Lights Out in Wonderland

by DBC Pierre

  I decide the trip only serves as an example of how not to spend a limbo. If there was ever a time to seek comfort, this is it. There being no notion of future in limbo, it hits me that it’s a naturally capitalistic space. Perhaps the perfect capitalist space, utterly organic. Limbo has no budget, no rating, no limit. It’s a spend. I could’ve bought all the sandwiches at the station and picked the best one. And I didn’t have to suffer the indignity of the Saver fare.

  Finally I grasp the beauty of money: it elevates life into blue sky, above clouds of terms and conditions. It admits no term or condition except having. No stabbings attend the full flexible fare. And though it requires us to accept being robbed outright—can robbery even exist in a limbo? If a limbo has no future, then robbery deprives us of no future benefit. So robbery can’t exist, unless it takes our whole bank at the outset.

  A revelation looms.

  I always wondered why the law allowed small robberies by companies from individuals, but not by individuals from companies. And why governments no longer promoted visions of future society, why promises only spoke of more good and less bad:

  Capitalism is a limbo.

  Not a structure but an anti-structure. Driven not toward a defined end, but hovering over a permanent present, harvesting a flow of helpless human impulses. It builds no safe futures, leaves no great structures, prepares no one for roads ahead. And why would it? We don’t march through an age of civilization but float between Windows and Mac, treading water.

  The revelation is a stroke of irony from the Enthusiasms. In finding the purest abandon before death, in fleeing the cult of free markets—I’ve become one myself.

  Whoosh—a body blow.

  I look around and things are suddenly dreamlike. I’m Ebenezer Scrooge on a moral tour of Culture Present. Even my countrymen on the train are perfect products, corpulent beetles comprising storage sacs for sugar and fat, with limbs just sturdy enough to navigate teller machines and stores—or else they are sallow and sphinxlike, having mouse eyes that glow with discontent.*

  I must aim for a higher limbo. One that smells of hotel soap. A limbo where young Swiss strangers care for me. An evening more splendid than any since the fall of Rome—I ask for it now, as a newborn capitalist, looking up into the night through the window. Come, you Enthusiasms, manifest this wish.

  And let us marvel at the style of its arrival.

  In the middle of my reverie a robot calls to remind me I have voice mail. But here’s a modern hitch: my calling credit is low, and if I call Vodafone to make a card payment, Lloyd’s bank will instantly block my account. Mobile phone top-ups signal fraud, you see. Then I won’t be able to remove the block because the phone will run out of credit listening to Lloyd’s automated menus. And I won’t be able to get cash to buy credit in a store because the block will stay until I call Lloyd’s. I’ll even be unable to call Vodafone—because it demands credit to discuss credit.

  The phone is in its own dying limbo. Forced there by the markets. What a symbol. How alike we are. Suddenly limbo is the key to understanding all modernity. Anyway, I quickly decide this: I’ll listen to one message and use the remaining credit to get Smuts pumped up to the night’s bacchanal.

  I will never top the phone up again.

  As long as I live, ha ha.

  The first message is from Sarah, my girlfriend till yesterday:

  “It’s me,” she says. “Just so you don’t blame me for not warning you, Hamish is on his way round to your place tonight. He wants to kill you, for God’s sake just do as he says. You have to sign yourself off the action group account, he’s got the papers. Nigel’s the new treasurer. And Yaseen wants your text for the new flyer. He’s not happy either, they’re both bailed to appear in court tomorrow. I’ve told them you won’t have touched a penny of the fund. But it’s the last time I’m vouching for you, Gabriel. I feel so fucking stupid. We all do. We thought you were so sensitive—but it’s just weakness. Bourgeois inertia. All it’ll take for the forces of profit to destroy this world is a few more people like you, all talk and no action. Anyway. Don’t call back. If you found something for Douglas and Fay, just pass it on to Yaseen.”

  The message ends. Ah, well. How remote my old life seems. I’m as detached from it as if wearing an iPod. Even the political certainties behind our action group have been turned on their head in the space of a day—and flipped again on this train trip alone. And dear Sarah, the revolutionary, still fretting over a gift for Douglas and Fay’s dinner party. Then calling me bourgeois!

  I sit back and reflect on our relationship, here laid bare. You’ll know that romance begins when we lasso a flying thing out of the air. Once snared, it can drop to hang as a weight or stiffen into rods of attachment that pass for love in the long term. But no flying thing started this romance. We found each other’s lassos dragging on the ground, and stamped a foot on them. Her stretch marks never ached for my touch, my hollow chest didn’t pound under her gaze. No crucible of fury contained us, no compulsions were vented in gasps. Our playground had just one game: “If it wasn’t for you,” playable on fields of any size. Ah, well. A lesson comes from this which you and I can peruse later, in a duller frame of mind, and with wine. You’ll see that I’ve closely studied the dynamics of romance, but I tell you that this relationship was notable for its lack of qualities known to romantic love, including romance, or love. Of course, it had a fleeting hook one night, when by accident our perspectives were in harmony. Mumbled reference was made to our souls becoming one—that laughable dream achieved by none. Still, it was enough to ignite the pathologies that bound us. This is usually when nature invites us to think destiny must be at work, because what else could explain the mystery of such strangers growing attached? Well, no. Not destiny but pathology was there. Still, in these qualities our relationship was truly English, truly human, and I defend it, and her. Losing those defeating routines will be a blow to Sarah. I just hope, as our pathetic games were hidden behind a public face, that she can play out the loss as a tragic love and enjoy the abandon it brings. It’s a kind of limbo, and so a fitting last gift from me.

  Although I’m already a phantom, the loss jolts me nonetheless. It’s another tie cut from the earthly plane. It may seem bleak, dear friend, to speak like this, and I don’t do it having spurned visions of love, but rather having embraced them. I dreamt of serving some kindred soul, of course I did—some light, determined heart, one that engaged me in combat over things that mattered, punctured any part of me that set our bliss askew, and mastered me unawares to myself. One who undertook the workload of me and gave me her works to undertake. I even pictured her in a small, fine frame, with hair as black as jet, never sulking or dropping snide asides, but settling our spats with a pillow fight. Needless to say, I never met such a soul. In our time and place the souls I found were all trapped inside themselves, too busy at the mirror to feel me reaching out.

  Ah, well. My mind starts to hunt things to look forward to, this is how it works, pulling itself along a rope of future comforts, ticking them off a list as they arrive. I see it now for the monkey device it is. Still I let it roam till it fixes on Nelson Smuts. What a party we’ll have. I reflect that of the friends we collect over a lifetime, not every one fits all occasions. Each has their time, their seasons flourish and wither. But this night pummeled by gales, this odyssey on the rim of oblivion—this is Smuts’s night.

  Granted: I always wished I was him.

  Smuts became a great chef, although his temperament makes him unemployable in the usual sense. Instead the epicurean underworld pulled him into its rarest bowel. Apart from those childhood summers when his foster parents brought him over from South Africa, we later set out to become chefs together. My father was indirectly responsible. With what remained of his swagger about running a club in Berlin, and with money mysteriously contrived from who knows where, he partnered up with a smug Canadian
called Tattersfield to open a bistro on Kilburn High Road. The Coup de Gras, they pathetically called it. Nothing with enough character to erase the smell of fresh paint was ever cooked there, and even as it served its bilious pestos, their bickering over the name never stopped. They quarreled over whether the spelling “Coup de Grâce” would draw as much attention to their cleverness as “Cup de Grâce” or “Coupe de Gras” or “Ku-D-Gra,” as the preening imbecile Tattersfield suggested just prior to making his asinine girlfriend pregnant. With that he added a screaming mouth called Lovey to the café’s payroll, and a hammer blow to its plummeting fortunes. Throughout all this, Smuts and I haunted the kitchen.

  Dreams sprouted there.

  We would become genius chefs. Gastronomes would weep at our creations, kill themselves in rapturous despair. We dreamt of a restaurant called Nimbus, named for the aura around a saint—because our dishes would light a nimbus around our patrons. The place would have no signs, its name would be passed in whispers. It would exist behind locked doors, where couples weren’t allowed. After signing a last will and testament, diners would be strapped into deep-sea fishing chairs and shrouded in linen with which to mop their tears.

  We made such a fuss that our dads sent us to catering college.

  But it was clear after a week that all I had was airs, and no talent. Plus I was timid around knives and flame. This slap of truth ended my time at chef school. I slunk home to help my father reinforce my worthlessness; a task we took to with all the gusto of model-train enthusiasts.

  Meanwhile, Smuts really did have genius. To him a foodstuff was an alchemical element. He quivered around food, unleashed his senses upon it till no grain of meat, no stalk of spice kept any secret. Blades flashed like sunlight in his hands. Nevertheless, the hour of his final exam came and went without him. The absence was put down to his temperament, by then a known feature of the college climate. But later certain classmates and tutors found an invitation to a crematorium. Smuts had booked twenty minutes’ burning time between funerals, and while the exam was under way had there blistered to perfection a suckling pig lifted straight from a sow’s womb, unstressed by vaginal birth. Smuts was gone when the classmates arrived—but the pig was there, steaming under a serving cloche.

  Back at the college they opened the animal up, at first heaping scorn on Smuts because the organs were still inside. Then a tutor saw that the gut was lined with pastry. The intestines were a black pudding of wild nuts, the liver a haggis of foie gras, the kidneys butternut raviolis, all anatomically exact. And when they sliced open the blue-maize dumpling that was the heart, a crimson juice spilled flakes of real gold across the tray.

  A legend was born in the kitchen underworld.

  And Smuts had other things going for him. He burst into his life with the tender musculature of a young dog, and with eyes and lashes that made everyone want to touch him and take care of him. As our young summers passed, nature took her chisels to Smuts. His hips ruthlessly narrowed, he sprouted shoulders and arms like the claws of a burly crab. By contrast nature paid scant attention to me. My eyes bulged apologetically, my whole gangling form was swept back as if against a nearby blast. I had no choice but to cultivate quirks for my character and peer out from the gloom behind them. Smuts meanwhile rippled under the sun, with all the symmetries that are an unspoken passport into society. Not that he was hacked in the way of hard and angry men, but rather strung and smoothed into a hallmark of nature, one of her boasts, like a hummingbird or a summer’s day. The gentle rasp of his voice delivered simple ideas in blunt Anglo-Saxon words, and every action he took, even swallowing, set musculatures plowing over his body. As we grew up I felt girls get weak around him. They grew silly and forgot themselves. Whereas with me they remembered themselves—or worse, the powerful ambitions they had for themselves—and even honed their harsh caprices on me. I suppose this is why my nerves headed inward, while his shot out to the skin where fingers and tongues fell to helpless obsessions. Smuts provoked intimacy by his very being. Modest girls would do things for him that prostitutes would refuse.

  Despite this, he never saw us as different, which lifted me up. He shared those intimacies as if they were also native to my life. And by this arrangement they became native to me through him, and fed my boiling senses.

  I feel Smuts even looked up to me. His temper could shift so quickly that his feelings were often left bewildered; and because his senses faced outward to be caressed, he hadn’t much conversation with that inner traffic of feelings. I think my cerebral analysis of things was useful to him, and calming. This, I think, is why we’re friends. We each have a quality without which the other is slightly futile.

  I’m off to drink my last with Smuts.

  I call his mobile number. He answers after five rings:

  “Yo.”

  “Smutty,” I say, “Gabriel!”

  “Who’s that calling me Smutty?”

  “It’s Gabriel.”

  “Wait up—what?”

  “Gabriel. As in Brockwell.”

  “For fuck’s sake. It’s ten to six.”

  “Eh—where are you?”

  “Tokyo.”

  “Oh. Well, Smuts—”

  The line goes dead.

  Ah, Smuts.

  Smuts, Smuts. Hm.

  6

  It seems limbo isn’t immune to disappointment.* I suppose the markets face the same lesson. The culture faces it. Things can seem rosy from inside a limbo. As detached as wearing an iPod.

  Jolting into King’s Cross station, I find it peopled by two races: the drunk and the frightened. Mobs decant to the trains barking echoes at the high glass roof, and many trains set off without conductors, presumably as none dare ride them. But I reflect what a glorious sight it is—society in its limbo, leaving a false appointment and making its own way to the feelings it was promised. Because it’s worth it, ha ha. My only concern is that it’s an ugly decadence, without mentors or finesse. Its wages are vomit and debt.

  We might see about this, in the course of tonight, with wine.

  Meanwhile, stress mounts in limbo. My house is likely to be the target of a pinch, with both the anticapital action group and my father converging. Still I must regroup, after this setback with Smuts, and the place is where I live; or used to live. After I decide to mount a lightning assault by taxi, the scamp Enthusiasms send me a driver from that species of white-haired London cabbie who decided that in the time-distance equation of taxi meters, time pays more. So he waits for every light to turn red. Only eventually do we nose into my road. I suppose there are many things to say about the corner of North London where I lived, but they don’t matter to the narrative anymore. One of its Victorian row houses is the place I shared with housemates Alan and Evelyn. I sputter past it in the cab, scanning for signs of trouble. All seems quiet. The television flickers through the first-floor window. I leave the cab waiting around the corner and let myself in, gathering flyers from under the mailbox, though as a technically dead person I don’t have to. Courtesy is shown in my last hours. Light in the stairwell fades to dark up the stairs.

  In the background I hear the television:

  “I’m a housewife and mother,” says a woman.

  “And do you have any kids?” a presenter booms.

  “Yes, three.”

  “Three wonderful kids! And what do you do?”

  “I’m a housewife.”

  I go inside, collect some grams of coke, some hash, and some ecstasy from Alan’s bag, and leave money for them. Then on an impulse as I pass Evelyn’s room I grab the strongest perfume I can find on her dresser, and splash myself with it.

  It wraps me in a citrus armor.

  I pause, stunned.

  “Guerlain,” says the label.

  “Jicky.”

  Pure decadence. I leave a gram on her dresser in
payment, then my reverie is shattered by a bang on the front door:

  “Brockwell.” It’s Hamish, the head of the action group. “Come out! If you haven’t touched the Action Fund, then we will not harm you!”

  My heart starts to race, even as I ponder how stupid he is to think I might come to the door.* But before I can act I hear a ping on my phone. It’s a text message. A warning about credit. Suddenly it occurs to me—maybe Smuts didn’t hang up. Perhaps, consistent with our day, my credit simply expired, and the service provider, despite a fortune I’ve let them rob over the years, simply terminated the last crucial call of my life.

  A receptive space clears inside me, between Hamish’s thumping and the bloodsucking phone. And a moment later, in a drenching revelation, the night’s answer comes.

  I scribble Smuts’s number on the back of a matchbook, then throw down the phone and smash it dead. Turning to my laptop, I log into the action group account and find nearly five thousand pounds there, which I send to my personal account. I’m already a traitor in the group’s eyes, so it’s reasonable to think the fund is well spent on my destruction. And if I find the shadowy forces in the night, for five grand I can give them a good thrashing.

  Next I look up Japan Airlines.

  I throw on my Munch’s Scream T-shirt and my military greatcoat and gather the perfume, my passport, and a quick change of clothes, resolving to spend limbo at the airport overnight—not in the most obvious terminal, but in the second most obvious.

  Then I carefully lift and weigh the laptop in my hands. I raise it over my head and throw it down—that vacuum of life, that cretin savant, that pilfering Latin maid, that predator’s restroom.

  As I kick it across the floor my housemate Alan bursts in.

  “Ahh—depression’s gone, then.” He spins me around, searching my face. “When did you last sleep? Do you know what you’re doing? Is it a whoosh thing? You have that pedagogue troubadour look in your eyes. Patronizing, glazed over.”