Rob Doyle - This is the Ritual

He left the next morning and took a bus to another town on the edge of the desert, where he hung around for a few days, reading Alberto Moravia in cafés and walking out at the periphery. He had sex again, this time with a barmaid from a place he got drunk in one night. She lived with her sister and Julian could hear her snoring in the next room while they fucked. They didn’t use a condom. Later in the night, as Julian lay in the dark with his eyes closed, he heard the woman weeping beside him. He left in the morning. After drifting for another couple of days, he arrived at Caborca, a desert city where more punks he knew were squatting. One of these was Sebastian, a Mexican who Julian had known six or seven years previously, in Madrid. Back then, Sebastian was twenty-five and still ablaze with youthful idealism. Now, that fire had all but burnt out. The world had not changed like Sebastian had demanded it to, but had moved on without him, brash with sunshine and thoughtless laughter. Like so many punks past their mid-twenties, Sebastian had begun to re-channel the aggression of his fading youth into a world-hating defeatism.

The building that Sebastian and his friends were squatting was a crumbling four-storey block on the desert-whipped fringes of town. There was a large courtyard in the middle, hemmed in by the pale walls of the abandoned apartments. In this courtyard the punks would pass their days drinking, smoking weed, sometimes screwing one another, and playing music when they could be bothered to on battered amps, guitars and a rusted drum-kit, though their songs were all at least five years old and they seemed to spit out the rebellious, leftist lyrics with bitter irony (all of these punks were in their late twenties or older). The numbers fluctuated but there were usually around eight of them staying there. Mostly they were Latin Americans.

Sebastian’s girlfriend, Erika, was an Argentinian who said she’d never go back to that country, so vacuously obsessed was it with image and surface. Julian would watch her through the late-afternoon tequila blur, when the sun’s glare dragged all of existence out into the open, groaning, exposed and humiliated. Erika seemed strangely indifferent to Sebastian, who grew more sullen and withdrawn as the days and weeks piled up, loitering at the far end of the courtyard with his dark curly hair and his Misfits T-shirt. The couple had an open relationship, but neither Erika nor Sebastian ever seemed bothered to fuck any of the other punks, perhaps because the permutations had already been exhausted. After he’d been there for a couple of weeks, Julian followed Erika into the shade of one of the rarely used rooms, up on the third floor. There was nothing in the room but a bare mattress. They fucked for hours in the hot afternoon as Sebastian and the others drank in the courtyard below. Between bouts of screwing, while he and Erika took hits on a plastic bong, Julian could hear Sebastian’s voice, unnaturally loud, sometimes igniting into harsh and mirthless laughter. Then there would be silence for a while, the nullifying presence of the desert drifting over the apartment block like a cloud of sand or slow gas.

‘What do you think is up with Sebastian these days?’ said Julian as they lay side-by-side, stoned and separate, gazing at the ceiling while intermittent shrieks rose up from the courtyard.

‘Nothing’s up with him,’ said Erika. ‘He’s unhappy. Why wouldn’t he be?’

Julian snorted. ‘What, cause he never managed to change the world? He needs to grow up. I don’t have any pity on him.’

‘You don’t have pity on anyone. And no one has any pity on you.’ She laughed.

‘That’s not true,’ said Julian, tiredly. In the courtyard someone played a grindcore band on an ancient cassette deck and Julian began to fuck Erica with his fingers, while she stroked his cock, gently at first but soon tugging violently, so that they came almost together, juices spilt on leather and dust as the slow, turgid warp of grindcore bounded off the walls.

He stayed on in the squatted block. Days rolled past like the occasional, slow clouds in the desert sky, or the lone cars on the highway that trailed silently to the horizon.A guy called Raoul came up from Mexico City with a great deal of speed. For three days they all stayed up getting wrecked. It was fun, like the old days. On the second night of the speed blitz, Julian screwed Erika again. This time it was vicious, both of them snarling, biting and clawing, the border between lust and battery obliterated. ‘Spit on me,’ she hissed as he held her legs back and plunged into her, wanting to stab and maim and lacerate. His saliva slapped the skin above her eye. She punched him hard in the jaw and he slapped her with equal force so that she let out an involuntary whimper. He felt his cock throbbing hard inside her. At one point Julian turned and saw someone standing in the doorway, the figure indistinct in the gloom. He thought it was Sebastian but couldn’t be sure. After a while the figure turned away, indifferent, and Julian gushed into the heat of Erika’s pussy, then collapsed on to her chest, wheezing as arrows of light flashed on the screen of his eyelids. He felt alone and serene in the empty drift of time. Nothing had ever mattered and why should it now.

When the speed was gone the group got back to drinking, smoking weed and hanging around. The atmosphere seemed to have deteriorated, even when the after-effects of their drug-bender had worn off. Occasionally they ate some half-hearted vegan fare, attempting to quell the sickly heave of their guts. Julian perpetually had the runs, as if something inside him had melted or ruptured. It was like someone was wringing out a filthy towel in his bowels. He didn’t screw with Erika any more. Maybe it was time to move on. But Julian was unable to summon the will to break out of the inertia that hung over the block. He didn’t really care. The insidious thing about depression is that it snuffs out the desire to do anything about it, negates the notion that there’s any compelling reason not to be depressed. He thought he’d been at the squat for five weeks but he couldn’t be sure.

One afternoon Julian got back from the town with two bottles of tequila. Five or six of the punks sat in the glare of the courtyard, drinking straight from the bottle. Erika was even quieter than usual, staring as if into an invisible daytime campfire, sighing every now and then. Sebastian too was silent: he had hardly spoken in days. After a while, he took a deep swig on the bottle and walked away, into the gloom of the building. Someone put on a tape, an Arizona sludge-metal band, the awful sound of empty time, the abysmal truth of the desert, of all existence tumbling in the void. As they sat amid the drone, something made Julian look up: on the rooftop, veiled by the sun’s glare, stood Sebastian. He was gazing down into the courtyard below. Julian used his hand to block the sun, and watched. None of the others had noticed that he was up there. Sebastian stood very still, never once glancing towards the group far beneath him. Then, without prelude, he let himself fall forward, on his knees. He dropped from the rooftop and plummeted past the fourth, third, second floors. There was a thud and a flash of dust and he fused with the concrete. Julian cursed. The others all turned in the same instant. Sebastian had impacted head-first; his top half was flattened into a puddle of swirling human colour. His back half rose out of the fusion in low mounds, like the mesa on the empty expanse of the plains.

Erika and the others wouldn’t accept that Sebastian had killed himself. When, after a couple of days had passed, Julian tried to persuade them that that’s what had happened, they turned on him, hissing that he was scheming and malicious, he thought it was all some fucking game, he should fuck off back to England or anywhere else as long as it was out of their sight. Julian stayed one more night after that. The following morning he gathered his things. On his way out of the squat he took one last look at the patch of concrete where Sebastian had landed, which first the police and then the punks had hosed down. You could still see the blood, a rusty brown smear like a diarrhoea stain. Julian knew it would be there for ever, or at least long after the punks had moved on, or died or grown old, or just walked out into the desert to be felled by the sun. No one was awake to say goodbye when he left.