*
They were watching him from across the table. Hard, ugly faces, missing teeth, utter lack of warmth or sympathy — no better than cannibals. ‘Where is she?’ ‘Gone.’ His teeth on edge like acrobats. Muttered curses, glances passed among them. They get up and leave the canteen. Time of our dire need. They found the old lady by an open window that night, broken in various ways. Consign them all to the pits of hell.
Aren’t you dead, like us? ‘Only on the inside.’
*
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?”’