Adam Thirlwell - Lurid & Cute

— Want a cigarette? she said.

— Sorry? I said.

— Want a cigarette?

— I don’t know.

— You don’t know?

— I mean no.

We paused on this obviously not satisfactory conversation. I was hoping it would mean she’d stop but she didn’t.

— What’s your name? she said.

— My name?

It’s sometimes useful to look like me, or at least the way I look to certain people, which is younger than I am — I have this face that’s wide-eyed and also innocent, and this was one of those occasions when it had its useful aspect. So I just stared at her. I let the silence enlarge itself until it began to freak her out.

— Well. No harm done, said Quincy.

And she wandered away in this weird dazed perplexity while I was left in a state of envy or melancholy for her condition as a blissful and morally unstained employee, even if this state of mine was also still totally panic. By which I mean: was it right for me to be so punished? Events will become much worse but still, I think it’s right to posit this question now. All I’d done was wake up — for the very first time in my life — beside a woman who was not my wife. Is this so untoward? I really didn’t think the grand things are real — like murders and death and destruction — it never occurred to me that such things could really happen in a life, and now that something like this was happening it was making me amazed and also confused. Yes, I think it was about then that the first inkling began to occur to me — like the way you see a cat drift through some amateur porn footage and just sit there, it occurred to me as backgroundly as that — that I might be doomed. It was like the moment you look up in the air at some distant passing plane and just think for a sad moment that its engines might possibly be failing. I really did feel that this was unfair. I dislike harm in all its forms. I became a vegetarian because I had a vision of a bleeding cow, stripped of all its skin, and bleeding, and bleeding from the eyes. My favourite meal I ever had was this vegetarian goose dish which I appreciated above all for its noble ingenuity. I am trying to teach myself the banjo. Reading want ads makes me sad. I have no meanness in me . Whereas just make sure, Fate was telling itself, as it contemplated the picture, like a connoisseur, that no level spot of ground isn’t trampled over with blood. I don’t think this is an exaggeration. It fits the facts as I see them. I would have preferred it if Fate had concentrated more on the future of — I don’t know — Aldebaran but it seemed that no, it preferred me. And in response I would like to say that this was in no way fair. Or I mean, no, this is what I was thinking. Elsewhere they are in their black ship somewhere, your enemies, the pirates are floating out there in the port, and drinking champagne. They are in the dark tanker. That is everyone else. But you are here and you are on your own. And you are no longer into the poetry of the Buddhist sages, or movies filmed on hand-held cameras or whatever. The whole culture is not the point. It is no longer yours — the culture. Because now, against your will, you have undergone a metamorphosis. I was feeling suddenly empty, like I was the Windsor Plantation that with just one careless cigarette gets suddenly converted and becomes the Windsor Ruins. I was pulling out of the car park in a car whose steering, I was now thinking, was shonky, and needed to be seen to, before something went haywire on the road and then I died, but if this was a problem it was not as much of a problem as the possession of an unconscious girl with whom you may be illicitly in love. And I was saying to myself: Kid, you are currently the least talented gangster in the world. Or, in other words, you were always way-out innocent. Your mother used to say it was your sweetest characteristic. And now look at you.

into another world

And so it happens that someone falls from a window or into the sea and into another world. They just fall and are transported. Like my friend Wyman who one day woke up and discovered that his life had made him superfat without him quite understanding how, so that in his anguish he just cried out in supplication to the Virgin and any other deity whose name he could remember, even though of course there were many reasons why Wyman should be so lavish in his size, reasons which Wyman preferred to ignore — namely the penchant he had for Wuxi-style soup dumplings and disco fries, or a meal consisting of LaMar’s Donuts as a final flourish after three Schmitter sandwiches — not to mention the demise of his legal career, and the garish side effects of his various uppers and downers…

an occurrence possibly more normal than it seems

In fact, the more I thought about it, as I drove to the hospital with Romy slumped beside me, and I kept putting my hand to her mouth as if to silence her but really to check that she was still continuously breathing, the truly strange thing is that when you wake up in the morning you do generally find things exactly where they were the previous evening. That’s the deeper freak-out or at least it should be. Because in sleep or more precisely in dreams you find yourself, or at least you think you do, as the zaddiks of sleep description have observed, in a state fundamentally different from wakefulness, and when you open your eyes an infinite presence of mind, or rather quickness of wit, is therefore required in order to catch everything in the same place you left it the evening before. Waking up, I just mean, is such a terrifying state that it’s a wonder anyone survives it. So easily you could be taken back to high school, or accused of an impossible crime, or discover that your wife seems to be now a shy Alsatian. Not that everyone wakes up every morning as a donkey or beetle but still, everyone will some time — because to wake up as a donkey doesn’t always mean you wake up feeling groggy in your new big flappy ears, or turkified and in possession of six scimitars. It can happen in whatever hotel you pass by every day, with just the merest inflation of a thought balloon — and there you are, in bardo. In fact it’s not even necessary to, let’s say, wake up beside a girl who is bleeding from the nose and unconscious. It can be even smaller than that, I was thinking. Recently it happened to me more and more — I would wake and feel just minutely transformed, simply by waking beside my wife, with a miniature dog between us. I understand, to you this is possibly not so psychedelic. But was I really so wrong? Show me the married man who is still living at home with his parents and neurotic dog, who is putting his clothes in the wicker tub of a laundry basket, as he has done for more than thirty years, so that his mother can once a week take them downstairs to the washing machine, and then tell me if you think it might not be acceptable for this man to be given over to feelings of catastrophe. Not to mention other complications of hospitality which I will come to very soon. At this point it’s only important to consider how this was not the basic situation that my ambition would have imagined for its future self. That’s maybe why every day now I woke up and was just dazed by reality, like any cartoon character who is supine after a fight, with many dingbats circling his bulldozed head.

especially for a dauphin or delfino

The only thing that’s made me unlike other people is that me I think much more. It was because of such excessive thinking that in my family I was adoringly known as a prodigy. But when you think more than other people, although that difference might seem small, it can end up enormously expanding and you finish with different results. It certainly meant that I felt just slightly separate from the world — whenever I saw an object, the consciousness that I saw it remained between me and it, like a halo, preventing me from ever knowing it directly — and that’s a dismal condition to inhabit. All I’d ever wanted was to get on in the world! — that was the only glory I had in mind. And in this I was only being faithful to the values of my family. I think every family has its myths and ours was that really anything was possible. My mother assured me every day that I could do great things, like she was my astrologer. We were the courtiers of the inner life! I don’t mean that we were super-rich or the owners of vast factories and estates, but we were definitely among the powerful, those with sparkling waters in the refrigerator and unusual fruit from the supermarkets. Obviously as usual on the outskirts of other countries there were wars — small wars, absolutely, but wars nevertheless — in which our armies were involved, but they were far away and so for us instead it was the time when everyone was owning strange pets, not quite possums or small lemurs but almost, and meanwhile it was incredibly chic to eat small pastries imported from various locations, and in every garden people hung those elegant paper lanterns. While me I was a prodigy. I know because my mother said so. In bookstores she told the assistants that my reading age was hyper-advanced, then she bought me histories of the pharaohs and I read them all. In the luminous pharmacies and department stores, people always smiled at me, and I believed very much that when they smiled they did it because they liked me. What happened next was that the money of my parents bought my education at a secluded school, and later a secluded university. Afterwards, because I was a devoted son, I worked in an office in the city. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that everything was very soft and delicious. The juggernaut of meaning, let’s say, was not parked heavily on our lawn. When I married — and we married very young, my wife Candy and I — we remained living at home, just as my parents preferred. You see? I always wanted to be a pirate and I think I basically was, if by pirate you mean someone who has everything they want. So OK, I had no eyepatch or cutlass, I wasn’t truly a corsair, not in the clothes, but everything I wanted I got. Before school every morning my mother styled my hair with a hairdryer and delicate brush, as a servant might have cosseted the curls of the inbred Habsburg prince in his knickerbockers, the prince with his outsize chin. But if this seems like a basic paradise with fountains and gentle rills I should also add that such happiness rarely remains happiness for long, so that in fact at the moment when you are realising that what you feel is happiness it is probably transforming itself into something much more slithery, whether you know about this transformation or not — the way a demon might extend his slithery arms, or you might open the back door one morning and not notice the cat entering menacingly below your gaze. I was possibly seven when my mother said to me that there was no one who made her laugh more than I did. Would you like to be such a dauphin? I do not think so. It’s lovely to be the only child — it gives you privileges, the privilege of being adored, of being the only one there, and if that happens it does last your whole life, I think, or at least it has for me, nobody can do anything but take care of you, that is the way I was and this is the way I still am, just as also it means that whereas for everyone who has siblings, which is nearly everyone, the issue of superiority is a very important one, the issue of who is better and who is more loved, instead I have always been more equable, serene in my own serenity, as if Buddha had been born right here in these delightful suburbs, just contemplating the monkey-puzzle trees and mechanical sprinklers: yes, all of that is true — but still, to be the dauphin has its disadvantages. My mother drove me to school every day and while we drove I entertained her with my quips. What a weight for a child to bear! That’s why when I talk, I still tend to talk very hyper. To be destined for higher things has this effect. You find yourself in some silent isolation tank, apart from other people — like you’re training to go into outer space and there you are, alone with your dizziness and nausea.