by Will Self
‘When I see a guy lighting a cigarette as I turn the corner, I don’t think he’s gonna be taking the bus!’
I could see her point, but I’d been waiting for the service for a while and even in the northern Californian sunshine everything was weighing heavily on me: I needed a smoke. The timing was wrong for a walk into town – besides without a Reichman to goad I didn’t really have the oomph. I thought of the days ahead of me, the paltry rituals of a man alone in a strange city: reading suppers – possibly a concert, an excursion to see the Golden Gate Bridge.
The Metroline bus blatted along I-29, through the cleft of the buttocky hills, one of which bore the tattoo CITY OF INDUSTRY. I’d never liked San Francisco in all the time I’d been visiting; for me the city always remained tangled in the fallen freeways of the 1989 earthquake, and these, in turn, contained within their distressed steel and clots of concrete the ghost of the 1906 earthquake with its subprime fatalities – 300, 3,000 or 30,000? The tenderloin was a cut of putrefying meat, crawling with tramp-flies and shoved in the face of tourists, and in the Prescott Hotel on Post Street where I had slumped, stifled by swags, pelmets, tassels, throw cushions – all the amniotic padding of an embryonic luxury – I noticed for the first terrifying time that reflected in the mirror the label of the mineral water bottle read NAIVE.
I couldn’t believe that San Francisco had been hiding these big things from me – but there they were, floodlit: a concert hall, a city hall, some kind of library or museum, all stacked along avenues wide enough to gladden Albert Speer. No doubt in Sacramento there would be a state capitol that was a copy – near enough – of the one in Washington; it was the same throughout the States: prêt-à-porter legislatures and courts, bought from the Great Framers up in heaven.
I had booked the best seat in the house, the plush throne of B1 in the balcony. High above the stage dangled enormous transparent sound-bafflers, and as the soloist mounted the keys with his fingers, climbing up and up to the tremolo peak of the allegro, I wondered how great a compass of emotion might be contained between one note and another, dreadfully pinched by the minims. The Ohrwurm bored on into my cheesy brain, proof – if any were needed – that I was already dead.
I zombied back towards the Prescott under a full and ruddy moon, appraising the bitten-off cripples along Market Street: what diabolic ghoul could have taken that leg or arm? Surely not these slim Latino girls bussed in from the Bay Area? They sported fetching light-up devil horns and glittery red micro-mini dresses, and cavorted on the sidewalks goosing one another with outsized plastic forks.
Ploughing my way through burger ’n’ fries in the laminated belly of the Pinecrest Diner, I envied them all the easily converted currencies of youth: sex and bullshit. Envied even the kid who sat opposite me, the hood of his H. H. Geiger alien rubber suit pushed up off his brow to expose the pained maquillage of pimples and white-blond bum-fluff.
At the Prescott yet again, I naively slept, then cynically dream-dollied myself in through the doors of the Moscone Convention Center. The Little People of America were gathered – no less grotesque than any who sport celluloid name badges, yet certainly no greater. My mobile phone rang and I answered it as quickly as I could, although not fast enough: a clutch of dwarfs swarmed about me. ‘Have some goddamn respect,’ said a termagant with a perm as tight and prickly as a burr. ‘Can’t you see there’re royalty present?’
What gives? Sherman’s voice in my ear.
‘Um, n-nothing.’
Are you attending some kind of levee?
‘I thought the lady told you to cut that out!’
The phone was snatched from my hand, and before I could remonstrate there was a Nagasaki of flashes, a low moan, and the dwarfs surged towards the main doors – then were checked by a force field of awe.
Tiptoeing into the convention centre came a brother and sister; they had the same white-golden hair, worn shoulder length, and must have been in their late teens. They held hands, and seemed not so much shy as bemused by the adoration they had provoked. I noticed first the tiny patchwork denim bag the girl wore slung over one shoulder, then their savagely undershot jaws and keel noses, then their stature: for they stood at most twenty, maybe twenty-one inches high.
‘Aren’t they beautiful?’ said the burr-headed woman, clutching my leg so fiercely that her nails dug into the tendon behind my knee.
‘Beautiful,’ sighed the little man who’d snatched my phone. He pulled a silk handkerchief from his blazer pocket and mopped his eyes.
I understood that these were the dwarfs’ dwarfs, embodying for them all the aesthetic qualities the actual sized ascribe to the miniature. Wishing Lévi-Strauss was with me, I found myself being pushed forward and instinctively I offered my hand to the primordial dwarf girl. She rearranged the strap of her handbag and I was acutely aware of the quail’s ribcage beneath her doll’s cardigan – then the grossness of my fingers, with their elephant’s knees knuckles and fertile crescents of dirt beneath the nails. As our hands Sistined together she turned to quicksilver and burst into a spray of droplets, one of which hung from the chin of the burr-headed woman. I stared at this bubble world and saw in its mirrored convexity the dwarf conventioneers, the concrete and glass of the foyer, and my own moon face, cratered by its passage through deep space.
I awoke with the Barbour’s waxen arms wrapped around me, my face buried in its musty tartan lining, its double zips nipping my neck – and couldn’t stop weeping until a young woman in the line for the breakfast buffet offered me a Kleenex and said, ‘I’d appreciate it if you didn’t.’ Determined to walk away these black-and-blues, I went back to my room, packed the Barbour’s pockets, then headed out into the sunshine.
The temperature was in the mid-seventies and the jacket wasn’t a mistake – it was burden that had to be endured as I toiled up Nob and downhill, passing show couples with show dogs posing outside pacific patisseries. I cursed myself for a fool: far from being unencumbered here was I, beneath an ice cream headache, sweating with the exertion of carrying a shooting jacket.
At Marina Boulevard, where the Palace of Fine Arts hid its Moorish fakery behind an arras of pines, I nearly gave up – my progression was purely arithmetic. Only the previous week, when I was either 53,710 or 537 miles away, district officials had scuttled the idea of plastering the Golden Gate with corporate advertising. ‘If you ain’t into this you real sucka,’ J. J. Bigga told the 500- – 50-? 5,000-? – strong audience at the Cow Palace ... House repos were up 622 per cent to 10,427 in the last quarter ... or was it 104,270, or even 1,042? At Crissy Field I stopped a bucktoothed Scotswoman on a bike and asked her for directions to the inconceivably big thing that arced through the haze to the green hills above Sausalito, and she looked at me the way the sane look at the mad.
I plodded on – the Barbour was a waxwork effigy of William Cavendish, 4th Duke of Devonshire, which melted across my shoulders. I set the sludge down on the grass and moulded it into a semblance of Alcatraz, which stood off in the bay. Then I took it up once more and went on, while my LongPen shaded in an afternoon two months previously: an exhibition of Ron Mueck works at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh, where, wandering through the rooms, I was arrested by the follicle-perfect dummy of a depressed woman lying in bed, her white face five times life size. Around the peak of her nose a security guard came hurrying – he told me to stop taking photographs. Perhaps if he’d been a Canadian he would’ve added, civilly, ‘It’ll do you no good to confront your past writ large. Besides, that is not your mother, wrung out by postnatal depression and eking out the years between parturition and cancer with gardening and library books.’
At the time I’d realized that what Mueck was doing reversed everything I thought I understood about the distortion of scale: far from his giantess being a purely intelligible object, she was all feeling – her desperation magnified until it filled the gallery with the ultrasonic howl of a harpooned leviathan—
Mounting the path that switc
h-backed up through Fort Point National Heritage Site, I was seized not by the Ektachrome of the evergreens and the waters of the bay; nor by the towers of the bridge that rose up before me, which appeared sandy-damp, as if freshly moulded by giant hands, then raised by massed Lilliputians drawing on their steel cables. What grabbed me were the walkers, in their T-shirts and sneakers, their jeans and sweat pants, who converging on the bridge’s approach reached a pedestrian density I’d seldom seen in the States before, except in an airport concourse, a mall or Midtown Manhattan.
I, better than most, understood the compelling urge to walk across a big thing, an urge separated by a mere carpaccio of neurones from the compelling urge to throw yourself off it. It goes without saying that thoughts of suicide were never absent, but burbled repetitively in my ear – ‘Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself’ – just as did the stream of anxiety: ‘You forgot to turn off the gas/shut-and-lock the door’ and, more recently, the times-10/divide-by-10 tic. It took only the signs to alert me: EMERGENCY PHONE AND CRISIS COUNSELING and then, a few score paces on, CRISIS COUNSELING. THERE IS HOPE. MAKE THE CALL. THE CONSEQUENCES OF JUMPING FROM THIS BRIDGE ARE FATAL AND TRAGIC.
If I had had any reservations at all the ‘and tragic’ banished them entirely. The composers of the signs understood entirely not merely the anger-born-of-fear of the felo de se – in my view an emotion much exaggerated – but, more importantly, our narcissism. Yes! A tragedy! That’s what it would be, a fucking tragedy, I had been cut down in my prime, after struggling manfully for years against this debilitating condition, one that I had – still more tragically – vouchsafed to hardly a soul. My notebooks, left open on the table in my room at the Prescott, would explain all that, explain also the awful shame that pursued me, the tiny Eumenides sprung from the Titan’s blood.
By the time I had reached the middle of the bridge, and was standing there listening to the wind shear lament through the cables, and watching the drop yawn below me, I had succumbed to its sublime contours. If the monumental was an architecture of social control, then what could be said of monumental bridges, save that they were very obviously for jumping off – that they in fact ordered you to jump off them? ‘Jump!’ they bellowed, sergeant-majors on the vast parade ground of civilization, and so the Mayans, the Easter Islanders, the Norse Greenlanders, the Romans and now the entire West did their bidding.
What possible purchase could Section 2193 of the State of California’s Penal Code have on the profound gravity of this situation; for this was about physics, about small things and big things – people hardly entered into it. And in those last few moments, when a woman in a hijab heading one way and a Japanese–American woman eating a beanshoot salad from a Tupperware container as she strolled the other, simultaneously gasped as I vaulted nimbly on to the thick, rivet-warty girder of the balustrade, my loved ones were of scarcely any concern, being irredeemably actual size.
I had hoped ... for what? A game of Scrabble on the way down, or to get married, or at the very least to link hands with a serendipitous octet of fellow self-murderers – the drop had certainly looked big enough for such skydiving antics. After all, the waves in the bay were wrinkles, while from up there downtown San Francisco had no more civilization than a playroom Lego ruin.
As I fell towards the deceptively yielding pavé of the bay (and, believe me, like all suicides, I knew just how hard the impact would be, foresaw entirely the Faroese slaughter of my expiration: a small pink whale gashed open and wallowing in a cloudy red stain), I also anticipated feeling this consolation: that I had cast the beastly Barbour aside, and so was meeting my fate without any baggage at all, no plasticized Beethoven, no paperback Great Expectations, no rolled-up plastic trousers, no waxed cotton class suit; I was going to my execution as every baby-boomer should: in a T-shirt and Levis, bravely refusing Ray-Bans.
So it was with a sense of fretful – almost pettish – annoyance that I realized Death was bopping me on the head without any more ado, that my extinction, far from being profoundly protracted, was to have all the grand tragedy of a prankster creeping up behind me and suddenly yanking down the woolly hat I’d forgotten I was sporting, so that I was entombed in a tickly darkness – for all eternity.
I came to in a large poorly lit room notable for a tacky earthenware statue of the Buddha on a low table. This Gautama had an expression not so much spiritual as obscurely self-satisfied, while the joss sticks set before him curdled brown smoke into the gloom. Around me shuffled the shades, all dressed in floppy shirts and baggy pants of faun, umber and other earthy tones, which looked to be woven from flax, or hemp, or some other retro-fibre.
My groan hearkened one of these souls to me; he or she was suitably inter-sex, with sepia hair scraped into a mule tail and circular wire-rimmed spectacles. ‘Would you like an urbal tea?’ he or she asked gently. ‘We’ve got most varieties, cardamom, caraway seed, ginger?’
‘Whatever,’ I pleaded, and he or she footed soundlessly away.
A lissom man, with a sandy trowel-shaped beard and the tense look of someone who practises yoga furiously, mounted the low platform behind the Buddha and concertinaed into a full lotus as easily as I might’ve scratched my arse (when alive). Despite my recent death I could sense the aggression radiating from this man, and as he picked up a small brass mallet and tapped a bell his mild features writhed with barely repressed fury.
I was remarkably unfazed.
‘For our dharma discussion today,’ announced the sandy Sangha, ‘I will be taking suggestions; anything you wish guidance on I am happy to consider—’
‘It’s vervain,’ said the shade, pressing a tepid mug into my hand. ‘Enjoy.’
Remarkably unfazed because this all seemed altogether just: that the Tibetan Buddhist cosmology should turn out to be correct and that my own bardo should – at least initially – take the form of a room full of the angriest people in the world: occidental Buddhists. Of course, what would begin to happen when my ego started to disintegrate I shuddered to think; presumably in place of the multi-headed demons that tormented Tibetans I’d be visited with my own bogeybeings; perhaps the fibrous Buddhists would transmogrify into giant Bionicles, those weirdly skeletal robotic toys loved by my youngest child that had techno-scimitars and laser guns for arms, and could be posed on their long legs so as to delve surgically in their victims’ innards.
‘Drug addiction and the dharma,’ offered one seeker. ‘Dharma and movement practice,’ said a second. ‘The three pearls,’ a third in lotus position said, his thick glasses like an insect’s compound eyes.
‘OK, OK,’ the Sangha snorted. ‘That’s enough – we could go on all night taking suggestions and have no time for instruction.’
The seekers tittered obsequiously, while behind the Sangha’s enlightened head I could see the dark ballooning of a massive and unconstrained ego.
‘I’m, I’m ...’ I grasped the wrist of the exiguous urbalist who had coiled into the canvas chair beside me, ‘not dead, am I?’
‘Heavens no,’ s/he relied in a beige undertone. ‘You poor man, you fell backwards from the parapet of the Golden Gate Bridge on to the walkway there and were brought by paramedics into the rescue centre. We get a lot of sufferers such as yourself; if there isn’t absolute proof that a person is trying suicide’ – ‘trying’, I liked that, it suggested that suicide was only one of the options available from the smorgasbord of inexistence – ‘then the Bridge cops are happy to, like, outsource—’
‘It seems,’ the sandy Sangha’s gentle voice was viciously clenched, ‘that someone with us this evening has a more nuanced interpretation of the three pearls; so, would you like to share?’
The urbalist bowed his/her head in abject shame. I, however, was on the point of rising up and chinning the fraud, but was forestalled by a commotion from the doors – that and the sharp pain in the back of my head, which was – I now realized – swathed in a crêpe bandage.
One of the slipshod sannyasas came shuffling down
the aisle and bent to whisper, ‘Your friend is here now to collect you.’
Friend? What friend? As I limped to the door, passing by the rows of outlines of devotion, I racked my bruised brain: I had no friend in San Francisco, nor – without being self-piteous – did I have that many friends anywhere. Besides, how might such a friend have found me?
The answer to the second question came in the form of the Barbour, thrust into my unwilling arms so that it hung, slick and black as a roosting flying fox. The answer to the first was Sherman Oaks, who stood out on the Sausalito sidewalk, pulling intemperately on a stogie.
In that instant of recognition, my eyes drinking in the scant three feet of him, I realized a thing at once terrifying and beautiful: it wasn’t that the Buddhists had been rendered indistinct by their quest for the white void, or that the community hall within which they were assembled was any more vapid than such places usually are – it was me. Had I suffered some pinpoint-accurate injury to my visual cortex, or was this only a form of hysteria? Whichever the case, the result was the same: casting wildly about the main street of the chichi resort town, I could make out the outlines of all intermediately sized things – such as cars, people and the no-good pagoda of Spinnakers seafood restaurant – but not their infill; whereas the very large things that blocked in the horizon – the hills, the bridge, Alcatraz – retained their detailing even in the twilight.
Then there was Sherman, who, with his potbelly and droopy ears, was truly the presiding spirit of the very little, and who stood proud of the indistinctiveness of his setting, just as the very little things in the window of the Swarovski’s across the road – crystal strawberries dimpled with brilliants, vitrified bouquets half an inch high – leapt to my retina and swarmed there as veridical as after-images.