by Louis Armand
The days and weeks living, if you call it living, in that closet of a room people came each night to fuck in. Trolling the streets for work. Running down. Killing time. And night after night drifting apart, helpless before events we were too innocent or dumb or weak to act against. The dream evaporating, becoming that dull futile resentment that feeds whole under-classes of humanity. Estranged from ourselves and each other. Embarrassed at what I saw myself becoming. Afraid of losing her – Regen – grown more and more remote, like a swimmer caught in an undertow, who you wave at because you can’t save.
*
As I closed the door behind her, staring at the roof of the stolen car, brown under the street lights, an incident came back to me. Something I’d forgotten. How only a couple of mornings previous, it was a Sunday, we were walking through the city after another long night. Exhausted, like the days working the slaughter house, and her there with the scent of disillusionment clinging to her, hand limp in mine.
Crossing můstek, the five a.m. horrors emerging from Metro exits, pale grey and shivering. I remember looking down at my feet and wondering how the rest of my body stayed attached to them. Regen beside me, sweating inside her skin. We were walking towards the silhouette of the Museum, but the direction seemed arbitrary. In a doorway a hustler was shaking down a drunk who’d pissed himself and couldn’t keep his legs. The whores on Wenceslas Square were rigid with abjection. A rigor mortis seemed to have invaded everything as the grey light of dawn leeched away all residual sanctuary the night may have left behind it.
Regen’s face when I looked at her was full of disgust. When we got to the top of the square she spat as if to rid herself of some contaminant. I remember laughing, and it struck me how ridiculous we each must’ve appeared to the other, like creatures from different planets. For a moment longer I stood there just looking at her and laughing, low down inside. I couldn’t recognise her anymore. She must’ve been thinking the same about me, but she wasn’t laughing.
And now I could hear that menacing laughter once again. Our lives, everything we had, was broken, the way a thing breaks when you smash it against a wall. I told myself I could put it right, but I couldn’t get the sound of that laughter out of my head. As I drove us through the night across Bohemia, the welts rising on my back, I told myself the same thing again and again until I almost believed it. But the laughter in my head only grew more insistent, until I too began to laugh. Quietly at first. A barely audible noise deep down in my throat. Some fatalistic reflex made me start to go over all the things Regen had told me about herself on the long train journey from Znojmo, quietly laughing all the while. Things I’d never known before then. Things I’d never even begun to suspect. Thinking how funny it was now. Dawned on me finally how her life had always been a mystery to me. Imagining, during all that time, something as trite and ridiculous as a love without shadows. And yet even now still clinging to it.
15. SOLITAIRE
Another bar in the same part of town. It’s almost ten o’clock. A klezmer trio in zoot suits is wheezing out muted horn-notes and asthmatic accordion sounds like stalled traffic. The place looks like a bazaar, every available piece of wall hung with looted Yiddish junk. A pair of Hanukkah candelabra by the door serving as a coat rack. Fake old-world melancholia draped over everything.
I’m sitting alone in an armchair at a low table with an oil lamp in the middle of it. The armchair’s stuffing is spilling out, hanging from the arms in long greasy cords. The whole place looks like it’s coming apart at the seams. The world and me in it. I’m nursing a bottle of Jelinek, set on riding out the night, waiting for all the broken pieces to fall into place, or into a pile. Letting the booze do my thinking for me. It’s a bum game.
Maybe if I leave things to drift long enough, they’ll look after themselves. After all, nothing’s really a mystery, as Regen used to say, except in the way you look at it. It’s the seeing that needs solving. Things themselves are just what they are. And what they are is like what a mirror is. A smear of light reflected in glass.
On the squat bandstand in the corner of the room, a stick of a man’s hunched over his trumpet blowing a low, plaintive note and holding onto it like a long thread leading through a labyrinth. He’s playing to half-a-dozen empty tables. There’s a bar by the door. And behind the bar there’s a girl with tattoos up and down her arms and a brown bowler hat, gazing at her fingernails. A black Rottweiler lies at the foot of a bar stool, glancing around with large watery dog eyes, being forlorn.
The only other customer is a midget in a ratty antique wedding dress, sipping absinthe and chain-smoking its way through a crumpled pack of cigarettes. Face like a rubber mask. There’s a deck of tarot cards spread out on the table in front of it, which it fidgets with from time to time, in that bored mechanical way of someone cheating themselves at solitaire.
Candlelight makes shifting cave-patterns on the walls.
I finger the photograph folded inside my coat and vaguely remember leaving Inessa on a sidewalk somewhere, saying there was someone I needed to meet, or maybe something I had to do, and knowing full well she didn’t believe a word of it. But you can’t keep looking a confession in the eye. And once I’d made it, telling her about Regen, it was no use. She was just some kid I met in a bar. We’d fucked. I’d let myself pretend she was someone else for a while. I even felt sorry for her, in a drunken nostalgic kind of way. Maybe I’d felt something else too, something I hadn’t wanted to feel in too long. But words Blake said once kept coming back. Words that made the drink sour in my mouth. Seeing in my mind’s eye his death’s-head face leering out of the darkness at me, sleeves rolled up, baring the grey prison scars that covered his arms, saying: “Every confession is a lie.”
*
Things change in ten years, but not everything. The pictures on the banknotes are still the same. Like the faces in the streets. But the denominations don’t mean the same things they used to. Time’s a veneer that gets sprayed on like that parade of Hapsburg kitsch in Old Kafkaville. You dress things up a bit. Change the names. Roll out the new costume drama. The future looks old already, drained of whatever once made it seem believable. Maybe the hardest thing to learn is that life’s meant to be a sham, that species evolve because in the cosmic mind we’re just another fiction being told over to keep away the dark.
Only six months ago I was in paris, sitting in a bar in the marais, off rue de rivoli, listening to Blake fill in the missing years. In my head I was still that ghost on the Amazon, staring back at a corpse with ants streaming from its mouth. And then nothing. Scenes skip like faulty playback. A white screen. Needles probing the vein. Insect-brained. Cicadas and fruit bats. Lying awake one morning in a hospital ward in São Paolo and a black nurse talking at me with a red mouth and teeth. Red, black, white. And too many voices to separate into words. Days getting longer and then shorter, until one big sleep, floating out across the vast delta into the capsizing barbiturate sea, for thousands and thousands of blank identical miles.
The jungle became a ward, became a ship, became a city. Somewhere, someone was busy flipping all the switches in the big reality show. Waking from one episode to the next, like you’re stuck on the wrong side of the screen looking out, but only seeing what’s on the screen.
In the ward, some men came to see me. Called me by the dead man’s name. Asked lots of questions I didn’t understand. They told me a story, about how I’d been found, skin and bones in a canoe out in the Amazon delta, lucky, they said, to be alive. I laughed. It was all I could do. And the more people who came to ask questions, the more I laughed. I felt like a kind of rag-doll Buddha, propped-up on pillows in a hospital bed, laughing at the world’s foolishness.
Finally a doctor came and told me I was well enough to go home. I thought that was funny as hell, too. Some goons from an office turned up. They’d’ve put me on the next plane out of there if I hadn’t managed to give them the slip and hitch a ride on a Venezuelan freighter. East to Casablanca, north to Le Havre.
The great stench of Europe wafting over the sea.
Everything seemed to happen by itself, as if in reality I had no part in it. Like a game of chance you begin by playing but which ends up playing you. It’s always been that way, for as long as I can remember. The world only appears to be coincidence and accidents, but in reality everything’s decided, right down to the specifics, even if you’ll never know when, or where, or how. You take what’s offered, because if you don’t it’ll drive right over you.
I sometimes think if Regen hadn’t appeared that day at the bus stop in Božice I’d still be humping carcasses somewhere or drinking my unemployment cheque, since the town ended up shutting the abattoir anyway. After my mother died, I just got angry and the anger paralysed me. And my old man, the Big Boss, hanging over me – whose very existence was the deciding factor in everything.
If you want the truth, I never really knew my father, I only knew I hated him. What I didn’t know then was there are many ways to hate. But hate, like desire, needs to be fed, the way a junky needs to feed his habit. It was Blake who tried to teach me nothing’s ever fixed in stone, that everything exists only once, uniquely, that things can be their own cause. The mistake is believing that anything remains the same. A person, a place, an atom, or an idea. Toujours pour la première fois. Always for the first time. Familiarity’s just an illusion. The way sleep’s an illusion. But it’s just as easy for a man to be murdered in his sleep as in a jungle full of wild beasts. And I think of those stories Regen used to read to me, out of ancient mythology. Like the one about a man chained to a rock and everyday a vulture comes and tears his liver out, and every night his liver grows back, so that each time the vulture tears it out is really the first time. The first agony. The first fear.
They say the body can’t remember pain, but I’m not so sure. You watch a junky going through withdrawal and it always seems like the body’s been storing up all that pain in special pain-memory banks just waiting for the day the junk runs out. Hate’s different. You can fill yourself up for years with it until it’s the only thing you live for and maybe you die of it too. Get a dose too big and too pure it fries your brain right down to a cinder. But you miss the connection and the hate shrivels up like a turd baking in the sun.
Some people are wired for hate, but mostly hate’s a discipline you have to work at. Refining it, keeping the corrupting elements out. Synapse eugenics, Blake called it. You’ve got to keep a pure store against the day to come. And the day always does come. Like Christ looking up from the cross and realising for the first time there’s no way out.
You lose the faith, muchacho, and everything else crumbles away.
*
The bar I’m in has a name, but I can’t remember what it is. Before the Nazis and then the Commies took over, it was supposed to’ve been a synagogue. All it looks like now from the outside is a bricked-in garage in the courtyard of an apartment building off Šternberkova, full of salvaged junk. Ten years ago, more or less, it was just another post-revolution dive. In those days the regulars were still mostly vagabonds, beggars, drunks, junkies, ex-felons, and plain old certified nut cases. One-time dissidents gone to seed in the few short years since the Wall came down. You kept an eye out for the flying glasses and pissed outside against the wall. From time to time an ape in the corner would pick a fight with himself, hunched-over flailing at the back of his head with closed fists. Maybe ram himself into a doorpost for good measure.
But like so much else nowadays in the Golden City, the place is unrecognisable. You give the barmaid a bowler hat and install a midget by the front door and – voilà! – the joint’s almost respectable. The only thing missing’s a rabbi at the altar and a congregation to ai-ai-ai in time with the jazz.
I remember one night, back when Regen and I were still living by the docks, when I’d wandered into this part of town more or less at random, and as usual hard-up for a drink. I strayed in while that crazy poet Magor, all flabby and boozed up to the eyeballs, was throwing his clothes off dancing naked on the tables. His claim to fame was peddling a rock band no-one could bear to listen to anymore. A drunk who’d been leaning against the bar jabbed me with his elbow. Wanted to confide some learnèd opinion of his that this Magor was really just another ex-Bolshevik on the make. Like dancing on a table with a shrivelled dick in your hand was a noteworthy political statement.
“Democracy,” the drunk said, slurring his syllables to press his point, a line of spit hanging from his chin, “is just communism’s new clothes, see?” I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. When the revolution happened, I was just another dumb kid on a farm in south Moravia. It had nothing to do with me. But maybe the drunk was right. Every pimp I ever met used to be a communist.
Well maybe the past is never as bad as we make it seem. Or maybe it’s worse. You grow up in a shithole that could just as well’ve been paradise itself, now that it’s gone.
This is what I’m thinking when the door beside the bar opens and who should walk in but Inessa. She stands there just inside the doorway, eyes searching the gloom. I sink deeper into my chair. On the other side of the room, the stick figure with the trumpet has traded the bandstand for a stool and is siphoning spit from a valve. The drummer slouches behind his miniature drum kit, brushes in hand, like a puppet waiting to have its strings twitched. The accordionist is making silent hand gestures which in the room’s chiaroscuro look unreal.
Inessa makes no move away from the door. There’s a cold draft coming in, upsetting the midget’s arrangement of cards and making the oil lamps sputter. The midget and the three musicians all turn and look at her. She doesn’t seem to notice. Finally she stumbles back out into the night. The girl in the bowler hat steps from behind the bar and closes the door. I realise I’ve been holding my breath the whole time, like a thief in the dark afraid of being caught.
16. SNAKE HOUSE
Eyes. Mouths. Faces cut from old magazines stuck up over sheets of newsprint. Yellowed, pre-revolution, the print illegible. Where the walls had been plastered, the whitewash stood out in dark blotches under dim 40 watt light. Ripped chunks of wall-board lay strewn about the floor. The place was covered in an inch of dust. There were old footprints. Animal tracks. Crumbling wasp nests.
Whatever I’d expected didn’t matter. I was already seeing things with a kind of finality. An x-ray vision through layers of time. I’d parked the stolen heap where I figured no-one would see it, if anyone ever happened to come along. We sat there in the dark for an hour, waiting for dawn, the shape of things gradually forming in the gloom. Sunlight broke all of a sudden through black clouds, setting the house and lake aflame. I watched the scenery burn and then fade and a grey light settle over everything like ash.
Regen sat in the car and didn’t move. I thought if I waited long enough she’d fall asleep, but she didn’t, so I cased the house to make sure it really was deserted the way she’d said it was. And that’s when I saw the pictures on the walls, through the boarded-up front window. Something about those cut-up faces spooked me. Lost souls. I wondered who’d taken the time to stick them all up there.
A porch stood out on the side of the house facing the lake and a half-sunken jetty. Wooden palings sloping down into the water. An outhouse tilted against a nearby tree. The porch sagged when I stepped onto it and invisible rats scurried underneath. Spiders gleamed on webs strung between rafters. Wings flapped.
The back door had a rusty padlock that came apart after a couple of blows. Inside was a small laundry. Sagging cardboard boxes stuffed with rags and generations of mouse holes gnawed through. Shelves stacked with empty glass jars, paint tins, cans of marine lacquer, turpentine.
Through the laundry and into the room with magazine faces stuck all over its walls. To one side, a kitchenette with a pair of rusty hotplates, a mouldy fridge and a couple of empty gas canisters. To the other, a doorway led to a smaller room, with a half-collapsed bed frame and mosquito net reeking of DDT.
Whoever owned the place
hadn’t cared about it in years. Regen always called it the Snake House, something she heard once. But it was no more than a shack. White clapboard turned mostly grey with mould and general decomposition. The lake behind it was half-choked with reeds. Midges hovered everywhere. Eels rippled a surface of black water.
*
Regen didn’t sleep all that day. She sat huddled at the end of the bed, cigarettes burning down between her fingers one after another. I felt lost. When I tried to touch her she flinched. Her eyes were hidden behind the shadows of her hair. I thought if I nodded off, I’d wake up and she wouldn’t be there. I walked around the house doing whatever I could to keep my mind awake. I’d never been so tired in my life.
It was late August. Outside the sun was already high above the trees. The clouds had evaporated. A fierce heat radiated from the sky. The air over the lake shimmered. Nothing else seemed to move. I wandered between the rooms like a ghost, not knowing what I was doing there. I’d jerk awake staring at a wall, only inches from my face. A voice kept telling me: “Nothing’s ever for free.”
I checked on Regen. She hadn’t moved. A blackened cigarette butt stuck out between her fingers. I started the routine again, searching for something, not knowing what. Regen looked like she’d cracked. I kept waiting for her to fall asleep. Then it’d be okay. She’d wake up and everything would be the way it used to be. But I was afraid – if I wasn’t vigilant enough she’d run away again or, Christ knows, try to kill herself even, the way my mother had. There was no shortage of means: shards of broken glass in the windows, behind the boards that’d been nailed from the outside – coils of rope amongst the junk piled in the kitchenette cupboards – rusted razorblades in the sink – rat bait – turpentine – a meat cleaver wedged deep into a chopping block crusted with eel skin – the lake, with its reeds and cold water. Violence offered itself everywhere I looked.