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  Praise for An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life

  ‘The precise and steely power of Paul Dalla Rosa’s writing is startling. He has the economic grace with words that reveals the talent of a born writer. The contemporary urgency of his stories is intoxicating. I was seized from the opening sentences, and when I turned the last page I felt grime and sweat and heat on my skin: I had travelled the world. This is such an exciting collection—writing this good is thrilling, exhilarating.’ Christos Tsiolkas, author of 7½

  ‘Paul Dalla Rosa’s writing is beautiful in its simplicity, awe-inspiring in its assessment of contemporary culture, and hilarious when you least expect it. Each story in An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life contains its own stunning world and its own cast of unforgettable characters playing out scenes that only Dalla Rosa could write. This book is a knockout.’ Chelsea Hodson, author of Tonight I’m Someone Else

  ‘I love these voyeuristically addictive, funny, and deceptively simple stories. Paul Dalla Rosa has perfectly articulated the bizarreness of human isolation and human behaviour.’ Halle Butler, author of Jillian and The New Me

  ‘Reading this collection is like smoking on the balcony at a party with your funniest, smartest, most depressed and self-aware friend, hoping no one interrupts before he gets to the end of the story he’s telling you. It’s a precise and perfect depiction of a particularly current brand of emptiness and aloneness, and the places people vaguely, lazily search for meaning and connection without really expecting to find any. These stories are hilarious, brutal, warm and tender, filled with characters who are equal parts entitled and self-hating, ambitious and stagnant, flawlessly dressed and totally broke.’ Abigail Ulman, author of Hot Little Hands

  ‘How can these stories be so funny, dazzling, deep and dark? This is a sharp collection that will grip you with strange force; the people here are desperate and what happens here is harsh, but it’s always laced with wit and insight and the things we don’t want to know about sex and work and love.’ Ronnie Scott, author of The Adversary

  ‘Paul Dalla Rosa’s An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life is an existential prayer of a book that attempts to find meaning in a rapidly changing and absurdly disconnected, occasionally nightmarish, modern world.’ Oliver Mol, author of Train Lord

  ‘These are bold, acerbic stories that draw out the surreality of our disconnected, often brutal world.’ Seán Hewitt, author of All Down Darkness Wide

  ‘Engrossing, gleefully unsettling, curious but mercifully never whimsical, this is an eminently readable collection.’ Lauren John Joseph, author of At Certain Points We Touch

  ‘Constantly teetering between hilarious and heartbreaking, An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life is a sharp-eyed keyhole portrait of our disconnected and disaffected modern times, breathing life into a diverse range of lost, limping characters and touching upon the humanity in each one. It’s deliciously deadpan, often absurd, and painfully alive.’ Alice Ash, author of Paradise Block

  Paul Dalla Rosa is a writer based in Melbourne, Australia. His stories have appeared in Granta, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Meanjin and New York Tyrant. In 2019, his story ‘Comme’ was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Award. He is currently undertaking his PhD at RMIT University, studying ‘the real’ within contemporary fiction. An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life is his debut collection.

  First published in 2022

  Copyright © Paul Dalla Rosa 2022

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  ‘The Hard Thing’ was originally published in New York Tyrant (2018); ‘The Fame’ was originally published in Meanjin Quarterly (Vol. 77, #1, 2018); ‘Comme’ was originally published in Granta (#144, 2018); ‘An MFA Story’ was originally published in Electric Literature (Recommended Reading #434, 2020); ‘Short Stack’ was originally published in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern (#62, 2020); ‘In Bright Light’ was originally published in Granta (#154, 2021); and ‘I Feel It’ was originally published in The Paris Review (#239, 2022).

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web:www.allenandunwin.com

  ISBN 978 1 76106 619 1

  eISBN 978 1 76106 442 5

  Internal design by Alissa Dinallo

  Set by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Cover design: Design by Committee

  Front cover image: United States Postal Service / 34¢ Venus Flytrap stamp, 2001

  For Stephen

  Contents

  The Hard Thing

  Comme

  Short Stack

  Charlie in High Definition

  The Fame

  Contact

  An MFA Story

  Life Coach

  I Feel It

  In Bright Light

  Acknowledgements

  The Hard Thing

  I was living in Dubai and I didn’t have a phone, a laptop either. I believed such things could betray me, or at least enable me to better betray myself. My father would call me on Skype but the calls would ring out. He sent emails I read later at work. They were generally the same. ‘Answer my calls,’ he’d write, and then he’d ask about my ex-boyfriend. He would list my ex’s good qualities: that he remembered people’s birthdays, that he was okay with my limited job prospects, that he routinely exercised. ‘Most men are not like this,’ he would say.

  My father would also tell me about my future. He texted my birthdate and his credit card details to a psychic hotline that did readings on late-night television.

  Today, my father wrote, ‘It isn’t great.’ The stars indicated I was under the influence of an inverted Mars, which meant I could act like a body possessed. Unless I reconciled with certain energies, I would only ever know too late when I was truly loved.

  ‘I think this is it,’ my father wrote. ‘I really do.’

  I didn’t find this as impressive as he did. To me, it read like an aphorism—it described most people.

  The city was not what I’d anticipated. The air was either thick with sand or heavy with smog. When I first arrived I’d stayed in a serviced apartment I had rented due to misleading photos online. There were two small rooms and no windows. I could never tell if the sun had set. This was during Ramadan, so no one could serve drinks until it had. Every night I’d call the front desk and ask them: is it time, is it time?

  I moved, but it didn’t do much good. My new apartment, on the thirtieth floor of a complex that was built next to a series of man-made lakes, crawled with cockroaches. It had a kitchen, a communal bathroom, and a shared balcony the size of a shower stall. My room fit a single-size mattress and little else. Six people lived in the apartment. It’s difficult to understand how.

  I had come to make money and become someone else. I did make money; I paid no income tax, but my rent was expensive, outrageous, so I had little after spending on essentials. The company I worked for dealt in mineral rights. I used the company Amex card to book foreign nationals hotel rooms and to stock office supplies. I sent out priority mail and poorly proofread correspondenc
e. Often all I would do for a day was stick little red stickers on contracts next to where clients had to sign. The documents were lengthy, in both Arabic and English, sometimes French, Mandarin. Like most things, I didn’t need to understand them—I just had to avoid asking questions, had to get into a rhythm. I’d sit there between glass partitions, drinking ice water, my eyes out of focus, my headache slowly dulling, and in this way feel at peace.

  I was purifying myself, I thought, and so I rarely ate. When I wasn’t working I went to the building’s exercise centre and ran on a treadmill that wobbled and shuddered. I did squats on my balcony, and smoked cigarettes, looking out over Sheikh Zayed Road. I felt the heat. Most nights I descended the thirty flights and crossed the road to drink vodka and fruit juice in a hotel bar. Sometimes I would do small inexplicable things like smash a glass on the floor or take a late bus out to the dunes and scream. But I remained celibate. I was living where laws were meant to be moral. Sodomy was illegal, and so I figured my relationships could only be platonic. That was my idea: to exist as an ideal.

  After seven months I met a friend for drinks. He was the only person I knew in the city from my life outside of it. He was the kind of friend you occasionally email but often lie to. I told him I had been here for less time than I had. Our drinks were arranged quickly. Maybe it was a date. I wanted to see if I could be a new person.

  My friend was tanned and wore white linen. He looked ridiculous. He taught schoolchildren at an international school where he said the kids all spoke like movie stars. He told me that his students’ parents often gave him gifts, either to influence grades or use local etiquette. He didn’t know what to do with them. He was concerned about the ethics of it all. That’s what he said: the ethics. He took a box out of his backpack and gave it to me.

  ‘Take it,’ he said. ‘I’ve already been given five.’

  It was a smartphone. I put it on the table. I stared at it while he continued talking. I didn’t want to take it, but I didn’t want to give it back either.

  He told me that a twelve-year-old had come to class that week missing three fingers. I gasped. I was already drunk.

  ‘Did he steal?’

  ‘No, it was his birthday party the weekend before. His parents gave him a quad bike.’

  My friend and I were different in many ways. He actually knew Arabs.

  I said, ‘That sucks.’

  ‘They were going to reattach his fingers,’ he said. ‘But they couldn’t because they were lost in the sand. The kids all thought it was kind of cool, though. But it’s awful. You don’t give a child something like that.’

  My friend kept speaking and I was glad. The last thing I wanted was to talk about myself. I placed one hand on the smartphone’s box, still on the table, then the other.

  As he spoke I felt further and further away. I was reminded of when I saw a therapist. I saw her for two sessions. She had me write my problems on cue cards. We were to start on something easy. For a week she had me think about why I found it difficult to maintain personal relationships. I arrived at the next session and told her that I’d had a breakthrough—I just didn’t want to have friends at all. The therapist pursed her lips and said, ‘You’re making this difficult.’

  I realised neither of us was talking. My friend looked at me expectantly. I wasn’t sure if he’d asked a question.

  ‘I’d better go soon,’ he said. ‘Stephen is cooking tacos. You can come if you want. Give your partner a call and have him come round too.’

  ‘Go,’ I said. ‘I’m going to head home. We have our own tacos. I’ll be out after I use the bathroom.’

  I didn’t go anywhere.

  Close to ten, I watched a group of Emiratis come in, wearing white robes and headscarves. The bartender looked at them and shook his head. They shuffled out and came back half an hour later in Levi’s. They drank martinis. I did too.

  At close, I stumbled to a taxi stand. When we pulled up at my apartment building I felt wretched and alone. I got out of the car and the driver called out to me, ‘Sir, please take your shoes.’ I picked them up off the back seat and nodded demurely.

  All in all, I thought the night went well.

  In my room I plugged the new smartphone in and watched a red bar silently blink across the screen.

  In the morning I crawled across my bedroom floor. I’d woken up there, tried to move towards my bed then let my head rest. I listened to hear if I could sense my flatmates. All was quiet. I stretched, then rolled over and saw a cockroach. We regarded each other for a moment, then it moved on.

  I got up and walked to the balcony. I did what most people do: I took a photo of what I saw and put it online.

  After our breakup, and sometimes before, using an app, I sent photos of my penis to men I hadn’t yet met. Times were arranged. My ex knew nothing.

  Naked with two other men, one of them said to me, ‘Doesn’t my boyfriend have a hot cock?’ and I said, ‘Yes,’ as it bobbed in front of me like a cartoon character, kind of nudging my face. The boyfriend, on his hands and knees, breathed into my neck and repeated, ‘Hot cock, hot cock, hot cock.’

  A petite Asian student asked me to pee on him. The windows of his studio apartment were lined with aluminium foil. I drank a large glass of water and he kneeled in the shower.

  I did other things, unsafe things, that didn’t make sense at the time and make even less now. I clicked ‘attending’ on an invite to a sauna party, then I went and walked around in a towel. The towel came off and I had sex with a man, then another, and another, all raw. The last slicked his fist with Crisco. He hesitated. I told him, ‘Put it in.’

  The next day I went to the hospital and recounted my sexual history. The nurse in triage ticked a box: ‘Exposure risk high.’

  My ex and I were still together in the morning, then we weren’t.

  Afterwards, for thirty days and nights I had to swallow two pills that made my stomach churn, until slowly I didn’t have to take them or worry about that one specific thing anymore, just everything else. I sent my ex messages telling him I loved him. I also sent him messages describing the men I had slept with, and photos of myself reflected in my bedroom mirror, naked, in the position of an animal, the position of a dog.

  _____

  At work there was talk of a sandstorm, and then there was a sandstorm. The outside turned dark, a great and empty haze. It was still hot. I couldn’t regulate my temperature. I shivered at my desk. I sweated. I looked at the papers in front of me and realised I didn’t know what I was doing. There were rules, but I couldn’t remember if I had them the right way round, whether a section had to be signed or if a signature there would make the contract invalid.

  The director, an Italian man with an almost impenetrable accent, stopped at my desk and spoke to me. I thought he was speaking to me in Italian, and I didn’t understand why he thought I could speak Italian. But he wasn’t. He was just asking if I felt okay. I said, ‘Si,’ and then excused myself.

  In the bathroom I sat on the toilet and set up my email account on my phone. There was an email from my father, the subject line, ‘Last Night’s Reading’. The body text just said, ‘Do the hard thing.’ I replied, ‘What’s the hard thing?’ Then I looked at my junk mail and scrolled through an Abercrombie & Fitch advert. I rolled my shirt up and sort of pawed at myself, looking at the models.

  That night I was in a hotel further down Sheikh Zayed Road. It was a kind of sky lounge, with neon lights and floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out onto the waters of the gulf, islands under their own construction, cranes in the sky. There were some businessmen in boat shoes. A woman in a floral dress read a travel guide.

  I tried to read but it was hard. I had to be calm, which meant I had to be drunk. I had only brought a few novels with me into the country and so I reread the same ones. Instead of reading a whole book, I would read from the parts when the protagonist was at their lowest and in the last thirty pages somehow steps out of the narrative reborn.

  I
looked at my phone. I looked back at the book I wasn’t quite reading then ordered another vodka soda. The woman sitting at the bar smiled at me.

  I reread a few pages. In the novel a character travels to Sri Lanka and meditates with Buddhist monks. At one stage she walks onto a rocky beach, kneels, picks up two rocks and gouges her chest with them, then her feet, then her arms. Bleeding, she goes back to the monastery where no one says a word, partly because they do not speak. Eventually, with a shaved head, she gets on a plane for home.

  I wondered if I had misjudged my plans, all of them, and then my phone vibrated on the table. It was an email. It was from my ex.

  ‘I saw you’re in Dubai. That’s cool. I’m going to Europe but have a layover for two nights. Tips?’

  I immediately replied.

  I sat in the bar, then sent another email telling him to disregard the first email in which I said we should see each other, and then a third to disregard the second. There was a fourth but that didn’t really say anything one way or the other. I put my phone down on the table, picked my book up, put my book down, picked my book up again and held it close to my face.

  Someone touched my arm. I recoiled. It was the woman in the flower dress. She said, ‘I love that book. There was a time when it was everything to me.’

  I shrugged her hand off and got up.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I just really love that book.’

  I said, ‘You should work on having more dignity,’ and walked away.

  In my room I looked at my phone, and then, its screen glowing, slowly pushed it beneath my mattress.

  For four days I stalked my ex’s Facebook profile, dry-cleaned my shirts, listened to meditation audiobooks, stalked his Facebook profile, did push-ups in the dark of my room, sent off contracts at work, and stalked his Facebook profile some more.

  On the fifth day I saw he checked in to the airport. He was boarding his plane. Here it was 1 a.m. on the morning of a work function and so nine hours later I was at the work function. It was brunch, which really meant hours of daytime drinking and a buffet. Using the company Amex card, which now rested in my shirt’s front pocket, I had booked the function a month ago in a large hotel on The Palm, a man-made archipelago built for actors and business tycoons.