*
Run the Train
Lily Herman
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Content warning: violence, sexual abuse, genocide, infant mortality, substance use disorder.
I felt the man’s hand closing around my throat, not just closing but throttling, my whole skull rocking up and down against the pillow. He asked things like why couldn’t I come, why wouldn’t I stop coughing, what was wrong with me, until finally the crescendo—
“Why won’t you just fucking die?”
In response, I said nothing. I laid perfectly, obediently still, and thought—if I don’t move, maybe he’ll come.
When I tell a friend about this night or others like it—where I was strangled nearly to the point of unconsciousness, kicked in the ribs, had fingers shoved so forcefully into my throat that I threw up, was hit in the face with enough impact for a black eye to cover my skin, like a napkin blotting up blood, and when I tell that friend that I had learned to accept these things, to believe they somehow fell under the heading of sex—I don’t know how to account for it. I no longer know how to inhabit the body I nearly destroyed, nor defend its choices.
But at the time, it felt like each expression of private violence was an intimacy. A secret garden where most people wouldn’t tread, and so even when it hurt me, even when it became clear that all of the impulses moved toward hurting me, I wanted these men to express them. I believed it meant that we were speaking a language which few people understood, but which I was daring enough—special enough—to speak.
The intoxication of being special, and being chosen for that specialness, has always been the strongest one I know. There is nothing like the heady rush of singularity, of someone recognizing me as an answer to their prayers. The men who most devastated me always led with the certainty that I would be an eternal, extraordinary presence in their lives—with their certainty that they were choosing me for good. Remaining endlessly susceptible to this bullshit was, admittedly, my own weakness, and it’s been long, slow work to place a more discerning guard at the gates. But for their part, the ones who knocked with such urgency weren’t usually neutral forces. Their conviction contained and concealed a desperate need—they weren’t coming in to find me, they were coming in to escape a bitter, unlivable cold. And compared to that, how could I not appear to be (at least briefly) a warm and welcoming paradise?
So no matter what, there was always a moment of reckoning when they discovered that I was not, that we were not, the answer to all of their problems. For the most part, at this point, they just left—tactfully or not, kindly or not—or lingered, out of some cocktail of affection & fear. Neither of these responses was preferable, but both are understandable. Both worked recognizable, human-sized wounds into my ever-attaching heart.
But every once in a while, I encountered someone who—faced with the realization that I wasn’t as transcendent as he thought I was—was filled with the urge to punish me. For still wanting him, for my inability to make him still want me. Above all for my failure to make him a new man. If I trusted him with a tenderness, and he failed to wield it tenderly, it was easier for him to hate my heart than his own hands.
Instead of refuting or even responding to any of this, my friend says, “You have a beautiful body.” At first, I’m unclear on why they think I need to hear this. They hug me tightly. “You have a beautiful heart.” This inexplicably makes me cry, and through tears, I explain that it’s not because I’m frightened, nor because there is some phantom lurking, still threatening to harm me. I’m crying at how different my life is now. The relief of being free, the pain of having been trapped, or having trapped myself, all of it adds up sometimes, suddenly, at moments I don’t expect, and causes something in me to spill over.
*
I don’t know how, in a way that is not disrespectful to survivors and to the dead, in a way that doesn’t minimize their suffering, to name how it is that this all began. But around the same time in my life—at the end of elementary and the beginning of middle school—two events took place, one rapidly after the other. First, I was introduced to Holocaust witness literature—the memoirs and fictionalized accounts which emerged from that genocide and carried its unfathomable stories to a new generation. And second, immediately thereafter, I discovered internet pornography—images, chat rooms, and videos.
There are guidelines, I now know, for teaching children about the Holocaust. I know that most experts don’t recommend it until 6th grade at the earliest, and that there are entire pedagogical systems devoted to handling such delicate material, such delicate minds, responsibly. But the world was less wrangled, less regulated, at the moment when I came up into it. From the moment that I read the first book, a hole had been ripped in the fabric of my reality—and because I couldn’t patch it, because I realized that it was a hole around which the future world, the world as I’d found it, had been built—I wanted to study it, to learn everything about it that I could.
The descriptions of torture that I read in those first survivor stories meld in my memory, melded even then, with the images I found across media in late 90s/early-aughts porn. Like the world at large, the internet in those days was much less sophisticated, but also less sanitized. It was so novel that the average person did not seem to understand that the tool could be used for anything sinister. Parental controls had not yet been conceived of, much less exerted in meaningful ways. I remember when the computer’s box—spotted like a Holstein cow—entered our house, and with it a mousepad, decorated with an eye in the center of it. Even then I felt like this eye was watching me, as I typed—curiously and then wantonly—into the abyss.
From the Holocaust books and the porn websites, I remember this blurred reel of film: women squatting outside, pissing into piles of hay, people who hid by diving into pools of outhouse excrement, underwear packed purposefully with filth, naked grandmothers cowering in fear, naked grandmothers oozing wideward on a bed, people hung by their thumbs as the playthings of their captors, penises forced down women’s throats in parking garages while men stood over them and grunted, in tongues I did not need to speak in order to understand.
Most of all, I remember men from chat rooms. My parents were going through a protracted, messy separation, and in contrast to this distraction, I loved the attention I got from men in the rooms. I had initially discovered them as a place to discuss hobbies and interests, but they quickly revealed themselves as grooming grounds for nascent sexuality. The men—who were almost always fully aware that I was underage—told me that I was right to crave attention, that I deserved it, and exactly what I needed to do to keep getting it. They liked to talk about controlling and hurting me, so I learned to beg for humiliation. They were consistent. They wanted the same things from me over and over again, and it was easy to deliver. I had always loved words and very quickly, I acquired the vocabulary that they wanted to hear.
I later confessed to my therapist a tiny percentage of the things I said in these exchanges, how ashamed I am at the concepts and ideas, each more colorful than the last, extending far past the initial forays and deep into the years of my adulthood. She responded by encouraging me to see that this was not something that I did, but something that was done to me.
Somewhere, between the chat rooms I frequented and the books I read, I got the message that life was something given to you, a privilege, revocable, and held often by merciless hands. When I began to search for men in my real life, I was drawn to the ones who had explored the same worlds, in much the same unsupervised ways. It pained them like it pained me, but it also shaped them, like it shaped me. Before I had learned how to be touched, I had learned to be hurt, and before they had learned how to touch, they learned to hurt what they held. In our earliest exploratory phases, we were alone in that world, and there was nothing controlled about it. Just a wall of fire with no self left on the other side. So when all of this came to a head in my 20s, when someone asked, as he had sex with me, why I wouldn’t just die, the memories began to pop up inside the frozen world of my body.
*
My brother and I are talking around instead of about this, as we walk past the burl that looks like an elephant. Past the old grist mill whose decommissioned wheel bleeds iron into deep, stagnant water. He knows the gist, but I spare him the gory details. Defunct railroad ties are at our feet, and we skip across the rotted-out boards which connect them. He keeps calling everything mighty. The mighty Susquehanna River. The mighty Conowingo Dam. I haven’t seen him sober in 14 years, and it’s mighty.
He started taking drugs at the same turbulent family time that I started to experiment with sex, and except for a few months more than ten years ago, he has never stopped until now. I didn’t know that it would take getting used to. I didn’t know there would be pain in realizing just how long I’d been holding my breath, pain in letting it go. The relief of being free is once again surprising and sharp.
*
Throughout all the years of his active addiction, and even now, into the early days of his recovery, my brother has maintained a staunch disinterest—bordering very nearly on disdain—for 1996’s much-lauded Trainspotting. Never mind the fact that the movie is widely regarded as having set a thrilling cinematic precedent—with its taut, acrid humor, bright colors contrasting sallow faces, unforgettable cast of characters, soundtrack so iconic that it became impossible to parse from the identity of the film. Never mind the fact that these components, along with the characters’ fragile fates, are held masterfully aloft before our eyes, like a set of juggler’s balls suspended in a majestic arc—inviting us to roam and examine and admire them before they come, exquisitely and fatally, crashing down around us.
The crash, whether in film or real life, looks like this: pupils as small as pin pricks, so small that if the eyes are windows to the soul, then the sashes are coming down, the hope for escape is growing smaller and smaller. The boundless soul is trapped inside the poisoned body. Sweat soaks through shirts, skin is visibly acrawl with imagined pests, movements alter. Swaying, jagged sideways gesture, a sharp lean, a position which mimics the fetal curl even when standing. The voice becomes duller, rounder, forming words which are meant to placate us with the idea that our ears and eyes deceive us, that everything is fine, but we don't hear them, because the sudden realization that we’re speaking with someone high fills us with rage. We hoard that rage like our own drug, because it assuages our pain if we can avoid acknowledging the pain so clearly outsprawled before us.
There’s no denying that Trainspotting depicts a fairly decent approximation of this—the most gnarly, incalculable consequences of substance abuse. But it does so with a sociopathically detached hand, one which would make Italo Calvino—who once admonished writers to approach all grave subjects with an equal and opposite lightness of tone—endlessly proud. To this point, the most horrifying moment of Trainspotting is not when Baby Dawn dies in the shooting gallery of neglect or SIDS or malnourishment. The most horrifying moment, the moment which clarifies the exact magnitude of the beast of addiction, as it pursues all of these characters, is when they peer into the crib—still containing the baby’s fresh corpse—and Mark Renton (Mark, Rents, Rent Boy, played by Ewan McGregor) responds only, “I’m cookin’ up.” This normalcy, this continuity in the face of hell, is what Calvino was advocating for: we don’t shiver when a writer holds forth on how bloodthirsty the wolf is. We shiver when the writer throws someone to that wolf and then tells us to keep walking, that the tour continues this way.
*
*
So if the complex, integrated tapestry of this movie didn’t appeal to my brother, then no unit of measure has yet been invented to record how little interest he has in its anemic sequel, T2 Trainspotting—released in 2017 to an utter lack of fanfare. (“First of all,” he says—a 1980s child speaking to the audacious title choice—“let’s be clear. T2 is Terminator 2.”)
Setting this offense aside, his distaste largely has to do with accountability. So much media, in his view, romanticized drug abuse, made this life seem like a rip-roaring and natural choice. They posited desolation and hopelessness as such foregone conclusions that one could almost sickeningly admire how some people threw themselves whole-heartedly into the cause of their own destruction. Once a friend told me that drug addiction was a state approaching priesthood—because the people in the throes of addiction understood giving yourself over to something so totally that it became your god.
My brother, for his part, allows that he was arcing toward addiction no matter what other influences acted upon his life. Drugs were coming for him from the first taste, and he’s nowhere near alone in that predisposition. If living in addiction is akin to being a monk, then some people are definitely predestined to pick up their crosses. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a certain amount of residual vitriol reserved for the forces which served, intentionally or not, as ancillary recruiters.
It’s not that the movies made drugs themselves come off as picturesque—I think even casual movie-goers of a certain era can picture, with a sinking heart or stomach, the cry of “Ass to ass!” or the abscessed arm from Requiem for a Dream, the decimated minds and equally decimated hotel rooms of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or baby Dawn’s corpse and Tommy’s funeral in Trainspotting. The trouble isn't that these details make drug use seem glamorous—it’s that the distinct anti-glamour somehow possesses its own potency, and therefore, presents its own danger.
The problem is the way that addiction itself comes off as compelling—the otherworldliness of debasement, like a high fantasy realm in which the characters are privy to a different (dare I say, deeper?) understanding of things like suffering, drowning, disappearance, and death. They are willing to risk and lose things to which the rest of us cling, vestiges of our daily lives to which we are more materially attached. “When you’re on junk,” Mark explains, “you only have one worry: scoring. When you’re off it you are suddenly obliged to worry about all sorts of other shite.”
Addiction is often mistaken for exciting. Perhaps the truest, most useful thing Trainspotting has to say on the subject, is that it is not. It is in fact, routine, and montages of endless theft and minor crime and drug purchases do a lot of the work of nailing this point home. Addiction is oppressive in the way that all routines are oppressive, with the added measure that this particular routine, by its very nature, represents a total and sometimes permanent surrender of freedom. Not to mention the fact that it constantly threatens to annihilate beloved people, people loved from birth, people who we have learned to love as they fight the machine that is constantly gunning for them, to love while holding the knowledge that there is nothing we can do to stop that machine ourselves, that we can only run alongside as it hunts them, screaming I love you I love you over the sound of its fearsome and thrashing jaws, and praying they veer in time out of its lethal path.
*
I believe that through a labyrinth of absurdist and avoidant twists, Trainspotting ultimately delivers us back to something like this—to an honest, if interpretive, portrait of addiction. We see the failure of the state to protect, support, or even meaningfully feign concern for its most vulnerable members, we see just some of the impact of the AIDS epidemic in 1980s Edinburgh, we see the almost preternatural ability humans have to act in direct opposition to their own best interests. We see, ultimately, the chokehold that drugs have on the people who abuse them, how these people are held in dungeons, shining a light on a solid wall and desperately searching for the weaknesses in it, beating their way out with bloody hands or dying in the process, throwing their bodies helplessly against it. We do not see any different choices available to the people living in such dire straits, in spite of the phantom cheer tolling under the entire plot. “Choose life,” Mark says, like one of Ophelia’s unhinged chants, the nonsense prayers of the doomed, recited not to alter their destiny but to comfort them as it arrives.
It’s easy to mistake his tone for strictly facetious—but there’s something ambitious to it, too, a state that he desperately wants to attain. “I’m gonna be just like you,” Renton concludes in the original movie’s final scene. For a time, in T2 Trainspotting, he seems to have cracked the code—which is that, of course, you do not get to simply choose life. You have to choose life over and over again—redundantly, cartoonishly, with every breath—and the moment that your defenses waver, something else is always waiting to choose you. Mark has assimilated to ordinary life over the course of twenty years, but the recent scare of a heart attack, and unfinished business with all of his friends, suddenly burst the carefully-built bubble of his new world, all by asking the question—what is this life you’re choosing? And why is there so much death in it, too?
*
But I see my brother’s point as well—all of this suffering, neatly jarred for a theater audience, belies the camera’s preferred claim to amorality. The point of view, embodied by the film rolling silently inside the camera, slips out of an affected ambivalence as it acts as the bridge between plot and viewer: no matter how many overdoses and deaths are depicted, and no matter how painful these confrontations are, the viewer is never really forced to contend with their finality.
Because just as the audience rises from their seats and walks out of the theater when the movie has ended, the actors Ewan McGregor and Kevin McKidd are resurrected from their respective bouts with overdose and toxoplasmosis. We know this. The overdose, even, is reversed in real time, Renton brought gaspingly back to life onscreen mere minutes after he has begun the Lou-Reed-scored roll into his open grave. And just as this is not the end for Mark, Kevin McKidd likewise returns to remind us that he is not lost—we see them both later in Trainspotting, in T2, in flashback sequences, and even when the actors go on to star in other projects. Perhaps this is what my brother means when he criticizes the dabble that these movies offer into a world which does not, in reality, issue any tourist visas. McGregor and McKidd’s future lives as Obi-Wan Kenobi and Dr. Owen Hunt somehow imply—in spite of hundreds of thousands of global overdose deaths every year—that Tommy and Rents can never really die.
And say none of that confuses you, my brother adds with disgust. Say you understand the weight of each loss, and you understand there is nothing triumphant in dying young, and say you are lucky enough to have not been born inclined toward addiction. Say you are only a spectator. How dare you, he asks, get off on touring this depraved landscape, which some of us would give anything to escape? He thinks of films like Trainspotting as tour buses, guiding shuddering civilians through a war zone where they don’t have to live.
*
To his cry of voyeurism, I can only point out that some people are voyeurs. I understand this critique. As someone who likewise spent most of my teens and twenties living out a series of self-destructive, compulsive behaviors, I have sometimes been guilty of overlooking their bedrock state of utter indignity in order to idealize their exciting, exotic surface. There’s an angle from which it can appear to be fun, like just being a particularly prolific lover girl: a storied past of straight sex, queer sex, one night stands, threesomes, throuples, and a few meaningful, real relationships scattered in there for good measure. It’s easy to think being a sex addict is, well, sexy.
In reality, sex addiction can look like many things. Just some of them are: rubbing layers of skin off of your genitals. Needing more niche and more extreme types of pornography or sexual encounters to feel even a hint of pleasure, which forge ever-deeper and ever-more-destructive neural pathways in your brain. Reconfiguring your standards so that anyone can meet them, because you can’t face the prospect of no one. Maxing out ten credit cards at strip clubs and driving your (oblivious) family into total bankruptcy before anyone is the wiser. A hunger for love so potent that it births other, lesser hungers. A fear of aging, a fear of dying, a disembodied hand that has been mashed into its own body, because you can’t bring yourself to let anyone else touch you. A series of gimmicks, postures, and toys, designed to keep you from authentically reaching for another person, in the unbearable hour of the night when all of your dead have returned—instead, a dilettante parade of esoteric bodily distortions. Tricks, treats, the kind of pain you can cause each other with a little bit of creativity. Or if you’re alone, a sticky keyboard from one hand dipping back and forth, from body to machine, one coloring the other with its inhuman glow.
So I feel a similar disquiet as the one my brother experiences around Trainspotting, when I hear songs or see movies which glamorize sadomasochistic sex, the kind of sex that primed the pump for so much of this to flow through me. This is particularly true when the media depict dynamics where the man is in charge (as he almost always seems to be). This is not subversive, I want to shout, this is just how the world works. How dare we celebrate this.
*
After the man wanted to know why I wouldn’t die, I was finally sufficiently afraid, as afraid as I should have been all along. It persuaded me to give up most of my destructive behaviors. Around the same time, the sleep paralysis I had experienced sporadically throughout my life came back in full force, my nightmares increased, and my extremities started to go numb at totally unpredictable times of the day. There were certain triggers I noticed, more likely to bring these symptoms on: my body seized toward coldness and nonfeeling when anyone raised their voice to me or had sex with me (which I couldn’t yet see as a participatory act, but, in the words of my therapist, as something being done to me). My brain could still tolerate violence—I am not sure it has a threshold for how bad it will allow others to make it feel—but blessedly, my body couldn’t. It had been so long since someone reached for me gently, that piece by piece I was fading away, becoming not my own. I was becoming a voyeur in my own body, watching it as it went.
After some months of this, the thought began to bubble up that no one had touched me for the better part of a year, and that I usually went at least a month between touching myself or even consciously looking at my body—if not longer, much longer, often as long as I could manage. Whenever it occurred to me to touch, I just watched, I sat and watched the feeling until it passed me by. This is sometimes referred to as sexual anorexia, and viewed, in its own way, as a symptom of addiction. Addiction thrives on isolation. Recovery is reaching out, in a gesture of connection and authenticity—with one hand toward who you want, and with the other, who you want to be.
*
The first iteration of Trainspotting—the Irvine Welsh novel on which the film was based—is written from the perspectives of multiple characters. Couplings and uncouplings, illnesses and deaths, imprisonments and employment opportunities—all of these events are described by the many characters who feel their impact. The subsequent movie adaptation departs from this multivocality. It’s narrated instead entirely in Mark Renton’s voice. Sometimes his elocution is spunky, sometimes loquacious, sometimes pale and detoxed, but it’s always all Mark.
An example of how this influences our interpretation arises when Mark comes off of heroin for the first time. The film chronicles this event through Mark’s perspective, and he notes most importantly how his best-frenemy Sick Boy (AKA Simon, played by Jonny Lee Miller) detoxed at the same time. “Not because he wanted to, you understand, but just to annoy me. Just to show me how easily he could do it, thereby downgrading my own struggle.”
Even so, the camaraderie is obvious between Simon and Mark, the closeness of petty criminals, occasionally reformed, always aching for the chance to revert back to rascalry and revelry. We travel such powerful crucibles to remain ourselves. The bond between them is as seductive to watch as it has been essential to their survival. Abbreviated language, gruffness disguising love, love disguising loathing, the kind of friendship which flirts with siblinghood by its lack of adornment. The longevity is hinted at with flashback photos of them as small children, buzzcutted or blonde. Their connection is always palmed but never counted, the treasure most valuable and most likely to be taken for granted.
When I think about people like Simon, or Renton, or my brother, and certainly when I think of people who exist in far less protected positions in relationship to the three-headed hydra of monetized sickness, profiteering incarceration, and extortionist recovery—it’s entirely logical that Sick Boy & Mark have milked this brotherhood, as well any other resource available to them, for all it can offer. Why not manipulate a system which hinges your freedom on it? Especially because whatever you try is still never enough, not nearly enough, to set you free.
*
*
What’s clear in the text, however, is that hearing from Simon himself makes all the difference in how we view this competitive drug withdrawal. Whereas the film makes him seem basically superhuman, completely impervious to the agony of opiate withdrawal, the book offers methodology, tells us how exactly Sick Boy manages this coup of self-control.
In fact, this passage demonstrates how much Simon shares the single-mindedness which plagues Mark during detox. The difference is that we see Mark in his initial, acute struggle to come off of drugs. We see him in the clammy and pallid night of the soul, in the hours wracked with such convulsions that once my brother rolled from a top bunk to the floor. Sick Boy, on the other hand, only appears in the days after physical sickness—and by the time this flu fades into the past, he has seamlessly transferred the fixation usually reserved for drugs onto another pursuit: women. He was desperate to score in one way, now he’s just desperate to score in another. His newfound teetotalling is transfigured, through this substitute compulsion, from Herculean feat into basic white-knuckling.
This trajectory is common in recovery groups. Many’s the sex addict who has been in recovery from drugs or alcohol for years, before eventually realizing that now that they have that urgent, life-threatening condition under control, they’ve transferred its spiritual core into another shell.
The first few paragraphs of Sick Boy’s early sobriety are a drooling account of a panty line he observes through a woman’s outfit. Off of drugs for a few days, there is an immediate need to find and stow dopamine in as many places as possible, like a squirrel preparing for a brutal winter only he can smell. It’s not enough to have just one hit. Simon exerts his calculated, considerable charm on two tourists who agree to get a drink with him later in the evening—he flexes all of his wooing muscles, while internally debating if he’ll even bother to show up and meet the women later that night. He breezes, in his mind, through all of the sexually gratifying scenarios he could engineer for himself. Seducing the two out-of-towners. A dalliance with the woman whose visible underwear so excited him. A night at a club where, Sick Boy purports, nobody gets laid (except him).
It’s hard to articulate exactly how accurate a portrayal this is of an addiction left unchecked. Why have none or one when we can have three? Each there to relieve us, should we need it. It’s not enough to take the edge off, we need to know that the edge has been permanently decommissioned, dismantled piece by piece in a way which ensures it will never return.
*
Toward the end of this soliloquy, Simon pauses to ask himself, “which lucky ride will ah stick it intae the night? Who’s the best fuck?” Readers likely prepare themselves for a particular woman’s name to follow here—or at the very least, for a description of a type. In the next sentence, however, in the very next breath, Sick Boy renegotiates the terms under which the question is being entertained.
“Who’s the best fuck?,” he asks himself.
“Why me, of course,” he answers.
The ego of this aside, the pursuit of the best fuck points us toward the very impulse Simon is attempting to control, by substituting it out—OK so not heroin, but if he can’t chase dragons, how about the thrill-seeker’s need to provoke them, champion them, even possess them. He wants the most dangerous, purest, and highest high, and he knows it’s him. Nothing else, no one else exists, who could ever satisfy him.
This neatly directs us to the close of the passage, which is one of the more succinct treatises ever penned on the addict’s condition: “[T]here’s an opportunity,” Sick Boy says, “tae get off wi a woman…and that’s it, that is it, ah’ve found fuck all else, ZERO, tae fill this big, BLACK HOLE like a clenched fist in the centre ay my fucking chest…”
*
Like any reader who has felt the clench of that fist, I am forced to remember what it is to wish equally to either succumb to it or be saved from it. I have prayed out of both sides of my mouth, for the abeyance or the swift arrival of the thing, the one thing—“that’s it, that is it,” Simon says—which will bring peace to this gnawing need, which will wrest each finger of the clenched fist loose. This approach to seduction—in spite of the riotous language Simon uses to describe it, and never mind the fact that it involves the body of another human—is a supremely lonely state of being. Nothing which forces you is fun.
This is true even when the habits are swapped out and the stakes are low. As my brother tells me, it was always tempting to make fun of the kids who were sent to treatment for, ahem, weed addiction, but he regretted this afterward. Beyond the lack of immediate physical danger wrought by hard drugs, he explains, what we’re talking about is the same. Any kind of compulsion represents a soul-death. The same fist is squeezing us all. He refutes my whimpering at imposter syndrome on these grounds. If anything, he tells me, he’s glad that we’ve got addiction of some form in common. “It makes you more relatable.”
I am coming to recognize this as valid, though the extremity of our struggles is so different that it remains challenging for me to accept that they are iterations of the same root. Maybe this is becoming more believable, though. In an age where we understand the severity of tech addiction and online sports gambling, perhaps it’s easier to focus on the shared source, rather than the specific substance.
As my brother and I commiserate, I see that there is more similarity than I could have ever known. We reminisce about the combined sweet relief and apprehension we’d felt all the times when we gave up the struggle and ran toward relapse. We shared the same desensitized pleasure receptors, impervious to anything but the most tailored molecule. We’d felt, thousands of times, an identical sensation—a rush which could not be had any other way but was pregnant with bile, like a poisoned sword tip stabbing us out of our misery.
*
As I think about Simon, I try to trace this thread back to the beginning, to figure out what it is I find so appealing about him. Part of it is the same thing that attracted me at age 11, in chat rooms. It was men’s disregard for women, and the way some women learn to covet it.
“Which lucky ride will ah stick it intae,” I hear, in a voice unmistakably belonging to myself. I’m imitating Simon’s accent, briefly inhabiting his body. Even though we pose the question comically, I know that shame lives in the chasm between its ask and its answer. Simon and I are poised above a pit: on one side there is the hunger which hounds us, on the other side the disgust we feel when we’re finally sated. It’s a lose-lose cycle unless we can rise above it. This is why Simon keeps pursuing all of his amorous options instead of committing to one. If the two states never intersect, then the circuit remains blissfully incomplete, and the pangs never ground back home. He can go on pretending that his pursuit is one of happiness and not survival, that there is something out there which could fill the hole. The liminality must be prolonged in order for us to effectively lie to ourselves.
My brother once said, about these bargaining times, “So me, I reach for tin foil and a lighter, and you—well, this is what you do.” We all find things to transcend ourselves, but the transcendence is fraught, ever-failing, a series of solutions which only marginally stick even if we strain majestically to implement them. We are like planes with one propeller constantly threatening to sputter out and spiral us down.
Similarly, it’s obvious that any relationship attempting to compete with Simon’s clenched fist will fail. Burgeoning affection—the bashfulness with which we should approach courtship when it could lead to real, delicate human connection—could never hope to survive that squeeze, let alone alleviate it. Nothing, therefore, is allowed this chance. In T2, Veronika is, in her words, “[Simon]’s girlfriend, but it’s business really." In Trainspotting, we see a strung-out Simon still charismatic and flirting with Allison, but they don’t claim each other, don't lean on this relationship to fight the atomization of addiction. We don’t know he is the father of Allison’s baby until the baby is already dead. Mark says, “Baby Dawn, she wasn’t mine. Spud’s. Swanney’s. Sick Boy’s. I dunno,” and it is, famously, only Simon’s scream which asserts his part in this lineage. He opens his throat and the hole inside of him takes shape in sound. He watches, they all watch, as it swallows not only him, but the woman and baby who—in another life—could have been his family.
*
So if fatherhood and some loose facsimile of romance didn’t save him, the kinds of one-night stands he narrates don’t stand a chance. How can any single person passing through the filter of the all-encompassing Sick self find a way to loosen the grip of the fist? And if, as Sick Boy reports, the fist is in the center of his chest—how could anyone hope to navigate around it and get at his heart?
This posited my wish to be Simon’s lucky ride in a strange place. Viewed by the light of wanting to be special or chosen, it was twofold. It contained the desire to be with him, sure, the desire for him to look at his bounty of options, and determine that none of them could have competed with me—but this wish was paired with an awareness that regardless of how special I was, this man had no system for endurance. No matter what, I’d wind up being disposable to him. Because this knowledge didn’t diminish my initial attraction, what emerged, perversely, was the desire to be disposed of.
If I extrapolate further, it was the desire not to matter, for nothing to matter, for nothing to sink in or stick, for everyone to go around grazing each other and never making an impact. If I let Sick Boy stand not just for himself, but for a wave of men I have known, then I’m awed at their collective ability to exist casually—in the world, in their bodies, in their charm. All three are settings in which they take comfort in their sovereignty, to such an extent that reality actually yields to accommodate their desires.
I, on the other hand, have never been casual. I have spent years of my life weeping and wishing for reality to yield to my singular hope to find love. In the past, I counted myself lucky to be among the desires of men like Simon, never considering what I wanted myself. I cowered and quieted myself, hoping that if I wasn’t too demanding, I’d go unnoticed and be permitted to stay. This is hardly a recipe for self-esteem or reciprocal love.
So when I finally started to fight back against this paradigm, when I told a man that anyone who didn’t love me was banished from my bed, I was, in some ways, fundamentally altering the landscape I once sought. The magic was stanched at its poisonous source. Asking Sick Boy to be more considerate, to be more caring, to be anything besides the almost comic brutality of a hard and heat-seeking cock, meant he would cease to matter to me in the hour of my urgent need. It meant he could not be the untouchable Adonis who chose me and made everything right in the choosing.
It was the returning legacy of those early years, when my parents were divorcing and the men online stepped in to raise me. If it was their world, if it was Sick Boy’s world, if I was three holes and a heart which occasionally got in their way, then there was never any need to struggle for something better. I could be the hand on his chest and the tongue scooping ecstasy from his mouth to mine, the stranger over which he momentarily obsesses, I could stay anonymous and unlovable forever. I could just lie to one side and let the tide roll me back on myself, toward a new becoming.
*
*
So that was the sickness. If the concept of healing is a sham, which it is (the writer Adrian Shirk asks, what’s the unpolluted state to which we imagine ourselves returning??), then the good news is that it can begin anywhere. I did a lot of things. I joined a support group. I made lists of the behaviors which were safe for me, and wouldn’t catapult me into compulsion’s trademark feeding frenzy. Then I made lists of the behaviors or people or habits I must avoid at all costs, because my sanity lies on their line. I cut myself off from the usual vices. I didn’t allow myself to read or watch anything which posited an overt power dynamic in sex. No men towering over women, no name calling if the names weren’t kind, no bad-faith actors with advanced vocabularies in degradation.
Instead, I started to pick up different things, to see what might have once attracted me. What would my desires have been, if I’d been able to explore before my brain was calibrated to accommodate the obscene specificity of a too-adult world? I resented the ways that this world taught me to draw a line falsely linking sex with increasingly rarefied kinks. Even without the help of porn sites, it’s very likely that some people would have derived satisfaction from seeing fluids leave their body and land on their partner’s—but, absent the internet, it’s doubtful that so many would have independently discovered a taste for brainwashing GIFs or feeding fetishes or financial domination, or for the frightfully esoteric lexicon accompanying these and countless other interests.
I wanted to come back to claim the life I would have had, before the proto-sites which I encountered in the late nineties launched themselves and their attendant 1,000 ships. What would my body have wanted if I was alone with it while it was still forming? I laid back and tried to tap into the thrum far below the buzzing surface, like straining from a basement to hear rain fall on the roof.
It started simply, requiring so much effort to become instinct: there was a drummer who I liked to watch play. I liked how it wasn’t just his arms but his whole body pressing him forward into the song. It seemed like he was altering time, traveling through it at a different rate than the rest of us, and offering—through his sticks—to bring us with him. I liked how boxers moved—not the brutality of a real fight, but the wrapped hands, discipline, the way they punched when they were not facing an opponent but knocking out every shadow self who came to spar. I liked when footballers kissed each other on the cheek or leapt into each other’s arms. I liked songs about devotion. I began reversing, through the embrace of these gentle giant archetypes, every instinct my body had to imperil itself. I no longer wanted the strong man unless he had proven he could be trusted with that strength.
*
T2 Trainspotting was a big part of the compass turning inside me to require kindness. Every wrongdoing and scrape committed amongst these friends in their younger years calcified, and left a con-trail in the tapestry. Pain turned out to be a more everlasting substance than our heroes presupposed. There were things they believed they had left behind—that we, as an audience, were asked to leave behind, in the vague repository of two lost decades. Otherwise, how does the plot ever inch forward? But as every addict knows, pain is a force not actually diminished by avoidance. It’s merely postponed. And in many cases, pain not dealt with returns vengefully, with a mind to collect interest for time-not-served.
For anyone who’s seen it, I don’t need to clarify that Trainspotting is not a sexy movie—even though the characters are compelling, they arouse a maternal instinct more than anything else. I was drawn to the characters in the second installment for a number of reasons, chiefly because by the time I encountered it, Sick Boy and Renton were wrinkled and had been wounded in love, just like me. The men in the second movie were also closer to my age than the boys in the first. And crucially, their relative sobriety meant they had shed the 10,000-mile stares of their youths.
*
Given all that, I lean back and feel into my body, to the place where sound stops. This is not a metaphor. I have been touching myself to a few standout moments in this actual film since it was released in 2017, and riffing an entire universe of imagined moments with Sick Boy and Renton besides what actually happens onscreen.
To start the ritual, I subtract Simon’s inner self from the equation—I don’t want to think about his negligence as a father, stint as a pimp, or wandering tongue. I just fantasize about his face, his body, and about Mark’s too, the beautiful faces and bodies, toward which I could prove myself near-idolatrous. Their cruel indifference toward others or their unblushing self-abuse—qualities which should be dealbreakers—would not be things I could overlook if they were real people. They’d be hideous by that equitable light, the way shining light in a covert place is always grotesque and enlightening: the worms crawl there. So I fantasize about the two actors who play these characters. I superimpose approximations of good and decent people onto the bodies that I can’t help but yearn for.
I fantasize in the present tense, thinking of them both elegantly arrived in their forties. I think of our lines matching lines, the gentle but insistent quality of lovemaking that unseats both the savagery of youth and the compensatory timidity which sometimes follows. Steady as rain. I can hear it on the roof after all.
I think of Sick Boy lying behind me, holding me, while Mark carefully gives himself to me, telling me what a good place it is where we’ve both arrived. The important thing is that I am able to fantasize about this, about a quality of awe in a lover’s voice. In spite of having thought for so long that I knew how all affairs began—and much more importantly, ended—there are people who have also experienced loss and still choose to be overwhelmed by beauty and kinesis. This is the hot heap in which we might survive winter: like a den of mixed snakes welcoming one more into their midst. There is beauty beyond our own which matters to the moment. Simon kisses me and holds my face, asks me to stay in the present. Their hands climb me from behind like ivy, not creeping and imperial, but drifting and greening.
*
All of this may not sound like treatment for the malady—but the greatest dilemma of the fist squeezing the center of my chest, or the hand squeezing my neck, was that on some level, I believed I deserved the squeezing. I shouldn’t get air. I should actually fucking die. That has to be one of the loneliest feelings in the world, and one of the most convincing. If I had never risked getting close to anyone else again, never reached out to see that not all hands are fists, then I might never have learned that feeling is a lie. And in those early days of recuperation, when reaching out to real hands, real people, felt like an impossibility, something else had to pave the way.
So when you take into account these other, older fantasies—the pain and pinking, slap, spitcrawl, and unconsciousness which can be craved and crawled to and also dealt unsolicited from hands (real and imagined), from whose inscrutable grasp I had spent my entire life trying to beg love or break free—it’s no insignificant thing to imagine two sets of hands which are gentle when they reach for me. To imagine them elevating me is a small revolution.
This isn't about the characters from any movie. It’s not even really about sex, although that should be bountifully clear by now. It’s about the good witches we invent, to give us power when we are powerless. The proximity of all three bodies is as intimate as birth. Hold me while it happens.
*
As with all addictions, the flare-ups and relapses and regressions occurred around moments of stress. Whenever I struggled to inhabit intimacy, the temptation to close myself off was strong—it was easier than explaining why I suddenly needed someone to stop touching me, or to start rubbing my legs to bring the feeling back into them, or to justify the lines in my face and my sudden sprays of grey hair with the notion that sleep paralysis is, tragicomically, also known as “Old Hag Syndrome.”
But I knew that if I was going to be close with someone ever again, it meant I had to get nearer to myself. Toward this objective, I brought Mark and Simon close and apprenticed myself to them. And now it’s just instinct: when I can tell I need it, I let them guide me.
In this case I’m on top of Simon, and we’re facing the same direction, which is toward Mark, we’re looking at Mark. For my part, when it comes to this position of summit, surmount, atopness, I don’t often like it and I never much have. I don’t like to control how deeply I feel things. No matter what has ever happened to me, I’ve adjusted, but don’t ask me to be the one at the helm.
But in the fantasy, there’s something for me to learn from this. It’s suddenly possible for me to modulate my own experience, for me to say when. Looking toward Mark helps, like picking a spot on the horizon to keep from getting dizzy, and the arc of my body is long and levitating, and Simon’s hand is on my hip, not to control my movements, because we’ve agreed that’s not how power will work between us—but to hang on, to stay with me through the waves, and I feel grateful because it means I don’t have to be vigilant. I’ve spent my whole adult life trying to find a man, and now that I’ve found two, I’m glad that I don’t have to keep looking for them.
*
*
Once, before he went away, a man who I loved taught me to float in water, and in spite of his going, in spite of me believing that if he left it meant I would drown, Sick Boy is right here, his hand under the small of my back. He’s saying, She’s OK, she’s fine, she’s beautiful, you’re beautiful, and Mark says, Sure she is, we are.
This we is everything. It's the imperishable fellowship present between us, between any people wherever we are gathered. Even when we’ve broken each others’ hearts, squandered each others’ friendships, left each other floating in the Mediterranean, or just plain stolen each others’ wallets, the we endures. It’s who we can’t help but be.
Friendship is different over time. If we must age, T2 seems to suggest, it will age with us. Its strength is not withered but winnowed—the force of friendship between the major characters is stunning, almost violent. They insist on each other. Ever-present is the blood-lust which Mark inspired in his friends at the end of the original movie, by stealing £60,000 from them, just before curtain fell on their little fates. They don’t mince words or forgive him for this, even after twenty years. It’s not about forgiveness. They hate Mark and want to kick his ass—in the crude, inviolate methods available to them. (As another film about drug addiction, The Panic in Needle Park, points out, “You can only betray someone you need. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter.”)
As Mark rips his friends off, he clarifies that Simon “would have done the same if he’d only thought of it first.” And in the sequel, he has no misgivings about seducing Simon’s girlfriend, Veronika. But in a scene when the three of them are blowing coke and watching old football matches, Veronika says “You are so clearly in love with each other that I feel awkward in your company.”
Their bond is singular. It’s not tacit approval or watery support—it’s just sticking around. If their connection cannot be snorted, shot, beaten, or betrayed away, if the true test of a relationship is not kindness but continuity, the propensity to just keep showing up, whether you feel like it or not, whether you’re welcome or not, then T2 offers a unique picture of friendship. It offers a group of patchily-bald men, stunted in a prolonged adolescence which some of their brethren unfortunately did not live to see. Men brimful with the desperation and gratitude of having escaped the would-be henchman of untimely demise. This is friendship between men who thought they’d be dead long before they’d ever meet again.
The twenty year bridge between the Trainspotting films is a convoluted love song between two best friends. It’s about how countless the betrayals they commit can be, without ever disturbing the essence of something between them.
As for me, I wanted to get in the middle of that miracle and magnetism, to bottle up some of their unshakeable bond by getting close enough to touch it. I need to know this is real. Because in a backwards way, the more they cheat and cuck each other, the more I’m allowed to believe in unconditionality. I am reminded, through their mistreatment of each other, that we love the people we love because we love them—and not for any other reason.
This thought sustains me until it’s supplanted by Mark reaching out. He’s right, I’ve thought enough about this. Bring me back now. He feels my breasts, my waist, all of my body in its crackles of exertion. The light warms each new place he finds, we’re set to a continual simmer, flushed and sheenful. Each man is glowing to know that just on the other side of me is his best friend, his friend could not be closer, none of us can come closer than this.
*
I feel Mark’s hand on my chin, see the look that Simon gives me when he kisses me for the first time. They have taken me to some other movie’s house, and the set pieces are all obscured, but the sound of a creek outside is too familiar to forget.
Sometimes I still struggle—to find my body in all this loss, or find my loss in a natural avoidance, or to avoid the corners of furniture. I’ve always been clumsy, I keep bumping into everything and counting the bruises without touching. I find photographs of bruises similarly covering me—my ass black and blue, the outline of a hand slapped into the skin of my cheek, bites on my thighs which bloomed into a sickly, guava-grey.
For the next segment of the fantasy, I put Renton above me, and it’s easy to picture, because there’s a scene in T2 where he’s on top of Veronika, and if I squint, I can pretend I am her—exchanging her litheness for my soft thighs, her eastern European accent for my east coast. In this scene, we see the way that some sex is divided into output and intake, we see him straining into her, across the years that divide their ages, across the borders that divide their upbringings, we see the reasons she will rob him and the reasons he deserves to be robbed. When I’m close to coming, I feel the energy push out of my body and toward him, toward the Deco quality of his arms, angled over her.
It isn’t time yet. I need something else. Mark and Simon aren’t characters anymore but hands for hire, ghost writers toiling with me toward something. My brain still tosses up blocks to protect my body from what was done to it, each limb numb and tingling, and they’re helping me recover the memory from my feet up. Starting with each sole in their hands, they rub until the nerves wake back up—my legs, arms, chest, it’s all coming back to me now, how violently each of these places has been handled in the past and how desperately I want to trust these men with them now. It’s clear that they’ll help me tell this story as I remember it, from all the places flooding inside me.
I lean back onto Simon, the tendrils of a vine rifling down from above. Mark reaches forward for me, and I breathe as the plant grows into my open mouth, craning not toward the sun but where the water runs. I come with my eyes wide open, looking into Mark’s eyes and feeling Simon’s on me, my breath expanding inside of my ribs, so that I am both ways closer to their touch. The music swells into credits, each of our names exploding from the screen.
*
It’s hard to say in these moments if I am talking myself into or out of intimacy—the feelings of closeness I’m experiencing are, notably, not attached to real people. And if even they were, I’m looking for a life partner, not two bedfellows (no matter how charming). But I appreciate the ways they’re preparing me again to face an actual man. Fantasy allows us to engage with elements of reality and unreality on equal ground. Without unreality, we have only our lives as we have lived them. Without reality, we have no hook to hang desire on.
When I close my eyes, I remember the house where a boy took me at eighteen and we undressed together. I fell in love for the first time in that room. This moment is no longer real and yet it lives forever. It was private, and I won’t say anything else about it, and if Mark and Sick Boy were here right now, I wouldn't tell them, either. But I feel thankful to them, for helping me remember enough of myself to find it again.
*
The scene most likely to draw criticism in T2 is when Mark and Sick Boy excoriate each other for the two major blemishes in their respective pasts.
“You’re a tourist in your own youth,” Sick Boy says. “Just because you had a near-death experience and now you’re feeling all fuzzy and warm. What other moments will you be revisiting? Here’s a good one: How about the time you sold Tommy his very first hit? Leading him on to heroin addiction, HIV infection, and ultimately his death at the age of—what was it, twenty-two, twenty-three?”
“Aye,” Mark says, “that’s mine. How’s yours?”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“She’d be a woman by now. Maybe kids of her own. But she never got that far, did she? Never got to lead her life. Because her father, someone who should have been lookin’ after her, protecting his own infant, was too busy filling his own veins with heroin to check that she was breathing properly. Aye. How d’you keep a lid on that one?”
This exchange doesn’t reveal any new information—it’s a reference to everything that went seismically wrong in the first film, everything that has remained immoveable since the two characters last saw each other. It could be accused of over-explicating two of the most poignant moments of the original movie, a favoritism shown wrongfully to Telling Not Showing, a siphoning of the excruciating magic from its nonrenewable source.
But it’s important—it’s essential to the state of sequelhood, and to the truth of this movie, that this conversation immediately precedes both characters’ sole heroin relapses in T2. The thesis of the entire Trainspotting saga—the unspoken truth which set the stage for a return in the first place—is that both characters, to different degrees and in very different ways, felt partially responsible for the loss of a single life. The only way either of them has managed to deal with this has been to pretend, for twenty years, that they were over it, the way I have likewise pretended to be over things which finally refused to be forgotten. All three of us heard the siren call imploring us to “keep going and fuck everything,” as Mark says, but eventually, there was nowhere left to go, and everything was already fucked.
Simon and Mark make ample room for self-delusion, but they will not suffer it in each other. Implicit in the way they each force one another to face the music, is avoidance of their own shameful song. So now, instead of placating each other, reassuring each other that they did the best they could under the circumstances, providing each other with the strength or tools necessary to keep a lid on that one, they are there to tilt each other’s lids glaringly ajar. To blow the lids clean off.
Without fail or hesitation, each knows where the other has buried his unforgivable skeletons. They navigate to these most sensitive locations as deftly as if they’d been returning to the secret, shared site of boyhood treasure. I needed them to do this for me, too. By guiding my hand to all of the places I thought had become graves, they insisted I look at which parts of myself I kept hidden there. Only then could I live.
And in the face of unbearable pain, of the “big, black hole in the centre ay their fucking chests”—they’d only ever known one reaction. One needle in two arms—the same needle which was ultimately responsible for the deaths plaguing both of them. Just when our heroes think that they’ve grown too old to be desperate, too settled for squalor, too grey to live at the superhuman pace of active addiction—the pain reaches out and finds them, and announces that there is no such thing as a sequel, that the first movie never really ended.
*
But importantly, they don’t stay here. This relapse is a singular episode for both Sick Boy and Renton, because they have found other ways to stay afloat in this life. We see Mark coming home to hug his father, where once he sat sullenly or stole money or was locked into his room. Simon goes back to the hunt for grandiosity haunting his ordinary life. We get by. Every time one addict tells his story to another, he is cracking open these unspeakable burial sites and learning to live, gracefully and gradually, with what is unearthed there.
What if T2 Trainspotting—in its willingness to irrigate its wounds and track their long-term reverberations—is actually free from the sins, as my brother saw them, of its father? It helped me look at an unexamined injury, determine that the problem was trying to live with my heart separate from my body, and assisted me in putting one back inside of the other. It helped to determine which wispy threads of the self can or should be preserved in the endless throttle & assault of this world’s late hour. It helped me feel my own body in ways I had believed to be extinguished.
When I think of putting this essay out into the world, I am sedated by total terror, but—in part because of T2—I no longer let the terror dictate how I live. I don't have to bury it to put it down and walk away. In fact, I’ve just witnessed, courtesy of Mark and Simon, how little burying it works. My brother, who was lucky to live, unearthed so much of his story and told it to a group of people who had walked, like him, through the valley of death. It was this talking which gave us our lives back.
*
It’s entirely possible that T2 should be condemned as a pathetic, nepo-runt, but then, maybe it's not alone and we could just allow it—like my brother, like me—to live, allow it to thrive, entirely on its own merits and on its shaky, post-recovery legs. Maybe it helps us to see beyond how ill-formed we are, helps to free us, and points out that for heaven’s sake, we should free ourselves in the direction of other people. Our salvation is there: past lust and loss we belong with our boyhood friends, our circle of post-sobriety brothers, our families and enemies, we belong to all of them and this belonging is the opposite of death. If I wasn’t ready to let new people in for a while, if I had to imagine them, Simon and Mark offered a safe, lush place to temporarily land.
The point is not that Tommy and Dawn must die in order that we may live, or that I needed to be slapped toward my own happiness. We all must go through a certain amount of pain, but exceptional pain is not the prerequisite of exceptional jubilance, and it’s a fool’s errand to keep chasing one’s tail in that frightful cycle. The point is that since we’ve outlived that pain, we might as well be happy. There is dignity in surviving what must be survived, but no glory to be found along long and needlessly sacrificial roads, so anything we can do to collapse the distance between where we stand now, and a world of possible joy, is not only our right—it’s our sacred responsibility.
In a past life, it was the bond of friendship which enjoined Mark and Sick Boy to take the train to Corrour station, breathe the fresh air, appreciate their identities and where they were—and it is their dead friend, twenty years gone, whose ghost brings them back. As they confront each other about who they are, who they have always been, the past is with them. Urging them out into the world with each other, to do battle or to pay tribute—then to go home, to never stop struggling together toward the light.
*
I don’t need the boys anymore, but sometimes I still want them. I'm taking my time, using my index finger to outline their absent forms on my own skin. Some nights I'm afraid if I touch myself, I will open a portal through which I can't return. I pray while I do it, because what I want is to give up control, and some echo of a prayer reminds me that there are things I don’t have to see to trust. Simon can tell that I’m leaning back on him because I’m afraid to drop overboard, and he’s saying, Spill, spill, til finally the alarm sounds, and the river rises, and I fall forward, but Mark is on the other side. He catches me, he kisses his own best friend, and there are hands on the fronts and backs of my shoulders, assuring me that I don’t need to be afraid to go forward. There is life on the other side of this veil, they tell me, the kind of life that cannot be revoked by any unfeeling force in this world. I’m lucky that it’s there, and I’m lucky that it’s still a mystery. If I knew everything about it, what would I have left to dream about in the dark?
*
Lily Herman is a writer from Maryland. She has two chapbooks available: Spree, through BRUISER, and Each Day There is a Little Love in a Book for You, through Dryad Press. Her website is lilyjherman.com and she is writing about grief, like everyone else.
