Breakfast at Midnight

by Louis Armand

  At some point we reach a crossroads. An orange sign starting out of the gloom points left saying ZOO. We follow it. I picture wild beasts in cages, stalking back and forth in the mist. Elephants. Flamingos. Howler monkeys. Giant iguanas. A whole menagerie. As we walk, Inessa combs her wet hair with her fingernails, gathering it at the back of her head and letting it fall loose again. Her other hand’s still under my arm but it’s just there and not holding me up anymore. Thinking how small she is and the burden I’d make for her. Though some people get upended if they don’t have a burden to carry around like ballast.

  I’m thinking some such idiot thing when I realise Inessa’s stopped somewhere behind me. I turn around and she’s staring off through a clearing at the edge of the path. On the other side of it, barely visible in the dark, there’s an old boarded-up planetarium – a crumbling domed structure nested within the overarching trees. In front of the planetarium there’s a small antique carousel, with painted lions and unicorns and horses with tangled manes. A grey tarpaulin hangs over one side. It takes a while to realise where we are.

  In the drizzle the painted animals have a strangely mournful air about them. The scene belongs to one of those scaled replicas, a miniature potemkin village under a plastic dome filled with water and tinsel, that snows when you turn it upside-down. The sort of place you find in fairytales, stumbling lost through a forest.

  Inessa whispers something in my ear and slips away among the shadows. Footsteps lost in the gloom. A moment later the lights of the carousel flicker and come on. Cracked gilt mirrors and rusting candy-striped poles shine in the wet. Then the lions and unicorns and horses start going around. Accordion music at half-speed belches from a megaphone, sounding weirdly in the big empty night.

  *

  When I was very young my mother took me to see the Berousek circus in Mikulov. A big red and yellow striped tent in a field. We sat in the dark with our scarves around our necks near a coal stove. There was a ring master with high black boots, a top hat and moustache. A woman in a sequined leotard swung on a trapeze. The bears danced. A pair of monkeys ran around doing tricks – one in a little white suit, the other in a tiny white dress. One rode a bicycle, the other rode on the back of a pony and jumped through hoops.

  Afterwards we ate ice cream at a stand, even though it was winter.

  Carousel music played from a cracked megaphone.

  Across a warp in time, Inessa is waving at me. Her hand a pale blur. I watch her go around on the carousel, riding a white unicorn in her black boots. I walk out of the shadows into a pool of light. Climb up beside her on the carousel. Her eyes gleam.

  “How’d you do that?” My own voice sounds far away.

  “Magic,” she says.

  As we kiss, water runs down the back of my neck. I feel Inessa’s hands on my face. Her tongue in my mouth. The darkened world turns around us to the noise of that cracked accordion music. Around and around like something in a dream. Until the music slows down again and stops. And the fuses blow in a shower of blue starlight streaking the air.

  We wait in the dark, listening to the sounds come back from the trees. Wet leaves dripping on the ground. Drizzle turning to mist. We kiss again, slowly. A kiss that begins with the mouth and spreads out through the body – her mouth sweeter than sour plums. She pushes my coat down from my shoulders. Pulls me onto the back of the wooden unicorn, until I’m astride it, with her astride me, our mouths never separating.

  It was a kiss that seemed to go on forever. A kiss like the kisses of childhood, full of timeless, unknown things. And when it ended something inside me felt sad. Like the child who was supposed to be me, sitting beside my mother under the big top, watching the bears doing their tired melancholy dance. The grey-haired ringmaster stooping with outstretched hand, coaxing them to one more trick.

  How had I become what I am? Looking up at my mother’s astonished face, when the trapeze artist somersaulted high in the air. And never suspecting her astonishment was solely for my sake. Holding my little mittened hand. And when it was all over, kissing me on the forehead. And if she hadn’t hung herself in a tree, none of this would’ve happened? And I wouldn’t be here now, on a broken carousel, in the dark, in the middle of the night, in the arms of a stranger?

  A whisper in my ear says shhh and I realise I’m sobbing. Inessa’s warm mouth grazes my face. I close my eyes, feel her hand loosen my belt, cold fingers slipping down around my cock. The air surges. My throat tightening. Inessa hushes me. Fingers gently stroking. With a strange tenderness she draws my erection out between her thighs. The encircling cold. And then her warmth enclosing me.

  This time we make it slow. A slow rocking like a boat rocking on water. I see myself somewhere far away, in a canoe on a river. It’s neither day nor night. It’s neither one place nor any other place. I look over the side of the boat and there’s Regen lying there, the brown water thick in her hair like honey. Honey running down her breasts. Between her thighs. All of a sudden the air’s swarming with bees. Thousands of them. The queen bee and her drones. And I feel their stings suddenly all over me, blinding, convulsing me.

  I gasp for breath. Inessa’s face hovers in the dark close to mine. Jaw clenched. Her body shudders long and hard as she comes. Silently she clings to me, her thighs tight around my waist. Our breath hangs in the air. We stay that way until the cold makes us ache.

  *

  In silence we return to the road through the park. Inessa walks slightly ahead of me, so that I can’t see her face. Beneath the overarching trees the road makes a tunnel through the darkness. Water glistening on tarmac. After a long time we reach a fork. Inessa goes on without stopping, taking the turn to the right. The road narrows into an underpass. On the far side of it, a small bridge spans a canal onto an island. We pass stables and an arena. The smell of horse manure hangs in the air. Dogs bark. Unseen birds flap in the trees.

  The island’s wide. As we cross it, the air seems to grow warmer. In the distance the sky’s gradually lightening behind the silhouettes of communist tower blocks, etching-out the hillsides. On the river-side of the island, the air turns sour from the smell of coal smoke. A swaying footbridge runs across to the old Trója palace. Its walls marked by the last flood. And behind the palace, the zoological gardens, echoing with bird-sounds.

  Crossing the footbridge I notice the swans asleep on a small outcrop, their plumage stained with the river’s filth. The yellow of the streetlights slithers across the face of the water. Nearby a radio starts playing. Voices from a window. A grating of strings. Then a breeze blows up and the music sputters and flaps about and comes wafting back over me. An old cygnet lifts its head briefly and nestles back down into sleep. Inessa stops at the far end of the footbridge, waiting for me. But there’s something pricking in my side like a thorn.

  I reach inside my undertaker’s suit jacket and touch the photograph of the dead girl, sticking out of the pocket. A face without a name. I look away along the river. Breathe its scent, like some primordial maternal scent. My mother, leaning over me in my bed. A lifetime ago. Whispering. A voice, a nursery rhyme. To soothe a child’s conscience with. Her scent or my wish-fulfilment of it, too many years old.

  This floating little world is all irreversible actions – stepping across a precipice, numb to the fall. But whatever it was, it’s too late now. I take the crumpled photograph that Blake had given me and hold it in my hands. It looks like nothing. A piece of paper. I strain to picture the face on the other side of it and whoever it once belonged to. A face in the rain. A girl who’d been a child once, too, trying to find her way in a world where everything loved translates an injustice or tries to be a weapon.

  I let the photograph of the dead girl fall into the river. It floats there briefly like a ghost and then it’s gone. I turn back towards Inessa. She’s standing on the embankment watching me. Behind her a street leads away from the shore, past factories and derelict tenements with graffitied walls and smashed windows. The ruins of a city that’s only
ever existed in the past tense.

  23. CAMERA EYE

  The man staring up at me through the blood in his eyes is my father. Time by the clock: thirteen minutes past four exactly. It was a small room, the window lit by streetlights, the walls spattered with cast-back from the cleaver I was hacking him with. One blow after another. But he wouldn’t die, he just kept staring at me.

  “You’re killing me,” he said, a statement of fact. Writhing across his bed. My shadow, moving after him – two figures in a savage dance. The room spilled open in a blur. A shadow raising its fist and beating down, cleaver and meat. “You’re killing me,” he repeated, hooking an arm around my neck, stifling the next blow. Faces pressed close. Forehead to forehead. Breathing hard. We clenched for what seemed like hours, barely moving. The smell of blood on him and reek of stale booze. Red digits of an alarm clock flashed the time in the dark.

  I only wanted it to end. For him to lie still and death to come quickly. I felt, as our faces touched, a strange and hopeless tenderness. Like the tenderness you feel for dead things. I thought of my mother’s hair. Long and jet black, which I used to breathe-in longingly while she sat and brushed it. The perfume of her stockings. The scent of her underwear in the bottom drawer of the dressing table. Like dead butterflies.

  I clasped my father in my arms, telling myself it would be over soon. There was only time left. Blood soaked the sheets of the bed, draining out of him like spoiled wine. They’d hang his carcass above the door for it to whiten. Roast it when the harvest was done. But then he got away. Escaped from me, backwards through the bedroom window, the windowpane exploding into the night.

  It happened in the blink of an eye. Slipping from my grip, half tangled in the curtain’s white gauze. The sound of glass shattering across the pavement. A fierce wind rushed up from the street. My mind froze. And then I was falling after him, my body acting of its own accord, down into the tunnel of night, the vortex of the streetlamps, a camera eye hurled through space.

  *

  They say you’ve got to be delusional to kill your own father, whereas to kill a complete stranger you only need to realise it’s possible. “Blood,” my father used to say when it suited him, “is thicker than water.” And sweeter, too, when you can taste it. He didn’t bleed a single tear when my mother died. It made him angry, though, that she’d cheated him of her suffering. But her suicide was like a black hole in the middle of my existence. And then Regen. And now this.

  At the end, I was standing beneath an orange streetlight and he was lying on the bloodied cobblestones, staring up at me the way babies do. I couldn’t even tell if he was surprised, or angry, or afraid, or if he was laughing. Making ha-ha sounds like a wounded crow. He had no mouth anymore. Without it, he looked absurd, as if his prick had been cut off. Only the eyes were left. Eyes full of blood.

  I could barely lift the blade in my hand. The cleaver had turned to lead. One more blow would’ve finished him. I pressed the blade against my cheek, wet and cool. But there was nothing left in me. My head swam. If only I could’ve lain down there beside him, the way I’d lain so often beside Regen. Father and son. Floating on a sea of red wine. In that old bathtub among the vines. Sailing into the night.

  Instead there were voices. Lights coming on. Something called me out of my trance and I suddenly saw myself, standing there, holding a meat cleaver covered with blood in my bloodied right hand. My father’s blood. Sangre de Dios. In nomine Patris, et filii…

  Footsteps on the street. More voices. I felt the blade slip between my fingers and clatter heavily to the ground. I turned my head in slow motion and saw people coming down the sidewalk. A door opening across the pavement. My grandfather’s face.

  And then I was running. No-one stood in my way. I ran blindly, guided by some fatal instinct. The car was where I’d left it, behind the wrecker’s yard. Long minutes seemed to pass, wiring the ignition until it caught. Mind frantic. Hands gone numb. I drove crazily, fishtailing on gravel, down rutted back roads. Headlights gone dim. Plummeting through the night, tunnel-visioned, rpm in the red, avoiding that face in the rear view mirror.

  At any moment I expected something to come out of the dark and put an end to it, like the hand of God. But there was nothing. Only the emptiness. I was driving through it the way you drive through a landscape. A desert. A vast flat open space. I imagined, beyond the headlights, a straight line stretching off to infinity.

  *

  The house by the lake was in darkness. I found the gate and the dirt lane leading up to it. It stood out from the pre-dawn like an intuited presence, barely a silhouette. I don’t know why I expected her to be there still. Guilt? Desire? Or something else? The ropes were lying tangled on the bed. She’d managed to free herself, take her clothes and run. Everything else was the way I’d left it. I searched around the lake, but there were no signs. I stopped and tried to breathe. It was madness to go on.

  I knelt down at the end of the jetty, not knowing why. In the moonlight my hands were dark with blood. There was blood all over me. I stripped-off my jacket and shirt. Plunged my face into the water, stirring up mud. I could feel the cold settling into me, but it seemed remote, like a finger prodding beneath the skin under anaesthesia. I knew this was the end, that I’d fucked-up everything. I should’ve killed myself right then, while I had the chance, but I didn’t. I didn’t do anything. I just knelt there, half-naked, like a monkey chained to a post, empty-eyed, staring into the gloom.

  Gradually the moon began to sink behind the hills. I could smell the algae in the lake, the mud along the shoreline, the reeds. A sweet smell like a carcass left in the sun to putrefy. The air teemed with insect noises. It was as if an unseen force was closing in. Life in all its viciousness. Death, regeneration, extinction. And as the vapour seethed out of the earth, I thought of Regen, lying in the middle of the vineyard that first night, a mock of moonbeam in her hair, groaning: “I want it.” But the image blurred into its opposite. Her hands, tied at the neck, the whites of her eyes, body jerking beneath my weight. And somewhere out in the night she was there. Alone. Running. Afraid. I tore at my face, crying out, hating myself, what I’d become, and still hearing her voice. Again and again. “I want it. I want it.” But what had she wanted?

  *

  Back in the house I searched through the mess that was left, not knowing what I was looking for. The last time she’d run, she’d gone to the border. But she knew I’d follow her there. And besides, her passport was at the bottom of the suitcase she’d left behind. I turned the pages, all of them still unmarked. Her face smiled up at me. Hair tied back. A white lace collar buttoned at the neck. Her face and beside it a name, a number, a date and place of birth. Could she have gone back there? Could she have gone to the cops, even? I told myself it was impossible. I made myself believe it.

  That’s when I found it. The photograph of Regen with my father. Taken in that very same room, only years earlier, a lifetime earlier, before the house had been left to rot. The cut-out faces on the walls were there. The metal bedposts. The mosquito netting. They’d called it the Snake House. They’d fucked on that same bed, under that window, with the lake outside. How long ago?

  Regen had warned me: “Never trust appearances.” But I couldn’t help it. That photograph said everything. It said too much. It said almost nothing. I’d wanted to believe, like Hänsel and Gretel, that everything comes good in the end. A fairytale that could become real. But in the story, the children don’t end up with blood on their hands, like the blood that was on mine. They bring home the bounty to the hapless, forgiven father, and all’s well – they’ve earned their keep after all – and he gets to grow old and forgetful.

  But the father in the picture didn’t exist any more. Alive or dead, it made no difference. It’d all come to nothing. The little house in the woods, beside the lake, with its hidden secret. Hänsel and Gretel. The mother hanged. The wicked witch somewhere above the world with her crystal ball, cackling.

  I struggled to cast
off the spell the photograph had put me under, folding it into my trouser pocket. I looked at the time. It wasn’t as late as it’d seemed. My mind raced – there had to still be a chance to put everything right. If I could find Regen. Make her understand that it wasn’t me who’d done those things. That it was something else. Something in me. A madness. A poison. Something I’d had to get out.

  I bolted from the house just as I was, half-naked, Regen’s suitcase in my hand. I turned the car around and drove cross-country towards Prague. A sudden certainty that she’d try to get back there, but not knowing why or how. I drove north and then west, keeping to the main roads this time. Looking for her all along the way. Scanning the roadsides. City-limit truck stops. Petrol stations. Faces of hitchhikers flaring in the headlights.

  I saw her everywhere, but found her nowhere. Just outside Prague the car ran out of gas. I grabbed the suitcase and began walking – the lights of Černý Most like a mirage in the distance. At dawn I fell asleep in a ditch, finally overcome. A black sleep in which nothing appeared. When I awoke it was already growing dark. At first I was confused, not knowing whether the day was coming or going. Sixteen hours in sixteen seconds. The air had turned humid. Dark clouds hung on the horizon, moving in from the west. Insects swarmed above the tall grass.

  I found a bus stop and rode into the city. No-one paid me any attention. It was a dead run, all the way to Palmovka. When I got to St Pauli’s there was someone there in the apartment we’d been living in only a couple of days before. But it wasn’t Regen. A prostitute from the club was washing herself at the sink. She barely registered me, a stupid doped-out vacancy in her eyes. I searched the room but there was nothing.