List of the Lost

by Morrissey

  “What are you doing tonight?” he asked Eliza.

  “Seeing you,” she felt assured.

  “That is the correct answer. Well done.” Ezra had been a beacon of light to so many females as there they lay, under the male, with nothing to lose. Up and into his eyes they looked, finding an almost primitively embarrassing meaning, finding that they finally had a name, and Ezra alone taught them to see themselves through their lovers’ eyes. It wasn’t easy, and the gift worked both ways, of course, but it did different things to different hearts. And why shouldn’t it? Sameness meant that nothing moves on. Occupied by Ezra, the girl-woman somehow enjoyed the sensation of feeling oily and disgusting, and as Ezra flashed his ‘no biting’ smile, he playfully bit her ear hard enough to hurt yet not hurtful enough to matter. It is rough with the boys, as Eliza will find, just as it is boring with the considerate gentlemen. For his part, Ezra was appreciative, but would never be the dazed underling, and neither would he ever be cheap enough to be cruel. Eliza, though, had caught him unawares, because although she awakened him, full gratification would not be quite so prompt. Of similar height (should these things matter), they amused each other daily with dilly-dally and doo-lally repartee, the kind which neither would accept from others.

  “I have an old soul,” begins Eliza.

  “I am a model of healthy humanity,” chops Ezra.

  “Friendship is a waste of time,” lobs Eliza.

  “I dream of a booze-infused orgy,” shoots Ezra.

  “I am a booze-infused orgy,” is Eliza’s reverse-twist.

  “I have erotic curiosities,” topspins Ezra.

  “I can take life as it is and leave it at that,” backhands Eliza.

  “I slow down to inspect traffic accidents at the risk of causing another,” lies Ezra.

  “You mustn’t keep asking yourself why you feel what you feel,” is Eliza’s dropshot.

  “I am a flawless triumph!”

  “I am a floored triumph!”

  “I take myself very seriously,” is Ezra’s sudden half-volley.

  “… therefore I do not need to …” serves Eliza.

  “I am a puzzle,”

  “I, a solution,”

  “I am flimsy,”

  “I am whimsy,” the ground strokes went on, leading nowhere, for the tiebreak was truced and the play-and-serve love match was an even double.

  “I am the perfect fiancée,” leaned in Eliza.

  “I am the perfect fiasco,” advanced Ezra, headmanning a drop pass. Furiously paced, this private nonsense went on until at least one face cracked, not because any of the puck-handled dribble had been funny in the least, but because, well, what it must be to be in love.

  At the ivy halls in dreamy central Beantown, the quartet warmed up beneath the contemptuous giant shadow of Priorswood, with its tower aloft like a snooty nose of supremacy, its historic standing being reason enough to glare down with full repulsion at the deformed modern world. Sprinklers on the football field and sunlight flooding The Great Library wheezed a privileged blow of warm air across the absorbed and collected students of intense expressions and processed formulations clanking about inside their spaghetti heads – so small and lost are they, so petty their actual blood-and-guts experience, yet oh so very ripe for clever positions within the judiciary or the media, and with their narrow historical views the students will become unbreakable in their steely assurances, and whatever the unreliable and self-serving shit story history books have left out does not matter, as long as their own life happens as designed, for it is all and absolutely only about money. Social consciousness and abnormal pre-eminence certainly take their little place at Priorswood, whilst naked life is elsewhere, and is irrelevant when pitted against the literary pretensions and superiority complex of social position. The catatonic magpies are called to and they line up, and the theorists theorize without ever getting their feet wet. Ezra whispers in warning to the other three. “It’s here,” he says, as Mr Rims approaches. “Did he really part with money for that shirt?” murmured Justy.

  “He found it on a bus,” smiled Nails.

  “He found it down the back of a couch,” added Justy.

  “I heard exactly what you just said,” came Mr Rims, jejune jesting ( having heard nothing ), and well aware of his clichéd self. “Even worse, I saw that last track attempt and I wonder what exactly you’d call it. Performance art … Community Theater? It’s anybody’s guess, of course. I at least had the benefit of watching you from the window and no closer. That’s all that can be said in your favor.”

  “We were just practicing,” smiled the Ezra of goodness.

  “Evidently,” sniffed Mr Rims. “Now, as you know, complaining is all I have left in life, but I like to think I still have my finger firmly up the pulse when it comes to choosing track teams. You let my good name down and I’ll probably kill you, and I’ll gleefully assure the police that your sudden death was not an accident. This day is all about discipline, exercise, practice, preparation, conditioning … all the things that you lack.”

  “We’re on it,” affirmed Harri.

  “You’re certainly on something,” rocketed back Rims. “Now. You do know the date, the month and the year that we are currently in?”

  The foursome didn’t bother to answer or even to nod as this teasing twitter played out its daily dozen. Hamstring and tendon yakkety-yak backchats and gabs as the afternoon sun loses its edge and gentle music yawns across the lawns. There is shrill laughter from an open window, so ditzily unreal, and Ezra thinks of Eliza as she was – in a simple dress with a low neckline and no sleeves.

  “I’m definitely having a baby,” she had said. Flustered, Ezra paused and fumbled, asking her to repeat what she had just said as Eliza marvelled at the richness of his gullibility.

  “In Dutch or English?” she snapped with a scowl of power. She then explained that the baby was not currently within, but that the wish would one day certainly be fulfilled. “I’m not saying by you – necessarily. I’m just saying that … eventually … should I find myself in the Holy City … living in a friendly room with books, then I’d let myself go to one of the savage hordes … he of strong jawline and fierce gentleness … and hey presto … the process … such as has ever been the way.”

  “The pro-cess?” stammered Ezra, looking all of ten very confused years of age.

  “Oh, I see … linguistic expertise …” she has faltered. “Yes, that sounds like something I didn’t mean at all. Life takes the stran­gest turns, and I’m not saying that you, pumpkin of my pumping heart, do not strike me as the perfect father … but we must just be … and not rely, otherwise I see myself crushed and bewildered and unable to get up again.” Eliza enjoyed overweening confidence at such times as these, because she knew she could inflame the dim light of Ezra’s confusion which, in turn, re-shaped his face to an appealingly shy appeal for peace and mercy. Eliza was now on top with Ezra being entered with as much professional aggression as deemed necessary. Incitement to mayhem.

  There is a querulous pause. “Ezra,” she now began with softened tone, “should I leave my husband and come and live with you?” This form of play is coy bait, since Eliza does not – and has never had – a husband, but much of Eliza’s jabs would not depend upon rational justifications for both were in that state known as love, when even the defensive fencing sends a sexual shiver.

  “Have you ever considered a wordless existence? You’d fare far better,” Ezra now joins in, and both relax.

  “Yes, I have considered a wordless existence … since words could never be accurately found to describe all of … this,” she waves a hand out in quite stately sweep … but at nothing.

  “You were very smart, Eliza. But something dashed your brains out at some point. Do you understand me at all?”

  “Yes, I do, but only at all. Nowhere else, and I am not vulnerable to offen
se because of, well, let’s just describe it as an abnormally solid wall of love for you. Undeserved at times, perhaps, but I’m immune to argument on the subject, and what a joy to be able to finally say these words for the first time … catching your breath as you sigh … finally in the living world. But we need each other in order for us both to be good, and to hold on to a certain unshakeable belief without reason.”

  “There are certain things which are best not to mess around with.Human thoughts, for example, haha. But, look, you are my heart. You save me every single day from … absolute boredom. This is how I know I … pause … love you.”

  “You haven’t finished the sentence,” clips in Eliza; “the bit where we move in together is missing … and the other frazzled issue of my new life and, my, my how your expressions alone reveal your deepest insights … or at least they give me mine, should I say? Or are our lives too ordinary to be worth yammering about?”

  “What would your mother say if you said ‘I’m pregnant and I’m leaving home’?” asked Ezra.

  “If I told her you were pregnant and leaving home I think she’d be quite pop-eyed … should the gin allow.”

  “Is that clear, Ezra?” This voice now belonged to Mr Rims, breaking into Ezra’s dream, the danger signal that reality must always be. Ezra realized that he had not listened to anything at all said by Mr Rims, or by anyone else, as all five squatted on the grassy green of Priorswood propriety. A grin broke across Ezra’s face, as if this alone could assure Rims.

  “Jesus, you’re a devil,” rounded off Rims. And that was that.

  The boys break it open on the track, but Harri tanks at third base and bolts into a header. It’s a poor show under tension.

  “ Muzzle-head!” shouts Rims … “infidel!” he clips on, and all are quietly embarrassed.

  With just over a month to go before the competition where middle- and long-distance events shape lives forever, our foursome pack life’s inessential essentials in migration for a holistic fortnight at a sportsman’s haven known as Natura, a no-nonsense collegiate retreat where countrywide affiliations commune in one hearty scholastic clash, where a single-track road led to the hidden pavilion of an abandoned plantation shadowed by giant dawn redwoods five meters in girth; where deadly dale led to stumpery woods, and slippery stepping stones criss-crossed over dangerously racing rapid rivers. Natura’s facilities were not necessarily more useful than those at Priorswood, but the colonization of contenders cramped within shared living quarters brought the critically serious within competitive towel-whacking distance of those whom they’d zealously oppose in combat on that final commercialized Pillsbury Doughboy-soaked televised day. This tested preparedness and authority and overall composition, weeding out wet-knickered nerves and any lingering sensitivities. In fact, our team converged at Natura without making any exchanges whatsoever with the other mariner athletes, thus the intensification of such a move ultimately felt lost on the unit. Woodland surrounds of cud-chewing laziness wrapped Natura in a soon-to-be-shorn lamb’s warmth and protection, here, where humans are allowed to feel almost as dignified as nature, and where an immediate harmony with silence and beauty (which most of us have learned to live without) embraced the boys as a pictorial love affair began. The city peasantry is ineffectual here, and they will call it wilderness whilst not knowing the meaning of such a word, yet somehow acknowledging the moral superiority of land untrammeled by the flapping mediocrities that make up the simple-minded majority. These woods are an eternal ocean, familiar to you only from television; they are gamely danger-ous or overripe with majesty depending upon your surging urgings to give an opinion. Nature always waits in the wings and the winds, ready to pounce with all of its power just at that sloppily contented hour when you foolishly assume it to be plainly tired out. Narcissistic humans do their quite pathetic best to kill nature off, oblivious to their self-reliance on its upkeep, yet nature will only take so much bureaucratic bullying before it snaps a deadly snap – for it does not need your approval, your organized banditry, your prepubescent social laws, your trades of cheapening commerce, your militant preachment, your apologies or blind belief of superiority … as if a presidential seat gives you an intolerable presumption of dominance over this earth’s terrain! Watch, wait and listen, and soon you’ll be bitten. Natura indeed means mother nature, and here she is all around you, as you stand shyly abandoned, denying that what was said was ever intended. Early evening has our hounds in leisurely stroll through deep-dell woodland where oxygen almost chokes you with its purity, for there are no chunky human discontents fanatically generating their defective habits. Animals do not pollute, do not need a god in order to be good, and live in organized societies of reciprocal altruism. Animals do not need money, and they will even feed the subordinates within their kin. Humans, on the other hand, live entirely upon repayment of favors given, and on a costly demonstration of super­iority that thrives on divine punishment. New air rolls into the city in order to save it, yet it is defiled by the smack and shuffle of everyday destruction of Neanderthals posing as modernities, causing nothing more serious than life simply needing to do its part. Our speed merchants do what we all do in the stimulating silence of woodland of mature oak trees and wingnut trees: they throw back their heads and they squint to the tallest point of the tallest evergreen, and then they walk slowly, with mouths agape, yew cones underfoot in wild flower meadow. Yet what makes wild bluebells wild? And could they ever be tamed? Is a caged animal no longer wildlife? Or is it in fact wilder still, due to its incarceration? Marshy montezuma pines line the pathway through the woods, and deer are here – knowing enough about the evils of the human spirit to keep well hidden, for the human race is anything but humane. They have created the hell of the slaughterhouse, aflame and far more perverted in sickness than anything apparently designed by Satan. Ah, yes, the human race: impinging and threatening with every gleeful twist of the branding iron.

  Whilst the city demands that we jaunt instead of stroll, slaves to the hands of the clock, the clock, the clock (even though a moochie traipse might be all that’s required of you), this pathway through the woods makes no such demands. You walk as you please, amongst yew, lime and maple marsh, none of which fear time as pathetically im­perialist you do. With the howl of a dog, Nails dances through the woods, happiness in high gear.

  “It’s on ice! It’s on ice!” he shouts, and nature’s space returns an impressive echo. The others know what he means, and are even dismayingly amused by his orgiastic war dance. Nails has no doubt whatsoever that the ultimate trophy awaits at the upcoming barnburners competition, as late bird-song, here, in the pine-coned hollow, is heard as ever it has been, undisturbed since the original and native Americans (now blanketed and blue-penciled out of his-story and her-story) first sprayed their pioneer’s mark on a country that really wasn’t ever kind to its own people. Of the white race no explanation is necessary because expect­ations are so low. Nails rocks along in mock fun-house mirror buffoonery, and no one knows why, and it hardly matters. Ezra thinks of Eliza, and he wonders if she thinks of how he thinks of her.

  “… and if we fail, we shall fail magnificently!” lords Justy, and with this he hurls his wristwatch into the shrubbery as he shouts, “I refuse to be a slave! I refuse to be a spectator! This body is decorative art! I delight in my own magnificence! Why shouldn’t I? War is an old, shitty business! I am young! The nuclear arms race is a mass mental illness! Nuclear physicists are highly paid serial killers! All they can think of is cremation. Why aren’t they all on Death Row? I am alive! I will not be destroyed by regulations! ” The dance goes on.

  “Yes, very good, stop it now, please, or I’ll split your head,” says Harri, flatly.

  Curled and hidden amongst the flora and fauna that run alongside a boundary-line bridle path, a small and crumpled figure is doing his best to stand upright amongst primrose and violets. Soundlessly the boys freeze as five sets of eyes assess each other. Nobod
y speaks. No civilized description could bring to life an outlined sketch of the elderly imp swaying like a nightmarish object of hardbitten brutality, with his torn overcoat blacker than death and his face lined and marked with the sorriest scars – dis­possessed, dehumanized and insidious, this intimidating ding-a-ling wreck is at the end of everything, and possibly wanting the end sooner rather than later. The hunched hobo has no hair, his skin a dish of human dirt, his bearing having already drifted into the final chapter as if it were death. His voice suddenly spoke, as if half-strangled in his own throat. From the swill-bucket mouth came breath that could kill off a team of horses, and hands like withered leaves made fumbling motions as an occultist drone of despair dripped from his chipped and chapped lips.

  “Well, none of youze is black, so I suppose you won’t kill me,” he starts. The human sickbed steps closer, a stench of stale medication vaporizing from his gaseous and perished clothing, to which evidently cling bits of herb garden. A pitiful vision of life’s loneliness, his timid steps suggest a man pushed past his limit and now ready to feud with his own grave. His cataracts mist the pain, but the agonized mouth knows that only midnight is ahead, with no further chance of recovery from enforced oblivion. The voice speaks with the tone of struggle, passive goodwill, yet sorrowfully nowhere, neither myth nor fiction. Only so much despair can be survived before the mind finally caves in. Trapped in his clothes, trapped in his history – the history that created him, and he is here, one of the lowest of the lower animals. He is now his total outcome, the inevitable moral and physical defeat, changeless in its ignominy.