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We agreed ‘The Vase’ was very touching: we’ve got emotion! The extract from ‘Cappucino Carpe’ just has to make all of you laugh and humour is key! As for Logic Primer, we hope it will intrigue you as much as our team! Element of surprise? Check! What more could you ask?
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Logic Primer
Dear Roberta,
My angel, if you’re reading this with just by Zeph Auerbach your eyes, then you can’t get far. You’re the one who taught me to always read with a pencil in one hand, so as to cross out all the nonsense. I remember the first day we met. It was a cold day in mid February, and I was waiting for our replacement lecturer in Room VII in Brasenose College. The moment you walked in, a shiver ran down my spine, and I don’t know whether that was because I was suddenly so close to the first female Wykeham Professor of Logic, or just because of the striking architectural beauty of the lines on your face and the order to your finely braided black hair. And you looked at me – me, a jittery undergraduate boy with Harry Potter glasses and the world’s most pathetic moustache. I remember etching into the margin of my neat quadrille paper: Dr. R. Postgate Arrives. The first thing you taught me about logic was that it’s all about consistency. How the only things logic rules out are those which directly contradict each other. I remember your smoothly elevated smile as you told the class: nobody is trapped by logic. Logic is what defines all possibilities. You did not look into my eyes again. I remember wishing that I would see you on that Friday, when we’d both be at the 30th of the month college banquet. But I did not see you for what felt like so long. I felt completely trapped in my solitary college cell, and I told nobody about what I had sensed. I discovered that not only did you have a husband, but you had sons, and a whole life entirely separate from me. I didn’t even dare to mention it to my closest friend here at college, Patrick, who is – unlike me in all respects – charming, strong and handsome, and is even planning to be an RAF pilot next year. Patrick would have just laughed at my foolish overreach. It was not to be. Logic ruled out love. Then one Friday I received a note from you in my pigeon hole. You said you wanted an undergraduate’s eye on a logic primer you’d written. I remember walking so carefully to your basement office, ensuring so much precision in every step. I remember the bell taking an eternity to strike its four o’clock. When I arrived I didn’t even have
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to say hello, I saw you from the corridor, at your desk, and knew I was permitted to sit down right next to you. You taught me to read through the lines of crisp propositional calculus with just my fingers. You were making notes on the suggestions I was giving, and occasionally you would fetch a peach pebble eraser from your right jacket pocket to make corrections. I have always been tremendously frustrated when the logic of things does not work out; when I cannot get my way. You had on your deadly serious face, the same as you’d maintained for the whole of that first lecture, and you repeated what you’d said that day, that only fools are trapped by logic. And then the next time you made a mistake in something you wrote, I made a decision, and it felt as if the world stopped turning for just one second as I dipped my fingers into that left jacket pocket and retrieved the eraser myself. Because of your family, and because I still lived with my mother, we had to meet in the college. Sometimes, if we were daring, in Room VIII, to remind us of the first lecture. On a few precious occasions you would wear your hair up in a beret, just like you had done that day. Or else we would schedule additional logic tutorials in your office, where – after retrieving your eraser – we’d first kissed. I remember looking down from your window there and seeing my snotty-nosed peers shuffling between tutorials in the quad. Once I saw Patrick there and it exhilarated me to think that he would not even have imagined to look for me by aiming his thick spectacles in the direction of the office of the Dr. R. Postgate. That room was a place of singular perfection, as exquisite on each meeting as it was on that morning of our first kiss. I am going to end this. So we went on – despite your husband, despite your little Mary and Veronica. At group tutorials I would secretly drop folded notes into your jacket pocket, and you later said that this must’ve been why for your whole life you’d always left your jacket pockets entirely empty, waiting for those messages from me. But then it happened so very quickly: you left me messages; you did not leave me messages. I thought at first that perhaps it was because it was difficult for you to communicate with me, maybe because I was one of the few students without a pigeon hole and so on. But you do not even look at me now. It does not help, to return over and over again to that time you first summoned me to your office, for extra help with my essay. The door to your office is now as firmly closed as it was on that day, but I will never knock on it again. I heard that you were being considered to be the Wykeham Professor of Logic, but in the end they chose somebody else. The first thing you taught me about logic is that it’s about the abortion of possibilities in the womb of the imagination, before the world can ever give them birth. Logic is what denies possibilities. Perhaps you could have taught me more. But of course we never had any additional tutorials, and we never will. You once lectured on how people like to think that they believe certain things when really it is quite impossible for them to do so, for their beliefs are logically incompatible. We hold onto many beliefs that if we rigorously examined – if we logically checked them each against each – we would realise cancel out. For it takes even a sharp mind a little time just to realise why a man never thinks well of his widow’s father. How beautifully
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things cancel out: strike them through, strike them through, and all that will be left will be the truth. Copyright © 2010 Zeph Auerbach
But we still share most of everything in our lives. The only things that I can say are truly, wholly mine are the plants that line our windowsill and the vase standing on my nightstand that was a gift to my mother from my father, which then trickled down to me.
the vase Maybe it’s because we’re twins, but growing up, I had always been close to Natalie, closer than most siblings I know. We shared everything – faces, hobbies (at the age of 10, we were inordinately proud of how we could play so many songs as a duet on the piano), clothes (which bothers Natalie to no end), a room, books and endless summer days and crushes, favorite songs and a goldfish and embarrassing moments, and so the list goes on. We didn’t hate it, as people would most likely think. In fact, Natalie seemed to love it – I was another representation of her, a way she could look at herself detachedly and smile at what she liked, change what she didn’t like.
by Tess Ma
It isn’t so much that way now any more, of course, though I think that Natalie hasn’t (or doesn’t want to) sensed it yet. We go out by ourselves, to different places and with different people, and at the end of the day we retreat to our side of the room quietly – Natalie usually comes in later, so I have some time to be by myself for an hour or two – and we slip into our beds. We don’t talk after we turn off the lights like we used to when we were younger, probably from that end-of-day tiredness, or maybe it’s because we don’t know where to start reaching for words to fill in the blanks. I know that’s the reason for me; it’s somehow more difficult to tell someone that I once felt was the other part of me about bits of my life that she wasn’t there to experience.
along with our mother, who nags and pushes me to finish my work too when I unintentionally begin to doodle or daydream. Natalie wants to be a lawyer. I don’t have even an inkling of an idea of what I want to be.
We are becoming different persons. I wish that she could see that. Natalie, you see, is somewhat of an overachiever. She needs to do something perfectly or not do it at all. She doesn’t do any sports because she’s not very good at it (neither of us are, though I try to do some of everything each season just for the fun of it), but she almost always gets lead roles in plays. She lays out her clothes the night before so that she’ll never have a badly-outfitted day, and while I do like to dress myself nicely, I think ten minutes before we have to leave for school is enough time to choose what I should wear (with some amendments from Natalie). Natalie comes home right after play practice so that she’ll be able to do all her homework and put in some time to review everything we’ve learned that day; she’s the one,
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Flowers are the one interest that Natalie never cared to share with me. I suppose she never saw the point in them, though when we were very young, when our Dad still gardened, she and I would frolic at his heels while he kneeled among a sea of lovely flowers, dashes of color and frail prettiness against muddy brown. That’s how my Dad wooed my mother, that’s where we began – flowers. He used to love them. I know he still does. And when my mother, the belle of their small town and the cosseted daughter of a well-off family, agreed to a date with him, he who was just one fairly appealing boy among many boys, she was unpleasantly surprised when he turned up with a vase but no flowers. “This is for all the flowers that I will be giving you,” he said, handing it carefully to her as if it was the most precious object he owned. She thought him a bit strange at first, a little puzzling, but she took the vase and gave him a second chance. And a third, and a fourth. He brought her flowers every time they met after that, tulips and daffodils and gillyflowers and forget-me-nots that he had grown himself, and she did put them in that vase every time he did. They dated throughout college and got married when they both had graduated, and every week my Dad never failed to fill that vase with flowers. When Natalie or I asked him incessantly as children why he had given her an empty vase, he would give us random answers, always different. He’d say, “None of my flowers had blossomed yet” or “I thought it would make a better impression to give her something I had actually bought”, and we’d poke him and tell him that he couldn’t keep changing his answers, but of course we were delighted by the different ways he’d answer. So I guess it really began with a vase, the vase that is now set on my nightstand, a translucent midnight blue with pale swirls throughout the glass like small galaxies that I can only see when I shine a light on it. Somewhere along the way, when we were around five or six, my mother’s family’s fortune was drained by a business misstep – Natalie tried to explain it once to me, but I really couldn’t understand it – and we couldn’t live on Dad’s salary as a gardener for an art museum any more. Mother urged him to get a ‘proper’ job, though she was already working as a psychologist. Those were the nights when I would crawl into Natalie’s bed, and we would sit together in the dark listening to raised voices muffled by the wall, as if the house itself was trying to protect us. We didn’t understand why they were arguing, but after a while the shouts faded to murmurs, and at last Dad gave in and resigned as a gardener.
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Well, Natalie, like I said, never understood my fascination with plants.
“Why don’t you ever put flowers in it?” she asks me now. I look up at her. We both have books in our hands; she has her work on the desk, I’m re-reading a novel in my bed. The dim yellowness of our room light creates a hushed, almost secretive atmosphere, like when we would sit under a blanket with a flashlight on, except now there’s so much more space, bloated with all the unshared pieces of our lives. “They’re not tall enough,” I give her the easiest answer, nodding at the flowerpots by our window. Natalie only looks at me with dark brown eyes (exactly like mine) for longer than usual. “Fill it up,”” she suggests, turning back to her calculator.
I find the whole exchange a little strange.
I wait until the next day, after school when she has rehearsals, and I get up and
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and pluck a tall tulip from the pot. But it isn’t right. Flowers – my flowers – aren’t enough to fill up the emptiness in this vase. A small voice in the back of my mind tells me, April, these are big shoes to fill. And I agree. I know. So I lay the flower on Natalie’s pillow and go to get some water to fill the vase with and find the small net we use to take our goldfish Freddie out when we have to clean his fish bowl. I scoop him out, as gently as Dad would touch a flower, and I slip him into the vase. The blue of it casts dreamy, swirly shadows in the water and on the shine of Freddie’s scales. I hear the door open behind me. There’s a pause before Natalie says, “That’s nice.” I turn, and there she is smiling at me, proudly somehow, and in that moment when we stand across from each other like mirror images, with the same crinkled eyes and the same smile, I feel like we’re beginning to share again.
There is a blood soaked tea cosy sailing on the horizon of my immediate life. The sails are puckered with cigarette burns and sinking. It’s sinking into the ocean humiliation. If I where to be judged at this moment, chalked up on the board of life. Well I would not get into God’s classroom in the by Daisy Stenham first place, I would be ushered to play metaphysical connect the dots in middle rate purgatory. I am standing alone in the woman’s toilets ashing my cigarette in the sink staring blankly. Fuck. Shit. How did I get fired? I replay the immortal conversation again in my head, “its nothing personal Matilda. We have to make some cut backs from each department. You know I see the company like family, do you think I want to be doing this?” Like family? I sneer into my dismal reflection. I am the urban Moses being abandoned into the reckless waters of unemployment. What’s even more insulting is the way that it’s marketed as this trendy new lifestyle. Have a credit crunch lunch, or some credit crunch fun, why don’t I just commit the credit crunch suicide with my company biro right now. Shit, this is a code red, a code magenta. I am in desperate need of ego masturbation before I become so insecure I develop a stutter. Just as I about to reach the climax of my narcissistic one-woman romp I find some herbal calms in my handbag. I shove a handful into my mouth and wash it down with tap water. It’s all-fine. Well it isn’t really is it? I don’t know why we bother saying that. No one is looking. Dismantle the sequined masks, cancel the string coquette and take down the offensive backdrop who’s the show for anyway?
Extract from ‘Cappuccino Carpe’
If only I could pack up shop. “Do you ever want to just pack up shop?” I turn to an old man on the strand. “What the fuck are you talking about? I don’t know. I am sorry. This is the part where Father Christmas is meant to turn to you and say,’ don’t give up hope. Have a cuppa and a Valium and think about it in the morning.
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Prose Then again the western kiss of death. I am dejected. I have been standing immobile staring at the Legally Blonde poster for a long time. It is now starting to rain. I am depressed? What is the point? No wonder they call it the human condition. Why can’t you buy the point? Why is everyone so secretive about it? For gods sake why don’t we talk about it more? I suppose its not all black coffee, Gauloises cigarettes and Sartre. The best your going to get is a back street Zanex, some Radox lavender bath oil and a, ‘live in the moment’ bumper sticker. The adult equitant of ‘only boring people get bored’ is ‘if you are searching for a meaning you don’t have one’. Well DO point me the direction Yoda. If you have time that is. I am sure we will find out sooner then later once Virgin Galactic pokes its way through the pearly gates. Oh my god I am having an existential crisis. I have always waited for this moment. Someone take a photograph. We are just over evolved animals. We have got it all wrong. Why have we built up this hideous urban jungle that looks like Dubai powered on weaker batteries? Is everyone thinking this? I am on the edge. I am on the edge. I am still staring at the advert. I don’t know where to go. Shall I call NHS direct? ‘ I am having an existential crisis’ ‘ So I am I lets run away together with the nations supply of morphine wrapped into a poker dot handkerchief.
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