Absolute Zero Cool

by Declan Burke

  My line for today: Most people are not looking for freedom at all, but for a cause to enslave themselves to. (Max Stirner, aka Johann Kaspar Schmidt)

  I am no Luddite. Technology is not evil per se. A sword, a nuclear weapon, the internet – these are inert tools that may or may not be deployed by those with intentions that may or may not be retrospectively described as evil. A ploughshare beaten from a sword will be regarded as a weapon of mass destruction by the woodland creatures whose habitat was destroyed to prepare land for farming.

  I prefer to surf the web aimlessly. I constantly avail of Google’s ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ option. There are always diamonds to be mined from the dross. Dross is defined by its propensity to yield precious material.

  Tonight I stumble into a chat-room populated by young girls. These young girls are discussing the latest Katy Perry promo, which their parents will not allow them view on TV but which they have downloaded from the web on their mobile phones. I log on, join in. I tell them my name is Jennifer, that I am eleven years old, live in Dublin, and that I have not yet seen the promo under discussion. I expect to be ridiculed. Children are animals, fiercely self-defining in their shared imperatives as they struggle to survive and thrive. But I am pleasantly surprised. Compassion is alive and well and available at a young girls’ chat-room near you.

  The conversation topic evolves. One girl, Tara, complains that her mother found her underwear in her bag when she was picked up from a supervised school disco. Mass commiseration ensues. Advice is offered. I confess that my mother does not allow me to attend such events. Commiseration threatens to melt down the server.

  It grows late. One by one the girls retire to bed. We reprise the ending of every episode of The Waltons. Soon I am conversing alone with Tara, lol-ing IN CAPS when we recall our unsophisticated adoration of Justin Bieber. We arrange to meet again soon, metaphorically speaking, in the chat-room. We say our goodbyes.

  Tonight I reflect that Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet were thirteen and twelve, respectively. Tonight I reflect on how Shakespeare would have had no concept of the media through which his dramas would be performed in the future. Tonight the internet; tomorrow, perhaps, the tale will be beamed directly into my brain, and my subconscious will select the most suitable variations of my own personality to populate the cast.

  My line for tonight is, This love I feel, that feel no love in this/ Dost thou laugh? (William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet)

  •

  ‘I hope you’re wiping your surfing record,’ I say. ‘Deleting your cookies.’

  He glances up from his notebook, wary, trying to judge if I’m taking the piss. ‘I’m making it all up, man,’ he says.

  ‘Of course you are.’

  ‘Karlsson was a pervert,’ he says, ‘all that hinky shit he had going on with Cassie. But that’s not me.’

  ‘Glad to hear it.’

  ‘You and Cassie both.’

  •

  The old man disappears. He is traceless. His bed has been filled.

  I wonder if beds have memories, if they retain the distinctive curvature of a particular spine. I wonder if beds mourn the passing of peaceful sleepers.

  I ask around the ward. No one seems to know where the old man has gone. Most are unaware a new patient has arrived. This may or may not be a deliberate ploy formulated by their collective unconscious. The eye is the most selective of the body’s organs. Memory is a Swiss cheese.

  There are options. The old man might have been moved to a different ward. He may have been released. He may have died. He may even be in purgatory, aka the hospice.

  I wheel my cart to the nurses’ station. The nurse behind the counter is mid-twenties and meticulously blonde.

  The front-line nursing service in Ireland is second to none. This particular nurse is a notable exception to this rule. Perhaps she is conducting a one-woman wildcat strike against Ireland’s penchant for rewarding essential excellence with penury.

  ‘What happened to the old mechanic?’ I say.

  She stares. ‘Mechanic?’

  ‘The amputee. Long John Silver. The gangrene guy.’

  ‘Oh, him.’ She flicks through a sheaf of forms attached to an aluminium clipboard. ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘Call me sentimental.’

  ‘But you’re not entitled to that information.’

  ‘I know I’m not entitled,’ I say. ‘But be a princess. Where’s the harm in a little extra-curricular compassion?’

  ‘It could get me in trouble,’ she says, ‘is where the harm is.’

  This is not true. We both know this. But she’s looking for quid pro quo, so I play along.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I say, ‘I won’t tell anyone. How about a chocolate-chip muffin for your coffee break?’

  I place said muffin on the counter. We have now entered the realms of a possible conflict of interest. I am attempting to bribe a public health representative with a chocolate-chip muffin, albeit in the pursuit of information I am entitled to know.

  ‘So what happened the old man?’ I say.

  ‘He signed himself out this morning.’

  ‘How was he when he left?’

  ‘I don’t know, I wasn’t on this morning.’

  ‘Don’t you care? I mean, you looked after that guy for three weeks. Didn’t it occur to you to ask how he was when he left?’

  ‘In case you haven’t noticed,’ she says, ‘we’re pretty busy around here.’

  She says this standing behind a counter in a quiet corridor with one hand on her hip and the other hand reaching for a chocolate-chip muffin.

  Self-awareness is not a natural instinct. It is a goal to be aimed for through constant re-evaluation. Perhaps she is too busy thinking she is busy to devote the required time.

  Plato declared that the unexamined life is not worth living.

  Plato lived to the age of eighty at a time when the average life expectancy was thirty.

  Is it safe to assume that Plato never had to wipe excrement out of the crack of an old man’s arse?

  I push the muffin across the counter. ‘Watch out for the chocolate chips,’ I say. ‘A woman down in pre-natal chipped a tooth last week.’

  Tonight Cassie wants to go to the movies. The new George Clooney has finally arrived. Cassie likes George. She reckons she would happily marry anyone so long as she could amend her vows to, ‘’Til George do us part.’

  Later, Cassie will close her eyes while she screws me, the better to pretend that I am George Clooney. This will be her thrill. My thrill will be screwing a woman who is screwing another man. All’s fair in love and warped intimacies, etc.

  We buy our tickets. We buy popcorn. We find seats, hold hands. This is the unspoken deal we cut with all the other couples pretending to be normal couples.

  George is hamming up his cheeky Aryan schtick. George has starred in some very good movies: O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Good Night, and Good Luck, Michael Clayton. I even like Ocean’s Eleven.

  Cassie’s favourite is Out of Sight. It allows her to indulge every woman’s fantasy combo of damp gusset and irresponsible empowerment.

  Up on the screen, Hitman George reveals his tender side to an Italian prostitute. This is Cassie’s time. Right now I am a distraction. I slip away to the bathroom.

  The corridor is quiet. I pick another movie at random. I walk down the centre aisle and hunker down beneath the screen. There is no immediate reaction. There is no reason why there should be any reaction at all. I am not interfering with the audience’s field of vision. I make no sound. No one is discommoded by my presence. I simply hunker down and stare out at the sea of silvered, flickering faces staring up at the screen. But I am noticed.

  Even above the din of the movie’s soundtrack I hear the squeaking of buttocks shifting on springy seats. Despite the clatter of attacking helicopters I can sense a wave of discontent washing down towards me. Mortars boom and grenades explode but I can still hear the audience shout vulgarities, expletives.
Someone queries my sexual orientation.

  A carton of popcorn arcs out of the silvery glare. I duck away. A cardboard beaker follows. Sticky liquid rains down. Someone cheers. It is a war cry, an ululation. Missiles rain down. We are remaking Zulu, with chocolate raisins for spears. Lemon Bon-Bons are so much shrapnel. The back rows are standing up, the better to take aim. The soundtrack of helicopters, tanks and ground-to-air missiles has been drowned out.

  I am oddly moved by their passion. I am tempted to conduct an impromptu vox-pop enquiring as to how many of these Bon-Bon warriors voted in the last election.

  But my knees are aching. I rise from my hunkers and stroll up the centre aisle. People sit down as I pass. They grumble, sneer and cast aspersions on my parentage, although no one confronts me directly.

  The uproar has attracted attention. Outside, an usher jogs up the corridor towards me. His maroon velvet waistcoat is so ill-fitting it bounces on his shoulders. I jerk a thumb over my shoulder. ‘You’d want to get in there, man. Some asshole is blocking the screen.’

  ‘Cheers,’ he says.

  I slip back into the George Clooney movie, find my seat and sit down. Cassie does not look across as she whispers, ‘Everything okay?’

  She is still immersed in George. The words are rote. Nonetheless, their distracted familiarity conveys the vague, tremulous yearning that has shaped history since the dawn of mankind as the engine of every trade, war, religion, voyage and sexual encounter: the desire to believe that everything is okay, and that everything will be okay.

  My line for tonight is: Love is this nagging preoccupation, this feeling that the treasure of life has condensed itself into the little space where she is. (William Golding, Envoy Extraordinary)

  Tonight, on the night of our eight-month anniversary, I am disappointed to discover that Cassie has never heard of Antony and the Johnsons. Cassie has led a sheltered life, culturally speaking. She takes people at their word and judges books by their covers. She does not read between the lines.

  These are only some of the reasons Cassie and I are celebrating our eight-month anniversary.

  ‘You’ve never heard of Antony?’

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘Only the greatest singing voice on the planet.’

  Cass listens to pop radio. She watches Pop Idol, albeit for the personalities. Every Saturday morning she irons for two hours to the soundtrack of the latest download charts on TV, then bops along for half-an-hour to the Dance Fit Wii.

  She will never hear Antony and the Johnsons in this way.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I say.

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Just let’s go.’

  We drive north out of town to Lissadell. We trespass on the country estate that was once a temporary home to W. B. Yeats, poet, statesman, Nobel Prize winner. In a civilised nation, this estate would be a public park celebrating genius, and we pilgrims. But we are in Ireland, courting prosecution.

  We drive through a wood of deciduous trees that slopes down to the shore of a wide, shallow bay. We find a grassy area that allows for a view of Knocknerea across the bay. The moon is full and bright but the inky darkness of the bay is indistinguishable from the foot of the mountain on the far shore. For perspective we have to rely on the rippling of the moon-silvered water.

  I park the car on the edge of a low bluff, angling its nose towards Knocknerea and its nippled grave of Queen Medbh. We step down off the grass into a shallow dune, spread a blanket. I roll a joint lightly laced with the last of Tommo’s Thai and give it to Cass. Then I go back to the car and slip some Antony and the Johnsons CDs into the stereo.

  Cass sits cross-legged, staring out across the bay. The moon is so roundly full it appears to be the light at the end of the tunnel. ‘We should come here more often,’ she murmurs as I slip in behind her.

  ‘Ssshhh,’ I say, pressing play on the remote control. ‘Hope There’s Someone’ washes down across us as if from some Olympian height, wave upon wave until we are fully immersed. It is possible to imagine that we are at the centre of a universe composed entirely of sound.

  Sitting behind Cass allows me to reach the back of her neck, which she loves to have stroked, fingertips running against the grain of downy hairs. Soon she is shivering. A tiny squeal as she wriggles away, one final shudder rebelling against the delicious decadence of the flesh.

  I roll another jay. Primitive man ate magic mushrooms and danced beneath the moon until the visions made themselves manifest.

  ‘Bird Gerhl’, the final track, tapers off into silence. Cassie opens her eyes and allows her head to roll in my direction. Her eyes sparkle.

  ‘So what d’you think?’ I say.

  ‘I don’t know. I’d need to hear it again.’

  ‘Okay. But check this out first.’

  Back we go, to Antony’s eponymous first offering. ‘Twilight’ gives way to ‘Cripple and the Starfish’, then ‘Hitler in my Heart’. The album draws heavily on orchestral influences, deploying piano, strings and brass. ‘River of Sorrow’ opens with a mournful fall. Cassie mock-swoons, rolls her head back, closes her eyes.

  Later, as she dozes against the rise and fall of my chest, I stare up at the night sky. The moon is so roundly full and bright it seems to be the mouth of the universe shaped in a perfect ‘O’ of delight.

  The cosmos has seen too much to be surprised by new lovers. Yet somehow it is always surprised by love.

  My line for tonight comes courtesy of W. B. Yeats: And what rough beast, its hour come round at last/ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

  •

  ‘That’s from a couple of weeks back,’ he says. ‘It might need some touching up.’

  ‘No, I like it.’ I like it so much it sets my wisdom teeth grinding. ‘You and Cassie, you seem to be getting on well these days.’

  ‘I’ve been making an effort,’ he concedes. ‘She’s asked for no sharks, less Spartans and three showers a week.’

  ‘They reckon the basis for a good relationship,’ I say, ‘is a man raising his expectations and a woman lowering hers.’

  He shrugs. ‘I have her on a diet of Kurt Vonnegut, Joy Division and the Coen Brothers. We’ll see how it goes.’

  •

  Hitler was not evil. Stalin was not mad. We tell ourselves these lies for the same reason we tell children about the bogeyman: the truth is too terrifying to contemplate.

  True, Hitler and Stalin were genocidal megalomaniacs. But they breathed oxygen. They ate and drank, pissed and shat. They laughed and cried. If the genetic code of the orang-utan differs from that of the human being by a mere 3 percent, how closely do other human beings resemble Hitler and Stalin?

  Are the majority of people born immune to genocidal urgings? Are Hitler and Stalin to be pitied because they were born with an acquired immune deficiency syndrome in morality?

  The winners write the history books. The losers wait impatiently for their opportunity to burn the winners’ books and start all over again.

  So runs the perceived wisdom.

  So struts the arrogance of winners.

  Such is the ugly presumption of history.

  Hear me now: the winners do not write the history books.

  The writers write the history books.

  My supervisor has found yet another parking space. This time he hides his car in a far corner on the second level of the cavernous underground car park, where an L-shaped recess obstructs the sight-lines of the casual viewer. But I am not a casual viewer. When I look, I see.

  Of course, my supervisor has no way of knowing that I am drawn to such underground havens, the cellars and catacombs, like a perverse moth fleeing the flame.

  Parking in this particular underground lot requires an official permit, which is allocated on a yearly basis. My supervisor must have pulled many strings to secure one. I am impressed by his resourcefulness, although I am less impressed with his unquestioning acceptance of how things appear.

  It is true that the underground car park offers
security against the smash-and-grab thief, but its Restricted Access status means that it does not provide comprehensive CCTV facilities. Cameras dot the walls at intervals but the security guard checks the surveillance monitors on an ad hoc basis.

  I know this because the overworked security guard in question, Frankie, told me so while he purchased an eighth of hash last week.

  I ring Frankie. I say, ‘Frankie, it’s K. How’re you fixed?’

  ‘Dry as a bone, man. There’s a drought on.’

  ‘I’ve an ounce Tommo dropped on me. Take it off my hands and I’ll unload it for an even ton.’

  ‘Done deal.’

  ‘Nice one. Meet me at three bells, fifth floor, the gents, second cubicle.’

  I use these numbers to confuse him. When he rings later, wondering why I didn’t show, I will tell him I said three bells, second floor, fifth cubicle. Frankie will undoubtedly blame his poor short-term memory caused by smoking too much dope.

  By then, of course, it will be too late. By then my supervisor will be driving a death trap.

  According to the old man, the ex-mechanic, rats will chew on the brake-hose of cars in order to get at the sweet-tasting glycol in the brake-line fluid. They will not chew all the way through the hose, as this is not necessary to drain the fluid. This means that the brakes will function as normal, providing the car does not attempt any extraordinary manoeuvres, such as braking sharply at the bottom of a hill.

  Replicating the shape and indentation of a rodent’s bite is a simple affair, achieved by the repeated application of a crocodile-clip. When I am finished I take the service elevator to the fourth floor and enter the men’s bathroom. There I wash the excess brake fluid from my fingers and wrap the crocodile-clip in a wad of toilet paper. This I flush.

  As I leave, my phone beeps. A message from Frankie, who is anxious to secure the ounce of dope. I text him back, arranging a new drop-off for tomorrow. By then it is likely that my supervisor’s children will be half-orphaned. By then Frankie will be guilty of gross negligence.