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March 51, Martinaise, Revachol, Insulinde
They crawl out of the Kineema and onto the snowy sand in a heap of hands and elbows and lips. Harry’s hands were in Kim’s hair as he parked, drenched in brilliantine, reaching out how he could from the back seat, eventually opening the door with his knee to keep holding onto this warm miracle and stumbling out like a crab knocked over on the beach. They find each other’s mouth before they can breathe the damp air of the Martinaise coast. It is their three-hundred-and-eighty-fourth kiss since their first, which was two hours and seven minutes ago, with a half-eaten hot dog as their sole witness. Some distant voice in Harry’s head is keeping track, joining the celebrations best as it can.
The muted bass line pumping out of the church reaches out to envelop them in a warm waft of glory. Drunk with triumph and the sweet lure of human connection, they try to compose themselves, one with his back against one of the rotten poles that hold up the old fish market, the other holding him there, being held, breathing heavily as they shiver in the cold March air. (In Eminent Domain, under the long shadows of the 8/81, two cats in heat are going at it on the precarious ledge of pillar 873/b. The yowling echoes across three blocks)
“Harry… you kiss like a timer’s going to go off,” moans Kim. It is the coolest thing in the world – Kim’s unobstructed desire, Harry’s intensity, this feedback loop of incredulous frenzy they cannot quite wrap their brains around so keep digging under each other’s skin like they will find the answer there.
“It is,” says Harry. “And in there we’ll be in front of the juvies. Gotta behave. Getting ahead now.”
“Good boy.”
“You make me want to be the best, baby.”
He is shut up by kiss three hundred and ninety-five. They compose themselves for real, minus a furtive touch, a longing stare, this glitch in reality that is their desire, an impossibility that fills the air with bursts of static. They came here to celebrate and celebrate they shall.
Disco Elysium is in a state of flux. No-one would look at these bare wooden bones and in good conscience call it a club, not yet, maybe not ever, but it breathes, it exists on battered stilts against the ice and the waves. Van Eyck’s beats push its blood in circle. The dance floor is kept alive. At its dark margins, someone works on the wood, measures the acoustics, pulls aside the great cable snakes slithering across the floorboards. The stained glass to the north-east lies forgotten. A crude brick wall covers most of it, closing up the draught and rising defiantly past the hole to hide the towering figure of the Innocence. Cindy’s brushwork hints at something, reaching for divinity through the obscene, but her sketch remains unfinished for now, interrupted by a banal lack of paint, empty bucket and dry brush resting at its feet like an offering at the altar. One imagines sunlight filtering through the remaining blue edges of the glass to bathe her blasphemy in a halo of truth; this late in the day, when the skies are dark, it remains remote and incomprehensible.
“Detectives in the house!” Harry announces them to the mixed crowd of ravers, crab man, Soona, Cindy and Cindy’s friends-slash-assorted-adoptees from at least three different incompatible social circles. For one moment, all fifteen pairs of eyes are on him. “We cracked the case! We’re celebrating!”
Kim’s imagination flutters at the enticing prospect of what it is that Harry would say if anyone asked for details – discoveries were certainly made today but they just about amounted to the taste of each other’s throat, which would be hard to spin into an unassuming Dick Mullen tale, even a dark sexy one. Which is why he would, perhaps, like to see it happen.
But all that greets them is approving nods and a loud “Hard core!” as a stamp of approval from behind the console, and the attention deflates. There is just Harry on the dance floor, surrounded by half a dozen people, at once existing each in their own world and in a collective performance as a manifestation of soundwaves. In Harry’s case, as a manifestation of if the soundwaves had a bad leg and a bad year or twenty, but he remains the magnetic pole of Kim’s attention, magnificently alive against the grinding of the world. He calls for him as his footwork brings him further back, under a thicket of strobe lights. Invisible currents guide him toward the center and end point of all routes on the dance floor, the epicenter of the collision of matter bursting silently in the rafters.
Kim thought he would join him, that’s what they came here for after all. Every fiber of his muscles remembers the catharsis of their shared dance in the empty church. Back in Jamrock, one hour ago, they both knew at once that they wanted to come back to that, wanted to relive that one burst of glory to crown the triumph of today, joy over joy over joy.
The church is not empty now. People would be watching. Kim stands by the sidelines.
Anodic beats fill every atom of the space inside their ears. Harry’s calls were drowned by the noise, “Kim,” “Kim,” “Kim,” one with the rhythm of the church. Now he is standing still in the back of the dance floor, under the Swallow, filled with a crackling energy as the world stops making sense. He cups his hands around his mouth, waits for Kim’s undivided attention and shouts. Kim squints. He can’t see well enough that far under these lysergic lights, but a silvery thrill reaches him nonetheless. Harry’s words keep coming. The hole in the world sucks them in. Kim stares, enthralled. It is not “I love you,” lip movement is all wrong and he would not dare. It is something secret. For Kim alone. For one moment they exist together under the great void. Kim thinks of defiance.
They regroup outside, on one of the benches shielded by the strange angles of the church’s walls. A light rain is falling on Martinaise, but the sloping roof carries the water past their huddled-up bodies.
“I thought you’d join.” Harry shuffles his feet. Some part of him is still boogieing in the darkness and the music and the inexplicable memento of the inevitable entroponetic catastrophe.
“And I thought you’d be drawn to the Swallow like a moth to the flame. One of us was right.” Kim shrugs. That came out all bungled but there’s no going back on misfired rhetoric, all that’s left to do is wait and hope Harry won’t rub it in. He really was right about it, at least, so that’s a start.
“Trial run for the end days, you know,” says Harry. Kim shivers. (Fifteen blocks and twelve hours away, a pigeon flew straight against the sun.) He wishes Harry had poked fun at him instead. His partner continues: “It’s good for your constitution. Were you keeping your distance on purpose? Scared?”
“No. It was too crowded. That’s all.”
That is not all. He thinks of Harry under the void, he himself not part of that vision anymore, his imagination can’t sustain such nonsense. A lingering unease crawls up his spine. Harry somehow notices, or by luck of the roll decides that it is a good time to wrap an arm around Kim’s shoulders, and the world is whole and warm again.
“I do not think that it is good for your constitution to annihilate yourself, anyway,” says Kim who, on occasion, has something of a penchant for not knowing when to put an argument to rest.
“I want to.”
“You shouldn’t.”
“Yes mom, lieutenant, partner.”
“I wish it weren’t difficult for you. I like it when you are alive, Harry.”
“I’ll try.”
They go back inside and tap their feet to the music, together.
February 78, elsewhere, elsewhere, elsewhere
They cling to the wool of each other’s sweater, fingers burrowing under heavy parkas like there is nowhere else left to go, and they kiss, slowly and deliberately, at the corner of a street that is the only place in town that is still real. Mold grows. Memories of their drafty flat at the end of the block fade like the last few years of their life were never there; Revachol crumbles further away into the past, a dying sun. They stand against the morning like her last feeble rays across the reaches of cosmos. It is the last embrace in history.
A motorbike is parked next to them, well-kept and shiny. Two helmets, no bags.
“I don’t want to,” mumbles Kim.
“You have to.” Harry finds his lips again. They don’t have many kisses left and they never got enough. “I’m sorry I couldn’t take this fear from you.”
“Nonsense. You made it bearable. Guide me.”
Look at that: age finally caught up to Kim’s inveterate curmudgeonry. Perfect, beautiful Kim, with an old man’s gravitas to his complaining, to the way he shakes his head. Harry buries his nose in his partner’s neck and feels Kim run his hand through his white ponytail. He has never been more in love.
A dull, confused sunrise flashes past the silvery veil and they are all out of wars to prepare for. They are leaving it all behind. The world is fading in the mist.
“Fine. Fine. Let’s do this. Pedal to the metal throughout the near pale. Keep your wits about you, near pale is for vodka and goats, we cannot give up there, we’re going someplace beautiful. Keep going until even the underpinnings of the idea of road collapse and inertia slingshots us through fundamentals. Past gravity, past magnetism, weak and strong interaction...”
“Harry. You’re crying.”
“It will be beautiful, Kim. That’s where the beauty comes from. That’s where the beauty comes from… keep going and it will stop making sense until all that’s left is that I love you. That’s our end point. Our big win. The… the last rest stop on the Motorway South, Rodionov’s slope.”
“Alright.” He grabs a helmet and weighs it on his hand with a boldness he does not feel.
“Kim?”
“They’ll hear us coming in the next world. That’s a promise.”
“I expect nothing less. Partner.”
The last thing this aching, dying air remembers of them is the whining harmonics of variable current spinning through the coils of a supercharged 90 kilowatt engine. In the distance, they dissolve.