which becomes more violent
But at the same time, it turns out to be very easy to make someone very small, just as large as the largeness of their body and no more, as demonstrated by one of our adversaries, who stepped forward and placed a holdall on the ground. Then very gently, and I was impressed by the way she did this, how smoothly and how at ease, she then removed from this holdall a gun. She looked at us and it was the kind of look that says adios, compadre, in the very fact that the look is so blank it says nothing at all. The problem was that I saw no way of understanding what would be the way to take myself out of such a situation. I did not know what was wanted, whether money or attention or apology or promise to flee the country. I wanted to plead and offer anything at all. To think how angry she was! How angry someone must be with you to bring out a genuine gun – and that it was genuine I had no doubt, it was just something in the way that she was holding it, and I realised that this was a very useful knowledge for the future, if I had a future, and if that future involved me being confronted with a gun, which I hoped would not be true. Everything inside me was scrambled and in despair. No wonder I was admiring of Hiro’s courage! I knew that in some way there was a relation between his sprightliness and the pills that he had taken, but still, I don’t think it’s possible to reduce anything to anything: all behaviours in the end are a total mystery.
— We should totally calm down, said Hiro. — We should absolutely sit down and talk about this, maybe over coffee. Wouldn’t that be a better plan? I’m not meaning to impose, I’m just –
He gradually stopped speaking and I understood, because it’s difficult to maintain your poise in the absence of an understanding audience. To try to diminish such disquiet I tried to look around me at the natural beauty. It had rained so continuously that violent flora and fauna had emerged: new beetles, and savage kinds of kale. The last sunlight was making soft columns among the trees. I think I have no interest in natural beauty, or at least I didn’t then. My interest very strongly was in something my mother had once said to me, which was that I deserved everything that happened to me. She meant that I deserved all the good things and the prodigies, but I was wondering if also I did deserve this too, as punishment for all my million misdeeds. And if so me, then maybe Hiro deserved such violence as well. And yet what kind of violence, I did not know. A small animal was staring at me from a tree and a vast terror overtook me. I really did not want to die, out here, in terrible pain. I am used to telling my innermost feelings to people and having them respected, and so I did this now. For I really was not ready for death, to go down into the underworld, into the hall of two truths and weigh my life against a single feather. I know you are meant to be ready for death at any moment, but what does this really mean? Certainly I am not ready for death – with so many secrets to be discovered in my email, so many projects left unfinished and indecipherable in my notebooks. I had no wish to become a body, with around it crouched my nervous first responders.
— I’m afraid of you, I cried. — I’m really afraid.
For if you say such a thing, surely this is a signal that you mean no violence to anyone and deserve to be pitied? And also I did want to emphasise that even if they were murderous and like a firebrand from the ancient myths, I did not judge them, since I think it’s a basic principle that if you are inside a situation where you may have been to blame, you cannot blame the people you might have hurt if they want to take matters into their own hands, however objectively bad they may be.
— You see? said Hiro, in a gesture of amenable supplication.
And then they shot Hiro very gently. It was a brief moment but also irrevocable, about as small and irrevocable as the moment whenever the instrument known always as the bonjo acquired the new name of the banjo, and all previous musical history came softly and precisely into focus.
& placing our hero outside all his usual categories
Everything was creaturely and disintegrating and wet around me, like suddenly I was part of the natural world and that’s always a disturbing feeling. It was no longer just a history of some uptown hustle. Presumably thousands of miles away in a brown swamp somewhere on the outskirts of town a green crocodile was submerging its one good eye, and me I was crying very much without being able to stop it. Had you ever talked to me about gun violence, I think I would have said that the true guns would have been terrible items, complete with dazzling sounds. I expected flame and burning maw, but instead it was much softer. The gun flinched but her arm didn’t. Then after a very small pause, certain reds were slowly everywhere on Hiro’s sleeve and I did not know where to look or how to feel, except my feelings very strongly were occurring without my knowledge. I say knowledge but I mean control. I think they had shot Hiro in his outstretched arm but it was difficult to know. I was screaming many things inside my head but outside I was silent. Or possibly I managed something very small and meek, but righteous, like:
— It’s not right. It’s not right.
Or something roughly like that. I thought that then Hiro had scrambled away into the dark forest before realising he had simply lain himself down very simply on the floor. And I became very afraid. I think that fear has been one of the lessons I have learned from this season, and how you cannot find the way of being equal to it. It’s just the natural reaction when everything is sweet and there is no mischief in you, yet everything you do tends to create these ancient consequences, like you are in the amphitheatre with the wolves and the lemurs. For since this moment in the woods I have often dwelled on this finale. Never have I felt so single and alone, and suddenly I thought of our dog in the car underneath the salon towels and how he was alone, too, just as Candy was somewhere in the city and alone. When I used to wake up in the mornings, I would lie there and consider the fringe of light below the curtain. And I always knew that my mother would be in the house and everything was safe and that was always a relief. To know that safety was always possible was a lovely form of knowledge. And it occurred to me that in fact until this moment there had never been a point when my mother did not know where I was. This was the first moment where I was completely outside her orbit, and it was very sad. I mean, it was sad to discover how this sense of safety was just one more of my illusions, that in fact I was not exempt but like every other animal in the world I was killable, just like my dog was, too. It was really amazing and terrible. But still, I was trying to keep thinking because I had this instinct or superstition that if I was thinking then I would not be in danger, and the hyper was as ever my only mode, like thoughts were leafing from me and gathering at my feet, like pencil shavings. You always do whatever you want, said my mother. Always you do whatever you want and that is OK with me but it is going to upset other people, she said. I had always disagreed with her. I thought that instead you had to have some faith in people because otherwise why continue? I mean why continue in society at all? – and everyone in some way is in society, they can’t help it. Except that possibly right now I wasn’t.
in a small delirium of language
Then I heard a noise and felt something on the inside of my body that was a pain more than I had ever known. I guess I knew what must have happened but also still I was hoping that I did not. I did not want to think I had been shot. So many images of dismemberment and maiming were inside me. Still, it was undeniable. It felt like all my legs were gone except they were also still both there, and one of them was frantic, as if in panic. I was thinking things through as belatedly and slowly as the people on the sidewalks whose umbrellas are still up although there isn’t any more rain. There was a crumpled liquid soft implosion in my thigh, like a starfish. I felt like I was not precisely here but everywhere else, which was complicated, so I closed my eyes to concentrate.
— Yeah it’s done, said someone above me.
I thought she was talking to me before I realised she was talking on a phone.
— No it’s sorted, she said. — It was nothing at all.
Then they walked away, le
aving us to our sad devices. Everything was over and empty, the kind of emptiness the station boulevard has, at night, when all the minicabs are gone. And I was trying to hold together this conversation I was trying to continue with myself, since no one else was trying, and I was saying that of course I couldn’t be sure that this wasn’t dying. I might be wrong that I was going to live. It was my old Madama Morte fear, but this time perhaps more rational. For presumably, I thought, in fact I would never know if this was dying, because if in the next four minutes, or twelve minutes, I find that I have died, this will be a pure delirium of grammar, unless it turns out that in fact I will be able to just leak out of this body and observe the scene, and only then I suppose will it turn out that grammar was not delirious at all. Hiro was moving very slowly and I hoped that he was smiling, because I did think we had reached some resolution, and that was definitely a relief. It was like finally all the pirates had arrived at once to claim their merited revenge. And perhaps, I suppose, they had.
from which our hero surveys his recent history
One thing I had been considering a lot in these nightmare times was that story from the classical era about the famous sadhu and the flute – that as the poison was being brought to him in a bronze cup to effect his immediate execution he was learning a melody on the flute. And when people asked him what the fuck he was up to he said: At least I’ll have learned this melody before I die. And while I know that this legend is meant to be a legend proving how noble the sadhu was in his adherence to an ideal, I think it also helps to make something clear that is usually very difficult to think about – because I don’t see why the fact that this sadhu is about to be executed should make any real difference to the degree of his nobility. Every child who ever learns a banjo or piano scale in suburbia is being as noble and as grand – since after all proximity to death is just an effect of proportion: and in the scale of the vast long shadowed centuries we are all just as close to death as that pre-executed sadhu, or almost. But whenever I had thought like this, it had left me very anxious, since while one interpretation of the story of the sadhu was that this represented a noble adherence to the value of things that cannot be priced, there was also the possibility that in fact this just represented a total pointlessness, that this story was in fact not a parable but a black and gargantuan joke on all human endeavour. What I mean is: If it seems pointless for the sadhu then, why not for all of us now? Why do anything at all? That’s a difficulty that seems to me far easier to dismiss than ever solve but also, I was suddenly thinking, among the lianas and ivies and streamers, it was liberating, too. I mean, it really is impossible to know what’s truly real, or at least I sometimes think so. If you were to ask the prince which state was real, the slumming or the palace, I think he’d find it difficult to answer. All of which must mean that it’s not impossible to change one’s life, as in any Technicolor sequel in the tropics – or that if the world you believe in was lost before you ever entered it, and is only an illusion, that’s no reason not to preserve that lovely illusion. To have lost everything, I just mean, may be a disaster but not all disasters are catastrophes. And when I thought about it like that, it made me very hopeful for the future.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adam Thirlwell was born in London in 1978. He is the author of the novels Politics and The Escape; the novella Kapow!; and a project about international novels, The Delighted States, which won a Somerset Maugham Award. He edited a compendium of translations for McSweeney’s. He has twice been selected as one of Granta’s Best Young Novelists, and his work has been translated into thirty languages. He lives in London. You can sign up for email updates here.
ALSO BY ADAM THIRLWELL
Politics
The Delighted States
The Escape
Kapow!
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IN SUMMARY
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
1. Madama Morte
2. Utopia
3. Lowdown, Clumsy, Sly, Underhanded
4. The Pistolet
5. Long Fiesta (The Horoscope)
6. Tropicália
7. The Thing Itself
8. Time Sadness
9. Noir
A Note About the Author
Also by Adam Thirlwell
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2015 by Adam Thirlwell
All rights reserved
Originally published in 2015 by Jonathan Cape, Great Britain
Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2015
eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014959065
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-374-29225-6
E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71242-6
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