With apologies to Ambrose Bierce

5.

Lucius Nathaniel Calvin. “Luke” or “Lucy” to his friends. Good-looking boy with innocent sour milk breath. Dutifully unspectacular student. Never show-offy with hand-raising in class or sinister in the sophistication of his cheating. Reasonably popular within the limits of rural terms of popularity, which hinge on things like prowess with a hunting rifle. Unrealistically blue-eyed, farm-tall, short-lipped, with veiny hands and close-cropped, pale-wheat hair which he kept in a Caesarean haircut that only a perfect-eared boy would dare to. The grainy photograph showing up in all the papers on the same day was from his yearbook, of course. The kind of smile that everyone of a certain age knows is put on to mock the cheap-suited yearbook photographer. 

Jennifer Paine. Jennifer Paine would later call Lucius, in all the interviews, on regional TV and local radio and for all the Midville newspapers, her fiancé. Lucius’ maternal grandmother (with whom Lucius had lived the first five years of his life, after his mother’s exit and before his father had gotten his accounting firm “off the ground”) claimed she’d heard of no such plans. She’d never said this in interviews for she was never interviewed. She always said it in a room featuring a television or radio on which Jennifer Paine was being interviewed, whether or not there were others in the room at the time. Lucius had caught his grandmother talking to the television before.  “Dream on,” she’d say. Or: “As if.” 

The kick of a rifle should increase with the size of the animal hit. The kick of the rifle should hurt. Then it would be fair.

Once, Luke said that the sky is a river. 

“What?”

“The sky. It looks like a river, doesn’t it? It’s like the sky is a river and we’re stuck on the bottom of a cloud looking down on the river and we could fall in it if we don’t hold on.” 

Jennifer squeezed Luke’s hand. He recognized the gesture of concern. Her other hand was palm-up on the sharp tips of fresh-mown grass and her eyes were shut. “I guess.” 

“No, seriously. Try.” 

“Try what?”

“Try and see it that way.”

“But why?”

“Because you’ll love it.” 

“I guess I’ve heard that argument before.”

Lucius laughed. He loved it when she acknowledged their iffy sex life. They were using pregnancy as a method of birth control.

A bullet is also a message.

Civilians were still finding silver blobby or feathery black fragments from the space shuttle in their driveways and swimming pools. Portrait-sized flakes of ash were scattered across flat roofs. Jennifer Paine loved Mike and the Mechanics and Lucius Nathaniel Calvin did not. 

4.

Oh My Papa. 

A big hit for Eddie Fisher. 1954. A very big hit. Fisher was of Russian Jewish descent but came off to many of his many fans as Italian. Being Italian had gone from acceptable to dreamy overnight and everybody wanted to know one and nobody knew why. What they called those dark good looks, which are always accompanied by a swagger. He thought he had it made. Died and went to Acceptance heaven. Fisher had a variety show called Coke Time with Eddie Fisher.

The unconscious smile on the old man’s flickering face as he stands in the doorway, angled against the jamb. Like, he doesn’t want to dignify that red-baiting network by sitting on the divan and taking the entertainment it offers like everyone else, as a responsible member of the audience. No, he’s making a statement, which, at this rate, it’ll take Ike approximately six thousand years to get the ambivalent message. But Debbie Reynolds is a different story. That he’ll watch. Eddie and Debbie duet. 

-It wasn’t six million Jews, it was six thousand. It’s not six billion years, it’s six thousand. Is this a coincidence? 

Three distinct strains of local rumor about Fisher that year (as though Midville has a plausible connection to either Hollywood or Tin Pan Alley) merge into one and hit Abraham Winters’ son with the force of an iron fastball to the temple on the suntorched baseball diamond he first hears it on, standing at first base with the kid who’d got there by bunting. The not-green grass of the diamond is patchy. The kid has a classic bowl haircut that reminds him of 1950. Maturity is measured in rectal thermometers. He caught himself thinking the word Ralston-Purina without anything attached to it. 

“Hear about Fisher?” 

“Hear what about Fisher?” 

“You seriously don’t know?” 

“Seriously what?” 

“Eddie’s a Hebrew queer who sucks colored cock like it’s going out of style. Pass it on.” 

“You’re so full of shit your eyes stink.”

“Oh yeah? My uncle’s seen the pictures.” 

“You’re uncle’s a drunk.” 

“So’s yours.” 

There’s a line drive straight over the only other half-Jew on Winters’ team so he never gets the chance to finish the argument. Home is a very long walk away for the losers.

“If you looked any more like Eddie Fisher than you already do, your father would smell a rat.” 

“Don’t say that, ma.” 

“I thought you liked it?” 

“Eddie Fisher’s a queer.” 

His mother slapped him. Slapped Robert Algood Winters, Caucasian, 5′6″, brown eyes, 125 pounds, fifteen years old in December. Nicknamed Howdy Doody by the arresting officer. Apprehended in flight to Matoon. 

The old man is shouldering the doorjamb in a plaid suit with the tie loose watching Channing Pollock saw a lady in half on Sullivan with a look on his face like he’s picking up tips. Like he’s matriculating. One hand balances a paper plate that’s way too shifty and bent and hot with baked beans while loud drunk relatives cavort in the gazebo. Speedy Gonzalez jokes and everything they imply, including the aunt with the bristle chin whom nobody can remember which relative by birth she used to associate with before he died and to ask now would seem insensitive. But the old man is mesmerized. Looks like Ray Milland in the cyanide-blue Sullivan light. The ghost-beacon that is midcentury television, guiding lost souls through the ether. The Ray Milland of interstate feedgrain sales. We’re talking about a magician that the old man quotes like a Winston Churchill. 

-Happiness: a way station between too little and too much-Channing Pollock. 

-No man in the world has more courage than the man who can stop after eating one peanut-Channing Pollock. 

There were two main medical theories about masturbation and neither was flattering.You were either a homo or a werewolf. He had a two-handed technique that made him look like he was committing hari kari with a turkey neck. His father would curse under the window before trying to yank-start the lawnmower again. His bedroom walls would mottle with waltzing late-afternoon clock-gears of leaf shadow and he couldn’t help thinking of them as Jew walls; Jew leaves; the roar of the motor. Robert first learned the adult theory of the word pussy back in the fateful Thanksgiving of ‘53. This sparked an increase in the annual productivity of his jerk-off factory by an impressive 51% percent. 

There’s a street in Midville, east of his house, with a colored on it.

The old man lectures him that he never touched his own self once before marrying your mother. 

Midville isn’t even a proper name, but a description, as a teacher informed him, sadistically, because Midville is half-way between Decatur and Matoon. Mr. Schieble. Feeble Schieble. Is Robert a name or a description? She lives in a split-level with a two-car garage and her polio husband with two young unisex offspring, pretending to be Italian, doing that pinchy hand-gesture, but you can see the Mulatto of her at the end of every summer, when her skin is just a little too brown and the humidity of August brings the frizz back up in all the tawny hair bunched under the scarf and he pictures her on her knees in a pearl necklace and zip else, sticky as butterscotch, blowing Eddie Fisher and boom the earth moves and Robert sees stars and his junk hits the ceiling. He has trained himself in the art of not groaning. His mother’s Episcopalian, meaning he is not a Jew, an explanation he has polished to terse perfection in the relentless rehashing. Maybe Mrs. Schieble is an Octoroon, speaking of Robert’s favorite kind of cookie, a brand new unopened box of which on the dresser awaits him. 500 million sperm cells in the average healthy white male emission. 100 million on the ceiling alone. He does Jackie Gleason doing Reggie Van Gleason III, the imitation everybody says he should get paid money doing, saying, What do you think, old boy, shall we go another round? 

The old man suddenly bangs the door open. 

His Schwinn can do ten, fifteen miles per hour, easy, just cruising downhill towards the reservoir. He’s standing up on the pedals like a walk on the wind with a song at the top of his lungs and furious black smoke like a thunderstorm bottled up in the house behind him. But no more songs by Eddie Fisher. 

3. 

I look you and everything forgiveness. You are unbelievable beautiful. I feel like wrecks compare myself but I’m think you choose me for be most beautiful also. I do not dare for looks in mirror to whispering of sentence for staring you with sleep for whispering loud to hear this make me strong. This is hope my letter is tell you. 

Life is such in Europe city to require every for what my strength is. I know is choice of me with go was make to go is true. I for snapped him finger one by one to daring try is stop me leave for everything. What a terror is for getting on such plane! But so many terror are unbelievable thrilling. For terror you are comfortable make to misery live. So for consider blessings to what city for people say way of talk with uncomfortable stay to stay. So smell of walking sidewalk with careful not bumping not notice for people I’m walk here. So stay is food smell for make is remember carnival or such childhood of fair from childhood is happen. This fair in a longest driving city was far long going. I from do not think of fairs now more. 

Sometimes I wonder so panics what you think when look me. For always fears I say with do wrong thing to see what loving turns with pity. Loving what impatient become is something else. I wonder such times if not for transitional emotion, love. Unstable by definition, connecting deeper more useful states like fear, disinterest, hatred? I mean maybe you can’t hate something until you have loved it first and maybe the capacity for hating something is so important that love had to be invented in order to making hate work? 

You can tell your mother almost have go for college. She know is Somerset Maugham or Upton Sinclair or also Saki.  She know is Pride and Prejudice for. As you can also tell she unbelievable mess. Remember you get the good and the bad with everyone. But look at you so perfect, beautiful, innocent, deserve everything good. I am looking at your slightly parted lips with that rosy space between them so unbelievable small like ghost of the finest watch-part. It’s like you are truly powered by some new kind of energy better than sunlight glowing through your cheeks and eyelids and the tips of your hair and warms your sweet breath. Or it’s like you’re made of this energy and I cannot believe it came out of me. They always called that the miracle of life that I finally understand, after thinking this was just flower talk for many years but I know it now something so pure can come out of a body so stained and dirty with a dark bubble of pain from this dirty body’s bloody mess. 

I feel that you angelic is masterpiece of geometer to look at the spiral of the wax of its ear and the small fat fruit of each balled fist unfold in a flower. Exactly its dreams probably are made still of the numbers more of the one than words that are something more envy to because the life of its mother is words and nothing but. My dreams are words always mumbled or scream but remembering I used dream for mostly in smells. For remembering the smell of a man’s aftershave could make me sicker than dogs. I’d go in and out of the house with a handkerchief deliberately soiled with chickens–t covering my nose when he’s shaving. I don’t want to complain in this letter but I have had rashes you could read in the dark by plus problems of the lower body most doctors would kill to look at. And these are just a few of things I overcame to becoming your mother. 

Today when you found your own seat on the tram and sat a little ways apart from me swinging your feet looking back to wave, I was so proud and crushed, darling. It made me so hopeful for future and for worrying. I thought about how today it’s your own seat on the tram, tomorrow it’s you talking with people I don’t know and bringing questions home with you. It all depends on how much I’ve unbelievable lie to you, which is not a lie for fun but for safety and pride and caring. This letter is my answer for one of those questions. I’m still not sure how I’m going to writing this. 

You don’t have a father, but you will know that already, by the time you’re read this. Oh, and you’ll probably never know the sensation I just felt after writing the last dependent clause of previous sentence. It’s like seeing one’s name on a list of the dead. I’m write this from the other side of my extinction, in a way, since (and I guess it’s spookily significant that I was always unbelievable affected by plot devices like this in second-rate novels and third-rate films) I’ll have made the necessary arrangements that you’ll be reading this letter only after receiving whatever possessions you’ll inherit in the event of my etc. Well, corny as that sentence is, I just can’t bringing myself to write it all out. 

Back to the thing about you have no father. That’s just the way it is, darling. I guess there’s a good chance I’ve already discussed this part with you (by the time you read this), but, in case the topic never came up, or I never had the nerve to be straight about the situation to your face: I wouldn’t recognize the man who inseminated me with you if my life depended on it. If your life depended on it, I’d make unbelievable effort, but, no. All I wanted was you, and I needed a man’s help to make for happen. 

He was very good looking and intelligent enough (we chatted for quite a spell at the touristy bar I picked him up in because I wanted to make sure). It was a Friday night, warm out, crowds on a sidewalk. We held hands on the way to his hotel room, which is more important to me, now that I think back on it, than you can possible imagine. I’m sure he’s the father, because I’ve only had sexual intercourse with two men in my life and the second man followed the first by gap of fifteen years.

You’ve never seen America and there is a good chance we will never go there together. Maybe you’ll go on your own one day. It’s hard to believe that I wouldn’t have discussed Midville with you but truly it’s obvious that my method will be for balance your happiness with the truth for shift and evolve as you grow older depending where your interests develop and so forth, so, if it turns out that I’ve decided to inventing the city of your mother’s (me) birth and childhood I’m sorry. The truth is the place I’m from is called Midville in the state of Illinois which is know as part of the Midwestern part of the United States of America. 

If I’ve invented my own exciting childhood in an urban metropolis for you, with rich parents and exotic friends: no. None of that is real and I hope I haven’t going too unbelievable far overboard to give you a mother with past you can to proud of. Again, I am very sorry if that was the case. The only difference between a working farm and the place I grew up on was that the place I grew up on was not working. I always felt I had a certain right to be bitter about the thriftshop clothing and chewed-on hand-me-down toys (shipped in crates from superior cousins I never met) but I always thought also even as unbelievable kid: what you expecting? The country’s ten times bigger than it was in the days that a farm was a livelihood… something more than the perfect place for the head of a family for hang himself. But your grandfather never hung himself. 

No, he didn’t. But you’re going ask of me, one day, about your grandparents, and whatever story I will have made up to tell you when you ask, this letter is the final truthful answer. 

2. 

“What a coincidence.” 

“No such thing, my friend.”

“This is the last place I’d expect…”

“Paging Carl Jung… “ 

“A real live Midvillian. Pinch me, I’m dreaming. Remember the Dairy Queen? Everyone called it the Hairy Queen…?” 

“I do indeed.” 

“Bastards tore it down. What. Fifteen years ago. It’s a Planned Parenthood now. There’s an irony for you. When was the last time you were in Midville, anyway?” 

“Don’t ask.” 

“Honey, you wouldn’t recognize it. Even got ourselves a gang problem these days.” 

“Inevitable clash of hierarchies.” 

“You’ve lost me.”

“Country clubs, Al-Qeada, the Black Panthers, Catholic Church, the military… they’re all hierarchies. That’s the first thing you get wherever two human beings or more shall gather together is a hierarchy.” 

“Interesting.” 

“That’s what people say when something isn’t.” 

“Isn’t what?” 

“Interesting.” 

“No, seriously. Tell me more.” 

“Well. You find yourself at the bottom of one hierarchy, what you do, any self-respecting ego, he invents one he can be at the top of. Say you’re some towel-head with a 5^th-century education who couldn’t get laid if his life depended on it…” 

“Ouch.” 

“You invent, or situate yourself within, a hierarchy in which towel-heads…” 

“Not the most politically correct member of the frequent-flyer club, are you?” 

“Oh, I can do better than that.”

“I’ll bet you can. Let’s go back to your little hierarchy theory for a sec.” 

“Okay.” 

“Are we a hierarchy?” 

“Unless I’m missing something.” 

“Who’s on top?” 

“I guess I’m thinking what it would be like to put my cock in your mouth.” 

“You smooth-talking devil.” 

“That’s me.” 

“Hey, what’s the rush?” 

“You only live once.” 

“A grab the gusto kind of thing.” 

“Life is short, my cock is long.” 

“Vita brevis, cockus longus.” 

“You’ve been to college, I see.” 

“Auto-didact.” 

“Impressive.” 

“That’s exactly what people say…” 

“When something isn’t. Touché. You never answered my question.” 

“I don’t recall it was phrased in the form of one.” 

“Can I fuck the shit out of your ass?” 

“My, we’re saucy this morning.” 

“It’s been at least an hour since I jerked off. Look, I’m shaking. Hold me?” 

“Poor baby.” 

“If you let me fuck you in the ass, I’ll let you clean the sweet shit off my cock with your tongue.”

“And people say the art of conversation is dead.” 

“Now you’re being evasive.” 

“Not evasive. You just haven’t closed the deal yet, honey.” 

“You’re a treasure with a rusty lock.” 

“Getting colder.” 

“Are you allergic to beautiful dick?” 

“I think I hear my mother calling.” 

“Hey, it’s called a layover.“ 

“Check please.” 

“Okay, okay. Have you ever heard of the name Paul Michael Swanson before?” 

“Rings a bell. Are you telling me you’re a celebrity?” 

1. 

The country was wooded everywhere except at the bottom of the valley to the northward, where there was a small natural meadow, through which flowed a stream scarcely visible from the valley’s rim. This open ground looked hardly larger than an ordinary door-yard, but was really several acres in extent. Its green was more vivid than that of the inclosing forest. The configuration of the valley, indeed, was such that from this point of observation it seemed entirely shut in, and one could but have wondered how the road which found a way out of it had found a way into it, and whence came and whither went the waters of the stream that parted the meadow below. 

Ambrose knelt on the bank of the stream, weighting his father’s poor pockets with stones. His father, Mordecai, inclined a torn face away from the boy’s activity as though shamed by it, despite all evidence, such as the blood caked everywhere and the bone of his skull exposed white as chipped flint, that his cares on this earth were now settled. Mordecai still clutched the hawthorn switch he’d meant for the beating of Ambrose, and Ambrose still clutched, between his teeth as he grunted in his efforts, the blade he’d used to forestall forever the beating. That the sun still flamed and birds still sang and nearby squirrels even frolicked, despite the terrible scene of not an hour’s coldness they’d all been witness to, helped Ambrose to nurture a grievance against the callousness of nature and the perceived insignificance of nature’s darkest bastard, which is man.

.

1.

Venal Cunt spread her legs like a vile temptation at the end of the night, face deflected, eyes unplugged. Long and elegant and platinum-haired and bone-white with her sexy puckering lisp. The only color is the childish yellow scrawl of her bush and her pupils like residue in cocktail glasses and the raised red chevrons where she scratches her right wrist incessantly like a fox in a fur-lined trap. Even her nipples are white. She says what do I need to read for, my life is a bestseller. She says don’t take all day. Needy Cock lowers himself into her snob-dry vadge with pragmatic detachment and he cradles her too-small-for-compassionate-thoughts skull while he pushes in, prospecting in vain for as little as a teardrop’s quantity of moisture.  

The days run together like yolks. His savings evaporate and his postcards begin to repeat themselves. Surfers march like bowlegged Aztecs into the Rite Aid for sunblock and the bakery in Ralph’s sells cinnamon buns at four a.m. and the gardeners wield their shoulder-slung gas-powered leafblowers like AK-47s and yes the Mexicans are poor as pigeons but they are polite and very clean and it’s no wonder the blacks feel threatened. I’ve never seen so many convertible-driving Aryan teens in my life. Not even on television.

Literature doesn’t prepare you for any of this. 

His students shreik and clap. They say, “Say schedule again!” 

2.  

Needy Cock can tell by the look on the cop’s face that the cop is disturbed by something about Needy Cock’s demeanor. Something doesn’t add up. This is not a by-the-book domestic. Wifebeaters are usually not so. What. The two of them are out in the hallway by the open door of Needy Cock’s flat and his cop’s two colleagues are inside and Venal Cunt is communicating tersely from within the locked bathroom. She refuses to come out.  

It’s a beautiful day. A sack of Krugerrand-colored sunshine pours through the skylight, absorbed by the infinite dinge of the hallway. How many times has he plodded down this very hall to this very spot in front of his very door without having noticed that the pattern in the carpet is dollar signs? Well he notices in the extremity of his tribulation and the hallway appears to him as terribly run-down and it strikes him that he is now the working poor, one of Graham Greene’s shipwrecked whisky priests with a twist: an author of books who has recently resorted to borrowing money from one of his villa-dwelling students to pay cash for cafeteria sushi. O, this foot-blackened carpet and cigarette-sooted walls and cigarettebutts on the laundryroom stairstep…  

Needy Cock finds that he’s strangely unashamed as a curious Queer neighbor (probably the one who made the call to the cops in the first place) steps out from two-doors-down and steals an avid glimpse. I Will Survive blares defiantly from the Queer’s open door. How many times has Needy Cock phoned the police in the dead of night to complain about the level of the disco music and this, ironically, is the first time they finally come?  

“What was the fight about, Ma’am?” calls the cop through the bathroom door.  He’s a freckled bull with bristly rhubarb-colored hair, scratching his chin. His partner is tall and black with close-set eyes and a mustache. The black has a hand hovering near the heavy gun on his hip and more of the essence of his being is concentrated in his pistol hand than in his face at the moment. The pistol hand is worried. How does the pistol hand know that Venal Cunt doesn’t have a weapon in there?  

“Was it about money?” the ruddy bull, the spokesman, the one with the degree in sociology, offers. “Was it about debt?” 

Venal Cunt snorts. They can all hear it through the bathroom door. A hefty snort of derision. “None of your fucking bithineth,” she screams. 

A career criminal couldn’t muster as much arctic contempt for a uniformed cop as Venal Cunt, in the waning throes of her beserking, is spitting at them. Needy Cock has to admit he admires her for it and yet he realizes that his admiration only exacerbates the problem. Like when she was banging him across the apartment with kick-boxing techniques she’d spent the year learning, at Needy Cock’s suggestion and expense, as a way to channel her anger. He’d seen the humor in it. And she’d looked magnificent to him while doing it, too, even as she was kicking his thighs and punching his ear and his balls and knocking him over with a reverse hooking roundhouse and smashing things she had first carefully identified as his before smashing them. A splintered wooden bar stool is arranged like kindling across the bed. Steel-framed pictures are knocked off the walls and stunned with cracks. The phone is smashed and first editions are ripped and stomped-on and strewn about in what looks like the aftermath of a fascist rally.  A fancy soup, still warm, is dripping from the walls and windows. 

“Who started it, Ma’am?” the uniformed sociologist with a gun in their living room tries again. 

Venal Cunt snatches the bathroom door open. The Bull steps back into a near-crouch in a reflex as she steps forward, six foot two in platform shoes, red-faced but otherwise camera-ready, and she says, “It wathn’t him, it wath me. Can you fuckerth pleathe get the fuck out of our fucking living room a. eth. a. p.? Can you pleathe just go?” 

“I’m afraid it’s not that simple, Ma’am,” the Red Bull counters, regaining the force that he’s lost as a man in the bulwark of the law’s tradition. He’s well aware that out of uniform, in a nightclub, in his dancing shoes, he’d be less than a mosquito in Venal Cunt’s ear. He regains his manhood in the Judeo-Christian majesty of the civil laws he has sworn a kitschy oath to protect. 

“The discretion to press charges in a domestic abuse call is not entrusted to the private parties involved, for obvious reasons.” He gets out a little notebook. “It’s up to us,” he nods to his tall black colleague and the short blond one with Needy Cock out in the hallway, “…to make an evaluation at the scene, and act accordingly. Taking our observations under advisement, it’s the prerogative of The State,” he gestures out the window, “… whether to press charges or not.” 

But they do leave, after a cursory admonition for Needy Cock and Venal Cunt to try to get along, with the tall black nodding at a framed Helmut Newton of a naked, welt-breasted goddess saying Nice picture and doing a double-take as he realizes the model is Venal Cunt herself as a teenager. How far she has fallen. Needy Cock points out the photographer’s autograph on the print. The Red Bull, taking leisurely note of the almost-ornate library that Needy Cock has amassed on tall shelves against two adjoining walls of the living room, inquires if they’re Needy Cock’s books. 

Needy Cock lifts his chin and says yes. 

The cop says everybody should read more. 

3. 

Needy Cock closes the door quietly and tip-toes in the kitchen to get a bucket to start the long clean-up. The fancy soup on the walls, books and everything else is hardening. The glass from shattered pictures needs sweeping up. The splintered bar stool disposed of. Prater Violet is a write-off. 

Venal Cunt is back in the bathroom and he can hear her crying again. He turns the kitchen tap off and he puts the bucket down and he stands there, face to heaven, hands in fists, stuck in his existential quagmire. He still feels that love. He raps softly and enters the bathroom in order to embrace her and her knuckledboned back is turned to him. Her shoulders are hunched in crying. He tentatively touches an elegant shoulder blade where it raises a soft cotton scallop…just that hesitant fingertip touch…  

…she spins and drives a steak knife home in his chest. He throws an arm up in a futile defensive gesture and shouts an effeminate ”Don’t!”  He grabs at the blow which seems to glance off his chest with a stinging thud. She’s clutching the bladeless knife handle and whimpers and avoids his touch with spider-horror, sidestepping where he clutches at the shower curtain splashing blood. 

Needy Cock is calling her name with absurdly gentle indignation. Venal Cunt! Venal Cunt! The pain of the blade in his body isn’t so bad, but the shock of it is sickening, humiliating, awful, for he has crossed a dark border into the Land of the Violent Poor with their tacky knife and gunshot wounds. Even as he grabbed for the shower-curtain, seeing stars, he knew it couldn’t support his weight and they’ll need to buy a new one. Venal Cunt has run into the bedroom in tears and slammed and locked the door behind her. The curtain rings go pop…pop…pop… 

He’s gasping in the tub, legs over the side of it, the sucking wheeze and bubble of his fatal chest wound. He fingers the copious puddling heat on his Fred Perry shirt and the blade at the center of it and realises the handle snapped off when she drove the blade in and this warm piece of metal rises an inch from the puckering slit. Touching it’s like tapping a tooth. He recalls that grunt she grunted while shoving it in and he keeps hearing the vitality of it and Christ it’s too funny. The most sexual noise she’s ever made with him. 

4.  

That night she fucks him. Lights off of course. She strokes the crusted periphery of the wound. Strokes also, with a virgin’s holy awkwardness, the metal itself…which he discovers he enjoys having tugged. She touches it “accidentally,” at first. She touches it again more boldly. She pays it more direct attention, twisting and tugging and jarring it as they lose themselves in the screaming fall towards massive orgasm and she displays the kind of dirty fascination with the blade anchored firmly in his dead heart that he had always hoped for regarding his genitals.  

Venal Cunt strokes the jagged edge of the dull glint in the dark room post-coitally cooing to herself. Needy Cock thinks they should have done this years ago. He thinks things could be worse. He imagines all the American girls he will score with this new secret weapon. 

.

A text message from Rafael Miller. He’s in Berlin; time for a little walk? I don’t see him often. Don’t take that as a tragic lament. Rafael only likes to see me in order to brag or complain and he starts in on the bragging before my hand can fall out of the first handshake we’ve shared in six months. In media res, as they say. Things are going so well in his new job that he’s thinking about opening a business of his own, soon. He’s living in a modest flat in Bristol, England, selling men’s suits for his generous German boss. The boss, says Rafael, promises to finance a second shop that Rafael, himself, will be running. The big money will finally be his. Which way should we walk? I nod in the direction of the Ku’damm and we’re off.

It’s a not-too-chilly, intermittently sunny day in March. Rafael is very tall. I’m tall but he’s a head taller. An athletic-looking, very handsome black American I first worked with years ago, when I was new to Berlin and looking for a male singer to front a commercial project. Rafael can sing a little, models here and there and can claim to do several other unremarkable things, besides selling men’s suits, to earn his money. He’s an astonishingly-preserved fifty years old, appearing to be in his mid-thirties. The problem with Rafael, if it can be said to be a problem, is his profound stupidity.

Rafael sometimes shows unexpected flashes of wit, as though fleetingly, mockingly, possessed by intelligent demons, between the bragging and complaining and the clumsy efforts to impress. He has an off-putting trait of habitually working out his angles and options via whoever he’s facing at the time, without the necessary ability to mask these calculations, which are always displayed quite plainly on his face. He’s usually torn between the need to brag about having plenty of money and the urge to borrow some.

As a former American soldier, he is allowed to own a gun in Berlin.

One grasps that American Society has invested time and money into creating and maintaining Rafael’s stupidity. Why?

Rafael is a likeable fellow. But it can be excruciatingly embarrassing, strolling down a busy street with him while he’s holding forth on some topic he’s ignorant about in the confident voice of the ignorant. I remember him holding forth on “the Jews” a few years back, on a summer’s day, in a crowded Berlin shopping district, with the bell-clear tones of a hiker discussing bad weather. He gestured at the German banks, boutiques, cafes and cinemas and announced that greedy Jews owned all of it. Surely, relatively recent German history contradicted this claim? I tried, with a smile, to get him to lower the voice, if not to change the subject, but why should he? As he put it, he was telling the Lord’s truth and therefore had nothing to be ashamed of.

Just as American celebrities of a previous era had a tendency to speak in the third person (I’m thinking here of Jerry Lewis referring to Jerry Lewis as “a Jerry Lewis”), Rafael Miller favors the second-person narration. This can be more distressing, for his walking companion, on a crowded street, than when he’s pontificating about the Jews. He was complaining to me about his girlfriend; a tall, beautiful, status-obsessed Muslim of Eastern European descent, no Erasmus herself. Rafael and I walked on a day that was warm enough to fill the sidewalks, and he entered into the spirit of his complaint.

He shouted at me, “I show you all my damn love and give you a damn place to stay and put damn food on your plate and the best damn clothes on your body and shoes on your damn feet, you gonna pull this selfish shit on me?”

            *****

Anyone who takes writing seriously, who wasn’t clever enough to have been born rich, must put some thought into finding the kind of job that will pay the bills without sapping one’s writerly will to go on. Early I discovered that I had two talents ( “talent” defined as the ability to produce steadily) , one musical, one literary. It took years to come to the conclusion that if I prostituted the former, I could pay for the luxury of the latter, destroying the former completely. It’s possible you’ve heard some of this shit on the radio.

            *****

There was a quaint era when young men without steady jobs spent most of every day being unreachable by phone. Answering machines soon mitigated this freedom, before cell phones eradicated it entirely. The young men I see on the streets and in the U-Bahn, now, look hunted. The young women look like section heads for a vast, data-gathering-and-disseminating network; like bureaucrats sitting on a mountain of information. The old people look out-of-it; the old people look like corrupted data; none of these incessant phone calls are about them.

            *****

The nicest guys tell the smallest lies. Constantly.

            *****

I once spent a weekend in the supposedly ritzy city of Munich, attempting to collaborate with a sinewy, weathered expat American songwriter named Bradley Rankin, with material to his credit on Tom Petty and Celine Dion albums. Rankin claimed, on the second day of my visit, that his clairvoyant German wife had detected thirteen spirits, among them the shades of John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix, hovering around the recording studio. He asked me if I was afraid of ghosts. He didn’t ask me if I was afraid of strangers who make ridiculous claims they dare you to laugh at. He didn’t ask me if I wanted to punch him, destroy the studio with a fire axe and take the cost of my roundtrip ticket out of the deco cigar box he kept his cash and his baggied pot in.

            *****

If you can’t be a star in the heavens, be a lamp in a chamber

-Arab proverb

            *****

The Germans call their celebrities Prominente. These Prominente are engorged as ticks on their fatty super-suppers of self. And why should anyone care? It’s clear to me, as I flip through the pages of various magazines, that America’s idols are proportionally even more absurd; an even bigger prank on a planet which foolishly thinks of these human logos as old friends or moral compasses or arbiters of style. As an expatriate, I see the con with fresh eyes.

Look into a stranger’s shopping cart if you want to see how terrible your own diet really is.

            *****

I was fronting a four-piece avant garde rock group called Tin Tin Tin Tin at a party I’d helped to organize for a Czech Theater group, singing my spectacularly strange composition, “The Ancient Fireman Song.”  As I walked offstage to confused applause a permed booking agent named Frank Gagne handed me his card and posed a rhetorical question about whether I wanted to make real money playing music. He told me, in his rented car, in an effort to bond with me, that he’d married his wife for her tits and further because he could fuck her in the ass and come in her mouth immediately afterwards. It was as he was telling me all this with glittering eyes that I realized that I would never make real money playing music. So I became a composer.

            *****

I slept with a fetching Duchess (with a dilapidated family castle to brag of) who, before performing the oral sex, sniffed my penis like a hound, her nostrils flaring, forcing me to laugh too hard to maintain an erection.

            *****

My father, a neo-Fauvist painter, had his Korean War rifle confiscated by the Liberian government, because it was more powerful than any weapon in the army.

            *****

A Literary Critic who introduces us to otherwise neglected work is performing a valuable service. Everything else is a matter of taste and generally suspect as back-scratching, score-settling, band-wagoning, hackwork or envy.

            *****

A British pop-act-manager (with an advanced degree in History) once presented me with the schnapps-fueled theory that Bobby McFerrin had written and performed the most trenchantly satirical, socially-conscious number-one pop record in history, but that the American inability to grasp sophisticated irony had doomed McFerrin to be forever associated with the ethos of the Reagan era he had set out to excoriate, rendering him a great martyr, second only to John Lennon, in the minds of the cognoscenti.

            *****

There’s no real reason a lottery contestant isn’t every bit as likely to win once as win ten times in a row. What argues against it happening is the Narrative Field. Statistics are a narrative. Statistics pre-suppose some kind of connection from one moment to the next.  Without consciousness, which supplies the narrative, what connects the first coin toss to the fiftieth? As far as the inanimate coin goes, each toss might as well be its first: there’s no physical reason why there shouldn’t be a string of 5,000 heads (or tails) in a row. It’s only the Narrative Field that prevents it.

            *****

I walked into a MacDonalds in Stockholm, off Kungsgatan, with a sheepish grin on my face, as though I expected the fourteen year old  Swedish girl in the paper hat who took my order to sneer, Oh, suddenly you’re not too good for us.

            *****

The commonest greeting in Vienna is “Grüß Gott” (Greet God!) , a tendency which the Viennese are without a doubt averse to being told is remarkably Muslim in character. Walking up and down that small city and having its straight-spined citizens greet one relentlessly in that fashion is very much like being at sea on an immense Christian warship. The waiters in Vienna are square-jawed, crewcut and tall, like elite soldiers. There’s a table-waiting academy they are obliged to attend and a very long apprenticeship they must complete before being allowed to serve. When a waiter in Vienna hands you your menu and orders you to “Grüß Gott” you forget your hunger and do it.

Sipping a Kleinen Braunen (espresso), in a mellow block of spring sunshine at a restaurant which lies just beyond the chilling jurisdiction of Saint Stephen’s midday shadow, it occured to me that my body’s blasphemous transubstantiation of a heavenly Sachertorte into reeking lumps is a reminder that human cultural evolution is the chronicle of a protracted battle between Shit and Beauty.

The middle-European word for ‘novel’ is Roman, as in romance, and what better non-chemical form of escapism could exist for the literate, aristocratic dreamers of the 18^th century than the virtual immersion in a book’s compression of time and omissions of  odor and its structural beatifications of Death and Sex?

            *****

This is the thing about Bush: people who voted for him knew it was wrong…they were pre-teens smoking cigarettes behind the garden shed…the transgression that feels so giddily and foolishly like empowerment. Europe of course was the stricken parent.          

            *****

No: Bush is that lying, thieving, physically abusive son-of-a-bitch that a woman (America) just couldn’t bring herself to break up with.  Everyone warned her, until the inevitable finally happened. Was it low self-esteem, in the end, which killed her?

            *****

I started writing my own songs before I had learned anyone else’s and formed a band, DaVinci’s Lips, before I could properly play. Astonishingly, the best drummer I ever had left me in order to join Prince. He was an extremely fat drummer known to wear attention-getting hats. He was well-read and very bright and seemed somehow able to package his fatness as being a direct consequence of such unwieldy intelligence. What I remember, fondly, is how he fell through a heating grate one afternoon and got jammed in the circular hole in the floor of the rehearsal space.

            *****

I performed oral sex on my girlfriend on one of the principal sets of the film Purple Rain. I was guarding the set overnight, alert, to the point of distraction, to every sound in the cavernous night club. The club was/is called First Avenue, a remodeled bus station. I was licking my girlfriend like a not-entirely-famished cat guarding a bowl of rather too much clotted cream. Being very young and naïve I was disappointed at the cheapness of the materials on the set: the tinfoil and plastic, the Styrofoam and cardboard; the terrible script, a copy of which we had found and read through, taking the parts of various characters as if it were Ibsen.

           *****

Germans sometimes chide me for my imperfect German, unaware of the fact that my original inability to speak the Fatherland’s language was what made Berlin so attractive to me in the first place. A day’s worth of any language is nothing but data, with no intrinsic style, meaning or value. Imposing elegance on the bulk medium requires the strenuous premeditation and/or good habits of verbal hygiene that most citizens can’t bother with. Overheard small talk is nearly as pleasant as second-hand smoke. The only thing worse than overhearing it is being forced to participate.           

            *****

For some reason, the sectarian warriors in Belfast got bored with their hatred. Someone should analyze this. Making hatred boring may be the only hope for the planet. Or, examine the demographic shift. The hatred hurricane probably requires a critical mass of young men to feed it. Or maybe the girls of Belfast have gotten a little easier to sleep with?

            *****

One of the loveliest public spaces I’ve ever spent an afternoon in was an abortion clinic in London, out on the Richmond line. Sitting on the end of my girlfriend’s bed in a room full of beds of chatty Irish girls, passing around their chocolates.

            *****

I auditioned a singer who turned out to be a high-end prostitute who begged me for three months of free singing lessons, which I consented to give her. At the end of the three months she begged me to be the father of the unborn child she’d been carrying since the week before she’d auditioned, to which I said no.

            *****

Austrian super-misanthropist (and great writer; do the two go hand in hand?), Thomas Bernhard, was the scourge of his country. He often referred to Austria as a land of six and a half million idiots full of unrepentant Nazis and murderers. The Austrians, in turn, considered Bernhard somewhat of a Nestbeschmutzer (a bird who shits in his own nest) while he lived, though the country now celebrates the very dead Bernhard as one of its greatest products. Bernhard did his best to preempt this hypocritical plaque-making by stipulating, in his will:

My material - whether published during my life or made public after my death - shall, for the duration of its copyright not be performed, printed or recited within the borders of the Austrian state, wherever the borders of this state may lie. (I wish to underline that I don’t want anything to do with the Austrian state and I reject not only any interference but also any approach by this Austrian state towards me and my work in the future.)

Bernhard’s last wishes are being jocularly disregarded by his survivors. The dead, as we know, are always at the mercy of the living, and not just the worms and the weevils. It can be said that Bernhard the living writer fucked with the corpse of the dead novel with as much rude glee as the Austrian state (or any state) fucks with the dead writer, as he is famous for his grandiose deformities of style. His book Correction, for example, is two paragraphs long: the first paragraph is 140 pages long; the second is 131.

            *****

From human personality to insensate animal to object to substance: it seems impossible in anything less than a thousand years. How can it be that the same system that requires millions of years to transform a chunk of carbon into a diamond only needs a decade or so to turn Duke Ellington into a few kilos of mud?           

            *****

The difference between an Artist and a Hack is that an Artist knows the difference between an Artist and a Hack.

            *****

I was thirty minutes into the walk with Rafael Miller when a slightly heavy, middle-aged woman with a sensible haircut and the ghost of blonde beauty haunting her cried out his name from a distance of ten meters. We all then stood on the corner chatting. They were old acquaintances who hadn’t met in fifteen years, I gathered. I also gathered that Rafael couldn’t remember who she was and therefore failed to introduce us. I studied her solid, ruddy face; her blue eyes and straight nose; the thick blond hair and even white teeth. I saw her as she saw herself: clinging to the shreds of once-formidable powers of seduction. I was glad, all over again, that it wasn’t necessary for me to seduce anyone anymore, unless initiating intercourse with my beautiful wife by touching her shoulder can be called a seduction.

           *****

Suzanne Verdal, a French-Canadian dancer of great gypsy beauty, casually mentioned that she was looking for a Flamenco guitarist. I felt inspired to claim I could play: a very young man’s endearingly foolish bravado. She asked to borrow thirty dollars and made a hesitant, contingencies-probing attempt to seduce me the next day when I delivered the money in fresh bills to her borrowed flat, where she was lying in bed, rumpled and moistly warm. Leonard Cohen had written a famous song about her, though she had never once offered to seduce him and they are no longer friends.

            *****

Why is Black music so far ahead of Black Literature (as far ahead of Black Literature as it is of White music) ?

            *****

I recently re-read an interview with Vendela Vita in which the interviewer remarks that Flannery O’Connor once said there are “too many writers.”

Ms. Vida responded: “I completely disagree with that. There can’t be too many. At our writing lab, 826 Valencia, we’re trying to raise all these kids to believe that they are writers–and indeed they are–and convince them that they can go around and say, ‘I am a writer,’ or, ‘I am a poet,’ at age twelve, and hopefully they will take that conviction with them the rest of their lives. So I don’t think there can ever be too many writers.”

Awful and foolish. Makes me think of a five-storey smiley face logo on some future Ministry of Culture in which even the buttons in the elevators will correspond not to numbers but pictographs of dullards performing simple tasks.

By tricking these kids into proclaiming themselves as writers at the age of twelve she robs them of the pleasure of the infinitely more magnificent declaration, I want to be a writer when I grow up.

            *****

The word bed looks like one.

            *****

I was enlisted by a man named Owen Husney (unflatteringly nicknamed, by, who knows, perhaps the worst sort of disgruntled and mendacious nobodies with unfathomable motives, “Owe Me, Hustle Me”) to write songs for his next big discovery: a lanky blonde guitarist who looked and sang like David Bowie. Owen’s first big project had been Prince; Prince owes his start in show business to Owen Husney. Owen therefore hyped Zane Travers as the “white Prince”. The problem with Zane being that while he looked like Bowie and he sang like Bowie, his material savoured overpoweringly of Jethro Tull. Even hippies, who preferred, sensibly, to dance, eschewed his performances.

There was a brief period in History during which young men believed that guitar virtuosity, hierophantic sects of antiquity, and cutting-edge particle physics… in some way overlapped. This period deserves careful study. 

Zane Travers was the best guitarist I have ever known: a useless distinction, as it turns out. What he had going for him, in even greater abundance than the similar sine qua non that makes Prince not only famous but also unmarriageable, was the aura of sometimes-helpless, sometimes-threatening and always presumptuous nuttiness we commonly associate with great artistic gifts. He called the unadorned mattress he slept on rent-free in the corner of the living room of a hippie-infested household his sanctuary and turned white the time he caught me sitting on it.

I was drafted by Owen Husney to help Zane come up with commercial material, though I considered myself a strange choice for the job. In the manner of all Artistes who disdain the mainstream while believing they can milk it, the tunes I composed for the Zane Travers Project were even sappier than the most hideous Top 40 junk then stinking up the charts. I had fallen into the worst artistic trap: condescension.

            *****

I once spotted Zane Travers at another band’s record-release party, squatting upon a stovetop, his long blond hair like Lauren Bacall’s, hiking his kaftan in order to shit a glistening turd in a souvenir ashtray.

            *****

Rafael Miller and Zane Travers taught me everything I know about music.

.

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.

.

“Every war on Earth is, in the end, a battle of the sexes.”-Azzedine El-Hadi

In the three months between the time I signed the lease on my new flat and the day I returned to Berlin with two suitcases of meager possessions, the building next door was knocked to the ground, and construction started on an above-ground parking garage. I’d been charmed by the old fashioned quality of this corner of the neighborhood and now they were modernizing it.

The day I’d first looked at this flat, flipping light switches and opening and closing cabinets in an amateurish pantomime of my father, the caretaker assured me it was a quiet neighborhood. It’s standard in Berlin that you’re allowed to deduct a portion of your rent for inconveniences such as malfunctioning heat in the winter or quality-of-life-damaging construction on or near your dwelling, but there is so much development happening in this suddenly fashionable neighborhood that there’s a special clause in my rental contract that negates the reduced rent option ‘in the event’ of construction, which, obviously, though unknown to me, was a certainty when I signed the contract. I signed it, flew back to California a week later, then returned to Berlin on the last day of summer.

The taxi driver who drove me from Tegel to August Strasse was not German; he was a London-born Pakistani named Shadz (a contraction, he informed me, of a name that sounded, as he pronounced it, like Sa-Heedz). Shadz lifted my two large suitcases of meagre possessions into the trunk of his BMW-built taxi and guessed that I wasn’t a tourist. “Are you a scientist?” he asked, after I’d given him the address in halting German. I can’t say why, exactly, this offended me. Perhaps I’d rather have been mistaken for a rock star.

“A scientist? No.”

“You absolutely wouldn’t believe how many scientists I end up driving.”

“Really.”

“Oh, yeah. Something like, I dunno. Half a dozen a week, maybe more?” He didn’t in any way resemble the voice that was coming out of his mouth. He stared into the car that we were passing on the left as though its driver was insane. I looked too and saw that it was an extremely attractive woman at the wheel, brushing her teeth.

We drove through leafy green lanes that gave way to narrow, treeless, cobblestone streets. There was a fenced-in muddy lot of old touring coaches emblazoned with Cyrillic lettering, across the street from a row of run-down stucco cottages with boarded-up windows. Then a quaint shopping district populated almost entirely, it seemed to me, with women in Turkish headscarves. Then a mile of much-graffiti’d brown brick buildings. The scenery changed quickly and in unexpected ways and felt like an edited montage of several cities from different eras. Which, in a way, is what Berlin is.

“Are they working on some kind of big project, do you think?”

“Who, mate?”

“The scientists.”

He eyed me in the mirror. “That’s the question I was going to put to you sir, actually.” We both laughed. Shadz said, “A machine for influencing your dreams, maybe?”

“Exactly. Top Secret stuff.”

“Imagine the possibilities if you could beam adverts directly into people’s skulls while they were sleeping,” he said wistfully. I smiled but couldn’t think of a clever comeback and soon found myself dozing… nodding off… my chin touched my collar bone twice. Each time I awoke with a sudden start and a snort. Embarrassed, to prove I was awake I said to Shadz:

“But how do you know they’re scientists?”

“How else would they get the job?”

When we pulled up in front of my building it was shortly after noon, and so the construction workers were on a break, but I noticed the skyscraping crane anchored in the building-sized crater next door with a sinking heart. I was too tired to much care at that point, however. Shadz quoted the amount I owed him, I handed him two bills fresh from the money-changing kiosk at Tegel, and he popped the trunk and hopped out. He was yanking my bags with virile grunts and lowering them onto the pavement before I could manage to get my door open. That’s how wobbly the flight had left me.

Before he climbed in, he handed back one of the bills I’d given him. “Keep your eye on the ball, mate.” He winked. “This time the lesson was kostenlos,” he said, using the German word for ‘free,’ and he drove off, leaving me jet-lagged and constipated and with two large suitcases in the middle of the road, facing a construction site.

The only thing I like more than packing a suitcase is unpacking a suitcase; the former indicates an adventure to come and the latter an ordeal survived. My pleasure would be magnified in this case by unpacking my suitcases in an absolutely empty flat… just walls, floor, windows, doors and ceiling… a ritual I was, however, too exhausted to enjoy before getting a little sleep. In the top layer of suitcase number one was a cloth-covered air mattress I’d purchased from a bankrupt Army Surplus store as a much younger man always on the look out for bargains, novelties and items that nobody else had or wanted. I’d finally unpacked the thing, to air it out, the day before my flight, and it gave off a sad, dry rot odor of Korean War memorabilia when I first unboxed it. The odor managed to taint the entire contents of the suitcase, which I had wisely refrained from packing with clothes; suit case number two had all the clothes in it, along with a five hundred page manuscript (single-spaced, narrow margins, tiny font) I was nowhere near being finished with.

When I yanked the rip-cord dangling from the panel with the stenciled warning on it (WARNING: DO NOT PULL: JERK!), I expected the cord to snap off in my hand, or for nothing to happen, but, to my surprise, the mattress inflated rapidly with a loud hiss that changed in pitch as the mattress plumped out. The compressed air cannister continued until the mattress bulged asymmetrically and I backed out of the room with my fingers in my ears and it exploded in a cloud of dust. Of course. I unpacked half the clothing from suitcase number two, arranged it in a thick rectangle in the middle of the room and laid the blown mattress on top. I kicked off my shoes and curled up on the makeshift bed.

I dreamed I was climbing a steep, grassy hill on a sunny day with The Beatles. They were long-haired and bearded and young-looking, younger than I had been in years, and I was slightly embarrassed, in this dream, to be an over-thirty… someone they might not trust, or, even worse, someone they might mock with their rapid, cutting, inside jokes. John was the one I had to be especially careful with, I remember thinking in this dream, and I put an effort into watching his face very carefully for reactions to my cautious remarks: a lifted eyebrow or a curling lip or a conspiratorial glance at George. It was difficult as he was the furthest from me. To my immediate left was Ringo in a bright red caftan and then to my right the order went George, Paul and then John. Climbing the hill in the heat had winded me but they, The Beatles, didn’t seem visibly affected. Their long hair was shiny, fragrant and beautiful in the golden light; in fact they were pretty as girls, even with their beards, and I couldn’t stop thinking how it was really them, The Beatles, and here I was climbing this hill in the sunlight with them.

At what point as the dream unfolded did it become clear to me that these four young men weren’t The Beatles at all? They had merely resembled The Beatles. But as I stared at the profile of the one I had taken to be John Lennon, the one who was furthest from me, with most of his face eclipsed by his hair, I could no longer locate even the faintest resemblance between his face and Lennon’s, and it seemed to me (or does so now) that his facial features were changing, subtly, even as I watched, into something very strange.

The brilliant sunlight had dulled and darkened, too. The wind was picking up, whipping the tall grass, and, back down the hill the five of us were trudging up… down the hill into a vast valley that reached for miles to a poisonous black seam of clouds on the horizon… I watched white bits and large gray chunks of some kind of debris blowing; bouncing; rolling down the hill. The four young men I was climbing with were menacing… unambiguously hostile towards me and united in some kind of mission or scheme… and their grim faces and dark clothing in combination with the cold wind and violent storm overtaking us made me shake with despair.

The noise that woke me was so loud that it seemed to push me to the floor, but I was already on the floor, or close to floor level, gasping as my heart raced. I didn’t know where I was, but it felt like I was in an earthquake, back in California, having a heart attack. What was I doing on the floor of an empty, high-ceilinged room with strange windows and two narrow doors and a power socket in the wall shaped like nothing I was familiar with, rattled in my bones by a deafening rumble? A cheap ceiling lamp on the end of a white chord was swinging left and right. I stumbled in a panic to the door jamb and wedged myself there with my arms covering my head until I suddenly remembered where I was exactly and under what circumstances and laughed at my stupidity, right there where I squatted in the vibrating doorway. I slipped my shoes on, confronted a sleep-smashed face in the bathroom mirror (soft; middle-aged), splashed some water on it, and left the building to go for a walk, since sleep was impossible.

The day… a late spring/early summer day… was streaked with low, fast moving clouds like dark fish in a cold creek and the chill in the air made me consider going back to unpack a light jacket. But going back would have felt like the first small failure of my new life so I went forward instead, my hands jammed in my pockets and my collar turned up. It was early afternoon and there was only one other person on the street, a tall, pretty girl with brilliant orange hair. She wore a pale green diaphanous scarf over her hair and she didn’t once look up as she hurried past me on loud boots in the direction from which I’d come, the noise of her loud boots disappearing into the roar of construction. Turning to watch, I saw her cross towards my building and let herself into it while dust clouds and diesel fumes from the frenzy of construction next door blew over her.

I had followed her half-way back and waited to see if she’d appear in a window in the upper floors, pulling a curtain or lifting a blind to catch me spying from the corner. I lingered awhile, saw nothing and continued my walk. I started thinking of her as ‘the little red headed girl.’ I’d never had a neighbor that pretty in any apartment building I’d ever lived in in America, but I had observed women like that in some of the houses I’d worked in, chatting amiably with harmless me over a mug of coffee from the other side of the invisible barrier of comfort.

Most of the work we did was at one or another of the gated communities that had mushroomed beyond the suburbs in response to opportunities in new technology at office parks that were an hour’s drive from the city. The rows upon row of brand new houses were identically over-large, poorly designed, thrown up far too quickly and in need of paint. The owners were invariably young, college-educated and friendly to a fault with the workers, all the way down to the Mexican maids and gardeners. I always made it a point to have at least one conversation with the lady of the house to assert myself, I suppose, as a reader of books and an appreciator of culture. Which Richard, my partner (my boss, actually; they were his bids, and he had me on an hourly wage), considered embarrassing not only for me, he said, but for the client and himself and the tradition of house painting.

“No matter how smart you may think you are, to them you’re just a beat up old house painter, just like me, John.”

“I’m only doing this to finance the writing of my book, Richard. You know that.”

“All I’m saying is how you see it ain’t how they see it so the point is what? Plus it’s fucking unprofessional. Okay?”

I was careful not to let him catch me talking with the homeowners after that exchange. Once, I walked into a living room carrying a step ladder and found the client’s blonde wife curled up on the Cadillac-sized leather couch in a bright red jogging outfit, chewing a finger and reading a brand new paperback of Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov. She just happened to look up from the book as I entered the room in my cover-alls and cap, ladder over one shoulder, paint on my face. As she made eye contact I pointed and said, because I knew Richard was out in the van, mixing paint, “There’s textual evidence in there that Quilty is Lo’s biological father,” and her eyes went wide and her mouth fell open as though a talking dog had walked in on its hind legs and asked for a date.

Rosenthaler Strasse is the nearest main road and a trolley runs up and down both sides of it. There were more pedestrians there than on the sidestreets that led me to it and there was eerily quiet, clogged traffic packed with makes of cars and trucks I’d never seen before and for the first time since I’d arrived I had the thrilling sense of being in a foreign capital… the implication of infinite possibility and vague threat that middle-aged Bohemians travel for. The wind whipped flimsy spring coats against the short-skirted legs of business women or secretaries hurrying back to the office from lunch breaks and I wondered if the eros of foreign travel was more in the anonymity of it… as though anonymity in and of itself is an invitation to transgress… or in my subconscious superstition that European women find American men sexy. I turned left on Rosenthaler Strasse, under a whole city of clouds in places so black they looked rotten and I was chilled to the bone by the same wind that was flirting so rudely with the secretaries.

I hadn’t gone twenty paces when I came upon a pale older man, his thin hair wind-blown, painting a picture on the wall of a block-long building. The building housed a bakery and a barber shop and a travel agent among other ground level businesses. The building was made of huge black blocks of stone and he was very carefully taping a stencil to the wall and spray-painting it with slashing strokes. He then taped a second stencil on top of the first… lining up the edges of the two stencils with deft-but-nervous fingers… and sprayed again with a different color. He was blowing on the fresh paint, his lips just inches from the black wall, as I came up on him, and he didn’t look my way but cocked his head at my footfalls. He carefully peeled the stencils off and slipped them into a backpack, then produced, from where I don’t know, a telescoping, red-tipped stick and hurried off, tapping the base of the black wall with the stick.

I looked at the image he had so carefully double-stencilled and saw that it was a formless mess of red and green paint running together into brown drips down the wall. I looked up again in time to see him hurrying across the street, his cane like a taut lead on an invisible dog. Almost without realizing it I decided to follow.

2.

The title of the book I’m struggling to finish is ‘The Bomb Collector’. Set towards the end of the 1960’s, it concerns the personal life of Azzedine El-Hadi, an Algerian émigré living in upstate New York. El-Hadi is a writer and bon-vivant, a silver-haired, worldly man of fifty with three American girlfriends. He teaches a creative writing class at a community arts center in his small town in the Wisselvallig Valley, and the youngest of his girlfriends, thirty years his junior, is a star of the writing class. The second girlfriend is married to a teacher of an evening class for working adults called ‘Generational Dissonance in Post-War Jewish Literature: from Singer and Malamud to Bellow and Roth,’ at the same arts center. His third occasional girlfriend, Ruth, his ex-wife, is the woman he married for his green card. Ruth is an amateur landscape painter and the mother of two grown children from a previous marriage.

El-Hadi has published one French novel, years ago, which he is busy translating for the English market; his second mistress has promised to show the manuscript to a publisher with whom she may or may not be having a parallel affair. The title of the French version of the book, Le Collecteur de Bombe, is from an Algerian saying that Azzedine’s father, a devout Muslim, often admonished his son with during the boy’s sex-mad adolescence: a man with too many women is like a bomb collector.

The Bomb Collector is comprised of thirteen linked short stories or vignettes on the theme of adultery; there are Moroccan, French, British and Nigerian adulterers featured in interwoven tales all set in Algiers, the great North African city. Cora (the second mistress, married to his colleague) has suggested that beyond translating the book, Azzedine should also include a new chapter, featuring an American, in order to increase the chances of getting the English version published. He initially resists her idea because to add a chapter would violate the numerology of the book… ‘thirteen’ is one of its ordering motifs.

“Well,” suggests Cora, “simply replace one of the existing chapters.”

“Which chapter would you suggest I replace?”

Without hesitating in order to think about it, Cora answers, “Love is Blind. I think it’s the least-charming chapter in the book, to be honest. It denigrates women… also men, when I think of it. The book will be better without it.”

How can Azzedine admit, then, after Cora’s judgment, that the Love is Blind chapter is his favorite… the very heart of the book? A handsome man, an epic womanizer with philosophical inclinations, goes to his Moroccan apothecary one day and requests a philtre that will render him blind, but only temporarily. The apothecary, a man as versed in modern pharmacology as he is in Moroccan folk medicine, mixes a concoction that will blind his client for thirteen days exactly. Take this with a glass of wine on the morning of the first day and your vision will return to you on the evening of the thirteenth. The apothecary, who knows the womanizer well (having provided the man with condoms as well as penicillin and various other salves and ointments in the past), adds, But if you don’t mind my curiosity: why?

The womanizer explains: As you know, I rarely go without extremely desirable female companionship. However, it’s often occurred to me that for every impossibly beautiful woman I allow (or cajole) to climb into bed with me, there are at least a hundred of her sisters, all too willing but, unfortunately, too ugly to meet my silly standards. I curse my good taste but, as you know, there’s nothing to do about it… the male organ can’t be reasoned with in terms of what it finds attractive or not. However, I realized, one need only sneak a lover past the sentry box of the eyes in order to…

Ah yes, says the apothecary.

Following the apothecary’s instructions, the womanizer stirs the bitter substance into a glass of wine early the next morning. It’s a brilliant day, and he doesn’t even realize, at first, that what seems to be the encroaching gloom of cloud cover in an unseasonable display of weather before lunchtime is, in fact, the drug taking effect. By dinner time he is utterly blind. After spending a few days getting used to the situation (with the help of his servant), the womanizer tests his theory that by being free of the tyranny of the aesthetic prejudices of his eyes, his lovemaking will enjoy new freedoms and varieties… new intensities. Guided to the marketplace on the arm of his servant, he says: point me in the direction of a real sow. The servant does so; the womanizer makes contact with a lady of that description and finds himself escorting her home (just as he is escorted by his servant) in no time at all. The resulting sexual encounter is the best he’s ever had.

By the time his vision fades gradually back in on the evening of the thirteenth day, the womanizer has bedded dozens of women… fat, tall, short, skinny, old, young, poorly-dressed, exquisitely-dressed, European, African and everything else… and all with the same high level of energy and pleasure. The experiment has been a success. So much so that he hurries back to the apothecary the morning after the regrettable return of his vision and asks that the prescription be refilled. As you wish, cautions the apothecary, but I must tell you that the third time you use this drug, the effects are permanent.

Another thirteen days of carnal amazements follow. At the end of this journey into the ravishingly sensual night, the womanizer opts for a third, permanent dose, reasoning that he is no longer a young man; he’s seen enough of the world’s picture; to trade just one of his grossly limited senses for limitless pleasure would be more than worth it. With logical eloquence he persuades the apothecary to sell him the third dose.

A year goes by. The apothecary has nearly forgotten the strange case of the self-blinding womanizer when the man appears one morning at the counter on the arm of his harried-looking servant, looking pale and skinny and with his formerly distinguished head of gray hair gone white. The apothecary is filled with guilt and pity: it strikes him that the poor fellow has returned to plead for his sight back.Which is, as he was warned, impossible. As the apothecary approaches the counter with a heavy heart he is surprised to see the blind womanizer detect his presence with a cocked head and give off a sly and boyish grin.

How can I help you today, my friend? asks the non-plussed apothecary. Are all things right with your chosen life?

Righter than ever, answers the blind womanizer. I’ve broken my own previous record for number of conquests in a week several times over and show no signs of slowing down. There’s only one thing I need from you now to make my bliss complete, says the blind womanizer, lowering his voice so that the apothecary draws near.

And what would that one thing be? inquires the very curious apothecary.

A drug to render me deaf, responds the womanizer.

The parallels between the blind womanizer from the book within my book, able to ’see’ all women as equally desirable in his darkness, and the blind graffiti artist, able to falsely ’see’ his art as beautiful (or well-executed), were amusing to me. As I followed the blind man on his route, along which he stopped to stencil his runny brown blobs on various buildings, I began to feel that I knew him because I had created the character he was an offshoot from. I began to predict the buildings he would chose to mark (or to ‘piss’ on; wasn’t it territorial behaviour? Wasn’t it canine?) with impressive accuracy. He went right for the newest, cleanest buildings, despite his blindness. He’d walk right by the buildings with too much graffiti on them. The unstylish buildings, too… he didn’t seem to find those very attractive. I assumed by this behaviour that up until relatively recently he’d been able to see.

I was miles from home already but unpanicked because we’d followed a straight line through a commercial district with a tram running up and down it and I could always hop on to ride one home. Figuring out how to buy a ticket (I speak less German than the average pre-schooler here) was another matter, but I’d face that hurdle when the time came. The street I followed the blind man along is called Kastanien Allee.

It’s a neighborhood of young people, good-looking young people sitting inside and in front of the packed cafes (despite the threat of rain) and smoking languorously, or with emphasis, like movie stars. Young people strolling in and out of funky record shops and quirky boutiques. The girls are all stylish and tall like the ‘the little red head girl’ living in my building and I marvelled at their uniform beauty. Not a fat body or failed outfit or wrinkled face among them. I began to feel quite self-conscious as a voyeuristic emissary from the awful fraternity of the aged and unhip and almost wished I’d picked a dowdier neighborhood to live in. I didn’t need to have my unfuckable mortality rubbed in my face every time I stepped outside to buy butter. But the blind man was above all that; those beautiful girls were as invisible to him as I was to the beautiful girls and so they had lost their power to tantalize and diminish him. He was flying through outer space with his spray paint. He would have been impossible in California and I realized that it was up to me not to become impossible in Berlin. Enough with the bitterness; expect nothing and you can’t be disappointed, I told myself. Finish your novel.

The writer character in my book, Azzedine El-Hadi, creator of the character of the blind womanizer, is based on a real person (of the same name) I’d met as a house painter. I suppose I never bothered to change the name of the fictional version of Azzedine because I either never really expected to publish the book, or assumed that he’d be dead by the time the miracle happened.

While the fictional Azzedine El-Hadi is a writer, the real-life El-Hadi runs an antique shop, with a sideline in contraband antiquities. Richard and I had been hired to paint the little apartment that Azzedine keeps over the shop which is situated in a row of genteel businesses in the Mission Hills neighborhood of San Diego. Richard had said, You’re going to get a kick out of this guy on the way over in the van that first morning and he was right. El-Hadi looked like something out of an Agatha Christie novel when he answered the door, a silver-haired gentleman with a fastidious mustache wearing red satin pyjamas and velvet slippers.

The walls of his bedroom were covered from floor to ceiling with framed photographs of beautiful women; photographs it was our task to remove and eventually replace in exactly the same order. There was more preparation than actual painting involved in this particular job and I had the pleasure of chatting with Azzedine, or listening to him chat, while I worked. Richard had learned by this point in the history of our partnership to behave like a real boss, leaving me to do the great majority of the work. He’d be gone a few hours every day (at the race track for all I knew), therefore I was free to chat with the witty, literate El-Hadi while I stripped the wall paper in his bedroom or sanded the moldings.

It gradually dawned on me that El-Hadi’s wit wasn’t the main reason I enjoyed his company. Unlike every other citizen of the state of California, he was able to distinguish easily between my soul and my occupation. In short, he treated me as an equal, a fellow human being, and not a middle-aged house painter. If he hadn’t hired me to paint his flat, he never would have known, not being impolite enough to ask, how I earned my money… it was of no concern to him, the details of my material wealth or my social standing. What he needed to know about me he gathered with his eyes and ears; it was the quality of my conversation he noticed, my ideas and opinions.

Richard’s return from his four hour lunch break was always jarring: I became a house painter again the moment he climbed the back staircase with his thermos of coffee and the paint-layered cuticles of his fingernails. Richard’s idea of egalitarianism was to display contempt for us both (Richard and me). At which El-Hadi would shrug and wink, preserving the secret of my humanity until our conversation could resume.

As my admiration for El-Hadi increased during the three weeks we worked to refinish his apartment in an oriental theme of greens and golds, my stubborn tolerance of Richard shaded gradually into resentment. I saw that an ugly aura radiated from the man and that my first assumption… that being a house painter had turned him sour over the years… was wrong. His job, posture, manner of speech, living arrangement and outlook on life were all just accessories, after the fact, to the original core of his negativity. We’ve all known gloomy or even vicious children from our childhoods; maybe it starts in the womb, or in the miserable upbringing of the mother. It was finally clear to me in any case that time in Richard’s company was more toxic than exposure to any of the noxious chemicals we handled and for the sake of my own health I should get out, despite the money he paid to keep me near and under his control.

I brought up the taboo topic of novel-writing with El-Hadi one day about five minutes after Richard drove off to whatever he did on his own for half of every working day…  but he came back. He came back for the wallet he’d left in the jacket on top of the toolbox. He caught me standing on the top of my step ladder, scrubbing the ceiling with trisodium phosphate and discussing the problem of particularizing character in the context of a first-person narrative; how to separate the narrator’s voice from both the writer’s and the reader’s? Azzedine stood at the foot of the ladder with his chin in his hand, looking up. Even Azzedine jumped a little when Richard shouted at me.

“Hey! Don’t we have an agreement that you keep your mouth shut and paint shit? Nobody wants to listen to your wannabe crap!”

“Calm down.”

“Calm down shit!”

I climbed down off the ladder. “Forget it, Richard” I said. “It’s over. I quit.”

“Fine. Get the fuck out of here.”

“Fine,” I said, wiping my hands.

“Excuse me for interrupting, my friends,” said Azzedine, with his mellifluous voice and his unreadable smile. He nodded at me. “John and I were having a conversation that I would very much like to finish.”

“But you heard him, Mr. El-Hadi: the damn fool just quit!”

“Perhaps you can send me a bill for work completed, yes?” Azzedine turned to me. “Can you finish it on your own, John?”

I shrugged, then nodded. Richard turned red. He put his hands on his hips. “We agreed on a price.”

Azzedine’s smile took on extra depths as he made a very compact little voila gesture, saying, “Ah, but we have signed no contract, sir, correct?”

Richard laughed as though he enjoyed being out-maneuvered.

3.

It was sometime after I’d watched the blind artist spray, with meticulous care, the fourth brown blob on an otherwise immaculate building that he lost me… he must have slipped into a doorway or up a sidestreet while I was watching an unreachably pretty girl walk by. Ahead of me stood the massive overhead girderwork of the overground link of the U-Bahn system at Eberswalderstrasse, an old green hooded train bridge straddling a complicated five-way intersection thronged with cars and walkers. To get to the other side of the U-Bahn station I had to cross under it and against three traffic lights in a crowd of people. It felt like a group activity: a sight-seer’s hike or school kids on a class outing… five minutes of camaraderie with people I’d never seen before and would, for the most part, never see again. I imagined the crowd holding hands, two by two. A big girl to my immediate right, dark-haired and sweet-faced and over-dressed in a puffy orange jacket, must have thought the same thing: she seemed so amused by it all when we made eye contact. Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have considered her even remotely attractive, but loneliness in a foreign city can be a powerful aphrodisiac.

“Welcome to the International Society of Pedestrians Crossing Schönhauser Allee,” she said, with a pronouncedly Philadelphian accent. She walked as though weighed down by an invisible, book-laden backpack. I guessed her age at 29-ish.

“Membership is free, I take it.”

“All you need to join are your feet.”

“And you’re the president.”

“No, sir, I’m the ombudsman.”

“I always loved that word.”

“Me too. Ombudsman, stipend, satyr, druse… “

“Druse?”

“An incrustation of small crystals on the surface of a rock or mineral.”

“Aha.”

She pressed her hands together in a mockery of prayer. “I’ve been waiting for years for someone to ask me the definition of that word.”

We all completed the complicated task of crossing under and to the other side of the vast green riveted structure. The group was dispersing. “Now what?”

“Ask me the definition of drupaceous.”

“Okay.”

“Resembling or related to a drupe.”

There was a cafe in the shadow of the U-Bahn station and we sat there with cake and coffee while the weather, miraculously, cleared up. Her name was Amanda Nye and she’d been in Berlin for five years.

“Came as a German language student but defected when I figured out I don’t like speaking German.”

“If you don’t like speaking German, why stay in Germany at all?”

“Because Germans don’t like speaking German either. It’s easy to get by with your English and a native vocab of about twenty six words. Besides, Berlin is the least German city in Germany. I just pretend it’s South East London in an alternative universe where the Nazis won the war. How old are you?”

“Forty two.”

“Okay. That’s not so old.”

“Thanks.”

“Wanna come watch porno at my place? It’s not far from here. No big dogs or roommates.”

Funny girl. I paid for our coffees and half-eaten cakes and followed Amanda out the door of the cafe in time for a lurid sunset. All of the clouds had been pushed to the westernmost corner of the sky like damp kindling. She produced a wafer-thin camera and aimed it over my head and clicked without looking, paying attention to me instead. She said,

“Personal anecdote. I thought I was Dianne Arbus when I was nine years old. I had an old Kodak Instamatic and I photographed the ugliest people in my neighborhood. Fat kids, acne cases, crones with dowager’s hump, shrinking violets with faint mustaches… you name it. I kept developing these rolls of film and getting them back and they looked nothing like Dianne Arbus. You know: haunted, shunned and auguring extinction? Nothing at all like that. Nothing like I had hoped to capture.”

“Did you try using black and white film?”

“That was my next step. My uncle Dan drove to a flea market and got me a banged up old Pentax for twenty bucks. So back I went to re-photograph every freak and outcast in my neighborhood, and then I did my church and my grammar school too. The custodial staff at school was a god-send. They were Existential super-models. Wet eyes and stubble. I shot rolls and rolls of black and white 35 millimeter film and spent all my savings… every single Kennedy Half in my piggy bank… getting those damn rolls developed. And guess what?”

“You still weren’t Dianne Arbus.”

She pantomimed tearing her hair out. “I still wasn’t Dianne Arbus. It was very frustrating to a nine year old girl who’d come that close to knowing what she was going to spend the rest of her life doing.”

“You tacked every print to the bedroom wall and stared for hours trying to grasp the difference. While all the other kids were playing you were staring intensely with the curtains drawn. You took a magnifying glass and studied gray, blurry, low-contrast images down to the finest molecular grain to locate whatever it was that wasn’t quite there. You studied between the grains. You ran your fingers over the photos in the dark… “

“I sure did. And guess what?”

“Eureka?”

“I came to a profound conclusion. See, all my freaks were… smiling… smiling. In every single photo I’d taken. Listen, it’s hard to look like a freak and an outcast when you’re smiling. Arbus was a fraud. Those famously eerie and depressing pictures of hers would have looked exactly the same no matter who she was photographing… as long as she put ‘em in a bad enough mood first!”

I laughed, but it was also some kind of genuine insight. Funny girl; smart girl. But still not any version of pretty.

“See, artists, first and foremost… if they’re any ‘good’… ” She simulated quotation marks with her fingers, seeming to quote her own head. “… they’re con men. Con Artists. It’s all a scam. Because of that precocious little revelation, I lost the desire to be an artist very very young… but I couldn’t find anything else to replace it. Some epiphanies suck.” She sighed. Or ’sighed’.

I thought: I should study her face the way she studied those photographs and get to the bottom of this ‘attractiveness’ thing. Was there no hope for her? We walked in silence for half a block until she perked up and skipped ahead and turned, walking backwards to face me and ask, “So, I guess being forty two and all means you already know what you became when you grew up, huh.”

“Well, yeah. ‘What’ and ‘how’ are pretty young questions. ‘Why’ is the one I’m dealing with now.”

Still walking backwards she held the camera out at me like it was I.D.. “Ask an oblique question and get an oblique answer, I guess. Smile?”

“Best I can do is leer.”

She stopped abruptly and I bumped into her, making us both laugh while also confirming my suspicion that she was flat-chested. Her bones were like a heavy old iron bedframe.

“So here’s my building and so forth.”

“Am I coming in?”

“Suit yourself.”

She shouldered a massive door and we passed through a dark hallway, one wall of which was a bank of letterboxes, and across a barren courtyard the most interesting feature of which was the wire-fenced enclosure for two wheeled dumpsters and three barrels for various colors of recyclable glass. Meaning beer bottles. She lived in the rearmost wing of the building, what the Germans call the hinterhof, and up five flights of stairs. Her voice and our footsteps echoed in the otherwise deathly quiet stairwell.

“I arrived in Berlin about two weeks after the attack on the Twin Towers, right? First thing I noticed was the airport… I flew out of Newark… the airport was empty. No lines, no waiting. I got upgraded to First Class and I got all kinds of free drinks. It was like everyone was feeling sorry for me. Then I land in Berlin and the Germans… you never saw Germans acting so compassionate. It freaked me out. I saw an ad in the paper and came to look at this flat… I was staying in a youth hostel up the road a ways… and the lady practically begged me to take it. Didn’t ask about my financial status or anything. All she needed was to hear that I was American. I was like a celebrity… I was living, breathing history and she wanted to be a part of it, and to show her solidarity with the American way of life.”

We were huffing and puffing as we trudged ever upwards.

“She told me she was leaving for Jamaica… a friend wanted her to run a bed and breakfast there… she proposed I sublet until she returned in March and then we’d talk about it. Fully furnished, washing machine, the works. Reasonable rent… all the utilities bills are deducted automatically from her bank account. All I have to do is deposit money in her account before the fifth of every month, right? She says I’ll call in a week in case you have any questions. She doesn’t leave a number or an address she can be reached at but I figure nothing that bad can happen in a week… if the toilet backs up I’ll bang on a neighbor’s door or something.”

We stood on the landing in front of the door while she dug in her puffy orange jacket for the keys. We were both winded and panted heavily while smiling at each other like idiots. She said,

“But she didn’t call in a week. Or in three weeks. Or, like, ever. It’s been five years and I haven’t heard a word.” She unlocked the door and pushed it open and gestured that I should enter first.

It was an airless flat with hardwood floors and overstuffed, maiden-aunt furniture. The distant odor of rotten cherries. Every flat horizontal surface… windowsill, counter-top, book shelf, banquette and faux mantelpiece… was covered with obsessive-compulsive kitsch. Porcelain figurines, miniature spoons, plasticine cartoon characters, antique thimbles, keys, ink pens, buttons and egg cups and so on. The living room opened, theoretically, onto a balcony but the double doors were blocked by a small table supporting a very large vintage radio and had a sealed look about them. There was a large box or trunk on the balcony, exposed to the elements. To the right of the table supporting the radio, on the floor, was a television on top of a VCR angled to face the overstuffed couch that Amanda gestured with mock grandiosity that I should sit on.

“Do you know what a vollmacht is?”

“A what?”

“Okay, it’s like this signed declaration authorizing you to pick up a parcel at the post office on the signatory’s behalf, for example. Okay. She left one for me on the kitchen table figuring there’d be packages for her from time to time.”

To the right of the television were two old steamer trunks which, unlike all the old steamer trunks I’d ever seen, had obviously once belonged to the profoundly wealthy, with ornately bracketed corners and complex locking mechanisms. The larger of the two stood on end, on metal wheels, and the one nearest the television lay on its bottom face, handle facing us. She opened this one and removed a video cassette and shoved it into the mouth of the VCR.

“Just about every two months I get a little green notification in the mail that the mailman has supposedly attempted to deliver a parcel… which is a lie, he’s just too lazy to come up the stairs and he assumes people will be at work during the day… and so here’s me in a taxi to fetch a package that isn’t even mine because it’s way too heavy to use my bike.”

She aimed a remote control at the television.

“About a year ago I figured, what the hell? So I started opening the parcels.”

A sinister-looking copyright warning in Cyrillic lettering appeared on the screen.

“It’s all porno. Hundreds of videocassettes of porno porno and more porno. Every kind of porno known to man, no pun intended. This trunk here is full of them but these are only the ones I’ve gotten to… the bedroom is stacked to the ceiling with ‘em. Hey, what can I say, I’m on a tight budget… I can’t afford to go to the movies, pay for cable, or rent something from the videothek, so… you know. This is my entertainment. I can see you’re surprised. Some of them are actually pretty good and even clever in a theory of film kind of way but, well, duh, most of them are amateurish and evil but they’re all fascinating. I’m becoming kind of an expert. The neighbors must be pretty acclimatized to the moaning by now… moanin’ noon and night… moanin’ and groanin’ and horrible horrible music and so forth. I tried watching with the sound off a few times but a soundless porno is like a silent martial arts film and it was definitely missing a dimension.”

“So, you weren’t kidding about the porno.”

She shook her head just once and tossed her jacket on a chair near the kitchen door. “I wasn’t kidding about the porno.”

She plopped down beside me on the couch. “I’m not an expert on the terminology, okay, because I never studied it in school, so give me a break, but I’ve managed to break the films down into three basic categories: mind control, rape, and torture. The mind control ones are the easiest to watch. It goes like this. Some guy exchanges a chatty kind of dialogue with some chick with boobs out to here… I mean, I assume it’s chatty from the general sound of it… and within a few minutes she’s got his thingy-do in her mouth and they’re off an running. Some of the guys look fit enough and sometimes even slightly, weirdly cute… in a sideburned way… but most of them are bushy, freckled pot-bellied beasts so that’s the mind control aspect. It’s a certain kind of male fantasy for a certain kind of male… usually the gentler ones… that they can have sex with a mind-bogglingly attractive woman by merely coming up with the correct combination of words, all things being equal. I love it. But this one we’re about to see is from a rape batch, I’m pretty sure. Yeah, it’s definitely going to be rape. So, like, fasten your seat belt… “

A tiny, black-haired, Middle Eastern type with dirigible breasts climbs out of a limousine as it comes to rest on a circular driveway. She’s done up in a way we’re meant to accept as wealthy: a low-cut black micro-dress and gaudy jewelry. Her hair hangs down as far as her thighs and she is pretty in a hard bronze way, with khol-rimmed eyes and cheekbones of almost Mongol severity. She lets herself into a pillared house we accept as a mansion. Cut: to two gangly gentlemen (resembling nothing so much as retired second-string basketball players) dressed in black leather and berets, ransacking the master bedroom. Cut: to the ‘wealthy’ beauty ascending her spiral staircase, a half-finished bottle of champagne in one hand and her stiletto heels dangling by their str