WTF

Thinks

DON

“Do you speak English?” asks a woman who looks like an old office coffee machine. Don considers the matter but doesn’t know what the question is supposed to mean. Whether she can speak, in general? Don is so lethargic and numb, lovesickness, you know how it is, that she doesn’t care at all where she is. Like anyone in love, she keeps working herself up with thoughts that make the pain unbearable, perhaps because other than drugs only unrequited love causes such a death wish–inducing cocktail of hormones.

“So do you understand me?” asks the woman. She seems to have some sort of head injury, and Don, turning to her in a friendly manner, nods, accustomed as she is to dealing with the mentally deficient. Don’s coffee machine person

Has shockingly thin hair.

The

WOMAN WITH THE THINNING HAIR

MENTAL STATE: latent passive-aggressiveness. A woman, after all

HEALTH: circular hair loss, flatulence

HOBBIES: no exercise, no friends

USABILITY: none at all

Possesses a résumé whose particulars closely resemble those of many of her acquaintances. During the 1990s she studied literature, earned a doctorate, published articles, met her husband, the type you see and think: does such a nondescript person, someone with thinning hair and small eyes, have someone who finds him adorable?

Then moved to London. Small flat in Whitechapel. Love. Happiness. Hope. Ikea furniture. Playing at adulthood. Earnest faces at the dinner table. Pass me the pickles, please. Job at a university as assistant professor. Hurray. Husband also does something or other. Let’s say journalist. Journalism always works. Poorly paid, well-intentioned. They see each other in the evening. Talk about the future. The future always looks rosier.

At first taking the tube every day, among the masses, they freeze, but, of course, they love. Or rather, fuck. At some point getting tired out.

Because—

Nothing, nothing changes; no garden, no dog, at some point no more fucking. Silence at dinner, the husband is let go, the newspaper goes online, he is paid by the line. He is

Humiliated. And depressed. He gets neurostimulation and is flaccid as a result. Not just sexually. After ten years, still in the same flat in Whitechapel with four rent increases over the course of that time. And no child. Children aren’t possible. Too expensive. Alongside getting paid by the line, the husband delivers food. The couple economizes. Tech gadgets are bought on Black Friday. Hurray, Black Friday. Buy stuff. Hunt, consider yourself to have an edge, finally to have won at something.