““He told me he didn’t know why he’d done it, that it just happened, as though he had had very little autonomy in the whole thing. More than that, he seemed not to have any curiosity about why he might have done it.””
This is not who I am, he told me. Was he crying when he said it? Perhaps he was, or perhaps this moment became commingled in my memory with a later scene in his apartment some days later as he described the event more clearly. He had his mobile on the table, in amongst a number of paper documents and letters and unopened junk mail. There was a postcard sent from a friend on holiday in Vienna, sent before the incident had happened. It was a silly thing, he told me, ridiculous really, but he was shaking as he said it so, clearly, it wasn’t ridiculous. And if it were then how, in his words, had it potentially ruined him, compromised his reputation and career? I didn’t know much about things but I knew silliness didn’t look like this. There was something vaguely funny about the way he cried, though, the way he gestured, with his fingers pressed to the side of his face, child-like, as if to undermine the seriousness of his own feelings. He told me where the coffee was and I went to his kitchen and boiled some water. His apartment was very untidy, and there were more piles of bills and correspondence on a side table by the fridge. Letters had spilled onto the floor. There was an empty, unwashed food bowl for a cat or a very small dog. When I came back with our coffees, he had stopped crying. He was texting someone, and didn’t look up when I set his mug on the table before him.
I didn’t like him, and I never had. I didn’t know anyone who liked him. He was an unpleasant man, and that was the truth. But he didn’t seem to recognise this, and that was funny, too, I suppose. But not in a laughing sort of way. It was a different sort of humour, kind of inward laughing and sad.
This is not who I am. He said it a few times, I remember, once he’d stopped texting. But you see, it was who he was, that was the point. He was a cruel man, and he could be a bully. Not to me, necessarily, but I’d seen him cause other people to flinch, to automatically take a step away from him, overcome with a certain sense of shock and disgust. He seemed to delight in finding just the right word or phrase that would produce the greatest appalled effect. A contrarian, my mother would have called him. For instance, once when a student of his explained to him how her father had died, and she was overcome with a sense of guilt at not being there at the hospital bed, he had nodded in a very sombre manner and told her that now she wouldn’t make the same mistake again, would she. Let it be a lesson, he said, with this sanguine tone, as though he saw this advice as magnanimous and kind. Which, I think, surprised everyone listening to the conversation, because the girl was clearly looking for sympathy and understanding, and probably deserved it, given her loss. The girl didn’t say anything at the time, of course. None of us did. And this, probably, had encouraged him. So we were all to blame, really.
The video was troubling to watch, and I couldn’t look at it too closely. It had been doing the rounds for a week, and reposted countless times, when I bumped into him in the street. The dog wasn’t hurt, but even knowing this I couldn’t help but feel nauseous. I’d seen the clip on the day it was posted, and then watched it again, with him on the street. And then again in his apartment a few days later. It was him who played it for me on his phone. I got the sense he’d watched it often, alone. Over and over. Just a kick, you can see that, right? He asked me. He told me he didn’t know why he’d done it, that it just happened, as though he had had very little autonomy in the whole thing. More than that, he seemed not to have any curiosity about why he might have done it. Whether it was a gesture of hopelessness, an expression of latent aggression and violence or even an unconscious act of self-defeating spite. The question didn’t appear to interest him, only the subsequent controversy took his attention. This was the time in his apartment. He’d invited me over after that meeting in the street, with him crying. We were standing, because the chairs in his apartment were all piled high with boxes, as though he was in the process of moving in or out, I couldn’t tell. The scandal of it all had died down by now, and most people had become rather bored with the affair. No malice, he said. I don’t have any malice in me, he said, sipping his coffee. But that was not true, and he must have known this. Or did he? Could he be so deluded, I wondered.
I said nothing.
After a month, he left the university and eventually another lecturer replaced his classes. Every now and then I wondered what had become of him, but he had stopped texting me. Then one day, I saw him in the street in town. He was talking to a man selling newspapers in a kiosk by the station, and he was laughing. I had to get a train and so needed to pass fairly close by, and as I did I looked to him, ready to say hi and share a brief word. But when he glanced to my face, he seemed not to recognise me. He’d put on weight and appeared very happy and satisfied with himself. I noted he was wearing a pair of bright blue leather shoes, and he wasn’t wearing socks. He looked summery. I caught my train, and a month later I read that he had killed himself, and I wasn’t too surprised.