Absolute Zero Cool

by Declan Burke

  ‘And?’

  ‘There’s a pay-off expected, Billy. Like the femme fatales in film noir. They get all the best lines, get to look all sexy and shit, but they need to go out in a blaze of glory at the end. It’s natural justice.’

  ‘Bullshit it’s natural justice. It’s you fucking around and bending the story out of shape.’

  ‘Into shape.’

  ‘Because that’s what people expect.’

  ‘That’s the game, Billy. Giving people what they want.’

  Here follows a heated exchange about the pros and cons of writing a conventionally conservative crime novel that adheres to the paradigm of three-act classical tragedy.

  ‘Whoa,’ Billy says. ‘You never told me it was a crime novel.’

  ‘We’re blowing up a hospital, Billy.’

  ‘So you’ll kill off Karlsson just because some assholes can’t handle the truth.’

  ‘You don’t see it? It’s Karlsson who’ll kill off Karlsson. The guy believes he’s doing everyone a favour by blowing up the building, right? Except his disease is logic, and by his own logic he sees himself as the incarnation of everything the hospital stands for. So he has to go down with it, the captain with his ship. Jimmy Cagney, top o’ the world.’

  ‘So what happens to me?’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘If Karlsson goes, where’s that leave me?’

  ‘I don’t know. Where are you now?’

  ‘I’m here with you,’ he says, ‘planning to blow up a hospital. But where’ll I be when the hospital’s gone?’

  ‘Don’t lay this trip on me, Billy. You’re the one came up with the big idea, and you’re the one who decided he wanted to write it all by himself. It’s not my bag to worry about what happens after it comes off. If it comes off.’

  ‘It’ll work, don’t you worry about that.’

  ‘Great. All I need to know is that it’s actually going to happen, and that it’ll be plausible when it does.’

  ‘Don’t sweat it,’ he says. ‘You’ll get your pound of flesh.’

  ‘Fuck you, Billy. I told you from the start that this had to be a commercial prospect. You knew that. And if it’s going to be commercial, we’re going to need justice and redemption and all the rest of that horseshit. Crime and fucking punishment, Billy.’

  He stares. ‘You just don’t give a shit, do you?’

  ‘You want to know who I give a shit about? Debs and Rosie, that’s who. Except every second I spend on you and your story is a second I’ll never get back with them. So if I’m going to do this, you can be damn sure I’m going to make it worth their while in the long run. That’s my pound of flesh. You don’t like it? Then take a fucking hike. I’ve better books I could be writing.’

  He snickers. ‘Do you, though?’

  ‘Between you and me, Billy, I’ve written better than you out of my system to get at a story.’

  ‘Except I’m still here,’ he says. ‘I’m still here.’

  •

  In our favour is the sheer size of the hospital. The smug arrogance inherent in its vast scale. Pride comes before a fall, etc. ‘The bigger they are, the harder they fall’ is entirely appropriate when applied to a large building.

  A hospital is not a leaning tower in Pisa. A hospital cannot function at an angle. The weight of all that massed concrete means one thing: once it starts to go, it’s gone.

  We need to think positive, people. We cannot despair when we look upon the hospital’s monolith. We cannot allow ourselves to be blinded by the sunset blazing upon its windows. We cannot be dazzled by its chrome and steel, its buffed and shining floors.

  Achilles had his heel, Troy its wooden horse. The terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Centre knew their Homer. Ozymandias still drifts to the four corners of the compass, reduced now to dust, sand and fragments of memory. Could Victoria have ever imagined that the blood-reddened map of the world might be reduced to Gibraltar’s apes and the ghettoes of East Belfast? Even the most paranoid pharaoh could not have dreamt the living nightmare of a tourist economy.

  It is the sheer size of an empire that allows cracks to form and germs to fester.

  Thus, this: it is the vast volume capacity of the hospital that will prove its undoing. We need to start thinking inside the box. We need to start thinking small. We need to start thinking molecular.

  A question: what is it that exists on every floor of every hospital, in every last nook and cranny, that must by necessity exist in the lungs, heart and bloodstream of each and every living human being?

  My line for today is, Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! (Percy Shelley, ‘Ozymandias’)

  Cassie discovers my folder of notes, which includes the work-in-progress magnum opus, Sermo Vulgus. She stumbled across the manuscript, she says, while dusting the spare bedroom I use as a study-cum-office.

  ‘You were dusting inside the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet?’

  But she’s not listening. Incandescent with rage, she waves the manuscript in my face. ‘How dare you put in that sex crap?’

  ‘What sex crap?’

  She refers to the pages in her trembling hand. ‘“Give me handjobs, blowjobs and anal sex. Offer me your armpits, you wanton fuckers. Let us lacerate the sides of virgins with gaping—”’

  ‘Right, yeah. Well,’ I say, ‘it’s supposed to be an honest document of how––’

  ‘Who the fuck gave you the right to be honest about me?’

  This is a valid question. All the truly valid questions are unanswerable.

  While I am not answering, I think about how she does not ask why someone might want to blow up a hospital. If Cass sincerely believes that Sermo Vulgus represents the febrile outworkings of my diseased imagination, why then does she not query the possibility of my assistance in suspected cases of euthanasia detailed in the accompanying notes?

  My theory is that Cassie’s reaction is symptomatic of the narcissism that plagues modern civilisation. Today a Dutch masterpiece is reduced to the status of a chin being stroked in a fogged shaving mirror: ‘Mmm, yes, but what does it say to me?’

  The Sistine Chapel has been re-veneered with reflective tiles. The Louvre has become a fairground Hall of Mirrors. The world is a looking-glass, and we Alice.

  This is a regression that will ultimately lead to the narcissism of the infant. The baby is so self-aware – and so only self-aware – that it has no need of a mirror, and no conception of what a reflection might be.

  ‘This is the last fucking straw, K. That’s it. I’ve fucking had enough.’

  She throws the manuscript in my face, not neglecting to include a contemptuous wristy flourish. She flounces out of the room. She soon flounces back.

  ‘Don’t think I’m even worried about that crap being published,’ she says. This represents the second negative critique of my work, one courtesy of an ex-mechanic, the other from a practicing physiotherapist. It would appear I am missing my target audience. ‘It’s the fucking betrayal that kills me,’ she says. ‘Do you have the slightest fucking idea of what I’m talking about?’

  In the prevailing spirit of honesty I am compelled to say no, I don’t.

  She shakes her head. Her mouth drops open. For a moment she threatens speechlessness. Then she falls back on her old reliable. ‘Who gave you the right to be honest about me?’

  ‘I dunno. The same guy who gave you the right to be dishonest with all the rest of the seven billion liars?’

  This buys me a goodly portion of furious, albeit wordless, disbelief. Then she drops to her knees, hauls a sports bag out from under the bed and marches off to pack.

  I go into the kitchen and check the calendar.

  Yep, it’s Tuesday.

  I let her cool down for a week before ringing her mobile.

  ‘What do you want to do about this wedding?’ I say.

  ‘K, you’re a fucking space cadet. No kidding. If there was a hotline for nutbags, I’d be on it dobbing you in.’

&nbs
p; ‘You’ll be miserable on your own at a wedding.’

  ‘I’ll be miserable if you’re there.’

  ‘So either way you’ll be miserable. My way, you get to take it out on me. And don’t shoot the messenger, okay, but if you turn up on your tod they’ll just reckon you can’t pull a bloke.’

  There is quiet. There is shallow breathing. ‘K, seriously – what’s going on with that manuscript? You can’t be serious about that shit.’

  ‘It’s not supposed to be a fucking novel or anything, Cass. I’m the one who should be pissed off here. That was my fucking diary you were reading.’ I find that Cassie responds well to the hint of repressed emotion suggested by the judicious use of expletives. ‘You’ve some fucking cheek,’ I say, ‘rummaging through my drawers.’

  More silence and shallow breathing. Then a stilted giggle. ‘You should be so lucky,’ she says.

  I snort sarcastically. Then I breathe out. There will be some grovelling to be improvised when next we meet, but the worst of the crisis is over. We are no longer in breach. We are Code Blue. We are stood down, at ease, waiting for the other to speak first.

  ‘Give me a buzz,’ I say, ‘if you change your mind about the wedding.’

  ‘K?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Did you ever think we’d get married?’

  ‘No.’

  Cassie rings. I am permitted to accompany her to the wedding. I am not allowed to pick her up beforehand. Instead I am ordered to meet her at the church. Afterwards, at the reception, she ignores me and mingles with the friends and family of the bride. She has had a hard time of it recently, so I make it known that I’m cutting her some slack and spend what amounts to a working day propped at the bar alone. Not long after midnight, she weaves unsteadily through the throng, a sheepish-looking guy in tow wearing an exquisitely tailored suit.

  She says, ‘K, meet Tony. Tony, K.’

  ‘Alright, K?’

  ‘Tony?’ I say. ‘The Tony? Ex-Tony?’

  Cassie nods. ‘We’ve had a good chat upstairs,’ she says, ‘and we’ve decided we’re giving it another go.’

  ‘Go?’

  ‘We’re getting back together. Just so you know.’

  ‘Cass,’ I say, ‘that’s a hell of a lot of slack.’

  The point of the exercise is not to demolish a hospital. It is to demonstrate how it can be done and to highlight the vulnerability of hospitals.

  Unfortunately, in the process we may have to actually bring down a hospital.

  The destruction of a hospital should not be news. Hospitals are bombed and torched every day. We do not hear about this because these hospitals house brown people, people with slanted eyes, and people who may or may not wash as often as creamy-pink people with rounded eyes who have access to an excess of running water.

  For this we have our old friend Perfidious Albion to thank. During the Boer War (1899-1902), the British army targeted the civilian population as a means of bringing the elusive guerrillas to heel. One result of this policy was the concentration camp. Another was the legitimisation of the civilian as target. Despite the best efforts of the Black-and-Tans during the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921), this policy did not really catch on until WWII (1939-1945). Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and subsequently Palestine, Cambodia, East Timor, Chechnya, Northern Ireland, the Balkans and the Twin Towers, et al, bear witness to this policy.

  Perversely, it was the British nurse Florence Nightingale who invented the concept of the modern hospital during the Crimean War (1854-1856).

  Back then, the hospital was regarded as an innovative step on the path to universal compassion. Today, in many parts of the world, it is a means of housing the non-contributors in a place where they can be exterminated with a single payload.

  Often these non-contributors are in a hospital because they have stepped on a land mine. This is because the land mine was not designed to kill. It was designed to wound and maim, to create cripples and amputees who are useless in terms of the war effort, but still need to be fed, drugged and cared for.

  There are nations who fear hospitals the way cattle fear the slaughterhouse. There are men and women whose role is to poison the food, water and minds of non-participating civilians. There are men and women whose role and perhaps vocation it is to blow up hospitals.

  What may or may not provoke outrage is the destruction from within of a hospital tending to creamy-pink persons, with said destruction instigated by a creamy-pink person.

  Look for the enemy within. From ’flu germs to Quislings to the planet’s molten core, the enemy is always within.

  Mankind nurtures the seeds of its own destruction. ‘Mankind’ was an oxymoron long before it was coined. ‘Mankind’ is the unkindest cut of all. Hospitals are mere Band-Aids on the gushing artery of de-oxygenated poison that is the human condition.

  •

  ‘Okay,’ I say. I put the sheets of paper to one side, start building a smoke. ‘I like all this, you know that.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But we’re still not getting any practical intel on how you’re going to blow the hospital.’

  ‘Change the fucking record, man. You’re stuck in a groove.’

  ‘You don’t get it, do you? How long have we been doing this now?’

  He shrugs. ‘A month?’

  ‘Nearly five weeks. Five weeks, Billy, we’ve been dancing around blowing up this hospital, and you still haven’t worked it out.’

  ‘I have, you know. I just haven’t told you.’

  ‘I’m not talking about the technical details. I’m talking about what the hospital represents.’

  A frown. ‘But we know all that. It’s civilisation at its best, except it’s undermining society by keeping the sick and weak alive, yadda-ya, especially at a time when we can’t afford hospitals anymore. So we––’

  ‘That’s just the McGuffin, Billy. The bullshit to keep the intellectuals on board. But it’s not what the hospital is really about.’

  ‘So what is it about?’

  ‘Well . . . I don’t know if you remember me saying, but when I wrote that first draft I was, y’know . . .’

  ‘Depressed, yeah. Getting shit out of your system. So what?’

  ‘I was sick, Billy. Depression’s a disease.’

  ‘I’m not saying it’s not, but . . .’ He comes up short, the Newman-blue eye ablaze. ‘Fuck.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The hospital,’ he says. ‘It’s you. All that wank about sick-building syndrome, it’s all about you being sick.’

  ‘Not exactly. It’s more about me getting cured.’

  ‘So Karlsson . . .’

  ‘The old people he killed off, they were the fucked-up thoughts I was having, y’know, self-harm, overdose, all this. So I sent Karlsson into the hospital to eradicate them, wipe them out. Except a lot of other dark stuff came up. The pervy stuff, the Hitler thing, the Spartans, sharks . . .’

  ‘That’s why you let him get away with it,’ he says. ‘Why you gave him a free pass at the end.’

  ‘Maybe, I don’t know. But the point is, as bad as it got, as extreme as Karlsson was, it never occurred to him to actually blow up the hospital.’

  ‘You’re saying you were depressed but not so badly you wanted to end it.’

  ‘If I’d been that badly off,’ I say, ‘I wouldn’t have been able to write the story, would I?’

  ‘I don’t suppose so.’

  ‘What got me thinking,’ I say, ‘was when you asked me about the old guy, why we just didn’t get rid of him. Put him out of his pain.’

  ‘But he isn’t in pain this time.’

  ‘And maybe that’s the whole point. I’m past all that shit now. I don’t need to purge.’

  He cocks his head, scratches his nose. Then he makes a production number of rolling a smoke, lighting up. All done without breaking eye contact. He exhales and says, ‘You don’t want to blow the hospital.’

  ‘It’s not that simple.’


  ‘I’m afraid it is,’ he says. A bitter undertone. ‘You can’t be a little bit pregnant, can you? We either blow it or we don’t.’

  ‘Look, I understand where you’re coming from. You need the hospital to blow to make the story big enough to be worth publishing. Except I need a happy ending, for myself, because the whole process of redrafting has made me realise how far I’ve come in the last five years. Y’know, Debs and Rosie, finally getting a book published . . .’ I shrug. ‘I’d be lying to myself, and to anyone who read it, if I made it out to be this dark bullshit just for the sake of it.’

  ‘You’re a fucking sap,’ he says.

  ‘Try having a kid, man, see what it does to you.’ The words are out before I realise what I’m saying. He flinches. ‘Anyway, that’s why I need to know what you’re doing with the hospital. How you’re going about it.’

  ‘So you can bend an exploding hospital into a happy ending.’

  ‘That’s one way of looking at it, yeah.’

  ‘Houston,’ he says, ‘we have a problem.’

  ‘Not necessarily. We could––’

  He holds up a hand. ‘The problem,’ he says, ‘is too many fucking metaphors. I mean, the hospital’s 9/11, okay, I get that. And it’s a totem for a dangerously compassionate society, sure, and a symbol for the building boom that bankrupted the country . . .’ He shakes his head. ‘Seriously,’ he says, ‘it’s a wonder the thing hasn’t collapsed already under the weight of all these fucking metaphors. Except now you’re tossing another one onto the pile, the hospital’s you on top of everything else? I mean, give us a break.’

  ‘Back off, Billy. The hospital’s my idea, okay? I built it. You’re like some toddler in crèche, he sees a tower of blocks, his one big idea is to knock it down.’

  ‘You built fuck-all,’ he says. ‘The hospital was already there. You just started throwing all these metaphors at it, hoping some of the shit would stick.’

  ‘So build your own hospital, blow that one up.’

  ‘No, I like your hospital,’ he says. ‘All I’m saying is, you’ve wrapped it in too much horseshit.’