In/Half

by Jasmin B. Frelih

  ‘Zoia!’

  Max Adorcuse takes a quick look around to make sure the stone that just rolled from his chest didn’t crush anybody. He shakes her hand and smiles self-consciously. It’s a tight-lipped smile. It doesn’t seem appropriate to show teeth. He’s shaking and he’s proud. Nobody has pulled a fast one on him, everything will unfold in a manner that will put him beyond all reproach.

  ‘Hi, Vaclav.’

  Now he’s embarrassed. The people have heard her voice and have automatically gathered around, closer to her body. Vaclav? They sneer. Vaclav? Is that guy even American? He’s a nobody, how did he get to Zoia? Does he blackmail her? He must have something on her, I’m sure of it. Vaclav…

  ‘Uh, call me Max, at least for today, if not forever, from today on.’

  A sour smile. Zoja is replete with empathy, her eyes broaden and she covers her mouth with her hand.

  ‘Oh, Max, I’m so sorry, Max, yes, I don’t know what came over me, where did I…’

  The people are weighing up her response. Was this a mistake? Can Zoja even make mistakes? Or is she simply being considerate to this Adorcuse dolt? That would be in her nature, doubtless.

  ‘It’s all right, it’s nothing. It’s hard for me to express how overjoyed I am that you are here, and I’m probably not the only one.’

  Zoja is used to such adulation, but his is pleasantly sincere, since it doesn’t derive from self-interest or coarse taste-making. It seems to run deeper than that.

  ‘Lots of people,’ she says.

  Max looks around, his chest swells, and he allows himself a pinch of pride.

  ‘Poetrylitics is here to stay. But I’ve got no illusions. It’s all because of you.’

  ‘Not in the least,’ says Zoia. ‘Without somebody ensuring a material basis, we poets just hang in the air. My words are available to all, my body to no one. But maybe that’s how it should be. Still, I’m here now. It was about time for me to come out of hiding.’

  The people applaud her. Max is happy. His famous acquaintance has already made some of the girls stop looking down on him; the gazes cast in his direction now resemble those of hungry people ordering hamburgers. He is trying to disregard them. It’s hard. In spite of all this, Max is an ordinary man.

  ‘I was thinking of waiting another half hour or so, until it’s properly night, before starting. First I have a few singers with guitars for when the people are getting seated and then I’ll, with your permission of course, say a few words and have a bunch of artists do their thing, but I was thinking of consulting with you first about how and what you want to do, I mean, whatever’s best for you, but in any case your performance has priority, the others can go on after you if they, well, I don’t know, that’s just…’

  The vortex of the crowd stimulates her brain. She stares at them. She has the luxury of being able to gawk open-mouthed and she could probably even point a finger at people without angering anyone. The jugglers off in the distance are drawing rings of fire, two drunks are hugging on the pavement, one wrong look away from a fight, people are kissing, mostly teenagers, not far away a girl is playing a flute (is she by any chance naked?), and two black girls are playing catch with a shabby ball, on the other side they’re loudly bargaining with and dealing in seashells, and, hold on a second, that can’t be true, Jesus, hard to believe but, look, it is, it really is him, who would have thought? Strange, most of those present came to see her but she, years and years ago, had been the one following him around. Will he remember? Does he even know what became of her?

  ‘…what do you think?’

  ‘Just a second, Max. I have to go tug at someone’s sleeve.’

  ‘I was born in 1330 in Neuilly-sur-Seine. I speak seventy-six languages, two thirds of which are extinct. I can babble for days on end without anyone understanding me. Don’t you believe me?’

  Marjorie’s young lover has taken off his sweaty shirt. To the immense pleasure of the ladies, girls, and aesthetically attuned men, he’s flexing his muscles and trying to keep his cool next to that chatty apparition. The man speaking to him is about 30 years old, white as He’s probably an albino. In his hand he holds a nondescript brown vessel, wooden and overgrown with algae. He nods, of course he believes the man, why wouldn’t he?

  ‘I am the Fisher King, my friend, don’t misunderstand me. You have no idea what’s going on, but I do, for I have seen this so many times that I know it all by heart. Killing, lying, living on. It comes round about every hundred years. What do you know about the twentieth century?’

  ‘Hmm. What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, about what happened back then?’

  ‘You got me. I’m not much of a historian.’

  ‘Well, anyway, you must know something?’

  ‘Wars?’

  ‘Ooh, wars. Find me a century that did without. What else?’

  A salty drop of sweat slides off a swollen bicep. The man places the goblet under it and catches the drop. The young man looks at him in horror. The Fisher King shrugs.

  ‘Sweat, tears, saliva, blood, it’s all the same to me. Well, what else?’

  ‘Uh, what do I know? Oh, right, they went to the moon, didn’t they?’

  Now the man grabs his belly and belts out laughter. His face changes colour. A moment ago his eyebrows were completely white, but now they’ve taken on a yellowish tinge, as if they’d been subject to tobacco smoke all day.

  ‘To the moon, to the moon. For the first time, right?’

  ‘Yes, for the first time, of course. What of it?’

  ‘Wrong!’ exclaims the man. A wrinkle forms on his forehead. ‘Using Leonardo’s notes, already in 1725 after the second Christ, or 982 after the third, Count Navelgaze built an atmospheric chamber and, using the instructions from the first Temple of Solomon, split the atom, propelled himself to the moon, and came back with a few rocks. I knew him personally. I held those rocks in my hands. He said he had expected more. He was, perhaps, a little bored up there. Why do you think the Huguenots had to burn down the Library of Alexandria for the seventh time? Because Marx, that lush, couldn’t keep his mouth shut, even though he’d promised. Don’t think I’m making this up. I was there when they were raising the Alps.’

  His cheeks sink and a beard begins to sprout around his trembling lips. Dark circles appear under his eyes, in three waves. He stoops down and age spots burst out on his skin. Marjorie’s boyfriend watches him, smiling a wry smile. He doesn’t notice the old man’s transformation; all told, we are very selective in what we notice.

  ‘Now can you please go find someone else to talk nonsense to.’

  ‘Do you think this was the first time a Great Cut happened?’

  The phrase attracts the attention of people who until then had been staring entranced at the shirtless young man’s sculpted body.

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘I just told you. Every hundred years or so they kill off everyone who knows anything – why do you think Adolphina eradicated all those tribes? And why did the Templars demolish Troy? What happened to China? – and invent the whole world anew. I myself have helped to make history three times already, not from the ground up but from the top down, so I know how things go. This latest cut was just a little more exhaustive, obviously, since nobody has a clue, not only about what happened but also about what is happening this very minute!’

  It’s getting difficult to deny that something rather unusual is happening to the Fisher King. He is visibly shrivelling up and shrinking, his face is becoming like dried fruit, his yellowed nails are falling off, and his head is wearing itself down to a pale pink. His fluffy ivory hair is flying all around. The crowd sighs, such wonders give them reason to believe.

  ‘Tell us about the Great Cut!’ is heard from a few throats, and a dozen others echo: ‘Tell us!’

  The Fisher King opens his mouth, and a single tooth flies out. Watching in astonishment, he runs his hand over his face and, with the last of his strength, bends down to the wooden bowl that
now contains at least twenty drops of sweat. The crowd holds its breath.

  How is it possible that just a few seconds later a healthy thirty-year-old man is once again standing before them, a man who, albeit without pigment, has all his hair, teeth, nails, and the eyes of an angora rabbit? No one knows. A collective sigh of wonder. Only Marjorie’s boy is not enraptured, and he grudgingly spits out of the right side of his mouth, rolling his eyes when the Fisher King catches the spit with his chalice.

  Among those present are some very old people who have been terrified of death their whole lives, more and more with each passing day. They look at each other and a completely clear bond is woven among them. No one wants to die. Not today, not tomorrow, not next week. No, no. Someone coughs. That’s their signal. Twelve old men and women, pensioners of the round table, gallop in the direction of the grail-bearer. This vision of youthfulness has rendered them lithe, their backs and joints and vertebrae stop creaking, and a cloud of dust rises where their cast-off crutches fall to the ground.

  When I was twenty-five years old, I was, by a comfortable margin, the angriest woman in the world. You can forget about those Palestinian mothers, those wives of travelling salesmen, those preachers’ daughters. My boyfriend, the only boy I’d ever loved in a completely selfish way, dumped me. No girlfriend offered support and my family preferred to worry about themselves instead of me. Today, looking back, it’s of course ridiculous, but, regardless, I can’t be so wicked as to renounce the authenticity of my twenty-five-year-old self’s feelings. I cursed the world and cried furiously when nobody was looking, I dreamt up the most extravagant of suicides and was convinced that this was the end for me, that the world would never open, that I had used up all my chances and would remain defrauded. Overnight, everyone seemed to find their way in their new lives, while I had no new life in sight. Nothing seemed worth it to me. Should I have scratched away at their vain souls in hopes of improving my position? I had neither the will for nor the interest in that sort of thing. Dammit, some of my poems had been translated and published abroad, just enough to make everyone jealous of me, and this jealousy then fuelled their joy at how alone, how alone, how alone, how deservedly alone, I ended up. Want some advice? Never stake your whole personality on some high-school love. When the hallucination breaks, when the hormones of adulthood hold up a mirror, a hole appears that you’ve unknowingly been digging all the nights before. The more you enjoy it, the deeper you go. That boy, or girl, or whoever, then disappears into their own fate, while you realize that you’ve never given anyone else the chance to get to know you. And suddenly it’s late.

  The Cut saved me. I have to admit that I secretly rejoiced the moment it happened, although I had no idea what was in store for me. Overnight everyone was up in the air, without a foundation, without support, and they felt closer to me. Before they went to sleep, they knew how the world ticked, and the next morning they didn’t. Total chaos. All that noise made it easy indeed to ignore the screams of a cheated heart. I can still clearly remember that man standing in front of a dead ATM and persistently pressing the buttons, like he wanted to restart the system. He was dressed in a jacket, shirt and elegant shoes. Instead of a tie he had despair tightened around his neck. Were there tears running down his cheeks? Maybe I’ve embellished the memory a little. He just stood there pushing buttons. He didn’t look away, his eyes were entirely fixed at the screen and once a minute he stretched a finger towards the keypad, again and again hoping he’d get a response. I can appreciate that grown-up people can be completely dependent on the acts of strangers, can be inextricably bound within the web of this or that system. When the trust breaks, they look truly tragic. But I was prepared for it – not on purpose, but due to a particular set of circumstances. There was no violence, none of the looting, raping and rioting everyone would have expected, the people needed a few days to breathe it all in, and then the economy began to set itself up anew, hand-to-hand, mouth-to-mouth. There simply wasn’t any time for a large scale panic. A human has to eat.

  After the love-tragedy and with the state of the world in free fall, there was nothing out there to provide restraints, so I chose my own type. The irony of the cult of personality is not lost on me. I was obsessed with him for a while, just long enough for him to, as they say, fatally mark me. I don’t want to sully the text with that phrase. I followed in his footsteps, I went to Paris, I was an orator, a café attraction, an exhibitionist, I conversed with very intelligent people about the natures of human consciousness, and Car-Cut found me entirely prepared to help them pour the base and the superstructure into the monolith of poetry.

  Cats had been living under a strict military dictatorship for millennia. In their insufferable maltreatment they called on Bastet, but she was deaf to their supplications. Perhaps she had long since disappeared from this world, offered her children up to the clemency and inclemency of strangers. This proud order that used to sniff around the pyramids, that had brought down the Roman Empire, kept the plague in check and established medieval kings, is now reduced to rummaging around in city rubbish bins. To domesticated lives in the company of senile spinsters. And cast into the torture chambers of the most horrific of beasts. Ludovico extracted information from them like it was thread from the cocoons of silkworms. Miles and miles of it.

  ‘Are you trying to tell me you don’t know what the Great Cut is?’ he asks an older man who clearly does not belong here.

  Mr Bollinger sizes him up and insecurely wipes his sweaty palms on his trousers. He has forbidden his daughter to take part in this ‘assembly’ where duty, morality and a sense of the divine are all for sale. She had locked herself in her room and blared out music before slipping out, which is why he hadn’t noticed her absence until dinner time. Bollinger’s daughter Lucy is a big girl and she doesn’t miss meals. He burned her books. This person wrapped up in dirty sheets, with red flecks on his face, standing in front of him and asking improprieties symbolizes everything Bollinger thinks is wrong with the world. And yet he can’t help being curious. Although Lucy shouldn’t be so hard to find (he asked where they were selling food, but everyone looked at him like he was from another planet, then he scrambled around looking for discarded sweet wrappers that were nowhere to be seen, and even pressed his ear to the ground in case he might happen to pick up the vibration of her hefty steps; when he finally spied a bar of chocolate and began to believe his daughter was really here), he’s been looking for her for hours and beginning to lose hope.

  ‘Have you seen my Lucy? She’s blonde and a bit, well, a little on the hefty side, roly-poly, ample, she looks, well, plump. Perhaps you’ve seen such–’

  He’s interrupted by Semyona Sherdedova, who places herself between the two men.

  ‘The fatso? I’ve seen her! She’s over there with those fools in the animal skins, what do they call themselves again, some sort of kollektive? They’ve stripped her naked and now they’re worshipping her. Calling her Venus. They’re going to erect a temple to her, they said.’

  Mr Bollinger turns red in the face. He rummages in his pocket for his inhaler, finds it, puts it to his mouth and activates it. There’s something suicidal in the motion. All this shame! He doesn’t say thank you, he just storms off in the direction of the droning didgeridoos, pushing apart the bodies blocking his path.

  Semyona turns to Ludovico and gives him a friendly jab in the shoulder.

  ‘And what is it you know about the Cut, eh?’

  Ludovico assumes the professorial position: right arm across his stomach, left elbow cupped in the right hand and chin supported in his left hand. A moment of portentous silence.

  ‘It’s all the sock puppets’ fault,’ he says.

  Do you know that feeling when you’re sitting in a half-empty cinema and a six-foot-five guy with a hairstyle like the crown of a redwood enters and you just know, in your gut, that he’s going to sit right in front of you? That’s how Anwar feels when he sees a young man in a military uniform and a helmet on his head
slowly approaching. He could evade him – to his right there are three bored long-haired guys revelling in childhood memories, to his left there’s an old lady meditating in the lotus position, and behind him there’s also no sign of anything threatening – but his legs have turned to stone and a feeling of inevitability has entered his chest, so he just closes his eyes and waits for what must happen to happen. Either way it’s already too late. Everything is in motion.

  The first week after the Cut, paramilitary gangs expelled all first-generation immigrants from New England. Anwar hid himself from them at his professor’s, a feisty red-headed woman named Moitza Saëns who taught International Settlements, with whom he’d had a rather strange relationship a few years before. In exchange for getting a sneak peek at her tests and a stack of other information that facilitated his university career, each Thursday evening he had to go to her place to perform Odysseus. She’d tie him to a chair, shove a Viagra pill in his mouth and then, naked, do every manner of things in front of him. She called it the ‘dance of desire’. That’s all she wanted from him. For him to want her. He was, however, never allowed to touch her in any untoward manner. Once she’d sated her passions (a process that could take hours), she’d get dressed and untie him as if nothing had happened; he’d rush to the bathroom and masturbate like crazy.

  They resumed playing that game while he was hiding out at her place. Later he learnt that that’s when his sisters and father, who had no idea where Anwar was, were being tortured and killed by a section belonging to ‘Admiral’ Sherdedov (a child of Russian immigrants, born near Boston, who long before the Cut formed a tiny group of skinhead idiots and put together a database of undesired ‘hoomans’). Before the establishment of the transitional authority of the first UIGOPWTSOALSSV, which hunted down Sherdedov’s gang and sent them off to do forced labour in the sand quarries of Ohio, they’d set fire to Anwar’s flat and made life very difficult for anyone who was even suspected of being his acquaintance. Anwar still regards being bound to a chair, utterly willing but utterly helpless, as the defining metaphor for his life.