miro - still in london.

(this works well when read with ravel's 'kaddish' in the background)


‘There should be a flickering neon sign above the door saying ‘Give up hope all ye who enter here,’’ slurred Miro.

His only solid memory of this part of the evening would be the foyer, where tall black men standing sentinel at the gateway guarded the labyrinth’s pylon like inevitable statues of Anubis. Then a flash of light and water and him in the shower, wrapping a white towel around himself like a baby after a bath, and then into the maze.

‘The Rites of Eleusis,’ he said to the bleach-heavy air. Boris had already left him.

Men walked the halls like the inpatients of a mental ward, a moving swarm of lobotomised bees, bringing sperm as honey to the dead hive, flitting between the tiny cubicles, the cells, licking and sniffing at each other in the vain hope of finding direction. He too had left a part of his brain and hope with his clothes in his locker, and took on the same desperately indifferent gaze of the others, to blend in, to become one with the inmates.

Some men looked as if they had forgotten why they were there, and shuffled over the tiled floor, like slowly dying wind-up toys without traction, others seemed to have more of a purpose, like rats that had figured out the maze, and knew how to generate dubious treats. This was a map of the brain, a memory map, of rooms and anti rooms from childhood memories. It was endless corridors and lost classrooms, changing rooms at swimming pools, all the places that generated fear and excitement in a boy’s brain. Or was it the naked halls and improvised shower areas from an inherited memory – the hell of a concentration camp, a gas chamber? Love amongst the inmates. Is there? Wouldn’t that be a greater hell?

Doors half open, half closed, faces half awake, half asleep, bodies turning towards you or turning away. Where do you generate the will, the desire, the drive to make one of this indecipherable, undecidable ciphers mean something? He couldn’t muster the inclination to even nudge a door, so continued the trudge until he found the dark room. Heavy ribbons of rubber acted as a curtain, like the almost-doors of an abattoir or a hospital, so he pushed through them, let them lap at his tacky skin, and into the darkening.

We watch him, but he’s not there. The smell of bleach, amyl nitrate and sperm in the sticky room. No sound. Bodies rise up and fall back into the obliterating fog, darker spaces, darker bodies, moving through and over the waves of grey and paler folds over the curtain that blows over a black hole.

Miro’s neck bends this way and that, as if he is testing its strength, his head too large, too heavy; a tired child. He is trying to see the genitals, the truth behind the smoke and the gauze. There’s an arm around him, protective and strong, its owner invisible, moving him into the centre of the room, the gravity of desire without aim pulling him in.