Wildlife

by Joe Stretch

  ‘Bullshit,’ Janek whispers.

  ‘No, no,’ snaps Aunt Sophie, ‘the truth.’

  Still on the floor, Janek touches his tongue with the tips of his fingers. He finds words there. Three of them.

  Please don’t die.

  A second later and Janek has shrugged off the rabbi and has pushed Aunt Sophie away. He is striding down the central aisle of the crematorium. He is stuffing the N-Prang into his pocket, walking in awkward paces of varying lengths, beatless, no rhythm at all.

  Please don’t die.

  Janek picks up his suitcase and his bass guitar from a luggage locker at Bristol Temple Meads. He phones Life. Voicemail. Meet me in Wow-Bang!

  Janek sits in the long tunnel of the train station. He watches as the people strain to look at the screens before being siphoned off to one platform or another. He thinks about getting out his bass and doing some busking. But everyone’s wearing an MP3 player. You can hear it in the air. The thin ringing of personal music. He’d be better off begging.

  I’ve got to find Life. If anyone knows the way to the Fuck Festival, it’s her. I’ve got to make her fall in love with me. I’ve got to stop using the N-Prang. Life can be more than just a goodie bag, a music video, a funky existence, a wandering bass line. Everything matters. Nothing. Everything. They were only ever words. Fat, wet words that you got bogged down in. You dickhead. Relax. Fall in love, it’s fucking agony. Sex is fine. Enjoy it. Life is fine. Be optimistic. We all know what we should be doing. Be optimistic!

  Half an hour later, Janek Freeman is on the train to London. He watches the countryside scroll by. He listens to his dead mum drone on and on inside his head.

  ‘Don’t!’ he shouts, causing fellow passengers to turn at him and glare.

  Staring at the fast fields, he realises that little can be sustained. Ideas and desires have the lifespan of a mint, and while being optimistic is fine in theory, it can’t be sustained. The N-Prang is burning a hole in his pocket. He thinks about pushing a hosepipe into his ear and filling his skull with cold water. He’s not even halfway to London when he decides to lock himself in the toilet, stuff the earphones into his ears, cover his eyes and close his mouth.

  ‘Life,’ he sings, alone. ‘Life, I’m coming to get you, baby. You’re in my brain, you sexy lady.’

  12

  ROGER HART HAS discovered he is difficult to move. His lower legs are now covered in black plastic. Both feet. Both legs. Up to his knees. He doesn’t like it. It’s heavy, for one thing; he has to lift his legs with both arms if he wants to go anywhere. But also, his lower body now reminds him of the dashboards of cars he was driven in as a child.

  He sits beneath his computer in his empty flat. He’s found an old photograph of his family on holiday in Brittany. Roger, his parents and his sister sit round a table in a pretty little courtyard with uneven, stony ground. There is a red-and-white tablecloth. A plate of pasta and tomato sauce sits in front of all four of them. They have turned to smile widely at the camera. Roger’s sister, elder by two years, looks very pretty in a dark blue dress with small red flowers on it. His parents look like younger versions of their real selves. Their hair still lively and with colour. Their faces not yet pulled towards the obscurity of old age. Roger’s head is not as large as it was to become. The lenses of his square spectacles are still fairly thin. On the photograph’s reverse, it says ‘1990’. Roger ignores the machinations of his body and stares at the image in silence.

  To go back! To snuggle inside that split second again like it was a warm sleeping bag. To force my huge adult head inside my small childhood one. To make happy high-pitched sounds. To spill red pasta sauce down my lovely white shirt. To be with my family. To be with humans. To go back!

  Just when Roger’s convinced he’s going to bawl his eyes out, his eyes slam shut and refuse to open. He feels his eyeballs turning round and round; turning, slopping and dropping, like wet clothes in a washing machine. When his eyes do spring open, he blinks blue sparks. Roger sees that the photo has fallen from his hand. It is out of reach. He lacks the strength to retrieve it. Roger has discovered that he is difficult to move.

  Turning into a piece of clumsy technology, thinks Roger, has to be the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. No, no, that’s an exaggeration. Most of my adolescence was worse than this. But this is still pretty awful. Roger knows he has sat at his computer for too long. He suddenly pictures the vast array of words he has produced in the last year or so. The lengthy descriptions of certain shits he’s taken, certain wanks, nose-picks, pisses, etc. The words he’s wasted describing his sitting position. His blog was popular, sure. But it was bollocks. Roger realises that he has screwed up too many words into hard balls and hurled them at innocent people. He realises that, deep down, he wants to continue to do this. He is addicted to blogging. He wants to write every last bit of space out of the world. He feels guilty about this, of course, but he can’t deny his instincts. And anyway, he feels guilty about loads of stuff. He realises that it is time to confess, before it’s too late and before all his true feelings get threaded like bronze wires inside safe and colourful plastic. He heaves his heavy body up onto his office chair and sighs and sparks.

  Allow me. Allow me. My loyal readers. My gentle teenagers.

  How I have enjoyed writing to you. Blogging for you. How I have enjoyed learning about your little approaches to life. You have amused me. You have. You have amused me with your funny stories about feeding your burgery backsides into your skinny jeans. Amused me with your love of American musicians who tell lies about their age and claim to love death. Your touching loathing for those around you. I have loved it all. The black hoods you tug over your impressive hairstyles. How I have enjoyed watching you grow and grow.

  But I have something to confess. The blogs I wrote were full of lies. The person I created, the person you liked, El Rogerio, was nothing but an invention. I am not like him. Nothing like him. My real name is Roger Hart and I do not care for rock music. I’m a really big fan of the musicals. My ambition is to dance and sing on the West End stage.

  I’m thirty. The things I have claimed to love or hate, I barely know. They are just things I discovered through researching around your interests. I became lost in the exercise, began to believe myself. I have been isolated for a while now. I’m writing to you this one last time, to warn you.

  I should say that not everything I wrote was bollocks. I am, for example, a prolific wanker. I did indeed fire semen at my TV, at the bony, busty Anka Kudolski. But let me tell you, my faithful teenagers, we are all of us wankers. So don’t elevate me or feel bad about yourself. We are all of us hungry. We are all of us greedy. We are all of us starved.

  For me the game is up. I have taken things too far. I see that now. I have lived without humans for too long. I couldn’t return. Soon I won’t even be able to talk to you, my teenagers. This makes me sad. But I’m pretty sure that very soon I will be little more than a flurry of programming, technology, devised by something that is, in essence, dull.

  You see, I really did crap a motherboard. I really do have wires in my head. My legs are truly black and shiny and my belly does bleep in the same way that yours rumbles. I can’t sleep. Physically. I can’t sleep. Water hasn’t passed my lips in weeks. These are the facts. You didn’t believe me, did you? Well, come to Manchester and administer my cream. See what a mess that motherboard made of my arsehole. Then you’ll believe.

  The one truth I told you was the one thing you refused to believe. This pissed me off. So much so that I thought about abandoning the lot of you. Leaving you alone. But then . . . But then. But then I couldn’t breathe without my keyboard. Couldn’t wank without my mouse. My body’s black and full of wires. I lack the guts to leave my house. I think I’m dying.

  I realise, as the technology inside me gets more and more advanced, I have no one left to turn to but you. Only you lot, whom I have lied to from the start. What a sad state of affairs. You feel death winding up inside you
, your foot turns black, then your legs, you give birth to technology, and the only people you can confide in is a bunch of children you’ve always lied to and who you’ve never even properly met.

  I can’t even be sure that my fingertips are hitting the keys. Tell me. Are they? Are you reading this, my teenagers? Is this real? I can no longer tell the difference between really breathing and describing breath, the difference between the filling of my lungs and the tapping of my fingers. The difference between my brain and the screen, my penis and the porn, myself and my text, my heartbeat and my hard drive, my arse and my elbow, my eyes and your eyes. I’m confused. I’m disgusting. Am I alive or am I describing being alive? Both. Tell me, are you reading this? If you are, then comment on it. The text, I mean. Comment on me. Send me messages.

  SUBMIT.

  Roger watches with anxious, humming eyes as his teenage readership do indeed begin to comment on his blog. There are a few unforgiving dicks who go down the ‘How could you lie to us, El Rogerio?’ route. But, on the whole, the teenagers take the news of Roger’s deceits well. They claim to be quite interested and ask Roger to continue. A girl called RapidDeath says she was once taken to see Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and thought it was quite good. Roger smiles. Bleeps. Carries on.

  Thank you. Allow me. Allow me. Still alive. Let me tell you the whole story.

  I crapped out the motherboard and then I rested. I tried to sleep but I just couldn’t. In the middle of the night, I removed the existing motherboard from my computer and replaced it with the one I’d given birth to earlier. I couldn’t resist doing it. It was an upgrade. It is not in my nature to turn down a technological upgrade.

  After screwing the new hardware into place, I switched on the computer. I watched it boot up. I listened to it bleep and whirr. I listened to myself bleep and whirr. The fact that I was turning into technology, as I have said previously, bores me to death. When I noticed that my pubic hair had been replaced by a snakepit of red and black wires, I yawned. I was so lost in my blog that I didn’t care. I wasn’t interested in the changes to my body.

  With the new motherboard successfully installed, I felt an increased unity with my computer. We were more bonded than ever. A motherboard had passed from me to it. We were conjoined somehow. We shared each other. The attachment I felt towards this machine far exceeded that which I had felt for other humans. Just to look at the computer made me happy. It became a symbol of self-fulfilment, play, creativity, socialising, sexual experimentation, information and enjoyment. When I stared at the screen, I felt a profound lack of responsibility. I felt exhilarated. And although I try to fight this feeling, I love it.

  I have taken things too far. I promise you that, effectively, I have turned into a computer. It’s very gay. I’m hardly surprised now, when I go to clean the wax from my ears and I discover USB ports. Or when I think about Anka Kudolski and go to touch my penis, only to find a numerical keypad and above it, as I say, a thatch of plastic pubes. What a laugh. I’m hardly surprised any more. It’s some elaborate pisstake. Can you imagine me on the West End stage? Hobbling on with these stiff plastic legs of mine. Metal springing out from me. If the leading lady kissed me she’d receive an electric shock. My vocal range is diminishing rapidly. Soon, I suspect, I will be left with just one note. I will speak in an old-fashioned, unrealistic monotone. But speak to who? To you? To Anka Kudolski? I’m frustrated. I didn’t ask to become a computer. I can barely move. Getting over to the stereo to play Les Misérables would be a struggle.

  I can feel an impulse inside me that I cannot fight. It is an impulse to describe. Not to live but to describe. It is an impulse to fill the world with words until you just can’t move for them. I will just describe and describe. Words will zip from my software brain out of my window and out into Manchester, then London, across the seas. Soon you won’t be able to run in the outside world for fear of smacking into a sentence of mine and hurting yourself. People will sneak off to the countryside to try and escape the endless amount of words that will gridlock the cities and black out the sky. But words will get everywhere. Young couples will run up mountains for a bit of secretive sex, but sentences will straddle these mountains like giant slugs. Small words will flit about in the air near the summit, putting the couple off their lovemaking. They will feel awkward and watched. This is the impulse that is inside me. To describe until it hurts to breathe the air.

  I’m trying to fight this impulse. Oh, really I am. But I can’t fight it for much longer. I am a man. Or I am a computer. Whichever I am, I am afraid to die. You should be too, my teenagers. If you don’t get up and do something soon, you’ll be screwed. You’ll be sitting at your computer, chatting or watching a video or whatever, when words will enter your bedroom. Big boring words will surround you and you’ll get scared. Rightly scared, staring with petrified eyes at these menacing letters. Lengthy descriptions of human beings doing fuck all will square up to you and suck the air from your lungs. Idle chatty words will fuck with you. Basic flirtatious words. Sharp needless words. Jokey words. Heavy gossip. Words that advertise. Long bullshit lists of words. Films people like. Books people have read. Huge meaningless words will surround you. They will come together like the clashing rocks of ancient times and they will crush your head to dumb, dumb shit.

  I can feel all this inside me. I can feel no desire to live. I can feel a desire to just gossip, chat and declare that I’m laughing. To bang on and on and on about nothing until there is nothing left to say. If you don’t act now, my poor teenagers, then the human dead will bequeath little else but lists of likes and dislikes, one-word declarations of sexualities, a favourite quote and a funny joke, some abbreviated remarks, a stupid question and not a breath of displaced air.

  This is depressing. Isn’t it just, my little friends? You didn’t think I was capable of caring so much, did you? Well, this was my last and only warning. From me to you. Our boring thoughts and our boring remarks are going to hunt us down and bore us all to death.

  Hey U. U ok? U ok? Gr8. Hey U. U ok? U ok? Gr8. Hey U. U ok? U ok? Gr8.

  I invite you all to attend my wake in Wow-Bang. I’d like to say goodbye to you all before I finally become a complete computer and just start jabbering total crap. Anka, if you’re reading, I’d especially like to meet you.

  Forgive me, my teenagers, for lying to you. I hope you understand that I was in an odd state of mind, that I was turning into a computer and therefore honesty was a difficult policy for me. If you’re angry with me for not being myself, then, well, that’s a bit silly. But feel free to meet me in Wow-Bang. Feel free to exact your pound of digital flesh.

  SUBMIT.

  Roger is at his desk and trying desperately to sing. He tries to sing the song the people sing when they know they’re going to die. When they know the revolution is over. It has been crushed. Look down. You’re standing in your grave.

  Roger’s notes do not soar like they used to. His voice is modulated and getting crushed to a singular and irritating drone.

  ‘I will fight. Obviously I will. But first to Wow-Bang!’ he cries. ‘First to Wow-Bang!’

  Roger’s fingers squirm onto the keyboard like fast worms onto a warm corpse. There is a furious tapping. Tap. Tap. Tapping. Sap. Sap. Human crackling.

  ‘Help me!’ cries Roger, watching his blurred hands in disgust. ‘I am hitting the keys too hard.’

  Knock Knock.

  Scratch.

  II

  One Night in Wow-Bang

  Knock knock

  13

  IT’S AMAZING WHAT we can do with computers nowadays. The traipsing queue of civilisation that snakes behind us in brown clothes and rubbish shoes should be jealous. (Insert smiley: the angry one.)

  That lot. The dead. The past. What do they have? Mud. Silly hats. Inkwells. Glossless lips that mumble the old questions that we no longer mumble. ‘Are we free?’ they whisper. ‘Is it good?’ they groan. ‘Life, we mean. Is it good?’

  Don’t answer.
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  The sky above Wow-Bang is a perfect yellow and a perfect blue. It streaks in the way that all skies would streak, if humans were able to reach up and streak them personally with large, artistic hands. The birds are excellent birds. They are birds of paradise and of prey. They fly in great numbers, silhouetted against an imaginative sun, large wings beating slowly and in unison.

  The harbour of Wow-Bang is programmed well. There are white houses bathed in sunlight. There are wooden walkways. Virtual humans sit on virtual chairs. They chill and chill in the bars and in the cafes. They are looking out at whales in the harbour, just under the surface of the shallow digital sea. The large and docile whales designed and programmed, no doubt, by the whale enthusiasts of the real world. Those who have grown tired of the scarcity of whales and wish to see them more often and so bring them, wrapped in code, and tip them into the sea off the coast of Wow-Bang, shouting, ‘Look, citizens of Wow-Bang! We now have whales! Soon we will have everything we need!’

  Life Moberg often comes to the Wow-Bang harbour in the early evening. The harbour is the city’s most peaceful district. The only part that is yet to be taken over by fetish clubs, fuck palaces and discotheques. Life likes to walk along the seashore, staring at the whales, of course, and at the perfect sky which appears most beautiful when viewed from the coast. It doesn’t attract too many people, this place, so the graphics of Wow-Bang are able to scroll smoothly. One’s virtual body doesn’t jerk like it does in more crowded places. Here, it is easy to enjoy the impressive, well-programmed, unnatural beauty of Wow-Bang. Here, it sometimes seems possible to breathe.

  But of course, in some dimly lit room in the real world, Life Moberg is sitting on a real chair, staring at a screen with her index finger pressed firmly on the cursor keys of a computer. But she sees through that reality and so should we. She ignores the air she breathes. Its taste, temperature and smell. So should we. Life is enjoying Wow-Bang.