This is the Ritual Read online

  *

  The body had been riddled with bullets. ‘He’ll disappear, the way they all did.’ ‘People think it’s revenge.’ ‘As if this had a logic.’ A day of drizzle and wind. Headlights in the rain. (The Herriots? No, that other couple.) A lone eccentric, he lived in the woods. They say he ate magic mushrooms and sat out in the moonlight. Intense dialogues with unseen beings. Various other rumours, likewise unsavoury. Contact with outer reality was rare. He wrote poetry, such as this: ‘Grant no peace to disturbed remains/Knowledge resides at the limit/Burnt-out ruins on the horizon, no place for a woman of breeding.’ Lecherous half-thoughts: ‘Her blood is streaming everywhere, flowing into my groin. Her beautiful ankles . . . Lick me if you like me.’ Energetic resolutions, guilt, resignation, etc.

  *

  Living on the island, she thought often of Jean-Paul. Not that she hadn’t had lovers since. The longest day was past. Still, these visions of him asleep on the bed, naked . . . Writes a book whose themes are betrayal, hatred, the lure of utter destruction. ‘I was bored.’ ‘We’re all fucking bored.’ That Russian girl, no one would deny she was attractive, though in a fickle, plastic way. ‘You destroyed what we had for her?’ There’s always some excuse, rarely a justification. One morning she had gone to a riding school where the trainer always eyed her hungrily – revenge was inevitable. But let a lost boy have his erotic moments, she thinks now. After all, we live in flames, it’s better we are never truly known. Then: it’s a free world, the twenty-first century. (Late-night film in her beach cabin: orgasms real or fake, it’s all the same to her. A couple drives in silence, headlights in the rainy dark. ‘Just fucking do it.’ ‘I’ll never take you back!’ ‘Suit yourself, like you always do.’)

  *

  Natalya rides a train to the peripheries. For love of this world, she pledges calm and what happiness is possible. Writes in her notebook: ‘Suddenly, life takes us all so seriously.’ Watches dawn break over squatted Munich high-rises. Cables slack like arteries. Karla and Renée asleep in their bags somewhere. ‘Gazing into this mirror, I realise what has happened.’ The area between here and the sea is peppered with military installations. She imagines the species to come: tragic like all conscious life. The train passes insane asylums, electricity plants, warehouses, abandoned docks. Traces of the European War. Handles life like a sacred weapon. No longer young, she has fewer illusions. This place doesn’t symbolise anything, she thinks bitterly, except perhaps its own haunting. Freedom is what? To take drugs and eventually commit suicide? To fuck without empathy? At least the fighters had beliefs and values. From the train, glimpses through smashed-out windows at vases, framed pictures, glasses and cups. Everything scorched and blackened – romanticism at its most ruthless. Parable of the human condition: ‘The misery of man without God.’ (Canned laughter.) What are they looking at? They ruined everything. Demolished the monasteries and churches. AK-47s in every photograph, enchanted by their own manliness. Now we douse our pain with alcohol and chants. Passing old statues like a graveyard, she writes in her notebook: ‘All philosophers hitherto have merely changed the world; the point is to destroy it.’ Landscapes of our mad desire. Journey on, through this night. The train will never reach its destination.

  *

  The lovers are strangers here. Entertaining doubts about their own existence, they see the headlights of a car on the far side of the square. (Just some couple in a hell of their own.) She smiled girlishly, pushed a wisp of hair back from her face. ‘Life is to be ruined.’

  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 remem
ber 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!’

  Watches films with no sound in scarcely furnished Belgian lodgings, or empty cinemas in undistinguished German cities. ‘All this furious activity . . . Is it merely a prelude to universal war?’ She can’t utter the phrase ‘spiritual struggle’ without a sneer or tragic irony. Postcards to her sister out by the Pacific: ‘A sky bereft of sun, yet still blue, still containing birds . . . Moorish cafés at noon . . . “Beauty is a promise of happiness”.’ Twilight, late summer, the burning sun . . .

  Absurdity of our dreams.

  *

  He emerged from catastrophe clutching a red bandanna. Collaborators. Failure and destruction. That vulgar being, ‘God’ – son of a war criminal . . . Recuperates in Paris for a few months, then slips back across the border to Spain to ignite the Republic. ‘No one knows – not even God!’ (Hysterical laughter.) A tormented community, but such beautiful women . . . ‘I would gladly give up my life for one night with her.’ The older man laughs. ‘You may not need to.’ Inland, he enters the Basque Country. ‘We crouched around the radio all night when we heard the capital was falling.’ ‘My child, remember this day.’ ‘Yes, Papa.’ Gunmen with the certainty and zeal of youth roar slogans as they storm through the streets. ‘I’ve seen all this before,’ says the old woman. ‘Don’t ask me to applaud your fervours. Just let me dissolve like the rest of nature.’ (She’s seen it a million times, literally.) Piety and patriotism, the dignity of any creed at all. A nation is reborn.

  I wake in a hotel room with the taste of petrol in my mouth.

  Loch Ness

  We were hitch-hiking on a freeway at the limits of the capital. The situation incited a fearful joy. ‘Cruelty? That’s just like you.’ ‘This is my country, I don’t have to tolerate anyone.’ ‘Natürlich,’ I replied. Cars zoomed past us, a monstrous violence inherent in the world today. We were young and in love and nothing else mattered.

  *

  Watching the dreary procession, standing over her grave in the rain . . . I remember the day like a death sentence. ‘Nothing will ever be the same again.’ Once, during a trip to the provinces, she told me that being alive is just like staying in a hotel. ‘Then again, when you’re in a hotel, you may as well have sex,’ she added huskily.

  *

  Rob Doyle out walking along the cliffs on a grey afternoon. His lips move, he talks to himself, frowns for no obvious reason, makes sharp gestures with his hands. ‘You’re a tourist, and you’re disappearing just like this coastal land.’ He ignores my voice and gazes out to sea. ‘I wish I had one day of life to spend in pure happiness. I also wish I had a dog, having proven already that I can’t live with women.’

  Still this struggle to write, fretful and serious in a house on the coast. Listens through the wall to his neighbour having sex, though he was under the impression that she lived alone. ‘Maybe she’s not having sex.’ One bad review and he almost dies of it. Doesn’t leave the house for nearly a week. I email him a quote from Ezra Pound: Ignore criticism from men who have never written notable works. To which I add, ‘For comfort, bear in mind the unreality of life.’

  *

  Visits the grave of E. M. Cioran in Montparnasse cemetery with a slender blonde who stands slightly back, her features suggesting keen observational faculties and a cool temperament. A cloudy afternoon, the cemetery all but deserted. ‘This is as fine a place to make love as any.’ They lie down together and couple efficiently, though without any great passion. ‘Beckett is buried here too,’ he murmurs afterwards, fixing himself. She remains sitting on the ground for a spell, silently contemplative. ‘Pessimism as a philosophy is about as interesting to me as heavyweight boxing.’ They go for coffee in a nearby café.

  *

  Phrases from the philosophers of Despair start appearing on advertising billboards: Man? A twilight sigh . . . All thought craves the Night in which it will capsize . . . Gaze into the corpse – know thyself !

  In a nearby motel, the champion fighter holds his head in his hands. ‘I’ve lost my ferocity. May as well be a limp-dick sonofabitch.’ His young wife (blonde, Caucasian) tries to soothe him: ‘Don’t fret, baby.’

  ‘I fear everything.’

  Their marriage dissolves.

  *

  Done with hitch-hiking, we perch on a hillside overlooking the freeway, out where the billboards are. Binoculars, a blanket, a selection of cheeses, two wine glasses. ‘Cities are becoming conscious, let’s hope they’re benign.’ Through the binoculars, she sees a car with tinted windows glide towards the desert.

  ‘You love me. But is it for ever? Youth is fleeting, a wild fuck astride a grave. In a matter of hours we’ll have changed beyond recognition.’

  *

  She can never te
ll her husband about the erotic dreams she has of heavyweight boxers. Black, glistening men who make her cry out in her sleep. ‘I’m a brutal tyrant, a vicious ruthless killer, I live on fear and nails, there’s no one like me.’ When she wakes, she still loves him, but her love is frayed at the edges by contempt and a mild disgust. Lying beside her, he smiles and looks towards the ceiling, speaking softly of his hopes, always of his hopes. Men are redundant, she decides, little more than playthings. This year, she will take a holiday alone. Madagascar, Barbados, Jamaica . . .

  *

  Another billboard: Your bitterest enemy lives in your own home.

  *

  ‘I wasn’t looking for the “Grand Love”.’ He cracks open a beer and slugs savagely. ‘You have no idea how hard I’ve worked to keep this family together.’ ‘Yeah well, all I ever learned from you is the art of skulduggery. Is that what marriage is? That and nothing more?’ They agree to stay together for the kids, though they soon fuck them up. (Round of applause.)

  Saddest thing I ever heard.

  The Closest I Ever Got

  A dead body rolled up in a carpet and kicked down the basement stairs. The barman kept pouring till all the glasses overflowed. ‘It’s worth it in the end.’ ‘Not really,’ said the blonde. ‘Aggressive, ready for violence – the usual sexual competition between young men. I get it everywhere I go.’ This broad drinks to forget, the barman thinks.

  *

  A fountain in the main square. An Australian psychologist admiring the quality of the European light. Those glamorous years . . . The same canals, the hot, sensual cities. A beautiful girl on the back of a motorbike, rides off down the Calle de Noche Triste. Traces of a higher culture, though all of that has long passed . . . A young author types rapidly with the blinds drawn in a small, hot apartment (green T-shirt, trilby). Hearing the laughter of teenagers down in the street, he sighs, then goes out and stands on the balcony. Black lace panties. The phrase captivates him; he returns to his desk and types it out seven times, then stares at the screen, mesmerised. The teenagers are flirting. A boy in a black leather jacket rides off on his Vespa with a girl whose body justifies everything. Later, the author opens a bottle of port and weeps.