Praise for Benny Platonov!
“Uneven.” - ROBERTO BOLANO JR., Lee Harvey Oswald Jr.
“Yes, uneven.” - JATINDER SINGH, Poe-down Review
“Weirdly uneven…” - AYA NAKAMURA, Chicago Whinge
“Indefatigably uneven…” - MONICA LI, Toronto Skips
“[The author] gives us a reference to the unevenness of the writing within the novel itself, begging the question: Is this just a didactic, novel-length response to his own shortcomings as a writer?”
- STOO SEPP, Funk n’ dunk Magazine
“…from the opening paragraph it is apparent that this ‘thing’ was written by a pervert. A few more paragraphs and we can add misogynist. I dread to think what kind of writer we’ll have by the end of it…” – TOSCKA, Schlock is my frock
“I was out by page twenty. Crap.” - SIMON WARDLE, Pol Pot Pit
“[The author is a] PISS FUCKING, CUNT WAFFLE, DICK TIPPING, SLUT CAMPER…” - ANONYMOUS, the Internet.
“…it is hard to understand almost seventy five percent of what is written here, but somehow we are left in no doubt that it is the work of a genius.” - RITGER HAUER, Not Rutger Hauer Magazine
“…a mad professor of words, Puncher writes ‘drunk scenes’ like no other since Bukowski…” - LEMONY FUCKING SNICKET, I’ve run out of magazine names Magazine
“…a guy sits in a park drinking beer and watching tramps with fannypacks, and he’s hurting, apparently. So what have we here? He’s gonna pick them all up and turn their lives around, get them jobs, give them some self-respect and change their lives? Ah no, wait…that’s right, he’s a writer. He’s gonna write about them…” - TREEHORN, The Internet
“Uneven.” – KWOK FU SHING, Golden Four
“…goes on and on and on and on and on, and, just when you think you’re out, [the author] puts a part two in there and drags you back in.”
- LUKE McCONNAGHEY, Woodenbear
BENNY PLATONOV
Gupter Puncher
A Year Zero Book
Year Zero Books
This novel was originally written by Gupter Puncher. It has been slightly revised and updated to both Hong Kong and the modern era, but is still, inherently, Puncher’s work.
The lovely giant rat, man, bench and grey background on the front cover were created by Bradley Wind.
‘Benny Platonov’ is first published in this edition. It is copyrighted under the Writer’s Guild of America West, 2008.
All Rights Reserved.
Copyright belongs to Oli Johns.
The author asserts the moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
I think this just about covers my ass.
Thanks to:
George
Kenji
Andrei
Thomas
Rudy
Gupter
Year Zero
…and all those who told me I couldn’t write for shit. You were half-right.
INTRODUCTION____________
Gupter Puncher, little known writer of the seventies and child (and later an exile) of the East German-Soviet State, disappeared from this world on January 16th, 1980. On a beach near Yokohama was the last place he was seen. Some commented that winter had always been difficult for him to endure and for that reason he had killed himself, while others suggested that his compatriots from behind the Iron Curtain had finally caught up with him. Whatever happened that day, his stories remain.
‘Benny Platonov’ was originally called ‘Jurgen Platonov’, the last name taken from the Russian writer, Andrei Platonov, a writer whom Gupter Puncher had a lot of affection for. He wrote in his notes many times, ‘all of us come from the earth, and we will all fall back into it. We are the ones who create the differences.’ By differences he means the class system and money, and in this novel he targets both.
Puncher set his version on the streets of Berlin, when the State controlled so much of its citizens’ lives. His ‘Jurgen’ had the same arrogance, the same struggling ambition, the same guilt that ‘Benny’ has, and they both focus their rage on the powers that they believe are creating the ‘differences’: In East Germany, 1973, it was the State and the wealthy; in Hong Kong, 2008, it is merely the wealthy. So, in their own limited way, they try to attack what they see as the major fault of the world, using what they believe to be their gift; words/literature. But what do they actually get done? They dream of glory on their terms, saving the poor, becoming heroes or martyrs. They fuck women they despise, they teach students more publishable than them, they contradict their own opinions with their actions, and they lose themselves in their own thoughts. They start things, but don’t finish them. Most of all though, they care about those on the streets, they really care, and it hurts.
The two locations and their respective eras are opposites, of course, and several changes had to be made. Details like the short film, the coffee shops, the behaviour of the foreigners and the locals have all been added to this version to make the switch to Hong Kong more comfortable. Some of the cultural references have also been updated, although others, like ‘The Night of the Hunter’, have remained. The rest of the story is a simple translation of what Puncher wrote.
In his notes, Puncher insisted that the novel begin with a quote from the main character himself, in order to introduce the belief system that becomes prominent throughout. It is unclear from his notes if Puncher was a determinist as well, and, frankly, it doesn’t really matter as he never claimed that he was any of his characters.
So, the quote:
‘By my own reckoning, but not anyone else’s, I am presently seven years old, with my eighth birthday only four months away [too stiff maybe...reckoning? Presently? Does anyone still use these?].
I was born at twenty. Well, either twenty or sixteen depending on mood; most of the time I choose twenty, but I’m never completely sure. I could go back even further, to when I was five years old, if you count your true birth as the arrival of your first distinct memory, which I don’t [I’m assuming a difference between natural and intellectual birth…should I make this clearer??). That was when I was five, I think. I remember running around a patio in dungarees and mop hair being pestered by what I thought at the time was a giant but was merely my father. I don’t know what he wanted but he had shown a very stern face when talking to me, so I guessed that it wasn’t good. That was the first thing I could remember of my life so you could say, as Joseph often does, that that was the moment I was born. That would make me, by Joseph’s [Should I mention the others or stick with Joey?] reckoning, twenty-two years old. I don’t agree with this but you might. No, in my view, I still had fifteen more years of luck, chance, misdirection and external decisions beyond my authority to sail through before I would term myself born. And then, another seven years of books and experiences which I can now reflect on as an adult [right tense? Can or could?], before I would be ready to imprint myself on the world.
But now I am ready. I understand all that I read with total clarity and I have thoughts in a second that most others fail to have during their whole lifetimes. Another year, I think…just one more year and others will know.’
[Benny Lowrissa, writing in his notepad [5th draft], Hong Kong, 2007.]
Benny continues with the parks and the playgrounds and those that should be sitting in their boxes…
Benny laid himself out on the bench and let his arms dangle down, his fingers an inch away from the dirt on the ground, just like the man two benches away from him.
The park around them was still, obedient, with its leaves and bricks and fallen cigarette butts not troubling anyone. Not that there were many there to trouble, the only noise coming from two women, possibly whores, sat on the wall, and a local walking a long circle behind the benches, talking to his dog.
Benny ignored the voices and focused on the fingers of the man in rags, trying to see if they were touching the ground.
On the other side of the bench, Captain kept on talking.
“…rub it against their thigh, only for a bit though, then they grab it and they just whack it in, mate…no half push or anything to warm me up, they just stick it straight in there and-…and then what, they lie back and wait, and moan a little, but they keep an eye on you, like they’ll raise their head and look down, to see how it’s coming along.” He leaned back on the bench and tilted his head towards his crotch, mimicking them. “…and mate, they yawn. Seriously, with a cock in them, they yawn…not because it’s me, but just in general, for anyone they get. And-…that’s not even the worst of it, mate, some of them go and put the fucking TV on. They stop looking at me and look at that, and-…that’s when they cross the line, putting the TV on. If they do that to me I don’t give a fuck about them anymore. I just hold their legs up and finish it. I drill them, mate, and I don’t give a shit where they look.”
He laughed, pleased with his use of a good alternative word like ‘drill’ in place of ‘fuck’, then tapped on his can when he saw Benny was elsewhere.
“Where are you then, mate?”
“What?”
“You’re touching the ground…”
“Me? No, I’m-…I’m just lying down. Tired…”
Captain looked around and saw the tramp sketching along the ground with his fingernails.
“You’re looking at that guy.”
“Which guy?”
“You’re copying him, mate, I just saw you. That guy, him.” He pointed at the tramp with his foot then moved it over and pointed further along. “There are two girls over there with skirts you could put in your pocket and you’ve got your eyes on a tramp. You’re a weird fucker.”
Benny pulled himself back up and drank from the beer they had just bought from the conveni round the corner. He had reached for another brand, but Captain had seen the one they were drinking now and told his friend of the last seven months that it was a tramp’s drink. Special Brew, eight percent, cheap, and with associations of poverty, Benny got two for himself and two for his friend.
“Ok, yeah, I am. But it’s not-…I mean, I’m watching him because he’s hopeless, isn’t he? He’s got nowhere to go. He’s lying on a bench. Don’t you think that’s interesting?”
“They’re not waiting for anyone, mate.” Captain was still with the girls. “It’s been an hour almost. No one’s coming for them. Unless they’re-…no, they wouldn’t-...”
“Captain?”
“I’m listening. What?”
“Over there, the guy. Don’t you think he’s-…”
“Interesting, yeah, I heard you.” Captain turned round to look at the man and scrutinized him for authenticity. “You said he’s got nowhere to go, but how do you know? He might be looking at you thinking the same thing. No, hang on, you’re white.”
The man opposite them shifted onto his left side and faced the two girls with the non-skirts. Benny watched him, waiting for him to get up and start some drama. The man did nothing, just stared. Then he lifted up his beer and took a sip. His watcher, instinctively, did the same.
“Seriously, mate, he’s just a tramp. What do you expect him to do?”
“I bet he’s got an interesting story…” Benny muttered into his can.
“Here’s his story: Woke up poor, grew up poor, got no education, couldn’t get a job, spends his life in this park. It’s sad, mate, but only sad, nothing else.”
By the time his analysis ended, Captain had moved the old man off his screen. He was looking at the girls again.
“Go and ask him for me,” Benny tried.
“Talk to him? Fuck off…”
“Go on.”
“He won’t understand me. I told you, I speak funny Cantonese. It’s off. To them it’s off, actually it’s proper, the way it used to be spoken. I told you this, right? My parents are from a village, I live in a village. I don’t speak like they do here.”
“They speak it wrong, you speak it right?”
“Yeah, exactly, mate. Example, “neih”, that’s ‘you’, it means ‘you’, they say “leih”, while I say “neih”, which is the proper way to say it. I was talking to my parents on the phone about it last week and they said I was saying it right. I listened to the way they talk and that’s where I get it from, I copy them, and they speak proper Cantonese. They’ve scuffed the language here, mate, they all speak common…”
“But they still understand you, right?”
“Yeah, but they laugh at it even though, technically, I’m right and they’re-…”
“So just go and ask that guy how he got here, onto that bench or whatever…however you wanna put it…”
Captain drank more from his tramp’s beer then crushed the can.
“I’m gonna speak to the girls instead.”
He threw the can into a bin nearby but didn’t move. The tramp stayed on his left side as Benny finished his own can and put the flip flops back under his dirty feet. There was only one of them tonight, not enough for research, and if Captain wasn’t going to talk to the guy then it was better to go back. Next time, he’d come alone and stay longer.
The tramp lifted a double page of newspaper off the ground, straightened it out then lay back down on the bench and used it to block out the park.
Benny, tired and frustrated over the waste of another day, pushed open the door from the stairs to the corridor leading to his apartment and heard the sound of tiles falling onto an invisible board and an old woman, who had probably never uttered a quiet word in her life, shout out in victory. It has to be mah-jong, he thought, he heard them playing it at least five times a week. What were they doing except playing that fucking game? What were they talking about between tile placements? In a more distant apartment there came a stop-start line of piano, a few seconds of rehearsed performance, a pause, and then the same few seconds, perhaps slightly improved. Benny didn’t think much more on it as music wasn’t a keen interest of his. It was a lesser art, an art that only appealed to the senses, not the mind. That was why he classed himself as a writer. “If I can get the authenticity of poverty then I’ll have a story,” he told himself as he opened the cage protecting the wooden door to his apartment. “Those other ideas are good, but they’re not calling cards, not like this one. I’ll come back to those when this one is done.” The cage and then the door were opened and he walked into his modestly-furnished apartment, kicking his flip-flops off, turned on the thirty-eight inch TV he had bought after only two days of doubt over the expense of it, and put the kettle on before finally letting his shoulders drop down in comfort.
The news came on the screen and by the time he was sitting on the couch it had moved onto a story about rebel fighters in Sri Lanka flaying some monks who had wandered, tourist-like, into their area from the opposing side. The Tamik tigers, they said, had killed over a hundred innocents within the last month in order to protect their territory in…Killinoti? Killinocki? How did he say it…Killinokiti? That was an achievement. A hundred people in a month, three and a limb each day. Another monk, a friend of one of the skinless monks perhaps, came on and talked about “peace first, and then justice for these immoral, disgusting crimes.” His face looked familiar, someone who had featured in Benny’s own life at some point. Is there a link between them, he wondered? We met in the past and he went that way and I went my way, and now he’s facing the prospect of getting flayed while I’m living in this fantasy land where people never get flayed. What would it be like to wake up in the morning and think that, on that particular day, someone might catch you and take a knife to your skin? There were places like that all over the world and he was nowhere near any of them. Well, Sri Lanka is close, he reasoned, and Tibet is closer, but it’s not in the same world. Hong Kong didn’t know violence like that. People died here, sure that happened everywhere, but the percentage was so small. Only eight-hundred and fifty-seven destitute in a city of seven million, he recalled. Not even one percent, krist.
The story on the TV changed to the elections in Russia, forcing Benny to shake his head as if every country were more dramatic than the one he was currently in. Another country with a recent history of suffering that put Hong Kong to shame. The Cold War, snuff movies in warehouses, Chechnyan militia, the rush to sudden capitalism and riches and surplus warheads, the tanks moving into that renegade arm of Georgia; why wasn’t I born a Russian?
He drank some water out of a clean glass and turned his computer on. He would try to make up for the days waste and write for a bit, then sleep. The air con blew into his face, reminding him that it was working on in the background, and the news reporter said goodnight from inside the TV screen. The music played out and the studio went dark and a preview came on for ‘House’, with Hugh Laurie being pulled over by a cop, a familiar cop, the guy from…what? White hair, big, six-five maybe…scrunched up eyes, who was he? When his computer loaded up he stared at it for a few minutes before connecting and going to Wikipedia. He searched for ‘House’ and scrolled down the page until he found the cast list, and then the list of recurring characters, and went down that until he-…David Morse.
“Ha! David fucking Morse…” he cried, and sat back relieved while outside the window, down in the estate below, amongst all the trees waiting for the light to come again in the morning, the benches lay empty, alone, tramp-less.
The banners were up because it was summer. The bars lining both sides of the main hill where most of the foreigners went to drink in Hong Kong were busier outside than in as people drank and watched the newcomers strut up the main stretch and paid careful attention to where the prettiest ones stopped.
Benny sat at the back of a high table with Captain, Michelle and her boyfriend in front of him, outside a bar on one of the branches of street shooting off from the main climb.
“Why are they all coming here? It’s not even clean, mate. Look, that shit on the kerb over there. It’s only the insides that have any class to them, that’s what they come for.”
“What were you doing last week, Benny? I called, but you didn’t answer. You didn’t phone back either…”
Captain had spoken first, Michelle second. Benny ignored the first, figuring it didn’t need an answer, and tilted towards the woman who was five years older than him, with the boyfriend in shadow behind her right shoulder.
“Last week? I was-…I can’t remember where I was. When did you phone?”
“I’m seeing the same faces going past too…that one; she just went by not even two minutes ago. Where are you going, love?”
“I phoned twice on Sunday. You didn’t pick up, honey.”
Benny smirked, noticing the boyfriend’s hand come out of the shadow and place itself on hers. What was his name again?
“Didn’t I?” he drawled.
Nearby, another conversation coasted over, this one political, manned by two middle aged men in suits.
“…it could’ve been millions, it really depends what figures you rely on, but, the thing is, the thing that makes it so frustrating is the lack of justice. That’s the only reason we’re even talking about it and-…hey, you’re knocking the table…watch it. No, ok it’s straight…yeah, what was I-…the lack of justice, that’s it, that’s the problem. All those people who died and their relatives now aren’t going to get any-…”
“That’s always happened though, always.” A quick sip off the head of the beer while the other shook his head. “And justice? You’re overlooking history. Listen, every struggle has a winner, and they write the story. They win, they make changes, the country moves on. Now the Chinese government, and I’m not defending them here, they did what they had to do, they modernized the whole area because it had to be-…”
“Had to be what?”
“Modernised, and it was. They were all farmers and religious nuts, and that’s what needed to be-…”
“Religious nuts? Jesus, talk about broad strokes…”
Captain continued across the table, oblivious to anything but the people in front.
“They’re repeating themselves, eight of them at least anyway. You ever hear that theory, mate, there are eight people in this world, in any country, that look like you, exactly like you. I think it’s true…”
“So where did you get to?” came Michelle again.
“Fine, they modernized the country, maybe, but so did Stalin, so did the British in India, and they killed thousands doing it, you can’t forget that. That’s what the price is…”
“I’m not forgetting it, I’m just making the point that-…”
“Benny?”
“…no, wait a minute. Wait a minute, let’s be clear here, you’re trying to brush it away, you’re saying it’s all ok. That’s the classic ulitaria-…ulititarianism-…no, what’s the word? Ulit-…Utit-…fuck off, I know it…Utilitarinism, that’s it. That’s the classic (spoken slowly and cautiously) u-tili-tari-nistic attitude right there, isn’t it, and you think it excuses everything, that’s what you’re saying.” A deliberate shake of the head from the speaker, a bitter sip taken from his pint. “But it’s not justified. If you’re honest, you’ll admit it, but you won’t, will you? You know what I mean…ulititary-…fuck, you’re saying it’s ok to murder in one village if it makes a whole town happy somewhere else…that’s what you’re saying.”
“Benny, are you in there?” Michelle repeated.
“What? No, I don’t know where I was on Sunday. Writing maybe, I don’t know. Why, you wanted to meet up?”
Michelle pulled her hand away from her boyfriend (Andrew? Alex?) and edged her stool closer to Benny.
“I always wanna meet up, but you never do.”
“No, that’s-…that’s not true, Mish.”
The boyfriend pulled her away with something in Cantonese, and Benny drifted back into his seat, closer to the politics…
“I did study this at Cambridge, Tone. You don’t have to draw examples for me. And how do you know what I’m saying, you aren’t even-…”
“People died, people starved, thousands of them. That’s fact, complete fact. And you’re saying that’s just history, let’s brush it…let’s brush it under the, the…whatever, the carpet and move on.”
“Wait, hold on, hold up. You’re making my argument-…that’s a straw-man you’ve-…that’s a straw-man. I’m not saying any of that…”
“Straw-man? For fuck’s sa-…tell me what you’re saying then. Go on, tell me, explain it to me…”
“Yes, fine, give me a second to actually speak and I will…”
“…two of me already. Did I tell you that?”
Benny tuned out of their conversation and picked up Captain.
“What?”
“Not the exact same faces though, right?” Michelle asked.
“No, two of me, mate, exactly the same face. One in Egypt, one back in the UK. Seriously, there was a guy who was me, in Egypt. The Arabian me or Egyptian or whatever you call them. I’m not lying. He was a taxi driver, mate, sitting-…”
The volume of the politics got louder…
“So, burn them if they protest too? Is that it? Great, well then that’s just crap, they’ve got every right to protest, they’re not a minority over there, they’re-...”
“Who said protest? What are you talk-…you’re having your own conversation, Tone. No, don’t shake your head, you’re doing it again. Every time I speak. Jesus fucking-!” one of the suits turned away in further disgust and stroked the hair on his arm just above the plated watch that looked to be genuine silver. Benny watched him covertly, annoyed that they were talking about suffering. What did they know about it?
“I think I’ve just seen eight of the same faces on this fucking hill alone. And there’s another one, she’s local, isn’t she? Yeah definitely, she’s-…what’s that? She’s got a-…krist, she’s hanging onto a French guy, a French guy, mate. That’s one country that doesn’t have my face, I know that much.”
“Hey Benny, you didn’t answer my question…”
“What’s that?”
“You’re dreaming, aren’t you?”
“No, I’m here. What is it? You phoned me, right?”
“Yeah, but you didn’t pick up. We said that already…”
“I didn’t notice the calls, sorry Mish.”
Benny gave her his face and tried to remember, honestly, why he hadn’t picked up her call. I didn’t ignore her, did I? He recalled the phone lighting up and her name on its screen, but with no sound, and where was he when that happened?
The boyfriend leaned into her ear and said something in Cantonese. She nodded in response, no smile, no turn of the head to face him. He patted her shoulder and slipped quietly back into his chair.
That guy, krist, the information giver…Benny wanted to lean in close, grab her by the other ear…Mish, you’ve been with that guy for two years…two years. What is he doing for you, really? He suspected…no, he knew, it was simply the sway of familiarity and…what…the other one, routine, or regularity. That’s what they have, thought Benny as he scanned over the boyfriend’s bland features, familiarity and regularity, but not love. But wasn’t love simply familiarity, the repeated waking to the same face for so long? There was a story in there, beyond the aphorism, definitely a story.
“And why are we in the only local bar in this whole area?” continued Captain in his own bubble.
The two amateur politicos were getting up from their table and had retreated into silence, perhaps aware that a few more lines of dialogue would end their night. They grunted options for the next bar, put on their jackets and picked up their briefcases, politely pushed the stools back in and then they were gone. The waiter came over quickly, his face slipping as he saw there was nothing but the two empty glasses to take away.
“I had a new idea for a story, Mish.” Benny brought himself closer to the table and his listeners. “You wanna hear?”
“You write…a story?” the boyfriend asked, surprising everyone.
“He talks more than he writes,” laughed Captain, coming back from the street.
“No, he does write…” Michelle started.
“I’m writing.”
“…on Sundays. When his friends have their only day off.”
“I’m writing all the-…what? No, last Sunday I-…I had to, it was important. Anyway this new one…”
“Short story or longer?” Captain butted in again.
“It’s about a-…mostly short, but just listen, this one…it’s-…”
“Is it the poverty one you were talking about?”
“What? The poverty-…no, not that…”
Captain leaned over the table to Michelle, towards her ear. The boyfriend stayed still and smiled harmlessly.
“He’s been dragging me to Mong Kok to watch tramps. He copies them and tries to get me to talk to them. He says it’s research, but I don’t get it, how can you research that? What does he want them to do? They’re just people in a park, mate…”
“Ok, just let him tell his idea, Cap…”
“I am, I am. I was just saying…” He stopped and left the space open for Benny to talk into.
“It’s not the poor people one, it’s a newbie. And I wasn’t expecting them to do anything, I was just watching them to-…I don’t know, to get a feel for them, I guess. I can’t just use my imagination on something like this, it’s gotta be real. Anyway-…”
“How do you mean get a feel for them? They were lying on a bench, mate. Tell me how it’s impossible to imagine that…”
“It’s not just the fact of it, it’s the details, it’s-…it’s hard to explain.”
“Mate, if you’re gonna write a story like this you need one thing. A main character you can empathize with, that’s all. Poor or not, you’ve gotta make me give a shit about who you’re writing about.”
“Cap, I didn’t say who the main character was…what are you-…you haven’t even heard the story yet…”
“Alright mate, take it or leave it, I’m just trying to give some pointers.”
“…and I haven’t even started that one anyway.”
“I know, I’m just giving some pointers, mate. And it’s true, the books I read, they’ve always got an asshole as the main character and what does he do? He walks around smoking and he drinks and fucks around with women, and he says all these smart, clever things, but who gives a shit? No one, mate, it doesn’t work. I’m just telling you that you need someone sympathetic as the main guy. That’s all, take it or leave it.”
Benny patted the table, nodded, then turned round to the street behind them and twisted his face in frustration.
…fucking street, slabs of know-it-all, know-everything stone shit, never wrong fucking pavement, go fuck yourself…krist!
He came back to the table with a conciliatory smile.
“I’ll think about it, when I write it. If it’s natural…” He wanted to put a dig in but the ‘natural’ line was all he could manage. “Anyway, the new idea…you wanna hear it?”
“Of course we do,” Michelle said.
Captain nodded, the boyfriend smiled.
“Ok, the abridged version then…basically, it starts with-…or you’ve got a guy who wakes up and everything seems normal…he’s in Hong Kong by the way, living out near Tai Po, like a village house or something…and, so he lives his life as normal for a few days, going to work, coming back home, sleeping, eating and all that…he doesn’t have many friends, I think, maybe just people he sees once a week, and then most of the time he’s at home, alone, and-…so everything’s normal, it starts normal, but then one night he gets a visit from a man in black, who kinda barges into his apartment and starts acting weird for a few minutes, pointing at things and shouting, and before the guy can react and ask him to leave, he’s been knocked out and dragged upstairs to his bed. The guy then sits down by the bed and waits for him to wake up and, when he finally does, the guy-…”
“Hang on, mate, which guy?”
“Which one? You mean, who knocked out who?”
“Yeah. I mean, who’s been knocked out? The guy in black?”
“No, no…the guy in black is the intruder, he’s the danger…the other guy’s been knocked out…”
“The man who owns the house?”
“Yeah, him, he’s been knocked out…”
“Ok, mate, go on…”
Benny nodded and turned towards Michelle.
“…so, the bedroom…in the bedroom, the guy watching him, the man in black, tells the other guy this huge revelation, that a few days earlier the man, the one who’s just been knocked out, had been turned with drugs and chemicals and shit from a Christian to an Atheist, only he doesn’t remember any of it. The whole process wiped his memory of his past life, it’s all gone and he totally believes himself to be fully Atheist. So, the man in black gets out his own needles and tells the guy he’s gonna change him back, but the guy in the bed is obviously petrified as he’s only got this guy’s word for it, and I didn’t really mention it before but the guy’s dressed in black and seems really intimidating, just this huge black figure looming in front of him like Robert Mitchum, ‘Night of the Hunter’…you ever see that film? No? It’s pretty old, I guess…but, ok, the guy, he’s like a complete righteous psycho, and he’s huge and has these grand fucking needles so that makes the Atheist guy even more panicked, so-…after a bit of drama and struggle with that guy he somehow gets away, I’m not sure how yet but he does, and he goes off to hide in the shittiest parts of the city, like Lai Chi Kok, Sham Shui Po, Mong Kok, all the dirty Kowloon areas, and, to cut it short, after a few nights watching his back the Atheists find him and he finds out that there are a load of these guys running around the city, using all these chemicals to change people while they sleep. But the thing is, the conflict is, he knows he’s been changed against his will into an Atheist, but he also thinks like an Atheist now, so there’s some kind of torn feeling there, like which side should he pick…that’s the basics of it. Which one is right…which one should he choose?”
He leaned back, stretched out his arms and tried not to look at Captain.
Michelle nodded, a positive nod. “Sounds interesting.”
The boyfriend, who couldn’t have understood much of it, smiled and nodded, his lips altered into a ‘y’know, it might just work’ expression.
“Yeah, I think the idea’s decent,” Benny said, his arms still stretched out.
“It sounds a bit messy, mate,” Captain decided.
Benny’s arms froze in front of him. He spun his wrist a little to give a sign of life.
“Messy…really?”
“It sounds good, at the moment,” Michelle said, patting his arm as he brought it back down to the table.
“It sounds good, yeah, but still a bit messy. You’ll have to make it more logical.” Captain, again.
“It’s going to be a satire, I think. Logic won’t be so important.”
“No, it doesn’t matter, you’ve still gotta have logic, mate. That’s a part of satire. If you make it too ridiculous then you’ll lose the audience, and then that’s it, you’re done.”
Benny thought it through. He had seen at least fifty satires in his life and he had read them in their most common genre, Science-fiction, and he was almost completely certain that logic wasn’t a crucial part of the formula. Did Vonnegut use logic in ‘Cat’s Cradle’? All that stuff about ice-nine, Bokonism, the way the world ended in that little Caribbean State…that wasn’t logical, it couldn’t be. But wasn’t that an absurd satire? He wasn’t sure what the difference was, he wasn’t even sure if there was a difference, but to say it out loud, how would Captain respond?
“Can’t lose the audience, mate,” Captain repeated with authority.
Benny bit both his lips and put a bag over his brain to stop it fighting back. There was no point arguing a point he might be wrong on, not with him, even though he was certain he was right.
“It’s just an idea…”
“…it’s not fleshed out yet, but that’s the basics of it. Anyone want to comment?”
Benny sat on a low lying seat in the City University of Hong Kong library with twelve other seats organized around him and nine slightly younger faces, none of whom had been intellectually birthed yet, aimed at his. It was his sixth month teaching these students of English literature how to write fiction and one of them had just asked him if he was writing anything himself.
“It sounds really cool.”
“Interesting beginning…”
“Yeah, I like the way the characters are like big party animals.”
All eleven students (twelve, including that new one, the one with the pretty face, what was her name? Wendy? Winnie? Krist, she was more than pretty, she was a psiren, a beautiful witch…where was she today?), except one, had so far failed to query Benny on his credentials as an instructor for them and were never willing to do any more than ask simple questions, the answers to which they would never be brave enough to dispute.
“I think it seems like science fiction, right?”
“Correct. Science fiction it is.”
“Science fiction is cool, I think…” another student said.
“Yeah, it’s good for ideas…” the first one agreed.
“Science fiction is amazing for its ideas,” Benny stated. “Some of the best works of the last century came from Science fiction. Heinlein, Haldeman, Dick…they all wrote great books, but they never get the credit they deserve.”
“Lucas…” burst from another seat.
“Lucas? You don’t mean George, do you?” Benny asked back.
“Biston…” came from another.
“Who?”
“Yes, George Lucas, Star Wars. They made books about it, they were very good. Very exciting…”
“Oh…”
“Luc Biston. He made the Fifth element, with the woman in the white bandages. That was very good…very visual.”
“Ah…Luc Besson.”
“Yes, he’s a visual genius, isn’t he?”
“Ok, on film, yes, he’s very good, but if we can get back to literature for a moment…” he searched the group for an intelligent face, “…does anyone else have any thoughts about the story idea?”
Most of the group looked down at their notepads. None of the students, except one, had ever asked Benny which magazines he had been published in, or what issue his story had been featured in, or whether or not it was archived and available for them to see online.
“The three spaceships are a good idea, I like the symbolism of them and the way the crew all swap around and sleep with each other. It is symbolic, right?” another student asked, this one wearing a straight beret and possibly trying to become a Chinese Simone de Beauvoir…at least that was the image Benny had in his head as he rallied a defence to her attack. Yes, this scene: Her, the girl (perhaps in a black beret, not mauve), sitting next to Sartre, who is next to a printing press…and she’s stuck to one side of his face, talking, performing, trying to drag him away from writing the words for Camus’ obituary, who he’s trying not to cry for. That’s a striking image, thought Benny. If I could get someone to draw that up in a sketch and think of a plot, it could be my first love story, my second novel…no, wait, the poverty one…fine, the third then…
“The spaceships aren’t strictly speaking symbolic, but the decaying interior is, to a degree, reflective of the decaying morality existent in the relationships between crew members. They’re loose with their relationships, so the ship is loose with itself. The disintegration of the environment in parallel with the disintegration of the moral soul, you understand?”
The students nodded, held their pens tight, and wrote some of Benny’s sophistry onto their notepads. None of them, except one, had ever asked him where they could find the novel he had told them had been published two years previously and acclaimed by many critics as being a “fresh view of a society floating happily in decay”. Some of them had gone to Amazon and other online book centres to look for it behind his back but had come up with nothing. They were curious, but not excessively so as they remembered Benny had explained once that his novel had been so scarring that it had been taken out of print and only a thousand copies now existed.
“I think the main character is promising too. You say he’s in love for the first fifty pages but they drift apart, and then he loses himself in other women and men until everyone has had everyone…” said the beret again.
“Yes that’s a key viewpoint of the novel, when I write it that is. He is the idealist, corrupted by himself and the boredom of all around him. The woman, in generic literature, would be his great love, but she gets cut off, and then you won’t see her again for the rest of the narrative, just on the edges…the periphery if you will. It all comes down to a kind of abstract representation of nihilism. That’s how it should come out anyway, if I do my job.”
Most of the students laughed politely, ignoring the contradiction of “abstract nihilism” actually being represented physically and non-abstractly through the lost love Benny had just described, and thinking that there was no possible way that this radical novelist could fail to storm the world. Of course, none of them, except one, had ever asked him precisely what techniques he used to convey his themes in his work and what he planned to use for this forthcoming novel. This was fortunate in Benny’s case as for the last six months he had been making up his own names for techniques that he had talked about in their discussions.
So far he had coined about seventeen, the picks of the bunch being:
‘dramatic refraction’ – Benny’s definition: “a technique you use when you want to skip ahead in time during the narrative, only you don’t give any reference to how much time has passed [he had name-dropped Proust as an example for this one despite never reading him, relying solely on the title and a front cover he had once seen – fuck it, it was a long book, they’d never check].
‘ornalisation’ – “a term given to description of landscape…streets, buildings, interiors, whatever else…when you don’t want to actually waste time describing it [this one had been born abruptly a month earlier when he had read a student’s story describing a hotel crumbling, with four pages of uninterrupted description, and accused the student of boring the reader out of the story. “There is no time for description,” he had declared, “but if you have to do it then do it simply and only mention things that stand out. Ornalise your story, nothing more.”].
…and his best one so far:
‘Needle narrative’ – “Basically, Pete, it’s a technique, originating with Chaucer, where numerous, peripheral characters talk around a central, important conversation, which is being conducted by two other, major characters. So, it’s hidden like a needle in the narrative. In other words, you have to scan through many lines of crap to get to lines of…well, hopefully, not so crap.
This last device had been lifted from Altman, the director who had made and delivered ‘Mash’ and ‘Short Cuts’ into Benny’s teenage life, but that was film, not literature, and that’s why it was so impressive to Benny. No one stole techniques from film and put them into prose, no one even thought of it; no one except him. [Of course, he was ignorant of well known writers such as Evelyn Waugh and David Foster Wallace, who often lifted techniques from the cinema and put them into their prose, but the students were also ignorant of them so, in their eyes, their teacher was still the prime mover.]
“I don’t know if you noticed or intended it but the idea of the journey has potential too…the way that they have a vague idea of where they’re going and how long it will take, but in between there’s not really that much to do. Do they set up some kind of social system as they go or does it stay the same as when they leave? What kind of class system develops when they’re all from the same class back on earth? I don’t know, it’s a good starting idea…it’ll be interesting to see what happens to it.”
Krist, it was him, the one, Benny hissed and kicked a wall in his head.
This student, this one, was trouble; a disputer, an asker of difficult questions, a stick-thin prick with shoulders narrower than his waist. He was the policeman of the group. Benny had known it since the second lesson, when the one had asked (without raising his hand and, by this action, being the one responsible for the others not doing it thereafter) for a copy of his book. The first direct challenge to my regime, he had thought at the time, before rejecting the request. But it wasn’t just that, it was his face, and his words, the language he used in lesson. He had a more phlegmatic gaze than the others, he was always slouched in his chair, was always phrasing his comments in a strange way, making sure that Benny knew there was no trust between them. He had asked about the magazines and the stories, he had questioned him on techniques and tried to catch him out. He was trouble, real trouble.
“The journey, Pete, is a metaphor for life, obviously. I mean, we all have ideas about where we are heading and we are all stuck on this planet after all, so, from this shared experience, this synthet-…this synergetic connection, isn’t every one of us so sure of life to begin with? A job, a family, God, Jesus, all of the basics, but then-…then as we get older, isn’t everyone less sure? You see, the longer the journey goes on, the more we question our purpose and, concurrently, the destination at the end of it all. The blanket of space and the walls of the ship naturally serve as our own self-constructed shields to the loneliness that exists where-…where others do not.”
Benny stared for a moment at his own dogged Pat Garrett then roved around the rest of the circle, hoping for a question from someone else.
“So, when do you plan to write this novel?” Pete asked.
“I think it will be my next, definitely my next. I’ll flesh it out in the summer, write it in the autumn then look for a publisher next year. That’s the plan at least.”
“Is it hard for you to find a publisher?”
“It’s always hard to find a publisher, err…Charlotte.” He almost called her Simone…that fucking beret. “I’m fighting against the market with the fiction I write.”
“But you’ve been published before, right?” Pete again, krist. Benny looked at his watch to see if time was up for the day. It wasn’t.
“I have, but, as I’ve told you before, it was taken out of print and hasn’t been seen since. Not a lot of people got to know my name or my work, unfortunately, apart from those in the know, the underground.”
Most of the students wrote something down on their notepads. ‘Underground’, he presumed. A beautiful word, so lovely and nebulous, and completely irrefutable. No one, not even Pete, could penetrate its-…its nebulousness? Its nebulosity? Krist, was there a noun for that?
“If you’re writing this one now, what about the other one?” asked Pete.
“Which other one?”
“The one about the poor.”
“Oh yeah, that one.” Benny remembered he had told them about it a few weeks ago. These kids were like tape recorders, didn’t they think of anything else?
“Yes, you said you were going to write something to right the wrongs of poverty and shock the world,” confirmed De Beauvoir.
“I did, didn’t I?”
“You said it wasn’t fair on them. You said a true writer needs to be on a level with them in order to write with honesty, and if we just rely on our imaginations then we will only ever write the most fictitious and offensively fantastical fiction,” added Pete.
Benny had in fact said all of those words in that exact order with the sole exception of the adjective “fictitious” to describe fiction three weeks earlier. But still, that was a ninety-nine percent accuracy rate...
“You’ve got a fine memory there...sorry, what’s your name again?”
“Pete.”
“Pete,” Benny corrected himself, and then with a grin, “see, I can’t even remember your name. Not so good for a teacher, huh?”
The students laughed politely, except two. Pete sat like a rock in his seat and De Beauvoir sat as a second rock in comradeship. She’s close to him, Benny warned himself. They’ll be the two to watch. I’ll have to recruit other students onto my side to balance it out. Perhaps Wendy or Winnie, the psiren, the one who was missing. She would be on his side; she always listened attentively and made smart comments. Krist, she was pretty…
“And the novel?” Pete asked again.
“Which one?”
“The one where you save all the poor people.”
“I’m still clocking up the experiences for that one, Pete,” Benny said. “I’ll keep you posted.”
Benny held up his camera and pressed the button.
The old men crowded around the stone table were too far from the flash to notice that he was taking pictures of them. He moved closer and found a place next to another stone table a few stone tables down from their stone table, the stone table that was forbidden for him to touch, crowd around or talk to. He had tried it once before and they had slapped him away like a mosquito. It wasn’t his area, it was theirs, and they had no time for others, especially foreigners, and especially foreigners who were interested in chronicling their daily cycle of hopelessness from which Benny had decided without fact or statistics they would find it impossible to break away from. There is no up for them, there is no higher education for their kids or grandkids to break the cycle, there are no positive axioms they can use to better themselves, he told his imaginary dictaphone.
Benny raised the camera again and clicked. One of the men noticed the flash and threw his arm down in brief disgust before turning his back.
No, none of the axioms Benny knew applied to the poor. “We are down here on our own, brothers,” he whispered to the group ahead of him. “No one’s going to help us, no one’s going to come along and lift us up with proper donations…money that could actually buy us something necessary.” He thought of one axiom in particular: ‘Life is what you make of it’, preached to the middle classes all around the world. But it wasn’t speaking to the poor. Not the majority at least, Benny reasoned. There were some who broke away obviously, the ones who were pretty, or who had preternatural brains, or who took to crime and killed more than the others in the muck. They could have the money, but what percentage was that? Was it even one percent?
I am part of that one percent, Benny decided guiltily, as he raised his seven thousand [Hong Kong] dollar digital camera back again to the scrawny men in vests, but I won’t leave you, any of you. I’m closer to you than any of those above. I will write your stories and you will see it, you’ll understand I’m one of yours, and those others…they won’t have a choice but to call me the truth teller, the one in the muck telling the-…the oracle in the muck. Just like Orwell, I’ll be the same, his successor, and I’ll write like he did, but better, truer, more-…
A shoulder collided with Benny’s waist and he looked down expecting to see a child run past, but instead saw an elderly woman with a yellow calf and no backbone bending herself into the bin four yards away. The hairs on his arms pricked up and he raised his camera, framing her ass and her legs against the twilight around them, thinking about the ambiguity of the shot, the question people would ask, “…is she climbing out or going in?” Either way, there would only be a second of pathos before their attention would be elsewhere, but this woman, this poor woman, thought Benny, his anger building up inside, would have to do this same action everyday until the day she didn’t wake up anymore…
He watched her struggle with the bin, the legs kicking out to push her further in. The camera waited patiently in his hand, his finger frozen over its button.
…and krist, how many others were like this in this city alone? And the rest of the world? All those people sitting in comfort every night, wondering where their lives were going and downing pills to ease off depressions that meant nothing, that were amateurish, that lacked any kind of suffering except what they allowed themselves to suffer, those fucking self-dramatists, those disgusting beasts in flash clothes, every fucking thing they bought was a luxury and they thought nothing of it, every dollar they spent on something that let them just pass the time was a dollar they should’ve spent on no one but this woman, this poor other stuck with her ass hanging off the edge of a bin. And it’s me, isn’t it? Oh krist, she’s here for me and she’s-…I’m the one, I have to get her out, don’t I? Benny cried within, feeling bile rising in his throat that wasn’t really there.
He put the camera in his pocket and hurried over to the woman with his hands out front and opened in a gesture of reassurance, but stopped as she pulled herself back out, her hand clutching a slab of cardboard, her prize. Benny dropped his hands and fished in his pockets for change he could give her, but only found a hundred note. What would she do with it if he gave it to her? It couldn’t make any kind of difference to her life, could it?
The old woman shuffled off towards the next bin with her piece of cardboard while Benny stood inert in the middle of the park, in Sham Shui Po, the poorest area of Hong Kong. He folded the hundred and put it into his wallet, reasoning that it would’ve been futile to give it to her anyway; gestures like that were solitary in these parts and would total nothing. No, the things that had to change were structural, things like education, wealth distribution, the rich sharing all they didn’t need. These things will never change though, thought Benny. They never have and they never will.
From the furthest edge of his eye, he saw a crater in the park that he had possibly seen somewhere before. Distracted, he left the woman dangling from the next bin along and took a few steps closer to the large hole. He couldn’t have seen it before, he had never been to this place, but it did seem to resemble something he had seen, a borrowed image from another area, he presumed. He made it to the edge and recognized the shape of it, the stretched out kidney curves of a swimming pool missing its water. A template image from myriad places and myriad films, it was lurking in this park, parched.
Benny raised his camera again and framed the empty pool in shot. It’s cinematic enough to impress someone, he reasoned. As he absently clicked off two pictures, he forgot about the bin-woman and the others living in the dirt, and didn’t think of the clear symbolism that putting either one onto the pool floor would’ve produced.
“Ok, here’s another idea. You wanna hear?”
Benny and a girl called Oggy Ho were alone on a bench in a children’s playground at the far side of Victoria Park with a group of five boys, who Oggy guessed were somewhere around seventeen or eighteen, drinking by the climbing frame nearby. They had been there for almost an hour and had already tried the slide and the swings. Both of them had been too big to sit on the swings properly, but they had sat anyway, their legs being forced upwards to let their feet rest comfortably on the ground. Benny had thought it would be more fun than this to come to the playground, but it was where he had brought the others and it had made them happy enough.
“Is a story?”
“It will be soon,” Benny answered.
Their feet were off the ground and on the bench, their bodies facing the side. Benny sat behind using his body as an outer shell, his legs stretching out past hers and his chin resting on the top of her head. To get closer, to close the shell, he hung his arms around her neck and moved his crotch closer to her ass, allowing himself the image of the dress removed and his trousers around his ankles, and the rest of him invisible inside her.
“Story about me?”
“Kind of. It’s about a beautiful, young girl who shows her intelligence and steals the heart of a guy on the cusp of literary greatness. You wanna hear?”
“Litary greatness, what mean?”
“It means becoming a famous writer, which is what the guy wants.”
She laughed even though it wasn’t deserved. Benny brought her top half closer and buried his head behind her shoulders where she couldn’t see his eyes rolling. She wasn’t ideal, God knows she wasn’t Winnie, but she still had a body.
“It’s you and me?”
“Maybe it is,” he said quietly, still hidden from view. “You wanna hear it?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Ok, it starts in a bar with the girl. She’s sitting there alone with a drink in front of her, when a guy, I think I’ll make him an artist, comes over and starts talking to the girl, trying to come on to her…”
Benny continued the story, making up the narrative as he went along, confident that this girl wouldn’t get caught up on any of the details. Just the idea of someone smarter writing especially for her would be enough to get her on her back, or on her knees. And, in truth, he was half-thinking about Winnie anyway, thinking of ways he could talk to her the next time he saw her in class. She was smart. Krist, a lot smarter than this one.
“So they have an argument in the taxi and the girl, who turns out to be really, really smart, makes him look really, really stupid and then walks off leaving him to pay for the taxi. Then she meets the other guy, the guy who’s on the cusp of literary greatness-…”
“Huh? What it’s mean again?” she interrupted.
“He’s becoming a writer, remember?” Benny shot it out quickly, anticipating the delay. “So, she meets the writer and they have a really, really smart conversation and the writer guy, who I might call Benny, realises that he is in love with this girl, and-…”
“Girl you might call Oggy…” she said snugly.
“Who might be called Oggy,” he conceded, “and they end up kissing outside in the rain and then…”
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