Breakfast at Midnight

by Louis Armand

  *

  It was after midday when I realised she was gone. The heat inside was unbearable. A crazy panic overcame me. I charged out among the trees, found the empty car, the empty laneway, choking back my fear. The air buckled and swayed in the heat, the deafening sound of cicadas everywhere. I couldn’t think. The sky weighed down on me. I had to struggle to breathe. If I lost her in my mind, I thought, I’d lose her forever. I ran along the dirt laneways, searching everywhere for tracks, footprints, any sort of clue, thinking only irrational thoughts. Hours passed. The heat, unrelenting. Every path led to a dead end.

  I walked back to the house to begin all over again. But it was only after I’d stopped looking that I found her – hanging over the back porch, retching into the grass like a sick cat. A white singlet drenched with sweat clung to her back. The rest of her was naked. I stood in the doorway and watched the tremors shake her body, the crust of my father’s scum visible between her thighs. I couldn’t help picturing the two of them. His coarse hands all over her. His cock sticking in her mouth. Her arse. Her cunt. A glistening slug in the half-light. A sliver of shit. A blood sausage.

  I smashed my hand into the doorpost and felt the wall tremble. Blood formed on my knuckles. I smashed again and again. Then something made me stop. I stared at the splinters sticking in my skin. Black and white. I began picking them out when I heard Regen. She’d backed all the way along the porch and was staring at me wide-eyed. I could already see her making a run for it. The white palings of the collapsed jetty gleaming under the water. The hissing of the reeds. Her hair spread out on the rippling surface, bejewelled with dragonflies.

  The muscles in my thighs twitched.

  “What’re you afraid of?” I said. Thinking, you try to lull an animal before you slaughter it, or the meat will taste of fear. Taking a step towards her. The boards straining under the weight. Her hands began creeping up over her breasts, backing herself into the corner of two railings. “It’s me,” I said, moving closer. “It’s okay.”

  “Don’t touch me,” her voice paper thin.

  “It’s okay. No-one’s going to hurt you.” Another step, and another. And then it was too late. But she didn’t run. Instead she flew at me, blindly, like a cornered animal, her fingernails at my face. The fury of it stunned me. I staggered, seeing only red. Then bit by bit I took her fury into me, absorbing it. I used my size to smother her blows. For a long time she struggled, her nails like claws. Teeth. Elbows. Feet. I weathered her violence, crushing her in a slow choke until finally the blows stopped and her body went slack in my arms. The air around us swelled with the low sound of blood beating in my ears. My lungs burned. Everything began going dark.

  *

  Regen lay on the dirty mattress with her long hair clinging to her shoulders. She’d dyed it back almost to its natural colour. Late sunlight through the wood criss-crossing the window gave it a tarnished look, like brass. Her head hung to one side, the whites of her eyes visible beneath eyelashes rolled back crazily. If it weren’t for her breathing – a sick animal-rasping down in her throat – she might just as well have been dead. Something about her stillness aroused me. I stared at her body. Her dirty feet, her knees drawn up, the stubble around her unwashed vagina, the shape of her breasts through the white singlet. Her wrists were beginning to swell where the rope had chaffed them, tied together to the rope around her neck. Her hands clasped against her right cheek, like a picture of a child asleep.

  I told myself it wasn’t me. That thing in my mind. That other thing, full of anger, making me stuff a half-limp cock inside her. Watching myself, like a shadow on a wall. Seeing instead the image of my father fucking her. And seeing me there fucking him, getting harder, ramming it into him. One blow at a time. Harder and harder until I came. And Regen, her body shuddering beneath me, inert, eyelids twitching. Her singlet transparent with the sweat pouring out of me. I forced myself to kiss her slack mouth, my head swollen with blood, trembling. The taste of vomit on her lips.

  For an instant her eyes opened, unseeing. But in them I saw the reflection of my own face and the ugly thing it’d become. In my shame I slapped her and keep slapping her. Fucking and slapping. Groaning as I came again – more painful, eviscerating, deadening.

  I rolled off her into a ball, teeth sunk in my knee, eyes knotted. Somewhere in my head I heard her sobbing the way my mother used to sob. A strangulated sound through a half-open door. But it was only the sound of my own sobbing.

  *

  That evening the nightmares began. The house by the lake was dark. I crouched outside, among the reeds, watching the full moon begin to rise over the slanted roof. It’d grown cooler. A faint breeze across the water. Inside, Regen lay unconscious, just as I’d left her. I told myself it was for her own good. Let her sleep. Let her know nothing of the night to come. In the morning I’d untie her, wash her body with my own hands, wake her with kisses. We’d be free, purified, now that fate was driving me to do what should’ve been done all those months ago. Never to have set foot on that train to Prague, but to have sought vengeance then and there, in the full light of day, like a man. But reason gives birth to monsters. Fearful, malformed, unkind beings. I filled my hands with mud from the lake and painted my face with it. An animal emerging from the darkness. A short-haired snout. Yellow tusks glinting in the moonlight.

  17. CELLULOID

  The night wears on. It’s already after midnight – one more midnight in a never-ending chain. The zoots are winding-up their act, accordion sounds warping like fairground nauseas. The old synagogue has taken on that half-demented, two-dimensional cubism things do after you’ve been awake too long – flattened-out and up-close. The oil lamps glow a dim orange as though someone had tried and failed to snuff them out. I’m fed up with myself, but still not drunk enough to slop out the recriminations. It seems like too much work. I’ve reached the end of the bottle and about to call it quits when my phone rings. I glop at the handset. There’s a number blurring out of it. I hate these things, but it came with the barge job. Every now and then the Greek phones up to make sure no-one’s nicked his pile of scrap.

  “I’m not here,” I say, ignoring the voice at the other end. “Don’t leave a message.”

  “Stay where you are,” Blake shouts, loud enough to be heard over the droning accordion. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.” I stare at the blank screen suspiciously, thinking about all those secret microchips they put in everything nowadays to keep track of you. And how the hell could Blake find me at night in this city anyway? But I give up and let the chair suck me down into a vague, plotless half-sleep, like sinking in water. Concentric circles ripple a surface that’s already too far away. My heart thumps out an irregular rhythm. A drum-line spiralling to a dull thud.

  *

  I’m walking along a street with someone following me. I can’t see who it is. It’s night. The street’s unfamiliar. It could be anywhere. A city. Orange streetlights. I hear the footsteps of the person tailing me like an echo. I walk faster and the echo pursues me, I slow down and it backs away. I wait around corners, reverse directions, cross and re-cross bridges, underpasses, intersections. But the footsteps are always there.

  After walking around like this for what seems an age, I come to a dead end. There’s a high chain-link fence cutting the street off from a vacant lot. I struggle not to panic. Behind me my pursuer waits, biding his time. I grab at the wire fence and try to pull myself up, but I can’t get a grip. The effort’s hopeless. There’s no way out.

  It’s then I notice the coat hanging on a coat hanger that someone’s left there on the fence. A brown leather Gestapo coat. It moves slightly, as if something alive were inside it. A dog keens in the distance. The sound of a bottle breaking. A doorway opens and a pair of children sneak out onto the sidewalk carrying a television set between them. On an impulse I make a run for the doorway, but the door’s locked. A scurrying of feet. There are no names on the doorbells. No house number over the door. Somewhere above, a window ope
ns. A match flares in the dark. I look up and see a faceless man in a white butcher’s apron smoking a cigarette. From behind him, music on an old record player crackles loudly. A metallic orchestra at the wrong speed.

  Everything slows down in time to the music.

  I shrink away. At my back something makes a noise. I turn around. A man’s standing beneath a lamppost on the other side of the street, dressed like a tramp, singing to himself. Baby face. You’ve got the cutest little baby face. Without thinking I start walking towards him. As I come closer, I realise the man’s standing in front of a large dressing mirror that’s been propped against the lamppost. There are two of him now. One with his back turned and the other facing me. I’m standing in the middle of the street watching him as he applies makeup in the mirror. A face painted like a circus clown’s – black crescents for eyes, mouth twisted in a grotesque smile. A face I recognise, turning white in a sudden flare of headlights.

  *

  “So we meet again,” the voice says, coming from the darkness at me. I open my eyes and there’s Blake. It takes time to get him into focus. He’s got that faintly manic look he always has when he’s on the edge of a come-down. Face constantly shifting around as though it won’t stay together in one piece – a head like a Rubik’s cube with all the coloured squares sliding off.

  I groan. A few more people have come into the bar while I’ve been asleep. The band’s packing up. Ashkenazi jazz whispers from a pair of dusty speakers. Blake sits down across from me and makes his face into a grin.

  “Voilà,” he says, pulling out a copy of one of the daily scandal rags from his coat. Plešk. He spreads it on the table, pushing the empty bottle aside.

  I wave him away, yawning. “Yesterday’s news.”

  “There’s no news like old news, muchacho. It always has a habit of sticking around. What did Marx say? History repeats, first as coincidence, then as inevitability.”

  “Marx never said that.”

  “No?”

  “Anyway,” I groan, “necessity’s just coincidence admiring itself in the mirror.”

  “And I thought you didn’t believe in coincidence.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Bueno, muchacho,” he says, pointing a yellow finger at the page in front of me. “In which case, this won’t interest you at all.” He lets the grin slide from his face. “It’s the morning edition. Hot off the press. I was just at the news office delivering some prints. I thought you’d want to read it, seeing as how…” His voice trails off without finishing the sentence.

  Against my better judgement I look at where he’s pointing.

  *

  The story’s buried on page eight, between two column-widths on Helmut Newton, dead in an LA car crash, and an ad for russian ladies escort agency. It takes some effort to decipher the fundamentals. Some hack had cooked up a tale of woe about what drives young women to suicide. Case in point: unidentified girl drowned at Trója. Body discovered Friday. Suspected suicide. The word suspected stands out. No mention of the girl being naked or rope marks around her neck. Something’s wrong. It vibes suppressed evidence, undercover investigation. And then the story veers off completely, about the two fishermen who’d pulled the corpse out of the river. Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dee. A thumbnail photo of two mugs posing like they’d just landed the catch of the day. I wonder how Plešk missed the scoop.

  “Someone sold the paper a bum story,” I say.

  “Maybe there wasn’t any story.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Means maybe there wasn’t any story.”

  “Sure, and maybe the girl in the newspaper isn’t the girl in the morgue, right?”

  “Maybe.”

  “And maybe the girl in the morgue didn’t drown herself, either.”

  “Maybe that too.”

  “Fuck maybe.”

  In an ideal world all those maybes ought to add up to alternatives. You change the names, the faces, the situations, and everything turns out differently. Lives unlived, roads not taken. As if an alternative’s worth a damn unless it’s a better one.

  Picture a kid in some claphouse down on the border, telling herself all those beautiful lies about how one day she’ll make it in the big time in the Golden City. A kid fresh from hicksville with a baby bundled in newspaper left in a dropbox. Desperate calls from phone booths. Selling herself for the price of a coffee and a pack of cigarettes and a one-way ticket to nowhere. There’s a crucifix on a silver chain around her neck. She still believes in things. Like redemption, eternal salvation. But none of that matters because whoever she is, she’s dead. Dead as a drowned dog.

  “I liked the original version better,” tossing the paper back at him. “This one stinks.”

  “You want to see your name in the headlines?”

  I can feel the hair bristling along my neck.

  “Enough comedy for one day, okay?”

  Blake laughs. A dry rasping noise that comes out of his throat. I can’t see what’s funny.

  “Relax, muchacho. I’m doing you a favour,” he says. “Here,” sliding a hand across the table. He plants a neatly folded square of tinfoil in front of me. “It’s a gift. No hard feelings.”

  I look at the square of foil. There’s something wrong about it. It resonates some sort of Blake mindfuck. My fingers start tapping on the edge of the table.

  “What is it?”

  “Look and see.”

  “You’re trying to mess with my head.”

  “On the contrary, my friend. I’m trying to help you clear your conscience.”

  Without another word, he gets up and crosses the room in a series of fluid movements. There’s a suit sitting at the bar who wasn’t there before. Blake shoulders him out of the way. The suit tries to make himself look annoyed, but thinks better of it and slouches off. Blake signs to the barmaid in the bowler hat and calls for a bottle. He makes a gesture of snapping a photo of her. She laughs, the tip of her tongue wetting her top lip. Shoves a bottle of brandy across the zinc-top and chalks it up on the tab.

  *

  I hold up the square of celluloid against the candlelight. The image is hard to make out at first. Figures in negative, flickering in and out of focus. Like staring into a pool of water that won’t stay still. Blake sinks back into the chair opposite, settling a bottle of Jelinek between us. Pours two glasses. I watch him wipe his face with his hands, eyes half-crazy. Pervitin-mad. He looks like a death’s head in the jungle. Totem figure. He’s forcing me to become part of my own delusions.

  I stare back at the crumpled tinfoil lying on the table in front of me. I’m drunk. I don’t even know if what I’m seeing is what’s really there.

  “So,” Blake’s voice, calling me back. “What’ll it be?”

  I try to shake the image from my head. Aware there are other people here. Distant underwater voices. A double bass thuds rhythmically. A glint of light from silver foil. Something swimming through the room’s chiaroscuro. Scales of a fish glinting in a shaft of sunlight coming from above. A lure on the end of an invisible line. You reach out to grasp hold of it. And then what? Blake yawns. The music ends.

  Without saying anything I let the negative dip into the candle’s flame and catch light. It flares momentarily then turns to smoke.

  “Plenty more where that came from,” Blake says, planting his hands on the table. There are scars on each of the knuckles. Grey runic knots of damaged flesh where someone had stubbed out a dozen cigarettes. There were other scars, too. Knife scars. Settling old scores. In La Paz, though, he always carried a gun.

  “So what?” I shrug.

  Across the room I notice the midget flip another card onto the table. The stereo blares. Parrot-screech of saxophone in sudden crescendo. Blake sighs. He makes a tired face at me, letting his right hand drift across to the glass in front of him. He lifts the glass to his lips and drinks the brandy down slow. Puts the glass back on the table. Unhurried and deliberate.

  “Life’s a ga
me,” he says, “isn’t it? Nothing’s ever as far beyond comprehension as we pretend it is.” His eyes get me into their focus. “When it comes down to it, there’s only this – what we’re permitted to see, and what we refuse to see. And it happens that from time to time we need someone, or something, to open our eyes for us. The question is, does it matter,” he goes on, “if what we see, or what others see, is true or not? When all’s said and done, who decides what’s true anyway?” Blake fingers the bottle cap as he speaks, turning it and turning it. “You, for example,” he says, spinning the cap across the table. It comes to rest against my hand. “You can always chose to believe what you want to believe.” That grin again. “But be careful, muchacho. What you believe is what you just might get.”

  Or maybe he says something else. But I’ve stopped listening. I’m sick of the sound of Blake’s voice, of my voice, of everyone’s voice. All by itself some demon of intention pokes a finger into my mind’s eye. My hands ball into fists. Blake’s smiling now. A grotesque circus clown smile. He has my father’s eyes. Black holes of mocking ruthlessness. A head stuck on a pole like some god-fetish in the jungle. Supai. Nightmare demon.

  “Remember what they say in the classics,” he says, in a dried-up toneless voice, rictus-jawed. “Don’t fuck a gift horse in the mouth.”

  18. REALISM

  Sometimes I have trouble remembering things the way they happen. Or else I remember too well and reality palls. The sorts of things in my head wouldn’t make sense in any photograph. A camera only sees effects, not causes. Like some cold-blooded thing eyeballing you through a pane of glass. It’s the photographer’s demon who gives the image its psychology. The god in the machine who seduces the way you see. Turns a naked body into pornography. A morgue shot into a pietà. Fiction into real life.