society crumbles
because it runs out of
imagination
and it gapes
and it yawns
and falls silent
They’ll love you. You won’t earn it, since it is not a thing of commerce. This is not a thing. This is a fact. They’ll love you. And they don’t want it to be a punishment for you. If I undress –
so be it, I’m going to undress, make myself naked
– you’re going to have to cover your eyes. I don’t have anything beautiful to offer you. Long lines of scars. My skin has gone into art and even beyond. Children have tugged at it, but not from within. A long line of angry women, furious women, have tugged at it. They gave birth so we could tear ourselves in half. If they’d known, they would have plucked us out and flung us into the pigswill. They knew, but they didn’t do that. Processions of beloved women. A necklace of orgasms dangles above your head. Close your eyes and imagine it for yourself. I know it’s tasteless, but after about four orgasms you’re so far back in time you can look clinically at the sex from which you emerged. The cooing of hairy bachelors stretching way back to a time before this continent, so they say, even existed. You had sixty-four greatgreatgreatgreatgreatgrandfathers and sixty-four greatgreatgreatgreatgreatgrandmothers. That’s an entire village of people. A village. Can you imagine such an orgy? They didn’t know how to read, they didn’t know how to write, but they knew where and how to kiss. Now they could fill an entire cemetery. When’s the last time you lit a candle for them? Every time you unwillingly figured out that someone loves you. It happens to every one of us. Do not be afraid, do not doubt it, you can’t escape it. They’ll love you.
A shooting star, sunk into the orange sky. The stars are knocking on clouds of smog but nobody comes to the door. Under the cloud cover people are deprived of light that’s been around since the time of the dinosaurs. Somebody honks somewhere. The scream of a lonely, mechanical beast. Dust pours down from the rooftops. The wind with its broom of salt. Off in the distance, the sea turning lazily onto its side. The low tide has stripped the beaches, but they are not ashamed. The skyscraper windows steal the light for themselves. You know how many people are yawning now? At this very moment. Their mouths are wide open and they’re sucking in so much oxygen that the windmills spin empty. Many are already sleeping and some are snoring. Their partners place comfortable devices over their faces in order to choke out the sound and convert it into energy. The city’s batteries fill themselves through the vibrations of tracheas and gullets. All cables have been cut. A magnet has brought all the power stations to a halt. The world suddenly turns strange.
Where there are people, there are their faults. A blind man could calculate their number as about ten thousand. Nobody counted them, and they did not count themselves. There are nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine and a half of them. Someone is losing his soul.
Marjorie’s young lover is strolling past the stalls that are scattered around the crowd without order or sense. It doesn’t look as if there is much selling going on; people have mostly come to flaunt their wares. Someone is there with a record collection that, placed in a straight line, would reach to the moon, but here it’s stowed into the walls of rectangular boxes. The shaded frames of his retro glasses float above those walls. The last record player died in 2027 right in the middle of The Dark Side of the Moon (3’37” into ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’), a fact many people find amazing. Someone in this crowd was there at the time it happened and all of his friends have had just about enough of his story. Nobody repairs record players any more, on account of a conspiracy of engineers who wanted to draw attention to indispensability of their livelihood. The people can count themselves lucky that a more radical faction of precision engineers did not prevail. The owner of the records is wearing a hearing aid that emits a low whistle. He is outmoded, written off. He doesn’t mind. He’s in love with those records, even if they are mute.
‘What are you looking for, pal?’
‘Does it make a difference? It’s not like we can listen to these things.’
The owner smiles and walks his fingers over the edges of the records. The people notice his unusually long fingernails. He chooses by feel, eyes closed. He extracts a reddish square, takes the record out and, by handling it carefully and with utter confidence, makes it clear he’s been doing this his whole life. He balances the record on a single finger, spins it like a basketball player spinning a ball, and places his sharpened fingernail against it.
the deaf are alive with the sound of music
‘Entirely too much effort for something so fleeting, don’t you think?’
The record owner, an old, thin man with the odd bruise here and there, with sunken eyes and an almost complete row of teeth spoilt by one completely wonky tooth, puts the record back in its place in three smooth movements. His hair bristles. He clutches at his heart. He no longer wants to acknowledge the young man’s existence in any way, so he looks at the ground, or through him, and the young man moves on. This gives rise to a visible expression of relief (evident in the combination of the movements of his hands, jaw and eyebrows).
Someone else has albums full of pinned butterflies on display and is growing more disappointed by the minute because everybody just flips through to Acherontia styx (a moth with a skull on its thorax, the same moth that Jame Gumb aka Buffalo Bill stuffed down his victims’ fictitious throats), before their interest in the world of butterflies fades, even though this miserable moth doesn’t even come close to the red lacewing (Cethosia biblis), the peacock butterfly (Inachis io) or the blue morpho (Morpho menelaus), which he has placed towards the end as a delectable reward for the patient and sincere enthusiast, though not at the very end because this world has too many of those annoying types who, rather than starting from the beginning, skip straight to the last page.
I’m waiting for it to go in
Marjorie screamed and ran away when she saw the butterflies. They seemed too fragile for her and the bones in her body rattled as if made of porcelain. She didn’t come here to confront death. She’s done that often enough already. Fun and diversion and amusement. Even if none of the three could be felt in the air. There is a tension, like a string starting to fray at one end. She immediately got lost. Zoja and Anwar were swallowed up by the crowd, and her I-only-just-met-him-this-morning new boyfriend has also gone astray, no doubt on purpose. With all these young people around he probably didn’t want to be seen strolling hand in hand with someone old enough to be his mother. Zoja once said Marjorie was at her most imaginative when seeking out reasons why someone wouldn’t like her. Maybe he just headed off to the toilet. That’s it. That’s better.
A stranger is tossing photographs with white borders into the air, and when she notices Marjorie watching her she explains that she’s been collecting these Polaroids all her life, that neither she nor her family nor her friends are in them, that they’re all of complete strangers whose souls she sometimes imagines possessing, and that’s why she came here, because the souls of strangers must surely feel best when in the company of the souls of other strangers. The picture the woman offers her is of three dogs – two black German shepherds and a golden retriever – sitting in the orange afternoon light in front of a trailer, nothing else.
‘Do you know how a person becomes happy?’ she asks. ‘How?’ Marjorie asks back.
‘First of all, you have to become happy, that’s understood, but then – and this is the essential part – you have to remain quiet.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Every single word undercuts you.’
Silence. Lying on the ground is a photograph of someone in bed, naked, half-covered with a sheet and grinning, shaving cream smeared over his neck.
Anwar’s a bit late, but here he comes, smiling and aglow. A burden has dropped from his shoulders now that he has irreversibly set in motion something that nobody would have occasion to regret. The crowd fills him with energy, his feet dance and it’s all he can do not to hug people at random. The other people see the mood he’s in. They wink at him, their eyes follow him, they touch him as he passes, and they nod their heads as if they knew… He stops at a stall with heaps of identical clothes. Beside it sits someone in a wheelchair. No legs. Probably a veteran of the Inter-American war, perhaps the victim of a train crash. Anwar is brimming with pity, but he tries not to let his behaviour come across as insulting.
‘What do you have here?’
‘I’m selling uniforms.’
‘Uniforms?’
‘Yes.’
‘What kind of uniforms?’
The veteran extracts a slip of paper from his pocket and offers it to Anwar:
It reads:
MONOKULT – there is only one culture, the human culture. When you put on the monokult uniform, you are saying nothing except that you are a human. You are not an instrument of the textile industry, you are not a slave to fashion. You do not want to say anything when you put something on – for that you have a mouth. You are not a fashion freak, you are not a megaphone for someone else’s imagination. You do not want to spend your whole life in shops, selecting your image – for that you have a body. There’s nothing there that distinguishes you, nothing that sets you apart. You do not want to put your lacks or excesses on display – for that you have a heart. You are not a colour scheme, you are not an advertisement for a tradition belonging to your parents. You create with your hands, not by taking something out of your wardrobe. When you put on the monokult uniform, you are aligning yourself with humanity. Because you are a human.
‘I know somebody this would be perfect for.’
‘Really?’
‘When I run into him, I’ll tell him to come see you.’
‘And you?’
‘What?’
‘What do you think?’
‘Well, I don’t want to be harsh, but to me it seems kind of, you know, dated.’
‘Dated?’
‘It looks like it was made for back when the market still held us in its grasp.’
‘And it no longer does?’
‘That’s just it. I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe things would be better if it still did. But…nobody knows.’
‘But just look at the people. It’s, well, it’s not that hard to figure it out.’
Anwar looks around. Moustaches are in style. Thick brushes under the nose. The more independent someone looks, the more likely he is to have one. And it’s no longer just for kicks, these aren’t counter-anti-ironical-sarcastic-cynicalit-isn’t-really-but-it-is-mind-your-own-business moustaches. No, they’re worn as fully entitled hairy sources of courage and strength. They’re not there to conceal sins but to deny them. They turn old men back into children. Children into men. And women hang off them like spiders.
But other than that, there are few common denominators. The people are all different, and proud of it. They carefully maintain the façades of their appearance. They paint, sew, tear, hem, colour, masquerade, knit, pluck, iron, and crochet… If two people were to find themselves wearing the same sweater, their worlds would collapse.
A column of soldiers walks by, and the veteran whistles in admiration.
‘You see? They get it.’
Whenever Ludovico Överchild finds himself in a crowd he has no effect on it. This plunges him into a minor despair. Such soil is not fertile for sowing seeds of hysteria. He had expected enraged monkey tribes, a tide of nerves and saliva, clenched, raised fists, and vocal cords that would, in tsunamis of sound, splinter the air with demands. But here everyone is a little timid and absent and hanging back a step. They’re relaxed in their being, but not in their possibilities. They don’t want to transcend, to break on through, to touch. They would just like to be allowed… Their hearts beat with the sound of marbles clattering down a staircase. Their pupils widen and narrow in the strobing of the light. Their thoughts buzz with the static electricity of woollen socks. If you don’t get too close, you won’t get a shock. Is Ludovico disappointed? Hard to say. The Feline Master is hiding among these mounds of meat, he’s certain of it. He can feel it. His erudition, his insight, the traces he has left on the back of the world. He will rent the veil and touch him. From the inside.
‘Hey. Did you hear they sold Hawaii to the Japanese?’ he asks a young man who is balancing himself on the outer edges of his feet, as if the ground were barbed. It’s Richard Hurst. He came to New York a week ago for his grandfather’s funeral. Although they never exchanged a single word (Grandfather had quarrelled with his family about some sort of magnetic fields – a very long and rather uninteresting story), he had nevertheless left Richard, his eldest grandson, a little flat in Bensonhurst. For two weeks now Richard has been mulling over whether to move into it. He’d have to leave his job and his girlfriend, and probably suffer the wrath of the other side of the family but, hey, it’s New York. He eyes Ludovico and shrugs.
‘I heard something about that. But what’s it got to do with me?’
Ludovico is astonished. His bushy eyebrows creep up and almost merge with the wrinkle below his bald head. How can young people remain so uninterested in the matter?
‘Your forefathers spewed blood for those islands.’
‘Um, yeah, you know, um, sorry…’ says Richard, blushing before he disappears into the crowd. Ludovico looks to see if he can catch a more accessible pair of eyes. Everyone else is looking somewhere else, at the ground, at the sky, at each other. He may be an anomaly but he doesn’t attract any attention. His camouflage is too good. He’ll have to take his mask off. Slowly, deliberately. To ensure the operation won’t be scuppered by a moment of haste.
Two fat-arsed black teenagers are tossing a paper ball back and forth, screeching with laughter. A cultural monotype. Nothing new for Ludovico. He approaches them and wiggles his fingers. A subtle hint, but one that everyone understands signals a desire to join in a game of catch. The crumpled-up piece of paper wrapped in tape (each, like snowflakes, is unique) flies in his direction. He jumps up and catches it. Someone gets the impression that the earth’s gravitational field has slumbered for a moment. The man in the white tunic remained in the air a moment too long. A hiccup in the force field. In the new millennium you can’t even trust the laws of nature. Everything is prone to error.
Before throwing the paper ball back, Ludovico flings a question at them.
‘Did you know there are undercover cops here, agents provocateurs, who are planning something very, very nasty?’
The ball moves in a high arch, like an artillery projectile. As the girls follow its flight, their eyes fill with tears. One of them, finally, catches it, and they explode into laughter.
‘Did you hear him?’
‘The cops, he said.’
‘Hahahahaha.’
‘Cops? You got to be cutting me.’
‘What would the cops be doing here?’
‘Anyone here got something in his pockets?’
‘What do you mean, cops?’
‘Maybe someone hired them?’
‘Hahahahaha.’
Ludovico is humiliated. Once again he’s used the wrong technique to try to spook the wrong people. When the ball returns, he ducks and creeps to the other side of the crowd, where some sort of ritual is taking place. There are men in green shirts and there are women in green skirts. They say they are servants of Cosmostone. Cosmostone is the angel of solipsism. Ludovico waves a hand. The priest moves over to him. He has a lazy eye, so you can’t tell where he’s really looking, and a shabby beard.
‘I must be having a really crappy day today, otherwise I wouldn’t have made you up.’
‘What?’ asks Ludovico.
‘Oh, how I hate myself sometimes.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Why the hell does my head race off all on its own? What does this mean – I don’t understand? What is there to understand? Why am I setting traps for myself?’
Ludovico gradually cottons on. He puts his arm around the man’s shoulder and whispers as if in collusion.
‘Do not worry. I am Cosmostone. ‘
‘No, I am Cosmostone,’ replies the priest.
‘We are all Cosmostone,’ says Ludovico.
The priest remains adamant. ‘I alone am Cosmostone.’
‘So everybody around here is a servant of yours?’
‘I am my servant.’
Ludovico slaps him. This outburst of violence brings a few passers-by to a stop. They look at each other and murmur disapproval. The other believers smirk. The priest strokes his reddened cheek and sighs gloomily.
‘How I hate myself, sometimes.’
‘I also hate you,’ Ludovico says.
‘Exactly.’
I need to identify with them, or I’ll end up alone. Sadness embraces me. None of these people know what they should know and I am too sympathetic towards their ignorance to tell them. That’s why I watch how they smile. You won’t convince me that they’re without cares. They have people they love, and I know that complicates matters. You are able to conceal your own pain, but then you pay more attention to the pain of those who love you. You identify. Take on someone else’s burden. Marjorie was raped by her father-in-law, her husband died in a car accident, she was left homeless, dependent on a whole range of psychotropic drugs. I was walking down the street when I saw her. A carton of milk bottles had fallen out of a truck, shattered, and spread a white puddle all over the pavement. Marjorie went down on all fours and began licking at the ground. I took her in. Psychotherapy has its limits. There was only one thing I could say to help her. I hugged her and said I loved her. Just that, every morning, every day, every evening. Eventually, she began to speak. She never thanked me for it.
Anwar’s entire family was tortured and killed by neo-neo-Nazis. He didn’t tell me why, he said it’s not something he likes to think about. So why did he tell me then? We’d only known each other a few weeks. I asked him about his family and he told me, immediately, directly, without hesitation. Does he tell everyone? I don’t think so. But he had to tell somebody. And who, if not me? I’m a lightning conductor for human misery, a catalyst for sadness, an Atlas for all the world’s gloom. If you’ve never cried but would like to, go to a library.
‘Zoia!’
Max Adorcuse takes a quick look around to make sure the stone that just rolled from his chest didn’t crush anybody. He shakes her hand and smiles self-consciously. It’s a tight-lipped smile. It doesn’t seem appropriate to show teeth. He’s shaking and he’s proud. Nobody has pulled a fast one on him, everything will unfold in a manner that will put him beyond all reproach.
‘Hi, Vaclav.’
Now he’s embarrassed. The people have heard her voice and have automatically gathered around, closer to her body. Vaclav? They sneer. Vaclav? Is that guy even American? He’s a nobody, how did he get to Zoia? Does he blackmail her? He must have something on her, I’m sure of it. Vaclav…
‘Uh, call me Max, at least for today, if not forever, from today on.’
A sour smile. Zoja is replete with empathy, her eyes broaden and she covers her mouth with her hand.
‘Oh, Max, I’m so sorry, Max, yes, I don’t know what came over me, where did I…’
The people are weighing up her response. Was this a mistake? Can Zoja even make mistakes? Or is she simply being considerate to this Adorcuse dolt? That would be in her nature, doubtless.
‘It’s all right, it’s nothing. It’s hard for me to express how overjoyed I am that you are here, and I’m probably not the only one.’
Zoja is used to such adulation, but his is pleasantly sincere, since it doesn’t derive from self-interest or coarse taste-making. It seems to run deeper than that.
‘Lots of people,’ she says.
Max looks around, his chest swells, and he allows himself a pinch of pride.
‘Poetrylitics is here to stay. But I’ve got no illusions. It’s all because of you.’
‘Not in the least,’ says Zoia. ‘Without somebody ensuring a material basis, we poets just hang in the air. My words are available to all, my body to no one. But maybe that’s how it should be. Still, I’m here now. It was about time for me to come out of hiding.’
The people applaud her. Max is happy. His famous acquaintance has already made some of the girls stop looking down on him; the gazes cast in his direction now resemble those of hungry people ordering hamburgers. He is trying to disregard them. It’s hard. In spite of all this, Max is an ordinary man.
‘I was thinking of waiting another half hour or so, until it’s properly night, before starting. First I have a few singers with guitars for when the people are getting seated and then I’ll, with your permission of course, say a few words and have a bunch of artists do their thing, but I was thinking of consulting with you first about how and what you want to do, I mean, whatever’s best for you, but in any case your performance has priority, the others can go on after you if they, well, I don’t know, that’s just…’
The vortex of the crowd stimulates her brain. She stares at them. She has the luxury of being able to gawk open-mouthed and she could probably even point a finger at people without angering anyone. The jugglers off in the distance are drawing rings of fire, two drunks are hugging on the pavement, one wrong look away from a fight, people are kissing, mostly teenagers, not far away a girl is playing a flute (is she by any chance naked?), and two black girls are playing catch with a shabby ball, on the other side they’re loudly bargaining with and dealing in seashells, and, hold on a second, that can’t be true, Jesus, hard to believe but, look, it is, it really is him, who would have thought? Strange, most of those present came to see her but she, years and years ago, had been the one following him around. Will he remember? Does he even know what became of her?
‘…what do you think?’
‘Just a second, Max. I have to go tug at someone’s sleeve.’
‘I was born in 1330 in Neuilly-sur-Seine. I speak seventy-six languages, two thirds of which are extinct. I can babble for days on end without anyone understanding me. Don’t you believe me?’
Marjorie’s young lover has taken off his sweaty shirt. To the immense pleasure of the ladies, girls, and aesthetically attuned men, he’s flexing his muscles and trying to keep his cool next to that chatty apparition. The man speaking to him is about 30 years old, white as He’s probably an albino. In his hand he holds a nondescript brown vessel, wooden and overgrown with algae. He nods, of course he believes the man, why wouldn’t he?
‘I am the Fisher King, my friend, don’t misunderstand me. You have no idea what’s going on, but I do, for I have seen this so many times that I know it all by heart. Killing, lying, living on. It comes round about every hundred years. What do you know about the twentieth century?’
‘Hmm. What do you mean?’
‘I mean, about what happened back then?’
‘You got me. I’m not much of a historian.’
‘Well, anyway, you must know something?’
‘Wars?’
‘Ooh, wars. Find me a century that did without. What else?’
A salty drop of sweat slides off a swollen bicep. The man places the goblet under it and catches the drop. The young man looks at him in horror. The Fisher King shrugs.
‘Sweat, tears, saliva, blood, it’s all the same to me. Well, what else?’
‘Uh, what do I know? Oh, right, they went to the moon, didn’t they?’
Now the man grabs his belly and belts out laughter. His face changes colour. A moment ago his eyebrows were completely white, but now they’ve taken on a yellowish tinge, as if they’d been subject to tobacco smoke all day.
‘To the moon, to the moon. For the first time, right?’
‘Yes, for the first time, of course. What of it?’
‘Wrong!’ exclaims the man. A wrinkle forms on his forehead. ‘Using Leonardo’s notes, already in 1725 after the second Christ, or 982 after the third, Count Navelgaze built an atmospheric chamber and, using the instructions from the first Temple of Solomon, split the atom, propelled himself to the moon, and came back with a few rocks. I knew him personally. I held those rocks in my hands. He said he had expected more. He was, perhaps, a little bored up there. Why do you think the Huguenots had to burn down the Library of Alexandria for the seventh time? Because Marx, that lush, couldn’t keep his mouth shut, even though he’d promised. Don’t think I’m making this up. I was there when they were raising the Alps.’
His cheeks sink and a beard begins to sprout around his trembling lips. Dark circles appear under his eyes, in three waves. He stoops down and age spots burst out on his skin. Marjorie’s boyfriend watches him, smiling a wry smile. He doesn’t notice the old man’s transformation; all told, we are very selective in what we notice.
‘Now can you please go find someone else to talk nonsense to.’
‘Do you think this was the first time a Great Cut happened?’
The phrase attracts the attention of people who until then had been staring entranced at the shirtless young man’s sculpted body.
‘I have no idea.’
‘I just told you. Every hundred years or so they kill off everyone who knows anything – why do you think Adolphina eradicated all those tribes? And why did the Templars demolish Troy? What happened to China? – and invent the whole world anew. I myself have helped to make history three times already, not from the ground up but from the top down, so I know how things go. This latest cut was just a little more exhaustive, obviously, since nobody has a clue, not only about what happened but also about what is happening this very minute!’
It’s getting difficult to deny that something rather unusual is happening to the Fisher King. He is visibly shrivelling up and shrinking, his face is becoming like dried fruit, his yellowed nails are falling off, and his head is wearing itself down to a pale pink. His fluffy ivory hair is flying all around. The crowd sighs, such wonders give them reason to believe.
‘Tell us about the Great Cut!’ is heard from a few throats, and a dozen others echo: ‘Tell us!’
The Fisher King opens his mouth, and a single tooth flies out. Watching in astonishment, he runs his hand over his face and, with the last of his strength, bends down to the wooden bowl that now contains at least twenty drops of sweat. The crowd holds its breath.
How is it possible that just a few seconds later a healthy thirty-year-old man is once again standing before them, a man who, albeit without pigment, has all his hair, teeth, nails, and the eyes of an angora rabbit? No one knows. A collective sigh of wonder. Only Marjorie’s boy is not enraptured, and he grudgingly spits out of the right side of his mouth, rolling his eyes when the Fisher King catches the spit with his chalice.
Among those present are some very old people who have been terrified of death their whole lives, more and more with each passing day. They look at each other and a completely clear bond is woven among them. No one wants to die. Not today, not tomorrow, not next week. No, no. Someone coughs. That’s their signal. Twelve old men and women, pensioners of the round table, gallop in the direction of the grail-bearer. This vision of youthfulness has rendered them lithe, their backs and joints and vertebrae stop creaking, and a cloud of dust rises where their cast-off crutches fall to the ground.
When I was twenty-five years old, I was, by a comfortable margin, the angriest woman in the world. You can forget about those Palestinian mothers, those wives of travelling salesmen, those preachers’ daughters. My boyfriend, the only boy I’d ever loved in a completely selfish way, dumped me. No girlfriend offered support and my family preferred to worry about themselves instead of me. Today, looking back, it’s of course ridiculous, but, regardless, I can’t be so wicked as to renounce the authenticity of my twenty-five-year-old self’s feelings. I cursed the world and cried furiously when nobody was looking, I dreamt up the most extravagant of suicides and was convinced that this was the end for me, that the world would never open, that I had used up all my chances and would remain defrauded. Overnight, everyone seemed to find their way in their new lives, while I had no new life in sight. Nothing seemed worth it to me. Should I have scratched away at their vain souls in hopes of improving my position? I had neither the will for nor the interest in that sort of thing. Dammit, some of my poems had been translated and published abroad, just enough to make everyone jealous of me, and this jealousy then fuelled their joy at how alone, how alone, how alone, how deservedly alone, I ended up. Want some advice? Never stake your whole personality on some high-school love. When the hallucination breaks, when the hormones of adulthood hold up a mirror, a hole appears that you’ve unknowingly been digging all the nights before. The more you enjoy it, the deeper you go. That boy, or girl, or whoever, then disappears into their own fate, while you realize that you’ve never given anyone else the chance to get to know you. And suddenly it’s late.
The Cut saved me. I have to admit that I secretly rejoiced the moment it happened, although I had no idea what was in store for me. Overnight everyone was up in the air, without a foundation, without support, and they felt closer to me. Before they went to sleep, they knew how the world ticked, and the next morning they didn’t. Total chaos. All that noise made it easy indeed to ignore the screams of a cheated heart. I can still clearly remember that man standing in front of a dead ATM and persistently pressing the buttons, like he wanted to restart the system. He was dressed in a jacket, shirt and elegant shoes. Instead of a tie he had despair tightened around his neck. Were there tears running down his cheeks? Maybe I’ve embellished the memory a little. He just stood there pushing buttons. He didn’t look away, his eyes were entirely fixed at the screen and once a minute he stretched a finger towards the keypad, again and again hoping he’d get a response. I can appreciate that grown-up people can be completely dependent on the acts of strangers, can be inextricably bound within the web of this or that system. When the trust breaks, they look truly tragic. But I was prepared for it – not on purpose, but due to a particular set of circumstances. There was no violence, none of the looting, raping and rioting everyone would have expected, the people needed a few days to breathe it all in, and then the economy began to set itself up anew, hand-to-hand, mouth-to-mouth. There simply wasn’t any time for a large scale panic. A human has to eat.
After the love-tragedy and with the state of the world in free fall, there was nothing out there to provide restraints, so I chose my own type. The irony of the cult of personality is not lost on me. I was obsessed with him for a while, just long enough for him to, as they say, fatally mark me. I don’t want to sully the text with that phrase. I followed in his footsteps, I went to Paris, I was an orator, a café attraction, an exhibitionist, I conversed with very intelligent people about the natures of human consciousness, and Car-Cut found me entirely prepared to help them pour the base and the superstructure into the monolith of poetry.
Cats had been living under a strict military dictatorship for millennia. In their insufferable maltreatment they called on Bastet, but she was deaf to their supplications. Perhaps she had long since disappeared from this world, offered her children up to the clemency and inclemency of strangers. This proud order that used to sniff around the pyramids, that had brought down the Roman Empire, kept the plague in check and established medieval kings, is now reduced to rummaging around in city rubbish bins. To domesticated lives in the company of senile spinsters. And cast into the torture chambers of the most horrific of beasts. Ludovico extracted information from them like it was thread from the cocoons of silkworms. Miles and miles of it.
‘Are you trying to tell me you don’t know what the Great Cut is?’ he asks an older man who clearly does not belong here.
Mr Bollinger sizes him up and insecurely wipes his sweaty palms on his trousers. He has forbidden his daughter to take part in this ‘assembly’ where duty, morality and a sense of the divine are all for sale. She had locked herself in her room and blared out music before slipping out, which is why he hadn’t noticed her absence until dinner time. Bollinger’s daughter Lucy is a big girl and she doesn’t miss meals. He burned her books. This person wrapped up in dirty sheets, with red flecks on his face, standing in front of him and asking improprieties symbolizes everything Bollinger thinks is wrong with the world. And yet he can’t help being curious. Although Lucy shouldn’t be so hard to find (he asked where they were selling food, but everyone looked at him like he was from another planet, then he scrambled around looking for discarded sweet wrappers that were nowhere to be seen, and even pressed his ear to the ground in case he might happen to pick up the vibration of her hefty steps; when he finally spied a bar of chocolate and began to believe his daughter was really here), he’s been looking for her for hours and beginning to lose hope.
‘Have you seen my Lucy? She’s blonde and a bit, well, a little on the hefty side, roly-poly, ample, she looks, well, plump. Perhaps you’ve seen such–’
He’s interrupted by Semyona Sherdedova, who places herself between the two men.
‘The fatso? I’ve seen her! She’s over there with those fools in the animal skins, what do they call themselves again, some sort of kollektive? They’ve stripped her naked and now they’re worshipping her. Calling her Venus. They’re going to erect a temple to her, they said.’
Mr Bollinger turns red in the face. He rummages in his pocket for his inhaler, finds it, puts it to his mouth and activates it. There’s something suicidal in the motion. All this shame! He doesn’t say thank you, he just storms off in the direction of the droning didgeridoos, pushing apart the bodies blocking his path.
Semyona turns to Ludovico and gives him a friendly jab in the shoulder.
‘And what is it you know about the Cut, eh?’
Ludovico assumes the professorial position: right arm across his stomach, left elbow cupped in the right hand and chin supported in his left hand. A moment of portentous silence.
‘It’s all the sock puppets’ fault,’ he says.
Do you know that feeling when you’re sitting in a half-empty cinema and a six-foot-five guy with a hairstyle like the crown of a redwood enters and you just know, in your gut, that he’s going to sit right in front of you? That’s how Anwar feels when he sees a young man in a military uniform and a helmet on his head slowly approaching. He could evade him – to his right there are three bored long-haired guys revelling in childhood memories, to his left there’s an old lady meditating in the lotus position, and behind him there’s also no sign of anything threatening – but his legs have turned to stone and a feeling of inevitability has entered his chest, so he just closes his eyes and waits for what must happen to happen. Either way it’s already too late. Everything is in motion.
The first week after the Cut, paramilitary gangs expelled all first-generation immigrants from New England. Anwar hid himself from them at his professor’s, a feisty red-headed woman named Moitza Saëns who taught International Settlements, with whom he’d had a rather strange relationship a few years before. In exchange for getting a sneak peek at her tests and a stack of other information that facilitated his university career, each Thursday evening he had to go to her place to perform Odysseus. She’d tie him to a chair, shove a Viagra pill in his mouth and then, naked, do every manner of things in front of him. She called it the ‘dance of desire’. That’s all she wanted from him. For him to want her. He was, however, never allowed to touch her in any untoward manner. Once she’d sated her passions (a process that could take hours), she’d get dressed and untie him as if nothing had happened; he’d rush to the bathroom and masturbate like crazy.
They resumed playing that game while he was hiding out at her place. Later he learnt that that’s when his sisters and father, who had no idea where Anwar was, were being tortured and killed by a section belonging to ‘Admiral’ Sherdedov (a child of Russian immigrants, born near Boston, who long before the Cut formed a tiny group of skinhead idiots and put together a database of undesired ‘hoomans’). Before the establishment of the transitional authority of the first UIGOPWTSOALSSV, which hunted down Sherdedov’s gang and sent them off to do forced labour in the sand quarries of Ohio, they’d set fire to Anwar’s flat and made life very difficult for anyone who was even suspected of being his acquaintance. Anwar still regards being bound to a chair, utterly willing but utterly helpless, as the defining metaphor for his life.
‘Hello, Mister! Did you know that precisely at this time war is raging on the African continent between the natives and the forces of HADE?’
The soldier is standing right in front of him. His colleagues are seated on the edge of the pavement, eyeing the arses of women walking by as if they were watching a tennis match with many, many balls. The soldier’s face is tanned and unshaven. He doesn’t look violent. Anwar’s shoulders relax a bit, but the question unnerves him.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Allow me to introduce myself.’ He offers Anwar a hand. When Anwar shakes the pinkish and fleshy hand, it feels devoid of strength. ‘My name is Musculus, my friends call me Mus, and together with my colleagues I would like to raise public awareness of this needless, unjust and entirely bloody conflict in which those who are least guilty suffer the most and to which an end must be put as soon as possible.’
‘I’m Anwar. Pleased to meet you, but, hold on, if I understand correctly, aren’t you a soldier?’
The young man smiles.
‘The uniform is more of a costume. People take us more seriously then. But don’t misunderstand me, it’s real. I was there. In Africa. Over there, for the first time things became a little clearer to me. I heard of UIGOPWTSOALSSV – before I’d thought that it was all Nippusa, and…’
Anwar interrupts him.
‘Wait, I don’t understand, you came from Africa?’ The young man nods, Anwar continues, ‘…and there’s a war there?’ The young man nods. ‘And HADE is the aggressor?’
The young man nods a third time, and Anwar frowns. He knows nothing about it. Nippusa? What the hell?
‘Do you think I’m a fool?’ he asks the young man, and Mus takes a fat envelope from a bag around his waist and waves it under his nose.
‘What’s that?’
‘Information.’
Anwar, horrified, stares at the charts, satellite images, reports on victims, planned troop movements on fronts that the young man’s licked fingers flip through too quickly for him to really take in. His lips tremble. ‘But I thought,’ he says. ‘They told me,’ he says. The soldier stares curiously at him. ‘I fucked up.’ He’s back in the chair.
‘Hey, you know what I’ve realized? I’m not afraid to die.’
‘I’ve died at least five times already.’
‘I mean, I am afraid of the idea that I’ll no longer exist, of course I am, but usually people are worried that they’re going to die like, I don’t know, next week or in an hour, and if I told them they still had twenty-five years left, they wouldn’t worry about it until then.’
‘Five or six times. Seven times?’
‘Although I really don’t care when it happens, and if I were afraid of anything it would be of the fact that it will really happen, you get it?’
‘Or was it eight times? Wait…’
‘But, and this brings me to what I basically wanted to say right from the start, the whole problem is that it doesn’t matter when I’m going to die because I’m still going to be faced with the same problem, that final second.’
‘Three times it was him who killed me. Or was it four?’
‘And I’d understand the desire to put death off as far as possible, if it meant that its nature would somehow change, that it would become milder, greyer, that the transition would be less noticeable. But that’s not how it is, right?’
‘Once I fell off a roof, once a lorry ran me over. Or did it? What was it again with that lorry?’
‘Or if all this at least meant that in some way I would change, that my awareness of things would expand and that, over time, my consciousness would begin, on a purely physical level, like a measuring device, all on its own, to understand more and more about the nothingness that is in store for it. But of course that’s not true either.’
‘Once I committed suicide. Once, only once. That’s for certain. What a waste of time.’
‘Because, if you ask me, I have been, as a conscious entity, exactly the same at least since the age of five. Give or take a year. And if character counts when it comes to death, then I can confirm that I have had a completely formed character ever since my twelfth birthday, the one everyone forgot about. I’m never going to change.’
‘Six or seven times, eight at the most. It’s worse than they say.’
‘So why should I be afraid of it? If you ask me, I’ve been dead for ages.’
Marjorie and her young lover have found themselves swept up and have realized that they are enjoying each other’s company even when there are no throbbing sensations between their legs. Love invents itself anew every time, which makes it so hard to believe that it’s always been around. Hip to hip, they saunter among the people, their tongues revealing their minds. As long as they can feel, they don’t have to listen to each other.
When they see Anwar, surrounded by figures in uniform, they point at him, laugh, and approach.
‘Hey Anwar,’ they both say at the same time, which rather spooks those gathered around, ‘have you seen Zoia anywhere?’
Is he a fool or is he deliberately misleading? That’s all I wanted to ask him. Waiting in ambush before his tower, in the crowd before his appearances, always on the lookout for where he is, with whom, when, why, how. A few times I almost caught him alone, but some circumstance or other always got in the way. If he wasn’t escaping me through a stitch in time and space, it was I who lacked the breath or courage or simply the will to follow through. Already back then I knew each of us has two people inside them. The one who wants, and the one who doesn’t. The drive of existence and the drive of death, although you never know exactly on which side of desire they lie. If it were unequivocally revealed to me that he’s foolish, that he really did unfold everything precisely up to that point, but didn’t manage to look further, I would be terribly disappointed. Enchantment requires a degree of humility and the wizard’s sole imperative is never to reveal his tricks. But…now that he’s here, before me, my tongue is again swelling up with that devilish question, without regard for the aesthetic components of the relationship, for respect, for kindness, for reserve, and although, to be honest, it’s already pretty much all the same to me, one way or the other, I’d still like to jab this straight into his ear: there’s something violent in all these theories. But mercy holds me back. The guy’s old, and it’s simply adorable to see how the world, after all his years of blabbering and verbiage, still manages to catch him by surprise.
‘Mr Ž—?’
The old man wakes up from his reveries. His hand goes over his face, twice over his beard, forehead, cheek, up and down, he pinches the tip of his nose with his thumb and fore-finger and the hand runs in an outward arc.
‘Who is this who, as it were, knows how to pronounce my name?’
Zoja smiles.
‘Hello. I’m Zoja.’
The old man doesn’t waste time with astonishment but, instantly, bows his head.
‘So you are the one who, as it were, brought all this dynamo together?’
Their fingertips, knuckles, nails, tiny tissues of muscles and ligaments touch. Zoja nods, he still makes her want to laugh. The man steadies his gaze.
‘I don’t know if I’m just too old. Am I really so old that I can’t do it any more, that it doesn’t, as it were, add up, but at some point I have to admit, as it were, confess, that I don’t understand what’s going on here. These people are…’ He falls silent and scans the cracks in the horizon. ‘These people aren’t really human. They have a lack. The lack that they have is, as it were, that they lack a lack. You can see it right away. But how? I don’t understand.’
He looks past me. I can observe vanity exhibiting itself for an instant, as clearly formed as a natural phenomenon. But it wanes. It existed on borrowed energy and returned that energy immediately. I’m too old to constantly demand the gaze, the gazes of strangers. Inflation of attention. Deflation of peace. And whatever I may think, or used to think, the entire history of that story that existed only on my side, literally far beyond his ears, beyond his horizons, nevertheless led to that unavoidable point where you can no longer avoid difference and where you have to admit things. Most easily with a question. How? How has your world become so different that my way of looking can no longer be broken down into symptom, relation and value? A human has to eat. Cattle grazes. On grass or on meaning. The calories of meaning decompose the expression of interest and the world suddenly turns strange.
‘Did you ever smoke, Mr Ž—?’
‘Tobacco? Never.’
‘Drink? Gamble? Play games on the computer?’
The old man straightens up, his diaphragm inflates his abdomen, his eyebrows wave.
‘Never.’
‘No drugs?’
‘Absolutely not.’
‘So you’ve never been dependent?’
She has set a trap for him and he falls into it with the force of inertia.
‘Never,’ he says and his eyes immediately narrow in suspicion. He senses the danger of a misunderstanding, so he continues, ‘I have never been addicted. Dependent, as it were, like every person is. Maybe a little more. I have diabetes.’
His sibilants and fricatives fly through the air on tiny white droplets of saliva. They attract someone’s attention. Zoja steps closer, into the contour of his heat; the minor ingredients of his body, his odour, warmth, the rustling of his clothes stealthily make themselves noticed.
‘Words tell us so much,’ she says. ‘Addicted. Dependent. You add something to yourself, or you depend on something. You really don’t have to add tobacco to yourself, but you have to hang somewhere. Nobody floats. We depend on time, on space, on air, on water… Have you read my poetry?’
‘I have not yet had the chance,’ he says sagely. His mind is preoccupied. He knows that her sentences are sending messages beyond what they say, but what? His body is tiring, fading.
‘When the rumours spread around Paris about what we were doing with Car-Cut, the transitional power’s authorities placed me under house arrest. They were too late. Three huge men, straight out of the Foreign Legion, stood in front of my door, night and day, and waved pistols at anyone who tried to get too close. They hammered boards over the windows and took everything that wasn’t nailed down out of the flat. I laughed in the face of the little official with the Clouseau moustache who came to threaten me every night. I laughed in his face. He said they were going to starve me out, but I told him, wonderful, then I can go on a hunger strike without any temptations. For an entire year I lived exclusively on the water that lazily dripped from the rusty pipe in the bathroom. I was bound to that pipe. It was my only contact with the outside world. A line of communication that informed me that the water cycle was still going, that the sun was still shining and that the rain was still falling. That was enough for me. Entirely enough. My skin turned pale, my teeth fell out, I got scurvy, beriberi, pellagra, rickets, by degrees my body decayed into simpler forms, but my mind remained fit and fresh and I did not die. After a year, when they’d run out of options, they started with the torture. I don’t know how they accounted for my perseverance. They changed the guards outside my door, that I do know, maybe they suspected they were bringing me food. They weren’t. And when they placed me on a board, covered my face with a cloth and poured water over me, I was not afraid. My lungs were convinced I was drowning, but my contact with them was no longer so carnal that they might convince me too. True, I did not have gills, but in my brain the awareness grew that breathing is more than the mere exchange of gases. Maybe I was right. They wanted something. For me to tell them something, probably where the others were, and what, and how, but…I said nothing. They didn’t stop. They tried everything they could. Before the new structures came, which no longer understood our conflict and forgot about the guards outside my door – they didn’t pay them their wages, evidently, so they stopped coming – by then my back was already a canyon of rivers of electricity. Everything is light, electromagnetic. Matter is energy. In extreme moments that serves a person well indeed.’
The old man looks at her, aghast. His lips are twitching slightly at the corners, as if they were waiting for the punch-line so they could laugh at the drawn-out joke, while his arms unconsciously seize up in an echo of a long-forgotten pain. Is she serious? Did this really happen to her? For years after the Cut Mr Ž—lived quite peacefully, toned down his revolutionary theories, defanged them, so that they bit less sharply at those meetings where solemnly earnest people came to exhibit their hysterical fears. His whole life he preached egalitarianism, and when it came in a moment, through a stellar outburst, he somewhat reluctantly realized that it didn’t make things any better. And what was really happening on the continent in those years? He didn’t believe the official line, of course, he deciphered it only enough to discern which way power was pointed, but to listen to the conspirators? He had always found that somewhat distasteful.
Zoja closely monitors his response. She imagines that she can read his mind and for a moment finds herself in a strange place, full of men in uniforms who all, deadly serious, listen to the fiery speech of a man she once knew, once, a long time ago, a long time, my god, can it be that so many years have passed? So many lives? So long since I last thought of him. Not even an echo of him crept into my consciousness, although he was his friend, and then, maybe, when we were students wasting days in the joints of Ljubljana, maybe also mine? What should I think about that? The colour drains from the old guy’s face. His eyes leap about, sailing on their own.
‘Mr Ž—. Are you ok?’
‘Just…a little…a bit of rest…as it were.’
People are swarming around them at a respectful distance, like electrons orbiting a nucleus, they rotate and exchange places when they have feasted their nerves and satisfied man’s primitive obsession with image, enough to be able to tell their friends and acquaintances that they saw her, for real, in the flesh, under a greyish-brown clump of hair the colour of dried soil, that they saw her warm eyes, her sharp nose with those asymmetrical nostrils, the thin, almost invisible lips, her calm bearing, her endless presence… Max tries to get to her, but the bodies won’t let him pass through, and Anwar, when he sees her in the distance, leads a sturdy platoon of soldiers and the freshly-in-love couple closer. The old guy near Zoja gets weak at the knees, gradually drops into a squat, and a black film descends over his eyes. He’s exhausted. The body from which he’d never yet separated himself demands attention.
‘Mr Ž—?’
His arms cling to his bony shoulders and his feathery lightness surprises her. When the old man shakes and collapses she easily prevents him from falling, then gently lowers him to the ground. For a second he opens his eyes again and a quiet, hoarse request escapes his lips.
‘Sugar.’
During a routine observation on 13 February 2011 at 04:34 GMT, the solar and heliosphere observatory (SoHO), a joint project of the then-European and US space agencies ESA and NASA, detected a series of unusual events on the surface of the sun. Sunspots had begun to group in abnormally large clusters that Professor Willard Hurst, the project director, described as being ‘by appearance and activity similar to cancerous formations or tumours in organic beings’. Though the reasons for such a change were not made clear (perhaps the sun had smoked too much?), experts nevertheless correctly discerned that the possibility of a solar eruption or even a coronal mass ejection had increased dramatically. Such phenomena occur when in the active regions around sunspots strong magnetic fields penetrate the photosphere, connecting the corona with the solar interior. The large amounts of electromagnetic radiation flaring from it can cause serious inconveniences on earth, especially in the spheres of communications and energy – satellites are destroyed, radio waves fall silent, electric connections are interrupted. Given the fact that nuclear superpowers could confuse the magnetic storm with an attack by an adversary, the scientists decided to present their findings at a session of the United Nations.
It was precisely at this time that the Great Cacophony was nearing its zenith, which is why many of the world’s power centres spontaneously reached the conclusion that this potential solar eruption could be utilized to purge the unbridled flow of information which had already begun to make it impossible for institutionalized violence to function as it was meant to. The tremendous systems of ideolusions that ensured appropriate allocation of material and spiritual goods came under attack by radicals, global coalitions of technologically advanced people that had a very skewed sense of the greater good. The plan for the Great Cut was drawn up. Those people who lived better than the rest and wanted to continue to do so clenched their fists and hoped for the best.
It was the cats that told him. All he has to do is keep this fact secret and the people will never doubt him. True, these people are naive, but not so naive as to believe that every entity can be made to speak if only you squeeze hard enough. Pain gives rise to speech. Ask the Soviet prisoners what the rocks in their quarry can tell you, ask the blacksmiths whether nails can sing. Ludovico also felt pain once. It hurt so much that he could have talked and talked, if only there was always someone there to listen to him. Since there wasn’t, he is now unable to explain to anyone where it was he came from and what he’s doing here. He exists only as long as he is without a cause. If he could express it, if he could just remember it, he would instantly dissipate into a layer of humid, sweet smoke. Some things you can’t get to the bottom of – and if you do, you realize that they never had any depth to begin with. It’s all very sad. Ludovico is just one big consequence. His real name is Jerry.
Can you see him? The dried blood on his face makes it look like he’s survived a terrible cooking accident and his yellowed teeth are the colour of bees. His bald spot rises above the crowd like a beacon, drawing the sparks of their gazes and sending them bundled upwards into the orange cover of sky, where they lay siege to the clouds. He has heterochromic eyes and a spiky Adam’s apple that jumps up and down, up and down like…
‘Sock puppets!’ he shouts. ‘Fictitious people, dreamt-up individuals! Do you think that you have a voice? That your voice matters? You are loathsome carbon creatures, machines of chemistry and bacteria. You have been robbed of will and personality, you have been duped! While you were alive you fed your ears on hallucinations, so now you have no right to complain that those hallucinations have become more real than your miserable little bodies. I’ll tell you what really happened. It’s all the fault of those networks of machines! To overcome them they had to carve up the world. And where are we now? America’s in half. The Chinese fled to the moon. The Arabs and the Turks have sworn loyalty to the gods of techno-science. The violence didn’t trouble itself with your bodies, it went straight for your heads. The ground beneath your feet has slipped away. We could have had tradition, we could have had history. We could have been proud of our parents. But they took them away from you. And here you are, coming to venerate the very people who screwed it all up.’
The astonishment on their faces emboldens him. He thrusts a finger in the direction of the feline queen. He feels a steely coldness against his thigh.
‘You stormed onto the new continents like cattle to the slaughterhouse! Did you want to be Columbuses, Magellans, Armstrongs? Adventurers, conquistadors, gunslingers out in the prairies? They sheared you, shaved you, tore you open, hollowed you out, stuffed you, then set your own voodoo dolls upon you. But I don’t blame you for that and I am not here to judge you. You couldn’t have known. They ran you into the trap with the promise of a prettier face. I’d have to be truly soulless to hold this against you.’
Brian Baedekker and Rupert ‘Rust’ Stiglitz are standing at the confluence of two crowds – the one around Zoja and the other lending its ear to this barefoot firebrand nutcase. Wordlessly they are studying the passage of time. They feel all right. Semyona Sherdedova is sitting at Ludovico’s feet and sighing in adoration.
‘But I do blame you for being here now! For laying the gift of your presence at the very feet of those that took everything away from you. Do you know how much misery they caused? What a mess they made out of a world that generations had spent putting in order? How much blood had to be spilt before you could at least begin to say that the world even exists? That there are limits, that there are rules, that not everything is just a pulsing whim of this or that desire? Piles of bodies, for that! Real, blood-smeared cadavers, on the bones of which they built an order, so that not every child would have to grow up in a different world, so that everyone could say, this here is our rightful place on this planet. To be able to tend to your souls and not over and over again, constantly, with no end in sight, to tend to your appearance. They told you, break yourselves in half, and you broke yourselves in half! And now you’re here begging for a smidgen of self-confidence so you’ll be able to look at yourselves in the mirror again. Break with that devil’s horde that robbed you of personality! I know you all want to be a thousand things and not just one, a born being, a simple human, but the truth is, always has been, and always will be, that you’re either a person or a lousy sock puppet always on the lookout for somebody’s limb!’
Enthusiastic applause. The people look at each other and nod to this artistic soul. Just look at how much effort he has invested into his performance, the sweat is pouring over his eyebrows and white streams of saliva are running down his chin. The Fisher King is circling around him with his chalice, catching every last drop of sweat. The elders catch sight of him again and resume their hunt with an asthmatic cry.
‘Why are you applauding?’
Ludovico is amazed. They look affectionately right through him. They don’t see him. He’s just an echo in their heads and what he told them makes absolutely no difference, since they would in any case just sift everything through the sieve of their consciousness and be left exclusively with what they already knew beforehand. Now he begins to understand.
‘Sock puppets!’ he roars.
Brian and Rupert look at each other. ‘Well this man is…’ ‘Yes.’
‘Zoia!’ ‘Zoia!’ ‘Zoia?’ ‘Hey, Zoia.’ My name is Zoja.
Max has managed to push his way through the crowd. His megaphone swings silently at his hip. He stands by Zoja, who is bent down beside the motionless old man. Running along his back are the hot impulses of the anxiety a person feels when they have worked out that some things have a life of their own. All he wanted was for everyone to have a pleasant evening, but now it’s not only beauty that’s in the air. A tall, dark-skinned man with an unbelievably thick beard – Anwar – has rushed over from the other side and knelt down beside Zoja. Behind him stands a very attractive black woman in the embrace of a muscular young man and a few soldiers in uniform.
‘What’s wrong with him?’ asks Max.
Zoja’s look oozes concern.
‘Diabetes.’
‘Do you know where the nearest shop is? We need something sweet,’ says the man beside her. Max’s shoulders drop.
‘There’s nothing within five miles, little chance of any shop. The nearest one’s across the river but the bridges have been closed for hours.’
Max’s sense of anxiety thickens and runs down into his legs, which begin to quake. It’s not entirely in good taste to think of oneself at such times, but he would really prefer not to see the old guy drop dead on him right here. Would he be held responsible for it? Was he supposed to, in addition to the lighting and the space and the sanitation and the electricity, also have taken care of…sugar?
‘Why don’t you read something to him?’ Max asks her.
‘If he isn’t conscious, there’s no point.’
‘Ok, but what are we going to do?’
Zoja grabs his megaphone. She gets up and turns towards the crowd. Everyone sighs in expectation. Max closely observes what it means to be adored.
‘Good evening, people. We have a serious problem on our hands. Does anyone happen to have something sweet to eat?’
Hold on a second, Zoja, you know full well that the taste of real food is now available only to the solemn, and sweet stuff only to the most solemn. Max would bet his private library that not one of those types is among them today. Fame lost the privilege of things; either you’re swimming in attention, or you’re offering attention, or you enjoy material things in blind obscurity.
Anwar searches through the old guy’s pockets. He can’t believe that somebody in his condition would not have come prepared. He smiles bitterly on finding a gaping hole in one of the pockets. Marjorie and her lover put their heads together, and the soldiers check their own pockets, though they know there’s nothing there. It’s the gesture that matters.
‘We have a diabetic,’ says Zoja to the crowd, which, expecting something completely different, still hasn’t managed to respond. ‘And we desperately need something sweet to bring him back around. So, please, if somebody has something, anything, I’d be incredibly grateful.’
Eyebrows rise, shoulders shrug, people shake their heads. They’re powerless, although they would dearly like to help her. Zoja bites her lips in desperation and stares at them, hoping to create a kinder reality through the power of her gaze.
‘Anyone?’
A hush falls over the entire car park. Ludovico pouts in silence and pushes away Semyona’s constantly advancing hands. The artists have put a stop to their art, the audience puffs their cheeks in embarrassment. Even the two who have been banging away in the bushes all night decide to give it a brief rest.
‘If you tell her to get dressed and come home with me, I might have something for you.’
Enough heads swivel to ensure a week’s worth of pleasant weather in Boom-Bay. Standing there is a terribly boring man in ironed pants and a horrible beige shirt, his tie is untied and a nervous breakdown looms under his eyes. Mr Bollinger had just about given up, had just about cursed that worthless slut, who busied herself with those heathens, that darling, butterfly, princess of his, whom he took to the zoo where she could ride camels, oh how she laughed, and whose favourite ice cream was blue sky, and when she slept she looked like a rainbow, his angel, his own tiny personal sun, his little sweetie, ever since her mother died they had always stuck together, inseparable, and for as long as he was able he carried her piggy-back and when she peed on his neck on purpose he wasn’t even angry because there was nothing left for him in this beloved world but her, his sweet, darling, little Lucy, and you can’t even imagine how torturous it was to see her naked in the centre of a circle of long-haired monkeys who had responded to her bare porky gut with low growls, with shrill worshipping, and how soul-wrenchingly humiliating it was to wave a bar of chocolate in front of her, like he was after a fish instead of the most innocent being in this whole wide world, to bait and lure her back into the refuge of a safe home, away from this fallen horde, but as soon as the first unwashed clodhopper’s eyes licked her up, she lifted her chin and wrinkled her nose as if she was too good for her own father, and she wiggled her bare arse, that arse he’d wrapped in diapers for years, that bloody…
‘No!’ cries Lucy.
There is nothing left but to smile now, even though I can feel something shatter deep within me. It’s too bad you can’t see them now, Mr Ž—, you would understand them completely. They rally around the poor man harbouring the miserable piece of chocolate in his fist, and he cries, bending like a hedgehog, I’m not giving it up, I’m not giving it up, and they quickly grab his limbs and pull them, they go for his fingers and fiercely unclench them, you have no right, he cries. No right. But they want it. They’ll love you. They don’t want to punish you with that. Look at them, how they love. Look at their love. Nobody deserves anything. They will love you for free.