BOOK ONE
Mountjoy
THE KABBALAH OF
ALEX-LI TANDEMTake me to the center of everything.
—the popular singer Madonna Ciccone
to a taxi driver upon her arrival in New York CityThe unique phenomenon of distance,
however close [an object] may be.—a definition of
aura,
offered by the popular wise guy Walter Benjamin
CHAPTER ONE
Shechinah
PRESENCE • Alex-Li Tandem was Jewish • A rainbow over Mountjoy • Handprint • Superstar • Princess Grace • Marvin is a milk operative • Alex’s feminine goy side • Not talking about the car #1 • Communion with a snail
1.
You’re either for me or against me, thought
Alex-Li Tandem
, referring to the daylight and, more generally, to the day. He stretched flat and made two fists. He was fully determined to lie right here until he was given something to work with, something noble, something
fine.
He saw no purpose in leaving his bed for a day that was against him from the get-go. He had tried it before; no good could come from it.
A moment later he was surprised to feel a flush of warm light dappled over him, filtered through a blind. Nonviolent light. This was encouraging. Compare and contrast with yesterday morning’s light, pettily fascist, cruel as the strip lighting in a hospital corridor. Or the morning before yesterday morning, when he had kept his eyes closed for the duration, afraid of whatever was causing that ominous red throb beneath the eyelids. Or the morning before
that,
the Morning of Doom, which no one could have supposed would continue for seventy-two hours.
NOW OPTIMISTIC, ALEX
grabbed the bauble that must be twisted to open blinds. His fingers were too sweaty. He shuttled up the bed, dried his left hand on the wall, gripped and pulled. The rain had come in the night. It looked as if the Flood had passed through Mountjoy, scrubbed it clean. The whole place seemed to have undergone an act of accidental restoration. He could see brickwork, newly red-faced and streaky as after a good weep, balconies with their clean crop of wet white socks, shirts and sheets. Shiny black aerials. Oh, it was fine. Collected water had transformed every gutter, every depression in the pavement, into prism puddles. There were
rainbows
everywhere.
Alex took a minute to admire the gentle sun that kept its mildness even as it escaped a gray ceiling of cloud. On the horizon a spindly church steeple had been etched by a child over a skyline perfectly blue and flatly colored in. To the left of that sat the swollen cupola of a mosque, described with more skill. So people were off to see God, then, this morning. All of that was still happening. Alex smiled, weakly. He wished them well.
IN HIS BATHROOM
, Alex was almost defeated by the discovery of a sequence of small tragedies. There was an awful smell. Receptacles had been missed. Stuff was not where stuff should be. Stepping over stuff, ignoring stuff, stoic Alex turned to the vanity mirror. He yanked it towards him by its metal neck until its squares became diamonds, parallelograms, one steel line. He had aged, terribly. The catch in his face, the one that held things up, this had been released. But how long was it since he had been a boy? A few days? A year? A decade? And now
this
?
He bared his teeth to the mirror. They were yellow. But on the plus side, they were there. He opened his Accidental eyes (Rubinfine’s term: halfway between Oriental and Occidental) wide as they would go and touched the tip of his nose to the cold glass. What was the damage? His eyes worked. Light didn’t hurt. Swallowing felt basic, uncomplicated. He was not shivering. He felt no crippling paranoia or muscular tremors. He seized his penis. He squeezed his cheeks. Present, correct. Everything was still where it appears in the textbooks. And it seemed unlikely that he would throw up, say, in the next four hours, something he had not been able to predict with any certainty for a long time. These were all wonderful, wonderful developments. Breathing heavily, Alex shaved off three days’ worth of growth (had it been
three days
?). Finishing up, he cut himself only twice and applied the sad twists of tissue.
Teeth done, Alex remembered the wear-and-tear deposit he had paid his landlord and shuffled back to the bedroom. He needed a cloth, but the kitchen was another country. Instead he took a pillowcase, dipped it in a glass of water and began to scrub at the handprint on the wall. Maybe it looked like art? Maybe it had a certain presence? He stepped back and looked at it, at the grubby yellow outline. Then he scrubbed some more. It didn’t look like art. It looked like someone had died in the room. Alex sat down on the corner of his bed and pressed his thumbs to his eyes to stop two ready tears. A little gasp escaped him. And what’s remarkable, he thought, what’s really amazing, is
this,
is how
tiny
the actual thing was in the first place. This thing that almost destroyed me. Two, no, maybe three days ago he had placed a pill on his tongue, like a tiny communion wafer. He’d left it there for ten seconds, as recommended, before swallowing. He had never done anything like this before. Nothing could have prepared him! Moons rose, suns fell, for days, for nights, all without him noticing!
Legal name: Microdot. Street name: Superstar. For a time it had made itself famous all through his body. And now it was over.
2.
Out in the hall, Alex met Grace. She was crouched on the second step, looking vengeful. Her tail in the air, her face messy with bird blood. Protruding from her mouth was the greater part of a wing. Alex saw that it was no sparrow, either, but a colorful, pinky-blue type of bird, the sort he might have got sentimental over, built a birdhouse for, with one of these miniature Welcome Home mats much loved by the widowed of Mountjoy. But he had come too late for all that. When pushed (she had not been fed), Grace became a garden terrorist and made no sentimental distinctions between species in the same genus. A squirrel was as good as a mouse to her, a parakeet equal to a pigeon. Picking her up, Alex forgave her, kissed her on her flat head, tugged her tail and slid her down the banister. In return, she painted a long streak of red, like a design feature, down the length of pine, punctuated by little hillocks of bird guts. And
still
he did not throw up. Ha! Alex was counting this as Personal Triumph of the Morning #3. The second was walking. The first was consciousness.
3.
“It sort of hurts,
here,
” said Alex to his milk operative, Marvin, who was on the doorstep. Marvin reached out his dark hand and up went his white cuff. Despite himself, Alex thought of Bill Robinson reaching out for the hand of Shirley Temple. It did seem a musical out here today on the chilly street. Bright, awesome.
“Where?”
“Kidney area.”
Marvin felt the area. He had long fingers and he poked deep.
“Careful . . .”
“What am I looking for? A lump?”
“You think it could
create
a lump?”
Marvin shrugged. “Highly unlikely, bro. Not in such a short time, anyway—but it raaver depends what they put
in
it, you get me?”
Alex pulled his pajama top back down and frowned. “I have no idea what they put in it, Marvin. It’s not like this stuff is regulated. There was no ingredients list. There was no consumer—”
Marvin waved his hands in Alex’s face, dismissing him. He never did sarcasm. He possessed what Alex imagined to be the essential sincerity of urban black men with hard lives.
“Yeah, yeah,
yeah.
Your head isn’t itchin’ in your skull or nothing?” he asked, stepping back, holding Alex speculatively by the chin. Alex felt depressed. It was clear that Marvin’s expertise outstripped his own. It is depressing, being out-experted so early in the morning.
“Itching?”
“Then you’re fine. It might have been strong, but it sounds pure. Sometimes they’ve got Floxine in it. Then your head itches in your skull for a bit after.”
“Floxine?”
“Do you want any yogurts, then? Bloody freezing out here,” said Marvin, turning in the direction of his milk truck and employing one hand as a visor against the winter sun. He bounced on the balls of his feet, stepping back, stepping forward. In his left hand, through those long, clever fingers, he passed his small notepad from the first finger to the last and back again like a playing card. Marvin was bored.
“No, not really.”
“Say again?” said Marvin, in a menacing tone.
Marvin was three months into a government-sponsored job initiative. Before this he’d had a brief stint as a parking attendant. Before that, he had been a dealer of drugs. At present he was in addiction counseling, the language of which he sometimes spoke on his milk rounds. As soon as Marvin began his deliveries in Mountjoy, a huge leap in demand for expensive yogurts and milkshakes occurred, a growth that had an exact correlation to public fear of Marvin. Alex too, at first, had ordered a lot of individually wrapped cheese singlets, mousses, pressurized cream cans, etc. But now he wanted to
redraw the boundaries of the relationship.
Now he wanted them both, he and Marvin, to
move towards new criteria.
“I’m all right for yogurts, actually.”
“Well, bully for you,” said Marvin sourly. He slipped his pad into the pouch at the front of his uniform. He reached forward once more and widened Alex’s eyes with his fingers. “What was this foolishness called, again?”
“I think, a Superstar?”
Marvin clapped his hands together, laughed, and shook his head in a move called—if Alex were asked to give it a name—
The Dance of Scoff.
“And
you’re
the intellectual.”
“And I’m the intellectual.”
“And so . . . what?” asked Marvin. “What was the deal, Tandem? Was joy sown before pain was reaped?”
Alex fiddled with the fly of his pajama bottoms. From here his penis looked smaller than it had ever looked ever. It was curled in on itself like a mollusk—but where was the hard shell that would protect it? Where was its home? Its shield against life?
“Were you . . . like, dancing or chilling or? I know some people,” considered Marvin, “and they get on a
living-room
trip. The TV sucks them in. They commune with the TV, right? And they take their trip through the channels.
Suburban
style-ee.”
Alex had been in his bed for around three days, that much he had a grip on. In which time he had survived on the bright spangles of Christmas chocolate coins sitting on his night table. He remembered a lucid hour in which he had plumped some pillows behind himself, picked up the phone and called a radio talk show during a conversation about early menopause. He remembered the sleep. Deep, padded. But the night before this, the night in question, this was a shut door with its wood warping from some unseen fire, smoke squeezing through. He could not open it. He didn’t dare.
“Marvin,” he said finally, “I have no recollection. On the past week, I am drawing a . . .”
Marvin nodded and made the sign for a big empty circle of nothing in the air. Through it Alex could see the embroidered lettering
MARVIN KEPPS, MOUNTJOY MILK OPERATIVE
and, beyond that, a tiny blanching gap in his buttons, where the tight corkscrew of his chest hair was suggesting something scary to Alex, some untapped velocity in the coil.
“That will happen,” said Marvin, and placed his hands softly on Alex’s shoulders. “Tandem,” he said, “let me lay it out for you: in the pros column we have heightened sensory perception, visionary experience and the rest. I don’t have to tell
you.
Every note of music, every blade of grass, et cetera. But here on the cons we have short-term memory
collapse.
Back in the day, they called them Goldfish. For the reason stated above.”
For the second time this morning, Alex felt tears rising. The specter of
permanent neurological damage,
number four on Alex’s Big Five List—
1.
Cancer
2.
AIDS
3.
Poisoned Water System/London Underground Gas Attack
4.
Permanent Neurological Damage
(
in youth, through misadventure
)
5.
Degenerative Brain Disease, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Etc.
(
in old age
)
—grabbed at his gag reflex and he swerved towards a bush by the fence. Marvin caught him by the elbow, hugged him to his body and straightened him up.
“None of that,
please,
” said Marvin fondly, massaging his knuckle into the top of Alex’s head. “It’s just the problem with those things, and what I’ve learnt is this: they’re meant to be a shortcut to the ultimate . . . thing, the plane, or whatever you want to say it like, yeah? It’s meant to be: here’s your thirty quid or whatever, take me to higher consciousness, please. And it don’t work that way, bro. You don’t get the full benefit. You’ve got to work your way up that tree, meaning that that is an allegory which is saying: you can’t just fly up to the branches. You get me?”
“Right.”
“I know I’m right. So, Mr. My Bed Is My Office. Going out today?”
“Considering it, Marvin.”
“Consider hard.”
“Will do.”
“Will do,” echoed Marvin in the effeminate voice he often used to impersonate Alex. In the past this has made Alex wonder whether he seems effeminate to black men or just to Marvin in particular. A couple of months ago, in Mountjoy Swimming Pool, Alex-Li Tandem did a passable backflip and then, rising out of the water, put the matter to his friend Adam, who took off his nasal clip and said:
“No . . .
no
—I don’t see that, I don’t find you particularly effeminate. You’re too bulky, for one. And hairy. And he does that to me too, anyway. And I’m the black guy.”
“Yes,” said Alex happily, kicking some water in the direction of children who had kicked some at him, “you’re
the
black guy.”
“Yes,
I’m
the black guy. No doubt I die halfway through. So. I don’t know. I think it’s probably more of a class thing.”
Water dribbled out of Adam’s nose along with some more viscous material. There should be a law. Alex took an Olympic breath and surged to the gritty, tiled bottom of the pool, performed a rolly-turn thing and kicked off from the side, after which he swam two thirds of the length underwater, a personal record. He was a little fat, these days, and he smoked. When he returned, he got four floats and put them underneath his body in such a way as to enable him to sit upright in the water and bob up and down in a sort of Mer-King scenario.