by Louis Armand
I press closer. The blur becomes an outline. I strain to see clearly what it is. And there, looking back at me, from the depths of my own reflection, is a young girl. Her forehead, like mine, pressed to the glass. In her eyes, I can see very clearly the room in which I’m standing. Only I’m not there.
20. MANDALA
I’m nobody. I don’t exist. In a night stuffed full of holes, it could be anywhere, any time. The mind in its body, in its purgatory, awaiting absolution. I ought to be dead by now, but I’m not. I’m not even dead. There’s no excuse. Going on like this. What am I doing? What am I doing here? What was I ever doing here?
*
Hunched against the bar struggling not to vomit. On the other side of it, a large mirror swarms in a convergence of reflections. It isn’t the same place as before. Blake’s gone. Vanished into the night. Took my soul in contract. The demon you own and the demon who owns you. Mumbling into my drink. A name. Nothing more than a name. Like Blake says: Pas un nom juste, juste un nom (talking French ’cause it comes-on more profound). And the rain still falling, in the dark, somewhere, far off. In a place perhaps imaginary. That other girl. The one you lost. The one you always say you’re looking for.
My eyes swim in the deep unfocused background, all shadow and sleight of hand. I’ve got to get out of here, but I’m not going anywhere. You came back. What for? My conscience is clear. Your conscience is as precious as a fleur-de-lis in a beggar’s arsehole. Blake’s laughter. Like the cat in the cartoon that gets the canary. A sound of flapping wings. Someone always gets to laugh last. Just before the end. The gut-laugh of the great almighty. Bye-bye.
But if this is the end, what the hell am I still doing here? And who the fuck am I anyway? A wrong name in a passport, waiting to expire. The name of a town I was never born in. Who is there that knows me? Ha-ha. My head aches. I can’t think anymore. A mask in that mirror, multiplying. Like an autism. Head-staggered. Eyes and mouths overlap. A thousand identikit faces.
A character walks out of one story into another, like a ghost. The places all familiar, but the names are wrong. The face in the mirror isn’t yours. The one you’re looking for doesn’t know you.
Regen.
Two syllables that barely form. I can’t get them out. It’s all too late. Salt in my mouth. Red in my eyes. A drunk holding on for dear life. All around the tide’s swelling. Inch by inch. But I can’t give up yet. I’ve got to make it to the bitter end.
One more for good measure. Won’t feel a thing. Ha-ha. But it’s no good, the glass weighs a tonne. It’s my anchor. My still-point.
The sea closing in. Blake’s voice again. A waxwork’s hiss.
I shut my eyes. No use. He’s waiting there for me. Sitting at a table, dealing cards. He’s laughing. The cards fall faster and faster. A blur of hands. The edges of the cards flutter against a draft that comes from nowhere and everywhere. The room shudders. Cards fall in a shapeless mess. All but one.
And then.
Everything jags back into focus. Blake holds the last card out to me. A pattern in black and white. An ace. The ace of spades.
He turns the card over. On the other side there’s…
A face.
A face I recognise. Because it used to be mine.
The room telescopes into it.
Flickering.
Like an image in an old film. The centre
of a spiralling
mandala.
That face. Sucking everything in. Vertigo. And
just as I’m about to gag, the film
unravels,
spills from its reel.
Frames of dark light dissolve into one another, erupting
into white sores.
Rancid stench of burning celluloid.
Its taste in my throat. Laughter in my ears.
*
Meanwhile, or much later – who knows when exactly – I realise Inessa’s standing beside me. Faint neon catches in her hair, falls across her face. There’s a look of sadness about her. I could ask her what’s wrong but I don’t. When she speaks, her words sound like a voice played backwards. It takes a while to make sense of it. She doesn’t seem real. Nothing does. I try to focus. To see if it isn’t just another one of Blake’s demons sent to screw with my mind.
“What’re you doing here?”
“I’ve been looking for you,” she says. As though I should care.
“Hell’ve I done to deserve that?”
“You should stop feeling sorry for yourself,” she says, taking my glass away and pouring what’s left on the counter. The barman growls something from the other end of the bar.
“You’re a tough nut, kid.”
“More than you know,” she says. “Now stand up.”
“I don’t wanna stand up. I’m right where I belong.”
“Shut up,” she says, pulling me off my chair. I grab hold of the bar. But I’m too exhausted to put up a fight. I feel like I’ve been running an obstacle course set up by unknown opponents. It’s a familiar feeling and I know how it always ends. Face down.
But I’m still standing. Inessa has my arm in a grip that’s too strong for a little girl like her, but I’m not arguing. My eyes move hazily around the room. A dark room full of white bees. Black bees on white snow. TV static. A row of slot machines blocks off one end of the bar. A couple of shapes mechanically slot coins to make the numbers go around and the lights flash.
I don’t have a clue where I am but I feel like I’ve been here before. That I’ve always been here before. A room, a nowhere situation, what you might call a predicament. The type of place a man could die in and no-one would notice the difference.
*
When Blake left me behind in La Paz, it was like he was discarding one of his whores. There’s a danger in letting yourself get attached to things. I should’ve learnt that lesson years ago. I look at this girl who’s standing next to me, keeping me from falling down, and wonder what crazy idea she has coming after me. She ought to know that some people are just too ugly to play at redemption. Besides, there’s no such thing as a better world. The world’s just as ugly and stupid as the people in it and always will be.
Blake was right about that. And maybe he was right, too, that to see what’s true in the world you need to make it just a little bit uglier. Like the saints in the Bible communing with filth or offering themselves up to martyrdom. But somehow the lesson was lost. The filth and martyrdom got prettified into art. Christ on the cross. Gratifying humanity’s wish for an eternal scapegoat. It made me think of my mother and her strangulated piety. “People always venerate the wrong things,” Blake said. “Suffering’s everywhere. The crucifixion’s beautiful because it’s ordinary.” Well amen to that.
Standing outside the gallery on Národní the night of Blake’s opening: “Art,” he said, gesturing through the window at the frocks and bowties on the other side, “is civilisation’s whore.” Sure. A slut dolled-up like a virgin. The oldest hustle in town. “La beauté,” he mocked, “sera banale ou ne sera pas.”
*
For a long time I’d fooled myself into believing that Blake was a kind of father to me. (Beware of fathers!) When he’d left me in La Paz, I was too sick to think straight. I imagined all crazy things. Seeing Blake everywhere like a voodoo spirit. An evil genius guiding me through the inner night. I don’t know how long I stayed there with the fever working its way through me. Time’s whatever you believe it is. Just like the truth’s whatever you say it is, unless someone can prove otherwise.
I imagined Blake’s whores plotting to do me in, while I lay there helpless. Some sort of revenge. Maybe they enjoyed watching me suffer. Maybe they didn’t care. I dreamed of the men with machetes. I pictured Blake having his face carved up or getting a bullet in him, out on the altiplano. When I woke from the fever, the boy was there. I’d never seen the kid before. But something about him was familiar. A strange silent boy with Blake’s eyes. Witchdoctor’s apprentice. Leading me far into the north. From th
ere to make the long journey of purification, ha-ha. Sensing all the while that Blake himself was somehow watching me. Those eyes. A ghost leading a corpse through purgatory.
*
Back in the here and now, I’m staring at the mirror behind the bar through a gap in the fog. The mask of a lunatic ready to howl at the moon. Inessa’s still beside me. She’s not an hallucination after all. I try to say something that’ll make her reconsider, but I don’t even have the energy to be ugly anymore. I tell myself that’s okay. There’s always tomorrow.
Inessa tosses some money at the barman. He scoops it into the till with a fat, oversized paw and says not to bother coming back. I’d like to vomit in his face, but Inessa’s already dragging me towards the door. I gag and stay upright. It seems funny to be walking out on my own two feet, but the show’s not over yet.
“Where’re we going?”
“Why did you leave me before?”
“Shit. Nothing personal, kid.”
“Of course it’s fucking personal.”
“Ježíš Marjá!”
“Look at you. Big man. You’re pathetic.”
“I’ve seen worse.”
“Idiot.”
“I like you too, kid.”
“Idiot.”
21. MONKEY’S MOON
No homecoming but a return. A street in a town. Blue squares of windows. The flicker of TV light throwing stark shadows against the walls. How long had I been away? Months or years? Time like some remote, foreign place. As if returning from a truly immense journey, everything I’d once known made strange. The full moon above the telephone lines. Branches shifting in the wind.
A tin can rattled along the street. Cats upsetting the trash in a trash bin. I listened from a distance, becoming one with the shadows. At the end of the street, a rusted metal gate with a NO ENTRY sign turned yellow in the lamplight. Somewhere the sound of water running. Valves of a saxophone. TV dialogue wafting through the trees.
I kept to the shadows, past the NO ENTRY sign, through the vacant lot. A pear tree stood out of the gloom. Long grass, piles of rubble, cracked bricks, corrugated iron. Useless implements jumbled together. A wooden fence cut the yard from the house beyond. The house of my father’s father. I picked my way across. I pushed my hands against the wooden fence, ants streaming through split palings, and felt it sway. Something groaned and cracked. A faint light through barred ground-floor windows.
I froze and waited, watching for signs. For the lights to go out. For the old man to turn-in. I clutched at the package inside my coat. A meat cleaver wrapped in a dirty cloth, the wood of the handle smooth in my hand. Time passed. I edged along the fence until I found the gap that’d always been there and slipped through.
I skirted the small concreted yard, avoiding the bins. Silence. In the moonlight, the concrete glistened wetly. The smell of blood and raw meat. A spiral of foamy water around a clotted grate. I breathed deep, filling my lungs. The faint smell of the slaughter yards. A smell you never get away from.
Behind the far wall was the cool-room, discoloured squares of brick and mortar where basement windows used to be. At my shoulder, a pane of dirty glass and grey prison bars. Inside, the room was empty, lit from the stairway through an open door. A row of chopping tables. Knives, saws, mincing machines. A green rubber hose coiled on the floor. Mops and brooms. Black plastic bags, tied and stacked against the wall.
I settled back into the shadows and waited. Felt in my pockets for the house keys. It was only a matter of time now. For the hour to strike. Hands, feet, shadows. An animal in the night, hunting its prey. A curious detachment came over me, aware of this animal within. Mind and instinct. The one that bears witness, and the one that hunts and kills. Over and over I’d calculated the moves until every thought was like a trance. Hypnotised by inevitability. I listened to the noise in my head fading out. Then an upstairs window opened and he appeared. Standing there, smoking a cigarette, face and white apron lit by the full moon. I sensed his eyes move through the shadows, unconsciously seeking me. I sank down silently. I watched. I waited. All reflex now. There was no way out.
*
What would my mother have thought, to have seen me like that? The full moon up there in the black sky like a cut-out hung on a mobile. The big green, blue and red planets and moons turning on their invisible threads of fishing line. When I was young. Impossibly young. A star chart and a model telescope. To see God with. Dreaming of life on other worlds. Their Roman and Greek names: Mars, Neptune, Pluto, Io, Europa, Titan. Watching the solar eclipse through a hole in a piece of cardboard, facing away from the sun. One day finding a piece of blackened celluloid and staring through it at the strange white orb the sun was behind its fire. A white hole burned into my eye, becoming its opposite. A black dot on a white wall. That grew larger and larger, until it swallowed everything.
It’s funny the things you remember. And the things you don’t. If I force myself, I can almost picture my father’s hand reaching down through the darkening water to grasp hold of me once upon a time, to save me from drowning. First memory. The river behind our farmhouse. The yellow-brown water and his hand. Fingers spread out and rays of light fanning between them. Did he resent having to save me?
Regen and I used to swim there, in that river, for years until my mother died and ruined everything. People would come and trap eels. Often there’d be a bucket of eels sitting in the laundry, stinking the place up. On Sundays my mother would sometimes make dumplings with the blueberries we picked. Our hands and arms, mouths, stained with juice.
Until my mother died I hardly knew my father. He was always somewhere else, doing overtime, returning at night. On weekends he stayed in his workshop. My mother did most of the work in the orchard, pruning the trees while I collected branches and made them into piles at the bottom of the yard. Once a year we smoked the hives and made honey, slicing the waxy honeycomb into cubes to eat.
Whenever my father was around, I’d stay outside. He always mocked the way my mother did things, telling her in so many words she was an idiot. If he was drunk he’d sometimes make a grab for me and give me a hiding for anything at all. I could hear him at my mother from behind their door. It could go on for hours. I’d run out into the vineyards and hide, waiting for something to break.
After the revolution my father’s family had the house in town with the old butcher’s shop restituted. It happened just before my mother hanged herself. After, when they were packing up the farm, I found a portrait of the communist Gustáv Husák in the attic covered in pigeon shit. I knew who he was from school. My father burnt everything that’d belonged to my mother in a bonfire in the middle of the farmyard. Dresses, shoes, a wedding gown in a box. Even the wooden crucifix that’d always hung on the kitchen wall. Fire gleaming in his eyes.
*
Someone said once, you return home to go mad. The demons of childhood lying in wait for you.
Inside the house it was quiet. Moonlight played over the walls and floors. Each room opening into another like boxes in a Chinese puzzle. In the middle of the puzzle there’d be the last room, the one in which the mechanism of some diabolical machine would be meshing and spinning crazily like the mind of God.
The staircase groaned beneath my weight. At each step I pressed myself to the wall, holding my breath. No-one stirred. My grandfather slept at the far end of the hall, above the shop front, with his door locked and a cork in each hand – to stave off rheumatism. My father’s room was at the head of the stairs. His door was unlocked. I pictured him in bed asleep, lying on his back, mouth open. I listened for the sound of his breathing, suspecting a trap.
Was it really him I’d seen at the window? Was it really him in the apartment above St Pauli? Or were there two of him? More even? Demons sent to trick or torment me. I climbed the stairway inch by inch. I concentrated on the door ahead of me. Willed myself towards it. A faint sound of snoring from within. Moonlight burnishing the handle. I watched my shadow pass ahead of me. Reach out. Turn it
.
Beyond was a hot, airless place. Stinking of sweat and booze. I stood in the doorway watching. My shadow moved without me. Silently it strode to the head of the bed. Raised its hand. The long rectangular silhouette of the cleaver, lifted high, and for a moment seeming to hesitate. And exactly at that moment, my father’s eyes opened. He was staring up at the blade dumbly, a confused expression forming on his face. He couldn’t see me, because he didn’t believe I was there.
22. ACCORDION
Out of the bar, slosh. A street somewhere. Rain coming down in fine slanting lines. Apartment buildings at wrong angles. We walk and walk. Skeleton trees trace shapes in the wind. Invisible things fluttering in the air. Wet tarmac and streetlights, scattered across the night like angel dust. Nothing happens for a thousand miles. Past the art academy. The park gates. Down the steep embankment and across the railway tracks.
Inessa has a hand under my arm, leading me I don’t know where. We stop and listen, waiting for a train to materialise from the dark. But none do. The cold rain gradually sobers me. Breathing the wet earth. Sap in the trees. The season’s breaking up, mad like all the rest of us. Stirring dull roots. Reflex and hypothalamus. The brain of winter thawing in its jar.
The rain turns to drizzle again. Inessa leads me down along winding paths beneath the leafless canopy. Faint lamplight reflecting on a darkening sea. The park spreads out beneath the sky – we dissolve into it, becoming smaller and smaller. Footsteps echoing. The darkness groaning.
