The whole morning, while practising a Scelsi piece – his fourth String Quartet, to be precise – I kept glancing at the wax-plant flowers that had opened during the night. The white and pink blossoms hung in clusters and looked like tiny little eyes watching over me: a little audience from another species, I thought afterwards, in the afternoon, as I stood by the canal, by the gravel path between the police station and the water, and waited for the guitarist and the composer. I was meant to be going to Copenhagen with them to hear a concert by the German organist Christoph Maria Moosmann at the cathedral, Vor Frue Kirke. Moosmann would be playing pieces by Pärt and Cage, and In Nomine Lucis, by Scelsi himself, a piece that sounded absolutely magnificent on a church organ, I knew that from experience because I’d heard Kevin Bowyer play it, it was quite clearly in the same class – as I asserted then, at least – as the best works for organ by Messiaen and Bach. But that morning I didn’t give any of that a thought. As with all successful rehearsals, I was completely reset, emptied of words and concepts, free of thoughts, memories and desires, and yet in the grip of some centripetal motion, on the way to something significant. I looked at the sheet music in front of me and breathed. My ribcage, my lungs and my arms were moving. My elbows were moving, and my fingers. Sound became flesh, body. I closed my eyes and was no longer myself. Now we were approaching the central station, and the guitarist said something about the time, presumably because he’d caught sight of the clock up on the tower. He said we had plenty of time after all, assuming the train wasn’t delayed, and I said it was probably going to be fine, at the same time as I thought I should ask the composer to repeat what she’d said a minute ago, about geometry, and that I wanted to tell them about Scelsi’s Fourth String Quartet, which, I was pretty sure, neither the guitarist nor the composer were that closely acquainted with. The most interesting thing, I wanted to say, was, aside from many things I’d like to come back to (for instance its scordatura and the relationship with the golden ratio), the notation. The piece was written in such a way that every string had its own stave in the score, as though it were composed for sixteen instruments, rather than the quartet’s four, and as though I, normally responsible for one instrument, with a relatively broad register, was now playing four instruments, which independently, and viewed as instruments, were poorer in terms of expression and tone, but which, in some way, and this was what I wanted to discuss with the guitarist and the composer, together succeeded in constituting something that was different, that was more than a cello, and which, assuming the same was the case for the quartet’s other instruments, meant we were something other than a string quartet. But what? And why? And how did that fit with the character of the piece, that striving, ascending, descending, trembling, like a tug-of-war between weight and levity, between descent and ascent? Playing it felt, on the whole, like falling upwards. Does that sound feasible? I wanted to ask the composer. What was it she’d said about geometry? I hadn’t been able to make out her words, I’d been thinking about Soot instead, as though he was standing before me, swaying just above me, in a kind of formless guise, unfathomable, an invisible light, and hearing him say, voicelessly, yes, soundlessly: so I don’t know, Cody. Why? A soldier dies, gets shot down. Nothing so strange about that, is there? That’s what they do, soldiers. They die, fall, drop their guns, someone captures them in that moment, on film, mid-fall, falling, in the air. Someone takes a picture, it gets turned into a banner, makes its way around the world. Then we’re sitting there, a bunch of years later, under that picture, and Denzo digs out a bit of standard and roasts the tobacco and you start thinking, finally a little peace and quiet, finally a little respite, as they say, finally respectus, refugium, sanctum, the kind of stuff the coconuts come out with, and you know my dad told me this is paradise, and thirty years later he’d acknowledge that the whole thing had been a bluff, a lie, that he regretted the whole move, the emigration, as he put it, the emigration, cos, you know, he was never an immigrant in his own mind, no fucking immigrant, he was an emigrant, man, an exile, brah, and he said he regretted all his thirty years in exile, he was sorry for it, you know, wanted to ask forgiveness for everything then, when it was already too late, but you know, we were just sitting there under the banner with the dying soldier and we carefully sent round the bong, and I puked later, again, as per, with Denzo, that was his name, he was the one, but why? we laughed, do you remember? Metallica’s double basses, some cripple in a video, ah, I don’t know, there’s no justice, I cannot live, I cannot die, trapped in myself, absolute horror, and Mum watching Oprah, watching The Bold and the Beautiful, and you know, did you know Olga moved back to Kazakhstan, but you know, soon she fell over the Russian border, started streetwalking, as they say, in Novokuznetsk, started shooting up speed and horse, I know this cos I spoke to her two months after she’d gone, but then it went quiet and there were rumours she’d started using krokodil, and in that case they’ll be burying the rest of her worn-out body soon enough, but I mean, I swear, you know that guy Anden, the guy who was playing the big man in the yard, when we fought I called him a nigger and he called me a cunt or a queer, that’s what we used to say when we were kids, but it’s not him, and it’s not Denzo, not him, I think he’s alive, and it’s not Niko, we called him Niko, his name was Niklas, and he died, he died – what – ten, is it already ten years ago, he died in front of the TV, his mum found him, did you know that? Died in front of the TV, heart stopped beating or something, stopped breathing, suffocated by his own vomit, I don’t know what happens when you shoot too much horse, but his mum found him in front of the TV, dead, overdose, and I always think about TV static and about his mum coming into the room and seeing her son is dead, this guy, you know, who I used to play with once, and I mean you can ask yourself why here, you get me, he was no soldier, or OK, maybe he was, I mean, what is a war? I guess it’s about finding the biggest gang. Arben preferred to head over to Kosovo rather than stay here with his anxiety, if you remember, and at the time we thought how the fuck can he do that? But today it’s totally obvious, why shouldn’t he go over there? And today they go to new places, where the biggest gangs are, the ones open to them in any case, I mean they could hardly join the cops or the military, too late for that, but I don’t know, what do I know, this has nothing to do with Niko either, he was just a regular junkie, and I don’t know why I thought of the TV static either, if he was watching TV it was probably playing, just cos he died it didn’t make the TV stop, I mean everything goes on I guess, life goes on, the TV goes on, the ads go on, the news goes on, the series, the films, the chat shows, the comedies, the thrillers, the tear-jerkers, the cop shows, and at some point his mum came into the room and saw her kid as a corpse, and so she lifted up his head, and you know how heavy and cold a dead head is, it weighs a fucking ton, mate, and she hit him over the head and over the chest and jerked her kid about, pulling at this corpse, trying and failing to shake some life into her kid, his life was gone, it was over, she’d seen it come and go, once he didn’t exist, then he did, and now he didn’t again, just as all other life was continuing, and that bit is hard to get your head around, I know that, but sorry, Cody, forgive me, I don’t wanna talk about this, it’s getting ridiculous, I’m embarrassed, I don’t wanna think about it, I don’t wanna paint these pictures, cos I know how people react when they see them, like we did when we sat in Denzo’s room at the home, under that poster, like why?, you just have to take the piss out of it, you have to laugh at it, you have to be like, and?, a junkie dies, a soldier dies, a thieving immigrant gets a bullet behind the ear, a bullet in the stomach, a bullet through the heart, and so what? Believe me, I don’t want to, if it was my choice I’d keep my mouth shut and glide on by, but I can’t cos my eyes are swimming in it, and it’s roaring in my ears and my whole mouth is really full of it, of his body, his child-body, of the fact that we were children, that we were playing, as it used to be known when we were little, that we walked along talking, just as usual, as children
do, walked, talked, thought, played, and then the static, then the cold heavy head, and his mum’s gaze, but I don’t know what it was, his dad died of an overdose too I think. Niko I call him, he lived in Möllevången, we went back to his place, watched some Bruce Lee film, clips from old ninja films, he always talked so much shit, mything, that’s what we used to call it, got hossi, as we put it, lied and boasted and manipulated, always had to show he was the biggest and the strongest, even as a kid, yeah, I think his dad overdosed too, earlier, when Niko was little, but I don’t know, he rang me too, later, when we were older, a year or so before he died, and it’s like I said, you laugh at things like that, at people like him, I can’t remember what he wanted, just that I didn’t want to talk to him, he was so irritating, such a hossi, he lied and it was obvious, no self-awareness, no respect, too much attitude, so it’s not him, he’s already dead and buried, and I wasn’t there, I don’t know, maybe someone from the family, what could he have been, around twenty, still a brother in some ways, like you, right bratku, right Cody, brah, tell me to shut my mouth now, I wanna shut my mouth, seal up this hole, make it disappear, fade away, into the haze, as they say, another haze, but I see it the whole time, my eyes are like swimming in it, my eyes are like made of it, it’s inside my head, like a filter, like a note on an organ, a membrane, I don’t know, I really don’t know who’s lying in the coffin, in the cremation chamber, but it’s not Caro, in any case, cos she did her months, got focused, got a new life and left Vlad and his dirty shotter’s life, and it’s not Saladin and co, they’re still alive, still getting vex, yeah, but I’ve seen them myself, and not Ronny, Nenad or Said, cos they’re all living totally normal suedi-lives, with pensions and summer houses, and it’s not Tindra, as she used to call herself, cos she’s still alive too, she might have done herself in, yeah, but she’s still living, and to be honest, that’s probably what you’d say about me, right Cody? Isn’t that how it sounds when you open your mouth and talk about your friend, your comrade, your bro, you say no, it’s not Soot this time, he’s still alive, they say, he’s alive, homeless and half-psychotic most of the time, but he’s alive, and a load of crap about cherry orchards blah blah blah, I’m gonna flip out soon, you’re always talking so much fucking shit. Isn’t that how it is, Cody? Isn’t that what you say? Not Soot, no, no he’s alive, he’s worn out but he’s alive, and you know when we were little we kissed to test it out, like queers, yeah, precisely, when we were little we drank rum and smoked hash, smoked kush, smoking weed, like brothers, snogging like blatte batty boys, not a word about it to anyone, keeping it on the down-low, batty bros, is that what you say, man, tongue brothers, and hung out with hot Turkish girls outside the pool, I remember that, one was called Ayşen, the other I don’t know, something beginning with T I think, but back then we were brothers, right, bratku, punks and hard rockers, brats, kids, snotty little kids with fags and hash and marker pens in bumbags, we ran around at night with butterfly knives and stilettos, Reeperbahn, Altona, Karoviertel, right digga, broke into places, stole, when we were little, went to gigs at Die Fabrik, Docks, Große Freiheit, Markthalle, Störtebeker, saw Fugazi, Cypress Hill, Sick of It All, Strife, Unsane, moshed stoned in sweat, blood and spit, adrenalin-racing little animals, that whole white-trash thing, fucking hostile, bumfluffed little boys, steeped in that American shit, and we watched the films, looked at the records, slammed here and pogoed there, just another victim, kid, with our bloody noses clotting, but whose blood is that, kid? Isn’t that what you say, Cody? Sat up late at night watching video after video, Suicidal Tendencies and War Inside My Head, but also Psí Vojáci, the dog soldiers, and later on their song about razor blades too, razor blades on the body, razor blades in the body, and our dads who’d both cut their arms, such brothers, and his mum who said she’d heard it was the sweetest thing, when your body drains of blood, when the life runs out, better than the best drugs, better than crack, better than a speedball, but what happens? we asked, it’s like you rise and sink at the same time, and we creased up, we laughed, drank powdered ice tea and went on little trips to the sea, I remember that guy who’d never seen the sea, went to Heligoland, stole little bottles of spirits in the shop and hid in a cubbyhole under a stairwell on the ferry, down it, neck it, creasing up like idiots, Sweden doesn’t exist, Denmark’s going under, Germany we love you, Yugoslavia’s burning, Europe is the future, the Eastern European kids fuck themselves in the arse with turquoise double-enders, their tender, oozing dreams flowing like pure shit, what’s happening, man, how hard can life be, really, if we’re honest, and how tender is it to die by your own hand, just how, how focused do you have to be, yeah, yeah, it was screwed up, and being screwed up was something to aspire to, so we fucked off down to Bambule, floated about between the scabby caravans, the mud, the planks, the rubbish, the smoke and the fires in big rusty barrels, in shopping trolleys, the rags, fighting words, flags, it was anarchy for idiots, we said to each other, even we, we said, children, have started reading Bakunin and Goldman, but those guys and their girlfriends are pure 100 per cent idiots, we said to each other, cracking up, they’re retarded kids, we said to each other, and in the dark we could make out a mannequin with no legs, covered with tags and stickers, we knocked on the door to the dealer’s house, the fat anarchist pig was lying there watching a film, some imbecile American film, his expensive fucking bike hung on the wall, clean and lovely in that shithole, a block of a couple of ounces or more on the little coffee table. Was geht, digga? we said. What you want, he said, the ugly anarchist, and we had twenty DM so Soot said we wanted a twenty’s-worth, and the big freedom-loving anarchist with tattoos that must have cost half a year’s salary on his body, he laughed at us. A twenty? Motherfucking kids, I can’t even be fucked getting up for a twenty, and we stood there, thinking and gauging, and then we went up to the bed and smashed a beer bottle over the head of that revolutionary little anarchist bitch, took out a knife, and Soot just held it two inches in front of that pale anarchist head, and we stood like that for a while, nothing happening except for my heart beating fucking hard, and the big man rebel anarchist went on mocking, saying shit like we should go to hell and fuck our mothers and we were snotty kids, but that was cool cos we could see he was afraid and in the end he got off his fat arse and cut what must have been a quarter and didn’t even dare do anything when he didn’t get our twenty, though we still didn’t risk walking off with the whole block, just said that’s how it goes, you lazy cunt, and walked out and spat at his door and then ran as fast as we could, past all the caravans, and all the scabby punks with their Bad Religion shirts and rich parents in Bavaria, and then we couldn’t go back and buy from there for several months, but it made no difference cos we found a new source and so on and so forth, is that how it is, Cody, and you say actually that’s true, we’d started reading, and we’d started talking about books, yeah, it’s true, me and Soot, when we were younger we talked about Kafka, with our bumfluff-stoner vocab, about Metamorphosis, we smoked bongs and I puked all over his room, we had to cut off a bit of his carpet after that, and we hung out in the squat on Laeiszstrasse, or wherever the hell it was, and at some mate of Soot’s who played Snoop the whole fucking time and I hugged the toilet bowl and puked and puked and puked till thick yellow bile came up and my stomach kept churning but nothing else would come up and Snoop was Snoop Doggy Dogg in the background, and all that shit, it’s so boring, but that’s the kind of thing you say, right Cody? Isn’t it? But I don’t know, it’s not like we didn’t try, Cody, right, I mean, I really did go into that last interview with the best of intentions, as they say, to get on that course, to get that job as a truck driver, and they asked a load of questions and I replied and I said those words, born in Prague, and I knew they’d light up and say, oh, it’s beautiful there, and I knew those mental images had captions like Charles Bridge, Rococo and Art Nouveau, and believe me, Cody, believe me, I know all about that stuff, I know all about Art Nouveau and all that shit, or at least as much as them, I�
�ve done graffiti my whole life, right, and I’ve flicked through those books too, I’ve sat in the library, I’m not thick, I know where I come from, and I know what they saw, they saw the castle lit up at night, they saw gilded spires stretching up into the sky, stretching up, everything stretching up, like Mucha’s foliage, more and more slender, like Schiele’s bodies, everything wanting to lift and shine up into the heavens, into something beautiful and almost divine, but of course retaining its weight and its trademarked Kafkaesque despair, and perhaps they’d read Hrabal too and now they saw some charming drunk stumbling home over the Staromák cobbles, mumbling secrets to the strains of some trademarked dissident jazz, just as charmingly dilapidated, or some fucking gypsy fiddler or something, but you know, I’m not from there, I wanted to say, that’s got nothing to do with me, you know, up there, in there, that’s where the decision-makers live, I wanted to say, but didn’t, you know, I come from places decision-makers never come from, I didn’t say either, I come from Háje, I didn’t say, but should have, that’s in Prague too, go home and google it, I come from Jižní Město, from Jížák, from the final station, always the final station, go home and google that instead, I didn’t say but should have, don’t think Bedřich Smetana, think Peneři Strýčka Homeboye, you get me, don’t even think Plastic People or DG 307, or some shit like that from the seventies when our grandparents worked their arses off, kept their mouths shut and our mums toiled away at home and searched for our fathers who’d gone hiding in bars behind beards and long hair and antisocial counter-cultures, think more Chaozz and Prago Union, Naše Věc and DeFuckTo, you know, just smoking weed and no future, you get me, but you don’t, I didn’t say, instead I just said yes, it’s beautiful, and it was true in a way, cos it is, it is beautiful, in its way, even if it’s ugly, if you see what I mean, but you don’t, or, I dunno, maybe not beautiful, I dunno if it’s really that beautiful, the buildings I mean, the streets, and the greenery and shit, but I mean the other stuff, I like coming out onto the street early on an autumn morning, or that there’s at least something small, a small, small part of that, though of course you’re stressed out cos you’re on your way to some shitty job, if you’re lucky, on your way to being screwed in the head as per. But still, there’s something small, a part of it, something I quite like when I’m walking along in the morning, perhaps it’s a little chilly, kind of misty, or dewy, or whatever, it’s early autumn, mid-September, the leaves have begun to settle on the ground and I come out onto the street and immediately see a bunch of scaffolders banging their metal pipes and wooden planks about, their chat, wet and Polish or sharp and Lithuanian, and then some toothless copper thief comes cycling along with his toolbox and his little solar-powered radio, his body broken by addiction, but those hands holding the handlebars are powerful, sinewy and strong, as muscular as if he’d escaped from one of those social-realist monuments our forefathers raised in the name of the proletariat, in the name of work, and our gazes meet just as I walk past the hairdresser who’s smoking the day’s first outside her salon and I wish her a good morning and she does the same and I walk a little further and come to the edge of the square where the alkies and addicts have already kicked off the day, and one of them laughs and smiles and says good morning and I say the same to her and her dude, who walks along a metre behind her pushing a bike with a punctured tyre, says good afternoon and laughs hoarsely and I shake my head at the lousy joke, but I’m happy, in some way, that they’re happy, and I pass a stallholder unpacking their wares on the square and I keep walking, you know, I’m just walking along, down another street, looking at some teenagers smoking and drinking energy drinks, throwing the rattling aluminium cans on the pavement, two men come walking along from the wasteland where they sleep under tarpaulins strung between pallets, and one of them bends down and picks up a conker, weighs it in his hand, holds it, looks at it and throws it up again, up into the tree, up into the boughs of the tree, and it stays there, as though he was a fucking angel or something, maybe a demon, I don’t know what the difference is – he throws it back into the tree, into its casing, onto its twig, its branch and trunk and down into this earthly hell and its burning core, and I close and open my eyes again, and see some dogs nosing and pissing, crying children who don’t want to go to school, it’s like I see, really see all this shit, this movement, you get me Cody? Can you grasp all that? I don’t know, Cody, but this is where it all becomes so clear to me, so obvious that everything fits together, Cody, doesn’t it, Cody? Maybe that’s the thing, maybe that’s what’s so beautiful, as they say, perhaps it’s that commonality, the fact we’re heading in the same direction in some way, that we’re waiting for the same bus, getting on the same bus and sitting there, standing on the escalator behind one another, heading down into the tunnels, sitting on the metro opposite one another, not speaking but exchanging looks, energies, touching the same objects and breathing the same air, out and in and out and in, all the time, round and round, I don’t know, sure, it’s hard and ugly and damaged and fucked up with drugs, but still nice to come home, that’s what I mean, still nice to see your friends, your sisters, brothers, still beautiful to watch their struggle, every day, every night, it’s beautiful, as they say, so yeah, you’re right, it’s beautiful, you’re right even though you don’t know what you’re talking about, you’ve got no fucking clue, I didn’t say of course, but should have, right Cody? And you say, yeah, yeah, Soot, calm down, and we crease up, and you say yeah, you’re right about that, man, you should have said that, why didn’t you say that? And I say I don’t know, I suck my teeth, feel the gravel and the taste of blood, feel the pull of the THC, spit out the foam that’s collected with my tongue in overdrive and point at my head and say Dezorient Express, man, and Wait, ladies and gentlemen, please, my head’s in a fog, I can’t speak, and so here we are again with that whole fucking cherry orchard shit, makes you wonder what kind of fucking orchard it is, what kind of cherries we’re talking about here, where they’re from, and I don’t know, and I do that thing with my teeth again and say, you know, I’ve always been jealous of the people who don’t end up rejecting their parents, I mean, the people who can respect their parents, and I don’t mean cos they’ve inherited a summer house or something, but you know, because they were honest, honourable, hard-working, enlightened, you understand, strivers, and to be frank, well-brought-up middle-class, that’s what we’re talking about, you know, immigrants who, if they hadn’t migrated, would have passed down summer houses in their wills, if you get me, thanks to my mum for teaching me to strive, and brush my teeth, and oh, thanks Dad, you taught me everything about combustion engines and philosophy, you taught me what it means to be proud and you taught my sister to stand up for herself, taught my brother to handle his drink and violence and shit, you get me Cody? Soot says, and I see him before me, Soot, I think about his sister, Vasti, we called her Cherry, after the fruit, or Neneh, I’m not sure, but it had nothing to do with Soot’s orchards, nothing at all, but she was his sister and I think about how I went round to her place and the kitchen was all fucked up and I remember she wasn’t crying any more, she just looked bitter and hard, cleaned up after him, the kids were with a neighbour. I said: who fucked up the cupboard doors, the plates, the glasses? And Cherry said: you know who. Soot, my brother, my own brother. My own flesh and blood. Almost everything in common. Our childhood. All these memories. Half our lives. More than that. And now. Now what? Psycho, homeless, drunk, pills, probably more, totally fucking p-noid. I’m not like him, at least. I take care of myself. And the kids. Nothing like him. None of us siblings like him. A little self-respect. Every day, we’re striving. Taking care of ourselves, of each other. And who takes care of him? No one. That’s the thing. Not him. And no one else can be fucked with it. We all feel bad, but no one can be fucked with it. Cherry cleared up, I helped her. I said: I know. I cut him off too. We blew up. Got into a fight. Almost. Didn’t he tell you? He’s frail, but he tried to attack me. It was night-time, outside the petro
l station on Feldstrasse. By the entrance to the metro. We’d bought some beers and got into some beef. Can’t remember why. I was holding his hands cos he was trying to attack me. I remember getting tunnel vision I was so angry. I could’ve killed him with my bare hands, I knew that. So I held onto his. I could only see him, his face, covered in motherfucking adult acne. He went in, as though he was going to hit me, but I grabbed his wrists and held him there. I gripped hard. Really hard. It was hurting him. He started whining. I said if he tried to hit me one more time I’d do him in. Really. Then I let go. And you know. The thing was, my dad was standing a way off, watching. He didn’t do anything. Just laughed nervously, acted worldly, drank a beer. But afterwards, Soot kept saying I’d hurt him without provocation. So bizarre. He showed everyone his wrists. And there were bruises. Of course. I’d been holding him hard. As I said. I’d been holding onto him hard instead of beating him to death. They were dark, almost black bruises. It was for his own sake, I did what was best for him, as they say. And he whined and whined. And my dad, who’d seen it all, said nothing, just said we should stop fighting, getting at each other. But after that I didn’t speak to Soot for a while. So yeah, I distanced myself too. Cos of the fight, and cos he rang me up in the middle of the night. Wouldn’t listen. And Cherry said: I know. Me too. Cos he stole from me. Cos he came here with his violence. Came here with his whores. I didn’t want the kids to see that. They shouldn’t have to see that shit. Not yet, anyway. At least, not more than they’ve already seen. Not as much as we’ve seen, you get me. I just got sick of it. Soot’s psychotic babble. Soot’s lies. Soot’s attacks and accusations. Soot’s cursing and filth. Mostly I didn’t want him doing something to them. Not cos I think he would. But you never know. I said: no, you never know. No, you never know with him. It’s impossible to know. You just have to hope, cross your fingers, wait. Impossible to know. It depends. Cherry said: it all depends. It depends what he’s high on, or not got hold of, who he’s fallen out with. There’s always a conflict. I said: always. And they can never be resolved, cos he needs them. I don’t wanna sound like his psychologist or nothing. But, you know. And she said: no, I don’t wanna sound like his bloody psychologist or nothing either, not that he’s ever had one, to be fair, cos it’s not that fucking easy, going to a psychologist, really, believe me, he’d never’ve managed more than two or three times, and taking it seriously, doing something about his problems? Forget it, but, you know, these conflicts can never be resolved and he needs them, because his perception of reality is totally different to other people’s. I swear, his brain is totally fried, man. He’s been stuffing those chemicals up into it since he was twelve, thirteen. Every day, pretty much. We’re not living in the same world. And if that’s the case, how can we even get along? There’s no way of knowing. If he comes to see the kids, for instance. Has he got a knife today? Pepper spray? How can you live with him? How can you make it work? I can’t. Not any longer. Not any more. You know, I said. You know: the sick thing is that I sometimes think there’s no solution for these people and that we should actually exterminate them, for everyone’s sake. So they can’t cause any more suffering. Honestly. For themselves, for others. So they can’t have any more children. So we don’t have to see them fucking about with alcopops and pills pushing a pram in the morning when we’re on the way to school or work. Cherry said: honestly? I said: I swear. But it’s totally sick. I know, totally sick. But it’s what I think, I swear. If they could just disappear. If I just didn’t have to see. But that’s not the point, that’s just an impulse, some sort of mental mechanism or whatever you call it, a – I don’t know – reaction, you get me, but as soon as I start thinking a little, you know, it passes, but what I mean is like, if I think that – I mean me, when my values are actually completely different, or whatever, my opinions are completely different, I think in a different way. You know, I’d never do anything like that, right, it’s just a thought, a feeling, a reaction to something, to them, to their way of like totally taking over my life, right, a reaction to their threat – but I mean, what I mean is, if that’s what I think, what do all those cop types think, all the ones who really have something to lose, all the ones who can actually act on their thoughts, you get me? Do you never think like that? Cherry said: I mean, you can’t think like that. I said: I know, I can’t help it. Cherry said: try. I heard the composer say: like almost seven hours of The Well-Tuned Piano or Riley’s In C, though perhaps with pure intervals, you know, something like that, somewhere far away, and I noted, from the corner of my eye, that a yellow bus was driving towards us at full speed, and I skipped to one side slightly, a movement that was, I think, simultaneously intentional and reflexive. Or the impulse came from the line between reflex and intention, consciousness, if such a line exists. I don’t know, the guitarist said, but it’s so damned American, do you know what I mean, while someone like Julius Eastman never had a chance. Exactly, the composer said, and why do you think that was the case? Why were some worshipped and praised while others fell into abuse and homelessness before dying in obscurity? But you know, Soot, I hear myself say, instead of replying to the composer, because I always have to defend him, always have to say something nice about Soot, always try and find some positive angle, always stand up for him even though he maybe doesn’t deserve it, even though he’s a filthy blatte tramp, as I once heard Vasti say on the phone to a friend, but you know, I begin to say, think about it, he hasn’t always been like this, when we were little he was smart, interested in things, like any kid. You want to grow, to learn in some way, develop, but he was too young to start using, it destroyed him, I say, your parents were fucked up, I say, with their own shit, how was he going to manage, but yeah, I know, it’s not that simple, at some point he has to take responsibility for his own actions, at some point it’s on him, I know, and now I’m gesticulating, in my head at least, starting to move differently, in, like, some inner body, I know, I know, I also came close to beating him to a pulp, the little bastard, but he can’t just do whatever he feels like, behave however he wants, with no respect, but you know, I think, it could all have been different, right, why shouldn’t it have been different? But how, how, I don’t know, you know, but it didn’t start off like this, it was different before it got like this, he was different before he got like this, and I go on talking, more and more and round and round, words and words and words till I end up with that cherry orchard stuff, and you know, I can just hear Soot’s voice saying cherry orchard blah blah blah, are you thick in the head, bro, fuck that, he’s laughing, his laughter sounds like Tupac’s hoarse voice, give it up, just give it the fuck up, you fool, I’m done listening to your shit, your voice is hurting my brain, you get me. It’s done, it’s already over. Too late. You can’t think like that, Cherry said. Well in that case everything’s better the way it is. It doesn’t get any better, it doesn’t get any easier or clearer. But I do, you know. I just do. I walk past that square every day. Every morning, every afternoon. Every weekday, and often on the weekends too. I see them every time. I don’t know their names, but I recognise the faces, the old Yugo with the ponytail, you know, the Polish woman with no teeth, the skinny bug-eyed Turk, the hard rocker who’s always laughing, then those two small-time dealers, the twins, what are they: Latinos, Arabs, I dunno, but always dressed in those Adidas trackies. Almost every day I see them. As soon as the hostel throws them out each morning, they’re there. And I think about him, maybe even miss him. And? What do you mean? I mean, OK, the crux, the central point, what is it? That it could have been us? That it could have been me? Sure, that’s the truth. It doesn’t get any more banal than that. It’s true. It’s a place that I was destined for and that I escaped. This hangdog thing. The drugs, the crime, the death. Doing time, filthy mattresses and sofas, the hostels, the psych wards, the memorial gardens. The whole shebang. That life and that death. It’s true. But what does it mean? What do you think it means? Sure. Yeah. You’re right. It’s not some kind of straightforward survivor guil
t, if that’s what you were thinking. What I feel is only partly sympathy, empathy, understanding. I also want to smash their faces in. They disgust me. Have you ever seen someone have a breakdown? Close up? The weakness, the bodily fluids, the shamelessness, the spiritual and intellectual poverty. How pathetic it is. How ridiculous it is. Self-hatred, you say? Wannabe psychologist. OK, maybe a bit. There’s a limit. It’s the limit that you see. It’s the line between human and animal. But actually I think it’s extremely weird that it hasn’t occurred to anyone to just get rid of them. They don’t fulfil any function, the poor, the ones not needed in the factories, the ones not needed on the production line, in the care system, for cannon fodder, for brothel fodder, why has no one systematised this, an organised extermination of unnecessary lives, used up or unusable, a drain, why isn’t there an extermination camp for them, I don’t get it, even I’ve thought that thought, even me, who could’ve been one of them, like I’m saying, it’s a place, I’ll say it over and over, till the meaning is clear, till the meaning, the true significance of these words, crystallises, till something unpronounceable becomes manifest, in some as yet indescribable way, yeah, I’ll say it again, it’s a place that I was destined for and that I escaped and if even I think it might be best to just get rid of them, the way people do with stuff they’ve no more use for, the way people do with animals that no longer fill a function, it’s true, what many people say: anything you can do to an animal, to a rat, a dog, a monkey, anything you can do to an animal you can do to a human, that thing about human life having a value in itself is ridiculous, in this context it’s ridiculous, bizarre, absurd, almost nauseating it’s such bullshit, anything you can do to a rat you can do to a human, and you can do anything to a rat, and when I walk past the square, every morning, every afternoon, and on the weekends now and then, with friends or alone, and see them, their faces, and recognise them, without knowing their names, though I recognise their faces, their bodies – every single time I think all this, these lives, why hasn’t it occurred to anyone to just get rid of them, or rather, why has no one put it into action yet, these thoughts exist, in my head, and no doubt in their heads, suicide is a solution too of course, a funeral is much cheaper than all that care, all that rehab, all those police initiatives, building all those prisons, maintaining them and on and on and on. All that palliative care, to no end. Anything you can do to an animal you can do to a human. Yeah, I’m sure it will happen, said Cherry, I’m sure we’ll see it one day, she said, looking pained. The pictures show a street that would seem completely unremarkable to you, but which is a veritable oasis in their desert, said the photographer, Riis, to the group of benefactors. It’s surrounded in every direction by densely packed dirt and many streets, humming with a young, wretched, squalid generation. But its pavement is comparatively free of those children who have nowhere but the street to play, which creates a rather desolate impression, because so few people walk there. Yeah. Anything you can do to a rat you can do to a human, and you can do whatever you want to a rat. Yeah, Cody, said Soot, that’s how it has to be, and soon we’ll die, like rats, sinking down, leaving, becoming something else, lost. Yes, leaving. The world, life – these concepts aren’t important any more. Earth, the part that’s not water, the continents, the nation, the landscape, the city, the district, the building, the room, the bed. The washing-up unwashed, the pan rusting, the bread going stale, the butter melting. Sickbed, sickness. It’s night, I’ll do a few lines and, an hour later, a few more, those will be the last. Place is everything and death is placelessness to us. Bodilessness. We’re the confined ones, we’re the ones incapable of using our gifts. Despair, sorrow, loneliness. Insomnia creates new spaces, pockets of time, has a unique light, unique sounds, how they appear depends on where you live, the way everything depends on where you live. Soot is awake when everyone else is sleeping. And vice versa. Soot is a reflection of something, a reflection, an inside-out being, an interior on the surface, the outside within him, a whole world in there, a world of reactions, effects, consequences. Soot says suicide is not an alternative. Soot repeats it, suicide is no alternative. Soot has his place, in front of the window, in front of and above the street lights, and it doesn’t resemble anything: no photos, no films, no books and no games, none of the sci-fi white corridors, no dark-as-night shit, no romantic rock songs and no hip-hop diss tracks with pumping basslines from the clubs of the American South, it really doesn’t resemble anything. I don’t even resemble myself. I look at myself, as though from the outside, from the future: afterwards I thought I should have known something would go wrong that day. That I should have felt it coming. Wasn’t that the case? Wasn’t everything that morning steeped in a foolish good humour? Wasn’t there something beautiful and docile, almost benevolent about the late-morning skies, about the building facades gliding past outside the bus, about all the central-station bustle, the people in the cafes, the stacks of newspapers and chocolate, the weight of the railway lines, the landscape, which, as unassuming as it was tyrannical, opened up outside the train window. Soft drinks, coffee, cinnamon buns. Birches, houses, fields. A jokey text (someone was looking forward to ‘corybantic ecstasies’). A bird that seemed to sing for me alone. That sensuality, in living. A soft scarring. The body faced with this love, yeah an address, a message of love, why ever not, that had previously been concealed, now came forth into the light. And this light flooded, heavy and urgent, over objects and beings, over the world, whose age and size were so enormous that the mere hint of it, the mere hint of the contours of just an insignificant fraction of all that, of the unnameable fabric of eternity, that boundless cloud of not knowing, had me drowning in love. Somewhere there, in formulations like this, in the affect of love, in its simplicity. At this point I should have thought: something’s going to happen. It’s going to hurt. I’m going to hurt. In the darkness of our era: in a constantly expanding universe, where the distance that separates us from the most distant galaxies grows at a speed that means their light can never reach us, it’s our job to become aware, in the darkness, of that light that is trying to reach us and can’t. That’s our task, when heavy raindrops fall on the earth at dawn, and we hear the muted sound of them boring down into the soft, loose stuff of the furrows, a roguish bird flies just above the ground, mimicking a child’s cry, and the rain relents as the light intensifies, and the air is fresh and clear, and in the earth puddles glimmer before sinking down, and animals peer out, among them the human animal. The human animal looks proud. Here, she says to her crying children. Eat and live, and she presses them against her body. They don’t know how but they soon learn. They learn fast. They find paths. They learn. They spread. They look at each other. They say: we’re living. They die, and bury one another. Cities grow. They say: we live here. In the city centres, near the squares and the parks, near the meadows, the fields. We’ve lived long with the fields. You can see it in our bodies, our skins. We sit and watch the night and tell of everything we’ve seen. We saw the rains come. We lived with the animals. We watched them be fed and die. We ate them and we buried them. We gave them names. We lived with the machines. We oiled and repaired them. We had names. We screamed our names. Day and night. Called out our names. Let the night envelop me, we begged. And we invoked fires. Now we sit on balconies, looking out over the burning hills and fields. We sit and smoke and drink liquor and listen to the radio and look out at those roguish birds mimicking the children’s cries and we’re still starting fires. We drink liquor and say: the skull, that is what a girl is called in the nomads’ language. The outline of her skeleton showed in her worn features. The skull tells us: once I would take my children with me from city to city, in cages, in containers. On the backs of their necks I wrote their names and birthplaces. The cemetery from the First World War: that’s where I saw the names mixed up, saw that everything was mingled. The skull was my great-grandmother, she came from the Eastern Side, and she used to say that on the night I was born she’d seen a dark star in the sky. My family tal
ked about it a lot when I was young, about what it might mean; what Great-grandmother had actually meant by star. It wasn’t until many years later, when I was on the way to becoming a grown man and Great-grandmother was dead, when the whole Eastern Side had disappeared, or at least the Eastern Side that had been hers, when the outer wall had been moved and the Eastern Side was under the sway of the new Ruler, it wasn’t until then that we even began to ask ourselves what she meant by dark, because it was now clear that the Eastern Side’s darkness, Great-grandmother’s darkness, wasn’t the same as ours. Your name, Cody, she said, the skull said, shortly before she died, your name made me recall how I used to carry around a cranium I’d found in an old chapel. I carried it from city to city. They’d moved graves and exposed 100-year-old skeletons. On the skulls they wrote the names and birthplaces of the deceased. I used to focus my gaze downwards, at the ground, at the obstacles in my way, the puddles and at the bumps in the asphalt, where I thought I saw something of significance. The bumps in the asphalt and the cheekbones were painted with roses and forget-me-nots. Carnations and wax plants. That’s what my great-grandmother said, now she’s like a skull inside my head, a cranium full of names, dates, flowers. In that way, perhaps some aspect of the Eastern Side’s world view lives on. Now I’m weightless, looking up. Through the roof, which is open to the sky, I see swarms of thrushes flying by, birds that rise in the dusk before darkness closes the routes available to them. I remember the suicide scenes in the tower-block landscape of my childhood, that magical hall of mirrors. It drove me mad. What was it that drove me mad? The wealth of variations? Or the opposite, this alone, this monolithic fact? The thing that drove me mad, the thing that pulled me out of my childishly straightforward, simple existence, out of my wits, was the realisation – at first diffuse, covert and inexplicable, before becoming a revelation and then a kind of experience, a somatically and intellectually couched understanding – that some lives don’t deserve to be lived. That this lie prevails. And no one can do anything about it. Images flicker. Something glimmers. When I was a kid, there was a four-year-old boy who lived on the ground floor of the house across the street from us. I’ll call him Antonio. Of course he was called something else, but these kinds of anecdote always have, by necessity, a degree of impossibility, so I’m unable to tell you his real name. Once I saw Antonio eating polystyrene. He would sometimes stand there, pissing out of his bedroom window, wearing his too-big cowboy boots. And he used to say he fucked his little sister. If there was a fight in the yard, and there often was when Antonio was around, he would try to frighten his enemies by saying they should watch out – because his dad worked at the prison. One of my classmates lived two floors above Antonio. We can call him Olof, though he too was called something else, equally unmentionable. Because he was short and very scrawny, people round there used to prefix his name with the word Little. So we can say he was called Little Olle. I never caught sight of Little Olle’s dad, perhaps he worked with Antonio’s dad, I don’t know, but his mum was also short and very skinny. She was out of work and an addict. What she took I don’t know, I never got that close. Once when I went to Little Olle’s house to play the computer game Pong the whole flat had been emptied of furniture. We went into the kitchen. It smelled vile, and in the middle of the floor, where the kitchen table had previously been, was now a large black bin liner. It was well filled, that much I can remember, but however much I try, I can’t recall what it contained. Nor can I remember if we found out what had happened to the furniture. But I think it was probably the bailiffs who’d been there to collect things that, in the eyes of the state, could have been put to better use, or maybe his mum had sold everything worth selling to get the money for something that was more important at that moment. I don’t know, it’s like my memory just stops. Something comes to a halt there in the kitchen and the room closes around us; two children of about ten in front of a black bin bag with indeterminate contents that reaches their chins. An image. That flashes up for a moment. And then what? Unveils its significance? Never to be seen again? Can the past really be captured that way? How can you reconcile that volatility with the enormity and persistence of that experience? And what is true in this shifting moment? Whose truth, whose history? I don’t know. I only know that I’m tied to it. And there’s always more to be said about it. There’s always more of it. Even when it’s quiet. It’s so quiet. The days pass. No, the days fall. Slowly, like softly fluted petals. Weeks, months, years. We grow older. We forget one another, the contours of our faces fade and we remember other things entirely. Everything shape-shifts, over and over. In the end we don’t know what’s true, what’s false, where one thing starts and the next finishes, or what one thing has to do with the next. What ideas about power and freedom – ideas about the tension between possibility and necessity – have to do with that bin bag, that room. With the shifting image of Antonio’s cowboy boots and the crumbs of polystyrene in the corner of his mouth. It’s more than just images, I force myself to write. It’s more than just words. There’s always more. Behind every voice a choir. A flicker of bodies. If I listen I hear. The sound carves into the walls. Through the window, secured with a substantial padlock, I see the men gathering, a dozen young men helping each other remove the barbed wire before the police return. I remember it being beautiful in the dawn and the dusk. Almost every day I fantasise about gruesome violence, that I’m going to kill a pig with my bare hands. A man. My enemy, sometimes I think he looks like me. Through the tunnels, whose lighting no longer works, we are transported, in a stolen factory-fresh Renault, and I think of steel-blue mountains beyond rose gardens, of small islands appearing in the dawn light, fields lying fallow. I suddenly remember, out of nowhere, an enormous and mystifying lightness. One thing I’ve learned: to beware of calling time and society by their true names. To make your way as though through a bad dream: without looking left or right, with lips pressed tight together and gaze fixed. When you’re locked in it’s easier to cry. I’m silent, my lips pressed tight together and my gaze fixed. Oh, swathe me in night and surround me with holy pyres. Was that a prayer? Was it Soot who was praying? Let me fall for all time a victim, but by Your hand only. Yes, he was praying. In the evenings, lying in bed, the ceiling and the cold light from the window, sidelong. Hand folded on his chest. Yes, even that. Our Father who art in heaven. Like a child. It’s almost a joke. Miserere Mei, Deus. In a cell. That’s how Soot died. Yes, exactly, and that’s particularly clear in Antiphona nach Hildegard von Bingen, the guitarist said at this point, in a kind of triumphal tone I just couldn’t get my head around, probably because I’d missed something central to his argument, but it was something to do with the difference between bordun and ostinato, and at that same moment we heard a loud bang behind us, and a strange, unplaceable sound, kind of metallic and sharp, but also wet, fleshy, and then, without really understanding, I realised what it was and I turned round and knew then that I’d also heard a braking sound: screeching brakes or tyres skidding across asphalt or something similar, and some kind of hissing, venting sound, and what I saw was a bus positioned diagonally across the carriageway, and in front of that bus lay a person and a bicycle, all wrapped around each other, behind one of the front wheels, it was difficult to tell exactly what I was looking at, like my brain couldn’t make sense of the image, and I heard a whimpering sound, and saw a woman in an orange coat running over to the body, to offer help, I assume, I saw her almost bounding over to the front part of the bus and bending over, but then she kind of flinched back, as though an invisible force had repulsed her, or pulled her back, she turned her gaze and her face away from what she saw under the bus, and her hands moved, shook, in a peculiar, irregular way in front of her face and I saw that we’d come closer, without noticing I’d set my bike aside, leaning it against the bridge railing, and moved towards the site of the accident, which had now attracted a dozen or so other people, and in among them the bus driver paced back and forth and I saw his face, that drained, grey, tired fa
ce, the white short-sleeved shirt and the red tie, and I saw several people had gone over to the victim and got out their phones, so I stopped, realising the guitarist and the composer were stood alongside me, it must have been four or five metres from the front wheel of the bus, I couldn’t stop myself looking, and now I saw the black jacket, the black hood, blood and something white sticking out, between shredded clothes and bicycle parts, and I averted my gaze. It was him, I thought, it’s him, the junkie, it’s him, he’s lifeless.
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