by Olivia Laing
A thing people said a lot that year, and especially the year before, x is a trashfire, also I want to burn everything, sometimes eroded to: burn everything. People were complaining about Pepe the alt-right frog but it seemed to Kathy that there had been some internet-induced desire for destruction on both sides, it wasn’t the most constructive place to spend time. She was still deep in her phase of right-wing research. She’d spent the morning, 23 August 2017, reading an essay about Dylann Roof, the white supremacist with the bowl haircut who had massacred nine African-Americans in their church. He looked dumb and vacant, like hate had simply occupied a ready-made space, not that there was anything simple about it. The writer of the essay went to a plantation Roof had visited before the murders. I stood next to the dummies that are supposed to represent black people in their deepest ignominy, she wrote, and noticed that there were no dummies that were supposed to represent the masters or the mistresses of the plantation. Accompanying the article was a photo of Roof burning Old Glory in a GOLD’S GYM muscle top and stonewashed jeans. What republic did any of them want? One where no person was ever not the same, and therefore no one would ever get left out of account. Bitch please, are you truly that stupid? A republic worth burning 11 million illegal immigrants for, as Kathy had heard a KKK leader vow to do on TV that morning. They wanted milk and honey, the whole Biblical nine yards, and also the rivers of blood and burning cities, Slave Street up and running again, reanimating those abject bodies. It was like living in a Philip Guston painting, it was that dumb and rotten, that cartoonish, blood stains on white robes, good old boys with night sticks going on patrol, then a pile of shoes and jackets, you know exactly where the owners are.
Who is anyone right now? A friend had offered to paint them a portrait as a wedding present, they said yes of course. They went for the first sitting, two chairs, the big question was how close to set them. She was all for sprawling but the artist advised a small gap. He took lots of photos, some close some less so. This is a big commitment, he said, it’s going to take a lot of time. Are you sure you’re into it. They were. Kathy had modelled often, really a lot, sometimes clothed more often naked. Her husband was less familiar though honestly much better at sitting still. The room was white, glassed at the end, shelved with jars of pigment bought in Rome for 2,000 lire, a quid each, back in the ’90s. Kathy loved them,she liked the dusty floor, she liked submitting to the camera lens. It was exactly like Warhol said, everyone wanted their fifteen minutes of pure attention, the camera’s unwavering serious eye. She couldn’t be bothered to make pretty faces, she just looked back, frank and unappealing. You have the same eyes, David said and clicked another frame.
Somewhere along the way Kathy had read an essay comparing the sexual excesses of the Marquis de Sade’s novels to an office. The pursuit of both was apathy, hierarchy, repetition, endless bureaucracy. The article compared the libertines in 100 Days of Sodom to the management committee; the children to interns and then,audaciously, to the very 8½" x 11" multi-use acid-free paper on which the workplace discourse is pitilessly inscribed. Kathy liked that pitilessly. That night the essay induced an unpleasant dream of turds in bath water. Don’t read about coprophilia before bed was one explanation, but Kathy did feel somehow soiled or sullied. She drank too much, she hadn’t been to the gym in weeks, she basically lived on the couch, hunched and barely breathing. She needed clean air, vegetables, she despised comfort, there were too many pastries and radiators in her life. Christ, time accumulating in rolls around her stomach. She felt like she was hastening after agendas and appointments with a butterfly net, not able to make anything stick. She was a set of eyes that feasted on hotel and airline websites, that had been her week, the entirety of her range. Then she got tired and booked a flight too early, forgetting check-in times, forgetting jet lag, forgetting body clocks and all the expertise of moving bags and bodies around the planet that she had so painstakingly absorbed over the past two decades. She couldn’t even find a sublet, she didn’t want to go, she wanted her own closet, her own shower-cum-bathtub, her clear cool light, her mirrors. She hated travelling, hated frizzy hair and having the wrong sweater. She stood on the brink, shivering on a diving board, I’d rather not, I need to leave.
Within 24 hours it was all sorted, flights, hotels, sublets, the works. It was always like this, abominable, impossible and then done, barely worth a thought. Kathy emailed her friends, Matt + Carl + Larry + Alex. Mi living room es su living room, Larry said. He lived on C and 9th, she loved his couch. She and Carl expressed their ongoing sorrow and concern with regard to Sinéad O’Connor, who was going through a rough time publicly documented in YouTube videos neither of them could bear to watch. Poor beautiful Sinéad. Instead Kathy put on ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ and gazed in awe at that choirboy’s face. She was hungover, she’d drunk a great deal yet again, but that phase of the summer was now behind them, they’d agreed to it over breakfast, 25 August 2017, painfully confronting the wreckage of the previous night, the chicken carcass in a pool of congealing fat, the damp remains of salad, the thirteen glasses with dregs of brandy and red wine. Thirteen her husband said. There shouldn’t be thirteen, and triumphantly he plucked an unused rummer from the mix. Now, they were teetotal, from this day forth they would spurn alcohols of all kinds, especially wine, even champagne. For at least a week they would be sober, their livers would shrink, they’d stop being so bilious and grumpy and fat. Kathy had put on three pounds this summer, pure booze + lack of yoga, she wrote a frantic email to her instructor begging to return. New people, married, toned, sheeny, eternal.
They decided to put the new ordinance in place by seeing no one for a day. Their new table arrived, that was exciting, they sat on the sofa waiting for it like people in line for a movie. Then there was a considerable business of putting things on it and taking them off, shifting it by minute angles, getting it all exact and then rummaging everything with a loose hand so it wasn’t too perfect. After lunch they removed themselves to the secret part of the garden and took off their clothes. Kathy had three books and a catalogue about Basquiat; her husband snoozed on a lounger while she pawed through. At 3 they had a choc ice and celebrated their one-week wedding anniversary with new vows: I vow to wash up more, I vow to be less of a dick.
It was hot, it was magnificent, there were several drunk butterflies and a dragonfly her husband characteristically praised. They’d talked themselves into tatters, now they needed to recharge on sunbeams and the basic smell of grass and dirt. Definitely almost autumn, the slant of the light, the lovely rotten ripeness. Plums, blackberries, the first few fallen leaves. The small fish that had come from nowhere were slightly bigger, all black bar one, which was surely a koi, with orange splodges and a pouting mouth. Lots of roses. Did you want for anything, really? They had fizzy water, they were warm enough in their suits of skin, two animals, even cows, that just liked to stand nearby, in the same field. Let nothing happen, just for a bit, let the minutes toll in the stunning air, let us lie on our beds like astronauts, hurtling through space & time. Kathy closed her eyes. For once, Kathy had let go of anxiety.
NOT YOU
She was trying to remember the 1980s, specifically 1987. What did people know, what were they ignorant of? This was the problem with history, it was too easy to provide the furnishings but forget the attitudes, the way you became a different person according to what knowledge was available, what experiences were fresh and what had not yet arisen in a personal or global frame. AIDS, specifically, a subject with which Kathy was as familiar as anyone who lived in the epicentre of the epicentre of the crisis pre-combination therapy i.e. the East Village New York City. She remembers STD clinics, brown plastic chairs, signs dual-translated in English and Spanish, she remembers people dying in the street junk-sick or covered in the purple of Kaposi’s, friends powdering their cheeks, friends emaciated, friends juggling drug schedules, funeral protest funeral protest. What she didn’t remember is what exactly people knew in 1987 as opposed to 1988. She
was trying to reconstruct attitudes, to understand ambient levels of prejudice and fear. Did Warhol die that year, did Liberace? And if she hadn’t been there, had been instead, say, a heterosexual English boy, what different thoughts feelings insights might she have about the world now?
It was uncomputable, it was the province of the novel, that hopeless apparatus of guesswork and supposition, with which Kathy liked to have as little traffic as possible. She wrote fiction, sure, but she populated it with the already extant, the pre-packaged and readymade. She was in many ways Warhol’s daughter, niece at least, a grave-robber, a bandit, happy to snatch what she needed but also morally invested in the cause: that there was no need to invent, you could make anything from out of the overflowing midden of the already-done, the as Beckett put it nothing new, it was economic also stylish to help yourself to the grab bag of the actual.
She needed to be more alone than she was, it was already causing problems. She kept dreaming about being in the wrong house, being in an old apartment, with the wrong furniture, in the wrong neighbourhood, with the wrong key, the place already let, a misunderstanding, you have to share. She wanted a fortress. She wanted to swim away down a cool green avenue. She didn’t seem to ever go anywhere alone. Her husband’s sad eyes upset her but also infuriated her, she detested being responsible for anyone else’s happiness. Like can’t you just figure out what you need and get it? Why do you have to keep asking me. Kathy could share, but on her own terms. On the original question, is Kathy nice, it’s looking like probably no. It’s not you, she kept saying, it’s me, the kind of cliché she was keen to avoid. Finally she understood all the aloof boyfriends, the endless appeal of people who were only half there. She’d liked it that way, she’d liked being by herself, kept company by her old pals hankering and craving. She’d liked living in a perpetual adolescence, never having to be responsible for anyone else. Were other people as bad as Kathy? Did they wake up out of it, in shock at their own intractability, their own bad taste?
Meanwhile the fox was in trouble. Kathy and her husband were sunbathing, not in the secret back garden but in the regular declarative portion. Someone shouted Ian twice and then muscled in. Kathy was in her knickers and a sweaty yellow T-shirt, her husband was in underpants pulled both up and down to maximise sun. The neighbour was oblivious. She wanted to tell them about the fox. The fox had become in Kathy’s mind a talisman, she liked to think of it moving among them freely, an anarchist who broke their things but did not exactly wish them harm, who was conscious of objects and events of an order Kathy could not possibly perceive. She liked to remember it emerging from the apple tree, wild, unharnessed. The neighbour said the fox is the culprit. It had been stealing straw and leaving it in other people’s gardens, it was not a respecter of private property, it was spendthrift, prodigal, quite possibly overdrawn. She said it was this close, she said well it’s eaten Lorna and Andrea’s chickens. Kathy was at maximum recline, she shaded her eyes, she had never heard of these people. Her husband said it is very beautiful. Earlier her husband saw a dragonfly on the washing line and said it has a mouth just like my grandmother’s. It’s a new one, a totally new colour.
Other things were going on at the same time. Houston had flooded, there were photographs of a care home in which several residents in wheelchairs, elderly black women, were up to their chests in dirty brown water. The President was on it, he was using a full arsenal of exclamation marks. Kathy read a long essay on Ivanka and Jared, she was doing her duty as a citizen, keeping abreast of corruption. No one liked them, that was the gist. Who gave a fuck, Kathy thought, no one liked Putin, likeability was irrelevant, what mattered was whether you could make people numb enough to change all the laws, change the entire system, that was the game. Once you pardoned a corrupt sheriff who’d openly run concentration camps for Latinos you were probably well on the way.
Numbness mattered, it was what the Nazis did, made people feel like things were moving too fast to stop and though unpleasant and eventually terrifying and appalling, were probably impossible to do anything about. She’d been reading a book by Philip Guston. On 23 October 1968, Guston had been in conversation with Morton Feldman at the New York Studio School. He’d been thinking a lot about the Holocaust, he said, especially the concentration camp Treblinka. It worked, the mass killing, he told Feldman, because the Nazis deliberately induced numbness on both sides, in the victims and also the tormentors. And yet a small group of prisoners had managed to escape. Imagine what a process it was to unnumb yourself, he said, to see it as it actually was. That’s the only reason to be an artist: to escape, to bear witness to this.
Kathy dug it, even as she felt the numbness moving up her body. The speed of the news cycle, the hyper-acceleration of the story, she was hip to those pleasures, queasy as they were. People got used to them, they depended on the reliable shots of 10am and 3pm and 7pm outrage. Take right now, 27 August 2017. HISTORIC rainfall in Houston, and all over Texas, Trump had tweeted. Floods are unprecedented, and more rain coming. Spirit of the people is incredible. Thanks! I will also be going to a wonderful state, Missouri, that I won by a lot in ’16. Dem C.M. is opposed to big tax cuts. Republican will win S! The next day there was a picture of him by the floods, arm and arm with Melania in serious spike heels, her blow-dry flawless. Grifters on a jolly. The man who owned the megachurch, the pastor, Kathy supposed, was getting a lot of flak for keeping his church closed. He was praying, but since people were pitching tents on roofs they felt understandably annoyed at the doors being locked on a potentially vast public sleeping space.
Was everyone getting more democratic, now things were starting to bite? Probably not, though Kathy had some small hopes. A local mattress retailer, called something like but not exactly Mattress Matty, had opened up his stores to the wet hungry and otherwise dispossessed. He was offering free mattresses, help people get back on their feet. Meanwhile Stephen Hawking had written a letter to the Telegraph explaining that Jeremy Hunt was about to sell off the NHS to private corporations, even though he said he wasn’t. This was beginning to seem like the end game of Brexit, especially after the Japanese non-deal, to get the country into such a dead end, an abject hole that the only thing to do was sell the public silver. If there was any public silver left – yes, Kathy thought, schools, parks, swimming pools, possibly railway tracks, the Royal Mail, definitely the NHS. The gold had gone, also electric power and other utilities, there’d been a series of pieces in the London Review of Books that she’d read carefully but now could barely recall beyond a slow stirring of nausea, the sense of the ground being parcelled off beneath her. Last night a steam train had gone past on the tracks at the bottom of the garden, an unexpected visitation, its windows lit gold with old-fashioned lamps. There were people inside, in glowing chambers, and she opened the door to her study and stood in the evening air, watching them shunt by. The past was gone, if you posted a letter now it took three days to reach its destination, there were definitely unpleasant changes up ahead, less money, fewer elephants, one day for sure no water in the taps. Kathy hoped to be dead by then, but she’d prefer it if the mostly benevolent life she lived was shared equally by all people. A crane in the distance, the imperative to make it over, make it new.
*
It was raining, the noise of the rain and the trains was very pleasant, Kathy had a hot-water bottle, her study was tidy. She’d left that morning intending to go to yoga but had been sidetracked over coffee and instead had gone into town, a rare occurrence, and bought a pair of orange cashmere socks. There were people in the house all the time, the noise of paint being sanded, sofas delivered, two men carrying 2 by 4s down the alley. It was the same right down the street, everyone regenerating the houses of the Victorian poor. They built up into attics and out into gardens, Kathy’s husband had three buildings out there, a shed, a study and a library. They still didn’t have enough space, they tore off one Farrow and Ball colour and replaced it with another. Green was briefly exposed then covered up. No
one could park for skips, the world was running out of resources, it was manic, insane.
A Trump bot had mistaken a photo of Condoleezza Rice, who went shoe-shopping while a hurricane forced Americans from their homes, for Michelle Obama. Kathy was becoming obsessed with the numbness, the way the news cycle was making her incapable of action, a beached somnolent whale. No one could put anything together, that was the problem. She had recently read an article that listed all the reasons why monarch butterflies were dying, before segueing proudly into an account of taking a plane across America so the writer could cheer herself up by seeing monarch butterflies. On the plane she complained about the air pollution of jet fuel and perfume, how it gave her allergies, but she didn’t connect the casual habit of flying thousands of miles with the collapse of the butterflies. Kathy didn’t blame her. The equations were too difficult, you knew intellectually, but you never really saw the consequences, since they tended to impact other poorer people in other poorer places. There is no away to throw things to didn’t quite work as an axiom if you were a species that depended so stubbornly on the evidence of its eyes.
The next day, 31 August 2017, was Kathy’s husband’s birthday. Since it was the first time ever she had celebrated someone’s birthday as their wife she got up at 6:30 and went into the damp cold garden and cut him a pink dahlia, a lolly on a stick. She made tea and set out a tray, with his card, a deep-sea diver waving, and his present, profoundly expensive cashmere socks, far better than hers, which she sort of knew were a size too small. She opened his door just as he had silenced the radio and was pulling the duvet back over his head. A small animal, warm and breathy in its burrow. She climbed in beside him and cuddled up. His tea had to be made in a very particular way, it involved several implements; hers was a bag. He was extremely excited by the tray. He was chief fusser in their lives, it was good for him to receive. The socks were too small but he held them to his cheek all the same. The diver was him, waving keenly. Hello! Hello! Help!
