D.O.A (Dance On Arrival)

D.O.A (Dance On Arrival)
René Adams
2,587 words

AN ambulance turns up on Tuesday. It takes away a woman with a broken jaw. I hear about it later. Some drunk nutter down the street. The sirens around here are the same as owl calls. All hours, or at least, especially in the mornings. And, I’d love the extremists to come and chat with the folk around here. The chats would be the most interesting thing in the rain. They wouldn’t begin with books, theology, or the tepid life of –dance for no reason– media, no, there would only be the 8th sin, which is to replicate without thought. I had nightmares for years when younger that I would replicate. I look that sentence over, and see more about writing inside it than my years as a student. There was one guy, he always wore the same leather jacket, and had gone head first through a windscreen when younger. He stuttered with the amount of ideas he wanted to place in one place, and later, I came to know that he wasn’t so daft after all.

The campus was full of people like this: misfits and abstract stereotypes, myself no different. What’s the ‘Twitter line’ that people say about you? That lad with the big eyes, that lass who always photographs things three times or spits on you. I had had a sentence tattooed on each inner forearm, so, I was the bloke with a strange accent and tattooed arms. Not quite north-east England. I’ve moved around a little, so it changes.

There are so few people able to write, speak, dance, and just call a dog a wailing dog. Next door has a couple of Chihuahuas, and they bark when I’m not alive. The real pill is in behaving like a human, a four limbed, non-cannibal, creative, breathing, unreplicating human. Making new life is the main thing, but not without a thrust of thought. I love what Pasolini said about the proletariat. In that, it’s fashionable to strike at the police about this or that, as if, they represent the system directly. Which, as any non-drugged person knows: they are not, in regards to the ones you’ll call if you suffer from a crime. The people you’ll meet will mostly be from the working class. And, to renegade against them, in any way, is like pissing on the brow of reality, increasing the float of banality, which surrounds us all, vehement, swamped with anti-art commercials, and begging to be off the leash.

Is it right to believe that the artist and their art are not separate things? They never are. I go to an exhibit at the British Library with a lover, and walk into the gift shop, wondering if there’s something she’d like. And, years on, I ask myself this. On the nose: we went to an exhibit about a famous writer, who devoured weed, small boys, and didn’t support himself financially until fifty. And I guess this is why I love the city. A contradiction on every corner. Walk over there, a shop where a mate of mine asked if he could charge his phone, skint, after a full weekend, and a bloke offered to buy him a sandwich. Later asking if they could go into an alley and fuck.

Then later, as the train station transforms, the night starts to drip down, I smoke, and the feral pigeons welcome me to their banter. I’d start working tomorrow, after the meeting, interview, date, and the day is sorted. So, one more night in a local hotel. It’s warm. And I get lost thinking that the place is a five star place, where, my place is down the road. A door. I chuckle. They just used the name of the famous place, and slapped another street beside it. The clerk gives me a quizzical look as two people leave. It might be because I’m dark skinned like him, I don’t know. He breathes out like a mechanic looking at a dodgy motor- which is fine, and tells me how much he appreciates people booking ahead.

He gives me the keys and I hit the street again. The room has an en-suite pisser and shower, making me feel like a king, and I wonder what the hell I’ll write about. Hell. That’ll do. Years meeting head on, it’s morning, and our limbs are laying around the room. And it is not that we are dead, just that time is emotion, and the city passes up and down outside the open window. We wake at the same time, and I hope that the rest of today is the same. Grunting and hurling abuse at the air, I turn you over, as you turn me over, and this room is a canny place for life without desire. Of course, I desire you, and you me, but we are satisfied, so lacking the contempt for life that is bred elsewhere. Our blood, floating in the air like infinite organs of colour, reflects around us in every pulse of day. And it cripples me to leave you, this femur, this ulna. And, we have only one mind, this mass in the corner, hovering in a jar. We agree upon how to make the day. Since we have long since been separate. We are couriers, have only one complete body, and it’s time for work. My legs walk towards your upper torso. They snap in-place, as my arms wipe the sweat from your brow, with the connection being a painful thing, my own head being used elsewhere in Tunisia. Our body walks over to the jar in the corner, dipping a hand inside, and taking out the brain plus spinal column. The floating particles of blood in the atmosphere drift towards our body, uploading the data scent of today’s work.

And it’s fine to say nothing. We have needed no vocal mechanisms for centuries. Turning, we depart, and with a kick, we fly out, joining the menagerie of rushing vehicles. Joining the stream of wind, like a burning and anonymous silhouette. And we have a few minutes of consciousness in the chaotic peace, where we fly in queue behind a gigantic drift-truck, the driver long since dead, or multiplying in the moulding burnt flesh inside, with an antediluvian limp, out of time, and swaying from side to side. We speak. I ask you why you’re diving away. Away from the stale concourse, and we discuss the amount of time we have left on our payments for new limbs. It would be alright to be separate again. We rush down through the wind, vertical, the rain, god spilling his beer, as it runs off our visor. Until mach three comes, passes, and our diving body makes the air whine.

Before reaching the street, we flip back one-eighty, fire rushes out from our heels, and helps us to land. No-one walks these days. It’s more like a pitter patter of shy clam shells on ice. Like Peter Heller mentioned, art, sex, and money, are class weapons. In each levity of pitch, it is not: why are you sweating so much? But rather: I bet I can bottle that. And there are times, when I am glad to be insane, glad to be a hybrid of flesh, and, it’s impossible to write such things without laughing at yourself. I walk out on to the moors, long after I miss dark haired lassy, where I still do, and the darkness is so transparent that you could spit across to Pluto, and all that would come back is a tsunami of light. The light, like blood, would walk into a pawnbroker’s, so many worlds in the future, and we’d hassle a battered cheque out, or I would, knowing that I had to cash it in order to buy shopping, and make a meal for you later. Having it be as it was, the grease flicked through the tender man’s fingers, one, two, three, pieces of paper. I walked out and looked up at the sky. The fields were imploding. We were imploding. The animals barked filth and broke out in suits. I began to walk, and walked the fields again. I enjoy the night walks as if I am walking through space. The village lights a mile away stay alert, like pin holes in a black face. Then snow comes. My feet lift up from the cow-pat grass, and I find cheer in the gale. And, as human as I want to be, flocks of darting geese fly across the night, and a heron stands on one leg by the river.

A screenplay is finished. A new job begins. I chat with a friend. And we wake again in that bed, your eyes opening and closing like dark clams. I ask you how the food is, and years earlier, you give me a flask for my birthday. The inscribing, the inscribing… “The whole world is three drinks behind.” I have no concept of birthdays or Christmas, but I understand gifts given in time, created from the individual motions of dance. And this steak has a face. And we manage to fly beyond our vulgarities in words, vitality, and peace: the obsidian reverse of life. More than anything else, I love the oppressive nature of reincarnation. The Bhuddas’ story is the smuttiest of them all. To say it, to just, go on and say it. To say: carnality will calm your soul, kill it into closure, and then take it away, so: I give you the answer. And then to say that we live in a hybridic fashion of causality, where my actions now will grow me back as an animal that I do not yet know. The most fantastic kernel of creative human thought. Fantasy. But good all the same. Yet oppressive as any tome, in a more subtle way. Perhaps straighter though. I come back as a short story. I come back as a film script. I come back as a design.

I know of little else that makes sense other than the writer who said: Only poems can describe poems. I call the day a tepid infection which has no organs to create anymore. The performers who could perform are nearly gone: the Nicholsons, the Tim Carreys (the original method actor before it was fashionable, Minnie and Moskowitz 1971, not the mask), the Hieronymouses, the lasting remembrance of the surreal ways we sweat, the Maupassants, the prose which seep and flow uncannily, and speak like a wet sculpture in the dark. I knew that it was the end in one job I had, where I began reciting Murakami aloud. However, the insanity fit well with the night, the low hum of the printers, the workers clacking and tapping silently away on the night shift. And in all fairness, I was asked what I was reading. I couldn’t read anymore news about this or that celeb dressing up as a dog in a dungeon, and the websites we could visit were limited in downtime. Yet. After a while you get the system, and it’s only as sharp as the next techy who blocks reality, so a tap tap tap, and: the world of people who think beyond the miasma.

There is a small number of mad who can pay the rent, dismiss the nonchalant paws of tiredness, and just start up again, and get paid. After you’ve eaten nine hours of balls. The number grows and diminishes. We leave the British Library, and waltz the street. The moors are red and heavy in vein. They pour out from my hands. The soil becomes my blood. I lay down, and enjoy the cosmos. It doesn’t sigh, it fucks like a mercenary on a Sunday. And the sirens begin again. Far away. I am amazed by your figure dressing the city. I am amazed by the moxie of our leap, this: travelling back up into the exosphere, beyond the tired tram of dust haulers, where we continue to run as two, diving back in through this window. And aye, swans float by on the river. And aye, heavy night, laissez-faire day, but the writing breaks it. Or, did I just spend the last twenty years dancing, the next few, then the next few. We glide easy, as the cosmos has no wind, and begin a random design at 2am. A gutter howl from the thorax, a cheer in overturned boats, a blood in the fight: space croaking like cicadas, and the most simple days jettison ahead, where our hands are linked, and we fly through the dusk.

We talk about the small things, about what I thought about today’s post. And we sway over towards Jupiter, drifting over the knell and gravity of its size, just two dancers, able to wake, able to scream, able to create helixes from sadness past, where they are no more tangible than the stream of novae colour bursting behind us. And aye, the articles, the designs, and the fiction comes out, when I sip a beer on my balcony. I watch the planes go by, lighting the clouds, like neon shadow puppets, and wonder nothing. The floorboards are rumbling. It’s Friday again, or, another train rushing by above and below. And say

Seulement la chimère. Or the throws
of my blood where only the chimera
goes. where only I know your hate
you shall depart, in the way that
fire does after flesh rips down the
worn down hearts of chaos, and i
shall remain in the city, in the
country, hunting you, if you harm
any of my kin, and so said the
silhouettes that shatter spite,
that bring only light.

Where death laughed, and asked where I learnt one of its poems. And the streets sang in a similar way, as I walked back into my flat, and began a new design, watching you dress the sun, and decided to walk the long way to work the next day. Business people: swinging briefcase hearts, workers: luminous silence, and the long road towards the office. A gathering, slow trot, the markets beginning to break out. Hustlers hanging on the edge of betting shops, ready to offer the lost a way to win back their money, via sleeping Nirvana, losing again, eternally, via £20 per bag if I know you, or, more if I don’t. Yet it’s lucky that we dreamt so hard, since I would have no way to walk unless we had. And I would only drag my replicated carcass across the ground if we didn’t dance in space. My conversations this day are in space. They are as ours our: seven, or more hours. And, we carry out our work as what we know of relationships. I’ll never understand rushing, unless you are a river. I’ll never understand hiding, unless we are made of night, and the ears of hares pick up across the fields, checking who or what is coming, knowing that we are slowly winning the war. The red-coats taken off the horse. The fox left to be fox. Where, the small wins count towards a planet becoming alive, where, no animals are chased for sport, and we understand that bulls are heavy fellas, and do not require swords to be put into their sides, for the lack of vitality in others.

The hours pass slowly and without grace.

Until we drink on the Friday eve, and we’re collectd around a table. Of course, we bang on about who we’d like to bang, and, I just listen. It’s some doo. Some dude has left and come back for one night for drinks. And it’s all the same, I’d do this, I’d do that. But, I really do. And, it comes to a silence, as they walk through all the girls they’ll never fuck. And I say “Christ, the perfume that Nazish wears makes me want to fucking weep…” And. No reply. Awkward I guess. A little too straight maybe. So in the luck of it all, the bar isn’t too far beyond walking distance from my home.

And I begin with my lead, a place without restraint. Tear a few sketches down from the wall. Take a look at them as I sit down on my bed. Start working the ideas, where something comes, and understand that they all taste of us. I stand up, walk over to my desk, fire up the machine, and decide to lay a couple down.

One animal, creating many, throughout the night.