I stumbled towards him over a floor mural, probably by his design.
“I’ll see you?” He pushed me up to standing above him on the bright sidewalk.
“You could come to my place for a little.” I wasn’t going to run from him.
“Still alone? In that dingy hole?” At last, he sounded familiar.
“I mean, I have a new roommate, David. But he’s quiet.”
This wasn’t untrue. David Okoduwa, a comp sci PhD student, had taken up my mantle as the swottiest nerd Hermit of Kensington. His mother, like mine before her, had recently purchased my old studio and let me use the kitchen space as a week-day retreat for a nominal fee as long as I talked to David about women and the long-term side effects of academia.
“You’re happy?” Aubrey sounded nervous.
“Well, I’m not clinically depressed any longer, is that fine by you?”
“That’s uh…look, however you can keep living with yourself, keep making something of your life.”
“Okay…sure?” My vocal chords betrayed me, whisping up to a lisp. I’d prepped this reunion beat in a therapeutic script over months, and though my scenes always differed in setting and genre, never once had I imagined that Aubrey would leave our conversation anything but the ass-tucked coward between us.
He knew I was frightened. “I just wanted you to know. Whatever the Hell happened, I’m not judging you, Ma’s not. She’s gone unhinged since you left. She doesn’t understand why and I can’t be the one to tell her. We’re-“
“Oh, that’s too kind of you, choosing to forgive me after all I haven’t done.” I tongued a small victory lap around my dry mouth as Aubrey lowered himself another step to pull his final ace at a safe distance from me.
He whispered, not unkindly, like our divorced father. “No, I’m saying we don’t care what happened. As long as you’re well, you’ve moved on…but we’re not happy without you. We miss you.”
I assumed he was lying, because we shared the genetic blushy poker grin for a tell that our grandfather used to call our funeral front. “But you haven’t stopped beaming at me. It’s extremely creepy, almost pathologically sadistic. And in fact, I think you’re stalking me. You might even be kidnapping me in another minute.”
Aubrey reached a pale hand into the air behind my head, grappling for someone unseen. “Campbell, I…God, or yes? We’ve been looking for you, but-”
Thankfully, my ringtone shouted Aubrey into silence and I was able to live out my fantasy of dumping a “Hello, darling!” straight down his gobsmacked, ovular gullet.
His whole torso seized with the possibility that I might be loveable, while I basked in a five minute phone call with Tarak, who was helping me install a doorbell camera. Darling was our code word for “SOS!”.
When I hung up, Aubrey sniffled again and muttered, “Can’t be.”
“Sorry, I should go.” I cooed at the pit bull leashed to a nearby lamp post.
“Wait. Do you…you’ve got a partner? Really?”
I took Aubrey’s bait. “No thanks, I’m bored of waiting.”
Part of me wished I could’ve left him stunned with that line and force fed him a purgatorial binary that he’d never be able to settle. I’d watch him submit to the illusion of having a free choice to look up at me or down at the grimy tube pit, knowing that he’d always be a co-dependent to his pride, and that whichever non-choice his ego made for him, he’d never escape the smiling shadow off my back.
But apparently I didn’t have the anger reserves to push him further. I waited for his response, and at length, he met my gaze and said, “Hey! I saw that piece in the New Yorker, Brooklyn, whatever magazine. The FBI shot the little fuck, did they? And now you’re the only one left alive who’s gotta start over?”
“Why, you don’t think I deserve to?” I sniffled, forever a co-dependent to my shame.
“Of course you do, we all deserve redemption. Come here. We’ll go?”
I grinned back at him. There was the glimpse into his reality I’d craved for years. He needed me to be guilty of some forgivable crime so that he could rescue me and absolve his own guilt, just as I needed him to be sadistic so that I could triumphantly damn him and cower off as his victim. It occurred to me that we’d only ever wanted to acknowledge each other through the distorted plexiglass of our selfish animal needs, so that even if we stumbled over the silver line into one another’s intellectual psyche, we’d never inhabit one human soul without triggering alarms.
“Okay.” I skittled back down into the station and slung a tepid arm around Aubrey. We hugged again, this time long enough to express our growing forgiveness of the flesh brother we’d met for the first time in Pinko’s gallery.
And I knew I was ready, that night, to admit to Aubrey and Ida, that I was still grappling with guilt. I’d confessed my failure in my bed, one too many times. And I would soon confess again, semantically, but no less explicitly, to strangers who’d love me for giving them a fake choice to decide. Did I deserve redemption?