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    Hallucination in Hong Kong
    Hallucination in Hong Kong
    Hallucination in Hong Kong
    Ebook101 pages1 hour

    Hallucination in Hong Kong

    By Rohan Quine

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    In Hallucination in Hong Kong by Rohan Quine, sliding from joy to nightmare and back, a plane-flight frames a journey into Jaymi's and Angel's polarised identities and perceptions, where past and present merge in an obsessive fantasy of love, death, horror and apocalyptic beauty. At take-off, warmed by the presence of his friend Angel beside him, Jaymi starts to doze, and enters a fog of horror in seeming to remember that their destination lies in the past, not ahead … forcing him to explore those hellish possible events lying beneath the surface of our present and future, always ready to break through into reality. A Distinguished Favorite in the NYC Big Book Award 2021.
     
    As their plane takes off, Jaymi is warmed by the presence of his beloved friend Angel beside him. They are bound for Hong Kong, to perform a grand concert of unearthly music from a stage set high on the Peak. Jaymi starts to doze ... and enters a fog of horror in seeming to remember that this concert lies in their distant past, not their imminent future: it happened nine years ago, and straight after that triumphant occasion there occurred unexpected disaster and the permanent catatonia of Angel. Those terrible events were rendered all the more poignant by the idyllic chapter they had experienced upon first meeting and falling in love, which he now recalls in great detail.
     
    In reality (it would seem), Jaymi is on this flight alone, on a mission to put a compassionate end to Angel's life, in view of his continued catatonia. And in an atmosphere of escalating nightmare and disjunction, incongruously set against the beauty of night-time Hong Kong as seen from the Peak and the Midlevels, this grim mission of euthanasia is accomplished - perhaps. That nightmare atmosphere is magnified by the obsessive flicker of Jaymi's mind through complex permutations of his own possible guilt at betraying Angel, and the latter's possible knowledge of this guilt ... because hadn't there actually been a mirror on the ceiling above the bench where Angel lay supine years ago, unnoticed by Jaymi at the time but in fact revealing to Angel certain things about Jaymi's movements that he hadn't known Angel could see?
     
    Sliding from joy to nightmare, then back to a joy stained by the flavour of vanishing nightmare, Hallucination in Hong Kong explores those hellish possible events lying beneath the surface of our present and future, always ready to break through into reality if they become so inclined. In this journey, it conjures up from Jaymi's and Angel's polarised identities and perceptions an obsessive fantasy of dark androgyny, ironic horror and apocalyptic beauty.
     

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEC1 Digital
    Release dateJan 1, 2014
    ISBN9780957441989
    Author

    Rohan Quine

    Rohan Quine grew up in South London, spent a couple of years in L.A. and then a decade in New York, where he ran around excitably, saying a few well-chosen words in various feature films and TV shows (see www.rohanquine.com/those-new-york-nineties), such as "Zoolander", "Election", "Oz", "Third Watch", "100 Centre Street", "The Last Days of Disco", "The Basketball Diaries", "Spin City" and "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit". He’s now living back in East London, as an Imagination Thief. His novel "The Imagination Thief" is published in paperback, and also as an ebook containing hyperlinks to film and audio and photographic content in conjunction with the novel’s text. See www.rohanquine.com/press-media/the-imagination-thief-reviews-media for interviews and some nice reviews in "The Guardian" and elsewhere. Four novellas – "The Platinum Raven", "The Host in the Attic", "Apricot Eyes" and "Hallucination in Hong Kong" – are published as separate ebooks, and also as a single paperback "The Platinum Raven and other novellas". See www.rohanquine.com/press-media/the-novellas-reviews-media for interviews and reviews of these. All five tales are literary fiction with a touch of magical realism and a dusting of horror. They aim to push imagination and language towards their extremes, so as to celebrate the beauty, darkness and mirth of this predicament called life, where we seem to have been dropped without sufficient consultation ahead of time. They may be read in any order. His upcoming novel will be "The Beasts of Electra Drive", now barrelling down the pipeline... www.rohanquine.com | facebook.com/RohanQuineTheImaginationThief | @RohanQuine "Rohan Quine is one of the most original voices in the literary world today – and one of the most brilliant." –"Guardian" Books blogger Dan Holloway "The swooping eloquence of this book had me hypnotised. Quine leaps into pools of imagery, delighting in what words can do. The fact that the reader is lured into joining this kaleidoscopic, elemental ballet marks this out as something fresh and unusual. In addition to the language, two other elements make their mark. The seaside ghost town with echoes of the past and the absorbing, varied and rich cast of characters. It’s a story with a concept, place and people you’ll find hard to leave." –JJ Marsh, "Book Muse" "Quine is renowned for his rich, inventive and original prose, and he is skilled at blending contemporary and ancient icons and themes." –Debbie Young, "Vine Leaves Literary Journal"

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      Book preview

      Hallucination in Hong Kong - Rohan Quine

      HALLUCINATION IN HONG KONG

      a novella by Rohan Quine

      EC1 Digital

      Hallucination in Hong Kong by Rohan Quine

      ISBN: 978-0-9574419-8-9

      Published by EC1 Digital

      London

      UK

      Copyright 2014 Rohan Quine

      www.rohanquine.com/hallucination-in-hong-kong

      Cover design by Jane Dixon-Smith, www.jdsmith-design.co.uk

      View from the Peak, Hong Kong: photo by shin / www.shutterstock.com

      Eyes: photo by Robert Chilcott

      Author: photo by James Keates, www.jk-photography.net/

      This novella Hallucination in Hong Kong is included in the paperback collection The Platinum Raven and other novellas published by EC1 Digital, which also includes:

      The Platinum Raven

      The Host in the Attic

      Apricot Eyes

      An earlier version of this novella appeared, with the same title, in the paperback collection Hallucinations (New York: Demon Angel Books), published only in the USA in paperback.

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      Title

      Copyright

      1 So here is the horror, to sicken the sun

      2 Love among the spires and the fountains

      3 Oh, my Angel

      Other titles by Rohan Quine

      About Rohan Quine

      Connect with Rohan

      1 So here is the horror, to sicken the sun

      Click here to watch the video-book version of this chapter 1

      Outside, concrete fields and the blast and shriek of turbines. Inside, tinted hostess-smile, canned comfort, bland gloss.

      The plane accelerates. The runway sucks us on, fans wide to swallow us. As thrust turns to lift, the cargo hush. The airfield drop below us, hanging metal throbs and whines; and angled steeply upwards, we cut through the clouds.

      The flight underway, I settle back into the warmth of Angel’s presence here beside me. By Angel, I should clarify I do mean Scorpio. The rest of the world still addresses him as Scorpio; but just between him and me, ever since the dramas of Hunts Point, he’s gone back to Angel, just as he was called when we very first met.

      *

      I start to doze … and feel myself connected to you, Angel, just as I’d have tuned in, back in Asbury Park. On my left the oval porthole, and in front of it, you—your face in profiled silhouette, framed in sunshine through the cirrus. You turn to me. Soft brown eye-shadow’s streaked across the tan skin around your dark bewitching eyes: your gaze, which I know so well, still melts me from so close. Our hands are almost touching. Your lips part; I feel I’m sliding down between them, warm and sleek. I murmur, I could eat you!

      Your eyebrows jump a fraction as they sometimes do unprompted and you laugh, while your eyes flicker down to my lips. Me too! you say.

      We’ll share you, I concede.

      People look, who pass us down the aisle. I hear my whispered name when they believe themselves inaudible: He’s on the plane with us! Who? The one we’re going to see on stage—look, he’s up in front! God you’re right. Shall we say hi? Better not. Who’s that next to him? Angel—you know that track they do together, what’s it called? Oh yeah. Huh! I thought they’d both be taller…

      I glance at your watch, then at a pulse on your neck. I close my eyes and look ahead. Hong Kong. The night. This concert… What I’ve wanted to do for years!

      I visualise the set I’ve had designed and constructed in Hong Kong. Perched against the Peak, above the Midlevels, facing north across the city to the mainland, is the stage. On the mountain-face a screen of vast dimensions will project events below it to the multitudes beyond the front few thousand. Throughout the concert, out of two giant gas jets either side, dancing tongues of scarlet flame will lick the night to east and west. Clamped to the towers of rock that flank the screen, a pair of speaker banks will blast a sound to pluck the laser lattice spilling out of each in orange cities spread across the sky.

      Beyond the ground around the stage—from hills, gardens, roofs, windows, streets, cars, trains, boats, balloons—they will watch. To see us live, a six-figure number; worldwide a nine-figure one, by satellite. To remain within Hong Kong will be to hear us.

      Wherever I requested, be it almost inaccessible, are television cameras, poised to shoot our image out to cities I have never even heard of. Everywhere, on records, posters, clothing, magazines, screens and airwaves—my face, my voice, and sometimes yours.

      You will join me up on stage to sing our track, the one you join me for. Already I can hear it now, the newspaper scream: Sounds of hell and heaven dance together! Oh yes; manic and sublime, like the end of the world… Even now before the frenzy, I can see too the way it will be told in the histories when we’re dead. Already I can see it done, that grand device of cinema and televised biography: the picture, a well-chosen image of the subject (happy, sad or enigmatic), camera zooming in to frame the frozen eyes; the soundtrack, their creation, living on; the coupling of the two, a never-failing means of reining in an era’s worth of feeling to the service of the subject. What a game! But the bio now continues. First you come in focus like a dark sun out of mist, your coolest gaze above a point beside the camera, expressionless to carry off your beauty and preserve its type—androgynous, unreadable, exquisitely effeminate, your devastating eyes enormous, gentle, soft, unreal—while round you like a hurricane, my voice, and you its eye! The clouds all scatter then; my face replaces yours, and your voice mine. The gasp with which you start our track is sex, your breath addictive, sultry, aching, drugged, a self-renewing cycle of appeasement and revival of desire—and for my head whose eyes are staring out behind it from the screen, a voice to burn inside forever…

      *

      It feels as if I surface on a surge of nauseous terror, find not you on the empty seat beside me but a wodge of abstract pain. It’s all going wrong now. Flying to Hong Kong to give the concert—that’s not real, no, that’s memory. I struggle in a sick fog. The concert… It happened, yes—nine years ago. Everything is different now, muddy, churning, dim. The yellow-lit ceiling of the tunnel I am seated in alone with other passengers is leaning in towards me as it swells and now disjoints in lurid fragments. I look at the outside shape of my body to check that it is not what it feels from the inside, a tight thick mass like a bag of maggot-organs pumping fluidly at tension in a helpless breathing skin without extremities. I try to move, but only squirm where I am. I make to grip the seat, to prove myself articulated—manage, yes, but then my fingers feel like flabby arms encircling something huge. I panic, as towards me, with inexorable slowness and a constant whine that cuts the clotted atmosphere around it with the metal sheen of lipstick laid on whale-flesh, rolls a dark ball-bearing denser than a star, in a hollow on a time-grid that yields to its passage as a mattress to a stone. The tunnel warps at its approach—becomes a giant dome upon whose underside I hang, gummed. Across its giddy vault I see you swaying on

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