Lurid & Cute

by Adam Thirlwell

  THE DAUPHIN

  into another world

  And so it happens that someone falls from a window or into the sea and into another world. They just fall and are transported. Like my friend Wyman who one day woke up and discovered that his life had made him superfat without him quite understanding how, so that in his anguish he just cried out in supplication to the Virgin and any other deity whose name he could remember, even though of course there were many reasons why Wyman should be so lavish in his size, reasons which Wyman preferred to ignore – namely the penchant he had for Wuxi-style soup dumplings and disco fries, or a meal consisting of LaMar’s Donuts as a final flourish after three Schmitter sandwiches – not to mention the demise of his legal career and the garish side effects of his various uppers and downers …

  an occurrence possibly more normal than it seems

  In fact, the more I thought about it, as I drove to the hospital with Romy slumped beside me, and I kept putting my hand to her mouth as if to silence her but really to check that she was still continuously breathing, the truly strange thing is that when you wake up in the morning you do generally find things exactly where they were the previous evening. That’s the deeper freak-out, or at least it should be. Because in sleep or more precisely in dreams you find yourself, or at least you think you do, as the zaddiks of sleep description have observed, in a state fundamentally different from wakefulness, and when you open your eyes an infinite presence of mind, or rather quickness of wit, is therefore required in order to catch everything in the same place you left it the evening before. Waking up, I just mean, is such a terrifying state that it’s a wonder anyone survives it. So easily you could be taken back to high school, or accused of an impossible crime, or discover that your wife seems to be now a shy Alsatian. Not that everyone wakes up every morning as a donkey or beetle but still, everyone will some time – because to wake up as a donkey doesn’t always mean you wake up feeling groggy in your new big flappy ears, or turkified and in possession of six scimitars. It can happen in whatever hotel you pass by every day, with just the merest inflation of a thought balloon – and there you are, in bardo. In fact it’s not even necessary to, let’s say, wake up beside a girl who is bleeding from the nose and unconscious. It can be even smaller than that, I was thinking. Recently it happened to me more and more – I would wake and feel just minutely transformed, simply by waking beside my wife, with a miniature dog between us. I understand, to you this is possibly not so psychedelic. But was I really so wrong? Show me the married man who is still living at home with his parents and neurotic dog, who is putting his clothes in the wicker tub of a laundry basket, as he has done for more than thirty years, so that his mother can once a week take them downstairs to the washing machine, and then tell me if you think it might not be acceptable for this man to be given over to feelings of catastrophe. Not to mention other complications of hospitality which I will come to very soon. At this point it’s only important to consider how this was not the basic situation that my ambition would have imagined for its future self. That’s maybe why every day now I woke up and was just dazed by reality, like any cartoon character who is supine after a fight, with many dingbats circling his bulldozed head.

  especially for a dauphin or delfino

  The only thing that’s made me unlike other people is that me I think much more. It was because of such excessive thinking that in my family I was adoringly known as a prodigy. But when you think more than other people, although that difference might seem small, it can end up enormously expanding and you finish with different results. It certainly meant that I felt just slightly separate from the world – whenever I saw an object, the consciousness that I saw it remained between me and it, like a halo, preventing me from ever knowing it directly – and that’s a dismal condition to inhabit. All I’d ever wanted was to get on in the world! – that was the only glory I had in mind. And in this I was only being faithful to the values of my family. I think every family has its myths and ours was that really anything was possible. My mother assured me every day that I could do great things, like she was my astrologer. We were the courtiers of the inner life! I don’t mean that we were super-rich or the owners of vast factories and estates, but we were definitely among the powerful, those with sparkling waters in the refrigerator and unusual fruit from the supermarkets. Obviously as usual on the outskirts of other countries there were wars – small wars, absolutely, but wars nevertheless – in which our armies were involved, but they were far away and so for us instead it was the time when everyone was owning strange pets, not quite possums or small lemurs but almost, and meanwhile it was incredibly chic to eat small pastries imported from various locations, and in every garden people hung those elegant paper lanterns. While me I was a prodigy. I know because my mother said so. In bookstores she told the assistants that my reading age was hyper-advanced, then she bought me histories of the pharaohs and I read them all. In the luminous pharmacies and department stores, people always smiled at me, and I believed very much that when they smiled they did it because they liked me. What happened next was that the money of my parents bought my education at a secluded school, and later a secluded university. Afterwards, because I was a devoted son, I worked in an office in the city. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that everything was very soft and delicious. The juggernaut of meaning, let’s say, was not parked heavily on our lawn. When I married – and we married very young, my wife, Candy, and I – we remained living at home, just as my parents preferred. You see? I always wanted to be a pirate and I think I basically was, if by pirate you mean someone who has everything they want. So OK, I had no eye patch or cutlass, I wasn’t truly a corsair, not in the clothes, but everything I wanted I got. Before school every morning my mother styled my hair with a hairdryer and delicate brush, as a servant might have cosseted the curls of the inbred Habsburg prince in his knickerbockers, the prince with his outsize chin. But if this seems like a basic paradise with fountains and gentle rills I should also add that such happiness rarely remains happiness for long, so that in fact at the moment when you are realising that what you feel is happiness it is probably transforming itself into something much more slithery, whether you know about this transformation or not – the way a demon might extend his slithery arms, or you might open the back door one morning and not notice the cat entering menacingly below your gaze. I was possibly seven when my mother said to me that there was no one who made her laugh more than I did. Would you like to be such a dauphin? I do not think so. It’s lovely to be the only child – it gives you privileges, the privilege of being adored, of being the only one there, and if that happens it does last your whole life, I think, or at least it has for me, nobody can do anything but take care of you, that is the way I was and this is the way I still am, just as also it means that whereas for everyone who has siblings, which is nearly everyone, the issue of superiority is a very important one, the issue of who is better and who is more loved, instead I have always been more equable, serene in my own serenity, as if Buddha had been born right here in these delightful suburbs, just contemplating the monkey-puzzle trees and mechanical sprinklers: yes, all of that is true – but still, to be the dauphin has its disadvantages. My mother drove me to school every day and while we drove I entertained her with my quips. What a weight for a child to bear! That’s why when I talk, I still tend to talk very hyper. To be destined for higher things has this effect. You find yourself in some silent isolation tank, apart from other people – like you’re training to go into outer space and there you are, alone with your dizziness and nausea.

  who lately has been anxious about his achievements

  But then, of course, everything that once seemed grand in conception soon seems only small, the miniature realisation of a dream that itself was not ambitious enough at the moment it was first conceived: like, for instance, I don’t know, the freeway system in LA with its beautiful intersections – and this dream of my higher glory was no different. I got older, and there was n
o glory visible. I did not, let’s say, impose. If someone walked towards me, when walking down a street, I was always the one to move aside and into the wet gutter. In the local bars and mescal diners, no one nodded to me or knew me by my name. I was like a trick of Photoshop, the way I tended to be camouflaged by my surroundings. It made every day a trial because in the end it’s important to have a certain sense of self, I don’t think that’s an outlandish proposition. In fact, such outlandish propositions, and other general maxims on the way to live a life, were why in the end one morning when I woke up and once again, as so often, discovered myself in this unreal state which did not in any way match up with my ambitions, I subsequently realised that I could not do this any more. I could not continue wasting or losing so much time. For a long time now I had been meaning to write to a friend in the country. My friend Shoshana had married and moved into the provinces, and subsequently Shoshana was obviously sad. Her husband, she said, did not understand her, and she was imploring me for pity. But me I shied away from the sad, in general. In general, I preferred the glad. I sat down to write to her and suddenly I could not, and for the same reason that I could not write Shoshana a consoling email I also that very day walked out of my office and did not ever come back. How could I write with any consolation if there was no sincerity? That was the question which perplexed me. For in the end if you are destined for greatness it’s a worry if it seems that greatness has passed you by. I was worried that I had never found the true form for all my gifts – and certainly that form was not, as my mother and father assumed, the world of the office and its liquid financial vocabulary. I mean, think about it. In my impressions of the world I am super-subtle. Were I ever to be a superhero, I would be a superhero of thinking.

  MY MOTHER

  Let’s not try to analyse everything to death, shall we, just this once?

  ME

  But what else can I do?

  And it was out of consideration for this anxiety that I made the determined decision to respect such inner grandeur and leave the world of work. Or the world of as they say steady work. Instead I wanted to pursue my dream of art. Exactly what form that art would take, I did not definitely know. What I knew was that I needed to resign from this outer world. After all, it was the time for it. Others around me were being made unemployed every day. So why shouldn’t I make myself unemployed of my own volition?

  & unemployment

  And yet I did have to admit that I could understand why my parents were now concerned. Gradually, I felt it too. I have been a son for ever, it has been my best career, which is why I say with some authority that one problem of being a son is to persuade others of your worth. As the weeks went by, it didn’t seem like I’d chosen the ideal time to begin a new vocation. Each morning with amazement I watched the busy people filling the pavements with their cortados and umbrellas and other accessories. Perhaps as a result of this general panorama I also returned to the hospital for another short period of rest, the kind where they give you pills to restore you to your former self. It always seemed to work and this time was no different. I came back home and while for the moment Candy, abetted by my mother and father, was supportive of my ambition, we all agreed that I should have other ways to spend my time. So to keep me extra busy we bought a dog. The dog had very sad eyes. While Candy went to work in the city, where she looked after the international financial affairs of a charitable and radical organisation, I took this dog to puppy class or also walking in the park. Or I made conversation with the woman beside the road selling fruit from laundry bags. The sky was grey and it was like the sky wanted to keep on raining and so it did. It was a cold but monsoon season. As for me, I suddenly had no salary or status at all. I could understand what our puppy felt like. Although sure, I had my activities. I don’t think I’d realised how much work you could invent for an average day, what with washing and talking to the plumber and developing the dog’s personality. I was hyperactive and a slacker both together – a hyperslacker! And although very little of my time was watching Troma studio trailers or surf videos, I knew that my father wasn’t quite convinced by my concentration. Maybe nor was I. I had developed this problem thing in conversations of getting maybe too emotional. My mode right now was the rant.

  — Why, I said to my mother, — does everyone say that rant is such a bad word? Isn’t it good to have high expectations?

  — Perhaps, she said. — I just don’t know. You shouldn’t be going making youself so sad.

  — Who made me this way?! I exclaimed.

  When I woke up every morning now strange beings were advancing. All the thundercats and griffons I had never believed in were yawning and stretching their unwashed wings in the empty air, and in fact they appeared not just when I woke beside Candy in the dawn, but also at other moments when I tried to distract myself – whenever, for instance, I was taking my many drugs to keep me excitable or serene, but also in more healthy places, like when I was on my bike in the early mornings on my way to the private gym and spa complex. For by the way I do think that biking should happen more often – to protect the environment, definitely, but also because it has an old-world charm. And me, as I think I have mentioned, I like to preserve the outmoded things. That time will destroy all things is something that upsets me every day.

  harried therefore by a sense of catastrophe

  If we posit an ideal heaven, and in that heaven place Candy, answering questions about me, I think she would almost definitely argue that this catastrophe thinking was just an unfortunate illusion of such a mood, my whole dark cafard thing. This melancholic mood she tended to see as the fault of my inheritance.

  CANDY

  You slept all together in your parents’ room! You slept beside their bed in a sleeping bag! This is not in fact normal, my darling, my kook.

  But after all I was the heir. I existed to continue our major line. So what if the heir was screwy? And so what if our throne was just a carriage clock with foliage engraved on the face, a prayer shawl and an escritoire? As I said, we were not the super-rich. We were the moderate rich and that’s a more delicate form of existence. With such a burden on me, no wonder that I suffered attacks of terror in the night, so that I would sleepwalk and be returned to our bedroom by my father. Always I was warding off disaster – I had many lucky charms that I carried with me, just as in the evenings, when some light was still seeping under the curtains from the garden and the street lights, and in the twilight the orange netting of my soccer goal in the garden was developing into a bruised green, I would sit up in my bed and pray. These prayers were very detailed lists of worries and future problems. I wanted my million gods to concern themselves with my music practice, or sports reports, or perfect my knowledge of verbs in any language on which I might be tested.

  — My problems are psychosomatic! I once said to Candy.

  — Psychosemitic, added Candy.

  My prayers were very fearful of the world’s approaching disasters. If whatever power was in the heavens would solve these problems or avert these disasters, I would promise the heavens my good behaviour. I do not think I am alone in this condition. I performed some good deeds, others went forgotten, and in this way the undone good deeds piled up. Still, I kept on promising. I was loaded down with unfulfilled promises. The last I still remember was a series of good deeds I promised to do, if it didn’t rain one afternoon. It didn’t rain – but I still didn’t perform the good deeds. And yet I went on praying. What I’m saying is that I was born into my family as previous heirs might have been born into some eighteenth-century library, with all the marble busts of previous luminaries and forefathers gazing down on me with blank concern, even if my own were pedlars from the eastern shtetls or yeshiva accountants. It’s definitely true that my parents scared quite quickly – whether the cause was drug-taking in the young, allergic reactions to nettles, correct dress etiquette for bar mitzvah celebrations in the ballrooms of grand hotels, the traffic systems of global cities to which they had never been. To t
hem the world was fearsome even if that world was where they wanted their son to be, and I suppose it’s therefore only natural to inherit such a feeling, a general tone in which you see things – that everything’s unknown and ever so delicately hostile. I go outside and things upset me very fast. In fact I don’t think that’s so mad when you consider that outside the fascists are enjoying a boom, and everyone hates everyone. But still, perhaps without such phenomena I would have been the same. I was like that figure in the old dialogue, crying out always: Madama Morte! Madama Morte! I gave up therapy because I was scared my therapist would die. Even the dogsitter makes you very sad, said Candy once. And it was true. I suppose it has to be admitted that it’s a problem. But then just think how lonely people can be! Our dogsitter is a lovely man but when I sometimes think of the life he lives, to be with the cats and dogs whom other people love and yet love them in some secret way like maybe a mistress loves a husband – I mean there is something secret and unregarded about his love, when perhaps he loves these animals more than anyone else, but still he is forced to leave them, he is forced to say goodbye in a totally casual way, the way a woman might say goodbye to the love of her life, sitting at a cafe table with some acquaintance from the bureau, as if she can hardly remember his name: when I think about him, I do think that this existence is a sad one. I can’t help it. When I step into the world, all I hear is a catalogue of sighs.