almost forgotten her name. Eduardo’s brash desire to exploit the patterns surrounding us had awakened in me an almost numinous feeling of resonance with a defunct self. Suddenly I found myself simultaneously living in both the present and a (possibly falsely designed) reconstruction of the past. Everything now was seen through (what I would have previously considered) mutually exclusive lenses, as if my two eyes occupied separate realities but nevertheless crossed wires at the optic chiasm and produced shimmering double-exposure films for the theater-going homunculus in my head. The street in front of me was both the street as it was and the street as it had been ten years before; the objects I held in my hands both current in the moment and physical repositories of history no less fully present, via their physical embodiment, than the objects, and their contemporaneous surfaces, themselves.
After her marriage I had dropped all contact with her, and, while I assumed she was still in the area, I had no definite reason to think so. By some miracle her name appeared in the phonebook, although I had no way of knowing which, if any, of the seven doppelganger entries indicated the address and number I sought.
The TV in the living room spontaneously came to life. I remembered setting the wake alarm some time before, but whether I had confused the A.M./P.M. settings or if it was, in fact, already morning was a fact beyond me. It would not surprise me if I had remained awake throughout the entire night. Eduardo and I had gone back to his apartment while I told him all I that remembered about the televangelists, how when I would minutely tune the radio to bring in the voices of the preachers, when my fingers would finally find the vital band, electricity would flow through the knob to my hand, and I would hear the stars singing. Eduardo had nodded along, saying very little. At one point he pulled out his camera but pointed it out the window and far down the street, focused on some far distant row of houses. I told him that sometimes I still heard these voices in the street, that there were streetpreachers, twenty years old with the voices of cracked sexagenarians, their megaphones distorting their words into the perfect semblance of crackling radio transmission. Eduardo nodded and said that this was normal, as if I were a patient describing my symptoms to a doctor, and as if I were, perhaps, slightly hypochondriac, but not insufferably so, really more just over-conscientious in watching after my health, which was not a bad thing to be as I got up in years.
I realize that the radio has spontaneously turned itself on as well, and I’ve been listening to a call-in talk show about health and fitness. Either I have confused the A.M./P.M. settings twice, on two separate appliances (unlikely), or it really is morning. I turn the radio off to hear the television better, because it is talking about a young man who has snuck into the home of two elderly women and bludgeoned them both to death. Police report that after killing the occupants, the young man set up residence in their home, leaving the bodies propped up on the couch in the living room, where police found them when they entered the house. Neighbors had initially called to complain about the stream of cats exiting the house and invading neighboring lawns and backyards, presumably in search of food. When police entered the home they initially thought the two women still alive due to the semblance of life provided by their postures and the hectic disarray of empty pizza boxes and drug paraphernalia that surrounded them on the couch—their lack of response to the officer’s entrance was taken as narcotics-induced stupor. It was only when a cat, presumably one of the last to remain, a hardy survivalist, jumped up on the couch and began nibbling one of its owners' ears that the police noticed the bloodstains in the women’s matted hair. The news crew has not been permitted inside the house, but they have archival footage of the street outside, and they show the house in a static shot, zoomed in from some distant elevation. The camera jumps a bit, as if the operator’s arm has jerked, and I see the edge of the house neighboring the crime scene. It is, as I suspected, my own.
Only a payphone will do. Suppose I were to be traced?
A streetpreacher is on the sidewalk outside my house.
“Why are you here?” I ask him.
He fingers the trigger of his megaphone held limply at his side.
“Going home.” He says.
“Need a ride?” I ask.
“Sure,” he says. “Thanks.”
We get in my car. When I had paged through the phonebook earlier I had found that the typical flower-courier services were not yet open—the morning was still new, and their business lay largely in the evenings. The number I had scribbled down belonged instead to a funeral home, interrments carried out while the larger world slept being, apparently, not an uncommon occurrence.
“Where do you go to church?” I ask, but before I do I know that I won't be able to hear the response.
Between 1647 and 1651, Spanish artist Diego Velàzquez painted what is known today as the Rokeby Venus, a four-by-six-foot painting of a woman lying on a couch, gazing into a mirror, her back to the viewer. Her face is visible only by its reflection in the mirror, and there only blurred and muddled. She lacks the facial features typically attributed to Venus in similar depictions; while there are sufficient paintings of Venus on a couch for this subject to constitute its own genre, most depictions feature a blond, slightly-featured Venus, not the plain-faced brunette exhibited by Velàzquez. Likewise, the props seen in a typical Western painting of Venus—myrtle flowers, roses, jewellry—are absent. The identification of this woman as the mythic Venus rests solely in the fact that the mirror into which she looks is being held by a winged child, presumably Cupid, thereby placing this piece in a milieu of analogous pieces in which Cupid similarly holds a mirror for his mother.
In 1914, a woman named Mary Richardson smuggled a meat cleaver into the National Gallery and slashed the Rokeby Venus in seven places. In a statement that shortly followed her arrest, she claimed to have performed the vandalism as an act of suffragist protest, stating that the imprisonment of her friend and fellow suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst merited the destruction of “the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history.” Thirty-eight years later, at the age of sixty-three, she stated further that she hadn't liked “the way men visitors gaped at it all day long”--a gaping that may have been provoked in no small part by the verisimilitude of the painting, not for Venus, but for an actual woman. The commonplace nature of the subject's face, the absence of the mythological props, and the equal-to-life size of the image rendered it believable, and therefore desirable. So complete was the suspension of disbelief carried out by viewers of the painting that journalists, in covering the act of vandalism/protest, tended to the visceral in their descriptions, ascribing to the painting the qualities of an actual person, and to the damage that of bodily injury. The Times, in an extremely detailed account of the vandalism, described Richardson's cuts as “gashes,” “blows,” “slashes,” and in one case as “a cruel wound to the neck.” Richardson was held in prison for the maximum time allowable by law, and the gallery keeper insisted that visitors henceforth leave not only their walking sticks and umbrellas at the door, but also their “muffs, parcels, and satchels,” although the implement brought in by Richardson had, apparently, been held in her jacket.
I ask the streetpreacher if he’s eaten yet and he says no. I swing the car around and we head toward the gas-station-cum-diner, passing through several red lights along the way.
The question of which of the seven identical phonebook entries belongs to my former crush is, I have decided, irrelevant, as I do not plan to pursue this exercise any further. Given that I will be unaware of the final outcome of the project, sending flowers to a complete unknown will ultimately present, to me, an outcome equal in satisfaction to that achieved by sending her, herself in her monotypical identity, the flowers. I had therefore selected at random from among the seven, writing the result down on the same piece of paper which carried the number of the funeral home.
When we arrive at the diner it is not yet open, but the former restaurant reviewer
is already there, sitting on the concrete slab outside the door, his knees nearly up to his ears, his head low. He looks up when he hears us approach.
Édouard Manet's Olympia depicted a woman that hailed from a Venerean-artistic heritage different from Velàzquez's Rokeby. The Olympia, painted in 1863 but not formally exhibited until two years later, shows a woman gazing directly at the viewer from her couch, sans Cupid or mirror, but accompanied by a woman behind her bearing flowers. Manet patterned his image after an earlier painting by Titian, usually referred to as The Venus of Urbino, which was in turn patterned after Giorgione's Sleeping Venus. Giorgione, circa 1510, depicted his mythic figure in full mythic context, placing the nude Venus atop drapery and in front of an empty, idealized landscape. She sleeps in the open air, eyes closed against the viewer's, the distant town behind her either deserted or as asleep as she. Her right arm is upraised, its elbow crooked, its hand behind her head. The other hand delicately covers the otherwise-exposed mons veneris. Titian placed the scene indoors, in a Renaissance palace, opened the Venus' eyes, and put her
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