The way the wax-plant flowers moved, those small movements, that trembling, that gentle vibrating, like an echo of the moving strings, combined with the low-frequency tone, the rumble – all that lingered in my consciousness as I saw the newly built tower block and the figures on its roof, with the railway tracks and rail yard in the background, all while I tried to say something to the guitarist and the composer about Scelsi and my microtonal work. We walked towards the central station to take the train to Copenhagen, to Vor Frue Kirke and the Moosmann concert, and I pushed my bike with both hands now, and when we crossed the road I looked around and thought for a moment that I couldn’t orient myself, that I didn’t recognise the setting, and I thought the roundabout must be newly built too, the same with the fence and the benches, and we walked along the canal, between the water and the tracks, on newly laid tarmac, and I felt the bike moving differently: lighter, smoother, and our shoes made no noise, or almost none at least, and the guitarist said: was it some special instrument he had for that? Yeah, I said. Well, I don’t know about special, it was something called an ondiola, a kind of Italian version of a clavioline, I think, that early synth. The composer said something about microtonal potential and the guitarist started going on about Tolgahan Çoğulu’s custom-built instruments with their moveable frets, and I was listening partly, half, as though dazed, or absent-minded, lost in thought as they say, looking at the graffiti, thinking about Soot, of course, again. Homeless, face pressing against the ground. The guitarist and the composer were talking fast, so fast I couldn’t keep up, I’d barely had time to understand the words, their import, before the next salvo came. A lot of people have experimented with microtonal tunings, the composer said, students of Pauline Oliveros, who was doing that kind of thing too. She turned to me: she’s listened to Scelsi a fair bit, I reckon. Bro, I can’t do it, I can’t take any more. Riverbed. Structures like mudbanks, levees, oxbow lakes and cut-off channels out in the delta. And I thought, again: I got off lightly. And Soot, I heard him say cherry orchard. Just like that. Got off lightly. That place, if it is a place. It is a place, and it’s a movement. It’s a bus on a roundabout. It’s a bus moving forward and round, it sways and I brace my body, grip the handhold, the bus judders, vibrates, the driver accelerates, our bodies want to fall, outwards, backwards, and I grip the handhold and look up at the roof. And Alvin Lucier, that piece for cello and vases? Have you played it? I mean it’s a completely different thing, right, but it sounds the same, if I’m not mistaken? I thought about Soot, and another writer who’d recently died, hit by a commuter train. Not that I knew him or anything, I just read about it and saw it before me, as I’d seen Soot die again and again in my imagination, even though it had never happened to him, even though I knew he looked after himself, that he was careful. I’m careful, he always said. I’m careful. But you can never be careful enough. At four in the morning that other guy died and he left a final tag behind him, a final little dash of colour. No, I said, no, but I’ve heard Charles Curtis play it. It’s really nice, yeah. I looked at the front wheel of the bike, turning, the spokes that vanished and appeared, vanished and appeared with the movement. So still and lovely, I said. Sure, I guess there are links. But the differences are probably bigger, at least if you’re playing the pieces. And I started thinking about the black-and-white moiré pattern on the sleeve and about Scelsi’s work with the golden ratio. What differences were there? Arithmetic, geometry, harmony. Wasn’t everything mathematics, or at least patterns, repetition, variation? But Soot, I thought. Soot, that’s what we called him, that was his tag, and I thought about that place, what was it, twenty years ago, that roundabout, when I sat on the bus and the sun was rising and I saw bloodstains on shoes, swollen knuckles, but the clouds and the sky too, white and blue, just as something brown became green and yellow in the grass in the middle of the roundabout we were passing, the bus swayed and I was pulled out towards the sides, I spent my time on the city’s southern periphery, not far, not far at all from the little allotments where people grew, and maybe still do grow, mint and garlic, thyme and parsley, carrots and radishes and candy-striped beetroot, probably not that far from the fenced-off cherry orchards I’d never in my life seen – The cherry orchard’s been sold! Soot said, and yeah, we called him Soot, even though he was called something else, cos that was his tag, and he liked to say those words, cherry orchard, and I wonder how long he remembered it, how often he said those words towards the end, if he sat somewhere, a fucked-up bloody tramp of a junkie who everyone abandoned, especially the ones who loved him, if he sat and repeated the words to himself or to someone else, if anyone listened to a ghost like that, cherry orchard, I don’t know why, I think it was just the sound, that he enjoyed saying it, that he just liked to say cherry orchard, that he enjoyed saying Kirschgarten, that he liked saying körsbärsträdgården, that it gave him something: saying višňový sad, or livada de vișini, or cseresznyéskert, or višne bahçesi, I don’t know, that there was something about the different languages, the different sounds, the prosodic fragments, I don’t know, perhaps it was just that he knew a line from something in school, I don’t know why he knew it. Was the cherry orchard sold? Yes, he said. Who bought it? I bought it. I bought it, he said. Wait, ladies and gentlemen, please, my head’s in a fog, I can’t speak, he said – not far, not far at all from motorway bridges, figs and quinces and kitchen windows with watercress and forest glades where dense carpets of wood sorrel still cover the ground, and I don’t know, but all that’s going on as the bus sways its way around the roundabout, I’m gripping the grey handhold, bracing my body and looking out through a slightly scratched windowpane, up at the clouds, yes, the white, it’s a circular motion, but it’s more than that, another motion, a centrifugal force, we drive round and round, but also out and out, I’m on my way round and out, far out, in the same way I’m on the way out, far out, far away from the flickering strip lights of the station, away from everything I’ve done and away from Dima and Hex and the kids in the squat and all that, and I’m being drawn out, into the south of the city, where I’ve lived, on the southern periphery, where the city meets the fields, where the city meets the hill, where everything gets bigger in some way, or maybe smaller, like when you zoom out I mean, so everything gets bigger as it gets smaller, you get me, Soot? Like that, just like that, like when you zoom out, everything gets smaller and bigger, bigger and smaller. You get it, Soot? You were proud of that, or – how can I put it – you liked, in any case, to emphasise that: the origin, the source, despite the fact that a conventional pride of place was impossible for us, let alone national pride, in the event we should be interested, since neither we nor our parents ever lived in the same place for more than one or two, maximum three, four years, we always left every place and we were always newcomers to a place, as soon as we stopped being newcomers, as soon as we were no longer strangers in a place, in a community, then we left that community, that place, that location, and now the bus is swaying and I’m pushed out and round, round and out, and you know, I think, when I think of you Soot, I often start talking to myself, I raise my voice, and stand alongside myself and start talking, or I stand in front of myself and start talking, as though I were Soot, as though I were another, and I’m ashamed, but I brush off the shame, try to ignore the narcissism, I start talking, I am Soot, I rock back and forth, suck my teeth, I am Soot, I chew, I talk, I look you in the eye, I suck my teeth and spit, I open my mouth and say something, I’m constantly moving, cracking up, I talk about anything at all, about sandpits, about knives, about miserable filthy clothes, anything, really, or almost anything anyway, about stolen silver jewellery, about gymnastics, about overgrown parks, about how I found several kilos of white powder, packed in plastic bags and taped with brown tape, when I was out playing in that clump of trees we called a forest, out by Tygelsjö, behind the water tower, do you remember Cody, when I was seven, eight years old and Mum rang the police, and they came and collected the bags, they didn
’t say anything, but I reckon it was amphetamine, and of course we could have sold it and made nuff cash, but Mum didn’t know anything about that kind of thing, and even if she had known she never would have done it, and it was probably good she didn’t, cos someone probably would have found out, and then we would have had some speed-mafia Pole on our backs, this is the kind of thing I say out loud to myself, I say: Cody, listen, you get me Cody, that’s how it was back then, there’s so much I could tell you about that, about those areas, the southern parts of these cities, so much, almost too much, about the zones in the south where the hate burns bright, about all the stuff we’ve sprung from, too much, I say, Cody, Cody, Cody, this kind of chat always makes me think of funerals, Cody, you know, it always makes me think about the dead, it always makes me walk with them, walk beside them, as though I were already one of them, as though we were on the way to yet another of those funerals, yet again, and it’s nothing, just there and just then, it means nothing, we don’t even know who’s being put in the ground, who’s in the coffin. Who is it Cody? I don’t know, and it’s nothing, this, nothing, just a few steps, one leg in front of the other, lungs breathing for themselves, eyes seeing, ears hearing, by necessity, it lives, this body, by necessity, it moves, in need, on the way to yet another funeral, by necessity yet another, but it’s not mine, not Ponyboy’s, not Lalik’s, not Darry’s, no, they just fell asleep, and if you open your mouth out it runs, like after getting a tooth knocked out, a funeral, pulled down towards the ground, sunk into the ground, it just runs out, these funerals and these people and this wretchedness, I’m drawn to it, but not to my own, not Blerim’s, not Shaban’s, or Chabanne’s, not Jovan’s, or Jonny’s, not String’s, not Vlora’s, not Wotan’s, Ahmed’s or Aren’s, not Nitwit’s, Benny’s, Danish’s, no, they’re just sleeping, their names fall, run out of your mouth, but it’s not their funerals this is about, I don’t know, I’m just moving forward, looking up at what looks like a pink sky with mother-of-pearl-adorned party horns or whatever, or dark stars, or whatever, and all against my will, it’s not my intention, it’s against my will, against my intentions, you get what I’m saying, Cody? The will to shut my mouth is stronger, because the sounds that come out of my open mouth have no meaning, and because, seen from some kind of objective perspective, I intend to keep quiet about everything, because I know there’s no meaning in it, and believe me, the impulse to keep my trap shut is strong, the impulse to keep quiet about the funerals, to stop saying names like Erik, Rodde, Elna, Solmaz and Marcin, to let all that go and fall silent forever, that impulse is strong, but it’s like after a tooth has been knocked out, you know, your mouth is full of it and it has to run out, cos – this I know, cos I was there when Laila, in pure desperation, cut her tongue out – swallowing blood in such large quantities is no good for the body, cos the body, the stomach, can’t handle it, it’s too much iron or something, you start feeling ill, you get nauseous, you get sick, and now my mouth is full of it, of that taste of iron and names and places, of events and movements, of memories and images, I have a mouth full of the tongue she cut off, I have a head full of blood, I see it the whole time, I have waking dreams about it in the day and I dream about it at night, my head is full of it, Cody, I have a mouth full of blood, I have a mouth full of earth, I have a mouth full of you, I have a mouth full of your ears and your mouth, I have a mouth full of your sealed lips, which are hard when they press against my lips, as though they want to bite me, I have a mouth full of foam, I suck on my teeth and blood comes, I eat earth full of worms that tie themselves in knots in my throat, earth and gravel that scrapes against my palate, my mouth sinks in, contorted into grimaces, stuck through with teeth that bite into and consume it, I have a mouth full of figures, like that poster, who was it that had it on their wall, alongside 2Pac, Hendrix, Marley, Cobain or something. Not Ville, or whatever his name was, not him, my mouth full of earth now, I don’t mean Willy D, or whatever he was called, the Greenlander, his mum was a childminder, not him, Eskimo, that’s what we called him, the kids crawled around screaming on a filthy rug in one room, he couldn’t say S, I think that was it, and not the Albanian, what was his name, everyone said he was gay, but I don’t know, not that guy Johnny, I don’t know which country he was from, Africa somewhere, not him, so who was it, come on Cody, maybe some suedi, not that Turkish girl either, you know, years later I figured out that they weren’t Turks after all, they were like Christian Armenians, or Assyrians, or Syrians or something, I don’t know, but imagine all those years with everyone chatting shit, we used to go on about smirking Turks and Turks being jerks and all that, everyone said they were rich, that their parents were strict and used to hit them, I dunno, they had to go to university and if they couldn’t go to university, start their own business straight away, some were like that, a lot of Iranians, but we didn’t have any Iranians, you know, it was mostly Yugos, Chileans, Hungarians, Roma, Albanians and Poles, no Finns, or maybe a few, Arabs from different countries, Turks, Afghans, Somalis, a few Russians, a load of dropout Swedes, yeah yeah OK I’m gonna shut up soon, I don’t want to talk bout it either, I just wanna say I started thinking about that guy, if it was him, with that poster, you know, a soldier dying, who gets shot down, from behind, he’s falling, dropping his gun, caught just so, in the air, mid-fall, and then it says: Why? Do you remember, do you remember us laughing, we creased up, why did he have that picture, his name was Deniz, yeah, he was in care, and fuck it, I can say it to you, but my mouth is sinking inside itself, twisted into grimaces, stuck through with teeth that are biting it to pieces and consuming it, but that’s the image I have in my mouth, a poster, white background, black print, a picture of a dying soldier, shot down, dropping his gun and falling and then it says: Why? and now I know, man, it’s on my tongue, in my mouth, I know we listened to Bob Marley and it was at Deniz’s place, that home is in my mouth, that children’s home, the community home, it was there, over his bed, that he had that poster, and I don’t know, but I remember we sat there listening and he showed me the articles his brother had cut out and saved, and I remember seeing the words RUBBISH DUMP, so now I have those newspaper articles in my mouth too, and I have to chew on them, the letters and the pictures, I have to chew those fucking pictures and those fucking letters, those fucking words, cos it didn’t just say RUBBISH DUMP, it said more than that, it said much more, there were so many words, they were black on white, and the words were HUMAN and RUBBISH DUMP, those are the words I have in my mouth, man, it’s those goddamn fucking words I have in my fucking goddamn mouth, Cody, HUMAN and RUBBISH DUMP, and you know, my dad said to me that now we’ve come to PARADISE, but in the paper they wrote that it was a HUMAN RUBBISH DUMP and that it was a catastrophe and it was 1982 we moved there, to paradise, I think, but it was 1985 when they wrote about the human rubbish dump, they wrote the suburb of Holma has become a catastrophe district, a human rubbish dump, they wrote, Holma has become the part of the city where almost everyone with problems gets relocated, with the blessing of social services, this is not the Evening Post’s harsh judgement of a pile of concrete, they wrote, no, this is what the people who live there think about their own neighbourhood, they wrote, and then they wrote that the Evening Post has spent a week wandering around Holma, we’ve met the addicts, the immigrants, the young people who like beating people up, and they wrote that they’d met the embattled idealists who wanted change in Holma, the idealists who hope it isn’t too late, they wrote, and we’d only been there a short while, but it could already be too late, and others, like Rodde, Elna, Solmaz and Marcin, and fucking loads of others, hadn’t even arrived yet but it was already too late, it could already be too late you see, despite the fact that some of them hadn’t even been born, and then we had headlines like KEEP SWEDEN SWEDISH and NO LONGER OUR HOME and KNIVES IN OUR BACKS and PYROMANIA and GRASS FIRES, it was a special kind of poetry, a rank, shrill song about our childhood, steeped in Geschäftsgeist, a poem about our lives in capitals and bold type, with words like TWO WOR
LDS and SEVEN IN TEN IMMIGRANTS and FORCED TO TAKE IN and TERRIFYING FACTS that they repeated for increased impact, TERRIFYING FACTS and THOSE WHO CAN, ESCAPE, and it’s that image I have in my mouth, a photograph of some dark, threatening figures, some teenagers they’d shot in silhouette in front of a corner shop, in silhouette in the dark, that image, and I guess I didn’t know anything about it at that time, or at least very little, cos I wasn’t one of those kids who got to stand and pose in front of the photographer’s lens, I wasn’t one of those kids who got to stand there boasting about roundhouse kicks and butterfly knives to a reporter from the Evening Post, a reporter so bursting with poetry and lyricism and eloquence and black ink and Geschäftsgeist that poetry positively ran out of his mouth, like blood, free from violence, blood that came from a good heart, yeah blood, like after a tooth has been knocked out, but in his mouth, and it ran down onto his notepad and then ran onto the presses where it was spread across paper, then cut to shape and stapled together and sent into the world again where it was sucked up into people’s brains via their eyeholes, via their pupils, as though they were fleas, ordinary house fleas, ordinary human fleas, as though their ability to read was the proboscis and the newspaper, the very paper it was printed on, was the skin, which they attached themselves to with small but incredibly strong hooks, and the contents, the meaning, the very sense of it, was the bloodily black poetry that had run out of the reporter’s mouth, and the blood that, through that parasitic act, that outwardly, bodily parasitic act, forced its way out and into their bodies, out into their limbs, in roughly the same way and in the same order as a baby develops the ability to move, its gross motor skills and its fine motor skills, that’s to say, first into its eyes, via the proboscis, and then out into the face, and down into the neck, then the arms, down into the trunk, and last of all down the legs and out into the feet, right out into the toes, as they say, the whole way out and the whole way down, from top to toe, as they say, and when the people then moved, when they went about their business, when they woke and ate breakfast, when they showered and got dressed, when they left the cosy confines of their homes, as they say, well, the darkness was always there, and then, when they threw themselves out into the world, free and full of confidence and courage and Geschäftsgeist, well, then the bloodily dark poetry leaked out into the atmosphere, like an invisible, scentless gas, more or less, and when it came back to us then, when we breathed it in, we too were filled with it, we who’d never even been there, even I who knew nothing about that stuff, I who wasn’t one of those teenagers, I who was more of a little brother to those teenagers, or a neighbour, or a schoolmate, the one they frightened when I walked up with my mind full of childish ideas, playful dreams and wild hopes, the kind of thing that would soon be beaten out of me in roughly the same way you toilet-train a cat, and in that way the outwardly parasitic act has become an inwardly parasitic act, the darkly bloody poetry that originated in our own actions, filled our bodies roughly the way a tapeworm occupies space in a body, living and growing in the gut, living on our shit, catching in us, with hooks and suckers, you get me Cody, it’s that kinda thing I have in my mouth, I have worms like that in my mouth, with hooks like that and suckers like that, I chew them, I have guts in my mouth, I carry my own guts in my mouth, and I guess that’s why I could never make sense of it all in my head, cos you know my dad had told me that now we’d come to paradise, and I knew it was the richest land in the world, but in the paper they wrote it was a human rubbish dump and it was a catastrophe, and I dunno, it was 1982 we moved there I think, but it was 1985 when they wrote human rubbish dump, and so I guess it must have been, big deal, and what can you make on a rubbish dump, well, you make nothing and you make chaos, that’s about it, and then you laugh at the adults who break down in front of you and cry from the frustration and the misdirected empathy, or what can I say, nothing and chaos, as I said, there was nothing more to be done, there was nothing, nothing was something, and the thing that actually was something, it was chaos, it smelled of booze, cat’s piss, sweat and full ashtrays, the thing that was something, it hurt, it was that laugh, the fact that you knew it was some kind of weapon, that being able to laugh at everything and say fuck it all, bro, like I give a shit, there’s nothing you can do to me that’s worse than what I go home to every night, it’s just chaos, bro, and that was that, big deal, and now I think about it, I’m mostly just surprised that we didn’t do worse things, that we didn’t burn more things down, that we were pretty moderate, just set fire to the grass and the nursery and that little shed by the garage and a few cars and a motorbike, some shed over by the car park, but never the school and never our own houses, even though we tried a couple of times, or that I didn’t beat Danne to death when he said we were dumpster divers, because even if everyone knew it was a human rubbish dump, this place, you didn’t wanna look like a tramp, so yeah, I beat the shit out of Danne when he said we were dumpster divers, which I guess we were, to be fair, you know, but it doesn’t matter, or I mean, it didn’t matter, he shouldn’t have said it, it wasn’t something he should be saying, you know, but it was true, it happened now and then, it happened that Mum called us and said she’d found a new container and we went down to the back yard and unlocked our bikes and pedalled off to some trash-filled metal box somewhere or other, in Bellevue, Kulladal, Gröndal or Ärtholmen, where people threw away things that weren’t totally broken, that hadn’t fallen apart, not completely anyway, things that could still be used, things that could be fixed, repurposed, used in some way or other, and one of us, or two of us, or all three, depending on whether we had to keep watch or not, jumped into the dumpster and lifted out junk and trash and looked for things that worked, and we were ashamed, it was that whole thing with the human rubbish dump and shit again, you know what I mean I think, and sometimes we didn’t find anything, and sometimes we found something, and if we happened to find something we could take home and make use of we got to feel ashamed every time we looked at the thing, cos every time we came into a room and looked at a lamp or a curtain or a chair or a rug, we knew that thing, that toaster, that tray, that juice beaker, it had come out of a dumpster, and we’d dived for it, and that meant we were dumpster divers, no doubt about it, once and for all, and it was the same with the things I’d nicked, the stuff I’d pinched, like that radio I took when we broke into the nursery, when Carlos fell down through the skylight and I jumped down after him and he sprained his foot and I gashed my hand, and I nicked the radio, I stole it and lied to Mum that I’d found it in the bin rooms on some estate, or in a dumpster, that someone had thrown it out, they must’ve bought a new one, but there were letters burnt into the black plastic that said the council owned the radio, that it belonged to the city, that it belonged to the state, but I burned off the letters with a lighter and got the plastic to melt, got it to go completely gooey and sticky, and then I smoothed out those state-owned letters, and then I said I’d found it, that someone had thrown it away cos they’d probably put it on the hob or something, and I don’t know if she believed me, but it could have been true, and then we had that radio in the kitchen, on the windowsill, for years, and it worked well, and I used it, that lovely black radio with red detailing, and burned-in letters that were no longer visible, no longer applicable, I used it a lot, I took it into my room in the evening and listened to the radio, listened to the radio programmes, they came from another world, they came from the other side of the sea, the other side of the giant ocean I’d learned that some children could cross, in little dinghies, in little wooden boats, made from reclining chairs and tables, and sails made of sheets and towels, and I closed my eyes and listened, closed my eyes and saw other worlds and other lives before me, others’ lives, better lives, while I listened to programmes with names like Eldorado and Inferno and Soul Corner and Slammer, and I listened and thought and listened and soon learned to recognise the sounds I liked, the ones that sounded different to the ones I was used to, but also words and sounds that in different ways
related to the life I recognised, the pain and the rage and the shame and the hate and the madness, like when I, at Eleonora’s place, got to hear Godflesh and Slayer for the first time, and at that point, as I listened, it was like my life got better, like it really, properly, got noticeably better just cos some guy had stood there yelling in a studio, as though my life became another as I lay there with my ear to the state’s little loudspeaker, when I recorded the songs or whole radio programmes, so I could listen again and again, but the whole time I knew it was stolen, that I’d nicked that shit, and it was the same with the lamps and the candlesticks and picture frames, every time we used them we’d feel ashamed, and we knew that as we stood there in the dumpster and looked around us, a bag of clothes was ripped open and we looked at them, looked to see if they could be worn, that they fit, that they were intact, that they didn’t stink of piss or shit or puke or mould, and the fear of being discovered was double, on one hand residents, janitors, cops and shit, on the other people we knew, our fear of being branded dumpster divers, which was what we were, the terror of being branded down-and-outs, which we were, social cases, yeah, like the poor fucking dumpster-diving family we really were, that was precisely what we were, penniless social cases who rummaged through dumpsters after nice things to have in our home, nice things to wear on our bodies, and we continued to be dumpster divers till Securitas started patrolling that shit and the people who threw out things that worked started locking up their rubbish, cos it was theirs, cos they’d learned the art of telling yours from mine, as the pigs would put it, and they were proper, sturdy locks, made from toughened steel and that dot that meant they were difficult to open, that you couldn’t pick with those kiddies’ picklocks I carried with me, picklocks I made from those little key-type things you open sardine tins with, cans of processed ham or whatever it’s called, help me, food, keys, picks, ham, pigs, cops, cans, aluminium, shit bro, everything’s spinning, I mean, wait a bit, good people, forgive me, my head’s spinning, I can’t talk properly, I’ve got something in my mouth, I’ve got a mouth full of food, of blood and pig, and Danne’s bloody nose under my fist and my stranglehold, and his eyes, his piggy eyes, staring and showing he took back what he’d said, what he’d said about us being dumpster divers and dropouts, which we were, but I threatened him anyway, knocked him down and sat on him and threw a few punches, held my hand round his throat, and his eyes opened wide like he was a little pig, or a little calf, a tasty little morsel of meat, and there was some other pig I did in when he said Dad was an alkie, which he was, but he still got a fat thump on the kisser and then he kept quiet about it, it’s not a thing I wanna be reminded of the whole time, right, little piggy, not even I wanna talk about it, not even now, I mean, everyone already knows everything, everyone out here’s already heard it, I don’t know, Cody, I don’t know why I’m going over this again, over and over again, this mess, over and over again, this miserable shit, this murderously boring dirge, I don’t know Cody, I don’t fucking know, I’d rather give it a miss, be someone else, have a different mouth, without bloody pigs in, without that taste, without these words, it’s so meaningless and boring and I don’t even care, and why should I care, who cares, shit, Cody, forgive me, I don’t know, it’s against my will, believe me, that much I know, it’s not my intention, it’s against my will, against my intentions, as I said, yeah, the desire to shut my mouth is greater, always, stronger, cos the sounds that come out of my open mouth have nothing to do with anything, nothing real, nothing more than guts full of shit and bloody pigs, and I know it, and I’m longing for peace, to get away from the sound of my own voice, get out of my own shit-streaked pig’s head, believe me, bro, the impulse to shut my mouth once and for all is strong, but it’s like I can’t do it, I can’t, it just happens, it opens like a well-fucked anus and all that shit leaks out, and then suddenly my mouth is full of it again, of names and places, of events and movements, of memories and images, I have a mouth full of ugly memories and ugly words, I can feel it, how I stand there with my mouth open, open like an idiot, and my head is full of ugly blood, my eyes, I really can see it the whole time, I have waking dreams about it in the day and I dream about it at night, I have a brain full of it, Cody, my whole mouth is full of blood, my mouth is full of earth, my mouth is full of names, my mouth is full of you, my mouth is full of your ears and your mouth, my mouth is full of your sealed lips, which are hard as they press against my lips, almost like a cock, a cock with teeth, my mouth is full of your face and I’m eating earth full of worms that tie themselves in knots in my throat, earth and gravel that scrapes against my palate, my cheeks sink in, my mouth is twisted by teeth biting and consuming it, my mouth is full of figures and letters and words and images I looked at in those papers I went round trying to sell, and those flyers I handed out, when I was trying to be an honest little boy, an honourable little saint with no need to care about the pig’s blood and the rubbish and the earth, when I worked, when I believed, without understanding that that was what I believed, or that I believed anything at all, since I couldn’t think, since everything was so self-evident, so clear, a given, yeah, precisely, a given, but I thought, you know, that there was some simple way out of all the shit I’d ended up in, that we’d all ended up in, landed in, fallen down into, been thrown into, been forced, pressed, screwed down into, and I went round, I was twelve, and I went round, handing out flyers, I don’t remember what the flyers were for, none of that exists any more, none of the companies or the shops or the logos or the subs, none of those words and images, nothing at all of all that stuff I looked at and read again and again, the stuff that used to bother me so much, that filled me and shaped me, nothing, not one word, not one image, not one single letter or colour remains, just the feeling of being bothered, the smell of the paper and how it felt to touch the paper, just my filled and formed mind and body, the same mind and the same body that went round selling papers sweating like a little geek, and it took a while before I realised it was totally meaningless, that it was better to sell hash or at least moonshine to the alkies, cos you earned next to nothing for the legal stuff, not a fucking thing, and there I was going around like an idiot with these papers over my left arm, ringing on doors, saying: hello, or good afternoon, or good evening, would you like to buy the Evening Post today, the same fucking Evening Post that had interviewed the older guys who were now even older and into darker things and wouldn’t let themselves be interviewed by some lófasz from the paper and definitely not photographed by some malakas photographer; if they were caught on camera, it would most likely be CCTV picking out their dark silhouettes as they tried to break into a post office or the like, the kind of thing that still existed out there back then, before they gave up on it all and closed and shut all that shit down, so that nothing became even less, that is, even more nothing, but there I was anyway, going out to sell this bloody piss, and I said hello, or good afternoon or good evening or just: an Evening Post today? and I think they were six krona each, and then one krona went to me, I think, and I’m not joking, one lousy coin, man, and I wasn’t exactly chasing big bucks like the kids do these days, boast about these days, but the gold ten-krona coin was new and sometimes I got one and they said: keep the change, you know. I realised pretty soon it was pointless to go around like a fucking beggar for a krona here and a krona there, it was really hard to sell that jumped-up shit posing as eloquence and poetry too, but you know how it is, one day someone stole a paper, cos they used to dump them, in bundles, by the cycle path, and you were meant to ring in and report them stolen, then they took it off what you owed, so I told them three had gone and then I sold them and made 100 per cent on them, of course, and then I did it more and more, and of course everyone knew only thieves and immigrants lived out there, and so it was sorted, more for my pocket, 100 per cent, right, but you know, they realised pretty soon that something wasn’t right, and I got the sack, I think, somehow or other, and I remember sitting there anxiously by the phone, our first one with button tone
s or whatever you call it, plasticky with a tangled wire, you had to ring in and punch and punch and it beeped and beeped, and the whole time I was wondering what they were gonna do if they caught up with me, but nothing happened, I just got the sack, had to start from scratch with zero cash in my pocket. Then I delivered flyers, you had to sit there night after night, doing the inserts, my mum and sister helped sometimes, then up and down the stairwells like an idiot, fingers shredded by paper cuts and those damn letter boxes ripping up my cuticles every time I put my hand through, didn’t get paid shit either, but at least I had music in my ears, music I’d recorded from the radio, with the help of the thieved radio, the lovely black thieved radio with the red detailing, and that music made me, sometimes, dumb as I was, think it was totally fine, like it wouldn’t have been better to sit in some quiet place, or go walk somewhere, listening to that same music, instead of running up and down those stairs like a fucking idiot, and that wasn’t even the worst part, far from it, no, the worst part was doing the inserts, there were maybe ten different flyers, and they all had to go inside the largest one, and you know, it’s Friday and you’re sitting there doing the inserts in front of the TV like an idiot, bunking off school to get through that shit, but anyway, it was only mother-tongue study sessions and we never did a thing in those anyway, so now I had to sit there doing inserts in front of the fucking TV, Mum’s watching Oprah, Mum’s watching The Bold and the Beautiful, or QVC is rolling, you know, headphones on, then Saturday evening and we’re stuffing flyers in front of the fucking TV, I’m thinking I’m gonna flip, I swear, Mum, any time now, need to take a walk to the fast-food stand, meet Rodde, smoke a straight, calm myself down, and at that point I hadn’t even started thinking about the older guys with their Mercs and BMWs and their deals and their runners, still, Saturday and Sunday always came round and it was time to head out and do the delivery, up and down like an idiot, totally owned like some little cunt, some piss-poor little prick, like air, know what I mean Cody? It’s these things I have in my mouth, and since I’m talking about jobs there’s one thing I’ve just got to say, Cody, are you listening? There was this time I was gonna park down here on the street. I found a gap, pulled up gently alongside a shining-white Audi and reversed in smoothly, in a single movement, and just as I was opening the door, about to get out of the car, I saw something, something big driving up behind me. So I stayed sitting there, pulled the door back to halfway and looked up at the passenger seat of this minibus. And I saw a pale man in his twenties frothing at the mouth and laughing. It took two seconds for the minibus to drive by, but the image of this man’s sort of delirious gaze, his cheeks and chin bubbling with saliva, it stayed with me and pushed me down into my seat, as two memories popped up simultaneously. They were memories from two different times in my life, now brought together, placed next to each other, or like a double exposure in that one moment. In one of the memories I’m sitting in the passenger seat of a small truck. The man driving is the boss of a company that imports and sells cut flowers to florists. I work at his warehouse along with two Poles and an Albanian. We unpack flowers, roses from Kenya for instance, that come packed in large boxes, we repack them in bunches, five at a time or ten at a time, or in special bouquets, in the run-up to the Midsummer holiday, for instance, and put them in buckets with water and little paper labels with flower feed or whatever. It’s cash in hand, the work’s monotonous and there’s almost always overtime, since the boss is a workaholic, as they say, and demands everyone works as much as he does. The difference is we’re standing up all day, at the same workbench, apart from thirty minutes’ lunch and short fag breaks, while he’s sitting at his desk, positioned so he can see everything we’re doing, for long periods, and at regular intervals he disappears off to do some shit or other. Helge or Stig – or something like that, I can’t remember – is capricious, sometimes friendly and generous, sometimes sullen and complaining. You have to ask permission to use the toilet. So one day we’re sitting in this little truck Helgestig has hired from like Hertz or something to drive some stuff to the old folks’ home his dad’s just moved to. He asked me and I agreed, on condition of payment, naturally, the same pay as I got at the warehouse. We’re sitting in the truck and he starts chatting about young immigrant men with flash cars. That he can guarantee, with very few exceptions, that they’re criminals. I’m dumbfounded, unsure how far what he’s saying is aimed at me. Not that I have a car, I didn’t even have a licence at that point, but you know, I’ve only been working for him for a couple of weeks and I’ve already realised he’s a bastard. Like a lot of times already, I just want to ask him to shut his mouth, which I can’t do of course, cos I need the money to pay for a flat I’m renting over the summer (after that I don’t know where I’ll be living). Then we drive past a minor accident, a car has gone into the back of another at a red light. Helgesigge says: oh dear, little darkie. If you’ve gone into the back of someone it’s nobody’s fault but your own, however much your little introspections succeed. Yeah, that was one of the memories. That: your little introspections succeed. I don’t know why it just occurred to me now. The other memory is me coming home from this job washing dishes at a restaurant, it’s late, and I have that taste in my mouth and I’ve found my roommate Erik lying on the sofa in front of the TV. He’s totally gone on ket and started foaming at the mouth; it’s running from the corners of his mouth down onto his skinny, hairless chest where it’s collecting in a little pool. For a little while I’m genuinely scared and try to assess if it’s a serious overdose. On the coffee table is a piece of paper with a big heap of the stuff. Erik’s recently started selling K to stay solvent, so to speak, money-wise, since losing his job. He buys it by the bottle, in liquid form, and cooks it down in a Teflon pan. We talk for a bit, I tell him not to take any more today, put away the wrap and throw him a tissue. He tries to wipe his mouth and chest, but just spreads the saliva out. I sit with him for a while to see how he’s doing. It seems OK, but what the hell do I know. I smoke a joint and tease him a bit. We’ve discussed this before, the dangers of suddenly finding yourself with large quantities of powder. You’ll end up like Scarface, I said. Then we called him Tony Montana for a while. Erik was totally convinced it would be easy to resist the temptation to snort it all, cos he needed the money. How fucking dumb are you? I say. He smiles blissfully. Then I’ve had enough and leave him, almost hoping he chokes on his own vomit, go into the bedroom and lie on my bed and listen to something, maybe Drexciya or Philophobia, or Things Fall Apart or like DJ Krush and Toshinori Kondo, the Ki-Oku record I guess, I was pretty obsessed with it at that point (I remember when my dad heard a track from that record, he laughed scornfully and was like: who’s that playing at being Miles Davis?). Or maybe it was Kakusei, that had that track ‘Crimson’ I think it’s called, with the Harold Budd sample, from ‘Bismillahi ‘Rrahmani ‘Rrahim’, but I don’t know what that means, and I didn’t know that Krush, or Hideaki Ishi as he’s really called, was a petty criminal in his youth, was even a member of the Yakuza, but I often used to listen to ‘Survival of the Fittest’ on the way to work, and I don’t know what to say about that kind of social Darwinism, like in Mobb Deep’s track of the same name, or in ‘Shook Ones part II’: Rock you in your face, stab your brain with your nose bone, but CL Smooth is so sick in that, or that one with Tragedy Khadafi, aka Intelligent Hoodlum, you know (which makes me think of Killer Mike and his: I’m a young G, I’m a EV, Educated Villain, and I’m a book reader, I’m a gang leader), who says in a video clip: To me it ain’t no love out there, y’know what I’m sayin’… everybody… everybody just like robots right now… like zombies… ain’t no love out there… I think the future gonna be a scary thing… like y’know… gotta get ready for it… y’know what I’m sayin’… if you ain’t tryin’ to get ready for it, then just get high and get bent… y’know what I’m sayin’… and let it come or go or whatever… that’s my fuckin’ philosophy on the future… and that was more or less what we did, got high and g
ot bent, weren’t really ready for anything at all, right Cody, right man, and yeah, worked and worked of course, worked and thieved a bit sometimes, or quite a lot really, shotted a bit, not a lot but a bit, right, and slept a lot too, slept whole days sometimes, found it really hard to get up in the morning, I didn’t really get up before one, and I almost always had massive anxiety in the morning, which meant a spliff with my coffee and it eased a little, then you could just lie there, lazing in bed a while, read a magazine, a book, snooze, watch some porn, wank, fall asleep again, chill, and get into weird states, hypnagogic states, as they call it, till you felt like a failure and just wanted to die and fall asleep again, but sometimes you came up with really great solutions to all kinds of problems, mostly how we’d get on in life and stop having to work, and stealing and sleeping and shit, but it carried on instead and there was more and more of it, that’s what it felt like anyway, time just passed and I just wasted it, I wasn’t stupid, I knew that, thought about it all the time, I mean if you listen to that survival-of-the-fittest shit at the same time as being totally lost, a layabout, I mean you feel it the whole time, you’re no gangster, you’re not king of anything, you’re no knight, no ninja, no survivor, you know, and I thought about it all the time, as I was standing waiting for the bus, going one way or the other, when I was waiting for a shift to finish, when I was working ten hours straight on a building site for loose change that took an evening to drink and smoke away, but you knew the only thing worse was no job at all, no cash at all, so yeah, you worked and I still have that taste in my mouth, of dust, coffee, fags, a nagging boss, the taste of sweaty, reused face masks, the taste of work, the taste of the same thing all the time, again and again, back and forth, round and round, that’s what I have in my mouth, several metres of guts and shit and I don’t wanna talk about it, I don’t even wanna think about it, you get me, I don’t wanna have it in me, in my throat, on my tongue, in my mouth, but every time I open my mouth, out it runs, what can I do, I open my mouth to say something completely different or just to breathe and this shit runs out, all these things run out, everything just pours out, symbols, figures, letters, numbers, images, films, stories, tragic, funny, like the one about two boys out walking one day, they’d left their homes and made their way into the big wide world, as they say, and then this happened. It was Saturday. They were sitting on a bench by a kiosk. Behind them were a school, a few bushes, a roundabout and some houses and a car park with cars parked in shining rows. The boys had a fag and shared a can of Coke and a Snickers and talked vaguely about things they were interested in, about life, about music, about some album covers, about skulls and a few other things. Then a car pulled up. A man got out and asked if they wanted work. Employment, he said. Earn a little money, he said. They asked what they’d be doing. Handing out flyers, he said. For his building firm. Go around the wealthy neighbourhoods and stuff a few flyers through letterboxes. They asked how much they’d get. Five hundred. To share. Course we will, they said. That’s a lot of money, they thought. They got in the car. He drove them to the wealthy neighbourhood. They got a stack each. Took a side each and put them in the letter boxes as he drove along behind them, crept along slowly behind them. After a while they’d run out of flyers. Oops, Builder Man said. We’ll have to get some more, it looks as though I’ve left them at home. It’ll only take a minute, he said. After that you’ll get your cash. OK, but it better be quick, the boys said. And then we’ll have the cash. They drove out to his house. You can smoke in the car if you want, he said. Then they arrived. It was a big house by a field. He went in to get the bundles. They stayed in the car. Smoked. Looked through the glove box for something to steal. There was nothing, just receipts and pens and bad music on cassette. Builder Man came back with two boxes. He put them in the boot and sat in the driver’s seat. Right, he said. Let’s be off. Then he said something about the car. He asked if they could drive. They said no. Do you want to have a go? he said. Of course, they thought. Can we try it? they said. Yes, he said. It’s not hard. It takes a while to learn the pedals, but I can do them. You can sit in front of me, he said. You do the steering wheel, I’ll do the pedals. They said yes. First one. There wasn’t much space up there. Can you move the seat back further, the boy said. That’s as far as it goes, Builder Man said. So he ended up sitting on Builder Man’s knee. OK, drive then, the boy said. He drove slowly. The boy held the wheel with both hands. At ten to two. He laughed. Looked behind him at the other boy. Watch the road, he laughed. Builder Man did the pedals and held the bottom of the steering wheel with one hand. At six. He sped up. He steered a little, down there at six, occasionally letting go of the wheel and letting his hand rest there. By the boy’s cock. The other hand rested on the boy’s thigh. He sped up a little more. The boy watched the road. The lines and the ditch. He swerved a little from left to right. The boy in the back seat laughed. They talked about driving. The car was moving quickly along the empty road. Builder Man stroked his hand back and forth across the boy’s cock. That was what he did. And sometimes he moved the boy’s whole body so it pressed against Builder Man’s hip, against his cock. The boy felt this with some kind of vague surprise, Builder Man’s hand stroking his cock, back and forth, and up and down. It wasn’t fear the boy felt, more a diffuse discomfort. He watched the road and thought about how he was driving the car. Or was he really? he thought. Sometimes Builder Man let go of the wheel, resting both hands in the boy’s lap, on the insides of the boy’s thighs. Shifted the boy’s body again. Picked him up and released him. Stroked his hand across his cock again. It wasn’t fear. It was uncertainty. About whether he was just imagining it all. About whether he was maybe enjoying it. The car moved forward. Ditches, fields, solitary houses. Hands on the boy. That was all. Then they stopped. Now it was the other boy’s turn. The first said nothing. They talked about driving. Same thing with the other boy. They drove. They didn’t know where they were. An hour had passed, more, since they’d picked up the boxes. You know what, Builder Man said. It’s late. You can do the rest next time. You can have the money. Asked if he should drive them home. Supposed it was getting dark. They told him where they lived and that he could drive them. They got a 500-krona note. His number. For when they wanted some more work. You never know when you might need a little money, he laughed, and if there’s one thing that’s true in this world, it’s that you always need a few coins in your pocket, so the dogs won’t piss on you, and that was what I was thinking about as I stood there, feeling dirty and weak under the tall street lights by the turning area, in the night, by the car park, just before the big meadow and the fields began, by the turning area where he’d dropped us off a few hours earlier, under the street light, in the ochre light, and I exhaled smoke and the cloud floated up towards the light and got bigger and bigger until it was completely impossible that that cloud had just been inside my body, in my lungs, then come up through my throat and out through my mouth, up towards the light, and I guess it’s that I have in my mouth now, that lesson, that truth, that if you have no money you can’t buy nothing, but if you’ve got a little cash, a little paper, a little green, a few p’s, well then, you can suddenly get anything you want, you get me, man? You get what I mean, Cody? You hear what I’m saying? I thought as the guitarist looked at me and I strained my face in an attempt to focus on his face, on his eyes. But y’know, I really like that, he said, that O’Carolan didn’t bid farewell to life, to the world, but to music. I took a deep breath and heard the composer say: yeah, but what does it mean, that he didn’t think he’d be able to experience music after his death? I tried to understand what they were talking about and noticed the canal was full of rubbish, bobbing about on the surface: plastic bags, bottles, a metre-long metal stick glistening. Two kayaks came gliding along on the water. Or is it about life continuing, after death, so to speak? Well, I don’t really know what he meant, said the guitarist, or how he imagined the whole thing. No, I said, and I was about to say something about Scelsi’s string quartet but the word
s got stuck in my throat again, and after a while the composer said that thing about mathematics is interesting, and she said something about sacred geometry, but I didn’t hear cos I was thinking about Soot again, I was still thinking about Soot, and about that place I was intended for, that I’d escaped, on the roundabout, in the bus, that motion that went on and on, within and without me.
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