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He had done as they'd requested; followed their instructions to the
badly printed letter. But sending $1.35 plus 39 cents shipping and handling
to Department 310, Automation Drive, Mt.Clemens, Michigan, had not resulted
in the 'GREATEST ILLUSION OF THE CENTURY! APPARENTLY SEE BONES THRU
SKIN, SEE THRU CLOTHES ETC' that the small advertisement had promised.
Despite the money back  guarantee,
Grainger felt cheated. The American dream was hollow, and the White
Room was gone. But where?
He removed the xray specs and tossed them on the table. There were cigarettes
and decomposing cookies in the half-light; a dead wasp dissected at
the waist; dusty whorls of woodgrain; something congealing inside a
cup. The outward signs of neglect that certain well-paid, educated people
with an interest in such things would diagnose as madness.
An eternity passed in the blink of an eye. Grainger lit a cigarette,
inhaled, and listened to the sluggish hiss of cars on the slick black
tarmac outside. Had it always been raining like this? Bare floorboards
and a few orphaned sheets of newspaper offered no reply or insight into
his situation. He had lost himself, or maybe it was they who had lost
him...either way, his memory had been pickpocketed; nothing much but
scraps of language and the essential anatomical processes that he needed
to exist, to function, in this place called Reality. Words spluttered
and flickered on the screen in front of him; ancient green on black;
trails of fingers where the dust had been cleared. Each new day was
a day of enlightenment—of learning—for Grainger. Discoveries bloomed
in his mind and spread outwards, like ripples on a black, fathomless
expanse of water. But how long would it take to reach the depths? To
understand those shadowy wraiths moving beneath the surface reflections?
The cigarette smoke curled up and over itself, like a blue dog chasing
it's tail. Grainger had forgotten half his life; couldn't even be sure
that he had lived it. Things had been erased...backspaced, and the clattering
of the typewriter had stopped. But amongst the vagueness there was still
that room...the White Room, where Grainger could see the bright polygons
of sunlight on empty walls. nothing but clean, minimal expanse. Like
his life, it may or may not have existed, and now he was slowly trying
to gather the threads back together.
The information started to appear on the screen. there had been writing
once...a novel. Something he had poured his whole life into. And now
he couldn't locate it. Either in his mind, or on the ancient computer.
But there were fragments; shards of it embedded in documents of meaningless
and encrypted code. If he could only reassemble the pieces.
The mantra was Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V. Over and over. Grainger, dear old Grainger,
was cutting and pasting an identity for himself...
Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V.
[ ... ] for kicks I would flout the laws of physics. Submerge / surface
anywhere; infinity in the blink of an eye. Have dreams, will travel.
Often did, as I sat there in the lime-green subterranean womb/cocoon
of Bar Madrid. I was always amazed at how much colour there was out
there in the world, away from the soothing sterility of the White Room.
A real world, that beat-up your senses; windows with smashed black panes
like rows of broken-up teeth...grinning, always grinning at me: the
fool in the rain with no overcoat and flip-flops; big toe painted like
a union jack. [... ] so I sat there in the underground bar, with the
techno burrowing into my skull, and I saw Josie come in. At first I
didn't see her, because of my sunglasses, but by the time she'd negotiated
half the room, my senses had locked onto her. She asked if I was drinking.
I said it was a stupid question, and gave her the money for two more
beers.
Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V.
[.... ] it was small and yellow, and I took it with a glass of coke.
She said it would make my jaw ache. So I sat there and waited for it
to kick in. The music swam in and out of her smile like a shoal of fish.
Then I started smiling myself. A great grin...beaming like the sun through
a gap in the clouds of some dirty old sky. My depression had left me;
stormed out of the house with a suitcase, and gone off to Timbuktu.
Or some such far-flung place. And it all made sense. The whole world
wasn't supported by Atlas and some Greek elephants after all. It was
supported by love. We were standing on the shoulders of love, and I
loved everyone. I asked Josie to kiss me, and she did. I crept right
inside that red, wet mouth and listened to the far-off noise of the
bar reverberating against her teeth. One little pill...the god, the
sun and the holy truth...ecstasy...a step ladder to the stars.
Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V
[... ] I tapped away in the white room. Josie murmured something, tangled
in sheets. My muse was asleep; my seed still sticky between her thighs.
But I was on a roll. The words were forcing themselves out. Helvetica,
Helvetica, my beautiful Helvetica. Come to daddy...
Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V
[...... ] the laughter of a party goer fluttered on icicle wings to
find me. I crossed the street away from the crowds, nudging a parked
car and setting off the alarm. I looked up at the sky, drunk. The snow,
though still a premonition, carried on the air like salt that comes
in off a foaming ocean. I caught the tang of it as I stood there fumbling
for a cigarette in Covent Garden; bladder close to bursting. I found
a dark corner and started to mark my territory with spreading urine
tributaries...another weeks wages, pissed up the wall...for what? A
fleeting spectre of steam in an alley full of wheelie bins? No...there’s
more to it than that. Drink enough beer and I'm Steve McQueen, about
to gun a motor cycle through the barbed wire border crossing of a neutral
territory. A place where everything doesn’t fracture; crack like frescoes
of serene Madonnas under old Italian eaves, or turn to shit the minute
I touch it. What the fuck did I do to deserve this? It seemed that lady
luck had abandoned me at birth to suckle on a she-wolf. But I never
founded Rome: just work, depression, debt and pain. I stepped back out
into the street. Faces flashed like startled fish through the windows
of a passing car. The snow was coming, and tomorrow, she would purge
this place; make London look like a beautiful corpse...the taut white
skin of bleak mid-winter stretched across it’s architecture.
Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V
[ ............ ] Inside the white room, I was trying to master the graceful
art of time travel: the ability to rewind, pause, fast-forward time
to any point of consciousness, beginning with the amniotic murmurs that
my unborn mind had first translated random images from; like selotaped-together
reels of film, cut up then reassembled into dreaming's first existence.
I wondered if others shared my ability to submerge, surface anywhere;
make de-ja-vu a destination, rather than just a nagging sense, or burn
stars down like cigarettes to one last glow before they're spent. Oh
god yes...infinity, beautiful & terrible infinity in the blink of an
eye. I found that concentration just hindered. It was better to relax
and let your mind expand slowly; allow yourself to change shape, loom
up on the wall like Max Shreck's Nosferatu shadow, then contract
to a baby's fist: the closed pink bud inside a womb, where dreams move
in concentric circles; overlap, spread wide to fade, like ripples on
the stagnant pool I used to skim flat stones across, and wonder just
how deep it really was. How deep? As deep beyond the water boatmen as
Excalibur's resting place. so deep, they'd never find the bones...
Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V
[ ................... ] My clothes were filthy. Ruined by neglect and
vomit. The symptoms of my depression had extended to my personal hygiene:
I didn't give a fuck about anything. And I knew that they were closing
in on me; edging towards the inner sanctum of the white room, with their
wedding rings and bi-focal spectacles. the nodding heads...the concerned
looks. I wanted to burn the lot of them inside a parked car and sing
to the charred remains. I left my room. It was summer. People looked
happy and distracted from the pain of reality...brainwashed by a splash
of sun. But I knew that everything was dead. Or dying. This was a place
where you kept your car doors locked, and no-one gave a shit beyond
the two-thirty-five hurdles at Uttoxeter, or forty-nine numbered balls
that shot up plastic fallopian tubes on TV each Saturday and Wednesday
night. It was here, but it could have been anywhere: a burnt-out mattress
reality of sovereign rings and love-hate knuckles, sticking silver in
the slots of a South East London laundromat...a dull kind of church
or railway waiting room where people watch their black bin bags of socks
that could shock a geiger counter, spin like planets through the suds
of a non-biological universe. The sign said 'no service washes,’ so
people sat on the wooden slats with magazine horoscopes from four years
back, well-thumbed problem pages; 'should I sleep with best friends
man?' or 'is it wrong to masturbate?' Dear Linda-looking-quite-concerned
at the out of fashion knitting patterns free with Woman's Own
that week. They couldn't see it, but I could. That everything was dead.
Or dying. Not even Persil could shift that...
Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V.
[ ..... ] It was one of the darkest days. The days when the sweat would
trickle down my sides, and neither Josie nor drugs could ease the suffering
of existence. I half-thought about jumping in front of the 7:30am train.
It would be over in a rush of unnatural wind and inevitable impact.
But someone had beaten me to it. Strangely, his face eludes me; I can
only remember his shoes in retrospect. Still picture how aligned they
were, beyond the yellow safety line... like a pair of long black gondolas,
or hearses glinting in the sun. The announcer said 'stand well away
from the edge of the platform...fast train approaching.' But he didn't.
Just hung there, suspended in the rain. I imagine his face was just
the same as all the others: non-descript and virtually impossible to
photofit. He didn't look like a jumper, whatever the hell that looks
like. If he had, I would have cried out 'stop!' or something just as
useless, just before his sensible brogues—with one lace limp like tagliatelle—left
the platform's whitewashed edge and met the seven-thirty-seven train
to London Cannon Street. I turned away before the thud; just heard a
metallic scream of brake, and then the chaos—sheer confusion...spreading
like a forest fire. Women cried and men tutted. I just stood and sweated
my sickness out of every fucking pore
Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V.
[ .... ] I shrank into the white room. Down, down, into myself. The
thirst was unbearable, so I went to get a beer. I realised that fridge
is a mirror (albeit opaque), of it's owner's personality. Mine says
that I’m disorganised; it's empty except for a dubious slice of dolcelatte,
some low fat spread gone well beyond it's sell-by date, and half a jar
of damson jam: covered in soft grey down like an old man's chin; fermenting
into penicillin. Probably. I had to face the fact that everything goes
brown / breaks down in these tundras of extruded plastic. Just as much
as it does outside the white room. And in the lower salad drawers were
vast, unexplored tracts of vegetation: dark, unless the door is open;
bad unless the door is shut...
Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V.
[ ...... ] I watched the TV footage with the sound off. The world was
at war again. Tanks rolled along urban thoroughfares, and foreigners
fired guns into the air. Men were going to die. Fathers were going to
die. Bleeding to death and thinking about their sons and daughters as
their life-force sank into alien soil. All the casualties would be pawns
in this game of brutal, global chess. No kings. No bishops. It had been
like that for eternity, and it sickened me. A man with a beard screamed
into a microphone to massed supporters. Flags were being burned. The
frenzy unfolded silently inside the serene confines of the white room.
I watched one of the soldiers gripping his machine gun. He held it in
the same way that I held Josie. He loved his gun like a woman...loved
those lubricated actions sprung with just a little finger pressure;
bullets to break a grown man’s heart. Even with a blindfold he would
recognize her shape, her feel. Every curve of her polished stock: the
colour of conkers smoothed in a pocket, and planted in his shoulder's
sinew. Her name is Kalashnikov, which sounds like ermine brushing against
a woman’s skin...it hardly brings to mind a gun; far less the standard
weapon of wild-eyed revolutionaries and freedom fighters. As the crowd
screamed, he gripped his die-cast angel of death and nursed her fiery
temperament...
Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V.
[ ... ] I found myself in the white room again. but it wasn't my white
room. Someone had shifted the furniture, and barred the windows. My
muse Josie had gone; there wasn't even the image of her body left in
the sheets. Or her scent. The sheets were gone, replaced by a rough
blanket. Perhaps she had left long ago. So far ago, that I had forgotten
her leaving. One last icy grin, ringed by dark red. They came for me
at intervals here. Different men, sometimes a woman. I never saw the
sky. I longed for the sky, but there was only light and dark through
the dirty, frosted panes. And electricity. It spread through my body
in convulsions. My nerves screamed for Josie; reached, but touched nothing.
They talked. Asked. Probed. I was sick often: vomiting back up the worms
of electricity that had burrowed into me, and the smell of brown leather
and industrial floor polish. Back in the white room, they gave me pills:
shapes and pretty colours that seemed like treasure in the sterile expanse
of my room. I tried to write; form letters of lead on pristine sheets,
but my mind was sluggish... content to count the tiles and wait for
mealtimes. And then the day came when there were no more words. Like
snowflakes, they had all got lost amongst the whiteness... [ ... ]
Grainger watched the cigarette burn down to nothing; the embers falling
like spent stars...a shudder of stars in slo-mo.
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