by Will Self
I got into the back seat and Sherman clambered into the front. Baltie’s shape said ‘Hi’, with that special tone people reserve for failed suicides, at once sympathetic and reassuringly annoyed, as if to say: See the trouble you’ve put us to!
Within minutes we were tooling back over the bridge, the tyres of the big car drumming the deck plates, the mighty lyre of the cables strumming past. At last, shorn of the encumbrance of any human scale whatsoever – no finicky aerials or watertank bobbins – the San Francisco skyline acquired, for me, the majesty others always claimed they found in it. Once we were down off the bridge and augering into the core of downtown, the sidewalks were as unthreatening as Hanna-Barbera backdrops, the homeless mere silhouettes, the traffic no longer steely but graphite – reduced to a few pencil marks on the fronts of the buildings.
I made a conscious decision to say nothing of this ... nothingness to Sherman, while he treated my rescue as simply another chore to be completed with despatch. ‘What’ve you got on here?’ he rapped as the Range Rover pulled up beside the Prescott. I muttered something about a book reading at the City Lights in two days’ time. ‘Fine, then. You can come out to Stanford and the Google Campus with me tomorrow in the day – we’ll pick you up around ten. If you need me you’ve got the number, we’re staying in the Transamerica building, they rent out a penthouse suite.’
As I prepared to insert my stick body into the line drawing of my bed I pictured Sherman in his odd accommodation, at the very apex of the Transamerica’s 48-storey white granite-faced pyramid. With Baltie a hieroglyph on the marble wall, Sherman rollicked back and forth in this despotic bed and breakfast, stubbing out a Hoyo here, snatching up a glass of champagne over there, consulting a sale catalogue while he barked at Borzois in Kiev, or Pekineses in Beijing. I wondered if, in all that restless communication, he had taken the time to reassure my family, who might have been concerned by the phone call from the paramedics who had scooped me up from the Golden Gate Bridge. Wondered this – yet felt powerless to call them myself.
This latest episode in my relationship with Sherman had taken things to another level. I knew that my behaviour in the past had been shameful, yet this very Dickensian coincidence – of which I could’ve had no great expectation when I teetered atop the parapet – brought home to me quite how much psychic baggage I was carrying with me.
Perhaps I should’ve felt more disturbed by the excision of any sense of proportion that I had once had, and its replacement by a thick fog of mediocrity welling up from San Francisco Bay. I didn’t, though, for since having come to Marin County and listened to the pugnacious Sangha, I had been blissfully free of the multiplier and the divisor.
Lying in the darkness of the Prescott, I ran over the stats: the bridge was 8,981 feet long, the longest span was 4,200 feet. It was 746 feet high, and there were 80,000 miles of wire in its main cables, while approximately 1,200,000 rivets had been used in its construction. Between its completion in 1937 and 2005, more than 1,200 people had jumped the 245 feet to their death in the chill waters below. 1,200, not 120 nor yet 120,000, but 1,200 – these figures were incontrovertible: the facts on the ground.
5.5
The Last Nurdle
Watch it bigger day by day! Natural manhood enhancement! Easily to get male package ... Demetrius Erectile Organ Cosmic. Gargantuan Penis Beau. Reach out and bone someone ... I stood in the restroom at the Googleplex, Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, and these came back to me: Fuck Stick Ample Floyd. Rosa Full-Size Fuck Stick. Body part enlarged shown. FannieMonumentalCock ... Manglings of syntax and grammar that nonetheless got across the hollow promise that a credit card number could be exchanged for Viagra – and Cialis and Ambien, should you so choose.
I stood at the urinal and held on, remembering these emails spammed at me through the yielding tissue of virtual reality. It wasn’t that I thought any of Google’s 450,000 servers might be implicated in this huge trafficking of drugs intended to make the relatively little grow bigger; it was just that the laminated sheet of programming tips tacked above the urinal naturally tended one’s thoughts in that direction; this, and the fact that one was holding one’s LongPen.
‘Testing on the Toilet’, the sheet was headed; beside it were two light bulbs, one happy and shining, the other upside down, dim and sad. Below that the screed continued: ‘Normally people are only interested in the test data for coverage files ...’ but I couldn’t read any further, it was all impenetrably technical to me – and besides, I’d pissed on my shoes.
Back past the niches containing the electric toothbrushes and facecloths of the never resting microserfs, back past the misaligned bookcases, the dangling model jet engines, the defunct servers piled up into statuary and the colossal novelty beanbags, I found Sherman and Baltie in the canteen noshing on piles of bean sprouts and slurping smoothies. ‘Get yourself a tray,’ Sherman commanded; ‘you need to build up your strength.’
I supposed I should’ve felt more grateful to Sherman than I did; after all, he had scooped me up in San Francisco and incorporated me into his whirlwind schedule. That morning we had already visited the Stanford Linear Accelerator, where he had discussed plans with the facility’s director to site a Sherman piece alongside the two-mile-long klystron gallery, which – as both men saw fit to inform me – was the longest building in the States.
‘The longest building – quite right!’ Sherman had crowed as we puttered through the campus in the Range Rover, past the great Romanesque halls of learning. ‘While the accelerator itself is the world’s straightest object! That’s why this body form will be so sinuous, with arms and legs cuddling the gallery, cheek pressed against it. I particularly like the fact,’ he continued as Baltie angled the Range Rover up the slip road on to Highway 280, ‘that the whole installation lies right across the San Andreas fault. The next time there’s a big one, my piece and the accelerator will go down together, erotically entwined, spurting electrons and positrons in a lava death fuck!’
I doubted that Stanford would’ve let Sherman anywhere near the collider if they’d heard him talk in these terms – but then I doubted this piece would ever get made; it seemed to be just another of the notions sprouting from the artist’s ever fertile mind as he revolved around the world. True, plenty of Shermans were getting made – a group of three mediumsized thirty-footers had been erected in Death Valley only the previous week – but the ratio of planned to enacted Shermans did seem to be shifting decisively.
After our veggie lunch at the Googleplex, Sherman lectured the employees for over an hour on ways in which their 450,000 servers might be adapted to serve his own ends. He proposed Sherman start pages, Sherman links and Sherman levies on advertisers. He quite seriously entertained the idea of a Shermanet (at least, disloyally, that’s how I thought of it), with each Google search contributing to the creation of a body form so large it could exist only in cyberspace. ‘Your servers process a petabyte of data every hour – fifty petabytes is roughly equal to the entire written works of humankind up until now ...’ He looked significantly at me, scrunched up in the front row trying to hide the pee stains on my shoes.
‘But why not generate a calculus of say 5,000 petabytes of differentials describing the shapes of a body form that, were it to actually be built, would dwarf this entire solar system – more than that! It would be so big it could link arms with the spiral arm of the galaxy and high-kick across the heavens!’
I had to hand it to Sherman – not for the breathtaking egomania of his artistic vision, but for that grace that had so struck my wife, and that allowed him to use the d-word so offhandedly, standing there, all thirty-nine inches of him, in front of the Googlers. It was difficult not to love Sherman at times like this – Velázquez’s portrait of de Morro may have imbued the court dwarf with humanity, but it was a humanity defined by thwarted emotions, smouldering resentments and long-anticipated slights. But Sherman was a de Morro in motion: his hands a blur of explication, his head bobbing with such
self-affirmation that his beard seemed like a brush putting the finishing touches on his own shining countenance ...
I thought all this, then I looked around me at the other listeners, only to discover that they weren’t listening at all and that their faces, far from glowing with the enthusiasm that beamed off Sherman, were merely bathed in the chilly light of the laptops they had propped open on their knees.
Later, as Baltie expertly piloted the Range Rover along the crowded drag of El Camino Real, I sought to comfort Sherman: ‘They were probably catching up on some work. I mean they’re driven so hard in that place – there’re even programming tips stuck up in the men’s.’
‘I’m not bothered in the least!’ he snapped back. ‘They weren’t working – they were googling me.’
As I say, I should’ve felt more grateful for my salvation, but functioning in this odd new realm where the median had been annihilated, leaving only ever accelerating electrons, and lumbering Shermans, was ... taxing. I had thought it was hard enough dealing with my tics and compulsions without having to cope with troublesome emotions – but now I wasn’t simply feeling ashamed in relation to Sherman, but terribly indebted to him. So, when they dropped me off at the Prescott, and he began saying, ‘Listen, Will, it strikes me that you need a little human comfort in your life’, I was about to interrupt him when his phone did it for me:
‘Yes, yes, Sergei ... that’s all arranged,’ he said. ‘And no, we won’t be needing snowshoes or the dog team, let alone the sodding umiak – it’s only late October ... Jolly good!’ He broke the connection, then explained: ‘We’re flying out this evening; the Albertan government is interested in my doing something with the Athabasca Tar Sands – sort of massive tar-baby-type body form.’
I was secretly relieved, and as he seemed to have forgotten the touchy-feely stuff I said goodbye casually; but then:
‘Don’t imagine for a second this means I won’t be keeping tabs on you,’ he flung at my retreating back. ‘In fact, I’ll be calling every day.’
However, he didn’t call the next day, and that evening I gave a reading at the City Lights bookstore with the ghost of Allen Ginsberg howling in my ear and the bloated corpse of Kerouac beating a port wine jug on the floor in the corner. Nor did he call the day after that, when I flew to Seattle and walked the sixteen miles in from the gargantuan bobbin-terminals of SeaTac along the Green River trail to the city centre. I could see nothing of the orderly suburbs I paced through, only coppery bills agitating on the trees and the discrete cloud of Bill Gates’s $70,708,080,100,000 wispy over Medina. Footsore, dragging myself along the East Marginal Way past the Boeing Field, I looked first at the splitting aglets of my bootlaces, next at the seven-storey tailfins cleaving the vapours above the airstrip. And, as I crossed over the goods yards and began to drag up the desolation row of 4th Avenue, the heroic skyline in front trickled down to the homeless man who walked ahead of me, in the gutter, pushing his shopping cart piled high with nothing fit for e-commerce.
Another Prescott Hotel and the naivety of mineral water and the sculptural folds of strewn towels and tossed sheets. Of my work in Seattle I recall very little. That night, dark visions of the inflamed papules and vesicles around the anus of a lover I had taken from behind – perhaps in this very room – in a previous millennium, whose face was still other sculptural folds buried in the marbled pillows. In the dream, heaving over her runty thighs, I looked at the mobile phone clutched in my left hand and longed for it to ring: Sherman’s bark might rouse me from this torturous in-and-out that was going nowhere, but still he didn’t call.
The following morning, before dawn, I headed back to SeaTac. A panel had been damaged on the International Space Station and the crew were trapped up there in the bus-sized craft costing $100 billion – while down here on the bus, we ploughed through the asteroid belts of the Seattle suburbs. In the seat beside me sat a girl tricked out as Madame de Pompadour, complete with powdered wig, mauve feathers and a silk bustle.
It was Halloween – I was scared, but still boarded an Alaskan Airways flight down to Los Angeles and, stepping out from the arrivals hall on to Century Boulevard without any clear idea of where I might be headed, was shocked to see Baltie’s blond quiff – layered by Trumper – outlined by the driverside window of another rental Range Rover. Then his master’s stumpy legs swung round the bumper, followed by his master’s heroic and oft-copied trunk.
Sherman – who was on a call – put me on hold with a digit; I dallied in the louche southern Californian noon: an entire civilization with its collar unbuttoned. ‘Yes, yes, Harriet,’ he was saying, ‘of course I’ll need more than ten earth movers – what if half of them break down? What? Yes, I’ll be in LA for a couple of days, then I’ll come to you. Jolly good!’
To me he was equally abrupt: ‘C’mon, let’s go to the Watts Towers! You need to stretch your legs – lanky fellow like you crunched up in economy, it’s only a matter of time before a blood clot forms in your leg – curious that such a little thing can do for you, no?’
We walked along Century – or, rather, I walked. Baltie picked Sherman up and dropped him off again and then again, in a resumption of our usual way of travelling together. While he was bowling along beside me, making no concession to the heat (I had the Barbour slung over my shoulder once more, as weighty and useless as a constitutional monarch), Sherman explained about the earth movers and the project to carve the 26-mile-long outline of his own body form into the impacted salt of the Great Salt Lake Desert in Utah: ‘You’ve no idea the politicking involved,’ he yelped, lighting a Hoyo. ‘It’s Federal land, and I’ve been pogoing back and forth to DC for months now to butter up wonks at the Bureau of Land Management.’
At Inglewood, beside the Hollywood Racetrack, I found myself alone. From the gentle rise I could see the distant sierra and feel the hot body of Los Angeles aroused beneath my soles. It occurred to me that Sherman was revolving around me with two distinct magnitudes: first, on his longer sweeps as a comet does a solar system; and secondly, with these small hops along Century, as an asteroid does a planet. In neither case, I thought, were these orbits stable – at some point he must lose speed and crash into me. There would be a conflagration.
In the backstreets of Watts, Sherman told me about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area of the Pacific a thousand miles west of California and twice the size of Texas. He expatiated on how discarded plastic from all over the globe had become concentrated there: ‘Packing tape, plastic soldiers, widgets, grommets, webbing, shopping bags – you name it! It all pitches up in the Patch, and there it photo-degrades, breaking down and down and down, into littler and littler blobs known as – I kid you not – “nurdles”.’
He seemed oblivious of the miniature gravestones and other Halloween decorations studding the front yards of the tumbledown frame houses – immune also to any sense of threat in this, one of the most feared ‘hoods in South Central. It occurred to me, observing the way cars slowed and fingers pointed, that here it was not Sherman’s restricted size that attracted attention – no one was playing ‘Child or Dwarf’ – but only the fact of our age, our colour and our class. All Hallows’ Eve was nigh, and the gun crews who tried dicking with us were warned off by our middle-aged, middle-class, white man horror masks.
We stood beneath the airy minarets of the Towers and Sherman tugged his beard. I understood where the nurdling had been leading: he was intent on matching Simon Rodia’s awesome feat of bricolage with one of his own: ‘There has to be a way to fuse all that plastic into a single sculpted agglomeration—’
‘You mean a body form?’ I queried, knowing full well the answer.
‘Yes, yes, a body form of course!’
And I saw the monstrous baby staggering upright from the horizon, its chubby arms formed by billions of nurdles.
5.25
It’s a Small World
At the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Downtown LA I struck up a friendship with Felipe on the concierge’s des
k. He had an outsized pencil that reminded me of the ones I had on my desk at home – one blue, one lead – writing implements that juxtaposed amusingly with my minumental figurine of Sherman’s Behemoth. Felipe used his big pencil to doodle while he waited for guests to ask him things: Where’s this – or that? How do I get to ...? Can you recommend? When he was distracted in this way I took the opportunity to swivel the ledger and examine the doodles, but there seemed no precise relation between the series of boxes, circles, triangles and these enquiries.
I say friendship, but I doubt Felipe thought I was anything but a saddo, flopping around the colossal atrium of the hotel, peering disconsolately into the ornamental fountain, or else standing caught in the fugue of minimal preference, looking from one souvenir to the next in the gift concession. I had a reading to give at the Los Angeles Public Library, but apart from this my time was my own. I forced myself out to wander the stepped pyramid of Bunker Hill, pausing in its cigarette-packet-sized parks to admire the crumpled tinfoil public sculpture.
There were no calls from Sherman – there couldn’t be any network coverage out there on the Bonneville Salt Flats. Baltie revved up the earth mover, then slipped the clutch. ‘Hey!’ his boss cried, rattling around in the jump seat as they doodled across the crystalline page, describing a line that could be erased only by a once-in-a-decade ‘rain event’. In Beverly Hills Britney had retreated to the shower stall to speak to an interviewer from Coast FM – I could hear the pitter-patter lying on my bed at the Westin. The kids were arriving for their court-ordered time with Mom.
Felipe, seeing how loose my ends were becoming, malevolently suggested I might like to visit a carniceria out in East LA, so I walked over Bunker Hill to Broadway and waited among the baggage, the denim and the rolled gold for the 31 bus. It ground across the bridge over the Inca runnel of the Los Angeles River, then along 1st Street, while I watched in-bus American Latino TV: adobe men in white hoodies yapping like Disney characters for a public health campaign.
