Furious Horses

>Brilliant Jarvis was born, of course, brilliant. The doctor agreed—he’s just brilliant, Mrs and Mr Henry, just brilliant—and there was no other comparison to make. His brilliance shone from his forehead not as a shining light, but as if the shiniest light was reflecting off him, and that there was no one else it would ever have chosen to shine off. He was chosen, not by someone or something, but just chosen.

Later in life, when casually-dressed people gather to protest a supermarket, Brilliant Jarvis will be the one to call them radicals. The papers pick it up, and, of course, the rest is history (albeit in a future tense). When there is no more room left in the car to put a lush rendition of a particularly lovable Olympic mascot, it is Jarvis who brilliantly suggests the use of suction cups.

No one else looks out that window, he observes, as if answering an inner monologue (which is, of course, how he speaks), and his parents can not help but agree that yes, no one does look out that window, and that yes, the plush rendition of the mascot would fit very well with suction cups attached (—and that way, everyone can see it when we’re driving!— his mother will say).

Brilliant Jarvis began his life among the angle grinder ankles of professional carers. He saluted a flag whenever he saw one, even though no one had told him to do so, and no one could remember ever showing him anyone doing it. His professional carers commented on his alertness, his politeness and, of course, his brilliance. The only problems were the disappearances. Jarvis would go missing. He would tell his parents, of course, that it was a societal problem, that fifty years ago no one would have minded, that it wasn’t his fault that the private fears of our collective consciousness had not only caught up with society but had indeed overtaken it. His parents told him he was so brilliant that they were worried someone else might want him. He showed them an article from The Bulletin on date rape.

Later, Jarvis will lecture about such matters. He will say a normal person can’t guiltlessly fathom having sex with someone who doesn’t want to have sex with them. There’s no pleasure, he will argue. It’s the sexual repression early in the life of an individual, he will contend, that really matters. Jarvis will always prefer prevention to the cure.

Brilliant Jarvis was so brilliant he was given a video camera for his first birthday. He would make nature documentaries in his parents’ extensive backyard. He was not yet tall enough to explore the heights of trees, so he instead focused on ground level. He observed, through his diamond-grinded lens, the lives of bugs and worms. Although after a day or so of filming, he became inexorably drawn to the lives of ants; he loved their faceless toils and struggles, their strength and unquestioning industrial drive. Jarvis would lament, later in those days, as the wide sheets of sunlight began to shrink, drawing back, contracting like water down a plughole, disappearing between fractal cracks between black-shadow branches (becoming, as always, the soft nerves of night). Jarvis begged his parents for a television, and he began to watch his films after dark, drawn from sleep by ants crawling complex paths: indecipherable to him, intrinsic to them.

Many years on, Jarvis will meet the love of his life in an identity parade. Only moments after leaving the police station, Jarvis will reflect on ideas of attractive symmetry. The police officer waiting in the room with them will step hesitantly on the balls of her feet, so that when she walks it always seems as if she is about to fall over. Jarvis will walk more confidently immediately afterwards, assured of his correct posture, meticulously honed by the cheese-grater knuckles of childhood professional carers.

Although he had many carers through his early years, and although he respected them all, Brilliant Jarvis would love only one: not a homely Balkan, nor acerbic Hebridean: she was, of course, his mother. After many perceived failings on the part of hired carers, Jarvis’ mother assumed responsibility for her son’s welfare, which, she told herself, she perhaps should have done a long time ago. But rather than appear in her normal role, Jarvis’s mother assumed the guise of another faceless carer, hoping her son would not notice. She dressed as plainly as she could, wore too much make-up, and a wig. Jarvis, of course, did recognise her, but he was brilliant enough to realise that if he stayed quiet about it, he would spend more time with his mother in one day then he had in the entire previous span of his life. So he didn’t stay anything, and they were both happy. In time, he began to convince himself that his mother was a professional carer, someone who had trained to be what they were now as an extension of a previous, mysterious life, someone who would go home to another bed at night. His greatest joy in his forgetfulness was the little leap his heart would make when he saw his carer at the entrance to his bedroom door, a familiar face couched in a stranger’s clothes, and he would know it was someone he was excited to see.

Jarvis next applied his brilliant mind to street numbers. He was perplexed as to why odd numbers ran up one side of his street, and even numbers the other. He was often bothered by wondering who decided which side would be which. His house was number 62, and said HENRY in large letters along one side, in yellow writing. He used to pretend that the letterbox was called Henry, and that it wasn’t just his family name printed up to let the postman and other people know who lived there.

He was, in short, brilliant.

>She had toes the colour of new five-cent pieces. It was after all that dancing, after all. She unbound her feet beside an open window, blowing in the high forgotten winds of winter. Deep down there, in the streets below, the streets were clogged with people. The trains had stopped running around lunchtime, giving birth to a new stranded urban population. She watched them: they were nothing but dots, charges in a quivering molecule. She felt her heat begin to dissipate, began to crave a thick shawl. Flexed her toes, one by one, reacquainting.

>The can of Fanta popped open without much fanfare, but Heinrich still licked his lips in anticipation. This was a taste he had not afforded himself in as much as ten years away from home. There was no sweetness in his new life. Only the bitter slap of artificial sugar on his tongue every morning after a coffee, the occasional pasty store-bought cake for someone’s birthday, eaten from paper plates with plastic forks. Otherwise, it was carefully balanced meals of light grains, legumes and vegetables.

And O that first sweet sip of pure orange sugar was like orgasm, the thin cold aluminium and the fizzing cool liquid trickling joy down his throat. His head buzzed, his dietary denial finally upended in one swift movement. He had to sit down. He actually had to put the can down for a moment on the Formica table and lower himself, weightlessly, to a chair. His eyes swam with visions of summer afternoons, in that very same chair, swinging the fridge door open and seeing those rows and rows of brightly marked cans: beautiful colourbars of possibility.

Heinrich was about to take another measured sip when he heard the creaky complaint of the back door swinging open. Damned anathema. The other end of sweet childhood memories: the indignity and cheek-roasting shame of being found out. His mother’s squeal made it down the corridor well before she did. Heinrich had foolishly left his satchel on the hall table.

“My darling!”

Heinrich’s mother rolled into the room, as if on casters, hugging her son and removing the precious can of Fanta in one fluid movement. “Who left that out there, then?” She upended the can into the sink with one hand, the other still rooted to her son’s shoulder. “One of those neighbourhood kids, I don’t doubt.”

Heinrich watched that gorgeous catastrophic orange disappearing down the drain, and suddenly felt all the worse for having had so little of it, to have been brought full circle back to the fat wax of a full life, a childhood of nothing but possibility.

“I will fix us some nice herbal tea,” said his mother.

Heinrich felt a great hot tear run down his cheek and into his mouth. As he tested it with his tongue, he thought of the four tastes. Mostly, it was sweet.

>It’s so easy to become the bad guy. And it’s so easy not to. Just a few seconds either way, really. Do you push the button, cut the cable, let the secret slip. Or does someone else do it first. As to which I am, well I can’t really tell you that.

It’s all relative, supposedly. Lecturers in large halls asking us how many lives are worth the torture of one. Us, nestling safely in our untainted minds, being shown real human suffering week after week and laughing it off. Parties, jokes, all that damn coffee.

And, it turns out, I’m one of those people whose hair makes a mark on a bus window. Unwashed for how many days now? It’s one of those rainy mornings anyway, where all that human heat makes condensation bead on rush hour glass, all those droplets squabbling together on their religious journey to the bottom of the window.

Unclean, I suppose, is the word. The dirt of a long day settling down on me. Eyes full of radiation. Aches radiating up from my feet. And all that romantic dyslexia beating away in my belly. He sat by me again today. Left handed, scrunched over his lecture pad. Beautiful beautiful left-handed scrunched-over boy. I spent ten minutes lost in a line of chopped hairs on his neck.

The bus lurches, my own head snaps back and forth. I should have sat next to him. The only place more embarrassing than two seats away would be right in his lap. He looked up as I sat down and I really was just another guy in just another lecture. The words back-burning my throat for an entire forty minutes. Then, right at the end, when he had to get past me to the aisle, I went to say something, anything, all the world’s carefully worded phrases fluttering straight from my head. And I’m starting to talk, and he’s brushing past me. ‘Scuse me mate.

Me, the fucking human slalom course. I ran straight to the toilets two floors up because I know they’re always quiet and I leant against a sink and hit my head over and over with the palm of my hands, willing myself to disappear.

We’re nearly out in the rain now, just waiting at the lights, the nose of the bus edging out from underneath the busway, leaving the speed-controlled, time-tabled confines of the inner-city, ready to fly out to those highways, to those blank slates of suburbia.

>Sometimes the cruel tides of history can be so unkind to our greatest literary heroes. Like you, I had never heard of Rupert “Bluey” McDowell, until, almost like magic, a chance encounter in a dusty old bookstore led to a surprisingly lengthy sexual harassment suit and during one those long appeals, I had to read something. Luckily, a piece of old parchment was steadying a wobbly table in a cafe across the road where I would spend hours being coached by the defense attorney on what to say. I pulled out the parchment, and it just happened to be one of those old maze-hunts from the trays they used to have at Hungry Jack’s. After spending five fruitless hours trying to complete the maze, I happened to look up, just in time to see a prophetic message on a nearby idling bus: “National Nine News : Still the One”. Later that night, as I watched the news, one particular item caught my eye. It seemed that someone had trained a duck to ride a skateboard. Also, some days later, I was Googling the address of a nearby podiatrist and and a typo led me to a page mentioning Bluey McDowell. I got stuck with a whole lot of pop-ups. The rest, as they say, is History!

>They were down about six hundred feet most of the day. Mainly, it felt safer, but really it was just nice to be pottering around close to home for a change. They spent so long and were so often working, it seemed lovely just to be able to switch on a light and read a book for a while. The only distraction seemed to be the faint clatter of children running hoops up and down one of the outside tunnels. Their muffled laughter, it seemed, was a seldom-heard, daytime treat.

So cozy everything seemed, too. Walls were thicker, less room to worry about. And sure, all the books had been read more than once, but wasn’t it still nicer to be doing exactly what you wanted to do? They made many cups of tea, until eventually all that steam hung around their ceilings like expensive gauze and more than once heads ducked uncertainly at this these new imagined drapes.

Someone shouted, mid-afternoon, after stubbing a shin painfully on a low table. Others winced in solidarity, rubbed their own legs. These phantom problems were not usually such a worry. Many tried to guess when night was falling. There was, they realised, no real way to tell.

>They rolled into town like mountains moving. Bigger than the army trucks we’d seen the week before, and far less regimented. At first, when Orson came running down the hill, he just said they were trucks carrying hot air balloons, but by the time the rest of us had gone back up there we saw tall caravans piled into high oblongs, like top hats teetering down the road. Horse floats followed, ends open but too dark to see inside. And then the biggest truck, with the logo on the side. ‘Circus,’ whispered someone. ‘Circus, here!’

In our town, summer holidays were nothing but sun-drenched silences, the hours plodding past. A circus was a living dream.

‘Noah,’ whispered Orson, nudging me in the ribs, ‘look.’

I followed his arm, not believing there could be anything else to see. But there they were, three tigers on the back of an open trailer. They sat there quietly, not roaring or leaping like the ones we’d seen in movies or magazines. They seemed, from our distance, comfortably relaxed, more like dogs than cats, basking lazily in the sun.

We all agreed then that the circus would stop in our town, an agreement formed more by desperation than hope. It had to stop here, we told ourselves. Tigers would be among us.

>Oh man, where to start? Well, first of all, none of this could have happened without the support of that crate thing I sat on that day when those fighter jets went over and a little private part of me thought, Oh man, there’s some sort of invasion going on, and then when I thought about it later, it was actually quite funny because I thought it was Remembrance Day. It really wasn’t a crate, more like a box I guess. The sort of thing they make you sit on in those trendy cafes where they think it’s uncool to have backrests and people look really happy about it. Anyway, there was one out in the street, so I decided to sit in it, and I was looking down at the grass where there were some ants just mucking around and that’s when these jets went screaming across the sky and I freaked out. Well, the jets were probably already well past where I was. I just heard them, because I’d have guessed they broke the sound barrier. Later that year I also wrote some songs.

>One of those philosophers visited me today. I was sitting at home, baking in front of a midday movie, one of those very very good ones where Brian Dennehy’s a cop who sweats a lot and James Brolin’s some sort of pebble-eyed bad guy.

So I hear this knocking at the door and it’s really persistent and the knocks are somehow really really evenly spaced. I rock up off the couch and get a little afternoon headspin. In fact, I squint my eyes in preparation for the furnaced white of outside that will no doubt greet me. I put my eye up to the peephole and then remember, for the umpteenth time, that it doesn’t work any more. I turn it over in my mind, and convince myself to open the front door.

There’s this guy there, on my step, like something out of the very heart of continental Europe, dressed in a shirt with these huge cuffs and a pork-pie hat. With a feather. I groan, not bothering to keep it to myself. He peered up at me through these little fey glasses, flickering his eyelids far far too quickly.

“Don’t tell me,” I said to him, taking up residence comfortably on the door frame. “Twentieth century. Post-Positivist French.”

The little man nodded.

I sighed. “A Marxist thinker, but you don’t identify with Marx.”

Another nod.

“Fan of Canguilhem?”

The little man fidgeted with his feathered hat.

I ran my hand over my face. “Look,” I told him. “I’d really love to, but I had this guy last week who talked discontinuist views of science at me for like three hours, so…” I let my sentence hang in the air. You had to be careful with these guys. One careless mention of actor-network theory and they were liable to go for your eyes.

The little man’s face began a slight twitch. Tears, I could sense, were not far away.

“Look,” I told him, “I happen to know for a fact that the old lady two doors down is really looking for something to explain away her growing disaffection towards Frege’s whole infatuation with axiomatic predicate logic. Only a few days ago, this was, down the supermarket.”

The philosopher’s face rose to this news. He crossed one leg in front of another, bowed, and doffed his hat. He sprung off down my front steps and back down the road.

When I got back to the TV, Brian Dennehy had already been shot, so it wasn’t really worthwhile continuing.

>The sound of the side door sliding was a rockfall in a silent night. A Greek chorus of rust and sombre bent metal. Theo stared at the invoice again, straining his eyes in the near-dawn. BEING FOR. This particular heading confused him. He knew the amount of money, he knew the date (one short trip to a newspaper pile outside a shut-up kiosk, plus one day), he knew who he wanted to pay him. But the BEING FOR, that was the tricky bit.

Theo tracked his toes through the sand-dirt, leant back into the vague heat of his van. He had undertaken many jobs in his time, ones that he could describe in a few simple sentences, but this one was almost inexplicable. Not totally inexplicable, because he had done it, and you had to be able to describe something in order to do it. One time, Theo had found himself in the locked-off radio truck of a prominent senator during election week, being fitted with wires and microphones. Once the moustache had been attached to his face, it was a simple matter of walking through the gates of the television studios, flashing some mocked-up ID, and striding confidently past all those blown-up portraits and down to studio three.

The best thing was, set designers were not ever really expected to look a certain way. Key grips, gaffers, lighting techs—that was another story entirely, but set designers, now they were truly unnoticeable creatures. That was the beauty of the plan. A basic knowledge of human psychology and average upper body strength was all that was needed to drag a certain senatorial candidate’s chair five feet to the right, thereby placing a certain senatorial candidate’s head directly in front of the roaring flames of his supposedly confidence-assuring open fireplace. Theo made sure that when television viewers saw a certain senatorial candidate’s very expensive election advertisement the next day—during its first showing in the first break of a particularly popular afternoon soap opera—they were presented with not a caring, conscientious alternative to the incumbent senatorial candidate, but rather a startlingly sweaty man who appeared to have flames leaping from his forehead.

That was oh so easy, thought Theo, compared to this. He wished so dearly to be able to scrub down his brain, the same way the he swabbed and scoured the inside of his van after it was down. It was not that he felt dirty: it was more than that. He felt inhabited, lived in, by someone and something else. He pressed his fingers into his eyes.

BEING FOR. Damn it all to hell.