Here Are the Young Men (6 page)

That cleared the area of any other innocent bystanders. No one is innocent, thought Kearney, breaking into an easy jog to get himself out of these back alleys and shady laneways. He hijacked a Mercedes and shot the driver in the jaw. Then he cruised towards the city's main
shopping
district. He was supposed to be picking up a backstreet abortionist from a house in West Town and taking him to Eddie Fly's in Kingsland. Or was it that he was supposed to ferry a trunkful of coke to Sly Diamond the Mexican and then kill the greaser punk when he paid for the shit? He couldn't remember, cos he didn't give a fuck. Following the missions was good once in a while, a diversion. But most of the time Kearney preferred to just cruise and kill.

He broke the red lights as he arrived at the glitzy city-centre plaza, then pulled a handbraker and flattened an old man as he screeched to a halt. Onlookers screamed as Kearney emerged from the car, slow and deliberate, a man of steel. He hammered the combination to activate the Maximum Weapons Cheat – he had resisted it thus far, knowing that total overkill all the time could become monotonous. But now the moment was right: it was time to climax.

‘Are yis ready, humans?' he bellowed across the plaza. ‘Are yis ready for
me
, human race?'

He pulled out his rocket launcher and fired randomly. ‘ALLAHU AKBAR!' he roared as the missile swooshed across the dark expanse of the plaza, tracing a horizontal plume of smoke. It slammed into the side of a building and Kearney, exultant yet sober, relishing every moment with cold intensity, saw his own face lit up in the orange flare of the explosion.

Cars were skidding on to the scene, unsure of which way to flee. Kearney launched a rocket into the side of a dark-green Mazda. It burst on impact, a thump of flame igniting the car behind, which also exploded a moment later. The cops were swarming in by now. Kearney took cover behind a burnt-out car and switched to sniper rifle. He picked off a few pigs as they ran for position, savouring the founts of blood that spouted from their neck wounds. He pinned a copper in the shoulder and he spun in the crosshair once, twice, slowing with each turn – lo and behold, it was Kearney's da! ‘Ye fuckin paedo ye!' Kearney roared. Then he pulled the trigger and the pig's face vanished in a halo of dark gore.

‘
YOU ARE SURROUNDED! THERE IS NO ESCAPE! DROP YOUR WEAPONS OR YOU WILL BE KILLED!'

The voice came from the sky; they had set the cop chopper on him but Kearney got it in his sights with the rocket launcher and took it out with the first shot. The helicopter bled smoke and began to spin earthwards in drunken spirals. ‘Fuck yis, humans!' screeched an ecstatic Kearney. The people below screamed and tried to run, but there was no way of knowing where the bird would fall. It crashed finally into the entranceway of a skyscraper at the side of the plaza, killing three innocent bystanders.

No one is innocent, insisted Kearney – and as he did a single crack of gunfire sounded behind him and his face exploded in a drenching of blood and gore. He had been shot through the back of the head by a lone copper who had stealthily taken position to his rear – it was Rez, the gay bastard! ‘Ask me hole,' Kearney gurgled poignantly through a clot of facial tissue and splintered bone. Then he crashed face first on to the concrete.

Kearney saw his body from above, and as he spiralled into the night sky, keeping his gaze fixed on his own corpse and the carnage that surrounded it, he was informed of the following.

You have been FUCKED!

Kills (total): 316

Cops slaughtered: 32

Missions completed: 0

Depravity rating: 94%

Appraisal: Loose cannon/psychopath

Fallen Henry the Titan says:
You a mean motherfucker, kid, but you ain't never gonna climb to the top in this business – too goddamn crazy. Shit, you the kind of nigga we send in when the situation be really fucked up, to clean shit up when all hell be breakin loose. But you can't be trusted, man. Too goddamn crazy. Shit
.

Kearney's
ma was calling him. She sounded angry, by which Kearney surmised that it was her third or fourth time to call.

‘Joseph, I won't fuckin call ye again! Would ye come down here before this is cold!'

‘Yeah, hang on will ye, I'm comin.'

She threw the plate on the table in front of him when he sat down, and called him a selfish bastard. She brought her own dinner into the living room on a tray to watch Judge Judy. She left the door open and Kearney was able to see the screen. Judge Judy was arrogantly presiding over the fate of some tubby black guy who was supposed to have stolen his girlfriend's dog or her daughter or something. It was all so fucking boring. What kind of crime was this? Where were the cracked neo-Nazi spree killers who unleashed Armageddon on high schools, or emptied Uzis into shopping-centre crowds? It was all so fucking boring. ‘I'm innocent!' pleaded the tubby nig-nog. No one is innocent, mused Kearney philosophically.

He looked at his plate: beans, fish fingers and chips – the usual shite. He went to the fridge and poured himself a glass of milk, then sat back down. As he chewed the first mouthful, he observed his ma watching the telly. She was a fat, ugly slapper. To rectify this, Kearney stood up, walked into the sitting room and stood above her, blocking her view of the telly like a cruel eclipse. He switched to baseball bat, raised it behind his head, and brought it down in her face with a vicious swing. She was dead on the first smash, but he switched to pistol and shot her repeatedly in the face nonetheless, just for the craic.

Kearney finished his dinner, left the plate and empty glass on the table, and returned to his converted-attic bedroom.

9
|
Rez

Problems with Reality: Rez and the Postmodern Condition

Rez watched himself having sex with Julie. Glancing down across their chests and stomachs he saw his erect penis, condom-wrapped, gliding in and out, in and out of her vagina. The erect penis didn't seem to be a part of him – it was like the baby creature in
Alien
.

They were in Julie's bedroom. It was Monday afternoon and Rez hadn't slept after his night with the lads. Everything was pitilessly visible in the daylight. They'd been having penetrative sex for five minutes. This was a reasonable time for Rez to allow himself to ejaculate and bring it to an end. But Julie hadn't come. He had to make her come.

He could hear himself panting and see the winces and grimaces he made – he couldn't tell whether these reactions were genuine, or just imitations of pornography, echoes of someone else's long-vanished pleasure. He closed his eyes and tried to focus on pure sensation: the sound of her breathing, the feel of her skin where it pressed against his own. But he couldn't dam the gush of his
thoughts.
He wondered whether he was even excited, whether there was any lust in this at all. He had an erection, therefore some excitation must have been taking place. But maybe the erection was a mechanical reaction to the gestures they were making that they'd picked up from films, telly, porno …

Julie still hadn't come. Rez wished it was all over. These noises they were making: who were they trying to convince? But he had to keep going. He had to make her come. Julie's face was bobbing up and down beneath him. She panted and rolled back her eyeballs but Rez couldn't blot out the sense that they were both alone, imprisoned in their separate minds. He kept seeing flickers in Julie of film-sex, responses downloaded from beautiful actresses. It was the over-eager way she contorted her body, the hyperbole in her whispered incitements and dirty words. He felt like he was having sex with a hologram. But he had to make her come.

They manoeuvred themselves through various positions. Rez was concentrating hard, trying fiercely to enjoy himself. Eventually Julie seemed to come; at least, she made a loud, prolonged warbling noise and went, ‘Oh fuck!' Then she formed an O with her lips and began to take noisy breaths, in and out, as if recovering from a near-fatal pleasure. Rez's orgasm was imminent: it would all be over soon. Determined to enjoy these last few seconds at least – otherwise what was the point? – he urged himself to stop analysing and just be in the moment. But it was hopeless: he registered the mechanism of ejaculation taking place in his penis and testicles without the faintest tremble of pleasure. Miserably frustrated by his inability to stop thinking and just enjoy things like a normal human being, as he ejaculated he let out an anguished, gasping whine. Julie, mistaking it for a sound of pleasure, renewed her moany porno-noises. ‘Yes, Rez! Oh yes, oh yes!' she cried, not looking into his eyes. Shuddering as the last spit of ejaculate squeezed into the condom, he groaned and slumped down into her shoulder. He buried his face in her neck and hair, and wished he never had to see anything ever again.

       

It
wasn't only when he had sex that Rez saw it, but that was when it was most visible, and most excruciating. Sex, real sex, had a lot to live up to. Real life had a lot to live up to.

Rez worried. He worried that he was losing it, smoking too much dope and falling out of orbit with the world. For as long as he could remember, he'd had the sense that he wasn't as fully connected to reality as you were supposed to be. But he had always struggled to express the specifics of this condition, even to himself.

Recently, so much had fallen away, no longer trusted as being real: emotions, pleasure, music, art, even gestures and expressions. Nothing was simply itself; everything was a reflection of something else. Nothing was to be trusted.

Take Cocker, leaning against the wall the other day, smoking a cigarette – it was stylized, he had learned that from telly and films. Or Jen, raising an eyebrow and smiling as she walked away from Matthew one night – that was straight off the telly as well, probably from
Sex and the City
, or
Friends
, or something. It was a cheap imitation; there was nothing genuinely enigmatic or seductive about it. Was there? Rez couldn't tell. He had begun looking around at the people in his life – his ma and da, Michael and Trisha, his friends, Julie – and seeing them more and more as unreal, sinister, holographic entities, hardly human at all. Then, with rising unease, he had begun to look at himself in the same way. He had turned his gaze inward, but found no depth or substance, only froth and fever. There had arisen in him the weird and inchoate sense that he was a centreless chaos, becoming self-aware.

Whenever the anxiety threatened to engulf him, he would tell himself that surely the best way to deal with this was to try and talk to someone about it, to communicate what he was going through. Maybe even Julie could help him.

       

Later
that afternoon the two of them took a DART out to Howth, to walk along the cliffs. It had turned into another dull, windy day. Fatigue weighed heavily on Rez. He wanted to sleep and sleep and not wake up for days.

As they walked away from the town, through the heather and scrub, high above the sea, he told Julie he had been barred from attending the graduation.

‘What, even you?' Julie said.

‘Yeah. They sent letters out to our parents. I mean, Foley likes me cos I read books, so I thought I'd be alright. But no, I'm barred as well. Me ma and da are goin mad.'

‘But the school will be sorry they barred ye when they see how well ye do in the Leavin Cert …'

He gave a cheerless laugh. ‘I doubt it, Julie. Honestly, I think I've probably failed half the subjects. I know ye don't believe me, but ye'll see for yourself soon enough.'

Her voice was strained with anger. ‘I don't see how you could fail, Rez. You're so smart …'

‘But I just … I told ye, I just couldn't concentrate. All year. I … there's too much goin on in me head.'

She pulled away, sick and tired of hearing it. He didn't blame her. He couldn't even say what he meant. An older guy with a moustache and a shaved head approached them on the trail. Rez happened to glance up at Julie as they passed him: she caught the guy's eye and smiled faintly, not realizing Rez was watching. Rez said nothing.

Julie suggested they stay for the sunset, and watch the darkness drift in over the Irish Sea. They sat on a perch and waited. Rez didn't want to be there. These days, situations like this always made him miserable. He wished there was a switch he could flick to turn his mind off, and he'd sit there and look at the darkening sky, untroubled by doubt or rumination.

‘
Isn't it gorgeous?' Julie murmured, lying back to enjoy the panorama of crashing waves, cliffs, and the dissolving day.

Rez sniffled. ‘I don't know, is it?'

‘What do ye mean? Of course it is. Just look at it.'

‘I am lookin at it. It's just, I don't know if I can see it properly.'

‘Is there something wrong with your eyes?'

‘There's nothing wrong with me eyes. Well, there is and there isn't. I mean …'

He was determined to articulate what was in his head. Otherwise the isolation would suffocate him. He tried again.

‘When ye look at it, are ye not just thinkin it's beautiful cos ye've seen so many pictures of sunsets in magazines and car ads and everywhere, and ye've been told that they're beautiful? Do ye know what I mean? Is it like an automatic thought, like ye look at it and ye think, “Ah, a sunset, it's beautiful,” but really ye feel nothing? Or even worse, maybe what yer really admirin is yerself, sittin there and bein all cinematic, starrin in something like a film or a novel or whatever. Or like ye're sayin to yerself, “This is what an experience looks like,” only ye've never really had one – just the experience of not experiencin anything at all. Ye know?'

Julie was shaking her head. Her voice was low, almost hostile. ‘No, Rez. It's gorgeous.'