Solo

by Rana Dasgupta

  ‘Come here,’ he says, and they kiss, her hand in his ample hair. ‘Let’s go away together. Let’s go to Paris. I’ll take you for the best food you’ve ever had.’

  ‘Let’s go now. Tonight!’

  ‘As soon as Boris’s album is finished. Then we’ll go.’

  He kisses her again and carries her towards the bed.

  ‘Fuck me where I can watch you with my other eye,’ she says. ‘The one I have on my back.’

  Boris’s album is soon to be released, and Plastic sets up preview concerts for the inner circle. He wants the journalists and critics talking about Boris even before the music hits the market. He sets up gigs in Chicago, DC and LA. Boris takes Irakli along for the ride.

  The concerts create a furore, and Boris wants to go out all the time. People like to have him at their parties. They like to touch him, to see how he drinks, how he sits in a chair – and Boris is developing a style for dealing with it. He lets himself be taken here and there.

  Irakli loses track. Most nights he ends up cutting loose early, and going back to their suite to sleep.

  One morning in LA, Irakli is watching TV alone in the hotel when Boris comes back there with a girl named Lara. She is beautiful unslept. She carries a single yellow rose, which she stands tenderly in a glass of water. She puts her bare feet up on the table and lights a joint. Boris is in high spirits and sings. He says to Lara,

  ‘This is Irakli. He’s my muse. He’s my mentor.’

  He is walking round the room in a goblin dance.

  ‘Just look at this hotel room!’ he says. ‘A herd of cows could live in here!’

  His violin is never far away, and now he plays a rustic jig. Lara passes the joint to Irakli, and it tastes fantastic. He draws from it several times and feels the armchair fold like warm wax.

  ‘Lara can sing,’ says Boris.

  Lara’s blonde hair is in braids and she has a pretty voice. She sings an old jazz song that Boris tresses with his violin.

  He says,

  ‘We were at a party last night with some musicians, and Lara and I made a recording. This guy set up mikes and we improvised a whole session.’

  ‘It was fucked up,’ says Lara dreamily.

  Boris takes a drag of the joint too, but it does nothing to still him. He is so full of energy he cannot sit down. He looks out of the window and says,

  ‘Who wants to swim?’

  ‘I do,’ says Lara promptly.

  Irakli does not respond. He can feel the vibrations of the world rising through the feet of the armchair, and he does not want to disturb them with his voice.

  Boris uproots him unmercifully and carries him out of the door. They get in the elevator, Lara chanting the descending numbers of the floors and drumming them on Boris’s head. Boris still holds Irakli in his arms, and when the doors open on the ground floor he marches him out into the lobby, speeds along the corridors under the arrows saying Swimming Pool, manoeuvres through the narrow exit to the hot LA morning and, breathless, lays him down on a recliner.

  ‘Now get your clothes off,’ he says, pulling off his own.

  Boris and Lara jump into the pool. Boris splashes exuberantly while Lara glides underwater like a stretched white seal. She comes up laughing.

  ‘The water’s beautiful!’ shouts Boris to Irakli, who is not moving from the chair. The heat is blazing, and he shields his eyes against the force field of the sun. There are parakeets screeching in the palm trees. The grain of his own skin is like a mesh of glistening ravines, and he can smell the sweat gathering in the crook of his elbow.

  Through the heat haze, Irakli sees Lara climb on Boris’s shoulders. Boris makes like an angry bull, roaring and snorting and trying to unseat her, but she digs her feet into his flanks and has an arm locked around his head. She is high above the water in her translucent bra and panties, singing defiantly, and she swings a rodeo arm round and round in the air. They struggle against each other until Boris tips her crashing into the water, and for a moment she is lost below a whirlpool. Two parakeets swoop low over the pool, their shining bellies reflecting turquoise. Lara bursts through the water’s surface, puts her arms round Boris’s neck and kisses him. Irakli closes his eyes to a crack, until he sees only the curved horizon of his own cheeks.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Boris shouts to him. Irakli does not answer, and Boris comes to get him. Wet-stepping over the hot stone, his shadow flashes across Irakli’s face, who flinches. Boris starts to undo Irakli’s clothes: dripping water from his hair on to his burning face and arms, he strips him down roughly to his underpants, picks him up and carries him into the pool. His torso feels clean and cool.

  ‘How can you be this heavy,’ Boris says.

  As Irakli’s body touches the water, it turns to loam. Boris lays him with infinite gentleness on the surface, he holds him there for a long while and draws his arms so slowly away that Irakli does not know the moment when he is floating alone. Boris paddles away to intercept Lara, who is submarining from end to end.

  Irakli looks up at the hot plate of the sky, the sun lighting rainbows in his eyelashes. Around him, the white water is duned with lapping blue, and it closes in a creeping tickle over his still-dry stomach. His ears are submerged and all the sounds are deep. He hears the protest of liquid as Lara and Boris fall over each other again, and the altered sound of their distant cries. With washed eyeballs he has new focus, and sees eagles circling in the remote sky – but then the surface floods over, and the palm trees turn molten. He closes his eyes and feels himself drift, his limbs outstretched, and eternity just around the corner. The water removes the impact from things, extracts their sound and colour, and soothes them all.

  There’s something amazing about this kind of sleep. There is nothing so calm as the muffled deep.

  He is suddenly uprooted again.

  ‘Breathe!’ shouts Boris in terror, dragging him out with adrenalin strength and laying him on the side of the pool. He slaps his face first one way then the other.

  Irakli opens his eyes. He wants to say I’m fine, but he is seized with coughing, and chlorine water pours out of him.

  ‘What were you thinking?’ demands Boris.

  They go back into the hotel, where the air conditioning is cold on their wet skin. Irakli’s eyes will not adjust to the light inside, and he is in darkness; his ears are full of water, and he hears only the caverns of his head. They take the elevator back to the room. Irakli lies down on the sofa. He feels drunk and exhausted.

  Boris and Lara are kissing on the floor. They have thrown off their wet clothes and they lie naked in the rectangle of sunlight pouring in through the window. Their hair is still wet and their eight limbs move over each other like the lingering tentacles of sea creatures. Lara’s back shines in the sunlight, dappled by the protruding curve of her vertebrae. The hairs on Boris’s calves still hold the wavy pattern of pool water running away. Irakli watches the kneading route of their hands and it is as if he can feel the responsive flesh under his own.

  Boris turns to him.

  ‘Come here.’

  Irakli’s ears are completely blocked with the water, and he cannot hear what Boris says, but he understands the gesture. Lara looks round at him, her breasts small and perfect, and they are both open to him, waiting. But Irakli closes his eyes and, as their lovemaking resumes, he succumbs to his own great desire: to sleep. He has a glorious dream.

  He wakes up with regret. He does not know how long it has been. The rectangle of light has moved, and Boris and Lara are lying in the dark shadow, passed out in each other’s arms. Irakli tilts his head to better see them lying there.

  At that moment the water shifts in his inner ear. There are tremors as it pools together and begins to move; it thunders over the eardrum, and courses through the ear canal, his whole body shivering with the arousal of tiny hairs. It oozes round the curves, unblocking him and letting in the sound – and when it spills out, wet and final, on the cushion, Irakli lets forth an involuntary moa
n.

  16

  BORIS LEFT ON TOUR, and Irakli did not know exactly where he was. He was playing in Montreal and Seattle. He was in Madrid and Berlin. He played in Bulgaria. He played in Moscow and Vienna.

  Irakli did not hear from him. He saw him only on TV.

  Khatuna was always travelling too. She was working on buildings in São Paolo and Dubai. She spent weekends with Plastic in exclusive Caribbean resorts.

  Irakli was left alone, trying to write. He composed phrases in his head, and sometimes they seemed good, but when he saw them on paper he realised they were stupid. He wondered whether he would ever write anything worthwhile again.

  He received his copy of Boris’s album in the mail. It came wrapped in cellophane and sealed inside with holograph stickers. He cut it open carefully. Inside was the list of track titles, which Irakli had composed himself. They were the only thing he had managed to write for a long time.

  The Delight of the Barbarians

  It was after you understood everything perfectly that you realised she was speaking an unknown language

  What disappointment, when you see a landscape from on high and realise that a map is true

  It is thanks to the exacting olfactory standards of moths that night flowers smell so lovely

  You assumed his fingernails were yellow from the nicotine until you noticed his toenails were yellow too

  He said: ‘Modern life seems safe only because the ones cut down in its path never survive to tell the tale’

  Before demolishing the walls of my childhood, they should have taken care to remove the shadows I left there

  Inside the CD was a photograph of Boris. He was pictured in black and white, sitting with his violin on a desolate mountainside against a thunderous sky. The caption read, Genius of the Balkans, but Irakli knew the picture had been shot in Colorado.

  Irakli prised the disk out of the holder and put it in his stereo. He drew the curtains, pressed Play and sat down to listen.

  When the CD finished he sat for some time in silence. Then he opened a bottle of whisky and turned on the television.

  He watched moguls on chat shows explaining why they were rich and everyone else was poor. Because I dared to dream. He watched music videos and men wrestling with crocodiles. He enjoyed the endless cacophony of flicking channels. He saw infomercials for cosmetic surgery, fireplaces and phone sex. Water ballet. Horoscopes. Folk dancing. He watched documentaries on Jesus Christ, Stalin, Alexander the Great, Hitler and the Crusades.

  Irakli let himself sink in television. Days floated past, and he did not clutch at them. He realised he could drink entire bottles of liquor, and he would find a blankness there that released him from the irrelevance of his thoughts.

  When Khatuna returned home she found him twisted and immobile on his bed. He was unconscious with drink, and smelt like a distillery. He had saliva crust across his cheek.

  She shook him until he came to. He opened his eyes and, seeing her, he smiled in bliss. As if still in a dream, he called her by her secret name. She brought water for him to sip, and he came back to life.

  She thought of the night, many years before, when she had discovered him wrung out with fever in their freezing room in Tbilisi. She realised that the same scene had recurred many times in her life – coming upon her brother after a separation to find that he had settled down, in her absence, only just this side of death. This accounted for her background of panic whenever they were apart.

  ‘Why do you do this to me?’ she said, stroking him. ‘Why do you cause me so much pain?’

  He closed his eyes with the pleasure of her fingers in his hair. She said,

  ‘You were always so happy when you were a child. You were the one who kept me happy. What’s happened to you? Now we have a nice life.’

  He said nothing. She wet a finger in her mouth and wiped at the residue on his cheek.

  ‘Tell me if there’s something wrong,’ she said, ‘and I’ll try to understand.’

  She was lying next to him on the bed, and her smell was intoxicating. She had that primordial smell of flesh to which one has once been joined. He said,

  ‘Sometimes this thing descends on me. It’s not like a curtain or a mist. It’s like a bridge falling, or a building, pinning me down. The only way to escape is to give in.’

  Khatuna looked stricken.

  ‘What is this thing with Boris? Are you in love with him? Are you lovers?’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ said Irakli. ‘It’s nothing like what you think.’

  ‘I don’t like him,’ said Khatuna. ‘I don’t care how great people think he is: I don’t like the way you are when you’re around him. I think you’d be a lot better if you didn’t see him any more.’

  Irakli said,

  ‘Why don’t we go back to Tbilisi?’

  ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I can’t walk down the street where Kakha was shot.’

  Irakli mused,

  ‘Things were all right when we were there. I was writing poetry. Mother was not alone.’

  ‘We’ll go back, I promise,’ said Khatuna. ‘But not yet. I can’t go yet.’

  ‘Where’s Boris now?’ asked the CEO.

  Plastic was in the Universal boardroom, answering questions.

  ‘He’s supposed to be playing in London tonight,’ he said.

  ‘Has he arrived?’

  ‘The band’s there, waiting in the hotel. But they haven’t seen him since Amsterdam.’

  ‘So he’s missing in action. He goes missing for four days and you just sit here hoping he’ll show up. He’s our hundred-million-dollar property, and you’re telling me you don’t know where he is.’

  ‘He’s probably spending our cheque,’ said the head of Decca, trying to lighten the mood. ‘He’s just a Bulgarian peasant: give him that much money and he’ll be off at the Ritz doing coke with a couple of hookers.’

  The CEO ignored him.

  ‘What’s the latest on our situation?’

  ‘Without knowing all the facts,’ said the lawyer, ‘it’s very clear that Boris is in multiple breach of contract. He seems to be willing to record with anyone who turns up with a microphone. Four other labels have issued original music by him. Some small pieces, one full-length seventy-two-minute album. Available for download on the internet.’

  ‘Maybe Boris didn’t know?’ suggested Plastic. ‘Maybe they recorded this stuff without him knowing?’

  ‘It’s possible,’ said the lawyer. ‘That’s why I say I don’t know all the facts. But the quality of these recordings suggests Boris made them in a studio. He knew what he was doing.’

  ‘All this is in the last two months,’ said the CEO. ‘His album’s only been out two months and already it’s through the roof. That kid should be promoting it with every cell in his body. Instead he’s recording other stuff on the side. Where did he even get time to write all this new material?’

  Plastic said,

  ‘Some of it he was writing here. Experimental music that we couldn’t put on our album. The rest – I don’t know. You know what he’s like. It pours out of him, he doesn’t need time to think it up.’

  ‘All that is our property, goddammit, circulating out there for free without so much as a credit to this company. What the hell are we doing?’

  ‘I’m dealing with it,’ said Plastic. ‘I’ve left him a hundred messages.’

  ‘Oh, you’ve left messages,’ said the CEO savagely. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t realise you’d left messages. So what am I getting concerned about?’

  There was silence in the room. Under the table, the head of Verve Records typed a message on his phone. The CEO said,

  ‘I don’t need convincing about this guy’s music. His album’s one of the great achievements of this company. It proves why big music companies like us are still relevant. It shows we can still pull genius out of our ass. This kid’s like Piaf or Armstrong or Elvis – people will always pay money for him. He’s got a long career ahead: endorsements,
collaborations, soundtracks – a solid revenue stream with no end in sight, which you’ll all agree is a ray of hope in today’s bullshit market. So you’ll forgive me if I’m a little sensitive when things go awry. I’m hearing a lot of strange things about this guy: unscheduled concerts, unauthorised recordings, trips to Morocco no one tells us about. Someone has to tell him how we do things.’

  He looked around the circle of music mavens. He said,

  ‘If you have to get on a plane, Plastic, and hold his hand the entire tour, then that’s what you have to do.’

  Plastic left the meeting cursing his colleagues and cursing Boris.

  Outside, there was sleet in the street lights: it was one of those dark January five o’clocks that made him loathe New York. He buttoned his coat as he walked. The aerial highways seemed empty, and when sometimes an engine strained overhead, its Doppler fall was like a dirge.

  Plastic had worked single-mindedly on Boris’s album for all this time, and now he was wondering whether his genius musician had taken him for a ride. He got home and his phone rang. He leapt for it, but it was Khatuna, not Boris. She was coming over. He almost said he couldn’t make it, but didn’t have the energy to invent an excuse.

  They went downstairs for a meal in a small Italian place. The place was full of rich foreign tourists, and did nothing to improve Plastic’s mood. When they came back up, Khatuna lit a cigarette, which he’d told her not to do in his house. She said vacantly,

  ‘What do you want to do?’

  He had no conversation. They went into the bedroom. They undressed and lay on the bed. But Plastic was unable to make love.