Lurid & Cute (22 page)

— We could have sex now, said Candy, — if you want.

— It's OK, I said.

— OK, she said. — Well, you can't say I'm not interested.

I did my small usual smile but the interior of me was very sad. Everyone dresses in teeshirts in bed and we were no exceptions.

— So, shall we go to sleep? she said.

— Yeah sure, I said.

— Have you set the alarm? I said.

— Sure, she said.

I am trying to think how to put this – the way I was thinking about events, in the pale darkness. I was thinking about my horoscope and how I would ever know if it had come true. It's something like the problem of volume that is a rooftop swimming pool – that when you are in it and lissom and supported, your own transformation from solid into liquid makes it difficult to believe that this element in which you are drifting is also massive weight. Or no, perhaps it's better to think in other liquid terms, I mean not of water but of blood. Sure, the absence of blood is one of the strangenesses of my former history, my history before this history began. But sometimes the blood does emerge, after all. It emerges and there seems no way to stop it overflowing all the carpets and the curtains. Even if you had no idea that this would happen but just thought that you would be carrying on for ever in such lovely surroundings, like a pasha or state councillor from the old regimes, you never thought that in one conversation certain things would suddenly become tinged in your head with blood. But still, there it is: they do.

 

6. TROPICÁLIA

 

TROPICÁLIA

& once again he enters another world

And so it happens that someone falls from a window or into the sea and into another world. They just fall and are suddenly among the butterflyfish and blue-striped snappers. That isn't so strange, or what I mean is that certainly it's no less strange than other events that you might think are normal. As one guru has it, if you say
A man is sitting, there is a ship overhead
, that's at least as real and maybe more so than the sentence
A man is sitting and reading a book
. But also I think this could be described the other way round: you are sitting there, at your kitchen table with a bowl of nectarines and prickly pears, or wherever you want to sit, and then the sea falls in. That's possibly how it feels more often, whether what you are doing is bargaining with your dealer to let you have a rock of crack at a temporary discount, or trying to locate your elbow and wrist in among the auto wreckage. The outside just falls in on you.

which can happen anywhere

But did I know this or not know it? I mean, let's just consider the situation of your hero. Here he is: unemployed, with various women who love him, plus a friend who is let's say a little crazy. Now what is this hero to do? Does he try to be the good prince like he always is, the baby son? Or does he somehow move from state to state, a clown donning his various costumes, until there he is alone against the horizon begging for his life while someone points a gun at him? And OK, it does seem like option number 2 is the one he's taken, but at what point did the true darkness become obvious? From this perspective of the future, I do find it difficult to say. Did I know that I was in the tropical sea or did I only know this later? Because definitely the outside can enter your life at any given moment, whether you are lost in the jungle among carnivorous plants, or watching from your presidential palace while the secret services drop bombs on you. Or there you are, in the snowy wastes, having got down from your carriage, waiting for the horses and kibitkas to be changed, so you stand there, and around you there's this whirling snow and beyond it the flat dark. And you know it. It is over, civilisation. It is totally done with and over. Yes, in all these places – whether in the jungle or your palace or the matte snow – you can feel exiled from world history. And me I was unemployed and deceitful and in love with many women, as well as a minor criminal and a warlord: and when you do that, you also tend to find that you are suddenly outside all the usual references you previously relied on. You end up with this discovery of pain and its other elements, suddenly buoyant and alone in the soundproofed metaphysical spaceship.

even if it may not be obvious in the present moment

You think this is no way to reach the dark metaphysical, to squander the money and opportunities my parents gave me? To be harmful to my wife with my sadness and deceits? It turned out that it was dark enough for me. In the end, wherever you are is nowhere and is the silent snow and the broken kibitka, and a man cursing while he tries to keep the axle steady on the greasy ice. But I do not know if I knew then what I know now. It did not feel like darkness and snow at all. Such confusion! It was all just bright and interesting to live among, out here on the edges of a giant city, and I did not realise that I was moving darkly into chaos. In everything I say, therefore, you will have to have these time frames very much in mind: that not only did I not know something, that I only understood much later – by which point that knowledge was irrelevant, or of no use to me at all – but also that the understanding was precisely conditioned by what happened later. For I have studied this phenomenon, and its official terms. And in fact I think it's possible to say something even stranger. It's not just what you know that changes, depending on what you discover at the end, when everything is over; it's what you intended to do, as well. Everything is retrospective, and that includes your motivations. Which doesn't mean, however, that everything you feel when something's happening is blindness or self-deception. If a motive is revealed in the future, it doesn't mean it was there to be intuited all along. Like I remember once an erudite friend trying to explain to me in some pub or other dive how there was a difference between the conscious and the reluctant narrator, the one who knows what they're revealing, and the one who doesn't – whereas I'm not so sure you can really maintain that distinction. No person who ever talks is quite conscious of everything they're saying. However much I have always been the shammes of my own head, the guardian of all its thoughts, sadly it's never been possible to be the true comprehensive. That's the basic problem I am having when I talk and try to describe these facts, because there are, it turns out, no facts at all: just signs and interpretations. Or just anticipations, and recollections, so that possibly the moment itself might not exist at all. There is no romance, or adventure. For I would happily bet in any world currency that no one has a clue about the kind of story they are currently inhabiting – everywhere they look they are muzzled and confined with no escape in sight – and so for instance nor did I, when I woke up beside Romy bleeding, or left a nail salon with cash triumphantly, or other criminal acts, I did not know what type of story this involved at all. I would only know when I could tell it, and I could only tell it when it was over: and what could it really mean, for any story to be over? I don't mean I'm some philosophy champ. I just mean I was very confused.

but only later, in the future outside the actual story

Because all along I have been existing way beyond the events I am now recounting, at this story's most future point, for it was only in the enclouded future that these thoughts really occurred, long after Candy and I had definitively separated, and I had left my parents' house, and our dog was dead. I was definitely very alone – in an apartment in one of the high-rise cantonments, out on the South Side of this giant city. Here I am, with the wound in my leg, and its comical limp, like any other marked seer. Maybe always now I will be this person with a limp, like I have suffered in great wars. My apartment was very bare and the night was coming on, and I was looking at the patterns the smog made on the sky, just as I was also watching smoke crawl out of a cigarette across the air and I think that in an interview I could have plausibly replied that I was feeling happy in the lightest manner possible. Or at least, I would have liked to give such a ruthless answer. But it's not easy to be as ruthless as you might like, always you can get overtaken and in my case it was by this nostalgia. Nostalgia was the illness of our time. Because whereas other generations have this ability to let their past and all its artefacts disintegrate into dust, we have this availability on every computer or phone we happen to own to go back over our entire past: not only, let's say, the endless credits of
Dogtanian
or the lovely
Pink Panther
, the items from our childhood, but also our entire backlist of correspondence. Every human is now more historically documented than Napoleon and it would be much to be regretted were it not so irrevocable. It means that depression and nostalgia and a whole rearranged way of thinking is the central fact of nearly everyone I know. And so in my case I was reading all the emails I had ever sent to Romy, and watching the way our friendship had then developed into our affair and then evaporated, and I was thinking how much I love friendship. It's a really difficult thing. It's as complicated as love and perhaps more valuable. Or at least, it's just as capable of colossal sadnesses. It is definitely a form of adventure in a life. Just as also I was looking over emails to Dolores, to which she no longer replied, and then also the emails from the early years of my relationship with Candy, and only now was I realising something that Candy had been trying to tell me, and it made me want to explain to her how sorry I was that I had been so stupid. That's one dark pleasure our technology affords, to be so quickly able to reread all the communications one has received, and understand where one has failed. And I was considering calling Wyman and just seeing how he was, or at the very least sending him a message, when my phone rang, and it was Candy.

— It's me, she said. — Is this a good time?

— Uh-huh, I said.

— Are you busy right now?

— Where are you? I said.

— Here, she said.

— What kind of here? I said.

— Downstairs, she said.

I put the phone down. And then I paused, while I waited for the elevator to ascend, and in that pause I was partly looking out at the balcony of my apartment, where I had hung a birdcage I had bought the other morning in the bird market, and my new backpack, or listening to a fly scribble its noise zigzaggingly all over the room, but also I was perhaps at last having the kind of moment where I did understand what had happened to me, or was still happening. I had in some way definitively aged. It was the time sadness you get in a plane when you realise that not only are the air hostesses on your transatlantic flight in no way comparable to the lissom pinups of your imagination, but that in fact they once were precisely those selfsame lissom pinups, but now time has passed and they are still up here, in the air, serving mini muffins and miniature wine, but simply older, with wedding rings, and a more refined idea of sarcasm, and everything has changed without anyone understanding how, or why. I could not say that I was happy Candy was here. In some way it felt like a test or torture and I did not know if I could bear it. And then there she was, in my doorway.

where he sees his wife for a final time

Of the many exquisite aspects of Candy's beauty, the aspect that struck me now, as it had often, obviously, struck me, was the very long length of her legs. There you all are, I often wanted to say to the world, when I was out with my wife, you look at Candy, you look at the grandeur and the beauty of her legs and then you think: but only a man with a humdinger, a baseball bat against his thighs, like something resembling an aubergine or pumpkin, no not pumpkin, a
baseball bat
, could satisfy a woman with legs as long as that. Her legs are these things of supple delicate extensive beauty that therefore lend themselves to imagining them in various angular poses, kinked around your thighs, or upright and resting on your shoulders, and when I saw them again I had such desire for her I could not think, because I could only think about the way those legs became her hips, and the soft skin between her legs and how it would go wet if I just touched it, as if something had dissolved. I watched her while she observed my bare apartment, with my single beloved backpack, and also magazines and books and cigarettes, because lately I had taken up smoking, a habit Candy had always disliked and so I had rarely done it, or at least not professionally.

— You're smoking now? she said.

— I didn't ask you here, I said.

— OK, she said.

Then I walked towards her, I think just to be closer, and she watched me walking, and then when I was beside her at the window she leaned towards me and too late I realised she only intended to hug me – for after all we are very different in our heights, where I am small, she is tall, where I am cherubic, she is elegant and lithe – and so regretfully I felt my lips meet hers. She kissed me very softly on the lips and I felt like the women are said to have felt in previous eras, the way you are kissed and feel like you are swooning. The lighting in the room suddenly felt wrong. The lighting was yellow because it was twilight but before I thought to improve it her phone rang.

— Yeah I'll call you later, she said.

— Who was that? I said.

— How long have you been here? she said.

— How long? I said.

— And why are you limping? she said.

— Limping? I said.

— Yes, limping, she said.

— It's a long story, I replied.

It was definitely difficult to talk to her. And that in itself was part of my new knowledge, that something irrevocable had happened, but not just that – that something in the past had definitively happened, because of what was happening right now.

& understands his transformation

Most stories are like the story of the man who threw away a date stone and then there started up behind him a muscular spirit, saying,
Get up that I can kill you, just as you killed my son
. And when the man said,
How did I slay your son?
the spirit simply replied:
When you threw away the date stone it hit my son, who was passing by at the time, on the chest, and he died. There is no help for you. You have to die
. And so he kills the putz, without mercy. I mean, most stories seem to begin with chance, with just a djinn appearing, and then they end up being destiny. I say destiny, but what I really mean is total unfairness and people being beaten to a pulp whether they deserve that fate or not. Because here's how I see the present situation. The universe is a total psychopath and bully, with paws and boxing gloves and whatever other trinkets it finds most useful for beating people into pulp. It is out of control, totally. It is a bully and I am its slave and that leads to different kinds of knowledge. One of which, for instance, might be that whereas you might prefer it that one thing follows another very normally, in fact it's like how a friend of mine once described it – that if a dog bites a little boy and gives him rabies, the illusion of a universal cause and effect is maintained, and order exists, and everyone feels happy. But if, on the other hand, the boy instead turns into a dog himself, by which I mean, if the story has some inexplicable transformation or hole in it, then the world is uncontrollable – and that scenario is in fact while improbable also much more likely – like all of our affections, our inability to live up to our own standards, and our undeserved misfortunes. And when that happens, and you have a story with a hole in it, then that hole transforms your story into a myth. So that the obvious $1,000,000,000 question, in my opinion, is therefore something like this: Is there really any normal story in this world at all? Isn't everything at some point, if you make the frames go slow enough, going to reveal itself as mythological?