Wax plants? Was it really wax-plant flowers I was thinking of as I stood there by the canal, against the backdrop of the police station’s symmetrical facade? Wasn’t it cherry blossoms? And it wasn’t at home on the windowsill that I’d seen them, was it, but in the yard, in the garden, by the fence, wasn’t that it? Or in the park, past the bridge, under the bridge, yeah, in the water, in the cold, dark water, bobbing, calm and serene. We should go, said the guitarist after a while. I don’t know how much time had passed, but it was enough for the full realisation to hit us that there was nothing we could do, nothing at all. We saw the paramedics come and deal with the body, someone else was looking after the driver, and several times I was about to open my mouth and say something, that I’d met that guy before, just a little while ago, just before you came, by the canal, by the police station, but for some reason I couldn’t manage it, didn’t know where to begin, from which end, from which sensory impression, and now the guitarist was silent too, and the composer just said Jesus, and fucking hell, a few times, and we walked to the central station, bought our tickets and took the escalator down to the platforms. We drifted down and I felt like I was having to shout to make myself understood, even though the guitarist and the composer were standing right next to me, so close I could hear them breathe, hear the swishing and rustling of their clothes. This is how it is, I thought several times, more or less involuntarily, and without even knowing what that meant. This is how it is. This is my life. It has to be this straightforward. So tyrannical. The junkie’s dead and I’m the only one left. Then I thought, still on the escalator, going down and down and down, that it was idiotic, that my thoughts were idiotic, that I was an idiot. And we got on the train, in silence. The guitarist got out his phone and started tapping at it. I looked at the composer, she closed her eyes and sort of massaged them, rubbed her fingers against her eyelids, and I took the chance to lean my head back and close my eyes too, my hands resting on my lap as the train glided across the Øresund. We got off at Nørreport and wandered across to the cathedral. The guitarist said something about a car accident he’d been involved in where everyone had escaped with their lives, and the composer showed us a scar she’d got when a car she’d been in drove into a motorway barrier. We reached the church, paid the entrance fee and sat right at the front on the left-hand side, each with a programme in our hands. Then Christoph Maria Moosmann entered. I turned round, looked up at the organ and could just make him out as he sat down at the manual. He began to play Pärt’s Annum per Annum and everything seemed to close in, filling with weight and levity, the room expanded and contracted as though it were breathing, and I breathed with it, and a few seconds into the first chord’s powerful vibrations I breathed out, before holding, lungs empty, for the rest of the minute the chord sounded. Then it ebbed away, and I drew breath, deeply and noisily, much too noisily in the quiet church, as though I’d been underwater and was now struggling up to the surface, up to the oxygen, just as the pause, the silence, was at its most intense, and when those first weak, light, playfully searching notes began to sound I couldn’t help once again thinking about Soot and about that last night, about what I’d done, what I was, about Kiko and Rawna, about that bus, on that roundabout, that circular motion and the centrifugal force that pushed me out towards everything with such satanic power. We were supposed to be going out and having it, as we used to say, and we’d chilled at Kiko’s, and then onwards, met Dima, Becky, Argo, Saima, Fernanda, I don’t know who else, Hansson maybe, Zoltan, Vadim, and were heading up to Elsa V’s to get some shit, do a quick job for her. We dropped one there straight off, but had to wait an hour at least before she let us in, seemed there was a lot of people passing through, a lot going on. She gave us the gear and we took off in search of Slovak, the Bulgarian. A few evenings before, I’d been sitting in Arben’s crappy Mazda 323, with its driving ban, waiting for Hansson, who was running around trying to sell those nine-bars from Christiania, and the radio was playing some new song by some new rapper and Arben said to Kiko, who was sitting there grooving and nodding along, that he hated those fuckin gangsta fuckers, as he put it, that whole thug style, he said, what even is that, ey hey yo waddup, man’s glidin in the whip, he mocked, the screen’s all tinted, guy’s fuckin minted, let’s go, shorty’s so damn wet, with a retarded expression, suit’s got three stripes, but my cock’s so crooked, nigga speak real funny, all this coke got me cookin, and we laughed and I said cuz dem bars is on fire, but he was being serious, said damn I fucking hate them, I swear, I mean actually living that life is one thing, not saying nothing bout that, but bragging bout it, chatting shit that way, tricking the kids into thinking everything’s cool blingbling, it’s bullshit, man, it’s totally wack, no joke, and Kiko thought he should calm down, it’s just music, he said, but Arben said it’s more than that, it’s advertising a lifestyle, and anyone who’s seen that life at all knows it’s 90 per cent stress, he said, and I said he’d just said it was better to live that life than to rap about it, but that’s not what I mean, he said, you know yourself it’s 90 per cent chaos, but Kiko said hey, what you chatting about, per cent this per cent that as if you work in a bank or something, course it can be stressful but there are quiet times too, admit it, who gives a shit if it’s not bling, but Abbe insisted, listen man, 90 per cent panic, he said, believe me, all night long when you’re on your own and can’t sleep and your mates, your fucking brothers, could stab you in the back at any moment, for nothing, and not even for the cash, not for some tinted whip, man, for nothing, just cos they’re scared and tired too and they have to play the fucking game, honest to god, Tony Montana this and that, such fucking thug chat, I can’t even hear it, has anyone ever even seen the whole of that film, don’t they know how it ends, and I said you think you kill me with bullets? I take your fucking bullets! and Kiko was bent double with laughter and told Arben he should become a politician, or work for Save the Children or something, don’t you realise it’s art, bro, music, and what you’re saying’s not true, loads of people tell you how bad that life is, rap about stress and suicide, even Biggie and that lot did, but you know what, they have to be hard and real at the same time, you know, they have to have respect from the streets, and Arben opened the window and spat. Real, go fuck your mother, he said, this is real, and then he pulled up his shirt and showed us the scars under his arm, but I don’t go around acting like some fucking monkey, and Kiko grinned and said yeah yeah, bro, you’re hard, but you’re no gangster, you’re a fucking small-time thief, man, a bike thief, and you’re getting old, fifteen-year-old kids rob you, so don’t take this the wrong way, bro, but who’s gonna rap about that, about being stressed out and poor, unemployed poly-addict, failure among failures, you get me, homie, I mean, just look at your car, man, not exactly an advert for your lifestyle, and Abbe looked pissed and said we could get out if it was so shit, and just when I thought they were gonna start fighting for real, Hansson turned up and said the guy didn’t want to pay and also we were probably being watched now cos that fucking idiot didn’t warn us. And surprise, surprise, we got stopped by the pigs three minutes later. They lined us up by the nursery school, right in front of the kids and staff, all staring, frisked us and searched the Mazda. They impounded the car but none of us were carrying anything, so they had to let us go. Then we rang Dima, who came after half an hour and drove us home, he dropped me off last and that’s when I found out why Arben had been so pissed. His dad had got his sentence and was going down for eighteen months. I thought I’m gonna cheer him up, so I rang and said, mate, I’ve got a bottle of Bacardi, want to pick up some Coke and come over and have a few, estilo cubano? He laughed at me and said, stop being a dick. I said what? He said he couldn’t be bothered, he was going to drop a few benzos and watch a film or something. Estilo cubano, he said. You’re totally thick in the head, man. Two hours later Hansson rang. He’d sold the nine-bars. Time to get paid, bro. Are you in for the next round? And I didn’t really want to any more, bu
t I thought about the first time we’d gone over to Christiania to buy up the stuff and everyone was there apart from Marko who chickened out, we’ll get banged up, he said, and if we don’t get banged up we’ll get taxed by one of the big guns. We said your lookout, man, more green for us then, and then everything went fine, no problem at all, and we made a bit, not that much but still, you know, a bit extra, while he had all these different jobs, official, unofficial, legal; but he was still poor and trying to get his grades and all that, and in the end he went to some club to chill out, but this psycho-bouncer started hassling him till Marko flipped out and then he got five or six months for aggravated assault. I went in to see him the first week he was there and he said he regretted fighting back, said it was pointless, you always get it wrong, regardless. Then I’m suddenly standing there in front of Elsa again with the team behind me. What’s up? She looks me in the eye, then at the faces surrounding me. You’ve brought your friends, she says. New faces. As long as they’re halal. Dima giggles with nerves. I give Elsa the money. She’s got her tiger face on. She casts a glance at the notes, folds them once and stuffs them in her pocket. I reach out my hand. The others giggle too. Thanks, I say, a little too quickly, before she’s given me anything. Same to you, she says, taking my hand in hers. Enjoy responsibly. I put the bags away and the wraps the kids had folded for her. Then she gets out the big packet and a dark-blue rucksack, she passes both over. Give this to Slovak and he’ll give you the money. Be careful. You can go out that way in a minute, the others have just gone, she says, and points to the door in the back. Thanks, I say. Yep, you already said that. Relax, it’s cool. She grins and turns round. She has a big scar on her upper arm. It says DOOM on her top. We go out, and then into the club again via a door guarded by this absolutely enormous guy with an Ivan Drago hairdo, black polo shirt and a fat gold chain over his shirt. Want something to drink? Becca says to me. Nah, it’s cool, I say. Then she tells me about this guy who’d tried to play the hero. He’d come by a little money, she says, said he wanted to take me out to dinner. We went to some place, kind of like a falafel joint but a bit nicer, with Persian food. We ate this beautiful rice he liked, then he said he was going to take care of me. He promised, you know, all formal. I’m gonna protect you, he said. He said with him around I’d never come to harm. And to be honest I felt grossed out. I looked at him. Then I took a fork and stabbed myself in the arm. It made four holes and they were pretty deep. We just sat there a while. It was bleeding and he looked hurt. Almost desperate. It felt lonely. For both of us, I’m guessing. He tried to eat the rest of his food, but I just drank a bit and held a napkin against my arm. Then I said I should go home and disinfect the wound. Can I come along, he asked. And I felt like sticking the fork in his eye. But instead I just said of course. We laugh at the guy. I get up. I’m going for a piss, wait for me. I hate this UV light. Weird that she thought we were cops. She can’t seriously have thought that, for fuck’s sake. How you doing, Cody? I’m fine, I’m fine. You’ve got blood on your knuckle. On your knuckles. It’s dripping. Shit. I didn’t notice. Sorry. What happened? Nothing. Did you get any on you? Here, tissue. How’s it going? It’s fine, it’s cool. Stop asking the whole time, I’m getting spooked with you asking me that the whole damn time. How are you doing yourself? Cool. A bit glazed-over, dunno. Sorry. How are we gonna find the Slovak anyway? He’s not a Slovak. He’s just called Slovak, he’s like Hungarian, or Bulgarian or something, I dunno, a filthy pimp in any case. Is everyone here? We’re here. Did you get the bags? Yeah. And the nine-bars? Yeah, I got everything. What are they up to in there? Come on, let’s go. We have to test it. We go to the pub, some wack place with darts and a slot machine and football on the TV and we order beer and cider and Dima goes into the toilet to test it. Comes out and you can see straight away it’s a good high. Makes a ker-ching sign with his arm and then my turn and everything is suddenly dazzling, you know, the way it gets. One morning Soot woke up on the floor of his apartment in Pruitt-Igoe. He’d managed to smash all the windowpanes in the apartment and now the cold wind was blowing in over the shards. His hands were bloody, his knuckles all torn, on one of them something white, cartilage or bone, was showing. It made him dizzy to look at it. In the kitchen he washed his face and, carefully, the backs of his hands. Then he went out into the bathroom and started gathering things up from the floor. When he’d gathered up all his toiletries and towels and jewellery, he took the shards of mirror and put them in a large glass jar he’d brought in from the kitchen. First the big shards, then the smaller ones, then the very smallest with a broom and last of all he hoovered up the tiny, barely visible slivers and grains, with the old vacuum cleaner he’d stolen from a building site a year or two back. Then he grabbed a damp cloth and wiped away most of the blood from the walls and the floor. Same thing in the living room and the bedroom. His wounds stung and burned. Cherry came by. She looked around and gave him a hard stare. Maybe you should get that bandaged up, she said, nodding at his hands. A sound came from his throat. He picked up a butt from the floor and lit it. It’ll be cold now, Cherry said. You look different. Different? Not different. Not really. No. There’s nothing different. Things are things. Yeah. The future’s already here, it’s just unevenly distributed. Trippy, bro. You get me? No. I dunno. Or maybe. I think. Wait, come on. Let’s go. Let’s get out of here. In the car. Away. Up. Down. No fucking clue where. Out. And why shouldn’t there be slum lenses, Riis says up on the stage, when there are lenses for other purposes, like portrait, landscape and architecture. ‘Slum’ can, from our particular perspective, be defined as a narrow, dark yard with a number of wretched women and children hanging about the doorways – especially in good weather. Because of the high surrounding buildings and the narrow passageways, the light that falls on this kind of group is so weak and poor that brighter optics than normal are required to produce an exposure. Until lenses suitable for slum conditions are available, all we can recommend is the use of strong achromatic lenses. This is an area for further research, which will reward anyone who gets to grips with the problem – now the season is approaching. Some heavies threatened to rape Becca and I didn’t dare say anything. Woke up in the afternoon, somewhere else. The day vanished quickly, I helped Katti procure a little paper, as she called it, lit some incense, sandalwood, outside the door, fucking hippy, said Dima, people passed on the long balcony, as Sanne calls the walkways, the children were playing football and skipping, we ate scrambled eggs with our hands from a big frying pan, licked each other’s fingers, before slumping onto the sofa to play PlayStation. Fell asleep like that, dreamed I could suck myself off. The next day I met Kiko down by the shops, he had some isolator, and we smoked a tiny little bit, stupidly. I got so zonked I shit myself. Literally. I sat under a cafe table and shat my pants. I had to throw them away. Borrowed someone’s boxers. We got kicked out of the place by some goody-goody lefties. Then we wandered around freezing our arses off. We met Hansson and Adi, who offered us some vodka, and thanks to them we ended up at some party where this pumped-up dude on acid was going round in a tight shirt with a face full of acne, talking shit. Everyone was fucked, but him most of all. Wired chats about anthill architecture and intelligent insects and illuminati bankers – Adi got hung up on the latter and it got too much for me. That guy was freaking me the fuck out and I told Sanne and she said me too, so we decided to do one, even though there were chicks and Suedi wanted to bang one of them. But first I stole a pair of trackies. Katti nicked a bunch of CDs, a bottle of gin and a whole box of fucking Cornettos. I realised I’d had enough and wanted to go home now, but instead we wandered around for a while, getting cold. The ice creams didn’t help. We gave the rest to a beggar who stank of piss and he made a weird face. Then we got on the bus. Everyone started talking about football. Kiko gave a few guys the evil eye but nothing happened. I got noid. Adi started going on about some film with some kind of lizard goats or goat lizards and agents with telepathic beams and X-ray vision, a Medusa with her crew of s
nakes. I felt like eyes were staring at me. Sat on the bus unable to move. I was cold and my mouth was full of sugar that was somehow swelling up. I felt sick, and Becca said how the fuck do I manage to put up with this, for real? And I giggled a bit but Adi laughed until he cried and sang like a little kid about eejits who don’t give a shit. Then he started babbling about his illuminati crap again, about this and that person owning this and that, and I said to him are you a nazi or something, man, look at your pants, and the whole time the bus was turning round and round, like a fucking carousel, and stopping and accelerating and stopping and accelerating, and suddenly I felt better, and I creased up about Adi’s trashed whizz-head jeans, and Becca went for it and said look at your jacket, the three stripes, man, what kind of uniform is that anyway, I don’t get it, mate, makes no difference where you are, which country, rich or poor, everyone has those three stripes on their pants, on their shirts, on their jackets, sweaters, on their shoes, unless they’ve got a swoosh, or whatever it’s called, but didn’t you know they were nazis, those Adidas boys, I swear, the name of the guy who started the whole thing was Adolf, he was called Adi, just like you, mate, it’s like Adolf and Adnan are the same somehow, you get me, for some reason it’s become a fucking gangster uniform all over the world, people who live in some ice-cold shithole in Outer Siberia wander around wearing sweaty vests and bumbags full of the kind of shit we throw in the bin – and you know they go around in like, sliders, even though it’s below freezing outside, like that guy, you know, Ibbe, with his fucking prison slippers all year round, even they have their Adidas copies, made of, like, melted recycled plastic in some poisonous Chinese factory where everyone has cancer from the toxins in the air and the food and the water and the fags made out of like the roots of the tobacco plant or some shit, and in the end the poisons are in the gear too of course, gear they send out to their legion of piss-poor mates, of lófasz-gangsters, tramps who think that having three stripes on their clothes makes them kings, please, man, you’re just giving free advertising to a company started by a nazi, I’m telling you, bro, it’s nothing more than that, just cos some guy in the eighties went around rapping in Adidas garms, now all of you gotta have em, but fuck, you could just put a big clock round your neck like that dude from Public Enemy, why don’t you do that, she said, and Adi made a weird noise with his tongue and just said fuck off, get lost, and I said haven’t you got a better argument, you’ve got to disarm this shit she’s talking, are you a soldier or a tramp? But he just said shut up you fuckin mudak, and there was a long silence and I felt so tired I could’ve fallen asleep anywhere, completely zonked, and then Adi turned to us, grinning from fucking ear to ear, saying stop being cunts and listen a sec, and he told us about his ABC book, he called it The ABC of Storytelling, which everyone thought was fucking dull, about A, who’s ‘telling a story in which B orates on the way C talks about D describing how E chattered on about F’s retelling of that time G’d rambled on about the way H related how I’d extolled J’s criticism of K’s way of announcing that L had posited that M had whispered something about N’s tendency to declare that O sometimes lisps on about the fact that P’s spoken about Q mumbling something about R’s assertion that S once said that T confirmed the fact that U pointed out that V noted W’s habit of gossiping about the time X yelled that Y implied Z should stop lying about what kind of stories A is telling’, and the idea was that Soot would illustrate it, but he didn’t know how you would illustrate something like that, because nothing happens, you know, it’s just talk, there’s no images, so he just drew and sketched some grotesque faces with great open mouths within mouths, gobs within gobs, he said, with tongues, teeth, palates, throat holes or whatever they’re called, black holes telling and questioning and complaining and declaring and whispering and asserting and on and on, over and over again, round and round, like a goddamn loop, said Soot, like one of those staircases, you know, that just go up and up in an eternal circle, and when Soot showed Hansson those drawings, those sketches, he said cool, you’ve got talent, but you know, you should do something simpler so the man on the street can appreciate it, you get me, something straighter, clearer, and Soot took the pad back, pretended to gob on the floor and said stop chatting shit, bro, I am the fucking man on the street, you goddamn donkey, and Hansson opened his eyes wide and said OK, man, chill, so draw something the donkey on the street will understand then, and Soot shook his head and now everyone was shooting sideways glances at Adi, and someone shouted ayde, yalla, we need to get off and then we jumped off and within a few seconds we were in a fight with some beggar tramp by the ATM and someone lost it a bit and I shouted who the hell are you to me, I’ll bang your whole family you bastard to some filthy Italian squatters who hadn’t showered in months, they sleep with their dogs, I said to Becca, I swear, fucking lousy shits, genuine vermin, filth, and then I admitted that OK, I haven’t showered for a few weeks either, and laughed, got a crusty white cheesy bellend, I know, and she said why are you telling me that, you animal, do you want me to shove a tampon in your mouth? Allow it, don’t talk like a whore, Adi said. Oi, rassclaat, watch it, said Saima, don’t talk like a cop. Everyone laughed, I was nearly done for by this point, exhausted, but the pavement was like a conveyor belt, it was impossible to stop. We passed Lehmitz, went in, had a few tequilas, a bender in leather pants was standing on the bar playing air guitar to Judas Priest and Adi was jumping up and down like a proper mong, shrieking thug life, thug life, and Becca told this joke where you had to ask a cop if he or she, that is, they, you know, spoke French, and if you were lucky and they said yes, you asked them what nine was in French and then they’d say neuf, and then you’d say what? and they’d say neuf again, and if you’d filmed it you could just edit it together so you had a nice little sequence of them doing an impression of a pig, and she laughed but then made a serious face and said shall we burn down the cop shop, but no one heard her cos the others were talking the whole time, I closed my eyes and pressed my eyelids and it was like I had a lava lamp in there, then I looked around for Kiko but couldn’t see him. Kiko! Where are you? Kiko! There was red and green and white slime floating slowly around, I felt a bit sick but was trying to ignore it, everyone was shouting and again Becca said fuck we should burn the bacon factory, but no one heard and then a third time fuck the five-o and shouldn’t we go and burn the fuckin pigsty to the ground, but no one was listening to her and then I saw that Sanne and Adi were standing there talking to the Bulgarian, who I knew sold horse, and then I knew it was over for today, for yesterday, for tonight, and I thought soon I won’t be able to cope any more, I’m starting to feel a bit tired, I said to Becca, signalling to her I was going to go and do you want to join me? Riis had excellent images of mortuaries, interiors from sanatoria, children’s homes, prisons, mental hospitals and graveyards. He showed an image of three blind beggars and said that he’d managed to accidentally burn down their home because of an incorrectly aimed or incorrectly dosed flash charge at the moment the flash went off (cue laughter from the audience). We cadged fags off people at the central station and then Soot showed me a cubbyhole behind a stairwell I’d never seen before, we sneaked in there, there were a few brats sitting on a bit of cardboard, they were scared of us, but Soot calmed them down with a gesture and a few words I didn’t understand, we sat down under a window and rolled a fat one, Soot tagged the wall and I watched, then we passed the last bit to the kids and took off, past a heap of sleeping bags and down into some kind of basement where the lights just went on and on, with walls that were red and then green, and then switched back and forth. As we were walking, Soot said I’d promised we’d go to the sea someday. But how are we going to get there. Riis said: I wanted, with my own eyes, rather than going on the assertions of people who’ve never seen for themselves, or who’ve only seen part, to get to the heart of the matter. Furthermore I determined a certain simple measure, with which I set out to assess life in the underworld. Everything intended to foster life and physical and spiri
tual health was good, and everything that harmed, smothered and restricted life was bad. Becca sat in one of the rooms, she’d worked a double shift and then slept the whole day, now she wanted to cut loose and she was bugging us: let’s do something, I’ve got two days off then I’m working a week straight, I don’t give a shit what it is but we’ve got to do something fun. I dunno, I said sleepily. Let’s take the bus, Becca said, or we could borrow a car from someone serious and head out to the coast, have a puff and chill in the sand, swim naked in the sea, it’s the shit, jumping off cliffs and that, bring your violin and play for us while we chill in the shade. It’ll be fucking cool. I’ve told you a thousand times it’s not a violin. It’s a fucking cello and I’m not taking it anywhere. Don’t you remember when we lived on the edge of the quarry? That summer we dreamed of justice for all, when we sat there smoking on the edge of the cliff, teenagers, estupidos, proper junkheads, and Ponyboy’d knocked out four of his teeth before he turned fifteen and Žana’d had two abortions in a year, it was the record for our part of town, that was the year before she turned sixteen, Ibbe started selling, Zoltan bowed out, turned into a swot but was still hanging out with us, Larsson got us our first pistol, etc., it felt like everything happened that year, the world was ours, you know, the sun hung there like a fucking orange over the water and shone on our skinny little bodies in the evenings, on the cliffs, it was the summer we discovered the Malaysian code of honour (you get three warnings, then I have the right to kill you if I do it with my bare hands) and fell in love with Polish skinhead girls who wore sun crosses, had Celtic crosses tattooed on their cheeks, on their foreheads, on their backs, on their tits, and we told them: you can’t be nazis here, you idiots, we’re blattar here, and we drew lightning bolts and skulls and flowers on our bodies, because we dreamed of justice for all, that’s what we said, and apparently that included sun crosses on the face and tears in the corner of the eye, a tear for each year in prison, as they said, a tattooed tear for every year, for every friend no longer here, for scars and wounds and hidden fears that multiply and reappear, each day week month so clear, you know the heavy atmosphere, when no one knows who’ll overhear and no one dares to be sincere, so close your eyes, forget, close the window, forget, lock the door, forget it all, bed down to sleep, shut down, as they say, make it all disappear, lose yourself in your dream, soon they’ll come for you: yalla bye! Your time’s up, you’re the one they’re picking up, you’re the one on the stretcher, it’s your friends crying, they’re the ones with new fears, new scars, and you know bro, that’s how it goes, as they say, like a real warrior, as they say, and Becca looked at me and I looked at her, and I said of course I remember, of course I remember what they said, all that stuff about freedom and justice, but it was all child’s play, it’s years before you realise just how damaged you are, how fucked up you got, and you want to tell the kids, you want to warn them, like an older sibling, you want to tell them there’s a better life, there are other ways to live, you don’t have to be afraid, don’t have to defend yourself all the time, but you don’t, you don’t say anything to them because you know they won’t understand what you’re saying, not a chance, and even if they did understand they wouldn’t take it on board, they just wouldn’t, they can’t hear it, the same way we didn’t hear. You don’t realise until years later that the word free exists, no, that the word free exists, but it has no meaning, I mean, it doesn’t denote anything in reality, just like the word unicorn, like the word god, or I don’t know – perhaps it denotes something that isn’t in front of me, to the sounds in my headphones that take away part of the world around me, and if I close my eyes everything disappears, and now I can think, I’m not sucking my teeth any more, like Soot, and my tongue is silent and unswollen, unbloodied, I close my eyes and listen, I’m Cody but I don’t know it, or perhaps I know but I pretend I don’t, I pretend I’m going to live, to grow and become an adult, I hide in a corner of the youth club and listen to this secret music, my secret life, my true life, I pretend it’s me playing, I pretend I’m already an adult and that I’m talking, freely and easily, joking and serious, I see myself pointing to the sheet music and discussing something, a glissando or a vibrato, and my arms, my elbows, my wrists, fingers, so light and agile, stable and reliable, I’m a calm person, unafraid, I explain something, I demonstrate something on the cello, my hand in a relaxed grip on the bow, but out of the corner of my eye I see madness encroaching and madness questioning and madness pressing in and pressing down on me, madness threatening to punish me if I don’t respond, asking what I’m doing, laughing at the sounds coming from my headphones, I laugh back, stand up, I’m going to get the others and tell them, he says, I turn it off and knee him in the groin, now it’s me laughing at him instead, because I see his surprise, he thought I’d back down, and madness sinks down in one body and rises in the other, I kick him in the calves a few times and press my forehead against the bridge of his nose, with small jolts, to push him away. A pulsating rhythm, a repeating pattern, a regular oscillation between stronger and weaker points in repeating cycles of various kinds. Bach’s cello suites, where the fuck did you get that from you little cunt, get out of here, a sucker punch and a headbutt and there’s no one else left in the room, and my tongue is still silent, unswollen, but now I know I’m Cody, all this is nothing but waste products and arrested development, toxins that the ruler of madness is washing from his system, it’s an international dream of beings who can shape-shift, change their appearance, become something else, as though you could go up to the child, take a good grip on their jaw and say that in the future, Kyoto clowns will laugh at Romantic depictions of the primaeval forest, spread hewn-off faces around themselves and harbour Modernist ballet performances inside their frontal lobes, and the angles of their brow bones will bloom inwards like an infection, so the lioness can keep the egg warm, incubating the latent psychoses till they blend with the external, dissociative ones, with the drugs, that is, which must in turn be dipped quickly in dopamine, in pools, pools where all this can be released, pools that reflect all the world’s psychoactive canopies. Fucking monster of a tree that one, says Cody, roots-vibe discotheque and shit, and then on we go, not a penny in my pocket or the bank, just two or three gulps of moonshine in a Coke bottle, one last roofie, man’s out of it now, just one last ball, please, a bout of unipolar disruption, that’s what they said, but we took it easy, bro, just an old postcard with torn-off corners, a rolled-up receipt, an empty wrap in our pockets, mementos of better times. Yeah. It’s hopeless, right, as the doctors say when we can’t hear. But we know, we’re not stupid, said Marko when I went to visit him that first week, just cos we have dirty clothes and debts with the authorities it doesn’t make us thick in the head, as I said to the pig before he slammed the cell door shut with his vile bastard grin, cop’s grin. I swear we’ve read all those books, Marko went on, with a weird look on his face, what the fuck else are we gonna do with all these years inside, and believe me man, we know everything about all the different leaves and fruits and harvest times and anhedonia and different receptors and shit like the diathesis stress model, have you ever read the Bible, you bastard? I told you: when you’re in here the revelations come along like clockwork, one after another, like Chinese firecrackers, like a string of pearls, I told you lot, you shouldn’t have given me computer time, paper and a pen, cos when I link my brain up to the internet trippy shit happens, always, you get me, conclusions, analyses and insights come raining down till I’m wading in that shit, so to speak. You know you can request copies of your records? Marko said. Makes for nice reading. The affective syndrome makes it impossible, or at least difficult, to have a functional routine. Over the years, the effects have varied, though certain recurring traits are worth mentioning: feelings of isolation, alienation and inferiority, insomnia, internalisation of the social order. Substance abuse, naturally. It’s so thrilling you start making your own notes. I’ve got to remember to ask the psychologist if we can interpret the alcoholi
sm, with additional short-term substance abuse (cannabis, amphetamines, ketamine, MDMA, benzodiazepines, cocaine (in your dreams, man)), to be a consequence of, or at least to a certain degree linked to, the social phobias that have developed (can I say blossomed here?). Other compulsive behaviours. Whose thoughts are you thinking? You’re an adult but you see yourself as a damaged child. You see yourself as a victim and therefore feel that your right to this hatred, indiscriminate and to be honest pretty vaguely defined, is unshakeable. You live fully in the shadow of your parents’ failures, their losses, their blind struggle. You’ve got kids to take care of but you go to pieces, breaking down the moment you start thinking about your own childhood. You want to murder the person you see in the mirror, but you daren’t, so you swap the mirror for a window. Who’s out there? Your self-image leads to a critical situation in which the most important elements are a paralysing fatalism combined with an all-eclipsing defeatism. Shit, bro, said Marko, pausing, all these words. Do you know how it feels to have them in your mouth? Like Tupac said: if we do wanna live a thug life, OK, so stop being cowards and let’s have a revolution. But you know what it’s like, bro. Only god can judge me. Fatalism, defeatism? Look it up, man, said Marko. It’s what’s known as ressentiment in philosophy, Hakim told me, and Hakim’s read more than anyone in this whole place, there’s a German guy who’s written about it. You should read more philosophy, and Marx, and contemporary political theory, he said, you can find all that shit in books. In the Koran, even in the Bible, trust me. Sure, Tupac’s a start, it’s good that you’re reading his poems and checking out the interviews, it’s good, that man got a lot of things right and was well sharp for his age, bearing in mind he was an entertainer, but man, you’ve got to see the limitations too and step it up, raise it up a level, go above and beyond, you get me brah? Right, bro, course I know that, Marko said to Hakim. Marko told me all this when I went to visit him. And it was exactly what Soot used to say. I know all about how they come out and photograph us and talk about us in their seminars and conferences. How the other half lives, heroin chic, the proletariat, thug life and spare a little change mate. I say to them: you diligent lab workers, to you human beings in need are just insects you have to stick a pin in so you can study and classify them, you street-level slum Samaritans, you gutter tourists, on the hunt for the next aesthetic wonder, the next imagination-whetting, titillating larva, the next grub who, anticipating metamorphosis, crawls around in the dung covering itself in whatever grot emerges from its orifices, and so on and so forth. I know, said Soot, I know exactly, that’s what their artists are like, that’s what Soot always said, I’ve met enough to know, he said, they live off other people, they seek us out, broke monstrosities and oddballs and spectacular freaks, spiritual cripples and that whole undefined, motley, drifting mass who they hand a crust of bread or a handful of coins and then fix with their camera, said Soot, position in front of their easels, their microphone booths, they hound the homeless, the beggars, pissheads, junkies, the criminals, they’d skin a creature alive just cos their still life is crying out for a splash of carmine red, they’ve got no problem asking the suicide case to throw themselves in front of the train fifty metres further along, so they get the fairground in the background, believe me, that’s what they’re like, I’ve seen it for myself, time and again, believe me, bro, I’ve seen how they pull people’s sleeves and beg and ask to be allowed to listen and see and touch the latest hot story, juicy tale, personal, private, honest and raw – but simply and straightforwardly told – portrait of desperation, and in return the teller gets to stroke their soft clothing, to sniff the mimosa and the hyacinth and the lily of the valley they keep in their editors’ offices, which those silent cleaners, our mums and dads, have wiped clean with their aching bodies, a pat and a hug, self-congratulation disguised as tenderness and love, believe me, said Soot, and sucked his teeth and spat, I know a thing or two about that stuff, yeah, I know a whole lot of shit about the less tender sides of that tender, nurturing representational apparatus, and Becca said: I believe you bro, I know a few things too about those so-called ‘disturbances’, but if I say shit about how things are, real talk, and maybe my thoughts about why things are the way they are, they look at me with the same expression I imagine a certain person was wearing when he looked at Oliver Twist asking for more food. But it’s all right, we know how to take food, right, man, and that’s why we laugh at them, right, laugh at them and say: we feel sorry for you, cos we know we’re better equipped for the future than you could ever be, with your straight spines and broad smiles, I mean, better equipped for at least one future, a possible, potential future where most of what surrounds us now has literally collapsed and been torn apart, caved in on itself, a time where all that remains is struggle; blind, raw struggle for survival. There, weapon in hand, hungry, dirty, plagued by swollen, bloody feet and memories of death and battered comrades, or just the expectation of death and battery, on our side or the enemy’s, there, in that place, we’d do better, we say, that’s where it would finally become apparent how absurd your world has been up to that point, how bizarre your lives have been, your psyches, even your bodies, the implausibility of all that flabbiness being allowed to exist unthreatened, it would become completely obvious how bizarre these spoilt, secure creatures are, these people, that is, you, who never cast a nervous glance over your shoulders, who never look around before you step into the road, what is that, people who step out of a doorway, a bus, an SUV, without looking left, looking right, checking the other side of the street to evaluate the risks, what kind of arrogant, perverted creature treads unfamiliar ground without looking first? Soot looked at her and sort of nodded and shook his head all at once. A creature like that must be a long way from their true nature, Becca went on. Being at ease in that world, I dunno if I can imagine anything more abnormal, anything more ignorant, anything more feeble-minded, and it makes me feel contempt, even when it comes to my sisters, my brothers, my people, my team, the smart ones, the ones who are awake, the ones who’ve understood the real shit, you know, but they’re still naive, running around with this fucking bizarre idea that what they do and think makes any difference at all to the big picture, that they have any part to play in the big game. It’s an ease that’s just ignorance, stupidity almost, it’s the same sort of courage that Alma, my two-year-old niece, has when she tries to jump into the deep end at the pool when she can’t swim. They walk out into the road without looking, walk into new rooms without first checking the place out, identifying dangers, threats – for them there are no dangers, nothing threatens them. They’re comfortable, at home in their bodies, their houses, their neighbourhoods, cities and countries, at home in their lives. Shit, the world is theirs. Feeling at ease in the world, is there anything more twisted, is it even possible to be more conceited? Becca asked Soot, who was now just shaking his head and looking down at his feet, as we walked along in the red-green sheen reflected off the old tiles, as I remember, Soot was dragging his lighter along the wall, making a gentle scraping sound interrupted by the rhythmic click, click, click, click of the joins. For a while it looked like we’d come to some kind of underground traffic crossing with neither traffic nor roads meeting and I heard Soot breathing, his jacket rustled, and I saw Becca pop something into her mouth, a tablet or some chewing gum, and my mouth felt dry but my tongue didn’t move, it lay fixed and unswollen under my palate, and I said nothing but thought, shit, I’ve got all this stuff in my mouth too now man, like a fucking river it’s running, even now, when I’m not saying a word. You could hear a pin drop in the hall as Riis turns on the projector. Marey and Muybridge, he says, captured birds in flight and trotting horses with stop-motion photography, and LA Huffman rode alongside his subjects in the territory of Montana and photographed right from the saddle. But the light-sensitivity of the glass plates and the brightness of the optical equipment available didn’t yet allow for shooting from the hip or for candid photography in the dark stairwells of the tenements and
the dark back alleys. Becca opened a hatch in the ceiling and we clambered out onto the pavement, the evening was dark and cold, an old beggar came up to us and we all shook our heads, and Soot said: I need my change as much as you do, my friend, you can bum a cig but that’s all, and Becca said: shit, the old guy’s damn shoes must have cost more than mine, and it felt as though someone had started drilling a little hole just behind the bridge of my nose, between my eyes, up into my brain, up into my frontal lobe. Soot and Becca said they were going to head up to her place and you know, take it easy and shit, and so suddenly I was standing there alone in this bright orangey light, seeing my body reflected in the plate glass of the bus stop. Where are all the animals? I thought and saw Cody, half transparent in the plate glass of the bus stop, sweep his gaze across the empty square. The buildings were covered with great dark patches, and these were connected by fracture-like lines that created an irregular, chaotic network above the streets. No animals, said Cody, as though there was anyone there to hear. No animals in sight. He picked up a half-metre-long pipe that was lying on the pavement and went into one of the buildings. An empty, desolate, enormous entrance hall. He wandered around aimlessly for a while, searching for the stairs without finding them. But the lift seemed to work. After a moment’s indecision, he entered it and pressed the button for the fourteenth, the uppermost floor. The doors closed and the lift began to rise. Cody observed his face in the mirror, he felt dirty and knew he smelled bad. He listened to his breathing and the distant sound of engines and let the metal pipe slowly glide across his left palm, fingered some debris flaking off one end of it. He wondered where it had come from. Once it had been part of a chair and someone had sat on that chair. Once they’d lived here. Once they’d cycled to the limestone quarry and bathed in the clear water. Once everything was open, uncertain, possible. There’d been a bed there, with freshly washed sheets. A scent, now impossible to recall. Everything in the disengaged face he saw in the mirror had told him he had to jump. Cody had passed the sixth and seventh floors when the lift slowed down. It glided past the eighth, too, before stopping, with a sudden deceleration, on the ninth. The doors opened. Cody was alarmed to see five or six people standing in the dark corridor outside the lift. But he didn’t do anything drastic, just took a little step backwards as his grip on the pipe tightened. However, the people took no notice of Cody. There were both men and women, they were light-skinned, had blonde or ash-blonde hair and were smartly dressed. They all had large scars on their faces. Scars that went from ear to ear, as though the corners of their mouths continued, out across their cheeks, out towards their earlobes. On some of them, Cody saw once they’d entered the lift and turned their backs to him, the scars even continued behind their ears and down their necks, towards their spines, where the lines met and, it appeared, continued down their backs. Cody couldn’t help imagining how it had looked when these lines were skin sliced open, fresh wounds: he pictured a kind of fishlike creature. Fishlike creatures falling upwards – rising to the surface like bleeding bubbles of life. Then it came to an end. He was driven out. Unable to afford the fee for a hammock or mattress at one of the better hostels, he moved into a police hostel near Church Street. One night in his sleep he was robbed of the gold medallion he always wore on a chain round his neck. Reporting of the theft to the constable on duty – and asserting legal ownership of said object – led to him being thrown out onto the street. Alberta, a stray dog who’d adopted him and had to wait on the street outside the hostel, sank his teeth, in solidarity, into the leg of the policeman who’d thrown him out, at which point the policeman took hold of the dog’s hind legs and crushed its skull on the stone steps. His Slavic blood rose and, blind with rage, he went on the rampage, attacking the guard’s office with paving stones and assorted cobblestone ammunition. He was soon disarmed by the security guards, escorted to a ferry and conveyed across the river. Behind the abandoned railway lines the vegetation had forced its way through, taking over everything. He saw the sun come up behind the damp birches and rowans, and from a rusty, cracked viaduct, all the pillars of which were richly adorned with wildstyle letters, he saw the beautiful, complex patterns the lines created. Is that Mary Ann Hobbs’s voice? he asked Saima, and she nodded and they talked about sounds from The Breezeblock and Anti-Gravity Bunny Radio as though it was their world, as though they weren’t interlopers or thieves there, and at night he put a sock between the strings and the fingerboard, practising scales and arpeggios while the others were sleeping. Together they could say love in eight languages. Then the plate glass of the bus stop was empty, and I went on alone. It wasn’t long before I bumped into this guy Darko, accompanied by a blind donkey he’d christened Yul Brynner, and it turned out he lived near Dalaplan, and because I lived there too – actually no more than a stone’s throw, so to speak, from the clinic where we all, a few years later, would be reunited, in a vision, like shadows, in a waking dream, a revelation, with all these speculations going around about our behaviours, our reactions, our needs, desires, our violence, et cetera, as they said, and only another stone’s throw from Mobilia, where a few years earlier we’d hung out in gangs, as they put it, stealing and vandalising both private and public property, or buying vodka and fags off the Poles in the car park – I said to Darko I know how to get there, I can help you, we can go together, I’ll just finish my drink and then we walked, weaving slightly, through the city with Yul Brynner and Silver Arrow, my bike, this sick mountain bike I’d bought off Maxamed outside the school in Kroksbäck for 500 krona, which was stolen again just a few weeks later, while Bergsgatan was deserted, as it always was at night back then, I was walking with Darko, I was pushing my bike along and he was leading the donkey, the street was deserted and empty, there was fuck all there since The Black Cat had closed, and Darko told me he was from Banja Luka, a crappy little town, he said, and I said just like this one then, and we smoked a fat joint by the statue and spat on the honour of the working man, and he told me he was a double deserter, he’d fled from two different armies, beat that if you can, brate, you can’t, can you suedi, that’s what you are after all, that’s what he said, and he said he hated refugee centres, where he’d lived before finding a sofa to sleep on near Dalaplan, they were just full of peasants, he said, peasants who beat their wives and children, and I said don’t lie bratku, you’re lying, you’re exaggerating, you’re the one sounding like a suedi, man, and the whole time Yul Brynner was standing there, chewing on something, with a face that said fuck it all, it’s like he’s hating on us, what’s the word, explicitly, no, what’s the word, you know, demonstratively you mean, yeah, that’s it I guess, and I taught Darko the word ruminate, said Yul Brynner was hating and ruminating, but Darko said donkeys don’t ruminate, they don’t ruminate or have hooves, he said, which is why you’re not meant to eat them, according to Devarim, the Fifth Book of Moses, that is, and I probably looked a little confused when I asked how he knew about that kind of thing, and he told me his grandma was a Serbian Jew from Hungary, that is, from the Kingdoms and Lands represented in the Imperial Council, and the Lands of the Crown of Saint Stephen, as Darko said his grandma used to say, and this grandma had taught him all this, and I said OK, well then we’ll give eating the donkey a miss, out of respect for your grandma, god rest her soul, and Darko said he wanted to make a film about Yul Brynner, the real one that is, not the donkey, and it was going to be called Yul the Sinner, or maybe Yul the Winner, he laughed, pleased with himself, flashing a row of yellow-brown teeth, but I didn’t get it, didn’t even know who Yul Brynner was, and he told me all about some Bosnian and Yugoslavian authors I’d never heard of either, and he told me an anecdote about this sewage-soaked techno party in Belgrade during the NATO bombings. Nihilism is truth, brate, he said, to je ono pravo, and then he related this dream he’d had. Just imagine: vultures. On cliffs. Sea and shingle. Sand and drifts of seaweed. The salt water crashing in over the corpses. Black birds leaning forward, pecking and picking and tearing at the flesh, sin
ewy and heavy. There’s a bang. They look up, fly up, unfurl their fantastic wings, fly up even higher, rise, sail away, disappear. In the hand of one of the corpses: a sodden piece of paper, on the paper a compass rose, black and red ink, white background, numbers and letters. It says: LEO. I look up and see a sculpture, a lion standing beside a recumbent lioness who’s been hit by an arrow, two lion cubs are climbing on her. I walk around the sculpture, and I see that the lion cubs have also each been hit by an arrow. On the back, someone has sprayed Rex Nihil, you get it, king of nothing. Trippy, right. I dunno Darko, not sure what to say, it’s a bit boring listening to this, to be completely 100 per cent honest with you mate. Then I met him at some illegal club, bloody and totally wasted, he’d jumped up and nutted the ceiling, and I turned round and said Darko, man, you’re getting blood all over my shirt, it’s like a bad dream, bro, I can’t wake up, I take my shirt off, I’m wearing a white vest, we pose and play tough for a French photographer outside the club, a magnificent cul-de-sac, she says, I remember it now, the speed was burning and stinging, Hansson started a fight at the bus stop, everything was frozen like a tongue on a lamp post, one tug and it’s all blood and ice and you’re hitting yourself in the face again and again, totally shocked, numbed. I wake up. There are voices coming from nowhere. What, vole? What do you want? The homes are very simple. Dirt and desperation fill the bare, empty corridors and dangers lurk in every stairwell. Few women venture out after dark. Now Moosmann was playing John Cage’s Souvenir, gently, restfully, so calmly I began to feel tired and thought I might drift off, but then came a great, heavy, murky cluster of notes, a powerful noise, a sound that both filled my insides and consumed me totally, and something, the movements, the dynamic, held me there, eyes closed but wakeful.
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