Will Self's Collected Fiction, Vol. 2 (2014), page 121
part #2 of Will Self's Collected Fiction Series
At the time I’d realized that what Mueck was doing reversed everything I thought I understood about the distortion of scale: far from his giantess being a purely intelligible object, she was all feeling – her desperation magnified until it filled the gallery with the ultrasonic howl of a harpooned leviathan—
Mounting the path that switch-backed up through Fort Point National Heritage Site, I was seized not by the Ektachrome of the evergreens and the waters of the bay; nor by the towers of the bridge that rose up before me, which appeared sandy-damp, as if freshly moulded by giant hands, then raised by massed Lilliputians drawing on their steel cables. What grabbed me were the walkers, in their T-shirts and sneakers, their jeans and sweat pants, who converging on the bridge’s approach reached a pedestrian density I’d seldom seen in the States before, except in an airport concourse, a mall or Midtown Manhattan.
I, better than most, understood the compelling urge to walk across a big thing, an urge separated by a mere carpaccio of neurones from the compelling urge to throw yourself off it. It goes without saying that thoughts of suicide were never absent, but burbled repetitively in my ear – ‘Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself’ – just as did the stream of anxiety: ‘You forgot to turn off the gas/shut-and-lock the door’ and, more recently, the times-10/divide-by-10 tic. It took only the signs to alert me: EMERGENCY PHONE AND CRISIS COUNSELING and then, a few score paces on, CRISIS COUNSELING. THERE IS HOPE. MAKE THE CALL. THE CONSEQUENCES OF JUMPING FROM THIS BRIDGE ARE FATAL AND TRAGIC.
If I had had any reservations at all the ‘and tragic’ banished them entirely. The composers of the signs understood entirely not merely the anger-born-of-fear of the felo de se – in my view an emotion much exaggerated – but, more importantly, our narcissism. Yes! A tragedy! That’s what it would be, a fucking tragedy, I had been cut down in my prime, after struggling manfully for years against this debilitating condition, one that I had – still more tragically – vouchsafed to hardly a soul. My notebooks, left open on the table in my room at the Prescott, would explain all that, explain also the awful shame that pursued me, the tiny Eumenides sprung from the Titan’s blood.
By the time I had reached the middle of the bridge, and was standing there listening to the wind shear lament through the cables, and watching the drop yawn below me, I had succumbed to its sublime contours. If the monumental was an architecture of social control, then what could be said of monumental bridges, save that they were very obviously for jumping off – that they in fact ordered you to jump off them? ‘Jump!’ they bellowed, sergeant-majors on the vast parade ground of civilization, and so the Mayans, the Easter Islanders, the Norse Greenlanders, the Romans and now the entire West did their bidding.
What possible purchase could Section 2193 of the State of California’s Penal Code have on the profound gravity of this situation; for this was about physics, about small things and big things – people hardly entered into it. And in those last few moments, when a woman in a hijab heading one way and a Japanese-American woman eating a beanshoot salad from a Tupperware container as she strolled the other, simultaneously gasped as I vaulted nimbly on to the thick, rivet-warty girder of the balustrade, my loved ones were of scarcely any concern, being irredeemably actual size.
I had hoped … for what? A game of Scrabble on the way down, or to get married, or at the very least to link hands with a serendipitous octet of fellow self-murderers – the drop had certainly looked big enough for such skydiving antics. After all, the waves in the bay were wrinkles, while from up there downtown San Francisco had no more civilization than a playroom Lego ruin.
As I fell towards the deceptively yielding pavé of the bay (and, believe me, like all suicides, I knew just how hard the impact would be, foresaw entirely the Faroese slaughter of my expiration: a small pink whale gashed open and wallowing in a cloudy red stain), I also anticipated feeling this consolation: that I had cast the beastly Barbour aside, and so was meeting my fate without any baggage at all, no plasticized Beethoven, no paperback Great Expectations, no rolled-up plastic trousers, no waxed cotton class suit; I was going to my execution as every baby-boomer should: in a T-shirt and Levis, bravely refusing Ray-Bans.
So it was with a sense of fretful – almost pettish – annoyance that I realized Death was bopping me on the head without any more ado, that my extinction, far from being profoundly protracted, was to have all the grand tragedy of a prankster creeping up behind me and suddenly yanking down the woolly hat I’d forgotten I was sporting, so that I was entombed in a tickly darkness – for all eternity.
I came to in a large poorly lit room notable for a tacky earthenware statue of the Buddha on a low table. This Gautama had an expression not so much spiritual as obscurely self-satisfied, while the joss sticks set before him curdled brown smoke into the gloom. Around me shuffled the shades, all dressed in floppy shirts and baggy pants of faun, umber and other earthy tones, which looked to be woven from flax, or hemp, or some other retro-fibre.
My groan hearkened one of these souls to me; he or she was suitably intersex, with sepia hair scraped into a mule tail and circular wire-rimmed spectacles. ‘Would you like an urbal tea?’ he or she asked gently. ‘We’ve got most varieties, cardamom, caraway seed, ginger?’
‘Whatever,’ I pleaded, and he or she footed soundlessly away.
A lissom man, with a sandy trowel-shaped beard and the tense look of someone who practises yoga furiously, mounted the low platform behind the Buddha and concertinaed into a full lotus as easily as I might’ve scratched my arse (when alive). Despite my recent death I could sense the aggression radiating from this man, and as he picked up a small brass mallet and tapped a bell his mild features writhed with barely repressed fury.
I was remarkably unfazed.
‘For our dharma discussion today,’ announced the sandy Sangha, ‘I will be taking suggestions; anything you wish guidance on I am happy to consider—’
‘It’s vervain,’ said the shade, pressing a tepid mug into my hand. ‘Enjoy.’
Remarkably unfazed because this all seemed altogether just: that the Tibetan Buddhist cosmology should turn out to be correct and that my own bardo should – at least initially – take the form of a room full of the angriest people in the world: occidental Buddhists. Of course, what would begin to happen when my ego started to disintegrate I shuddered to think; presumably in place of the multi-headed demons that tormented Tibetans I’d be visited with my own bogeybeings; perhaps the fibrous Buddhists would transmogrify into giant Bionicles, those weirdly skeletal robotic toys loved by my youngest child that had techno-scimitars and laser guns for arms, and could be posed on their long legs so as to delve surgically in their victims’ innards.
‘Drug addiction and the dharma,’ offered one seeker. ‘Dharma and movement practice,’ said a second. ‘The three pearls,’ a third in lotus position said, his thick glasses like an insect’s compound eyes.
‘OK, OK,’ the Sangha snorted. ‘That’s enough – we could go on all night taking suggestions and have no time for instruction.’
The seekers tittered obsequiously, while behind the Sangha’s enlightened head I could see the dark ballooning of a massive and unconstrained ego.
‘I’m, I’m …’ I grasped the wrist of the exiguous urbalist who had coiled into the canvas chair beside me, ‘not dead, am I?’
‘Heavens no,’ s/he relied in a beige undertone. ‘You poor man, you fell backwards from the parapet of the Golden Gate Bridge on to the walkway there and were brought by paramedics into the rescue centre. We get a lot of sufferers such as yourself; if there isn’t absolute proof that a person is trying suicide’ – ‘trying’, I liked that, it suggested that suicide was only one of the options available from the smorgasbord of inexistence – ‘then the Bridge cops are happy to, like, outsource—’
‘It seems,’ the sandy Sangha’s gentle voice was viciously clenched, ‘that someone with us this evening has a more nuanced interpretation of the three pearls; so, would you like to share?’
The urbalist bowed his/her head in abject shame. I, however, was on the point of rising up and chinning the fraud, but was forestalled by a commotion from the doors – that and the sharp pain in the back of my head, which was – I now realized – swathed in a crêpe bandage.
One of the slipshod sannyasas came shuffling down the aisle and bent to whisper, ‘Your friend is here now to collect you.’
Friend? What friend? As I limped to the door, passing by the rows of outlines of devotion, I racked my bruised brain: I had no friend in San Francisco, nor – without being self-piteous – did I have that many friends anywhere. Besides, how might such a friend have found me?
The answer to the second question came in the form of the Barbour, thrust into my unwilling arms so that it hung, slick and black as a roosting flying fox. The answer to the first was Sherman Oaks, who stood out on the Sausalito sidewalk, pulling intemperately on a stogie.
In that instant of recognition, my eyes drinking in the scant three feet of him, I realized a thing at once terrifying and beautiful: it wasn’t that the Buddhists had been rendered indistinct by their quest for the white void, or that the community hall within which they were assembled was any more vapid than such places usually are – it was me. Had I suffered some pinpoint-accurate injury to my visual cortex, or was this only a form of hysteria? Whichever the case, the result was the same: casting wildly about the main street of the chichi resort town, I could make out the outlines of all intermediately sized things – such as cars, people and the no-good pagoda of Spinnakers seafood restaurant – but not their infill; whereas the very large things that blocked in the horizon – the hills, the bridge, Alcatraz – retained their detailing even in the twilight.
Then there was Sherman, who, with his potbelly and droopy ears, was truly the presiding spirit of the very little, and who stood proud of the indistinctiveness of his setting, just as the very little things in the window of the Swarovski’s across the road – crystal strawberries dimpled with brilliants, vitrified bouquets half an inch high – leapt to my retina and swarmed there as veridical as after-images.
Naturally, I said nothing of this to Sherman, who anyway only left off barking into his own phone to bark at me: ‘They checked your phone to see who you’d called recently, then rang a few people. I happened to have been in SF for the Web 2.0 thing, flew here from Miami, so I came out to get you, you dumb fuck.’
The outline of a Range Rover pulled up to the kerb, the outline of Baltie at the wheel.
‘Yeah, yeah, I know. I have to see some people at Stanford in the morning, then I’ll be with you at lunchtime—’ He broke off again: ‘Go on, get in the car willya?’
I got into the back seat and Sherman clambered into the front. Baltie’s shape said ‘Hi’, with that special tone people reserve for failed suicides, at once sympathetic and reassuringly annoyed, as if to say: See the trouble you’ve put us to!
Within minutes we were tooling back over the bridge, the tyres of the big car drumming the deck plates, the mighty lyre of the cables strumming past. At last, shorn of the encumbrance of any human scale whatsoever – no finicky aerials or watertank bobbins – the San Francisco skyline acquired, for me, the majesty others always claimed they found in it. Once we were down off the bridge and augering into the core of downtown, the sidewalks were as unthreatening as Hanna-Barbera backdrops, the homeless mere silhouettes, the traffic no longer steely but graphite – reduced to a few pencil marks on the fronts of the buildings.
I made a conscious decision to say nothing of this … nothingness to Sherman, while he treated my rescue as simply another chore to be completed with despatch. ‘What’ve you got on here?’ he rapped as the Range Rover pulled up beside the Prescott. I muttered something about a book reading at the City Lights in two days’ time. ‘Fine, then. You can come out to Stanford and the Google Campus with me tomorrow in the day – we’ll pick you up around ten. If you need me you’ve got the number, we’re staying in the Transamerica building, they rent out a penthouse suite.’
As I prepared to insert my stick body into the line drawing of my bed I pictured Sherman in his odd accommodation, at the very apex of the Transamerica’s 48-storey white granite-faced pyramid. With Baltie a hieroglyph on the marble wall, Sherman rollicked back and forth in this despotic bed and breakfast, stubbing out a Hoyo here, snatching up a glass of champagne over there, consulting a sale catalogue while he barked at Borzois in Kiev, or Pekineses in Beijing. I wondered if, in all that restless communication, he had taken the time to reassure my family, who might have been concerned by the phone call from the paramedics who had scooped me up from the Golden Gate Bridge. Wondered this – yet felt powerless to call them myself.
This latest episode in my relationship with Sherman had taken things to another level. I knew that my behaviour in the past had been shameful, yet this very Dickensian coincidence – of which I could’ve had no great expectation when I teetered atop the parapet – brought home to me quite how much psychic baggage I was carrying with me.
Perhaps I should’ve felt more disturbed by the excision of any sense of proportion that I had once had, and its replacement by a thick fog of mediocrity welling up from San Francisco Bay. I didn’t, though, for since having come to Marin County and listened to the pugnacious Sangha, I had been blissfully free of the multiplier and the divisor.
Lying in the darkness of the Prescott, I ran over the stats: the bridge was 8,981 feet long, the longest span was 4,200 feet. It was 746 feet high, and there were 80,000 miles of wire in its main cables, while approximately 1,200,000 rivets had been used in its construction. Between its completion in 1937 and 2005, more than 1,200 people had jumped the 245 feet to their death in the chill waters below. 1,200, not 120 nor yet 120,000, but 1,200 – these figures were incontrovertible: the facts on the ground.
5.5
The Last Nurdle
Watch it bigger day by day! Natural manhood enhancement! Easily to get male package… Demetrius Erectile Organ Cosmic. Gargantuan Penis Beau. Reach out and bone someone… I stood in the restroom at the Googleplex, Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, and these came back to me: Fuck Stick Ample Floyd. Rosa Full-Size Fuck Stick. Body part enlarged shown. FannieMonumentalCock… Manglings of syntax and grammar that nonetheless got across the hollow promise that a credit card number could be exchanged for Viagra – and Cialis and Ambien, should you so choose.
I stood at the urinal and held on, remembering these emails spammed at me through the yielding tissue of virtual reality. It wasn’t that I thought any of Google’s 450,000 servers might be implicated in this huge trafficking of drugs intended to make the relatively little grow bigger; it was just that the laminated sheet of programming tips tacked above the urinal naturally tended one’s thoughts in that direction; this, and the fact that one was holding one’s LongPen.
‘Testing on the Toilet’, the sheet was headed; beside it were two light bulbs, one happy and shining, the other upside down, dim and sad. Below that the screed continued: ‘Normally people are only interested in the test data for coverage files …’ but I couldn’t read any further, it was all impenetrably technical to me – and besides, I’d pissed on my shoes.
Back past the niches containing the electric toothbrushes and facecloths of the never resting microserfs, back past the misaligned bookcases, the dangling model jet engines, the defunct servers piled up into statuary and the colossal novelty beanbags, I found Sherman and Baltie in the canteen noshing on piles of bean sprouts and slurping smoothies. ‘Get yourself a tray,’ Sherman commanded; ‘you need to build up your strength.’
I supposed I should’ve felt more grateful to Sherman than I did; after all, he had scooped me up in San Francisco and incorporated me into his whirlwind schedule. That morning we had already visited the Stanford Linear Accelerator, where he had discussed plans with the facility’s director to site a Sherman piece alongside the two-mile-long klystron gallery, which – as both men saw fit to inform me – was the longest building in the States.
‘The longest building – quite right!’ Sherman had crowed as we puttered through the campus in the Range Rover, past the great Romanesque halls of learning. ‘While the accelerator itself is the world’s straightest object! That’s why this body form will be so sinuous, with arms and legs cuddling the gallery, cheek pressed against it. I particularly like the fact,’ he continued as Baltie angled the Range Rover up the slip road on to Highway 280, ‘that the whole installation lies right across the San Andreas fault. The next time there’s a big one, my piece and the accelerator will go down together, erotically entwined, spurting electrons and positrons in a lava death fuck!’
I doubted that Stanford would’ve let Sherman anywhere near the collider if they’d heard him talk in these terms – but then I doubted this piece would ever get made; it seemed to be just another of the notions sprouting from the artist’s ever fertile mind as he revolved around the world. True, plenty of Shermans were getting made – a group of three mediumsized thirty-footers had been erected in Death Valley only the previous week – but the ratio of planned to enacted Shermans did seem to be shifting decisively.
After our veggie lunch at the Googleplex, Sherman lectured the employees for over an hour on ways in which their 450,000 servers might be adapted to serve his own ends. He proposed Sherman start pages, Sherman links and Sherman levies on advertisers. He quite seriously entertained the idea of a Shermanet (at least, disloyally, that’s how I thought of it), with each Google search contributing to the creation of a body form so large it could exist only in cyberspace. ‘Your servers process a petabyte of data every hour – fifty petabytes is roughly equal to the entire written works of humankind up until now …’ He looked significantly at me, scrunched up in the front row trying to hide the pee stains on my shoes.
