There is a large and very beautiful old house, which would, a hundred years ago, have housed a wealthy family and their staff, but which is now rented out to whoever, whenever, for whatever purpose. It has many rooms, and is built in stone, on the slope of the highlands of one of the hundred thousand islands that arbitrarily dot the Mediterranean. The architectural accents are typical of its region. The house has views of the sea, and, on its other side, of the black, rocky, mountainous region at the island’s centre. It has a rich and beautiful garden, which is planted with trellises of flowers—sweet-smelling jasmine, passionfruit vines, hibiscus—and stands of ancient trees, now grown-over and untended. It has many rooms for entertaining, for sleeping in, for cooking, washing, and dining; it has rooms that are moved through and made use of every day by those that rent out the house, and it has rooms that might be used once, or not at all. The interiors are modernised, and furnished in good taste. There are one or two rooms that are almost secret; not easily accessible to its temporary tenants. It has a broad driveway that leads to a gate, and to a track that runs down the slope of the mountain, to the sea, and the sea is warm and bright year-round, turquoise blue. It has a private road that leads to a private beach of exquisite beauty; a private beach which is nonetheless used often by the locals, who, out of a volatile sense of pride, will quarrel with the temporary tenants of the house on the smallest pretext. It has access to another road, this one public, that leads to a local stand of fig trees grown wild in an abandoned concrete lot that would have been a new house—concrete foundations, modern lines, bigger than those around it—but was abandoned for lack of funds and now stands as empty as the primordial desert. This same road leads up into the black stone mountain, and down, onto the freeway that circles the island, and which eventually terminates at the airport, which is how the tenants arrive and depart.
This is the first set.
The second is a series of dreams, or stories, or images, of heaven— of peace, or at least of escape from pain, visibility, care, illness, degradation, shame, fear. These images are cut through the scenes in the house and the grounds and the island in the Mediterranean. They are difficult to categorise cleanly. Perhaps it is best to trust that the reader will know them when she sees them, and pass over them here in silence.
The third is an organisation; a staff, and a timeline, and a plan (or many plans, whose objectives interlock in complex patterns); a logistical structure. Its elements are organisational, which means that each of the actions that compose it are like a point in a diagram, discreetly functioning, a success or a failure, and organised in relation to other scenes of this kind. Individual successes and failures are less important than the continuation of this structure of discreet scenes, which can absorb and metabolise any amount of defeat, and which nonetheless is very rarely actually defeated—its resources are, for the purposes of this story and its human scale, effectively infinite.
This third set is a place of great horror, sadness, fear, and inhumanity. It is understood that the third set is the background structuring element for the other two, that it is their nightmare substrate, and that its influence will be felt more and more as the story progresses, and the characters chase their small triumphs and suffer their setbacks; until the whole has been entirely subsumed into and infected by this more powerful organisational system.
A horror story then, or a tragedy. But this is not worth dwelling on now, before we know anything about the stakes, or about the characters, whose humanity (common to us all) may absolve and dignify their eventual dissolution into their fate. This remains to be seen; it is in contention.
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These are the types of scene, and, like any narrative construction, they have their individual moods, their style and presentation; their props, lighting, sound design, and special effects, foregrounded (or tellingly absent), to express specifics of authorial intention. Specialist machinery, techniques, tricks, misdirections, smoke and mirrors. You might identify distinct suites of them.
The first is a type of hyper-amorous saturation of colour, smell, warmth; food, quiet conversations, bodies, clothes and cosmetics, soft light, secrets, unspoken understandings; the usual sparring grounds for most of our cast. They are specialists in the navigation of territories of this kind.
The second is a storm so big that it covers the world. You fall through it, or you fly upwards into it—it has no end which means that there are no directional markers, no specific points of reference. It is composed of smoke and wind, flashes of fire, vast sheets of energetic discharge, rains of boiling and freezing water, rains of acid, rains of poison. There are patches of emptiness interspersed throughout the tumult, tiny in comparison with the chaos that surrounds them, but because of the size of the chaos each might take you hours to fall through. In these pockets you hearing only the wind in your ears, the distant movements of pure air. The colours are grey and white, and sometimes, far away, dark red, or soft yellow. The light of the sun, obscure through so much intervening material, but still visible in brief instants, carves out the endless volume of the clouds with spears of light. The movements and the forces are irresistible. If you made your body rigid, if you tried to fight against your violent dispersal through this space, you would be torn to pieces immediately.
The third is, in some obscure sense, the same as the storm, although superficially they appear to be nothing alike. It is the storm’s other face, its predator face, its killing face. It looks like bright, flat moonlight falling over a deserted town, or on an empty garden, on the roofs of thousands of houses, an endless field of them, shining in the warm, still air; houses where everyone has died or gone away. The moonlight is exactly equivocal— it falls without discrimination, and makes everything under it the same substance. You can move through this unvarying space, at street level, at the level of black doorways and black windows like the mouths of corpses, or furniture which has been changed into something else under the light, something you recognise from dreams that persist after waking as ugly, sad confusion, and terror that you feel in your body.
If you move for long enough through this space you might see someone else, very far from you, at the end of a very long street, but, you think, moving closer at speed, sprinting towards you. If you watch you will realise: that they are you, and they can see you too, in the distance, moving towards them at a dead sprint; that you are sprinting, that you mean them, or you, harm. How could you have missed this?
There are others; less specific, more modular, more controlled, built and deployed for specific scenes as necessary. Since these are effects, produced and deployed with a purpose in mind, each can be used to counterpoint the sets and characters, regardless of other factors. They are ‘floating’, and have no inherent agenda or content of their own beyond the technocratic modulation of the scenes. It goes without saying that no image of heaven can be modulated in this way, and that these much each be composed by their own light, and by their own logics, which can occur only once, and which must then stand for their own recurrence in perpetuity. An image of heaven is a circle, or a fragile dream of a loop in time.
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Beautiful companion, how can I write you for myself. I want to write you such that no one else would ever possess you —I would need a cypher of my own to do so, it would need to be impossible to decode for another.
Desire is a horror story. It stinks of the most intimate smells, of mornings before we washed our bodies, of breath and hair and sweat. Its encoding into writing is no simple thing. The first thing to do is to swap your gender for another. Then your hair colour, your features, your body that is loved by me, your name, which I will amputate to a single letter, and even that of another… No one else can ever possess the truth of the writing of your body that I make public; the most vulgar display. What is important is that I can remember the steps I have taken to obscure you. Without them the writing does not function and is rendered useless and obscene— a broken, specialist instrument that cannot be repaired without the kindness and trust that we once shared; without the grace held between us, made between our mouths. It trails behind me like a smashed limb. I have written so many stories that no longer function, because I have forgotten the cyphers that I developed to code you into them.
Then let me say this clearly:
The first time I met you I immediately knew several things. You were proud, and this was plainly visible on your face; pride, along with something like hallucination. How can you see hallucination on someone’s face? It was in your eyes, but it was also in the way your jaw was set, in the way you could retreat from any situation immediately, without moving—it was like watching your soul vanish—in the oblique angles of your face as you looked into the flat glow of the white, hot summer sky; it was in the way you looked at people and things. You looked at them like they were something that you understood; like you had the secret truth of the elements that composed your environment. This was also how you spoke to people, how you spoke to me. That I understood you when you spoke, or thought I did and happily asserted this, and that I often agreed with what you said, meant nothing at all to the force of your assessment, which grew outwards at the speed of light to include the workings and mechanisms of the whole world.
I also understood that you were beautiful, and that I would fall in love with you, in my amputated, nearly mechanical way. I wanted to know you in the most intimate way. I wanted to know how you thought, I wanted to be able to anticipate your thinking, and also what in you was unconscious—your strange needs and drives, what compelled you to hallucinate the universe that wasn’t you.
Your features are strong, too big for your face, artless, and very expressive. You are clumsy, and you worry about what people think of you. Most often, and most obsessively, you worry about what you’ve said, about how it will be remembered; about whether you can maintain friendships long term, about whether you will ever be able to hold down a job. About loneliness. And it is true—though your face first looked to me like pride and like hallucination, I realised quickly that it also looked like loneliness, and of your own fear of how your life would go. You are more and more clumsy as time goes on.
The Guests Arrive
They arrive over the course of a several days. All of them fly to the island from Europe: three from London, one from Berlin, one from Marseille, one from Paris, one from Milan. But none of them are from these cities, and if they live in them, or have adopted them, it is in that itinerant way reserved for cultural-industrial postgraduates, and corporate fixers and consultants, which is what they are. All of them believe in the toughness and efficacy of pure intellect, pure research, all of them believe in language, all of them believe in a common equality between people, beneath the specificities and historical accidents of culture, material circumstance, etc. Nonetheless, all of them are careful to avoid naiveté. They are mostly ambitious, and they are mostly kind. All of them understand that kindness can look like toughness, like straight-talking.
Two rent cars at the airport, the other five take taxis. Each is preoccupied with their own complicated set of projects, projections, relationships. Each has dressed themselves exquisitely for this trip (more on which soon). They do not get to see one another so much these days, as they are all kept very busy.
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Ella is the first to arrive. She picks up the SUV at the airport and drives up along the one interior freeway, shaking her head more and more violently in amused disbelief at the apparently suicidal confidence of the other drivers on the island roads. When she arrives (the drive takes around twenty minutes) she parks in the broad gravel driveway, then takes some time going through the emails and messages from the people who have let them the house, searching for the code for the key safe attached to the doorframe. It doesn’t take her long to enter, and to make her round through the many rooms, to find a bedroom that suits her, to open her suitcase. She sits on the bed for half an hour or so, willing her mind to unspool, slow down. Then she decides to make a more comprehensive inventory of the interiors by walking them out before anyone else gets here.
There are nine bedrooms, ranging in size. All of them have natural light. The one that she chooses is smaller, but further away from the main complex of sitting and dining rooms, and the kitchen. The floors are tiled throughout, even in the bedrooms. The kitchen is large, modern, well-appointed, with brushed steel appliances, obviously good-quality, with the sense of being bought all at once, and of being chosen by the designer or architect. There are two dining rooms, one large and formal, with carved, dark, wooden furniture, and a very high ceiling, and one informal, with glass french windows opening onto an arcaded and covered area at the back of the house, and views out across the downward slope of the mountain to the blue, glittering blanket of the sea. This covered space also has a large dining table and chairs set up beneath the canopy—which she thinks absently makes three of these dining areas in all, excessive even for a house of this size. She watches the sea from beneath the shaded eaves; watches the points of white light move across the iridescent blue surface and blur together. She is very far away from it but when she unfocuses her eyes she can imagine that the sea is right there in front of her; that she could reach out and touch it, even reach through it. Its smells of salt and its great noise of surf. When she refocuses her eyes it take a few seconds for the black and white dots to disappear from her vision. She finds the visual distortions and accompanying mild vertigo quite pleasant. Then the garden recoheres, with its brightly coloured trellises, its two pagodas, and its rampant and vital, dark, shining, foliage, and she decides to step down into it to explore.
Her encounters in the garden are peaceful, and very beautiful. We have spoken already of the trellises of flowers; there are eight of them, and they are thickly overgrown, but not so much that you cannot see through gaps in the blossoming vines that wind through their structure. She imagines watching another person through the gaps, catching flashes of smiling eyes and a smiling mouth. She imagines playing this game drunk, and smiles with the pleasure of this image. Then she moves past them into the shade of the trees planted further back— some ornamental, some bearing fruit. There are flies and wasps buzzing around, crawling over the bark of the trees, boring into the fruit, maybe laying eggs, hollowing them out from the inside, but the fruit is nonetheless exquisite; brightly coloured, taught, obviously ripe. There are apples and pears, those small, hard varieties native to the island, and there may be others that she cannot see. They look like fat, polished jewels, or like blown glass ornaments, resting in the shade, feeding predator insects, catching reflections and stray beams and particles of light, giving them back to the eye overgenerously.
Between the trees are shaded areas of lawn, which is growing over itself, totally out of control. She thinks that this lack of cutting back and good order makes an odd but also pleasant contrast to the well-kept interiors of the house. There are large patches of green grass that are exposed to the sun, and that glow vibrantly. Through the shaded area a low fence, the border of the property, and then a steep, rocky, slope of scree that angles down towards the lowlands of the city and the coast. Open air, the sea and the sky in the distance, both rising up like a wall summoned up from nothing to meet the ragged drop in the earth.
Standing by the fence, looking out over the country, down the scree slope, and at the sky and the horizon of water, what she is most aware of is the sound of wind moving very high above her. There are no clouds at all, just the great invisible rushing and the empty space and the hot, flat sunlight, which smothers and drowns her. The rushing sound sounds like it comes from inside her body, in her throat or the back of her skull. Her feeling of vertigo returns. Light can be like smoke, she thinks. It can curl around you, you can breathe it in. Light like smoke has a smell. It smells like ozone; like luminous grass; like hot concrete. It deforms what it illuminates. I have lost my shape in this light; I am different. Then she thinks: I don’t know what I’m doing here. I don’t really know who I am any more. Thoughts like this are not uncommon for Ella these days.
It’s while she is in the garden that Michael arrives in his taxi. Michael is the one in the group who knows Ella least intimately. He has actually made a mistake, he thought that everyone was arriving tomorrow, that he would have the house to himself to finish off some work before the rest of them got here. So when he finds the front door open, his first thought is that the people who rented them the flat have been broken into, or that their cleaners are still here, or that they are morons and that he might be able to request some restitution from them for leaving the house unsecured before his arrival. Then he notices the SUV and realises that someone, either Ella or Parvel, has already arrived. For a couple of seconds he experiences something nearly like panic. It isn’t panic, but it is close—a surprise that, in the moment, he can’t get around the edges of. He considers calling another taxi and staying the night in a hotel in town instead. Then he enters the house and walks through the rooms, the two dinings rooms, the kitchen, the many bathrooms, lounges, and bedrooms, saying ‘Hello? Hello?’ until he is totally convinced that no one is in the house. They must have gone for a walk he thinks. He notes the first arrival’s bedroom choice and makes sure that his has enough space between the two that they won’t be able to hear or disturb one another that night.
He doesn’t unpack his suitcase. He simply lies back on the bed fully clothed, with his arms crossed over his chest and his eyes closed, thinking about nothing. Slowly, over many hours, the light fades from the room. He barely breathes. His body and the bed that he lies on could be carved from one contiguous substance, from concrete or stone. Still he thinks of nothing, although very, very deep down his brain is processing things, metabolising, the way a snake does after eating something five times its size, resting underground, digesting for months. Eventually he hears the back door open, and, after several seconds, judiciously, because he does not want to scare anyone, he stands up and calls a friendly ‘Hello!’ out into the silent rooms, which have now all been stained with the colours of the evening.
He hears the answering ‘Hello!’ and thinks that it has to be Ella. Then he moves out into the kitchen and sees her, and they hug and kiss one another on the cheek, and stand in the darkening room and catch up with what’s been happening in their lives. They are both polite, unselfconscious, and charismatic, and they both work to match these qualities in the other. Michael is busy with editing work, and Ella is busy with writing work. They talk about their projects with a sort of easy facility. It has been a long time since either of them found it difficult to talk to strangers about their creative and professional projects. Ella knows the press that Michael is working with at the moment, and Michael says that he is looking forward to reading Ella’s book when she finishes it, which makes her laugh, though she doesn’t really know why. It must be with happiness.
After half an hour or so Ella says that she can’t be bothered with cooking and doesn’t even know if there is a supermarket around here, that they can check this in the morning, but that in the meantime they should order from somewhere, and Michael nods, so they spend some time gathered around his laptop, trying to figure out the local delivery processes. Neither has switched on any lights, and the house is now properly dark. In the end they order a pizza to share, and then move together to the arcade at the back of the property to watch the last of the orange and purple light fade from the sky. There are millions and millions of stars and they shine very brightly, and also many satellites, which are bigger, less bright, and more uniform, and which track across the sky with fixed speeds and directions, five or six visible at any given time.
When the food arrives it is totally dark. They still haven’t turned any lights on, and when she sees the black windows of the house the courier assumes at first that she has made a mistake. But she tries the bell anyway, and makes a few cries of ‘Hello?’, and Ella hears her and yells back that she is coming, to wait there, that she needs to find her wallet. The courier waits patiently. When Ella does eventually emerge and the courier hands over the food she says ‘Why don’t you turn on the lights? I thought no one was home,’ which Ella ignores completely.
The pizza is very good and very hot, and they both realise simultaneously that they are starving, which means that they don’t talk at all as they eat. Once they are done Ella says she wishes they had some beers or some wine with them, or even some spirits, and Michael agrees. Then she asks him if he is single these days, and he says that he isn’t, and hasn’t been for several years, and asks her if she is seeing anyone, and she says that she isn’t. She doesn’t say anything for a minute or two and then, with a strange feeling in her brain, something like TV static, or the doomed courage of a captain whose position is hopeless, but who is nonetheless determined to die well in combat, she asks if he and his partner are sexually exclusive, which he tells her that they are, keeping everything very breezy and light but of course leaving no room for any misunderstanding. She nods quietly in the darkness. Then she says wouldn’t it be funny if the house had some store of alcohol inside for guests, in the fridge or in the cabinets, like a hotel minibar, and suggests that maybe they should have a look.
But neither moves, and after a few more minutes of silence they decide to go to sleep, and say goodnight, and switch the lights on for the first time as each makes their way back to their respective rooms, each room or corridor along the route lighting up for a second or two as one of them moves through it, then returning to its darkness in sequence. Each performs their basic toilet in their own bathroom. They wash themselves, and brush teeth, and study their faces in mirrors. Then each lies in their bed and tries to sleep. Ella falls asleep quickly, and has nightmares; about suffocating, drowning, being strangled by someone whose face she cannot quite place; also about shame, specifically the shame of allowing herself to be killed in this way and not putting up a fight.
Michael takes several hours to fall asleep, and he doesn’t dream at all, but when he wakes up the next morning it is in fear: his heart is beating very hard, and he has a sick feeling in his stomach, which also makes him feel sick in his head, like everything is wrong and nothing is ok, like he will never be ok again. He is used to letting these feelings pass, and this is what he says to himself in the morning, lying in the unfamiliar bed and watching the bright sunlight on the very white ceiling, and on the dark wooden blades of the ceiling fan: ‘You are used to letting these feelings pass, so just let it pass.’ It takes ten minutes or so, but it does pass, to his very great relief.
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