‘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.
Anus — Black Sun
I found the video in the small hours, lodged in the murky peripheries of a horrendous porn site, the kind set up by Ukrainian deviants and then abandoned, forgotten, left to fend for itself in the wastelands of cyberspace. A kind of obscene and feral orphan, roaming the void, howling in abjection.
I had come home from a warehouse party and was off my face. I don’t know what kind of craving was in me that night. Restlessly I clicked through a series of conventional porno clips, leaving each one behind after a few seconds. Nothing was enough; I wanted something harder. I clicked on links that led to links that led to links — the infinite nexus of the internet, like the fabled Tora Bora caves that Bin Laden was said to have haunted.
The video I eventually uncovered, I have never forgotten. I clicked the flesh-filled thumbnail to begin streaming, noticing with surprise that the clip lasted forty-three minutes.
On the screen, in a window surrounded by ads so vile I felt soiled whenever my vision strayed to them, there was an anus, in close-up. It did not look dissimilar to the anal close-ups common in standard porn clips. Yet this one did not move. It was not a still image, however: there was a constant, subtle shifting of pixilation, and the low hum of background ambience — someone was filming the anus. My jaws gurning, I gazed uncomprehendingly at the gaping aperture nestled between taut buttocks. It was a pert anus, slightly strained, as if the woman (it was clearly feminine) was on all fours. But that was it. No penetration, no other organs, no agent of pleasure or violation. And no narrative — not even of the ultra-minimal variety favoured by modern pornographers, in which all extraneous details of character, plot and setting are effaced, leaving only the pure event of organ-in-organ-in-motion, and the hyperbolic wails of phantasmagorical desire.
An anus, nothing more.
I tried to skip ahead but the video would not allow it. So, I let it play on, and watched, and waited. Nothing happened. Yet, as I watched, I began to feel a change taking place, not in the image onscreen, but in my perception, in myself. It was akin to the onset of a trance. Devoid of all context, even that of the body to which it belonged, the anus began to assume an abstract quality. It became unmoored from its functionality, from its historicity, from all sense of reference. It was neither arousing nor repulsive. I am tempted to suggest an affinity with Kant’s ‘thing-in-itself’. In rapt free-association, I began to see in the anus intimations of a sublime geometry, of astronomy, of black holes, galaxy clusters, the swirl of incipient being-in-the-void which is how I envision the cosmic birth. I saw the sun, the black sun shining on a hazed primordial scene; I saw the solar eye, a god of war and carnage sucking everything into itself and rendering being as non-being, matter as void, darkness as light and light as darkness; I saw the all-seeing eye, the third eye of Shiva, the black core of the earth, the infinite sphere of Pascal’s nightmares, the silent portal wherein each man, in terror, must confront himself. The abyss from which all things arise and to which all things must return.