Hear, friends–can there be
a story of a man alone? A drama of one man, stuck in one apartment,
with his pants down? Of blood rushings and blood flowings; of tipping
tapping fingertips? Can there be an action of imagination and departure?
There
can, my friends.
If
it’s interesting, you ask? Oh, as interesting as the touch of love
on loneliness.
If
it’s passionate? All the bulbs of passion of a quiet man’s garden
lie there, underneath.
If
it’s sad? One swims only so long in the ocean, even on the hottest
of days, before crawling on shore to lie on the warm sand. And the
shivers one feels are those of happiness of the body, spent and loved.
Hear
then, o friends, the story of Anton, a young man of great love and
of middling health, who learned to speak up loud enough, and always
kept his silence to himself.
Not
unloved, he grew up in the house of a merchant of fair success, in
the green and breezy
He
learned well and quietly, and cried very little as a small child.
Whimpers met tears only at the homes of other small children, whither
his solicitous mother sometimes took him to play. With her mothersense,
she would run to collect him, apologizing to the mistress of the house,
and take him home. Then she would let him sit with her while she played
at balancing her husband’s books, or expertly chopped up vegetables
for soup with a huge and fateful knife.
He
seldom cried with me. Well and fondly do I remember the hours
he and I spent together, sitting on the floor in my darkened parlor,
father away and mother cooking or gardening. To pass the time he would
make up stories for the mystical objects that surrounded us; a painting
of a Harlequin, a Chinese vase, the great tree of my courtyard – even
the plastic, deeply engrimed garbage can gained a life in his mind.
I listened with a little smile and let my mind wander.
As sundown turned to dusk, they would share their meal together, Anton
and his mother, which she always prepared herself in a massive cauldron,
though she never ate much, and the tiny body of her son was quickly
sated. After they’d eaten, she would read to him, sometimes for many
hours, especially when the days were long and the merchant was away.
Anton was never so happy as then. Cuddling up to her vibrating, motherly
flank and burrowing his cloud of light-brown, curly hair into her
fragrant armpit, he would listen to her soft voice reading out the
tales of age-old childhood, and let his big eyes roll up to the ceiling.
When he was particularly dreamy, and the story slow and wordy, he
would let his gaze penetrate past the ceiling, past the wooden beams
of the fine old house, and through the tiles of the roof into the
softly dusking summer sky. The moon would begin to shine in its reflected
light, and the wind picked up.
He
went to school with the beautiful and bright sons and daughters of
the other merchants of the district – many of them richer than his
own father – and, slowly but deliberately, he learned their vices,
if not their pleasures. Though he had learned to speak with the other
children his age, his own silence grew more and more profound. As
he became a young man, Anton would spend the evening hour alone, with
me. When the summer afternoon dusked and the summer dusk nighted,
instead of looking through the plaster and wood and tile above him
to see the moon, he would first peek through the window-blinds to
make sure no one was about, and then, gesturing to me to follow, crawl
through the window into the quiet, empty courtyard. We would sit upon
the red Spanish tiles which surrounded the night-flowing fountain,
and would have only to gaze through the creaky, rustling branches
of the great oak tree in order to be alone with the moon. He read
other books now, and told of them to me as he could to no one else.
I listened with a little smile, and let my mind wander.
When
he came of age, he decided to travel to the great and sprawling city
of
When Anton arrived in
He
met a girl his own age, Hannah by name. She had been sitting scared
in a fashionable café, hiding her torso behind a carafe of wine, her
head behind an edition of one of Anton’s favorite books. He quoted
from it in a voice deep yet timid. She wore flowing dark waves of
hair that dangled over her huge dark eyes, whose force and depth were
almost enough to draw his attention from her dramatically shapely
form: her full, pendulous breasts seemed to bounce out on either side
of the carafe, painfully towards Anton’s groin She smiled
ironically in response. She, too, he soon learned, had come from abroad
to study in the great city, albeit from as near as
She,
too, loved to sit behind books, and to look at the moon and smoke
cigarettes. Neither of them did much work of any sort.
As
time passed each became the other's sole support in the great city.
Anton longed desperately to look into her eyes across a wrinkled pillow,
and even thought that he could love her self, though he had never
yet known love. And though Hannah liked very much to talk to Anton,
and thought very highly of his talents, she had already given her
love to another. He felt that he could divert her passion from her
lover to himself; partly because the latter lived across the freezing
sea, but mostly because Anton liked her very much, and because it
seemed that someone so much like himself ought by rights to love him.
But her love proved stronger than Anton had expected. She spoke to
her lover every day through the telephone, and Anton was often disturbed
by the tears of many colors which she shed, speaking of her love to
him, while the two of them sat together in her tidy, sparsely furnished
apartment over a carafe of white wine.
Nonetheless,
he happily agreed to move in with her, for she was his only friend
in the vast, low, heavy city, and he clung quietly to his hope for
her.
I
worried for him greatly around this time. The only news I got of him
was long out of date before it passed through my hands. When they
were presently to move in together, he became very ill with an infection
in his throat. His illness, however, only stoked his lust for his
friend. And when, in the early, grey autumn evenings, he stalked out
alone and hunched over through the sea of strange people, it seemed
to him that he met only with white painted faces, and with elaborate
masks, the latter sometimes sporting enormous noses.
I
learned from his strange, incautious letters that when he came home
to his friend around dusk, they would cook together, and drink tremendous
bottles of white wine. He felt encouraged to laugh with her late into
the night, though for each night he laughed this way his own face
grew a little whiter. This especially concerned me, for in the land
from which we hail even the whitest of complexions bears a coat of
red and a cheerful smattering of freckles. Attend as I read, friends:
his freckles have faded; the story ends badly.
Night
My
dear friend,
I am shocked, to be frank, and not aroused in the slightest.
“You
can check out my pictures, as well,” she told me, in loaning me her
computer for the length of her jaunt off to
We’d drunk a two-liter bottle of cheap white wine over dinner. I’d
cooked and it was splendid. We’d gone dancing through the dismally
rainy, silent streets (despite my protest) and through our dusty apartment,
laughing madly and speaking in exaggerated, inaccurate English accents.
(Hers less so than mine, naturally.)
When
we danced closely, she had a way of looking into my eyes with pursed,
chapped lips that frightened me. It made me want to turn and remove
my hand from the top of her right buttock. (Strange to say.)
“Hotel
Night #1 and Hotel Night #2 are not quite appropriate.”
“Oh,
I see,” I answered with a lopsided, ironic leer and a knowing English
accent.
It
was quite clear that she meant for me to check out her pictures,especially Hotel
Nights, Nos. 1 and 2.
And
so I did then, drunk and grainy after she’d bid me goodnight, sitting
at the table we’d bought together today, along with mattresses and
more cookery.
But
first, for safety’s sake, I stole out of my room down the hall: ostensibly
to brush my teeth or take a leak, but really to make certain her door
was appropriately shut, with no orange light shining through the crack
at the bottom.
Satisfied,
with half-drunken, half-habitual glee, I scampered back into my room,
and took my seat at the ghostlike table. I took of my shoes, undid
my belt, and “checked it out.”
Through
“My Documents and “My Photos” the trail led straight to “Hotel Night
#1.”
–Selected and huge on the computer screen, it showed first and foremost
her CUNT: she was spread-eagled on a motel bed, blindfolded and bound
to the bedposts. Smooth, longed-for thighs and the spots where they
meet the plumper posterior were unnecessarily indifferently displayed.
And her cunt, her cunt – her word not mine – curly and wet all the
way to the anus. Vulgar, I say. Quite vulgar.
–Now
she stretches, forcibly supine on unnaturally white sheets, face distorted
by the angle and almost invisible, breasts hanging helpless to the
sides and only too visible – this is not the pose to show her body
off to its best advantage. Amateurish lighting, too, I must say. The
black, unconsidered beyond invades the foreground striking with weapons
as blunt as those that abuse her cunt, her cunt….
I
would have done it rather differently.
The
rest of the photos of “Hotel Night #1” showed equal grit, deconstructed
and reconstructed in pixels.
–The
next trains artlessly in on her VAGINA, which term I now feel is appropriate
to the newly matter-of-fact manner of its presentation: wet and curly
still, the death-odors of the real stealing up her thighs. Wet wet,
and long curly. And fat everywhichway. Health shown unhealthfully.
After
that, –a carrot stuck here,
–a
cucumber stuck there;
–and
then stuck here and there simultaneously. Hmm…I hoped #2 would have
more to offer…
...more, perhaps: more penetration, this time starting off with
–a
slim, long-haired forearm tipped with what looked like the ribbed
opening of a latex glove: there must be a fist hidden somewhere. Doing
violence, most likely.
Amid the debauchery, I found a solitary image with potential balance:
–she
kneels on the mattress, her torso inclined ever so slightly backwards,
a white satin slip quite escaping her breasts. It’s hopelessly marred,
though, by a blindfold (justice?) and a far-too-serious expression
on the remainder of her face. For her big, dark eyes are the seat
of her black humor and her sometimes-hopeful ambiguity. But then,
–all
subtlety blasted in a downward shot on a flashlit face, still blind,
and painfully overfilled (I imagine) with large and veiny cock…
“My,
this is dirty,” I thought to myself in a British accent. I hadn’t
thought that her Oxford-Laws-Midlands-trash-Jew-with-scoliosis had
it in him. I’d rather hoped he hadn’t. He does feed her fantasy, I
see. Quite amply, I might add. She doesn’t need an artist for that,
I suppose…
*
Refrain from scoffing, my friends, and listen;
though the vulgarity and shame, sweetness and anger in Anton's voice
does pain the heart. The end comes soon, and his vigor does not blind
him to himself. Poor man!
*
Day
Dear
friend,
I
slept in the nude last night, and throttled myself several times with
vigor, though I hadn’t though myself titillated by Hannah’s photos.
I was happy and sufficient in my body: I lay on a mattress for the
first time in weeks, and after dashing off a couple of lines to you,
I slept insistently on my side to feel the springs give way under
my hipjoint, like helpful doormen in a fancy hotel.
She
came into my room in the morning gray to get her shoes and to say
goodbye. I mustered up a tired, unnaturally genuine voice to bid her
a good trip, and leaned up out of my flamboyantly orange comforter
more than was necessary to hug her, exposing the elegant cleft of
my bottom.
She
left.
After
the satisfying click of the front door, I dawdled a moment in bed,
and then sprang sprightly up, early though it was, with a mission
in mind.
A touch
of a button, and her computer sang its opening harmony. I found a
somewhat more innocent and alluring set, entitled “Me and Lizzie Nudies,”
bookmarking it mentally before leafing through her other collections.
I
was caught quite off guard by Joseph’s appearance.
(His face, I mean, his face, which hadn’t been immortalized in the
“Hotel Night” opuses.)
-He looks self-assured, with longish, wavy hair that comes neatly
round to his lower neck, in strands and not in muddles. His short
but manfully square chin juts from an earnest, quiet face. Round for
the most part, but not laughably so, for the strong cheekbones and
quiet eyes.
No
sign at all of the weakling nasal humpback, or the exposed sternum
and stubborn orthodoxy for which I had almost hoped. He really exists,
I though to myself with consternation. He really exists and they love
each other really and aesthetically, too, and with none of the silly
idealism I’d hoped for. None of the abject lust I thought I’d seen.
Hmmmm…I pointlessly masturbated instead watching
-nervous,
blotch-faced Lizzie.
Well
then, I said, underwear about my ankles, time to seize on my first
day’s irresponsibility about the town. Through a gap in the scaffolding
that suffocates my windows, I glimpsed a patch of cold, pale, northern
Sunday sky. Before going out into it, I browsed aimlessly through
the rest of Hannah’s pictures while recovering from my exertions.
-A
romantic road-trip to
I felt a change in mood in myself as I beheld a photo of a subsequent
set: In it, I saw:
-a plain white desk in a blue-gray room, with weak, northerly light
limping stringily through the large, open window to the right.
I
thought for a moment, and realized that I myself had known an identical
desk and an identical window, in a mirror-image room. The next photo
showed
-a rainy
vista out of the window of her old place the chain liquor store glowers
among the bleak, flat warehouse roofs of upper Prenzlauer Berg. I
myself had stood at that window, and looked out of it on sunny Saturday
afternoons, smoking and leisurely standing guard over her as I made
her listen to Dylan she hadn’t heard.
A later, better composed still-life sparsely presented
-a
bowl of browning last-night’s leftovers in a blue glass bowl (salad?),
flanked by some votive candles and a couple of cigarette butts in
a candle holder, on the linoleum floor in hard, late-morning light.
My post-prandial tipsy cigarette butts! My fanciful candles! But where
am I? I clicked on.
-A dark room seethes in the brown light of the same votive candles:
the same room at night. Empty.
And
then suddenly
-the
backside of a yellow forearm, with slight pale hairs blurred, but
visible with a squint. A precariously large droplet of black blood
quivers on it – I only knew it to be red.
Now
-she exhibits the wounded arm consciously against the closed window,
lit dirty yellow. Her face and body are black, and I can only just
make out plump cheeks and a dark jaw closed in a pathetically earnest,
self-aware gaze.
The next picture in her dark set centers upon
-the
desk again, the weapon in question conspicuously placed at the front:
it is a satisfyingly fat, benevolent Swiss Army knife, the largest
blade extended. I’d probably opened a bottle of wine with that knife
that very evening. (Not with the blade, of course.) I look closer,
and see my own little volume of Rilke open just behind the knife.
A strange sensation seizes over me...
I
hurry through the last sets of photos with a sense of dread and doom.
-A
chicken on a plate that we’d boiled for soup when I was sick last
week.
-A masculine
hand artfully holds a wooden spoon full of soft vegetables. Carrots,
onions, broccoli – a tribute to my mother. I was sick then, miserably
so, and weak, and somehow simultaneously flushed and pale.
In
the following photo
-only
my hand is visible, unsurely grasping a large kitchen knife with the
whole fist, and shakily cutting into the chicken’s yellow, firm flesh.
And then we finally see
-the
whole I. Supporting itself on the counter, holding the wooden spoon
laxly at its side, trying hopelessly to make itself appear triumphant
at the culinary success–or at least happy. I look neither triumphant
nor happy in the photo. The stocky legs look short in blue jeans.
The tight German zip-up sweater grabs a bit of paunch on the stomach.
The hair is huge and unkempt, a tangled lock of it stands straight
up from the geometrical summit of the skull.
Two
more pictures to go until the convergence:
-I
sprawl in a three-quarters pose on her bed. I look intently down at
the floor with one squinted eye. It seems as though I have some papers
in my hand, but there’s nothing around but the wooden floorboards.
My nose is long, my eyelids heavy.
-Then he’s looking simply at the camera, his face blank and stubbly,
his cheeks blanched. Even his hair has lost its fire; it lies subdued
about his ears. A red line is drawn across the bridge of his slightly
upturned nose. It is a simple, imperfectly symmetrical face, broken
and hopeless at the age of twenty. A face that would be fat before
long, and suffer a long, imperfectly wielded knife of thirst to score
its underside before slow death. Not a beautiful face, but an expressive
one; still: one watches the bags under the eyes droop lower and lower
from reading and loneliness until they cover the cheeks, in spite
of the flesh that happens just now to be impertinently young and firm,
even in sickness. All damages would show in time, the face says, even
on the mask.
I
needed cigarettes and couldn’t think straight. I got up to put on
my jeans to go out, but they were still wet from when we did laundry
two days ago and couldn’t afford the dryer. So I laid them haphazardly
back on the heater and put on my khakis, doing up the belt. I felt
in the pocket for my keys. I felt in the other pocket.
I
kept calm and grabbed my coat. Front pockets, inside pockets, even
a pocket I didn’t know I had.
My
blood began to rise.
I
started rifling through my pile of clothing in the corner, then rifling
and tossing, listening intently for a hopeful tinny fall against the
floor.
Ah…!–my
nail clippers.
Kitchen
counter, her room, bathroom, coat pocket, pants pocket, dining table.
Maybe I missed them in my pile of clothing…? Nail clippers clink again.
I
hastily remove all of the deceptive change from all of my pockets,
and put it on the table. Nothing.
If
I walk past this German lock, I can’t come back.
And
so, my lost companion, it seems I’m stuck in my apartment with my
pants down, alone with a ghost. Stop.
*
For
there was no place left for Anton to search, my friends.
Hannah
will not come back to him till Wednesday, and, as he knows now, will
never come to him.
And
so let us afford him a taste of company even in quiet watching. Try
not to blink.
Our friend Anton looks a fright, his brows high and yellow-sweated,
as he lifts up his mattress again to look under for his errant key.
-The
lamp falling over, head first.
-The
fluorescent bulb dimming to a soft orange, and then going tenderly
black.
He
looks closer at the broken light; we see the recognition stamped upon
his face as he notes the crack through which the noble gas seeped
inexorably out. He looks hard up at the ceiling, and lets his eyes
roll away. There is no overhead light fixture in the apartment of
Anton and Hannah.
It’s
dark in Anton’s room now, and it is in this state, I fear, that we
shall have to take our leave of him, and he of us. The walls that
he knows are mercilessly whitewashed loom gray and shadowy around
him. Scaffolding covers all of his windows; he sits cordoned off from
the courtyard by a wall of blue and green squares of gauze–
–through
which he cannot climb.
These
are supported by a web of steel poles–
–on
which he cannot clamber.
The
tent is flanked by a refuse chute, made of a chain of particolored
garbage cans, swooping down into the courtyard–
–down
which he cannot slide.
He can hear the clowns begin to howl as he palms his keys, opens the
balcony door, and, with his whole fist, slashes them through the scaffolding.
Fall.
Author's Bio:
