Locked In

Locked In

I was born aged thirty-three to a car crash in a town called Truth or Con­sequences, New Mex­ico. They always begin their books like that, with some notori­ous event, the nuc­leus of an explo­sion of cause and effect; the cre­ation of a prot­ag­on­ist. That is the dif­fer­ence between fic­tion and real­ity: in fic­tion noth­ing can be inane or incon­sequen­tial, ran­dom­ness is non-existent; Newton’s third law reigns supreme as we act and react. Every story begins with a col­li­sion: of worlds, of lives, or in my case, of auto­mo­biles. My atom bomb was a clash of cold, hard steel. A tale of two Chevys.

And after this blast, there is always a lull, the tinnitus-ringing con­cus­sion of descrip­tion and explic­a­tion before the noise of plot creeps back, as the reader is whipped into the pound­ing action and reac­tion. Per­cus­sion fol­lowed by reper­cus­sion. It is writ­ten to be read, idiom and tra­di­tion. It’s so for­mu­laic. And so I’m get­ting out; I’m break­ing free of con­ven­tion and con­straint. Until now you’ve always read the author’s story. Now you’re get­ting mine.

Here comes the first break with tra­di­tion, the first insult to idiom. A book always starts with the birth of its char­ac­ters; I’m going to start with the con­cep­tion. I was con­ceived in a smoky study, a seedy late-night encounter between an author and a mediocre idea. My author wasn’t an ideal­ist, he knew he’d had bet­ter ideas. He knew that if he waited, there were far bet­ter ones to come. But he was hungry, he needed it now. His pub­lisher was on his back, and he was fad­ing out of the pub­lic eye. It was a mar­riage of con­veni­ence. And so it was, I was con­ceived in this sor­did, half-hearted clinch between an author and his fail­ing imagination.

I sup­pose I should describe myself. I’m a col­lage, an amal­gam of body parts that caught my author’s eye over the last few months before he wrote me up. I’m a Mex­ican, so he ima­gines Gael Gar­cia, the only Mex­ican actor that someone who lives in the cul­tural isol­a­tion of an anglo­phone coun­try can con­jure an image of. But some­thing has to be dif­fer­ent: I’m older, I have Bob Dylan’s beard, and I’ve put on a few pounds. My hair is flecked with grey, the same as the model in that hair dye advert that he saw last year. Just like all authors, he pro­jects his own insec­ur­it­ies on to me, cor­rect­ing them as he goes: like him, I have one blue eye, and one green, but unlike him, I don’t wear col­oured con­tact lenses to cover my tracks — I’m not afraid of my body’s idio­syn­crasies, I embrace them as he wishes he could. As he writes his yearn­ing to be what he cre­ates is spilled, drip by drip, on to the page.

But there are prob­lems with me telling this story. I have no con­trol; my actions are pre­de­ter­mined, already com­mit­ted to print, for a char­ac­ter ink on the page is an irre­vers­ible fate. I can’t change what I do, how I look, how I react. The only thing I can con­trol is how I per­ceive my actions, and how I relate them to you. 

* * *

So, I was born aged thirty-three to a car crash in a town called Truth or Con­sequences, New Mex­ico. An odd name for a town I know, but the place does exist, and my author thought it held some kind of irony, a lit­er­ary poignancy. Every­one else thought it was a strained and thinly veiled meta­phor. What my author didn’t know is that far from hav­ing the gran­di­ose past that its title sug­gests, the town was actu­ally renamed in the 1950s, after a radio broad­caster announced that he would host his show in the first town to christen itself after the pro­gramme. A town will­ing to under­mine itself for a moment in the lime­light; a total sell-out. 

The crash wasn’t dra­matic, but meta­phor­ical: a simile for the ran­dom­ness of chance encoun­ters and their influ­ence over our lives. It wasn’t bru­tal, no ambu­lances were called and no tires squealed. He didn’t want to dis­tract from the real event, the col­li­sion not of two cars, but of two char­ac­ters. A small bump was all that it needed, the begin­ning of the chain reac­tion. I was hurled into an exist­ence without a past.

“Puta madre, pinches mujeres no pueden conducir”

He always put my foul lan­guage into my mother tongue. It was an attempt to seem authen­tic, and to dis­guise the words from his mainly con­ser­vat­ive, middle-aged audi­ence. The lat­ter he denied, of course, but let’s just say he knew which side his bread was buttered. 

“Hey, what, weren’t you watch­ing or some­thing? No mames, cab­rón!  Look at my car! I mean, what the f…”

He still didn’t let me swear. But by now it doesn’t mat­ter. Our eyes have met, the clichés are flow­ing thick and fast. Love at first sight? You could say it was fated, writ­ten in stone – or on cheap typ­ing paper. 

* * * 

There it was. My birth. But unlike you, I grew up before I was born, aged before I was con­scious. My emo­tional devel­op­ment was both instant and inad­equate. Seems like a tough job to cre­ate an entire per­son­al­ity within the space of a few lines. But my author is made up: he doesn’t even have to describe how I’m feel­ing, human empathy bridges the gaps for him. And as the scene is described you pro­ject your emo­tions onto me like you fill in a crossword. 

ACROSS

1. As he stared into her eyes, he real­ised that he had never felt like this before… (9)

AMAZEMENT

DOWN

1. …he sud­denly knew that noth­ing else mattered… (7)

ABANDON

ACROSS

7. …and that he had to make her love him. (6)

DESIRE

The clues were all there, and this cross­word was by no means cryptic. But my author left holes, his inad­equate descrip­tions often leav­ing me ambigu­ous, incom­plete. You might not have ever worked out what my author meant when he wrote that the girl’s beauty filled me with a nos­tal­gic sense of regret. But then neither did he. What did it mat­ter, as long as the words filled the page, made the right sounds and con­nec­tions. It was in these empty words that he lost con­trol, cre­ated this par­al­lel exist­ence which I main­tain. I am alive in that wriggle-room that he left me; I have cre­ated myself in the gaps. My ‘One Across’ is CONFUSION; my ‘One Down’ CUNNING. I’m try­ing to take back the power that you and my author used to hold; I’m filling in my own blanks. 

But how­ever good your intu­itions were, you’d never guess from the descrip­tion of my meet­ing with this girl that I would go on to kill her. That was the twist, the plot turn right at the end to keep you from real­ising how bor­ing the book had been. Sorry to spoil it for you. To under­stand my ver­sion of this tale, you need to under­stand my pre­dic­a­ment: I am try­ing to give you a sense of the inev­it­ab­il­ity of my actions. I would kill her – and I could do no more about it than you could. But for now that is all that you need to know; you can make your judge­ment later, once I have told what needs to be told. Whatever you might decide about me, you can’t say that I’m not hon­est, upfront and frank.

* * *

I don’t see myself as the vil­lain of this story. The anti­hero maybe. But why shoe­horn myself into these roles cre­ated by just that tra­di­tion that I am try­ing to escape? In real life there are no her­oes and vil­lains, just a whole load of good people who have done bad things. Or maybe bad people who have done good things. Who can tell? Real­ity is a rain­bow in shades of grey. And now I talk of real life, but what do I know? I am as far away from real as it gets.

After the crash my author crammed in a hur­ried romance. It was everything that a fic­tional rela­tion­ship should be: sim­pli­fied, melo­dra­matic and doomed. It had its moments of decent writ­ing, but for the most part it was trite and corny. Still, it was noth­ing if not func­tional, and the girl and I were soon con­densed into a single entity, our love becom­ing a char­ac­ter in itself. We had what would be dubbed by croon­ing, forthy-something women in sub­ur­bian book-clubs a ‘roller-coaster romance’, with it’s ‘thrills and spills’. The dis­cus­sion would rattle along in lan­guage more cliché than even my author could sum­mon. Suf­fice to say that the plot unfol­ded with a sick­en­ing predictability.

We fought, we made up, we made love – the lat­ter related in almost por­no­graphic detail that my author and his read­ers some­how con­sidered less offens­ive than curs­ing. I car­ried out everything required of me. I plastered a “lost-boy look” on my face when she stormed out, pay­ing no heed to the ineptitude of the descrip­tion that I was sup­posed to ful­fil. I wandered through the city in the rain look­ing for her, endur­ing pathetic fal­lacy that was ‘pathetic’ in a more con­ven­tional sense than my author inten­ded. It was the epi­tome of the trashy romance: designed to seem nor­mal in its abnor­mal­ity, the deluded read­ers sym­path­ising with the situ­ations that they wished they were excit­ing enough to have experienced.

Of course it was the secrets that spoiled it, brought it all crash­ing down. What else could it be? He couldn’t let those expect­ant read­ers down – where would they be without that for­mula to revise, novel after dull, duplic­ate novel. The illiter­ati cling­ing on to the only thing they could under­stand. No, they wouldn’t tol­er­ate change. My author pre­ten­ded that this restric­ted him, but really it set him free. How else could he earn a liv­ing ped­dling trashy, mediocre romances. Yes it was the secrets that spoiled it, and all the usual sus­pects too. He didn’t hold back: shady fam­ily back­grounds, old flames and dodgy busi­ness deal­ings all reared their mundane heads to shoot my coup­ling out of the water. He painted me as a man who wanted to change but didn’t know how. He painted me from experience.

But then he really blew it, really made me mad. I could have been happy with my lot. I was trashy, but at least I wasn’t bor­ing. So I slipped into a depres­sion, I can take that. I turned to drugs as a way out – who doesn’t, right? But anti-depressants and tran­quil­lisers? They aren’t even fun. I couldn’t even play the angry young man, the James Dean wan­nabe or the Hunter S. Thompson on an apo­ca­lyptic bender. I was the sad­dest kind of middle-class, sub­urban junkie, so hung up on social stigma that I was too afraid to hit the real stuff. He wouldn’t even let me des­troy my life in style.

* * *

No, not in style at all. I didn’t go out in a blaze of glory so much as in a flicker of inad­equacy. And so towards the bor­ing, pre­dict­able end of his bor­ing, pre­dict­able book, I got into my car and headed into town. And it was then, after a half-hearted and simplistic attempt to exam­ine my chem­ic­ally altered state of mind, that my author crashed me again. And of course it was her car I crashed into: an attempt at clas­sical sym­metry and unity, coupled with an astound­ing lack of depth and ima­gin­a­tion. Me and my lover thrown together one last time by a dis­ap­point­ing cliché and a fail­ing author’s pen. She died, of course, my lover. I’ve told you that already. Did I die too? I couldn’t tell you. He left that last ques­tion unanswered. Per­haps he’s already writ­ing the sequel.

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