The Fabrications

by Baret Magarian

  He stopped kissing her.

  ‘You’ve gone all sad.’

  ‘Have I? I apologize.’

  ‘There’s no need to. I hereby decree a ban on saying sorry. No more apologies, because when I’m with you, I’m filled with something good.’

  ‘Golly, little me does that? This non-creative pleb?’

  ‘Shush. That stuff isn’t important. What it is about you, it’s – ’

  ‘My bellybutton? My earlobes?’

  ‘Among other things. You’re serious and light at the same time. You lift me, you pull me up to where you’re pottering, though you don’t think of that place as being different to anywhere else. But it is, my darling, it is. And up there I’m not so haunted.’

  ‘I’ll drink to that.’

  She cupped her hands in the water and made as if she was lapping at them like a thirsty dog. He stared at her in bemusement and began laughing.

  Afterwards she said, apropos of nothing, ‘You know that night – the night of the fire – do you mind my asking – do you have any idea – how it might have started?’

  A frown of disquiet passed over his face. The trickling of the fountains continued.

  ‘Yes, I’ve got a pretty good idea,’ he said.

  *

  ‘I would like to offer a few thoughts on how to live,’ said Oscar. ‘A way we might all live creatively, beautifully, fully, our eyes opened, our senses steaming, our sinews burning.’

  The space left by the departure of Alastair and Lilliana was now filled by a large man who welcomed the additional room for his bulk.

  ‘Here’s my contention: During the act of love human beings are able to perceive with full intensity the wonder of being truly alive. Not always, certainly, and to be sure such unions are often no more than functional and ephemeral. But when a person is truly engaged with another being there can be an attendant loss of aggression, selfishness and greed; in fact, all those things which constitute the dark side of the human personality. When we make love we are truly alive, open like a petal, in tune with our environment, which in this case is the other person.’

  Behind the stage there was a large screen about the size of a small billboard and on it images from ancient Tantric art now flashed up, back projected: stone pillar-sculptures from temples, statues showing the gods Shiva and Shakti in blissful embraces, icons of bizarre and ritualistic couplings, and finally the face of the Buddha radiating a narcotized tranquility – all sights Oscar had encountered during his recent trawls through libraries.

  He caught a glimpse of a young man with orange-bleached hair looking up at him, his face imprinted with recollections of distant grandeur.

  Accompanying Oscar’s next words was a newly won physical grace, a plasticity, as his hands found patterns to support his meaning and his body joined forces with verbal energy to create a composite picture of sincerity and belief. He suddenly felt a love for humanity welling up, a genuine desire to give them all he had. And the sight of the young man’s face made Oscar think he’d managed to get the crowd on his wavelength. He might even be able to reach the speech’s end triumphantly...

  ‘When we are in the physical world of another, we have access to their most personal, private territory. The caress gives consciousness a greater definition; our sensibilities are raised onto a new level through passion. This enchantment is also a process of awareness, of awakening, when you learn about yourself more intuitively, more clearly than at other times. In other words our perceptions are operating correctly during the sexual act. Imagine if we could apply that intensity of perception to our ordinary waking lives. Then we would become aware of the whole of creation as if it were a vast, lover’s body stretching out in front of us and offering us the riches which we all too often cannot see. Might we then respond to the call of others, regardless of whether they were friends or strangers?’

  A couple got up to leave. This time (unlike with Alastair and Lilliana,) Oscar noticed and tried to work out if his words might have given offense. But he couldn’t read their faces from where he stood. They slid behind the leviathan tree carved with graffiti.

  ‘I’m asking you to imagine a world in which the sensitivity and responsiveness to another person during the act of love, that respect, is brought to bear on all other beings.’

  An actor in a caffeine twitter embarked on an involved examination of his fingernails. They were too long – however hard he tried he just couldn’t get them to stay for any given time at the right length. It was the same with his hair; for about two days out of the month it was just right, but then a corner started sticking out. Inevitably barbers, no matter how passionately he pleaded with them, would lop great wads off the sides, so drawing attention to his drooping ears. He had a vast supply of sprays, waxes, mousses, and gels, but none of them gave him any joy.

  Meanwhile, on the other side of the tree it became apparent that Oscar’s words, far from offending the couple who had withdrawn, had created an appetite for each other which could no longer be disregarded. Quietly, efficiently, they removed each other’s clothing, which didn’t take long, as they both wore little. Since they were cloaked by the tree and took great pains not to make a sound their coupling went entirely unnoticed. They were dimly aware of Oscar’s voice droning on.

  ‘The thing that allows for perception, that allows the channels to be opened is, surely, vulnerability. When a person unmasks themselves, reveals their essence, then great things happen. Vulnerability in turn leads to transparency. If we might express this vulnerability in our everyday relations, not just in the rarefied world of the bedroom – what I am suggesting is that to do such a thing might lead to a world free of aggression, a world of unity and understanding. The way forward is to achieve transparency through vulnerability, understanding through union. What might be delivered is a world free of hatred, a world that fuses into one being, one consciousness just as in a sexual synthesis or in the ego-transcending moments of orgasm. The key to this is to find a means of transferring this vulnerability.

  ‘Eastern thought, whether it is Buddhist, Tantric, or Taoist, teaches that everything is part of a cosmic whole, that everything affects everything else. We must transcend the notion of an individual self in life, just as we manage to do sometimes in sex.

  ‘The key is to have an erotically open relationship with the world and people. Make no mistake; I’m not licensing a meaningless pursuit of pleasure, and pleasure only. I’m talking about using those perceptions eroticism can offer in order to melt barriers, barriers between races, creeds and customs. There must be a recognition that what we take to be other and external has its roots in an incorrect perception which in turn encourages ideological distortions and untruths, and later on, injustices and tyrannies.’

  By now the spotlights had been switched on though it was not yet completely dark. Far-off parts of the gardens were lost in shadow. It had cooled off a little. Oscar looked romantic and dreamy, his golden tunic dazzlingly lit in the spotlights.

  But as he stared into the arena he was aware of his heart pounding; he felt a resurgence of nerves. He wondered if he could possibly continue. He could scarcely believe such lofty sentiments were issuing from his lips. Though he was some way into the speech, the end still seemed an eternity away. By contrast, the audience was comfortable, and people were intrigued. And it really did look to them as though Oscar had acquired a mystical aura.

  He cleared his throat, took a few steps forward, reached the end of the walkway and resumed. It was then that the copulating couple was discovered. They had been too intent on finishing their work to notice the small boy who stood silently watching their growing fever. As he stood there, staring blankly, his father appeared, and was on the point of retrieving him when his eyes registered this double-decker of shuddering flesh. He uttered a cry of surprise, grabbed his son and marched him back to the audience. But the father’s cry had alerted those closest to the big tree and they craned their necks to see what was going on. One or two men walked ov
er to get a better view of the lovers, who were vaguely conscious of these random voyeurs, but carried on, thrusting together toward the moment of release they so desperately sought. Oscar’s elevated sentiments about the sexual act were eclipsed by this more compelling spectacle. Then more people gathered around, drawn by the familiar and yet hallucinatory tableaux before them.

  And then something happened.

  The sight triggered a flutter of impulses and realizations in the minds of those watching which terminated at last at a beautifully stark place. The hothouse, aromatic night; the open spaces; their proximity to each other, made sex transcendentally simple. Oscar’s presence, his magnificent eloquence, his insistence on the riches sex could bring (after all he was a celebrity, a prophet) all endorsed unstated desire, nudged desire into becoming deed.

  Where now were the tenets of interpretation and speculation, misinterpretation and hesitation, rejection and acceptance?

  And where was the beauty, the mystery, the tenderness?

  They were dying; they were dying...

  Cross-currents of hysteria rose, drove forward, lashed out like angry winds, were squeezed through the eye of time’s needle, then dipped and leapt out of existence.

  Oscar stopped forming words, stopped moving his lips. He carried on breathing, and he carried on standing. And watching. Slowly and inevitably a shape began to emerge. The shape of the stirrings that lead to nakedness.

  Some wanted to confirm whether or not they did actually feel more alive during coitus since they weren’t at all sure they did; some wanted merely to satisfy newly sprung desire; some thought they must first have sex in order to then carry out Oscar’s ‘transference’ (by reminding themselves of what was involved), and others, who under any other circumstances would never have been able to have intercourse (because their partners had long ago withdrawn into disinterest or because their relationships were dead), now could since this night, by some wondrous sleight of hand, had resurrected the life of their unions.

  Oscar stood rooted in horror.

  Flesh was unveiled, clothes tossed recklessly into the air. Torsos, bare backs, legs caught the light. Hairlessly trim or furrily lumpen stomachs were revealed. Breasts bounced. Penises stood at half-mast, dangled flaccidly or proudly announced their graduation with flying colors. A kind of sickly nightmare had been created by his words.

  So soon grinding bones and flesh fed off flesh and bones; restraint and diffidence were cast aside and people started to squirm, in a composite of agony and ecstasy whose character was refined and adjusted with each pulsation. For Oscar, the words of his speech were visible in a new and ghastly light. Not one, not two, not three, but scores of couples were copulating. Those who weren’t were watching those who were. In the stifling night the blinding imperative of sexual desire had triumphed, crushing every vestige of self-restraint and self-consciousness.

  Bodies moved up and down, from side to side, like pistons, grunting, sobbing, screaming, rocking, heaving, thrusting, pressing, swaying – supine, suspended and nailed together by burning pleasure, seeking ever and again for a more total and engulfing sensual cohesion. All about them were the hallmarks not of some spiritual awakening, but rather a negation of everything except pure will. There was neither vulnerability nor poetry here. Instead there was a final, precise reductiveness, a rendering of human complexity into reflex, the iron rule of instinct, emerging after short-lived hesitation, growing now to fury. They were lapping at one another, using each others’ limbs as triggers, as buttons to be pressed, to yield a greater arousal, flooding each other in delirium. Acrid smells passed through, above, and beyond the lovers, tossed like salads.

  ‘I think the audience may have taken me a little too literally...em..., ’ Oscar began ineffectually.

  ‘I can see my words may have had the wrong effect. Or you may have mis – misunderstood...I’m...I’m sorry if I’ve misled you. Please stop. Hey...look...HEY!!’

  Some of the lovers glanced up. But most of them carried on regardless, rocking back and forth, limbs sliding, slotting together, generating the white heat of friction, moans and groans spilling from them, lending the night the atmosphere of some blood-curdling occult ritual. Someone newly joining the lecture would have been forgiven for thinking a series of pagan sacrifices were taking place, until they digested the phantasmagoric truth.

  Those not having intercourse were staring aghast, or looking to Oscar for guidance or laughing with nerves or embarrassment or abandon. This laughter of abandon could have been the laughter of demons, as faces turned purple, single, arching veins standing out of brows with scorching precision. As Oscar watched he feared the violence of the laughter would leave bodies headless. He visualized scores of decapitated heads lolling around bloodily, still cackling, lines of blood trickling through the green grass, attracting swarms of flies and maggots.

  Yelling so loudly that his vocal chords burned Oscar bawled, ‘Passion should not be confined to the bedroom...eh...and thank you for such a frank demonstration of this. It should be universal. No, scratch that...We’re all poets within the embrace of flesh. Let’s be poets elsewhere. But not here, perhaps. You might frighten the squirrels.’ He didn’t really have time to adapt his painstakingly rehearsed speech to the recent developments. And as the speech fell to bits the crowd broke ranks, growing more and more excited.

  He tried to avert his gaze from the antics of the lovers but just couldn’t look away. Something, he mused, must have burst like a fountain and turned people into lusty baboons, proving that with a little in the way of mental readjustment, the jungle was not such an alien place for mankind, and perhaps the day would soon come when people could take their place there with pride, initiating an era of evolutionary regression.

  Looking beyond the tight circle, in the distance he could make out a cluster of policemen galloping over from the direction of Knightsbridge. He resolved to finish his speech before they blundered in. He went off at an absurdly quick trot: ‘I want to bottle rapture up freeze it and preserve it like a vital oil in short I want us to remember we’re humans carrying a torch holding it aloft not robots licking a boot we must never sink into a mechanized existence.’

  Then in slower, more measured tones, he declared that, ‘It might be an idea to postpone the fornication until the police have been and gone.’

  This brief calm fled and again the words were tumbling out of his mouth. He was determined to rattle through the rest. This time I’ll get to the end, he thought. Why am I never allowed to finish my bloody speeches?

  ‘The external breaks down with friends it melts with lovers it melts away totally they become one as they say the divisions between lovers break down as they spill into each other become part of each other. Do you feel it? Are you made one? Hey! You out there! Or are you just lecherous bastards?’

  He caught a glimpse of the full, preponderant moon. The sky was a mess. Overhead some traces of blood were flecked against the outline of amorphous clouds. There were dirty white cavities wherever his eye wandered: It looked like something had taken the fabric of the sky and literally dragged and wrenched it apart. Nature was convulsed with pain.

  ‘Love shouldn’t wear price tags. Or be confined to one’s inner circle of friends and family. And love must give up power, not exercise it. To give without expecting anything in return – that is something to work toward. By the way, I am available for one-on-one discussion. If you have any queries...’

  The crowds clambered onto the stage and pulled him down from it. They wanted to pay effusive homage to him. One man, hopping up and down into his trousers whilst trying to zip up his fly (he looked like he was on a pogo stick), yelled into his ear, ‘Mr. Babel, thank you, thank you so much! My wife and I haven’t been able to have intercourse for six years...you’ve given us the confidence to cure ourselves.’ Oscar heard himself say, ‘Oh, right. Don’t mention it.’ He tore off his radio mike when he realized his voice was still booming through the speakers.

  Another member
of the audience, a shambolic, breathless figure in a waistcoat, tried to get close enough to Oscar so as to shout important words to him, but he couldn’t reach. He tried calling from where he was standing, being repeatedly pushed and shoved.

  ‘Oscar! Hey, Oscar! Over here!’ Webster yelled. ‘Bloch’s in the hospital! He’s very ill! Bloch was admitted to the hospital yesterday!’

  But Oscar didn’t hear or see him and that part of the crowd Webster was lodged in now began moving sluggishly toward the Albert Memorial. Webster shoved up against a man from whose every pore a foul, unholy smell emanated; after about five seconds of this Webster was gagging, close to that total loss of control which precedes vomiting.

  Webster had not been one of those who had experienced sexual intimacy.

  He managed to find a few inches of space away from the stench and took in some air, then turned around to see if there was another way of reaching Oscar. But he could no longer make him out. He muttered to himself, ‘Sod this for a game of soldiers,’ and waddled off down to Kensington High Street in search of a slice of coffee cake. He was cheered up by the thought that he’d soon be seeing his beloved Chinese lanterns, which had pride of place in Bloch’s front room.

  A squadron of television cameras had arrived and were busily being positioned in key areas to film those still mating. They were like athletes gasping in the final stages of a marathon run, the finishing line within sight. Lights were speedily assembled since the night was dark now. Young women clutching microphones were speaking rapidly in front of their cameras, which observed the lovemaking dispassionately. The images were relayed to thousands of homes by satellite (interrupting an item in the news about a young boy charged with stabbing his mother to death, the two having argued over a missing container of chocolate icing). In their lounges people were suddenly confronted with this eruption of decadence. Fathers took their microwave dinners down from their laps and told their children to go to their rooms and filmed their televisions with their phones and tablets.