AFTER LIFE We love the birds. They ornament our lives, they make us grow in tune with them, with almost everything: music, flight. They – are indifferent. If they could, they would resent how we have hunted and harassed them, killed their food, and poisoned them. By good luck – they don’t seem able to do that sum. Maybe – there’s sums we can’t do either. Or – they could be the aliens we seek, flown here from different stars. The journey back? ‘No! Not yet.’ Why? When, then? Which tiny opening of silver light to aim at, which one did you come from ... does it matter? Yes, of course. So – we aren’t alone, and nor are they ... what’s next? I despised pop concerts. The first one I went to, the lights and the beat were wonderful, you couldn’t have imagined them, not anywhere. It was a universe, the one you’d not believed in since you were promised it when you were a child. The eager people, not your friends but not overtly hostile – they were everywhere, and if you went alone, whatever you started as, you climbed on the eagle’s back, all of you – each with their eagle, and their loneliness, and beside me there was another me: ‘I love you,’ I said. ‘What?’ she said. I held her hand, like the music said, and at first this other me, her pinched Polish face like a bit of space-rock, gypsum, lit up by the days as the nights swept past and blackened it with soot – it took me in as part of the collectivity. But we went out together at the end, and I did love her, and being straight was the best thing, better than nothing like had been before the dull pulse-plodding music and the lights and the whipping us on by the singer and the backing group that really could sing and didn’t mind being under his, the lead hero’s, spreading tree all evening, and mine was real true love, and it was the worst thing that ever happened to me, and I fell into the spider’s trap, and couldn’t get out of her terrible story that dribbled over me, sticky, leaking from a Polish coffin underground.... Anna. She was your box, and the soil on top. You were trapped beneath her, beside her.
‘Anna?’ asks Buryat, shaping up for harsh words: ‘She’s ordinary, ugly. Once “plain”, now, honestly – a fright. Emaciated, muscular – if you had a three-round bout with her, you’d be crying “uncle” after one.’ Her work, lifting, deploying heavy stuff – gives her the strength to pull your head off, to have her wrapped round you like a carpet, and the donkeys will come and trample you, both. Can being born in Poland be responsible? For anything? Not for Anna, surely.... ‘All true,’ I say: ‘She is a lump. Lumps – the sugar of the world, no doubt. Dull, resentful, loud in defence. Too much of her – your organs shudder. But ... the worse there is, the more there is to love. To sacrifice yourself, perhaps, but – human, absolutely human, Buryat!’ I could, on my own, live, I think. But – I don’t. The human conditional: ... ‘I might – I don’t’. What else is there to be prized and valued? If I do what I want – would it cost me more than I have? The human state, shaky and ephemeral ... What other animals, so careless of their fellows, make you love them so, forgive them what they didn’t do to you but for what they are, for ever, for their awful lives that you fell, jumped, into ... They are the twisted stem, and you must free its spirit ... find the tree within. A slender, elegant, well-bound folio, until you opened her and read. ‘You’ll regret,’ says Buryat, my friend, the spy: ‘You think you’re strong, like Prometheus. But – you have the choice. Any fool can pick the bad horse, ride it, break it, destroy it, shame yourself. Be different. Bet on the fast, good-looking mare, spend your winnings on Lambrusco and papayas.... Leave Anna to the rodeo....’ Does it reassure you, to know the universe has rules? Does it reassure you, to know there’s a criminal code, that binds you too? That the cops can take you off? And you have rules built in – many, many – not like the red and yellow bird, who knows about the family, distances and predators – things that might be useful for you too. You have complicated ones of loyalty, of who you tell what. And Time. What you can’t do today you could do yesterday ... We should discuss them more, these rules – not in a parley of us instruments, in the evening, with alcohol or pot, all melody – but conscious of the overhanging cliff. Fixed there till there’s rain or drought, or something that shakes the ground, and down it comes. Before it decides the punishments, the law says if you’re guilty it doesn’t matter what you did. You’re guilty. Feel it. Rubbing out a species – it isn’t easy, though it’s been done countless times. The Creator, the Supreme Showman and Impresario – does a good job with the eraser. Sends the tempests, the landslides, the diseases – into the spiky nests and dusty tunnels. Still, some resist, cling on. The humans – themselves great exterminators – they can’t fight back, but don’t go easy. They’re on the list now, the top. Who’s next? On with the search for perfection. Behold the art show in the universe ... bands of colour, swirls of dust, noxious atmospheres ... humankind is still out there, in front, ingenious and sparky. Multicoloured. It will take time to rid existence of them, of us, and who is next? Wolves, peacocks? – almost everybody has a claim, but most are opportunist, they don’t know how to make it plain – how good the world is, how you’d like to gobble down that goodness so you’re full of it. The bad – excreted on the ground: with a foot you can cover it with fallen leaves ... Ants, fruit-flies? Do they persist? Worth a modest bet ... Knowing good and bad – that seemed the answer, or the clue ... but no. All that was an invention. More reflection? More self-doubt? Waiting for tomorrow’s supreme species – passing the buck, the plugged nickel ... Ingratiation, that’s the best, the only bet. * Anna told me how her eyes had a disease ... she had to wear dark glasses or she’d go blind – and not just eyes ... there was a disease profound, and the treatment wore the whole system down. Be very careful – your companion, your sickness, is touchy, kills or blinds you if you don’t follow his rules. What he intends, and how he deals with what you have in mind – it’s a war you carelessly didn’t want; dared to happen. Quite unprepared – ask somebody for help, in debit to them for decades. Too much light? Or fear of it – what it might do, what it might show. A just precaution, anyway, be on guard, respect illumination. ‘What’s that paper you’re studying?’ asks Buryat. ‘It’s an injunction,’ I tell him: ‘I’m barred from the casino for cheating: from the rest as well – the dogs and horses. I wish I knew how I could cheat at chance....’ ‘It’s your name,’ he says: ‘The police. They think you are a launderer, wash dirt off what you have, the cash ... believe you pretend you lost it all on the red, the black – the wheel of fortune. Soldiers and shamans – they front almost all the crime ... that should make you lighten up: you’d be no match for them.’ Buryat humours my pretensions. He knows nothing. He says, ‘Power and knowledge? – bet against those two, you’re a trusting guy: play the shell game with them.’ ‘It’s the great cake-bake, Buryat,’ I say: ‘Everyone makes one to their recipe, they look like all the others. You don’t win, don’t know why some guy has. You take the cake home – it’s limp and stale. That’s why you didn’t win? It’s inedible. So are all the others – the winner too, that’s been consumed, it’s been on TV, crumbling putty ... You lost, accept it, it’s a lesson ...The ingredients – they are you, they always are.’ It was life: self-pity. No one else is interested. We were a huge family, underneath the other, even huger, one. Like in an archaic marriage, we were the female part, we had to smile, submit, recover. Minister, comfort, heal. It had begun an age ago ... my father? A debt, a favour – money and permission to take one of their women, and to take a debt which would for ever grow, and never die, like the sacred flame in Iran, with sacrifices to Ahura Mazda. Don’t wait up for Him! He’s a platoon! Twenty names, and all creation. We were bound to believe. If there is a God, or Gods – you have to love them, hate them, no difference. They exist so they can be served. We believed, we had to, in the other, the unholy, family. So – this other family, an immense, an ever-growing band – we were their tributaries. We hid them, gave them alibis, burned their bloody clothes, fenced their thefts, healed their wounded, buried their victims, gave them shelter, protected them. Love and fear. No love and much fear. Some we liked and all we feared. When they were on the run, we were the ones who paid, who went to jail, who died for them. We were a tribe, who lived from the dwindling forest stocks, while robbers came and took the trees, the animals. The gangs fought wars, and we were chivvied, they were our totems who we had to protect, with all our being. Die for them. We had once been fugitives, I suspect. Now we have been hunted down and enslaved, been subjugated, by the gangs. They saw us run, and snaffled us, as slaves, or hostages. It could happen without crime and blackmail: – in the Congo, a certain tribe is despised by, subordinated to, another. To an outsider – they seem similar, symbiotic even. The Aka. They are small, that’s all. With us, it happened in a modern city. No forest, and no trees. We were animals you can milk or skin, but seldom butcher. Our advantage was to be alive, always available and servile. Killing us – a stupidity. To stop being accomplices, we could back off, back out – go to the forest, where there were few trees, just tubers in the grit: rubbery amphoras. A source of moisture in the long dry season. We could stop being poor and accomplices, become just – very poor. Subsist. Attract more people attracted by nothing, living in and on, nothing. Living without: – you make a little troupe, invent the myths, sing the songs. Live on discards, live by the blowpipe – eat little birds, tiny scurrying creatures smaller than outcast rats. Walk. Cut down the few trees, don’t cut baobabs if you can avoid. Devise harsh rules for marriage, for choosing leaders. Work for others by the day, sometimes, to get cash for what you need, can’t find or scrounge. There! No gang would want you now, you’re beyond helping anyone, you can’t be blackmailed. You are free. This solution exists in Madagascar. I’d read about it – be so outcast you’re protected, preserved, a curiosity. The Mikéa. You shelter those who run away from civilisation. A thief, a murderer, has more self-respect, enjoys her meals and walking on a pavement. We’d be of no interest to scholars, to anthropology, because it was so very simple. Easy. But we didn’t do it. We were accomplices of the strong, for ever. |
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