Rob Doyle - Here Are the Young Men

Everyone else, he noticed, was as fascinated as he was. Day after day, week after week, the telly pulsed with decimation. It was planetary death-porn, the greatest show on earth.

Then the global focus had shifted to Afghanistan where Kearney gorged on the carpet-bomb ejaculations, the rapacious ground offensives, and all the delicacies heaped on for mass consumption, for Kearney consumption. The way some people are fanatical about Man United or Liverpool, Kearney became fanatical about Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. He read everything he could find about what the papers called the ‘Islamic death cult’, Al-Qaeda. Soon his attic bedroom became transformed into a shrine to 9/11. Posters and photos of the exploding buildings, of New York and Washington staggering under attack, gradually filled every available inch of wall, creating a cocoon of holy violence to block out any seepage from the mundane world, from dull, squalid reality. Never a day passed that he didn’t look, with undimming awe, at footage of the World Trade Center attacks. They had even begun to feature in his dreams: erotic dreams of curvaceous boom-clouds, bulging red-black orbs like bums, like body-curves; dreams of belly-dance carnage; of screams of indistinguishable terror and ecstasy — an orgasm of hate.

My alarm clock was going off. I pulled the covers over my head and whimpered, wanting to stay there forever. I only got up when my ma’s calls from downstairs got too angry to ignore.

Five minutes later I was staring into my bowl of cornflakes, watching them float on the surface, turning soggy. I heard the house phone ringing, then my ma stuck her head into the kitchen. ‘It’s Joseph on the phone for ye,’ she said. ‘Come on out and take it.’

I cursed under my breath, stood up wearily, and went into the hallway.

‘Alright,’ I muttered into the phone.

There was silence on the other end. I listened to the electric hiss, waiting. In my black humour it was easy to resist the pressure to speak.

Eventually, in a quiet voice Kearney said, ‘Matthew, ye can’t pretend that wasn’t unbelievable.’

‘The girl fuckin died, Kearney. She fuckin died. That was real. That was her mother there, screamin cryin. And she’ll be cryin for a long time.’

‘I know all that, Matthew,’ Kearney said softly, placating me. ‘I know all that. I do. I’m not sayin it was a good thing that she died — no way. It’s terrible, you’re right. But the fact is, we didn’t do it. It wasn’t our fault. We just happened to be there to see it. It would’ve happened anyway. How we feel about it doesn’t affect anything. People die all the time. Right now it’s happenin, all over the world. I’m just sayin, actually seein it with me own eyes — it was … I’ve never felt like that before. Do ye know what I mean?’

‘No.’

Kearney sighed. ‘I’m just sayin, it was powerful . That’s all I meant to say. Yeah, it’s sad that she died or whatever. Yeah. But Jesus, it was just … I haven’t slept a wink. I’ve never felt so awake. Me mind feels really fuckin clear. Seriously. I’ve just been sittin here in me room, in the quiet, for hours and hours. It’s hard to explain.’

‘Kearney, what are ye on about?’

Silence again. Finally, he exhaled. ‘Nothin, Matthew. Never mind. And never mind that ye smiled at me in the cop shop yesterday. I just thought that you felt it as well. But okay, I made a mistake. Ye did smile at me, though. I remember it dead clear. All me memories are clear. Soon I’ll be on a plane. I’ll be thinkin of ye on the way over. I’ll email ye.’

We hung up. I walked slowly up the stairs, back to my room. ‘Is everything all right?’ my ma called after me. I ignored her and locked the door from the inside. I lay down on my bed and stared at the ceiling.

Later that day Kearney left for America. Rez started his new job as a nightwatchman. Jen was off in Madrid with her da, and Cocker seemed to be drifting towards a new crowd. I sat in my room that night and listened to music, afraid to smoke a joint for fear of the thoughts and visions it might trigger. I felt utterly alone.

That was how our summer began.

Why I am Not Real and Happiness is Impossible in the Modern Age. To be read after my demise — by Richard Tooley

Section 23: Why Thinking is a Disease

Part A

I remember one day I was kissing Julie. Usually kissing is considered to be normal and uncomplicated but this is not always the case. If you think too much about what you are doing, it will be unspeakably ruined for you. You will be genuinely paralysed. Julie and I had just eaten dinner at Rick’s fast-food place after we had been to the cinema to see Irreversible . We were waiting at Julie’s bus stop and we started kissing. Suddenly I couldn’t stop thinking that a few minutes ago Julie had put into this mouth that I was kissing the body of a dead animal. (She had eaten a cheeseburger and chips.) It was one body inside another. Not only that, but the animal she had put into her mouth had been processed, cut up, cooked and mangled. Maybe it wasn’t even just one animal, but the merged flesh of several animals, compressed in a factory into a single burger .

I tried to just kiss her and feel pleasure, but I couldn’t put it out of my head. Now I could smell it, the dead animal which she had put into her mouth. And it struck me that ‘mouth’ was just a name for a hole in her face .

She kept kissing me ‘passionately’, but I was going weak with disgust. I tried harder to just enjoy the kiss. I closed my eyes. But it was ruined. It was too bizarre and disturbing for me to pretend it wasn’t happening: inside her, at the end of the dark tunnel in the hole in her face, the dead animal whose chewed-up flesh I could smell was being squirted with acids, the purpose of which was to decompose the dead animal and merge its flesh with Julie’s human-flesh. Like some horror fflm. I pulled away from her, unable to continue kissing the hole in her face. It was like there was a dungeon of freaks beneath the surface of Julie .

That happened a month before we broke up. For the last month that we were together, whenever we kissed I had the same thoughts. Sometimes it wasn’t quite as bad but it was always there. Kissing was ruined for me forever. I had thought about it too much .

Part B

I envy animals. They are part of nature. I am part of nature too but it’s ruined for me, because my mind is a virus and it attacks me every minute of the day. I’m out of sync with everything, all screwed up .

The reason I envy animals is that they are programmed by nature — just like we are — to live in the normal way (eating, sleeping, having sex, tearing each other to pieces). Unlike us, however, the animals cannot deviate from nature’s programme — they haven’t got a sabotage-mind that sticks itself into the gears and sends everything haywire, all sparks and hissing smoke .