Paranoia

W. is cheerful and full of bonhomie. Why shouldn't he be? The apocalypse is imminent, things are coming to an end, but in the meantime …? It's always the meantime, for W. There's always time enough.

He has a critical distance from events, W. says, which I entirely lack. Life is a perpetual emergency for me. It's always at the very end of the end. It's always the final extremity, which is why I am so frantic, W. says. It's why I'm so paranoid. 

No one's out to get me, W.'s often told me that. And I should calm down, relax. Do some work! Find a quiet corner like him and get on with something. But I can never relax. I'm up at dawn, and sometimes before dawn, pacing the halls. It's why I look so tired. It's why my eyes are bloodshot.

I'm fundamentally self-dramatising, W.'s always known that. Do I really think the secret police and going to turn up and take me away? I'm not Shostakovich, though I like to think I'm Shostakovich, and this is not Soviet Russia. I'm the sort of of person who would thrive under a dictatorship, W. says. My paranoia would make sense; it would have a correlate. But as it is …

Why do I fear unemployment so much? Why do I fear empty time? It's becauseI have no projects. It's because I never get on with anything except the administrative tasks in the office. On the one hand, I'm frantic, I always look harried, but on the other …

'No one's after you', says W. 'You're on no one's list'. And then, 'You matter to no one. Your life means nothing'. Because isn't that the other side of paranoia; paranoia's fantasy: that your life would mean something, that it would matter enough to draw attention?

'You matter to no one', says W. Only to him. And even then, not greatly. In the end, it's some contingency that will wipe me out. The iceberg will loom because of some minor clerical error. My name will appear on some form, and will be crossed out, and that's it, I'll be gone, scratching my head and wondering what happened.