This is a collection of alternative facts. The words it contains are symbols for things and ideas you already know. They cannot convey the true essence of even everyday objects. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is purely a fuck-up.

The ignorant get stuck in words like these, like elephants in the mud. The enlightened keep their feet dry.

To learn this in this life — not the next — put something in my alms-bowl. Now.

You will be rewarded elevenfold.

“It’s not about the past, it is about now.” — Shetland, Season 5, Episode 6

ON THE EVE of their tenth undocumented year in France, on their way home from the hospital with their first newborn, their taxi rear-ends a car on Boul Mich. The baby is fine, his wife and mother-in-law are fine, but he rehurts his neck, and this makes him instantly return to the night when he and his then-girlfriend were sitting in the front seat of her mother’s Buick, parked at the curb on Beatty Street, both on the verge of tears, trying to describe to each other what they were feeling. It’s over, he was thinking, and it felt astonishing to think this, the finality of this realisation, and, even more surprising, how real everything suddenly felt, how present, how absolutely present, and how impossible it is to say this, any of this, in a meaningful way. I will be annihilated, he thinks, I will be destroyed, I will be no more. Then something catches their eyes and the tense shifts, and they both looked up at precisely the same moment — Beatty was a one-way street back then, and it was raining hard — and saw the speeding car fishtailing the wrong way down the middle of the road towards them.

His girlfriend got a lawyer. When she finally settled — more than a year after the accident — she received enough money to live on for two years. He, on the other hand, represented himself and took the insurance company’s first offer. It wasn’t much, a few thousand dollars.

He thought, though never said, that his injuries were worse than hers. He had whiplash. Seventy stitches cobwebbed in several directions across the top of his skull. His right shoulder ached. He got headaches, especially after drinking.

He gave up his apartment. He crashed on friends’ couches. He barely slept. He hadn’t changed his clothes in days. He went late to the bars downtown and took as many day shifts as he could get. He needed money. He sold a few boxes of his books; what he got for them would have been laughable if it hadn’t ground at his soul. He gave the rest away, along with his albums, forgetting that many of them weren’t his to give; they belonged to a friend who had moved to Germany. The same friend who, three decades later, would wheatpaste the image above onto a boarded-up storefront window on Hastings Street. A few years later, when the friend confronted him, he felt terrible. How could he have been so thoughtless about another person’s possessions? It was fine not to care about one’s own stuff. Laudable even. But other people felt differently about things. Especially their own. This made him think of a Buddhist text he had once read, about imagining seeing a corpse thrown over a wall into a charnel ground. One, two, then three days dead, bloated, ashen, oozing matter. His body, too, was of the same nature. It would be like that. It couldn’t escape this fate. During these three weeks, he thought about this often, kept it in his mind, observed it internally. He strove to be attached to nothing.

Although everything was a jumble, he had never felt so organised. Or so energised. There were many people he needed to see before he left. The word closure irked, but fit. He kept a list of things he had to do in his pocket. Every time he completed a task, he crossed it off. Decades later, he recognised this as a form of mania. After those three weeks, however, clear-headed, never so sure of anything — his love, his newfound seriousness, his commitment to this new life — he boarded the plane, took his seat one row up from the smoking section, put on the seatbelt, and slept for almost the entire 11-hour flight. He didn’t remember his dreams or what was served at mealtimes. His only memories were two glasses of tomato juice and the smoke, how it made his temples sweat, and his skin prickle — all through the flight, passengers in the non-smoking section walked back to the row behind him and lit up — and then the ambivalent look on his girlfriend’s face at the airport. Their embrace and kiss, awkward, almost shy, though they had lived together for two years by this time and had been seeing each for two years before that. Seeing each other. Other irksome words. Was it a kiss or a peck? Did their teeth touch, did he somehow miss her mouth? He felt closer to her than he had to any other person, living or dead. What did she feel? Did she want him there? He didn’t cling to anything in the world except her. This made him think again of the cemetery contemplations, the corpse devoured by birds, dogs, jackals, and worms. Reduced to scattered bones, bleached like shells, heaped in a pile, crumbled to dust.

He had a Toshiba laptop that weighed a ton, probably a book — something pretentious—and some clothes and toiletries in an old suitcase of his sister’s that didn’t have wheels. He had one pair of shoes.

They took the bus into the city. When they reached the city gates, two controllers boarded and asked to see tickets. These were only good for one zone, they said — or, at least, that was what he guessed they said. They had travelled through three zones. They would need to pay a fine. He gave them a traveller’s cheque. He carried the cheques and his passport in a nylon money belt. This is not enough, they say. He gives them a second traveller’s cheque. They do not give him any change.

Again, there is a change, a fragmentation. That night, they share two mediocre dishes in a Chinese restaurant near Les Halles that, after repeated efforts, he will never be able to find again, despite walking up and down the street and all the streets around. It’s as if the Chinese restaurant, with its red lanterns and black lacquer furniture, was part of a movie set, shuttered right after they left, replaced by a boutique or a bistro.

There are scroll portraits of the Taoist Eight Immortals on the walls. The only female among them holds a lotus flower and a flyswatter. Her name, his girlfriend tells him, is He Xiangu. She is from Guangdong. She was born with six long hairs on top of her head. When she was a teenager, an enlightened spiritual being appeared in her dream and told her to eat ground-up crystals to make her body immortal and celestial. She followed the instructions, vowed to stay a virgin, and stopped eating.

Everyone in the Chinese restaurant smokes; almost everyone is playing Go. This is not what he expected. The dishes come basted in cornstarch slurry, the rice is mushy, and the Tsingtao is overpriced. He thought his first glass in France would be French wine.

He gets his girlfriend to bum a cigarette from the young man at the next table. The young man stares at his girlfriend for the rest of the night. He says something that neither of them understands. Va te faire foutre, his girlfriend says, aggressively, unaware how powerful and disproportionate to the occasion these words are, which incense the man; he stands up and moves toward their table, shouting insults that neither of them understands. He stands up, gets between his girlfriend and the young man, who is smaller than him. The man backs down. They sit.

He is surprised by her fury. He lights the cigarette, pulls the smoke into his lungs. He has forgotten how much he likes the smell of French tobacco. Not the taste or the effect, the smoke makes his head spin; and, likewise, too, earlier, during their walk to the restaurant from the RER, carrying the suitcase on his injured shoulder, he rediscovers the other characteristic odour of Paris — diesel. He has also forgotten how the city’s congested air lines one’s shirt collar with black grime. He doesn’t wear t-shirts. Or sneakers. He wears button shirts, blazers, tweed sports coats, suit jackets, and long wool overcoats. He smokes, but only when he drinks. He has no grey hairs.

He has a third beer and challenges a man to a game of Go. He played obsessively at university, long into each night, to the point of migraines. He loses. They leave. He has already spent too much money. He’ll have to cash more cheques at the Thomas Cook office. He wonders if there will be a letter for him there. Probably not. He just arrived. This was thirty-three years ago. He has difficulty discerning temporal differences. He is chronically on time, always too early for trains and planes, never late for appointments, but five or six weeks can feel like three, and three like a decade, and minutes if watched on a clock take hours. Time for him is a series of instantaneous moments rather than a continuous flow. Or maybe an illusion or mental construct, dissolving in states of deep concentration. He keeps a notebook in which he jots down ideas. Not journal entries; he’s too self-conscious to record his meaningless comings and goings. Sometimes he writes poetry. None of it is worth remembering. In the back of his mind, he thinks he is destined to be a writer. The rest of his mind laughs at this presumptuousness.

The next day, or the day after, he reads in the Thursday book section of Libé about Catholic “incorruptibles”, saints that do not decompose naturally, not by means of deliberate preservation, but spontaneously, because of their inner goodness.​ He is not sure he understands the article; he reads it with the help of a Collins French Pocket Dictionary. Many of the words are not in it.​

They stay in a hotel in the fourteenth for two weeks, then move into a friend’s one-room apartment in the ninth, above a sweatshop that somehow stamps buttons onto shirts and coats, sometimes all night, a wheezing sound like a clown’s last breath, then a loud thump that shakes the floor beneath their bed.

It is now late April. His girlfriend had been accepted to a Master’s programme in International Relations at the University of Warwick. She is to start in September. She has rented a house near Coventry. He is hazy about what he will do, maybe get a job in London in publishing, or in a bookstore, or audit classes, hang out with Nick Land’s Warwick crowd in Coventry pubs or in the Philosophy Building writing nonsense about Deleuze, acceleration and hip-hop.

On their first date, all those years ago, in a tasca on Commercial Drive, they talked about Paris, and while they were living together in Madrid, she went to Paris without him, to see some friends she’d met there two years before, unaware that the weekend she had chosen for that first visit was the bicentennial of the French Revolution. The streets were crowded with revellers. It is one of the most memorable experiences of her life.

One of those friends is now their roommate. This was who she was going to visit. He had met him once, when he came to Madrid for a weekend. They went to a half dozen tapas bars and the German cervecería, and the fino bar on Echegaray. He thinks they ended the night at a club, and that the sun was up when they left. His memory of this is fragmented. They ended many nights like this. That morning, however, was different, because when they got back to their tiny piso, the French friend, who would later become their roommate on rue Eugène-Sue, vomited in the bathtub and the bathroom sink. Why not the toilet, he asked him, isn’t that a more sensible place to throw up? The friend looked at him as if to say, No, French people don’t throw up in the toilet. French people throw up in the bathroom sink and the bathtub.

While she was in Paris, he went to a wedding in a small coastal town near Aberdeen. The idea of being in an English-speaking world again had excited him; during their year in Spain, almost all their friends were Madrileńos, and socialising in Spanish was exhausting. His jaw hurt at the end of each night, and while by the end of their year there he could mostly follow a chiste, he never understood the punchlines, which made everyone laugh even harder.

¿Que? ¿Que dice?

In Aberdeen, however, the Scottish accent was worse than Spanish, so thick he couldn’t understand a word.

An old girlfriend, one of the bridesmaids in the wedding party, told him she had just visited the Outer Hebrides, where she saw Frankenstein mummies, composite skeletons from several corpses preserved in peat bogs then exhumed, kept above ground for centuries, reburied under houses as ancestor figures, and, more recently, transferred to plexiglass display cases in a museum in Lochboisdale on South Uist.

The Nazis flattened Coventry. Paris is unscathed, never changing, an eternal constant. They grow irrationally attached to it. They decide to stay. His girlfriend (now his wife, they married a few years later) turns down Warwick and enrols in a Master’s programme in diplomatic and strategic studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Internationales. This is the year the Soviet Union implodes, which makes international diplomacy and strategy comically difficult to teach. No one on the faculty, which includes retired generals, politicians and haut-fonctionnaires, has any idea what is going on geopolitically or what will follow. She spends the year learning about Roman warfare, ICBMs and portes-avions. She cobbles together essays in French with the roommate's help. She keeps a notebook of words and phrases she likes, most of them from Libé or the books she is assigned, or from a copy of Proust that she signs out of the library and fills with yellow post-its. Her library card, after her student card, is her second official French document. Since his name isn't on the lease or the utility bills, he can’t get one. He can’t get a bank account, either. He does, however, get a job at a bookstore, where the owner insists that male employees wear shirts and ties. He’s not sure what the dress code is for the female employees. Skirts, dresses? Are trousers allowed? Securing the position required passing a ten-page entrance exam with dense sections on general knowledge, philosophy, world history and literature. Multiple choice, short sentence answers, four short essays. It is the most difficult exam he has ever taken. Fortunately, his girlfriend took it before him. He arrived, prepared.

They move into their own apartment. He gets a bank account. He gets a library card. He takes out Tintin books, which he read in English as a kid. He reads Asterix and Obelix and discovers George Simenon.

He attends a Jean-François Lyotard lecture at the Sorbonne. There are hundreds of students in attendance. Few of them seem to be listening. He has no idea what the philosopher is saying. He does remember reading Lyotard years before. The words jostle in his head. Sublime time. Pure event.

Why do you have to share everything? This is a question his girlfriend asks. Why are we always the last people to leave a party? He is drunk when she brings this up. No patterns repeat, he says. She looks at him oddly. He is not sure what it means. He won’t remember saying it, but when she repeats it to him the next day, he thinks it has messianic power.

The following weekend, they go with friends to a country house in Normandy. It rains most of the time. They visit the village cemetery on the Sunday. It is empty and derelict, not a single tombstone stands straight, and most have been knocked over and buried in overgrowth. His girlfriend finds a small ceramic Christ on the cross. She picks it up, puts it in her coat pocket. When they try to exit the graveyard, she can’t pass through the gate until she puts the crucifix back where she found it.

He gives English classes to a computer scientist from Damascus and a philosopher from Beirut in an AI lab near the Parc de la Villette. The lab contains a bank of Sun workstations; they’re the biggest computers he’s ever seen, but his students don’t seem to use them; instead, they fill notebooks with harebrained ideas about technologies that allow users to modify or “fashion” themselves and medical diagnostic tools that can be worn or carried. He writes texts for them, translations first, then his own based on their notes. Computers, the philosopher tells him, quoting somebody, keep finding easier ways to use people. Computers will soon begin to think like humans, the philosopher says, and humans will start to think like computers. This, too, is from someone else. Everything is from someone else.

A musician friend, married to a neuroscientist, tells him at a party that what science shows us doesn’t exist doesn’t exist. We should accept this. But just because science hasn’t found something doesn’t mean it’s not real. Take consciousness: humans have felt it for centuries, but we don’t know what it is or how it works. It exists on the quantum level. It is everywhere. He doesn’t know what they mean. He’s had too much to drink. Then they tell him about enlightened beings who, after their death, are often compared to a fire gone out when the supply of wood is over, or to the flame of a lamp gone out when the wick and oil are finished, while some monks, when they die, their bodies remain in a meditating position without decaying for weeks. Buddhists, they tell him, see death as a process, not an event. They believe the spirit lingers after physical death in a clear light of focused energy — meditative energy — where the mind slowly unravels from the body, dissolving into universal consciousness. Only then does the body truly die. He can barely listen to this. His mind races, he sees the skulls under his friends’ faces. He leaves the party and walks home.

Where the hell did you go, his girlfriend asks when, an hour later, she finds him sitting in their darkened living room. He tries to explain.

The Syrian asks him to represent his research company, an academic organisation that holds international conferences on design sciences, architecture, urban studies, and information technology. The internet barely exists. He enlists a friend, and together they contact embassies to pitch a service: matching academic experts with businesses for consultancy contracts. He is hazy about what any of it means, but his friend is knowledgeable, or at least sounds knowledgeable. They print up brochures and business cards on his friend’s inkjet printer. The business cards have two layers, the bottom in card, the top in translucent paper. They only make six.

He wears a sports jacket to the meetings. His friend has a snazzy Prada suit, but there are two large moth holes near the right knee, which he hides behind a briefcase or, when sitting, a brochure. They meet one-on-one with a friendly CIA agent at the US embassy and with science officers at the Japanese and Dutch embassies. He is called upon to make presentations. He has no idea what he is talking about. All questions are fielded by his friend. No follow-up appointments are made.

The contact at the Canadian embassy is almost as bewildered by their meeting as he is. They talk about the Blackberry smartphone. A second appointment is made. It leads nowhere.

The men and women at the Israeli embassy are young, beautiful and friendly; they politely grill them for a full hour before allowing them past security. Nothing comes of this meeting. At the Russian embassy, they sit with a dozen grey-faced men, most of them ex-KGB. Vladimir Putin is among them. Again, thankfully, nothing comes of it.

The Dutch set them up with a Unilever meeting at their headquarters in Rotterdam to discuss fuzzy logic and just-in-time manufacturing. Again, he is called upon to make the initial presentation. Again, nothing comes of this.

Before boarding the train from Amsterdam back to Paris, he ingests a sizeable amount of skunk weed purchased at a coffeeshop. He sits in the dining car and orders a full lunch, which is served on proper plates. The wine comes in a wine glass. There are only two other people in the car, a white woman and an Asian man. As he eats, the weed begins to take effect. When he goes to pay, he realises he does not have his credit card or any cash. He begins to get nervous. He looks from the man to the woman and chooses the man because he is in a closer booth. He explains his predicament. The man has no idea what he is saying. I’ll cover you, says the woman. The man now understands and insists on paying for everyone’s lunch.

The three of them start chatting. The man and woman join him at his table for coffee. The man is from Jakarta and is part of an official Indonesian envoy visiting architects and real estate developers across Europe. The woman is from Haiti. She is reading the Celestine Prophecy, a novel published that year. Except for her, like this, it is not fiction, but a journey of discovery about nine insights found in an ancient Peruvian manuscript. The ninth insight, she tells him — this is where she is in the book — envisions a future where spiritual growth accelerates, freeing time from mundane labour through technology. This makes him think again of the Coventry nonsense. We must pursue our intuitions, she says, and our missions, and this will lead to a general rapture in which those of us truly enlightened will vibrate at higher energy levels and become invisible. Immaterial is the word she uses, which is the same word that Lyotard used during the packed lecture at the Sorbonne.

He thinks the Haitian woman is crazy. But he is high. The man from Jakarta is nodding his head vigorously in agreement with every word she utters. He is a healer, he tells them, a bridge between the human and spirit worlds. I reach into people, he says, flashing out his hand towards her like a serpent’s head, and pull their cancer out of their bellies, and if I snap my fingers like this — snap! — hundred-dollar bills will appear in the air like this — snap!

No hundred-dollar bills appear.

Just before the train reaches Paris, the man whispers to him: Can you tell my group that you are with Interpol and that the two of us have a meeting at the Interpol office to discuss the counterfeit Yassar Arafat commemorative coins that are being circulated in Europe? He does not know what to say. He has never been so high in his life.

When they get off the train, he follows the man over to a group of Indonesian men. Words are exchanged. The men look at him with suspicion. Then they leave. They walk back to his apartment, where the man gives him the business card of someone from Interpol — he forgets the name on the card — and asks him to call and make an appointment. The man on the other end of the line seems to have been expecting his call. They talk about the counterfeit Yassar Arafat coins and make an appointment for the following day. The Jakarta man seems satisfied by this. He asks for a bed and sleeps for four hours. Then they go sightseeing.

The next day, he cannot take the Jakarta man to the Interpol offices because he has to take a train to Veneray-Les-Laumes in the Côte-d’Or, where he meets 17 recent graduates of Ivy League MBA and investment banking programmes. He has a summer job as a bike guide, herding men and women who will soon be working as Frito-Lay account managers and junior analysts at Citycorp through vineyards in Burgundy and the Loire, up and down the Pyrenees, and along the northern coastline of Spain. Though it pays a pittance, all his expenses are covered, and he has carte blanche to take his clients to any restaurant of his choice and order the most expensive bottle from the wine list. After each trip, he submits his receipts to the accountant, who sits him down in her office and goes through each one, clicking her teeth, sighing, shaking her head with incredulity. She tells him he spends twice as much as any other guide in the company's history.

Years later, the tour company’s founder suddenly dies of a heart attack. At the funeral, in the central chapel of the Pere Lachaise crematorium, people have nothing but kind words for the deceased. A slideshow runs in a loop on a screen, accompanied by rock-and-roll songs; he is not surprised that there are no photos of him. When the main speakers have finished, the assembly is invited to come forward and tell their own stories about the dead man. He can think of a few, but he doesn’t have the courage to speak. Months later, it is discovered that the dead man had two mistresses, possibly a second family, and large debts. The company goes bankrupt.

He surprises his girlfriend with a Christmas Eve dinner served in their bedroom on a round table that their roommate nicked from a café down the street. The first course is oysters, three each, then little ovals of salmon and hard-boiled egg in aspic that he buys from a posh traiteur on the Rue des Martyrs. Instead of turkey, they have roasted quails, one on each plate, with mashed potatoes, carrots and turnips, brussels sprouts, cranberry sauce, stuffing and gravy. He forgets what gifts they exchange.

Near winter’s end, the roommate burns a hole, using his grandfather’s eau-de-vie, through the bakelite box of their electricity meter. He then slides a bent paper clip through the hole to snag and stop the disc that measures their power usage from spinning. An EDF man comes, sees the paper clip, and fines them.

His girlfriend finishes school. Through an American couple, they get jobs teaching English to insurance companies. In the couple’s office, on the wall behind the man’s desk, is a framed photo of the man with Ronald Reagan. A second photo, very large, is of Buzz Aldrin in his spacesuit. Both are signed. He forgets what the dedications say. There are other photos of statesmen and celebrities, most of whom are dead.

The couple, high-ranking members of Republican Overseas France, invite them to an election-night party in the Lionel Hampton Room at the Méridien hotel in the 17th. The man peels off several yards of drink tickets from a roll and gives it to his girlfriend. They amuse themselves by joining conversations among the disappointed, pretending to commiserate, and booing loudly every time Bill Clinton’s smiling face appears on the giant screen.

The couple retire and gives them all their insurance company contracts. He hires a lawyer, who, for a sizeable fee, gets him a Social Security number. He joins and pays into all the required caisses, gets medical coverage, but doesn’t apply for residency status. You don’t need to, another lawyer tells him. You’re a white Canadian. The lawyer doesn’t actually say this, but it’s clear that’s what he means. His girlfriend, meanwhile, begins working for La Cimade, helping migrants apply for residency rights and refugees make asylum claims. Ironically, she herself is now an illegal alien — her student visa expired, and her request for a new one has been denied. She is paid under the table.

They are clandestine for the next eight years. At first, he is careful, especially around police. He never goes to street protests. After a few years, he relaxes a bit. He starts jaywalking. If there is no traffic, he runs red lights on his bike. But if he sees an altercation on the street, a fight, where one party is smaller and weaker than the other, he won’t intervene.

He is afraid of asserting himself in public. Or expressing opinions. When he crosses borders, he prepares for the worst. A few times, when travelling to the United Kingdom or the United States, he is delayed by border officers. What is the nature of your visit? Where do you live? But he is never stopped from leaving. On his returns, no one looks at him. He is waved through passport control. He begins to think he has a special type of power. He meets people; then, when he meets them again, they act as if they have never met him before. This happens over and over. No one sees him. You’re Mr Invisible, says his girlfriend. He thinks this is true.