Band Performance Section of "Hypocorism" (ROUND 1)
scent of the day: Oudh Infini, by Dusita
Oudh Infini (2016, Pissara Umavijani)—a skanky-floral throwback fragrance that, wrapping a classic French skeleton in ladyboy silk, is made not for polite company but for those who like their indole-rich florals (a major contributor, especially the orange blossom, all on their own to the notorious animalics here) scraped across crotch-cricket haunch fur as if it were Charmin from a roll that had sat in a cabinet a next to cinnamon-scented aromatic wax cubes—
gives us two punch-honey florals in petal-to-stem holism (dewy-peppery May rose, waxy-perineal orange blossom) lifted into an operatic cloud of vintage animalism (sundried-urine civet, ass-cheek sweat musk) and then twisted from the European boudoirs of romance novels to the Southeast Asian super-gonorrhea holes (a nightmare of sex-tourist consequences) by means of a Laotian oud that, so deep and steady it can easily be overlooked, here comes off as more metallic-mineralic and varnish-lacquer variety (even with some shitty-hay like vibes typical of Assam oud) than the scorched-bandaid and burnt-clutch variety of Laotian oud we get in Tauer’s L’Oudh,
this musky-sour ferality ramped up rather than toned down in queasiness (tonally whiplashed to the border of vomit tones, in fact) in virtue of being set upon a creamy-nutty sandalwood (the sandalwood-rose-oud combo actually reading like one of those minimalistic Indian attars like Yaaseen’s Blaze) smeared with less a gourmand sweetness than violin varnish or staircase shellac (plasticized-doll vanilla and caramelic-glue benzoin with some Christmas spice sprinkled in)—
the overall result being an animalic floral fragrance whose spotlighted rose seems of the highest quality (green, honeyed, dewy) and whose co-star civet seems young like I like (sour, musky, pissy) and whose laotian oud does also (an unaged cheese rambunctiousness that, providing an omnipresent bass-thrum like a colt or a perhaps better a pissy Filly who will not stop kicking inside a locked barn, works perfectly with the over-green may rose), the vintage-style tartness of the whole (an old-age-home sourness, a rose-civet-synergizing acidity, here more feminine and perhaps onlu more poopy than pissy because of the oud) persisting throughout the life of the fragrance even as it shifts from bright citrus (think: civet paste freshly rubbed by civet cat to mark territory on a tree) and then to lychee-like potting soil tartness (think: civet paste now covered in earthworm dirt);
the overall result being, in other words, a fecal-sour rose fragrance that, perhaps not only due to the civet and oud but to unstated skunk oil and hyrax, vacillates between whole roses (green-sour tilted roses) muddled in a diabetic urine (ketotic urine browned with a dollop of poop) and something more like rose growing through grassy cowpat, its putrid zoo tartness and pissy-poopy snarl never contravening its femininity but rather presenting us with a non-Disney primordial version of femininity (which involves perineal tears, terrible in their jaggedness, and inadvertent poop, both logs and spray, while infants and placentas get squatted out upon the earth);
the overall result being, to put it in a more comparative way, an animalic-floral perfume that (1) takes the central phenolic feature of Triad (a white-grape May rose that, because of the combo of vanilla-varnish benzoin and fertilizer-chip Laotian oud, feels as if wet with the 87-unleaded rain of a Mad Max post-apocalypse) and then (2) throws in the central fecal feature of Murasakino (a wildly urinous-sharp dirty civet, not the aged-sweet-round civet of Civet de Nuit, bent in a radically bright manure direction by not just oud but indolic white florals) to give me something more brutal than Beauty and the Beast and something, although not as rich in animalics and although lacking the soap-meets-raunch classicism, even skankier than J-Musk: an impression of May rose, a whole gasoline-dewy bush of them, flourishing like a pig-in-shit butterfly despite growing from concentrations of fresh dung that would normally, I guess before the weird evolutionary pressures of this Mad Max world, burn through roots with its high levels of ammonia.
*Let's workshop this portion of the story "Hypocorism" where an intellectual grapples with the tension between his abstract philosophical defenses and the unflattened reality of the girl who loves him.
Band Performance Section of “Hypocorism”
She had a band performance the next day. He had not planned to go. She told him it was more like an open rehearsal. Out of habit—but not entirely, since it was still before the time he would usually pick her up anyway—he drove to their spot: up the cemetery hill among headstones too eaten by rain and earth to expect visitors.
He parked under their tree and smiled to himself in mimicry of her own smile on the afternoon he had taught her how to drive, when she worked up the courage—after ten minutes of circling at a crawl—to give the car some gas. “There you fuckin go girl!” He spoke aloud in reminiscence. “Now we’re talkin.” Being in his head, maladaptive as it had become, was not all bad.
The idea struck him that they should carve their names in the tree. “You a corny mahfucker, bro.” He said it out loud, not teasing out the possibility that doing so might have been even cornier. But he loved it up here. They both did. The meditative quiet of this place, the canopy shading them in a trembling dapple that surfaced thoughts with clarified grace, stroked their connection into a sobering articulacy he had not known even with day-one friends—friends with whom sustained depth of conversation, before life got buttoned up by adulthood, had come closest to enactment when they were all too colored by drugs, thoughts of getting more always intruding, to navigate what they wanted to express.
Beyond their tree were many more like it. He wanted to roam around with her in the woods, climbing them or at least helping her climb them—no drugs, only that pubescent convergence of wonder and independence that Stephen King (no doubt with tastes like him too) had been so good at capturing. He wanted to hunt for treasure with her, antlers and jawbones—maybe even a hidden spring to swim in like the free range days before the screens followed us. His joints ached in ways that adults always used to talk about. But it stopped hurting with her at his side.
The previous night had worn him out. He stepped out of the car and opened his chest in a yawning stretch. A groundskeeper putzed about in his utility cart with distant squeaks and creaks, circling the areas paved for more relevant graves. Younger men, way down by the entrance, were backing mowers out of the gatehouse turned maintenance shed—its little chimney, piercing a pitched roof of slate tiles, making it easy to imagine a steward and his family living here in a different era. Free rent, isolation—he would have been one for such a job.
He placed his hands on the ground and brought his body into an inverted-v, holding the pike position while he shifted his heft between both legs to stretch his calves. The hula dance of light and shadow on the ground, a liquid-gold shimmer like when sunlight hits the sandy bottom of a Caribbean shoal, made the area seem like it was breathing—purring—in sleep. A thrush, pecking in the leaf litter for beetle calories, hopped in a jazz of broken silence: hop hop, hop hop hop—hop. He liked to imagine, even though it was earlier than usual, that this was the same loner he had taken to calling “Wolf” but whom she called “Wolfie” despite his insistence against the diminutive—an insistence that brought him back to correcting his mom for calling his action figures, his Hulk Hogan and Ultimate Warrior thumb wrestlers, “dolls” instead of “men.”
Noting the big loop of her driving practice with that squint of eye usually reserved for fond memories that go back decades more than just the other day, he ambled over to the closest tombstone: a bassinet. That bassinet loomed before them every day, windshield wipers grooving or not. A man whose commitment to routine has disrupted interpersonal relationships to a degree that would have Aristotle shaking his head with a sigh (needing to pause the movie with his former wife, say, in order to carry out, lest he feel like a failure, the oral-care routine that had ballooned, one micro addition at a time, into a half-hour stretch at this point involving not just water-flossing but also saline nasal irrigation), he parked in the same orientation each time. She had even said something to him about his tight grouping of parks, as if some supernatural proprioception keyed him in to coordinates (trampled turf, tufts of clover) no one else saw, but in her joking way.
“You know you off by almost an inch?”
“Huh?”
“Like an inch to the left—.”
“The fuck you talking, girl?”
“You gotta get it the same way, right—the car?”
“Okay. Hardy har har.”
“And nah look at the root. You too far forward too. Let’s just leave and come back.”
“Fuck you.”
“Dead.”
He had watched her go up to the bassinet once after coming back from a pee, and then another time after going to speak in baby tones to Wolfie. He could see up close, this his first time (a way to try to convene with her in her absence), that inside it had tasseled pillows and a draped blanket. Laid out was a little christening gown, its lace detail softening into a flatscape at a rate too slow for human notice in process outside of a centurial time elapse compressed into a short video. Gray lichen, almost black in spots perhaps with the help of soot, had spread across the tassels like tiny archipelagos. Moss, a plush emerald illuminated in the wet, pooled in the deepest creases. Parallel grooves that looked more like driftwood grain than an actual name, he thought of her comment: “a bitch’s name aint even safe.” Feeling the impact of her words, he cribbed her poem seed in an email to himself (not trusting that the note app she recommended would save his stuff): “even your chiseled name dies.”
Surrounding headstones around told a similar story. Marble lambs sleeping with their legs tucked under them, carvings of winged infant heads. Pitted and cracked, sunken and softened, bleached and powdery, streaked with orange and green and black—it was as if, in alluring twistedness strangely similar to when girls on social media brag about having daddy issues, they flaunted their very disintegration. The putti faces were so rounded off that they looked melted.
He took a picture and a few notes, the start perhaps of an ekphrastic piece. “Headstone cherubs, even the Michael psychopomp whose feet they encircle, all with faces like the aroma of civet paste after time has taken its toll: sharp urine and pungent halitosis, once angular and glinting like an Ethiopian cage shaken to terrify the cat into secretive production, now mellowed to what could be mistaken for unfiltered honey.” He opted, in his worry about cliché, for this arcane synesthetic comparison instead of the one that struck his mind first, which was to describe the faces as worn down to such roundness as to be as doubtfully a real face as the famous “Face on Mars”: perhaps no more than wishful projection of creatures groomed to find pattern with such life-and-death tenacity that rampant false positives, from a sudden gust mistaken for a leopard in the tall grass to griddle burns mistaken for Jesus in a corn tortilla, that only autistic robots among men, totally insensitive to our evolutionary roots, would default to assuming lies and malice from these believers.
The spot had been her idea. Friends she knew—“school chums,” he liked to tease—would smoke blunts up here. Walking among the dead, enough humans congregated for a small city—the undertow of the abyss had to contort the high. He thought the same thing every time he pictured young people up here getting high, especially on the sticky potency that has today become the bud norm. The toppled tablets whose dates you could no longer make out, stone footings the only thing remaining of God’s home here—these, especially coupled with spring frenzy to breed new death, were intense enough without all the children’s plots.
He pursed his lips in a slow exhale. Whispers of our having been throwing into a dwarfing vastness, an all-encompassing immensity that itself—no matter how you cut it, whether unmoored or self-moored (the only two options since extrinsic-mooring applies only for what falls short of all-encompassing)—seems tinged with an unsettling bruteness that extends beyond the behavioral sense of the term (roaches cannibalizing one another, rogue black holes gobbling planets) and right into the metaphysical (explanatory stopping points, ultimate bottoms)—those whispers, even if too distant to tickle the ear, would work upon even the most immature kid absorbed in his own little world of collecting Jordans (or even, to take a more contemporary example, his own little lobotomized world of the infinite-jest screen).
The undertow of the abyss did not need to be named to be felt. But she could name it. That made all the difference. No doubt the Gothic atmosphere catalyzed the righteousness with which she insisted upon the relevance of the first-person perspective in their debate, a perspective that—never coming up in his academic papers and, especially after the my-truth reign of terror, dismissed in the classroom as irrelevant to facts of the matter—he had let atrophy so much that it caught him by surprise. “I have one life!” he could hear her from the other night. “That’s it: one fuckin life!” The clock of obliteration not just ticking without pause but skipping the line like childhood leukemia, her declaration in this context meant it was dumb—“some weak-ass, backwards-ass, shit,” she would say—to let parochial hangups interfere with a connection such as theirs. He understood what she meant. He was not dumb. But feeling it in the quiet—“that shit,” he could hear her say, “hit different.”
His knees cracked as he squatted to inspect the rosebud engraving on another headstone. Its outer petals had begun to loosen and curl back: timid suggestions of a fullness to come. The stem was snapped, right below the head, as if throttled by some furious tenderness, some intimate caress, that forgot its own strength. He closed his eyes. Part of him had that empty-fridge hope to find a change when he opened them. He fingered the full length. The weathering of rain and frost, the green in what little grooves remained, made the flower feel—and smell, he put his nose up close (not the inky romance he expected but fungal decay)—much older than the person behind it, both proven by the overkill of causality to be anything but the center of the universe.
He thought of the parents. “How do we fucking stand this?” he whispered. He did not know what he meant exactly. But the vagueness seemed appropriate to the immensity. Her smile rose in his vision like an answer. Would it have been better never to have been born and not be whipped around by loss for who knows why? Her laugh, that feminine giggle at the end of her breath, tickled his ears like an answer. Their connection alone vindicated existence as worth affirming. A living breathing connection was best chance of soothing the existential ache. That is what she taught him.
Many connections, not just theirs, were powerful enough to redeem reality—a connection to a cat or a cause, even a perfume. Many connections, in fact, would be powerful enough to redeem existence even in the face of surefire knowledge of its absurdity. And, really, we do have such knowledge—at least in a first-person sense. The overarching absurdity—we would feel that, register it deep inside, even in the best case: where everything finds its buckstopping source (synchronically in terms of ontological dependence if not diachronically in terms of temporal dependence) in that which itself has existence baked into its very essence and so (self-caused rather than uncaused) exists by necessity (that is, due to the sufficiency of its own resources alone) as opposed to randomly (that is, due to nothing). Even knowing that the best case were the case, that would still not settle us.
There is a wedge here between logical closure and existential satisfaction. That is the point. The big why—despite bottoming out in ultimate bedrock in this best case, despite being anchored in foundation that is brute in the virtuous sense of being self-explained as opposed to in the vicious sense of being ad hoc—is still too unsatisfactory, too full of the air of “because I said so,” to quell the nausea that Camus and Sartre had in mind: that which even the most upbeat ontological account, airtight in its logic and stamped with divine QED, could never assuage; that which drops away, in eerie similarity to the molested child who only finds relief in molesting others, only when the focus of our action takes us closer to the present in mimicry, in effect, of a divine action so jazzlike that it created the very blueprints (all possibilia) humans (sometimes even philosophers) like to say, blaspheming the very nature of the divine, God consulted beforehand.
Thinking of the wedge, he could not help but think of her. She had been hammering a similar wedge, a contagious wedge, ever since they met. cerning age-gap romance. She has borne witness to him plugging every argumentative leak with sound logical argument as to why a romance with an age gap like theirs was morally suspect. It had been weeks of this. And it culminated in bald glory last night. But even though she agrees with all he has to say, he still does not win. In his acadmic circles, in journals and conferecnes, it would mean he won. But not here. She still she remains unsatisfied. She remains unsatisfied not just because she can be a brat. Her very conscience tells her that something has been left behind.
She sees that wedge—that is why. A young pupil but one who would look at the moon instead of Bruce Lee’s pointing finger, she knows there is more than just the paper on which his charts and diagrams made everything airtight. Had she been in one of his Intro to Philosophy classes she might have made the analogy to how materialist explanations for what it is for S to be in pain (certain brain fibers of S firing, or S pumping out a certain output when encountering a certain input, or so on) all seem to leave out, all fail to capture, one key phenomenological element of S’s feeling pain: the first-person feel of it—the qualia, the what-it-is-like (from the inside) to feel pain. The same goes when it comes to the metaphysical issue. Even if every why-leak is plugged by means of an ultimate arche (an ultimate origin and explanation for everything, a supreme radix that—as the sufficient explanation for its own existence too—always already obtains), that final bedrock still feels arbitrary from the lived inside. For that Whitman part of us sitting in front of the astronomer’s chalkboard, it carries the hollow ring of a cosmic “because I said so.”
Connection on paper would not steam a mirror put up right under it. Their connection, however, breathed so hard it panted. Bracket off the optics of the age gap. That panting would still draw eyes. And more than that, it would soothe eyes. That was what was special about their connection. Beyond the life-affirming impact it had on them, their connection could bring a sense of metaphysical security even to others (if only those others would be able to let down their guard enough to see the eidos beneath the hangup filter—something he knew, as a guard-keeper himself, was easier said than done). She said as much in her own way.
“I swear. Niggas would be celebrating what we got. That’s what really piss me off. Like they would literally feel good (yes, even the haters) if they took the really see. You feel me?”
“We’re contagious. It’s like when you see people laughing. You start laughing too.”
“I’m not just saying that, though.”
“I know. I know its deeper.”
“Yes.”
“What we have could give people hope as to what is possible. Like maybe one day they can transcend isolation or find true love even in all this hookup culture.”
“Yeah, but not just that either. Because it’s not just about them themselves. Feel me?”
“I get it. What we represent has the capacity to restore their faith that true love is out there, regardless if it applies—.”
“Again, yes. But again no. Cuz it aint just love. It’s bigger.”
“Okay. Shoot my ass down.”
“It’s more like—. Tch. I don’t know. It’s like when my grandma used to watch the Olympics on TV. She aint never ice skate. She aint give a shit about it. But you could see like a glow. Bitch like in constant pain, suffering and shit—her neck, her hip. But sitting there she had that glow. Feel me? That’s what we bringing. That’s that energy.”
A stone angel loomed over him. He did not know which one it was. Its face looked down at him, terror and beauty in one—a magnetic tension that made Billy Idol so unsettling to him as a child: hypermasculine ferocity (unapproachable, imposing, structurally hostile) and yet an edge of stylized femininity (delicate face, high cheekbones, full lips almost in an alluring pout).
She called herself his angel. That was obvious hyperbole. Angels—static anchors immune to change, not needing anyone to teach them how to drive—cannot participate in the mutual growth and vulnerability on which romance relies, the dynamic exchange where the shaping influence flows in both directions. Catalyst for change (pressing him to make a definitive choice instead of letting life passively happen to him), unsparing mirror (showing him what he has been too scared and blind to see)—in the more looser sense of the term, however, she was definitely his angel.
It had been decades of ignoring the wedge before she came into his life. He had turned away early on from the philosophical traditions that focused on the personal beyond logic—the raw place of prethematic, pretheorized, first-person immediacy where it was okay, where it was relevant, to yell “I have one life!” Perhaps it was to keep the chaos out, which would makes sense given that teaching logic gave him this unplaceable sense that all was right with the world—that it was not tethered to a black hole. Perhaps it was also not to be looked at as a flake in a world that judges philosophers, all philosophers, as flakes—a way to redirect what the world threw at him onto others: those who specialized in Merleau-Ponty or Heidegger and would have ready-to-hand the word “othering” to describe just that scoffing aikido. It had only gotten worse in the rise of the my-truth era, where the phrase my-truth became a debate-ending way to resist objective reality. Especially since those who got him terminated from his professorship were such types (insisting in particular that their beign offended by his writings was their truth and thereby true, and grounds—in order to keep people safe—for his removal), he had become radicalized into a mocker of anyone who used the phrase “lived experience.” But she came in and forced him to see the baby he had thrown out with the bathwater. She encouraged him to have the emotional maturity to be a child again and see the wonders beyond the abstractions of logic—something he had been groping for by turning to the civets and muskrats, the skunk tinctures and deer musks, of artisinal perfumery.
He walked back to the bassinet. The baby booties said it all. Adult and child were equalized here. How could that not increase her society-be-damned entitlement? If, to put the point in a more removed way, some disinterested but empathetic intelligence on the outside (not blinded by tribal anger or personal axes to grind), some extraterrestrial fly on the exosphere, knew all their details and then considered this cemetery imagery of oneness across the age-gap, it was easy to imagine what it would say to its own heart—yes, even before being worn out by how we slaughter each other over invisible gods, or how we are so apish in our inconsistency (finding rape-rack anal electrojac stimulation of the sentient creatures we eventually kill and eat permissible but a handjob to relieve our suffering dog abominable). “Give the damned girl what she wants already!”
His stomach sank at the idea of this setting as catalyst. That did not sit well with him. It seemed all-too-convenient for him. Of course, he could not shield her from everything. He knew that. Just the stars in the night sky alone have this finitude-reminding effect, pointing to potential pointlessness scary enough just by being potential. It would be absurd to have her cover her eyes to them. Would not the same go here with the cemetery?
He shook his head, refusing to be let off the hook. Logic, science, statistics—his sun side was undeniable. But it was more like the faith of the born-again is undeniable. It smelled compensatory. He was raised by a woman. He was neurotic like a woman—a necessity when it comes to prioritizing the wellbeing of the young. No matter the number of cellar locks, there was a moon side too. To attend to the wedge, and allow its implications to ripple out, meant being unable to ignore that side and realizing, moreover, that the very insistence on the third-party rule had been an expression of that side: the side that has the mama bear’s chest tighten, no matter the giggling stretch of drool, as the father throws the infant up and down; the side that Nietzsche spoke from when he worried that those thinkers who place the search for truth over even care for psychological-emotional-spiritual hygiene, who would endanger the atmosphere of delusion (which all creatures need) just for the sake of learning what might even poison them or a whole people into suicidal depression.
He loved being here. And this place now had sentimental value. But doing his best to make sure she kept her head about her was more important. That was his duty: to stand at the door and bare his teeth to make sure she stayed safe. His very namesake was in opposition to evil: that which seeks to destroy wholeness. He could not protect her from every discomfort, of course. And he knew it would not be good for her if he did. But some discomfort, even the sort of discomfort necessary for growth, could be too much: more reps with a bicep curl was good to a point after which it became destructive. Even worse (and pertinent here), some discomfort could make one vulnerable to exploitation: experience living with little resources builds genuine grit but, after a point, tolerance for discomfort might become so normalized that one refused to demand fairness.
He knew these things. He taught these things. He tried to honor these things. He often fell short, the Aristotle on his shoulder shaking his head. But he kept trying, the Aristotle on his shoulder nodding as if that mattered most. They were already drunk in their love. The bassinet, he worried, was overkill. She was still a kid.
He walked back to the car. The gravel crunched the way it would under his father’s steel-toe work boots. He had tried hard back then to get that crunch, envious of the power it suggested. But he was too light even for cheating twists to make a difference. Now his father was down the hill encased in concrete, a requirement of new casket burials here.
“We’re not coming here anymore,” he said out loud as he closed the door. He could hear her laugh at him. It was like she was right there. “Tch. You like a whole headcase. A nigga need to learn to relax.” Fantasy-her had access to his mind too, just as real-her did. “Besides, the damage already done.” She was right. “I’m right but I’m not right too. Cuz you aint doing no damage. If it damage, the shit done. How you gon kill a bitch twice. Dead. I’m just playin. But for real, you think I aint seeing niggas get shot everyday on the Gram. What about Jada? We been done lost whatever fantasy world you talkin bout. You ever see a life-in-weeks chart—the black squares the one you lived, the white the ones you got left. My teacher gave us that shit. I’m 16% filled in. A nigga aint even wanna know his shit.”
How could he not be moved by such a smarty-pants? But still it was his duty, preserving both truth and wholeness, to find the balance in any situation, to make the compensatory adjustments. “I want you to hear me out, though.” Fantasy-her turned to him like a good girl, moved by an authority in his tone rare outside when they were at their dirtiest. “Like I say with poetry, or with anything (chess, tennis), constraints don’t just block. Constraints are keys. Even walls are openings. For finite creatures like us, dependent creatures like us who need the spur in order to see, they definitely are. That is how I look at the shit.”
His tone could not hang in for long. But fantasy-her—like real-her—respected him for the nuance, the empathy, it reflected. He looked over. She continued watching him. “I mean, of course, if we didn’t have time—. And I know you’re thinkin ‘Tomorrow’s not promised’ but—. I don’t know. We would be together every moment. I do know that. We would go away. But look at us now. We’re loving each other in ways that many couples never do—spiritual ways. It’s really old-school—like courting in the true sense. You know what I mean? And see that’s the thing. You got the one-life thing, fine. Okay. That’s a point all my logic shit can’t touch. But I got my trump card too. I need to protect you. And the constraints, the limits I put up, have opened up new possibilities. I’m thankful for that. I want to have gratitude. I believe there’s gratitude to be found in everything, just like there is humor—even in the darkest pit of the holocaust. You think, to put it metaphorically—you think there’s some place God’s light doesn’t reach? And I know you’re thinking I’m being evasive. But you know how my mind works. I’m just saying—we’re already together is my point.”
Then came her turn. He could not stop her even if he wanted. The fantasy form had its own life like a song looping in your head. “Nigga you acting like if we was fuckin we wouldn’t be talking all this deep shit. Cuz I am gettin what you saying and I see the love in it. And I agree with where you got to but—. Tch. Not gonna lie, how you got there—that shit kinda outta pocket if I’m being honest. Cuz first of all you acting like you God and just opened some shit up some special shit cuz you said ‘no’ bout some random-ass shit, put up some random-ass ‘wall.’ And second you acting like we wouldn’t vibe like this no matter what. That shit offensive. And that shit untrue. You act like we’d be fuckin every second. Please. We’d be doing this shit.”
Tears welled in his eyes. Fantasy-her watched him swallow them back. “Get out your head! I know you mean well. But you gotta see reality. It aint just them woke niggas who out of touch. Just like the real world different than the one on the Gram where every white person hates black people, the real world different from the categories. Listen to your own shit you tell me. The territory aint the map. That’s what you say right? Maps blur the shit—every hospital, no matter have different they are, the same red cross. Feel me? I’m real in the territory. I’m not just a kid. I’m this kid.”
A ringing wave of tinnitus shut his stupor mouth. The weight of everything, up so late replaying their big have-at-it, had him exhausted. “It’s my life!” Her yell looped in his ears. He unlocked his phone and clicked on the Gmail app. “There are values,” he wrote, “that cannot be fully represented inside third-person ethical bookkeeping.” The yell continued to loop. Writing failed here. The scaffold did not stop him from looking down.
He closed his eyes. His hand played with her mini ear in the vision. Kindergarten edges wild and free, her hair was twisted into locks. A few had flamingo yarn woven in for a haphazard ghetto-hippie effect. All of them had at least one plastic bead of intergalactic multichrome at the end: some more in the electric range of magenta and fuchsia; others more in the abyssal range of plum and indigo. Yellow-purple hair clips, one on each side of her head just above her downy eyebrows, reinforced a middle part. Her black eyes—a duality of vulnerability and determination emphasized by a sharp stroke of winged eyeliner—searched with the movement of higher intelligence and spoke with a vocabulary as granular as an Inuit’s when it came to snow. Under them a wide nasal bridge slid humpless to a rounded tip, flared nostrils—expressive themselves almost in the uncanny way of expressive ears (he thought of Sloth from the Goonies)—adding a context of roughhouse-ready snarl to lips as fat and two-toned as the rest: matte eggplant at the top, medium rare loin at the bottom—the temperature clash (deep and cool, juicy and warm) fitting her like a good smack. Hyperpigmented peaks at the top, the culmination of the prominent ridges from the bottom of her nose, were as sharp as the funerary carvings must have been—a dramatic contrast to her cheeks, which still had enough softness of contour and Oshkosh-b’gosh give for him to call her “Dumplin.”
The sun was nearing the horizon when he woke up. He looked over expecting her to be there. They had fallen asleep here together before. Many times he pretended he was asleep just to watch how she looked when everything in her face relaxed, only he could not keep it up for long before playing with her little ear—pulling it, stretching open the hole on the lobe.
He opened up his phone to look at her profile picture. Ever since her trip to D.C. he kept tabs on her Twitter, another one of his secrets. He gave her face a little kiss and then did the automatic scroll down out of habit to see if there was any new tweet. There never were any new tweets. Almost a year of silence had followed a spat of glizzy memes. So at first he did not believe his eyes when he saw not a repost but her very own words. “A grown-ass man will turn intimacy into a statistic so he don’t have to feel the weight of it. It’s not ‘anybody.’ It’s us.”
“A grown-ass man”—he repeated it above the frenzy of rocks tinking and clinking the underbelly of the car. He found no way to disqualify it as being about anyone but him. At the front gate, before pulling out into the street, he read it again. “Intimacy into a statistic? Huh?” Adding in a squinty-eyed “What?” of disbelief did not make his puzzlement believable. He knew exactly what she meant. She had called him out from outside of their bubble. Seeing her seemed like the only way to make the spinning stop. So he drove to her school.
He looped around, Baltimore to the side streets, looking for a place to park. He could make the performance. But he did not know whether he would go in or just wait outside imagining it all in hope that he might even see her come out. He reclined the seat as soon as he parked only to open the door and get out, not knowing the best entrance or the protocol or if he even needed some sort of pass. He followed a kid carrying a big case for something like a tuba. When the kid sat down on a bench he asked where the performance was and the kid directed him.
The door was lighter than he imagined. The entered with a bang. A teacher was on the stage talking to the audience. Instead of the customary theater dim, the fluorescent tubes buzzed at the same merciless wattage of lunch hour. He made his way, doing little nodding smiles of guilt, to the back of the auditorium. In other circumstances, one similar to what he had been in countless times with his own child, he would have sat with everyone else at the hexagonal tables where the students ate. But even without the head turns of parents who he could not help but think somehow saw the truth (or maybe even saw a picture of him somehow shared with their children), he knew that he had burst into the space with a self-conscious energy and that lost look of wildness. He did not want her to see him anyway. He did not want to throw her off.
Breaker-bar doors to the outside, he slid a few feet away from them in his lean against the wall. Not wanting to set off an alarm, still to this day avoided any door with a fire-exist sign above it. As if he meant to trick himself as to his true motivation, he slid over a bit more with the neck-craning theater of searching for the best angle.
The music began, everything still washed in clinical glare. The smell of tatter tots and floor wax wrestled his attention from the bad notes and the off drums. From where he stood, right beside the breaker-bar door, the music came to him in mushed echoes and metallic in tint. The childish cacophony of it all—the same reason it was cute to parents made him feel like a creep.
Then she rose from her chair. He moved forward a few steps. Her lips wrapped around the mouthpiece. His chest tightened, pitched forward. She looked so small under the lights. But her posture took on a fierce gravity. From her big horn bloomed deja vu. It was as if she were screaming again what had no place, for all its argumentative oomph, in an ethics article—screaming, shrieking, her existential challenge to abstract reasoning, to impersonal logic that could capture a lived bond no more than physics could God. “It’s my life!”
“It’s my life!” Jarring staccato like a machete hacking, broken phrases like a throat cracking—the interiority behind the words reposed like a beer bottle gleaming in a forest clearing. The self-centered part of him he had not yet managed to shake since single digits, that would have wanted to reduce her message what made him her center: “Our specific reality cannot be flattened into a category without lying about what we actually share.” But her solo had too much presence for that reading stand. She was her own person. This was a rage against all flattening.
A hot prickling hit the back of his throat. He tried nuzzling into the greasy-plastic aroma the way some lovers think of baseball. He swallowed and swallowed again. But the pride had him dizzy. She was so good.
The archaic torso of Apollo unfrozen into music—her passion alone, her expressing it for us all, shouted a message that had nothing to do with his projection. “You must change your life.” But he also had access to the details that applied to him, the details that she would have had no problem later saying she intended even if her play had been no more than an unthinking flow state. “Have the courage to be who you are.” He could hear her own voice. “You get all upset that niggas hate your work. Like what do you expect? You say fucked up shit and then get mad they upset?! You asking too much. Stand on your shit. Own it. You got one life too. I’m proud of you.”
A single tear broke the seal. With the tears came the boogers. He wiped his nose into the inside of his shirt. He looked over to the janitor, his lone companion in the dark outskirts below a retracted basketball hoop. He handed him a paper towel from the brown roll on his cart and said “They grow up fast.” Wiping his eyes and blowing his nose, he heard his voice crack out a “Yeah.”
Against his tendency to wait and see if she would talk to any boys after the show, he nodded “Bye” to the janitor. He knew he would keep this visit to himself until the right time. It would be, he figured, a matter of years. His little secret, he pictured a wedding-vow reveal—something teary.
She had him chronically aroused in a way he had not remembered since he was a child, when self-play—anywhere he could, the risk of being caught part of the excitement—had his penis flared and itching like lawnmower hands and snowtube thighs. But he did not masturbate when he got home. He made his dinner, a sandwich of deli meat starting to slime, and stood in front of the fridge meditating upon the card she had made him as if it were a candle flame.
He had poked fun at her when she gave it to him. “This the most kid shit I’ve ever seen you do.” He took on the singsong tone of a nursing home that puts resident dignity last. “Is this squiggle supposed to be me?” The swirls and dots looked like the work of a manic toddler. He pictured the blunted tip of an extra-fat crayon jutting from the pinky side of a balled fist, harsh lines flying beyond the edge of the craft paper and onto the desk—the action all shoulder and bicep, the strength brute enough to nullify the fine-motor countermeasures rooted even in the most finicky of tripod grips. She insisted it was the point to make it look like that. “Okay. So like primitivism. Nice,” he said. Not knowing did not intimidate her away from deeper knowing. “That’s why I did the letters like that.”
Like one of those cards half-made—three-quarters made—by the pre-K teacher, the S’s and P’s were indeed backwards. “Where’s the macaroni, girl?” But the message, centered in a lopsided box, was all her: cocky, perceptive, impatient.
Hurry kills Presence
Worry kills Peace
Doubt kills Faith
Ego kills Love
Fear kills Spark
Duty kills Intimacy
He had his comebacks. But in honor off the card’s message, and knowing that she already knew them, he stayed quiet, letting her watchful smile and searching eyes stay pure. Inside the card was more tornado swirls around another box that said: “Read it the other way too.” Something he had not noticed on the day she gave it to him, an oversight she did nothing to correct (a feat of which he would have been incapable), was the message on the back: “I kill the noise.”
“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right)
