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Sometime after midnight, 8th of June 1989.
Twice in his long life, Hob Gadling is touched by Despair. Hob doesn’t know that yet, yet he remembers all of it.
The first time, when he loses Eleanor and the unnamed babe, and later Robyn. The pain of continuing to live when they didn’t, of being his own tragic legacy, is almost too much. Hob is thankful that his stranger didn’t come, then, to ask his question; he’s afraid of what his answer would have been.
Hob survives, and he lives. By all the gods, he lives.
1889 is a close call. But he thinks of the tears stinging his stranger’s reddened eyes, seeing his own hurt and loneliness mirrored back, and he dares to hope. He hopes that time will heal the rift between them; that his stranger has blown off some steam during their centennial time-out. What is a century but a tantrum between immortals?
The second time doesn’t happen until 1989.
It is only after the pub closes, after he understands that he has been stood up, that Hob finally spirals. Moving like a ghost-driven automata, Hob call his contact, and buys an obscene amount of drugs. MDMA, he thinks, although his intent was just to throw whatever he could find on the walls of his immortality, just to see what sticks. Somehow, this knowledge — that he could overdose again and again and again without ever dying — is a new kind of hurt. He wonders if this would be one of the exotic experiences his stranger would have found so interesting — even if he had never been interested in Hob himself.
He finds himself stumbling into a smoke-laden club, somewhere in Shoreditch, he thinks; one of the few that would deign to let him in in this state. He sinks into the cloying arms of the crowd, the suffocating press of bodies a crushing weight, a calming anxiety blanket; yet it only seems to fuel his touch-starved desperation, a hungry maenad moshpit of flesh and swollen synths thrashing low in his stomach. A girl with a spiky pink mohawk pressed into his non-existent personal space; her face a pale question mark. Hob sways with her, trying to keep his eyes level with the horizon of her winged eyeliner. The DJ puts on a new track, and the whirring intro makes Hob freeze. He knows this song, but he knows it is too late to leave. So instead he leans into it, into the grinding warmth of this willing, wrong stranger. He closes his eyes and loses himself to the intoxicating bass riff of The Cure’s “Fascination Street”.
“Oh it’s opening time
Down on Fascination Street
So let’s cut the conversation
And get out for a bit
Because I feel it all fading and paling
And I’m begging
To drag you down with me
To kick the last nail in
//
Yeah! I like you in that
Like I like you to scream
But if you open your mouth
Then I can’t be responsible
For quite what goes in
Or to care what comes out
So just pull on your hair
Just pull on your pout
//
And let’s move to the beat
Like we know that it’s over — ”
— No. It’s too much. Robert Smith’s sultry moans reverberates through Hob’s body, causing something to splinter in his chest. He feels himself unravelling; he whiplashes out of the girl’s arms, and runs. He runs like prey without a predator in chase, throws himself into a cab, promising the driver that he won’t throw up in the backseat.
Don’t worry, It’s just a panic attack. It’s only centuries of heartbreak. It’s not like it could kill you.
Finally home, Hob stumbles into his bedroom and succumbs. He frantically rummages through his LP box until he finds his fate; putting on The Cure’s newly released album Disintegration with the resolve of a man walking to the gallows. Then he collapses into bed, fully clothed and a mess of tears and snot, and he leans into the hook dragging him down. He lets himself have this form of self-harm. God’s breath, he has earned it.
Music was one of the many things he would have been so excited to tell the stranger about. Hob had spent most of the 1980s fantasizing about how his stranger would dress; imagining the excesses of his eyeliner, the depravity of pale skin, the wantonness of his raven hair; the entire goth subculture an inadvertent sacrificial tribute to his likeness. Now, thinking back to the past decade spent in dark clubs; to every pasty Robert Smith lookalike Hob had sucked off in dirty bathroom stalls, he it had all been to calm his nerves — like wanking to improve stamina before his centennial date.
When “Pictures of You” begins, the onslaught of memories from the 1889 meeting catches up with Hob. One of the most painful aspects of immortality is that no memory is sacred; every time Hob touches it, it is irrevocably tainted by change; it shifts, morphs, throbs. He has learnt to survive the memories of the stranger’s seething anger, disgust, hurt. What keeps killing him is hope: how it seeps into the edges of his true memories, leaving false details of wishful reveries in its wake. False memories of would have, could have, should have; of ifs and buts and wants. Conjuring up a memory that is so much more painful, because it’s not even his; because it didn’t even happen.
“Remembering
You standing quiet in the rain
As I ran to your heart to be near
And we kissed as the sky fell in
Holding you close
How I always held close in your fear
Remembering
You running soft through the night
You were bigger and brighter and wider than snow
And screamed at the make-believe
Screamed at the sky
And you finally found all your courage
To let it all go"
Hob grins through the tears, thinking of the irony that the few times in his long life that he no longer wished to live, the stranger was not there to ask the question. He bitterly fantasizes about finally telling the stranger that he was done living, that the constant rise and crash of hope is the only thing that has been killing him for 600 years; that if he cannot have the stranger’s love, then he can at least have his disappointment, deprive him of this little distraction or whatever purpose he had seen in their meetings. He remembers the stranger’s earnest fascination, his cruel tenderness, when Hob had hit rock bottom, back in 1689. Perhaps that was the most Hob could hope for; perhaps, if the stranger turned up in a 100 years, Hob’s pathetic ruin would act as a healing balm, restoring something — anything — between them. But most of all, Hob hated himself, because he doesn’t truly want to die. Because he still dares to live, and because he knows that he will still be there in 2089, waiting for his stranger. Until then, he leans into the savage torpor of the music, letting it flay him alive.
He flips the vinyl to the B-side, and moves the needle until he hears the first tunes of the track “Disintegration” come on. A whisper of primal self-preservation beckons to him, begging him: this is no longer catharsis, this is self-immolation. Please, turn back. He knows this is too much, yet the despair is hypnotic, magnetic -- The soft and the black and the velvety -- dragging him under.
" So it’s all come back round to breaking apart again
Breaking apart like I’m made up of glass again
Making it up behind my back again
Holding my breath for the fear of sleep again
//
Now that I know that I’m breaking to pieces
I’ll pull out my heart
And I’ll feed it to anyone
//
I never said I would stay to the end
(Somewhere here, Hob ceases to breathe.)
I leave you with photographs
Pictures of trickery
Stains on the carpet and
Stains on the memory
Songs about happiness murmured in dreams
When we both of us knew
How the end always is
How the end always is.”
Hob cries: relentless, guttural sobs wrecking his body, wrenched out of him like organs ripped from a wounded, still breathing animal; soaked strands fanning out like a pathetic halo around him. The tears roll down his cheeks; unyielding streams flowing into his hair, as if there were fingers soothing him. Something next to him, hardening his tears into pearls and braiding them into his hair; a pearl crown of self-loathing. He feels like some forlorn sailor, ignoring the sirens calling out to him, instead helplessly drawn to the allure of crashing himself on the dark rocks. Some ancient tune, vibration, an echo from an imploding star, a cat’s purr, a lover’s hum, a siren lullaby trying to lull him into a restless slumber. Hob desperately clings to wakefulness, greedily wanting to hurt more; trying to stay awake by focusing his mind on on the faint, fading lyrics of “Untitled” lapping at the corners of his waning consciousness.
//I’ll never lose this pain // Never dream of you again//
This is what finally shatters him. He succumbs to the void, to the expected nothingness.
After 1889, both his dreams and nightmares had been dark and sexual; one of a new kind of starvation, worse than anything he had experienced before. When they abruptly disappeared in 1916, it had hurt him more than he could have imagined. Like his stranger had at least let him have that, out of pity, and then had taken even that from him. Exactly how that was even in the stranger’s power, Hob did not know. He only knew it was his punishment.
The needle of the record player skips, and then the eerie pizzicato strings of “Lullaby” envelops Hob in a claustrophobic embrace. It is so seductive, so hypnotically mesmerizing, that Hob doesn’t even notice the moonlight being spun into spider silk, reverently wrapping across his hips.
Hob Gadling has not dreamt in 73 years.
That is why the Mare takes him by surprise.