£380

Looking at the gift makes me want to kill myself—truly unique, truly exquisite. So this is how I obediently walked into the trap. It turns out that just a few moves on the board were enough to turn me into the very kind of person I once despised most. Choosing isn’t the hardest part; the hardest part is convincing yourself. This is a tax, this is your retribution, this is payment for sex, this is the amount defrauded, this is rent, this is the weight of existence, this is the obligation of consumerism, this is the new era, this is the new world, this is your new shackles and your new hamster wheel. Go ahead and hide, you anarchist—anarchists are all doomed to die without descendants, because they refuse to buy gifts when they’re in love. How could they bring themselves to buy one? What kind of derangement, what kind of vanity, what kind of blissful intoxication could possibly make a person feel at peace with themselves, could make the price tag match the object in good conscience? I’m terrified—not because I’ve never placed an order for something in this price range, but because I’m about to, in the name of love, push myself into the abyss. Haha, I said long ago that I’m vermin, I said long ago that I have no right to refuse, I said long ago that I’m already caught in the vortex. Spin, spin, endlessly—I too will become the demonic figure in nightmares, I too will become a pile of corpse chunks, happily married. I feel so disgusted; let’s break up, I really want to break up—if not, then I should commit suicide. Get out immediately, immediately exit the commodity fetishism. But I can’t, and my very existence says no. And if I just surrender like this, doesn’t that mean I’ve been defeated? Oh! Pitiful, laughable, contemptible desire to win. I knew it all along—what I fear is her comparing me to her ex, that goddamn, heaven-damned thing. What a terrifying gaze this is, what level of hell—being oppressed, being compared, being judged… “Really willing to spend money on women,” oh, that was her verdict on him, pronounced so casually, yet it landed heavily on my heart. There’s no escape now. Even if I say no right this second, it’s already too late. The two strands of hemp rope are already entwined; your body is a piece of disobedient magnet, already firmly attached—breaking free now would be difficult! I walked into this net of heaven and earth myself, I must bear this tax myself, along with this endless self-contempt toward myself, of course. Muslims can refuse pork because their faith demands it; but a basement man like me, with only a feeling that deserves to be called “nauseating,” with no religion to convert to, no doctrine to claim, cannot even utter a refusal, and thus can only let the evil spirits bully me. This is what I am. I know that once I place this £380 order, I will irrevocably set off down the road to ruin; I know I will turn into a machine—a machine diligent in sex and industrious in money. This is fate, I suppose! This is the full course I must close my eyes and walk to the end…

Talk? There’s nothing to talk about. Of course I’ll receive gifts too, so in exchange I’m forced to buy my own gift, right? Isn’t that correct? Can I choose my own gift? Can you give me a set of Dostoevsky’s hardcover collected works? Sign me up for some language classes… Alas, forget it. So I too am just a leek to be harvested; I merely squander my money in other places—there’s no hierarchy, a necktie would be no worse… Yet I care about nothing less than a necktie, and I still have to pretend to smile, don’t I? I still have to feel satisfied, don’t I? Oh, you hate my acting the most, but if I act like I enjoy this whole commodity-worship ritual, you probably wouldn’t mind—how could you mind…

So this is the kind of person I am—one mask removed only to put on another. Even writing this piece requires wearing some kind of mask, because loving her is a mask, hating her must also be a mask; because to make the text coherent, logical, at least readable, I have to imagine a target in my mind—the words are merely the arrowheads shot toward it. But that target is not the same as my heart; once the target is set up, it is no longer my heart! In order to create text, to conform to grammar, or for some literary or dramatic effect, I have to phrase it this way—but this too is a mask, and it’s not what I originally thought…

After the words flow through my fingertips, both love and hate come to a stop. There’s nothing worth hating; it’s all just an act in the play. A hundred years from now we’ll all be dried corpses; looking back from paradise at the human world, at this tragicomedy we performed together, it will be like pulling out a yellowed, dusty Andersen fairy tale from childhood. Are we still moved? We can be moved, but the emphasis is on “can”—because we are already outside the story; being moved is merely a choice, a pity and charity bestowed upon those tragicomic farces, like saying to a beggar on the roadside, “poor thing.” Oh, this is probably the true essence: it’s all charity! Love too is nothing but charity—two beggars saying to each other, “poor thing, poor thing…”

Of course, there may be something great in all this… I cannot rashly claim to have seen through everything; I haven’t. I want to understand, I want to learn, I want to know whether there truly is something here that I have not yet grasped. Perhaps in this pile of rotten mud there is, after all, a single grain of gold? Perhaps? But that gold is not the gold bought with £380—that kind of gold cannot be bought. What £380 buys today is only a lump of rotten mud—or rather, perhaps a ticket that allows me to refine gold from the mud. But who cares? Yet to cover oneself in mud from head to toe, to roll around excitedly, to howl and wail and give thanks to heaven—this isn’t the happiest thing under heaven, the “highest good” that pigs and swine of all ages and all lands have rushed toward one after another? Who cares? Yet £380 is nothing more than a small indulgence… a small indulgence that reminds one that one is, after all, one of the swine.

(Translated by Grok.)