Read by Terence Anderson
Science fiction: there was a war of endless attrition where young women, young men, died in .....-nothing. A strange expanse of media space. A blackness.
They were there and then they are gone. They die. Where they are sent as uniforms, coloured connections between brain, machine and target: they are marching feet, machines clicking, bleeping, whirring, bells chiming red hairs glowing TARGET DESTROYED they are faceless in a void. From whence they will either return hollow, streaked with horror, bagged and boxed in prosthetics, endless bars, or: a newsreel clatters and suddenly they are alive. The proud young applelike faces of this war ranged on the evening’s news like fruit stacked in a greengrocer’s barrow.
“When she died she was ... a flash a blinding light like heaven – Worse than heaven. It was a shape an angel claw. It took her alone into darkness; an unknown galaxy; ... light years into: nothing ... a smear, a spike of gas and molecules fading - .... burned on rock melted into glass ... scream sucked into its own sound ... disappeared ... like her ... flesh and neural networks ... flashing on/off highways of desire ... until ... turned inside out, red, purple, deflowered colours a tiny spray of blood and ...”
Target destroyed.
Watch this: an army goes out faceless in vast black transports, not flying cities but whole continents their engines plugged into forces you can’t even imagine, forces the shining corridors of school, the glass lecterns, are built on, buttressed by: the engines of these things are plugged into forces so vast that you cannot seriously believe them as anything other than mythologies. Pilots have a name for them, They call them the mysteries. An army leaves faceless in flotillas of tectonic ships plugged into these mysteries and the best you can see in your mind is this: the sound of a million feet stamping. A beast, a huge insect with countless eyes.
A boy dies. Young, smiling, proud over the collar of a dress uniform, he lives in a clean official frame. There are medals. A flag. Parents fat from cream, meat, potatoes, a frilly blouse frothing at her neck. His hands large and red in his best suit.
This picture is on the front page of every newsreel FOUR OF OUR BOYS KILLED...... TRANSPORT ATTACKED ..... BOMBED ..... BOMBED..... ROADSIDE BOMBING and the boys are not lying bleeding not hunks of red the canvas weave of their uniforms somehow sealed into their meat the shock the blast unifying them with metal, cloth: the boys are not this at all but cheery apples in barrows, shiny, white gloves plastic dress belts a glowing face.
-I’ll write you a newsreel. ‘Sa Fucking War. People die.
The old man at the bar slobbers into his drink. He is drooling from one side of his mouth a continuous line of beer, spittle, a pool on old bartop, pool and mouth joined by this line of phlegm, of amber lager, it looks like a strong Perspex column propping his head up with gluey lava inside. He’s grizzled, his face doesn’t quite look at you, frozen in the moment of looking by dirty sunlight crawling in through a diseased window.
-I know, he says, I been there. War I was in, you report everyone of us killed wouldn’t be time franything else. Imagine. 1,000,000 Killed This Afternoon. Fucking photos? Newspaper’s’d be a mile thick. Always looked the same, though. Like fruit. Like wax. Them photos. Looks like the kid’s already dead. Papers. TV. Makes me sick. I’ll write you a newsreel. Watched eight hunerd of my buddies disappear in that ghost light, ever seen that? they just disappeared, there was this shell like dark iron and it cracked, it was a disguise. Fucking ghosts. Light, light was bad, you never seen this, like a piece of iron crumbling and it was just a skin stuck on the lightcage and they were gone. You could’ve seen the fucking photos fly out of their shoes and back here, could’ve seen em crack out of their fucking heads and get in the transporter ships and fly here, mysteries anall, seen em paste emselves in the fucking newsreels staring out ‘fem like apples in boxes. Fuck. Imagine they try writing that shit for every guy that buys it here on Earth. Imagine. Imagine, you get a reel for every poor fucker that buys it here, every face you never saw walks inner the wrong end ‘fatrain, a bullet, just walks inner the wrong place. News for you. ‘Sall a war. People die. Make’m fuckin heroes flying off in them big buggers get themselves ate by ghosts way out onna vortex. Balls. Look at em. Big shiny apples waiting to get et.
It’s heroism, says the bartender, a disembodied voice floating above capable hands. A white towel rotates mysteriously in the shadows behind the ruined countertop, glasses appear not exactly clean. What you want: a lifetime with no face or get eaten in the vortex, come back as a picture in the ‘reels? Better that way.
An ancient newsreel behind where the bartender’s head ought to be clatters out a thin ream of coloured air. It sounds like a train. The coloured air is strips of faces floating over bottles and twisted shelves, swollen and happy in their dress uniforms. A voice is quietly speaking: the ubiquitous ‘reel announcer.
Four of our boys .. six ... our girls ... died ... result insurgent action ...-...ship.....bomb -rebels will be crushed said ... ckkk ... minister
Old man: - Balls.
Hand signals another drink. Head doesn’t move. Still angled over its stem. It ticks and stutters. Bad green crawling in his eyes.
I know, the old man again – I know. Just another old man. Ancient mariner. I seen it boy. Look at my eyes.
The newsreel clatters. Where the bartender’s head should be is wreathed in images. A black boy his cheeks fat under a shiny peaked cap. The boy holds a rifle in hands made plastic like an action toy’s hands by large white gloves. Gloves that perhaps were polishing ornaments in houses groaning with weights of history, verandahs, mossy oak trees. Servile gloves holding a gun. The gun is fat. It looks like it secretes bullets, lays bullets like eggs: the boy is fat. Well fed. He is a child. He is smiling.
He has vanished in some foul hatchway, literally disappeared: a flash a quick mist of blood. Now he is seen in a million bars, on trains, in city squares, family homes, righteous indignation rises, OUR BOY killed in action. Hardly newsworthy: a soldier is killed in a war. The old man, his eyes flickering badly now, translates: -fucking war! he screeches. People die. Kid was a fucking slave, went to another dimension to get shot, get et, get swallowed turned inside out little bloody bags falling through nothing in cathedrals of light.
OUR BOY is famous at last his face a thin smoky wafer of transparent colour clattering out of newsreels all over the country. OUR BOY who the brave glittering army took from servitude our servile boy who was the product the prisoner of degradation of iniquity of pain and oppression our beautiful ground-down downtrodden BOY was given plumage, red and black plumage white plastic gloves. He’s flying at last a beautiful tiny bird a little square of transparent colour in every nowhere bar our boy was taken by the shining army and now he is dead. He marched off to the desert a vast empty space a universe moving on mythologies, on faith: they laid eggs in his head and when it exploded OUR BOY’s beautiful hair vanishing in the red spray we were so proud. Father’s too-big hands in the photograph fluttering like moths in the space where the bartender’s head should be. Ready to wring over a token coffin and a folded flag.
The nation is indignant. Even in this bar indignation is seeping in, over handrails, under footrails, like that unhealthy light you get in morning drinking establishments, dust wanting to be night. Urinous. The nation is indignant another child we raped insulted kept in its appointed place has died for us because we told him it would be a good death.
-Death! Weren’t told nothing about death. Lined up with all the other waxworks onna firing range, told ’san adventure playground. Girls girls girls all the way to the singularity. To heads dissolving sprays of blood and bone red roots clutching at empty space. Join the army live forever. -Imagine the interview he cackles. Jenkins are you prepared to die? Yassuh. Are you prepared to kill? Yassuh. Balls.
-What I’d really like to do, the old man says, what I’d really like to do, is this.
Adverts are swirling out of the newsreel now, tiny sexy angels flying around your head, recruiting adverts JOIN THE ARMY join the club. The family. The ads give off a precisely calibrated admixture of pheromones, smells: musky wet labia, sweat collected at the perineum of a dripping horny male. A group of soldiers walks out of a nightclub and into a transport. There is a flash of vagina. A huge cock. An enormous overpanning shot of battalions lined up on parade. Clean buildings and white gloves. Proud parents. Money. It looks like a stream of soft porn is being vomited from the bartender’s non-head.
-What I’d really fuckin like to do, says the old man, is make a real advert.
The bitterness of his idea roils in the eternal column of liquid holding up his head. Beer is spilling onto his old military leggings. It makes a sound like canvas tearing.
What I’d like to do is this, he says: JOIN THE ARMY and they spill out of the nightclub all the pussy and cock they spill out of a transport that moment of weightlessness of disorientation it’s cold and stars wheeling lights you don’t know if they’re up or down if they’re the transport you’re falling away from or the ground you’re falling to or worse the transport you’re being sucked up to blat a smear of blood and guts is all you are a tiny dead bug on the carapace of the metal country that brought you here. Or sucked into the engine a whiff of smoke and then you fall and your buddies are vanishing turning into wet sacks, red, pink, yellow tubes and valves and white bits of bone and the noise is a great whooshing nothing swallowing all your illusions in one big stinking mouthful. That’d be one and you’d land if you made it that far drifting down through space while the little pink and yellow wet flowers bloom around you you’d land in another one and this advert is the one where you have to kill. Where the enemy leaps out of the darkness at you his jaws open his hideous boiling face open, screaming, and the scream is your death the end of you of everything you have ever been until you are just a fat kid in a photo flying home on datastreams to circle a shitty bar on the edge of nothing. The scream is all around you it smells of thick hot iron. You have a gun. It blurts. The thing in front of you is disintegrating a mess of flesh, skin, little hot burning cinders of skin and the thing is just another person. He could be you. He could be a girl hair melting to her face. Her breasts running down her. You killed her, OUR BOY, you killed her and her bones melted at your feet.
The old man’s eyes are revolving now, the bad green spattering his irises, buzzing, clicking, smoke whirling. In the street someone is waving a flag. The bartender, just a movement in an empty space a pair of capable hands, says: another? And the ads from the newsreels fly like scented birds.
Be the best by Jim Alexander was read by Terence Anderson at the Liars' League Blood & Thunder event at The Wheatsheaf, London on Tuesday 13 October 2009.
Jim Alexander lives in Devon, where he tends bar for tourists (of whom he used to be one). He once had two books published on the same day to a fanfare of neither publicity nor acclaim. There was free beer, though.
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