List of the Lost (3 page)

There is a querulous pause. “Ezra,” she now began with softened tone, “should I leave my husband and come and live with you?” This form of play is coy bait, since Eliza does not – and has never had – a husband, but much of Eliza's jabs would not depend upon rational justifications for both were in that state known as love, when even the defensive fencing sends a sexual shiver.

“
Have you ever considered a wordless existence? You'd fare far better,” Ezra now joins in, and both relax.

“Yes, I have considered a wordless existence … since words could never be accurately found to describe all of … this,” she waves a hand out in quite stately sweep … but at nothing.

“You were very smart, Eliza. But something dashed your brains out at some point. Do you understand me at all?”

“Yes, I do, but only at all. Nowhere else, and I am not vulnerable to offense because of, well, let's just describe it as an abnormally solid wall of love for you. Undeserved at times, perhaps, but I'm immune to argument on the subject, and what a joy to be able to finally say these words for the first time … catching your breath as you sigh … finally in the living world. But we need each other in order for us both to be good, and to hold on to a certain unshakeable belief without reason.”

“There are certain things which are best not to mess around with.Human thoughts, for example, haha. But, look, you are my heart. You save me every single day from … absolute boredom. This is how I know I … pause … love you.”

“You haven't finished the sentence,” clips in Eliza; “the bit where we move in together is missing … and the other frazzled issue of my new life and, my, my how your expressions alone reveal your deepest insights … or at least they give me mine, should I say? Or are our lives too ordinary to be worth yammering about?”

“What would your mother say if you said ‘I'm pregnant and I'm leaving home'?” asked Ezra.

“If I told her you were pregnant and leaving home I think she'd be quite pop-eyed … should the gin allow.”

“
Is
that clear, Ezra?” This voice now belonged to Mr Rims, breaking into Ezra's dream, the danger signal that reality must always be. Ezra realized that he had not listened to anything at all said by Mr Rims, or by anyone else, as all five squatted on the grassy green of Priorswood propriety. A grin broke across Ezra's face, as if this alone could assure Rims.

“Jesus, you're a devil,” rounded off Rims. And that was that.

The boys break it open on the track, but Harri tanks at third base and bolts into a header. It's a poor show under tension.

“
Muzzle
-head!” shouts Rims … “infidel!” he clips on, and all are quietly embarrassed.

With just over a month to go before the competition where middle- and long-distance events shape lives forever, our foursome pack life's inessential essentials in migration for a holistic fortnight at a sportsman's haven known as Natura, a no-nonsense collegiate retreat where countrywide affiliations commune in one hearty scholastic clash, where a single-track road led to the hidden pavilion of an abandoned plantation shadowed by giant dawn redwoods five meters in girth; where deadly dale led to stumpery woods, and slippery stepping stones criss-crossed over dangerously racing rapid rivers. Natura's facilities were not necessarily more useful than those at Priorswood, but the colonization of contenders cramped within shared living quarters brought the critically serious within competitive towel-whacking distance of those whom they'd zealously oppose in combat on that final commercialized Pillsbury Doughboy-soaked televised day. This tested preparedness and authority and overall composition, weeding out wet-knickered nerves and any lingering sensitivities. In fact, our team converged at Natura without making any exchanges whatsoever with the other mariner athletes, thus the intensification of such a move ultimately felt lost on the unit. Woodland surrounds of cud-chewing laziness wrapped Natura in a soon-to-be-shorn lamb's warmth and protection, here, where humans are allowed to feel almost as dignified as nature, and where an immediate harmony with silence and beauty (which most of us have learned to live without) embraced the boys as a pictorial love affair began. The city peasantry is ineffectual here, and they will call it wilderness whilst not knowing the meaning of such a word, yet somehow acknowledging the moral superiority of land untrammeled by the flapping mediocrities that make up the simple-minded majority. These woods are an eternal ocean, familiar to you only from television; they are gamely danger-ous or overripe with majesty depending upon your surging urgings to give an opinion. Nature always waits in the wings and the winds, ready to pounce with all of its power just at that sloppily contented hour when you foolishly assume it to be plainly tired out. Narcissistic humans do their quite pathetic best to kill nature off, oblivious to their self-reliance on its upkeep, yet nature will only take so much bureaucratic bullying before it snaps a deadly snap – for it does not need your approval, your organized banditry, your prepubescent social laws, your trades of cheapening commerce, your militant preachment, your apologies or blind belief of superiority … as if a presidential seat gives you an intolerable presumption of dominance over this earth's terrain! Watch, wait and listen, and soon you'll be bitten. Natura indeed means mother nature, and here she is all around you, as you stand shyly abandoned, denying that what was said was ever intended. Early evening has our hounds in leisurely stroll through deep-dell woodland where oxygen almost chokes you with its purity, for there are no chunky human discontents fanatically generating their defective habits. Animals do not pollute, do not need a god in order to be good, and live in organized societies of reciprocal altruism. Animals do not need money, and they will even feed the subordinates within their kin. Humans, on the other hand, live entirely upon repayment of favors given, and on a costly demonstration of super­iority that thrives on divine punishment. New air rolls into the city in order to save it, yet it is defiled by the smack and shuffle of everyday destruction of Neanderthals posing as modernities, causing nothing more serious than life simply needing to do its part. Our speed merchants do what we all do in the stimulating silence of woodland of mature oak trees and wingnut trees: they throw back their heads and they squint to the tallest point of the tallest evergreen, and then they walk slowly, with mouths agape, yew cones underfoot in wild flower meadow. Yet what makes wild bluebells wild? And could they ever be tamed? Is a caged animal no longer wildlife? Or is it in fact wilder still, due to its incarceration? Marshy montezuma pines line the pathway through the woods, and deer are here – knowing enough about the evils of the human spirit to keep well hidden, for the human race is anything but humane. They have created the hell of the slaughterhouse, aflame and far more perverted in sickness than anything apparently designed by Satan. Ah, yes, the human race: impinging and threatening with every gleeful twist of the branding iron.

Whilst the city demands that we jaunt instead of stroll, slaves to the hands of the clock, the clock, the clock (even though a moochie traipse might be all that's required of you), this pathway through the woods makes no such demands. You walk as you please, amongst yew, lime and maple marsh, none of which fear time as pathetically im­perialist you do. With the howl of a dog, Nails dances through the woods, happiness in high gear.

“It's on ice! It's on ice!” he shouts, and nature's space returns an impressive echo. The others know what he means, and are even dismayingly amused by his orgiastic war dance. Nails has no doubt whatsoever that the ultimate trophy awaits at the upcoming barnburners competition, as late bird-song, here, in the pine-coned hollow, is heard as ever it has been, undisturbed since the original and native Americans (now blanketed and blue-penciled out of his-story and her-story) first sprayed their pioneer's mark on a country that really wasn't ever kind to its own people. Of the white race no explanation is necessary because expect­ations are so low. Nails rocks along in mock fun-house mirror buffoonery, and no one knows why, and it hardly matters. Ezra thinks of Eliza, and he wonders if she thinks of how he thinks of her.

“… and if we fail, we shall fail magnificently!” lords Justy, and with this he hurls his wristwatch into the shrubbery as he shouts, “I refuse to be a slave! I refuse to be a spectator! This body is decorative art! I delight in my own magnificence! Why shouldn't I? War is an old, shitty business! I am young! The nuclear arms race is a mass mental illness! Nuclear physicists are highly paid serial killers! All they can think of is cremation. Why aren't they all on Death Row? I am alive! I will not be destroyed by regulations! ” The dance goes on.

“Yes, very good, stop it now, please, or I'll split your head,” says Harri, flatly.

Curled and hidden amongst the flora and fauna that run alongside a boundary-line bridle path, a small and crumpled figure is doing his best to stand upright amongst primrose and violets. Soundlessly the boys freeze as five sets of eyes assess each other. Nobody speaks. No civilized description could bring to life an outlined sketch of the elderly imp swaying like a nightmarish object of hardbitten brutality, with his torn overcoat blacker than death and his face lined and marked with the sorriest scars – dis­possessed, dehumanized and insidious, this intimidating ding-a-ling wreck is at the end of everything, and possibly wanting the end sooner rather than later. The hunched hobo has no hair, his skin a dish of human dirt, his bearing having already drifted into the final chapter as if it were death. His voice suddenly spoke, as if half-strangled in his own throat. From the swill-bucket mouth came breath that could kill off a team of horses, and hands like withered leaves made fumbling motions as an occultist drone of despair dripped from his chipped and chapped lips.

“Well, none of youze is black, so I suppose you won't kill me,” he starts. The human sickbed steps closer, a stench of stale medication vaporizing from his gaseous and perished clothing, to which evidently cling bits of herb garden. A pitiful vision of life's loneliness, his timid steps suggest a man pushed past his limit and now ready to feud with his own grave. His cataracts mist the pain, but the agonized mouth knows that only midnight is ahead, with no further chance of recovery from enforced oblivion. The voice speaks with the tone of struggle, passive goodwill, yet sorrowfully nowhere, neither myth nor fiction. Only so much despair can be survived before the mind finally caves in. Trapped in his clothes, trapped in his history – the history that created him, and he is here, one of the lowest of the lower animals. He is now his total outcome, the inevitable moral and physical defeat, changeless in its ignominy.

“I generally can't stand young people … taking drugs for the good of the country … how does that help? Taking chemicals to experience natural happiness? Everyone has something to hide, of course, and power is all very well, but nobody's powerful enough to leave this world alive, haha. Do the rich go to a richer heaven? Do kings and queens go to a special royal heaven? Haha, I don't think so. But why not, if they're as royal as they say they are? But if a cop places his hands on me I will do my level best to kill him, I really will. I am nothing and I have nothing but I hate the cops because I know them and I know what they are. There is no safety and nobody cares about you, make no mistake about that. The cops, even, yes, my very country-men, are my biggest enemy – only schoolyard shitheads join the police machine, you've noticed, I'm sure. Shake your head as you will, but while I still have my senses … I've seen some beautiful houses, not far, quite near, and they look like what you'd call success … y'know, that senseless trance of absolute boredom … but is it success? I don't know because I'm not the one living inside those houses and I'm not the one who pays for them, so I don't know if the word ‘success' is even applicable because it could be sheer hell inside those dark-hearted walls for all I know, and I must tell you that the people down there don't look too happy to me … all them frozen postures and changeless actions … impossibly restricted by their own wealth. Their tax money funds atomic testing grounds in Nevada. They blow up live pigs imagining them to be Muslims. Affecting, isn't it? And through it all they talk of God, as all war-mongerers do. I see the sun shining on the water and a shock of joy rips through me like it's the most true and pure pleasure that life can ever give you. Shake your head as you will, but while I still have my senses. Most things end and you don't even remember them. Most
people
end and you don't even remember them, like my wife, if you want an instance. I'll give you an instance. She lost her mind and was gently led away to die – don't ask me where to because I didn't care enough to ask. I'd had no education, no proper job, and being on state aid was just a blatant way of doing nothing – I knew that. My wife just sat there. I didn't even know her and I was expected to feed and clothe her for the rest of her life, and all because … of what? Because she allowed me access. I couldn't even feed and clothe myself! And I asked for nothing! She just sat there, anyway, in her bed-chamber of horrors, exiled, as if she'd been in a fire or something, as if she'd lost her lower body in the war and as if nothing could possibly be expected of her because she was the woman. Proceed carefully because marriage is just a … suffocation … your life doesn't belong to you. Shake your head as you will, but while I still have my senses. Well, I lost and that's that. Not that I wish to press the point. I was four years too young, I really was, and my mind keeps wandering back to that desolate time, it really does. Well, the dead are dead. You can't go through life knowing who you'll fall in love with, and I want no god judging me for whatever I … think, never mind do! When I was first married I didn't realize that you couldn't do the intimate physical bit unless you felt confident about it, otherwise it just couldn't work. I didn't like that fact, but it was a fact nonetheless. Anyway, I discovered I was useless and then I didn't have a choice, and once you've faced the mocking nature of making love badly then you can never get free of it. But if I hadn't been so afraid I would have found out more about it, and wouldn't I have been happier so? A girl laughed at me when we were both thirteen years old, and that widening mouth of laughter, as dumb and sterile as it was, the vicious disdain because I couldn't measure up … but it was the way she laughed … the way she laughed … the way she laughed … with all that hair like something pulled out of a microwave … like something you'd twirl on a stick … it stayed with me forever, and it triggered my dislike of all women, or, my embarrassment at women. I'd known a boy from over the back, and I'd stand on tip-toe to watch him every day at four o'clock [now his eyes became greedy], not knowing why at first. I'd wait to the point of excited tears. The patience I gave! And I was thirteen to his sixteen! You'd laugh or cry! I'd shake his arm off – but, ah, the demands of other people, other people, other people, other people, other people … but what about me, and what I felt? What makes my feelings so … impossible to satisfy? And if they're impossible to satisfy then … why are they there … in God's image! Who says I'm faulty? No one dies any differently to anyone else. It's all the same passage. Which of us doesn't die? And if someone soothes my hurts, what does it matter to those who aren't involved? Sexual morality is just an unpleasant excuse to snoop into other people's lives – bored as you must be with your own. They said my emotions were unusual, but they weren't unusual enough for there not to be laws against them, so they must have been quite common, in fact, and not unusual at all. He was a good whistler, and that's a sign of a very contented mind, isn't it? I know people don't walk along and whistle any more, but they did then, you see, each hand in each pocket. I knew I need only wait, because it roared out of me – louder than any roar I'd roared! And we're meant to be whatever we are, otherwise we wouldn't have been made to be whatever we are. I can't be entirely wrong. My wife, you see, was just a mouth … just a mouth and nothing else … she was just about better than nothing … although, on reflection … She yawned from morning till night even though she wasn't tired. I never knew love – equal love – and I thought the consolation of physical contact would … well, lust has nothing to do with all of the other emotions … it's a separate emotion in itself. I found that, anyway. Bless me, yes. In any case, my wife rambled like a martyr and we'd only been two months married, but she wasn't happy and I told her she was contaminated and I now don't think she was, but I couldn't think of anything else to say, and neither of us could imagine living and not being unhappy, but we were too shy to talk to doctors or anything like that because we couldn't imagine anyone being interested in our problems. It wasn't a settled home … padlocks, fifty sets of keys, and we only had four rooms in total. I had full cause to grieve, and there were no possibilities to make progress, because you were kept where you were – by the state – shoved further and further and further down by a mass of laws that I'd never consented to in the first place. Once it had all ended and the homeless shelter had told me to go away, then the welfare kitchen reported me to the police. I mean, what do the police know? They don't live in the slums … Judges don't live in the ghetto … they are exclusively verbal beings. What can they understand about the way life moves? They have no precise meaning. What makes them royal? What makes anyone royal? Being in possession of a squad of tanks? Would judges even recognize dog shit if ever they saw it? Their interests are not the same as ours, so what gives them the right to judge us? They don't understand the houses we live in, or why we persist. They're scared to death of the underprivileged … whose powerlessness gives them an almighty power. Judges live in secrecy, don't they, because they've done so much harm to society … they have to hide like criminals on the run. I've never seen the Chief of Police breaking bread with the bag people, no, no, no. The police think it's OK to shoot anyone as long as control is the outcome, which is just like saying it's OK to bomb foreign countries if it means we get to control them. How did that ever become constitutional? The game is rigged! Like there's nothing on earth but control! And control can never be wrong! And the cops! They know very well what they do to innocent people, and they don't want it done back to them! Anyway, you're all next. The military! … dreaming up new ways to wipe out entire populations. How evil could any human mind possibly be? Shake your head as you will. Do you think I was always seventy-five years old? Bless me, no. Being this old is new to me. This is why I can't take to young people. They think the elderly have been elderly for years and years, but we haven't, we've just turned old from being young – and all we know about is being young! You'd laugh if I said I was no different to you – but it's true. My mind is twenty-one. I can't recognize the body I have now … because it isn't mine … I'm new at being old. I ran like a frightened gazelle, and I'd spring like a poked cobra, but you can't stay that way forever, and I can't talk about it enough. Yet what am I left with? My wife and I had nothing in common, and that's what brought us together! We were meant for one another 'cos we were both useless! She said she was dying from sexual neglect – but she was lucky because I didn't even know there was any other way to feel. Well, I knew it as a marketing ploy, or from the television … as profitable as war. Did you know that every government needs a war in order to balance the books? Did you know that every government
loves
a war?
Woo-hoo!
‘Our hearts go out to the families of the heroes' … well, stop sending them out to futile death, then. Those boys are so heroic that no one can be bothered to mention their names.
Woo-hoo!
You chase it every single day of your life until its mocking nature all but destroys you, and I can't talk about it enough, yet we laugh at small children who still believe in the Tooth Fairy – but we do, too! Until the day we die! I can't talk about it enough. I said, I can't talk about it enough. Have you seen much action yourself?” He now, suddenly, moves too close to Ezra, as if heaving into place.