Adam Thirlwell - Lurid & Cute

that then escalates

Definitely it is no fiesta that does not alter your existence. And yet as always, even amid the most serious things I was being distracted, and I think somewhere I was having this backdrop thought as I listened to the songs that the problem with modern pop music was that it all got ruined by just the odd bad line. No rigour, that was the problem with pop music, and then I realised with surprise that I was saying this to Hiro. I had no idea where he had arrived from but also I was glad, because if Hiro was there then possibly this discussion with Candy might stop. And Hiro in response just gave me another upper to calm me down. I wasn’t so sure it was a good idea but I did it anyway because Hiro wanted me to stay as cheerful as I could. And I was thinking how this fiesta situation was like one of my bad dreams. I was having bad dreams every night — unlike Candy, who just has lovely dreams, like a shoe is there and she examines it, or a sundae, whereas me I get all feverish and crowded with demonic shapes. But I had no time to analyse this sensation because Candy was back there with me. This constant substitution was exhausting, no doubt. She’d taken something, like maybe coke, and she was also turning serious which is a definite recipe for conflict. That’s the problem with drugs — they make things happen but then you do not know what precisely they will have concocted until it’s too late. What happened next was that suddenly we found ourselves the usual stoned minicab driver with views on the music of the 1980s — and to your surprise in such situations it turns out that you do too, and then you are back home in your parents’ living room and listening to music that is perhaps just very loud, or also you are shouting in the kitchen, observing the neat arrangements of pots and pans and it is as if you are examining your childhood from the vantage point of some Swiss mountain sanatorium.

CANDY

How can we improve if you don’t want to try?

ME

Maybe we shouldn’t talk too much about this.

CANDY

Maybe I’ve never had amazing sex.

ME

Great, petrushka, thank you.

Yes, violence in arguments is definitely one thing that previously gentle people are good at. Not that it needs to be like Kayvon, who argued with his wife with a gorgeous passion, so much that each time she would throw his clothes out the window of their apartment, not because she wanted him to move out but just for the pleasure of seeing him go down and gather everything up, or not even for that pleasure, she once told me, but for the pleasure of seeing his embarrassment at being observed by the friendly Shahs on the third floor, looking down at him from their window, and to whom he would each time just offer a small but amicable wave. It’s incredible the amount of violence that finds its strange ways of emerging, I was thinking, as suddenly Candy emerged onto a new plane of hatred, like in one of those ancient video games where you jump from rising platform to platform in your effort not to fall.

CANDY

Do you even love me at all?

ME

You just said that was my major problem.

CANDY

Fuck you, OK.

ME

Babe –

CANDY

Like what, really, are you doing here?

ME

Hey, calm down –

CANDY

Calm down?

ME

I didn’t mean that. Just come to — come to bed. Or let’s just sit down.

CANDY

You don’t think you want to make me be like this? You don’t think you have models?

ME

Who?

CANDY

Your mother , sweetness, your mother.

Zigzags occur always in conversations and zigzags are a problem. And yet in depicting such a zigzagging conversation, I think, a lot depends, because in such a conversation are all the problems of being me and the people like me: I mean all the people who go about their business in island cities, going to restaurants and concert halls and supermarkets in circles, those people who find talking difficult but also necessary. That was the class in which I have to claim my inheritance.

ME

Why does this always have to be so difficult to talk to you? You’re shouting!

CANDY

I’m not shouting. I’m not shouting at all, kook.

She was crying and I did that face which is always depressing to produce, the kind which is softened and worried and hesitant because it is not the right face and you cannot locate the right face, it is somewhere lost among your collection of Pierrot masks and other carnival accessories. And it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps the problem with every amour in history is that you know everything you need to know as soon as you meet someone, but then also you can live with knowledge for a decade and still do nothing with it.

— I’m really sorry, I’m an idiot, I said. — I love you, you know that.

— I don’t need this, she said.

Always we were good at these conversations because we could make each other less hurt, even while we had hurt each other gruesomely.

— I do love you, I said.

— I know, she said.

— So much, I said.

— I know, she said.

That was how I managed to get her to our bedroom, and could even believe that I did not notice that the light was visible in my mother and father’s room, as if I were way above such small concerns as other people. I was concentrating on Candy instead.

until the thoughts of blood return

Every conversation is a world apart, and I think I mean that as non-metaphorically as possible. That’s why when I considered if perhaps I should just confess to everything, I was also thinking: Why hurt her more? There’s something so very convenient in all confessions, when really things could be much better managed in silence, by keeping all the different worlds apart. Yes, I was thinking, as we got undressed, I could be a better person by saying nothing at all. Even if the prospect did leave me very frustrated, that I had not managed to make a larger impression on the world. Oh, it’s appalling the positions you end up in, it feels just sometimes too impossible to continue! But then wasn’t this impossible structure what I also always liked when it came to the movies and pictures? I was just less happy if it was all for real. But I really had always liked those impossible objects where things happened in one medium that couldn’t happen in reality, the more dreamlike the better, I always thought, and so I always loved the images that included impossible tricks, and in particular the technical ones designed to demonstrate errors in perspective — where a man’s fishing rod loops up and into a faraway mountain lake, or a traveller on a distant hill is lighting his pipe from a candle held out of the window by the mistress of a hotel in the foreground, whose sign is hanging somewhere in the middle of a very far forest. Just as my ideal raconteurs were the stand-up kind who talked like those water slides where you descend one chute but emerge head first from another — the way I emerged from this fiesta on my bed with everything awry, or askew.

— We could have sex now, said Candy, — if you want.

— It’s OK, I said.

— OK, she said. — Well, you can’t say I’m not interested.

I did my small usual smile but the interior of me was very sad. Everyone dresses in teeshirts in bed and we were no exceptions.

— So, shall we go to sleep? she said.

— Yeah sure, I said.

— Have you set the alarm? I said.

— Sure, she said.

I am trying to think how to put this — the way I was thinking about events, in the pale darkness. I was thinking about my horoscope and how I would ever know if it had come true. It’s something like the problem of volume that is a rooftop swimming pool — that when you are in it and lissom and supported, your own transformation from solid into liquid makes it difficult to believe that this element in which you are drifting is also massive weight. Or no, perhaps it’s better to think in other liquid terms, I mean not of water but of blood. Sure, the absence of blood is one of the strangenesses of my former history, my history before this history began. But sometimes the blood does emerge, after all. It emerges and there seems no way to stop it overflowing all the carpets and the curtains. Even if you had no idea that this would happen but just thought that you would be carrying on for ever in such lovely surroundings, like a pasha or state councillor from the old regimes, you never thought that in one conversation certain things would suddenly become tinged in your head with blood. But still, there it is: they do.