Adam Thirlwell - Lurid & Cute

as an avenger

The end of guilt! If I had a battle cry, perhaps this could be it. For was I not going to pay back the money? Was I not also preoccupied with the demise of my marriage, the death of my dog, the happiness of my friends? Not that I did not think I deserved dark punishment. I was very much aware that punishment was my due, as just one more of the powerhogs and warmongers. But at the same time I would argue that I always tried to act from the best of motives — I really do dislike harm in all its forms, and surely that’s a form of purity, even if what happens seems to have this impure tone? — and if unintended consequences ever occurred that were shameful, then surely this was not the only way to judge a person’s life? Totally, I had entered a world I did not understand and when that happens perhaps you will have to accept some violence as your due, and it was true that the violence used against me had been quite small, involving as it did only one member of the animal kingdom, and not for instance the severing of my wife’s ear, or clubbing me in the legs with a metal baseball bat. From that perspective, sure, the violence was quite delicate, but then I think it’s important to remember how vast such smallness feels. And why should it be our dog to suffer? Our dog was the most innocent creature I had ever known, the kindest, with the saddest eyes. I began to lift him up, just very gently take him in my arms, and as I did so it was like my arms remembered what it had been like when he was miniature and a puppy, when I would take him in my arms so that he could go outside into the garden, for the single step down to the patio was too much for him and alarming. It was really not to be endured. Everyone had disappeared. Everything had gone. But therefore I would face this situation with some kind of grace. I would face the violence with grace out of love. Because to be a dog is a terrible situation, you are dependent on the protection of other people and always I had taken this protection very seriously. Absolutely, I had done something wrong. But did that mean the punishment itself should be so grotesque? If they thought that it was easy to be fearsome, then they should surely be taught that this was no way to behave. If I had to, I would defend my territory with aplomb. Whether such a decision constitutes a spiritual life I have no idea, but for me it was enough — like if now it were the día de muertos I could acquit myself with bravado. Suddenly I understood the material, the way the best movies are the ones where at a certain point you can see where the film-maker has understood what she is doing, a moment of pure clarity, and that is when she transforms the whole shebang into something live and fragile and unfamiliar. I would face violence with style. And surely that’s something? Surely in the history of the saints there is one who does not seem so saintly, whose saintliness does not take the form of performance pieces like sleeping on a bed of nails, and so on, being tied to a wheel and spun? And if so, then maybe I was one of these less obviously saintly saints.

together with his sidekick Hiro

Very softly I laid our dog down, then went inside to talk to Hiro. Because if you are in the business of revenge, you generally need weapons, and a sidekick.

— You still with me, yeah? I said.

— This is crazed, said Hiro.

— It does seem so, I said. — But this is what we are going to do.

Probably it was good we had already entered a narcotic atmosphere but I also think my plan was justified. For what I was proposing was no mayhem and multiple murder, it was only something very simple and not necessarily violent at all. I wanted to bury our dog out in the fields, in the woods, where he so liked to roam. But first I wanted to go to the nail salon and return their money — because although we had spent that money and although the idea of stealing from my parents did not excite me, still, I knew where my mother kept a fat pile of notes in the freezer, for emergencies, and surely this did count as an emergency. But also I thought it was important to do huge violence to the nail salon’s premises: not to anyone personally, but just an act of vengeance that would show I was not going to be perpetually accused.

— That your plan? said Hiro.

— It is, I said.

— OK, said Hiro. — OK.

And I was very pleased that this operation would be conducted with Hiro, because angry as I was, I still understood that maybe this plan would not succeed, for many things can go wrong when you introduce violence to the world and are not practised in it, and that worried me, but I tried to keep that worry as small as I could. It existed in my mind like a patch of sunlight through a window on a floor. I mean it does and does not belong to the floor you’re looking at.

— Then, said Hiro, — we only need ourselves a hammer.

— A hammer? I replied.

— Sure, said Hiro.

A hammer, he continued, was very frightening to people and you could pick it up in every home, which is an advantage if you are new to the business of revenge. And of course he was right. We have this category of weapon , whereas so many domestic things are weapons if you use them differently: knives, forks, hammers, hooks, tongs, shovels, spades — these are all you need to behave completely manically. And that, he concluded, was how we would manage this conundrum. It was all very neat and very intelligent, the way Hiro planned it out. We just gathered up our dog, the money from the freezer, two hammers from a cupboard in the kitchen, then took the keys to my mother’s car, and drove up to the parade. That’s how easily things can happen when you’re thinking clearly. Just as also thinking clearly has its advantages of complication, too — because as we drove Hiro suddenly said: The spade , and I had to admit he had a very good point. Because it is not possible to dig a hole among leaf matter or mud with your own hands, it’s just not possible at all. For a moment we terribly paused, and I worried that all my planning would disintegrate — but then, in one of those moments of inspiration that must mark the biography of a person destined for great things, if they were not often forestalled by circumstances and practical details, I remembered the warehouse emporia, out by the motorway.

a revenge from which they are briefly sidetracked

For something noir can still be very bright. And so we drove back out past the vacant apartments and chop shops until we found the home-improvement store. It was opposite the hypermarket where ever so long ago, or so it felt, I had sat in the car park and felt this encroaching doom. And maybe after all doom was not so wrong. But I did not want to think like that. The light inside was even brighter than the bright blocks of cars. It was made of plastic multiple chandeliers, teardrops, copper wire, with a fragile tinkling when the distant air-con fans approached them. But me I was making for the garden section, with such opposite softness, such scent of wood in the air, of garden twine. And it was only maybe now that I was discovering that terror is a drug, terror is an atmosphere you acquire. I was on a mission to buy a gravedigging spade for my beloved dog, this dog who had been killed in revenge for my own misdeeds, with hammers concealed on my person. And perhaps one reason why it was so enticing was that to the outside observer there was nothing fearsome visible at all. And so it was occurring to me, because I am always given to seeing myself in or as other people, that the woman beside me, testing a range of ornamental garden forks, was maybe buying a fork to bury the bloodied root of her husband’s penis, or that the man looking at urns for shrubs or herbs or other foliage was in fact assessing if it might be large enough to plant his child’s beheaded head. That was how I thought, with maybe wild eyes but still a softness in the sneakers, while I contemplated the garden tools. The spades that I had been thinking about it turned out were very big. They glistened and were stainless steel and so heavy that I wasn’t sure if I could wield one. But nevertheless, I bought one. I had no choice. And so we went back on our way.