Rats

I promised myself to write on the way reading opened a path out of the hi tech industrial estate where I used to work. A path – no, that’s not the word. All paths that led out of Winnersh Triangle lead back there; there were only an infinite series of Winnersh Triangles all over the world, one after another, each more or less alike, each staffed by black and yellow and white employees, each traversed by great company cars that I have never been able to drive.

Yes, a great network of industrial estates and then, on the fringes, the great plains of misery where wandered the starving and disenfranchised, the unnetworked and disconnected. In truth, the plain was everywhere and the industrial estates, as well as the gated communities to which they were linked (and to the towns like Wokingham which were, in their entirety, gated communities) were spread only at intervals across it. How often, falling from a temporary job would I find myself back on the plain, not starving or thirsty, it is true, but at one with the hungry and the starving, in a great solidarity not of workers but of non-workers.

The unemployed! The sick! Those sent mad by work (and I will use that simple, undifferentiated word mad)! If you could not link hands with the others, if you were as yet unnetworked, depending on the slow, too-slow computers at your local library, and wandering through streets from which everyone you once knew had moved, if you were carried on the vague breezes that pass across the everyday it was not because you were the only unemployed person, the only wretchedly dependent one relying on everyone but himself. But where are the others and how might you recognise them? There are only the elderly and young mothers with toddlers or with prams. There’s no one your age, not here. Everyone has been assimilated except you. The light falls in steady benediction on everyone but you.

Now the plain opens at your feet. Every step you take opens a suture in the everyday. You are that scar, you the wretched one who does not work. The mothers with their prams hate you. The elderly, who’ve worked their whole lives, resent you. What are you doing on the streets, young and fit? What in you is broken? What’s wrong with you? The office workers pass around you at lunchtime. They have an hour to look for rolls or for toiletries. They move quickly, purposefully, thinking of their upcoming meetings or of networking opportunities. Some, you imagine, would like to work creatively. They would like to take a risk. They feel dissatisfied.

And what about you – what would you like to do? What? There must be some way, you think, of draining money from those around you. How can you tap the rich for their money? But when you talk to these young workers, they are pleasant, polite, there’s nothing to loathe. They talk of career pressure and taking time out; they’d like sabbaticals; they envy you with your free time and open afternoons. When you visit them, you find they have the same books as you: there’s Lacan, there’s Woolf, there’s Said, there’s Spivak.

These are humanities graduates, still shocked by the world, still reeling from the fall from university to the working world. How is it possible, they ask themselves? Then they stop asking and the corridor encloses them that they rush along with the other graduates. You imagine, rats, amiable rats, running everywhere, on top of one another, beneath one another. How busy everyone is! If it’s not work, it’s ‘home admin’ and if it’s not that, it’s the attempt to find a partner. Where is he? Where is she? Another rat, perhaps? Another rat who might turn her rat face to yours?

But you are not a rat. You’re not even a rat. Who are you? What are you? Scarcely assembled, scarcely held together, you haven’t a chance to become a rat. And the rats, looking for partners, will not look at you. Who are you, after all? You are unnetworked, unconnected. You are not one for whom the computer is that great portal through which you reach others in the world.

I want to be a rat, you say to yourself. But then you say: I despise all rats. In the library, you read books about apocalypse. The end is coming, you say to yourself. The end for all rats. But an image comes to you of a swarm of rats running across a blackened planet. Nothing will stop them, you think to yourself. Not even the apocalypse.

Black, hot skies and still the rats are running, crawling on top of one another. Winnersh Triangle has spread everywhere. Cars used to run on petrol, but now they run on hydrogen. Airships and not aeroplanes fill the black sky. The economy collapsed in 2014 but now it’s up and running again. It’s 2020, 2120, 2220 …

One day, I know it, the rats will transform their bodies into airborne locusts. They’ll live in the black clouds of the ravaged earth. The rest of us will be long dead. But the locusts will live from what little sunlight passes through the thick clouds. Then, further on, the great exodus: the locusts spread to interplanetary space. Then, even further into the future, they will spread themselves as dust between stars, buying and selling, exchanging light, still dreaming of what they might create, of their sabbaticals, of early retirement …

Then, with the heat death of the universe, they will upload themselves into another dimension and, discovering another universe, a host of universes, will disperse themselves across everything that exists and could possibly exist writing themselves into genetic code and into the heart of every atom. They’ll make sure that you, the aberration you are, never could have existed. They’ll find a way back through time and eradicate the possibility of your birth. You’ll have never existed and there never would have been an open afternoon or an open sky. Passing the wrong way through the office workers you think: and that is how it should be!

What is painful, infinitely is painful, is that capital will not admit you as one who would willingly be sacrificed. There is no place to offer yourself to the altar of capitalism. You want to say: I will give you all I am, all my life. You want to say: I want the knot of me untied. Or, better still, simply to disperse into the air. To disappear, every particle of you, into the air which drifts above the industrial estate. Then, seeing you, the sleek workers would see nothing and you wouldn’t trouble them by your presence. Yes, their sight would pass right through you as they look up through the sky to the empty interstellar spaces they will one day inhabit.

Meanwhile, in the present, on this day as on any other, you stay in to read the books you borrowed from the library. You lie on your belly in your room and read. Dust motes float in a shaft of light. The cat lies on the patch of carpet touched by that light. The air is warm and stagnant and the pine trees behind the houses across the road stretch into the sky. A way out of the Winnersh Triangle? There is no way out that does not lead back here. History has ended, or it never began.