TBT #48: My Starship Has No Windows

It’s all so metallic, my home. Metal walls, metal floor, metal shelves, metal beams. And it all shimmers with an unnatural shine, gleaming with reflections of a natural kind of light that — as far as I can tell — does not exist. I spend long days wandering long corridors that all look the same and lead back and forth, connecting together again and sending me back to rooms and rooms that I either have been in or have never been in before. My footsteps echo loudly, clanking on the floor. And how did I come to live here, on this starship? The answer is simply that I was very bad at living on earth.

I spent a long time trying to figure myself out. Trying to figure out how to phrase things. I never could do it. I messed up. I messed up the most simple of things. How do people do it? Things like announcing your presence when you enter a crowded room. What do you do? How is it possible to let people know you’re there without making yourself seem vain, inconsiderate or rude? And how are you supposed to leave? Should I interrupt a conversation to say goodbye? It is not as if goodbye is not implied by the very act of leaving, right? And how do I say it? How do I say it without being awkward? How do you say “I have to go because I am not enjoying myself” without offending? How do you phrase that?

How do I phrase things.

There is too much. Small pauses between words you don’t quite know how to pronounce. Pretty little glances becoming wide-eyed stares as you realize that you have just said what you needed to say far too fast, stumbling over your own words, your meanings blurred. Making quick jokes, reconsidering, and explaining them too fast. Staring at yourself in the bathroom mirror, repeating words over and over again, trying so hard not to think of ways everything could go wrong. “I’ll be back,” you say. “I’m just going to get lunch.” Catching your own eyes in a rear-view mirror, becoming filled with anger. Then disappointment. Then sadness.

It only got worse. That disconnect between me and everyone gave way to the greater disconnect between all things. Trying to rationalize events that seem so far apart but are linked by the indisputable fact that this — this — is human behavior. This is us, wallowing in our existence, celebrating the very miracle that gives us nothing but the ability to say we are in place of, well, nothing at all.

I tried to learn. There are ways to learn, people told me. I needed someone. Needed closeness. I fell in with this crowd that worshipped a program called “Double Your Dating”. A 22 DVD set that vows to show people — people like me, I guess — how to get out there. How to interact. How to pick up women. How to have them and control them and make them yours for as long as you want.

Employing a laundry list of acronyms that takes weeks to memorize, I was taught to refer to women I wanted to be with as HBs (Hot Babes) and immediately upon seeing them to assign them a rating from 1 to 10. Thus, the nice girl at the post office became HB7.8 while the neighbour lady who always watered her flowers after work became HB6.2. It got worse. I was given scripts. Long, involved scripts that were supposed to guarantee a woman’s interest. They had scripts for every occasion, from the initial meeting to the post-coital conversation. They were all the same. All thinly veiled references to sexuality, meant to get a woman thinking about contact, about touching, about sex. Gesture at your penis, they said. Say this, and then gesture at your penis.

I quit the day I came upon a seminar about controlling your woman. About developing a power over her, that would help you not only win arguments, but help you avoid arguments altogether. It involved constantly referring to the door. Pointing at the door, making small reference to the door whenever possible, making a point to explain how bad it would be for her if you — this gallant, suave and perfect male — were to go through that door. How alone she would be, if you used the door. The idea, it said, was to so closely associate the word ‘door’ — and even a small gesture towards the door — to her feelings of insecurity, loneliness and loss that it would act as a trigger, making her swell with panic and give in to whatever you — gallant, suave, perfect — wanted.

‘Door’, can you believe that? ‘Door’. Meant to excite feelings of panic, of being alone. Door, I thought. Door.

Issei Sagawa was a student of English literature in Paris. A seemingly normal student, one semester he became very fond of a Renee Hartevelt, a classmate. So fond, in fact, that, after asking her to read one his favourite poems for his tape recorder, Sagawa shot Hartevelt in the back with a rifle. Over the next few days, he violated and ate pieces of her rotting corpse. All the while, he kept telling her that he loved her.

It does not end there. After Sagawa’s arrest, he was judged unfit to stand trial and was sentenced to an asylum in Paris. It does not end there. After just over a year, he was extradited back to his native Japan where he was confined to another asylum. However, thanks to a clerical error and the machinations of his wealthy father, Sagawa was released some fifteen months after his crimes. It does not end there. Sagawa is now something of a national celebrity, having written a book detailing the murder. He was not repentant, but rather he reveled in what he had done. Declaring himself the godfather of cannibalism, he has written several more books, has a weekly column in a Japanese tabloid, makes frequent television appears and, through all of this, remembers fondly that time he killed and ate a 22-year-old girl.

And door, I thought. Door.

I didn’t get it. I don’t get it. Trying to find connections between these things and realizing that, all there really is, is human behaviour. That’s all it is. It’s just humanity — bulging, bloated, expanding, erupting humanity, falling out of step, breaking into pieces.

So my starship has no windows. And my footsteps ring hollow upon the floor. Dancing images of terrible things floating through my head: A young man chasing disease in a city nightclub; a fetus the size of a fingernail sold as medicine on a dirt-road street; a man screaming at a crying mother, telling her that her son — her only son — is going to hell; a six-year-old dressed in military fatigues, holding a gun, declaring his will to die with an explosion of lungs and guts and hearts and splattered brain; six teenagers feeling light-heated under a crumbling bridge; a man severing his own leg, searching for happiness; a cannibal commenting on celebrity gossip; a black-eyed woman, holding a sign, advertising her daughter — cheap.

I’m wandering metallic halls, moving nowhere in two ways at once. My life is coloured with fluorescent brightness. For me, there is no space. No planets, nebulae, comets or meteors. No asteroids, radiation, satellites or stars. My starship has no windows. Because the stars, outside, give light.