Rob Doyle - This is the Ritual

*

Young people on a beach, preparing a meal. It’s an overcast day, a little windy. ‘Eat something.’ A dog sitting on the bonnet of a car, seems to know more than anyone. The exceptional beauty of these girls. ‘I couldn’t eat another morsel.’. . ‘No god lingers in my blood.’ A poet masturbates in a cave, out where the rocks are jagged.

When the tide comes in, the youths have disappeared.

*

Madam’s erotic dreams. . Fearsome tyrants butchered on camera — the embassy in flames — ‘We reject in the strongest terms this —’ Hot tongues of mongrel dogs. They approach slowly and lick the glass. . She wakes drenched in sweat, panting. All this opulence, yet so many nights since she’s had a man beside her. Every woman needs it.

*

‘Your father’s dead,’ says her teacher. The gamine Nicole has always had troublesome fantasies. Now they might become real. ‘Take me.’ They fall together, a pleasure intimating total annihilation. ‘All I want is to vanish from the earth,’ she whimpers as he moves inside her. ‘With you!’ The teacher’s urgent words: ‘We are not bound to “real life”, nor to their shitty morality.’ He comes inside her with a howl.

*

The blonde girl kneels down and takes it. Pornography, shotguns, occasional music. (In her latest painting, crucifixes line both sides of the autostrada to Salerno, a groaning fascist on each one.) At first I made her read the Marquis de Sade aloud while I explored her with my fingers. But Christ — that girl soon brought me to my knees. In a voice as delicate as an hourglass: Love is best conveyed with the fist . Against a severe desert sky, a towering phallus glistens like an obelisk. ‘Past the age of twenty-four, men just don’t fuck the same,’ she tells her friend over the phone. ‘Sexual morality. . crucifixes. . Men are terrified, and they’re right to be. I’m young, sexy, and as beautiful as death. Tell me that’s not power!’

I wasn’t insane. I had sought a return to animal life, that kind of debased magnificence. The next time we met, she dangled the keys in front of me. Then she locked the monotonous hotel room from the inside. ‘I’ve always had a thing for panting blondes.’ ‘You and everyone else.’ She made me slide a finger in her asshole. I could feel flakes of shit against my fingertip. My breath in her hair, on her neck. Nothing had changed. ‘You get happier, and more fatalistic.’ Brazen and vulgar, as intoxicating as an open sewer. The closest to love I ever got.

4

Baby, the West Will Fear Us

Passion festers within the camp perimeter. The odour of dust, excrement and coffee seeps into the affair itself. She looks at him now with mistrust. Writes her nightmares in notebooks she conceals in her mattress. (‘In this mirror full of screams.’) On the walls of the camp, relief maps, aerial photographs, refugee statistics. All that textual babbling. Midnight in the canteen: ‘Your attitude is bizarre and sometimes sickening.’ ‘Look, just tell me you won’t make an issue with my wife.’ ‘We have nothing more to talk about.’ Out here, all tensions are exacerbated. Desert truth.

*

You talk often about nobility, but what do you know about shame? Cacophony, dissolution, this eternal fucking world. Cities teem with men like me and our torturous intrigues. . He began to shudder and then scream. Stagnant, atrophied, patently homosexual, he rides the night train from end to end and back again. The only therapy he can afford. Beneath this city, such feelings, these rabid eyes. Men like me become a threat. Men who brood in small rooms with bad air. Listen. Soon you will see my face on every screen in this nation. He carries photographs of Moscow and St Petersburg in his breast pocket — street signs, buildings, blurred shots of obscure functionaries and minor celebrities. Shakes his head disgustedly — these infirm men and their ideological drivel. Poverty is not a crime! The beast in us wants to be whipped. I will step up . The night train hurtles through diseased cities — his bad mind. Tyre factories, power plants, slums that seethe with venereal sickness and every kind of plague. He’ll feel better at daybreak, he tells himself. That’s if I live that long. There is nothing to do but recall childhood and try to stay calm. Days later he awakes in a rented room in another city. I keep myself alive only out of hate, and habit.

*

Madman painting in his studio. Psychiatric outpatients’ home on the edge of a vast park in the middle of the city. Calls these paintings his ‘blue series’ — a wilful provocation. The medication suppresses his sense that the territories are being overrun (migrants, refugees, terrorists). ‘Silence please.’ Panic in the air like a rectal stench, a –

*

Cop pulls her over on the interstate. ‘Need to see some ID.’ She looks at him desperately, still clutching the wheel. ‘Transgression, the lust for disorder. . Officer, I’ve spent my whole life courting delirium.’ Cop shakes his head sadly. ‘Out here that just won’t ride. Been driving like a crazy person.’ And she was so near to the coast — this unceasing ordeal.

*

‘In my defence, I was crazed with lust.’ The young man stays in his ground-floor room watching porn and taking caffeine pills. Vines from the back garden cover the window. No job, few friends. Says the internet meets all his human needs, bar nutrition. Flatmate is from Belgium, twenty-five, lesbian. Likewise private and reclusive. He rarely sees her. That’s not to say he doesn’t fantasise. This is to the east of the city, where rents are cheaper. ‘I’m out in the future. Symbols are ambiguous. . Stranded in remote territories. . We have known each other for ever.’ He dreams of her on a black sea, dying to capsize.

*

Another slap in the face, another abandonment and humiliation. I too have lived in filthy hovels, I too have crawled like an insect. Raskolnikov of the internet age. ‘You raise the gun, you transcend all laws.’ I fell in love with porn actresses, suffered indignities in the workplace, voted for the lesser of two evils. I watched my human heart grow diseased and die before I was twenty-two. What do these leeches know about shame? I’m ten years older than everyone. Ten years that passed like a day. There is no home for people like me.

*

Paris on a midweek afternoon. I was supposed to be writing about a Bulgarian author whose feverish theories had haunted me since college, but my thoughts were sluggish and grim. When it rained I sat in a café and took out my notebook: ‘Perimeters. . Reproaches. . A lifetime spent wandering in foreign cities, utterly depressed. . The world holds its breath for a collision it both fears and craves.’ Somewhere a door closes. Footsteps in a corridor. He orders another coffee.

*

I liked her but I knew she was insane. So was everyone else in that guesthouse on a lost coast. Ocean like a churning scum, skies of impenetrable grey, motorbikes that passed in the distance — local amphetamine-thugs with a grudge against my civilisation. She would walk by herself on the beach for hours, gazing out at the foam. Those days I sat alone in windswept bars, often the only customer. Sometimes there wasn’t even a barman. ‘Heard he was only here for the sex, and to drink himself into oblivion.’ ‘Yep.’ On a hill out of town, a group of boys strum a guitar, singing intermittently. Everyone seems to be waiting for a calamity, a shattering. I slept for thirteen hours. When I woke, she was gone. A note on the bedside locker said, ‘This is a past life.’ A few vague lines about a shaman and some ruins.

If I stay here, I will go mad.

*

Autumn in a mid-sized city that isn’t particularly distinguished. He’s always tired now, sighing and staring into the TV while she’s out at work. Sometimes he murmurs about having kids one day, other times he’s silent for entire afternoons. Something has been damaged: a fundamental innocence. The daytime talk-show host gestures manically. ‘Everywhere the sacrament of LSD is being consumed.’ Drives with the radio on but remembers nothing. (Music? Talk? Static?) Sees his own emptiness reflected in billboards. By night, watches burning condoms curl up and disintegrate in a deserted car park. They never make love any more.