NOWHERE-NOW HERE, HECTOR CASTELLS TRAVEL JOURNAL I
Nowhere, NOW HERE, March 2024
What I’m about to tell you is the most dreadful injustice I have ever witnessed, the end of my life, as I knew it, and the beginning of a travelling runaway currently ongoing.
Overall, it is my desperate effort to build a painless bridge connecting void and gravity zero, a retaliatory sort of limbo where memories won’t weight and flashbacks shall become eviscerated, while I slowly travel-blog the ashes of a neglected, stolen world… and get ready to slice your throat —you know who you are, so take the hint and pray.
I must honour the words of the Aikido ancestors, the daring and ruthless Samurai swordsmen who used the weapons that I train with NOT to blend seamlessly into nature (as O’Sensei, the founder, would advise years after), but to inflict deadly blows to any human or animal hazard.
The old masters also believed that the Samurai sword is a holy blade only to be drawn as a last resort. They even estimated its average use: once every 500 years, even though most of those swashbucklers would unsheathe their weapons daily —and deadly.
I’m just trying to honour the saying: “He who lives by the sword dies by the sword.”
I must use a nickname for prosecution purposes: there is an arrest warrant pending over my bony head. You can call me Wilson.
If this opening paragraph were to be a song, it could be Jurgen’s Paape «In Time». Unfortunately, it sounds more like Aphex Twin drilling Mahler with a jackhammer. Music, literature and Aikido were once the answer. Then Nora stopped breathing and all the answers became obliterated. I had no alternative: I had to die by the sword.
Barcelona, 1990’s
I was young once. It was confusing and visceral. I thought I could write. Then I realised I could barely do it without embarrassing some of my heroes; hence I got a Degree in Journalism and shamed them all. My pal Manu got me my first gig as a movie critic for a trendy magazine printed in the Little Barcelona Hell during the late 1990s. Manu and I met inside a toilet. He managed to escape it.
He set me up with an interview with the director of the toilet —aka the magazine. She had an impossible name, looked like an alligator dressed in Prada, had a fluffy, flaming-red hairdo, and a seemingly stillborn kangaroo stuck to her side. I was too spellbound to be horrified. Inevitably, I asked about the dead mammal.
She said it was not a kangaroo but a Louis Vuitton handbag —almost the same thing. Then she said: «THIS IS THE MAGAZINE».
It was a disposable affair: 72 trendy pages issued monthly that you could get for free in clubs, bars, record stores… It included fashion editorials featuring underage, intoxicated and very thin Catalans wearing Mickey Mouse jumpers and sucking lollipops; plus stories about music, arts, cinema and a cultural agenda mapping all the coolest spots in town where fashion and music victims would hang out with their Mickey Mouse’s jumpers and Adidas Gazelle on, while dipping their lollipops in their personal stacks.
The headquarters where the alligator smoked and plotted her magazine revolution were in El Born, a former working class settlement properly dismantled and reassessed before the Olympics, that became the most hip, gentrified part of town. The HQ was some stunning 400 square metres apartment with a huge waiting room broadcasting fashion and music channels I had never heard of.
It felt like strolling through a Scandinavian museum of modern art. I remember the sleek, dark glass tables in every meeting room, the abundance of gigantic interior plants, the mind-blowing vintage lamps, and the pornographic Gaudi-meets- Da-Vinci-tiled floors.
«All the furniture is by my favourite Norwegian interior designer», the director said.
I was still in college embarrassing my heroes, and, all of a sudden, I walked into the backdoor of journalism…. THROUGH LOUIS VUITTON BACKSTAGE IN BCN!!!!!!!
I was lucky, wasn’t I? I would be travelling in private jets in no time. The director’s office was massive, filled with thousands of records, CDs, books and artworks. It felt like the Nazi’s bunker for artistic confiscations.
She asked me to watch a movie called Will Hunting or something, and to write the review. It was the story of two young idiots who could play chess and scrub toilets, and who shared the most annoying therapist in the history of cinema. At least I didn’t pay to watch it. The downside is that I was not paid for writing the review either. (The private jet must wait, I told myself).
I wrote a convoluted text filled with words like «hemorragia» and «crepúsculo». My heroes must have been disgusted. I would have fired myself if I were HER. I didn’t know that using those two words was all you needed to become a “culture” journalist. The director was delighted with the review. She said I was hired (for free), and asked if I was ready for the next assignment. She wanted me to interview a band called Asian Dub Foundation. I hadn’t learnt to say NO at that stage. I had read that Goethe only learnt to do so in his forties, although he probably never said yes to an unpaid gig.
But then again I was twenty and an ignorant: I had no clue about whom ADF were when my mouth opened and said:
“Maybe: is it a commissioned gig?”
The director knew that maybe meant yes, ignored the question, looked at her many shelves crammed with CDs, and picked the debut album of the band. She asked me to listen to it. I said thank you. Then she said: «RECUERDA QUE ES DE HUELVA» —remember this CD has to come back to mum.
It was the first lesson I learnt as a journalist: never give back your working materials, no matter how many greedy bossy vipers you have to deal with. I was dumbfounded, nonetheless.
So So Low
My years of professional journalistic deformation were shaped right before the invention of the infamous LOW COST culture, a ground-breaking, ruthless scheme designed to identify all the cheapskates in the world —in order to punish them for being so.
It was the era when Ryanair’s staff would abuse you for being one of the many shameless passengers who chose humiliation instead of caring. Then came Zara, Amazon, IKEA and all the corpofucked, exploitative businesses that made you feel rich for buying cheap shit.
The low cost invention was a freaking, data-fracking operation intended to document and identify those living below or parallel to the ZERO mental income line.
The director was a super low cost pioneer: she had eradicated the cost of everything except her salary, a pool of zeros that she would fill with cocaine, Norwegian wood and embroidered knickers while we (the free contributors) kept multiplying our labour per zero.
The gap between her throne and our gutter must have infuriated Marx, another hero we all embarrassed like proper young idiots.
Instead of mentioning any figure, the director said that HER magazine was a great platform and that HER contributors were the best, super talented, all destined to journalistic glory, including me, thanks to HER platform.
Most of the time I spent enslaved by the platform I felt like Joaquin Blume, the tightest gymnast ever born in the Iberian-macho-peninsula, a self-extended acrobat well capable of sustaining the crucified posture for hours, months, years….
I also felt like a nightmarish version of Tom Daley, a shaved up, underage body soundlessly spinning the air before realising that there is no swimming pool underneath the fucking platform. In the end Tom Daley never died and the platform worked to set me up with a job for a Franco’s nostalgic newspaper in Madrid a year and a half later.
I was earning the lowest low-cost salary (a neat, perfect zero) when the paws of the far right showed their wonderful disposition to inoculate my pen with cash. Their platform was a national newspaper and a freedom of expression guillotine —except for our Friday magazine; a supplement whose existence went unnoticed for the CEO, one of the most sinister minds of the perpetuated Spanish Inquisition.
Many Catalan friends stopped talking to me after I signed for the sons and brothers of the Spaniard dead dwarf.
They had a point, although they ignored that the alleged leftist newspapers they read, like El País, El Mundo or La Vanguardia were the main sewers were critical thinking and independent journalism morbidly choked. As of today, nothing has changed except for the income gap, an abyss of cheapskate writers falling perpetually through the Zero Hole. Most of them are also currently enslaved 24/7 by ungrateful employers named Zuckerberg, Bezos or Musk who keep fracking up their cuntent for free.
The End, Dublin 23rd of April 2019
I disposed of the stinky journalist corpse on the closest garbage dump I could find, and moved to Ireland to learn their language and become a literary translator. I was living in Dublin, had the funniest, loving partner, an office in town, a creative writing teaching gig, a book and an Aikido black belt underway, and a promising gallery owner increasingly interested in my homemade videos of rubbish glittering on the stream of the Liffey. Then I met the wrong law enforcer at the wrong time in a place that should not have been wrong. The agent was called Carl Murder, true fuckt.
The time was right after the last breath of a very fine and troubled young user that I loved dearly, and whom I failed to resuscitate after a detox session inflicted by a quack. As for the place, it was called Now Here, a free shelter for young, recovering users, where I was teaching Creative Writing to a lovely bunch of orphans like me. Since the rest of the underage residents renamed the centre Nowhere after losing Nora, this will be the name I will subsequently use to refer to it —and to title my escape.
I had met Alex, the quack, witch-in-house-doctor at Nowhere, a couple of times before the end of light. Then I met her one last time on the ghastly day she asked me for help in utter panic, before fleeing the scene of her own crime, leaving me with blue, sweet Nora.
I had seen others go before my eyes, but none of them were so young and had survived as much as Nora had had. I waylaid my lips to hers and took half of her last breath. She shivered gently, and whispered her last two words: “love” and “Asia.”
I waited for the paramedics to arrive. They pronounced her dead at the scene. It felt like someone had cancelled the sun on May Day.
The criminal investigators landed right after. Murder was the first to show up. He was wearing a bowling hat, had his sleeves rolled up despite the freaking cold, and had a scar like a deep question mark running from his right cheek to his crooked chin. He was anything but a misspelt agent on an X file. He carried a notebook and a pen. As Lydia Davis’s first husband used to say, «you only need a pen to become a writer» (he became Paul Auster).
Murder kept drawing like a demented sketch artist all sorts of indecipherable symbols on his notepad. Then he stopped and said:
“I will have to get the Interpol on the case due to your nationality.
”“What the heck are you talking about?”
He said I was a suspect in a murder case, mentioned the embarrassing place where I was born, and asked for my criminal record and my links to Alex.
“I was trying to save someone I loved! For fuck sake! I would have done anything to protect Nora!”
“Let the judge decide that and the nature of your work with Alex.”
“What work? She was holding the deadly body of my favourite person in the world. She knew I would never leave Nora alone. I would have killed Alex if I had known what she was about to do.”
Murder looked anything but impressed.
On the day we met, Alex told me that she held a MA in Psychology, and that she was using organic drugs, such as iboga and psychedelics to break addiction patterns in long time users. I asked her to keep Nora out of it: she was too young, plus she was making great progress with her writing assignments. I should have known better: there are people who you must never tell WHAT NOT TO DO.
Alex had to prove me wrong for the sake of her god-like ego. When she came asking for help I read fatality on her grimace. I also realised that her calling for help was just a sneaky manoeuvre to pave her way out of the scene. She ran for her pointless life to no avail.
I felt like an ambulance on speed, a red and blue siren tumbling down the slope where Yin kills Yan. I rang Selby, my ten-year loving partner, straight away.
He was a human rights activist and attorney. I was speechless and then stuttered. It only took him one minute to utter the heart-breaking words: “You must leave the country right after they interrogate you. Buy a burner phone and ring me back once you are done. I’ll arrange everything. Don’t use your credit card. And dear, remember: don’t ever dare coming back home.”
Coming morning, when Murder and his agents knocked at the door of our last known home, I was already miles away with a fake passport in my pocket and Marrakech beyond my pale, pale window. Selby welcomed the agents and said that I had left early that morning, and that he was not quite sure if I was off to play a gig in Kerry or West Cork. What was the issue anyway, he asked. Murder smirked.
“I know who you are: you won’t fool me,” he said. “If he doesn’t show up at the police station in the next 24 hours he would become the primal suspect in a murder case. So you know, darling.”
NOW HERE, May 2024, Nowhere
I have been on the run for four years. I’m used to it now. I spent a few months in a birdcage sort of facility owned by a millionaire in exchange for ghost writing his biography. He became famous overnight thanks to the many lies I wrote, and sorted me out with a plastic surgeon in exchange. I have been a brand new sort of ghost ever since.
I kind of look like Wilson, Tom Hanks volleyball and best friend —in another horrible movie with Tom Hanks in it. Nobody seems to figure out my pronoun anymore, so I have decided to just answer yes whenever someone inquires about it. If you call me non-binary I say yes, if you call me him or hers, I say yes, and if you call me a sicko I also say yes. And thanks
Does it make me pronoun fluid or just polite?
Before I became Wilson, my paranoia had been increasing like Wagner on steroids. Life has been much easier ever since, enough at least, to decide to come out and vindicate this journey, the first travel blog ever devoid of locations. I believe that if you read and look at the photos with a little bit of curiosity, you won’t find it difficult to pin me down.
I’m ready for Murder. And I will die by the travelling sword, my only home.
Welcome to NOWHERE, right now, Now Here.