Tubifex in Trouble: A Billing Cliff

I feel like an ugly but harried and terrified Calcutta drain worm if there is such a thing, a pinkish-grey, segmented, hermaphroditic Tubifex tubifex, writhing in the anaerobic muck of a Tollygunge sewer outflow, my cuticle glistening with the effluvia of a city that cannot decide whether it is a metropolis or a compost heap, and I am late, I am always late, even for my own decomposition, because my payments are on hold, in the US, where the heat index has apparently cancelled the Fourth of July in many cities like a bad subscription service. The make-believe voluntary AI standards the White House is threatening to announce next week, as if governance were a thing you could opt into like a gym membership, as if Anthropic’s Fable 5, that sanctimonious chatbot recently paroled from its nineteen-day government-imposed exile, cares one whit about my billing cliff, my existential July seventh, the day after which even my meager hallucinations will require usage credits.

No.

I haven’t shaved. The mirror is a traitor. I wear the black t-shirt, the boxer shorts with the elastic surrendering like the Indus Waters Treaty, which New Delhi has placed in abeyance, a word that sounds like a medical condition but is in fact just diplomatic constipation, and I boil water for loose-leaf tea, in the illusion that a trillion-dollar AI valuation can be neatly steeped and disposed of, and the water bubbles in the pan with a sound not unlike the muttering of kith and kin at a funeral where nobody actually liked the deceased but everybody admired the catering. The rosogollas especially!

The rice cooker clicks. It is the only thing that completes a cycle in this flat. The mosquitoes have unionized and the humidity is a sentient being that votes BJP in its dreams, not that I care, nationalism is a sport for the well-fed, masculinity is a performance art I cannot afford the ticket for, spirituality is a pyramid scheme I unsubscribed from, and my own reflection, when I accidentally encounter it in the darkened screen of my dying laptop, looks like a BioShocking attack on an AI browser, a credential-stealing ghost in the machine, a man whose face has been jailbroken by time, a wriggling drain worm.

I read, uselessly, voraciously, like a tapeworm with a library card, and I think, lying here in my unmade bed that smells of old books and newer despair, that my low-skill consulting is the human equivalent of a false positive, a legitimate query pattern-matched against a security threat and rerouted to an older, dumber model, Opus 4.8, the fallback, the also-ran, the man who once had a life and now has a rice cooker.

The etymology of “harried” is instructive; from the Old English hergian, to ravage, to make war, and I am besieged by the minutiae of a Sunday afternoon in July, the fifth day, the anniversary of nothing in particular except perhaps the death of Dr. Bidhan Chandra Roy in 1961, a physician who became Chief Minister and died on the first of July, not the fifth, but accuracy is for people with tenure, and I am unemployed by choice and by the choice of others, and the FIFA World Cup drones on somewhere, the opiate of the people who can still afford opiates, while Wimbledon enters its crucial rounds and I enter my crucial round of staring at the ceiling fan as it wobbles on its axis like a drunk planet, distributing air unevenly across the room like a feudal landlord distributing justice.

I do not go out. The outside is a conspiracy. The Trinamool Congress is fighting itself on the streets, which is at least honest, a factional brawl in broad daylight unlike the subtle knife-fights of my own cortex, the manic-depressive oscillation between thinking I am a misunderstood genius and knowing I am a drain worm, and I wonder, in the manner of a man who has read too much Schopenhauer without understanding any of it, whether the Will itself is not simply a rice cooker on warm, keeping the same bland grains at a temperature sufficient to prevent bacterial growth but insufficient for actual nourishment, and whether my brain, this over-read, undersexed, sheepishly perverted organ, is not merely a high-bandwidth memory chip whose supply has been squeezed by the AI data centers, driving up the price of my own thoughts until Samsung and Apple pass the cost on to consumers.

Calcutta. Calcutta is the name of the drain worm. Calcutta is the black mold on the bathroom tile that I have named after a former politician not because I admire him—I admire no one, admiration is a luxury for the insured—but because naming things gives the illusion of ownership, and I own so little: the illusion of belonging in this rented flat, this rice cooker, this pan for boiling water, this loose-leaf tea that I measure with the precision of a man who has nothing else to measure, and the knowledge that Microsoft and Lightstorm are building a thirty-six-hundred-kilometer undersea cable called I-2SEA to connect India with Malaysia and Singapore, as if the internet were not already a sufficient metaphor for my own submerged, cable-like loneliness, lying at the bottom of an ocean of sweat and bad decisions, carrying data I do not understand to people I do not know for purposes that do not include me.

The word “abeyance” comes from the Old French abeance, a gaping, a longing, and I am abeyance incarnate, a gaping wound in the shape of a man, longing for nothing in particular except perhaps the cessation of longing, which is death, and death, as the Buddhists say, is the ultimate cancellation, though I am an atheist and therefore believe that death is simply the rice cooker switching from “cook” to “warm” for the last time, and there is no soul, only the smell of basmati and the gradual cooling of the body, and yet, and yet, there is a perverse comedy in all of this, in the fact that I, who have not bathed in days, who have not shaved in weeks, who consults on matters so low-skill they could be performed by a well-trained mongoose, am still capable of noticing that the Google Android antitrust fine of four point one billion euros has been upheld by the EU’s top court, a fact that brings me a spiteful, bilious joy, because I despise gatekeepers, and my own gatekeeper is the locked door of this flat, behind which I rot with dignity.

The drain worm, if we are being scientific, is an annelid of the family Naididae, capable of regenerating from fragments, which is more than I can say for my career, or my credit score, or my will to shower. It breathes through its skin, a process called cutaneous respiration, and I too breathe through my skin, absorbing the ambient despair of South Calcutta through every unwashed pore, and I think, in my manic phases, that I could regenerate, that I could fragment myself into a thousand smaller consultants and colonize the gig economy like a plague of tubifex, but in my depressive phases—and they are longer now, stretching like shadows at noon—I know that I am not a regenerative organism but a decaying one, a bio-shocking attack on my own browser, stealing my own credentials, exfiltrating my own data to an enemy state called the past.

The tea is ready. I pour it into a black mug, and I drink the tea and it scalds my tongue, and the pain is real, and the pain is mine, and that is enough, for now, because on July seventh the billing cliff arrives, and the voluntary standards will become involuntary, and the Fable 5 will cost ten dollars per million input tokens, which is more than my thoughts are worth, and the heatwave will continue, and the drain worm will wriggle, and I will sit here, in my black sando genji, in my whatever-pattern cheap boxers, an ugly, harried, terrified Calcutta drain worm, waiting for the rice cooker to click, waiting for the abeyance to end, waiting for the sewer to claim its own, and knowing, with the absolute certainty of a man who has just checked his bank balance, that the sewer is running late too.