Rob Doyle - This is the Ritual

X is badly unnerved: it takes a third of a bottle of whiskey to calm him down. When he finally falls asleep on the couch with the television on, he dreams of the review he wrote years earlier of K’s book. In the dream, naked men sit at their computers, reading the review while masturbating slowly. Later, the website is revealed to be embedded in a cliffside. The name of the website is ‘Melted Face’.

The next day there is a second email. The message is repeated — You are a liar — and this time there is an address: 38 rue du Borrégo, Appartement 107, Paris. This is intolerable, X thinks. He decides that he must travel to Paris while K is abroad, and confront his accuser at the address indicated.

X flies out that Monday morning, having left his daughter with her grandparents. He spends the first afternoon wandering the districts where he had spent the happiest years of his vanished youth. After dinner that evening at a bistro near the Sorbonne, X decides to enter a small cinema where a film is about to start. He sits in a middle row, away from the few scattered viewers. In the film, a man in his sixties is living with his cat in an apartment in Brussels, shunning the world. One day, a young woman appears at his door. Various misunderstandings ensue, which result in the older man and the woman driving across Europe in a sports car. (X’s French is rusty and the finer details of the plot escape him, though he believes it involves either an annulled marriage or an attempted kidnapping.) The film ends in Reims, where the woman draws a revolver and shoots a squat, bearded Asian man in a bowler hat, for reasons which remain opaque to X.

The following morning, X resolves to visit rue du Borrégo. He takes the Métro, and as he holds the overhead hand-rail and watches the Parisians sharing his carriage, he imagines the paths both his and K’s lives would have taken if K had learned, years ago, that he was the author of that cruel review. He disembarks from the Métro at Saint-Fargeau and follows the map on his phone, which takes him off the avenue, down a quiet street with high residential blocks on either side. When X reaches number 38, he presses the bell for apartment 107. There is no answer. An elderly woman exits the building and X lets himself in behind her. He ascends the poorly lit staircase until he reaches the top floor. He knocks on the door of 107. Nobody comes. He presses his ear against it, but can hear no sound from inside. He knocks forcefully, many times. He cries out, I’m here. Open up. Who’s in there? His voice resounds through the stairwell. Then X throws his weight against the door with his shoulder. To his surprise, it opens.

The apartment is bare and unfurnished. The walls, floor and ceiling are all of grey cement. There are no panes in the windows, and X can see the higher floors of the building across the street. A cold breeze blows through the apartment. X enters each room, but it is all the same. No one has ever lived here, he thinks. Fleetingly, it seems to X that he has been here many times. After standing in the middle of the largest room for a long time, he leaves the apartment.

That night, X gets extremely drunk in a series of ugly bars around Clichy. When he finally returns to his hotel, he falls into bed without undressing. His sleep is hot and jagged. As dawn filters greenly through the curtains, X dreams of K. In the dream, K’s skin is pale and she never meets X’s eyes. He tries to follow her head so he can look at her directly, but it swivels, always out of reach. Finally, her head separates from her body. Then K is gone, and the squat, bearded Asian man appears. He says to X, There is a man who has sucked your wife’s nipples. When? asks X. In August, says the Asian man.

1

World Without End

Afraid of all that lay ahead, she felt closer to him than ever. ‘The time is past when man thought of himself in terms of a dawn.’ They drive along the curving, shadowy streets. The shutters are already closed throughout town. The wind sweeps the church and its surroundings. ‘An ache I soothed with prayers and codeine.’ A car approaches. ‘What if he asks for our names?’ There were tears in her eyes.

*

The door opened. A grimy old woman in a headscarf. Everyone moves with deliberation. ‘I don’t understand it,’ he says. ‘Giving up is cowardly. So is carrying on.’

‘Silence please.’

*

They are in bed, windows open to the morning coolness. Analysis of the passions, a definition of love. Faith, she thinks, is more mechanical than doubt. The wild light in her eyes. Or rather, almost wild.

‘Great minds are very near to madness.’

*

A photograph on a mantelpiece: his future wife. The light was better then. ‘Nature can hardly be forgiven.’

Goes over to the table where the American woman is sitting. ‘In Barcelona I turned thirty.’ ‘Yes, I remember perfectly.’ Slowly the light changes. Old surfaces of the town. They walk on to a balcony. ‘It’s hopeless.’ ‘This is what you wanted.’ Season follows season, world without end. ‘We have known each other for ever.’ ‘It isn’t enough.’

*

I was alone, as if face to face with a blank rock. Traders and pedlars in the sunshine, the major marketplace. No one stands still under that dome, in dim shadows. ‘If it smells like shit, it probably is.’ I won’t see her again, he thought. Spends her years making propaganda like someone stirring a burnt-out fire. She was more beautiful than –

In the morning, a little lucidity and few illusions left. Hotel melancholy. Now she goes out to the coast for the summer, in a caravan, where the estuary becomes tidal. A feeling of eternity. Black hair, an open window. It is already afternoon. The Volkhov River.

*

Asians wearing European labels. Hotels erected on the shore. A whale’s skeleton at the base of a limestone cliff. The last race, all colour and fire. Instead of dreams, memories. ‘I have returned to Europe and its struggles.’ The Russian ballerinas, they dance very well. Red stone buildings, copper pagodas. The fragility of those shacks. ‘They used to run this place like clockwork, but now. .’ The church square is rather sad. Love is possible, but unlikely. Young men with fine features and cold, knowing gazes. People who seek to be useful (not us, my love). ‘A book is a postponed suicide,’ mutters the tramp as he slumps in a doorway. Even in a large city, the streets at night are relatively still. How lonely it is to be alive.

*

In a Genoa hotel room, hears the ringing of bells resound through quiet streets at dusk. I leave the world as I found it.

This Is the Ritual

Face covered against the pollution, she fumbled in her bag for a coin. The entire ritual had been tainted. ‘If I had children, I would strangle them here and now.’

Under a metallic sky, composing music far away from the war. Valiant but vain attempts to find a common language.

*

Sex detached from any genital processes. He goes back to bed and lies down. She is too old for him.

‘Kiss me.’

‘I never thought my mother would become my mistress.’

*

I was watching television on New Year’s Eve. The demons were getting worse. (‘It’s a long trip. We are the only riders.’)

*

When she arrived at the Greyhound station she understood that something was different. Sound of gunfire. . Funeral processions. . Atrocity footage in black and white. . ‘This is the ritual.’ She drinks coffee from a Styrofoam cup and looks over the crumpled sheet music, puts it away again.

*

Dusk, the lights of windows in high-rise blocks. ‘Take me there.’ A bullet shattered the pane in the lift. For a few days the girl seemed to lose her mind. ‘You have to live your life, that’s all there is to it.’ Suddenly the voice of a human being becomes a towering edifice. ‘I can’t stand it any longer.’ She turned to those who deny all taboos, all shame. ‘Again and again I am engulfed by it.’ She died miserably. Windy city outskirts.