Faith is an environmental force. It suspends phenomena by surrounding them with stories, and also waives the need for narrative explanation, as in the case of miracles. This positive and negative capability is secured through the faculty of attribution. When something happens, we may attribute its occurrence to something else, moving along the grammar of reality into analysis. Moving the opposite way along the grammar of unreality into creation, we may also attribute a thing to an action, even if the action is mere being. Faith secures movement on both sides. It suspends transit between the realms of reality and the unreal, the one we associate with objective, external life, and the other with subjective, interior life. That we have these categories at all, that is, that we experience a distinction between them, is a miracle suspended by the environment, which has so thoroughly waived the need for explanation that we feel its miracle as ambient. Faith is environmental because it is the connective force within this ambience between what we understand and what is understood in us. The environment is therefore not a part of reality.
Reality is rather one part of the environment. This reversal may seem odd because in our secular scientific universe reality is the underlying substance to which all phenomena belong. It fulfills the encompassing quality assigned to god in times of faith, or the analytic half of the faculty of attribution. The generative half, which in the past has been fulfilled by the unreal, is now met by our industrial output, which is disturbing because it takes place within a superabundant reality whose products are external. As this swollen material framework encounters the environment and the unreal it is beset by disasters and chaos, which are opportunities for the reintegration of these forces in the old balance secured by faith. The longer this balance is deferred, the closer we come to a new one in which we are prevented from creating at all within the material framework of reality. This impending prevention is an actual threat because reality is not all-encompassing. It belongs to the environment and is subject to it, as a part is to the whole.
Imagination, or the unreal, is the complementary part within that whole. Things of the imagination are immaterial, a word that currently means irrelevant, as the more time one spends imagining, the less one is able to make objects or money. The regulatory function of this loss is overlooked if imagination is seen as private and contained within the scope of individual life. An example of its collective use comes from the early days of covid, when everyone was shut in online, in the unreal space of the web. The sudden primacy of immaterial, virtual production had a salutary effect on the environment. Perhaps it was understood that we were doing-nothing and that, in a half-joking nihilistic way, we had disappeared, and our premature extinction was just what the earth needed, but that is only because we are so out of the practice of immaterial creation, we failed to see our activity as generative at all. In terms of attribution, it appears we were compensating for our superabundant reality by diving into the virtual. The tangible result was environmental health, which could be said about no other configuration of activity within secular time.
In times of faith, the immaterial is rampant, and its main product is belief. We tend to think of belief now as a question of ability: if god exists, why were they not capable of stopping x? But the foundation of a question like this is the assignment of being to a divine something-or-other at all, which is a demanding collective activity. It skews the entire narrative system of the group that sustains it, for if so much energy is spent holding something unreal, then through the exchange faith allows with the grammar of reality, this suspended divine will participate in the process of rationalization. We call this superstition, its prefix super- indicating it is in excess of the real, but if we conceive of this interaction without excess, we simply expand our narrativity with what we already have. A more effective term could be fanfiction. This larger space of storytelling inevitably draws us closer to the unreal, where intense material production and accumulation are limited, though of course, not totally.
That capitalism emerged from monotheism and not polytheism seems consistent with the demands of their respective narrative systems. There is quite a difference between belief in a single god whose glory is only sometimes mediated by nature and beautiful things, and belief in an animated universe, the materials of which are inseparable from their immaterial souls. The activity required to suspend the latter is incalculable, which is to say it rejects number as an ambient force, though it never exceeded the rituals of a group to which it belonged, and was therefore harmonic with the sum of their energy. The task of faith is the arrangement of this harmony.
Without faith, a narrative system produces dissonance, the aesthetic qualities of which are less apparent when it assumes a fundamental status in our experience of life. For instance, we obey the doctrine of infinite growth, which subordinates our present to a future we can only know is greater by enlisting the concept of number. The baseline feeling of this system is inadequacy. It is dispiriting in the literal sense of deposing spirit by number, for the two possess incompatible relationships with infinity. Whereas numbers are external to infinity and only approach it, spirits are of the infinite as aspects of its movement. That we feel the primacy of number as dissonance and the older primacy of spirit as harmony is, rather simply, because we are ensouled. We do not begin with number inside us, but a fragment of infinity. To be dispirited is to become a stage for their reaction, and from the intensity of the resulting aesthetic of dissonance, to run toward the anaesthetic of realism, to require reality, and even become addicted to it.
The ubiquity of realist textures is a symptom of this urge, as it extends beyond the fully-realized sitcom or film to the proliferation of HD cameras and the hyper-legible micro-narratives of advertising, whether commercial or personal, as in the production of subjectivity on social media. The need to explain, which is met by the high definition of all terms (whether verbal, visual, sonic, affective, that is, all parts of effect), never encounters the need to obscure, which is still felt across the internet’s unmonetized zones. The faculty of attribution, the enabler of this encounter, is therefore quite low. Where it is high, in those difficult texts and works of art called postmodern, there is a sense that our present can only be registered as a futility of narration. But what is futility if not the negative miracle of what absolutely can’t be allowed to happen? The misrecognition of this miracle doubles as its fruitless contemplation, the residue of which is irony. It is highly ironic that something miraculous, and therefore essentially unreal, should suspend our glut of definition. For this reason our public feelings are dissociation and shock (disbelief).
These effects tune out hypocrisy. And yet, hypocrisy is a surface of plurality. Its exposure in a world obsessed with truth is critical, but also imaginative, as it comes from the miracle of futility, which it is possible to approach with the awe miracles deserve, if only we desire this expression. These complex allegiances, or what is perhaps the multiple character of the meanings I am applying to the terms and interactions of my argument, is a function of the epistemological diversity of our time. On the one hand it flourishes online, because the internet is unreal, and on the other it is absent from the scientific business of neoliberalism. Yet this contrast is an even further proof of diversity from the perspective of the whole, which enables the fluidity I desire.
The refusal to integrate opposites, whether by numbness or shock, is a way to suppress diversity in the name of the authentic, or real. We are ashamed of plurality, of its weak and pathological state, which is tied to the character of nature that has changed in our lifetimes. For millennia and across cultures, nature was a tireless artificer whose genius and beauty knew no bounds. Now, as so many species works and climatic harmonies have been shattered, the productive character of nature has slowed, as any character does in illness, and focus has shifted to the internal state of the environment. Its hypochondriacal fragility is dazzling and unrelatable. It requires empathy we may not have the expertise to express. But the discourse of expertise is numbness, a further suppression of diversity. As in all psychic connection, the arrangement of internal states closer to what is hoped for in synthesis is a viable form of action. To practice diversity at the level of thought, in a word, to become more imaginative, would increase our intimacy with the environment.
The emotional tenor of this connection has the advantage of belief. Intimacy is a space of expanded attribution. We not only trust those we are intimate with, we support their experiments in narrativity, which must occur in the fragile interaction of what is real and what is not. The narrative of environmental degradation is still an unsupported tale. It consists of pain attributed to the basic functions of our material framework. Because the metabolism of our society is combustive, each carbon-based breath of civilization advances climate change. We are able to deny this story because our tools of belief are low. Even though it is a scientific tale, the environment is speaking through this discourse, contaminating its methods of facticity with the fact of its expression. It is experimental not in the prickly sense of the avant-garde, but in the way that anyone telling their story bridges reality and the unreal. To support that bridge is less a matter of statistical persuasion than closeness. Intimacy is a calibration of the range of distance called near.
Perhaps only in hallucination do we experience this type of closeness with our environment. Under the influence of LSD we may attribute more to what we see, hear, and feel from things around us. It is generally accepted in moments like these that objects have a narrative quality, and based on their neutrality (if it is a good trip) are natural, easy communicators with much more to say than they let on. Without drugs, environmental intimacy fractures into expressions of the poetic or the pathological. And yet, there is a space where it functions regularly, or at least where its creative or dysfunctional character is obscured: the space of advertising. Products communicate with us commercially. An ad campaign is nothing less than a forceful animation of matter (or, abstractly, of service). The principle of faith, if not its psychic benefits, is at work in every ad that puts us in dialogue with something that is silent under normal conditions of perception. Indeed, the incredible variety of narrative effects developed for commercial use is inspiring. I imagine the greatest lyric poets walked in worlds as gregarious and in touch as our marketplace. But we do not share their desire for our intimacy, nor do we share the terror of the mad.
The commercial system is normalized by the narrative effects of money, which, like the environment, is a planetary ambient force. It suspends the distinction between what is profitable and what is unprofitable and installs reason as the bridge between these categories. The degree to which its system resembles the environment and faith infuses financial adventure with uncanny spiritualism, which we call success. However, since it produces value instead of balance, the heart of the commercial system will always disintegrate its primary terms: what is profitable must flee from or suppress what is unprofitable. To the extent that value is created this system can be said to operate beautifully. But its terms are superimposed on those of its model: the environment, its suspension of reality and imagination, and their bridge of faith. As this older system is designed to balance its primary terms, the mapping of profit onto reality renders it dysfunctional.
A curious aspect of this dysfunction is its effect on what we consider art. If, in the commercial system, profit corresponds to the reality of the faith system, loss corresponds to imagination. This means far more of our activity is legible as imaginative than in the past, when, without the compulsion to monetize life, periods outside of production were not seen as losses or as creative, but as bare—empty in a way that menaced no one. Today the unprofitable is negatively productive. It creates an inverse potential of wealth. In a strangely affirmative turn, this burgeoning notion of what is lost/imaginative has coined the vague noun creative. Much of what creatives do is not considered art, either because it demonstrates no clear mastery or because they do too much and no critical perspective yet is able to chase this quantitative leap. We are in the oppressive position of being surrounded by ingenious work we must neglect because it is not serious and not art. The familiar form of a situationship. Yet our qualms are ideological. Many associate podcasters, meme admins, and prolific rappers with the pathology of overproduction that chimes with endless growth. But their sympathy with our structural forces shouldn’t dismay us. Great artists (or simply minds) of the past have often integrated the dogmas of their ages. Without the church there would be no Dante and no Milton. Dogma is a most creative aspect of ideology. Despite the harm it has caused, it is amazing how the commercial system appropriates so perfectly the system of faith. The drama of this act is thrilling. If the imaginative work of our time is neither commercial nor artistic, its degradation can be seen as an adaptive challenge. We are asked to update our aesthetic and epistemological categories to fall in step with it.
Yet this challenge is ambivalent. It requires a double compromise. On the one hand, we would treat the proliferation of content with the reverence of art, conceptually damaging the latter. On the other hand, we would accept by default the machinations of profit responsible for our media, bypassing critical instincts that reject the scent of capital. The result would be a reinstantiation of the faith system’s terms with contemporary figures. The unreal would again be fecund. The real, despite its profit character, would be confined to its side of the system. It would not instrumentalize the whole. Faith would appear between them. Both our sense of what is beautiful and our sense of what is right would be shaken in this pact. It would yield but one advantage: an organization of forces more diverse and encompassing than avarice or righteousness currently offer.
The problem of diversity is anterior to the lifespan of a system. Contact with and assimilation of the world as it improvises itself is the representational standard of universality. Without this impression a system is seasonal. It is therefore shocking that despite the internal combustion of difference which characterizes the commercial system, its acquisitive aspect is so strong that the image of plurality is upheld. As the question of profit touches everything it achieves the same dominion in time over existence as poetry achieves over language, namely, that all of experience can be given to it. The elasticity of its application is secure. Of course, this impression is distinct from material contradictions that limit its operation. It accounts only for the affect of our submission to its logic, at once cheerful and suicidal. We mirror this range because it encompasses the texture of our lives. And yet there are pluralities greater than images. If the commercial system is the most superficial expression of diversity and the faith system its most essential, their combination is the limit of this quality.
Though I do not by combination mean a blurring of their boundaries. A more effective method would use these systems for their habits. The system of faith tends toward the unreal, while commerce tends toward reality. Positioning them whole within the framework of faith would free them to their tendencies and accommodate the range of belief in today’s spirituality, which includes the absence of belief. The difficulty of placing side by side systems currently superimposed is high. There has never been so little accord between real and unreal. They are finally opposites. But this contest is desirable. It calls on attribution. For the range of diversity in conflict consumes ambivalence. Just as there is no way to return to the past before the development of commerce, there is no way into the future free from its touch. We might conceive of the ideas in circulation today as species of thought. To eradicate any of them in the push toward another world would replicate the extinctive logic of progress that fostered capitalism. They must instead undergo the mutation of collaborative process. The exclusive quality integral to their operation would devolve, which is, after all, the behavior most threatening to our survival.
We rely on combustion for its metaphorical harmony with exclusion. Of course, our activities require fuel, but given the limit on these materials, only their conceptual agreement with our notion of the world gives their use an illusion of plenty. As combustion displaces materials to the air, they become invisible or ignored, keeping their presence in the environment as the excluded share responsible for the interior. There is no way to mediate between human activity and its byproduct. The waste of fossil fuels is senseless. It either has no spirit or it is a body whose spirit was extracted in the process of its use, rendering it soulless, as in some traditions demonic evil is understood. As a non-human it is ideal. It has nothing to say about the activity it is involved in. With an accepted and required passivity, it is peripheral to each aspect of civilization, surrounding and centering their particular focus. It is how we would like nature to be, or how the god of scripture assigned it to us. We are obsessed with combustion because it produces the one thing in our universe beyond animation. We love it for its playlessness.
To think of how it might come into play, we have to consider the soul of waste. As surely as there are metaphysical niceties in the commodity, such qualities also permeate the excess of production. We may look at waste in any state, solid (landfills), liquid (effluents), or gas (GHGs), and try to imagine how it would look back at us. Like an invasive species at a planetary scale, it chokes out life across the earth and forces what is left to adapt to its presence. The only way to limit the intensity of this adaptation is to reduce the material generation of waste, at which our civilization excels. The demands of this species are greater than the demands of our own under the scriptural license to rule over nature. Waste is the expression of this rule, and of its impossibility, because it is still natural: neo-natural. Having created more of what we ostensibly subjugate, we are like the old natural world in subjugation. We seek mercy. But mercy is a product of spirit. Perhaps it is a greater imposition on the resources of faith to install a soul in garbage than a god in heaven, but the payoff is proportional: the animation of the world is its communicability, its chance to be found on the path of attribution. To lose this path is to lose contact with human life. And whatever we are excess to, or outside of, will not mourn the loss of us on earth.
The immaterial production of the soul of waste makes it relatable. The same principle is at work in memes. Before the internet, the detritus of culture was inert. Now it is ever at play in comedy. This genre is significant. It is not guaranteed that all relationships are pleasant. Flux is fundamental to their life force. There was always the possibility that our culture could have killed us, and from many perspectives it is doing just that. Thankfully, this idea occurs most often in people who do not generate culture, whose level of attribution is quite low. For those in whom it is high, great care is taken to maintain the equanimity of play. For waste of any kind is conceptually other, and we have repeatedly made the mistake of turning these others into enemies. The extremes of this mistake are the conceptual categories of blackness and terror. Out of the former we have seen the highest expressions of ecumenical humanism martyred by our state. Out of the latter, the repeated resolve to wipe us from the earth. I do not mean the groups of people gathered by these categories are waste in the sense of something to dispose of. I mean they are excess to the system of material production they surround. All material production makes waste. However, the responsibility to positively connect with this entity is inescapable. Immaterial production makes space for that connection: the soul. Care and intention do the rest.
The problem with movies is that they’re about skinny people. That’s why the form gave way to personal video. It’s about attention. The hypnotic power of the beauty ideal was its claim on focus; to hold the attention for two hours on a broadly unrepresentative aesthetic became impossible when video technology entered the rest of humanity into aesthetic understanding of itself and people became bored with the conflation of focus and being thin. It is not that there can be no movies of fat people. Rather, the ideals of those who made movies were so firm and narrow for so long that when attention approached the conceptual pearly gates of transmutation, it was like a classic work of art: a definition of itself. For the rest of the ways people looked, nothing but a new form of focus sufficed, disguised as its absence. What diagnostic language called attention deficit was in fact a threshold for the historical period marked by love of otherness.
Sally, an exquisite girl, marched forth from her room and struck the sun with her her, for she was not a tiny perfection. She was enormous. And let me give a pharisee’s thanks I’m not the type of author to allow the physical character of my character to be drawn by association pure and frank. We all know what goes on behind the closed doors of predisposition, and for that reason, tis boring. Sally was 5’7”, broad–shouldered and buxom, though without a bra her breasts sank and one was noticeably larger than the other. It is said that souls are carried away on the stretch marks of her skin, else they recall this sight when at last they gaze upon the river Styx, and like at other momentous moments, confusion between sensation, image, and memory growing to a fever pitch, and the soul amassing all this in its eye, whosoever is first to encounter that worried look is like to say: ah yes it happened, is happening, and shall have taken place still, for beauty is a measure of the distance of vanishing.
Sally had scarring from the condition Hidradenitis suppurativa under her breasts, her arms, and on her groin. The sores left purple marks that gave these areas Argus-like awareness of who would not understand these parts of her. In this way she acquired a natural audience for the conceptual promiscuity of her wondering, which occasionally made its way down the complex into the nasty things people, persons, and personae non gratae enjoy doing.
At these times they would take her hand, or be taken by her touch—her dominant sense—warm and soft as sleeping babes, and yet as firm as that sense is when it draws the weight of one’s body, before the body can walk, when it leans upon whate’er it touches. A rather drunken sense at this stage, but favored by love, and so fortunate in its aleatory games that it never misses, abolishing the concept of aim, and filling its vacancy with blisses. Sally’s hands were handsome, the hands of a tenor, or a gallant mezzo. They wove as they went, and what designs were spun they undid, so as to free their lovers from the cage of scarcity that holds much romance and inspiration in check.
It was said that minor respiratory infections were cured from napping on Sally’s chest. And with the proper tools, she would clean the teeth of those who dared smile at her with an abscess. She couldn’t help it! Execution was her middle name: Sally Execution Geese (short for golden fleece (short for flavor of reese’s (the etymology of this word being even stranger, it would buck what little plot there shall be, and let us say, amen.))) But why did they smile, these daring dental miscreants? It was like a ship in space caught in a tractor beam, the muscles of their cheek in light of hers. Sally had a very wide grin, and like a novel virus, no one alive was yet immune. Her teeth were strong, but slightly beat up from cigarettes, which she continued to smoke, forcing her lungs to send fluid out of their sacs like a disgraced man, like a joke! fie! begone silly infirmity! One smile from Sally and you could choke. You could do anything. It was a providential pardon.
What next? Her eyes were pale jade with a small cracked brown center that disappeared in low light. And in selfies, they lent her unmade face a washed out look, almost sickly, yet still so strong, picture a lovelorn nariad—immortal, and stricken. When painted with her signature blush, the green grew deep and the brown like fertile soil. In fact it was so grand, so much effect in one face, on one canvas, that it was comic, and made her laugh simply to be so alive. She was Christmas-hued year round if she could help it. And she could! So there!
Her hair? From the effects of accutane as a teen (prescribed to offset the intensity of hidradenitis) she had premature thinning bove her brow. Yet she took great care of what was left, greying now, though in the manner of tinsel, which added to her marine grace, silver more than gold the flair of the sea. She wore bangs, or held her hair up with a band, and could be seen with two curlers most mornings, so as to get a bounce that fluttered. Her hair down, its contact with her shoulders drove many to madness, which, fearing it could be badness, turned out to be the sense of wanting to be a strand, a poetical distribution of spirit into a smallest thing, and this access of feeling, if pursued to acknowledgement, would instead be a gladness. Even drawing lyrics from barren pens. Oh to be a strand of Sally’s hair!
Her ass was small. Or perhaps latent. Aloof, as if it had something else on its mind other than sand and time (why hourglass=femininity is beyond me, though Clepsydra is a pretty word and an even prettier poem. Name your daughter Clepsydra, dear reader). It was the kind of butt that kept its fat above the hips, or on them, which is usually where the shapeliness of chronologic figures shows. The inscrutability of her donk was an abstruse text misread by vision and caught by touch (as Proust says, perhaps what is missing in the first encounter is not understanding, but memory—well, switch Sight for Understanding and Touch for Memory, and wonder why dualities permit such fluid transaction, and why the softest sense should fall away in time…) In short, her ass, like all the rest of her, was gorgeous, obliquely. In profile it scarce showed up, but Sally was wide, so when it was upon those blesséd bodies whom she played with, or merely when she was in line at Valentino Food Market on Fresh Pond, or walking up the metro stairs, in high-waisted black jeans and tan clogs, her ass was eloquent. Loquacious. It gave its address.
And do you suppose I’d miss her feet? Size 9, seldom without color, pink, rose, or iris-purple, and on her soles the graded ochre of a corn or two, which are like emphases of earth—we bold things in text, while it bolds our journey-work. Her feet were never lost in a cartoon cloud. Sally walked with purpose, and seemed to stride, even in the house, but with calm. Many are they who kissed her feet, not like an empress, but simply cuz it seemed the thing to do.
Physiognomy.
Styled on this precious day in lilac denim, an oversized black Las Vegas tee, a white stetson, and those studded ankle uggs, or what they’re calling “suede boot cognac” from p.rn.gr.phy (far be it from me to shame intellectual theft, as TS Eliot roughly put it: the greats steal, the lesser deface), with sun-slapping ease, Sally emerged a vision. She had a coffee date at 3 with Penmanship
PENMANSHIP, a difficult friend
it was nigh 2:50.
The date was at café Scimitar, a brilliant java saloon on the corner of Bleecker and Overthehill. Scimitar was first to feel the rising tide of the disappearance of bodegas, all in Ridgewood having phoenixed into cafés. Competition is regular, but problematic if a market is saturated and the basics once supplied by Polish, Yemeni, and Korean delis no longer grow on corners. Let them eat zucchini bread, the brasher coffeers murmured, but Scimitar took a chance and began stocking tostones, Zywiec beer, chips and salsa, bimbo bread, sad avocados, takis, gum, and pour-it-yourself joe. They even had a ginger cat named Creep By Radiohead, who had recently won the nobel prize for cuddling. Café Scimitar was basically a deli, but you could sit out front if you didn’t mind the sound of construction. They were in the process of changing titles, from café to gourmet. And the grapevine had told Sally: they now have a juicer. She had her stomach set on Green Immune Boost Angel, and there was Penmanship, sipping an espress-yourself-O neath a cloud of wood dust, so low in his seat his balls must’ve felt like concrete.
“Penny! Most somber slu*t, how art thee?”
“Terrible, Sally, just pitiful! The girl I can’t stop from coming is coming to my party tonight, even though I’ve told her we’re a dozen and thirteen will give us each five to seven business days of bad luck.”
“And? What’s her solution?”
“She’s going to bring a friend, some long-lost sibling I apparently mentioned during eye contact one eve.”
“Penny, this is wonderful! A reunion! And fourteen is two sevens, luck be a situationship tonight!”
“No-no, Sally, it’s wretched. My sibling is a housing lawyer I embroiled in a loft-suit against five roommates who insisted I watch Catfish with them over the long nights of quarantine, and the judge ruled that I was indeed a curmudgeon guilty of terrorizing the vibe—he sentenced me to a five-year lease and posi thoughts only, with a mood ring for assurance. My sibling must enforce the law, out of fealty to abstraction, and is going to Clockwork Orange me into a friendly person if she sees me tonight, which is why fourteen sounds like bitter retribution!”
“Gee, Penny, that’s f*cked up.”
“Thank you.”
“Can’t you stop f’ing the poor girl?”
“Let’s change the subject. What's on your mind?”
“A big green smoothie. Be right back!”
Leaping past six purple labs collared with their pronouns (they/them), Sally entered café Scimitar in her usual tizzy, greeting the shopkeeper with a long, slow kiss… at least, that’s what the guy thought about whenever she came in. And this despite the fact that he was heatedly engaged in a critical tiff with a regular unsavory customer o’er the merits of You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go, which had been on repeat in the store for a week now. Truth be told, he knew his interlocutor was a piece-a-sh*t, but like Moses, he was tongue-tied when it came to things like this and cast about frantically for help in the matter.
Sally caught his eye the way a gentle knight pricking on the plane, y clad in mightie armes and siluer shielde, wherein old dints of deepe wounds did remaine, the cruel markes of many a bloudy fielde, might catch the eye of some damsel in distress, and sidling up to the counter huffed,
“A green immune boost angel on the double, what! You gents appear to be in contest. Over Dylan?”
“Yeah, Sal, this bazoon has played his song to everlasting death, and won’t even tell me why. I officially hate it, and I’m the type of guy to lick the dust off records. It’s makin me sick. I’ll give this place a hundred bad reviews if someone can’t redeem it.”
“S-S-Sally, d-do you want i-i-i-i-ice in your j-juice?”
“Christ! Whaddaya take me for? Course I want ice in a small cup on the side of my juice so I can watch it sparkle in the midday sun while decompromising my immune system.”
I’ll look for you in ol’ Honolula, San Francisco, or Ashtabula
You’re gonna have to leave me now I know!
But I’ll see you in the sky above, in the tall grass, and the ones I love
You’re gonna make me lonesome when you go…
“Siri, pause!” Dylan froze. You could hear a tote bag crumple. “The issue here is generalized love disorder. What we call anxiety is fear that random phenomena will dispossess our spirit, diminishing our capacity to love, which, however shiny it may seem, is at bottom a utilitarian principle of relation. Without the possibility that love at first sight will pluck the string between our eyes and the grass, we are less functional. The anxious person suffers from a constant threat of this foreclosure, even though the heart is indestructible. It is like an immortal machine, which only makes anxiety worse, because each moment then learns the negative fulfillment of fear, and time becomes its servant. The lover should be the opposite of this condition, but as our world is asymmetrical, is not. What the lover unlocks is a full amplitude of possibility in encounter. The connection of love occurs with many things, and this awakens them. Some leave, for they are anxious, then return, and leave anew, while the force of connection falls across an ever-greater landscape. Finally there is a shock, a love that stands out against even the possibility of love that characterizes all things. The relation of this love to the all it stands out from is its dual character. It is like everything that stays and everything that goes. That is why the singer is already thinking of his loss. Its temporality is inconsequential. Just as the sky, the grass, and the others who are here represent both what is in possession and what dispossess. Their status of relation is inconsequential. The generalized lover is diminished and increased by the grass, immune to the opposition of these values, and because they become one in him, lonesome, the blue of oneness.”
“Yer juice is ready, Sal.”
The cup of ice hovered beside, comme une ange—guess that’s why they call it an angel, S mused, as Unsavery spat cereal, respectfully, into his sixth pour-it-yourself brew, and the song changed: Minaj’s Everybody, Sally throwing ass to her seat.
Typically after critical effusion her brain needed rest. That is, her soul, imp and jack of trades, would stop shoveling coal into the furnace of her thought, crack its knuckles, have a good stretch, and stride out of the engine room into the dining quarters of her Titanic, during which exit, its garments would slough like skin and a linen suit would appear over dainty limbs, the very expression of its face drawn from virtuous labor to urbanity, and her soul would repose a while, leaving no interest on her brow, which, recently furrowed, would slack as a junkie’s posture, offering no quarter to bullsh*t or blamers; Sally was coolin.
“Hel-looooo—anyone there??” Penny murmured: “Abandonment.”
Unsheathing tinder, he matched with the girl sitting behind him, a tutor in rhetoric for upper west side strivers, just now on video call:
“Yes, Isaac, that sentence is sufficiently taut. And remember: adjectives belong with every noun, even seamen. Ciao.”
Her laptop clicked. With seriously blue eyes she looked past Penny at our lady of honk-shoo, and stage-whispered,
“Heavens! Is she alright?”
“Mild asperger’s.”
A pause.
“We’re not dating.”
“I’m around the corner.”
“Shall we?”
And there lies a coffee date at Scimitar, cut down at tender age, as many fools are.
S took just ten minutes of rest. This gave the forces of sociability time to marshal another hang. And bending back the bow, shot one Combotina
COMBOTINA, a loyal friend
across the path of our exquisite girl.
Being a loyal friend, CT knew the ways of Sal like the back of her hand, and stood by amiably until she awoke.
“Combo!”
“Geonbae!”
A weather beaten hand thrust two glass cups between the friends. The hander clinked em, then threw his back with such elan, Combotina and Sally echoed as if yawning.
“I used to run the deli here. It was called Grace Tree, the ‘T’ in our logo was drawn like an oak. When it folded I took to soju, and for a while I cursed life. I ruined my marriage, wound up homeless, still am, if you look from certain angles. But after enough misery life relented. I used to be so angry with this corner I would avoid it, even blackout drunk I managed to walk around it, rambling, but sure I wouldn’t see the useless piece of sh*t coffee spot that ruined my last years. Then one day I felt calmer, and I noticed I was on this street, walking toward the old Grace Tree, and closed my eyes. I smelled like piss, and figured anyone might throw me out, but I wanted to go in at least and hear what kind of voices filled the space. It was strange, I’ll tell ya, walking in blind, it almost felt like going to sleep. I dream of the old shop, that's where I get to see it still, and the sound of ‘café’ Scimitar was just like it was ten years ago, or at night. I opened my eyes and saw that it was just as I’d left it! They even had a ginger cat, like ours was. Of course, the clientele was stiffer, but I get the sense that to be truly modern, one must walk with stick up one’s ass. And I suppose that even if I can’t enjoy the stability I’d planned for myself, it’s nice to see how stubborn nature is. I mean the environment. Neighborhood, whatever the hell you call it. Not everything is passive.”
He poured another glass, and for the girls too. They hadn’t understood a word of his Korean, but were awed by his energy, which seemed to say f*ck-you as gently as a caress.
“Love that guy,” CT said when he was gone, sliding into Penmanship’s seat. Combotina was a petite jewess with large dark eyes. A responsible lady who naturally took on the emotions of others in limited, constructive ways. One of G Eliot’s unhistorical figures who make the sun come up and the day go down without pulling too many stars out of night. She accepted the eccentricities of her peers with libran grace, and was passionately in friendship with Sal, whose vitality had no better vessel than clear conversation.
“Sup.”
“Nuh-in.”
“Same.”
“Yeah?”
“Truly. I’m full of sick thoughts and green flags.”
“Mix em, Combotina. Hit me.”
“But you were just napping. You first.”
“Uh-uh! I’m not playing main character tennis today.”
“Alright.” CT took a hit of passersby. “Y’know that space Pageant by Flushing? I was there last night for a set of dances by this Spanish choreographer and my hinge date fell asleep. He was doing that thing where you fall forward and jolt back upright because, I dunno, the little elves in your lungs like pranks. Anyway, it was super distracting, cause the kind of dance we were watching had the same sort of fluid motion that suddenly gets clipped, however intentional and sexy the performers did it, my date was in the uncanny valley of a movement I was pissed he was crashing. And I knew when it was over he’d want me, like nothing amiss. So I’m sitting there, conscious of how bad my taste in men is, unable to connect with this gorgeous art, and then, bam! Something in the ratio of my date’s nodding and the dancers’ slow-whip just clicked. It’s like he joined them with his negligence. Not even cause he was pulled in, they just met on some beat and carried on together, and I was shook. By… coincidence! I even shifted a little so I could watch both, like I was getting twice what I paid for. It made me think of how many movies, subway reading stretches, or even segments of friendship I had felt were interrupted by carelessness, or sometimes my own thoughts, and how many moments of correspondence were lurking in that awkwardness, if only I’d gleaned em. I’m ashamed to say that when it was over, the sleeper clapped like the rest of us and looked at me with the self-satisfied lust I knew was coming. But I looked at him like he was part of the group we were applauding. The sex was terrific, even though he didn’t deserve it, and I intend to ghost. I can’t help feeling grateful for his faux-pas.”
Sally listened closely to Combotina’s tale. She loved her friend’s hands. They were usually out of sight, worrying fabric or playing with her keys. But when she grew animated they would fling wildly about, like pigeons scared of an eyelash. She imagined that if someone were to make a bust of CT, it would be in such a pose, but neither she nor any friend had this skill. The immortalization of intimacy was perhaps only possible on IG stories, and they were gone in a day. But she knew the full Combotina, and tried to fill herself with this knowledge till her skin sang, voila! She'd goosebumps.
“Sal? ya there?”
“Yeah, sorry,” grinning, “You look hot Tina.”
“Don’t tell me you wanna stick your dick in me too.”
“Nah, if I had one we’d be friends without benefits.”
“Friends with setbacks.”
“Opps.”
Tina blew at her bangs. “What’s new in your world?”
“That guy Virtuoso
VIRTUOSO, a suitor
has been dangling from my social media. I think he’s got problems, but I like his swag.”
“Careful, Sally. Don’t go trying to save him.”
“Excuse you, what if I wanna be saved?”
“You’re like, totally immortal. You’re beyond all that.”
“What if I wanna be saved from not having to be saved?”
“Sounds dumb. But I understand.”
Sally took a green gulp. She felt the juice leading a charge of reinforcements in her immune system, beating back the cold that wanted to make her sneeze, like a middle school mastermind getting some chump to say ICUP. Bodies are so slay.
“I swear I could post anything and he’d like it.”
“Is that why you’ve been taking pictures of the dirty corners in your house?”
Sally blushed.
“Which I love, and I’m glad that’s how you’re flirting. But Virtuoso doesn’t seem like meet-the-parents material.”
“Combotina! You know my dad was a lightning bolt and my mom is ancient dirt.”
“It’s a phrase, Sal! I’m only trying to say he’s a cad in simp’s clothing.”
“He’s a poet. If he didn’t break hearts he’d be worse than a skinny chef.”
“Have you walked by his place? He’s got Aphrodite and Cupid passing out promises like CBD gummies. There are women literally pinned to the vinyl siding of his street-facing bedroom.”
“Like consenting adults.”
“Like sausages! Three weeks later they’re in sex and love addicts anonymous.”
“Oh no.”
“I’m tellin ya. Virtuoso is a siren.”
“Lash me to the post! I can’t stop reading him.”
“Y’know he’s going to Penny’s.”
“Sadboys link up.”
“It should be fun.”
“You’re going?”
“Yeah.”
“Protect me.”
They pinky swore.
“I love you, Combotina.”
“I love you back!”
The ice, playing Deli in the dream of its sparkle, smiled.
When the hour struck four and the carillons of Coptic, Presbyterian, Greek Orthodox, Catholic, and whatever other sects of god-fearing timekeepers—I can’t keep track—leapt from their steeples, Sally adjourned for a tarot reading in her kitchen. Virtual, that is. And let me give a tour of her abode.
It was a railroad on the northwest corner of Apple and Forest, with a white bedroom, a yellow library, an orange den, and a pale green kitchen. The bathroom, black and white octagonal tiles, squared in the negative. There were bug traps on the counters with the dust of fully decomposed German roaches, which Sally liked to meditate on to remind herself of the intelligence and vanity of other species.
The books on her shelves had come from a kleptomaniac bibliophile, who enjoyed a kind of sortilege of gifting Sally obscure texts she might strike meaning from like a match. However, his condition got the better of him frequently, and he would drop off loot by the stack to shake his reputation as a crook (by trade a psychiatrist). Sally’s collection was a marvel, as was her resulting education, but there had come a time when she turned away new bequests. And told her thief to get help. Alas, he was upstate now for a hundred counts of larceny, and she wrote him often, out of guilt. Education is never painless.
Her furniture came from Alberto and Sons, those intrepid connoisseurs of estate sales. In the orange room she’d a long low vivid blue couch, a beat-up brown eames chair, and a duo of towering velvet sunnies. There was a floor reading lamp with heathenish incandescent bulb. And a white glass top desk with green trimming.
The bedroom shall be a story for another page. Most urgently I should declare that Sally lived alone by the grace of her card business and the occasional antiquarian purchase of a first edition. She was to speak with one Matti Outinen, who, from his email several weeks ago, seemed beleaguered, and not at home in English.
But then, Sally liked a vagabond grammar. There was only so far you could go in language before starting to need something from it in return, the legal character of tongues being chary with this payment, it made sense dialect grew an easy friend. For the dialects of languages are profligate spenders. They accept any charge of spirit, whether in frustration or joy, and make their crude attempts at painting, like invisible and constant graffiti. The more dialects gathered, the more a language speaks to its speaker, the less intelligible they are, but the more felicitous, to be sure. The mistakes of immigrant English are like seventh-generation stews. No one knows how the taste got there, but are certain its multitude favors them. The complexity of English being vast, the privacy of email being deep, and the discourse of psychic entreaty unposh, to Sally the gems of this genre flew.
And waiting-to-receive, in general, was her shtick. Not patience. Sally rather impatiently waited. For it seemed to her that all things had a shape, which was expressive enough, but really where their soul came to rest. At their core was an endless projection which might cast upon a wall, though it also would be energetic, and the way to fashion this screen, Sally had found, was by waiting. Inactivity maintained this structure. Though of course, the images it received were odd. They had to do with the past, the present, the future, with desire and disgust, and with disturbance and focus. They were not divided by theme, and had so little in common with the outward person (or thing), the difference was unsettling. It took a long time for Sally to label and sort her reception. She was unwilling, at first, because it seemed a violation of the continuous nature of the soul. But the more ordered she was, the more protected, and the better use to projectees. Truth be told, she didn’t need cards; it just freaked some clients out to be stared at, so the ritual was nice. The cards were reliable, but blocky units of information. If some data were larger, and some more faint, a reading was like a poem: a gesture could be so just, one had to be able to change the whole on its account.
Matti glitched into zoom. She found his face sincere, which, over forty, only comes from the conscience of reliable people. Yet it was also marked by the knowledge of having let others down. His sincerity wasn’t drawn from a management of time. There was no accounting for what could occur upon his word, which is to say, he was not a man of calculation. But neither was he prone to the sophistry of schemers. The target of a peculiar fate, if he didn’t know what it was, he certainly wouldn’t act as if he did. The effect was winning, however off balance. Windswept, like his hair, combed in the manner of the nineties, when his aesthetic had leading man caché. An idealist with a dog’s optimism, soon to fetch a limp.
“Hello,” Sally said, “how do you pronounce your name?”
“Mattí, like you’re going over the hill.”
She repeated.
“Not bad.” He pronounced each word with this elevation difference. It made him drawl. “Let me tell you my position. You’ll tell me how to adjust.”
He was an architect who hadn’t done more than a residential addition in a decade. Certain he would never build a highrise or a prison, his natural grandeur had pounced on the infrastructural dilemma of climate change. He railed against the materials of modern construction. The windows were too thin. The walls uninsulated. The vogue of glass and steel was a sacrifice of heat. Naturally, the emissions of this mania for cheap construction and sleek design were responsible for a chunk of global warming. And the effects were irreversible. It was certain that in twenty years, tops, the coastal megacities that were crucibles of this audacity would be flooded. Unlivable. The solution? Move the skyline inland. Fifty miles. But that wasn’t all. Reduce land usage by building even taller towers. Mega-high rise complexes, solely for housing, that would free up ground for public life. He laid it all down with the ardor of an illiterate preacher, and Sally picked each word up.
To the mystic, words are alive as people and stones are alive. There is the definitional character of a word, which is fixed, and the circ*mstantial character, which appears when it is used, and is most always unique. In this second meaning are the projections of the souls of words, which say what is unspeakable in the system of that moment’s speech. Sally paid close attention to this level, because it was fleeting, and because it contained the unintegrated aspects of Matti’s vision. Its shadow, as it were. From out of the words Sally saw the burlesque of thriftless spending, opacity, and the ruses, so natural they were unconscious, of a born con-man. Like many dreamers, he was impecunious, and had developed a falsely respectable color to keep the game fresh. Which diminished his essential hue. He was, in fact, a cosmic dunce, “bent on mischief and good works with equal zest” (as the poet says), and the true audience of his performance weren’t money-lenders, but shmucks: the rest of us fluent in fool.
That was the first card she pulled. Then came the tower and three of coins. She felt it was enough.
“Well Matti, I have some news you may not like, but try to bear with me and keep in mind that if I don’t know you, I’m still on the side of your energy and its fittest expression.
“I’ve drawn the fool, which is quite a powerful card because of its ease in ambivalence. You are someone free from logic in your internal and external affairs. This doesn’t mean you can’t solve problems or be of help to others. On the contrary, your nature is bizarre and collaborative, represented by the last card I drew, the three of coins. You are simply an intuitive person who leads a life of chance and circ*mstance in your thoughts and what befalls you. The middle card in your reading is the tower, the card of crisis and breakthrough. I find it interesting that your ideas revolve around the construction of a highrise and the way our building methods threaten the skyline with flooding. This is like the snake that eats itself. The modern tower, then, aligns with the symbolic meaning of the card: it is your crisis and your way in.
“Because the fool inflects the tower with its ambivalence, your plans will neither come to fruition nor cause your downfall. Their ideal tone is ironic, as irony is the force that balances opposing conditions. Your plans are funny. You, in fact, are a comedian. You resist the impression others have of you that things haven’t gone your way, that you haven’t been successful, and have not built the grand monuments of our cities. But the real nature of these buildings is absurd. They support the system of profit that has endangered the ground they stand on. You should advance your ideas not with the gravity used to cloak these malintentions, but with lightness that pokes a hole in their facade. Expect laughter from the world. Your ideas make sense in a co*ckeyed way. They may yet appeal to people who critique our lifestyle with pleasure, not with austerity and holiness.
“If you accept your fate as fool, odds are you will find accomplices, not backers: people who share your enthusiasm, and who are unable to exploit you because they are weak. This isn’t a glamorous path, but you will be less isolated, and more effective than your present activities show. With a bit of humility, something will take shape from your plan.”
The guy was stung. He couldn’t hide it. With a low reserve of ‘good breeding’—that old pastoral term for chill—he locked on Sally like a crosshair. But didn’t know what to address first. The trouble was that each barb was tied to a piece of good sense. Sage advice is like this. It comes in the form of a riddle—since people often see what they dislike as incoherent—that would trap the hand that tries to undo it. Faced with such a puzzle, the recipient leaves in silence, and later, when it feels less painful to see the structure as necessary, if abrasive, resolves it as an aesthetic, and not an unpleasant one. The process is similar to ugly-cute, née experimental, art.
But it isn’t fun to watch. The raw surface of pain is more disruptive than a rejoinder. Quick people are polite when they clap back. They’re more considerate of the vibe than their ego, whereas Matti was running everything our leading lady said through the manichean machine of his self-concept. Sally had to make sure some of it sank in, and the proof was his confusion.
“Look, I’m not calling you a failure. That word applies to everyone where they’re most blocked. Do I think you have the kind of ideas that make money? No. But you have ideas and should seek their harmonious expression.”
“There’s nothing pretty about a fool.” He pronounced pretty with quiet flair, like an old queen dusting off a taste once gay.
“I didn’t say pretty. I said harmonious.”
“No one cares about harmony. They are beyond, beyond…” this was his um, “beyond ballet!”
“I think you’re barking up the wrong tree.” Regrettable phrasing. Idioms should be improvised. Alas!
“It’s what I’ve got.”
“You’re not using even half of what you have.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Yes, but what are you?”
“Finnish. You Americans call everyone else nuts.”
“What kind of responses have you gotten so far?”
“I sent a proposal to the Department of Energy today.”
“Do they know you?”
The man blinked.
“Of course not. Cause you’re nobody. Try talking to other nobodies. Put your faith in youtube.”
He hung up.
Sally opened a window and stretched. It went like this half the time, which is to say, almost always with he-clients. Most of them were foreign, slightly-desperate men without exposure to positive discourse around talk therapy. They had no emotional regulation skills, which made for a higher incidence of fantasy, and caused them to seek guidance in its most concentrated, least socially contingent form. Sally was no hack, and told them what she felt was practical and life-affirming, but it often struck a nerve. If they didn’t follow up by email after several weeks, she’d track them virtually for signs of adherence. She was rarely disappointed. With tact she would make herself known, a like here, a comment there, as subtle as you please, and the once-bellicose would usually resume contact that blossomed into a regular relationship. It was a pattern of fire, but she knew the protective turns.
5pm already! A text from Catafalqua
CATAFALQUA, a basket case
spelling doom.
bro, i’m having a menty b
She sent a video Sally hopped like a banana peel in Mario Kart.
darlin, it would be weird if you weren’t
be srs!!!
i am <3
can you just Please watch the video
It was a press conference with DONNA TRAMPSTAMP, the Emperor of Empiricism.
Catafalqua, girls like you should not be watching the news
my shrink said i need a new vice
try again
Sally! sweet! climb into this hole with me XD
u going to pennys
if i don’t sue of side
if i watch you have to come
ok
Sally scrolled up and clicked.
Donna Trampstamp was the kinda broad whose body hadn’t reset between lives. She was sixty years old and had probably lived about as long in previous incarnations, but the ravages of those years clung to her skin, as if it were half-immortal like her spirit and the veteran of multiple deferred atonements. You can always tell a spiritual debtor by their awkwardness. They move in bodies that don’t make no sense. And the reason to pull such suffering down on one pair of shoulders is ambition. It was true she was the powerfulest person in the whirled. By status and by touch. Everything on a bajillion. For instance, her title. Did empiricism really need an emperor? A crusade? Like all philosophy, it was better left in the air. The political price of its application was either absurd or violent, unless you were that rare overachiever who fancies both.
Through papercut lips, she declaimed:
“I hate the American dream. It makes all you miserable people crazier than needful. You get bigger than yourselves and wind up doing something all anyone else can do in response to is forget. That’s why you’re all on drugs and hate work. Work makes you present. But the present is made of sense in its clear perception. How can you be present if you can’t trust your body cause you’re lost in the bullsh*t of the sky? Or some memory you’ll never get back? Or some future that is actively running away, not towards you? Face it. You’ll never be able to outsmart the illusions of the world if you’re high on what’s not here.
“That’s why I’d like to put in place measures of disillusion. The Department of Observation has gathered specialists on all the major sensory experiences we feel should characterize American life. We’ve programmed their biometric data into this choker, which comes in pink, yellow, or blue. To the extent that your nervous system conforms to the responses we’ve set, the collar will send you waves of pleasure, but to the extent that your feelings wander, the device will shock you. Stray thoughts and fantasies will also trigger correction. We’re hoping to get everyone on task and thoroughly realistic by 2028. Together, you and I can overcome passion and lead fully regulated lives. Help me to help you feel the bare minimum.”
lskjgduregb, Sally began to text, then erased. how can such a slu*ttily named person want everyone to be normal???
yk shes a freak
i wonder
shes probly having new forms of sex cuz the old sh*t doesn’t work anymore
bleak
i bet theres chipmunks doing karate in her puss*
poor things. their world is a forest
and they don’t care which kind
i still don’t think you should be watching this stuff
why shouldn’t i challenge myself?
challenge yrself to take your meds on time
not ready for that
well im glad i’ll see you tn. i plan on doing something spectacularly stupid and i’d rather be in company
mwah. cant wait
Sally rolled a joint and lay on her living room couch listening to Street Hassle by Lou Reed on headphones. Man, did she love this song. It was a story in three parts, but the perspective and tone of each was different. In the first scene a narrator describes a score, a courtship, and some sex. Then the track cuts and the rather broken sentimental promise of the guitar returns, without cello, and now the narration is in first person, and the girl from the last scene is dead. The speaker notices she’s stiff and tries to explain to the dealer who brought her that he’s gotta throw her in a dark street unless he wants to explain it to the police. Compared to the romance of the first verse, the speaker seems crashed out and detached, just wanting to be rational so he won’t get in trouble. But he does describe how people get into these messes, looking for something to take away their shame and fear, a means of expression, and when it’s consumption instead, he calls it bad luck. Another break, then Bruce Sprinsteen (uncredited, consensually) cuts in, talking about the sad story in all of us we can never share, but “tramps like us, we were born to pay.” The last verse is sung in the most touching register. Lou is himself, and knows that love has gone; he wishes he could have it back, but it slips away, like the lovers in the first scene, who slip away into each other. The ambiguity of slipping away, whether to death or to connection, finally hits you like a hammer on the marble block of memory.
When you realize something about the past, you don’t feel its shards swing together into a story; you see the breaks between them—which render their narrative coherence unlikely—as the illumination of their sequence. Without these caesura, you can’t read what happened, even though before, they made you too scared to look, fearing what they might contain. Really, they contain nothing. You can’t relive the seamlessness of experience. But you can deal with its essential isolation by accepting the meager thread connecting one iota to another.
Sally felt it true that at times you speak from the outside, as if you were the hero in an ancient tale. And then, when the glamor fades and you’re dealing with the fallout, sure you’re lucid, but you do everything you can to escape the present. Then you’re past it, but you feel like you’re there, maybe because you know you can’t get back what’s lost. You reach out in a room in the future full of people who don’t even know what you’re talking about, and if you tried to tell them, it would sound like three different you’s were there, and at odd moments, unable to tell the whole story, but it’s finally safe to open your heart to the passage of love that all things share. It doesn’t matter that it won’t add up. Its incoherence is your blood.
But Sally was psychic. Surely if she couldn’t know the past, she could touch the future? Thing is, love’s a god, and doesn’t brook its temporality being handled left and right. If Sally was ever blocked in prediction, she figured the divinity liked this one surprise too much to ruin it, and that was that. It was like love planned to be remembered falsely, so as to do its work in total freedom. A little bit in third person, a little bit like death, a bit pathetic, and a last punch strong. You couldn’t sell such a salmagundi, even to the starry-eyed. It was like Oprah-gifting lamborghinis to the pure on the condition that they’d crash in a week. Who would dare open their heart if clarity came at first blush? It was a protective measure, this mystery, the narrative futility of love. It was like saying, there are no love stories. Only glorious hassles. And find your way in that, knowing that by the end you won’t have anything left, that yours will be an audacity, foolish to pronounce.
Let us praise the Household. Surely there is more to say at the end of a book than dates of composition and locale (New York, March 2021 – August 2022 says nothing; now, Tuscaloosa, May 1982 – June 2013, that is quite piquant). Surely there is another tale waiting to be told of the participation of environment in the makings of the mind. Novels often take such things into account for their characters, if a bit stale from a habit of psychology; for it is not the mind reflected in the depressions of a bower, the shade in this case taking its state from the always-anterior emotions of the subject; this interests not; but the way the environment catalyzes safety through little acts of mischief, what we call inspiration on the side of the interior: it is the way what surrounds us flirts with provocation, letting us feel it trusts that we will act as friends who rib each other into naturalness. That is rather what I’d know of composition.
Probably most thought is collaborative in this way. That is why artists are such bores in interviews. How’d ya come up with that? Jo Shmo queries, and not wanting to sound insane, t’other replies: ah gee, I ran up the wall with my eyes. Liar! You owe it to your household, from where you seldom stray, because you are haunted by it in the best way.
Sally on her couch was egged on by the decrepit blue fibers of the upholstery. Where her shirt rode up and exposed the small of her back, fraying threads tickled her and made her change position every few minutes. She would open her eyes, as if unsure what was wrong, knowing only there was excess of some kind, and then realize it was the same thing, without pulling her shirt down to close the case for good. But would catch the level of light in the room, warm even at dusk on the darker side of the house because her curtains were also orange, and sheer. The dark’ning fell like a hand on the space, or the glance of an enormous being overcoming some mild shock, at the center, or on the surface of which Sally was as dust. The floor reached up at this moment, rather loosely, but with flourish, that is, it reflected some of the dregs of day across its cracked skin. And the chairs came closer, perhaps they seemed to expand, while retaining their apparent size, like faces in sympathy, though of a pressing kind, wanting their interlocutor to arrive at some point. As Sally’s hand wandered on her thigh. Truly it was the room’s hand, moved by the air, which took of these several things and couraged the appendage to trace the lines of scars on our heroine’s skin, vestiges of curiosity with pain’s limits, or worship of pain, that since had found expression in some other way, without erasing this route.
Perhaps it was the air guiding her hand that made the first trek across the bridge of sense and cognition. For every thought is felt, not only by the neurons in our heads, but by our fingers and feet, and our curious liver, and our nosy tongue, and our officious knees, and our snooping ligaments. A really brilliant idea makes you shiver. So the start of many notions in our limbs shouldn’t surprise. Tis cognition in reverse, to feel at home in truly feeling. Bless the environment of the house.
Sally was pissed. How could the day end? She’d only been up three hours and change. Now it was dark. Usually she’d take a walk and wind up in the Jewish cemetery on Grandview Avenue, down the hill from Grover Cleveland park. There was a bench beneath a cherry tree, beside the family plot of Rose. Sally liked to sit with Roses and space out. It was the quietest bit of outside in Ridgewood, and when you turned to the right you saw the skyline (oh, skyline!), which was like a living picture, mute and so indulgently framed. On a clear day the city was inscrutable: busy body, what dost thou think of thy innumerable deeds? So autistic, and so fierce, and public. What’re your wants? Speak!—but on a rainy day, or a hazy one, the whole was more relatable, doubtless cause it was doubtful, or seemed so. No one can do a thousand things and feel in line with each of them. On a rainy day the city looked bumbling as a bespoke commuter drenched by a passing cab, not exactly company it wanted, but the vibes were sharable.
Damn night! If only she could beat the clock… there was no way… unless…? I mean, she did have a timebeater, the old New York version of Hermione Granger’s high tea and finger sandwich chrono-manipulator. But she hated the anxiety that came with it. Suppose someone saw her out, suppose she saw herself out! Then, by golly, something troublous would occur! And the very thought of this trouble, oh, it made her sweat! For the timebeater, as everyone versed in its lore is aware, will stop working the instant it is undry. Ya gotta figure this is why little time tripping has occurred in the city, despite the possession of many such garments. New York is an anxious town, and few with short-term nostalgia court calamity with success.
But Sally was in the mood. What the heck. It’s picaresque, not realism. Go for it, milady. On she donned the timebeater, with a pink and red flannel, and hocked a loogie in the sink (for that was how old New York did it), saying: Fa cryin out loud, be 1pm-a-somethin! And magically twas day.
Sally saw her past self sleeping across the house. She tiptoed out into crummy weather. Not that she examined the sky. Too amped on breakin the law, she power-walked down the few streets to the grave, so abstracted by her beating heart, she successfully avoided the friends and acquaintances she passed (someone’s acting weird today) and made it to her bench. Sweet bench! Iron and cold, but warming to the touch. And the cherry tree assiduously in bloom. With the inflammation of countless flowers swelling each branch. And the grass long with thawing growth. In this small space, where the canopy blotted out the sky, the tree seemed its own sky and the ground reached up, suggesting an horizon in their globe of shade. And almost sound-proof, or Sally was deaf from lush.
A contract. A contractual agreement. The contraction of space around a hot bod. What I mean to say is: gravity’s more intense around bliss. The curvature of spacetime increases, and a warping effect along the edge of vision is like canvas stretched on multiple climes. The day cuddled up, and Sally pushed out—her breath was already in something else’s area, even in her lungs. They were day’s, and she was glad to leave possession of them. A caterpillar scrunched up a leaf of grass. It would have been natural to watch it inch over the top and continue in a straight line past her eyes into her head, and then out back, like Ferris Bueller in the final moments of his day off, falling like rain through an atmosphere of property. The caterpillar was Matthew Broderick, it had a certain charisma in common with him. And the rain was Eric Adams, someone omnipresent that you didn’t want around—
Oh sh*t! The rain! Sally tried to be upset. The cherry tree was blocking with its tough football flowers each drop that fell straight down with beautiful heisman palms, but the rain that fell around the tree obeyed the new gravity that followed the contraction of a most blissful gal. It whooshed and it spat and it crashed right into her, like a drunken adolescent one must pat gently on the trapezius, a lost deer, tho he’s totally f*cking up your day. By the time this experience had thoroughly trodden Sally’s mood and the tempest’s path returned to something more physically plausible, she was soaked. The timebeater would never work until she got it dry. And the rain should totes let up, cause her date with Penny’d been clear. Ha! Imagine wet Sally walking by dry one in front of Café Scimitar; that is not how the fabric of reality’ll tear. Too goofy. But how to avoid?
She needed shelter. And umbrella(s). Possibly more than one, those suckers fold under pressure. A kiss for bench-Rose-blossom world and Sally was off, positively soggy by the street, where she caught the eye of a post punk outfit on a smoke break from shredding, the antics of masculinity being held in contempt, and thus negatively guiding their actions, yet in a sweet way, they hailed our damsel into the putrid sound waves of their garage, whereupon she ordered them to bring her a blow dryer and folding chair. The boys were glad for distraction. Erato, muse of lyric verse, had not appeared today, and they sucked.
Steve the bass player led Sally upstairs into a kitchen full of dead plants. He apologized for its lifelessness and gestured to a chair.
“No I see what you did here,” Sally returned. “Dryer?”
Steve produced one from a drawer.
“Life saver! Be out of your way in a jiffy.”
“S’no worries.”
“Snow would worry me too at this time of year!”
She stripped and started drying. Steve sprang back to the garage. His first note was absolutely perfect, like a stray thought that gilds a week, the renewal of basic wisdom. They pumped up the jams while Sally drone-banished moisture from her duds, tap tap tappin along. Funny thing about sound. Plants get it, or else they mistook Sally’s shape and heat source for sun; either way, they revived. And the umbrella plants and hyacinths, and poke-weed, elder, mullein, wisteria, rose-of-sharon, cacti, the banyan trees and willows, the skunk cabbage and poison oak, the hemlock and juniper bushes, the topiary marching band… these boys were horticulturalists… all began to dance, which was cool, sure, but got in Sally’s way. She became separated from her clothes and had to squeeze through the gyrating hothouse to grab her outfit and skedaddle, with a verdant umbrella in tow; not that she needed it; the entire forest of the kitchen followed her out of the post punk house and overhead as she rushed home, dragging the entranced boys with, until she got to the door of her apartment and politely said: farewell, causing the whole parade to snap back like a tape measure just as her past self kicked open the door, flattening Sally like a griddle cake, and chastening her temporally wicked ways. She hocked a loogie in the sink and mentally went AWOL on the couch, coming to in darkness.
Salvific night… sweet cool imageless purple field… time of touch… university of going dumb… time of eloquent wind and silent song… patient wordless open mouth… time against maps, against guiding… of not knowing, forgetting, wiping clean… of lost color and bass woofer… fervent hopeful hopeless night… indeterminate coordinates… flight of the eventual from now… transformation of now into a swan… cleverness of the eventual… near embrace of the swan and eventual… continued flight of the latter, further and further in unmarked space… time of the blues… time of dark green… time of yellow that doesn’t know itself… pink that doesn’t know itself… obliviated white… assembly of differences without speech, bumping into one another… time of bloody nose smiles… of sound… of being around…
yo, you around?
It was Football-Zoe
FOOTBALL-ZOE, a stallion femme
me n malik
MALIK, a misanthrope r going to Kathmandu
i’m famished! see u there
Sally threw on a wedding dress, shaved her brows, and drew sea-green shadow over the now-available crescents from nostril to temple. She reapplied blush and bustled out the door. The restaurant was three blocks away, just past the Seneca M. Outside the liquor store by the station steps stood an Albanian clerk, smoking a cigarette. He was aerodynamically designed, and one worried that if he raised his eyebrows too fast he might lift off the ground, blown to who-knows-where. He nodded at Sally, part-watermelon part-bride, and returned to purveying liquid spirit to the economically-displaced yet rent-controlled dregs of the old neighborhood, like a silent deacon.
Sally had never bought a drink in all her goings-out. Whenever she would try to produce the cash or plastic compensatory for a beverage, cards and bills would fly like shurikens over her hand and into a slot, or the breast pocket of the bartender. It was a little annoying. She felt there must be karmic debt building up, and she wanted the simple exchange with her server, who was often cuter than her patron. You would think a universal repetition like this would make her paranoid, but in order to be paranoid you must have a sense of self, and Sally was so permeated by her surroundings, something closer to a constant disintegration was taking place about her. The men who bought her drinks would saunter over and pass their libidinal targe, as if she were a revolving metal cage subway exit. Even the alcohol would seek in vain her blood cells, spun by each out of their stream and through her pores, intoxicating those around her secondhand.
For pleasant emotions this dance was useful. Happiness is most real when shared, after all. But fear is a concrescence of self, and Sally had not material for it. She was always trying to get scared, to see what it was like, if she could change her nature, even for a moment, to experience that awful possession that seemed to recognize the present and replenish its need. In many ways she felt unresponsive to the moment, and on those rare occasions when her vigor and delight in disruption flagged, she felt her rebellion was wrong. Molecularly wrong. Blue Sally, Oh lord, the infinitesimal depressive.
And yet, things can go wrong at any scale. They always have, only, in the long period prior to the application of data and personality to all phenomena, breakdowns obscure we assigned to the wisdom of god. This alienating, unsuspected logic was a comfort, because it blocked the possibility of getting to know a plastic bag, and how it might feel about the basketball court the wind has trapped it in. Nowadays you find that all things have a set of bourgeois problems so relatable, you can’t help getting involved, even if you keep it to yourself, it is a public conversation one must contribute takes to, even privately. The alternative is scientific rigor. You demand of things their productive value, including yourself, you thing! A cloying model of interaction I personally don’t buy, but neither do I stan the projective fantasy of literally same. Though if you reject number and subjectivity, you run the risk of being a grouch, and exactly how long a person can withstand their grouchiness, while again, I find no glee in value, is a situation that secretes a quality I am in love with, so thank the spheres for the deplorable state of our universe.
Sally, to return, was a block away from the restaurant. Did something happen between here and there? Why else would I give you this piece of information? Something has to happen, now that I’ve established there was a block to go. I mean, it just seems the text is screaming for an event to justify the encoding of this data. Or maybe its distress takes a different shape for each reader. Either way, the time is Now, and it’s very upset to be teased, and won’t stand to be treated this way in the future, at which point its status as Now will elapse… but, well, something must have taken place???? Surely! Sally! Flipped! Her———HAIR.
“Nice hair flip Sal,” Football-Zoe with the hug. She was the only friend Sally felt inside of an embrace with.
“Hi doll.” Malik was perched in his chair.
They ordered lamb khaja platters and chai tea.
“How’s the pod?”
Malik ran a podcast.
“Don’t you listen?”
“The second it comes out, but—”
“But what?”
“You’re an aquarius. I figure the way you actually feel is somewhere else.”
“Don’t pull that psychic sh*t on me, Sal. Just ask how I am.”
“How are you?”
“Perfect.”
“See?” Sally turned to Zoe, who shrugged. Football-Zoe was a community top, a femme-chad, at one with her second chakra. Turn the conversation over to her and negative energy would run to the hills, the vibes were too strong. Malik, sensing this, and hearing Sally’s indrawn breath of inquiry as to FZ’s emotional state, a sound like a toilet flushing him from view, thought again.
“Well, the pod is… a bit risqué, even for my taste.”
“Oh?” Sally turned back, “but it’s your show, after all.”
“But you know, you can’t control yourself, the way you can in music, for instance, or writing. Talk is just, pulling from the vein. I didn't know how much me there was, until I started listening.”
“Do you like it?”
“I’m scared, I think.”
Malik used to be a DJ. He made these minimal edits of Solange, Nicki, Drake, Soulja Boy, etc., that felt like you were far away listening to tinsel or like a junk yard was bucking through your head. They were neither virtuosic enough for the avant-garde, nor buttoned enough for studio production. But his taste was exquisite, the harmonies beamed into his bedroom from marginal asteroids were strong, and a few hundred fans would flock to his regenerating soundcloud each time the app’s AI nixed him for copyright, a charge most edits fall under, just outside the aesthetic of redirection called remix. Edits are surely the most conceptual form of interpretation, and Malik was that sort of mind, never too concerned with mastery, genre, or creed. His cover art consisted of slaughtered goats, brown hentai girls, and demonic black dandies. His bio read: SOMEBODY PAY ME FOR THIS. Few dared.
The only viable route for illegal sound artist is the club circuit. Malik was in Atlanta in the mid 2010s, New York before the pandemic, and overcommitted himself socially under the aegis of queerness. He was in fact a misanthrope who relied on the nexus of the club for professional advancement, while the bulk of those who peopled the space were self-styled activists, whose style required constant recoding through battle. The thrill of conceptual art deriving from the breadth of association possible in an ambiguous range of ethical signs, Malik instinctively kept his heart splayed and manner aloof, chafing safe-spacers, until spats broke out. Twenty-first century duels, sans bullets. Suffering none of it, he would tell the accusers what he thought illogical in their claims, or what he considered purely a matter of taste. Frankly, they weren’t making the art they enjoyed, largely when they were high enough to chill out. Which, if true, was not a friendly thing to say. And when charges of reactionism gave way to elitism, he was no better off than before. Socially marked, he was booked less, and turned to hustling now and then to make rent.
The romantic connections he was barely holding onto in this city of greener grass slipped fully out of his hands when the emotional task of coping with sex work made off with the patience he once had for a web of partners. And since romance cushions the shock of coarser communal interactions, he began to get outright testy in the scene. Drunk one night at Knockdown Center, he told one tall femme trying to drag his little c*nt ass into a moshpit to f*ck off, and the belligerent maiden howled harassment, had him thrown out, and in a fit of fixation spread rumors he was a pest. She began playing at his old spots. Cold comfort her art was mid. Now his elitist rep included transphobia and base perversion.
When the pandemic razed nightlife he kicked the club for good, and while still releasing music, got a social media position at a startup and rebranded on tiktok as a problematic sage. He would argue the merits of conversion therapy, proselytize the gospel of Nicki Minaj, and comment disdainfully on streetwear trends years from anyone’s radar. He speculated utopically on North Korean opacity. He had a soft spot for Putin. And yet he was dark as teak, fey as a limp wrist, and mannered as a Victorian heroine. Malik was a pure product of America, long-gone crazy.
And Sally and Zoe were OG fans. When they began to see his IG tags in Ridgewood they reached out, and were crazy enough themselves to inspire calm in the veteran of identity politics. Malik considered his friendship with Football-Zoe a kind of exposure therapy and minor-long-term-reenactment. Sally was a muse, though he would never tell her that. His podcast with another diasporic African was called Subtle Urban Sex Appeal (S.U.S.A.), and its registration of cultural nuance captured a following that included fans of the music. If Malik was unlike anyone else, the condition was now common, a paradoxical remainder of inclusionary malaise; and he was that mixture that we know so well, the combination orator and sacrificial lamb. Sally and Football-Zoe were his shelter from the storm, even if it was unlikely they would become old friends.
“Scared?”
“What, are you surprised?”
“Curious. What’s that like?”
“Ugh, don’t tell me you're writing a novel. You white bitches think you can alchemize everything, but there is hair in your armpit.”
“I’m not writing anything! I wanna know.”
“Well, I’ve barely been able to monetize my incredible personality despite a life of being real, and now it feels like I’m selling the fentanyl of Malik to ignorant hordes, of whom it takes only one overdose to pack me up for good and make my permanent address the street.”
Sally was disappointed. She could see this would not happen. The presentiment of doom was a result of blocked energy either sex or intoxicants would realign. The period of delusion after release, she’d found, was actually closer to the form of futurity, if not its content, than depressive scries could ever be. This is why poetry pulls us forward, without showing us where that is, and remains just. Sally decided Malik’s anxiety was uninteresting and pushed back.
“I think people like that thrill and have unconsciously chosen to channel it out of the chemical form that kills into the sonic form that puts our hair on edge.”
“But they talk Sal! About these undesirable expressions that fit me to the tit.”
“You’re givin the people what they want, darlin. Never has that been guilt free.”
“True.”
“And think of it this way. If the dealers of this safe high suffer the phantom fear of killing their junkies, the latter suffer the phantom fear of justice losing its sacrificial pomp.”
“But I have been tossed.”
“You’re on your feet.”
“Amen.”
He took out a flask stamped with a peeling image of Nicki in Guadalupe glam and spiked his chai as a waitress brought their food over, frowning.
“We don’t have liquor license.”
“Oh don’t worry, babe. It’s holy water.”
With a deeper frown she described everything on their platters, asking at the end if there were questions and turning before there was time to speak.
“Is it just me or does she never remember faces?”
S and Z affirmed.
“I bet it has to do with language. She def doesn’t think in English, so whatever happens in it goes in one ear and out the other. Or I’m just another gorgeous, subtly, urbanly sexual black face, in an ugly way. But like, I order the same thing every week. Maybe she’s hom*ophobic. I should tell her I hate gays too.”
Football-Zoe coughed.
“What! I meant eye contact.”
“Pour me a drink if you’re getting drunk.”
“Pour me a drink what?”
“Please, pour me a drink.”
Malik shook his head. “You’re too big, Zoe. It’s more than my flask can handle. Besides, it’s my only whim. I’m celibate, remember?”
His celibacy was a pox on the girls. On the one hand, he was traumatized from sex work and trust-impaired from getting canceled. On the other, he was a bit too loose without anyone to impress, which, for the sake of being himself was ideal, but it produced hangovers of self-consciousness worse than anything alcohol could do where he made a show of his contrition that was, like his vulgarity, also too much. His endless imbalance was divine in the Old Testament sense of scaring you sh*tless now and then. But Football-Zoe had a feeling he’d find her when his drought came to an end. She flashed a meaningful look.
“I’m going to the bathroom.”
“Don’t stand and shove that bulge in my face.”
“I’m sitting across the table,” she said, grinning.
“I’ll close my eyes before you rise.”
“I don’t think they’re fully closed—”
“Go ahead, dear.”
Sally could see the celibate podcaster’s retinas through fluttering slits. It looked like meditation.
“Y’know Malik, almost everyone f*cks Zoe. Half this room I bet.”
“You too?”
“Tons of times.”
“But what does she do outside of sex?”
“Work, watch TV, get high.”
“Ew.”
“What?”
“Dissolution is gross.”
“Football-Zoe is a public institution.”
“You said it, girl. Not me.”
“She represents the notion that pleasure should be taken seriously.”
“You and your ideas. You’re an idea-bitch, y’know that?”
“Yeah. I’m an idea, Zoe’s an org*sm, and you’re a vibe.”
“We’re power rangers. Look!”
A bird flew through the space, which had a tiki theme—or perhaps it was some wooden inn for the Nepalese traveler; either way, it wasn’t swagless like a fusion joint, and that was a virtue—the dowitcher, a migratory shore bird far from Brighton Beach, but in respect to its total journey not really out of place, flew in shadowless flight eight feet from the floor. Sally observed its stomach had that holographic quality where, as one turns, a different image coheres—an odd effect, to be sure, but given the randomness of the bird, which seemed to fly at normal speed, as if the wall of the restaurant had a dowitcher-sized hole through which it arrived; given the strangeness of its presence, this adolescent effect was soothing—on the belly of the bird flashed luxury logos: Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Balenciaga, Vetements, Hermès, Versace, Dior. The wait staff panicked. Through the kitchen window a net was pushed into the clammy hands of SMZ’s waitress, who regarded her weapon at first with anxiety, but quickly found resolve and assumed the stance of hunter. She made as compelling an image as the bird, and Sally began to look back and forth between them, surprised at how slowly yet swiftly this transpired. Into the restaurant barged models of the aforementioned brands, whose ardor was greater than the huntress’, though they had no tools of capture. Now that it was indoors, this seemed OK, like the building was a giant net provided by a simple twist of fate. The models looked at the waitress, who looked at Sally, who looked at the models, who looked at the bird, who looked in 300 degrees, seeing all of them and also an horizon that beckoned from afar, through buildings and trees and even mountains poked through by desire external to the dowitcher, yet in touch with it, who shot through the wall and disappeared.
The models, who hadn’t eaten in days, emerged from the single-mindedness of quest into the comforting smell of food, and realized they had just seen a waitress, who awkwardly dropped her net and showed them a table.
Sally turned back to Malik spiking her tea with the rest of the flask. He seemed vindicated, and while we all do when we’re sauced, she wondered if the scene was his design. Had he planned the bird? Was it in line with his mischief, or was he just quick? And if so, yet clumsy enough to be caught?
“Oh my god, Malik! Y’know I can’t get drunk.”
“Pero why?”
There was care in his voice. A missing vice to him was like a missing child.
“I’m not sure. I’m still figuring it out. It has to do with how my energy flows out to what’s near it. It’s like I don’t have a center cause there’s never enough at home to call in. I’m always somewhere else, even though it’s generally where my body is. Which is true down to my blood cells. They think too much. The alcohol can’t grab em.”
“You need a drink like, ten years ago.”
“Woulda been the same then.”
“Does having no center mean you don’t know who you are?”
“It means who or what I am is conditional.”
“But you’re always Sal.”
“I know! But I can see my cells rejecting the alcohol, and the alcohol feeling rejected. I can even see my thoughts putting this together despite the situation wanting to avoid language.”
“It’s like you’re non-con with reality. Maybe that’s why she made you sober.”
“I like weed.”
“Weed is a reply guy. Alcohol is that bitch.”
Sigh.
“What’s it like?”
“Huh?”
“What you said about noticing alcohol or whatever.”
“Uh, it feels like… someone scooped out an avocado and replaced it with circuits of artificial intelligence, and then put it back in a supermarket and allowed existential questions to pile up in a psychic gangb*ng that the avocado reduces to yet more observable and subsumable phenomena, despite the dominance and carnality of its character as crisis.”
“That is disturbed. I feel at home.”
A mutual feeling. Only Sally appreciated Malik physically. He had a very odd face. It was matronly and round, but he’d no brows and his hair was bleached, so he was giving alien grandma with a bizarre glow from infuse organics™ balancing oil. He was like a royal phlebotomist. Too antisocial to be feminine, but too slinky to be masc. Probably no one’s type, and yet the fact that many of us die alone didn’t scare him. When Malik wasn’t celibate, the ferocity of his need for contact and the foreclosure of his romantic horizon made him a sickening lay. He would rock climb his tops, f*ck them from angles they didn’t know existed in the bed-bath-or-beyond room. Sometimes he would put a co*ck out of commission for a week after an obsessive-meeting-turned-weekend-binge. But darkly hanging off such encounters was baddd weather, gunmetal skies, the long dark night of solitude he refused to do the math about its origin in an aesthetics arbitrarily accumulated over the course of civilization. His response was newness. He made sh*t up. Music, talk, juxtaposition, whatever. And socially he would juxtapose his style with the Sallies and Zoe’s of the world, not until it changed—it never would—but until he felt good enough to find a way back to the feeling.
Football-Zoe sat down. She could see Malik and Sally were having a moment, which is to say they were framed and perfect in each other’s eyes. I think it is coarse to say that when we connect the other becomes for us a thing of depth, as if our relationships went along a course of development identical to visual culture. Getting to know someone is not the same as leaping out of the middle ages into the Renaissance. Rather, when intimacy hits, do we not then become primitive, reduced to a set of characteristics more essential, strange, and limited only for us? The speed at which we emote, at which our faces change the level of light pooling in their surfaces, suddenly shifts into the solid, monumental planes of cruder imagery, portraiture from ancient times when a statue of a man was equally the statue of a god and neither were very much like the face of the model. The need to know nothing more, that is true relation.
Football-Zoe was degrees off from these facing pictures, like what happens in a gallery when night comes and no human presence can be found to shake the essence of the paintings like branches in the wind. She could only see the space saturated by what she wasn’t sharing. Thankfully she was incapable of fomo.
It lasted two seconds. Then speech was appropriate.
“What are you guys talking about?”
“Sally’s avocado problem.”
“Huh?”
“Selflessness, not the righteous kind.”
“Oh,” chewing a tough piece of meat, “she always opens up about that stuff in missionary, but I’m too distracted sucking on her tit* to really get it. And then when I turn her over she makes animal sounds.”
Sally colored, a deeper red than blush. Malik got shiny.
“Yes, that’s a good example.”
“You mean, you’re not putting on? In one position you’re educated and in another you’re feral?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Wow. Not that it makes any difference to me, but does it bother you?”
“No, because I have friends who understand.”
“Or don’t care.” Malik glanced disapprovingly at Zoe, who caught it like an outfielder with a salary larger than a fledgling nation’s GDP.
Like an athlete divided into gestures that mean the most for each interaction, however brief, with her team, Zoe was a stranger to doubt. She was team pleasure, and batting a thousand. Of late, there was no breakup in the neighborhood who wouldn’t lean on her sensuality for how many weeks it took to get on their feet and date seriously again. To the charge of frivolity and minoring in majors, as Malik via his estranged mother would say, she turned her head, deaf and blesséd as Fortune. Not that she went around like god’s gift to heartbreak, but the belief that there oughta be one is rare. And thankless. Football-Zoe made the unf*cked happy. And the true meaning of happiness is looking a gift horse in the mouth. Her lovers always left, and never did she weep. Like Jerusalem abandoned, but sans proto-nationalism, she was infrastructure in decay, ready to accommodate the way bodies wanted to be, without the hygiene of permanence and the progression that leads to kings, trouble, and wrath. Zoe was in a state of low development. Instead of going higher, she aspired to spread out, like a spider web, feeling everything.
In dreams her co*ck would shoot a web inside the body of a bosom friend, or into the air, and extend its equal plane forever. It was nonsensical and calming. Detestable to strivers like Malik who wanted to be known, deeply, somehow, by everyone. Zoe knew the body was only so much, even if the mind was virtual, its end was skin. And there she was, waiting like a palm.
“Can you change that?” She asked, with no game plan. “Could you get a self, a steady?” Maybe she just liked the words, they were kinda cool.
Malik wagged a finger. “You gotta be born with it.”
“Really?” Football-Zoe’s tremendous eyebrow arched. “Doesn’t everything change? Couldn’t this change too?”
“I don’t see how, unless you fall in love with a narcissist.”
“What’s that?”
“Someone like me,” he plumed.
“But you hate love.”
“Well, a narcissist who loves love, then.”
“Where d’ya find those?”
Sally gulped.
“Poets,” she said.
“Mm-hm.” Malik drank more gin, er, chai.
“Sounds old-fashioned. And sexist.”
“It so is. Right, Sal?”
And the chaste, hom*ophobic, racially reactionary podcaster swung his yes-seeking eyes into her area like the high beams of a truck. She did not have an answer. The vibe, as a velvet deer, was struck and killed on the spot, and like a driver blasted by broken glass, Malik was stunned. He wobbled in his chair; Zoe choked on a soybean. Everything went slow-mo, except the sweat from Sally’s pores.
“Damn, girl. What did we say?”
Sally gulped again. The eyes of her friends were saying: this bitch really just gulped twice. A third gulp. Their eyes: unbelievable. A fourth. Eyes: when will it end? Fifth. OK, this is kinda—Six—
“Can you stop swallowing yourself? You’re gonna disappear.”
Malik looked uneasily at Zoe and laughed, but the Amazonian princess was legit amused and smiling infectiously. M’s nervous energy broke into a belly howl he covered with his hand, pointing at Sally.
Our heroine choked on the tenth gulp and her body transitioned to hiccups, punctuated by laughter and tears. Her ribs began to hurt and she had to turn away to recover her breath and shake the giggles. Wiping her eyes with a bit of tulle, she took a deep breath and returned to normal human eating posture. Her expression: salute emoji.
Does it seem off, dear reader, that Malik, whose morals have taken the kind of “vacation” a young father in a cold sweat at 2AM takes in the name of cigarettes, should care about a thing like sexism? It is not a contradiction, I assure you. Misandry is the religion of outlaws. You simply cannot do what you please if you’re tied to a man. The most bohemian of connections entails a power dynamic all the more controlling if it is passively managed, as it is in these liberal times. Malik, Zoe, and Sally were a trinity of too-much, and would scare off any guy; even the most polyamorous, commitment-phobic gunslinger in Kings County would feel some type of way about his division of energy with these maenads. The pursuit of freedom, as if in a straight line, began at the sign of the father and peaced out.
Sexism, as invoked by Malik and Football-Zoe, meant compromise. They had no poetic conception of love. sh*t, who does anymore? Fortunately this was a conceptual question; it allowed Sally to steer them to an abstract plane, away from the very real topic she would avoid until Penny’s, inshallah.
“What do you two think about love?”
Malik and Zoe calmed down. Did I say they had no p—— conception of love? Why yes, I did, and that was true two seconds ago, when the light of discussion was at an angle revealing so much of themselves as even they were conscious of. There is, in reserve, a part of us always ready to pounce, even though it is closest to our center, and at all times is covered in darkness, as if in its own shadow. Focus the light just so and it will appear in the midst of us, elephantine and bored with anything that doesn’t demand immediate movement. This part of us that loves is like the part of us that retains contact with the heaven through which our souls are drawn from one life to the next in the tapestry of their transit. It is, like this thread, larger than the period which bears our name, but yet fits within us, so compact it escapes attention, and even association with our character. But ask the right question, in the right voice, and it appears, like a genie, ready to throw down in the name of the place from which all names have come.
Malik: “I think about GFOTY’s v-day mix. It has a lot to say about love, period. In an anatomical heart versus emoji way. There’s lust, betrayal, possession, deceit, memory, presence, need, getting over, bragging, cruelty, devotion, tenderness, in short, all the stages and behaviors that people have adorned love with and will until the sun goes out. There are also songs from people of different classes and scenes, from pop, grime, and trance. The only thing that connects them is the need for variety and hype you find in club music. They’re all celebrating, even when their topics aren’t happy, they’re pitched up and gladiatorial. The songs are all remixed, or highly edited, but you know you’re listening to romance. No matter how much it’s distorted, you can hear melodies and tones we associate with love. Only, because the tracks are so messed with, it’s like we arrive at scene after scene where, if we closed our eyes and ears, we could supply the next hour of events in the suggested story to ourselves, but are robbed of that assurance and forced to listen to the new suggestions brought on by edits. The personality of love shifts and we must follow, even though the initial sounds placed us far into the future or knowledge of what should occur.
“Love is more like this mutation than a definition we have at hand, though the former requires the latter. It’s a range of behavior as wide as evil and chaos, but just short of our need to recoil. It is, really, unlike itself in the extreme; unlike the promise of safety, expansion, comfort, and warmth. The difference between our confident image of these things and the reality of getting close enough to someone to pass their recognition—this difference is the source of real love, as it must be met with the warmth and understanding we began expecting to be the target of; when in fact, these are things only we can supply to the challenge of discrepancy closeness reveals.
“I think the challenge is the beginning of love and continuous with our response. But I sound serious. When the challenge is met, the emotional tenor of the whole is not sentimental, and still does not resemble our first associations. It’s goofy, like a free jazz kazoo. It sounds corny, interrupts itself, rushes in and bottoms out, forgets half of what it was trying to bring us. It’s disorganized and devoted, but whether devoted to a greater mess or to the ideal order it is appropriated from, is unclear. At best, it makes us smile, forgets the anger we knew was coming from our pettiest, fact-checkiest, never-drop-the-conversationiest selves. The us who can’t party, love deforms.”
Football-Zoe: “Guess I never had a connection longer than three weeks, but there’s so many of those I can’t count. At a certain point, if what you’re doing falls short of what it means to do a thing, a thing you measure in units, you have to take the units that really occur in your pattern and own them, start to reason outward from their elemental substance, into a picture less clear, but no less moving, if you’re strong. And I’m tough! My tears have muscles. I guess what love in short periods can do is make a body feel new. When a heart breaks, the story it was writing on the flesh comes to an end in such a way that storytelling itself seems to stop, and not only do we find this boring and heavy, we feel our body become meaningless. The special quality of always being there for a kiss, a word, a touch, and the beautiful way this kind of language flowed from the pen in crazy sentences that needed no editing, suddenly this quality vanishes, and our bodies seem absurd. Really nuts, like they’ll scream if another affection even brushes them, when really, that's the reason they’re there. We have bodies for the inscription of love.
“Infatuation, the smallest love, is vital when the body-as-text seems shut. A way of marking the page and sacrificing those marks, so that you protect only the will and its destination, while you and your squeeze take a hit. Or just them. My motto: the one who is left. For it is true that infatuation isn’t real love, as it is true that all love isn’t romantic, without necessarily being chaste. A fling is part of the connective public, its area, surfaces, and physics, in a utilitarian, vulgar, precise way. A fantasy made to collapse so that others can be generated without shame, or with only so much as is proper. It is not what allows us to compare and define real love, but to begin to construe it.
“I enjoy being this sacrifice. I mean, duh, pleasure is the name of the game. But I find it strange that whoring is hounded by justice. I suppose real love is legal in marriage, but a ring won’t crack you on the head, or not immediately. Like, sure, love is miraculous, but how much of that is scarcity’s argument, because the infrastructure of love is poorly maintained? If its channels, that is, our bodies, were regularly tuned and kept running, wouldn’t connection be less amazing and more normal? The fact that you have to pay someone to do this for you when age, circ*mstance, or the addiction to getting paid, have closed your body’s book, just makes it more likely that love will be an anomaly, well-worth celebration, but only because it was handled frugally on the insane network of our desire.”
Sally’s plate: a silver circle eighteen inches in diameter, with gooseflesh skin to diffuse the light. It was meant to be stared at when you didn’t have anything to say, when you were listening, or when the source of your contentment was abstract and needed the crutch of a pleasing sensation to extend itself between clarities. On her plate in shallow cups were small pieces of lamb, tough with spices, baked flat beaten rice with dry chili, tomato and radish salsa, soybean seeds, egg, cucumber and yogurt. Her tongue was on a spree, and every now and then she cleansed her palate with tea, exuding inebriation to her peers, like a gift one keeps refusing.
The numerical understanding of the body as weight has a double consequence. It prevents us from feeling our own bodies and prevents our connection with food. The caloric value of food is supposed to shame us from desiring what we eat. We may still want to eat it, but we no longer feel that it wants us too, and that the exchange is reciprocal because of its history of touch—because of the bodies in the past who activated this exchange, and who invested this form with its power to engage our sensuality. The path of desire is backward and plural. We are like everyone else who reduced the distance between themselves and their repast to zero, unquantifying relation. While the path of number is forward and singular. We would like the future not to increase the value of our weight. But weight is not something you can touch or taste. It interrupts the flow of these senses, coating our bodies and food with its layer of insensibility, on the other side of which are individuals and items.
The history of touch is a record of breaking this barrier. With bodies it is sometimes scary to feel how infrequently this has happened. That is, how much of life has been experienced out of the hands of others, purely in a state of management and comparison. It is like eating a chicken sandwich that burns with envy for a banana, knowing it will never look like one. The virtual presence of this other thing falls like a sheet of mind between the soul and body of what is in contact, without separating these aspects or sending you away from what you’re near. It only enters negation into touch, rendering partial a desire that might have been whole.
Sally: “My body is pure when it ceases to exist as mine, when the one who is touching me is in contact with all I have been in contact with, and I am in touch with all who have touched them. Like a portal against a portal, we prevent each other from falling in and protect the openness of the moment, weeping the past. Touch me the way I have never articulated. Touch the stupidity of my desire. All of its knowledge will be yours, and you will fail to articulate it too. The achievements of our love will be a lost culture. When each bout ends we regress, not to a zero of intimacy, but further into speechlessness and fear, the diffuse attention of exhausted animals hounded into the hollow of a tree, frightened by each sound, but so dull from nervous tension that we expect nothing more.
“Touch me as if it could speed our evolution, as if roads and cities could peel like images drawn from the press of our skin and shape themselves in the air about our contact, only to wilt and rot like leaves in the autumn of letting go into shapelessness. For I have no shape without your hands. I am only an image, without translation. There is no room on the sight of my skin for those who have already shaped me, just as there is no end of room for those who have yet to shape me in our touch.
“I would like to be different for you. I am young, but already ancient. My sensations are classic. They have reached perfection by threading pleasure and repetition together. You must take this thread and fool it. Or I am lost. I will mean nothing to you, and you will mean nothing, though you risk and play and shout and tumble. Renew me, or I will let you fall in to my past, down the portal of my body, away from the present, away from the harmony of my lost name, and your lost name, away from the loss of ourselves, and the expansion of what we are not. Renew me. Sacrifice our sacrifice. Touch me and be touched.”
Wind blew into the restaurant, though no one was at the door. It coiled Sally and cooled her tongue. Not that she had a low spice tolerance. She ran hot, and encomium made her hotter. The wind was just a simp, always doing her favors, hanging around. Another one of those things with a body of ungainly, or unknown, dimensions, struggling to shape its affection into so prosaic a gesture as a hug, but wanting to be near, all the same. Sally allowed herself to be tangled in its grasp, against which she could not push back, unless ‘twere a gail. But that would get it kicked out, and the wind had good breeding. Sally’s mouth was open, her hair blown out, and the skirt of her nuptial gown akimbo.
Malik motioned for the check.
“Why’d ya wanna know that Sal?”
“D’ye have a crush?”
“Who? me?”
“Who else? the wind?”
“We know who the wind likes.”
“Well, gee, ahh, hm, hum, ho—”
“Y’know Z,” Malik interrupted, “you and I may not be as theoretically brilliant as Sally, but we know when someone’s beating around the bush…”
“Asking for a friend…”
“Kicking the can down the road…”
“Delaying the inevitable…”
“Standing under a grand piano held by a piece of string linked to your mood…”
“Self-testing one’s batty scientific invention to see if it works…”
“Quarreling to quarrel, as if fighting could replace a foundation with which something is dreadfully wrong…”
“Refurbishing gum from a sidewalk because you’re afraid to show your face in the store…”
Here a wail sounded from the street, part subway hiss, part cat, part shuttered business.
“Holding your hands stubbornly over your midriff despite your choice to wear a crop top…”
“Yeye what’s your point?”
“What’s your point, pal?”
“Buddy?”
“Friend?”
“Free-form lover!”
“What!?”
Malik closed his eyes. “Do you have a man.”
That’s how he said it, reader! Sans interrogative. He declared the question.
The waitress and the ritual of payment broke his glare. Outside, Sally glanced at Football-Zoe, who seemed cold. An avoider of negative feelings, she could not erase M’s confrontational vibe or Sally’s mystery provocation, which her non-inquisitive mode would let lie. Therefore she was inert, and for an active person who delights in movement, inertia is depression. She wasn’t being standoffish, but had lost equilibrium and was acting like a dork.
The idiot and the judge, mused Sally. If fascism can reduce to the emotional stakes of my position, I believe I’m in it. Not to be melodramatic. Or, actually, yes, to be that.
She met M’s drunken and perceptive face. Like a good artist, he grew with indignation. The question was still in the air.
“Why’s it any of your business?”
“Well, my dear, I became your friend because I assumed you would never find anyone. I saw within that negative a picture of our trio meeting for dinner, going to parties, and carrying on like pure degenerates until one of us, probably me, died of an overdose in a cramped bathroom and immediately rose to the stars, helped by an essay dashed off at the height of grief by you, my devoted friend and fan.”
They were walking to Rosemary Park, a concrete single block square with three levels, the largest for ecuavoley and calisthenics, the middle for hand- and basketball, the lowest for playgrounding and chilling, containing several plane trees. Sally bought a pre-roll from ZaZa Express and absorbed the stabilizing swagger of the king behind the counter, who genuinely seemed to appreciate her business and at the same time philosophically project that he did not have a horse in the race of her life and death.
Verbally, she wanted to slap Malik. It was offensive that he marked her undateable. This seemed minor, however, given its role in the larger fantasy he revealed of his romantic apotheosis. A sign of intense pain no less than the strength of imagination such ungluedness could reach, it was not her place to disturb the position of his psyche. Indeed, a person like him could function as a true friend alongside these ideas without dissonance. His character required that he straddle extremes in order to function at all, it occurred to Sally. And he would be happy to go this way, in sordid fulguration. He was in fact disclosing a dream, not a nightmare. Inwardly she prayed for its realization, though it was likely nothing’d be that neat.
“Why do you think I’ll stay single.”
“Cause you’re fat.”
By now they were in the park. Sally lit up.
“Football-Zoe likes my body.”
“Football-Zoe likes sex, period. And she doesn’t love you.”
“I do too!”
“Fine. But you don’t love Zoe.”
“Malik, your sense of that word is restrictive.”
“And yours isn’t precise enough,” he spat, accepting the joint. “What I mean is, you’re not gonna find anyone who can hang. This, whatever we have, is not a social world you can give to a guy.”
“But what does that have to do with me being fat?”
“If you were thin you wouldn’t know me.”
“Would too!”
“Oh ye? Where are my thin white friends.”
They looked at Zoe. Brickish. Hot. Vaguely medieval features. From the hill (No’ Cackalacky). Practically Balkan. Plus: huge dick. Hard now, too. Why? Just cause, virile as a teen, she stretched out, resigned to their tiff.
“Y’see, Ms. Fruit, Ms. Prothalamion—” Malik was a great fan of Spenser “—thin white people are entitled to a range of stimulation that excludes yours truly. I belong to the rest of humanity, the diverse range of mundane scandal and exotic situations, big with misunderstanding.”
“But if someone cares enough—”
“They’ll pave it and build a condo.”
Sally started to cry.
“You make it seem like we’re friends cause no one else wants us.”
“Aren’t we?”
Zoe licked her tears.
“I think you’re both beautiful,” Sally sniffed.
“Ditto, girl.”
“But why are you calling me ugly?”
“Cause two things can exist. And in this case they need to be known. The beauty of our friendship doesn’t make it innocent or protected from the farces that determine its effect on the world.”
“Does it make us guilty?”
“Yes.”
“Then what’s the way out?”
“Stop dreaming of one.”
“Ye, stop dreaming,” Zoe said, in a tone that sounded like stop arguing.
“Wait, no, I mean: what’s the way in?”
Just then, heavenly wallpaper crumpled from the sky, in a sound commensurate to the action of a hand, in the shape of a dog who came bounding to the talkers. Behind the night was next day, noon, the park full of sunday families shouting children. The setting was totally wrong for this discussion, which, hurtful as it was, needed conclusion. The dog looked at the trio like a sphinx. He was midnight blue and dotted with cold hard twinkle. Sally began to cry again as multiple families moved out of her radius of flux. Malik crossed his arms, and Football-Zoe pet the dog, who stuck out its tongue. Producing a treat from behind its ear, the Amazonian fed the pup, who abruptly uncrumpled into the night of disenchantment they by now had come to need.
Zoe bowed, happy to distract the brawlers. (“See?” Malik said.) Or not.
“See what?”
“Wasn’t that miserable?”
“Everything is miserable right now.”
“But wasn’t that worse?”
“The dog or the scene? I thought the dog was cute.”
“The scene! The day! The world of men!”
“Malik, you are so paranoid.”
“Real, Sally. I’m honest.”
“Promise?” Her pinky shot out.
“Forever and a day, babe.”
They swore. Z took a deep breath. She was on tinder.
“You guys, look at this profile.”
She brought the phone between them. Nine of the pictures were tonally inverted selfies with bangs over the eyes, Y2K curtains, and the contours of the face translucent in black ice cheeks. In two of these a wrist was up, sporting a livestrong and then a tiny teddy bear glued to a stopwatch. The last photo was a dynamic color portrait similar to Walser in his Berlin years, but more gaunt and with longer, just receding hair, slicked back, it seemed, with scotch and thrust. The eyes burned with ennui so powerful that it impressed itself, overcoming a loss of stimulation, but stranding its new sensitivity on an island surrounded by the liquid of those dumbass selfies. puss* hit like jackie chan, read the bio. A capricorn, it turns out. They were looking at Virtuoso.
Malik screamed, an upward spinning lemon spiral. Football-Zoe yawped. A squirrel in the trees went ee-er-ee-er.
“You said it bitch,” Malik gestured wildly at the creature, hitting the j and passing to Sal. “This boy is made of f*ckery. I’ve heard tales. But now I see their author.”
“What tales?” Sally said, shaken like a polaroid.
“Excuse me? What tales? Can you return to planet earth and gossip, please?”
Sally looked pleadingly at Zoe, but apparently she knew, too, so Malik ran on.
“They say his mind works in mysterious ways. Entirely by association, moving from thing to thing, but that he is also a great listener. He seems, on the one hand, to leave behind his object of attention with each turn of thought, and yet to reveal its minutest details in the next breath, only to treat this analytic victory with the same disregard as the rest of his chatter, forcing his ‘friends’ to hang on’s every word, in case he express something unprecedented, or totally charming.
“Having named oblique precision his engine of personality, people expect nothing direct from him. That is, they do not know him, and hope he is equally unknown to himself. Some say Virtuoso is the lifelong project of a surrogate artist, or a chaotically neutral alien who never succeeded in programming a neural map of our species. Detached from expectations, he is somehow super-human. Not like X-Men, but super real. Authentic. A poet who burns and coagulates his tongue. But who can’t distinguish words and life. All that can be expressed is real to him, as if language were a dimension that includes every time and every possibility within those times, overwhelming doubt with malleability.
“Safe to say, not fun to argue with. He’ll spend half of it trying to figure out his own objective, then distance himself from it, then describe its inevitability, an attachment style that occasions spats in the first place, only in flesh and blood, as it relates to the claimant. But get on his good side, he’ll f*ck you under the table. The instability of referent that marks his speech applies to his sense of where to bang. You could be in the pet food aisle of the dollar store and his tongue’ll be in your ass, like it’s waiting for you to come home to your senses. Then again, the slightest quirk will shut him down, like a candlestick on a beach. And once non-verbal it may take hours to get him talking again, even if he was yappin about your clam.”
Sally listened carefully. If Malik was proof of the hollowness of obloquy, he was also its pleasure. Bad reputations are a kind of rot. They invade the present and stop its generation with accuracy that may bear fruit, or not, or fruit and other gain, as fickle as a harvest. It hasn’t to do with truth or prediction, but with how the urge to be correct obstructs its target, whose own goals are open-ended. The degree to which this exploration can be narrowed is the proper concern of rumor. A steady affect, good humor, and a lack of superstition are signs, in this case, of wild insouciance. Malik, it must be said, was shaken by his run-in with public opinion. Virtuoso, it seemed, was chill. Certainly, that was a sin. But more, please, more.
“The OED,” Football-Zoe took up, “records the first use of situationship in his 2017 poem ‘Synthesizing yt comment section of Young Thug’s Relationship ft. Future,’ which he posted as a comment on the titular video, receiving twelve likes. A decent chunk of the heartbroken in my infirmary come from his clutch, and kiss strangely. Y’know that trick in middle school where someone holds your hands while you try and push out, and after thirty seconds they let go, and your palms float apart? They kiss that way, impelled to separate, even from what they want. It’s hot… but spooky.
“They act as if they were refugees of love who inherited values from a war our culture never saw, while our safety makes us sentimental and deluded. I’m not sure I get through to them. I hope they feel good. The stories they tell are amazing, at least. You can’t know if they’re true, cause he infects them with his fantastic. But they sweeten trauma, that’s for sure.”
“Tell me one?” Sally coughed. The j was over.
Football-Zoe ran a tattooed hand through curls the color of sunny sidewalk. There were anatomically correct bones in orange on her skin, the x-ray design you find on emotionally unavailable thems. The hue in this case sent a different message, less medical, procedural, a way to say a body without despair.
“Y’know [redacted]?”
“Ye.”
“She went over to Virtuoso’s late one night. They smoked, looked at a book of Henry Darger, giggled, did the thing, and fell asleep. Lovely. Then he wakes her up at four with a gun in his hand and everything ready for a tat, saying, I need you to put something on my face or I’ll jump off the roof. [Redacted] starts laughing, and he’s laughing too, it’s so batsh*t, whether he’s serious or not the scene is precise. Turns out he is, though he stops saying he’ll jump and just looks her in the eye with this calm, manic glare. How they choose a tat is fully stupid. What’s your favorite number? 5. What’s your favorite color? Red. Red-5 it is, he gives her the gun and she’s never used one before so he says put a red-5 on your hip, here, he points, his hands burning, which apparently feels good, and wakes her up. She puts a 5 on her hip with three flares above it, like a cross. And then leans over Virtuoso, whose face is totally clean, mind you, and wants this 5 on the outer corner of his left eye. [Redacted] f*cks up, but doesn’t say anything, and keeps drawing, and it comes out sh*t. He goes to the bathroom—and she’s sweating bullets—comes out, and says erase it. What do you mean? she asks. Cover it up. Put more red. By now she’s feeling a little nuts too and figures why not, so starts fillin in red up to his temple. It seems like she could keep going, he’s so passive, but then she realizes he’s fainted from pain. She’s been coloring his face out cold for twenty minutes. She decides to bite his lip, and he wakes up into a kiss, and they’re rolling around laughing, til he’s on top of her, and then starts on her face, coloring it in, yellow and blue, pink and teal, but then she passes out, and he wakes her up with a kiss, they wrestle again, she takes the gun, and they trade off for hours… until it’s light, and drift off bruised and bloody, painted like Willem de Koonings. They actually can’t get to sleep, their nerves are on fire, but they also can’t move from pain and exhaustion. A couple hours later they’re up, skin clear, the gun gone, and only a few drops of blood are left on the floor. It even feels like they got rest, but their faces are raw, like someone removed and returned them, or like they over-exfoliated. The boy claims no memory, of course, except the Darger and the sex. He says his favorite number isn’t five.”
“What is?”
“210.”
Sally’s weight.
“That is a great story,” she muttered.
Sally stood beneath a cherry tree, at the apex of her high, looking through its double flowers in a white streetlamp. There were few things this light could not pervert, and the cherry was one of them. Its leaves were the color of verdigris, its bark a heavy steel. The temperature of tones conveyed polarity of gender balanced at the height of flux like an arabesque. She was under the Forest M. A train roared in, depositing caterwauling revelers from Manhattan quoting the carnage of Sovereign House. The train roared out. It was all one breath, as far as Sally was concerned. Pink green copper black silver green and white, and purple, the night, and brown, the wood of the overpass, and one visible star, and the yellow vinyl of a house, and the offwhite of another, sweet plurality Sally safe in a bliss.
Football-Zoe put her arm around her friend, who let her head loll upon a thewéd shoulder. Red eyes locked, laughed, listened to the birds sing—god knows what time they think it is—and Sally licked the mucus from her lip. Salty.
“Y’know the party scene in Cannery Row where Doc reads a poem and the whor*s cry?”
“No.” Football-Zoe said.
“I want that. Right now.”
“Topos?”
“Ye. Malik!”
The producer was talking to the prayer candles of a street grave. He turned his head.
“We’re going to Topos.”
“It’s ten o’clock.”
She grabbed his hand. The bookstore was a block away. Sally opened a dialogue with its roll gate:
Good even. Good abe. Godiva trucklebed, bic enough flame, silk wife eater and a wave cap? A greatess alive, I shall barter for the ahh, nacheese, the ope. Plenny skirmish ave I seen, ave I avenue, U-ahraughtksmmooolrlrow, sorry. no one shall be sory (sry) in my knightfe! Slick, das blud, let it run the mar*thon to nex cheek. Chuck, yknowim? Nay. Thou liest. Wif pillow. Couldabin scubadiving no ledge, ahearings things whit eyebowls full o stew, buchu (good health!) wer chasin tail as a tail in a whirled o’tail, th’tail-atoll of Sally-days, til the bowls come home no salad. Pause. Eggwhites — dickens — industry chickens — woolves — sparraws — ferruginous (moi)(mwah) — declaritous — oversharitous — sycophanticus breach, how the castle’m doon, a’fuh? He say he buy me one a dose. L’visine fur ma’parchédize. Fyu don parchmeant tis not mannt, he’s in this lationship, y’see? Saw. Go awn. Gwawf. Color unnerstan me. Hue mean hue? Jess. Das my ont. Hwhahhhh????>>>???? Ye we syncin, we goin down shee I new you was eightyship roll gayt come Awn. Awf! Tip! Tap! Gimme uvula. I know eye NO youse aves ones—Nah. Yah. Nah. Yayah! Ahhhhhhhhhhh
“C'mon you guys!”
“Sally what the f*ck is happening.”
“Whatever it is’ll last a second. C’mon!”
In they rushed through dilated iron that closed like sand beyond their butts.
Topos was a neighborhood institution. Sensitive to the emerging literature of the outer boroughs, and sensibly stocked with New Directions and Verso indie luxe, one might have the fortune to find Will Alexander on the poet-shelves or Silliman in theory, a Pasolini novel, or the latest Susan Howe. Plus the coffee slapped. And the vibes as close to calm as we neurotics can reach. Lately they had removed the central table for new sh*t and put in chairs, offering ballsy dates a chance to promote the general rizz, in the interests of a libidinal cognoscenti. It sort of worked and was sort of painful. What more can you ask of the avant-garde?
Sally had kind of forgotten why she was there. Zooted off the loud, she was taken with her performance at the gate. Malik and Football-Zoe were too. All charm is magic, but seldom do we see the application of the reverse in a practical way. Not being explanation-seekers, M&Z reacted to their shock with mania. They spazzed out. Malik grabbed the aux and put a mix on by Filipino dj boyliker and Zoe began to strip the shelves. Sally made espressos.
Hypocrite lecteur, does it seem violent to deorganize a bookstore? When they were more common in the city, few shops were alphabetical. It is only in recent years that virginal purity rose to meet the sense of order needed to peddle merch, or when retail started coming first in the human race, that abcedminded digs got their day. A wall of books is better in disorder. You already concede much to put them in rows as opposed to a big mobile. Even better would be a sort of batting cage where the clerks hit volumes as you enter the store, and you either take em to the face or peruse Georges Perec for a spell and cop or field another slammy. There could also be a waterfall model should the financial enterprises in glass towers rind up and blow off and the floors cave in from lack of hugs, where in the hollow skyscraper books fall from thirty flights into a pool of bookishness and native nerds bathe in textual stream, getting glowier by the minute, and more natured. Yet the old model is fine because it is forest. You look at a shelf the way you look at a canopy, expecting light through chaos.
Cannery Row! Sally remembered, Black Marigolds. Doc and the tears of easy virtue. Putting a shot in the hands of her friends she dove into the fiction nook. Zoe had torn up to M from the shelves and was circling the pile in the middle of the store. What do you say to a mess? Zoe: oomph. S thumbed the paperback until she found the enjambed passage. The poem was two thousand years old. It had been translated from Sanskrit to English and published in 1919 by E. Powys Mathers. The act of translation supposes a third tongue between the exchanging languages. It would be a tongue of transposition that speaks clearly when the essence of one text is shepherded into another; rather like tearing a temple from a Renaissance painting and dropping it into Impressionist haystacks, without removing from the composition of one or adding to the other. This principle of relation is a stable floor across time and culture. It implies that any text can tryst with any other, no matter how mismatched. Certainly, the more ill-fitting the connection, the more dexterity one demands of transposition. It becomes more wily. Its marble floor gets dirtier. Perhaps it has a crisis of values. The nobility of brilliant minds softly carrying silken parcels of verse over centuries gives way to the clamor of sots dancing in the name of the fastest method to f*ck. The floor is indestructible. In the long record of its use, if this transition is violent, it adds the quality of stupidity to the list of effects worth perfecting by culture. You can’t ask for more (jinx), cause that’s the last thing anyone would ask for.
But like, Sally tore the poem from the page, it curled like a whip on the curving plane of transposition, and slapped it onto the opening of Sentimental Education (lying belly up on Zoe’s pile), which now read:
Monsieur Frédéric Moreau, who had just matriculated, was returning to Nogent-sur-Seine, where he would have to hang about for two months before going to read for the Bar. His mother had sent him to Le Havre, giving him just enough money for the journey, to see an uncle who she hoped
Even now
If I see in my soul the citron-breasted fair one
Still gold-tinted, her face like our night stars,
Drawing unto her; her body beaten about with flame,
Wounded by the flaring spear of love,
My first of all by reason of her fresh years,
Then is my heart buried alive in snow.
The displaced passage of Flaubert now clinging to the invisible plane with some irritation, Sally brought it down into the next text at hand, Lyn Hejinian’s (rip) The Unfollowing. Yet due to the open nature of these poems, the texts merged in a perfect braid, trading word for word:
would According leave to his one fortune theory to of her the son novel; he narration had is returned a to man’s Paris piano only at the which previous a day woman, and sits he We was will making elegize up and for make the loud impossibility elegies of on staying the in demise the of capital public by education taking The the bird longest is route writ home tide wild
Sally removed the texts of four books, Slow Homecoming, The Iliad, Microscripts, and Where Shall I Wander. Not every word, but a chunk from each, the black letters adhering to the manifold they created by needing a place to hover. Blowing the words out of a monograph, she threw the four-text on its blank, and began to read:
Sorger had outlived several of those who had become close to him; he had ceased to long for anything, but often felt a selfless love of existence and at times a need for salvation so palpable that it weighed on his strong destiny against godlike Sarpedon. Now as they in their advance had come close together, the own son, and the son’s son of Zeus cloud-gathering, it was Tlepolemos of the two who spoke the first word: ‘Man of counsel of the Lykians, Sarpedon, why must you be skulking here, you who are a man unskilled in the fighting? They are liars who call you little shoes were smiling, for how happy it must have made them to cling to the feet of so enchanting a creature. The children’s game was dragging on endlessly, but ‘endlessness,’ you are lying, and now I shall have to spend an eternity begging and stammering for the indulgent granting of comprehensive comprehension on account of this lie, did I say that? Yes, that’s what the man said beholden to the garlands of woven fruit and beribboned cartouches, amen. What we have here are certain individuals intent on disarraying the public gravitas of things.
She pulled on a closed book at the edge of the pile. Like loose thread, its contents obliged and spilled out, tugging the contents of the books it was touching, and so a stream of words, like magic ribbon, flew from the center of the store, to which Zoe had transferred most of its volumes. The letters darkened the air above their heads and twittered like insects, spinning in the intellectual blender of Topos. Sally allowed them to churn for a minute, then sent the mass back into the blank books of the store. She opened a copy of what was supposed to be Winesburg, Ohio, and found the following:
the most continent eyes could not continently endure its hand long enough to reach up and dig in a nostril. He is haunted by the idea of action, they end up at a hotel. We could have foreseen this. I grow lean in loneliness, like a water lily gnawed by a beetle. She hated humans. But she knew that was silly, because she was a human and so were all her Rest. Do you please me. I do more than that. When are you most proud of me. Dare I ask you to be satisfied. Say then to Caesar, Canst thou send lightnings, that they may go, and say to thee, Here we are? Who hath put wisdom in the inward parts? or who hath given understanding to the heart? Now sh*t got a kind of ironic look. He pulled his out again. ‘Go on and kiss the f*cker, then lemme get outta here. Okay?’ A Venetian who stayed in the kingdom of Pegu a long time and has only just come back writes that men and women there always go barefoot, and speak thick, and the maggot is the stronger one and Plume is its wife. This is a fundamentally different type of voiceover than Sang-won’s, but as we fluttered inside like a peaco*ck in the net, I was grieved with that generation, and said, Has it been to be, if it is when she, let it can it be, if you can and three.
At this the store shuddered. It seemed to be in preparation for a sneeze. The tiny staccato breaths that signal this action pulled Sally’s work out of the books to which it was briefly committed as their words ran back to their initial order like chastened students nipped from an orgy by epigrams of overhead light. The store heaved a thunderous achoo sending the correct texts to their pages and the trio of buds out of a sphincter of brick and awning into the Ridgewood night where a pocket of air caught and distributed them, by commodious flickus, back to the floor of ZaZa Express.
“Nother pre-roll?”
“Two please.”
Penmanship Supertears (I give you his government) lived at the corner of 69th Ave and 60th St., known as 69th Square due to the rolling addition of a tail on the zero by those tall enough to reach. A block of blond brick houses with porches and yards, it was an excellent place to live well or escape the task of living well by living poorly. Or surfing the wave between these states. Or mildly treating the virtuous and the vicious, not forgetting to speak one’s mind with naturalness and vigor, projecting a truly random but sincere position into the poles of one’s life, and so entertaining them. In any case, the stars of the magnolias were shining luck on Sally, Football-Zoe, and Malik, who strode to a rager. A man with no legs wheeled down a bike lane with an open six pack in his lap and a bluetooth headset, crooning Arabic. The Ecuadorian spot La Canoa was closed, but the space next door was blaring music Malik attempted to Shazam, the app said No, as equally loud children cried from the next door down. Then the street was calm. A car pulled up.
“Are any of you Mike?”
They shook their heads.
“My c*nt!” He roared, and five hands slapped his back. The same type of hand, thick, hairy, cured.
“My c*nt! My c*nt!” They wailed, driving on at a controlled speed, stopping fully at the end of the block and turning gracefully.
There were puddles on the corners from the rain earlier. Petals floated on their surface. A dog broke water on a gingko. Someone lit a cigarette. Heels clopped by. Someone sang Billy Strayhorn and gave the trio chills. The gravel looked like black bread with butter in the light. A living room was pink. Someone hit a spliff, farted, smiled, said good evening. Two cats played poker with a rat, you’re big blind, they said. A Honda Civic. A Scion. An Escalade. Two dope boys in a cadillac. Three dope boys in a cadillac. Four dope boys and a cultivated member of the bourgeoisie in a cadillac. Night was young, livid, limber.
I have something to confess. The plot requires that I now describe a party, but I have only enjoyed a handful of these occasions in my life. As a moth returns to an open hydrant glittering in the heat, like a retard, I continue to go to parties in the hope of drawing life from a source. My sensitivity absorbs their stimuli and sets them loose in fictive realms where physical laws do not apply. If I had to say which parties I prefer, I freely admit the ones I have written. Perhaps joy is always an overcoming of the physical, a breakthrough of the virtual on its own three wings. I am not going to describe a recognizable lituation. I would have you know I shirk reality out of despair, but only because, for a person like me, no happiness is pure that doesn’t begin with sorrow. If I don’t struggle to smile I cheat felicity. That’s a capricorn trait.
The door was open. Not intentionally, it hadn’t closed fully when the last person came in or went out. SMZ went up the stairs and passed into a room thick with smoke. Penny had invited Zapmantha
ZAPMANTHA, a laser-beam baddie
who was only visible in this weather.
“Sally! Zoe! Malik! Welcome!”
Malik ran. Lasers were losers in his book.
“Zantha, you look great! Please avoid my eye.”
“Oh, sorry!”
“That’s OK. Someday when I’m ready to go blind I’ll hit you up.”
“That’d be lovely. Do I have your number?”
“Still AAA-AAAA.”
“Duh. How could I forget.”
“So who else is here?”
“Everyone. You guys were the last to arrive. Sorry it’s hard to see. Penny was kind to fill the air.”
“Stop saying sorry!” Football-Zoe stood up. She had taken off her shoes. FZ was the only person strong enough to gaze at lasers. Her eyes turned green on contact. Her feet were funky.
“Aw, Zoe. Let’s dance.”
They left Sally at the entrance. Fog swallowed the room. It was kindness beyond courtesy. Penmanship had invited Zapmantha as a way to keep everyone in the dark, as usual. She was a nice girl, but had blinded several people in her two years of residence. One of them was the judge of her trial for the initial incident (a speed-dating visual massacre), who had also pressed charges. It was unlikely she would be in the city another year, let alone the country. Fantasies of Portugal and Croatia crowded her conversation. Very ungrounding, which is why she fit in well with their circle, even as a liability. She was from Chappaqua. Anyway, Sally knew this largesse was self-serving. Penny was avoiding his f*ckburden and his sibling, and perhaps failing. Perhaps they had found him and disarmed his projective fear, and were now making toasts, endless toasts to qualities they admired and abhorred in each other. Finally nothing was off limits.
Malik must have found the aux. He was playing a jersey drill mix, no wait, he changed his mind: Jarvid 9: Gecko, something Sally had shown him last month. It was always a compliment to hear selectors select your stuff. This tape came from the insanely fecund two-year stretch when James Ferraro put out hundreds of albums—concepts, really—each exploring environments through densely textured loops. Some were over two hours long, like Jarvid, and didn’t have tracks. They were sound paintings, this of an older geological period of fertile mist and saurian throng. It fit the shrouded party. Sally had a picture of the apartment’s layout in her memory, but refused to consult it. She would walk until she found a conversation, and so help her, it would be her fate!
Fifteen minutes later she was still walking. No barriers and the atmosphere had changed. It was hotter and more fetid. There was water on the ground, which no longer felt like hardwood but soil. The birds of paradise had migrated out of the digital loop of the track and called in irregular patterns. Penny had really outdone himself. Now the fat leaf and curving liana of an accredited jungle appeared. Sally slapped her arm, killing a bug who was probably the last poet of his species, a hyper-niche aphid.
Blood sprayed awkwardly close to her dress. Actually, it would have hit her, but the drops were party-minded and apologetically bent away just in time. They came from the bite of a lion crushing the arteries of a jaguar. Bananas clustered thick above like fat chrysanthemums. The lion would not lay an implicit finger on Sally. There was something urbane in its expression, as if you could get so rural that truly urban people became provincial by the refinement of your wildness. Sally was oafish, even, looking directly at the cat, whose giant face was high on carnage. The lion’s sight fell on Sally, it did not meet her, it fell like a weighted blanket on a chair where it lived when not in use. The jaguar was a masterpiece. If a car was a perfectly balanced machine whose soul had been subtracted for the purpose of going where its owner wanted, the jaguar was a product of the soul’s return to the machine, warping iron into muscle, growing appetite and whim. It was outrageous to destroy such a beautiful thing, and the lion was indifferent.
But that was fair. The jungle was the highest form of public space. Altogether with its life and death no tapestry was finer, none had greater subtleties, finality being one of them. Certainly we are not bold enough to push our cycles into the open, so there is nothing like this indifference which is innocent by its artistry. The jungle weaves itself. The lion provides the item of closure. It cultivates death, which has a long and downward life in the circle of nutrients. Linearly, we seek to relegate and defeat death, obscuring its circular function. Indifference now is never pretty. It sustains no gaze. Imagine if you could look at someone ignoring someone else in the same space. See the tears of the latter and the calm of the former. Or hear the sobs and the even breath. Taste the salt and the blank skin. Touch the heaving pride and flat possession. Smell the mix of stress and ease. If this must happen, and if it couldn’t be siloed, you would demand impartiality like the lion’s. Swift and strong as the upward opposite curve. That life should equal death.
Sally, Sally! Take a seat girl. Have a banana. This wedding dress? It won’t do, you ought to change it for a loincloth, the cat’s pajamas. Really, here, try this tigerhide two-piece, and this spear, unhook the point, it’s a shot glass—no, I know you don’t drink, but isn’t that cool? Yes I do take care. Of what, I’m still not sure, but what I take of it is drastic. Following the sound of a waterfall Sally came to a clearing. There, as adroitly as droplets, Combotina and Catafalqua splashed. They really made a pair, one unhinged, the other even-keeled, and physically almost twins, dark curly hair, plump as Renoir’s bathers. Bare but for a choker Catafalqua wouldn’t part with. Vanity thy name is—but wait! It was rocking her every now and then, as if a boxer were inside her belly. Sally had never seen her smile this much. Oblivious of our heroine, our heroine dove into the crystal pool and swam up to their fray.
“Sal!” Tina cried. “Nice bikini!”
“Nice nice.”
“You know me.”
“But do I know Catafalqua? She looks too happy.”
“She picked up one of those behavioral shock collars from a weed store.”
“Which one?”
“The Gas Station.”
“Those guys are weirdos.”
“Yeah, anyway, instead of disciplining her whenever she has an un-American impulse, she enjoys the pain, feels vindicated by it, and then reaps positive jolts for a healthy American hubris.”
“She really hit the jackpot.”
“A perfect misreading.”
Catafalqua, normally three heartbeats above catatonic, chased herself like a puppy in the pool. That water fell in a stream from above was a continual discovery as her mind poured out impressions three seconds old. She was so present that she warped the space around her, as if its tranquility were at the back of each second, not glum, but too low-energy for her tumble, resigned to being grabbed by her and spun slightly forward.
Of course it was unsustainable, but Sally rejected the idea that happiness brought out one’s essential features. What she was seeing was not the core of her friend, but a figure made of surface. Catafalqua had attained a mode without interiority, which a person like her would do well to remember, but it would be unfair to set this state as a goal. She was crazy and would ever remain so, forced to uncover the ways her crazy might mesh or improve a handful of rare situations, confining her to such slight uses on the waste of misery, like a blighted tree that is actually quite kindled in the sun. Then again, it was nice to see the spirit take a boulder and ride it like a horse. And wasn’t she complaining about this earlier? SMH.
“What a clown.” Sally shook her damn head.
“In sickness and in health.” Combotina leaned on her pal’s shoulder. “Guess who I saw earlier.”
The immortal protagonist of our story blanched. She barely said his name.
“Wastrel!” Tina spat. Sally caught the associated spit. Her friend looked sharp. “I thought you wanted protection.”
“Yes. No. Yes.”
“Then why hold onto spit that cursed him?”
Sally stuck her tongue in Tina’s mouth, wrestling that last sweet syllable from its grooves. Tina broke free. She was hurt by Sally’s weakness, and no match for its instinct.
“What do you actually want from me?”
Warrior queen mute.
“Ya love’m. Doncha?”
:3 … :0 … :)
Combotina swerved. An emotional driver of world class (Ridgewood being after all the fourth coolest neighborhood on planet), she was picking up heavily on the I-wanna-go-to-hell vibes her friend was putting down. Tina’s mandate to help all friends in all friends’ endeavors got tough at times like these, but an argument was not in the cards for a triple libra. The best she could do was share something shameful about big V, which wasn’t hard as he took his bad reputation as seriously as a job. However, one girl’s poison is another girl’s purr, and she’d no clue how fast Sally would turn bull into silly sh*t. CT was thinking with her neurons, while S was stinking with her butt (But Uvcourse That’s Terrific)!
“OK cowboy. I saw him bout an hour ago right when he came in from the heat-bent horizon, we were listenin’ to good time fiddle, some hobo lullaby, when the stranger drifted in and rubbed the boys wrong, yknow the boys who can’t seem t’ever be rubbed right? Yeah he pissed em off what with that exquisite bearing and closed-face-tureness he’s got, what’n they expected some genuflectin’ I suppose. sh*t if I know left from right in this tumbleweed frontier, this cheap-o movie set, this sonically inflected louche interior, anyway—Virtuoso swaggers inna the saloon an asks a bottle a liquor and a cigar, tall order for a single man mind ye. He don’t say hi, don’t offer to suck nobody’s dick, don’t offer to cut them in on’s inheritance, just nods at dem Boyz. And by jove are they blitzed! Been drinking since the sun come up, which, on this desert plain, is about 3AM, and now’s about three past noon. Virtuoso allows the barkeep t’cut’s cigar, drinks straight from the bottle, puffs once, and sits back, as if he’s the type a nudnik what lets’s food get cold in the face of the hunger of others. The boys are slaverin like dogs, hootin an a hollerin (full disclosure, we’ve hired the Boys to protect our outpost from an even worse set of criminals once employed as a subspecies of police, who we betrayed when our funds allowed us to buy real police; our fortunes then slipped, the old Boys are outta jail, and we await their revenge under the aegis of these hooligans who’ve raped every whor* in town and drunk us nearly sober), they want action! Virtuoso leaves the counter, flashing one half of his perfectly-formed ass after another in the two steps it takes to leave this joint, and moseys down across the dust to the barber’s. Trim and a bath, he gestures. Well, it’s his liquor they want, the Boys agree, we’ll just pay him a visit for a sip of that there corn piss, nothin doin. Ye simple azzat they say, slinkyin down the steps, tiltin the windmill o’ the dust on the way, they barge in on big V with the barber’s nappykin over’s chest and just stand, sorry, lean there, learin atim. They’re rugged. He’s handsome, the barber just ate beans. The air is heavy with foul vapors. One o’ the boys hocks a loogie, winds up his whole sinus, nay, the sinuses of his compatriots too, verily drains the tiny shop of phlegm, and spits it at whatever metal surface is meant for that sh*t, and suddenly there’s a bang. The bullet has some complex directions: it leaps out of the chamber behind the napkin, takes a right at the loogie, drives it back through the snotter’s nose, takes a left at his pal’s throat, then a sharp U-ey for the last Boy and nails him in the lung. Ya missed my heart, he says. And that’s true.”
“What boys? What frontier? Ain’t this a jungle?”
“Yeah, but that’s cause the music changed. An hour ago it was twang.”
“OK, so, there were no boys, there was no town, Virtuoso did not kill anyone.”
“Virtuoso did kill several people, who were projections of the environment brought on by the music.”
“Illusions, then.”
“Real in the context of a contingent scene.”
“It doesn’t sound like he did anything wrong. The act of killing is yet another projection within the scene.”
“Right, but the vibe is violent.”
“But these ‘boys’ were even worse. The environment was hostile. He responded…virtuosically—” Tina rolled her eyes, “and now the environment is more pleasant.”
“Well I don’t see how the two relate. Murder transpired. That’s a fact.”
“Slay.”
Combotina crossed her arms. Talking to Sally was often like reading a poem. The words and logic were clear, but diverse and disjunct. Understanding was a body one tries to awake from a dream, but every touch rolls it further into position. There is also that exasperating need of poems to resolve a nest of contradictions with a flourish whose mercy extends to all of creation. An absolving oblivion. You could never be sure that Sally heard a thing you said, or that it mattered in the first place.
“Not slay. Demon vibes.”
Sally got hard nips.
“Don’t you think you’re bound to read it this way cause you dislike him?”
“He’s impossible to like.”
“Mind over matter,” Sally shrugged. “The way I hear it, you’re defending illusions. But they never asked. And anyway they're invulnerable.”
“They’re flimsy.”
“They’re both. They give way to themselves and accept this condition. They should teach us to do the same.”
“I don’t think they should teach us carelessness.”
“Combotina! It’s a party!”
“Yes but the party is made of illusions! You can’t scratch them indefinitely. Soon you come to the ground and then it’s over.”
“The party?”
“Yes.”
“Well at that point you def can’t be careless, so why not indulge now?”
“Sally, why’s it so hard for you to indulge balance in the course of your pleasure?”
“Ew, Tina. It just is.”
They were now butting heads. If I were a less conscientious storyteller I would take advantage of this contact and allow the scene to fall erotically away from the argument over morality and imagination. I would allow the scent of Sally’s tiger hide to reach Combotina in a rhyme with the sports leather of her high school bullies, several members of the football team who made fun of her fat ass and Jewish features in an onslaught of vulgarity, their life force, even, though all of them would jerk off in the school stalls thinking about her peculiar submissive resilience, an activity she knew nothing about, though she hoped for it, among other violent fantasies of rehabilitation. I would allow Combotina’s breasts to unfasten Sally’s bra while her hands cupped her ass and lifted the heroine up like a child in the accommodating gravity of the pool. There would be a ferocity in Tina’s gestures, as if in her association with the jocks she had taken on their wannabe sexuality and skipped the interminable verbalism that separated cat and mouse, skipped right to the redemptive pleasure that acquits all species, a narrative elision Sally would grasp, like the Immaculate Reception. It would make her so hot and wet the color of the water by her crotch would darken, as if in shadow, and the circumference of her mucus would stand out by its viscosity from the faster, lighter element, like a clear stone washed by a stream. I would allow myself to grant Tina the strength of these boys, not only their frenzy, but their muscle, albeit without changing her form, perhaps in the manner of adrenaline, making her capable of lifting Sally until the warrior princess puss* was at a level with her tongue, Tina chair and serpent, her tongue tearing Sally’s loincloth in two, lapping at the fount of Hippocrene of her crotch, unable to even touch her labia, for the pressure of the discharge is too much, and like a ping pong ball secure on its jet of water, there Tina’s tongue-out head would remain until our leading lady calmed down, which simply wouldn’t happen. If I were a less conscientious storyteller I would get carried away in such detail. Thank heavens I am not!
Anyway, didn’t I say Combotina was a triple libra? That she would only dip a toe into the waters of argument? (Nevermind the waters of water she was discovered in.) I did, didn’t I? Hm, reader, wot! Look sharp. Don’t just sit there waiting for life to happen—or do, I find both charming on divers shoulders. Yes, Combotina can only be a fighter and lover of Sally linguistically, wherein all scenes are possible. Even politeness, consistency, correction: Catafalqua, while her pals were chit-chatting, received the following impulse, shall we say, afflatus: listen to Bobby Shmurda. Now, Catafalqua had a piercing voice. When the fruit developers of Siri designed the massive ear, they set its true timbre at a pitch of crisis in order to prevent regular people in regular situations from getting in touch with the software and whelming its server. The kind of voice that would always activate Siri they assigned to crazy bitches, reasoning they were an independent isolated bunch who would not have much need of AI. And they were correct. But when a crazy crazily needed something, the need was met with such speed, the words were hardly out of the mouth of Catafalqua, SIRI, PLAY HOT nigg*!!!! when the ground of the jungle gave way and separated the friends.
The transition of landscape, far from being terrifying, was so familiar to each guest from hours of Super Smash Ultimate that in the shuffle of geographical features each enjoyed a moment of ideal quiet in which the various settings of this gaming experience played at high speed without volume, as if a surveillance camera had captured the motionless congeniality of these rooms and sent it to their recollective present, to affirm the pleasant fighting. Like zooming in on Yoshi or Mario as they jump, in the midst of battle, with such sweet faces, do these warriors not teach us to bring to war a veritable Christian mildness? If so, shame on them!
The land is more noble. Thus it changed: the surface of the jungle, from each leaf and creepy-crawly to the waves of the pool and the waterfall, sagged a little, pushing a layer of transparent amber to the top of itself like a cicada. Up through this delicate material pine trees poked and mountains peaked, one between the feet of Sally and Combotina, putting them on opposite hills. The parrots gave way to ravens, the iguanas to owls, the lion to a flock of sheep, a boulder to a bear, the tropical atmosphere to the austerity of the Alps, Bobby being goth, they were now on natural gothic dirt. The hills were alive with the sound of Shmurda.
Sally lay down on a bed of needles. My god, was she pretty. Betimes I think beauty a divine pity for our foolish existence. That is why it is so variable. The gods’ omniscience is manifest not in one swallowing principle, but in pleasant aggregation of our infinite particulars. They know us. Everything we are. That is why they are divine. Only pure intimacy can ratify this glory, and if there is such a thing as a common holy moment anyone today can locate, it is the moment of feeling understood, whose rarity’s a logarithm of the complexity of life. I repeat: beauty’s a divine alignment with our taste. I have been reading Montaigne’s Apology, a very funny text. He argues we are arrogant to think humans capable of understanding god. In an astounding display of erudition he goes on a joyride through every major thinker in the classical canon, debunking their ideas by revealing inconsistencies, as if he were lodged in a bedroom closet, taking notes on their amorous technique. What I don’t understand is why every act of understanding, misunderstanding included, is not the agility of divinity. Why is it not here, in the movement of thought, right or wrong? A performance every being is engaged in. What do I know?
Sally’s belly is so warm. Her skin so smooth, until not, and the head of sores is actually quite soft. Before they burst they gain a sheen. And demand care when they open. Have I praised her ankles? Or the sparse hair on her shin? Or the hollow of her knee, her armpit, where the hair is long and light, like the beard of a Japanese hermit? In this Protestant clime her green eyes flare like Milla Jovovich. Her bangs stick to her forehead. The corners of her mouth push her cheeks into voluptuous hills, like waves in a cool autumnal sun, frozen by a photograph, yet no less liquid. Her breasts hang to the side—remember when Combotina’s freed them? Oh, that was a fantasy (the definition of which: it does not affect the prioritized narrative)? I retain its felicity without its consequence, its fondness at the level of costume, a splash of a watercolor highlight—the left more than the right. To be honest it’s enough to make the sun randy. If she weren’t in faerie shade that stellar wanker would pierce her womb and make her with child. That’s how hot she is.
Hot feet ran up. They were jogging in place—so 21st century—just, like, staying there??? The nerve of some people! Cantcha see the protagonist of our tale lying? Covered in the gold leaf of brunchlight, as if it were just ripped from the walls of the abandoned palace of now? Of course he can’t, he’s Penmanship Supertears, never been a better time to focus on him than jetzt. Penny was unaffected by Sally’s tit*. In women his taste was normal. He could look at her for hours, think critically of her shape, write essays to the intentions of her creator, but never odes and the like to Sal. That was why they had a friendship and no other galleon. Obvi Penny was dressed like Link. But scared. Mans was frightened!
“Penmanship, howdy! Great party, babe. When’d ya start planning?”
“About a week agoO,” he yodeled. “sh*t! I’ve given myself away.”
“What’s eatin ya doll?”
“My sibling and squeeze are pursuing me through this 550 sq. foot apartment. I've done my best to cloak it in illusions, but they won’t let up. Hide me Sal, and when they come along, lie, get em outta here, please!”
“Quid pro quo, Pen Man… tell me where Virtuoso is.”
“I’ll tell ya a helluva lot more’n that. But save me, Sally Geese!”
“Done.”
And with that she kicked the boy into a pine. He received one scratch on his index finger, under the cuticle, suckin blood and watchin his deliverance.
The pair came by, consisting of one Lawyer and one lovesick girlie. She belonged to the genus film wife, slender, black jeans/frames, bangs. Prepared to throw down the wikipedia page of any minor European director. In a time of greater spiritual organization she would be mother superior of a chic convent, too cool for gender. But in this day and age her obsession lacks a totalizing form. She observes the hedonism of cinema without the protection of a cult, just this side of autistic, neurodivergent enough for a lazybones like Penny to have his way at arm’s length (quite a pecker on that boy) and throw her to the dogs. Poor babe. Though in her downtrodden state she induces the benevolence of Penny’s sibster, his opposite, his apposite. This gal is even more mixed up than her sinner brother. Fit check: bulimic tweed and a most respectable bob. She seems to have gone into law to reform her bro, whose constant half-immoral behavior was the foundation for her desire to once and for all distinguish good and evil. Penny’s old roommates have moved on, the show Catfish has ended(?), and a thousand natural auguries have screamed in white noise that de boy won’t change, but in vain, his sister being oracularly illiterate, this goes over her head. She is here in the trap-generated Alps hunting down her blackguard sib, looking at Sal from over the head of her plaintiff, she is six feet tall.
Sally felt a drop pitter patter on her chest. Must be Penny’s anxiety daemon telling him be more anxious.
“Raining, is it?” The Lawyer spoke English™.
“Afraid so,” Sally mooted.
The situation suggested the obvious danger that she would look up and see at least the family jewels hanging from a perch, but so transfixed were the hunters by Sally’s shining tit* that they were unable to focus on anything else. A clear case of the end justifying the means, for the tension caused Penmanship to sweat even more, which turned the brightness of our lady of don’t-care-didn’t-ask-plus-my-tit*-bounce-when-I-walk up several degrees. The pursuers were at the mercy of their own ogling. Surely even they could reflect to the bottom of this phenomenon, but its surface was sublime and held them to it like a slow dance at the climax of a courtship in a film about a delicate damsel and her circ*mstantial suitor. Again, it was like the allegory of the cave, with Penny playing the role of shadow maker on the far wall of Sally’s chest, forcing the plebeian huntresses to consume his artifice image.
“Have you seen my brother?”
“Have you seen my boo?”
Sally looked up. She could just barely make out the haunches of the desired man; indeed the sweat was coming from his scrotum. But how did it manage to fall in a line that avoided every branch? Only the water of someone as anxious as Penny could swerve and display its own tortured psyche in a flight to splash her breasts. A feat she could neither condone nor help but commend.
![Sally - joeyrobbybiddyjr - sxylk [Archive of Our Own] (2024)](data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAEAAAABCAQAAAC1HAwCAAAAC0lEQVR42mP8/h8AAvMB+NzmkbcAAAAASUVORK5CYII=)