Little Deaths, page 22
‘Sure.’ Their hands joined for a moment. Tony pointed to the fire escape at the back of the house. It was quite easy to climb, though being painted black, the steps were hard to see in the moonlight. Flakes of paint came off on Lee’s hands and elbows. On the second floor, two windows were close together; the left-hand one was boarded. Tony removed the board from the frame, like someone taking a patch off an eye. There was no glass behind it.
Inside were two chairs, a small table, a mattress. You could see all there was to see by moonlight and the distant railway lamp. Lee felt an uneasy sense of recognition. The iron-framed mirror above the table showed him only a negative image, like a shadow, of his own body. This was where they had made at least one of Austin’s short films. ‘Never Cry?’ he said.
Tony nodded. ‘And The Pain Threshold. They used the fire escape, too. Remember?’ There was an awkward silence. Lee rubbed his hands on his coat, trying to wipe off the fragments of black paint. Surely there couldn’t still be blood, after all this time. Fake blood, he reminded himself angrily. It all seemed more disturbing than at the club. A film was a film, wherever it was shot. But how had it really been? He remembered seeing a youth (Tony) chained to the fire escape, against the background of the city at night; streetlamps, tower blocks, distant fires, stars overhead. Austin’s technique of cross-cutting had made this landscape appear to be projected on to the wall of a prison cell. The youth was being beaten by two faceless attackers. Burned with strips of magnesium. In isolated frames, semen drying on his neck. It had excited Lee, but he didn’t know why. He didn’t know what it meant. But then, Tony was exactly his type: short black hair, pale skin, dark eyes, the narrow features of someone starved of comfort.
Lee sat down at the table, staring past Tony at the empty window-frame. Tony moved towards him, stopped. His eyes were black pits, devoid of expression, in the weak light. He gripped Lee’s hand, leant across the table, and spoke. Lee saw his mouth form the words before he registered their sound. ‘When you see a film, you don’t ask yourself what’s real and what’s acted. Let alone what’s been created by editing and dubbing in. It’s all just there. Even the effects of how the film’s been copied and botched up—illegal films go through nine or ten generations on video. Chinese whispers. Even the place you see it in, and what’s in your mind at the time. You get me?’ Lee nodded. ‘For actors, it’s just the same.’ Tony sat down, his hand on Lee’s arm.
‘I worked with Carl for three years. Even when I knew how little he cared about what we were doing. He never actually had me, you know. Or if he did it was by proxy. What is he to you? A sexual rebel? A subversive artist? To me, he wasn’t anything in particular. He was everything we had. Whatever he did, whatever we did for him. A complete world. Do you understand?’ Lee said nothing. He tried to form an image of Carl Austin from the photographs, articles and fragmentary interviews he’d come across over the last few years. Blond hair, a determined face, a constant half-smile. He was an underground figure, a man perpetually on the run; but, Lee thought suddenly, one who had never been jailed. Nobody was sure what (if anything) he stood for. Lee had learned a lot about the porn trade during his six months in prison. It was like the drug trade: the police used it as a network, a chain of connections that they could tap into at various points. By applying pressure in one place they could affect things from a distance, assert control, gain information. It was one of their maps.
Lee thought of a remark Austin had made in a magazine interview: ‘Pain is a universal drug. My films show you how it feels to cross the pain threshold. They take you to the edge of identity—the point beyond which death comes to life, darkness becomes light, pain becomes the most intense pleasure.’ At the time, Lee had thought he understood what Austin was saying; but now, the words seemed empty of meaning. I don’t know about reaching nirvana through pain, he thought. But I know about punishment. And I know about police surveillance. Is Carl the same? Or is he a visionary? I’m not. I’m just a voyeur.
When he spoke, it was to ask something he could never have imagined asking. ‘Was it real? The torture?’
‘Yes,’ Tony said. ‘And no. There was more to it, there always is …’ He leaned over and kissed the side of Lee’s neck. ‘The pain was real. Even if the rest was fake. That’s why I went on with it.’ He put his hand on Lee’s shoulder, pushing himself back. ‘Have you wondered why I’m here? I’m trying to break away from the group. Carl’s people. I want to go where nobody knows me. Even in this city, shithole that it is, I’ve got too many connections now. But I’m an exile, you understand? If I register for work or accommodation, they’ll trace my records. I’ll go to prison. Because I used to work for Carl. And I don’t have any protection now, because I’ve gone.’ Lee stared at him, feeling cold. His hands were numb. ‘I want to live for myself. When I got to Birmingham I couldn’t find anywhere to sleep. I knew about this place, so I came here. Not much good at escaping, am I? You can never escape. Do you know who Walter Benjamin was?’
‘Sorry?’ Lee was totally confused. ‘Who? Did he work with Carl?’
Tony shook his head. ‘He was a writer in the last century. A Jewish socialist who was captured by the Nazis, panicked and committed suicide. I read somewhere something he said about the Holocaust. He said The real death is the death of the witness.’
The moon had crossed the window, and it was near to complete darkness. There was no lightbulb, and probably no electricity supply; Tony lit a candle and stood it in a mug on the table. He lit a cigarette from it; the smoke was metallic, a mixture of tobacco and some narcotic, probably manufactured. In between drags, he took pills from his shirt pocket and chewed them. He crossed to the window and fitted the board back in the right-hand frame. There was an ancient oil heater in the corner of the room; Tony, with some difficulty, got it to light. A blue and orange flame jittered in the heater’s oval mouth.
Lee felt the cramps returning to his legs and making his fists close up. A brief sense of helplessness passed through him. He took three capsules of plasma from his coat, along with the pen-sized injector.
The only clear light was at the table, so he rolled back his sleeve and injected there. It made him angry—having to depend on drugs from other people’s bodies. The anger was an image on the screen of fear.
Slowly, his muscles returned to their normal tension. His vision cleared slightly, the focus moving outward. He got up to go to the toilet. The bathroom, at the end of the hallway, seemed too bright; the light made a silver web in the frosted glass. Then he realized the moon was still visible from this side of the house. There were crystals of ice on the walls, glinting; when he touched the plaster surface, they crumbled. The powder stuck to his fingers. It was cold enough to hurt. He rubbed his hand on some tissue paper, staring at the wall as though it held a secret pattern that would reveal itself, given time.
When he walked back into the room where Tony was still smoking, Lee could see the tiny ice fibres encrusted on the ceiling and upper walls. They made vague geometrical patterns in the candlelight. Perhaps he was hallucinating. It was like one of Austin’s visual effects. Or like the effect of repeated copying. Tony looked at him. ‘You’re thin-blooded,’ he said. Lee nodded. He supposed it was widespread now; people were less afraid of it than when he had developed the condition. The first cases were less than a decade ago. It was known to be an effect of contamination, though whether the cause was radiation or some chemical agent was still not clear.
‘How long have you been like that?’
‘Three years.’ It limited his power to live alone.
‘You’re lucky. It killed my mother. Five years ago, before they could treat it. Her muscles just seized up. She became like wood. My father panicked and left. He was afraid it might infect him. I watched her die. It should have been my father. He used to hit her. I remember. He called her a lunatic. When he beat me, he’d shout You’re like her, you’re wrong in the head, you’ll be put away. I was fourteen when my mother died. A couple of years later I started working with Carl. I was doing porn films already. Made some contacts, got in touch.
‘The death of the witness, you see. I thought being a victim would save me. And more … it was something to belong to. An extended family. People who’d look after me.’ He laughed. ‘That was my trouble. I didn’t just want a lover. I wanted a community. Outside all this shit. But they … well, they were either in it for Carl or for themselves. They think they own me. Now I want nothing. Except this.’ He stubbed out the cigarette on the table, went across to Lee and embraced him. Lee felt at a loss. He wanted to talk, but the script was missing. It had been years since he’d seen any film that didn’t separate people into attackers and victims. He took it for granted, even when he wasn’t sure which he was himself. Tony stepped back and took off his coat. They’d be cold, despite the flickering heater.
There were blankets on the mattress. Lee had been in worse places; he sat down to unlace his shoes. He felt more sure of himself watching Tony undress than he had holding him. There was too much about this situation that felt unreal, as though these were parts that Carl Austin had written for both of them. In the light from the table, Tony’s shadow was a blurred giant. Lee could just make out the narrow white scars running down and across his back. It was like a chessboard. When Tony turned round, Lee saw the same criss-cross pattern on his chest and stomach. Somehow, the cuts seemed too deep and regular to be the work of human hands. They had the look of something industrial.
Tony’s fingers moved over Lee’s body, slowly, finding its shape. They knelt on the bed, facing each other. Lee tried not to look at the scars. There it was again: the starved look on Tony’s face. Like someone who needed to be whole, but couldn’t be. Tony gripped Lee’s shoulders and pulled him close. Their mouths clasped together like open hands. He seemed so hungry; they both did. And then they were lying side by side, kissing each other’s bodies, biting, hardly able to breathe. There were no roles. Lee felt terrified at being close to this man he had wanted so badly; though he still didn’t know what he wanted. Was this really the same one? He was shaking with tension. However tightly they held each other, it seemed there was no security, no peace.
They came into each other’s mouths, almost at the same moment. Lee swallowed the chalky fluid with a compulsion he’d never felt before. Then he sat up and looked at Tony’s face. Very briefly, the other man smiled. Leaning over him, Lee kissed the sweat from the rough hollow of his cheek. Pain echoed in his head, harsh as a guitar note. Not a pain that could be filmed. He was trapped in himself again. They hadn’t spoken.
Minutes later they were curled together on the bed, trying to sleep. They both faced the window, Tony in front; Lee’s right arm was folded across Tony’s chest. For a few moments, his left hand traced the lines in Tony’s back. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine meeting Tony a long time before, perhaps in early summer; a close friendship that had flowered into romance. That eased the stress in his head. His own body felt still and unfamiliar. The scars kept him at a distance; a fence that wouldn’t let him through. They seemed to link the sleeping body to the city outside. An extended family. Too many connections. A walking map. The cold in the walls and the outside world wrapped itself around their little shell of warmth.
Not long before daybreak, Lee dreamed of a wire fence, too high to climb and sharp enough to cut your hands if you tried. The fence stood between him and a mass of people who were trying to reach him. It was night; there was mud and gravel underfoot. Distant trees were narrow cuts in the view. What he had at first taken for the moon was some kind of white lamp positioned high overhead. By its light, he could see some of the people moving behind the wire. They looked thin and distorted, as though they were suffering from malnutrition. Though they pressed their faces and hands against the wire mesh, they didn’t seem to be aware of him in particular. Their faces were like pictures from newspapers, the features stubbled in with carbon. The eyes were gaps; the mouths were scars, healed shut.
Lee turned and began to pace along the wire, wondering what was on the far side of the enclosure. He turned a corner and found the desperate figures still just beyond the mesh. It caught the light here, made a grid of silver lines that mapped out all of the panic and loss filling his view. He was unable to turn his back to the wire. But he walked on until he had made a complete circuit, several times over; without once finding a way out. And without meeting anyone else on the inside.
When Lee woke up, it was daylight. Tony was still asleep beside him, half-curled and facing the window. Lee couldn’t move his own arms or legs; at first, he thought the cramp had come back. Then he realized that his limbs were joined to the other man’s. Their bodies were half merged, around the edges of the barrier. There were faint traces of blood on Tony’s back now, darker at the nodes where the scars crossed. Lee stared for a long time. Then he started to pull himself free. It felt strange, as though he were becoming divided. But it didn’t hurt at all. He raised his arms, crouched and then stood up, leaving the shapes of his night tangled inside the still figure on the bed. He needed to inject some plasma; he’d have to go back to the hostel for that. He dressed, as so many times before, and left by the fire escape;
It took him an hour to reach his hostel on the other side of town. The sky was white; rays of sunlight glinted through the torn clouds like crystals, reflecting from steel crash barriers and broken glass. Such a waste of light, he thought, when there was so little to be revealed. But perhaps what you saw wasn’t as important as how you saw it. Traffic shot past him on the expressway, feeding substance to the patches of faintly glowing mist that hung over the office buildings. Lee wished he had a cigarette; it would make his breath more solid.
When he got back to his room, he would close the curtains and listen to some tapes and find something to eat. Beyond the city centre, a few naked trees lined the roadway. Three tower blocks stood on a hilltop, their upper windows glittering in sunlight, as though nothing lay behind them but the sky. The building where he lived was one of them.
SINFONIA EXPANSIVA
by
Barry N. Malzberg
‘Sinfonia Expansiva’ is in Malzberg’s trademark terse, elliptical style, in which maximum content fills the minimum space. It deals, as do many of the stories in this volume, with sexual politics in a dangerous age.
SINFONIA EXPANSIVA
This is Samuel’s song:
I know the erotic. And I know horror. But I am not sure that I know that point of synthesis, that hot intersection at which horror and the erotic at last conjoin, mesh in the darkness. I have searched for that intersection all of my life, scrambled for it, sought blood and the steaming purity of deadly congress but I cannot delude myself that I have found it yet. Perhaps it is not to be found. Perhaps the goal is not the orgasm after all but that peering death, that hole of death, that lasting death toward which we strain in the hump and bump of our necessity. Mild and necessary death, thy sting our own faint jab in the pubis. And then again, perhaps that conjoinment exists and it is all they say and more.
That’s sick, she said, that’s really sick. Are you out of your head? She stared at him with an intentness only she could have managed, a blurred attention. I mean you have to be really some case, you want to do that, she said. No. Absolutely not. She leaned against the sheets. Forget it, she said. Let’s just call it quits this very minute. Let’s put on our clothes and get out of here. Jeez, she said. You are really something, Sam, you know that? Something and a half.
Samuel said nothing. Now, in the abyss of his shame, there was nothing that could be said, his small and wistful secrets exposed before her and laughed away, the shadows of the room themselves winking at him. Oh, he said, you shouldn’t have said that. You really shouldn’t have said that, Marie. You don’t shame a man when he shows you his soul.
His soul! she said. Her breasts which he had thought so soft and loving were, Samuel could now see, deadly ordnance, metallic turrets facing him, ready to cast him in deadly fire. Oh, Marie said, I’ve heard a lot but that’s a new one on me. Come on, she said, what are you going to do, then? You going to go all crazy and violent on me, turn into one of those rapist lunatics, some guy that I met at an Ethical Culture social? You try any moves on me, I’ll cut your balls off with a knife, she said. I’m just the one to do it, too. Come on, start talking crazy, start acting crazy and see what happens, what do you say?
What do you say? There was nothing to say. Samuel rolled on the open canvas of the bed, reached for her, his need sudden and enormous in the bleeding space of the room and as he reached toward her, as he gathered himself against her he felt a moment of yielding more splendid and terrible than any he had ever known, Marie opening against him as he had once fantasied was possible with some stranger met two hours earlier, suddenly declothed and humping violently in her private boudoir—but then it stopped, she receded from him in small and then larger pieces, the ordnance of her breasts retracting, gone from him. So now you’ve turned out straight after all, she said. But where’s the protection? You don’t think you’re just going to do me, do you, some guy I’ve never seen in my life and may never see again? You better put on something right now. This is no better than the other stuff, she said. You better pull yourself together, these are new times.
He looked at her, feeling the heat, the shifting warmth moving through the panels of his body, but even as he stared at her yapping little face; her features screwed into a kind of certainty which he understood represented the death of all feeling, he could sense the slipping away and then the slow, helpless relaxing of his limbs. Oh, you’ve got me, he said, you’ve got me two ways now and all within the same five minutes. You are an expert on this stuff, aren’t you? And watched the disgust pour into her once more, knowing then that he had fouled this up big-time. Big-time and where did you go now? When they shut out the lights and then shut out the lights, with whom did you boogie? Where was Miss Molly when the preacher came through the door? Doggerel assaulted him, old rhymes and snatches like prayer. He could have been fucking Marie at this moment, so retracted was he into himself. I’m through with this, he thought. I’m through with it big-time just like I screwed up big-time. There were other possibilities he would explore. Do not, he thought, tell them your secrets. And if you do, get new secrets. Obtain new secrets at the door in this era of lies and constant exchange.
