Absolute Zero Cool

by Declan Burke

  There is also a very good chance that Cassie feels the pangs of guilt most women feel when a relationship fails, no matter whose fault it was, the subconscious guilt of extinguishing all those babies who might have been.

  ‘So what’s up?’ she says.

  ‘There’s some stuff I’ve found, I didn’t want to chuck it in case you wanted it back.’

  ‘What kind of stuff?’

  ‘There’s a few CDs. And some of your book club books.’

  ‘That’s okay, you keep them.’

  ‘There’s something else.’

  ‘What? K, if you still have photos of––’

  ‘No, it’s nothing like that. It’s tapes of you singing.’

  ‘Singing? Me?’

  ‘Sure. You sing in your sleep.’

  ‘In my sleep?’

  ‘No one else ever told you that?’

  ‘Singing what?’

  ‘I don’t know, it’s hard to tell.’

  She considers this. ‘You taped me singing in my sleep?’

  ‘I thought you might want a record of it.’

  ‘And how come you’re only telling me about it now?’

  ‘For the reason you’re pissed off. It’s an invasion of privacy.’

  ‘Too fecking right it is.’

  ‘Which is why I’m giving them back. Or should I just destroy them?’

  ‘No,’ she sighs, ‘don’t destroy them.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll leave them here for pick-up. You still have your key, right?’

  ‘Yeah. I suppose I should give that back.’

  ‘Not unless you want to.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘It’d mean I’d have to find another key-holder.’

  ‘You want me to be your key-holder?’

  ‘Not if it’s going to be a problem. Otherwise, yeah. Why not?’

  ‘No reason.’ A telling pause. ‘Listen, K? I’d rather meet in town. Would you mind?’

  ‘No problem. By the way, you might like to know – I’m dumping that novel. I thought about it and you’re right, I don’t have the right to write about you like that.’

  ‘That’s your decision, K. It has nothing to do with me anymore.’

  ‘I know that. I’m not trying to woo you back or anything. I’m just saying, if you want the manuscript and the discs, you can have them.’

  ‘Just burn them, K.’

  ‘Will do. So where do you want to meet?’

  We arrange a time and place: F—’s, next Saturday, early afternoon. This is to ensure there is no opportunity for drunkenness and irresponsible nostalgia. We agree to be on our best behaviour for the duration of the meeting. We arrange our lives with the care of an old spinster retying a red satin bow around a bundle of yellowing letters, and then hide our lives away at the bottom of our battered hope chests.

  ‘K? Any weird shit and I’ll walk. Okay?’

  ‘If it’ll help, I’ll learn sign language. It’s just too much effort to be weird in sign language.’

  She snorts, says goodbye, hangs up. I spend the evening practising her signature by turning it upside down and copying out the meaningless squiggle. When I am confident I have it right I sign her name on the fly-leaf of Jean de Florette, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Love in the Time of Cholera.

  My line for today is, People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading. (Logan Pearsall Smith)

  The old man, the ex-mechanic, dies. This is despite his express wish to the contrary. This is as sad as it is inevitable, although its inevitability should go some way towards alleviating the sadness. The old man simply arrived at a point in space and time where irrational hope intersected with irreversible logic.

  On the way to the funeral, to cheer myself up, I go into a bookies and place a bet on my not dying.

  The woman behind the counter is nonplussed but intrigued. ‘Ever?’

  ‘What kind of odds can you give me?’

  ‘None. There are no odds. There can’t be.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Everyone dies is why not.’

  ‘You’re saying it’s impossible for me not to die.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘Have you any idea of what the odds were against my being born in the first place?’

  ‘Better than those against you’re not dying, that’s for sure.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘Everything dies.’

  ‘Okay. But not everything lives in the first place. The odds against my being born were hundreds of trillions to one. And that’s a conservative estimate.’

  She thinks about this. ‘How would you collect? I mean, just say you never died. How would you collect?’

  ‘You won’t have to worry about that. You’ll be dead.’

  We decide on a one-euro bet at odds of a billion-to-one. ‘Best of luck,’ she says, signing off with a flourish.

  At the cemetery the rain is a drizzled blessing. The old man’s family drift towards the exit. Most people don’t stick around for the final act. The fat lady sings a siren’s song.

  The gravedigger leans against a convenient tombstone, smoking and staring me down. He is mid-thirties, tall and lean, unshaven. I smoke and stare back.

  He nods at the hole. ‘I have to wait until you go before I can start filling him in.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘I dunno. It’s traditional.’

  ‘You think the old man would mind me watching him being filled in?’

  ‘How would I know?’

  ‘Put yourself in his shoes. Take a guess.’

  He takes a drag off his cigarette. ‘If it was me, yeah, I’d mind. If it was me, I’d rather be left alone.’

  ‘He used to be a mechanic,’ I say. ‘Played centre-back on the team that won the double in 1961. In the last six months he had the grand total of three hospital visits, and he liked to eat peach yoghurt and Dairy Milk chocolate. They think it was gangrene killed him.’

  By way of empathy, the gravedigger places a thumb against one nostril and snorts the other nostril clear. ‘I’ve work to do,’ he says.

  ‘There’s a meteor on the way,’ I say, ‘it’s called Asteroid 1950 DA. It’s still eight hundred years away. But it’s coming.’

  That grabs him. ‘Like in the film?’ he says.

  I nod. ‘Check this out. NASA put a probe on a meteor, a different one, travelling at twice the speed of a bullet three hundred million miles away. They wanted to know what it was made of.’

  ‘And?’ he says. ‘What was it made of?’

  ‘No idea. What I’m saying is, they can put a probe on a meteor travelling at twice the speed of a bullet three hundred million miles away, but they can’t know for sure it was gangrene killed an old man.’

  He takes a vicious drag on his cigarette, tucks it into a corner of his mouth and picks up his spade. ‘That gangrene’s some cunt alright.’

  He shovels dirt into the hole. It lands with a metallic-sounding clatter.

  ‘Most people worry about dying in a car crash,’ I say, ‘or from falling down stairs, or being hit by a meteor. But the vast majority of deaths are the result of internal degeneration. In effect, we’re being sabotaged by the partisan elements of our constituent components.’ He shovels on, still smoking. ‘Beware the enemy within,’ I say. ‘The fuckers are working behind the lines, blowing up train tracks, cutting down telephone lines and assassinating minor representatives of officialdom. How are you supposed to organise reprisals against your own colon?’

  The gravedigger unloads a spatter of dirt, takes a last drag from the cigarette and flips it away. It lands on a neatly tended grave of pristine crystal chips. ‘This meteor,’ he says. ‘It’s eight hundred years away?’

  ‘Give or take a couple of years.’

  ‘How come I never heard about it?’

  ‘Why should they tell you? I mean, now you know, what’re you going to do about it?’

  He shrugs. ‘Not one fucking thing.’ He pats his pockets, finds his cigarettes,
lights up. ‘Pity it’s not eight hundred fucking minutes away.’ He tucks the cigarette into the corner of his mouth, digs into the heap of earth. ‘I’ll give them fucking meteors,’ he mutters.

  I toss the betting slip into the gaping hole and walk away through the drizzle towards the exit. I notice that tombstones are erected by the living for the living. I notice how the dead have no stake in their death.

  Life is a perverse anomaly. Perhaps this is why my pulse stutters when the world begins to turn away, when the trees start to rust, when the whiff of decay drifts up out of the earth. Autumn is the world’s way of reminding us that life is lived in parentheses, a temporary state of enervation preceded and followed by non-being.

  Today, in the chat-room, Yasmin presses me to commit to going along to meet Shane on Saturday night. She has investigated timetables. She informs me that if I catch the 16.10 train from Dublin I will get to Sligo at 19.05, which means we can meet Shane before he goes onstage and be back at the station in time for the 21.30 train to Dublin.

  I tell Yasmin I am excited, but so nervous my pants are damp. I tell her that I might be grounded for life if I am caught.

  Yasmin says that some things in life are worth being grounded for. She says that my mum will be angry, for sure, but that no mother can stay angry forever.

  We continue in a similar vein for some time until Yasmin confesses that it is her birthday on Saturday, which is why her mother is bringing her to meet Shane. She says she will be twelve, and that she wanted it to be a surprise for me.

  I am touched. Now there is no way I can disappoint her. I confirm that I will get the train and see her at Sligo station on Saturday evening at 19.05.

  We sign off with our usual kissy-kissies.

  The blood roars in my ears. Below in the valley, four-square in my path, the Rubicon wends its lazy way to the sea.

  I meet Cassie just after five in F—’s. This bright, busy bar is a temple to voluntary subjugation. Even on a Saturday it is thronged with men wearing symbolic nooses, and women who believe their mission in life is to propagate the genes of well-hung men.

  I appreciate Cassie’s tactics. She believes that I will not cause a scene in a bar crowded with conventional people doing conventional things. In this she is correct: I have no intention of causing a scene. My plan depends on being surrounded by hordes of conventional people doing conventional things.

  Cassie is late. She does not apologise, because she is deliberately late. She sits down on the other side of the table.

  ‘So what I can get you?’ I say.

  ‘G&T, thanks.’

  ‘Sound.’ I get up to go to the bar. ‘The bag’s under the table, by the way.’

  From the bar I watch her rummage through the black refuse sack. I see her frown, puzzled. She is holding Love in the Time of Cholera. By the time I return with her coffee she has unearthed Jean de Florette and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. She holds up the latter as I sit down. ‘These aren’t mine,’ she says.

  ‘No? So whose are they?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘They’re not mine, I know that. I thought they were yours when I saw your name inside.’

  She says, puzzled, ‘Yeah, I saw that too. But I don’t remember buying them.’

  ‘I thought you wrote your name on all your books.’

  ‘Well, I do . . .’

  ‘Hey, don’t sweat it. If you don’t want them, I’ll take them. They’re good books.’

  But her instinctive reaction is to protect and cherish. To own. She stashes the books in the refuse sack. She doesn’t mention the tapes of her singing in her sleep.

  ‘Odd,’ she says.

  ‘We all get old, Cass. Maybe your memory isn’t what it used to be.’

  ‘Maybe it isn’t. Maybe if it was,’ she says, ‘I’d stand up and walk out this very second.’

  I nod. I allow my shoulders to sag. In this way I implicitly accept the burden of guilt for the failure of our relationship. This is what every woman craves: the illusion of absolution from responsibility. I believe they crave this because they understand, subconsciously, that on their shoulders – or hips, to be precise – falls the agonising responsibility for the propagation of the human race. Feminism is Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, begging for the cup to be taken from its lips while knowing it cannot be.

  Or maybe she’s just happy to see me admit it was all my fault.

  ‘Before you go,’ I say, ‘there’s something I want you to know.’

  She sips her G&T with her pinky finger aloft. She shakes her head. ‘Save it, K. You’d be wasting your time. It’s over. Oh-ver.’

  ‘Don’t get me wrong, Cass. I’m not trying to change your mind. I’d just like you to know why I am the way I am. There’s a reason for everything, except maybe the universe itself.’

  She holds herself stiffly. She sips again at the G&T, observing me across the rim of the glass. She is intrigued despite herself.

  Women should be sent to colonise Mars. In a straight choice, women will pick drama over oxygen every time.

  ‘Go on,’ she says.

  I take a deep breath. ‘I’ve never told you this, but I was in a serious car accident a few years ago. You know how I hate cars?’ She nods. ‘I’m not giving you any light at the end of the tunnel bullshit,’ I say, ‘but it was a near-death experience. It happened so fast it was over before I knew it was starting. But here’s the thing. I had enough time to realise I was dead and to hope that it didn’t kill the passenger too. I didn’t mind so much for myself, but my last thought was a terrifically sad one, because I thought the passenger was going to die too. All that realising happened in a split-second,’ I add.

  ‘How come you didn’t tell me this before?’ From her tone I can tell that she doesn’t believe me, but that she is desperately anticipating any evidence that might allow her to. She sips at her G&T. ‘And what has this to do with us, anyway?’

  ‘Well, obviously I didn’t die. And the passenger was fine too. But the shock was traumatic. It’s still ongoing. It’s left me with an acute awareness of the fragility of life and a very shallow pool of emotional responses. Most of the time I only have enough emotion to keep me covered. I can’t afford to make an emotional investment, otherwise I’d bankrupt myself.’

  ‘K?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Try speaking English. Just this once. I mean, I’m listening, but I’m not hearing anything genuine.’

  ‘It’s not easy to talk about this, Cass. The brain isn’t really engineered to verbalise concepts relating to its own annihilation. But what I think I’m trying to say is, I sold you short on the emotional side of things. Because if I hadn’t, I’d have wound up slitting my wrists.’

  She flushes. ‘I knew it. I can’t believe you’re threatening––’

  ‘Cass? Relax. I’m not threatening anything. I’m explaining how it was then, not how I want it to be now. You’ve made your decision and I respect that. And to be perfectly honest, if one of us has to be happy, I’d rather it was you. No disrespect, but I think I can take the shit better than you.’

  She sips her G&T. She says, in a doubtful tone, ‘How do I know you’re not spoofing?’

  ‘What do I have to gain by spoofing? You’re with Tony now. I’m only telling you this so you’ll know why I was acting like a prick.’

  ‘Don’t flatter yourself. You are a prick.’

  ‘I know. I’m thinking about counselling.’

  This is the magic word. If there’s one thing women love more than talking, it’s talking about talking. ‘Really?’ she says. ‘You’re seriously thinking about that?’

  ‘Thinking about it, yeah. But I don’t know, it all sounds a bit faggoty to me. Want another one of those?’

  ‘Yeah, go on. And don’t be such a homophobe.’ She drains her glass. ‘Not so much ice this time,’ she says.

  From the bar I watch her rummage through the refuse sack again. Even from the bar I can tell that I am giving Cassie exactly w
hat she wants, which is to be absolved of all blame, always. Even from the bar I can tell that the Rohypnol is already taking effect, and that Cassie is in for an interesting evening.

  My line for tonight comes courtesy of Eugene Ionescu: The basic problem is that if God exists, what is the point of literature? And if he doesn’t exist, what is the point of literature?

  Sermo Vulgus: A Novel (Excerpt)

  God has seen it all, Cassie. There’s no shocking God. If there is an omniscient being responsible for the entire universe, its palate is by now irreversibly jaded.

  God has seen ecosystems deliberately wiped out. He has seen races, civilisations and species obliterated. God has overseen the destruction of planets, taken bets on the exact time of a sun’s winking out, coolly noted whole galaxies freeze to within a quark of absolute zero. Cassie, if the scientists are correct about the Big Bang, God has observed the destruction of at least one infinite universe to date.

  Cassie, put your humiliation in perspective. On the cosmic scale, the fourteenth-century genocide of thirty-four million Chinese by the Mongol hordes wouldn’t even make the Top One Million list of atrocities.

  Tonight the last matriarch of an undiscovered Amazonian species of tree spider passed away. Tonight the ghosts of a vanquished galaxy waved placards as they marched in mute protest past the gates of God’s many-roomed mansion. Tonight an infinite universe sweated blood and prayed that the cup of self-immolation be taken from its lips.

  All, alas, to no avail.

  Yasmin awaits, but first I must ensure Cassie will be comfortable for the evening. We walk back to my place with the intention of smoking a joint while listening to the new Antony and the Johnsons album. I allow Cassie to open the front door with the key she holds on my behalf. This is the ex-lovers’ equivalent of two Verdun survivors symbolically signing the Versailles Treaty.

  Cassie is under the impression that we are acting out a charade to prove how truly evolved human beings are: how we can love and hate, then shake hands and part with no hard feelings.