by Will Self
Reichman may have been grateful to me for leading him through this suburban netherworld, but I was equally grateful to him. His sanctity enfolded me and I felt as hermetically sealed as a suitcase encased in polythene by one of those weird machines at the airport. I needed this: I needed my cheating heart to remain safely inside of me, foetally curled in my own dirty laundry. I had foolishly craved the freedom of travelling light, yet arrived in the New World more encumbered than ever. It was better to at least share the psychic burden, and so we went on until we reached the junction of Dundas and Spadina in Chinatown, where our ways naturally divided. Reichman got me to drag the bag the last few yards to where it could be temporarily entrusted to the doorman of an apartment block where some friends of his lived. Then, back out in the street, he turned to face me and said, ‘I can’t thank you enough. You’ve performed a great mitzvah – you will be blessed.’
He offered me his hand, but I had to restrain myself from grabbing his shirtfront and nestling into his beard.
‘You never told me your name,’ he said.
‘No,’ I answered. ‘I never did. But listen, leave me alone now like a good chap, will you. I’m footsore and sad, and I want ...’ I nodded to the restaurant beside us, its window hung with orange-glazed ducks, ‘... to eat some pork.’
* I’d never owned one of these waxed cotton jackets before – they were standard-issue country kit for the scions of the British upper and upper-middle classes and as such an anathema; but I needed a garment versatile enough to cope with a 30-degree temperature range and all kinds of precipitation. After the success of Stephen Frears’s The Queen (2006), in which Helen Mirren, looking frumpily monarchical, sported a Barbour while staring balefully at Scots glens cluttered with antlers, Americans couldn’t get enough of them and Stateside sales increased by 400 per cent. 40 per cent would’ve been too much – and yet, curiously, 4,000 per cent still credible – these were after all boom years.
* Which is Vesper Enfärhschein’s edition of fifty copies of Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Settlement’, each a 45-page book, with 22 lines of type per page, each book measuring .45 of a millimetre square, leather bound, gilt-tooled and slip-covered.
4
The LongPen
Tony Blair stood, his Church’s shoes squishing into the Albertan muskeg, all his vaulting ambitions reduced to this halting lecture tour, all the breadth of his vision focused now on the 1.7 trillion barrels of bitumen – but why not 17,000,000,000,000, or 170,000,000,000? – that constitute the world’s largest oil deposit, the Athabasca Tar Sands. Meanwhile I rode up to the twenty-second floor of the Westin Harbour Castle Hotel – but why not the 220th, or a queered mezzanine between the second and third storeys? – already straitjacketed by Canadian politeness.
Inside the room there were the little comforts, the scaled-down soaps, the cotton buds and the sewing set borrowed from the Borrowers. On the back of the bathroom door hung a terrytowelling robe with a monogram that implied the hotel and I were one. Outside a window that had been shut for thirty-three years genotypic skyscrapers stood about the lake front, awaiting the call to stand in as parts of New York or Chicago.
By way of unpacking I took off the loathsome Barbour; then I rode the elevator up to the penthouse suite, where I registered for the book festival and received my folder full of never-to-be-read info-sheets. The roomesque space was dominated by paper doilies, muffins and a tub of vicious poinsettia; in the corner a tablet computer linked to a desktop computer sitting on a workstation. ‘The LongPen,’ a functionary in a knee-length cardigan dripped (Canadian gushing). ‘You’ve heard about it? Peggy Atwood’s invention so that authors can sign their books long distance.’
‘...’
‘We’re very excited to have it here – Peggy herself will be doing some signing during the festival.’
I was excited as well–sexually excited. I felt my penis sleepily unfurl in its 92 per cent cotton, 8 per cent Lycra burrow. I hadn’t had any erotic thoughts in a while – or, rather, I had repressed them savagely, since the adrenalized counting of licks, tweaks and caresses was a torment, let alone the division of caresses by licks, or the multiplication of tweaks by ... grunts. But the LongPen could well be the solution, interposing thousands of miles between the infinitesimal motions of a single fingertip and the 8,000 nerve endings packed into a few thousandths of an inch of tissue. Although why not ...?
‘Is the suite open twenty-four hours?’ I enquired innocently.
‘Uh, no,’ the cardigan rumpled suspiciously. ‘We’re staffed until midnight.’
‘Oh, OK.’ I filed the intelligence away.
For four days I lay in Room 2229, planning a trip out to have one of the eyelets on my left walking boot repaired. During the walk from the airport a metal grommet had become detached and the lace subjected to microwear – an aglet was splitting open. I lay there on the made bed and thought how strange it was that such a small thing could immobilize a grown man. And I thought about Nicholson Baker’s obsessive detailing of the microwear of his shoelaces in The Mezzanine, and I thought of Baker himself, with whom, a decade before, I had shared a stage at a similar book festival in Brighton. I remembered how pinheaded he had seemed – considering the size of his thoughts; and how later that night I had swallowed a powderywhite MDMA pill with a titchy dolphin stamped on it; and how still later I’d ended up in a boutique hotel room knocking back whisky miniatures with a man who will reappear at the end of this tale to confirm that my life has had no narrative – which implies a linear arrangement of events – but only spiralled either out of control, or into a vicious centrifuge of repetition and coincidence.
Enslaved characters from children’s classic literature shared Room 2229 with me – Stuart Little paddled up and down the bath in a birch-bark canoe, Moomintrolls trampolined on the pillows, the aforementioned Borrowers strung together climbing ropes out of my dental floss, then expertly tackled the four pitches necessary to ascend to the top of the armoire. Then they triumphantly rappelled back down with an individual UHT milk carton that they winched up to where I lay, pinioned by the invisible – yet unbreakable – hawsers of my obsessive-compulsive disorder. As they dribbled the last homogenized drops between my cracked lips, I croaked my thanks, then manumitted them.
Eventually I forced myself from Room 2229 and abseiled down the lift shaft into the subway. At the Royal Ontario Museum I became transfixed by the bags visiting high school students had left trustingly strewn across the lobby: how could anyone be allowed to receive an education who insisted on dragging about that much stuff? And transfixed again in a subterranean gallery by the pensées of the former premiere Pierre Trudeau: ‘To remove all the useless baggage from a man’s heritage is to free his mind from petty preoccupations, calculations and memories.’
If it had worked for him, what was he doing here – or at least a photograph of his younger self, in white T-shirt and belted jeans? More to the point, what was the very canoe that he had been paddling when he had this epiphany doing here? Looking round I realized that this wasn’t so much an exhibition as a lumber room, with items from the museum’s permanent collections cast about willy-nilly: a Mercedes saloon got up with wood, a shamanic grizzly bear cast in bronze, and behind this shape-shifter Bacon’s Study for Portrait No.1, the reflex-dilation of Pope Innocent’s anus-dentata as shockingly disregarded as it must once have been when it leant against the wall in the artist’s South Kensington studio.
‘I’m sorry, sir, there’s no photography allowed.’
‘But I’m not photographing anything.’
‘Sir, no photography.’
‘I’m not taking pictures, I’m looking at them.’
The vertically aligned cooker knobs and key-in-lock coition from an ocean away had undone me: I desperately needed reassurance that things had been turned off and closed up, because in my mind’s eye my house was a burning oil well, shedding hairy-black smoke all over the neighbourhood.
Using Canadian magic, the gua
rd pushed me with disapproval alone towards the stairs ... and stumping along behind him, swinging one abbreviated leg in front of the other, came another who had more reason to. But no! This was ridiculous, if I carried on like this I’d soon be kitting Sherman out in a hooded shiny-red raincoat and putting a dagger in his hand.
I managed to thrust Sherman away but he rejoined me at the Eaton Center, where I was scanning the directory for a heel bar. He stood sizing up the atrium, and comparing it unfavourably – in loud un-Canadian tones – to the Galleria Umberto 1: ‘Yeah, these fat Canucks could do with a little risanamento, d’jewknowhatImean? Look at that muffin stand – oops! Sorry, it isn’t a muffin stand, it’s some people queuing for a muffin stand.’
He snatched at the air, as if given sufficient reach he might tear down the flock of model birds suspended from the barrel-vaulted ceiling, and hymned the absurd complaisance of the city government: ‘The base of the figure’ll be down there by the fountains on the lower level – but this one won’t stand upright, instead one arm’ll extend along the second level, and one leg will sorta kick through the atrium, while the other arm and shoulder brace against the roof. It’s the biggest yet, mate – a logistical nightmare, of course ...’
Novelty Shoe Rebuilders offered a ‘waiting service’, so I waited in socked feet while a cobbler replaced the eyelet of my boot with practised economy. ‘Will that be all?’ he asked. I forbore from mentioning the aglet.
‘There were no egos up there.’ His name was Dan, and he wore a CND badge, the roundel formed by gaping red lips. He also had grey hair in a ponytail and a grey beard. No egos? No fucking egos! I wanted to scream at him: I’m all ego, my friend, I’m a Babushka doll of egos – ego-inside-ego-inside-ego-inside-ego-inside-ego. Hell, if you unscrewed the fifth ego you’d probably find another one in there ready to shout you down as well.
But I didn’t say anything of the kind, because this was Toronto and we were buried somewhere deep inside the Harbourfront’s concretized bollix, and Dan had just been chairing the ‘event’ I’d come all this way to participate in – an event that had involved me sitting onstage with the actor David Thewlis. In truth, Thewlis didn’t seem at all egocentric – more to the point, he was actual size, which was something of a shock because one’s so used to actors being either much smaller than their image on a movie screen, or much larger than the one on the TV.
Thewlis, who had written an amiable comic novel, had a slightly prominent top lip, a wispy moustache and lean, expressive good looks. If there were to be a biopic of my life I’d want to be played by him. I tried to ingratiate myself with him while we waited backstage by mentioning mutual acquaintances, and he chatted away amiably enough. Onstage he was still more comically self-deprecating. He wore an expensive and globular watch that he brought up to his face from time to time, so that his finger and thumb could twist the end of his moustache. I found this tremendously amiable – and not comical at all.
Afterwards, when the books had been signed, I was on the point of suggesting we go get something to eat, when Thewlis was whisked away by his entourage, leaving me with Dan. It was a shame, because I’d wanted to ask him about his role in Mike Leigh’s Naked. It was the first time I’d noticed Thewlis and I thought his performance mesmeric and bruising – like being beaten up by a hypnotist. It was widely known that Leigh worked largely by improvisation, encouraging his actors to bring their own characters to the set, then spurring them on to create dialogue and action spontaneously. In the opening scene of the film Thewlis’s alter ego, Johnny, was having vigorous congress with a woman in an alley. But was it rape? Some might say that consent is a very little thing – but is it? I wanted an answer to this, a question that had haunted endless late-night conversations in the mid-1990s – after all, Thewlis should know.
Much later that night I lay in Room 2229 unable to sleep and regretting having freed my mini-slaves. I rose, dressed and laced my boots – appreciating the neat job that had been done on the eyelet. Then I went for a walk around the cavernous hotel counting my charged paces in tens, then hundreds; counting the emergency stairs in tens, then hundreds; stopping beside service carts and riffling the shampoo miniatures – then moving on.
In the morning the driver who drove me to the airport was tight-lipped. I could understand why – the highway was wide and terrifyingly nondescript, the buildings resisted the anthropomorphism of scale, the sky over Lake Ontario was bigger than a nebula. I scanned the verges of the freeway; even though it was midweek I hoped against hope that Reichman had got the walking bug, and I would see him pulling his own suitcase back to Pearson.
The driver took a call on his cell phone and listened intently to the muffled squeaking.
‘Pest control problem?’ I asked when he hung up.
‘You could say that,’ he answered curtly. ‘The festival’s suite at the hotel was broken into last night. Things were done with the LongPen ... dreadful things.’
5
There is Hope – Make the Call
‘Excuse me sir, you have too many things in your pockets.’
We stood on a desert island of carpet tiles somewhere in the placid lagoon of Pearson International Airport. I was a pre-wrecked Crusoe; she was a squat mermaid of South Asian extraction with blue-black hair. She wore a nylon jacket with fluorescent patches that bulged at the hips and the fishtail of her lower body was poured into black slacks. At least it was healthy flesh and not all the necrotic stuff I had wadded into the Barbour, stuff she began to gingerly extract with rubber-gloved hands, laying it all out on the brushed steel.
I waited with the Ohrwurm boring into me: a tiny finger flutter of the keys, the entire orchestra dangling from the pianist’s hangnail ...
The security woman unearthed the tiny plastic tomb within which this vast and resonant performance of Beethoven’s third piano concerto – by Daniel Barenboim with the London Philharmonic – was interred. She bunched up the skirt of the Barbour, appalled to discover yet another pocket – the poacher’s – and unzipping it removed the small corpse of my rolled-up plastic trousers.
Leaving Tor-Buff-Chester (a mega-region embracing Toronto that stretches all the way from Buffalo to Quebec City, and has an annual $530 billion of economic activity) was proving more difficult than anticipated. ‘The concert piano and all wind instruments bore me in small doses and flay me in large ones,’ contended Uncle Vladimir – meaning ‘bore’ as in ‘induce tedium’. I didn’t feel that way: my ability to build a concert hall in the inches between my ears was the only thing that made all of this – the queuing, the carpet tiling, the pornographic X-raying of my possessions – remotely tolerable.
Then, aloft, as the Northwest flight skipped across the dimpled Great Lakes, I dipped carottes coupées et pellées in trempette ranch, while little Daniel braced himself in the aisle and puuuushed! with his fluttery fingers, so that the entire fuselage of the plane widened and the trolley dollies could dance about one another in Busby Beethoven routines.
There were 216 private jets booked into Miami International Airport for the Miami Basel Art Fair. ‘Fine art is a luxury good, and so there is a natural marketing synergy, a comparable customer profile and a similar trend cycle,’ or so said Jeremy Laing, the Canadian fashion wunderkind. I wondered if Sherman would be there: he was outwardly disdainful of money, contending that if he sought the maximum for his pieces and ruthlessly hired, fired and even circumvented his gallerists, it was only to further the work.
‘I’m just a very little man making very big things,’ he’d said when I last taxed him with posing for the cover of a glossy auction house magazine. ‘And you have to appreciate the costs involved: the planning, the technical drawings, the lobbying – materials and fabrication are only the tip of the iceberg.’
I hadn’t observed that the end result was as egotistic as any other monumentalism, and that really spending his money extravagantly might be of more benefit to others than these iron giants trampling down the hills, or standing forlorn in
the Seine. I hadn’t, for the shameful reason ... but there was also Sherman’s indisputable generosity: restaurant bills paid without a murmur, plane tickets chucked like paper darts, and opera seats offered offhand.
And yet ... and yet ... I was never entirely comfortable with his largesse; was it all adding up to a costly obligation? Besides, Sherman devalued his gifts by exhibiting the appetitive disdain I’d noticed in others like him – those who, by their own efforts, had worked their way up from a comfortable childhood to being seriously rich.
Sherman had shirts and suits tailored by the score; and, as he advanced through life, Baltie brought up the rear, picking up the clothes that had been discarded by his boss because they were slightly soiled. Sherman bought bottles of Cristal, drank half a glass, then, gripped by a whim for a pint of lager, climbed down from tables doodled with costly food – dots of Beluga caviar, scrawls of langoustine – and marched away, leaving Baltie to settle the bill. Sherman – having already extracted a Hoyo de Monterrey Petit Robusto from the humidor that went everywhere with them – would wait at the kerb: a fire hydrant spurting smoke. Needless to say, the expensive cigar was stomped to shreds after a few puffs.
