Lurid & Cute (17 page)

in a criminal plan

How little equipment do you ever need to be convincing! Already I had learned this in the bodega incident. The merest replica of a pistol is enough to make you feared and this was after all not, said Hiro, the true and crazy thing itself.

— It's not? I said.

— Man, no, he said.

True, it was more real than a water pistol. On the other hand, he pointed out, it was less real than a real gun.

— Is just a replica, said Hiro.

— It still looks real, I said.

— Well, sure, said Hiro. — Why wouldn't it?

How many doubles, really, does a tale need? For while it's easy to do things with water pistols and so on, argued Hiro, if you want to do something a little grander or more serious then you do need better props, or so he had decided, while roaming the lovely wide-open illuminated spaces of the computer screen. The water pistol was good for speed effects, but if a gun looks real, like truly real, with appropriate safety catches, finishes, sheen and so on – that's as real as it needs to be if you do not intend to use it, and most of the time a gun in civilised society is precisely not intended to be used, it's much more a general way of talking to other people, a sign like fishnet tights or lunatic lunettes.

— What, I said, — do you mean by more serious?

— Well, let's say, the nail salon? said Hiro.

I do think we live in a very dangerous age, I mean dangerous for one's moral life: for in the previous eras there was always a problem of material for the beautiful soul who wanted to express herself, I mean it was perhaps not so easy for the average bookish student in the marshland cities or slum conurbations to get hold of a gun, or other accessories, nor the many wraps of opium that their heart may have desired. But now so many things are available from the flat depths of a computer screen, and while that's surely an advance for civilisation, it's perhaps also a drawback, too.

— OK, keep talking, I opined.

When we had done that thing with the water pistol and bodega, Hiro pointed out, at no point had I complained, so why, he wanted to know, would this be different? If the prop was slightly more menacing, still, in its essence, it was not more menacing at all since in both cases the implement was not truly real. So that if my worry was for the safety of the people who would be threatened, I did not need to worry, just as if my worry was for our own safety, then there as well he thought I should be happy, since what security detail or panic button would a nail salon ever have? For after all, continued Hiro, it was just a place of harmony and perfume, to which no one with any aggressive intent ever went. Sure, there would be CCTV and so on, but since the CCTV is the worst cinema experience in the world, with only blurred and minute figures, that did not need to worry us either. While
morally
, nothing could go wrong because such an establishment would be very much self-contained, with insurance schemes in place for precisely this kind of sad and inevitable event. Every shop on every street must expect this, said Hiro, the way a woman must expect a man at some point to hustle her against a wall and explain stupidly that he loves her. So that in conclusion, I suppose, his basic argument was that so long as nobody suffered you could treat crime as a pure and singular event.

HIRO

Like, does it really matter if you hold up a retail outlet? I mean: who gets hurt?

ME

I no follow.

HIRO

The girl you point the gun at or whatever, the bayonet, is going to get her money back, the company behind that shop is going to get its money back, the only person who pays is the major insurance executive who is very far away and more importantly can take it.

And I felt a slight annoyance – it was inhabiting me very gently, the way the giant wind inhabits the tops of the eucalyptus trees and acacias – that Hiro obviously felt it would be so difficult to convince me, and if he thought that I would not be easy to convince I wanted very much to prove him wrong.

— Let's do it, I said.

— You sure? he said.

— I know it, I said.

If you have no way of demonstrating skill in the rest of your life, it's really restful to think that there may be one small way you will be able to succeed. And after all, I was thinking, as I took the last bite of my doughnut half, so many things were now different in my life to how I had thought they would be long ago. The old thinking seemed no use. I know the usual thinking is to separate the inner from the outer, to argue that OK sure there can be an aesthetic interest in let's say grazing the brink of horror in any number of thought experiments and bagatelles, in considering murders as so many objects deserving of aesthetic attention, like statues, pictures, oratorios, cameos, intaglios, and so on, but that if at any point you succumbed to the actual realisation of such thought experiments the feeling would only be one of repulsion and squeamishness. But I was suddenly not so sure. It seemed a distinction that was perhaps more useful for the general social contract than just true. And what I wanted was excitement in my life. The lack of excitement seemed a very serious problem and I would do anything, I began to think, to see that excitement return – in whatever zany form. Please interest me! I was imploring to the world. It was like being a lover of animal rights but still in the end having this total need to sit out in the dying sun while watching the matador kill the bull. Definitely I was curious as to what a heist might actually be. I was gangster, I agreed, in this: if you have to find money in this world, it's always best to do it quick. That's just obvious when you think about it. What's worse than suffering ennui?

to rob a very bright nail salon

Because, said Hiro, people have a very complicated idea of heists and other steals, like if you want to break into some major art museum it probably seems natural to think you will have to do something ultracool, like borrow the uniform of the gallery security, then make your way to the control room and shut off the surveillance cameras, then deactivate all the electrics in the rooms with gold-leaf art and have your sidekick do his sidekick thing with lifting pictures off the walls then smashing on the sprinklers. That's how people might argue but really, said Hiro, you should just burst in and do the place with assault weapons and balaclavas. You have three minutes before any Black Maria is going to turn up, and that's a lot of time when you know what you're doing. The most complicated things, in other words, said Hiro, are often the most simple – and I believed him. That was why we made no major plans or diagrams of entrances and exits, we just entered the nail salon like any other client wanting a quick colour and polish – except that we were in baseball caps, and sunglasses, against the afternoon light, because the time we had chosen was that absence of the early afternoon, a time which is really only known to those who are parents or unemployed. The receptionist was on the phone and very much engrossed in her efforts at conversation:

— So she wasn't two weeks late, I think she was a couple of days. And the reason she was a couple of days was she was stressing. Yeah
thank
you. She's lying. Ly-ing. This woman has issues.
Very
unstable.

There was then a pause then something like:

— The fuck that got to do with things? The girl thinks she cool because she married an Asian. She never liked a black girl in her life.

I mean, I cannot remember exactly. I'm just mimicking from memory. That was the tableau as we entered, and it was happy in its bright way and I did feel this regret that we might be the agents of lessening this happiness, of being causes of concern and fright which was why I very much wanted to be doing this for as little time as possible. Also therefore I was glad that we had such a gentle look overall, because although perhaps it was a problem of heist authority, it surely would go some way to allaying their natural terror and unease. Just as also, I wondered, it could add an even greater element of surprise when you do indeed pull out the gun than if you entered with a balaclava and menacing cries, and while the shock may be greater to other people, the nail technicians and single customer with one hand in a chemical bath, then perhaps the fear is less. And as Hiro did this, I mean took out the gun and raised it in the air, I realised that my heart was not staying still at all, it was gigantic inside my body. That was one more effect that I would not have predicted, when contemplating the event from the air balloon or weather plane – and in many ways this event, as I now remember it, or as I now try to record it, was an entire network of unforeseen effects. According to our sketched-out plan in the cafe, my job was to be the lookout or sentinel – although were I to have seen a security guard with wolfhounds or some other police agent, I now realised, I was not sure I would have exactly known what I should do. Therefore I tried to ignore this gap in my knowledge and instead stayed by the storefront, with mannequins displaying their gorgeous nail designs. Their hands were very large, as if in some dream or other hallucination where your will is not in control. And it was at this point while I was observing these hallucinogenic hands that Hiro started to shout – in a way which seemed to me just slightly exaggerated, and it worried me, this exaggeration, because it did seem to give away that we were scared and not exactly in control of the situation. In fright the girl stood up and her chemical bath overturned, and instinctively I wanted to find a cloth to mop it up – because mess in any form distresses me – but then I thought no, I needed to stay still. And so I did. Instead of the pool of chemical, I considered the gun, because, I was discovering, it's very interesting what happens if you bring out a gun in public. A sudden stillness happens and I can see how the serial criminals operate, it must be such a delight to have this every day, and also addictive, to watch how you becalm people with a single heavy gesture. To discover a power you did not think you had, this is definitely an interesting feeling. And OK, yes, my friend Álvaro, I know he is used to waking up to discover that his children's kindergarten has been decorated with bullet holes caused by a passing machine gun, and is now accustomed to the bribes and threats and protection and whatever other ways the criminal activity reaches the average taxpayer – like the way the Broadway shows eventually show up at the quiet provincial theatres, like the ones to which my mother took me to watch the pantomimes – but me, no. Whereas now I was realising that maybe the criminal and dark could also involve me. It was a new metaphysical step. But still, I also understood that this was not the moment for my reflections, and in fact I am not sure even that these were indeed reflections I had then – it was more like they were there inside me, awaiting pollination.

which they accomplish hyperfast

Everything was happening hyperfast. Hiro was pointing the gun at the woman behind the cash register and demanding on the one hand that she should not move, because if anyone touched a phone then he would not hesitate to shoot, and on the other hand she should move, but very slowly, in order to open the cash register and deliver all its money. I suppose these things just happen because you've seen them happen, I mean in the usual miniseries. But what I was not expecting was how slow it was, this hyperfast activity, even this five minutes, or how outside the window I could see people softly walking their dog or doing other small things – there was a man having a conversation with a very beautiful woman, and I could tell that he wanted to impress her because he had taken out a cigarette, and also taken out a lighter, but each time he was about to light the cigarette he let it pause there, while he kept on talking, then slowly lowered it again, and it was really lovely to see, that attention to another person. Then I noticed that at one of the mirrors there was one woman and she was crying very much, not violently or loudly but tears were on her face and there were smudges of mascara on her cheeks, like she was smearing her face with ashes in the manner of an ancient mourner. I wanted to comfort her very much and also I was not sure if Hiro would approve. So I called over to Hiro something like:

— Hiro, I said.

— The fuck, he said.

I think he was annoyed that I used his name but I wasn't sure that really mattered, I mean outside the movies – but still, he was annoyed so I wanted to apologise.

— Sorry, I said.

— It's OK, he said.

I knew that he was angry but I guessed this was not the moment for apologies, and I did appreciate at least that he acknowledged my mistake.

— It's just, I said, this girl is crying.

Hiro looked over at me.

— We're going to be done so fast, he said to her, and he said it softly so that she might calm.

She was not so calm but I had done at least what I could. And I was sad for her because, after all, so little was really happening, just two hoodlums with their gun, and we were not even hoodlums really, just as the gun was not even a true gun, not some .45 Magnum ready to be fingerfucked by the coked-up assassin, but then I realised that the girl at the counter was seeming agitated too.

— I said don't move, I said.

— I didn't move, she said.

— OK, I said.

I wasn't sure. It was very possible, I thought, that I was more scared than she was, and I wanted to make some kind of conversation. It's what I do when I'm nervous, like when I'm talking to our cleaner or to children. On the counter was a small wood carving of a saint or holy woman, and suddenly this was all I wanted to think about – it was one of those oubliettes of slowness like when you're on amphetamine and it suddenly becomes very very important to be refolding the clothes in your wardrobe in a particular order, or copying out the to-do notes in one notebook which are now a bit scratched out and tatty into a new notebook with the scratched-out notes no longer there, even though really you should be going to a funeral, or your lawyer for a divorce hearing. They are ways in which your attention is suddenly diverted, but whether or not it truly is diverted, it's difficult to say – for in my case what I was also considering was a moment when I was very young and had come to this very same parade and my mother bought me a book about the greatest football tournament in the world, and I was thinking how happy the book had made me and also thinking that that smaller version of me could never have imagined that one day he would still be here, with friends with guns.