Her husband is happy (Hat 11 (a tentative conclusion))

What mostly protects the ministers in all systems from being shot is only partly their so-called state security, their army of bodyguards; mainly it’s the certainty that ministers will always and immediately be replaced by others of their kind. (Frisch) It’s not true, he thinks, what really protects them is faith and desire. He closes the Frisch book and looks up. It’s early, just after 6pm, the weekend started as soon as he got home and they decided to get a takeaway dinner from one of the local restaurants. Here he is waiting again. The people and organizations that had been haunting their lives for the past four weeks had flown back to their criminal and capitalist lives. It is the fourth Friday since they arrived and only yesterday the last people had flown out on flights back to Japan. The Chinese contingent left a few days earlier. thoughts are so unreliable, as unreliable as speech and memory, as infected by ideology and personal history as anything else, though some of the people who have just left m don’t believe in the existence of ideology, he thinks waiting. ( In this, in what follows nothing can be trusted, except perhaps that none of the people mentioned in this ending are trustworthy, they are after all mostly, selfish, criminals and of the 1%.) He is queuing in a modest restaurant, waiting for the food to be prepared, boxed up, waiting to drive the food home. To talk to his wife, to make sure she is alright. He is sipping a small glass of beer that they had offered him because of the slight delay. He is pleased that they could begin to think of the important things in their lives again; children, friends, the possibility of solitude, quietness and the lack of events. He sips his waiting beer, they are placing the food, which is in card and foil packaging into brown paper carrier bags. The food will ready in a few seconds to take away, he is thinking, as he watches them put the final items in the bag, that their lives are lived in between the shims of the social machine, in which they are trapped (it feels like a network that resembles a sketch for a mechanical project, that is to say an attempt at a perfection and a happiness…) except the machine is designed to constrain them. For them philosophy and poetry, might be said to exist in the accidental touch of their fingers and arms. The memory of which they always carried with them as they continued to walk along the paths of life and danger, never letting go of the little notes that passed between them. He has been here threatened many times before, though this has been one of the more serious and sustained set of threats […] He wonders how many times they have ordered food from this restaurant over the years, today the girls wanted frites and mayo, baguettes and chicken, whilst they both wanted wanted breton fish stew with frites as a side dish. A diverse selection of puddings… John, he asks, can you add a bottle of chablis to the order? Over the past weeks everywhere had been a place where negotiations took place, concepts, threats and ideals exchanged. Whilst for them, a man and a woman who were only involved to be safe together, it was like an encounter with a genre of criminal-prose-poetry. Whilst for the others their desperation was increasingly obvious.[…] During the weeks that passed, whilst sitting across tables and desks, negotiating with these people who wanted so much from them that she continuously imagined killing them, but after three or more weeks of this they have arrived at a new negotiated conclusion which protected the japanese from being killed, shot or suffering a carefully arranged ‘accidental death’. Something that is not based on the security apparatus that surrounds them, the legion of bodyguards, finance, the law, it’s the absolute certainty that they would be immediately replaced by others of their type. A long stream of criminals becoming capitalists just waiting. There are so many of them she moaned at midnight, so many of them. So the man is merely waiting for the food in the modest restaurant, to take it to her, rather than putting the used guns back in the safe in the library and investigating the murders that he knew his wife had committed.

[ The day before they flew home, a typical conference room, it has a long rectangular table with power and network sockets, chairs, windows along the long axis, on the other a double glazed glass wall. At each end there is a monitor surrounded by framed photographs. There is a single glass door entrance. A man from Tokyo had been sitting alone in the room reading documents and drinking tea or coffee for about an hour. A black A4 sized notebook in which he is writing the occasional reference is open in front of him. She looks through the glass wall and decides to go and say goodbye to him. She gestures to her two guards, a man and a woman, to wait outside the door and prevent anyone from entering. She sat down opposite him her back to the glass wall, he looked past her at the two guards. “You have bodyguards…” “Yes, dangerous people.” She sits back, leaning back into the chair enjoying the flexibility and curve of the plywood chair., she closes her eyes, she pivots slightly and rests her feet on the adjacent chair. Conscious that he is looking expectantly at her she sighs and still with her eyes closed puts her phone and a paper notebook on the table. He keeps reading the documents . Silence reigns in the room. He watches one of the guards, who returns with two cups, tea or coffee he presumes. Only the sounds of the building working, humming, of the paper pages turning and the sound of them breathing. She is silent and is thinking I could stand, move and hit him before he had a chance to react and before I even opened my eyes, she thinks and and and smiles at the thought. How many time have I sat in rooms like this and thought that she wondered. A few minutes pass. She opens her eyes and looks at him. She realizes he is looking at her. and says, I never expected to see you again after Tokyo. […] She moves in her chair. Speech, dialogue, words, memories are inherently unreliable. I only spoke japanese with my mother. Here, as now i only speak English. In Japanese i could never say, […I love someone leave me alone… ] The last time i saw my mother i was sitting on a sofa in K’s front room, You were there. I was tired, exhausted, just as he was we were on the sofa together. I couldn’t say her name. Those days I could never say her name. Couldn’t call the monster who created me mother. Even then as I sat on the sofa waiting to leave she still wanted me to kill someone. All she ever wanted I suppose. If I had done what she wanted i would never have left, never had a chance to be a human being, here we are years later and i am still having to work out how to get them to leave us alone. He ignores her implied question and says. “ If I was alone, a singularity, I would have vanished on the day after I arrived here, before meeting you. Taking a few things with me. Vanishing. Perhaps I wouldn’t have even needed to come here. I only came because of her. There was nothing else I could do. N isn’t like me, she simply couldn’t run. Becoming invisible is impossible for her. If I wanted her to live I had to make the money I stole not an issue. So that I could beg for her life with I am sorry I had to do this. He stopped and looked at her. face. I presume you know this. Know how desperate I was to make this choice, which N does not know was a choice between certain death and coming here and decreasing the risk. “ He stops — (There is no solution for you, i have no more idea of it than you do, at the moment I have no more idea if i’ll survive than you do. He says. ) […] She looked thoughtful. You could stay here. I cannot, any more than you could stay there. He realizes she has taken off her jacket, she has a loose electric blue shirt on, to the left and slightly below and to the side of her breast there is a pocket in which a couple of pens are clipped. I can’t, thankyou for the offer though. It’s been surprisingly nice to see you M. I have to go and speak to the Chinese. Those two, are they triad ? She shook her head. No, they work for Chan, is there a difference? They are hostages. Hostages ? Yes we are keeping them because Chan cares about them. Nobody cares about any of you. She is almost at the doorway, he is gathering together his papers. He says at her back… “Yes, reluctantly, no it was, is, friendship, desire and love. Desire nothing, I could have sacrificed desire, perhaps even friendship, but becoming love was what happened to us. I could have dealt with the consequences of my error . But we, she and I cannot… (he shudders) I realize it sounds weak but this was the only way I had to stay with her in Tokyo or anywhere else… With Seo though, it’s different because its within the limits of her ambition. She is negotiating her way onto the council in her own right. Becoming council as a becoming capitalist. There is no limit to her ambition. I didn’t know this before. If I had perhaps I would have tried something differently.” He stopped. She turns round and looks at him, her face reminds him of how she looked at him from a table in Tokyo. Have a good trip back. I won’t be at the meal tonight, don’t ever come back. I will guarantee your safety..]

So on Friday evening he takes the two brown paper carrier bags of food and goes back to his car, placing them on the front passenger seat. His phone rings. We are only interested in his half of the conversation and even that is pretty uninteresting. It takes place as he drives up the hill towards home. Turning corners, crossing shire lane, past the parade of shops, up the drive, and pass the children’s school into the close and woods they live in. Hello Seth, do you need something?… That’s good… Do you have enough information to show her to justify a warrant ? … You are not sure or you do have? … Ok, who is the duty this weekend ? … shit that’s a shame… What do you think you want to do ? … I think then that what you should do is maintain the surveillance over the weekend… and on monday morning… we’ll go to her and ask for a warrant… no that’s not what I mean, rather you will ask for the warrant and I will be there to say I think you are right… OK that’s good, if you need anything call me, any serious developments that mean we need to raise the warrant early call me and I’ll speak to her etc. Normal life has resumed […] She is warming plates in the oven as he parks in the drive, carries the food into the kitchen, cutlery is on the table, glasses, plates, serving spoons and forks. The girls appear from watching youtube or something similar on the tv, sitting on chairs speaking noisily and… she peels foil lids from containers, distributes, he opens wine, water, pours. What were you watching ? he asks the older girl. Who tells him, her mother unable to stop smiling, that it was a roblox fighting game video. The younger girl says that it’s really exciting! They are both relaxed at the same time for the first time in weeks.

Have we become aristocrats ? he asks, our Achilles asks. They are sitting in a bathroom, she is in the bath a towel wrapped around her wet hair, leaning back and looking at the white tiles. As she moves the water makes attractive sloshing noises. She is counting the tiles, imagining that she can calculate how many tiles there are on the wall. Become aristocrats? I always wanted to become invisible, ordinary, irrelevant to them, instead I think that this Hat thing means that when we get older they’ll try and kill us which is the fate of all aristocrats. He is sitting on a whicker chair in the corner, behind him a wall of shiny white tiles, on her towelling dressing gown. Which I suppose is like suddenly finding ourselves to be called Aristocratic idealists, those who succeeding generations will condemn as being nihilistic heirs, simply because we survived. She smiles at this and says, we could have avoided this awful fate, perhaps even left the 1% if they hadn’t forced us to wear Hat, to create Hat but with both K and Hat we will not manage to avoid being aristocrats. Bastards. Criminals and capitalists giving us a forced choice. If it wasn’t for the children I would have been tempted to open the gun safe. She soaped herself, I know, really none of them will ever know how the children saved them. If they hadn’t done this to us we might have become democratic materialists, or even better invisible materialists. This discussion between people who love one another, cannot imagine living without one another, who are parents, misses the inevitable truth that when their children become adults they will have, at some point, to protect their parents. This is still unimaginable for these two people sitting in the bathroom whilst their children are asleep. As she gets out of the bath, she thinks, whilst looking at the way he is watching her wrapping her naked body with the towel and putting on the toweling robe, and then says — those who receive a blow, can easily become bitter, and we need to take care that we don’t become bitter… I, we didn’t think it through, we should have been poorer, then this would not have happened. She smiles at him, living on your salary, mine as well, lived in amongst the multitude. Then this would not have happened. He shakes his head, then they would have killed us. Its my work, yours, the money, which put protection around us until now. Middle class and dead isn’t much of a choice, we needed to look useful to the secret state. She shrugs, the dressing gown falling off a shoulder a little. Perhaps a level of wealth, but not this much ? It’s not just this Hat fiasco though is it. there is also the Han kidnapping case, when we rescued her and the others, leaving that trail of bodies. We, you and I were noticed by more people. Hey, that wasn’t my fault, you decided to become a criminal mastermind and save the girl. She sighs and tries to look innocent and failed, I merely ordered planes and supplied some assassins. We could have survived Hat or the Han case, but both are a little too much. Let’s go down and have some tea… I suppose we’ll have to become (an) aristocratic war machine, he says sadly… Idiot. She said affectionately. We’ll buy some woods, some fields and grow trees, pretend we aren’t too rich to the girls, continue to be a war machine, use their capitalist bodies as fertilizer if they annoy us to much… He is boiling water to make green tea in the glass teapot when the older daughter comes down, for a glass of water and to ensure they are both there. He unconsciously and without thinking hugs her. What shall we do this weekend ? He asks the top of her head. The woods, lets go to the woods. She says. That’s a good idea, do you want a drink of water? Her mother says, I’m sorry I have had a horrible month, things will be better now I promise. Her daughter, standing by the counter looking at her, I think Imo would like to see Nyr. OK, I’ll see if we can arrange that. Do you want Mummy or Daddy to tuck you in ? You, she said. Come on then. […] A busy weekend he says when she comes down again, I’d like to go to B’stead, for supermarket shopping and maybe the charity bookshop? Camden or Oxford on Sunday, perhaps ? That would be nice, to spend time with them… I’m seeing architects for the Hat project at the beginning of the week […] As they define us as aristocrats perhaps that idealism will enable them to leave us alone. He looks at her chest where the robe has fallen open. You distract me so easily. he says. She laughs at him. You are my territory, she says, opening her dressing gown before wrapping it around herself. And you are my steppe, my Penthesilea. We left the pack and became loners, never wanting to be exceptional individuals after leaving the pure multiplicity of the gang … and here we are with them forcing a choice on us, a predestined one… Revenge, i would like some revenge, Achilles says sipping china tea at midnight…

The next morning ordinary life has returned. the children eating breakfast cereal and grabbing other things to eat, waffles, toast. He is making coffee in the pavoni. The showers draining slowly, she says. I noticed. We should get some unblocker. OK, we also need some silicone lubricant for the window hinges, they are creaking again. The cam belt needs changing so I’ll book the car in. We need biscuits, cereal and chocolate, the girls chorused. She laughed. He handed her an americano, he was sipping a flat white. More fruit, he said to girls. He is looking through the window at next doors cat which is looking at him. We should get cats. She opened a window to usher a fly out of the house… Reliability has returned with ordinary life.

After a month time we have a long weekend in august in Stockholm with the children. I am, we are hoping that we will be allowed to extend the boundaries of our virtual prison into western Europe. I wanted to travel to where Brecht stayed, to see the home of the master but we simply ran out of time. [me-ti recommended that spacetime be considered as matter’s form of existence] Whilst Park is simply enjoying the hotel, wandering around the city, riding the trains and trams, the unknown language, walking along the waterside, across the bridge to the modern art gallery. She is wearing her newly bought Kasa (see Hat 9) straw hat and a longish loose coat that reaches her knees, the combination makes her look like a samurai on holiday, my daughters are wearing their Stockholm caps, drinking fruit juice and eating cake. I am leaning back into the plywood chair with my eyes closed feeling content listening to the sounds of the gallery, from the human to the machines, they make me feel happy. I look at Suki and Imo laughing and enjoying cake, these snowballs are lovely I say to them, happily munching my way through the dessicated coconut into the light interior. The coffee is disappearing into the mouth of my amazonian wife and I suggest — Let’s go to the shop. Utopia is a war machine on holiday in Stockholm she says. Looking at my t shirt with its Brecht print. Robert (her psychoanalyst) was excited when he heard we were coming here. She said looking past me with a wry smile on her face, I look round and can see one of the perpetual surveillance team buying a takeaway coffee, he sees her amused expression looking at him,he shrugs ruefully, mimes no breakfast at her. “These guys are so relaxed…” She says to me. .. How can you be happy? She asks me later in the Mariatorget outside the hotel, the children either playing some game or are on the seesaw, the Stockholm marathon is running past in the early evening. “I am a middle aged man, with a glamorous wife and children. Family, kinship and love, who could ask for more, apart for coffee, vodka and an icecream, and my wife left her gun at home…”