Sunday, January 01, 2006

4 :

I will never be king. I will never be President. I will never be James Bond. I will never be a millionaire.

Despite what we’re told. You can be anything. You can be anyone.

In a land where anybody can be a millionaire, everyone’s going to try. And almost everyone is going to fail. And as time goes on you realise that you can’t be anything. You’re lucky if you’re anyone. Let alone someone.

There are always those who serve and those who eat.

There were things I knew I wouldn’t see - the Eiffel Tower at daybreak, the public execution of Margaret Thatcher, the inside of a Bond Girl’s apartment, but this was something that was beyond my imagination - even beyond my comprehension - as a possibility.

Something that you don’t even rule out as a possibility. Something so far beyond the possible that it is not even imagined by most people. Unimagined by me.

And here we are. Somewhere beyond imagination.

One thing I never thought I’d get to see is my own funeral. To see a casket containing my corpse consigned to a fire. I am ash. I am fire. I am burnt wood and rotten fibre. I am smoke.

With that event, there could be no rebirth, no revelation, no thing. No resurrection, no chance of my body crawling forth from the ground alongside the millions of others, our resurrected eyes blinking softly in the morning light as civilisation ground to a halt around us. No four horsemen of the Apocalypse, their stars aligned, their prophecies fulfilled, the fire and brimstone promised by a God that doesn’t exist.

There might be for the reanimated grey skeletons of the dead. But not for the army of the cremated. Not for me. Not unless every cell of our ashen cadvers were sucked back out of the air, out of the bodies of the doomed living, back to their component parts, back to form skin, flesh, bone, soul.

And I know that this was too soon, that something went wrong, that somewhere, something happened, that God, if that invisible superman-alien exists, forgot me, and all he (or she) needed to do was forget for me for one second, because it only takes one second to die.

And he has bigger things to do, more important things in his life than my life. Though life, time, none of these things are linear. What happens happens. There is no great reason, no grand architecture, no master plan. Things happen, things change, and what is real for me now is no more real to you than the events of five hundred years past or hence, or events five hundred miles away.

The human psyche just isn’t designed to accept this information. I. Am. The. Dead. My body is no more. I’m just a bunch of atoms and thoughts swirling around the room, around this world.

We live our lives as if we are immortal, invincible ; sure we all know we’re going to grow old one day, maybe die, but never until we stand on the edge of mortality, with the racked, stolen breaths of the dying, do we ever consider that it really is going to happen, and now. And then we repent. We find God, or maybe he finds us. And we beg forgiveness. Trying to cling to the last few seconds, minutes, hours of life. And always wanting more.

Just one more breath of acrid, polluted air. Just one more meal of modified, reformed dead animals and chemicals.

The repentant are always those who can feel their bodies growing numb, their heartbeats fade, the last trickle of blood travel around their bodies and everything grow cold. As the last heartbeat pulses round those thin, old yellow arms, that last minute as the blood makes it’s final orbit around the flesh, you know. It’s time. And nothing can change that fact.

You always believe in God when you no longer believe in life. The last minute rush for tickets to the resurrection. I have sinned. Father, forgive me.

In those seconds, as the body dies, as the flesh grows cold, as the soul desperately clings to even one more second of a life, that’s when one becomes repentant. Or suffers the furious impotence at a life wasted. That when one finds out what one believes in.

I pledge alleigance to fuck all. I believe in coyotes. And time as an abstract. And as that day comes, as our stomachs expand, our hair recedes, our vision fades and our wrinkles grow, until then, we believe that we are invincible : we can do anything, go anywhere, fuck anyone, and it doesn’t matter, that nothing will change, that we will never age, that we will be immoral immortal forever, because we are alive.

And life itself, just being alive, that is a victory. And I has lost this battle. There was still a war to be won. And like all wars, one day it would either end, or everyone would be dead.

We believe that whatever we do won’t kill us. The we are invincible. Superfuckingmen that can drink, fuck, kill and that there is no consequence. We will never die. There is no future. Only now. Whatever it is, it will just make us stronger. That we choose when we die. That we make the decisions. That we have the choices. But we don’t. Our choices are controlled by prisons : our ways of thinking, our limited options, so that we, like rats in a maze, follow the path others want us to. We are rats in a treadmill. Animals in an experiment of limited choices, watched by unseen eyes.

Death is invisible. We can feel it’s presence. We feel it walk in the room when our backs are turned. We know it is there but we don’t – can’t - see it. We block out the thought, the reality, death becomes some kind of impossibility in the mind of someone living. The complete negation of the self seems impossible.There will always be some mark to indicate that there was a me, there was an us, that I was here, and we all leave our own frail attempts at immortality : creating a new life, writing a great book, even something as flimsy as a good song – all these things are our ways of leaving footprints in the sands of time.

All these things are our way of trying to scratch a little immortality onto this planet. The planet that will be caught up in a black hole, sucked away by life, as the universe shrinks, as the sun shrivels to a burnt rock, and we are reduced to something less than memories. As if we never were.

The body that I had shaved, the body I have controlled, the hair I had meticulously combed, was going to be burnt like a piece of fucking trash.

At what point do these things cease to matter? At what point does one cease to shave, to wash, to clean, because we know that one day it will cease to matter, that we are all finite, mortal, flawed. When you’ve rocked your last roll, when you’ve reached the end of the line. A week before? A day before? The hour before?

When do you know that you’ve rocked your last roll? When the human race is run?

There’s a black hole in our core, where the knowledge of the inevitable death sleeps. A cloud of ignorance descends. The knowledge that one day we will die and all the things we have done will be meaningless is incomprehensible. You, me, every person sat in every room in every street in every country - everyone. Gone.

Fuck it. I’m dead. That seems impossible.

I’m. Dead.

It never gets any easier to comprehend. You can say it. Repeat it until the words become meaningless, irrelevant, like the endless, infinite habitual I love you’s of the suburban marriage.

You just kind of move through it. You can’t accept it – you live through it. Well, you don’t - you can’t live through it. You just try to find a way through. You always thought there might be something more, that death is not, can not, be the end, and that somehow there will be more, that something is beyond death, beyond life, but whatever it is, no one knows.

That whatever comes after death is a bigger, better experience. Better special effects. Life : The Sequel.

When I try to sleep, I still dream of life. I still dream of love. I still dream of nights spent out dancing, or mornings driving tanks or spaceships, wrestling sharks, punching snakes, playing guitar, or saving the world, or flying like Superman. Typical boy dreams, even when I age, and my flesh grows wrinkled and my hair pales to the colour of snow.

We know what we could see if we opened our eyes. And we keep our eyes wide shut so we can pretend that the monster that lurks in the dark under our beds isn’t there. If it cannot be seen, it cannot give us fear. A wilful ignorance of the fact that we’re feasting on carcasses, living an economic lie, deluding ourselves of our importance on the planet.

These hands, no more. These lips that kissed, no more. These loins that brought forth life, no more. The teeth that smiled, the fingers that shivered - gone.

That’s why I didn’t want to be there.

Sometime you don’t know where you want to be : but you know where you don’t want to be. Here. Anywhere but here.

But I knew I’d spend the rest of my new life regretting not going. And I’d spend the rest of my new life regretting going. There really was no other option - whatever choice there is, whatever action I took, I would regret it. I wanted to be somewhere else. But I couldn’t think of anywhere else I could actually be. Wherever I would’ve been my mind would have been here.

I don’t want to be brave. I didn’t want to make these kind of decisions. I didn’t want to be a leader. I wanted to be a chickenshit conscienmtious objector hiding in the trenches and charged with cowardice. Sometimes you have to stand up for what you believe in. Sometimes knowing what you don’t want is as important as knowing what you want.

Sometimes there is no such thing as a choice. The options become so narrow and restricted that choice is not possible. Devil. Deep Blue Sea. No choice. As much of a choice as the one between Pepsi and Coke.

Fuck man, I was scared. Scared in my soul. The type of terror that one could not see. When one feels things that one cannot see, when one fears what one can only feel.

I was scared in the way that you are when you have the taste of fear on your lips. Your heart in your mouth, on your knees in the dark with a man standing above you and a gun in his hand. And you’re spitting blood through your teeth.

I was wondering about the bacteria on the cold steel. I was hoping he’d washed that gun recently.

Sometimes you lose all sense of perspective. Sometimes only the closest thing can be seen in your vision, even as something far bigger in the distance is obscured.

I walked through the plots of graves around the church as if I were a ghost. No one has a grave any more. These days our lives are consigned to footnotes. Small plaques and names in guestbooks. Small vases and Tupperware boxes holding dust, which is seven/tenths is just incinerated wood.

I had time to kill. I was in no hurry to do anything ever again. I felt cold under my coat, despite the spring sun. The cold wasn’t on my skin. The cold was within my very veins, as if I had been immersed in ice - the type of cold that can never truly be escaped. Deeper than flesh, permanent like the scar of memory. It permeates the skin, permeates the blood, into the very cells. Of my soul. Like a wound. The doctor can sew it up, but they’ll always be the tear.

My soul was weary. My soul was cold. Cold like winter.

My grandfather served in the Second World War. He was a gunner in one of the British Regiments stuck deep in the forgotten wars of the African Deserts. After his return, he would always sit by the fire, tired and cold. Wrapped shivering in a jumper at the height of summer. The heating blazed like an annex to the afterlife. The cup of boiling coffee steaming by the table. And always, always, he was cold.

When the war was over, they sent him home. A man trained to kill with nothing to kill is a man lost. In the absence of a purpose, a man seeks a purpose. A soldier defines himself by his war. There must always be a war, for without a war, a soldier is without meaning. There is nothing to fight but himself. Without a centre, a void. We define ourselves by our enemies. We define ourselves by what we are not, not by what we are.

Every culture needs enemies. Every culture needs to be opposed to something. War is good for business. After the Boche was vanquished, there were the Commies. After the Vietcong, the Argies. After the Arabs, the Muslims. And finally they will come to the invisible demons. Those inside. The gays, the fags, the jews. The war was eternal : there was always something to war against that no amount of Playstations could fill.

To declare that there was no enemy was to declare that our culture, our society, is fundamentally unable to satisfy. That the enemy is ourselves. That we are the demon. And that our unhappiness is ours. It is not caused by anyone or anything else.

Therefore, our sense of unhappiness always came from those outside, those who threaten our way of life. So we always have an enemy - and if there is no threat outside of us, then we find one inside. We find immigrants. We find children who swear. We find music and movies are to blame for society’s ills.

We define ourselves by our enemies. When we have no enemies we turn on ourselves.

Men trained and bred to kill - to act as Gods emissaries and deliver the curs to their creators. Their sole purpose, with God on our side, missing, still had to fight a war. His war was against the cold. But the cold was on the inside. It was beyond the flesh - it was a spiritual cold. The kind of cold that allows a man to override any consideration beyond that of duty and murder another man.

That kind of cold. Cold as a tombstone. Fold open your wings, Uncurl your flight, Cease the pain and suffering, Know that redemption comes in heaven, You are free, Others will miss you, Until we are reunited. Yeah, death, fuck you death. I survived. But is this survival? Because it sure as hell wasn’t about being alive.

All these people, all these lives. Each name with a face, a love, secrets and memories. Each one a person. Each one whose actions could change the world, and whose actions would vanish in time. All that’s left is what we leave behind. Our children. Our actions. The love we make must be more than the love we take.

One of these stones could be my great grandmother. A woman, whom I never met, will never know, but without whom I could never be. A woman born in love, who died in love, more in love with life itself than anything else.

Died 1896 aged 36. "Brought back into the arms of the Lord." It made it sound so graceful, so peaceful, being separated from your body in the most permanent fashion. A grey stone, weathered and with its indentations worn thin with years of climate, overgrown by neglected weeds, for a family united again. These are my neighbours now.

I glanced at my watch, the time in a slow sweep of a long arm. Each second is just a second, but some are longer than others. Time is meaningless, when you have nowhere to go and nothing to do. And all of eternity stretches before you like the longest sentence there is. Maybe death – true spiritual death – is the sweetest release. To transcend into something else, to evolve. To truly leave it all behind.

I was a freak of nature. A stunted evolutionary growth. A missing link.

Ahead in the distance, two hundred yards away, through a thin grey mist of rain was a hearse. Black and elongated, reflecting little in its obsidian sides. A brown casket above, with gilt edged handles. Around it my brother, my friends, and two pall bearers. Just doing a days job, sir. My brother buckling under the weight of my flesh. Poor bastard.

I wish I’d lost a little weight before I died. I remember carrying my father out on a casket. That shit is heavy. There’s a physical weight no one warns you about. And even deeper inside, another kind of weight. The spiritual one. That when your parents die, there is no innocence. You can’t run away home anymore after that. Home is the clothes you wear, the life you make. The life other people take away. You can’t go back to your mum and dad, because there is no mum and dad.

Across the wind and chatter of insects I could hear music. This funeral, this was for everyone else to sit around and feel sorry for themselves. This was for everyone else to say their farewells. This was not for me.

I bet she’d chosen some gawdawful song I never loved in my life to consign me to my premature grave. Sombre, religious stuff I never cared for in life, and even less after death. The tendency these days is for people to play modern hymns at their funerals. "Angels", "My Heart Will Go On", "Highway To Hell".

With shit like that no wonder I didn’t want to be awake in there when I had to listen to it. God bless my Mum, but this funeral wasn’t for me. I wasn’t supposed to be here. I was supposed to be in Heaven.

I was supposed to be anywhere but here.

And there she was. Dressed in black, wearing those flat heeled shoes that she wore under long skirts, not because they looked good, but because they were the only comfortable shoes she could ever wear formally. Her heels were the wrong shape for the shoes they sold.

And there she was. With her eyes brown, dark as pools of blood glinting in the moonlight, hurt but trying not to show pain. Just get me through this, fo fucks sake. It was a duty. A horrible ugly duty. Not even trying to show a brave face. Just to show her face. Trying to lift one’s head up in the face of a cruel world. A world that is not cruel, but one that does not care, a world that will continue wether you are there or not.

Eyes dark as the night, deep as oceans, beautiful as the black polished stone of obelisks. Numb to this world that has fucked her over.

Thank God I had changed my will. Let my bitch wife inherit nothing.

If only we knew before, we’d be able to make our peace. But the things unsaid, the thoughts unsaid, the love ungiven in the haste of life, we cannot claim those things back. Not one extra chance, nor one extra second to whisper in a loved one’s ear. Not one moment to brush aside the trivia, the bullshit, the detritus that we call our lives, and say "I’m sorry" for all the pointless disagreements, the screamed declarations, that ultimately don’t matter when the Power Of Love comes to sweep it all away.

And there she was. Hidden behind herself, eyes pointing down to concrete. Sleepwalking through this. As if she were a zombie : as if she were merely someone who did things. Sleep. Eat. Drink. Walk. Work. I missed her. I just wanted to hold her in my arms and tell it was OK, that I wasn’t really gone, that I was just somewhere else, in another oom, a room she couldn’t go to, and it really wasn’t that bad.

The great unknown is somewhat frightening. But you cannot fear what you cannot change. There was nothing to fear anymore. I have seen the great unknown.

I wanted to do something to make it better. Anything, even if it wasn’t something that could make a difference. Something to make me feel as if I could change anything. Anything to make me feel less impotent. Anyfuckingthing at all. Please. Just give me a chance to heal this. To mend the hurt.

I prayed to a God who wasn’t there, as I had done when I was alive. I do so even less now I am dead than I did when I was alive. Then I didn’t know if there was a God or not. Now I know if there is a god, and if there is, he is a cunt.

And after this, when she gets home, slowly the books on the shelf, the text messages on her phone, the notes under her pillow, will be moved somewhere out of her daily orbit. I will become a unperson. A memory, history, a possible past. A son who never grew old. A father to a child she never had. A lover she never watched grow crinkle and fold in time. And slowly her sorrow will become normality, normality will become confidence, and someone will hold her in his arms and as his hands will stroke the skin of the woman I love, the thought will cross his mind : this, this could be love.

And all the time, at the back of her mind, the thought, dimly formed, that those hands should have belonged to someone else. My hands instead of his. My eyes she glances lovingly into instead of his. A future unlived. A life cut in half.

She will walk across a room as if it were the most normal thing in the world. As if she was never broken, never beaten, never kidnapped. But it may only take a second, a glance in the eye, a familiar phrase, the smell of stale urine, and then all of a sudden, she is there – in an instant, the blink of an eye – back to the world she tired to forget. When she opened her eyes and saw her husband murdered, face down in a pool of blood in a dark room.

Eventually the snapshot of us taken at someone else’s engagement party will be moved from the mantelpiece and become an ornament in a cardboard box in a loft in a row of suburban semi-detached houses. To them all, I am already a memory. Someone who used to be here. An empty space in a family photograph.

They will never see me laugh, never see me irritated again. Never tell me not to mix my drinks, or suggest that I really don’t want even more junk food at closing time. Those things will never happen again.

I hear someone mutter that I died quickly, and now I am at peace.

Oh, I fucking wish. You only die once, and for each of us, unless we are stolen in the dark pit of sleep, it cannot be anything other than violent, anything other than protracted, as we cling to life for every last second, as we fight the numbness running through our fingers, racing over our bodies, hoping for even one more instant. I’m not in a better place, and I wish to fuck I was. I’m here. Stuck in limbo. Neither flesh nor spirit, but caught in an infinite waiting room. Looking for a door.

I didn’t - I couldn’t - go in to the church during the service. I couldn’t bear to hear some man I had never met relay anecdotes about me to a room full of people who are somewhat awkward, anxious, who don’t want to be there. Much like me. I pace the car park. I look through the window of the hearse. There is no reflection.

As if I was never there. As if I never was.

Not having a reflection scared the shit out of me the first time I ever noticed that particular fact.

I see the place where my body lay fifteen minutes ago. I see my brothers average car. The baby seat in the back. I hear the distant sound of a crying child, hushed by my brother. As I am consigned to the dark. I hear my brother shushing someone in his arms. Someone has lost an Uncle.

Fuck. I feel so useless. Why did I come here? I’ll only end up regretting it. I regret it now. If I hadn’t gone I could pretend that it didn’t happen.

If I could cry I would. But without a body there can be no tears.

My death was old news to me. It didn’t stop hurting. The sting of an old wound. But it had been months. A week before they found my body, and months until it had been released. And this, this was just the beginning and the end.

The end of my life. The beginning of a new one.

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