Lurid & Cute

by Adam Thirlwell

  — Although you just wait. Soon they’ll go with other people, I said.

  — Like you? said Candy.

  — Like what?

  — Do you ever think about other people?

  — Other people? I said.

  It’s really terrible when a joke for another person creates a situation in your own routine. Obviously I was trying to understand what possibly Candy had understood or known about Romy. I had no idea. If she was saying it so directly, presumably it meant the question was innocent, or perhaps it was some intricate deceitful invention designed to blur every level of the real. I could not know, because it’s never easy to know what is happening inside a conversation, especially one like this where major things are being said without you in any way being prepared, as you would be for the ideal interview, with your notes and new pens and other aids. For while it might be true that miscommunication is in some way the motif of our age, I think in some way this does not do justice to the true happenings, for miscommunication implies some kind of arrow that goes missing or misses its targets, whereas the true problem is that neither the arrow nor the target is aware of its existence, since we are using so many lies and problematics with each sentence. Or so I now think, when I think about the end of this fiesta, so many sad things were being said and as if without hindrance or control. And also they were being said very loudly and that’s interesting – I mean it’s interesting when you become the centre of attention without wanting to be. But there seemed no way to stop this. Each sentence created another sentence – so that when my query to Candy created no reply, I did not soften things or end them which would of course have still been possible, but instead invented some other line, something like:

  — You don’t feel lonely?

  Violence in arguments is one thing that previously gentle people are good at. Or at least I find that’s true for me. When I’m frustrated I can throw things and Candy has been known to ruthlessly slap me in the face. But also it is violence just when two people begin to shout without embarrassment or shame. And to have a vision of Candy’s rage was truly terrible.

  CANDY

  Lonely? Why would I feel lonely?

  ME

  Hey, don’t shout.

  CANDY

  I’m not shouting.

  ME

  OK, OK.

  CANDY

  What do you expect? You think people who’ve been together for so long will be like people who’ve just met –

  ME

  Sure, no sure –

  CANDY

  I think our sex life is good. It’s sometimes even delicious, boo.

  ME

  OK.

  CANDY

  You think we need to talk more about it?

  ME

  It should be easy.

  CANDY

  No one finds it easy! Ask anyone!

  Certainly the loudness with which Candy was talking was making me nervous and ashamed, and I am not sure that is really so wrong, not to want to be the film stars who are drunk and screaming at polite parties … Perhaps, I was suddenly feeling, the problem was that we had still not yet had children: without children, I was thinking, it was like you are creating all the energy in your house, like some animal that’s being forced to go round and round to keep a motor running on electricity. It means that all your other energy is dead or otherwise dying. Or that was something I was thinking. I don’t know why. I was often wrong.

  that then escalates

  Definitely it is no fiesta that does not alter your existence. And yet as always, even amid the most serious things I was being distracted, and I think somewhere I was having this backdrop thought as I listened to the songs that the problem with modern pop music was that it all got ruined by just the odd bad line. No rigour, that was the problem with pop music, and then I realised with surprise that I was saying this to Hiro. I had no idea where he had arrived from but also I was glad, because if Hiro was there then possibly this discussion with Candy might stop. And Hiro in response just gave me another upper to calm me down. I wasn’t so sure it was a good idea but I did it anyway because Hiro wanted me to stay as cheerful as I could. And I was thinking how this fiesta situation was like one of my bad dreams. I was having bad dreams every night – unlike Candy, who just has lovely dreams, like a shoe is there and she examines it, or a sundae, whereas me I get all feverish and crowded with demonic shapes. But I had no time to analyse this sensation because Candy was back there with me. This constant substitution was exhausting, no doubt. She’d taken something, like maybe coke, and she was also turning serious which is a definite recipe for conflict. That’s the problem with drugs – they make things happen but then you do not know what precisely they will have concocted until it’s too late. What happened next was that suddenly we found ourselves the usual stoned minicab driver with views on the music of the 1980s – and to your surprise in such situations it turns out that you do too, and then you are back home in your parents’ living room and listening to music that is perhaps just very loud, or also you are shouting in the kitchen, observing the neat arrangements of pots and pans and it is as if you are examining your childhood from the vantage point of some Swiss mountain sanatorium.

  CANDY

  How can we improve if you don’t want to try?

  ME

  Maybe we shouldn’t talk too much about this.

  CANDY

  Maybe I’ve never had amazing sex.

  ME

  Great, petrushka, thank you.

  Yes, violence in arguments is definitely one thing that previously gentle people are good at. Not that it needs to be like Kayvon, who argued with his wife with a gorgeous passion, so much that each time she would throw his clothes out the window of their apartment, not because she wanted him to move out but just for the pleasure of seeing him go down and gather everything up, or not even for that pleasure, she once told me, but for the pleasure of seeing his embarrassment at being observed by the friendly Shahs on the third floor, looking down at him from their window, and to whom he would each time just offer a small but amicable wave. It’s incredible the amount of violence that finds its strange ways of emerging, I was thinking, as suddenly Candy emerged onto a new plane of hatred, like in one of those ancient video games where you jump from rising platform to platform in your effort not to fall.

  CANDY

  Do you even love me at all?

  ME

  You just said that was my major problem.

  CANDY

  Fuck you, OK.

  ME

  Babe –

  CANDY

  Like what, really, are you doing here?

  ME

  Hey, calm down –

  CANDY

  Calm down?

  ME

  I didn’t mean that. Just come to – come to bed. Or let’s just sit down.

  CANDY

  You don’t think you want to make me be like this? You don’t think you have models?

  ME

  Who?

  CANDY

  Your mother, sweetness, your mother.

  Zigzags occur always in conversations and zigzags are a problem. And yet in depicting such a zigzagging conversation, I think, a lot depends, because in such a conversation are all the problems of being me and the people like me: I mean all the people who go about their business in island cities, going to restaurants and concert halls and supermarkets in circles, those people who find talking difficult but also necessary. That was the class in which I have to claim my inheritance.

  ME

  Why does this always have to be so difficult to talk to you? You’re shouting!

  CANDY

  I’m not shouting. I’m not shouting at all, kook.

  She was crying and I did that face which is always depressing to produce, the kind which is softened and worried and hesitant because it is not the right face and you cannot locate the right face, it is somewhere lost among your collection of Pierrot masks and other carnival accessories. And it sudden
ly occurred to me that perhaps the problem with every amour in history is that you know everything you need to know as soon as you meet someone, but then also you can live with knowledge for a decade and still do nothing with it.

  — I’m really sorry, I’m an idiot, I said. — I love you, you know that.

  — I don’t need this, she said.

  Always we were good at these conversations because we could make each other less hurt, even while we had hurt each other gruesomely.

  — I do love you, I said.

  — I know, she said.

  — So much, I said.

  — I know, she said.

  That was how I managed to get her to our bedroom, and could even believe that I did not notice that the light was visible in my mother and father’s room, as if I were way above such small concerns as other people. I was concentrating on Candy instead.

  until the thoughts of blood return

  Every conversation is a world apart, and I think I mean that as non-metaphorically as possible. That’s why when I considered if perhaps I should just confess to everything, I was also thinking: why hurt her more? There’s something so very convenient in all confessions, when really things could be much better managed in silence, by keeping all the different worlds apart. Yes, I was thinking, as we got undressed, I could be a better person by saying nothing at all. Even if the prospect did leave me very frustrated, that I had not managed to make a larger impression on the world. Oh, it’s appalling the positions you end up in, it feels just sometimes too impossible to continue! But then wasn’t this impossible structure what I also always liked when it came to the movies and pictures? I was just less happy if it was all for real. But I really had always liked those impossible objects where things happened in one medium that couldn’t happen in reality, the more dreamlike the better, I always thought, and so I always loved the images that included impossible tricks, and in particular the technical ones designed to demonstrate errors in perspective – where a man’s fishing rod loops up and into a faraway mountain lake, or a traveller on a distant hill is lighting his pipe from a candle held out of the window by the mistress of a hotel in the foreground, whose sign is hanging somewhere in the middle of a very far forest. Just as my ideal raconteurs were the stand-up kind who talked like those water slides where you descend one chute but emerge head first from another – the way I emerged from this fiesta on my bed with everything awry, or askew.

  — We could have sex now, said Candy, — if you want.

  — It’s OK, I said.

  — OK, she said. — Well, you can’t say I’m not interested.

  I did my small usual smile but the interior of me was very sad. Everyone dresses in teeshirts in bed and we were no exceptions.

  — So, shall we go to sleep? she said.

  — Yeah sure, I said.

  — Have you set the alarm? I said.

  — Sure, she said.

  I am trying to think how to put this – the way I was thinking about events, in the pale darkness. I was thinking about my horoscope and how I would ever know if it had come true. It’s something like the problem of volume that is a rooftop swimming pool – that when you are in it and lissom and supported, your own transformation from solid into liquid makes it difficult to believe that this element in which you are drifting is also massive weight. Or no, perhaps it’s better to think in other liquid terms, I mean not of water but of blood. Sure, the absence of blood is one of the strangenesses of my former history, my history before this history began. But sometimes the blood does emerge, after all. It emerges and there seems no way to stop it overflowing all the carpets and the curtains. Even if you had no idea that this would happen but just thought that you would be carrying on for ever in such lovely surroundings, like a pasha or state councillor from the old regimes, you never thought that in one conversation certain things would suddenly become tinged in your head with blood. But still, there it is: they do.

  6. TROPICÁLIA

  TROPICÁLIA

  & once again he enters 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 suddenly among the butterflyfish and blue-striped snappers. That isn’t so strange, or what I mean is that certainly it’s no less strange than other events that you might think are normal. As one guru has it, if you say A man is sitting, there is a ship overhead, that’s at least as real and maybe more so than the sentence A man is sitting and reading a book. But also I think this could be described the other way round: you are sitting there, at your kitchen table with a bowl of nectarines and prickly pears, or wherever you want to sit, and then the sea falls in. That’s possibly how it feels more often, whether what you are doing is bargaining with your dealer to let you have a rock of crack at a temporary discount, or trying to locate your elbow and wrist in among the auto wreckage. The outside just falls in on you.

  which can happen anywhere

  But did I know this or not know it? I mean, let’s just consider the situation of your hero. Here he is: unemployed, with various women who love him, plus a friend who is let’s say a little crazy. Now what is this hero to do? Does he try to be the good prince like he always is, the baby son? Or does he somehow move from state to state, a clown donning his various costumes, until there he is alone against the horizon begging for his life while someone points a gun at him? And OK, it does seem like option number 2 is the one he’s taken, but at what point did the true darkness become obvious? From this perspective of the future, I do find it difficult to say. Did I know that I was in the tropical sea or did I only know this later? Because definitely the outside can enter your life at any given moment, whether you are lost in the jungle among carnivorous plants, or watching from your presidential palace while the secret services drop bombs on you. Or there you are, in the snowy wastes, having got down from your carriage, waiting for the horses and kibitkas to be changed, so you stand there, and around you there’s this whirling snow and beyond it the flat dark. And you know it. It is over, civilisation. It is totally done with and over. Yes, in all these places – whether in the jungle or your palace or the matte snow – you can feel exiled from world history. And me I was unemployed and deceitful and in love with many women, as well as a minor criminal and a warlord: and when you do that, you also tend to find that you are suddenly outside all the usual references you previously relied on. You end up with this discovery of pain and its other elements, suddenly buoyant and alone in the soundproofed metaphysical spaceship.

  even if it may not be obvious in the present moment

  You think this is no way to reach the dark metaphysical, to squander the money and opportunities my parents gave me? To be harmful to my wife with my sadness and deceits? It turned out that it was dark enough for me. In the end, wherever you are is nowhere and is the silent snow and the broken kibitka, and a man cursing while he tries to keep the axle steady on the greasy ice. But I do not know if I knew then what I know now. It did not feel like darkness and snow at all. Such confusion! It was all just bright and interesting to live among, out here on the edges of a giant city, and I did not realise that I was moving darkly into chaos. In everything I say, therefore, you will have to have these time frames very much in mind: that not only did I not know something, that I only understood much later – by which point that knowledge was irrelevant, or of no use to me at all – but also that the understanding was precisely conditioned by what happened later. For I have studied this phenomenon, and its official terms. And in fact I think it’s possible to say something even stranger. It’s not just what you know that changes, depending on what you discover at the end, when everything is over; it’s what you intended to do, as well. Everything is retrospective, and that includes your motivations. Which doesn’t mean, however, that everything you feel when something’s happening is blindness or self-deception. If a motive is revealed in the future, it doesn’t mean it was there to be intuited all along. Like I remember once an erudite friend try
ing to explain to me in some pub or other dive how there was a difference between the conscious and the reluctant narrator, the one who knows what they’re revealing, and the one who doesn’t – whereas I’m not so sure you can really maintain that distinction. No person who ever talks is quite conscious of everything they’re saying. However much I have always been the shammes of my own head, the guardian of all its thoughts, sadly it’s never been possible to be the true comprehensive. That’s the basic problem I am having when I talk and try to describe these facts, because there are, it turns out, no facts at all: just signs and interpretations. Or just anticipations, and recollections, so that possibly the moment itself might not exist at all. There is no romance, or adventure. For I would happily bet in any world currency that no one has a clue about the kind of story they are currently inhabiting – everywhere they look they are muzzled and confined with no escape in sight – and so for instance nor did I, when I woke up beside Romy bleeding, or left a nail salon with cash triumphantly, or other criminal acts, I did not know what type of story this involved at all. I would only know when I could tell it, and I could only tell it when it was over: and what could it really mean, for any story to be over? I don’t mean I’m some philosophy champ. I just mean I was very confused.

  but only later, in the future outside the actual story

  Because all along I have been existing way beyond the events I am now recounting, at this story’s most future point, for it was only in the enclouded future that these thoughts really occurred, long after Candy and I had definitively separated, and I had left my parents’ house, and our dog was dead. I was definitely very alone – in an apartment in one of the high-rise cantonments, out on the South Side of this giant city. Here I am, with the wound in my leg, and its comical limp, like any other marked seer. Maybe always now I will be this person with a limp, like I have suffered in great wars. My apartment was very bare and the night was coming on, and I was looking at the patterns the smog made on the sky, just as I was also watching smoke crawl out of a cigarette across the air and I think that in an interview I could have plausibly replied that I was feeling happy in the lightest manner possible. Or at least, I would have liked to give such a ruthless answer. But it’s not easy to be as ruthless as you might like, always you can get overtaken and in my case it was by this nostalgia. Nostalgia was the illness of our time. Because whereas other generations have this ability to let their past and all its artefacts disintegrate into dust, we have this availability on every computer or phone we happen to own to go back over our entire past: not only, let’s say, the endless credits of Dogtanian or the lovely Pink Panther, the items from our childhood, but also our entire backlist of correspondence. Every human is now more historically documented than Napoleon and it would be much to be regretted were it not so irrevocable. It means that depression and nostalgia and a whole rearranged way of thinking is the central fact of nearly everyone I know. And so in my case I was reading all the emails I had ever sent to Romy, and watching the way our friendship had then developed into our affair and then evaporated, and I was thinking how much I love friendship. It’s a really difficult thing. It’s as complicated as love and perhaps more valuable. Or at least, it’s just as capable of colossal sadnesses. It is definitely a form of adventure in a life. Just as also I was looking over emails to Dolores, to which she no longer replied, and then also the emails from the early years of my relationship with Candy, and only now was I realising something that Candy had been trying to tell me, and it made me want to explain to her how sorry I was that I had been so stupid. That’s one dark pleasure our technology affords, to be so quickly able to reread all the communications one has received, and understand where one has failed. And I was considering calling Wyman and just seeing how he was, or at the very least sending him a message, when my phone rang, and it was Candy.