Breakfast at Midnight

by Louis Armand

  I lay on the laundry floor and shivered. It went on for hours. A crack of light under the stairway door told me my father was still awake upstairs. I imagined him up there, building and unbuilding some elaborate scheme of punishment in his mind. I began plotting my revenge, just as I always had, only now it almost seemed real. “Boy,” he’d said. And he’d known. He’d seen right into me.

  Afterwards, it took time for me to realise I could be stronger than he was. In my mind, I was still just an overgrown kid. On weekdays, before school, I lugged carcasses and meat trays for my grandfather. I fought off boredom by drawing pictures in my head. Every night I dreamt of Regen. I called from payphones. I rode out to meet her at the bus stop near the shoe factory. We walked to the wreckers yard. We made love on old vinyl car seats, pungent with diesel and engine grease. I started mulling over that first night. About how she hadn’t been a virgin. About how I hadn’t expected her to be.

  My father said I was queer. He’d get drunk at his workbench, assembling and disassembling his machines, like an angry Archimedes. Machines for cutting, grinding, pressing. Killing and packaging machines. Antique machines that did nothing at all. I told Regen. About the drinking. About the anger. I said I thought it was because of mum. She said I could hit back if I wanted to. I told her about the fear. “Every fear,” she said, “hides a wish.” I thought about that for a long time. Psychology, she called it. The obvious turned backwards.

  Regen’s family were some weird religion that kept her out of school, but each Thursday she took the bus into town and borrowed books from the library. Her parents didn’t care what she read. God spoke to them through their TV sets. She said apart from that they were open-minded. I asked what she meant, but she couldn’t say. They belonged to a wine grower’s cooperative. Every Autumn strangers came and harvested the grapes. My mother called them Ketzern, heretics. Said she pitied Regen. Her soul would burn, she said. Whenever Regen and I were together, she never took her eyes of us. Once she called Regen a little slut. It made me angry, though I wasn’t sure why.

  After we started seeing each other again, everything was different. It was as though I’d been asleep all those years. Regen knew things I’d never even heard of. When she talked to me, I came away feeling smaller, like I’d never be enough, never know enough, but aroused too, hungry to share the secret. I went to the library and borrowed the books she told me to. My father found them and laid into me. Said I was a lazy good-for-nothing cunt. Because I was old enough, he took me out of school and sent me to work at the abattoirs, to earn my keep. Each day four a.m. at the meat works. Knee-deep in blood and crap.

  It pissed my granddad off that I wasn’t around to do his donkey-work for him any more. They argued. My father said I should start earlier, work both ends. He knew I’d be too fagged-out to do anything about it. I got so tired I couldn’t even dream anymore. On Thursdays Regen still waited for me. I memorised every inch of her and went over and over it in my head just to stay awake while we hacked up carcasses on a backwards production-line. My hands stank of dead meat. I conjured up the scent of her. My face between her thighs. The sun baking the car wrecks. The tang of our sex. Afterwards she’d read to me. About dreams, Nietzsche, poetry. Her words drifted over me like sleep. I felt more and more helpless. She asked me if I ever thought of killing anyone. I said the smell of dead things clings to me. She licked the blood from my fingers. She took me into her again and again. She made me forget these things.

  5. FETISH MACHINE

  I want to know why Blake brought me to see the dead girl. I want to know where the rope marks came from. My mother hanged herself with a damp bed sheet, wound around a branch in an old plum tree. It would be easy to imagine it differently. A sheet spread on the ground, collecting the ripe fruit. A warm late spring morning. Lying there, gazing up through branches at the big sky. If I’d looked, would I have seen my mother’s hands tied? The last act of someone who wasn’t free. Childish thoughts come to me, of my mother climbing the ladder beneath that tree with both hands behind her back. Winding the sheet around the branch with her teeth. Slipping the knot. Falling. Only someone must’ve come and freed her wrists, because when they laid her out on the stretcher one arm stuck out from beneath the sheet they’d covered her with. A pale unblemished wrist. Fingernails bitten down to the quick.

  Perhaps my mother hanged herself because she couldn’t bear drowning. Perhaps the girl in the morgue drowned herself because she was at the end of a rope and life was strangling her. I don’t know what drives a person to suicide. How many accomplices it takes. Who or what it is that decides. Empty causalities pile up like cairns erected to the dead. I see the drowned girl in my mind and I say to myself that I don’t know her, I know nothing about her. But she stays there. She won’t go away.

  Blake knows about Regen. He knows I’m looking for her, only he doesn’t know why. I ask myself why, and I don’t know either. It’s simply there, that’s all, weighing like a fact. Something that should’ve been self-evident, but wasn’t. I need her to exist somewhere. To be possible. If I’d tried to understand it, the reasons would’ve gotten away from me. Just as she had. Just as she always had.

  We’re sitting there in the Orient Express like a couple of washed-up extras from a B-film no-one remembers ever having been made. Fumes of cooking fat and cheap liquor. A waitress with horrible girth hands us each a grease-smeared menu. We order brandy straight. The lampshade’s shadow cuts Blake’s face in half, one eye gone black. Dull aperture. Shutter blink.

  “In ancient Rome,” he says, Stoic-mouthed, “the punishment for murdering one’s parents was to be scourged before being sewn into a leather sack – together with a monkey, a scorpion, a snake and a rabid dog. Then tossed into the river. The parricide’s doom.”

  “It’s customary,” I say, “for God to smile upon the misfortunate.”

  I think: You figure your odds. There’s always a worse alternative to anything.

  Blake laughs. Crow-cackle. A disembodied head looming out of chiaroscuro. Eddies of cigarette smoke. Mouth open. Holofernes in Caravaggio.

  “Do you know the story of Sotades the Obscene of Maronea?”

  “Should I?”

  “He was a poet from Alexandria. He invented the palindrome.”

  “The palin-what?”

  “Writing something so it’s the same backwards and forwards. Like D-E-D, dead.”

  “Sounds like a terminal disease.” The marinated abscess pouring forth its poisoned parable.

  “Terminal for some.” Drone. “King Ptolemy had Sotades thrown into the sea wearing a lead suit, for scribbling satirical verses about his wife… Why he was called the obscene.”

  “Some people can’t help themselves, I suppose.”

  Magor, I think. The mad poet, naked and drunk, pissing against the back-end of a Russian tank. Rotted in a cell in Valdice for the crime of poetry. Last seen: drowning his sorrows in a cellar under Jilská street, post-revolution. Magor who ranted: Anyone can versify and go to hell for it. But that doesn’t mean he’s a poet.

  “Totalitarianism,” Blake intones, “makes art into obscenity. Capitalism simply makes it idiotic. Like they used to say in the good old days: You kiss Marilyn Monroe’s feet so you can be buggered by Stalin. Without his gaoler the artist withers and dies. Amen. He hates his freedom to be free. Amen. The monkey on his back. Amen. His father’s corpse. Glory be to him who art. Amen. What should I be complaining about? We’re free aren’t we? Just look around at all the great art our freedom’s produced. L’ironie c’est morte. Vive l’ironie!”

  The waitress hovers, a toothless grin like a lopsided sphincter. Another brandy. Blake soliloquises. Somehow, without even moving his lips. The words emanate. Their shadows drift off through resinous air. The waitress returns again bearing a tray. I toss back the brandy. Scatter coins on the tablecloth. Silver and gold. Blake pokes yellowed fingers at them, slotting them back and forth as he speaks. The waitress snatches the lot, beating him at his own game. A l
oud guffaw.

  “Vive l’ironie!” Blake stands and shouts.

  “Do prdele!” belches the sleeping truck driver. Up yours!

  Blake upends his drink. The fat waitress astride two bar stools.

  “Baba Jaga,” Blake says, with sly wink, twitch of mouth. “The furious child-eating witch.”

  A sour farting sound comes from her mouth.

  Goodnight sweet ladies…

  Blake exits stage left followed by yours truly. We stumble from the Orient Express and weave our way across freight yards. Labyrinths of drunken shipping containers stacked up into canyons. Rivers of slurried rainwater. Backwash. Ziggurats of scrapped steel. The drizzle once again peters out. A flare of grey light briefly in the east. At our backs. Unheeded epiphany. We stoop towards our shadows’ blotted compass-point. Gravity. Footfall. Our echoes precede us.

  Blake’s monologue fractures, leads us through diversions, down blind alleys. He keeps hold of it barely, a blind man at the end of a leash. Blind leading the blind. Navigating through warehouses, shunting yards, past dilapidated sidings. We scale the junk mounds that border the old Jewish furnaces. Židovské pece. Lime kilns. Ghost smelters. Alchemists’ covens. Up the brown weed-infested slope – our little mount of purgatory.

  *

  Blake’s studio is the attic of a building overlooking the yards. And beyond the yards, the faint outlines of poplars and yew trees in the cemetery where Kafka’s ghost keeps company with the dung beetles. We ride the box elevator to the sixth floor. The grey concrete of the elevator shaft, scrawled with graffiti. Grey metal doors on each floor.

  The studio opens off a small room with a couple of old office couches, a potted rubber plant and a pile of photo magazines. Blake throws his coat down on one of the couches and trails off through a doorway, camera bag slung low. He’s still talking, reeling off names now of people who’ve taken the big swim in the Vltava. A type of telepathy, names dredged up from unconscious knowledge.

  “Good King Wenzelsplatz,” he says, mockingly, “had his ex-wife’s confessor tossed off a bridge with his hands tied – the hapless John of Nepomuk. Otto Gutfreund, toady to Picasso, drowned himself there in 1927. The May uprising – ’45 – corpses choking the river all the way to Dresden. So they say.”

  I follow the voice through a maze of tiny cubicles littered with film strips and contact sheets all reeking of acetone. A stairway up towards the high ceiling. A loft. Beneath it’s the darkroom. Red light in doorway. “And of course,” Blake says, leaning against a door jamb, “there was Pavel Tichý – 1995 – you probably never heard of him. A philosopher. Before the revolution, he wrote a thesis about the vicious circle of definitions. Suicidal algorithms of pure logic. But that was in another country. And besides…”

  “History,” he nods towards a curtained doorway, “is supposedly to blame.” Turning his back. “Make yourself at home.”

  The door to the darkroom closes. I can hear Blake at work with his trays and chemicals – the alchemist’s alembic distilling images from darkness into light. I wander around the studio, across the curtained threshold into the room he photographs his models in. A side wall with bookshelves and a workbench – a washbasin, a table littered with old prints, film cartridges, portfolios, empty whiskey bottles. Gel lights surround a plain square of herringbone parquet, painted black. A bolt of black fabric hangs down from black rafters. Black custom furniture with leather belts and metal rings attached.

  In the silence of the room a faint sound of rain falling against heavily curtained windows. The room’s cold and somehow empty, denuded. I flip through one of Blake’s portfolios. The usual routine. Latex masks. Manacles. Fetish paraphernalia. I toss the portfolio aside and pick up another. Faceless avatars bound in rope. Ankles, wrists, necks. Branded. Tattooed. Frame after frame of breasts, genitals, anuses. Mouths gagged, streaming spittle. Dead-eyed.

  Blake calls this art, but he photographs corpses for money, though I don’t suppose it’s only for the money. Some studied higher purpose. Redemption of mankind. A line gets crossed somewhere. I mean, he’s trying to photograph that line. The line between sex, death, the camera. The fetish inside the fetish machine. Camera-eye necrophilia.

  *

  A camera, they say, has a perfectly clear conscience. Like God. Man staggers blind through a night of his own creating: his god exists to let him see with impunity the acts he’s only able to commit by not believing in them. Like art. Or coincidence. Looking for clues to unravel some obscure crime. Only the mind creates disorder – everything that happens is a fact, born of an unknowable instant.

  I’m standing there, Blake’s catalogue in hand, filing through crime scene photographs, simulations, forensic nightmare banalities. A litany of detail, like a coroner’s report. Each one offers up its scenario behind a veil of nakedness. On one page, a handcuffed penis, ridged with shadows of blue light. On the facing page, a blonde with artificially blue eyes, chained by the neck to a metal post. Two hands bound together supplicant. Eyes unfocused, a mouth disfigured by pain or boredom.

  “Beautiful, isn’t she?”

  Blake’s voice filling the malign silence. I hear the snap of a lighter. The burn of a cigarette.

  “What’s wrong?” His voice dry. “Got no stomach for it, have you?”

  When I look up, Blake’s standing there with a sneer that could cut ice. Coatless, he’s cryogenically thin. He jabs his cigarette at something lying on the table. A sheet of photo paper slick with developing fluid. A face sheened with tears. Naked body. Autopsy stitches. Rope marks, lurid and colour-saturated. I feel my eyelids knot up into my head. There’s an image in there, waiting for me. A face like the face in that picture. I can’t describe what it belongs to. A demon with a hundred different bodies all sewn together into one.

  “You’re sick.”

  Blake snorts.

  “The world’s sick.”

  He takes down a fresh bottle from the bookshelf and breaks the seal. Whiskey. Pulls a squat vinyl armchair around to face me.

  “Besides,” he goes on, “what was it Rilke said? Beauty’s nothing but the beginning of terror. But what can we know about beauty, without also seeking the meaning of terror? To lose yourself. To approach the nothing at the very heart of what we are. Terror is the great disillusionment.”

  It sounds pretentious and fake, like a justification. As fake as the pain in his photographs. I say nothing. Lay the portfolio down on the workbench and reach out for the print he’s left lying there. My hands shake. I try not to look at them: It’s just the body of a girl someone found in the river. The developing fluid has dried into blemishes like a film of scum on brackish water. I try to work the tension out of my jaw. There’s more to all this, but I’m not sure what. Everything’s too obvious, obscure. Finally the words come.

  “You knew her?”

  He looks at me blankly.

  “If you say so,” he says.

  He takes a long swig from the bottle. Wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. His eyes are almost black with dilation, red around the rims. He’s been doing lines in the darkroom between stages. Bugging-out on pervitin. He offers me the bottle. I shake my head. I look again at the photograph.

  “She’s all yours,” he says. “Keep her. A souvenir.”

  I fold the picture and stuff it in my coat pocket.

  “You know,” Blake says, “people must wonder about you.” He takes another swig of whiskey. “The way you hide out on that bucket of rust, cutting up fucking magazines. All that voodoo crap. Looking for a girl who maybe doesn’t exist. Talking about it the way someone talks about a crime they maybe committed in their sleep.”

  I walk around behind him, barely listening. There are dead flies at the foot of the curtains, mingled with dust and hair. I pull one of the curtains back and look out at the rain. The weather won’t make it’s mind up. It’ll go on like this all day. Like an accusation. I turn and stare at the back of Blake’s head. A mess of silver hair sticking up above the headrest.r />
  I say: “Something’s on your mind. You’ve been stringing me along all morning.”

  I think: I’m to blame?

  Because I can’t help remembering that time with Regen in the wrecker’s yard and how she kept on asking me, while I’m fucking her, coming inside her, if I’d ever wanted to kill someone. Fingernails stabbing into the base of my cock, sweat gleaming on her neck, on her sternum. Only now when I see her, there at the back of my mind, she’s holding a camera in her free hand pointed straight at me. I picture a line-up, mug-shots, police reports. I see myself becoming part of the evidence for a crime that hasn’t taken place yet.

  Blake laughs dryly. Another swig. Another movement of the hand across the mouth. I suddenly feel too tired to give a damn what he thinks. The sort of hell he lives in. Demons talking.

  “I think sometimes there are just too many coincidences.” Fingers pinching the bridge of his nose.

  “I don’t believe in coincidences,” I say.

  “No,” he says. “Of course you don’t.”

  6. ULTRAVIOLET

  Sometimes I wonder if Blake really exists, or if I really exist, or if we made each other up as alibis. A chance encounter on the other side of the world. You open your mouth to speak and they recognise you. The foreigner. The toy of paradox, forever out of place: a man running through a desert watched by a silent audience, struggling towards the invisible reprieve. A desert full of mirrors.

  La Paz, in the last days of December. The old year gasping its last. Treading the path of dissipation, amnesia, absolution. A journey with a wrong symmetry, across an ocean and two continents. A journey that began when Regen disappeared. Losing track of the cause. Tunnelling down into my nightmare, to the child no-one has found or ever will find. A child in an orchard staring at a plum tree. The child I long to lay to sleep at night. To dream again, to never have to wake.