Rob Doyle - This is the Ritual

*

I was drinking whiskey with two French friends. City outskirts. Smell of used condoms, excrement. Conversation revolved around sick dogs and a viable home. I thought of Claudel. (My erect cock seeking his testicles, his scrotum.) All my previous conditioning disqualifies me from what we face now. The city is a cemetery, the tramp used to say. Graffiti I saw in a Métro station: I am come to destroy the works of women . Realising then that her fears were real.

I endure myself.

*

Nothing in his face reveals suicidal tendencies, she thinks. An advertisement for whiskey. The four provinces of Ireland. Flecks of snow in the sea air. They rarely speak. She has always associated sex with the sea. Our Lady of the Dark Interstellar Spaces .

Onward. Landscapes seen through train windows. No one is expecting to be thanked. ‘I love your ferocity,’ she says. Snow in the sea air. Windy city outskirts. ‘Swear I will also be your victim.’ Smell of condoms, excrement. They travel widely. A young male lover, known to pick pockets and carry a knife. Lost a fortune. As if from a distance, sadly but gently: ‘The triumph of death and pain.’

*

The canteen was all but deserted. An elderly woman scribbling a mathematical equation. ‘We live in a climate of exhaustion.’ Outside the window the sky is darkening. Night after night I had passed these houses. ‘There are bodies by the pool.’ ‘ Non .’

My salary ran out in Paris. ‘I’m no longer capable of rage.’ ‘I’m still young, I need sex. It’s normal.’

Late at night there would be older people at the tables, sometimes couples. Habit dulls intensity and marriage implies habit. ‘That was just poetry.’ Buses that don’t arrive. A café that is closed for the summer.

‘Needed you, Claudel.’

*

She fantasised about picking up a hitch-hiker. A couple of strangers, their faces seemed familiar. Windy city outskirts. Psychopaths preserved in a nature reserve. Unmade beds that smell of excrement. ‘All the same she was a good-looking woman, in a common, feral way.’

*

She watched him with a faint, sceptical smile. He was sitting on the bed, drinking a beer. There subsists in man a movement which always exceeds the bounds, that can only be partially reduced to order . He lay down. She shook her head, a faraway gaze. The transgressive side of marriage often escapes notice .

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

*

Long shadow of the corporation. In a late-night shop she buys a bottle of gin. . Scattered factions near the border. . That bar, always full of smoke and drunks. . Late-evening sun. . The estates. . ‘We must have a formula, if only to give a façade to the void.’

I leave the world as I found it.

2

The Outer Sites

We drive in silence. Fox eyes flash in the headlights and she curses under her breath. Corroded, like everything in our marriage. ‘Answer me, you fucking bitch.’ ‘If you’re going to do it, just fucking do it.’ Moment of weakness, like many before. Both of us fantasise, both of us are tired. These streets are decomposing, he thinks drowsily. Cocktails at the weekend with the Herriots.

*

The orgasm came quickly, powerfully. A chubby boy in an anonymous hotel. Desert highway, far from any need for conversation. Not creating a life, not changing for anyone. I never said I was lost. Later, the boy stands in the moonlight like a god or a phantom. ‘But you disappeared years ago!’ Wind across the plains. In the distance a coyote whines. A man devoid of hope, with no investment in the future. ‘No one lives for ever, therefore no one is alive.’ ‘A banal assertion.’ Fires burn along the mountain.

*

They were watching him from across the table. Hard, ugly faces, missing teeth, utter lack of warmth or sympathy — no better than cannibals. ‘Where is she?’ ‘Gone.’ His teeth on edge like acrobats. Muttered curses, glances passed among them. They get up and leave the canteen. Time of our dire need . They found the old lady by an open window that night, broken in various ways. Consign them all to the pits of hell.

Aren’t you dead, like us? ‘Only on the inside.’

*

The body had been riddled with bullets. ‘He’ll disappear, the way they all did.’ ‘People think it’s revenge.’ ‘As if this had a logic.’ A day of drizzle and wind. Headlights in the rain. (The Herriots? No, that other couple.) A lone eccentric, he lived in the woods. They say he ate magic mushrooms and sat out in the moonlight. Intense dialogues with unseen beings. Various other rumours, likewise unsavoury. Contact with outer reality was rare. He wrote poetry, such as this: ‘Grant no peace to disturbed remains/Knowledge resides at the limit/Burnt-out ruins on the horizon, no place for a woman of breeding.’ Lecherous half-thoughts: ‘Her blood is streaming everywhere, flowing into my groin. Her beautiful ankles. . Lick me if you like me.’ Energetic resolutions, guilt, resignation, etc.

*

Living on the island, she thought often of Jean-Paul. Not that she hadn’t had lovers since. The longest day was past. Still, these visions of him asleep on the bed, naked. . Writes a book whose themes are betrayal, hatred, the lure of utter destruction. ‘I was bored.’ ‘We’re all fucking bored.’ That Russian girl, no one would deny she was attractive, though in a fickle, plastic way. ‘You destroyed what we had for her ?’ There’s always some excuse, rarely a justification. One morning she had gone to a riding school where the trainer always eyed her hungrily — revenge was inevitable. But let a lost boy have his erotic moments, she thinks now. After all, we live in flames, it’s better we are never truly known. Then: it’s a free world, the twenty-first century. (Late-night film in her beach cabin: orgasms real or fake, it’s all the same to her. A couple drives in silence, headlights in the rainy dark. ‘Just fucking do it.’ ‘I’ll never take you back!’ ‘Suit yourself, like you always do.’)

*

Natalya rides a train to the peripheries. For love of this world, she pledges calm and what happiness is possible. Writes in her notebook: ‘Suddenly, life takes us all so seriously.’ Watches dawn break over squatted Munich high-rises. Cables slack like arteries. Karla and Renée asleep in their bags somewhere. ‘Gazing into this mirror, I realise what has happened.’ The area between here and the sea is peppered with military installations. She imagines the species to come: tragic like all conscious life. The train passes insane asylums, electricity plants, warehouses, abandoned docks. Traces of the European War. Handles life like a sacred weapon. No longer young, she has fewer illusions. This place doesn’t symbolise anything, she thinks bitterly, except perhaps its own haunting. Freedom is what? To take drugs and eventually commit suicide? To fuck without empathy? At least the fighters had beliefs and values. From the train, glimpses through smashed-out windows at vases, framed pictures, glasses and cups. Everything scorched and blackened — romanticism at its most ruthless. Parable of the human condition: ‘The misery of man without God.’ (Canned laughter.) What are they looking at? They ruined everything. Demolished the monasteries and churches. AK-47s in every photograph, enchanted by their own manliness. Now we douse our pain with alcohol and chants. Passing old statues like a graveyard, she writes in her notebook: ‘All philosophers hitherto have merely changed the world; the point is to destroy it.’ Landscapes of our mad desire. Journey on, through this night. The train will never reach its destination.

*

The lovers are strangers here. Entertaining doubts about their own existence, they see the headlights of a car on the far side of the square. (Just some couple in a hell of their own.) She smiled girlishly, pushed a wisp of hair back from her face. ‘Life is to be ruined.’