Lars Iyer - Spurious

• Название: Spurious
• Автор: Lars Iyer
• Издательство: Melville House
• Жанр: Современная проза
• Год: 2011

In a raucous debut that summons up Britain's fabled Goon Squad comedies, writer and philosopher Lars Iyer tells the story of someone very like himself with a "slightly more successful" friend and their journeys in search of more palatable literary conferences and better gin. One reason for their journeys: the narrator's home is slowly being taken over by a fungus that no one seems to know what to do about.

Before it completely swallows his house, the narrator feels compelled to solve some major philosophical questions (such as "Why?") and the meaning of his urge to write, as well as the source of the fungus… before it is too late. Or, he has to move.

---

Only the pedestrian has the measure of the world, we agree. The pedestrian is the true proletarian. Drivers have always been mysterious to W. and I. What do we know of them? How can we understand what goes through their heads?

Sometimes drivers or their passengers shout abuse at him when they pass, W. says. It’s his hair, W. says, his ringlets. Drivers hate ringlets.

W.’s hair is very long now. It’s a year since he last had it cut. He looks leonine, I tell him, like the lion of Judah.

If you’re not going to be a thinker, you should at least look like a thinker, W. says. And if you’re not going to be religious, then you should at least look religious, that’s what W. believes. Genuine thinking and genuine religious belief might follow from looking like a genuine thinker and looking like a genuinely religious person.

‘Love’, says W., reclining on his sofa, ‘your favourite topic’. I’m not discussing love with him, I say. Forget it. — ‘Why are you so afraid of love? Why?’

How many nights have passed like this, W. drunk and I half drunk, and both of us looking for a way to fill the empty hours until dawn?

Occasionally W. will speak of his love for Sal — this is always moving — but mostly he likes to probe me with questions, one after another. — ‘What do you think love is?’; ‘What is love, for you?’; ‘Have you ever loved anyone?’; ‘What do you consider love to be?’; ‘Do you think you’ll ever be capable of love?’; ‘What is it, do you think, that prevents you from loving anyone?’

For his part, W. is eminently capable of love, and happy to say so. As for me, W. says, I remain eminently incapable of love. — ‘You only love yourself’, he says.

‘Why do you think you’ve failed as a lover?’, asks W. ‘What do you think you lack? What’s missing in you? What crucial stage of development have you missed? You lack depth. You lack seriousness. You need a woman who abuses you’.

Sal has complete contempt for him, says W. — ‘That’s how it should be. Your partner should always have contempt for you’.

Sal improves him, says W. She makes him better than he is. That’s what I need. And then, after thinking a little, W. says, ‘You have to feel proud of your partner. Of her achievements’. W. feels proud of Sal, he says. — ‘Have you ever felt proud of someone?’, he asks me. ‘Are you proud of yourself?’

The living room is filled with examples of Sal’s glassware. — ‘We could never do that sort of thing’, says W. ‘Look at us!’ But Sal, he says, has a natural gift. — ‘She’s talented. Not like us’. He feels proud, he says. — ‘All my friends prefer Sal to me. That’s a good sign’.

If it can’t be explained to Sal in the bath, then it’s not a genuine thought, says W. That’s his test: the bath, Sunday night, he tries to explain his thoughts to Sal. She’s merciless, says W. She demands that everything be absolutely clear. She doesn’t tolerate vagueness or prevarication, he says. She wants to understand, and if she doesn’t, it’s invariably his fault, W. says.

Do you remember what she called us when she heard us speak? Vague and boring, says W. You were vague, and I was boring. Or was it the other way round? Either way, she’s more intelligent than us, W. says. And she can actually do things, make things, he says. She’s got more to give to the world than we do.

In fact, all of his friends prefer Sal to him, W. says. Whenever they visit, their first question is always, Where’s Sal? They’re always disappointed when it’s just him, W. says. In fact, even he’s disappointed, says W. What is he without Sal? How would he think or write anything if it were not for their weekly bath?

We’ve dressed up for town. — ‘My God, look at you! You’re so scruffy. That jacket! You think you look attractive in that jacket, don’t you?’, says W. ‘It’s shapeless; it looks like a sack’. It makes me look obese, he says, which is why I always think I’m obese. But in fact it’s the jacket that makes me look obese. — ‘No, on second thoughts, you are obese’.

W. keeps his suit very carefully for Saturday night, when he and Sal go out for cocktails. — ‘What are you going to wear? You can’t go like that’. My shirt’s unironed, for one thing. W. says he’ll iron my shirt. ‘Go on, take it off’. And then, ‘God, you’re getting really fat’.

‘How dry do you want them?’, the barman asks us of our Martinis. — ‘On a scale of one to ten, where ten’s driest, about eight please’, says W. The barman asks us what kind of Vermouth we want. W. tells me they stock three kinds of Vermouth, all imported from America. They even import the salt for their Margaritas, he tells me.

W. likes cocktails which are as close to pure alcohol as possible, he says. Our Martinis are served in frosted cocktail glasses with a curl of lemon rind floating in the clear liquid. — ‘When I’m feeling rich, I’ll buy you a Martini made with Navy strength gin’, says W.

‘The trick is not to stop drinking’, says W. In Poland, he drank five shots in a row, stood up, and fell under a table. — ‘The Poles pace themselves’, he says, ‘but we don’t’. And then, ‘Where were we? Oh yes: love’.

‘Companionship is very important’, says W. ‘It’s the heart of a relationship. You have to get on. Sal and I get on’, he says. ‘If you’re working class, like us’, says W., ‘you show your affection by verbal abuse. That’s why I abuse you — verbally, I mean. It’s a sign of love’. W. reminds me of what Sal said about a joint presentation she saw us give: we were vague and boring, she said. Vague and boring! It’s great. Your partner should be full of contempt for you. It’s a good sign’.

All evening, Sal berates W. and I. — ‘Why don’t you write your own philosophy?’—‘She’s right!’, says W. ‘Why don’t we? You explain’. And then, to Sal, ‘Open your eyes! Isn’t it obvious! Look at us! Look at him!’

Sal thinks W. spends far too much time on revisions. His book was better before he started working on it, she tells me. It’s true, W. admits, he cut so much of it that parts make no sense at all. — ‘Still it’s better than your book, isn’t it? You should see his book’, he says to Sal, ‘my God!’

The damp’s worse than he can imagine, I tell W. on the phone. Mould is growing in patches, the damp is blackening, and a fine layer of downy salt covers the plaster. I brush it and it flakes down, salt from the wall. Salt leached from the wall: isn’t it rather beautiful? Above me, the new joists and the wooden boards fastened over them. Dry as a bone now; nothing comes from there, I tell W., the corner from where the leak ran.

But I can still hear the water rushing. Every night I hear it, rushing in the dark as though on an unknown and urgent journey. Every night, going into the bathroom, I hear it rushing beneath the floorboards.

‘Keep it warm’, said an expert on the kitchen damp. And the damp in the bedroom? — ‘Keep that warm, too.’ So where do I point my heroic little fan heater? It does a shift in the kitchen, and then a shift in the bedroom. I carry it from one room to the other, over the bits of kitchen furniture that are scattered everywhere.

In the living room, the washing machine on its side as though it were stranded on a beach, covered in black mildew. Then a cupboard, the back of which is greeny-black with damp. I have to keep everything dirty, the expert tells me, to show the original surveyor tomorrow. — ‘Keep it mouldy. Then he’ll be able to see’.

I have no idea how to talk to people, W. says. I lack even a basic sense of the reciprocity of conversation. W.’s going to write a book of etiquette for me, he says. The art of conversation, that’s what I’ll have to learn, he says. Give and take. And table manners. — ‘You never learned them, did you?’ And keeping myself clean. — ‘Look at you! You’re filthy! When did you last wash your trousers?’ And wiping off that morose expression on my face. — ‘Why should anyone want to talk to you?’

Conversation! All real conversation is messianic, W. says. Not the content of what is said — quite the contrary, but the fact that it is said at all, that speaking is possible, says W., impressively. But what would I know of that? — ‘You’re conversationally lazy’, W. says. ‘You can’t be bothered, it’s obvious to anyone. You never feel responsible for your conversation. You never want to drive it to greater heights’.

For his part, W. is never happier than when he is pressing a conversation towards the messianic. He always has the sense his conversationalist is about to say something great, something life-changing. That’s what a conversation should be, W. says, every conversation: something great, something life changing. But of course I’d have no sense of that.

Every conversation must be driven through the apocalyptic towards the messianic, that’s W.’s principle; the shared sense that it’s all at an end, it’s all finished. He loves nothing better than conversations of this kind, W. says, when everything’s at stake, when everything that could be said is said.

That’s when messianism begins, W. says. You have to wear out speech, to run it down. And then? And then, W. says, inanity begins, reckless inanity. The whole night opens up. You have to drink a great deal to get there. It’s an art. The Poles have it, W. says. They understand what it is to drink through the whole night. And that’s what the Hungarians are doing in the bars in Béla Tarr films, W. says. Steadily, patiently, they’re drinking their way through the night.

All drunks have something of the Messiah about them, W. says. They speak a lot, for one thing. They feel they’re on the verge of something, some great truth. He does when he drinks, W. says. Once he starts drinking, says W., he can never stop, it’s quite impossible.

It’s because of the faith it gives him, says W. It’s because of what drinking reveals: the whole night, the apocalypse, but also the patience to get through the apocalypse, to dream of the twenty-second century, or the twenty-third, when things might get better again.

The whole flat is now full of mould spores. The warm air is soupy; it’s jungle hot and damp, and smells of rot and spores. The oven, new in September, is stranded in the bathroom. The hallway’s full of mouldy bits of wood, and another sporey cupboard is pressed up against the radiator. At night, going to the bathroom, I have to step over damp wood and pass between damp cupboards.

The smell is overwhelming. I feel faint, I tell W. on the phone. The other day I went outside to look at the kitchen wall. Naked brick, exposed. I took a stick of bamboo and idly scraped out the stuff between the bricks. But it was the brick itself that started to come off, I tell W. The brick itself, rotting as I touched it. It’s wet and runny, I tell him. It comes off on your nails as you scrape it.

Inside, I tell him, I study the kitchen walls, watching for where damp comes and goes. I take the fan heater in there, pointing it at this or that part of the wall. It will dry after an hour or so. Dry, but then — in another hour, or two more — pinpricks of moisture appear on the whitened plaster. It’s returning. It’s coming back, the damp. And then pinprick joins to pinprick, and soon the whole wall’s the same clammy brow it was before the drying.

But still I watch, I tell W. Still, nightly, I wield the heater. Is the wall drying out? Has it begun to dry out? I ask myself like a madman. Or is it a mirage, a mirage of damp? Have the spores got to me? Has the mould coated every passageway of my lungs and sent me mad? True, I have a new and persistent cough. I cough all the time — today I thought I’d lose my voice, I tell W. One day I’ll wake up mute in this flat of damp. Mute in the damp, spore-filled, choking. And one day, as I approach the walls, I’ll disappear into them, damp returning to damp.

W.’s been ill, he says. Again? Yes, again. He gets up, goes to work, and comes back to sleep, that’s all. — ‘I don’t know how Kafka got anything done. It’s terrible being ill’. I ask him whether his houseguest has gone. She has; and Sal’s still away, so his house is becoming like Howard Hughes’, he says. With bottles of urine everywhere? He hasn’t cut his hair and nails, says W. He’s like a wild man.

Has he had any thoughts from his illness? — ‘None’. Has his new book advanced any further? — ‘No’. Has he written our joint abstract? — ‘No again’. And what of my news? he asks me. I tell him of my plans, my new schemes. — ‘Every year a new stupidity! It’s all begun afresh for you, hasn’t it?’, says W. ‘What new plans do you have? Where will your idiocy lead you?’

I’m at my most idealistic at the start of the year, W. notes, whereas he’s at his most gloomy. ‘Idiocy protects you’, he says. He reminds me of my great follies in the past. — ‘Do you remember your Hindu period? Your plans to learn Sanskrit and become a scholar of Hinduism?’ And then there were my plans to learn music theory and become a scholar of music. We both marvel at them. ‘What’s it to be this year?’, says W., ‘go on, I need a laugh’.

The new year! It’s always the same! New ideas! New follies! But W. is ill, and has no plans. Bottles of urine everywhere, hair and nails uncut, scrabbling through piles of unfinished writing, he staggers through the day.

W. is ill and so am I. But W. will never believe I am as ill as he is. I haven’t moved from my sofa in three days; he hasn’t moved from his in a week. I’ve done little but watch DVDs; he hasn’t been able to muster the concentration necessary to watch a film. I’ve lost my appetite, but W. has forgotten he ever had an appetite. And above all, I’m capable of writing, I’ve lost my appetite, whereas W. hasn’t touched a keyboard for a week. Even my illnesses are affectations, W. says.

‘You don’t know what it means to be ill, night and day. Like Kafka. Like Blanchot’, says W. W.’s illness is grand, mine is petty. His draws him closer to the masters, mine only reveals how far from them I have always been. — ‘What amazes me’, says W., ‘is that they could ever write a line’. W., in his illness, can write nothing.

Colds come from China, says W. They spread west across the mountains and the steppes. It’s a tremendous journey. From China to Plymouth, but a cold’s reached him nonetheless, although he calls it a flu, since he’s always been prone to exaggeration.

W. was impressed at my recent depression. ‘It’s a sign of your seriousness’, he says, ‘or that even an idiot like you cannot escape seriousness’. These are desperate times, says W., even I must have a sense of that.

W.’s always admired my whining, ‘like a sad chimp, at the limits of its intelligence’, but my depression has taken me beyond that, hasn’t it? ‘You were silent for once’, W. says. I didn’t ring him, or respond to emails … No chatter from me: that’s when he knew things were really bad, W. says.