《渺小一生》:药物或毒品也是一样

　 He had started crying then, not loudly, not steadily, but crying nonetheless. “JB,” Jude said again, his voice low. “Come with me. You don’t have to go back there.”

谁知他开始哭，不是很大声，也不是哭个不停，但就是哭了。“杰比，”裘德又说了一次，声音很低，“跟我走吧，你不必回那里去。”

　 But “I can’t,” he heard himself saying. “I can’t. I want to go upstairs. I want to go home.”

但是，“我做不到，”他听到自己说，“我做不到。我想上楼。我想回家。”

　 “Then I’ll come in with you.”

“那我跟你一起进去。”

　 “No. No, Jude. I want to be alone. Thank you. But go home.”

“不，不要，裘德。我想一个人静一静。谢谢你，你回去吧。”

　 “JB,” Jude began, but he turned from him and ran, jamming the key into the front door and running up the stairs, knowing Jude wouldn’t be capable of following him, but with Jackson right behind him, laughing his mean laugh, while Jude’s calls—“JB! JB!”—trailed after him, until he was inside his apartment (Jude had cleaned while he was here: the sink was empty; the dishes were stacked in the rack, drying) and couldn’t hear him any longer. He turned off his phone, on which Jude was calling him, and muted the front-door buzzer’s intercom, on which Jude was ringing and ringing him.

“杰比。”裘德又继续说，但他转身跑开，把钥匙插入前门，跑上楼去，知道裘德没办法追上来，而杰克逊则紧跟在他后头，发出刻薄的大笑声，同时裘德的喊声“杰比！杰比！”也一路跟着他，直到他进了自己的公寓（裘德先前进去时帮他打扫过了：水槽是空的；盘子堆在沥水架上晾），再也听不见。裘德打电话给他，他就关掉手机；裘德一直按门铃，他就关掉前门对讲机的声音。

　 And then Jackson had cut the lines of coke he had brought and they had snorted them, and the night had become the same night he’d had hundreds of times before: the same rhythms, the same despair, the same awful feeling of suspension.

然后杰克逊把他带来的可卡因切碎，排成一行行的，接着他们两个用鼻子吸了。那一夜变成之前几百个同样的夜晚：同样的节奏，同样的绝望，同样地体会到了那种暂时停止的糟糕感觉。

　 “He is pretty, your friend,” he heard Jackson say at some point late that evening. “But too bad about—” And he stood and did an imitation of Jude’s walk, a lurching grotesquerie that looked nothing like it, his mouth slack like a cretin’s, his hands bobbling in front of him. He had been too high to protest, too high to say anything at all, and so he had only blinked and watched Jackson hobble around the room, trying to speak words in Jude’s defense, his eyes prickling with tears.

“你的朋友，他很漂亮，”那一晚稍迟些，他听到杰克逊说，“但是可惜啊……”这时杰克逊站起来模仿裘德走路，那种东倒西歪的奇怪步伐根本一点都不像，他还故意像个白痴似的半张着嘴，双手在身前上下晃动。他整个人嗑药嗑得茫然了，没办法抗议，茫然得什么都没说，只能眨着眼睛看杰克逊在房间里跳来跳去，试着想讲话捍卫裘德，双眼却被泪水刺痛。

　 The next day he had awoken, late, facedown on the floor near the kitchen. He stepped around Jackson, who was also asleep on the floor, near his bookcases, and went into his room, where he saw that Jude had made his bed as well, and something about that made him want to cry again. He lifted the plank under the right side of the bed, cautiously, and stuck his hand inside the space: there was nothing there. And so he lay atop the comforter, bringing one end of it over himself completely, covering the top of his head the way he used to when he was a child.

次日他醒来时已经很晚了，发现自己趴在厨房旁的地上。他绕过睡在书架一旁地上的杰克逊，走进自己的房间，看到裘德帮他铺好的床，又想哭了。他小心翼翼地掀起床边右侧的那块木板，伸手进去摸：里面什么都没有。于是他躺在床上，抓着被子的一角把自己完全盖住，把整个头也盖起来，就像他小时候那样。

　 As he tried to sleep, he made himself think of why he had fallen in with Jackson. It wasn’t that he didn’t know why; it was that he was ashamed to remember why. He had begun hanging out with Jackson to prove that he wasn’t dependent on his friends, that he wasn’t trapped by his life, that he could make and would make his own decisions, even if they were bad ones. By his age, you had met all the friends you would probably ever have. You had met your friends’ friends. Life got smaller and smaller. Jackson was stupid and callow and cruel and not the sort of person he was supposed to value, who was supposed to be worth his time. He knew this. And that was why he kept at it: to dismay his friends, to show them that he wasn’t bound by their expectations of him. It was stupid, stupid, stupid. It was hubris. And he was the only one who was suffering because of it.

试着睡觉时，他逼自己思考为什么会跟杰克逊混在一起。其实他不是不知道为什么，只是羞愧得不愿意去想。他开始跟杰克逊来往，是为了证明他不必靠自己的朋友，证明他没被自己的生活困住，证明他可以、也会自己做决定，即使这些决定很糟糕。到了他这个年纪，往后大概不会再认识什么新朋友了，朋友的朋友该认识的也认识了，生活圈子变得越来越小。杰克逊愚蠢、乳臭未干又残忍，根本不该是他瞧得上的那种人，也根本不值得花时间结交。这个他知道。这就是为什么他坚持跟杰克逊来往：为了让他的朋友惊愕、失望，为了让他们看看，他才不会被他们的期望束缚住。这样真的很愚蠢、很愚蠢、很愚蠢，也太傲慢了，而且他是唯一因此受苦的人。

　 “You can’t actually like this guy,” Willem had said to him once. And although he had known exactly what Willem meant, he had pretended not to, just to be a brat.

“你不可能真的喜欢这家伙。”威廉有回跟他说。他完全了解威廉是什么意思，但他还是假装没听懂，只为了唱反调。

　 “Why can’t I, Willem?” he’d asked. “He’s fucking hilarious. He actually wants to do things. He’s actually around when I need someone. Why can’t I? Huh?”

“为什么不行，威廉？”他问，“他很搞笑啊。他真的想做点事情，我需要的时候他真的就在我身边。为什么不行，啊？”

　 It was the same with the drugs. Doing drugs wasn’t hard core, it wasn’t badass, it didn’t make him more interesting. But it wasn’t what he was supposed to do. These days, if you were serious about your art, you didn’t do drugs. Indulgence, the very idea of it, had disappeared, was a thing of the Beats and AbExes and the Ops and the Pops. These days, maybe you’d smoke some pot. Maybe, every once in a while, if you were feeling very ironic, you might do a line of coke. But that was it. This was an age of discipline, of deprivation, not inspiration, and at any rate inspiration no longer meant drugs. No one he knew and respected—Richard, Ali, Asian Henry Young—did them: not drugs, not sugar, not caffeine, not salt, not meat, not gluten, not nicotine. They were artists-as-ascetics. In his more defiant moments, he tried to pretend to himself that doing drugs was so passé, so tired, that it had actually become cool again. But he knew this wasn’t true. Just as he knew it wasn’t really true that he enjoyed the sex parties that sometimes convened in Jackson’s echoey apartment in Williamsburg, where shifting groups of soft skinny people groped blindly at one another, and where the first time a boy, too reedy and young and hairless to really be JB’s type, told him he wanted JB to watch him suck away his own blood from a cut he’d give himself, he had wanted to laugh. But he hadn’t, and had instead watched as the boy cut himself on his bicep and then twisted his neck to lap at the blood, like a kitten cleaning itself, and had felt a crush of sorrow. “Oh JB, I just want a nice white boy,” his ex and now-friend Toby had once moaned to him, and he smiled a little, remembering it. He did, too. All he wanted was a nice white boy, not this sad salamander-like creature, so pale he was almost translucent, licking blood from himself in what had to be the least-erotic gesture in the world.

药物或毒品也是一样。嗑药不是厉害的表现，也不酷，而且不会让他更有趣。现在这个年头，如果你是认真创作的人，你就不会嗑药。放纵的观念已经消失了，那是垮掉的一代、抽象表现主义、欧普艺术和波普艺术时代流行过的。现在这个年头，或许你会抽点大麻。或许每隔一阵子，如果你感觉非常糟糕，你可能会吸一条可卡因，但顶多就是这样。这是纪律的时代、剥夺的时代，不是灵感的时代，而且无论如何，灵感再也不等于嗑药。他认识且尊敬的艺术家——理查德、阿里、亚裔亨利·杨，都没人嗑药：无药物、无糖、无咖啡因、无盐、无肉、无麸质、无尼古丁。他们是苦行艺术家。在比较叛逆的时刻，他会尝试欺骗自己，假装嗑药过时、老套到某个地步后，又变成了很酷的一件事。但他知道其实并非如此，就如同他知道自己并不真心喜爱杰克逊家有时会举行的性爱派对一样。在威廉斯堡那间充满回音的公寓里，一群群皮肤柔软的人在里头移动，盲目地摸索着彼此。有回他在这样的派对上碰到一个男孩，太过纤瘦、年轻又没有胡子，完全不是杰比的菜，那男孩要杰比看他从自己身上割出的一道伤口吸出血来，他听了很想大笑。但他没笑，而是看着那男孩在自己的二头肌上划了一刀，然后扭着脖子舔那些血，像只小猫在舔自己，他忽然觉得心头涌起一股悲伤。“啊，杰比，我只是想要一个体贴的白人小伙子。”他的前男友、现在的朋友托比有回跟他哀叹，此时他想起来，微微一笑。他也是。他想要的只是一个体贴的白人小伙子，不是这个长得像蝾螈的可悲生物，苍白到简直像是透明的，舔着自己身上的血。那绝对是全世界最不性感的姿势了。

　 But of all the questions he was able to answer, there was one he was not: How was he to get out? How was he to stop? Here he was, literally trapped in his studio, literally peeking down the hallway to make sure Jackson wasn’t approaching. How was he to escape Jackson? How was he to recover his life?

但在所有他能回答的问题中，有一个他却回答不了：他要怎么脱身？他要怎么停下来？他人在这里，名副其实地被困在他的工作室中，名副其实地偷窥着走廊，好确定杰克逊没有过来。他要怎么逃离杰克逊？他要怎么找回以往的人生？

　 The night after he had made Jude get rid of his stash, he had finally called him back, and Jude had asked him over, and he had refused, and so Jude had come to him. He had sat and stared at the wall as Jude made him dinner, a shrimp risotto, handing him the plate and then leaning on the counter to watch him eat.

他请裘德来帮他处理掉存货的次日晚上，才终于给裘德回电。裘德要他过去，他拒绝了，于是裘德就来他家。他坐在那里瞪着墙壁，裘德帮他做晚餐，煮虾仁意大利炖饭，做好了装在盘子里递给他，然后靠在料理台上看着他吃。

　 “Can I have more?” he asked when he was done with the first serving, and Jude gave it to him. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was, and his hand shook as he brought the spoon to his mouth. He thought of Sunday-night dinners at his mother’s, which he hadn’t gone to since his grandmother died.

“可以再给我一盘吗？”他吃完第一盘后问，裘德又给了他。他原先不知道自己有多饿，握着汤匙的手都在发抖。他想到了母亲家的周日晚餐，自从外婆死后，他就再也没去了。

　 “Aren’t you going to lecture me?” he finally asked, but Jude shook his head.

“你要训我一顿吗？”他最后终于问了，但裘德只是摇摇头。

　 After he ate, he sat on the sofa and watched television with the sound turned off, not really seeing anything but comforted by the flash and blur of images, and Jude had washed the dishes and then sat on the sofa near him, working on a brief.

他吃完后，坐在沙发上看关成静音的电视，其实根本没看进去，只觉得那闪光和模糊的影像很舒服。裘德则在厨房洗盘子，洗完就在他旁边的沙发坐下，忙着弄一份案情摘要。

　 One of Willem’s movies was on television—the one in which he played a con man in a small Irish town, whose entire left cheek was webbed with scars—and he stopped on the channel, not watching it, but looking at Willem’s face, his mouth moving silently. “I miss Willem,” he’d said, and then realized how ungrateful he sounded. But Jude had put down his pen and looked at the screen. “I miss him, too,” he said, and the two of them stared at their friend, so far away from them.

电视上是威廉演的一部电影——他在里头演一个爱尔兰小镇的骗子，左边的脸颊上疤痕交错——他停在那个频道，没看剧情，只看着威廉的脸，看着他的嘴巴无声动着。“我想念威廉。”他说，随即才发现自己讲这话有多么不知感激，但裘德放下笔看着屏幕。“我也想念他。”裘德说。两个人就瞪着屏幕上的朋友，他离他们好远。

　 “Don’t go,” he’d said to Jude as he was falling asleep. “Don’t leave me.”

“别走，”他快睡着时对裘德说，“别离开我。”

　 “I won’t,” Jude had said, and he knew Jude wouldn’t.

“我不会离开的。”裘德说。他知道裘德会留下来。