Here Are the Young Men

by Rob Doyle

  But what he’d got back then was never enough. Riveted to the screen, gorging on bloodshed, Kearney had always willed the body count to rise higher, to multiply, to soar. He had craved nothing less than the apocalypse, an atrocity that would end history itself. Kearney, in his way, had yearned for the Absolute, with all the earnestness of a desert-hard mystic.

  He had waited, knowing something big was coming. And sure enough, when he was fifteen, there came the day when his patience was rewarded: 11 September 2001. Like everyone else, Kearney would always remember where he was when the planes hit the towers and offcial reality became so suddenly, blindingly interesting.

  He remembered where he was: he was at home, playing Grand Theft Auto.

  ‘Joseph!’ came his mother’s cry from downstairs.

  Kearney’s initial assumption was that she wanted to berate him over something he’d done that she had taken exception to, like forgetting to flush the toilet after taking a shit. That was why she usually roared his name. After three more cries of ‘Joseph!’, Kearney slid down the ladder from his bedroom, cursing under his breath. He bounded down the stairs and into the living room – and found the camera eyes of the planet fixed in awe on the blackly billowing New York skyline.

  He dropped instantly to the floor, legs folding automatically beneath him like some meditating sadhu, and his eyes didn’t stray from the screen for many hours. When the second plane hit, he became very quiet, very still. A great peace came over him. All his restlessness melted away in the radiance of tranquillity that infused him, brighter by the second, brighter as each flailing stick-man fell from the sky-high roofs, as the Gemini spires combusted and crumpled, and clouds of cinema-smoke tumbled through the filmic canyons of Manhattan.

  Kearney couldn’t look away. He couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep; he didn’t think of sex or games or anything, for days. The news channels played the clips again and again, from every possible angle: the planes whacking into the buildings; the huge, liquid-flame explosions bursting from their sides. It was worthy of any movie, undisappointing even to senses jaded from a lifetime of sleek, carnage-dense blockbusters. Kearney felt dwarfed, humbled by this mighty event. This awesome twenty-first-century breed of atrocity offered Kearney his first glimpse of what others called the sacred, the numinous, the unsayable.

  Everyone else, he noticed, was as fascinated as he was. Day after day, week after week, the telly pulsed with decimation. It was planetary death-porn, the greatest show on earth.

  Then the global focus had shifted to Afghanistan where Kearney gorged on the carpet-bomb ejaculations, the rapacious ground offensives, and all the delicacies heaped on for mass consumption, for Kearney consumption. The way some people are fanatical about Man United or Liverpool, Kearney became fanatical about Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. He read everything he could find about what the papers called the ‘Islamic death cult’, Al-Qaeda. Soon his attic bedroom became transformed into a shrine to 9/11. Posters and photos of the exploding buildings, of New York and Washington staggering under attack, gradually filled every available inch of wall, creating a cocoon of holy violence to block out any seepage from the mundane world, from dull, squalid reality. Never a day passed that he didn’t look, with undimming awe, at footage of the World Trade Center attacks. They had even begun to feature in his dreams: erotic dreams of curvaceous boom-clouds, bulging red-black orbs like bums, like body-curves; dreams of belly-dance carnage; of screams of indistinguishable terror and ecstasy – an orgasm of hate.

  19 | Matthew

  My alarm clock was going off. I pulled the covers over my head and whimpered, wanting to stay there forever. I only got up when my ma’s calls from downstairs got too angry to ignore.

  Five minutes later I was staring into my bowl of cornflakes, watching them float on the surface, turning soggy. I heard the house phone ringing, then my ma stuck her head into the kitchen. ‘It’s Joseph on the phone for ye,’ she said. ‘Come on out and take it.’

  I cursed under my breath, stood up wearily, and went into the hallway.

  ‘Alright,’ I muttered into the phone.

  There was silence on the other end. I listened to the electric hiss, waiting. In my black humour it was easy to resist the pressure to speak.

  Eventually, in a quiet voice Kearney said, ‘Matthew, ye can’t pretend that wasn’t unbelievable.’

  ‘The girl fuckin died, Kearney. She fuckin died. That was real. That was her mother there, screamin cryin. And she’ll be cryin for a long time.’

  ‘I know all that, Matthew,’ Kearney said softly, placating me. ‘I know all that. I do. I’m not sayin it was a good thing that she died – no way. It’s terrible, you’re right. But the fact is, we didn’t do it. It wasn’t our fault. We just happened to be there to see it. It would’ve happened anyway. How we feel about it doesn’t affect anything. People die all the time. Right now it’s happenin, all over the world. I’m just sayin, actually seein it with me own eyes – it was … I’ve never felt like that before. Do ye know what I mean?’

  ‘No.’

  Kearney sighed. ‘I’m just sayin, it was powerful. That’s all I meant to say. Yeah, it’s sad that she died or whatever. Yeah. But Jesus, it was just … I haven’t slept a wink. I’ve never felt so awake. Me mind feels really fuckin clear. Seriously. I’ve just been sittin here in me room, in the quiet, for hours and hours. It’s hard to explain.’

  ‘Kearney, what are ye on about?’

  Silence again. Finally, he exhaled. ‘Nothin, Matthew. Never mind. And never mind that ye smiled at me in the cop shop yesterday. I just thought that you felt it as well. But okay, I made a mistake. Ye did smile at me, though. I remember it dead clear. All me memories are clear. Soon I’ll be on a plane. I’ll be thinkin of ye on the way over. I’ll email ye.’

  We hung up. I walked slowly up the stairs, back to my room. ‘Is everything all right?’ my ma called after me. I ignored her and locked the door from the inside. I lay down on my bed and stared at the ceiling.

  Later that day Kearney left for America. Rez started his new job as a nightwatchman. Jen was off in Madrid with her da, and Cocker seemed to be drifting towards a new crowd. I sat in my room that night and listened to music, afraid to smoke a joint for fear of the thoughts and visions it might trigger. I felt utterly alone.

  That was how our summer began.

  PART TWO

  DIVERSION ENDS

  Disciple: Oh enlightened Master, most illustrious and illuminous Sage, oh Teller of wise and profound Truths, oh superior Mind that splits Diamonds and splits Hairs, oh Prophet, oh Seer, oh Saviour, is it really true, as the Thought has come to me in my Hours of Anguish, Despair and Gloom, when my Soul has craved, in its Urgency, some Glimmer of Solace – is it true, that, behind the apparent Veil of Multiplicity, Strife and Separation, we are all, ultimately, One?

  Master: Probably not.

  —Killian Turner, Visions of Cosmic Squalor/ The Upheaval

  20 | Rez

  Why I am Not Real and Happiness is Impossible in the Modern Age. To be read after my demise – by Richard Tooley

  Section 23: Why Thinking is a Disease

  Part A

  I remember one day I was kissing Julie. Usually kissing is considered to be normal and uncomplicated but this is not always the case. If you think too much about what you are doing, it will be unspeakably ruined for you. You will be genuinely paralysed. Julie and I had just eaten dinner at Rick’s fast-food place after we had been to the cinema to see Irreversible. We were waiting at Julie’s bus stop and we started kissing. Suddenly I couldn’t stop thinking that a few minutes ago Julie had put into this mouth that I was kissing the body of a dead animal. (She had eaten a cheeseburger and chips.) It was one body inside another. Not only that, but the animal she had put into her mouth had been processed, cut up, cooked and mangled. Maybe it wasn’t even just one animal, but the merged flesh of several animals, compressed in a factory into a single burger.

  I tried to just kiss her and feel pleasure,
but I couldn’t put it out of my head. Now I could smell it, the dead animal which she had put into her mouth. And it struck me that ‘mouth’ was just a name for a hole in her face.

  She kept kissing me ‘passionately’, but I was going weak with disgust. I tried harder to just enjoy the kiss. I closed my eyes. But it was ruined. It was too bizarre and disturbing for me to pretend it wasn’t happening: inside her, at the end of the dark tunnel in the hole in her face, the dead animal whose chewed-up flesh I could smell was being squirted with acids, the purpose of which was to decompose the dead animal and merge its flesh with Julie’s human-flesh. Like some horror fflm. I pulled away from her, unable to continue kissing the hole in her face. It was like there was a dungeon of freaks beneath the surface of Julie.

  That happened a month before we broke up. For the last month that we were together, whenever we kissed I had the same thoughts. Sometimes it wasn’t quite as bad but it was always there. Kissing was ruined for me forever. I had thought about it too much.

  Part B

  I envy animals. They are part of nature. I am part of nature too but it’s ruined for me, because my mind is a virus and it attacks me every minute of the day. I’m out of sync with everything, all screwed up.

  The reason I envy animals is that they are programmed by nature – just like we are – to live in the normal way (eating, sleeping, having sex, tearing each other to pieces). Unlike us, however, the animals cannot deviate from nature’s programme – they haven’t got a sabotage-mind that sticks itself into the gears and sends everything haywire, all sparks and hissing smoke.

  Animals do not think, which means they do not doubt. They are pure instinct. They never trip up over themselves: they just do it. All I am is doubt. I am tangled up so badly that I know I’ll never be normal again. This is the root of my abject misery.

  ‘Just do it’ – like the Nike ads. That is how animals are. And not only animals: also the majority of humans, such as jocks, meatheads, footballers etc. They never trip up because they never think, they just do it. They are animals. That’s why they like wearing Nike and all that crap. In spite of my abject misery I am proud that I am not one of them. It is better to think than not think, even though thinking is a disease and it kills everything, so that soon you can’t relax and just fucking enjoy life like a normal human being.

  21 | Matthew

  For a week I didn’t see any of the others. I was working in the garage most days. That was okay because I didn’t want to be at home on my own. It was a relief to be distracted from thoughts about Becky, the little girl who had been run over. But at times nothing could distract me: I would see her crumbled, bloodied face superimposed in sudden flashes over the face of my boss, or a customer, or another employee.

  I didn’t hear from Jen all week. I emailed her once, but after that I resisted the urge to try again. In the email, I told her what me and Kearney had seen out in Killiney. I didn’t tell her how I’d smirked at Kearney in the police station, or how much I’d hated myself ever since. I didn’t say that to anyone.

  Becky had been on the news and in the papers. I’d kept all the stories about her, and all the pictures. I’d put them in a little wooden box that my granda used to own, and hid it in my bedroom. I told no one.

  Jen was due back on the Tuesday. On the Monday two things arrived: an email from her and a postcard from Kearney.

  In the email Jen said she was sorry she hadn’t replied earlier, but she had deliberately stayed away from phones and computers. I skimmed over lines about art galleries and beaches and her father, until I found the parts about me: she looked forward to seeing me again, and could we meet up in town on Wednesday?

  So she hadn’t changed her mind about me. There it was, the proof on-screen.

  ‘Matthew, there’s a postcard here for ye from Joseph.’

  I didn’t know if my ma’s voice from downstairs actually sounded ominous, or if I only heard it that way because of what she’d said.

  I went down and picked up the postcard. The photo was of the World Trade Center, before the plane attacks. Thick letters coloured in like the American flag said:

  USA STILL STANDING TALL – HEROES LIVE FOREVER

  In black marker Kearney had drawn the planes swooping in, a big explosion ripping out of one of the buildings, and the little stickmen falling from the sky. I turned the card over and read:

  greetings from Great Satan

  ive come strate down to New York with Dwayne for a cupple of days. its AWESOME! U can stil see the ruins and rubbel at Ground Zero, its the best thing ever. we set off an antrax scare on the Subway this morning 4 a laff, It was gas!! hoho no pun intendid nigga Seeriusly though America is deadly – in spite of all the infidels. theirs a lot of FUN STUFF here – u know what I mean.

  keep it real black man. Allah Akhbar!!!

  The K

  For fuck’s sake, I thought. Now I’d probably be put on some CIA blacklist. They’d take me in the night and waterboard me or something. Not to mention what my ma would think. I took the postcard back up to my room. I tore it in half and shoved it in the bin. I lay down but I could still see the glossy cardboard jutting out of the bin. I took the two pieces back out and ripped them up into many smaller parts, then shoved them all into the bin and put a sheet of paper on top so you couldn’t see them. I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes. I could see Kearney’s grinning face on the red spots and darkness of my eyelids.

  A few minutes later I got up, had my breakfast and walked down the road for my morning shift at the garage.

  I met Jen that Wednesday. We went to see The Matrix Reloaded, which was sort of a let-down but actually alright once you took it for what it was. From then on, me and Jen started seeing a lot of each other. We had always seen a lot of each other, but now it was different: we saw each other alone.

  Nearly every day I would meet her in town and we would get stoned together and go to films, or hang around Stephen’s Green or Temple Bar or Merrion Square. She wasn’t working for the summer but she always had more money than me. One afternoon we sat up on a hill in the Phoenix Park under puffy clouds and watched the summer waste away. I had some hash with me and kept thinking about making a spliff, and in the back of my mind was the idea of getting some drink, but I kept putting both intentions off because we were having a good laugh as it was, and in the end we did neither. We just joked around and had mess fights and kissed on the grass. Jen put on songs by The Cure and Radiohead and we listened with one earphone each and it felt like the love scene in some film.

  Jen rolled over to look up at the blue sky. She was smiling. ‘It’s funny how it all works out, isn’t it?’ she said.

  ‘How do ye mean?’

  ‘Nothin. Just, ye know, you and me gettin together like this. You know, like you have the idea or the image of it in your head, and then it really happens, and it feels funny, that’s all.’

  I had a vision of ten million other young lovers across the globe, having the same conversation, each of them feeling beautiful and unique but really just acting out some script, given to them by nature or maybe television. Rez’s theories played out in my head, threatening to spoil the afternoon. But I looked at Jen’s face, the way her eyelashes moved as she watched a plane trailing high up in the sky, and all those doubts seemed frothy, needless. Rez was wound up way too tight – maybe he just needed to relax and look carefully at things, or feel the sun on his face, or lie down beside a girl on the grass in the Phoenix Park.

  Later we walked into the city centre. It was still sunny so we wandered into Stephen’s Green and sat on the grass. People had their shirts off and Frisbees flew through the air, everyone laughing and smiling. While we were sitting there my phone beeped in my pocket. It was a message from Rez: ‘alright matthew listen r u around? i really need 2 meet up with u, i can come over r wherever u r.’

  I was puzzled by the text. He didn’t say what he wanted: whether it was to get stoned, or drink, or go to a gig, or what. It was the first I’d hea
rd from him since he’d started his security night job. Jen said, ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Just Rez. He sounds a bit … I don’t know. He says he wants to meet up.’

  Jen watched me and said nothing. I texted Rez back: ‘Hey Rez cant meet up now. Might be around this evening. U around later? Want 2 get stoned r whats up?’

  When I’d pressed ‘Send’ Jen said, ‘There’s something going on with him, Matthew.’

  ‘Yeah, there probably is. He’ll snap out of it. He’ll be grand.’

  ‘Well, are you sure?’ she said.

  ‘What do ye mean?’

  ‘Just that I wonder about him. I emailed him back when I was in Spain, and the reply he sent me, it seemed … I don’t know, it was frantic, it was hard to make sense of. It was kind of disturbing, actually. I mean, you hear so much talk these days about depression. And suicide. Young men especially. I read this article in The Irish Times and, like, more men between eighteen and twenty-five kill themselves in Ireland than in any other country in the world – apart from Norway.’

  ‘That makes sense. Ireland would do that to ye,’ I said. But my instinctive cynicism was boring even to me. I thought for a moment then said, ‘Maybe they see through things, though. Maybe they do it because they’re aware of the reality of what we’re living in.’

  I enjoyed hearing myself pontificating so I continued: ‘I mean, like, maybe the ones from this generation who kill themselves are the ones who would have been, like, priests in earlier times, or, like, shamans in other parts of the world. Ye know? Like maybe they’re kind of, like, diviners for, like, the emptiness all around us, and they kill themselves because while everyone else just rushes out to buy things and smile at the computer and all that, these suicide fellas know that it’s all bollocks, there’s nothing out there. Ye know what I mean? Like, have ye ever seen that film, Logan’s Run? Me and Rez watched it a while ago. It’s mental. There’s this underground society hundreds of years in the future, and every year there’s this ceremony where some of them try to escape to the earth’s surface to find this place called “Sanctuary” – but they always get killed before they reach it by this big laser thing. But then this fella Logan actually manages to escape to the surface but all he finds is, like, desolation. Just total wilderness. So he goes back down and he starts screamin, “There is no Sanctuary! There is no Sanctuary!” But the rest of them have such a need to believe in it that they just hate him. And, like, I think they kill him or something. I can’t remember, we were fairly stoned by that stage. Ye know what I mean, though? Maybe there is no Sanctuary.’