The Vivisectors
About this book
Agathe lives in a crumbling university city where academics and rogue gardeners hold power in an uneasy balance. Disillusioned after graduation, she works for a charismatic professor whose scholarship and daily life depend heavily on Agathe's invisible labor.
A campus conflict erupts between Adam, the professor's favored contrarian student, and a rising academic, with each man claiming discrimination. The professor instructs Agathe to approach Adam, listen, and relay what he says.
The assignment draws Agathe toward Adam and into a dispute in which language can create the facts it claims merely to describe. Attraction, surveillance, and professional loyalty become difficult to distinguish as the university polarizes around competing versions of harm.
The Vivisectors is a standalone surreal campus novel and uneasy love story. Missouri Williams writes about deteriorated communication, institutional dependence, and the violence people can perform while insisting they are only interpreting one another.
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i.
The morning after my mother finally tried to kill herself my uncle decided to say something to me, although we usually ate breakfast together in silence. Leaning over the dark mahogany table, which I’d taken to draping with one of his own mother’s embroidered tablecloths, he told me that if you wanted to write something terrible about somebody then it was best to use the first person, because they’ll never be able to accept that you were capable of betraying them so utterly, and so instead of seeing the obvious they’ll look at just about anything else. Disguised like this, you could tell whatever story you liked. It was the safest of all forms, my uncle concluded, because to mix up the author and their narrator was the most cardinal of literary errors. His watery grey eyes examined me briefly before drifting in the direction of the garden.
My uncle only ever approached me indirectly. He let me know his opinions through all kinds of subtle hints. But he was always trying to get me to express myself, which I thought a bad idea. Once he had even bought me a diary with carefully delineated sections for events, thoughts and feelings. I had thrown the book out my window, into the garden, and for the next few weeks we watched it disintegrate in the spring rains. Ever since I had left my parents, my uncle and I had lived together in peace. For the most part, we understood one another perfectly. He was a frail man, older than his sister, my mother, by a good twenty years. His wispy grey hair floated around his balding head like a faded corona. He never raised his voice. What communication he had with the rest of the family was conducted on the telephone, in whispers, in rooms where I never went. My uncle seemed almost ashamed of his continued connection to them, and nothing he said ever had any power to help his younger sister. But their conversations persisted nevertheless. And yesterday had been eventful. He had been forced to speak to my father. He had told me what had happened late in the evening, stopping me as I climbed the stairs to the upper levels of the house, and then had returned to his study, presumably to await another call. I imagined my uncle and my father conferring late at night, in the library where we were sitting now, each speaking in hushed, considerate voices while the moonlight crawled across the overgrown lawn outside. Even though I wasn’t interested in what had happened my uncle had let me know that my mother had tried to drown herself in the bath. She had drunk enough alcohol that she had almost succeeded. After that I couldn’t help thinking about it. My dreams had been full of water.
That morning the library was dim. All that came through the wide bay windows was a weak and incapable light that failed to banish a single shadow. Outside the green plants were dripping. It had rained overnight. There was something desperate about the garden that cut through its dark and splendid indifference: the semicircle of the ruined fence, sagging hopelessly at what had once been the garden’s farthest edge, reminded me of my uncle’s tentative smile. This disturbed me; it wasn’t what I was used to. The garden I knew and admired was wild and arrogant and enclosed my uncle’s house on all sides, and it barely registered the attempts of local gardeners to tame it: no matter what they did the garden sprang back. I would watch it gain in strength from my bedroom on the third floor. First the weeds would return, green and relentless. A carpet of nettles would spread out from the border of the trees, along with tall columns of thistle, and the yellow heads of dandelions would break up the manicured monotony of the lawn. I observed the process with sick satisfaction. Nature doesn’t care about us at all. We can beat it down and tear it to pieces, but it just lies there mutely, saying nothing, before it comes back again. There’s no reproach and no reciprocity, nothing but the same dumb growth as always. And so nature never gives up and the truth is that one day it will overwhelm us entirely.
The same is true of human nature. My mother would have been driven by the same mechanism as the garden, there was no stopping something like that. Even if we had been there to witness it, we would have stood silently and watched the event as it unfolded, as if the following action had already been recorded, written in an ancient manuscript or sculpted in stone, which is true of all actions in one sense because everything has been determined in advance. There is almost nothing new that we can do to one another.
All of this is to say that I was used to indifference. And yet today the whole world seemed to be waiting for me to say something, to give it a sign of what I felt, though perhaps this perception of natural sympathy was simply another one of my mother’s many tricks. She had always had a talent for spreading herself around. The little light that bled through the glass collected in my uncle’s spectacles and turned his eyes into bright, impenetrable discs. Though I couldn’t see the sky through the windows that lined the hexagonal walls of the old wooden library as they were crowded with trees, I knew that above our heads black clouds were gathering. We had heard the forecast on the radio and it was bad.
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It would have been impossible to read my face clearly in the half-light, and in addition to this my uncle had cataracts. He was trying to help me without understanding how dangerous it is to help a person like me. Even after all these years, I don’t think he suspected how many awful things I had to say, all the hatreds I had stored up. However, there was no chance of him seeing the truth. In appearances, I was calm and clear-eyed and still looked like a child. I kept my dark hair short, and my complexion was smooth and clean. It was as if none of the things that had happened to me had left any mark at all, the life I’d lived before moving into my uncle’s house nothing more than the unpleasant dream of some long illness. But at the centre of my soul there was a big dead rock that wanted nothing to do with anything else, and when I thought of my name or the qualities that supposedly made me me, this was all I saw – a great big lump of stone sitting in the shadows. Sometimes at night I would dream of it, and it was still, very still, but deceptively so because as always it was somehow commensurate with that strange rolling anger, the same anger that made me feel seasick when I moved from the dark hallway into the dead light of the senile city, which after all was my city, and so resembled me. I never blamed myself for my feelings. How could I feel anything other than the same dull hatred a rock feels when I had been made with it buried inside me? Just like the events that had preceded it, my mother’s attempted suicide had left no impression – the surface was too hard. Nothing could get to me and besides that there was barely any me to get to. So when my uncle hinted that I should express myself, I could only shake my head. It would have been a terrible idea to take him seriously.
When I think about myself, I see that black stone. When I think about the world around me, I see an arrangement of walls, each enclosing and excluding different planes of emptiness, fields where nothing grows and villages devoid of inhabitants. This is the true state of things. But the truth is so painful that we pretend we can’t see it and refuse to take responsibility for what we know to be the case, even though there’s nobody else who could have made it this way because nature has no walls – the other animals don’t build them. By enclosing something you create emptiness. All at once a space that was full of motion and constantly subject to change has only two states: either there’s something in it or there isn’t. Once something dies there’s nothing to replace it. The field is barren.
Inside my mouth my teeth are pale and stubby because I grind them at night. The constant trauma has made them nearly translucent. Because of how much I grind my teeth I often have headaches and nausea. But my uncle doesn’t know about this either. When he says something that makes me smile, I cover my mouth with my hand. And in this way my deceit continues: nobody has ever been able to see what I really am, although at times they have sensed it.
As it turns out, I did take my uncle’s advice and I’m writing this now. Only it isn’t because I want to write about my mother but because I want to write about my boss and all the things that happened to her the summer my mother tried to kill herself and for once surprised us all.
*
My boss insisted that things started going badly for her at the university only after Adam joined her lecture course. It was my opinion, however, that her time in the faculty had been tortured from the beginning, and this was because I did her job for her and I wasn’t very good at it.
I had started working for my boss four years ago, in the middle of the summer the year before the university had offered her the position of lecturer. It had begun to rain a month earlier and hadn’t stopped since, my boss had complained to me then. In that whole time she hadn’t seen a single ray of yellow light; the sky was a static grey screen. It was her inability to cope with the disappointment of our summers that had endeared her to me on that first meeting, and it had also had something to do with my reasons for taking the job, although of course the greater motivation had come from the obscenely high hourly rate she offered to pay me. She was astonishingly unclear about what exactly I would be doing for her. At first I was under the impression that I would be tutoring her child, who had been held back a few years at school because of his difficulties in adapting to our city and our language, which I assumed was code for him being slow or stupid or maladjusted in general. But soon it seemed that the real person I would be helping was my boss. After a few lacklustre sessions in the child’s study, my boss called me upstairs and asked me a simple question about grammar – at that time she was still a graduate student and in the final stages of writing her thesis – while pointing at a line of text on her monitor. I fixed the sentence for her and glanced over the rest of the paragraph, which was full of errors. It was already obvious that she intended to drag a lot more out of me, but I didn’t want to give in to her all at once, and so I made my excuses and returned to the child sulking downstairs. Even then I could tell that my boss was a dangerous person. She was a mountainous woman with huge, rolling hips, and when she padded across the parquet floor her bare feet left fat ovals of sweat behind them. Everything about her was enormous and desperate.
My whole life people have acted as if I don’t have feelings, and for the most part they’re right. There have only been two people in my life who have suspected me of something more: my uncle, in his quiet, tactful way, and my boss, who was constantly trying to extract some kind of confession from me, though it was never clear what it was that she really wanted to know. She was indiscriminate in her interest. Every single thing I did was fascinating to her: the fact that I walked to her house instead of taking the tram or cycling, as all the other students did, or the fact that I liked to listen to a single song on repeat, the same song for weeks, even months, which was something she’d come to understand because of the way the sound leaked out of my cheap plastic headphones when I took my coat off in the hallway. She had heard the same muffled tune so often the summer I first began working for her that she demanded to know what it was, and by now it was a habit. I would refuse to tell her the name of the song on principle. She wouldn’t have cared for it anyway. As far as I could tell, my boss listened to no music at all. She didn’t read, and she didn’t watch any films either. She had almost no interest in the world around her. But she would go to great lengths to try to surprise information out of me. It didn’t matter what.
I’ve always been repulsed by people who want to know more about me, but at the same time I often fantasise that there’s someone, maybe God, watching me and noting everything down: how I act in certain moments, how I hold myself under pressure, the quality of my thought, what I underline when I read, even the foods I like to eat, because nothing about me would be too mundane for its interest. And this omniscient presence would love me, not in the way that God loves his subjects, but with a cold, unwilling obsession, as if I fascinated it against its better judgement, although its judgement was supreme, and so all the time that it was observing me it was also biding its time, as if waiting for the right moment to strike me down, because it was unbearable to be so drawn to another person or thing. I was unable to imagine love without dominion; it was too disinterested, too abstract. I wanted someone to know me either absolutely or not at all, and anything in between was awful. And because I wasn’t able to compromise, I said as little as possible. I never complained about anything.
My boss, however, had feelings to spare. She shared them with me relentlessly, and her attention to detail was phenomenal. She was capable of analysing the most trivial of encounters in a million different ways, and beneath her scalpel problems exploded, became infinite. Nothing was ever resolved. We circled around the same topics until I was more familiar with her life than I had ever been with mine, the outlines of which were pale and blurred and filled with indistinct, uncertain events that I preferred to forget. Before long I knew everything there was to know about my boss. She had grown up in a city I had only heard of, a new, aggressive city that was hurling itself into the future and reshaping the power relations of the past. It would soon be a force to be reckoned with, she said, that city for which ours was only a precursor, a faulty, doddering model, though she had to admit it had some elegance, the way we lived, which remained a mystery to her no matter how long she stayed here or how proficient she became in our language. She thought that we were decadent, sick. We lived without real ties, she said, and there were no families either. People had stopped having children. The schools were empty and were it not for its increasing intake of foreign students the university would be empty too. It was so lonely, how we lived. Our city had no point, she said. Every year there were less and less of us, while the people who remained had nothing to keep them together, no shared purpose, nothing. Soon the city would be deserted. Worst of all, we didn’t care. We had no fellow feeling. It was different in her city, my boss said. Her city had a future. Her own family had been enormous – there had been seven of them. But she had had brothers, only brothers, and they had ignored her, the youngest, unexpected child of ageing parents. Her whole life my boss had been oppressed by her siblings, although now they depended on her and her husband for their expenses. Her parents had died when she was still a teenager and left her alone. Though she had met her rich and capable husband soon afterwards, my boss was plagued by feelings of abandonment, her body crammed with empty spaces that she yearned to fill up. She was overflowing with emptiness, like a glass full of foam, and this, she said, was the source of all her problems. It was what compelled her to eat in the way that she did, which was excessively, and ensured that every single effort to rectify the problem failed. Every deficiency of the body is matched by a deficiency of the soul, she said, and my case is no different. She had told me this the very first time that I had met her, as I stood in the dark living room and watched with morbid fascination while she shovelled tapioca pudding into her mouth from a bottomless silver tureen. Without any preamble at all, she had informed me that she was trying to overcome the great desolation of her childhood, an immense lack of love. When my boss said things like this, her black eyes seemed as if they might brim over, but this was just a trick. In reality she was always busy assessing how her statements were received. My failure to react interested her; it meant that she could invent a reaction for me.
My boss’s past had never left her alone for even a second. It never shut up, and neither did she. And the only thing that troubled her more than her past was her present role at the university, in the job that I had helped her get after she and I had finished her thesis. I’d researched the faculty until I knew its tastes inside out and composing the cover letter was child’s play; even so, it had still surprised me when my boss had been offered the position. Neither of us had fully understood why she had wanted the role. As far as I could tell and despite all her claims to the contrary, my boss hated to do things. She said she loved to clean, but the housekeeper did it for her. She said she loved to garden and even to mow the lawn, but in fact she watched the gardener push the sleek, state-of-the-art machine up and down its green expanse from behind two layers of glass. She said that she loved to write, to think up ideas and untangle difficult concepts, but I was the one who wrote, thought up ideas and untangled those difficult concepts. She said she had a theoretical contribution to make in the field but would do anything to avoid the effort of thinking what it might be. The truth was that she didn’t have a contribution to make and neither did I. Our writing sessions were a waste of time, a mutual lie that made her feel better about her extreme lack of activity. For the most part we didn’t work but analysed her motives. Eventually, we decided that she had wanted the job because she had been forced to give up her former career to become a mother – although she had expected otherwise, she had found herself discarded by the brutal and patriarchal managers of a booming industry with no time to rest – and so her desire to work was the first real, selfish desire that had come to her after years of pushing herself to one side for others, or at least believing this to be the case. She must have had something to prove, something that felt unfinished. Perhaps, she said, it was that she had wanted to right a wrong. Having a child had cut her professional life short, and my boss had felt cheated. For once, she had wanted to feel capable, in control. She had wanted to escape her past and her family.
She wasn’t sure she’d managed it. Something had been lost on the way. New disasters had arrived – the move, our city. Her problems had piled on. And our language was hostile. It had almost destroyed her. Though she had spoken our language all her life, as it was the dominant language, learning how to read, write and think in it had been a different matter. The process had been painful. She told me that her struggles with our language had shattered her sense of self. She had been made to feel stupid and incompetent. She had been discriminated against wherever she went. Our city hated change. It despised difference. Because of this it had wanted to break her, and this language had been its weapon. Even now, all these years later, the ground beneath her feet was still liable to shift at a moment’s notice. Just like that she’d lose her grip on things. She’d find herself forgetting words, saying sentences backwards. She wasn’t sure of anything she attempted, though she often insisted to me that in her own country she had been a capable and confident person. It was hard to believe her in that marbled house filled with expensive objects and corridors along which housemaids crept at odd intervals. (They were all extremely professional, good at what they did and paid far less than me.) It was hard to believe her because my boss was like one of those expensive objects, a piece of ornamental furniture that somebody might dust from time to time, or a painting of a landscape that only guests were ever compelled to look at. She was a pampered, useless child that was fed at certain hours and tidied up after. Often, as I sat with my boss in the living room and listened to her interminable monologues, I could feel the contempt of her staff flowing around us – it was the only living force in the house. The maids would whisper in their language when I passed them on my way to the kitchen or to the bathroom, and they did the same thing when she walked by too. Their dislike was palpable, but my boss never took any notice of them. She was inured to critique from voices she considered lesser than her own.
Every session we circled back to the same question. Why had she taken on the role at the university, instead of a practical one in the business world, of which she felt herself a part? She could have gone anywhere with a qualification from an institution as prestigious as ours – it was one of the most famous universities in the world, despite its slow decline and the rotting city around it – and she would have been welcomed in any number of bright glass offices. My boss might have done anything, but she had chosen to stay at the university; she had even sought it out. She still thought about it, whether her decision had been the right one or not – it was hard not to, with everyone doubting you all the time – because after all she was as rich as Croesus and had never needed to work. Her colleagues had caught wind of her wealth, of course. She radiated a kind of learned helplessness that bespoke either great misfortune or great fortune (or, in my boss’s case, both), and though they made space for her in the first year of her fellowship, they soon ran out of patience. There was a massing against her – my boss was sure of it. She had been advised to tread carefully. The anxiety she felt when confronted by her work was immense. This was why I was the one to read and reply to her emails, in her clumsy foreigner’s idiom that I had learned to impersonate, my cheerful sentences littered with predictable mistakes that were intended to strike the reader as endearing. I never admitted to my boss that I did this, because she was the type of person who had never understood how to lie with grace, which meant deviating from the truth only at the most essential moments. I constantly wondered how she continued to manage to deceive the faculty. She was as transparent as glass, and her face was a window. I signed off everything with her name and institutional signature.
In fact, I did almost everything for her. But even when the burden of her labour had shifted from her shoulders to mine, which bore it indifferently, or so it seemed to her, my boss still suffered in spades, or at least she thought she did. Compared with what was to come, however, the misery she felt that spring, which was her third as a lecturer in the department, was something light and intangible, the result of a conspiracy she couldn’t quite pin down, a general reluctance on the part of her colleagues to linger with her in the corridors or exchange a friendly word, unanswered emails and messages left on read.
I would go to my boss’s house every single evening during term time, which in recent years had begun to take place in all seasons, as these days the university never missed the chance to make money. The foreign students, especially, attended courses all year round. In the summer I liked to walk. It took me an hour to reach her house on foot, skirting the edge of the park, though it would have been just twenty minutes on the tram. I walked in the winter too, even in bad weather. One of the only things that gave me any real satisfaction was my step count. I compulsively checked my phone to see how many steps I had taken because it was here that I channelled what little remained of my ambition. Every day I tried to exceed myself. Sometimes I would walk for hours and hours, making lengthy detours and crisscrossing the suburbs until night fell and the drunks came out in their droves, all to see that number creep up, first in the thousands and then in the tens of thousands. As a consequence my feet were often covered in blisters and my socks soaked with blood. My toenails were cracked and yellow and prone to fungal infections. But being in pain has never bothered me. I have always been able to control my impulses.
It was this drive towards order that helped me do my boss’s job for her, although I knew little about city planning, urban design and business restructuring, which were all areas over which her discipline supposedly ranged. I liked to fix things, and I knew it wasn’t necessary to understand them to do so. All you need is to be able to intuit an outline and to understand how to put things in place. Form is everything; the content is meaningless. You also need to know how to get rid of things. For the first year, everything went well enough, even though at the beginning I could barely comprehend what I was writing, and my boss retained her position despite having lost the respect of many of the other academics in the department through a series of glaring errors, ones that had nothing to do with me, or at least so I insisted on the sole occasion that my boss dared to ask me. I approached my secret work for the department with a dramatic confidence that prevented me from admitting a single mistake.
My boss never questioned me because she was so terribly insecure. Almost everything in her life had been shaped by disaster. She was never not being swept up by events. Even her husband had stormed into her world without her willing it. She had been smiling abstractedly, not thinking of anything, a student. He had seen her across the library and had thought she was smiling at him. At the time he hadn’t known that my boss was short-sighted. Without her glasses she was incapable of recognising anything, and so it was all the same to her where her smile landed. But he had seen it, remembered it, and pursued it. A year later they were married. They would tell the story to her husband’s friends and colleagues as a charming anecdote, my boss said, but sometimes as they did so she would see her own face smiling as she narrated that unwitting moment, how she had smiled back then, and the distance between those two smiles appalled her. She had been so innocent. She had barely experienced anything of the world. And then a tornado had picked her up and carried her from one enclosure to another.
The part of the city where my boss lived was expensive and empty. Most of the homes were owned by wealthy foreigners who only inhabited them for part of the year, émigrés who lived in their mansions for one or two months before heading elsewhere. Some of them, perhaps shocked by the inhospitable weather, never returned, and so the streets were dotted by abandoned residences with windowpanes smashed in by storms and gardens filled with waist-high weeds that stank of wild garlic. Despite their cost, the houses were falling to pieces, with rotting wooden fences and paint peeling on the doors. Once I had slipped through a broken gate and entered one of those ruined palaces. Inside I saw floors carpeted with thick green ferns and the crumbling white skeletons of birds, and water streaming down stained walls while bands of moonlight slashed through the collapsed roof. I never went into any of the houses again. Over the years the neighbourhood continued to empty. It was one of the most desolate places in the city. The only activity that took place was the dogged labour of the gardeners as they tried to beat back the growth of the park beneath the watchful eye of the district administrator. Aside from this there reigned a great lethargy. Only men like my uncle were indifferent enough to continue to live in the depleted suburbs. My boss’s house was at the edge of the woods on the northern border of the park, surrounded by tall oak trees and with a lawn that grew at a vicious pace. Even my boss’s personal gardener, a veteran of the neighbourhood, couldn’t keep it down without assistance, and if his attention relaxed for a moment the lawn burst back with a vengeance.