The wax plants had blossomed during the night, and in the morning while practising I could see their flowers vibrating. Not – as I at first, a little vainly, imagined – because of the cello, whose strings I was doing my best to manipulate in line with Scelsi’s directions (or rather, in line with one of Scelsi’s interpreter’s directions – he had an underling, a so-called ‘negro’, who did the notation for him: Tosetti, or whatever his name was), but rather because of the freight train rolling by two or three hundred metres away, making my window and the rest of the building resonate with a weak low-frequency tone, and perhaps I saw something in the junkie’s face, something in the whites of his eyes, that made me think about that again, the whitish-pink petals, vibrating and shining stiffly, as dead as they were alive. We walked along the canal and the guitarist said: do you remember that thing we listened to – what was it – maybe fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years ago? That Loren Connors guy. Airs? I didn’t really hear what he said, I was working hard on not drifting off altogether. Wasn’t he called Mazzacane? the composer said. Yeah, right, that’s the one, the guitarist said. Yeah, said the composer, as she pulled out a little bag of throat drops, liquorice or mint pastilles or something. Yeah, I remember it was kind of impressionistic, him just going round and round on some minor chord, kind of thing. She held the bag out to us. The guitarist took one while I shook my head a little. Right, the guitarist said, and moved the little pastille around his mouth with his tongue, which made me think of the junkie’s slightly slack, dribbling mouth, maybe he uses open C tuning, and it’s almost like he was playing slide but without the slide, just round round round, and all the songs are the same, some pentatonic scale the whole time or something, I think so anyway, and like, it shouldn’t work but it does, it doesn’t sound as kitsch as it should, and I think it has something to do with the rhythm, that it’s kind of irregular, fluid, swaying, you think, just because it’s called Airs, like the air, but in plural, which is impossible, but it’s got nothing to do with that, apparently it has roots in Celtic or Irish harp music, he said, and I tried to say something but sort of couldn’t get it out, and I got out a cigarette instead and lit it and tried again to say something but I couldn’t, it was as though something had broken, something really small of course, but still, broken, cracked, burst, some little part or thread that was essential to speech, and we walked on the gravel, it crunched and scrunched rhythmically and the composer listened and I was listening and not listening, and the guitarist went on talking about Connors, and Turlough O’Carolan in particular, in like the 1700s, he died in the 1700s at any rate, 1738 I think, and I don’t know if he was born in the 1600s, or when it was, I mean, I guess people didn’t live as long back then, but anyway, that last piece he wrote, like on his deathbed, was called Carolan’s Farewell to Music, and that I like, the fact he didn’t bid farewell to life, to the world, but to music, and… He broke off. I inhaled and said: oh, so he didn’t think it would be possible to make music after dying. No, apparently not, the guitarist said, and we went on walking along the canal and I looked down at the gravel, down at the grains of gravel, and it made the noise it does and I felt something, a diffuse pain, and I thought, as though in the background, while I was speaking, whether I should mention something to them. But what? I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. The feeling, this pain that was impossible to locate or describe, was familiar but ungraspable. What could I say to the guitarist and the composer? How could I formulate it? Maybe it can’t be explained, maybe it can’t be described, talked about, maybe it can’t be done, as they say, maybe I shouldn’t say anything about it, maybe I should just be quiet, keep on listening, maybe it will pass after a while, that was what I was thinking now, and we walked on, we walked on along the canal, alongside one another, and I heard the composer’s voice as I was thinking about Robi’s brother, who’d also been inside for something or other, and the corner flag and the cloud of gravel, and my mouth got dry and I breathed and looked up at a tower block in front of us, saw someone moving about up there on the roof, and thought about Copenhagen, where we were headed, to a concert at Vor Frue Kirke, in the cathedral – where Moosmann was going to play In Nomine Lucis, among other things – and I thought about Sanne in Copenhagen and I heard the composer’s voice but couldn’t listen, because I was hearing Robi’s voice at the same time and seeing Robi’s back receding, getting smaller and smaller, but his voice was just as persistent and rich inside my head. Fucking nice whores, Robi’d said, and I thought of Sanne, who fell from the fourth floor, somehow she survived that jump, that fall, Sanne, who grew up in Copenhagen Central Station, raised by the johns on Halmtorvet, as she used to say, they were a gang of, I don’t know, five or six kids aged thirteen, fourteen who used to hang out together. ‘The little match girls’ and ‘the ugly ducklings’, Jane used to call them, she was a psychologist at the supported housing they used sometimes (without really understanding, I think now, what that kind of characterisation, those associations, did to them). They stuck mainly to the central parts of Copenhagen – Vesterbro, Nørrebro, Østerbro and Christiania – but occasionally I visited Sanne in a little apartment in Ishøj where her brother lived. I met them in Christiania, on the way to Aarhus, Hamburg, Marseille or Istanbul, and we recognised each other immediately, that’s how I remember it. We – failed abortions, as she put it – all found ourselves in the same place: a hard, lurching place we’d come to to escape this or that, various hazes, various forms of violence, to disappear inside something, another haze, a numbness, a repose. We wandered about at night, slept in stairwells, on benches and in parks, in churchyards and the homes of various more or less lousy people we bumped into by chance, or because they had something we needed, money mostly. Sanne. Nicko, Wotan. Vivi. Fox, you trippy fuck. And I noticed the guitarist had asked me something, so I looked at him, mumbled a few words and gave a nod as he repeated: it shouldn’t work, but it does, in spite of everything, it’s really good, you know, evasive, subtle melodies, and I thought about the junkie’s ribs, and I thought of the pain and I thought of all the hundreds or even thousands of times I’d stood there, practising body blows in all those different gyms, with condensation dripping from the ceiling, onto the floor, onto us, where we threw punches at a bag or at mitts, threw punches and drove in punches, and I thought of the three times I’d thrown a really solid punch – decisive blows, as they say – once at a plain-clothes cop, though I didn’t know he was a cop and he didn’t do anything afterwards because he was on his own and because he was embarrassed that I’d brought him down with a single blow, and once at some mouthy guy in a club, and the last time at a racist who picked a fight with me on a night bus – and all three times were really successful, proper solid punches few could get up from, and every time, all that happened was I lifted my left hand and touched their face, with a little jerk, but lightly, very lightly, not a blow, almost a caress, so they would lift their arms in defence in a kind of reflex, exposing their body, their ribs, their spleen, and so I could get in position for the body blow, that is, with my right hip and shoulder back a little, and then just drive it in full power, from the legs, from the hip, just whip it in with the elbow at just the right angle and pointing up a little, and see the guys sink down with broken ribs and that expression on their faces that says: hey, wait, what’s happening now? – but I was thinking too of that time I got a cracked rib after getting kicked in the chest, and that pain, I recall it so clearly, those breaths, so shallow, so careful so as not to cause more pain, that absolutely horrific pain, and the contradiction of feeling it when you breathe, which you can’t stop doing, you have to breathe after all, you have to live after all, and I didn’t hear what the guitarist said and I thought I had to sort myself out, pull myself together, so I focused my gaze and said: Airs? As in the stuff we breathe? You have to live, after all, I thought again. Yeah, as in air, the composer said. Like shoes, don’t you have some of those? Yeah, look, she pointed at my shoes, at my feet, down at
the gravel. Like Nike Airs, she said. Plural, air in plural. And the guitarist said: yeah, that’s right. Or in a way at least. Air or ayre, it means like, song or melody, and it’s actually connected to aria, which comes from like air or aer, but then… he lost his thread a moment… I mean, it’s patterns, he said, it’s that, he almost stammered, it’s that, that, that, that the music is there in the oscillations, there, there’s, there’s, there’s nothing strange about it. Even if you might think— Now I interrupted him. Yeah, I said, sound is air after all, and… or I mean… I felt suddenly tired and thirsty, like a hangover, even though I hadn’t had anything to drink. Well, the composer said, not really, but OK, like oscillations in the air, pressure… I yawned. Changes in pressure, you know, it’s to do with the production values, or with the echo, the resonance, the production, the reverb, I don’t know how much you mute the strings when you play the harp, I don’t think you do, though I guess you have to, in fact, maybe it’s necessary, I mean, maybe it’s obvious… When spring comes, another year has passed, and we travel past yet another lake. Everything is grass, birches, sky. House after house after house. Birches, sky, another year has passed. I can hardly believe it’s true. We’ve lived yet another year. The large rooms are divided up into several smaller rooms, with no regard paid to ventilation or light. The amount of rent was decided by the size of the room and the distance from the street. Soon enough the whole house filled up, from basement to loft, by tenants who lived from hand to mouth, morally loose, with careless habits, a lost people, just as obscene as beggars. It’s like Robert Wyatt says: Be in the air, but not be air, be in the no air, the guitarist said with a muted laugh, and I searched for the tune a while, and then it came, Had I been free, I could have chosen not to be me, but I didn’t say anything, let it play on in my mind. What kind of spider understands arachnophobia? Yeah, I see now, he said, what it means… But I didn’t hear. I was somewhere else, because that thing about the ribs made me think about Kiko and the last time I’d met him, his books and that last night, the night that started at Kiko’s flat and finished god knows where. It was the first time I’d been to his place. I took the metro there, it was early evening, after work. I found the street with the help of a crumpled little map I’d got from Argo, I think he’d torn it out of a free paper. I got into the yard via a rickety wooden door covered with tags and shreds of old posters. In the entrance it was dark and damp and I clearly remember the heavy smell of rubbish and old piss, which made me raise a hand to my face and quicken my step. The yard consisted of cracked, moss-covered asphalt and a two-metre-high red-brick wall. On the wall someone had sprayed a goal with a stick man for a goalie, and in one corner was a rack for beating mats. Four children about ten years old were standing next to it. I looked around. There were three stairwells. I turned to the kids. Excuse me, do you know where Kiko lives? They looked at me, two boys and two girls. Francisco? Short guy with dreads? He means the nigger, one of the boys said quietly to the other. I suddenly saw he had a large kitchen knife in his hand and the other boy was holding out his arm with the inside upwards, upon which two long cuts were bleeding slowly. Hey, what the hell is this? I said. He can’t feel anything, said the older girl quickly. But what the hell are you doing? I asked again, and moved closer. The boy with the bloody arm said: it’s true. I’ve got no feeling in my arm. His nose was blocked. I could see a little drip of snot in one of his nostrils. We’re just kidding about, said the boy with the knife. What the fuck do you care. You’re a fresh one, kiddo, I said, taking hold of the wrist of the hand holding the knife. Watch out you don’t get a slap. Fuck you, you fucking creep. The boy tore himself away as he dropped the knife and spat in my face before running out through the main gate, which slammed loudly behind him. Having instinctively turned my face away, I wiped the saliva from my cheek and looked at the other children. The older girl shook her head a little. You shouldn’t have touched him. Adults shouldn’t touch children. The boy with no feeling looked at the blood running down his arm, the back of his hand, between his knuckles, the middle finger and the ring finger, and dripping down onto the ground. Are you OK? I said. I don’t have any feeling in my arm, the boy said again. No, but you’re bleeding, for fuck’s sake. You need to put a plaster on it or a bandage or something. Why do you care so much, who the fuck are you? the girl said. I threw my arms up and nodded. Yeah, that’s a good question. A really good question. What do I care? I turned my back to them, walked back to the gate and muttered something about them being totally fucked up, tried to sort of shake them off me, but I looked back immediately and asked over my shoulder: do you know where Kiko lives, or not? C, the girl said, pulling out a tissue. Second floor. Thanks a lot, I said, with as much sarcasm as I could muster. You’re welcome, blatte, she replied quietly. The boy grimaced as he gave me the finger. I stopped, intending to turn back and carry on arguing, but, realising it was pointless, clenched my jaw briefly and headed for door C instead. I walked up the stairs, saw Kiko’s name and rang the doorbell. Kiko opened up. All right Cody? What’s goin on? Nothing much, Kiko said. Playing PlayStation. I walked into the hallway. OK. What game? Resident Evil. I nodded and grinned. Got stuck in Raccoon City, right? As per usual mate, Kiko said with a grimace. Shit, sick fucking kids on your estate, man, I said, hanging up my jacket. I know. Don’t talk to them. They’re totally messed up. Racist too. We went into the living room. The blinds were down, it was dark and smelled of smoke. A big lava lamp and the glow from the TV. Yeah, one of them anyway. It’s just cos his brother’s a skinhead. But he’s not dangerous. Just stupid. Plays Skrewdriver and all this racist Oi! shit so the whole yard shakes with it. He laughed and sat down in the armchair. I went over to the lava lamp, leaned over and followed a red, amoeba-like clump with my finger. I normally answer with N.W.A and my speakers are better so I always win. I don’t know. It sort of feels like they need their heads smashing in. Perhaps we’re too kind to the little bastards. Kiko started playing again. I sat on the sofa, looked at the zombies filling the screen. Bloody arms, like the little guy with no feeling. Though one time he actually got a gun out, Kiko said as he played. The brother or the little guy? The little guy. You’re kidding. I swear. A Beretta, with the serial number scratched out. He must have got it off the dwarf, you know, Carlos. The only guy I know who’s cold enough to hook little kids up with that kind of shit, Kiko said, shaking his head. Do you know about that stuff? Like which one? Beretta and all that, brands and shit? Not really. I just know that brand cos I had one a while back. Replica, but still. Sold it when I bought the Akai sampler. What happened with the little dude then? No, nothing. When I didn’t back off, he did. As usual. As usual, I laughed. What the fuck, don’t play gangsta. He asked if I wanted to play a little RE. I said no. There was fruit on the coffee table. I asked if I could have an apple. Course, he said. Have a red one, they’re amazing. We talked while he played. I saw he had a book on the table and I peered at it. Edgar Allan Poe. Kiko said he liked Poe. The stories. The poems felt a bit old-fashioned. He’d been given a copy by his sister when he was in hospital in London. I asked why he was in hospital. He told me he’d been jumped by racists in Seville. And he’d stabbed one of them in the stomach. He didn’t know what happened to the other guy. He’d got concussion and broken ribs and a punctured lung. Then in London the wound in his lung had reopened or something and he was brought in again. He said the pain was indescribably awful. He just wanted more and more morphine the whole time. But when the pain finally disappeared it was pretty nice to lie there and trip out to Poe’s stories. It was then he realised he liked reading. He went to a library and was surprised when the librarian, this old lady, sixty-odd, pulled out a load of books on zombies and old German poems about corpses and stuff. I asked about the attack and he told me it happened at night outside a train station. I asked if he carried a knife. Not any more, he said. But it was different there. You had to carry a knife with you in Spain, even if you didn’t want to, because Spain was heaving with sick racists, he said. Fucked
up, that is, I said. But you know, that Poe guy was a racist too, Kiko said. Everyone’s a fucking racist. You know what she called me, I said. The little girl in the yard. No, he said, and turned off the game and the TV. What? Blatte. She said: You’re welcome, blatte. Really? Shit. That’s sick. I laughed. Right? You know how long it’s been since I heard that? What? That long? To my face, I mean, yeah, it’s been a long time. Really? I swear. God, do you remember the first time? I remember it in detail, man. Nah, I don’t. OK, I can’t remember the year, but it was at a football camp, like ’88, ’89, ’90, something like that. So you were like ten, eleven? Shit, that old? I swear, it was the first time. It was at football camp. Me and someone, I don’t remember who, maybe Besart, someone else, we were winding up these older guys, taking their ball and shit. Then one of them, his name was Magnusson or Magnus or something, whatever, then he said fucking blattar to us. I’d never heard it so I didn’t get it. But then I asked someone. And they said: it means foreigner, immigrant, dirty wog, you know, though I hadn’t heard that then either. And I couldn’t let it go of course, so when I went past this guy Mange, or maybe his name was Tobbe, I slammed him in the chest, or the stomach maybe, with everything I had. Without a word… all psycho? Yeah, yeah, totally silent, just: bam. So what happened? What happened? He was almost a foot taller than me. He looked at me and punched me full in the face so I got a split lip. Then I got a massive caning from the trainer and later from my mum for getting in fights. Catastrophe. Yeah. Totally. A thick lip and total disgrace for having stood up for myself. Know what? I was at a camp like that once too. I was about ten, twelve, too, maybe a bit older. These neo-nazis came along and were gonna smack us up. What, adults? Yeah, yeah, they had cars and shit, motorbikes. Drove up late one night when it was dark. The camp leaders and older kids chased them off, but, you know, we were shitting ourselves. Course. Thought they were gonna lynch us, brah. Sick times. Yeah. Really, really sick. Think about them all. What are they doing now? Think about it. Guys like that, frightening kids. Honestly. I don’t wanna know, I said, I hope they don’t exist any more. No, Kiko said, but they’re probably around. They’re probably politicians now, and soon they’ll take over everything. We sat quietly a while. Then Kiko told me, out of nowhere, that he had a son somewhere he wasn’t allowed to see, the mother didn’t want anything to do with him. He showed me a photo of a tiny baby. It’s a fucking old picture, he said. He’s five now. I haven’t seen him for three years. I’m not allowed to see him. Why, I asked. I don’t know, he told me. I didn’t say anything. Kiko started rolling a spliff. It’s complicated, he said. Complicated? I said. He didn’t reply. Damn, I didn’t know you were a dad, I said, and tried to sound happy. We smoked. Really oily black kush from the Zambian by Metro. The guy we bought New York Diesel from? Exactly, him. It hit me hard and Kiko put on DJ Screw, who I’d never heard. ‘Still D.R.E.’ from Freestyle Kings, bro. I’m spinning out, this is so heavy. Neither of us could speak, I looked at Kiko with eyes like tiny cracks, the muscles in my face soft. Shit, I’m spilling out across the floor, man. Pff, I said, pointing at my forehead. Suddenly he took the remote, put the music on mute and looked at me with a really pained expression. You know, he said, my mamma sold ganja in Córdoba when I was little. I didn’t respond, it was all so weird. We never used to say ‘ganja’ – that was the kind of thing the wannabe Rastas said. I tried to think, but everything was somehow drawn out. What did he mean? I didn’t know what to say, my tongue was stuck fast to the roof of my mouth. I just said, is that true, feeling as twisted as the music. As though waves were passing through my body and driving my flesh down towards the ground, down towards the dark-blue carpet, which I was scraping my toes against, where brown tobacco flakes and small columns of ash lay where I’d dropped them. My mouth was dry but I managed to gather a small quantity of saliva which I put on the tip of my index finger, then bent down and touched, as carefully as I could, the ash so it stuck and lifted from the floor. I brushed my finger against the edge of the ashtray and wiped it on my trousers. When I looked at the carpet again it looked the same, dark blue, with tobacco flakes and lumps of ash, cylindrical, grey marl. Hadn’t I just removed them? I was drawn down again, my hand carried on wiping my finger against my trousers. Kiko blew out a deep toke and squinted. I swear, he said. Heavy, I said. I looked at him and saw he’d got stuck somewhere, he was still squinting and his eyebrows were raised in two high arches. Two arches, two lines and a mouth that said the same thing again, kind of mechanically, as though he was practising a line. My-mamma-sold-ganja-in-Córdoba-when-I-was-little. The words echoed in my brain: mamma ganja Córdoba. Then I laughed: Kiko, for fuck’s sake. I don’t know where Córdoba is. He too, laughing: en Andalucía, puto. He put the sound on, the bass flowed in again and we listened, so stoned we even forgot it was time to roll another. Then we left and went to meet Soot, Dima, Becca, Sanne – and the others, Adi, Olga, Ponyboy, Lajos. That was the last night and we never said goodbye. Soot, I thought. Soot, goddamn Soot. The guitarist pointed at a tower block and said something. I looked up and saw two figures moving about on the roof, at least ten, twelve floors up. But a few seconds passed before I realised that, aside from an interjected look, what he was talking about had nothing to do with the figures. But Langille, the composer said, she’s done loads of interesting things too and those records they made together are really good. You know, sometimes it makes me think about Colette Magny actually, have you heard her interpretations of Artaud, where she shouts and makes a load of noise and howls and rages? Totally fantastic, really. Not because Langille does all that, but there’s a tone there, a, how can I put it, like a Stimmung, if you get what I mean. The composer looked at me. Speaking of Stimmung, how’s it going with the microtones? When I didn’t answer for a few seconds, she added: pun intended. Soot fell, I thought. I got off lightly.
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