*
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.
*
On the afternoon of her twenty-sixth birthday, the Belgian girl drew a bath and opened her wrists. A drowsy, incoherent goodbye. Her flatmate was in his room with the porno. ‘She was always insane.’ ‘We will never make it home, not now in any case.’ ‘The condition of being locked outside of life.’ ‘A willing, attractive woman by your side. Days free of all obligation. . Does it matter that our sexuality was incompatible? I loved you, in my way.’ Burning condoms in a deserted car park. There is nowhere to go.
Utter derision, in this mirror full of screams.
*
Interstates, freeways. Drives all night with the radio on. ‘I would want, literally, to kill her.’ A cuckolded boyfriend — that perennial experience. When something is broken, it’s broken. Hears the voice of the talk-show host say softly: ‘The saddest thing I ever heard. .’
In an early bar on the dusty edge of a city, saves himself only by getting blind drunk. ‘How beautiful you were.’ Starts weeping and embarrasses the barman (he is the only customer). The barman has no time for this maudlin scene — he looks away. ‘Last night the devil stood outside my door. .’ It’s all coming out slurred. The barman continues to ignore him.
Finally he collapses face-first on a table. Everywhere, whiskey and broken glass.
Barcelona
Alicia moved to Barcelona when she was twenty-nine, having ended an eight-year relationship after learning of her partner’s long-term infidelity.
After a couple of months in the city, she got a job as a waitress in a restaurant on the Calle Trujas, on the fringes of the red-light district. She mostly worked nights, and often prostitutes or their pimps or clients would come in, alone or in small, garrulous groups, to eat burritos and kebabs. The prostitutes’ clients were drunk and loud, and sometimes they tried to joke with Alicia about their exploits, as if to reassure themselves through her complicity. Many of these late-night customers were foreign tourists. Sometimes they said the most obscene, misogynistic, lewd things in Alicia’s presence, not realising she spoke English. Other times they just didn’t care.
On some nights, Alicia was overcome by bitterness and misanthropy. It seemed to her that the Calle Trujas was a sewer, and that the restaurant where she worked was a rotting piece of wood that floated along the surface, on to which rats would crawl and sniff around for a while before lurching back into the fetid stream. Alicia did not have much money: most of what she made at the restaurant went on rent. She could have lived more cheaply if she shared an apartment, but she was determined to live on her own, which she had never done before. Late at night, when her shifts ended, she would go back to her apartment, several streets away on the Calle de la Madera, and sit with the lights off, looking out at the rooftops, drinking a beer and eating from a box of noodles or a few slices of pizza. When summer came, she sat on the roof terrace instead.