CHAPTER ONE
DEATH
XXXVIII.
One Moment in Annihilation’s Waste,
One moment, of the Well of Life to taste--
The Stars are setting, and the Caravan Starts for the dawn of Nothing--Oh, make haste!
– Edward Fitzgerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, 1859
* ¢
John Smith was dying again. It happens to even the truly greatest comedians. John Smith was not great. Truly, he was not even good. He wasn’t terrible. There is something memorable and remarkable about a dreadful comedian. John Smith was forgettable, anyone who had to sit squirming through his obvious observations, over-contrived anecdotes and featherweight punchlines wanted to forget the experience. Occasionally he would get a few mercy laughs or the momentum of the previous performer would carry the audience laughing into his act. But tonight he killed them; he reduced the whole room to a deathly silence. Yet this would be the second best performance of his life.
The fantastic acoustics of the Covent Garden Comedy Club only enhanced the unpleasantness. Tombstones of silence marked the death of every gasped-out joke. Everyone in the room could hear everything with crystal clarity. They clearly wished they couldn’t but no one was intervening to put John Smith out of their collective misery. Instead one hundred and thirty seven people squirmed uncomfortably in their seats, checking their watches or looking longingly toward the exit. In the darkness of back rows, friends exchanged pained looks while the people in the front rows, illuminated by the footlights were finding their shoes very interesting, desperate not to make eye contact with the condemned man before them.
The compere stood, sadistically impassive in the shadows, indulging his long-standing dislike of Smith; a largely irrational, highly visceral antipathy borne out of personal loathing and professional derision. Davie Wales had been on the stand-up circuit seventeen years; he had toiled through the apprenticeship and was now acknowledged by his peers as a senior member of their establishment. He was usually a generous mentor to struggling newcomers. Assuming there was some talent to nurture. He really hated mediocre no-hopers who did not know when to quit. He was a professional jester but he didn’t suffer fools. Fools like Smith. He could not stand nor understand them. They must know that they were not funny. Being at the centre of a horror-show like this, stared down by nearly three hundred despising eyes ought to work its way into the mind of even the most self-obsessed egotists. After all, didn’t they claim to be good at observation?
Attending your own funeral was an unusual thing to do voluntarily. It might be a thrilling experience, just once to dig your own grave and deliver your own death sentence in front of dozens of stony-faced mourners. Mourners whose only wish is to bury you quickly and piss on the grave. But why put yourself through repeatedly and why should everyone else suffer too? Why spend ten minutes every Saturday night making strangers hate you? Normally losers like Smith were only inflicted on small groups in tiny basement clubs or the upstairs rooms of pubs. Tonight, for some inexplicable reason, he was being allowed to make over a hundred new enemies all at once.
Davie could step in at any point and win the crowd back at the drop of a hat. If he wanted, he could do it at the expense of Smith and having the whole room laughing with him before he had even said a word. All he would have to do would be to walk onto the stage at a dead march. The tension would be burst as everyone felt the relief of release. He had done it many times before and it never failed. Tonight he was going to let the corpse swing a little longer before he cut it down.
He was not typically malicious but something about Smith got up his nose. Nothing in particular distinguished John Smith from any number of other unfunny wannabe comedians but Davie had taken an instant dislike to Smith when they had first met a few years ago. Perhaps it was the slight air of superiority and awkwardness with which Smith failed to fit in with the other comedians waiting to perform. Or perhaps it was that he was wearing on of those pathetic, supposedly amusing t-shirts. Davie could not remember but thought that this was exactly the sort of thing Smith might do. When Smith turned out to be as crap at telling jokes as he was wearing them, it had only cemented the hatred. Two years later and if anything, Smith was a shitter comedian but with a thicker skin that kept him coming back. Still, this was his biggest gig and this was the biggest fuck-up Davie could remember, maybe this would penetrate.
So he let Smith struggle on with some pathetic sequence of jokes about replacing the pieces in chess with different types of dinosaurs to make the game more interesting. Chess? For fuck’s sake! Nobody would blame Davie if he went and broke a chair over the man’s head. In fact, why hadn’t anyone in the audience thrown anything yet? Or shouted him down?
The Saturday night crowd at the Covent Garden was comedy’s bear-pit; multi-millionaire stars of American sitcoms had come off this stage in tears. Tears that were often mercifully hidden by the beer dripping down their perfect features. Yet tonight the audience sat in ominous silence. He hoped that this was not the calm before the storm, because if it blew up they might lose their entertainment licence. Westminster Council would be unlikely to let them continue trading after a lynching. But if silent treatment was enough to stop Smith from ever performing again, Davie was going to let the audience suffer a little longer. The rest of humanity would thank them in the long run. This first three minutes had been uncomfortably long enough for most.
Eric Hayle was more uncomfortable than most. Twenty minutes ago he had done a line of coke as long as his cock and it was starting to work its South American magic. Or it would be, if it wasn’t for this fucker on the stage spoiling his buzz. He was tempted to leave. But gave up on the idea when he realised how much hassle it would be to try and explain to his party that they were leaving. He doubted that this Thai prostitute spoke much more than massage parlour English, and while Raoul, his favourite Brazilian rent-boy, was a very talented linguist, he was very petulant and would not leave without a scene. So Eric gave up and resigned himself to being trapped in a darkened basement, folded into a highly unergonomic chair. The Viagra he had popped was starting to make it’s presence felt too. He tried distracting himself by texting Hans to see if the party was still on for later. When a Berlin fetish night comes to London you can never be entirely sure what might go down. And this was tolerably interesting in its own way. He had seen and done things a lot more unpleasant in his long life. As Mih or Liu or whatever her name was would probably find out later. His night was young. Eric Hayle was ninety-one years old.
Despite Davie’s doubts, John Smith was not enjoying his evening much either, and to Davie’s potential glee he was seriously considering his future. And he seemed to have a lot of time to do this in the gaps between the jokes. Gaps that in his interminable rehearsal he had left for laughs. Having practised so much for what was the largest showcase for his talent, he was unable to deviate from this timing. This was of course his problem. One of them. Poor timing was one thing, lack of decent material did not help, but having no discernible talent to showcase was the real iceberg to his Titanic comic pretensions.
Though his perpetual failure was more in the style of King Henry VIII’s hopeless vanity, the Mary Rose. Never once had he got out of the comedy harbour before sinking under the weight of his over-preparation, his archaic jokes top-heavy with his intellectual arrogance. In real life, Smith had a dry sarcastic wit, he had the ability to make his friends laugh with arch and accurate dissection of the preoccupations of their small circle. This convinced him he was funny, and he was, though in a particular wordy and unworldly way. Sadly it was a brand of humour that did not sell well to the customers of the comedy store. Right now it was selling like hot cowpats.
He noticed the word ‘OFF’ on the handle of his microphone. At first he saw it just for what it was, a tiny white stencilled word on a black background. At the same time, he really ‘saw’ it, his vision focused down to a narrow beam, momentarily unaware of anything else in the room or anything else in his mind. And then as suddenly as it had arrived this fleeting moment of intense conscious experience was lost. He became aware of the room again and of all the people in it and of how they felt about him. He had lost track of where he was in his script. It was completely gone. He could not remember a single one of his jokes. (This was a good thing, though he had not yet realised it.) He became aware of a panic like none he had ever experienced before. His bowels had turned to ice water and his intestines were rearranging themselves to escape the cold. In the process they bustled uncomfortably against his stomach and pancreas, releasing acid and bile that rose alarmingly in his throat. His adrenal glands became aware of the commotion and flooded his body with adrenalin. It was this that saved him. And made him famous.
The audience had noticed that John had not said anything for nine seconds and a second is a long time in comedy. For the first three seconds they had assumed this to be an over-long pause. For the second three seconds they struggled to work out if this was some joke that they were failing to get. After sitting through the last three minutes, it was a feeling they were becoming accustomed to but they recognised this as something new. In the final three seconds they divided evenly between two camps. Those who thought and prayed this was the end and those who had registered the panic spreading across Smith’s face. The second camp split into a faction who were feeling dreadful, stomachs knotted in sympathy with the poor performer and a faction of those who were starting to get excited in anticipation of an on-stage breakdown. Davie Wales and Eric Hayle were both in this last category but they would be disappointed and delighted respectively.
“Whoa!” Smith broke the silence but not the tension.
“A few moments ago I was wishing I was dead. I would have given my life to be anywhere but here, but now I am not so sure. I can feel my heart racing, like I have just escaped a race with a leopard. I feel great. I feel alive and I like it. I had a scare and I survived. But this is what I am wondering; Why is it that this is what it takes?” John knew that he had not quite worked out what he was trying to say so he went slowly. He saw it clearly in his head but had to untangle the thread to lead himself logically through it.
“Why is it that this is what it takes to make me wake up?” he continued. “To make me stop and look? To really look. I want to be clear here. I want to try and tell you what I mean because it has amazed me. Amazed me that I have never noticed this and I want to know if you are the same.”
The uncertainty in the room indicated that, by and large they had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. It is unlikely that Smith had noticed this and it was even more unlikely that it would have mattered to him if he did. He was at this point mainly talking to himself. He carried on regardless, picking up the pace and pacing the stage.
“I have awoken to the moment. In my plodding life from past to future, I had never noticed ‘now’ before. Not before now, not properly. I had always gone along reflecting on what was going on or reacting to whatever had happened. But when you are reflecting or reacting you are attached to the past. Your attention is engaged with events that have already occurred. You might be getting something right, but you are lost to the world as it unfurls around you.” Smith did not know exactly where he was heading but he had found his feet and was starting to warm to his theme.
“If I was not looking back, I was preparing to act. Planning for the future, which might be ten minutes from now, it might be next week or a couple of years. You are laying down waiting for the world to wash over you. Between the past and the future there is a tiny sliver in which we live. Except we do not use it to live, the present does not get a look in. We stand here, arranging the remains of the past into what we would like for our futures.” He looked around the room. One usually could not see much beyond the stage lights and John could not see the people looking at him. But he knew from the silence that everyone was attending to his every action. It made him even more aware of himself, of what he was doing right at that moment. Everything was beyond real. Exactly the same but different, as if he had been seeing the world in black and white and the colour had switched on.
“I have just woken up to the present, I had always been absent from it because I was not paying attention to myself. Nor to the world. And it took the visceral shock of this death by comedy to make me spot it. I am not talking about living your dreams. That is trite American trash. Your dreams will always be implausible and distant.
Or else I was frozen in the amber of experience. You are either observing the world or looking inwards. It seems very hard to do both simultaneously. Yes, we have times when we are living ‘for the moment’, but these are the times we are most likely to be lost to ourselves. We are so wrapped up in our enjoyment of whatever intense pleasure it is that is pleasing us to reflect on the self that is experiencing this buzz. We do not pause on the dance-floor to take stock of our mental state; we do not become contemplative in the middle of the plunge of a bungee.
Or just now, as you were sitting there in the audience enjoying some comedy. Or you were originally back then before I messed it up. But after that, after it stopped being a performance. Then we’ve had to do something new and that has woken us up.
To put it another way. What is like to be you, sitting there right now, staring out of your eyes, thinking your thoughts? I cannot know, but most of the time you don’t know either. Because most of the time, it is not like anything. You just are.
But you are unaware of who you are. You do not look inwards because the world is rushing past so fast on the outside that you are caught up in the experience of things rather than the experience of experience itself.
Do you know of anyone who has had cancer and has not had their life changed by it? Tragic isn’t it, that it takes the face of death to wake people up to life. It would be more remarkable to find someone whose outlook on life wasn’t changed by cancer. Who took it in their stride because they knew they were liable to die anyway.”
John Smith was starting to enjoy himself. He was getting a reaction. He was figuring things out and able to explain them to the people in the audience. He took the luxury of looking round the room, becoming aware of his surroundings. He saw the ‘OFF’ switch again and stopped. It was turning back into a performance.
“No! Stop! Look, you are all getting comfy in your seats again. I am getting relaxed into telling you this shit. We are back to the beginning where you’re the audience and I am the performer.” He looked around. “Just a few moments ago we were all uncomfortable. It was not ‘nice’ but at least it made us think. Even if all you thought was ‘I wish this idiot would quit it.’
“The rest of the time we are not really here to think. We prefer to play mental games. The comedians make you laugh and some of it may stick with you but mostly it’s just a way to fill an evening. To take your mind off things. Well, it’s a waste. But I am not saying it is the opposite either.
“I am not saying we should be alert and questioning at all times, going though life thinking about every little detail. It would be exhausting, impossible.
“Just as there is more to it than material goods, than power, status or even spiritual enlightenment. There is also more to it than that rational sense of purpose and need for explanations. There is something simpler; there is a need to be alive right now. To live for the moment, in the moment, of the moment.
“It is unrelenting and, as a consequence, we get tired, we get lazy. Lying in bed all day is one kind of laziness, but lying to yourself is far worse. We get swept up in the humdrum, the comprehensible and the everyday and our lives slide by without is even realising we are alive.
“That is all I have to say. All I should need to say.”
The audience did not know how to respond, the whole event was unlike any performance they had ever attended. Their repertoire of ways to act in social situations did not provide a script that fitted what they had just witnessed. It was certainly not comedy and nor was it theatre so they did not think they should be clapping. And though it had something of a sermon about it, it was too impassioned to be left with respectful silence as they reflected on what they had been told. Likewise, it wasn’t rabble rousing. This was more complex than something you’d get from a showboating politician deliberately inviting audience appreciation. So they dithered, they looked uncertainly about to see if anyone else would take the lead. For a few seconds nothing happened, and then one member of the audience started clapping. This was joined by someone else clapping faster and more enthusiastically.
Eric’s companion Liu had not understood a single word of what had just occurred and consequentially was a good deal less confused than almost everyone else in the room. There was a lot she did not know about British culture. She had arrived here a year ago from Thailand on a student visa but never studied. Even before she arrived she had known that was sham; six months working in a Thai brothel teaches you to be realistic. Equally, she was pleased to have come, virtual slavery in England was far much preferable to virtual slavery in Thailand. When Eric had started to clap, she understood this must be the end of the show they had just seen and so joined in with the ostensible enthusiasm of someone whose profession is to please others.
Davie Wales did not really know what to do either. As the clapping died out, he went onto the stage, but arriving at the mic, his mind went blank. He could not think of anything more to say. There was one more act, the headliner, but during the clapping he had been signalling frantically to Davie that he did not want to go on. Davie could see his point; there was no joke that felt appropriate to the moment. In any case, some people had already decided that this was the end of the night and were getting up from their seats, manoeuvring themselves into their coats.
“That’s it, thanks folks. See you next time,” he said and left the stage.
Eric, tall, skinny but far from frail, elbowed his way through the crowds who were milling around the stage finishing their drinks. He approached the curtained doorway to the backstage area where John Smith, still in a daze, had not quite made it off the platform.
“Mr Smith, I have one very important question and I want you to answer me truthfully. Was that performance rehearsed or for real?”
“It was.. I.. well no, it just sort of happened, I guess. I said what I saw as I was seeing it.”
Eric fixed him with a bright penetrating eye as he considered Smith’s answer. He had been surrounded by ingratiating liars and yes-men for his whole life and he knew their sort. At times his own life had depended on being able to tell who to believe and who to trust. This lifetime of experience told him that this hapless buffoon was telling the truth. He was not some amazingly talented actor working from a dazzlingly original script. He really was a hapless buffoon who had in a moment of deep crisis stumbled across a profound personal insight and had the intelligence to express and communicate his experience. He was the genuine article, and that could be very marketable.
“Excellent, excellent! That is what I had hoped. I will be in touch, Mr Smith.” And with that, the conversation was over.
Eric’s own highly developed sense of the preciousness of time had him impatient to get on to Hans’ London Extravorgasma.
“Raoul, tell that dumb bitch we are leaving.”
Smith was left standing even more bewildered than he had been thirty seconds previously.
“You don’t know who that was, do you?” asked Davie Wales, who had been hovering nearby.
“No”
“Eric Hayle.”
“Fuck me.”
“Yes, he probably would.”
•
The man had spent Saturday night laughing. He was rediscovering the world. He had forgotten what a wonderful place it was. What a funny place. Earlier in the day he had been to the supermarket. He had been there six hours and had a wonderful time looking at all the super things they were trying to sell him.
In fact, he had spent his afternoon in two different supermarkets. After a couple of hours they had thrown him out of the first one. Even though he had shown them his loyalty card. He wondered if, with that sort of treatment, he would remain loyal after all.
When he had first arrived at his regular supermarket it was almost overwhelming. How had he not noticed this before? It was so colourful and had so many different things. Or they had seemed different. He wanted to buy some toothpaste, but with so many choices he wondered how anyone ever made up their mind which kind they liked. He watched other shoppers for a while, but there was no brand that was universally acclaimed. People would hurry along the toiletries aisle, scan for the one they were looking for and hurry on. They were extremely sure of themselves. It would be a shame, he thought, if all your life you had stuck to using one particular toothpaste and never discovered another that you might have liked more. So he tried a few. This was when they had thrown him out.
Upset that they could treat a loyal customer in this way, he went to a rival of his normal supermarket to see how he would be received. The second supermarket was even bigger and no one noticed as he had spent four hours roaming its aisles. Here, he had chosen to try something new and take a trolley. It had been a revelation. He had spent the first hour just learning to drive it; gliding up and down the aisles, sliding it round corners, spinning it on the spot. You could not do any of this with a hand-basket.
The trolley solved the problem he had at the first place. The choice was overwhelming him. So many brands, so many variations within a brand. Would he prefer his toilet to smell of pine forests or of lavender? Would he prefer his Ribena to be reduced in sugar or with added vitamins? He even had difficulty with the vegetables. Each red pepper was individual and unique. Each aubergine bulged in subtly different directions. (Although they all had that pleasing bouncing baby texture and soothing hollow wobble as you tapped it.) He knew he would never get away if he was forced to choose. But with the trolley he could at least sample some of the vast range the world had to offer. He could take one jar of kosher peanut butter, one jar of diabetic peanut butter and one tub of organic satay and he would be able to compare them at home. Spreading them on rye bread, seven grain granary baps or poppy seed and loganberry bagels. One day his toilet could be lavender whilst his air was a refreshing pine, the next it could be the other way round. He man was carried away by the new opportunities and yes there were still choices to be made, even more of them in fact, but none had to be final. For every satsuma he selected, he was not forced to deny himself a pomegranate, as he might have done back in his basket days. He could have tinned peas and frozen peas. He could even have fresh peas but he did not like fresh peas. He was happy and four hours of the afternoon flew by as he granted himself all his wishes.
His trolley completely full, it was only as he stood in the queue to the checkout that he thought about the cost. Looking in his purse, he saw that he had seven pounds and a little change. He realised that this selection would cost more than that but fortunately he had his plastic. Unfortunately the shop did not accept any of the cards he tried to give them. It seemed that this chain would not accept any of the credit cards he tried to use. In fact they had kept quite a few of them, saying that the credit card companies had cancelled them. The man could not understand this because he never normally used any of these and so they should be as good as new. He filled in any form that got sent to him and had received five or six credit cards as a result but he never needed to use them. Normally he just got money out of the building society with his bankcard but the store wouldn’t accept this either, apparently it could only get him money directly from his account. His House of Fraser store-cards weren’t any good in this store either, which was a shame because he’d never found anywhere to use it. He had been signed up for it by a salesperson in some department store but he had forgotten which one and since that time he had never seen any Houses of Fraser. By this point the highly aggravated check out assistant had called her supervisor and shortly thereafter another security guard threw him out of his second supermarket of the day. Then it was quite late and the man, tired and distressed by his experience, had to be content with stopping at the late-night garage on the way home. Here he had bought a loaf of bread (sliced white being the only option), Rice Crispies and a pint of milk.
Now it was late evening and all the disappointments of earlier were forgotten and the man was happy again. For the last hour he had been sitting at his kitchen table crushing Rice Crispies. There was something so pleasing about picking up a single Crispie with your fingertips, something endlessly fascinating about bringing it up really close to your face and rolling it gently back and forth between your finger and thumb, studying at its uneven surface; where had it puffed up the most? Which end was bigger? Which was the biggest bubble? Some of the bubbles were so delicate that you could see through them into the middle of the Crispie and if you were not careful they could break. Of course, some of them had broken already in the bag; sometimes it would only be half a Crispie. There was not a lot you could do about that.
That is just the way the world is.
He liked looking at the little Crispies, but even better than that he liked to get one of the good ones and squeezing and squeezing it until it collapsed in on itself in a cloud of Crispie dust. He liked the dust. Sometimes if he thought a particular Crispie was going to be a good one, he would put it on the kitchen table and press down with his thumb. Now when it burst he would not lose any dust and he could look to see what was left behind. Crispies are a pale yellow colour, when you crushed them you got Crispie crumbs and some white dust, but if you looked at the dust in the bottom of the bag it was all yellow. He spent a long time wondering about this. A lot of Crispies were crushed as he tried to figure out the secret of the dust.
Each Crispie was crushed individually. Each was a separate entity. For each he constructed its history, its Crispie biography. This turned boring very quickly as all the Crispies had a similar tale to tell. Born in a paddy field far, far away, living the simple rice life for a season before being harvested and transported overseas to a Rice Crispie factory. Where they were fortified with seven vitamins and iron, and baked in an oven till they bubbled and popped. Packed into bags and transported to the shop, some settling occurred in transit but it was an unremarkable part of their trans-continental life stories. The whole thing was, no doubt about it, a great adventure for an individual Crispie, but it was wearying to hear it so repetitively.
And yet they all popped so differently and he did not know why, they all lead similar lives and yet they bubbled up with great individuality. It was another Crispie mystery and many more Crispies were crushed as he tried to spot the patterns behind their variety.
He hit upon the idea of pretending they were little Crispie people. He had even tried drawing faces on the individual grains but this was not a success. He satisfied himself naming the ones that he thought would crush especially well. He gave them names of people who he would especially like to crush, the names of his enemies, names from The List. The List was his liturgy, he repeated it to calm himself down and because it had power. The List had begun a long time ago and the start of it was worn into his memory from thousands of repetitions and not even his more vibrant mind could confuse him on this but it was always getting longer. There were a lot of these people, too many to remember especially at times like now when he would get easily confused. But that’s why he had his notebooks. He gave the Crispies names off The List and then he crushed them. There were a lot of Crispies but luckily, there were a lot of names on The List and it was being added to all the time.
He knew it wasn’t really his place to smite them but he just playing God not Playing God.
*
John had spent much of Sunday staring at the ceiling of his bedroom. After his rousing call to action and experience the previous night, he felt dazed and unable to face much more of the world than the crumbling and discoloured plaster of his rented roof.
Partly he was exhausted by the bombshell of the previous evening but also by the need to attempt to watch the workings of his own mind. To try and reconnect with the immediacy he had felt on stage. The intense and singular sense of being himself right at that moment. He concentrated but every time he thought he had captured that feeling, it evaporated and he had to begin again.
In other cultures, his introspective sloth might have been called meditation and respected as a valuable tool for self-analysis. Brought up with the protestant work ethic, John merely felt guilt about his sojourn. He gave up chasing after a perfect crystalline appreciation of the present moment and let his mind wander more slothfully through his past. He wondered how he had ended up where he was now. Lying in a single bed that hadn’t been changed all month, in a rented two room basement flat in a less pleasant part of Brixton.
John had always been differently motivated. Not exactly lazy, he was conscientious but unambitious. To him the phrase ‘being driven’ conjures up chauffeured limos rather than psychotic over-achieving. (Often, of course, the two go together.)
His childhood had been a happy one. If he stopped to think about it, this was a bit suspicious. It did not fit in with how his