The Bond

He lay back on the unfamiliar pillowcase, exhausted. The girl seemed anxious to be gone, already sitting on the extreme edge of the bed to pull on her trousers. He watched her passively, his eyes glazed over as if narcotised, observing her in the patch of orange streetlight that penetrated the room’s sagging net curtains; in the brilliant lights and colours of the club, she had seemed radiant, vital, dancing alone, her eyes shut, locked in her own transcendent world. Now, only hours later, she looked sallow, tragically commonplace â€" he could summon up no enthusiasm to invite her to stay, no simple human empathy to even extend such false kindness as a token of appreciation to her for momentarily enlivening his strangely sedated existence. What was her name again? It didn’t seem important, though he knew it ought to.

Was it like this for everyone? Did every man find himself similarly aloof after such a liaison? Was it only he who could not bring himself to see these women he picked up as human beings, as nothing of more depth than a painting or photograph, as nothing more complex than the sum of their parts? Was it only he who could find no common bond, of even the most basic sort, with his fellow creatures? Who sought it again and again in rooms just like this one, hotels and motels and the big cold white bedroom of the big cold white apartment he rented â€" but which he had never been able to think of as a home.

He wouldn’t do this again; not because it affected him, made him feel sad or inadequate or grubby. Such emotions (all emotions, it seemed) were as alien to his character as was remorse for any emotional hurt he might right now be causing the girl in this room with him, who was beginning to sob quietly as she stumbled over her shoes in the dark. No, simply because it drew to his own clinical attention his own clinical detachment, which troubled him as much as anything could.

Which wasn’t much, he thought, as he rolled onto his side, turning his back on her, this poor sad pathetic thing who had no doubt wanted something more from him than this. They always did, these child-women who he seemed to attract, full-grown and self-confident, but somehow retaining an infantile belief in fairy tales, in the myth of love at first sight, in the magic of eyes meeting across a crowded room. He â€" tall, dark, with individual features and an air of indifference which passed for melancholy in the eyes of the inexperienced, stood out and impressed such women, who fancied they had found some intellectual or deeply wounded soul. When as far as he could determine, he had no soul at all.

He was probably being very cruel, turning his back on her, refusing to acknowledge her when she clearly expected something more. That ought to trouble him, really it ought. He breathed in, a long, level breath, and arranged his limbs into still, neat shapes. He wished she would go away.

He wished that he wished she would stay. He wished that he could care what her name was, where she lived, what she did for a living. He wished he could ask these commonplace questions without feeling like a fraud. But all he could do was lie there, frozen and unfeeling as a corpse, as she muttered an apologetic, humiliated farewell to his unresponsive back and fled, struggling with the door and her tears. And he felt a part of him go out with her into the night. A responsibility for her pain, a debt of grief, added up and weighed and measured on the balance sheet of what had once been his soul. Recorded, but not remembered â€" one of a thousand nameless, dateless, encounters that all added up to prove that the bond of humanity that united all people had eluded him. And would continue to elude him. Forever.