Closer by Dennis Cooper

Author:Dennis Cooper
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781555847753
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

ALEX

THE REPLACEMENTS

Alex, 17, is slouched in an old movie theater chatting with friends. Lights dim. He peeks at Cliff's crotch. As Explosives begins—damaged print—he feels torn between what he's observing—four wrestling hippies—and a sweet daydream— Cliff fucking him violently on a twin bed. The scenes get mixed up in his mind, like images in those light shows that stoned hippies used to project over rock concerts back in the late sixties. Alex pretends he's on acid. After a minute or two, the sex slowly dissolves in his eyesight.

He watches one star topple back, hit his head on a rock and stop moving. The hippies untangle. One puts his ear to the victim's chest, stares, shakes his head. Alex's cock is still hard from his fantasy. The actor playing the dead boy has freckles. Alex imagines his friends lug him into an alley, undress the corpse, then themselves, and gang-bang him. In truth the stars call for help, but the truth has already dissolved in this fantasy.

When the corpse has been sapped by his former chums, and their inventive if dated invectives thin, Alex blinks. His cock deflates. A funeral is in progress. Some bad actors bawl, stagger, screech. The freckled boy lies in a box on a flower-strewn mound of dirt. “No,” Alex thinks, “reputation or not, this film's a yawn, however startling it might have been in the sixties. The corpse would be thirty by now and the world's grown more hellish. A baby could see this and not feel the slightest bit dazed by its moral.”

Alex turns to Cliff. “You want to leave?” Cliff's eyes say no. Alex fights a desire to be fucked on the floor, then attempts to rejoin the film. “What's Cliff seeing in it?” he wonders, shifting his gaze back and forth from his friend to the huge square of images. Three hippies kick a Coke can down a road. Cliff's eye movements don't match the actions on-screen. Maybe it isn't the film he's enjoying, but some private story. Alex acquires an intense need to know, then this longing dissolves in more pertinent thoughts.

For Alex life is a series of gradual dissolves—one thought or mood or companion dissolving into another, over and over. It's a term he hears bandied about in his evening film workshop. The teacher will show classic artifacts—M, Potemkin, The Blue Angel—take a few steps to the right of the screen and subdivide what the long-dead directors meant. As an experiment, Alex has tried to apply this idea to his life, remaining just to the side of whatever is taking place and narrating its course as though he were the voice of a rather pretentious spy story.

The actors enter a hippie nightclub. They buy two beers. Cut to the bartender's face concentrating on pouring their drinks into glasses. Alex would like to poke Cliff and explain how the film's tempo makes this switch possible without disturbing its slight credibility, but Cliff would stare, shake his head and not know what that meant.

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