a filmsong by Steven Augustine

The Kiss Off

or

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Decline of the Aura 

1.  Art is Honkies Fucking 

The pedigree of the kiss in Western culture is less a matter of sex than of Christianity.  Spirit is breath, it utters the sacred word.  The early believers were enjoined to bestow on each other the kiss of peace.  Blasphemy is the sacred’s inversion:  the Judas kiss.    

The kiss started to become secularized around the time of the troubadours.  The fair skin of the beloved was a foreglimpse of the pleroma; through her lips poured the divine afflatus.  Soon most of the afflatus had leaked out, but there was still enough left to puff the white sails of religion’s successor, romantic love.  

By the time of the really iconographic kisses – Rodin, Klimt, Munch – many had begun to suspect that romantic love was a con.  Schopenhauer and Darwin had given the hint:  It was all about replenishing the racial stock.  Hence the three most famous kisses of the time were also the most equivocal – too strenuous, or too brittle, or vampiric.  

Along came Hollywood and pop music to re-inflate the tires.  It wasn’t just a question of warm bodies after all, a whole society had to be reproduced.  Rhett!  Scarlett!  Rhett!  Scarlett!  Some crooning, some swooning – then the Lent of mortgage payments, a new refrigerator, and picking a wallpaper pattern for the nursery. 

The flowery script on the warranty said Forever but it wasn’t until Pop Art that we were able to appreciate the irony.  Warhol’s Kiss (1963) would seem to spell the quietus est for twenty centuries of honkies fucking in frescoes and framed museum pieces.  But instead we have a culture in the grip of cynical reason:  I can’t stand to walk away . . . I can’t stand to stay . . . a generic pop tune in endless playback.  

Fin.  Repeat. 

2.  Art is Fucking Honkies 

Traditionally the kiss symbolizes union.  In the mingling of breaths, two souls meet and become one.  Art, too, is supposed to resolve contradictions.  It creates a unity that is “above” its determinations.  

“Andy & Patty” refuses this harmonization, staging instead the disarticulation, the incommensurability of the very materials it brings together.  They are not melded, only superimposed.  Each new frame reframes the others. 

The appearance of writing in a film destroys the unity of the image.  So far so Godard, but the filmsong’s writing goes further, deploying the rhetorical figure of chiasmus: 

            Art is Honkies Fucking

           Art is Fucking Honkies

           Fucking is Art, Honkies 

Chiasmus is the privileged trope of difference, of the production of difference-in-identity.  It is the double-cross that undoes the self, in the same movement founding and confounding it.  In this case, the universalist pretensions of Art are revealed to be a European narcissism, honkies pressing faces to the mirror.    

The filmsong is chiastic in its very structure, almost an elaborate pun on the inverted parallelism of chiasmus itself.  It opens with the straight couple from Warhol’s film but works its way to the mash-mouth of Warhol’s gay couple and a scene of two-fisted interracial monster-cock deep throating.  Sexual difference and racial difference – ideological coordinates of the Great White Kiss.  

In the era of cynical reason, however, nothing any longer has the power to shock, it’s all grist for the mill of social reproduction.  Since Patty Hearst’s turn as “Tanya” even terrorism has become part of the spectacle.  The only image to resist the tidal pull of banality is what would seem to be the most ordinary and everyday of them all, almost beneath notice:  the scaffolding against the side of the building. 

In the Greek alphabet the letter “chi” – the first letter in the name of Christ – is shaped like an X, a cross.  For this reason chiasmus was once the favored trope of Christian writers.  The scaffolding’s props and crossbeams also suggest a kind of Calvary.  The two workmen arrive for their daily crucifixion. 

The filmsong offers a chiastic pun on images of labor – labor as work, and childbirth as labor.  These were, after all, the curses stamped on Adam and Eve’s eviction notice:  “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread . . . In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.”  I almost said Andy and Patty’s eviction notice. 

The image of childbirth avoids the banal affirmation of “new beginnings” to the extent that it is by caesarian section.  Instead it is a parody of the Virgin Birth.  We see a gaping wound; there will be a scar. 

Every document of civilization has as its verso a transcript of toil, written in scars.  The same with love:  there was always someone before you.  It’s as if our kissing couple should separate for a moment and one – it doesn’t matter which – should say to the other, “Whose cock is that on your breath?” 

3.  Fucking is Art, Honkies 

Astrolabe, centrifuge, one-armed bandit – the Andy & Patty chiasmus-machine keeps turning.  Old binaries undone, their tokens may yet yield up an unforeseen combination or novel precipitate.  The one moment when a pair of eyes looks back at the viewer is in the clip of the blond porn-actress at work.  Like much women’s work, it must be performed on her knees.  With her hands raised to the sides of her head on the mahogany crossbeams of enormous cocks, it is another image of crucifixion.  Yet covered in sweat and spit and goo, her hair plastered and mascara smeared, she glistens as wetly as a newborn.  And look at the technique, the brio, the sprezzatura – she is good at what she does, and she knows it.  Colors mix on the palette.  A new millennium of poetry and fucking is in store for those who can divine this threefold mystery.  All others pay cash.  

Edmond Caldwell

February 2009

1. 

-Ina says a dreamboat’s any man refrains demanding anal on like the third date.

-Dreamboat’s mother’s word.

-Mother’d pronounce it in-uh.

-Daddy said Eee-nah.

-Couldn’t even agree on that.

-Ina burns her fingers on the water glass.

-They served me coffee in a water glass.

-My first sensation in Berlin.

-A burn.

-A Flashback:

-Mother pretending drunk on balcony overlooking Mississippi.

-A balcony as architectural trophy of amicable divorce.

-Mother pretending drunk to make the saying…

-Ina needing no such excuse.

-…of certain things…

-Hard as some things are to say.

-…easy…

-Excuses are for those who can be bothered, says Ina.

-The darling child.

-Talks to herself openly in public.

-Sings oldies.

-Mother’s hiccup.

-Ma, it is only cranberry juice.

-Oh so you’re a drink inspector now too. My daughter the mind-reading drink-inspector who quits colleges to chase ratsafarians.

-The sunset a rich dessert.

-The mighty Mississippi.

-Dandan’s  mercurial grave.

-Ina thinking it is a Negro river.

-Thinking but never saying this word Negro…

-Okay she remembers calling Joanie Joplin my Negro once.

-Mother saying now Ina…

-Mother saying now do not look at me when I say this but.

-Sunset spectacular flambeéd entrails.

-Staring she said remember dear, gentlemen…

-Ina remembers and laughs out loud at table alone in café where they burned her fingers.

-I must look crazy.

-Suitcase beside me.

-Crazy but hot.

-Nazi folksinger looks up when she laughs.

-Again.

-He sure looks like a folksinging nazi.

-Looking pure but not benign.

-Probably Jewish just to teach me to….

-Half-Jew.

-Half-Jews…

-Mother through ruby depths of faux Chablis peering says remember dear, gentlemen.

-Cheeks both red as cranberry.

-Is this how she turns herself on now?

-Talking dirty to college-age daughter?

-Remember dear, gentlemen do not expect a lady…

-Ina hoots.

-To swallow.

-Ina hoots.

-Ina thinks how preciously naïve.

-Is that the scariest…?

-Ina thinks if only.

-I’d swallow a quart if that’s where it stopped.

-I’d be like, is that all you’ve got?

-Mother pronounced it ratsafarian.

-Please never tell me you’re pregnant with ratsafarian…

-And do not give me that look like it never happens.

-She’d say for all intensive purposes.

-Nucular.

-Flashback finished.

-Inscribing Department of Human Race Horses in her immaculate hand like preserve a secret for the ages in notebook and smile.

-Catch that nazi folksinger look again.

-I am wet as an eight-second egg.

-I am wet as a Mississippi.

-Looks again I’m saying something.

-Looks again it’s on.

-Let’s do this.

-I don’t give a chunky fuck.

-LED eyes Thou hast.

-Kiss these blistered…

-Sorry means never having to say I love you.

-Ina stands and goes hey um would you watch my stuff for a minute I need to go to the bathroom.

-Uncomprehending look in return.

-Look of the daze-ruptured put-upon.

-It is 15:40.

-Do you speak English?

-Do you?

-She laughs and squeezes between the tables wishing she hadn’t said need. Sounds so well I don’t know so irrefutably graphic to say like I need to go to the bathroom. Want would have been better.

-And what’s up with the word bathroom.

-It’s like I need to take a humungous dump.

-For medical reasons.

-Perforated duodenum and such.

-Can you hold my colostomy bag for a sec thanks.

-Batting her eyelashes. Do you find me alluring?

-Feels two eyes on her ass as she passes.

-The tables are just a thigh apart yet she squeezes through without even touching edges.

-Passed the buttock test with flying colors.

-Buttock the farm word.

-Fantasize he is infallible cool cyborg assassin scan rapid digit display scroll phosphor-green screen while geometric simulation of ass rotate 180 degrees on pulsating graph when target-circle zeroes-in on her anus.

-Assassin.

-Get it?

-Loo door swings.

-Thankgod no Americans in this bathroom.

-Clears throat.

-Would it offend anyone if I called this shitroom Mecca?

-I could stay here all day.

-Having grown to abhor the sound of Trustifarian English.

-This haven.

-If I’m in here longer than five minutes nazi folksinger will picture the taking of a humungous dump.

-Can’t have that.

-Though: would it not be funny to birthgroan loud as a whale?

-We are not comedian.

-We are hot like Joan of Arc.

-’Tis only tinkle.

-Mother crying Jesus wept on the toilet.

-Door’s all wide open and I’m like Mother.

-Rotten jello smell: the pain of stench.

-Hemorrhoids mother hindparts acquired evacuating hero of our story.

-The mighty Mississippi.

-My little brother’s widow.

-This foreign toilet paper sucks.

-In-uh.

-Get it?

-Flashback finished.

-Srsly.

2. 

-So he claims his name is Spinoza.

-He claims his name is Spinoza. Yes he does. I do. He do.

-That is a fuckedness.

-But seriously.

-Seriously?

-You are a name bigot?

-Your parents are hippies?

-So now she is hippie-intolerant?

-On top of everything else.

-What else?

-I am an honor student.

-What if I was black?

-Were.

-Was.

-Were.

-Whatever. What if I were black?

-You’d have an excuse. But your name would not be Spinoza.

-No, my name would be LaFoyer Grady.

-That is a pretty convincing job of black name random generating on short notice.

-You try.

-DeMario Smalls.

-I see we have our racism in common.

-Something to fall back on during lulls.

-Lulls aren’t the things we fall back on?

-So his name is seriously Spinoza.

-Yes.

-Just Spinoza?

-Simply Spinoza. Yes. I am a gifted young DJ. What is yours?

-LeKwanza Pinckney.

-My first black girlfriend.

-Whoa.

-Whoa?

-Things are moving quickly.

3. 

-Ina thinking I recall now reading that a sweetish semen means it is diabetes.

-Which feels like far too intimate to know or to tell him.

-To wake and tell him.

-Rather text it.

-In a week I’ll text it.

-Spinoza in his fetal postcoital coma in the gloaming.

-Semen from her lips to his to close a circle.

-And also the Lego smell and Daniel.

-Daniel melted Legos on their bedroom lightbulb twice.

-Later died on a dare with the Mississippi.

-The varsity swimmer slash little brother in that mighty Negro river.

-Spinoza does not snore he fartles.

-Gnashing his teeth he fartles.

-Spinoza farts the smells of melting Legos to channel brother Daniel.

-Supine Ina sneers at posters of now-old or long-dead frog and wop actresses who wouldn’t even’ve as iffed him.

-Spiderwebs darkly drug-addled thoughts above his mattress.

-Said spiders watch his Jewy dreams.

-Said Ina too.

-Her mouth still sized to the proximate dick.

-The look called pursed.

-The boy she thought a nazi folksinger.

-The boy she thought pure not benign.

-He is fartling he is gnashing his teeth.

-Lo, a tugboat crosseth pudding lake.

-The anal flap and sputter.

-You just can’t imagine loving him less.

-In the spirit of which she note-writes about goodbyes and goodlucks and hinted-at manageable medical conditions.

-The dazzling legend of Nordic healthcare.

-Signed LeKwanza.

-Signed the first blowjob is free the next in dreams bereft ie fool me once.

-Signed I hate being an American on this Americans-choked sidewalk oh so looking the part of congenital Mallness.

-Like folks I just fell off the intercontinental turnip truck.

-But I will learn.

-She had a forty dollar haircut and birthcontrol bazooms and she was ready to use them.

-This rolling suitcase louder than the liberation of Paris.

-The airport handle.

-I am creditcard-dressed and distressed.

-Sweet-semen fed and obvious.

-Turning sees Spinoza in his briefs in window like mother on balcony overlooking mighty Negro brother-stealing river with a waving shyness mouthing call me.

-Call you what?

-Almost Daniel?

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 against 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.  

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 both knew this.

“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.”