Lurid & Cute

by Adam Thirlwell

  — It’s me, she said. — Is this a good time?

  — Uh-huh, I said.

  — Are you busy right now?

  — Where are you? I said.

  — Here, she said.

  — What kind of here? I said.

  — Downstairs, she said.

  I put the phone down. And then I paused, while I waited for the elevator to ascend, and in that pause I was partly looking out at the balcony of my apartment, where I had hung a birdcage I had bought the other morning in the bird market, and my new backpack, or listening to a fly scribble its noise zigzaggingly all over the room, but also I was perhaps at last having the kind of moment where I did understand what had happened to me, or was still happening. I had in some way definitively aged. It was the time sadness you get in a plane when you realise that not only are the air hostesses on your transatlantic flight in no way comparable to the lissom pinups of your imagination, but that in fact they once were precisely those selfsame lissom pinups, but now time has passed and they are still up here, in the air, serving mini muffins and miniature wine, but simply older, with wedding rings, and a more refined idea of sarcasm, and everything has changed without anyone understanding how, or why. I could not say that I was happy Candy was here. In some way it felt like a test or torture and I did not know if I could bear it. And then there she was, in my doorway.

  where he sees his wife for a final time

  Of the many exquisite aspects of Candy’s beauty, the aspect that struck me now, as it had often, obviously, struck me, was the very long length of her legs. There you all are, I often wanted to say to the world, when I was out with my wife, you look at Candy, you look at the grandeur and the beauty of her legs and then you think: but only a man with a humdinger, a baseball bat against his thighs, like something resembling an aubergine or pumpkin, no not pumpkin, a baseball bat, could satisfy a woman with legs as long as that. Her legs are these things of supple delicate extensive beauty that therefore lend themselves to imagining them in various angular poses, kinked around your thighs, or upright and resting on your shoulders, and when I saw them again I had such desire for her I could not think, because I could only think about the way those legs became her hips, and the soft skin between her legs and how it would go wet if I just touched it, as if something had dissolved. I watched her while she observed my bare apartment, with my single beloved backpack, and also magazines and books and cigarettes, because lately I had taken up smoking, a habit Candy had always disliked and so I had rarely done it, or at least not professionally.

  — You’re smoking now? she said.

  — I didn’t ask you here, I said.

  — OK, she said.

  Then I walked towards her, I think just to be closer, and she watched me walking, and then when I was beside her at the window she leaned towards me and too late I realised she only intended to hug me – for after all we are very different in our heights, where I am small, she is tall, where I am cherubic, she is elegant and lithe – and so regretfully I felt my lips meet hers. She kissed me very softly on the lips and I felt like the women are said to have felt in previous eras, the way you are kissed and feel like you are swooning. The lighting in the room suddenly felt wrong. The lighting was yellow because it was twilight but before I thought to improve it her phone rang.

  — Yeah I’ll call you later, she said.

  — Who was that? I said.

  — How long have you been here? she said.

  — How long? I said.

  — And why are you limping? she said.

  — Limping? I said.

  — Yes, limping, she said.

  — It’s a long story, I replied.

  It was definitely difficult to talk to her. And that in itself was part of my new knowledge, that something irrevocable had happened, but not just that – that something in the past had definitively happened, because of what was happening right now.

  & understands his transformation

  Most stories are like the story of the man who threw away a date stone and then there started up behind him a muscular spirit, saying, Get up that I can kill you, just as you killed my son. And when the man said, How did I slay your son? the spirit simply replied: When you threw away the date stone it hit my son, who was passing by at the time, on the chest, and he died. There is no help for you. You have to die. And so he kills the putz, without mercy. I mean, most stories seem to begin with chance, with just a djinn appearing, and then they end up being destiny. I say destiny, but what I really mean is total unfairness and people being beaten to a pulp whether they deserve that fate or not. Because here’s how I see the present situation. The universe is a total psychopath and bully, with paws and boxing gloves and whatever other trinkets it finds most useful for beating people into pulp. It is out of control, totally. It is a bully and I am its slave and that leads to different kinds of knowledge. One of which, for instance, might be that whereas you might prefer it that one thing follows another very normally, in fact it’s like how a friend of mine once described it – that if a dog bites a little boy and gives him rabies, the illusion of a universal cause and effect is maintained, and order exists, and everyone feels happy. But if, on the other hand, the boy instead turns into a dog himself, by which I mean, if the story has some inexplicable transformation or hole in it, then the world is uncontrollable – and that scenario is in fact while improbable also much more likely – like all of our affections, our inability to live up to our own standards, and our undeserved misfortunes. And when that happens, and you have a story with a hole in it, then that hole transforms your story into a myth. So that the obvious $1,000,000,000 question, in my opinion, is therefore something like this: Is there really any normal story in this world at all? Isn’t everything at some point, if you make the frames go slow enough, going to reveal itself as mythological?

  only when everything is over

  — Are you avoiding me? she said. — Is it me you’re running away from?

  — I’m not running away, I said. — I’m just. I’m … You want something to eat? I said.

  Then Candy kissed me again and this time it was real. It was in no way what I expected but also if it was happening I did not want at all to resist. I pushed off her leather jacket and she wriggled her wrists out and then let it splash on the floor, and she had a white vest on through which you could see the outline of her nipples – because Candy hardly ever wore a bra, she didn’t need to, and this was something always I had found so erotic about her – and something about this sight made me terribly sad, it was so definite and also so elusive.

  — Are you with someone? she said.

  — No, I said.

  — And you? I said.

  Then I realised I did not want to know, at the precise moment when I also realised that she was not going to answer.

  — I didn’t hurt you deliberately, I said.

  — I don’t care, she said.

  Then she sat down in a chair, in this pose of complete elegance and sureness, with her long legs angular beneath her, just ever so slightly gawkily, and I did not know what was happening.

  — Come to the window, I said. — Look at the streets.

  — No, she said. — Come here.

  But I didn’t want to do that. I was suddenly too sad.

  — You know, I said, — you once said to me that we should maybe get together when we were sixty.

  — I didn’t mean it, she said. — I was being nice.

  — How was that nice, I said, — if you didn’t mean it?

  — Don’t be crazy, she said.

  But of course it was not the words but the tone in which she said it, this flat thing where nothing was emphasised, that was what made me so terrified for what had happened, as if in that flatness there was so much knowledge about the world but in particular about me. As she took off her vest and stood there topless in her jeans so that her breasts were there, I looked at them and understood that never again would I know that beauty, because it was nothing to do
with the physical breasts themselves but to do with the entire situation, this situation in which a goofy clown understood what precisely he has lost. For I would say: the basic moral problem is that quite obviously we are more than one person, and throughout our lives so many of my friends are ruthless to the alternatives, to the other options and arrays of Wyman and so on that they do not wish to bring into life. But why not? Why does the Wyman who is a drug addict not get owed as much as the Wyman who is a paralegal? Why should the paralegal be the only Wyman who is adored? When I feel guilt it is all for the things undone, the things I do not do. To which the only possible response is what Candy would say and it is one reason why I loved her. That there is no logical reason not to do everything, sure, and therefore if we take the matter of for instance sleeping with the girl in the cream tuxedo and leather trousers sucking suggestively on a bottle of beer, the only reason not to go into the dark bedroom light with her is no reason at all, but also it is everything – that in the manner of the most superfluous and beautiful artwork you have decided to say to yourself that you will not ever do this, and that is in fact a binding and wonderful place to be. For it is wonderful, the state of being bound. Except now I was not bound at all.

  — I’m not sure we should fuck, I said.

  — I don’t care, she said.

  — Stop saying you don’t care! I said.

  — I’m sorry, she said. — What do you want me to say?

  But I did not know what I wanted her to say. I was remembering a little speech that Candy had once given, where she at some drunken point announced that her life was basically always the same thing. When she couldn’t do anything, she was unhappy; when she could do something she was unhappy because there wasn’t enough time to do it; and when she thought about doing something in the future, which should presumably give her some hope, she was then devastated by fear, giant and encompassing fear. That doesn’t mean, of course, she then added, that there aren’t good moments. I missed the speech of Candy very much. Outside it was the usual overcast atmosphere: the taste of ashes floating in the air, flowers steeping, a fine drizzle over the canals. While above us surged the military helicopters and the fragile commuter planes. And then I lay back on the bed and Candy lay beside me, in the expanding darkness, with fireflies mimicking light bulbs at the window.

  which demands a new kind of thinking

  What I mean is: at some point, I had been invaded. The outside had come in – whether that was when I woke up beside Romy bleeding, or Hiro moved in, or we began our involved commune of injured feeling, or just when I began this life of lethargy and torpor, or when we started playing around with guns and scaring innocent well-meaning people – and I was lost. Because no one is impossible – if the right combination of apples and pears comes to rest in the slot machine. And when that happens, you need as tropical thinking as you can find, in the manner of the old tropicália masters. If there was ever an artistic movement I could adore, the tropicália artists would be such a movement. They understood the basic tactic – you have to take whatever you can get, and not care about the question of provenance. That’s what you discover when you are outside civilisation: whether or not something is truly yours is no longer a pressing issue. If you need the Kabbalah or the four stages of enlightenment, then you should take it and make it yours. Or so I was basically thinking. Eat each other! Be a cannibal! If you are born in the middle of nowhere, and in fact that nowhere is wherever you are currently sitting, then you better find your nourishment wherever it turns up. I mean, who are the tropicália masters? Since these revelations, I have been doing my small research. There is that artist Oiticica, and his installation art: where the viewer sits there among some pot plants, and various bathing huts, and also pebbles and macaws, and finally, at the end of one miniature corridor, discovers a single TV set. But also there is my other hero, the poet Huidobro: who once recited his manifesto in a theatre in Santiago, on the edge of the known universe: and on the edge of the known universe our hero, who was bored with the realities that surrounded him, just batshit bored, announced that instead what he therefore wanted was no longer to copy the realities of nature, which after all did not belong to us, but instead to create realities in a world that would be ours, in a world awaiting its own flora and fauna. There’s no need to be satisfied with what’s there, that was the basic message of Vicente Huidobro: if you find yourself among lianas with heavy pendulous tongues, glossy like boxing gloves, then so be it.

  & so he resolves to record it

  No wonder, if you are in such a way-out place of tropicália, that when you come to describe it you end up with these repeats and mini fantasies of time travel, as if somehow you can recreate your innocence deliberately. Which is perhaps not such a mad ambition, since what you foresee or what you remember can be as important as what really happens. What else would you expect of this new habitat? In the darkness I could hear some people walking past and I was up here in this bedroom with Candy. I wanted to say something that would make things at least better, for it’s always best if something ends on a happy note.

  — Really, I said to her, — I am in your place and have not ever left it.

  — Darling, you’re a sweet thing, said Candy. — But –

  — I mean, I am constantly berating myself, I promise you, I said.

  — You know it, no? None of your self-recriminations excuse anything at all.

  — Then what can I do? I said.

  — There’s nothing you can do, she said. — You could have done things. You could have, for instance, just not let yourself be spoiled.

  I considered this grave charge.

  — But to be spoiled is a terrible temptation! I sadly said.

  It was as if I could see her figure becoming smaller with distance, even though she was right there beside me on the bed. And while I did not blame her – since it must be so boring waiting for people to improve, I understand – it occurred to me that I would no longer be able to prove my innocence to her, and since she was the only person to whom I ever wanted to be proved innocent, I would never be innocent again. I was guilty for ever. Not, of course, that all my crimes had not been punished very severely by the many misfortunes that had darkened the recent part of my life. So that maybe you could even argue that since Candy had discovered so many avengers on her behalf, my guilt for having offended her was possibly much diminished. But also it was at this point that I realised that if I were ever to have an art form, it would have to be an art of full confession. Only a description of my profound triviality would be adequate to convey the magnitude of my perdition. My own corrida! – where I would hunt myself desperately down. I was so despicable it was wonderful. As I lay there with Candy for the last time beside me, I suddenly remembered the miniature sketch I had written after what had happened in the sauna, and was thinking that surely now I could carry on my task, as a new gargantuan version. I had this vision very clearly of a book in which I would record my total experience, and I knew how it should sound: with all the tones that no one ever admires, – the Gruesome, Tender, Needy, Sleazy, Boring, the Lurid and the Cute. In such terrible tones I would tell my kawaii tale, with no distance between me and the absent person to whom I was talking. I saw it as one continuous thing, a little cascade with eddies and swirls, or an endlessly fidgeting fire. For always, I had only wanted to live. And the true life – and this is no new discovery of mine, after all – the life that was at last discovered and illuminated, and therefore the only life that has been truly lived, was the life you observe in retrospect, from some way-off point in the clouds, and one word for that kind of look might possibly be literature. Or if not literature, then talking, at least. And if Candy was not there, I was sadly and delightedly now thinking, in the tropical air, I could still talk as if she were.

  very possibly in a book

  I don’t know why people think that stories or pictures take you out of the world. My talking was the only route I had into it, like it was Velcro or a hinge. In the
end, nothing can be taught: everything has to be learned. And you only can learn anything by letting yourself howl as many words as possible. After all, I considered: I was very used to writing down my own thoughts, or talking very fast. I was a prodigy! Always I did this talking to myself, without anyone there to listen, like some crazy man out in the park in the open-air afternoon. And yet, it now occurs to me, as I finish my endeavour, there is one final somersault that I had not in fact predicted. It’s difficult now to write this all down and still believe that what I say is true, I mean true absolutely. I know some of that might just be laziness but also I do have this fear of betraying my ideal. For the dream is that everything you say will be complete, with absolutely every qualification docketed and allowed for, but of course this is only an ideal and like every ideal also unattainable, so that instead what happens is that you say something and because you have indeed said this you end up losing the thing you intended to say, for it is only replaced by the thing you have said which while inaccurate is also real, and therefore according to the law that what is there will always erase what is not there, that’s all that in the end you can remember. I suppose on the other hand you could see this as a good thing too. For OK, perhaps you have lost the original importance, but when you have that sentence there before you it’s also possible that from that point on it might be able to gain a new importance, that had never been suspected. What you say is never what you think you say. What you really say is said without you knowing. It’s like how no one ever thinks they are of their era, even though everyone of course is of their era, except that it will only be when we are all dead that what is of our era in us will be revealed. Once you realise that, it’s a very difficult problem for creation. For why begin something with any intention in mind, if that intention will in no way be the effect of the finished work? And yet if you do not begin anything, then nothing will be expressed. So that the only way of beginning is to begin with an idea that you know will never be expressed, in the hope that through it something else will be able to be expressed of whose existence or form you are not yet aware. It’s not so much a record as a new experience entirely. I was falling asleep beside Candy, and when I fall asleep my thinking tends to become more frantic. I was trying to find an analogy or image for my ideal. For some reason my only image was a hamburger. My thinking was as vulgar as that – the last time I ever saw Candy, when I finally realised everything I had lost, in the dark metaphysical desert of an apartment whose air con runs through the night and is very loud. For books, like hamburgers, are both just things that are layered in groups. Yes, if I had a picture of my ideal method of talking, it was a hamburger with all its sauces: a multicoloured assemblage, sweet and greasy and delicious. That’s what you need if you want to talk about what happened to you in tropicália, if you want to do all the tricks you might like with that horrible substance called time. And for as long as I could before I fell asleep I lay there contemplating this possibility, like the risk-analysis clerk or med student who for the very first time stands there longingly at the entrance to the hoochie-coochie joint, gazing up at the neon void.