Monument Maker, page 37
Seriously. I’m standing there with this painting of God and His angels or who knows what, and my cum is dripping off it, there’s still dribbles coming out of my jap’s eye, the painting is probably completely ruined, and she says to me, you are fucking incredible. What a gesture, she says, and she shakes her head. Then she beckons me over to the bed, I’m still feeling a bit sheepish, to be honest, and she says, let me clean you off, and she takes my cock back in her mouth and cleans up what’s left.
No! the young boy gasped. I’m telling you, I said. Then she lies back on the bed and immediately falls asleep. You’re a fucking nut, the foul-mouth clown with the infantile tattoo said. What a waste of precious jizz. You could have nailed that bitch and instead you spent it on a fucking painting. There’s only so much to go round. Even God knows that much.
Anyway, I continued, ignoring his contribution, now’s my chance, don’t think I’ve given up my hypothesis for the sake of some post-coital praise. While she’s asleep, I comb through the room. I take down the mirror, I look behind all the furniture, I run my hand along the wall searching for spyholes, I examine the elaborate candelabra for tiny surveillance cameras. Don’t be soft, the moron with the retarded sketch on his arm said, you can’t get a camera that small. You think? I quizzed him. Who knows what the secret service are up to. Who knows what the Nazi top brass have dreamed up in secret command bases buried under huge mountains. And remember, this guy, this husband of Mariella’s, the late film-maker, he was a Futurist, sorry, not a Futurist but a Januist, which is worse, and so if anyone could get their hands on the most covert technology, the latest breakthroughs, tiny pinpoint cameras that could film your every move, then it was him. So did you find anything? the curious young man asked me. No, I admitted, there was nothing I was able to locate. I heard a noise at one point, a scuffling sound in the wall, but I think it was only rats.
We carried on. Mariella had a new-found appreciation of me. She looked at me in a new way, full of desire and bewilderment. We performed in Volos, in Larissa, in Tsagkarada on the coast. Before the concert it was my habit to take an early-evening walk around the city, minus my mask and cloak, obviously, and I was reassured to see that I could still terrify, that my appearance was still appalling to the man—or woman—in the street. It was only sex workers, in those years, in the dying years, as I have termed them, who the wounded could turn to. I, too, had my fair share. Often on my evenings alone in an unknown city I would locate the red-light district and buy myself some companionship. Already, even in my secret life, I had deeper secrets. I had an annex and a bunker built in the side of my life that I shared with nameless prostitutes and destitute whores across the length of the country.
In Tsagkarada the whores displayed their wares in a run-down tower block with numbers on the windows. I chose a young blonde in sunglasses on the ground floor. She took her dress off, laid a towel on the bed and sat on the edge of it with her legs spread. Her pussy was perfect, not a wrinkle, not a hair. She asked me to wash my hands, nothing more, and when I removed my underwear she told me that I had a nice cock. I believed her to be earnest. She offered me her asshole to play with and I laid her over my knees like a little girl. When I was about to come, which didn’t take long, she said, give me your juice, baby. At the time I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard.
I single out Tsagkarada and the meeting with the poetic whore because it is there where the visitations began. Let me explain.
Wait a minute, the lout with the cartoon of heaven’s gate on his arm interrupted me, why the hell are you seeking out whores when you’ve got it on tap at home by this point? The idea that I was being filmed had unnerved me, I admitted to him, sex with Mariella now had the aspect of a performance. Whores, in my experience, in other word Greek whores in the dying years, were not looking to be impressed. My desire for a quick wank, say, with no kissing on the lips, I was able to confide in them. They felt the same way themselves. Besides, love, too, requires its secrets. A transparent love, in my experience, never lasts. The clown seemed satisfied with my answer, he gave a low grunt in response.
I took up the story. I’m on stage, I told them, I am delivering the future. Some old bat has asked some question about a family member who died, something typical and tragic and a little bit pathetic like that. I am about to speak when I catch a figure out of the corner of my eye, standing on the far side of the stage. It is my father, my father who died in 1936. He is wearing a light-brown suit. He has wet himself. I turn to look at him and he looks right back at me, as alive as he ever was. Then he shrugs. What’s to stop the dead pissing themselves? he asks me. That’s what convinced me it was really him. If he had said, for instance, who says the dead can’t be incontinent, then I would have had my doubts. But it was my father alright. There was a silence throughout the room, it was obvious I was distracted. Could anyone else see him? I wondered. No bugger can see me or hear me, my father replied, as if by magic, except for you. Okay, I said, and I attempted to regain my composure. I am receiving a transmission from the other side, I announced to the audience. We are not alone. Fuck it, I thought to myself, he’s only going to disrupt things if I don’t include him, so I said to the crowd, I would like to introduce you to my father. He died in 1936, I told them, but he has come back from the dead. Does he bring good news? a voice from the audience asked me. I looked at the state of him, his stained trousers, his uncombed hair. He smelled like the grave. Yes, I lied, yes, he brings great tidings.
What was the name of your loved one again? I asked the old dear, who was still standing. His name was Iannis, she said, Iannis Anastas. What can you tell us, Father, I asked him, of the fate of Iannis Anastas of Tsagkarada? How the fuck would I know? my father replied. That’s like saying, oh, you live in Scotland, in that case you must know Jimmy McTavish. The afterworld is a fucking big place, you know. Anyway, he said, how are you doing? Not now, I said, and I turned to the audience and told them that some parts of heaven are cut off from others, that the heavens are numbered and that not everyone resides on the same cloud. That’s one way to put it, my father mocked. Indeed, I cautioned the audience, the dead often fall into common relation, which can make it hard to recognise them, which is to say they become united, in a sense, with all of the relatives that have come before them, who greet each other with much clamour and joy and who come to resemble each other as one of the tribes of heaven.
I became aware of a tapping, or a rapping, more properly. More spirits, I thought to myself, more ghosts. Then I realised that my father was dancing, performing a tap dance on stage. He started to sing. It was “My Mammy” by Al Jolson. That’s in poor taste, the young boy interrupted me. It was grotesque, I nodded. It was horrific. One of his legs was dragging. His arms flopped by his side. There was some kind of bile or foam coming from his mouth. His head rolled back and forth as he sang in a strangulated voice. As I have already pointed out, there was a huge piss stain on his trousers. What are they doing in heaven today, the old woman asked me, where sin and sorrow are all washed away? I looked to my father, who had fallen to his knees and who was struggling to regain his footing in a pool of his own secretions. They’re dancing in heaven, I told her, they’re dancing in heaven where everything is forgiven. With that I got to my feet, walked past the pathetic form of my father, now motionless on the floor, and left the building by a rear exit.
The next morning, in a cafe on the waterfront, in the perpetual dust of Greece, in the terrible heat, Mariella quizzed me on the previous night’s events. She was wearing a long form-fitting black dress and her now trademark black lipstick. Her black heels were scuffed. The wind blew her hair across her face. The waiter, who I noticed had a limp, brought us two cups of cold water with our eggs. He looked at me and nodded as if to acknowledge our secret brotherhood. Your father was really there, Mariella said, it’s true, isn’t it? She took a long draw on a cigarette and flicked it agitatedly to her side. Yes, I admitted, he was really there. But he was in a state. I won’t lie, I told her, he looked like hell. Yes, she said, and she nodded as if it was no surprise. That’s how the dead come back, I’m afraid, she said. Listen, she said, and she tossed her cigarette into the dust and stubbed it out with her heel, do you know what a zombie is? A monster, I said, some kind of voodoo creature that comes back from the dead, a horror show, basically. Do you know what causes zombies? she asked me. I don’t know, I shrugged, voodoo priests, curses, hypnotism, some kind of sign or command? No, she said, and she looked at her hand and began to scuff her nails (that’s what you do all day in the cell, the young man burst), what causes zombies is love, she said. It’s love that brings back the dead. What are you talking about? I demanded.
How can love turn someone into a zombie? This is science fiction, this is fantasy. No, she says, it’s all true. As long as we cannot break the bonds with our loved ones they return to us through force of will and incredible sorrow. They rise from the grave and they cannot rest until we ourselves allow them to. This is where the legend comes from. He was in a state, wasn’t he, your father? Yes, I told her, he had pissed himself, his leg was dragging behind him, in the end he collapsed on the floor. He is making a supreme effort to come back, she said. There’s no love between my father and I, I told her. We were never close. His appearance seems to say otherwise, she said. Look, I told her, you know as well as I do that the whole fucking thing is made up, I don’t see these people’s relatives in heaven, I don’t talk to the dead. Nevertheless, she said, the dead are now talking to you. She lit another cigarette; she was a three-pack-a-day woman at this point. My guess is that your constant focus on them, your constant attempts to get in touch, phoney or not, has made you a target, well, not a target, that’s badly put, a point of contact, let’s say, a light in the dark. I suspect your father was only the first, she said. After this they’ll be climbing heaven’s gates to get to you.
At 4 A.M. I woke with a start. Mariella had said it was like a light in the dark, that’s what she had said, a light in a dark room. I turned on the lamp next to the bed and she stirred slightly and rolled over onto her side. I confess by this point I was having all sorts of crooked thoughts. She wants to bring her husband back, that’s what I thought, the films are like beacons, points of contact, that’s what she said, a flashing light in a darkened room. Through her own experiments in mediumship, her own failed experiments, or so she said, she had developed some kind of sixth sense for that power in others, so she had picked me up when she had seen me begging in Athens and set me up in the role of oracle. It was true, now I was attracting the dead, bringing them down, or up. But was there more to it? I slid the covers down and pulled Mariella’s black slip up above her waist. I entered her as she slept. Yes, she said softly, yes, but I had the feeling she wasn’t talking to me. I looked around the room just in case, searching for what, I wasn’t sure, for a camera, for the return of the dead. Eventually I fell back asleep. I had a dream about animals devouring animals, a dog that ate a dog that ate a dog. Everything was significant; isn’t that what they say about schizophrenia, that it’s like an internal overloading, like everything outside you only serves to further focus the eye inside? I was playing with madness; that much was clear.
In the lobby of the hotel the next morning, as we waited for a lift to the train, Mariella asked me if I had made love to her last night. No, I said to her, it must have been your dream lover, and she laughed, and she stroked my arm, but I could see she was confused and that inside herself there was an eye, casting around for meaning, a bloodshot eye, but an eye all the same.
Volos was uneventful, as was Larissa, except for the moment at the start of the show where I hypnotised and removed the head of a young boy who claimed to be not a thought in God’s head this time but something that God had forgotten, that he had escaped from a dream that God Himself had never even realised He’d had. Keep it to yourself, I told him, to much hilarity from the audience, we don’t want to go bringing it to his attention, I said to him, this way we can get away with murder.
In Trikala we gave a performance at the house of some kind of local dignitary that Mariella knew, someone with minor local standing who had a grand apartment that looked onto a square where lovers and musicians congregated in the evening beneath the streetlights. I sat in the bedroom, masked and robed, by this point Mariella had embroidered a golden eagle on the back of my robe, and I recalled the man who had given it to me on the seashore at the beginning of my new life. I looked out the window at the lovers coming and going in the square. What if I had washed up here, I thought to myself, what if under the streetlights in the square I was to see myself holding my ID up, begging in the evening? I could live a hundred lives, I told myself, a thousand, even. I knew I was strong enough.
The evening went well; the filthy rich, like the dirt poor, are easily made fools of. I removed a young bureaucrat’s head and allowed him to escape from the mind of God. I brought tidings from old uncles and tragic young spouses, all of whom were doing well and thought fondly of the living. As the parents of the young dignitary chastised her from beyond the grave, I noticed a small black dog appear from beneath a chair. I can’t say for sure whether anyone else saw it or not. No one seemed to pay it the slightest attention. It walked over to me and sat simply by my side with an expression, if dogs can have them, of sadness, of pity, even. I continued with the message from the parents. What did they miss most about being alive? the young dignitary asked them. They laughed. Not much, they scoffed. The sunlight, the mother said, I miss the sunlight, I suppose. Why, the young dignitary asked her, is it dark where you are? Oh no, dear, she said, don’t get the wrong impression, it’s just that the sun never rises or sets. The dog cocked its head to one side, and as I looked into its eyes I realised that there was something present in the animal, that the animal was occupied by a twin soul. I realised that my brother, too, had joined the ranks of the disappeared.
What is he on about now? the madman with the single paralysed bollock interrupted us. Dogs have souls, he says, the idiot with the tattoo replied, lots of them. What, the bollocks guy burst, do you mean to say there are dogs in heaven? But the young man with the pyjama top turned on him. Are there tower blocks in heaven? he quizzed him. Is there food in heaven? Can you get a bite to eat in heaven? Are there birds in heaven and do they still sing in heaven? Are there sports in heaven? Is there sex in heaven, is there lingerie in heaven (I fucking well hope so, the bollocks guy said), are there endless orgasms in heaven (you would think so, the man with the solitary functioning bollock nodded), are there beautiful long legs in high strappy heels, is there painting in heaven, is there boxing, is there sparring in heaven, are there clothes in heaven and if so are there cupboards to keep them in, do you need shoes in heaven, is there grass in heaven and how about trees, are there trees in heaven and if so how do they grow, is it all dreamed up in heaven or is there rain in heaven, are there tongues in heaven, are there vocal chords in heaven or is there no need to speak in heaven (okay, okay, the man with the tanned arsehole protested), are there rivers in heaven or mountains, can you even climb a mountain in heaven, is everything achieved in heaven, is there any point in heaven? Are there faces in heaven? If there are faces in heaven there must be prisons too. Don’t you see? he said. But dogs, the man with the wretched tattoo said, he’s saying people come back as dogs. He’s not saying that, the young man contradicted him, he’s saying that animals can become vessels for individual souls, maybe they’re just more porous or something, like they have less consciousness so there’s more room for the wandering soul to take up residence. What about possession, the man with the unfortunately permanent scribble on his arm asked, what about when a man gets possessed by a ghost or spirit like in voodoo? No one is saying it doesn’t happen, the boy agreed. What I don’t get, the man with the divided genitalia protested, is why the dead don’t just show up as themselves. They do, the boy insisted, but it’s normally terrible.
I saw a ghost once, the man with the obnoxious tattoo interrupted, steering the story somewhere else completely, and despite what you say, in my experience, ghosts are quite beautiful, he continued, and this story, he interjected, might go some way towards explaining the provenance of my unfortunate tattoo, which, believe me, I am aware that you have been clocking the entire time, though I’m surprised with some of you being sea dogs yourself that you’re in any way perturbed by amateur pinwork, what’s the matter, boys, never seen an unidentifiable on the arm of an old salt, well, let me tell you how it came about, and what it is, if none of you have guessed yet, and this requires us going backwards instead of forwards, but at least that way we’re dealing in verifiable facts, am I right, in things that have actually taken place rather than flights of fantasy or confidence tricks, not that I’m saying you can’t see the future, and I do think it’s a skill to be able to see the past and see it clearly and it’s true, if you think about it, that there might well be as many alternate pasts as there are potential futures, if you were to add up all the eyes that have taken in the same scene, all the brains too, and all the different parts of the brain, for that matter, and memory, too, memory too comes into it, I’m not saying anything controversial when I say that no two people remember the same thing in the same way, am I right, lads, memory colours the deal and the colours are often rudimentary, just as this tattoo on my arm is a little, well, a little roughly sketched, I’ll give you that, and we’ll get to that, believe me, but first just like our faceless friend The Oddity here, he said, and he pointed his chin towards me, his awful chin, it occurred to me, even though I was the one with the hideous face, supposedly, and he continued with a date, it’s 1936, he said, and the war hasn’t even begun.
