The Digested Twenty-first Century (4 page)

You are in clover.

But my life is over.

Daniel 25,4:
I’m tired of feeling nothing. I break out. I smell the pestilential ordure between a savage’s legs and make for the hills. I will die. I am finally alive.

Digested read, digested:
25 Daniels don’t give a damn. And neither will you.

Moss fingered the heavybarreled .270 on a ‘98 Mauser action with a laminated walnut and maple stock. He glassed the Texan desert with a pair of 12 power german binoculars. There were men lying on the ground beside two four wheel drive trucks.

Agua, said the one man still alive. An H & K on his lap and an exit wound in his throat.

Aint got no water.

Moss checked the back of the truck. Packets of a brown powder and a valise. He flipped the catch. $2.4m. He left the powder, took the valise and headed home. This kind of changed everything.

Where you been?

You dont need to know, Carla Jean.

He woke at 1.06. Theres something I gotta do.

What is it?

You dont need to know.

Moss headed back to the trucks. The Mexican was dead. Shots from a sawn-off shotgun rang out and Moss headed for the road, blood streaming from his back.

I dont know when things started getting nasty roun here. Folks say it was after Vietnam but I reckon it started before that.

Sheriff Bell surveyed the eight bodies bloating in the sun. Things are gonna get tough for Moss and Carla Jean, he reckoned.

Moss checked the curtains at the motel. He had company. He lifted the air vent. Two Mexicans pooling blood and the money in the corner. He retrieved the money, removed the transponder and a blast took him in the back. He fired the sawn-off and limped down town. He was a dead man. Shots from a machine-pistol rang out and four Mexicans lay dying. A reprieve.

Chigurh was a patient man. He stitched his wounds. He hadn’t got the money yet. But he would. Too bad those Mexicans got in the way. But four less to deal with later.

The man called Wells.

Find me the money and get Chigurh.

Wells tracked Moss to the hospital.

Wheres the money?

Safe.

You wont be. Call me.

Chigurh cornered Wells.

How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?

Wells shrugged and the bullet blew away his forehead.

Chigurh went to the man.

You sent Wells to kill me. Now you gonna die.

He fired into the carotid as his phone rang.

It’s too late, Moss. But you can save your wife.

Not if I get you first.

Chigurh crept up on Moss. Time to die.

Bell shrugged as he saw the putrefying corpse. What could he tell Carla Jean?

You know who I am?

Carla Jean nodded.

I promised your husband I’d kill you and I keep my promises. You stay settin there. He aimed carefully and fired.

My granddaddy was a sheriff and I was proud to be a sheriff. But I reckon I’ve had enough.

There was no sign of Chigurh. This country could kill you in a heartbeat.

Digested read, digested:
Once Upon a Time in the West.

Around the grave in the rundown cemetery were a few of his former advertising colleagues, some people who had driven up from the Starfish Beach retirement village, his elder brother, Howie, his second wife Phoebe, his two sons, Lonny and Randy and his daughter, Nancy.

‘This is how it turns out. There’s nothing more we can do, Dad,’ said Nancy, throwing some dirt on to the top of the coffin. The day before the surgery, he had remembered going into hospital as a boy for a hernia operation and how the boy in the next bed had died. But this was not the first death he had known; the year before he had found a German submariner washed up on the shore. ‘It happens,’ his father had said.

He had got married and divorced – he couldn’t blame Lonny and Randy for hating him – and he had remarried. He had been happy with Phoebe and Nancy was adorable, but really the next most interesting event in his life had been when he had had life-threatening surgery at the age of 31 on a burst appendix.

Twenty-two years of excellent health passed and then the EKG showed radical changes in his heart that indicated severe occlusion of his major coronary arteries. It was touch and go whether he would make it. By now he had moved on to his third wife, but she had no taste for a crisis so by the time he recovered he went home alone.

He fell in love with his nurse – a not uncommon experience – and she moved in with him after his father died. The night of the funeral he could almost taste the dirt finding its way into his father’s mouth and choking him.

For the next nine years his health remained disappointingly stable, but then in 1998 his blood pressure began to mount and the doctors diagnosed an obstruction of the renal artery and he
was admitted to hospital for angioplasty. Again his luck held, and he returned home to his one real pleasure – revising his will.

After 9/11 he moved out to Starfish Beach where he might have enjoyed himself teaching painting classes. But fortunately enough of his elderly students were dying of cancer and his star pupil overdosed on sleeping tablets to save him from any feelings of positivity.

From time to time, he cast his mind back to his wives, his mistresses and his former job. He had had some good sex and some bad sex and his career had been better than average, but all it really amounted to was a diversion between hospital visits. And in the last seven years of his life, he was pleased to note that he had needed major surgery at least once every twelve months. A stent here, a stent there: what more could one ask? How could he have ever envied Howie his good health?

He had been going to ask Nancy if he could move in with her, but just as he was about to call, she had phoned to say that her mother had had a stroke and would be moving in instead. ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he had said before phoning the widow of his former boss and an old friend who had terminal cancer to offer his condolences. He had then befriended a grave digger, before entering hospital for surgery on his right carotid artery. This time there was no coming back.

Digested read, digested:
Life’s a bitch and then you diet.

The old man sits on the edge of the narrow bed. His mind is elsewhere, stranded in the figments of his head. Who is he? What is he doing here? Who cares?

There are a number of objects in the room, each affixed with a strip of white tape bearing a single word. On the table, for example, is TABLE. On the lamp is the word, LAMP. And on this book, BOLLOCKS.

Is this a prison? Is it a house? The old man has no memory. But perhaps he isn’t even old? So let’s drop the epithet old and refer to the person as Mr Blank. For this should tell both you and him everything you need to know; that you are trapped inside some meaningless pretentious crap that is passing itself off as cutting-edge post-modern metaphysicality.

Mr Blank remembers his old rocking-horse, Whitey. He doesn’t know why. But you do. Because it is obviously going to crop up again later. A phone rings.

Who am I talking to?

I’m James P Flood.

Refresh my mind.

The ex-policeman who visited you yesterday. Save me from your dream. My life depends on it.

Mr Blank has no memory of yesterday. You wish you had no memory of today. But never mind about James P Flood, because he’s as pointless as every other character in the book. Which, as you have probably guessed, is the whole point.

Mr Blank looks at a picture of a woman. He thinks it might be Anna. But isn’t Anna dead? A woman walks in.

I’m Anna.

Are you a different Anna?

Who knows? I forgive you for killing me, anyway.

Mr Blank starts reading a manuscript about a man called Graf locked in a Confederation prison in Ultima.

I don’t get it, he says.

That’s the idea.

Who are you?

Another character.

Mr Blank misjudges the distance to the toilet and urine squirts down his pyjamas. Why did this happen? Why does anything happen? He picks up the manuscript and continues reading about Graf and his dreary adventures in the Confederation. He throws the papers down angrily. The story has finished in the middle. If only.

A character called Sophie lets him touch her breasts.

Now make up the rest of the story.

Graf is riding Whitey. He thinks about three possible endings for his wife but none is satisfactory. So let’s ignore her. Let’s tell the story of Ernesto Land instead.

Mr Blank picks up a book. It’s called
Travels in the Scriptorium
. It starts, ‘The old man sits on the edge of the narrow bed.’ Gosh, he thinks. The characters have taken over the novelist. How predictable.

The satirist puts down a book. He knows why he’s read it. He’s been paid. But he can’t see why anyone else would bother.

Digested read, digested:
Blankety Blank.

This evening I was watching my slave, Marcus, try to avoid the attentions of Lolla. I knew he would rather be playing with the other boys but would end up spending the night with her. This banal observation about the nature of relations between men and women impelled me to retell the story of the beginnings of the world that has been gathering dust on ancient parchments in my cellar.

You want to know about me? My name is Maire. There is always someone called Maire. I was born into the family of Cleft Watchers, like my mother, her mother and all the Old Shes before them. We women lie in the swirling jellied waters of the pools and every month when the moon is at its highest, we climb to the indentation we call The Cleft where the red flowers grow and we have our blood flow. That is, all who are not going to give birth.

I cannot say how it started. Only that it was ages ago. How long ago is ages? Who can say? The Old Shes must have known something because before the first Monsters were born, there were only Shes, only Clefts. When these first deformed babies with Tubes between their legs were born, we would take the Monsters – these Squirts – to the Cleft where we would dash them on the rocks. But then the Eagles, with their meaningless capital letters, began to snatch some of the baby Squirts from our clutches and drop them in the forest.

As a descendant of one of these Monsters, I feel the need to intervene – if only to break up the plodding predictability of the story. For future reference, my amazing Roman aperçus are the passages printed in italics – so it’s quite simple to skip them if you feel like you’re dozing off.

How did the first Squirts survive? No one really knows, but we must presume they were suckled by deer. All the documents relate is that eventually the Squirts and the Clefts were united – the Squirts through an aching need in their Tubes that they never fully understood and was only relieved by mating – and the Clefts through a primal maternal bond.

And how long ago did this take place? No one knows. Only that it must have been ages after the first ages.

I was talking to my wife, Julia, the other day and it occurred to me that men and women are quite different. Women are much
more intuitive, while men tend to be much more unthinking. But I expect all you women already know that!

Some of the Old Shes weren’t happy about the arrival of the Squirts and planned to kill them. But the younger Clefts, led by another Maire, were prepared to forgive the occasional gang rape and stepped in to save all the Squirts whose Tubes made them too stupid to save themselves. How did everyone feel about this new prelapsarian state? We don’t know because everyone was stuck in a 1960s feminist timewarp and had no inner world or emotions worth mentioning.

Ages later – how long we don’t know, only that it was ages after the last bit and ages and ages after the first bit, the Squirts were led by Horsa and the Clefts by Maronna. At this time the Squirts used to run around doing dangerous things and didn’t bring up their babies properly, and the Clefts were cross about this and used to scold the Squirts. One day Horsa took a group of people off to explore the island. The Clefts were very worried, but after a bit of a tiff everyone made up in the end when the rock Cleft exploded.

I was thinking about how similar this was to Vesuvius. If only I had lived in Pompeii I could have saved us all a lot of bother.

Digested read, digested:
Men are from Mars, women are from Venus.

They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night. As they sat down to dinner in the honeymoon suite of the Dorset hotel, Edward was mesmerised by the prospect of inserting
his member inside the moist cavity of this formidably intelligent woman. All that troubled him was the worry of over-excitement.

Florence’s anxieties were more serious. She loved Edward with a passion but had no desire to be penetrated. She had read the references to glans, mucous membrane and engorged penis in the modern bride’s handbook and felt nothing but a visceral dread.

‘I love you,’ they said to one another for the hundredth time that day. And they truly meant it. Edward had a first-class degree in history but, on this July day in 1962, he doubted if any other man had ever been as happy. He looked at her long pizzicato fingers and felt a constriction around his crotch as if his trousers had shrunk. Would she take the lead, as first violinists often will? He remembered too well her revulsion at his stiffening manhood when he had placed her hands on his trousers at the cinema, and how it had set their physical congress back by many months.

Edward had prepared for this day by refraining from self-pleasuring for a week and when she suggested lying on the bed he felt all those unimportant details, such as Harold Macmillan and H-bombs that had only been included to provide a veneer of context, race from his mind. Florence reminded herself how much she loved him, as Edward’s tongue parted her lips and greedily explored her larynx.