Irina Kaspe. Jennifer is dead and I'm not yet

Jennifer is dead and I'm not yet
Martin Amis. Night train / Per. from English E. Petrova. - M.: Makhaon, 2000

Irina Kaspe

Publication date: August 15, 2000

This is a fucking life. Over the course of several years, you learn to stand on the surface. You visit the Alcoholics Anonymous club. You tint your lips before leaving the house. You work like hell. And then you get a clean, flawless naked corpse, three bullets in the mouth: smart, shy, beautiful, optimist. And do whatever you want with her. It was worth trying for so long, pushing forward, not allowing yourself a single deviation to the side, chewing on this fucking life, in order to end up alone with this impenetrable sphinx. To walk around and not know which side to approach.

Martin Amis's novel belongs to the type of texts that we, apparently, are just beginning to master: smooth texture without any knots or hitches, a slight smell of disinfection, pastel colors, minty freshness. The plot seems unexpected. The ending seems banal, although it still doesn’t disappoint. There is nothing to cling to, but it catches: how and what is unclear.

Conceiving the perfect suicide, Jennifer Rockwell, an astrophysicist, the daughter of a cop and the lover of a philosophy professor, leaves behind false evidence - consolation prizes for her inconsolable loved ones. The calculation is justified, everyone looks for himself in the deceased and pecks at the bait placed. Only Mike Hooligan, a female detective, almost according to Stanislavsky’s system, tries to find the deceased within herself, which, of course, does not end well. Thus, history balances on the shaky scales of self-identification. “Before it’s too late. I want to change my name. So that it sounds more feminine. For example, Detective Jennifer Hooligan . ” It costs nothing to separate the killer (she’s the murdered) and the investigator (she’s the guinea pig) into different plot angles: gentle, infallible, everyone’s favorite Jennifer with “perfect physiology” , with organs “like in an anatomy textbook” (the autopsy showed) and Mike , slob, thug with a drunken liver ( "What else can you expect from Mike Hooligan, who was fucked by her own father as a child" ).

Everything seems simple. Old Lady Hooligan is a lawless dinosaur in a sterile, smoke-free post-industrial world, and beautiful Rockwell is his (the world's) soul, rose and navel. However, something doesn't add up. Martin Amis mastered the sterile world with a slight smell of disinfection a long time ago. It (the world) is not a utopia, not a nightmare, not the fevered fantasy of the Strugatsky brothers, although the utopian-nightmarish sterility and desolation, and interpersonal distance, and close-ups, and, as a rule, no more than two people in the frame, and humanoid students. There is no need to oppose it, the world, there is no point in fighting it, it is stupid to escape from it, there is no need to divide its inhabitants into friends and strangers, and Mike Hooligan is not a stranger. This applies equally to everyone: as if one day a tense string snapped and a nuclear catastrophe occurred. The scorched landscape that remains in the end is the common habitat. Life after death. They don’t run away from here - except maybe three bullets in the mouth, and then you’ll see.

The tavern on the corner, the bar for smoking patrons are not islands of a past, full-blooded life. Now, when lighting a cigarette, you can only feel how the body is destroyed, the lungs are filled with smoke, and time flows into the sand at twice the speed. The most terrible torture is a pile of cigarette butts in an ashtray, growing as the interrogation progresses. Gas chamber. Only the innocent survive.

Mike Rockwell and Jennifer Hooligan exist only in tandem. Like two friends, like two sisters, like a young lady and a bully, like Jekyll and Hyde, like yin and yang, like ego and super-ego. And they look at things the same way. This world has two main characteristics: transparency and dullness. You can spy on the characters through a window or glass partition. Astrophysicist Jennifer occasionally, if the sky is clear and the picture is good, studies her stars through a telescope; Detective Mike - his suspects through the peephole of the interrogation room. Life after death is clearly visible, and therefore there is no hiding from it. If the surface ceases to be transparent, it means that another death is hiding behind it.

The human body is transparent - internal organs can be seen right through. Human logic is impenetrable because, most likely, it is completely absent. The matte surface of the skin can say much more than letters, notebooks, or notes in the margins. The more laconic, the simpler, the more inexpressive the final explanation, the better. The beauty Jennifer Rockwell killed herself because she killed herself.

And at this time a night train rushed over the city - filmed a little from below, watch only on the big screen - as ponderous as Detective Hooligan's current boyfriend, Tobe. Like all her past boyfriends - Deniss, Duwayne, Sean and John. Like herself. Like this fucking life.

"On that clear evening when Jennifer Rockwell passed away, the visibility was excellent. But the picture - picture, picture - was no good . "