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  Swish

  I often think about death, most particularly those awful throbbing seconds before it, that tiny glance of moment where you—you, your brain, your id, and your ego—they all realize together that this is the last breath and flood your body with adrenaline, that creeping feeling up your body, toes to throat, of the last of the life of you escaping. And I always think: That sounds bad. Dying, I think, I could cope with. But the few seconds of panic just before death: no, not for me. That doesn’t sound fun at all.

  Thankfully I have devised the perfect way to die, and all I need is a basketball court, like two hundred guns, and a bunch of lasers.

  So first you get a basketball court. I figure like a basketball court at a high school over summer, that sort of thing. Somewhere you can really let loose, and also die. Where you won’t be interrupted or anything like that. Put some bulletproof metal down at the half-court line. That’s when you get your two hundred or so guns: rifles, pistols, anything with a decent medium range, anything that can splatter shrapnel through your head and guts. Aim all the guns at the half-court line. Figure out some sort of relay system so they all go off at once.

  And here’s what you attach that trigger to: the basketball hoop. But you use detection lasers or whatever, so if the rim shudders or vibrates in any way, the guns do not go off. The guns only fire if you get a perfect swish.

  Please, take a moment to imagine your death:

  You, having driven your car off the end of a pier in a jealous rage after you find your wife in bed with her lover, whisky drunk and crying, crying and snotting and veering, you steer the vehicle off the pier and into the sea, where the cold water hits up your nose like concrete, or—

  You, having turned up two minutes to closing at Chick-fil-A, order their most expensive and complex chicken meal, the one that means the already overstretched and overworked staff have to fire up the fryers again that they had just started wiping down to make it, and they hand it to you with surly brows fifteen minutes later, and yeah, yeah, the meal is good and everything—big up the Polynesian sauce—but also something seems off, somehow, you swear one of the patties was pink in the middle, and so it turns out to be a crippling case of E. coli, you bent and doubled by your toilet, all night and all day, depleted of fluids, I mean it is spraying out of both ends of you like a pinwheel, and you are exhausted, and coughing, and pale, and losing you are pretty sure blood, and there is the acrid taste of vomit in your nose, and you are going light-headed, dizzy, and hold on, is this it, are you d—

  You, having lost all your riches on a single 32 red roulette bet at a high-rolling casino, you out of your mind with that one, you thought it would be a thrill but you lost it all, you flew to Las Vegas for this, you were seduced by the glitz and the glamour and the free scotch and the low-plunged-dress-wearing women, how will you tell your wife the house is gone, how will you look her in the face, and you are on the top floor of the Palazzo, full tux, and you think you will flutter to the ground but in practice it feels overwhelming, the ground rushing up to meet you, no, stop, you didn’t mea—

  Or my way, where I spend a relaxing hour or two trying to score perfect swishes, because scoring a perfect swish is the most awesome feeling not only in sport but in all of life, it is a hundred thousand orgasms at once, it is winning every lottery in the world, and yeah, all right, it’s taken me a few hours of rim bounces and straight-up air balls to get here and I’m sweating a little, slightly clammy, but I can feel myself warming up, it’s coming, and bounce, bounce, arch the toes, bounce, this one feels good, oh this one looks good, oh it’s marvelous, oh my god, it’s dipping, it’s dipping, and—

  Swish!

  And for one perfect second I feel elation.

  And then the guns explode my body into atoms.

  Who in the world knows best how to die? It is me. I know best how to die. Golby, 3; Life, 0.

  PCM

  When I was a kid, my mum considered the entire house her project. My mother had, and RIP, the worst taste in interior design ever in the world. The front room was painted a deep, ominous red. The dining room was a sort of dirty terra-cotta with a head-height gold line—less than an inch thick, like a twinkling string—running the entire circumference of the room. The kitchen was white, then wood paneling painted blue, then a lurid pink. The staircase, her final masterpiece, stripped of wallpaper and left bare for years while I was a child, before one day I came home as an adult and oh, it was vomit yellow. My bedroom was cobalt blue until I was allowed to paint it neon green. When I abandoned the nest, it was wallpapered in a turdish brown. We painted over all of it when she died, to better sell the place to normal people. Layers and layers of white.

  In a way I crave that now, living as I am in my ninth consecutive plain white room. Paint colors are a mark of ownership. You do not get to paint walls as a renter, not without express written permission and a promise to paint it back over, white again, when you leave. White walls, they tell you, are a blank canvas on which you can project yourself: put up prints, they say, hang pictures with special adhesive hooks that don’t leave marks on the plasterwork. Be here, they say, make it your home, but leave no trace of yourself behind when you go or we will take it out of the deposit. I now understand that unusual craving to paint a bedroom cream w/ ornate streaks of orange. For ten years now, I have lived under a singular monster, a hive brain with many bitter limbs. For ten years I have lived under landlords.

  The first landlord I ever had was called Nigel and used to come over on the first of the month every month—knuckles on the door but then immediately key in the keyhole anyway—to demand his monthly rent was written, in front of him, and handed to him as a check. Like: direct deposits were invented, then, my dude. They already existed. We might have been students but even we knew this. We could have wired the money to him every month automatically. There was no need for him to be here, at the door, at 8 a.m. There was no need for anyone to knock on a door at 8 a.m. He would knock on my door first, because I had the downstairs room (in a student house share, in a small gray northern Welsh town, on terraced streets pebble-dashed with student house share after student house share, where all the back gardens are gray-tiled over with weeds leafing up in between, and on top of that, bin bags full of old chicken bones and beer cans; in those homes there is no concept of a shared living space, a leisure room: only an additional room that can be rented out as accommodation, and that was my room). Four of us lived there, and he went around collecting the checks from each, then wordlessly sauntered off. At one point over Christmas of that year he hired builders to erect a plasterboard wall that dissected our open living room/kitchen space and instead turned it into a smaller living room, a smaller kitchen space, a small narrow corridor between the two, slightly less space than we had before because it was now taken up with drywall, and also one of the main windows and therefore the main sources of light were now blocked. He told us this was to comply with fire regulations. I do not believe him. I believe he made our home uglier and less functional for perverse reasons beyond fire regulation. I believe he did it out of spite. He kept 100 percent of my deposit, £280 per calendar month.

  My second ever landlords were an eerily smiling couple renting a dissected student house around the corner from the first. Student housing in small university towns is high demand, low supply, so to get the best places you have to band together with your friends as a sort of impenetrable gang, but our group had disbanded: one guy dropped out, one guy moved in with some girls in the vague hope he could sleep with one of them, and one guy punched me full in the face—the pub has the CCTV footage—after I made a tame joke about his goatee beard, which, to his credit, he maintains, the beard—I just checked on Facebook—he maintains it even now, a decade or so later (a goatee beard). This meant I was left with no choice but to move into a sort of waifs-and-strays house share, where I had to live with friendless third-year students who cooked plain boiled ri
ce at insane hours of the night, then ate it, alone and insanely, in their own bedrooms, while somehow using all of the broadband supply at once, occasionally emerging from their bunkers to leave passive-aggressive fridge notes that detailed every noise made after 9 p.m. in the last fortnight. It wasn’t the best.

  The landlords were very keen to stress when I was viewing the house that they were Reasonable People, which I have learned to now take from landlords as an immediate red flag that actually means “I am insanely deranged,” but I didn’t know this then; I was but a young bear cub, tiny and clear-eyed and full of trust, and plus desperate. There was a back room in the house that was ostensibly a garage but had been cleared and roughly plastered and, we were told when we returned after summer’s end (you will see a recurring theme where university landlords would change the very structure of our house for no immediate reason to us but meaning they could charge more rent to the next cohort and that we, the current renters, would have to put up with the building sounds and building smells and the building dust being marched through our house followed by builders; we would have to put up with the inconvenience for someone else’s reward), would be a gleaming new lounge, with sofas and carpet and a large TV, and curtains and no drafts and a coffee table off which to eat our dinner. This was a lie. When we returned, the garage was in more or less the same state, although maybe with slightly more tools in it, and on odd Tuesdays or Thursdays the landlord, Mark, would turn up and start sawing and swearing and playing a game with himself where—as best I can tell—he would repeatedly drop a jigsaw into a bucket of old nails, from a large height, repeatedly, for hours, while swearing. Very little progress was made on the whole thing despite the regularity of him standing in our garage-lounge and trying. And then one night around January, when at 8 p.m. he still hadn’t left our house, still sweating and swearing in the lounge-that-wasn’t-a-lounge, we asked him as a household when the work might be finished: and he went absolutely full-throttle mental, jumping at us, me in particular because I was tallest, and screamed directly in my face, “IF YOU WANNA FUCK OFF, THEN FUCK OFF!,” only there was as aforementioned no more available housing in the entire city, so we didn’t fuck off, and we had to go through the humiliating ritual of this spurned man, his chiding wife standing behind him, turning up a few days later to shake our hands and manfully apologize, and long story short, the lounge ended up getting finished about eight weeks before our tenancy was up, and it was a shithole, so what exactly we were paying that extra £50 a month for all academic year I don’t know: £340 pcm, 100 percent of the deposit withheld.

  If the universe is just, it will, just once, let me watch my landlord die. Or a landlord, any landlord. But I would like it to be my own: I would like it to be one who wronged me. And as they die, their heart rage-exploding in their chest, their body under too much fiery pain to make a noise, every muscle contorted and engaged, every nerve alight, as they collapse to the ground silently at my feet, eyes pleading, arms extending in desperate prayer towards the sky, I will watch them, blinking; I will watch them and enter a near zen-like state of calm. I once practiced literal meditation with a Japanese monk at 5:30 a.m. at a temple in Kyoto, with the small splashing sound of koi in an ornamental lake behind us, maple leaves dipping into the glassy water beyond, mosses and greens, quiet bonging sounds, the tinkle of the first morning wind in the bamboo. It was a transcendent, beautiful experience. My mind jetted out towards the edge of the universe and back towards my exact center. I found a note of peace I don’t think I’ve ever found before or since. And I think I could eclipse that if I just watched one landlord—one! that’s all I ask!—collapse and die in agony. I do not ask for much.

  Third landlord didn’t ever happen. After I moved to London and spent many months in my sister’s spare room, even she and her husband—hardworking successful human beings living and killing it in the toughest city on earth, empathy and patience close to angels, charitable people, pure souls—even they got kind of tired of living with a twenty-one-year-old man-child who exclusively ate breakfast cereal and did not clean that breakfast cereal up after he had eaten it, and also took twenty-minute showers and almost violently needed a haircut. So, three months into my first job in the city, I went to look for rooms and found one sort of nearby—I would have the second room in a two-bed house share that was otherwise occupied by two extremely normal Ph.D. students who were almost unbearably in love and clearly had a thing for decorating their flat and rooms with objects they had found traveling, which was also annoying. (There is an entire stratum of people in London who are just extremely normal Ph.D. students called Tom who wear the most unforgivingly cut jogging bottoms around the house, and their only hobby is always “cooking,” and their dissertation and deadline schedule seems to directly coincide only with the like one night out in three months you come home roaring pissed at 3 a.m., and they are always in love with an exceptionally clean-faced girl who is round your flat all the time, and the two of them, for fun, like to do things like playing frisbee, and it is impossible to spend any time living in this city without having your own Ph.D. Tom, and they are among the worst people to live with, and I include the guy I lived with for a year who partied once a week like clockwork and rolled home to do this gigantic, immovable drug shit, this enormous cocaine shit every single Sunday morning, medically unflushable, the shit, and I consider him a better housemate than this city’s thousands of Toms.) Anyway, it never happened because the landlady did such a deep dive into my finances to see if I was capable of mustering the £550 a month that she made like three calls to my boss, not just asking what I earned and how often I was paid but also my job performance, was I likely to be fired any time soon (I was), and requested two entire years’ worth of bank statements, like she wanted to look at my finances harder than I ever have before or since, and by the time my boss pulled me to one side and said, “Hey,” like, “Can you get this crazy lady to stop calling me?” I decided to find somewhere else, because if a landlord is so fucking annoying that they jeopardize your very employment before you even move in, then imagine how they are gonna react when you tell them there’s mold in the bathroom. No thanks, Susan. £550 pcm n/a.

  You are in the rental car and I am in the passenger seat. I have planned this meticulously. We both wear black hoodies and black jogging bottoms. Scarves around our faces. I have been wearing gloves all day so as not to leave a fingerprint on anything. CCTV will never pick us up. We rented the car in cash, no paper trail. The registration number can never come back to us. They will never find us. I brick the window of the estate agents while you slow; then we peel away, laughing. We do this two weeks in a row, three. Every time they have to board the window, then pay for the entire pane to be replaced, then do it all over again. Shatter the glass. Peel away. We are costing them thousands. We are costing them every penny they took from us, then more. And then, one final hit, once more with feeling: a Molotov cocktail, a Jim Beam bottle stuffed with petrol and lit with a fabric wick, thrown at pace through their front window. And Michael Naik on Church Street, Stoke Newington, goes up in red, red flames. I watch as it turns orange, then vivid yellow, then gray down to ashy black. I watch the flicker, then the smoke, then the shocked-out corpse of it afterwards. We cannot return your deposit. I’m sorry you’re unhappy with our service.

  So third landlord proper was entirely absentee, and as a result I never met him and harbor slim-to-no ill will. For whatever reason, this guy bought a three-bed flat in Muswell Hill, London, and then just immediately moved to LA, where he seemed to forget both that the flat existed and the concept of inflation did, too, meaning we were paying near premillennial rent on this place, which is a double-edged sword: on one edge, you do not have to pay as much rent as anyone else in the city; on the other edge, anytime you need something fixed in the flat, the dude responsible lives all the way over in LA and any attempts to alert him to the fact the flat exists might remind him that he owns it and, dominos fall, he then raises the
rent. So yes, on one hand: I did especially enjoy only paying £280 a month rent. On the other: when our boiler broke down one winter, it got so cold that when I got home from work one night, I put more clothes on and then had to sleep in those three layers of clothing, beneath a duvet, wearing gloves, and then woke up crying (??? somehow ???) and had to go and move back with my sister for a fortnight until it was fixed. Like: the house got so cold, it was colder than just being outside. Somehow the boiler broke so bad, it reverse engineered the entire place into a refrigerator.

  The landlord’s proxy was his father, the most Irish-looking man alive, a sort of sinewy human knuckle of a man (You know when you go to a restaurant and they have an offal dish? It is a liver, or a brain, or a foot, or something? And you umm and aah about ordering it because you like the good meat, the glamour meat, but you’re feeling adventurous and go okay? And you order it and it’s the ugliest but most unctuous piece of food you’ve ever eaten? Okay, imagine now the pig’s foot dressed w/ gravy is somehow wearing old Sergio Tacchini sportswear and has a hearing aid. It’s this guy.) called Pat who would occasionally bowl into the flat, looking through failing eyes at an errant radiator or dead boiler or swath of black-flecked mold, then sit on the sofa and tell us in the broadest pissed-Irishman accent possible about his day, his life, his dry home life, his errant LA son. And then he would ease himself up after like twenty minutes and creak down the stairs, and we wouldn’t see him again for like four more weeks, and the problem with the mold or radiator or whatever would not be fixed, because he almost certainly forgot about it as soon as he left the building, possibly before. One day the woman downstairs died and we only really knew because it’d been a couple of days since we heard her yelling at her kids. I would say this was easily the best flat share arrangement/landlord situation I have ever had. £280 pcm rising to £330 after two years.