MacGabhann Saints

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-0683555-3-0
Verlag: Scratch Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 184 Seiten

Nine breathtaking, gripping and oddly sublime tales of narcos, cops and addicts in modern-day Mexico. Gritty hard-boiled tales shot through with the hallowed light of the miraculous, written in MacGabhann's pyrotechnic exhilarating prose. A constellation of rich, vivacious stories of sewer diving, ghosts, a falling satellite and vengeful pigs.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Macgabhann, Tim

Leseproben

CHAIR

1.

I live on a roof, in an old maids’ quarters: a shed-sized concrete homelet right there between the cisterns and the bird cages. Two floors down is the room where I chair Narcotics Anonymous meetings three days a week. But I’m not in there now. I am hauling bags of sand one at a time from beneath the stairs. I am just always trying to make less stuff happen all the time. What this stops happening is it stops the place flooding. Dragging the bags is a pain in the ass. The door is too heavy to hold open with my foot. So I drag the bag as far as the door, drop the bag, open the door, go out the door, push the door open from the far side, hold the door against my shoulder, haul the bag with one hand, dump the bag. Then I go back through the door as far as the stairs, go under the stairs, check the bottom seam of the next bag, take the roll of tape from the corner of the space under the stairs where I had the tape, lay a strip along the seam if the seam looks weak, pull at the tape with my teeth, then drag the bag as far as the door, drop the bag, open the door, go out the door, push the door open from the far side, and so on; the ache in my shoulders and lower back becoming a burn in my shoulders and lower back and finally a numbness in my shoulders and lower back, until the bags are all laid out in a big ‘C’ that begins at the left-hand lintel of the sex shop to the right of the door to the meeting room, and the little stand of chips and cigarettes and mints and chewing gum owned by the old woman, to the left hand lintel of the hipster pulquería, stopping before their door because I hate their door, because the doormen there wear these weird all-black contact lenses like the guitarist in Limp Bizkit used to have and always tell me the prices of their drinks and to come on in, on rote, like bots, like one day I might go in there.

The problem of dragging the bags doesn’t end just with which lintel to draw the ‘C’ from. The problem of the ‘C’ itself poses problems, in that as the ‘C’ grows I must jink in and around the pedestrians – office types with lanyards swinging, eyes on their phones, workers toting gallons of water on their shoulders, bike couriers going ninety, tourists at bovine speed, with bovine loudness, in bovine numbers – and take their looks and their tongue-clicks and their head-shakes with the kind of mute placidity that is meant to obliterate resentment but sometimes only presses the resentment flatter within me.

The ‘C’ goes three bags high. The pedestrians butt their shins or their knees on the ‘C’ or else hurdle the ‘C’ entirely. It’s not like it’s my fucking fault. It’s the fault of the government; they’re the ones who took a stone head of the rain god Tlaloc from his crag above a valley in Otomí territory. These stone heads marked the heights people watched the clouds gather at, if the clouds were of a specific darkness there then they would know if they were to plant, or sow, or dig flood channels, or flee for higher ground. Unpegging those stone heads from the mountain unpegged the people from the seasons and the seasons from time itself. Now the world just grows old by itself, everything flies apart, the rains get worse year on year, fall punctually at the worst of rush hour, so that if I don’t lay my ‘C’ of sandbags the old woman’s stall will wash away and the sex shop will flood and my building with the meeting in it will flood and nobody will be able to get in and up the stairs for the meeting.

Flip through the fat-white vellum of the old annals at the city’s main library, those big books that thud open, flake-edged scab-crimson leather, and you’ll find any number of floods: 1607, when an eight-mile incision in the earth was needed to drain the floodwaters; the thirty-six straight hours of rain that fell in 1629, pummelling the corn-stalks to nothing, crumbling the adobe houses, reducing the main square to a tiny island stalked by rabid dogs who snapped their jaws at any boat that got close enough; and 1692, which brought a mud-slide so bad that people resorted to canoes instead of pack animals. Everything wheeled was abandoned, just as in the days before the Spanish. Masses were held, priests imploring the skies from the roofs of churches in front of congregations gathered in little boats. There have been so many ends of the world here. Europe’s the incision through which the whole continent is bleeding to death. I test the sandbag with the toe of my boot.

The thing about apocalyptic visions is they always exempt the visionary. I’m not exempt from shit. I’m going down too. These bags won’t hold forever. One day the rains’ll close over my roof. I’ll sink and be gone in a pluming of dirt-coloured bubbles. They’ll catch up with me eventually, maybe, the years using. Lungs clear, liver unbruised, kidneys as glossy as a pair of beans, all that, but who’s to say when the post will return from all of those other times of huffing stuff off foil, or banging up, or drinking for years, even from the toxins in the tinfoil, blowing in little subatomic ribbons around my brain, mercury-shimmers waiting to fatally catch somewhere in there.

The only person not doing that stressed-commuter jog through the wet is one of the crack sadhus who lives in the little triangular park between two big cross-streets. He goes picking through the crowd, a holy slowness to his gait, a wry smile on his face. He watches the adverts repeat themselves silently, endlessly, in morphing shapes of heated plasma, locked inside the walled garden of his little chemical heaven.

When the ‘C’ is laid out, I stand with my hands on my hips and my foot on top of a bag and watch the crack guy for a while, and then I squint up at the rainclouds, trying to read something in its darkness that isn’t just ‘A fuck ton of rain is about to fall’, and feel a dark ache leak from my back.

2.

Paper lanterns sway in the blue gloom, outside the Chinese restaurant where I’m waiting for the rain to stop. The metal roof of this restaurant is really roaring. It’s got everything else on mute: the sputter of oil coming from the kitchen, the bubbling of the fish-tank filter behind me where koi nudge through the murk, the rasp of the fraying electric wires coiled at the top of a pole on the corner. I’m looking across at the sandbag barricade, my foot tapping, hoping they’ll hold. The bottom sandbag’s dark with rain, phosphor around the edges, all these little white bubbles. But the old woman in the snacks stand looks cosy and serene under her umbrella, her steel-grey braids immaculate. If she’s feeling OK then I should feel OK.

My notebook has my step work in it. Step work is when you get the big Narcotics Anonymous manual with the green and gold cover and go question-by-question through all twelve of the steps, beginning to end, like the book’s interviewing you: What does ‘the disease of addiction’ mean to you? Has your disease been active recently? In what way? What is it like when you’re obsessed with something? Does your thinking follow a pattern?

I’ve been going back to this book for seven years. Looking at my answers, I just see words now. I am always just trying to stop more stuff happen. What writing all this down does is stop my head chewing on itself, throw some language into those teeth, giving them something to gnaw on, gnash through, chomp to mush, before they come after me again.

I lean back against the lilac-and-turquoise pleather banquette. My knuckles rap the table. I can hear my mouth and throat making a stressed little hm hm hm noise, even if my body doesn’t quite feel stressed, not all the way. Eels of lit rain unthread from umbrella rims. Milky tints roil kerbside and vapour chases cars through the drench. Little frost-beads of hung rain deck the market-stalls. Steam unfurls in crisp layers from hot-plates, ruby lights vie and shimmy all down Insurgentes.

If I go out now my jeans’ll be an otter’s pelt in seconds. I’ve no umbrella, and there’s an hour to go to the meeting. But I need to get donuts. The pedestrians out there legging it through the foam, the Hindu-god tangle of the arms I can see through the bus windows, the people leaning on the horns, the people coming to the meeting, about to flop forward through the door in their wet-dog smell of soaked jumpers and jeans and find warmth, peace, coffee, sugar, and the thought of them coming in and not finding any of those things makes my gut squirm: on day one, if I’d come in, found none of that, maybe I’d have bounced out, picked up, gone way off the deep end, lain around for days and days getting rotty, feeling like if I got out of bed the paint on the boards was going to blister and curl and pop in little bubbles so dark were the hate waves beaming off me, milling stimulus into myself, trying to get to that numb and reckless place in myself. Only thing that’d work sometimes was I’d get up and do just one thing very very carefully: something like opening a pomegranate over a bowl. That’d take...