Lurid & Cute

by Adam Thirlwell

  CANDY

  Zezette, what’s wrong?

  ME

  I think I might just always be about to cry? You know? I think I’m maybe I’m unhappy.

  CANDY

  With us?

  ME

  With – no, with everything. Not us.

  & can happen very casually

  Because, to put this another way, it turns out that in the perfect marriage where you are absolutely trusted there is no end to what you can do. For lying only distils its gorgeousness if you are doing it to the person who wakes up next to you every day, who believes they know your inner heart more than they know their own, that’s the perfect person to lie to because only when you lie to someone like that can you create a perfect lie, the kind that opens out new possibilities of other lives and other worlds, as if you’d made a voyage to the moon in your own home-made jetpack. You just do something with panache and anyone who loves you will believe you, if they have no other reason not to – and most of the time they do not. Although the problem with lying is that if what I wanted to do was consign just one aspect of my life to unreality then I think I was mistaken. Unfortunately, it leaks all over the picture. Sure, terrible things may well be often said in conversation but much more terrible can be the way that nothing is said at all. In either case there will be consequences, so that what looked like nothing but silence and absence may well turn out to be a grand event. For on reflection I do have to also admit that it was the particular way that Candy and I constructed this nothing that was in fact important for the future story I have to tell. That there were no consequences in the immediate future turned out to be the darkest consequence of all for the genuine, more long-distance future. It was the way we silenced each other that had the explosive possibilities inside it. And I do say silence. Because let’s say that however cool a person is, very few are the people who definitely enjoy the row and the argument. I am certainly not one of them. If what you want to film is sharpshooting in the bars of silent towns, with shotguns and other props, I am not necessarily the ideal star. Nor can I do the shouting in restaurants thing so very well – those scenes with women who upturn tables and scrawl lipstick on their faces like bloodstains or bad clowns. Such scenes make me scared. In fact, brawls scare me in every form they take. The only other person in the world who dislikes conflict like I dislike it is Candy and maybe this is one reason why we will love each other for ever. We prefer there to be silence between people, even though of course there is no such thing as silence, for even as you move your head or hand in a certain way you are offering communication – which is maybe why there are so many possible art forms, because while film is possibly the greatest if what you want to do is silence and the many truths of gesture, then also you need an art form made of words for all the elaboration of the inside thinking. Just one of the art forms is not enough to do the entire cosmology, the vast interior and the small exterior. And in this case the cosmology was how much truth a man must tell his wife, in the early and suburban morning of a giant city. I would not say I totally yet knew.

  ME

  You go to work all day and it’s difficult –

  Yes, the only problem is that lying has to be managed with care, and for a moment we were careless.

  CANDY

  I only do it for us – I mean – I just want you to have your space –

  Suddenly this was a more difficult place for me to argue from and so I paused there. But also I did try to make the right sort of noise because I totally agreed with her. She was in no way being cruel and in fact the opposite, which often happens. It was like my mother long ago berating me in some Chinese restaurant for not wanting the salt-and-pepper chicken feet when I had ordered them myself. But there I suppose I can be excused by my youth and inexperience. Almost definitely it was catastrophic harm that I was causing but I don’t know if harm should be the only or even main criterion for judging any of one’s actions: what about for instance glee or marvelling or simply the grotesque? For there it is. Lying is lovely. True, to make that discovery is also very troubling. If you have a desire for moral outcomes, if your aim is the most ideal society possible – and that is always what I try to achieve – then lying has its fearsome aspects. But it just happens very softly and fast, like I’d just discovered that all the leather-bound volumes along one wall of a stately library were false, and then the wall swings slowly open and you walk on through, into another book-lined room. Somehow, I was thinking, it was now a situation that was true and not true, at the same time. For once again Candy regained the acceptable tone.

  CANDY

  But maybe do you think you should get a job? Would that be good? Do you think you’re just getting bored? Is it good for you to be around the house all day? I mean doesn’t your mother get you down?

  ME

  Like a job like where?

  CANDY

  I’ve always thought you’d be a good teacher – like a good primary-school teacher and you’d work with kids and I think it’d just be great for you. You’d still have time for other things. I think you’d enjoy it.

  ME

  I think, no. I think no way.

  CANDY

  What’s happening with your work?

  ME

  I’m not sure.

  CANDY

  You think that’s why you’re not happy?

  ME

  Is possible.

  CANDY

  Why don’t you write a horror flick?

  ME

  A horror flick?

  CANDY

  Something with gore –

  ME

  You think?

  CANDY

  I want men bleeding from their eyes. Or at least I want something happening. Why doesn’t anything ever happen? Like make a movie about a massacre?

  ME

  I don’t think you can show it –

  CANDY

  You don’t?

  ME

  I do not.

  And so we chattered on. And once again catastrophe had receded, just receded into the blurred and pastoral distances.

  even if the gore remains, as a token, or proof

  Always I had felt about as moored to the world as that airship was moored to the landing stage on the Empire State Building – and that’s probably to be expected if you live a life where catastrophes are infinitely postponed. To be a stevedore or farmer is no preparation for a life like mine, where the real is more like sherbet. That feeling is enveloping – so that even as I turned and Candy asked what I had on my teeshirt, I was not perturbed. I looked down and with a surging recognition, the way a surfer must recognise the wave that will pull her under and cause the wipeout to end her days, I saw that in my hurry I had simply put back on the teeshirt with which my evening had begun. It was, therefore, a teeshirt with a range of bloodied stains.

  — That? I said.

  — Uh-huh, said Candy.

  — I don’t know, I said.

  And once again we paused there. As I said, we are no sharpshooters, Candy and I. We let the pause suspend itself, engorge itself. Because it’s really not so hard, to ignore things. And so it was like – what was it like? It was like that story of the man who passed through Paradise in a dream, and had a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there. And indeed, when he woke up, he held a flower in his hand. That’s one sort of similar story – or no, this is what it was like. It was like the story of that prince in the eastern realms who once upon a time dreamed he no longer lived in his palace but in the city, and was very poor. In this new life of his, he had no servants or cooks. He only had a wife, who went out every morning to work as a sales clerk in some department store. They lived in a house in the suburb favelas of a giant city together with a single hound. His life was shanty town and barrio. And then one morning he woke up and was back there in his palace with his courtiers or flunkeys, while the second hand on his gorgeous watch was perhaps just describing a minutely more obtuse angle –


  HIS COURTIERS OR FLUNKEYS

  Well wow you just dozed off there for a moment, sir –

  but the prince still in his heart knew that something, like definitely, had taken place. What happened therefore next is that he ordered the whole court entourage to go out driving with him in a minor motorcade, and sure enough when the SUVs entered the plastic outskirts of that giant city, with hotels and other details, he recognised a street. Calmly he left his limousine, where in the road a woman came up to him. And she said: Zezette, where’ve you been all this time? Like what, you got arrested? – How should he put it? the prince would say, years afterwards, telling this disturbing tale. – Imagine that you are the enfant terrible who wakes up to discover that he is in fact the creation of some pen or quill or keyboard that he cannot see. That’s how I would put it. It’s not a good feeling at all. But enough of me. What this party needs is more negronis. And so the story ends. I mean, it was like that, sure – this bloodstain: just back to front, or upside down.

  2. UTOPIA

  THE WATER PISTOL

  at which point his double Hiro

  — Why did you get married if you’re totally unhappy? said Hiro to me some time later in this neon epoch.

  — I never said unhappy, I said. — I never used such a word.

  — Talk to me, said Hiro. — Explain yourself.

  — I had a vision, I said.

  — What did the vision say?

  — The vision told me not to get married, I said. — So I got married.

  — Totally logical.

  — It’s not easy to get visions right.

  — Maybe, said Hiro. — What kind of vision?

  — A kind of voice? I said.

  I did mention other complications of hospitality. As deftly as some tapas stooge presents you with a dish of chicharrónes without you knowing that you’d ordered, or a djinn appears in one of the old fables, Hiro had suddenly appeared in what you could comically call my life, and there he stayed.

  is revealed in the suburban panorama

  Everyone who describes anything has this problem of what stays and what doesn’t. Walt Disney had this problem and so do I. In this little murder ballad there are some things which already exist that will play a part in its future – like Candy, and Romy, but some things do not yet exist, like firearms or the time since I have last seen any of the people I am describing. Some things have just arrived, like Hiro. And some things exist and will still exist, like the setting. The setting is the one permanent phenomenon. At night, Candy would say, I almost like it here, when there’s just the street lights and the citrus smell of the garbage trucks, but in the grey days it can be very hard. Don’t you think so, chico? I knew the lyrical problem she was describing. There’s nothing less homelike than the place that is your home, a place of memories, of dejection, of pettiness, of shame, of deception, of misuse of energy, however much you try to feel affection for it. I think a lot of the difficulties some people have with life are caused by the fact that you only come from one place – or maybe that’s only a problem if you grow up in this panorama, with autoroutes and quilted plains, but since nearly everyone grows up in a place like this the problem must be almost universal. Take your pick wherever on the globe you like, in Kabul or Santiago, the same landscape is there before your eyes. Because in fact most inhabitants of Kabul do not live precisely in that city but instead on its edges, where Kabul disintegrates into vast light and vacant streets, the kind where the pavement is listless and there are only a very few street lights, maintained by random generators in concrete huts. That’s where most people are nowadays, and it means that when you travel to any city of your choice you can find yourself at home, just so long as you get out far enough, not too far but just enough. I think these places are the most beautiful in our time: the tennis centres, lorry depots, chain restaurants, and also the hypermarkets and wholesale units. But whether these places are good for happiness, I do not know, if you consider how much suburbia is also a kind of absence, without a focus or a centre, like the verdant So-Cal foothills, just a succession of high streets and outer roads. It’s basically grass, or lichen, the way it spreads to fill in all the gaps between the rail lines and the autoroutes, just spreads itself with multi-lane parkways, burger kiosks, banks, pharma stores, crematoria, temples for various religions and other faiths, insurance offices. In such a place, it’s only natural if the boredom tends to expand like cookie dough and stay there, a sort of sense that you cannot connect all the pieces of your life together – like when you’re in an endless security queue at the airport and therefore have no way of going either forward or backwards, but must just simply submit. And if in particular what you want is people to live together, to live together and adore each other, which is always my ideal, that suburban vagueness is maybe not so good as a locale.

  with his utopian instincts

  In this story I have to tell, people try to live together, but mostly they’re apart. In this story people try not to be separated by money or love but mostly they are. And yet we did try, after all. To take Hiro as an example: when he got a side of turnip dumplings in the Thai cafe by the tram terminus he shared them, and with enthusiasm, for not only did he talk utopia but he tried to make the world as charming as he could. Whenever we walked down the street, Hiro took my money and gave it to any tramp we happened on. And I was always very impressed by this because me, I give very little to the poor, not out of any selfishness but just because I find it difficult to know how to interact with the less fortunate. It tends to go badly when I do, because I cannot talk with the free abandon I employ when I’m alone. Like only recently I had been in a burger place at whose counter a woman was being asked by her many small children to buy them fries, and it was very obvious she was embarrassed by this problem that she could not afford to buy them all food, so she bought one miniature portion for the horde of them. And therefore when I came to purchase my own fries and chocolate milkshake, proudly I added the appropriate number of multiple fries to my order and brought them over to her table, where she looked at me in hatred. They’ve already eaten? she said with that total disgust intonation. So I retreated with my many fries and in my shame I ate them all, then hated myself for eating them. Utopia, I just mean, is not so easy to recreate, and it maybe showed in a certain manic quality also to Hiro’s thinking – his letter-writing scheme to aid prisoners in the west, or a mobile kiosk for granitas, in flavours ranging from lavender to chilli. On one day when we had maybe drunk too much beer iced with imported orange soda, we even had a dream of an office for these schemes and went so far as to investigate one, in a building whose other occupants included any number of other businesses, like opera newsletters, foreign-language lecture bureaus, highly specialised travel agencies, small-time currency speculators, perhaps a private detective or two, because it’s never good to be isolated from the world. Had there not been such difficult matters as rental payments, or insurance certificates, perhaps we would have taken it. I was thinking very often in this manner, as if really you could do anything you wanted if you only tried. Weightlessness was the element in which I lived – whether I considered Romy, or Hiro, or my basic unemployment. That’s what I mean by these suburbs being a problem. A landscape like this tends to make the world as flimsy as those old movies where you see the hero romancing the heroine while driving, and behind them unwinds the pre-recorded road. And the further problem is that when you enter such an existence it’s like when you return from a million miles away and are jet-lagged, and all the things you thought were important just seem to have been not removed entirely but just slightly rearranged, like life is some espionage officer who enjoys playing with your mind – reordering the books when you’re at the supermarket, taking out your garbage, until eventually you start to doubt your own reality.

  & manic tone

  Even if very possibly such unreality does perhaps improve your moral code, in that it makes things possible that other people might be inclined to ignore, like forming
this gang that we then formed, this trio of Candy and Hiro and myself. Especially for instance my father and my mother did not quite understand, perhaps because for them the only desirable group was the very definite family. At home, there was one constant conversation –

  MY MOTHER

  And when do you think that Candy will be wanting children?