Adam Thirlwell - Lurid & Cute

— I don’t know. I don’t know, she said.

— OK, I said.

— No I do know, she said. — I think we should break up. I’m done.

— Really? I said. — I mean –

— I think we should, she said.

Then she started to cry, but without doing anything about this — she just sat there crying and letting the tears emerge and disappear very slowly, and it was the fact of not doing anything about these tears, not wiping them away, not smearing them across her cheeks, that seemed most delicate and bereft. So I decided that I should at the very least look after her and not be the one to cry myself. If to be noble was my ideal, then to maintain some self-possession was the best course I had at my disposal.

confronted with his fate very unexpectedly

For if she wanted to leave me, I could understand this desire. Probably I had made life very difficult for Candy, if I thought about it from a certain perspective. And I began to wonder if perhaps I had therefore deep down wanted this, yes wanted our marriage to founder and my happiness to be destroyed, yet even as I thought that I also knew that if this was finishing, and even if I had wanted it to finish, now that it was finishing I certainly wanted it to begin again, and the possibility that I might be logically inconsistent in this way pained me very much. It was like the way in your remote childhood when you are going out to some party to drop acid or methadone, and you have lied to your parents for a long while to bring this situation about, but then as you are about to leave, in the early evening the house suddenly seems so comforting, so happy, with your parents consulting the takeaway menu and a selection from the video store, and you do not know why you are going to leave it for the dark large windswept night.

ME

Don’t you think every first marriage needs to end? I mean, no, that’s not what I meant. I mean: can’t you be my second wife?

Furiously I was trying to argue with myself. I was trying to maintain that the liberation I had just been envisaging could still exist, and I did believe this, since why should it not be possible on my own? And yet I was sadly realising that all my liberations occurred with Candy as the background, and the prospect of having this backdrop torn away, like the end of the studio system, seemed to render everything inexplicable. Like for instance now Candy did not however smile at my small witticism and attempt at lightness; she was only in her own careful world where she said exactly as much as she could, like tell me how bad she felt about my parents. And I wondered if I could seize on this as some concession, and change the subject to the possibility of us seeing professionals for help, if that would change her mind, but brutally she shook her head softly no.

CANDY

I want to leave now.

ME

I want to talk to you. You’re who I always talk to –

And then I could not continue. Regrettably and despite my best intentions I started to cry. Then she started to cry again, too.

ME

This doesn’t feel real.

CANDY

I’m sorry.

ME

Are you really leaving?

CANDY

Yes –

ME

I feel like I’m dying. Like totally –

but also very definitely

I wished I could escape it in some way, this fate of mine — that I could just stop off in some desert diner and stuff myself on jalapeño poppers and ranch wings, or at some hill station cafeteria, with pickles and chapatis, but overall I realised that this vision like most visions was sadly unattainable. I had to carry on. From now on, I would have to carry on and I would have to do so on my own. The prospect was so painful that I really did feel that I was dying, it was no exaggeration, even if as I said it I also knew that it would only sound like an exaggeration and melodramatic, but still, I had to say what I felt. It was as if I could feel inside me all the molecules of my body close themelves gently down. While at the same time it surprised me to realise that, painful as this was, it could have been even more painful, if I had suddenly confessed to Candy everything that I had been doing without her knowledge, or if not without her knowledge then without her acknowledgement, which is a slightly different situation. Whereas instead for ever we would continue in this small enclosure, where not everything would ever be said.

CANDY

We needed to do this for so long. You’ve wanted this, too.

ME

How long?

CANDY

Well, months –

ME

This is horrible.

CANDY

Look, we were dying here. You know this. This shouldn’t make you so sad.

ME

Hold me.

It was very strange. I was making these sad noises like I was groaning or keening, because definitely I was feeling like everything was dissolving beneath me, the way the floors dissolve in horror films when you are trying to escape, yet as I did this I was also thinking how I needed to preserve a pleasant cheerful tone. If this was going to be the finale, then it at least needed to be treated with as much lightness as was possible. For everything can be made into a toy, if you only choose the correct viewing position. Or at least I hoped so.

in one more of time’s catastrophes

From this position therefore I tried to create a small stalling of Fate, however miniature — the way a cartoon genie might raise his hand to trap a malevolent spirit in a freeze frame eternally.

ME

I thought you were going to be there when we were old. I thought that we’d have children.

CANDY

Really? Did you really?

There was a long pause.

CANDY

Maybe we should just try again when we’re sixty.

I was grateful to her, because it was surely a way of showing that perhaps this was not for ever, that always there exist other possibilities and byways. The fact that it might not be true or only gentle was too sad for me to contemplate. And I know that people think that if you’re young, or recently young, then the tricks of time are not available to you, not really — but I was discovering that the fact of being young or almost young simply means that these tricks are just more compressed into a smaller span, like computer models of constellations. All of time’s disasters can occur at any moment, and nostalgia for instance is no different, it can just graze you in its gentle flight — as for instance at this moment when I was losing Candy for ever, but also when you find yourself calling every film you watch a video, even though it is only digital on a screen, or, to give you a larger example, when I had recently been with Hiro, passing a cinema, a multiplex of which I wasn’t even fond, and it occurred to me that it was in this cinema that I had first seen the foreign and stylish movies, almost exactly half my life ago. Back then, I thought there would be many such great works that I would see or read and that they would have a major impact on me, and I would of course become an artist myself. But in the event there were rather few. And the only art form I achieved was this swarming account, all bright and sincere like the paintings people hang on the park railings. As nostalgia, I understand, it’s perhaps smaller than a man about to die seeing a vision of his first love, but so what? The feeling is the same. And I was having another such moment now, as I felt the entire future disappear. Suddenly it seemed very important to memorise as much as possible, of Candy’s face and everything she said, just as often I found myself remembering aspects of my past — like for instance the room we slept in had its window over the drive. Although by drive this doesn’t mean it was some hacienda in which we lived, no this drive was the length of a car, and it had gravel in it, poured out by my father. When I was a child I used to stay in that room if I was sick, as a treat, and I heard the milkman coming down the drive. And now I woke up in the dawns and realised that there were no more milkmen. The only keeper of the sound was me.