Amnesia
One Sunday evening, after a dull dinner at his parents’ house, Jose told Alicia that he was planning to write a diary novel. He’d become obsessed with diary novels, he said, especially with the idea of writing one. He didn’t think that there really was any other kind of novel (at least for him); if you thought about it, the history of the novel was in fact the history of aspiring, mutilated diaries; it was the only form that –
‘Sure,’ she said, ‘sounds great, you should do it.’
‘You’re not listening,’ he said.
‘I’m doing my best.’
‘But I’m trying to tell you…’
‘Something that’s incredibly important to me,’ Alicia said, ‘something I’ve been trying to work out for several years without realising it: that my reading so far has been a kind of cover story for my search (yes, I’m not embarrassed to say it’s an ongoing journey) to find a way to open up my life rather than close it down…’
She continued for a while: openness, memory, this time I’ll really do it, blah blah blah. Then she trailed off.
Jose didn’t know for sure (and he fell into a kind of trance for the last thirty seconds of Alicia’s little speech), but this was more or less exactly what he was going to say.
‘How did you –’
‘Because you’ve said the exact same thing every Sunday evening for the past six months. And then we have this back and forth, I encourage you, I make a few comments (which you never like) about how it might be good to occupy your mind in the evenings. I suggest you call your little imaginary novel Diary of an Amnesiac. You say –’
‘Don’t tell me what I’m going to say.’
‘You say: “Don’t tell me what I’m going to say.” And then I say: if you’re not going to bother, I should write it for you. And by the next morning, you’ve forgotten all about it.’
‘Well, why don’t you?’
‘Why don’t I what?’
‘Write it.’
‘I’m busy, it’s boring.’
‘Well, this time…’
‘I know.’
Of course, if Jose had bothered to write the amnesiac diary novel, this little exchange might have been a nice introduction, an opening gambit, as they say. But that version remains unwritten.
For several weeks, so did the version that Alicia eventually started putting together. But one Sunday evening she was at her wit’s end. (It’s not clear why exactly; and it doesn’t really matter). She took one of Jose’s empty notebooks from under the bed, and got going with the diary novel the next day. For the next few weeks, every evening after work, she recorded what Jose had eaten that day; his strange and possibly invented allergic reactions (plywood?); his complaints about the office; the little quotes from action films he mumbled as he pottered about the kitchen while she made dinner (‘I’ll be back,’ ‘Say hello to my little friend’, etc.); and if they’d had sex, her imagined description of his experience (she couldn’t come up with anything more elaborate than ‘had some sex’). She added a few quotations from existentialist philosophers too.
Alicia did this for months. In fact, she carried on until she was bored to death. She recorded this feeling by copying out a quote from Kierkegaard that she thought Jose would like: ‘boredom is the roof of all evil.’ Then she crossed it out.
One morning, after she’d finished the final entry – ‘Tonight I think I’ll sleep like a log’ – she left the diary open on the kitchen table. Alongside it, there was a note telling Jose that she was moving to São Paulo.
Jose read the note, but didn’t read the diary. He didn’t even notice it was there. If he had, he’d have learned a lot about himself. He’d have learned that he was a good ten years older than he thought he was; that his parents weren’t who he thought they were; that Alicia had come to despise him a long time ago, and that she lied to him non-stop (mostly for his benefit, but also for fun). She’d lied about her family and her job, she’d lied that she was called Alicia, and she’d lied that he was an amnesiac.
In short, Jose would have learned, and then forgotten, that his life amounted to little more than Alicia’s curious private project. He could barely be said to exist outside of the ghost-written diary novel, which is still lying on the kitchen table, even though Jose moved out of the flat to live with Alicia’s sister and her two elderly cats a couple of months ago.
*
Warhol
A few years ago I wrote a blog that briefly made me famous (I almost wrote infamous), at least in certain corners of the internet that it’s probably not worth peeking back into. It described various sexual encounters I’d had with celebrities. All of these stories were fictional, and drew exclusively on people Andy Warhol mentions in his diary (Arnold Schwarzenegger, Pelé, Ingrid Bergman, Michael Jackson and Diane Keaton, to name a few). I added a disclaimer to the end of each post: please note: these events did not occur either inside or outside of Andy Warhol’s diary. (I was worried any Americans I mentioned might sue me). But people believe what they want: what can you do?
By far the most popular post, the one that attracted an initially unpleasant amount of attention, was a description of a three-day bender with Jack Nicholson and Madonna in Malibu. (Unfortunately Roman Polanski turned up as well, but he just watched). And the least popular post, which also happened to be my last, was about an encounter with Warhol himself.
It was a rainy autumn evening in New York. I was in a bar, considering how I was going to make enough money to afford a hair transplant, when I realised I was sitting across from Lou Reed. He looked depressed. He didn’t have an umbrella, but he must have spotted mine (it had an elegant dark green shimmer), because after a while he said he was going to Andy’s office and I should join him. It was clear he was terrified of getting wet. As we walked along Broadway toward 17th Street, he kept yanking the umbrella away from me, and gripped my arm as if his life depended on it.
When we arrived, Andy was at his desk. He was mumbling to someone on the phone and flicking through a magazine. I sat and waited, hoping that other celebrities or pseudo-celebrities would join us. But for the most part it was just Lou Reed, who wasn’t chatty at all, and kept pacing back and forth through the doorway.
When Andy eventually got off the phone I said: ‘Hi Andy, how are you?’ ‘Um, yes,’ he said, ‘good.’ I said I was here on sexual business. ‘What other kind is there?’ he replied. Then he picked up the phone again: ‘Hey Pat,’ he said, ‘some guy who looks like a priest has just turned up and said: “I’m here on sexual business.” I said: “What other kind is there?” You get that?’
Then he put the phone down again. ‘Do you want me to take your picture?’ ‘Not really.’ He picked up the magazine again. ‘Sex isn’t, um, real,’ he said. ‘It’s all just fantasy. It would be better if no one learned about sex until they’re forty.’ ‘Do you really believe that?’ ‘Sure, do you?’ ‘No.’
Lou Reed poked his head through the door to say he needed to leave. Andy told him to get some money from one of the girls downstairs. ‘How old are you, by the way?’ I said I was forty-five. ‘Huh,’ he said, ‘you look older.’
A couple of minutes later, I found myself shuffling into the studio. (More accurately: I bumbled in, Andy ghosted.) To my surprise, no one else joined us: it was just me, Andy and the cameraman, who provided no direction whatsoever.
I don’t want to rehearse the scene, which is described in great detail in the original blog, and is easily findable for enterprising sleuths. (One specific detail comes to mind now that I don’t remember recording: there was a huge spider swinging back and forth from the ceiling, and I swear to god it had fangs.) To cut a medium-length story short: we both became unglued.
Naturally, the cameraman filmed everything. I think it was twelve minutes in total. The provisional plan, put together semi-breathlessly as we put ourselves back together, was to release it under the name Reality. (I initially suggested Unravelling. I think it was the cameraman who shook his head. He said it sounded like ‘some bullshit avant-garde play’, and he was correct.)
But the moment he’d finished gluing his face back on, Andy started muttering nervously. He was flushed, he was frantic. ‘We have to destroy that tape,’ he said. ‘You can do that, can’t you?’ He went over to the cameraman and took some cash out of the inner pocket of his blazer. ‘There’s two hundred dollars,’ he said. ‘I can get you more.’ ‘I don’t need more.’ ‘Do you want to be in the magazine?’ ‘No thanks.’ Andy looked as if he was about to collapse. I said: ‘Maybe it’s better if I keep the tape in a safe. Do you trust me?’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘But that’s okay…’
I yanked the tape out of the camcorder and started running. No one tried to stop me. Andy just stood there in a daze. I passed a whirl of faces but didn’t see who any of them were. I ran past Union Square for what felt like miles. When I got to my hotel (which was in fact only ten minutes’ walk away) I did some breathing exercises, took a cool shower and ordered some Chinese food. I calmed down, and took a short nap. When I woke back up, I got straight to work on the blog, while the details were still fresh enough for me to record accurately.
Why did I run? To this day I don’t know. I also wanted to destroy that tape and had no intention of preserving it. If I remember correctly, after I’d finished my notes, I considered throwing it from the balcony or disposing of it with the laundry. Eventually I put it in a carrier bag and slid it under my pillow.
Later that evening, as I was half-watching a western on TV, I heard a few scattered taps against the window. I looked down and saw a man in a long grey coat with a green umbrella, throwing a handful of small stones towards me – a thug masquerading as a photographer. The rain had cleared up. The man took his camera and pointed it directly at my window. My career as a blogger was over.
*