Free A Theft: My Con Man by Hanif Kureishi

I met a man who fed a worm into my ear,
    I met a man who fed a worm into my ear, and it lived there for more than a year, where it became comfortable and began to devour my mind and eat into my brain. Colonised and infected, I was anxious and depressed, and, at times, a shell. I staggered about like a dying man and slept as much as I could; being awake was no fun. I understood hiding, denial and the passion for ignorance.
    Sense is usually the last thing that anyone wants to see, but eventually the truth presses down until you have to open your eyes. I began to hate this man, whom I had only recently met, but who had led me on, and then deceived and stolen from me. At one point, it seemed, he even pretended to be me. After doing this, he disappeared but rang every day for months, with apologies, offers of help and mad promises.
    I found my hate was so great that not only was it corrupting me – ruining my view of the world until I believed it was only foul – but, to my surprise, by some mysterious alchemy, it was turning into love. I was beginning to love my thief, a man I barely knew, but whom I had trusted and even liked, and who had taken my savings, amongst many other crimes. At one low point I was phoning him every hour. I was impatient with everyone else because I was thinking of him all the time. I was waking up at night to think of him more, and when he did call, my heart leapt. I would retreat to a quiet room where I could hear every tone of his voice. I would, I even thought, go to his house and see him in his privacy. I would become his stalker.
    Freud wrote that love involves the undervaluation of reality and the overvaluation of the desired object. While the correct valuation of a person is an odd, if not impossible idea, we might say Freud meant something like this: for various reasons, many of them masochistic, we become involved with others who cannot possibly give what we ask for; we can wait as long as we wish, but they do not have it, and one day, if we can bear to abandon our fantasy and see clearly, we might face reality straight on. We will then look elsewhere for fulfilment,to a place where our needs can, in fact, be satisfied.
    At the beginning of this business, one of my agents, the man who had recommended Chandler, had told me how impressive Jeff had been at meetings. Clever and decisive, Chandler had satisfactorily done my agent’s accounts, as well as those of my agent’s family. Chandler was on top of things. He knew what he was doing. Everyone felt in good hands. But, by the end, when everything had gone wrong, the truth was that Chandler did not have anything. However, he remained confident and liked to give the impression he did have it all. Or he maintained that he would have it soon: funds were on their way from Spain or Switzerland. And so I kept asking for it, but he knew, and I realised eventually, that he had lost everything. It would never come back, and this was a loss I would have to live with, think about, and attempt to integrate.
    *
    Pop and the theatre, my first cultural loves, are both, in form and content, games of deception, deceit and mischief, where there is nothing authentic or real behind the artificial front, except the desire to play and to be someone else. David Bowie knew that popwas a put-on; he lifted and modified everything that interested him. I’ve always been fascinated by the nefarious cleverness of hypnotists, tricksters, card sharps, mountebanks, con men, convincers, deceivers, big-mouths, bigamists, hiders and cheats; men who had three families living in one neighbourhood unbeknownst to one another, others who pretended to be doctors, pilots or Olympic swimmers, or who concealed an evil past as a Nazi. I like to think of the man who tried to sell the Eiffel Tower to an industrialist by convincing him it was to be used for scrap metal. I think of undercover agents, of anyone who has talked someone into something, someone with nothing who can persuade