Lurid & Cute (34 page)

— It's not right. It's not right.

Or something roughly like that. I thought that then Hiro had scrambled away into the dark forest before realising he had simply lain himself down very simply on the floor. And I became very afraid. I think that fear has been one of the lessons I have learned from this season, and how you cannot find the way of being equal to it. It's just the natural reaction when everything is sweet and there is no mischief in you, yet everything you do tends to create these ancient consequences, like you are in the amphitheatre with the wolves and the lemurs. For since this moment in the woods I have often dwelled on this finale. Never have I felt so single and alone, and suddenly I thought of our dog in the car underneath the salon towels and how he was alone, too, just as Candy was somewhere in the city and alone. When I used to wake up in the mornings, I would lie there and consider the fringe of light below the curtain. And I always knew that my mother would be in the house and everything was safe and that was always a relief. To know that safety was always possible was a lovely form of knowledge. And it occurred to me that in fact until this moment there had never been a point when my mother did not know where I was. This was the first moment where I was completely outside her orbit, and it was very sad. I mean, it was sad to discover how this sense of safety was just one more of my illusions, that in fact I was not exempt but like every other animal in the world I was
killable
, just like my dog was, too. It was really amazing and terrible. But still, I was trying to keep thinking because I had this instinct or superstition that if I was thinking then I would not be in danger, and the hyper was as ever my only mode, like thoughts were leafing from me and gathering at my feet, like pencil shavings. You always do whatever you want, said my mother. Always you do whatever you want and that is OK with me but it is going to upset other people, she said. I had always disagreed with her. I thought that instead you had to have some faith in people because otherwise why continue? I mean why continue in society at all? – and everyone in some way is in society, they can't help it. Except that possibly right now I wasn't.

in a small delirium of language

Then I heard a noise and felt something on the inside of my body that was a pain more than I had ever known. I guess I knew what must have happened but also still I was hoping that I did not. I did not want to think I had been shot. So many images of dismemberment and maiming were inside me. Still, it was undeniable. It felt like all my legs were gone except they were also still both there, and one of them was frantic, as if in panic. I was thinking things through as belatedly and slowly as the people on the sidewalks whose umbrellas are still up although there isn't any more rain. There was a crumpled liquid soft implosion in my thigh, like a starfish. I felt like I was not precisely here but everywhere else, which was complicated, so I closed my eyes to concentrate.

— Yeah it's done, said someone above me.

I thought she was talking to me before I realised she was talking on a phone.

— No it's sorted, she said. — It was nothing at all.

Then they walked away, leaving us to our sad devices. Everything was over and empty, the kind of emptiness the station boulevard has, at night, when all the minicabs are gone. And I was trying to hold together this conversation I was trying to continue with myself, since no one else was trying, and I was saying that of course I couldn't be sure that this wasn't dying. I might be wrong that I was going to live. It was my old
Madama Morte
fear, but this time perhaps more rational. For presumably, I thought, in fact I would never know if this was dying, because if in the next four minutes, or twelve minutes, I find that I have died, this will be a pure delirium of grammar, unless it turns out that in fact I will be able to just leak out of this body and observe the scene, and only then I suppose will it turn out that grammar was not delirious at all. Hiro was moving very slowly and I hoped that he was smiling, because I did think we had reached some resolution, and that was definitely a relief. It was like finally all the pirates had arrived at once to claim their merited revenge. And perhaps, I suppose, they had.

from which our hero surveys his recent history

One thing I had been considering a lot in these nightmare times was that story from the classical era about the famous sadhu and the flute – that as the poison was being brought to him in a bronze cup to effect his immediate execution he was learning a melody on the flute. And when people asked him what the fuck he was up to he said:
At least I'll have learned this melody before I die
. And while I know that this legend is meant to be a legend proving how noble the sadhu was in his adherence to an ideal, I think it also helps to make something clear that is usually very difficult to think about – because I don't see why the fact that this sadhu is about to be executed should make any real difference to the degree of his nobility. Every child who ever learns a banjo or piano scale in suburbia is being as noble and as grand – since after all proximity to death is just an effect of proportion: and in the scale of the vast long shadowed centuries we are all just as close to death as that pre-executed sadhu, or almost. But whenever I had thought like this, it had left me very anxious, since while one interpretation of the story of the sadhu was that this represented a noble adherence to the value of things that cannot be priced, there was also the possibility that in fact this just represented a total pointlessness, that this story was in fact not a parable but a black and gargantuan joke on all human endeavour. What I mean is: If it seems pointless for the sadhu then, why not for all of us now? Why do anything at all? That's a difficulty that seems to me far easier to dismiss than ever solve but also, I was suddenly thinking, among the lianas and ivies and streamers, it was liberating, too. I mean, it really is impossible to know what's truly real, or at least I sometimes think so. If you were to ask the prince which state was real, the slumming or the palace, I think he'd find it difficult to answer. All of which must mean that it's not impossible to change one's life, as in any Technicolor sequel in the tropics – or that if the world you believe in was lost before you ever entered it, and is only an illusion, that's no reason not to preserve that lovely illusion. To have lost everything, I just mean, may be a disaster but not all disasters are catastrophes. And when I thought about it like that, it made me very hopeful for the future.

 

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam Thirlwell
was born in London in 1978. He is the author of the novels
Politics
and
The Escape
; the novella
Kapow!
; and a project about international novels,
The Delighted States
, which won a Somerset Maugham Award. He edited a compendium of translations for
McSweeney's
. He has twice been selected as one of
Granta
's Best Young Novelists, and his work has been translated into thirty languages. He lives in London. You can sign up for email updates
here
.

 

ALSO BY
ADAM THIRLWELL

Politics

The Delighted States

The Escape

Kapow!

 

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IN SUMMARY

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Epigraph

1. Madama Morte

2. Utopia

3. Lowdown, Clumsy, Sly, Underhanded

4. The Pistolet

5. Long Fiesta (The Horoscope)

6. Tropicália

7. The Thing Itself

8. Time Sadness

9. Noir

A Note About the Author

Also by Adam Thirlwell

Copyright

 

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

 

Copyright © 2015 by Adam Thirlwell

All rights reserved

Originally published in 2015 by Jonathan Cape, Great Britain

Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

First American edition, 2015

 

eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected]

 

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014959065

Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-374-29225-6

E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71242-6

 

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