GUD Magazine Issue 1 :: Autumn 2007

by GUD Magazine Authors

Watch the foil. You are passing under sodium streetlamps. The light is orange; watch it on the foil. Expect the next lamp, then the next and the next. As the car turns, watch the light turn across the foil. Cultivate the illusion that the foil is not reflecting but transmitting light, that it is not a strip of foil but a window into a silver place where orange lights flit by too quick to question. Wonder what this place is that you see through the silver window.

  * * * *

  If I'm going to fall in love with a woman, it is important that we start out strangers. If I have some image in my mind before we meet, it will be false, and this false image will always come between us and prevent me from knowing her.

  The first time I saw Catherine, we were at the aquarium. We were both looking at the cuttlefish. She turned to me and said, “Would you eat a cuttlefish?"

  I thought about it. I said, “If it were prepared by someone I cared for, then I would eat it."

  "What if you were in a foreign country?"

  "Yes.” I nodded. “I would also eat it if I were in a foreign country."

  She looked satisfied. She said, “I ate a cuttlefish in Italy."

  The movement of the cuttlefish is smooth and undulating. It does not twitch and dart, as more conventional fish sometimes do. We looked at the octopus, which is related to the cuttlefish and moves in a similar way. Then she went home.

  * * * *

  The second time I saw Catherine, I was walking down a hot street in the middle of summer. She was standing at the edge of somebody's lawn, close to the sprinkler, so that her legs and hands got wet. It was early afternoon, right after lunch. She recognized me and smiled. She said, “Running through sprinklers is childish."

  "You never get wet enough,” I said. “It's too hot to do anything this afternoon."

  She said, “Do you want to take a walk?"

  I was surprised that she seemed to think we ought to be able to take a walk together. I didn't even know her name then.

  I said, “Where will we go?"

  "We can walk to the ocean."

  "I don't know how to get to the ocean from here."

  "Neither do I,” she said. “But it's east of us. If we keep walking east we're bound to get there. Do you have anything else to do?"

  I didn't have anything else to do, so we started walking towards the ocean. Soon the neighborhood became strange. I said, “I've never been here before."

  "Me neither,” she said. “At least I don't think I have. I forget things. In another day or two I may have forgotten you."

  It was a long walk to the ocean, and we were both tired by the time we got there. We walked to the end of a pier and sat down.

  Before, I had always thought of the ocean as a vast expanse in two dimensions, as a plane. I would look at the ocean by looking at the horizon and thinking of the distance. But this time I looked down at the ocean. Long, round swells rolled in, one after the other. I imagined my body fitting into each swell, and I began to think of the volume of the ocean and the mass of the waves. Catherine put her head on my shoulder.

  * * * *

  We fell in love and it was still summer. We went to the art museum, which was air-conditioned. The art museum enclosed a great deal of space, but only a moderate number of artworks. On a crisp white wall as big as the side of a barn, there would be three small portraits. The empty expanses made the museum seem a larger place than the world outside with its posters and billboards.

  Catherine said, “My brother is a carpenter. Once, when he was remodeling a museum, he showed me how the light from the paintings actually soaks into the walls. If you look closely at an empty wall, sometimes you can tell what kind of painting used to hang opposite.

  "For instance,” she went on, “there was probably a Klee opposite this wall, maybe a group of them. Look at the angle the light makes on the walls—the walls remember the Klee light deep down in their cells. If you look, you'll see what I mean."

  I looked at the stretch of wall, and, sure enough, I soon felt as though I were looking at a Klee. I thought Klee must have been the one who had painted the wall that eggshell white.

  We played a game of trying to read what kind of paintings had hung opposite various walls in the museum. When we were ready to go, I said, “Let's leave something here together. Something small that the cleaning people won't find and throw away, but that the walls will see and remember."

  "Something small,” she said. “Here's what we'll do: I have some lip balm that's kind of shiny. We can leave a kiss somewhere out of the way, down low where people won't look. Even if it only stays there a month, or a week, or even a day, it will change the light a tiny bit, and maybe the walls around it will remember."

  We found a narrow strip of wall, between a corner and an archway, where the light was dim and there were no paintings. Catherine put on some lip balm, knelt down, and kissed the wall, and then I kissed her until my lips were covered in lip balm and put a kiss on the wall over hers. When we stepped back, we could barely see a silvery gleam on the wall.

  "It's not much,” I said, “but I think it will be enough."

  As we left, she smiled at me and reached for my hand. “Now even if we break up,” she said, “the walls of the museum will remember us together."

  * * * *

  Often, when love wanes, I begin to think that I will never fall in love again, or that there is no such thing as love. Because it is hard to look forward to a life alone, I am frightened to admit that I am no longer in love. When winter came, I told myself that Catherine and I only had to keep moving forward.

  A friend told me about some hot springs that he and his wife went to every year. Catherine and I made reservations at a lodge near the hot springs and rented a car. We arrived late at night, after most of the other guests had gone to sleep. After we checked in, we saw a pool table in the lounge.

  "Do you like to play pool?” I said.

  "Only late at night, while everybody else is asleep."

  Neither of us was very good at pool, but it was pleasant to play by ourselves. It was pleasant to enjoy a public place in secret, as though there were no one else in the world. After we finished a game, Catherine said, “Do you hear a baby crying?"

  "It's coming from that way,” I said. We walked down a humid, tiled hallway and reached a room where the waters of the hot springs were pumped into an indoor tub. A woman sat on the edge of the tub, dangling her feet, and a man held a baby in the water. The baby was crying.

  The man smiled sheepishly. “It's his first time in the water,” he said. “It's only tepid."

  "We've been coming here for twenty years,” the woman said. “We love the hot springs. We find that the sooner we put our kids in the water, the sooner they start loving the hot springs too. We want them to love it as much as they can, so we get them started right away."

  Catherine and I said nice to meet you. We went back to play another game of pool, but it was no longer pleasant, because we knew that other people were awake. We kept listening to the baby. My back and feet hurt. It grew very late and neither of us could make a shot.

  "If you had a baby,” said Catherine, “would you introduce it to the hot springs right away?"

  "If I had a baby,” I said, “I would drown it."

  * * * *

  Experiment: Birds

  Obtain access to a large auditorium. It should have tall windows stretching from floor to ceiling, and long drapes in front of the windows. Find out when there are lectures there. Choose a lecture on a topic unfamiliar to you, one that takes place in the early evening. Write down the date and time, but do not tell anyone that you are going.

  Make sure you have nothing else to do that evening. Walk alone to the auditorium, waiting patiently at every street corner until the light turns green.

  When you arrive, take a seat at the back. There is still plenty of time. Use it to savor the yellow light and the bright empty volume of the lecture hall. Let the conversations of the people around you mix into babble in your ears. Pre
tend you are the kind of person who comes to this kind of lecture and makes this kind of conversation. Imagine the house you might live in and imagine where you might go during the day. Imagine your silverware. Imagine who you might love; look around and think who it might be.

  When the lecture begins, forget love. Listen to the speaker as long as you can, then allow yourself to become sleepy. The lights are dim; there are slides. Feel the air become warmer.

  Turn to look at the vertical strip of evening sky that the drapes have left uncovered at the side of the room. Notice how the sky changes from bright pale blue at the bottom of the strip to twilight blue at the top.

  Watch a flock of birds fly across the narrow strip of window. They pass, each in an instant, black motes flickering in and out against the blue.

  Cultivate the illusion that the window is not transmitting but reflecting light, that it is a screen on which the flickering image of birds is projected. Wonder about the source of this image.

  * * * *

  When I am with a woman I no longer love, the thing I notice is the light. Many years later I may no longer remember her face, but I will remember the glare of the streetlamp outside her window, or the first high clouds of autumn arriving in the afternoon. Yet the women I have loved have never thought to be jealous of the sky.

  The last time I saw Catherine, we were at my apartment. It was February, a rainy afternoon; I made her tomato soup. She had a bus ticket.

  "I wonder if I will remember this,” she said, “the last bowl of tomato soup we eat together. I forget things, you know."

  "You may not remember,” I said, “but your cells will. Your cells remember everything that happens to them. You may forget that I ever existed, but the next time you eat tomato soup your cells will remember me. All of a sudden it will feel like a rainy afternoon in February and you'll miss me. You won't remember my name or the name of this city, you won't remember how I look or what we did together; you'll only remember there's someone you miss. That much is in your cells."

  When it was time for her to go, she put her coat on and stepped outside. Before I closed the door, she turned around. “I have an idea,” she said. “We'll both keep moving to different cities—we'll keep moving and moving. We'll get new clothes and new haircuts, maybe glasses and tattoos. We'll keep moving and changing until we've forgotten each other completely and would never recognize each other anyway. But sooner or later we'll accidentally move to the same city and happen to pass each other on the street, and then our cells will remember. It will be as though we were seeing each other for the first time, but we won't walk by, because our cells will remember that we can fall in love."

  She walked away and I closed the door. I wondered if it might happen that way—if we might meet again on strange streets, as strangers, nothing left between us but the faith that we could fall in love. I wondered if it might. I sat down to watch the dusk, but the dusk seemed unfamiliar.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Anything by Matt Bell

  Sitting on the toilet, I gently kick her once, twice, three times in the ribs. She doesn't move. I don't know what I'll do if she wakes up, but if she stays unconscious, well, then I've got an idea.

  I'm in the bathroom of someone else's studio apartment. Outside the door there's a party going on. I'm here because my friend Raquel is here. I don't know where she is now. I don't know the host or anyone else, not even the girl passed out on the floor. I've only met her once, earlier this evening. She was drinking champagne straight from the bottle in long gulps, all night long, so when I saw her go into the bathroom, I didn't think much of it. I didn't feel anything either, except for irritation. Because of what she'd done to me. Eventually I noticed that she hadn't come back out, so I wandered in to check on her, only to find her passed out on the floor.

  And now? Well, it's like I said. Now I've got an idea what to do with her.

  * * * *

  The party is being thrown by a friend of a friend of a friend. The host is an artist of some local fame, his huge canvases dominating the room and separating the party into segments. The first time I saw the girl, she was standing under a twenty-foot-long oil painting that looked like the floor of a parking garage, all grays broken with dirty puddles of black and streaks of yellow. I had no idea what it was supposed to be.

  This girl, she caught my attention, first because her red gown clashed with the painting, then because she looks a lot like Raquel. I even thought the girl was Raquel at first—she had the same blond hair piled on top of her head, long, the same skinny limbs, the same small, cone-shaped breasts.

  When I walked over and said hello, I could see the girl checking my qualifications to talk to her, my résumé in full view and up to date: a dark blue suit from a good tailor, an open-necked shirt underneath in a cool but complementary off-white. I have a good haircut, straight teeth. She took my hand, her small fingers draping over my larger ones.

  "Good evening,” I said, releasing her hand and smiling.

  "I don't think I know you. Is this your first time here?"

  I nodded. “Is it that obvious?” I looked around. Everyone was talking like old friends. Raquel, the only reason I'd come, was nowhere to be seen, but she was probably just on the other side of one of the host's canvases. It's frustrating how she brings me to these parties and then just disappears.

  "It's usually a pretty exclusive group,” the girl said, knocking back another gulp from her champagne bottle. “But since you're here, you might as well introduce yourself."

  "Oh, sorry. I'm Greg.” I offered my hand again, then put it back down, feeling awkward.

  "I'm Nadia,” she said, tossing her head slightly, causing one long blond curl to tumble down the side of her face. “Who are you here with?"

  Nadia was intimidating in a way that was hard to define exactly but probably had to do with the way she held herself. She gave off the impression that no one was good enough for her, that those perfectly-sculpted hips were forbidden territory, that breaching the hollows within would require a monumental siege of time and money. Neither of which I wanted to spend, especially not where Raquel could see me.

  How would I describe what I am? Safely. “I'm a friend of Raquel's,” I said, searching for her again, watching Nadia nod in recognition. Raquel's done a couple of big shows recently and she's starting to make a name for herself in the city. She paints erotic still lifes. As in dead people fucking. The only time I ever asked Raquel what the paintings were all about, she told me that sex is beautiful and so is death, and that when beautiful sexy things die, well, that's the most perfect thing of all. I don't know about all that, though her paintings sell well enough that I suppose she must be on to something.

  Raquel ... she says she's obsessed with death yet she's never known anyone who's died. She thinks that lack of knowledge hurts her work, but she also just finds the fact of it tragic. Maybe it is. I wouldn't know. Raquel's a pretty odd girl, but always up for pretty much anything.

  Actually, now, here in the bathroom, I'm counting on that. This just might be the chance I've needed.

  * * * *

  When I was talking to Nadia, Raquel was still nowhere to be seen. “She appears to have left me on my own."

  "Is that a problem?” Nadia tilted her head, smiling, her eyes sparkling until they were obscured by the upward tilt of her bottle.

  "Doesn't seem to be.” Seeing her drink reminded me of the martini in my hand. I raised it to my lips, drinking so deeply that my olive banged lightly against my teeth.

  "So what do you do, Greg?"

  "I'm a broker. Wall Street."

  Nadia laughed, but not in a funny way. “And what are you doing here again?"

  "Raquel's a friend of mine. We used to date.” And still would, if only—

  "I'm surprised she brought you here. You're so out of place.” The smile on Nadia's face turned bored, dismissive. “I mean, what could you possibly have to talk to anyone here about? Stocks and bonds? How great the NASDAQ
looked today?"

  She said, “How dull."

  She said, “I've got to go. Enjoy the party."

  Nadia stumbled as she brushed past, leaving me to stand there watching her, hating her with every swing of her hips, wanting to throw my glass at the exquisite little space between her exposed shoulder blades.

  I restrained myself, finishing my martini. From across the room, I watched her get drunker, watched her flirt with art boys ten years younger than me dressed in ratty clothes and bad haircuts. Stinking of pot. I watched her touching their arms, kissing them on their cheeks. They were worthy and I was not.

  I watched until I was sure I'd seen it all before, and then I went to the bar for another drink. And another.

  * * * *

  Nadia's lower half is sprawled awkwardly on the ground, her dress pulled up to expose how well-formed her legs really are. The fabric over her chest is pulled tight, her breasts straining to get free. I don't touch her.

  I'm tapping my cell phone in my hand. Thinking, thinking, and finally smiling.

  I kick her again, but this last time carries no charm, at least not for her. She remains motionless, passed out. Oblivious. Perfect.

  I bend over and pick her up. Once her feet are more or less on the ground, she moans as her head rocks back too fast.

  If she wakes up, I'll drop her on the floor and walk out.

  She doesn't. I bury her face in my shoulder and head for the bathroom door, dragging her out into the apartment. A few people look at us, none of them Raquel, who's still out of sight. No time to look for her now. I'll call her later. She'll be interested in this, I'm sure.

  * * * *

  No one tries to stop me as I take Nadia from the party. Why would they? So far, I haven't done anything wrong, not really. The apartment is on the fifteenth floor, so I push Nadia into the elevator and prop her up against the wall. The whole way down, her body slumps against mine, limp and flaccid, in stark contrast to my own.

  Drooping in my arms, Nadia is closer to me than Raquel was on the way up. In fact, we're more intimate this way than Raquel and I have been in years.