A Bright Moon for Fools

by Jasper Gibson

  “I’m sorry?”

  Christmas laughed in their faces. It was a coarse, false laugh, of the kind one might make on learning that one’s worst enemy has contracted a venereal disease. They were stunned. “Do you know,” he said, “the thing I’ve noticed about you Americans is that you’re rather young in the eye. It’s as if the reincarnation department had to release a whole raft of first generation souls just to fulfil your rapacious expansion. What’s it like living over there? I mean, really? Sleepwalking through hell?”

  “OK, buddy, now you wait there just a minute—” Christmas eyed the man’s T-shirt while draining his glass.

  “You know, I think I’ve just realised what the real difference is between our two nations.”

  “I think you’d better stop right there—”

  “English idiots wear T-shirts of where they’ve been. American idiots wear T-shirts of where they’re from.”

  “Are you calling me an idiot?”

  Christmas poured another drink while the man came to his own conclusion. “Now here’s an important question,” Christmas looked straight at the woman: “Would you like to have sex?” The man grabbed Christmas by the lapels.

  “I meant with each other—”

  “You watch your goddamn mouth!”

  “It’s a little bit too close to the nose for that.”

  “Asshole!”

  “The word,” he said, “is arse-hole.”

  “You’re goddamned lucky I’m on vacation,” snarled the man, leaning further into Christmas’ face, “or I would rip your fucking neck off, you hear me, asshole?”

  “Arse-hole! I’m an arsehole, the devil take you!”

  The man released Christmas in disgust.

  “Come on, honey,” said the woman, standing up. “Let’s go.”

  “Is he honey?” smiled Christmas, “looks more like a bit of a jam to me.”

  “You’ve been warned, pal!” spat the man, stabbing the air with his finger. Christmas watched them storm out of the bar and upstairs to their room. At the top of the stairs, the woman turned round to give him a look. This convinced Christmas she was secretly attracted to him. He toasted their backs. Then he turned to the rest of the room, silenced and agape, and toasted them too.

  “We closed,” announced the woman behind the bar, looking straight at him.

  Christmas went to his room with the rest of the bottle. He sat on the edge of the bed. Then he lay down. Then he sat up again. He opened the wallet and looked at the photograph. He turned on the television. Numbers whizzed and flew, financial data ticker-taping at different speeds. Why were they always showing this rubbish? he thought, sliding once more down the flume of rum into the comfortable baths of complaint: The Rot. Those digits were meaningless code, unless you were a professional financier, in which case it was available on your computer screen at work. Why all these channels of the stuff? Why the updates after every news programme, the insistence, the ubiquity? Christmas was certain that the answer lay in its unintelligibility: it was something people didn’t understand, something else to make them feel there was a vast world of inscrutable mystery run by people cleverer than they, so it was best just to shut up and toe the line.

  He took out the money from Bridget’s wallet. Twenty dollars, 110 bolívares. He counted them, fingered them, held them to the light. They were relics just as he was. Modern transactions now were pieces of digital information flying back and forth through the godforsaken wires that were strangling the earth. Money itself had to make money. It had to contain information about where it had been and whom it was going to, information that could be sold. These banknotes were too finite. They had no potential beyond themselves. In the world he was from, things just were – contained, understandable. They didn’t need to be connected. They weren’t part of this obscene archipelago. Christmas sighed. He lay back on the bed. The Rot was here too. The Rot was everywhere.

  These days it seemed as if everyone was talking from the same bad script – practised, learnt, regurgitated: a never-ending re-enactment. Walking past the tube stations at rush hour as the crowd streamed to get under the ground, he felt as if he were walking between the lines of some terracotta army. They creaked and groaned and protested but in the clamour he could see only obedience. Obedience and the glorification of suffering – religion, then, but what new kind of God was this, brewing for thirty years in the mulch and mucous of The Rot? What age was rising, suckled by the glossy swamp? Switching, sniffing blindly over its own eggshell, retching, an idiot grin stretched across its damp face? Whatever its character, there would be no place for old Harry. Between the death of old Rome and the reign of the new messiah, when all is turmoil and cultish frenzy, here he was on the edge of his own Black Sea, a drunk and talentless Ovid, poet to no one but himself.

  He turned off the television. The devil take the lot of it! He picked up the bottle. Slade. He still couldn’t believe it. He took a drink and sat on the edge of the bed as if waiting for something. He had nothing to wait for, nothing but morning and its cold burial of the stars.

  By four a.m. he was naked, unable to sleep and seriously drunk. His hands grasped nothing, legs entwined with sheet. He got up. He opened the door of his room and there was the American woman. She was smoking, looking out at the night and scratching a bite on her foot. He watched her puffing angrily at the moon, all the more convinced that she hated her boyfriend. She was bored, he decided, bored and trapped in a loveless union with a brainless bully to whom she felt obliged after he had delivered her family from financial ruin. Her life was empty. All she had to look forward to were secrets. Christmas suddenly knew he was going to kiss her. The conviction came upon him as suggestion, but, its origins quickly forgotten, was left in his mind as fact. He took a step forward, then another. The woman turned and froze in shock at the sight of this moonlit behemoth shifting towards her. She looked down at his penis. Christmas remembered he was naked. He dismissed it as a trifle. As she was about to make a noise, he kissed her – a deep, pressing kiss. Then he pulled back, retreating through the shadows, leaving those eyes without answer. Christmas shut his door and lay down on the bed. He felt he had completed some perfect moment, the elegance of its execution finally unleashing sleep across his frame.

  Christmas dreamed he was on an island. He had been shipwrecked with some schoolgirls and all the teachers were dead. The schoolgirls were from the future. They wore earrings that were miniature holograms of waterfalls and sunsets, and ate packets of tiny swollen food that you lit from the bottom and inhaled like heroin. They wore ties round their heads. One girl had contact lenses that made it look as if there was a tiny bird trapped in each eyeball. They hated Christmas and were deciding between various cruel fates for him at some vile council. All their gadgets were running out of power and somehow he was to blame.

  The girls became women he’d slept with. Diana wanted him tarred and feathered. Another suggested making toys out of his bones. A third wanted to throw him off the cliff onto the rocks. Christmas was on his knees in the dirt. His hands and feet were bound. He looked about for Emily but he couldn’t see her. The women walked round him in a circle of menace, frothing themselves into an angry mob. He was put in a cage and sunk into crashing waves. He felt something at his feet, he looked down into the water, the salt attacking his eyes and saw Emily chained to the bedrock, inhaling sea, clawing at his feet in panic ... Christmas woke up. He was being punched in the face.

  35

  “Fucking pervert! Think you can make a move on my fucking woman, huh, old man? Do you? Do you?” It wasn’t the first time Christmas had been woken in this way; the mysterious echo of pain that brings a sudden dawn, hands to the face, the taste of blood and a consciousness struggling to stand. “If I ever see you, or you ever fucking come near us again, you’re dead. You hear me you fucking pervert? Dead!” Then he was gone.

  Christmas opened his eyes to the ceiling. He wiped the blood from his nose with his fingers then, with an arm dangling over t
he side of the bed, he laughed in an empty, put-on way, as if some concealed person was listening.

  He lay there for a long time. He may even have slept. At some point in the morning he heard the American couple leaving, banging their luggage along the corridor. “Asshole!” the man shouted. Christmas winced at the diction. He was alone again.

  It was early. His brain felt like cold mud. He roused himself upright in bed and took a swig from the rum bottle. It was warm and vicious and almost done. He checked his hands; they were shaking. Christmas went to the bathroom and washed his face. He had a black eye. He checked the stitches in his head and examined the mosaic of bruises, noting how the new were mating with the old, admitting to himself that his ribs were probably broken. He could only move his right arm a few inches before his shoulder screeched. Opening the door he looked up at a scaled, reptilian sky. The posada was still. He felt as if he were the last man on earth.

  An hour later the rain started. New guests arrived. He ate breakfast with the women of the posada staring at his eye. There was a bus to Guiria, he discovered, later that afternoon. He drank several cups of coffee and then sat in the hammock on the verandah outside his room. He stayed there all morning. He bought another bottle of Cacique. He went back to his room.

  There, in the dark, he drank. He sat on the edge of the bed and drank. He read Emily’s Montejo book and drank. He sat by the fan and drank. He stood in the doorway and drank. He drank in front of the mirror. He drank in front of the open wallet. He drank from the bottle. He drank from the glass.

  Swinging in the hammock, he thought about his dream. He hadn’t thought about these women in years. The one who wanted to turn his bones into toys. Vanessa, the yoga teacher ... must have been four or five years before he met Emily. What was her last name? He remembered they went on a yoga retreat together and he got the giggles in every class. The sterner the looks she gave him, head bent beneath a knee, the more he laughed. Eventually some sinewy hippy with a lisp asked him to ‘pleath leave’. The subsequent conversation was the end of their relationship:

  “I’m really disappointed in you, Harry. Really, really disappointed. Why can’t you take anything seriously? Why can’t you honour yourself?”

  “Oh, come on now, Vanessa—”

  “No, Harry, I mean it. We have this beautiful connection, yet you are constantly trying to sabotage it. Us. You are constantly trying to sabotage our union.”

  “Oh, Vanessa, do try and lighten up a little. I mean, come on, it was pretty funny ... Ommmm ...”

  “It’s not funny, Harry, actually; it’s not funny at all. Why do you have to be like this?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “You know, if you could only just change this one ... thing that you have, then—”

  “Change?”

  “Don’t pull that face, Harry – we all need to change things about ourselves. That’s growth, Harry, that’s a relationship. If there’s something you want me to change, then fine, I’ll do it.”

  “OK,” he shrugged, “shave off your moustache.”

  Then there was Lisa, the high-powered businesswoman. He had met her while he was pretending to be a travel journalist, enjoying the free delights of a country house health spa he was supposedly covering for the Sunday Times. Lisa was also spending the weekend there. She turned up pissed for her vegetable enema and ended up in a fight with the therapist. Christmas was getting a massage in the room across the corridor when he heard the commotion. As soon as he opened the door, a therapist ran past him, crying, with bits of carrot all over her face and there was Lisa, shouting abuse and wearing a plastic robe the wrong way round.

  Lisa. Orgasmed like she was having an exorcism. They used to go out drinking together for days and then sit in the bath, unable to get out, weeing and laughing. What happened there? She started talking about children. That was it. One day he went out for cigarettes and never came back.

  Who came next? Stephanie Oodles, conceptual artist. Then that married woman with her husband downstairs in a wheelchair. And then Debbie the pianist. He’d helped her get rid of her flatmate by sitting too close to him on the sofa and whispering, “Things from hell are after me ...” Everything was fine, until she mentioned settling down.

  “Now look here, Debbie, it can’t be helped,” he had said, rounding off his announcement. She was in the middle of a piano lesson with a little boy. “We’ve had a good run. Run’s over. We’ll just have to get on with it.” Debbie had burst into tears. The little boy had played a low key.

  Clumsily grasping the bottle with his armpit, Christmas took out the wallet and looked at the photograph again. Yes, Judith was a fruitcake, but she was a brave old girl really. Just lonely like everyone else. Didn’t deserve the old dip-the-shoulder-and-out. A mosquito settled on his ankle. He wondered if this was the only living thing on earth that wanted to be near him. He tried to kill it. After a swig he inspected the bottle. Are you drinking to forget? Bridget was asking him again. He would miss Bridget. “No, young lady, no,” he said out loud. He was drinking to remember, that the sting of spirits on his tongue might remind him he was alive. “Alive!” he cried, and pushed off against the wall. He burst out laughing.

  Thick ribs of cloud were binding the earth. The afternoon was darkening. A family came out of their room and Christmas pretended he was asleep. With his eyes closed he listened to their music, their bickering song of family love; the high voices of children, the tinkling chime of the mother, the low warm tone of the father, scrapes of bags and flip-flops slapping against the floor. They went downstairs. He heard bare feet pad across the floorboards towards him. He recognised the step. It was Emily.

  He could feel her stop just behind his head. She was in her pyjamas, her hair all awry. She was cross because he hadn’t woken her up for lunch. “But you looked too happy, Em,” he murmured, smiling, “I didn’t want to – well, OK, what do you want? I’ll get them to make it and bring it up ... of course they will ... Just toast and jam? Nothing else? You’ll waste away ... oh, har har, very funny ... Snoring? What about you? Thought there was a train going by ... yes, you were, oh yes, you were ... Now why don’t you come and give Pops a kiss, eh?” Christmas lifted his hand in the air and waited for it to be filled. He waited and waited. When he let it drop it was to wipe the tears from his face.

  The sky heaved and fell; Christmas watched rain chatter with the ground. He slipped into sleep. When he woke it was evening. He felt he should eat before his journey to Guiria. Christmas inspected his black eye in the bathroom mirror. He put on his jacket. He showed himself his teeth.

  Christmas went downstairs. The man at reception told him he’d missed the bus to Guiria but if he went into the village he’d find a taxi. Christmas paid his bill with the remaining dollars and began to ask him how much it cost to set up a posada, what the logistics were, the bureaucracy and so on, but the man walked away from him while they were in the middle of talking.

  Christmas left the posada and walked along the road to Chacaracuar. He came across an empty restaurant, four plastic tables under a palm frond roof. The weather had cleared and the sun was setting. The waiter got up from watching television and took his order of fried pargo fish with rice, plantain, coleslaw and another bottle of Cacique. Christmas folded a paper towel in his hands. He folded it over and over until it was too small to fold it again. He aimed it at the ashtray and missed.

  A group of teenage girls came in, half talking to the waiter, half watching the soap opera on television. Christmas floated them a crooked smile; how womanly they were! He condemned Europe and its haunchless daughters, then bent his head, an apology to Bridget. “Not you, not you,” he said out loud. He poured another glass of rum. “You’re a fine young woman. The best.”

  “Si, Señor?” The waiter was above him. “Algo mas?”

  “Ah, dear heart,” sighed Christmas, helpless with emotion, “I beg only for such rustic viands as I see before
me now.”

  “Que?”

  “Nada, gracias, amigo. Nada mas.” Another mosquito was biting his ankle. He examined it. A vein in his foot was visibly pulsating.

  When Christmas had finished the meal, he felt like smoking a cigarette for the first time in years. He had given it up when he started coughing up bits of his lungs and discovered he had pulmonary embolism. Somehow, at this moment, it seemed appropriate. He rested his chin in his hand and watched the crimson evening turn black. The girls shot looks at him and whispered. Finally he asked for the bill, leaving an enormous tip in defiance. He stood up, general of a deserted army, and snatched up the Cacique. It was time to leave this outpost. It was time for Guiria.

  36

  Christmas walked into Chacaracuar with the aggressive looseness of the drunk. He flagged down a passing taxi, a 1970’s Chevrolet that looked as if it had been driven straight off the scrapheap. Christmas eased himself in, took off his jacket and opened the window. They pulled out onto the road and, sipping at the rum, he let the breeze cool his face. The village became dark countryside. He rolled up his jacket as a pillow and fell asleep.

  They crossed the Paria Peninsula and arrived in Guiria three hours later. It was the middle of the night. Christmas paid the driver, got out of the car and watched it drive away all before he was fully awake. He’d left his bottle of Cacique on the floor of the taxi. He looked at the money in his hand. Forty bolívares. It was less than a ticket to Caracas. Where had the dollars gone? He looked around. He was in the town’s main square, a Plaza Bolivar, geometric red tiling inlaid with quadrants of trees and scraps of grass. It was deserted. Christmas had no idea what he was going to do. He put his jacket on, lay down on a stone bench and fell back to sleep. He awoke to the atrocities of dawn.