Text of short teasers for the Video-Book format of Hallucination in Hong by Rohan Quine

On this page are the full texts of the teasers excerpted from Hallucination in Hong Kong’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), your soft brown eye-shadow

I start to doze … and feel myself connected to you, Angel, just as I’d have tuned in, back in Asbury Park. On my left the oval porthole, and in front of it, you—your face in profiled silhouette, framed in sunshine through the cirrus. You turn to me. Soft brown eye-shadow’s streaked across the tan skin around your dark bewitching eyes: your gaze, which I know so well, still melts me from so close. Our hands are almost touching. Your lips part; I feel I’m sliding down between them, warm and sleek. I murmur, “I could eat you!”

Your eyebrows jump a fraction as they sometimes do unprompted and you laugh, while your eyes flicker down to my lips. “Me too!” you say.

“We’ll share you,” I concede.

 

Teaser 1(ii), your eyes gentle, soft, unreal

Perched against the Peak, above the Midlevels, facing north across the city to the mainland, is the stage. On the mountain-face a screen of vast dimensions will project events below it to the multitudes beyond the front few thousand. Throughout the concert, out of two giant gas jets either side, dancing tongues of scarlet flame will lick the night to east and west. Clamped to the towers of rock that flank the screen, a pair of speaker banks will blast a sound to pluck the laser lattice spilling out of each in orange cities spread across the sky.

Beyond the ground around the stage—from hills, gardens, roofs, windows, streets, cars, trains, boats, balloons—they will watch. To see us live, a six-figure number; worldwide a nine-figure one, by satellite. To remain within Hong Kong will be to hear us.

Wherever I requested, be it almost inaccessible, are television cameras, poised to shoot our image out to cities I have never even heard of. Everywhere, on records, posters, clothing, magazines, screens and airwaves—my face, my voice, and sometimes yours.

You will join me up on stage to sing our track, the one you join me for. Already I can hear it now, the newspaper scream: “Sounds of hell and heaven dance together!” Oh yes; manic and sublime, like the end of the world… Even now before the frenzy, I can see too the way it will be told in the histories when we’re dead. Already I can see it done, that grand device of cinema and televised biography: the picture, a well-chosen image of the subject (happy, sad or enigmatic), camera zooming in to frame the frozen eyes; the soundtrack, their creation, living on; the coupling of the two, a never-failing means of reining in an era’s worth of feeling to the service of the subject. What a game! But the bio now continues. First you come in focus like a dark sun out of mist, your coolest gaze above a point beside the camera, expressionless to carry off your beauty and preserve its type—androgynous, unreadable, exquisitely effeminate, your devastating eyes enormous, gentle, soft, unreal—while round you like a hurricane, my voice, and you its eye! The clouds all scatter then; my face replaces yours, and your voice mine. The gasp with which you start our track is sex, your breath addictive, sultry, aching, drugged, a self-renewing cycle of appeasement and revival of desire—and for my head whose eyes are staring out behind it from the screen, a voice to burn inside forever…

 

Teaser 1(iii), grinding rocket smear of fire

It feels as if I surface on a surge of nauseous terror, find not you on the empty seat beside me but a wodge of abstract pain. It’s all going wrong now. Flying to Hong Kong to give the concert—that’s not real, no, that’s memory. I struggle in a sick fog. The concert… It happened, yes—nine years ago. Everything is different now, muddy, churning, dim. The yellow-lit ceiling of the tunnel I am seated in alone with other passengers is leaning in towards me as it swells and now disjoints in lurid fragments. I look at the outside shape of my body to check that it is not what it feels from the inside, a tight thick mass like a bag of maggot-organs pumping fluidly at tension in a helpless breathing skin without extremities. I try to move, but only squirm where I am. I make to grip the seat, to prove myself articulated—manage, yes, but then my fingers feel like flabby arms encircling something huge. I panic, as towards me, with inexorable slowness and a constant whine that cuts the clotted atmosphere around it with the metal sheen of lipstick laid on whale-flesh, rolls a dark ball-bearing denser than a star, in a hollow on a time-grid that yields to its passage as a mattress to a stone. The tunnel warps at its approach—becomes a giant dome upon whose underside I hang, gummed. Across its giddy vault I see you swaying on a balcony. Your tongue twitches out from your mouth like a bacon rasher poking through a letter-box. I dip to bite it off; but the thought, when my own tongue lolls on my teeth, of a hippo sliding open down a razor blade prevents me. Lazy, you jump from your perch. A silent roar of waters yawns around you; writhing hands and staring eyes are pawing as you fall… Rushing air, grinding rocket smear of fire on blistered sky—then with a thud you land impaled on jagged railings, shriek and rock with maniac laughter like a puppet in a box at a fair on the pier.

I jolt awake, dripping sweat, see again the empty seat.

Yes, I’m going to Hong Kong, but not for a concert I performed nine years ago. No. I’m coming for a very different reason now.

 

Teaser 1(iv), figures scurry in the wings

Hong Kong. The night arrives. I’m on the stage. The stage is dark and quiet.

I look down upon a cityscape of heads and sweating towers, where a murmured babble rises in the air. The gas burns high and clear a hundred metres either side. Ahead of me the moon is tinted peach, hanging heavy on the sharp black sky.

I turn to face the Peak, its bulk my backdrop. East and west, flame-lit crags start from shadow, flicker in silence to the rhythms of the dance of the jets. Underneath, softer slopes ripple out and fade away. Above me, phosphorescent sky, my ceiling.

A thud from high to right and left escapes the darkened speakers: skeins of birds fizz out from each, coil up and twinkle and evaporate, to prick the tiny sidelight nestling up beyond the cornice of the Peak.

Behind the stage, the screen, gigantic and dark, projecting focus of the multitude, aglow for my anticipated image.

Hooded figures scurry in the wings, and then are still. I shift my weight from side to side, then poise…

 

Teaser 1(v), metronomic bomb-blast

A single strident note from lead guitar rips out to crack the sultry night above Hong Kong. Four synthesiser pips attend the echo, at their leisure. (Clatter of distant pebbles from the rock face either side. The human stew is mewing massively behind me, too, soon to be drowned.) Then the Peak emits another blast from lead to split the air between the tower blocks and shoot across the bay to mainland China, where the Guangdong Hills curve up behind the plains beyond Kowloon to form the back wall and the cheap seats of my natural auditorium. This second stroke is tweaked three seconds later, like the first, by a hiccupping pip from synth—a drip of fat that glistens at a jagged skewer’s end. Another drip, another, and another, and another—then again the heavy skewers twang, as long as trains, four end-on-end, each double-shafted, splintered, spiked, corrosive black. Now the music dives to gain momentum for the onslaught it has so far merely fanfared, with a barrage of five battering-rams of sound launched in turn, the third and fourth a Double Dare aimed higher than the other three, the last one tailed by a cowlick of clicks like a pennon… Here the searchlights blaze and flood the stage; the screen lights up, to show a long shot of the flames and all between. I see myself, a speck of black upon a central shelf of white, my back to audience and camera, growing larger by the second as we zoom in close towards me. Five more battering-rams, again a tail, and whine of feedback. As the camera streaks in closer, I prepare to turn. The viewpoint dips and lurches over valleys full of heads, to frame my swelling silhouette against the screen: on screen, on screen, on screen—for now a regress yawns and flickers round my static head and tunnels as I stare and am caught up with, through the Peak, the Sea, the Ocean, to the Ice and out beyond… Five more battering-rams. Then the drums explode in a lazy burst, cascade, and land in rhythm on the beat they now inform, both slave and master—pre-volcanic, unrelenting, like the metronomic bomb-blast from the foundries in the centre of the earth!

 

Teaser 1(vi), be swept up and carried

In fear the human wavelets near the stage attempt retreat, but only bunch up into dunes. Central by the footlights, like a prompt-box, is a monitor relaying for me what is up on screen: my face close up, my golden eyes triumphant, dark and lethal, burning level-gazed as if to scorch in double path the lightless wastes of Asia… Separate sectors of the multitude as prearranged are floodlit, one by one, in direct echo of the movement of my eyeballs on the screen. The music has grown richer now and fuller than you ever thought it could be (I address not you, my Angel): dense as print, its layers and its columns, every sound in precisely the role I allot. The size of its ego, which is monstrous and beautiful, makes of it not a hemisphere that seeks to find completeness in your listening, but a sphere—well, nearly that—of vocational charisma, for your wonder, celebration and resentment. It is rape, glee, destruction, assault with intent to engulf. As invitation to dance, unacceptable, for proffered by a giant too big to engage with. In any case, you cannot tell its sex: it appears to be male but displays upon inspection several curious transcendences of gender. Your choice, then; decline from the wallflower beds, or be swept up and carried where you never knew there was… You hesitate. The giant stoops to grab. You try to bolt—he claws you up. You struggle—he grips, you shriek.

 

Teaser 1(vii), music pouring from the Peak

You try to shout but cannot. Whistling air, then you smack into his shoulder with a crunch, where you dangle, cling and ooze, moaning faintly to the beat, with a smile. But now beside you from the giant’s neck, as if a glint of steel were pushing out through the flesh to pierce the chitin and unfurl and cut the air, erupts a blade and licks itself—my voice at last! My voice has come, to sing for your destruction. At its ruptured scream the giant roars in pain, clutches vainly at this scythe that slices out below his chin to kiss the air in which it hardens as it twitches, then he flounders on a swell of sound encroaching from behind, bogging down his every step. Glancing back in panic, he can see the music pouring from the Peak—as if from its entire length the mountainside were belching out a glacier of blackened flesh and metal, flowing out above the stage across the jets (around my feet its shadowed outline, chewing sluggish teeth of sightless grated white, like divers’ pains) then out and down among the millions, inexhaustible and hideous as a vision out of Giger. The giant tries to run, but waves of darkness overtake. From their surface shoots a spume of treble sound, the jagged top-case of a carriage of immaculate complexity whose lowest treads, articulated wheels of bass as never heard, on caterpillar tracks as tall as towers ride up over any barrier, with majesty inhuman, biomechanoid, insane…

 

Teaser 1(viii), so watch me now

But there you nestle, you who toppled from the giant when he fell, where you squiggled and you bickered for the crannies—yes you did! Cower now, then, and shake to hear that voice stride infernal and divine across the wastes of metal sky above the framework where you hide; for as it enters you, diffuses, throbs inside you like a drug you cut with ice and powdered glass before you shot it, every shrivelled twist inside you will be infiltrated—sternum, ribcage, heart and eyes! My spider-movements’ legs are bass guitar: its claws are snouts, to rear and lick you where you shiver… I glimpse a sudden image of the singer on the monitor, his skinny leaping body as his echo thunders merciless, immense and redly gashing on the blackness of the music. My own voice and actions mate with his and ride upon him, cut him open, mingle with his blood—ram him through and flow around, assimilate him whole, to multiply eleven-fold the ecstasy and agony he stirs. I see a close-up, shafting out across the multitude my singing mouth, my eyes, my leering face, my open head and gullet, shrieking guts and arteries. Yelps of guitar shoot up the corners of the sky in branching clumps and flower in umbrella sprays of yellow. Bass shakes the bones in the boulders of the sea, while the hills blaze hollow eyes and groan! Heads and bodies bubble in the distance all around me. Don’t you hear me now? Don’t you feel me down inside you, you before me, every one of you? D’you kid yourself that you’ll escape the damage I intend? I think you do! So watch me now…

 

Teaser 1(ix), magnetic in its dominance

Lights weave and lash. You are rapt, you are stunned, you are limitless and legion, tier on tier as up the sides of a satellite dish. Through screens and speakers round the world, I control, hour on hour, centre-stage—your collective fascination’s poisoned cynosure. I drink the lurid limelight as a desert gasps for fluid, while a billion spotlight eyes are drinking me. My mesmeric voice resounds and soars and swoops, and softly lacerates (omnipotent, relentless, for a night). As the vaults of heaven boom, the firmament reverberates; Hong Kong, the continent, the oceans and the world at last are borne up and churned in a storm-coloured vortex on the cyclone of the sound. Smooth as china now, its lesion: magnetic in its dominance: in power, sublime. Your understanding stretches to its peak, then floats on a plateau of air at the foot of a further scale of impossible peaks to stretch towards. Jangle of blades in your head—then the music implodes. The carriage disappears as black spaghetti through the mouths of the Peak; its echo dies, like a house that snaps and totters and collapses, to be sucked through a furrow in the carcass of the toad that rots and winks above the lift-shaft in the earth below the cellar.

I bow my head a moment, turn and leave. The stage is dark and quiet again.

 

Teaser 2(i), you smiled back shyly

Then I turned back. At last she was gone.

And there you were.

You blinked the most bewitching eyes I’d ever seen. You looked around, as if deciding what on earth to do now. Both hands on your glass, you took a gulp from it. A thin fire sang in me. You saw me, held my glance a moment, dropped your eyes—looked again a second later—looked away.

I sipped my drink and gazed about. My friend said something. Absent, I replied; tapped an idle finger on my glass; watched the bar swim with people, and my mind with your presence.

You shifted, leaning forward, legs and arms crossed. I caught your eye and smiled. You smiled back shyly, seemed about to speak. I leaned across to hear you through the babble. Waited—no reply. You looked at me in hesitation, laughed. Spoke at last: “…I don’t have anything to say!”

I grinned. “What’s your name?”

“Angel.”

“Jaymi.”

“Oh,” you said.

 

Teaser 2(ii), the silver birch glade

The next day. Two-fifteen, and there you were. Your T-shirt was turquoise. “D’you know about the garden?” I asked.

“No. Where?”

So out from the bar and down the back road we bubbled, to the corner where the path between the hedges begins. Cyclists swerved to pass us. By an iron gate we stopped. You darted up to peer between the bars and shot a glance of excitement at me over your shoulder, as you saw for the first time the lawn sloping down to the silver birch glade where the sap burned heavy through a lazy sway of branches. Behind us somewhere in the distance on the wind, over roofs, played a clarinet. Reaching around you, I slid the heavy key into the lock, turned it gently and pushed.

With a low squeak, the gate swung wide.

Inside, I pushed it shut. You scudded through the bushes to the edge of the expanse of lawn and stopped. Cedars rose in state beyond the grass out of high beds of foliage, where other secret regions of the garden could be glimpsed. Gnats danced pin-pricks in the air above a sundial, like the ticking of the seconds—like a hundred years before. Above, blue radiance.

You gave a sort of wiggle as you reached to touch my arm, while the colour and the light within your eyes were as your whisper—“This is magic!” Through your hair shone the sun, as sirens sing. Between us now the crackle was electric.

 

Teaser 2(iii), affection felt as sun on stone

Setting off across the space, I turned to meet you running up behind me with the smile of a child. “Let’s go!” I said.

And so we went; and sitting in the glade, together alone at length and sweetly, we talked for many hours—a talk that felt like running through a field. Laughter flung our friendship up in shafts, till our words were made of instinct and intimate inconsequence. We fell quiet at last, no need to speak. Clarinet strains lapped again across the lawn and through the glade, and came to mingle with the ripples of the sunny sea of leaves upon whose amber crackled surface we were buoyed.

Then, with the simplest of manoeuvres, your warm shy body lay alongside mine, and the touch of its affection felt to me as sun on stone.

I looked at you, and happiness flowered in me like a burst. Your eyes gazed at mine through your lashes; turned away. (No, you weren’t very good at eye contact then.) I held you closer still and whispered in your ear. And so we lay, till liquid birds lulled and coaxed through the rich soft dusk.

Then we sneaked quick and quiet across the twilight of the lawn, past the sundial and back through the shrubs to the gate. Your upper lip sweated faintly. My mouth was alive, juices like wine…

Behind us, the gate swung shut with a clang.

 

Teaser 2(iv), dry ice on the dance-floor

And there you were.

Inexorably we kissed, and as we did so the strobe-lit atrium resounded with the opening cry of a track that was the sound of the week or month then. I turned to the dance-floor, dragging you complaining as you laughed, tripped upon the steps and nearly fell. (I’d have thought of it as our track, if only you had liked it—still, you had no choice this time.) I led us to the centre of the crowd. Catching up, you turned on me with useless boxing motions; I feigned terror. You pretended to be bored as you laughed, dancing close to me. Dry ice gulped at us and rose to block you out. I made to kiss your hand but caught your ear. The music seemed to lift us to a land of instant fun, love, money, sex, fashion, hope and pain, all beautifully arranged, both leisurely and urgent. Seeing your divine smiling eyes seeking mine alone, I even felt I liked all these people around me. Are there any brain surgeons here? I wondered absently. Who knows, there may be several. Which are they, and which of the rest could do to see them? You can’t tell. Who’s a good machine, and who’s a bad? Who can write a music so sublime you’d not believe it? No, forget it now. We’re dancing on the dance-floor, you and I—watching, being watched! We’re beautiful, both of us, meaninglessly so. We’re sane, healthy, lucky, rich. We’re too good to be true, ’cos we’re young, in love, and winning—yes! The smell of amyl nitrite was dense in the air; my head felt as if it could be cracked like an eggshell. As that track faded, the next one erupted. Your eyes lit up. You pulled me to you, arms around behind me. A friend of yours shimmered through the bodies and the dry ice—Niko, rather like a beautiful horse, making thin pointed reachings with his arms as he danced. He smiled at us with irony and came to join us here, his face sharp and elegantly selfish… And so it was we flipped, to the voice of an angel, the three of us so long ago.

 

Teaser 2(v), I love you!

It occurred to me there was something to say to you that we hadn’t yet said in the two or three weeks we’d known each other. I looked up at the strobes and wondered for a moment. But as I did so it was you who put your mouth to my ear, you who spoke still and small through the din to me: “I know what you’re thinking. I want to say it too, you know… I love you!”

I looked into your eyes from very close. Stopped dancing. Led us off the floor. Then gently, silently, slowly and ecstatically, backed by the angel’s voice, I let you know as well as I could the thing that words have never said as truthfully as touch.

Outside afterwards, the street lights were yellow in a spitting London rain. Three teenage boys approached us down the pavement. Our hands disengaged. One craned forward as they passed, as if to check in horror what he’d seen.

The words cut simply through the dark: “I hope you both die of AIDS.”

Our hands re-engaged, further on.

 

Teaser 2(vi), rotting garden-land of heaven

I pulled the window closed to keep the organ music out that filtered darkly through the glass across the court, and drew the curtains shut.

I walked to a corner of the room, while you watched. On a white shelf, a CD-player perched. In the darkness either side a candle burned high and clear. High to right and left, a pair of speakers…

I inserted a disc, flicked the switch and rejoined you in the armchair. “This is what I’ve written so far,” I said.

You nodded, looked appropriately serious and curled up against me.

Welling trumpet licked around us, coiling muscled pulses violent-smooth and pure. You gave a little quiver. Then its echo softly died. Hard to convey the effect of the sound, but the nearest I could get would be to say it died as if across a stone field, fled into a desert where a bitter cold sun chilled the sand—the shout of Pan across an empty page. We followed in the air, over hollow land to fields of fever flavoured creepy-sweet, where out of monstrous vegetation edging purple seas an aphid swarm arose on drifting haze of painted light (unreal—an honest light would breed the dead). Guitar wept on lava-fields of synthesiser, plucked our bloodlit skin with trilling squeaks thin and sad as the scream of the butterfly carried in the snowlight. The hills rolled the whites of the lakes in their eyes, but exhausted, their coloured streams, dry-lashed and dead. Now the rhythm of the music gathered majesty and force. Round a corner (once I painted it), a vision: down a straight yellow path to a valley through a vast undulation of green bubble trees we were galloping on horse-back, toward but never nearer to a river at the bottom on the other side of which ran ranges of hills, growing infinitesimally small and ever clearer till at last they were bent round, tucked up and swallowed in a haemorrhage of permanently disappearing sun… On sped our horse, its every step becoming lighter. Beyond the tideless green to either side, on a scale and at a distance not improper for sublimity, gigantic towers sprang. Their bases splayed like tree boles, with barely chance to right themselves before they pierced the clouds, where (extrapolating curve-wise) their main thrust shot to heights unseen and inconceivable. In echo of them then the horse’s hooves left the ground, so we rose on the windswept air above the valley to the sweet-rotting garden-land of heaven, where the earth seems nothing but a cinder in the sky.

 

Teaser 2(vii), growl of worms in egg-slimed earth

The music changed. The horse slowed, came to rest and dropped us on a sombre square of grass, all enclosed in a wall of gateless hedges. Turning, the horse seemed to frown at us ambiguously, reared its head and snorted, and fled into the dusk above the foliage. The grass was stiff and dry between my fingers. I reached across to him with whom I visualised myself, lay a hand upon his arm and whispered “You all right?” He smiled, nodded, moved across and curled against me, eyes closed. I stroked him, looked about me. Dark silence. In the high dense hedge to my left, a glow of shadows turning red as if an unseen sunset were spreading off horizons out beyond, where I knew the mountains rose to bite the air. A glass-coloured planet left its teeth-marks on the twilight overhead, its sudden sight producing that uneasy thrill I felt when I first saw the man in the moon. Round it hung a livid sky, ill, stagnant, dying, seeping out a sickly radiance. A faint blackish light full of bits of floating matter cast a nauseating dullness on the colours round about: Claustrophobia crept around the marches of the field—snuffled through the hedges—pulled them nearer me, pretending not to realise it was noticed. Once again, dark silence… Or was it? Had I heard a noise behind me? I turned; for the first time noticed, in a section of the hedge that seemed to rustle as with hidden wings, a cave; wheeled to face it then, and froze. Dark-bodied meat-flies buzzed in a stream from the cave mouth, collected and danced in the air. It seemed that voices soft as thunder sounded far below: grave chthonic bells, fiery harmonies, and muttered incantations echoed dead and harsh in deaf and timeless labyrinths of stone … then they vanished, leaving nothing but the buzzing of the meat-flies, swelling now in gouts. —No, there was more. From the coolness of the cave depths, a noise from a bad dream; a hum, corroding sanity as acid eats a walnut. Gulps, drips, squeals and glutinous dread, growl of worms in egg-slimed earth… I grabbed my companion and shook him, but he slept.

 

Teaser 2(viii), shocking! shocking!

Flies surged out from the cave in a black scream and massed in the air, in expectation. “Into the line of awfulness, this work!” I heard my mouth shout, and braced myself. “Here it comes!” The hedge turned ugly and the grass turned black and here it came, on a billow of bundled death: from out the hive shot a horror. Lunging out, bowing up and down in the jerkily unnatural way of cinematographic animation, accompanied by shrill-faced yelps and gimlet shrieks, sprang a cold stiff hard thin dog reminiscent of a greyhound, one metre tall, skull cleft with an axe, emitting through what looked like locust mandibles a high-pitched wheeze of eldritch cries and mandrill hoots, as if from other beings trapped inside it.

It halted, smacked its lipless snout and slavered, fixed a pair of glassy eyes on me and on the boy lying draped in my arms. I stared at its body—almost retched. No fur, but a slug-like, tuberous salad of intestines shot with pulsing purple veins. Then to my astonishment a thick, clotted, grinding voice erupted from its head and spoke: “Shocking! Shocking! Hah! We better pray for you! Shocking! Shocking! Bless you children! Hahahah!” Nocturnal eyes, anti-eyes it had, without expression.

 

Teaser 2(ix), tongue like a baguette

“Woops! What a shame!” crooned a chuckly rotten voice, then simpered, “Must have sinned! Fuck my eyes, what a rush! Hahahah!” Quickly I put myself between it and my friend, fast asleep and still unwakable. “How sweet!” it grated fawningly. “How touching… Wormsmeat!” A cold lumpy stream of vomit gushed from its muzzle like a geyser and drenched us. (To live is to boil, I reflected in a flash.) Dipping and shuffling, it bowed to the ground—weevilled nearer—thrust its grinning mask at me and shot from its mandibles a brown sticky tongue the length and thickness of a baguette. I dodged just in time, and heard the tongue sucked back through its jaws with a noise like oily sandpaper. A moist catarrhal voice leaked out from its face, as if confiding: “I know the way to your heart, you little pervert! In through your ribcage—hah!” I dived for a wide flat sharp-edged stone lying near us on the grass.

 

Teaser 2(x), pedipalps and spiders’ paws

As the gloom of the twilight digested its bellow, unexpectedly the cave mouth returned it at me magnified. I jumped, regained composure, swung the weapon upward in an access of demonic strength, and down again. While the axe descended with a whisper through the air, the creature’s second face sloughed off like a glove to show a third—this one a worm-face shaped like a fork, pumping tenderly inside as if with sightless wriggling larvae. “The plot sickens, runt!” I shrieked in parody, and slammed the axe home. The creature’s head, about to snap through my leg with its jaws, rent in two upon the blow without a sound, spilling out a stew of crawling pedipalps and spiders’ paws that scuttled through the grass to be immediately devoured by the meat-flies. Twelve sets of prim little lips pushed out from the corpse in a last collective purse of disapproval, and subsided. The worm-face maggoted about among the mess, found a nook to choke and nestle in, and twitched to a halt.

My sleepy companion stirred, stretched and shifted on the grass. “Must have fallen asleep,” he yawned. “Did anything happen?”

I laughed, kissed him, tapped his chest: “Well, I found out the way to your heart!” I said.

As the music closed, the field seemed to lift up and elongate—streaking out in strings across the darkness of my room, to disappear like vermicelli through the mesh-covered mouths of the speakers on the shelf.

At this very first hearing of my music, my Angel, you stirred, shifted suddenly beside me in the armchair, arose, murmured that you had to go, and fled my room.

 

Teaser 2(xi), darkly and passionate we kissed

Soon afterwards, at night, through suburban streets from elsewhere: you and I, returning home, saying little. Among the chimney-stacks, as if among the blackened points of pine along a dead plantation road, wept the wind.

Inside, dog-tired, we crept through the building to your room, where I lay upon the bed. You put a CD on, wandered round and sang distractedly, an effortless falsetto so bloodless and beautiful, my head swam. Vague, you came at last to join me, lay your body’s light and weight on mine, encircled by my arms. Caress of lips and lashes; through our clothes along my limbs a glimmer ran warm and wide. Close above me clanged the symmetry and measure of your cheekbones and eyes, like a gong: desert-like, deadpan, softly they killed. But there was no communication there, not since I’d played you my music. Had I played it too soon? I attended to the track we were hearing, which I knew but had never really listened to. A love song, sweet, slow and sad, sung well with simplicity, sincerity and every other trick—and now it hit me. A dangerous sense of loneliness hovered just above me, poised, then slipped and enveloped me, clamped on my mind—on its separateness from you. A deadly pulse, I felt it grip me, fill me, drain me… Slowly, deeply, darkly and passionate we kissed, ineluctable as breathing: though the burn of your lips to me was agony, I couldn’t stop. All that stirred were our tongues, playing, sliding, stroking. I felt as if I stood back to spectate, a dark and lonely watcher at some doomed and slithery ballet. How arbitrary this union was, like any other: I and You in a random room, random building, random district, town, country, era—one twenty, one nineteen, and each supposing he is closer to the other at this moment than he was the day before they met or will be when they both start to rot. We each might as well have been another. I felt so alone, or ceased to kid myself I wasn’t.

 

Teaser 2(xii), on a bed in North London

This was the first moment anyone had broken through the bubble I inhabited. I felt it was my bubble rather than yours that had broken. Your bubble touched me now, the unsheathed me. What if your bubble broke as well, to leave us touching? Would I weep, would I tremble as I clung to you? You lay your head face down upon my chest. I kept preparing words, kept seeing how inadequate they were, and always stopped myself from speaking. How to better “I love you” when it’s all there is to say but still a shortfall? I think I murmured it in any case, deliberately controlled, to stop you raising up your head to seek my eyes out with your own and draw me into them—to mask from you as well the agonised imploring face I shot around the room while I hoped (fearing to search) that there was not some dark coincidence of mirrors where you watched me and wondered what the hell I felt. What was happening? Where were you? Should I break through or not? How I wanted to, but knew I didn’t know what I would find, what reception I’d be given—didn’t know the risks involved. To melt your bubble open, or to seal them both again? It could still go either way…

Another second, then I chose. Chose to shift; and shifting, broke the spell. One move sufficed to seal me up again and leave you sealed: the victory of survival over grandeur. At first you didn’t stir. Then you had to, with a token noise.

No reunion, then, not yet. Just a separate tired proximity on a bed in North London, as the rain stung the windows.

I rolled you over, had you face me. “The moon won’t stop in its course, you know, and the sun will continue to rise!” I said.

“Let’s sleep,” you smiled.

 

Teaser 2(xiii), your usual scent of Poison

Next day, an evening of parties. We went; but you were absent, preoccupied, hardly met my eye. At length you left—you were tired, you said, you’d see me tomorrow. I nodded.

A splinter group from one party splintered again: five of us, late, in a grand white building with grass either side. Rooms on the top floor, capacious and elegant in pale green paint. The evening’s end was permanently imminent, for no one had the energy to call it. I said I would return, and slipped away to check your light.

Night shone cold about the lamps in the court, where a shadow quivered underneath my tread upon the flagstones. Inside another building, I climbed the stairs, pursued constricted corridors and found yours. As I strode, the building bled a blandly violent disco beat—the cellar. Were you there? Through the window from the kitchen by your room I peered out, saw your light was off. I crept to your door, stopped dead. Turned the handle softly, poked my head in, looked around… Empty. Nothing but the moonlight, the usual scent of Poison, and your echo in the mirror like a wink in the dark. In default of your lips, I kissed your shadow and left.

 

Teaser 2(xiv), on the crest of a mountain

I walked across the court to the bars of the gate; peered out upon the desert of the quiet of the street where the dogs should have danced in the glare of the sodium; returned to the pale green room.

Its owner had retired to his bedroom for the night. Two remained, about to leave. Was I staying? Yes I would, for a while; there was still a bottle open, unstarted, the cork thrown away—it wouldn’t keep. Then would I lock the door when I left? Yes I would.

Alone again, I settled in an armchair and stared at the flames in the grate, dying down now. I poured out a red glass and sipped—knew enough to call it finer than I knew. Piano music trilled from the speakers either side of the fire: a concerto, casual and sublime, every phrase both surprising and inevitable. Glass-doored cases of leather-bound books lined the walls. Either side of the line between my armchair and the fire were two divans, symmetrically arranged. Not many sets in this building were lived in; it struck me I was probably the only one awake in it. Centrally seated in the grandest of settings, furnished with firelight and cigarettes and freedom, Mozart attending and claret to excess; on the crest of a mountain of comfort and luck, high achievement all around me and my own music waiting … this, for the moment, I could feel to be a pinnacle. Briefly tonight, with its owner all unknowing, this room was host to an abstract guest: right there, hovering before me on the air, was a single point of light where this culture that had formed me chose to park its very peak… Soon the point would pass, swept away around the globe on unfathomable vectors of darkness and energy. But just for now it burned here, majestic and immobile, oblivious to him for whom it lit the room with soft fire—unconscious of his wish that you could share it.

 

Teaser 2(xv), red wine in the pale green room

I poured another glass, drank deep, and felt the haziest of memories assail me from a past dream: running down a cataract of myriads of wide steps of white polished balustraded marble, alone, down a mountain to a valley full of writhing silver birches in a violent gust of rain from a yellow-grey sky—

The music ended. I turned off the stereo, sat down again and poured another glass. Distant laughter echoed in the court. What extraordinary twittering it was, heard out of context—so reflex, as if from a machine. How long before that laugher would forget she ever made that sound? Perhaps in an hour, or perhaps she had already; yet for a second it had filled her, its cause so very urgent. And what of my forgetting? Would tonight remain in memory long? Would all the parties? What had we all discussed with such energy? What was it we were laughing at in candlelight, stoned the other night, the six of us in my room? (Who were we, come to that?) Reconcocted flavours overran precise facts, like weeds in a yard where the light comes seldom and aslant.

I rose, wandered through to the study, to the window. On the skyline, thick and squat above a clump of trees, the tower of the library reared black against the stars. Restless, I returned to the main room and knelt by the grate. The flames had died away but the embers were hot. I blew on them; they glowed inside, a dull infernal red. I rose again, walked across the room, sank my weight into the chair and poured another glass of wine.

 

Teaser 2(xvi), Destruction grinned and beckoned

I thought of you. Where were you now? I thought of us together, of the beauty of the friendship we had started—of the waste of it? I thought as well of our appearance to the world; of how so many when they looked at us saw only what repelled; of how bizarre this was, when we were not repelled by them. (I pictured pairs of them together, tried to feel repellence at the love that I was seeing—simply couldn’t.) How sad, then, that they should have that feeling. Sad for them, sad for us, indirectly sad for all. What a sad song it was…

Motionless, I watched an anger kindle inside me, flaring up in different places, spreading fire through my veins. Voluptuous Malevolence accosted me; its venom pumped inside; I felt no deity but Violence, dark and complete! Suddenly I yearned to extinguish a life—to feel the hot strong calm clear sharp rush of sweetness that derives from dealing death, that intoxicates and satisfies! The blood-rush! What a rush… I reached for a hand mirror, held it up and stared into my pupils in the sidelight. Destruction grinned and beckoned to me, elegant and cruel in black and pink among the shadows in the cowl of the porch—mouthed one word KILL!—blew a kiss at me and winked.

 

Teaser 2(xvii), the posse of sprinting pigs

I grinned as well, and put the last of the claret in my glass.

As I did so, an extraordinary image overtook me: a speck on the horizon, creeping nearer through a pulsing desert haze at what must be an almost supernatural speed. I couldn’t make it out, but heard a thunderous galloping accompanied by sharp cries; whatever it was was heading straight towards me. As it drew near, I saw to my astonishment a posse of a dozen sprinting pigs—ovoid, identical, like outsize toys—driven by a wild-eyed long-haired keeper who was bellowing instructions to go faster, faster, faster still… I froze as they passed close by, seeming not to notice me, all doggedly intent on the furthest horizon. Dust swirled around me. When it cleared, they were far across the plain, streaking bullet-like away to fade at last to a speck again and vanish in the haze.

I frowned at my glass in disbelief and laughed aloud. Time to go, perhaps! I drained the wine, staggered up, extinguished the lights, pulled the door shut behind me and tottered down the stairs to the court outside. I shook my head and smiled as I walked across the grass, mouthing the enquiry I addressed to the stars: “So who’s the keeper, then?”

I decided I would sleep on it.

 

Teaser 2(xviii), ripe globes of melon pouted

Saturday. Ten to eight, and on with the final touches. Round the main hall, Peruvian lilies, raspberry ripple in tint, in a faint but unmistakable condition of decay—highly convincing in plastic. Drinks, for all tastes: gin by the bucketful; wines, from Beaumes de Venise to Montbazillac; Opal Hush and silver wine in lime chrome; strawberry lemonade (in each full glass a little bear reading “Hold Me Kiss Me Love Me”). For nibbles, tangerine delights: voluptuously cream-soft, heaven-scented bonbons in the shape of juicy petals, in a frail sugar husk: orange as the sun in the evening sky, orange as the gleam in a panther’s eye, orange as the rose in the summer sun, as the fire from the killer’s gun, unrepentingly morish and bearing a similar relation to fruit as a sky-painted ceiling to the great outdoors. Ripe globes of melon pouted yearningly from bowls, next to plates of nutty fingers (sugared almonds for the nails).

As I checked once again that nothing lacked, the door swung open behind me. You, greater delicacy still: dressed, from beret down to ruched pixy-boots, in peach and black, you reminded me of sunlight—at least the kind that I prefer. Through tonight, shafts of beauty would be emanating from you, even when you were unlooked at; I resolved to intercept as many as I could.

With a quick shy movement you kissed me and skipped across the room to put the first CD on. Thunder and an ersatz downpour resounded—the start of the track, from which a main beat welled. Leaning one each side, drinks in hand, against the open double doors from the hall to the lawn where our guests must arrive, we descried through the twilight the first of the horde, rustling out from under low trees: gliding majestically across the grass towards us, between a pair of acolytes, Cyan—elegant and beautiful adornment of parties, long hair rising gravity-defying in a plume like a peacock’s, crest swaying gently in the stillness of the dusk… Gradually, from either side behind them, further figures loomed and floated into view—army of exotics, out of earshot, all intent upon the light where we stood to receive them.

You turned to me and prophesied: “It’s going to be a good one!”

 

Teaser 2(xix), the slinkiest of melodramas

Voices sprouted tiny in the air below the clouds, at shoulder level. Change of vision, end of slow-mo; start the countdown to the moment when events will take their course… And here it came, and now it flickered up around us (so close, so nearly three-dimensional)—the tableau, cutely outré, nubile and delicately scented, where the goldfish are black and the boys are like baby-faced girls. Pointlessly pretty were the players in this ravishingly narcissistic, slinkiest of melodramas: edible and elfin to venomous and vain, crotch-tight tension to loose-clad languor. “I Feel Love” wove a hypnotising under-spell around us from the speakers in the corners of the hall. I greeted, talked, listened, laughed, aware of every movement we were making. As I filled a glass with champagne from a nearly empty bottle, seventeen of the thinnest silver bangles slithered down my upturned forearm and dropped past my wrist, one by one, to collect with a shimmer and a chime against the width of my hand. The boy for whom I’d poured it smiled, stretched out his hand and seemed as well to stretch the time he took to do so: in the course of half a second, I could take him in at leisure—feel his quickness to be earnest and his readiness to laugh, know the warmth behind his violet eyes and see upon the slim tanned curve of his neck behind a brilliant metal earring-glint the softest whorl of down below a sharp close-cropped cut of hair rising smooth and gently layered as a spray of violin notes. Next to him a different beauty, dark-eyed, feminine and sleek but depraved, face taut as the muscles of his black leather jacket, with a smile full of evil and the grace of a switchblade. It offered me a cigarette, was grabbed from behind by a friend, gave a spasm and a shriek and disappeared in pursuit.

This was it, then, the moment when the party took over. I filled my glass again, lit the cigarette, surveyed the scene. I drained my glass, refilled it, and headed through the throng, my very passage making love with the crowd either side.

Conversations seethed, music leapt and people danced, over many drunken hazy hours. You surfaced next to me.

 

Teaser 2(xx), a crowd of coloured sprites

“Let’s take the air,” I said. You hiccupped, nodded, took my hand. Pushing through the people to a side door, we ran along a passage, turned a corner and emerged on a terrace looking out across the gardens.

The heat of the night behind the house was smooth, the air unblinking, as we leaned against the terrace balustrade.

Beyond a low pavilion swathed in leaves, where the scent of faded roses twined the stillness of the air, a sunken garden was surrounded by a tract of spacious woodland, grassy vistas, distant urns and lichened temples horned with towers crisp against the sky. Outline trace of light on splintered limes—moon silver. So we stood, immobile as a pair of infant brothers who have stumbled on a paradise they know they cannot tell of, for the grown-ups won’t believe it. You squeezed my hand in yours, and we set off through the rose-beds. Beyond them, a pair of granite obelisks (one pink, the other tan) flanked a flight of steps that led us up from gravel into undergrowth. Skipping out between them, we swerved down a wooded path at random, into apple glades and groves of silver birch, to colonnades of fern and shadow, dappled jade and copper-feathered on the mossy earth. We turned again. Suddenly you ran ahead and dipped from sight, your laughter ringing out behind a clearing through a sheer immuring bank of tangled thorn that hedged it in. I stalked through a gap, stopped dead and listened hard; heard a tiny muffled giggle. Leaping round the tree-trunk on my left, I caught you—felt you squeal, and held you close. From some way off, like birds of fever in a jungle, trickled skinny voices… Creeping through the undergrowth around our niche, we peered between the branches to a wide sloping glade of filtered moonlight saffron-soft, where heavy blooms among the bracken, beating silent as the chime of the stars in the night, drugged the air with tears of bitter peach. Seeping from the dark green cover of the trees around the glade, as we spied, came a stream of figures—party guests, scampering excitedly in long thin grass while emitting little eunuchoid cries that seemed to tickle, like a crowd of coloured sprites or the dance of a tiny troupe of hands in the bone of a plum … then one by one they vanished at the bottom of the glade, just as fast as they had come.

 

Teaser 2(xxi), plumes of spotlit water

Making out a constant sigh nearby, we pushed towards it and came to a dark round ornamental lake banked in fern and padded pine. Plumes of spotlit water rose and fell from the centre, where a fountain flung its cascade high. A pair of hazy water faces peered from the surface when we craned our necks to look. We peeped again, to check if they were staying there; they were. Lying on the soft-heaped needles of the bank, we lit up clove cigarettes, watched the smoke coiling up into the branches, and listened. The sough of water, softened at a distance, was immense. I closed my eyes and felt you look at me.

“What d’you see?” you whispered.

I kept my eyes closed, and thought. “A million palms,” I said, “like shingle sighing, or the beating of anemones beneath a shallow sky. We’re lying on the sand in a bay, you and I, a little way from the water. Breakers boom unseen beyond the dunes just in front of us. The shore exhales and sputters shale and scallop, scudding flakes of surf and suds of skimming foam. Mermaids flow and dance among the spray—or maybe just dugongs…” I concentrated harder. “The sky’s a fragile blue, with a softness of shell; the horizon, in the places where we see it, weeps in mist. You can feel a mane of mist around us with your fingers, though it isn’t cold. Far across the bay, never-ending and majestic, is a vast spout of white-boiling water, lit triumphantly in descant through cathedrals of ice … the South Pole! (Eight thousand miles away below us through the earth, then, the whirlpool churns whose flue this fountain sucks.) Are you with me?”

You nodded.

 

Teaser 2(xxii), hermaphrodite with dark blue eyes

“Then above us,” I continued, “on a rock beyond the sand, is a figure, plucking gently at the strings of an instrument the shape of half a pear—you know the one I mean. A hermaphrodite with dark blue eyes is planted on the promontory, the focus of the bay, as at the bottom of an amphitheatre, singing, as I see now, the siren-song that shines around us all—unearthly as that one castrato’s voice we have on record—wordless and effortlessly powerful, enclosing all the world, reaching out above the billow of the fountain into countries full of sea-fire and devil-fish and dragons, where the sun-blast is golden and the she-lions are white! And I realise that this singer, like the saddest statue coppiced in a garden unremembered in the forest of a continent long-lost, has sung forever and to nobody its rapturous lament: this song, ambassador and abstract of humankind’s achievement, offered up unbidden and unheard to the heavens, just in case—a jet of feeling poured across a bay without an audience—a music playing, as it were, through headphones to a corpse.”

 

Teaser 2(xxiii), river-light tunnel under trees

I opened my eyes, saw you shiver, lie unspeaking for a moment, then reply: “I see a wide green tunnel under trees—a river, with an ecstasy of light upon its surface. We’re reclining in a gondola together, pulled along with strength and ease by a ferryman of animal allure! Beside and behind and in front are other gondolas, propelled by a pride of human creatures of a near-unnatural beauty. The vault of leaves above is dense and luminous, receding to a needle-sharp stiletto of infinity ahead of us. Attached to the tree-trunks, candelabra flicker by the gloom of the swamps, like motes on the edges of the cone of a moonbeam. Every drop of nectar on the foliage is highlit with a magically exaggerated pin-prick of light, as in a modern stylisation of Elysium. We pass an underwater tiger in a raised glass tank, prowling up and down its prison, never resting. Each splash! from the pole echoes out across the water—through the tunnel, down the regress, into folds of flooded forest endless centuries away. The lightness of our movement on the river where we trail our hands, the gold glint of eyes below the branching of your lashes and the lapping of the water as it slops at the boat with the gurgle of a kiss … this is heaven!”

I lit a pair of cigarettes and handed one to you. “We should have pressed ‘record’ on that,” you murmured. “Now we’ve lost it forever.”

I smiled at the fountain. “Honey, we were just warming up,” I said. “Now, what else do we hear?”

You drew your breath in. “Wait,” you said, and pulled a pen and paper from your pocket. “I’m going to write this one day!”

 

Teaser 2(xxiv), the cobalt sprite that leaps

I closed my eyes, turned them upward and listened. “We’re in a long rich hall of fluted marble, where our whispers flit in echoes crisp and sweet among a gallery of pink-veined pillars, coalesce again, are magnified and boomerang across a floor of cool white stone. Reflected on the floor, from the open double doors at the end of the hall, is a more than perfect vision. Ice-golden cataracts are spilling out of mountain peaks, cascading over foothills onto butterfields of honey-stone, then out across alluvium to bays of clam and bubble-shell and mango-fruit and aloe, seeping down at last to hang inert in trenches underneath a china sea. Slowly, hand in hand, we tread the marble and the vision, down the hall towards the doors, where sublimity awaits us at the threshold of the balcony. We lean upon the balustrade, immobile, and listen… The vision conjures harmonies, colossally barbaric and celestially sophisticated: more and more intense become the sounds, attaining registers you think they can’t maintain—then they do. Like a peach afloat in grenadine, a swollen orange sun is hung in webs of vermilion, its last dying rays slashing weak through the clouds. As it shrivels in the sky, a scent of ilex, dew and linden, cep and clubmoss, eucalyptus, elm and carob spreads around us from the jungle, while the tideless groves of mangrove glisten neap and wanly cyan and the salamander valleys sing with light! Phrases of the music climb the scale towards delirium; sensations go beyond the point where pain begins to grin among the pleasure. Now a silver-flamed chariot of music lifts us up at last, accelerates—propels us out on dark-ribbed wings of our own, over incandescent oceans… Planets bob like fruits around a pale-plum moon; there to meet us is the cobalt sprite that leaps before the bright Antarctic rim. He may hate the sound that brought us there or curse us if it scares him, but he can’t say we didn’t get away with it!”

 

Teaser 2(xxv), then I felt you in my arms again

Then I felt you in my arms again, your black sweep of hair against my forehead and the sameness of our bodies, basking rapt within your love that ringed me round like abalone. The feel of you was old and new as birdsong, words unnecessary. Tomorrow we die, so let’s just do this now. We shan’t be long inside this garden where the grey poison rots, so what better while we’re in it? Love: the biggest turn-on of the lot. Love: the reason why you’re beautiful (a logic too serene to be corrupted by the fact that you were beautiful in any case). Staring through the window of your eyes, I smiled—so that’s the other one with whom I’ve come to be like this! What excitement and surprise… Our bubbles had broken now, and the feeling was calm and luminous, not frenzied as I’d once feared. I wished that I, and not my hands and gaze, embraced you here and now. I wished that all of me were in your body, occupied its space, perceived sensations through its faculties. (What a crazy wish, though! Think about the danger. What if pain began to rend you? Could I extricate myself? In any case, inhabiting your body would oblige me to receive my own caresses—no, I’d rather feel yours.)

And so we lay for long, during which it seemed the hands of your watch must be revolving at the same speed: hours came and went before we knew it, while the minutes trickled by. “Each minute spent with you is the right time,” I murmured.

As I did so, we were covered with a decorously delicate but cold plume of water, blown towards us from the fountain by a sudden gust of wind. Amused and indignant, you were just about to speak when you stopped, saw me reach out a ring from my pocket, take your right hand and guide it down your third finger’s length. A bird called; dawn glimmered faint at the edges of the sky. For a moment, entranced, you were frozen—unable to move or speak. Then you sank back down beneath me, tears shining on your cheeks among the spray.

 

Teaser 3(i), the “ghastly” smile

A knock at the door. It opens. The nurse.

How long will I be? Visiting hours are over—I was expected earlier—though if I wish for a special arrangement, the Director could be telephoned…

“No, I—thank you. That’s it, I mean.” I look my last on this room and its inhabitant, and sway towards the door. I twitch what I know at once to have been a “ghastly” smile, then continue against my will to smile as I flee down the rubber corridor, painfully gripped as the tears burn the sockets of my eyes with a sort of shrieking mirth, at the knowledge of what the nurse must be thinking: “Oh look! a ‘ghastly’ smile, now I know what one looks like! I bet he knows I’m thinking this—I bet he’s twisted up inside with a sort of shrieking mirth down the corridor, unable to stop because he knows I’m thinking ‘Oh look! a “ghastly” smile, now I know what one looks like!’—though he shivers at his mirth and the tears burn the sockets of his eyes as he runs!…”

Outside, the air is sweet and cool. Birdsong laps in the leaves above the path. Beyond the hillside ahead the sun is painted, fluid orange.

—So louder the churning, so sicker the horror.

 

Teaser 3(ii), slumped in marijuana haze

I excuse myself and wander, find a warm dark room and settle down in a corner on the floor. Low music hums and pulses out of speakers. The air is warm as milk, the thick-sharp smell familiar. Joints are passed; nodding thanks, I drag deep and long. Slumped in acrid haze or stalking softly around are other figures, blurred and anonymous in gloom. Now and then I hear the rasp of a cough through the swelter, or the grate-flare-flicker of a match close by. A giant bong squats in the middle of the circle, dim-lit only by a smudgy glow that shimmers through the curtains where a whiteness burns outside.

Blood sings giddy in my head. I seem to feel the tug of each corpuscle through my veins, like grubs in a cheese. My mind begins to lurch with the dislocated glisten of a roller-coaster. Underneath, my body buzzes torpid with the judder of my heart, in annotation to the rich dark throbbing of the city through the curtains.

Next to me are headphones. Absently I don them, flick a switch and stretch out flatter. I gaze at the slow-shifting figures in the room, sealed off by the deadpan whirr of white noise, and let my eyelids sink. With a rude shock I recognise the faint ghosted opening of the music on the disc before the start of the recording—barely heard but unmistakable. It’s our song! The track that means the-two-of-us to each, the one we’d always sung together, that we should have sung: that sloughs off the scab from the wound of your vanishing: that excavates your memory: makes the hole you left inside me ache and ring with lack-of-you… I feel all this again inside a fraction of a second (how slow the disc spins)—the promise of the song, thrumming faintly as it were from a far-flung chamber, seeping down the corridor like ox-blood—listen! And now before I can manoeuvre hand and arm to switch it off, my ears are hammered as the music detonates. I seem to rise on its surge and rotate into space. In counterpoise of harmony and tension I spin; can no one see? I twirl at once in both directions: clockwise on an internal axis like a spit, and anti-clockwise round an empty void where you should be.

I pull the phones off with a spasm, sweating freely and delirious, and turn the music off. I sink to the floor and breathe the calm of the room again.

 

Teaser 3(iii), it’s you, my Angel, in the glass!

Then I see it.

Above a point beside me, set into the ceiling, is a circular mirror. Why had I not noticed it before? I cannot see in detail those reflected near the doorway, their virtual image being too far removed; the effect is of a stew of grains inside a child’s kaleidoscope. But I do see that one figure looks up and stares at the mirror and at me… It’s you! It’s you, my Angel, in the glass!

Two thoughts jangle in my head and clamour for supremacy. The first, a distant memory: reading by an open window upstairs in my parents’ house, shaded from the summer heat outside. My father, digging in a flower-bed below, calls a greeting to a neighbour. I look up from my book. He is out of my direct sight, close beneath the window; but the first thing that my gaze lights upon when I look up is the tiny image, thin and pale and sharp, of his profile reflected in the window of the stairwell on the opposite house. He seems infinitely further away than he would have, had I not had such an unexpected glimpse but only heard him. Though I pay no attention to his words, the distant doubling of his face and hand, flicking up to catch the light, reminds me of how alone we are, how irremediably cut off from the others that surround us, from family, friends, lovers—sealed forever off from even those with whom we find ourselves as intimately close as we can ever know.

 

Teaser 3(iv), a whisper booms

The other thought ousts this in a second: I must reach you—I must get to you. Don’t move! Please stay. Don’t look away, I’m coming… I try to move. I note that you are fabulously beautiful. Not grasping that fact, nor its cruelty, you make no response when I mouth in desperation to let me approach, let me shrug off what is keeping me immobile. I am aware it is possible you will smile recognition, emitting involuntary and unmistakable signs that your path across the room to me will be as reflex, inevitable and ecstatic as mine would be towards you, and that we shall soon be together. I also know that it will not happen. I don’t know why it won’t; most certainly it should. It would be fitting. But despite or because of that, I know it won’t. And it doesn’t. Your face is gentle, smooth, expressionless, calmly divine in its tranquil hub. Now it grows to fill the glass, a metre wide, pinning me down as the room revolves. The voices round me squirm, boiling up to a crescendo of growling and screeching. The walls and bodies sway beyond control. Helpless, I am floundering in the ocean of a single eye of yours, which has grown to fill the mirror. It is as if I am now the grain in the cylinder, while soft and wide above me through the spy-hole the monstrous wet eyeball of my owner drinks my image as it twiddles the kaleidoscope. It stares through and past me, without communication. A whisper booms, from deep within the earth: “BLINK!… BLINK!…” I try to obey, but cannot. I try to scream “Stay! Stay! Stay!” but am frozen. If I don’t speak now, I know you’ll go. The entire mirror’s width is now your iris—now the event horizon of your pupil—now a black hole. My vision pulses light and dark in time with my heart, as it does before my eyes cry. My eyes must cry, must—try to, cannot.

The floor comes up to hit me. I observe there is no mirror, nearly smile with relief.

 

Teaser 3(v), a sad-voiced duct in a wall

I rise, leave the party and the block, and travel fast to the city’s edge. Foiling guards, walls and spikes with the thoroughness, ingenuity and persistence of unqualified obsession, I climb into a garden, stalk unseen across a lawn, seek a means of entry to the building I’m intent upon, and find one.

A small frosted sash, unlocked. Gingerly I raise it, wriggle through into a washroom and close it behind me. With the caution to be expected, I emerge from the room, locate myself, pursue constricted corridors and find yours. I creep to your door and turn the handle. Locked.

Footsteps approaching round a corner. I dive for the handle of the door next to yours—turn it softly, poke my head in, slip inside, close it after me and freeze behind the door. Dim light shows me another little cell like your own, but unoccupied. The footsteps grow louder, pass and recede.

I breathe again and peer around. A bed, a chair, a basin. Where’s the light from? Looking up, I see it then. One internal window, near the ceiling. And through it?

Through it is a ceiling. Painted bloodless orange, in a liver-blotched light…

I sit on the empty bed and wait, in case of further footsteps. None. No sound; just the click through the wall, every minute, from your clock.

The more I concentrate, however, the more there is to hear. I freeze again, cock my head and listen hard, as if by hearing what you’ve heard so long I’ll know the vegetations of your mind.

A light buzzes blandly in the yellow rubber corridor, cutting through a sad-voiced duct in a wall. A distant cough, through many walls. Then some tiny shred of sound unidentified and odd, like a twist of cellophane across a valley… And underneath it all (to my excitement and discomfiture and growing fascination) the microscopic pipe-line of my bloodsong through the darkness of my head!

Both of us are silent.

Are you ready?

 

Teaser 3(vi), the pane explodes

OK… I bound off the bed, push the chair against your wall, step up on to it, look up, plan the movement to be made; flex my legs (eyes wide, lips tight) and launch myself upward. My fingertips attain the sill, grip it fit to snap and take my weight, edging forward as I dangle. Feet against the paint-work, working gently. Inching further, sill regripped—too narrow, finger-nails hit glass—now elbows splay as biceps creak, and upward slowly slide… Right forearm onto sill; right side of head (flatter than front) against the glass, to bring my centre of gravity forward as far as I can. Stabilise, breathe. Now my left hand is free, to smash the pane I lean against.

One thing I had not foreseen: being unable to face forward without toppling back, I shall have no chance, until I have shattered the glass, to make out any more than an empty corner of your room—from the rest of which I know I must be all too visible, framed here as if on television.

My right arm is trembling.

I raise my left fist carefully behind me and launch it forward as hard as possible. The pane explodes; glinting shards hit the sink with a clatter that is deafening and somehow unreal. I grip the sill on your side, to steady myself … and look.

I jolt, for there’s a shock.

 

Teaser 3(vii), balcony high in the Midlevels

I travel fast, return to the block and to the party. Bottles and bodies strew the floor like cigarette butts soaked in blood and wine. It’s nearly over now.

The warm dark room is empty. I recognise the voice on the stereo, one that’s been with me for years. That voice—dramatic, naked, intense, a violent silence just before a storm.

Lightly I swing across the floor to the window. The curtain looks strangely solid, almost sculpted. I grasp it, make to lug its heavy-looking folds along the rail; they slide aside at the lightest touch. I step out on a white-lit concrete balcony, contained in tinted sheets of glass a metre high and topped in polished steel. From here, high up in the Midlevels, rearing up to blot out half the sky, the dark cathedral of the Peak squats close. Against my will, my eyes are drawn to a recent crop of tower blocks perched on a site where, in ages past, a stage was set…

Snaking through the curtains behind me from the room seep strains of the music, which dance in my mind till the night is instinct with the ullage of their poison.

 

Teaser 3(viii), buds as fat as paws of cabbage

The balcony surrounds the tower block. I float around its circle to the unlit north side and lean on the rail overlooking Hong Kong. Twisting out to mingle with the city’s breath, a suppurating scent of musky blue is overpowering the tang from the apartment, from a box of outsize flowers on the parapet—the undulating petals pudgy, succulent, obscene in the stillness, the grubby buds as fat as paws of cabbage… The blooms seem random, redundant. The arbitrariness of their being in just this configuration out of the infinite number possible transmits itself as a buzz, a hum, a very high-frequency sing. They are clearer, brighter, harder, cleaner than I ever would have forecast; even the earth they grow in is clean. It is as if I knew they would happen, though not what “they” would be. Bizarre and odd within themselves, yet how pointless, how irrelevant they are to anything outside them. They matter not at all, and they carry on. This is how it is.

 

Teaser 3(ix), sky bulging taut as if pregnant

I lean on the rail, the entire shining city sprawled below me, charged to flash-point. I look towards the sleepless district, cut by teeming alleys in the thick hot heat, where the people stream as ichor in the veins of a giant, where the red-lit air is tingling alive on the skin, where the broken basement windows sweat the sultry beat of music and the unmarked stairs bleed neon. Then I take a long shot up and out, where the Bank Building soars up in shrieking verticality from Central, where perspectives slice and plunge in spired glass and diamond parallax—refinery of moonstone glistening with night-fire. And underneath it all? Fear and hatred, I sense, like the surge of a pool writhing ugly and grey below a wafer-thin crusting of ice.

There’s a movement above. I glance up, but see nothing. I scan the horizon as far as the lightless zones to right and left, in search of a forked pin of lightning. A storm must be drawing near, inaudible but imminent, barbing the air with a prickling of positive ions. My eyes wander over the heavens. On the surface they are matt; but underneath, a fluid chocolate-purple, aglow from within. All is still… There again, no denying it, the same huge movements—monumental shiftings and grindings, always noiseless, as of cosmic bulks of furniture being hefted up some grand stair from one world to another. The sounds come not through eye or ear, but chest and bowels, limbs and diaphragm. I tilt my head further back, and further still and further, till my swimming gaze is whisked from the sky-depths to bob upon the end of the aerial that shoots from the tower roof behind me. I lower my head again—halt transfixed by what I see. Far in the distance of purply-brown air, beyond Hong Kong, beyond the beacons of Kowloon, above the Mainland, the belly of the sky flickers almost imperceptibly. More noises—softer now in timbre, more organic. The sky bulges taut as if pregnant with something that is kicking to escape. The heavens are coming alive… The skin of the night stirs and ripples, like a muscle in the sea. And again and redoubled, that strange translucence.

 

Teaser 3(x), the pink cloud hatches

Now, across a hundred degrees of my circle of sight, a remarkable vision unfolds. Dim shapes appear: features are assuming moist laborious shape. I watch them thrash and struggle to penetrate their walls of grained elastic—pushing out soundless yells to no effect. I can almost see their bodies now, their sluggish senseless deadweight, their feet that claw in vain against the gristle that contains them. Necks slide in writhing desperation, frustrated mouths agape to screech autistic howls of ecstasy… A sickening tension and urgency build up inside me for release, longed-for release. The sky breathes faster, wheezing like a ruptured lung. The outlines thicken, clarify: the outlines of futility, of loss, of stale delusion in your absence. There is now no longer room for the shapes to dance and flip; they must expand, sway, shudder in compression as the walls contract convulsively and each mouth groans below the force that strains to crush it. The pressure mounts, the bodies’ oscillation so constricted I can barely see a movement—all their features squeezed within three cells, like bars of soap embedded in a swill of gluey mud. (A moment’s inactivity. Kai Tak airport is bathed in a pale green light; the planes have finished flying.) Then, silent and calm, a giant pink cloud hatches out from a fissure in the middle cell, as if from a tear in a spotlit back-cloth. Fussy and deliberate, it trembles and unfolds—inflates, becomes more fungal, more intricately fleshy. Pink light nestles in a thousand flushing wrinkles; minute movements flutter in its branches, which paw and shiver like floating boneless fingers. Storm-clouds brood around it, slate-grey and tubular, staining with a livid arc the western sky inland towards the Pearl River. The cloud blushes prettily to puce, then erupts in a soundless explosion, spurting filaments that gush in ragged skeletons of fire until the sky is streaming blood. These tissues then transmute in weird eclosion in the debris, into myriads of teeming motes and animalcules. Twitching their vanes, the midget creatures mew and signal with tics and dinky squeals, unearthly in the hush. As the cloud in ghastly splendour decays to a worm cast, the creatures gulp the bile that bubbles round it, fatten into mumpish yolks and sprout in profusion like an orgiastic circus. Tougher than the hide of a dried-out puffball, the worm cast is itching … then it fades out of view. The foetal circus of homunculi, maggoty and sickly, is at last fading too as it continues to proliferate—and sinks, among the coloured hills, beyond the plains of Canton.

 

Teaser 3(xi), home with my love, to be with him

I lean down to peer at his watch, which tells me it is only half an hour since take-off. Is that all? Now Angel raises his head, yawns, and stretches. So vivid was my dream, I almost feel it must have spilled right out of my head into his as we slept. Its details are slipping away even now, though the flavour remains; already I must struggle to recall it… Hazy as my recollection is, however, I have a powerful sense that I would prefer him not to have been tuning in. I shiver. “Sweet dreams?” I ask.

He turns, looks hard at me. “Oh yes,” he murmurs, smiling. His hands move to my neck. “Oh yes!…” Then with a sudden whisper “Was it good for you!?” he squeezes his hands, so I almost choke.

I start in horror—didn’t I just dream…?

He drinks my confusion for a moment, then he titters, kisses me on the mouth again and holds my hand in his, leaning back and closing his eyes.

I shake my head and frown. I’ll ask him later.

Focusing beyond him, through the oval plastic porthole, I see that we are high above the cloud-belt, floating free in liquid crystal blue. I smile, sink my head back, close my eyes and look ahead. How beautiful it is to have no plans or schemes or schedules to pursue in New York City, but just to be returning to my home with my love, to be with him…

What I’ve wanted to do for years!

 

The above teasers for Hallucination in Hong Kong‘s Video-Book are here too:

And in the Vimeo showcase “Teasers for HALLUCINATION IN HONG KONG by Rohan Quine”.

And in the YouTube playlist “Teasers for HALLUCINATION IN HONG KONG by Rohan Quine”.
 

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

Here are some great reviews of it.

Buy Hallucination in Hong Kong in paperback or ebook or audiobook format.

 

To watch any of the three complete and unabridged chapters of the novella’s video-book format (for which the above little video snippets on this page are just short teasers), see:
here for chapter 1;
here for chapter 2; and
here for chapter 3.

Buy Hallucination in Hong Kong in paperback or ebook or audiobook format.

 

Add Rohan Quine’s Hallucination in Hong Kong in Mobi or ePub or paperback format to Goodreads.

 
Rohan Quine, Hallucination in Hong Kong, literary fiction, litfic, magical realism, horror, dark fantasy, cyberpunk, contemporary, science fiction, gay, transgender, LGBTQ+, Hong Kong, Victoria Peak, Mid-Levels, Central, plane flight, concert, catatonia, paralysis, mirror