Lurid & Cute (27 page)

by armed intruders

Also after the macabre scene with the boy selling dusters and other kitchen items I had this resolution that in general I would not be so fearful of those who came to our door, the extras and deadbeats. I would lavish attention everywhere, on every member of the cast list, wherever they happened to be placed in the general composition. And so I opened the door and immediately discovered that I was letting in two men to our house, masked in balaclavas. Also they had these accessories that very much resembled guns. I realised that I was shouting something – not so much articulate as just a noise, and so no more useful than the cries of any other language, like if I had said
oyé
or anything else. I was being walked backwards from our hall and into our living room, and as I walked I was trying to think at this very late point in the night both of lighting and of the telephone, just whether in either case I could reach them and try to make the situation better. But also I was feeling very scared and my body was lighter than it had ever been, and softer. I was not really sure of the language I should use. Definitely I was happy that my mother and father were not here, because no one should see their house invaded, and not only that, but also see their child menaced in this way in the morning/night when everyone should be sleeping. The balaclavas in particular did upset me. After all, Hiro and I had been very careful not to use such threatening items ourselves, and now I did feel vindicated, because the effect was horrible and upsetting. Certainly it made me scared but the more scared I became also the more angry, even if at this point I did understand that to be angry was no solution. But still, a sense of humiliation was inescapable and I let it marinate there. These two people had dressed their faces in balaclavas, although as I say this I realise that
dressed
is perhaps not right, but I do not know the verbs for balaclavas, just as I only know that fear it turned out was new and very sad, because it was like a whole body had disappeared, like I was about as strong as the drape of a curtain as it hangs there, perhaps not even as strong as that.

— Sit the fuck down, said the second man, and as he did so I realised he was a girl.

Not only that, but at the same time I also realised that there was something in their tone of voice that indicated a possible uncertainty, I mean a lack of practice or of being duped by their own role, and that's a problem, because one thing that is true is that you have to sell your role to yourself and know it before anyone else will be sold and know it too, but whether or not that calmed me I do not know, I think it didn't, because in many ways the gangster who is nervous is much more dangerous than the gangster who is a professional and knows what they are doing, just as you do want your mortgage adviser to be seasoned and basically bored by the job they have to do, that's only human nature.

THE GIRL

I said, sit the fuck down.

So I sat. As I did so I saw Candy standing in the doorway, and she looked so vulnerable, in this black vest and shorts, this vest that displayed the pale surface of her skin and the beginning of her breasts and I felt such love for her – such bravery in unknown circumstances! – and wished that I could cry out how much I loved her, but decided sadly no. And so instead I let the scene continue as its starlets wanted: with much terror and fainting and blood.

& very gently terror enters the picture

No doubt there are always people – as the poison works its way into their liver and veins, or they press the trigger tight as they aim it at their heart, or see the truck approaching on the wrong side of the road with its horn sounding across the empty plains, or while the girl who on reflection now seems possibly illegally young is unzipping them and whispering that no one needs to know – who have their doubts as to whether the real is as real as it tends to think it is. That's just the natural consequence of seeing blood or guts or other gunk. It's just what happens when gore is present. Because no one was expecting it they do not know what to say or how to describe it, they have no references and when you have no references it becomes difficult to talk – it's like when people after witnessing a car crash or drugs shooting or plane disaster say,
Hey it was just like a movie
, whereas they really mean of course that it wasn't like anything they've ever seen before. But the gore is a much smaller subset of the lurid than people ordinarily think. The lurid can occur at much smaller moments. Because I don't think it's so unusual to expect that the lurid and the normal might just happen to never coincide, no it's not so lunatic to imagine that nothing strange will ever happen in your life because of course most of the time it doesn't – but then the extraordinary isn't what never happens but what sometimes or very rarely happens, which means that it does happen, in the end. And one conclusion that can possibly be drawn from this would be that the lurid and the ordinary are in fact only different descriptions of the same thing, like they're the low note and the high note and in between is the sliding glissando scuzziness of an electric violin. The movement from one state to another can be therefore very small – as miniature as crossing over from Mexicali to Calexico, or, for instance, letting in two people who seem to wish you harm, with deep malignity in their postures and their tone of voice. And in fact maybe there's not so much difference between the benign and the malign. In the end you cannot separate any event into any category at all, since everything is just a succession of singular things.

— This is only a warning, said the man.

— OK, I said.

— Is kind of your own fault, the girl said.

— We're being nice, said the man.

— You shouldn't take what isn't yours, said the girl.

— But what have we taken? said Candy.

So much communication was occurring between Candy and me that it was no doubt marvellous, if what you are interested in is the wonder of human consciousness and its ability to exist as this kind of ectoplasm between two people, but I was trying not to think about what Candy might be thinking. And also I was at the same time interested in the fact that these two gangsters did seem very unsure. They were picking things up and smashing them but in a slightly listless manner, like they did not quite believe in this as a gesture. It was making me sad because now all my suspicions would return again, and never would I trust people, I mean the people I did not know – for always now I would feel justified to refuse the people who came to my door, demanding things, as if they were just criminals or lunatics rather than hard-working honest people. Little by little, they were taking the room apart. Everything that had previously been in the room was still there, sure, but now it was in more pieces than it should have been. And I think it's quite unusual, to see a room that's minutely multiplied like that. Only a few people will have seen this phenomenon – when a room in your house is completely and very beautifully destroyed, in one systematic tableau.

in the form of a destroyed room

Up against one wall, the twin cushions of the sofa were now standing, in a slack and improvised V, and each half had been slashed like the canvas of one of those modernista paintings so its foam was visible and you realised just how dense the foam inside a sofa is, like
foam
as a word in no way does its deep density and honeycomb kapok justice – and these slashed cushions formed the backdrop or central motif to the general scene, in the foreground of which was the smashed form of my banjo, whose pieces were now haphazard around the room, the left-hand side of which was marked by a chest of drawers, except now every drawer was pulled out in an irregular stacked fashion so that its profile was more like an art deco building, and while most of these drawers were still in their containing chest, with the stuff inside them strewn on the floor or collapsing over the rims, two of the drawers had been entirely taken out of the chest and turned upside down, so that out of them had tumbled a selection of old photographs that were now in a spilled heap, including the ones from my father's business visit to an unidentifiable city when I was five, and also photos of me sporting a spaceman's helmet and space cadet's shirt, while on the other side of the room, by which I mean the right-hand side, the wall now had a small smash or dent in its plaster, maybe related to the fact that a mirror had been pulled off the wall in the process of which the hooks had ripped down two strands of wallpaper that was printed with ornamental roses or tulips – I have never been good with the language of flowers – which now descended floppily to the floor where they caressed a pile of my old Super 8 films and a broken Polaroid camera and a smashed pair of Hiro's glasses: yes, this was the basic set-up on the floor, over which was now scattered my backpack that was now torn, and some of my mother's shoes, which she had left out, maybe to clean them or reheel them or resole them, which included a pair of gold sandals with high heels, and two pairs of black stilettos, and as I looked at all this it struck me very forcibly how easy it was to make objects into garbage and I think that's an interesting phenomenon, that everything ends up like this, I mean just sad and badly made, unusable like my banjo, dirty, it's their natural fate, there's no meaning in anything at all, I suppose – an example of which, for instance, was one of the toys that Hiro had bought for the dog which had once resembled a spirited rabbit but now no longer had the stuffing in its legs, and the stuffing itself was revealed as a mess of cotton wool that was a pile of clouds on the floor, while its felt eyes had been ripped out and were on the floor among its entrails and its arms, although I think that in fact this destruction had been there already, and was not these gangsters' fault but the dog's, but as I looked at this bright tableau I was also thinking that while this looked like total mess the amount of actions that they had really performed was strangely smaller than you might think, the effects were much grander than their causes because there are only so many objects in a room that can be destroyed and in fact the most confusing and perplexing to the eye was the most minute, by which I mean the new surface on the floor that the girl had caused by just upending some quite small boxes of my mother's in which she kept whatever she had no idea of classifying, a surface that was soft and sharply glittering and was made up, for instance, of two pairs of folding sunglasses, but also some plastic and silver rings and a set of picnic plastic cutlery, under which were draped one striped silk scarf and one chiffon scarf – printed with what I think was a floral design but I wasn't down on my hands and knees among it – along with some hair grips and a miniature pill box with a beaded design on its lid and some old beer-bottle tops that were presumably souvenirs, one fried-chicken menu, then various chain necklaces tangled up, I think in fact there were more rings than I previously thought, as well as a flyer from one of the bars that we had visited, and then also a pile of now-defunct fairy lights to light up any home which I had never ever noticed but now realised they had been hung up in our house for all the major festivals, because I suppose in the end what people mean by an unknown reality is just the real you haven't noticed, like the image in a microscope or the mess that's created by just making a pile horizontal, a pile which further contained, I finally noticed, not only a bag of weed but also various other empty plastic sachets, and a felt-tip pen which I think was the one Romy had once used to do up her hair, though how it had got there I had no idea, and then another pen, one of those pens where inlaid in the holder is a panorama, and this particular panorama was a miniature ferry that slid to and fro in front of the Manhattan backdrop while I definitely thought that if you could only look closer then you would see the hopeful faces at the ferry windows and then the mascara on the women's heavy eyelashes, if you could only get even closer, but I couldn't.

& a gun

It was at this point that in wandered our curious dog. And I was very glad, because a dog is always a distraction.

— What's his name? said the man.

— Sidney, I said.

— It's a girl? he said.

— No, boy, I said.

— Fuck you, he said.

— How is it a girl's name? I said.

— Obviously it's a girl's name, he said.

I had no idea what to say to that and so I just said nothing, because possibly this was just the menacing crazy talk that was prelude to us being dismembered or other violations. Or maybe in fact every name is double, and philosophically he was right, which I suppose is possible.

— Sydney, is with a
y
, he said.

— Oh, OK, I said.

Always in life it's good to humour people and especially when they mean deliberate violence to you – for obviously I was not convinced that you could spell Sydney with a
y
, not as a name, but then in life there are so many names and in the end a name is just not important, it's just a means of identifying something with one sound when that thing is in fact multiple and not really to be identified at all. And if this were all that were to happen then I did think we had got off lightly.

— The money, he said, — is to be paid tomorrow.

— What money? I said.

— Really? he said.

— What money? said Candy.

— The money is not important! I cried.

— No? said the girl.

And she presented a definite gun.

which he cannot deny is in some way a just punishment

I felt a wild smearing sense of injustice inside me, or perhaps more precisely this sense surrounded me, like a cape, and maybe in fact that sense was also fear. When I was criminal myself, I had not been so fearsome! We had been very careful to avoid harm! When we entered the nail salon or canal cafe with our gun we knew that definitely it was not real and also that even had that gun been real we would not have been capable of using it. Whereas this was a very different proposition, it turned out, just because this person was not me. There was no way of knowing how far this gun was just a gesture or a true instrument of massive harm. In general I did feel that people were not such maniacs as to shoot in domestic areas, but obviously I did not know what she was thinking, not at all. Of course I was therefore scared! But not just scared. I was many frequencies at once. Anger certainly was something I was feeling, or a sentiment just like it. And also at the same time I had some expanding sense of karma. For the provenance of these people was very mysterious and could not easily be explained, or at least, there was more than one possible explanation and they were giving me very few clues. But whether they came from the nail salon or cafe or even the small bodega from so long ago, it was obvious that at some point we had made one fatal miscalculation, which was to think that that salon or cafe or bodega would be run by conscientious citizens with impressive insurance deals, rather than, as was perhaps becoming clear, criminal organisations who very possibly were using these operations to obscure their secret financial misdeeds.