by Ananda Devi
“Less than what?”
“What does she want from you?”
He didn’t reply.
I don’t know, Cub thought to himself. I don’t know what she wants from me and what I want from her. It’s all a haze in my head. That first day, standing in front of her house, with the window that wouldn’t shut, I was smoking and thinking it would be so easy to sneak in that way, to see what was inside. I wouldn’t have done it. I wouldn’t have broken in, even if I was thinking about it. Then she came out, I must have thought she was ugly, old ladies are always a nightmare to look at, but she wasn’t like the others. She seemed transparent. Like she was made of fog, smoke, a wisp of cloud. And her eyes, so blue in the middle of that white. The way she held my hand. I didn’t understand it at all. She didn’t disgust me.
She still didn’t disgust him. Nor did her house, which must have struck him as horrifying. He had crossed a boundary. He was in London, but it wasn’t the same city anymore. I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore, he whispered, smiling a bit. Deep down, he felt like Dorothy, carried by a tornado to another world, another dimension, where he wasn’t Cub and where Mary was … something else. How could he have, if not …
He shook his head violently to keep himself from thinking about that night. The night of gray cats and soft, downy flesh slipping between cold sheets under the eye of a corpse.
As he left the flat, and his mother, and Brixton, with a slow tread, he couldn’t shake the feeling of a door closing behind him. Somehow, the familiar words of Bob Marley came to mind: My feet is my only carriage, so I’ve got to push on through.
He remembered. He stepped over a disgusting puddle at the base of a building. He looked down and saw nothing reflected back.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
—T. S. ELIOT, Four Quartets: Burnt Norton
He was sure of it now. His mind had resisted the possibility as far as it could, but now he had to concede the truth about himself.
That other evening, leaving his mother’s place, he had gone to King’s Cross St Pancras to see his friends. He heard the furious roars and felt the vibrations of the trains deep within his belly. A sort of icy dread or premonition had kept him from going in. The people were coming in and out of the station in a long, unchanging flood. Hurried and frozen at the same time, all of them alike, their gazes identical. The flow of faces had erased all individuality, the constant swing of hands and feet had blurred them all into uniformity. Cub walked against the flow, against its will. He felt the oncoming flow of the human flood as if it were trying to push him backward. He had wanted to let himself be carried away. The station doors seemed to open wide to seize him. He knew this place so well, but in this moment he didn’t feel like he was returning; it seemed to want to shut him out, he was at the mercy of a fate that refused to let him go so long as he didn’t remember everything.
He had the impression that the train station’s medieval sculptures had multiplied: dragons with crocodiles’ bodies, griffins with eagles’ wings, gargoyles with vultures’ necks. Beneath the arches, vast and empty spaces awaited his gaze, awaited his scrutiny of their shadows. Gothic and Victorian, the two neighboring stations, King’s Cross and St Pancras, false twins, extended outward, the one within the other, chased one another, bit their own tails. There were so many details to examine, like these tiny windows that a blue light would pass through at a specific hour of the day and which otherwise were invisible, doors that closed off long-untouched attics. All this created a black hole of strangeness. To look up would mean losing all sense of what was straight ahead.
He made his way toward the bridge that some people called “the suicide bridge.” Someone had told Cub that the most suicides in London happened there—more even than in the Thames. He sniffed the air. He could smell their fear, their despair and their exaltation at the moment of jumping off. Could you step off this bridge? he wondered. He’d also heard that dying under a train was the least painful way to go. He couldn’t understand that. He couldn’t imagine a more painful way of killing himself, other than by fire. Someone in the gang had bragged about having a good shag one night on this bridge, in the hot steam blasted from the trains, the smell of sulfur and soot, under a steel vault. “I’d never come so hard!” he said, and they’d all laughed. But he’d added that, when they’d finished, the girl’s white dress had ended up covered in black specks, as if the hand of death had touched it. Today, Cub, on the bridge, wondered whether he would come just as hard here, in the darkness, the wind, the smoke, the metal—a stern, narrow world, like a planet that wasn’t Earth, inhabited by stone and steel beings—or whether the hand of death would touch him.
Even if he turned this hand down, he knew that she would call him with a distant voice, she wouldn’t let him run away, she wanted him, she lusted for him, she held him, she was the angel come to find him and throw him from the bridge and he had to let her guide and carry him, lead him like a lamb to the slaughter, he could cry, sniffle, sob, but nothing would make a difference. It was decided. The gargoyles and the dragons would accompany him, their voices sharp, but without mockery, they would know that there were places marked by this seal and that some ventured here, risking their lives—or their deaths.
It was at this moment that he made the connection. Here, at this exact instant that he’d climbed up the bridge.
Could he be up here and down there at the same time? In this no-man’s-land, so far outside his limits, he could take that risk, he could become as primordial as an amoeba and forget his body, his sad eyes, his presumably dreamless days. And pull on the thread that would bring him back to himself. Was it possible that he’d never even existed?
On the bridge of the damned, he understood that he had meant to rob the old woman. It was that simple: he was a thief. If she’d fought back, he might have even killed her without much thought. Only pure chance had kept him from committing murder. Then she’d looked at him with her odd eyes, a dizzying upwelling of love, and that desire had gone out from within her, leaving behind something else, a boy who was no longer a child, not yet a man. On the bridge of final moments, he told himself he didn’t need to be ashamed. There were far stranger, uglier things in this world, in Brixton’s buildings where fathers fucked their daughters and grandparents their dogs. And gang rapes in basements so far underground that, as in outer space, nobody heard the screams. Gang rapes he might have taken part in, high on crack despite his mother’s fury, barely seeing the contorted face and the bottom of the giant, gaping mouth out of which came piggish squeals, and everything he saw was one dripping crack or another, oily and reddened by too much friction before finally dripping with blood, it was utterly inhuman, it was simply a place to stick his dick in, just like all the others, there hadn’t been anything more to it, anything worth thinking about.
Around him, he didn’t see a place but a world that he filled with his sperm. An old land that he was transforming with his blood, his energy, his vigor. “I’d fuck an old land to bring it back to life,” he whispered. “I’ll take the world with all my come.” He was seized by a despair so ancient it seemed to have been the residue of this very space, a despair encompassing his mother, his cousins, his neighborhood, a despair at this dissolution of entities that altered small parts of the world and never the whole, just the parts that bent toward violence. A despair that engulfed him in a revelation of his uselessness, of how wholly unexceptional his absence would be. Like a barely visible shooting star, the question crossed his heart: What difference would I have made?
His hands gripped the barrier and he wondered if he had the courage. He stood up on his tiptoes. What if? What if? A train neared, venting a thick, black violence. What if? The noise ran through the rails, shook the bridge and Cub too. What if? The heat seeped through
his pores, sank into his entire body like so many needles. What if?
Slowly, Cub raised his foot and set it on the lowest crossbar of the barrier.
“Hey, wog, need some help?” a voice asked.
His foot came back down on the bridge and he saw six men walking his way. They were fat, swollen, red-blooded, thoroughly drunk. Their cheeks were flushed. Each had his own boozy swagger. Their shaven heads set off hundreds of alarm bells. The silver necklaces with crucifixes or swastikas hanging off them. Their fingers encased in knuckle-dusters. The tattoos, the studs, the boots.
Cub gave them a stupid smile and held up his hands, palms facing the men to show that he wasn’t dangerous. They smiled, too, baring their rotting teeth to show that they were.
Nobody was near. Nobody would be near. The guys had a sixth sense that steered them clear of trouble. They closed in on him. A warmth snaked its way down his legs and he realized, in shock, that it was piss. He hadn’t realized just how scared he was.
He knew he was going to die.
They reeked of sweat, beer-soured breath, cigarettes and unwashed clothes. And their skin, most of all, their white skin mottled with red, streaked with bloody scratches, had a recognizably, horribly animalistic smell. The odor bound him where he was before their faces had even entered his field of vision. This stench of hordes ready to turn violent, leeching off his fear as if it were a drug, this scent petrified and paralyzed him, it made him reel as the hands reached out to him.
Just as they were about to touch him, he found his strength. He bolted in the other direction.
Bile rose up in his throat and reached his teeth. It dripped out as he ran. And maybe something else, something that dissipated when it was clear that there was no use hanging on to the improbable ballast of a fleeing body.
Fear, just as much as the hatred that radiated from their bodies, urged him onward. That was what had scared him most. A chemical stench. The odor of this hate had frozen him for a moment as with those animals who sprayed their prey with a paralyzing agent. But the same primal instinct of panic had enabled him to escape.
He was so unaccustomed to this sensation of flight, this burst of untrammeled strength. He had been on the other side; like them he had tasted the flavor of fear. Now he knew he only had a small chance left—which was to flee.
They weren’t human. Nor were they animals. They were relics.
Cub reached the bottom of the bridge. The train went by. He was overcome by the noise, the gusts of hot air as it kept going. He didn’t feel anything anymore as the train obliterated its shadow.
Rows of dragons and griffins and odd animals made out of stone and dust and incisions stretched as far as he could see. It was cold, very cold, either within himself or outside. He couldn’t be sure. In his mind, the fantastical array of beasts watched him with their bare eyes. Dragons, griffins, phoenixes—although he barely knew those names. He saw, with absolute clarity, that his final vision was all around him. Then this thought, too, disappeared, and all he could remember was that hatred.
He ran. With all his strength. With all the energy his small body, used to folding up or contorting or dancing or being torn, could muster. His steps took him instinctively toward Portobello Road, toward Mary, toward this chance encounter that was now his lodestone. It was only a potential refuge. (Brixton was too far away, getting back there would be impossible.) He ran there. He flew there. (His heart didn’t remind him that Portobello Road was too far away, that Portobello Road was now in the pliable world of Oz.)
The possibility of love that he’d glimpsed in the light of Mary’s face when he’d seen her for the first time. That possibility alone spoke to him. Filled him, entered him through every pore and every opening and every brutal wound. Flooded him, flushed out all the blood he would lose all too soon. This long race through London. So light on his dancer’s feet that he bounded down so many kilometers without feeling tired, and yet they kept on following him, they hadn’t given up, they climbed onward like giants, as if they owned the earth, and that was how they saw things, free for the taking, as was their right, and each step they took as they ran was a claim on a bit more land, they swallowed up kilometers of pavement, swelling their unrelenting desire like a wildfire, while for Cub, each step he took was toward abandonment and defeat, toward the moment when he would stop and turn and look at them, knowing that this would be his last retrenchment, his last confrontation before experiencing his death. And it would be a respite.
The roads unfurled. The black facades oiled by rain, the splotches of the past, the surges of the future, the corners he thought he knew but which now presented an unfamiliar face, the edges, the lines, the profiles of the entire city, this city he thought had been his own, that he’d thought was manifold, colorful and open, it all closed up like a fist as he raced through. Nothing held him back now; it was because there would be nothing left at the end.
He didn’t know how he got to Portobello Road; Mary’s house gleamed under a heavy sky as distant as a lighthouse, the only one strong enough to keep him going despite the pain in his muscles, despite his heart being ready to burst out of his chest. He was accompanied by the skinheads’ footfalls as they pursued him, filled with enough booze and drugs and hate to not let go, to keep up with him, being, like him, marathoners without knowing it, who would never see a brick wall that could hold them back. Cub was the prey. They were the hunters. They would not let go.
When he came to Portobello Road, a wild, furious hope invaded him: the idea that he might have enough time to knock and enter Mary’s house and shut the door behind him. Mary would protect him. Mary alone. But the footsteps were too close. If he turned around, he would meet their heavy breath. He banged his fists against the door. He didn’t know why he had come back here, where nothing but the smile of an old woman awaited him. He kept on knocking and knocking with all his strength.
He didn’t have time to prepare himself for the darkness. They were already around him, shouting at him, sniggering, driving death into his belly like sperm into a womb. His fragility touched their hearts, but not as much as the flower of violence now blossoming in their torsos and their crotches did. They were on home turf: their victim had no hope of any help. Nobody would open their door to the sound of his screams.
Without warning, an iron-encased fist slammed into Cub’s nose. Then came other blows in other places, a prolonged battery that made him wish for the ultimate end. He struggled at first not to scream, but when a boot plowed into his stomach, he howled.
It was that sound that opened up the gap that could never be closed again; the words that followed wrenched open new waterways, bloodways, and he, the prey, accepted, as every prey did, the fact of his weakness and his predators’ strength, bowing before them, abandoning in submission his right to life and to things. He was on the ground, held down by hands that had no sympathy for him, that were only there to make him suffer, nothing else, all they saw in him was his color: his black betrayed him. Finally, when he saw the blade unfurling from one of his assailants’ fists, he smiled.
This smile unnerved the skinheads. The one who had raised the knife didn’t bring it down immediately. He held it in the air, his gaze boring into Cub’s, tracking the expressions playing out there, following their slow, lucid progression, each shift a realization, each second filled to the brim with radiant truth. Nothing outside weighed him down. The man contemplated the eyes of his victim, perhaps there was a tiny tremor of compassion from deep within the arid landscape of his soul, maybe he thought that this boy bore some small resemblance to his little brother, aside from his skin, and his hair, and his lips, and his nostrils, but soon enough this thought gave way to another, more ritualistic one, the ugliness of this color, this hair, these lips, these nostrils, and so he sank the sharp blade into Cub’s belly.
His life took its time. It let itself be seized and tasted, it escaped and left behind all its flavors. Cub relived the taste of burgers, hot fries, cold milkshakes, even Wanda’s bu
rnt steaks. Cub tasted the smallest particle of life in his mouth, the bright redness of his gums, the springiness of his tongue, the thickness of his saliva, the whiteness of his teeth. His tongue was dry and he knew that there wouldn’t be any more saliva to assuage it.
Then he smelled the scent of corporeal release, of a body that had given up, that had lost the game, as its fluids escaped one by one, sweat soaking his T-shirt like dry wine, strong, undeniably masculine and his, and his cargo pants sticky and disgusting. All this contrasted with the calmness in his mouth. Only the odors kept on speaking, pleading, hurting. The last human conversation that could be had when almost nothing human remained, or rather when everything that remained was too human, and the man was merely body, the body was merely animal, the animal was merely rot.
His eyes no longer saw anything, not even the shock of the skinhead hypnotized by their light, but merely disparate colors that came together and then apart without any rhyme or reason, with only some small measure of consolation—it was so rare that the sky over London was ever that blue, verging on obsidian black, and he was so happy to see the pinpricks of stars, and the silvery wing of a vulture sweeping across that blue, its beak awaiting his flesh, so happy not to feel any fear. He knew what had been done to his body had been the worst profanation. That this body would feed the huge bird that was nourished by the dead seemed to be wholehearted justice.
The path dipped deeper into silence. It was the silence of water dripping within stone, of air’s erosion, of light’s infinitesimal collapse, it was the silence of existence’s slow march toward nothingness, beauty’s transformation into an ugliness that was all the more seductive for being irreversible, certainty’s descent into shadowier realizations. All that could be done was to follow the path without protesting, even with a sort of joy.
Mary heard the screams not just with her ears but with every part of her body. She had heard the pounding footsteps, the surges of violence that she would never come to understand. Someone had banged on her door. She knew she wouldn’t open it. She didn’t think to check that the front door had been shut properly, shut and locked and padlocked.