Adam Thirlwell - Lurid & Cute

by what is visible & what is not

Elsewhere the room was marked by an awkward messiness, the horizontal problem of chair legs and lamp cables, and I was sad when I had to think how awkward bodies can look when there isn’t a civilised amount of room. Sure, there were possibly only nine people involved, but still, the basic feeling was that everything was everywhere entangled. A girl was just lying there being licked between the legs while idly toying with a penis that had been offered to her hand, but her head was resting on some popzines and I worried for her neck. The question of common hygiene also worried me but I knew that if I raised this with for instance Candy she’d just dismiss it as even more uncool than usual, so I dismissed it on her behalf. I’m just saying that a lot of thoughts and counterthoughts were occurring in this time, so many that it turned out I needed the orgy for distraction, and so I watched, like it was television — if television had become something extreme and also malevolent. Because now what had happened was that Epstein had returned to our group, after getting a glass of water. He lay down beside my wife and they were talking in the manner of old friends, but this time old friends who are naked, which of course was what they were, and he was nuzzling at her neck, and as he did so I could see his penis sort of just gently move and rise in this slow fashion, and it was painful, to see this happen and not to be able to do anything, to have to accept this as the price you must pay for your ideals. And I was aware, not totally, just slightly — kind of like when you’re trying to reach for a dream when you wake up, or for the ping-pong ball when it’s been smashed off the table and it’s squirming away in spirals — that if I looked like I was happy with this new state of affairs, then it would have one good effect which would be that it would very much serve to show Candy that in this orgy I was not possessive of or focused on Romy. It would show me to be a libertine of absolute unimpeachable openness. For Epstein was looking also at Romy and they were smiling, and sadly I watched them watch each other. Everyone was exchanging these looks and glances to reassure each other that something drastic wasn’t occurring, whereas of course this scene was drastic, absolutely. And yet perhaps it wasn’t, after all, if we could still smile. Never had I felt so much tenderness and painfulness coexisting. Always I had wanted a troupe, I was trying to tell myself. It had been Candy and Hiro and me, and now here we were, extending it into vaster regions, like discovering the estates and empires of the moon. Romy leaned forward over Epstein and I could observe the tendons in her armpit and the way the skin of her breasts where it met her ribcage seemed so thin and fragile, and such delicacy made me want to cry out with love, but I didn’t, I tried to remain outside myself instead, and one way I could do this was by thinking about the smell, since something I don’t think I’d ever imagined if I’d ever thought about an orgy, which I must admit was rarely, was that the smell of many people having sex was obviously the same as just two people having sex, but multiplied, and this was sometimes disgusting and sometimes alluring, depending on your mood: it was deep and vegetal and enclosing, like being in a hothouse among tendrils with condensation on the glass. Then Romy was letting Candy sit over her face and it was a very delicate thing, the way Candy was holding herself there, very intently, you could see that it was a pleasure but also painful to remain in that position. Or Romy was sucking Epstein’s penis and just occasionally she’d minutely gag, which made me worried for her but then also I was thinking it must presumably be nice in some way, the choking sensation, or at least a pain that was part of the pleasure, or why else would anyone do it? Then I was looking sideways at Candy to see what she was thinking but she didn’t seem to be thinking anything. She was just narcotically relaxed and I was happy to see her happy — and however sad I was inside myself I did have this vision in front of me that I had to admit had happiness in it, for in this orgy it seemed to be being demonstrated that there were as I always wanted to believe other models for people to be with each other, there could be a sort of caring that was almost impersonal and very sweet. Perhaps therefore Hiro was right, that such small adjustments to reality could create much more interesting and pleasurable scenarios. Or in fact, whether or not I agreed with him, I reflected, it didn’t really matter, it did not affect how Hiro existed in the world: he was just there, the way wind is in a wind tunnel. Just as so for instance here he was, in front of us. He handed Candy and me an ice cream each.

— Let me, said Hiro, — for once in my life have the presence of mind displayed by the hero of that movie who in the middle stopped and said: I just want to let you know that being here is one of the pleasures of my life .

Then he walked away again. Hiro was hyper like a genki drink. And that, I think, was how the tropical confusion began.

with potentially dark consequences

For afterwards, it was delicate — like it’s always delicate after the first time you’ve had sex or at least just touched another person, but now exaggerated. It was that type of momentous thinking when future possibilities are now in the air, ludicrous like demons, or rather that you yourselves are the demons, flapping around in your stale and outsize costumes. I think I knew that none of us was exactly invulnerable or impervious to feelings, and that if this was happening then we should undertake some responsibility to try to prevent the tragic consequences. But that knowledge was so far away, like the merest lighthouse in the distance. So that however much I was aware — as Romy began to lick my by now quite tired penis while very gently cupping my balls in her warm hand, in a way that I felt was her mute method of reassuring me, and failing, that something other than playfulness was happening — that we had put ourselves in this situation where everyone was at risk, I could not pause and consider the question why. And if a story was taking on more elements than I expected, who was I to stop it? If things were leaking everywhere, my only duty was to examine the leak with care — whether or not I was the agent of catastrophe. I kind of thought I wasn’t. I tended to see Hiro as impresario in this case although perhaps to find an impresario or first cause is not important or even possible. Then a friend of a friend who was naked apart from a pair of ski boots wandered over and asked for a light. Her name could have been Gryphon or Maria or Kayley or something similar. I searched in my slumped jeans on the floor because I was glad to be busy with something that wasn’t sexual and meanwhile she kept talking.

— It’s been the worst comedown of my life, for like three days? she said. — My immune system’s just this tiny piece of paper? I mean it’s like I’m not myself any more?

That was the dialogue that was normal among my friends, with that whole offness and bizarrerie. In fact offness was the total territory we inhabited. That’s the tone I think I’m doomed to record.

leading to rumours of libertine exploits

The rumours that then circulated about our little band were gothic and other genres — the noir, the skin flicks, the hammer schlock — until eventually I answered my phone and there Shoshana was. What shit is going on? Shoshana would say, or one of those Fed-like questions. She wanted me to know what was being said — that we all slept together in the same bed; that we liked to sleep all day then spend the nights doing acid in some sexually combinatory situation; or that we would turn up at parties and instigate crazy effects that left people shaken and disgusted. It was also being said that I was becoming a part-time dealer, including various prescription and non-prescription drugs, with a sideline in web entertainments where Romy and Candy had sex, or Hiro and I would do anything we were asked by an online ensemble of paying spectators. Other people could swear that they had seen Candy at parties with her arms covered in bruises, or wearing handcuffs to which only I had the key. And of course, everyone, signore, is the subject of rumours, everyone exists as this series of misinformation and stories in the minds of others, this is what everyone knows all the time, but to discover that, to know it for real — well, that is an unusual fate which is usually only the merited preserve of the celebrity. To be notorious or scandalous in any way distressed me very much — not that I could deny, however, that such rumours corresponded with a certain new freedom in my way of life. To have been part of such a group activity seemed to have extended the basic thinking — this discovery that things I might have feared like orgies or infidelity in full view of my wife could happen as pristinely as the way avocados existed, or the postal system. I had finally realised that whereas I thought I was simply standing in the garden, among verdant streams and widespread birds, I had in fact pushed open a door and discovered the general abattoir, and everywhere there was gore staining the furniture and my delicate hands.