The ‘boys’
(31, 33) are here and so are the parents: that was my first thought. The ages really did appear to me in brackets as they would in a newspaper. The single most disreputable trick of the newspapers, I thought, and here it is in my head, condemning me for still being here. For being back here again, only older, my external circumstances depressingly similar. Like all previous years, the
four of us at the table in candlelight before various woebegotten relics, which I had to admit were also beloved relics: ‘the best cutlery’ – old, worn, iron-tasting, lined with tiny venerable
creases like crumpled flattened tinfoil - and the best placemats
with their Audubon birds and in the middle of it all the Christmas dinner, the breast of the turkey rising like
some golden-domed unreachable mountain, a taunting anachronism seen through a crack in time. And then I remembered Mount Fuji.
I had once been almost at the foot of it, on the far side of the world, and now I'm here again. It was vast, snow-capped, utterly iconic. A friend and I set out from Tokyo. For hours we took all sorts of local trains to the town of Fuji, which we had assumed was the correct destination. For an hour at least the great mountain could be seen from the train windows. When we got to the town we started walking towards it, that aloof, flat-topped giant looming at us from the pastel horizon. Everyone we saw was ancient. Leaving the town, many we saw had backs so bent from years of rice work that they were almost quadrupeds. We walked all day towards the mountain but it grew no closer. Hours and hours went by. No more people scuttled in its shadow. The cap went white, then pink, then bluish. Then through the dusk we saw a sign ahead: Camp Fuji - an American military base. A youth was leaning against the sign, smoking; his neck was thicker than his head. Wire blocked the way. I remembered then that we turned around, defeated, and I looked at the dinner again. It seemed oddly distant, as if the table had stretched.
The Christmas dinner - turkey, ham, sprouts, potatoes - is as golden as ever, I thought, though the day, little by little, year by year, has shrunk to nothing or rather less than nothing: it has become a husk, a purely negative and blackened kernel of something that had once been beautiful. To think that once upon a time we couldn’t wait; we would stay awake in our beds all night listening to our parents, or Santa as we obstinately wished to believe, moving about downstairs getting things ready. The voices muffled through the floor. I remembered longing to know what those muffled voices were saying, straining to discern clues about the presents that were actually down there right now. To think that we once used to get up at five or six in the morning to open our presents. To think that we used to run down the stairs to the tree. For so many years, the template and essence of joy. Now it's all used up. Now the day has shrivelled up around the dinner like burnt paper, I thought.
Then it occurred to me that my mother, whom I love so much, is old and worn too, one year older, smaller, and greyer, one year longer under siege, one year more bent, one year more spent, one year more neglected, one year more unrequited, one year closer to death - but the food is of the same unappreciated quality as in previous years or perhaps even slightly better, a mocking constant in the midst of all this entropy. It seemed to me that I always had these terrible thoughts whenever I saw her grey head bowed over her dinner, cheekbone propped up by one of her arthritic hands, fork loosely gripped in the other, listlessly pushing small pieces of food back and forth across her plate. I considered extending a cracker to her at that moment but thought the better of it. Made out of gaudy crepe paper, there were two in each of the gaps between the four of us, and to me they seemed garish with the mad optimistic hope that levity, ‘cheer’, could somehow be pulled out of them with a thin pop when not even nostalgia was any longer possible. There could be no resurrection.
I had once been almost at the foot of it, on the far side of the world, and now I'm here again. It was vast, snow-capped, utterly iconic. A friend and I set out from Tokyo. For hours we took all sorts of local trains to the town of Fuji, which we had assumed was the correct destination. For an hour at least the great mountain could be seen from the train windows. When we got to the town we started walking towards it, that aloof, flat-topped giant looming at us from the pastel horizon. Everyone we saw was ancient. Leaving the town, many we saw had backs so bent from years of rice work that they were almost quadrupeds. We walked all day towards the mountain but it grew no closer. Hours and hours went by. No more people scuttled in its shadow. The cap went white, then pink, then bluish. Then through the dusk we saw a sign ahead: Camp Fuji - an American military base. A youth was leaning against the sign, smoking; his neck was thicker than his head. Wire blocked the way. I remembered then that we turned around, defeated, and I looked at the dinner again. It seemed oddly distant, as if the table had stretched.
The Christmas dinner - turkey, ham, sprouts, potatoes - is as golden as ever, I thought, though the day, little by little, year by year, has shrunk to nothing or rather less than nothing: it has become a husk, a purely negative and blackened kernel of something that had once been beautiful. To think that once upon a time we couldn’t wait; we would stay awake in our beds all night listening to our parents, or Santa as we obstinately wished to believe, moving about downstairs getting things ready. The voices muffled through the floor. I remembered longing to know what those muffled voices were saying, straining to discern clues about the presents that were actually down there right now. To think that we once used to get up at five or six in the morning to open our presents. To think that we used to run down the stairs to the tree. For so many years, the template and essence of joy. Now it's all used up. Now the day has shrivelled up around the dinner like burnt paper, I thought.
Then it occurred to me that my mother, whom I love so much, is old and worn too, one year older, smaller, and greyer, one year longer under siege, one year more bent, one year more spent, one year more neglected, one year more unrequited, one year closer to death - but the food is of the same unappreciated quality as in previous years or perhaps even slightly better, a mocking constant in the midst of all this entropy. It seemed to me that I always had these terrible thoughts whenever I saw her grey head bowed over her dinner, cheekbone propped up by one of her arthritic hands, fork loosely gripped in the other, listlessly pushing small pieces of food back and forth across her plate. I considered extending a cracker to her at that moment but thought the better of it. Made out of gaudy crepe paper, there were two in each of the gaps between the four of us, and to me they seemed garish with the mad optimistic hope that levity, ‘cheer’, could somehow be pulled out of them with a thin pop when not even nostalgia was any longer possible. There could be no resurrection.
By
silent consensus the younger had been given the place by the fire. The flames
flickered behind him. He's radiating a sickening and theatrical martyr’s piety, I thought. I thought to myself, he's sitting there like he has been raped by us. Though no-one has yet said
a thing, sitting there like he has been forced to dine with thugs who have gang
raped him, looking down or to the side but never at, except for flickering glances which express the utmost hostility
and indignation. I listened closely: the glances were accompanied by mutters which were never more than functional at best, and in
those moments he managed to imbue "could you pass the potatoes" or "pass me the
gravy" or "can I have the stuffing" (never with please, please was specifically a word other people took very
special care to say to him) with imperious
spite in a minimal volume, the wronged one forcing his inferiors to crane in, to humble themselves first before being silently scorched by his
tone. Everything he says sounds as if his buttocks are clenched tight shut - that was my next impression.
All his words come out constricted and pinched and reeking with righteous malice, the verbal equivalents of "silent but deadly" farts, his slightest utterance met with long-established
fear and tension; I can feel my shoulders knotting as he traps us into being hateful to him, I thought to myself, traps us into giving him
the polite ostracism from which it will be all the easier, all the
more righteous, to lash back at us.
After all, I remembered, he has a prophecy to fulfil. He has prophesised that Christmas will
fail and he does not like to be wrong.
The morning rose again in my mind. In the
morning he himself had risen pointedly late and at once started to bitch. Beneath the tree he tore open a few small items and cursed our mother behind her back as she slaved in the kitchen for getting him more rubbish
to clutter up his room, more fucking
rubbish I don’t want and don’t need when money would have been far more
practical. Then when he found the money in a card she had given him he
criticised her for her coldness. Couldn’t
be fucking bothered thinking about what I might want. Then when asked why he never asked them for anything specific, I couldn't be bothered, I just couldn't be fucking bothered, I don't want anything from them. And then asked why he didn't then ask them not to get anything at all, a brave question, there had already been too many questions, intrusions, the response was I don't want them accusing me of ruining Christmas, I don't want to take away their pleasure, they like being martyrs, they like resenting us. Then he told me that our father would ruin dinner again as he allegedly had the past
two years, sitting at the head of the table in his glum, shocked
silence, confusion and disapproval and disappointment just about the only
things discernible in that alien mind. And he bitched all the rest of the day
relentlessly, just for me, and I listened meekly because like everyone
else I was afraid, because like those who hadn’t the choice but to be
connected to him and spend a certain amount of time in his presence,
i.e. like the rest of the family (martyrs all round, it's true) I felt at that moment that I was for bullying, that is my role, like the other two I'm a punching bag
for his puissant but narcissistic intellect and warped but utterly
coherent logic. And the safest thing I can do is nod, is hide. And issue noncommittal smiles. Ultimately the father had begun the dinner in a mood that
was not at all bad, relatively speaking, in that he had let words slip out in a tone no worse than neutral, though as usual not particularly appetising. So the prophecy’s fulfilment would have to be
pursued more directly, I thought to myself, listening as his words plopped out awkwardly onto the table and lay there untouched lest the others be fingered as collaborators.
And then I thought, Why are we such misanthropes, you and I? Why are we such misanthropes? Why are we stuck here? And I looked at my father and wondered if it was all to do with him after all. And although outwardly I would betray nothing of the switch, I nevertheless asked myself this question: Whose side should I think on now? I thought about my father's trio of virtues - reasonableness, ordinariness, common sense - and how he felt himself to embody these virtues. And he felt that everything good about humans, about the world, is expressed in those three virtues, which he embodied. And that when I deviated from him, I deviated from those three values; I was not doing what any normal, reasonable, decent person would do. And when I did so deviate, words like aberrant, malformed, abhorrent, incorrect and shameful would rise up in my mind and stick to me. Freakish. And it seemed to me that, through universalising his own personality through these three values, he, essentially, had become the entire world. And when I deviated from him, I deviated from the world, the way the world should be. Because he was the world, and when I deviated from him, I deviated from all Creation. And when I opposed him, I opposed the world, and when I separated from him, when that process began, the process of becoming a creature at least in some part autonomous and separate from him, I had to do so in opposition to the whole world, which he was. And to live, I had to invert the whole lot of it. It had to be the world which was malformed, aberrant, abominable. Because he, it, did not want me. And maybe that's why you and I are such misanthropes, I thought. That process. A monumental Oedipal-Copernican revolution. And yet for me, behind it, always some contradictory pull, the desire to be accepted back, to please, reining me in. Not so for you; hence our differences. And thus I am microscopic, I am nameless; I am a drifting spore of the damage, separate from the vast subterranean organism only in order to perpetuate it, tossed about by the gentlest breezes and hoping simply to be blown briefly against opportunity as I all the while murmur It's too late, it's too late. You, however, can be seen pacing back and forth in the structure of your outrage. I envy you this. I envy the truce you have wrenched from them, from time, through sheer hatred. But my father; why is he as he is, I wondered? And I thought of his own father, my grandfather, who had died when he was very young. And of his mother, my grandmother, who had hated his father silently while loudly loving God. And what even came before that, I do not know.
And I thought then of software 'lock in', where the crude flaws of past architectures are locked in place in all future additions to the line, so that once an error occurs, everything is warped from then on. Forever. I thought of the human personality then: lock-in stretching back forever, accumulating psychic damage as heritable and as inextricable as the genome itself. Great psychic chains stretching back tens of thousands of years to the plains of Africa. All links in a chain bend back on themselves. We pull away just to stretch back, hooked. We have done so forever, all of us, and every link that whelps whelps another link in the everstretching pollution. That's too much, I thought then. Good things accrue too, like culture and technology, I recalled. Recoiled. And people are mended too sometimes, somehow. But there was little satiety in this bland line of thought, so I immediately corrected myself: no, I thought, precisely the opposite, I thought - it's not enough. There is not just one chain stretching back, I thought; there are chains from all sides too, at every moment. All human encounters are a hook in the flesh. The game 'six degrees of Kevin Bacon' rose up in my mind at that moment, a party game from a few years ago in which people whose heads are unhealthily colonised by Hollywood attempt to connect any given individual to the actor Kevin Bacon within six steps. And I thought - that's not a game; it's a portrait of horror. Every surface of every human has the hook of another human pulling on it. It's not 'six degrees of Kevin Bacon,' I thought, not six degrees of separation; it's 360 degrees of evisceration, I concluded, momentarily satisfied. And then my mind turned abruptly to the penultimate scene of the horror film Hellraiser, which does not star Kevin Bacon but only people to whom he can no doubt be connected. In the scene, a thousand hooks on the end of chains fly into the flesh of a man and then retract, pulling him apart in a hail of gore. That's more like it, I thought, much more accurate; then immediately afterwards I thought, No, that's far too extreme, human relations can't be compared to that. But, though I was repulsed, the extremity of the mental image had momentarily both placated and exhausted me. I returned to the world around me and to my plate, unaware that as I had been lost in thought, my father had carved up the turkey and ham and distributed the meat around the table. I cut a bite-sized slice off the bits on my plate. Poor Kevin Bacon, I thought. And then I saw myself sitting there wordlessly and thought that maybe I am the anchor of things, the invisible, dense nullity around which the rest revolves.
And then I thought, Why are we such misanthropes, you and I? Why are we such misanthropes? Why are we stuck here? And I looked at my father and wondered if it was all to do with him after all. And although outwardly I would betray nothing of the switch, I nevertheless asked myself this question: Whose side should I think on now? I thought about my father's trio of virtues - reasonableness, ordinariness, common sense - and how he felt himself to embody these virtues. And he felt that everything good about humans, about the world, is expressed in those three virtues, which he embodied. And that when I deviated from him, I deviated from those three values; I was not doing what any normal, reasonable, decent person would do. And when I did so deviate, words like aberrant, malformed, abhorrent, incorrect and shameful would rise up in my mind and stick to me. Freakish. And it seemed to me that, through universalising his own personality through these three values, he, essentially, had become the entire world. And when I deviated from him, I deviated from the world, the way the world should be. Because he was the world, and when I deviated from him, I deviated from all Creation. And when I opposed him, I opposed the world, and when I separated from him, when that process began, the process of becoming a creature at least in some part autonomous and separate from him, I had to do so in opposition to the whole world, which he was. And to live, I had to invert the whole lot of it. It had to be the world which was malformed, aberrant, abominable. Because he, it, did not want me. And maybe that's why you and I are such misanthropes, I thought. That process. A monumental Oedipal-Copernican revolution. And yet for me, behind it, always some contradictory pull, the desire to be accepted back, to please, reining me in. Not so for you; hence our differences. And thus I am microscopic, I am nameless; I am a drifting spore of the damage, separate from the vast subterranean organism only in order to perpetuate it, tossed about by the gentlest breezes and hoping simply to be blown briefly against opportunity as I all the while murmur It's too late, it's too late. You, however, can be seen pacing back and forth in the structure of your outrage. I envy you this. I envy the truce you have wrenched from them, from time, through sheer hatred. But my father; why is he as he is, I wondered? And I thought of his own father, my grandfather, who had died when he was very young. And of his mother, my grandmother, who had hated his father silently while loudly loving God. And what even came before that, I do not know.
And I thought then of software 'lock in', where the crude flaws of past architectures are locked in place in all future additions to the line, so that once an error occurs, everything is warped from then on. Forever. I thought of the human personality then: lock-in stretching back forever, accumulating psychic damage as heritable and as inextricable as the genome itself. Great psychic chains stretching back tens of thousands of years to the plains of Africa. All links in a chain bend back on themselves. We pull away just to stretch back, hooked. We have done so forever, all of us, and every link that whelps whelps another link in the everstretching pollution. That's too much, I thought then. Good things accrue too, like culture and technology, I recalled. Recoiled. And people are mended too sometimes, somehow. But there was little satiety in this bland line of thought, so I immediately corrected myself: no, I thought, precisely the opposite, I thought - it's not enough. There is not just one chain stretching back, I thought; there are chains from all sides too, at every moment. All human encounters are a hook in the flesh. The game 'six degrees of Kevin Bacon' rose up in my mind at that moment, a party game from a few years ago in which people whose heads are unhealthily colonised by Hollywood attempt to connect any given individual to the actor Kevin Bacon within six steps. And I thought - that's not a game; it's a portrait of horror. Every surface of every human has the hook of another human pulling on it. It's not 'six degrees of Kevin Bacon,' I thought, not six degrees of separation; it's 360 degrees of evisceration, I concluded, momentarily satisfied. And then my mind turned abruptly to the penultimate scene of the horror film Hellraiser, which does not star Kevin Bacon but only people to whom he can no doubt be connected. In the scene, a thousand hooks on the end of chains fly into the flesh of a man and then retract, pulling him apart in a hail of gore. That's more like it, I thought, much more accurate; then immediately afterwards I thought, No, that's far too extreme, human relations can't be compared to that. But, though I was repulsed, the extremity of the mental image had momentarily both placated and exhausted me. I returned to the world around me and to my plate, unaware that as I had been lost in thought, my father had carved up the turkey and ham and distributed the meat around the table. I cut a bite-sized slice off the bits on my plate. Poor Kevin Bacon, I thought. And then I saw myself sitting there wordlessly and thought that maybe I am the anchor of things, the invisible, dense nullity around which the rest revolves.
*
I think now, there’s nothing more to write, nothing more to spew up, only dry retching now, or the last few indigestible lumps. My brother had thought of at least ten different reasons to destroy Christmas - Was he right? Did it need to be killed to free us? - and ten different strategies for accomplishing this and feeling good while doing it, or at least feeling outraged, which for him as for a redtop newspaper, it seemed to me at that moment, is the same thing as feeling good. There's only the aftermath left to savour: he said he will not be coming next year, no fucking way, and when he left the room, they muttered into the thick silence that they would maybe spend next Christmas in the Caribbean. Or in Mayo, it was quickly amended. Leaving me, I suppose, alone with the dog, unless they take her to Mayo too. They probably will. There’s nothing worth remembering here and all this is only one more layer of stifling, choking filth on older, better memories, I think. And then I look at myself writing this. And I see that here I am now ranting because I can’t confront him; here I am pretending cowardice is art.
I remember reaching a cracker across the table to my brother. I remember him turning his face away like it
was a stick covered in dog shit that I was proffering. And I remember thinking, Recognising the danger the crackers represent to his prophecy (and they are far more dangerous than we, the broken people) he has, after all, said he will not be
pulling any crackers this year (No. Why not? None of your business), and it is very important he remain resolute, that he stick to his raging principles, clutching his scourge with white knuckles, clutching tight with the same tenacity he used to have when he clutched his childhood blanket, a beautiful boy, a boy I failed, the same tenacity he used to have when he sucked his nestled thumb till it was white and shrivelled like a grub grown malnourished and morbidly vigorous in the dark. And the words clutching on in the family home rose up in me, clutching on with whitened knuckles. Why?
And all the while as we eat in silence the dog, whom I love without complications, runs about whining from place to place, expecting food. And we are sitting there in a place where dogs speak more than people. Where dogs are spoken to more than people.
And all the while as we eat in silence the dog, whom I love without complications, runs about whining from place to place, expecting food. And we are sitting there in a place where dogs speak more than people. Where dogs are spoken to more than people.