— Well, what do you think would be better? I asked – like I was in a cafeteria lunch queue or massage spa deluxe.
— I think for the end it’s better with, said Caycee.
So she did it with a condom. I lay down on my back and looked away, in the familiar guise of the nineteenth-century wife. I also wasn’t sure that I had an erection at all. It was like I was in such a panic that I had lost all feeling or awareness of my penis, like the frankfurter must feel inside a corn dog. I just assumed that if she was carrying on, then some version of an erection must exist, but perhaps such an occurrence is all too common in these situations and Caycee was so civilised that she could cope with soft extremities, like the older woman in that old movie instructing a soldier in the definitions of fiasco. She was kind of crouching over me to one side and I asked her if I could touch, and she nodded yes. So I touched the skin inside her buttocks, the rougher skin and the wrinkled hole. Then I touched her where normally it would be slippery and wet but here it was very dry and very smooth. And I did feel a slight disappointment at this absolute lack of wetness. I know there is no reason she would be finding this exciting but there was a part of me that did, or hoped she might. I couldn’t help it. So I tried to think about something else. At first I was just thinking that in fact this was the first time I had ever had a blow job with a condom on, and couldn’t really work out what it was feeling like, but in so far as this was a novelty the greater novelty, obviously, was the fact that I was paying this girl to put my penis in her mouth, but before any of these thoughts could continue towards conclusions I had come. It was definitely the fastest orgasm of my life. Slightly I was relieved that therefore if I had come, presumably I had been erect. But still, I could not conceal from myself a disappointment. She tied the condom in the most lissom and minute of motions. She was very neat, and I thought that in fact there is nothing neater than coming in a girl’s mouth. People think it’s mess but that isn’t true. I came inside a condom inside her tidy mouth. How domestic can you get?
— That was quick, she said.
I wasn’t concentrating so hard on her tone but I think it sounded more like she was pleased than that she was being sarcastic or ironic. I think from her point of view I must have represented good value for money. It also added to the tone I was hoping we had developed of being friends, or in which I tried not to impose. And then I realised that while if this was real life, and it was of course, but if it was let’s say another aspect of real life where we had met as normal in a bar and afterwards found ourselves in such an intimate environment then we would have developed in this aftermath a conversation, and this is something I always like, to develop conversation, because it did feel that maybe there were things we needed to discuss, but here she was wanting me now to just get dressed. And so I did. I didn’t want to upset her at all. She was very nice and personable.
in which all moral values are revised
We walked back down the corridor and I went into the changing room while she stood outside, waiting, and I came back with all the cash I had, because I wanted to show my gratefulness. I tipped her what was possibly double the actual payment. But then I am always unhappy with tipping, because the tip is saying that the system of society has failed, that the price advertised is not equal to the service rendered, and of course, señoritas, the system has failed, of this we have no doubt, but the tip therefore becomes the place where somehow restitution will be made. Even if in doing so it struck me that I was committing another injustice, since this cash of mine that I had given to Caycee was in fact really my father’s, because all the money I had right now was given to me by my father, and it felt a little wrong that I had used it for this purpose, rather than on improving books. That felt like the greater betrayal, even, than the betrayal of my marriage vows with Candy – and so my true feeling at the moment, a little like the morning I had woken up beside Romy, was more like nostalgia, like I wanted to call Candy right there and listen to her voice. She just seemed very far away, like I wanted to be talking to her, even if of course she was the absolute person to whom I could never tell this tale. I would have to make do with my voice inside my head, and other confidants, like Hiro. And so I went back into the salon, where Hiro gazed at me.
— You totally did it? he said.
— Well, not entirely, I said.
— Me too, said Hiro.
— What do you mean? I said.
— We were talking and she said that she was tired. She said she’d been working twelve hours.
— Uh-huh, I said.
— So I gave her a massage instead.
I envied him, I really did. Somehow Hiro had managed to have a sweeter experience than I had. But that’s what happens when you hang out with someone way ditzier than Buddha. It destroys all your moral faith.
4. THE PISTOLET
THE PISTOLET
the basis of larger schemes
Already I was feeling that in the matter of world transformation, we were maybe quite advanced, we were extending new manners of behaving in every direction, stretching out the world, like stretching out the dough to make a pizza, but in Hiro’s opinion we were losing ourselves in abstraction and inaction. We had no grander scheme.
HIRO
This could carry on for ever.
ME
You’re bored.
HIRO
I am more than bored. I am frustrated.
Our analyses of feelings, and feelings about feelings, in which we specialised, thought Hiro, were not enough, or at least, while possibly amusing in themselves, they were not the proper way to live. We needed larger activities. Or this was what he announced one dark morning in a cafe, when we discovered that we could only pay for one tea, and one elderflower doughnut, for one of Hiro’s aims was always to exist as gigantically as possible – and I had to admit that I agreed with him. When you have no resources it’s not easy to create ideal communities. And recently my father had decided to end the money he was giving me, being as it was spent on so many luxuries and lazy pursuits – not that he disapproved of those in themselves, he wanted to emphasise, he just disliked being the person who was funding them for other people. By which I guess he did mean Hiro. He tended to think you should fund your very own laziness, and while I tried to wonder if maybe the truest form of resistance to the world in its current form is to waste the money of other people, I did not have the heart for it. Possibly I agreed with my father too. For to be as dependent as I was seemed to me in no way a good profession.
MY FATHER
At your age I had already founded a business.
ME
But that’s my point.
MY FATHER
It wasn’t easy.
ME
It’s not so easy to be me.
To have it difficult in your early years, I think, is a good recipe for self-respect. Whereas to have it good – to be the one on the sunlounger beside plashing fountains exclaiming che beleza! – is definitely to have it bad. Which is just a more general way of putting the sentence: I live at home with my mother and father and wife and I feel as if in constant pain. To come from a family is unavoidable, of course, but also it’s a terrible affliction. There is no amount of white pills that can make this cloud feel better. And when life does this to you, it’s difficult to react very well. I suppose depression would be one way of describing my ongoing state, but I preferred the more romantic terms that were once in vogue, like melancholy. My therapist said no. She said I should say depression. But that was long ago. I grew up in so much comfort I was totally dependent. To the zillionaire I suppose it wasn’t much. I just knew that I could always go home, in a taxi, and there would be clean sheets on the bed, and maybe the window open slightly so that the small sounds of the city could be heard, and downstairs my mother would be making me hot chocolate. Elsewhere there were addicts to junk burgers or to malls or sleeping pills. Me I was addicted to my station in life’s bazaar. Don’t you think such comfort might not be so good for a
nature like mine? I don’t mean my parents meant to do me harm but harm as we all know can emerge through so many sewer pipes and gutters that there’s no real way of keeping the harm away. Maybe other people could maintain their independence even in such conditions but I was not one of them. So although it was hard to bear, this knowledge that my father was now through with me financially, I could also see it as a bright occasion. Like I was the ball and this situation was the basketball star and now we were only waiting for one final element to arrive and slam me into the hoop.
with firearms for accessories
In Hiro’s opinion, the first problem was the eternal problem of cashflow – and of course I could not disagree at all, it was the pure difficulty now in our lives – but also, added Hiro, the more difficult conundrum was this: we did not want to work for it. His basic thinking was: if it’s possible theoretically to get rich quick, why take your time? Or, to put this more philosophically, the gangster in her desire to get rich quick is doing something of extensive resistance to the social order. She is very much bored with the world of work, and this is not, perhaps, to be despised, or at least certainly not so stupid. And Hiro now, it turned out, was also in this business – and to prove his point he then brought out a very gorgeous gun, not so much the Uzi or small-bore but some sort of petite Magnum, I’m not so sure of the category, and the sight of this machine on Hiro’s knees in a retro cafe, with photos of dead stars from the worlds of snooker or daytime television, caused an excited response in me which is not I think unusual, because it’s not so ordinary to have a gun in your life, or at least not if you are the kind of innocent prodigy and general person I am. But also I would say that if you have never held an object that looks like a gun in public you have not lived. Whether replica or real, it doesn’t matter. The thrill is cool.
— The fuck is that? I said.
— It’s kind of obvious? said Hiro.
And I did not want immediately to seem too reluctant or disapproving, partly because in the end the person with the gun in their hand is always very persuasive, but also because I had this theory that I could make at least some people very happy, and maybe in the end the only person this was true of would be Hiro, so how could I deny him? And also as I said, I was slightly sad and angry at my station in this life. I had this melancholy rage inside me and that’s a destabilising condition to be in when trying to make your everyday moral decisions.
in a criminal plan
How little equipment do you ever need to be convincing! Already I had learned this in the bodega incident. The merest replica of a pistol is enough to make you feared and this was after all not, said Hiro, the true and crazy thing itself.
— It’s not? I said.
— Man, no, he said.
True, it was more real than a water pistol. On the other hand, he pointed out, it was less real than a real gun.
— Is just a replica, said Hiro.
— It still looks real, I said.
— Well, sure, said Hiro. — Why wouldn’t it?
How many doubles, really, does a tale need? For while it’s easy to do things with water pistols and so on, argued Hiro, if you want to do something a little grander or more serious then you do need better props, or so he had decided, while roaming the lovely wide-open illuminated spaces of the computer screen. The water pistol was good for speed effects, but if a gun looks real, like truly real, with appropriate safety catches, finishes, sheen and so on – that’s as real as it needs to be if you do not intend to use it, and most of the time a gun in civilised society is precisely not intended to be used, it’s much more a general way of talking to other people, a sign like fishnet tights or lunatic lunettes.
— What, I said, — do you mean by more serious?
— Well, let’s say, the nail salon? said Hiro.
I do think we live in a very dangerous age, I mean dangerous for one’s moral life: for in the previous eras there was always a problem of material for the beautiful soul who wanted to express herself, I mean it was perhaps not so easy for the average bookish student in the marshland cities or slum conurbations to get hold of a gun, or other accessories, nor the many wraps of opium that their heart may have desired. But now so many things are available from the flat depths of a computer screen, and while that’s surely an advance for civilisation, it’s perhaps also a drawback, too.
— OK, keep talking, I opined.
When we had done that thing with the water pistol and bodega, Hiro pointed out, at no point had I complained, so why, he wanted to know, would this be different? If the prop was slightly more menacing, still, in its essence, it was not more menacing at all since in both cases the implement was not truly real. So that if my worry was for the safety of the people who would be threatened, I did not need to worry, just as if my worry was for our own safety, then there as well he thought I should be happy, since what security detail or panic button would a nail salon ever have? For after all, continued Hiro, it was just a place of harmony and perfume, to which no one with any aggressive intent ever went. Sure, there would be CCTV and so on, but since the CCTV is the worst cinema experience in the world, with only blurred and minute figures, that did not need to worry us either. While morally, nothing could go wrong because such an establishment would be very much self-contained, with insurance schemes in place for precisely this kind of sad and inevitable event. Every shop on every street must expect this, said Hiro, the way a woman must expect a man at some point to hustle her against a wall and explain stupidly that he loves her. So that in conclusion, I suppose, his basic argument was that so long as nobody suffered you could treat crime as a pure and singular event.
HIRO
Like, does it really matter if you hold up a retail outlet? I mean: who gets hurt?
ME
I no follow.
HIRO
The girl you point the gun at or whatever, the bayonet, is going to get her money back, the company behind that shop is going to get its money back, the only person who pays is the major insurance executive who is very far away and more importantly can take it.
And I felt a slight annoyance – it was inhabiting me very gently, the way the giant wind inhabits the tops of the eucalyptus trees and acacias – that Hiro obviously felt it would be so difficult to convince me, and if he thought that I would not be easy to convince I wanted very much to prove him wrong.
— Let’s do it, I said.
— You sure? he said.
— I know it, I said.
If you have no way of demonstrating skill in the rest of your life, it’s really restful to think that there may be one small way you will be able to succeed. And after all, I was thinking, as I took the last bite of my doughnut half, so many things were now different in my life to how I had thought they would be long ago. The old thinking seemed no use. I know the usual thinking is to separate the inner from the outer, to argue that OK sure there can be an aesthetic interest in let’s say grazing the brink of horror in any number of thought experiments and bagatelles, in considering murders as so many objects deserving of aesthetic attention, like statues, pictures, oratorios, cameos, intaglios, and so on, but that if at any point you succumbed to the actual realisation of such thought experiments the feeling would only be one of repulsion and squeamishness. But I was suddenly not so sure. It seemed a distinction that was perhaps more useful for the general social contract than just true. And what I wanted was excitement in my life. The lack of excitement seemed a very serious problem and I would do anything, I began to think, to see that excitement return – in whatever zany form. Please interest me! I was imploring to the world. It was like being a lover of animal rights but still in the end having this total need to sit out in the dying sun while watching the matador kill the bull. Definitely I was curious as to what a heist might actually be. I was gangster, I agreed, in this: if you have to find money in this world, it’s always best to do it quick. That’s just obvious when you think about it. What’s worse than suffering ennui?
&nb
sp; to rob a very bright nail salon
Because, said Hiro, people have a very complicated idea of heists and other steals, like if you want to break into some major art museum it probably seems natural to think you will have to do something ultracool, like borrow the uniform of the gallery security, then make your way to the control room and shut off the surveillance cameras, then deactivate all the electrics in the rooms with gold-leaf art and have your sidekick do his sidekick thing with lifting pictures off the walls then smashing on the sprinklers. That’s how people might argue but really, said Hiro, you should just burst in and do the place with assault weapons and balaclavas. You have three minutes before any Black Maria is going to turn up, and that’s a lot of time when you know what you’re doing. The most complicated things, in other words, said Hiro, are often the most simple – and I believed him. That was why we made no major plans or diagrams of entrances and exits, we just entered the nail salon like any other client wanting a quick colour and polish – except that we were in baseball caps, and sunglasses, against the afternoon light, because the time we had chosen was that absence of the early afternoon, a time which is really only known to those who are parents or unemployed. The receptionist was on the phone and very much engrossed in her efforts at conversation:
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