Read by Keleigh Wolf (fifth story in podcast here, at 1:03:37)
The night is Vantablack and John Cage-silent when the Uber drops me at Zora’s. I thank the driver and rate him five stars and tip him a tenner on the app. What a nice guy, I think. What a goddam human being. It’s four below, and the frosted pavement outside Zora’s live/workspace in Catford is scintillating like a million tiny stars. I can hardly tear my eyes away to find the doorbell, it’s so beautiful. A kind of exquisite fractalism, the tiny ice crystals reflecting the unimaginably massive, superhot balls of gas billions of miles away …
Fuuuuuck! I shake my head like a cat with a flea-collar. I’m so sick of this wonderstruck hippie bullshit. This is not how I want to feel. And it’s all Zora’s fault. I need more of the bad stuff, and Zora’s the only one I know with a solid connection.
I press the button again: far off, upstairs in her echoing studio, Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells bongs out. I hammer the door for good measure. Could she be asleep? Nah, it’s only three. Probably dropped a raven an hour or two ago and is working on the last pieces for her Tate Modern show next month. She let slip at Gail’s opening last week that the new work was going to be “darker than a black hole”.
I know what that means. It means she’s still got some pills left. And I need them. Now.
A suspicious dark-brown eye emerges at the spyhole.
“Uber Eats?” I say. Worth a try: first comes the existential despair, then the nihilistic fury, then the soul-scream, then the munchies. She’ll be at the munchies stage by now.
The eye narrows with fierce craving. “Gis a minute.”
Clunk, rattle, beep, of bolts, chains, alarm. There’s a lot of valuable art in Zora’s place right now, but also, she’s always been paranoid.
“Taylor?! What the –”
Slowly, I step out of the freezing night and into her hallway, making gentle, pacifying gestures. If she’s still riding the soul-scream, violence is entirely possible, and she’s not a small woman.
“Sorry, sorry, false pretences I know, I just couldn’t think what else to do.”
“Have a kip, like the rest of the world?” she snaps.
“Except you.”
“Yeah, I’m working. And unless it’s in your backpack, you haven’t brought Vietnamese food, so what the hell are you doing here?”
Her pupils are like poppyseeds. She’s been working all right.
“You know what I’m doing here, Zor.”
She recoils like I’ve turned into a Telegraph critic. “Tay, no, come on … I thought you quit?”
My eyebrows shoot up. All artists are liars and hypocrites, obviously, but this is rich.
“I thought you did. When we ran out of the first batch? Or did we?”
Now she looks suitably shamed. “Look … it’s complicated, OK? … It’s this last piece. I was never happy with it. Not real enough, y’know. Too superficial, too frivolous. It looks bloody stupid compared to the rest of the show. Like a bouncy castle in a cemetery or something. I had to go back to it. Get it right.”
“So you’ve still got some?”
I knew it.
She huffs, flips up the flap of my bag in an instinctive, drug-driven hunt for snacks. “You better come up.”
#
The first time I did Agony I wasn’t expecting much. A mild sense of depression, a general surge of misanthropy – a slight downtweak in my general mood. Nothing dramatic: maybe a Sunday-teatime level of ennui and misery. Even the pills had the appearance of a knowing 90s joke: instead of a dove embossed on a white circle, they had a tiny raven stamped on a black one.
I’d snorted: a raven for the ex-raver. So Goth. So … basic.
“It looks like a charcoal supplement,” I told Zora, who was watching me with wry anticipation.
“Don’t feel like one,” she said drily.
Opioids and some hallucinogens aside, most drugs aren’t all that: rumours of their effectiveness are nearly always exaggerated. Four hours of ugly-sobbing at my reflection in the bedroom mirror, however, changed my mind. Tactfully, Zora had locked the windows and cleared away all sharp objects and most blunt ones, leaving only my white futon, an A3 sketchbook and a packet of crayons. She knew the drill.
I resurfaced to discover to my relief that the world, and universe, was not (quite) the bleak, shrieking vortex of futility I’d just been hurled into. Also, that I probably wasn’t the worst and most despicable creature ever to crawl across it like a misshapen, misbegotten and deservedly unloved baby slug. In short, I no longer had the mindset of a depressed 15-year-old – or at least, the depressed 15-year-old I and many of my artist friends had once been.
Also, I was really hungry.
It was quite a maiden voyage, not least because it turned out that the Crayola self-portrait I’d somehow scribbled while at the fathomless bottom of my A-hole (sorry, I know, but that’s what users call it) was the best thing I’d done in years.
Zora had wandered over, wordlessly fed me three slices of pizza, and examined the sketch. Then she nodded and glanced back at me.
“Told ya it’d work.”
At first glance the image was almost pretty – an abstract storm of slashing lines in kid-friendly rainbow hues. But the longer you looked, the more the agonised face emerged, containing – in fact, spilling over with – infinite, inexpressible pain. Those eyes … even I had to look away.
I won’t say it was a riveting, iconic image to rival Edvard Munch’s The Scream. But a Time Out review of my first solo show for a decade did say exactly that, so I admit I was pretty happy. Or I would have been, if I hadn’t been banging down ravens like they were Liquorice Allsorts in an attempt to maintain the fragile link with my tragic muse. And more importantly, create enough work to fill a room in a new headlining exhibition of Dark Art at the Saatchi Gallery.
Those were the first, blissful, tormented days, the honeymoon-slash-bitter-divorce period if you like: when the lows were profound, brutal and pure; the lacerating emotion intense and uncontaminated.
Obviously Zora and I started sleeping together. After a while, gazing into the abyss makes your weirdly horny, and besides, nobody else could stand to be around us. All our middle-class, thirtysomething, irony-saturated, kitschy Etsy friends from art school, who were now Heads of Creative (ha!) at PR agencies and Video Production Leads on M&S food adverts and bestselling watercolourists of the Cornish coast, backed off so fast we could see the smoke. They’d all made deals with their inner demons years ago, and didn’t want to be reminded of whatever they used to believe so passionately about Art and Truth and Meaning and all the other abstract nouns. Oh, they blathered smugly about mellowing, finding balance, gaining perspective – but all that really meant was they’d lost their edge. Their agony, in fact.
Zora and I didn’t care: the last time those guys had felt true terror or anguish was when Waitrose ran out of three-ply toilet paper during lockdown. Who needed them when everything we touched turned to raven-dark, soul-searing gold. We laughed and wept, tripped and fucked, screamed and scrawled and made art all day every day, squelching every sunny, optimistic resurfacing (the Agony equivalent of a comedown) with more of the little black pills.
Our work reflected and commented on each other’s, too. Zora would create a handprint collage of a baby’s face using her menstrual blood, as a protest against societal pressure to reproduce. So I would riposte by setting a canvas on fire and beating out the flames with my naked body, as a comment on the suffering required to make art. (On reflection, I probably should have shaved more of my body hair before that one – but the Guggenheim bought it, so I can’t complain).
The batch Zora had somehow scored was the original and best: the sheer, heady abysmal plunge, the essence of angst cooked up in a mothballed pharmaceutical factory outside Bremen or somewhere (the Germans always had the purest stuff, of course).
But like the second Summer of Love, our long low couldn’t last. There’s only so much you can scrape the barrel of hurt before you come up empty, and not in a good way. Zora’s stash of ravens petered out, and when the next consignment proved to be barely enough to make us hide the knives, so did our affair.
Until now.
#
“I knew you were holding out on me,” I tell her as we reach the top of the stairs. She’s kept enough aside for creative emergencies, that’s for sure. Her studio’s filled with newly-finished work – wrenching, disturbing, unnerving images I can hardly bear to look at, mostly because I’m boiling with envy and resentment. Which are the first detectable negative emotions I’ve felt in months, thanks to her.
Some lovers are destroyed by sex, or violence, or madness, or betrayal, or even success. But Zora went one better than that. My extended holiday in my own pain, with no further access to Agony, left me in a state of permanent mild cheerfulness which is the exact opposite of the emotional conditions required to produce lasting and meaningful art. These days, I’m only fit to work in a call centre, or possibly a Harvester: anywhere relentless chirpiness is the norm. The thought of it makes me want to throw myself off a bridge, or would if all my self-destructive impulses hadn’t been exhausted by our months-long emo bender.
Because Zora’s little black pills have used up all my capacity for anguish. Every time I have a gloomy thought about the state of society, the environment, or even my own career, it inexorably slides into cautious optimism. The tipping point was the day I caught myself saying breezily “Oh, I’m sure it’ll turn out all right,” and meaning it.
And I wasn’t talking about the weather, oh no. I was talking about humanity.
Zora turns to me and shrugs helplessly.
“I’m sorry, Taylor,” she says in a quiet voice. “But I’m glad you came.”
God, she’s still beautiful, even if she is a selfish pain-draining monster. And her work is … well, it’s agony. Agony to conceive, agony to paint, agony to look at. Profundity comes off it in waves. It absolutely stinks of significance. But comfortably numb as I am, I can’t even appreciate it any more. And it’s killing me.
“Listen,” I say. “If you’ve got any left, whatever you want for it, just ask. I’ll literally give you anything. I just need to feel bad again. Even once.”
The look on her face is half-wicked, half-sorrowful.
“Tay,” she says, “all I want’s your company, babe. All these months, all these paintings … it’s not the same without you. Guess that’s why I was saving these.”
She opens her hand to show me the black pills resting on her palm. I take one and hold her gaze as her eyes widen and her lips open.
“See you at the bottom,” she says.
I smile.
“I hate you,” I tell her.
She grins back. “I know.”
(c) M J Lee, 2023
Keleigh Wolf (left) is an American poet, performer, journalist & activist. She performs as Coco Millay with Poetry Brothel London & she also founded The Little Versed Poetry Collective, produced and hosted the Propaganda Poetry radio series, and was Poet in Residence at Kabaret @ Karamel.
MJ Lee is a visual artist now exploring poetry and fiction. She lives in Tracey Emin’s hometown of Margate, with forays to a writers’ colony in Wales.
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