-7m28s She idolized Patti Smith and wore men’s shirts unbuttoned over black denim that crinkled behind her knees. When I met her she was reading aloud, a book in one hand and a glass of red wine in the other. It seemed like a long time ago. She cried because her heart hurt. I cried because she cried. I bought a bottle and walked her home. We fucked. She made all the noises. She didn’t come. I did. I told her this time I meant it. I had to go. She curled up around me and said she understood. I told her she didn’t. I wanted to change my name and leave the country. She wanted to get high and cheat on me backstage with Erol Alkan. I got out of bed and put a record on. Something clinical. Something heartless. ‘Shall we do another half?’ she asked me, her eyes bursting with the idea. I told her this was my last. She smiled. She’d heard it before. Pills were dead I told her. She knew it. We all knew it. The lights were up. MDMA, MDMC, M-CAT and all the rest, they would soon be macabre curios synthesized in NHS labs by medical researchers crawling down back alleys of the human psyche searching for a cure. She’d be alright, she was younger. Acid House was ancient history to her. We did the pill and listened to the song, finding new shapes in the spaces between the percussion, two skimmed stones on a still glass lake. Soon it was too late to talk. I ran my hands along her jeans. They were tight across her thighs and I felt her hot inside. The high came up like canned applause. We fucked again. Afterwards we lay side-by-side inert, hypnotised with the pill and the sex and the music. Strands of dawn burned off the night, its spell broken by the birds. She rolled onto her side away from the light and knocked the bottle over me. I laid there, eyes in tracer, staring at the ceiling as she sucked what was left of the wine off of me. She put her head on my chest and said maybe we would see each other again some day. I half hummed Vera Lynn. She didn’t laugh. Neither did I. I was tired of me. The bedsheets were wet with us and the wine and that’s how we fell asleep. -6m51s Moore’s Law states that computing power doubles every two years. Medical science moves a lot slower. I’ve known them. The casualties. Permaslur and bent smiles. But this is different. We don’t stand a chance. By the time the doctors diagnose it, half a million will be lost in the neurosoup. Flatlined people without names or histories. A slow fluttering madness that drowns you out like insect wings. The Emnesiacs. Eyes like mercury rivers, their minds are film negatives exposed to the light. Dementia. A switch is flipped. The brain is an electrical device. The body is a circuitry. Burned synapses. Dead receptors. Spent serotonin. There’s a fire in the message centre. An exclamation mark in time. Are the security services on alert because of terrorist attack or the imminent threat of mass public hysteria? How long until the vulture bares its teeth? When you hear your neighbour through the floorboards night after night, crying himself to sleep? When mothers are found wandering the streets half-dressed, clutching their kids, confused and afraid? Or when the nation’s favourite television personality is found dead in the front seat of his BMW with a hosepipe in his mouth and Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works set on repeat? The old clubland is a moratorium for a more innocent time. The dancefloors are dormant. Stripped and boarded up. The rich will live out their days in five-star asylums strung out on free drugs imprisoned in a flashing magnesium bohemia. The party gets smaller every year. Like a gas chamber, they go in but never come out. But darling what wonderful people and the scene really is to die for. You must come. Not me. I wasn’t born with a silver spike in my arm. This is not our Great War. They’ll see to it that we disintegrate in silence. Pariahs. Martyrs. Cautionary tales. People are dying of cancer. Babies are born with a hole in the heart. Innocents are being stabbed in the streets. I’m dying of hedonism. I burned my eyes looking into the sun. -6m22s The sign said: UNWANTED, PLEASE TAKE. I taped it to the screen of my television and walked down to the Rat & Scuttle. When I came back, everything was gone, even my old shoes. I off-loaded as much as I could in a week. Shops, internet, charity, wherever. What I couldn’t carry or sell I just left behind. ‘There’s some nice stuff here,’ said the bloke at the record exchange. He offered me three hundred for the lot. 25p a fucking record. I watched the twenty pound notes go down in silence and asked if he was interested in buying a second-hand phone. -5m33s I sit naked in an empty room. The sentence for possession is life, but when you know you won’t remember your own name in five years’ time, what difference does it make? Objects are losing meaning. Faces mouth words but only speak in syllables. One night stands. Friendships worn away over time. Fuck the fake smiles and the lip service. Fuck ‘keep in touch’ and ‘see you soon’. Fuck the nine to nine and a London way of life. Fuck doing the right thing and being a good person. Fuck ‘I love you’ and ‘stay positive’. The crystals wink back at me from the polythene bag. Cut the ties, they say. Run. Run until your lungs burn. Run until your heart stops. Run to the end of the Earth. -4m40s Dr. Felicity Briquet-Anderson pumps out a bicarbonate soda smile and air kisses her way around me. Her lipstick rings out like a triple cherry jackpot in the staid caramel pocket of the Magellan Business Centre. The ‘truth room’, that’s what she calls it. I sit down. Dr. Felicity opens the wine. Everybody who gets diagnosed gets the therapy. It’s standard issue. The doctors do nothing. All tests are negative. They blind you with psychosomatics and cure you with placebos and platitudes. I threatened a nurse with a hospital fork and got referred the next day. Dr. Felicity says it’s delirium. My mind is trying to rationalize the irrational. I have to see my episodes for what they are: chemical reactions. I know this is a lie. These are symptoms not reactions. It’s the stirrings of this animal thing. The long dark tunnel whistling Origin Unknown in my ear. It’s hiding itself. It’s latched on. It’s hollowing out the marrow in my bones. It’s the tingle in the end of my fingers. It’s the swelling in my temples, the pins and needles in my legs. It’s why I can’t remember the first girl I fucked or where I was when the twin towers went down. Dr. Felicity’s red hair is pulled back straight and tight. Her eyes are painted on with eye shadow. The freckles across her botoxed forehead make her look like a speckled egg. I think about tapping that pumped up oily eggbrow with the back of my knuckle. Maybe she’ll crack. I sit on the faux-leather lounger that fills one side of the room. On the wall next to me is a floor to ceiling mural. A hazy White Isle cliché of rolling sand and low stoned sun. When I straighten up and rest my head on the padded headrest I notice a man sitting in the corner of the room. ‘Oh, this is Randal,’ says Dr. Felicity, ‘he’s writing a book.’ ‘A book about what?’ ‘Me,’ smiles Dr. Felicity. Randal looks like Brutus from Popeye. If Brutus from Popeye had been a gay fashion editor. His lips are blue and blubbery and he’s dressed 10 years too young. He smiles and looks through the viewfinder of his camera, pulling me into focus. ‘And if I don’t want to be in the book?’ ‘Oh you won’t be, he says in a peppermint voice. ‘This is research.’ The shutter closes and his flash sends rings of light ghosting across the back of my eyelids. ‘I don’t want photos.’ The flash fires again. ‘No fuckin’ photos!’ I shout. ‘No fucking photos! No fucking photos!’ Randal queens hysterically. He drops his camera down on the desk and rolls his eyes at Felicity, ‘Who buggered him on the wrong side of bed this morning?’ Dr. Felicity tries not to smile. She takes a make-up compact out from her handbag and in among the soft brushes and eyeliner unfolds a wrap of white powder. Dr. Felicity licks the end of her finger and dips it into the powder before sucking it clean. She motions to me. I shake my head. She looks at me disapprovingly. ‘Oh come now. We’re so much more productive when we’re in a comfortable therapy environment aren’t we? Heavens. If you wanted rehab darling you came to the wrong place!’ Dr. Felicity and Randal laugh. I sigh and lean over from the lounger, lick my little finger and do a dab. Randal does the same. We drink. Dr. Felicity recrosses her legs and looks down at her notes before peering back up at me over her nose. The hypnosis begins. ‘I want you to clear your mind.’ I watch her sticky red lips press into one another with every consonant. ‘I want you to imagine–’ I imagine my dick in her mouth. ‘Tell me again about how you felt.’ I trace the lines of her tits through her shirt. ‘What went through your mind?’ I think about running my hands through her hair. ‘Can you remember?’ I unbutton her shirt and pull the straps of her bra over her shoulders. ‘OK, you find yourself in a pleasant state of heightened relaxation.’ I crack her egghead with two knocks on the back of my knuckle and fuck the yolk. The curd oozes down my cock as it goes in and out of the top of her. Randal drops to his knees and starts shooting, the flash popping with the shutter, spitting light into her. His tongue wags at his wet lips as he paws at her for more, one hand on the shutter, the other pulling his cock out of his fly, ‘and 3... 2... 1... welcome back.’ Dr. Felicity smiles and says that’s all we have time for this week. I ask her for more Haloperidol. She writes me my prescription without looking up. As usual she tells me to cut out the drink and drugs. As usual, I nod and agree in earnest. On my way out I cancel next week’s session. -3m56s The wood drips into dark corners where the light never goes. The locals lurch around their pints, shouting drunkenly to one another from opposite ends of the bar. They ignore the young and beautiful around them, save for the occasional leud proposition to the befringed Bardot-u-likes that sway about the place since the cool kids decamped here. This pub was the seat of a revolution. Now it has a free wi-fi network. They fought and sang and fucked in this pub. But like those before and since, the Young Turks were castrated when the people crowned them kings. The old boy looked across at me as I finished my pint, ‘Well you know what Oscar Wilde said brother,’ his quiff receding but pomped, ‘when you’re tired of London, you’re tired of cunts.’ ‘Yeah,’ I smiled, ‘I’m tired of being tired.’ -2m47s I’m the only one sober. It’s a special occasion of some sort. Maybe it’s the sun. There are girls being sick in bins. There are people running down corridors. There are lines of coke on a glass table and a stripper sucking cock in the men’s toilets. I get up from my swivel chair like any other day. Say goodbye like any other day and get into the lift like any other day. ‘I’d just like to take the opportunity to say–’ I pull his head up out of the chair by his hair and press his face against the glass. We look down at the traffic through a polarized tint. I watch the reflections in the glass bubble like a hall of mirrors as I beat his head on the double-glazing. This isn’t very professional I think. I kick him in the ribs and put my heel on his face, rolling his skull around on the bottom of my shoes. He’d remember my fucking name now. I turn and spit into his still-born eyes. He wishes me good luck and says it was a pleasure working with me. I thank him and close the door behind me. -1m39s Something Detroit. Something electric. The pavement is wet the colour of slate. The people run down the streets like drops of condensation. A junkie is lurching along the pavement, swaggering on chalk bones, cocky for nothing to lose. His old plimsoles are soaked with dirt. He’s a parasite, a flea on the back of the concrete elephant. He looks at the couples with the same wary snatched glances that they look at him. Two sides of the same mirror, only their opiate is routine, repetition, safety. He watches the citizens sitting in chain coffee shops beaten slowly numb by mediocrity. Day trippers. Chinese tourists. Internet dates. Unhappy families. The out-of-towners. Football fans get drunk on sulphuric pints between recruitment consultants and media mongrels in gutless identikit pubs soundtracked by exploitation pop. London expands in ever-less defined echoes of itself. Nothing works but they build more. The old city, the great city, the middle-men pulled it down brick by brick and replaced it with flat-pack glass boxes that have no exits or entrances. Street names are turned into logos and history is sold on as retail opportunity. Every last crumb of worth has been bought up and sold on in a megalomanical feeding frenzy. Skinned and mounted, the fleas have sucked the elephant dry. It’s infested. In the square mile, Babel tower torches burn crude oil up into a sky worn whisper thin to power a week-long summit convened by the stock exchange, the Bank Of England and the Mayor Of London in which it is to be decided who’s face will go on the back of the new fifty-pound note. We are an island nation sinking slowly into its own shit. A feathered cage never cleaned out. Tonight teen soldiers are being skull-fucked by IEDs in sacrifice for an abandoned kingdom. A place where the home fires burn drowsy with cough medicine and the moral majority are sedated by technology and video toaster repeats of their own lives in infinite reflected recursion. The outsiders are strangling their children in box-room towns, but the city, glittering island within an island, the city grows by eating its young. The Big Smoke carries a government health warning issued by the Doctor General, a twenty-a-day man addicted to internet pornography and crack cocaine. Paste it on the walls: a black and shrunken heart, a dusty carbon shell prised open with forcep clamps. London is harmful to you and others around you. The junkie asks me for money in a small humble voice. I can see the shape of his skull, his mouth is lined with sores. Five years ago he had a guitar case full of brave ideas and a 20-grand advance. But the smack has robbed him of all that. I look into his eyes and see mine. Ours was the most dangerous myth to believe in of all: our own. I stand still and stare at him, my mouth won’t move. I sidestep him, walk in and pay for the flight in cash. -0m55s There’s no sleep. There’s video game hypnosis. Boxes of ex-lovers, guillotine dreams. Anglepoise eyes. Cumshot compilations and Bukakke seppuku. The light plays tricks with the rain. Raw ceramic gums until I can’t feel my teeth. I lie on my back itching in my own sweat, arms crossed over my chest. Mummified in cotton. Molars ground into chalk. Miles Davis in the Skeleton Key. Dead breath played backwards on a reel to reel. A beetle scuttles across the floor hunting for food. Bad decisions and dead end turns. These are the night terrors. When time compresses like wet pulp inside the throat and fills my ears with fluid. 2:18am. 3:47am. 4:34am. Speeding psychomotor activity bubbling under my eyelids, eyeballs too small for their sockets. A chicken-wire cage tightens around my head. Bad memories on repeat like scratched gramophone records. Ghosts mouthing my name. Chinese water torture inside a magnetic loop. Is this the scent of madness? I pick up my notepad and write it all down. There’s no sleep. -0m31s I’m higher than I want in the dregs of the day but there’s no turning back now. At terminal velocity the only thing to do is keep going. Accelerate. The sky’s closing up over my head. Got lost. Mosquito skin. Cash machine blues. Deck shoe zombies in the Friday half-life. Fuck the foreplay, take me down into the vox. A velvet anteroom beneath an unmarked doorway. War paint faces and saloon door stares. Jump the queue with three kind words. Identity is currency. The kid at the pay-in grabs me by the throat. So what you fucking got boy? What you got for us? Enough for one more drink. Four beats to the bar in a minor key, I pull up a stool. Safe in the belly. You’re never alone at the bar. I wash myself clean in booze. The band plays it loose. White noise loud. I do a half and then another but the walls won’t come down. Out across the floor I watch the young faces, expectant in the stage light. I pick up a glass eye fantasy for a 19-year old polka dot femme fatale. She comes to the bar for a drink. I let the booze do the talking. Want to run my hands through your make up. Want to put my cock in your shoes. Bitch baby queen, little darling sweet honey pie. Death croons for us. Let’s die a teen romance, high on speed and drunk at the wheel. ‘You got any drugs?’ Only pills I tell her. She looks at me like it was AIDs. On our way to the dancefloor I crumble up a pill in my pocket and when her eyes are closed I drop it in her drink. We walk up over the hill. Looking down on the city past the churchyard, I let the quiet wash over me. The city is flat and endless up here out of the tarmac trenches. A crater in waiting. I knock back vodka from her hipflask. She bends over and flips her skirt up. I pull down her tights and fuck her over a headstone. She gives me a kiss. ‘Got any more?’ she asks. We split one. I climb up onto a raised Victorian tomb and dance to the music in my head. I look down on the spirits from our stone stage. An audience of souls. They move line by line five deep. If I concentrate I can see their faces. Feel them. Stones in our ears. Hot coals on my feet. Whiskey ice tears. Arm in arm with the dead I dance it away. That newly dug grave of mine. Dance it away. Cross-city under glass. Acceleration. Die alive or die a death. No fadeout. Inside the underground pipes of Vauxhall, it’s like the good old days. In through the warren hole, I scan the room. ‘Who fuckin’ means it?’ None of us anymore. The floor’s full but they stand apart, eyes dilated with futureshock not empathy. Jaws clenched with grit instead of bliss. The love’s evaporated like sweat. All tomorrow’s parties are cancelled. The new sound’s laced with dread but I’m alive among the paper silhouettes, mind’s eye wide, synapses alight. The music bleeds into its component layers. I move down the room and the beat changes. Through the fog come the glistening opening chimes of Origin Unknown. I do everything I’ve got. A handful. Six or seven or more, I don’t know. The chimes oscillate half-speed heliocentrics. Buzzing fluorescent neuronoise streamed directly to the cornea in formations of digital light. 8-bit solar mazes pixellating into the black space between my eyes. Obliterated white light sound. White blood cells interlock, wagon-wheeling. Bitcrushed in a chemical equation. Sound becomes physical. I’m inside it, dancing down the long dark tunnel. Closer. Higher. I try and speak but my eardrums palpitate. The waveforms are in my spine. Ears an orifice fucked. Seeing in stereo. My feet go light. Narcosis. Without eye sockets for blinkers, there is no ugliness. Without fingers to touch, there is no feeling. Without blood to pump, there is no heartbreak. Without memories to play there is no pain. I see the white light, more brilliant than the sun. I float towards its bubbling golden surface on Icarus wings. So close to death I can see its writhing serpent seas. I open my arms and close my eyes. Euphoria. I burn alive. Just a sound in the ether, a flame to the beat. | Originally written for Turbochainsaw Magazine. All words © Paul Dixon 2010 |