Solo (39 page)

He is wearing sunglasses to cover up a black eye.

There are poor people all around. There’s an old man singing in a baby carriage, and scabby children passed out on air-conditioning vents. Skeletal women with bulging eyes are motioning to the traffic, trying in vain to sell themselves.

‘Khatuna’s going insane, knowing I’m out here with you,’ says Irakli.

‘Your sister doesn’t know what friendship is,’ says Boris. ‘She’s never experienced it herself and it makes her insecure.’

They drive for a long time in silence. Irakli looks drained, and has little to say. Gas stations announce themselves with fluttering pennants, like fairgrounds. There are palm trees, and the largest houses they have ever seen, and pale people staring out. They imagine they will chance upon some inviting destination. They imagine they will see places to stop. But they find nothing of the sort, and finally they drive back to the hotel.

When Boris’s first award is announced, Plastic seizes him with unfeigned delight. Enmity is forgotten, for Plastic never stopped believing in the music. He removes Boris’s violin deftly from his hand and pushes him into a funnel of smiling, clapping people.

Boris’s own music plays at excruciating volume through the speakers, but it has become unrecognisable. It has become military. He is passed from usher to usher, and propelled on to the stage. A tall woman hands him a trophy, a gold gramophone player, and puts a mike to his mouth. He looks at the audience head on, so many, the sweeping lights brown through his sunglasses.

The woman’s teeth are like beacons.

‘Boris, you have such an amazing story.’

Her voice does not come from her. There is the impress of a million eyes, and his name is sprinting on the screens over his head.

He forces words into the microphone, and his own voice is stolen too.

‘I spent a decade in an abandoned town, alone with the animals. Everyone should try it.’

The audience laughs, and he is stupefied by the scale, cameras spinning over his head. The many images of Boris turn their eyes upon the multitude.

‘I’m not joking,’ he says.

The cackling gallery gives way to clapping, and his music thunders again. He is led off stage, and with all the video screens it is like a hall of mirrors finding a way back.

‘No! Come back! We
must
have Boris!’

The man and woman who stand for the cameras either side of Boris possess two of the most well-known faces in the world, but he does not recognise them. He is bent over, laughing in the flashes, the woman’s bare arm brushing his cheek, the journalists shouting.

‘Boris! Take off your glasses!’

Irakli stands by, watching. He has become entirely invisible. He stands under the blazing lamps, and still people try to walk through him.

Plastic and Khatuna are standing near by. Khatuna wears dark make-up and has drawn silver lightning flashes on her cheeks. A journalist wants a comment from Plastic.

‘Is it true the American music industry is being taken over by eastern European gangs?’

Plastic is smiling for the cameras. He says,

‘That’s an insane question. Who gave you an idea like that?’

Security men are trying to protect the demigods who walk here so close to mortals. The love they inspire is so consuming that ordinary people cannot keep themselves from throwing themselves at them and ruining their hair. As they pass through the doors into the evening, humans line up along the immortal corridor and scream with the pain of adoration. Khatuna walks down the carpet on Plastic’s arm, looking at the goggling, afflicted faces, and wonders again how American youths can get so fat.

Boris leaves a cosmic shower behind him, as the camera flashes fade.

‘Where’s your girlfriend, Boris?’ shouts a photographer.

Boris is full of witty remarks. His hands are full of trophies. He is handsome and magnetic, and Irakli is entirely inconspicuous by his side. He looks at the way Boris holds himself and realises there are parts of his friend he will never know.

The four of them get into the same limo. The car doors shut and they can hear their voices again. Boris seizes the champagne with relish, and pours four glasses. Khatuna drinks hers straight down and grabs the bottle.

‘Are you OK, Irakli?’ asks Boris. ‘You’re very quiet.’

Irakli nods, and forces a smile.

Plastic’s face radiates gladness. He locks an elbow around Boris’s neck and kisses the top of his head.

‘That’s my boy!’ he shouts. ‘My genius boy!’

Plastic and Boris exchange tributes, and Khatuna gets increasingly impatient. There’s a line of limousines blocking the street, and theirs has hardly moved.

‘How far is this party?’ she asks irritatedly.

‘It’s in that building.’ Plastic points about a hundred metres down the road.

They are motionless in the traffic. Irakli’s face is turned towards the crowds outside, and Boris plays a snatch of music on his violin, though there is hardly space to move a bow. It’s a tune from his album, and he hams it up, crossing his eyes and playing like an idiot. Khatuna can’t stand it, and she shouts over the music at him,

‘Is it true you’re dating that actress?’

She manages to make it sound like an insult. Boris says,

‘I hate that word. Are we calendars?’

‘Jerk,’ she says.

Boris puts his window down, and hangs his arm outside the car. His violin is lying in his lap.

Khatuna says,

‘You’re losing your hair. I can see it in this light. You’ll be bald by the time you’re thirty.’

Plastic glares, trying to rein it in.

Suddenly Khatuna seizes the violin from Boris’s lap and begins to whack it against the window ledge. Plastic tries to save the instrument but she roars like an animal and her strength is unexpected. She smashes the violin three times, and it is entirely destroyed, only the strings holding the pieces together. She tosses the carcass through the open window.

It is Plastic who turns on her, hits her in the mouth and shouts obscenities. She laughs in his face, and touches her finger to her bleeding lip. A glass is broken, and there is champagne down Plastic’s suit.

Boris turns up at the party with nothing in his hands. Smiling moguls put their arms around him and lead him to the right people.

Irakli stands on his own, watching. The room is full of faces he has seen every day on television. Pop stars and movie stars are serving up smiles, and using gestures they have prepared beforehand. They are stealing glances at each other’s clothes. They fawn and are fawned upon: everyone loves everyone, but it is not the love of humans.

The most famous woman in the world is here, a woman so impossibly celebrated and beautiful that she must sit in her own private corner behind a velvet rope, surrounded by young men selected for their looks and their ability to keep talking.

Previously, at home, Irakli has watched some of these people with rapt attention, his pupils wide. If he has ever speculated about being in a room with them, he has probably imagined his emotions in a heightened state. But here he is excessively bored. Waiters are passing with cocktails and he takes them two at a time, and still he is unable to lose himself. The banality is strangely devastating.

Plastic and Khatuna are off among the crowds, sparking with their rancour. A bruise is coming up on Khatuna’s cheek, and she seems to be showing it off. Plastic is trying to be charismatic, but the strain is showing, and it’s noticeable that people walk away from his conversation.

The most famous woman in the world sends a message to Boris,
inviting him to join her in her private corner, for she is not above the fascination of ordinary people. Boris sits down next to her and she asks him questions about himself. She says,

‘You’re quite a normal size. I imagined you would be big.’

Boris laughs. ‘People are getting smaller. Haven’t you noticed?’

He becomes restless during their conversation. He does not want to talk. While she is asking how he feels about the great number of his awards, he takes her cool hand under the table and positions it firmly on his penis.

The most famous woman in the world does not remove her hand. She looks him in the eye and says,

‘You’ll have to excuse me. I’m a vegetarian.’

Boris matches her gaze. He is enjoying himself. He says, obscurely,

‘I’ve heard of vegetarians. Don’t they lose their talents young?’

Irakli is on his own. He listens to conversations about the sensational hookers who have come into town for this night. He cannot get close to his friend, who is cocooned in the corner, and he decides to get up and dance. He spills his drink over his clothes, and curses. He starts to move to the music, and he knows he is very bad: he cannot hear the rhythm or master his body. He bumps into somebody, who turns round, complaining and indignant. Eventually Irakli leaves. A camera flashes as he comes out of the door, the photographer like a jumpy sniper realising too late that the person coming out is no one.

Irakli walks back to the hotel and takes the elevator to the twenty-first floor. His room has been altered in his absence, the signs of his existence removed. They have folded back the corner of the bed-covers, and put away his things. There is a promotional package from Universal Records on the table. He takes out Boris’s CD and looks at it again.

He looks at himself in the mirror. Turquoise half-moons are buried under his eyes. It is true that he has become difficult to see.

He unwraps the cellophane from Boris’s CD, and puts it into the player. He pours himself a drink from the minibar and lies down on the bed. Water has seeped into the corner of the ceiling of this expensive
hotel, yellowing it, and making stale bubbles. Irakli presses
Play
on the remote.

Boris plays the
crepuscule encounter
, and the
eighty leagues of sleep
. The
fulminating spiral-hair
, the
pale glow in the deep
. It is beautiful and poisonous. Irakli lets himself be swallowed by the hungry ear. He bleeds blindness and weaves a mattress of vertigo; he wishes he could sacrifice himself to this loveliness. Boris plays
the Arab shirt she saw and loved, the
wart-faced Tetrarch and the falcon on his glove
. Irakli weeps in the dark room, for this is perfect sound. Above his stone head, a congregation of wild scintillas spend themselves in the night.

Through the music, Irakli hears Khatuna and Plastic come back to the room next door. They too have left the party early, and Irakli hears the inarticulate bark of their discord. While Boris plays the insect mother, while he thanks the steamy air, Irakli can hear irate sounds coming through the wall, which ebb and flow, gather and evolve. The noises become rhythmic, and soon the sex is loud and undeniable.

The CD comes to an end.

Irakli lies in the darkness, listening. Plastic and Khatuna stab each other with obscenities, and Irakli coils up in a whorl.

At length he gets up, sits down at the desk, and writes on the hotel branded notepaper.

The dream of the embryo on the night before
birth

The dream
Held prisoner in my dark head
Wants to escape, and prove its innocence to everyone on the
outside
.

I hear its impatient voice,
See its gestures, its furious
Menacing
state
.

It doesn’t know that I too am only someone’s dream.
If I were its jailor
I’d have set it free
.

Irakli reads it back to himself, stands up, and tidies his belongings. He takes Boris’s CD out of the player and puts it back in its case. He takes a look around to check that everything is just so. He opens the sliding door to the balcony. He climbs on the rail and sits for a moment, his feet swinging above twenty-one floors of void. Then he lets himself go.

W
HEN
B
ORIS ARRIVED
at Khatuna’s New York apartment, he found the front door standing open.

Khatuna had a scarf around her head and was packing up the house. She looked up when Boris came in, but she did not greet him. She was shrouding things in bubble wrap. Paintings and vases, and many other objects whose shapes had been obscured in the wrapping. She was gagging their mouths with plastic.

The air stank of cigarettes.

Boris looked over the piles of clothes arranged in rows across the wooden floor.

‘Are you leaving?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

He nodded. He saw clothes of Irakli’s that he recognised. There was the shirt that was drenched in the rain on the night they had met. There was a pen he used to carry. On the top of a pile of books he saw the volume of poetry he had given to Irakli after returning from tour.

Boris listened to the slight noises in the room: the hum of glass, the collision of dust, the echo of before. There was nothing here that did not whisper of Irakli.

He imagined Khatuna returning to this place after the horror of LA. He imagined how she would have staggered, walking in, when she saw everything so unchanged. He saw her fingering Irakli’s imprint upon the rooms: his food half eaten in the fridge, his pocket coins spilled
upon the sofa. He saw the devastation of a book half read, and an unwashed shirt. He saw her following the source of her brother’s radiation, looking at the parrot and the hollows in his half-made bed, and coming, eventually, to the pile of papers on his desk, where she stopped and placed her hand.

He could see all this vividly – as if it had been left behind in the room, too barbed for time to swallow away.

She had put Irakli’s manuscript in the middle of the dining table, and Boris could read the title.
Androgyne
.

He saw that the shelter he had built out on the balcony had been removed, and there was no sign of the pig. Everything had been fixed and cleaned.

The parrot was perched on the table. It had lost most of its feathers, and was covered in patches of scaly skin.

‘What happened to the parrot?’

‘Nothing happened. It decided to pull out its feathers,’ said Khatuna.

She lit a cigarette. Boris stroked the parrot’s bald head.

‘I came to read Irakli’s poems,’ he said. He gestured to the manuscript on the table.

‘Don’t say his name,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to say a word about him.’

But she didn’t stop him when he picked up the manuscript.

He took it out on to the balcony and slid the door closed behind him. He read the book from beginning to end. When he had finished he stood with his hand on the rail of the balcony.

His eyes were red when he came in. He said,

‘It’s a wonderful book. It’s a wonderful, wonderful book.’

He waited for Khatuna to say something, but she was intent on her packing. He said,

‘What will you do with it?’

‘I’ll publish it. Even if I have to sew the fucking pages together myself. The whole world is going to know my brother was a poet.’

Boris put the manuscript back on the table. He picked up a button from the floor. He said,

‘I know you don’t like me. But I loved Irakli too, and I want to talk about what happened. I still don’t understand.’

Khatuna looked at him for the first time. There were hollows around her eyes. She said,

‘I’m not talking to you about anything, Boris.’

She was angry. She said,

‘Don’t think just because Irakli is gone that you and I are friends. I hate you and I wish he’d never met you. I wish I’d followed my instincts and made sure he didn’t get involved with you. I knew it would end badly, I
knew
it. I’m not going to talk about anything with you. Fuck you.’

Boris said,

‘I’ve never—’

‘You have no idea,’ shouted Khatuna, ‘what I’ve been through in the last few weeks. You have no idea what an effort it was just to pull myself out of LA, when I only wanted to stay with him and die. You have no idea. He was the one thing I
couldn’t lose
, he was the one thing that was absolutely necessary to me. You know nothing about me. I’ve lost everything many times and I can get through that, but I
cannot
lose my brother.’

Khatuna’s grief suddenly took her over. She fell to her knees, crying. Her face was terrible, and between her sobs she sucked loudly for breath. Boris went to her and took her in his arms, absorbing the spasms of her body.

She calmed down. She pushed him away and lit another cigarette.

‘I’m not ashamed of crying,’ she said, sitting on the floor.

He took one of her cigarettes too, though he never smoked. For a time there was only the sound of the two of them inhaling and exhaling.

Boris said,

‘Are you going back to Tbilisi?’

‘I’m going to Baghdad,’ she said. ‘I’m going to help design the new security city. Renovate the old palaces of Saddam Hussein.’

She took a drag of her cigarette.

‘I have to go on living,’ she said. ‘I’m not dead. I have to put myself
some
where
and do some
thing
. I want to see a city at war. I’m fed up with this boring place. I want a place with real men, where real things happen.’

Boris did not know what to say. He stubbed out his cigarette, which tasted disgusting. He tried to conjure Irakli back into the room, picturing him on the sofa, where he had seen him many times. It was strangely hard, and he felt his memories, too, were being slowly taken from him.

Khatuna said,

‘Let me tell you something, because it doesn’t matter any more. I made reports about you to the FBI. I implicated you in all sorts of crimes. You’ve done some questionable things and it wasn’t difficult to exaggerate them a bit. I know a lot about crime. Those guys aren’t very complex, I know how to get inside their heads. It’s only a matter of time before they come down on you.’

She stood up and dusted cigarette ash off her knee.

‘It doesn’t matter now. I wanted you to go to jail and suffer. But now I don’t give a shit. All I want to do is smoke cigarettes in this apartment until I’ve inhaled everything he’s left behind.’

Boris walked over to the door.

‘Bye-bye, Khatuna,’ he said.

‘Wait!’ she said, and ran with sudden urgency out of the room.

He heard her opening doors in the kitchen, and the icy scrape of the freezer. She came back weighed down, her arms laden with a ruddy frozen mass.

‘Here,’ she said. ‘Take this away.’

She put it into Boris’s arms and he realised in horror that it was Irakli’s pig. Its throat had been slit.

‘How could you do this?’ he cried.

The pig was solid against Boris’s chest, and turned it numb. He began to cry like a baby.

‘How could you do it?’ he said. ‘This pig was part of Irakli. It’s like killing him again.’

‘No,’ said Khatuna. She had ice crystals on her T-shirt, and she was rubbing her hands to warm them up. ‘It was like killing you.’

T
HE
CEO
CALLED
P
LASTIC
into his office. Plastic was in his gym suit. He hadn’t shaved for a couple of days. The CEO massaged a pile of business cards, aligning the edges. He said,

‘I’m sorry to have to do this, Plastic, but you’re fired.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘I’m not happy about it, but you haven’t left me any choice.’

‘What?’

The CEO put his neat pile of business cards into a golden box. He straightened the keyboard of his computer. He was in a mood for tidying up.

‘Look, I don’t know what you’re mixed up in. But it’s got to a stage where this company’s looking questionable, and I can’t have that.’

‘You can’t really believe all this! I thought you were on my side!’

‘I’ve just been interviewed by the FBI,’ said the CEO. ‘I didn’t appreciate it.’

‘Take a look at me. Look at the state I’m in. They’ve taken over my apartment: I can’t go home. I slept in the office – I haven’t had a shower for two days. They’ve taken my paintings, my papers, my laptop, they’ve had me in a room for two days, asking questions. They want to know where Boris is – how the hell do I know where he is? They’re asking me what are
my
links to organised crime. They arrived with piles of my bank statements and asked me to explain cheques I wrote ten years ago.’

The CEO did not feel obliged to comment. Plastic raised his voice.

‘That guy who committed suicide – I hardly knew him! I didn’t exchange ten words with the guy. He was my girlfriend’s brother, that’s true, but I hardly knew him. Now she’s my ex-girlfriend because she hasn’t spoken to me since it happened. Look: he was a depressed poet, and he committed suicide. End of story. They are manufacturing a crime around it because he was a friend of Boris, who has disappeared
off the face of the planet. Because he was from Georgia and his sister was involved with a gangster – and they think the only thing that comes out of that part of the world is crime. Well, I have nothing to do with any of it!’

He seemed short of breath.

‘You’re an idiot if you fire me!’ he said. ‘If you believe there is any truth to this!’

The CEO exhaled into the mask of his hands.

‘Someone is setting me up!’ yelled Plastic. ‘I don’t know who. But the FBI knows things about me they couldn’t know. There are these Bulgarian bureaucrats who took a dislike to me when I stole Boris from under their noses. Maybe it’s them. I don’t know! All I’m saying is someone is cooking this up and you’re swallowing it without asking a single question.’

‘I’m sorry, Plastic. It’s not what it is, but what it seems that matters. Suicides? Artists disappearing? It’s all gone too far. All the newspapers can talk about is America’s new criminal underworld. And Boris is the poster boy. Boris is the Pied Piper, leading us all into the shit.’

‘He’s more famous than he ever was,’ said Plastic. ‘Universal has a legend on its hands.’

‘Do I have to remind you that we
don’t own his music
? It floats free, remember, in some very cool, post-industrial sort of way, and all the lawsuits in the world are not going to bring it back. That’s how my differences with you began, remember?’

‘Do you remember who you’re talking to? I’m not one of your managers, sitting on my suited ass. I’m Plastic Munari, for Christ’s sake! You can’t do this to me!’

‘You were great,’ said the CEO. ‘I’m not denying it.’

After this conversation, Plastic was not allowed to go back to his office. He was escorted down to the lobby. Security men put their hands on him and he lost his cool.

‘I need to get my stuff from my office, I’m not letting anyone else do that. I’ve worked fifteen years in this company: at least let me pick up my fucking things!’

Above the lobby, people had come out on to the landings to see Plastic evicted. The whole company was there, murmuring.

‘We’ll get everything sent to your home,’ said a security guard.

‘I can’t get into my home!’ shouted Plastic. ‘The FBI has taken over my home. Does no one understand anything I say? Just give me half an hour in my office to pick up my personal things. I have antique paintings. I have two eighteenth-century globes in there – do you think I trust you people to pack them up?’

Eventually, the security team forced Plastic out on to the sidewalk, where all New York was around him and there was no point shouting any more.

He got a taxi and checked into a hotel. He had a shower and changed back into the same clothes. He went out for a walk. He had to buy some deodorant. He had to calm down.

There were offices and lively restaurants around him, and he tried to get out of their way. The cacophony of clothes boutiques and hairdressers grated on him, and he looked for emptier streets. He turned a few corners and found his way out of the crowds.

He passed the red-light district, peaceful at this time of day. He saw a naked arm stretched out of a window, and a woman reaching on tiptoe, trying to put a sandwich into the hand.

He walked for a long time, not really knowing where he was going. He passed liquor stores and warehouses, and the roads became cracked. He saw two men labouring under the bonnet of a car, a crushed can of oil on the road beside them. He saw a cat sleeping in a doorway, and a young girl crying in an alley – and then no one at all. He reached a part of town where entire skyscrapers stood vacant. He walked aimlessly, and ran his hands along a wall.

Evidently, few people ever came here, and the thistles that grew between the paving slabs came up to his thigh. The cars parked here were old models, and they had merged with the tarmac and the trees. There were clocks on buildings, stopped at different times. The area was abandoned.

Plastic was surprised, therefore, to see an open music shop. The lights
were on, and the windows had sparkling displays. Above the entrance was a wooden sign carved with lyres, and decorated with gold script. Plastic pushed at the door, and a bell tinkled inside.

‘Good afternoon,’ said the owner. He was busy polishing the keys of a clarinet, and spoke to him in the mirror.

‘Hello,’ said Plastic, looking around the shop. What a beautiful place it was. How amazing he had never seen it before.

‘May I have a look around?’

‘Be my guest!’ said the man, engrossed in his work.

They had old gramophone players on sale here, and hundreds of records. They had shelves and shelves of music scores. An entire case was devoted to metronomes. Plastic looked at the rows of flutes and oboes in the glass cases; he looked at the harps and organs laid out.

Finally he sat down at a piano and, hesitantly, he began to play.

U
LRICH IS WAITING ON THE CORNER
of Hudson and Canal. Boris pulls up in a brand-new car, and opens the passenger door. He leaves the engine running.

‘Don’t you want to stop for a moment?’ suggests Ulrich. ‘I’d like to buy you a drink.’

‘I have to go,’ says Boris. ‘I have to meet someone soon.’