Rob Doyle - This is the Ritual

Morning. Sunlight falls through the guesthouse windows. The repetition of this situation across aeons. A few descendants. . He understands the appeal of cave-painting, even if he has never succumbed to art. After shaving, he finds her quiet and pensive on the bed. ‘I’ve been away a long time,’ he says, towelling his chin. ‘I know. Years.’ ‘Longer. We have to consider where all this will lead.’ Of infinite richness, this life. At least, that’s what she thought then. It’s true, she had been unable to resist temptation, hurling herself at all those strangers, but at least her heart was open. She caught him by the arm. ‘There is nothing I didn’t give you.’ Tears of hatred, an inner violence that astonishes her. (‘My father’s daughter. . Where is she?’) The square outside the window is deserted, she notes absently. Life evaporates from morning streets. Soon even our memories will be gone. We’ll dissolve in the earth with the worms, but before that day, my body will light up brighter than supernovas, and you will not be the one to know it, though it will burn you. She kneels before him, pulls down his trousers, looks up in his eyes, communicating so much. He gasps. One of you is close to tears, the other close to death . She draws her fingertips along his cock, tweaks the tip, how he likes it. Takes him in her mouth, hears him whimper as if in remorse. Noon falls. Shadows drift across the room. (Seen from outside the window, the room is empty.) Later she sleeps, her shorts and knickers round her ankles. The door is ajar. Faint breeze stirs the open curtain, she moans softly, raises a leg to find him (not there). He boards a train and goes back the way they came.

*

‘Consciousness: the condition of being locked outside of life. We press our faces to the glass.’ (Standing ovation.)

*

Even those with noble motives wake with a hangover. Wars no longer end. ‘You cannot face your “human animal”.’ Got no home, not now in any case. Subject is photographed naked, in humiliating poses. ‘The perennial madness.’ Man is ingenious in how he holds his world together. Disguised as playboy billionaires, they buy yachts, luxury cars and apartments in the major capitals. Channels open from Pakistan. War becomes a metaphor. ‘The only arguments I had with him were about cars and baseball.’ Things had become too bitter, he said. A headstone somewhere, flowers falling apart in the rain. ‘And you call us terrorists? If any struggle requires martyrs, it’s this one.’ Gentle, she said, like a race from beyond. . Mother was a seller in the bazaar — fruit, dates, coffee. . A sobering demonstration for those who can perceive it (footage of mushroom cloud over the Bikini Atoll). ‘The major breakthrough had to do with clarity.’ ‘Who are you, the Thought Police?’ Imagine it growing, multiplying, diversifying. . inevitable rise towards consciousness. There’s no point being a pessimist about the internet. ‘We envy their weapons, their convictions, their pornography.’ Shudders. At dawn, driving towards a mosque in Lahore. A harmless lunatic, they said. Soon they’ll know better. Emphasise the history of technology — a conscious evolution. Burning outskirts of the world. Now learn to sit back and watch.

3

A Promise of Happiness

‘For years I had been trying to think up stories, narratives, that would give me the excuse to convey, say, a deserted beach, because that — the beach — was what I really wanted to convey. Finally I thought, “Why not simply give them the deserted beach?”’

— Killian Turner, from an interview with ZG magazine, 1981

Writing page after page, day upon day, remaking himself in a cabin in the woods. A manifesto, he called it. The usual doleful anarchism: ‘Systematic genocide of the native people. . Our forced march through territories of nothingness’, and so on. Bombast and idle threats. Shrouded in self-made myth and marijuana fumes, a face like the entrance to caves. This painstaking construction of a ‘visionary’ work. Nothing like a belated revenge, he thinks. Bearded and fervent, like some mujahedin.

*

The rooms the soldiers combed smelt strongly of shit and petrol, and something else too. Dolls and clothing strewn over a dusty floor. . They had entered the city after a wave of high-level defections. Now he peers through his binoculars at the outlying posts and the dunes along the horizon. Fraying fabric of the regime. ‘Everything is conditioned by necessity.’ ‘So much code eventually becomes theology.’ Medals of bone and charred flesh. Desert roads buried under dust and rubble. Villages stand deserted. ‘This hostile attitude towards all sensuous cultures. .’ ‘The White Man’s burden, pal.’ ‘The White Man? I remember childhood afternoons, the particular quality of the sunlight. Oranges dropping from a tree by the train tracks. So ripe, so heavy with sweetness.’ Sighs. ‘The absurdity of our dreams.’

That night they watched the first bombs fall.

*

Teenage lovers in a shopping-centre café, eating ice creams. Nicole pouts and rolls her eyes. ‘After all, there is a war on.’ ‘. . It’s just our insular labyrinth.’ ‘Are you saying it isn’t real?’ ‘Not exactly. We don’t yet know what kind of age is upon us. But it’s perfectly real.’ Nicole sighs as another song comes on the café speakers. He never gets it.

Then Mickey grins. ‘You’re still my soda-girl pop queen — they’ll never take that away from us.’

*

The bus trailed over the plains by night. Everyone had nightmares. At dawn they reached the outskirts. She turned to the man in the seat next to her (handsome and silent, he had been staring out the window for hours). Clutching his wrist: ‘Cities this vast must breed psychosis. All cities do.’ ‘I know. It’s always been that way.’ Somehow his words pacify her.

*

An unfinished novel by some frazzled drifter, ‘Rob Doyle’. He lives near the port. Drugs come in on those ships, I told him. They roll out of town in those trucks down there. (Watches from the hilltop vantage.) Enough coke, heroin and hash to feed this entire junkie nation. He says: ‘I think you’ve just seen too many films. Films distort reality.’ ‘It’s the other way around.’ (Howls of laughter.)

‘What was the novel about?’ I asked him once over kung-pao chicken. ‘A man who lives in the woods. There are cannibals, anarchists, and a priest who can’t forgive.’

*

Vienna at twilight, a sumptuous dissolution. ‘Everything is in decline, and always has been.’ From our hotel, a view over the canals, dazzled with evening light. ‘Sure, I’ll have to live without tobacco and sex for a time, but men have faced starker destinies.’ We read on the balcony till we grew tired. Then I turned to him and said, ‘Choose escape and individuation. . follow a lonely path, even if it leads to mountain-solitude where only lakes reflect you.’

Down there, the thieves disappear in the backs of cafés. Existence consents to its own ruin. That night he dreamt of landscapes we have never visited, at least not together — small towns, canyons, immense quarries. There is an inner core to him I’m no longer privy to, despite the telepathy.

‘He will never finish that novel,’ he says the next morning. He is my partner and I love him.

*

‘All works of art are unfinished, anyway.’. . ‘Faggot. A genuine talent impresses the women and subjugates the weaker men. Thrash about all you like, I know a drowner when I see one.’ ‘I write for posterity,’ he says, laughing bitterly.

*

In a drab provincial hotel room. Mingled smells of many vaginas. Other men’s sweat on this bed. (Thinks of a girl from the past whose vagina had an overpowering smell, vaguely aroused by the memory.) In Naples a whore sucked me off in a room like this, I couldn’t manage to come. . But Nietzsche lived in such a way, he thinks, dancing naked in a frugal room in Turin. Every day a ledge between the prison and the madhouse. ‘My love, all the world is aflame.’ Tenderly: ‘Ignore the past.’ ‘Love of my life!’