by DBC Pierre
“This is the result of your day.”
“Oh, is it? And I suppose you’d have preferred something more totalitarian, a childhood like Gerd Specht’s, with police filing your smell so they could hunt you with dogs.”
“Nothing’s more totalitarian than profit. And dogs are what come next, wait and see. Business has turned this country into an Afghan backstreet.”
“My God. And to think you’re twenty-six next birthday.”
“In fact, every single global—”
“Stop there—let’s talk narcotics.”
“I’m—”
“Narcotics, Gabriel. Paramedics aren’t stupid. They don’t roam around looking for flounces in buildings. I could’ve driven a bus through your pupils last night. If you’re trying to rally support for a binge like that you’ll have to dig deeper than Heart FM. I’m telling you now—rehab is my last contribution. After this you sink or swim on your own.”
“That’ll be a change.”
“Cinderella Boy: you lost a job reheating fries. And that’s the best you’ve had, in case you wonder where the crowds of investors in your future went.”
“Excuse me—that was a two-hundred-cover dining room.”
“Gabriel, I drive past South Mimms every week. It’s a truck stop. It’s a damn Burger King.”
“It may have shared a building with Burger King, but the dining section was spread over—”
“Don’t make yourself look an even bigger ass. Now get the doctor back on the line.”
“I’m telling you I turned a corner. I just feel rehab’s the wrong response.”
“On the evidence, what do you expect me to do? You may have turned a philosophical corner, but it’s made you a mess. Last night was suicidal, Gabriel. What would people think? Now put the doctor back on, you’re raving.”
David West walks up the corridor, stopping ten paces away. He leans into the air, as if held by an invisible rope, stroking his chin.
“I just need to get away,” I say to my father. “Put the usual triggers behind me.”
“Nonsense, you’d run straight to Nelson Smuts, if he’s not already dead.”
“Ireland, for instance. Or Berlin—how about that? Away from this paintball-combat of markets. Anyway, rehab’s hardly going to solve anything in two weeks.”
“You can stay until they do. And don’t get misty-eyed about Berlin, it’s almost twenty years since we were there. Surprised you even remember it.”
“It’s the last place I was free.”
“Gabriel: since then it’s become the capital again, of the third most industrialized nation on earth. It’ll be one big McDonald’s. It’ll be a parking lot. Nobody’s singing Russian lullabies and fondling chunks of the wall. Things were changing before we left—I left a perfectly good business, remember. Anyway, if you’ve lost your job you can hardly afford to travel. My advice is: buckle down to your therapy. And if they can’t cure your compulsive need to philosophize everything, then at least find an ethical model that moves you forward.”
“I have the model—it’s life that’s moving backwards. Anyway, two weeks of therapy for a one-night bender is crazy. And let’s say they uncover buried trauma—how is that helpful? Surely that’s a workload for me across a lifetime?”
David hovers, ready to take the phone. I turn away.
“No deal,” says my father. “Shedding light on some issues has to be the way forward. It’s not just one night—you haven’t been right for a long time. Light needs to be shed.”
There he steps into a trap. Because the only issue I have in life is that he smacked me through a glass door. I stay quiet. It’s a helpful feature of the guilty that their fears grow without outside help. I last saw him like this in the time between his divorce and my mother’s death.
Hear him soften:
“Berlin, Berlin,” he finally muses, like it’s the first time he’s heard of it. “You won’t remember Gerd, my partner in the Pego Club. He never bought me out in the end. I should chase him for my bloody share. Massive, these days, it must be—can you imagine, these days? Unbelievable. Gerd Specht. Needed a kick in the ass back then.”
“Maybe it’s something I could look into for you. The old family business, eh?”
“With Gerd Specht? You must be kidding. Absolutely not. Very decadent man. Now put the doctor back on.”
“He’s not a doctor.”
“Put him back on.”
I hand over the receiver. David ushers me up the hall to reception, where I see Dalí opening lockers behind the counter. Asking my father to hold for a moment, David puts a hand over the mouthpiece: “Mineral water?” He smiles at me, and after I shake my head, he waves Dalí over and gently says: “Some water. And see if Roman’s free to do a watch tonight. I’ll need a watch room too, I think eight is ready.”
He means suicide watch. I tense as Dalí Girl pads to the counter. A page turns on the desk. The intercom hoots: “Roman to reception, please—Roman.”
I’m about to let gloom possess me when, in this lull between scenes, where one set of sounds dissolves into the next, a fire alarm shatters the quiet.
Whoosh. The Enthusiasms are with me. Running from the bottom of the hallway, an orderly peers through all the doors, slamming them shut, while David springs into action. Clients start to shamble up the hall, glad of the diversion, and even the kitchen cat—the so-called support animal—sashays up.
“Quiet Room!” yells the orderly. “Smoke!”
The alarm shrieks, David bolts down the hall, and while clients shuffle out to the forecourt I linger back and identify the key cabinet behind reception. Once Dalí Girl has moved out of sight, I locate my key, open the locker, and snatch my wallet and phone before hurrying out to join the others.
Drizzle swoops under spotlights outside, darting around like diamonds at the whim of the wind, while everyone huddles watching for signs of a blaze—rather hopefully, it seems to me. Once I’m sure of their distraction I duck into the row of trees that line the driveway, and slip away through shadows to the road.
My route takes me past the Quiet Room.
A window scrapes open, voices drift out:
“Looks like lemon.”
“Lemon?”
“It’s deliberate. We’ll need the police as well.”
“Fucking lemon?”
5
I stride a jagged line from rehab, writhing against weather like a worm trying to stay upright on end. I’m not concerned about being captured. My strategy is to head for the second nearest town. One advantage of our day is that you never have to be more than slightly smart. Remember this: there are no receptors left for smartness in the public domain. You need never be more than slightly smart or slightly nice. Anything more will arouse suspicion and rage, and confound the software that runs the country. This is because society’s mechanisms are calibrated for stupidity and indolence—and to not be that way is now, by definition, antisocial. So I save myself the drama of scrambling through hedges and over fields. I simply set off not to the nearest town, but to the second nearest, which is smart enough. It wouldn’t be profitable for anyone to search beyond the nearest town, especially when profit hasn’t been disturbed.
I’m free to die. It’s powerful to realize it. Every lick of wind, every crack of leaves is as emotionally stirring as the night before a fifth birthday. When you do something for the last time in your life, however small a thing, it becomes significant. And if you know it’s a last thing beforehand—it becomes momentous.
No litter blew across the yards at rehab, but walking down this road trapped between hedges, litter blows again, and I feel at home. Twigs reach out like talons, I cuddle into them whenever a car speeds past, and I use this walk to start devising an ethic for limbo. Not to complicate a thing that’s essentially free, but to
see that I don’t become buoyant and lose sight of my goal.
I start by defining seven reasons to die:
I come from an emotional Addams Family. I’m the lash end of a whip of ancestral and cultural psychologies which are miserable defeats that must be stopped.
I can see too clearly the dark motions of humans in action, and find these predatory and false. Neither can I be trusted to operate in a more ideal way. All I needed to know about human dealings I could’ve learned watching nine-year-olds in a schoolyard. After this, the process called maturity is simply one of disguise, community life simply an opportunity to learn that God dislikes the poor.
History’s best thinkers eventually concluded that our flaws were too powerful to trust with freedom. Thus we’ve been groomed as hamsters in a wheel that benefits a laughing few. No more great works will be accomplished under the regime, because beauty is not democratic or profitable.
Owing to all above, the image of the person I want to be is one I could never achieve; and just pretending to be him will not suffice.
Love, touted as a principal reason to live, is just a Velcro of mental detriments which find an antagonist and stick to it. The result is a calcification of spirit. Love is an invitation to death, not life, and its flutters in the heart are as much the knell of an ending as the rattle in a corpse’s throat.
High moments where our ideal selves heroically erupt into life, moments we’re led to dream of and hunt, will never happen due to restraints in our characters. Only by choosing death have I found a nook where suppressed vigor might come out to play; and I say it’s a fair price to see it flicker to life at least once.*
The Enthusiasms are clear about how things work. The rise of science as a source of wisdom—a science that attaches current feeble knowledge to all fact—has led us away from Fortune’s most obvious truths: in thinking creatures all happiness not derived from intoxicants is false. Life is horrific without a drink. This has always been true. It’s why intoxicants exist in nature. You can be moderate, a single drink will dampen two concerns—or you can follow me and blast all concern from the landscape. Note, though, that the wages of excess is death. This tells us: be briefly happy—there is no long happiness—then step aside.
Approaching streetlamps light the sky like an aquarium at night, and clouds slink together like sea slugs to feed there. England’s hum is pierced by rain, handfuls thrown in my face, and gusts of splintered noise. Before long a traditional English town unfolds before me. It comprises a Tesco, a Carphone Warehouse, a WH Smith, a Vodafone shop, a Burton, an Argos, a Boots the Chemist, a Burger King, a KFC, a Subway, a Halfords, a Shell service station, an Iceland, a McDonald’s, two charity shops, three pound shops, a train station, and a police station.
A darkened Gothic church cowers behind trees.
I feel calm to be in my heaving land. Britain’s empire might be the empire of modern capitalism, an invention of its quaintest loons, but I decide capitalism’s grand flaw isn’t Britain’s fault. Rather it’s plainly the fault, as with anything hopeful, of nature and her jokey craftsmanship. Stupid nature, which the church led us to admire as a perfect system, has crippled us as it cripples and kills everything, through shoddy design. All we have been driven by nature to achieve across history has today left us as soft as an infant’s turd. And my beloved land, having so long been at the pinnacle of achievement, took the brunt. Some redress is surely due from nature.
We’ll see about this, in a quiet moment, with wine.
A fire engine roars past with its lights flashing. I turn my back and stare at Burger King as if I might buy it. But whoosh—I find beauty there. The neon has dimmed on a corner of the sign, causing a delicate graduation of reds, from hot capsicum to dry blood. The dimmer part is at the bottom, making dark matter seem to pool there, but that old blood sparkles with highlights thrown by other lamps nearby. There’s no orchid or lily as rare as this fragment of sign, I reflect.
Certainly none spelling “King.”
Arriving at the railway station, I find it droning with an alternating current of apathy and rage, buffeted as much between trains as when they rocket past without stopping. I switch on my phone and hear it ping a chain of messages.
“Single to London please,” I say to the ticket clerk.
He looks up: “Forty-eight pounds thirty, that’ll be.”
“For a single? That’s a pound a minute. And first class?”
“Fifty-five.”
“I’ll have a first-class single, then.”
The clerk stares up through the top of his glasses. “I can do an Advance Saver for thirty-two, if it’s a specified service you want.”
“Then yes, please, the next service.”
He squints at his screen: “That’ll be the twenty-one thirty-six. Departing in ten minutes.”
After buying the ticket I move to the shop, where I teeter for a while in front of the sandwich cabinet. This earnest national pursuit is worth savoring one last time, with its sweet dread of choosing badly and limiting personal happiness. I don’t stand too close to the cabinet as there’s a camera watching, which means I’m a suspect. In the same way a cliff can be scary in case some unstable reflex makes you throw yourself off, it pays to stand back from the cabinet because, as a suspect, I’m afraid they know something I don’t. I might snatch one involuntarily, under pressure of scrutiny.
Ah, sandwiches—the beautiful game.
When it comes to finally choosing, I play safe and go for egg. I buy the one showing the most yolk, but having bought it, upon lifting the bread I see a row of yolk half-slices arranged at the front, with a single lonely lump of white on the expanse behind.
With my personal happiness limited, I make my way to the platform. It’s too noisy with loudspeaker apologies to hear my phone messages, so instead I cock an ear to the variety of ways there are to apologize for chaos, which is one. The train arrives on time, but as I go to board, a platform attendant comes to inspect my ticket. She’s pretty, beginning to show the thick ankles and hips that signal a journey north; a proud journey compared to the south, where pants are worn under a dress as if it cancels the ass outright.
“This isn’t your service, I’m afraid.” She points at the ticket.
“What? But it’s nine thirty-six.” As I say it, a passing officer slows his patrol, glancing over to assess the odds of a stabbing.
“That service is canceled, I’m afraid. This is the late-running twenty-one twelve. You’ll have to catch the next service.”
I look into the empty carriage. I can’t afford to miss this train, at my back I feel the forces of rehab, my father, the police.
“Terms and conditions of the Saver fare are that in the event of cancelation you catch the next service. Which will be the twenty-one fifty-nine, though it’s not due till twenty-two twenty.”
“And how can I get on this train?”
“New ticket, I’m afraid—you’d have to purchase a full flexible fare on board.”
“And can I cancel this ticket?”
“I’m afraid the terms and conditions of the Saver fare—”
“But I only bought it ten minutes ago.”
“I’m afraid the service was only canceled just now. You can ask for a form in the office and write to Customer Services. You see, the terms and conditions—”
I wait through the sermon of small print, then look at her. She braces herself. The officer waits on alert in case I resort to threats or abusive language, while all around, from every gable and cranny, every tower and pole, the sproutlings of fascism, that state formed by decadence to mop up its mess, hum watching us on video: “Hm. Well.” I finally scratch my head. “I don’t blame you.”*
She cocks her head sympathetically and wanders away. The officer also moves off, disappointed. This exchange highlights my problem with th
e war on capital: its criminal masterminds have placed themselves beyond reach behind blameless cogs, whose own lives are crushed between pincers and cogs.
It’s a human shield spanning all society.
If I could meet the shadowy forces it might be a different matter. Bring me the shadowy forces! The ones who wore us down inch by inch till we accepted any outrage, put us in a room together and then we’ll see.
I buy a second full-price ticket to London. Modern frustrations fan out in my mind like a hand of cards, not least that our language sets us up with its “I’m afraids” and “Sorrys.” Surely no other language paves its own road to dismay. Then the twenty-one twelve is late because tracks and signals need investment which is too costly; my ticket costs five times more than in Holland because the company has to support that crumbling infrastructure while simultaneously expanding its profit; the Saver fare is only cheaper because fewer holders will actually travel, having been foiled on the roulette wheel of delay or fallen foul of a trick in small print.
There it is: every flight and dash of hope, all rage and calm, the clatter and grind of every life owes its modern form to one thing—the profit of nameless others. In the instance of this robbery I take the Englishman’s way out and simply resolve not to use the service again. My mood even lightens with the jokes this whips up. Over my dead body will I ever use this service again, ha ha.
As the train rattles through Stevenage I note that only bugs seem to be traveling. Ruddy blobs with spindly, grasping limbs. The lucky ones find newspapers abandoned on the seats or floor and read them, tutting while windows flash with industrial estates, with roads and roadworks, with trailers, and with cars that dodge and lunge behind them as if swimming with feces. So goes my last train ride, a hurtling montage of where things stand. Looking around, I wonder what it is that makes my fellows able to bear such a life. How can they face the day, when I can’t? Is there some secret to living that makes its conditions irrelevant? A neutering of expectation, a mastery of the mundane? Or have they just grown accustomed to rape?
