Boris Nightingale was possessed by a pain that could not be expressed. It took the form of a vague, buzzing emptiness. The image in his mind was of his own face slackjawed with emptiness. Often, young intellectuals from the university would attempt to make his acquaintance and discuss topical theories and postulate on the political nature of various abstract notions, and all Boris could do was reply with a nod or two and a far off stare. It felt distant and removed, a penetrating look, the look of a man imagining faeries capering in the garden. But he always wondered if it was just a look without a spark. A sadness and a bitterness. He felt arms reach out to touch him by the shoulders, arms hesistant of his unpredictability. His body was carried like an alien thing, and felt strange and unpleasant to the touch as though it were covered in static. His head was always at odd angles to your own, and if you ever gripped that jaw with both hands and forced it square to your own and wiped off the mask the peered inside, you probably wouldn’t find anything. Nothing you could recognize at all.
Boris lived for a while in a white room surrounded by books of the purest canonical nature. The novelists were all Nobel Scholars. The philosophical works were all the major texts by the major continentalists. He had four Bibles, although he’d never looked at any of them. Stacks of scientific journals. A DVD collection of foreign films. A tattered poster of Che Guevara. Boris lived inside a fort made from the Encylopaedia Britannica, and lined with cardboard. He painted pictures on the inside of capering Nike dancing in a style reminiscient of Matisse and Keith Haring. He was always so dark, his style a haphazard grunge (he lacked the energy to make himself up as a goth), his clothes stinking and dirty, and yet it was always faeries, winged genitals, dream sequences involving Alice in Wonderland… his poetry was free verse rap style. He only ever wrote about a stanza of anything, but it was all part of his great work, the work that would save his soul.
Most of the time when I saw him he was lying curled up in a concrete corner of his white room, half naked, ripped jeans, bare feet, his position a sitting fetal. I’d squat next to him and speak to him softly. He’d look up and smile beautifically and his blue eyes would glimmer, but was that the light, or was it actually hope? Sometimes, a beautiful bohemian girl, a girl called Ciahwye, would come to visit him. She liked his poetry and often stood on a rickety wooden chair under the naked bulb and read a poem in a ridiculous, oratorical store involving much gesticulation and pauses for gasps of laughter. I never saw them touch, never saw them embrace, but they were tighter than any other couple I have seen. There was always something dead in Boris, something that made you want to keep your distance, something you wanted to save and denied everywhere but your heart that it was too late. So I spoke to Ciahwye about this once, and she said that he was not always like this. She’d not known what had happened but something had. Suddenly the world had taken on sinister overtones for him, and he’d had to retire to this silent room, to his eyes which focused on nothing but his own internal burden. He painted this for me, once, when completely drunk and probably on acid – it was a double helix, a spiral which never stopped, rather like a sound wave, or an ocean tide, oscillating like a breath, a pain which throbbed dimly, and slowly, no longer with cause, and certainly without end.
The last time I saw Boris Nightingale, his room was a wreck. Che had been torn into small, deliberate strips. Harsh, short, thick brushstrokes covered the wall in blue and black and paint – no other colour. The strokes intimated hidden faces, patterns which somehow described things bending impossibly into awkward shapes. I noted with interest that the strokes weren’t random, they were continous. There were no contradictory strokes which cut violently diagonally throughout the morass as one might have expected in an artist without talent, but plenty of angst. The patterns reminded me of Van Gogh, and the starry night over Saint Remy. There were things I could see here, although I didn’t know what they were. I had the feeling I was looking at his dreams, surrounding a floor of toppled bookshelves, or disarrayed paperbacks. I had to dig my way through to the fort. The entrance had been completely blocked by a coffee table at an awkward angle, so I peered though a crack in the wall of books. I could see a naked eye within, rolling like a goat’s, like the dry horrors I’d seen in hobos too poor to afford the next tipple. I spoke to him softly and he revealed to me that Ciahwye was gone. I never knew why. He was, he seemed lost. I felt unclean, guilty, as though I were gazing on some embarrassing scene that was no business of mine. I never saw him again. I have a feeling he’s gone, now. One way or another, he’s gone.