Breakfast at Midnight Read online

  Breakfast at Midnight

  Louis Armand

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  FICTION

  The Garden

  Menudo

  Clair Obscur

  POETRY

  Séances

  Erosions

  Inexorable Weather

  Land Partition

  Malice in Underland

  Strange Attractors

  Picture Primitive

  Letters from Ausland

  Synopticon (with John Kinsella)

  CRITICISM

  Incendiary Devices

  Techne

  Solicitations

  Literate Technologies

  Event States

  Breakfast at Midnight

  Louis Armand

  EQUUS

  © Louis Armand, 2012

  Cover image: Libor Fára, Rezonance jejího večera / z cyklu Snídaně o půlnoci / 1950

  © the Estate of Libor Fára and the National Gallery, Prague

  ISBN 978-0-9571213-0-0

  Equus Press

  Birkbeck College (William Rowe), 43 Gordon Square, London, WC1 H0PD, United Kingdom

  Typeset by lazarus

  Printed in the Czech Republic by PB Tisk

  All rights reserved

  Composed in 11pt Garamond, based on type designs by the 16th century punch-cutter Claude Garamond, with headings in Futura Light, composed in 1927 by Paul Renner.

  BREAKFAST AT MIDNIGHT

  1. All Blackness Turning Grey

  2. Resurrection

  3. Orient Express

  4. Slip Knot

  5. Fetish Machine

  6. Ultraviolet

  7. Fiesta Pig

  8. Ace of Spades

  9. St Pauli

  10. Nuestra Señora de la Paz

  11. Temple of Lost Souls

  12. Rioja

  13. La Fin du Monde

  14. Providence

  15. Solitaire

  16. Snake House

  17. Celluloid

  18. Realism

  19. Wind Becomes Water

  20. Mandala

  21. Monkey’s Moon

  22. Accordion

  23. Camera Eye

  24. Trója

  Notre jeunesse, c’étaient des cadavres faits pour danser, qu’à tout moment la vie pouvait distraire de cette joie.

  – Montaigne

  La vérité est trop nue; elle n’excite pas les hommes.

  – Cocteau

  1. ALL BLACKNESS TURNING GREY

  Another four a.m. struggling to make the demons shut up. An erratic light stutters overhead. Through the porthole, a dark blanket of mist and drizzle. Black water streaks the glass. Somewhere in the night a freight train sheers off the last threads of sleep, a banshee’s screech phasing out into shortwave radio hiss.

  Regen used to say, when we dream that we dream, we’re beginning to wake up. Am I dreaming then? I lie there like someone who’s died with their eyes open. Everything shudders into focus in a kind of aftershock. It’s been like this since she left. I wake up and all I can remember is blackness, the sound of bees, a face staring up at me with eyes full of blood.

  It’s cold. There’s a woman’s voice in the distance, echo of laughter, static and white noise. Then I wake again. And it’s the same.

  *

  It’s always the same, the face inside the dream. Those eyes. Don’t look at the eyes. A fit of coughing wracks me and the image turns to red. Jag upright. There’s a sound of breaking glass, debris. Empty bottles litter the floor. Been sleeping in my clothes again. Old undertaker’s suit, Gestapo coat. Gradually the coughing subsides. I imagine struggling on the edge of a precipice, boots dangling, vertigo. The fall into space, the recoil. Something snaps underfoot, the way something snaps in your life. A muffled sound in the shadows. The alarm clock blinking thirteen minutes past four. Squint, waiting for thirteen to become fourteen, but the numbers don’t change. Nowhere-time.

  I make it as far as the sink before everything upends. Taste of gunmetal, stomach acid, diesel. I keep heaving but nothing comes out. Pain behind the eyes – staring too hard, trying to force shapes together, hold them in place. Down below, the Styx-grey waters, groaning against the hull, the groans of the damned. Faces down there, rippling with the tide. Dead souls.

  When I look in the mirror it isn’t pretty. A face like something left too long in water, hair matted with cold sweat. I wonder if I’m as ugly to others as I am to myself. Pull back, straining to breathe – grope down the companionway. There’s nothing to drink in the galley but a carton of soured milk. I drink it anyway, to kill the acid taste. Reminds of damp bed sheets and soda bread. The way my mother used to curdle milk with lemon juice. Once upon a time, staring up at a plum tree with a white rope of bed linen hanging in it. A vertical line through the foliage and that same soured milk smell. Grass thick with rotten plums, ants, wasps, fruit flies swarming over them. Sound of bees. A pair of black leather high heel shoes covered in ants.

  *

  I get lost sometimes, head filled with too much noise. In the half-dark, the galley’s all unhinged – a puzzle-cube with pieces missing, other pieces sticking out at wrong angles. I let my eyes close, inhale slow and deep. The shortwave’s hissing still. I reach through darkness and switch it off. Wait. Eyes open. Grey light settles on the floor, the table-top, crates of paper and refuse. All blackness turning grey.

  Up on deck it’s warmer than it was. Sign of a thaw setting in, post-rigor-mortis. The air’s brewery-sour. A depthless mist hangs over the river, seeping up the riverbank – restless spirits seethe out of it. I stand at the bow breathing-in the alien atmosphere, arcing a stream of piss onto river ice.

  Bird sounds echo from skeleton trees across the river. Sharp animal movements. Sentry codes. Night heron, heard, not seen – they sense dawn’s relay, the slow heave of celestial gravity. I try to sense it too, dull psychic fingers groping outward, across its Braille. Thinking: One wrong step. Dark rivulets criss-cross the ice – runic scriptures threaded on gobs of fatuous light. Lines that run out where bodyweight falls off into nothingness. Some sixth sense urging you back from the edge, down the steel gangplank where flakes of rust graze your hands. Roped electrical cables weave the mist overhead, vine-like.

  From the shore, everything immediately appears different. The barge hovers in the mist like a strip of wet tarmac. An old Spiller’s barge that came down from Hamburg, before the great flood. Engine stripped out, fuel tanks and prop shaft. Antediluvian. Four letters of a name barely legible across the bow. G. O. R. A. This is my Ark on its moveable mountain. Six hundred tonnes of rivets and steel waiting to be scrapped.

  A circle of light blinks at stern. Febrile Morse. Groping the fuse box I reset the fuses, back to zero. The light goes out and comes on again through the porthole window. Stilled now. Gibbous moon. The shortwave crackle starting up. A dog grunts from somewhere nearby, rattling its chain.

  *

  Above the dry docks a path leads along the slipway to the rear of the container yard. Drizzle on junk-mounds and slagheaps. Empty warehouses loom in silhouette beside a demolition site. I pass the gatehouse, a lit square of window where the night watchman’s sleeping in front of a TV. The TV’s blue aquarium flicker. Sleepless mastiffs stalk the perimeter.

  Across the street a taxi idles outside a nightclub called St Pauli’s. The only thing that lets you know it’s a claphouse is the strip of neon over the doorway. A gypsy with her skirt hiked around her waist is weaving a path up the stairs. Fin-de-millénaire euro-trash drifts through the doorway. Voices, cracked, boozed up to the eyeballs. Canned laughter. A concertina of collapsed innards wheezing onto the pavement.

  Inside, the air stinks of sweat and booze
and expired perfume. A peroxide blonde is standing behind the bar with dark crescents for eyes. I need a drink, but the place has a sour used-up atmosphere where a drink’s just a way-station on a downward run. A pit-bull in a burgundy polyester suit gives me the evil eye and I scowl back at him. There’s a party of drunks holding up the walls, chewing the air with a couple of bored-looking whores. I ask for a coffee and the blonde pours something nasty into a cup. A soup of muddy grounds, Turkish-style. The caffeine jolts hard. I give the pit-bull another scowl and throw some change on the counter.

  I’m back outside, circling around, following a random trajectory. Orange streetlights ooze through mist. Up ahead, a garbage truck is undoing the secret arrangements of trash along the sidewalks. The god of entropy in his heaven looking down. A night tram thuds past, headlights boring holes in the mist – grey faces behind fogged glass. Intermittent traffic out of the city’s dark open-cut. I walk on with a sick animal alertness towards Libeňský Bridge. Somewhere the sound of a bell echoes over water. Clochecall. Siren. Cockcrow. The mist parts like a stage curtain. The river’s dark sheen opens out, red and green navigation lights receding – the eye of the TV tower fucking down into it.

  *

  The bridge has no end, telescoping into mist and fog, like a bridge in dreams. The rain starts up again, heavier now, wetting my face – collar pulled up around my ears. I realise I’m shivering, but not from the cold. It can’t be far now. The pale orb of a clock face stuck above a graffitied tram shelter. Dead hands hanging down vertical. An electric billboard lies shattered on the ground, plumb lines of steel mesh keeping the shards together. Inside the shelter a bum’s sprawled unconscious across a ruined steel bench, pockets turned-out – a body in a wrong arrangement beneath a sky full of broken glass. Headlights flare out of the gloom. The sound of footsteps. Laughter, like a swarm of bees, swarming closer.

  I turn, but there’s no-one. Jaws tense. The fog swarms with imagined adversaries – the click of a blade opening, slivers underfoot. Primal fear instincts. Something that crawled from Jurassic swamps, given body, flesh and blood. Those eyes.

  A pair of yellowed orbs leer out of the night. I stare back at them, an animal too dumb to move. The great beast heaves like a mechanical leviathan with its springs winding down. Its mouths open. Foul breath warm and thick with old mastications. I give myself up to it. I’m surrendering. Actions without reason. The night tram pulls away. I let it take me to the end of the bridge and begin walking back again, going nowhere, killing time.

  2. RESURRECTION

  It’s just before seven when Blake wheels up on an old Enfield he swindled off a Sikh from Bombay. He’s wearing a pair of WWII flying goggles and a greatcoat with a fox fur collar, like he’s in some sort of movie – silver hair fanning up from the top of his head – unshaven – eyes a mess of broken capillaries. He gestures for me to get on behind him and I do. Like straddling a packhorse. Blake says something over his shoulder, but I can’t hear it.

  I was back below deck when he called, communing with lost spirits. Candles set out on a tin tray with crows’ feet, bones of rat. A shrine to unholy powers. The galley’s walls are covered with pictures cut from old magazines. Any sort of magazine you can imagine, scavenged from the dump sites on Libeňský Island. The cut-outs are all faces. Part of a puzzle, trying to pick up a trail, a scent, clues channelled by whatever means are at hand. The voodoo of discarded images, secret metamorphoses of the animal brain in its grief and mourning. If I look deep enough, perhaps all those faces can be made to reveal the one that isn’t there, like an approximation of something that can’t be grasped.

  A face lost in the rain.

  The first thing Blake said when I picked up the phone was that someone was dead. I was staring at the wall, trying to see through it backwards in time and place, to make all the images connect, when the words hit me. Who’s dead? He said to meet him outside St Pauli’s and hung up. I held onto the phone, waiting, but there was only static. Who’s dead? I was sitting there in a second-hand undertaker’s suit, the one I’d slept in. Outside it’d stopped drizzling but it was the kind of grey that evokes funerals and cemeteries. I thought: You’ll look the part, at least.

  “You look like hell.” Blake, shouting this time so I can hear him over the engine. A two cylinder 500cc. I catch my reflection in the rearview. He’s right. I look even worse than he does.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To pay our last respects.”

  “At this hour?”

  It doesn’t seem right. Waking the dead.

  Blake shrugs, easing out the clutch. We pull into the early morning traffic and head for the bridge. Even without the rain there’s slush and mud everywhere. The river’s still curtained in mist. We ride across to the island and follow an exit ramp that winds down under the bridge, past junkyards and used car lots. From here the island stretches out into marsh and landfill – a place of illicit deals and contract killings. This is the Prague nobody wants to think about, saturated with dereliction, like an unconscious – sordid, grotesque. It would be easy to believe there’s nothing here anyone would ever be nostalgic for. Piles of rubble loom out of the fog – the half-demolished silhouettes of warehouses, smashed walls, archaeologies of broken doorframes, bottle glass, enamelled runes.

  The fog casts back the echo of engine-sounds eerily as the Enfield slaloms along the rutted track, spraying mud. Debris flutters from the branches of skeleton trees. The greyblack swathe of landfill stretches towards the city. On the far side, an old industrial district that went under in the flood. Buildings toppled on rotten foundations, the whole place built on sand, river sediment. We cut up past Rohan Island to a mile-long pedestrian tunnel under Žižka’s horse, high on its hill, where the tomb of Stalin’s puppet lies vacant and waiting. The Enfield’s reverb in the tunnel deafens. Yellow lights flicker overhead. And then we’re in Žižkov, heading north again through fogged backstreets, grey worker’s tenements walling them in. Tyres on cobblestones echo claustrophobic. Orange street lamps gloom like mortuary candles.

  *

  We pull up in front of an ugly old white building that hunches up on itself – a 1920s cubist horror, wedged between office blocks, across the tramline from the cemetery. Blake unstraps a camera-bag from the back of the bike. It’s part of what he does – photographing corpses. I listen to the ticking of the Enfield’s engine as it cools. Across the road, people in black are milling around the cemetery entrance. A couple of kids are chasing one another between parked cars. As if on cue, an ice cream van drives by with a megaphone on its roof and a tinny polka drifting out of it. I settle down against a railing to watch the spectacle.

  Blake comes over with his camera-bag slung across one shoulder, smoking a cigarette.

  “Strange how families really only make a point of existing at weddings and funerals.”

  “It’s why the commies tried to ban them most of the time,” Blake yawns.

  “Families?”

  “Funerals. In public, death evokes primitive, tribal instincts. It always risks being political.”

  “And weddings?”

  “Mindless optimism. Good for the masses.”

  “Is that why you brought me up here, to philosophise?”

  Blake looks at me unsmilingly and shakes his head.

  “There’s something I want you to see.”

  He tosses his butt on the wet ground. Hiss. A dying insect on its back.

  I follow him up a ramp to a loading-bay at the rear of the building. A couple of ambulances are parked off to one side. Blake speaks into a grill beside the bay doors and somebody buzzes us through. Inside it’s mostly dark – a wide corridor with low-watt fluorescent tubes leads past rows of cubicle offices, pale hospital-green. A male nurse meets us at the far end of the corridor, he’s wearing steel-rimmed glasses that stick out on either side of his head. One revolving fish-like eye. He looks like he might’ve been resurrected. Dawn of the Dead.

  Blake mutters something to t
he stiff which gets lost in the general miasma. A wad of cash changes hands. The stiff gives me a fish-eyed stare and I stare back at him. Blake says something else and the stiff turns and jerks his head towards a set of double doors. We follow him through. Two orderlies in bleached overalls pass in the opposite direction. We approach another set of doors. No-one seems to speak. The silence is getting on my nerves. I want Blake to tell me what I’m doing here.

  Next thing we’re standing in the meat locker. Lights come on overhead. A row of sinks along a wall of scummed tiles that once were white. The stiff hands Blake a plain envelope then goes out. Without looking at it, Blake stuffs the envelope inside his coat. He’s a pretty picture, with his fox fur, his silver hair flaring out, stubble and red eyes and flying goggles around his neck – like some Luftwaffe pilot blitzed on pervitin.

  In the middle of the room a gurney has been left out, draped with a green sheet. Blake takes out his camera and walks over to it. He waits until I’m next to him before he pulls the sheet away. It takes a few seconds to register what I’m seeing and then something inside me locks up. Bruised flesh leers pornographic – laughter, like a swarm of bees, swarming closer. I can hear the shutter of Blake’s camera clicking off one shot after another until the film runs out. Somehow that sound neutralises everything.

  *

  Behind my eyes images seethe and turn grey – my throat tightens around a scream that won’t come out – my head goes numb. Regen’s lying there, watching me. Red hair and jade eyes like an oriental fetish. A blur of stage-light on porcelain. Too naked. And then she’s gone again. Where she lay, there’s a corpse. Like a Janus figure. They might’ve been twins, but not quite. Two images reflecting one another through a gap in time.