Non fiction

Tundra

I want to start with a lie, in 1996, but there are earlier recollections that go back farther, to 1990 and 1992. They’re elusive, hard to get hold off in context, in story, and compared to what is to come they appear trivial. There is, to begin with, the torch, long and thin, white, but dirty, too much handling. The head is small, the light weak, a faint ray that hardly alleviates my fear of the dark, the couple that stand by the window, merging with the curtains, the folds that have become faces, lurking, tall bodies, a knife, insane eyes. I don’t know how I came by it; the circumstances, like the darkness, are impenetrable, but I remember the torch, the rib cage, the ribbed grip, little ridges of dust and light, and that I took it everywhere for a while, into bedrooms and tents at night, less for light than for its touch, a landscape to travel over, unseeing.

1992 is even less defined; there is no entity that encapsulates the year which stays featureless, distinct purely because of the date, the number, of what is invested into it, in hindsight. No touch, no smell—the material, white rubber, a kindness too, is absent, leaving only those digits and colours, red and white on flesh, but not mine; my hand is left unmarked that year. It’s too early, though I couldn’t sleep then either. Else, everything is mixed up, 1992 is also a year later, or already 1996, the school bench, the colours on my hand. ‘92 is, nonetheless, a year of defeat, still a sleeping giant, unformed, whose import exists in accumulation more than anything else; the craters are still pockmarks, the surface dented, ridged like the torch, but only for a while—it smoothes out, is smoothed over, and runs on ahead regardless.

Incidents and involvements are, up until then—that combination of colours, a geography test, some remark to the teacher—slight; no news there, but this moment would’ve made the great start to this story, the point of eternal return where all ramifications of narrative retreat. The temptation is almost irresistible, here is ground zero of all that follows, the bench, the test, the teacher, my retort to his comment, both of which I still remember, an innocuous observation answered inadequately, or so I still think, because I say them (full phase teenage angst), and also because words are, of course, rarely enough. Except, I don’t always believe this, in fact mostly do not, words like razors, some snippet from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, which I used later to justify, but that’s the wrong word, to practice engravings on my body. Words like razors and razors for the words that leave no visible record. The school bench, then, and the geography test, subject matter unknown, an exam, perhaps, on the topography of the land. I remember the term ‘Tundra’, the accompanying pictures, capped shots of endless stretches of wasteland, running on, unseen, beyond the photograph. A desert in our eyes, territory that does not support human settlement, though life, not as we know it, Captain, might exist on some other level, evident in a perspective that doesn’t just eradicate whatever else there is. The tundra is the one that stays, though there were others, which I’d need to look up—it is the up until then unknown word that lingers, like ‘taciturn’, like ‘thanatoid’—but tundra comes with a mistake I made, too, about people going to beaches in Spain because the climate there is poor, prone to torrential rain, like Glasgow in July.

The night, like I said, was sleepless, and my hand, the next day, featured a flag, emblem, that day and for a while after, of a passion, more than anything else, for a game; the concept of, and support for, a nation is trickier, though I tried to learn the language, bought a book plus tape to teach me words like ‘city’, a lesson that was structured around a helicopter flight, circling the polis below, a word (world?) that is now lost, was lost to begin with. I never remembered it, an inkling, already, of my failure to acquire the rest of the words. ‘Yes’, ‘ano’, so simple, stands in such stark contrast to how I really feel about nations, flags, the ‘we’ that people use.

Come to think of it, the enthusiasm went beyond the wish for the acquisition of words; there was an exchange organised by the school, a year or so later, and I had changed schools in the meantime because I wanted to be an artist, a painter of abstractions—so the whole thing was, after all, about more than just the game—and I volunteered to put an exchange student up in my house. I filled out a form and specified the gender of the visitor, which had to be male; Martín was lovely, but nothing like I’d imagined, and I didn’t lose my virginity to him as a result either, which is what I’d wanted, to have sex with some hot, Czech student in my bedroom, a place that is, like the city, lost, but all for the better: I never had sex in that room, or not with anyone else at any rate.

Interest faded though, was replaced, the posters taken down, or fell down because of the blue tack, old, which crumbled in my hand. I kept them, the pictures, the wall charts, they lie folded up. I have scrapbooks too, but plastic bound, with plastic sleeves that contain the newspaper clippings, the headlines that only vaguely recall the frenzy, the total adoration, the video tapes that I borrowed from a friend and then never gave back. My mum’s VCR broke, and she didn’t replace it; the technology, now, is obsolete, so are the tapes, discarded, spools of lost magic.

They were great, though, the tapes, the sense of suspense yielding an atmosphere that would now seem quaint, a distant echo, totally irrelevant. To watch them again, were it possible, would be to contact the dead, pictures—moving, unmoving—of dead times, 1996, VCRs that communicate messages from beyond the grave. It’d be a process of mourning, for all sorts of reasons, failed potential, missed opportunities, a level of form that has not been matched since. So I half-heartedly followed fixtures for a while, occasionally checked results, the table, but the posters stayed down alongside the levels of interest, attention spans that ran on, while running out. In 1996, not the Year of the Rubber Torch—that was Italia ’90, and who knows who won then—it was the Czech Republic whose flag I drew on my hand after a sleepless night and then sat a geography exam, in which the ridges of a torch, through my travelling hand, started to concur with the pictures of a tundra.

Alexis Machine