Spurious

by Lars Iyer

  His life is absurd, says W. It’s a living absurdity, and mine is no better, although I have the strange capacity to just get on with it. Where does it come from?, W. wonders. Who am I trying to please?

  I always feel the world’s about to end, that’s what W. likes about me, he says. I always think I’m about to be found out and shot. I want to lick the gun I think is pointed towards me, he says, which is why I’m such a good administrator.

  But this apocalypticism is the reason I’ve succeeded to the extent that I have, W. reflects. Whereas I’m all apocalypticism, W. says, he’s all messianism: he’s always full of joy and serene indifference to the world. What I suffer, he laughs at as the most extreme folly.

  It’s all mad, he says. The world went mad some time ago.—‘But you take it too seriously’, he says. In the end, I want only to be spoken to gently and soothingly like a wounded animal, a dog run over at the side of the road.—‘But that’s how they talk when they’re about to shoot you’, W. says. ‘And they are going to shoot you, no matter how much you lick the barrel’.

  Perhaps I want to be shot, W. muses. Perhaps that would be the kindest thing that could be done for me. But he has an application to write, that’s why he’s phoning me, he says. He’s applying for a job in Canada, he says. He needs motivation.—‘Give me a sense of urgency’, he says. ‘Give me a sense the world’s about to end’.

  Even now, despite everything, W. dreams of Canada. Everything would be okay if he got there, W. says. He could start again in Canada, begin a new life. Imagine it! W. in Canada, close to the wilderness as everyone in Canada is close to the wilderness, W. peaceable and calm as everyone in Canada is peaceable and calm. He would be a different kind of man, says W., a better one.

  Ah, Canada, with its pristine blue lakes and bear-filled wilderness! Of course, W. is Canadian, and his Canada is not a fantasy. It’s based on his own childhood by the great blue lakes and on the edge of the wilderness, and alongside the open-hearted Canadians.

  They had a big house, he remembers, and went swimming every day. They were happier then. Once he showed me a photograph: a happy family, by a big house, with pine trees behind, and a big blue lake to swim in. And who are those people?, I ask him. Canadians, says W., open-hearted Canadians.

  Moving back to England was the disaster, says W. Wolverhampton of all places! England’s bad enough, but Wolverhampton! He shows me pictures of himself in school uniform. It had all gone wrong by then, says W., can’t I see it in his eyes? I can see it. Ever since then, says W., he’s dreamt of getting back to Canada.

  It’s not impossible, he says. His sister’s made it. She’s a Canadian now. Or perhaps it’s impossible for him, and for the likes of us.—‘It would be impossible for you in particular’, he tells me. ‘The Canadians wouldn’t put up with you for a moment’. Canada! It’s a big country, unlike England, says W. And cheap, too—he was there a couple of years ago on holiday, and was amazed. It’s cheap, and the people are open-hearted.—‘Not like the English’, he says.

  Children rap on his windows as we talk. What do they want?—‘Ignore them! Close the shutters!’, he says, and we sit in darkness with our gin. Are there feral children in Canada?, I ask W. He doesn’t think so. It has a good social security system, he says, and an egalitarian attitude. They pay well, too. Salaries are high. Canadians enjoy a high standard of living, with their blue, pure lakes and the great tracts of wilderness.

  Would the cold bother him?, I ask W, who always moans he’s cold. It’s not a wet cold like over here, says W. It’s a dry cold, completely different. It doesn’t feel anything like as bad. And it’s not as depressing. You don’t get wave after wave of Westerlies coming in from the Atlantic. In England, we’re battered by Westerlies, says W., but in Canada, the weather is as pure and simple as the lakes and the open-hearted people.

  What about the bears—wouldn’t they frighten him?, I ask W., who is not a brave man. There are ways of dealing with bears, W. assures me. The Canadians issue pamphlets on the matter. They probably keep things in the back of their cars to scare them off. Bear-frightening devices. Wouldn’t he have to learn to drive in Canada?, I ask W. It’s a big country after all, and there are miles of wilderness to negotiate. W. admits he might have to. He’d take lessons, he says. That would be part of his new life.

  And what if he broke down?, I ask W. He’d have to learn some basic car maintenance, W. admits, for the Canadian wilderness. But he’s practical, he says, and would pick it up quickly, not like me.—‘You wouldn’t last a minute in Canada’, he says.

  Every year, I write long and elaborate letters to places of employment in Canada on behalf of W. I write of him as the finest thinker of his generation, or as the thinker surest to mark the age with his name. I take dictation from W., who speaks of his commanding presence and his extreme intelligence. He is a thought-god, says W., no don’t write that down. He is the best of the best of the best, says W., don’t write that down either.

  But we hear nothing from the Canadians. They remain silent and distant, as remote as Martians. To console ourselves, we imagine the endless plains of the Yukon. The Canadians are busy in the wilderness, we decide. They’re boating on their many lakes or hiking through their many woods. They’re an outdoor people, we decide, and not given to replying to letters of absurd overpraise.

  We’ve never liked crossing roads. Now the bridge by the station has come down, we have to run across the road in a blind fury, me with my rucksack, W. with his man bag, pausing only on the bush-covered verge between the two lanes.

  We push our way through the bushes. We’re halfway! But we still have half a dual carriageway to cross. It’s fearsome! We pause for a moment and then run like idiots, heads down and in fear of our lives to the other side of the road.

  Only the pedestrian has the measure of the world, we agree. The pedestrian is the true proletarian. Drivers have always been mysterious to W. and I. What do we know of them? How can we understand what goes through their heads?

  Sometimes drivers or their passengers shout abuse at him when they pass, W. says. It’s his hair, W. says, his ringlets. Drivers hate ringlets.

  W.’s hair is very long now. It’s a year since he last had it cut. He looks leonine, I tell him, like the lion of Judah.

  If you’re not going to be a thinker, you should at least look like a thinker, W. says. And if you’re not going to be religious, then you should at least look religious, that’s what W. believes. Genuine thinking and genuine religious belief might follow from looking like a genuine thinker and looking like a genuinely religious person.

  ‘Love’, says W., reclining on his sofa, ‘your favourite topic’. I’m not discussing love with him, I say. Forget it.—‘Why are you so afraid of love? Why?’

  How many nights have passed like this, W. drunk and I half drunk, and both of us looking for a way to fill the empty hours until dawn?

  Occasionally W. will speak of his love for Sal—this is always moving—but mostly he likes to probe me with questions, one after another.—‘What do you think love is?’; ‘What is love, for you?’; ‘Have you ever loved anyone?’; ‘What do you consider love to be?’; ‘Do you think you’ll ever be capable of love?’; ‘What is it, do you think, that prevents you from loving anyone?’

  For his part, W. is eminently capable of love, and happy to say so. As for me, W. says, I remain eminently incapable of love.—‘You only love yourself’, he says.

  ‘Why do you think you’ve failed as a lover?’, asks W. ‘What do you think you lack? What’s missing in you? What crucial stage of development have you missed? You lack depth. You lack seriousness. You need a woman who abuses you’.

  Sal has complete contempt for him, says W.—‘That’s how it should be. Your partner should always have contempt for you’.

  Sal improves him, says W. She makes him better than he is. That’s what I need. And then, after thinking a little, W. says, ‘You have to feel proud of your partner. Of her achievements’. W. feels
proud of Sal, he says.—‘Have you ever felt proud of someone?’, he asks me. ‘Are you proud of yourself?’

  The living room is filled with examples of Sal’s glassware.—‘We could never do that sort of thing’, says W. ‘Look at us!’ But Sal, he says, has a natural gift.—‘She’s talented. Not like us’. He feels proud, he says.—‘All my friends prefer Sal to me. That’s a good sign’.

  If it can’t be explained to Sal in the bath, then it’s not a genuine thought, says W. That’s his test: the bath, Sunday night, he tries to explain his thoughts to Sal. She’s merciless, says W. She demands that everything be absolutely clear. She doesn’t tolerate vagueness or prevarication, he says. She wants to understand, and if she doesn’t, it’s invariably his fault, W. says.

  Do you remember what she called us when she heard us speak? Vague and boring, says W. You were vague, and I was boring. Or was it the other way round? Either way, she’s more intelligent than us, W. says. And she can actually do things, make things, he says. She’s got more to give to the world than we do.

  In fact, all of his friends prefer Sal to him, W. says. Whenever they visit, their first question is always, Where’s Sal? They’re always disappointed when it’s just him, W. says. In fact, even he’s disappointed, says W. What is he without Sal? How would he think or write anything if it were not for their weekly bath?

  We’ve dressed up for town.—‘My God, look at you! You’re so scruffy. That jacket! You think you look attractive in that jacket, don’t you?’, says W. ‘It’s shapeless; it looks like a sack’. It makes me look obese, he says, which is why I always think I’m obese. But in fact it’s the jacket that makes me look obese.—‘No, on second thoughts, you are obese’.

  W. keeps his suit very carefully for Saturday night, when he and Sal go out for cocktails.—‘What are you going to wear? You can’t go like that’. My shirt’s unironed, for one thing. W. says he’ll iron my shirt. ‘Go on, take it off’. And then, ‘God, you’re getting really fat’.

  ‘How dry do you want them?’, the barman asks us of our Martinis.—‘On a scale of one to ten, where ten’s driest, about eight please’, says W. The barman asks us what kind of Vermouth we want. W. tells me they stock three kinds of Vermouth, all imported from America. They even import the salt for their Margaritas, he tells me.

  W. likes cocktails which are as close to pure alcohol as possible, he says. Our Martinis are served in frosted cocktail glasses with a curl of lemon rind floating in the clear liquid.—‘When I’m feeling rich, I’ll buy you a Martini made with Navy strength gin’, says W.

  ‘The trick is not to stop drinking’, says W. In Poland, he drank five shots in a row, stood up, and fell under a table.—‘The Poles pace themselves’, he says, ‘but we don’t’. And then, ‘Where were we? Oh yes: love’.

  ‘Companionship is very important’, says W. ‘It’s the heart of a relationship. You have to get on. Sal and I get on’, he says. ‘If you’re working class, like us’, says W., ‘you show your affection by verbal abuse. That’s why I abuse you—verbally, I mean. It’s a sign of love’. W. reminds me of what Sal said about a joint presentation she saw us give: we were vague and boring, she said. Vague and boring! It’s great. Your partner should be full of contempt for you. It’s a good sign’.

  All evening, Sal berates W. and I.—‘Why don’t you write your own philosophy?’—‘She’s right!’, says W. ‘Why don’t we? You explain’. And then, to Sal, ‘Open your eyes! Isn’t it obvious! Look at us! Look at him!’

  Sal thinks W. spends far too much time on revisions. His book was better before he started working on it, she tells me. It’s true, W. admits, he cut so much of it that parts make no sense at all.—‘Still it’s better than your book, isn’t it? You should see his book’, he says to Sal, ‘my God!’

  The damp’s worse than he can imagine, I tell W. on the phone. Mould is growing in patches, the damp is blackening, and a fine layer of downy salt covers the plaster. I brush it and it flakes down, salt from the wall. Salt leached from the wall: isn’t it rather beautiful? Above me, the new joists and the wooden boards fastened over them. Dry as a bone now; nothing comes from there, I tell W., the corner from where the leak ran.

  But I can still hear the water rushing. Every night I hear it, rushing in the dark as though on an unknown and urgent journey. Every night, going into the bathroom, I hear it rushing beneath the floorboards.

  ‘Keep it warm’, said an expert on the kitchen damp. And the damp in the bedroom?—‘Keep that warm, too.’ So where do I point my heroic little fan heater? It does a shift in the kitchen, and then a shift in the bedroom. I carry it from one room to the other, over the bits of kitchen furniture that are scattered everywhere.

  In the living room, the washing machine on its side as though it were stranded on a beach, covered in black mildew. Then a cupboard, the back of which is greeny-black with damp. I have to keep everything dirty, the expert tells me, to show the original surveyor tomorrow.—‘Keep it mouldy. Then he’ll be able to see’.

  I have no idea how to talk to people, W. says. I lack even a basic sense of the reciprocity of conversation. W.’s going to write a book of etiquette for me, he says. The art of conversation, that’s what I’ll have to learn, he says. Give and take. And table manners.—‘You never learned them, did you?’ And keeping myself clean.—‘Look at you! You’re filthy! When did you last wash your trousers?’ And wiping off that morose expression on my face.—‘Why should anyone want to talk to you?’

  Conversation! All real conversation is messianic, W. says. Not the content of what is said—quite the contrary, but the fact that it is said at all, that speaking is possible, says W., impressively. But what would I know of that?—‘You’re conversationally lazy’, W. says. ‘You can’t be bothered, it’s obvious to anyone. You never feel responsible for your conversation. You never want to drive it to greater heights’.

  For his part, W. is never happier than when he is pressing a conversation towards the messianic. He always has the sense his conversationalist is about to say something great, something life-changing. That’s what a conversation should be, W. says, every conversation: something great, something life changing. But of course I’d have no sense of that.

  Every conversation must be driven through the apocalyptic towards the messianic, that’s W.’s principle; the shared sense that it’s all at an end, it’s all finished. He loves nothing better than conversations of this kind, W. says, when everything’s at stake, when everything that could be said is said.

  That’s when messianism begins, W. says. You have to wear out speech, to run it down. And then? And then, W. says, inanity begins, reckless inanity. The whole night opens up. You have to drink a great deal to get there. It’s an art. The Poles have it, W. says. They understand what it is to drink through the whole night. And that’s what the Hungarians are doing in the bars in Béla Tarr films, W. says. Steadily, patiently, they’re drinking their way through the night.

  All drunks have something of the Messiah about them, W. says. They speak a lot, for one thing. They feel they’re on the verge of something, some great truth. He does when he drinks, W. says. Once he starts drinking, says W., he can never stop, it’s quite impossible.

  It’s because of the faith it gives him, says W. It’s because of what drinking reveals: the whole night, the apocalypse, but also the patience to get through the apocalypse, to dream of the twenty-second century, or the twenty-third, when things might get better again.

  The whole flat is now full of mould spores. The warm air is soupy; it’s jungle hot and damp, and smells of rot and spores. The oven, new in September, is stranded in the bathroom. The hallway’s full of mouldy bits of wood, and another sporey cupboard is pressed up against the radiator. At night, going to the bathroom, I have to step over damp wood and pass between damp cupboards.

  The smell is overwhelming. I feel faint, I tell W. on the phone. The other day I went outside to look at the kitchen wall. Naked brick, exposed. I took a sti
ck of bamboo and idly scraped out the stuff between the bricks. But it was the brick itself that started to come off, I tell W. The brick itself, rotting as I touched it. It’s wet and runny, I tell him. It comes off on your nails as you scrape it.

  Inside, I tell him, I study the kitchen walls, watching for where damp comes and goes. I take the fan heater in there, pointing it at this or that part of the wall. It will dry after an hour or so. Dry, but then—in another hour, or two more—pinpricks of moisture appear on the whitened plaster. It’s returning. It’s coming back, the damp. And then pinprick joins to pinprick, and soon the whole wall’s the same clammy brow it was before the drying.

  But still I watch, I tell W. Still, nightly, I wield the heater. Is the wall drying out? Has it begun to dry out?, I ask myself like a madman. Or is it a mirage, a mirage of damp? Have the spores got to me? Has the mould coated every passageway of my lungs and sent me mad? True, I have a new and persistent cough. I cough all the time—today I thought I’d lose my voice, I tell W. One day I’ll wake up mute in this flat of damp. Mute in the damp, spore-filled, choking. And one day, as I approach the walls, I’ll disappear into them, damp returning to damp.

  W.’s been ill, he says. Again? Yes, again. He gets up, goes to work, and comes back to sleep, that’s all. – ‘I don’t know how Kafka got anything done. It’s terrible being ill’. I ask him whether his houseguest has gone. She has; and Sal’s still away, so his house is becoming like Howard Hughes’, he says. With bottles of urine everywhere? He hasn’t cut his hair and nails, says W. He’s like a wild man.

  Has he had any thoughts from his illness?—‘None’. Has his new book advanced any further?—‘No’. Has he written our joint abstract?—‘No again’. And what of my news?, he asks me. I tell him of my plans, my new schemes.—‘Every year a new stupidity! It’s all begun afresh for you, hasn’t it?’, says W. ‘What new plans do you have? Where will your idiocy lead you?’