TO BE EATEN

A Culturally Relativistic Address

To be eaten by us is a great honor, the young man explained in nearly perfect French, while his father and other family members looked on, intently conveying that his words were the apt representation of their collective sentiment. It means that having met you here, and learned about your ways during the time that you spent in our midst, we value what you are to the extent that our utmost desire is to assimilate those qualities into the very core of our tribe. Eating you is, passed down by our traditions, the ideal manner to achieve that, as it leaves nothing to escape the mysterious process of integration. We trust that you will not poison us. We know that you could, but you have shown us that your heart is pure. We trust that there is no better use of your worldly form, since the gods have decided that our paths should cross, and we so thirst for your blessings. We all will share the meal, men, women, and children alike, so that your strength and spirit will be multiplied more than twentyfold, and passed down to our future generations. We have prepared a fragrant broth, with all the herbs and spices that we know, and while you cook we will sing and dance to celebrate such a joyous event.

I can sense your objection, he added, one hand raised, darting a look sideways to signal that his going off script was not cause to worry, and we have considered your point of view also. As I have learned, and I tried to explain this to my family, despite the concepts being wildly alien to our mode of thinking, the people of your tribe entertain the notion that they own an individual right to deciding their fate. At this, he could not repress a faint smile. Surely, this seems quite fantastic to us, as it would, I believe, to any observer of nature, but since we cannot separate who you are and the ideas, fictional or otherwise, that may or may not have contributed to the development of your divine being, we endeavored to reconcile them with our intentions.

It would follow, if your desire was to preserve your physical form for another purpose of your choosing, that you would have remained in, or elsewise sought, the safest place for you, presumably within your family house, or one of these lordly castles that you have described. Instead, you have ventured extremely far, further than any of your tribe had ever done, and entered our forest, keen to encounter us and learn our customs, as you have consistently indicated since the day of your arrival. Evidently (and even if you had not conceived of it yet, you will certainly recognize it as true when pointed out to you), this meant that you had no better use of yourself, where you are from, than to travel to an unknown, remote part of the world and let yourself be transformed by whatever you found there, while you transformed it also with your presence. Of this, we are offering the most complete realization, welcoming and abetting your project with our combined and open hearts.

Accordingly, we trust that by shedding this instinctual reluctance which I can still read in your eyes, you will fulfill absolutely your destiny, such as it must now plainly occur to you. Moreover, as this is also the moment in one’s life when, having attained all possible meaning, existence exhausts its purpose and must discontinue, to be eaten by us appears equally, and beautifully symmetrically I might add, beneficial to you as we trust it will be to us.

Therefore, come, my new and foreign friend, he said, an open hand now extended, shifting sideways to include all present, and let us disrobe you, and honor you with all our love.

MISS MISAO MISSES

A Time Dependent Adaptive Geometry

She said you can sleep with me if you want, and as I met her gaze in mute, explicit questioning, added: but only sleep. I considered her proposal.

We stayed in small bedrooms opposite each other, two of twelve identical cells on the top floor of a former monastery, in Southern France, converted into a library and lodgings for literary translators, who applied for weeks- or months-long residence when in need of focusing on a particular project. She translated children’s books from French into Japanese, I translated contemporary novels from English into French, and under the pretext of enjoying the same torrefied tea, or hojicha, before sleep, we had begun hanging out in private almost every night.

Our attraction for each other had only grown with further acquaintance, but remained unspoken until, one evening in my room, a moment of intimate, subtle silence lasted so long that, fearing that continued passivity on my part would risk a misunderstanding, an accidental deflation of interest, I grabbed the chair on which she sat and slid it toward me (the benefit of a significant size difference), manifesting frankly my desire for proximity. That made her laugh and we kissed (in a strange, lipless fashion, all tongue and sucking of the tongue, which I would later find out to be typically Japanese), allowing our bodies the first, tentative touches. Then, by these both apparently pleased, we progressed to deeper, plausibly prefatory petting, until she said: I only want to have sex if it’s love, like, 100%.

Excited beyond thinking, I said me too. And if pressed, I could have felt that I was there, at 100% already, in spite of having just started; such is often the intensity of male desire, also known as self-delusion. Nodding in approval, she added, as the obvious consequence of our previous exchange: And I need some time to know that. I was surrounded before the battle began, so, naturally, I went along with it and said that makes sense, although that was not the sense that I had had in mind a moment earlier. Purportedly in full agreement, we kissed a short while more before parting at my door, very romantically: a slight self-imposed heartache tinged the quasi-virginal elation of new beginnings, transforming one night’s delight into, possibly, the promise of love.

The morrow night, then, we were in her room, she sitting in my lap, on her desk chair, having drank our torrefied tea and exchanged enough kisses to wonder what came next, when she bade me to stay. If you have ever been a male, you understand my conundrum; if not, it will take a bit of imagination, but not that much. The fact is, sleeping in the same bed as the object of our desire can be a daunting prospect, involving neither sleep nor comfort, as long as a certain instinctive urge, reproductive in nature but quite amenable to many forms of simulacra, isn’t one way or another fulfilled. The best of us can modulate our behavior, but no tripod, I mean, man, has ever successfully summoned sleep in that situation. Yet I did want to become more intimate with Misao, emotionally as well as physically; I sensed from her that the right or expected answer was yes; and also I was raised a Roman Catholic: in that particular circle, self-denial in matters of the flesh is considered virtuous (don’t ask me why), and being initially a bit of an eager beaver, a wannabe good boy of the first order, I internalized that principle early, and most excessively, in my relationships to girls first, then women.

Poor girls first, then women! Having secured the interest of, if I may be so vain, a rather genetically privileged, acceptably articulate male, they found themselves in an appropriate setting, of those reserved for making moves or in their view, having moves made on them, only to see such a promising partner inexplicably freeze, repressing for no conceivable reason a resoundingly evident desire, and seeming to expect from them, in exchange for that most superfluous feat of self-blueballing, appreciation or even tenderness, such as be their response to a declaration of love, rather than their obvious disappointment at remaining untouched, untapped the natural and fluttering flame in their loins. Not being provided by their cultural background the option of taking, as females, physical initiative in matters of romance, they became fairly stuck, likely judging unkind or distasteful the alternative of leaving, hoping maybe, such was the weight of burbling water behind, for the dam to finally burst and seize them in its twirling wave of surging foam, seeing that I wanted it, not understanding why I wouldn’t do anything about it, just sit or stand there, petrified, smiling, not moving.

On my end, I experienced such moments as intensely shameful failures, based on the social and individual expectations that my involuntary passivity kept breaching, and the perceptible frustration that it created in others and myself. Even more so as I was well able to imagine, in the mental seclusion of masturbatory fantasies, what I wanted to do to them if given the chance; these inner pictures indeed inspired the behaviors which, while skillfully (I thought) concealing desires that my own cultural background had not informed me that women shared, led rather efficiently to their private chambers; only to be abruptly replaced, at the first inviting smile or whisper, by an inexplicable inability to initiate intimacy. Afterward, while they swiftly switched their attentions to another suitor, I remained tormented, burning with an agonizing self-hatred that returned, pretty much, every time a situation might entail the slightest allusion to sexuality, gender, the possibility of seduction, or the collective pairing rituals that the youth call hanging out and partying. Thus I also remained alone, and growingly disgruntled with myself and with life, until the vagaries of cultural diversity furnished me with a partner that could, ere the moment for love became a lack on my part, joyfully take me in her mouth and get us started, at the same time unwittingly transporting me to the far shore of puberty: Oh, America, land of the blowjob, all praise to thee!

Still, being human and needing my story to make sense, I rationalized: wasn’t there more pleasure, I posited, to be had by resolutely restraining desire, diligently delaying the physical aspects of love, thus intensifying the emotions which, in the end, determined their quality, than one could ever find in quick and easy releases?—This was once I’d had sex a few hundred times. Before that, no amount of wisdom seemed fit to contain, no matter the potential benefit in terms of physio- and psychological balance, the volcanic tumescence of male virginity. After that, I had unfortunately returned to Europe.—That thrill which I knew so well, and had labeled as fear since it prevented me from fulfilling the male duty to action (after having initially conceived of it as respect or courteous love or the highest form of compliment a man can make to a woman or other such bookish nonsense), wasn’t that thrill actually pleasure? Was it not these girls’ and women’s silliness, in wanting to grasp so quickly the low-hanging fruits of passion, which had misguidedly precluded the attainment of higher, more intense, supremely worthwhile enjoyments?

Our minds are truly great at this: finding ways to reframe as positive choices that which we cannot change about ourselves. It allows the worst of us to think well of themselves, which is magnanimous, really, on the part of the Creator, or else expedient on the part of evolution, since self-esteem cannot be the criterion for natural selection and must, therefore, as the fuel of self-preservation, be provided to all.

Thus, it came easy to me, the idea that by mastering my mojo in Misao’s bed, I would not only demonstrate my sincerity, leading maybe to her future evaluation of our nascent relationship as the coveted %, but also potentially experience with her the superiorly elaborate forms of eroticism which are reserved for the wise. Misao was 13 years older than me, who had just started my thirties, and as previously mentioned, she was from Japan: to me, a still-exotic Orient, with whose inhabitants this was my first such proximity. I had done some research on my computer a few nights before, and a women’s magazine had provided me with this intriguing tidbit: For a Japanese couple, the most intimate acts consists for the man to lay his head in the woman’s lap, and for her to clean his ears with a Q-tip. Understandably, after that, I had high hopes! and every reason to suppose that Misao knew more than me in certain matters, whose practicality remained thoroughly mysterious, but also full of promise for someone as curious as I am—like a dense, steamy jungle on a virgin shore, calling with moistness and danger to the ardent, the adventurous explorer. Concluding therefore that, ultimately, my genital bravery might well be richly rewarded (and all the while feeling not a little infatuated, calculations aside), I accepted her proposal.

We went to bed, she wearing a nightgown, me coyly removing all but a pair of Hawaiian boxers, anticipatorily selected in vesperal presumption, and briefly kissed goodnight before she settled her head in the nook of my right shoulder, softly nuzzled against me down to her toes (which barely reached my upper calf) and, seemingly content, fell asleep. I remained, while enjoying the warmth and candor of this agreed upon and certainly quite sweet platonic cuddle, wide awake for some time; intensely erect as could be expected, but more, in truth, than I had foreseen. I think that my penis permanently grew in size, that night, expanding to a scale new and heretofore inconceivable to me, from the combined pressures of constant stimulus and unbudging, rigorous repression. Not only was my prick turning into an ICBM (InterContinental Ballistic Missile) with a plethora of possible targets; my entire body blazed with contained arousal, a raw primal craving which, constrained in unbending immobility, kept sending prickly shivers through my arms and legs, raising on my skin a feverish sweat and in my frantic mind delirious, demented carnal images; and my feelings were diamonds of ice compressed by tectonic subduction to a fathomless refinement… and all in all, in my padlocked ecstasy, I thought I might pass out. But continued breathing and burning, breathing and burning the dual flame of distress and delight.

This for, I don’t know, hours. I must have dozed off in the morning, as my next memory is of a nightingale singing on the roof, pale dawn seeping in through the skylight. Misao began to stir. Softly, tentatively at first, I let my left hand roam free on her stomach, along her hips, tracing on her skin slow, random patterns that were as many question marks. Conceivably still half asleep, not signaling otherwise, she welcomed my touch with muted but moaning abandon, and accordingly, displaying attentive and playful largesse, I ventured down an overgrown path until I found, and kept under my finger for a while, the key to making her come.

Having caught her breath, she whispered: Antoine, what did you do?

I knew what she was asking: did I expect reciprocation, which would mean that my caresses had broken our vow, or had I given with pure and selfless intent, if maybe a hint of—in hindsight (post-orgasm) pardonable—naughtiness? Quite certain by now of what suited her, I replied, imperceptibly withdrawing my groin: that was just a way to say good morning. She glowed and tenderly pecked my lips, then we got out of bed and I put my package back in my jeans, unused, unwavering, and proud.

The next night, in my room, we kissed then quickly, unconditionally went to bed. Taking charge, she had me lay on my back and proceeded in turn, with her small and strong hand, to rubbing me. Never, for two obvious reasons, have I been more grateful for the slight leftward slant in the axis of my dick, born from years of right-handed self-pleasure, than when I c-c-came and felt and heard a huge splatter of cum land upon my pillow, splashing into my left ear.

1. because it missed my face.
2. because, to my wonder and delight, Misao then produced, from the pocket of her neatly folded jeans, a Q-tip, and looked at me inquiringly.

SON OF STRANGE

An Inertial Reference Frame, with Body Parts

His only garment was a simple cloth that he had spun himself and wore wrapped around his waist. He ate little and prayed much, privately and publicly, each according to the demands that the turmoils of our young nation imposed on his desire for retreat. Similarly, he traveled from state to state at the behest of various groups affiliated with the movement that he had established as the driving force of independence from our colonial oppressor and now, of a novel form of government by the people. That he did not accept any official role in the latter only underscores the range and depth of his influence, founded upon a symbolic and religious incarnation beyond the reach of the most skilled politician. His wife of 65 years (they had been married early) remained in the town of their birth and he journeyed in the company of two young women, one of which was my mother. They were remote cousins of his, simple, illiterate creatures who took care of his modest material needs, arranged the rooms where he slept and what little nutriment he required, and appeared only as silent, doting figures offering their shoulders for a rest to the gaunt arms of the exalted man. Their names were unknown to the public and their presence unmentioned, although they are visible, in whole or in part, on almost every newspaper photograph of that time and many an international newsreel.

Yet to them, of a class accustomed to attending unquestioningly richer and more educated masters, this employment was, in relation to their peers, a source of vast and wildly envious consideration, as it is true or deemed such by those in subsidiary positions that the higher the object of one’s charge, the greater honor there is in service. What’s more, I believe they loved him, as he was a warm and gentle person, moderate in words and actions, of even temper and pleasant demeanor; surely, my mother never spoke of him without a tender mist filling her gaze, expressing an attachment that was none the lesser for belonging firmly to the past.

She would tell of seemingly mundane moments which in the company of the great man had acquired for her the solemn intensity of historical events, to be always remembered on a different plane, remote from ordinary life. After a long walk on the dusty, garbage-strewn streets of our motherland, she would wash his feet with cold water and a bar of soap, meticulously rubbing each patch of skin and sliding her fingers between his toes, which made him wiggle them and laugh. After morning prayers, he would often sing to himself, not the expected religious hymns, but secular love songs from old movies, the popular hits of his youth, in a frail yet agile baritone. To my mother, these daily affairs became, especially once she’d returned to our village and its ordinary, pedestrian lifestyle, the stuff of legend, to be narrated, in hushed and devout tones, only to a privileged few who visited us for this purpose, and observed around the matter all the attentions of a ritual. This was, all in all, what her existence meant, her participation in the quotidian of this most illustrious man; and nothing more could it ever mean.

Therefore, it was only after I pressed her for what was truly many years that she relented and confided in me what much aroused my curiosity. Yes, she admitted, at night, after they had all retired to the same private room, there was often a shuffling of sheets, and one or the other of the young ladies-in-waiting would receive on her cot the sinewy visit of a panting and voracious male. Without ever uttering a word, nor needing to, he would engage in acts of wild sensuality that belied his age, including some that my mother hadn’t known to exist, she said blushing and skipping over details. He was vigorous but considerate, always making sure that the object of his affection enjoyed their interaction as well, leaving her fulfilled and exhausted, transported quite beyond herself. On nights when it was the other woman’s turn, the moment was almost more exciting: hearing and imagining what happened in the dark, suddenly feeling quite cold and untouched, while pulsing in unison with something both unspoken and unseen. And beforehand, when measured steps approached across the room yet one—for he alternated irregularly—didn’t know who was to be chosen, there was such intense hoping as ever a promised princess could have conceived, awaiting in fairy-tale virginity the return of her liege.

Never had she discussed the event with her consort, nor with anyone. Never had it troubled her, as I pointedly inquired, that this was a man publicly and widely defined by vows of austerity—although chastity itself had not been mentioned, probably considered implicit by the common standards of holiness—who thereby indulged secretly and, in fact, extramaritally, in pleasures of the flesh with not one but two women many years his juniors and living under his tutelage. As far as she was concerned, there had been no need for explanation or judgment.

It was left for me to ponder, what this all meant, and although it doesn’t matter as he was killed long ago, shot in the street by an extremist of a different hue, still I wonder who my father really was and how to call this of which I was born.

HOW TO BE LONELY IN MEDELLIN

Analyzing Hidden Phenomena in Asymmetric Complex Systems

Anecdote: Aline is telling me about this beautiful place on the West coast of Colombia, where the jungle ends where the beach starts, and she watched the sun set on the Pacific recently with a friend, and it felt like paradise. I get erect inside my jeans as she speaks, sitting across the small pink table of a café on a hill above Medellín, and I wonder if she’s had sex with that friend, maybe on that beach, maybe bathed in the glow of the setting sun? But I don’t ask her: sure, we slept together a few times back home, two months ago, and I’ve just arrived for a week-long visit which entails, evidently, an evaluation of our romantic potential; but that tentative repetition, while suggesting a further interest in each other, did not, obviously, imply an interim commitment to monogamy. So it is none of my business.

Background: Yet I don’t commonly get erect in conversation, nor in any situation really that isn’t clearly defined as leading to sex, so this unexpected burgeoning tells me that something strong is in play between us. I am feeling possessive of her. Even hypothetically imagining that she may have had sex on that beach with a black man whom she had just met at her hotel (she has mentioned having traveled alone, on a small twin-engine plane; and also that among the many physical types coexisting in Colombia, she finds black men most attractive¹, my own sexual instincts are awakened. I don’t say anything, but it gets me thinking.

Principle: Some years ago, I noticed that imagining the woman I love being unfaithful is actually a turn-on. Jealousy may come later, if she ends up rejecting me, or becoming unavailable to me for another reason. But in itself, picturing her fully aroused, a physical phenomenon which I intimately know and find delightful, in the grasp of a virile, erect lover (the visual of the erection is important, seeing this hard, male member about to plunder that juicy, quivering boiled oyster—enticing yet deceitful, concealing a hollow like a tiger trap), makes me physically, well, want to join in. This is not what I was led to expect by the behaviors depicted in books and movies, where only rage seems to prevail in such a case, murderous, devastating urges of revenge for an untold and yet apparently obvious blow to a man’s feelings; but this construed betrayal I myself find, or so it seems in real life, a rather pleasant and ultimately inviting abandonment.

Memory: The first time was in a relationship that had been going on two years. After the summer, we were to attend separate Ph.D. programs, a thousand miles apart, and before going on a vacation together, she had taken a job in a café for a few weeks, while I stayed home as I didn’t need the money (my future campus being located in an inexpensive college town, while hers not quite). There, during a break, a colleague had kissed her, and yes, she had returned the kiss. Why? Well, because she wanted to. But she didn’t intend to go any further: she was just telling me to be honest about it, and because I might see the guy if I came along Friday night, when their team had plans to meet for drinks at the local tavern. Indeed, I felt that I must, and before the furious gaze of that young man, as well as the amused witnessing of others, silently reclaim the woman as my own. That kiss, narrated by her on the porch of our house, cocktails in hand of an evening, was my first thrill of cuckold arousal. I did not tell her at the time, as I wasn’t yet willing to encourage this type of behavior, but it got me thinking. And later, when she did cheat on me for real with a famous professor of that distant university, I cried and banged the floor with my fists in sentimental despair, sure, but I still had a very frank erection as I pictured, following her contrite description, the two of them flung on a leather couch, her wet, white underwear, his massive cock rubbing on it².

Theory: But by then, I believe I knew why: if sexual competition was the norm, in the polygamous—orgy-prone, rather—bands of hominids that for millions of years combined to engender our oh, so civilized species, seeing another male about to penetrate the female that you desire is not a signal to go and fight him, or wallow into tears and self-pity, gobble fast food in front of TV and sink into depression, but to quickly sign up for seconds. She is going to mate with everyone around anyway, as it maximizes her chances to conceive. Seeing this other male just tells you, from a far away perceptible sign, more prominent and garishly noticeable in the darkness of the cave than hers, that she is open for business. If the male is already inside her by the time you get there, you still have options: poking him in the butt, should you be so prepared, is sure to make him come swiftly, and let you take your turn. Otherwise, luckily your penis possesses such a shape that, if thrust back and forth inside a wet and appropriately sized container, it produces a suction effectively capable of extracting the sperm of your predecessor, to be replaced by yours³. Now, this can explain getting aroused at the sight of any available female in the arms of an erect male, which might well be the case (but I lack experience to confirm). Adding onto this the contemporary (at this scale) phenomenon of romantic infatuation, I conjectured that by loving a particular woman, I wanted her more, wished to impregnate her more specifically than any other, and thereby reacted more intensely to the visual of her impending penetration by someone else.

Relevance: So on that day with Aline, I learn from my penis that I’m attached to her in that special way, wanting to claim her as mine, but I’m also curious to know how I know—or am I right to think, since she hasn’t said anything, nor did I ask—that she indeed had sex on that beach at sunset. It would be a pretty nifty skill to possess, that of smelling or divining the sexual behavior of one’s partner when one isn’t around. Don’t you think so? In this specific case, I’ll find out about three months later: having confirmed in the course of that first visit that we like each other, I return home with a plan to come back for a few months, once I’ve worked out some financial and professional parameters. We’ve still not discussed exclusivity, and I assume that my dick feeling was right, so I keep going on dates also, and two weeks before flying back to Medellín, I sleep with a nice brown woman⁴. When Aline and I meet for a weekday lunch—coy as we are and pretending to be casual about this whole thing, me dropping my life to, not join her in Colombia as that would be excessive at this stage of our budding relationship, but make sure that we have a chance to see each other more, by moving to Colombia and renting an apartment two blocks from hers, in that nice neighborhood of Belén Malibú—, I tell her that I did, being that kind of guy. (What kind? Well, less subtle. I should probably have described a nice garden, in which I’d taken a wonderful walk with someone. She might have gotten it and wet.) Turns out, I had guessed correctly, but it didn’t mean anything to her, whereas now, this does. No, she cannot keep exploring our relationship, knowing that there is someone back home that I may, I did not lie, want to see again. No, she is not, and this is quite insensitive of me to ask, she says holding back tears, no she isn’t aroused right now under the table. No! She isn’t even hungry anymore.

1. And because she mentioned it, you may assume that she is white; and because it registers as a relevant fact in my beach scenario, you may assume that so am I. Beyond that, I am not sure if it matters. ↩

2. That he was Black also is purely coincidental. I think. I mean, these are real situations, I’m not making this shit up. And yes, in case you are wondering, I also get aroused if the lover’s penis is white or another color. Just these two most relevant examples happen to involve two distinct black men—the first of which I have never seen, only imagined (like you are now doing for all of us), making his appearance a particularly abstract and subjective projection[a] Come to think of it, for the second, I have never seen his penis: only by hearsay (or lack of contradicting hearsay, rather) do I assume to know its color. (By the way, how does she look to you?)
   [a]: I guess the point of playing with linguistic mental projections is to show that this is what we do always, even when we think we are interacting with reality as opposed to fiction; and to provide, along with that distanciation, options and agency as to how one projects, through language, into one’s self and reality[i].
   [i]: And this conflicts with political identities and worldviews, for sure. As it asserts a much more small scale variability of perception and meaning than collective discourses can (or usually do) allow. ↩

3. I’m not making this shit up. See Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, Christopher Ryan & Cacilda Jethá, HarperCollins, 2010. ↩

4. I’m still not sure what I am supposed to do with these skin color facts. In my narrative (and memory), they are part of the sensory experience of someone’s body. But yeah, I get it: a lot of baggage in the fantasized sexualization of other races, especially by mine. ↩

AN ANOREXIC ANALYST

Detailed Prescription from a Doctor of Philosophy

I had noticed that she was thin, but as we had started dating in the season of padded coats and woolen sweaters, wasn’t prepared for what appeared when sitting on my bed, after a fair amount of kissing and listening to Chopin, she enjoined me to undress her. Slender as they were, and most vertically inclined, her bones were all that supplied any shape; everything else was retreating indefinitely within, withholding her existence to an extent that challenged the mind. I didn’t know that there could be so little flesh between two hip bones, so much void above skin tense and curved like a ship’s sail; nor that an adult woman’s shoulder blades could look fully like the ungrown wings of an angel. Well, I had seen pictures of Auschwitz detainees, but not expected to find one in my bed, quiveringly eager to copulate! Her warm, wet hole, swollen as it was by desire, was all I had to chew on, like one steamed wonton at the tip of long ivory chopsticks. As the spare rest of her shook and rattled in ecstasy, I felt closer than ever to necrophilia or acting in a Tim Burton porno. But I am not a picky eater, and accepted the menu as it came. Moreover, I really like Chopin and was not a little pleased to have found a person for whom a dozen piano studies constitute, as they do for me, ideal preliminaries to intercourse. In short, I was in love, and as such much disposed to bending my tastes and ideas in order to fit the declared object of my imagination. I renounced wholeheartedly any previous inclination for tits and ass, and focused instead on the countless freckles that dotted her pale skin like so many constellations, whose shapes and names I soon began to record, and revisit each time she granted me the opportunity. (Did I consider whether they would make nice lampshades?) She did not offer much to grab or hold on to, but pivoted gingerly around the axis of my pride, and bent easily, and was light to lift and carry, so much so that it felt like making love to the wind, hearing only, to stave off a daunting sense of aloneness, the faint moan of a ghost crossing my path here and there as I twirled and danced in the night, the ghost, judging by its vocal patterns, of a woman being repeatedly stabbed.

Laura, that was her name, was a psychotherapist working with terminal cancer patients. She had studied philosophy at an elite Parisian school that will remain unidentified, in order to allow me a free rein in commenting that I have never seen, although this was an extreme case, a healthy body on its grounds (excluding janitorial staff). The pressures of a selective admission process, over a period of three or more years, maybe coupled with the subsequent realization that being best of the best meant absolutely zero career prospects outside of teaching, resulted in many a shriveled cunt or cock, many a bent spine and tipping spectacles, before the age of twenty-five. But Laura had rebelled: she had wanted to do something practical with her talents, and through a further course of study, qualified herself to attend to the mental health of others. She went fast, she went big: her terminal cancer patients were children, and she worked with them and their parents to… ease their sense of doom? Regardless, I liked her character: she was my kind of gal, a maverick and a trailblazer, and this budding affection only began to preoccupy me when she revealed that, barring a rapid change in her eating habits, she was also going to die soon.

Not that dying is a bad thing, everybody does it, but when you are enamored or otherwise attached to somebody, the prospect of their imminent demise can appear in a dramatic light. I immediately resolved to act and, regarding myself a creative thinker, commenced looking for unexplored solutions or cures to that not uncommon condition: anorexia. Laura, since her early teens, could hardly eat a meal without making herself vomit afterwards. Every known treatment had been attempted, and over a decade of psychoanalysis had borne its fruits in the form of many an insight about her deep, unconscious tendencies, but not quite of a practical method for encouraging digestion. I myself was not a medical professional, only the holder of one of the lesser doctorates, those that actually require the production of original research but do not lead the general public to call you doctor, yet that did not in my view constitute a hindrance in completing my self-assigned mission: on the contrary, I judged that nothing but an entirely novel approach could succeed, and that I was therefore ideally qualified to break new scientific ground while also saving the life of my true love. It may be relevant to mention that I am a doctor of fiction.

I looked at the problem as a story that cannot reach its end, and retreats miserably to its starting point, leaving only bitterness and unprocessed chunks of text in its circular and ephemeral wake. Laura, it seemed to me, was not accepting that she had a bottom, occupied as she had been all these years in developing the functions and qualities of her higher body parts, the brain, conceivably the heart, but anything lower, how horrid! How base! How ignoble. She refused to let God’s creation go through her, expressing a limited if useful value, and come out at the other end, reduced to sordid waste. Everything had to come back up, directed at the sky, at the enlightened spheres of knowledge and art, philosophy and the aspiration to a perfection of thought that discarded all physical comforts. Consequently, she was nearing the end of all spiritual quests, the ultimate liberation from the problem of human existence: but she didn’t seem stoked about it, and I definitely wasn’t, having only recently initiated a rather pleasant usage of her bodily being.

So it was clear: I had to make her feel her butt. I had to impose on her consciousness, by any means necessary, the fact that the breath of life comes out at both ends, and elevates the soul equally by either process, or at least that neither impedes whatever aspirations one might have of accessing real, or imaginary, but inherently glorious, realms of abstraction and ideality. I had to therapeutically spank her, in vigorous and recurring sessions, had to make her butt cheeks burn and bleed, smitten and outraged, until she connected that sensation with what happened in her head, and progressively acquired an acceptance of the parts of her that lay between. It would be arduous and time consuming, would require the sacrifice of whatever shame and modesty either of us had left, and would inevitably bind us for ever in the cataclysmic apocalypse of her individual neuroses, and a conjoined ascension to a fully accomplished togetherness as a healthy, committed couple. And we would not stop there.

Sufficient as this course of treatment may be, we had to ensure its efficacy and confirm the cure by pragmatic and empirical means, thereby guaranteeing not only her future and continuous well-being, but also the complete expression of all feelings and desires that our maieutic, soteriological, and I daresay, romantic sinapisms may have arisen in either of us. What I proposed, analytically, was to penetrate her, anally, following which, in the required position of a four-legged animal, she would reach directly with her mouth into a plate of various foodstuffs, prepared and conveniently arranged at appropriate height, and chew and swallow while I remained, moving moderately so as not to impede her deglutition, but innocent of retreating, a constant and firm reminder of whither must needs her efforts lead. Probably she would, despite her hands being otherwise occupied and unable to perform the usual trickery, vomit the first few times her full repast, but we would not allow it to break our resolve, nor our conjunction, and I would not concede the diminishment of my presence within her inner sanctum until the conclusion of our daily session. Thus repeating till she would, not only ingurgitate, but contain throughout the preponderant completion of the gastric phase, i.e. about two hours, a consequent plateful, we would further our union to unprecedented acmes, inscribing my therapeutical contribution into the depths of her newly integrated incarnation, and only then would I relinquish my post and give way to the promise of proximate and solidly sculpted successors.

When I exposed my project to Laura, adorned with full theoretical apparatus and bibliographical support, its expression dynamized by a mixture of scientific enthusiasm and of the most ardent, pure and romantic love that I had ever felt, she blanched. I cannot say whether she disagreed on principle or lacked the intellectual flexibility to appropriate an admittedly audacious approach on such short notice (as I had indeed gathered the necessary materials to engage in our initial session immediately), but the fact is that she stated her desire to repair to her own quarters in order to consider with suitable thoroughness all the implications of my genius (she didn’t say genius, but something similar) idea, and I never heard from her again.

It was therefore with immense regret, both that our encounter had come too late to attain operativeness in her case, and that her illness had deprived her of the opportunity to communicate her indubitable gratitude, if not in her name, in that of science and the cohort of her congeners, for my discovery once she had been able to properly evaluate its import, that I learned a few weeks thereafter of her death.

MY FIRST TIME

A Memory in Fail-sharp, Opus 1

I was 17 and—according to my friends, “still”—a virgin, a fact which I didn’t mind admitting, being the truth and also not shameful in my opinion, but privately very much deplored, as I wasn’t less horny than the rest, only slightly more shy and sensitive, less able to leapfrog the verbal and emotional stages of intimacy in order to land straight into someone’s pants, or them into mine, such as I observed my entire cohort striving to achieve, with varying levels of success but a shared absence of restraint, each Friday and Saturday night, while I drank to excess in a paltry attempt to catch up. Below the surface of my fastidiousness, I felt physically quite ready, eager, frankly, to begin partaking along with my peers in what appeared to be the greatest joy available to humankind, or at least the most frequently praised in conversation. After a few failed attempts over the course of our now dwindling senior year, each sadly disrupted by self-defeating excesses of modesty and/or alcohol, I was determined, when my next opportunity would arise, not to complicate things. Go with the flow, as my friends said; seize the day, as my books said.

So, after meeting late at a birthday party and exchanging barely a few words before, among the tangle of goodbyes, sharing a drunken kiss and our phone numbers; subsequently going on a proper date the next weekend, enjoying a mellow jazz concert and a fast-paced succession of cocktails, followed by a passionate, achingly protracted kissing session on the sidewalk outside the club, when asked if I wanted to come over for a nightcap, I said yes.

We proceeded to a nearby tramway stop and my only worry, as we stood there waiting, was that I had started experiencing some rather painful cramping in my lower abdomen, which was getting stronger with every passing minute, and I didn’t know how much longer I could conceal this kind and amount of discomfort. Yet, despite what the relatively mature adult that I have become would advise their past self, I did not contemplate, even for a moment, verbalizing such a base physical fact on this first, so far successful, romantic date. It would have broken the mood as swiftly as a fart during a blowjob, is what I felt at the time (also underestimating the potential appeal, to some of us, of farts), unable to conceive the benefits of honesty in building trust with a new companion, rather than hiding oneself in a cocoon of shame. Call it youth or stupidity, all that mattered to me was to sustain the conventional appearance of romance until reaching the long coveted acts of sexual validation—not to behave fairly or authentically toward either of the people involved. Too many times before had I made up an excuse and ran away!

As the old tramway creaked to a stop before us, I stiffened my resolve: nothing so trivial as belly pain would stop me now in my quest to get laid! Especially since my date was pulling all the stops to entice me: having jumped on board, I sat in the second available seat, purposefully leaving one free ahead of me, yet was soon surprised to find my own lap occupied by their heavy, grinding bottom, and our lips joining again in deep, passionate tongue-twisting. Oh, it was on! and I was thoroughly enjoying it, except for the part that with each jolt of our rickety progress toward the suburbs, extra friction was created between our nether regions, which was having the opposite effect that one might, and my date certainly seemed to, judging by concomitantly localized sighs and smiles, assume would be produced in these circumstances: not pleasure but pain, and not the good kind of pain, rather the debilitating sort of gonadal contraction that can nip the most avid burgeoning in the bud. And yet, thus diminished, I kept pretending, repressing the sacrificial complaints of my lower half for the dubious profit of the upper—by which I mean the brain, there being nothing fake or artificial in the voracious contortions of my mouth—, I kept pretending to be fine.

From time to time, the tramway doors fluttered open and closed in the background, unheeded by the fervid lovers, until suddenly, after one look outside, they playfully jumped up and rushed me down the steps, into the unknown. We stood at the intersection of two perpendicular roads surrounded by nothing but wasteland, and I realized that never before had I ridden so far outside of my urban comfort zone. There were no landmarks, not even the faint orange glow of remote city lights to get a sense of direction, but they smiled and said: Don’t worry, my place’s this way, not far. The night was cold and quiet, the sky sprinkled with stars like grains of salt on a really rare steak, and already we were advancing at a brisk step, my hand held warm and slightly pulled forward, across the bare, frozen ground.

We soon reached a grove of rectangular, identical apartment buildings, certainly sprung in such isolation out of the wisdom of 1970s Sovietic urban planning, and in an overheated, sparsely furnished living room, met their two roommates who had also just returned, yet unaccompanied, from evenings out. There, I entered a strange state of stiff speechlessness. On the tramway, I was immersed in a frenzy of passionate, gluttonous making out, and thus escaped any measured exchange that might have betrayed my inner state. Now, eager to prolong and further that embrace, but uncertain of my capacity to suppress my pain long enough, I proved largely unable to engage in the affable bits of socialization that were exchanged among the three of them, and genially offered to me, as I sat on one end of a couch, feet flat on the ground, knees straight, an ill-advisedly accepted cup of tea, too hot for drinking right away, rigidly held with both hands.

Aside from its currently suspended, purely tactile operations, my tongue refused to function for anything but declaring my discomfort and need to retire home; yet having come this far, I stubbornly resisted the nagging temptation of admitting defeat, instead clinging fiercely to the appearance of propriety, as if sharing tea with the neighbors were a natural phase of the bedding process, and striving to present a jovial, if unfortunately mute, countenance. Thankfully, after some excruciatingly protracted remarks on the compared merits of various bars and nightclubs for procuring suitable erotic partners, which to me seemed mooted by the roommates’ current failure in that regard, and to which I nodded, my date ended up noticing my reserve and desperate attempts to swallow quick sips of scalding tea. Although likely misinterpreting what would have appeared as a more straightforward form of polite impatience, they got up with a frank smile and, reaching for my hand, unabashedly announced that we were now going to bed, to the manifest approval of our transitory companions.

I was glad to escape once again external scrutiny, to immerse anew into physical touch, with growing excitement and diminishing dress, as we rolled onto the bed in a bare, dark room only shaded by the glimmer of a half-moon through a tall, curtainless window. By continuing to rush forward, performing the putative steps of passion with an appetite and pace matched only by my complete inexperience, I could avoid focusing on my pain which seemed thus to recede, and only as our hands reached almost simultaneously into our underwears did I realize in a panic that we hadn’t discussed the scourge of our generation, the unavoidable return of the mechanical within the furthest throes of romance, I mean condoms. Or condom, even. I didn’t have one. Nor had I ever used one (see “virgin” above). Nor could I consider mentioning it, as it would imply a willingness and competence regarding penetration that I knew not to possess—my theoretical willingness being curtailed to the domain of imagination by an overwhelming incompetence, as well as, it may be noted, a curious fear to reveal in this setting my status and level of experience. As much as I wasn’t ashamed to discuss it in front of friends, I had gathered the misguided notion that admitting virginity to potential partners was—instead of, as may be conceived today by more accomplished minds, a rather obvious technical information to provide, counting at least on some moral understanding, the person whom one has elected to trust with the physical acts—a sure way not to get laid.

And laid I very much wanted to get, except, having reached adolescence in the 1990s, it had been decisively imparted on me that AIDS, AIDS, AIDS, YOU HAVE TO WEAR A CONDOM ALWAYS!! Or you will die. I had repeatedly, incessantly heard that message from school, parents, and magazines, long before anyone cared to explain what happens in and around the condom: what sex is, how it’s done, and why it matters physically and emotionally.

So, as much as I felt incapable of bringing it up, I stood in dread at the thought of violating that primordial prohibition, and yet I craved for IT to happen, penetration, and soon IT was already happening…

And it was magical. A fusion of self and other, of body and soul, dark eyes and dark hair wrapping around me like a shroud, pulling me as deeply into oblivion as if I were indeed about to die, right there and then to be killed, lovingly bitten at the neck, at the heart, devoured and conceived, swallowed and made whole.

When time came to come, there was thunder, transpiercing the dark pillar of the night.

And my virginity, taking my breath along, absconded out the window.

Sperm, sperm, sperm. There was sperm where there should not be. A lot of it, warmly, deliciously expressed into one another. Soon getting cold, though. Sticky cold. Uncomfortable. Squishy readjustments ensued. After that, I stayed on the bed, daring not to move or think, to enter that new reality that our act of supreme transgression had thrown into being.

Coming back from the toilet, they asked: Are you OK? I didn’t answer. Perplexed, they sat next to me and gently insisted: That was what you wanted, right?

I didn’t know how to respond without lying. I did want it, and I didn’t. It had been great, it had been terrible. The best and worst combatted still in me, excitement and despondency, physical release and psychological dread, pleasure and despair, pride and guilt: would one side eventually prevail? Would they learn to cohabit? I didn’t know. I couldn’t say.

I didn’t know, said I.

And there, to my surprise, they rushed forward and hugged me sweetly. ”I’m sorry,” they said, stroking my hair, “I didn’t mean to pressure you”. I could tell they were sincere and felt a bit guilty myself, a bit untruthful: had I not wanted it more than anything? Yet had I not also not wanted it? Comforted, petted, appeased, I accepted a kiss and we lay back down, our cuddle eventually turning into sleep, first as spoons, then each drifting slowly to oneself.

In the morning, they walked me back to the tramway stop. We didn’t hold hands or anything, neither of us pretending that nights as these mean any commitment beyond a common one to having fun. But I knew. At some level I already knew, as the birds sang brightly and in the gutter, a puddle of rain mixed with gasoline displayed every color of the rainbow, but darker, I knew that we were now irreversibly bound by life and death, the risk and attraction of both. I knew what this meant to me.

We got married a year later. It did not last until death—although the end of the relationship almost caused mine, but I doubt if that counts as fulfilling the wedding oath—, nor did it create life. And I have thought often since about that first night, my sense of tragedy when the deed finally happened, of indissoluble togetherness afterward. Would further events have unfolded differently had I been able to communicate my feelings better along the successive stages which led to the scaffold—I mean, to intercourse? Did my partner really have my full consent when performing the actions which so utterly tore down my boundaries, physical and emotional? Would the answer to this last question change based on which gender each of us identified with at the time?

I AM A PERVERT

A Non-Inertial Reference Frame, with Shame

When I was 8 or 9, my parents took a new helper, a girl a year or two older than me, who came from our ancestral village, deep in the bush. There were less restrictions about employing children at the time, and as the distant cousin who brought Fari to our doorstep on a Sunday afternoon said, it was really a way to help her, since she was the youngest of nine and her family couldn’t afford to keep her.

My first memory is of her crying constantly because our apartment was on the fourth floor and she was afraid she would fall. “People aren’t meant to live that high,” she said, sobbing desperately—in the villages, there were only ground-level huts and shacks. After a week of her whimpering, I was so annoyed that I took her forcefully to the balcony, pushed her against the iron railing, and yelled: “Look! You’re stupid, we ain’t gonna fall if we don’t want to.“ Struggling to break free, she stared at me with wide, white, bloodshot eyes, helpless and scared. When I let go, she scrambled away, figuring out a safe distance from the void, and remained crumpled there, still sobbing: having made my point, I stuck my tongue out at her and left. She pouted for another week, but quit crying all the time about heights, only at night about missing her village.

I was very aware of her lower status as a helper because she sat on the floor, while we used chairs and couches. I also knew that she was dirty, because Mom had her eat her meals in a different plate and drink in a different glass, which were washed and stored separately from ours—something she’d stopped doing for our other helper, Bintoo, a girl of 17 who had taken to brushing her teeth and showering daily, even asking for more soap and toothpaste when she ran out. Fari smelled like the goats that roam everywhere in the villages, in and out of the huts, keeping the children warm at night, but she didn’t care nor understand why we did, stubbornly resisting my mom’s instructions to get clean. Mom had to stand outside the bathroom to make sure she showered, otherwise she would just let the water pour out over the bar of soap, and later show how it had become thinner, claiming not to know why the process had left her own body unchanged.

I reckoned that I could order her around, if there were no adults present, and she seemed to find it natural also. I would come up with tasks for her to do in my room, like taking all my toys out of their basket, arranging them according to my current preference, of which I expected her to keep track, running the feather duster over all of them, but certainly not play with them, after which I would perform an inspection. Whenever I found fault with her work, and I always did, I would chastise her, verbally at first, then, since “she really didn’t understand, the stupid village girl”, physically. I would push her, beat her, and usually end up riding her, holding her down on the carpet while I rubbed myself on her hip or bum, rubbed myself hard.

After a while, she would stop resisting and just wait for me to be done. Then, as I got up, panting, she would smile at me timidly, and I would feel a strange sweetness toward her for a moment, but she still smelled like a goat, and had darker skin than the rest of us, and did not deserve any nice words: just tasks to do, the food we gave her, and her place in the family, the lowest one, while I was the little princess, pretty much an only child after my older brother had left for military school.

That’s it. There’s not really a story there. I just feel bad, now, for using her in that way. Although she never complained, and it only happened at the beginning, I feel so wrong about it. No one found out, I just stopped at some point, I don’t remember why, and later on, we became rather good friends, I think, almost like sisters. She learned to shower with soap and brush her teeth, she even learned to read and write a little, and when she got married, my mom cried as if her own daughter was leaving the house. I’m not sure why I’m telling you this, I hope you won’t repeat it. I’m so ashamed, I wouldn’t want anyone to know.

You better not write about it! she exclaims, realizing, but too late, what she has done.

THE NIGHT WAITING

“In ideality alone, there is no repetition.” Søren Kierkegaard

It had happened to me before and she knew it. Yet when she didn’t come home at night, the first time, my worry was still mixed with pain. People cheat on each other more often than they die in car accidents, I tried telling myself. On paper, each of these two hypotheticals entailed relief from the other, and accordingly pain and worry alternated in my mind and heart with increased frequency as the hours passed and the night remained still, the street silent outside our house. My hard-fought composure gradually crumbled but I held on, as faithfully as I could, to the crescively dubious notion that I preferred, all else being equal, that she be currently cheating on me rather than dead.

That she knew what had happened with my ex made it difficult to imagine: her willingly subjecting me to the same anguish, had she now decided to cheat on me or leave me. A phone call, a lie or the truth, is it that much to ask? No news at all, when a couple is settled in a decade-long quotidian of caring for each other’s well-being and, within consensual boundaries, periodically ascertaining each other’s whereabouts, no news at all carries a lot of weight. As she was fully informed about my past ordeals, her silence tipped the scale of probabilities toward the more tragic option, the one in which she was unable to communicate and therefore gravely injured or dead.

Dead.

With my ex, fifteen years earlier, it had started with a New Year’s party that I had declined to attend. I do sometimes display unsociable tendencies, yet have learned to tolerate the gregarious needs of others: when she insisted on going, I was fine with it, expecting her to come back some time during the wee hours, not bothering to stay up and wait, so young was I and confident in the continuity of love and life. When I woke up the next morning and she wasn’t in bed next to me, I did wonder a bit why. But she probably had drunk too much, as we were both prone to do any day of the year, and crashed at a friend’s place. No big deal.

When the whole day went by and I still remained without any news of her, I began to worry somewhat.

Incidentally, this was before the era of cellphones, when you couldn’t just message someone a bunch of times, and if they didn’t reply or you couldn’t see in the app that they had received your texts but were ignoring you, quickly and logically deduce that the situation warranted alerting emergency services. When a person left, either you knew where to call them and when, or you waited by your own earthbound telephone for them to contact you, and there were well-defined lapses of time before you could convince any public agent to make your individual concern an official affair. As it was, having recently joined her in the town where she lived, far from my place of birth, I only had the number of her friend Julia: I dialed it repeatedly without getting an answer, which made sense if they were both out together, as I was obviously calling Julia’s apartment, not a device in her pocket. Having no idea who they may have partied with nor where, all I could do was wait.

Wait and wonder when would be time to worry like, for real.

As the sun was setting on the evening of January 1st, she telephoned. Yes, she had partied all night, just woke up. Where was she? At some guy’s place, out of town. Her and Julia. Was she alright? Sure. She sounded strange. Had anything happened? Well, they had both kissed the guy, her and Julia. They were just drinking and smoking pot, and you know, things got a bit out of hand. She was sorry. Truly sorry. But nothing more. It was Julia who ended up having sex with him. She’d left the two of them to it and slept on the couch, she said. Truly, that guy was gross, anyway. Right now, Julia was showering and they were going to head back soon. Not to worry. She was sorry. Truly sorry. Would see me soon.

And then I waited the whole night and she didn’t come home, nor call again.

Waited endless, sleepless hours of bouncing between worry, jealousy, doubt and back again, replaying in my head that phone call that was supposed to release me from all of it, and had done so for a time, fear progressively creeping back in until the pale light of winter dawn seeping through the blinds asserted with ruthless certainty that something was seriously wrong.

In the late morning of January 2nd, I was contemplating reaching out, remaining unsure to whom, yet at least needing to hear myself explain the situation to someone, maybe not a cop, a neighbor?—when I heard a knock on the door.

Relieved for her safety, but still deeply concerned for the future of our relationship, I leaped to let her in, heart beating fast. As soon as I glimpsed her face, wrecked and smudged with makeup, the recognizable black waves of mascara of one who has cried, black hair almost comically disheveled, I felt a rush of sympathy and forgiveness, a caring and protective impulse which instantly replaced the petty pangs of possessiveness. I loved her, I LOVED HER, only wanted to hold and comfort her, erase in an embrace all of her pain and mine, but then, as her image stabilized in the fever of this long-awaited reappearance, something came off, like a layer peeled from the sky in a flash of purple thunder, changing everything.

Familiar as she seemed in her devastation, this was another woman.

It took me some slow, groggy seconds to recognize Julia, and an endless vacillation ensued, her tear-filled eyes reflecting my stupor like patches of deadly blue ice, until she said, bursting into loud sobs: “There… Uh… there was… Uh… an accident.”

So when my second life partner, upon showing up at 2 a.m., told me that she had gone to dinner with a man, that afterward they had kissed in his car, that it had been awkward and unpleasant, and that she regretted it (she also said that he was not nearly as good-looking as I am, which made everything else sound true to me, since I am nothing if not convinced of my good looks—check me out online, I’m not blind, just not falsely humble), I reminded her that these events with my ex had been rather traumatic, obviously, and that just answering her cellphone to let me know that she was safe (I had called and left probably a dozen messages, with accelerating frequency, as the night went on) would have been an appreciated mark of consideration.

As to the quasi-cheating, in a long-term relationship, temptations conceivably arise and if it didn’t mean anything more, I would make do with it. I would just prefer not to be tortured a whole night through by the compounded fears of her death and of my being abandoned, every time that she felt like exercising her well-respected right to individual agency. I trusted that she understood. She said she did.

It happened again two nights later. Although it took another week for her to explicitly break up with me, and over eighteen months and counting for me to quit having nightmares about it, I knew during that second night alone, when her cellphone repeatedly went to voice mail, when the noise of a car driving down our street was not that of a car stopping, when the possibility of an accident had become ridiculously unlikely, I knew that no matter what else might be said or done, no matter what precisely was or was not unfolding between her and that man, no matter what lies could be made up, nor how much hope I retained of us somehow still having a chance as a couple, I knew, with all rational certainty now, that our love was dead.

BIRD POO ON THE LAWN CHAIR

For a Psychoanalytic Pictoriality: A Manifesto

On the cracked, white plastic by the cracked, white plastic table (dirty white, dirty white, streaks of greenish water white),

on the crisscrossed rattan on the marble terrace by the pool—which is lagoon blue with a tiny umbrella on top, thank you very much, and belongs to my parents not to me, as I don’t care about money. We were having a party, you know a small party

it was after my uncle’s funeral, her dress was black and right away I saw the white smudge on her back as she leaned forward to refill her plastic cup of Grazia wine, and wondered if I should tell her

with just a few hundred friends by the cocktail colored pool, DJ blasting gangsta pop, booties shaking, big dicks swinging and me, the King of All Creation, snorting coke off my mother’s Italian lawn chairs

but she was visibly upset already.

But she was visibly upset already when she got there and I don’t think I’m to blame for that, not as much as she is for distracting me at such a sensitive time,

she met my gaze and it was clear that she’d been crying but recently, although I hadn’t known until that day that she was friends with my uncle, as to me

to the extent that I kept going along what I perceived as a continuous white line, stopping only when something sticky heavy warm got lodged deep inside my right nostril

she was Ms. Patterson from 10th grade, a busty, jovial and too young to be true math teacher, who had inspired many pubescent activities on the bunk of my mezzanine desk, while below lay neglected the homework by her assigned

and I froze.

And I froze when she now rested her hand on mine and whispered, “you want to take a look inside his trailer?” and I said yes, I would and

and I froze again when the doctor said the word “cryptococcus”, later as I was reclining on her exam table, although its meaning is cryptic the word is quite scary, wouldn’t you agree and

afterward she told me to pull out before, and I did and squirted all over the back of her black dress, as she bent panting over the red Formica table top,

afterward I cried as she explained what meningitis is, and told me that I was lucky since with appropriate treatment, the death rate is only about 10%, as opposed to 100% without

large, white, oyster-like expressions of delight.

And my mother cried also.

THE CHERRY

If Schrödinger’s Cat were a Fruit

After dinner, as dusk deepened under the cherry tree—it was the end of summer and while they already fell earlier, nights were still warm—we talked about our love lives and sexuality. As the conversation progressed and we derived, from small personal revelations, a growing sense of intimacy, I noticed that she seemed, now, quite attracted to me; probably eager, as was I, to feel sexually alive again after divorce, or just plain horny. For ever longer moments, she would maintain eye contact and smile, joyfully, unashamedly inviting, confirming what I had secretly hoped: that she, like I, had pursued this private high-school reunion, twenty years after last seeing each other, with erotic if not intentions, at least imaginations.

I remembered how, as a teenager, simply meeting her gaze like this used to give me severe bouts of feverish, irrepressible vertigo. Even in the constrained environment of a classroom, I felt myself plunging toward her, swallowed by the space that separated, but really joined us, melting my youthful heart as I fell uncontrollably, vanquished beyond volition by the inscrutable clarity of her eyes, until she distractedly looked elsewhere, at the teacher for instance, at her half-chewed pencil, and, holding myself back at the edge of my chair, I learned about loneliness. Oh, how I had loved her! and suffered from lacking the strength or wits to interact with her while in (or even after, such was the impact of) that state of upheaval! The intervening years at least had made me, I now observed, a more stable person, able to sustain the sight of these particular twin suns.

Yet they had also allowed me to identify my limitations as a sexual participant. Not wanting to repeat the sorry encounters of my past, I decided to show some maturity and lay my cards on the table.

“You know, outside of the two people that I had those long-term relationships with since high school—when I was a virgin, as I’m sure you knew then or have figured out by now,” this eliciting a small smile from her, “I was never able to have a sexual relationship just for the fun of it. In love, I’m intense and liberated; but outside of that, when I flirted with people and we ended up naked, I was always too uncomfortable to go beyond basic preliminaries. I would either not be able to perform, or make a stupid move or comment that radically broke the mood: one way or another, it’s never really worked out well for me and I’m convinced by now that it is a part of who I am. Love is godly, love is pure, and I can do that. Simple human sexuality, though, seems out of my reach. So at this point, I would rather spare myself and others the embarrassment—regardless of how much desire I may feel while the encounter is only an imagined, anticipated possibility.

“But there is one way that I’ve been able, a couple of times, to feel sexually liberated without deep love being previously declared, and that was when some form of kinky ritual was observed.”

This time, she smiled widely.

“Yeah? Like what?” she interjected.

“Well, it’s sort of cheapening to tell precise stories of these kinds of things, but for instance”—I looked at her and marked a brief pause for maximal effect—“for instance, have you ever been tied up?”

“No!” she exclaimed with a single gurgle of laughter. Then she stopped and thought about it. “No, but what does it do?”

“Well, what I have in mind is for one of the partners to be tied up to the feet of the bed, with knotted scarves for example, by one’s wrists and ankles. Lying on one’s back, able to wriggle but unable to move away or set oneself free, entirely at the mercy of the other partner who can caress and kiss and stroke at his or her complete discretion… What it does is mostly to the one who is tied up: you feel vulnerable. Although you trust the other, you have given up control of your body and, technically, your life. The other could do anything to you, and that triggers something instinctive, primal, disturbingly intense, in the form of extreme arousal…”

“When you describe it like that…” she said and left her sentence unfinished.

I drank a sip of wine, waiting, looking at her. She reached for her own glass and, without batting a lash, brought her lips to its rim.

“Would you like to try it?” I said—which made me feel psychologically naked and vulnerable already and, as such, excited, while also proud of my new strategy: talking to women, telling the truth about myself. Never would I have guessed, as a teenage boy, that it was so simple! And yet impossible until one knows enough about oneself.

She swallowed her wine and smiled again. She had beautiful teeth which gleamed in the darkness.

“I might…” she said, pointing a cherry stem in my direction. “But you get tied up first.”

While she was in the bathroom, I undressed and prepared a selection of scarves and silk ties for her to choose from. She came back, still dressed in her jean skirt and wide purple t-shirt, underneath which a black lace bra had imprinted a teasing tracery all evening long, and I lay on the bed. She took off her black leather sandals.

“You know how to make a good, solid knot?” I inquired with a hint of male arrogance.

“Yep. This girly’s sailed before.” she said and knelt on the bed, picking a scarf and getting to work on my left wrist.

After I was all tied up, she stood and unhurriedly removed her skirt, t-shirt and, excruciatingly, bra. She had large, white breasts with dark pink, grainy areolas and pointy nipples. I was salivating abundantly. She walked to the foot of the bed and faced me, over my parted limbs; looking me all the while in the eyes, she removed the black, triangular underwear that had heretofore concealed her sex. She sported a slim, dark bush that matched her black hair, which she presently untied and loosened upon her shoulders.

Then, casually, she touched my big toes, first one, then the other, and slowly moved to my shins with the tip of her fingers, while progressively bending over the bed, bringing her knees on the mattress in between my strapped ankles, and her torso hovering above me until her nipples began to tease my upper thighs, while her long, dark hair brushed my stomach and chest. I was madly erect already.

Her face came close to mine, so close that I felt faint, plunging into her dark brown eyes, darting quick looks at the beauty mark above the left corner of her mouth, the intricate design of her ears, the softest line around the edge of her cheekbones, and returning ever to be consumed by the two black suns with their matching halos of lashes.

“This is fun.” she whispered.

“Yeah…” I answered in a raspy voice.

She saw how excited I was and smiled, then broke off and sat on the bed next to me.

“So… What are we going to do with you…” she said musingly. Then a thought occurred to her: she jumped up and exclaimed: “Wait, just a second!”

She left the room and I heard her move around the house, opening and closing cupboards and drawers as she went. When she returned, she kept one hand behind her back and set something down by the bed, out of my sight.

Shut your eyes,” she said.

I heard a silky ruffle, then felt her tie a piece of fabric around my head.

“Now, don’t cheat.”

I could not see anything. I could not move. She went back to the foot of the bed and a long silence ensued, in which I heard only the sound of my heavy breathing, and felt the warm tug of my erection, the rest of my cold skin exposed to the unknown.

Then there was, by my belly button, a light stroke, unnerving and slightly ticklish, like the tip of a feather. It made a few curves on my stomach, then ascended to my chest, surfed on the hair of my sternum and swirled sideways to my nipples, which hurt sharply when touched, stimulating all the more the erectile blood flow that pumped through my swollen perineum. Then the stroke traversed my armpits, slowly probing the hairy, sweaty hallows, and rising along my biceps, sending wave after wave of nervous shivers down my spine.

I was in a trance, twitching, moaning, pulsating with every muscle, every inch of sensitive skin. I felt her weight shaking the mattress, then, suddenly, at the center of my aroused body, infinite warmth enveloping my member, progressively engulfing it until it was all gone and, at the same time, her buttocks came to rest on my thighs.

I believe that I moaned uncontrollably, but she gave me no respite and began riding me, starting imperceptibly slow and progressively accelerating, while I felt a now familiar stroke on my neck and cheek, on my forehead and down my nose, on my lips, back down to my throat and into the small notch between my clavicles, then down my chest again, while she kept quickening the movement of her hips, the friction of her pubic bone on mine, the mutual appropriation of our incandescent sexes into one eternal and volcanic SEX.

There was a loud, guttural cry, then suddenly she ripped off the scarf that had been covering my eyes. She was a Gorgon leaning above me, her hair flowing darker than the night from all around her head, falling down enveloping my face, enclosing us in a tunnel of musky, undulating animality of which she was the mistress. Her dark eyes were bolted deep into mine, as deep as my sex inside her body. She smiled with all her shining white teeth and lifted her shoulders, still pounding me at the hips, until she sat on me vertically and I glimpsed, in the hand of hers located where that ticklish, caressing stroke had lately been, on the left side of my ribcage, a knife.

A long, silvery kitchen knife.

While my mind remained incredulous, my body went burning all over with adrenaline. I tried to say something but before I could utter a sound, she raised her arm beside her head, and stabbed with all her might toward my face.

I came, and came, and came, while the pillow next to my cheek exploded in a twirling cloud of white feathers.

I came some more.

The rest of my body was petrified, tensed and arched back in the posture of the dead man that I almost became, that I briefly thought to be. I exhaled the last of my breath, then felt a burning shiver traverse me whole, as life started flowing through me again.

Slowly, I managed to look at her, who had let go of the knife and brought her hands behind her head, stretching forward her magnificent breast, while making small, swiveling movements with her sex, inside which mine showed no sign of receding.

“You’re crazy…” I muttered.

She answered only with a broad smile, then rose and brought to mine her lower lips, enticing me to drink, at that flower-like cup, the warm confession of my simple humanity. Rendered obedient anew by this sweet attention, I lapped eagerly, eliciting a long moan, and thought I had reached the pinnacle of pleasure when there slid, mixed with the cream that my tongue was pursuing deep inside, into my mouth a cherry.

A DREAM COME TRUE

The Pursuit of Happiness: Traffic Flow and Safety

The 2-door, hatchback limousine drove by either in the mornings, around 11, or in the afternoons, around 3, then back again a half-hour later. From the semi-basement of her uncle’s chocolate shop, where she stood day in and day out preparing special orders—gift boxes and baskets, wedding favors, bags of eggs and truffles adorned with colorful ribbons—Lisa, 16, could only see part of the luxury vehicle as it slowly passed, all shiny and black, on Main Street in front of the shop. Through the dirty glass pane, beyond the feet of occasional passers-by, she distinguished the silhouette of the driver, a serious, uniformed man with a cap, and then the tinted windows behind which lay a cocoon of unimaginable luxury.

“One day, I just might ride in one of these!” she thought to herself, feeling a tingle of excitement in her chest and down between her thighs, bashful and brash just for the thought. She felt her mother’s severe stare as if her mother had been there, felt the same effect inside although she was alone and her hands were working, all the while, with automatic speed and agility. Pretending that her mother was indeed in front of her, in which case she would never have dared, she shrugged and added more loudly, with a tone of protest, but still in her inner voice: “Why I just very well might!”

Her uncle was her mother’s brother; he ran deliveries and met with important customers all over the county. His wife ran the shop upstairs; when she took lunch, she had Lisa stand for her behind the counter, and Lisa ate afterwards, downstairs, the sandwiches that her mother had prepared for her in the morning, and left by her lunch box on the kitchen counter. Lisa lived 5 miles out of town, in what was formerly a farm and now a slightly dilapidated abode for her father, unemployed construction foreman, her mother, nurse, and her five brothers and one sister. The eldest, Lisa rode a rusty bicycle to work every weekday, with her lunch box strapped on the back. She had dropped out of school the year before.

She sometimes wondered, during those lonely days spent in her semi-basement, how it would come to pass, that she would ride down Main Street in the fanciest car that she had ever seen. It was complicated. Obviously, no one she knew owned one. There would have to be changes in her life, and not just such that could be concretely defined by an amount of money or even a social status, a profession like actress, model, or cosmonaut. No, other changes more essential as well, more profound and diffuse, changes that she could only suspect or vaguely imagine, like how it would feel to finally lose her virginity. She wasn’t allowed to go out on weekend nights, so her prospects in that regard appeared similarly scarce.

In fact, the two equally unreal realms became progressively somewhat confused in her reveries. In order to ride in the large black car, in the painstakingly construed life scenarios that led to this climax of wealth and fulfillment, there was usually a man, at some point, a rather mysterious, but dark-haired man, the likes of which she had not seen before outside of TV and the movie theater. Yet she was ready to recognize him instantly, one day, if the time came, just as he would recognize her; they both would know and run toward each other…

But the days were long and boring. Well before it was time to go home, she would have exhausted all the possible ways for her dream to come true. Life, she sometimes thought, was like a box of chocolates of which someone had already eaten all the fillings.

All she had left was the youthful hope that tomorrow, maybe, things would be different. And since today inevitably led to tomorrow, today was okay then! In the darkening dusk, she rode her bicycle through the fields, on narrow country roads, at times rising from the seat and yelling, after checking that no one was around: “Yes, Mother, one day I will ride in that limo!”; and at other times sitting just so, leaning forward, that it became interesting down there, and images of a brunet paramour flashed before her eyes…

One such evening, a speeding farm truck failed to spot her on the road, and a few days later, she did go down Main Street in the back of that luxurious vehicle of her dreams. Her family followed, all packed together in a rusty, beat-up car.

A GERMAN LOVE SONG

Beyond the Skein of the Border: Co-creating Connections

To J.S., a great teacher.

The German soldier took off his helmet and set it down on the grass. His black hair, drenched with sweat, stuck to his neck and temples. He crouched by the riverside, cupped some water in his hands and splashed it on his face. I focused my gaze back on his neck, through the sights of my .22 long rifle.

Behind him, the chrome parts of his Zündapp motorcycle shone bright in the sunlight. This was what we were after, with my buddies of the Cize maquis: his motorcycle. The Wehrmacht couriers drove by almost every day, on this remote Road 83 between Besançon and Lons-le-Saunier, most often two or three of them, but sometimes a lone one. We had waited patiently, surveying from the cover of the woods this stretch of road that we knew well, between Mouchard and Arbois, and on this afternoon of September 1943, this was finally our chance.

He had appeared alone at the end of the curve. He had slowed down at Arsures bridge, then turned on the unpaved road and followed the river up to the edge of the woods, where he had shut his engine off.

We had quickly taken up position: Léon and René with me, Marco hanging back to spot any incoming vehicles on the road. I was the best shot among the group; I was the point man. Once we had reached the correct distance, I signaled to my buddies and lay down sideways in the wet grass. Still under cover of a patch of bushes, I cocked as silently as I could the modified Lee-Enfield rifle that we had recently received in an airdrop and with which I had trained at our Montgriffon headquarters. Then I rolled onto my stomach and got the target in my sights.

I had just softly laid my finger on the trigger. I was about to begin the long inhalation that would, a moment later, allow me to shoot without shaking, when suddenly – incomprehensibly – a male voice rose in the silence of the woods: Morgen muß ich fort von hier, the voice sang, und muß Abschied nehmen.

Even before I saw the soldier’s lips moving and understood that it was he who had begun to sing, I recognized the song. The tune and lyrics, in a fraction of a second, transported me back to the living room of my parents’ house in Ville-d’Avray near Paris: me running after my friend Yehudi, my mother shouting “Boys, be good!” when our horsing about disturbed the quiet of the room where Yehudi’s father, a German violinist, and mine, a French engineer, played chess while from the HMV 78 rpm gramophone rose Richard Tauber’s low and mellow voice: Oh, du allerschönste Zier, scheiden, das bringt Grämen.

Yehudi and his father had become our neighbors during the summer of 1936. I was 12 years old, Yehudi was 10. At first I had thought that he was a girl: he had long, curly black hair, a thin frame and a pale complexion, and he seemed shy. I had kept my distance on that first afternoon of July when he and his father had first visited us, but my mother had nudged me toward him saying: “Boys, why don’t you go play in the garden? I will call you later for snacks.” I had remained stunned, faced with the contradiction that I saw between such a delicate creature and the fact of being a boy, a condition proudly and roughly claimed by myself and by my equals both at school and in the various sports at which I excelled. It was Yehudi who had held his hand out to me, while the adults watched us with wide smiles. So I had taken his hand in mine and said: “Come on, let’s run!” while leading him toward the garden. He had followed me, but once outside, it appeared that he did not like the same games as I did. I was fascinated by anything involving a ball: I could play tennis alone against the garage door for hours, dribble my basketball while counting out loud to a thousand, or cross the garden like a soccer star, evading again and again the bushes/defenders before scoring between two trees while a crowd of squirrels roared madly in acclaim. I – already – liked war games: running under enemy fire, throwing pine cones as grenades, dying heroically while protecting imaginary comrades-in-arms or leading the final assault to conquer, finally, the porch where Mom usually had snacks waiting.

But Yehudi did not like action, he liked characters. As he had established that first day (in his almost perfect French diction to which a touch of German accent added only the lightest of murmurs, a humming, like a secret whisper), the games that interested him required some preliminary organization. First, there had to be a dramatic situation: for instance, a young man in love with an opera singer, or a Golem that escapes from the control of the young rabbi who had given him life. Then, something had to be at stake in the interaction between the two characters: the young man tries to convince the opera singer to requite his love, the young rabbi tries to prevent the Golem from destroying the entire city. Only after the frame had thus been established and the casting determined, could the game begin. Playing then was mostly dialogue: I knelt in front of Yehudi, who took haughty, coquettish airs, and listed the reasons that should make him respond positively to my amorous advances, racking my brains to come up with anything; or while I advanced threateningly, gargantuan, toward a massacre of sinners, Yehudi tried to hold me back, arguing for the redemption of humanity, whose members were certainly imperfect but also capable of goodness. In the end, when the scene seemed to have exhausted its dramatic potential, there was always a troubling moment: “You devil!” said the opera singer in a flutter of eyelids; or “My Golem!” said the rabbi, his hand still holding my dreadful biceps; then there was silence.

Our bodies remained frozen in the position in which the ending drama had left them. Yehudi’s glittering eyes remained nailed into mine, and I felt strangely, vertiginously pulled toward him. I stood there, breathless, wanting to squeeze him against me. Usually, it was at the precise moment when I decided to act out on this impulse that Yehudi would jump away laughingly, shouting teasingly: “You won’t catch me!” and darted away. I ran furiously after him and that is how we ended up barging in, overexcited, in my parent’s otherwise so quiet living room.

“Boys, be good!” shouted my mother, so we calmed down. I took Yehudi by the hand and we sat next to the chessboard to follow the friendly battle that took place on it. My mother brought tea and cookies and Richard Tauber’s tenor voice lulled us, soft and melancholic: Tomorrow I must leave far from here and say farewell, Yehudi translated for me, Oh my most precious treasure, what pain that we must part.

In this instant, lying down in the cold grass, the butt of my rifle squeezed against my right cheek, I saw as in a dream – or rather felt like the impression left by a dream, in the morning, when its events are already disappearing from memory but still remain, warm and deep, the emotions that it had inspired – I saw again these summer afternoons in Ville-d’Avray.

Suddenly, the soldier who was singing in the sights of my rifle appeared to me not just as an enemy in uniform, but as a young man about my age: a young man alone by the side of a river, in a clearing bathed with sunlight, who was far from his home and who sang, with a deep, gracefully measured voice, the same song that had so moved me in my disrupted childhood.

For him too, maybe, this song evoked the memory of someone or somewhere; or maybe he sang only out of a sort of insouciance, because in the midst of war and suffering, there still remains time to be young and sing love songs.

Whichever it was, I now had a problem. Because this young soldier so similar to me, with his black hair like Yehudi’s and his tenor voice like Richard Tauber’s, I had entirely lost the desire to kill him.

I shot a glimpse toward Léon who was covering me from behind a bush, an antique Model 1892 revolver in hand. In his eyes I thought I saw a confusion similar to mine. It now seemed improper, even indecent to murder this young man in order to steal his motorcycle. To shoot him coldly from behind, without him having any idea of what was happening – in the very moment in which he was forgetting who he was and what he was doing there. The worst, for me, I think, was his wet hair shining in the sunlight, that summer sunlight that radiated onto the whole clearing, in this quiet spot of the forest of Revermont: one would have thought that we were on holidays, taking a trip to the river, among friends, not that we were at war.

I never found out if Léon really shared this feeling of mine: that evening, we felt uneasy and spoke of other things and a few weeks later, he was arrested by the Wehrmacht. Maybe what I had seen in his eyes was only him worrying about the time that I was wasting, when we knew at any minute other German soldiers might appear on the road. As for myself, seeing Léon like this, looking away for a moment from the young German soldier, I was brought back to the situation that we were in. We were there for a reason that had nothing to do with my feelings, nor with anyone else’s.

I set my eye back in the sights of my rifle, I inhaled deeply and in the middle of a controlled exhalation, I shot.

Today, for my first class of the year, I showed my sixth-grade students a VHS featuring Richard Tauber in Heart’s Desire, the 1935 English film that gave its worldwide fame to the song Morgen muß ich fort von hier.

“But sir, this is our first German class!” exclaimed a daring soul from the back row. “How are we supposed to understand anything?”

First, I asked them to only look at the images: what is happening? We are on a train, there are mountains passing by outside the window, other travelers are listening intensely to the song. We can already guess a part of the story, can’t we? We can very well imagine the rest. Then, I played the excerpt a second time, asking the students to focus only on the melody: is it happy? is it sad? quiet? energetic? What feeling is the singer expressing? Melancholy, maybe: add this to the moving train, what do you think his song is about? Imagine! Which words do you think would feature in such a song? The most daring students started coming up with ideas and I wrote a list on the board: as could be expected, the words “leaving”, “sad”, “suffering” came up, as well as others from the same lexical fields. Once everyone had contributed, the blackboard was full. Acting casually, I added the corresponding German words while saying them out loud: “to leave” is “Verlassen”, “suffering” is “Grämen”, etc. And finally, I played the song a third time and watched the students’ faces light up, one by one, when they recognized in the song the words that they had guessed.

“You see, actually, you already understand German. You just have to use your imagination. We’ll talk more about it next time.”

The students left the room mumbling, some visibly upset, others excited by the new horizons that had just opened up before them. As for myself, while gathering my materials, I thought of Yehudi who had been the one to suggest this little ploy, when I had told him that I would be able, this year, to project video recordings during my classes. Yehudi always comes up with this kind of idea: be it on stage or in real life, he is always encouraging everyone to discover, or uncover, themselves through their imagination. He says that by imagining we actually remember who we really are.

I found Yehudi again in New York City, in 1950, almost thirty years ago. He and his father had left for London, at the end of that summer of 1936, from where he had sent me a postcard; then I had received another one, two years later, with a picture of Ellis Island. Each time, the postcard was blank, with only Yehudi’s signature at the bottom, underneath the word “Love,”. Love, comma. Then, nothing. My father had died in the war in 1940. Nazi occupation had laid its leaden weight upon us for four long years.

In 1950, I had finished my studies and obtained my certification as a German teacher, so I decided to take two months to travel America. Before I took my first posting, I wanted to discover the country of our “liberators”, them nice fellas with perpetually bovine jaws who had shown up one fine day, just in time to take part in the final victory. After crossing the Atlantic on the Queen Mary, I had directly continued on a Chicago-Denver-San Francisco-Houston-Atlanta loop, enjoying the services of the Greyhound company and seeing much thriving farmland. As a conclusion for my trip, I had organized to spend two weeks in New York City before taking the boat home. In the cultural capital of a country that many where I came from thought of as culture-less, I had pleasantly spent most of my time in museums – admiring the matchless collection of Asian art at the Met, most of the best European modern art in MoMA – and in theaters, on and around Broadway Avenue. It is there that one night, under the guise of Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, I suddenly saw appear on stage my friend Yehudi.

I recognized him instantly, in spite of his make-up. I was seized by a violent shiver. It seemed to me that the play should have stopped then and there to let us meet again, but on stage, the action continued, unconcerned. Hypnotized, I continued looking at this unreal Yehudi bustling about in front of me. While he devoted himself to unveiling Blanche DuBois’s secrets, I kept scrutinizing the face and movements of the actor, in the futile and yet irrepressible hope to catch a glimpse, under his appearance as character, of what he had become in life.

When the play ended, I left the theater in a daze and walked randomly the streets of Manhattan, for a long time, without knowing exactly what the question was to which I so crucially needed an answer. The next night, I was again in the audience, and the next night again, my heart still beating, my mind still searchingly empty.

The third night, when I came out into the street, Yehudi was waiting for me on the sidewalk. His make-up hastily wiped off, a black coat thrown over his costume, he was standing motionless in the midst of the moving crowd, piercing me with his eyes. I walked slowly toward him and, without a word, took him by the hand.

“Come on, let’s run!”

And running we went into the night, weaving our way through the crowd, like two children happy to find each other again.

A little later, we sat in a nearby nightclub that was vibrating with the sound of Charlie Parker’s saxophone and told each other about our lives between then and now, just what was needed, the essentials. Sitting face to face in the subdued, pinkish light, only a few words, a gesture, were enough to understand each other. The war was far away and yet we both carried in ourselves its indelible mark, like an education, a silent strength.

In the end, after much hesitation, I told him about the German soldier that I had killed in the clearing between Mouchard et Arbois, on a sunny summer day. I told him of the memory, of the feeling that had come over me when Richard Tauber’s song had resounded just when I was about to shoot. And when I was done, leaving between us a deafening silence that was even intensified by the brassy tears of After You’ve Gone, is when Yehudi leaned slowly toward me and kissed me for the very first time.

IN THE CHANGING ROOM

On the Insularity of Identity

One afternoon, I was in the changing room at the local swimming pool when I overheard a conversation in the stall next to mine:

– OK, now Billy is going to put on his swimsuit, said an old woman’s voice.
– NO, GRANDMA FIRST! squeaked a kid.
– Well, all right, first Grandma, then Billy, okay?
– Okay.

There were some shuffling noises, and then:

– GRANDMA, YOUR UNDIES ARE UGLY!
– Hem, no, they’re not ugly, Billy, they’re regular undies. Be nice, now.
– NO, THEY’RE UGLY!
…
– AND THEY STINK!
– Billy, what’s the matter with you! My undies do not stink! I put them on clean this morning, like I always do.
– NO, THEY SMELL LIKE FISHIES!

Struggling not to laugh out loud, I finished changing, hearing nothing further, and afterward I couldn’t resist hanging back in the hallway, eager to sneak a peek at the fearsome Billy and his brave, if presumably shamefaced, grandmother.

I waited a few minutes, pretending to look for something in my knapsack, then the lock clicked, the door pivoted creakily…

Holding a gray towel, wearing a bulky black Speedo, an old man appeared, his chest covered in white hair, his skull shiningly bald. He paused, somewhat startled to see me there, then he lowered his head and set out for the showers, loudly dragging his flip-flopped feet on the blue and white tile. Behind him, the cubicle was bare.

THIRD DATE FIRST

How Time’s Arrow Becomes Flacid if Reversed

I woke up spooning her, my hand lazily circling her navel, and I did not know who she was. Dark hair, warm, female body, almost entirely naked as tentative explorations confirmed: I thought it wise not to signal right away my new condition, and enjoy this gift of the gods.

I was 18, had spent the night drinking and smoking pot and fallen asleep on a friend’s couch. Whoever this was, seductively conjoined to my youthful slumber, I can honestly say that I would not, in the evening, have shown more discrimination in choosing a bed partner than established factuality thus, in the morning, offered me. Minding that she seemed still asleep, but measuring at what I thought was a fair value her intention of sharing with me, well, at least the pleasure of lying under the same blanket, half-embraced, for these delayed resting hours of the partying bunch, I inhaled, and lightly caressed, and gratefully partook in this pure, detached from the vagaries of knowing each other, coziness of the break of day, of dawn, until she began to stir.

Then I pretended to wake up also, bringing my lazy hand back to myself and turning over on the couch, faking a stretch and a yawn. Having thus reinstituted basic social conventions, we quickly determined that we were Pauline and Antoine, having heard of each other before in the tales of the couch’s owner, and that her night having ended later than mine, she had decided, against the protestations of our common friend who would have willingly offered his bed, with or without him in it, to her, to finally make my acquaintance. Because we both really needed sleep, she thought it fine that our bodies meet, in that manner, a few hours before our minds.

I did not point out that I had gone to sleep wearing my jeans, so “exhausted” was I, and was now waking up in my underwear, indicating further playfulness on her part than her narration admitted. She looked too delightful to nitpick. A brunette with blue eyes, very pale skin, straight short hair and generous curves vaguely concealed by a thin, white nightgown that she, being an organized type of drunk, carried in her purse whenever she went out and might, as it were, spend the tail of her night sleeping on a friend’s couch.

This she explained after I, looking for my pants which I expressly needed to put on before I could release my half of the blanket, found them folded at the foot of the couch and she, noticing my surprise, said that I had seemed uncomfortable sleeping in them and that she had subsequently taken them off for me. I thanked her for her kind concern, we shook hands playfully, and I turned away to get dressed. She took advantage of the moment to grab her own pair of jeans from a nearby chair and slip them on, keeping her nightie on as a sort of shirt or blouse.

I was struggling not to stare at her pointing nipples, thin brown bud tips under a satin haze, and to come up with some kind of suitable conversation, when our mutual friend emerged from his bedroom, fresh, clean and wearing a suit. He smiled maybe a little wider than appropriate while stating that no introductions, it seemed, were needed, and that he, being less of a bum than us two artist types, had to leave immediately for work, both important and remunerated.

I quickly countered that a photography gig that began at noon could hardly be construed as respectable employment, and Pauline added haughtily that indeed he may leave, we would let ourselves out—maybe. Everyone was quite merry as our friend, making me the happiest that he ever did, followed up on his promise and removed himself from our impromptu rom-com scene.

I was hungry. So was she.

She offered to cook pasta. I volunteered to go buy wine.

We seemed to agree on everything.

Optimistically, I bought two bottles. Luckily, her pasta was delicious.

We chatted about painting (her passion), writing (mine), flirted a bit but didn’t kiss, nor make any advances. It didn’t feel like a time to begin anything. We had just come out of bed, after all. We finished the wine, exchanged phone numbers and parted ways, slightly tipsy and titillated, certainly happy to have met each other.

We knew that we had come for each other. It was a party organized by a friend of our common friend, who had let each of us know, knowingly and known to all, about the party and that he had also let the other know. He himself wouldn’t be there. He really was a great friend.

I arrived early and the party was still calm. Pauline was sitting on a couch with another girl. They were looking at a notebook of Pauline’s drawings, as I learned by joining in with a quick, “Hey, what’s that?”

Pauline’s drawings were exquisite, full, dark, technically impressive, thematically exciting. They are difficult to describe from memory, but they represented legions of body parts combined in impossible, yet entirely plausible shapes. Each bestowed with multiple sets of humanoid genitalia, of either gender and intricately intertwined, these creatures seemed at once monstrous and unarguably natural, like mistakes that nature had forgotten to make until Pauline came along. They were drawn in pencil, a full notebook of them, with such texture, grain, shades of dark and darker, such complexity, such obsessive passion… I was thoroughly impressed.

Also, the notebook was of a kind I had never seen, which Pauline said was from Japan. Each page was linked to the next on the opposite side of the previous one, and the spine was unbound, forming something like an expandable paper accordion. I liked the notebook very much as well, I said. I said I wanted to have it. Pauline replied that she could not give it to me, she needed the drawings for her art school project. I said that I understood, but could not help really wanting to own this specific notebook, with these specific drawings in it, very, very much.

I cannot quantify how much drinking went on that night, nor do I feel able to subtly indicate, as the story unfolds, the stage of intoxication that corresponds to each event. You, reader, will have to infer that from the characters’ behavior—or alternatively, start taking quick shots of whisky, now!

Pauline said that she liked that I liked her notebook so much, but she still needed to keep it for school. Seeing that I was disappointed, she said she would make me a deal, though: if I could steal it from her, unnoticed, during the night, then it would be mine. I said OK. We shook on it and moved on.

Since this was a friend of a friend’s party, we did not know many people, so we went to mingle. Pauline was clearly the hottest girl there, which I could tell by the way the other guys looked at her, and were unfriendly toward me. But I soon broke the ice with liquor, a hobby of mine that they all happened to share.

The next thing I remember, Pauline, the girl that she had been speaking with when I arrived, three guys and myself are in the bathroom, putting on some make-up. We are all cross-dressing.

I am happy enough until at some point, the three guys are encouraging Pauline and the girl to kiss, in a way that makes me uncomfortable. It is clear that Pauline and the girl are not unwilling. It is also clear that the three guys really want to watch them kiss. But I am unhappy.

I am unhappy, not because I am jealous of Pauline, but because it seems sleazy to me, in that moment, the four of us dudes watching these two girls kiss, packed together in the bathroom. I don’t feel like we are cool gender-bending young people anymore, like I did a few seconds ago. I feel like three or four horny guys have introduced this whole cross-dressing affair only to partake in some faux-radical lesbo-voyeurism. Maybe that is because none of the guys seem to have any inclination to kiss each other. Maybe that is just how I feel.

Surely that is how I feel, because when Pauline and the girl begin kissing lightly on the lips, I can’t stand it and push their faces apart, in what I intend as a soft gesture of playful protest.

Among a general mix of shock and disappointment, this softness of my gesture is immediately brought into question by the girl, whose name I have entirely forgotten. She might have had, I realize then, a more genuine desire for this kiss than I had understood. At least, she seems to be challenging me, like a man would, for the role of being Pauline’s date, while complaining for what she characterizes as an act of aggression on my part.

Pauline says it was just a game, no need to get angry anyone.

The girl proceeds to punch me in the face.

Waving off the boys’ exhortations not to retaliate, which hadn’t crossed my mind (such a male chauvinist am I), I repeat that, in my opinion, my gesture had been soft and in no way contained the intention to initiate violence. Rather an act of dismissal in a situation that had become distasteful in my view.

A long theoretical and rhetorically complex debate ensues, in which I guess I prevail, since the girl finally accepts my explanation, and subsequently agrees to make up and hug it out.

During this hug, I experience my first black-out of the night.

By which I mean, I fall over mid-hug with the girl in my arms. The audience to our whole affair is still surrounding us and we are quickly caught and helped up, and I regain a sufficient amount of consciousness to stagger away on my own.

The party continues. Apparently, I have not made any new friends.

The next thing I remember, I am drinking alone on the couch, in the living room. Most people are gathered in the kitchen, and by the sound of it, having fun. After a while, Pauline comes out and sits with me.

I feel like we can finally resume where we left off: we are interested in each other, this is alone time again, just her and I, which is after all the reason why we both came to this party where we don’t know anyone. I don’t remember specific discussions, or if I managed to speak at all, only that there is music and an empty room, so at some point, after a minute or an hour, we get up and start dancing.

I am much too drunk to dance. I keep bumping into things, failing to catch Pauline’s hand ever, and stepping almost exclusively on her feet. Pauline suggests that we slow dance instead, regardless of what song is playing, we can be romantic as we please.

I faintly recollect a few moments, not many, of holding her in my arms. She is as soft and warm as I remembered, reimagined, dreamed of, and longed to experience again, ever since that morning. This was truly the only thing that I had wanted to do all night, holding her like this, and I like it. Everything is finally as it should be, everything is all right, everything.

During this dance, I experience my second black-out of the night.

By which I mean, I fall over mid-dance with Pauline in my arms. This time, there is no one to catch us. We hold on to each other at first, then realize that we have to let go, unless we want to just fall flat on the hardwood floor. So we each scramble in our own direction, and I knock over a large, wrought iron lamp. This attracts the attention of people from the kitchen, the tenant of the apartment included, the friend of our friend. He is not too happy, but being drunk is cool at that age, so what can he say? I try to help fix the mess, and the party continues! The next thing I remember, Pauline is in the bathroom. Her purse is still on the couch, so I seize my chance and take her notebook out. There is nowhere on my person where I can conceal it for long, so I go and hide it behind the piano. Pauline comes back and it seems that people are leaving. At least we are, Pauline and I. While we say goodbye, I manage to retrieve the notebook and hide it in the back of my pants. I am so happy to have achieved this feat of sneaky thievery that I don’t think about what is going to happen next. I am going home with the notebook. It is with an intense feeling of victory that once outside the building, I bid Pauline a quick farewell, leaving her alone on the sidewalk.

I do not remember anything else from that night.

But in the morning, lying next to me on a friend’s couch, Pauline’s notebook was mine.

A few days later, I received a text from Pauline asking if I had her notebook. I texted back that I had successfully stolen it, so I owned it now, remember our deal? She proceeded to call and explain that she needed it for her schoolwork, seriously, would I please return it. There was no amusement in her voice anymore, so I said fine, I would. Since I lived in a different city at the time, I mailed it back.

A few weeks later, I was coming back to Paris, so I sent Pauline a text. I had just read a novel by Dostoevsky, entitled The Gambler, in which the narrator, a man named Alexis, is in love with a young woman named Pauline, so I made a reference to it in my text, trying to be witty. I believe it went something like:

“I am returning soon from Roulettenberg (the fictional gambling town where the novel happens), dear Pauline, could I be so bold as to humbly request the pleasure of your company?”

Pauline’s answer was: “Who is this?”

After an instant of puzzlement, I understood that she must have erased my number from her phone. That was disappointing. I had still thought of us as potentially interested in each other, despite the notebook kerfuffle. I had even considered being in love with her. So in a jest, I wrote:

“It is Alexis, but of course.”

I assumed that it would end there, but her reply immediately came back: “Which Alexis? Where did we meet?”

I followed up on my Dostoevsky reference: “All of our talks by the fountain, in the park. How could you have forgotten, my Pauline?”

I still didn’t think that this would lead anywhere, at least not outside of fiction. I was merely acting out of disappointment, dejection, and a slightly twisted sense of humor. But Pauline replied again.

“I have not forgotten. When will you be in Paris?”

Only then did I conceive that it could be fun to surprise her. Romantic, even? Maybe this was my chance at a fresh start with her. Forget the notebook, forget the extreme drunkenness, I would jump out of a novel and back into her good graces, we would resume our playful, fantasy-filled flirtation, and hopefully finally kiss…

“I shall arrive on the morrow. My heart flies toward you Pauline.”

“OK, let me know when you want to meet up.”

I reached Paris the next afternoon, and from the train station walked straight to the bar where our common friends used to hang out, just in time for the beginning of social hours. I had barely set down my backpack in a corner when people started pouring in, including the friend on whose couch Pauline and I had first met. She was to come by later, actually, he said with a glimmer in his eye. He asked me if I had made any progress with her. Coyly, I told him that she and I had been texting.

More friends arrived whom I hadn’t seen in a while, so we exchanged news and stories, bought each other rounds, and toasted the many deities that ruled over our privileged universe. The place was getting lively with youthful booze-fueled energy, and while sharing in the joyous mood, I kept my plan to myself, checking the door from time to time, feeling overall rather confident about my little literary stunt. Then Pauline walked in.

Across the crowd, our gazes met. And from her expression at that precise moment, I perceived two things at once—two things that she would confirm with just a few words, upon reaching our table. But these words I didn’t need to hear.

I had read it in her eyes that she had guessed, seeing me sitting there, that it was me who had been texting her as Alexis.

And that she was disappointed.

THE TIMELY PROFITS OF EDUCATION

An Abridged History of the French Republic

I entered the dining room wearing the least plush of my Gucci bathrobes—feeling a thinner version of myself —, found the table set with Tiffany silver and Cellini dishware, nodded in acknowledgment that it was thus Thursday, and lifted the sterling globe. Underneath, I discovered a roasted chicken, topped with a branch of thyme, and to the side, one purple potato. I heard the call bell before even cognizing that my hand had seized it.

The noise tore through my brain, sore as that organ was from the previous eve’s libations, as well as from having achieved that morning some rather cardinal advances in the field of analytic philosophy, and I brought a few ringed and weary fingers to my sorry forehead.

Antoinette, my wife, came in:

“Oui monsieur?”

I paused to examine her appearance: nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Her face was polite and expressionless as instructed, her French maid uniform tidy and adequately starched.

“Antoinette, what is this meant to signify?” I said, indicating the deficient offering on the plate.

“This, monsieur, is all that circumstances allow.”

The words did not compute. I remained still for an instant, considering whether I felt like taking it upon myself, at this time, to reinstate in Antoinette’s feeble mind the proper respect for Boileau’s maxim that

Whatever is well conceived is clearly said,
And the words to say it flow with ease.

or just spank her.

But, deciding that I had, under the gable of science, contributed enough to the public good for half a day, I simply raised an inquiring eyebrow.

“Monsieur might want to look outside,” humbly offered Antoinette.

Recognizing not a touch of insolence in her tone for which to censure her initiative, I elected to approach the window which, two floors below, provided a view of Paris’s Place Vendôme. Where usually an elegant parterre of polished cobblestone and marble was at most transitorily occupied by one or two limousines, a throng of garishly clad, apparently human, in demeanor and shape at least, beings, now stood or sat in small groups, holding placards adorned with barbaric acronyms and minuscule percentages, as well as a dismaying array of improvised confections intended, it seemed, as weaponry: cutlasses made of shredded traffic signs, maces fashioned, evidently, from various automobile parts, and the odd antique rifle of the sort formerly favored by peasants. What was this? And indeed, how was my wife supposed to procure my favorite Noirmoutier potatoes from Fauchon? With a military escort?

As I gazed in amazement at this most intriguing plebeian display, kind Antoinette came up behind me and delicately loosened my bathrobe. I presumed her purpose to be, in this moment of disquiet, the appropriate tendering of hand-powered comfort, and shrugged off the garment entirely in order to direct her combined attentions to my backside as well.

Stark naked, nobly erect, I suddenly felt a vigorous shove between my shoulder blades and plunged through the window, surrounded, like the feathers of a lubricious swan, by the expanding explosion of a myriad glass shards. And this is how the Revolution truly began, my dear friend. How I came to lead the People into this most glorious hour of our New Nation.

OEDIPUS NOW

Decolonizing Motherhood: Target Definition and Symbiotic Praxis

(Based on the testimony of Mr. Bui Minh Duc.)

On March 28th 1954, the French paratroopers launched a counter-attack on our position. I was just returning to my section with our daily rations of rice when the shooting started. Immediately, I grabbed my rifle and ran toward my fireteam. Lam, our leader, and Thanh, a new recruit two years my junior, were already firing at the approaching enemies. I joined in without a word, propping my back against the edge of our fighting hole, then turning around to shoot, folding back to reload.

After their initial advance, the paratroopers were now digging in as well, establishing a position about thirty yards from us. The shooting was relentless and there were already many dead on both sides. Soon, Lam was hit in the throat and fell to the ground, the blood from his wound first a powerful pink spray, then a progressively gentler gurgle of a liquid dark as mud. I felt a surge of panic, looked around quickly: there wasn’t anybody in charge anymore. Everyone was too busy shooting and trying not to get shot. With a knot in my gut, I reached over and took Lam’s machine gun and ammo. The blood from his throat was still flowing out, but his eyes were already set and glassy.

I checked that the machine gun was functional, then began firing. The recoil was considerably more powerful than with my single-shot rifle and I struggled at first to keep aim at the correct level. With my heart pounding and the deafening roar of battle all around, it took all my focus to remember what little training I had received in automatic weapons. But soon, applying the correct amount of pressure with my palms, I was managing to fire short, precise bursts at the French soldiers whose dark silhouettes rose above the horizon.

I looked to my side and realized that Thanh had been shot as well. There was a small hole in his chest and he was staring at the sky, not dead yet, breathing hard, grimacing with pain. He saw me looking and returned my stare for a moment, hanging on as long as he could, then closing his eyes. A spray of bullets hit the ground behind him and I lowered my head, checked my ammo, and again turned around to fire.

Soon, there was a pause, ending the first wave of the attack. I saw that eight of our twelve-man section were down, dead or wounded. I moved over to where the next fire team had been and propped their machine gun back up, so that I could go back and forth and shoot from both angles. Further down the trench, I saw Phuong, our medic, lifting an injured comrade on his shoulders in order to carry him to the rear. Then the second wave started and I was constantly dodging, firing, switching stations, expecting to get shot at any time but determined to give it my all. I don’t know how long it lasted. At some point, the noise subsided again and I still wasn’t hit. But I was the only one left from my section.

Breathless, fighting the need to collapse to the ground, I considered this nightmarish sight: all my comrades taken out. A few were still moving feebly, most were dead. Everywhere, blood was flowing, making rivers and lakes in the soil. Flies were beginning to feast. Further to each side, the other sections barely fared better: I saw a few soldiers who, like me, had organized multiple positions from which to continue fighting. Among the wounded, those who could still move prepared grenades and reloaded guns. I saw Phuong coming back toward me and just then, a major explosion shook the ground and sent mud and human flesh flying all around.

It was the third wave of the attack. Forty yards out, I saw enemy soldiers advancing. I gestured to Phuong to join me, then began firing again. There were more explosions all around us. I stayed stuck to the ground and still wasn’t hit. But I heard Phuong, behind me, say: “My arms, I’m injured.”

I told him: “Go get cover, I’ll manage!”

But I had spoken too soon.

I heard a sudden clicking noise, then everything went dark. For a few seconds, I didn’t know where I was, then I started checking myself. I didn’t have any major injuries, only blood flowing on my cheeks, and I couldn’t see. I called Phuong and he said: “My Goodness! Your eyes!”

His tone of voice told me that it was serious, but I didn’t feel the pain until much later. I said: “Look, I still have my arms, I’ll shoot. You still have your eyes, tell me where.”

Phuong replied: “Ten enemies! Thirty yards out, right ahead.”

I emptied an entire clip, applying the same amount of pressure with my hands as I had before, trying to reproduce the exact same movements.

Phuong said: “Well done! They’re retreating! Shoot again! Right and left!”

I emptied a second clip. I couldn’t see anything, but I imagined bodies falling until all that remained was the horizon, a dark shadowless line under the burning sky.

Just then, reinforcements arrived: another company from our battalion pushed back the French soldiers. The enemy attack had failed. Phuong, who had lost too much blood, would die soon after. A medic bandaged my eyes and guided me back to a field hospital.

This had been my first experience of combat in the Resistance War, and was also the last.

THE DEFINITION OF INSANITY 3

“Victory belongs to the most tenacious.” Roland Garros

A few weeks ago, I submitted the short story below to a digital publication that provides feedback on submissions. Though stylized, it is entirely autobiographical.

The Definition of Insanity 2

A few months ago, I submitted the short story below to a digital publication that provides feedback on submissions. Though stylized, it is entirely autobiographical. One might even say therapeutic, as in the wake of a major sentimental disappointment, I was trying to make sense of the succession of events known to me as “my life.” It was entitled “The Definition of Insanity,” from Albert Einstein’s quote that it is: “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

The Definition of Insanity

I was in love with Nobuko. We were 9. On the last day of school, we had a mini-prom and while we were slow dancing I told her I loved her. She turned on her heels and went to the buffet. Thinking that she hadn’t heard me, I caught up with her and repeated those three precious words: I love you. She turned on her heels and went out the door, almost running, skipping away.

I was in love with Michelle. We were 13. I wrote her love letters in a notebook which after much trepidation, I gave her. She returned it a week later with a letter of her own. It wasn’t a love letter. She didn’t really address that topic, instead providing me with more details about her life, her friends and yes, the boy that she cared about. He could do one hundred push-ups: wasn’t that amazing? She found muscular boys sexy. I wrote another letter about my feelings for her. She replied much in the same vein. Going back and forth all year long, three notebooks were thus filled.

I was in love with Chloe. We were 18. I wrote love poems for her. Sexually explicit, abstractly constructed love poems. After a few months, I had half a notebook worth of poems and gave it to her. She liked art and poetry, generally, and indeed when she returned the notebook, one day at the end of class, she said that she liked my poems. A lot. We were alone in a stairwell. I said “thanks” and waited for her to mention what the poems actually suggested, the things we could do together out of love. After a moment of silence, she looked at me with a striking mixture of tenderness and pity, leaned over and gave me a peck on the cheek, and left.

I was in love with Laura. We were 25, 26. I told Laura that I loved her while we were making love for the second time. She said it back a few weeks later. We were happy for a while. We had a lot of sex. I wrote short stories that no one would publish. I tried writing better ones. Recently, at 32, I told her that sure, I was interested in having children with her, as she was suggesting, but that I also wanted to have a career as a writer. I was really hoping to start publishing short stories, before taking the next step in life: novels.

Laura has since left me for another man: an older, successful writer. He has published many novels. She is expecting a child.

END

Which she is. On my end, I submitted the story, waited, then received the following response:

Dear Antoine Bargel,

Thank you for submitting to us. We have decided not to publish your piece, “The Definition of Insanity”. Some reader comments:

• I appreciate the story being the escalation. I can get some indication of the narrator from what they say. The general thrust of the piece fits well with the title. However the ending might be a bit too open. Perhaps I want to be sure that this person is unlucky in love for a reason: not wanting children doesn't really relate to the first three younger attempts at romance.

• Interesting take on "a writer's woes" … I actually liked it a lot, but the ending wasn't satisfying. I would have liked something much more punchy.

• I liked most of this, but I feel that it needs a more tragic type of ending to fit the theme of the piece. It seemed to be working up to something more final.

• I liked the escalation, but I don't think it ended with a big enough bang. I would have liked to see an extension further into his life, with perhaps more drama articulated in the same style that relates even more strongly to the themes already introduced.

• This has potential to be a really nicely constructed piece, but I'm not sure the execution is on point. I would have liked to have had an ending with more punch. It kind of falls flat where it was built up for a much better end, if that makes sense. I like the idea very much, but needs a more thoughtful resolve.

Best of luck, and please feel free to submit to us again in the future.

Subsequently, I thought hard and long about the importance of short stories in my life, the relationship of my stories with reality, and endings, and in a moment of logical and thoughtful resolve, committed suicide.

END

But I didn’t. Instead, I submitted this new story, and waited for a response.

EXCERPTS FROM A POLICE REPORT ON A FAMOUS ACTRESS

Social Functions of the Artist in Early Capitalist Democracy

February 1875

[The actress] had a liaison with Mr. Basilewski, residing at 59, Saint Peter Street, who had previously been involved with Mrs. Ferrari, to whom he left a considerable sum. Upon her debut in the theater, she had an affair with young Mr. Konor, who had won $40,000 in a single evening of gambling and left her a quarter of that sum before returning to his duties at Fort Polk.

September 1875

Was involved with Mr. Chabrillant, who gave her $300 to $400 a month. Then again with Mr. Basilewski, who is said to have sacrificed for her a large part of his wealth. It is also rumored that she had an affair with Maurice, the horse trader of Rampart Street; that the two were genuine lovers and that he gave him riding lessons in exchange of her services.

January 1876

For a while, [the actress] was without a lover (November and December 1875), but she received almost every day the visit of a very young man, elegantly dressed, who stayed with her all afternoon until she went horseback riding in the park, rarely in his company. She also received the visit of another young man, a bit older than the former, who arrived in a two-horse carriage. His coachman wore a white livery, but his visits were less frequent.

March 1876

Seems subject to gloomy tendencies. Is reported to keep in her home a rosewood coffin, padded with white silk, inside which she sometimes sleeps. Also said to possess a human skull which she displays on a silver platter when entertaining guests. Is said to commonly wear on her person, as a brooch, a minuscule skull which she calls Sophie. Lives on 2, Burgundy Street, but will soon relocate to Bourbon Street. Is said to possess draperies representing bones and skulls, which she intends to have installed in her new residence.

July 1876

Is a regular of lounge number 6 of the Golden House. During the month of June, was in said lounge with one of her friends, Mrs. de Joya, of Italian origins, when they received the visit of Mr. Massena, Prince Robertskoff, and a Mr. Gautray.

December 1876

Owns 5 horses and 3 carriages. Is said to be very good to her household staff; allows the lovers of her male and female servants to have meals with them in the kitchen. Therefore has considerable household expenses.

January 1877

On the 27th of this month, Mr. Gautray, residing at 10, Toulouse Street, visited [the actress] at her residence on 4, Burgundy Street. He had intimate relations with her and left her $100 for her services. Mr. Gautray is said to be a close friend of the Laffitte family.

February 23rd 1877

Mr. Henri Ducasse, previously mentioned in this report, again had intimate relations with [the actress], last Saturday. This time, he visited in her residence on 4, Burgundy Street and gave her $50 for her services.

February 31st 1877

Mr. Henri Ducasse left for Baton Rouge last Saturday. Before his departure, he had intimate relations with [the actress] and, in addition to the usual sum, he gave her a pair of diamond earrings of considerable value. He should be absent for eight to ten days and promised that he would visit [the actress] again upon his return.

April 28th 1877

Senator Henri Ducasse, who has been mentioned various times in this report, visited yesterday a well-known madam, to whom he declared that he was putting an end to his relations with [the actress], having surprised her with Mr. Remusat, his colleague in the State Senate, and also with Mr. Gautray, residing at 10, Toulouse Street. That when he arrived at the residence of [the actress] on 4, Burgundy Street, he sometimes had to wait in the anteroom until one or the other of these gentlemen left the premises, and that he was tired of having to put on such a show for a woman to whom he had given over $3000 in the past three months. He added that he did not understand how [the actress] accepted the company of such old men. It is to be noted that Senator Ducasse is himself quite old, as well as disabled, being partially paralyzed on the left side of his body.

June 21st 1877

[The actress] attended the funeral of Mr. Basilewski. The cause of death is believed to have been tuberculosis.

September 17th 1877

Death of [the actress], of tuberculosis. Her funeral was attended by Senators Ducasse, Remusat, and Gallifet; Congressmen Kenner, Barrot, Augustin, de Marigny, and Labranche; Messrs. Gautray, Chabrillant, Percy, Laville, and Konor; and a number of representatives from the theater, equestrian, and nocturnal professions.

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER DOLLARS

Deconstructing Generational Wealth

“I like my character,” said the blind man to a can of beans, “after seventy-two years I still don’t own a pair of pants.”

“I’m over here,” I called out with a calculated amount of scorn. I wasn’t going to tolerate any of the usual bullshit, such as this old refrain about being a free spirit. When one owes society more than one’s miserable existence remains capable of producing, one should accept the consequence.

“Why don’t you save us the unpleasantness and take your own life? I have needles and pills in my briefcase, your choice.”

This was me mustering my most amicable manners, but the subject still hadn’t measured the severity of his circumstance. Rather than heed the limpid intent of my speech, he elected to attempt a comical exit:

“Robert, don’t speak like this to your father. You know it makes me feel queasy. Bring me a banana milkshake.”

Such ludicrous tricks are often endeavored by individuals who realize that they are about to die. They try to personalize the interaction, however they can, hoping to draw out compassion from the unfathomable depths of their prospective murderer. Tough luck: I possess no more of that sentiment than if I were made of steel and electronic parts, despite being entirely cellular, organic even. My genes were free-range farmed, certainly not distilled in the infectious bean sacks of this banana lover.

“YOU KNOW WHERE YOU CAN STICK YOUR FUCKING BANANAS!” yelled I to express my disgust and, at the same time, pull the man back to reality. “I’m going to kill you if you don’t do it yourself,” I added in a raspy voice.

“Come on, Bobby, you know I’m going to die soon. Can’t you just wait a little more? Do you really need this money now?”

Of course. The whining stage. It pains me to mention, but almost all of them go through some form of lamentation, supplication, and unmitigated humiliation They will make up anything in the desperate hope of escaping their fate. I wish there was a way to improve this part of my job, which I find rather distasteful. In truth, there is only one way to move us on to the next phase, so I stick my fingers in his eye sockets and pull his head back against my chest.

“In the name of God, Robert, behave yourself!”

He still seems to think he’s my fucking father, so I slip my elbow under his chin, grab my opposite biceps, and, all in one days’s work, snap his neck, then go home and wait for my check.

MISAO’S MOTHER’S BRAIN

A Culturally Relativistic Maladdress

My friend Misao lives with her aging mother in a popular district of Tokyo, in a small wooden house located right next to a suburban railway line. About fifty times a day, the whole shack suddenly starts shaking as if there was a powerful earthquake, and for a few seconds, all one can hear is the deafening rattle of the train going by.

Misao’s mother had a car accident when she was in her fifties. “She lost a part of her brain,” Misao told me, tracing a large circle on her forehead with her index finger. “At first, the doctors said that she was not going to make it, but after a week in a coma, she woke up and started talking. The doctors could not find anything wrong, so they let her go home. When she left the hospital, one of the nurses gave my mother a jar containing the piece of her brain that the surgeon had taken out during the operation.”

“My mother was very happy about it,” Misao said. “She disposed of the jar and picked a special drawer in the kitchen to store the small piece of brain, that soon became all dried up. When visitors came to the house, she liked to take it out for them, like a prized possession. Actually, what she would do was to give them the piece of brain and say nothing, just stand there and smile, and it was usually up to me to explain to the guests what they were holding in their hands. People would try their best to hide their surprise, torn between immediately wanting to get rid of it, almost to throw it away in disgust, and the need to show proper respect for what was, after all, despite the incongruity of its current location, which in a way also explained itself, a very special body part of their host. Summoning their utmost self-control, they would bow quickly many times and, as soon as they deemed suitable, politely return it to her.”

“Once, an American friend visited me,” Misao said, “and just as he arrived, I had to go urgently to the bathroom. My mother went to the kitchen, took the piece of her brain out of its drawer and, returning to her guest, made him open his palm, where she deposited her offering. It was my friend’s first time in Japan, so he thought it was a kind of cookie or cake, given to him as a welcome, and that it would be impolite not to taste it—especially as my mother was standing there expectingly, looking at him with a broad smile. As I came back into the room, I saw my friend just about to put the piece of my mother’s brain in his mouth, and I immediately yelled for him to stop! But right then, a train went by.”