by Miles Klee
“Senseless?” I laugh. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
O, double dear.
*
Azura always orders what the fattest man in the restaurant is having. Often with archaic zest. Watch her struggle to not say Je voudrais. Adore it when she fails. Thrill at the articles studding her syntax: “It is easy as a pie,” she’ll insist when begging a favor. By now she’s wise to the hiccup and executes it with flourish.
“I love you so much I could cut a off homeless man’s nose and catch the rainbows streaming out,” she whispers as I unmoor myself for sleep.
“Let’s call that a mistranslation.”
We are exhausted from the day, a visiting artist’s new exhibit: “Justice/Mutilation and the Reversed Con,” photo galleries of unknowing dark faces with ghoulish epithets written under skin, liminal smirks of thieves whose ruses have gone all 8-figured. They are African sources of fraudulent e-mails, phony princes and supposed heirs, here made to believe someone has fallen prey to the scam. Only, trust must be established. Our artist teases with the promise of bank-account codes. The signs of good faith are obscene facial tattoos, in baffling, vile English idiom. Strange but irresistible trade. They uphold their end, photograph themselves after hours and days spent under a needle. Of course the numbers never come, but the faces we see are fully expectant, sadness unassembled, inked hate glancing off cheeks and through the gritty lens of a cell phone camera.
“I don’t see where material trickery can dovetail so with physical cruelty.”
“Live to breach faith; your faith is breached. What could be simpler than Hammurabi?”
“Don’t deserve that. And the circuit is false—artist gives up nothing. Can’t show her subjects in the days of gathering comprehension. The reversals go unrecognized.”
“Naturally,” Azura says, “the prelude is all that counts.”
She runs fingers through my hair and bites an earlobe.
“If I can’t have you, no one can.”
“You have me, Azura.”
In spite of everything, she does.
*
Detective York smiles, knows I cannot escape, splay of a reproduction of Pollock’s Cathedral dancing fractally beyond smug teeth. And just as I sense the first flex of thigh, divided between fight and flight, my office door flings open, its knob barely missing the detective’s gut. Laura, my dourly dressed editor, steps in, clutching a paper that has clearly inspired anxiety.
“This is your blurb for Reynolds’s new Kant translation?”
“Really can’t tell when you crumple it like that. Don’t quote.”
“Uh, ma’am …” the burly detective says.
“ ‘Reynolds has untangled the putrid knot of Kant’s phrasing and therefore renders unto us a document of masterful inaccuracy.’ Really?”
“Some knots should stay tied, Laura.”
“I’m sorry, miss,” Detective York says, “but we were just—”
“Readability? Is that a crime?” Laura interrupts in a monotone shout, putting a hand over the appalled detective’s mouth.
“Readability a crime,” I laugh. “It’s not even a word outside of focus groups!”
“You’re going to have to excuse us,” Laura says, pushing York’s reddened, disbelieving face—and by extension York himself—into the hallway. I rush over and lock the door just as he realizes I’m going to. A kick comes, splintering the wood. He kicks again.
“How’d you get on this guy’s good side?” my editor asks over continued battering.
“Laura, I would love to discuss the fusillade of Kant’s grammatical gaffes and their bearing on the Critique’s success, but I, ah, how many police vehicles are outside?”
“Couple. Why?”
“Really should be finding my wife.” I throw my briefcase out the window, straddling the sill. The detective’s boot punches a hole in my door and struggles to yank itself back out.
“We may need to thrash things out,” I explain.
“Women. Bonnie’s estrogen levels really fuck up our relationship at times.”
“Why, Laura, I had no idea you were a homosexual,” I marvel. She shrugs.
“She and I have our weird way of resolving things, I guess.”
“Bless you for that,” I say.
And jump.
*
When I dip toward sleep but spasm uncontrollably, screaming about the vampire bats who’ve shadowed me since childhood, soft mangy things that doze under blankets where feet plunge into warm black mist, waking to flutter upon clammy limbs, Azura holds me with tenderness I certainly do not deserve. She tells me it’s just a thing, this spasm.
By which she means: it happens to everyone.
By which she means: it’s nothing.
But she is constantly forgiving me, which is nice.
*
I land on one of the pulsing orgies caterpillars prefer, maybe millions thick. Have to admit I’m embarrassed to murder so many for convenience’s sake. I pull slime and fine-haired carcasses off in gobs.
Other pockets hang together on benches, buildings, bushes. Writhing chain mail. Rappelling on invisible wires from the tattered leaves of trees. Azura is considering a cycle of poems on the wretched creatures, and the contagion of her focus can madden.
“Consider,” she said last night atop the peeling old observatory, “their manners.”
“Yes, they bow to greet each other.” I grabbed a dark handful from the balcony handrail and flung them into cheap-smelling night. “Almost Far Eastern?”
“Religieux, essentially. The cocoon une sorte de purgatoire—they trust in an afterlife. Paradise.” She lets one squinch along the length of her finger.
“And can it be that the caterpillar who sees a butterfly sees an angel?” I ask in the teasing voice men save for their worst moments with the women they love.
“Who says they’ll be butterflies?”
What I know:
I made the deplorable mistake of reading my wife excerpts from Sylvia’s term paper for Philosophy of Psychosexual Criticism.
Azura masturbated to Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness right there in her seat when it premiered in Berlin in ‘92.
I can remember Sylvia’s scent, but any sense-record of the act is torched ex post facto.
Azura can climax without even her fingers; I’ve learned to notice when she does it—the micromoans, the muzzled hummingbird pulse after I seem to have punched in for my shift of night terror.
Regarding Herzog, we agree: There is something unhappily erotic about wastelands.
What I suppose:
It would be facetious to say in ill-fated Sylvia and predecessors I see an other to Azura, simplistic to say I see a sameness (for Azura is above all blessedly dissimilar to the world), approaching fact that I see a spark of potential Azura that must be fanned, for Azura’s mortality is more horrific than mine.
“ ‘Every discipline,” I recited, “is secretly anchored by its articulation of Lacanian lack.’ ”
“A lack that by definition is where nothingness and catastrophe fail to be articulated,” Azura replied. She took off her shoes and examined the space between tanned toes.
“ ‘Literature finds the female vampire, a monster whose fanged orifice in Stoker’s hands is the paradigm vagina dentata.’ ”
“I wish this girl would realize,” lamented Azura, “that the mouth is not a substitute vagina but something worthy in itself.” She dipped her bare feet in a pool of caterpillars and laughed lightly at their ticklish touch.
“ ‘Astronomy’s black hole, meanwhile, is a fundamental expression of phallic illusion, the ultimate void amongst countless protrusions.’ ”
She saw a painful erection trapped in my slacks, but I didn’t follow her gaze, didn’t look at myself, just watched her face while she stared a stare that trumps the uncanny, and when it was over I’d written sideways in the margin of Sylvia’s C+ paper:
But the black hole isn’t a void at all; it is a node of unthinkab
le mass.
*
I shred through the silk threads festooning our campus, feel caterpillars in my hair and heart. Singeing, sticky strands and hot spring sun. I stop to lighten my briefcase, tossing less worthy works into a dumpster behind the steamboat-shaped dining hall. How had Korean for Beginners made the cut at all? I look up, trying to remember why the hell I bought it, at a tropical sky that sighs Azura’s name. Perhaps I’d simply needed a new book—any book—and, being a city boy, liked the menacing glow of Seoul on the cover.
Her Algerian-born parents, Azura recounts, found her newborn eyes resplendent as the Côte d’Azur, moon-baked site of her conception. But protean blue became earthly brown—a sea-change to acquaint her with despair.
“Didn’t they understand your eyes could change?”
“You see the blue, buried,” she prompts me from bed.
“I know it’s there.”
There’s no expanding on such shaky claims. Besides, I’m busy. My class is looking forward to a lecture on the perversities of David Koresh, his branch, his ranch. The research solders my senses together. Babies sinking in blue dark pools. Brides of Israel anointed early and often. Flock painted, drenched, in their own lambs’ blood. Did he figure it for the new Masada? Did the alignment with Passover bubble cheerfully in his flutes of marrow?
“Regardez-moi,” Azura pouts in periphery, nightgown waterfalling off.
To recognize the God-sent Cyrus? They say he’ll ride a milk-white horse.
“Much better,” she purrs when at last my hands explore her maps.
“Do not tell others our special ways,” a would-be messiah begged his girls.
“Your skin,” I whisper, thinking: who can hear topologies?
Outlanders rose against his prophecy, unaware they fulfilled its word.
“Are you cross?” she asks imploringly.
The Babylon beyond will judge.
“I am never cross with you,” I say.
As sinful men will always do.
*
Choppers, mutant toys, jackhammer overhead. Not for me—they drop fist-sized silver irradiation (or whatever, I’m no scientist) orbs to kill the bugs. They fall like so many New Year’s novelties, too slow to believe, settling easily on the boughs of Norway Spruces. In the deafening thrum of mass murder, I collide with Aidan, a preening milquetoast of a student who’s worked up the courage to say he can’t wait for the annual open house tonight. Whose? Mine and my wife’s, of course. Hosting duties, honestly, are a casualty I’ll never mourn.
“Might there be a more appropriate event?” I ask, panting, massaging my ribs. “With grain alcohol punch and ritual humiliation of the sub—er—unconscious?”
“I’d rather continue our debate on fragmentary analysis,” he admits. “It’s more … personal.”
“Aidan!” I chide. “Young man, theory is anything but personal.”
As he tries to digest this witless comment, I take off running once again.
*
My wife and I once took a cruise, just us. Borrowed a colleague’s yacht that neither of us could manage. Were all but capsized in a storm off Cape Cod and decided that was that and started screwing the hell out each other up against the enormous steering wheel, which dug into your back reassuringly.
“I love you,” I said.
“I want to come when we start to drown,” she answered.
But the very idea went rocketing through my blood so ferociously that all I could do was come right then and ruin the final lovemaking of my life, which it wasn’t. Some sea nymph stopped us from listing as I withdrew, and I said as much with a facile grin.
“Of all the times to mention another woman,” she mumbled, truly hurt.
When we finished all the food but couldn’t find land for days after, we had a starving contest.
*
I stop in fitful shade, the churn of departing helicopters a failing breath, and crunch the odds. I move again, steps bent toward Jerry Godforth’s office in O’Hare Hall, its clock spire ever ready to inject the heavens with time.
Azura, naturally, has beaten me here and barricaded herself in Jerry’s office. I wait as she drags the furniture away from its ignominious pile on the door’s opposite side. Soon as I squeeze into the disheveled room, Azura turns back to the window, cradling the WWII-era Sturmgewehr 44 assault rifle I bought her last anniversary.
“You know that was for your private enjoyment,” I say, when really I meant to say nothing at all.
She turns her head, smooth wave of hair a deliberate dig, expression cool and careless. She signals with her eyes to Jerry, who is struggling and making what noise he can. I take the spitty gag out. He licks his teeth.
“And Azura, how would you respond to that?” he asks.
“Exactement,” she tells the glass, “No gift sans conditions.”
“Tell him,” Jerry reminds her.
“If you wish to give me a gift, it must be a true gift, to enjoy on my own terms. Mondieu.”
“When did your terms stop being formalist—or don’t you remember that raving manifesto you sent me from Prague?” Jerry twitches his nose at this.
“What did we say about trying to ground our thoughts in a less theoretical place?”
“We didn’t say much on that matter. You did. And Prague is very real.”
“Don’t hide behind the joke.”
“What I want to say, Azura, is that I buy you these gifts because I know your attractions … but I can’t stand by while innocents suffer.”
“Better,” says Jerry, who squirms in his ropes, slightly rocking the chair in search of relative comfort.
“And I certainly don’t see why you have to treat our mutual friend and peer, who has been kind enough to counsel us though he no longer practices, like a common hostage.”
“Quelle surprise,” says Azura with alluring sting, “trying to make an ally.”
“Azura’s right,” Jerry concedes, “don’t make me a talking point.”
“Merci.”
“Is it fair to suggest she treat others with a dose more compassion?” I ask. A beam of giddy romance slices through Azura’s face.
“May I show him?”
“I think you should,” Jerry nods. “I think that could be very cathartic with respect to the conflicting feelings we were discussing.”
“Come,” says my wife, gesturing with the Sturmgewehr, and we leave the office.
Jerry grants me a wink as I pass.
“Where are we going?”
But Azura says nothing, leads me up the hundred stairs to the top of the clock tower. To a pair of bells made from molten Civil War swords on orders of Ivyland’s pacifist mayor—two weeks before Appomattox. We look out over the South Quad. She points with her rifle at the grass.
“There.”
It’s Sylvia we see, alive, a stretched, overpale thing on patchwork blanket, body flinching now and then as she flicks away invisible pests. A face-flushed and ridiculous odalisque.
“I would have. But look. Just look.”
She’s standing now, a stupid white stalk in the blaze of perfect green, an awning of fingers above her eyes as she scans the clock face. For the time, not us. And now I know Azura’s point. This creature is no threat to her.
“But, the detective—he said.”
“No,” she says, watching Sylvia. “More important women to destroy. A certain Lady Liberté? Ever watch the news?” Erupting with a quaking glee adults are supposedly drained of at thirty.
Sylvia cocks her head, bewildered, as police cars surround our tower, sirens scribbling out the afternoon. Corpses curled like commas rain from trees. The bells chime four, bringing students out of classes, into soft hail and extinction. Through silver oases of silent demise, littered like dew drops, sunbeams boomeranging off.
But Azura. Azura. Criteria of goddess-ship, work of Fauvists to the last: bodies hum. Perspective a myth. Her halo spins one hundred miles an hour.
“Tahiti would be nice,�
� I say, and she kisses me.
She shows me the only caterpillar poem so far, a joke, scrawled on a napkin and untitled, as megaphoned demands beat silence raw.
I can put aside their feel
Milky clasps of muted hair
The way you rear on blades of grass
Cast your heads about and there
Look for what you cannot name
Yearning just to greet and bow
When you find the one selfsame
Mismatched friend to show you how
Neither needs to play the game
And not one will wear the crown
But I have to say, it’s so unfair—to make them human, make me care. Give them eschatology, and revelation they can spare. Hell is a Paradise you can’t share.
The Lambs are ready: let them dare.
“Are you cross?” she asks in stained-glass glare.
*
What I like to do before “Gauguin in Tahiti” is study his last Continental paintings, from just before he abandoned his family, and contemplate the savagery to come.
“The Yellow Christ” is our museum’s best. Crucifixion scene set in thick cloissanist lines, a harvest countryside. Breton women weep for jaundiced Jesus. His beard in that pointed French style Gauguin himself wore. An unnamed man steals into autumn hills—logically he’s Gauguin too.
Hang my yellow coward’s corpse with nails, leave it out for carrion birds. I will still get away. There’s no need to go, to skulk offstage. These bells will ring as long as we want. Wherever, whenever our cells slow past thresholds for life, we’ll pluck the fruit of true solipsism. Our world shades over into private apocalypse. Yours soldiers miserably on.
CAL /// NEW YORK, NEW YORK ///
SIXTEEN YEARS AGO
We went to the Thanksgiving parade. I’d seen it on TV, of course, but the promised remaking of rhythms and colors in a city’s throbbing heart, no medium to pale the joy . . . was tempting enough that I demanded it, and my parents were happy to comply.
Years of elbow warfare as we pushed toward the train. Glances exchanged with smaller children being dragged through the forest of adults. On board, every seat was taken; people shoved from car to packed car in denial. It was a third-world train, lightless and dank. People clogged the aisle, gripping luggage racks overhead. Babies’ voices curdled. A crazy man dressed in garbage bags bit the air and foamed. Maybe H12.