Idiopathy Read Online Free PDF Page A

beers – more and more, it seemed. Katherine had a theory for this trend, developed while watching Keith’s lizardly eyes dart from one bikini to the next. Keith’s libido, she decided, was based on strangeness. This was true of most men, of course, but for Keith it was particularly true. He had an in-built urge to fuck people he didn’t know – anonymous, foreign, mysterious people with whom he would need to exchange only a few ham-fisted pleasantries. In the beginning, he’d been rapacious to the point of aggression. Now he was cursory, distracted, frequently drunk and usually all-too-clearly thinking of someone else. At first, Katherine had been concerned that Keith was thinking of a specific someone else – that there might be one particular bronzed beauty by the pool who had caught his eye for longer than the others. After a while she realised he wasn’t thinking of anyone else at all, or specifically, he wasn’t imagining he was actually fucking someone who wasn’t Katherine, he was simply imagining that Katherine wasn’t Katherine. That’s what mattered, that’s what got his engine going. Keith’s withdrawal from anything that could have been termed a shared reality between them was precisely because that reality, or any reality for that matter, was profoundly un-erotic to him. He didn’t want to fuck Katherine, he wanted to fuck a stranger who looked like Katherine.

    U nder the pretence of checking her email, she used the hotel’s criminally expensive internet access to google Daniel – a habit she’d quickly fallen into after he’d unfriended her on Facebook and thus forced her to employ more creativity in her virtual stalking. A few well-practised clicks and there he was: smiling and well-groomed and just the right side of smug, beaming out at her from his staff picture on the website of a biological research facility somewhere in Norfolk, where, apparently, he was the public face of research his biography described as groundbreaking. There were even one or two YouTube clips of him at press conferences, talking about sustainable development and secure food sources. She had no idea how this had happened: he’d somehow edged out of the drabness of office life and into a position both admirable and faintly glamorous. It was predictable, really, and she could picture him being good at it, but it still gave her something of a jolt. She imagined him at work – Daniel and his Jesus complex – surrounded by chrome and glass and Petri dishes. It was his natural environment, she thought – icy and microscopic. Sometimes, when they were together, she’d called him the Vulcan. She’d meant it as a term of endearment but it had cut a little close to the bone. Now here he was: sartorially, facially and interpersonally sharpened; every inch the beatific boffin.
    She wondered if he thought about her and, if he did, what he thought. Perhaps she might even have passed him in the street and not realised. Perhaps he’d seen her and turned away. She wondered if he talked about her, if his new partner, whoever she might be, knew about her and had an opinion. Maybe they laughed about her, late at night after a glass of wine. Or maybe Daniel stayed quiet. Maybe he’d erased her completely. He was capable of it. Indeed, she’d seen him do it. Just a few short months after their friend Nathan had disappeared, Daniel had stopped talking about him almost entirely.
    Out of habit, she googled Nathan too. There was, as always, a long-cold trail in the chat rooms. Coded locations for parties. Discussions of the night before. Substance inventories. Casualty lists. Difficult, she thought, to reconcile all that with the Nathan she knew: the Nathan who sat up with her late into the night after Daniel had invariably exceeded his limits and blacked out in the bedroom.
    She trawled for anything with a recent date, but got nothing. Wherever he’d gone, she thought, he was doing a good job of not being found.

    U nable to bear