Work Text:
“I went after the supreme form,
after the cloud and the nightingale
and the crystal, the youth and the gem
of heartache.”
Porfirio Barba Jacob, “The Sound of the Wind” (1944)
—
Michael woke up in a cold bed under the drowsy 5 p.m. light of a leaden sky, even though it was actually eight in the morning. This would depress most people, but Michael’s mood these days was like the stone at the entrance of the tomb, only shifting with the resurrection of Iesu Mawr (Saesneg: Jesus Christ) himself.
It was Friday, Gwaith Gwirfoddol (S: Voluntary Work) day across Wales. Anna had taken the car the night before, and had only responded to his frenzied texts asking after her safety with a single passive-aggressive “thumbs-up” emoji. Passive-aggressive because, since Wales had become a haven for climate refugees from Middle Eastern countries, the double-meaning of thumbs-up had trickled into day-to-day discourse. The dual gesture of “Fuck You/Da Iawn” was uncannily appropriate for the times.
In any case, without the car he’d have to bicycle into town, which meant stepping-up the pace of his morning routine: tea, breakfast, newspaper. The dark grey clouds admitted little light, so solar power was restricted to the basics. Some things would need to be done the old-fashioned way. No electric kettle, and natural gas only for those with disabilities. Sure, no one checked who was disabled or not, and every other person had some form of manifested Long COVID sequelae, but only a selfish cunt would siphon heating away from people with chronic lung infections.
So he lit a fire in the wood-burning stove and filled a kettle with water from the tap. Because if one utility could be relied upon in Wales, even during a slow-burn apocalypse, it was water. Fell from the sky as manna or a curse and, in the winters, their primordial mother the sea crept ever forward, as if to reclaim her misbegotten children. But she had started with the English, because last hired first fired, and the Welsh were the indigenous inhabitants of Britain, you know.
As he waited for the kettle to boil, he opened his tablet to read the newspaper, which had gone entirely digital to conserve paper. Since Wales had unofficially become self-governing after the Druids stormed Sotheby’s in 2028, the consumer economy had turned on its head and everything was conserved, recycled or, even better: upcycled. Upcycling perhaps was the best metaphor for Welsh community uplift after The Flood, especially of people, which was a welcome change after being treated as disposable for the better part of a millennium.
This upcycling of the community showed in a resurgence of local news media. The Welsh newspapers had stopped producing print editions, even before The Flood had turned much of the South Coast into an estuary, but this had been the result of disinvestment from Westminster and the collapse of local journalism generally, back when capitalism had been the governing temporality.
Though the internet these days was a piecemeal proposition, the national satellite network hosted Archifau Cymru (S: The Welsh Archives), which maintained a listing of local, self-published newspapers for various interests, or none at all. With fewer people working jobs, in the old sense, this had actually produced quite the resurgence in local journalism, of sorts. Some people reported on local happenings, most from one intersectional perspective or another: the Welsh nationalists (who now felt like a throwback to the ethnic idea of “nation”), the transfeminists, the animists, and even some people who may have gone a bit twp (no Saesneg translation) after their animist psilocybin initiations and wrote niche publications, like charting the progress of a particular tree bracken on a weekly basis.
Michael had taken to reading a graphic novelist, Aneurin Bevan ap Llewelyn ap Gruffudd (probably a nom de plume, but you never knew these days), who self-published a serialised periodical centering on a Welsh King Arthur (which he was, look it up!) finally rising from his resting place in Glastonbury. He’d actually planned to rise during the rebellion of Owain Glyndŵr, but had hit the snooze button one too many times and now was grappling with the byzantine bureaucracy of Cymruddyfodoliaeth, (S: the Future Wales). This week he’d announced himself as King in Bangor, so the Ludic Works Circle assigned him to a day teaching tweens how to sanitise chemical toilets, followed by clearing the filters in the municipal sewage works. The title was “Sit gwahanol, un diwrnod” (S: Different shit, same day.)
Without Anna, breakfast would be even more spare than usual. He wasn’t much of a cook, but he did enjoy food, and though he’d acclimated to localism in most ways, or at least was stoic about it, localised foodways in the British Isles could get bland. Even the local Indian take-away had incorporated leeks into most dishes and used spices smuggled in with drones, though the local authorities turned a blind eye because everyone liked a good vindaloo, even if the main ingredients were mutton and turnips.
The ice box in the cellar only had ingredients for cooking from scratch, so for breakfast he cut off some slices of dark bread, full of seeds and coarse grains. He ached for marmite, or even some Flora to lubricate the thick bread, but the kettle finally boiled, so the tea moistened its path to his belly which, even with less food and weekly bursts of manual labour, was still a pot belly. But with fewer consumer goods to insulate one from the outside world, like central heating and German-engineered winter jackets, it turned out that having one’s own padding was no bad thing at all.
The day would be long, and some of the more zealous team leaders saw tea as anathema to local ethics, an unwelcome bastion of colonialism, or both, and would only serve ‘lupine coffi’ on breaks, which was not coffee or even caffeinated, but was brown, grown in Wales, had an earthy taste, and didn’t really taste great however you drank it, but was best served warm.
The tension of the past days, David’s cohousing proposal, and Anna’s explosive reaction to said cohousing proposal, clung to him stale and tacky as old sweat. He yearned for a shower to reset, but without natural gas inside, he’d have to use the generator-run outdoor shower, and the idea of getting naked under a dull sky felt like a synesthesia of melancholy, and anyway he needed to hurry to make it to the city centre by ten.
Michael had nothing against bicycles. Actually, a bicycle moved at a pace that was neither too plodding, as in walking, nor too high-stakes, as in driving. But the hedges on country roads threw up so many blind corners, and sometimes drivers would hare around the corners. Now there were fewer motorists, but with the roads in their sorry state, there was always the risk of hitting a pothole and going flying, so he wore a helmet. His motivation for paying for road works out of his own pocket had not been totally selfless, but no one was complaining.
Thankfully, Michael didn’t have to worry about leaving his daughters alone in an empty house in Anna’s absence, as the there were still two weeks left of the Ysgol Goedwig (S: Forest School), until the cold weather forced them back into the house for remote learning. That’s something he’s had trouble adjusting to, the school year flipping its schedule to March-to-November, in order to avoid unnecessarily concentrating young people in indoor spaces. Their generation’s health was already so fragile from the first years of the pandemic so, at least in Wales, there was a concerted effort to create conditions for their immune systems to recover, hoping that the emergency repurposing trials of HIV medications would be fruitful.
There had also been a shift in pedagogical emphasis. The usual subjects were still taught, though the English imperial curricula were undergoing significant revisions by various local Decolonising Circles, but they were supplemented with practical skills that would benefit the new society. Now, it was mushroom season, so the girls were learning about mycology. Which would be useful, not only to supplement food stores when things got lean during what used to be called the ‘starving months’ between February and April (and, from what he’d heard, had reverted to that in England parts on Scotland), but also because his daughters sometimes attended the rituals of a local animist coven, and if they wanted to do the the adult rite-of-passage in a few years’ time, it involved harvesting one’s own psilocybin. And knowing that they would know magic from malignant mushrooms calmed his nerves. Somewhat. In his day, you took whatever psilocybin the local metalheads had on offer and proceeded to enter heaven and/or hell in the presence of sheep. It was much more straightforward.
Just as schooling had changed for children, work had changed to something unrecognisable for adults, both worse and better. Like so many things. Most jobs that had been considered bullshit under the previous state of affairs, such as in finance, the service industry, and pretty much anything that had only existed to serve the wealth agenda, had disappeared overnight after the devolved Welsh government authorised a tax revolt against Westminster, but that was its own story.
Michael was fortunate because the arts, including acting, were an essential part of the Cymruddyfodoliaeth. While he’d anticipated that, at this stage of his career, he’d mostly be doing well-paid roles as sages, villains and sagacious villains, the budgets had contracted while the repertoire had expanded. Because the old ways of theatre and visual media by their nature concentrated large groups of people in enclosed spaces, England’s provisional government in Leeds had legislated away more high-risk productions and diverted arts funding to smaller, but more diverse projects: independent films, micro-budget Archive series (TV was no longer viable from an infrastructure perspective, so the satellite archive had become a more democratic alternative) and, of course, old-fashioned outdoor theatre. This had been a boon for Wales and Welsh-language programming, which had always made do with micro-budgets and small production teams, and now were no longer competing with England for resources.
Since commuting was no longer possible, if Michael wanted to continue his English career, it would have required a move to the new de facto capitol of Leeds, so instead he decided to embrace his changed circumstances. He’d thought his Welsh was passable but, acting with lifelong Welsh speakers, he felt terribly inferior. In the beginning, he learned many of his lines phonetically, especially when speaking Gogledd Cymru (S: North Welsh) and teenagers from the Valleys acted circles around him. Now he was fairly fluent, but he appreciated how much acting had always been through the prism of language. He knew instinctively how to inflect characters through the English language, but it had always felt counter to some latent instinct. Now, acting in Welsh simultaneously felt forced, because his template for personhood had been constructed in English, but also a homecoming to the terrain of Welsh, a primordial way of being that redefined natural. The Cymraeg Revival Circle definitely had a point that language was the carrier of culture.
But his fame didn’t exempt him from Gwaith Gwirfoddol. Nothing exempted you from Gwaith Gwirfoddol except claiming that you’d been radicalised by the far-right, but skivers who went that route quickly found that the reparative therapy was even worse.
And so, this Friday as every Friday, Michael showed up at the Neuadd y Dref (S: City Hall) to be assigned to whatever needed doing. There had been cultural reasons for Wales’ conversion to local foodways, but it was also practical, which so happened to be another core societal value. Since Brexit was the gift that kept on giving, Britain now had less access to globalised food commerce so, like Cuba during the Cold War, Wales had converted every iota of arable space into agriculture. A great deal of privately-held land had been unofficially expropriated by the Agriculture Circle, but since much of it was owned by absentee landlords who’d fled abroad after the first Flood, and with fuel shortages air travel was severely restricted, landlords trying to seize back land would have to brave the pirates in the English Channel or pay to be trafficked in order to get back into the country. Oh, the irony.
The organisation of the voluntary work day could be haphazard, but Michael had learned to find the person holding a clipboard. Because in war, peace, pre- or post-apocalypse, a clipboard meant logistics. He checked-in with them, took a COVID rapid test and, as he waited for the results, was assigned to harvesting sugar beets. At his age, sometimes the farm work could exhaust him to the bone, but he was still crawling with tension about Anna and David, so he welcomed the chance to do some perhaps literally back-breaking labour.
The sugar beets had been grown on a patch of land at the base of the hills, an irregularly-shaped space that was too small to be plowed by heavy machinery, so it would all be done by hand. The work crew had six people of all ages, genders, and extractions. This was by design, as part of the philosophy of Gwaith Gwirfoddol was creating a shared project for people who might not otherwise meet. The positive effects of such social mixing had been demonstrated time-and-again during wars, but they certainly didn’t need one of those.
It was too far to bicycle, in any case, so Michael and his five workmates climbed into the back of an old flatbed truck that had been jury-rigged to run on recycled vegetable oil, which meant they’d be accompanied by the smell of ‘chip shop after closing’ for the duration of the ride. Michael didn’t feel particularly chatty, and with nothing to occupy him, found himself checking and re-checking his mobile from a message for Anna.
Outside the city, the satellite signal for his mobile dropped, and he wouldn’t hear any news until the evening, so he listened to the conversation unfold amongst his workmates. It was encouraged to speak Welsh on Gwaith Gwirfoddol days, but as this could be a third or fourth language for some, this could be adjusted to Wenglish or even Saesneg, so long as it was intoned with Welsh musicality. It turned out that a good distraction from one’s troubles was listening to people with worse troubles.
Only two of his crewmates originally came from Wales, the others were from Ukraine, Eritrea and The States. That was the way of things these days, people fleeing one disaster or another, as often as not trading problems. But Wales, which above all required motivated people to make this mad project work, had become a landing place for all sorts.
The person from Eritrea was jolliest, and hearing Welsh through their vivacious Eritrean accent was a treat. Despite the cheer, Michael knew there was a civil war going on in their home country, and that had to be weighing on them. The two native Welsh were a lesbian couple, the Ukrainian was ginger-haired and a former resistance fighter, but by far the most morose was actually the Yank. In fact, they were the only person who seemed more withdrawn than Michael, having squeezed themself into the corner next to the truck cab, trying to look engrossed in the landscape, even though it was hills-and-sheep, hills-and-sheep, all the way down. Michael only knew they were from Stateside because the three words of Welsh they’d spoken during check-in had been so histrionically American that there was no mistaking it.
Michael didn’t want to speak to anyone, let alone someone who seemed in the grip of major depression, but in this case civic duty took over. “Depression in your fellow Cymru? Extend some hospitality.” The English slogans of the Welfare Circle, before they transitioned fully to Welsh, sometimes had a Maoist ring, he had to admit. But since he had no inclination to feign cheerfulness himself, and perseverating about Anna and David was a daft fucking idea, he pushed himself to engage.
“Bore da. Michael dw i. ‘E/Nhw.’ Shwmae?” Michael asked.. Because when ‘Nhw’ (S: ‘they’) pronouns became an option, he’d thought ‘Why not add them to the repertoire?’
“Tipyn bach,” the American said. “Daniel. E/Ef. Um...dw’in hoffi coffi,” he added, which was colloquial speak for, ‘I can only say I like coffee’
“Well, I’ve only got tea, so that will have to do,” Michael said, switching to Saesneg. Daniel visibly relaxed.
“All right?”
“Fine. It’s not too hot. But I feel like I’ve pissed myself.”
Michael offered his handkerchief for the fellow to clean-up. “You can drink off the rim,” he said, because they’d both tested negative on the morning’s rapid tests and would be sharing air all day, anyway.
Though he was an actor, Michael was somewhat incurious about the stories of people he met. And especially for people from Stateside, so many had been dragged through hell during the Troubled Twenties, that it wasn’t a polite subject. He used to see this frame of mind as a flaw, until he realised that actually he was very keen on people, but as an immediate experience. Michael was interested in was how a person comported themselves in any given moment: how they held their bodies, their mannerisms, how they groomed themselves.
For his part, Daniel had three days of beard grown in, likely because he hadn’t gotten the hang of a straight razor and disposables were hard to come by. He was also on the shorter side, though had some muscle that looked newly acquired. May be more accustomed to desk work. He was handsome in a certain eccentric genre of person — Ginsberg’s phrase “angel-headed hipsters” came to mind — and, of course, his most fetching attribute was his central heterochromia.
Daniel was pale, but naturally darker than most indigenous Welsh. And against this background, Daniel’s eyes appeared green on first glance, but were actually a grey-blue surrounding a starburst of yellow. Eyes weren’t normally so vivid, except in high-resolution photographs, but on a grey day in Wales everyone’s shone like jewels.
Since Michael by default assumed everyone was bisexual, and was always up for a new flavour of person, this man’s eyes were normally enough to whet his interest. But he was too distracted and just didn’t feel in the mood, so in conversation stuck to their present circumstances. It was an interesting change to talk to a person without one part of his mind already in bed with them.
“Have you harvested sugar beets before?”
“Not yet. I’ve done potatoes, though. Not here, but at an intentional community in Dorset.”
“Dorset? Had a holiday on the Jurassic Coast?”
“Not exactly. Though I did swim there once. The North Atlantic in March hits like razor blades, by the way. I was a guest worker at a Friary there.”
“What, for the English voluntary service?”
“Before all that. I went to the countryside to write. Also, I’d overstayed a student visa, so wanted to go off-the-grid, if you take my meaning.”
There were loads of stories like that. People who found themselves stateless in England, and seemingly by osmosis found their way to Wales. Michael didn’t push the topic, which in its own way validated the everydayness of what this fellow had been through “Oh, you’re a writer. I think I read a poet say ‘Dorset is light and dark, ecstasy and melancholy.’ Write any pastoral poetry while you were there?”
“Not so much. I haven’t written poetry since uni. But I wrote some for TV. Was climbing the greasy pole of writing for soaps, hoping I’d be an ‘auteur’ someday. I mean, the idea of an auteur is a hangover of the myth of the individual artistic genius from the Romantic period, but that’s really the only way to succeed if you have a creative vision out here…” his face fell. He must have caught himself speaking in the present tense about things tucked-away in the past. “But that’s over and my Welsh isn’t good enough to write here.”
“And what is your creative vision? Give me your elevator pitch,” because if there was one thing you could rely on about artists, they could talk up the ins-and-outs of manifesting their souls outward. And it would take the pressure off Michael to manage the interaction for a bit.
And Daniel had a ready answer: “I wanted to write horror comedies where gay men took revenge on their oppressors. My first screenplay was about a garment worker in a Phillippine sweatshop. It was called the ‘Textile Chainsaw Massacre.’”
Michael had to look again at this gentle whiff of a man, somewhere in the peat bog of ‘lost’ in his thirties, which could turn a corner into either a bitter or settled forties and thought, ‘Well now, there’s more here than I thought.’
And so for the rest of the ride, Michael and Daniel pitched increasingly absurd loglines that fit the basic premise.
-Disgruntled furries start a zombie apocalypse. (Petplay Sematary)
-Hirsute young men wrestle in basements, then have a domestic terrorist debt jubilee. (Fight Cub)
-The Antichrist dry-humps a statue of backward naked Jesus in his basement. (That was just the plot of the Omen III.)
They were so engrossed in their conversation, that their crewmates took notice and joined in the pitching and punning, so that when the truck stopped at a field at the foot of some hills, there was a well-established feeling of camaraderie.—
Michel didn’t understand the meaning of ‘honest work’ until he harvested. In fact, it put the whole Puritan Work Ethic into perspective, even if he thought that, on balance, it had been used for the most rancid exploitation. One need only look to the roots of the Welsh diaspora for that.
The honesty wasn’t the virtue of work itself, but a subjective feeling of honesty that came from doing the work in the right context. Modern life meant spending much of his time in his head, buzzing like a hard drive in need of fragmenting, rife with inadequately metabolised food and impressions. But digging ditches shoulder-to-shoulder with folks in the community: the exertion, the coregulation and, above all, the knowledge that his labour would sustain those around him, well suddenly that buzzing fell away and he felt an internal integrity that he’d never known was possible.
To harvest the beets, the team had a carefully worked-out system where they stood in a line between rows, picked up one beet in each hand, knocked them together to shake off the dirt, deposited them in a line, and moved on. It was exhausting, and it didn’t take long for Michael to work-up a good sweat.
The work also seemed to perk-up Daniel, who worked directly ahead of Michael and, no doubt from physical labour, had a nicely-rounded backside. All right, maybe Michael wasn’t completely off sex today. And so he turned on the charm, and led the singing as they worked.
Some traditional Welsh songs had a good rhythm for harvesting, then they moved onto Methodist hymns (some in Saesneg, but we won’t hold that against them), and Arabic pop music from the 2010s (courtesy of the thriving Syrian community in Port Talbot). Though it seemed that the only songs for which everyone knew the lyrics, back-to-front, were The Proclaimers, who had experienced a renaissance at the turn of the 2030s, becoming the instrospective yin to Abba’s celebratory yang at outdoor, socially-distanced community sing-alongs, or what were sometimes affectionately called the “Karao-stethfodd.”
During the Te Bach (S: tea break), which unfortunately only served ‘lupine coffi,’ Michael, who had become an amateur enthusiast of improvised musical instruments, showed Daniel how to play spoons, while Michael sang “Throw the ‘R’ away,” the Eritrean banged a bucket drum and one of the Welsh lesbians broke out a harmonica. It was a homely little quartet, but more expansive and yet intimate than any concert at the O2 in the Before Times. Surrounded by thousands, he had no awareness of how truly lonely they all had been.
—
On the trip back, Michael shared the remains of the tea with his crewmates, to which the Ukrainian added some kind of cannabis tincture and, with everyone loosened up, Michael managed to both invite Daniel to join him for dinner and volunteer him to make said dinner. Because Michael truly was a bad cook.
Back at the Neuedd y Dref, Michael only had the bicycle, and Daniel had walked from the vacant office building that had been repurposed as community housing. But scarcity had forced everyone to hone their skills of improvisation, so Michael begged a spare helmet off the logistician with the clipboard, and Daniel rode on the back of the bicycle, astride the rear basket, but he was slight so it only bent a little under his weight.
—
The girls were already home from the Forest School, so Michael introduced them. Always enthusiastic about new company, they tried to engage Daniel in Welsh and, detecting his discomfort, then offered to play sous chefs while he cooked dinner, teaching him the words for everything they used. The low-stakes conversation with Michael’s daughters relaxed him, and eventually he was able to speak three words in a row. The grammar was shite, but that wasn’t the point.
With the ingredients in the outdoor ice box, the best he could manage of the few entirely local ingredients in the kitchen turned out to be leek burritos flavoured with leftover sauce from David’s barely touched Indian takeaway.
When it was served, Michael must have looked like murder, because Daniel blanched and asked if he’d done something wrong. The truth was that it felt like a sin to share anything of David with his children, especially before he had the opportunity to have a proper conversation about the situation, beyond explaining that he and their mother had a row but everything was ok. And it felt like an insult to share it with a stranger who, even if for the rest of his days he compressed all of his attention to a singularity on the topic of David, could never compass what the world was losing. But there was no way to say this, so he just said, “Just never seen Welsh-Indian-Mexican fusion before.”
“My abuela’s from Oaxaca, so I learned some of her cooking. Wish I could make you a molé, but an authentic sauce takes days and I can say with confidence that zero of the ingredients grow in Wales.”
—
After dinner, Michael did the washing-up, a chore he’d learned in order to compensate for his lack of facility with food. Returning to the sitting room, he caught Daniel browsing the books on the bookcase. He looked embarrassed about being caught, because these days people were less saturated with media, and books were seen as more intimate. Someone’s psyche, history, passions all at once. But Michael liked a bit of passion on display, so was pleased that Daniel had unintentionally initiated this. “Find something you fancy?” Michael asked.
“Yeah, I hadn’t expected to find Porfirio Barba Jacob’s Poemas Intemporales here. Do you read Spanish?”
“Alas, no. These books I inherited from a boyfriend, a long time ago.” Michael never circumambulated around the truth. It only delayed conversations getting interested and invited lowest-common-denominator assumptions.
“I’m sorry. If I may say so, he had good taste. Jacob was a gay Colombian poet in the nineteen hundreds,” Daniel said. Michael involuntarily cringed at the reminder that, for for younger people, his home century now had the status of archaeology. Soon it would be known, along with other mineral eras, as a mote in the eye of the Silicon Age, no doubt. “He lived most of his life in exile in Mexico ”
“Fascinating. Yes, Tim did have good taste. He was one of those people who actually read poetry, more slowly than novels, even. Drove me to distraction, but now I can appreciate it.”
“So you haven’t read this?”
“Sadly not.”
“My Spanish is rusty, but maybe I could translate. Oh, wait…” Daniel flipped the pages and found that the second half of the book were the poems translated into English. “Would you look at that!”
Reading aloud had become a favoured pastime, especially past solar season when electronic distractions were off-the-table, and people relied on each other for entertainment.
Michael asked the girls whether they wanted to join, as the younger generation were even more keen on books than adults; with so few printed nowadays they had the veneer of ‘retro,’ like playing granddad’s gramophone or something. But they were rehearing for an upcoming Samhain ritual with the animists, so didn’t join. Pagan rites. What a surreal way for the acting gene to pass to the next generation.
“Guess it’s just the two of us,” Michael said, with just enough suggestion for Daniel to take-or-leave.
Daniel, who perhaps didn’t have the self-confidence to believe that he was being seduced, and likely with too many memories of misunderstanding and being misunderstood, said, “I hope that’s ok.”
“Fine. How about we read in a round. You read the Spanish and I’ll read the English.”
“I’d like that. Where should we start? The titles are: ‘Ballad of Wild Joy.’ ‘Future.’ ‘Oh, Night.’ ‘October Lamentation.’ ‘Sound of the Wind’—”
Just then, there was a knock on the window, making both of them jump. Michael kept an actual fucking cavalry sabre in the sitting room (long story), and bandits seldom had more than kitchen knives in their arsenal, so he was prepared. But it was just the wind knocking a branch of ripe apples against the glass.
Michael sighed in relief, then laughed to break the tension. “That seems to answer it,” he said.
He opened a bottle of home-distilled fruit spirits and poured each a glass. Alcohol aggravated Anna’s COVID sequelae, and though in this household middle teens was old enough for heavily-diluted spirits, the girls chose not to drink. Young people just weren’t interested in alcohol these days. So it was nice to share the comforting ritual of drink with someone, especially after Michael had cocked-up the champagne with David. He tried to push David out of his mind, but as they were in the sitting room with the freshly-cleaned recliner where he had let David fuck himself into a health crisis, David clung to the room like a spectre.
Still, he steered Daniel away from the recliner and toward the sofa where, if he couldn’t banish thoughts of David, they would simply exist alongside his new guest. Come to think, the name ‘Daniel’ was very nearly a portmanteau of ‘David and Michael,’ which was too daft of an observation to pursue any further.
And so they read the poem in a round. It had been so long since Michael had spoken in truly sonorous English, and the words and the sound brought back impressions of times past, which both felt present and dreamlike.
“The sound of the wind in the arcade
holds within it the key to myself:
I am a strengthened puissance,
I am a lamentation of the abyss.
In the midst of the sidereal choirs
I hear a thing in me that’s out of tune.
My actions and my songs
had a very particular rhythm.
I came to the torrent of life
in Santa Rosa de Osos,
in a midnight all in fire
in luminaries of blurry omens.
I took possession of the earth,
mine in dreams, linen and bread;
and, changing the rules of war
I was Eve… and I was Adam.
I embraced the ripe field
as if it were a woman,
and a dark wine of pleasure
muddled me.
I relished the voice of the wind
as if it were a ripe fruit,
and I ate it… with a plaint
of greediness in my heart.
And in the day winged skiff
and to the beat of the sea at night
my fantasy drifted
in a beam of solar light.
I went after the supreme form,
after the cloud and the nightingale
and the crystal, the youth and the gem
of heartache.”
The room seemed to hum with the poet’s desperate joie de vivre, a keening pleasure hanging over the abyss of unmaking.
He couldn’t read Daniel’s expression, as the young man had taken off his spectacles and was cleaning them on his shirt. But for Michael, either from the true content of the poem, or simply because David’s lingering presence was so suffocating, the images were like a serious of non-sequiturs all about him, atemporal and vivid. The ripe field as if he were a woman, the nightingale and the crystal, the blurry omens, even. Though that last one crossed a line into fucking trite.
Perhaps it resonated of David because he lived like a poet; so many of them took leaps into big-R Romanticism in search of the ultimate, only to fall into some new species of disaster.
Michael agreed with Anna. It was all a terrible idea. But Anna was a realist, whereas Michael was a nihilist, so had come to opposite conclusions about the appropriate reaction. Anna was committed to her version of what life should be, a tenacity that had made Michael fall in love with her, and so she wanted to avoid madness.
But Michael knew that life was terrible, inchoate, irredeemable madness. And instead of trying to shape it into something that looked like someone’s version of sanity, he embraced the darkness like a brother. David’s dying a senseless death and wants to start a commune for his last few months? Well, all right. At least his vision was more Oneida than Jonestown. And it was fitting, a nice couplet to tie-off of a life that had suddenly degenerated from sonnet to freeverse to noise.
Anna would come around to the idea, or she wouldn’t. He was more sanguine that seemed decent in the circumstances, but he knew Anna’s chief fear was that this situation would somehow change him or change them when, under it all, nihilism was perhaps the most flexible approach to life in that nothing could really shake its core. Whether she agreed to come along, or not, she’d soon see that he was the same Michael and it would most likely be fine.
Thinking about it would only introduce unnecessary doubts, so he returned to Daniel, who was absently turning the book’s pages, looking pensive himself.
“What did you think?”
Daniel replaced his cleaned spectacles on his face and said, “I too ‘hear a thing in me that’s out of tune.’”
“Every artist does,” Michael said, which was true, but even he knew there were more uncomfortable, and that’s to say more personal, layers.
“I’m afraid I’ll never be sane again,” Daniel cut right to the heart of it.
“I don’t think you want to hear my answer to that,” Michael said, not because he wanted to avoid holding space for his guest, but because his earnest answer would probably upset him.
“Go on, I want to hear it.”
“I doubt anyone over thirty will be sane again. The younger generation, they’ve acclimated to a world that I don’t recognise and, if I’m honest, I don’t think will work. I appreciate the idealism of this Future Wales, with the voluntary work, and endless Deconolonising gestures, and ‘We are all Cymru’ and all that. But it so flies in the face of the values and assumptions I grew up with, that even if it works I can’t believe it. I’ve lost the flexibility. The girls, though, they’re going to take mushrooms, commune with Queen Mab, and go on visionining toward the future, whatever it is, because they make sense in all of this.”
“So it’s too late for us?”
“Me, certainly. You? Who can say? You’re on the bubble, so you can go either way. But what I do think is that you’re perfectly capable of learning Welsh. But holding onto those old dreams, where you’re William Friedkin Jr. or something, that’s holding you back. Television’s dead. William Friedkin’s dead. And, in Wales, English is dead. Find something alive to care about.”
Daniel took the liberty of pouring himself more fruit spirits.
“What do you care about?” he asked.
“How do you mean?” Michael knew exactly what he meant.
But perhaps energised by the opportunity to speak from the truth of his sorrow, Daniel didn’t allow the prevarication, polite guest etiquette or no. “I remember you from telly. I dreamcast you in a role once. A reclusive veterinary surgeon who is abducted to be the personal physician to an unscrupulous time traveler. It made the dialogue sparkle. I even got repped based on the script. But then, you know, the Floods. But you? You were A-list and now you do theatre in the park for picnickers and snogging teenagers.”
“No one says ‘snog,’ you know.”
“Oh, that’s nothing. I once mixed-up ‘Nonce’ and ‘Nance’ and it got heated. But really, it would mean a lot to hear, what do you care about?”
Michael never had the question put to him so directly, and that spark of novelty spurred him on to look inward sincerely. It went without saying that he cared about Anna, his children, David and his family, and all of his family and friends. But care here had a keener edge, something that got to the root of what moved him as a person, even on leaden days like today where it felt like 5 p.m. from waking until sleeping. That made end-of-life care for a dying friend in a potentially explosive polyamorous relationship seem, if not reasonable, at least do-able.
“Me.”
Daniel looked at him with curiosity, as if to say: ‘I see, now go on.’
Michael continued, “I’ve been graced, and I mean that in the full sense of the word, with a mellifluous voice, an expressive face, a dexterous body, and I have a passion for filtering everything I see through it. Giving it life that’s also unmistakably mine. That’s what I care about.”
Michael could get lost in the music of his own words, but when he paused and checked himself for bullshit, none was detected. It was all the truth. He continued, “Now I’ve revealed myself to be an egomaniac so, when I ask this question, you have to answer honestly. Nothing noble about greater goods and all that nonsense. What do you care about?”
Daniel didn’t hesitate. He knew his desires like a thirsting person knew with their whole life history that they needed water. “Knowing handsome men inside-and-out. A knowing as loving as anti-social…” The dark, certain tone of this previously introverted young man got Michael hard. But then Daniel seemed to become uncomfortable at the fervour of his own passion and added, more tentatively. “Maybe I should have led with that in my elevator pitch for horror comedies.”
Michael ignored the deflection, sensing it was a moment to put words aside. He and Daniel had maintained a polite gap between them on the sofa, but it was easy to reach across, to put a hand in Daniel’s dark hair, running his fingers through the strands.
Daniel at first tensed, then relaxed into it. He put a hand on Michael’s thigh and leaned into the touch. When he was well-and-truly immersed in the sensation, Michael took hold his hair (commanding but not too rough, at least not yet), pulled his head to one side, and bit his neck. Daniel actually cried out then and, remembering they weren’t alone in the house, clapped a hand over his mouth.
So Michael led him to the date room and closed the door.
—
After all of the accumulated tension of the past days, as well as admitting to a stranger, fellow Cymru or not, that he lived and breathed the mortal sin of solipsism, he needed something as straightforward as orgasmic release. But despite holding his own ego as a centre, Michael was an unfailingly generous lover. And anyway, he wanted to know what ‘knowing men inside-out in antisocial ways’ looked like.
Which turned out to have a literal meaning, as Daniel searched the wooden chest of sex toys at the base of the bed and found a rectal speculum that had never been removed from its original packaging. It had been an impulsive purchase at a BDSM retailer in San Francisco, along with a clamp normally used for equine castration, but it was so fiddly that Michael’s more spirited approach to sex simply didn’t allow the patience for it.
But Daniel knew exactly what he was doing. So Michael found himself on his back, legs in the air, sphincter clamped open with cold metal and colder lube (because sex toy warmers weren’t considered ‘basic necessities’ in the logic of energy rationing), as Daniel manipulated Michael’s prostate with a latex-covered finger, making him feel deliciously helpless.
When Michael told him to tell him what he saw, Daniel used all of his writer’s repertoire to describe in detail the layout of Michael’s anal cavity: the glistening walls, the gentle contours like the shell of an ear, all velvety and yielding to the touch. It made Michael feel a bit like furniture, but not in a distasteful way.
He found that it was incredibly difficult to come if his asshole couldn’t close, so after a long stretch of torture with Daniel stimulating his prostate, first with his finger, and then with his tongue through a latex dental dam, eventually Michael capitulated and whispered the safe word.
After Daniel extracted the speculum and Michael had a moment to recalibrate, he fully expected Daniel to want Michael to reciprocate in same way. But it turned out that his interest in knowing beautiful men inside-and-out was purely one-sided and, when it came to his own tastes, he wanted to be fucked slowly and mindfully in missionary.
Thankfully, he had a front hole, so the practicalities weren’t particularly complicated. Condoms unfortunately deadened the sensation of penetration for Michael when he topped and so, after a long, nigh tantric, stretch of fucking where Daniel came over-and-over again, Daniel must have felt the plateau in Michael and said, “come on my chest,” not like the sultry dare of shame-play, but something like down-to-earth solidarity and simple kindness embracing on another. Truly the ‘Come on my chest’ of the Future Wales. And so he did.
—
Daniel was a light sleeper, and anyway Michael tended not to spend the night with new partners, so he left Daniel in the date room and returned to his own bed. But he soon found that he was too grimy from the day’s work, the night’s fucking, and the previous day’s big emotions, to surrender himself to sleep so, after a while, he got up, went outside, stripped to the skin, and got under the outdoor shower. Since it ran on a generator, the water pressure was piddling, but it was hot and just strong enough to make him feel more grounded.
Thanks to a sometimes eidetic memory, the final stanza of Porfirio Barba Jacob turned over in his mind, beckoning to be encountered in the solitary darkness.
“I went after the supreme form,
after the cloud and the nightingale
and the crystal, the youth and the gem
of heartache.”
The supreme form, the cloud, the nightingale, the crystal, the youth and the gem of heartache.
If David were the “I,” then perhaps the supreme form was the new arrangement: Georgia in her dissociative haze was the cloud, the nightingale as the lover returned was Michael, hard-edged and clear the crystal was Anna, the youth…who knows? Maybe some aspect of David himself. Or perhaps this guest had a role to play. At least the gem of heartache was clear, the destination that, in Michael’s opinion, David truly longed for, even if he thought what he aimed for was actually some kind of paradise. But allegory was always so on-the-nose, so derivative. The infinite variety of the world distilled down into a child’s made-up alphabet.
To Michael, poetry was more of a subjective experience, the supreme form, the cloud, the nightingale, the crystal, the youth, and the gem of heartache were all him. The individuals words were burnished, yet homely in their disjointedness. But he could stamp them all with his own exquisite Michaelness. There was nothing intrinsic to any of it, after all. But he was Michael, and so existence could be.