Adam Thirlwell - Lurid & Cute

even if Fate seems also to be lurking once again

For the wisdom of such cartoons is the only wisdom that might prepare you to survive such terrible things, as when for instance you are driving out to the woods in the suburbs of a giant city, in order to give your beloved pet a decent burial, and are in your mind just trying to maintain a small bouquet of happiness, and then in the rear-view mirror you minutely notice that one car seems to have been on the same journey as you — the same mini roundabouts and traffic signals, the same views of tennis courts and funeral parlours and vegetable markets — and while I suppose in every city there are people mimicking each other’s journeys, that’s just one feature of a giant city and its mania for multiple coincidences, this one did seem strange to me. Not perhaps so strange that I had to consider it a threat, but still, it seemed of let’s say interest . I could not after all forget that we had just done much violence, and I suppose no act of violence can be assumed to exist without its consquences, possibly no act at all. Although to be chased still seemed a little exorbitant, for surely in paying back the money we had done what we needed to do? So that it was also possible, I had to admit, that if we were the object of a pursuit, the range of our pursuers could be much more vast than I had first considered. And I would argue that in such a situation the best thing to do next is to do outlandish things, like explore a train station forecourt or make a reconnaissance tour of the area’s business parks. And if the same car keeps on following you then perhaps the chances of this being a giant coincidence are maybe slightly diminished. With such thoughts in mind I drove zigzaggingly and disordered, with Hiro just slightly querying the general sense of direction and my possible concentration.

— Kid, said Hiro. — Let us keep our eyes on the road.

It was very good advice and very sober. For to be chased in these places is not the exciting experience the video games and other educational environments have imagined. It requires a much more stressful concentration than the videastes seems to think, since while they imagine constant bursts of speed and a grand disregard for the safety of others, I found that it was not possible in any way to reach the desired acceleration I might need. There were old people crossing roads quite slowly, a funeral cortège involving a Caddy Hearse filled with flowers, and then roadworks with temporary traffic signals, or also at one point a procession for many saints, which made me pause for at least ten minutes, with a Jesus carrying a bright white helium cross on his shoulder. Such a chase is more like the complications of a driving test or proficiency exam, and not some pixelated swirl.

in the guise of an adversary

And also it forgets that if this is an area you know well, then it will have some sad connotations. There was one point when we zoomed down the underpass, then up alongside the hospital and away down the street with the eastern restaurants, then the street with stores for sewing-machine parts, past the zoo, and it occurred to me that this was always the route I had taken with my parents if we drove into the city. It had always been the most romantic route for me, and it still was, even if now it had such danger and tempest attached. I wondered very fleetingly if my parents ever knew, I mean knew how tenderly I thought about this small collection of streets. The nostalgia was very great, even if really I was just one car among the many other traffic items, the ambulances and caravans and bikers in scrambled formations. Beside me, kids were in trucks smoking weed while in a more compact sports thing a probably coked-up girl was probably going to see her orthodontist who was probably superhot. While it was also possible in this system of blockages and slowness that in the limousine behind me a philosopher was being driven to a conference where he was going to prove the non-existence of time, which was one thing I would have liked to believe as I very slowly entered and exited the outer lanes. I do not recommend it, a car chase in the megalopolis traffic. I think to be in such traffic makes it even more difficult for the beginner hoodlum, especially if driving was never that hoodlum’s thing. Had I been choosing a location for my first ever car chase I would not have chosen a major city in the twilight, but something more akin perhaps to a deserted freeway in the steppes at night. There was a vast gap as usual between the real and ideal — about as wide as in that story of the screenwriter who wrote down his dream ideas one night on a notepad beside his bed, only to discover in the morning that his big idea was Boy Meets Girl. We were on a road somewhere between the city and the suburbs and not really in the direction of the woods, since that destination was for the moment just suspended while I tried to lose whoever was intent on hunting us down, and I realised that our journey had led me to go past the hotel where I had returned to find Romy bleeding, and yet as I examined it with its pool and palmettos, I could only assume that something was wrong, that to search in this place for that previous time was not possible: since the fact that the time had passed meant also that the place had disappeared, as well. It was the same and not the same, which was just one more demonstration of the world’s non-existence. Meanwhile I was feeling more and more frightened and distracted. At the junction for one of the largest shopping centres in the world, I did not make for the quieter roads but instead entered the funnel to one of the city’s outer speed routes.

— Well, it’s an adventure, Hiro said.

He was so cool it was extravagant. And if perhaps, in retrospect, I could have finally paused, then this is where I would have paused, at this moment of the highest speed. Just look around you! The stars were starting to get scattered in the upstairs loft of the sky. Beside the autoroute, in the distance, the paintball signs, in the twilight, were doing this stammering thing in neon. While below the underpass as we zoomed onto the freeway and into the sky, some tired men who presumably probably came from distant war zones were selling a range of remote controls for absent televisions and a few dead video cameras. Far away, beside the canals, grasshoppers were probably folded up like nail clippers. But the sad thing is that you cannot pause. Because you really cannot avoid a fate. By which I mean, the method by which you avoid it in the end will be the means of your destruction. You prove your new machismo and the very means you use to prove it will be that machismo’s takedown and general beating. That’s how it is. The dog-god in the end will hunt you down.

pursuing them in an auto chase

We were up there on the Presidential Freeway and to go at the turbo speed I was going made me very much afraid. Whereas the car which was following us was in contrast a very happy automobile. It was careering joyfully among the other cars with a freakish allure of abandon. There were moments when I began to worry that I would soon confuse the accelerator and the brake. I was overwhelmed. The entire scene was so much action that I felt just felled — the way you feel when you’ve forgotten seventeen appointments and then as you remember them you feel them descending on you just like the lava descended from Vesuvius to Pompeii, or maybe worse, because unlike Pompeii the petrified inhabitant of such everyday cases does not have the luxury of being immediately calcified and therefore excused from further diarising. You have to continue instead, amid the continuing disaster, and for instance try to figure out exactly who this car might be, and why they had such an interest in our persons, since in general I think it’s fair to say that most people are able to live very much obliviously to other people, and that’s in general the perfect state in which to live. But also as well as thinking these impossible thoughts I had to make many quick decisions, and the decisions I then made were maybe not the best. That should be no surprise when you consider how confusing thinking can be. Now, of course, as I consider the matter from up here in the dulcet clouds of the future, it might well appear that the best would have been to drive for ever on the endless highways until this car behind me disappeared — I should have relied on the gift of speed, and also for safety kept to the open and public roads. But that was not what in fact happened. I was very scared and confused and not after all sure that the acceleration on my vehicle would match that of the car that was so patiently behind us, so that is not what did in fact happen. What happened was that in my panic — and this whole account if it is anything is a description of a panic — I took the very first exit off the motorway and went back down into the ordinary roads and roundabouts. I wanted to make for the woods, after all — for if you have once decided to do the right thing, then you should do it, despite all present dangers. Or at least, I think that’s why. I can’t be always sure of my motivations. And maybe this absence of a deep reason is just natural. Maybe always when the end point finally comes, and it always will, you will think that it arrives for no good reason at all. I think I also had the idea that in such wilderness and suburb undergrowth I might have the upper hand, because in such a competition it’s important to choose your territory, and in particular to choose a territory where you feel at home, the way other creatures choose a burrow. Quickly I entered smaller roads, looping round the cemented village greens, past the water troughs and the mini golf courses converted into car washes, until again we were out of the urban system and instead in some kind of greenery. We were driving through the outer villages that were really just ferocious roads. Still behind me hovered the terrible car. It was a very interesting experience, to know that you are being followed and chased and not have in any way the capability to stop it. I was pausing at every zebra crossing for pedestrians and when I slowed this car slowed as well — which gave me hope because I thought that if you are doing this then you have some respect at least for civilised behaviour. You may not be all blunderbuss and death squads. I wondered if in fact such obedience to the law might represent my only chance. There was night just softly descending its million nets over the houses and the breweries, and I accelerated through the cross-coming traffic with the klaxons doing their diagonal streaming thing behind me, and for a moment I believed that I was free. We were speeding along and I turned down towards the forest and I was thinking that perhaps as usual I would be exempt from major trouble. Then in the mirror I saw that behind me still followed this terrible car.