DOOM 94 Read online

  I had never before heard music like this. I had never even been able to imagine that something like it existed. It was an entirely different world. It felt good to sit here on the asphalt, together with Death and Zombie, in the middle of the road to another world.

  — Faggot! Whore! Cocksucker!

  Zombie was unloading his frustration in true nineties fashion. Another car had just blown past us. As great as his wild gesticulating and theatrical poses were, Zombie’s efforts to flag down a car weren’t working. He’d been at it for fifteen minutes, judging by the sun (none of us had a watch). Death spoke up sullenly:

  — We’ll never make it to the Stocks. They start at ten.

  — So maybe stop warming your junk on the asphalt and help! My arm’s about to fall off.

  I didn’t believe that Zombie could ever be tired. Now he was plucking long reeds from the roadside and whipping them at invisible enemies.

  I took over the hitchhiking. I saw a micro-bus coming up the road, and dropped my hand, tucking it behind my back before turning away from the road. We didn’t have any money for fare. Then there was another Zhiguli; the man kept his hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road, while his wife smiled and shook her head ‘no’. But their back seat was empty. They looked to be my parents’ age, and my parents always stopped for hitchhikers. Then came a regular Audi or something similar (I’m not good with car makes, I only know my dad’s Zhiguli). Then another foreign model, its driver a polite guy who gestured with his thumb to the right to indicate he was about to turn off the highway, otherwise he’d stop. It was brief, human contact. The next driver gave me a totally ambiguous gesture. What did it mean? Grow up, kid, don’t go crawling out of your house until you have your own set of wheels?

  And so I communicated with the drivers; my side of the conversation had longevity and growth, but theirs lasted only a moment. I communicated with the thousand-headed road parade all while standing in place — and then a car signalled to us and started to slow. Death turned to see where Zombie had gone off to, but the car was full of degenerates barely older than us, definitely coming from Olaine. They were just screwing with us and laughed as the car slowed — then they revved the engine and were gone. And even they, who had paid attention to us for a second, would probably forget us in two minutes, three kilometres.

  — I’m done. It’s not working. Your turn.

  Death went to the shoulder, disappointed with the world; he sniffed and stuck his hand out in the space above the road. He came up with a mantra:

  — Pull over, idiots!

  The car was as long as a starship, its glinting body seeming to stretch on forever as it rolled to a stop. It was shiny, and must’ve been expensive. The monsieur leaned out the window and asked:

  — Where’re you boys off to?

  For some reason the answer ‘To Flatsville’ came to mind, but Death replied matter-of-factly:

  — To the Stocks.

  — Ha ha. The stock market is in the other direction, boys. In Lithuania.

  — To Riga, then.

  — Where?

  — Riga!

  The man chuckled again.

  — Well then let’s go. We can take you.

  Zombie ran up from the field, covered in bits of grass like a disoriented King Lear; before he got into the car the man turned to him and said:

  — Brush off.

  The car drove along quieter than a Zhiguli, and over the passengerside headrest I could see a cascade of beautiful hair, so bright it was blinding when the sunlight touched it, and a romantic blood-red when in the shade. The passenger was a metalhead! But no, I looked in the rear-view mirror to see a girl’s eyes starting back at me. Her father stepped on the gas and I pressed my nose to the window to resume my conversation with the road. We caught up to the carful of losers, all of them silently staring off in his own direction, and as we passed them up I gave them the finger. Then we passed up the guy with the ambiguous hand-gestures, and he looks just as serious as before. Then we passed the polite guy about to make his turn, but why hadn’t he turned off yet? And there, even the Zhiguli with the couple my parents’ age; the woman turns her head and sees me, and again smiles and shakes her head, no, no.

  — What are you boys going to do in Riga?

  The question came from our friendly chauffeur. None of us spoke up, waiting for the others to go first.

  — What?

  The man asked again. Death and Zombie answered simultaneously.

  Death:

  — To the store.

  And Zombie:

  — To count old people.

  No-one wanted to mention the Stocks again. For some reason it felt vulnerable in this car that smelled of leather and ‘Wunderbaum’.

  — Ha ha. You boys sure are funny.

  It’s some kind of unspoken rule that the hitchhikers have to make small talk with the driver. So the transaction is mutually beneficial. I was about to add that the weather was great, or something, when the man spoke up again:

  — Who are you, exactly?

  An existential question. Because, truly, who are we? Zombie answered slowly:

  — B-o-y-s.

  This in a voice that indicated he was trying hard to stifle a giggle.

  — I mean, who are you, you all have long hair, are you from some kind of association or something?

  We shrugged. We just were what we were.

  — You boys aren’t part of those crazy metalheads, are you?

  Ding ding ding! But what should we say... Are we, or aren’t we? Someone say something!

  — What kind of music do you boys listen to?

  Death couldn’t take it anymore.

  — Cannibal Corpse.

  — Excuse me?

  The driver turned his own music down — the most classic classical

  music ever, and a total potpourri of a playlist, too. He turned the music down

  even lower and half-turned to look at us.

  — What?

  — Cannibal Corpse.

  — And what does that mean?

  — It’s English, it means ‘the corpse of a cannibal’.

  — Do you think I can’t understand English?

  And he turned up his Beethoven, ridiculously remastered with a thumping beat. A minute later he repeated:

  — Do you think I can’t understand English?

  — I don’t think that, no.

  — Then why did you say I can’t?

  — I didn’t.

  — What do you mean you didn’t? That’s what you said!

  — I’m sorry.

  The man continued to steer along, not that you need to do a lot of steering along the Jelgava highway.

  — I, for example, listen to good music. You know what this is? Do you have any idea who this is?

  It was Beethoven’s 5th, mixed to flow into Brahms’ ‘Hungarian Dances’ in the most baffling way. But I said nothing.

  — You don’t!

  I wondered if the girl next to him, probably his daughter, was still staring into the rear-view mirror with her girlish eyes. I didn’t look.

  — Why don’t you boys listen to good music?

  Death had clearly decided not to say any more; he had zoned out, his face blank. He was an expert at that. Zombie gave it a go:

  — We like interesting stuff.

  The man pressed his foot down on the gas pedal; I wanted to look at the speedometer to capture the moment so we could say later how fast this lunatic had been driving, but I didn’t dare, because then I’d probably also look into the rear-view mirror and probably see the girl staring again. I kept my eyes on the road. There was a fox, run over.

  — And why don’t you boys look normal? You know why? I’ll tell you!

  The man was worked up:

  — You don’t even want to be normal. It seems silly to you. You think

  you’re smarter than everyone else.

  He was getting out of control. And we were nowhere near Riga yet.

&n
bsp; — And now you’re in my car, and you can see, it’s a nice car. But do I get any respect from you for it? No!

  Now I was really freaked out. Because he was saying exactly what I was thinking at that moment.

  — You don’t care if a person has made something of himself. You just think, eh, so what if he’s well off, he’s probably a crook or a sell-out. No, but you don’t think that at all. You don’t care about anything.

  Our monologue was making me feel incredibly uncomfortable.

  — This world isn’t good enough for you. You’re the special ones. Living a normal life, trying to make something of it — that all seems stupid to you! Let those idiots drive their cars, let them buy us beer. Meanwhile, we have to focus on our cannibals.

  He carefully maneuvered into the right-hand lane, then stopped the car along the shoulder.

  — This is your stop.

  We looked out. It definitely wasn’t Riga. Just the roadside. The most notable thing was the bushes. Our reaction time was too slow for him.

  — What part of that didn’t you understand?

  We got out. Did Death actually say thank you? It would have been so like him. The car pulled away. Zombie was chuckling to himself as if this was a good thing. But Death just repeated:

  — I told you, it’s the shirt! We’re never going to make it to the Stocks.

  I looked back at the road; what else was I supposed to do? Eventually the Zhiguli passed by, then the Audi, then the Ford, and its driver again gave us that curious gesture, maybe because he recognised us, but maybe he’d forgotten us because it was the same ambiguous gesture. But the polite guy who had said he was going to turn off didn’t drive by again. He really had turned off. Back then some people were honest about what they’d said they’d do, and remembered. Even the car of degenerates, who should be coming up the road any minute, would likely remember getting the finger.

  2

  School had changed. Of course, it had changed before. Nirvana had arrived as the unifier and the pacifier. Songs about loneliness and pain brought us together and made us happy. Everyone was on the same side. Jurģis liked the acoustic version of ‘All Apologies’, it was peaceful and beautiful; Kārlis like the aggression of ‘Negative Creep’ from Bleach, and Milēdija liked ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night’, the first half of which is so elegant you could almost listen to it with your mother, but at the end the screams rip you in two. I liked that song a lot, too.

  Nirvana times had been good times for all. But the time had passed, and some people were restless. If everyone is your friend, are they true friends? Being number one in the top charts and the industry — is that how it was meant to be? That’s why Kurt killed himself, he understood it all. He didn’t want to be a start, we betrayed him by hailing him as one; we betrayed him by not betraying him.

  That’s why the world changed again. It was no longer uniformly bad or uniformly good. Carcass had a song, ‘Polarized’. Society was being polarised. Or it was polarising itself. Either way, our group was again the minority. We had finally found a road not everyone wanted to go down.

  We openly and purposefully did the wrong things. We had various reasons. There were even those who joined in because it was the only chance to join something, to be part of something. It wasn’t a rule or anything; there were a few who stayed on our side whose prestige in school society was always significant. But most of them sided with the majority.

  I observed with a quiet and monstrous glee that Milēdija didn’t accept our other side either, she’d only bug out her eyes and purse her lips. She wasn’t even that pretty.

  Now I only liked metalhead girls. They walked through the school halls as if they’d always walked them. They wore their long hair loose down their backs, sweaters with long sleeves, ripped-up jeans or floor-length skirts. Heavy boots or trainers. They’d probably taken the boots from their fathers. But how were they able to grow their hair out that long? Tell me the secret! No, these were the girls who had only recently undone their braids, who hadn’t yet thrown themselves into life — unlike the girls who had shortened their skirts as well as their hairstyles — these girls had left their long locks alone, their fathers’ pride and joy, and now their hair flowed along with to the poetic sounds of metal. The legs they hid under their long skirts were gorgeous. They themselves were, too, and I couldn’t understand; how were they so beautiful? I hadn’t yet read Kafka, who wrote: ‘The guilty are the most beautiful.’

  I stepped up to the urinal in the bathroom, pulled out my dick and started to pee, like you do. I did all this with just my left hand; I had my house keys in my right hand and was carving the word ‘Asphyx’ into the chalky surface of the bathroom wall. They were a Swedish brutal death metal band, and had a distinct and easy-to-draw logo. I’d seen Death do it once. The bathroom wall in front of me was already covered in the history of the world: ‘Nirvana, Sakne the Bitch, Nine Inch Nails’ and now Asphyx. Kārlis was in the next stall over; we’d come in at the same time and now continued out conversation. I was working on the letter S and said:

  — What’re you doing?

  — What d’you think?

  — I mean I know. But what are you writing?

  Because I could hear the satisfying sound of a key carving into the wall coming from his stall, too.

  — Metallica.

  — Why?

  They were metal, but kind of commonplace, not very radical.

  — What d’you mean, why? They’re classic.

  The stall divider made me feel invisible, and therefore bold:

  — Does Milēdija like them?

  — Yeah.

  Something made me painfully squeeze what I was holding in my left hand. I asked:

  — Did you hear Hypocrisy’s The Fourth Dimension?

  — Ages ago.

  It was hard to fluster Kārlis. As in all things, he was even ahead of me in music. And yet, and yet — was he really all-in?

  I finished carving ‘Asphyx’ and, with an artist’s flourish, dropped my tool. The one in the right hand. And, naturally, my key ring fell right into the toilet.

  — Shit! My key fell in the toilet!

  — In shit?

  — No, no. In clean water.

  And I lowered my hand into the yellow pisswater. The keys were balancing on the edge of chaos, right on the lip of the hole. I swore that if only I could save my keys, I’d become a better person. I grabbed them and pulled the dripping mass back into this world. Now I had to fulfil my promise.I thought a moment and then said:

  — I only really like the first track from Fourth Dimension anyway, the slow one, ‘Apocalypse’.

  Kārlis said nothing. I wiped my keys off with toilet paper and continued:

  — It’s normal to like the pretty songs. We have to deal with much. But we have to deal with it! Once we’ve started in, we can’t stop. We have to listen to harder and harder music, and anyone who doesn’t can just stay sitting on their goddamned pot!

  I myself was right in front of my pot. And apparently I hadn’t kept my promise. I had to take it all the way.

  — Kārlis? Wanna bet that I’ll throw my keys back in the toilet? I don’t want to go home anyway! Wanna bet? I’ll throw them in and flush them, and even take a dump on them!

  His drawn-out silence was suspect.

  — Hey, asshole?

  Kārlis was sharp, he’d definitely answer me, maybe even throw a turd at me over the stall divider. But nothing happened. I put the keys in my pocket and stepped out of the stall. The neighbouring stall door was open and it was empty. It was an old trick — leave the bathroom in the middle of a conversation, so the other guy stays there talking to himself. Dixi et animam levavi.

  3

  When I was little I could never remember which river was the Driksa and which the Lielupe. They were both right next to one another, and actually were one and the same river, just split at this one point by an island. Around 1265 the Jelgava Palace was built on the island, then called the Mitau
Palace. The Livonian Rhyme Chronicle told how the palace quickly came to fame: ‘And all the Zemgalians / Cursed it loudly’. No-one really knows what it looked like. The palace was rebuilt several times and burned down even

  more — in 1376, 1625, 1659, 1737, 1918 and 1944.

  Though there were times when the palace stood peacefully with its residents. And as soon as people started living in the palace they wanted to decorate it. Duke Jacob Kettler’s bedroom had very fancy wallpaper made of woven wool. As time went on little fibres of wool separated from it, which the duke then inhaled and then coughed up along with pieces of his lung. This was seen as some kind of sorcery, and the steward of Vecmuiža was tried and burned at the stake for it right in the centre of the courtyard. When the palace wasn’t on fire, its people were.

  When Rastrelli was constructing the palace as it looks today, it took him forever to finish it; it was draining the duchy’s powers like the pyramids had in Egypt. Some Count of Provence — the future king of France, Louis XVIII — once complained about the on-going construction and the lack of simple comforts when visiting the palace. At that time he wasn’t yet king, just an exile, whose brother, Louis XVI, had laid his head down on the guillotine without so much as a peep only five years earlier. The proud exile had brought an entire entourage with him to Jelgava. There was the Jesuit L’Abbé Edgeworth de Firmont — the same one who had administered Louis

  XVI his final sacrament on the scaffold. Maybe he thought that the brother would also benefit from his services, but the Abbot died first, right here in Jelgava, and it was Louis XVIII who wrote the man’s epitaph. Louis XVIII had also brought his trusted courtier the Marquis d’Oissel, who was supposedly a very tiny man who preferred to perch on the King’s shoulder. He was also a hundred or two hundred years old. But the Jelgava climate got to him, and the miniature aristocrat got sick and died.