In entirity the nawf so far, okay?

Individuals whose affairs have reached an utterly desperate crisis almost invariably keep themselves alive with hopes, so much the more airily magnificent as they have the less of a solid matter within their grasp whereof to mould any judicious and moderate expectation of good.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables.

My girlfriend Hermione is dead, I think. I’ve made an exhaustive collection of notes. Taken small articles of her from her room, attempting to construct the relationship between her and her things. Anything that I could pull from them would leave me more satisfied than the three months of memories and the simple resolution that we were over. So I write in the cheap notebook I purchased from the corner store, as I take an extended vacation, or prolonged unexcused absence depending on how you see it, from the gallery that I work at. This is not the story of my life, but an attempt at a full biography and explanation of every moment that we spent together.

When I sit back and think about her, I’d like it to be a flood of images, something like a film or a dream. I’d like Hermione to be a place I can visit, somewhere I can be completely surrounded by every moment I’d been with her. I want her to be a world unto herself. If I could somehow capture every aspect of her simultaneously and call them into being for me at once I would be completely content. As it is, my memory fails me. It falters and trips at times. There were moments in our short relationship when I was certain she loved me. However at other times it’s very hard to remember the more specific details, the evidence that proves the bond we had to each other. There is the postcard she sent me from a short trip Pascagoula: “I am very muchly looking forward to seeing you again Rainer. I miss you.” The other side was decorated with an image of a pizza made out of rice crispies treats and fruit loops. I ask myself if she meant it, or if that was what one was expected to write to a lover while away on vacation. Often I resign myself to believe it means nothing at all, that the closing of this letter was an arbitrary whim written in the space of less than two minutes.
My memories of Hermione are not very clear. I remember her in flashes. I never see her entirely at once as I’d like. One can stand in front of a painting or piece of art and be swallowed by it. When I first saw the Friedrich exhibit at the Alte Nationalgalerie, during a short vacation after I made my Abitur at eighteen, I stood in front of The Sea of Ice following the angles of the ice floes that jutted from the water. The eeriness of the empty landscape seemed to accentuate the museum’s smell of dust and paint. An odd feeling of vertigo mixed with headache passed over me. When I looked at the painting I somehow lost myself in the peculiar loneliness of the sea. For a while afterward I researched Friedrich on my own. It became a kind of hobby figuring out the clues he left in his paintings. I think one can remember a painting or a photograph completely. I can close my eyes and recall the essential parts of the image: the composition, contrasts, and perhaps some of the less subtle aspects of light play. Art has always been a flat thing that I can pull before me. Even quite some time after seeing a piece, I remember an image very clearly. Hermione is much more difficult. It’s hard to remember exactly how she looked. Even when I was with her I would find myself surprised each time I saw her. Her face had specificity, a clarity and sharpness that I could never keep with me. The photos I have of her lack the strangeness of her presence. They seemed to reduce her being to a single expression. Photographs are not true to the moment. I fear, though, one day I will only have her photographs. Memories and photos will become the same when I forget her. It will happen eventually. Her smile in a snapshot will become the content of a happy memory as I forget the complex and melancholy details of the situation.

I remember clearest her most striking elements. Physically, Hermione was short, shorter than me, though she was not terribly short in terms of other women. Her head reached to my chest. I distinctly remember the way her head would knock against me when she hugged me. Her hairpins would occasionally poke through my shirt. I had to lean down to kiss her. She stood on her toes while slinging her arms around my neck. Her balance was drunk. She wasn’t terribly graceful, but she had an unconscious charm. That was what was so winning about her; her complete abandon and utter lack of concern for sophistication.

Her hair was red like a beet. She dyed it, but I never saw her dye it. Photographs fail to capture the way the sun shone on it. It was violet at times, but redder at others. She had bangs that were cut to lie flatly on her forehead. I would run my fingers through her hair in the morning when she leaned into me sleeping. Her hair smelled like fruit punch.
The soap she used always left her smelling vaguely sweet like almonds, or marzipan. After her showers she would sit on the bed on top of a towel waiting for her hair to dry. I often kissed her neck trying to find the source of her marzipan smell. It was much milder than her shampoo, but for some reason it did not fade like the scent of her hair would during the day. I would catch hints of almond on my sheets after she had slept over. It lingered on my sweaters after she wore them. There are times now when I think I catch it in some article of clothing, or on a pillowcase, but it is so faint that it might very well be some ghost of my imagination.

When we were in bed, while she slept, I would stare at her hands. Her arms were flung over her head like a dancer’s in mid-leap. Her hands would land over my pillow. The nails were uneven, rather dirty. They would twitch. I would kiss them, but she never felt it. Or at least she pretended to be asleep if she did. She looked rather strange when she slept. I do not think that she was particularly beautiful sleeping. I think she looked like some sort of animal like a cat or a puppy. I was always tempted to wake her up when I watched her sleep. Her foreignness in sleep disturbed me a little. I would kiss her cheek or stroke her arm. She would murmur something and open her eyes. Her eyes were bright green in between blue and gray, a yellowish ring encircled her pupils. When she opened her eyes in the morning I was always surprised by their intensity. The moment she opened her eyes in the morning she became immediate. It was as if a great distance had been traveled from where she was in sleep to waking next to me.

Before she died, we’d been arguing. It had been a week of terrible misunderstandings and confusion. Her accent got thicker when she was angry or nervous. She would say one thing; I would misinterpret it and respond perhaps more extremely than I should have. Hermione would ride off on her bike, pissed-off, usually saying she would call me when she felt like talking again. I became quiet. Our arguments would happen too quickly for me to sort out my words and feelings. Tension made me even more confused about what she expected me to do. I was never sure if she preferred yelling to silence, but I could never yell at her. Hermione would ride off somewhere, perhaps around the city or next to the river, very quickly. I was too proud and stupid to ever tell her that it hurt to see her leave angry. I would hide my crying as I walked home kicking cans, small stones, parking meters, lampposts, etc.

The content of the arguments is not very memorable. One of us would say something that would annoy the other; one of us would get upset. She would accuse me of being too proud. I would tell her that she shouldn’t be so judgmental. She would call me cold. I would tell her that she was sensitive only concerning her own emotions. The arguments were never about anything, but they were so powerful as to obliterate all of my other feelings for her. I was convinced that she forgot any fondness for me the moment we started an exchange. In these moments all of the closeness of a previous morning or evening was destroyed. Often it was as if we were completely different people in each moment. I’m not being extravagant when I say it was hell. The arguments made no difference at all to whatever it was that we had been talking about, but they made all the difference between us.

I remember our last argument very strongly. We had gone to bed upset in her apartment. She was not so angry that she couldn’t stand being with me, but she lay on the other side of the bed with her back facing toward me. Hermione woke earlier than I did, which happened very rarely. I heard the door slam in a dream and woke up alone several hours later to the familiar interior of her apartment. The wide bed we usually shared was cold that morning. My hand rested on the pillow where her head should have been. I knew that I’d upset her again somehow. I looked around for a note, but could not find one on the refrigerator. Leaving notes on the refrigerator door had been a habit we’d developed with each other. Both of us kept messy bedrooms. Hers was a hybrid of study and sleeping area. Bookshelves full of papers, books and notebooks lined the wall. Every writing surface had a pile of papers collecting on top of it. Finding a single note in the midst of all of her things was impossible. She’d given me an extra key a month before to feed her pet crawfish. Eventually we decided to give each other copies of our keys out of convenience. We alternated staying over every time one of us had a day off.

I pulled my clothes off of her floor and left her apartment around nine am. It was an unseasonably warm day for January. The sky was bright blue and white. I was too embarrassed to walk past the kitsch shops on Magazine Street and wait like an idiot for the city bus while an entire Saturday morning cavalcade of shoppers inspected me. I walked around aimlessly; staring at the pavement and wondering how long the ugly stretch of arguing we’d stumbled into would last. I cursed myself for having ruined another one of my mornings off. I would’ve liked to have gone to breakfast with her, or bought some rolls from the bakery down the street. We could have had some coffee that morning. If we had woken up and had coffee together, things would have worked out all right the rest of the day I think.

I stumbled past the glittering homes of the rich. Their shrubs were very well tended, but that didn’t prevent me from spitting on them. A dog barked. I remember my feet crushing the dry brown leaves on the sidewalks. I saw what I thought was one odd large bird, wounded and struggling on the sidewalk. I leaned in to see if I could help it, but two sparrows flew off in separate directions.

I had supposed that she wouldn’t call me at all that day. The ride home on the streetcar was rather typical. Eventually I sat in my room reading the Hawthorne novel that Hermione had lent me earlier that month. I left some messages on her answering machine and felt like a fool for doing even that much. She never bothered to answer my calls. I measured out the nights in tequila from the corner shop. A week later her friend Anja called and told me she had died Saturday morning buying pastries. Apparently it took some time for the police to contact her parents and friends. I hadn’t gone back to her apartment because I hadn’t wanted to bother her.

Diagram

From the information the hospital and her friends gave me I’ve managed to reconstruct the events:
1. Hermione buys croissants and puts them in her bike basket.
2. Hermione rides back toward her apartment.
3. Car A parks in front of bookstore on Magazine.
4. Hermione is still riding her bike down Magazine Street, where she lives, which is both riddled with potholes and is wide enough for only two mid-sized vehicles.
5. Truck B is some distance behind Hermione.
6. Car A opens driver side door without looking in side view mirror into Hermione’s path.
7. Hermione attempts to swerve out of the way, but she is too close to make it.
8. Hermione is thrown from her bike to the left, the direction her bike was steered toward in order to avoid collision with Car A, and hits her head upon impact with street.
9. Truck B applies brake, but does not come to rest until it has passed over Hermione’s neck and shoulder.
10. Hermione dies instantly.

When I learned she was dead, this may seem odd, but I wanted very much to hug her. I wanted to pull her up from the place of death and tell her that I was sorry that we’d been arguing so much recently, and that it was a terrible thing that had happened to us. What changes take place between a man and a woman to make us argue as we did? I wanted to hold her and tell her that she didn’t need to die, that sooner or later things would work out. That we would have gotten over whatever it was that was bothering us.
I somehow would not believe she was dead. Perhaps Anja was preparing another performance piece, some sort of audio instillation about death and playing tricks on dopes like me. I sat on my couch and looked out the window of my bedroom that provided an uninteresting view of a palm tree and the side of my neighbor’s house. I think about six hours later it dawned on me that I should call work and tell them that I wasn’t coming in. I don’t remember exactly what the content of the call was, but I think I managed to spit out something like, I’m not coming in today my girlfriend is dead. I don’t remember how I dealt with it exactly. It’s hard to recall the fine points of pain after it has passed, but I do remember crying, a call to my mother, and several long walks that ended nowhere in particular.

Eventually I found my way back to her apartment during my wandering. I stood in front of the iron gate wondering if I should enter, and under what pretext it would be appropriate for me to enter. Part of me wondered if her apartment was unchanged since the last moments we had seen each other, or if people had come in searching for evidence of some sort of misdeed. I wanted to see her room again, to smell the way her house smelled and somehow call on all the fond memories that had taken place here. I unlocked the door and stepped into her empty apartment.

It was exactly as it had been when I left. It felt strangely like all those times I’d come to check on her apartment and feed her fish while she was gone, except there was no expectation of her return, none of the happy expectation of seeing her again. Outside I heard the birds calling and the sound of cars on the road. These were familiar noises to me, I remember all those days that the birds calling each other would wake me up next to her and I would stare at her sleeping next to me.

What I did in her apartment is embarrassing for me to talk about. I sat in her bed and touched a hair on her pillow, one of her long red violet hairs that I would never see again. I fell into her pillow and tried to find her scent in it. I cried without reservation. I crawled under her covers and held her pillow tightly against me. It was terrible to know that she was gone, that she had stepped out the door and disappeared a week ago. At some point I fell asleep.

Folks, readers, my future self reading this later, if you exist I must apologize for starting things off on a sentimental note, but what else can one talk about, and how can one talk, after death? My telling of the events may put you off, but I must record the exact depth and intensity of these vulnerable and perhaps too personal moments in order for me to understand how and why I feel as I do now, a month after the events. I must be completely honest and say guiltily, that I did steal the soap from her shower as a memento of sorts. The soap, with its familiar soapy almondy smell is too dear for me to ever use now. Even as I write this very sentence I am aware of the soap’s weight against my leg. Though the habit is mysterious to me, it always ends up in my right pocket. It comforts me greatly, but I am vaguely uncomfortable that it may be symptomatic of an unhealthy attachment.

Boudreaux

Hermione told me once that Boudreaux was the most charming pet that she had ever had. It was very hard for me to understand how that could be true. He was a muddy brown and red crawfish, with large wiggling black eye stems. His body had some odd looking parasites on part of his shell. Anytime anyone other than Hermione came near him he would raise his claws at them and begin snapping them open and shut furiously while bubbles dribbled from his clacking mandibles.

Hermione had found him at a party around Mardi Gras in a crawfish boil. As she told it, she was standing next to a kiddy pool full of live crawfish drinking a PBR and talking to some guy she’d met about fast food technology when something in the pool caught her eye. Hermione walked away from the conversation toward the pool and saw Boudreaux. In an instant she knew there was something very particular about that crawfish. She pulled him from the pool and placed him in an empty beer cup. When she first told me the story, I laughed and asked her how much she had been drinking that night. She insisted that she had only had one beer that night. Oddly enough I believed her, since Boudreaux had never pinched her and seemed to act like a crazy animal around everyone but her.

She told me that at that moment she knew that she could never eat meat again, and looking at Boudreaux in his large glass bowl helped her solve personal problems. Hermione spoiled him completely. He ate well. As Hermione ate she would drop a small of amount her scraps into the bowl for him. Their diet consisted of shared pastas with cream sauces, fresh rolls, baby greens. She insisted that he was especially fond of fresh tropical fruit, though I never understood how a creature with a natural diet of swamp sludge could exhibit a specific fondness for mangoes and bananas.
Often she would tickle his sides. Boudreaux would lean into her fingers and roll around. See, look, he likes it, she would giggle as I stood some distance away. Other times Hermione would take him out of his bowl and let him crawl on the palms of her hands, or would play tug of war with him with a chopstick. I was ever jealous of the attention Hermione lavished on the disgusting creature, wishing she would tickle me instead.

I was aware of Boudreaux’s icy gaze returning mine as I stared into his crawfish castle. Hermione had constructed a monstrous and odd home for him on her kitchen table. His house was a huge glass mixing bowl occupied by a castle, a sunken ship, miniature treasure chest and a tiny plaster skeleton. The mixing bowl, she insisted, replicated Boudreaux’s swamp home. Looking at him while we ate our meals had always made me feel uneasy. Now that I had the long awaited opportunity to toss him out the window, flush him down the toilet, or boil him alive and eat him, I felt oddly attached to the swamp monster Hermione had spent so much time spoiling.

Boudreaux and I stood locked in a staring contest. The results were disappointing. I was still tired from my crying and too short nap. Boudreaux had no eyelids. I became dizzy, and still have trouble remembering what exactly occurred. It was something like hypnosis I imagine.

Please forgive your humble narrator for lapses in memory on such a serious occasion. I imagine that the news of her death had caused me a great deal of stress. Stress that might manifest itself in bodily pains, loss of appetite, a disturbance of sleeping patterns, and change in mood, and might also make itself known in visual or audio hallucination. That is how I account for my brief conversations with Boudreaux, why they occurred and how they occurred. Rather than simply dismissing myself as a madman and running from the house in terror I stayed to chat with him. I was too tired to think of any other option.

So we find ourselves alone together at last. The fact presents itself finally, you hate me and I hate you. Though our mutual animosity will put a strain on our conversations, I think that we can agree to behave according to the boundaries that Hermione established, out of mutual respect.” Boudreaux’s voice was husky and dry; it had the tone of a wise grandfather. It was stern and spoke with the authority of experience. The words were slow and clear, pronounced with confidence and determination. His voice had the very real quality of speech, however I am now certain that we were communicating telepathically. I had no idea how to respond, or if it was appropriate for me to ignore the voice in my head hoping for it to disappear.

“I expected you to be shocked, seeing as you never struck me as terribly bright in your conversations with Hermione. She was much too good for you, by the way, but no doubt you had the same prejudices regarding her fondness for me.” He paused thoughtfully, “Tell me Rainer, are you familiar with the transmigration of the soul? I’m speaking of that esoteric notion often associated with Hindoo and Eastern philosophies. Though Hermione often entertained me with conversation, I have been greatly isolated from the auspices of human conversation and the society of man for too long I fear. I no longer know the philosophical spirit of the times. She was quite familiar with the concept which explains my current, unenviable state of affairs.”

I nodded, and stuttered my response in German mixed with English as the crawfish continued his self-important lecture. “Through no fault of my own, after my death I found my spirit inhabiting the body of a small crustacean. It is no doubt a strange destiny, to be trapped in this dirty and inappropriate shell, watching the mundane sequence of events that constitute human life pass before me like a play performed by my mistress.” Boudreaux coughed dryly. “One achieves an odd state of removal, separated as I am from the authenticity of human interaction. But by no means do I mean disrespect: I was singularly touched by Hermione’s company.”

“Watching her rise from bed, like primitive Venus, naked, hair wild, was a ne’er thought achievable life moment for me at one time. I was studying philosophy at Bowdoin, with an interest in pursuing law, too occupied with my scholarship to be interrupted with personal relationships. In life my name was Phineas T. Bradshaw, it feels so odd to pronounce the name that was once so ingrained in my existence. Slated to graduate into 1825, during an ill-fated walk in the Maine woods I was struck by lightning while seeking shelter under a near-by fir tree.”

He paused thoughtfully, and hesitatingly whispered, “I died deprived of the more gentle aspects of the fair sex, being exceedingly shy and inexperienced in their company. At which point I must express how marvelous it was to watch the two of you freely make sport with your bodies with almost daily regularity. The oriental and creative positions, kneeling on the divan, sprawled over the kitchen chair, leaning against the bookshelves. Frankly amazing… I must confess that often I would imagine myself in your place as you made love to Hermione. But what woman would ever be with a crawfish…? None, certainly.”

The conversation grew increasingly more uncomfortable as he ceaselessly recited the details of his long gone life, the limitations of his current embodiment and lovingly recollecting the particulars of my “white hot” nights with Hermione. I had been looking forward to some quiet time in her apartment, sorting out my thoughts, taking back some of the things I had leant her, saving personal items from the trash heap. The crawfish continued talking without any deference to whether I was paying attention or not. Flushing him down the toilet, despite his amazing powers of communication became a greater temptation as his rambling monologue showed no signs of fatigue.

“What a curious position I found myself in, one could hardly believe…”
“Shut up,” I stuttered.

“Yes, Rainer.” He muttered. “Predictable, I see how you power over me becomes readily apparent…”

“No, you don’t understand. I need you to be quiet. Nothing is easy to understand now. Of course being trapped in a crustacean body is a difficult place to occupy. So yes,” I was talking non-sense. It was hard for me to think of a response to Boudreaux’s invasive, yet incredibly articulate and polite, line of conversation. I felt bad for him. Obviously being stuck in a crawfish shell was humiliating. I would have readily discussed all of the complications and the tragedy of his situation if he hadn’t been such a jerk. Cutting him off mid-sentence was not kind of me, but I had no idea how to stop his awful talking.

I think that at some time or another we’ve all had fantasies about stopping time and traveling in reverse through it, to an earlier more pristine state. While we inevitably dismiss them as immature and fantastical sentiments, I constantly find myself wishing that I could travel back in time before the conversation with Boudreaux. If anything clearly designated mental illness or tragedy, it was my conversations with Boudreaux. I am of the opinion that normal people do not speak with crawfish. Quite frequently, to my own dismay, I engage in conversations with my briny friend, most end in bitter arguments. This was the first example of such, perhaps one of the more mild ones.
I don’t know what to do with the information Boudreaux gives me. He admits, quite regularly, that self-preservation is his foremost motivation. Therefore, it will always be to his advantage to lie to me, or deceive me with colorful and self-aggrandizing stories of his youth. Our conversations lead to mutual annoyance, hatred, and the basest shows of frustration. I have threatened to boil him more than once and regularly imprison him in the refrigerator for the sake of a moment of quiet introspection. I’m not sure if he plays games with me, or genuinely believes that we share a connection that transcends the immediate situation.

“I’m sorry I lost my temper, I’ve been under a great deal of stress since she died,” I admitted to the air and the crawfish.

“So you actually believe that she is dead then?” he asked with an audible sneer in his voice. His question had a terrible force, an impact like a ton of bricks crashing into my solar plexus. The tone of his voice was defiant and proud. Hermione was dead to me, though I had not seen the body nor spoken with the police. Boudreaux’s question disturbed me, yet renewed a sense of hope within me. Hermione alive and well, Rainer the victim of a simple misunderstanding regarding the circumstances of a very serious, but non-lethal car accident!

I could envision it, Rainer the dashing gent kneeling at her bedside with a bouquet of red roses, petals smooth as velvet. Hermione, bound-up in a cast barely conscious, muttering my name in her coma/fever dreams. I, dashing Rainer looking Valentino-esque, swearing my love to her forever, and awakening her with passionate kiss.

“You’re a fool Rainer,” Boudreaux said. My fantasies were interrupted by the crawfish’s crusty voice. “You were so blindly infatuated with her that you never stopped to notice that she had begun to loathe your very essence. Your arguments were ludicrous. You obviously did not respect her art, or her friends. She was ashamed of you, ashamed that you throw yourself to her with a total lack of self-analysis. Saying that you loved her without taking the time to know her.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked uncertain of his remarks.

“You are an idiot Rainer. I will never be able to make the truth clear to you; you’re obsessed with controlling a situation you never had control of in the first place.”
Shortly following his remarks, I placed Boudreaux, crawfish castle and all, in the refrigerator very carefully. Having no intention of harming him, I made sure to sprinkle a few pieces of lettuce in his bowl, before I stuffed him in the crisper.

Diagram #2

Hermione plans to leave me, discussing options with her friends and Boudreaux.
Hermione synthesizes an argument with me, and then leaves the house the next morning at an early hour in order to disappear/avoid conflict.
Hermione stays with a friend, either in town or out of state, until I commit suicide/forget about her.
Dressed in their best clothing, they all drink wine and laugh during my funeral.

The probability of diagram number two having truth value seems a stretch to me. I’m not sure that Hermione would orchestrate such a bizarre plan to avoid me. It would have been simpler put the phone off the hook, or have one of her friends tell me that she didn’t want to see me any more if she was thoroughly interested in avoiding me forever. However Boudreaux’s uncannily specific knowledge of our conflicts haunted me. I had never properly understood Hermione’s art, her life ambitions, or her obnoxious artsy friends. I could not be completely certain that I was not a victim of her aesthetic sensibilities.

Art and life were one entity, she always claimed. One had to think artistically, constantly questioning acts and speech, looking for the structures of power, sexism, and the political agendas that lay underneath the surfaces of everyday interaction. I never understood what she meant; though I would attentively listen to her explain the theories and philosophies that captivated her. It was difficult to concentrate; I would space-out quite frequently and find myself paying more attention to the cadences of her voice than her examination of French philosophers and American cinema.

Her draftsmanship was concise. Her ink and pencil work was crisp and clean. She worked with oils occasionally, and her control of the media as well as her sense of color impressed me greatly. In terms of craft, I can say without personal bias that her work was magnificent. She would sketch as a hobby, a way to relax after work and keep her hands busy while drinking and listening to the radio. I envied her abilities and often told her so. She would laugh and shrug, sipping more wine as free jazz blared in the background.
Hermione was not a photographer, nor was she a cinematographer. She had not received any specific literary training while at the university. It disturbed me that she dedicated herself to art that did not exhibit the purest aspects of her talent. I was not sure what to make of her various creative projects, which ranged from mundane and easily accomplished to expensive, time-consuming and bizarre. She finished them after a great deal of work and complaining, according to her self imposed schedules and deadlines, seldom ever late. Before she died, Hermione had been in the process of completing several action pieces. She had written an instruction manual and “acts” on small squares of brown paper grocery bag. Her plan was bind them into a book, then perform them in an instillation at a local gallery over a period of several weeks. She never bound them. I haven’t been able to locate the complete text since her death. I wonder if she took it with her the day she disappeared, or left it at a friend’s house. They seemed clinical. I experienced a sense of violation reading scripts and anger with her for making strangers the victims of her ideology. The scripts had a taste for deceit and sadism that I found inconsistent with her sweetness.

A Script for Action Number Sixty-Two

Construct a box, or use an old shoe box. Condition it to show signs of age and wear.
Fill the box with smooth stones, dried leaves or flowers, twigs, or shiny pieces of glass. Any objects will do, however they must evoke a sense of place.
Place a photograph of a couple in the box after obscuring the face of one of the subjects, or damaging the photograph in a visible manner. One may also choose to place strands of hair, fingernail clippings, or wisps of cloth in the box.
Give the box to a stranger after pretending to have happened upon it in a public place. Watch and document reactions.

Hermione’s apartment holds secrets, too many to investigate in an unmethodical manner. Her single-bedroom apartment is laid out in manner similar to the shotgun duplex I live in, except that hers shares a wall with the supply room of a drapery store that faces the street (DIAGRAM/FLOOR PLAN). The space cost her approximately five hundred dollars a month, slightly less than my apartment. I am not completely sure how she could afford living there, though I suppose that she saved money somehow. Hermione worked as a waitress at the Rorotorium, an odd café under the Mississippi River Bridge that kept irregular hours, usually opening sometime after nine pm. Her tips must have made up for her part-time hours.

The parlor, adjacent to the kitchen, contains her dinner table (red) and six mismatched chairs. The walls are decorated with her sketches, her friends’ drawings, and unfinished bits of stories. She had a profound interest for found objects and handwritten or homemade flyers, such that an entire wall was reserved for hanging the things that Hermione and her friends had found in the city. Her taste often puzzled me, especially concerning the papers she rescued from the kiosks, electrical poles, and bus stops around the city. The ephemera ranged from ads looking for roommates and lost dog signs to handwritten plays and children’s drawings on the backs of placemats.

I grabbed the flyer off of her wall. It was slightly smaller than a postcard. One side had an ink drawing of three hands and an orange printed on it. The etching evinced an eye for detail, the fingers tapered and lengthened around the ruddy surface of the orange and descended into tarry blackness. It was an advertisement for the show where we had first met.

December 6 – February 4, 2k.
Pop Surrealism
Opening Reception
Saturday, December 6, 6 – 9 pm.

Born 197x, in Belfonte, Pennsylvania; lives and works in New Orleans.

It was a group exhibit. The CAC was down the street from my gallery on Julia Street. Marry McGee and Yoshitomo Nara had been getting a lot of coverage in the usual glossy New York art journals. I had never really identified with the mix of cartoon and fine art, they weren’t particularly to my taste though it seemed like the next urban art phenomena. Anyway, I had to go to represent the gallery.

Hermione’s pieces were seemingly literal translations of the show’s theme. Three pieces were on display: a video and sound piece, a sculpture, and a large mixed media piece. Her work occupied the entire first floor. The pamphlet from the show explained that the work was from her Night Songs for the So-Called Space Age series, a greater attempt to mix the visual arts with pop music and youth culture.

I’d come into the show early, at six exactly. People were seldom punctual, typically the gallery set came in an hour later. The busy nerves of the CAC’s attendants buzzed around the bar and caterers. I slipped through the heavy glass and steel doors without notice. I appeared to be the first guest.

The more I look
The more I see
The more I feel

Hermione Rosenwinkel.
Justin Wilke, videographer. 200x

After snagging a bench on my pant leg, cursing myself and tripping in the dark, I sat down on a plastic bench as a motion sensor in the wall sent the video into cue.
The wall was flooded with the black and white image of a young woman’s face submerged in water. Her hair was dark, floating upward in the water and bobbing in some invisible current. Eyes closed as if sleeping. There was no change in her expression. It was unclear if she was asleep, holding her breath, or dead.

The room had been quiet when I entered it, but I became aware of the sound of water lapping at a very low pitch, very gently. The waves had a murky, soft sound that shifted into muted piano noises. On the screen a cloud of dark inky liquid snaked slowly through the water. The piano loop was still barely audible; old honky-tonk and out of tune but at the same time baroque. Minor thirds I think. The cloud over the woman’s face clouded over her face in a dense darkness almost like smoke. In the film’s last moments a voice whispered, in a controlled and almost monotone voice:

Come here, kiss me now,
Come here kiss me now.
Come here, touch me, kiss me,
Touch me now, touch me, touch me.

The dark cloud had completely engulfed her face. The video had faded into black, until I too was surrounded by the darkness.

As I got out of the bench and turned to leave I bumped into a small person in the dark. It took me some time to realize that the video had finished and, indeed, someone had been standing behind me asking a question.

Did you like it? I think you’re the first to see it tonight.”

“Blargh wah! Ahh. Sorry I didn’t see you. Sorry.” Brilliant first words, I know.
“Yeah. It’s dark, sorry.” She flipped a switch on the wall. The lights came on and I was staring into the opened eyes of the face from the video. Her face was heart-shaped, dark red bob framing her pointed cat-like chin. She was wearing an odd dress, white, it looked like it was made of feathers and it was covered with gigantic red cloth flowers.
“Oh I was a little confused. Same voice, you know,” She laughed at my comment. She was always laughing. “Yes. Very mysterious. I haven’t seen the rest of the project. I mean the greater context. I don’t know her work very well.”

“Oh, her? Hermione?” She cocked an eyebrow.

“I haven’t listened to Depeche Mode in a while either which doesn’t help I think. One of my high school friends had a copy of Violator. I think I’d dubbed a tape of it. I used to go to industrial clubs when I was younger. I suppose that’s where I place Depeche Mode, I guess. I didn’t properly understand the lyrics, but the synths were very catchy.” She laughed then too.

I wonder if she was nervous then, that time when we first met, pretending not to be herself, not admitting out right that she was more than a model in her own video. Was her laughter excitement about her first show, or as she laughing at me? I know that later she would agonize over her pieces; I would see her mood suddenly shift from pleasant to strained talking about her work with me and her friends. Hermione was never satisfied, or perhaps more correctly, she was always dissatisfied with herself.

I never understood how she could be so confident with others, but so insecure in her abilities. I would see her cry and sulk if she thought she’d been snubbed in a review, and become completely enraged if she heard someone make a flippant remark about her performance art while sitting in her café. This first conversation was so like but unlike her at the same time: cocky, self-deprecating, and ironic. There was sadness behind her weird humor. Her laughter halted a little too quickly, became quiet while her eyes struggled to escape my gaze.

“I liked them a lot when I was the same age. At the time I thought the lyrics were very deep stuff, emotional. Of course it never struck me as odd that they sang so many songs about fifteen year old girls. I thought it was a personal touch at the time.
“I’m a bit tired of them now. I had to listen to their songs so many times. Over and over again.”

As we spoke people trickled through the CAC’s doors. The galleries outside began to hum with conversation, punctuated by the occasional obnoxious laugh. Why were people always laughing at gallery openings? Always that single loud self-satisfied laugh. Meanwhile, Hermione having not yet introduced herself to me, suggested we get a drink at the bar.

“I should put the light out. I think if I stay here all night I’ll get paranoid seeing my giant head in the water. They have a really large space upstairs. I thought there would be more instillations. I guess I’m the show’s token video artist,” she said with a laugh as she turned out the light. “It seems like every museum has only one video installed at a time.”

“I’m more familiar with the similar large black painting phenomena.”

“Yeah, I think it’s a more modern version of the black painting. Or more post-modern maybe. I don’t know. I like them though, but I always wonder if you gathered them all up, if you could have some kinda all giant black canvas museum. Maybe you could wear all black and it would be like camouflage. If it were in New York you’d be constantly accidentally bumping into people trying to get a closer look at the canvases.” She grabbed a plastic cup of some pink bubbling stuff for me and herself.
“What is this exactly?” I asked.

“Pink Zinf.”

“Pink Sniff?”

She smiled. “Yes.”

A crowd had gathered in the main gallery. People were chattering about a thousand things, vacations, spouses’ passport status, and exhibitions on the coast. I saw my gallery director across the room in Donna Karan black talking with her husband.
“I suppose we should both mingle some. I don’t want to be rude.” She said with some discomfort as she wiped her nose.

“I have to do the same for my gallery.” I paused, “Is your name Hermione then?”

“Yes, that’s me stranger.”
“I’m Rainer. I work at Elizabeth’s gallery. Sufjan Pedersen.”

She shook my hand and walked into the crowd. I should’ve gotten her phone number, or suggested that we get together soon. Only later would I realize that so much of our future meetings would be entirely owed to chance meetings that were the result of Hermione’s cleverness.

I think of the blackness now, the casual dismissive comment about modernist painting that meant nothing, just a cheap joke at the expense of a sentiment too complicated to articulate. As I look back on it our pretension was a reaction to our mutual discomfort.

So we laughed and made jokes about nothing at all then. I wonder if it could’ve another way. Did the conversation determine the making light of all things dear to us? Was our interaction a series of self-conscious admissions veiled in irony, could it have been more than that if we tried for truth – to somehow reach out her essence rather than commit myself to the choreography of loathing, self-deprecation, and an endless stream of word plays, insults and veiled truths?

The blackness that crept like slow fog and coiled around her head like a serpent, did the blackness rise from her? Was it that stuff that crawls under our beds at night just before we go to sleep? Was it the darkness of death in us, the haunting shroud of her mortality, our own mortality? The ether of thought swamping around our minds?

Or was she dead already, wasn’t that the point, that we were all dead parcels that maintained the illusions of life and being – had we been symbolically paralyzed by our own finiteness?

What did she mean—what did her art mean? I would ask her at times, late at night as we lay in bed talking:

I like to think about it in themes. I try not to think about it as a literal translation. I organize the motifs and symbols in my head. It’s like going for a ride to the supermarket but ending up on the other side of town looking at the river. Not ending up where you thought you would but liking it. Finding it strange but familiar.

I would listen half asleep, never quite understanding her answers, or if they were even answers. She scoffed at other people’s self-importance, but at the same time there was an undercurrent of seriousness that belied the pop. Thinking on blackness one encountered only the unresponsive darkness. I find myself, the sound of my own breathing and the answerless void.

A Script for Action #31
The Adding and Subtracting Game

Locate a subject, preferably a casual acquaintance.
Add a gift or letter, content undetermined.
Note reactions. This requires the subject to be followed. May require a group effort for surveillance. The level of surveillance may vary in intensity from mild to obsessive.
Subtract, take something, whether it be obviously sentimental, dear, cheap or expensive. The material value of the subject must not over-determine the value of the object taken. Ideally a letter, notebook, phone or address book, novel or favored article of clothing.
Note response. Be careful not to be caught.
Add. Return object to subject, claiming to have found it.
Continue the game, either adding or subtracting with discretion.

Herm, who were the games for? Were these ever acted upon or were they waiting to be made real? Did you play the game with me ever?

An Excerpt from Hermione’s Diary

Thirteen. I was leaving France. I don’t remember it but do remember it well, feeling dejected. Pop had decided that it would be more profitable for him to act as a consultant in America, or at least that was the reason he had given at the time. Pop had taken his new wife, my new mom, really just Charlene, to visit our village. She never really formally lived with us-- however she stayed over for short bursts quite frequently. Just on holidays and summers, as evidenced by the ever-present supply of Veuve Cliquot in the cellar and the used orange juicer on the table August-long.

I suppose that the incident had escaped me until recently. I was waiting for Sybil at the bus stop when I saw the fur shop and the graffiti dripping from its window. Giant red X’s were spray painted across the windows like dripping bloody crosses.

I remember I had seen the bruises on Orianne’s hips, ass and shoulders those few days after the spring holiday. She was a quiet little thing. Small and blond like a tiny doll, very quiet, very shy, and she would talk to me when we ran in the woods around the convent. I knew she hadn’t had a fall, that she hadn’t ever been with any of the boys in town. I knew her father had done it to her. She’d never liked him. It clicked together in my head. I’d never liked the way he grabbed her arm when they were together. It was like the touch, seeing it, had told me the entire story.

Mr. Michelbach was the furrier. What an appropriate profession, selling the skins of all those little animals to other stronger animals that could afford to have someone else do their dirty work. I held it in me until the winter holiday. I remember that it was cold out, but I hadn’t worn a thick jacket.
I had the bucket of paint and a bucket of stones. The paint was white not red. It was snowing.

I don’t remember how it sounded, the glass breaking. Or if it was very fast or very slow. The furs were white and syrupy looking afterward. I’d filled the linings with rocks and sand.

As I left, I could here the alarm sound. When I got home I crawled under the covers and had a good night’s sleep.
Later I read the newspaper reports with surprise. The snow covered up my tracks. Some Arab boys got blamed for it later. Typical.

Yesterday afternoon Ronika rang my buzzer. I answered the door in some awful pants that I’d been wearing for the past three days and an old t-shirt. Baseball bat leaned over my shoulder.

“Herr Rainer I wanna go to the store,” she said in a voice between whining and commanding, in the sort of voice only a thirteen year old could possess.

“Yeah, let’s go.” I found myself pulled away from the writing desk, from the notes I’d gathered and the polaroids I’d glued to the wall.

“Hey Rayyy—ner c’mon.” She was insistent. “Nice shoes,” she said. I’d put on a brown and a black. “The dirty porno beard has got to go. That’s just nasty.”

“Yeah, yeah, okay. Thank you, comments noted.”

“Are you living like a caveman now? You’re like a vampire. Maybe your people are always pale, huh?”

“Ha-ha Ronika.” So I endured her insults as I grabbed my keys. I was tired and slightly wobbly. I wondered if there was a way I could avoid going out with her. Some excuse I could find to crawl back in bed at four in the afternoon on a Wednesday. I put the bat back into the umbrella stand.

“You know you gotta stop doing that.”

“What?”

“Answering the door with a baseball bat. People are gonna think you’re crazy.”

The Wednesday afternoon habit, where Ronika would come over and make fun of my clothing, make me buy her junk food and would open my beer and never finish drinking it, began one week after I had moved in. Feeling somewhat out of place I brought over a Käseküchen, something from a box of mix that my mother had sent me from home, shortly afterward Ronika came over Wednesday afternoons after school. Her mother insisted that I would be a good influence and teacher her about foreign cultures. Since that time I have become a babysitter/tutor for the bubblegum popping New Orleans public middle school student, attracting a number of unpleasant looks when we walked together in the neighborhood.

On more than one occasion walking together, I’d be wearing the bedraggled thrift store suit that I wore to work while Ronika wore her two sizes too small school uniform. The kids that saw us would point and call out at us, calling me her sugar daddy business man, calling her bunny bread. I had no idea what any of it meant until she told me. Ronika let loose a stream of foul insults and shut them up instantly. The adults gave us an odd mixture of icy glares and, disturbingly, knowing winks.

“Rainer I want olives.”

“Yeah. Okay.”

“The good ones, from Langenstein’s.”

“Huh?”

“I’ll show you, okay.”

The olives were imported from Spain. The pits were stuffed with almond. They swam in garlic brine, flavored with French herbs. Moments after I bought them for her Ronika popped the top and inverted the jar, draining the liquid onto the frying afternoon pavement.

“Are you sure you don’t want some water?”

“No way.” She continued smacking on olives, eventually finishing the entire jar before we got home. Typically she’d ask me questions about living abroad versus at home, girl-boy problems, and other questions that I usually didn’t have the answers to. Generally she’d play it cool, pulling flowers off plants or ripping the grass out of someone’s lawn, then she’d slip one of her famous questions into the conversation. I’d fumble, and come up with some ridiculous response, pretending to be confident.

“Why are you wearing that baseball cap, it’s weird. Not like you.”

It was Hermione’s. “Yeah, yeah. You have some sort of problem with the Cubs? They try hard.”

“I don’t know. Your clothes seem weirder that usual.”

“I haven’t been doing my laundry.”

“Your girlfriend dump you?”

“Something like that.”

“Are you depressed or something?”

“Sometimes I get like that.” Green olives. Shreds of them fell from between her lips, onto the sidewalk, onto her shoes. She was talking with her mouth full. It didn’t bother me, not so much as her mother. We were casual. I was quiet.

“Yeah. I guess that’s like that. When Ariyell found out Tim Simmons was going with Dauphine she pretended not to like him, but you could tell that she did. That she liked him even though she said he looked like a frog and his nose was too big, but she was always talking about him anyway.” She looked at me. “You could tell me about it if it made you feel better. But I guess guys are different, huh?”

Guys are different. Maybe I should have told Ronika, but I hadn’t planned to have this conversation with her. In fact, I had no reason to bore or confound her with the weird secrets of adult romances. Who was I to burden her with my rambling? I didn’t presume to be interesting, but some part of me wanted to tell her, to lay my story out before her and hear her naïve advice. There was something so wholesome about our lazy chats, her seriousness and the manner in which she maintained the professional interview quality of our walks, her grudging belief that I had ever been like her or her age. I wanted the comfort of confession but hesitated.

“Yeah, I guess we should get something to drink. It’s hot.”

“I found that on the Champs-Elysee the last time I went to Paris. The visit was pretty bad, but I think there’s something really special about the poster. Every time I see it, I feel more cheerful. I can’t help but laugh.”

Framed with bar napkins and obscene doodles, there, pasted to her kitchen wall, was a poster of the Eiffel Tower covered with street graffiti. The poster itself looked like a reproduction from the files of a historical archive, but instead the tower had been made to gush liquid into a gigantic and poorly drawn, very hairy, vagina.

I remember that first visit to her house. It was a Wednesday. I was waiting for the bus just after work when she whizzed past on her bicycle. I was leaning against a trashcan reading a manual about painting restoration, solvents and technique. She rode back, sheepishly. Somehow after a few minutes of chit-chat she had already gotten me to agree to walk home with her for an hour in the June sun to have tea and cookies at her place. I’d wanted to take the bus; it seemed too impossibly hot to walk home in the afternoon sun. In reality it was. I feel as if a sort of haze had poured over me, and subsequently the memories themselves had taken on a dreamlike filter.

She rode by and rang her bike bell at me. I’m not sure if this is absolutely true, but I do seem to remember her emitting a wolf whistle in my general direction. After a few minutes of talking she had invited me over to her house for tea, proposing that we drink the tea that she had stashed in a plastic bag in her bike basket. I suspected something.
“It’s rather special,” she said with a smirk.

“Why?”

“Because it costs $180 a pound. Some random customer at the Roratorium gave it to me. I guess he thought I liked teas because I would recommend him different sorts.”

“Do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Do you like teas?” I asked.

“Not particularly,” she said after some hesitation.

I can’t remember if her tea tasted good or bad. We drank it unsweetened. She had bought a gallon of spring water from the corner store. The leaves were loose and green. After the tea had steeped for five minutes the leaves looked like dandelion greens, or some sort of undersea foliage. Hermione declared it to be totally extraordinary. I was distracted by the bits of stem and leaves adhering to the sides of my teacup and occasionally my lips.

Her kitchen was a mess. She seemed completely unselfconscious about having me there, though to this day I’m not sure why. It seemed like after she learned how clean I kept my apartment, she became ashamed of her house. The cookies had been sitting on a plate on her table, really I can’t be sure how long. We ate a mixture of shortbreads and lemon tarts, she apologized for their staleness, but we both ate a large quantity of them gleefully.

Of course she had given me a tour of her house, my first tour of the house. It remained largely unchanged. At the time I had thought it was a bit cramped. Her kitchen had counters butting out of every corner. Some were covered with scraps of desiccated slivers of vegetable, crumbs and coffee rings. The table had a net of rings faded onto its dark uneven surface. A largish counter ran from next to her refrigerator to the opposite wall. She had constructed the table, her work bench from a door she had found in the trash and sanded smooth. Tiny butts of pencils, wood shavings and crumpled bits of paper were spread across it. There were also a few globs of plastic that had melted onto the table whose source I could not identify. There were scraps of wood and paper piled alongside her kitchen walls, piles of clothing and shoes huddling on her bedroom floors. Everything had collected in claustrophobic excess; no matter where I looked I had the feeling of distraction, stimulation and curiosity.

She never apologized for the mess, I liked that. The dirty dishes on the table were loudly scooped up and tossed into a sink teetering with more soiled china.

“Hold up. Do you want some water too?”

“Yes,” I said.

She filled what looked like and empty mayonnaise jar with tap water and plopped it on the table.

“Yeah, so my house is kinda messy, but I like it that way. Do you keep a clean house? I think it makes my nervous to live in a place that’s uncozy.”

“My house is perhaps more bare.”

“Why is that?” she asked. I imagine she was perplexed. Every inch of her wall was paper with a photo or come sort of flyer. Christmas lights were strewn like vines around the inside of her house. There was a collection of plants in various stages of desiccation and leafiness on the countertops.

“I suppose that I never had anything catch my eye. Really I’m very boring when it comes to collecting things. You know, I keep photographs in photo albums. I don’t have too many things since I’ve moved. I never bothered to make things as personal. I really like it here. It reminds me of a lot of rooms that they had in the group living situation in my college dormitory.”

“Was that long ago?”

“Maybe two or three years ago. The university system is different in Germany.”

“Yes. I’m vaguely familiar with the European university system.”

“I’m uncomfortably familiar with the European university system. I was thinking of finishing the terminal degree in art history, either here or there.”

“Terminal is such an odd word.”

“Yes, the doctorate is and odd and terminal thing. I suppose that that’s how I found myself here, not pursuing the terminal degree. Taking a bit of time off, or really running away to be truthful. My advisor knew someone that knew some one else, so that’s how I received this job really. Really, how I’m here talking to you. In a way it’s very arbitrary. I’m glad to be here, but it’s very random. In a way the decision made itself for me and I simply followed through.”

“No regrets, right?”

“Certainly not, but it’s very typical of me, to find myself here as a sort of accident.”

“When did you come here?”

“Something like three months ago.”

“Have you made many friends?” She asked. I sipped some water. The tea was beginning to boil and in a way I felt as if I was beginning to boil as well. I hoped that my answers weren’t too disappointing. Her life seemed so visibly full of social connections and meaning tied to this place, to the people here. Actually I had not made a lot of friends. The gallery was a mess but there was enough money flowing in and out to keep me busy planning shipments and keeping track of invitations and patrons. They were a burgeoning institution in the city, but as a transplant I never felt tied to it. I still try on occasion to feel elated about larger sales and well-attended shows at the gallery, but usually the effort is pretty pathetic and too self-conscious of my own lack of feeling to ever really convince myself that I had any personal involvement with my job.

“Yes, some here and there. I get along very well with my neighbors. My job keeps me occupied.”

“Do you like it?”

“In a way, yes.”

“I never liked working in galleries. I guess I’m pretty happy with tending bar at the Roratorium. It’s a gig, and I can work on my covert art activities. You know. Sales are the hard work. It makes me anxious, the thought of selling my things to strangers. I feel like I’m not good enough, but I feel angry too. Trying to convince people that you’re worth their time. You know. It’s better to sell directly too, not through a gallery, but how often do you get lucky enough to find people to sell you work too. I hate that in the end that it’s all about money. I’m not very good with worrying about money. It makes me crazy. Makes me paranoid.” She shook her head, “But you have to live, you need to pay rent. My parents were rich so I’ve always been a little uncomfortable talking about it, thinking about it, no making enough of it, wanting to make more of it then hating myself for thinking about it so much.”

The kettle was screaming. She poured water into ceramic teapot that was asymmetrical, with a gleaming syrupy glaze on it. To this day her things will always fascinate me, their seeming randomness and delicacy.

“Try these,” she said as she placed a heaping plateful of cookies in the middle of the table. “My neighbor gave me the recipe. A lot full of whipping cream was about to spoil at the café, so I made it into butter. I had to combine it with some cold butter to get the texture right. It was crazy, the cream smelled so good, but a lot of it ended up flying out the mixing bowl as I was beating it.”

The cookies were still cold from the inside of her freezer. The texture was somewhere in between a dry shortbread and an oatmeal cookie.

I wonder if she ever slept with anyone else, while she was with me. I know she would never do it to be mean-spirited or as revenge. I never wanted to tie her down to me. It sounds cliché, but she was such a free-spirit. I wonder if she would think to tell me if she did. If she would do it out of curiosity, or boredom with me, with us. I mean, would she struggle with telling me or go through with it as a matter of course? We were from very different places. I can’t help but think that I was a disappointment, my conventionality. It hurts to think about it, her in bed with someone else one night then in my bed another.

She was very attractive. I don’t doubt that she would’ve been approached by men. Hermione was so beautiful.

“Hello, Sufjan Pederson. This is Rainer.”

“Hello, yes.” The voice was a little gruff, but distinctly female. “I was calling to inquire about piece I saw the other day.”

“Yes, do you know the name of the artist, or perhaps what sort of content the piece refers to?”

“Yes, I was calling in regard to a rhinoceros.”

“A rhinoceros?”

“Yes. I would like to buy one rhinoceros.”

“Well, at the moment we don’t have any representational art, so perhaps you’re mistaking us for some other gallery.”

“No, no. I want to buy a rhinoceros.”

“The large gray animal?”

“Yes. Exactly.”

“Oh.”

“So? Is it a deal? How much will it cost?”

“Well, I’m afraid we don’t have any of those either.”

“No rhinoceros?”

“No.”

“So this conversation has been a total waste of my time then.”

“Yes, I suppose you could think of it that way.”

“Well, I’m very disappointed to say the least.”

“That’s too bad.”

The night after we had slept together for the first time, we walked through my door and out into the awaiting neighborhood. I watched her wrestle with her bike a little as she stepped over the threshold. In truth we looked in bad shape. My hair was a mess. Her clothes were wrinkled from being crumpled on my floor over night. The mockingbirds were singing loudly and the sun was painfully bright. As luck would have it my neighbors were sitting on the stoop. Ronika, Dee-dee and her youngest sister Chantel were sitting on one step, blocking our exit.

“Hey Rainer, how are you doin?”

“Oh, fine,” I mumbled, suddenly aware of our state of disgrace.

“Is she your sister?” Chantel asked.

“This is Hermione…”

“He’s my half-brother,” she answered jubilantly. “Isn’t that right bra?” She said as she slapped my back.

“Yeah, sure.” I had no idea what she was getting me into.

“He was adopted. My father adopted him when he was a teenager. He was troubled. That’s what the foster agency said about him. But my father always wanted a boy. My mom was too old and didn’t want to have anymore kids. My dad’s mistress didn’t want to ruin her figure either.”

“What’s a mistress?”

“Okay. Hermione and I have to go now. I’m sure we’ll have more opportunities in the future to talk to y’all later. Shouldn’t you be in school Ronika?”

“No. It’s Columbus Day.”

“Yeah great. Well, we have to go.”


“Hi, Rainer, this is Elizabeth from the gallery. I’m just calling to catch up with you. Donna’s probably going to be in later tonight. Are you going to be taking the rest of the day off? If I’m not here give me a call on my cell phone, okay? Talk to you later.”

“Hi Rainer, this is Elizabeth again. Look’s like we’re gonna be playing phone tag for a little while here. Could you give me a call as soon as you get in?”

“Rainer, it looks like we’re having trouble getting in touch with each other. I had a look at the log, and it seems like you’re on the schedule for today and the rest of the week. If something’s come up, could you please leave a message for me in the gallery, or give me a call on my cell? Thanks.”

I’m having trouble concentrating. I’ve been shifting between Hermione’s house and mine for I’m not sure how long now. I’ve found it difficult to get the laundry done, but no one’s around to complain about how wrinkled my clothes have become.
Boudreaux and I have reached an understanding, oddly. He doesn’t seem to bait me as much, though he hasn’t resolved to let me alone completely. I’d like to think that he enjoys my company, as much as he loudly disdains it, and that, ultimately, he prefers it to his loneliness. In a way I feel the same way about him. It’s as if he and I are united in a strange way. That only Boudreaux can understand my attachment to Hermione, having witnessed so much of our private interaction, having seen us unguarded with no one else around.

I find myself sitting at her kitchen table when I’m trying to sort everything out. Usually I’ll make little notes, while looking through the various stacks of papers that had accumulated in shoeboxes, trunks, and dusty file cabinets allover her apartment. On this occasion, I’d found an unlabeled notebook, filled with drawings and daily entries about the city. It was a more recent artifact. Though most of the entries were undated, they chronicled a six month period from around the time when she first moved to the city.
I’d been pouring over a doodle of a vase of flowers. Vaguely reminiscent of Odilon Redon and perhaps a little Egon Schiele. Was it done with a Sharpie fine point? The ink didn’t seem to have the characteristic blue-yellow distortion of that pen I’d seen her use so frequently. What pen had she been using at the time, perhaps another make that was more expensive and of a finer quality? Or was it an everyday Uniball?

I’d been in the midst of noting the finer points of her line work when my thoughts were interrupted by a very loud rock band playing happy birthday songs next door. It must have been around eight or nine in the evening. I wasn’t sure if they were drunk, practicing, or merely inept. I’d tried to get back to my work, but the garage-style covers of sixties classics and the yowling voice of the singer continued to jar me from my work.
Perhaps I should have politely asked them to stop playing so I could return to my research, but I opted to make an omelet instead.

Do you think that I enjoy this? Sitting here, wallowing in the pit I’ve dug for myself? Do you think I enjoy it? Hermione, where are you? Tell me what you’re doing. Why don’t you call me anymore? Do you think I’d be a coward to call you again?

Excerpt from Hermione’s diary

No, no, body, body, so sexing arresting world a walk war for.
Restless restless one one.
Five fire flower bee.
Figure five for four.
So love so live, walking down the street, thinking like a balloon, things floating sparking off like electricity. I will reach out into the blue cells of air, a thousand mega volts bursting and burling frictionless into the atoms of the air and universe, cleaving them smoother than a hot knife through butter.
Bursting forever.

Remember the ones that kissed with their eyes closed. Remember the ones that kissed with them open.
In a way losing can be beautiful. We just live in a culture of winning, but goddamn if it can’t be terrific to float away.

One gets the feeling that it is a matter of time before things blossom. I can feel the period before the storm. Maybe something good will happen & I’ll shake off all of the blues around me.

When I had my first period for the first time, I had only the vaguest notion of what was going on. I was at boarding school. It must have been Connecticut then, right after we moved. I’d spend the summers with father.

I guess it was my first semester at boarding school. I remember feeling tired during my trigonometry and algebra maths class. Sort of worn out. I went to the bathroom and there it was—a sort of darkish stain. I expected it to be red like blood, the way it looks in paintings and movies, unmistakably liquid and flowing stuff, but it wasn’t.

I’m tired Boudreaux.

I would say that I too am somewhat fatigued.

I was facing away from Boudreaux, cutting up green onions. We had gotten into the habit of bickering with each other, like an old couple that had ate breakfast at the same table, staring at each other every morning for what seemed like our entire lives. We had our gaps of silence and our moment of conflict, to be followed again by periods of unspecific silence.

Rainer, I’m a little concerned about your health and good spirits. Of which I’ve noticed a profound decline.

Spare me your pity, Boudreaux.

No, Rainer, I mean it sincerely.

I was silent.

It is currently a very early hour of the morning. You’ve been cooking for the last hour, more food than you and I could possibly eat.

Oh, yeah, I’d completely forgotten what I was doing. The potatoes had begun to soften and the frozen peas were warming up. The curry potato omelet had always been a favorite. I should’ve put the eggs out earlier, to get them up to room temperature.

Rainer, what are you doing?

The onions are bothering my eyes.

You should retire. You are obviously in need of rest.

I am a little tired.

Rainer, why are you wearing Hermione’s robe?

Boudreaux… I don’t know.

Monkey, monkey!
Yes, Ermine?
Do you like my robe?
Mmm… Yes, but I think that I need to take a closer look

I said as I pulled her toward me
And slipped the robe
Hypnotic multi-hued discs
From her pale shoulders.

I pretended to examine it for some moments before I wrapped my arms around her waist and wrestled her all giggling and kissed to the floor.

We sat staring at the boats trudging down the Mississippi river. The air was still warm though the sun was only a faint glow peeking over the river. Hermione and I had split a bottle of Merlot she’d tucked in her picnic basket. She said:

I picked Depeche Mode, mainly because everyone knows them and they had such a role in my youth. A lot of bedroom radio listening late at night and writing in my diary.
Do you have a favorite?

Maybe. “Question of Time” or “Shake the Disease.” I like the poppy beats. You?

“Stripped.” It’s grim, but I always identified with the song lyrically. I was fourteen or fifteen at the time which might explain why. A girlfriend had made a mix tape for me. It was after a Pogues song.

So were you into the anti-media culture lyrics? At the time?

To some degree. I found a lot of things frustrating in my life at the time. I had a pretty insular childhood, so I was generally upset about everything.

Really?

Yup.

That doesn’t strike me as too much like you.

Why is that? What do you mean?

I guess you seem really well-adjusted. You know, disturbingly well-adjusted.

I laughed. Thanks I guess.

My childhood was an uneventful period overall, though not entirely unpleasant. I grew up in a village of five hundred. The village lay in between two historic university towns in the middle of the Hessian farmland. I would open my front door into the wheat fields that bordered the forest. My parents were well-to-do, supportive both economically and personally. I remember my father videotaping my first concert with my high school punk band Crud at the EFZ, the local community center.

I was frustrated as a teenager, but no any more than anyone else. I wasn’t so happy-go-lucky. I could never muster up the rock and roll bravado that so many of the other kids had to go drinking at the regional festivals. I was too self-conscious. It all felt too provincial to me. Frustratingly quaint compared to Frankfurt and all of the modern cities I’d visited then. I longed for an expanded outlook, but I was more or less trapped in Oberwalgern until I’d finished school.

My parents’ outlook was limited. They’d lived there since they were children, constantly celebrating the calm and quiet of the town. I would get annoyed with their conservative remarks about migrant workers and immigration. I would then get annoyed with myself for even being angry with them. They were both very kind to my strange looking friends, about my choice of haircut, and left me to myself regarding my studies. Really, they did everything one could ask from parents. They left me to myself. I was very lucky. I could see that things stood differently with Hermione-- that she held onto deep-lying conflicts with her surroundings, that she’d always be defending herself from something, that she was always ready to fight.

Object Number 78:
An Atelier to the God of Iron

Large ammunition case containing
One piece iron ore
One rusted axe head
Shears (sheep shears unbracketed)
One metal sprocket
One small motor
One paper clip
Forceps
One railroad spike
A quantity of iron nails
Fishhooks
A spoon, knife and fork
One clamp
One Zippo
One typeset lowercase “a”

Each object is wrapped and connected with a piece of twine cord and each object is covered in a layer of felt.

No, don’t worry about it, I make the frames for wear. Hermione’s friend had just thrown six of his paintings onto the dirty green tile in the center of the square. They’d hit with a loud smack.

I was bending over to pick them up. We bumped heads.

I apologized.

“No way dude, it happens all the time. I’m a clumsy motherfucker. I’m just lucky that this shit is tough as nails.

Hermione was showing me off to her friends. Jack had been selling his papercuttings in the square for the past year, in hopes of buying a house so he could in turn fly off to Madagascar.

Yeah, I find most of this shit in dumpsters. Piles of it. You know most people would see piles of garbage. Rotten wood riddled with rusty nails. They make hardy frames. Even the paper, old lottery scratch off tickets from Boston. I’d find garbage cans full of them outside of convenience stores. They’re just the right size. And the paper has the right texture for cutting.

I was staring distractedly at a small print of barefoot angels flying, stretching and merging into each other.

How fucking weird is that. I fucking dig shit out of dumpsters and sell it back to them. Some people think it’s quaint, but man I gotta tell you America is totally fucked. I spent the past November living in a Schwar village in Equador. That shit totally changes your perspective.

I could only nod quietly. Hermione had told me that her friend Jack was beautiful, odd and would talk my ear off if I wasn’t careful. His art, she said, was more real than hers, but I never understood when she would make statements like that. “He’s real in a way that my work could never be. Well, at least some of it. He’s a lot less pretentious than I am. I keep saying he and I. I really mean his work and my work.”

It’s nice to meet you Jack. Hermione speaks very highly of you.

“Aww, you, he said as he punched Hermione on the arm. Get out of town. You’ve seen some of her notebooks right? I mean, goddamn. She’d done papercuttings for a while. I thought she was out to ruin me. I spent like tens years learning how to get a hand to look like a hand and the first thing she cuts is a woman transforming into a swan out of a cereal box with a pair of rusty nail scissors. God it was amazing.”

“Fuck you Jack, don’t say that stuff,” she said with a smile on her face.

“Yeah, you know it’s true. Don’t deny it.”

“Yeah, so I cut paper. I don’t have the pretense to call myself an artist. I just make things. Hopefully people’ll like them and buy them. Most of the time they cut themselves and the scissors move like they’re guided by something else. Well the ones that I’m fondest of, the ones with preliminary drawings involve a different process. That’s the work stuff.

Hermione was watching a child feed pidgeons and the gutterpunks pawing at each other.

“How does that work?” I asked. Do you just do something like automatic drawing?

“Automatic drawing is a bunch of hokum made up by some bored Europeans. I just cut out the forms. Really I just hold the scissors and something else guides me.”

“What’s the something else then?”

“Well,” Jack scratched his neckline with his pinky, “my gods.” I didn’t know if Hermione was watching me then or if I had only imagined her eyes on me looking for some sort of reaction.

“Do you believe in God?” she asked as she stared at the river.

“Yes. No. Well not really. I don’t have much occasion to think about it. I suppose if God existed it would be a surprise to me.”

“A good surprise?”

“No. Just a surprise. Unexpected perhaps is the best word. Do you?”

“Do I believe in God? I’m not sure but I think about it a lot. Not as much as I used to. I don’t believe in the Holy Ghost, but sometimes I get this big odd feeling sitting in nature. Often alone I get a queer feeling that there’s something more than the objects around us-- that there’s a meaning and a being. It’s weird. When I was younger, young young younger I was a total atheist. I used to laugh at people who would talk about God, you know, think they were stupid and that they’d found comfort in some lie that they’d concocted for themselves. But not anymore. Well, not so much anymore.”

I fell quiet. It was so delicate, that moment. I had thought that Hermione was hard, full of criticism and resolute in her view of the world being the determinate one. The quiet element of her, her belief and half faith had taken me by surprise.

At night alone here, I can hear the traffic in the street, the cars, the bus shaking the house. All the sounds of the street filter through the kitchen window. A dog howls somewhere. Someone is sweeping a porch down the street. A ship moos in the harbor. I turn in the bed and the sheets are cool on her side.

“I used to be confused about it when people would talk to me when I was behind the counter.”

“About what??”

“Have you ever worked behind a counter?”

“No. only at the village bakery. It was a small job. I’d imagine yours is more glamorous.”

“You’ve never come in during my shift?”

“No.”

“Well, it’s slow. People have a lot of problems and it annoys me the hell outta me, but I still like them… Nobody ever hesitates to tell you every moment of their day. It’s like you’re their prisoner completely. It makes communication more difficult. I guess I tend to be anti-social as a result. I don’t like a lot of small talk I find it exhausting.

“I don’t have that problem so much in my work. Usually I’m completely at task on moving a large package around or something like this.”

“It’s very hard for me to hang out in the café like I used to before. I end up picking up little things staying longer than I should.”

H’s Diary

Life has always taken place in a tulmult without apparent cohesion, but it only finds its grandeur and its reality in ecstasy and in ecstatic love.

remember remember remember

that sex is not a promise

the body in union as one

the body in miraculous mystery

when i sleep with him i am with the all male all masculine

him man boy inside of me

remember men don’t think the same.

“Sometimes I wonder.”

“What?”

“Wonder if it will be like falling asleep and those dreams that follow. Those strange illusions where one finds oneself both not himself yet resembling himself in those dream actions.”

“What are you talking about?”

“When you die. Actually when I will die again. Crossing over. I wonder if I will die differently, if it will be darkness alone or if I will become some other creature. If years will be like minutes or if I will become a man again…” he trailed off.

“Well, why wouldn’t it just be like the first time?”

“It was both a confusion and perfectly boring. I simply remember the rain, a noise like a canon but one hundred times louder, and my fear of injury.”

I stirred my coffee and gave Boudreaux a leaf of lettuce.

“So it was as if I woke from a late night in society. My body cramped a little. I stretched out—my very first movement—and my body’s change had made itself dreadfully apparent. My arm were tendonous sinews. My skin was hard and crusty. It took some time to acquaint myself with my own new skin, as you can imagine.

I wasn’t sure how I’d gotten there. It was simply as if I woke one day not quite right. After some contemplation I realized that I had in fact died, or perhaps some accident occurred whereby I switched bodies. Perhaps some crawfish soul occupied my former body for a time. I think upon it quite often. I find myself in an odd position, given over to introspection. I think that I am most completely given over to contemplation. I have managed to come to an understanding about this world, this current space and moment in which we communicate, Rainer. It’s not as easy for me as you would imagine. My understanding is pretty limited, as I am currently in a glass bowl and have no real power of locomotion. I haven’t felt the toasty comfort of the heath nor been stirred by exhilarating conversation for some time. I miss my favorite ale and familiar benches in my collegiate pub. I’d imagine all of those are gone now, those props and stages I had grown so fond of.

I had the habit of reading a great deal, an activity I can seldom enjoy with my current sensory apparatus. I am ill-equipped to be a man. My body seems to know what to do on its own. I’m not conscious of cleaning my antennae and scraping off the dead bits of shell; the body has its own mind that I know nothing of. It is the time that affects me greatest. Time passes in a completely inexorable fashion. I imagine that I’m at bottom of the ocean or on the surface of some far off rocky planet watching humanity, seeing actions, knowing the effects of those actions, deeds and consequences as one, but not quite knowing meaning. Like watching a clock and knowing that the bird will burst through its door and cuckoo when the hands draw to the hour. Totally impotent, like some tiny godhead.”

“Rainer, you will realize that things have gone too far, that you’ve lost control of yourself. You’ll be carried through on a great momentum. Too late. You know you’ll have to leave, but really you’ll stay until you’re made to leave. You won’t understand what I’m talking about until much later. This isn’t a parlor-trick, but a warning. No, you don’t understand, but I suppose I felt that I should tell you anyway. I’ll make things easier on you: you’ll spill that cup of water on Hermione’s vanity top, in the process the ink text will become too obscure and serpentine to read. It’s not particularly important that you believe me, what I’m saying to you at this moment. I’m not making claims or playing games with divination. I’m merely found myself in a peculiar situation, in situ. I suppose one might thin God had made some sort of mistake. I blame my being here on some tiny malfunction in the machinery of this world, if you can believe such a thing.”

I think he sighed then and mumbled, “Everything is beautiful. Everything is very plain. I don’t know how else to describe it.”

Boudreaux would shift from haughty condescension to vulnerability. He was moodier than I most of the time. Usually I was too self-involved to make much of it or really notice. I suppose he was jealous, me being a man and him having lost that. Who could blame him? I knew he was capable of reading my thoughts, I assume that he was being extremely tactful during our conversations. Or at least I hope that his access to my brain was limited to those parts I wanted him to see.

“Did you talk to Hermione much?”

“Not at all” Boudreaux replied.

“Didn’t you want to?”

“I had tried to, but it seemed my efforts were in vain. She would talk to me like a pet. She would lay her troubles upon me, acting as if I could never hear or understand her. That was the tenor of our exchanges. I never had access to her thoughts as I do with you Rainer.” He paused. “She was very modern, wasn’t she?”

“Yes, I think so. Even for our standards. She was her own woman, very smart.”

“She was very much like a man, but I liked that.”

“I guess so.” I tried to understand where he was coming from, though I couldn’t make out how Hermione was like a man, or why exactly Boudreaux would regard that so strongly in her. Hermione was very much her own person.

Hermione’s Diary

I had been wondering if it should look more polished. The boards were rotting in places. The paint had begun to peel off the rougher spots of the salvaged wood. But I was already there and in costume and the only thing I had to remember was to play the piano.

This is a low low place fore me. Why was I playing in a bar full of smoke and drunks? Who were these people? God were they laughing at me in my bear hat? At least it was better than nothing. Maybe. Than a crowd of staring blank faces.

Wait, was it really like that? In part I think.

The event had to continue until its termination and it had already begun. That was the way it had always been—once started, no matter what—the event had to continue until it was finished. So be it.

Audiences are hard.

Bars are hard especial if you have a relationship to bars that is sometimes conflicted.

The bear hat was warm and I was sweating into the sheer slip I was wearing. No one was laughing. No one was dancing. They just stared but what else could they do. I guess that’s what we’re trained for, to watch not interactivity.

So her I am curled up in bed again and he is not here. The HE. I will call him that even though he is his own, but he is still a part of the greater theory. That one day you will meet the one special one that will love you like a mother, or perhaps like a father that was not involved in his own life. Like an infant again. And then you’re lead to be greater somehow through your love.

I wish it would come. I wish that it could be uncomplicated and pure but it is never like that really. No life is really never like that. I suppose that’s okay. You just have to make yourself vulnerable and scared and then you remember all those other times that love has called your name then jerked you around. Then you have to ignore that demon and put on happiness like a new suit.

Yes, that’s the way it is. And then you get hurt some and wonder why you bothered. And then you wonder if you ever really knew that person at all, or were just kidnapped by the mystic and beautiful sensation of someone new and utterly remarkable and beautiful in every way. I suppose it never stays like that. Nothing can ever be new and beautiful forever. After a while it all becomes familiar and tired and predictable, doesn’t it?

We are all complicated people. It is terribly easy to love Boudreaux because he is only a creature and can only ever be a creature uncomplicated and unfettered by the lives we live. It is a terribly stupid thing to be fond of a crawfish. But he is certainly reliable and that can’t be said about a lot of friends and lovers.

I like you and you like me. It’s a good feeling to find loverdom. I don’t know if it’s grand. Let’s drink heavily from the same lead cup. Go out together and sleep drunk all day long.

I like the way it feels because a love that’s left too long can fester and become toxic.

New new new. The nights get cold and there is not enough news in my life.

On the phone, or rather not on the phone because it did not ring and he did not call me again tonight.

I could hear that he does not love me the same way I love him.

So I will set out not thinking about him, trying to let him go.

Am I doing it to hurt him?

Or because I do not wasn’t to be a servant to myself?

I walked home today. It was Coliseum St after the rain. The sun was shining. It was mid-afternoon, sometime between noon and two, the corner of Coliseum and St. Andrew. The air smelled like clove and cinnamon. The smell of wet tree bark was like clove I think. The yellow leaves had fallen over the sidewalk coating the black gray cement with a layer of light gold.

I thought to myself, I must capture this! Put it in my pocket and show it to everyone I know during some northern blizzard. If I could paint this moment later, the smell of the afternoon after a morning full of rain and cold. The warmth of the day and the subtleness of those wet leaves plastered against the sidewalk.

The yellow shined like golden coins. Music-- strains of someone practicing clarinet from inside the Rose Apartments down the street. Stevie Nicks’s gravely voice sang to me, floating out from another window.

I thought—this moment is beautiful and some how true to me.

I knew that I was changing, that some old part of me was realizing a new part of myself.

Instructions for today

Gather the dead grasses of the field and build a nest for yourself. Sleep in it all day and sneak out into the night to find yourself.

The alcohol of women and men

The alcohol of conversation--\

I don’t want to think of it

The motivation and ambition.

What does it mean – the talking up.

A cigarette that juts at a calculated

Angle indicating ease

Or provocation

I won’t have it.

I’m always drinking. I’m so thirsty.

I woke up. It was five forty-five in the afternoon. Damned show. How are my kitchen floors so cold. Kitchen and bathroom. They make my feet feel like ice. The eggs boiled and I ate toast with margarine and apricot jam.

If I just get it done I will not feel like a madwoman. I will not be hungry for it. Remember when you wanted this so badly you?! To be obligated and real, remember? Well there you have it fancy pants. God, I’m still tired and I have so much more to do and plan.