From Synapses by Simon Brousseau, translated by Pablo Strauss. Published by Talonbooks in 2019.
- Yesterday evening you spent in conversation with Cleverbot, a chatbot capable of more-or-less coherent conversation, developed by Google as a distraction for people without anything more pressing to do who enjoy drinking Fin du Monde and asking metaphysical questions to a snotty piece of software that respects only its own endless capacity to generate answers and questions expressly designed to ensure it always gets the last word, the prerogative of zealots and machines, and in that sluggish state brought on by your last beer you were surprised to find yourself pounding your keyboard when the program insisted that love was love, and that the best course of action is to do exactly what you want.
- You decided to leave Moncton and open a practice in Québec City, your very own hypnosis centre, and despite your family’s apprehensions when you set off it all went well at first, people came to you to cure their phobias and alleviate their fears and overcome their hang-ups, but after a while you had to face the fact that once they were cured they had no reason to come back and submit to your pendulum and bewitching voice, so your clients began deserting you one by one and leaving you all alone in your office with your stuffed owl and that photo of your mother looking at you sternly as you silently mull over the idea of joining the army, after all, they’re always happy to take in lost causes like yourself.
- It really drives you nuts the way young people walk around in flip-flops, especially since no one else seems bothered by the sound, like a slurping in foot juice, that their soles make with every step, and you are irked beyond all reason by those fluorescent shirts that hug the muscles they all seem so proud of, the preposterous girth of the ballooning pecs that characterize this particular tribe and embodies, in your eyes, the boundless emptiness of human beings who have never faced their angst and understand nothing but how to revel in their own dereliction.
- At a very tender age you started going to tanning salons, and soon became addicted to the blue lighting in their little pods, their uterine warmth, and the pacifying purr enveloping your naked body, and before long you stopped resisting the temptation to go three times a week and sometimes more, ignoring the insistent warnings of dermatologists in the magazines you flipped through, until the day you started suffering from cutaneous depigmentation, and people started talking about you behind your back, and a girl in your class even had the nerve to tell you to your face that your tan made you look like a dish of scalloped potatoes left in the oven too long.
- You’d never really noticed before, but since a friend complimented you on your delicate hands and slender fingers, amazed by their satiny whiteness, you’ve kept an eye out in the hope of finding other men with hands even less powerful than your own, to prove her wrong, but you’re now forced to admit that you do, in fact, have the most delicate of grips, even compared to men smaller than you, an observation you take as an affront to your masculinity, which you’ve always feigned not to care about since it’s an outmoded notion cherished by men who take pride in their muscles and the calluses on hands rasped rough by labour.
- The other day, eating a smoked-meat sandwich at Schwartz’s as is your habit at least once a year, you bit into the second half and your gaze came to rest on the massive pickle jars lined up on the counter and you were reminded of the woman who looked after you when you were little and how she’d call you her “little pickle,” a detail that slipped your mind for years but now brought back an entire chapter of your childhood, when you still believed in a fantasy world inhabited by gnomes, a field of knowledge in which her expertise seemed boundless.
- Your girlfriend has been getting on your nerves since she started meditating and making claims about preparing to leave material concerns behind her, since the one truth we can count on is that we’ll take nothing with us when we die, all the rest is a web of lies, and in her discourse you can’t help but detect a pseudo-spiritual justification of her own negligence and, yes, perhaps a tinge of condescension toward you and your interest in material things, their correct placement and proper handling to prevent damage, and then there’s the way she starts laughing like a hyena every time she breaks a glass, releasing it back into the Great Disorder whence it came.
