1.

You are in your bath room, you see a handsome thirty-three-year-old man in the mirror,

sunburnt skin, high cheek-bones, long blonde hair. Your eyes are blue and attentive. You

make a few serious faces in the mirror and flutter your nose-wings. You move into your small

study and look out into the rainy streets through your window, you see the port from a

distance, just a few large boats, and the snow is melting away. You are dressed in a black t-

shirt and black jeans as you sit down by the desk. You put up your legs on the desk, lean back

and pick up the biography of Michel Foucault by Didier Eribon. You are smoking red

Marlboros and drinking diet coke as you read slowly with a pen in your hand sometimes

taking notes in the margins of the book. Your apartment is small but neat, it is filled from

floor to ceiling with books and CDs in white book-shelves, on a small piece of wall not

covered by books and CDs there are non-figurative black and white photographs pinned

directly to the wall. You go into the kitchen to get another can of coke and a bowl of peanuts.

You go into your bedroom and light the bed-lamp, the king-size bed fills up most of the room,

its linen and pillows are black and so are the drawn curtains, back at the desk again you lean

back, close your eyes and try to reach your nose with the tongue. You return to the Eribon

book and smoke your Marlboros. Your desk is large and divided into an area with pens and

black notebooks and an area with a laptop and a small printer. You are keeping a photograph

in an envelope under the notebooks, as you take it out and look at it you see a woman

reminiscent of Madonna around 1990, she is sitting on a horse in a leather teddy holding a

whip in her left hand, the black horse looking nervously back at her.

You put the envelope back and start writing in one of the black notebooks, you write very

fast at first with your eyes almost closed, than you flip the pages a bit and start writing more

slowly on a fresh page: ‘This is her shop where she used to keep a collection of cameras and

cases of red Chilean wine at the back, this is where you enter her shop among the flowers and

the small bronze statues, love-making figures in impossible positions. This is where you first

kissed here and she lost her first heart-beat. You called her Sophia but you could never

pronounce her name correctly, you dream of her thighs and her different tastes. You are dead

in a positive sense and what remains is all about you.’

You stand up and gaze out through the kitchen window at the concrete back-yard, the

neighbors on the first floor have lit candles and are in the kitchen cooking and drinking wine.

You are looking up at the contours of the church on the hill behind the building complex but it

is getting too dark, nothing is moving out there. You go to your CD-player by the desk and

1

put on something by Satie, very low. You go into the kitchen and look at the church contours

again, then you go into the bath room and look at yourself in the mirror. You straighten up

your back and do some relaxing neck exercises with closed eyes. You stop and stand very

stiff. You remain stiff but your arms make a very fast dance for a minute. You stop, open your

eyes and stare at yourself in the mirror. You make a sardonic face and then wipe it off with

your left hand, you look at yourself expressionless and stiffen up the body again. You hear

Satie and hum along a bit. You say “Well, I guess we have always been one of a kind, too

similar in taste to fool anybody” as you nod to yourself in the mirror. You begin to brush your

teeth with your eyes closed as the music stops.

You meet her in a quiet bar standing next to a poster of John Cale. “Excuse me, have I met

you before?” she says. You answer “Yes, probably” and sit down at a table with her and order

drinks. You see a woman with curly long blonde hair, blue eyes, her voice is husky, nervous

hands around cigarettes, slowly sipping her drink. You are approached by two young men

who ask if you are a couple and you do not answer. You are conversing and you begin to put

on your sardonic face but you stop yourself and smile instead and look into her eyes.

You watch her as she is leaving in the morning rain, she walks across the concrete yard and

you see her body from behind, athletic, tall legs, the long curly hair waving on her back. You

go into the bedroom and light a cigarette, walk into the study and look at the black desk-chair,

your eyes zoom in on a spot on the chair, you bend down a bit and put your left fore-finger on

it, lick your finger, put saliva on your finger, put it on the spot again and lick the finger again.

You open your briefs and put your left hand around your balls, shaking them. You sit down in

the chair and finish the cigarette writing a few lines in one of the black notebooks then look

out into the rainy street.

You are dancing with her in a trashy bar, a group of young men stand around you, drunk

with large beers in their hands some of them are smiling, grimacing and making thumbs up at

you. You are dancing stone-faced, most of the time your eyes are drawn to the body of a very

fit young woman in long black hair and a tight black dress, she sits down on a bar stool with

the back to you displaying a perfectly arched back. You are now smiling back at the young

men and they bring you a beer that you down very fast, “Way to go man!” one of them cheers

and you laugh. You look around the room and see that there are a few young women on the

dance-floor, as the music switches to Rod Stewart’s “Sailing” you walk to the bar and order

two tequilas, she comes up to you after a little while, sips one of the tequilas but finds it too

strong. You get her fur coat which is rather heavy as you help her on with it, the bouncer grins

at you and wishes you a pleasant “continuation” of the night as he holds up the door. You

2

hear a racket at the bar, a sudden silence and then Leonard Cohen’s “Closing Time” begins

too play very loud. You look back into the bar, then at each other, laugh and shake your heads

and laugh some more.

You watch her as she is leaving in the morning, it is sunny and she takes of her fur coat,

straightens up her back and disappears around the corner of the concrete building. You walk

into the study, look at the spot on the desk-chair and sit down. You pull down your briefs a bit

and pull your foreskin back as far as it goes.

You stand with her in the elevator up to your apartment and push a button firmly as if you

were drunk. You beat your forehead with your fist and laugh. You watch her body in the

mirror as she says “Damn!” and then, a bit louder, “it is closing time!” You both laugh and

attack the elevator buttons with all four hands, mock-bang your foreheads into the mirror and

kiss violently until the elevator comes to a stop.

You sit with her in the café that has a French menu and plays blues classics on low volume.

You notice that she has a pair of red shoes, not too long heels, they are slightly too small over

her wrists. “You know,” she says, “I usually do not drink too much, usually one beer and then

an Irish coffee and the rest of the evening I stick with water. It is because I have to think about

my weight a bit.”

You watch her red shoes again, she has tiny feet and swollen wrists. “It was always so dark

in the theatre,” she says, “and I could not understand a word of those minimalist plays. Like

Pinter. My sister always wanted to be an actress, she studied the first scene in The Birthday

Party and learnt it by heart reciting all four characters in the same monotone voice. But she

got married and moved to London. I do not think she has been acting for a long time.” You

smoke your cigarettes, sip your beer, listen to her and nod once in a while. You decide to look

for the last time this evening at her red shoes. “My sister and I used to hide inside the theatre

in the darkness. We would bring a guitar and sing Neil Young songs like ‘Helpless’ and

‘Cinnamon Girl.’ But we would also walk around in the neighborhood and ask if we could

sing in people’s gardens. Usually they did not mind.” You hear the voice of John Lee Hooker

in the background, gradually fading away as the café begins to fill up. “My sister,” she says,

“was my destiny.” You look at her and she shakes her head. “Do not worry. I will tell you all

about it one day. When she got back from London the first time she was so radiant and happy,

she had been acting and made some kind of success. She told me how much she loved me and

that she had understood this only when we had been apart for the first time since we were

small kids.”

3

You look quickly at her red shoes, then into her eyes. You ask “Did you ever stop singing?”

and she laughs not smiling with her eyes.

You are having sex in the desk-chair, she is on top of you with her back to your face and

you are taking notes on a single sheet of paper with the heading ‘Erotographic Metafiction.’

“Did you come?” she says and you answer “Yes.” You watch her firm ass and athletic legs as

she gets up and goes to the bath room and you take a few more notes. “You should write

about the theatre” she says from the bath room. “Do you ever talk when you are making

love?” you reply and put the pen down. “No,” she says, “sex is underrated. I mean the erotic

parts of it. It is so funny you write about sex, I mean the erotics of it. When we are doing it.”

You hear her moaning from the bath room and then she flushes.

“The erotics of the body” you say and look sardonically at yourself in the reflection of the

window.

You are on top of her in the bed. You are listening to her: “Yes, right there, yes, yes, and

there too, yes, and there too!” You close your eyes and after a little while you come in

silence. You look at her, she is sleeping. You wipe of some sweat from your forehead. You

look down at your chest and realize that you have your t-shirt on. You sigh and as you take it

off you say to yourself “this is unusual.”

You are in your desk-chair, on a piece of paper you have written GRAPH in large letters

and you are doodling thin geometrical shapes around the letters, bodies in athletically strange

and impossible sex-positions.

You are listening to Charlie Mingus, for the 7 minutes and 21 seconds of “Better Git It In

Your Soul” you are pacing around your study at a moderate speed, diagonals are five steps,

straight lines are four steps. You change to “Fables of Faubus” and for 8 minutes and 13

seconds you sit at your desk. You are humming along silently with the melody to begin with.

You are looking at a blurry Xerox copy of a photo on your desk, it is a man’s face with a

small beard and glasses, out of the left eye there is the reflection of a butterfly. You straighten

up your back and hum along to the end of the song and turn off the CD-player.

You are in a nightclub, you see two blonde women at a table and ask to sit down with them,

one of them says “Yes! Of course!” You talk with her about the good weather, her friend is

very happy and neighing like a horse. You are on the empty dance-floor with the neighing

blonde and the DJ puts on Ace of Base’s “The Sign”, her eyes are very blue, her legs are tall,

her body is athletic, her biker boots are brown. You are ordering tequilas, you are dancing,

you are drinking. You are neighing into the tequila glasses.

4

You are in the study with her, drinking tea, smoking Marlboros. You are listening to Kevin

Coyne’s “Eastbourne Ladies” as she falls off the desk-chair and laughs, “I can drink a lot,”

she says, “but I never lose control, remember this. Can you play that song again for me?”

You watch her body, you play the song again, she lights up a cigarette and starts talking

about Vipassana meditation and breathing exercises.

You say “You are very pure, clear, bright.” “Same-same but different,” she replies.

You are in the bed, she comes into the room, topless, a pair of thongs, and asks if she can

borrow your tooth-brush. You say “Sure” and watch her body as her tall legs take her to the

bath room.

You watch her face, body, thongs, as she comes back. You have a hard-on, she looks at her

own body, “I told you I am married,” she says. You look at her long blonde hair, her very

blue eyes, her athletic body, she lies down next to you, she says “It was so great on the tenth

day of the meditation camp, we got out from our little huts and were allowed to talk to each

other again after the nine-days-silence.”

You take off your briefs and say “We have to do it.”

“No,” she says and looks at your hard-on. You close your eyes as she kisses you briefly on

your throat. “No,” she says and looks into the ceiling, “But we have to,” you say. You look

into the ceiling, close your eyes, she bends down, holds your cock with her left hand and rubs

it gently against her throat, stops, “No” she says.

You look at your hard-on and say, “We have to.” “But I have a problem,” she says, “a…

kind of… feminine I mean female… problem. My period.” You look at her body and say that

that is not a problem. “But your bed will be destroyed,” she says, “I mean your linen…” You

get up and return from the bath room with a large black towel. You lay it out on the bed and

she lies down on it on her back. You kiss her thighs, she is moaning, you part her labia with

your thumbs and kiss her clitoris, you lick it, she is moaning louder, you put your tongue in

her and lick up some blood, you bend forward and put your tongue in her mouth, she screams.

“We are going to take it slowly,” she moans. You put your cock in her and begin to massage

her clitoris with your left thumb, you move in her and keep massaging her a bit faster, a little

while later her body shakes, she screams loudly, sits up a bit and bites you violently in your

left arm, she falls back screaming and you come into her silently. You lie there together for

quite a while.

“Oh, baby, it is so good when you come inside me,” she whispers. You sit up and light

cigarettes.

5

“Actually the meditation camp ended yesterday,” she says, “and now I can talk to people

again.” You look at her thongs on the pillow, extinguish your cigarette, then begin to lick her

again. You are inside her with your tongue, your thumb on her clitoris, your eyes into hers.

and she comes still smoking, she screams, coughs, laughs, neighs and throws the cigarette into

the wall. “Damn” she says, “you have to wash your mouth!”

You stand together for a while in the bath room and smear blood over your bodies. You

smile sardonically into the mirror.

You wake up, light a cigarette and walk into the kitchen. You see her through the window

walking away slowly on the concrete, she stops for a while, straightens up her body, sighs

deeply from top to toe and then she walks away a bit faster.

You are surprised when she calls you up two days later and says that she forgot an

important piece of paper in your apartment.

You never read the letters you write to her in shorthand. You begin the first letter quoting,

“My Darling, You will have to wait till yesterday is here; I wait for You between the gray

skies and tomorrow’s rain.”

You walk around in the port with a hard-on thinking about her. You cannot remember her

face.

You guess from her conversation that her husband’s name is Alain Loisir – but her French

is very bad – and that he used to be a great dancer, that he is now impotent and owns a

pawnbroker’s. You never know her name, but you call her “Lee.” “You are always 300 lines

away,” she says, “but I can be your mistress.” You shake your balls a bit with your left hand

when she is on the phone again.

2.

You never know her name and you walk with her one wintry night through the port. You

watch her apple-shaped behind in tight jeans and then she suddenly rushes ahead and neighs.

“You are such a happy creature,” you say, “your whole body is happy with the world.”

“You, you, you,” she says, “it is all about you!” You look at her moist lips and smile. “I, for

one, am not happy with the world,” she says. You watch her body as she indicates performing

a mock-somersault, she laughs and sighs deeply. “It all started on a night like this,” she says,

“on the way to the meditation center.”

6

You look out at sea and smile. You see nothing in the darkness out there, you smell

something in the clear air, widen your nostrils, sniff loudly, and roll your eyes at the

nothingness.

“Alain could be dead for all I know,” she says.

You smile: “I can only be your lover.”

You make a few bodily movements as if dancing to techno music. “You know,” she says,

“it suddenly strikes me that I might go with other people.” “Yes, you might go with other

people,” you answer.

You both laugh.

“It suddenly strikes me that I had a vision,” she begins and you both laugh, harder. “That I

was carrying your books,” she continues, “in a Mediterranean landscape!” “A vision!” you

scream out loud together and laugh again.

“Will you be my lover and nothing but my lover,” she whispers towards the sea.

You stand quiet and still for a while, both looking out into the nothingness.

You walk to your apartment, enter, light some candles, she sits in the desk-chair, you lay

down on the floor looking at her face, you hum along to Van Morrison, a live version of “You

Know What They’re Writing About” from the stereo.

“I cannot do this anymore,” she says. “You can be my secretary,” you say as you crawl

toward her on the floor, you put your head between her legs and bite and lick her thighs

though the jeans. “Auuummm, no, no, no,” she mumbles.

“I think I am depressed,” she says as you enter the bedroom.

“Your soul is not depressed,” you say as you lick her clitoris. “Auuummm, no, no,” she

mumbles.

You have your cock in her mouth for a long time until you come, and as you come you take

your cock out with your left hand and spill some of the sperm on her chin, she is massaging

her clitoris and screams when you put the cock back in.

“That was good,” she says after a while when she takes some of the sperm from her chin

with her fingers and licks it up, “but do not forget my face. Do not ever forget my face.”

3.

You are sitting with Cath in the café Per Elato, she is drinking tea from a large mug and you

are having your coffee and Marlboros. “So dark in the theater,” she sighs, “my family are all

7

acting people, if you see the name Langacker somewhere you will be able to connect it to

scenic gestalting in some form.”

“Connect?” you say. You laugh.

“Well, you see,” she says, “generations back the Langackers were all circus people, clowns

and jugglers mainly, they were all depressed people but I am only a teacher. Grammarians

like me like words like gestalting by the way.”

You are taking notes. You write for example: ‘Linguistics is dancing in my head.

Gestalting: the formulation on stage and the formulated off-stage.’ You look at Cath, she is

wearing a rather thick golden chain around her neck and she is smiling. You write down:

‘Lee, your body is dancing in my head.’ You feel your hard-on discreetly under the table with

your left hand.

“So,” she says, “is everything good with you now that you are back with your old girl-friend

again? She does not mind if you meet me once in a while, does she?”

You nod and smile and listen to her as she continues to talk about darkness and theatre, you

take notes and smoke.

You are in the apartment looking at your writing, ‘Lee, your body is dancing in my head.’

You walk into the bedroom, take off your clothes. You put on a pair of her thongs and walk

into the hallway, you look into the mirror there, your package is pouring out from under her

thongs. You take the thongs off, smell them and look at your hard-on in the mirror. “Are you

talking to me?” you say to your hard-on in the mirror. “Must be, nobody else around.” You

sigh. You tie the thongs around your hard-on and walk into the kitchen, you pour some red

wine in a large goblet and dip your cock in it. You untie the thongs, leave them on the kitchen

floor and walk into the study with the wine, you sit down at the desk and begin to write

sometimes striking your hard-on gently.

You are sitting on the floor in the study with your back against the wall under the black and

white photos, to the left ashtray, cigarettes, wine. You write in one of the black notebooks,

sometimes poking at your hard-on with the pen. You have lit a thin green candle that flutters

on the desk. You hear the sound of your pen moving fast against the paper and the rain

against the window. You close the notebook, sip some wine and smoke, you look with your

sardonic face at the book-shelves across the room, “Yes, my beautiful friend,” you say in the

direction of the book-shelves and then into the wine-glass. You seat yourself in the Buddha

position with your back against the wall, you squeeze your hard-on gently, close your eyes

and begin doing breathing exercises.

You remain on the floor, open the notebook and write ‘8 @ %.’

8

You bite your nails a bit and gaze into the wall.

You hear your neighbor’s dog barking.

You answer the phone, it is Lee. “I just tried your thongs on and got… hard.” “I bet you

did! What are you wearing now?” You both laugh.

“I am not coming out tonight,” she says, “not in this awful weather. I would not go out even

if James Bond called me up!” “Yeh?” “Fucking weather under-the-weather-weather! And I

think Alain suspects something, not that I care really. He is not at home. Maybe he has found

some crazy fuck in town.” “Yeh?” “No, he is just too boring. He used to excite me, you know,

he was an exciting artist, you know. Now he is just so… boring.”

You walk into the study and take some notes as you continue listening to her, you sip some

wine and smoke your Marlboros, Maria Farantouri is howling “Hymnos stin Spetses” in the

background from the stereo as you walk into the kitchen for a refill. “It is like Fado,” she

says, “all you need to know about life, all you need to know…”

You listen some more and take some more notes.

“OK,” you say, “this is James Double Hard-On signing out. See you tomorrow.”

“Do not ever forget my face.”

You hang up the phone and light another thin green candle on the desk.

You walk into the bath room smoking a cigarette and nod and smile at the mirror and say:

“Yes Cath it is all darkness and theater.” You kiss yourself in the mirror. “Yes Cath it is all

about depressed people and you are the teacher of my heart. Do not say no like all the old

teachers of my heart. Do not say no.”

4.

“My uncle Dorff used to say that the theater cannot express darkness, that it has no means of

doing it and that method acting is all a conspiracy. Look at what happened to Marilyn and

Marlon.”

“Yes,” you answer, “some people never seem to hear themselves talking. And they will

deny everything even if you record it and play the tape to them.”

You both laugh silently and order some more coffee at Per Elato.

You look at the opened page in your notebook: ‘All truth passes through three stages. First,

it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

Gender politics, à la Foucault?’

9

“Anyway,” you say, “Rutger Hauer is great in Blade Runner.” “And in The Legend of the

Holy Drinker,” Cath adds.

You sip your coffees and smoke your cigarettes, Per Elato is very quiet this afternoon, you

listen to the mild rain, Cath is writing something in a minimal notebook with the picture of a

pink hedgehog on its front.

“Ha-ha! “ she says, not laughing. “An ordinary-looking woman is sitting in a café with a

handsome man, in fact he is something of a ladies’ man. They are strangers. They converse.

As the woman leaves, he sees her body for the first time. He writes down in his notebook: ‘I

am sorry, my dear, for not having been too engaged in our conversation. It was not until you

left that I realized you had the most perfect little ass.’”

“It is a good thing we are not in a relationship,” you say and nod, “that is quite a good

observation my dear lady…”

“It is not as if we were ever going to get married or anything,” she says and smiles.

“You are a great converser.”

“Yeh, but seriously what is it with men and their obsession with women’s bodies? Men will

kill for that half inch of flesh…”

“The ancient knowledge that a woman’s soul resides in her clitoris? I would not get my

hand over my heart about that.”

“Men do not have hearts. But I have to go now. And do not forget to watch my perfect little

ass as I am leaving.”

“You are a great converser.”

“And like most women who have asthma I smoke cigarettes anyway!”

You sit alone for a while in Per Elato, taking deep meditative breaths, looking out at the

rain. You take some notes, smoke, finish the coffee. You watch the café-owner as he turns up

the music a little, he looks happy-sad as he moves his head to Cat Power’s “The Greatest.”

You look out into the rain and hum along tonelessly, a bit loud at first. “Great song,” you say

to the café-owner, he sighs and points his opened hands at the loudspeaker above the shelved

bottles in the bar.

5.

You are eating in the kitchen, chick peas with tomatoes and garlic drained in olive oil. You

shower the dish with salt and pepper and drink some red wine. You eat some more, drink

10

some more and look at your mirror-image in the large shiny pot in front of you on the table.

You lean forward, making a grimace you bite the pot and howl a bit like a lonely wolf.

You walk into the bedroom and puff up one of the pillows.

You sit down again in the kitchen and stare at Eribon’s book on the stove.

You pick up Seamus Heaney’s Preoccupations from the chair next to you, you put your feet

on the chair across from you under the table. You read, drink wine and smoke, you take some

notes in the margins. “Priapathic, now that is a nice word,” you mumble. You hum tonelessly

as you keep on reading and finish the wine bottle. You get up and take out a bottle of Jameson

from the cupboard above the fridge and pour a large one. You go into the bath room and

speak to the mirror: “Slaintcha Mr. Heaney, I read your book! Here is to the drips and

bitterness of the Robinson Bar, Belfast City!” You down the whiskey.

You go back into the kitchen, crouching over the waste-bin you begin to fork away the left-

overs but stop and scoop up a few peas with your left hand and eat them. You remain bent-

over with straight legs, keep still for a while, then eat most of the left-over peas and toss the

plate into the bin. You take up the plate and clean it.

You walk around the apartment and turn off the lights.

You lie in bed, listen to the rain and look at the squarish red digits of your clock-radio. You

breathe deeply for a while, then roll around on your front and bury your head and arms in the

pillow.

6.

You are looking at Lee’s breasts, she is sitting at the desk in front of the laptop, looking back

at your forehead, ready to write. “OK,” you say, “the heading is Tribute to Qwert Yuiop.” You

look at her typing. “OK,” you say, “pull your top down so I can see your cleavage even

better.” You watch her stiff nipples and you say: “Writing is sometimes annoying but always

inspiring. It is like when a man pulls his hard-on out of his pants and the woman stares and

asks, ‘and what are you going to do with that… thing?’”

You walk up to her and she sucks your cock with plenty of saliva. You take off her top and

bra and she plays with her breasts around your cock. You pull your cock against the laptop

and whip it against the keyboard, Lee is looking at the screen with her big blue eyes as the

letters move there. “I wish I could write ‘on the waterfront’ from right to left,” she mumbles.

You sit down on the floor just out of reach of your bodies, you are stroking your cock and

she is massaging her clitoris.

11

“The difference and sameness of sprained and sprayed wrists,” she mumbles.

You move around on the floor and she is on all fours. You hold her firm buttocks with your

hands and watch your cock going in and out, she keeps her arched back very firm. You hear

the morning paper drop down heavily in the hall-way and laugh a bit, she is quiet, you

concentrate on moving your cock slowly in and out and watch it intently. “I want you to come

inside me,” she says. “I know,” you reply.

You are in bed smoking a cigarette. “My god, the things I have been writing!” she screams

from the desk in the study, “if only somebody could see this!”

You finish the cigarette and look at the red digits on the clock-radio. You begin to fondle

your balls. You shout “I want you!” “My god!” she screams, “I just have to finish this

sentence, I cannot believe this! I cannot believe this is happening!” “I want you!” you shout

back.

You watch her body and her flushed cheeks as she comes into the bedroom. “OK, make this

quick, come inside me, and do not forget my face!” You laugh and fuck her from behind

again, with a firm grip on her behind you sometimes release your left hand and slap her tight

buttocks. You come and she gets up.

You follow her into the bath room, as she gets up from the toilet seat she loses her balance

and you pull her out of the way of the doorframe.

“You can always come inside me,” she says, “I have total control.”

“I can always come inside you,” you say.

“I cannot believe that stuff I wrote,” she says, “can I print it out?”

“Of course.” You watch her body as she goes quickly into the study and sits down in front

of the laptop, she looks at the screen, laughs and shakes her head. “Ho-leee mudder-fucker”

she whispers and strikes her fingers over the keyboard, “hooo-leeeeee…”

You get back into the bedroom and smoke a cigarette. You hear her mumbling from the

study: “I cannot believe this is happening.” “Un-be-liev-i-ab-le” you say to yourself in a

French accent that turns slightly Italian toward the end of the syllables.

You stretch out your legs and your feet, you put your left palm under your balls and watch

your sore cock, feel the foreskin with thumb and forefinger. You look up into the ceiling and

listen, it is quiet. You take a few deep breaths. You make your eyes very round and stare at

the ceiling, you try to keep your eyes wide open at the same time as you slowly close your

eyelids. You let go of the eyes, you close your lips in a geometric smile and concentrate on

your breathing, widening your nostrils.

12

7.

You are moving around books on your shelves, put some on the floor, put them back, read a

little in a few of them, dust a bit, put them back. You take out some of the thin green candles

from the shelves, light them, snuff them out and put them back. You rush over the carpet to

the window, it is raining hard outside, you close the window and smoke a cigarette. You sit

very straight in front of the laptop, stare at the screen, click fast with the mouse a couple of

times and turn it off and pull the screen down. You turn on the stereo and begin to listen to

The Fall’s “The Advocate,” you turn up the volume and rush over the carpet into the bath

room. You stand still and stretch out your tongue as far as you can, trying to reach the lowest

part of your chin.

You clean off the kitchen table, spit on it and polish it with a piece of cloth. You look at the

stove that is shining white, you look at the black and white pornographic pictures of Lee that

are nailed on the fridge with magnetic black bull miniatures. You study one picture especially

carefully, a close-up of her wet cunt and protruding clitoris under her left thumb. You open

your fly and study your hard-on, touch it for a few seconds. You reach for the bottle of

Jameson, pour a stiff one and sip gently, groaning with pleasure. You rub in a few drops on

your cock, you strike the foreskin once and press the hard-on back into your pants.

You go slowly into the study and put on one of New Order’s worst CDs and choose the

most boring song. You sip the whiskey, light up a cigarette and groan. You write down in a

notebook: ‘Listless face. How to pronounce that? Horse coiled upon granite/Ride by the last

gravestone.’ You drink, smoke, groan. You hum along with the lack of rhythm. You write

down: ‘The world according to Annie: Pure postpunk stuff makes me depressed straight

away, it is so great!’ You get up, light another cigarette, finish the whiskey and go into the

bath room. You hold the cigarette between thumb and forefinger and follow the smoke rising

toward the ceiling in the mirror.

“For Annie,” you say to the mirror. “Your eyes are like the morning sun, Annie now that

you are gone.”

You laugh at the mirror. You lower your head and mumble “Do not laugh like that mister.”

You look at the mirror and say slowly with a debilitated voice “Do not laugh like that mister.”

You mumble wordless sounds into the mirror, you put your tongue out and shake your head

violently. You stand still and take deep breaths. You take Lee’s lipstick and write ‘azure’ on

the mirror. “Are you azz-u-re?” you whisper to the mirror.

You wait in front of the mirror. Finally you say: “I am sure.”

13

You go into the bedroom, look at the red digits on the clock-radio and brush off your black-

t-shirt with your palms. You put on your biker boots and your black leather jacket. You fold a

few sheets of paper and put them in your left back pocket. You check that you have one pen

in each jacket-pocket. You walk out of the apartment, into the elevator, into the street. You

straighten your back, push your pelvis a bit forward and walk fast on the sidewalk away from

the port toward the city lights.

You arrive at Per Elato, Cath looks at you with a smile somewhat as if she were surprised at

something about you. You look at her long wavy blonde hair, it is done very high. You look

at her face, her round eyes eyeliner-enlarged. You look at her large gold chain around her

neck, her breasts protrude in a thin black top, she is wearing a glittery track-suit. You look at

the café-owner, he is also wearing a track-suit, a large gold chain over his hairy chest, you

nod at him as he is getting your coffee ready. “You are late,” she says. “Darkness in the

theater never has time to wait.”

You look around, the café-owner’s wife is sitting in the far end corner in her usual high hair.

Cath: “I hope everything is working out with your girl-friend who used to be your girl-

friend and unexpectedly came back to you again. “Everything is fine,” you say, “chaos equals

order in the long run, I guess.” You light up your cigarettes.

“Sometimes I feel good in this place,” she says.

“The salami sandwiches here must be the best in the city,” you say as the owner brings you

coffee. “Would you forget my perfect little ass if I just stood up and left right now?” she says.

“Not in so many words, bit I am glad we are not in a relationship since I can only dance

arrhythmically.”

Cath: “Fuck rhythm. We are not, and never will be, in Arcadia.” You look at her breasts and

she looks at your hands resting on the table. You watch her whole body as she stands up and

takes a few dance steps toward the bar.

“You know,” she says as she sits down again, “I sometimes think of your body as a kind of

homunculus dancing in my head. And you lead me away in an erotic waltz, a movement

beyond chaos and order if you will.” “Is there any resistance in our movements?” you ask.

“Yes. To resist is to create. To create is to resist.” You light up new cigarettes and sip your

coffees. “Darkness in theater,” she says, “I have found my way out of it. My girlfriend Layla

said the other day, ‘There is an evolutionary explanation why men love pornography and

women hate it.’ I do not believe her of course.”

You watch the owner as he downs an espresso and turns up the music.

14

“And what exactly was her evolutionary explanation?” you ask. “Ah, Layla got into some

complicated comparisons with method acting, can you believe it? Marlon and Marilyn all

over again.” You watch her breasts and she watches your hands, you lift your head and smile

into her eyes, she smiles back.

Cath: “Some people say Layla had a sex operation. Her clitoris can get extremely large

anyway.” “I have not met her,” you say. You both laugh and listen as the owner turns up the

music some more, Maria Farantouri is singing Cavafy’s “Obsianus’ Dance” in a non-

expressive voice accompanied only by a disappearing thin alto saxophone.

8.

You are sitting in the kitchen in khaki shorts, a worn grey t-shirt and sandals, you are drinking

whiskey and smoking, smiling out into the dark streets above the port. You hear the door-bell

ringing and open to your top floor neighbor Jacob.

“Howdy Eliot,” he says, “we are having a little party and the girls want to smoke some

cigarettes. Do you want to come up and check out the situation?”

“Yes, sure. Marlboros are all I got.”

“That is fine man. Oh, give mesome of that whiskey first.”

“Well, sit down please. Want a Marlboro, too?”

“No I have never been interested in smokes myself.”

“Here is to your health!”

“What? Yeh, cheers. What is that music? It is kind of… weak?”

“Jan Garbarek. ‘It’s OK to Listen to the Gray Voice.’”

“What? Is he a Pole? I have never liked Poles, there is nothing wrong with them but I just

do not… like them.”

“He is a Norwegian.”

“What? He likes to be in the woods a lot then, ha-ha! But the… music?”

“It is just meditative.”

“Are you seeing that blonde woman?”

“Yes.”

“She is a real beauty, I will give you that.”

“Well…”

“This stuff is not very smokey.”

“It is Irish whiskey.”

15

You walk up the stairs with Jacob and into his apartment, there are some well-built girls

hanging around in a large leather sofa, the guys are spread out in chairs and around the stereo,

everybody is drinking imported German beer from cans. You look at long blonde hair,

pouting red lip-sticked mouths, breasts, thighs, the loud music stops and the girls look at you

and shout: “The Marlboro man!”

You look around the apartment at some oak furniture, the guys by the stereo put on the

soundtrack to Pulp Fiction.

You put the Marlboros on the table, the girls cheer to the music and look at your hands. “It

is OK to smoke inside,” Jacob says.

You walk into the kitchen and Jacob pours you a large scotch, he mumbles something about

“real smokey stuff.”

“Did you see that blonde in the corner with the fishnet stockings?” he says. “Yes, of

course,” you reply. “We had a party a few weeks ago at Benny’s place, she was there and then

I took her home and we had sex, not just sex but sex-sex. And she has been avoiding me

since.” “She is nice,” you say and down your scotch.

You sit in a chair sipping beer, smoking, Jacob is talking to the fishnet woman in the sofa,

Pulp Fiction ends and Rammstein is played for a while, then Jacob gets up and somebody

puts on a Barry White CD. You go over and sit down next to the fishnet woman.

“I like your stockings” you say, “I want to come all over them.”

“What?” she says.

You sing in tune with “What Am I Gonna Do With You,” a bit loud with the ‘aouuuw!’

beginning at 1:52 and the ‘rrrr-rrrr-rrrr!’s at the end of the song.

“Who are you?” she says..

“Do you know of the Peruvian poet César Vallejo?”

“What? Are you a poet?”

“Maybe, what are you?”

“I am a cook. I only use real butter.”

“That sounds promising. Anyway, there is a great song, no a great poem by Vallejo, ‘Faith

in the Cock, but not in the Pants.’”

“Oh, what?”

“We can go down-stairs, I will read it for you.”

“I do not know about that.”

“It will only take a few minutes.”

“Right. You live down-stairs?”

16

You enter the apartment with her and kiss her violently, she is standing on her toes, her ass

is protruding in the hall-mirror, her legs athletic, her tongue moves fast and hard in your

mouth as you grip her ass.

“No,” she says, “what are you doing?”

You go into the kitchen, in the light you see a tint of red in her curly long hair, you pour

some whiskey, hand her a glass and open the notebook on the kitchen table.

“Faith in the many, no longer in the one,” you pretend to read and continue: “the blood of

the tongue is needed, and the edge of the tongue is warm.” You walk up to her and kiss her,

her tongue is pointed and hot. You lift her up on the kitchen sink, pull her skirt down and

keep your hands around her firm buttocks, feel the thongs cutting in, kissing is intense and

you lick some eye-liner from her skin. “No, what are you doing?” she says.

You walk into the study and sit on the floor under the photographs, she follows, lifts her

skirt up a bit and sits down. “Why are all sex-jokes about men and their cocks dangling

around everywhere?” she asks. “Not sure,” you say. “No. That is just it. But I had a hell of a

night last week. When I got home I threw my thongs against the wall – and they stuck there!”

“Reminds me of Vallejo,” you say. “’Faith in the dark red, faith in yourself,’ phew, it sure is

hot in here.”

You get up and undress, you stand with your hard-on in front of her face.

“Were you wearing Borg underwear?” she says.

“No. They are just black.”

“So, my boyfriend used to wear Borg. What are you planning to do with that… thing?”

“I already told you.”

You watch her head move slowly to your cock, her mouth opening slowly, her lips then

gently around your cockhead, her tongue circling a bit, you are about to come and take it out.

“Shall we enter the boudoir?” you say and walk into the bedroom. You smear off the

lipstick traces with your left forefinger and taste it.

You watch her pear-shaped breasts as she enters naked, she massages her hard left nipple a

bit with her left fingers, she leans down and works some more on your cockhead. You pull

her down and dive in between her legs, eat her pussy, drink her pussy, she screams as you bite

her thighs, you continue to taste her sweet and only slightly sour juices with your tongue, she

moans, puts her fingernails in your shoulders. “Come on give it to me,” she says and turns

around on all four.

You watch her perfect ass and her tiny little asshole. You enter her slowly, pull in and out

slowly, you are about to come and pull out and lick her from behind.

17

“You stink!” she says and suddenly turns around. “You can’t do it! You are too weak!”

You laugh and wrestle her around, she is lying flat on her front now and you push your cock

in hard from behind, push it in and out hard. “Shall I come inside you!?” you shout. “Yes!”

she shouts. You are about to come and she shouts “No!” You pull out the cock and spread

your sperm over her anus, thighs and back, you wave it around and come some more in a long

shot that reaches her hair on the back.

You are holding your hard cock as she turns around and looks at it still dripping heavily.

“Hey, what about me? You are a lousy fucker!”

You watch her fingering the hair and then licking the sperm. “You asshole, I wanted you to

come in my mouth!”

You hold out your cock and she licks the drops.

“Well, just give me five,” you say and light a cigarette.

“Five minutes! What are you, some kind of sex-starved monster?!”

“Let us enjoy it while we can,” you say. “More whiskey?”

You wake up and walk into the study, you write down in one of the notebooks: ‘I am always

that which your boyfriend never will be: Hard Again.’ You close the notebook and pick up

her thongs from the desk, they are really thick with dried-up juices, you lick them a bit and

put them back. You notice her small black purse on the desk, her driver’s license is sticking

out from it, you can see her date of birth, and her name: Katarina D’Hilly. You laugh briefly

and sit down at the desk looking out toward the port.

You are answering a phone-call as she wakes up and comes into the study, one hand over

her pussy, smiling, she whispers “Have you seen my…?” You point to the thongs that you

have put on top of her purse on the desk.

You see Jacob later in the day on the stairs, he says he should be complaining about being

tired and hangover but since he is not he will not.

You ask him if he gets that German beer at a good price and he explains that Benny buys

them in the port and is stupid enough to only add a ten percent profit.

You open the door to Jacob later, in the evening, you drink some of Benny’s beer with him

and explain that you are not a really a beer drinker.

“I am going to work as a night watch-man,” Jacob says. “In a uniform and all. Not that I

really need the money, we Metzingers always had money.” “Maybe the girls will like the

uniform,” you say.

You sit with Jacob for a while and then he goes into the study, standing in the middle of the

room listening to the music. You turn up the volume a bit, Van Morrison, a live bootleg,

18

Morrison is very drunk mumbling words from “The Story of Them” in the middle of another

song, gnawing and biting the harmonica.

“The birth of cool, 1964,” you say as you lower the volume.

“The what?” Jacob says and begins to investigate your shelves with CDs, he fingers some of

them, turns his head to the side now and then begins to read the titles, drops the lips a bit, then

straightens his back and neck, counts the Zappa titles with his right thumb, goes back a bit

alphabetically in the shelf, pulls out U2’s Achtung Baby!, sighs, and says: “Well, at least you

have got this gone!”

You wake up the next morning and remember your dream vividly. You sit down at the desk

with coffee and cigarettes and write down most of it:

‘You are in the Robinson Bar in Belfast watching “The Late, Late Show” on a small TV-

box crammed in between bottles of Jameson behind the counter, sitting next to you is Seamus

Heaney fondling Violet Morrison a bit, at the same time Heaney appears on screen

announcing the next guest in mock-broad brogue: “Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome a

promising young man that I have always had my eyes on, I mean his writing of course, the

very multi-talented, of Ballycastle descent, the incredibly smart and gentle gentleman, the

maa-aan, Mr. John Hawkes!” Your glass is filled by Heaney who pulls out another bottle

from behind the counter, Violet smiles awkwardly as a gang of bikers come in from the rain

and join you, one of them puts his finger in Heaney’s back, then points at the Jameson bottle,

says “That stuff killed my old man!” and puts a case of vodka on the counter. Heaney is on

screen but his face shifts into Bono, Hawkes has sat down in a sofa and is reading from a

black book but there is no sound, there is a pack of Marlboros and a Zippo lighter on the table

in front of him. Your glass is refilled by Van Morrison who pushes Heaney away and tells

Violet to go home, Morrison proceeds to kick one of the bikers very hard in the crotch and

when he is on his back on the floor he bangs the case of vodka in his face. You see Heaney on

the screen again but this time his face changes into Freud, then rapidly back to Heaney again

who is now in a very elegant three-piece suit waving a big cigar, then back into Freud, the

TV-screen is now much larger and Freud talks in an impossible-to-understand Cologne accent

before the screen grows more and more and finally displays Courbet’s L’Origine du monde.’

9.

You are at your desk, your fingers are moving away quickly on the laptop keyboard, the

afternoon sun is beating down increasingly on your desk and you put on a pair of sunglasses.

19

You flip through one of your black notebooks, read something and transfer it into the PC. You

write the following on the screen: ‘Up until now women have made me strong. My wife says

“The Wolf is strong.” But what she does not understand is that I am not interested in children,

household activities or pension funds. I am interested in hard work and play. I am a natural-

born hard-working playboy. Now she says: “The Wolf is a dreamer. He simply does not know

what reality is.” So up until now we have been friends in a language that neither of us know.’

You press DELETE.

You go into the kitchen, there is a broken wine-glass in the sink, you take a piece of it, run

some water over it and go into the bath room. You make a slow cut on your left cheek with

your left hand.

You watch the blood trickle a bit.

You sit down at the PC and write: ‘Keep mediocrity at bay at any price, but not wordlessly.’

You go back to the bath room and cut the cheek a bit deeper next to the first cut and watch

the blood trickle some more.

You sit down at the PC and write: ‘Work off the sins of others in a language that nobody

owns. Polish your aesthetic strategies and ethical statements in a language that nobody knows.

Work hard until your foreskin begins to bleed a little, until your pen begins to bleed a little,

until your body bleeds a little and begins to dance over the keyboard.’

You go back to the bath room and cut again, a third parallel line. You watch the blood

trickle and try to look very sad in the mirror with your eyes and your lips.

You sit down at the PC and press DELETE again. You look at the screen and click the

undo-functon and look at the text again.

You press down a few asterisks and begin a new paragraph:

‘Would I find Lee? She would be the kind of woman who did not need lined notebooks to

write erotic poetry, she would not be surprised by the chaos of planned meetings, she would

never squeeze out French cheese from the bottom of the package.’

You get up and walk around the study restlessly, then into the kitchen, you seize the

remains of the fake blonde’s fishnet stockings from the knife-box, spread them on the kitchen

table and play around with them until you get a hard-on.

You put your cock back in the pants and walk into the bath room, look down at the blood in

the hand-basin.

You hear your neighbor’s dog barking and your neighbour trying to silence the dog in her

arrhythmic Austrian accent.

20

You go into the kitchen and eat a bit of stale bread, holding it above your bent-back head as

if it were grapes.

You sit down at the PC and write without looking at the screen:

‘Gekrepten, you were really such a pretty one but it is impossible to remember your face. I

guess, like many of them, you had a perfect little ass once you walked away from me. You

will always remain a frightful mirror, a monstrous materialization of deadly repetitions, juicy

yellow flowers, thin green candles, ripe bone-cancer.’

You clean the desk quickly, put the black notebooks on the desk-chair, undress, lie down on

the desk on your back, look at your hard-on, put the PC on your stomach and look with a

sardonic face at the screen.

10.

You are in a supermarket putting tomatoes, onions and basil in a large trolley. You are

humming along, quite loud, with the muzak that keeps disappearing and as you then drown

the silence with “The Ride of the Valkyries” you startle a few of the other customers. You are

in the check-out line when you start improvising the Wagner piece and the crouching woman

in front of you hums along with her eyes far away until the cashier asks her for 5.50. “Are

these the Spanish tomatoes” the cashier asks in a jumpy voice that reminds you of your

neighbour and her barking dog, she looks angrily at you. “Yes,” you answer.

11.

You sit in the kitchen, finger the basil and smell your fingers. You read the last page of

Eribon’s book, close it, sit still for a bit, then open the last page again, flip through the book

and return to the last page. You pick up a pen and write below the printed text:

‘Ergo. Foucault was so full of it. The case of the anus.’

You get up and put Eribon in the waste-bin, look around the kitchen, then take the book out,

brush off a piece of wet coffee filter around the letters FOU, walk into the study and put it

into the wastepaper bin.

21

12.

You are in Lee’s apartment eating lobster, drinking red wine, looking at her walls wall-

papered with figurative paintings. You comment on the one painting that really stands out, a

self-portrait in Bacon style, her athletic body true to nature, her face gently distorted in horse

features and an almost sardonic smile, a play with spatial composition, surfaces emerging and

merging.

“You should have more of your own stuff on display.”

“I know. But it takes at least twenty years to get somewhere with your painting. I said to

myself, ‘Woman, it is not worth it. Woman, that is it!’”

“Ten thousand hours makes you a master they say. Twenty years at 500 hours a year…”

“Life, man, life! My life is more important. All the people, the people is what is important,

people living their lives, it is all we have got! Picasso painted for ten thousand hours then he

became an asshole! Life, it is my life, that is why I decided early to never have children and

not become old in this country. My life, my only life. Not Alain’s, not anybody else’s, my.”

“My-my.”

“You bastard, you would not understand, you are a man. All of modernism is a dirty old

man.”

“I thought that made all the difference, I am a man and you are a woman.”

“You bastard, everything is just sex for you!”

“No, but I am all for an erotics of art.”

“This has to end. I cannot take it being in a relationship again.”

You smile and lie down on the floor on your back. “But we are not in a relationship,” you

say, put your hands behind your head and let out a breath of contentment.

“You bastard! I have been in so many relationships, it never works!”

“We are not in a relationship.”

You watch her glowing cheeks and eyes. You look down at bit at your hard-on, she looks

down there a bit too and sighs.

“I got you a present,” you say, “something for you to wear.” You watch her rolling one of

her very thin joints with a minimum of marijuana in it, she sits down on the floor and you

smoke with her. “Deepak taught me how to smoke a long time ago,” she says. “In La Jolla?”

you say. “In what?” she says.

You watch her as she enters the room in her present, a thin silvery fishnet body. “You

bastard,” she says, “I swore this would never happen again.” She puts her left forefinger on

22

her clitoris and rubs it a bit. “I did it twice in the bath this afternoon so I would not be hungry

when you got here tonight. You say: “I want to come all over that fishnet, on your breasts,

you holding them and shaking them a bit.”

You are in her bedroom working hard on her clitoris with your tongue, the fishnet torn into

pieces over her body. “Do you think I am cheap?” she whispers. “Not at all,” you answer. “I

shaved down there, is it too much?” she moans “I did not think about it,” you answer. “Ah,

aoouuww! Keep the tongue there you bastard, I am going to come, ah…” “Yes come on my

tongue.” “Ah, you bastard, aooouuuwww!!!”

You enter her in the missionary position, push in and out hard, she continues screaming as

you take it out and massage her clitoris with your cockhead, you enter hard again, keep it still

for a while, rip the remains of the fishnet from her breast area, take out your cock and wrap

the fishnet around it, when you come she cups her left hand over your cockhead and rubs the

fishnet around a bit.

“I want you to come inside me the next time,” she says and keeps her grip on your cock

which remains hard for quite some time.

13.

You walk back and forth in the mirror in the bath room looking at the two sides of yourself,

two rings in one ear, the other ear naked.

You sit down in the kitchen. You talk a little with Mr. Jameson in the bottle, you talk a little

with the round shapes of the glass, you hum tonelessly. “Lee, you are my tastebud,” you say

in the direction of the stove.

You sit down at the desk and open one of the black notebooks. You write at the top of a

page: *Dialogue for a Prequel*

You proceed a few lines down:

“I am multitalented but I suffer from synaesthesia.”

“How so?”

“When you come in my mouth this morning I could feel the taste of Chilean red wine and

Irish whiskey.”

“And I can taste your female soul when I lick your clitoris any time of the day. Or night.”

“You what? You cannot! Bastard! That is not synaesthesia in any case.”

“How now? When you taste vhlita for example…”

23

“Ah, do not give me that Greek shit! You should be fucking some bimbo instead, somebody

much less intellectual than me.”

“Than I, perhaps?”

“What? And do not tell me I suffer from dyslexia. I can see things in paintings that you

cannot see because I do not have to put words and letters together, in some kind of holy crap

righteous way. It just is.”

“It is good to never be able to discuss shallow truths because language will not deceive

you.”

“Right, man! It just is! That is why I read very fast and never look back.”

“You are an artist.”

“Damn right I am an artist! It just is! Man!”

You lean back in the desk-chair and fondle your balls for a while. You write further down

the page: ‘Lee could also have said something about Narcissus and Goldmund. Something

about how Goldmund takes over, takes over the whole thing more and more, takes over life.’

You put on some warm clothes and walk out into the night toward the port. You stop and

smoke a cigarette under a lamp-post, you look beyond the port, beyond the infinity of the

darkness of the sea. You smell the sea and the sky, you breathe deeply and expand your

nostrils maximally, you put the filter of the cigarette in your nose and inhale some of the

smoke through each nostril. You feel the rhythm of the words ‘he kept looking at / the side of

her face’ as you say them out loud, you indicate the pitch with your boots as you repeat the

words. You see somebody approaching the lamp-post, you pretend to be deliriously drunk

head-banging and repeatedly screaming Einstellung, Goldmund! Einstellung! You walk

further toward the port sniffing loudly with expanded nostrils, sometimes showing your

sardonic face to the dark sky. You stop and stand very still, you hear nothing, see nothing,

smell nothing, you are dry and thirsty, you are sweating a little under your warm clothes. You

return.

You sit on your bed looking at the squarish red digits on the clock-radio: 02.02. You grab

the machine when a minute has passed and reset the time: 02.02. You repeat this eight times.

You smoke a cigarette and drink some water. 02.02. You write down at the top of the New

York Times Arts Section lying on the bed-table: ‘The time is now **hours ** minutes. There

are no signs of red.’

You wake up at dawn and look at the flashing digits realizing that there has been a power

failure. You fall asleep again.

24

14.

You wake up, drink coffee, smoke, read the morning paper quite fast and take some notes in

one of the black notebooks. You listen to Eric Satie and Wim Mertens, and write slowly. You

let the door-bell ring a couple of times and open to Jacob, he asks if you have been working

all night.

You look out the window. “Well it is day-time now, I can see that!” You laugh.

“I just worked my first night-shift,” Jacob says.

You look at his black apparel, he is holding a knuckled beret in his hand. “I thought you

were the chimney sweeper,” you say.

Jacob: “At least they get paid well.”

You: “But you Metzingers do not care for money, do you?”

Jacob: “It is instrumental.”

You: “Like music?” You smile into his forehead.

Jacob: “Are you alone?”

You: “My bath room mirror is with me as usual.”

Jacob: “It was lonely to do the nightshift, but mainly boring. Do you just sit around on your

own these days, what about your job at University?”

You: “I have a research grant now. So I work from home most of the time, sometimes I just

need to go to the library.”

Jacob: “That sounds weird, what do you do in the library? Search for rare books?”

You: “Research mainly consists of reading what other researchers have written and prove

that they are wrong. Nothing original, but it can be fun.”

Jacob: “Really, I could not just sit around everyday all day doing nothing.”

You “A couple of days ago I went into the city to look at a new bath room mirror in a store.

The shop-assistant, a gym-built redhead, followed my ass around the store, I could see her

ogling my ass in the mirrors. Finally I saw the one that I wanted and stood still staring

intensely into it into my own eyes, I almost got dizzy. The redhead did not seem to dare to

approach me then.”

Jacob: “She was probably a lesbian.”

You: “Do you want to come in for a coffee?”

Jacob: “No, I got to get some sleep.”

15.

25

‘I am glad I am not in a relationship with you,’ you write in the black notebook on the kitchen

table.

You get up and stumble around the kitchen, you pick up the coffee cup from the table and

down the remaining last drops, almost puking you spit it out in the sink. You look at the dirty

dishes and begin to clean them slowly, warming the fingers of your left hand under the hot

running water from time to time. You close your eyes, straighten your back, walk five steps

backward counting in German. You walk the five steps back to the sink not counting. You

walk into the bedroom and watch the blinking red digits for a while. You continue work in the

kitchen, more effectively now. You finish, you swing the towel around your head and let it

drop on the floor.

You sit down in the study on the floor beneath the photographs, listening to The Fall, some

of the John Peel sessions. You fold up your body in the Lotus position with your back against

the wall, as the music finishes you take a few deep breaths, close your eyes and begin to

meditate, at first you keep your mouth and jaws fixed in a sardonic-smile style but as the

meditation continues your face relaxes like the rest of your body. “I am aware that I am aware

that I am consciously thinking that I am not thinking about anything,” you whisper now and

then.

You get up from the floor, mumbling something in German, eyes closed you begin to hum

something tonelessly, quietly, then you open your eyes slowly. “You are on another blind-

date with life,” you say to the black and white photographs on the wall. You walk into the

kitchen and say to the fridge: “No Mr. Jameson to talk to today, eh?” You walk into the bath

room and stand in front of the mirror slapping your cheeks quite hard and watch the skin-

color come alive. “All in good health,” you say and laugh loudly. You get a hold of a fresh

toilet roll, open it, go into the kitchen and roll it from the floor there into the study, you crawl

with the toilet roll under the desk until you reach the wall under the window. “One should

always write one’s own length each day, every day, as Mister Gogol said,” you say to the

toilet roll.

You take off your clothes and go into the bath room. You look at your hard-on in the mirror

and strike it a couple of times. You move closer to the mirror, there is a drop of juice on your

cockhead and you take it up with your left forefinger and taste it. You go into the study, put

your clothes on pressing your hard-on into the pants. You sit down at the desk and begin to

write in one of the black notebooks.

26

You are writing intensely when somebody knocks hard at your door. You get up fast, run

into the bath room and look angrily at yourself in the mirror. You stand in the hallway for a

while, then you swing the door open violently. You see nothing at first, but you hear

somebody breathing, when you look down there is a crouching dwarf on your door-step.

“Jehova’s Witnesses?” you say, “I am not interested.”

You are about to push him away and close the door, when the dwarf asks: “You are Eliot

Erobal?” “If it says so on the letter-box,” you answer. “I am,” he says after a brief silence,

“Jaako Langacker, Cath’s brother.” “I did not know she had a brother,” you say. “No, no, it is

nothing like that,” he says, “I bring you a message from Cath, no, not a message, it is a book

about your conversations.” You bend down and he puts a notebook with a black satin cover in

your left hand, ‘Darkness and Theatre’ printed on the front with a golden felt-pen. “This must

be a mistake,” you say as the man shoots off on his roller-blade, jumps up and pushes the

elevator button, lands on the blade as the door opens, rolls into the elevator, jumps up at the

down button there and disappears as the door closes.

16.

You walk toward the city in a mild drizzle, you straighten your back and push your pelvis

forward and increase the length of your footsteps. You hum a long toneless tone as the night

falls.

You sit down in a café, drink coffee and eat a large Danish as the bald professor starts

reading his lecture on ‘Zizek and Recursion.’ You listen and suddenly your head drops down

violently almost hitting the table. You pick it up quickly, dizzy, and look at the professor who

stares at you. You now see a screen behind him with text, the heading being ‘Extra-Textual

Evidence.’

17.

You stand over the laptop screen in the dark study and read the text aloud: “’Cultural

Relativism. In times of social unrest and uncertainties mankind has generally turned to myth;

in our “age of fear,” of both nature and human beings, many men turn to hallucination

hermeneutics. On the one hand folk legends, religious symbols and occultism to make

universal sense; on the other hand a relativism that is absolute in its claim that particular

27

“discourses” create the world.’” You sit down with your sardonic face and add to the screen:

‘But time is always the great monster…’

18.

You sit at the desk, doodling small geometrical faces in one of the black notebooks, smoking,

sipping some Evian. You let the doorbell ring for a while and then you let Lee in. “Why did

you just leave me in that bar?” she says and looks at herself in the hall mirror, adjusting her

black top a little. “I thought you were doing fine with those guys dancing flamenco for you.

Imagine that, by the way, flamenco dancers in The Wacke after a gig with Elac!” “They are

old friends of Alain.” “Yes I know,” you say and look at her breasts and her hard nipples in

the mirror. “Give me some of that Chilean wine,” she says.

You sit down at the kitchen table with the wine. “What are these books?” she says and

points at a pile on the table next to the wall, she lifts up Phlippe Sollers’ Women, holds it up

and tries to look at the picture of the writer on the back but is too near-sighted. “Why all these

books, why read new books all the time, man, life is out there!”

You: “I like that top of yours, it is very black. Do you care for some more wine?”

Lee: “Why do you sound so formal?”

You: “Men are formal, we like forms.”

You watch her as she lifts her wine glass, she puts it to her thin lips and it looks as if she is

going to down quite a bit, but she stops the hasty movement and has her usual first moderate

sip.

You look at her breasts, she looks at your forehead. You get up and walk around her.

You: “Men are visual creatures, we are seduced by forms.” You lean over her and speak

softly into her ear: “Women, on the other hand, are seduced by sounds, especially voices.”

You watch her breasts and abdomen jump as she takes a quick breath. You lie down on the

kitchen floor on your back and look up into the ceiling.

Lee: “So here you are in your perfect little world with your books and your pens and

perfectly fresh air from the port when you open the window. You have never been in a

relationship, you have never been irritated at finding your partner’s dirty underwear on the

bath room floor, you have never found the odd half-eaten apple on the kitchen table, you have

never seen your partner reading the obituaries in the morning paper. You have never missed

anything or anybody in your life. But it is not life. Life is out there. People! All the people!

You should burn all your books and go with other people! Not relationships – the people!”

28

You: “We are not in a relationship.”

Lee: “You say ‘relationship’ and you do not know what you are talking about. Do you not

have anything better to do than just sit around here with your books. You men and your

infernal reasons for everything. Why not just live? What are you afraid of? I hate it that you

are so reasonable all the time. You are always acting mysterious, playing hard to get, speaking

in that mysterious poetic voice to cover your emptiness. The problem with you is that you just

cannot relate to other people.”

You: “We are not in a relationship.” You laugh and move your eyes from the ceiling to her

blue eyes.

Lee: “Stop it with those eyes, it drives me crazy!”

You laugh a little, get up and walk into the study and put on Barry White’s Golden Hits.

“Now that is a fine example of human expression,” you say and dance around arrhythmically

for a while. You watch her body as she walks into the room, she sits down on the desk-chair.

“You bastard!” she says as she leans back and lifts up her skirt. You watch her as she pulls

down her thongs a bit and begins massaging the clitoris with her left forefinger. You turn off

Barry White, you watch her closed eyes, you listen to her moaning. You walk up to her, bury

your head in her thighs and begin licking, you bite her gently, she screams and sits up a bit.

You watch her clitoris and smell her juices, you put your tongue inside her, she screams and

stands up, looks around, takes a scissors from the table and cuts her thongs free. You lie down

on the floor and tell her to sit on your face, she sits down on you, you close your eyes and

work with your tongue, she rams your hard-on in her mouth and sucks it hard, sometimes

gnawing it with her teeth. “Wow!” you say, “I guess a man cannot fake an orgasm in this

position” and she sucks harder and bites your cockhead. You want to hold your come back

and start thinking about e.g. barbed wire squeezing your cock, Margaret Thatcher’s mouse-

colored pussy, you conjure up Sarkozy’s ugly face, you see him fucking Bruni from behind, it

does not help when you see Bruni’s perfect little ass and then her mouth and face full of

dripping sperm.

“Goddamn!” Lee’s voice muffled says as she swallows and coughs.

You watch her body as she climbs off and crawls toward the ashtray and the cigarettes, she

lights one, inhales deeply and sits against the wall under the photographs, she breaths heavily

as she rubs her clitoris violently with her left-hand fingers, she burns herself with the cigarette

below her navel a couple of times and screams as she comes and throws herself around the

floor. You pick up the cigarette and inhale a couple of times before you put it out in the

29

ashtray. You look at your cock, it is red and sore, you put your left hand around it and it is

getting hard again.

19.

You are at your desk writing: ‘From the annals of the sinister eye. An erotics of art. Now your

mouth cries moral wolf.’ You feel the warmth of the coffee, the smell of the sea coming in

through the open window. “Smoking and the geometrics of joy!” You shout out the window

as you light a cigarette.

20.

You walk in moderate tempo, pelvis pushed forward, back straight, toward the city in the

evening. You stop in front of a lighted basement-floor window with black curtains. You see

people sitting at desks taking notes. You see Cath standing at a blackboard in a pink dress,

glowing lips and a pink ribbon in her hair, she has drawn large and small diagrams all over

the blackboard and is now pointing up in the air with her piece of chalk. You see the people

closing their notebooks, looking at her, her mouth is moving, the people look at the ceiling

then look around at each other and laugh a little. You notice a small man in the corner, he is

wearing a rain-coat and sporting a Hitlerian moustache, he walks up to Cath, shakes her hand

and lights up a pipe, talks to the people, points at some of the diagrams, talks, puffs out gray

smoke. You try to read Cath’s lips as she walks around the blackboard gesturing and talking,

you try to find the words ‘darkness’ and ‘theater’ but you cannot see them, the man in the

raincoat has disappeared.

You leave the window and walk through some deserted streets humming “Waltzing

Mathilda.” You hear the clock in the church tower striking, you walk into the empty church,

look around, leave quickly.

You continue through the deserted streets, you see your shadow in the window of a paint

shop, you walk faster, turn your head around once in a while listening intensely to the city

sounds, so intensely that you stop and put your fingers in your ears for a few seconds. You

shake your head violently and begin to walk home to your apartment. You make a detour

through the port and smell the sea and the sky.

30

You get into the elevator, close your eyes and push all the buttons at the same time, you

open your eyes and look at yourself in the mirror.

You get into your apartment, pick up the morning paper from the floor, look at yourself in

the hall mirror, pretend to be exhausted and fall to the floor with the paper in your hands. You

roll around on the floor rubbing your face into the carpet.

21.

You are drinking coffee and smoking, writing in one of your black notebooks: ‘Reaching out

for that moment when everything is transformed, a glimpse of extraordinary expression, as if

to close your fist around that space in time sensing the fluttering wings of a butterfly

somewhere in there. But for the producer, the sender, of that “butterfly effect” it is a release of

rising contingency, a deepening of style that reaches into its own magic – raw – form.’ You

answer the phone and it is Cath:

“I understand why you did not come in to our meeting, I, too, have frozen moments, when

leaving my apartment makes me dull and tired, when I sometimes lose my voice and write

indecipherable notes to myself, when I stand in front of the open wardrobe and look at the

darkness, when I dance and lose track of my moves, when I start weeping and get dry in a few

seconds. But I too have lived with strong passion, I have. Did you not ever feel the desire to

be happy, in the company of others?”

“In the company of wolves perhaps. Buy the way that was quite a mouthful.”

“Eh… sorry? I am rehearsing for the role of La Maga.”

‘In the company of whores’ you write down. ‘In the company of intellectual whores.’ You

laugh out loud.

Cath: “What? I do not want to be happy, maybe just content, a bit lax. I am afraid of

happiness, that it would take over, here in my head it would take over. And it would kill me.

Or I would murder somebody.”

You: “That sounds in character.”

Cath: “I, too, was once young and passionate. And I longed for somebody to be my friend,

soul and body. But I never wanted to know who he was, even if I were always with him. I

would share with him casual meetings that were just the opposite, dates written down on lined

writing paper.”

You: “Will you leave out, in the monolog, the symbolic deafening silence after the wet

umbrella has collapsed?”

31

Cath: “Yes. La Maga will just end by saying, ‘Oh, I am talking like a teenager,’ and there

will be no explicit references to her father.

You: “Jaako was here the other day and delivered your notes.”

Cath: “So, what do you think?”

You: “I have only read fragments. It is not as if any of my words are in there.”

Cath: “It is a disguised dialog.”

You: “Words of totality, complete with my words missing.”

Cath: “Theater discovers, orders, transmits. The actor is in a flux of effort, creation,

liberation. There is, per definition, nothing natural on stage. Darkness, on the other hand, is all

nature, fleeting sensations, timeless pain and resistance to pain that causes an increasing

suffering.”

You: “What if a thunderstorm broke out right now and we could not almost hear our voices,

shouting at each other?”

Cath: “What?”

You: “I am just a realist when it comes to nature. What you see on stage is the seen.”

Cath: “What? But La Maga is all about intuition, she would never squeeze her toothpaste up

from the bottom of the tube. Your problem is that you will never understand what intuition is,

you think that every step on the stage is carefully planned like all of life was carefully planned

acting. You are not supposed to measure the fleeting sensations on stage or in life. Theater is,

and I could go on about this for hours, not darkness, not about the geometrical intertexts you

always talk about, theater is an expression of intuitions that you simply cannot grasp.”

You: “I am glad I am not in a relationship with you.”

Cath: “What?”

You: “If that were the case I would have nothing to express, no means of expressing it, no

body from which to express…”

Cath: “Ach, stop that Becket crap, you cannot even paraphrase it correctly!”

You: “I could be… in the wrong…”

Cath: “What? And what is this thing you have about relationships? Relationships are built

on intuitions, the best thing for everybody is to be together, all personality types are

compatible, you have to work together, if you live a hundred percent together with somebody

you will see that things work.”

You: “Why did all the politically correct cultural relativists side a hundred percent with

Salman Rushdie?”

Cath: “You and your lousy koan paraphrases. Zen is all about intuition!”

32

You: “I prefer my geometrics of joy any day.”

Cath: “The darkness, Eliot, you have to get out of the darkness!”

You: “Perhaps that is enough for today?”

22.

You are watching a video, it begins with a seven- or eight-year-old girl, curly blond hair, blue

eyes, standing at a train station she smiles and points at an arriving train. You see a woman

waving from behind a window as the train has stopped, she is pale, wears large glasses, she

sports a furry red wig that sits like a hat on her round head. You watch her struggling with a

large suitcase getting off the train, declining help from passengers, the left leg straight and

stiff, she opens her arms and the little girl runs toward her and hugs her. “I am Lili,” she says

as the camera closes in on her face, “I am Lili, but everybody calls me Grandmama

Langacker.”

You now see a cheap hotel room, Cath is having tea with Lili at a small table. “I still suffer

from synaesthesia,” Cath says. “Ach,” Lili grunts, “you just never learned to see colors, any

normal child would do that!”

“But…” Cath begins.

“Aauu-rrhh,” Lili grunts and snarls, “you were such a difficult child, always not listening to

me. You were the child with your pockets always full of loose change, that purse I gave you

did not last for long. You developed a double chin at a very early age, that is still your most

significant trait for all your beauty, but that does not mean I do not love you. You should have

gotten green tea instead, it is much better for your health.”

Cath: “But this is green tea…”

Lili: “Aauu-rrhh, the problem is you never listen to me, you should have listened to me in

the first place. Theater! That was your biggest mistake! And now you can never get out of it.”

Cath: “But I am not in theater anymore…”

Lili: “Aauu-rrhh,” lights a cigarette, coughs, “ach, you never listen. Why are we here? We

are here to go! No… Why are we here? We are here to discuss evolutionary psychology, we

are here so that I can explain to you why women have more words than men. It grew out of

the necessity of keeping track of things while the men were out hunting and having a good

time, irresponsible of all things as they have always been and always will be. So why do you

persist with this theater stuff? Men have all the words there, in the darkness, and they never

33

keep track of anything, aauu-rrhh, it is a wonder that men survive at all. Look at me, I used to

be the greatest juggler in the world, the circus always tells the truth.”

Cath: “But I am… getting out… of theatre now…”

Lili: “Aauu-rrhh,” swallows the tea the wrong way, coughs violently, “auu-rrhh”, coughs

violently again, “aauu-rrhh, you should have gotten green tea!”

You watch as the camera zooms in the seven- or eight-year-old girl sleeping on the bed, the

camera shakes over the hotel room carpet, shows fuzzily how Lili struggles to get out of the

chair, walks gruntingly to the radio, turns it on, Springsteen’s “Badlands” begin to play, Lili

turns it off, looks toward the camera, smiles, and says in a lean voice: “I am Lili. but

everybody who knows me calls me Grandmama Langacker.”

23.

You are in the apartment, the video is playing in the background, Grandmama Langacker is

talking and there is a glass and a bottle of red wine in front of her. You go out into the

hallway, look into the wardrobe and take out your black greatcoat, you need to fix a missing

button, check it out a bit and put the coat on the floor.

You go into the kitchen, get a needle and thread, get the coat from the hallway, go into the

study, sit down at the desk and sew on a new button. You make a few notes in one of the

black notebooks, return to the video and rewind it to where you stopped watching.

Grandmama Langacker begins her monolog again: “You young people never learn anything

new that can be of use to me. For example long before darkness came into the theater, I posed

the question ‘Why do so many individuals not hear their own voice, their own thinking, why

their lack of distance to whatever they get involved in?’ The answer is quite simple but no

scientist has found it out, ever. Let me take a detour. It is because the rhythm of the artist’s

activity must not be broken, that which the actor expresses, on stage, a formulation that has

never been formulated before and this uniqueness requires that the rhythm is never broken.

And the only technique for this is the artist’s auditory oblivion, the artist must be instructed,

not directed, to take this necessary step in the relation of being and meaning….”

You turn off the sound but let the tape run. You read her lips for a while. You walk over to

the desk humming “Spooky” by Cobb/Buie/Shapiro/Middlebrooks. You sit down, stop

humming, pick up a pen and look at it. You take deep breaths.

34

24.

You watch Cath and Lili walk in a park, a golden autumn day, leaves red, orange, green,

sooty, a bony man, hunched-over, in a black track suit walks the other way, camera focuses in

on Cath and Lili as they walk slower.

“I like it so much when you cool down a bit and smile most of the time Grandmama

Langacker.”

“Ach, do not call me that, sweetie-pie.”

“No? What, then, shall I call you?”

“Just use ‘you’ as much as possible. Avoid names as much as possible.”

You watch them come to a halt in front of a phone booth.

“I have to get in there,” Lili says.

“It is out of order. Use my cell instead”

“But it is so cool, a good old phone booth in the middle of the park. I will go in there,

change, and come out as Superwoman!”

“You are already a superwoman Grandm…. I mean you…are…you.”

“Let me put it like this. Science is a question of invariancy. For example, as a graduate you

lick an all-wooden professor’s arse until your tongue begins to bleed a little. Then you make

your scientific career careening through academia waiting to have your own arse sucked blue.

You could not do this with the science of theater of course, not in the long run.”

You pause the video and hum tonelessly for a bit. You write down in a notebook:

The Invariant Man

Always returns to sing his song

Death is the same that is the point

Freedom is the repetition

Of freshly pulled-out fingernails

It makes sense this catalogue

Refusing universal pain

You return to the video.

35

Cath: “But the good thing with science is that the truth always comes out in the end,

regardless of foolish professors and arse-licking careerists.”

Lili: “Yes of course, it just takes time, provided that we talk of real science that can be

falsified down to each last detail.”

You watch Cath and Lili walking slower and slower, they reach a bench, look at each other

and sit down, the camera zooms in on the leaves for a while.

Cath: “Are you happy, you…?”

Lili: “No. I just have to tolerate a lot of people to get by. I have learnt to tolerate people

quite a bit, but it took some time.”

Cath: “Does that mean you have some idea about how one might live?

Lili: “Stop it.”

You watch as Lili begins to make a gesture with her left hand, you sense that her left eye

twitches a bit, then she remains very rigid holding back any expressive gesture from her body.

You stop the video, rewind, lean forward and study the minimal twitches in her eye.

You rewind and watch again, leaning very close to the screen you cannot see the twitches.

You drink some coffee and smoke a few cigarettes. You watch the rest of the video, where

the camera leaves Cath and Lili and moves around shakingly on some paths in the park, then

there is a cut to Lili sitting in front of a desk in a barely lit room, reading from a notebook

only sometimes looking into the camera but always reading in a crisp melodic voice:

“I still write, yes. I am not that old but I will keep on writing till the day I die. I lived in

confusion as most people do till one day when I woke up and said to myself: ‘You. It is about

you.’ I realized that I had been teaching acting all the time in exactly the right way but I had

been acting wrong myself all my life. I had not been shooting in the direction of the arrow

once, I had not been writing in the direction of the pen, not one single line. I knew about death

and freedom since my thirteenth birthday when I had my first orgasm. My father gave me my

first orgasm with his left forefinger. He taught me everything about how to combine total

concentration with total relaxation. He taught me all about acting, that it is not at all acting till

you let go of all acting. He taught me that acting on your own is all there is to it. The act of

touching yourself is the only true act of freedom and death, and there can never be too much

death or freedom. Yes, these are words that I twist around the way I like to twist them around,

relentlessly. It is of no concern to anybody but myself. And that is exactly it. Cath, you will

not become an actor like me, you will not touch yourself like me, you will not be writing like

me. (Stops, coughs, drinks some water.) Ach, it is all about you.”

36

25.

You are dreaming that you are walking through a moderately large shopping mall with Cath

and Lili. You hear Lili’s voice like a constant babble but you cannot see her mouth moving,

Cath’s facial expression reminds you of her nearing orgasm, your feet are heavy but you

follow their pace easily. You walk into a café where Lili loudly complains about the

customers’ choices of pastries and tells them that they all deserve to die, that in fact they will

be the first to be executed when the revolution comes.

You get into an elevator where Lili pushes a red button with the word GALLOWS in black

letters. You see Lili’s mouth moving in the mirror but there is only silence, Cath remains her

near-orgasm facial expression. You look at yourself in the mirror, you are very swankily

dressed in a pin-stripe dress, under it a white t-shirt. You look again in the mirror, you are

naked and Cath is down on her knees giving you head, she is wearing a leather teddy and

minimal thongs. You are about to come, but each time you pull your cock out with your left

hand to spray her face and hair you feel the breeze of the AC cooling it down and put it back

in her mouth, this happens maybe a dozen times. You are really about to come when the

elevator door opens and a very hunched bell-hop boy stares at the two of you, his fuzzily

empty face features turn into John Hurt in the mirror, then the door closes and there is a

black-out.

You are walking through the mall again with Cath and Lili, Cath stops to look at a large

poster with John Heard holding a large automatic gun, the film advertised has the word

HELDEN in the title.

You walk a bit further and the three of you stop in front of a smaller poster advertising The

Beat That My Heart Skipped. You hear Lili begin to speak:

“You are an actor are you not? I know you are not Romain Duris but you look a bit like

him. I have seen you in some movies and in the theater.”

You turn around, the three of you, and look at the handsome man who has been standing

behind you, he does not look at all like Romain Duris, he averts his eyes, embarrassed. You

hear Lili speak again:

“You look like Romain Duris who looks a bit like Robert De Niro acting like Robert De

Niro. Robert De Niro was good before he became Robert De Niro, do not let that happen to

you!”

“How could I,” says the actor, “I do not even resemble Romain Duris in the first place!”

37

“You are always as embarrassed by yourself when you are acting as you are now in real

life,” Lili says and frowns, sizing the man up.

“How could I,” the actor says, “I am not a coward in real life!”

“How could you? How? Well, to begin with you must stop posing when you are acting.

That should make you learn something about real life. You are too restrained, you express

nothing of the continuum of chaos and order that a personality has. You hold back your

chemical body, your impulses, your rhythm, you think you act without acting but nothing

could be further from the truth,” Lili proceeds in a mellow analytic voice.

“How…?” the actor begins in a trembling voice keeping a stiff upper lip.

“Much better!” Lili interrupts. “Keep your voice at a minimum, be your own body!”

You watch how, in slow motion, Lili walks up to him and punches him hard in his stomach

a couple of times, surprised he looks at her and doubles up, as he slowly straightens up Lili

gives him a karate kick on his forehead, he looks surprised but stands up straight.

“Good!” Lili screams. “Now you are ready for acting!”

You are walking through the mall again with Lili and Cath, the annoying muzak gradually

turns into Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme”, you walk on, the three of you, smiling, humming,

you pass a lingerie shop, you pass a lame busker resembling resembling Lily Tomlin’s

character in Short Cuts, you pass a Greek taverna and stare at the red mullets on display, you

pass a large screen showing American Gigolo and Cath comments on Gere’s tiny ass, you

sing along as the music changes to Lydia Lunch’s “Everything,” you run a bit toward a big

setting sun in the distance, you are back in the elevator, Lili pushes the red button with the

black letters FELLATIO, you pull out your cock to spray most of your big load in Cath’s hair,

and some of it in her staring left eye.

You wake up, the light is on in the bedroom, you look at the red digits on the clock-radio,

you look at Lee who crawls slowly with her head toward your hard-on, she looks into your

eyes, her tongue sticking out and circling round and round ironically.

26.

You watch the last part of the video with Lili and Cath, they are walking through the park

again, this time Cath carries a large black duffle bag, Lili is pulling a large green bag on

wheels, every once in a while she stops to rest, when she does so Cath puts her bag on the

ground.

38

You see them as they arrive at the platform where the video started, Lili pulls out a copy of

Alan Bennett’s The Lady in the Van from her coat and hands it to Cath. “This one, including

two characters named Alan Bennett (she pronounces it in a French accent) almost cured my

synaesthesia,” Lili says and nods at the book, Cath looking confusedly at the blurb. You see a

hunched man in a black suit walking behind them and the camera starts following him, he

halts before a train door, straightens himself up, turns around looking into the camera, smiles,

and hops nimbly up the steps backwards and vanishes into the train, the camera moves back

to Cath and Lili who kiss and hug in a formal way and the screen goes black.

27.

You are walking around in the port, it is a very bright autumn day. You stop at the fish-

monger’s window, look at the owner in there, nod to him, he disappears behind the counter.

You look at the fish on display and then you concentrate on the image of your own face in the

window, your eyes are very attentive but tired at the same time, you make a quick sardonic

grimace.

You walk home from the port, not too slowly, but you hum numbers for each step you put

down and look with concentrated eyes at your boots each step. You come into the apartment,

take off your clothes and lie down on the bed. You get up, walk into the study, put Lunch’s

“Everything” in the CD-player and walk back to the bed singing along. You lie down again.

You have a hard-on and satisfy yourself slowly in an awkward way with your left-hand palm,

mainly rubbing the under-side of your cock, sometimes spitting in the palm and sometimes

focusing on your cockhead.

28.

You walk home from the port, not too slowly, you come into the hallway, look at yourself in

the mirror. You pick up Lee’s beret from the floor and put it on. You go into the bath room

and look at yourself in the mirror there, you make your eyes look sad and then the lips,

slightly.

You in the mirror: “Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing your arms around a piece of

fresh carcass.”

39

You stand still, straighten your back and listen to your neighbor rummaging in the bath

room a few feet away behind the wall behind your bathtub.

29.

You sit at the desk and smell the sea with the window ajar, small things could fly in there.

You take out a thin pile of unopened letters from the drawers. You open one of them slowly

with a pen-knife, it contains a cubistic aquarelle of pink poppies, you hold it up against the

afternoon light from the window. You turn it around and look at Lee’s letters on the back.

You read: ‘Do with me what you will. I am already gone.’

You take out a small square mirror from the drawers and look at the underside of your hard-

on in it, the skin is a bit sore there.

30.

You are in the bath room staring at the mirror, for a few milliseconds you see your arms

crawling explosively around your shoulders.

You go into the bedroom and lie down on the bed, take deep breaths. You look at the red

digits on the clock-radio and get up. You put on your black clothes and leatherjacket, check

that you have the pens and a notebook with you, get out of the apartment and walk toward Per

Elato, you arrive, sit down and look at Cath’s breasts and her thick gold-chain that bumps

around her cleavage when she speaks.

Cath: “There is no more darkness. There is no more theater. There is only void.”

You: “Is that a problem? Or the final reflection on a problem that is insoluble?”

Cath: “I now understand the last words of Grandmama Langacker. Acting is like when the

Navaho Indians paint in the desert-sand to come into contact with a higher power and then

dance on the image till it has disappeared. Creation and destruction are inseparable, it is like

jazz where the destructiveness never comes to a closure.”

You: “I have the greatest respect for Grandmama Langacker’s aesthetics but would it not be

more interesting if the actor acting expressed the difference between wanting to know how to

do it and the wanting to be able to do it?”

Cath: “Acting should be like life, that is what I am saying, there is no way of separating

chaos and order, but the destructiveness is the important thing, acting should be like… eh…

action-acting, yes, action-acting! Pollock would have liked that.”

40

You: “Darkness, void, destruction. And now Pollock: do you mean to say that he painted

until the painting got quiet for him, that the jazz musician plays himself into silence, that the

actor acting kills the action in an act of… acting?”

Cath: “Something like that. But you do not understand the transparency of void, the actor

should break through the continuity of being which is absent from the ordinary experience of

living.”

You: “Being and living, yes. But I would say it call comes down to a question of how to live

and what for – even if you are some kind of acting actor.”

Cath: “No!” Whispers: “You bastard,” as she walks with tears in her eyes toward the

restrooms.

31.

You are dreaming that you wake up one Monday morning and find yourself left-handed, you

write a short story with a similar beginning and read it soon after at a poetry festival, it takes

exactly eighteen minutes to read, Lee is in the audience with a radiant face. You dream the

same dream the next night, but at the end of the dream this time, somebody mistakenly

projects clips from the pornographic scene in Lost Highway on the screen behind your

reading, there is no Rammstein music but instead a very mellow live version of Bruce

Hornsby’s “The Way It is.” You dream the dream a third night, a mixture of the two

preceding ones, and it now ends with a sudden power cut but you keep on reading perfectly in

the dark as somebody brings a lit thin green candle to put on the podium before you.

You wake up with a stiff smile on your face, you walk straight to the desk and write down

most of the details from the dreaming experiences, you realize your stiff smile when you have

finished writing, grab your face with your left hand and pull the smile off., you clench your

fist to keep the smile in there, walk over to the paper waste-basket and dispose of it there.

You walk into the kitchen, boil some coffee, go back to the desk, drink coffee and smoke a

few cigarettes. You listen to Cristina’s versions of “Blue Money” and “Is That All There Is.”

You write down: ‘Idea for a poem/song: proceed from describing Cristina’s exquisitely dead-

pan voice in “Blue Money,” keep it simple, sensuous, palpable, but insert some far-fetched

reference to synaesthesia, possible title Mediocrity (ironic; pentametric imbalance; non-

heroic).’ A few lines down you write: ‘Cristina’s “Is That All There Is” was released in 1980.

Consider it in the context of singing-as-bad-as-possible. But mainly consider it in the context

41

of the death of punk music, punk as existentialism, how to live and what for. Copy that. Over

and out.’ At the bottom of the page you write: ‘Lyrics that swallow up any content.’

You read Mann’s Enttäuschung (“Disllusionment”), put it down and yawn for several

minutes.

You wake up in bed wondering if you have taken a leap, a single leap, while sleeping, since

your feet are where the pillow usually is, the pillow is under your head where your feet

usually are, very symmetric.

You get up quickly, sip a few centilitres of whiskey and bring out a portable film-screen

from under your bed while smoking a cigarette, you leave the apartment quickly after

checking that notebook and pens are with you in the leather-jacket pockets. You walk quickly

through the concrete cityscape, you pass the graveyard where something usually smells of

freshly grated beetroots in early fall, you enter the park and slow down as you pass the

children’s zoo, you walk for quite some time till you reach a secluded opening. You unfold

the film screen and hang it on a tree branch about one meter eighty centimeters high, you sit

down in a lotus position eight meters and fifty centimeters from it. You look into it, attentive,

with semi-closed eyes. You sit.

You feel your hard-on pressing against the jeans, your straight back is full of dull pain, pain

sharp as razorblades is dancing behind your eyes, your ears fill up with white noise, your

nose-wings expand, there is a metallic taste in your mouth. You bite the inside of your left

lower lip until you bleed a little, you try to sneeze but you cannot, you imagine you hear your

blood-pressure in your ears, your eyes fill with dry tears, your back turns comfortably numb,

your cock remains firm.

You close your eyes and see yourself sitting before the screen where a black and white film

projects the text:

‘I expect nothing, I fear nothing, I am free.’

You shake yourself out of the dreaming and look attentively at the screen with semi-closed

eyes again. You sing the melody to Miles Davis’ ‘E. S. P.’ for about 5 minutes and 27

seconds, you repeat Et in Arcadia ego, home of the great Pan eighty-one times in a low

toneless voice, you close your eyes and see the text LITTLE ONE on the screen, black on

white, which transforms into Lee’s juicy clitoris, realistically colored, with her left fore-finger

partly touching it.

You shake yourself and become attentive again. You try to remain conscious of the fact that

you are trying to think about nothing, you are conscious of thinking that the dull pain in your

42

back has evaporated, that your back is still there but it has moved a few centimeters from your

body and is still full of pain there.

You close your eyes and see Julio Cortàzar on the screen having an animated discussion

with Salma Hayek about her perfect little ass, you see the murder of Bunny in Donna Tartt’s

The Secret History in slow-motion, you see a 1960s Candace Bergen on the beach of a sun-

burnt Greek island on all fours in thongs, she is looking back at you over her shoulder waiting

for your cock and says so.

You become attentive again, you adjust your hard-on, the foreskin, in your jeans, so that

you can flex your cock and anus muscles pleasurably.

You get up slowly, shake your balls with your left hand a bit, let the cock relax a bit. You

leave the screen in the tree and walk back to your apartment the same way you came, noticing

the intense smell of freshly grated beetroots as you pass the graveyard again, you make a

mental note of using the sensuousness of the scene in a short story about an extreme

performance artist called Kurtz who kills himself by drowning in a rain of ball-bearings in his

final artistic act which unfortunately was lost to the world since he ran out of film and was

particularly eager to die on that day, 2/2/2002.

You sit down at your desk, open two of the black notebooks and take parallel notes of the

day. You bring a large bottle of Jameson, almost full, and two packs of Marlboro to the desk

and begin to write beautifully shaped sentences – grammar, punctuation, gestalted metaphors

– using your laptop. You do not finish until your story has come to an end.

You listen three times to the bootleg outtake “Coda” from Springsteen’s Greetings from

Asbury Park, N.J. You walk into bedroom, on the way there bouncing sometimes against the

walls pretending to be drunk.

32.

You are walking with Lee in the mall, you have been watching Lynch’s Boxing Helena in the

apartment, afterward you used duck tape to tie her athletic arms behind her back almost

dislocating her shoulders. You twisted her fingers and taped them into a container for your

cock and fucked her there with the only intention of coming as soon as possible. Your cock

sore from rubbing against the duck tape you came in pleasure and pain and cut her loose with

your Swiss knife.

“I want you to come inside me!” she said, grabbed the duck tape and taped some of it on her

clitoris, she teared it off semi-slowly and screamed, then massaged herself furiously with

43

fingers of both hands bringing herself orgasms that would have satisfied even a cat in a hairy

sack.

You are walking with Lee saying, “Look at all this commerce, it is all about seduction, all

the shiny stuff propositioning you, and yet there is nothing behind the surface, nothing there

to grasp your fingers around, nothing to satisfy you.”

“You should have fucked some bimbo all along, I am the intellectual type. Seduction my

ass! I know what I could grasp right now, hard…”

You laugh and hear a bit of her asthmatic panting behind you.

You leave the mall and walk across the street to Le Village where a somewhat Frida Kahlo-

like waitress slams down a bottle of red wine and menus on your table.

You recognize a clothes sales-girl at a table, her company is a neatly dressed gentleman in

an expensive black suit, white shirt and tie, granite face and wild curly hair that has been

colored in a strange yellow tint. You see her noticing you, she nods at you a bit and you look

back into her eyes, her company is talking and gesticulating looking at nothing, above her

head.

“I hate people with yellow hair,” you say to Lee who is trying to read the menu with peering

eyes.

“You and your tiresome irony,” she mutters, “I will have whatever you are having.”

You cheer and taste the red wine. You order the food in French – as is expected –, the Frida-

look-alike is frustrated, generally, and gives you a lesson in French grammar, pretending not

to hear a plural ‘s’ that you did or did not enunciate, she ends her discourse by exclaiming,

“Mais grille, monsieur, gril-le! Le canard est gril-le!”

You drink the wine, smoke cigarettes; Lee is talking about her friend Margarita who has a

hang-up about cleaning her house: “Nobody knows why, she just cannot do it, she is a neat

person, you have met her, very elegant, you know she has got style, she is a very caring

person, she raised two children, Meredith and Fiona, she was a young mother, too, two fine

girls, the father worked in the off-shore business, drilling oil, one day there was a gas

explosion and he was dismembered and divorced her, for her sake, he was a fine man, the

best, and now she is stuck with a real ass-hole, calls himself GeeWee, tries to look young but

has no sense of style, wears expensive suits and tacky t-shirts, one of them has a print

advertising a cheap Brie, a very irritating person and now he says he has cancer, which is of

course a lie, says she has to take care of him, he is like a four-year-old that has only grown

vertically, a pathetic loser… That guy over there with the golden hair could be him…”

44

You look at the sales-girl who is eyeing you back a bit, her companion now reminds you of

an old German-speaking actor, partly of Marockan descent with a Dutch van-name, a

morphinist in the scandal press in the old days.

You eat your duck and drink some wine, the Frida-waitress walks by and kicks Lee’s chair

briefly, she says “Oh!” Lee smiles sardonically: “Pardons moi,” she says. “What was that

about?” you say. “Ah, nothing, women’s stuff,” Lee says and smiles.

“Baby, I have to go to the restrooms,” Lee says.

“You know they have quite luxurious rooms here,” you say.

“Oh, baby,” she says.

You are in the large bath-room sitting with your back straight on the toilet seat, smoking a

cigarette, Lee has just extinguished hers in the bidet. You watch her as she undresses in

moderate tempo, but not too slow, her body in different mirrors, you devour her breasts and

perfect ass there. You watch as she displays her body around the mirrors and squeezes her left

nipple with her left hand, she then takes a few gymnastic steps and jumps to stand on her

hands and comes toward you. You stick your tongue out and circle her clitoris as she is

standing with her feet against the wall above you, her curly blonde hair dips against the floor.

You hear somebody knocking on the door and a muffled voice in French, then silence.

You are now moving your cock in and out watching Lee’s firm ass from behind, slowly

slowly, she is panting and repeatedly whispering: “I want you to come inside me.” You watch

the act in several mirrors, she has a firm grip on the hot and cold taps of the basin, there are

some drips coming out of the hot-water tap. You see the shadow of a person outside the room,

from the mirror straight in front of you, you see the person pressing the face against the glass

of the door till the face goes a bit flat. “I want you to come inside me!” Lee screams. You

want Lee to go down on her knees to spray her face and hair but you are very close to coming

and instead ram it hard into her two times, you ram it in a third time and begin to come as you

see the door open slowly, in the mirror you see the sales-girl who is staring at your eyes in the

mirror and you stare back into her eyes and continue to ram hard into Lee filling her, you are

still orgasmic as you pull out and deliver some of the last sperm over and around her anus.

33.

You sit in a café similar to Per Elato reading a morning-paper, muttering phrases from a book

review like “discourse identity,” “untouchable veneer,” “gender trouble.” You take a few

breaths as this rather famous actor comes in, walks over to your table and sits down.

45

“You know the Langackers, right?” he says.

“If this is about method acting…” you begin in a dead-pan voice.

“No….” He hesitates. “It is about… eh… sexual… slash… textual identities.”

“Expressions like that make me want to slash my wrists.”

“Eh… I could not help noticing you were reading the article about van Dilenar’s latest

publication.”

“He makes the critics look bad in a really bad way. Listen to this: ‘His text swallows the

human heart like a sharp geometrical ice-cube, his textuality carves out a colorful bas-relief

that is pure sensuous surface’

You both laugh and imitate each other’s blank facial expressions.

The actor: “I saw you in the mall the other day, I could not help noticing your firm,

masculine body language, at the same time your gentle conversation techniques. You

reminded me of the Langackers, of the quest for total concentration and relaxation, of the

absence of myth in the theater. There is no darkness. There is only that cruise for pleasure as

in Stavrolakes’ sculpture with the same name.”

You: “I follow you but I am not sure where this is leading.”

The actor: “Ach, sorry. It is just that I caught a fleeting glimpse of it all when I heard you

conversing with Cath in the mall. After you said something like, ‘hope for nothing, fear

nothing, be free.’ Eh… I cannot say that I pretend that I hope for nothing, after all I am an

actor, I have to believe that people see what I do on stage, not that what I do has any specific

meaning, but what I do must arouse feelings. If somebody says that what I do is creatively

dead he has understood nothing or that particular person is just creatively dead himself. Eh…

I am not sure about fear, though. When I am meditating I always reach a deep point when I go

blank that then immediately transforms into a gut feeling of fear. But I guess that is as good as

it gets. Hmm… Freedom I am more sure about, it is not freedom of expression but that kind

of freedom when you accept death and at the same time fight against death.”

You: “You should be moving your body more. You should be walking up and down Illyrian

mountain slopes talking to goats to begin with.”

You sit motionless for a while, the actor nods and runs out of the café.

You walk home to your apartment taking the detour through the port. You stop somewhere

and watch the signs WALK/DON’T WALK for a while. You turn around and see a tourist

bus pulling up close to you waiting for green lights, the bus is brightly lit inside, the guide is

talking into a microphone and smiling at you from time to time, the passengers are all wearing

46

silver-gray tracksuits and thick golden chains, looking with expressionless faces out into the

dark night.

34.

You stand in front of the bath-room mirror smiling sardonically, you whistle parts of “Is That

All There Is?” You hear the neighbor’s dog wailing softly, the morning paper is on the toilet

seat, in the mirror you are reading parts of an article about a fictional character named Millie

who tortures a poet with rubber bands.

You let the phone ring for a while, when you answer you hear Lee’s voice, she is talking

about the weather, James Bond, and color-blindness, the line is bad and you keep repeating

that yoy cannot hear what she is saying, finally you hold out the phone in front of you and

squeeze it hard in your left fist.

Your door-bell rings and you open to Jacob, he is carrying a case of German beer.

“How about some dwarf-tossing?” he says, “I have read that book by Grass you

recommended – but I must say I prefer crack!” “You should read Evolutionary Pranksters,”

you reply and laugh. “You are the reader, I am not!” he says and laughs hard and coughs.

You: “Have you quit the night-watchman job?”

Jacob: “We Metzingers always had money. Benny is in the car, there is lots more beer.”

You: “Well, bring him and it in, I have nothing against the Bennies of this world!”

You drink a beer with Jacob standing in the hallway, you both swallow large mouthful after

mouthful but the beer lasts quite a while, finally Jacob calls Benny on his cell and asks him to

come in, Benny appears fast on the doorstep carrying another case of beer.

Jacob: “You are invited!”

Benny: “Thank you, you will not be disappointed!”

You are closing the door behind Benny as the doorbell rings again, it is the sales-girl

appearing with a radiant smile.

You sit drinking in the kitchen, Jacob is looking at the sales-girl and into the floor. You

have put on Berg’s Lulu and nobody is listening, after a while Jacob rises and speaks

solemnly: “I dedicate this toast to all my friends…”

You answer the phone, it is Lee, she says she wants to come over and asks if you are alone,

you answer you are not, the line breaks up.

You ask Benny to get the door as the doorbell rings again, he opens the door to Cath and

Lee who enter giggling.

47

You: “Do you two know each other?”

Lee: “No, we just met in the elevator going up.”

Cath: “Berg! Is it the München Alte Oper recording with Patricia Petibon?”

You: “Yes.”

Lee: “I just came from a party. It was crazy. Tom brings in his Harley-Davidson and puts it

in the middle of the living room on display for the winter season. I sat on it most of the time,

the drinks must have been spiked, do you have some coffee?”

You watch Jacob looking into the ceiling then approaching Lee and mumbling something,

Cath mutters something in French about ‘Les Bergs, Les Bergs,’ you see the actor through

your kitchen window walking through the yard, you wave at him, walk to the door and let him

in.

“Metzinger!” Lee shouts from the study, “I bet you drive a very expensive red sports-car!

Bring out the booze, let us have some dancing!”

Jacob: “I will get you some coffee…”

Lee: “I am only talking, I am only talking…”

You are gathering on the floor in the study, Jacob is talking to Lee about U2, Benny goes

out and comes back with another case of German beer, he puts it in the middle of the floor,

you sit around it and drink and raise your cans and cheer once in a while.

You are eyeing Lee who looks back mock-flirting, she is ‘high’ but she ‘never loses it’ as

she says, you watch her blue eyes wandering around the room, you have a hard-on and when

you look away from Lee you can tell she is looking at your pants. You watch Cath conversing

with the actor, she keeps a stiff upper lip, you hear her saying “Who the reader is?” a couple

of times, you guess from other parts of the conversation that they are talking about The

Dresser.

You look at Jacob’s receding hair, not attempting to get up he is moving his feet and

gesticulating with his arms, trying to outline the basics of some hip-hop moves to Lee and

Cath, they laugh and Cath’s feet tremble with excitement, you hum tonelessly trying to

remember Gielgud’s voice from an old BBC recording reading Marvell.

You walk into the bath-room and adjust your hard-on a bit to the left in your pants in front

of the mirror.

“Play with me,” your face says into the mirror.

“Yeh, I am feeling ludic tonight,” Lee says and comes in to quickly brush the surface of her

teeth.

48

You walk into the study, Jacob is close to the sales-girl whispering into her ear and looking

serious. You put Kip Hanrahan’s Tenderness in the CD-player, the sales-girl gets up and

dances with closed eyes shaking her hips slowly.

You sit down, Cath and Jacob get up, beers in their hands their feet follow the music and

without dancing they proceed to the hallway.

You watch Lee’s left foot on the hand-basin in the bath room, she is adjusting a toe-ring.

“Metzinger…” Cath says as she walks around the study with Jacob.

You walk into the bath room and close the door, Lee says to the mirror: “It is so quiet in

here.” You turn off the light, she bends over as you put your hands behind her legs from

behind and then begin to massage her clitoris.

You walk out into the hallway and leave Lee in the darkness, you put your left hand on

Cath’s shoulder and smile, the actor comes toward you and Jacob goes into the study, the

actor looks at Cath and says: “There you are, my lady of the lake!”

You all sit down on the floor and drink your beers quietly, you look, one at a time, at the

black and white photographs on the wall.

The sales-girl: “It has been such a long working week, people babble all the time. My ears

get sore from all those words. It is good to sit here. It is good to sit with people. I wish there

was a drug who made people not want to talk.”

Benny: “Well, this beer is good, is it not?”

Jacob: “I could kiss this beer, drop by drop, separately, for a long time.”

Benny: “And then… you would drink it?”

Cath, to the sales-girl: “You should try acting, it will take away your loneliness, it will take

away all the unrealities and all the babbling. There is pain in life and there is resistance to pain

in life, suffering is the result of too much resistance.”

You watch as the salesgirl hugs Cath gently, their breasts touch and you look down a bit at

your pants and your hard-on.

You listen to Benny as he mumbles something about resistance, he raises his hand as if to

make a point and then goes quiet.

You look at the shape of the sales-girl’s breasts as she straightens her back and sighs.

“I must take a note of this,” Benny mumbles and brings out a waiter’s pad and a pen from

his pockets.

You watch Cath’s mouth as she begins to speak but goes quiet directly.

Jacob, looking into the ceiling: “Do you realize that we are all sitting in the same place?”

Cath, staring at her feet: “Drink your beer.”

49

Benny, scribbling: “Great! Say something more!”

You listen to Kip Hanrahan: “...then she turned so that…maybe a third of her face was out

of the shadow and into this…this fuckin’ beautiful halflight…”

You get up and sit down at the desk and begin to transcribe in one of the black notebooks

what is happening as it happens: ‘Jacob shakes a beer and opens it in the face of the actor who

gets up and kicks Jacob in the face. The actor throws himself over Jacob and hammers his

fists into his face. The sales-girl puts on her reading-glasses and watches the blood. Benny

brings a kitchen-towel to wipe off the blood from Jacob’s face. It is silent and the people

position themselves in a circle, sitting in lotus positions they drink beer slowly with their eyes

half-closed.’

You get up and walk into the bath room, turn on the light and look at Lee’s body, she is

naked except for the thongs and bends over with her hands on the bath-tub, “Fuck me!” she

says, “I want you to come inside me!” You unzip your pants an take your hard-on out, you

keep your pants on, pull the thongs slightly to the side, keeping your balls inside the pants you

make one long deep penetration, then another and the third time you come inside her pumping

out sperm for quite some time. You hold your cock there, still hard you pull it out and put it

under the hot-water tap, you take off your clothes, put some tiger balm on your cockhead and

begin to rub it with your left thumb and fore-finger, Lee turns around and puts her mouth

around your balls, “Yeh baby, I want you to come again,” she says and gnaws a bit with her

teeth on your balls. You keep working on your cockhead, Lee gets up, takes her thongs off

and wraps them around your cock-shaft, she puts her red lips around your cockhead, sucks

and gnaws, each time you are about to come she pulls the thongs tighter and looks at your

cock with a delighted expression. You pull her up and kiss her violently tasting yourself and

the tiger balm as she circles around in your mouth, she gets down on her knees again and you

disconnect the thongs and spray her face and some of her hair.

You fill up the bathtub, sit down in the hot water and share a joint.

You sit with closed eyes for a while as Jacob and Benny enter and wash their faces.

You look up when Cath and the salesgirl come in to borrow a few towels.

“Everybody is getting a bit sweaty out there,” Cath says and giggles.

You sit around on the floor with the beer case in the middle of the circle, except for Jacob

who leans against the wall with his head, his left foot is stretched in an awkward position and

he pretends to be asleep.

Cath: “Have you all decided to join the circus?”

Benny: “Life is a carnival.”

50

You: “The mirror has been drinking, not me.”

You sit still and listen to the silence.

You listen to the actor who produces a non-sensical monolog repeating the phrase “running

up that hill” many times.

You walk into the kitchen and take a few notes in one of the black notebooks.

You stand by the kitchen window, Jacob comes in and stands behind you.

“Let us go to Peru!” he shouts and sucks on an empty Jameson bottle.

You go into the study and put on Lydia Lunch’s The Drowning of Lucy Hamilton, by the

end of “How Men Die in Their Sleep” you take a few arrhythmical dance steps and somebody

remarks that you have lost weight.

You bow and thank yourself for the dance, Jacob walks into the room and stumbles into the

wall with the black and white photographs, he staggers and falls, Cath crawls over to him and

puts his head in her lap.

You look the guests as they leave one by one, sitting leaned-back in your desk-chair with

pen and notebook in your lap. You write in small letters: ‘Dizziness, suffocations, all

tomorrow’s parties.’

You check that the door is locked, walk into the bedroom and look at the red digits on the

clock-radio for a little while. You lay down on your back, watch your toes wiggle, take a few

deep breaths.

51