‘Organize yourselves just to be organized! Be your own purpose!’
When I enter my own flat, there is a scene on the floor, in the middle of the living room, on the grey carpet, that not long ago would have made me close my eyes or apologize or just turn around and go back out again, angry at myself that deep inside me there are still patterns of some entirely ordinary upbringing and that I can’t accept such a scene as just a normal thing, since it gives rise in me to all sorts of physical and emotional responses that I can’t control and that make me always and again confront things that I should long ago have already dealt with, things like shame, desire, even envy at the youth and beauty of this pair of bodies that, naked, are losing track of time on my carpet, as if the world really were exactly what we all want it to be – carefree and sensual and gentle. It takes a lot of bravery on my part to silence my body’s spontaneous reactions. But I have to be brave. My life is based on bravery. Especially now. Dr Clotos said it won’t be much longer. And I could give in, at this point nobody should be allowed to even come close to holding it against me if I gave in to my own body and blithely yelled, ‘get a room, you nasty filth’, or ‘don’t even think of sullying my carpet with your juices’, or ‘find at least a modicum of respect for others and don’t parade your fit, young, toned bodies in a mockery of everything that’s old, broken and will soon be dead’.
But I don’t. For that very reason. You don’t respond to your body’s betrayal by surrendering. There will be no white flags. It is exactly at such a time that everything you do with your mind becomes important. So I relax and direct my gaze at them. I move a step closer. Marjorie lives here, she has been my roommate ever since I saved her consciousness and her life. I don’t know who the guy is, I’ve never seen him before. A tattoo stretches from his rump to his shoulder blades, his back arches with each thrust. Her fingers are clinging to him. They’re a tender pair. Beautiful. Marjorie looks at me with a smile of pleasure as she turns her face. I put the bags down and go into my room. Anwar is still asleep. He got up before me, read over breakfast before the sun rose, and went back to sleep. I got up at eight, went to the shops, to the doctor’s, went for a coffee. It’s so bloody hot out. I take my camera, my old Leica, I take my long red silk scarf from the hook on the wall and walk past them – they’re still gasping – into the pantry. I find a jar of paint left over from the previous paint job. I remember the painter. A dangerous, alluring man. He took me by the hand and in one motion let me know what it was he wanted from me. I didn’t let him. I regret it now. I gave him a book of my poems. He said thank you, and left. The paint is yellow, like his teeth were. I walk over to them. I pour paint around their bodies, make a yellow circle. They’re in the middle. Only now does the man notice me. He smiles at me and his hand twitches. He’d like to offer it to me, introduce himself. I shake my head, no need to, it’s fine, just carry on. He’s deep into her. The orgasm is approaching, spreading its membrane. I can feel it. I throw the scarf around his neck. I surround them like they’re my prey. My finger on the trigger. I wait. Moaning. The wet pulse of contact. The rhythm grows. His buttocks are pressed together. Her chest is touching his. It’s so strong that I feel the pulsing waves in my knees. The shot.
Now I’m truly, properly ashamed. A pleasure thief. I retreat to my room. Anwar has woken up.
‘Good morning.’
‘Good morning.’
Anwar ibn Tahir ibn Anas Al-Dukhan, born in Basra in 1981, is some sort of prince. A little before Bush II’s war, he and his family moved to Boston, where he crossed the river and went to study International Law at Harvard. After the caliphate was established, he got a job at UIGOPWTSOALSSV (United Interest Groups of People With the Same or at Least Somewhat Similar Values), the modern successor to the United Nations. He’s been in America for over thirty years – he’s had enough of bureaucracy, official celebrations and gala dinners – and soon, anytime now, that which has in recent years become the sole purpose of his existence, and which has been gaining an increasing lead over all other aspects of his life, will be brought about.
He and Zoja met a few weeks ago by chance at a public library when both of them, at almost the same moment, had come to borrow The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. A conversation and a coffee later and they were in bed together – each too old to drag out the courtship any longer than necessary. These days it’s hard for them to part.
‘Did you sleep well?’
‘Not too well the last two hours. Animal sounds.’
‘They’ve been doing that for two hours?’
‘They started as soon as you left. The last half hour has been a little quieter. At first I thought he was skinning her alive.’
Zoja scratches her nose.
‘You know what I was thinking as I was watching them?’
‘Tell me.’
‘Why the hell have we never found any pornographic cave paintings?’
Anwar cracks up. Zoja is thinking aloud.
‘Where are the phalluses, where’s the coitus, the cunnilingus? Nothing but buffalo, bison, wild cats, nothing but violence and blood, but no sex. Caveman puritans.’
Finally, he clears his throat, his eyes watering.
‘The Cave of Hands looks pretty erotic.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Argentina.’
Marjorie knocks. Zoja opens. She’s dressed in a man’s bathrobe.
‘Ever since you agreed to read,’ says Marjorie, ‘you’ve been getting tonnes of mail again.’
‘You’re going to read?’ asks Anwar.
Zoja nods. ‘Today.’
‘Today?’
‘Are you coming?’
Marjorie looks back and shakes her head with a smile. She puts a hand into the opening in her bathrobe. It’s not possible to see what she’s doing with it.
‘Where, when?’ asks Anwar.
‘In the evening, somewhere around Bed-Stuy.’
‘Bad neighbourhood,’ says Anwar.
‘Ah, not so bad any more,’ says Marjorie, ‘The new generation of squatters is surprisingly peaceful. I hear the whole northeast has come to listen. Brooklyn hasn’t seen anything like it since Yoko Ono set herself on fire for the tenth anniversary.’
‘That was totally morbid,’ says Anwar. ‘How old was she then? Over a hundred?’
‘Over ninety,’ says Zoja.
‘Eighty-nine, to be exact,’ says Marjorie.
‘Crazy Japanese,’ says Anwar.
All three shrug their shoulders.
‘Well, I hope no one sets himself on fire tonight,’ says Zoja. ‘It’s already hot enough out there.’
Large mills of light, that’s what time is. Ludovico is standing in front of his shabby flat’s only window, he’s slipped his fingers between the blinds to open a slot for a thin strip of sunlight to fall on his disturbed face, and he’s looking at the fried town in front of him accompanied by a person’s snoring in an extended afternoon nap. In the distance the bridges are devouring the sunsets. He would like someone to finally believe him. The bleached metal prisms are breaking up the light to create a pinkish rainbow. Passion has overcome him again. Again, he went to her, he went to take her, even if afterwards he always felt so small. It’s too hot to go to work. The boss called, said nothing. Ok, so nothing, good, so nothing. Then he sat on the couch and stared into his lap until the floor disappeared and there was nothing but a phallus. Before he surrendered, before he, all sweaty, with curses on his lips, stormed through the door to where he knew he’d find her, he remembered the dreams. He was naked and mighty and the cats who loved him – he could see from their eyes that they finally loved him – tore his body to pieces and devoured him raw. When he remembered those dreams, he knew that he wouldn’t feel small today. That this wouldn’t be another loss but a ritual before the battle. Zoia stole his faith and she stole his faithful. Carious cuttle. The cats in the freezer are already frozen stiff. It has to go somewhere, all this light.
Max Adorcuse licks h
is hand. For the first time in his life he feels like something is really worth it. The salty sweat bears witness. He puts the mouthpiece of the megaphone to his lips and breathes in deeply in order to really howl. ‘Please don’t.’ He lets the excess air out through his nose and turns to his right, where an old man is standing, a pleading expression on his face. One hand is holding a stick, the other is preventatively propped against his ear.
‘How are you doing, sir?’
‘Good, as it were. It’s just that, as it were, my ears aren’t what they used to be. Without doubt I overburdened them, so now all they hear is a whistle if someone screams. I don’t like it when people shout, as it were, but I understand why that’s necessary sometimes. Mass communication, yes, as it were.’
The old guy’s speech is punctuated by nervous twitches, hands running over his face, and salivating sibilants.
‘I’m Max Adorkúse.’
A splutter of laughter.
‘Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, yes, as it were, don’t worry, I know them all, I knew them all.’
‘You look familiar.’
‘Yes, yes, yes, as it were, so, you’re the one who put this thing on?’
‘I am.’
‘Good, very good, as it were. Many people.’
‘Yes. But I’m not deluding myself. It’s because of Zoia.’
‘People want to get to know each other, and you gave them a good motive. It doesn’t matter how you drum up a bunch of people, as it were, just that they’re here together now. Maybe…’
‘Maybe what?’
‘Maybe all of this will be good for something.’
Some bushes are rustling with desire. Among the dry leaves you can catch patches of naked skin. Sweat and dust and sweet sexuality.
At the top of the pile there’s a note from the letter carrier. Get yourself a proper letterbox, I’m retiring in two years and all your mail is going to fuck up my back – Best. Rudy. Rudy and I used to be really good friends. What happened? I can’t remember. I think she was in love with me. Did she try to kiss me? Or did I only dream this? I don’t know. One fine morning she stopped coming for coffee. And that was that.
The very first few days after the new collection was published there was a huge amount of mail. I poured everything out into the bedroom, a flood of letters, the floor was eight inches deep in paper, I took my shoes off and swam, slept among the envelopes. Tore them open and read them. So many emotions. I felt like the conduit for that thorn that pricks into every one of our souls, that deeply buried, golden thorn that tears the veil of the everyday, slices into it a tiny rift from which truth drops, I mean…honesty, that voracious, beautiful, horrible honesty. As we walk around the city, we’re hiding. It takes a shove to really open us up. It poured out the window. We don’t know ourselves. We fundamentally do not know ourselves. And how much effort is needed to plug the rift. The room is groaning with hormones. Denuded consciousnesses, hard to imagine the insight that I got back then. I saw that I am not alone, not even close. And since then I haven’t written a single poem. People don’t need poems. All they need is an ear to listen to them. But they have to be honest, otherwise it’s all just a degree of illusion. Nothing natural. Simple art.
Dear Zoia,
I fear the world is not turning in the right direction. Each and every one of us bears part of the blame, because we haven’t dared break away from the ballast of a dictated existence. I hope I’m not too old for that. I’d like to see us all come together.
I’m thirty-five years old. I was born one sinister 11th of September, you probably know which year. I grew up in a very strange world, which I began to regard as very strange only after I became a little more familiar with the world as it used to be. Maybe that’s just a projection. Maybe the world has always been very strange and our particular brand of strangeness is just a variation on this very dishonest world. But I don’t know. The counter-culture of the Sixties grips me. The techno-craze of the Nineties grips me. The third millennium horrifies me. And I think that we’re the ones to blame, because they’ve convinced us that the world is made up of masses of people we have no influence over. Only after you look around a bit do you see that there aren’t any masses of people. That we are only me, and you, and you, and you, and you… That the mass we’re constantly addressing when explaining the world just doesn’t exist. That in the chasms between us there aren’t thousands of choked-out voices exerting their will, but only a gaping hole in whose place there should be a genuine, warm, human relationship, but the phantasm of the crowd banished it. Each has his own life, they told us. But if I give someone my hand, we get to know each other, and the world is different.
I spent almost fifteen years at the bottom of the corporate ladder, overlooked, ignored in the hierarchy of solemn things. It rubs away at your soul, being caught up day after day in the same intrigue. But I had a job, and with the job came everything that the modern world intends for you. I had a girlfriend. We were in a relationship for eight years and it took us two text messages to break up. Things just mellowed out, I’d say. I had a few people who were less than friends and more than acquaintances. Someone you could compare yourself to, to have an approximate idea where you stand. When I left my job I was totally insufficient for the operations of envy, so they forgot about me in a week. Take Mike, for example. For ten years we played squash every Thursday and for ten years I listened to his misogynistic blustering. If I called him now, he would say who’s there?, and when I’d tell him he would repeat, who? I never asked my girlfriend to marry me because I was convinced she’d say no. Maybe I had bad luck. Maybe I should have hung around with different people. But everything is so concocted, made up.
This has to be overcome, somehow. I’m not smart enough to say how it all came about – maybe this is to blame: the cultural production of individualism which constantly nourished a semi-divine sense of a public ego, a false one, of course. Or is it the global system’s terrorist tactics that are to blame? They’ve turned public contact into an important thing, swaying between thinking of an undiscriminating, tolerant attitude as dangerous or, worse, distasteful. Or is it something else, something completely different, that’s to blame? In any case, I’m sure that there are many of us who expect more from life. We have to spread our arms. Closing ourselves into the mould of bourgeois relational form leaves us lonely, weak, worthless and at the same time firmly convinced of the illusion of control over our own existence. The system is wily and vile, our confidence is a grim joke. That’s why we should come together. I don’t want to propagate power, as if, together, we could destroy and/or establish and/or change the world. I would just like to see who, today, is alive and present.
I hope I haven’t gone on for too long. I would like to ask you to read your poetry at Poetrylitics, an end-of-summer festival. I’m not going to make any money, and I’m not looking for any benefits from this. My motives are honest and pure. If you come, a lot of those people whose lives your poetry has changed will come. There are many of us, each of us lonely and stuck with our own shattered fate. I know you like your solitude, but I’m asking you because there are a lot of us who can’t, who mustn’t, who don’t want to afford it any more. Unite us? I’ll tell you more if/when you respond.
With great hope, with warmest greetings, in great anticipation of an answer,
another part of the carious cuttle, forever yours,
Max Adorcuse
(Vaclav Smech)
I said yeah, sure, why not. For so long I have wriggled out of such invitations, each with a whiff of profit-mongering or of some sort of ego trip from a disagreeable community, corpo-commercial, fashionable elite circle-jerkers. And then this poor Max. I followed the process to the degree it pleased me. He did everything himself, no money, pure will. If he wasn’t so ridden with complexes and aimlessly reflexive I might even like him, but then I wouldn’t want to read, maybe I would just… He didn’t want a kiss. That, for instance, I respect. An inhibited soul that calls for disclosure.
Exposure. Is that the same thing?
And now this space is again shaking under the weight of unknown voices. I leaf through them. I try to feel them through the cover. I feel a prick in the finger, like a needle on a spinning wheel, an ugly brown envelope, with ‘Zoja’ written on it, with a ‘j’. I turn it around and around. Nothing. That ‘j’ unlocks a rusty latch, and bits of rust splatter like raisins from potica. Home. In German, Traum means dream. I haven’t dreamt about home in ages. For that I’m thankful. The ‘j’ frightens me. It looks like a hook that will sink into my lip and drag me off somewhere I don’t want to go. Somewhere I have, deliberately, not been for so long it should no longer matter to me. Like a blunt memory that the brain didn’t know how to classify as unimportant, so it stays with you and insists, something as senseless as a stop at a filling station, a smile of buried love, a chocolate wrap and the smell of fumes… All too often, I still wake up to that.
I open it. Inside there’s a plane ticket and nothing else. It’s a morning flight, the earliest one. The voice of destiny, the call of coincidence. Who knows. I stick it in my pocket and don’t want to think of it any more. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad? Where is Seam?
Ludovico’s index finger is his longest. In the womb he was subject to an abnormal level of oestrogen. Therefore his frontal cortex has poor neuronal networks. Ever since he can remember, he’s loved torturing animals. There’s something attractive in suffering. In those eyes that have no idea why. They have no idea why. He feels it ballooning somewhere in the nape of his neck. He is drawn to it. The cats in the freezer are already frozen stiff. Like sock puppets peering into emptiness…
Theodore Robert ‘Ted’ Bundy, John Wayne Gacy Jr., Zodiac, David Richard Berkowitz, Mark David Chapman, Ludovico Överchild. Not yet entirely among them, but soon, if everything works out. Corrections are violence. What grows up broken stays broken.
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