Monument Maker, page 63
3. SONS OF THE DESERT
We spent our evenings in a square in Athens painting tourists, and sometimes beggars, who still longed to see themselves fixed, on the page, and sometimes monsters, too, whose longings are the same, for there were monsters on the street in that time too, and soon we were making a small fortune, which The Grey Owl channelled into daily supplies of the best freshly caught salmon, which was perverse, what don’t you like about our sea bass, our red porgy, the stallholders asked us, what’s wrong with our fucking lobster, some guy said, and The Grey Wolf made them wrap the salmon in newspaper rather than take it home in a bag with ice, and we would grill it in the back garden, really a concrete courtyard the size of a small WC with high, whitewashed walls on three sides and a dead vine creeping up, where one day we found a secret note, a piece of folded-up paper that at first looked like a fag end so that we wondered if some ne’er-do-well hadn’t scaled the walls and smoked some cannabis in our back porch before stubbing it out on the wall and getting a clear eyeful of our belongings through the window, which at this point amounted to three or four books, a few cloaks, a pocket-size shortwave radio, a men’s magazine The Grey Owl had bought and then discarded down the side of the bed, a typewriter that was so heavy that when working in the field we would take turns strapping it on our backs like a rucksack, a small paraffin lamp for cooking should we sleep through the day, and the tools of our new trade—chalks, quills, pens and paintbrushes, along with masking tape and fixing spray, a few easels made out of a combination of metal hangers and wooden chairs, Charles Sims had no better at St. Boswells, The Grey Owl said—but then The Grey Owl unrolled the paper like a tiny scroll and we realised that it was in fact a love letter; we had moved into the room two months before, and now it seemed like the previous occupant had an estranged lover, one who was now leaving us poetry and flowers and even one night, impossibly, a painting of a small bird.
S.W.A.L.K., the letter read, and there were rhymes, lewd rhymes, and The Grey Owl urged that we should be careful, that there could be rival operatives, he hinted, others could have made ingress, he suggested, our adventure in time and space could have brought us to the attention of the Axis Powers, he said, and I said to him, isn’t that the Nazis, isn’t that Stalin and the Japanese, but he said, no, there is a greater axis, and there are powers set to police it, and the visitations became creepier and creepier, to the point that we became convinced that our belongings had been moved around, The Grey Owl’s men’s magazine now rescued from the side of the bed, a pair of trousers hastily abandoned on the floor now in folded repose upon the bed—what was he thinking, that his love, who was clearly addressed as a female throughout, had taken to cross-dressing, that she was subletting a single room to two ageing astronomers, that the smell of her “almond curls” had turned to a kind of deflated musk?—then one day we received the invite, a letter addressed to “The Occupiers” that invited us to an event, a special happening that was to take place in an old lane on the nightside of the city, just behind an abandoned car park, to be there at eight, it said, where “blank” would take place and where we would “blank,” going on to promise us “blank,” and on the night we made our way by a circuitous route that took us through the fish market, eventually opening out onto a series of dusty paths that wound gradually upwards towards the Acropolis until the whole of the city lay beneath us like scattered pottery and we came to the lane in question, which from a distance had looked like a nondescript loading bay but which as we approached took a turn as the lane narrowed to a tunnel until we were walking in almost complete darkness, our arms held out in front of us, eventually stepping in what seemed to be a huge pile of horse manure—we had seen some mounted policemen earlier, though it was hard to believe that a horse could actually fit through a space so enclosed—and soon we came out on the other side, the tunnel opening onto a row of ordinary shops, all of which were closed for the night, and so we made the decision to pass back through the tunnel one more time, just in case anything had eluded us, just in case we had overlooked this promised “blank,” and sure enough, halfway along we discovered a small antechamber inside which there had been a ritual abandoning of old clothes, broken bottles, cardboard boxes and plastic bags, and as we turned back we caught a sudden movement and pressed ourselves flat against the wall and heard something large and formless approaching us and saw the glow of a cigarette and the silhouette of a man holding what appeared to be some kind of small child or struggling creature in his arms, and upon its head what looked like a series of twisted wire receivers or a crown of thorns, even, a homunculus, was what sprang to mind, even though afterwards The Grey Owl said, no, it was a monkey, it was a monkey with the top of its skull removed, it was a vivisected monkey, he said, are they sending monkeys through time, are there operatives reporting back, were these the first nascent experiments in time travel of some kind of rival organisation, he said, and we attempted to follow this pair, this man and his awful child, this tortured monkey, these Axis Powers, maybe, but when we emerged onto the main street there was no sign of them, and instead we were accosted by two drunken teenagers in sunglasses and an innocent passer-by who warned us to stay away from the tunnel, telling us that only drug addicts used it, and that in fact human beings had been known to defecate in there, and again we wondered about the horses, and when we returned home we realised that we had in fact misconstrued the date and that the event was actually scheduled for the next night, the realisation of which succeeded in sending us both into a rapture of having inadvertently penetrated the inner sanctum, of having seen deeper, and clearer, into the mechanism of the moment, we saw it as the sublime artistic gesture, the total work, this bracketing off of a section of reality, and we realised that this, truly, was the role of The SIRK, to excavate time and space and to reveal the underground that was right there in the moment, we rethought the movement as an art movement, essentially, which at first alienated the scientific wing until it became clear that science was in fact more important in the fostering of a particular illusion or the establishing of a reality set than art had ever been, and we committed ourselves to our actions—we called them nocturnal actions whether we staged them in full daylight or at night—with the detachment and exactitude of scientists we calculated, we inferred, we devised, we studied ambiences, moods, we looked to the areas of the city that were not under surveillance, the artistic equivalent of genre movies, where the exaggerated characters live and where you shake your head at the illusion-shattering walk-ons, the overly earnest extras, the fact that the damn set wobbles, and although you realise the audience figures are nil or nearly nil and that almost everyone who has seen it will instantly forget it or never take it seriously, you are somehow able to view it as a portrayal of everything that it is not, a literal negative, and you realise that it is a fiction that holds us up, just as it is a fiction that takes us down.
We had a series of calling cards printed that we distributed at random across the city of Athens, sliding them under the doors of widows and through the letter boxes of families and into the pigeonholes of hostels, possessed of a sudden mania, cards that had things printed on them like If You Are Reading This You Have Just Been Drugged, and that had small print that confirmed that the card they were now holding had been exposed to an experimental toxin and that included the phone number of a “helpline” that connected you to an answer-machine message from a deadpan female we had hired off the street and who confirmed that the caller had been exposed to an experimental drug that had been stolen from a top-secret government laboratory and seeded at random to the public, going on to describe its effects, all of which were entirely positive: the euphoria; the increased sexual appetite; the reports of X-ray vision; the feeling of timelessness and of intellectual superiority; and which is how Jack Frost rumbled us, I believe, which is how Jack Frost found a way in, which is to say how Jack Frost discovered a portal, a point of ingress into the story that we thought we were writing ourselves, and this contact from Jack Frost, this signalling that he was in on the story, began when The Grey Wolf first took leave of me in Athens, I have business to attend to, he said, and I asked him, but why now, we have all the time in the world, but he remained silent, except to say something about the axis, how the axis (which at that point, honestly, I visioned as a cross, as the place where a cross meets) was always shifting, and how constant adjustment was the only way to keep giving birth to the future, that there are certain checks and balances required, certain sacrifices, he said, and I started and I said, what, to hear you use that word, it’s disconcerting, but he calmed me and he explained to me that there were certain historical inevitabilities, was how he might better describe them, that simply had to take place, and under his watch too, he felt, you can imagine the sense of responsibility he must have felt, and I said to him, but take me with you, I want to travel in time with you too, I want to cross the great divide with you, but he said, no, no, he said, the toll it would take upon you is too great, he said, and then he said to me, would you have me fix this moment, in time, he asked me, as he held me by my arms, and looked into my eyes that he had always told me were beautiful and blue, and my nose, too, he said was unique, and of course I said, yes, yes, my prince, I said, yes, and he said, in that case I must love you and leave you, and with that he bid me adieu, farewell, my summer love, he said to me, and we held each other before we let each other go, into the past, into the future, in order that he could better fix the two of us forever.
