The Ruins

by Mat Osman

  “How are you doing that?” I asked. The viewpoint was way above his head height.

  “It’s a microlight drone with an iPhone mount and stabilisers, mom got it, look.”

  The table zoomed closer until its surface filled the screen. Then it zoomed out again. Robin giggled to himself as he guided the drone. “That’s not the best bit.”

  I heard the sound of blinds closing and the table became a black pool. He bent down, caught in his own camera for a second, and fiddled with something on the edge of the table. Lamps came on around the edge, bright white bulbs like runway landing lights. For a moment nothing happened — just the whirr of the drone rotors and his breath. And then a row of the squares tilted upwards. On all four sides they rose in unison, each catching the lamplight at different moments, sending streaks of light along their edges. Now they were a mirrored city wall, turning an arch from a ruin into a doorway.

  “You go in here, see,” Robin placed a plastic model soldier within the arch, “and then you step towards the middle.” He slid the soldier one square forward and again fiddled at the table’s side. There was a small handle there, as delicate as the one on Umbrage’s music box. He turned it and a ring of mirrored blocks rose as one. The sides reflected light from the edge tiles and sent it dancing across the room’s walls. Robin walked around the table gleefully, obscuring shafts of light as he walked.

  “And then here.” He placed the soldier a step closer to the middle and turned the handle again. The centre blocks rose and angled into a gleaming spire.

  It was beautifully done. Through the spaces in the table’s surface I could see some of the workings: Meccano and twine. Light bounced from lamp to slope to block to wall in clear lines, building another, less substantial city in the air.

  “And then,” Robin hooked a weight to the soldier’s base, pushed him one square on and it disappeared down a hole in the centre of the city. I caught a gasp in my throat as the little figure was swallowed by the blackness. But as he fell something rose up: a spindly contraption like a nude umbrella, unfolding in the shafts of light, and each prong was topped with a sliver of silver paper, buffeted by the drone’s downdraft and lit by the beams of light as the city, the whole tabletop city, began to revolve, making streams of light rotate and cross like scaffolding around the room. And each sliver of silver had the same phrase written across it in the terrible beauty of a child’s writing: COME HOME COME HOME COME HOME COME HOME COME HOME COME HOME COME HOME COME HOME

  I heard the door close. “Robin?” I said, but he was gone, so I sat, doubled, halved, torn watching a city of light revolve around my screen.

  It was an hour later when Rae came in to retrieve the laptop. The drone had finally spluttered to a halt after one too many scuffings on the wall, and the city was still. Her face loomed into view, crisscrossed by beams of light.

  “It’s amazing right?” She angled the laptop to face the city. You couldn’t still see the silver paper strips. They sat dark and bedraggled in the low light. I wondered who the messages were really meant for. Me or Brandon?

  “He spent hours on YouTube watching engineering projects for like college students. I didn’t think he’d be able to do it.” She turned the laptop to face herself.

  “You, you are a good man Adam Kussgarten.” She looked me long and hard in the eyes then. “That was important to him. It was important to me.”

  I was unused to being looked at this closely. I forced myself to look back. Grey eyes, grey sweatshirt, pale skin.

  “I feel like we’re taking from you without giving back.”

  I wanted to shout no. I was getting so much back. The tethers that had so rankled Brandon, I wanted them. Tangle me up I thought, tie me down. The pull of her eyes. See me.

  But I couldn’t say it. We looked at each other for a second and then her eyes flickered to the room behind me. “So many beautiful things,” she sighed. “Pianos and paintings and the flowers. All that booze and girls on tap and people at your beck and call. You’re going to develop expensive tastes Ads.”

  I looked around. After the first couple of days here I hardly noticed the furnishings but it was true, there wasn’t an ugly object anywhere in sight.

  “I don’t know. It’s quite sad I think. There’s something so desperate about what rich people spend their money on. This place feels like it’s trying to make up for something.”

  I blushed: I wasn’t used to talking this way.

  Rae sighed. “You’re right, I know. This is what you get instead of love, I guess.”

  That sentence echoed around my mind until my phone started vibrating in my pocket. Notifications crowded the screen, seemingly a message every couple of seconds.

  “It’s Baxter.”

  The texts mounted up.

  “He says he cracked and sent Frank Isaacs mp3s of some of the Smile stuff. Isaacs says it’s ‘the most important musical find of the century’. He has a buyer right now, so if I don’t sort the pressing this week he’s going to freaking freak. His words obviously.”

  She mused. “That’s great right? We might actually get some money out of this.”

  “You might. I told you. I don’t want it, I don’t need it and I don’t deserve it. It’s for you. And Robin. Call it reparations.”

  She laughed. “Actually Robin is technically Native American. It’s a long story, I’ll tell you another time.”

  I kept reading. “He says the stuff on Dillon’s website is really funny but is it a good idea to be sticking my head above the parapet right now. Mean anything to you?”

  “Dillon’s the guy I told you about, with the remix? Brandon’ll have been trolling I suppose. When he was wrecked he’d pose as a Dillon fan online and make fun of him. Pathetic really. Let me have a look.”

  Her hands clattered on the keys and a smile rose on her face. “Hey check out dillonmarksman.com”

  I went onto the site. It was very slick, with sections for his musical projects, charity stuff, his “revolutionary mobile app” and mentoring work. A rotating slide show of images showed Dillon with a cavalcade of famous people. He was clinking cocktails with Steven Tyler on the deck of a yacht, placing a mortar board atop a beaming Steve Jobs, ditch-digging, still in his turquoise Nudie suit, while Sting looked on gravely.

  I clicked through to the forum. It wasn’t hard to find the thread that Baxter had been talking about — most of the discussions there had five or fewer replies but one, at the top of the page, titled American XS — My Part in its Downfall had racked up thousands of views.

  “You see it?” I asked Rae.

  “Sorry, no, I haven’t got past the front page. Did you see the picture of Dillon and Metallica washing oil off a seabird? Fuck me, this is glorious.”

  I let her scroll through the pictures for a while and then she said, “OK, got it. The top one yeah? On three we dive in, right?” She beamed at the screen. “One. Two. Three.”

  Some Monsterism

  This was one of a number of threads on dillonmarksman.com. It’s by a guest user with no other posts.

  Awake with the dawn. Brutal LA light filtered through the graffiti that covers every inch of the floor-to-ceiling windows in this glass box of a bedroom. The sunlight is stained with Renaissance colours — vermillion, umber, emerald — and projected across my sheets. The windows have been painted from the inside. A malevolent Mickey Mouse, crucified through his sausagey white hands, stares balefully down while cartoon B-boys spin and pose at the base of his cross. Donald Duck totes an Uzi, as tear tattoos weep from a gimlet eye. It’s all a bit much after the night I’ve had, to be honest.

  There’s a scratchy noise repeating from somewhere deep in the house so I go to investigate. Broken glass litters the carpet so I feel around for the flip-flops. Flip-flops and a bathrobe like a honeymooner. Flip-flops and a bathrobe and the last of the duty-free B&H like a proper Brit abroad.

  In the corridor the painting is cruder and many of the windows are starred with gunshots, and paint-gummy w
here they meet the floor. Here and there, through the shards of broken glass, you catch sight of the outside world. A sprinkler’s arc and the trail of traffic on the I-50. The noise is louder here, like the tick of an artificial heart.

  The first bedroom’s door is propped open. A tangle of limbs — white, brown, yellow — more beautiful than the art outside. In the next room four black guys in boiler suits are dividing up a bare wall in pencil, preparing it for painting. It looks like a butcher’s chart of the best cuts. All four give me serious head-nods. “Looking good, guys,” I tell them.

  Down the corridor. The carpet’s an ashtray, littered with spray-paint cans and bottles. It smells of stale booze and burnt feathers. The last bedroom has its windows blacked out, sheets doubled over and gaffa-taped against any stray sunbeam. A mattress, a video camera and a discarded Spider-Man costume. Don’t ask.

  On Day One of the party Champ set up a DJ booth in the master bathroom. Leads snake down the stairs to speakers in every downstairs room, and even out by the pool. I poke my head inside. Somebody left a record playing last night and it’s still spinning in its lock-out groove, broadcasting static straight into our dreams. That’s the noise.

  I lift the arm gently and choose the first record of the day. Something to wake up to, something to swim to, something to mark Day Five of this permanent party. I drop the needle on Warren Zevon’s “Sentimental Hygiene” and feel the walls shiver to the riff.

  Out onto the stairs, pitted and gritted with ground glass. You can’t help but stop at the top of the staircase to take in a view that has been on the cover of Architectural Digest AND the Mid-Century Masters book, two more front covers than I ever had. The stairs appear to float in mid-air in a way that has been copied in every wannabe minimalist house from Long Beach to the mountains.

  Downstairs is open-plan and expansive but the modernist vibe is spoiled by the remnants of the ongoing party. Maybe thirty sleeping people, in deckchairs and what’s left of the couch, draped over armchairs or just foetal on the floor. The glass doors out to the pool have been taken off their hinges. The chandelier sits in the middle of the floor, bedecked in fairy lights, its crystal drops spread out around it like petticoats. I was elsewhere when they brought the palm trees inside but now leaves scrape the ceiling, their fronds stiff and blackened. The music is boomy and brittle, careening off all the flat surfaces inside, but no one wakes. I pick my way gently through the wreckage, human and otherwise, out to the pool.

  7am and it feels like a microwave. Pulses of warmth radiate off the tiles. Someone must have brought more food colouring last night because the pool water is an even deeper red. Blood-red, jelly-red, lipstick-red. Crimson with ribbons of silver light from the slightest of breezes. I ditch the B&H and the robe. Someone’s asleep on the diving board so I plant myself on the edge of the pool and curl my toes over the rim. Bounce two-three. The aim is to make as little disturbance as possible, which isn’t my usual MO, but horses for courses.

  On your toes and over, folding yourself up and then a slice into the water. In and under, a cleansing rush of cold, eyes open. It only hurts for a second. And then the bottom of the pool through layers of red. Like staring at the sun through closed eyes. Sunken treasure: coins, glass, a solitary high heel. A breath and then push off the side and through the water, thick with red, lungs complaining, pushing yourself down to feel the pool floor on your belly as you reach for the other side. Until you touch the far end, and burst for the surface like a rebirth, up into the air, into great gobfuls of air and burnt-out palm trees and bonfires and music and art. Silver Lake. 1999. Christmas Day.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m a long-time lurker on this forum but a first-time poster. Like many of you here I’ve been reading about the forthcoming reissue of American XS with rising anticipation. I’m sure it’s being done for the purest of artistic motives — the commenter here who said that Dillon was “a venal little leech who would dig up his granny if she provided a viable revenue stream” is being churlish, and whoever described him as “a talentless little dwarf” is just plain cruel. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. Once the album has been remastered I’m confident that the original American XS will sound weedy, cheap and tawdry. I’m listening to it now and that’s exactly how it sounds. Anticipation is a funny thing.

  My reason for posting here is that I see that there’s a forty-eight-page book, XS All Areas, celebrating the creation of the album. As I’m certain that my contribution to that creation will go overlooked I thought this might be a good place to explain how I accidentally inspired that deathless work. Read on…

  In 1999 I was the soon-to-be-ex lead singer of REDACTED. After a showcase gig which ended in recrimination and injury I was licking my wounds at the family home of my old friend, guitarist and keyboard player, REDACTED. It was an inappropriately picturesque spot for a breakdown. His parents owned a converted vicarage in Norfolk: all honeysuckle and wood pigeons and deer nibbling at your petunias. Anyway, you’re wondering where Dillon fits in. I’d had as big a night as you could have in Norwich in the 1990s and arrived back at the vicarage at the same time as the postie. Going through the mail in the hope that his parents might have applied for a credit card recently, I found a postcard. The La Brea Tar Pits on the front, and on the back:

  “Hey REDACTED, Got a crazy schedule coming up. Going to be in Blighty to shoot some stuff in November. Want to come see how it’s done? Or I know you said you liked the look of my house out here, want to cat-sit? That is if REDACTED aren’t busy on your stadium tour ha ha. Call my agent if you’re interested. Dillon.”

  I can feel it still. The quiet in the hallway and the blood rushing in my ears. To be gone from this fucking scene and Britain and its jealousy and its BBC2 and all those people who’d seen me fail. I went through the pockets of REDACTED’s jacket. There they were, the keys to his dad’s Triumph Stag. No bags, no schedule, no worries. The only ticket I could afford went via Madrid and Delhi. Twenty-four hours without a book or Walkman. At LAX I changed my last £25 into dollars, caught three buses to Silver Lake, arriving travel-crusted and hungover, to fall asleep in the doorway of Dillon’s real-estate agent.

  My disarray didn’t seem to worry her when she arrived. “Dillon said he might have someone stopping by. I’m thankful to be honest — my assistant’s been feeding the cat and she’s allergic.”

  Readers of this forum will know the house well. It’s Richard Neutra’s VDL Studio, where Dillon had his home and offices for years, and even his studio once, after, like so many over-ambitious musicians, he’d crashed his cachet on the rocks of Hollywood’s big business. (And by the way, I don’t think Dillon gets the credit he deserves for his real estate acumen. His Malibu condo development, his renovation of Picasso’s studio in the South of France, his Dublin cyber-hotels? Who says that these things aren’t as creative as his musical works? Certainly not me.) Even casual Dillonites will know one view of the house. The cover of American XS, that iconic shot of this mid-century classic in tatters, every pane of glass smashed, the swimming pool crimson with what looked like blood, and piles of furniture beneath the windows, the wizened matchheads of burnt-out palm trees, and wide-eyed Californians in bikinis and warpaint, motorcycle leathers and baseball caps, stoned and useless amongst the rubble. It was taken there. The photo is credited to Dillon, like so much is, but he wasn’t even in the country when it was taken. The photo was the work of Champ Lord, pick-up artist, airline scammer, and, at that time, my only friend west of Dublin. The devastation? That was all mine.

  I spent my first day there wandering through the rooms, relishing the throb of Californian heat and the pools of shadow in every corner. The house’s angles were sharp and clean with a tastefulness that veered close to invisibility. The stairs were just wooden slats and blinds threw bands of light that inched across matted floors. A sculpture of seven steel spheres, each reflecting a fish-eye view of the lounge, twisted in the breeze. Everything exuded a gallery-like calm.


  I wasn’t sure if Dillon had actually moved in. Boxes of unopened stuff lined every room: CDs, video equipment, clothes, an exercise bike, art propped up against the walls. I went through it all, not knowing what I was looking for, and it was evening before I hit the motherlode. Taped on the wall in an anteroom that housed the home phone was a list of numbers: food places, a drugstore, music shops, and lots of names that I didn’t recognise. It was time to check out where Dillon’s credit was good. Your boy did well for himself. American XS was a year away and he was abroad filming his Britpop movie but some of that Hollywood money must have already been flowing because he had accounts everywhere.

  By the end of the week I had a routine. I slept out by the pool with a dome of smog above me. Each morning the sprinkler woke me; I rolled out of its range and watched the droplets form a perfect, personal rainbow. Sprinklers and sirens, geckoes and joggers. A slow parade of maids, gardeners and cooks, not a white face among them, chattering along the shortcut down by the reservoir. LA mornings. I took to the phones. I’d drawn a red star by all the establishments at which Dillon had credit. I ordered breakfast from the list, working my way steadily through the rota, regardless of what I had a taste for. Kim Chi Monday. Burrito Tuesday. Sushi Wednesday. Then on to the liquor store where the clerk was under the illusion that I knew something about wine. We’d chat for a while about vintages and vineyards, mouthfeel and acidities, and then he’d send a case over. Now, years later, as I have, through some unthinking accretion of grown-up knowledge, ingested at least the basics of wine, facts I wonder at the stuff he sold me. 1960s Montrachets into which I decanted catering size tins of fruit salad to make sangria, a Vendange Tardive from 1983 that I used for cooking.