Text of short teasers for the Video-Book format of The Imagination Thief by Rohan Quine

On this page are the full texts of the teasers excerpted from The Imagination Thief’s video-book format. On this page is a list of the teasers’ headings only. On both pages, the headings are linked to the teasers on Vimeo.

 

Teaser 1(i), eyes behind the air

As I re-enter my office, I feel light-headed. Deciding some fresh air will do me good, I float across the floor and through the window-door to my balcony, where I lean on the rail and find myself dropped into the grand feast of a midsummer sunset spread across a panorama of towers and water. Poisoned sky, dripping orange through the twinkle of the river, presses down hot and thick upon the West Side Highway traffic surging far below.

Strange, but that stab of contempt I just felt in the corridor feels as if it’s made my eyesight clearer, revealing the truth of this idyllic balcony scene we have here. This is me, Jaymi Peek, peeking out of two little eye-slit windows cut into the end of a thin trunk of flesh perched on this giddy ledge above a concrete highway. Each of these windows gives a little wet reflection of the sun across the river, till I feel myself swaying and shut them both—but the sun spikes the eyelid-blinds and tints them vermilion, like eye-shadow. I lay the back of a hand against my cheek, then a palm against my head above the ear. Behind me in the office, where the walls run with moisture, a sluggish ceiling-fan turns. Inside the building’s outer wall a pipe gurgles, as if to break free and flex and coil around me hissing. Below me a siren wails up and down, continuous and smooth as a sine wave, curving where the straight-edged skyscrapers shine.

I rub my eyes. What on earth was in that CreamiChoc? Or that unfamiliar yellow packet of sweetener?

The last boiling drop of red sun sinks away, beside a far-off water-tower standing out sharp against the blood-glow along the horizon. Miles of air make the lights palpitate amid the grid of sad dock streets across the Hudson River. Up the sides of the city there’s a whisper and a flicker—and do rats bare their yellow teeth on fire-escapes and sniff? So New York. A flick of lashes stirs inside the sticky dusk. I peer, to try to make out the eyes I thought I saw hanging there staring from behind the air…

 

Teaser 1(ii), a squint at great events

Down across the Highway, among the towers’ geometric shouts into space, children play on fenced-in patches of grass, their voices through the traffic like the tiny bleats of sheep. I picture bomb-blasts climbing inside the skyscrapers, ripping through their roofs and out among the clouds, air whisking in folds from the blades of helicopters with the flash of shattered glass. A squint at great events, through two soft windows slit across the end of a thin flesh-trunk upon a balcony.

As normal clarity curls tight and peels away, I see the perimeters of myself as a whole entity, with the understanding that a driver attains of a car he masters, a jockey attains of a horse that he rides as one with, or a person attains with a long-time partner—a mastery of the possibilities of this particular pairing. This arrival at a mapping of my self’s edges gives me a clearer sense of how this vehicle interacts with what’s around it, and how it could interact. I feel serene, clear, resilient, strong; my sight newly empowered, calm, compassionate, canny, observant, as if beginning again. I’m aware of the wide totality of the scene before me, aware of its larger reality, the elements of infinity and eternity within it. I feel a high like a substance-derived high, but clearer and deeper. I look about me and I smile. So there’s all this around us and in us, in this beautiful empty cosmos, alone as we are in such a strange and fascinating predicament. I laugh aloud. What exhilaration! What riches of terror, beauty, horror and mirth.

As a use for all this, that extinguishment I was observing in the office behind me is like a mutilation of some kind. I was right to despise what perpetrates that … and in effect, although inanimate, it despises me. I seek voltage and revenge, and I’m newly empowered (though I’m not yet sure quite how). OK, it’s a battle. Time for action. Watch me now…

 

Teaser 2(i), aeons nested in compression

Pushing my gaze deeper into my own reflected eyes, I slip quickly into a vision just as vivid as the one that the rubber-gloved Zoë interrupted, but a hell of a lot quicker, lasting only a second or two. Within its flash, aeons feel nested in complex compression, as if I am seeing a collapsed version of the whole duration of human civilisation. Despite this, it manages to be essentially a still image, from near the Dunhuang watchtowers where the ancient road from China forks in two, so as to run either side of the desert’s lethal thirst: one route along its north edge and one along its south where the dead tongues of Asia flow. Within this fork, expanses of salt rim a land-locked lake that appears and disappears every year according to whether the Tarim River flows or chokes; and I watch the lake swell and shrink in sequence, every year collapsed into a second, like the beating of a heart of salt. The lake is Lop Nor, and above it burns a hidden purple flame wider than a hill. I feel its quiet roar and crackle shoot around the earth’s curve in every direction—sweet-smelling, silent, majestic and serene. I shall live and die and yet this flame will burn still, like a burning bell. Nations will fight from age to age and yet this flame will burn. Men will run through plains and will climb through city skies, but this flame will remain like a burning purple bell, floating huge above Lop Nor, dripping its elixir on the pale brown salt-pans, smooth and translucent as it carves out the desert bowl forever. When this speeded-up heart of salt arrives in the present age, I see that Lop Nor is now poisoned after decades of nuclear test bombs exploded around its rims … but high above the poison burns the hidden purple flame, still.

I wrench my gaze away from my reflected eyes, and Liberty Street returns with a thump of reality. I walk away from the mirrored building and around the corner in a daze. And up through a crevice in the concrete horizon pokes the summit of the GE Building, central in the Rockefeller Center, way uptown.

 

Teaser 3(i), dangerously ascendant

As I thread through the people thronging Washington Square, the white Triumphal Arch looms. Approaching it, I drink with a rush the vista framed by its high stone: Fifth Avenue, running up the centre of the city, dead straight, like a spine. I steer around the Arch and up the vista, which fans to take me, reconverges after me and elongates ahead. Walls and windows tower either side—angles yawning downward to slide me up between them. If I glance left or right, a street unfolds to take my glance. Dangerously ascendant, I can hear the zeroes singing for me. Horns blare, engines pound and tyres grind sharp into black tar: visuals and music for my march towards a building whose approach I can feel.

A helicopter’s clatter like a jagged scratch on velvet cuts the sky; I feel my clothes against my body and a drip of sweat trickle down the centre of my back.

The GE Building soars up ahead, and then around me as I push through its doors. Everyone inside is like a clockwork toy from a museum cabinet, gesticulating jerkily behind the dusty glass that seals them off from the obvious thunder’s roar of what is coming, what has pulled me—what the destined meeting is whose thudding spreads already through the walls and through the city’s groan, to grimy wire-fence city-limits and beyond.

How come all these people hear so little?

OK then. Stepping lightly on the sheen of stone, in rhythm with the thud, never hurrying, I pad through the lobby, under cameras, to a bank of lifts.

An open lift-door comes in frame. I enter, push the “close doors” button, hear a ting through the thud, and press the very highest button. The panelled wooden doors close. The lift moves and gathers speed, hissing up the shaft of the tower, like a piston. The heartbeat on the soundtrack grows in volume. Scarlet numbers flash: ten … twenty … thirty … forty … fifty … sixty … to a few unnumbered floors at the top. The lift glides smoothly to a halt. The doors open, I step out, the thudding ends.

 

Teaser 5(i), a great gold Cyclops

“Who are you?” he barks.

I haven’t planned this, but as I hoped, I know exactly what to say: “Marc, look harder. You’ll remember.”

He looks harder indeed, and just like music, I make us both focus on a scene from his internal landscape. The scene is startling and vivid, and for him clearly “primal” in some deep way. I watch him while he thinks of it; and while he stares at me, the eyes of that figure stare him down—the eyes from the ballroom party, just as they stared him down across that crowded ball without a warning, cutting straight through the heads of a hundred other guests when he turned to fill his champagne glass—eyes he’d not expected but had known before, from somewhere. Singled out and pinned where he stood, glass in hand, he knew that he was powerless against this figure, though no one else seemed to be aware of it at all. Never since that evening in the ballroom has its blazing golden gaze left his memory. The figure seemed above the crowd, its eyes strangely one: Marc felt as if he stared at a great gold Cyclops three metres high, sprouting horns like a Baphomet’s, its claws hanging down resting easy on the grey heads carpeting the ballroom, its heavy eye transfixing him—

“Stop!” he cries.

 

Teaser 8(i), violence coiled in this statue

Then thirdly comes a fantasy of yours, evoking how you will be at a time very far in the future, when you’ll have become a statue in an empty forest clearing somewhere—a statue fashioned out of smooth sugar coloured pure black, and wearing mirrored sunglasses. Your slender carved hands hold a scarlet rose, with a grip that looks limp but is unbreakable. Violence at demonic voltage, hard as a light-bulb, is coiled in this statue. From underneath the black flames of hair at your neck hangs an icicle of blood. But now I’m startled to recognise my very own disembodied viewpoint come hovering into the clearing, within this established fantasy of yours, and home in upon your statue in order to check on my own reflection in your mirrored glasses! I wasn’t expecting to bump into myself here. Your statue fantasy-self smiles and emanates, as if on heat, a smell of musk. You can’t coil around the hovering Jaymi viewpoint, because it is just a viewpoint and you are just sugar; yet it seems that you want to. Suddenly your lips move, whispering the strangest fire-and-brimstone language, and it’s almost as if this fantasy self-image of yours is making a kind of love with me as it speaks: “A black comet streaks along the dust lanes of the Milky Way,” your statue-self says. “Sunquakes boom through space, like the songs of whales through oceans. The great Basilisk cuts planets on its plate, where the blue of flaming methane licks. When life awoke in dark matter, neither the galactic hiss nor the endless background flux of waves stopped to mark its waking; nor did the liquid electric effluxion and resonance of airwaves three stars above us split the night in any great surprise. Giant discs have risen near the ocean horizon; towns have fallen into dust and been enfolded into mountains; and Violence, Religion, Injustice and Death, like the tides of the seas, have inundated the shadowfields: yet still we are not noticed by the Bloodstar, that sphere of pulsing scarlet fluid hanging at the centre-point of all black space… Well, so be it.” You fall quiet and still again. In mixed joy and sadness, the Jaymi viewpoint slithers from the clearing’s light and slips away in forest, as your statue gaze follows it, ambiguous and hungry.

 

Teaser 10(i), under European skies

Tickled by this smooth opacity, I’m curious to take a quick look inside him—strictly a passive one, of course … and the first thing I find, Jason Carax, is a memory of twenty years ago. You’re boarding a bus, on which you slip away west across the marshes on the highway from New York to the airport, sealed in your headphones, through airport lounges, over moving tunnel-floors, through the gates to a plane, and the music seals you off while you shoot down the runway and climb through the air and curve around and streak across the ocean, sunset-crystal through the moving glass, and down again, through gates and further tunnels, to a city where you bus, train and quick-change and out through the streets under European skies… You walk, meet and talk, part and meet, look and ride and run and drink, then you head for another town and start the show again and fix those Internet connections and make a rendezvous and shine again with the people, then slip away, blurred in an audio-electrical cultural haze of many countries, chic hotels and continental glamour, plane-wheels and plastic, foreign coins and fluid motion, from nation to nation: “London—Paris—Rome—Berlin—Athens—Barcelona,” say your eyes, “cities never-ending—a playground, almost like a video. So come with me now, we’ll escape, don’t you think?”

 

Teaser 10(ii), I was skinny in Paris

Jason, you manipulator, player, analyser! This is fun. Fast-track to yesterday, and there you are planning, scheming, framing, mixing on your laptop and phone and even diagrams on paper—slip and slide, and take us on a streak through the airwaves and out across the Web in fashion spreads. Turn poison into mercury and measure our temperatures; gauge the looks and market them to next year’s beat. Is that fire in your eyes or the glow of machines? I take another peek in you, to settle this dilemma, and I smile then with pleasure, as a clear silent stream of words glances through the air at me and onward far beyond me, like quarks in a particle accelerator… “Allure is a beautiful lie… Some people have a crackle… My people’s people will talk to your people’s people… Your entourage will have an entourage… Image as a second language… Plastic daydream… Dying young is such a good career move… I like to pit one demographic against another… I was skinny in Paris… French philosophy has the rigour of a good perfume… Media-genic… My fire is a glazed fire… There are those who make you and those who buy you… The secret of success is to be the ultimate extreme edition of yourself… It’s so sterile, you could write an essay about it!… I’m too famous for a business card… It’s without irony, and defeats any you bring to it… The public wants an Icon to be first euphoric, then tragic… It’s always reassuring to see other people’s frenzy… Making tragedy’s too obvious—I like to make myth… Abstraction: the perfume… I want to make a drama out of my inability to resolve an identity… If I ran a club, then even if you were refused entry it would still feel like sex… Perfect, sanitised angst… I’m your wispy myth… I can’t breathe in this mask!…”

 

Teaser 10(iii), a face so bewitching

What a hoot he is, I do confess. I feel like responding to his quarks with a fillip of hypnosis, saying “OK Jason, picture me a face like the sound of the slinkiest and coolest pulse of electronic music, with space between the cheekbones of its high flicks of treble and a wet bass weight within those lips I want to kiss upon a poster on my bedroom wall! It’s Jaymi’s face—mine, the face you need to see on me, for now it’s up to you to frame it to perfection, for the world. Angles of glamour on a face so bewitching, it is painful to the viewer—that’s the brief, so get going—off we go now, chop chop!”

That would probably backfire in some way, however, so I strap it down. “Well, thank you, Mr Carax,” I say aloud instead, proffering Bedford Pickering III’s card. “This is our attorney’s card, so I’m sure we’ll all be in touch with one another.” I give a little bow, like the one he gave to us; and he’s gone.

 

Teaser 12(i), the head rooted in the floor

As he speaks on the phone, however, I do permit my sight to reach in and grab one tiny salient picture from him. It comes from not much deeper inside him than my daily image of him from outside, residing just within the shallows of his surface, as it were … and in a high square tower in your mind’s epidermis, Marc, are bright white walls, and in the centre of this belfry is a never-sleeping, desperately alert white head, rooted there in the floor, whose job it is to keep an eagle-eye upon the distant mountain valleys to be seen through the unglazed embrasures in the belfry walls. The head is wide and solid, in its sixties, Marc, its features somewhat flattish. It is powerful, reporting to no one, a head to be respected—yet I also feel, somewhere, a tiny fleeting something of pity at the spectacle of such relentless wakefulness.

“So onward, then!” he booms. “Good luck tomorrow. Get some sleep.”

 

Teaser 14(i), ghost trucks thundering

I decided that at last I was leaving there forever. I ran to the home I lived in, put all absolute essentials into a bag, ran away to the highway and stood there with a sign saying “New York”. Soon a truck stopped, bound for Boston, and I climbed aboard. Escape at last! Never should I go back. No more need to hide! My mood soared above the truck. The driver was taciturn, which suited me perfectly. Physically immobile but inside aflame, I let the hours and the miles and the land slide by, through the afternoon and onward, as the truck thundered east across the heartland of America, the sun swung low through the giant sky behind us and the shadow of the truck ran away upon the road ahead…

And now this tour van streaks along, some years later in a very different chapter, its engine pounding smoothly as its shadow runs beside us. I seem to feel the turning of the earth and the planets, and enormous hidden powers all converging on the coast here—ghost trucks thundering up the highways of America from every state, intent on some explosive goal I cannot now escape.

 

Teaser 14(ii), Chill Out down the east coast

Alaia’s still asleep. I check the time: in another twenty minutes we’ll be there. I rest my head back. Evelyn must have turned on the radio, but hasn’t tuned it well. Unadjusted, it sputters through a spree of signals, snatching fragments up or ripping through a no-man’s-land between stations: heated talk, bland voices, earnest weather, urgent traffic; surges of classical or twangy country music, cut with advertising jingles; and wastes of crackle, wheezing, cryptic blips or dirty foundry roars. Voice, noise or music, all is random and detached, but makes its own sense somehow. “All the way down the east coast!” shouts a distant, raucous voice. “All the way down the east coast… Come back fat as a rat!… Why be a loser when you can be a winner?…” Another shimmers in, chilled-out, from many miles away: “For the next thirty minutes, I’m going to give you a special phone number, where you can call me, so I can send you a special gift, this week. Get your paper and pen ready, because I have a special phone number…” Montage: truck-stops and isolated diners on the highway, a cellophane wrapper blown across a lonely intersection, stabs of preaching through the babble, unreal city… What exhilarating multitudes of detail in the world, and how prodigious their minuteness of unfolding. A low electric growl like a worm out of mud comes, rises to a hum, to a whine and a squeak, before vanishing to dogs’ or even bats’ realms of hearing.

A sign—“Asbury Park 5 miles”—streaks by.

 

Teaser 14(iii), vivid sadness and magic

Then through the crackle comes a strain of faint piano, transporting me to something so long-lost and forgotten, from my childhood or another’s, that it fills me with wordless vivid sadness and magic: hiding in the shade of a square monastic cloister, where a sunlit fountain softly plays and chuckles at the centre, I flit down one long side of the square, on my tiptoes silent past twenty cracked columns, till I near the open door of a chamber in a corner. I creep to the door and peep within. An old man plays on an ancient yellow piano, never looking at the keyboard but up towards the ceiling, with the sweet tender smile of past hopes, past loves and faded glories long vanished, now revisited a thousandth time but never quite recaptured—a swelling, yearning, faded music once acclaimed but now forgotten, played with a lyric grace and fond regret that slows the blood and saps the will. He’s the composer, I realise. Around him, collapsing stacks of books and papers, scores and jottings, broken metronomes, bric-a-brac and knick-knacks rise from the floor and up the walls on every side, as if they hold up the ceiling. The old man has lived here a lifetime, clearly. Here he plays, all day and every day; and here he’ll die, in one year or twenty, unchanged. Here, in this place of tranquillity, I start to feel my energy and hope draining out, sucked away by a heavy past that isn’t even mine: if I don’t watch out, I’ll enter, settle in an armchair and take root, and then surely petrify and very soon be cobwebbed…

Stirring, I shake my head, bump it on the window and come to life.

 

Teaser 15(i), abandoned concrete shell

We pass some low concrete structures interspersed by a few elegant but run-down seaside buildings with ornate decorations—most of these buildings locked, shuttered up or wrecked, with old paint peeling off walls and wooden facings. “There’s the venerable Madame Marie’s psychic cabin on the left,” continues Evelyn as we cross Fourth Avenue, “closed due to unforeseen circumstances.”

I seem to hear a bird’s shriek, rich as a peach, and I picture it poking out its orange bill from shadow: I lean to the right, peer up and see a corner of the sky lying drowned behind the long-abandoned shell of a half-constructed multi-storey building. Years of aborted half-completion have encrusted its protruding metal concrete-reinforcing rods with rust where they poke up from the columns like frayed wires from a broken appliance. I see no great bird, I must have been hearing things.

 

Teaser 17(i), my ten giant floodlights

Meanwhile the clear, calm, relentless countdown continues: “… nine … eight … seven … six … five … four … three … two … one…”

A huge distant murmur arises, and swells loud.

The audience! Digitally created, to stand in for the millions at their television sets around the world. “Well, that’s showbiz,” I reflect.

Here it is, then, Sound & Vision…

Space unfurls, ballooning forward, up and out in front of me. Ten giant floodlights rear up skyward, from the highest outer rim above the stadium’s upper circles. The dizzy fall of bluish-white light across a landscape of several hundred thousand tiny heads below is fierce—and yet it’s also feeble, spilling to the ground beneath the cold gigantic darkness of infinity beyond it.

And now the floods start to dim, very slowly.

The crowd’s random babble dims along with the floods, while a unified cheer fades in from round the stadium. I close my eyes, seated here in my hidden perch above the big screen, and listen. I let my eyelids open and raise my glance. The cheer swells louder and the floods keep on dimming, till for two or three seconds just a scratch of blue filament in each of the ten banks of huge glass bulbs is left against the blackness. Then this dies too and faint stars appear instead, dotting the entire sky. The cheer simmers down again, to quiet and expectancy.

 

Teaser 17(ii), from eyelash-close across a valley

My outer gaze descends from the minuscule stars, to alight upon the central of the three camera lenses ahead of me. The focus of the audience approaches its peak. I slide my outer gaze aside, laying bare my sensors but not projecting anything. Immediately, I feel the hushed attention of every person present as a soft silk string, fired out across the stadium and sticking to me—soft and intelligent, the optical fibre of a secret human spider.

Behind me where I’m perched, a dim glow fades up, to silhouette me, as arranged. The big screen beneath me shows its first image—just my head, full-on but silhouetted black against the glow. In the instant, as the audience observes this and murmurs, I feel an outward pulling of attention on my face, from every seat around the stadium, non-physical but potent and growing all the time: a pull, from eyelash-close to the spanning of a dam across the width of a valley…

 

Teaser 17(iii), its many decks twinkling

The moment of optimum audience focus arrives. The surface of the deep blue night is a-shiver, like a shiny poster rippling in a breeze. Lamps around the cameras burn bright and light me up, so I burst alive and huge upon the giant screen below. A tiny curling spotlight like a hair hits Alaia far beneath me where she stands on the stage underneath the big screen. I open my projectors, and my eyes on the screen flood the lower echelons of the stadium with ocean, and the music of this ocean fills the watching bodies, buoys them up and carries them, as if the most bewitching tide of melody and harmony were sweeping them in circles. Fluorescent waves lap the shore, the scent of brine suffuses the enormity of space ahead, then over the horizon it appears … the greatest ship you’ve ever seen! Gliding through the silence behind the ocean’s music, it’s the size of a range of hills, the shape of an oil-tanker, deepest black, its many decks twinkling with strange lights—bewitching on the night sea. Who knew this ship would come? My projectors insinuate the shadow of a question: do you want this? Yes! my sensors catch your answer, huge and immediate. I love your answer and I love you too, although I know that love is pretty easy at this distance. Yes, of course you want this ship, though I know you didn’t ask for it. You’re mesmerised, there where you sway among the waves before its majesty and magic … so take this ship, it’s yours!

 

Teaser 17(iv), bells boom vast

Its prow rides higher in the sky than the floods, and the stadium revolves. Alaia’s voice rises through the splashing of the waves, to a chorus of voices that pour from the ship’s decks as honey into black sea or willow sap weeping into plum-dark depths. Figures can be glimpsed on every level of the vessel, silhouetted on the ballroom glow inside it. Most of these are standing at the railings of the decks, staring out across the water at us huddled in the stadium, while others float behind them down the length of the ship. Some figures must be three metres tall, one or two with antlers of some kind. Sea-hounds leap where the lush foam dances underneath the prow, their yaps like squeaks across the gulf of air and spray. The vessel towers closer, but our viewpoint rises, sweeping up till we’re above it, floating in among its aerials and minarets and turrets. Steam wreathes around us, belching up from the funnels. On a tower near below, a mighty searchlight revolves every fifteen seconds, like a lighthouse, flinging out a path of white a mile across the waves. Ahead, where the sun has set, a band of sky is clear scarlet.

As Alaia’s song wells through my eyes and fills the space of air, bells boom vast somewhere further round the earth’s curve, silent cracks of lightning flicker white through the scarlet, and I feel your adoration through your million spiders’ silks.

 

Teaser 17(v), these golden eyes on screen

Her sound grows in volume, and the audience is silent. Never has a sound like this been heard on earth before: a voice that is thunder and lullaby, channelled from above, beyond and inside the world, of a beauty that is terrifying, wordless and sublime. No words could evoke it, for her song’s the song that made us and our words; the wail of all destruction and creation, made as sound. Monolithic slabs of grey longing, big as mountains, push across the sky—a skeleton of girders equipped with the strength to march around the world and push the world’s horizon round the world’s curve, but also with a human skin’s naked sensitivity.

So now you are attending, I say to every one of you: inspect these golden eyes on screen, and know that you have seen them before, in your own mind. Hear what you heard then, but hear it loud and clear, for this screen is even bigger and the pupils of these golden eyes are even deeper black. To everyone, your own primal scenes flicker up on screen within my eyes, and music plays that’s you alone, sky-high in the airwaves—a grand, eternal music that will always play inside you. You hear it through this golden gaze, surging ever onward, drowning out the crackle of the flames of the oilrigs at night on Arab desert sands, miles underneath you.

 

Teaser 17(vi), eyes and lips of a flame-girl

Far above Alaia and myself, giant powers feel a fold of time and matter soften round us, aching out a passage like they haven’t felt before: they push and fill this passage out, with cosmic enormity, then spin us in an arc that is greater than a galaxy but smaller than an atom, with an ecstasy beyond physicality, beyond mind or thought or the bars of time and matter. Here beyond consciousness, we let these powers resonate, through my eyes and through her voice, and down through the stadium.

The screen has grown to fill the sky. Each of the golden-grained cymbals of my irises is bossed with a perfect central black sun, in exquisite radiance of heavenly geometry. My lashes curl as long as constellations; my eyebrows sweep across the sky’s northern hemisphere, in thin black sleekly-tapered arcs. Eyes and lips of a flame-girl, dissipating into air! And telescoped within the blinding grandeur of this face and voice, the turning of the earth’s nights and days shines divine through the vastness of space, while the years and aeons unpeel—billions of tons of rock and atmosphere and water, on an orbit that is breakneck, but luminously slow…

The glance of the sun across the surface of the planet, through the whirl of its dawn around the volume of its sphere, lights the points of its peaks and the spumes of its waves in the tiniest of detail, in a sidelight that defies any labelling of colour.

From the screen in the stadium a flood of purple flame spreads. A fountain of unearthly colours, tastes, sounds, scents and ecstatic touch pours out from screens around the world; and the oceans rise a fraction.

My face fades to black on screen, Alaia’s voice fades out, and Sound & Vision glides to the smoothest of halts.

 

Teaser 21(i), Angel’s luscious black fever

One cherry garnishes a brown-brimming cocktail glass, handed out by Flames to one who cuts in from somewhere, passing Kev without obstruction—a dark-eyed Latino boy of maybe twenty-one, whose spiteful sleek depraved face radiates decadence and damage from its sharp beauty. “And for Angel, one Manhattan,” Flames announces, takes a bow and returns to the bar.

With the arrival of drinks, talk around the table starts to drift and split. This newest face, I observe, is active here, though incongruous. He is shadowy, effete, both unhealthy and luminous: I picture him a pirate-queen scuttling up the masts of a slave-ship, to keep watch. Aside from a silver earring in his right ear, a shiny black vinyl brassiere is all that he wears above the waist, above black leggings and pointed black boots. Through his smooth brown skin I can sense the charge of nerves around his ribs beneath the faint swell of his breasts. His smooth little torso is built like a whip, thin and supple. Beautifully tattooed down the length of his back is a stark, emblematic pair of angel’s wings, cross-cut with faint lash-marks. Half the time his mouth, with its lips painted cinnabar, is sulky; and half the time his teeth are bared, jaws tense and snapping like a starved baby she-wolf. His voice is intersexual, with a degenerate breathiness underlying a fluid steel edge and a slight lisp on every s. A clean but musky sexual scent coils about him, even through the smoke. When his eyes fix mine for the first time, I have to make an effort not to flick my gaze away, so potent is the damage and so luscious is the blackness of fever within them. Hard excitement and the pulsing of attraction to the beauty of the dark spills out of him, as if his sweetest wish is for a violent revenge against life and all who live it.

One hidden thing do I let myself tune in to as yet, for a split-second only: tattooed on his forehead, in an ink that’s invisible, a single word flickers up and shouts out—SLAVE.

 

Teaser 21(ii), buzzing orange neon fuse

So, amid the noisy high spirits prevailing at Downstairs, we end up just having a loud good time, saying not much of substance: within half an hour I am tipsy and within an hour verging on drunk.

When I slip down the corridor at the back, I see Damian must have left us without my noticing, for here he is beside the doors to the toilets, selling drugs to a couple of punters. He has raised the collar of his battered leather jacket, making himself look even shiftier than usual. His customers eye my approach with suspicion, but he grunts a curt reassurance and they return their attention to him. Someone has thrown up pungently, I surmise when I enter the gents. As I stand at the urinal, Damian finishes his sale. “Someone bring a mop and bucket here,” he bellows down the corridor towards the bar. He spits savagely on the glistening floor, then tries to wipe the sweat from his tired face with his hand, but only succeeds in smearing it around.

The only illumination in here is from the bright yellow bulb of a street-lamp shining through the broken window from outside, where furtive figures go in and out of shadows in an alleyway. Finishing at the urinal, I peer with curiosity through the thick sultry heat, to locate the source of a constant jagged buzz, and discover that it emanates from an orange neon fuse nailed to the grimy bricks outside the broken window. Seeing this, Damian cracks the first grin I’ve yet seen on him and mutters at me, as if unearthing a conspiracy, “That’s the ‘s’ of ‘Downstairs’,” and grimly nods.

 

Teaser 22(i), the Persian Boy within you

I look around. Hot, sticky, summer night at Downstairs. Music pumps, whisky flows, and lights full of smoke bathe bodies full of blood. Under the deep red light, I see Angel’s make-up sliding down … and it’s time to tune in to you now, my little demon vermin Angel! Let’s see. For you, as in the tales, there has been no enchantment without ordeal. I assumed you were Latino when you first appeared, but now I perceive that your family was Armenian. Your self-image from antiquity, however, is a Persian one—the Persian Boy, of course. You see jewels, incense, flowing verse on scrolls of parchment, flaming candelabra in the harem around you, and purple eye-shadow when you glance in the hand-mirror. A barred window gives upon a courtyard of spiky flowers, palms and the cool splash of fountains. A flute trills, behind silk that hangs across a door; smiling women swirl, you whisper, and your whisper is an influence and seeps across an empire, now long vanished.

From birth onward, here in Asbury Park, you were scorned, and your spite took shape and grew. You were victimised and beaten, and your cruelty shot roots down and drank and pulled, tight as wires, through the earth. The beauty that bewitched you and the beauty that was in you were rejected and dismissed by those around you, and your viciousness unfurled like an icy metal flower. These elements inside you gathered force and locked together in infernal harmonies, until a great black symphony of Angel towered raging like a hellish dark mill against the sky inside your head.

Your brows were too arched for the oil-spattered trailer-park you lived in on the west edge of town, where abuse between the motor-homes spoke to you in simple terms: I’ll slit your pout wide, freak, I’ll carve pleasure from your mouth and throat—how about a sweet smile cut with this knife, and not your rat-faced sneer? Don’t fuck with me, bitch.

 

Teaser 22(ii), Full Moon in Scorpio

And meanwhile, slanting from the billboard on the highway, the film-star flickered down upon you like a whip, and you were certain they would find you sprawled dead and hard beside the grey electric fence behind your trailer-home, his image burned tiny on your retina.

There’s a place of enchantment, you knew, where the Full Moon in Scorpio irradiates the brightest, with wisdom and secrets, ancient powers and some smoke and mirrors too. So you ran through the night streets and flat deserted waterfront, through lanes of yellow lamps, always looking for this place—felt its whisper round the corner, heard its giggle from the next block, retreating—caught its black velvet breath around the angle of the bricks before it whisked away. Running, running, running, always gaining on it, slowly… And still the little boy-girl inside you runs the streets at night, seeking that retreating thing, and gaining on it, slowly. (But I found it first, in Manhattan, and that’s why I’m seeing into you—and why you saw the broadcast and watched me with avidity enough to twist the knife of your own rich pain.)

 

Teaser 22(iii), a yelp of splashed gasoline

Back at school, when the teachers bade you drink your poison up like a good girl, you’d slip through the alley-way where hypodermic syringes and empty lipstick cylinders would crunch beneath your boots. There you built heaps of trash you named as your enemies and then, one by one, set them toxically ablaze with a yelp of splashed gasoline and matches. Sudden blotchy hands gripped the window-bars beside you, from inside that shack of cinder-blocks, and you screamed and fled, and later you were jittery with excess coffee in the smudgy cracked window of the Coffee Cup Café, the ashtray heaped up with spent cigarettes you’d sucked to death.

I see you then at seventeen, scything the long grass, for pennies. Of course you are left-handed, and of course the scythe was made for a right-handed person and was thin and broken anyway, but there you were, slashing at the rank growth pressing in upon you.

 

Teaser 22(iv), southernmost concrete rind of the Bronx

She and you had good times, in among the bad, on that grimy strip where motorcycle horns cut the fetid yellow lamp-lit air.

And what a fierce street whore you were: where your heels scraped the pavement a red gash would surface, while you swung your arms, sauntering, and sucked a Capri cigarette. One night you decided, you would move to New York City and would knock ’em dead. But straight away a picture of yourself in the New York winter flickered up: a figure floating through, swathed tight in a long coat topped by a sleek-boned she-male face, unfocused, in among the cars across the oil-slicked pavement, desperate and gorgeous, up and down the tangle of expressway ramps by the Macombs Dam Bridge upon the southernmost concrete rind of the Bronx… You shook your head and landed back at Kingsley Street and Asbury Avenue, where Tillie grimaced down at you and seemed to shake his head. Something in that picture of yourself made you sense it: New York would kill you, somehow. No, you’d stay here for now.

 

Teaser 22(v), oh that Dark Summer

Then Lucan saw you one night, summoned you and scooped you up, plucked you out of Damian’s, installed you in his own house, and no one ever messed with you again. Then you rode high: you travelled round town in Lucan’s car, had respect and more money than you’d ever had. Throughout that first month with him were warm thunderstorms and muggy heat, and every clap of thunder announced your arrival here as someone whom the others had to know and take account of, whose power, crime and glamour stood plain, written high across the sky. They were avid to explore you and the trouble in your eyes. The beauty you’d exploited as a whore was now legitimised by Lucan, growing legendary beside him, as the girls watched in envy. God you looked fantastic! The downtrodden past was gone, and wide countryside opened up, lit in flashes on the summer sky across which you fluttered like a little black metallic butterfly.

How your life then accelerated. Lucan and Angel—untouchable power and untouchable glamour. What a legend! Oh, that Dark Summer, soaked in Ecstasy and petrol fumes, semen and sweat, while the music pumped relentless through the warmth of the air around the corners of the buildings and the flashbulbs popped—till the alcoholic glamour of the white and yellow lights streaking by you through the night swerved down into red-shift and gorgeous splintered-metal smells of sex-drenched death…

 

Teaser 22(vi), I shall sing you to the camera

You’re tough as nails of tungsten and the bravest of them all. You’ve always jumped the ship’s plank first, while the crew goggled safely down at water that you alone would brave—green, sticky, glowing water, pregnant with tentacles and eyeless-headed long necks of algae-smeared flesh, with curling mist and bubbles gulping up from the deep. Every day you’re down there, and every night you climb back alone to the pirate ship, unsung … but I shall make you one of my chosen four, I promise, Angel, so I at least shall sing you, to the camera!

 

Teaser 24(i), a reminder of sunlight

Electronic dance music pumps across a busy floor. “There’s Shigem,” says Evelyn, pointing towards someone I recognise from somewhere, and we set off through the crowd. After a moment I remember that I first noticed him earlier from the Cadillac, while the car was sitting at a traffic-light on Main Street, right beside where he was on the pavement talking to a girl. The first thing I registered then was a golden bracelet with the name “Shigem” engraved on it in slick squirly black letters, because it reminded me that Evelyn had told us this name during her guided tour when she first drove us into town. I almost tuned in to him then and there, but Angel ended up beating him to this honour because we were all too much in transit in the car, so I should not have been able to give Shigem a proper tune-in. The only thing I got as far as picking up from him was that he was Malaysian. He had long black hair with platinum-blond highlights in, warm bright eyes, and beautiful high-fashion facial features that were nevertheless prominently acne-cratered all over, especially on a pair of perfect high cheekbones. Here in the club he’s dressed with stylish flamboyance and a certain flash and trash, like a whore on Jalan Raja on a hot Kuala Lumpur night in Fashion Week. A thin silver earring hangs from each ear, and the word “Virginity” is tattooed on the honey-coloured skin of his left shoulder in the same script as the name on the bracelet. Inhabiting the femininity of his slim and delicate body with a simple, quiet and sensual pleasure, he reminds me of sunlight and moves with divinity.

 

Teaser 24(ii), chime through the strobe-lights

Here he’s in his element, much more than on the street. Hosting a club night, it’s clear he is a natural. Just within the time we take to cross the room and approach him, he has mixed in all directions. Tied to no one, he succeeds in connecting with everyone: faster than quicksilver, light as air and never once intrusive or demanding, he yet reaches somehow into every person’s presence, one to one, and draws them out and upward like a chime through the strobe-lights. Riding the crowd, he electrifies the dance-floor with effortless charisma, in tune with the dirty hard electro playing, as he lights up the faces and the spaces in between them with the bright sexy flicker of his presence. He curls his fingers round in the air as he speaks, and I see that malice cannot touch him here: no matter what may happen in the outside world, here in club-land he’s unbeatable. If all the land were set up as a chic nightclub, he’d be absolute monarch. I lean over to Evelyn. “Why is he not in Manhattan?” I ask.

She laughs: “I dunno—because he’s here, I guess. And he’s ours, and he’s way too good for Manhattan!”

 

Teaser 24(iii), if people spoke in dance music

As we dance, I contemplate him where he stands half turned-away, his left shoulder facing me with that word “Virginity” … and while we wait, Shigem, I think I’ll take a look inside you, before we’ve even met. And although I’ve been half-expecting that your mind would be a nightclub mind with “disco” VIP Room emotions to match, this is not the case. You see what you’re doing here as showmanship, neither more nor less. You do it, as you should, because you love it and it pays you and you know you’re the best—and you wish that the days were as dark and bright as this room, and that people spoke in dance music, permanently liquored-up and high like these. And yet you function in the real world too, I see, with only subtle changes and little disappointment.

 

Teaser 24(iv), vapour of a scarlet wine

But here’s a rich crevasse, for me: I see how you were several hours back, at home, when you settled down to watch Sound & Vision. As Alaia’s voice welled up, you sank to the floor and sat immobile, gazing at the TV screen. Silent tears sprang forth and ran down your cheeks. For hers was a song that had echoed in your head since early childhood, a song with untranscribable notes, without a name, which you’d treasured in yourself as yours alone … but here it was without you, for all the world to hear, paired up with that beautifully alien face on the screen. Somehow Alaia had discovered it—but how? It had always emanated from forbidden lands of cruel sun and sweet sensual nights; and it poisoned with bewitchment of yearning and delirium and glimpses of sublime bliss, ensuring that the real world would always, ever after, fall short. The first time you’d heard this song, coiling like the vapour of a scarlet wine throughout your head, you knew it was forbidden but ignored this of course. Often since then you’d heard it carried on the wind, in the fevers of the deep small hours, blown across a hundred years to land in you. It always sang of sweet dark and sorrow and enormous love, unearthing ancient things within yourself while it played.

 

Teaser 24(v), your private song around my face

And always joining this song, from your childhood onward through the years, every time it welled from your depths or echoed off the folded hills of the night, there would float up, several seconds after its opening, that face, Shigem… Oh, that face: yes, you know the one, I think. It’s this face, my own, upon the screen you watched tonight, in its soft unearthly lighting and the smooth coloured make-up that you saw on it—the first time you witnessed it projected without you, in the outside world, for all to see. So large had it always loomed, for you, that it seemed to float upon the sky, its gaze ever fixed on a point above your head that you couldn’t quite reach. But its gaze from the screen today looked at you, and you shivered to be looked at thus, for nothing of yourself could you hide from it. Somehow I’d embodied it. How? But there it stayed, on the screen, in all its melting permutations, with your endless private song wrapped divine around its lineaments—a shatteringly magical conjunction that floored you. Every last thing in you it saw, accepted, knew, without expression. “You’ve got everything,” you mouthed at me onscreen, in silent passion. This face, you saw, was all you really needed to know now, and all the rest would follow. It’s the only game in town, so to speak, despite the anguish of your knowing you will never be inside it. Along with Alaia’s song, this face has lived in you since boyhood, Shigem, and will remain in you till death. It’s majestic and familiar—rich and inevitable—powerful and beautiful—addictive and eternal!

 

Teaser 25(i), staring out across the centuries

Standing in the shadow of Alaia, I watch the crowd reflected in the mirrored wall behind the bar. There in the distance is Shigem; then much nearer to the mirror there is Evelyn, laughing; and standing near her, with eyes open wide and an opaque smile, is a slim, dark-haired figure—oh but that’s me of course. And there’s Alaia right beside me, lighting a Virginia Superslim, or trying to, with a match that isn’t working. I take a book of matches from my pocket, turn my gaze from the mirror to the real-life Alaia, strike a match and hold a yellow flame in front of her. She waits for it to finish flaring, sucks it through the end of her cigarette, nods me thanks and turns her attention elsewhere. I drift my gaze back to my unexpected figure in the mirror, which is the only figure, out of all those in the tableau, who shows any consciousness of someone else looking in upon them, of someone outside them in a different dimension: the only individual in the composition to look outward at the viewer, like that figure in the Bosch picture who fixes the observer with perceptive eyes from in between the heads of unperceptive companions, who is often thought to be Bosch himself. The frozen transience of the figure in the bar-mirror mural reminds me of the figure of a boy I once saw who’d been preserved since Roman times by ash, whose delicate build and size were mine, with the faint ashy shape, on a round little head, of a sort of Roman buzz-cut, just as my own hair was cut then, and vague eye-hollows where I stared back at length through the centuries…

 

Teaser 26(i), was beauty such delusion?

I tell Evelyn and Alaia I’m going to have a wander round, then I find a perch behind a railing by the dance-floor … and there you are, Shigem, you beautiful creature. So what happened next, once you’d heard that voice and seen that face on TV, for all the world to hear and see? Well, first you sat there, gob-smacked; then your intellect chipped in, to tell you that your overwhelming feelings were triggered by a highly-crafted television spectacle that meshed with spells you had inside you anyway. You shook your head. Was beauty such delusion, then? you wondered, then remembered that you’d asked yourself this very same question once before, in little-boy language, when you were a little boy, with your toes in the sand beneath the serpents and the dolphins on the wall of the Convention Hall.

Just before you’d asked this in your little-boy words, you had run down the sand with tiny steps toward the sea, beneath a sky you carried in you—a sky filled with heavy planets, dark brown caverns and the glint of pink stars on gigantic deepest blue—a magic sky amid ten thousand less enchanted skies. The sea had been mercury, not sinking through the sand but sliding waveless across it. From the ocean, standing there, you had conjured copper snails, silver dolphins, uranium express-fish, chromium sea-snakes and worms of plutonium, and watched them dance in front of you, bursting and sprouting in the quicksilver bay while you paddled and you capered in the shallows. Dry shiny drops had splashed up from your hand when you’d stooped to flick the liquid up. Then the slope of the scene had curved up, until above you there had been a shaft with shiny spinning galleries rising to a sweet space of honeylight in giant circles telescoped within one another, out beyond, to where this face smiled down at you from here and now. Your ground had risen upward, with a great turn of gears … but then you’d looked again and seen that all of that had not been real: there were no heavy planets, caverns, pink stars or deepest blue, no snails, dolphins, mercury, express-fish, worms or sea-snakes, and no shining shaft or galleries or honeylight or face.

Instead, you just looked east, across a flat dull sea, beneath an empty grey sky.

So then came the moment when you asked it, all those years ago: was beauty such delusion? You shouted out your version of it, out across the sea and up … a question you’d forgotten till tonight and Sound & Vision.

 

Teaser 26(ii), a mincing giraffe

The last of your innocence I see was aged six, when on golden days you’d picture a ride upon an ostrich through the sands of Arabia. Sun-birds would shriek and coo, electric flies would buzz, and sylphs and gnomes would speak in dimpled voices from the undergrowth (for this was your very own version of Arabia). Once you saw a chanterelle beneath a mauve rose: you dismounted from your bird and ate your tulipe à l’orange. Through the woods you spied a lake and scampered over to its shallows, where shubunkin and raspberry-tangerine-coloured ribbon-fish with helicopter ears buzzed and scuttled in the weeds, leaving spiral wakes. Glow-fish wiggled and a silver scallop winked from the sandy lake-bed. You looked up and dusk had fallen: tiny black horses and a mincing giraffe ringed a carousel built upon a cloud near the moon. Puffballs of shadow swelled huge among the hills, and rose and burst in the night in coloured fire.

 

Teaser 26(iii), Cindi’s Beauty Parlor

Above you on the glass was the scarlet neon outline of a nude recumbent woman. In reply to her, across the street in Cindi’s Beauty Parlor, now closed for the night, a neon sign “PRETTY NAILS” flickered, weak and pink behind the dusty glass. “Pretty nails,” you murmured, gazing vacantly across at it, your legs and arms quivering inside as you spoke.

Later in your teens, there you are with your friends, in Ronelle’s, out of town, all dancing round your handbags on the floor, waving drinks and laughing by the thump of the speakers.

 

Teaser 26(iv), tiptoes on the railroad tracks

Up just in time for a late, late lunch, still drunk, and prone to fainting, as you always were, but starting nonetheless to plan tonight’s fun and frolic … and how you’d not have missed all that, for the world.

Coming up to date, I see you not long before your recent London trip, sitting lonely on the platform in Asbury Park station, across wet tracks from a northbound train that was pulling out, pulling away the beautiful boy who held your gaze unblinking as he disappeared forever, down the tracks and into a point. And you never even spoke to him or knew him. Follow the tracks to nowhere, your tiptoes on the rails, Shigem. Amber, red, green in the mist—flee this town, through the asphalt metal night beyond the railroad crossing.

 

Teaser 26(v), planets sweep and turn

I check the time on my mobile. In ten minutes the club will close, the music cease, the house-lights blaze and then inevitably Evelyn will introduce us, knowing neither whether you have noticed me nor what I’ve seen in you concerning me. Because of this, would it not be classier and kinder if I introduced us now, within the music on the dance-floor, with neither talk nor ceremony? Yes.

I step from my perch here, down to the dance-floor, and move across towards you. You see me, and before your astonishment becomes a thing emotional to comment on or act upon, I’ve grabbed it with my eyes and pulled our gazes up inside you—up, where you leap high and streak through ice and sand, where the telegraph wires sing with frost, bodies scurry, wind soughs through the branches like a million years ago, magic circles curl away, and the planets sweep and turn and the stars spin and fly.

 

Teaser 26(vi), I love you for eternity

The last two long hard dance tracks are slamming, with the dirtiest and deepest thumping bass I’ve ever heard and stabbing hooks of merciless, ecstatic, driving power. For these two tracks, you and I dance together, never touching, never smiling, but staring at each other’s eyes with clarity and ease. As the crazy-deep climax of the last track comes, we are easy in the knowledge that we don’t need to speak about the broadcast at all, and we smile for the first time.

Here, several hours after Sound & Vision ended, you conclude a high-speed journey: you accept that although I can’t be Kim for you, I yet return to you the love you poured in my direction when it bounced off the glass of your TV screen at home.

—But of course, I can make you into another of my chosen four here in town, as I vowed tonight I’d do for Angel too! OK: your lovely image, my Shigem, will spread its fire and fluid far beyond your life, I shall ensure it. Fifty light-years in all directions, the broadcasts of fifty years ago hurtle outward in a huge swelling bubble. From the tops of the spires of the old stone cathedrals is rising a vast new cathedral of airwaves, multiplying, reconvening, splitting, being mirrored. Through Rik’s camera, this bubble will be fed with your image, so the rhythms and the visions of your dreams will run forever there, memes in proliferation, standing out Shigem-shaped, hard against the blackness, twisting outward further, mating light with other memes and surging out of sight beyond the curvature of space…

For I love you, Shigem, across the world or here in Paradise, forever; and I’ll never leave your side or let you down, throughout eternity.

 

Teaser 27(i), every girl you’d yearned to be

It happens that in Lucan’s group it is Angel who is standing nearest to ours, with points of yellow street-light shining off his black vinyl brassiere, and in my group it is I who am standing nearest to Lucan’s: Angel and I are thus no more than a couple of metres from each other and both somewhat apart from the rest. Evelyn is gearing up to move my group on, but first I fix Angel’s eyes with my own. Back at Downstairs I looked around among his memories, but now I aim a hypnotic suggestion at him, forcing him to feel that he’s known about “Jaymi and Alaia” for half his life … so you picture that cabaret bar, don’t you, Angel, where you sat years ago when you first heard Alaia singing through these eyes and started feeling sucked in: that saxophone of creamy chocolate velvet wine, spilling out its jagged notes of dark muscled flesh that coiled around you as you leaned your body forward, your elbows on the sticky bar, loath to believe you were there among the first to hear a sound you knew immediately would ripple out through history! Remember how your feet tapped the footrest on your bar-seat; remember how you reached for a white book of matches without looking down for it, to light another Capri up and draw it down deeply, your eyes growing wide until they blinked in the smoke? You shook the match out when you felt the flame approaching your golden-painted nails, tossed it somewhere down, surrendered to the pulsing of the beat beneath the saxophone and felt the tears start behind your eyes, alone within the crowd. Every girl you’d ever yearned to be, and every boy you’d ever wanted, were summed and projected in the pairing of Alaia’s voice and these eyes—remember? Then afterwards you wandered in a daze through the streets, saw the moon looking down at you, inscrutable and ancient, and you knew that my Vision and her Sound were in your blood for life… And though beneath this street-light my gaze looks as frail as an eggshell gaze glimpsed passing in a limousine, it’s raped you nonetheless, through the airwaves and light waves.

 

Teaser 29(i), fly away to a happy land

There was a man in your life, for a while, after you moved here to the high-rise. He even quit his shit-job in the factory on the Bayonne waterfront, to come down and live with you, here beside the sea. It didn’t work, however. I suspect he thought you saw, around the two of you, oppressive scenes of horror, retribution and smoke; but did he never notice your sweet little snub-nose profiled against any scene you might be in? Could any such scene be so bad, with such a nose? He never tried to fathom you, he only left you pregnant, not long before you miscarried. Before he left, you planned to escape him. “I could walk out any time,” you thought, “and hit the ground running—maybe never touch the ground! I’ll start a brand-new life, and then…” but you always trailed away here. That was years ago. Perhaps he’ll realise yet what he lost, though more likely he will not. Then perhaps you’d want him back, though more probably you wouldn’t.

Since then you’ve had friends, sometimes; but one thing you have never found, never coming close, is a lover who will stay with you for any length of time, who will be there and give to you. I doubt you ever will, though I shan’t tell you that. So ingrained is your aloneness, it is sensed at thirty paces. There are other things in life besides cohabiting with someone; but you, it seems, are set up so you need someone first, before the rest could occur, and so the rest never will. There’s one consolation, though: you may come back to earth for your next life, Pippa, if there is such a thing, and then perhaps you’ll find your lover then—you never know, you may! Then maybe he will want to fly away with you, to somewhere, then maybe you will fly away together to a happy land, forever, or at least another town…

 

Teaser 29(ii), your new internal continents

By chance you had in fact turned the TV sound on, just before our broadcast, so you did hear Alaia’s voice from down in your bedroom. The song you heard ran sky-high, slow and all-embracing through the airwaves of your head: you’d known the song before, you felt, with that one man of yours, in the sweetest early times with him, in moments in his presence when you stepped for the very first time into new internal continents inside yourself. (Hard to know those steps would turn out the only ones you ever took there.) Memories of your two shadows falling on a building wall, doubled up with laughter in a summer long ago, were unlocked by this song: shadows photographed on plaster and filed in the album of your memory. A dying love affair in Asbury Park.

 

Teaser 29(iii), a blip in witty camouflage

Sometimes you think you feel another man calling out, across this town, across the world, around both the past and the present, to address you. He calls through that song inside your head … and no, you won’t meet.

Such promise in you, Pippa—what went wrong? It seems your personality did not grow a backbone: no one, ahead of time, thought to say you’d need one. Living’s such an effort. (Who arranged that? and what a great mistake it was.) The weight of your body leads to stasis, by nature; any other action is unnatural, for you. The play of your attention leads to silence, by nature; any other noise is unnatural, for you. The spanning of your vision leads to darkness, by nature; any other lighting is unnatural, for you. Paralysis—an illness.

A wave of sadness breaks, as you see how “too early” overlapped with “too late”. Or maybe there was just a blip of time between those two periods; but alas, you didn’t recognise this blip when it arrived in witty camouflage, and so you didn’t know to act while it was still happening, and now the blip’s gone, taking its camouflage with it. Here’s a cool idea, though: perhaps that fleeting blip was all the more resonant, for never being utilised!… Is that of any use to you? No? No, I guess not.

I bring my tune-in to a close. So there she is. I suspect she’d have it otherwise. So should I, big time. Funny how things turn out.

 

Teaser 30(i), your endless Indian Summer

Standing at the front door, she turns her head to face me as I near her. I take my leave with a kiss … and while I’m close, I look behind your eyes and see beneath the sadness a happy place, somewhere, remaining from before, that lets its sun through your eyes now and then, spilling onto other people if they’re lucky to be with you when it spills. In that place, the place you should have been, fountains fling up jets of spray on mossy stone cherubs; strips of lawn snake away between high beds of flowers, where you sprawl in the grass, and the parties last days and nights and afternoons and further nights. You run through the moonlight across the portico, along the terraces and down cool woodland paths to obelisks and urns in the dappled light of stars. You’ve never taken a trip to such a place from Asbury Park, but you’ve always known that once you lived there, strange to say—once upon a time you lived that life, Pippa Vail, for a lifetime, somewhere—an endless Indian Summer in a palace!

“Looking forward to that picnic,” I say.

She sends her empty smile across the lift lobby at me: “Me too.”

I head for the Metropolitan on dead quiet streets, towards the glimmer of the dawn across the ocean ahead.

 

Teaser 32(i), Romel-we-hardly-knew-you

My mind starts to wander, rather as it did with Jason’s financial graph, so while I half-listen I can’t help myself tuning in to her for a moment … and I zoom in on a pair of childhood memories, Evelyn: the chime of the ice cream van with garish cones and faces painted gaily on its sides in faded letters, as you giggled with a girl who was a friend, but whose face is a lacuna in this scene. And linking chime and giggle, an old rock song heard in Frank’s, up on Main Street, where you went with a boy who came to town for a brief while but then moved away again and so fell out of touch—a boy called Romel, whom you thought of, when he went, as Romel-we-hardly-knew-you. What’s this ghost of your former self saying to Romel in Frank’s, with such enthusiasm? Neither you nor I can lip-read your younger self’s words, but the urgency of your chatter is at least preserved in the faint tug and ache of this small memory, and maybe also somewhere in the memory of the vanished Romel.

 

Teaser 34(i), icy-golden ladders to infinity

I fling this distracting intellectual analysis away, since her voice is now taking the lead as planned, with my gaze as responder and back-up, in a subtle overture … and to every one of you who can hear her and see me, it seems you are walking over fields with a mystery friend to whom you cannot turn but who feels like a part of you, and from this companion a full, swelling voice wails and keens. This friend is yours alone—exotic, from an ancient place, with eyes that see what you see and silence swelling loud beneath the wailing of its passage through the fields with you. It constitutes a procession in itself, dark, bejewelled and smiling at you, though you still can’t turn to face it.

Warmed up now, she accelerates. Her voice pushes outward, and hollows out sound, out of silence—volume out of nothing, as the Big Bang pushed out brand-new space at the speed of the light that was born of it. She carves out a bowl of sky and mountains with her song: you who listen find yourselves standing on a mountain pass, looking down at Lop Nor, the deserts all around it and the mountain bowl around those, wider in enormity with every passing second. Clouds boil and bubble on a level with your feet upon the pass. While you watch, cities sprout, proliferate and die, miles below you. Her upturned black face flings its inexhaustible magic out across galactic space-time, where (at her will) powers of ten collapse and stretch, collapse and stretch, collapse and stretch, in icy-golden ladders out of sight into infinity…

This being her journey, we take a darker turn than anything I’d have served you by myself. It’s as if, having just sketched the birth of space, she now bewails with tangy glee your wretched place within space—her song nearly cheerful in its rhythm but evoking the sound of your soft human lips on your hard stone planet, where you cling like red-nerved molluscs on a rock. Obviously those soft lips shouldn’t have been housed in this cold glinting song of death and planets, glass and rock and falling steel: what vicious force inflicted that upon you fleshy squirts?

 

Teaser 34(ii), Alaia’s sphinx voice

Her sphinx voice curls around your dreary snarls and mocks them, with goddess-like serenity and power. Through the litter and the dirt, round the jagged little corners of your fibreglass and concrete and your gaudy plastic shop-fronts, behind the stench of fates and minds, their limits, spite and hate—can you hear the haunting wail of her unfair perfection, huge and dark and female in the lower sky? Always seeing where you’re at, but not inclined to save you; apt to raise you up but leave you hanging; heavy and oppressive, but alluring as a drug. She’s Alaia—but she’s gone, just an instant before you see the form of her. She draws you on in anguish that you’ll always fall short of her, and yes, you always will … but then again she might just be lying when she says that, or lying now in saying this. Reach for her (she’ll make this very difficult), and some of you she’ll break in two and some she will caress, while seeming to imply there’s a reason for these differences—and yet she may be lying by implying so. Reach for her, she’ll kiss you, lick your ear or make you kill yourself. Reach for her, she’ll undulate a tentacle of shivers through your flesh or lick your eyeballs. She’ll light you up with wine, or burn your mouth away with acid, making certain that these outcomes are not in your control. When the sun blasts fire on the globe’s other side, you may hear her. Catch her late tonight, behind the siren of the train in the distance, when you half-wake: the train roars along the blasted viaduct, screaming, and drowns out a screech from an arch underneath it as the siren blares on for a whole long minute, stops a moment, then returns for another blaring minute … and you’ll arch through her colonnades and spin your hula-hoops along her yellow-twilit viaducts among your sweaty sheets, every one of you. But when at last you see her, then she’s gone! Did you ever feel led-on? D’you think she lies? Listen hard.

 

Teaser 34(iii), a different moon sets pale and vast

Her notes grow in violence—huge hammers smashing down on every beat, as if to kill it, and slamming in to crush your heads and bodies. Whatever words you try to say, she melts them to a primal scream. You bounce up cliffs on the surge of her sound, while the hammers swing relentless through the blood-spattered stadium; and up above the carnage, the angles and the curves of my face float serene…

At last you can face your mystery friend upon the fields, and you find, too late for rescue, that this friend is her too. Beyond the horizon, gun-beats billow, dry as thunder and as heavy as the Pyramids—a grand weight of cosmic sound that gives the planets gooseflesh. Then she leaves you dead and steps away through the fields, across the plain, staining the horizon with a spired plume of emerald smoke and icy flowers of mist. She slopes away a sudden hundred miles to a cavern where a different moon sets, pale and vast above a tiny crash of waves, and majestically she vanishes; and there we end.

 

Teaser 36(i), night streets in suburbia

Watching them clink glasses, I tune in to Kim’s own memories of his childhood … and I see you aged seven, by the sea, which was your friend in its impersonal enormity. Although so many eyes had looked upon it, yet to no pair of eyes had it cared to explain itself: you liked that.

I see you aged ten, growing up amid a stretch of tame suburbs on the edge of Southport. (So the English accent I first heard in Paradise is identified.) You walked in the night past quiet suburban houses, where the window options numbered five in total: a few uncurtained windows blazed openly with gaudy life; other ones afforded only glimpses of this, through twee net curtains or between solid curtains; a third kind showed solid curtains pulled across, lit around the sides; a fourth, solid curtains too, but unlit round the edges; and the fifth kind, darkened rooms with curtains wide open. Such were the permutations, and onto any one of these, bluish television flickers might be added. Occasionally, from blocks away, a shout would come, or the slamming of a door, then an engine and a dog’s bark, then nothing but the humming of the white street-lights. Every window stood removed, beyond an empty garden; but nowhere was a window that enticed you anyway. No one on your street was the same age as you, at all; but even if they had been, you’d probably not have clicked with them. Those of your age whom you knew from school, who lived elsewhere: you didn’t truly want to be with those either. You didn’t quite connect with them in any solid way—well sort of, one or two. But no one whom you knew had a life that attracted you. Throughout those years you wanted many things, but only some of these could you have named, if you’d tried. Much time would be needed, so it seemed, and much boredom, till you found individuals who excited you. For years until you found them, though, suburbia would yawn at you, with solitude and waiting games and emptiness and comfort, while at night your feet stepped through a thousand white pools of light, the dogs barked a block away and bluish flickers played around the curtains in the windows.

 

Teaser 36(ii), exhaustion of entrapment

I see you aged twelve, first realising the word gay applied to you, and feeling simple pleasure that the attraction you’d felt since age six, though seemingly natural, in fact belonged to something as alternative and interesting as this.

Next, there you sat upon the carpet, aged sixteen, smoking hash with the others. All were under threat from one another; yet fun was had, with music and videos, here in the living room of someone’s absent parents. You were cooler, in many ways, than anybody else here, and yet in other ways you lagged behind in this respect. Often you were unsure which score applied. For you there were stabs of tension, sudden mirth, and even bits of friendship—but always at the headache-making price of fitting in and guessing how not to veer beyond “unusual” into “wrong”. How little of yourself could you have shared with the others here. How different you felt—and how glad you were that you had not been any one of them. Your sexuality was merely one part of this, for there was so much more, too, that would have been alien to most of them, if you had just been your natural self and spoken your intelligent mind. So of course you tended not to speak. How exhausting and how limiting they were, with their mediocre cluelessness that pushed you into such quietness, then. What a waste of time. (No, not all of them—just most.) Drunk or stoned, you and they went through the kitchen to the back garden terrace, each of you making jaggedly politicised tracks among the others, trapped tiringly together; while you, saying nothing, just drank in the clean, cool, clear, black, non-human sky like a draught of freshest water.

 

Teaser 36(iii), please wait many stupid years

I glimpse you not long after, on that dim bus at night with the others through the countryside in France, your reflection in the window and the same music playing at the front again and again, and the furtive talk of smuggling fire-crackers through the border…

I see you in that nightclub in the suburbs, on that nameless faceless shuttered shopping street, just one time, where “Suburbia” was playing. A fight between emotionally retarded yobs began, at which you smiled to see them both really damaging each other, drawing blood and breaking bones and both deserving every stab of pain and much more besides. Then you left the club, caught a bus and gazed out through the window at the terraced houses’ sad sitting rooms and sad bedrooms, glimpsed behind squalid curtains.

Somewhere the electric stuff was waiting for you—wanted by you—hunted by you, Kim! But it wasn’t quite here yet. Never quite here yet. Not ready yet, Kim. Please wait and want and hunt for very much longer, Kim. Please wait for boring years of stupid, putrid school, Kim…

But while you wait, what fun it was, back there in the club, to see those macho morons hurt and stab and slash each other’s hateful backward faces, and if only they had died of it!

 

Teaser 37(i), in the dark in the cubicle

He pauses. “I was going down that hallway … and there was this little door in the wall. Not short, but narrow. There was a faint light coming through the hinge, though you couldn’t see through. There was a big keyhole in the door, and I felt a really strong urge to look through. So I bent down and peered in, and I nearly screamed, because inside was some kind of toilet cubicle, and it was just dimly lit, but there was a person sitting there, naked in a wheelchair, right close in front of me, staring at me with these weaselly eyes, level with the keyhole… You remember when Lucan’s gang was across the street from us?” I nod. “You know which one Angel is?” I nod again. “Well, this figure looked just like an identical twin of Angel. I didn’t know what to do. I thought, he must be able to see me out here, he’s so close to me—but his eyes weren’t showing any signs of seeing me. Then I remembered it was really dark out here in the hallway, and light in the cubicle, so of course he wouldn’t be able to see me. I also wondered if this person was unconscious, or in a trance, or maybe some kind of vegetable who wouldn’t be able to see me even if the light were on my face. Or maybe he’d be able to see me, but he wouldn’t be able to look like he was seeing me, because he was paralysed or something. I remembered where the hallway light-switch was, from seeing Pippa turn it off earlier, so I crept along the wall looking for it. And as I went along, I noticed there were no squeaky floorboards and I know I always move quietly, so I thought that with no light and no sound, maybe that figure still doesn’t know I’m here? Then I found the light-switch and flicked it on and crept back to the door and started bending down again—but I stopped dead when I was halfway down to the keyhole, because right there in front of my face, on the door handle, was this small smear of stickiness… It looked like it was congealed blood, or something like that, I couldn’t tell. I jumped back, feeling freaked-out, then I just flicked the light-switch back off and ran up the hallway and back into the sitting room and joined all you guys again.”

 

Teaser 38(i), amber years sealed and perfect

But the greater part of me is inconspicuously finishing off my tune-in to Kim, now that his childhood has piqued my curiosity … and I see you, Kim, there in your first college room, which you loved for being yours alone, at half-past-eleven in the morning, at your window with a coffee. Underneath a still, damp, stone-washed sky was a lane, little-ridden, lightly mossed, leading to the stark brown bulk of the Library. Along the lane’s far edge, a blond boy wandered past—quite pretty, dressed in a black coat and black-tie, returning home from some night out. Blue smoke rose as he took a languid draw from his cigarette, his hair hanging forward in a pale curved spray. And you sipped from your coffee mug, and idly watched him down the lane and vanish round the corner.

The hazy amber days you lived there were a gorgeous alcoholic social haze of serious fun. You wasted not an instant of those years, and nothing can alter that. They’re sealed—yours—and perfect.

 

Teaser 38(ii), through the arch and back again

Reclining on the warm grass beside the river late one night, you heard sweet thin notes approaching through the clear air. A girl alone in a small canoe floated from the shadows of the trees to your right, drifted past and down the river to your left, around a stone corner, underneath the Bridge of Sighs, and disappeared. For minutes more, her piping trailed behind her, faded, and vanished.

From the window of your last room, you looked across the front court: through fountain spray and through the arch, to tiny figures ambling in the haze along the distant road; then coming back, nearer figures by the river, framed in the arch; then back nearer still, upon the lawn just beyond the arch; then here in this front court and down beneath your window. That soundtrack was playing, and now it reached the infinitely creepy-sweet “Mysteries of Love”. And through your leaded window, all those distant background figures, standing still or gesturing in talk or crawling antlike across the frame, were sealed in a different world, photographed and laminated here in your memory.

 

Teaser 38(iii), your lightning unanswered

Then London, in a strange room, with telephone numbers. I see you pushing on, through a spitting London rain, past the black-painted rust-spotted wet metal railings enclosing the grass in a lonely residential square. Pushing along in the rain to a boy you loved or thought you did, who loved you back or thought he did, you were edgy with uncertainty, the promise of togetherness, and imminent aloneness. ’Cos you know as well as I do I can never think of anyone but you, went the song. Alone in buses and trains, reflecting, questing, staring at the distance, always seeking something, someone, somewhere else perhaps… You heard the silence beat behind the bustle and the rain: beating on and on, while you rushed through the rain to some suburban street you’d never seen before (and yet would see a few more times, a few), and the system of the city worked around you, oblivious. Sure, you’ll be all right, you thought—but where was the outside lightning, to answer yours that always seemed to flash alone without direct reply? And your symphony revolved within you, underneath the plane trees and past the wet railings, as the rain pattered on. Then, by and by, Kim: your face in the rain … last chance on the stairway … alone in the social whirl … I’ll never see your eyes again … dance away…

 

Teaser 38(iv), platinum-blond in black-and-white

Once you saw, waiting on the platform of a station, a tall platinum-blond spiky-haired boy in sunlight—striking, thin and sexy in a long-sleeved black-and-white-striped T-shirt, and he settled right then into your lifelong memory, just before your train pulled away from him forever.

A last small residential square in the afternoon. Soft weather, damp air. You accessed the square itself, found a hidden wooden bench, and sat. The odd bus passed, beyond the railings. A breeze blew the wet black branches of the trees, and their few remaining brown leaves spiralled down around you onto dripping shrubs. A grey squirrel hopped among the leaves on the lawn, as it nibbled at an acorn. It saw you, stopped nibbling for a second, then nibbled on. You held each other’s gaze.

 

Teaser 39(i), flashes of metal and cash

“Oh yes,” I reply, tuning in while I speak … and they’ve known you here for years, Evelyn, circulating through the streets, adding to the summer with your laugh. What fun it was, to lose control on a Friday night or a Saturday night, or both! What a rush to trip on acid, lying on the grass among the ducks on the island by the bridge on Sunset Lake with friends, after you saw that band play at the Saint over on Main Street. What better use of dollars than to drink them in a bar or on the beach beneath the summer stars, as someone played drums in the distance? All those words and laughs and fights and flashes of metal and cash and alcohol have flown away, and that whole scene is mostly gone; but how enriched you were by it, and how you returned the favour. They all saw you climbing into cruising cars at midnight, and sniffing coke in alleyways and nightclub toilets, your painted face alive and smiling, high from the scent of the gasoline and fuel oil spilled on the pavement where your high heels strutted. Outside the deli by the hole in the wall you would stand with your arms folded, leaning on the pay-phone, thinking of the coins and the bills in the pocket of your tight blue jeans, as you cocked an ear to some wild tale that the glamorous proto-anorexic Angel was telling you, before he found Lucan: in your eyes, as you heard him, were fun, compassion, sparkle and humanity. At Kingsley and Second was the corner where you sold yourselves, surrounded by the bars and clubs and empty lots and run-down homes and crumbling hotels. What a shit job, but you both made the best of it.

 

Teaser 39(ii), a sunny band of one

You’d never known another place to live than Asbury Park; you were used to it and loved it with a rough love, as home. Back then, it was only the marginal who moved here; most people bypassed this bombsite-by-the-sea full of people who would stay and die. Slowly since then, however, different kinds of people have been moving in, unexpected people. Jason came, for instance; and though he went away again, he left behind the sound-stage and hired you to drive for it.

And so you left the street and stayed off it, but you’re independent always. You move in your space with the beauty of a swagger, like an everyday assassin. To the drum-beat inside you, you shake your hips, flick your long black hair through the air, and run with no gang. It seems you hang with everyone, and yet you are a lone wolf, a sunny band of one. Good god, you’re beautiful.

 

Teaser 40(i), my scampering and giggling

“And you,” Alaia turns to me. “When you and I went out into town after the broadcast, with all that scampering and giggling about our making an escape…? It wasn’t spontaneous at all for you, was it? You were levering us both outside all along, just to look for poor innocent creatures to spy into—”

“Ain’t nobody innocent around here!” snorts Evelyn.

“That is not true,” I say.

“It sure is,” says Evelyn.

“No, I mean it’s not true about the scampering and giggling being fake,” I say, stung by this. “I wasn’t thinking about target-hunting at all, I was just elated after our broadcast. I promise you, Alaia: my scampering and giggling were NOT FAKE…”

They stare at me, taking in my passion. Then Evelyn bursts out laughing. After a few seconds Alaia follows suit, then after another few seconds so do I. I sink back onto the chair and Alaia sits down on the edge of the bed, where Evelyn is now lying back, bubbling with mirth.

“Well, I’m glad this all came out,” grins Alaia. She looks at Evelyn. “And all because you wore that whorish magenta skirt.”

“When you see that skirt in Angel’s footage,” I remark, “I think you’ll agree his memory had stored it up as being even shorter than it is, by the way. Or have you had it lengthened since then?”

When we have recovered our composure, Evelyn sits up on the bed. “Look, the bottom line is, it’s a done deal. We’re in too deep, there’s no getting out of it.”

“We’re in too deep, no doubt about it,” I reply.

“So hey—let’s just go back to the others.” She gets up off the bed, crosses the room, opens the bedroom door and heads back up the hallway.

I get up from my Friesian chair. “We’re steeped in sin,” I murmur to Alaia as I pass her in the bedroom doorway.

 

Teaser 42(i), rich watermarks of music

As Kim stares at him in amusement at this effusion, I hurl myself into a freeze-frame of Kim’s mirth-squinting eyes … and I see that for the last two years, Kim, just before you slept, you’d recline most nights with a drink and a joint, to hear that music at top volume through your headphones. Mixed with tobacco, the hash might burn unevenly, one side a bit faster than the other, whereupon a dab of spit on the runaway red side would help even things out. Ahead of you would be the whole album, whichever one it was, with some tracks to be repeated along the way—a prospect of pure pleasure. Then often when this pleasure came, it turned into ecstasy (it’s not too strong a word) and you’d be off, deep within the Wild of it, mating with it effortlessly. You could have lived in this music, if that were possible. It did everything you required at just the right moment, though always fresh. It constituted a fantasy play land of joy and sadness, constructed like a great delirious climbing frame from which it was impossible to fall and hurt yourself, or an enchanted factory or city of tunnels and halls, lights and colour, movement and exhilaration, all harmoniously interlocking, from its big-booming architectural shell to the highest-pitched aerial or finial, rich and self-generating… In some sense you wanted to be the music. How much easier and simpler life would then be—in comparison with the messy-sludgy-OK thing it was in reality. What exquisite sound and vision you would then be: what a permanent delirium! And although these nightly ecstasies of hash-enhanced music have had to stop since you met Shigem (for they do demand solitude, and anyway you both quit smoking when you flew here), nonetheless the rich watermarks of their magic will always remain in you.

 

Teaser 42(ii), a balcony of parting

Late in the course of one of the last such musical sessions, however, you spotted a new thing. High upon the façade of the multi-storeyed edifice of sound that you were inhabiting at that moment was a small traditional balcony with balusters, rather tight and sombre for this building’s style—and suddenly you knew that this balcony signified a parting with this music. Not goodbye forever, because you would still be able to hear this music and would certainly do so sometimes, but a subtle and deep intimation of goodbye nonetheless, such as is elicited by the sight of a railway terminus from which you’re about to leave a city or a continent you’ve called home, or by the ringing of a telephone heralding what you know will be the last conversation with somebody you’ve known well. You must move on, the balcony told you. This would be the last time you heard this music in this old way. No figure would emerge behind the balusters and wave goodbye to you, or even just stand there, for it wasn’t a balcony made to be used: it was as functional as those tiny stone balconies under certain windows on high old city buildings where, out of forty-eight offices on a façade, only a couple have such windows and yet the occupiers of these two are probably not aware of their privilege, since their balcony is either just an ornamental detail almost flush with the external wall or at most a thin vertiginous dirty concrete space hardly wide enough for a chair, accessible only via a window-door the key to whose painted-over lock was used once ten years ago and now is lost… “Curtain. 30. Finis,” said the balcony to you, and then said nothing more, while the music it was mounted on went ahead and played on and wound down at last and reached its natural and appointed end. Adieu, you replied; rest in peace.

 

Teaser 42(iii), time ticking dripping slipping

And so the music ended. You took your headphones off and lay still. The clock upon your bedroom wall ticked, and you thought of how you tended just to watch and not say much—after all, you were shy, and there was usually less to say than people thought there was. You felt time passing, dripping, slipping, ticking—gone, and gone, and gone. You saw the days fade away and started wishing x and y and z had come, but knew you shouldn’t think of things that might have been, and much time remained to you, ahead of you, as yet.

Indeed it did. For that night, by chance, was the night before you finally met the dose of spice and joy whom you’d sought so very long throughout those tame Southport suburbs and beside those London railings…

 

Teaser 45(i), your starved baby she-wolf

Through the little window beside me I spot Angel on the pavement outside. He is dancing alone, lewd and rude, as if he owns the space, obscenely gyrating his bottom independent of the rest of him, with one hand in the air and the other on his hip. Upon his tight black T-shirt, just above the gentle undulation of his breasts, hangs a little silver crucifix. I tune in, as he moves … and I catch you imagining, Angel, that you’re just a skeleton with flesh around it, and then recalling with unease that you are just this—and always in your head, like a drug, that sultry thrumming beat. Beneath the smooth seductive curve and flicker of your subtly made-up eyes and face, the starved baby she-wolf inside you licks her wounds and cocks her ears, hunting for the next scrap of trotting meat to spring upon and fight and bite to death without getting killed or hurt—knowing she will always have to do this until she is sprung upon and bitten to an agonising death herself, by something bigger, stronger, faster. That’s just nature, after all. (Great design, don’t you think?) So on you dance, alone in the light, lewd and rude, your bottom still gyrating independent of the rest of you, awaiting just that bigger, stronger, faster thing to bound up beside you, bite you through with its canines and chew you up with snapping bone and ecstasy of pain.

Right on cue, the Cadillac purrs around the corner and stops beside you, in a pool of yellow lamp-light. You stop your dance and wait there, your torso trembling invisibly. Lucan climbs out from the passenger’s seat at leisure. He grins and half-snarls, pantherine, and gestures with his head towards the door beside this grimy little window where I stare out—and you, of course, follow. You follow him through the front door nearby us, over there, with a smugly chewing Kev not far behind.

 

Teaser 45(ii), romance through glass

Oh, Angel—you know you should really go join them, remonstrate, take control, as you usually try to, but you’re so spacy from the drugs and that sultry beat in your head and all those hormones in your blood, and no food, and no sleep but tossing and writhing and churning in bed throughout the few hours last night when Lucan was asleep and so left you alone.

You see Lucan move away from Kev and head back to the front door, beckoning you to follow, which you do; just as I follow you, inside myself, from my table here. When you reach the pavement, Lucan has already walked to the Cadillac and is standing by its open rear door, awaiting you. You walk to him and straight past him, and climb into the car in silence. Kev gets into the driver’s seat. Lucan closes the door behind you, staying on the pavement, and leans down towards you. From opposite sides of the window, just before the car moves, you and Lucan each rest a hand, palm-down upon the glass for a second, in the same place, staring at each other. This romantic gesture, unexpected in itself, especially in public, is rendered all the more assaultive by the evil promised in Lucan’s smile and by the need in your eyes to be its victim. Positioning himself so the others cannot read his lips, Lucan mouths in silence, “You’re my dog.” The Cadillac pulls away and you settle into a poisonous silence with Kev.

Yes, you really are spacy, you realise, from the skunk you smoked before you came to Downstairs and from that never-ending sultry beat in your head, but nevertheless you attempt a piece of clear thinking, here in the cavernous back seat of the Cadillac.

 

Teaser 47(i), dark sea’s slosh and boom

At last Evelyn starts the van. “OK, it was just emotional violence in there tonight,” she says.

“My favourite kind,” I say. While we wait to cross Main Street, I see Pippa’s high-rise ahead of us, and tune in … and I see you spent the day sitting, staring at the walls, until the evening, Pippa! You could have gone out, talked and laughed and eaten, danced and drunk, thrown up and had a blast running round, but of course that’s not your style. Or gone to the Casino on the beach—that’s much more you, since its roof is caved in and trees reach to the ceiling of the hall where shows were once staged. You could have crossed the sand, beneath the shells and the ships in relief on the Casino walls, and sat by its further side and watched the dark sea slosh and boom right in front of you.

 

Teaser 47(ii), flick of moths on your balcony

Several blocks ahead and to the right, the concrete carcass-building rises—gorgeously disastrous, unmentionable, eleven storeys high, picked out by the scattering of streetlights below it. It’s more perhaps a monstrous abortion than a carcass, never having even achieved walls. You feel as small as the gnats, flies and moths that crawl these walls and flick and swing around the dim electric bulb hanging down from the concrete of the balcony above. “The balcony scene,” you muse, “there’s always a balcony scene.” How visible you feel beneath your light-bulb in this outdoor cell, for all to see and to know by seeing, high upon the front of this lone grimy high-rise, thrust against the face of the night just ahead. The dusty glass wind-chimes hanging near the bulb give a tinkle in the faint breeze. A pane of frosted glass cuts you off from the balcony beside you belonging to your neighbours, who never use it and have never spoken to you. Feeling as if you had been killed, you register that the scene before you is assuming the grain of this same feeling, until the sky is like the inside of a skull and the things around you reside in the fibres of your own once-enchanted mind, aborted hopes and carcass dreams. You’re vaguely aware that this expansion into the night is something of a fallacy, but it affords a modicum of escape, so you stick with it.

 

Teaser 47(iii), peeping through the spy-hole

As the days keep on relentless, the things around you cycle every twenty-four hours and they seep into your being with addictive repetition, till you’re made of them: the sad front rooms around the space across the street, the coming-on and going-off of street-lights, the quiet, then the swishing of the wind in the trees, the night-time shouts, passing talk and then quiet again, and best of all, the sighing of the sea when the wind is in the east.

You peer over the balcony rail and see a car pull up across the street, with a shadowed figure in it. Male, you believe. You know you shouldn’t think this, but there genuinely is a chance, albeit a very small one, that this will be a man who knocks on your door, enters, recognises you, takes you in his arms and completes your life. You will thereby have got what you think you need, without even leaving home. Your mind, you’re aware, is getting mushy after so long in here, but the light is dim, so maybe he won’t notice your confusion. But oh, suppose he knocks and is the one for you, and yet you fail to notice? You must be careful, when he knocks, to remain attentive to his face. You tiptoe to your door, swing the cover from your spy-hole and peep through its wide-angle lens at the stained concrete lift lobby.

 

Teaser 47(iv), the song behind the wall

After ten minutes at the spy-hole, you return to your balcony. You watch the trees, unmoving. Looking from your high-rise grave, you know the truth and it’s appalling: as part of being alive, you should have had the ability to run through the fields of the sky, chase the clouds and shout your joy to the world like a child running wild on the beach on an afternoon that never ends, with someone whose presence and attention give you meaning. And although you lack this scenario, it remains desired nonetheless, like a magic song playing behind a wall you cannot break through. Whatever forces were responsible for it, this arrangement was clearly, both at first glance and upon reflection, a colossal and painful mistake, like a huge steel and concrete carcass-abortion at the heart of a very small town. Tears stream hot down your cheeks and round your nose, from a silent howl.

The planes have departed; you have no voltage left. You see too clearly, Pippa Vail, and I wish that I could help you, but I don’t see how I can.

 

Teaser 49(i), the image-stream’s tail-feathers

“Action,” says Rik. Oh well, here goes…

So first, from the party, comes Kim’s childhood in archetypal suburbia: comfortable, alone and always behind-a-pane-of-glass from what he wanted.

Here come his golden days at college, not studying; then fun in London and the quest alone for love.

And here, from my tune-in to him and Shigem together, comes their both setting off home earlier this evening from Evelyn’s and Rik’s apartment upstairs, looking back towards the building that was only a shell.

Here is Kim’s freeze-frame on the street outside, and his memories of music alone through the headphones in London with his first sense of passing time.

Here are the pair of them together again, finishing their journey home tonight: talk of Shigem’s growing up, a love for masses versus individual people, and so to bed.

Here is Angel’s lewd dance, the she-wolf inside him that will eat or else be eaten; his sinking, his spaciness, his need to be a victim; and his drive home with Kev in horrid silence in the Cadillac.

And here at last is Pippa: her not going out tonight to trip the light fantastic; her relentless days, her visitor, her feeling she’s been killed.

I cut through my active gaze. The image-stream’s tail-feathers streak away and dissipate around the camera lens, like a ragged end of celluloid spinning to a halt around a spool on a projector. The tiny red light beneath the lens dims to black.

Rik flicks the studio house-lights back on. I take a deep breath. For me, that required just as much stamina as our first imagination theft did this afternoon.

 

Teaser 50(i), empty red theatre organ

Pippa herself should slow down my mind, I decide. I’ll use her as if I’m counting sheep: how appropriate! Perhaps I can also rectify my omission this evening when I tuned in and I forgot to look out for that narrow door. So I shoot my attention upward … and I find you, Pippa, naked in your big double bed in your depressing, cluttered bedroom, with your eyes wide and glassy. Just your presence in this bedroom gobbles half the room’s space, for even when you’re out, your emotional machinery remains here—parked across the end wall, complex and heavy as an outsized organ, with struts and pipes and pedals and a rack of tubes and valves, half atrophied. It’s too bulky to move and would probably not survive disassembly and reassembly elsewhere, so here it stays, playing soft and sad to itself, never stopping, like a haunted organ playing in an empty red theatre that’s been locked for years.

The only illumination in the room is the dim bedside light, but I notice there’s a book lying open on each of the two bedside tables. Your bedroom door is closed, so from your current vantage point I cannot see your hallway or that other, narrow door; but I cast around inside what I can see of the boarded-up warehouse of your mind, in search of anything relating to this … in vain, for now. A thousand faces flick across your bedroom’s television screen, muted, from that other world outside you. Some of these faces stare right at you here in bed, craning their heads in to peer through the glass screen as if through a window in the corner of your bedroom, mouthing things you cannot understand.

 

Teaser 50(ii), pillow-snails’ horns

Your ears push five slim pale-brown fingers out, one by one, into the dim room: you feel each finger squeeze out its girth with a pop, wriggle off across the pillow, then halt at the pillow’s end and sniff the air, scratching and stroking at the cotton with its long crimson nail. The fingers melt to snails’ horns, twirling at the pillow corners, each one freezing as it sees the people pouring through your bedroom from the TV screen: a cavalcade of bones and air and dust beneath the glamour of their chatter and their flesh; celebrities twitching in the back seats of limousines, pretty little skeletons, brittle dry voices… Their teeth gibber words out, which hang upon the silence pressing in from behind.

A sound-stream you’ve heard across the years rushes past you: an actor bites an apple in a spotlight while a pre-recorded crunch booms out from hidden speakers; the empty bus at night hums and wheezes through the empty square; a buzz of hornets cuts the air, and artificial bird-song warbles and trills above the manufactured sound of a fresh, moist meadow. A grand noise of yearning beauty swells, then inside it in the distance is the sound of children playing in that wasteland between the Arverne projects where you grew up. You think you hear your own childish speech among these voices, and the five-year-old buried in you stirs. Again behind the stillness you can hear the greater silence, and the even greater darkness behind what’s visible. Mercifully at last, a cone of black descends, and sleep.

 

Teaser 50(iii), your fire-escape in the sky

…But while you sleep, the hits just keep on coming, Pippa Vail! You raise your heavy skull up off the pillow and you peer out from inside, from just behind the eyes—watchful for meaty furry spiders on the walls behind your angel statuettes, where they often crouch, flexing their hairy thighs and picking at their teeth. Before they can beckon you to lick them, as you usually must, you’re startled to notice that your television’s on. Did you leave it on, at lights-out? Surely you wouldn’t have. It shows, furthermore, a thing it’s never shown before, in all these years: a simple, plastic, old-fashioned wall-clock, in black and white, mounted prosaically upon an institution wall, its second-hand sweeping round behind the window-bars… The picture cuts to you, where you clutch at your fire-escape railings, in the sky. Around you are long, bendy, lighted candles swaying in a faint breeze. A dry nose pushes from your left, and inside you the fossils of your lust stir a second, but it’s obvious from the space in your eyes that for you the sky’s gone out: your face has grown blind as the face of the moon. You see no further out than the colours on the inside surface of your skull—brown, black and purple. You hurry up the steps of your fire-escape, swilling and pushing along within your coat of flesh; the handrail is worn thin and limp by the touch of many dead hands. You see your goal ahead: a brittle husk, frail and translucent, hung aloft against the blackness of the cavern of your head. And the stairs up inside you end in death, with a stabbing scent of cheeseflesh and blood-lemon streaming away from your ears like the memory of a dream at dawn.

Soon it will be dawn and the end of this night. And within you as you sleep, the thing that never had the strength to birth itself, thus remaining trapped there and leaving you intact, stirs now, pressing slowly and carefully at the inside of your abdomen. Thin skin seals its eyes; webbing coats its teeth and joins its fingers. You stir with the thing inside, and underneath the curve of your sweet little snub-nose, your mouth grins wetly in the dark.

 

Teaser 51(i), fountain of rich brown light

Coming down Second Avenue, we see Evelyn on the left. Before she notices us, a voice calls her name. She turns to see Flames outside the deli on Kingsley Street on the sunny pavement, making eyes at her, and I sense a bit of history flickering between them. From her body language, her unspoken thought would seem to be: You wish, don’t you, Flames. “Hi Flames!” she breezes … and I can see your memory of your very first meeting, when you knew that he saw you as wild, free and self-sufficient, walking with a sway through the beauty of the night, like a part of the night itself—a sweet, sexy woman whom he passed at a corner. The second time he saw you, you were parked in your van with the door open, staring through the windscreen in thought. On your pale brown skin a simple golden band necklace hung and flashed in the sunlight, and when you saw him watching you, from some way away, you knew what he was thinking: Oh girl, he was thinking, how beautiful you are. You smiled through the windscreen and touched your golden band. He saw you as embodying how lovingness and warmth could exist in a natural and instinctive form, whatever kind of place it found itself; and when he looked in your eyes, then he felt plugged in to a warm electric fountain of rich brown light.

 

Teaser 52(i), fat mini-wheels of cheese

Pippa and I continue one further block, to the miniature golf course. Its narrow lanes, bridges and archways, stretching perhaps ten metres, haven’t seen a golf-ball in years, but are now weeded-over, here and there crumbling and returning to a state of mud and scratchy grass. We step across the low fence and find a tiny roundabout to lay our picnic gear on, with a hillock on either side of it where we each sit comfortably. No one is around us on the wide, dusty streets, though I suppose some people can see us from the handful of residential windows we can see. Litter is strewn picturesquely about. Some time earlier this morning a car was smashed and torched across Ocean Avenue, outside the hulk of the old Albion Hotel, and although its interior is no longer hot, its four burst misshapen tyres are all still smouldering on their blackened hubcaps. Smoke coils out from the cracks around the door of the boot, suggesting that a spare tyre inside it is smouldering too. The reassuring scents of gasoline and burning rubber fill the air.

I’ve brought a fine smooth Chopin vodka and some good picnic apples, plus a carton of Lucky Strikes for Pippa, and she has brought white Wonderbread, plastic cups, paper napkins, a couple of knives and a packet of fat mini-wheels of Laughing Cow cheese. “A discerning choice of cheese,” I remark. “I’d say the money-cheese, in fact.” She nods gravely, then beams wide. I pour a couple of generous shots of vodka into the plastic cups and hand one to her, and we bump our cups together, before downing them and gazing out to sea. We meet each other’s eyes and there is genuine fondness there, in both directions. I suspect she feels secure in the knowledge that I shall never judge her or demand anything but just accept her as she is.

 

Teaser 52(ii), a flourish of surf

When we’ve downed our shots, she pulls the short red plastic tab protruding from the oblate spheroid of wax enclosing the first cheese wheel she’s grabbed, opens it, and takes a bite of cheese and a bite of bread and we laugh at the funny name of the cheese and the sweet little picture of the laughing red cow on its label. “Moo!” we say to each other several times, and laugh. A gentle warm swimminess spreads within me. I like her, I really do.

I pour us a third vodka, she opens more Laughing Cows and we settle back more comfortably among the paraphernalia of the golf-course. I peer at the various miniature castles and mounds, roundabouts and gateways around us: “Gateway 3” one of the structures is marked, I can’t imagine why. “What a cosy niche we have ourselves here!” I enthuse. “And how comforting that wrecked car is: it distracts us from ourselves, suggests there’s something really happening in our world here this morning, some activity beside ourselves … d’you know what I mean?”

She just nods and smiles, but I can see she’s not just nodding and smiling: she really does know. I look again for that sticky red smear on the cheese, but it’s gone.

I pour us another generous pair of shots, which we knock together again before downing them. “Would you prefer a walk?” I ask her.

“No, no—let’s stay here, please,” she murmurs. After a pause she grins, becoming drunk, and asks, “D’you have a special person in your life?”

“Not at the moment,” I say. “Do you?”

“Oh, yes!” she nods and giggles, then falls silent.

“I’m glad to hear it,” I say, and announce within myself that the most graceful and fitting course of action now will be to accord her the simple dignity—here I hiccup loudly—of telling me as much or as little as she wishes, and not a jot more than this, nor indeed a tittle less.

And so we chat inconsequentially, with the greatest of mutual pleasure, and then lapse, by and by, into the warmest and most coppery of brown studies—two figures reclining nobly in a bucolic afternoon landscape. To stretch my legs I stand up, sway a moment, and squint towards the sea: upon the sand is a flourish of surf, and windswept is the shore…

 

Teaser 53(i), powerful and beautiful

“Ready?” she asks. I nod. And we watch…

I realise straight away that this broadcast will make a strange juxtaposition, for me, with the drunken whimsy of the picnic I’ve just had. As soon as it begins I sober up fast, for it is no kind of mirthful viewing: not that it’s entirely without flashes of implicit wit, but these are subtle rather than funny and in any case they must be engaged with on the broadcast’s terms, not on the viewer’s. The viewer is not in control of Sound & Vision at all—not even these two viewers, although we aren’t ourselves actually hypnotised by it, knowing far too well how we achieved the effects we did. In this, my first “outsider’s” viewing, I see more clearly that what my eyes achieved in the broadcast, aside from the scaring up of each viewer’s own internal magic for them, was a selective but rich celebration of one viewpoint on this bizarre state we call being alive—my own viewpoint, as it happens, but representative of a multitude of viewpoints.

What can I say except that it is powerful and beautiful, we are blessed that it happened, I am grateful for it and shall die much the happier for knowing it was put out so widely. It is itself, in sum, and funnily enough there is not a hell of a lot for her and me to say about it to each other: most of what is to be said has been said already, either by us in what we presented, or just by the fact of its broadcast and reception. Quite what it means that such a specific set of idiosyncratic material from inside these particular two individuals was transmitted and consumed so globally, I’m not sure. I suspect it may mean nothing more than that with good fortune we managed to effect such global transmission and consumption for ourselves, in place of some other duo’s effecting it for themselves. In other words its cultural meaning is a retrospective, simply historical one, rather than one deriving from any culturally prescriptive wisdom on our parts: it was these two who pulled that off by the method they did, and there it is.

 

Teaser 54(i), cold-blooded angelfish

OK, now it’s easy, bring it on. The countdown ends. From my eyes I feel the pull of photons streaming, turning digital in camera and shooting out to north, south, east and west through the air across the sky around the world. Every single viewer then is off alone, town to town, continent to continent: through the slums of Rio or beneath the Arctic Ocean, to their own bright heaven or their own torture chamber. What I myself believe in, while they’re drowning in this gaze, they cannot know. The make-up round my gaze is bright and sharp and rich as amber, while the gaze, cold-blooded as an angelfish, flutters cool and alien. The combination deifies and makes of me an icon on the screen—a creature born of exquisite light, inaccessible, a fever dream beamed from the most elite suites of the airwaves.

Meanwhile Alaia’s voice is like electric music spilling out through my eyes in all directions, rich and unstoppable. Gleaming machinery unfurls from this gaze, to fill the stadium. Note by indefatigable note, I unfurl it, adding to this city of machinery—silver insulator-cones, glass wires, pylons of platinum and red pipes pumping in an everlasting symphony of movement. I swirl around amongst it, come upon a porthole, stand in it with hands and feet splayed within its circle, and peer down. Underneath me are the outside walls of the great ship I conjured up in Sound & Vision. West across the ocean, the sun presses down in a wet sprawl of sunset and sinks through a giant hole of liquefied red; while thousands of miles underneath this, the Burma Lagoon bubbles silently and twinkles at the pale scintillation of dawn on its surface.

 

Teaser 54(ii), my hyphen ship’s tiny lights

I climb to the ship’s highest bridge, raise my arms and dance, slow and stately, by myself. I’m nearly home now, alone—away from the noise and exhaustion of people. There’s space above my head going upward forever, and beneath the ship’s keel, ocean depths. In blissful liberation of aloneness I shout, across the scarlet-flashing surface of the grand Pacific plains stretching radiant for thousands of miles in all directions. I shout aloud to no one in the night, from my tanker’s bridge, and yes—I’m almost home, away from Earth, away from life, and bound for better, higher, cleaner planes of empty nothingness forever! Oh, bliss of death and sweet dissolution, at last…

Before I say goodbye, though, I’ll take a final jaunt in the rowboat and trail my hands one last time in the waters of this small green planet. So I work the oars and strike out on black twinkling wavelets under stars, in the rowboat, for two solid hours, till the ship is just a hyphen floating free on the horizon. I pull the oars in, lie back, get comfortable and listen to the water’s slosh and sway against my boat’s wooden sides. A dragonfly flicks in lazy arcs across my vision. The hyphen’s tiny lights shimmer subtly, when I turn my head to face the right; but over on the left, just the ocean shines, out from this boat to the edges of the world where it leaps into nothing at the calm black horizon.

 

Teaser 54(iii), conversing with that face on Mars

I reach in my pocket for my matchbox, and sniff the soft air—salt water and the scent of unseen harmonies. I strike a match, let it flare, hold it up, then toss it out from the rowboat. It curves up and out and down, as if in slow-motion. Where it breaks the water, there erupts a soundless plume of pale flame rising curling, swaying, higher up, and higher still: although its root remains here, its tip rises in a rocket path, to lick the highest stratosphere. This signal meets the gaze of that mountain up on Mars whose side-lit contours form a face that stares across at us—you know the one. I move the boat towards the flame’s root. The face winks and smiles, with an eyelid volcano and an earthquake of the mouth. Leaning from the rowboat, I whisper my reply by the flame’s root. It sends my whisper upward, all the way; then the flame demurely falls, from the upper stratosphere to a point beside my rowboat, and vanishes at once with a gurgle and a puff, sending out concentric ripples through the slick black water where it fell. I breathe the night, thrilled to be escaping from the world so soon, and thrilled that my last conversation here possessed the scale and grandeur that it should have done. I take up the oars again and row at leisure, back to the beacons of the hyphen ship floating at the shiny black horizon, for two solid hours; and I climb aboard.

The aperture in each of the three lenses shrinks to a pinpoint, then disappears.

 

Teaser 55(i), Angel’s vegetable twin

“Oh, hi. Yeah, I was just calling to let you know the latest weirdness with Pippa.”

“What is it?”

“It was some time really late last night. I couldn’t get to sleep, so I finally went out for a quick walk, and somewhere a block away from Pippa’s tower I turned a corner and just stopped dead, because there she was, perched on her balcony, up near the sky, looking so spooky that I nearly cried out. For a start, it looked like she was too big, for the distance between us … but I guess that must have been a trick of the light. She was lit up bright by a balcony light on one side of her. Then on the other side of her, in her shadow, was a small, darkish figure, and I swear it looked like it was in a wheelchair. I was certain it must be that weasel-eyed person I saw in the toilet cubicle—that vegetable Angel, or whatever it was. I was too far away to see any more, but then when I crept further forward, the front of their balcony would creep upward and block my view of the pair of them. I did think of shouting up at them, but then that seemed pointless and dangerous, and even … I don’t know why, but it even felt as if it would be somehow obscene. I wished I had binoculars, so I could return to the other corner of the street, further back, and see them better. I pictured all the stuff lying around the flat here waiting to be packed, to see if I could remember binoculars that I could run and fetch before she left her balcony… But I couldn’t remember any binoculars, so I just went home and got back into bed and made sure I was somewhere in contact with the warmth of Shigem.”

 

Teaser 56(i), waltzing mannequins grimace

He lifts your streaming face and plants a slow kiss upon it. Throughout this your eyes stay closed, but your hand reaches up to feel the big golden crucifix hanging at his chest, where his muscles are so close that you can feel their heat, here upon your face.

I zoom in on your eyelids and through them, to your grand estate: a seven-layered formal garden, planted with metal trees and cinder-chip flower-beds and black ponds of oil, around a mansion with minarets and jagged glass spires. Here in your prison-pit of decadence, you’re powerful and wealthy. Your contempt is pure, aesthetically; your darkness divine, aristocratic. Around your mansion’s ballroom floor, waltzing mannequins grimace, by themselves or in internecine pairs, on jerky rails, while a poisoned orange light from the setting sun blasts through the terrace doors from far beyond the lonely claustrophobic furthest end of the mile-long enclosed Linden Alley carved westward through your forestlands…

 

Teaser 56(ii), your vermilion-tinted eyes

Your existence is exhausting, is it not? but you’re trapped in it for life, you may be certain.

And everything you love might seem to smile at you; but inside, it’s always preparing to escape you. Whatever thrill tingles in your fingertips, a death-shadow palpitates close above your head. Your vermilion-tinted eyes have the fever of a flame on a grave in the dusk, and your little pouting lips hide the kiss of death behind them where your canines sweat. Your glamour’s violent to the core, my Angel Deon—and your violence in itself is a glamour unto death.

Hear Lucan stalking through the attics of your palace, up your dark wooden staircases, hunting for you, whip in hand.

 

Teaser 57(i), Jungle on Charing Cross Road

Kim and I sort books into different sizes before slotting them into boxes. As we work, I tune in … and I see when you first met Shigem, Kim, three months ago. You’d gone to a party called Jungle, on a Monday at a club called Busby’s on Charing Cross Road, with your friend Robert plus a friend of his. The three of you were sitting in an alcove on the left, when another friend of Robert’s came over and greeted him. You took little notice but went to the dance-floor. A few minutes later you saw this new arrival dancing near you, glancing at you. You made recognition signs. He leaned towards your ear, but then said nothing. Flattered and amused by his shy approach, you smiled at him. “Can I buy you a drink?” he asked. You were attracted to him, no question. Everything was easy. “Yes,” you replied. You felt his arm go round your waist, and his long black hair with its blond highlights spilling past your shoulder. His presence was permeated by gayness, somatically engrained—a luscious quality that spread, sleek and fluid as a dancer, through every move and every word of his, as blood pervades a body. The chemistry between you was enormous and immediate. With absolute naturalness, you both were embracing by the time you’d reached the bar. With such unholy speed did your relationship start: there never was a thing between the two of you, except it.

 

Teaser 57(ii), to hold your hand in the rain

Later in the evening you both went back to your flat. He told you that he’d grown up in Asbury Park (you’d never heard of it), had recently come into a modest amount of money through his parents’ death and had now arranged to spend a month living in a series of cheap accommodations here in London, on his first trip abroad.

The things you said aloud to him were in-control things, but the things that your mind yelped inside itself were different, as they escalated upward by the minute and the hour: “Beautiful friend,” your mind said. “I long to hold your hand in the rain,” said your mind to him. “Take me in your arms—we’ll be silent together, as the wind through the window stirs our hair, satin-cool, and we’ll kiss like velvet, please, Shigem, Shigem, Shigem…” said your mind to him.

And never before or since has your mind spoken clearer or more truly.

You weren’t so easily swayed; your feet were on the ground. Yet this was it, you felt—right here. The once in a lifetime.

 

Teaser 57(iii), enchanted conversation

Memories of the very early evenings spent at your place have a golden glow already, just three months on. You kissed the brim of his glass before you handed it to him. Candle-light on bookshelves and cabinets, enchanted conversation, wine glasses filled and the evening and night ahead. Food, wine, cigarettes, the sharing of music and books, then making love, then sleep (or lying there awake as you stared at the sweep of passing headlights on the darkened bedroom ceiling, while Shigem stirred in sleep and then became still again), while the London rain pattered on outside … simple, inevitable, joyful incunabula of this relationship.

You spent hours entwined, not only in bed but in most other places too. Wherever you went, there was a powerful pull to hold each other close, whether talking or silent, serious or giggling. You spent so long entwined, it was as if you were catching up on lost affection, making up for all that lost time when you didn’t know each other. Shigem was so attracted, needing, gentle, wanting always to be with you, that you were wary sometimes of the strength of his need. But you returned it, exulting in the warmth and the comfort and the friendship and the love.

 

Teaser 57(iv), two right ears on Oxford Street

There was that graffito on the wall by the café where you used to meet: “Meanwhile a dwarf is passing out in downtown Detroit.” Much excited dialogue, talking on the phone and meeting every day. Together in the photo booth in Earl’s Court station, while it thundered outside; spitting rain, wet streets, wet umbrellas and the Underground. Sex on the mattress on the floor of the cold Friern Barnet room: the curtains always drawn, the electric bar-heater and the television playing, with the chair-legs black across the screen, from where you lay.

A montage of all the bars and clubs you knew together flashes crowded through a neon-lit door in your memory: you’d both rise and step to the dance-floor, the moment that a mutually adored track was played, where you’d make as if to eat him and he’d peal with a helpless and scandalised giggle. Then there were the funny tired rides in the rear of the upper deck of night-buses leaving Trafalgar Square, with all the queens from Heaven and the other clubs. One day you each had your right ear pierced on Oxford Street, and once you hugged goodbye beside the Albery Theatre stage-door.

 

Teaser 57(v), Falmouth Road and Heaven

And there among the housing in a cramped grey corner of a stretch of the city was another room where you and he sailed away—the room where he was staying with some others, in a council estate down in Elephant & Castle. You laughed out of wonder and anxiety, wanting this emotional adventure with Shigem of course, yet fearing it. His friends were always barging through or idling in the room—except they weren’t real friends, just temporary roommates who shared the same nightlife. The blond one, Fred, would flounce around, prattling on and borrowing clothes and making mugs of tea for the three of you. He’d do a fashion show with a towel for the whole room—the two of you—and you would both hold each other, there beneath the bedclothes, and squeal, to encourage him and also because, in your excitement and happiness, anything was funny if you wanted it to be. You slept on a mattress on the floor, at the head of which, right where a headboard should have been, was a scalding radiator; so you couldn’t sit and lean back against anything, but had to recline on your elbows or lie upon your side on one elbow or sit cross-legged leaning forward. Through a long low window was a dim court, half-enclosed between blocks of flats in brown brick with walkways. The London spring outside was wet and cold, so near the window it was cold, but near the radiator too hot; below the duvet too hot, but too cold above it. The joints that were rolled and passed around were thin, like Shigem, but strong—they’d make your head spin, first thing in the morning with a mug of instant coffee. Crumbs of hash crackled when unevenly mixed with the tobacco and too weakly tamped down inside the Rizla; bits of it fell to the carpet and were fumbled for. The TV’s on too loud—turn the news off, find some music, and did you know the singer of that group is really male? There’s nothing much to do, so you’ll lie around and see what happens, who appears, and then maybe start getting dolled up for Heaven later; and maybe you should eat something too, while you’re out.

 

Teaser 57(vi), in Elephant & Castle Sometimes

Some music on the TV is recognised and turned up, and starts to grab you strongly. The screen shows two men dancing on a rooftop among hanging sheets. You ask Shigem and Fred what it is; they know, between them, the names of the band and the track. A few moments later you’ve forgotten, ask again, are told—and not since then have you forgotten it again. Sometimes, you feel this track is sacred to you, because for you it came right at the proper birth of Love, revelatory and not in your control. It accesses happiness, anguish and fire: beautiful, vulnerable, serious and famous, it rises, is shot at, is protected, is championed, spins for years and sits at last within its little god-niche. You say not much about it, but you know that in a sense it will play within you always.

You’ve forgotten the address there, Kim, but I can see it buried in the trash-bin of your memory: that block of flats on Falmouth Road, Elephant & Castle. For the next few weeks until you both came to Asbury Park, Shigem stayed with friends he made in club-land, in six other flats, and I can see them too, tucked away beneath your memory, Kim: one flat on Bouverie Road, Stoke Newington; two successive rooms in that house on Dollis Hill Lane; one on Reighton Road in Upper Clapton; one in Stamford Hill; one on Hemington Avenue, Friern Barnet; and one on Craven Walk, Stamford Hill. Remember?…

 

Teaser 58(i), First Out Café by Centre Point

Shigem looks around, considering this. While he does so, I have an interesting idea … and as you stand in thought, Shigem, I take a look at your memories of first meeting Kim. To my surprise, though, I find that your first sight of him was not inside the club where he first saw you; for your memory is instead from a week before that club night, downstairs in the First Out Café, where he never noticed you but you most surely noticed him. In the corner, there he was: a handsome masculine blond boy, slightly sad-eyed, deep in thought, biting his nails as he read the menu. You were startled, as you watched him, to sense across the café the erection of his penis and his nipples, as their heat spread towards you—no it didn’t, you correct yourself whenever you remember this scene—that couldn’t happen! Anyway, then he ordered a veggie-burger, nothing else, and his voice was deep but also tinged with a blush of immaturity, as if newly broken. You started to realise you were not going to be able to get out of summoning up the guts to approach him (such approaches not being something you did often), and this prospect straight away made you feel so young and vulnerable that you laughed at yourself inside. “Get it together,” you thought, as you got up, but already your body had that tight invisible all-over quivering it gets when emotionally naked, as if pressed close under your skin against your clothes. Your throat drily gulped and clunked. “For fuck’s sake,” you shouted within yourself, “enough with this nerviness, you’re not fifteen. You are not going to faint, you are not going to faint,” and you frowned and walked purposefully towards Kim’s table and towards it some more … and then straight past his table and upstairs and out through the door of the café while you slapped yourself inside and then carried on slapping all the way around the corner to Charing Cross Road.

But you saw him a second time, by chance, in the nightclub one week later, on the occasion of Kim’s first memory of you; and then for you, just as for him, a new continent inside you began to unfurl while you watched it.

 

Teaser 58(ii), butterfly-lions and flaming creatures

One night, early on at the Elephant & Castle place, you dreamed that you and Kim would have to split up soon, because for some stupid reason the two of you just weren’t going to work. You groaned in your dream: was yet another incipient relationship over, so soon? Had you flamed, for a moment, with another blond boy—had you danced as a pair, for an instant, in a daydream? So bright you’d been, the two of you, together for a brief spell. You’d crackled and you’d shone with possibility and hope against the usual grey backdrop of everyday life. There’d been magic in the air around you, visible to all: the promise of a new and rich adventure! Circling each other, you’d been flaming creatures, butterfly-lions, but it seemed that the flat winds had blown you apart now. What a drag, if so. Once again, not your fault, but how commonplace, predictable—and didn’t you feel the temperature descend again, the lights dim to grey as they had been before he came along? Would you not see Kim again?… Oh well, how sad. You would always remember him, at least. “Turn and walk away, Shigem,” you thought, “and dance alone tonight. Tomorrow it will hit you and you’ll suffer. Then you’ll mend, for sure, for you’ll have no other choice—but once again, what a drag. Shigem, you’ll not forget Kim, but turn and walk away now, and dance alone tonight…”

But later that same night, you had a much better dream: you both were alone on some deserted level of a multiplex cinema, trying to find the exit. You came across an older gentleman, who stood in silence holding out a tray of mints. “Oh look—we get a mint!” you cried, and grabbed Kim’s hand. You scampered up to the man and both curtseyed and both took a mint. The man smiled, then with just a trace of irony he watched you both running off away down the escalator giggling and whispering in unison, “My god, I think we’ve just met the Mint Man! Tee-hee-hee!…”

 

Teaser 62(i), you kiss the world

I tune in to her … and as you walk with your gentle self-contained swing, Evelyn, I feel the easy sway and liberation of your limbs. I’m there for a second in your fingertips, stroking the arch of your brows up and round. I know the need to flick your hair back past your ears and down your shoulders. I feel the breeze bring a sudden drying cool to the smoothness of the side of your neck, where the skin is faintly moist. I see how centred you are feeling when you glance at your breasts and the curves of your thighs, with your hands on your hips in your chocolate-brown jeans, full of love for and pleasure at your own body: now and here and this is what you want to be. Through the sparkle of your eyes, slick and fine, it always seems you are sticking up two rude fingers at the world, while you kiss the world. You love being a girl and you know what a cute little number you are, with your smooth pale-brown skin warm and irresistible. A flock of white birds wheels high above the ocean; and way above them, too high to hear, a plane slides silver in the sky, like a capsule. It won’t be landing here on the torn asphalt airstrip of Kingsley Street, you think. It can’t see you, but you see it—a mirage of the elsewhere. “Elsewhere”: but you prefer here. You may go there in future, but not yet. Within you, it’s as if there lives a stadium of raised hands, swaying to the currents of the vocals in your mind. There is no elsewhere, in a general sense; there’s only what’s before you and you love this very much. You could do many things, but all you really have to do, my Evelyn, is just be you—and that’s a pleasure!

 

Teaser 64(i), queen-palms and freeways

Then the cameras roll and bam—time to go! The stadium balloons out around me … and are you all ready out there in the stadium now, for the last time? Hallo America, and hallo world!—and the audience roars in the distance, gigantic. This is just a little song I wrote while we were on the road (I think it was in a run-down motel in Phoenix, but those run-down motels all run together when you’ve been on the road as long as we have), a song about how I’d like to get away from here… D’you all ever feel like that, out there? I’m sure you do! Well, just so you all know, I feel your pain, yes I do, I do, I do… So now at last we fly away and unfurl, from body-form to something grander, freer, lighter, stronger. I don’t want the eating and the fighting and the struggle down here—I was made to be aloft and to fling silver rainbows and fly in a wide curve out past Jupiter, a comet’s light for food and the music of the spheres beneath my wings. I’m unimpressed that this has taken until now. How natural to expand by a quantum leap, exult between the planets and the quasars, and travel at the speed of light!

So I get into the plane parked here on the ship’s deck, and lay the stadium down in the cockpit beside me. Up we fly, close beneath the sky’s giant dome, over mountains and forests and seas, and there appears far below, through clouds and sunset light, a city dancing wickedly as night falls. A night-time rainbow flickers up, connected via multi-coloured lightning to the city, which is spraying up light and heat as harp-strings sound—every plink a highlight on a champagne drip. Zooming in to the city, we descry queen-palms among the street-lights and freeways, and the harp-plinks are heard to be the chirping of crickets. The plane dips low and veers out from the city, down a valley, in between coloured mountains. The plane’s roof is down but there’s no wind in my hair.

 

Teaser 64(ii), sprites with sharky shaped eyebrows

I twirl a dial, and as the aeroplane spins around its fuselage’s axis, the horizon spins slowly round a point upon its length, like a double-headed compass needle. Continents unroll on either side. We fly above a golden country far away, a country of colours all different from the earthly ones, where stately masked figures walk in poppy fields. The tips of two golden clouds pass by each other, while a golden moon behind them blinks soft through their vapours, like a gong’s bronze clang. A river of light flows around a chateau of air, reflecting a magenta-crystal sky upon its ripples. Flowers burst aflame in a pale space of foliage where white lions roar under fountains of light, as we fly through a tunnel, disappear in a sunburst and land upon the centre of an opened tangerine, pierced through with the howl of the beauty of its segments!

Tangerine magma rises under us; we soar through the clouds and up and out from the atmosphere and curve toward the sun, which hangs in a black sky. As earth recedes, we hurtle with the sun-blast pulling us, up to a mad speed. Specks of dust streak past, in thin cutting lines. The surface of the sun is rippled, raging and lethal. Streaming solar wind and shafts of light from other stars slash down through infinities of space, with a cold perfect cosmic enormity of scale. The disc of the sun has grown already somewhat bigger; I feel its hidden roar and its engines of destruction. A huge solar flame arcs out from it in ragged shreds, and rays of something shoot from some explosion at the flame’s tip, receding at the speed of light in straight lines splayed in all directions to the ends of space. Exultation pumps in me—I scream, and my scream stabs out from the open-roofed cockpit, faster than the speed of sound. I scream again, tears stream out from my eyes, streaking back—

Across the solar system, a choir of sprites sings on Saturn (icy cold and deep black and acid-green chartreuse), ranged on a cloudscape, shooting out strains of a song in high soprano, sharp and ethereal. Above their little pointy ears and sharky shaped eyebrows, the giant planet’s rings curve divine across the blackness of space.

And there I shall leave us: running to the sun, with the sprites for a soundtrack. Oh, you know you want it! My face fades to black on screen, Alaia’s voice fades out, and Big Bang glides to the smoothest of halts.

 

Teaser 66(i), red light on a silver earring

And what an upbeat but mellow party it is. I was half-expecting some new and gruesome wax dummy head to unveil itself, but no. Soon the drum and bass gives way to some booming old dub track full of basement chat and slow echoes, to which Flames improvises artfully and softly on his saxophone, leaning against a wall. The combination of sounds is like a rich thick whisky running over elephant hide, somewhere in a cavernous dance-hall, with the rain splattering down onto a corrugated iron roof high above.

As this segues into a dance-hall track, Flames keeps pace with it. A group of people near us drift away, so for the first time I see Angel where he dances in a corner by himself, and very much for himself, stoned and beautiful … and for the room too, you must admit, my little Angel, for several here are watching you with warmth while they talk and dance and sway. Lucan is among them, grinning as his eyes track your movements. He banters with the others all the while, taps his feet and dips his head in time with the beat. He’s so genial tonight that you almost forget his dictatorship and the tyranny he exercises over you—different as it is from the other tyrannies he exercises over many others here. So you just let go and bliss out, while in your mind you lie in comfort on the warm bouncy surface of an elevated roadway made from the horizontal stiff cocks, rooted alternately on left and right, of two lines of Lucans standing shoulder to shoulder who face one another just to hold you off the ground! You’re making subtle love with this music and this moment and the watching of the others, while you dance, with a pinpoint of red light reflected in the silver of your earring. Music never does harm, you tell yourself. So tonight you will dance, transcending all that needs transcending, till your stark black Angel’s wings will lift this whole smoky den up over Asbury Park and out across the USA. Lucan smiles and winks at you across the red and yellow space; you smile back weakly, hot and swirling in the dimness, wishing it could always be as now and never change…

 

Teaser 67(i), my floating to Babylon

Then swiftly but smoothly over the next few seconds, I come to a point where I cannot feel my feet on the floor at all. I stop and peer down: I am not levitating, but I have no sensory evidence of this, except through my eyes. I reach out and touch the corridor walls on either side of me, to guide myself, and set off again. There’s a problem, though: my ability to feel my hands on the walls is also disappearing. At this moment, out of the track that just came onto the sound system, there erupts the single-word lyric, BABYLON! in a voice of thunderous charismatic depth and power, resonating with fantastic volume and sensuality, welling up out of driving drumbeats that seem first to belch the word out and then to be flattened by it… I come to a halt again: I wasn’t expecting that. Now the word returns, thrown up by that driving beat, surging up the short corridor from behind me like the deep-bass explosion of a volcano: BABYLON! I realise I don’t want or need to move anywhere, if this sound will be coming back to me again here (as I suspect it will be), because it contains everything I need. Yes indeed, here it comes: BABYLON!… I feel I could listen to this, repeated, for hours straight—but I also begin to wish that this explosive aural feast had chosen a more convenient moment to visit itself upon me, for all I have here, pretty much, is visual data: proprioception has gone out of the window, leaving just a conscious head floating in a hallway above an unrelated torso.

This head decides it had better press on nonetheless, guiding itself by looking at where those fingers appear to be pressing into those walls on either side and somewhat below it … and somehow, after a few more BABYLON!s, the head reaches the door of an empty kitchen. I see a bathroom doorway on the other side of the kitchen, sway across towards it, disembodied, as if watching myself in a movie, float through the bathroom doorway with a good bit of guesswork, plonk myself down onto the toilet just inside it and pull the door closed beside me. Over the course of some long number of minutes, I’m not sure how many, the feeling creeps back into my hands, then into my feet, while a good number of further BABYLON!s erupt.

Evelyn was right about the weed here—I should’ve gone easier on those tokes.

 

Teaser 67(ii), that play of flesh and electricity

Before I can think about whether and how to extricate myself from the tune-in, I see that I’m looking at Lucan’s memory of first meeting Angel, two or three years ago on Kingsley Street, and I cannot look away … for he seemed to you, Lucan, like a sexy little fly. You saw him as a creature whose natural habitat would be hovering above a steaming-hot pool of blood and honey, sending his feelers down into it like the snouts of a voracious alien. And those killer eyes on him—so startling in close-up! Those big, brown, vital eyes, so dark and alive and dangerous and watchful, beneath long black eyelashes; the curve of the eyes echoed and magnified underneath by the fuller convexity of pale brown-olive skin curving outward over his cheekbones, then quickly back in and down in slanting arcs to the reticent mouth and smooth sharp chin; and the delicate jaw-line rising around behind, past small ears to the flame of black hair above a round intelligent forehead. That animal immediacy, that play of flesh and electricity combined, that scything sharpness and tang within a wrapping of organic yield and warmth, which knew that it grabbed your own gaze and licked it back. Here was an urgent, self-evident truth for you, Lucan, discovered at a moment and in a human vehicle where you would never have expected to find it.

 

Teaser 67(iii), like a fairy princess

I should probably get up and return to Alaia and Evelyn, before they wonder whether I’ve crashed out somewhere; but having just seen Lucan’s memory of first meeting Angel, I decide to sneak the quickest of peeks at Angel’s first memory of meeting Lucan, as I did yesterday evening with Kim’s and Shigem’s memories … and you’d seen Lucan here and there around town, Angel, but never from as close as when he stopped on Kingsley Street and looked you up and down. Planted there in front of you, surrounded by his entourage, he struck you as a drummer on a stage in a cone of light, with all the band beneath him and the curves of his biceps drumming with a slow aggression, face remaining shaded till he tossed up his head with sexy arrogance, flinging up droplets of sweat in slow motion through the spotlight.

You saw him, all in all, as a vision of perfection. You dreamed that he would sweep you off your feet and that you’d lie draped lasciviously across his powerful arms, like a fairy princess swooning when she’s rescued by a prince.

 

Teaser 70(i), song of unreachable perfection

We duck beneath yellow tape and set off across the sand. I watch Evelyn while she hurls pebbles out to sea, competing with Alaia to throw further … and a faint music wafts on the breeze, Evelyn. It has the magic of the song in Sound & Vision; but you know it is a lie, because it’s mixed with the lies from Alaia’s song of death. You hear it as a song of some unreachable perfection—a thing from which this world has fallen short and for which this world yearns from its gutters of disease and dirt. There’s lifting-up and flowering and bursts of sunlit glory in this music, with angel choirs piercing and soft (maybe lies?). The music carries ancient things and future evolution, outside time (another lie?). Out above the ocean we half-see mountains in celestial mist and valleys inaccessible, or is this just a cloudscape? I suppose that if you’d not been so behind the scenes with us, so much “behind the curtain”, you might have been more taken in by the pair of us.

 

Teaser 70(ii), a candy-pastoral de-classicised

In your eyes, behind the watermarks of Asbury Park, are flickers of another world you carry inside. As you laugh with Alaia in your pebble-throwing contest, I tune deeper in, to see the flowers in your looking-glass. And there in the palace garden’s scented dusk, I see them: flowers, in a more literal sense than I’d expected, mauve petals dripping scented tears onto humus. You’ve caught a peacock butterfly somewhere in the palace and have cupped your hands around it to bring it out here, where you now toss it up into the night—whereupon a dark bird swoops from the roof, snaps the peacock up, wheels with a rip of feathers flapping through the air, and is gone. You cry out and set off at a run through the grounds—a sweep of yellow silk down a twilit colonnade, where a frieze on the wall shows black human figures flitting delicate and sharp through a pale gold field. Your skirt is like a fluted column, coloured pale celadon beneath the yellow silk sash, running, turning back to me. (Celadon and yellow—a combo that you’d probably once have judged too fresh for Kingsley Street.) “I once collected tears in a glass!” you call. Your laughter ripples out from you, fluid as the image of the moon ahead reflected on the lanes of water running up the fields in our direction through a valley full of dripping mist. Soft weather, lilac-tide: we’d hear a feather float, just assuming that there were a feather, carried on the air where the samphire blooms under trees whose golden autumn leaves tremble on their branches. This cartoon candy-pastoral is undermined, however, by the final thing I see. Through your palace garden gate is the sea, but de-classicised by certain shoreline details: “Evelyn, it’s a mushroom bay,” I say. And it’s true: for the only things growing on the curve of this enchanted shore are mushrooms, some a metre high. As you nod in solemn pride at this, a line of dolphins leap from the water far across the bay, then dive beneath the surface once again, without a ripple. We hear a magic interval between two notes, several times—bewitching, as if an angel lives between them—and I know that I should now leave your mushroom bay. I shan’t intrude again here, so never shall I hear again that magic angel interval; but never will it leave me.

 

Teaser 72(i), the man in the high-rise window

You take your accustomed seat on the balcony, with the back of your head touching the sitting room window-pane right behind us, which I’d guess is in shadow, as Kim said it was just now. From your perch here you look across the grid of streets, beyond the edge of town, to another high-rise, where a young man undresses in the evenings and stands at his window and looks across the space above this town, at you—or seems to. As he ages, year by year, so do you. You never go to seek his building out at ground level, though you’re not sure why you don’t. Has he ever come to your building, down at ground level, seeking out its address? You guess that he hasn’t, and you’re most likely right, and yet… Sometimes in the dusk air, precisely between you both, flocks of birds alight on wires, silhouetted hard and small against the fading light that’s reflected on his windows; then they fly away. You know him, in a small way. You watched him yesterday, with his light on and yours off. Your bird-seed packet hung here at your balcony, unpecked, while the birds sat over there on the telephone wires. Behind you a game-show flickered, with the sound off. A jet plane buzzed through the sky above his high-rise; you got slowly older while you watched him undress; and he got older too, while he didn’t know you watched. What does he do when you can’t see him there at his window? you wondered. Does he watch for you inside his unlit room, like you in yours?

 

Teaser 72(ii), the traffic-lights are lonely

You heated up a tin of food and ate it from the pan with a spoon, at your window. The clock ticked. The birds on the wire flew away, one by one. The last bird lingered, as if deciding whether it would try your bird-seed packet, but then joined its companions. You lit a Lucky Strike and slowly smoked it in the shadows, down to the end. The man’s light went off. Had he gone somewhere, or was he sitting there? Was he smoking, in the flicker of a game-show with muted sound, like you? The hourly bus passed below, empty, and turned right to trundle up Main Street towards the other high-rise. Suddenly you think you see, there in the high-rise nestled at the skyline, the shape of the man in the shadows of his window. You wave … but he doesn’t wave back, because the view between the two of you is only one-way. His shape behind the window is yours to enjoy, but his view of you is blocked, for he never has thought about the mile of air between you; and the traffic-lights are lonely where you live.

You should leave this town and start again, but that would be so tiring and large and complicated. You should have done this and that and made other moves, but you didn’t. “Those who lag behind will be beaten,” said the big man.

Have you seen your stars in the papers today? You’ll forget them by tomorrow, but you may as well look. So you do look. And you know what? They aren’t bad at all, Pippa Vail!

 

Teaser 73(i), rigid and staring and skinny

I zigzag through the street grid to the width and quiet of Second Avenue, where the large, ramshackle houses look forlorn and somewhat spooky. I see that I’m about to pass Damian’s house, and I look ahead to locate it. It contrives to look haunted even in this summer sun. As I approach along the pavement across from it, a glimpse of something in front of his porch twangs inside me and makes me stare across this considerable distance. The old elm branches sway in a sudden cool wind from the sea behind me. That looks like a little figure, sitting in front of Damian’s door… It is a figure. It’s Angel! But something is wrong with him. It looked for a moment as if he was naked… Is he? I still cannot quite tell from this far away but I can see Damian’s guard-dogs pacing in agitation up and down the alleyway beside him, their tails out horizontally in the air like stiffened whiplashes. I cut across the empty street, at a trot—nearer, swaying as I go—and the dogs turn their attention to me, their eyes like pinpoints through the air. Angel is hidden behind a shrub which is swaying in the breeze, but now I come into view of him and there he is, rigid and staring and skinny and nude on the front path, staring right at me with creepy big beautiful eyes … but within a second, the penny drops and I see he’s a waxwork. (Is he?) Yes! A life-size, full-body wax Angel, rendered exquisitely in face and limb, complete with accurate black angel’s wing tattoos and modest male genitals tucked demurely between his thighs, beneath a small and lovely pair of female breasts—all of him modelled with taste, care and an all-too-evident love.

 

Teaser 74(i), lagoon by a desert palace

I wonder whether Kim and Shigem know about this wax Angel yet. I throw my attention out in search of them both and feel it dragged five or six blocks eastward from where I’m lying here, to the beach where they are also sprawled flat, in disobedience of the yellow tape stretched across the steps from the Boardwalk to the sand. Presumably for privacy, they have avoided the main stretch between the Convention Hall and the Casino, and have settled on this lonelier beach further north, across from the fields of concrete and grass at Seventh Avenue. They are clearly set to stay a while here, knowing they’ll be moving away in a couple of days and won’t have time to do this again. So calm and idyllic is the scene, that I cannot resist prolonging my shared tune-in to them. In fact, I’m so very comfortable that I drift to sleep, as I discover at least a couple of hours later.

On waking, I can feel that for those two lovers this has grown into a golden, classic day, an epic piece of sun-worship, as there is an almost mythical aura of closeness and childlike enchantment between them. Ignoring the “No Swimming” signs along the Boardwalk fence, they make regular trips into the water, then cover each other’s body in suntan lotion again after each trip, as the sun breathes Arabian fire without relent. With every splash into the waves, it’s as if they are diving deeper into an ever-more-vivid, not-quite-visible water—a pool both invisible and ultramarine, somewhere behind the appearance of the sea-water here, of an absolutely perfect temperature, that seals them off from the glare and splash of waves above their heads where the gulls cast shadows on the surface. Even when they have both returned to lie on the sand with their eyes closed, it’s as if they are diving together, holding hands, into this mirage of a pool, this lagoon beside a desert palace flanked with skinny palm trees.

 

Teaser 74(ii), hot wet horizon shimmer

Weightless and barely moving, my attention floats for another hour or two in their company, while they say hardly a word more.

At last I watch them rise, gather up their things and stand looking out across this sea beside which Shigem has lived throughout his life. Then they turn and meander up the beach. When they reach Ocean Avenue and turn left, walking down the middle of it, Kim says, “It’s funny, but it feels like a story’s being played out here—as if some tale were being spun, involving me. As if all this Asbury Park backdrop (except for you, my love) were some movie being projected onto the air around me, while I walk through it. But who’s projecting it for me? Who’s bringing me into it, and why?”

As he speaks, Ocean Avenue seems for a moment to be much longer than they’ve known it. It is heavy with a furnace heat, wide and deserted. Façades recede in both directions, matte brown and grey, flat as scenery or movie screens. A breath of wind in the dust stirs a cellophane wrapper on the road. Tiny in the distance, the street vista vanishes in glare: where it wets the horizon a shimmer hides the buildings, so the roadway punctures the smudgy blue sky. Shreds of air undulate thickly in the heat…

And there I shall leave them for this afternoon: ambling down the road’s yellow centre-line, each with a bag in his hand and an arm around the other’s shoulders, bodies touching all the way down to the hip, both leisurely and in-step, into the distance.

 

Teaser 77(i), his eyes are the eyes of a girl

My tune-in on the beach was a shared one, hovering between the two of them … but this time, Kim, my cobweb lands on you alone. With your forehead almost touching Shigem’s, you observe with a tiny shock across the centimetres, more than you’ve ever seen before, that his eyes are the eyes of a girl—there’s a beautiful girl just behind them, inside them. She’s so clear, now you’ve come to see her. Shigem’s lips kiss yours: a girl’s lips, a girl’s kiss, a girl’s sweet breath and gentle touch. It’s exquisite, beyond words.

You lift your face. Cold light stares from a dead-faced moon to the east, where the stars are emerging in the late deep dusk. A breeze whispers, stirring Shigem’s long hair and carrying the faint crash of waves and scent of brine. The moonlight darkens as a ragged stab of cloud pricks the moon’s disc and grows to conceal it. There murmurs a voice in your head, without warning, as if from behind the air, “The eggplants burning by the sea.”

I slide my attention out of Kim and let it drift up and float in the air above the pair of them.

 

Teaser 79(i), your dagger-skewered self

Coiled on the floor beneath the open turret window in the corner of the bedroom, you watch the distant white waves hiss and suck the sand, which you can see through a gap between two other pointed roofs, and you wonder why these things are happening to you. Catching a glimpse of yourself from above, you see a dark elf curled up inside a turret, with the shadow of a dagger clutched tightly in your left hand, the shadow of another dagger stuck into your chest—and your right hand diving to your chest right now, to flap in horror at the surface of your bright red T-shirt, feeling for this unfamiliar dagger in your chest that you’ve just seen. But your hand finds only your little silver cross, while your left hand clenches the handle of its shadow-dagger harder, harder, harder now than ever; and the sea sighs on, and a clump of old leaves rustle brittly in the gutter just beneath you.

What’s with those shadow-daggers, Angel? Are they part of that luscious fierce anguished little body you’re imprisoned in? Your red fingernails are like spray-painted petals broken sharp through your finger flesh. Did you ever feel as average people feel, or were you gorgeously twisted from the start? Tell me, do. You turn as if to camera (though I know you cannot see me), mouth “You’ll never know” and turn away. What went so wrong with you?—or went so right, perhaps. You want to kill most human beings that you see: twenty times a day you think of stabbing with your shadow-dagger, through someone’s forehead and deep into their brain, and this picture gives you peace and liberation. Under the dictatorship of Lucan you inhabit a delirium of the senses, yet at the same time you’ve always felt somehow that you were buried alive. The black sky inside your head oppresses, claustrophobically immense; and rest assured, you will stay buried there, alive inside your poisoned night of dagger-skewered self, until you die…

 

Teaser 80(i), the slinkiest thing I’ve ever seen

Throughout the whole of Big Bang—from the anticipation of the stadium audience before the first notes of Alaia’s song of death, until we disappear into space on our run to the sun—I feel as if Alaia and I are sitting here in a small bubble together, sealed off from the rest of humanity, including from Rik and Evelyn.

Any viewer’s awareness of the commercial undertones attaching to sequels is likely to have dissipated not long after the opening, as it is a truly hypnotic and sumptuous presentation. Compared with Sound & Vision it has a somewhat slicker feel, owing to the effects Rik has inserted in post, whereby snatches of music or imagery are plucked from the rest, sampled and repeated amid our continued input. For example, in time with a cadence of four deep-twanging notes of Alaia’s, the angle from which my face is viewed travels from camera one to camera three, right to left, insulated cleanly in the notes’ elastic looseness; then it flicks back to where it was, travels again in time with the notes’ repetition; flicks back, travels again with the notes; and again; and again, periodic and addictive. The effects have not been drastic or intrusive: they have simply made Big Bang a bit more flashy and (this is the most accurate term) slinky than the first broadcast. In fact, I decide—this is probably the slinkiest thing I have ever watched!

Just as when she and I watched Sound & Vision, what can I say except how lucky we have been? By the end credits, so much of the landscape of my own internal life has been channelled through lenses, entwined with a magical voice, enhanced through high-end software and beamed around the world for a planet-ful of people, that I could almost be content to die tomorrow—because these two monster broadcasts feel to me, right now, like the reason I was born.

Who could ask for more?

 

Teaser 81(i), a sourpuss doofus

The joint has come back around the circle to Rik. “Cheers,” he murmurs, inspects it and takes a long, cool drag. The candles flicker, the dubstep echoes and booms quietly onwards out of the speakers and the entire warm stoned attention of the room is upon him.

“Anyway, sometimes I glanced up from the script, while the girl was whispering it and I was shouting it, and my eyes had now adjusted to the spotlights, so I could see that sourpuss up there on the bleachers was smoking this ridiculous big cigar the whole time.” He hands the joint on to Evelyn. “The smoke was wreathing up all around her, like the mushroom cloud of a bomb. Also, bizarrely, her hair hung right down, across the front of her, so I couldn’t see her face at all. That made me curious, so I kept sneaking peeks at her during this interminable dirge of a scene. And every time I looked, the more it seemed her hair hung thicker than ever and further down over her face—and boy, was that off-putting, so I started buggering up the script, so the mousy girl started giving me these distraught looks and sounded like she was about to burst into tears. But it was too late, I was hooked, I couldn’t stop sneaking peeks at sourpuss up there, and with every peek I became more certain: no two ways about it, her hair was all the way down to her chin in a solid curtain, bushier than anybody’s hair should be, even at the back of their head… And while I was reading I was thinking, what a silly cow! What kind of doofus requests a haircut like that at the barber’s? ‘Yeah, I’ll have it right down over my entire face, please, extra-thick and extra-bushy, so I can’t see anything, and long around at the back and maybe just casual at the sides, thank you.’ So, being thirty per cent deaf, she’d chosen a nice seat about half a mile away from us, trying to hear me through her bushy hair-curtain, while I did a dire French accent that was regularly shading into Russian and Welsh and Indian and Norwegian, in a play that was a chunk of sludge to begin with. There were still several dense pages of the script left. Why was she letting us go on so long? Why were we going on? Why were we here, in every sense of the question? Then I thought, maybe I should sneak up the bleachers without her hearing me—she certainly wouldn’t see me—and then I could reach forward and part those curtains of hair without her expecting it, just to see what was behind … and I suddenly knew the awful truth: that if I did so, then I’d see the back of her head; and if I went round to the far side of her and parted the curtains there, then I’d also see the back of her head; and if I went to either side of her and parted the curtains, all I would ever see would be the back of her head, because she was all back-of-the-head… Well, that did it for me. I stopped in mid-dirge. I put the script down, and I just headed back to the door. And right before I disappeared, I called up at sourpuss, ‘Keep in touch!…’ and I was out of there.”

 

Teaser 82(i), fey boys with high-pitched lisps

But in my current state, even this factual memory of Shigem’s is less simple than I expected … for the first thing I see, Shigem, from when you and Kim first walked in here, is that a stylish woman in her thirties was perched on a bar-stool: the skin of her entire shoulders and arms was covered in a tattooed leopard-skin design, while in her lap sat a rabbit with leopard-skin fur and busy ears, and by her side squatted a sleek, disturbing space-cat. There she sat, callipygous and elfin, sucking down a tall blue drink through a straw—an Electric Lemonade, you guessed. I see that you recognised her as one of the club’s owners and its Supreme Ruler, and that she was about to make an announcement to the staff, right before the club doors opened. The bar was stocked with rare and mischievous drinks: the yellow and the green Chartreuses enjoyed a passionate celibacy, alongside violet champagne, moon-wine and a pointed flask of Sweet Spirits of Night. Spaced behind the bar’s length, five exotic bartenders listened as she rapped out their names in an upscale electronic voice: “Tapette, Twinky, Chi-chi, Maiden-boy, Chiaroscuro Queen—hear me well. No fuck-ups, please, tonight of all nights, our special friend Shigem’s very last!” Dead silence—she was Supreme Ruler here, after all. “A Joan Collins is a Tom Collins made with vodka instead of gin, but the sour-mix, the soda and the cherry are otherwise quite unchanged. I shall refrain from describing the dog’s dinner I saw being made of a Joan Collins by one of you here last week—I say not by whom. Make no mistake, I’ve commanded boys behind bars around the world, of every hue, from disco to disco: painted boys in neon bars, muscled brutes in smoky dives, fey boys with high-pitched lisps, and parrot-wearing bartenders training as pirates, so I know whereof I speak… Think about the dry vermouth very hard, before you add a dash or a drop of it or even just walk past the glass with it: if you don’t, it will feel insulted. Don’t pout, Tapette.”

 

Teaser 82(ii), those pink fur walls

With her hands on her hips, she concluded her harangue with a slick, swishy, tightly-timed sass: “And that’s that, as far as I’m concerned!” before picking up her leopard-skin rabbit and sweeping across the dance-floor to the management office, followed slinkily by the space-cat emanating a regal felinity that purred Learn it, bitches! to all assembled.

Half an hour after you saw the club doors opened, the DJ was already in top gear, though only a small crowd had yet arrived. There was a huge build-up of lighting effects and increasingly manic, dirty, twisted, even chunky house music … but at the centre of this spectacular whirl and bombast the dance-floor was as empty and still as the centre of a tornado. On the video screens above, there appeared some footage of that Supreme Ruler’s arms with their distinctive leopard-skin artwork: one hand stroked with long golden nails the white fur of a long-haired cat, while the other hand limply held a peeled banana.

“Remember that really chunderous décor that used to be here?” the bartender Tapette tittered at you from behind the bar. “Those pink fur walls…”

“Oh I used to love those walls,” you said. “I used to writhe against them. I miss that.”

“But they kept getting bits of chewing-gum caught in them,” objected Tapette.

“True, but I used to writhe against the bits without chewing-gum. Anyway, sweetie, I’ll have a Parfait Amour liqueur and cream soda, please.” You turned to Kim beside you. “Kim, did you know that our luscious bartender Tapette here colours the wine artificially—even the good stuff—just to jazz it up a bit, ’cos he thinks wine gets to be a boring colour after a while.”

“I do not!” shrilled Tapette at you, taking offence and stamping his foot. “I’d never commit such a sacrilege,” and he whipped out a diminutive cauliflower from beneath the bar and started peevishly trimming off miniature florets of it into the garnish trays…

 

Teaser 84(i), Evelyn’s clear-eyed love

“Fresh as a cucumber, cool as a daisy,” she coos … and as you speak, Evelyn, I perceive how you are when you drive this van alone: there’s affection in your eyes for the people on the street, who have usually done their best with their clothes and hair and make-up; for those things take effort. Just to leave their house on time for work, morning after morning—you’d call that deserving of respect. For their relationships, their crappy jobs, their alcohol and drugs to spark their lives up, their over-numerous children and their interfering relatives, you feel a simple love, though you see them all too clearly. Through years here, you’ve seen so many people and their violence and their hassles and their dumb misunderstandings; and yet if there was love in them, you’ve seen that as well. You’ve seen them when they partied till they passed out, in bars, clubs, sitting rooms and doorways. You’ve seen them watching TV with their mouths hanging open, hundreds of channels piped raucous into cramped sitting rooms, and you’ve even loved them then—

 

Teaser 86(i), Kim the smalltown boy

I shall now get back on track with a quick look around Kim, but this time on a properly-focused, single-tune-in basis … and in no time, Kim, you are wandering the bank of Wesley Lake towards the sea, past the Heck Street footbridge. The low-growing pines by the lake jog a memory: alone on the platform, the wind and the rain on your sad and lonely face, at the station in Southport, with a little black case in your hand, to move to London. There were low-growing pines there too, across the tracks while you waited on the platform. The train came; you went, and you never thought again about the pines, till now. Then alone in London at the window of your bed-sit, you watched the lights reflected on the surface of the wet streets. You met friends and others, and you partied and ran around, but still in many ways you were alone, as you liked to be. Then, by and by, you met Shigem, loved Shigem, came here in a dream and are together now. Yet in many ways you’re alone inside, as before; and that aloneness is a rich, peaceful place. Moving on, you run your right hand gently through the pines, while your left hand makes to clutch a little black case.

 

Teaser 88(i), the Nativity scene in the sky

“I was just telling the others about Huntsville, Texas,” says Damian, when you and Lucan reach him. “My kind of town. Every man, woman and child there knows: when the electric chair is used in the great prison there in Huntsville, every electric light in town flickers when the switch is pulled, and every TV picture shakes, and every fridge gives a quiver. And folks remember to trust no one, because they’re all on their own!”

The light dims and you all look up. The bank of clouds I saw this morning across the ocean has rolled westwards across the summer sky towards us, so that its dense upper billows are just now moving across the sun’s disc overhead. And as you all stare up, it seems remarkably as if there is an entire nativity scene piled on the clouds behind the billows—ass, ox, Mary, three wise men etc., with a halo round the whole group and shafts of Jesus-light fanning out in all directions. The five of you stand by the wayside a moment, your mouths hanging open to varying degrees, before you lower your gazes to one another, shifting slightly on your feet. Then you all turn towards a miniature blaze of golden light in your midst, emanating from where a dedicated beam of sun strikes Lucan’s crucifix pendant. Damian turns his eyes to the ground—hunted, humble. Lucan’s face assumes a hint of the messianic; Flames looks earnest; Kev picks his teeth.

 

Teaser 89(i), did that spyhole-cover move?

I stand on the other side of it for a moment, letting my eyes adjust to the gloom. There ahead of me is the hallway—and a cold chill runs through me as I see a horrible figure halfway down it, staring right back at me, with arms rigidly at its sides and a spiky hairdo that’s both creepy and goofy.

I see the hairdo is really the leaves of a pot-plant sitting on a bookcase whose tall white side-end faces me, and the rigid arms are really black folder-ends that protrude to right and left of that tall white shape on two successive shelves … but it’s set the scene nicely, nonetheless.

I set off with a certain grimness down the long, dim, narrow space.

I glance into the kitchen door as I pass it, for the first time noticing an array of carving knives hanging on the wall, and several bulky old fridge-freezers…

I reach the bathroom and glance into it, knowing that within its shadows hangs the large blue toothbrush and then, half-hidden behind it, the smaller black toothbrush…

I pass the front door, glancing at the spy-hole through which Pippa peered so long in vain for her gentleman caller. (Did I just see the little spyhole-cover swing and slither around a bit, on its tiny hinge?)

 

Teaser 89(ii), sigh or moan or grunt or shriek

Then I start to slow down, approaching her closed bedroom door ahead of me at the end of the corridor, because I know that very soon I shall spot the thing I do indeed now spot—the narrow door Kim described.

I slow right down, as I near it, then come to a halt just this side of it. I run my eyes comprehensively over it, skewering my gaze into the black crack that borders its tall rectangular outline. No light glimmers through the hinges, which are nearer to me. It is too dim in this hallway to see if there are any marks on the carpet, from movement in or out of the door. I cannot make out anything red and sticky on the handle … and there’s the large keyhole. I bend downward slowly, moving my face to a level with it. I’m not sure how wide the aperture within the keyhole is, so I narrow my eyes as I approach it with one eye, pushing aside thoughts of something long and sharp jabbing out of it without warning. By slow degrees I get close enough, and stay there motionless for long enough, to conclude that I am not going to be able to see or hear anything through the blackness of the keyhole.

What is it, sitting there right in front of me, that I can’t see through that little keyhole-shaped piece of blackness there?

A distant Alaia wails somewhere far down the hallway through the sitting room door, while I scrutinise. I straighten up, brace myself for the unexpected, and gently turn the handle…

Locked. I give a quiet knock. No reaction. “Hallo?” I murmur into the black crack. “Is there anybody in there? Please answer…”

I listen acutely for any vegetable Angel sigh, moan, grunt or shriek—but there is silence.

 

Teaser 90(i), one of the lonely girls

I conjure up my hostess this afternoon, lob her outwards and send my attention after her, to see just what she’s doing, up there in her high-rise, now that Kim and I have left … and I find you, Pippa, descending the building’s concrete stairwell, where the wind pushes in through the cracks around a rusty window frame beside you. You peer out and down into a small garden that no one ever visits, where a few tired leaves flap limply on stunted shrubs. You emerge from your tower through the back door and drift down the empty street, without an umbrella: glazed dim sky, grey rain. You’re sinking, Pippa Vail, and I wish that I could help you, but I can’t. A woman and a small child are coming down the pavement towards you. You could say hallo when she reaches you—but she would either just look at you funnily or, if she were polite enough to greet you in return, she would still think there was something odd about you and would want to hurry on, and what would be the point of that? So you don’t meet her eyes and she doesn’t meet yours, while the rain streams down over your furious blushing and the child stares at you rudely; and you never liked children (even and especially when you were one in Arverne) but you manage a weak half-grin at it, like thin porridge, and of course then the idiot child looks frightened and stares all the harder and more rudely, and they both scurry on, away down Sewall Avenue. Then a curtain twitches in a window, of course, and you know that there too will be a hard, curious stare at you, cutting through the thin rain sliding down the air on its way to the gutter. You look through the sad scene ahead of you, which might as well be behind you, and you move your legs forward—left foot, right foot, left foot. Yes, you’re one of the lonely girls. You’ve seen all this before, and you’ll see it all again.

 

Teaser 90(ii), up Cookman Avenue unheard

But otherwise, it’s not good, especially the other phone call. That friend of yours served you up a silence on the phone—unmistakable, the truth of his dislike carried plainly in the silence and deliberately implied. The last look he gave you was cold, too, the other week. That silence on the phone, and the last look he gave you was cold; silence and cold… A small strangled screech wriggles out through your windpipe by force and stabs up Cookman Avenue, unheard.

At the end of Wesley Lake, behind the boarded-up Carousel, you stumble round the colonnade beneath the tall chimney of the little dead power station. “Hail Satan,” says a graffito on one of the pillars, scrawled in unSatanic felt-tip pen. You wander down the Boardwalk to the old Howard Johnson’s diner, closed and dark today as it almost always is nowadays, where a wall-mounted radio has nevertheless been left on, aiming a small tinny music out across the ocean.

You drift onwards, anti-clockwise around the edges of the entire town, with wastes of empty space to your right and cars hissing away through the slosh to somewhere else. Grey sky hangs over wire-netting alley-ways around a corner shop, where the wind blows litter along. You come to a bus-stop where an old man sits talking to himself, a beer in his hand and his face full of fear and endless loss.

 

Teaser 90(iii), despair among the slip-roads

By the time you’ve wandered inland and some way out of town to a highway intersection where only cars move, the light is dimming into evening. In among the slip-roads you find a slip of grass, and there you sit and smoke, where nobody has ever sat and smoked before—and nobody will ever sit and smoke again, most likely.

This is the last game of all, Pippa, here among the slip-roads. The rain upon a bandstand that only you can see thaws out a music that was played here and frozen in a silent ring, awaiting your arrival now—notes rubbed thin by the ghosts of many tears. “What a nice day,” you say, and wish that it were so.

Here is the border of reality, the boundary fence, before you reach the rest outside. The fence is broken, here and there, where other lone wolves have pushed holes through it, setting off on journeys where the rest of us can’t follow. The air above the highway becomes arched over like a tunnel ceiling, with the wider environment merely an optical effect projected onto the tunnel walls—and this is when I know that you are really in trouble.

 

Teaser 93(i), snaky-pale platinum perfection

At home you climb the front staircase, clutching the banisters. You stumble to the big double bed and flop down fully clothed, your mind churning luridly from horniness and hormones, and you picture her again, the Baby Doll: her long straight platinum-blonde hair writhes and sprays against the blackness as she strenuously swings on her trapeze, wrenching at the ropes to send herself back down with adequate swing to push her further up at the opposite end of the arc. Her smile is a grimace and her white flesh streams tepid moisture. Her motion for an instant seems to slow, so her white hair streaks through the hot black space with a lonely volition of its own—luscious, vain, exquisite, fake and stunning in its snaky-pale platinum perfection. The lukewarm moisture, you notice, is sweat mixed with tears from her hazel eyes. A flat dead voice giggles out through her grimace, as she speaks a thing you cannot hear. She’s telling you something, grinning, while she yanks at the rope in either hand, to keep swinging. You strain, till at last you hear her message, seeking wisdom—but it’s nothing more than numbers, one to ten in sequence, repeated and repeated ad nauseam. Harder at the ropes she yanks, and wetter do her eyes run, and more and more stunning is her blonde hair swinging through the hot black, locked in its own swishy dripping private silence … and you feel as if you’re looking back inside yourself, Angel, as if you once were her, the Baby Doll.

 

Teaser 93(ii), Room 629 in Asbury Park

You twist around the bed beneath the surface of a half-sleep, and there I follow too, while you sneak into the Berkeley Carteret Hotel, to hide. You wander round the empty mezzanine, through the grand empty dark mirrored rooms and halls and terraces, with views of the deadness of this town all around you: a lushness all for you, flitting alone from mirror to window, peeping through the glass at wastes of concrete, empty grass, sand, ocean-hiss and blasted buildings’ silhouettes. I watch you, you little queen, dancing on the ballroom floor, beneath the chandeliers. From the shadows at the side, as you twirl in the middle, I conduct a string quintet you cannot see but can hear; and my face weeps pouring flesh that runs in red rivulets across the shiny wooden floor but sinks before it reaches you. I’d kill you if I wanted to, but suicide hurts, so I pull you towards me on invisible elastic that sweats as it stretches in the wine-red glow radiated from my face. I pull you up the stairs, past the mirror, past the paintings and the plush public couches where no one ever sits; around the corner, past the ice-machine and down the long corridor, nearly to the end on the right, to number 629, where you stand at the window of the darkened room and watch an empty bus hiss by, while here in the corridor I stand behind your locked door and stare at your neck—

 

Teaser 95(i), garden of water and loveliness

While Rik clanks around in the kitchen making breakfast, you drift back into a half-sleep, dreaming of your garden of water and loveliness contained in its circles of balustraded terraces. Down on your left is the flowering jungle, where a stiff-nosed anteater halfway up a palm-tree pecks at the palm’s trunk. Down on your right is dry land, where the lemon-trees flourish in the bright cool sun. Up the hill towards you Flames Alleyne stalks, carrying a crowded world of Spanish baboons in a sack, which he swings through the sunrays. You wave, to invite him up. He nods with animal seriousness and flips a control beneath the terrace, which you haven’t seen before: up comes a nozzle right in front of you and shoots a peeled hard-boiled egg tightly up the water chute inside it. He clambers up the nozzle to your garden, you embrace and evening falls. A rabbit in the moonlight beckons to the two of you and leads you to a lake upon whose surface little creatures caper (ponies, zebras, unicorns), flowing through the silken water; tiny bunnies slide down the slopes of the wavelets. A waterspout of tentacles is sprouting and shrinking at the centre of the lake, while white-eyed lungfish wheeze in the mud around the shore. You and Flames tiptoe and peer into rock-pools, where underwater micro-cities teem with pulps and jellies. Baby yales and sea-ears scuttle through the shallows, past sea-mice, sea-cows, sea-pigs, seahorses, sea-eggs, sea-cucumbers, dogfish, sea-oranges and sea-lemons … and you wake!

 

Teaser 96(i), wilt and swoon in glades

I bend my sight to Kim, who is also lying on grass, in the orchard-like calm of a deserted Liberty Square, reading … and you look up as I tune in, Kim, half-sensing someone. You’re doing OK; but even now, on the eve of your departure for a new chapter with a beautiful new love, how little does your OK-ness affect your calm knowledge of how much easier things will be after death. What a sweetness there will be at the moment of dying—the cessation of a struggle whose design has such cruelties for many and such dangers for all. True to its all-purpose aliveness, your imagination obediently conjures up the picture of a perfect, soulless ecstasy of electronic music playing behind the smooth vanilla-scented silence of a Burne-Jones orchard, where figures from a love-song wilt and strum and swoon in glades; and you smile at this. But seriously, Kim, what relief and release it will be, from this demanding and uncomfortable situation we’re in while alive, when we’re always just a narrow squeak away from events that could plunge us into fear, pain, grief, horror or insanity. How very badly arranged that narrow squeak is: wouldn’t a wide squeak have been a rather more intelligent setting? What a vicious and unforgivable fuck-up, frankly, on the part of whatever process caused this to happen. How exhausting and contemptible that we’ve been dropped into such a fuck-up, and how very sweet will your assassin be. You’ll know him when you see him; you will smell his lovely perfume and you’ll bend to kiss his lethal, jewelled hand. On your lips, from this hand, you will drink your elixir: honey, water, Nembutal and peace at last… Still, as you said before, all this in no way changes the fact that in practice you’re genuinely OK—quite content, in fact!

 

Teaser 96(ii), answering Lautréamont

You regain consciousness of Liberty Square for a moment, then return to your book. Curious, I read it too; and so we read together for a couple more hours, you and I, on this your last full day in Asbury Park. This strangest of books is bewitching you, I see, Kim, and making you resolve that you’ll answer it in writing yourself one day, across the decades and the languages: head to head, toe to toe and mouth to mouth, your own chants will meet these and dance with them, somewhere in an evil dawn of gold. What better use could there be for your hours?

 

Teaser 97(i), Angel’s dripping red shadow

Now by contrast, I am braced for whatever I may find … and as it happens, Lucan, you are staring through the window of the Cadillac, as Kev drives you somewhere without conversation. Nothing bloodthirsty here, but I do feel a blast of formidable street power, the flash of many drug deals and the sprouting up of much cash all around you. I also see a swathe of your internal landscape that’s like a pulsing cloud of shadow with drips of red in its depths, and I know straight away that this flickering storm-cloud is Angel’s housing, in all its opacity and exhilaration. No surprise that this dwelling should display a more ominous and complex mien than that of just your first memory of him: for those are the external ramparts of Angel’s grand estate and seven-layered formal garden, as seen from inside you.

 

Teaser 97(ii), mighty silver hubcaps

Yes, Lucan: multiplied in close-up on a wall of television screens, a gun’s safety catch is released in slow motion by your hand. Your biceps enters frame, lit in red against the sky. Your flesh shines with oil and has been misted just before the take, so individual droplets reflect the sinking sun. Photographed from lower down, your head scans the land, and your brows beneath a black bandanna frown low.

Now the music slams in, a mighty silver hubcap spins on each of the twenty screens, and roaring engines change gear. Pulling up and back through a crisp swirl of side-lit dust, the camera draws the whole tyre smoothly into sight, while flawlessly maintaining the hubcap centre-frame. (The visuals and sound design bear the hallmarks of a quite virtuosic skill, or at least a high budget.) The surface of a highway and the side of a truck appear, the truck’s load covered with a green and black canvas camouflage. With no cut, the same take continues somehow upward as the army truck, below us now, is framed without a wobble, hanging stationary on screen between the yellow-painted streaks that mark the edges of its highway lane.

Two more trucks slide in to flank the first, then more behind, ahead and either side, identical in black and green; the engine roar swells and the whole screen-wall now displays one projection of this single moving shot, shared across the width of all twenty banked panels. A slow colossal drum joins the drone of the engines, as the ever-rising camera swallows six lanes of trucks, surging thunderous up a valley through the setting sun’s light: the front of the convoy somewhere near the sun’s disc; the rear end behind you, near a darker horizon.

 

Teaser 97(iii), I’m exquisite damage

“LUCAN ABAYOMI” unfurls across the screen in a red blast, and then is gone. A voice like the voice of a mountain resounds: “A soldier…” A heartbeat quickens under screeches of metal, over shots of wires coiling underneath a closed door and a clock dial ticking, then a ball of raging orange fire. The mountain voice concludes: “and a thief of minds!… This man commands, from a screen near you. See The Imagination Thief.” That scarlet script unfurls again, across the screen’s entire width, “THE IMAGINATION THIEF”. Your gaze returns, scouring the horizon, left to right above the camera lens—and freeze-frame.

But instead of the trailer ending there, as it clearly should, there’s been some mistake up in the projectionist’s eyrie, or maybe it was back in the edit suite in post-production, or way back in production itself, or possibly longer ago in pre-production or even development … for as your trailer carries on, Lucan, Angel leaks in through the walls of your screening-room, and seeps up the curtains either side of the screen, and infiltrates the fabric of the screen itself, and pours through the canvas of that army truck you showed us—and cut, to this interior. The canvas roof above us here is camouflage indeed, Lucan, now it is revealed: for underneath it, snug below the green and black, the air is dim but candy-lit, and here is Angel Deon, your freak in a skirt of snakes, writhing in introverted lust and peeping out through the glands of his libido and the curves of the lens, to your screening-room… Moist, purple-nippled, pert-cheeked and eaten up with endless sexual hunger, Angel pouts and whispers at us, up there on your trailer screen: “I’m your fatal attraction, Soldier! I’m exquisite damage. But you’re the Ghost of Jealousies—a Stranger in Moscow.” Despite your market strategy, despite straight lines, here he is still—hitching a ride in your army truck, tainting your trailer and suffusing your entire super-square action-blockbuster movie with his sumptuous poison. Carried on your tough tanks, aloft among your heavy-duty metal gun-turrets and astride the booming gun of your artillery, he’s starkly incongruous within your wider image, Lucan, showing up your lies—but here you sit together nonetheless, just the pair of you, and here you shout together to the whole wide world!

 

Teaser 98(i), ghost-ship foreshadowed

“By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask: where did our two broadcasts take you, what did you see when you watched them?”

He stiffens, looking grim. “I didn’t see the second one, but your first broadcast dug something up that it should have left buried. It’s now running loose in me and hiding in the shadows. A thing I never knew I had. A shriek—that’s all I’ll call it. You don’t wanna know more.”

We lapse into quiet … and I see you as a boy, Damian West, when the sad pirate captain in your head said you’d sail via white sandy bays past frog-croaking jungles, through lagoons and straits and over seas whose green glassy surfaces shivered with the wriggle of gigantic squids and worms miles below. But even as a boy you could glimpse, within the captain’s vision of your ship’s jaunty launch, the spectre of the ghost-ship it would later become: torn shreds of sail hung on pale shrunken mast-wood, where cormorants perched and shat; the rasp of vultures scratched across the plastic glaze of sky, while an oil-slicked sea licked dully at the ship’s hull; and strands of blackened flesh upon your own skull and bones.

 

Teaser 98(ii), sour flame of pain

“Never let your enemies escape,” he urges me. “And yet, be patient too, because if you sit beside the river long enough, you’ll see the body of every one of your enemies floating by, dead.” He gives a mirthless cackle, then resumes, starting quietly but building in intensity: “I’ve seen it all, Jaymi: a madman in a dismal land, standing in a brown field, watching two bums who were trapped on a small shitty island in a river where they maimed each other using rocks and sticks in sunlight for hours, till they both died screeching—pointless, witless, hopeless pain. Larvae so bloodless and hideous, feeding off the napalmed bodies, out in Vietnam; and under the shed that I shared with the bodies was a baggy red light-bulb, squeezable and lit, with a fumble of wires, and I knew it was a bomb. So I ran, and heard it blow up close behind me with a burst of green smoke. Then the sun shone down pale green, through a green sky; dogs barked, birds screeched and body parts rained down. The sirens started wailing and the dogs wailed back at them, in time with the wailing of the newly mutilated—a sour flame of pain in a garden of evil. I saw that I was wounded. I started blacking out, then, and sombre pictures flashed in me: the son of the hounds of the sea, the hundred-foot snakefish, and swordfish jumping up conveyor belts. And torture, forever, all around the world, in chambers: the slash of steel, the burn of fire, the slice and stab of bone-twisting pain are all gashed into flesh at dawn as lightning shrieks, and nothing we can ever do to stop it.”

“And how warming it is,” I say, “to know that all that pain will last just as long as people last.”

 

Teaser 99(i), Pippa’s dead glassy stare

I recline on my bed, restless. My room is uncannily quiet. I close my eyes and shoot my sight out to hover over Pippa where she sits on her high-rise balcony, spotlit like a wax dummy, high in the night, with a golden angel ornament nestling on her lap, looking out with her dead glassy stare across town in exactly this direction. As usual, her moist green eyes look as if they’ve been crying. Although she seems to be looking straight at me, I know she cannot see through these walls to my body lying here. Nevertheless, I open my eyelids just a chink, peek across my room to my window by the eaves and check the window’s position in relation to me and her. My light is on and the curtains and window are open—but the angle isn’t quite right for her to see me here in the Metropolitan, I’m glad to note. I shiver, then close my eyes again. I remind myself that her high-rise cannot even be seen from this window, being hidden by trees or roofs or something else, as I ascertained a couple of days ago. Even so, I raise my eyelids once more, just a crack, to double-check.

Then I let them stay closed, deciding I shall trust she cannot see me … and at last I catch a glimpse of your mystery, Pippa, there where it stands in your mind for an instant before it’s smudged away. This glimpse centred unmistakably on whatever space is behind that narrow door in your hallway, but its nature was less clear. It was a black pit of utter horror, but with the blank opacity of a lacuna, as if you have blacked something out, which might explain its strangely elusive concealment up to this point.

 

Teaser 99(ii), hunched at the end of my bed

In your head a bird warbles, like water through woodwind. A line of oil-tanks on a freight train jolt and boom, across the points, beside an empty grey field bordered in coiled steel. An oily croak sounds from the rushes in the marsh beside the tracks. The cutting opens out upon a valley full of low unwindowed buildings, marked in Korean script. Over the death-camp, the wind sings faintly in the telegraph wires, a mournful dirge of loss and waste and sadness without end—thin and plangent and metallic where the pylons stride away through the blasted smudgy stillness of purple-black-brown air.

You’re in your chair, hunched against the night air, sleeping in your dark-red sweatshirt with matching red sweatpants, your head turned in my direction, eyes open, staring at me lying here. And while you sleep, Pippa, on your dreamscreen flickers up an antique dusk: across a misty countryside a statuesque bull’s head rears up and lows. Aged spectres, bestial and human, float from tumuli and copses, like shadows from the other side, wobbly and rustling. A goat’s skull stands out stark against the darkness, an ancient apparition. You hear the shouts and whispers of the multitudes of dead things, echoed in this old place, catching certain names through the chatter: Centaur and Serpent, Ten of Swords and Queen of Circles, Eohippus fossils buried under hills of bone. Rooks caw, raspy and ragged like a hundred thousand years ago, and there nearby you is a sign-post: Old Place.

As I lie here with my eyes still closed, you feel almost like a vegetable, Pippa—hunched there in your chair at the bottom of my bed, staring at me glassy-eyed, down the bed’s length at me—and always I can see the claw, pushing out against the inner muscles of your belly, sealed tight in its prison, pushing up the dark-red surface of your sweatshirt, towards me—

 

Teaser 100(i), your squeak is in its symphony

I sit on the window-seat in one of the shuttered window-bays and tune in to Evelyn in her van on Main Street … and as you drive, Evelyn, you feel the engine’s rhythm and you feel at peace. Stopping at a red light, you notice certain men who are out for the night, and your fingers drum the wheel and you purr within yourself and the engine purrs back. In your mind, music rises: a beat pumps, brass swells and voices float down to you, as flame lights you up inside and spills from your eyes and your fingers like a fountain. You let go all arguments, even the good ones, and picture the eyes of those around you. Brown? Blue? Green? Another colour? You project to them a picture of you stroking shut their eyes and then kissing them—you know their eyes deserve it, for your own are the same. If everybody else did this… Of course you don’t forget that their hands may stab you, while you’re stroking shut their eyes; so you’re ready all the time to dodge away or stab them back. But you dance in your mind, to make your kissing and your caution spin together, and you’re agile in your dance, so you find what love you can within the colours of their eyes, while your mirth ripples up and out and chimes between the stars! Trumpet ripples through your body, lazy and fluid, while the bright dome of stars above you spins through the aeons, and your squeak is in its symphony.

I reopen my eyes upon this darkened breakfast room, with a renewed sense of peace. Then again, what effect does she really have, when the immense pain and sadness elsewhere just carries on regardless?

 

Teaser 101(i), ball of orange fire

The forty-five-degree descent ahead is dead-straight, for miles. Either side, banks of pipes, valves, tubes and wires tower up to clear sky and drop to depths of gloom, clad in complex walkways, balconies and stairs. Panic floods through you. The rumbling of the escalator gears is augmented by a booming so deep that it might be the engines of a planet, overlaid with a bank of sound as dense as the machinery—clanks, hisses, whistles, grating screeches and explosions. Sparks leap from point to point around you, as you watch in fright. A huge grinding blast from far below shakes the steps and a red flicker rises. You lean beyond the hand-rail and peer down: five miles beneath you a ball of orange fire rages, tiny and intricately floral at this distance.

 

Teaser 102(i), in your boyfriend’s embrace

And there you lie together, in an eloquent communication of absolute silence and stillness.

This is a perfect, unimprovable situation right here, you decide, as you slip immediately towards sleep, easy and free now that you’re enclosed within the sweet relaxing calm of your boyfriend’s embrace. You’re half-conscious of the voice of your own mind, prattling on for a little while longer, to nobody, as it winds down: “How alive, to see the face of your lover through the years,” it is saying. “Oh, have I got staying power, strong like a mountain. But I’d like to turn a mirror to the sky first. Maybe then we’ll see far enough to travel backwards? The sun’s on track to expand to a red giant and swallow us.I thought about you twice just then, my love. Perhaps the second time was really first. Look at me, behind the mirror. Chase that shadow: just as fast as you follow, it’ll skip from your sight. It’s a living, for a shadow, I suppose…” and as you sink lower, slower, through Atlantic depths, your mind’s voice slows down at last. Down here in the deeps are only surges and fleeting things: seaweed fronds and eels make to grab your skinny torso from behind and wind you round them. Your body gives a twitch, as a fish-nose bumps you with a soft caress that leaves a nose-shaped dent upon your arm. Kim flashes up, swimming naked, right in front of you: kiss forever, in the darkness! comes a whisper … and you sleep.

 

Teaser 103(i), the dusk of unknown towns

Upstairs outside our rooms, despite her laughter just now, Alaia stills feels somehow in hiding from me, but with a new element of resignation … and of sadness. That’s it: she seems sad. In fact, I observe as we stand there, she is quite emotional at the moment, blinking at me with an odd sort of hunger in her eyes. Before I can decide how to process this or whether to ask her what the matter is, however, we are both inside our own adjacent rooms, in silence.

Lying in the dark here, I get that restless sense, redoubled: tomorrow, it is going to break. But what, exactly?

I give up trying to see the future and bend my attention to the recent past instead. On two grand occasions now, my gaze has crackled out through the dusk of unknown towns around the world, through aerials and dishes, copper wire and glassy cables, in between the dog barks and underneath the planes, and has lodged in the eyes and minds of people everywhere whom I shall never meet. And meanwhile, against the distant backdrop of those multitudes, a small fiery troupe has strutted right here in front of me, some of whom I’ve watched from as close as it is possible to get to a human ape—from inside its head.

For the first time I contemplate this fiery troupe together, all posed for a photograph that never will be taken—Marc Albright, Alaia Danielle, Jason Carax, Evelyn Carmello, Rik Chambers, Flames Alleyne, Lucan Abayomi, Kev Banton, Damian West, Angel Deon, Shigem Adele, Kim Somerville, Pippa Vail—and they contemplate me back, from this hypothetical photo. The freeze-frame animates, all of a sudden, as the thirteen in sequence make respectful bows or curtseys at me, each in their own way. Then some of them titter at me, slapping one another’s hands high and low, somewhat undermining their respectful obeisances … and so I drift to sleep.

 

Teaser 105(i), my favourite grimy high-rise

I home in on my favourite grimy high-rise … and I catch you, Pippa, sitting on your balcony and staring through the dusk light. Your spacious sadness arches in a grand high vault above this lonely town, belying all the chatter and the fuss of other people—but nonetheless your stars are good again! Every twelve years the planet Jupiter revolves around your sky and paints its roof in swirls of pink and orange; every twenty-nine years, Saturn bars its windows even tighter than before, in green and black; every eighty-four years (so you may live one orbit), Uranus electrifies your vault in paler green; for sure you will not know a full turn of Neptune over one hundred and sixty-five years, in deep delusive blue; but then at last, from unimaginably far above, once every two hundred and forty-eight years, your vault is smashed by a bomb-blast from Pluto, deepest black, intractable and alien. Yes, your horoscope gives you the coolest view of where we are in icy space, a view too wide for daily life—a goddess-sized view, in fact. So, as befits a goddess, you are silent and you don’t block your eyes.

You float indoors from the balcony, across the sitting room into the hallway, and now I think I may have hit a bull’s-eye at last, as you approach that narrow door … but you walk right past it, straining not to think about it, striving to resist its pull, which feels like the pull from a black hole in your sanity—

 

Teaser 105(ii), the lurid beauty in you

You slam your bedroom door behind you, cross the unlit room to your bed and lie down. You hear that special silence creeping nearer, to hedge you in; you feel that dark, clotted presence there in the air, congealing thickly, and you know it is again time to be the one you should have been, inhabiting the world that you should have found around you. So you watch yourself climb off the bed, descend the stairwell, get into a limo and be driven by an unseen chauffeur to a place that no one else knows. There in the dead zone beyond the city’s concrete edge, you strut like a skeleton across the asphalt field by the wire-netting fence. Giant metal floodlights sense you, hum alive and blaze down upon you. Lit stark white between broken empty warehouses, there your face and body-size change unpredictably until you can’t be recognised. The creature that you now become, you treasure. The world you were born on, and the time you were born on it, were not quite up to this; they fell short. But with enormous shining bitter-sweet pleasure, you create for yourself, upon this asphalt stage, the world and time that should have been. You flip your ribcage open with a gesture to the stars, laying lewdly bare a heart like a black fleshy artichoke, and move and look as no one else on earth, beyond description … while hidden in the blackness of the broken warehouse windows all around the field, trolls growl and moan at the lurid beauty in you. And when your show is over, you morph back to Pippa Vail, slip into the limousine and speed away again along the fence, while the floodlights dim to black, as if you’d never been.

 

Teaser 105(iii), shine with dead black light

Back home, you stare blankly at the mirror in the bathroom. You don’t seem to know it, but at some moment in the course of the upcoming month (perhaps the upcoming week), that imperceptible point of no return will have been reached and passed by you. When this occurs, presently, your isolation and dysfunction will have attained that combination of severity and duration required to warp you out of shape for good, easing you into a space where you will thereafter think in a different language from the rest of us. You could still then be guided back into our language, hypothetically, if a person with the necessary skills came along whose appointed task it were to do this. What would the chances be, however, of such a person coming along at such a point, Pippa? Negligible, yes?

Your eyes in the mirror are dead now—empty holes that shine with dead black light. Are you in them? Are you back there, hiding in the darkness of your broken warehouse windows, with the trolls?

I’m losing you. You’re fading. Make a sign, if you’re in there… Blink, if you can… Shatter your one-way mirror-sphere, before it shrinks around you—

There you go.

 

Teaser 107(i), wrecked and wild and feverish

I steel myself, shoot my sight to Angel … and I see you, Angel, running to the front door with danger in your eyes. You feel it too: the restlessness in town today, the violence in the sticky air, the gunfire waiting to ricochet, and phantom flames burning in the air around your head.

You wander to a grungy and rain-washed Main Street, to T.J.’s Pizza at Sewall Avenue. It’s warm but it’s drizzling, so you’re hot and cold at once. Dressed in black and dark-red, you’re shielded from the rain by your scarlet umbrella, yet sweat drips down your face and trickles under all your clothes. You’re wrecked and wild, feverish and tussled as you kick along an empty cigarette packet, churning with self-hate and self-love.

 

Teaser 107(ii), the colour of a boy-girl’s dream

Semi-conscious, your mind still sounds like a factory of machinery, as usual: whining engines, screeching blades, hissing sparks and a never-ending drum-boom of earth-shaking power, shot with clattering and echoes.

You twitch awake again, and Murder flickers closer to you; waits for you to notice it. You notice it. It lets you drink it in for a moment, then it draws you towards it, with glaring pools of eyes in the darkness of the bedroom … and something subtle changes in you, something irreversible and silent.

You are now resolved to murder, for real.

You gently push this resolution aside: it can wait to be processed, please, just a few minutes. (Why, yes it can! It is patient and quite prepared to wait.)

At last your banks of mind-machines are quiet, as you fall asleep for real. You quiver, then are still: and the colour of a spasm in a boy-girl’s dream has the radiant completion of a blade’s squeak and rush through Lucan’s soft-lit neck, while the cameras roll, projected on the big screen in extreme close-up…

 

Teaser 107(iii), weeping scarlet blood

This deep rest is short-lived, of course. As you start again to toss and turn and writhe and scratch your arms and wrestle with yourself in sleep as usual, radio feedback and strobing lights flicker through your pressured head: “Bad girl!” voices chant, “so like a woman…” in your tight red leather skirt and cherry lipstick and angel’s wings, holding the big dangerous hand of your man with his crucifix pendant, strong and golden on his chest. He leads you to a garden, ties you to the trunk of an ancient bush profuse with crimson roses, and fires tiny scarlet arrows at you. Every few seconds an arrow lodges sharp in your torso, then falls out leaving a small gash until your body is a red mess, merging with the crimson of the petals; and you squirm, with the thrill of him strung upon the wires of the harp in the Garden as Satan’s music thrums through his body. In a nearby nut-bush, a noose of light cusps off a twist of white nut-kernel-meat shaped just like a set of tiny fingers clasped in prayer; and you feel your tattooed Angel’s wings morph to the soft white wings of a dove. You take off, soar up and land on a nail-head that spins upon its point below, spoked with jagged lightning underneath a blackness pinked with tiny galaxies. Ziggurats and onion-spires pierce through clouds of smoke the colour of a sweet red wine as rich as Sin. Within the smoke, snakes of scarlet chase and swallow one another, as on burning paper. Off the Mosquito Coast among the angel-demonfish, two skinless animals are making love in slime and blood, birthed from your imagination’s most exquisite sump—a rapture of the deep! Dying fire seeps through the clouds of a sunset coloured treacle-black and blood-orange, sensuously chemical. Right where the sun should hang, your own face flashes up for one supernal instant, weeping scarlet blood … and fades to black.

You wake and sit bolt upright. You bound off the bed to the wardrobe, snake your hand behind it, prise up a floorboard, reach into shadow there and wrap your fingers tight around the metal of your gun. Listening hard for sounds elsewhere in the house, you pull the weapon out, check it’s loaded, pocket it and tiptoe from the bedroom. Downstairs you slip through the back door.

 

Teaser 108(i), traffic-light glow on Shigem

I check the clock: Kim and Shigem are set to leave town some time during this very hour, but getting shot can be a quick process. I close my eyes again and tune in to Shigem … and I find you still in Asbury Park, but sitting in the passenger’s seat of a rental car whose back seat is loaded high with bags. “Any thoughts, now that we’re driving out of here?” Kim asks as the car waits on Cookman Avenue to turn right onto Main Street. The traffic-light glow upon your face flicks from red to green, filling up a hundred acne craters with colour as you smile at him. He sets the car in motion, as I peer through your eyes and through the open windows, scanning for assassins.

You look, along with me, at the station on your left. “Years ago I sometimes fantasised about lying across those railroad tracks,” you answer. “But I never did, because I always knew it would traumatise the train driver and maybe derail the train and give Asbury a bad name—you know, ‘the Asbury Park Train Massacre’ or something. We didn’t need that here, on top of everything else. Still, I think now I might have the courage of my convictions: how about we stop the car, stay here after all, and both lie down across the tracks after midnight? It would be so poetic … except that they’d find our bodies limp and sickly and sneezing tomorrow morning, because there are no trains after midnight. Oh, life is cruel.”

 

Teaser 108(ii), that delicious background hum

You gaze through the windows at the shuttered shops and traffic-lights of Main Street. Up ahead a few more blocks, you’ll leave here, your home-town, for good. And of all possible times, it’s now that I attain a clear perception of a particular little fruitcake of thought in you, which I might easily have missed. For in reality it’s perhaps less of a fruitcake and more of a hum. Like the quiet but unique background hum or room-tone of every individual room located on a film-set, a few moments of which must be recorded by itself for later sound-editing, there’s a room-tone humming in your head at all times—very subtle, quite specific and unique to you. It’s your wish that you were a male who felt entirely female but had to live in the wrong sex: in other words you wish you were fully transgender, but not that you were female by birth or by sex-change. Unusual of course, as hums and wishes go, but there it is. The rest of you, aside from this specific part, is quite OK with being not fully transgender but rather just a feminine male without desire to be female. Yet always and forever there remains that delicious background hum, containing three sounds: a rich chord of pleasure in a major key; a single note of simple fact that colours your perceptions; and subtlest and deepest, a chord of regret, with the bitter-sweet flavour of unreachable perfection.

“Are we really moving to London?” you ask, as Kim accelerates past Sixth Avenue.

“Sure,” he says. “Why not?”

 

Teaser 110(i), uncoiling from inside you

So here you lie dying, and here I am privileged to watch. You see fires and explosions on the far-away horizon, where a nest of lethal Ferris wheels grinds through the night above a funfair of cotton candy, grinning clowns and death machines. You smell your own death now, uncoiling from inside you. Your mossy grave lies ready, up behind the night in a field of its own, with the cracked grey headstone bearing your name—can you read that?

You wonder what the person who searches you will conclude when they find the note that lives in the envelope in your rear left pocket. I frown, as I can feel something new and odd here… With awkwardness you reach into your back left pocket with your black-gloved hand, fetch the envelope, bring it to your face, pull the old piece of paper out and read it for the last time. At its left edge are small stains of blood, wet and dry, presumably from the gunshot wound in the right side of your back, where blood is soaking widely through your bright yellow sweatshirt. It’s a brief note scribbled a few years ago by Angel, addressed not to you but to Lucan, with urgent kisses along the lower edge. The text reads simply, “See you tonight!”.

 

Teaser 110(ii), asking who am I?

For the last time ever, you plant a fiery kiss upon his signature and place the note back inside its old envelope.

For the first time ever, you lick what glue remains upon the envelope’s flap and seal it up.

Then with care and discomfort, you fling this sacred object away from you, as hard as you can, down Fourth Avenue towards the sea.

The force of your throw, a collaborative breeze and lucky aerodynamics all combine to carry it far down the length of the strip of litter-strewn dirt and scrappy grass beside the carcass-building, halfway to Ocean Avenue and anonymity. You lie back, exhausted, your mind slipping out of your control. You see a convoy of cars in northern India, their headlights painted over with cartoony eyes. Beside it, a line of swaying poplars turns into a line of stunted poles stretching across the plateau into dim haze. At the end of the line is a graveyard ringed by statues of ash in crumbling colonnades. A sad human head like a marsh-flower swims through the air among the graves, where the long grass weeps. The sky dims and churns. White drizzle falls out of grey light to black snow. The wind dies, and far away, dust blown from distant lands falls to sea in silence.

Your system is sluggish now; the fog grows within you. You’re standing in an Arverne alleyway, with sad social housing all around you under damp sky. Across the grassy mud a small pig trots on pointed toes, its flank stained umber, like ceramic. Lights flicker on among the high-rise tower-blocks. Wind makes the telegraph wires in the alley sing, as fog rolls along its narrow length to engulf you.

Faintly you recall Pippa Vail on her balcony, asking who am I? Beneath Pippa Vail were the lights of a small town somewhere on the coast and the swashing of the sea. You swell with compassion for this Pippa you are seeing: for her passion and her dreams and her vulnerabilities, for the heights she aspired to and the depths she feared to think about.

You’re all alone, lying here. No one will wake you up, no one knows you’re here—and that’s fine, you reflect, as a smile lights your face.

 

Teaser 111(i), claustrophobic moisture mewing stale

Worried, I tune in to Damian … but I’m relieved to see you’re now home from Downstairs, Damian, unconscious in your poky room. I peer behind your sleeping eyes, and jump at what confronts me: on the Asbury Park Boardwalk, a fat chaotic Ferris wheel clatters round, swaying, and disgorges vicious children, every face with pinpoint eyes, hard-pupilled, stripped of humanity, like puppets’ eyes. Their tongues lick ice-cream cones filled with scoops of puréed meat-cream, shiny-pink and fatty. Whispers assail you in strange tongues, as crickets chirp and locusts thrum—all too loud and jagged. The sand-castles on the beach are wriggling with weevils; an eyeless fleshy black creature, all legs and whiskers, burrows down in fury and hides in the sand. Something very nasty is close below this surface … and Damian, you’re just a step too close to mental illness here, yes?

Like a painting on red velvet of huge-eyed, stunted kids, the child-faces here make you stare closer in at them, to catch the hard-eyed fakeness underneath the sunny smiles, and the pools of sick, and sickly-crusted madness grinning out through the sweetness. Dim-lit and floppy-limp, an ingrown girl dressed in swimmy-pulsing orange moves pins out of one tiny box, to another tiny box—pin by pin, week by week, month by month, year by year, and age by age—saliva on her bleeding fingers, fixing you with desperate eyes, up through your insides, with claustrophobic moisture mewing stale inside her needy, piteous stare—

 

Teaser 111(ii), you hang from the shriek’s face

You jolt awake and glance around your dark poky bedroom, breathing gaunt.

A coiled shriek, tucked in a corner of the bedroom by the wardrobe ahead of you, vibrates like a slab of red and blue meat. It twists up and rises, unsticking bonily from inside itself, through a mist of little sighs from the tiny mouths scuttling in the long swaying grass around the bed.

The shriek steps jerkily toward you, coming fast through the grass. The tiny mouths hiss and gibber at your toes. The shriek shoots out bloody legs in your direction, drags you in amongst itself and through the tendons of its sticky face, and sucks out your insides from in between your own teeth, with soft-piped mandibles. The mouths chatter on beneath the red and blue meat, while you hang from the shriek’s face, knotted up and paralysed, your insides sucked out.

Far across the ocean, as tall as your imagined pirate ship, booms a drum with a timbre like the splitting of Antarctica. Dark sky-bells ring beyond it in cascade, where you fall out and down, buried choking in your own corpse—out and down and down, to your death.

 

Teaser 113(i), dried blood in yellow light

As we reach First Avenue I give a start, for sitting beneath a yellow street-light on our right, with his face buried between his knees and his arms hugging his shins, is Angel. He jerks his head up at the sound of our approach, and I see he is wearing mirrored sunglasses. Sunglasses at night—too cool for school, excuse me! Alaia and I stop in our tracks. He jumps to his feet and stands still, staring us down as if tensed to pounce, like the little she-wolf I’ve seen so often inside him; and something about his lone presence down here and the tilt of his sunglasses prompts me to cock the most powerful, intrusive and hypnotic gaze, right behind my eyes, ready for deployment at an instant’s notice.

Nobody moves. The silver ring in his right ear glints in the yellow street-light, beside a dark-red polo-neck the colour of dried blood, and I register that for the first time he’s not wearing his silver cross, unless it’s underneath … and that would be the bulge of his gun, right there in the left pocket of his black leather trousers, exactly where I saw him tuck it when he slipped out of the back door of Lucan’s house.

Without warning he slinks towards us, with an undulating movement like a skunk or a weasel, and stops just a metre away. “You!” he says, managing to seem as if he’s hissing out the word, even though it has no s and he’d have softened any s if there’d been one. I cannot tell, through the sunglasses, which of us this was aimed at. “Sound & Vision and Big Bang were incredible—you’re both absolutely incredible!”

His mouth grins, ferret-like. Being unable to see his eyes, I find myself focusing on his pointed canines, as well as on his left hand in case he reaches into his pocket. It is all this practical watchfulness that’s preventing me from just tuning in to him and observing his intentions: doing that would be way too distracting for the practical watchfulness to be maintained at the same time. “Thank you,” I say.

I hold that hypnotic gaze of mine on the very brink of being unleashed, and my concentration at peak focus. Again, no one moves.

This is seriously dangerous—no question.

 

Teaser 114(i), the dark beauty of his eyes

Lucan is frozen with weakness and terror.

My hand reaches out and touches Alaia beside me. Moving as little as possible, she and I exchange glances. I make the tiniest of head movements, down Ocean Avenue to the south, and we both start to ease away in that direction. Straight away something invisible wriggles out of Angel’s frame, like a great black squid that’s grown to fill a building until it must lift the roof and spill its tentacles out from under the eaves. This invisible squid grabs Alaia and me both, pins us where we are, wrenches our heads back around to look at Angel and keeps our eyelids forcibly open. Seeing that his head has turned away from Lucan to face us, I flinch in anticipation of some kind of eye-themed nightmare…

I find, however, that his eyes are not at all hard to look at, even when they are fixed upon me in particular—and at this discovery I experience in turn surprise, relief, interest and gratitude. He’s being easy on me, I realise: he doesn’t hate me, after all. Wow! I feel a special glow and the stirrings of a kind of love for him, on account of this great leniency towards Alaia and me.

The dark beauty of his eyes is colossally amazing, too—almost too much for me to bear, in fact.

 

Teaser 114(ii), infernal pixie ring-master

Angel turns back to Lucan. You too! his eyes hiss. Get on back to the house—I’ll catch you later. And fearful after Kev, Lucan slopes off, weakly into shadow.

Angel swings his head around and looks at us with menace. My fear returns, for real. I see that Alaia is as malleable as me. He points up Ocean Avenue, his meaning clear: walk. Docile, she and I comply, on a forced march, two blocks northwards, back to the carcass.

Through the concrete columns I can see that the cars and cops have all gone. Angel points us through a hole in the wire-netting fence, then steers us towards the inland end of the building, where there’s a bare unfinished stairway lacking any kind of containing walls, balusters or handrails, rising eleven storeys to the top. He stands at the bottom of this, still holding us with his gaze, and points up. “Come on up, you little monkeys,” he says, with the ceremonial glee of some infernal pixie ring-master. “Let’s breathe the fumes in, and paint the night red!” As Alaia and I step forward, I’m startled to realise that the vicious, lisped exuberance of this utterance is in fact the very first thing he has spoken aloud, since my powers were transferred into him, despite the barrage of verbiage that feels as if it’s been fired through the air since then.

 

Teaser 115(i), a slight and delicate figure

And there he is, waiting for me, standing with his arms folded, pixily infernal in his dark-red and black. A slight and delicate figure to begin with, he’s all the more so at forty metres’ distance and set against the ocean’s flat vastness rolling out and away into the east, its ripples sharp and tiny in the moonlight. Yes, his eyes are burning atop his silhouette, very dangerously—and yet it seems that despite his ring-master’s bravado downstairs, he hasn’t yet decided quite what to do with us. We’ve all started creeping round our stage, here; I’m not sure when we started this. In and out among the line of columns we weave, as if threading through the blades of a knife forest, summoning the memory of how Alaia and I did the same among the drainpipes standing on her roof, while we celebrated Sound & Vision’s birth. This time our attentions are focused on Angel, instead of on each other. We have time to share only occasional glances, during which we don’t know which one of us Angel is watching, nor whether considerations of survival may now force us into mistrust of each other or even some kind of betrayal.

 

Teaser 115(ii), wrestling back my dead smile

While we all creep around like this, Angel’s eyes zero in upon me properly at last without warning, his gaze shoots through the air as if around the giant curve of a particle-accelerator, locks itself into my gaze and distorts this scene forcibly into a private memory of my own—so that he and I are suddenly prowling a heathery moorland plateau from somewhere a long time ago in my life, half-evading and half-pursuing each other across it now. (So this is what it used to feel like to other people, when I dragged them into some primal memory of their own.) A dim blustery sky hovers low above us, up here on the moor, but around us are grand valleys and light pouring down onto far horizons. As we stare sullenly at each other, his voice comes flat across the heather, but it does so a fraction of a second in advance of when his lips pronounce the words I’m hearing: I think you’d like a Ghost Town, wouldn’t you, Jaymi—yes! with his eyes accusatory, blazing and psychic in the moonlight. I shudder, while at my feet a twitch of yellow street-light glances in among the heather. Thinking on these disconcerting words of his, I register that their softened sibilants were echoing almost imperceptibly, after they were first pronounced but before his lips appeared to form them—a faint ghosting pre-echo that reveals a dimension I have missed until now, which immediately makes even this grand exterior space feel like the inside of an echoing stone chamber. The ghosted, lisped s in his phrase Ghost Town, in particular, constituted a sinister and malicious feast all by itself, for seconds after the end of the original s in Ghost, hissing and flaring on and on after the word, like an insect burning alive in a flame. I feel a dead smile play inside my lips, but I wrestle it back in, so it never quite emerges. That’s your dead smile, I can see it! he slants his words out across the moorland space, which now feels as enclosed as the space across a table with a mouse-trap upon it. Good that I just named it, don’t you think? he grins, to help it come again to you more easily and stick inside your jaws less?—and this final double ss is like a pair of agonised, mutilated mosquitoes, separated from each other and trapped, one in each of my ear canals.

 

Teaser 115(iii), I’ll switch off your head

I’m unsure whether he is speaking with his mouth or his eyes, as he carries on: This is weird, isn’t it, Jaymi? These spaces and colours feel like they’re on a screen, not around you. These vistas may be backdrops! I may turn around inside your little stone chamber and bite your neck, any moment, don’t you think? Something’s deeply wrong, you know. It’s creepy, too. Look around… Yes, it’s creepy, Jaymi, isn’t it … but you must allow it’s alluring, so why not come and lick me and I’ll switch off your head?

As he swings himself around a column only three metres away, the moonlight flares off his big silver earring and the moisture on his canines. I’m struck once again by the unbelievable allure of Angel’s eyes, finding it hard to look away from his bewitching beauty. Jaymi, he confides through his eyes or his mouth, I’m careful that you don’t see my real stare of thirst through the dusk at you—my green flesh and sunken cheeks would scare you away. When you stare at the silver-mirrored windows of my black limousine, as it slithers and it oozes through the night-streets, you can’t see my face right in front of you, behind your own reflection, frozen in a grimace that has gripped me for hours into wet-burning shame and exhaustion in the darkness…

Deep longing flickers in his mesmerising eyes, and with that last unbearable sibilant in darkness comes a hiss among the carcass-columns, as of gas in air vents—its shiver like the quiver of the shadow-dagger stuck in Angel’s chest, with his whisper in my ear, Stroke the blade soft on Jaymi’s neck, while he sleeps… The air clanks thickly, every clank ringing on for many seconds, as mocking oily voices call Jaymi! … Jaymi! … Jaymi!…

 

Teaser 115(iv), tiny cries shrivel upward

Angel Deon’s face hangs huge in the sky above a space of cloud, staring out of mirrored contact lenses—shrieking eyes across the ghost town. Across his left pupil a silver plane flies, with a tiny fleck of dirt upon its ice-coloured nose. The fleck of dirt’s a camera and the nose is a bomb-nose, primed to broadcast live tonight on network television, hurtling down—what a rush! The sun shines cold from the red crystal skies of a lurid mountain sunset and the bomb falls silent, its momentum that of ten thousand trains or a march of giant pylons through a forest to infinity. As the east grows dimmer, an obscene fungal bomb-cloud sprouts from a city; burning towers flare, tiny cries shrivel upward and the air beats thick fire. A woman in Arabia with eyes like the desert tells a camera, “As we turn, an explosion booms across the Gulf, the earth shakes, the sky turns red, a sword of light flies from the sea, and towards us comes a wave as high as a ship. What’s the sword of light, you ask? Methane exploding, released from sediments beneath the Gulf bed.” Cut—to where a great Antarctic crust of ice, the Devil’s Ballroom, grinds and snaps and crashes to the ocean. That’s the sound of the atom splitting! Angel’s giant face whispers from the sky, with a honey-coloured knife-smile purring like a scalpel stroking velvet the wrong way.

But now behind the clanks, Alaia whispers—and she’s teaming up with Angel against me, as I feared. Alaia is betraying me… Cold as a jewel, yet my voice burns, pitiless as desert sun parching human tongues into crackly black parrots’ tongues, around his shrieking eyes as demons dance and lightning flashes dry, she hisses. She’s becoming Angel’s soundtrack, as once she was mine. Is he forcing her, or is this what she wants? I am numb to reflect that she’s turning this on me, and I dread what she and Angel may be planning to inflict.

 

Teaser 115(v), death in powers of ten

Out of eyes without a smile, she fires a question at me: Was it ever said you’re like a flame in the distance? She points towards a corner of the building, where I seem to see myself like the whisk of a ghost, with a faint flame of purple in me, thin behind the ocean’s sigh. My ghost-self looks at me, with purple-brown-black points of light in its eyes, then licks its lips and summons a bevy of sinister things that step across our stage: proud as horses, these things glance sideways to check their formation, then they slink across the moonlit concrete, launch into slow-motion handsprings and back-flips and vanish… Where are they taking me, this villainous pair, Alaia and Angel? Where? she replies. To your death, Jaymi, where d’you think? Loud in my song, the voice of death. Death in tens: raised up from here to twenty-six powers, shooting out from my tongue and Angel’s eyes; and lowered eighteen powers more collapsing down from here. From tiny single deaths, to deaths of great collapsing towers and of towns. Deaths of cities and of centuries, expanding to the rhythm of the rise and fall of empires—a grand wave of death spilling upward and down through millennia, like a tide. Deaths of species, over millions of years. Deaths of planets and of suns, over billions of years, in ever-grander, slower waves. And deaths of whole galaxies and clusters of galaxies—

 

Teaser 117(i), like the eyes of a person

For the third and last time, therefore, I enter Pippa’s dim, cluttered apartment, where the space is all wrong. Once we’re inside, an unholy quiet prevails. Evelyn and I both seem to be walking on tiptoe, as if not to wake something. “I’ll go look on the balcony,” she whispers, heads up the hallway past the kitchen and pushes the sitting room door open.

Left alone, I glance down the long, narrow corridor in the other direction, towards Pippa’s closed bedroom door, and am startled to notice a faint light gleaming through the hinge of that narrow door… I creep nearer to it, careful to make no sound. There’s the keyhole. I bend down very slowly, bring my eye level with it, and peer through.

I recoil—for there it is. Exactly the figure Kim described: what looks like some kind of vegetable twin of Angel Deon, sitting naked in a wheelchair.

These eyes are quite different from the big, creepy, beautiful eyes on the waxwork on Damian’s path, however. These are weasel eyes.

These eyes look like the eyes of a person.

At least, I think they do…

Can Pippa really have kept a person in her apartment, like this, for who knows how many weeks, or months, or years?

 

Teaser 119(i), the driver like a skeleton

I look away in horror, feel my head start to swim and move it down between my knees. I know I must help the smaller boy … but when I come to, the music’s gone. I’m reclining in the passenger’s seat, which has been pushed back so that I’m looking up through the van’s open roof. I sense the driver is a bit like a skeleton, but I can’t be sure of this because I cannot tear my gaze away from the gluey ultramarine of the sky, which is enrapturing me: my eyes rootle into the sky’s surface as if to eat it. The driver turns from the wheel to me, grinning, and I feel more than ever how like a skeleton it is, wearing a wide-brimmed hat. Still I am fixated on the orgy of darkest blue, which grows ever larger and more glutinous. The driver leans close to me and its bony lips whisper, When the student is ready, the master will appear! Grinning wide, it blows upon my face a breath that’s at once decaying parchment, rich wine and the smell of Greek seas through the ochre dusk light of a temple on an island—then my gaze is released from the sky with a jolt and I am sitting in the driver’s seat, alone.

The car is cruising fast, sliding smooth on the curve of an elevated freeway, high as a suspension bridge, that strides grey and silver through the countries of a jungle on a march of slender legs I can see far ahead disappearing in a mist of light.

Either side of this sleek path of concrete and steel spreads a wet land of spongy green, monkey shrieks and bird plumes, hanging vines and steamy swamps twinkling with leeches and gassy mud, yellow fish and tiny white bubbles on the underside of weed fronds.

 

Teaser 119(ii), my freeway through the jungle

Jaymi, you see that ahead? comes the vanished driver’s voice, like a whisper from the back seat. A shadow in the overhead mirror—quickly gone. You see that ahead? comes the whisper from my left, and half a mile ahead beside the freeway a fountain of orange flame bursts from the jungle, to burn high and clear against the fluid sky. That’s your death, at age sixty-eight! You want a preview? Go ahead—I’ll hold the wheel while you look! and I can feel the steering-wheel being adjusted as we drive on, to keep us with exactness in the centre of our lane.

The orange fountain-flame seems to ripple into folds. A picture forms beyond it: the outside of a tiny washroom window. Inside the window, in a cubicle, a long shrunken grey face nuzzles into view, sick and pinched and mad with dead despair. Its chin sinks to rest upon the sill, its deadened eyes looking down to the right, as if it’s never been outside this poky washroom. It spits greyly, feebly—and suddenly I see that it really hasn’t been outside the washroom, for decades, and it knows it never will.

The flame-folds ripple back, to cover up my future, like a curtain sliding across a movie screen. The fountain subsides to the jungle canopy. Control of the steering-wheel returns to me. I drive on, distraught. The spongy land on either side carries on, as if nothing’s happened, just as beautiful and alien as ever.

“No,” I think, then scream aloud “NO!…” and hear my voice, flat and dead upon the closed air.

I sense I had to help someone, back there behind us. Who was that?

I sense, in addition, that the word I just shrieked was a sound and nothing more.

 

The above teasers for The Imagination Thief’s Video-Book are here too:

And in the Vimeo showcase “Teasers for THE IMAGINATION THIEF by Rohan Quine”.

And in the YouTube playlist “Teasers for THE IMAGINATION THIEF by Rohan Quine”.
 

Here are the basics of what the novel is all about.

Here are some great reviews of it.

Buy The Imagination Thief in paperback or ebook or audiobook format.

 

To watch any of the 120 complete and unabridged mini-chapters of the novel’s video-book format (for which the above little video snippets on this page are just short teasers), see:
here for Part I (comprising unabridged mini-chapters 1–17);
here for Part II (comprising unabridged mini-chapters 18–30);
here for Part III (comprising unabridged mini-chapters 31–50);
here for Part IV (comprising unabridged mini-chapters 51–60);
here for Part V (comprising unabridged mini-chapters 61–68);
here for Part VI (comprising unabridged mini-chapters 69–83);
here for Part VII (comprising unabridged mini-chapters 84–94);
here for Part VIII (comprising unabridged mini-chapters 95–103);
here for Part IX (comprising unabridged mini-chapters 104–115); and
here for Part X (comprising unabridged mini-chapters 116–120).

Buy The Imagination Thief by Rohan Quine in paperback or ebook or audiobook format.

 

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Rohan Quine, The Imagination Thief, literary fiction, litfic, magical realism, horror, dark fantasy, cyberpunk, contemporary, science fiction, gay, transgender, LGBTQ+, visionary, spectacular, Asbury Park, New Jersey, New York, small town, psychic, broadcast, enhanced ebook