Will Self
I have been confined to my apartments by a condition at once debilitating and embarrassing: at periodic intervals my body disgorges somewhere in the region of a cupful of matter, which is both colloidal and mercurial – quicksilver and stodgy. I never know for more than a few moments in advance when the discharge will come, or where from: eyes, ears, nostrils, mouth, urethra or anus. This gooey stuff smells at once excremental and aseptic – a bouquet of shit and detergent. I am reminded of the time before I was so sequestrated, when I prowled the city with fierce abandon – my quarry all the sensations it has to offer. So I scaled the stepped-back skyscrapers precipitately, ledge-to-ledge – and on one occasion, using a key I bought in an ironmonger’s, I opened a manhole and descended into its stygian sewer system. Clambering down, I grabbed the rusty old ladder’s rungs with my rubber-gloved hands, palms gripping then slipping on their thick lagging of ancient toilet paper.
I sloshed along the subterranean drains, feeling amorphous blobs sickly vacillate against my toes, shins, thighs, through my rubber waders. My torch blade struck feeble beams and gleams from the uvular walls – I swallowed hard. I heard the chirrups and squeals of the rats – but never saw one. At length, I reached the confluence of several tunnels: a chamber, perhaps five storeys high, into which they disgorged liquid sewage that gurgled and swirled in a mephitic whirlpool as it drained into some yet deeper chasm. I inched along a slimy walkway projecting out into the putrefying millrace, intent on confronting the monocular stare of this great and ineluctable process – the evacuation of everything humans deem anathema to the civilised life: their bodily waste, and the residue of their efforts to eradicate its faecal stain. My torch beam flickered over a greasy-brown boil that rose up from the morass, capturing a scrap of newsprint poised on its revolting surface tension. Around and around it went.
As I believe I may’ve said: I’ve no way of anticipating when, or from which orifice, the silvery goo will be voided – at most, there’re a few seconds of plenitude, followed by a piercing pain which lances through the relevant duct. Sometimes it’s only a few minutes between these episodes – others, hours. A week or so ago, when nothing had happened for an entire morning, I risked an outing to the local park. A child’s model yacht caught in pondweed seemed a suitable opportunity for a good deed – but as I dabbled in the green water, freeing the keel, a cupful slopped down onto its deck. The child came running and looked on, appalled, as I submerged the yacht again and again, muttering fervidly, ‘The ducks – they did something mucky. Yes . . . very mucky.’ I haven’t risked a repeat of this sort of thing – the consequences could be disastrous.
Instead, I remain behind the multi-density fibreboard of my front door – only descending into the corner shop which is located directly beneath my flat for essential supplies, or sallying a few hundred yards further to attend the local doctors’ surgery. He’s a young man and an old man and a middle-aged woman. He’s Asian and Bulgarian and English. ‘You disgust me,’ he said, as he analysed the silvery sample I’d coughed up into a beaker in the adjacent bathroom, ‘not that this is a professional opinion,’ he continued, squeezing the bulb of the pipette so as to add a few drops of reagent. ‘You disgust me – but this is a purely aesthetic judgement, not a moral one.’ He swirled the beaker – the gloop instantly turned a deep mauve. ‘What shall I do, Doc?’ I wheedled. ‘I can’t live like this.’
‘You need to concentrate,’ he said, his eyes rippling behind the lenses of his expensive varifocal glasses, ‘become more attuned to your body. That’s the trouble with modern life: our urge to be disembodied – I blame Christianity . . . all those angels.’
‘Angels have bodies, too,’ I observed, cinching my belt.
‘Maybe,’ he sighed, ‘but theirs don’t randomly disgorge silvery goo from all their orifices at intermittent intervals.’
‘What’s wrong with me, Doc?’ I asked, as we both contemplated the foaming, steaming beaker.
‘No bloody idea.’ He snapped back, ‘Now, if you’ll forgive me. I have patients waiting . . . patiently.’ His computer printer chattered out three prescriptions – one for a dietary supplement, one for a laxative, and the third for an anti-diarrhoeal preparation. In the reception area I felt the by now familiar pained plenitude – and the next moment a cupful spewed on to the worn carpet tiling. The receptionist handed me the kitchen roll as if this was a regular occurrence – and for that I was grateful. I did my best to scrub the stuff up, but still left viscous snail-trails twining the nylon bristles. I handed back the kitchen roll with an abject apology – then headed off to fill my prescriptions.
The best posture for me to adopt when at home has proved to be on hands and knees – and I wear no clothes. Fortunately the floors of my flat are wipeable wood laminate, and I have no rugs or carpets. So long as I’m left to my own devices, and not required to associate with my fellow humans, my existence is bearable enough. When the pained plenitude comes, I either head for the bathroom – or stick it out. Statistically, two out of every nine cupfuls will be decanted via my anus or my urethra. There’s no difference I can discern between this silvery goo, and the stuff that splurges from my eyes, ears, mouth and nostrils – but I’d accord myself lacking in all civilised decencies if I didn’t experience its evacuation as inherently more disgusting. Wouldn’t I? So, I keep a rough mental count, and try to be seated on the commode in time. Of course, often I’ll be slumped there, and instead of my back or front passage, the goo will quit the building of my body through my right nostril – or my left lughole. Sod’s Law, they used to call it – but they never said who Sod was.
I don’t sleep for very long any more. To begin with, unable to acknowledge my comprehensive leakage, I went to bed as usual – but by one or two in the morning, my sheets, my pillowcases, my covers – all would be soaked, smelly and slimy. The first time that you buy nappies as an adult can be a bit of an ordeal. If they’re for you, that is. It marks an important stage of accepting one’s incontinence – clearly, it isn’t going away. Indeed, it may well persist unto . . . the grave. A cruel and carping farewell, this – a kick in the dying human’s bemerded arse as she lurches out the door. I’ll spare you the agonies I experienced, bent double in the aisle of the chemist’s – I had my reading glasses perched on the end of my nose as I scrutinised the squishy packages. Was I large or small? I hardly knew any more. At the counter they were discussing painkillers – another cruel irony, since, as I attempted to pay for my embarrassing purchase, I felt the familiar pained plenitude. Wiping the counter clean took quite a while – they shut the shop while I completed the task. I offered the manager some money to let me go, but she insisted I mop it all up myself, while the staff all stood on the far side of the sales floor, beside the electric clippers, talking about a television show. I went to bed that night wearing one pair of pull-up absorbent pants (medium), in the normal fashion – and a second pair on my head, leg-holes serving for my weepy eyes. One beneficial consequence of my new absorbent headgear is that it damps down the buzz . . . a little.
Have you met the buzz? No, really – have you made its acquaintance? Say hello, Buzz, dearest: ‘Zzz-zzz! Zzz-zzz!’ There’s a good buzz – are you purring? It’s a marker of my profound isolation, I think, that the ambient noise permeating my flat has become personified. He was here when I moved in – the buzz, and to begin with I berated myself as a fool, for renting the place sound unheard. Next I did my best to track down the infuriating noise and eradicate it – but to no avail: the buzz comes from a pair of power units affixed directly to the wall of my flat, and when I confronted Mr Vairavar, the proprietor of the corner shop, he explained that they’re essential to his business. Anyway, the buzz is, it transpires, only first among a number of equally maddening noises: the subtle grind of my next-door neighbour’s bruxism – the awkward night-time breathing of the man on the other side, each inhalation long and shuddering, ever promising – but never delivering – his surcease. Then there are the buses that grunt into, and snort out of, the garage opposite. In the most minuscule hours, when the owl of Minerva flies on soft and absorbent wings, they pull out of the garage and stop at the traffic lights next to my block, so that their rumbling respiration is borne into me along its exterior walkways, and through its internal ducts, adding to the general cacophony. If I stand in my kitchenette and draw myself up to my full height, so that my head is up inside the stove’s extractor hood, I’m plunged into the aural equivalent of a panopticon. I’m able to hear all the sounds surrounding the building – from the chattering of the children who gather outside the corner shop on the far side of the road after school, to the barking of Wonga, my upstairs neighbour’s dog. One by one I identified these sounds – and in so doing, neutralised them. Only the buzz remained irrepressible – the silvery, gooey, insinuating Buzz: a tintinnabulation of my brain’s own electrochemistry, or so it has begun to seem. The buzz is the buzz of alienation and anomie – it has this in common with my malady: occult origins and a refusal to conform to any timetable. The buzz comes each time unexpectedly, endures beyond reason, then suddenly stops. In its wake arrives a silence at once shocked and profound: a fermata, during which I never fail to contemplate the utter bestiality of my condition – my bare and forked animal existence. Naked and on all fours – at bay, in a bricky thicket I pay an exorbitant rent for, my money contributing – as my landlady gleefully informed me on the sole occasion she visited – to her pension. So she rests – and I labour.
The doctor was right. I was forced to conclude – after a month or so of this awful existence – that I was indeed unclean. A pariah – excluded from all social norms, a mere body, prey to processes over which my mind could exert no control. Even the best and most malleable of wax earplugs only sealed the buzz in: an electric ear worm, vermiculating my very cerebellum. Exhausted, I held myself in readiness for the next sensation of pained plenitude, and when it’d passed I recommenced cleaning – intent on managing at least this much: a goo-free body, and gooless surroundings. To begin with, on my forays to the shop below, I bought copious supplies of cleaning products – bleaches and other reagents, rubber gloves, sponges, mop heads and absorbent cloths. The flat stank of ammonia – I wept. Each day was a smeary, teary progress, as I wiped and wiped again all two hundred square feet of the wood-laminated flooring. Then I bought a steam cleaner which was delivered pronto. With this magic wand, jetting out water vapour at a hundred degrees centigrade, I could reach every nook and cranny, liquefying all dirt and goo, so that its residue might be easily mopped up with some kitchen towelling. I shuffled down to the garbage hopper – once, twice, three times a day – to deposit my black bags full of crumpled waste, the cord of my old dressing gown dragging in the dried-out cherry blossom that lies in drifts on the exterior walkways and staircases of the block.
There’s no love lost when you’re afflicted in such a way – because there’s no love possible. After all, who in their right mind would be able to cope with this: at a singular moment of passion, when kisses and caresses are being bestowed with passion and artistry – a cupful of silvery goo plummeting down onto bare and wanting flesh? Oh, no – oh, God! I howled to the moon – who showed her celestial face, peeking, silvery and discrete, between low and scudding clouds. And then it came to me – came to me as I was actually examining the stains in the rank nappy I’d just torn from my stinking loins. What was this? At the very core of the sodden clout there were small and glittery flecks – as usual. But this time, instead of taking the residuum for granted and discarding the nappy post-haste, I removed the flecks with a pair of tweezers and scrutinised them further under a magnifying glass. The tiny flecks did indeed seem to be metallic – could they actually be silver? From then on I began to assiduously separate out the silvery flecks from the viscous goo in which they were being deposited. To begin with I simply hovered over the latest cupful where it lay on the wood-laminated floor, pecking away with my tweezers – and did the same with the two pairs of nappies I wore overnight, but soon enough, irritated by such inefficiency, I constructed a sort of panning implement, using a sieve and layers of kitchen roll. On feeling the familiar pained plenitude, I would now wave my implement around, holding it beneath first left nostril, then anus, then right eye – a balletic prelude, perhaps, to a devastating backhand tennis return – before, as the pained plenitude reached its inevitable conclusion, deftly positioning it beneath the right orifice.
In a week or so I’d managed to accumulate a small and glittering pile – which I shovelled into a small velvet drawstring bag. The next time I hobbled down to the shop, I took the bag with me, and when I paid for my purchases – kitchen roll, toilet paper, basic comestibles – I got it out, untied the drawstrings, and tipped a quantity of the silvery flecks onto the counter. Mr Vairavar – who owns the shop, sits all day, hunched at the counter, his eyes on the distant horizon of the top-shelf magazines – immediately straightened up: ‘What’s this . . . what’s this . . .’ he muttered, getting out a jeweller’s eyeglass and screwing it into his bilious, bagged eye. ‘What’s this . . . what’s this – why!’ he exclaimed. ‘This is highest grade silver, man – how is it that you knew I was a silversmith back home in Sri Lanka?’ I said nothing – the pained plenitude was upon me, so I staggered outside to void in the gutter. Leaf mould. Plastic twists and shreds. A crushed fruit-juice carton. The desiccated and washed-out face of a politician, smiling up at me from a scrap of newsprint. When I returned to the counter Mr Vairavar handed me my velvet bag with a smile, saying: ‘Is there more where this came from? Y’know, I’ve still got a crucible – and my other silversmith’s tools. If you’ve access to more of this – which is the finest grade of silver – then we could go into business together.
And so we did. In the beginning Mr Vairavar simply offset my silver production against my grocery bill. Then, as his own production came on line, in the form of small but intricate pieces – rings, pendants, earrings, animal figurines – which he displayed in a tray by the till, he began to remit me small cash sums. These, after a few weeks’ accumulation, I began to invest in more complex sieving equipment: laboratory clamps, to which I could attach more kitchen-roll-lined sieves, so that, whatever strange pose I adopted, in whichever part of the flat, the goo would be caught and filtered. Mr Vairavar took on an apprentice – while the buzz that emanates from the units which power his freezers full of extra-strength lager and full-fat milk became fused in my mind with my own excretory labour. So the buzz ceased to be the buzz of alienation and anomie – and became the warm hum of industry. Now, when I crawl on all fours, or pirouette in a fugue of pained plenitude – or crouch down to squirt, or rise up to piddle, or place both of my hands behind my head as my left nostril jets out silvery spume – or reach for the kettle, only to have it slimed by my gushing eye, I feel nothing but a sort of stupefying pride: for what have I done? Surely, taken a nauseating and repulsive affliction – this smelly, silvery discharge – and turned it into the fount of a new industry? A primary form of extractive industry, which I manage – as I do its refining and preparation. An extractive industry which is in turn linked to a manufactory, a distribution system – wholesale and retail enterprises. The wood-laminated floors of my flat are no longer a terra nullius, but a territory with which human labour and ingenuity has been mixed – I stare now upon scuffed skirting boards and stained bathroom tiling, with all the pride of any self-made industrialist.
As for Mr Vairavar – through him I feel connected to an entire network of people: makers and doers and buyers and wearers of his and his apprentice’s exquisitely made jewellery. I may still feel the intermittent pained plenitude – I may yet experience the randomised splurge. I may even remain in enforced reclusion, yet I know, that were all these folk to be confronted with my naked, straining and smelly form, rather than repulsion – they’d manifest only the sincerest gratitude. The last time I went to see my doctor, I sat in the surgery for a few moments, listening to him patronise me as he riffed on his computer keyboard – then I took out one of my velvet drawstring bags, crammed full of raw silver, and threw it onto his drug-company-gifted vinyl blotter: ‘Take that,’ I said, ‘and buy yourself a new attitude. You, Sigmund Freud, and all the other soul doctors have it wrong – far from coming into being as humans sought to hide the animal reality of their bodies, it is these processes themselves that lie at the very foundation of what we call . . . civilisation.’