Will Self - Shark

and winch myself in . Ssshhh-huh, ssshhh-huh, ssshhh-huh — Claude’s breath roars in his ears — ssshhh-huh, ssshhh-huh, ssshhh-huh — and then:. . the sea’s gone! The sea, with all its multitudinous movements adding up to produce. . an absolute stasis . Claude cannot move his head, and, although his view is fish-bowled , there can be no doubt about it. . I’ve arrived : this is indisputably the association area of Canaan House. Ssshhh-huh, ssshhh-huh, ssshhh-huuuooo. . Claude’s panting clouds floorboards mellowed by decades of dirt and polish, floorboards that spread all the way to the tall twelve-paned sash windows, with here and there a scrap of carpet floating on their waxy-brown expanse. On these atolls are groups of mismatched chairs — cosy Windsor and Morris, stiffer wicker and Brewster — the habitations of the Canaanites, who, hunched and muttering, perform their ritual sacrifices: setting fire to Philip Morris and R. J. Reynolds, then watching their smoke chiffon up to a coffered sky of cracked and sepia plaster from which hang. . eight oblong fluorescent suns. — Why Fairfield? He might’ve been rescued by any of the other state institutions and VA hospitals he’s patronised over the years — or Lexington, or a drunk tank in a big city lock-up, or indeed Rikers, where he did a twenty-eight-day stretch in ’49, or — before his brother, Gertie, wrested away control of Pop’s trust and Claude hit the skids — one of the old-style convalescent homes that hung up their shingles to the south of Washington Square. — Such as that quack Doctor Herbert’s, where Claude would lie in cloistral repose, loaded on phenobarbital. . reds. . MS. . anything he wanted, in fact, so long as he hit on the good croaker in the approved roundabout way. — And why this particular day — this time? Chow time, because here comes Claude’s doppelgänger, shuffling up the line, his moulded plastic tray in his trembling hand. — Seeing himself like this: stiff creases in his charity blue jeans, his red-and-white knitted ski sweater too tight, his hospital-issue slippers pitifully flipflopping — Claude feels a compassion he’s only ever able to experience when he’s. . dissociated — yes, I’m dissociating . . Dissociating also from the other patients, two of whom, as Claude shuffles on to their chair-island, shuffle discreetly off. — Tears pricking his fixated eyes, Claude thinks, I was a tough guy then, capable of blowing the goddamn snoot off anyone who crossed me, the way I’d mine blown off at OCS. Hell, I’d still grab ass when it came near enough and kick up a ruckus if I was crossed. Things got too wiggy, and they threatened me with the jolt. . or the knife, I’d bring it right down again, sweet ’n’ low — make with the goody-lucid-two-shoes the way they wanted.The belligerent jut of Claude’s bearded jaw as he drops into a glider and begins to rock ’n’ roll, the digging of his elbow as he wields his plastic spork. . my gook-eyed stare — all of it is expressly calculated to intimidate anybody: stick-body patients, tight-ass shrinks, bullying orderlies, spectral grey ladies and callow candy-stripers. . but not this one! — As the tall young man with the long reddish curls brushed back from his bulging forehead comes striding through the swing door, Claude at last understands why here, and why now: Gourevitch! He may be wearing a threadbare pale-blue regulation dressing gown with CT stencilled on its breast, and holding one of the pathetic brown bags new inmates are given to carry their personal effects in, but Claude-with-the-spork makes him. . right away . This is not — no matter what he may’ve told the intake psychiatrist — a man who hears the voices of entities that cannot be seen. Soon enough after making his acquaintance, Claude realises that such is Gourevitch’s colossal self-absorption, he can barely hear the voices of real, live people who’re standing right in front of him . True, he’s wary — his button-black eyes sliding across the faces of his fellow madmen, trying to read them for potential threat — even so Gourevitch heads straight towards easily the most dangerous man in the room, creaks into the rattan chair beside Claude’s glider, and, ignoring the masturbatory creaking and cunnilingual slobbering his new companion makes as he paddles back and forth, sporking shit from my shingle , sets his brown-paper bag down on the low table in the centre of the crazy little colloquy. Soon enough Claude will find out what’s in that brown-paper bag: a blackening banana, a chicken sandwich made for Gourevitch by his still younger and very sexy wife and several packets of Winston — contraband he’s smuggled past the orderlies who searched him and took his street clothes. Not that this will have been difficult: the Hospital’s buildings — which are extensive, and mostly shaped in plan like heavy bombers — are some way out of town, camouflaged by groves of fir and hemlock, although everybody knows they’re here . . This tactic of hiding in plain sight is one that Fairfield has — here Claude relies on the jargon of the oppressor — introjected , so throughout its mad realm everything that should rightly be covert or furtive is instead out front and blatant: the orderlies sock patients right in the kisser, and there’s nothing they can do about it because only other staff are credible witnesses. As for the candy-stripers, since they believe all the male patients have been exiled to sex-free Miltown, they’ve no shame: unbuttoning their uniform dresses to adjust their twisted brassiere straps, lifting their skirts to straighten their nylons right in front of the fools, who, in point of fact, are still drooling — because the patients are also flamboyant extroverts who openly discard such pills, or, if bothering to put them in their mouths, spit them out seconds later in plain view. When served a solution from the dispensary hatch, they sloosh it around and spit it into the dinky paper cup it came in, then drop this into the trash basket with all the rest — so that when the trusty comes along, the frog-legs of his mop scissoring across the impetigo lino , he has to sop up all this slop. — Compelled to watch his former self, Claude experiences considerable irritation: Fairfield Claude is trying to put the hex on Gourevitch with his bug-eyed leer, his frantic gobbling and his jackhammer knee. These are the affectations of a novice . . one who imagines he can experiment with the role of madman, pulling it on and peeling it off. . a sweat-damp leotard lying on the floor of a walk-up in the East Village, goddamnit! In the non-place Claude currently inhabits he’s becoming aware of these annoyances: an old wooden hat-stand with a watch cap speared on one of its curling prongs and an umbrella sheathed in its tacky scabbard. — Oh, and someone yelling at him: Claude! Claude! — Back in Fairfield, Claude snatches Gourevitch’s brown bag and, pulling out the banana, starts with the spiel: They say they found it, yeah? Found it with one of these, yeah? A midget sub, yeah? This. . this is a midget sub, yeah? Gourevitch shrugs non-committally, Fairfield Claude, wise to him and repelled by the fishy swelling of his throat. . sooner or later gotta carve him a fuckin’ blow-hole! . . continues: This is the H-bomb, yeah? Dropped outta a fuckin’ boodlie-boo B-52, yeah? I know ALL ABOUT IT, MA-AN, ALL ABOUT IT! He splits the banana’s skin with his untrimmed and horny thumbnail and tears it open. You wanna know why I KNOW ALL ABOUT IT? Again, Gourevitch shrugs, and Claude thinks, What a creep, although of what kind — MIS, OSS, Agency or Fed — he cannot be sure. I know all about this STUFF — he picks slimy fibres from the banana peel — about electrical leads that feed through banks of cut-out switches to the proximity fuses buried in this STUFF — he squishes the banana between fingers — AYCH-EE, AYCH-EE arranged in shaped CHARGES — he moulds the pulp into roughly lenticular blobs — fuckin’ LENSES, man, focusing the SHOCKWAVE, making sure that it closes in nice and tight into a CRITICAL MASS. He takes the blobs in his hand, squeezes them into a shaking fist that he extends towards Gourevitch’s face, the bilious pulp oozing from between his fingers. — You wanna know how I know about THE BOMB, yeah? Goo spatters Gourevitch’s dressing gown — he grunts ambiguously. — I know about it because I WAS THERE, MAN, calculating the Godly integral and Satan’s diff erential — that’s how I know to track the ballistic orbs and tridents through the heavens, ma-an. — Fairfield Claude’s glider carries on creaking, his body rocks, someone claims. .Читать дальше