hotel story in a port town in the desert of the anthropocene with hats, geophilosophy, the third situation -

So this is written by me, it all happened a long time ago, then I was unprotected, except by him, Leaf. Now of course things are different, anyway … we were on the margins between the desert of the land and the sea, the ocean. i am in love with the hotel. Who put this thing here to rescue us? The plane is like a desert that concepts populate without dividing up. the only regions of the plane are concepts themselves, but the plane is all that holds them together (Delueze and Guattari)…. I imagined the world with this hotel… I am looking at my exhausted face in the bathroom mirror, applying face cream, my cracked lips hurt. Chemicals helped. Love I think began at this moment… It would have been the time I emerged from the bathroom and he was in a towelling dressing gown sprawled half asleep on the bed, the clothes the hotel had collected for us were piled on the chairs, they only had sandals, I was asleep on the bed bedside him before I even had time to think about meaning, risk, danger. him… It would have been early afternoon and we slept and we woke around six that evening and got dressed, me in black linen trousers, sandals, a teeshirt, the pants fitted the bra didn’t, so I washed the one i’d been wearing in the bathroom sink, leaving it to dry hanging on the shower and put the bigger teeshirt on. They had found him a brown linen suit that almost fitted and and and a light grey teeshirt, sandals and we went downstairs and ate an early evening meal in the hotel restaurant, sitting in the corner and eating, drinking and talking about inconsequential things, perhaps some were consequential, who knows, we, in that restaurant could be said to begin to explore the strange country of the other person across the table. What could have been more consequential than that. Though we spoke, interacted, unconsciously mirrored the other we carefully avoided making any demands. The hotel manager delivered a message from London saying that my new passport would be delivered in a few days. After an hour or so tiredness arrived and we went upstairs and collapsed into bed again… slept all night. Sometimes I woke up and looked at you, he told me before we went down for breakfast. We looked out through the main doors towards the desert side, the square was coated with dust and sand, blown against the wall by the desert wind and falling down onto the port town, piled against the wall. What are we doing ? he said. I have no idea. It’s not safe to think about it, I said. I didn’t know what to say to him about this, so I said — it’s an experiment, lets just see what happens. But this is an understatement, an evasion — should I admit that the notion of experiment was already being is replaced by the notion of attempt. For an experiment as demonstratable and repeatable, whereas we could have walked away then and vanished into the dust.

They gave us some more of the things we had asked for that morning. They gave him some jeans that looked like they were bought for him. Some leggings and tops for me that were perfect. Perhaps I should have felt paranoid about this all too perfectly sized clothing, but here I was with an aching body, drinking good espresso in the late morning with him, after finding the really nice small library in the hotel, and reading Kant’s an answer to the question: what is enlightenment? I don’t remember what he picked up in the library. We simply forgot to be paranoid chatting over espresso and a book with each other. The next few days we mostly stayed in the hotel, using the gym, the solarium, recovering. In the evenings as the sun began to set we may have gone for a swim in the sea. How many sentences , phrases, words stories did we exchange in the hotel, in that port town? Nothing else happened. Nothing, we could have put on hats and one morning went out to the shaded covered market. The crunch of hot desert sand beneath our sandals. We walked through the displays of of of food, mummified animals, birds, chameleons, frogs, cats, dogs, dragonflies, booksellers, we were looking for a place to buy some more clothing — and there at the end of the market maze was the clothing market, with fake versions of fashionable european and japanese brands. By the time we reached there my legs were aching, <i was so relaxed by this time that my body felt capable of insisting that..> We might have bought a small wardrobe each, from socks and underwear outwards, matching pairs of Doc Martins, hats and shades. I tested the clothing with crane kicks, tai chi routines and punches. Leaf laughed, laughed… and drank coffee from an east african coffee pot with the man and talked about what it was like living in the desert of the anthropocene, whilst I tried on some clothes with his wife or perhaps she was his sister. I needed help with the sizing. She told me — We can live here because of the hotel, they supply the water and the power. She asked me — What happened to your clothes? I told her about the plane crash and walking out of the desert.. nothing happened. Husband ? She asked. He’s terrible husband material, I told her. She smiled and laughed, as I would have. We walked out of the market in the afternoon and sat on the wall on the other side of the square drinking lemonade with ice. The wind was now blowing from the sea and the dust suspended in the air was floating back towards the desert. During the afternoon the sea wind grew stronger and soon the sand on the roof of the hotel was lifted into the air and… I was wearing the hat I bought in the market, the wide brim shielding my eyes, casting half my face in shadow. We were wearing similar dark glasses, giving the world a touch of colour. The hat suits you, he said. I remember bouncing my heels on the short wall. We talked about how long we would be in the hotel.

Do you have parents? I asked him. Yes, a mother. My father is dead, he was military she was civil. Do You ? He asked. Yes, I said (the she in this relationship said) in Moscow, we don’t get on. My mother claims she should have seen it coming, I was that way even as a little girl — never satisfied, violent and a bully. When I am in Moscow, she visits once or twice a month and brings me tea, smokes cigarettes on the balcony. Eats fruit making crunchy noises, the noise gets to me and I think she is eating me, if it lasts to long I want to hurt her. Kill her, both my parents were military […edited… edited… ] It was nearly dusk. They made us like that, he says leaning against the hotel bar, ordering tea and shots of vodka in crystal shot glasses, somebody wanted us to be psychopathic. Our parents colluded. Did we have a choice? He asked the world. She looked at him wondering how she already knew it was a rhetorical question that needed an answer. Should I have thought that these sentences and the ones that followed it confirmed that we liked one another, did it also mean that these sentences meant that love began at this moment? My father did it to me, I told him, he volunteered his young daughter. Decades later here (her) we are. I always hated the way my father rubbed one foot against the other whilst watching TV or working on his notebook. Sometimes he would take calls in the conservatory. I hated that. I said bitterly. They put me in the training school when I was 10 or 11. He replied, gently. Caressing the crystal shot glass. I watched his fingers, the clear liquid being sipped. I didn’t think you had such places in the west. I said to him. They controlled every aspect of my young life, i didn’t know how to live, I still don’t. He sighed. I touched his hand. I had the same problem, the sex, death and seduction work was the worst, I confessed. Now that I’m older they don’t ask me to do those. Can we have some more please, he asked the barwoman. I always hated those jobs as well, something terrible about debasing yourself and then… an imaginary knife drawn across his throat. (he paused momentarily) think it completely ruined sex and relationships for me. Both of us, I can’t do relationships, I said. Sex and death, a terrible mixture, he said. I preferred killing people to the sex work, I told him. I had never told anyone that before he was the first and last person I have said that too. It’s because, I think that the relationships are always so unequal. Inegalitarian, yes that’s probably it. So much of the sex was fundamentally micro-fascistic.

Can I have some more tea, and do you have any chocolate? The barwoman poured vodka into the shot glasses for us. Sweet or bitter? She asked me. Sweet please. When it arrived, small cubes on a plate, he started eating them and looked slightly guilty. The barwoman went away and fetched another plate. Eli Moktar and his ethiopean band began playing across the garden. The only word I understood was “äfrica”. Rhythmanalysis. I took my hand away from his, we should learn to speak to one another before we do anything more. We already can and are, he responded. These are very sick societies, wanting us to exist. Truce. I declare a micro-truce between psychopaths, I proposed. Deal, he smiled, I will tell nobody what you have just told me. Nor will I, we have secrets, I said into my vodka glass. Can we trust the people you work for? i don’t know, so no, even if they don’t try to kill us. I suppose, looking back as I write this with my two finger typing, sometimes from by chaotic untidy written notes, written into a black notebook I found on the shelves of the library, that to the barwoman we must have looked very damaged. The only person in the world i can trust is you. We need to know who did this to us, even if we cannot do anything to them. He said. Anti-realist, I said to him, it was a longer sentence than that one word … You might think we had sex when we went upstairs again, but we didn’t. Neither dared to touch the other after the word “debasing” was said, whether its debasing yourself or debasing the other, we simply couldn’t because of that concept. Our similar histories hung between us, slowing down the inevitablity of sex. We had to forget what that concept. Leaning against the bar sipping tea, in the face of the sympathetic gaze of the barwoman also made it impossible. We were made like this, he said, It’s not genetically determined, the world doesn’t need us to be like this. so perhaps we can become something different. It’s not a matter of not being this, rather its not continuing to be obedient… Did I mention I really liked that hotel bar? Did I think that Leaf or I was kinder? It means so little and yet it was something that I felt once upon a time. (Forgive my loose uses of tenses and pronouns, I get confused across the languages.) So there we were suddenly, evasively, talking about the days we had spent in the hotel together, able to talk about walking out of the desert. The dust, sand and rock, the bare soil, the desert of the anthropocene. Could you have walked out of the desert on your own? Don’t know, we both lied. The differences between our walking out of the desert expressed, known, determined by the unfamiliar sensations. I didn’t tell him that I thought about killing him on the second night, taking his water, until much later, in London, in his apartment, after sex. I have never known why I told him that. A month later he was shot and I was arrested after keeping him alive, put into a black site for interrogation, waiting to be deported. But there, in the bar talking about how the sand and dust got everywhere, I didn’t know why I felt so relaxed, why we felt so relaxed. < why don’t you use more found text? he says over my shoulder. Quotes from Eli Moktar, didn’t he sing some June Tyson lyrics? Clezio, what other writers of the desert are there?Hey I’m writing this, you asked me for some words. Tell them about the deserts in Russia.> We are at the bar, sipping Orange Pekoe tea, have you ever been in any other desert? Yes, the Oleshky Sands. The Oleshky sands are man made, being a westerner you think they are in the Ukraine. Whereas for me they are of the steppes. <Nomad, he says. Knowing that this is his fault. > The anthropocene loves deserts. I ran some half marathons along a track there…. A day or so after leaning against the bar, we managed to forget “debasing”, we were both feeling better and negotiated desire, touching, looking, sex. I have no idea who made the first advances, if anyone, it probably just happened. Though that sex was probably terrible and tentative. It was a small miracle that we could even imagine touching one another without fear. By the end of the week, or perhaps when we were in his apartment in London we began to enjoy it… It would be on the second or third day leaning against the bar when he asked when I would contact Moscow. From London, when we know it wasn’t your people who did this.

About a week after we entered the hotel, I imagine we had just come back from swimming in the sea drinking tea at the bar before we went upstairs to change “Good swim?” the Barwoman ws asking. wiping the wooded surface of the bar. Yes, i told her and asked for some dates, beneath my beach gown i was wearing a lycra swimming costume I remember the gold zip with affection, his nice back against the bar, by this time i was beginning to like his body, he was looking at the young diplomatic technician and a woman Leaf knew from Internal Affairs “I know her,” he said watching them walk across the reception [cut…. edit… edit… cut] eventually, after a few hours or more the young technician from internal affairs gave me a passport and a driving license with leaf’s address on it I have kept that identity ever since The woman explained that she “worked for Fergus sometimes” “Sometimes?” Leaf said. “When nobody must know, when he needs favours”

How would we leave the hotel? together with a few other travellers, on the monthly salt ship, shipping sea salt created by the hotel desalination plant, northwards. The sea is stratified by the lines of the empires, more stratified even than the desert where the stratification is failing, this sea stratified by the europeans and other empires. Superficially it looks like a smooth space but its more striated than the desert, longitude, latitude, GPS, the fleet in being, the planes, warships, container ships, yachts. The small freighter travels north. Standing on the deck, watching the hotel and town vanish behind us. Without memory standing in bright sunshine. Crossing the wet desert which is dying around us, soon to be as empty as the desert we walked out of…Sea; the archetype of smooth space for westerners. Leaf and I are supposedly on different sides, creatures of different empires. He puts his left arm around me. I never knew what he was thinking, i lent against him. (That was all I remember, I don’t remember whether the ship docked in Lisbon or Marseille, and eventually London. I hope its raining when we get to Europe, i said to him. It will be raining in London, you’ll get fed up with it soon. If you say so my englishman… [cut…. edit… edit… cut… stop]