List of the Lost

by Morrissey

  “Well,” laughed Ezra, “if I say ‘c’mon, you guys,’ I’m not necessarily addressing just guys. I could be talking to guys and girls, but everyone knows I mean everyone.”

  “I understand. But would you address the same crowd and say ‘c’mon, you girls’? No, you wouldn’t, because men are insulted to be addressed as female, whilst women are thought to be delighted to be addressed as guys.”

  “Hang the innocent!” struck Ezra. They both kissed, but Eliza was impatient to return to the conversation.

  “Do you think Elizabeth Barbelo is watching us now, and if she is, why doesn’t she appear?”

  “I ache in every muscle when I think of that night,” said Ezra. “The question wasn’t … answerable … I’d been shoved past my limits … I know that. Do you think I haven’t cried every single night? Something corrupt happened to all of us, and it began that day in the woods with that schizo hobo. We didn’t mean to kill him, but that would be a lame confession to any jury. It’s between me and God Almighty now, I know that,” and with this Ezra’s tears lightly reappeared. “I don’t understand anything any more. I’ve never been a party to violence of any kind, and now I’ve killed a man and hidden his body in the woods … and then I dig up the body of a young boy murdered twenty years ago, and I’m unable to manage the truth to anyone … walking around in a hypnotic state … hearing Harri’s voice wherever I go. Edgar Allan Poe couldn’t concoct this. And in the midst of it all I was meant to lead a relay team to national … televised victory!”

  Cautiously, Eliza unwound herself from Ezra and stood up. A trance switched her expression to shock.

  “What – are – you – talking – about?” She towered above coiled Ezra. “You have … murdered someone?”

  “Yes. He attacked me, and then my punch was too forceful and he … just … died … hidden in ferns and fauna and woodland shit … never discovered.”

  “Which is … a good thing?” Eliza asked in disbelief.

  “Eliza, don’t. I can hear it in your voice. Don’t scrutinize … you know me as someone who is personally good, and I did what I had to do, please believe me, and I’ve cried myself to a state of exhaustion every night since. Nails, Harri, Justy – they weren’t to blame, but they stood by me, and I’ll never again know mental rest. Yet I have no understanding of why what happened took place. There’s no answer. Yet it had to be done. There’s a point at which you do what you must to protect yourself, and there isn’t time to consider im­-plications or tolerance or holy scriptures or nineteenth-century laws … it’s all there in the pit of the stomach, and you articulate whatever it is you’re feeling, whether it be with words or actions, and to hell with the Pope – who, in any case, isn’t there, isn’t facing whatever it is you face, and we must make the best of what we feel. Eliza, you are looking at me with gunfire in your unendurably beautiful eyes, yet you and only you have saved me through these recent weeks. We all have only one chance at living. Please don’t seal away our chance of happiness … if there could be any changing of your mind now –”

  “But you have done to this hobo precisely what Isaac did to Noah! You killed someone and hid the body! Are you insane? I’ve protected you, yes, but without knowing any of this!” Eliza was now shouting.

  “Eliza, don’t! If you stand in opposition to me then I’m finished. The two situations have no similarity whatsoever.”

  “But two people are dead, and their murderers are intent on getting along undiscovered … Ezra, what gives you this utopian spirituality? What is so superior in your defense against this hobo? And what do you even know about Noah Barbelo … that he wasn’t a sly boy who coaxed Dean Isaac into some blackmail act of opportunism? You read of these cases and the adult is always thought to be at fault … but these kids … they’re not all purified little tender angels … they know what sex is and how to use it and they know how adults are trapped and guilty and doomed as soon as the whistle is blown. Kids know all these consequences, and they know how to bow their heads and tremble in a courtroom … the gaze fixed down, the confused blink of the eyes, the pursed mouth of confusion.”

  “You’re wrong! You’re wrong! I saw this boy’s mother! Her predicament had destroyed her, and mothers know their sons!”

  Eliza collapsed into an armchair and wept. Sammy suddenly burst in. Ezra threw an atlas towards Sammy’s head that directly hit the target, and Sammy withdrew, impaired.

  “And I thought I was entangled in enough, but now you’ve told me this I become … a conspirator, a schemer … unless I blab to the flatfoots.”

  Ezra knelt before her. “Your emotional permanence is all that keeps me level. I only learned to love because you showed me that I could. Nothing else in life is enough. I will give you no trouble for the rest of our lives. I beg you to take me as I am, with the knowledge of all that’s happened. The agony will only be sharper if we separate. Unless I am with you I shall never be where I belong. Together we can recover, and we can live a happy life. There is no one but you for whom I feel this love. I’d endure any pain in order to spare you from it. Your love is beyond price. I am so heartily sorry for all that has taken place, but I am spared further self-hatred if I can turn around and there you are.”

  “Yes, there I am … co-conspirator,” she is now calming her anger.

  “Don’t make this our parting moment. I can’t bear anything more than I already have. Life has been … disgusting … no point and no purpose. I am puzzled, I am repulsed, my brain doesn’t stop this inane chatter … I am guilty, I am innocent, I’m relied upon … and all I await is for your arm to come around my shoulder, and love streams out of me. I’ve done nothing wrong.”

  His speech now over, Ezra lowered his head and Eliza softly placed her right hand upon it, reassuringly, for she now has little hope of anything at all, but she has nothing to gain from leaving Ezra.

  “I wasn’t attacking,” she said, “I was trying to clarify.” Ezra looked up, elated to the point of tears, for he had heard understanding in her voice.

  “I didn’t murder that mutant … I was simply defending myself against what he was about to do to me.”

  “Perhaps. But you know the courts of justice, and only a fool could have faith in such bird turd. Justice and the law are two entirely different things.”

  If true love takes the bad days in the same spirit as the good days, then the love of Ezra and Eliza now faced its final test. At ease, they rocked gently together, resuming their love. With her wish to spend the night in her own bed, Ezra drove Eliza the few drowsy blocks towards her parents’ home. Although they had nothing to say to one another, what was not said indicated a return to hearts possessed, for their past pride and joy had always indicated a love that could last longer than life – alas, one of the imperialist tricks of romance. The quiet streets were sleepwalking with secrets, the night resting with an inability to whisper, the traffic lights changing without any sign of traffic – their reds and greens talking to no one, fresher air creeping in to disadvantage the impurities of the deadened day. All quiet, all still in this decent and pleasant atmosphere of slumber and repose, where lush houses of beddy-bye shut-eye snoozled in sleepland; a smiling sleep of dreamland. In the middle of a cross-street the hypnotic sedation exploded as an automobile self-propelled itself from nowhere and cannoned into the passenger side of Ezra’s car with a sledgehammer smash that folded Eliza into the warped dashboard as she died instantly, head bowed into shattered glass. Ezra fell out of the wreckage and crunched against concrete, as the running feet of the slayer driver were heard darting away from the smashup; that tone, that sound and the silence that surrounded it, the shabby soles of shoes, evidence to be denied, Eliza no longer in possession of thought or those gifts and gestures bestowed at birth. Muscles, voice – all gone, Eliza denied of her revenge, drifting out of this world and no longer in anyone’s way, as permanent twilight called to her like the next dance step. But the
cheated victim was Ezra once again, condemned to life.

  The true origin of the word ‘hero’ does not carry connotations of either honor or virtue. A legend is something that might be true or false, and a conundrum is an answer that provides a joke, but generations shift word-definitions in order to suit whatever suits. In a listless dream state, catatonic Ezra is bedded for the unforeseeable narco­tized term at the University Hospital following excessive psycho­­somatic treatments. The transient trackster’s pleasures roll speedily through his incapacitated mind, for he has fallen to the reality that very few can bear – of being enfeebled to a desensitized and spiritless resignation. Traumatism has left him frostbitten and chilblained, feverous and flushed, fiery and felled. Delirium has lowered his resistance, and wired-up to the constant blips and blips and tings of surgical machinery his soft face leans sideways … staring out of the window towards the full extent of freedom. As long as he can see out there he is not in here. Attending examiners burst into the room, and nursing sisters whip around Ezra’s bed with their certain perspectives and their reams of stress tests and scribbled diagnostics, yet oddly saying nothing at all if asked for information. Ezra’s playful days are over, and blood-counts replace them; time, once a gift, is now a punishment. What you have been saved for has had its curtain call. Everything begins in the mind but ends with the body. These, now, are the weakly peaky backroads – under the weather and out of sorts, as white as a measly sheet. No computer-assisted tomography, no heat therapy, no sweat therapy, no urinalysis … nothing, now, can save the airsick slide of the suicidalist. He was once important only because the life within him had importance … but when lack of safety is suddenly nothing to fear? When the will finally gives out, and wants no return? No further tears against the dying of the light, as the quiet exit becomes the logical perspective. The practical nurse of title (but no apparent function) pounds noisily about the room, checking numbers and speaking loudly, not allowing Ezra any sleep, yet his nothingness has already taken him far away from medical examinations and sodium drips and the morbid aspect of badly paid caregivers with their podgy blue hands and their tense understanding – momentarily funny, yet without a breath of tolerance. How to rescue the soul? We suffer only because we believe we are alone, but how to get through without faith in life? Why should Ezra wait any longer – seeing Eliza’s smashed face before him and Harri’s grave beside him … and the missing Nails and the lost Justy, neither ever seen again on a landscape of far too many strange shadows. As Isaac settled down with a frothy Mimosa, the Lausanne sun warmed up considerably and he at the very least felt grateful for the black-hand syndicate that secured his protection. Here in Lausanne he would begin his memoirs, as most do when all’s been done. There were solitary figures idling by the Ouchy bay, and surely the law of averages would prompt at least one of them towards an assenting nod, if only as a basic half-amused act of human kindness.

  Ezra’s eyes lowered at the coming of nightfall, with all of its secrets of anonymity. A light from the yard at the back of the hospital threw darting shadows, yet anything recognized by Ezra tortured him, for his body had now absented whilst wondering why it hadn’t been allowed to die, and who is it that keeps forcing me back? Figuratively he had indeed already died – our great stylist of the track leaned into a rolling and groaning Harri trembling with exhaustion after a lengthy run and now lying flat on his back on the sun-soaked track, and Ezra kissed him softly on the head and Harri looked up with eyes that shed a gentle melancholy at an affection so unexpected and one that moves different people in different ways. The body at unguarded moments is fully alive to accept more readily, and will not be guided by jealous advice.

  “May we never be apart,” Ezra sensitively murmured to Harri, knowing that love could never be experienced without risk, or without a voice with a certain sound. There were days when … all we needed to do was accept, irresponsible acts meaning not very much at all, a disassembled life with a head full of music and a heart full of hope.

  “People reveal themselves only when they make love,” mused Eliza, chewing on a pencil in Ezra’s memory, “and never at any other time. Which is not something you can raise a toast to, unfortunately. I wonder why we’re all so lifeless? This humdrum civility … what is it? All of us crying to be let out! Well, I have a theory, of course …”

  “Somehow I thought you might,” came Ezra with a pretend sigh, but so happy to spread out on the lawn at his parents’ house, the half-asleep sound of mating doves in evening discourse without a single false note.

  “Well,” began Eliza, “once you finally know someone intimately … they no longer have any defense against you … and you suddenly have power over them … the power to hurt them quite viciously …”

  “But why would you want to?”

  “Well, that’s the heavy burden of heavy petting, isn’t it?” she said, gibbering now into Ezra’s dreams, where he no longer needed to keep his sanity unclouded as he felt the pull of the earth. A shivery touch brought him back … back to where everyone lived permanently on the point of apology, and a physician’s voice chattered and chirped with sharpened senses of noisy self-deception. Oh, the limited human mind, smiled Ezra. How it cannot keep pace! How we scamper about, trying to manage our lives properly … we little ripples … who go, and try our measly best to drag everything with us.

  “You can tell everything about a person just by looking at their hands,” offered Nails, one distant genial Saturday at Ledger’s Bar, yet no convincing account followed. I was there, thought Ezra, and I loved, and I welcomed with gratitude, and I cracked the female mystery wide open, and the love of my friends lived rent-free in my heart, and I ran on that track like a whole person – never asking for more than there was … ice-cold mornings made me laugh, so happy was I then. True friendship is a miracle; ‘yes’ is always a smile, but events outstrip us all sooner or later, and what happens when you are unable to call out? Who, even, to call to? Tonight, Ezra had exhausted himself knowing that his frail walk to this very bed had been his final walk to anywhere. Oh, let me sleep now, without any chance stirrings, without the pointless yap of EMTs, this heart exhausted and resolved, and it wants its turn of a replacement for life, no longer awaiting answers, too psychologically wounded to bother with questions, no longer disputing the Death Card already dealt. The lazily scrubbed hygiene of this little white room! Yet what of the spiritual hygiene approaching? The stove has died quietly, the palms of the dying are open flatly, and this murderous planet of criminal nations is a joy to leave behind. It is always Saturday in my mind’s eye, he thinks, as his breathing now comes from somewhere deeper than his chest, all lust and trust behind him, but happy to be giving in to something stronger than himself – just for this one time. How many doctors does it take? Why do I now remember things that I never actually knew? Come on, that’s enough for now. Close your book in this faltering light, for your eyes are pinkish and tired, little man. There is school tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after, and the day after. Destiny, now, has nothing to do with you, Ezra – all responsibility shredded and shed. Yet there at the foot of his bed he could clearly see a full materialization of the phantomic wretch; the stumbling unearthly midget whose life had been ended by one concentrated punch of self-defence from Ezra … that richly mind-swilling day in the woods as we all lived our small lives. Yet here he was again – at the foot of the bed, like a barking dog … like a smiling and shadowy disembodied seething mess, watching Ezra slide away, the wretch with a look of order and meaning upon his boiling face of inscrutable threat, with all the superior rectitude and militancy of a priest administering the last rites. Ezra applied final will to fully recognize the spectral sheet, as maddening midnight church bells provided their harmonized soothing dullness, asking only that we remember with kindness.

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  Copyright © Whores in Retirement, 2015

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  ISBN: 978-0-141-98297-7