Lurid & Cute

by Adam Thirlwell

  — So she wasn’t two weeks late, I think she was a couple of days. And the reason she was a couple of days was she was stressing. Yeah thank you. She’s lying. Ly-ing. This woman has issues. Very unstable.

  There was then a pause then something like:

  — The fuck that got to do with things? The girl thinks she cool because she married an Asian. She never liked a black girl in her life.

  I mean, I cannot remember exactly. I’m just mimicking from memory. That was the tableau as we entered, and it was happy in its bright way and I did feel this regret that we might be the agents of lessening this happiness, of being causes of concern and fright which was why I very much wanted to be doing this for as little time as possible. Also therefore I was glad that we had such a gentle look overall, because although perhaps it was a problem of heist authority, it surely would go some way to allaying their natural terror and unease. Just as also, I wondered, it could add an even greater element of surprise when you do indeed pull out the gun than if you entered with a balaclava and menacing cries, and while the shock may be greater to other people, the nail technicians and single customer with one hand in a chemical bath, then perhaps the fear is less. And as Hiro did this, I mean took out the gun and raised it in the air, I realised that my heart was not staying still at all, it was gigantic inside my body. That was one more effect that I would not have predicted, when contemplating the event from the air balloon or weather plane – and in many ways this event, as I now remember it, or as I now try to record it, was an entire network of unforeseen effects. According to our sketched-out plan in the cafe, my job was to be the lookout or sentinel – although were I to have seen a security guard with wolfhounds or some other police agent, I now realised, I was not sure I would have exactly known what I should do. Therefore I tried to ignore this gap in my knowledge and instead stayed by the storefront, with mannequins displaying their gorgeous nail designs. Their hands were very large, as if in some dream or other hallucination where your will is not in control. And it was at this point while I was observing these hallucinogenic hands that Hiro started to shout – in a way which seemed to me just slightly exaggerated, and it worried me, this exaggeration, because it did seem to give away that we were scared and not exactly in control of the situation. In fright the girl stood up and her chemical bath overturned, and instinctively I wanted to find a cloth to mop it up – because mess in any form distresses me – but then I thought no, I needed to stay still. And so I did. Instead of the pool of chemical, I considered the gun, because, I was discovering, it’s very interesting what happens if you bring out a gun in public. A sudden stillness happens and I can see how the serial criminals operate, it must be such a delight to have this every day, and also addictive, to watch how you becalm people with a single heavy gesture. To discover a power you did not think you had, this is definitely an interesting feeling. And OK, yes, my friend Álvaro, I know he is used to waking up to discover that his children’s kindergarten has been decorated with bullet holes caused by a passing machine gun, and is now accustomed to the bribes and threats and protection and whatever other ways the criminal activity reaches the average taxpayer – like the way the Broadway shows eventually show up at the quiet provincial theatres, like the ones to which my mother took me to watch the pantomimes – but me, no. Whereas now I was realising that maybe the criminal and dark could also involve me. It was a new metaphysical step. But still, I also understood that this was not the moment for my reflections, and in fact I am not sure even that these were indeed reflections I had then – it was more like they were there inside me, awaiting pollination.

  which they accomplish hyperfast

  Everything was happening hyperfast. Hiro was pointing the gun at the woman behind the cash register and demanding on the one hand that she should not move, because if anyone touched a phone then he would not hesitate to shoot, and on the other hand she should move, but very slowly, in order to open the cash register and deliver all its money. I suppose these things just happen because you’ve seen them happen, I mean in the usual miniseries. But what I was not expecting was how slow it was, this hyperfast activity, even this five minutes, or how outside the window I could see people softly walking their dog or doing other small things – there was a man having a conversation with a very beautiful woman, and I could tell that he wanted to impress her because he had taken out a cigarette, and also taken out a lighter, but each time he was about to light the cigarette he let it pause there, while he kept on talking, then slowly lowered it again, and it was really lovely to see, that attention to another person. Then I noticed that at one of the mirrors there was one woman and she was crying very much, not violently or loudly but tears were on her face and there were smudges of mascara on her cheeks, like she was smearing her face with ashes in the manner of an ancient mourner. I wanted to comfort her very much and also I was not sure if Hiro would approve. So I called over to Hiro something like:

  — Hiro, I said.

  — The fuck, he said.

  I think he was annoyed that I used his name but I wasn’t sure that really mattered, I mean outside the movies – but still, he was annoyed so I wanted to apologise.

  — Sorry, I said.

  — It’s OK, he said.

  I knew that he was angry but I guessed this was not the moment for apologies, and I did appreciate at least that he acknowledged my mistake.

  — It’s just, I said, this girl is crying.

  Hiro looked over at me.

  — We’re going to be done so fast, he said to her, and he said it softly so that she might calm.

  She was not so calm but I had done at least what I could. And I was sad for her because, after all, so little was really happening, just two hoodlums with their gun, and we were not even hoodlums really, just as the gun was not even a true gun, not some .45 Magnum ready to be fingerfucked by the coked-up assassin, but then I realised that the girl at the counter was seeming agitated too.

  — I said don’t move, I said.

  — I didn’t move, she said.

  — OK, I said.

  I wasn’t sure. It was very possible, I thought, that I was more scared than she was, and I wanted to make some kind of conversation. It’s what I do when I’m nervous, like when I’m talking to our cleaner or to children. On the counter was a small wood carving of a saint or holy woman, and suddenly this was all I wanted to think about – it was one of those oubliettes of slowness like when you’re on amphetamine and it suddenly becomes very very important to be refolding the clothes in your wardrobe in a particular order, or copying out the to-do notes in one notebook which are now a bit scratched out and tatty into a new notebook with the scratched-out notes no longer there, even though really you should be going to a funeral, or your lawyer for a divorce hearing. They are ways in which your attention is suddenly diverted, but whether or not it truly is diverted, it’s difficult to say – for in my case what I was also considering was a moment when I was very young and had come to this very same parade and my mother bought me a book about the greatest football tournament in the world, and I was thinking how happy the book had made me and also thinking that that smaller version of me could never have imagined that one day he would still be here, with friends with guns.

  — That’s nice, I said.

  — She protects me, she said.

  — OK, I said.

  — You believe in horoscopes? she said.

  — So-so, I said.

  — She protects me, she said.

  — Can I look? I said.

  The woman in the carving had a halo that was multicoloured and her clothes were multicoloured too. It was carved on a piece of wood that looked like some chess piece or intricate element of a fantastical building, by which I mean it had these arabesques and curlicues.

  — Can I keep it? I said.

  — You’re asking? she said.

  And I think it was at that moment that I really did understand that what we were doing was so much more violent than th
e usual world that she was absolutely correct to find this frightening. Because however much this crime might have seemed just very fun to us its perpetrators, totally I could see that to other people, I mean the people forced to act as bystanders or spectators or unwilling participants, like they are in the most upsetting piece of performance art and also against their will, it was something frightening and unusual. In movies there is so much violence that maybe it then doesn’t occur to people how violent just the smallest alteration to reality really is, in fact it’s very fearful just to see another person raise their voice, like if some holy man outside a pub is shouting at you and then decides to follow you as you walk towards a bus, it’s hard not to feel just very threatened and alone. So that to introduce a gun, even if it was only fake or invented, was to introduce a much more unstable element than I had ever considered. This heist was swarming with sad particulars that I found difficult to react to in the appropriately violent way, or anticipate when they occurred at all. Instead I did just feel very gentle and bemused, so that softly I put the saint or holy person back.

  — I’m sorry, I said.

  — It’s OK, she said.

  with doubts of the inner life

  I wonder if maybe in the end this is all about the whole pop concept of nice. The nice thing is the major problem. Because I totally do look nice. I wear teeshirts and jeans and sneakers like everyone else in the history of the multiverse. My hair is gently spiky. That’s what I look like on the street or in the canteen. Also my eyes are manga large and my voice is soft. I pay attention to the way I speak which I hope is audible. And yet also for example I get way up high watching very bright pornography, where a girl’s choking on a penis and her saliva’s hanging down in strands like spaghetti or maybe more precisely spaghettini. I suppose eventually it does make me sad or ashamed or disgusted so I look away, but for at least a few hours, totally not. So looks, I’m just saying, are no guide to the inner life: it’s no joke, to use a favoured phrase of my mother, as if only my mother understands the full seriousness of the world. Everyone I have ever met, their looks were nice – that’s all I mean. If the looks were everything, then no evil could ever happen. But it obviously definitely does.

  and large financial results

  For slowly the girl at the counter was offering me all the soft notes from the cash register. And it was very light, the way this felt – like I had maybe imagined that money in such quantities was going to weigh me down like the swag sacks of the illustrated burglars in my children’s stories, but no, it was about as heavy as a very light handbag, or not even. I marvel now at this ability the world has to sometimes arrange itself into scenes, to just pause there and coalesce the way a sorbet might, or crystal. That’s the difference between things happening and not happening, and since so much of our time is spent arguing that nothing happens, that an event is basically impossible, I still think it’s possible to see some lives as like the lives of the saints, where everything that happens, all the missed appointments and back problems and small mood swings, are really all fine details that form a wider pattern. For instance, just the weight of some old banknotes in your hand – that can mark a giant moment. Although at the time I did not think so. At the time I was not so sure that anything had really happened, as we ran outside, and I don’t think this reluctance to believe in events is indefensible or even unusual at all – for in general people do tend to believe that life is just this overall foliage, like as dense and thickly populated as the tree canopy out in the Amazon, or one of those collages with a crazy sense of offness, where everything is just minutely unrelated. That’s the general matte surface people think they live inside, like how the parties of this world keep on going, on and on they go, the fiestas, and it’s the same people with the same drinks or with minute variations, Campari one day, Aperol the next, and you just think that this horizontal vibe will continue for ever – with no dramatics or splits or fissurings, yes you think that the whole concept of the dramatic scene, I guess I mean, is overplayed. I definitely tended to think so. I more believed that what was happening always was just the ongoing process of my thinking, and its difficult moods. But then something vertical does happen, after all. I can’t deny it. We ran out into the quiet rain – back down into the noise of the normal life, and it was difficult, like the way it must be difficult for an astronaut when suddenly he’s no longer in zero gravity, and oh the tortures it must be just to keep your neck supporting your head, or lifting your fork when you eat your longed-for messy plate of carbonara.

  5. LONG FIESTA (THE HOROSCOPE)

  LONG FIESTA (THE HOROSCOPE)

  which improves his unstable mood

  It was a time of many fiestas. They happened at picnics or other locations, in the parks where the trees hid statues of generals and renowned pharmacologists, or busts of the great explorers, with pink filtered light and daisies everywhere, and then at night in disused factories or small houses. We were at them all – because however much in reality you only want to be in bed and delirious with another person, still, you will leave the apartment and go to every party to which you’re invited, it’s one of those strange mysteries, why constraints are so constraining. Even the fact that I worried for our dog did not stop me, although definitely it made me sad to leave our dog behind, since unfortunately you cannot take dogs everywhere, they are not tolerated in society. Presumably he would have liked to live in a pack, with other dogs, but he was forced to live alone, dependent on us and without the language that we used among ourselves, at these swarays, where we talked gossip and the daily topics. But fiestas do have many moods. For me, I was upbeat absolutely but also I tended to have this haunted gaze. At unappointed moments my hands would suddenly start shaking, and I think it had a lot to do with the trauma of my recent escapades. This transformation into macho and crime-scene expert, I did not totally take it with aplomb. And yet, I did want to believe that I could be equal to this career, with its possible revenges and temptations. I tried to think that although the life ahead of me certainly was frightening, still, since every career made me fearful, this new fear felt like a test I needed to surmount … It’s very difficult, after all, to make yourself proud of your own achievements. To pass exams is not enough. And so meanwhile I would interrupt these reflections with stand-up conversations.

  ME

  Did I ever tell you about this flight I once took?

  ROMY

  No, cookie, tell me.

  ME

  We were on the runway and it was taxiing and I totally knew that something was wrong, the plane’s noises were completely unusual, and then I saw the stewardess in front of me mouth What’s wrong? to the stewardess at the other end of the aisle, and so obviously I decided that I had to say something, I had to stop the plane from trying to take off, because it would only burst apart in flames, and so I called to the stewardess and explained, I advised her that the safest thing to do would be to return to the airport and have the plane thoroughly examined, to which she replied that of course she could do this, but first she would get me a glass of water and when she came back I could tell her if I still wanted her to inform all these people in the plane that I’d been so worried by what I considered to be the unusual buzzing noise of the air-conditioning nozzle that the plane would have to miss its take-off slot and be examined for what might be a period of four or five hours.

  ROMY

  So what did you do?

  ME

  I kept quiet.

  ROMY

  Is not so bad.

  ME

  But what I don’t know, do you get this? – was if my silence was due to an inner knowledge that I was in fact being hysterical, and that there was nothing there to worry about, or whether I was so imbued with vanity and the wish not to make a scene that I preferred to risk my own death and the death of 453 other people rather than subject myself to the possible humiliation of the stewardess’s announcement.

  For, aware as I was that I wanted Romy to love me, and also
aware that the reason why I was so in love with her was the fact that she had such cool, still I could not stop myself encouraging her to laugh at me. It was the only way I ever knew to charm, and so I could not help it. To live impossibly is no pleasure and yet it seemed to be the fate for which I was created. I knew of course that I needed to make decisions and renunciations. My life with Candy was impossible, but then, so was my life with Romy. Each option had no future. And yet in me was this extra wish to create some crisis, nevertheless, knowing there was no hope. Perhaps that’s just an effect of my character because I do have a drive to the future. I am always searching for a better me. But in particular I think there was one specific cause for this sudden concern for acceleration. I think I blame the new-found thrill which is created by any scene of violence with a replica pistolet.