Broken Monsters. Lauren Beukes

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       Detroit Diamonds

      The window of Rocket Coffee gives Jonno the perfect view of the hollow shell of the Michigan Central Train Station. The Acropolis of Detroit. Some genius suggested preserving the iconic ruins. That’s what everyone’s here for, anyway. To gawp at the broken buildings, take their portraits. The only difference between the hipsters breaking into abandoned buildings here and the middle-aged tourists in socks and sandals in the Colosseum is that the former use more filters on their photographs and the latter have audio guides. Not a bad idea, actually. He could do that – write audio tours. The problem, he reckons, is not the obsession with ruin porn, it’s that everyone is trying to figure out what it all means. It’s the human condition, obsessively reading too much into things.

      Like the fact that she is forty-six minutes late. And that’s thirty-one minutes longer than you should be expected to wait for any girl, unless she’s a certified supermodel or the producer on the biopic of your awesome life, according to ‘10 Rules For The New Gentleman’s Guide To Dating’ he churned out for some shitty men’s site last year. It’s all chum to pull in the likes. But eyeballs are more fickle than sharks, and the economy is still in the gutter, and he should be writing a post-post-modern Moby-Dick, not trying to come up with smarmy listicles faster than everyone else. But try getting paid for that.

      Oh, he’s been published in obscure literary magazines with a subscriber base of eight, not including the publisher’s mother, or the complimentary contributor copies. All the wannabe writers desperately reading each other’s stories, as if they could generate enough energy in a magnetic feedback loop that it would draw some of those damn eyeballs over here. But it’s all shit. Even his stuff. It’s only because he has realized that she’s not coming that he can even consider this. Because this is such a disaster, it mitigates his Total Failure As A Writer.

       She’s not coming.

      The despair cuts through the caffeine poisoning. He’s already had three cups of coffee, at first because he felt smug, sitting in the window bar, waiting for the hot DJ girl. That was before the Great Wake-Up Call, and then he lost his place when he went back for the third flat white, and now he is wedged in the back, near the bathroom, perched at a little round table that seems specifically designed to be emasculating.

      But she was beaming. At you. Apparently.

      Fuck the beaming. Fuck this depressing ghost town of a city. Fuck his career. He should write a melt-down memoir. An anthem for his generation. Bret Easton Ellis with more man-child ennui. Then she walks in the door, and he swears to fucking God that all the atoms in the room recompose themselves around her. She’s wearing jeans and snow boots and a puffy jacket in an electric turquoise that matches her eye-shadow, with jangly earrings and her braids tied up in an elaborate croissant twist.

      ‘Hi,’ she says, slinging her bag down onto the table, recklessly enough that he has to grab for his cup. ‘Sorry.’

      ‘You say that a lot.’ He’s grinning. He can’t help it.

      ‘Yes, well,’ she shrugs. ‘What, you didn’t get me one?’

      ‘Half an hour ago!’

      ‘You want another?’ She indicates his cup, still three-quarters full and he finds himself nodding, even though a fourth will probably tip him into heart-attack territory, like that kid who died from chugging energy drinks. But coffee is natural.

       So is herpes.

      ‘But to go, okay?’

      ‘What about breakfast?’

      ‘We’ll get pastries. I want you to show me round town. Show me your Detroit.’

      ‘What does that mean?’

      ‘Whatever you want it to. Personal perspectives on the city.’

      ‘All right,’ she says, with the same tolerantly amused look she had when he walked in on her with her hand between her legs. Definitely love, he thinks.

      Inside her jazzy little blue Hyundai, she clips in the radio face and heavy techno blasts out, a whining buzzsaw with a frenetic beat. He winces. It sounds like the grinding teeth of machines on methamphetamines. Good name for a prog rock band. Machines on Meth.

      She notices and laughs at him through a bite of almond croissant. ‘You were dancing to it on Saturday night.’

      ‘I was drunk!’

      ‘Want me to turn it down?’

      ‘Please.’

      ‘You’re a funny guy, Jimmy.’ But she flicks the volume knob.

      ‘Jonno,’ he corrects.

      ‘I know. I’m messing with you. So, where do you want to go?’

      ‘Back to your place?’

      ‘Not possible.’

      ‘Then mine.’ Although the thought of his grubby rental apartment gives him a fresh twist of resentment. And panic. His scattered underwear, the empty pizza boxes, the soggy towels balled up on the floor. He would need an hour, no three, to make it presentable. Actually, probably easier to burn it down.

      ‘Not yet,’ she says.

      ‘Then somewhere you like.’

      ‘It’ll СКАЧАТЬ