Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [125]
Then I turned the computer off, ate a cheeseburger at last, and started drinking heavily. The burger was excellent, and cheered me up no end.
Say what you like, but history is shit. It’s dirty, and it smells—with good reason, because it has provided the visceral energy which brought the present moment to where it is. This present is like our bodies: They look so clean, because they’re washed every day, but they leave little piles everywhere behind them. Past presents digested, excreted, and left for posterity—and our later selves—to smell.
As I sat in Howie’s office, in the hours before dawn and alone, I felt as if I were sitting in the midst of a hundred piles of shit, the stink of each subtly different from the others. When I tried to trace where each had come from I got lost. I couldn’t remember the steps clearly enough. It was all too complicated. Time to wipe the hard disk and start again.
Howie had left me by myself for the time being, at my request. I was trying to remember when my life had stopped making sense, when the loops got nested so deep I couldn’t see beyond them. You never value simplicity as a child because you’re always leaning into the turns, wanting to become older and get your hands on all those older things. As a child, your options are limited, and as such, so simple and free. Each day is a simple progression of activities, not fractured with the demands of the future.
There are countless things you can do when you’ve grown up, so many calls upon your time. You can smoke. You can drink. You can take drugs. You can work—in fact, you have to, because you have to pay bills. Then there are the things you can’t do. You have to not goof off, not sleep with other people even if they’re available. You have to be happy with where you are and what you’ve got, when the essence of childhood was the belief that there would always be something new.
The addictions and the mandates of being an adult take up so much of your time that you can never simply be. Every thought and every action is shaped and undermined by all the other actions or thoughts you have to forgo. You can find yourself haunted by people and events that never even existed, so surrounded by spirits that the real world shades away. You still search for Narnia, even though you’re too old to believe in it and now it doesn’t want you there.
Innocence is the freedom from having to have a cigarette every half hour, freedom from loving someone, freedom from the endless fallout of bad things which you have endured or done. Freedom from time, and ail time’s passing leaves behind it. The countless smells of shit
The melancholies of youth are to do with not being taken seriously, and the opposite sex. The desperate, biological exposure of that need; the feeling of being left behind when other boys seem to know about smoking and beer and girls—or when other girls had better clothes, a boyfriend of sorts, and tits. Not so much a feeling of being left behind, in fact, so much as a dreadful fear that you were on a subtly different and less vital curve, one which would never bring you into contact with these exciting, contraband substances.
And yet, when I got those things, I realized the truth in the only movie that really scared me as a child. I thought of the time when I saw Pinocchio on television, and I remembered the way the film spoke to me even though the animation was archaic and two-dimensional. I wonder whether my reaction then was a forerunner of what I feel now, if it was an intuitive preunderstanding that these forbidden things really would turn you into a donkey, forever tilling someone else’s field. But you run for them with open arms anyway, because