Blue Heaven Cubicle (1) “Boredom as it reaches its solar apex turns from its zenith point to its nadir in a slow winding arc, eventually disappearing into dust.” Arnaud & Aisha… …10:04pm 08 July 2004 On the third night he meets Aisha and they drink into hysteria, fear and fornication. They sit laughing and digging among the ashes under the open windows of Saint Michaels. Blue marijuana smoke drops in veils from catholic hideouts and the music of voices turns on and pricks at his ears. She consummated her purpose as they both sat fascinated beneath the window and were drunk on fragments of physical contact. Putting his cock in her mouth she sends him into visions of sulphas planes. When they walk in on her room that morning, she spins on him, requesting he goes with her to collect narcotics, specifying them as ‘narcotics’, nothing exact. “It should be a matter of ten minutes, unless he’s out of stuff and he has to make a run.” Clawing at the inside of his pocket Arnaud agrees and they take a taxi over there. The still early morning seems empty to both of them…everything looks pale, a sort of toneless blue. And there is no sound in the half-breed morning. Just the ghosts of some lunatic in the air, set off in the chocking red haze of the taxis running engine, and the ticking over of the rosewood dials. When they arrive, emptying out of the vehicle onto the abandoned pavement, Aisha leans back into the car and whispers something into the driver’s ear, turning him pale around otherwise naturally furious cheeks. He waves her away without request of any money for the journey, slamming the car into gear and taking off along the street in a frenzy of poor fear, hot under the intense vibrating vessel of frenzied machine, steering from side to side and looking back over his shoulder at the girl stood limp hipped on the concrete… Arnaud reclining his posture somewhat asks; ‘What did you say to him?’ Burning hawk lipped she replies; ‘that I am HIV…and that I would spit in his awful face if he didn’t fuck off’ Arnaud resorts to a giggle. He stands straight leaning his shoulders somewhat and pivots his hips to follow her as she passes him. He suspected something beyond the window of her remark. He knew that she had said something to the driver, and that it was not what she had just retorted to him. He guesses however that she is attempting to pass off something resembling humour. He turns and follows her, noticing the silent absence of wind in the tall street. They enter under a low passage which gives access to a block of tenements surrounding an oblong courtyard. The light contracts as they move into the deserted space. Neither her mournful air, nor Arnaud’s feeling that his spinal fluid was in someway freezing as it crept up along his back caused either of them to flinch. The vacant lots, cut out of the flat towering walls of the main building gave the impression that at any moment the red brick facades would fall in on the courtyard. They edge in like shadows through the main entrance, him kissing her neck and holding her up as they move in, his arm held under her armpit – fingers running around the underside of her breast. Curling inward with a hangover Arnaud pretends not to acknowledge the grim ache he carries in his stomach and head. The cold silence of the building is shattered by the sound of tumult as they reach the blockaded stairwell... There was an uneasy pretext in the exchange of glances that past between them. Circumnavigating the vile traffic of the tenements corridors, and jumping at dogs barking from behind doors, Arnaud finds it difficult to shake off the persistent presence of something in her that imitates…but imitates what? He struggles to pin it down but accepts that it incites an arbitrary alert in him. Cold eyes meet with his own as they shuffle by junkies on the staircase. Observing the descent in the bodies slumped around, in anaesthetic stasis, and the sound of the breathing corpses as we pass the sweet-sick smell of junk that hangs in every space of the apartment’s geometric enclosure. It is the awful decay of flowers. The audience to their ascent of the stairs are dead owing to an accident, they all die of god. We reach an empty floor and Arnaud’s heads rings. The doors of the flats unoccupied on this level are boarded up; the lower corners of each blocked entrance levered and split to admit some small body, Arnaud saw patches along the entrance, the scuff marks cut into the matt floor suggested frequent use of these entry points…Arnaud indifferently presumes it must be where the children hide. The only door that looks obviously occupied was the one Aisha stood in front of. The door bulges closed, a black metal cage bolted crudely to the wall around the doorway, representative he guesses of the equanimity its resident holds in the face of any bother his business may incur. He knew what it meant to show yourself to be blown away… this was his soft ground and his asbestos curtain. Preoccupied with the dipping contour of the hallways ceiling Arnaud immersed for a moment in clarity thought, she might not be real. He turned smiling expecting her not to be there. Aisha stands calm against the unvarying light that falls through the wire thread glass, Arnaud falls internally, struck by the soundless image of her. Feeling ill he begins to press his cheek against the cold surface of the wall, closing his eyes. Doing so Arnaud misses a split second, a split second in which the door swings open and a body hurls itself toward him. Rising vertically back against the wall he braces for violent impact. As he jerks backward and curls himself away in defence Arnaud glances over to the door where Aisha and a male figure stand laughing at him. ‘What the fuck are you jumping at Arnaud?’ ‘Is your friend ok Aisha? Are you ok friend…you look a little nervous?’ Arnaud puts his fright down to the dope smoke he must have inhaled en route up, taking into account the hyperventilation such a climb would usually induce Arnaud settles into a light headed stupor and drifts toward the door. Inside the room Aisha stood shielded from the sunlight pouring in, falling over the room in lines cut by the blinds set across the balcony. Arnaud slumped down into a chair and surveyed the room. He picked at his nails, pensive and silent thinking about his collapse into self disgust, his attempt to out do such feelings by abandoning them, by taking to an existence architectured to require no identity, offering to him the lucid depths of his own naked mind – the limitless neural expanse that lay guilt free in nothingness. Aisha’s connection slinks back into the room, telling her he is ‘all out’ but could go across the street and score if she would watch the apartment for five minutes. He points to a shelf above Arnaud’s head winking and nodding perversely like some absurd kiosk attendant at a peep-show. Arnaud reaches up and slides his fingers over the barrel of a gun, its cold steel impact upon the nerve ends in his fingers sets off a rush in his head, his reflex tells him that all is about to turn in on him. Aisha gazes lullingly into him, calamity is paused and a terminal aloofness runs through his limbs. He feels the urge to giggle but refrains and holds the tickle in his stomach causing it to be pushed out under pressure through his penis. He passes the gun over to Aisha’s man and wriggles himself back into the chair. Aisha’s man flexes his ashy cheeks in an attempt to smile but his eyes remain blank and dead on Arnaud. Again hit by the idea that this may still be some sadistic venture against him Arnaud leans out of the chair and asks where he can go to the toilet. Inside the toilet Arnaud paces around reluctantly turning his eyes over the room for anything that might relieve his anxiety, he crouches around the under sink storage unit feeling behind the toilet basin, pushing his cool skin against the greasy dust and porcelain. He goes through the cabinets. Sifting through the toiletries he stumbles back struck by a silver flash of realisation. Evading sickness suddenly with another moment of clarity, Arnaud realises with a thrill that his sexual arousal, due mostly to the odd and anxiety ridden scenario of the morning, illuminated the root of the problem…he begins to pull himself off. His spin twisting, his legs spasming in springs and locking like stilts. He braises against the blood rush to his thickening phallus. As his nuts tighten in a cool reflex he remembers that he will, if his suspicion of foul play against him is not proven right, be returning with the beautiful Aisha to fuck his brains out at her place, this realisation causes him to stop instantly. He wonders how long he has been in the toilet and recognises he has no subconsciously logged memory of the exact time that has passed, for some impenetrable reason he gets the impression that it has been an age, ‘fuck’ he mutters, ‘that dope exposure is sucking me off the world…’ He moves over to the wash basin and runs the cold water tap over his wrists. Cupping his hands he throws the collected liquid over his neck and face, cool streams run off his neck along the lines of his back. Arnaud thought of their romance among dreary courtyards and bad nights of heavy blue intoxication, he’d heap it all up in a hope of stopping the planet, watcher of the huge skies and wraiths of humanity, heap it all to find somewhere under her night - where they might be exiled and struck into drifting blindness, where nothing would matter but a universe like her…under the cold light and severe clinical décor of the bathroom Arnaud bends to his knees and peers out through the key hole into the lounge, his breath locked in his chest, as he tries not to make a sound. …7:39am 09 July 2004 Josephine & Vincent… …11:13pm 08 July 2004 Inside the room Josephine is searching for meaning in a meaningless universe, a kind of biopsy is taking place. Vincent notices she has really dreamy big eyes, the open circumference of her face an almost inexplicable oval dream. Vincent’s legs shook under him. “You’re a capitalist, you might wish to be a socialist in a perfect world but you’re a capitalist…that’s ok, nothing you can do about it. You can no longer hold any affect over the world you tread around in, the world you push your children out into. Capitalism has gone too far to be stopped, you turn it off and the world caves in, were all fucked. You are a capitalist, you feel bad about the women and children dying in Sudan, the only way you can help is too go out there with your own children and die sitting there in the mud, staring them in the eyes, your own children dying face to face with theirs. It’s the only honourable thing left to do, otherwise don’t feel bad; don’t think about them…they don’t exist. The only moral decision left in your life is choosing what colour the next car will be. All we've got left is our own psychopathology. It's the only freedom we have and that's a dangerous state of affairs. Everything is in place to keep you a happy camper; what would we do without gym membership, 600 channels of shit, and Britney Spears to assure us George. W. Bush is a good man and that the war on Iraq is just. A paralysing conformity and boredom to swill our televised aspirations down with, made by Coca Cola. I see women on TV in tears because they can’t stop eating and lose weight, in context, you are a fat cunt – parents sit and watch the children they given life too, die of starvation, or disease. ‘Little boy’ ‘Fat man’ Thermo-nuclear war stands hand in hand with executive housing and chat show hostesses. What fills your mind; TV soap opera or Zyklon-B? I see adverts asking me for money to protect homeless animals. I am told I need furniture that complements my life-style.” Vincent envied her extreme disappointment, her beautiful forehead, her unexcited eyes. He lay on the couch paused to listen, the rusty sheet pulled over him. Josephine’s every articulation was a grey breathless utterance, and no-one noticed Vincent as he sat there gaping at the Mellon collie surface of her skin. It seemed impossible to decipher any inch of her, the mute slope of her temple that jumped as she spoke, his eyes falling to the interminable landscape of her neck. Safe inside his own head, approaching her slowly out of sheer fright. The incredible dream of her face impossible to convey. Reluctantly, Vincent’s eyes turned across the room, she seemed to be reflecting sensation over the room’s heavy blue air. He sat, watched, listened…for a long time, she would occasionally glance up at him neutral and calm. “Also, why are missiles phallic?” She turns in her seat addressing the question to Vincent, consciously pushing into him the impression that he has been caught out, discovered as his eyes roam secretly over her skin. Vincent sits forward and stares into her eyes. “Marriage of the dual motifs of the all-voracious present, sex and death, the root of man fused into women. Sex; the architecture of birth and death…” Later on the pavement outside. Vincent stamped about, waiting. The motion of her head was distracting. Josephine seemed to be looking everywhere at once, motioning in every direction. “Who’s going in the boot?” Vincent vaguely recollects it being his turn and climbs in. Josephine climbs in after him without a word and Andy closes the boot on them. Perfume hangs heavy in the cold air trapped inside the car, finding among the fragrance Vincent and Josephine closed into the boot. The others taking seats up front. They lay in pitch black assembly. Trying to tell her that his thoughts were really weightless Vincent whispers “what the fuck are these drugs?” her eyes twisted and remote like dead stars, their bodies like quilts worn around each other in foetal positions. Josephine’s tiny body makes oblique patterns of movement. Veins rising, she keeps smiling and breathing up into Vincent’s face. Feeling pinned down under the abrupt current of some automatic obedience, the smooth flesh of Josephine’s small waist under his hand, Vincent asserts his sex crazed lips all over her. She takes out his cock and attempts to work it up into an erection. The thirst rising off her breath hangs still in the air as she draws her lips away from him. The car pulls up. She said dreamily “we’re there”. The boot clips open and the whole fucking world crawls out onto the street. Paused, rain sifting down through the air into her pale blue eyes. She paws over him and smiles. Vincent pulling himself up cautiously and rolling out onto the floor, catching his skin and scaring down into the pink flesh. Feeling immediately composed, with elbows and knees aching. He has a smiling image, invisible to the naked eye, of the ridiculous position, no longer oblique. He didn’t care if they spoke again that night, free from any borrowed reflection, his eyelids cooled in the rain. Vincent felt a respite from the calamity, a soft indifference. He gazed out from under his eyes. Josephine seemed to take bite but then rolled her shoulders over herself as if she could only turn by the pivot of her whole frame. She walks away. Sex and gender distinctions were only interesting if irrelevant. Vincent told everyone to go on ahead, that he’d walk up to the bar in a while. He wanted to stand in the dark old moonlit street and observe the still quiet air for a moment. The floor had been abandoned, all but the thin strips of paper that lined the pavement and seemed to stretch of indefinitely along some purposeful course. A bright, fairly luminous sky creeps a little further out. Vincent’s thoughts fixed. It seemed that the whole affair was lost, beyond record. Only in some deranged half-memorised sense had anything been recorded, or ever would be. …12:53am 09 July 2004 Victor and Jon… …7:00pm 08 July 2004 The short view out of the window was lit by a low spectral brightness, the light streaming through empty air. Victor felt convinced that the arcade was abandoned. He felt defiled, young and absorbed. He stood on the edge of the balcony and watched with a reflective dimension. Eventually Victor shuffled back out onto the wharf and sat down, watching the late sunshine with an expression of self immersed silence. He had sat there all day watching the luminous symmetry of the buildings opposite, shinning hot sun out along the lines of its high square walls. His impression of the wharf was one of open space, a high wall of the reddening sky throwing it all together as an ambivalent landscape. The wharf itself was a black square of obscurant liquid. Where light penetrates a green blue dream, filling the calm washing cool of the water that lapped like moments of inner silence against the stilts of the two jetties that protracted obtusely out into the smooth blank water. The fractured noises of people and music poured out through the open windows and doors of the bar. He sat, stirring with the impression that the noises were being pushed along by the heavy breeze that picked up and died down in sporadic intervals around him. The side patio of the wharf was made up with chrome tables and chairs that shone in the dazzling sunlight. Victor sat among them, preoccupied under the slow motion of the sun. Someone stepped out from the floor to ceiling window that had been slide open behind him. The figure hanging his shoulders in an oppressive pendulous motion. He winked at Victor and spoke with his arms out stretched. “We can regard ourselves, in all cases, to be subject to poses.” His shrill chorus animated by charged gestures. “Well fucking hell this is it, this is an exciting moment for me…” he cut in stammering “…and you too, I guess that this makes it… come on your killing me.” Victor gazed out blank and silent into his rigid face. “Don’t look at me as if I’m some sort of impostor, this is social science my young negro friend, would you care to take part in an experiment, or shall I leave?” Victor played with the beer mat. “What do you have in mind?” He stares into the bar through the large glass flanks lit by a phosphorescent gleam. “There’s a sort of constant struggle on a minute-by-minute basis throughout our lives, throughout every day; one needs to dismantle that smothering conventionalised reality that wraps itself around us. There’s a conspiracy, in which we play our willing part, just to stabilize the world we inhabit, or our small corner of it.” Clouds move past overhead under cool remote winds and shade drops in over their faces as he speaks. His eyes peering out old, unbluffed, unreadable. “One needs at the same time to dismantle that smothering set of conventions that we call everyday reality, and of course violent acts of various kinds, whether they’re car crashes or serious illnesses or any sort of trauma, do have that sort of liberating effect. I mean, people talk nostalgically about the Second World War, not because in wartime moral standards are more relaxed, or because people lived more for the moment and tried to enjoy themselves in a more unself-conscious way - not for those reasons, but simply because the conventional stage sets that are erected around us from which we can never escape, are suddenly dismantled, and there’s an element of magic involved…” A most regrettable brawl ensued. Their two bodies flung forward into impact, crashing upwards in an arc of strained human geometry over the table. For a moment they stay in gripped torpor, each caught in the others grasp. Victor slips his right arm under his assailants grip; the collision ran forward through the white light. He swings a blow from his hips, his right fist clenched, slamming into the face of the man opposite him. For a moment he hesitates as the whole audience of the bar behind them turn, looking for the cold slap-sound of his fist being driven into the still flesh of his opposite. Under this moment of hesitation Victor’s converse drove his torso toward him, pushing his head up into Victor’s soft nose, where it split with a sharp suffocating crack across the bridge of his noise. A group from inside the bar bowled out onto the colonnade to break-up the ugly scene. Here, neither makes concession and both turn on the small group with fists and half-empty glasses. Blows splitting fractures across the bony orbit of a young face, extreme blunt facial trauma, blow-out fractures occur as chairs flash across the veranda contacting with the dull thud of pulped flesh, sending grown men crashing to their knees in tears. Over turned table’s shelter limp bodies and traumatised forms crawl on all fours through glass and across the sticky concrete floor. More people slip out thought the window in an attempt to break up the snarling scene. However, in automatic obedience to a banal power these attempts soon exasperate and turn the small crowd into rioters. Victor risen from a violent fog spat blood and caught a punch in his temple sending him back to the floor, his head pulsating, shivering, his eyes streaming with tears…subverted under the heat and light of the sun he suddenly felt calm…paused…latent human techniques fell away from him and he felt a period of silence. He looked up and saw the figure with wide eyes and mad hair. His energy iridescent in the hot sun - erupting through the crowd. In the process of one fit he tore off the lower half of his t-shirt revealing his abdomen as he sweated and threw himself around, flailing wildly at one huge man and attempting to push a glass into his face. The large man grabbing him and biting at the back of his neck, drawing blood. He manages to twist free losing his t-shirt completely in the process and beats the man to the floor with a chair. The pervading arch of his torso leaning out into the sun, colouring the symmetrically perfect structure of his muscles as they rolled under his pale glistening brown skin. Victor felt a sharp dead white crash in the back of his neck. Red plush spilling, beating out of his open skin and running down the spine of his back. Blood pulsating gently from the lower part of his skull. He passes out on the warm asphalt. …7:21pm 08 July 2004 Victor, Jon, Arnaud, Aisha and Josephine… …7:38am 09 July 2004 He woke up, feeling the heavy blue-black skin of his back and sides hard and burning with pain, the sticky slime of yesterdays blood tying itself together as he dreamed, drugged in a poppy sleep. He looked around feeling his blood shot eyes role under the inflamed lumps that now acted as eye lids. The room meant nothing to him. Victor swung his legs of the bed, got up slowly and staggered a little way from the bed. He eventually fell against the wall, resting, his back pressed up against it, leaning. His gaze bent down to the broad flat rim that ran around the room at around waist height. It was the only recognisable feature of the room; the rest was four walls of white brick, cold and shining with a sterile glaze. He saw the door and smiled a contemplating glance as he recognised the photographs of Jon and himself tacked to the door. He takes of his clothes and moves over to the door running his fingers over the bumps in the heavy metal surface. Wearing only his socks he takes his penis in his hand, the heavy flesh thickening and rising slowly until he feels the blood rush up through his spine, the blood thumping in his neck, sending waves of pain up through his neck and over his skull into his eyes. A few minutes later he ejaculates into the corner of the room, his body turned over in an arc of tension as he spills thick hot jisom up in pulsating streams that hit the wall and run slowly to the floor. He had chosen to ejaculate into the corner of the room that would be covered as the door opened. At that moment he hears a voice from beyond the door. He moves forward through the kitchen, stacked with dirty plates, into the hallway leading to the front room, pushing his way through a wide variety of jumbled mess and piles of broken boxes that crumble underfoot. In side the front room he finds Aisha standing over a special locker full of some priceless cargo, then he realises she is actually looking at a tinny photograph next to the box. A photograph of him looking fitfully into the sky as the camera took. Holding one hand up daintily in a fixed gesture Victor opens his stinging cherry lips to speak. “Come on where’s the gun?” He scratches his neck and gulps. “Jesus Christ Victor, what the fuck have you done to your face.” “Does it look bad, I haven’t seen it yet?” Victor moves passed the mini aquarium into the centre of the room, the skin on his face cut like great blisters, bits of skin unhealed sat open, holes and boils everywhere. “Another one of Jon’s experiments” he looked over to where the gun usually lay and asked again. “Where is the gun?” “I don’t know I think Jon took it.” Arnaud walks in from the bathroom door, they all hear the lullaby of the street, a siren dipping in and out among the washing sound of cars as they sooth past. Outside a faint breath of panic rolls through the rough palisade, opposite the entrance to the courtyard Jon presses his back into the red brick wall of the alley, attempting to quiet his breathing. Two pigs tip toe around in the gravel pavement outside the alleyway, the sun just then coming up over the buildings. Jon stood stiffly smiling in a void understanding, the attention of the police momentarily carried off toward the corner of the street where a little boy was sat studying a nude magazine outside the broken down store where he delivers papers from. In this moment Jon makes for the courtyard but the police turn on the first sound of his trainers gripping into the floor as he runs and give chase. As they charge toward the maze of courtyards and entrances Jon catches a glimpse of his balcony and the reflection of the white heat of the sun against the glass of each block as he chases toward the door. As he reaches his block and pushes through the entrance a young female at the end of the floor is closing her landing door behind her, her light complexion and blue watery eyes shine at that moment. Jon bowls toward her sending her crashing through the door and back into her own hallway, he grabs her up by the wrist and pushes the tip of the gun into her neck. “Which one is yours, open it now…come on you fuck…move...” They burst into the flat as the police crash in through the front entrance to the stairwell. Jon presses the gun into her cheek as the sound of police radio echoes in the hallway. A hard-on flares up in his trousers as he watches the girl step back from him, her hands lifted in surrender, her eyes running quiet tears off her cheeks. She pisses herself in terror and jerks in silent rhythmic motion as she cries without a sound. …7:46am 09 July 2004 Victor and Aisha… …10:21pm 01 October 2003 Somewhere around this time He meets Aisha for the first time. She is drunk and flirts with him, it’s her seventeenth birthday. Victor is nodding and smiling at her, watching the perfect symmetries of her face motion slowly; her eyes burning into him, making his stomach lift some violent liquid up into his throat, so that he couldn’t breath. Exciting your senses, the way death does in dreams. Her face looked warm pink, the pinched corners of her lips drawing in as she lifted her face into a smile, her eyes dilated, her cheeks forming perfectly and comfortably along the lines of a smirk as she watched him, her lips full, moist and red…when Victor opened his eyes he sat there blinking, as if to capture in his mind some photograph of her at that moment. But then he had never been fond of photographs, he preferred things as he had remembered them, not as they were. She nimbly stepped around the mess they had made at the table. Her lips were damp and pushed out over the lines of her mouth, gouge mouthed and opium eyed, with her hair falling over her eyes she twisted and glided across the room. There was no light in the room but the lines of her pale shoulders caught something in that low, damp evening, her skin made him feel…well…hear are the complexities of it, he got drunk and stoned, yakking in poor Aisha’s ear about nothing, then following her in October afternoons, and finding cold autumn mornings full of lying warm in bed wrapped in her soft hot skin. “I can see you watching me.” And there in motionless air they turned over pale white sheets, writhing drunken harlequins, drinking mouth to mouth, the vivid resounding colours of the room moved, noiselessly and hopelessly. He leaned off just to look again, pressing into an image, remembering the taste of human flesh. Pain so great his pores suffocate. Victor is dazed by the smell of her, her body lay over him, her lips parted, following subtle luminous lines from her eyes to her chin, soft pink tissue enveloping him, his hands reaching all over her hot cinnamon skin. The visceral world draws up and dissolves it’s self in front of them, blushing, the rush and swell of skin, pressed up against pink palms and between fingers outstretched. The morning falls through the curtain and colours the lines and torsions in her back as she twists around him. Sending dizzy black waves over you, and like granite he falls into her and drowns, a thousand tons sink, with paradise rolling from neck to ankle. He watches the sharp clean lines of her, she whose curved feet move softly over his…the picture falls backward into the folds of his thoughts seeming lost irrevocably.
Go to part: 1 2
Copyright © 2004 David Lloyd |