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I can turn the tables and do as I want. I can make women stronger. I can make them obedient and murderous at the same time.

[I will tell you a terrible secret:] language is punishment. Language must encompass all things and in it all things must again transpire according to guilt and the degree of guilt.

Meeting sufferers of frantumaglia in fiction doesn’t guarantee pleasurable reading. A warm, palpable sense of self does not waft off the page to greet you, like a friend or familiar scent. These characters might seem underdeveloped, cold, aloof, not fully fleshed-out, unable to offer the reader a straightforward account of themselves. They might be described as unreliable, complex, neurotic, frustrating, unlikeable. They are often—but not exclusively—poor, neurodivergent, queer, women, people of color. They have often—but not necessarily—experienced trauma. Some might try to dissociate out of their own plotlines. Their incoherence is not the result of being poorly written, but because they exist in a troubled relation to what it means to feel real.

I wanted to be good in the terrible world. I thought of the birds. I accumulated fidelities in this space of diminishing returns. On the one hand, I felt that my obedience had been rewarded at last. On the other, in this cold and beautiful countryside, I feared I was living a life which I had done nothing to earn and I felt sure of some swift and terrible retribution. As I bit into the last strawberry, I began to weep because language, I felt, was no longer at our disposal, because there was nothing in the word that we could use. Nothing settled in place.

It was the year the sow eradicated her piglets. It was a swift and menacing time. One of the local dogs was having a phantom pregnancy. Things were leaving one place and showing up in another. It was springtime when I arrived in the country, an east wind blowing, an uncanny wind as it turned out. Certain things began to arise. The pigs came later though not much, and even if I had only recently arrived, had no livestock-caretaking responsibilities, had only been in to look, safely on one side of the electric fence, I knew they were right to hold me responsible. But all that as I said came later.

I walked around the shop perusing the impressively thorough selection of brushes on offer, ranging in size from the infinitesimal �� designed, I reasoned, to brush the teeth of a cat �� this perhaps to smooth the skating rink erected on the town's lake each winter. Somewhere in the middle of these two (for the tools were arranged by size) I found three brushes roughly adequate to the dimensions of my brother, that could provide coverage and relief to his longest flank as well to his littlest fingers.

He could easily understand the people of the town, he told me one golden summer evening, as we sat looking out on to the garden, their attitudes then, their attitudes now, how they felt they had got a raw deal, had been cut off from fortune by some accident of fate, merely because what at a certain point they and their forebears had called efficiency the rest of the world had, in stages, and one by one, rather like dominoes falling against one another in a tidy sequence until they found themselves all together in a heap, until everything came to an end, determined to be acts of barbarism. And how many of those claiming to be upright had agreed that none was too many? And how many of them in truth, in their heart of hearts, could say they were not guilty? What after all was the difference between thought and deed? Was it a question of scale, or systemisation? What about the pit parties? What about the dogs?

So here it all was at last. I had come to this place, whence my ancestors had fled, out of what I recognised at last as an unkillable longing for self-annihilation, no more than I felt I deserved and, moreover, what I felt had been meant for me [...] And here I was meeting history at last, proof that my deference, anyone's deference, was the surest and swiftest route to one's own eradication. It would be total.

... the fundamental question that I pose now, that has been posed before and elsewhere, more or less word for word, here it is, my brother, prepare yourself, is whether one can go on living after all, whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living.

I saw no reason to object - I had always wanted to live in the countryside, had often driven through the rural areas surrounding my natal city in the autumn to see the leaves in colour, to experience the fresh air, so different from the turgid air downtown, well known to be the primary cause of the high rates of infant mortality, not that I had children myself, no, no, nevertheless, the air quality and its deleterious effects on public health were of concern to me as much as they might have been to any other ordinary citizen.

It looked in other words much as one might expect a faded small-town manor house to look; my brother was nothing if not conventional, he would not have wanted to stand out, nevertheless even I was impressed at how precisely he had achieved the intended aesthetic effect, as if there had been no rupture in the house's historical lineage, as he were the natural inheritor of the house and its grounds, of its contents, of the social status and indeed bloodline these things suggested.

The different between me and anyone else was not that I wanted more to be good, it was not even that I was guiltier, no, it was something rather difficult to place, a surface placidity with which I moved through the days, plodding, plodding, what certain teachers had in my youth described as a kind of idiot impenetrability, who could blame them, the school systems were overburdened, understaffed, and to be frank there were prolonged periods during which I refused to speak a single word anywhere on the school grounds.

I kept up with my work for the legal firm, continuing the transcription of the audio notes of one of the firm's partners, presently engaged by a multinational oil and gas corporation to pursue every possible course of action against a certain individual, who happened also to be a member of the legal profession, and who had sought to prove, indeed had proven in law in certain countries though not his own, gross malfeasance on the part of the multinational's leaders that had resulted in the poisoning of a number of water courses, the destruction of ancient woodland, the decimation of at least two protected species of birds, the kidnapping of activists and the corruption of public officials, as well as tax fraud, racketeering, stock-market manipulation and other crimes besides.

The teachers lavished me with praise, holding me up as an example in front of my classmates, who despised me with good reason, in the first place because I appeared to relish the attention, taking every opportunity to answer the questions the teachers posed to us, delivering sentences with multiple clauses to showcase my linguistic virtuosity [LOLOLOL], revelling in every single syllable as it rolled off my tongue and into the space of the classroom in which I sat, together with my classmates, who observed the spectacle with silent loathing, suspecting I had prior knowledge of the languages and was in point of fact a cheat.

I am here and there is nothing to say. - John Cage.