Transformation Episodes - One

It's simplest, so we'll begin on the trains, though it's also worth noting it was right around this time that Michael started having the dream.

So, there was this woman, sitting a few rows away from him on the train one morning.

She was reading a hard cover held very curiously at the bottom spine - between her thumbs and her forefingers. Catherine always read her novels like that. And she had gushing red hair, just like Catherine; and her eyes flickered behind small, thick, black, rectangular rimmed spectacles; just like Catherine.

Michael was noticing her lips - pursed slightly upwards, cat-like, displaying an extreme ironic appreciation of some kind. It was as if she was undressing the book, as if an attractive man sat inside it somewhere, flirting with her. As if she was Catherine, and he was sitting there inside it somewhere, naked.

The train came to a stop and an extremely frail elderly couple entered. The train was packed and there were no seats. The woman who looked like Catherine glanced up at the couple and returned to her novel. When the train lurched into motion, the old man couldn't help but also lurch. In the process he bumped into the Catherine-like woman's elbow, accidentally knocking her book to the floor.

He apologized cordially and carried on past to find a seat.

“Jesus!” she hissed under her breath, though it was quite audible to Michael, staring at those lovely lips now mangled into something quite ugly.

*****

By the time Michael got home that night, he already felt that somehow something had changed.

“Catherine, I really need to ask you again, just a little help” he began, knowing what her answer would be.

“Come on Mike,” she exasperated, “you know that isn't my thing, you know I never touch anything like that.”

She repeated the standard argument:

“If you don't think of number one, what right has number two got?”

He canned the “but”. For some reason he'd always loved that about her, always found her selfishness extremely refreshing.

Somehow it had made her all the more desirable.

*****

But this time he thought really hard about it for a day or two.

He'd always loved her in a raw, animal sort of way. Despite a few frivolities and “fine things” appreciated accordingly, their relationship, when it was activated, was almost entirely and routinely physical.

Work was biggest in both their lives; they'd met back in law school, and had continued thriving on it ever since. They revelled in their successes, perpetually hungry for more: successes followed successes.

And how she had blossomed: well dressed, well groomed, witty, ever so classy. Hardly an ounce of hesitation in any field she chose to operate in.

The perfect woman in many respects.

*****

He dealt with it quickly this time: over an otherwise silent glass of red wine.

“Catherine,” he began, “we need to split up.”

She looked up from her documents.

“You're not my type any more.” he continued bullishly. “I don't have a type any more. You're alien to me somehow. And I'm invisible to you. We just can't relate.”

Amusement and pride bubbled across her face.

“So you know who you're not now, at least.” she finally said.

She expelled a brief, sour laugh.

“Well,” she said, “whatever you say, it is your life.”

“Yes, it is.”

“You were amazing,” she said, “and so was I, but OK. I think we've both had our fills.”

Yes. He was only being polite anyway. He really didn't care. It was quite astonish how little.

And they closed it down like the next big case.

*****

The death of so many years of togetherness bequeathed to Michael what can only be comprehended as a kind of astonishing newness, or an indescribable quiet. Invisible moments began filling him like chilly breaths over a pale dawn.

Life went on in a “normal” way, of course, it was just that Michael began to see everything in different lights.

He started new conversations with himself, mostly on trains.

“In your mid thirties. Successful. Why?” he would ask himself.

“Hard work, applied intelligence, patience, attention to detail. The usual of course,” he would answer.

“Still,” he would counterpoint, “at the top of your game, and only just starting to wonder why? Not why this career, or why that case. Just why? Why anything at all?”

And not a depressing, manic sort of why either. No religious undertones, deeper than that. Just a simple question, asked patiently, with applied intelligence; dots to be joined up; detail as yet to be filled in. He wasn’t after easy answers, but his question was simple:

Why?

*****

One evening, he found himself buying a pair of beers to drink on the train home.

He sipped and stared. Blocks of flats passed by like giant tombstones.

With the beer swilling around his head, thought began sliding out of his hard grip for once, despite the certain trepidation he felt. He realised that for quite a little while now his mind had been following a strong forward motion - one that had yet to find it's destination.

“There's a sense in which what you do is everything about you,” he thought. “Some people say “it's only a job”, but I don't know.”

Rows of dreary, box balconies passed by like discarded packaging. He imaged chilly weekends spent gazing out over rows of dreary, box balconies.

“A man's survival and very existence is defined by his work,” he thought. “His work, if it is valuable, will earn him riches. If it is flimsy, thin, unoriginal – then he may end up spending life in a box. It's as much about where as what. Certain jobs existed only in certain places, and to live in certain places there was only a finite number of things a man could do.”

The sky dwindled over a frosty countryside, and he mulled over a life's work.

*****

When he got home he opened a bottle of red wine. He drank it slowly but steadily whilst cooking a simple meal of pasta. He chopped, heated, boiled and sipped, thinking.

If he'd gotten Catherine wrong, he thought, how many other things had he gotten wrong? And how many other things could be changed so easily to such great effect? He questioned and reappraised every decision he could remember ever making.

Sitting down to his plate of food and now half drunk bottle of wine, he ate and drank and let the news blur past on the television, thinking.

He thought over his decisions in life.

Most were sound. Very logical in fact.

Overwhelmingly, he couldn't really fault himself. A hard-worker, a high-achiever, that rare thing he'd always aspired to be: an admirable lawyer.

He finished his food and continued drinking the wine until the bottle was finished and he felt quite heavy headed and ready to burst his gut with instincts. Stumbling to the bathroom, he relieved himself.

As he washed his hands, he stared at his clean shaven, slightly chubby face in the mirror.

Suddenly, he grabbed the sink tightly with both hands.

To an observer it would have looked like he was accusing his reflection.

“Yes,” he said out loud to it, “you have a large bank account and plenty of investments ticking away along the fringes of your serious life as a lawyer. Yes.”

His eyes didn't seem his somehow, but he let himself continue anyway.

“Yes,” he continued, “you burrow away at the corners of that great pyramid we call law, helping some people get unstuck along the way, yes, filling your bank account with riches along the way, yes, programming your mind into a giant robotic encyclopaedia, into the perfect thinking machine.”

Yes, he thought.

And what's wrong with that?

Is there anything wrong with that?