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Back In Moonland Save as PDF
Chapters (27)
  1. About the Author
  2. Title Page
  3. Dedication
  4. Epigraph
  5. PART ONE
  6. 1.
  7. 2.
  8. 3.
  9. 4.
  10. 5.
  11. 6.
  12. 7.
  13. 8.
  14. 9.
  15. 10.
  16. 11.
  17. 12.
  18. 13.
  19. 14.
  20. 15.
  21. 16.
  22. 17.
  23. 18.
  24. PART TWO
  25. PART THREE
  26. PART FOUR
  27. Acknowledgements

My head hurt. I wanted to go back to the little house at the start of the film, with its old piano, its humble gas stove and the smell of boiling garlic, but Ryan Gosling had set it all on fire.

PART TWO

PART TWO

Vincent wakes confused in The Celestial Lake, a very dirty hotel, which at least has the benefit of a ceiling fan, though it isn’t moving now. The power must be out. He lies staring at the grimy blades for a while, letting the shock of his predicament run through him.

From the street outside, he hears an almost unbelievable noise: horns, motorbikes, cows, bike-bells, donkeys, rickshaws, men yelling and spitting. Sounds that had somehow tangled in his sleep with the sounds of his childhood — his father and his brother, more specifically — many years earlier, arguing in the kitchen outside his teenage bedroom. A kind of nightmare, if he’s honest.

In the other bed, on the far side of the room, a man is snoring lightly, his impressive chest rising and falling. The American. Kurt.

Vincent lets the dream dissolve, like weak poison, into the day, which is swelling around him now. He looks at his watch. It’s almost nine in the morning.

The room is pale green, the walls spotted with dead mosquitoes and gashes of dry red liquid. He gets up and goes to the window to look out at this new city.

Poona.

Fuck.

The street below thrums with an intensity that frightens him. Less so than Bombay, but still. Just as dusty and hectic and poor by the looks of it. Just as desperate. He feels, acutely, again, his own insignificance, the thinness of his own being. How easily he might not exist at all. He thinks: What the fuck am I doing here?

Vincent had arrived in darkness the night before, with two Canadians and Kurt, an American actor who had played a centurion in the stage production of Jesus Christ Superstar. He had met them all by chance two days earlier, at the Leopold Café, in Bombay. But the taxi bearing them down to Poona had conked out, and they’d had to wait five hours beside the road for the driver’s friend (or was it his cousin?) to appear with another car. The driver had been so upset that they couldn’t bring themselves to abandon him. By the time they’d found the ashram, it was after ten and the gates were closed for the night. The hotel — The Celestial Lake — was Kurt’s idea. He was paying for it. The whole thing was Kurt’s idea, in fact. Being here now.