3:AM Magazine

By Gerry Feehily.

This was the season Gix Reverb saw storks for the first time. They were nesting in the ruins of the Roman aqueduct that previously had conveyed the icy waters of the mountains of Anatolia to the colony of Ephesus. Now there were storks there, roosting in the broken columns. Gix came to in a four-star hotel wearing a green Martin Margiela suit when the storks flew by like planes when you’re standing near to an airport, and you see their backs, the way they go down in increments. The storks landed in their huge nests while the sky turned pink.

Present also on the shoot was Virus O’Neill, who had added new metal studs to his face and, according to his agent, had also had his glans pierced. He also planned to have discs inserted into his earlobes in the manner of Amazon tribesmen, his agent pursued. In his press release.

After completing the shoot, Virus and Gix went walking along a country lane. The shoot had consisted of the male models standing in front of Cappadocian troglodyte dwellings in Martin Margiela suits. Little children had gathered round and begged for money. The photographer, the legendary Jake Malone, asked the guide to hand the kids 10 US dollars each on condition they would fuck off. “Now go buy yourself something, for fuck’s sake,” he said.

Then Jake Malone, legendary photographer, had a better idea. He had a bottle of Chanel No 5 and he got a kid with deep brown eyes and snot around his shiny brown nose with a velvety shine (“the same colour as my cock” the great photographer averred) to pose with his little sister who wore gold earrings and had mascara rimmed eyes. He got the kid to cradle the bottle of Chanel No 5 to his chest and look at the camera with his big dumb eyes. The result was an amazing fashion statement which was to adorn the walls of studios and agencies and press offices for at least two seasons.

Virus, despite the heavy sanctions for drugs in Turkey (had he not seen Midnight Express? they wondered in awe) walked down the country lane bare-chested, the heavy rings and jewels in his nipples and navel jinking, smoking a joint unmixed with tobacco, pure skunk. Gix would have joined him, but what he really wanted was some more skag. All his skag was back at the hotel. His longing for skag was such that every five minutes his eyeballs popped out on their stalks, he heaved up his internal organs, and collapsed into a puddle of steaming urine. Then he reconstituted himself. Then he was Gix again, Gix Reverb the male model.

“I once committed murder,” said Virus, exhaling joint smoke.

“So did I,” said Gix, who was bare-chested too.

They walked past a field where women, their heads wrapped in white scarves, were gathering peaches as the sun set.

“It was a policeman,” said Virus. “I cut off his head, sliced through. I remember the resistance of the windpipe and the upper vertebrae and the pints of blood that came spraying up all over the driveway. I was at home during the crime. I buried his head underneath a tree in my front garden. Then I went on the run.”

“That’ll teach the fascists what’s what,” offered Gix.

“I felt no guilt,” said Virus, puffing on his joint as the women in the fields hailed the male models.

The women in the field came running across the clumps of red earth, their brown bare feet kneading the clumps of red earth. They gathered around Virus, touched the rings on his nipples, traced the tattoos on his torso. They tried to count the number of studs he had in his face. Then they talked about him, amongst themselves. They pointed at Virus’s joint and asked to smoke it. They made this clear through gestures of fingers to mouth. Virus said, “Sure.”

The Turkish women were in their 30s. They were brown from the sun. They handed the joint one to the other smoking inexpertly with the joint in the middle of their blue mouths. Then they handed Virus some peaches. One woman, taking an interest in Gix, who had been trying to observe all this with his one not-fucked-up eye — as opposed to the fucked up one that looked like an X — touched his white belly, tapped it like a drum.

“When they talk about us, it’s as if we’re not here,” said Gix.

“But we’re not,” said Virus.

Then, as soon as they had appeared, the women ran back to the fields, stoned on skunk, chattering excitedly about the adventure that had come to pass.

Leaving the models with the peaches, who, upon returning to the village, saw that a village elder had emerged from his troglodyte and was asking the legendary Jake Malone to photograph him and his donkey.

“This is getting fucking dangerous,” said Jake Malone.

The village elder continued to talk to Jake Malone in his unworldly jabber as, on shaky legs, he advanced towards his patient placid donkey, which looked as if it had waited since the furthest recesses of deep deep time for this occasion, so patient and placid was it. Then, with unexpected nimbleness, did the village elder leap onto the donkey’s back, and slap its rump.

“Oh my fucking God,” said Jake Malone.

The donkey began cantering towards Jake Malone, and it was at this moment that the legendary photographer realized that he had no choice. The village elder, who had his hair specially combed for the occasion, ordered the donkey to stop. Then he smiled.

His smile, Olan the hairdresser remarked, was huge. His toothless mouth was like a black hole.

It was a smile that would eat the sun, he said, many years later.

****

No-one knows if Shiseido Shibuya can really see. Not even Wim Wenders, who is making a film about the living legend of design. Wim Wenders wants to get down deep into the mystery of why no-one had seen Shiseido Shibuya’s eyes since 1969. About whether behind those wraparound black sunglasses there are nothing but spinning white orbs, blind as the moon. But it’s going to be a tough one. He must probe, but gently.

Blind or not, though, Shiseido Shibuya is playing pool on the 136th floor of the Pol Pot Tower in Phnom Penh. The cameras are turning. Shiseido has just potted a striped, but the white ball goes off the cushion and into the middle pocket like a fucking wanker. Is this the right moment? Wenders wonders. Could it be true. Is this all bluff? Can he really see those balls? Or is he just…listening to them?

True to his enigmatic nature, Shiseido gives little away, to say to least, as to his reported blindness, whether he’s blind as a bat, whether he can’t actually see a fucking thing. “Did Beethoven hear the 9th Symphony, ah, when he compose it?” the Japanese genius once enquired of a journalist in a New York Times article. This is all Wim has to work on. Tricky kettle of fish — to say the least.

“So,” asks Wim Wenders, chalking his cue, mustering a grin, “what is the Shubuya philosophy, eh?”

Shiseido Shibuya considers, drags on a thick white Gauloise cigarette, and says, “Ties.”

Wim Wenders hasn’t a clue what this means. What the fuck? says his inner voice. He lines up his shot, trying to pretend that he knows what to say. But Wim isn’t an actor. Acting is hard. “Ties, aha!” he says, skewing his shot completely, missing every fucking ball on the table and handing the Jap maestro two free shots when he, Wim Wenders, had two shots himself!

“Ties,” says Shibuya, now leaning across the table for an easy pot while the flustered sick as a parrot Wenders can only look on.

“Ties,” says Shibuya. “I ask myself, why ties? All the time. Why do men wear ties? Who told them to, ah, wear ties, please! Are ties scarves? Do ties fight winter cold? I think not. What is the purpose? When man wears tie, I say, why? Why ties big in seventies, why ties thin in eighties? What are they? Why is the tie loved? Why do people love ties? So I say, OK, no tie.”

Shiseido Shibuya hits a striped ball instead of the white and Wim Wenders is thinking, either he’s fucking crap at pool or he really is fucking blind. Fuck me!

But this is dodgy, he could easily be making a huge mistake. The great German film director is flummoxed. He’s sweating. Shaking his head with a big oh shucks I’m about to shit myself grin, he says, “I never thought about ties that way.”

“The secret is the shirt,” says the Japanese genius. “Keep top button buttoned. No tie, but keep the shirt, ah, completely, buttoned!”

“Is that your philosophy?” asks Wim Wenders, gulping.

“No,” replies Shiseido Shibuya, legend of design. “I just talk about, ah, ties!”

And like a complete fucking cunt he goes and shoots again.

****

When he entered the village Marc Boss knew that the child was near. All week he had roamed the desert regions, all of these peopled places of red-mud nowheres with his armed guards Abdul and Miloud who carried semi-automatics riding in front of the jeep while he, Marc Boss, with his Satnav laptop, followed events in the fashion world.

Sometimes he looked at the desert landscapes and he imagined skyscrapers rising out of the dirt, the filth, golden cities of tinkling fountains, puttering streams, the buzzing of human energies, the trading of suits, shoes, accessories, make-up, to relieve the tedium, where people came running out of their adobe dwellings to smile and wave at the strangers on their way with their ancient marks of hospitality.

Sometimes he looked out of the back window to see the toothless villagers, barefoot, ragged, waving as the 4×4 produced a stream of dust that flumed along the road, produced a red ribbon of dirt that shrouded the ugly villagers.

“Fuck it,” he muttered, wiping the tears from his eyes, then dropping out of the window whatever notes he had in his pocket (he’d last been in Tokyo, so it was a whole wad of yens that went flittering out into the dust like a swarm of swallows). “1,000 yen is approximately one dollar,” he yelled out the window but wait there might not be even a travelling money changer around here, it’s so fucking lost.

Again and again they came surging out of the dust, running alongside the car, with great beaming smiles on their faces. “What are their names?” wondered Marc Boss. “And how the fuck did they get born here?”

Such mysteries were not on his mind, however, as the jeep swung into the village, as he got out of the car, as he walked into the village.

Strange, he thought, it seems they all know something was up. The villagers. Not that there was a welcome committee. On the contrary. There weren’t even any fucking dogs, wriggling and snuffling up to him with scraggy tails going to and fro like lengths of rubber.

Nevertheless, he ordered his armed men Abdul and Miloud to stay behind. “This is an Orange alert, right?” he yelled at them as they scrambled out of the jeep and took up firing positions, as he dragged his interpreter Hassan along with him, who asked directions from an old man sitting as still as a cat in the shade, an old man who pointed his knobbly stick made out of the some crap tree that grew in these parts down an alley of red mud houses.

Marc Boss walked down the alley looking in empty doorways till he came to the end where the parents sat in a low-ceilinged room, waiting for him. He stooped inside. The father was dressed in a suit, his hair slicked, the mother preparing tea. The father looked like the type of man who wore the same suit every day, who waited in the shade of tamarisks for things to happen, and who came back every day with visions of empty roads and the sun in his head, waiting for things to happen, like now, like this thing.

Marc Boss scanned the room — there was an amphora in the corner. “What the fuck is that?” he shouted, jabbing at it with his finger.

Hassan interpreted. His jabber then theirs, then resolved back into English.

“It was found in a well,” repeated Marc Boss. “Vestiges of the deep past, fragments of time gone. Temples of Apollo. Extraordinary.”

“Sir?” said Hassan.

“That’s okay — that’s mine!” said Marc Boss and burst out laughing, deep laughter, straight from the kidneys. Kidney laughter — the only kind!

Then Marc Boss explained the deal, removed from his briefcase the wads of brand new euros. The father nodded, the mother dried her eyes. Then the mother clapped her hands and appeared the child, 12 years old, six foot tall, a skin as wax white as was not possible. Marc Boss felt his knees judder. He swallowed. He looked at the child’s green eyes and long hands.

“Perfect,” he managed to say, only just.

The mother beckoned for the child to sit down. The child sat, reached out across the table form his tea, knocked over the glass filled.

“It’s nothing,” said Mark Boss, cheerful, “the child is awkward. But these are the things that will be brought out, brought away.”

He rose from the table, pushed Hassan the interpreter out the door. He led the child by the hand. The child had no belongings. “Don’t worry!” said Marc Boss. “Abdul and Miloud are covering us with super accurate rifles.”

He strode on, noticing that although he had seen no-one on entering the village, now it was as if they had all come out to follow him. The child gripped his hand. Marc Boss took in all the faces around him, ugly faces. He noticed satellite dishes for the first time on the red roofs. “The world is corrupt,” he said to the child, to himself. “The world is corrupt and yet every now and then like a new metal that drops upon earth from outer space, there’s this, there’s you. Savour your Youness.”

That night Marc Boss put his cock in the child’s mouth for the first time. The child, looking at the cock, took it in his mouth.

That night Marc Boss cried again, and gave the child 200 dollars.

This was the first day in the fashion career of Kola Natexis.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
London-born Gerry Feehily lives in Paris, but holds an Irish passport for his sins. His first novel Fever was published in 2007, a Spanish edition of which — since September 2009 — is sold in Spain and Spanish-speaking lands. He is a full-time journalist at Presseurop and frequently holds forth on French TV and radio on European politics.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Monday, November 9th, 2009.