Lurid & Cute

by Adam Thirlwell

  In this way my mother would sit down and just very casually discuss things with me, mainly in our favourite floating restaurant by the docks, eating pockmarked old woman’s bean curd, and pickled duck’s eggs with ginger sauce. And sure, if I could please anyone, I wanted to please my mother. She was always my best confidante, to whom all my secrets could be entrusted. But in no way had Candy and I begun to think about this possibility of children at all. We were beyond such usual thinking.

  MY MOTHER

  But of course you should do what both of you think is right.

  ME

  Uh-huh.

  MY MOTHER

  Talk to me. I am just trying to understand. You want to find yourself?

  ME

  Not quite.

  MY MOTHER

  So what then?

  ME

  What are you, Ma? Chang Apana?

  MY MOTHER

  Don’t muddle me. Don’t make your jokes.

  The people as old as my parents – they understood nothing! Because there are in fact many other ways of being together that are not a family at all, but something more like a troupe. And a troupe I think is a lovely and elastic thing. Those who have never been in such a troupe have missed one of life’s most desirable experiences. It makes you feel like nothing is ever boring because there’s suddenly always someone to talk to, it’s absorbing like that, which has as one consequence that you spend more money in general at coffee shops and/or brasseries because the sitting in such places becomes a total treat, the way you develop conversations and just generally consider the world situation, so that the money you might spend is easily recompensed by the amount of ennui that gets destroyed. That’s how I tried to explain things to my mother, even if according to her such reasoning was only anxious or hysterical, and in retrospect I can understand why she might have thought that. I could sometimes think too quickly or impatiently – not that thinking in itself is such a bad thing but it does matter when it occurs. If you do it too much before an event, then either nothing gets done at all, or what does happen is in some way too loopy or inflated. But I only learned that later. For to have turned Hiro away, as I explained to my darling mother, would not have been possible according to my moral code. And after all: Hiro and I had past. We’d known each other since the smallest of infants, then throughout the stages of our education he had been my comrade and accomplice. This was partly because in these suburbs and sylvan idylls we were similarly prodigies, but also because to us mathematics or chess teams were equally dismally boring (— But don’t you want to join in with something, sweetness? my mother had asked, when presenting me with a turquoise satin tracksuit as a corrupting bribe). Instead we were much more into the pharmaceuticals and narcotics. It brought us, as they say, together. I was basically Hiro’s double. Although admittedly Hiro had more charisma. If we were a commentary duo, then I was the play-by-play and Hiro was the colour guy. But still, double was no exaggeration. Especially if you also considered the way we talked, all quick and chancy with a polyglottic drawl. So together we had planned our entrance into the adult world. I would say that this entrance had gone differently for both of us. Hiro flew out to the skyscraper districts of various harbour cities, in the manner of the success story. While me, I remained in these horizontal environs. Sure, I sometimes called Hiro my crazy friend but I didn’t always know how seriously I meant this. (— All your friends are your crazy friend, said Candy to me once. — Dat’s because they are crazy, gringolette, I replied.) Like I knew that he took the various drugs from weed to coke but this didn’t mark him out as unique in this generation, just as I knew the rumours that swirled around him like winds blown from the trumpets of naked cherubim in the ancient pictures, that he’d eventually left his job out east because he’d spent some time at a rest cure or nervous retreat, like a nobleman with syphilis, but that didn’t make me doubt him. Me too I had my periods of melancholy and stabilisers, but did that also make me crazy? And since Hiro was the person who had known me for longer than anyone except my mother and my father – who do not count as people who know you, being parents, and therefore existing in an orbit of knowledge and obscurity known only to them – and since such childhood friends are the ones you cannot say no to, they are the ones who when they want to re-enter your life you cannot refuse, I therefore did not refuse Hiro. As much as possible you must try to be appealing, is what I’m trying to say, and be as likeable as you can. Just as anyway: always Hiro had been as energetic as a dot-matrix printer. If his chest had been adorned in wool-knit jumpers with intarsia penguins I don’t think anyone would have been surprised. Even when he was five, Hiro was inventive, and now that he was fully grown he was as loaded with wishes and plans as a musket is with grapeshot. I find that kind of personality just totally seductive. So one monsoon day Hiro arrived with a suitcase and installed himself in our spare room, and from then on we spent our days together – in the local dim sum cafes, the afternoon cinemas. Against the blank horizon, Hiro’s silhouette stood out, like a cowboy in his ten-gallon hat doing tricks with silver pistols at the very far end of Main Street.

  capable of world transformation

  Not that Hiro did so much standing. His general posture was the recline. A small pot he kept with him contained his little contribution to the pharma economy: the antipsychotics recommended by his doctors, then pills he had bought online from high-rise compounds in other countries, herbal remedies – and this sometimes led to comical situations, like he would mistakenly take both sleeping pills and antihistamines, then sleep from midnight until morning, wake up, but still keep falling asleep, until finally he would wake for good just in time for a late supper with the family, and so to bed again. How ill precisely Hiro was, I did not know. To be taking such pills, for instance, in no way made him special among the people I knew. We were all of us ordering remedies off the Internet. If things seemed possible to Hiro that did not seem so possible to other people, I tended to find this only charming and not sinister. Like he would happily talk to strangers and offer to drive them out to the airport, little kindnesses like that. For why should a person always have to waste money on vast taxis? And therefore why should I judge such brightness as a craziness? Perhaps, absolutely, now that I am maimed and aged and all alone, I now think differently, but at the time I was trying very hard to make the world a better place. And so we continued buying drugs off the Internet for our private use and these increasing narcotic entertainments did make the way I thought perhaps a little blurred. I don’t mean by narcotics the semi-precious items like peyote or crystal meth, which I tend to associate with ill health, but items you can find in your local general store like ketamine or uppers. They give you a sense of confidence which is really very important in your entrance to the adult world. For if your friends all dress like children, with their sneakers and sweatshirts and goofy hair, and so do you, this can definitely mean that the overall tone feels gruesome.

  — The problem is not, said Hiro, — that the adults wish us harm.

  — It is sadly not, I said.

  — The problem, said Hiro, — is that they wish us only good. We are the first children who are everyone’s dream children.

  — Is not so good.

  — Is not, he said.

  To think of the problems that can occur to one person, or two! To be a troupe is so much safer. But of course such troupes cannot be maintained at every point in the day, not in this sadly serious era, so that when Candy wasn’t there, which was of course the usual situation, when Candy went into the city to her office, her high office in the fraying clouds, Hiro and I continued the troupe as a duo. And often this duo was a seminar where we examined my moral philosophy.

  — You, said Hiro, — are in one strange position.

  — Say it, I said. — I can take it.

  — Flighty with your only love, dependable with everyone else.

  — Flighty?

  — Is the truth, said Hiro.

  It’s true that Hiro is my best
friend but I nevertheless didn’t think that he was right, or not right entirely. I knew, of course, why he said it. Romy had called me the day she left the hospital, and immediately I had gone to see her. Naturally I was very relieved that she was OK, but I would say the greater emotion was that I was once again excited, as I always was in Romy’s presence – how quickly feelings succeed each other! – so that just as recently I had been terrified of total catastrophe, I mean of Romy’s death and the death of my marriage and the total wipeout, now that such a scenario was no longer happening it was as if it had been cleansed from my memory entirely, and I only cared once more about Romy enjoying my wit and company. The new catastrophe, perhaps a wit could say, was the catastrophe of her survival. Everything continued as before – like I was the dazzled driver drifting happily between lanes on the autoroute – and in a way this episode of blood in its terror and suspense had made me feel even more tenderness and obligation towards her. Had I never come across her bleeding form, and had we simply got up and had breakfast and left, I suppose it’s possible that we might have determined to remain just happy friends. But the blood was a form of drama and it made us very close. Not that we had slept together again, but we did write messages to each other very much and talk on the phone, for such ties are difficult to deny – and yet also, nevertheless, I loved Candy without end. And this is why, I tried to explain to Hiro, I think that marriage is the most confusing state, it is our greatest enigma, like suicide was in the previous absurdist times. So what if our problems seem sweeter than those times, those times of wars and also pestilence? We are sweeter maybe, but also deeper. For basically I think true magnificence is in the maintenance of as many relations as possible. What else could utopia mean? Whenever I go to a party I always think it’s going to be the best party ever, Shoshana said to me once, before she disappeared deep into the furthest regions of this country. And I still have never heard a sentence that more made me fall in love. But if you really do think that way, and I think I do too, it is going to mean a difficult burden will fall on you. You are going to submit yourself to risks of other people that most people do not approach – the vast wisdom that any person who has once entered your life should never be dismissed from it. Those who no longer talk to people they slept with even just once are cowardly or strange, I think, while if I were ever a Communist and wanted to resign from the Party I would do it with a gentle grace – because why antagonise for no reason? That’s why marriage is such a grand and permanent problem. It is the purest of moral conundrums – like the largest urban sprawl in the world, so that whenever you think you have left it you are just in another concentric garden suburb. Or, to put this the other way round, in the end you cannot be only talking to your wife, and once you talk to other people then where will things ever end? You will, for instance, find yourself not only sending tender messages to other women, but also looking after your best friend and trying to keep him happy.

  — Oh I’m the problem? said Hiro. — Is that so, chico?

  And in a way he was. What I mean is that I think it often takes a person to make a philosophical problem obvious, it can’t be done with just the abstract thinking in your escritorio, and my friend Hiro was such a demon. For while it’s normal to say that the rule of the overall reality is that nothing happens – well, what do you do when something does? I think something is a whole unexamined category of philosophy. And it was Hiro who had this gift for inventing something where usually there was nothing. He was the opposite of the way people sit in deck chairs in the shopping-centre forecourts, as if they can make these weird spaces normal, which they can’t. Hiro could make a bingo hall or chop shop seem overgrown with unbelievable orchids and green vegetation. And even if such behaviour had its causes, and was perhaps a form of suffering, that didn’t mean the consequences weren’t real or even joyful. With Hiro it turned out that the difference between the ghoulish and the usual was maybe very thin, like about as thin as the difference between two sides of aluminium foil.

  where crimes can be virtues

  To consider small crimes as larger virtues was one such innovation. At night we would drive around the city – the quarter where the butchers had lately been placed, the beaux arts buildings, the cricket stadium – just slowly drifting past each little row of kiosks and illuminations, e.g. Kasey’s Chicken, a late-night milkshake bar, the gaming centre, a store that was advertising Cube Ice & Ice Cream, with underneath 24 hour scribbled in neon – and although I wasn’t sure if this all-hours claim was true I still liked that whole modern sentiment, because I think it’s good to know that always while you sleep you can get up and find people and also buy things, not that you ever will get up for cannoli or the like at five in the morning, but still, I think that’s an important reassurance. And then occurred – if that’s the right way of putting this, because I am finding often a problem of verb forms, I am finding it difficult to have the right tenses at my disposal – this moment where we were in one of the further suburbs, on one of our roaming sprees, and we wandered into a bodega, just to look around or consider buying lighter fluid or the fashion magazines, and I delayed looking at some blown-up cover for a society journal, just staring into the dead face of a supermodel or heiress, and so I was therefore maybe a few steps behind Hiro – which was why when I found myself definitively inside this place my first view of Hiro wasn’t him bent over and examining gelati in the freezers, no, not doing whatever else might be normal in such a setting, but instead with one hand he was holding a maxi bag of prawn chips and with the other he was holding out a horizontal pistolet or gun. And much later, when we described to Candy this tableau, she was certainly perturbed.

  — You are kidding me, said Candy.

  — Ignore him, said Hiro.

  — I am telling you, I said, — we were totally in an armed situation.

  Not that at this time I examined the precise nature of this gun, partly because although I know that guns are the most modern thing available that still doesn’t mean that it’s easy for the average Joe, and by Joe I obviously mean me, however modern this Joe or me might be, to be familiar with the items. I think it’s no exaggeration to say that being wised-up is no easy matter. And yet Hiro was making it feel very restful, to enter a bodega and pull out a blunderbuss.

  (— That reminds me, said Candy. — You remember my friend Epstein?

  — Epstein?

  — My friend Epstein, she said.

  — Darling, we’re telling you a story here.

  — OK, she said. — OK.)

  It was all the more exciting because Hiro’s look is not obviously brutal. This is another thing we share. That Hiro was brilliant or goofy or both together you only needed to look at him. He sported square spectacles with black rims, and a dark brown corduroy jacket with a shawl collar and various zips, underneath which he wore a brown plaid shirt, but the detail that marked him out was that on his feet were two tan deck shoes but without any socks, like a riviera mogul. He was a pure product of modern chic. That was why the picture was a little outré: in the background, the television behind the counter was on a rerun almost definitely of the famous cat-and-mouse revenge saga, for everywhere you look there are cartoons, it’s unavoidable, and meanwhile Hiro was slowly backing out of this very bright kiosk with the horizontal gun in one hand and the vertical prawn snax in the other. And I at least agreed with this idea of an exit because I was wanting to get right out of there and demand an explanation from Hiro as to when precisely he decided that holding up bodegas in our area was a way of spending time. I do accept that in theory there are no better or worse ways to spend time, the point of time is just to waste it, but also there are limits.

  — The fuck was that? I said.

  — It isn’t real, said Hiro.

  And he showed me the blunderbuss which on examination I now understood to be a water pistol, and plastic, but very realistic. And I guess that did calm me, to discover that no harm was intended. I had no idea how little you ever needed to be a
convincing copy, and not only was that knowledge reassuring but it was also, in retrospect, very tempting and seductive. I wonder if everything that happened from then on happened because of that seduction, the realisation that it doesn’t need to be much to be the thing itself – so that even as we looked up and down the silent boutique vista, even then we were transformed into watchful mafiosi. The threat to us, I had to admit, was small. There was one lone street sweeper in the distance, paused on his cell phone. It was as if the street were a beach, like the blank beaches when you come heavily out of the sea among the plastic seaweed, and you stand there, and look at the crowd and suddenly you can’t find anyone. Above us koalas or pigeons were playing in the jacaranda trees. And so we walked away, while Hiro gazed pensively at this pristine bag of prawn chips. Then generously he handed them to the first infant we went past on the street.

  which is a seductive knowledge

  Surely this was a form of utopian thinking, this small improvement to a person’s life? I found it very charming in my friend. Maybe in some far-off century if you wanted to reinvent the social contract you would have done it with more squalor, living underground in isolation, and losing yourself in crazy monologues and financial worry and hunger; but in this very bright time it also seemed that you could do it more softly – just in this desire to create a more adventurous existence: with friendships, love affairs, extra or extended families. Because I guess that although we now have so many forms of utopia, we have computers and space travel and TV and telephones, all the impedimenta of the recent future, still, there is more utopia available. It’s just maybe now it’s in something smaller, like the distance between thinking of something and in fact doing it – like tying up your boyfriend, then using him until he cries out in dark pleasure – or even smaller, just in the beginnings of sentences, like if only it were so … or something’s missing … You have to start small, I suppose I mean. And if your best friend was recently out of the hospital for difficult emotions and very vulnerable and with nowhere obvious to go apart from on his own then I think it’s only logical that we had a duty to take him in. For really what you adopt can be loved as truly as what you create and in fact perhaps more so. Or at least it always seemed to me that adoption of foreign elements was one proof you had a soul. Long ago, when I was much smaller than I am now, I was in some store with my mother and was apparently very intent on pointing out an ugly person, who had dark hair that was distinctly bushy inside her nose. My mother took me away and for ever after told this story as a very bad thing I had done. So what was I meant to think? From then on I thought that you should definitely not be mean to other creatures. Not that my thoughts were always on the oppressed of other nations, but I did try not to be cruel to those around me who did not have as much as we did. We are not rich, my mother argued, but I think this was because around us were houses with rose gardens and swimming pools and when that happens your perspective might get scrambled. Whereas when you start to think about things a little more closely you realise how limited you might have been in defining what you think of as the good or beautiful or charming, you realise that so many things you thought of as not possible, like sending messages to a girl in the middle of the night who is not your wife, or removing items from a store without permission, can also have their beauty if you only consider them right. That was how I now reasoned – as if previously I had inhabited some happy gated compound, that protected its inhabitants from the drug-crazed depredations of the maquiladoras without, and now I was in the open and also pleasantly surprised. I was admiring the cactus trees, buying myself a mango juice and enjoying the blissed-out vibe. Transformations, it turns out, are possible. A lot of the time maybe you’re doing something and it seems like nothing – just dense and pillowed like one of those perfumed puffy Care Bear stickers and then BAM! it’s mayhem.