Dear friends,
Offering you these lines from Patricia Lockwood’s Jewel Thief Movie:
They saw me laid on a dictionary
to demonstrate my transparency,
which was complete; they could read the word
everything through me.
And from Tennessee Williams’s Desire and the Black Masseur:
There is no original sin. Nothing shameful apart from that which we perceive to be our incompletion.
But constructs can feel very real. There are things that will be shocking in this excerpt, and to those I am closest to because it is autofictional. Even if the novel called fugue implies in its title a kind of psychiatric disassociation, an impending rupture, I feel it incumbent on me to issue a trigger warning.
If you want to hear something of pure unadulterated love, here is a good place to start.
Otherwise, read on.
I made a painting that is more a reflection of process than subject matter, though you could read into the latter association. My approach to all mediums is the same. A symbology appears in piecemeal. A collection of signs float up to the surface and assemble themselves, and my task is to intervene as little as possible. Though in writing the assembly is much more hands-on. Various collages take shape and a narrative arc binds the one that works. Like a spine giving a more calcified structure.
Experience can define us or we can define it and then it becomes something different.
I’ll leave it there for now. I don’t think any context for the excerpt is required except for Paul is the roommate of Elliot. Excerpt after the image.
The impression his fist made when it flew to strike the uppermost limit of their shelter, the ceiling just over her head, appeared to her as a color field composition. It was purple on purple-violet, a smudge gaining definition in a tear. When silver light came through the bars of the city window and struck it, an exercise in tonal gradation. A dark aureola bloomed like a bruise around a darker focal point on the white plaster he’d fantasized was her face. From where she lay on her back, her eyes could amble along its edges, the rupture delineating the chasm between her world then and now. That rupture looking onto a void space where he'd deposited all of her beliefs about everything, about herself, the woman who’d never stay after her man told her he’d bash her head in, because here she was. Lying stark naked on Elliot's bare mattress, staring up at the abstract expressionist, unblinking black eye he'd put on the ceiling.
He’d taken leave of his senses, then made her a Rothko.
~
Something had not been right about him when they almost collided in the hallway earlier that day. Coming around the sharp corner and down the stretch of corridor leading to his place, she almost didn’t recognize him at first: a dubious oncoming figure materialized into Elliot without locks. His long silky hair no longer. The equine features of his face seemed to take on new proportions that he shrank away from. On the left side of his forehead a gauze bandage sagged though she could not quite see underneath it. Apparently the hand responsible for his haircut had taken the shears too close to his head and nicked him in the process. The rough pixie delicately framing his face was a DIY job, that much was clear. It had the effect of making him out to be both the shorn lamb and the blind shepherd, a picture of reckless vulnerability. But it was the way in which Elliot held himself, his shoulders hunched as if to protect his sunken heart, that made him hardly recognizable. Never before had she seen him so timid, so pathetic. He trembled. She could only speculate as to the cause of the transformation. Elliot's audio engineering job description had expanded into areas he felt insulting to his expertise, moreover that his pay grade did not rise to evince, and it seemed that what he'd set out to learn was not all the music studio where he worked was ready to teach him. It seemed that he was not prepared to have his expectations checked and this had kicked his defences into high gear. She touched the top of his left ear where his beanie had always covered, as if to confirm he was not an apparition. Soft winter skin. He flinched. His eyes darted every which way in avoidance of hers, squirrelly. He would not be able to get around her in the one-way system of the narrow hallway.
“You didn’t reply to my texts,” she began. He'd gone missing after their quarrel in the dorm laundry room, leaving a trail of her messages in his wake.
“I was texting you back when I got hit by a car,” he said.
And before she could pose any questions about that, moved nimbly past her to his door.
She followed him inside. The place was more a wreck than usual. Ever since Paul had hit the road, it'd been all the more evident who'd been the only one ever to clean it. Strewn all around, takeout boxes from the Indian place where Elliot's order was known by heart stank of rotting meat. Paul had split following his acting debut as The Good Guy on that semi-reality dating show having revealed its premise to be nice guys finish last, with other cast members pretending to be members of the public sabotaging Paul's romance. Last they'd heard Paul had gone on tour with a band he was not even a member of. Maybe he'd finally had enough. Maybe splitting three-ways a studio apartment unfit for one person (that only two of the three of them excluding her put up rent for) was worse than sharing a tour bus with a group of strangers. Though, Paul had always seemed so contented sprawled out on his futon opening fire on enemy avatars controlled by people who existed, like he must’ve to them, as disembodied voices. So contented that his virtual reality had seemed to lend the real space a cosiness which, paradoxically now that they three were down to two, translated to a claustrophobia. Rae ducked where the ceiling dipped and the loft space encroached on the lower level, moving to put on a record. Some sound in contrast to that of the dull thud of Elliot's skull against a car windshield, intelligent dance music for him to lick his wounds to. Air was already on the turntable and that would do. She lifted the needle from its little holster and dropped it on whorling black.
Surfing on a rocket
Surfing on a rocket
Surfing on a rocket
The tune that came out didn’t seem quite right, it missed the mark, but she left it.
Hit by a car, she marveled. His injury seemed an unfair cancellation of her own indignation, but from his perspective, her guilt must surely have transferred to the driver. She was wondering what had been the make of the car and the circumstances surrounding the accident when she realized he’d gone up to the loft. She climbed the ladder and lay down on the dirty mattress beside him. Dirty verging on unhygienic. The loft felt cluttered though the only other objects in it were the two marking its boundaries: at the foot of the mattress on a short platform, the statue of Buddha—one of those skinny Thai Buddhas without a big brass belly, with a long nose arcing into eyebrows, elephantine earlobes drooping down to his shoulders and a skullcap like Elliot's but made of snails; and up nearer their heads on the shelf in the wall recess, the jar of pig hooves, each hoof a swollen cloven pair of ladies high heels, suspended in amber goo.
It did feel suddenly like that space were more than just the sum of its parts and not in a good way. Suddenly its peculiar non-functional objects appeared as symbols of the upended parameters of Rae’s life, and a queasy vertigo presented in her like the symptom of an upside down value system. All hours Elliot's work had been pulling him in and she was always on call when he got off, so their days had turned into their nights had turned into their days. The City had done its part to aid their seamless transition to this nocturnal lifestyle. Staying up all night for them, providing everything they needed and everything they didn’t. Like a life support machine for vampires, asking only everything in return. Rae sunk into the mattress that knew the contours of her body better than even Elliot did. Elliot did not immediately acknowledge her presence. The mattress was a Tempur-Pedic and it’d cost him a month's rent. At least if he got kicked out for not making rent, he'd still have a Tempur-Pedic to sleep on. It seemed too comfortable for their own good. It got her thinking along the lines of romantic tropes, of everything would be alright so long as they still had each other. If he were destitute, cast out into the unfeeling cold of the City, in a dark leafy corner of Central Park with only his Tempur-Pedic to his name, she could be his warm security blanket.
Elliot turned and wrapped his arms around her like she were something to have and to hold. Normally he'd call upon this as indisputable evidence, physical proof they were made for each other, Just look at how we fit together! as if testifying to an audience, a court jury. In light of their recent turmoil it felt less like an act of remembering what their bodies never forgot than a desperate grasping onto some shared reality. She felt edges she hadn’t before, as if his collision with the steel body of a car had embedded in him shards of psychic shrapnel. He was the hard metal spoon and she the soft yielding substance he carved into whatever shape he desired. With his hands on her tenderest parts he prodded. He was always wanting, wanting for some relief she could not provide. She whose desire was warping into a desire wanting only to be free of itself.
She did want for impossibilities, for another time when still she believed she could turn and see him, have him see her, but in her heart of hearts she knew she had left behind such a reverie in the Dream House, and all the eye contact in the world couldn't bury the finding that there was nothing so complicated as seeing, even as there was nothing so uncomplicated as looking, and their powers of perception were no more liable to lock them into an infinite loop of mutual affection than they were to misfire like wayward arrows grazing skin.
They had lost that connection. She removed his hands from her and felt his whole body stiffen, contract. So quickly could she make his advances in advance of nothing, reduce him to one big pipe dream. He did not persist in trying and that was alright with her.
Five four three two one zero
No one can stop me to go
the song played. Rae thought, I’ll lie here until he goes to sleep and then I’ll decide what to do, whether to stay or go. It’d only be only a matter of minutes before his body collapsed under the weight of his overburdened mind. She figured if she left, she'd tell him she'd had to go practice for her piano recital. She'd tell him she'd wanted to let him get some good rest, after all that he'd been through. She listened a while for his breathing to assume the ragged texture of sleep but his lungs expired smooth. He did not drift off like she thought he would. At length he turned face up away from her. He seemed to be waiting on her to take some action and so she turned in parallel to him. Except for his big toe he was still. His big toe with its wiry hairs stirred the air in time to its own rhythm. It drew her gaze down the length of his leg and beyond to where according to her sight line it touched Buddha's midsection. Curling ever so slightly up the corners of Buddha's lips. A faint smile did radiate from Buddha’s face like something funny had occurred to him in the middle of a serious matter. Like something in the mess mopped up by his equanimous all-seeing vision had tickled him.
“I should go practice,” Rae said.
“Stay,” Elliot protested, putting a hand on her arm.
The light was fading and time had a way of slipping away from her in that place even when fun had nothing at all to do with it. But before she could stage a counterprotest she felt a pinch that had to have been his fingernail on her left forearm. Delivering a tingling sensation that rippled not unpleasantly throughout her body. So completely had she poured herself into the mold of Elliot’s life that she had lost all of her own definition, and here was an invitation to reclaim it: in that line he was drawing on her skin, the limit to her malleability. Should she get her act together to leave right then. She moved into a seated position, pretending not to have been prompted by anything unusual. He followed suit, sitting up so that the width of his body blocked her exit by way of the ladder. Her back against the wall. Such a scenario she'd just not considered in picking a preferential side of the mattress. She gazed just beyond his right shoulder so as not to betray her focus on escape. There the pig hooves exhibited like some grotesquerie on display for the sole purpose of capturing her attention. Maybe they did have a function after all. The record had stopped playing and was making that sound records do when they're all played out. Scratching, like his fingernail were the needle claiming an alibi for when her skin showed where it had been, marking her. She moved her eyes to confront him and he flashed a nervous smile.
“I should go practice for my recital,” she repeated. She let her gaze slip and fall to the ladder and he shifted like it hadn't escaped him.
“Come get some ice cream with me first.”
“I don't know if it's healthy, the schedule we're on.”
“If the world is upside down then isn't our way of being in it just right?”
She looked at him incredulously though she could not deny such a rationalization had crossed her mind. It was the kind of thing she'd say to herself sitting at the piano, trying not to think about what practical good would understanding how a piece of music works do her after she graduated college. Nothing so useless as the sublime. Nothing it could be milked for it wasn't already giving away freely. And then solace would return to her at the thought: music theory was just a framework, for sighting patterns and conventions you first had to know in order to break. What was life if not a composition, subject to pulse, dynamics, (a)rhythm, duration. An experiment in form, and here Elliot was reminding her she had a collaborator in it. Remembering she was not alone made her feel warm inside and she laughed as if Buddha had let her in on the big cosmic joke. Her laugh seemed to remove the nerves from Elliot's smile relaxing like he sensed it had less to do now in the way of garnering her sympathies. He could make her stay by reflecting her back to her, showing her he knew where she was coming from that she could not run away from. He took her hands in his and placed them into his lap, holding them at the wrists. Rotating them she created a gentle friction.
“Do you know which instrument I'd play if I could?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“The oboe.”
“The oboe.”
“If I could play any instrument it'd be that one.” His voice intoned all bashful in telling her this, like it were something he'd never told anybody before but had been waiting all his life to. It was this way he had of revealing such things like they were sacred that made a person feel close to Elliot, even if she wasn't. Because what was sacred was intimate. At the same time, Rae got the sense that he was disclosing to her information so privileged that it had to be encrypted, and the oboe only stood in as code for something else obliquely referenced.
“They say it's like splitting a diamond,” he went on. “Making a good oboe reed, it’s subjected to such an extreme process of refinement. First it's better if the cane for the reed suffers, if it doesn’t get enough rain or is beat down by wind. Then there are things called splitters and guillotines to cut it.”
“Jesus.”
“A good reed tip is like hundredths of a millimeter-thin. They take the natural curve out and flatten it on top then fold it in half and carve it down with a razor. So you have to almost annihilate it to make it good. A lot of reed makers won't scrape it down thin enough, too afraid of ruining it, but it makes all the difference, the reed tip, all the difference to the sound.”
Her eyes had gone again to the cartilaginoid hooves in amber, and a memory came forward like a relic from cranial resin. Post-Apocalypse Lounge, coming back to his place together for the first time. Giddy drunk and collapsed on that same mattress, feeling what it felt like to lie next to each other. She'd closed her eyes and heard the inner voice of the Brahms opus ten number four ballad she'd been playing on the piano. That sonorous slender line falling between the outer voices, parting to showcase rather than overshadow it. When she’d opened her eyes it was to the hooves in their heavy glass jar, dangling just over her head because like a middle-schooler Elliot was dangling them there. It was up to her to take them from him and return them to their place on the shelf where apparently they'd not moved from since. That shelf in the wall on the other side of him. On her way back brushing his cheek with her mouth. Then his mouth meeting hers.
Now it disturbed her, that memory with all its irrational coalescing elements: the hooves as catalyst for her union with Elliot, inextricable from her disgust, and that queasy vertigo did surface in her again along with all the unseen things. She was an accomplice. The slender falling line and the broken arpeggio in a downward spiral.
“There's the stress it puts on the player too, the prolonged air pressure in the lungs needed to produce the tone, its effect on circulation to the brain, ocular damage, et cetera.” He was still talking about the oboe.
“You sure know a lot about it,” she noted warily.
Then saying nothing he got her attention. He was trembling again, like he were afraid of what he might do if given the leverage. She rotated her left wrist still in his hand, looking on her forearm for the line his fingernail had drawn, but found no trace of it in the waning light. In the dusk there was both coming and going, and his appearance only contributed to the atmosphere of ambivalence. He looked so androgynous with his long hair gone. Layered and yet stripped-down. His beauty both a forewarning and a century-old lesson: be not so dazzled by a Wagner symphony that you hold it apart from the spurious belief systems underlying it. His beauty was a piece of volcanic glass to be admired at an arm's length then dropped. Volatile in its nature. She began to withdraw her hands from his but found they would not come free. He was not going to let her go and they were not even pretending about it anymore. She yanked her hands in his grip and when he let go almost fell backwards. His turn to laugh but no tension did it diffuse in her. That empty falsetto. She made fists of her hands and revolved them like little worlds in a nod to the big one, come like a ball dislocated from the socket of the universe. Steadying herself but then it seemed it was the room that needed steadying. Matter not so sure of itself, not so solid anymore. Reality felt like a drug forcibly entering her system.
She'd started padding around herself as if for her lost bearings, when Elliot leaned in and whispered softly in her ear, “Slut.” Dropping on her that flat fully-loaded term of disparagement with all of the blunt force of language. “I was texting you when I got hit—” His lips tremoring, a crack in the façade before the whole thing broke, a dam disinhibiting a flood of tears. She moved reflexively to soothe him, her hand to his head, fingers through his short hair for the first time feeling his scalp, the contours of his skull.
“I’m not the cause of your suffering.” She was suppressing the urge to rip off the bandage from his forehead, fearing what she’d find underneath—smooth unadulterated skin to blot out all of his excuses. She gave herself license to indulge a fantasy of his body bouncing like some unwanted optical object off the lens of a windshield. A cab windshield because it pleased her to imagine the most ubiquitous vehicle of his beloved New York City turned like a weapon on him. To imagine his suffering as generic. His near death experience inspired in such last words as, don't forget my laundry.
He stopped crying. She retracted her hand and made for the ladder but his arms caught and shoved her easily backwards, into the foam mattress so expertly absorbing the shock of her that she felt nothing. What happened then happened too fast for her to move a muscle in its lead-up. The crack of his fist making contact with the wall on her side. A breeze only clocked after the sound. She was fumbling to hoist herself up when a second crack sounded, that of his fist punching a hole in the Sheetrock above their heads, unloosing on her flakes of plaster, a flurry of manmade snow.
“I’ll bash your head in,” he stated, disconnected as a weatherman gesturing at some vague formation on a screen inside a screen far away from her. Just to clear up any doubt before it arose in her what he was capable of.
For what seemed a long time she just glared at him massaging his fist, transfixed by it like it held some potential yet unknown to him and it was not his fault he could not predict what it would do next. In fact she might owe it a debt of gratitude for its mercy dispensed in the practice rounds, striking only a blow to her pride. She was happy to see him lose control. It cemented her resolve to flee and permanently. Propped up on her elbows, she surveyed the damage he'd done. There on the wall the new blueprint of chaos he'd laid. Beaming an expression shifty and impenetrable as that of the Man in the Moon. She looked back at Elliot’s sorry face bearing not so much as an apology.
“Take your clothes off,” he dictated.
Automatically she removed one article after another until there was nothing but moonlight on her skin. So seamlessly did her motions seem to perform themselves that she could only watch in a kind of dulled astonishment herself disrobing, as though more than just her garments were being shed. Her spirit. Her sound decision-making if ever that had been in play. He seized all that she surrendered and lay down his body on top of it, before turning and yanking away from her the bedsheet on her side for extra dramatic effect.
~
So now here she lay, on her back, staring up into the void his fist had opened for her. What else could she do? He had canceled any dignified departure she might attempt, parking himself on top of her clothing so that when he fell asleep (as he always did before her, why would tonight prove any exception), she'd not be able to retrieve it without waking him. There was no use trying to sleep. Her ears tuned with a new vigilance to the sounds all around her—the sirens slicing through ambient city noise, her ringing ears, shallow breathing—straining to track the exact location of the claws overhead. As if by employing her senses she could stop a rat from falling through the crack onto her. The claws seemed to clamor for some purchase on peace after peace had been disturbed in all the commotion. Scratching in some infernal asynchrony with the record left abandoned on the level below. She turned onto her right side and drew up her knees into her chest. Soon came the sounds of revelry rising as night fell, of San Marcos, the bar next door, through the brick wall like a porous membrane. The sounds of people imbibing Mountain Dew-colored slush churned out of machines, their vital organs soaked in poison. People exuding life. Life! It went on, undeterred as build-up in the system. Life! stalwart in its offensive against time, that killer. Surviving a run-in with the abyss. Life!
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