Adam Thirlwell - Lurid & Cute

capable of world transformation

Not that Hiro did so much standing. His general posture was the recline . A small pot he kept with him contained his little contribution to the pharma economy: the antipsychotics recommended by his doctors, then pills he had bought online from high-rise compounds in other countries, herbal remedies — and this sometimes led to comical situations, like he would mistakenly take both sleeping pills and antihistamines, then sleep from midnight until morning, wake up, but still keep falling asleep, until finally he would wake for good just in time for a late supper with the family, and so to bed again. How ill precisely Hiro was, I did not know. To be taking such pills, for instance, in no way made him special among the people I knew. We were all of us ordering remedies off the Internet. If things seemed possible to Hiro that did not seem so possible to other people, I tended to find this only charming and not sinister. Like he would happily talk to strangers and offer to drive them out to the airport, little kindnesses like that. For why should a person always have to waste money on vast taxis? And therefore why should I judge such brightness as a craziness? Perhaps, absolutely, now that I am maimed and aged and all alone, I now think differently, but at the time I was trying very hard to make the world a better place. And so we continued buying drugs off the Internet for our private use and these increasing narcotic entertainments did make the way I thought perhaps a little blurred. I don’t mean by narcotics the semi-precious items like peyote or crystal meth, which I tend to associate with ill health, but items you can find in your local general store like ketamine or uppers. They give you a sense of confidence which is really very important in your entrance to the adult world. For if your friends all dress like children, with their sneakers and sweatshirts and goofy hair, and so do you, this can definitely mean that the overall tone feels gruesome.

— The problem is not, said Hiro, — that the adults wish us harm.

— It is sadly not, I said.

— The problem, said Hiro, — is that they wish us only good. We are the first children who are everyone’s dream children.

— Is not so good.

— Is not, he said.

To think of the problems that can occur to one person, or two! To be a troupe is so much safer. But of course such troupes cannot be maintained at every point in the day, not in this sadly serious era, so that when Candy wasn’t there, which was of course the usual situation, when Candy went into the city to her office, her high office in the fraying clouds, Hiro and I continued the troupe as a duo. And often this duo was a seminar where we examined my moral philosophy.

— You, said Hiro, — are in one strange position.

— Say it, I said. — I can take it.

— Flighty with your only love, dependable with everyone else.

— Flighty?

— Is the truth, said Hiro.

It’s true that Hiro is my best friend but I nevertheless didn’t think that he was right, or not right entirely. I knew, of course, why he said it. Romy had called me the day she left the hospital, and immediately I had gone to see her. Naturally I was very relieved that she was OK, but I would say the greater emotion was that I was once again excited, as I always was in Romy’s presence — how quickly feelings succeed each other! — so that just as recently I had been terrified of total catastrophe, I mean of Romy’s death and the death of my marriage and the total wipeout, now that such a scenario was no longer happening it was as if it had been cleansed from my memory entirely, and I only cared once more about Romy enjoying my wit and company. The new catastrophe, perhaps a wit could say, was the catastrophe of her survival. Everything continued as before — like I was the dazzled driver drifting happily between lanes on the autoroute — and in a way this episode of blood in its terror and suspense had made me feel even more tenderness and obligation towards her. Had I never come across her bleeding form, and had we simply got up and had breakfast and left, I suppose it’s possible that we might have determined to remain just happy friends. But the blood was a form of drama and it made us very close. Not that we had slept together again, but we did write messages to each other very much and talk on the phone, for such ties are difficult to deny — and yet also, nevertheless, I loved Candy without end. And this is why, I tried to explain to Hiro, I think that marriage is the most confusing state, it is our greatest enigma, like suicide was in the previous absurdist times. So what if our problems seem sweeter than those times, those times of wars and also pestilence? We are sweeter maybe, but also deeper. For basically I think true magnificence is in the maintenance of as many relations as possible. What else could utopia mean? Whenever I go to a party I always think it’s going to be the best party ever , Shoshana said to me once, before she disappeared deep into the furthest regions of this country. And I still have never heard a sentence that more made me fall in love. But if you really do think that way, and I think I do too, it is going to mean a difficult burden will fall on you. You are going to submit yourself to risks of other people that most people do not approach — the vast wisdom that any person who has once entered your life should never be dismissed from it. Those who no longer talk to people they slept with even just once are cowardly or strange, I think, while if I were ever a Communist and wanted to resign from the Party I would do it with a gentle grace — because why antagonise for no reason? That’s why marriage is such a grand and permanent problem. It is the purest of moral conundrums — like the largest urban sprawl in the world, so that whenever you think you have left it you are just in another concentric garden suburb. Or, to put this the other way round, in the end you cannot be only talking to your wife, and once you talk to other people then where will things ever end? You will, for instance, find yourself not only sending tender messages to other women, but also looking after your best friend and trying to keep him happy.

— Oh I’m the problem? said Hiro. — Is that so, chico?

And in a way he was. What I mean is that I think it often takes a person to make a philosophical problem obvious, it can’t be done with just the abstract thinking in your escritorio, and my friend Hiro was such a demon. For while it’s normal to say that the rule of the overall reality is that nothing happens — well, what do you do when something does? I think something is a whole unexamined category of philosophy. And it was Hiro who had this gift for inventing something where usually there was nothing. He was the opposite of the way people sit in deckchairs in the shopping-centre forecourts, as if they can make these weird spaces normal, which they can’t. Hiro could make a bingo hall or chop shop seem overgrown with unbelievable orchids and green vegetation. And even if such behaviour had its causes, and was perhaps a form of suffering, that didn’t mean the consequences weren’t real or even joyful. With Hiro it turned out that the difference between the ghoulish and the usual was maybe very thin, like about as thin as the difference between two sides of aluminium foil.

where crimes can be virtues

To consider small crimes as larger virtues was one such innovation. At night we would drive around the city — the quarter where the butchers had lately been placed, the beaux arts buildings, the cricket stadium — just slowly drifting past each little row of kiosks and illuminations, e.g. Kasey’s Chicken, a late-night milkshake bar, the gaming centre, a store that was advertising Cube Ice & Ice Cream, with underneath 24 hour scribbled in neon — and although I wasn’t sure if this all-hours claim was true I still liked that whole modern sentiment, because I think it’s good to know that always while you sleep you can get up and find people and also buy things, not that you ever will get up for cannoli or the like at five in the morning, but still, I think that’s an important reassurance. And then occurred — if that’s the right way of putting this, because I am finding often a problem of verb forms, I am finding it difficult to have the right tenses at my disposal — this moment where we were in one of the further suburbs, on one of our roaming sprees, and we wandered into a bodega, just to look around or consider buying lighter fluid or the fashion magazines, and I delayed looking at some blown-up cover for a society journal, just staring into the dead face of a supermodel or heiress, and so I was therefore maybe a few steps behind Hiro — which was why when I found myself definitively inside this place my first view of Hiro wasn’t him bent over and examining gelati in the freezers, no, not doing whatever else might be normal in such a setting, but instead with one hand he was holding a maxi bag of prawn chips and with the other he was holding out a horizontal pistolet or gun. And much later, when we described to Candy this tableau, she was certainly perturbed.