At the planetarium
They took the girls to the planetarium. Leaning her head back to take in the night sky, she remembered the farm where they lived in their last year at school, their first as a couple. It was the remnant of a much larger estate, still farmed by two siblings who lived there year round, having squandered their inheritances when younger. Brutal in the winter, when she ran alongside the tracks to get to class without freezing, but in the spring, they walked its 1,300 acres (as the brother sibling told them), sometimes at night, making love, as they thought of it, and then, lying together, took the heavens in.
Men came on to her like dogs in heat, each assuming his attractiveness. It felt out of place with her studies, but many of her classmates felt entitled. Then she took a class on poetry. He was the TA, a scholarship boy who loved the subject. That he
wrote poetry went unmentioned. The drift of poetry then was Lou Reed’s machinery, what he later called algorithmic avant la lettre. His patron. an older sort of poet, brought his sources to life. He wasn’t at all wary of their influence. The three of them are still friends. She was struck by his lack of presumption and his hesitation. Was he gay? No, he wasn’t, but he’d been burned a bit. That wasn’t something he ever talked about, but there it was in his poems when he finally shared them. In time, so was she and so were they, this family they made from scratch.
In the summer, they rented a house with two other couples. That it was coming up threw a wrench into her spring sabbatical. At first, she gave a fuck, although she saw how her absences undid him. By midterms, she saw he’d picked up the slack, rallying himself to fill in, papering over it all with hope, she guessed, despite the fallout of her trying to juggle her work and parallel life. The man had his own tracks to cover, but was better at it. “Do we go in on the place again?” was the question. Yes, she said. Yes. He was surprised, but she was more so. He can always take the kids while I enjoy myself: the wantonness of this thought briefly revived her sense of transgression, but then it faded again. It wasn’t like he was going off into the wilderness. These were their friends and they would talk.
Hope can be very much day by day, hour by hour. She never knew how it would go, improvising as she did. Something he did or said brought out her affection for him and they would make love, as she
still thought of it. “Don’t get your hopes up!” she wanted to blurt out, but was this just her parallel life trying to keep its own alive? What did she really want? Summer in the city is hard to bear, the children out of school and the atmosphere often fetid. Upstate, there was a lake, paths and lanes safe to walk or bike on, and the urbanity of their circle, giving itself a month off. Her clients went to Amagansett or further out, but to her that would be work, the need to look good for them. She needed to be far away.
The man could well have been one of the dogs of their college days, older and smoother. He caught her when she was fed up, which was odd, wasn’t it? Maybe seeing it is part of their deal, knowing when to move in, a skill they lacked at school, at least with her. There he was, the necessary man. Now summer loomed.
Parallel lives are a lot of work, so he appeared relieved. He didn’t say so, but she could tell. By autumn, though, he seemed obsessed. A downside of her being good in bed? They met and she told him to pull himself together. He looked like damaged goods, but aware enough to agree to stop. “I’m seeing a therapist,” he added. “Good idea,” she said. She didn't believe in them, especially for marriage. The lights came up slowly, like early morning in the country. They looked at the dinosaurs and he noted how parts of this barn of a place were like a decorative arts museum. They bought ice cream cones on the sidewalk and took the subway back.
The girls talked about the constellations, those stories. Their schools had reopened, the city was already crisper. Their friends called with dinner invitations. The New Yorker took his new poem.
Rites of spring and otherwise
One of his talents was to know that a dress in a store window would fit her. He went to galleries alone as he moved so quickly, seeking resonance. With dresses, it was accidental, happenstance, rare but if he knew it, he went in and bought it, gave it to her: I saw this. You might like it.
A sense of how she’d fill it out and set off all she brought to it, an all noticed at the start and acted on, since he knew it would work in some fashion to be lived out and discovered: you can’t really ask more than this, the arrival of an awaited other. It works
once and never again. Not that there aren’t others, but her claim had its ring fence of first, even if bent and twisted. Proof, he thought, of its making, a cosmic truth amid galaxies of illusion, real enough while unfolding. Never again: this word “never” they always had handy, like a purse-size automatic, 25-caliber, maybe.
He read a stanza and then waited while the translator grappled with it. Later, his host joked about the damage she inflicted, but he defended her. Almost nothing made it across, even when poet translators sat with the originators of the texts. He noted how Heian women stuck to their own tongue, inventing the novel, while the men wrote Hallmark Chinese verse. He spoke no Japanese, but it sounded like Italian when the women spoke it.
The capital had this high/low affect overlaid with menace. He could imagine disappearing into it, the loudspeaker trucks providing a baleful chorus, body parts left in the war criminals’ cemetery, just a finger, still glistening. He never had such thoughts at home. Only the ravens shrugged off the replication the city conveyed, everything a facsimile of something else. Where were the originals or the models? They certainly weren’t here. He posed this as a question: What was a Western city like for them? He mentioned Breathless, its mood. An old film. Did they even know it?
Every morning, they handed him a bill with four zeros, and later, an envelope of $100s. He brought it home undeclared, put them in his grandfather’s old
cloisonné jar to use for dinners out, buying art, and the occasional dress, a gift. Not that she couldn’t have any dress she wanted, but his were like a raven’s uncanny cut-through-its.
He was an imitation of himself here, he felt, speaking too quickly or colloquially, joking pointlessly, bewildered by their acted-out hierarchies and the way the language reversed its order, as the retained English words indicated. He wrote no poems. It took him a week to recover and a month to find his voice, although he was more read than heard, given his tendency to trail off or unsure how to say this line or that. Others declaimed, but he never rehearsed. The lines sounded flat or odd or better than expected, which slowed his pace: a good thing in Japan, the translators said.
The return, a long haul with occasional chants or even childhood prayers to stop the turbulence or the shaking, the ocean’s long stretch below them, the air inhospitable. All believers now, he imagined. He could never shake it off or find refuge in sophistication. All rational bets were off and he looked for intersession, offered a future sacrifice, anything to repay Her.
Spring greeted him. Restless, so they slept apart, then his mind and body found each other, reminding her once again how perfectly he fit.
A matter of degree
How simple it might have been to remain unmarried, but he’d wanted a family and was smitten, so here he was. There’s a built-in contradiction to it, as marriage leaves no hiding places for any differences impervious to alteration. A household is the stage on which domestic drama has its long run, the children as audience. Later, an internal chorus takes it up. By then he might accept how his efforts were traduced, though without malice.
Out in the world, randomness flitted through, but most people are handed their behaviors and follow blindly, their minds elsewhere. Knowing is a knowledge of others’ particularity, but she remains a mystery, her life an expression of her nature and a byproduct of her work.
This knowing of others is his only art. It reminded him of Tacita Dean’s film of Merce Cunningham rehearsing, barely directing the dancers, never raising his voice, light from the harbor pouring in and moving around, like the
upper-floor hotel rooms he favored, the performers taking each other’s measure, finding a repertoire of nuances on which something memorable depends. If his knowing others always ends badly, is it due to the lack of an audience? But then memory brings it back, just as a film does.
Her work takes her away and sometimes she lingers. Mementos are brought back, along with marks. This burdens things a bit, and then she lifts the ban, affection’s closer expressions resuming. He leaves her alone until it passes. Absenting himself for an afternoon takes the edge off of this.
His pursuits are mixed with fatalism and resignation, those two lucky rabbits’ feet. The I Ching suggests to hunt where there’s game, but some hunters deny they’re hunting. His world is one of constant exposure. He could chalk it up to statistics, but there’s a whiff of poesis. Modern life’s remarkably small owing to specialization and its corollary, no anonymity. It’s easier for her, whereas he has to fit it in between work and everyday life. Abbreviated, yes, yet one knows and extrapolates.
His idea of marriage is steeped in domesticity: perpetuating themselves and then organizing a future to pay for it. Knowing is incidental, pursued for its own sake until exhausted. Marriage’s barriers are Zen barriers, each with its koan. He could write his own Blue Cliff Record or Kafka aphorisms.
His idea of marriage reflects how mating sets aside any pragmatic qualms about the differences one notes immediately. Or we intuit their
importance to the genetic melding that follows, discovering traits that are the outcomes of eons of earlier unions, if that word applies to boundaries so porous. It’s a hunger for this that attracts us. Everything else is a nostalgic allegiance to a semblance of order or a neurological oddness she lacks, so one more thing they engineered out of the kids.
In conversation with two friends, one speculated that the three were on the spectrum, but emotive. Was it true? Everything had to align, “straighten up” given a literal meaning. A dialed-up version would compel it. His could pass it off as composition. His daughter has it, he realized, hidden as curation. The house is a cabinet of wonders but the back of it is out front like that Michael Frayn play, only no need to turn anything around.
There are places where order is scrupulously kept. Business takes him there on occasion, but with knowing it’s the view he remembers, along with the myopia of intimacy, or is it that the other senses come forward? In those worlds, for work or for pleasure, each retain aspects of the other.
Knowing’s beauty is theatrically lit. This relates to love slowing time, and when time loses that quality, the lighting changes. She’s enduringly beautiful, but time never slows with her as it does with them. This is part of marriage’s generality, while knowing proceeds deductively.
A certain slowness
If the main questions are true and viable, my life preNed had few affirmatives. Resolution was slow in coming until I learned to ferret out the clues they left. I could organize a small museum of them, but what medium exactly? In Ned’s world, he might tag walls with them when not modeling at art schools. I almost wrote “Ned world,” to which I have a season pass, renewable the way Virginia Woolf asked Leonard to renew their marriage. Ned World is a similar arrangement. We even sent out a ha-ha postcard.
Ned shares with LW forbearance and solidity. I almost wrote “patience,” but it ranges further, a buoyant confidence that I realize again and again is as viable as it gets. Truth is guile’s absence, benign, the calm unwrapped body I first saw while sketching it, drawn by his neutrality or is it non-
alignment? An analogy to sovereignty is apt, a mountain outpost with an ancient charter or an island kingdom that’s on no one’s map. Except mine, of course, sailing as I was on that spring afternoon, the weather finally warmer. Nora, I announced. “I’m Ned,” he answered, and offered his hand. All but unclothed, he could have been wearing a suit in that encounter, a layer of hair, fine and light against his skin. He wasn’t pale despite the recent winter, “owing to walking,” he told me later. He likes to walk. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him run.
My father had a 30-foot sloop, Canadian, a fast boat on which we went to Edgartown via the Cape May channel, the East River, and Woods Hole, pausing at Block Island and other places. He grew older and sold the boat. I dated sailors, but their answers failed to measure up. “I admire swimmers, but I can only dog paddle. I like to look at the water,” Ned mentioned. Life can be lived in reverse, experiencing what proves ephemeral, becomes a memory that’s enough when you factor in the inconvenience. Dad also liked to camp. Those journeys involved tents and things I had to pump.
Ned World involves neither of these things. I like to swim, but I do that alone. Ned likes to walk and is fine with company or on his own. He never asks, “Want to take a walk?” He just heads out and in time he returns, and then I learn what Ned’s world had to show him, a recurring feature.
Life swans, sidles, or slithers in, preferring a window or a side entrance. I want it to enter
properly, declare itself, conduct its business openly. If my world was any other, the sheer falseness of life would get to me, but Ned finds it silly, that part, and finds the human responses to it poignant, the source of a comedy always tinged with sadness, like a Mozart piece.
Pen in hand: this is how it is with me. Ned draws me writing, saying that my body’s there and my mind is God knows where. “When I model, it’s the same. I’d respond unless I absented myself, but where I go is entirely blank. Like a wall painter, I think of it as flat, matte, unreflective. As well as keeping my body docile, it’s like staring at red then seeing green, only blank’s opposite is riotous. I carry that home and paint it. Nothingness is the uterus, I learned from modeling. Creativity depends on it.”
Ned has a few large canvases in process. He’ll photograph one and post it with a price and expiration date. He bases the price on something seen he feels is comparable. The basis for it is tentative, but if asked, he articulates his reasoning. It comes down to his sense of his evolution as a painter and where the painting fits “if I think like an art historian.” His education took him down that path before he abandoned it, “but it can’t be, once you get it. Dealers are the blunt end of this, and my pricing is in homage.”
True and viable: the answers can conform and yet be malleable, or are theories put out as such. One 11 May, proof arrived. We went to France the next month because of it; the rest went in the bank. We
live carefully, as fits a household of our type, barely registering on Mammon’s scales. It all goes unremarked, unless you count the followers, but I do write up his walking anecdotes. I write from memory, but I have a feeling for his voice. He’s also a character in my fiction, Charles, borrowed from a more famous walker.
Lines come to mind
That her taste was exquisite became one of life’s facts. Everyone else paled in comparison. So, he followed fashion compulsively, read the food section, thought about clothes and restaurants, and none of this had ever been his concern. He went to elaborate measures to interact with her, even managing to have dinner in the country and then drive back with mutual friends, but she joked about a lover she was dropping. This went on and on.
An interest in fashion persisted, kept alive by a few writers. He abandoned the food section for HTSI and Konfekt, imagining the lives those women led, which reminded him of his childhood. The models were sometimes striking. The ads had them too, but Konfekt cleaved to an imagined reality, as he thought
of it, his imagination overlapping its reproduction of a life he extrapolated from a long-ago that lived on in his Kodachrome memory.
His life was divided into repetitive phases: detached wonder; attachment; and detached regret and its side effects, watered down over time like the pandemic virus. The schisms were less pronounced, if schism was the right word for the sundered nature of his life, like losing a limb (or did it just go to sleep?). Static jostled him and restarted it all, but first detached wonder returned with its unanswerable questions. Is it not better not to slip into attachment? But “not to slip” was also a line: sliding in regardless.
All the particulars came back to mind in this state. He could read the ads or Konfekt with the impunity print affords, images to be read into, and this was possible now in real life, this nonattachment, finally grasped due to two decades of walking meditation through delusion’s gamut. Taken as directed, particulars were the senses in the rough order of their accrual. Life also has them, of course, but he paid more attention when in love.
Impunity was the reigning delusion, immunity only coming later and then tentatively at first. But he was immune, he felt sure. Yet every last breath of desire stirs despite the aging of its object, he saw, as she walked on in front of him. Still, the impulse stayed in the world of detachment. “Only coming later” was a possible line, with its hint of deferral, although on occasion he never came at all. Another
of life’s facts, but could he bank on it, like clairvoyance? “You tie one hand behind your back as you don’t think it’s fair to others otherwise” the psychic told him. In this life, hubris was a risk. A line would come to him that he carried until he could sit down and write. He never knew when this would happen, but this was true of everything. They say that dementia is constantly being surprised, but this is also normal life’s wonder floating through or his walking through it. A line would come and he would write a poem, to be reconsidered in stages. When he gathered his poems, they asked their main question and he was unsure how to answer it or, more accurately, his answers varied.
When they were wet, they wanted him for as long as possible, so they went on and sometimes he eventually came and other times he didn’t. Each came memorably, but attachment came with it.
Konfekt condensed the rituals of eating and talking to print feature length. His imagination ran with it, stretched it out. He considered how they’d move once they’d had their fill of this pictured “rest.” This was closer to “real life,” if not quite as exquisite as her red hair and blue eyes in the ad.
They're all in the West
A card-carrying member of the Writers’ Union, for all the good it did him. He trekked daily to the ministry that handled the cultural elite of the old regime, in an effort to secure a pension of some kind. Meanwhile, he considered selling the Volvo, a perk of his position. His wife, once a cover girl for a popular glossy the party published, left in the first week. She had relatives and he’d hoped to hear from her and follow, but no word came. Her address book was nowhere to be found, so presumably she took it. He only remembered a few names: Trudy and
Charlotte? Their photos were also gone. The only traces of her were what she associated with him. The official publishing house was shuttered. His longtime editor was also gone, but his secretary answered when he rang her up, still living in her flat, she said, unsure what to do next. “They’re all in the West,” she told him, when he asked about other writers who’d interacted with the editor. Had she heard from him? A pause. “No, which disappoints me a little. We worked together for a long time. He did call me to say he was leaving, but then not a word. It’s the same with the rest. I think of following them, but could I really find a suitable position? Here at least I have a flat.”
It improved both their moods to be in contact. It led him to take out his notebook and consider the next lined pages, starting where he’d left off some months ago. It was true, he thought, that he was free now to write about anything at all. What he published in the past was at best a curiosity for some excavator of these postwar decades. At worst, would they taint anything new he might write, the way Heidegger was made to suffer for his prewar flirtations? He was, more than most, an official poet, writing odes to the regime. But there were other things, hidden even from his wife. Did she read them without his knowing? His decades of philandering prompted her exit, he guessed, but that source material had had its own prompts.
Well, those days were clearly over. But they’d agreed to meet. He’d always gone out of his way to
treat the secretary with old-school deference. The editor abused her, he imagined, just as he abused his writers. He was the higher official, after all. He got on well enough with him to be granted a larger flat, an allotment garden with a small cabin, and the Volvo, as his poems enjoyed official favor. Reviewing these remaining assets, unlikely to attract the privateers, he wondered if he could effect a consolidation.
“We have to stick together,” he put it to her later. By then, they’d spent a few weekends at the cabin. She liked to garden, she said at once, a trait she had in common with his wife. He didn’t, but evidence of his wife’s attachment to it was apparent to them both, and they enjoyed whatever survived her absence. She also spent more time with him at his flat, bigger and better furnished than her own. These were selling points, he imagined.
The Volvo, kept in good condition, sealed the deal. Petra sold her flat and moved in with him. While not exactly young, her idea of companionship extended to an undemanding intimacy. He felt liberated from a marriage derailed by egotism, as she was remarkably free of neuroses. And they were both free of the party. No more paeans, no more minor officials.
She proved a better editor than her boss. She found his private work, when he showed it to her, poignant and filled with irony. Poems, short stories, novellas, novels, she read it all, discussing them intelligently and laying out a plan to get them
published “in the West,” although it was Germany now, reunited by fiat. Her address book was full of contacts “across the border,” diligently recorded while she served as the editor’s proxy. “They imagined your odes wrote themselves, a natural outgrowth of their importance, so your official work is really the regime’s. Only this work is yours.”
She was soon on the phone, talking animatedly with one editor or another as she made her way through her address book. She seemed to remember all her encounters, in person or correspondence, with an unerring instinct for what to say, what to put forward, how to get them to advance money to have things copied and sent, and later to negotiate the deals, including translations, and film and television rights. How did she know all this? “I asked them,” she said. “Whenever they visited or wrote, I asked as many questions as I could. Perhaps they saw how it might be in the future. And I read between the lines myself, of course, but I didn’t want to leave.”
Nor did he, he realized, but they traveled to Frankfurt that October as a newly married couple, enjoying the attention his first book received, touted by his publisher as a brilliant work “for the drawer” of this East German sophisticate, hidden in plain sight behind his official duties.
It was all Petra’s doing, but he recounted it as directed. She took particular care not to contradict the actual facts, anticipating that publicity might bring out colleagues from their past. He never criticized the editor who’d employed them both,
saying that everyone either had to live with the regime or flee it, and they chose to stay. That the editor had fled and they hadn’t, even now, made this ring true. “As is always the case with regimes like this, they control what they can see, but the mind rolls on, believing in the possibility of finding an audience at some future point. It happened much sooner than I could have hoped. But we’re natives, my wife and I, attached to our part of Germany and our tiny bit of its countryside.”
Petra eventually heard from the editor, who’d finally found work in the publishing arm of a public agency. He apologized for being out of touch, blaming the exigencies of his situation. “It must be gratifying for you to be married to a writer who found success on both sides of the wall,” he added. She read the letter aloud after opening it. He owed it all to her, he said, but she shook her head. “I felt my life was entirely wasted, those first few months, but then you called to remind me we were still here, two natives, as you put it. When I read your private work, it confirmed the rumors but also told me you’d liberate yourself and I would help you. We didn’t have to go to the West. We had some work to do, but much of it was done already.”
He took her hand and kissed it. “A journey, not without its moments, but none of it ever cohered into sense. I wrote against it, the way one tacks back and forth to make headway. When I sailed on our lake, I imagined a hidden opening, It was never clear to me where it led, but whenever I wrote, I thought of it."
His
sense of poetry
Why you fall in love in the first place is like the door of a desired home that proves on opening it and stepping through to be only the first of many, not all of them your own. I could say “rooms,” but “homes” feels truer to what unfolded, not always even seen and yet I could see them by extrapolating from the sorts he liked or where he was likely to be found. What you fall in love with in the first place is the nature of the man. Even in the absolute worst of it, there was this thread that no one else could break
and I could always see. I can’t say I reeled him in, but I took him back.
Why he fell in love with me was bound up with this thread. I held my own in all respects, even if others waylaid him accidentally. I lived through it numerous times, a pattern and so not fixed the way a compulsion is, but gloriously unhinged in both directions, immense production and in time the clinic or the asylum, depending on who found him. It predated me and I overlooked it, because he was the real thing, however terrible it could be.
His sense of poetry was like those enormous atom-smashers you can’t get near with a watch on because it will yank it off your wrist or pull items of clothing from you if they have metal fittings. Yet they win Nobel Prizes with them, plumbing this or that mystery down to its sub-particles.
We were taken for an urban couple with a daughter, sought after as dinner guests, our own soirées “important” to our circle and those who observed it. A circle is like this, if it has any gravity, pulling people into its orbit. There’s anti-gravity too, of course, the attract/repel nature of personality, but “however terrible” cut right through this.
There’s no cure, I saw early on. It’s like those beach-front houses that wash away in storms, or if you’re lucky, are standing but filled with sand. It’s still paradise, you tell yourself, so you salvage it or rebuild.
You grasp that life is portable, that you can close the door behind you if necessary, but this didn’t
actually apply to us, owing to the thread or tendril, maybe. There were other forces in play, like the rays in the movies that pass through walls, flashing alluringly or giving off sparks around the edges of his tailored suits. He should have come with a warning, I felt, but this could apply to any number of men.
Then suddenly it was over, the one thing giving out that didn’t occur to either of us, and not at home but in a cab, the driver flummoxed, barreling pointlessly to emergency. I’d written him out of the picture and life took this literally. But no, he’d come back, just as I knew he would.
His reputation has suffered, not least from the accounts of others. When I’m dead, when they unearth our letters, it will suffer more, despite his post-facto diagnosis. His poetry will find its place, likely a better one than his detractors have it. I never defend his work. I fell in love with him, his nature. We had this thread. I’d do it again. In a heartbeat.
Times two (or four, or even 11)
Meet the unconscious, he thought, drifting in and out of sleep. He wondered if she shared this sense of another self or selves, more likely, that were often more interesting than his conscious thoughts, expressed or just below ordinary life except at rare moments? How even to ask about this eluded him, but occasionally their bodily interactions led to a brief and mutual clarity in the sense of finally quieting the rest so their heat and breath spoke a common, natural language within which a few essential thoughts could be said between them and then remembered. He would set them down, whereas she would come back to them later.
Some say that the unconscious is our suave companion, while others see a plot. He fell into the former school, in keeping with his benign outlook, while she was unable to see motives for what they were. Strangely, this didn’t blunt her appetite for whatever made her heart race. He tried to extrapolate what her unconscious might be, or
possibly she lacked one? That would be a rare thing, but would explain her surface tension, like that topmost layer of water that certain flies can walk on. Below it, too many fathoms to count, self-lighting fish gather around spouts of methane, a depth that rocked the room and made her start violently at night. If this was her unconscious, it was a brute force, notwithstanding those fish.
He searched for them sometimes and she’d stretch out and roll up and stretch out as deep, deeper he tried to find where those fish were hidden. When they first met, he guessed the tension part but the depths were a surprise, like stepping into the grey ice piled up at a crosswalk and feeling his shoe fill up with cold water. Yet her motive, what passed for it, drew her to him. Mr. Suave and his stunt double worked for her. She held his arm, turned full wattage on him so men were envious. Whatever rose up, rose up at night, visible far off, coming, coming, carrying everything with it. The bed was a sight when this happened, but it didn’t always.
Mr. Suave appeared on those nights of calm. Mrs. Suave, he called her, and he could see clear through her to Australia or some other blue/blond place where she was more normally put together. “Are you there?” he’d ask. “There I am,” she’d answer, pointing at the bathroom or the closet or the window. Then she’d pull him over. Mr. Suave was nowhere around, but somewhere down deep, those self-lit fish were just waiting to be found.
Lucks of the draw
Consuelo was the name she chose when she'd reached that moment when choosing a name felt useful, imperative even. Then there was the choice of a suitable body in which to incarnate. No one, in the before times, had realized that a body could be so rapidly tailored, but warp was now the norm, to use that leftover expression. Anyway, she chose and the mirror told her in holographic detail how her name and body were all of a piece. These were the choices she could control, whereas it was still hit-or-miss when old-school humanity made up the field.
“Not too perfect,” she specified. Perfection was a giveaway and its shelf life was an issue. Some shed and reincarnated almost seasonally, but she wanted to stretch it out, experience maturation and aging. Imperfections made this simpler. This impulse was a breakthrough; her version’s consciousness allowed it and they intended for her to make the most of it.
Viktor came up randomly. Destiny is a Monte Carlo engine tapping an immense trove of human data. Not entirely so, as she’d entered keywords. Nor was he the first. He was 28th, the outcome of search refinement and words of encouragement. Emotion was the other breakthrough. When Viktor came up, she felt something entirely new. “This one!” she said.
Viktor was inconveniently at a distance, living in the industrial city where he was born and raised. His father ran a factory, and his mother taught piano and composed music performed by her and others in her circle. There were five children. Viktor was the third, the only boy. His talent was poetic. His mother enlisted him to write the lyrics she set to music, then a libretto for her most ambitious project, an opera. He too had a circle, overlapping hers, but he also worked at the factory, soon taken off the floor and asked to write slogans for the workers and ads for its products. He and his mother wrote jingles. One particularly catchy one about a tractor in love with its fields became their first hit.
Her handlers assigned Consuelo a flat in the city. For a month, she immersed herself in it, tuning her
comprehension of the language to its local variants. She went to cafés and bars alone. Striking, men constantly made passes, but she engaged them in conversation, probing what they did while absorbing how they said it and what accompanied it. In the market, she made small talk with the other shoppers about the cost of goods and their quality. She had her hair done and talked with the hairdressers, always listening, watching. A month in, she called on Viktor’s mother.
She introduced herself, said that she could sing and had heard that the woman had written an opera. “I’d like to sing it,” she said. “Could you give me some part of the score, accompany me, and let me try it?” This was just odd enough that his mother agreed at once. Hour after hour, they made their way through the score, including parts that his mother noted were unresolved. Later in the day, her two youngest children reappeared. Viktor and his father arrived around six. They listened as Consuelo sang the parts, transposing them as needed, a mezzo-soprano with a big range.
She stayed for dinner, telling them snippets of her backstory to justify her presence in the city. Her command of the local dialect cemented their sense of someone who’d left and then returned, dissatisfied with every other place, “unhappy,” as she put it, owing to an emptiness that followed her around until she could stand it no longer.
Consuelo and Viktor's mother became close collaborators. The opera, which was stalled, soon
took form and Viktor was caught up in it, writing and rewriting as his mother composed and Consuelo sang. Two months into it, they gave a recital for her circle, who were electrified by it. Word spread and other performers were recruited. A critic whose parents lived in the city saw a poster for it and attended. Overwhelmed, he wrote about it.
Viktor had a real genius for lyrics and a vivid imagination he shared with his mother. She just had to say a few prompting words and he’d sketch out the scene. Consuelo gave his lines emotional depth, which led them to revise, dig deeper into their wellspring. To get past his monumental reserve without wrecking the apparatus was her challenge. Their union would be unconventional, but then so were her desires, especially for him.
It was Viktor’s father who suggested that they marry. Specifically, he suggested that she move in so the three of them could work together more conveniently. Marriage, he told her privately, would be a good cover story, as the city was conventional if not conservative. They duly registered. On the strength of their collaboration, they were able to convert two adjoining flats as a studio and rooms, connecting them in a way that wasn’t obvious from outside. She and Viktor slept apart but worked together intensively. Their fame spread, and soon they and their ensemble were touring. Their work gave them a shared charisma. Her body conveyed the emotions their songs conveyed, occasionally overwhelming her, especially on stage.
Words like “incendiary” described her performance. This was their sex life, she understood. Viktor knew her like a lover, his lyrics giving shape to her voice and the emotions she conveyed, to him most of all. It was time, her handlers felt. Her voice and art were at its height, but ordinary time, human time, left her imperiled. Her touring life was also a factor. While fascinated by the way it played out, they nonetheless set off the cancer that struck her, fast and relentless, dead in a month. A hiatus followed, as advised, and an upgrade to the next version, all that knowledge still there in memory.
Consuelo was mourned, a gift to Viktor and his mother, to their family, their city, their fans. In time, her handlers sent a replacement by the same method, another mezzo-soprano, in keeping with their organization's motto, "No harm, no foul."
Experiments in living
“Perfection this time,” she said, as they added the testosterone. The name? Alain, the image told her: film-star good looks and a cinematic mix of sunny and something more. "That!" she said, and it was so. They set him within the floating world of art and design, a substantial line of credit to get him past any need for background. He immersed himself in it, a man of no fixed abode, always brilliantly turned out, shedding clothes bought in one city and acquiring others. He spoke whatever languages were
needed, with Parisian French as his mother tongue, lending plausibility to his cultural nous.
See and be seen was his opening gambit. It led to proposals of different sorts, including offers of small roles in films. He found that he made much faster progress there, and it connected him to fashion. The small roles led to more serious ones, and soon he didn’t need to talk his way into fashion shows, he was welcome and seated accordingly, a comer, and yet a mystery.
Part of the press thrives on deconstruction. Its methods are deductive, questions to be answered. He gave no interviews and declined to comment. “A citizen of nowhere,” someone reported. “No trace of him in Paris.” Yet there he was, speaking like a native. This sparked rumors and theories.
In April, he flew to Granada and took a bus south to the Alpujarra, where he’d rented half of a house from a psychoanalyst, trained in Madrid, who'd abandoned it to learn about the medicinal plants of the region. Alain had long since paid down his credit line, and here he could live indefinitely. He befriended a founding family living lower down, riding in their van to the nearest market town. He helped the naturalist plant and tend his garden. And he befriended an American a few minutes’ walk away, 21 or 22, described by the naturalist as quite interesting but a bit crazed.
She came here to learn Andalusian Spanish, her preferred variety, and get away from everything one
comes to Alpujarra to evade. She felt it was better to work through it here than to inflict it on others there.
He immersed himself in conversations with his neighbors, assisted in local tasks, which often depended on strenuous cooperation, and began to write up his impressions of the world he’d left. He discussed this with her, reading from his drafts and talking about the whole of it, finally divulging the fact that he was a mere essence, as he thought of it, although tangibly present here and there as matters of choice, the life he’d wanted to lead. What life, he asked, did she want to lead?
She didn’t completely follow his explanation of self, but his question she answered immediately. “It’s why I came here, having no idea what to do with what I know.” Alain pointed to the naturalist as an example of how some find their way, since one profession is something like another. He noted how acting in films relates to fashion or resonates there, and how clothes are one way we signal or mask our intent. Analyzing, cataloguing, and determining the effects and side-effects of his previous world was for him like the naturalist's work, “pointing to hawthorn as opposed to foxglove, as he might put it.” She said she felt her life required exactly this learning or these insights, to navigate it successfully.
“We’re here to get past ourselves,” he told her. “We arrive prewired and navigate by probabilities, but this is ‘human, all too human’ and misses our possibilities. Desire is in the mix with its destructive birth-and-death conflation and the way it causes
collisions with others as we try to find a suitable partner. Getting past ourselves can be a lifetime project if we have the patience and the stamina. It means consciously acquiring imperfections, the missteps that go to the heart of nature’s approach to us as a species.”
She saw how perfect he was beneath the stubble, the dirt and scratches. A bit weathered, but that seemed to be one of his goals for coming here.
“We chalk life up to randomness or destiny,” he said. "Our moods weigh on whether our past is something to build on or a hindrance. If, by some quirk of fate, you could choose your life in order to know it and know yourself, you’d still need to live it out, find the through line of experiences as you take them in and work with them.” A remark about Freud and Rorty that one of her professors made that she didn’t get at the time came to mind. They went together, she realized, much like Freud and Lacan.
He waved his manuscript. “This is done. I have to get back to the world I left, and you should do so.
A useful break in our respective lives, but it’s time.”
She nodded. “I’ve kept that door open, knowing I’d want to return at some point. These conversations have helped me, a seminar of sorts.” He laughed. “Just whatever I’ve picked up. And whatever it was that ailed you, you seem to have recovered."
Something about rhyming
Sex, hex, treks, wrecks, flex. Lips, hips, ships, blips, sips, dips, rips. Clit, slit, flit. Flower, power, bower. Her glasses were a preoccupation. Moon, June, loon, spoon. Try as she may, rhymes injected themselves in her thoughts. She could imagine the hotels where they fucked, the cities they walked around, dapper and then sinister, and retrospect did him no favors. They say a poet should have a model to study, imitate, absorb, get over, transcend. It struck her as odd. Getting over was surely heartache and
transcendence happened to others, it was rumored, or was long gone.
Novels were an exception, something to carve up or excise, bring forward and reconnect, saying the words aloud slowly or hesitatingly, a voice rising and falling unrealistically as the gaps between them threw her. Or she wrote letters as she imagined a poet writing letters, sighing as life marches past or joking about her quirks and invoking a lover on a staircase and a still half-open door at the top. It bordered on stories, but they were letters and not a little romantic, like the families in War & Peace, divided so she didn’t need a scorecard. She couldn’t see how he wrote such an epic, all of Moscow jammed into it plus French regiments. She pictured how it could be mined for words, but would they rhyme? His rhymes were less obvious.
Sometimes they went to look at the sea. Wave, stave, rave, brave. “Fave,” she added. “Fave makes five,” as indeed it did. The sea fell upon rocks and there wasn’t really a beach. Elsewhere, yes, but she wasn’t much a beach girl, more an onlooker where the sea fell upon rocks. (Socks, locks or lox, pox, docks.) She pushed her glasses back against the bridge of her nose, stared at the text, then set it down. She thought of her new friend, who arrived wearing a stunning thing borrowed from her mother, she said. Whose is this closet of wonders, she wondered, even if she knew the answer, but she could only infer the closet’s keeper from the clothes she passed along. This particular morning, her friend
wore a colored blouse, almost Madras but not. She meanwhile wore what she wore, but felt that poets had no need for elegance in this sense, only the rhymes, words brought out of the darkness.
Beach, leech, teach, reach, screech. Blouse, louse, house, douse, spouse. Shouldn’t they marry? A mother’s question, like earlier ones about traipsing from one hotel room to another and the gap that time diminished, but not her queasiness. Queasy, easy, breezy, sleazy. It felt like a passageway too narrow and insinuating, the sounds, though muffled, an undertow. This was not necessarily accurate, she thought to herself, never being entirely sure despite her retrospective sense of dread.
Replicants. How would you know? It seemed like she’d know, but could she be sure? They were subject to time, so if he he’d been one, he’d be older now. It would explain for example his depressive or fatalistic nonchalance. Fate, late, spate, crate, mate. But nothing came of it except the damage.
Who'd choose such a life, or fabricate it? Only a mother could love, and that involved no chemistry or sleight of hand. Well, enough of that or enough of him, the sea coming back to mind with its rocks and seals. Each time, she left a bit of him there, like the stubs of cigarettes that marked where the beach met the parking lot. It was like this, she felt, it would be like this, a trace that spoke of our tendency for order in the midst of transience or its edge conditions. There and gone. Who'd choose such a life?
What do they want, after all?
“Mars, no.” Peter said. Lately, others things interested him more. The political project, once so promising, was on the ropes, but things had brightened up. He slipped behind the one-way mirror, an old-school gesture, to be sure. Two people were in the room, a woman and a man. The door opened and the handler walked in. Small talk followed that he didn’t bother to overhear, but then the conversation settled down.
Peter glanced at his briefing sheet: a model and a poet who asked to be brought in, a rare case of two replicants seeking each other out. Usually they were
paired with humans, as this was the fastest way to move things along. Yet aberrations could be interesting, he thought.
Their memories of childhood were the issue. It was too closely shared and thus unrealistic: “Not even identical twins would remember it so similarly,” the man said. He wanted his to be altered.
“There’s something incestuous about it,” the woman added. Dan and Ann, names they’d be given not chosen. The handler told Dan that they’d arrange for difference and were glad for the feedback. “It doesn’t usually arise. Two replicants pairing up is the exception.” The woman spoke up. “It’s wrong to rob us of childhoods. I’ve spoken with others, and they feel it too, a deficit they can’t completely close.”
The handler seemed to hesitate, so Peter decided to intervene. The wall unclouded and he spoke. “Replication is a process. We tune it on different spectra, but we also give you a degree of free will. Your names indicate less of it, to see if it makes any difference. Still, you had enough of it to ask to be paired. We went along with it because it can be instructive. We were curious if your work would be affected but that’s not your complaint. What bothers you is the overlap, accentuated by your pairing. Being paired with a human can damp this down.”
The handler found her voice. “Among humans, incest has evolutionary consequences, but replicants are unaffected. Literature has siblings falling in love, like Musil's Agatha and Ulrich.” Ann lit up. “I read it! They're drawn to each other, but they hold back.”
The handler hesitated again. “What are you thinking?” Peter asked. “Why hold back?” she said. “My replicant and I share a childhood, but we make a game of it, imagining we grew up in a blended family and fell in love. If it happens to humans, it triggers accusations that are unfair. We see ourselves as a non-duality, living in a duality-centric world.”
“Mars, no,” Peter thought again. “This is where the action is.” Ann and Dan had perked up. The handler gave them what they were missing. In the debrief, she named it as frisson. “They said ‘don’t change a thing.’ It always seems to turn out that way, although of course we’re a limited sample.”
One afternoon is like another
Encountering an acquaintance while out walking a few days ago, he was surprised by her question, “What are you exactly?” A poet, he supposed, like his wife was a painter, but they’d long practiced as architects together. They met in school and found they detested the big firms it saw as their fate. They moved west, opened a tiny office in the hills, a carriage house of sorts that was split into two parts by the entry to a large house behind. As architects, they were complementary, as they’d been at school. She brought her aesthetic and he brought the kind of rigor that could be found in his poems, a sense of lines that had to scan, whereas her sense of them fell into place in an entirely different way. Yet they made it work.
She modeled for other artists, and they painted each other and each other’s families. She talked it through with clients while he listened and took notes. He wrote it up as scenes, brief stories she read and sometimes gave to clients to read. This method won them a devoted following, word of mouth at first and then queries: “I saw my friend’s house.”
In between the houses was what they felt was their own work. They never exactly said this to each other, because they were architects, after all, and bespoke, a practice bordering on art and involving a devoted army that provided the craft. They saw themselves as Slow in the Tuscan/Alice Waters sense, compensating for its leisure-class overtones by hewing to scales appropriate for a human experience of nature. This looked back to regional ancestors, which was okay with them. "Regional" didn't scare them.
She’d rouse herself, have a studio exhibit and sale. Before it opened, he’d take a few things, small portraits he put up in his writing room in their country house, along with other painters’ portraits of her. If he’d had any talent for painting; she’d be his model like Bonnard’s wife had been. Bonnard, Matisse, and Diebenkorn were her tradition.
The scenes that came to mind from listening to them talk spoke to how light played through rooms and how they opened to a garden, with its terrace, and a view. Traveling, they noted how this ran through the most disparate places, a hunger for it
that must be fundamental to how some humans create a world to which they can relate.
This was what their work provided to others of that sort. It was published by editors who found it resonant, prompted by photographers who saw it. They were always mentioned by their clients, and his scenes were often quoted.
“What exactly are you?” is a journalist’s question, and the acquaintance he'd run into fell in that category. When he encountered her again, he asked her if she was writing a novel. She blanched, he saw, so he rescued her: “I’m also writing one. I find that fiction’s as useful as poetry.”
“I decided early on not to be a working poet, but just to write poems,” he added. “It comes down to others’ expectations. It’s why we still practice. Those houses pay the bills, take the credit, and draw the criticism. It doesn’t preclude ambition. A friend, also an architect, saw Borromini as his competition. My ambitions don’t run that way, but I work within a tradition and what’s happening around me filters in, inevitably, because it’s here and now, not back then. The themes are perennial, even if the details vary. Humans are human, and nature is nature.”
One afternoon is like another, he thought, walking back, like Pessoa’s take on Lisbon, each moment of it he experienced memorably the same.
John J. Parman is a Berkeley-based writer and editor.
Published by Snowden & Parman Editorial (spedit.net) and offered by The Pallas Gallery (thepallasgallery.com or @_p_a_l_l_a_s_) in San Francisco (1111 Geary Boulevard, 94105), whose Pallas Annex is shown to the left.
Text and images © 2024 by John J. Parman
Poets & Models is a set of 14 brief stories, unfolding in a somewhat dialectical way, about two human types and, on occasion, their replicant counterparts, as well as their handlers and their handlers' handlers (or "they," as the replicants think of them when not in the same room with them, airing their complaints).
