Lurid & Cute

by Adam Thirlwell

  ME

  Maybe we should just go to bed and do crazy things. Like maybe we should just go back to my room and I can spend all night licking you wherever you want – like anywhere –

  HER

  Including for instance my asshole?

  ME

  I did say anywhere.

  Perhaps many people know this situation often and are not moved by it, but for me the rush was overwhelming and delicious – that I could say such things and the object of your desire would not turn away. She did not turn away. She stared at me.

  ME

  And you?

  HER

  Me?

  ME

  What would you want us to do?

  HER

  Then, after you had licked me, I would want you to bend me over a chair.

  ME

  Say that again! Whisper it!

  She came very close and her breath was a vast temptation inside my ear.

  HER

  I want you to bend me over a chair and fuck me very hard.

  Always, I thought, I will remember this. It will be like this memento I have buried with me in my pyramid with my million pottery slaves. That’s how exciting the world can be and I worry that my friends do not understand this. Wyman, I wanted to say: Do you really not know about this? Have you never felt this mania for detail? I do not know if you have. Or when you hear a girl swallow your come, does it sound sort of breathy or is it quiet? I know one girl who went very quiet but also I know others who kept on sucking and made a slurping gurgling noise which, Wyman, I can still hear. The gusto and the joyfulness! And am I to abandon this for the pleasures of kindness and loyalty? Is that really how the argument is concluded? For surely happiness is a moral virtue, too? Surely, the true sin is ennui? Or so I tried to argue, with my friends and confidants. In my life I always want as much ludicrous intimacy as possible, when everything noble and normal gets melted. I felt such pity for the large heavy men, with their hair cut too short, in their pinstriped shirts and slip-on shoes. No pleasure has ever touched them! Whereas me, in the park I go walking and meet a girl selling antiquarian books and very soon she has invited me to her apartment. Or then there was the girl who worked in the children’s puppet theatre, serving chocolate egg creams and limeade ice-cream floats … When things happen that naturally and inadvertently, I don’t see how it’s possible to use a language of blame at all.

  — Inadvertent? said my mother.

  which he tries to justify

  I don’t know why I always liked to confide in my mother, like I was the twelve-year-old bride and she was my aged nurse, but I did seem to have this need. Perhaps I wanted to be told that everything I was doing was correct, and of my many confidants my mother just might have fulfilled this role. But in this I was forgetting one important thing, which is that my mother loves me and to be loved is a place of many dispensations, but also she does not want to lie. It means that without in any way meaning to she is therefore the arbiter of the limits of my wishes, and that can make her difficult in conversation. Did I mention the shiny turquoise tracksuit my mother bought me when I was ten? I am not sure I have mentioned it enough – this tracksuit I had asked for, had begged for, with tears in my eyes, a shell suit that would make me look as gangland as possible, only for my mother to find a thing of turquoise satin, with flared trousers … What’s a child to do with such a mother? She loves him so much and yet she will not overspend. Obviously it’s in fact an excellent form of parenting but it still creates difficult dramas when really all I want is for all my wishes to come true.

  — You think this is love, but it isn’t, she said.

  — So what is this?

  — This is just sex.

  — Oh really?

  — Always you are thinking about just one thing, she said.

  I am sure she meant this kindly but I felt just ever so gently belittled, and I did not like this feeling at all. If my mother thought I was not my own man, I very much wanted to prove her wrong. I wanted to be announcing my decisions to her, whereas instead there she was maintaining that this decision was not my own: as if I was the most imitative mimic in human history.

  — You know we just want you to be happy, said my mother. — We love you so very much.

  I understood the sadness in her voice, and her unwillingness to blame. I knew the sadness very well, since obviously if you give up everything and then have nothing you can show to other people, then there’s no need for a commercial with screech trumpets and maracas to tell you that something might be wrong. But how could I explain my last resistance? These are delicate feelings, and while my parents always admired me for my daydreaming, still, I don’t think daydreaming is given the attention that it’s due.

  — You remember Nelson?

  — Nelson, sure –

  — He has his own office.

  — Oh because that’s important.

  — I don’t mean that. Look how kind Nelson is, said my mother.

  I understood her basic point. She appreciated Nelson’s care for his wife. In some dark way I wanted to be like Nelson too. But I would say that Nelson had it easy in comparison to me. I mean, sure, I go in terror of being called bad. Like Nelson and all the others of my class, I go in terror of the adjective selfish. To avoid this adjective I will stifle many desires, or at least stifle them in public. But why should the single thing you most are scared of necessarily be the moral code to live by? It’s not so obvious, after all. It was the code of the cloud in which I lived, absolutely, but what if this cloud was not the natural habitat – the way a fish might feel about its pitiless aquarium?

  because it leads to utopian experiences

  And what happened next perhaps only acquired its true significance because of this very bright tempest in which I moved, when everything was as sprightly as the emoji I adored. At some party or other gathering, there Dolores was again. No longer did she have Benicio with her, her boyfriend or putto. And as I saw her, it felt like a rearrangement had just occurred, for often perhaps when something with giant meaning occurs it has its mini prefigurations – like someone trying to locate the correct code for the safe-deposit box. Or at least, what I mean is: if you think that everything has a cause, then you also have to admit that clairvoyance and other forms or horoscope are therefore possible. Yes, in retrospect I was thinking that I had definitely foreseen this, I had known we would meet again and also known that it would be perfect, even though at the same time I had to admit that she had only existed at the corner of my consciousness. And fittingly therefore when I saw her she was standing in a corner of the room – as if it might have been possible to just snip her out of the picture entirely, like the smallest nymph at the edge of a ceiling painted with faded allegories – and immediately we were talking and were smiling very much, like the most tentative clowns in the room. I was crowded with excitement, even if I knew that in many ways this feeling could well be an illusion and just some trick of perspective – and so as we spoke I was waiting for that realisation and yet not waiting, a little like hoping someone will text you and having your phone beside you on silent but trying not to look, so that every drifting cloud or shift of light on its surface makes you nervous in your peripheral vision. There was something in her manner that enchanted me very much. She had a grandeur, no question, and that grandeur was in how sure she was of herself and of her charm. She had this integrity that was endless, including her carnality. So that it was not impossible, it seemed to me, that she would offer some route out of this scenario I was in, something decisive and irrevocable, a mode of living that was completely outside the system of my life up until now. Such a possibility must exist, after all. I had been giving it much thought. For a moment it seemed possible never to feel anxious again. For in Dolores, there was nothing serious. Or no: in Dolores, everything serious was devoted to this question of precision.

  — What did you most like about me? she said.

  — About you? I said.

  — Whe
n we first met? she said.

  — At that fiesta? I said.

  — For me, she said, — it was the way you were always looking at me.

  And it struck me that this type of conversation was very difficult, since in a way I remembered very little of Dolores in that conversation, mainly in fact only remembering how difficult I had found it in relation to Romy and Candy, but now that she was talking I believed that I could remember, too – since who is to judge the past? The fact that she remembered so much detail was for me a tender thing, and it made me want her even more, including the past I could no longer remember. I was looking at her and thinking that never could I imagine not wanting Dolores’s body: whether feverish with illness, racked with vomiting, crimson with sunburn. I could imagine our mouths all over each other, like intricate, intelligent animals. And even though we parted with no future plan or even appointment, every day I thought about her more and more, and this feeling felt like love: the way some pirate hackers take up crazy amounts of bandwidth without anyone’s consent. That was how opaque the world was, how beautiful, how blocked – and I would like to record this, the future I imagined might be possible with Dolores, I would like to give this lost fiesta some memorial, just before the violence starts.

  THE OUTSIDE COMES IN

  but then his utopia is interrupted

  To be just a single person! What a disaster! I really do think that the outside world is too small for the inside of people, it’s too definite and absolute. Who wouldn’t transform into anything else, into a piranha or other omnivore? Although already I was slightly like the other animals. I was like some octopus with its tentacles around its various saviours and adorees, around the bodies of Romy and Candy and Dolores and the million other mirages. But where would this melancholy octopus go? Events by now were becoming denser and smaller. It was like everywhere the doors and windows and other apertures were blocked, like those fake backdrops in the old theatres, with endless streets receding in fake perspective. Even the front door of our house now seemed like a place of danger, or if not danger then entrapment. If you’re given to such thoughts, perhaps therefore it’s only right that what happened next will happen – that very early in the morning, when the morning is also still the night-time, but you are therefore not in any condition for such philosophy, the doorbell rang very precisely and softly. And so in the usual nightmare method I walked down the stairs in my nightwear – some dead teeshirt, some dead trackpants – to answer it. My mother and my father were away on a romantic weekend together, removed from our festivities. If they were festivities, however, they were very mournful. They were people sitting in an endless tea party, with baking and other pursuits. It wasn’t the zenith I had dreamed of – where in a commune or higher plane everyone would love each other and no one would be hurt, whereas increasingly it seemed that no one really loved each other, and everyone was hurt. As for whether or not it is right for someone to arrive very early in the morning, when the morning is also the night, I did not really consider. Perhaps of course I should have done, although whether or not such protective thoughts had occurred I am still not sure how much protection they would have offered – since when danger approaches it will still approach, however much you have worried about it earlier. But anyway, I did not think about such danger. When you are woken from difficult dreams – like in this dream I was tucking into my own torso, like an ice cream, and when such are your dreams you are happy to be woken up at all – then your sense of perspective or usual danger is maybe momentarily suspended.

  by armed intruders

  Also after the macabre scene with the boy selling dusters and other kitchen items I had this resolution that in general I would not be so fearful of those who came to our door, the extras and deadbeats. I would lavish attention everywhere, on every member of the cast list, wherever they happened to be placed in the general composition. And so I opened the door and immediately discovered that I was letting in two men to our house, masked in balaclavas. Also they had these accessories that very much resembled guns. I realised that I was shouting something – not so much articulate as just a noise, and so no more useful than the cries of any other language, like if I had said oyé or anything else. I was being walked backwards from our hall and into our living room, and as I walked I was trying to think at this very late point in the night both of lighting and of the telephone, just whether in either case I could reach them and try to make the situation better. But also I was feeling very scared and my body was lighter than it had ever been, and softer. I was not really sure of the language I should use. Definitely I was happy that my mother and father were not here, because no one should see their house invaded, and not only that, but also see their child menaced in this way in the morning/night when everyone should be sleeping. The balaclavas in particular did upset me. After all, Hiro and I had been very careful not to use such threatening items ourselves, and now I did feel vindicated, because the effect was horrible and upsetting. Certainly it made me scared but the more scared I became also the more angry, even if at this point I did understand that to be angry was no solution. But still, a sense of humiliation was inescapable and I let it marinate there. These two people had dressed their faces in balaclavas, although as I say this I realise that dressed is perhaps not right, but I do not know the verbs for balaclavas, just as I only know that fear it turned out was new and very sad, because it was like a whole body had disappeared, like I was about as strong as the drape of a curtain as it hangs there, perhaps not even as strong as that.

  — Sit the fuck down, said the second man, and as he did so I realised he was a girl.

  Not only that, but at the same time I also realised that there was something in their tone of voice that indicated a possible uncertainty, I mean a lack of practice or of being duped by their own role, and that’s a problem, because one thing that is true is that you have to sell your role to yourself and know it before anyone else will be sold and know it too, but whether or not that calmed me I do not know, I think it didn’t, because in many ways the gangster who is nervous is much more dangerous than the gangster who is a professional and knows what they are doing, just as you do want your mortgage adviser to be seasoned and basically bored by the job they have to do, that’s only human nature.

  THE GIRL

  I said, sit the fuck down.

  So I sat. As I did so I saw Candy standing in the doorway, and she looked so vulnerable, in this black vest and shorts, this vest that displayed the pale surface of her skin and the beginning of her breasts and I felt such love for her – such bravery in unknown circumstances! – and wished that I could cry out how much I loved her, but decided sadly no. And so instead I let the scene continue as its starlets wanted: with much terror and fainting and blood.

  & very gently terror enters the picture

  No doubt there are always people – as the poison works its way into their liver and veins, or they press the trigger tight as they aim it at their heart, or see the truck approaching on the wrong side of the road with its horn sounding across the empty plains, or while the girl who on reflection now seems possibly illegally young is unzipping them and whispering that no one needs to know – who have their doubts as to whether the real is as real as it tends to think it is. That’s just the natural consequence of seeing blood or guts or other gunk. It’s just what happens when gore is present. Because no one was expecting it they do not know what to say or how to describe it, they have no references and when you have no references it becomes difficult to talk – it’s like when people after witnessing a car crash or drugs shooting or plane disaster say, Hey it was just like a movie, whereas they really mean of course that it wasn’t like anything they’ve ever seen before. But the gore is a much smaller subset of the lurid than people ordinarily think. The lurid can occur at much smaller moments. Because I don’t think it’s so unusual to expect that the lurid and the normal might just happen to never coincide, no it’s not so lunatic to imagine that nothing strange will ever happen in
your life because of course most of the time it doesn’t – but then the extraordinary isn’t what never happens but what sometimes or very rarely happens, which means that it does happen, in the end. And one conclusion that can possibly be drawn from this would be that the lurid and the ordinary are in fact only different descriptions of the same thing, like they’re the low note and the high note and in between is the sliding glissando scuzziness of an electric violin. The movement from one state to another can be therefore very small – as miniature as crossing over from Mexicali to Calexico, or, for instance, letting in two people who seem to wish you harm, with deep malignity in their postures and their tone of voice. And in fact maybe there’s not so much difference between the benign and the malign. In the end you cannot separate any event into any category at all, since everything is just a succession of singular things.

  — This is only a warning, said the man.

  — OK, I said.

  — Is kind of your own fault, the girl said.

  — We’re being nice, said the man.

  — You shouldn’t take what isn’t yours, said the girl.

  — But what have we taken? said Candy.

  So much communication was occurring between Candy and me that it was no doubt marvellous, if what you are interested in is the wonder of human consciousness and its ability to exist as this kind of ectoplasm between two people, but I was trying not to think about what Candy might be thinking. And also I was at the same time interested in the fact that these two gangsters did seem very unsure. They were picking things up and smashing them but in a slightly listless manner, like they did not quite believe in this as a gesture. It was making me sad because now all my suspicions would return again, and never would I trust people, I mean the people I did not know – for always now I would feel justified to refuse the people who came to my door, demanding things, as if they were just criminals or lunatics rather than hard-working honest people. Little by little, they were taking the room apart. Everything that had previously been in the room was still there, sure, but now it was in more pieces than it should have been. And I think it’s quite unusual, to see a room that’s minutely multiplied like that. Only a few people will have seen this phenomenon – when a room in your house is completely and very beautifully destroyed, in one systematic tableau.