Reward System (eBook)

Jem Calder (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2022 | 1. Auflage
120 Seiten
Faber & Faber (Verlag)
978-0-571-36380-3 (ISBN)

Infos

For fans of Patricia Lockwood and Ben Lerner, audacious fictions of a generation wondering: what now? 'Reward System is an exhilarating and beautiful book by an extraordinarily gifted writer. Reading these stories, I found myself thinking newly and differently about contemporary life.' SALLY ROONEY Julia has landed a fresh start - at a 'pan-European' restaurant. 'Imagine that,' says her mother. 'I'm imagining.' Nick is flirting with sobriety and nobody else. Did you know: adults his age are now more likely to live with their parents than a romantic partner? Life should have started to take shape by now - but instead we're trying on new versions of ourselves, swiping left and right, searching for a convincing answer to that question: 'What do you do?' Reward System is a set of ultra-contemporary and electrifyingly fresh fictions about a generation of the cusp; the story of two people enmeshed in Zooms and lockdowns, loneliness and love.

Jem Calder was born in Cambridge, and lives and works in London. His fiction has been published in The Stinging Fly and Granta. Reward System is his first book.

Rezensionen

The stories in Reward System are intelligent, cool and sharp. Jem Calder is a real find.

'A crushing and clear-sighted portrayal of people dodging the alienation of work, money and life's digital shorelines, told through short scenes so brilliantly observed I felt the reality of a generation in every detail.'

Textauszug

 

 

I watched as the city glided by, its high-rises diffusing vague blushes of aircraft-warning light into a translucent evening fog. Certain skyscrapers I considered active personal nemeses; had been watching them closely as my carriage entered a tunnel in whose dark I saw my face and the scowl it contained superimposed over the newly blank window opposing me, my reflection elongated a metre wide by its slightly convex glass.

The carriage carrying me quaked; I felt trainsick from the turbulence. I clamped a shoplifted bottle of supermarket-brand rosé tighter between my thighs, and, remembering that I possessed the ability to do so, exercised my pelvic floor.

Only now that I was already most of the way there did I realise I ought to text Teddy and let him know I was coming, having failed to RSVP at any point over the last few weeks.

‘HBD ted! think I will come if cool? are julia or roos there?’ The message delivered as I emerged from the tunnel.

A pulsing grey ellipsis, signifying messagecraft on Teddy’s end, appeared immediately in the bottom left of my smartphone’s screen. I wondered if that meant nobody had shown up yet. ‘Thanks!’ he texted. Then: ‘Tonight?’

I hesitated, and replied: ‘yep to your party. think I can come if still ok?’

He replied: ‘Thought you werent coming!’ Then: ‘Yes R is here, Julia working early tomo so cant make.’ Then: ‘*It! Excited to all hang out!!’ Then: ‘I just thought you werent coming!’ Then: ‘Cant wait’, followed by an indecipherable rebus of emoji.

‘great,’ I replied, ‘if youre sure its alright.’

‘Of course ofc cant wait, I just thought you werent coming!!! Glad decision was reversed.’

‘a perfect 360. see you soon’, I composed, reread, replaced ‘360’ with ‘180’, and sent.

*

Teddy’s parents lived in a high-net-worth, citadel-like exurb of the city whose leafy, evenly paved streets were further enriched by electric-car charging ports and anti-homeless architecture. I alighted the train there, tailgating a senior citizen through a ticket barrier to be received by the neighbourhood’s premium-quality silence and private views of un-light-polluted nocturnal sky.

On my maps app, an algorithm calculated a fifteen-minute pedestrian route to the party that I was certain I could outpace. I tracked the blue dot representing my virtual, trilaterated self as it slid across an aerial-perspective scale rendering of my surroundings. When I zoomed out slightly to contextualise my position, the unbuffered space beyond the loaded catchment area of my immediate environment appeared as an uncharted beige grid netted with darker beige lines. I pocketed my smartphone to walk unguided.

I had been to Teddy’s parents’ house three or four times before, but struggled now to recall its exact whereabouts. Facially, the neighbourhood’s new-builds all bore the same prominent, hereditary features: cedar cladding; aluminium bay windows; front doors featuring long, vertical bar handles.

After an hour of drinking lukewarm rosé and circling around indistinguishable culs-de-sac, I reached the driveway to what I was mostly pretty sure was Teddy’s parents’ house.

I recalled that, when I’d last trodden upon this same gravel, two Teddy’s-birthdays ago, I’d done so smilingly, holding hands with Julia – I went on a long thought-tangent remembering all the nice things I missed about her, then collected myself; processing the memory.

Realising that I’d stopped walking, I carried on walking. When I arrived at the front door, I paused for a moment before knocking. I reminded myself of advice I’d read online about how to maximise my likeability – that studies had shown authentic confidence could be reverse-engineered via its practised imitation. I exhaled on my hand and smelled the hand.

*

Nobody answered the door, which, after a second round of knocks, edged ajar.

In the house’s vast concourse of a hallway, maybe twenty people, assembled into fours and fives, drank, talked, semi-danced and laughed – about as many golden stelliform balloons bobbed beneath the ceiling’s distant skylight. Unnoticed, I stepped into the party.

I was surrounded by people I didn’t recognise, who, I guessed from their accents and clothes, were Teddy’s dynastically wealthy private-school friends. Most of them were good-looking, I noticed, or otherwise well dressed enough to compensate for their looks.

A four-to-the-floor rhythm from the living room reverberated against the sound-reflecting surfaces of the hallway, between which and the kitchen I estimated – having scoped out both rooms from their doorsills – a further twenty guests were divided. I swept back through the hallway as discreetly as I could, still recognising no one, and produced my smartphone.

I texted Teddy, texted Roos, wrung tighter the slender neck of the rosé bottle with my non-smartphone-wielding hand. After sending the texts, I kept the device aloft in front of me as a prop to support the illusion of my rich interior life; indication that I, too, had circa forty friends, although none of them were here right now.

Eventually, I pocketed my smartphone, circled the hallway once more, and – violating what could reasonably be said to constitute the boundary of a party guest’s welcome – headed upstairs.

*

Urinating into the sink – which maladaptive coping mechanism I had developed as a child from not wanting my parents to hear me using the toilet in the middle of the night, and out of which habit I was still yet to be shamed, having kept it so effectively concealed for over two decades – I stilled in resistance to the lure of my smartphone. Having caught myself midway through the unconscious hand-to-pocket gesture that cued into the device’s retrieval, I felt I had outsmarted every former version of myself who had failed to perceive and interrupt this behavioural loop.

As a reward for having achieved this accomplishment of the will, I equipped my smartphone again from my trouser pocket. I returned to the same few social media platforms I usually visited – every time I did so, it was at least partly to check if social media was as bad as I’d remembered it, which, unfailingly, it was.

Skipping through Teddy’s Instagram stories, I received a text from Roos: ‘Ur coming?? What time??’

I rested my smartphone on the sink’s sideboard while I washed and dried my hands with deluxe hand soap and a towel-rail-heated towel. I finished the last of the rosé; burped for a solid three seconds.

Beneath shrill bathroom lights I couldn’t remember having switched on, I glanced at myself in the mirror of Teddy’s parents’ en suite. By now, I was drunk enough for my vision to blur pleasantly at the sides. I dusted a light talc of dandruff from the collar and shoulder regions of my black sweatshirt.

The bathroom smelled of rosé and sandalwood diffuser, and for no reason that I could have explained if called upon to do so, I search-engined the words: sandalwood diffuser. ‘Wow,’ I said to myself out loud. They were less expensive than I had thought.

*

Downstairs, I resumed a solitary position, remained a foreign object to the tissue of selves constituting the party’s body of guests.

I was heading across the hallway for the kitchen, where the drinks presumably were, when I felt myself being embraced from behind. I turned around while being held and Teddy yelled my name directly into my ear. I hugged him back, and, at regular volume, he said how nice it was to see me.

I wished him a happy birthday, felt fleetingly self-conscious for not having bought him a gift, then lied: ‘You’re looking seriously great.’

In fact, Teddy was looking seriously worse than I’d ever seen him. Not just worse, but bigger – not just bigger, but iller. His cheekboneless, dairy-product-soft face seemed paler than it had before; the semi-solid of his midsection larger and more set.

A yo-yo dieter to and from whose fluctuating frame the same four stone had been added and subtracted for the duration of his adult life, Teddy had evidently spent the last few months in a sustained phase of bodily expansion. I recalled that, over the entire course of our friendship at and post-university, I had seen Teddy shirtless only the once, changing out of heavily rained-on clothes years ago – I pictured again the forlornly face-like configuration of his nipples and bellybutton as I had seen them on that day.

That mental image slowly disintegrated as we said more and more friendly things to each other; exchanged slaps on the back; made references to old times.

I felt the familiar lift of being in his company; I knew we loved each other a lot. Teddy asked if I’d had anything to drink yet and when...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 3.5.2022
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Schlagworte: Brandon Taylor • conversations with friends • exciting times • Fuccboi • Megan Nolan • Normal People • Open Water
• ISBN-10: 0-571-36380-6 / 0571363806
• ISBN-13: 978-0-571-36380-3 / 9780571363803