Lurid & Cute

by Adam Thirlwell

  — Kid, said Hiro. — Let us keep our eyes on the road.

  It was very good advice and very sober. For to be chased in these places is not the exciting experience the video games and other educational environments have imagined. It requires a much more stressful concentration than the videastes seems to think, since while they imagine constant bursts of speed and a grand disregard for the safety of others, I found that it was not possible in any way to reach the desired acceleration I might need. There were old people crossing roads quite slowly, a funeral cortège involving a Caddy Hearse filled with flowers, and then roadworks with temporary traffic signals, or also at one point a procession for many saints, which made me pause for at least ten minutes, with a Jesus carrying a bright white helium cross on his shoulder. Such a chase is more like the complications of a driving test or proficiency exam, and not some pixelated swirl.

  in the guise of an adversary

  And also it forgets that if this is an area you know well, then it will have some sad connotations. There was one point when we zoomed down the underpass, then up alongside the hospital and away down the street with the eastern restaurants, then the street with stores for sewing-machine parts, past the zoo, and it occurred to me that this was always the route I had taken with my parents if we drove into the city. It had always been the most romantic route for me, and it still was, even if now it had such danger and tempest attached. I wondered very fleetingly if my parents ever knew, I mean knew how tenderly I thought about this small collection of streets. The nostalgia was very great, even if really I was just one car among the many other traffic items, the ambulances and caravans and bikers in scrambled formations. Beside me, kids were in trucks smoking weed while in a more compact sports thing a probably coked-up girl was probably going to see her orthodontist who was probably superhot. While it was also possible in this system of blockages and slowness that in the limousine behind me a philosopher was being driven to a conference where he was going to prove the non-existence of time, which was one thing I would have liked to believe as I very slowly entered and exited the outer lanes. I do not recommend it, a car chase in the megalopolis traffic. I think to be in such traffic makes it even more difficult for the beginner hoodlum, especially if driving was never that hoodlum’s thing. Had I been choosing a location for my first ever car chase I would not have chosen a major city in the twilight, but something more akin perhaps to a deserted freeway in the steppes at night. There was a vast gap as usual between the real and ideal – about as wide as in that story of the screenwriter who wrote down his dream ideas one night on a notepad beside his bed, only to discover in the morning that his big idea was Boy Meets Girl. We were on a road somewhere between the city and the suburbs and not really in the direction of the woods, since that destination was for the moment just suspended while I tried to lose whoever was intent on hunting us down, and I realised that our journey had led me to go past the hotel where I had returned to find Romy bleeding, and yet as I examined it with its pool and palmettos, I could only assume that something was wrong, that to search in this place for that previous time was not possible: since the fact that the time had passed meant also that the place had disappeared, as well. It was the same and not the same, which was just one more demonstration of the world’s non-existence. Meanwhile I was feeling more and more frightened and distracted. At the junction for one of the largest shopping centres in the world, I did not make for the quieter roads but instead entered the funnel to one of the city’s outer speed routes.

  — Well, it’s an adventure, Hiro said.

  He was so cool it was extravagant. And if perhaps, in retrospect, I could have finally paused, then this is where I would have paused, at this moment of the highest speed. Just look around you! The stars were starting to get scattered in the upstairs loft of the sky. Beside the autoroute, in the distance, the paintball signs, in the twilight, were doing this stammering thing in neon. While below the underpass as we zoomed onto the freeway and into the sky, some tired men who presumably probably came from distant war zones were selling a range of remote controls for absent televisions and a few dead video cameras. Far away, beside the canals, grasshoppers were probably folded up like nail clippers. But the sad thing is that you cannot pause. Because you really cannot avoid a fate. By which I mean, the method by which you avoid it in the end will be the means of your destruction. You prove your new machismo and the very means you use to prove it will be that machismo’s takedown and general beating. That’s how it is. The dog-god in the end will hunt you down.

  pursuing them in an auto chase

  We were up there on the Presidential Freeway and to go at the turbo speed I was going made me very much afraid. Whereas the car which was following us was in contrast a very happy automobile. It was careering joyfully among the other cars with a freakish allure of abandon. There were moments when I began to worry that I would soon confuse the accelerator and the brake. I was overwhelmed. The entire scene was so much action that I felt just felled – the way you feel when you’ve forgotten seventeen appointments and then as you remember them you feel them descending on you just like the lava descended from Vesuvius to Pompeii, or maybe worse, because unlike Pompeii the petrified inhabitant of such everyday cases does not have the luxury of being immediately calcified and therefore excused from further diarising. You have to continue instead, amid the continuing disaster, and for instance try to figure out exactly who this car might be, and why they had such an interest in our persons, since in general I think it’s fair to say that most people are able to live very much obliviously to other people, and that’s in general the perfect state in which to live. But also as well as thinking these impossible thoughts I had to make many quick decisions, and the decisions I then made were maybe not the best. That should be no surprise when you consider how confusing thinking can be. Now, of course, as I consider the matter from up here in the dulcet clouds of the future, it might well appear that the best would have been to drive for ever on the endless highways until this car behind me disappeared – I should have relied on the gift of speed, and also for safety kept to the open and public roads. But that was not what in fact happened. I was very scared and confused and not after all sure that the acceleration on my vehicle would match that of the car that was so patiently behind us, so that is not what did in fact happen. What happened was that in my panic – and this whole account if it is anything is a description of a panic – I took the very first exit off the motorway and went back down into the ordinary roads and roundabouts. I wanted to make for the woods, after all – for if you have once decided to do the right thing, then you should do it, despite all present dangers. Or at least, I think that’s why. I can’t be always sure of my motivations. And maybe this absence of a deep reason is just natural. Maybe always when the end point finally comes, and it always will, you will think that it arrives for no good reason at all. I think I also had the idea that in such wilderness and suburb undergrowth I might have the upper hand, because in such a competition it’s important to choose your territory, and in particular to choose a territory where you feel at home, the way other creatures choose a burrow. Quickly I entered smaller roads, looping round the cemented village greens, past the water troughs and the mini golf courses converted into car washes, until again we were out of the urban system and instead in some kind of greenery. We were driving through the outer villages that were really just ferocious roads. Still behind me hovered the terrible car. It was a very interesting experience, to know that you are being followed and chased and not have in any way the capability to stop it. I was pausing at every zebra crossing for pedestrians and when I slowed this car slowed as well – which gave me hope because I thought that if you are doing this then you have some respect at least for civilised behaviour. You may not be all blunderbuss and death squads. I wondered if in fact such obedience to the law might represent my only chance. There was night just softly descending its million nets over the houses and the breweries, and I accelerated
through the cross-coming traffic with the klaxons doing their diagonal streaming thing behind me, and for a moment I believed that I was free. We were speeding along and I turned down towards the forest and I was thinking that perhaps as usual I would be exempt from major trouble. Then in the mirror I saw that behind me still followed this terrible car.

  — What you going to do? said Hiro.

  I considered this and found no easy answer.

  — You think we should stop and talk? I said.

  — Perhaps, said Hiro.

  That was how he was. Always he was open with many people and I think that’s cool, to be so open to new experiences.

  – It seems to be their intention, said Hiro.

  He had been taking a cocktail of small pills while we were on our car chase, and now he took some more, presumably for the hours ahead, complete with a bottle of water. There was something very homely in this gesture, I considered. It was very domestic and very homely, in some indefinably consoling way.

  which ends in a forest, or common ground

  The forest outside our suburb was one where I had once roamed with my father when I was young, looking for dead leaves to take home and use as mulch or fertiliser or other garden terms. The ghost of my father was everywhere, even though he was not dead but then that’s not impossible, that a person who is alive is also something that haunts you. As usual, I suppose, I was wanting to live up to my responsibilities – for after all, what’s growing up, in the joke of the old master? It’s to be allowed to crack that whip, your will, over you with your own hand, which was something I was doing as I parked to the side of the road. The other car mimicked me, if perhaps with more precision of manoeuvre. And I guess my plan in coming to a halt had been to begin a benign conversation, something in which we would simply come to conclusions about mistakes and misunderstandings made, then slap each other on the back and go our separate ways, but the problem was that no one wanted to talk, or certainly not talk in that way. I don’t know how unusual that may seem. I’ve always thrived in atmospheres where people are quiet and respectful. Instead they preferred to shout which always I have found completely distressing, and it meant that I was scared and seemed to feel myself consenting, as if I were no longer concerned about the precise reasons or motivations but only the issue of my safety. I was surprised to see that all three of these pursuers, now that they had stepped out of the car, were women, but that was not so much interesting as the terror of their equipment: ski masks, wipe-clean leather, that kind of terrific accoutrement. I determined not to be scared, or at least not to show I was scared, because if you show you are scared then you’re finished, and I did not want to be finished, not just yet. To Hiro I gave a confident smile and I could see by the way his face moved that this somewhat reassured him. He was communicating to me something like: You want us to sort this out? We will sort this out, and it will be a very easy thing. Just as easy as the way I took those pills back then, just as fast and slick as that. Don’t be scared, amigo! You could tell he was saying such things just by the way he was feeling in his pocket for a cigarette and lighting it with untrembling hands. It was kind of him, because I would say that I was currently feeling scared, not just of the people in front of us but also in particular the setting. It was difficult to tell where one fear ended. They seemed to swarm together. For I had only to think of how I really was unsure as to who these people might be, and what wrong I might have done – since after all there was a wide selection to choose from in my past and recent past, like the problem in the old game shows of choosing the most desirable reward from the goods arrayed on display, like some portrait of the trophies of the hunt – that I necessarily also became confused and worried in my thinking, a worry that was difficult to distinguish from a worry or presentiment that all around us now in this forest were insects and also animals, possibly aliens as well, as I had once believed when I was younger. There was a rustling that was like the way you might imagine language rustling, if it were a thing, which I suppose it is, or also danger, in so far as danger is also remote, miniature, desolate, and very close. And so as usual I tried to be the one to speak first, because in the end this is how you control a situation, so in my head I prepared very carefully the right things to say, such as how sorry I was, and also how I would like to know exactly why it was they felt this need to direct us into the dark of a roadside woodland or forest, even if I suppose in this I was wrong, since I was the one who had chosen this location, and yet in some way I was very convinced that things were happening without my being able to control them at all. But one of the women was quicker than I was.

  — What do you want? she said. — What did you think would happen?

  — I don’t know, I said.

  I wanted to ask if also she had been the one responsible for destroying the objects in my house, and also for the unusual messages to my phone, but at the same time I was feeling how suddenly I did not know how to be in such a conversation, I mean one in which all the responses were unpredictable. It was obvious that they were talking to us in code, like the ghosts talk to their mystic Dictaphone at the Ouija board in tongues, and as with every mystic the whole problem is decoding the mystery in time.

  — There’s been a mistake, I said. — We mean no harm.

  For if she intended to intimidate me very quickly I wanted to point out that whether or not I had grown up in the same kind of circumstances as she had, I was still my own person and had a certain courage.

  where a conversation takes place

  But instead I found that I was burdened with a heavy silence, with no more words left inside me at all, which often happens when people shout at me, it silences me completely. Like for instance there was this one time when I was in my infancy, when I thought that I had locked myself into a room, that I could not open the door, as if it were too high above me, which I did find very perplexing. And when I called, eventually my father came, and opened the door with ease, because it was in fact not locked at all – but instead of reacting with tenderness and care he only seemed angry, and shouted at me, while I stood there, my trousers round my ankles, and I felt a total silence and injustice, which always happens to me whenever I am berated. I cannot avoid it. And so I was grateful when I understood that Hiro was now doing the talking for us, even if also I felt a regret, since I had always promised myself that I would be the one to protect him, and yet at the highest test it had turned out I had failed. But then perhaps that’s not so strange, that in extraordinary situations the familiar structures might impossibly mutate. I felt this tenderness for Hiro that was a terrible sensation, given the invisible weight of such a feeling and how little prepared I was to bear such a weight myself. It had never occurred to me how good-looking Hiro was, with his unlined skin, his natural quiff. I was half in love with him. He was talking quickly and at some length, and while I knew that many of the reasons for this were only chemical, and that if you got to know Hiro you would understand that he meant no harm, he simply did not mean any harm at all, but still, the problem with life is that so many times we are making assumptions based on very limited information, and I could see that these people here were precisely doing such a thing, they were judging Hiro and finding him difficult on the basis of an interpretation that was certainly at least a little unjustified. When Hiro informed these individuals that he saw no reason to be scared of them, that in fact they did not scare him, that they should probably pack up their masks right now and disappear into the sunset, there was no need to see in what Hiro said anything arrogant or untoward. Not of course that I did not realise that to others he could seem just unpredictable. To me he was only vulnerable whereas I suppose it seemed to them that a certain cool bravado was the real machine for his actions.

  — So maybe, said one of the women, — you should just stop talking, yeah?

  To think that in this country there can be death squads and other torture organs! Not that in a way I disagree, since I can understand very well, from this long distance, the des
ire to put me on trial, but still – we had got so used to the idea that we would never have to face up precisely to what we had done. It seemed so beautiful, that kind of life. I never thought I would have to meet my enemies. And if this word enemy seems to you old-fashioned, if you are puffing out your cheeks or laughing like a putto, taking another bite of samosa and in triumph at my stupidity, I do think that’s unfair. The old words can maybe be useful. For here were people demanding that Hiro should stop talking, and one thing which is always true of Hiro in these moods is that he does not like to stop talking, especially when asked. Such misunderstandings perhaps happen all the time. To Hiro, he really was a person with so many intricate thoughts and opinions and tastes, he really did think that his love of green-tea ice cream was something that made him very rare, whereas to these people I understood that if they were seeing a human at all it was the most abstract version of a human, a person who simply does not understand what they are about, who is a problem for them and quite possibly needs to be eliminated – and to explain the one to the other would be almost superhumanly impossible. But well, not everything can be explained. Some things are spidery and private. There’s always this giant mismatch between the large interior and the small outside, and in fact sometimes I think the distance between the two is so gigantic that there’s no possible way of relating the one to the other. They are the pure incommensurate.