Goodnight Horses – Chapter Three
Hush, Mother, I Am Filled With Angels
‘…the same person is simultaneously a mass of atoms, a physiology, a mind, an object with a shape can that can be painted, a cog in the economic machine, a voter, a lover, etc…’
Aldous Huxley
Same as always it builds up all month until the pressure forces the words out the end of my fingertips. I say to myself: please, let me hear the future.
I am at home. I live in a comfortable but small two bedroom flat, which is shared with a Flatmate and my cat. A friend of ours lives upstairs. Many evenings are spent with the three of us in front of the TV, talking about nothing of great significance, and then talking about the fact that we talk about nothing of great significance. Sometimes we hear noise coming from the flat above, and joke that Man Upstairs is clubbing his ex-girlfriend to death and dragging her body around. When we tell him this he laughs giddily whilst his hand clutches his forehead.
I talk to Friend on MSN Messenger, about the situation that is developing after her threesome. She is excited that I have fictionalised it in my writing, even though the truth is that it did not happen until after I had written it into existence. We talk about the possibilities of me creating new experiences and situations by writing them into this work first. I make the obvious remark that I will have to immediately write about myself getting laid, as I am frustrated at going without for some months now. The feeling of frustration is somewhat deadened by my growing mistrust of people’s intentions, and the ever-growing realisation that most people do not realise how completely they delude themselves. Friend and I talk about the horrible, shitty bits of life, in plain and mundane detail that make them seem even more stark and hopeless than they already really are. We dissect ourselves constantly, renewing the fear and insecurity that rule our lives by dramatising it and feeding it back to each other in a continuous loop. We make each other laugh a lot, and are not afraid to be lazy and abstract and apathetic with and around each other. It is one of the best and most rewarding friendships I have ever had, despite the vulgar stream of swear words, sexual terms and abusive language that we exchange. In fact, this is one of the greatest parts of the relationship, apart from a shared obsession with the possibility of dying in a vehicle accident. In particular I am paranoid about being hit by a car, or worse a bus, whereas Friend is filled with the absolute certainty of her imminent death during an air disaster.
We scour air-crash websites together, going quiet in conversation over Messenger whilst we watch video footage of collisions or crashes, or listen to black box recordings of the last seconds of people’s lives, breaking off to swap website URLs that will torture and frighten us. Just a year past when America began military action against Iraq, I felt so numb and removed from the experience that I forced myself to download and watch video footage of real-life suicides, murders, accidents and executions. Shamed by my apathetic, tawdry little existence, lecturing work colleagues about the political realities of the situation whilst worrying about nothing more than getting laid and eating takeaway food, I felt the least I could do was try and force some kind of realisation onto myself of exactly what it might be like to see armed forces in action. As the first of tens of thousands of human beings began to be killed in Iraq, I watched footage of Russian soldiers executing Chechnyan rebels by hacking their heads off with axes, or forcing knives through their throats whilst their dirty heels forced their heads to the floor. The gurgle of air and blood and pain as a knife slits through a man’s throat is horrifying to watch and hear. Bud Dwyer, American politician, shamed in a local government scandal, calls a press conference, and brings a brown paper bag containing a Magnum hand gun. He hands out the usual press sheets to the journalists who obviously know him well, then pulls the gun from the bag. He tries to calm the room as everyone yells at him to put the gun down. He puts his arm out straight, and makes a patting motion with his hand, making them think he’s changed his mind. Then he puts the gun into his mouth and pulls the trigger, and a wet sheet splashes out from the back of his skull onto the wall, a waterfall from his nose and mouth, and his body falls, strings cut, shambling vertically to the ground, reminding me of Tommy Cooper dying on stage whilst the audience laughed because they couldn’t tell the difference between death and comedy.
Worst of all is footage of the kidnapped American journalist Daniel Pearl, forced to talk to camera by his captors, denigrating his country’s actions, a helpless terror etched onto his face. Right now on Radio Four they are reading the diary of his widow, and I wonder in amazement to think she may have seen this footage. On the video, he talks in a strong voice that can’t help but quiver with fear and exhaustion. There is a cut, and the next footage we see is a man slicing his head off with a crude, large knife. Whether he is alive when this process begins I have no idea. The head is held aloft, and looks exactly the same as before, but silent and calm. I have seen dead bodies in real life, and am always amazed at the massively evident loss of internal life. What’s left behind at death really is nothing more than organic waste. All essence and spark has gone. Someone has worn a costume and acted in it for years, but now they have let it slip off, and it lays there eventless. My father’s body looked like a shell of empty china, delicate but devoid of beauty. The difference between life and death is so colossal and so irreversible that I doubt anyone who has ever lived has truly comprehended it, and it makes me feel like I have most of my life; that I want to be artificial, truly just occupying a fiction suit that never wears out. One that does not have flesh and blood, or bone, sloshing liquids and grinding surfaces, long tubes passing piss and shit and bile through us so constantly that every romantic or sexual image is jarred loose by the reality of it. We are revolting, dirty bags of walking disease and decay held together so fragilely that we can create everyday devices that can crush us or rip us apart with ease. I do not find it to be a pleasant way of existing.
Now I go to work. I sit, I read more information, more websites. I tell a work colleague that if every person in China looked upwards and blinked at the same time that the air pressure created would cause devastating environmental damage. I describe the kinds of weather conditions only previously seen in stock footage cut scenes from old Flash Gordon serials. It might possibly even shift us out of orbit and closer to the sun, boiling to death first America and then Russia, whilst the crafty Communist hordes hide in specially created caves. Wait long enough to see all your enemies baked to death, then another big blink and back to more temperate climes. He wants to believe me. I want to believe me.
I am an object, moving between physical locations, and little more. I move between home and work, spending time in each location with no real difference. I move through all the spaces between the two more rapidly, but in the context of my life it is still only time spent in a physical location. I am a mass of closely related dancing atoms. These atoms would have been formed several billion years ago according to contemporary scientific thinking, and whilst they may have helped constitute different forms and masses, they have not individually changed since. I am approximately 15 billion years old. I remember reading that all the matter in your body is replaced every seven years, gradually, so you are completely physically different by the end of the 7th year. I also remember reading that the matter in your brain is never renewed. So both things cannot be true. Both are attractive concepts however, and I would like both to be true simultaneously. Maybe there is something in the other seven (or is it eleven?) unseen dimensions we cannot comprehend which makes this possible. I would like to think so.
I send signals through my body and my flesh and blood respond. I transport my physical bulk through space – time, passing through familiar locations. The air molecules I pass through I may not have passed through before, but I have no real way of knowing. If we could recognise individual molecules as we do other individual human beings, would that enrich our lives any further?
In everything I do I am simply a mass of matter, as old as any other mass, moving through space filled by gases and around similarly solid objects that I cannot pass through. I pass through other’s lives in a similar manner. Sometimes I am there, sometimes I am not. Death is difficult to understand because it totally removes the possibility of a certain arrangement of familiar atoms being present in your life ever again. Those atoms pass back into the earth, over time, and will eventually become part of other objects, but not in the lifetime of anyone who has known them. At my mother’s funeral we stood on the grass by the grave, sodden by drizzle, and my brother pointed down at the coffin, freshly lowered into the grave, saying,
“She won’t like it down there you know. She won’t be happy with that. You know what she was like.”
I didn’t reply but could only agree inside.
Now it’s a few days later. Recently the Israeli government has assassinated the founder of Hamas, provoking the group to announce that Israel has “opened the gate to Hell”. So far nothing has happened, nothing for several days after the event, or at least nothing is being reported. Perhaps the gates of Hell have slammed shut before anything could get out. At a gala dinner, George W Bush jokes about not finding weapons of mass destruction, whilst newspapers print front page photos of English troops on fire from head to toe. There seems to be no definition to reality; it shifts and slips around depending on what you read, which channels you watch, whose voices you allow through. Everyone seems convinced of their own opinions in opposition to any amounts of logic, physical evidence or a sense of responsibility or consequence. There are so many events and subjects to worry about, get angry about, weep about and get scared by that it becomes useless to stem the tide of information. Instead a valve is automatically turned on inside of our heads, filtering out the non-immediate and non-practical events, and abstracting all else. How the whole six billion plus of us are not screaming, terrified lunatics by now I cannot fathom.
I speak to Friend again, learning the latest developments in her complicated love life. After some weeks of a weirdly tense situation involving all three girls, there has been a change and settlement. Friend is no longer with Girlfriend, but has entered a full-time relationship with Tease, who turns out to maybe not be such a tease after all. It is probably not a surprise, but it is also surprising. I worry about Friend, but am also very happy for her. Maybe there is some trace of jealousy, knowing she has skipped from one relationship straight to another, whilst I let myself languish alone, partly deliberately, partly through fear and despair. I half-jokingly offer myself up as a participant if her and Tease wish to try out the other kind of threesome. I’m serious about this, and feel a dark, angry passion building at the thought.
I stay in for days, moving only to work and back. I am tired and feel increasingly numb and frustrated, but at what I have no real idea. I have no burning desires, no enthusiasms, no concentration. I find it hard to read, or watch a full film or television programme. I like only to lie on the sofa, thinking of nothing, wondering what it is I should be doing. The journeys to and from work start to become marked by small, strange events. One morning I see an old woman crouched in the road right next to the door of a car, lifting her thick skirt and pissing through her tights onto the grey tarmac. She looks around suspiciously to see if she is being watched. One evening I witness the aftermath of a motorbike crash. A pedestrian crossing the road has been flung aside by a crashing motorbike. I slow my pace as I walk past, looking for the excuse not to stop and help, to not get involved with someone else’s mini-tragedy. Two men are helping, in the absence of police or paramedics, though I am startled to realise that one of them is helping the women to the kerbside whilst clutching tightly at her right breast. She looks pale and scared, a line of red above her right eyebrow, arcing down to her cheek, cutting through thick foundation powder. I wonder which event will be more traumatic to think back on; the collision with a vehicle or the molestation by the helpful passer-by. The motorcyclist lies in the road, on his back with his knees drawn slightly up, and his arms raised at his sides, looking like he is attempting an impression of the comedian Tommy Cooper, or a Frankenstein monster with stomach cramps. His shoulders twitch with what could equally be pain of laughter, and he keeps his head raised, still blanked out by a solid black helmet.
Everyday I walk past a billboard hoarding containing a coffee advert. It features Trinny and Susannah from the television programme “What Not To Wear”, where they lecture grown adults about their unsuitable styling. The two sheets of the advert have been pasted badly, so that Susannah, the fatter and less attractive of the two, has some of her top lip area missing, compressing her face down into that of some dreary council tower block fat girl, the type that you look at and wonder if there is a trace of some mentally debilitating syndrome at work. This advert, obviously designed to promote the coffee as a stylish product, resides on a building whose roof has rotted away so much that a family of pigeons lives in it exposed to the open air. Down below lines of tires block an alleyway, and layers and layers of fly-posters are overdrawn with pornographic graffiti. I enjoy seeing this day after day.
When I was in my mid teens I had several very realistic and affecting dreams. They involved a six foot tall bipedal raccoon coming to take me away to an alternate Earth where I would help him fight the totalitarian regime that had taken control there. The dreams stayed with me for some years and at certain times of the year when the seasons change and I am out walking, I still feel that the dreams could be true, and could happen to me, or could come and find me. It’s not so much the appeal of an empowering teenage fantasy, recasting myself as hero, running away to another place where I was unknown, but a certain sense of inevitability that is shockingly mundane. Also in the dreams I found a true love, a mature, attractive woman to aid me in my heroic task. It’s the kind of thing that my psychotherapist would tear apart in moments; pinning all my hopes on a magical escape from a life I feel I have no control over. Escape from my own life has been a constant wish.
Now it is morning again, and I am waking from a dream of the future, a dream in which I float in darkness, feeling neither heat nor cold, nor any emotion. These dreams are clearly marked out for me, the ones which I know lie somewhere else in time and not just in my subconscious. Perhaps this is me in the womb once more, re-incarnated somewhere else, safe within a body, longing to stay there. Maybe it is what it feels like after you are dead. My fear of death plays out in many ways, and one of the horrific options high on the list is the thought that consciousness survives the death of the body but just continues existing in a non-physical limbo state, alone and isolated for eternity. This thought makes me feel physically sick if I dwell on it long enough or at the wrong time.
Today is one of my days off. I languish in bed for as long as I am capable of tolerating my cat clawing at my face and meowing. Once out of bed I shamble around the flat, my freshly dyed blond hair stuck straight up. I stand and observe my unshaven face, bloated by water fat and a bad diet. My white towelling dressing gown is even shabbier than I am, and has a large hole in one shoulder, where it was chewed open by the hamster my ex-girlfriend once had, which coincidentally had the same name as I once had. I feed my cat, and then sit and wait for my morning erection to fade before I go downstairs to check for new post. I receive a bank statement, a magazine subscription and a plain envelope. In this envelope I find a single piece of white, unlined paper, containing writing in black biro. It says:
‘Look for the picture of the child deformed by the accident at Chernobyl. The photograph will have been titled with the words “Hush, Mother, I Am Filled With Angels”. Follow the obvious link to a subject you have been reading about recently. The man who can change things with a word. Don’t believe everything you read about this subject, but be assured that the man exists. Something you have been waiting for all of your life is coming.’
I make a toasted bagel with peanut butter for breakfast, and drink orange juice, a no frills type brand, fresh and cold from the fridge. After a while of sitting and watching television I admit to myself that I am awake, and that this is really happening.
