Note to Self: A Novel

by Alina Simone

  “But why? Didn’t people like his films?”

  “Maybe not so many. I don’t know. I did.”

  As Simone rooted around her bag for a moment, Anna’s thoughts tetherballed wildly around the axis of these revelations. So many Tajes! A broken mirrorball of Tajes. Each seemed to cancel another out, reduce, indeed, to Zero.

  “I’ll tell you a little story,” Simone said, in a way that implied she started a lot of little stories this way. “Growing up, I went to this tiny private high school in Berlin, an alternative school. The popular kids all smoked, grufties who bought their clothes in the Mitte and listened to Einstürzende Neubauten. They hung out by this one bench in a park across the street from the school and they always looked so cool, soaking in their little clouds of unearned darkness.”

  Anna’s thoughts snagged, annoyed, on this phrase. How can you soak in a cloud? Who talked like this? Europeans, she guessed.

  “Every year, a new class of freshmen would come in, so innocent and hopeful and scared,” Simone continued. “The ambitious ones though, after a few weeks, they’d figure out how things worked and soon start hanging out by the bench themselves, bumming smokes. It was hard work standing out there in the cold, teaching themselves how to like these toxic things, but they did it anyway because they saw this was a blueprint for becoming popular. Within a couple of months, you couldn’t recognize them. Their clothes, the way they talked. They became totally different people. And of course, the next year, they were always first to offer their Djarum Blacks to the new freshmen, continuing the cycle. I think that’s what happened with Zero. Herzog was so supportive of what Paul and I were doing. Zero could see Nowism taking off right before his eyes and he didn’t want to be left behind. Though sometimes I suspect his heart was never in it.” She nodded at the waiter to take away her drink. “I can relate, though. I remember that feeling well. Sitting out there in the cold, choking on smoke. Who can blame him for wanting to be loved?”

  Before Anna could even form a response, Taj returned wearing his $125 x-rayed cow head and there was nothing to do but follow them out into the drizzle in her sorry, slept-in T-shirt. The dilapidated warehouses surrounding the hotel turned out to be a cluster of high-end art galleries clinging strenuously to their proletariat heritage. The blue-chip names were carefully hidden, engraved on tiny gold plates, while the huge, rusting signage of long-displaced industries remained carefully preserved above the doors. But Simone’s gallery did not even reveal its name on the call button inside the elevator, maintaining the illusion that they intended to sell you a vacuum hose right up until the smoked-glass entryway. The three of them passed into a chamber of polished concrete and exposed steel beams where an installation was still in progress. Near the entrance, a pair of men stood examining a meat-themed mural.

  “You can’t ask what it’s ‘about,’” the skullcapped younger of the two was saying. “I mean, whatever, like everything I make, this series is kind of a dumb joke. I was playing with the idea of, you know, a ‘sausage party,’ right? Because making sausage is a kind of cooking that combines these really brutal elements—slaughter, metal grinders, squeezing, compaction, animal blood, enclosure in intestines…”

  The other man, a collector type, leaned in to admire some phallic-looking columns on a Pantheon that looked as though it had been carved from steak.

  “… the mid-digestive shit channels of mammals. And I fucking love sausage! How do I deal with that, you know?” Here Skullcap paused to add a daub of penis-colored paint to the Pantheon. “But mostly I just wanted to play around with color, which is something I don’t normally do.”

  The man nodded gravely. Anna glanced over at Simone, who was wearing a wry smile.

  “Well, he’s got one thing right,” she said, sotto voce. “It is a total sausage fest around here.” Anna looked around and noticed it was true: all the artists in the room were men. Simone motioned them past the muralist toward a series of aerial photographs. “Ah, shooting shit from the window of an airplane.” She sighed, moving on to a neighboring painting. “Nice work if you can get it.”

  “Agreed. And I wonder when whoever did this knew it was done,” Taj snorted, indicating the painting. “When he came on it?”

  “Really? I find this piece tremendously moving.” Simone said, turning to Anna. “What do you think?”

  Anna flushed at finding herself the unexpected center of attention. Whose side to take? She took an inadvertent step back, felt a mysterious tug at her head.

  “It’s definitely a challenging piece,” Anna hedged, trying to extract her hair from the mesh sculpture behind her without attracting attention. But this milquetoast statement was the cue ball that broke the trio apart, setting them separately adrift throughout the gallery. Anna wandered past a confusing row of flat-panel screens and tangled headphones to arrive at another wall of photographs: depressed people in nice homes, blurry-looking snapshots, something underwater. There was a caption somewhere to the left that explained what it was all supposed to mean, why these images weren’t just a camera going off in someone’s backpack by accident, but Anna was too lazy to read it.

  A few minutes later, they regrouped in the narrow hallway leading to Simone’s installation. Taj went first, holding the heavy black curtain open for them. She followed Simone inside and the instant the curtain swung back it became so dark Anna lost all sense of the room’s volume. They could have been standing in a swimming pool basin for all she knew. Somewhere far above them a projector whirred, but the screen remained black.

  Anna blinked into the darkness, wondering what to expect. Something that upped the ante on Simone’s carnal, lo-fi, autobiographical fare, she supposed. Perhaps a film narrated by her vagina? As Anna waited for Simone’s vagina, blown up to IMAX proportions, to wrap itself around her face like a giant squid, she began to ruminate on the shelf life of an art star’s vagina. She’d once read an interview with Madonna where she complained how after she turned forty, any mention of her name was immediately followed by her age, as if to underscore her unfuckability. There probably comes some later point when a star’s age starts getting mentioned before her name, Anna mused, and a point after that where they just omit the name and add an exclamation point after the age. In any case, what would happen to the artistic valuation of Simone’s snatch as the years passed? Would her audience mature with her? Or, like the bag-headed lothario in Gilman’s Age of Consent, would they simply strike out for younger and tighter turf?

  It was about then that Anna realized the movie hadn’t started and they were all just standing in the dark listening to the whir of a projector. Had there been a malfunction? Should she say something and risk looking like an idiot? In the end, Anna decided against it. Where were Taj and Simone? The projector was so loud she couldn’t hear them moving. She wondered if there was a bench somewhere nearby, stretched a tentative toe forward but encountered no resistance.

  How much time passed before Anna realized this was the piece? A minute? Ten? She didn’t know, but at some point she noticed the sound of the projector was subtly changing pitches, shifting into higher and lower gears. Of course this revelation only presented new challenges. Did the piece have an “end” and was she expected to wait for it? Was she allowed to sit down on the floor? To speak? She stood there for what felt like a gerbil’s lifetime, by turns itchy, bored, and angry, wondering how long she would have to keep sucking on this bouillon cube of narcissism. Then came a new sound—the stuttering end of a film reel—and the black curtain parted. A warm yoke of light spilled across the room from the hallway. Simone was beckoning for them to follow her.

  “Wow,” Taj said, once they were back in the hall.

  Anna felt an anticipatory smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. If Taj thought the Romanians were dull, what would he think of this? The Romanians’ films, true, took place in real time, or some slower facsimile thereof, but hey! at least there were people, plots, dialogue. Watching a tofu loaf brown through an oven window, watchi
ng gym socks circle in a dryer, watching a fucking scab harden was still more interesting than pretending to listen to a projector while watching nothing at all.

  “Wow?” Simone said.

  “Well, you know, it’s not exactly your demo…” Taj trailed off.

  “What’s my demo?” Simone asked. Her voice was neither angry nor coy—merely curious.

  Perhaps deciding that “anyone interested in seeing your pink parts” was either too insulting or too broad a demo, Taj suddenly changed tacks.

  “You know who it reminds me of?”

  Simone cocked her head.

  “Michael Snow.”

  “You remember!” Simone exclaimed. For the first time, she seemed to regard him with real interest.

  “You forget that I remember a lot of things.” Taj dropped his voice a register, put on a new face. “Like this: ‘I’m a flaneur. That’s what I do. I just flaaaan around.” He began to do an odd little dance in the corridor, waving his arms—flanning around, apparently—and quoting someone they both knew, to Simone’s obvious delight. Then he whirled and grabbed Simone brusquely by the shoulders, drilling her with an intense stare.

  “What are you doing?” Simone said, her smile simultaneously managing to convey affection and fuck you.

  “I just shot a film of you. Up here,” Taj continued, in the same deep voice, tapping his temple. “I call it Mental Cinematography.”

  “Oh my God!” Simone broke down laughing. “Herzog. We were such idiots.”

  “Yup.”

  “We were young!” Simone said. And Anna couldn’t help thinking this was generous, since Simone was so much younger than Taj.

  “Not Paul,” Taj said, an edge to his voice.

  “Not Paul,” she conceded.

  Why couldn’t the spongy sculptural installation lining the hallway wall just silently absorb her, Anna wondered? How long would she have to stand here, witness to Taj and Simone’s courtship dance, with this stupid waiting-to-be-clued-in look stuck to her face?

  “Seriously, though,” Simone said, sobering. “What did you think?” She seemed almost vulnerable. “You know, about the piece?”

  “Gerda,” he said, as serious as Anna had ever heard him. “I loved it.”

  Her heart felt like a juggling pin that Taj had just dropped. Anna had assumed they would end up at Minutia later, making fun of Simone, had even already begun coming up with witty analogies for the film in her head; a roller coaster of boredom, the Matterhorn of monotony … But now Taj took a step closer to Simone, put a hand on her back, right between where the wings would sprout. He was clearly just about to say something else—something warm and sincere and potentially life-altering—when the frigid blonde from the front desk hurried up to them.

  “Ms. Weil. I’m sorry to interrupt. That journalist—”

  “Already?”

  “I told him—”

  “Ech. Sorry, guys,” Simone said, sloughing off Taj’s arm. “Have to run.”

  “Simone—” Taj began.

  “Thanks for the Bloody. I owe you!” The curator was already unhooking a velvet rope, leading Simone away through the area marked PRIVATE.

  “Later let’s—”

  “Yes, see you later!” she called back with a wave, leaving Taj and Anna to watch her vanish between the twin parentheses of their raised hands.

  * * *

  They took the elevator down and emerged to find the sky had turned a nauseating gray and the air had the sharp smell of a freshly struck match. It began to rain.

  “Shit!” Taj yelled, pulling his cow head over his real head. They ran as the rain thudded on the car hoods around them. Anna hurried after him, past a man carrying what had been a bouquet of paper flowers but now resembled a wad of used Kleenex on a stick. Back at their hotel room, Anna lay on the bed with too many pillows watching Taj towel his head dry. Throughout lunch and the trip to the gallery, Anna had left Simone’s revelations about Taj to simmer on some mental back burner. Now all the prattle had burned away, leaving only the clarified truth: Simone was a total ice bitch. Obviously, Taj had loved her, or did love her, and that had fucked him up. How could it not? She was a fruit-fellating microprostitute who had lured them into a dark shaft and subjected them to an art-based version of waterboarding. Who does that? Who thinks it’s OK to stick people in a black box, where time can be measured only by bladder accretion, to wonder what’s wrong with themselves that they can’t appreciate a motherfucking drone?

  A psychopath, that’s who.

  Connected, she suddenly thought, feel free to talk now.

  “I just want you to know I know.”

  “Hm?” Taj rubbed his ears with the towel as if he hadn’t heard.

  “Simone told me all about the Zero thing.”

  “Oh.” Taj shrugged. “Have you seen my power cord?” He began wandering around the room, scanning outlets.

  “You were in that class with Herzog,” Anna continued, thrown off by how not thrown off Taj seemed.

  “I know.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It’s a long story.” He lifted the bedspread and plucked his cable from a three-prong. “I don’t really feel like getting into it right now.”

  Anna felt her face prickling. How come people like Brie and Taj could so easily shut down a conversation with one of those Teflon phrases? Did it even matter to anyone what she felt like doing? She scootched over to where Taj was sitting on the bed, determined to be the anti-Simone.

  “Taj,” she said, placing a strategic hand on his arm. “Are you OK?”

  He looked up from wrapping his power cord and threw her a sharp glance. “What?”

  “I just know it’s been a long time since you’ve seen Simone, and you seem kind of—”

  “Anna, you’re getting clingy, and it’s weirding me out.” Abruptly, he got up and reached for a clean T-shirt.

  She tried not to be hurt by Taj’s dismissal. And while she failed at that, Taj changed into dry clothes. Suddenly he was standing by the door with a laptop bag swinging from his shoulder. Now she saw he was wearing another T-shirt from the shop. The one with the glittery skull.

  “Where are you going?” she said, alarmed.

  “To find a coffee shop. I’ve got a ton of editing to do.”

  “What editing? Taj, I want to—”

  But he cut her off. “Have you even started your video diary?”

  “No, but—”

  “No buts. Get your mind off things and get to work. Work, Anna. It’s the most important thing.”

  “OK,” she said, feeling like Taj was the most important thing. The door slammed and Anna stared at the digital clock on the stand across the bed. Everything was unraveling. It was like one of those time-lapse films of fruit rotting. First things were perfect, then kind of mushy, until finally what remained was just—the door opened again, and as if in a dream, there was Taj. Two strides and he was again beside her. On the bed.

  “As soon as I left, I realized I was being a dick,” he said. The most beautiful words, Anna couldn’t help but think, that he’d ever said to her. Taj picked up her hand and began to massage its underside with his thumb. Each stroke felt like a sexual telegram to all points south. She secretly thrilled at the prospect that maybe now they could make up with a proper ass-twisting sexathon.

  “You must think I’m such a Pol Pot, shipping you off to LA, telling you to do this video diary.”

  “No—”

  “It’s only because I think you have so much potential. You know, next year, I bet you’ll be the one showing here.”

  “But I haven’t done anything!”

  “I said you have a lot of potential,” Taj continued, “not a lot of accomplishments. That’s why the video diary is so important.” To tell the truth, the idea of making a video diary only made Anna feel tired, but for Taj’s sake she nodded with heartfelt affirmation.

  “I know. I’ve been lazy.”

  “You’re not lazy. You know what y
our real problem is?”

  She shook her head. “That I’m not Simone?” She hadn’t meant to say it, but there it was. And why not? Why not mix things up with a little honesty? Surely they both knew that men like Taj never looked at a woman like Anna the way they looked at someone like Simone. Or that girl at the carnival. They never did weird little dances in hallways to make her laugh or ran off to change their shirts just to ensure her approval. But men like Taj also didn’t sit around massaging the inside of her hand either, and right now Taj was doing just that. So how long could she go on pretending it was OK for him to openly lust for other women right in front of her? Regardless of whether their relationship could be classified as “complicated” or “vague” it was still, undeniably, something. Wasn’t it?

  “Exactly,” Taj said, and Anna looked up at him, surprised. But from his expression it was clear he’d misunderstood. “No one knows who the fuck you are, Anna. Fame, that’s what you need. Not a lot—I’m not saying get grubby here—but even a little would do wonders for your self-esteem.”

  “I don’t know—” Anna began, but Taj cut her off again.

  “Take your relationship with your mom. A couple newspaper clippings, a little item in your college alumni mag? She’ll forget all about that stuff she’s always harping on BAM! like that.” Taj let go of her hand and snapped his fingers. Anna laughed.

  “I’m serious,” he said. “All you have to do is hop on the fame bus to happiness.”

  “Could I just maybe take a fame scooter to mild satisfaction?”

  Now it was Taj’s turn to laugh and Anna saw her opening. She picked up his hand again. This was it, she realized. The part in the rom-com when the sunny alt-nineties music is cued—something by Matthew Sweet or the Lemonheads that says it’s OK to be unlovable but also be loved—and the undernourished antiheroes the audience has been rooting for all along fall into each other. She leaned hard against him, signaling that what was on offer here was the entirety of her and not just this one hand. But he merely leaned in the same direction, as though they were two trees bent by the same unseen wind. For a long moment they stayed that way, looking for all the world like twin forward slashes in a URL. Then he gave her hand a pat meant to convey I am definitely not going to fuck you and rose from the bed.