‘Do what?’
‘Anticipate reality.’
‘I wasn’t aware of doing anything except making some things up. I thought life modeling would be an interesting idea to explore as it was related to painting. I liked the idea of a cat because I don’t have one. And I put some of me into your personality. That’s about it. Oscar, I have to tell you something. I don’t really want to carry on with that story. It’s pissing me off.’
‘But – listen – ever since you’ve started it all these good things have been happening to me. It’s true. This man offered me an exhibition.’
‘That’s ridiculous. What are you trying to say?’
‘I don’t know. But the fact is – I feel different. There it is. I know it doesn’t make sense. But I just feel this story you’ve dreamt up is a good thing. And when I was reading it at the theater just now I felt plugged into something, like I’d finally come home. Can you see that?’
‘There’s something wrong with that thing. It’s not mine. It’s issuing from somewhere else. Some sewer. It’s as dysfunctional as that car, water-logged and ruined.’
‘It’s beautiful.’
‘These resemblances you talked about...they’re just coincidental. I wanted to give your life some exoticism, some flavor that was missing. I’m not a magician and I’m not a soothsayer and I can’t work miracles.’ He paused, and then, struck with a sudden realization, said, ‘By the way, has your landlord suddenly turned nice?’
‘No.’
‘Do you like Wagner?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Well, that’s a relief.’
Webster finally found them. His eyes were bleary and bloodshot, his face puffed up and purple, and his body, which had the texture of a marshmallow, looked like it was on the verge of collapse. He looked less like someone who has swum one length of a swimming pool than the survivor of a natural catastrophe.
‘Hello,’ he wheezed. ‘Finally had a dip...water’s a bit chilly. That car’s freakish. Are you two pals then?’
‘No, acquaintances. But we’re very close,’ Bloch replied cryptically.
4
During the next few days Oscar managed to get some modeling work at the Mermaid Academy. They paid fifteen pounds an hour, a figure he considered fantastically generous, considering he didn’t really have to do anything. Speaking to Najette about modeling had piqued his interest, but reading Bloch’s story in the theater’s bar had made the idea that much more intriguing. It was as if Bloch’s words had lent the whole notion a secret allure, ignited a strange and mysterious flame that was proceeding to hypnotize him.
That morning, while Oscar slept, Bloch sat at his typewriter, staring into space. In the end he had agreed to Oscar’s request to continue writing. While he realized that he shouldn’t really try and write any more – he was increasingly unnerved by the way in which aspects of the story seemed to be coming true – at the same time he was loathe to abandon any creative project. He was curious as to where his mind would lead him and what further imaginative shards it might throw up.
Chapter Three: the fabrication of wisdom
Oscar Babel, destined for greatness, destined to be admired from afar and from near. It is true that the man ultimately acquired a status which was mythic. In the end he transmuted into a philosopher who was popular, a thinker who was entertaining. His words became honed and weighted, sacred words. People were drawn to him. He spoke to future converts, dined at plush restaurants, enjoyed the attention of certain women. He became, in effect, a spiritual teacher, a guru, and the observations he made were received with an ardor which bordered on idolatry, as he held forth and horsewhipped society for its pursuit of the vacuous. The hotel room he finally embraced became his spiritual headquarters, the shimmering, flickering lectures like no others as the lackeys of the media elected to shut their mouths for once, as they journeyed along the road to enlightenment. Oscar proved fatally effective – he spoke words which made him the blessèd one, making mincemeat of our slumberous, constipated art worlds: corpses kept barely alive with heavy-duty drugs.
Inevitably I noticed a certain deterioration in him, of body and personality.
Oh, how the shining lights of the past, the noble grand dreams of men and women have been killed by hysterical consumerism and by the noxious oil spill of the ever-expanding, ever-lobotomizing, world-wide spider’s web!
He was borne aloft on the wings of the mass-turbating media, and certain figures that must remain nameless (and were already faceless) accompanied him and facilitated the journey, lubricated it, so to speak. And yet...
He stopped, took some deep breaths. He yanked the sheet out of the typewriter and read the text back to himself slowly.
This final fragment was all he could manage. He noticed it was more tautly written than the earlier parts. Was this because the life he here imagined for Oscar was the life he wanted for himself, deep down? Didn’t this final fragment reveal the cravings of a closet megalomaniac?
He folded the sheet up carefully, shoved it inside an envelope, sealed it and placed it in a drawer, where he wished it to stay. He got up, stripped and climbed in the shower. But while the water steamed his mind still spun. After drying himself off thoroughly he was back at his desk, still naked. He dispensed with the typewriter and took up a pen and paper.
16 June
Something’s happening to me.
I’ll try and specify exactly what. I’ve been having hallucinations. In the first I heard a man utter a warning on the radio; in the second one the same warning appeared on a piece of paper which I found while swimming underwater. Is somebody trying to tell me something? I must dress and get ready for lunch. I’m meeting my agent; he wants me to squeeze out another shriveled fetus. He is Barny by name, barmy by nature. Got to pull myself together.
Bloch drew a line through the words and began again.
Was I always acting the goat? Or some other animal? Supermarkets and dinner parties and weddings and receptions. They allowed me to showcase my flair for discretion and civility, allowed me to practice the etiquette that shafts sincerity. All lies. Where have I been in my own performance? In the wings, never really daring to emerge with a voice clear and bright. The public me strutted about on stage, making noise, voicing opinions. That me was like a whale producing bloated sounds. But the whale was hiding a poor little salmon struggling to keep up, struggling against the strains in the water and the rhythms that stirred in the wake of the whale’s fat fucking bulk.
Do some manage to dispense with these masquerades and deceptions? Do they embody constancy? Or does the heart of flux beat for them also, altering the contours and textures of their personalities, reshaping at every moment the essence? Poor humans. God’s cocktail of divinity and bestiality hasn’t been mixed very well. The earth cools. Time to bake a cake.
Bloch drew another line through the text and got up. He went into the kitchen and poured himself a whiskey. He wished the evening was upon London. What if life was an eternal dance? What if London was lit by a million candles at nighttime?
My mind’s filled with hot air, so why don’t I rise like a balloon? Into a place of light. Where clouds beckon. Am I dead or alive? How easily the paths of pleasure and pain entwine.
An almighty fart echoes throughout history.
Where am I?
*
In one of the large classrooms of the Mermaid Academy Oscar waited patiently. He heard the shuffling of the students as they walked in and took their places. There were seven men and two women, quiet and respectful.
He studied his pale flesh, studied its sinuous texture in silence. He watched himself with a new awareness; his limbs, white knuckles, and tender, sunken feet struck him with their elegance and purity. Had he until now ever taken the time to study himself, to get to know the topography of his own body? It seemed so odd that he should regard as unfamiliar this frame that housed his consciousness, his mind.
A tall, slightly authoritarian woman touched
him on the shoulder, signaling for him to take his place on a raised dais. He did so, surveying the students hurriedly, knowing this might be the only opportunity for a while to study them. There were two women veering toward middle-age. One looked quite worldly, dressed in sleek black leather trousers and a loose lilac blouse, a thin silk scarf flung around her neck. The other was a nervous, fumbling creature, forever checking the pockets of her jacket, feeling for the hard metal of her car keys. The majority of the men wore beards and looked incurably earnest. A youngish man with orange-bleached hair seemed to stand apart.
Now Oscar tried to relinquish the normal trappings of consciousness and become motionless and soundless, a doll poised before dissecting eyes.
The scratching of pens, as the students began to draw him with nibs dipped in a mixture of black ink and water, seemed magnified. To his surprise he felt neither embarrassed nor uncomfortable. He had expected to find being watched would be arousing in some way; instead it was wholly neutral. He began to have the curious sensation that he was not really there, that reality was at some nameless remove and he was gravitating toward an external observation of himself, as he was himself observed by the artists, like mirrors reflecting mirrors into infinity . . .
He thought about his days and nights at the cinema, the sense in which he had been dying there, slipping further and further into twilight. His skin registered the subtle movements of air around him; he felt the breath created in the turning of the students’ sketch pages. He felt at once anarchically alive. Taking off his clothes had also peeled away a layer of obfuscation from his mind.
Afterwards the tall woman told him he was welcome to come back – she was happy with his first session; he had kept sufficiently still, she said, and he had an interesting physique. For an instant he thought she might have been flirting with him.
As Oscar left the building a small man in blue overalls walked up and grabbed him by the arm. The man was clutching a folded miniature tripod screwed onto a digital recording microphone. Oscar’s immediate thought was that he was being arrested.
‘Excuse me,’ the stranger said – his words broken by a hacking cough – ‘are you one of the life models?’
‘Only just,’ said Oscar politely, disengaging himself.
‘Oh good. I wonder, would you be at all interested in answering a few questions about modeling? I’m finishing a small documentary on the subject for Art Cable. You wouldn’t have to do much. Just speak to the camera for a few minutes. The questions would be asked and then edited out. We would only see your answers’ – he broke off to cough – to the questions, as it were. They would be interspersed with footage of students drawing and sketching. You’d get paid two hundred pounds. Please say yes; no one else seems terribly interested. They’re a shy bunch these models. You wouldn’t think so, would you? And I mean to say, it’s good money.’
Oscar heard himself ask, ‘How about making it two hundred and fifty pounds?’
‘What? Two hundred and fifty? It’s my own money making this happen, you know. Let me see. That’s the lights and film stock. The make-up, the studio hire...down in King’s Cross...and the cameras. Payment for the crew. It was meant to be a modest little piece on a neglected subject. You see, I see possibilities in what others consider boring. I’ve made pieces on fun fairs, doll’s houses, glass blowing, even the humble household bidet. But fifty pounds extra. That’s an increase of twenty-five per-cent. Not that I’m a mathematician; no, I’m an artist myself – who cares about me though? They all get the grapes, and I get the pips. I’ve been making documentaries for twelve years; where’s it got me? What I wanted was to design bicycles. God knows what the hell happened there. Still, mustn’t grumble. Fifty pounds you say?’
Oscar nodded, exuding the serenity of indifference. This was all it took to unnerve the little man, who consequently agreed to the increased sum. And they shook hands.
‘By the way, the name’s Albert Lush. I knew I could count on you.’
Despite the fact that Oscar had agreed to be interviewed only in exchange for more cash, Lush interpreted his assent as empirical evidence of another’s belief in him as a documentary maker. Lush said, ‘Can you come to the studios...at 10 am on Monday 22 June? The whole thing shouldn’t take more than an hour. Sasha will make you up and everything. Just sound informed when you speak. By the way, sorry about this cough of mine, but there’s nothing I can do about it. This cough has made me a failure. I’ve had this cough for five years; it’s ruined my lower spine. It’s ruined my relationships with women; even dogs hate me. I’ve tried everything to get rid of it: sun, antibiotics, acupuncture, herbal medicine, saunas, syrups, eucalyptus oil, health farms, colonic irrigation, tranquilizers, homeopathy, osteopathy; nothing works. Oh well. See you soon.’
He hurried off with the nervous air of someone running for a bus. Oscar stared at him as he receded. It suddenly occurred to him that he didn’t know where the television studios were. He was about to walk away when the little man rushed back breathlessly, placed a card in Oscar’s hands without a word and bolted.
It was quite late when he got home. Dove was asleep in her basket, her small nose and mouth protruding from under crumpled blankets. From below the thunderous sound of the overture to The Flying Dutchman threatened to dislodge the floorboards. Oscar shifted the clothes and crumpled sketchpads that had piled up on the bed onto his desk. He switched on a bedside lamp; its light immediately made everything a little more palatable.
As he was preparing to boil some water there was a tentative knock at the door. He threw a tea-towel over the basket and the cat, and then Mr. Grindel was upon him. He noticed that the additional epidermis of his overcoat was missing. This was the first time he had ever seen Grindel without it. The music continued blaring and swelling wildly.
‘No coat, Mr. Grindel?’
By way of reply, Grindel raised his arm and started moving it this way and that, his mouth pulled up in a proud, noble arc as he imagined himself on the conductor’s podium, heir to the musical colossi of the past.
‘No, it’s at the cleaners,’ he said, still conducting. ‘It needs mending, anyway. I daresay I’ll have to think about getting it stitched up; there’s a few pockets there where nature didn’t intend, if you get my drift. By the way, thanks for the rent. Much obliged.’
This wasn’t like Grindel – to express gratitude.
‘I’m having a little soup, Mr. Babel. Do you want some? A few croutons thrown in to some vegetable stock and some bread as a humble side dish. Modest fare but made with love.’
This also wasn’t like Grindel – to offer hospitality.
‘Do you know much about Wagner, Mr. Babel? He is...what’s the word? It’ll come to me. I’m heating the soup now; there isn’t much, but there’s enough for two, if you know what I mean.’
But at that point, with fatal bad timing, the cat jumped out of her basket, scattering the tea-towel, and landed near Grindel’s feet. For a moment Oscar stared helplessly, then seized with panic, shouted, ‘What gives you the right to come in here whenever you like? It’s outrageous.’ Oscar didn’t know what he was saying; he just wanted to generate enough noise to scare Grindel into leaving. ‘And another thing, what about the peeling wallpaper, what about my mattress, I have to sleep on a piece of foam that wouldn’t support a snail. Why are you so useless?’
As he went on Oscar picked the cat up and returned her to the basket, as if he could still salvage the situation. Throughout Oscar’s tirade Grindel had smiled like an inebriated priest, his face swelling with absurd benevolence, discernible in blubbery, upturned lips and stupid, bovine eyes. When Oscar finished he waited a moment before setting out his case in a reasonable voice.
‘Yes, yes, we must do something about this, Mr. Babel. It won’t do at all. I have been lazy. This might have been connected with my cousin’s recent visit. But may I say how much I love your kitten; it is so small. Just wait there a moment. I’ll get her some chocolate. We’ll have some with the soup.
’
This wasn’t like Grindel – to listen to criticism, express affection and choose to ignore his own house rule about pets. In fact this was so unlike Grindel that Oscar wondered whether it really was Grindel. He half expected to find out that the man currently shuffling out of the room was an impostor, impersonating Grindel through some unfathomable sleight-of-hand, while his real landlord sat bound and gagged in his stifling maisonette. It was true then: another feature of Bloch’s story had found its counterpart in reality – Grindel had turned into a nice human being...
He re-appeared a few minutes later with a bowl in which bricklike chunks of chocolate sat. He placed the bowl near the basket, then held it close to the cat.
‘Go on, cat, try it,’ he intoned, trying to sound inviting. Dove peered into the bowl, licked at a bar, nibbled at a corner reluctantly. Without warning, Grindel picked up a piece, growled, ‘What’s the matter, puss, not gourmet enough for you? This stuff ’s Swiss,’ and thrust the chocolate violently into her mouth, pulling on her tail at the same time. She screeched in terror and vaulted off.
So Grindel’s kindness proved to be short-lived.
But then as Oscar stroked and comforted her, the landlord emerged out of his shell of cruelty, looking faintly stunned, a stranger to himself and his own mind. The last few seconds were erased by virtue of some kind of amnesia, and he smiled once again, for all the world the spirit of saintly kindness. Was the old, shambling landlord teetering on a schizoid knife edge, manifesting opposing personalities, like an actor whose roles have usurped a continuous self?
‘She’ll have some later, Mr. Grindel,’ Oscar muttered, ‘that’s all right. Thanks for everything – really. Another time for the soup maybe, but right now I’m very tired. I know you understand.’
‘I feel like I understand many, many things, Mr. Babel. Many, many, many things.’
The Fabrications Page 6