The Ept, The Ane and the Fantile

Berlin’s normally rainy early summer has produced a drought, blowing a gritty breeze that dries the sweat before it beads and vexes the eye with particles sluiced in camel-colored veils trailing from building sites where the progress is slow on a nihilistically Mediterranean scale. I sat down to a plate of very good falafel and watched a sirocco rise up like a Jinn from a dumpster under a scaffold up the street and it swept over me before I could make it indoors. Minus the eye-irritants the breeze is quite pleasant in the evening. 

It’s a very light late-suppertime and the EM, or europäischer Meisterschaft, has crammed the tables of the outdoor cafes with men and their girlfriends watching sidewalked widescreen televisions. The televisions make a spectacle of the spectacle of uniformed stags at play on green fields against the vast curtain of the local twilight, which is the color of a vintage picture tube in a dark room a millisecond after the shut-off. The fields on the widescreens are greener than anything in the neighborhood. Or the city.  Except other screens.

The widescreens have given public space the unusual feeling of a public space; strangers on benches at long tables are groaning and cheering together while flirting in open harmlessness with each others’ Helens of Troy, leering in jest. The females are dressed to compete with the athletes and seemed to have forgotten the fact that they’re the traditional spoils of symbolic Byzantine war. The better looking girlfriends belong to the more brutal of the fans and will be obliged to fuck when they go home after the game, whatever the game’s results.  A friend once claimed you can tell the civilized nations from the barbaric ones by their respective responses to winning or losing an important soccer match: the civilized fans loot and riot after a loss and the barbaric ones do so after winning. A similar dichotomy will determine the tone of post-match fucking. Which of the trophy girlfriends dread a win, and which a loss? 

Tinny echoes of fascist rallies pour out into the night as though channeled by spiritualist mediums wherever I walk. I’ve never before made a conscious association between spiritualist mediums and modern media, bridging the gap between the 1930s and the 21^st century. We can use our televisions to visit the dead; the dead in their aquarium. I’m looking for an outdoor café that doesn’t feature a widescreen television. I’m not hungry enough to forego the pleasures of this prejudice. 

The EM explains the German flags everywhere, little ones sticking from cars and big ones sticking from windows, although Germany isn’t in the game this evening. I see Turkish flags, too, because Turkey is in the game. The flags are national erections. Orientals, Aryans and Africans all compete. America’s team ineptitude is an insulting testament to the game’s unimportance; i.e., cavort in your short pants while we determine the fate of the planet. No one voices this observation.

A few years ago, a German businessman stabbed his wife for pulling the plug on his widescreen the moment before a tournament-winning goal and received a light sentence. There was the wag who cast soccers balls in concrete and skillfully painted the products and placed them around town during the tournament fever of that same year, breaking many feet. The sexual itch of a soccer ball just begging to be kicked. 

I think of Samuel Beckett, at the end of his life, watching televised soccer as a kind of bitter confession of the hopelessness of higher intelligence: to know so many things, with no power to change them; to have so many memories, with no power to return to the past. 

Practitioners of soccer, like those of sex, can achieve an impressive mastery which is nowhere else applicable.

*** 

It’s not difficult to draw comparisons between a soccer match and the traditional literary narrative, or to find echoes of my disdain for the one in my boredom with the other. Victory in a soccer match has its equivalent in the moral outcome of a traditional literary narrative, for example. The soccer ball is either roughly analogous to the reader’s consciousness or the mutable gestalt of the protagonist’s dreams and sensibilities, buffeted by the plot, or the ball is even, perhaps, the author’s soul. 

Why only one ball? Why only two teams? Why the boring rigidity of the diagrammed field, the player costumes, the segregated spectators and simplistic goal positions? Why aren’t players allowed to defect from one team to another mid-play, or import useful non-standard paraphernalia onto the field, or defecate/urinate/ejaculate on the pitch in an expression of extreme displeasure or animal exuberance or for purely tactical reasons? Why no trench-digging, pyre-building, or half-time stonings or dissident funerals? 

Spare a thought for fiction that invokes the hexagonal soccer pitch, a goal placed at every of the six sides, with three teams and three balls and six referees on horseback, three of the horses being mares in deep heat and the others stallions and the game frequently interrupted by violently elemental couplings which rip up the pitch. 

*** 

The penis is a symbol and a tool. The penis is a symbol of tools. It is the effigy of man, and in the fullness of its dance, from latency to tumescence to discharge to quiesence, it recapitulates the poignance of man’s determined arc. The spent penis alone in the vagina’s chamber is but man in his grave. The penis at daybreak is but crowless cock. Penis jester troll god. Where others see the empire state building, or pencils, rockets, eels, swords, Buicks, spindles, wieners, thermos jugs, snakes, worms, derricks, trees, mushrooms, church spires, trombones, syringes, fingers, tongues, decanters, snails, submarines, cucumbers, neckties, female torsos, bell towers, pistols, baracudas, paramecia, daggers, telescopes, salamanders, walking sticks, chainsaws, carrots, thermometers, dolphins and blimps…  the athlete sees penis.  

-The athlete at five years old: big soft mommy and funny-smell-lady are laughing (the athlete learns that he isn’t just a human with thoughts but an object with attributes). 

-The athlete at seventeen years old: his asthmatic easy-lay is laughing (the athlete learns that his attributes aren’t constant). 

-The athlete at eighty: Samuel Beckett. 

*** 

I find an outdoor café with a decent menu and no widescreen television. There’s only one other customer, four tables distant, facing the dark end of this tree-lined sidestreet on Savignyplatz. A woman. 

*** 

“I may look German but I’m not,” she smiles, in California tones, as the waiter hands her her second drink. She’s smiling at me while reaching for the wine. I don’t think she looks German at all; she’s clearly, in my book of prejudices, the second wife of an American professional who’s been exiled to Germany. The egalitarian t-shirt; the woundingly expensive Jackie-O sunglasses mounted in the burnished crop of her dye-job like a tiara. “Not a football fan?” 

“Hardly. Football’s sworn nemesis,” I joke, and we lift our respective glasses in a toast to a coincidentally-timed, ambient roar of jubilation that pours down the street and out of the windows of the genteel flats above us. I get up and move to the table next to hers to hear better. A whiff of vulva to her perfume. 

“Are you Gay?” 

“Don’t think so.” 

“Well, there’s Gay and then there’s Gay.”

“DNA Gay versus the Gay of convenience.” 

“That’s right. I basically found all this amazing porno on my ex-husband’s Mac one day and it hit me all the amazing stuff he’d been missing. I actually felt guilty for cheating him out of all that for so many years. You know? They do things I normally assumed was physically impossible and they consider it whitebread. Talk about out of the loop! We’re really good friends now,” she laughs, “but it kinda bugs me that his boyfriend is younger than mine. Younger and cuter. If you were Gay we’d end up being the best of friends. You’d call me up all giddy and breathless every time you thought you’d met Mister Right and six months later I’d be the shoulder you blubbered on when it all goes terribly wrong. I tried to get a personalized license plate called Fag Hag 27 but they wouldn’t let me. They say it’s a free country but what do I know. It’s free if you’re willing to pay for it, right? Except I was willing to pay for it and I still couldn’t have it.” 

“Story of your life.” I toast her again; again comes the coincidental jubilation.

“If this were a movie I’d come on to you rather drunkenly about now, wouldn’t I?” She toasts me back and bisects her grin with the sharp lip of her wineglass. ”But it isn’t so I won’t. Not that you care. What brings you to the Fatherland, anyway?” 

An hour later I’m guiding her to her flat like a spotter beside a low tightrope. Twice she falls, floppily busty and loud. The second time she scratches her hand and an orange knuckle bleeds but she doesn’t care to notice. I surprise myself by being afraid of the blood. 

Patiently fingernailing the double-knot-collapsed-into-a-recalcitrant-single-knot lace of her second trainer, I realize I’ll never be able to get hard enough to fuck her, so I decide to talk instead, leaving the trainer where it is, dangling from the edge of her depressing double bed. I extract, from the breast pocket of my blazer, a folded print-out of a story I’d been working on months ago and had forgotten about. Before I can pretend to solicit feedback and read her the excerpt, she’s snoring, an open-mouthed snore like a boy’s impression of half a stadium’s distant ecstasy at the tie-breaking goal. I stand with one knee on the mattress and ejaculate in three thick beams on her widescreen sunglasses, miffed that I cannot read the excerpt to her. 

*** 

Confession. I couldn’t find an outdoor café without a widescreen television.

Chapter One: More than Words

Sylvie’s father was a writer whose time had come and gone, but he was fine with that. He’d invested the windfall with prescience. He had a house in a decent neighborhood in a city that scored with consistent impressiveness on all the quality-of-life surveys worth checking, along with some property a two hours’ drive up north. The property up north featured a rustic cabin he was going to write his comeback in, a cabin near a well he wasn’t allowed to drink out of, overlooked by the aerie of an endangered species of hawk he could do up to ten years in prison for harassing or killing. The working title of the book was More Than Words. The rest of the book would come to him in the cabin. Usually he’d creep around the immaculately decorated house long after Sylvie had gone to bed, stewarding wineglasses and adjusting picture frames, soothed by the hum of the climate control, which made the house feel like an airship in flight over the continent. Sometimes he’d rescue a volume, or two, belonging to one of the sets of collected encyclopediae, open on its face on a settee in the media room, and shepherd it, humming, back up the three polished steps into the tracklit library, pushing with a satisfying resistance the thing into its proper slot. Tonight he just stood by Sylvie’s bedroom door, listening.

Chapter Two: A Perfectly-Judged Death-while-Sailing

Sylvie’s mother had come from a large, self-consciously colorful family that only tolerated exogamy, apparently, because exogamy’s extremest opposite was frowned on by The State. There were the four charismatic brothers who had always looked like men; an eldest sister of chilling beauty, with her infallible eye for long scarves (with their tragic associations) and a father who would have to die before Sylvie’s future mother finally moved out of the house she was born in, a recently painted Georgian mansion with pillars on its porches and Amish hex signs carved in its gable shutters, mocked on all sides by encroaching slum. Sylvie’s mother was the baby of the family and had effectively fended off Sylvie’s claim on the title. Driving by that house, recently, Sylvie’s father felt oddly vindicated by the graffiti all over its pillars and even slowed down in an ill-advised attempt to read some of it, stepping on the accelerator when the first stones ponked at the trunk. Girls who hate their fathers are not, as Sylvie’s father had discovered, the worst, if you aren’t the father. All three sisters, Sylvie’s future mother and the other two; the polyglot and the choreographer; had gotten pregnant within six months of the old man’s perfectly-judged death-while-sailing, and he wondered if there hadn’t been a subconscious race to produce a vessel for the old man’s anticipated return. Sylvie’s future father had first noticed Sylvie’s future mother not for her spectacular pre-Raphaelite hair, but for her terminal t’s, which she tended to over-articulate. Didn’t you want that with some fruit bits?- was the last sentence she’d spoken to him before he finally confessed, waving away the dry mangoes that always put him in mind of floor scraps from a bris, that he wanted her to move out. He hadn’t put it exactly that way. He’d offered to move out and she’d demurred as predicted. She’d joked about Arabs being able to divorce their wives by repeating a certain word three times but couldn’t remember the word and he’d said but we’re not really married and she’d stood suddenly and swept breakfast off the table, very much the prodigy losing a game against someone avowedly casual towards chess. She remembered the word was talaq. He said talaq, talaq, talaq, waving a finger like a wand, both of them laughing. To be honest, she was relieved. She’d said, We’ll let Sylvie decide who she wants to live with; that’s the only civilized thing to do, and Sylvie had chosen him, as predicted. Sylvie’s father and Sylvie’s mother continued sleeping together for quite some time until the night Sylvie’s mother never came home, which soon became the week she never came home.

Chapter Three: Cancer Gets the Girl

He imagined her seeing the country on a wasp-sleek Japanese motorcycle. He reminisced on how they’d met. They’d met in a self-defense class. She was there, looking barefoot and good, in what she called her Chinese pyjamas, because of encroaching slum, while he was there to meet a girl. Or girls. The solidarity of self-declared prey, as his best friend, whose idea it had been to go, had put it. This friend had dozens of good ideas on how to meet girls and yet never met any. From as far back as Sylvie’s future father could remember knowing this friend, this friend had talked like a well-informed cancer patient, with an ease in jargon and the cadences down and really good at reeling off technical specifications, probabilities, outlooks on graded contingencies with this clipped, confident, guardedly optimistic voice. And then he got cancer, causing no break or modulation in the flow of the way he communicated. He found the personality tic of his preferred mode of expression astonishingly well-suited to the circumstance. It’s as though he hit the ground running as far as cancer was concerned, was how Sylvie’s future father had put it to Sylvie’s future mother over a milkshake (this was before the days of fashionable young people drinking recreational coffee) after class. Should he feel guilty? Was the irony a bear, or a bluebird? He’d used his friend’s cancer to get a girl.

Chapter Four: Dreadlock Combover

Before Sylvie’s future father and her future mother got serious about each another, Sylvie’s future father wavered in his intentions towards another, slightly older, woman. Older, but in no way inferior, except, perhaps, in age. The woman was cultured and fine and dressed well in a manner that showed off her jaw, an angular marvel reminiscent of the jaw on the actress Jodie Foster, who was then still young. Whether she wore a ruffled collar, a turtleneck or a collarless t-shirt borrowed from her son, the jaw stood out with its sharp origami folds. He was enamored of this woman and had slept with her several times with memorable results and poetry and expensive baseball-sized sourdough blueberry muffins from her bottomless pantry as rewards. The day before Thanksgiving they attended an avant garde opera in a ceremonial gesture towards the deepening cultural seriousness of both that region of the country and their relationship, standing by coincidence behind her ex-boyfriend in the white-wine-line during intermission. The ex was a balding soi-disant (pre-internet) tech-whiz with blond dreadlocks leftswept over his pink pate like fraying ropes on a castaway ham. Fairly or not, she became repulsive to Sylvie’s future father in her ex-boyfriend’s reflected aura, but there was still an hour of grindingly self-serious and overlit opera to sit through. The weightless warm hand that sought its habitual place on his thigh when the opera commenced found only tensed muscle to rest on. The hand knew before the rest of her body. Sylvie’s future father reflected self-pityingly on an inner recitation of the oral history of his failed romances while two local characters (descendants both of auto workers) in Bauhaus-ish costumes of vaguely animal abstraction cavorted on a minimalist stage, realizing in a panic that the time he lost to the experience would never come refunded, and the woman he decided he loved was elsewhere.

Chapter Five: Ich mag sie nicht in einem Haus / Ich mag sie nicht mit einer Maus

Sylvie’s future father hurried over to Sylvie’s future mother’s house right after the opera, unmindful of the fact that he walked unarmed through encroaching slum. He found himself not only thinking of, but looking at, really looking at, more than one black-or-Afro-American-Negro-of-color at a time, for the first time in his life. He’d never admit this to anyone; not even to a friend with cancer; but the first thing that struck him was the variety. Not only in tint but in weight, gait, hair texture, posture, girth, aura, odor, manner of dress, scale of possible threat (from benign to sinister), range of facial features and sexual attractiveness. Some of the toughest boys were pretty as girls in their white t-shirts and tight jeans. Some of the prettiest women exerted the narcotic allure of the scent of the motherland, smouldering after a bushfire, and he locked eyes with more than one, with their coal-smooth breasts, before being ejected, further in his way down the road, each time, by a playfully dismissive smile. Sylvie’s future mother was on the front porch of the white island of the mansion, drying her gaze-stuffing pre-Raphaelite hair with a shreiking dryer at the end of a chain of three extension cords. Sylvie’s future father tried breathlessly to speak, sucking every other word back in, over the anti-siren song of the dryer. He told Sylvie’s future mother half the truth, which was twice the lie: that he’d suddenly realized that he loved her in the middle of an opera. She asked which opera. She laughed, or, being from a family of high-culture insiders, tittered, and explained. To his initial bafflement, which matured to a rage which hardened into a manifesto, he learned that the libretto of the work he’d squirmed through po-faced for two hours (the second half of which was twice as long as the first) was taken from Doctor Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham. In German. That’s the problem with postmodern so-called Art, he sorrowed. The joke is always on us.

Chapter Six: He decided to write a Book that Everyone could Understand

He decided to write a book that everyone could understand.

.

Like many young prostitutes in Berlin, Azura had a dayjob. Due to reasons too numerous to go into here, the fee a prostitute could typically expect in exchange for the usual requests had withered, over the decades, to a paltry fraction. A young prostitute of today could expect the kind of money a middle-aged whore would have been disappointed to earn in the 1970s.  

Middle-aged whores were now limping up and down the Kurfürstenstrasse, the scarred habitat of tattooed junkies and African exchange students, offering the total inventory of their butchershops for a pittance. Like the feather-sprung, peg-legged pigeons these damp women shared the curb with, time appeared to be dismantling them with extraordinary impatience. There was even a rumor that one of the oldest had been selling off toes and now fingers to pay for bigger implants. 

Four days a week, Azura worked as an intern for a fledgling film production company called Auslandish Films, on Rosenthaler Strasse in the Mitte neighborhood. Her wage as an intern was miniscule…barely “drink money”…but she believed she was getting her foot in the door of the film business. She resembled a film star herself, in a 20^th century way, with a defiant posture that her customers at the brothel interpreted as a challenge. 

Azura’s boss at Auslandish Films was a soft-spoken Afro-American expat named Mr. Jeffries, fluent in German, with an arrogant wife and three cookie-colored children, the oldest, a boy, not much younger than Azura. The boy was trouble, but he rarely showed up at the office. When he did, he made such an exaggerated show of ignoring Azura that it was the same as staring. His hair was in soft slow shoulder-length loops the color of dirty butter, floating in the invisible currents he seemed to move through. His own lazy ocean of Balthazar Jeffries. 

Saturdays were the only days on which Azura worked both jobs, stopping in at Auslandish in the morning (opening up with her own key and code to the alarm) to deal with the overnight mail and important answering machine messages and then riding her scooter far across town to the neighborhood of Charlottenburg, on Blissestrasse, where Lady Luck, her brothel, took up the second and third floors of a grand old building that had dodged aerial bombs during the war. 

On the Saturday morning in question Azura inadvertently intercepted a private message from Balthazar Jeffries to Mr. Jeffries on the answering machine. It was the last message on the tape and was so long, in fact, that the tape ran out in the middle of a sentence. She played the message more than once, hugging herself in the cozy gloom of the office with its steel shutters still down over the windows and sun slashing through like a razor. She recognized immediately Balthazar’s deep deep voice. 

“Hi, hello, this message is for the big man, the guy who knows everything. Yeah, Mr. George Washington Jeffries the third, now that’s a name, isn’t it? I don’t think you really want to listen at this little message with your co-workers in the room, George, so I suggest you give them all a nice long lunch break. You see that pause button? I suggest you press it.”  

He went on in a far-ranging monolog to say horrible things about his dark-skinned father Mr. Jeffries. There were almost no gaps between the words in his Gregorian chant of a diatribe and Azura knew from experience which drug was involved. Balthazar hinted more than once that the message was a suicide note. Tell Mom and Becky and Gladys and so forth. Azura realized that she had to come to a decision as to whether or not to delete the message before re-activating the security system and locking up shop and driving across town to the brothel. If the message was all merely the inhuman animus of a drug in oration, Balthazar would be profoundly relieved to discover later that his poor father had never received it.  

Azura dwelled on her decision, and the implications of her decision, the rest of the rainy afternoon in the brothel. 

The truth is that the most lucrative services weren’t about sex at all. Azura’s colleague Lilly, for example, had consented to an incision (local anesthetic) about four inches long, in her abdomen, not far from the left kidney, which the medical student who considered doing this a refined pleasure then carefully sutured, returning a week later to undo the threads (local anesthetic again) and probe gingerly, with a sterilized implement, the smiling wound. For this Lilly received two payments, the first much larger. And Azura herself had once complied with a request to make dirt discreetly into a chasteningly expensive triple-gusseted flapover briefcase. Real alligator. A perfect little shit like a milkdud. This month’s gas, water, phone and electricity bills all neatly despatched with a grunt. 

All this happened in the neutrally-decorated chambers of Lady Luck, a converted gerontological clinic, where Azura paid rent for a smaller room overlooking the courtyard. In the courtyard twisted a chestnut tree whose flowered arms reached up towards her window, nagging her about the past, wagging its finger when she bent over the little bed or mounted it on all fours with her face to the window. 

Every weekend during her happy childhood, Azura had slept at her grandmother’s. Some nights she’d sit up in her little bed crying. Her Nana was a woman from a small country of ritual and habit who only took her hair down when it was bedtime, before her prayers and after her milk and a magazine, and she climbed the stairs to the room where the ceiling slanted down towards the window by Azura’s small bed and asked her Azura, with the militant compassion of a saint, why she was crying.  

-Weil der Neandertaler nicht in den Himmel kommen kann, the child answered, with a gulp after every word. Because the cavemen can’t get into heaven.

-Say again? 

-The cavemen, she repeated, miserable. You said they were born before Christ Nana so how can they can ever be angels and go to Heaven?    

-No, no, cooed Nana, softened by the truth, stroking Azura’s forehead with a trembling hand and confronting her blunder in this fine-cut grief. Bible stories were always distressing for younger children, who hadn’t yet learned to bend logic. In her diaphanous nightgown and shocking dark tumult of hair Nana resembled an excluded angel herself, cooing how the Christian God would never be so unfair like that, Azura. The good cavemen, they will go to Heaven. Don’t worry. Go to sleep. 

-Even if they didn’t know it was a sin to kill Nana? 

-Even so, said Azura’s grandmother, with somewhat less certainty in her voice but the persistent desire that the child should go peacefully to her dreams. She who was given to fevers and days on end of pretty speechlessness. Mother a stone and father an old suit in the closet.  

The next night Nana was drinking her milk and re-reading a magazine (the hypnotic offense of raw youth in proud clothing; the communists would never have allowed it) when again she heard the prayer-like murmur of abject misery in the attic. Up the stairs she climbed, lifting the hem of her nightgown with one hand and clutching the candle holder with the other. 

-The cavemen, Azura gulped. 

-They’re in Heaven. Don’t you remember? The cavemen are in Heaven near God. 

-Yes, answered Azura, but how can cavemen be happy in Heaven? They can’t talk with the others. They aren’t wearing good clothing! The others will treat them like animals Nana! How will the cavemen be happy?   

Nana had to admit that it was difficult to imagine cavemen with angel wings flying around a standard Heaven, brandishing their clubs.   

-The Christian God is wise, she responded, after thinking a while with her eyebrows so high they were straining. About such a problem he’s already thought, before creation, even. He has given the cavemen their own Heaven and there they are happy. 

-There’s a caveman Heaven? 

-Yes. 

-And no one else can go there?  

-No one else can go there, confirmed Nana. To point and laugh, she added, smoothing Azura’s astonishing hair. No one.    

Rainy days brought out the worst kind of customer, for it was usually the type of person who would otherwise have been occupied, enjoying the weather in a convertible with a beautiful amateur had the sun been willing. She preferred the business of the damp white cast-offs who skulked in out of a glorious day, mocked by the splendors of existence. They were very quick and predictable and rarely had the money to propose something frightening. But of course such visits only covered a few hours of overhead.

On rainy days, as Azura’s colleague Lilly put it, the snakes use the staircase. Worst of all were middle-aged men with perfect bodies who mentioned the price they were willing to pay before describing the service they intended to pay for. The good news/bad news technique of the novice oncologist or seasoned sadist.

Azura was curled on the bed, gazing through the rain-melted window at a sky like cold dishwater and dishwater’s buried shapes, recovering from her last visit, toying with the idea of opening the window to let the bad feelings out. It was suppertime and she was daydreaming about Balthazar Jeffries. She daydreamed a knock on the door; she daydreamed putting on a bathrobe and telling whoever it was to wait.

She’d cross the room in three strides and sit at the vanity, the light from the illuminated mirror the only light in the rain-darkened room, and reconstruct the impenetrable mask of her makeup. Once, a customer had pressed her prone to the bed with his knee between her shoulder blades with such force while he pulled himself to completion that a perfect portrait of her face like a shroud of Turin remained on the pillowcase when he freed her to breathe again. Or, yes, more like that Munch painting.

She’d answer the door and like a horrible miracle and a gift there would stand Balthazar Jeffries, angered by rain and shivering off mud from the riverbed.

Grill smoke drifted like chalk drawings of tropical fish on the darkening air. A sudden calm suspended everything…the falling sun; Frisbees at apogee; the tiny crucifix of a jet dangling from the string of its vapor trail…in the mellow aspic of future memory. They all prepared to listen to Gregg read, conscious of the fact that many years into the unknowable they’d look back on this moment with intense affection. Affection for the city and the era and their former selves. Eric, Dave, Andy, Bill and Eric grinned open-mouthed with anticipated pleasure, their shadows long, as Gregg cleared his throat and lifted a finger of emphasis. All of Roosevelt Park, along with their future selves, hushed for a moment to listen. 

 “ ‘Two decades ago, with her sculpted features, Alaia-friendly figure, and a languid drawl that spoke of nannies and finishing schools, this rangy, patrician beauty (her uncle was a prime minister of Belgium) was perfectly cast to play artist’s muse.’” He peered up from under the corners of his tinfoil hat and affected a lisp. “‘They were a very, very glamorous couple,’ recalls the artist Peter Blah Blah, ‘He was this powerhouse of creativity and bravado and interest and talent. She was so intimidating to look at; a camera couldn’t capture her outrageous beauty.’” He closed the magazine and waited a beat.  “Now, I ask you…”  

Andy said, “Kinda makes you see the world through Charlie Manson’s eyes, doesn’t it?” 

Dave adjusted his tinfoil hat, which suffered from being a hasty construction, and said, “And for that I’m grateful.” He sipped beer from his family-size jug of Diet Sprite. Gregg handed Dave the Vogue and Dave put the sloshy jug down between his knees and paged through the magazine with one eyebrow raised and nostrils flared, a patented Dave expression. He passed the magazine to Bill, who would have preferred the jug. 

“Whatever happened to the peasant class, anyway? Why don’t we hear from any of them on stuff like this? Aren’t we long overdue for widespread rebellion?” 

“Revolution these days,” responded Andy, as Bill passed the Vogue to him, “is atomized, permanent and absorbed by the system. If we could somehow organize all the yuppie muggings that take place during one year in this country and concentrate them into one day and location, that would be your uprising right there. But the revolutionaries are all lone wolves now and they tend to have crack habits.” 

Eric reached for the Vogue. “Where did you find this thing?” 

“Wait,” said Bill, “You mean even bloody insurrection suffers from the same crisis of hot-dog individualism now plaguing the NBA?”  

“Gregg got a subscription for Christmas,” said Andy. Andy took off his tinfoil hat and looked at it with some interest. “Hey, am I just imagining it or are my thoughts a little…I don’t know…less staticky while I’m wearing this?” He put it back on top of his head. 

Gregg, with his perfect deadpan, said, “Now that you mention it.” 

“I don’t know about less staticky thoughts,” said the other Eric, “but I’ve had an erection since I put mine on…and that was at 5 in the morning.”  

“And they said he’d never screw again!” 

“Who said I’d never screw again?” 

“They.” 

“Oh, them.” 

“The same know-it-alls who said Christopher Reeve would never walk again, I presume?” 

Eric swatted Eric with the rolled up Vogue and Eric snatched it away and swatted Eric back and everyone laughed. A bumblebee lobbed over their loose circle in a wobbly arc as though it weighed a ton, and a beautiful girl in cut-offs and a vintage The Police t-shirt, oblivious in headphones, intersected the bumblebee’s flight path on her way to the water fountain. Eric and Eric had to twist on their spots to see what everyone else was gawping at. The denim lobes of her cut-offs appeared to inflate as she lowered her mouth to the spigot and she pulled her hair out of the way and slurped. 

Dave said, “Hey, in all seriousness, how are those burgers coming?” 

Bill crawled over to the hibachi on two knees and one hand, holding his tinfoil hat to his curly head with the other. He said, “The burger that’s directly over the one hot coal is getting there. The others appear to be incubating salmonella to varying degrees according to their distance from the one hot coal.” 

Dave chugged from his Diet Sprite bottle again and said, “I always thought that was the tastiest sounding food poisoning, you know? Salmonella. Salmonella spread, with pimento. I’d buy some of that.” 

Gregg said, “Let’s face it, it’s a major setback that our manliest member couldn’t make it this year.” 

Bill chuckled. “Manliest member.” 

“Mark,” said Dave, wistfully, “was, indeed, an idiot savant of the hibachi briquette fire.” 

“Is hibachi a Mexican word or a Japanese word?” 

“A skill he picked up as a pyromaniacal adolescent of the upper-Midwest, no doubt.” 

“It’s a Japanese word that refers to a heating device but not a grill, actually. The correct word is shichirin, but that’s too difficult for the average American consumer to pronounce, so they were marketed as hibachi.” 

“I love being forced to learn things.” 

“I told Mark he could bring Sadie if he wants.” 

“Well, the funny thing is it’s actually an ancient Chinese technology.”

“He obviously didn’t want.” 

“Will somebody stop this guy?” 

“Maybe he was afraid we’d covet her.” 

“Or frighten her with these hats.” 

“You asked and I told.” 

“Sadie. What kind of name is that, anyway? Is she a retired rhumba teacher?” 

“Next time I won’t ask.” 

“No, but I bet she refers to sexual intercourse as ‘relations’.” 

“He says they want to have kids.” 

“Quick, before the population falls under seven billion.” 

“Anyone ever notice that the blink-rate of a baby is only something like once every three minutes? My sister’s kid…” 

Bill jumped up and said, “Okay, who am I now?” He folded his upper lip under itself, exposing his teeth, and stuck his thumbs into his armpits, but before he could finish the impression a very large black woman loomed, wearing camouflage pants and a hooded black sweatshirt which presented a picture of Albert Einstein with his pierced tongue sticking out. She was large not only in the sense of fat but of tall as well and physically intimidating. She spoke with such abrupt loudness that Bill flinched, his upper lip still folded under itself. 

“Is this the thirteenth annual Delmore Schwartz memorial picnic?” She gestured with the classifieds section of the daily paper. 

“You advertized?” hissed Eric to Gregg. 

“I thought it would be fun.” 

“Well here’s your fun.” 

Bill said, “Yes it is.” 

She gestured at Bill’s tinfoil hat. “Is that supposed to be funny?” Before he could respond she added, “Is mental illness funny? Is suicide funny? Is the suicide of a gifted 53 year old poet grappling with the debilitating effects of an untreatable mental illness funny?” 

Gregg, with spell-breaking sang froid, said, “I’d prefer to conduct this interview in writing, if you don’t mind,” and Eric, Dave, Andy, Bill and Eric all laughed, grateful that he’d shown them the way. 

Piotr had never seen such a small human being up close. Stretched straight from the balls of her feet to the crown of her skull, she couldn’t have been much more than two feet long. If Piotr had a ruler or a yardstick he would have measured her. Measuring her precisely, with scientific instruments (in no way expensive or otherwise intimidating but stringently reliable) seemed important, somehow. He pictured himself recording the measurements in a log of some kind and the fantasy was immensely comforting. Piotr in a white lab coat and a clipboard, licking the pencil tip and inscribing digits with professional detachment in his tiny, neat script. The hum and whirr of machines in the background and the bright white blur of a lab. Obsequious assistants consulting with Piotr in hushed tones. Excuse the intrusion, Professor Piotr, but can you look at this data for a moment? Piotr the famous seeker of truth, fair in his dealings with underlings but impatient with the time-wasting niceties of politic deportment. Yes, that would have been him had he not become the he he was instead.

He looked around the room and mentally toured the rest of the flat and tried to imagine, objectively, being a stranger and guessing the profession of the person who’d choose to live there. He couldn’t, however…couldn’t imagine what a stranger would guess about the inhabitant of such a dwelling by the clues of the dwelling’s contents…and he realized what was throwing him off.

The baby on the blanket on the floor in the middle of the room. Did Piotr, in his library, have some sort of measuring device, or a straight-edged object of a known length? He used up a certain amount of time on that question, without, however, getting up and venturing into the library to settle the matter. Instead of moving from the spot he peered out the little window over his bed, and guessed from the quality of light on the wall opposite that it was late afternoon. Which would mean he’d been staring at the baby for hours. Then he had an amusing thought: yardstick? The last time he’d seen a yardstick was in grammar school! Had he known anyone in all his adult life to have possessed a yardstick? A bright orange yardstick for measuring what, exactly?  

He stared at the baby but the baby did not stare back and it seemed to him that she was strangely unobservant of her surroundings, glazed eyes scanning with a sparrow’s nervous methodology a few cubic feet of the middle distance. Staring vacuously into space whereas Piotr, had their positions been reversed, would have been without a doubt immensely interested in the giant kneeling on the floor nearby. If Piotr had been a baby in Piotr’s room, the last thing he’d do is take his eyes off Piotr, or any adult, or any living thing bigger than a fly, for that matter. Was her obliviousness the natural arrogance of the baby in its exalted ignorance, or the sign of a subtle defect? Some sort of recent trauma, possibly. Weren’t babies famous for wiggling and crying and generally making noise? This one simply lay on her back, breathing. The rise and fall of her ruddy little chest. Breathing and scanning the middle distance with both hands balled in fists and held to her mouth. Like an old woman in shock after witnessing a catastrophe.  

If you squinted and forgot you were looking at a baby it was easy to imagine that in all of her soft smooth heat and pinkishness she was some adult’s large-ish, heavy, temporarily-removed organ. Especially in that throbbing, docile state. She probably thought of herself that way, in fact, and was still in denial about external existence, the harsh lights and cold dry sounds, waiting to be stuffed back in and hooked back up to cozy wet infinities. Piotr was dying to go to the toilet but he dare not leave the room. He rocked a little on his haunches. 

A breeze pushed at the curtain and he remembered that it was spring, albeit in a tentative way. Spring this year was like a machine with a faulty switch, a machine that sputters before coming fully on, mixing bits of winter, still, with the flicker of warm days Piotr had been so desperate for. He’d barricaded himself in his flat November’s onset, ordering food to be delivered every Monday and reading his books morning, noon and night while the weather clawed at the city, leaving white scabs on the streets and bleaching the days of purpose. He’d passed the months in bookish hibernation, and what he longed for now was a park bench, some late-morning sunlight, a warm breeze laden with the sweet obscenity of flowers. Girls would traipse by in their short skirts and invincible legs and Piotr, as he did every year, would distinguish himself by not leering.  

The baby had a swirl of thick black hair on her head like a calligrapher’s sable brush laden with ink. That would indicate Asian, or Mediterranean, parentage. Possibly.  Piotr felt the sudden urge to curse his luck: stuck in a room with a helpless creature relying on him for everything but the air it filled its small lungs with, what could he hope to accomplish? He was no longer even free enough to void his bladder, a freedom the scruffiest dog takes for granted!  

Piotr sighed the sigh that meant that work on the novel would be indefinitely postponed. The need to urinate was another matter entirely. Piotr and the baby knew this both.

“That was great.”

“Did you really…?”

“I really liked it.”

“You’re not just saying that?”

“I’m not just saying that.”

“Me too.”

“Did you ever think…?”

“God no.”

“But I’m relieved.”

“You are?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“We both…that is, neither of us….”

“Of course.”

“You know what I mean?”

“I think so. But, really. I’m serious. It was quite…”

“Go on.”

“I was just going to say it was this unexpected intensity in an otherwise…”

“Yes.”

“Explosive.”

“Like…”

“Like the sun exploding.”

“Yes.”

“Like the sun exploding behind my eyes.”

“I’m still…”

“Me too. Shaking.”

“No guilt?”

“None.”

“That’s good.”

“Good. That’s not…”

“I know. Good is hardly…”

“I just hope it’s not. You know. You know? That we never…?”

“Do it again?”

“Exactly.”

“It’s more than that now.”

“But what will we tell people?”

“You won’t believe this…”

“But you only just thought of it now. I know, I know; same here. I was so…”

“Obviously. We were too…”

“It’s understandable.”

“It’s perfectly understandable.”

“We’ll say she fell.”

On the centennial of the passage of the American Civil Rights Act of 1964, an act of Congress made the word ‘race’ obsolete and the concept that the obsolete word represented illegal. “The very concept of ‘race’ itself,” stated the document, known as the Personhood Bill, “is racist.” The replacement word was Somatype and it was determind that humankind breaks down into 22 major Somatypes, each Somatype divisible further into a dozen-plus-one S-Inflections, each of these S-Inflections either an “A” or a “B” of its kind,  and each “A” or “B” a possible positive or a negative, according to specific markers in the genome. It was hoped that the unwieldy terminology would inhibit casual distinction-drawing in a kind of inverse of the way in which the intuitive simplicity of the original system had been a runaway success in framing and disseminating the uneducated hatred of diversity. Not a year later, in time for the semi-centennial of the inauguration of the First Earth Parliament of 202 countries (minus China), the Somatype standard was adopted as global law. 

Another century plus forty years after that, Siegfried Olubodun was told by his nearest rival at the University of
Hamburg’s department of Tempanthropy that the only reason he’d got the research grant was because he was black.  

About Siegfried’s blackness there was no debating; you rarely saw a face that black in Europe. Siegfried’s blackness was only marginally less rare than the famed whiteness of a family (blue-eyed, blond) who lived in a northern suburb of the city and whose estate had become a zoo, practically; people came from all over Europe to see the throw-backs in their natural habitat (they were auto mechanics, dynastically; half of the 80 hectares of the family compound was given over to garages and test-tracks). Siegfried tried to remember their name. The Ziegeldorfs. Siegfried was ancestrally Nigerian to an unusually single-minded degree. Whereas the Ziegeldorfs were viewed in Europe with great curiousity and a bemusement bordering on distaste, the Oluboduns were sometimes suspected of reproductive fascism. The Ziegeldorfs had been, perhaps, as driven by self-preservation as by greed in the opening of their compound to the public. But the Oluboduns were not so many in number and were spread among a handful of baronial flats overlooking the Alster. 

By the time of Siegfried’s thirteenth birthday, human Somatypes had dropped from 22 to 15 and, as a result of cheap travel and zero borders (but one) and the lure of exogamy, the number was still falling. Practically everyone on earth these days looked like a somewhat lighter or darker Brazillian. With the notable exception of the Chinese, who had long-ago absorbed Japan, the two Koreas, and much of Malaysia and who were exactly half of the global population. Africa (with its population density of one human per three hundred square kilometers) was still pretty dark but only in the range of bland toffees.  There was something his father always said but he could not remember.

“Selbstverstaendlich,” said Siegfried. Naturally. Speaking German, of course, was considered an elitist affectation. But sometimes Siegfried couldn’t help himself. 

“Ich wollte damit keinen Ärger machen,” I meant no harm in saying it, countered Marta, shrugging, but Siegfried suspected that Marta’s aggression (not the first time) was her clumsy way of flirtating. No wonder the population figures in Europe were falling again. Perhaps it was on that topic, the thing his father had said that Siegfried could not seem to remember. Though it ticked on the rim of his memory.

“They can’t very well expect someone with beige skin and European facial features to infiltrate the living quarters of Igbo-identified field slaves of early 18th century North America, can they?” 

“But there was mixing even then.” 

“Not so much in evidence among the field slaves. House servants were another class entirely and my research is on the topic of field slaves, Fraulein Sauerwald.” 

“It’s a major grant. You’re lucky.” 

Siegfried lifted his chin. “I don’t, as you know, believe in luck.” 

“But perhaps,” said Marta, with an unreadable pout, “you will need it.” 

“Excuse me?” He touched his codpiece. 

“Something could happen.”   

“I’m sure you’ll agree that ‘something could happen’ in the faculty dining hall, as well.” Siegfried curled his lip with bravado and placed the call confirming his receipt of the notice of his having won the grant. He pressed the patch on his throat and spoke clearly. In a flash he remembered and the enormity of it filled his mind to bursting not only with the implanted knowledge of his era but the weight and roar of future history.

Like Prometheus…

Even as Marta, with her lustrous blue-black hair, arms folded (the aureole of the left nipple lurid against the bisque mound of its breast; an allergy; it was itching like mad) looked on with an impossible mixture of longing and resentment, Siegfried, along with all of his belongings there at Uni…family photos, clothing, equipment, nametags and gene-keyed snacks in the faculty locker…vanished. With no sense of motion, Marta, too, vanished, and her haircut changed. She re-materialized on the other side of the campus and formed in the midst of a conversation with a PsySoc Prof who, by appearance, might’ve been her cousin. She was not surprised by Siegfried’s disappearance; she’d never heard of him. Nor had anyone.  

That’s how time travel works, since no object can occupy two timestreams in one universe. The only options are A) sending a duplicate, or B) removing the original from one timestream completely before inserting it in another. A virtual googlebit calculator in quantum n-space is responsible for keeping track of (and eventually reversing) the transaction. The process is funded by shaving a billionth of a second from the very end of all Time.  As a military option it made the oxygen fission bomb seem like a toy in comparison.

The first thing that met him was the smell. The smells. He hit 19th century North America vomiting…he staggered and fell to his knees in a sunlit bush, vomitting his guts out and scratching his arms and chest on the brambles. The sweat, bad breaths and long reek of the open latrine hit him like a seething kiss. Or perhaps it was a side-effect of the massive dose of thought-modifiers he had taken in order to mask his true intent. 
 

“Why don’t you put that away before you do something you regret?”

“You mean you’ll regret.”

“I mean both of us.”

“Have I already mentioned that one of the things that always pissed me off about you is how you like putting words in my mouth?”

“Okay, I’ll regret. I’ll regret it.”

“Think so? Only for a moment or two. And then you won’t give a damn. I promise.”

“That’s not funny.”

“Was I trying to be?”

“Maybe I don’t know you as well as I thought.”

“Maybe not.”

“Can I at least put on my jacket? I’m cold.”

“Will your feelings be hurt if I say that your comfort isn’t my priority at this particular juncture in time?”

“I need my glasses.”

“No you don’t.”

“I can’t see where I’m going.”

“You don’t need to. I’ll say duck when there’s a low branch. Trust me.”

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

“Is it much further?”

“Patience patience.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Oh wow: that’s perfect. Perfection itself. You don’t remember? It wasn’t long ago that that was my line. Why are you doing this? Remember? Hey, don’t tell me you don’t remember because that would really piss me off. Just joking. Funny thing is how not pissed off I am, to be honest. It’s all suddenly very clear to me, you know? Not like before. Before I was a mess. But this new me is just like boom boom boom, from A to B to C, just do it. Very matter of fact and in control is how I would put it. The first day of the rest of my life and so forth. I sound like a motivational tape.”

“Have you been drinking?”

“Oh my God how glad I’ll be to never have to hear that question again!”

“I’m not allowed to worry about you any more?”

“Keep walking.”

“Just asking.”

“See, in all fairness, I think you’d better save all that worry for yourself? Or haven’t you noticed that things have taken a definite turn for the worse during the past forty five minutes of your life?”

“So bitter.”

“So enjoying this.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“I don’t believe that. You want to hear the strange part? I mean the really strange part that deserves to be in a movie?”

“Okay.”

“I dreamed all this. All of it. All of it. But before. You know what I mean? When things were good, so-called, I dreamed this, exactly how it’s happening, and I woke up in tears…maybe you don’t. You don’t remember? You said, hey, what’s wrong, but I wouldn’t tell you, I was afraid to fill you in on the gory details because I was afraid you’d, uh, you know, think I was a little crazy and I didn’t want to make a bad impression and that used to be so important to me, didn’t it, making a good impression and bullshit of that nature, which is why, you know, blah blah blah. Anyway.You tried your best to pry it out but you couldn’t. I wouldn’t. All I would say was I had this terrible terrible nightmare and it freaked me out because it was so real. And you know what you said? Seriously?”

“Okay.”

“Oh, it was beautiful. Trust me, I heard violins. You said, maybe nightmares are the subconscious mind’s way of showing us how good life really is.”

“I said that?”

“Indeed you did. Ironic, wouldn’t you say?”

“How so?”

“Keep walking.”

“I just want you to explain to me what’s so ironic about it.”

“I said keep walking.”

“No.”

“Don’t make me.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Turn around.”

“You’re nothing.”

“What did you say?”

“I said you’re nothing.”

“That’s what you said in the dream.”

The car is a yacht. They are sailing under the dripping roof of the night’s weird cave in a black Cadillac convertible and he is freezing. She can’t remember the procedure for getting the dirty old rag top back up. She doesn’t know the year and wouldn’t even know the make if Cadillac weren’t in her mind a word like Hoover or Xerox or Biro, a brand name jumped up to a category through common consent. She has heard her husband say about a dozen times in twice as many years that the car is nineteen feet long, that’s all she knows. She feels lucky enough that the keys turned out to be in her purse and not in his pocket as she had initially believed. Her fur coat of course insulates her against feeling too bad about the top being down but her new friend, in his baseball cap and thin jacket, collar up, is on the brink of pneumonia.

“I never could stand the look of Berlin in the sunshine,” she says, “but at night she’s a real doll, don’t you think? Tragic ‘n sexy. Kinda like a teenage welfare mother in Old Tijuana.” She pronounces Tijuana correctly. You can just see her flirting with a Mexican pool boy. You can see her holding out a ten dollar bill with gentle insistence, offering a leaf to a fawn.

She looks much better with the yellow wig (now stowed in the glove compartment) off and her hair turns out to be a pearly bob raked by the wind’s dark fingers, thin as champagne but luminous and full of bounce, snapping back into shape at every available opportunity of stop light. Her facelift is a cartoonist’s allusion to speed, it looks intrepid, the way the corners of her eyes and mouth sweep back as she leans forward over the wheel, driving far-sightedly, but she’s a handsome woman with a softening jawline and a debutante’s nose, upturned, decorative, a master’s knifework. Her ability to snap back into sobriety in order to drive indicates that her husband is an incorrigibly boyish drunk and that she is the best kind of mommy, countering her little boy’s missteps at every turn. Flat-chested older women like her almost always have men who play the role of only child to the hilt, it seems to him. Runnels of the remains of a quick drizzle play across the Cadillac’s black hood like cold sweat.

“Where are we going?” he asks. But he doesn’t care.

“We’re escaping, doll,” she answers. “Can’t you feel it? Gravity slipping away?”

“Don’t you have to be back on the Queen Mary in the morning?”

Good joke. She laughs way deep down in her throat: a coughing growl. The kind of sound you make when your husband struts forth in his leopard-print undies. “We’re not complete tourists here, you know. As a matter of fact,” she says, with a half-hearted attempt at a posh British accent, “We keep a house in Grünewald. Little stone thing surrounded by trees. Care to see it?”

“Why not.”

“That’s the spirit.”

“Do you know that your husband offered to suck my cock for me at the party?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. He’s going through a phase of late.”

“It doesn’t bother you?”

“Not half as much as it would if I caught him picking his nose. You’re not a nose picker, are you?”

She asks him to keep a hand on the steering wheel while she retools her lipstick in the rearview.

“Much much better.”

She reaches across the armrest and the rain-beaded expanse of the red leather seat and rests a hand on his biceps, where it remains until she needs it again to hit the clicker and make a drastic left turn over a long iron communist-era drawbridge. The tires hum as they cross the drawbridge and the moon is a saucer and the saucer’s teacup is smashed in the water, smashed china, lilting away in shards upstream. It’s a scary old bridge that implies they are entering an earlier, unhappier era as they cross it towards a horizon either of low clouds or black trees. They cross it and see industrial fields left and right…near and far ruins, a factory gaping rotten in the grass, squatting on a zipper of rusted tracks, staggered away from the tree-lined road, harrassed and destroyed not by triumphant capitalism but by diligent little boys with their slingshots.

“No children?”

“Do I look like a breeder? My husband is enough.”

He can see that she had once been very striking, if that’s the word for it, and that she’d never been fat, or poor, or forced to beg for any favors. Her confidence strikes him as a kind of wisdom, and he wants to pose questions to her as he would to an oracle. But he just can’t think one up, or fix on one long enough to body it forth in words. He is tired and cold and not averse to having his cock sucked at some point but not counting on it, either. Sometimes it’s just nice being looked at.

“When I was coming along, it was always a matter of pretending that the guy was better at stuff than you were…this elaborate charade of deferring to the male as the default superior in everything but homemaking. God. My husband was the first man I ever met who was, in truth, truly better at some things than I was…which freed me to admit that I was better at the other things…he wasn’t threatened by that. You know what I mean? What a relief! But of course he has his quirks. Germans seem funny enough to us anyway, don’t they?”

She asks, gingerly, “Have you ever been with an older woman?” and he laughs so hard and long at this that she turns as red as a silver dish of Thanksgiving cranberries on her grandmother’s white embroidered table cloth in 1957.

.

    There was a bear stretched to its full standing height, perhaps even up on its tiptoes, shaking the branch of a tree (she wished she could say exactly what kind of a tree but being a city kid she couldn’t) for whatever reason that would undoubtedly make utter sense to a bear, but the thing about the bear that was truly noteworthy (and made her assume at first she was dreaming) was its tee shirt. It was easily legible in the early morning light, the letters (black on white cotton) arranged in three fat lines like a stoner’s haiku bulging across the barrel contour of the animal’s chest: That Which Does Not /Kill Me /Pisses Me Off.

Because of the animal’s great height (she wasn’t a wizz at estimating lengths and distances but it had to be nine feet tall) the dirty tee shirt appeared to be a cut-off and gave the bear, with its exposed belly (coated in rills of articulated grime like tire-ridged curbsnow), a vaguely gay appearance. Not that there’s anything wrong with a gay bear. She’d have to get off her own belly and climb out of her sleeping bag and peek from a better angle to determine the bear’s sex with any certainty and common sense advised against it. Not that curiosity wasn’t berating her with its distant, cat-killing, megaphone voice.

Her little cafeteria argument with Aaron Waldauer about bears and periods suddenly came back to haunt her with a vengeance that would have had the brat in hysterics if he had but known. A lingering fingernail of moon was visible behind the bear’s ear and that plus several rindy clouds and the thickening spume of a vapor trail made Zoey think of debris in a swimming pool and the time she’d spotted a ring on the blue tiles at the bottom of the deep end and frog-kicked down to scoop it up and bring it to the surface like a pearl diver. Only to present it to Judy wrapped in lavender tissue and have Judy lose it.

Mom (who’d announced long ago that referring to her as “Judy” was perfectly acceptable, though Zoey, after toying with the option for a day or two, had reverted to the standard with a shiver of wise relief) was in one of her comas. Screwed so deep into the mass of her dreamless sleep and exhaling through a mouth like a sprung valise full of gold the rich breath of Marlboro and Merlot she reeled jealously back with the suction of her chain-dragging snore. Zoey decided against waking her. She was glad they’d been good campers: their bloody garbage was deposited in a proper receptacle downwind. She also hoped that the air horn, the primordial fire extinguisher and the Taser (on loan from a possessive Mounty) were all where she thought they were (except the fire extinguisher, which was in the car) in the tent.

A shower of pine needles from the agitated branch glittered in the bright air like a static display that continued to function a while after the bear (satisfied, frustrated or simply bored) ambled off and the bear hadn’t been gone for five minutes before Zoey began doubting what she had clearly seen and wouldn’t remember again until coming to in a fog in her flower-choked hospital suite after the mastectomy.

About a week after I went blind, my friend Dorman dropped me off on a bench in Roosevelt Park, just exactly as he’d done the day before, so I could sun myself for three hours until the end of his shift. It was Thursday. Dorman said, “Now don’t you go anywhere until I get back, you impetuous kid,” and patted me on the head. He crushed the sharp grass with his boots as he climbed the slope to the sidewalk that ringed the park.

“What am I looking at?” I called over my shoulder.  I could just feel him standing there with his hands in his pockets, peering at the back of a blind head. The cigarette batting up and down in the corner of his mouth as he spoke. “Some gay guys playing volleyball.  Asian yuppie trying to teach a bulldog to sit.” 

I was partial to Roosevelt Park in part because of the courthouse bell tower looming over the park’s western corner and just as Dorman opened his mouth and said, “Well, adios,” the bell began bonging. It was two o’clock. By the time the bells were silent Dorman was gone, scrunched back down into his crappy little diesel-burning car with a plan to return at shift’s end.

I’d never truly appreciated the totality of the experience of sitting in sunlight on a late-spring day before the blindness. Less and less did I think of light as light and more and more as heat; I thought of it also as pressure and I knew that if the blindness kept up long enough the time would come when I could smell it and taste it too. I’d sniff the gray of an overcast day and the last gasp of twilight would reek achy blue. I sat there in my sunglasses, arms folded over my chest, face tilted towards the hum of that perilously huge and proximate star, inhaling it. I repositioned my head in one way or another, pretending to be watching things.

The sun felt so good. I could feel the smack of red palms on dirty white volleyball flesh, the green grunt (in a bouquet of gasps) preceding the smack each time and the grass-ripping skirmish of earthfall,  then pell-mells of yelps in pursuit of the ball to the opposite side of the net. And I could hear, at a forty-five degree angle to my right, at a distance of maybe thirty yards, metered out in human barks: “Sit.”

“Sit.”

“Sit.”

And I’m sure I could tell from the timbre of his voice, with liberal horror, that the person speaking was Asian. Dorman had told me as much; “Asian yuppie trying to teach a bulldog to sit.” So it’s possible that I’d colored the sound of his voice with the taint of prior knowledge. But he did. He sounded Asian. In the same way that every Public Service Announcement that I have ever heard on the radio in which a solemn majestic voice with a hint of high rasp in it has asked me not to litter or has asked me to give or has reminded me to remember Earth Day was a Native American voice and I didn’t have to be told that. Do I have to be told when an operator at the other end of a 411 call is black? So can’t I likewise detect the special quality of an Asian voice? Is it more racist to say that most Asians have a certain quality of voice than it is to say that most Asians have straight black hair?

Once every twenty minutes or so there came the cavernous flush of the public toilet behind and to the left, up the slope, beside the sidewalk. I could taste it, too, that deli tang of piss. There’s the brownorange of saturated vintage and the greeny-yellow of the day’s fresh pressed. Men like to piss outside the toilet bunker too, of course, much like those who helpfully toss their trash near a litter basket and the odor from such deposits has the sharpness of thumbtacks.

Holding my arm, Dorman had shepherded me to the toilet for one last drain of the bladder before he could take me down to the bench and park me here for three serenely helpless hours. Some lug was planted like a marksman at a stall already as Dorman and I had entered, arms linked, and I could feel the lug’s neck bones crack at us as his shoeleather flexed in the twist of his weightshift and his subsequent homophobe’s sniff and exit. Dorman tensed defensively but being blind I was far beyond embarrassment. Safe in my pod.

I had gone blind on a Friday. During the early hours. I wonder if a certain dream caused it. I sprawled there in bed for the longest time with a menacing sense of un-rightness. It was as dark in that room as I had ever seen on Earth but the noise that blew in on a temperate breeze through the window above the bed was the bright hustle and quarrel and stutter and screech of a wide-awake beast called a city.

“Sit.”

That bulldog was having a hard time paying attention to his master’s command to sit. Was it just not sitting at all, the bulldog, or sitting and standing again too quickly to constitute a proper sit? Was the guy pushing the dog’s flatulent rump down with every command? Was it a comically disobedient dog, with floppy jowls, peering up cutely from under a droopy brow? Or was it a bad seed, this dog? Destined to disappoint?

A funny effect of the blindness, which became evident after the initial panic subsided, after the first screaming-into-a-pillow day was out of my sytem, was the sexiness of it. I’d noticed a similar syndrome while travelling. I’d come into a new city, unpack a suitcase in a hotel room and develop a boner, an erection of adolescent persistence. Probably the possibilities implied by a maid-fingered bed in a virgin space, the thrill of knowing that anything can happen in a strange room simply because nothing had not happened there yet. And so it was in the Black Hotel Room of my blindness, my Pod; a state of constant arousal. I would crawl to the bathroom and finger the walls and fixtures until I oriented myself to face the blank mirror and milk the stiff udder of my imagination into the facebowl two or three times a day. Afterwards, I’d pull the silver knob that stoppers the sink, run the warm water and sluice them towards the pipe-encased sea of the city, my wiggling little atoms of need.

“How old is he?” I called out, boldly, wondering exactly how long I might fool somebody into thinking I could see. I tried to call out at a directed volume that might sound like I was aiming at him. Too loud would be a dead giveaway.

“It’s a she not a he. Five months. Stella.”

“Beautiful dog,” I said, nodding. I knew he was probably petting her, scratching behind her ears with pride. And the dog’s tongue was hanging out the corner of its messy mouth, ladling slobber on the grass. 

“Bulldog, right?”

He didn’t answer; had I offended him? but then it dawned on me that the owner was grinning and nodding. Then the silence stretched out until the bell tower bonged three and I realized that the Yuppie and his bulldog had gone, of course. Yuppies become uncomfortable after three or four minute exchanges. They’re ideally suited for elevator quipping in buildings of ten stories or less, or in line at a very fast bagel or coffee shop. Then it occurred to me that he’d probably seen Dorman lead me to the bench and sit me there, an ambulatory invalid, and it was clear to him that I was blind and I had looked to him as either pathetic or insane for pretending that I could see. He had crept off, embarrassed for me.

The volleyball game raged on. I could hear, in the out-of-breathness of some of the game’s participants as they shouted out scores, or good-natured taunts against the other side, that some of the players were a bit older than others, or at least in worse shape and were playing the game on a different level altogether. The young ones were just batting a ball around in the sunshine; the old ones were involved in a life-and-death struggle. The exuberant selfishness of beautiful youth, never looking at anything other than itself in any real detail, helped the old ones camouflage the terror in their efforts.  I got caught up in it, hearing it that way, and noticed that the weak, the sick, the old, were the ones making all the noise.  Gasping jokes. Desperate screams with the winning points. Then I smelled coffee.

My bench jolted and creaked with slender company.

“Hi.” 

“Hi,” I said, smiling in the direction that the “Hi” had come from. A female “Hi”.  A throaty, sexy, televisiony “Hi”. The kind of “Hi” that sounds like it knows full well it’s welcome, barging benevolently into your livingroom at primetime to sell you some kind of frozen gourmet dinner, or to warn you about the dangers of pre-natal smoking. Hi, I’m Lauren Hutton.

I cocked my head. “Actress?”

She hesitated before responding and I knew she was examining me with a skeptical squint.

“But you’re blind aren’t you?” she said. I reached out for her and we both laughed. She apologized. “I’ll bet that’s the bluntest anybody’s been all day.” She touched my shoulder while chuckling and I felt like a tuning fork being pinged.  “Isn’t it?”

“Surely.” I pulled off my sunglasses and gave her a quick un-look and winked and slipped them back on with both hands. “Not just blind, I’ll have you know. Nouveau blind. Blind for six days, thus far, but who’s counting? Sitting here trying to pass myself off as a guy with eyes.” I saluted her. “I’m still in the closet. How’d you ‘out’ me?”

“I live in those apartments…” she caught herself, “I live in a high-rise overlooking the park. I sit on my balcony doing crossword puzzles and drinking coffee in the afternoon. This is the second day I’ve seen your friend walk you over to this bench. I like the way you dress…you look kinda displaced. Your friend isn’t bad looking himself. He drives a Skoda, by the way. Vanity plates. ‘2 BAD 4 U’. Oh dear.”

I enjoyed a very clear image of her on her balcony, peering through the eyepiece of one of those expensive little telescopes that were so popular among the hip last year. Lauren Hutton with a telescope. Then I had a disappointing intuition. “You’re not about to ask me if my friend is married, are you?”

“Me? Heavens no. I don’t date smokers, or Skoda drivers, or guys with vanity plates, for that matter. Your friend looks too much like a writer. I have to admit I like the sideburns, though.”

“Sideburns?” Mock outrage. “He’s grown sideburns in the week of my tragic blindness?” Dorman had been talking about doing that for years, growing sideburns, but I always gave him shit about the notion.  “I must say he’s made the most of my handicap.” I shook my head.  “The Skoda he bought in East Berlin and the shipping it cost more than the car is even worth, but his theory is that the kind of girl he likes likes funky little cars like that, so….”

“Whatever works. Beats swimming upstream for a little salmon, wouldn’t you agree?”

“How do you feel about painters?”

“Painters.” I could feel her frowning. “You were a painter?”

“Were? Am.“  One smart nod.  “You have admit it’s one helluva gimmick. Arrange the tubes a certain way, work with a limited pallet, I could even do you.” I leaned towards her. “By touch.” I reached but she pulled her face out of range.

“Sorry,” she said.

“No, no…” Hot faced. “You…”

“But you honestly don’t understand.”

A very long minute elapsed. I could feel traffic and the dramatic slaps and yelps of the volley-ball seige and her ladylike coffee-sipping. I could feel inland-wandering gulls pleading for life in a chain of circles across the sky. I heard a tree-shadow encroach on my left as the sun rolled right. I shrugged and smiled that ever-upwards smile of the blind and said,  “Spring.”

She made the muffled interogatory mmmm? of someone busy with coffee. I cleared my throat. “This is the first Spring I’ve ever felt a part of. I can no longer see it, but I smell it and hear it…I am it. Like eyes are these holes in your head you’re always escaping out of. Now that I can’t get out anymore, I’m here…I’m present. Responsible for my atoms. ” I think I was smirking. It’s hard to feel, from the inside out, the difference between a smirk and some rue. In any case, I was thinking that she was obviously an old hand at diverting attention.  Ask her a question about herself and the next thing you knew, you were talking about you. 

“So, uh, you still haven’t answered my question.”

“Which question was that, sweetie?”

“Your voice. It sounds so…I don’t know…so polished. Well-modulated.”

“Am I an actress?” Meaningful chuckle. Irony there. “You’re hearing the Finishing School, probably. You’re hearing some debutante shellack. I’m no actress. If I were an actress, I could only get certain parts, anyway. Well, not even then. Along those lines, there’s something I should probably tell you….”

I had another disappointing intuition. The voice was so deep. Deeper than Lauren Hutton’s.

“I love this coffee. Persian Mocha Royale. Wanna sip?” She carefully steadied the heavy mug in my hands and as I lowered my upper lip to the hot edge of the coffee she said, like there was poison in the drink, “Wait.”

“You’re a man,” I blurted.

“That’s right,” she said, with what sounded like real pleasure, “you wouldn’t even be able to tell, would you? Well, happy to say, no. But,” she took a deep breath, “when I was younger, very much younger than I am today, ten years ago or so, there was an accident, yes? and I’d really rather not go into in any detail now, but I had to have some pretty extensive skin-grafts…my face, my chest, my right arm….the doctors were very expensive and very very good…but, uh, what can I say? I’m no longer what you’d call a pretty sight. I have a good body, knock on wood (she knocked on the bench) and I haven’t been a shut-in or anything and I’ve had more than my share of drug-induced one-night stands, because, as you may know, men will sleep with just about anything…but, uh, you know, nobody’s ever walked proudly down the street holding hands with me on a Sunday afternoon in Soho, if you know what I mean? People stare; the very old are as bad as children. Yuppies try so hard not to stare that it’s the same difference. Oh, plus: I get these resentful looks on the rare occasions when I decide that I’m human and want to dine in a nice restaurant…I guess it puts some people off their food. You know, it’s like: doesn’t she have the common decency to stay home?” 

She shifted on the bench, getting a leg up on it, hugging a knee to her chest. I think. She said:

“God…”  

“You can’t believe you just told me that,” we overlapped, in near-unison, laughing. She touched my shoulder again. Again I pinged.

“I just wanted to get that out of the way.” From the inclination of her voice I could tell she was staring out across the park, away from me, remembering things. I wanted her very badly. “I mean, I suppose I could have kept it a secret and you never would have known. Until you touched my face.”

I was so glad I couldn’t see her. I found myself almost desperate that she’d stay. I experienced the astounding luxury of not giving a damn how she looked.

“Well, since you’ve already mentioned the unmentionable, how old are you? If I may be so rude.”

“Prefer not to say,” she said as pleasantly as possible.

“Ah. Mysterious older woman?”

“Not really. And there’s nothing mysterious about any woman over thirty,” she huffed. “That’s just a phony consolation prize men give you for your wrinkles…‘worldly’ ‘mysterious’…only teenage girls have any mystery about them and that’s only because they’re mysterious to themselves.” She sniffed. Sipped some coffee. Crossed a leg. I’d touched a nerve.

“What’s your favorite period of Picasso?”

She took long enough to answer that I realized (and I realized that she realized as well) that it wasn’t really just an innocent question on my part. It was a test. Anyone who answered “The Blue Period” failed. I could be friends with someone who answered “Cubism”, but never sleep with them. I was hoping she’d answer correctly, because I really, and not simply out of base biological need, wanted to sleep with her. In a very noisy way.

When I could see, I cared so much more about how I looked and the woman in your life is definitely an extension of your own appearance.  Would she, my deformed beauty with the luxurious voice, be the first in a long line of exquisite monsters?

“My favorite period of Picasso.” She sucked a lip. “Well, the last one. Just before he died. When he was painting like a death-obsessed child.”  She tapped my knee. “When he was painting those monsters.”

I got chills. 

“Do you wanna know the weirdest thing about my current condition?” I could smell her dry saliva on the lip of the coffee mug. She wasn’t wearing lipstick. She scooted closer. This poor ugly lonely girl. How ugly? She smelled like Persian Mocha Royale and herbal shampoo and something else, something nearly-forgotten and I really wanted to eat her. Lick and chew that ugly face. Oysters are ugly too and don’t I love them?

“The weirdest thing about being blind,” I said, as I tapped my nose, “Is that I feel indestructible. I feel immortal. Back before, when I could see, I felt as flimsy as a fruitfly. Now I feel, I don’t know, like I’m in this very safe place, this kryptonite vault in space. I call it The Pod. I feel like my ties to this tiny world have been severed. I’m only still participating in the banality of everyday life because why not?  But in reality, see, I’m flying through space in The Pod. Immortal and unbound. Cozy in the black-box recorder of the jet plane of existence or something.”

I was selling her on blindness, you see. I was offering it to her, to share it somehow, in order to keep her with me. She touched me through my light jacket and her touch left sweet burns of sex on my arm. She kissed me twice, first on the side of my face and then, giving into the impulse, she suddenly took my blindness in her hands and kissed me hard on the mouth.

“I’ll keep in touch,” she said, and she was gone.

I was so stunned that I couldn’t even say goodbye. I had a sad premonition of coming back to this park, this bench, at the same time every day, for years of hoping. Tilting my face towards her balcony. Wherever it was.

“Hey,” someone called. I cocked my head.

“Are you alright?” The panting of the dog at his feet. “She sure can spin a tale, can’t she? That sister can talk,” he chuckled. He patted Stella the mildly disobedient Bulldog. Or maybe he was scratching her belly. “But you’re fine, I see.”

He settled on the bench.

“Gary Chew,” he said. “She smells good for a homeless, too. I’ll give her that. See, I used to give her money when I first moved here. I look like an easy mark, I admit it! She’d cook up these real elaborate sob stories and it was kinda funny because she never seemed to remember me and came up with a different story every time. But I always gave her a buck anyway. Then one day I saw her approach a brother, you know, a black guy, in a business suit, a successful brother with a real air about him and he just shook his head and kinda straight-armed right past her and I thought, damn! If her own people won’t help her, why should I?”

The Asian slapped his leg and Stella jumped with great effort upon the bench between us and her master rubbed her vigorously as he spoke.

“You a dog lover?”

I felt sick.

Setting:
a chat room

Dramatis Personae:
Ann Ominous-a recently divorced Academic (34)
O’Sirus-a bisexual serial killer with an interest in Celtic murder ballads and Egyptology (43)

OS: I like you’re profile pic

AO: To the extent that you’re willing to ‘believe’ (i.e. suspend disbelief) that the picture is A) ‘me’, B) recent and C) un-photoshopped, I thank you. What is it that you ‘like’ about the image, specifically? (And please don’t respond with, ‘your eyes,’ since we’re all aware that references to the ‘eyes’ are always coded symbols of everything *but* the eyes in the context of online transactions of desire and power). It would be refreshing, I confess, if a man, just once, were to answer the above-stated question bluntly, with, for example, ‘the size, shape, and elevation of your breasts’ or ‘your truculent, fellatio-evocative pout’, though, I’d qualify this confession by saying that a man gets ‘points’ (a currency calibrated in what units?) for somehow reconciling the ability to be ‘refreshing’ (transgressive) with some degree of elegance or suavity. That is to say, a contextually ‘hermaphroditic’ presentation interrogating the vitality of ‘male’ aggression with ‘female’ strategies of mimesis-in-play (‘play’ as equal parts ‘agon’ and performance) might prove to be a delightful synthesis. Not that I’m advocating a totalitarian approach to the aesthetics of persuasion, though Henri-Levy did, of course, once quip, “The only successful revolution of this century is totalitarianism.” However, lest your eyebrows remain raised (*emoticon of mirth*) at my referencing such a camera-ready poppinjay as BHL, I will “raise my stock” (as traded on what FTSE of sexual metaphor?) by appropriating the gravitas of Levi-Strauss instead: “If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void.” Substituting, of course, the terms “cockmaster” for “composer” and “pleasure arc of masturbatory chatting” for “musical ladder”. Not that I expect (hope?) that this last ‘revelation’ (obfuscation?) will ‘up the ante’ (referencing as this colloq. does the ‘game’ of ‘poker’ and the demotic pun it redeems) in our ‘chat’.

OS: ?

AO: 551 275 1585

  Qualos freezes before screaming. He teeters on his clogstilts, an icon of incredulity. He tells himself don’t. Don’t scream. Screaming will only serve to call attention to yourself. The car is gone anyway. It’s long gone anyway. Fast as cars move these days, the thing is a kilometer gone by now and screaming will only help Snatchers to track him. And how much is all the paper in these books worth, after all? The big book alone is 500 pages and he’s got three of them. Here he is schlepping this stuff unattended. Fatty Snatchers are sub-verbal and post-culture and heartless as the useful dead as the saying goes and so anything of value…anything. Qualos shudders. Aware of the healthy black market in fat.

Don’t worry about the books; the books are fine. The trousers are ruined. The books (in aluminum overcoats) are no problem but the trousers are toast. Digression: Qualos’s young colleague Wahn did an etymological study on the word ‘toast’ and discovered that long long ago the word referred to a fermented beverage. The modern usage (pertaining to a thing’s utter uselessness) obviously relates to the deleterious effects of inebriation via this potent ‘toast’ drink. Anyway. What was the cunt doing offroad? 

Qualos’s one fucking good pair of trousers…his inheritance…100 percent natural fibers. He was to be married in these, the ancient irreplaceable things, and he only hazarded donning them in the first place on this day of all days because there was going to be this suposedly special department meeting with Chancellor Shahvez present and now look. Oozing with cum-streaks of acid mud. And wouldn’t you know it the meeting was called off (department head beheaded; that’s El Ai for you) so…great. Might as well strip right down to his skinsuit and kick the rags down a firehole and be done with it. Blend in with the tards and proles in his skinsuit until he gets home.

No, he thinks, raising his chins. No, a scholar wears trousers.

He sloshes homeward with self-satirizing dignity, traipsing past several garbage-ringed fireholes along the way. The trousers soon hang in strips from his waist and the skinsuit shines like a lamp under the smoking tatters yet behold the chins of Qualos, so resolutely high-held. This is where his breeding comes into it. The resolute chins, the noble baldness. The shreds of the heirloom Armani.

My problem, thinks Qualos, as the rattan enormity of Hotel 547 looms unreflected over its sludgey moat into view. I’m too proud to exercise my prerogatives. I could have txtd Muhreea with the car’s vassalplate and Muhreea could have txtd her dad and dad could’ve called in a personal airstrike. Take two minutes tops and Mr. Sports Tank is bar-b-cue. How would you like that, you fruit dealer? Qualos can see it clear as day: the six-wheeled chunk of metal spinning on its back like a turtle dropped on a rock by a gull. The fruit-dealing negritoe within: a guttering wick. This makes Qualos smile.

What’s the point of marrying into a Warlord’s clan if you’re too proud to indulge in the perks? Qualos shakes his head with mock-long-suffering pride in his pride. Just as he is sometimes afraid of his fear and disgusted with his disgust he is proud of his pride. Typical scholar. Muhreea says don’t smile, Qualos, it makes you look so weak but he shakes his head and he smiles. What Muhreea and the rest of her dynasty fail to grasp is how a perceived weakness cloaks an unperceived strength.

Qualos breezes in through the southeast checkpoint and gets the green flash and the strangely disparaging (and vaguely homosexual) he’s harmless from the screener chip. No one so much as glances up from their phonebooks, frowning through loupes at all the little paradise-colored displays. The guests, the guards, the residents…all hunched and loafing with their phonebooks in the sweltering lobby. Becaus