by Martin Amis
Aboard the helicopter they found a faint pulse in her groin, and an hour later she was on the machine at the Royal Inverness.
That was two years ago. In his black suit, his black coat, Henry stood in the white land of the chalk field. It was time to awaken the Princess.
The patient looked like an enormous and ancient squaw, with the warpaint of death on her, but regally breathing.
Henry passed his hand down through the air.
‘Mummy’s …’ said Victoria.
‘But she breathes.’
Victoria pointed to the parallel lines on the screen.
‘But she breathes.’
And she breathed greedily, lustily. Could she still reach up and hold him and draw him in? And he smelt himself all over again – the smouldering smell of the male secret, like a fire doused in rivers of sweat.
‘That’s just the machine,’ said Victoria. ‘It’s the machine that’s breathing.’
‘Turn it off,’ he cried. ‘Turn it off. Turn it off.’
6. February 14 (1.25 p.m.): 101 Heavy
System Aircraft Maintenance: One oh one heavy, please repeat.
Captain John Macmanaman: Confirm engine number-two explosive failure. Number-two accessory drive system is blown. Secondary debris hit the horizontal stabiliser and severed number-one line and number-three line. These hydraulic systems are down. Copy?
SAM: Copy, one oh one heavy. You lost number two.
Macmanaman: No. We lost all three.
SAM: One oh one heavy. You lost number three?
Macmanaman: We lost all of them.
SAM: One oh one heavy. You still have number one, right?
Macmanaman: All three are gone. Repeat. All three are gone.
SAM: One oh one heavy. Copy, copy. You have emergency hydraulics.
Macmanaman: Affirmative. But the goddamned auto won’t disengage. It thinks one through three is fictitious. Extreme yaw. Extreme pitch.
Flight Engineer Hal Ward: Try it.
First Officer Nick Chopko: Yeah but …
Ward: Try it.
Chopko: … Auto disengaged!
Macmanaman: I feel it. I feel it. Auto disengaged. Hydraulic quantity returning. Now flying by direct law. Nose is coming up. Steadying. Steadying. Still yawing but no pitch. It won’t give us flaps.
SAM: One oh one heavy. I’ll clear frequency and give you Detroit.
Chopko: The backup hydraulics – where are they anyway?
Ward: Where they used to be, in the old days. Under the cabin floor.
Macmanaman: Come in!
Flight Attendant Robynne Davis: Is it over? Are we okay?
Macmanaman: We’re coming out of it, Robynne. What’s it like back there?
Davis: Like a vomitorium in ancient Rome. They can take a yaw but they hate a pitch.
Chopko: We got the pitch. We’ll get the yaw. Now what?
Flight Attendant Conchita Martinez: Lucy says the floor’s hot. The passengers are saying the cabin floor’s hot. Left side. Between the wings.
Chopko: Christ. Any smoke?
Martinez: How could they tell?
Macmanaman: You know what we need? What we need is an airport.
No, you couldn’t tell – about the smoke. A lavish bonfire of wet leaves would have made little difference to the pall. In Economy, 314 people had cigarettes in their mouths (they weren’t giving up now), including the occupants of rows twenty-five to thirty, seats H and I and J, who, in addition, had their feet off the floor and tucked in underneath them.
There was smoke in the hold, too, under the port wing. But this was smoke of a different kind. With this kind of smoke (hot, thick, black), you wouldn’t be breathing it: you’d be eating it. And it would be eating you … Just discernible in the pallet facing the cargo door, Royce Traynor, mantled in ebony, stood upright, slowly steadying on his base as if to regather his strength. When the plane yawed to starboard, he sank back, waiting, against a column of stacked bags. Next, the port wing began its sharp drop, and Royce, after bristling for an instant like a wave before it breaks, dived forward to butt the diagonal handle of the cargo door … This door was not a plug door, opening inwards, and kept slammed shut by air-pressure. It opened outwards, to increase holdspace and revenue … He’s up again now, with the yaw to the right, and leaning back, in weary but determined contemplation. Then the tottering vertical and the piledrive into the handle of the cargo door, with all his weight. Which was the weight of what? Which was the weight of the past.
You could see why Royce had to do this. When the sprinklers came on, you could see why Royce had to do this. He couldn’t trust to fire. It was now his aim to go for the very throat of the aircraft. Decompression, explosive decompression, was what he wanted to bring about, and the collapse, the catastrophic strangulation, of the cabin floor, with all its tubes and veins and arteries. Most proximately, the blown door would mean his own escape (he would be the first to go), his martyrdom, after death.
With no blood in him any more, just wax and formaldehyde, Royce sways. The front teeth, perhaps, are bared: the teeth of a sunbelt golf pro. Royce sways, but not drunkenly. He rests, catching his breath, unappeasably preparing himself for fresh assault.
PART III
CHAPTER NINE
1. The syrups of the sky
Xan Meo hit Fucktown at four p.m. on February 2, when the Fucktown Shuttle landed at Fucktown’s Felixio International Skyport … All the signs, of course, said Lovetown, as in Welcome to Lovetown. But people very often accidentally called Lovetown Fucktown. It was clearly something Lovetown had had to get used to.
First, at LAX, he was required to pick up his suitcase and clear it through Immigration. This wait at the luggage carousel, he realised, was an interlude of enforced, of mandated ennui. It wasn’t like standing at a bus-stop with nothing to read: the bus, when it came, would announce itself; and there were other things to look at. No, you had to go on watching, staring; you had to go on performing humble mental tasks involving the differentiation of shape; you had to go on dully imagining dull complication, dull delay. A lanky Englishman was talking fearfully to his mobile phone: ‘It’s going round … It’s going round … It’s not on it … It’s stopped going round … It’s going round … It’s not on it … It’s not on it … It’s going round … It’s not on it … It’s not on it …’ And, to Xan, this poem of boredom was like a douche of self-discovery. He couldn’t remember when he’d last been bored, and this was what it was like. It was like civilisation. Because you’re never bored, are you, when you’re always raring to fuck or fight.
A courtesy car transferred him to the second airfield. Here the little toytown terminal contained a busy, frisky, jittery throng: multicoloured lovebirds massing ecstatically for the long flight south. Xan felt further depersonalised by the open and unsmiling use, hereabouts, of the byname Fucktown – as in ‘LA – San Diego with a stopover in Fucktown’, ‘What takes you to Fucktown?’ and (from a man in uniform) ‘And is Fucktown your final destination?’ For an instant, as he stood beneath the blatting, clacking information-board, he saw, or thought he saw, the directive ‘14:05: FUCKTOWN 5D LAST CALL.’ The twirling cubes quickly corrected themselves, with a paparazzo flutter. Lovetown’s other cognomen seemed to be used only in reference to the Sextown Sniper …
In the plane his consciousness of anomaly, of regrettable innovation, persisted and ramified. It took him several minutes to identify an important absence – that of children. All planes have children on them. But not the shuttle to Lovetown: no babies, bassinets, no hefted bundles. Well Lovetown was a babyless place, he supposed. It was Adult. There were teenage passengers on board, male and female, who couldn’t possibly be destined for erotic employment; but Lovetown needed its hatcheck girls, its busboys and carboys, just like anywhere else. And some of the older people maintained a patina of childishness – the cartoon, the picture book. As he returned from the toilet he noticed that some men and women got younger, or older, fast, as you walked tow
ards them: about five years for every row of seats.
Surrounded by tans of butterscotch and eggyolk, by sculpted puppyfat in tanktop T-shirts, with noses too small or hair too big or mouths too wide, too full, and engaged in ceaseless laughter, as if the passengers were the unified audience of a coruscating comedy … The stewardesses in their blue suits looked more normal, less stylised in mien and gesture, than the intransigent titterers they tended. The Captain put them down in Lovetown, and the tube of canned sex emptied itself in relays of tits and pits and zits.
Again by courtesy car he was driven to the U Hotel, past suburban gardens of brown grass and haggard cacti. Xan read about it in the complimentary Lovetown Journal, fished from the pouch of the seat in front: the U Hotel belonged to a chain whose owner had earned 78 billion dollars for realising that w was the only non-monosyllable in the English alphabet. Scrapping the supposed abbreviation, which had human beings gabbling out nine syllables, and replacing it with three other syllables chosen at random (or, indeed, with the unabbreviated phrase ‘world wide web’) would save global businesstime half a decade per day …
As he climbed from the car a boobjob of a raindrop gutflopped on his baldspot. Lovetown: a sprung-rhythm land of earthquake, brushfire and mudslide, of stripmall, freeway and gridlock, of hatefuck, cockout and boxback, of blackeye, of whitehair, of yellowtongue.
‘Hatefuck evolved very naturally in a way,’ said the voice of Karla White, ‘because there had never been … any love lost between the actors and the actresses. The girls earn five or six times more than the men, and the gap goes on widening. As you can imagine, the scenarios for Hatefuck are extremely monotonous. “So this is the big guy, huh?” “You’d better believe it, bitch.” “Have you taken your pill like a good little boy?” And so on. And she’ll ask him about the car he drives, if any, and the square-footage of his shitbox in Fulgencio Falls. Then came Cockout.’
‘Cockout,’ said a man’s voice.
‘Cockout,’ said Karla White.
Xan went on to the balcony and smoked a cigarette. Down at the desk they had told him about the English journalist who was recently arrested and jailed for smoking a cigarette in his room. They had also given him Karla’s package: the script of Crown Sugar, the audiotape (‘Background’), and his docket for the courtesy car which, the following morning, would take him to Dolorosa Drive …
‘Cockout is a sub-genre, or an anti-genre, within Hatefuck. Much prized for its rarity, Cockout occurs when the man actually succeeds in arousing the woman – to such a point where she stops calling him a piece of shit and starts offering encouragement or even praise. The father of Cockout, Lover, Trash My Ass, was an uncontrollable hit. Nothing like Princess Lolita, but very considerable business.
‘Very soon, “I cocked her out” became the pet boast of the porno male, “He cocked me out” the pet peeve of the porno female. But its rarity created pressure, giving rise to a further sub-genre, Bullshit Cockout. Bullshit Cockout is when the – usually very minor – porno female pretends, after grim resistance, to get herself cocked out. And a lot of ten-year-old porno started being recycled as, in effect, Bullshit Cockout, suggesting that that was what porno was, all along: Bullshit Cockout.’
Below, Xan abruptly noticed, in about half of the thirty or forty plotlike gardens he could see, pornography was being made: little brown bodies around little blue pools.
‘True Cockout seemed to throw a lifeline to the porno male – to begin with, anyway. Every morning, as he thumbed his way to work, there was always the sustaining dream of getting hold of a headlining actress and cocking her out. The grunts, the poor stiffs, started rating each other by their cockouts. You know, stats and averages – like baseball. There was even an actor called Cockout. Kirk Cockout. He sure didn’t last long … Because Cockout was another poisoned chalice for the porno male. After a while no girl would even consider working with a guy who had cocked her out – or cocked out any of her friends. Porno men with any kind of rep for cockout stopped getting phonecalls. Then they started fearing cockout. A further humiliation was on its way in the form of Boxback.’
‘Boxback.’
‘Boxback.’
The sun was dropping down over the shoulder of the building. He leafed through the twelve-page script of Crown Sugar. In his only scene, Xan was supposed to exchange some words with Charisma Trixxx and then watch her perform with Sir Dork Bogarde (as follows: ‘Blow. Doggy. Cowgirl. Reverse Cowgirl. Facial’). His lines were not difficult or numerous but he was surprised by the ease with which he got them by heart. He paused … Something is happening to me, he thought. He paused, he listened; there was inside him a great hope that he didn’t dare reach for; with it, or instead of it, might come pain and grief of the same size. The bright sky was torn by contrails in various stages of dissolution, some, way up, as solid-looking as pipecleaners, others like white stockings, discarded, flung in the air, or light bedding after beautysleep, others like breakers on an inconceivably distant shore. He went through his lines again, in his head. They were there.
‘Which brings us to the heart of it. This is just my view, of course, but I hold it for reasons less obvious than they may appear. Boxback. Ill-named, I think. And containing a serious structural flaw … Classic Boxback is simply premature ejaculation – inflicted by the woman. The more premature the better. Now it’s certainly very humiliating for the man, because he has to go again, much diminished. So: the shower, the pill, the wait, the headache, the hatefuck. But this new footage will precede the earlier ejaculation. Unlike Cockout, Boxback leaves no filmed evidence of its own achievement. And then there’s the question of the Facial.’
‘The Facial.’
‘The Facial. Even the most rigorous Hatefuck demands the Facial. Market force number one demands the Facial. And Boxback never even tried to do without it. So what kind of victory is that? Sending the grunt on his way with a sneer and a taunt when you’ve got his come all over your chin? The Facial is there, always, because the customer wants it to be there. What do men want? They want the Facial. And it’s the one sexual act that barely exists outside porno. A prostitute might do it, but a free woman, on her knees? That’s another good reason for calling the Facial what they call it: the Money Shot.
‘You know … They sometimes call it the Popshot. They don’t call it the Momshot. Because, at one remove or other, you get the feeling: it’s how Daddy would have liked it. Beauty and the Beast, innocence and its opposite. And the woman looks up, from her knees, at someone far more powerful than any lover …’
He drank half a bottle of wine, out on the balcony, with his early dinner. His equanimity now tired and wavered, and the evening clouds looked like wigs – toupees, perukes, the tawdry syrups of the sky. But then came Venus, with a pale aura, like a set of silver eyelashes, and simpering down at him. And then came the quarter-moon, seen at an unfamiliar angle, as if from somewhere behind, like a platonically perfect breast.
At nine o’clock there was a knock on the door.
‘Who is it?’
It was the hoary bellboy, who offered him a bouquet of the most hideous flowers he had ever seen: redface and yellowtongue. Who is it? Joseph Andrews.
Xan checked: yes: it was still what he wanted.
2. Sickout at Dolorosa Drive
During thirty months of activity the Sextown Sniper seemed to have evolved a set of rules, or restraints: no high-velocity bullets, no headshots or heartshots, no freeway hits causing extra traffic backups, no incursions into Tuxedo Terrace or Dolorosa Drive where core property values might be undermined, no sarcastic notes beginning ‘Grieve, blind worm’ or ‘I am God’ for the mayor and the SSVPD, no targeting of Meso-Americans, no targeting of help of any kind, no targeting of the very young, the very old. And if a pointy-bearded Director of Photography got grazed across the ankle, if a towel-boy or a makeup-girl lost a finger or two, if Charity Divine had her hairstyle scorched or Schlong Gielgud stopped one in the rump – who cared? Porno people cared, but n
o one cared about porno people and what porno people cared about.
Facing the U Hotel, at ten-fifteen the next morning, the sights of the sniper, moving, ranging, from face to face: this one, that one. The circular frame holding a rounded simulacrum, like a miniature kept in a locket – the faces of those that are loved and lost. In its crosshairs the face of a porter, the face of an arriving porno star, the face of Xan Meo, the face of the delivery-man with the potplant over his shoulder.
‘Sire, I crave a boon.’
‘Name it, plaything.’
But before all that he needed to be delivered to Dolorosa Drive, and he needed to climb out of the courtesy car, and enter the mansion (there was a different porno crew, from some earlier shift, coming the other way), and kiss Karla White, which proved difficult to do, with the telephonic mouthpiece round her neck like a chinguard … She wore a two-piece black business suit, which faintly sparkled as if with motes of coaldust, and black heels.
‘You’re fine,’ she said, in her warm, deep, accentless voice. ‘You don’t have to change. You’re fine. I was hoping you’d have lunch with me tomorrow at my house on the beach. I’ll send a car.’
‘So I don’t have to wear a crown or anything.’
‘You’re Rameses the Great,’ she said, ‘but you’re on a time-travel vacation from BC to LA. With some of your entourage. You’re fine … I apologise. Charisma Trixxx is keeping us waiting.’
‘They all do that,’ said the man in the white dressing-gown. ‘Ninety-nine point nine per cent out of a hundred of them do that. How come I don’t have one single line?’
‘Xan, say hello to Dork Bogarde. You don’t have any lines, Dork, because you’re a mute.’
‘Ah. Hence why …’
To Xan she went on, ‘In narrative terms this is what’s known as a side-fuck. It gives the seventeen-year-old a breather.’ Karla’s head registered a slight jolt and she walked away with a hand raised to her earphone, saying, ‘Charisma? Charisma … Am I? … Now why’s that? …’
