When this trip was organised, she said that she would go with him, that they would take the bus, that it would be really cheap, but the bus from Bordeaux is a nine-hour drive and Kiko said, WTF? Are you living in the Middle Ages or what? We’ve got T.G.V.s in France, I’ll sort out the tickets right away. Mariana is going with him; it was a no-brainer. Vernon’s too out of it to travel on his own, she said, he’ll end up on the wrong platform and wind up in Frankfurt with an abscess ten times worse. She loves Vernon. He can feel it. And that’s alright with him. It punches a hole in his chest. He succumbs. She has put her headphones on, she’s listening to Amy Winehouse and looking at stuff on the net. She doesn’t like the camp rule that says she cannot go online. She says it’s tired old technophobe bullshit. She abides by the rule because she has no choice. She must really care about him to put up with it, as soon as they got to Bordeaux and she was given her tablet, she lit up. Finally, she could reconnect with the world.
Over her shoulder, he looks at the succession of photos on Instagram, a baby pig, a girl lying on a sandy beach, a green milkshake, Paul Pogba shirtless, shot in half-light. Soko waking up, a drawing of a trash-punk angel holding a bomb, a fat bud of sensimillia dripping resin . . . She slips her hand into his, never taking her eyes off the screen. Vernon feels a tracery of warmth course through his arm to his shoulder and flood his chest. He can visualise the feeling, he can even say what colour it is – deep emerald green. This is not the meds. This is what he’s like straight. Something inside him malfunctioned, something that never returned to normal. He has changed.
He’s heard many theories of varying ludicrousness about the reason for his transformation, which a lot of people at the camp call “an awakening”. Some say his serotonin levels have exploded. Why not? The theory of hormonal chaos has its defenders. After all, as Daniel says, “With all the endocrine disruptors swirling around us, go figure – in you, it’s produced a global reboot.” Others favour the theory of a brutal, accelerated male menopause whose effects, paradoxically, are salutary. Maybe . . . Vernon doesn’t feel as though his physical strength has waned, but then he was never built like a lumberjack. Perhaps his libido has changed – but it’s difficult to say: previously, he wasn’t surrounded by girls fighting for his favours. Too much demand kills the demand – he’s less insecure than he used to be, but that’s logical: in the camp, he fucks anything that moves. At other times, people talk about the awakening of the Kundalini to explain these curious sensations, the strange visions, the trance-like states that overcome him without warning. He has been breathing too deeply, or too well, and energy has been released from the base of his spine, catapulting him into a sort of never-ending acid trip. The most inventive talk about alien abduction – the visit of some extra-terrestrial that has made its earthly home in Vernon. There is also talk of shifting frequencies – reality as a radio with some heavenly hand turning the dial.
At first, Vernon felt that the camp was attracting an awful lot of weirdos. Gradually, he came to the realisation that the world is full of people with fantastical beliefs who, on first meeting, may seem completely sane. The enigma that is Vernon gives them free licence to express their bizarre nature. This is how, between the salad and the cheese course, someone can end up telling him about their privileged connection with the vibrations of macrocrystalline quartz. The country is full of fanatics convinced that the dead walk among us, that invisible creatures gambol through the forests and that by exposing oneself to the right sound waves you can restore your magnetic field . . . Give them an opportunity to expound their theories, and you can find yourself going down some very strange paths.
*
People from outside the camp come every two or three months when there is a convergence. This is the name they have chosen – no-one remembers coming up with the term, but everyone uses it – for the night when Vernon spins the music to make the participants dance. Their lives are lived to the rhythm of these convergences – finding a place to set up, preparing the space, the event itself, packing up and moving on to another site. This came about without anyone deciding that it should happen this way. Let’s just say it occurred.
Applications to attend the convergences quickly became so numerous that it requires a whole organisation to select the participants without inviting more than a hundred. Something is happening. People show up, some of them are a pain in the arse, they come to “check it out”, suspicious and aggressive, as though someone is trying to sell them some bullshit philosophy, when no-one is trying to sell them anything, not even a story: it’s about dancing till dawn, that’s all. The extraordinary thing is what the dancers feel – with no drugs, no preparation, no special effects.
*
There is always a handful of doubters who wander around telling anyone who will listen that they don’t believe, that they want to see for themselves, that they’d be pretty surprised if something happened to them on the night, because they’ve been there, done that, and they’re too shrewd for this kind of headfuck. Vernon and the others don’t try to persuade them. They have only to wait. That night, on the dance floor, they start out with arms folded, supercilious little smile, determined not to fall for it. And two hours later, they’ve fallen for it. The following morning, they cannot pinpoint the moment when they merged with the crowd, with its slow repetitive movement. They are generally the ones who, at dawn, are most shaken up. This is one of the things that happens on nights when there is a convergence – a general upheaval. This is what people come looking for at the camp, at the convergences. A gentle, luminous confusion that makes you want to take time and keep silent. Epidermises lose their boundaries, everybody becomes every body; it is a boundless intimacy.
*
And, at each convergence, Vernon feels like a worm in the centre of a powerful spotlight. He is too important. They call him the Shaman. Officially, it is just for a laugh. In practice, he feels everyone looking at him behind his back, feels expectation coil around his spine. People eye him suspiciously, wondering if he’s a con artist, or stare at him adoringly, convinced that he can save them. He doesn’t quite know how to go about staying cool when everything depends on him. Fortunately, his train of thought quickly goes off the rails, so it does not bother him for very long. He thinks, it’s too much stress, I can’t handle this, and a minute later he is contemplating a leaf on a branch and is utterly engrossed. It limits his frustration. But even so, he has discovered the fear of losing. Never in his life had he feared losing what he had: he always felt that it did not depend on him. Now, he revels in a comfort that is not material. They sleep in abandoned houses – when they can find houses – which are rarely heated, pitch camp near springs when there is no running water, wash out of doors when it is –7°C, eat out of billycans, and yet theirs is a life of luxury. They are convinced that the experience they are sharing is exceptional, an extra ball that life did not owe them, something gifted, magical. And he does not want it to stop.
*
In the carriage of the T.G.V. the passengers have opened their laptops on the tables. They are watching movies, catching up on work, replying to an e-mail. Others are riveted to their phones. They are all in thrall. There are no longer any bodies without accessories among those who can afford to pay for a train ticket. Admittedly, there is a man in his fifties a few seats away who is reading an old-fashioned newspaper. When he turns the page, it slightly irritates his neighbour. He is the only one whose vision is not blinkered by a screen. Even the five-year-old is not bawling and running up and down the carriage disturbing passengers, mesmerised as he is by the cartoon he is watching. Next to him, his mother is watching too, though without headphones, she does not have a second to waste on the landscape, still less on her immediate surroundings.
Vernon has got out of the habit. At the camp, all internet connection is forbidden. It began with one of the Hyena’s fits of paranoia, it was she who decreed that they had to learn to live under the radar, to leave no digital trace of their movements
or their conversations. She constantly gives the impression that she is priming the group to survive a third world war in which not sending e-mails would be particularly important. Initially, everyone accepted this protocol as some crazy ritual whose main purpose was to establish a set of rules allowing them to demarcate the camp as a bubble. Over the months, Vernon noticed that people’s attitude changed. Snowden went through the same thing. The order came to seem less outlandish. Mistrust of technology grew, and no-one now laughed cynically when entering a network-free space.
*
When they disembark at Gare Montparnasse, Vernon feels engulfed by the crowds, it is a strange feeling of vertigo. He is particularly overwhelmed by the noise. As though sensing his disorientation, Mariana puts her arm through his. She is a tiny slip of a girl, but there is a comforting authority in her gesture reminiscent of an adult reassuring a child.
It is not just that he is out of the habit, the city itself has changed. Paris has become hard. Vernon is immediately aware of the pent-up aggression – people are furious, pressed up against each other, ready to come to blows. In the corridors of the métro, not a single person smiles, not a single body suggests I’ve got time to waste. No-one dawdles, as they do at the camp. This is a grown-up city – no-one speaks to strangers, or if they do, it is only to shout. He is bombarded by images, too many posters, too many junk messages. But it is only when they reach the platform that he identifies what it is that has been bothering him since their arrival. The smell. Paris is an olfactive cesspit – a mixture of rot of air rancid with body odours of perfumes of metallic machine smells of filth and chemicals. Vernon realises that he is holding his breath. For months, wherever they have gone, he has been breathing everything in, each new place has its own smell, making it individual and unique. Here, for the first time in a long time, he refuses to smell where he is.
*
At Kiko’s place, Mariana looks around with the air of defiance Vernon knows so well – the expression those unused to luxury adopt when confronted with it: she looks as though she has been plunged into boiling oil. It is Vernon’s turn to lay a hand on the small of her back in the hope of imparting some of his calm. Extremely rich people know what they are doing when they furnish an apartment, even if they do it instinctively: every object here screams at those unaccustomed to luxury: fuck off, you filthy prole. This is the distinction between boho décor and that of the grand bourgeois: the former says to all comers “make yourself at home”, while the latter seeks to exclude all those who do not understand its codes. But Vernon knows this apartment, it does not intimidate him.
Kiko, too, has changed a lot. Of all the people at the camp, he is perhaps the one who has undergone the most radical revolution. Vernon has become his expensive indulgence, his weekend hobby. Kiko has jacked in his career as a trader. Like a guy in a casino who decides to leave the table when he’s on a roll. Take the cash and run. In hindsight, he doesn’t regret his decision – as he puts it, you’d have to be crazy to be rich and keep working.
He is not the only one in his profession who has had an epiphany. He knows other guys who, one day, warming their arses in a jacuzzi under the palm trees of their villa in Mauritius, stared at the booty of the girl who had come with them and were suddenly transfixed by a lightning bolt of lucidity: their life is shit. The only good thing about it is the conviction that everyone on the planet envies them. Whereas, what Kiko discovered in the group that so astonished him was that no-one wanted to swap places with him. Anyone else might have changed the people he hung out with – might have sought out company that was more reassuring. Kiko stayed. He changed his strategy.
In the early months, he was gripped by a sort of libertarian fever. It was as though he was decompressing. In certain people, age unleashes a reactionary energy that sometimes shoots out and destroys everything in its path. With Kiko, it was the libertarian that he allowed to emerge. One that had spent too long curled up, censored, imprisoned and made a hell of a racket as it now spread its wings. Or perhaps not the libertarian: the Christian. But in the most primary sense of that word: the person within Kiko who loved Christ – repressed for all these years – suddenly took over. The whole thing lasted about six months. He went from being embarrassingly generous to a complete pain in the arse.
He never wanted to work again, swore that he loathed money, that he was going to come and live with them, he and Olga pored over leaflets for minivans, he could already see himself living in a motorhome, following them around, he no longer felt remotely materialistic. He had a new idea every day. He would sell off his Paris apartment and buy a little abandoned village in the Jura mountains, they would all settle there and form a commune. Just because the hippies fucked it up, didn’t mean other people shouldn’t try. Ideas always fail until, eventually, they succeed. Kiko knows a bunch of doctors and, in the hierarchy of his world, doctors are at the top – he would persuade one of them to come and live in the village. That way, they would always have someone who could tell the difference between a heart attack and a panic attack, between a tumour and a large pimple. They wouldn’t have to worry about anything. They would grow old in peace.
*
But, over time, his ardour cooled. He got fed up with camping, moved back to Paris, got his nose into a baggie of coke and hooked up with his old acquaintances. His Christlike passion abated. He had invested in a cannabis start-up in Los Angeles. He was not as visible around the camp. But he came back regularly. He spent whole evenings regaling them with plans for his theme park – he was waiting for France to legalise weed, which was bound to happen. He imagined it as a cross between Jurassic Park and the spa at Le Bristol, all organised around the theme of weed. His crazy fantasy became so detailed that it began to sound plausible. In his theme park, there would be jacuzzis, video projections, specially designed yoga lessons for the stoned, a little contemporary art, massage treatments, a lot of music, and muffins everywhere for when people got the munchies.
Kiko has gone back to his former life, but a defiant streak has opened up within him. He is no longer prepared to give his all. All his time, all his thoughts, all his desires, all his convictions. He is no longer willing to prove that he can always add another task to this schedule. His role in the system is no longer perfect. Compliance no longer excites him the way it did. His way of expressing himself is to go back to the camp, to people who are nothing like him. He has not gone back to square one – he has found an alternative equilibrium, an alternating identity.
*
He always takes up a little more space than others, he talks a lot. Silence is an important concept at the camp. Except for Kiko. But no-one complains. He is the one who solves every problem. He abuses his position only in the sense that he takes up a lot of sonic space. There is one thing about which he is sincere, one thing that does not change with the seasons: the feelings he experiences during the convergences are unlike anything he can feel on drugs. And he wants to go “there”. His latest hare-brained notion is that Vernon should take his role as guru more seriously. Kiko has ambition to spare.
*
He invites them to sit down around the kitchen table, opens the fridge and compulsively takes out all the food he can find, as though the two of them are starving. He opens a bottle of champagne and Vernon says no, with the antibiotics it would finish me off. Mariana takes the proffered glass and drains it in one gulp. She is incandescent. Seeing him at the camp, she hadn’t realised that Kiko was this rich. She had worked out that his life was not the same as theirs from his obsession with flashing his credit card every time there was a problem. But she was not expecting this, this opulence which is an insult to those unaccustomed to it. She squirms in her chair, shooting angry glances all around. Even the red Smeg fridge, with its good-natured curves, makes her livid.
*
Kiko can’t sit still – he puts on an Erykah Badu C.D., too loud, asks them if they want some drugs, he’s got a new dealer, hot shit, never keeps him waiting. He feels the
need to fill the silences – it’s impossible to tell what he’s so shit-scared of that he needs to make a racket all the time. Vernon is used to his feverishness.
“Hey, you know what, that tree in the Buttes-Chaumont, the one with the huge roots where you used to sit all the time? They’ve ripped it out. Did you know?”
“When?”
“Beginning of February.”
“How did it happen?”
“Accidentally backed into it.”
“A tree that size? They didn’t see it in the rear-view mirror?”
“They’ve been doing a lot of work in the park. That’s all I heard.”
*
The news bothers Vernon. The fact that things do not stay as they are remains the most difficult thing to accept. He thinks about the tree, tall as a building, about the hours he spent enthroned like a king against the trunk. He says:
“I’ll ask Charles. He knows the park-keepers . . . It’s been a long time since I’ve seen Charles. I’ll drop round his way and see him . . .”
Vernon Subutex Three Page 2