Angles Morts

Blue mustang beckoned, red-eyed in stagnant throes of mania. I woke up on the wrong side of a plane crash that landed safely, sedated but awkward, next to a jagged old guy reading a battered paperback and drinking minis. We drew close to the antique white of the Rockies and the modern white of DEN. Through the earphones looping ribbons around my neck, some vacuous song professed love in a tinny, filtered voice.

Just another gauzy morning. Not easy, not hard, only misty. My stomach was offended by the air and baggage claim; my face was botoxed in cold; my hair was corkscrewed in strange angles from where I slept. If British accents had a neutral sadism to them, the up-down of American syllables were willing brutalists without artifice. They all communicated with this wide-mouthed frankness, smiling, offering their shiny teeth to me. 

Nobody called my name or held it up in ink. I recognised my father in spite of this. Baseball cap. Unbuttoned Bickle jacket. Faded t-shirt. From afar his mouth was a thin line as if telling the truth on a lie detector test. His jeans and boots were spattered with dirt and bike lube and ripped from constant friction with his heels. He didn’t offer any greeting, not in quietness nor secrecy, and instead offered a hand to shake my shoulder. Not in a dream of a dream, not in reality, would that hand rock me gently. I couldn’t smell for the mucus in my throat. If an aroma had hit me, nothing would’ve stirred: not for sweet d’eau, not for denim, not for dirt.

“Did you have a nice day?” I asked. 

“Follow me.”

There were dark marks beneath his fingernails. If this was supposed to repulse or offend me, it didn’t, but I was a rare exception — my idea of disgust had closed in so tightly it was hard to prise open with meaningless filth. I disliked the airport and I disliked my jet-lag lobotomy, but none of these things disgusted me. Didn’t that require a depth of feeling? Something beyond…? 

Denver’s raunchy urban sprawl was uniform but funereal. At a nameless fast-food restaurant, he and I settled, and in various misanthropic shades we observed the people around us. He gazed at a wailing baby with clear distaste. I fiddled with salt packets and organised the canisters of syrup while trying to decode the intentions of the blond guy leaning by the door. Neither in nor out, waiting on the precipice. He was so blond. Blond as a child; the kind of person who was utterly helpless to themselves, powerless to do anything but wait for the blunt force of their own beauty to bludgeon them. I barely noticed the waitress as he left; after lingering, he departed with indifference, stepping out into the pale day. 

I ordered coffee. My father got some fries. After lapses of years, his accent still betrayed him; if it was cruel and impersonal and terrible, at least it was also familiar.

My own lack of personality couldn’t be helped. I stared at him instead of speaking. I squeezed my brain hard, wrenching out all the stuff I couldn’t or didn’t want to say, and came up blank. Whatever dregs of conversation were left bothered me too much. I was a bit sick already. Fractals of light, edgy shards of it, cut along his jaw and neck. 

Though I was taller than him now, I had his boyish freckles. His baseball cap obscured pivotal evidence and I wanted to pull it off him to see how bad things would become. There were wormy scars across his knuckles. Gaps of flesh on his arms where hair no longer grew. Paunchy. Deflated balloon. A water-bleached plastic bag, faded and torn, carried along in the lazy deluge. 

(SCENE: A father and son sit in a hideous diner surrounded by confederate regalia. They talk in brief spurts of impersonality; humanity is now gauche. The father is a bruiser; the son is the bruised.

FATHER: How’s your mother?

SON: Yeah. OK. You know.

FATHER: And your brother?

SON: Also…You know.

FATHER: And — you?

SON: Aren’t I alive? [On a technicality, or through conjecture.] Isn’t that enough?)

Bored of that tact, he started again with himself. “I live a while away from the city. I drove for ages. The sun hadn’t risen yet.”

“Oh. I guess you really care or something.”

He frowned. “I never said that.”

“The guy next to me was reading Ayn Rand.” The waitress returned with a cup of black coffee and fries. I thanked her. He didn’t. “I think he wanted me to ask about it, but I never did. I was sat being jealous of his travel-sized whiskeys.”

“She’s a great writer.”

“You figure?”

“It’s hard to get a hold on books like that anymore. Anything that doesn’t ‘conform’. And if you don’t conform, then all the worse for you.”

“That’s too bad.”

“You have to read what they want you to read. It’s worse back in Britain. It’s hopeless. The situation is better here, provided that you pick a state that you can get to grips with, but I’m losing faith in Colorado. Sooner or later I’ll have to move.”

“Mm.” The coffee burned my tongue. “Mmmm.”

“Maybe Wyoming, maybe Montana. I haven’t made my mind up yet. The good thing about here is you can find a lot of interesting people — but, you know, there’s space. Plenty of space. You can get so away that nobody would ever find you. I’m not kidding about the distance in this country. Off the grid, cut off completely, where the sky can’t see you. God would find you in the reeds but that’s to be expected. Can’t pretend He wouldn’t figure you out, but it would take a moment. Nowadays I’ve considered it. As if disappearing. As if where you stood, there was nothing. Not just nothing, but the total absence of anything.”

“What about taxes?”

To that, he gave a long, drawn-out groan that was so melodramatic and genuine it made me laugh. Because it was so human. Because it endeared me to him regardless of if I agreed; at least something could move the unmovable.  

“Did I raise you or what?”

“In Sweden they love taxes, but that’s just their culture.”

“I hate culture!” he laughed. “Culture. Don’t make me laugh.”

Casually I wondered if he had something wrong with him, if he was a defective person, but that was a waste of time. Of course he was damaged. So were my brother and I; it would relentlessly persist through us for our entire lives, surging in situations unknown. It was pointless to pretend.

The rain yawned against the window.

“You can’t run from the rain,” he said.

“It smells strange here. The earth’s chemicals.”

“Chemicals,” he repeated, like an eerie gospel singer’s voice echoing from the body of the choir. 

It resonated within me, ripples of sound, and when it was gone, I still couldn’t forget. We sat in solemn reflection, considering the other person. Who knew what he thought of me? Both of us were blue. His glare was polluted glacial ice and I had obvious, unorganised veins. His were the same; we were deep-sea fish hauled up from sunless water by unsuspecting fishermen, pink and fleshy and unpleasant.

When he caught me looking at the image on his t-shirt, he said, “They were operatives of the C.I.A. to make people take drugs and lose sight of their Vietnam protest efforts. I wore it as a joke.”

“Their songs are alright.”

“You kids are pretty ignorant…Because you have all the access in the world to music, to art, to whatever, you can claim expertise on that thing. You don’t. You don’t have anything. People nowadays are full of facade — I know this, I know that, I’m a genius. There’s nothing genius about knowing stuff. Deciding what’s useful and what’s not is the mark of a genius. The songs are alright, but what does that matter in the face of things? It’s alright to brainwash people if you can carry a tune. Let’s put our hands up and admit defeat, wave the white flag. There’s nothing worse than people. My generation is no better — they’re proud of their lack of insight into anything — but you, you…”

“Sorry.”

“You should be. What do you know about anything? What were you taught?” He kept on laughing. I was salt-swollen. My eyes were getting sore. “If you stay, I can deprogram you. Wouldn’t you want that? Wouldn’t it be better?”

“Um. I don’t know.”

“I was sorry things never worked out before. I discovered the truth and the whole world was after me. Nothing was safe. The sanctity of everything was in question.”

I was amazed at my own irrelevance in this conversation and overwhelmed by a sudden nauseating scent, like smeared vomit on porcelain white as flesh, so I let him speak without interruption. This was the end of things. This was the moment the world disappeared — the open, gentle world, where things were bad but never worse — and I could see it so well, as if I’d been stupid to miss it before. Frequency illusions faltered and flickered. The old man from the plane ordered a burger not two tables away, his suitcase by his feet and book still brandished, and the baby was still sobbing and the man with angel’s hair had returned with a new carton of cigarettes to smoke outside the restaurant. His hair was in the wind, supple as the day he was born, and as I followed the road map of his moonish blink, pointed chin, and long neck, my father continued.

“...But there was no hatred for you. No cruel intention within me. Your brother was always so bright. The problem was I understood how the world worked. The more I loved you, the more I cared for you, the more likely it was that you would be stolen from me. Do you know what adrenochrome is?”

“What, that Cronenberg film?”

“No doubt they made a movie about it.” His breath was so heavy and sudden, gaze hard and intentional. He reached across the table to grip my hands. “Your brother is a lost cause, but I believe in you still. Young people aren’t all bad. Proficiency with technology; it’s a hormone to you. Some unique organ in your bodies produces it. Makes you able to propagate ideas. Stay with me.”

“I could.”

“You can.”

“I could…”

Eventually I really didn’t feel like talking anymore. There was something so morally and psychologically destructive about the image of my father camped up with his computer monitors and old leather in sagebrush steppe Montana that my speech ceased. 

“You don’t have anything going on back in London, do you?” he said. 

“Even if you did, even if you’ve made the wrong decision in life, it’s not over ‘till it’s over,” he said.

“You know I love you,” he said.

Emotionally anorexic, the sentiment carried no weight. The baby had thrown up. The boy was texting, hustling, laughing at the screen. The old man was pouring Malibu into a banana milkshake. “Don’t you? There’s a sofa for you — or the basement if you’re good. We can convert it.” With a laugh, he said, “We can convert you.”

“I think,” I said croakily, ironing out my vocal cords. “I mean — wow — and of course I’d love to spend time with you, really nail the whole Russia issue, get to grips with…I don’t know, Chinese spy drones…But I’m just really caught on the hangnail of…” I picked at my finger. “...And it’s just a small issue, mind, that I don't believe.”

“Believe in what?”

“In it.”

“In what?”

“In…I mean, isn’t that what this all is? Celebrities drinking caipirinhas on an island somewhere?” My father’s face folded in on itself. “They can have my blood, my DNA…What good is it anyway, really.”

“Are you stupid?”

Vapid, insensitive, self-interested? Yes. Stupid? Stupid enough to want to be embraced. Functionally brain-dead. Him and I were just wired into two different sides of the same apathetic media machine dissolving information into our bloodstreams like plastic, but here I could be the bigger man: the pacifist, conceding all dignity, feeling no urge to change my father’s ways. Let him believe in the esotericism he wanted; when the destruction of society fell upon me, I would brush it off as dust. 

“Yes,” I said. “I think it’s genetic.” 

(Submitted for an end-of-year project in 2024, as well as some other poems and an essay, hehe. I want to like it more but I think my writing style has changed a lot in such a short amount of time.)