A Fraction of the Whole

TWO

I was taking a forty-five-minute shower. I know I was being unforgivably inconsiderate of the environment, but I’d read in New Scientist that in a couple of billion years the expanding universe will have stretched to breaking point and will start contracting like a rubber band, time will run backward, and (therefore) the water will eventually return to the showerhead.

“Jasper! I completely forgot!” I heard Dad shouting.

“I’m in the shower!”

“I know. Do you know what the date is?”

“No.”

“Guess.”

“The second of December.”

“No. It’s the seventeenth of May! I can’t believe I forgot all about it! Hurry up!”

The seventeenth of May, my mother’s birthday. Inexplicably, Dad always bought her a present. Inexplicably, he’d make me unwrap it. I never knew whether to say thank you. Usually it was a book or chocolates, and after I opened it and said something like “Good one,” Dad would suggest we give it to her in person. That meant a trip out to the cemetery. This morning, since the significance of the date had slipped his mind, Dad ran around the house looking for something to wrap. In the end he found a bottle of whisky with two decent sips left. I stood there on edge while he wrapped it, and moments later he stood there eagerly while I unwrapped it and said, “Good one.”

My mother was buried in a Jewish cemetery, a possible nod to my grandparents. In case you don’t know, the Jewish religion wants you to put an old rock on the grave of your loved ones. I never saw any reason to quibble with oddball ancient traditions as cheap as this one, so I went outside and wondered what kind of filthy rock my dead mother might want as a token of my devotion.

When we finally got to the cemetery, we couldn’t find the grave. The maze of gray stones confused us, but in the end we found her lying where she always was, between Martha Blackman, who had breathed in and out for a tedious ninety-eight years, and Joshua Wolf, whose heart had unfairly stopped beating at the age of twelve. We stared at a slab of stone with her name on it.

Astrid.

No last name, no date of birth nor date of death- just her name all alone on the headstone, speaking volumes of silence.

I tried to imagine what life would have been like with a mother around. I couldn’t picture it. The mother I mourned was an amalgam of manufactured remembrances, photographs of silent movie actresses, and the warm, loving image of the maternal archetype. She transmogrified constantly, a vision in constant motion.

Beside me, Dad was bouncing on his toes as if waiting for a game result. He stepped forward and brushed the star-shaped autumn leaves off the headstone.

I looked at him. I looked at his feet. “Hey!” I shouted.

He turned to me, startled, and snapped, “Don’t make sudden loud noises in a cemetery, you ghoul. You want me to die of fright?”

“Your feet!” I shouted, pointing at them. He lifted up the heels to inspect for dog shit.

“You’re standing on her!”

“No, I’m not.”

He was. He was standing right on top of my mother. Any fool could see it.

“You’re fucking standing on her grave! Get off!”

Dad smiled but didn’t do anything to make his feet move. I grabbed his arm and dragged him off to the side. That only made him laugh.

“Whoa. Relax, Jasper. She’s not in there.”

“What do you mean, she’s not in there?”

“She’s not buried there.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean there’s a coffin. Only it’s empty!”

“An empty coffin?”

“And you want to know the worst part? You still have to pay the same price as if there was actually a body inside! I guess I assumed it was done on weight, but apparently not.”

I looked at his cheerless face, aghast. He was shaking his head, mourning the loss of his money.

“WHERE THE FUCK’S MY MOTHER?”

Dad explained that she had died in Europe. He wouldn’t say much more about it. He had purchased the burial plot for my benefit, reasoning that a boy has the right to mourn his mother in the appropriate setting. Where else was he going to do it? At the movies?

Over the years, when the topic came up, Dad had told me nothing about her other than that she was dead and the dead can’t make you dinner. What I can’t believe now is how fully I’d repressed my curiosity. I suppose because he didn’t want to talk about it, Dad had convinced me that it was rude to go poking into finished lives. My mother was a topic he put on the high shelf, out of reach of questions. I had accepted this at face value, that under no circumstances did you ask about the destruction of someone who was supposed to be indestructible.

But now, suddenly, with the revelation that all along I’d been grieving over an empty hole, anger mutated into a burning curiosity. In the car on the way home from the cemetery, I told him that if I was old enough to mourn, at nine years old, I was old enough to know something about her.

“She was just this woman I saw for a little while,” Dad said.

“Just this woman? Weren’t you married?”

“Oh God, no. I’ve never even gone near an altar.”

“Well, did you, you know, love her?”

“I don’t know how to answer that question, Jasper. I really don’t know how.”

“Try.”

“No.”

Later that night, I heard the sound of hammering and went into the bathroom to see Dad putting up curtains on the bathroom mirror.

“What are you doing?”

“You’ll thank me for this one day,” he said.

“Dad, just tell me about her. What was she like?”

“Are you still harping on about that?”

“Yes.”

“That oughta do it.”

Dad finished hammering, put up the rod, and pulled the beige curtains across the mirror with a drawstring.

“Why do people need to look at themselves while they brush their teeth? Don’t they know where their teeth are?”

“Dad!”

“What? Christ! What do you want to know, factual information?”

“Was she Australian?”

“No, European.”

“From where, exactly?”

“I don’t know, exactly.”

“How can you not know?”

“Why are you so interested in your mother all of a sudden?”

“I don’t know, Dad. I guess I’m just sentimental.”

“Well, I’m not,” he said, showing me a familiar sight: his back.

Over the following months, I pushed and pressed and squeezed and, in dribs and drabs, managed to extract the following scant information: my mother was beautiful from certain angles, she was widely traveled, and she disliked having her photograph taken as much as most people dislike having their money taken. She spoke many languages fluently, was somewhere between twenty-six and thirty-five when she died, and though she had been called Astrid, it was probably not her real name.

“Oh, and she absolutely hated Eddie,” he said one day.

“She knew Eddie?”

“I met Eddie more or less at the same time.”

“In Paris?”

“Just out of Paris.”

“What were you doing just out of Paris?”

“You know. The usual. Walking around.”

Eddie, Dad’s best friend, was a thin Thai man with a sleazy mustache who always seemed to be smack bang in the middle of the prime of life and not a day over. When he stood next to my pale father, they looked less like friends and more like doctor and patient. It was clear now that I was going to have to interrogate Eddie about my mother. Finding him was the trouble. He made frequent and unexplained overseas trips, and I had no idea whether he went for business, pleasure, restlessness, genocide, or on a dare. Eddie had a way of being categorically unspecific- he would never go so far as to tell you, for example, that he was visiting relatives in the Chiang Mai province of Thailand, but if you pressed, he might admit that he had been “in Asia.”

I waited six months for Eddie to resurface. During that time I prepared a list of questions, running and rerunning the interview with him in my head, including his answers. I anticipated- wrongly, as it turned out- a lurid love story wherein my saintly mother martyred herself in a Romeo and Juliet-type scenario: I imagined that the doomed lovers had made a tragically romantic double suicide pact but Dad had pulled out at the last minute.

Finally one morning I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth with the curtains drawn when I heard Eddie’s syrupy voice calling out. “Marty! You here? Am I talking to an empty apartment?”

I ran into the living room.

“Here he is,” Eddie said, and as usual, before I could say “Please don’t,” he lifted the Nikon dangling from his neck and took my photo.

Eddie was a photography nut and couldn’t go five minutes without taking my photograph. He was a great multitasker: with one eye on the lens of his Nikon, he could smoke a cigarette, photograph us, and smooth down his hair at the same time. Although he said I photographed well, I couldn’t disprove him- he never showed us the results. I didn’t know if he ever developed the photos or not, or even if he had film in his camera. It was just another example of Eddie’s pathological mysteriousness. He never talked about himself. Never told you how things were in his day. You didn’t even know if he had a day. He was, body and soul, aloof.

“How’s your dad? Still around, is he?”

“Eddie, did you know my mother?”

“Astrid? Sure, I knew her. Shame about her, wasn’t it?”

“I don’t know. Was it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Tell me about her.”

“All right.”

Eddie plopped himself on the couch and patted the cushion next to him. I leapt on it excitedly, unaware of how intensely unsatisfying our conversation would be: in all my anticipating, I had completely forgotten that Eddie was the world’s worst storyteller.

“I met her in Paris, with your father,” he began. “I think it was autumn, because the leaves were brown. I think the American name for autumn, ‘fall,’ is really beautiful. Personally, I like fall, or the fall, as they say, and also spring. Summer I can only tolerate for the first three days and after that I’m looking for a meat freezer to hide in.”

“Eddie…”

“Oh. I’m sorry. I got sidetracked, didn’t I? I forgot to tell you how I feel about winter.”

“My mother.”

“Right. Your mother. She was a beautiful woman. I don’t think she was French, but she had the same physique. French women are small and thin with quite small breasts. If you want big breasts, you have to cross the border into Switzerland.”

“Dad said you met my mother in Paris.”

“That’s right. It was in Paris. I miss Paris. Did you know that in France they have a different word when something disgusts you? You can’t say ‘Yuck!’ No one will know what you mean. You have to say ‘Berk!’ It’s weird. The same goes when you hurt yourself. It’s ‘Aie!’ not ‘Ow!’ ”

“What was my dad doing in Paris?”

“He was doing nothing in those days, the same kind of nothing he does now, except then he was doing it in French. Well, actually he didn’t do nothing. He was always scribbling in his little green notebook.”

“All of Dad’s notebooks are black. He always uses the same kind.”

“No, this one was definitely green. I can see it in my mind’s eye. It’s a shame you can’t see the pictures I’ve got showing in my mind’s eye right now. They’re so damn vivid. I wish we could project all the mind’s eyes onto a screen and sell tickets. I think how much you could expect the public to pay would really determine your self-worth.”

I eased myself off the couch, telling Eddie to go on without me, walked to my father’s bedroom, and stood at the open door, staring stupidly at the vast chaos and disorder that may or may not have been hiding the secret story of my mother in a green notebook. Normally I don’t enter my father’s bedroom, for the same reason you don’t walk in and chat with a man when he’s on the toilet, but this was important enough to force me to break my own rule. I stepped into my father’s open bowels, his howling sandstorm; that he slept in here was an achievement in itself.

I set about my task. First I had to navigate my way through a yellowing archive of newspapers that would rival those stored in the public library. They were stacked up and pushed into the dark corners of the room, the stacks so numerous they carpeted the floor all the way to the bed. I stepped on the newspapers and over things I could only imagine he’d pulled out of garbage bins and those I imagined he’d dragged out of people’s mouths. On the way I found things I had long considered missing: the tomato sauce, the mustard, all the teaspoons, the soup spoons, and the big plates. I opened up one of his wardrobes, and under a heap of clothes I found the first pile of notebooks- there must have been a hundred of them. They were all black. Black, black, black. In the second wardrobe I found another hundred, again, disappointingly, all black. I stepped inside the wardrobe- it was very deep. There I found a pile of magazines but tried not to linger on them. From all the photographs inside, Dad had cut out the eyes. I tried not to dwell on this. A man can read a magazine and might be inclined to remove the eyes if he feels they are staring at him insolently, can’t he? I ignored them, and moved deeper inside the wardrobe (it really was a deep wardrobe). Yet another box revealed yet another pile of notebooks, as well as all the cut-out eyes from the magazines. They watched me pitilessly as I rummaged through the notebooks, and seemed to widen with mine at the sight of, wedged under the cardboard flap at the bottom of the box, a green one.

I took it and got the hell out of his suffocating room. I could hear Eddie in the living room, still talking to himself. I went to my own room to examine the green notebook.

The edges of it were worn. I opened it to see that the ink had run in parts, but not so the writing was illegible. The handwriting went from small and neat to large and loopy, and in later passages, when it ran diagonally down the page, it was as though it had been written while on the back of a camel or the bow of a ship tossed around in bad weather. Some of the pages were barely hanging on by a staple, and when the notebook was closed, the corners stuck out like bookmarks.

There was a title page, in French: Petites misèries de la vie humaine.

This doesn’t mean little miseries either, as I first thought, but translates, more or less, to “Minor irritations of human life.” It gave me a sick feeling, although it served well to brace me for the story of how I came to be, the story that was located in the following journal, which I reprint here for you to read.

Petites misères de la vie humaine

11 May

Paris – perfect city to be lonely & miserable in. London too grim to be a sad sack with any dignity. O London! You grisly town! You cold gray cloud! You low-lying layer of mist & fog! You dense moan! You drizzling forlorn sigh! You shallow gene pool! You career town! You brittle town! You fallen empire! You page-three town! Lesson from London – hell isn’t red-hot but cold & gray.

And Rome? Full of sexual predators who live with their mothers.

Venice? Too many tourists as dumb as believers feed Italian pigeons, whereas in their own cities they snub them.

Athens? Everywhere mounted policemen ride by, pausing only so their horses can shit on cobblestone streets- horse shit lying in such mammoth piles you think there must be no better laxative in the world than bales of hay.

Spain? Streets smell like socks fried in urine- too many Catholics baptized in piss. Tho the real problem with Spain is you’re constantly frustrated by fireworks- sexual stink of exploding fiestas salt in wound of loneliness.

But Paris – beautiful poor ugly opulent vast complex gray rainy & French. You see unbelievable women, umbrellas, beggars, tree-lined streets, bicycles, church spires, Africans, gloomy domes, balconies, broken flowerpots, rudeness that will ring through eternity, aimless pedestrians, majestic gardens, black trees, bad teeth, ritzy stores, socialists moving their hands up the thighs of intellectuals, protesting artists, bad drivers, pay toilets, visible cheese smells, witty scarves, shadows of body odors in the metro, fashionable cemeteries, tasteful transvestites, filtered light, slums, grime, desire, artistic lampposts, multicolored phlegm of passive chimney smokers, demented cobblestone faces in terrace cafés, high collars, hot chocolates, flashy gargoyles, velvet berets, emaciated cats, pickpockets running away with glittering entrails of rich German tourists, & great phallic monuments in the squares & the sex shops.

It’s no rumor: prancing arrogant Parisians sit cross-legged in cafés & philosophize uninvited- but why is it that when I hear someone make a great philosophical argument I get the same feeling as when I see someone has put clothes on his dog?

With me is Caroline’s last postcard. Typical Caroline. “I’m in Paris ” & an address, some grimy suburb just out of the city. I’ll go there & tell her my brother’s dead, the man she loved, and then…But NOT YET- clumsy love declarations are a high heart risk. Should I see her? Should I wait? The problem with most people is they’ve NEVER been torn in half, not really not right down the middle like I have, NEVER ripped themselves to shreds NEVER listened to the warring factions BOTH make their case so convincing AND so right & they don’t know what it is to have your brain & your body want TWO things each that’s FOUR compelling ideas all at once.

I wonder if I’m reaching out for Caroline in particular or just for someone who knew me before five minutes ago.

4 June

This morning woke to sound of children laughing- that shit me. Even worse- found decision had taken place in my head overnight-Today Martin Dean will go to Caroline Potts & declare undying love & devotion. I lay in bed stuffing stomach w/butterflies. Thought how all my life-altering decisions are command decisions made from the highest peak of hierarchy of self- when orders boom from commander in chief what can you do? I showered shaved drank stale wine & dressed. In head 2 fragmented Caroline memories 1. her smile, tho not her smiling face, just the smile like a suspended pair of dentures 2. her handstands- plaid skirt hanging down to her armpits- jesus how that innocent childlike act made me want to pounce on her in brutal tho heartfelt manner.

Went into bowels of city then suffocating metro ride out of Paris. Saw four horse-faced people. 14-year-old toughie tried to pick my pocket making me realize I don’t know French word for Hey!

Finally sat on low stone wall opposite small many-windowed building, all shutters closed as if forever. Hard to believe this dirty apartment building housed the woman I love. Commander sensing I was about to linger screeched in my ear so I marched to front door & pounded. Bit my lower lip too tho commander hadn’t ordered it.

Door handle turned slowly & insensitively to prolong immaculate agony. Finally opened to reveal short, stout woman as wide as she was long- in other words, a perfect square.

– Oui?

– Caroline Potts, she is here? I said in perfect English translation of grammatically correct French. The woman blabbered away in her tongue & shook head. Caroline was no longer there.

– And Monsieur Potts? The blind man?

She looked at me blankly.

– Blind. No eyes. No eyes, I repeated idiotically, thinking Well, can I come in & smell her pillow?

– Hello! a voice called out from the upstairs window. An Asian face was hanging there looking for a body to match. Wait there! the face said & ran down breathlessly.

– You are looking for the girl & the blind man?

– Yes!

– I’m Eddie.

– So?

– So nothing. The girl left a month ago, after the blind man died.

– Died? Are you sure?

– Of course I’m sure. I was at the funeral. What’s your name?

– Martin. How did he die?

– I used to watch them from my window. Every day she walked him to the shops so he would know where the holes were in the street, but this one day he went alone. He must have got disoriented because he walked right into the middle of the road and just stood there.

– He was hit by a car?

– No, he had a heart attack. He’s buried up at the local cemetery. You want to see his grave? I could take you. Come on, he said buttoning up his coat, but I hesitated. Something in his manner was unsettling: his hands made delicate gestures & in his voice a conciliatory tone as if we’d argued & he wanted to make it up to me.

– Shall we go and see your dead friend? he asked sweetly & I thought I don’t like this man not that I had any real reason for disliking him but so what? I’ve been disliked by people who couldn’t even pick me out of a police lineup.

Under gray sky we walked up the same color road in dead silence to the top of the hill. The cemetery was only 100 meters away- convenient place to die. The grave had only his name & lifespan & nothing else no little witticisms nothing. I wondered if Lionel died instantly or w/final breath made a banal plan like Must buy milk. Then I thought about all the deaths I knew- how Harry chose his & how Terry was probably shocked by his & how my parents’ deaths must have come to them as a disagreeable surprise like a bill in the mail they thought they’d already paid.

Eddie invited me in for hot wine. His small sparsely furnished room smelled like a combination of burned orange peel & old woman’s cheek you’re forced to kiss at a family reunion. Carpet covered in big oily stains, the room spoke eloquently of spills of the clumsy fuckers who’d once lived there.

We had sandwiches & hot wine. Eddie was one of those people adept at summing up their lives in less than a minute. Born in Thailand. Studied medicine- never practiced. Traveled widely. Now trying Paris.

Nothing to say to that.

Conversation flowed like water down flushed toilet. He stared at me so intensely I felt my eyes were pocket-sized mirrors & he was checking his hair.

Night came quickly- it unnerved me he didn’t put on lights. Glanced at switch on the wall but was afraid to move if this fool preferred the airless joy of shadows then so would I. Finally he reached behind him & put on a lamp. Small light burned & grew huge in my eyes.

– So, you had a disappointment today, he said.

– Yes, I thought she’d be here.

This made him laugh in violent spasms, a laugh like a congenital defect.

– I meant the death of your friend.

– Oh, yes, that too.

– You love this girl?

– She’s an old friend from home.

– Australia, he said blandly making the name of my country sound like an old thing he’d once owned but had since thrown away. I said Uh-huh & he continued w/questions. What was I doing in Paris? How long would I stay? Where did I live? Did I work? Why not? & so on. He offered to help me in any way I needed. Money or a job or a place to stay. I thanked him & said it was getting late.

– Would it bother you very much if I took your photo?

It would.

– Oh, come on. It’s just this little hobby of mine, he said smiling. I looked around the room for proof of this claim- a photograph maybe- but the walls were bare & when he went into the next room to get his “apparatus” as he called his camera that made me shudder because whenever someone says the word apparatus I see enormous gleaming pincers w/single plump drop of blood at its tip.

– I think I should be going, I said.

– Just one little photo. I’ll be quick, he said w/ fixed smile like a window painted shut.

As he set up I felt convinced he was going to ask me to take off my clothes. He was talking all the while saying You really must tell me if there’s anything I can do for you, convincing me not only was he going to ask me to take off my clothes, he was going to pull them off himself. He switched on another light- a single bulb blared a trillion watts & he took my photo sitting in the chair & standing up & putting on my coat & walking out the door.

– Come by for dinner tomorrow night, he said.

– OK, I lied & hurried out & on the way home swung by the cemetery for a final farewell to Lionel where I tried to be solemn & feel REMORSE SADNESS LOSS SOMETHING I took a deep breath didn’t do any good I couldn’t feel ANYTHING other than pure disgust at myself- I procrastinated so long I missed what might have been a turning point in my life when is the next one going to be? I’d pictured our reunion a zillion times Caroline had been the focal point of my being in Europe or to put it plainly of being alive and through fear & indecision I’d missed her.

I kicked the headstone in a fit of impotent rage but then remembered Lionel. Tried to be sad again but had no room in my heart for mourning him. Too busy mourning love.

Unfeeling tribute to my old friend broken by soft footsteps on grass- Eddie at the bottom of cemetery hands in pockets staring. I pretended I didn’t see him & rushed off into night thinking of pincers.

Me Again

Can’t pretend other people’s minor misfortunes aren’t of great amusement to me because they are- not death or sickness but when someone’s money is swallowed by a public telephone which then refuses to make a call it’s fucking funny. I can watch people hitting telephones all day.

I’ve found an ingenious place to think- inside cool, dark cathedrals of Paris. Of course believers as dumb as patriots make conversations but conversations quiet as they’re w/ God. Stupid how we think God only hears our thoughts when we address them to him in particular & not when we think our dirty little thoughts in everyday scenarios such as I hope Fred dies soon so I can have his office, it really is much nicer than mine. The meaning of faith is our understanding w/ Creator that he will not eavesdrop on our mind’s whisper to itself unless invited.

Café Gitane

Months since last written. Crazy with solitude crazy with indecision crazy with imaginary eyes. Days filled w/ walking thinking reading eating drinking smoking & generally trying to pick the padlock of life but it’s difficult when you’re the blunt weapon left out of every war. Hope I won’t suffer same problems in the future, can’t think of anything worse. (Not that I’ve anything against problems, I don’t- expect to have them all my life- just don’t want them to be the same problems. Hope for different horrific affliction to mark each new year.) I think your early twenties must be the age you stumble onto patterns that will ruin your life.

A Thursday

Talk about volatile combinations now LUST & LONELINESS have fused in a haunting unbearable way my body screams my soul screams to touch to be touched around me are countless chiseled & flawless couples look like they’re off to start new unendurable race of ex-soap stars there MUST be someone for me somewhere.

2:30- Midweek?

Every day- same café, different book to read. I don’t speak to ANYONE & keep my eyes in strange places when I order my coffee but they know my face here. The patrons smoke anything flammable & the bartender asks you what you want to drink as if you might be his old nemesis from high school but he isn’t sure & I sit at a small table near the radiator thinking here I am again wanting to be invisible then furious when ignored.

Out the large window I look at life. What a fucking lot of bipeds! Australia – bipeds throwing a ball. Paris – bipeds in turtleneck sweaters. Pessoa called humanity “variable but unimprovable”- hard to find a better description than that. The waiter comes by with the bill. I argue w/ him & lose quickly. No wonder key existentialists were French. It’s natural to be horrified at existence when you have to pay 4 dollars for coffee.

Undated Time

I imagine Judgment Day to be God calling you into a tiny white room w/ an uncomfortable wooden chair that you sit in & splinter yourself as you shift anxiously. He comes in smiling like a train conductor who found you without a ticket & he says I don’t care what good you did or what evil & I don’t care if you believed in me or in my son or in any other member of my extended family & I don’t care if you gave generously to the poor or if you gave to them stingily with closed fists but here is a minute-by-minute account of your time on earth. Then he produces a piece of paper 10,000 kilometers long & says, Read this & explain yourself. Mine would read as follows:

June 14th

9:00 am

woke up

9:01 am

lay in bed, staring at ceiling

9:02 am

lay in bed, staring at ceiling

9:03 am

lay in bed, staring at ceiling

9:04 am

lay in bed, staring at ceiling

9:05 am

lay in bed, staring at ceiling

9:06 am

lay in bed, staring at ceiling

9:07 am

lay in bed, staring at ceiling

9:08 am

rolled over onto left side

9:09 am

lay in bed, staring at wall

9:10 am

lay in bed, staring at wall

9:11 am

lay in bed, staring at wall

9:12 am

lay in bed, staring at wall

9:13 am

lay in bed, staring at wall

9:14 am

lay in bed, staring at wall

9:15 am

doubled over pillow, sat up to see out window

9:16 am

sat in bed, staring out window

9:17 am

sat in bed, staring out window

9:18 am

sat in bed, staring out window

9:19 am

sat in bed, staring out window

Then God would say Life is a gift & you never even bothered to unwrap it. Then he would smite me.

New Year’s Eve

All Paris counting down to Christmas now counting down to New Year proving that not only are we more obsessed with time than ever we just can’t stop counting everything. Our perception is that time is moving forward but scientists tell us we are wrong wrong wrong in fact they say we are so wrong they feel a little embarrassed for us.

It’s New Year’s Eve & I’ve NOTHING to do NOBODY to touch NO ONE to kiss.

January 1

What a night! If anyone feels sudden potent tremors in the world they come from me having finally sideslipped into the aromatic hairy pocket of the other gender. Yes it’s official- I am a fornicator!

Sat on bench in Montmartre cemetery opposite Nijinsky’s grave & made a list of resolutions. The usual bunk- quit smoking & be happy with what you have & give to beggars but not pleaders & don’t grovel even to yourself & piss wine & shit gold blahblahblah. Banal list of promises to myself numbered an even fifty & as I tore them up I thought New Year’s resolutions are a confession that all along we know the fault of our unhappiness lies w/ us & not w/ others.

Walked the streets until midnight among the people of Paris gorging on joy & I felt stupid & inadequate in my unhappiness & it seemed very clear to me that loneliness is the worst thing in the world & people should ALWAYS be forgiven for all the compromises they make in love.

At midnight I put my fingers in my ears but it didn’t do any good-

I could still hear it. The countdown to the New Year was the worst thing I’d ever heard.

I walked on. The window of regular café shone out of the fog in a circle of dotted lights. As I entered fat bartender poured me champagne smiling. I took it & wished him a happy New Year in French. Regular patrons all turned eager to know who I was & plied me w/ questions & let out gasps of shock when I said I was from Australia – my country to them no closer than the moon. Got drunk & returned questions w/ questions & found out who had children who was divorced who had bowel cancer who won a small literary prize for a poem entitled “The Tripe of Life” who had crushing financial difficulties & who belonged to the Freemasons but don’t tell anybody.

4 am- noticed a woman standing at the other end of the bar. Hadn’t seen her come in. She had a beautiful angular face & wide brown eyes & wore a black furry hat & when she removed it hair fell out all over the place over her face into her champagne. She had a lot of hair. It went down her back. It went into my mind. It covered her shoulders & my thoughts.

I watched her as she drank & thought her face was one that you have to earn- there was a world-weariness in that face as if it had seen all the acts of creation & all the acts of destruction & had gotten stuck in the bottleneck of history & crawled out naked over miles & miles of broken bodies & machine parts & wound up here in this bar for a quick glass of champagne to rinse the taste of holocaust from her mouth.

The alcohol gave me courage & I went over without preparing an opening line.

– Bonsoir, mademoiselle. Parlez-vous anglais? I asked.

She shook her head as if I were a policeman interrogating her after a rape so I backed away & resumed my place at the end of the bar. Humiliated, I downed champagne in one go & when I finished saw her coming over.

– I do speak English, she said settling herself on stool beside me. Hard to place her accent, European but not French. Caught her looking at my scarred ears, not subtle about it, & before I knew what was happening she had her finger on my scar & I liked that there was no pity in her eyes only mild curiosity. Pity is the awful lost dazed brother of empathy. Pity doesn’t know what to do with itself so it just goes Awwwwwww.

She surprised me further by not asking about it.

– Do you have any scars? I asked.

– I don’t even have any scratches, she answered softly as tho a hand was over her mouth.

Her cardigan was open just enough to reveal a tight black T-shirt concealing small thrilling breasts like hard-boiled eggs.

I dangled my weak smile in front of her & asked what she was doing in Paris.

– Nothing mostly.

Nothing mostly. Those strange words played in my mind for a while rearranged themselves (mostly nothing) & finally died there.

Lust reaching astonishing proportions I felt my secret thoughts broadcast through a megaphone. She asked me where I was from & I told her & watched her eyes fill with the visions of a land she’d never seen. I always wanted to go to Australia she said but already I’ve traveled too much. We talked about the earth for a while & there was hardly a country I could think of she hadn’t been lost in. She told me she speaks English French Italian German Russian. Mastery of languages impresses my lazy Australian brain.

Was this woman accepting my advances? Even reciprocating them? There’s a hidden agenda here, I thought. She wants me for some banal purpose like to help her move furniture.

– Do you want to kiss me? she asked suddenly.

– As a start.

– Then why don’t you?

– What if you reel backwards and make a scene?

– I won’t.

– Promise?

– I promise.

– And hope to die?

– Above all things, I hope to die.

– In general, or if I kiss you?

– What’s wrong with you?

– I don’t know. Here I come.

I leaned forward & she grabbed my face & her long fingernails against my cheek were sharper than they looked & we kissed for a long time I think I was doing something wrong because our teeth kept colliding. When we finished the kiss she said laughing, I can taste your loneliness- it tastes like vinegar.

That annoyed me. Everyone knows loneliness tastes like cold potato soup.

– What can you taste of me? she asked playfully.

– I can taste your insanity, I said.

– What does it taste of?

– Blue cheese.

She laughed & clapped her hands then threw them around me & clutched my hair so it hurt.

– Let go.

– Not until you kiss me again. I want to taste some more of your loneliness, she said loudly. I was glad no one in the bar could speak English- this was embarrassing crazy talk & I didn’t want anyone in the café thinking about the flavor of my lonely soul.

– Let’s get another drink, I said.

We drank for another hour & I mutilated many of my most coherent thoughts by putting them into words.

I don’t remember how we ended up back in her apartment. I remember her hands resting on my arms as she talked & I remember kissing in the street & afterwards hearing the sound of immature whistling nearby. I remember her telling me to stop whistling.

I remember that the sex was good. To prolong the moment I thought of mass graves & syringes & gum disease. I don’t know what she thought of or if she even wanted to prolong the moment.

It was unofficially my first time. Officially too.

Now five in the morning. She fell asleep before me & I’m writing this very drunk & propped up in bed beside her. O Whatever Your Name Is! You sleep deeply like a beautiful cadaver & your ghostly white face sits there strangely on the pillow like a piece of the moon.

Still January 1, Later

Woke up feeling her breath on the back of my neck. The whole night played out in my head in Technicolor. I dragged myself along the sheets & turned & I looked at her dark eyebrows & big lips & long brown hair & thin body & small breasts & her beautiful angular face so still so chalky. I wanted to leave the bed without waking her & looked around the room for an object within reach of same approximate density of own body to replace myself w/ but could see only a coat rack which I discounted out of respect for my self-image. I lifted myself from the bed & quietly dressed. She is the first woman I have ever slept w/. She is a delicate flower I thought as I snuck out the door.

Odor of Paris in my mouth, mint with a chewy center. The sky a vast foreign country. The setting sun in my eyes but too happy to blink. Must have slept heavily all day- the sleep of a human body depleted of semen?

I have returned to my café taller from the previous evening’s conquest. Me conquered? Her conqueror? The moon has just risen. I feel lazy & hungover, the warm sensation of pleasant exhaustion slowly contracting. Edges of my old miserable self coming home.

I know I’ll never see her again.

January 2 (Night)

Saw her again. She came into the café & sat opposite me. My brain scrambled for excuses why I snuck out of her apartment but she didn’t appear to require one- she just began talking in her strange accent as if we’d arranged to meet. Behind her eyes I could tell she was happy to see me. That was surprising. Then I could tell she was unhappy that I was surprised at her happiness. Then she fell into awkward silence & she grinned w/ pain behind it & tried to stare at me but her eyes looked away.

She cleared her throat & in an uncertain voice told me that the way to make French people uncomfortable is to talk about money. When I still said nothing she said I don’t want to disturb you. Go on reading & she removed a sketchbook & pencil from her bag & started drawing my face & ordered a coffee & drank it slowly as she stared w/ strange big eyes, drawing me.

Was grateful to her for removing my virginity but it was gone now & I couldn’t see any further purpose to her. Like having dinner with doctor after successful operation. What’s the point?

– I can’t concentrate with you staring at my head like it’s a sculpture.

That made her giggle.

– Do you want to go for a walk? she asked.

Head whispered no. Mouth said yes.

On way out she told me her name was Astrid & I told her mine & I wondered if I should’ve given a fake name but it was too late for that now.

Luxembourg Gardens. Cold & windy & naked trees, frightening against the white sky. She kicked piles of leaves so they flew around us in the wind, an act of childlike joy she made seem violent. She asked me how tall I was. I shrugged this off w/ a sneer- every now & again someone asks me this asinine question & is flabbergasted that I don’t know. Why should I know? What for? Knowledge of your own height serves no useful purpose in our society other than to be able to answer that question.

I asked her personal questions, she was evasive & her eyes on me felt like cold rain. Where was she from? Her family was always moving she said- Spain Italy Germany Bucharest the Maldives. But where was she born? She was born on the road, she said, eyes half closed. Her family treated her badly & she doesn’t want to return to them, not even in her thoughts. The future is an unbearable topic also. Where will she go? What will she do? She shook her head as if to say these are the wrong questions.

Then in an excited voice she started boring me with lengthy historical discourses HONESTLY what do I care if Louis XVI cut himself shaving the morning before he was guillotined? DO I REALLY WANT TO KNOW that an eyewitness at the stake where Joan of Arc was burned heard her speaking to God through the flames saying You can be pleased! I didn’t renounce you! & God saying back Stupid woman! What do I care what these people think? In the end while I like reading about history, something inside me rebels at being told it as if I were a slow-witted schoolboy who can’t be trusted to open a book.

As if sensing my boredom she suddenly went silent & her eyes fell to the ground & I thought there’s something about her that’s way too adhesive. Occurred to me if I didn’t get away that very second I’d be prying her off later with a bottle of mentholated spirits & a naked flame but she invited herself back to my place & I accepted.

She came in & stood in the center of the room in a way that made me think of cows & horses who sleep standing up. We made love in the bedroom in the dark, only sometimes the moonlight hit her face & I’d see her eyes were not just closed but squeezed tight.

Afterwards I watched her delight in tearing the plastic off a fresh packet of cigarettes as if picking daisies. She seemed to be relaxed now & as she smoked she talked passionately about everything her eyes fell on: ceilings & windows & curtains & faded wallpaper as if she’d been contemplating these objects for centuries & I was impressed by her knowledge & insights & asked if her intensity was European in character.

– No, it’s just me she said smiling.

Then she asked me if I loved her. I have waited a long time to say it honestly to Caroline, so I said no. I wanted to say more, to hurt her so she’d never come back, so I said Maybe you should leave now before your angular face cuts something.

She exploded, tearing me apart, critiquing everything about me. The subtext was clearly You don’t love me, tho in my defense should a person even need a defense for not loving someone, I had only known her two days.

She stormed out & I wondered what she wanted with my hollow life. Did she want to fill it & by filling it empty herself?

A Few Nights Later

This is how it works: She turns up uninvited & stands in front of me like those dozing cows & sometimes we make dinner & sometimes we eat it & sometimes we make love & sometimes she cries during it & I really hate that.

Often she takes my arm even as we walk around the apartment and as she speaks I keep losing track. Her English is fluent but often I have no idea what she means as if she’s expressing an abridgment of her own thoughts. Sometimes she tells stories laughing & while she does have a genuinely sweet laugh I can never work out for the life of me what’s so funny. She laughs at what I say too but at such odd moments, for all I know she might well be laughing at the word “the.” Her laugh is so enormous and sustaining I’m afraid I’ll be sucked into her mouth & wind up on the wrong side of the universe.

amp; she believes in God! I never imagined I would be with someone who believes- out of boredom I start a little argument about him, lazily throwing out the old chestnut If there’s a God why is there so much misery & evil in the world, & she bores me right back w/ God’s facetious smarty-pants answer to Job: Where were you when I created the heavens & the earth? THAT’S AN ANSWER?

I think her love for me has nothing to do with me except proximity- wrong place, wrong time. She loves me as a starving man loves whatever slop you put in front of him- not a compliment to the cooking but a testament to his hunger. I’m the slop in this analogy.

I want to be in love w/ her but not. I mean she’s v. beautiful especially when exclaims surprise or shock which is why I’m constantly jumping out at her but I can’t bring myself to love her. I don’t know why. Maybe because she’s the first nonrelated/nonmedical person to see me naked and vulnerable or maybe because she often seems so genuinely pleased simply to be with me- something inside me irritated at the idea that I have the capacity to make someone else happy just by existing when my existence has never done anything for me.

Yesterday she told me to call her Pauline.

– I fake a new name depending on what country I’m in, she said.

– So what are you telling me, Astrid isn’t your real name?

– It’s real if you call me & I answer to it.

– What’s your name?

– Pauline.

– No, that’s your French name. What’s your original name?

– There are no original names. They’ve all been used before.

I gritted my teeth & thought what am I doing with this nutcase? She talks too much & her crying frustrates then bores me & every day I grow more & more convinced she’s spent some time in a mental hospital & if not she should really think about it.

Blahblahblah

Tried closing myself off to her but it doesn’t do any good. Astrid or Pauline or whatever her name is has sneakily gone about understanding me by finding passages I’ve underlined in books. The other day she found this one in Lermontov: “I was gloomy- other children were merry and talkative. I felt myself superior to them- but was considered inferior: I became envious. I was ready to love the whole world- none understood me: and I learned to hate.” This one struck her especially as it was underlined circled highlighted & annotated with the words My childhood! Must be more careful in leaving soul-glimpses lying around like that.

Going to have to end this thing tho don’t know how when it’s my indifference that’s probably made her fall deeper in love with me- if I wanted to stay she’d probably throw me out on my ear but since she can tell I want to leave she doesn’t. She knows pleasure of pushing someone out the door is weakened considerably when w/ slightest nudge they break into a run.

An Ugly Day

Eddie’s back. Standing on Rue de Rivoli wondering if I stole just one hot roasted chestnut would the vendor bother chasing me for it when I had the weird sensation that I was being talked to in a language not of words but of energy and vibrations. Turned to see his wry Asian face peering at me- we stared at each other, neither moving. After looonng time he waved meekly & came through crowd to shake hand resting in my pocket. He had to pull it out. We chatted amiably & I was surprised to find how pleased I was to see a familiar face. Familiarity is important in a face. Don’t like Eddie’s face tho it’s clean & sparkling like a bathroom tile in a ritzy hotel. Don’t know how we found each other again- when I say goodbye to someone I expect it to stick. We walked in cold air & wintry light & Eddie told me he’s working down by the docks & asked me if I have a job & what have I been doing without one? I told him I’d found a woman because that’s the only external thing that has happened to me- some internal things have happened but they’re not his business & besides they’re incommunicable.

– What does she look like? he asked.

I’m not good at describing people & wind up sounding like an eyewitness in a police interview. She’s 5'7'' brown hair Caucasian…

Eddie said he’d like to meet her, trying again to worm his way into my life. I sense he is trouble, he’s too nice too genial too helpful too friendly. Trouble. He wants something. Don’t know why but I invited him to dinner then thought Now I’ll never get rid of him.

– Get rid of who? Eddie asked & as streetlamps came on I realized that somewhere along the way I’d developed habit of thinking out loud.

Possibly a Weekday

Changing my opinion of Eddie. Tho he’s constantly chilling me w/ his suspicious pursuit of friendship I like his contradictions- he’s a man at the peak of fitness who refuses to walk anywhere & he hates all tourists especially when they obstruct his view of the Eiffel Tower & while his clothes are always immaculately washed or dry-cleaned the man just doesn’t brush his teeth. What I like about him most tho is that he seems genuinely interested in everything about me & always seeks my thoughts & opinions & laughs at my jokes & every now & then actually calls me a genius. Who wouldn’t like a fellow like that?

A strange threesome- Eddie & Astrid & me. At first when we ate dinner together you could see them freeze when I went to do something & it made me laugh to myself to see two grown people loath to be left in the same room. But soon quasi-friendship developed based on laughing together at my clumsiness & forgetfulness & lax attitude toward hygiene- amusement at my faults is common ground on which they both stand.

Sometimes three of us walk by the Seine. Buy cheap wine & bread & cheese & we talk about everything but I’m always impatient w/ other people’s opinions because I’m sure they’re just repeating something they heard somewhere or else regurgitating ideas fed to them in childhood. Look, everyone’s entitled to their own opinion & I’d never shut anyone down who was expressing one but can you be sure it’s really theirs? I’m not.

Catastrophe!

Tonight Astrid Eddie & me went to do laundry & to pass the time we tried to guess the origins of each other’s stains. Astrid thought every wine stain was blood & every coffee stain a splattering of tuberculosis. It was cold out & the window of the laundromat was all fogged up & we couldn’t see outside & Eddie was bent in front of the dryer lifting his clothes to his nose & sniffing each item with pleasure before folding it in a meticulous fashion as if preparing to send his underpants off to war.

– Hey, what the fuck? Eddie suddenly shouted as he sniffed his clothes his face contorting with each enormous whiff. There must have been something in the machine! These smell of shit!

He waved his garments under Astrid’s nose.

– I don’t smell anything.

– How can you not smell anything? Maybe you don’t smell what I smell but you must smell something.

– I don’t smell anything bad.

– Martin. You don’t smell shit?

I reluctantly took a sniff.

– It smells fine.

– Shit smells fine?

Eddie put his head in the clothes dryer sniffing. I was laughing & Astrid was laughing & it was a good moment. Then Astrid said I’m pregnant & Eddie hit his head on the inside of the dryer.

A baby! A fucking baby! A defecating pea-brained unformed biped! A horrible toothless homunculus! An incarnation of ego! A demanding serpent of need! A bald whining primate!

My life is over.

Help!

The topic of the moment: abortion. I am a passionate advocate. I hear myself in conversations w/ Astrid extolling virtues of abortion as if it were a new time-saving technology we can’t afford to live without. Like everything else her responses alternate between vague & fuzzy & downright mysterious. She says an abortion would be probably pointless- whatever that means.

Sex: the match that sets off human firework. In our loveless palace we’ve built a child. Suddenly being almost broke filled w/ new & daunting meaning compounded by the terrible discovery that I have not the heart/cunning/spine/amorality necessary to simply slip out of the country without a word and never return. To my horror principles have wormed their way into fabric of my being. I can’t recall a single instance of my parents showing strong moral fiber, but still it’s there inside me & I know I can’t leave Astrid. I’m stuck. Hopelessly stuck!

Much Later

Haven’t written for months. Astrid very pregnant. The fetus expands persistently. The invader draws near. My own private population explosion: spinal injury of my independence. Do I care if it dies?

The only good I can imagine from having a child: what I can learn from him, not from nauseatingly cute attempts at walking talking shitting which thrill every parent so they repeat their discoveries to you ad nauseam until you despise not only all children everywhere but even find you’re struck by sudden & irrational distaste for kittens & puppies. But it occurs to me I could learn from this child something about the nature of humanity- and if I accept Harry’s pronouncement that I am a born philosopher then this baby could be an ambitious philosophical project! What if I reared it in a cupboard without light? Or in room full of mirrors? Or Dali paintings? Apparently babies have to learn to smile so what if I never taught him or showed him laughter? No television of course no movies maybe no society either- what if he never saw another human other than me or not even me? What would happen? Would cruelty develop in that miniature universe? Would sarcasm? Would rage? Yes I could really learn something here tho why stop at one child? Could have a collective of children or “family” & alter variables in environment that will govern life of each one to see what’s natural what’s inevitable what’s environmental & what’s conditioning. Above all I will strive to raise a being that understands itself. What if I gave child head start by encouraging self-awareness at an unnaturally young age, maybe 3? Maybe earlier? Would need to create optimum conditions for flowering of self-awareness. This child will know a lot of solitude that’s for sure.

Yuck

If a girl Astrid wants to name the child Wilma for some reason- if a boy, Jasper. God knows where she got these names- all the same to me. If raised properly at a certain age he’ll/she’ll choose his/her own name to reflect who he/she thinks he/she is to feel entirely comfortable in his/her own skin- nothing worse than hearing your name called & feeling a dispassionate shudder or being left cold when you see your own name in print which is why most signatures are barely legible scrawls: the unconscious rebeling against the name, trying to smash it.

Worried about money. Astrid is too. She says she has been broke before in more countries than I can name in such poverty I cannot imagine but she’s never done it with a baby & she’s worried my inherent laziness will ensure our mutual starvation. Clearly criticism is the new fire that will not die. To have a child is to be impaled daily on the spike of responsibility.

Christ!

Idiocy (or is it insanity?) redefined in what I saw when I came home today: Astrid fixing the fuses in the kitchen while standing in a small puddle of water. I threw her over my shoulder and tossed her on the bed.

– You trying to kill yourself? I screamed.

She looked at me as if I had put my face on inside out & said in small bored voice If I could think of a really clever way to commit suicide, I would.

Suicide?

– How can you even think about suicide when you’re pregnant? I said surprising myself w/ pro-life thoughts.

– Don’t worry. Suicides often fail, anyway. When I was a girl my uncle jumped off a cliff and then waved from the bottom, his back broken. And my cousin took an overdose of pills and just wound up vomiting for a week. My grandfather put a gun in his mouth, pulled the trigger, and somehow managed to miss his brain.

– This is the first thing you’ve told me about your family!

– Is it?

– Did every member of your family attempt suicide at one point?

– My father never did.

– Who was your father? What was his name? What did he do? Is he still alive? What country did he come from? What country do you come from? What is your first language? Where did you grow up?

Why don’t you talk about anything? Why won’t you tell me anything?

Did something terrible happen to you? What…

A cold glaze came over her- she was receding fast. Her soul on an express train, back to nowhere.

Strange Days Indeed

Things w/ Astrid worse than ever. Icy wall dividing us. She does nothing all day, just stares out window or at own puffiness. On rare occasions she says anything her opinions are as bleak & sterile as mine were before I got sick of them. (I haven’t grown optimistic merely bored with pessimism so now I think light pretty thoughts for variety- sadly this is starting to get dull too- where next?)

I say We should get out a bit.

She says To do what?

I say We could go sit in a café & look at people.

She says I can’t look at people anymore. I’ve seen too many.

Life’s lost its appeal. Nothing I can suggest to break her from catatonic spell. Museums? She’s been to every one. Walks in the park? Already strolled under every color of the leaf. Movies? Books? No new stories only different character names. Sex? She’s done every position untold times.

I ask her Are you sad?

– No, unhappy.

– Depressed?

– No, miserable.

– Is it the baby?

– I’m sorry. I can’t explain it, but you’re being so lovely, Martin. Thank you she says squeezing my hand & staring at me w/ her wide glassy eyes.

One night she cleaned the whole apartment & went out & returned w/ wine & cheese & chocolates & a fedora hat for me which I wore w/ no clothes on & it made her laugh hysterically & I realized just how much I missed her laugh.

But by morning she was miserable again.

Remembering how on the morning after our relationship began she’d drawn my face in pencil I went out & bought paints & a canvas spending all the money I had in vain hope that she might take out burning misery on blank canvas instead of on me.

When I unveiled the gift she cried & smiled in spite of herself then moved the canvas by the window & began painting.

That set off something new.

Each painting a rendition of hell, she has many hells & she paints them all. But hell is just a face, and it is just the face she paints. One face. One terrible face. Painted many times.

– Whose face is it? I asked today.

– It’s nobody. I don’t know. It’s just a face.

– I can see it’s a face. I said it was a face. I didn’t say Whose hand is that?

– I’m not a good painter, she said.

– I don’t know much about painting but I think it’s very good. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I want to know who the face belongs to.

– I painted it, she said. It belongs to me.

You can see there was no talking to her like you talk to a normal person. You had to be tricky.

– I’ve seen that face before, I said. I know him.

– He is not a man. He is not in the world, she said & my suspicions hardened into conclusions: that this woman is insane.

Always small canvases, always the same painting, only the colors differ browns & blacks & muted reds. I can see her frenzy in that face.

Later I study the painted faces hoping that in the hallucinatory state in which she paints slips of her subconscious have dropped clues onto the canvas. The paintings perhaps elegantly symbolic maps that can lead me to epicenter of her morbid condition. My eyes train on them, dissecting them furtively under the weak lamplight. But I can’t see anything in that face other than her horror of it that fast has become my own. It really is a horrible face.

Yesterday

Whatever religious sentiments she has banked up in her interior stirred up in all this painting. Sometimes she’ll be lost in painting & she’ll call out Forgive me Lord! then go about chatting to him in half whispers leaving lengthy pauses presumably where he responds. When today she said Forgive me Lord! I did his part & said OK. You’re forgiven. Now shut up.

– He doesn’t believe in you, Lord.

– He’s right not to believe in me. I’m not very believable. Besides, what have I ever done for him?

– You have led him to me!

– And you think you’re such a gift? You aren’t even honest with him!

– Yes I am, Lord, I am honest with him.

– You don’t tell him anything about your past.

– I tell him about my feelings.

– Oh for fuck’s sake. Go and take him a beer. He’s thirsty! I shouted & a few seconds later she entered the room carrying the beer smiling sweetly & kissing me all over & I didn’t know what to think.

Curiouser & Curiouser

This is how we communicate. How I’m finding out a little more about her. Is there really a possibility she doesn’t know it’s me doing the part of God?

This morning she painted as I sat beside her and read.

– Oh Lord! How long! she shouted suddenly.

– What?

– How much longer!

– How much longer what? Astrid, what are you talking about?

She wasn’t looking at me she was looking up at the ceiling. I thought for a few minutes then went into the next room & half closed the door & peering through the crack tried this experiment and shouted back How much longer for what? Be specific, my child.

I’m not a mind reader.

– The years! How much longer will I live?

– A long time! I said and watched the light behind her face galloping away.

I couldn’t get any more out of her after that.

& Curiouser

Only when painting her ghastly sickening faces does it happen. I was sitting on the toilet when I heard from the living room Lord! I am afraid! I am afraid for this baby!

I opened the door a little so she could hear me.

– That’s ridiculous! What’s there to be scared about?

Speaking as God from the toilet lent the whole situation some authenticity, the acoustics made my voice echo just like his would.

– Will he be a good father? she asked.

– He’ll do his best!

– He won’t stay. I know it. One day he’ll go and I’ll be alone with this baby this sick baby!

– There’s nothing wrong with the baby.

– You know he must be sick like me.

Then she laughed long & horribly & lapsed into silence.

These chat sessions with the Lord i.e. me seem to take on proportions of a fabulous opera. Calling out from across the room, she confides in me as never before.

– Lord?

– Talk to me.

– My life is a waste!

– Don’t say that.

– I have wandered everywhere! I have no friends! I have no country!

– Everyone has a country.

– I moved too fast! I saw too much! I forgot nothing! I am incapable of forgetting!

– Is that such a bad thing? So you’ve got a good memory. Listen, whose face are you painting?

– My father.

– Really!

– My father’s father.

– Well, which is it?

– My father’s father’s father.

– Listen, Astrid. Do you want me to smite you?

She said nothing more. I’d put the fear of Me into her.

Sigh

Eddie & I discussed tonight my pathetic financial situation & he offered to give me money not as loan but as gift. Out of fictitious pride I refused it biting my inner lip. Wandered streets randomly picking cafés & asking in patchy French if I might work there. Answers came in wordless sneers. What am I going to do? Clock’s ticking. A nine-month gestation period just isn’t enough preparation time. I pray the baby won’t be premature- undercooked people are trouble.

Love Is Hard Work

I was in the kitchen & Astrid in the living room painting her soul’s leftovers & I heard her shout Dieu!

– What?

– Dieu! Vous êtes ici? Pouvez-vous m’entendre?

– English, my child.

– I saw a child’s corpse today, oh Lord.

– Yuck. Where?

– Outside the hospital. A couple were carrying him in their arms to the emergency room, they were running but I saw that the child was already dead.

– That’s hard, I said.

– Why did you take him, O Lord?

– Why blame me? I was nowhere near that kid!

She fell silent for ten minutes then said Where are you, Lord?

– In the bathroom.

– WHERE ARE YOU, LORD?

– IN THE BATHROOM!

– What if after the baby’s out, nothing’s changed?

– Are you nuts? A baby changes everything.

– But inside me? In my blood.

– Astrid, have you been to the doctor’s?

– Yes, God, I’ve been to doctors in Austria & in Italy & in Greece & in Germany & in Turkey & in Poland & they all say the same thing. I have the healthiest blood they’ve ever seen.

– Well, there you go. Did you really go to a doctor in Turkey? Did he wash his hands?

– I’m doomed.

– You’re imagining it. There’s nothing wrong with you. Everyone says so. You’ve been given a clean bill of health. You can’t go on imagining there’s something wrong with your blood. That’s just crazy talk, OK?

– OK.

– Are we together on this?

– Yes, Lord.

– Good. Now what’s for dinner?

Three in the Morning

Tonight I worked!

Eddie- without consulting me- convinced someone to give me a job.

– I didn’t authorize you to do that.

– You’re almost out of money. You’ve got a child to think about now.

– Well, all right then, what will I be doing?

– You’ll be working with me. Loading crates.

– That sounds all right.

– It’s hard, backbreaking work.

– I’ve heard about that kind of thing I said wondering why people always boast about doing something that breaks your back.

Pont Neuf at dusk- no boats. Dark waters of the Seine, not flowing. We waited on the stone banks of the river & watched the brown water just sit there.

– What do we do now? I asked.

– We wait.

Boats & barges ambled languidly by. A soft rain fell & night fell down with it. Colored city lights reflected on the body of the river. Rain fell unabated.

Two hours later Eddie said Here we are then.

The boat came forward relentlessly, a nightmare littered with heavy packing crates. Two men stepped off, faces hardly visible between where beanies stopped & scarves began. We worked wordlessly in the anonymous night clearing crates one by one from the boat & carrying them up the ramp to the street where truck was waiting.

Driver of truck had sluggish dozy eyes & as we worked I tried guessing his inner sufferings but couldn’t come up with anything other than “hates to work at night.” Eddie & I unloaded those heavy crates for hours while others shouted orders to each other in harsh whispers. By end as the empty boat putted out to sea my everything hurt.

Driver of truck gave Eddie envelope & we walked off together sweating in the cold moonlight. Eddie handed envelope to me, in an attempt to get me to keep all the money to feed my sudden & unwanted family but I gave him half- my greedy self chafing against my principled self.

I came home & was distressed to see I was spotless after heavy night of toil. Imagined my face would be covered in black soot but there’s just no soot in lifting crates no matter how heavy they are.

– How was it? Astrid asked as if I’d been to see a much-hyped movie. I looked at her belly & it occurred to me there was nothing inside not a baby not even a digestive system just a vacant hollow shell puffed up with air & I walked over & put my hand on her growth which she took as a loving gesture & she kissed my hand which made me feel cold all over & I thought I am incapable of loving this woman the mother of my child, and maybe I won’t be able to love the child either. And why am I like that? Is it because I have no self-love? I have self-like but is it enough?

A Week Later an Accident

We work night after night, silent silhouettes sweating in the dark. The hours grind by & I make time pass by imagining I’m an Egyptian slave constructing one of the lesser pyramids. My reverie broken when I mistakenly articulate it to Eddie by saying when we drop a crate for the third time Come on Eddie, for the love of Ra!

Tonight when I came home Astrid was on the floor.

– Are you OK? What happened?

– I fell down the stairs.

First compassionate thought was for the baby- his head will be dented & all squashed in at one side I thought.

I took her to bed & fed her & read to her like my mother read to me tho she was by all appearances unharmed by the fall. She lay in bed staring with only the whites of her eyes. Her pupils lay there like little broken pieces of night. She told me not to fuss. Do you think the baby’s all right? I asked. Should we take your stomach to the hospital?

– You don’t want this baby, she said not looking at me.

– That’s not true! I shouted defensively. I didn’t want this baby but now that it’s coming I’ve accepted the inevitable I lied hoping to talk myself into stoic fortitude. It didn’t work.

Tonight

Something happened tonight. Laboring away as usual, a useless moon shedding diffused light through a thin veil of clouds, the night like a bite of cold apple- it made my teeth sting. Tied the boat to the pier & thought how if someone bottled smell of wet rope & sold it over the counter I’d buy it.

Sudden shouting. Above us a group of four Arabs descended the steps walking closely together- a tough-guy walk, a mean bounce. Long black coats & longer faces. The Arabs shouted something & our guys shouted back & stopped working & grabbed whatever was handy, pipes crowbars metal hooks. The two groups argued in a spattering of French & Arabic. I didn’t know what they were arguing about but tension chewable. The two groups menacingly close to one another & there was a little show of pushing & shoving & they looked so much like rival football supporters full of beer the whole scene made me homesick.

Eddie said to me We should keep out of it. What do you think?

Didn’t tell him what I thought because what I thought was this: Everyone here but Eddie & me has a beard.

Couldn’t pick up the meaning of all those guttural sounds- only the hostility was clear. After the group broke up & climbed back up the sloping ramp the leader of the Arab group spat on the ground, a gesture that always says to me I’m too scared to spit in your face so I’m just going to put some phlegm about half a meter from your left shoe OK?

Dawn

Am I changing? Is a man’s character changeable? Imagine an immortal. Revolting to think he might be making the same old booboos over the centuries. To think of the immortal on his 700,552nd birthday still touching the plate even when someone has told him it’s hot- surely we have deep capacity for change but our 80 years doesn’t give us ample opportunity. You have to be a fast learner. You have to cram infinity into a handful of lousy decades.

This morning passed horribly deformed beggar who was for all practical purposes merely a torso rattling a cup- was it really me who gave him 100 francs & said Take the day off? It wasn’t me, not exactly. It was one of my selves, one of the multitudes. Some of them laugh at me. Others bite their nails in suspense. One snorts with derision. That’s how they are, the multitudes. Some of the selves are children & some are parents. That’s why every man is his own father & his own son. With the years if you learn enough you can learn how to shed your selves like dead skin cells. Sometimes they come out of you & walk around.

Yes I’m changing. Change is when new selves come into foreground while others recede into forgotten landscapes. Maybe definition of having lived full life is when every citizen in the hall of selves gets to take you for a spin- the commander the lover the coward the misanthrope the fighter the priest the moral guardian the immoral guardian the lover of life the hater of life the fool the judge the jury the executioner- when every last soul is satisfied at moment of death. If only one of the selves has been nothing but a spectator or a tourist then the life is incomplete.

My commander, that highest voice in the hierarchy of my head, is back- tyrannical bastard. He orders me to stay w/ Astrid & ride it out. No wonder am in confusion. Am oppressed by totalitarian police state in which I live. There must be a revolution one of these days. A revolt of all my selves- but I’m not sure I have the one needed to lead them: a liberator.

Escape!

Baby escaped! Fluid has become flesh. No turning back now. We’ve named it Jasper.

A cause for celebration & fear & trembling. Astrid proud mother- me semiproud. Never been much of a collaborator. Baby was joint project & my personal stamp hard to ascertain.

Today baby on a blanket kicking chubby legs in the air. Told Astrid to keep him off the floor- would be embarrassing if he was eaten by rats. Bent over baby & looked but really wanted to peer into his skull to see if any evil or cruelty or intolerance or sadism or immorality in there. A new human being. Am not impressed it’s mine.

Can’t help thinking that in this baby we’ve forged an absurd monument to our passionless relationship- we’ve created a symbol of something not worth symbolizing: a crazy edifice of flesh that will grow in equal proportion to our dwindling love as it dies.

The smell! The smell!

There’s more feces here than in the Marquis de Sade’s prison cell.

Silence

Baby doesn’t cry. I don’t know anything about babies except that they cry. Ours isn’t crying.

– Why is he so damn quiet? I asked.

– I don’t know.

Astrid sat in the living room all pale staring out the window. Can’t help but look at this baby & see not a child or a new human being but an old one. A sickening idea has taken hold-this baby is me prematurely reincarnated. I loathe this kid- I loathe it because it is me. It is me. It will surpass me. It will overthrow me. It will know what I know, all my mistakes. Other people have children. Not me. I have given birth to something monstrous: to myself.

– I think he’s hungry, I said.

– So?

– So get your tit out.

– He’s sucking me dry.

– OK, OK. Maybe I’ll just give him some normal milk.

– No! That’s no good for him!

– Well, fuck, this is not my field of expertise. All I know is the baby needs some kind of nourishment.

– Why don’t you read to him? she said laughing. Last night she’d caught me reading him passages from Heidegger.

– He doesn’t understand, she’d howled.

– I don’t either! I shouted back. Nobody does!

A very bad situation. Of the three of us, it’s clear whose welfare must be provided for at all costs, who is the most important here.

Me.

I Almost Died Tonight!!!!!!!

The boat’s never on time so we wait & read the newspaper & then it arrives like the four horsemen of the apocalypse on a moonlight cruise. The darkness broken by bobbing lights of the boat heading toward us & as it moors the rigid faces of our employers wedged tightly in the dark.

Tonight Eddie & I were lifting a particularly heavy crate that just wouldn’t budge & I’d only got it a quarter of an inch off the ground when I realized in a panic I wasn’t bending my knees. Fearing for longevity of my spine I lowered the crate & stepped away from it & tho it was too late I bent my knees.

– What are you doing? Eddie asked.

– Let’s have a break, I said & pulled out a book from my back pocket & started to read- a novel I’d bought at one of the stalls next to the Seine: Journey to the End of the Night by Céline.

Didn’t read more than a line- my eye caught dark mass moving toward us, a group of men you’d think were out for a brisk walk if not for guns in their hands.

A shot fired in the air. Our coworkers fled in all directions running up & down the bank of the Seine. It’s funny watching people’s stony indifference disappear when their lives are at stake.

Eddie & I walled in behind a tower of crates. Our only escape route would have been the freezing Seine or the sudden appearance of a golden staircase to the clouds. We ducked down behind crates.

– What have you gotten me into? I asked Eddie eager to assign blame.

Eddie ran forward & untied the ropes mooring us to the bank & pushed with his foot & ran back & joined me behind the crates. The boat slowly drifting.

We listened to the footsteps as they came closer to the boat & we listened to the footsteps as they jumped onto the boat now gliding down the Seine.

– Come out of there, a gruff voice said.

Maybe he’s not talking to us I thought optimistically & was annoyed at Eddie’s automatic compliance. He stood his hands high in the air like he’s done this before.

– You too, the voice said to someone, hopefully not me. Come on, I can see your shadow.

I looked across at my shadow & realized it’s only the head that gives you away. Otherwise crouched down you could be any old sack of potatoes.

I stood hands in air but felt too clichéd so turned palms inward.

Our would-be assailant had a beard that reminded me of an Alaskan husky & was generations past me & it filled me with outrage. I’d always expected to be done in by a young punk- wild & misguided & angry at the world.

He pointed the gun at me. Then he looked up at my hand & tilted his head slightly.

– Journey, he said. I had forgotten I was still holding the book.

– Céline, I said back in a whisper.

– I love that book.

– I’m only halfway through.

– Have you got to the point where-

– Hey, kill me, but don’t tell me the end!

He lowered his gun & said You won’t understand it unless you take it as a whole. It doesn’t work episodically. Who else do you like?

– The Russians.

– Well yeah, the Russians. What about the Americans?

– Hemingway’s OK.

– I like his short stories. Not his novels. You like Henry James?

– Not much. I love his brother though.

– William James! He’s a genius!

– Absolutely.

He put down his gun & said Shit let’s get this boat back.

Eddie & the Alaskan & I started up the boat & drove it back to the riverbank. Saved by a book!

– What’s all this about? I asked him.

– We’re competitors. My boss wants your boss to pack up shop.

– Well, shit, that doesn’t mean you have to go around shooting does it?

– Yeah, it does.

That figures. Most people are killed by their jobs slowly over decades & I had to land one that’s likely to do me in within the week.

Life with Baby

MAJOR problems at home. Astrid sleeps insatiably- her fatigue indefatigable & maybe because of this she treats poor baby as if he’s someone else’s dentures. Her love for me has gone all flabby too. I’m an irritant to her now. Sometimes I find baby on floor, sometimes behind couch, once I came home & he was in the empty bath his head resting on drain.

Other times she takes up her maternal role & lets the baby suck on her nipples her face a big blank. I ask if it hurts & she shakes her head & says Don’t you notice anything, you idiot?

There’s no understanding her.

Just five minutes ago she was on the couch her knees bunched up under her arms. I merely cleared my throat & she let out a scream. What if all relationships are like this behind closed doors?

– It was the only thing I hadn’t done she said. I thought this baby would change something inside me.

– It is a big change.

– I meant deep inside.

– I think you’ve changed.

– I mean right deep down at the bottom of the core of me.

I don’t know what she means. She’s mad. I’m gobsmacked when I think about HER secret minions. What dissent going on in that woman! Total fucking pandemonium! I think she’s suicidal- intestinal wall to intestinal wall crammed tight with treacherous extremists clamoring for the end.

I pick up the baby & comfort him.

I don’t know what to do.

I say to Astrid I’ve heard about this. Postpartum depression.

She laughs loudly at the idea tho it isn’t that funny.

An Extraordinary Day!

As usual went out & dragged anxieties along the boulevards until found a café to sit when anxieties wanted coffee & a cigarette. Paris all around me. A drunk pissing like he was nothing but a bladder in a hat, his ribbon of urine snaking its way through cobblestones. Two policemen paced the boulevard because to march would give off wrong impression.

Walked to the Seine & sat down beside it.

On bench next to me a woman had her legs stretched out catching a rare dose of sun. Nice legs- long & sinewy. She was looking at me while I was looking at her legs. I did a combination shrug & smile & before my brain recognized her, my mouth did.

– Caroline! I cried.

– Marty!

We leapt up at the same time & gazed at each other with deep surprise and joy.

– I went to find you! I shouted.

– Dad died!

– I know! I saw his grave!

– It was awful!

– Everyone I love is dead too!

– I know!

– Everyone! Mum! Dad! Terry! Harry!

– I heard! I rang home when Dad died and my uncle in Sydney told me the news!

– It was awful!

– I’m married! It’s terrible!

– No!

– Yes!

– Well, I’m a father!

– No!

– That’s what I said!

– Marty, let’s run away together!

– I can’t!

– Yes you can!

– I have to fulfill my parental duty!

– Well, I can’t leave my husband either!

– Why not?!

– I still love him!

– So we’re stuck!

– Hopelessly stuck!

– You look good!

– You look beautiful!

We both took a breather & laughed. I had never been so excited. She cupped my face in her hands & kissed me all over.

– What are you going to do? I asked.

– Let’s rent a hotel room & make love.

– Are you sure?

– I’m sorry I ran out on you.

– You were in love with my brother.

– I was young.

– And beautiful.

– Let’s get that room.

A small hotel above a restaurant, we made love all afternoon. I won’t go into specifics except to say I didn’t disgrace myself at all- duration was respectable & thunderstorm raged outside as we left the curtains open & I knew that this would hang hazy in our minds as a half-remembered dream & we would step back afterwards into our lives & when I thought this my heart painfully contracted there in the dark.

– So you’re the father of a French child, she said.

Strangely that thought had never occurred to me before & while I love the French & theoretically am indifferent to my own country, one’s roots hold a strange grip. Suddenly unpleasant my son wouldn’t be Australian. There’s no better country in the world to run away from. Fleeing from France is fine when German tanks are rolling in but in peacetime why would you bother?

We held each other giddily she was thin & so smooth I could’ve skipped her across a lake & she squeezed me in spasms & I kept kissing her as a way to stop her looking at the time as day turned to night. I couldn’t waste this opportunity & I couldn’t bear to hate myself again so I said that I didn’t position myself deliberately in the path of love but it happened and to that end I would leave Astrid and the child so we could be together. She lapsed into a long silence her face barely visible in the dark. Then she spoke softly You cannot leave your son and mother of your child I couldn’t handle the guilt besides I love my husband (a Russian named Ivan of all things). These people were insurmountable obstacles she said then added I love you too, but more as an afterthought hers was an I love you couched in conditions. It was not unconditional love. There were clauses and loopholes. Her love was not binding. I smiled, as if my mouth were compelled by tradition to do so.

I felt a violent mood swing coming on.

She and Ivan were going to visit his family in Russia for a while maybe six months or longer but when we said goodbye we arranged to meet again in exactly one year not on top of the Eiffel Tower but on the side & see if anything’s changed. She said I love you again & I tried to take her at her word & after we said goodbye I walked aimlessly feeling like my heart had swung open briefly then shut before I had a chance to see what was inside. I walked for a couple of hours wanting desperately to cry on someone’s shoulder but when I reached the Seine the sight of Eddie my only friend made me protective of my secret.

– Where have you been? You’re late.

– The boat isn’t here yet, is it?

– No he said absently gazing out upon the silent Seine.

One day I think history will judge me badly or worse accurately.

Night

It’s night now & am watching Astrid sleep & am thinking of van Gogh. When he was fired from an early job he wrote When an apple is ripe a soft breeze will make it fall from a tree.

Love is like that. Love was inside banked up & has poured out at her arbitrarily. I say that because I realize dammit I love her I love her but I don’t like her I love the girl I don’t like. That’s love for you! It goes to show love has little to do with the other person it’s what’s inside you that counts- that’s why men love cars mountains cats their own abdominal muscles that’s why we love sonsofbitches & blood-lesscunts. I don’t like Astrid one bit I love her.

Maybe Caroline’s tacit rejection of me had the same effect on my love for Astrid as the cooling of the universe had in aiding the formation of matter. & who would have guessed the heart is spacious enough to love not one but two people at once? Maybe three? Maybe I can love my son too.

The End!

This is the end!

Everything has changed drastically & permanently. Last big change- life will never be same again.

It started ordinarily enough. Was in Shakespeare & Co. bookshop leafing through secondhand paperbacks when I heard a voice Hey Céline!

A familiar voice, a familiar ugliness. The Alaskan husky striding toward me not slowing down the way people normally do but walking at full speed stopping abruptly an inch from my face.

– I’ve been looking for you. Don’t go to the pier tonight, he said.

– Why not?

– Have you finished Journey yet?

– Not yet, I lied.

– Shit’s going down tonight. I can’t say any more than that.

– Go on.

– OK. We’re going to blow your boat out of the water.

– Why?

– You’re our rivals.

– Not me. I don’t even know what’s in those crates.

– That’s why you shouldn’t show up.

Ran around all afternoon trying to find Eddie & wrote notes & left them for him everywhere at his house at his favorite restaurant with his barber. Notes all identical:

Stay away from work tonight. They’re going to blow up the boat into a trillion pieces.

Even left note at my house on the kitchen table for Astrid telling her to pass on message should she see Eddie. She wasn’t home. Why was I so terror-stricken that Eddie might die? Friendships are an unforeseeable burden.

At 4 went to a movie then passed by Eddie’s place once more on my way home but he wasn’t there & when I came home I opened the door to see him sitting in my kitchen a beer in his hand as though it were just an average day tho I spotted gaps in his tireless optimism. I caught him sighing wearily.

– You just missed Astrid, he said.

– I looked all over for you today. What a business you got me into!

– Back pain again? Anyway, I thought we’d walk together.

– What do you mean? Didn’t Astrid tell you about the note?

– No, she said she was going down to the Seine.

I stood thinking for a few seconds before I got it. I looked at my watch. 7:40.

Left baby w/ Eddie & ran out of house & along wet pavement covered in a frosty sweat. Stumbling, I hurled myself toward the mighty Seine. What is she thinking? Ran palpitating, my feet hitting the wet pavement like little heartbeats. What is she going to do? I ran & suddenly I was not alone: along came the shame of a man who all at once discovers he’s been ungrateful so we ran the three of us- me & shame & ingratitude running together like three shadows of three men who were running just ahead. I know what she’s thinking. Almost out of breath. Are my lungs half empty or half full? Don’t know what to do with my appetites. Astrid loved me greedily & I loved her back in reluctant nibbles. I thought I was as small as I could be but was wrong having once more shrunk in my own eyes. I know what she’s going to do!

Suddenly I could see her just up ahead. A little thing in a black dress she was ducking & weaving in & out of streetlamps’ pools of light a willowy figure slipping into darkness and out again. Of course she’s crazy I know this I know she wants to kill herself in original fashion she’s been looking for. She’s running to do it- that makes sense. No one saunters to her own death. You don’t keep Death waiting like that. You don’t dawdle.

I lose her & then see her again running along bank of the Seine. Streetlamps cover the river in glitters. Boat’s chugging in. Above I see the Alaskan hiding behind a wall. He holds up a grenade w/ one hand and shoos me away w/ the other. Boat docks & our guys tie it up to the pier. Three Arab men come running down pistols blazing & grenades in hands. Astrid jumps on the boat. They yell at her but she ignores them & the killers don’t know what to do. They don’t want to kill a civilian, no extra money in it.

She’s on the boat refusing to move.

One of the men sees me. Takes a shot & I duck down behind the stone wall.

A siren.

The men consult each other in guttural screams. No time to lose. It’s now or never. I look up at Astrid & her face is small & colorless & braced for death. Her whole face contracted like expecting boat’s explosion to be nothing but loud pop.

– Astrid! Get out of there! I scream.

She looks up & smiles at me eloquently conveying the message that the lacerating misery of her life is taking its final bow. There was an adios in that smile, it was no au revoir.

A second later the boat went up in a series of little explosions. Just like Terry’s suggestion box. Astrid in the middle of it, a wholly unique suicide. Pieces of her everywhere. On the bank. In the Seine. She couldn’t be more scattered if she’d been dust.

People gaping, terribly excited to have witnessed my tragedy.

I walked home leaving Astrid in a million little pieces. No one looked at me. I was unlookable. But from every face I asked forgiveness. Every face was a link in a chain of faces, in one face broken up. Regrets came up & asked me if I’d like to own them. Declined them for the most part but took a few just so I wouldn’t leave this relationship empty-handed. NEVER would’ve imagined that the dénouement of our love affair would be Astrid blown up into bits. I mean metaphorically maybe.

Never imagined she would ACTUALLY EXPLODE.

Death is full of surprises.

Under the arch I stop & think The baby! Am now sole caregiver me cursed & unclean w/ soul like forgotten limb on battlefield. Thought for first time maybe I should go back to Australia. Suddenly & for no good reason I missed my sun-beaten countrymen.

Back in the apartment her smell everywhere. I told Eddie to go home then went to the baby in bedroom asleep, unaware that his mother’s head & her arms & her face were all in separate locations.

Just me & this grimacing baby.

He woke up screaming from hunger or existential angst. What am I going to do? It’s not like there are any breasts in the refrigerator. I opened up a carton of milk & poured him a cup & then took the cup back to Jasper & poured a little milk into his mouth thinking I’m a widow of sorts. We weren’t married but a baby is a fleshier contract than a flimsy piece of paper.

Found note taped to the bathroom mirror:

I know you will worry how to be a father. You only have to love him. Don’t try to keep him safe from harm. Love him, that’s all you have to do.

Rather simplistic, I thought folding the note. Now I see it was her plan all along even if she herself didn’t know it. To have this child & then dispose of herself.

Astrid dead. Never really knew her. Wonder if she knew I loved her.

Went upstairs & threw some clothes into a bag & then went back into the room & looked at the baby. That’s what I’m doing now. Looking at this baby. My baby. Poor baby. Jasper. Poor Jasper.

I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry what terrible tomorrows we’ll have together what shabby luck your soul fell into the body of my son my son your father is love’s lonely cripple. I’ll teach you how to decipher all the confused faces by closing your eyes & how to cringe when someone says the words “your generation.” I will teach you how not to demonize your enemies & how to make yourself unappetizing when the hordes turn up to eat you. I’ll teach you how to yell with your mouth closed & how to steal happiness & how the only real joy is singing yourself hoarse & nude girls & how never to eat in an empty restaurant & how not to leave the windows of your heart open when it looks like rain & how everyone has a stump where something necessary was amputated. I’ll teach you how to know what’s missing.

We’ll go.

We’ll go home, to Australia.

amp; I’ll teach you that if ever you’re surprised you’re still alive to check again. You can never be too sure about a thing like that.

That was it. The last entry.

I closed the notebook, sick to my stomach. The story of my birth shattered into rubble in my brain. Each broken piece of debris reflected an image from the journal’s story. So, then- out of loneliness, insanity, and suicide, I was laboriously born. Nothing surprising about that.

The following year, on the morning of my mother’s birthday, Dad came into my bedroom while I was dressing.

“Well, mate, it’s the seventeenth of May again.”

“So?”

“You be ready to go after lunch?”

“I have other plans.”

“It’s your mother’s birthday.”

“I know.”

“You’re not coming to the grave?”

“It’s not a grave. It’s a hole. I don’t mourn holes.”

Dad stood there, and I noticed there was a present in his hand. “I got her something,” he said.

“That’s nice.”

“Don’t you want to unwrap it?”

“I’m late,” I said, leaving him alone in my bedroom with his sad and pointless gift.

Instead I took myself to the harbor to look at the boats. During the year that had passed, I thought against my will of all that was in my father’s journal. No piece of writing before or since has burned so permanently into my memory. Despite the clever tricks in the art of forgetting my mind knows, they have no impact here. I remember every frightening word.

I sat all day, watching the boats. Or else I looked down at the rocks and the slick, shiny coat of oil floating on top of the water. I stayed there a long time. I stayed until the moon rose and a curtain of stars was drawn across the sky and the lights on the harbor bridge shone out of the darkness. All the boats nodded gently in the dark.

My soul is ambitious and mercenary in its desire to know itself. Dad’s journal left this aim unsatisfied, and my mother’s story was more of a mystery than when I knew nothing at all. I had ascertained that my mother was probably insane and of unknown origins. Other than that, my investigation had led only to more questions. About my father, it didn’t surprise me that I had been violently unwanted. The only concrete thing I learned about her was that my birth was the final item on her to-do list, and once she’d checked it off, it allowed her to die. I was born to clear the obstacles on her pathway to death.

It got cold. I shivered a little.

The rhythms of the universe were perceptible in the way the boats were nodding at me.

A few years later I went back to the cemetery. My mother’s grave was gone. There was someone new there, wedged in between old Martha Blackman and little Joshua Wolf. Her name was Frances Pearlman. She’d been forty-seven years old. She left behind two sons, a daughter, and a husband.

Since finding the journal I had read it over several more times.

The most disturbing element in that unpleasant little book was his assertion that I was possibly a premature reincarnation of his still living self, that I was my father: what did it all mean? That somewhere inside him, the man feared my autonomy would be the death of him?

I thought this staring at the grave of Frances Pearlman.

There were fresh flowers spread out over her grave. This was no misshapen love or empty coffin. I thought about my father, and how one of us was the host, the other the parasite, and I did not know who was who. It seemed to me we could not both survive. It seemed to me that one day, inevitably, one of us had to go. It seemed to me we were going to fight each other for supremacy of the soul. It seemed to me I’d be willing to kill him to survive.

They were creepy thoughts, but I was in a cemetery, after all.