The Alpine Glow of Embezzlement

I woke with my tongue welded to the roof of my mouth by the adhesive residue of last night’s government-sanctioned amnesia, a paste compounded of country liquor sold in plastic pouches bearing the lithographed smiles of deities who have clearly subcontracted their mercy to the excise department, and the distinct, humiliating realization that while I was busy performing my civic duty of temporary obliteration, somewhere in Writers’ Building a clerk in a short-sleeved shirt was already filing the morning receipts for our collective sedation, tabulating the excise revenue with the same fingers he uses to scratch his fungal enthusiasms, and I thought, not for the first time, that our sweet subverted democracy operates less like a republic and more like a municipal corporation running a chain of open-air opium dens where the pipes are subsidized and the dreams are audited, and the only difference between the addict and the accountant is the altitude of the bathroom tile and the regularity with which the plumbing weeps.

The addicts are rising.

Not rising in any revolutionary sense, mind you, not rising like yeast or ambition or the dough of a new society, but rising like damp, like fungus, like the statistical certainty that accompanies any system designed to manufacture stupidity at scale, and I have watched them, oh how I have watched them, stumbling through the Bowbazar intersections with their eyes performing that particular glazed rotation of the recently blessed, the pharmacologically anointed, the holy rollers of the high commission, each one a walking blindfold, a muzzled vote, a somnolent data point in the great ledger of extraction, because the arithmetic is simple even to a man whose brain is currently attempting to secede from his skull: a stupid population is a profitable population, a drunk population is a docile population, a holy population is a population that writes checks to god and cashes them in Zurich, and I should know, because I have spent the last three hours of my manic phase attempting to calculate the exact tensile strength of civic shame, using only a broken pencil and the back of a used bus ticket, and the numbers keep coming up erotic, they keep coming up obscene, they keep suggesting that the coefficient of friction between a voter and his own gullibility is approximately zero, which is to say, frictionless, which is to say, lubricated, which is to say, the entire democratic apparatus has been generously, copiously, almost pornographically oiled by the very agencies sworn to maintain its dry integrity.

Swiss banks.

Say it slowly. Let the syllables sit on your tongue like the names of ex-lovers who have improved their station in life by abandoning you to rot. Swiss banks. The Alpen glow of embezzlement. The cuckoo-clock precision of laundering. I read somewhere—perhaps in the manic phase of a three a.m. Wikipedia spiral, perhaps in the hallucinatory footnotes of a railway budget—that the word “bank” derives from the Italian “banca,” meaning bench, the place where medieval money-changers sat, and how perfect, how exquisitely, grotesquely perfect that the men who purchase our stupidity wholesale do so from benches of marble in Geneva while we, the stupendously stupid, the gloriously groggy, the piously pickled, sit on broken concrete in Dharmatala and consider ourselves fortunate to have a bench at all, never mind that the bench is wet with yesterday’s rain and last week’s municipal micturition and the eternal, unwavering suspicion that the Public Works Department has deliberately omitted this bench from all maintenance schedules as a matter of fiscal prudence, and I laugh, I laugh until my ribs become a xylophone played by a drunken deity, because the joke is so vast, so cosmically, intestinally hilarious: they do not even bother to hide it anymore.

The subversion is not subterranean; it is not subtle; it is not sub- anything. It is super. Super totally holy. The holiness of the ledger. The beatitude of the balance sheet. The transubstantiation of public funds into private alpine views, and we, the congregation, kneel not in churches but in liquor shops, not in temples but in pharmacy queues, receiving our communion in milligrams and milliliters, praising the lord of the excise stamp and the prescription pad, and I have watched the pharmacists perform their sacraments with the solemnity of cardiothoracic surgeons, measuring out oblivion in brown bottles, and I have watched the politicians distribute their blessings with the generosity of men who know exactly how much each blessing costs per unit, and the whole operation runs with the efficiency of a gastrointestinal system, which is to say, it extracts nutrients from the top and excretes policy from the bottom, and we are the middle management of this digestive tract, neither fully nourished nor fully evacuated, just held in the perpetual, cramping suspense of the lower intestine.

But then the depression comes.

It arrives without announcement, like a municipal water cut, like the electricity board’s revenge.

The sentences stop.

They just stop.

I sit. The fan rotates with the enthusiasm of a bureaucrat nearing pension. The heat of Calcutta enters the room like a debt collector who has forgotten the exact amount but remains committed to the principle. I think about the woodlice. Did you read about the woodlice? Scientists in some temperate country discovered that artificial streetlights trap thousands of woodlice in mesmerizing circular death spirals, and I laughed for eleven seconds before I recognized the autobiography in it, the insectile accuracy of the metaphor: we are all woodlice, circling the sodium-vapor lamp of our own manufactured needs, scuttling in patterns of luminous futility, and the government is not even the lamp; the government is the hand that installed the lamp, the hand that pays the electricity bill, the hand that collects the taxes from the woodlice to fund the installation of more lamps, and somewhere a scientist with a doctorate in the obvious is taking notes while the woodlice perform their final, devotional rotations, and I wonder if the scientist files his reports in Geneva, if the woodlice data is stored in a Swiss vault, if the death spiral has been patented for broader municipal application.

They have also, I am told by the flickering screen of my phone at four in the morning when sleep has become a theoretical construct, created a silicon chip that writes DNA using electricity and water-based enzymes, a portable device for manufacturing life itself, and I wonder, in the hollow between manic and depressive, whether this chip could write a better citizen, a more obedient genome, a strand of deoxyribonucleic acid programmed to crave exactly the right dosage of oblivion, to metabolize policy into protein, to store data in the nucleotides of its own resignation, and perhaps they are already building data centers in orbit, as the news suggests, orbital facilities to house our artificial intelligences beyond the reach of terrestrial regulation, and I find this the most honest thing I have read in months: even our machines require escape velocity to process the horror of our condition, even our algorithms need to leave the atmosphere to compute the mathematics of our sedation without suffocating in the same air we breathe, the same air that carries the smoke from the burning ghats and the exhaust from the Ambassador taxis and the particulate residue of a million broken promises, and I read that scientists have combined machine learning with quantum physics to discover new superconductors, and I think, yes, of course, superconductivity, the perfect metaphor for the state, which conducts our wealth out of the country with absolutely zero resistance, no friction, no heat loss, just the cool, efficient transfer of public stupidity into private alpine refrigeration.

I have tried to sleep. I have tried to sleep one hour and twenty minutes less, as the recent study suggests, because apparently this mild, realistic sleep loss causes weight gain and inactivity, and I figure if I am going to be inactive I might as well be scientifically inactive, I might as well have my lethargy peer-reviewed, my torpor published in a journal, my catatonia cited by other scholars of the abyss, and the weight I gain is not the weight of food but the weight of information, the specific gravity of knowing too much, the adipose tissue of comprehension, and I lie there watching the ceiling perform its slow, geological peel, and I think about the Dyson sphere, that hypothetical alien megastructure, and how scientists now believe red dwarfs and white dwarfs are the most promising stars to examine, and I laugh because even our search for extraterrestrial intelligence has been reduced to a real estate assessment, a stellar property evaluation, and I wonder if the aliens, should they exist, have also discovered the utility of keeping their populations stupid, holy, drunk, and drugged, if they too have orbital data centers and Swiss accounts and villas with plumbing that does not weep at midnight.

In the tram, this morning, during the brief manic resurgence that sometimes follows the first cup of tea, I watched a man polish his own stupidity like a pair of Sunday shoes. He was reading a pamphlet distributed by some political party or pharmaceutical concern—I could not distinguish the logos, they have become interchangeable, a kind of corporate-political Sanskrit—and he was mouthing the words, actually moving his lips in synchronization with the printed instructions for his own sedation, and I wanted to tap him on the shoulder, to whisper in his ear that the words he was devouring were written in a language designed to induce exactly the cognitive narcosis he was experiencing, but the tram screeched around the Esplanade curve, and I lost my balance, and by the time I recovered my footing he had already turned the page, already swallowed the next paragraph, already entered the next phase of his willing, enthusiastic, sacramental narcosis, and I realized that the tram itself was a perfect model of our consciousness, running on tracks laid down decades ago by men now dead, powered by an overhead line that could be cut at any moment by a municipal decision made in a room I will never enter, and the destination board flickered between two locations, neither of which I recognized, and the conductor looked at me with the expression of a man who has seen every possible ticket and found them all equally invalid.

The Hooghly River, at sunset, performs a trick of light that I have come to understand as the only honest theology available to this city: it reflects the sky not as a mirror but as a wound, a horizontal slit of bruised orange and septic pink, and standing on the ghats one realizes that the river has been flowing through Calcutta for centuries without once filing a petition, without once demanding representation, without once organizing a protest against the effluent that pours into it from the tanneries and the hospitals and the unlicensed distilleries, and this, I think, this is the model of citizenship they prefer: a flowing, receiving, unresisting medium, carrying the waste of others toward the Bay of Bengal and the greater oblivion beyond, and I have tried to be that river, I have tried to be that accepting, that fluid, that capable of carrying the excremental byproducts of legislative digestion without once complaining about the temperature or the taste, but I cannot, I cannot, I am too solid, too mineral, too full of the calcium deposits of grievance and the arterial plaque of memory.

They want us holy. They want us drunk. They want us drugged. They want us dead, if necessary, and if not dead then sufficiently cataleptic to mistake the filing of our own obituaries for a massage.

And I am here, oscillating, oscillating like a fan with a loose wire, between the manic clarity of seeing it all—the villas, the banks, the woodlice, the DNA chips writing obedience in orbital laboratories, the superconductors conducting our wealth with zero resistance—and the depressive certainty that seeing is not touching, that understanding is not altering, that my rage is as useful as a third nostril, as decorative as an appendix, as permanent as the temporary.

The addicts are rising. The villas are rising. The data centers are ascending to the stars.

I am sitting in a room where the plaster is performing a slow, geological peel, and I am trying to remember whether I took my medication this morning or whether I took the government’s medication, whether the pill that stabilizes my serotonin is not, in fact, another excise product, another item in the great inventory of managed consciousness, and I cannot remember, I cannot remember, I cannot remember, and the fan turns, and the heat accumulates, and outside the window a streetlight flickers on prematurely, drawing its first circle of woodlice for the evening.

I am not one of the woodlice.

I am the shadow the lamp casts to explain the woodlice to themselves.

And the shadow, as any physicist will confirm, possesses no momentum, no mass, no Swiss account, and no particular reason to keep circling.