Here Are the Young Men (24 page)

‘You're fuckin sick, Kearney.'

‘Do ye reckon?'

Suddenly I felt deflated. It was no use. Kearney stood there chuckling away beside me, sparking up a joint.

He watched me for a while. Then he said, quietly, ‘I'm only buzzin with ye, Connelly. Yer so fuckin gullible. I made all that up. I didn't even go in to see him yet. I've to go in tomorrow. I wouldn't say any of that stuff to him. Do ye think I'm totally fuckin sick in the head? I wouldn't say that stuff. He tried to kill himself. He's me friend.'

I stayed till the joint was finished, neither of us saying much. Then I climbed out of the industrial estate and went home.

34
|
Kearney

He spent even more time in his attic bedroom. Sometimes his ma shrieked up at him and he would lie there, stoned, hearing her hateful noise, wanting to slice her face up till it looked like mince. After he had been back a few days she gave up trying to call him. No one bothered him any more.

Rez and his suicide attempt was only a sideshow, a diversion. Kearney had other things on his mind. He had a plan now; he knew what he had to do.

The idea had come to him in Boston, after the night Stu had called around. It had been suggested to him by a video they'd watched.

Throughout his stay with Dwayne, Kearney had slept on the floor of the apartment, with only a pungent, multi-stained sheet between his body and the bare and dusty boards. His brother was one of eleven young Irishmen sharing the ghetto-zone flat for the summer, and space was at a premium: they slept three or four to a room, like refugees, laid out close enough to smell each others' bodies and emissions, hear each others' heat-fever gasps and moans.
Th
ere had been an infestation: cockroaches. By night they'd seemed to multiply, appearing in hordes to maraud with nocturnal arrogance, scuttling over every surface and over Kearney's sticky, skinny limbs as he contorted and jerked in the throes of heat-insomnia. And it had been hot: maddeningly, feverishly hot. Kearney and the others could do nothing but endure this relentless heat alongside the hosts of glistening bugs that had occupied their crowded home.

The night of the video, they were sitting in the dark room on cushionless armchairs and couches with springs sticking out of them, or on plastic stools or the grimy floorboards. All twelve of them huddled around the sickly flicker of a TV that, like every item of furniture in the apartment, had been dragged in from the street after anonymous neighbours dumped it as they fled this ghetto full of crackhead blacks and drunken young Irish.

Stu came just after midnight. Dwayne stood up to greet him at the door with a hip-hop-style slapping handshake. He flicked the light switch and Kearney recoiled from the sudden glare. Stu, Dwayne had assured his younger brother, could not only get the best drugs in Boston, but was ‘heavily connected with some really hardcore motherfuckers'. (Dwayne had started using words like mother-fucker and asshole since coming to America.)

Certainly, Stu's hardcore credentials were confirmed that night; he was the one who brought along the video they watched, as well as the weed, coke and speed the lads had ordered from him.

‘Gedda loada this shit, man,' Stu said, waving the video in the air as he stepped into the room and commanded the group's complete attention. He wore a sleeveless basketball shirt and baggy jeans, with a faceful of stubble, peakless cap and eyebrow piercing – full hip-hop regalia, only he wasn't black. He did look like the kind of person you wouldn't want to fuck with, though.

Lankily he sat on the edge of the least tattered armchair, dishing out little plastic bags of drugs as he said, ‘I got this video from a buddy in LA. I ain't never seen shit like this, man. It's real, ain't no
doubt.
Fuckin heavy West Coast shit. You gonna see what I mean, dog. Here.' He chucked the tape to Dwayne and ordered him to turn off the single, bare lightbulb and the shitty stereo. Dwayne complied, and Stu cut out a line of coke for everyone from his personal stash. ‘This one's on me,' he said.

They snorted the coke and Stu said, ‘Shit, someone gonna roll a J?' Kearney was thinking that Stu talked a bit like Fallen Henry the Titan.

Dwayne got the video player going and retreated quietly to a spot on the floor, Stu having taken his place on the armchair.

The cockroaches kept pouring into the room, big oily things with scuttling legs. Kearney watched them crawl over the feet and legs of the lads on the ground – no one even bothered crushing them any more. He felt a tingle on the back of his neck and flinched, brushing nervously at his collar. But there was nothing there, it was all in his mind.

Kearney was stoned. Very stoned. This grass they smoked here, it was ferocious, completely unlike the stuff they got back home, which he now realized really was just ‘crap Dublin hash'; something he had long declared but without any real basis for comparison. As the stoned murmurings in the room died down and the spasms of static resolved themselves on-screen, Kearney reflected that this US skunk was as far advanced over Dublin hash as the Xbox was over the Amstrad he'd played as a kid. He liked this analogy, and hoped he'd remember to use it when he got back home to tell those queer little fuckers how clueless they were about life in general and dope in particular.

But now the film was starting. It began conventionally enough, with two brawny, crewcut guys fucking a trashy, hard-faced slut. They fucked her in the arse and fisted her cunt at the same time. Then she played with her tits while one of them fucked her cunt and the other tongued her arsehole. Next she sucked them both off at once, then let one fuck her from behind while the other pulled himself off and sneered down at her. Eventually they both came in her face.

Kearney
was starting to wonder what all the fuss was about, why Stu would get so worked up about a fairly standard porno.

But then, very rapidly, it all changed. Right after the pair of men had come, one of them punched the woman in the face. It was a hard, driving, downward punch, pounding her to the floor. Kearney flinched at it, tensing up all over – there was no way that could have been faked. And the woman clearly hadn't expected it; now she was crying, shrieking, between panic and shock.

The men slung her up from the doorframe, wrists bound by a black leather strap, the first of numerous macabre props that now started appearing on-screen in quick proliferation. The men worked quickly, looking tense and concentrated but managing to turn several times to the camera to flash conspiratorial grins.

For the next twenty minutes Kearney watched the nameless woman being tortured and dismembered. Throughout, she emitted a prolonged, almost unbroken scream and, increasingly bloodied and mutilated, she remained conscious right up to the very end. Her face a gory pulp, teeth smashed in or ripped out, nipples sliced off and hair set on fire, the gapless scream – now more a shrill gurgling – was silenced when the man who had punched her at the beginning drove a screwdriver through her wide-opened eye, impaling her brain.

The screen went black, then buzzed static.

There was no other sound in the room.

‘Whaddaya think? Hardcore shit, huh,' said Stu, still gazing into the dead television.

There was a silence. The only things that moved were the cockroaches scuttling across the floor, and the static on-screen. Then Dwayne said, ‘Yeah man, hardcore. Hard
core
.'

Mumbles and grunts of vague endorsement rose up around the darkened room like the yeas in a house of parliament; there were no nays.

Kearney remained quiet, pensive. When the torturing had commenced, there was a moment when something in him had recoiled
from
it. Momentarily he'd wanted to stand up and walk out of the room, run down the stairs and out on the streets, jump into the Atlantic and let the ocean swallow him up.

But he had looked around him as the film played on: a roomful of impassive faces, dull with interest, condoning through inaction. Kearney told himself that it made him fierce, edgy, strong; watching this stuff and, what's more, liking it. And he
did
like it, in a hesitant way at first, but more and more as he willed himself to embrace the horror of what he was seeing.

Then the quiver of protest in him died out, like the SOS of a forgotten submarine going down in cold, black waters.

Very clearly, right before the woman on the screen died, it had come to him: he could do this. He could watch this stuff and enjoy it, and no one was going to stop him.

       

The next day, the images from the snuff movie were still fresh and bloody, superimposing themselves over Kearney's mundane American reality. That was when the idea surfaced. It was a logical progression, like that which he'd gone through after first watching porno: the viewing, then the wanting to do it for himself.

The woman's death fascinated him: it was the moment it happened, the precise instant when the life force – whatever it was that made the body move, speak, fear, think, know – when whatever it was that did all that, vanished, was snuffed out. It was there, and then it wasn't. And when it wasn't there, all you had was what the woman in the film had become at the end, when the screaming stopped: a heap of meat, an inert sack of mess that was something, but that wasn't human. It fascinated Kearney. He needed to explore this. He needed to know how it felt.

35
|
Matthew

I visited Rez in hospital only once more. This time I went there on my own. He looked the same as he had the first time; pale, gaunt, wasted – it was a look that suited him. When I entered the ward, one of the other beds was empty.

‘What happened to him?' I asked, nodding at the wafer of absence under fresh, straight covers, by way of breaking the ice.

Rez shrugged his shoulders, managing to make the gesture look like it cost him worlds of effort. ‘He got out.'

‘What, you mean he's better?' I was surprised; Rez's brother had told me that the man was on his death bed, about to be dragged under by some terminal illness.

‘No, he's not better. He's dead.'

‘Oh.'

So much for breaking the ice. The bulk in the third bed shifted and groaned at the mention of death. Maybe in his fever he believed I was the Grim Reaper, come to collect him. I saw his face; a grizzled, ugly man with a terrible complexion and worse teeth. He peered at
me
with wet-eyed suspicion, then turned over and started coughing.

I looked at Rez in his bed. Lately I'd grown depressed at the thought – which not long ago would have felt exciting – that most of my friends were twisted, volatile outsiders. You started out playing with this stuff – the extremism, the chaos – and it felt vital and exhilarating; but then suddenly you couldn't control it, you'd gone too far and it wasn't exciting any more, only frightening.

‘How are ye doin, Rez?' I asked, exhausted already by being here, but wanting at least to try and fix things.

‘Not bad, considerin I recently tried to commit suicide.'

That was fairly dark, but at least there was a spark of humour in it, something he'd been devoid of last time.

‘My ma's worried about them lettin me out. She's afraid I'm goin to do it again.'

‘And are ye?'

He shook his head. ‘No. It was stupid. I can't believe what I almost did. It terrifies me, especially when I think it was only a fluke that I was found. I wake up sweatin, nearly in panic.'

I wondered if this was the propaganda he was putting out, to lure those around him into a false sense of security while he made another bid for self-annihilation. Rez and what went on in his mind were beyond me. He had drifted out too far, into weird fog: I couldn't see who he was any more.

‘Why did ye do it, Rez? Is there somethin ye … somethin that happened to ye?'

‘No.' His voice had hardened; he looked ready to lash out again, tense and defensive. ‘There's nothin that happened. I just… I've just been seein things clearly, too clearly. And not lookin away.' He shook his head. ‘I can't seem to look away, the same way ordinary people do. And when ye can't look away it's impossible to …' He paused; each word seemed a strain. ‘To keep livin, doin normal things.'

He looked like he was going to continue, but then he exhaled in a huge sigh, exhausted by the effort. I sensed that he wanted me to
leave.
But now I realized I had a kind of power over him, something I'd never had before. Rez was vulnerable and I wanted to push him, partly out of curiosity, but also for some other, shadowy reason that wasn't clear to me.

‘What do ye mean, though?' I said. ‘I mean, what is it ye say ye see about the world that makes ye want to, to go and do what ye did?'

He watched me for a few long moments, making me feel like a faecal germ under a microscope. Then he said, ‘You, for instance.'

I waited.

‘Me?' I said eventually.

‘Yeah. You, the way ye are. And you here now, for example. I know what it's all about. I –'

‘Ye what?' I snapped. ‘Ye know what about me? Ye always think ye fuckin know about me, and about everyone. What do ye know?'

I was suddenly sick of how everything he said, even every look he gave, was one of accusation.

He said, ‘You're enjoyin it, seein me here like this. It doesn't really make ye feel anything to know that I was miserable enough to try and hang meself. All ye really feel is the buzz of it, the drama. I don't even blame ye.'

‘Here we go again,' I sneered. ‘This same old shit.' I shook my head, exhaled in irritation, and shifted like I was about to get up and leave.

‘It's true, though. Even now, the way you're pressin me for information, it's just cos ye want a bit of a buzz from hearin me.'

I looked away. I felt exposed. I tried pleading, hoping for a truce. ‘Look,' I said in a softer tone. ‘I know it's true that there are horrible, really fuckin horrible things out there in the world. But it's not all bad, there are some good things as well that ye don't have to analyse. Ye have to take things more at face value, not just see the, the ulterior motives all the time.'