Breakfast at Midnight

by Louis Armand

  As a rule, Blake only photographed the women he fucked. What he said: “I want to be inside them, to understand them, their fears and desires.” His idea of anything’s to get in under people’s skin, find out what makes them tick, then screw around with the mechanism. There’s no such thing as too deep. However far you go, there’s always some place deeper.

  A couple of weeks ago I was standing outside a gallery on Národní street, pissing in the wind and ogling the passers-by. It was the night they were opening Blake’s show. The place was full of black ties and mutton done-up in taffeta, slumming it for thrills. A couple of stooges in waistcoats were rationing out fake champagne and little boiled sausages skewered on toothpicks. Blake cruised up late on his Enfield, then spent the rest of the time slouching in a corner watching the crowd like a spider watches flies.

  Whoever dreamt-up the show had the bright idea of calling it Le Déjeuner Nu. They’d printed a type of phonesex menu and stuck it outside the entrance on a lightbox. Mugshots with the eyes blacked-out. Asian, Caucasian, Latino, Negro and everything in-between. Under each mugshot, names like Chloë, Aurore, Christine, Blanche, Isabelle, Claire. Franchise names you can hear any night of the week on Place Pigalle.

  The pictures inside the gallery were all large-scale blowups in bloodless textbook anatomical detail. Naked women smoking, lying in bed, looking like they’d just been fucked. Teasers. Sanitised compared to what you’d find in Blake’s regular portfolios. The way most art’s sanitised. Because even when it’s real, it’s never real enough.

  We were in a cantina in El Alto once when a mob started throwing stones. Some cops beat up a kid and caused a small riot. Without any warning, a couple of plain-clothes began picking-off people in the street with automatic rifles. Bystanders brought an old man into the cantina with his forearm almost shot away. Tendon and bone sticking out. Blood everywhere. A while later the uniforms came and dragged the old guy off, unconscious, to maybe bleed to death in the back of a wagon or get dropped in a ditch somewhere out on the plano. I could see in Blake’s eyes how it turned him on. The sheer reality of it. The same look when he pointed a camera. Like pointing a gun. Reality, not realism. He made pictures the way you make a corpse.

  In Bolivia there was a whole industry for that sort of stuff. Snuff magazines right out in the open on news stands beside El Pais, Correo del Sur, El Diario. Daily horror shows. Full-page colour spreads of crime scene photographs, autopsies, the whole bag. Even the newspapers were full of it. Gang shootings. Organ thefts. Decapitated prostitutes. Anonymous mass graves. Some sort of death cult at work in the collective unconscious.

  But death per se didn’t interested Blake. He’d say things like: “It’s not what the image depicts, its what depicts the image.” The same way he talked about women. “A woman,” he’d say, “could have any name in the world. You ask her, maybe she tells you something. Chloë, Aurore, Christine. Why not? There are thousands of Chloës, Aurores, Christines. Maybe it’s not her real name? So what? What is a real name? A name you could put a face to? One face in a million?”

  A name, in place of some ineffable, unobtainable thing.

  “You know, there was a time when people believed that to forget the name of someone who died meant condemning their souls to oblivion. While in some cultures, someone dies and their name dies with them, cut-out of the language the way a tumour is.”

  The dead girl in the morgue. A face without a name. An image in a photograph. I only photograph women I fuck.

  *

  Back in real time I’m losing grip on the last little fragments of clarity. Voices swarming around the room. A spiral of noise. I can’t recognise where I am. The same place or some other place. Locations mesh in irrational dream-logic. My tongue’s thick. Something squeezing it forcefully down my throat each time I swallow. I hold a bottle, end-up, and something wet comes out of it.

  The night was going just fine until the picture of the dead girl showed up and then Blake too showed up, like the joker he is. Someone laughs in my ear. There’s a whole crowd in here, wherever here is. A couple of tarts are groping a drunk at the bar, feeling for money in his trouser pockets. Fishnets and tight plastic skirts. The walls lurch. I’m sweating. Jungle music comes up out of the floor. Incense. Shapes move in and out of focus. A brunette sitting at the next table is dripping candle wax into a glass. The wax congealing like little foetuses suspended in amniotic fluid.

  I look around the room but no Blake. A taste like vertigo under my tongue. The tarts have moved onto their next victim like vultures after carrion. A tramp clutching an empty glass at the bar, mascara running down his face. A shape in a butcher’s apron. Ghosts brushing past. Somebody says something. Some rudimentary equation struggling to make itself understood. A square of foil pushed across the table. A match flaring. A piece of celluloid. Déjà vu. Crooked witchdoctor fingers moving through the dark. Faces. A redhead in the morgue. Maybe she liked it rough. Maybe someone didn’t care what she liked. I feel dirty. Sick. A gap opens on the far side of the room, tunnelling into darkness. The descent beckons. I lunge towards it. The wanderings of Cain. A fringe of leaves. Words not heard before. Beasts these are, of another world.

  Light-shift. A door ricochets. I fall through it into an ammoniac stench, face to face with a cracked, shit-smeared lookingglass. Inwardly cast shadows fall across it, obscuring whatever lies within. A man’s or a woman’s full bloodied mouth. Dark heavy sacks falling from the undersides of eyelids and bulging out over the cheeks. It’s an image coagulated with meaningless substance. I see myself and refuse to recognise myself as being that thing.

  Laughter. The sound of bees…

  A lightbulb flickers. For a moment everything’s dark. A frozen retinal darkness. And then the light returns. A mere blink of an eye. A fragment, a ruin, a fiction. Something’s alive in there, grunting through a wall. A toilet stall behind a broken wooden door. Mind’s eye pornography of two men fucking each other in ways impossible. I push the door open and behind it there’s nothing. A hole in the floor. A craggy mouth. I get down on hands and knees to see better what’s inside.

  Reaching down afraid the way as a boy I was afraid. Arm covered in leeches where tree roots overhung the river. Regen burning them off with match-heads. Death flares. Black turd-like things writhing on the grass. But the hole in the floor is somebody’s face. A dirty white wedding dress spread out. Vomit down the front. Echo of something coming from its mouth. The house of cards comes tumbling down. The Drowned One. Utopenec. Lying in its own piss.

  My hands shake. The hag midget in its wedding dress lies there snoring on the cubicle floor, clutching a tarot deck like it’s clutching a bridal bouquet. The hem of its dress has slipped up to reveal the top of a pair of soiled miniature stockings. Perspiration stings my eyes. Blink. Look closer. A hand, mine, reaches out and slowly pushes the hem of the dress higher. Up over the thighs. Nosing the coarse damp black hair curling over wax flesh. Misshapen hips. The straps of a lace garter-belt framing a blood-dark oversized penis where the cunt should’ve been.

  I reel back. A snaking hiss, coiling and striking out from the shadows. The midget in the wedding dress lies there immaculate as a pietà. A naked bulb overhead, flickering.

  All of a sudden the room’s full of gaps. I’m fearful of being sucked into one of them. Blake’s laughter. A parrot screech in the jungle. I see a dead man slip into darkness as a canoe moves away from a river bank. Monkey voices. The river moving faster the further I drift from shore. Rushing now. Rats behind the bulkheads. A ship’s horn. Le Havre. A woman with her head wrapped in a pillowcase, screaming.

  I beat my head against the wall until the demons go quiet. A wave of calm. The shit-smeared mirror drips with sarcasm. You’ll look the part at least. I heave into the sink. A bouquet of brandy and slime. Brown water gushes from a tap. My hands do things to my face. I try to focus on one thing at a time. Feet on the floor. The face in the mirror almost familiar now. Like a face in negative. A face that doesn’t belong
there.

  19. WIND BECOMES WATER

  You get up from a chair and begin falling,

  and the falling doesn’t stop.

  Sound of a wet finger circling the rim of a glass.

  It’s cold. The ghost of someone.

  A flame touching the tip of a cigarette.

  Somewhere, a room, a box on an ocean.

  Not because you’re afraid that you won’t wake up, but because of what you’re afraid you’ll…

  Another drink and then another.

  “Look into my eyes.”

  Two faces joined in a maze of smoke and candle lights.

  A laughing cunt.

  Valves like a saxophone’s.

  Shadows. Something naked in a mirror.

  Knuper, knuper, kneischen.

  Blake walks in from outside the room, outside the frame.

  Totem-faced.

  Shrunken head on a pole.

  Matted rat-hair.

  A flame touching the tip of a cigarette.

  You fuck and you pay, muchacho.

  A cold coin pressed to the nape of your neck.

  Another drink and then.

  Mouth a Rorschach blot.

  Saying not because I’m afraid.

  Faces moving around a room to the darkest places.

  Sound of a wet finger.

  Eyes rimmed with sodden lashes.

  Rain at the window. Spiralling.

  Mid-get. Mid-get. Mid-get. Mid-get. Mid-get. Mid-get.

  Blake walks in.

  The dead girl, her mouth next to your ear.

  Do you want to find me? Or be free of me?

  Rain.

  Her mouth.

  Der Wind, der Wind. Das himmlische Kind.

  *

  When you cover your ears, the wind becomes water. Time slips back into shadows. Sunlight. The barley in the fields. Black grapes weighing on the vines. A bird sits on a wire fence, cocking its head to one side. Listens. Comes closer along the wire, awakened to curiosity.

  I lie there, watching the clouds merge and separate. A hundred thousand mental images all taking shape in the one space. The sound of water becomes the sound of bees. I try to concentrate. With no-one else around, it’s easier. The sky slips on its reel like a piece of celluloid. The image jags. Something dark crosses my field of vision. Black plumage on grey. Jackdaw. I see the bird peering at me. An expressive eye. It opens its beak and leans forward. I realise it’s speaking to me, but I can’t make out what it’s saying.

  *

  The scene begins again. I see myself, like a spectator watching at a distance. Lying there like an infant in a cradle. I think of a nursery rhyme. Wind rocking the shadows, back and forth like water. The sky is an ocean, as vast as time. A great big blue sphere whose edges are invisible. It wraps around the eye, waiting to swallow it. I think of somebody falling. A hole in space and a man falling through it, born into the void.

  Somewhere a muted ethereal horn sound. A hanging note. Silence. Then a whole cascade of notes spilling out of the sky like some crazy jazz. Reeling, suffocating, searing. A man in a bathtub in the middle of a sea, hair blown back, clinging to the shower-pipe like a boatswain clinging to a ship’s mast. The crazy music swirls. The sea like a warped lens. And that voice again, echoing through the jazz. I shut my eyes. The storm of noise sweeps over me in waves, wave after wave. Everything heaves.

  *

  I open my eyes. The wind’s still now. I’m standing with my bare feet on the earth, in the grey soil. Black trouser legs against pale feet. The sky glows above the vineyards, a virgin azure. A jackdaw’s roosting on the head of the shower pipe, hanging over the old bathtubboat. Gurgling craw-sounds, words lost in transmission. It tilts its black head, a black eye beadily gazing down. I follow its gaze.

  A young girl’s lying at my feet, pale hands tied together, a loose cord around her neck. Her hair’s been brushed down on either side of her face, garlanded with white lilies, a pall of white silk veiling her body. She’s beautiful, even though she’s dead. What would her name have sounded like? The jackdaw flaps its wings, shifts on its perch. Two women in black stand at the foot of the corpse, turning rosaries in their hands.

  Without thinking I kneel down beside the young girl’s corpse, brushing my fingers along the side of her face. Touching her hair, her mouth. She lies there with her eyes open, staring through me. I look and look but no reflection appears in them. Only a green-grey film of trapped light.

  I plunge my hands into the earth and begin burying her. One handful of earth at a time. The grey soil spills across her face, her livid mouth, her eyes. Across the white silk veiling her breasts, her sex. Sifting through her hair. A grey halo of dust hangs in the air.

  I hear the two women mutter as I work, turning their rosaries between their fingers. Ave Maria, gratia plena. The jackdaw gurgles, a priest intoning. Requies… I work and work, hands blackening, earth spilling over the edges of the cracked enamel tub. I work like a man erecting something. Imbued with purpose. A mound of earth with a rusted pipe standing up out of it.

  *

  It’s grown dark. But even in the darkness the grave’s clearly visible. I look around but the two women are gone. The jackdaw rustles its greyblack plumage. The smell of turned soil suffuses everything. Somewhere, in a distance I can’t even begin to fathom, a note rings out and fades. A bell. A small bell like a bell on a child’s bicycle. It rings again, closer this time. I turn around in the dark trying to locate the sound. But the sound moves as I move.

  I see a light approaching through the vines. Weird silhouettes bending and looming. I follow the direction of the light out onto a dirt road. There’s the stone wall and the gate. And behind it, the old farmhouse with its windows lit with a blue TV aquarium flicker. In front of the gate, a very small man in a white bridegroom’s suite is riding a bicycle around in circles. He rides slowly and seems at any moment about to lose his balance. With each completed circuit he rings the bell on the handlebars, a round headlamp tracing erratic patterns on the ground.

  For a long time I stand on the edge of the dirt road and watch the tiny man in the white suit peddling his bicycle. Curious, perhaps, to see if he’ll fall off. But each time he appears on the verge of losing his balance, he somehow rights himself, and turns again.

  *

  It’s the turning that reminds me of the teacher drawing circles within circles on a blackboard in coloured chalk. An orange circle for Mercury. A blue circle for Venus. A green circle for Earth. A red circle for Mars. And in the middle, a large orange disc for the sun. And I wondered why the sun didn’t have a name the way the planets did and the other stars did. Sirius. Alpha Centauri. Betelgeuse. And if it was because people used to call the sun God, which was silly, because the teacher said the sun was made of gas, like hydrogen and helium. And when the sun finished burning all the gas, it’d turn brown and fade and everything on Earth would die. Which was like Revelation, except that in Revelation God didn’t turn into a cold brown thing in outer space. A cold brown dwarf thing and not a black hole. And I thought how the idea of a black hole really would be like the idea of God. And that maybe God was whatever was on the other side.

  *

  On the other side of the farmhouse gate, the stone wall runs along a yard where it joins an old barn with brick walls painted white. The barn doors are open. A metal hook hangs from a cross beam, glinting in the moonlight. I hear a sudden beating of wings, a dark shape. The jackdaw’s silhouette perches on the apex of the barn roof. Caw-cawing. I realise that the man in the white suit has stopped riding around in circles and is nowhere in sight. At first I feel confusion. Then disappointment. Betrayal.

  I cross the roadway. A red bicycle lies on its side in front of the gate. Short white tassels hang from the ends of the handlebars. I reach down and finger the bell without ringing it. It feels warm, like a body. It’s a vaguely repulsive feeling. While I’m thinking this a voice comes from the farmhouse. I straighten up and stare at the flickering blue square o
f light where the window should be. Then the front door opens. The little bridegroom is standing in the doorway, beckoning at me to follow him inside.

  *

  Inside, the farmhouse is cluttered with bric-a-brac of all descriptions. A cuckoo clock over the mantle groans, its springs coming slowly unwound. Footsteps echo down the hall. I follow. The carpet there is deeper. I turn to the left and then to the right and then left again. The hallway turns in upon itself, at each turn the carpet growing deeper, until it’s like wading through undergrowth.

  Suddenly, just as I’m about to turn back, the hallway ends. The walls are damp. Humid. Perspiring. A skein of flesh. I feel there’s no alternative but to find a way through. My hands grope blindly. Somewhere, on the other side of the wall, there’s a voice singing. And then, all by itself, a door opens and light floods out. I find myself in a large white room. Light radiates from no visible source. In the middle of the room, a broken train set lies on the floor. A red toy engine is turning around in circles, on its side like a beetle with a broken back. Clack, clack, clack. Against the far wall is a bed beneath a window draped with gauze curtains. A mobile hangs above the bed, with white plastic discs depicting each of the nine planets in orbit around the sun. And there, at the foot of the bed, sits a ventriloquist’s dummy dressed in a white suit, its mouth drooping open.

  The sound of singing continues.

  When I walk to the window and peer out through the blinds, the singing stops. On the other side of the window it’s just possible to discern another room. Everything in this other room is also white. I cup my hands to the glass in order to see more clearly. As I gaze around the edges, I realise that this other room is almost identical to the one I’m standing in – except that in the centre of the room, or in the centre of the window, there’s a blurred shape which obstructs my view.