Lurid & Cute by Adam Thirlwell

totally did see the justice of how she was arguing but also I really did not, for the values by which she seemed to be judging were both unimpeachable and not my own. In many ways I feel let down by my friends. It’s like that film which Tiffany loves, where the black and white people begin an affair and then go back to their husbands and wives. Why, she once said to me, when I was not at all talking about this, should a possible future happiness be worth more than the present happiness of two people? And I wanted to assert that I really could not understand it. About happiness I am often wrong but at least I would like to believe it is the only question. You want what, she then added – a life without regret, is that it?
    ME
    If I have a regret, it’s that coffee with condensed milk in the Vietnamese way is not something you can have every day, because it really does fuck up your diet goals. If I have a regret then that would be it.
    TIFFANY
    Is like you’re tyrannised, boo, by this fear of missing out.
    She said it with this heavy wistfulness, as if just looking at me from far away and out of reach, an hauteur which I liked to think was possibly unjustified. In my defence I could imagine surely another perspective. I mean: lowdown, clumsy, sly, underhanded – can these not be values too, if happiness is at stake? And perhaps, OK, I therefore conceded to Wyman, my kind of listless paralysed atmosphere more usually happens in dictatorships and other totalitarian states, that’s where moods like mine tend to breed most colourfully, among the presidential palacios and tear gas and lampadas – but I would say that paralysed states can also happen in a number of other guises … There can be this sense of unreality, I said, while Wyman nodded – although he may not have been concentrating, it’s never easy to tell with anyone in any conversation – if things have just come to a gentle halt, like at the quietest country train station in the humid afternoon. Wyman, can you not feel this too? I’m only drawing a parallel, but I think in many ways my plight is similar to a lawyer or accountant from a bankrupt state who leaves everything to come and run a grocery store in a giant and clean city. The new identity is a shock, definitely, and in some ways a humiliation, but also it means that as you walk through the streets you do feel that you are walking in disguise, with all the hidden powers that a disguise might confer. You suddenly see meaning leaking everywhere – the way you might come back to some glamorous hotel in the late morning to see the used towels and sheets in formless damp piles in the otherwise perfect corridors.
    â€” Leaking? said Wyman.
    â€” It began with the orgy, I said.
    â€” The orgy? said Wyman.
    â€” I never told you about the orgy? I said.
    â€” Apparently no, said Wyman.
    â€” So settle down, I said. — You got a beer? Ensconce yourself.
    Â 
    THE ORGY
    a pastel atmosphere interrupted by a party
    Gently it began like every other party, with ice cream and accordions and dubstep and whatever other accessory people felt would make them happy. From the corner of the room I observed with Candy some psychedelic band. If I did have any feelings of foreboding, like some extra sense that even now the black mamba was descending on me with its gooey fangs, those feelings were just unwinding out of sight – like those backdrops of lakes and fields in the ancient brothels that some viejo would wind by hand to give the loving couple the illusion of a wagon-lit.
    â€” Hey, there’s Epstein, said Candy.
    â€” Epstein? I said.
    â€” Hey, that’s Romy, said Candy.
    â€” Romy? I said.
    â€” I told you, said Candy.
    â€” Told me what? I said.
    Of course I should have expected it, given how small the cast list is. Everyone in this account is a friend, really. I know them all. It’s like a group portrait or maybe more precisely