It’s a strange thing, getting to know someone. First off, there’s the impetus, the motivation behind you trying to make a person a part of your life. It might be because you admire them. It might be because you’re attracted to them. It might be any of the number of known but unknowable reasons that start to bring two people together.
What’s amazing about coming to know someone new is that you always come to see yourself anew as well. You enter the playing field in one piece, the eumelodic epitome of everything you’ve figured yourself out to be. You enter the game in order that, unsuspecting, this new, unknown force can show you there are still parts of yourself that you haven’t figured out—that your own journey of self-discovery or self-fulfillment or self-creation is far from being over, but rather a constant, fluid process. In coming to know someone, you come to know yourself, again, as you are reflected through them.
They exploit our transparencies. The things we’ve securely hidden we find dangling upon our bare chests. The motions that we’ve come to accept as integral to ourselves are questioned, evaluated, qualified and re-qualified. The facades that have hidden even our own reflections in refracted light, bright through the bathroom window, are razed to the ground, laying us bare, unprotected, vulnerable. Yet vulnerable more to them, or to ourselves, still I have not been able to decide.
But the strangest part of all, then—with new souls, certainly, but still too with those who have been with us all our lives—is realizing, conceptualizing, accepting that these people exist outside of the sphere of our own selves. What a person comes to mean for me—do they continue to be that person away from me? Are they fixed, constant? Or have they become as fluid as I, falling back into comfort and warmth and the knowledge of things that are familiar, and thereby becoming completely a person that I do not know and do not recognize? Perhaps some do. Perhaps some do not. It is interesting to think that I am the only clay in a world of unweatherable stone.
The most wicked, the most wrenching part of this realization—the realization that a person lives and breathes and exists when I do not see them or hear them or somehow know their being—is knowing that I am not necessary to that person’s existence; that, even now, another voice sounds in their ears, and words flutter forth whose target is not me, whose creation may not have even had me in mind; that, at even this moment, another hand caresses, another chest heaves, another heart ebbs and flows and dies and grows in some passion that preexists and stands aloof from any notion of me; that sweet words are uttered, falling upon enemy ears, words that are soft and braceleted and bare and spoken perhaps, I dread, as truth, as desire, even, God forbid, as unfeigned and unwanting love. Flesh upon flesh, I fear, upon a bed grown into the floor of a room whose door I look upon only in sad, twisting nightmare.
Yet, to counter the fear, in our oblivion, we are wont to cling to some glimmering hope, even if the possibility of its realization never did actually exist. The hope that an oath is uttered from their lying lips, that even the smallest incipium of sin grows in the hidden parts of their mind. The sheer empowering delight in hoping that you are more present there than the reality in which the thing grows; that, just as they are becoming your sole reality, unbeknownst to even their own self, you have become the same for them.
When you enter a café in the center of Athens, close your eyes. You will hear two sounds that overlap and blend together: male and female voices disputing heatedly, and dice bouncing against the wooden rims of a playing board while the checkers glide across. Clicking sounds and words: the same noises that pervaded the agora, the gymnasia, and public places 2,500 years ago. Nothing has changed. What the Greeks now call tavli and the Europeans backgammon was called petteia. It was a game in which intellect measured itself against luck. Just as it was with sharp-witted Athena, whose mind was polymorphous enough to cope with everyday contingencies. As for the small talk we hear in a café nowadays, it mostly revolves around two topics: politics—that is, whatever concerns the polis (the town, the state, or the country in general, which, in fact, was a city-state in the past)—and our everlasting search for happiness. That is, the topics of the dialogues that Socrates performed so sublimely and that went down in history as the major achievement of Western thought: critical insight. Always questioning. Always wondering why. Always wondering whether something is good or evil, whether it is right or wrong, whether there might be a better way to…
What we hear or see in the hours that fill a Greek café with an illusory nothingness nowadays, what took place in the Athens that is commonly considered the cradle of our History (a history that resonates with democracy, thinking, dialectic, research, and, chiefly, criticism), is what our ancestors saw emerging in the most excellent moments that human beings could create: the moments that were unencumbered by material needs and, in particular, by the necessity to work. Plato and Aristotle, the celebrated philosophers who followed Socrates’s lead, pointed that out on many occasions: man achieves the fullest realization when he is not obliged to work, when he is not weighed down by exigencies that divert his attention from perfecting his preeminent feature: his proclivity for truth, for attaining knowledge, his burning passion for what is yet known. In short, his penchant for philosophy, meaning by this a desire, a devotion, an appetite (in ancient Greek philein means “to love,” “to cherish”) for knowledge or wisdom (sophia) that cannot be fully and perfectly attained, being as it is the gods’ privileged status. Nonetheless, the proneness to search for, to investigate, the love and passion that compel us to look for answers and to inquire, to trace a path and to find a way toward happiness, this very search is itself what matters most to us and is essential for our complete development as human beings. Of course, we cannot accomplish this quest if we are working or if necessity monopolizes us, forcing us to embark on different tasks or to enter moods that make thorough commitment to the search still more impractical.
The Greeks deemed the total freedom that was essential to fulfill our grander ambitions as a perfect moment in a human’s life. So lucky were those who could indulge in that much-coveted condition; so lucky were those who managed to cast their lives in that extraordinary mold. That wonderful condition (“wonderful” as both “capable of arousing wonder” and “a state of wonder itself,” since wonder was the first sign of the presence of beauty toward which the search for happiness drew) was expressed by a seemingly forgotten, distant word: scholè. It meant “spare time,” the time spent resting, the moment when one’s own identity was achieved, when people could go hand in hand, when an individual was able to have hold of themselves (from the verb echein). In antithesis to this positive term, endowed with great evocative power, was a negative word; it undermined what scholè made possible: ascholìa, that is, “work.”
The long-established history of Protestantism has persuaded us that labor is the sphere within which man can achieve personal fulfillment and gain self-respect. Conversely, idleness and rest have acquired a negative meaning. A person who roams the streets, indulging in silent rumination, is often considered a weirdo. A person who wastes all day chatting in a café is viewed as a slacker. People who choose a small life, in order to have time to realize their identity and think about themselves, are often considered wasters, two-bit philosophers, or, at best, blunderers. For some reason, money has supplanted time as the only wealth we should strive to preserve. For some reason, we keep ignoring that time is an exhaustible resource, the only one we should properly manage, while money—only seemingly inexhaustible—falls short when our time is over. Perhaps we should start convincing ourselves again that Benedetto Croce’s authoritatively celebrated assumption is not true. To state that we cannot but recognize ourselves as Christians is not true. In fact, we cannot but recognize ourselves as Greeks. And in order to state it clearly we should go back to that seemingly forgotten, distant word. Seemingly: nothing but that. Since the word scholè is far from being lost in time. It still has a place in our history. The Greek word still re-echoes in a term that we always use: scuola, or “school.” At school boys and girls, free as they are from labor and other practical obligations, can fully reach that condition which marks our difference from animals. At school, they learn how to cherish knowledge and to become philosophers. At school we all shape our identities, since we realize that we have hold of ourselves, that we own ourselves, that our life is entirely open to us. Maybe then we will be able to make our life wonderful. Of course, “wonderful” in both senses.
To those who first conceived of it, the privilege walk must have felt like a revelation. White people and black people moving their bodies through space, revealing, learning, feeling… what? I imagine the creators’ hope was a scene similar to those videos of a deaf person’s cochlear implant being turned on for the first time. The way the eyes first get so big, the whole body then startled and amazed by the unprecedented presence of sound.
If you studied the culture of your ancestors in elementary school,
take one step forward.
If your ancestors came to the United States by force,
take one step back.
If you grew up in a house owned by your parents,
take one step forward.
If your car breaks down on a deserted stretch of road, and you can trust
that the law enforcement officer who arrives will be helpful,
take one step forward.
If you ever tried to change your speech or mannerisms to gain credibility,
take one step back.
If your family and teachers assumed you would attend college,
take one step forward.
If you are relatively sure you can enter a store without being followed,
take one step forward.
If you can watch mainstream media and see wide,
fair representations of people who look like you,
take one step forward.
But it doesn’t work like that. You can experience getting something you’ve never had, knowing only then in retrospect the full extent of your former poverty. You can experience losing something you’ve once had, feeling the sudden sting of a new resentment forming. But you can’t experience never having had something you’ve always had.
The privilege walk tells white people to imagine blackness thusly: start with whiteness and then keep subtracting. Subtract security, subtract respect, subtract belonging. The white people must subtract and subtract until (if the moderator has done her job well), they cry.
I know the taste of white tears, having felt their salty heat against my tongue. I know them, those tears of false catharsis that I have too often shed.
If you know the taste of white tears,
take one step…
The crying begins, tears quivering on a lash, because you are sad that a woman you believe to be your friend has been the victim of a terrible series of thefts. You cry next, the first few drops sliding down your cheek, because you feel powerless in random good fortune (and you like feeling powerful). You do not see, refuse even to see, the truth: you are the thief.
“Why are you crying?” the moderator asks.
“I forgive you,” Nadine Collier, the daughter of one of Dylann Roof’s victims, told him at the bond hearing held two days after his bible study massacre. “I will never be able to hold her again, but I forgive you.”
As a white woman, I can be as angry as I want to be. People may laugh, may make jokes about my menstrual cycle, but I will never endanger my own safety with my rage. If my mother or my child is murdered, I can yell and cry and demand justice, and if it is denied, demand consequences. I will not be required, as Michael Brown’s father was, to make public calls for peace and calm before my son is laid to rest. I will not be required, as Michael Brown’s father was, to film a public service announcement requesting that same calm in the lead-up to the grand jury decision determining his son’s killer’s fate. I will not be investigated, with demands that charges be brought against me coming from all corners, from as high aloft as the lieutenant governor’s office, as Michael Brown’s stepfather was, in the moments after his stepson’s killer was declared not criminally culpable and he refused to call for calm. His anger, and not mine, being of the shade that demands containment.
“For black people,” wrote Hilton Als, “being around white people is sometimes like taking care of babies you don’t like, babies who throw up on you again and again, but whom you cannot punish, because they’re babies. Eventually, you direct that anger at yourself—it has nowhere else to go.”
It seems quite appropriate that white Americans, having weeks earlier ignored Juneteenth, don flag shirts and paint their faces and drink beer every July Fourth. It was only after many years and many deaths that independence was won. But we do not celebrate that day. It is only the declaring that we parade down suburban streets to extol.
In his 1852 Fourth of July address, Frederick Douglass asserted, to the president and dignitaries before him, that to the American slave “your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”
The dam breaks, and as the heaving begins in earnest, the tears become sweet, delicious even. Because more than anything else, there is relief. This was just an exercise, a thought experiment. The self, yourself, the white self, which is to say the precise center of the moral universe, that self, is intact.
Oh Dearest Fellow Reader:
I beseech you READ ME NOT.
Nor should you, you kind soul, read of the metaphorical melancholy coal aqualung on pages 3—4.
Hasten instead to Chapter 1.
If you should require, as would any sensible member of our Great Christian race possessed of our most glorious rectitude, affirmation and attestation regarding the character of the narrator and confirmation of his good standing, let it be known that the humble narrator is in all moral aspects reformed and desirous only of bettering himself and improving his station that he might provide more fully for his family and inspire his race, and though his mind may appear at times impaired by angst, deliriously fevered by retribution and animus, muculent in bestial obsession and gaze, those fantasies are but the most superficial and ephemeral divertissements of a faculty riddled soft by the perennial sowing of implacable penitence implanted by many who shame our great Christian Race in their incessant kindling of discomposure and dubitation in the innocent souls of those within our charge.
I therefore implore you, Fellow immaculate soul, bypass with haste the aquatic interlude of the two impermeable pages which follow this introduction and alight thine unimpeachable and discerning eye upon Chapter 1, where you shall find a main narrative more porous and supple, more prone and sober, prostrate even. I also implore you, dear Fellow sage, nay, you Fellow guiltless spirit, you Fellow custodian of civilization, you my Brethren the quintessence of magnanimity, I pray you good Sir read with generosity of spirit and grace, and bear no malice toward our humble author for his unavoidable errors. Truthily, if I may be so bold as to speak under aegis of our Redeemer, I invite you, you of monastic chastity and comprehensive probing intellect, you my Fellow ecumenical evangelical, you my Brother in redemption, I pray you acquit our humble narrator of those syntactical and grammatical charges silently presented and deliberated within the rational mind, for though unvoiced, that internal enterprise, yet august, yet the central distinction of our Hellenistic heritage, yet essential to our safe passage round turpitude as does the lighthouse by constancy of resolve and illumination steer the ship round the wicked cape, that internal enterprise can’t but distract a Christian soul from its most solemn and noble ambition, which is to serve as our Good Teacher’s proxy through emulation in grace, forgiveness, compassion, and charity.
Read upright in heart this account of calamity and deliverance. Read with compassion for the vicissitudes of the nascent mind unyet endowed with the sapience our Good Creator saw fit to bestow upon our Christian being that our spirits may delight in the sacred translucence through which His divinity is known. Read with pity and ruth.
Early hyperborean readers remarked at great length and with undue generosity on the discordance between the exordium and the sequent testimony, noting that the “portentousness of the prolegomenon pertaining to the aquatic metaphor indeed is brackish and fails to portend the accessibility of the sequent, and principal, chronology.” My assayance therefore was to adopt a voice representative of the indignant imagination. Have you read this far I trust your thirsting credulity was amply slaked by the authentical deployment of dialect.
Those who have read this far be also moved in heart to present my humble case along with and among those that each night you commission Providence to dispense with grace. Be also moved to entreat your fellow hyperboreans to acquire this pithy text that the chronicles therein may be committed to public memory—the only collective repository sufficiently cessative to ameliorate capricious social struggles—that all our hearts may beat in harmony the rhythms of our common mortal assignment thereby ensuring obtainment of our heavenly assignation.
We drive over the bridge
into Arkansas,
the top down,
over the Mississippi,
where my grandfather
almost drowned
in a whirlpool
when he was my age.
We prolong the night
and cheat the day.
The light's coming up
but we cling to
dark possibilities.
We get out, sit on the car,
look at Lake Chicot
and talk. You use a word
I don't know, bellwether.
You're from a college town,
I'm from a cotton town,
and it's not that I think
we can be lovers.
I know you are straight,
but I savor this closeness
in our trance-like state.
A straight Jewish painter
helps me cut rolls
of glassine paper
to protect the art
from my friend's estate,
and it gets so late
he asks to stay over.
There we lie
in the same narrow bed,
but I don't dare reach out,
until the alarm clock rings
and half asleep, in the dim light,
I stretch across his bare chest
to shut it off and then we're touching.
It's all so quick and selfish,
and I jump up to catch a plane,
leaving him alone to feel guilty
and let himself out,
and we never see each other again.
He gives up art
to become a doctor.
The taxi speeds to the airport
and I make the plane.
I'm packing, paying bills, straightening up
for the friend who will stay here,
and checking a sex site where I find
a guy working late, a paralegal who
wants to come over. I offer to pay
the taxi fare from his midtown office,
and it gets later and later.
He sends me a selfie that's
way less cute than his profile picture,
testing me.
I have a beer belly I hope u don't mind
I think it's cute, I say, lying
I might be done about 3
I'll still be up.
I wanna suck ur nipples
You're making me hard..
omg I still have to make a conference call with people in singapore
Take your time.
I hate my office they treat me like a slave
Don't let them push you around.
probably be there in 15 minutes
Can't wait.
work so stressful I need to lick your nipples
Yes, you said.
Im at the bridge now btw
Close
I'm already on the bk side
I'll come out and pay the driver.
It's interesting to go against type,
and now that it's over,
I don't want to be rude
but I'll call you a car
and here's the fare.
I want to sleep for an hour
before I get up and vacuum
and mop the floor and take
the sheets to the laundromat,
so early the deli guys
haven't even opened up.
The cold air is bracing
and the morning light
is a hard slap.
The house had no privacy. The windows overlooked the street so it was impossible to meet my lover without being seen. It was a simple white house—spacious and elegant. My lover had a bald head. It fit well with the sparse furnishing. The baldness, like the floor-to-ceiling windows, was problematic for our illicit affair. Both bore a striking visibility. I wanted to fuck him, so I began to remove pieces of furniture. If the house seemed empty, our affair would be invisible, I thought. The first thing to do was dismiss the maid. She could not stay as a witness. We locked her in the bathroom. I peeled away layers. I removed appliances from the living room. Then the armchairs, the dining table, and the paintings that hung against the wall. I got rid of the couch we used to have sex on. Finally, the house was clear. My lover waited for me, sitting naked on the floor. I looked at him. He was too much. We convened his body should also be removed if we wanted to maintain privacy. We started with the legs.
Do landscapes remember?
Or are they, rather, memories themselves?
What does this geography of memory look like? What are its contours, its boundaries, its texture, its form?
Like an amputee who continues to occupy the empty space of their severed limb, landscapes of memory retain the impressions of infinite encounters through time.
These landscapes are palimpsests of past presences shed across their deep strata—clinging on with varying degrees of persistence—from the loosely tethered to the tightly taut.
This project is partly an attempt to gather the memories strewn across the landscape of my birth and early life—shed there by my great-grandmother, my grandmother, my mother, and me.
It is partly an attempt to ask what and how a body remembers.
There are some events that imprint themselves on our bodies in the form of physical scars. Others, more subtle—but no less severe, leave non-visible traces within our DNA.
There is a theory that trauma gets passed down from one generation to the next. That it is possible to inherit memories that are not one’s own and to re-experience these events in the form of flashbacks.
How do we understand the memories of others? How might we be affected by memories of events through which we did not live?
This project is also partly an attempt to think about images. How an image composes a memory. Like the human DNA, the ASCII code of a jpeg contains all the information required to create the digital image. In some sense, one can think of this code as the memory of what was photographed.
Can various memories coexist within an image?
This project is partly about language—how memory is translated and how it becomes narrative.
What is lost, left out, or forgotten when we translate memories into language?
This project seeks to initiate a conversation between landscape, body, image, language, narrative, code, and memory and to ask what it means to remember.
What are the weapons of the weak?
Nagging. Poison. Gossip. Sneaking around instead of confrontation.
—Toni Morrison
When I say hi and you say hello and the words are exchanged around kitchen or office tables or in front of modernist paintings across the ocean, how do I know for sure that what I’m saying and what you are speaking of is not just idle chatter?
On January 30, 1980, the Mexican artist Ulises Carrión wrote in his notebook: “I don’t know how I came up with the idea of using gossip for an artwork. Now it seems to me an excellent idea that, besides, fits perfectly with the rest of my work.” This note became manifest in a series of artistic performative interventions around Amsterdam titled “Gossip, Scandal and Good Manners,” a project commissioned by De Appel arts center. Between March and June 1981 a small group of people in the city spread, and noted the dispersal of, several semifictional rumors about Carrión’s work and life. He described it as a “conceptual performance.”
The period of word-of-mouth dissemination culminated in a lecture-performance at the University of Amsterdam on June 25, 1981, in which Carrión went into depths on the importance of gossip in literature, theater, opera, and cinema. He also produced this film both as a unique work and as a documentation of the process.
Gossip offered Carrión the space in which to work differently with language. At the time, he was best known for the bookshop and art space called “Other Books and So,” which he ran in Amsterdam from 1975 to 1979, and for his text “The New Art of Making Books” (1975). Exploring gossip, a key component of queer communities, gave him the opportunity to escape the narrative of the self as a contained and unique identity. As his stories alter in the mouths of the speakers, the artist’s work transforms and lives through the bodies of others.
Almost three decades later, gossip is still waiting around the corner not only in Amsterdam but also in Athens, in Rome, and perhaps in the inframince [infrathin: a concept termed by Marcel Duchamp, which cannot be defined] space of private conversations among friends moving from city to another.
The target of venom in philosophy by writers such as Martin Heidegger, gossip is often associated with women, servants, and the queer community. It is almost common knowledge that gossip is seen as a nonproductive and “regressive” feminine activity. The warnings to girls on the dangers of gossip have a wide tradition. There are the religious texts of the Judeo-Christian tradition calling on the destruction that gossip can generate, then the mythical tradition of Ancient Greece where chatting women are to be feared, or the medieval didactic books on how ladies should not succumb to the pleasures of idle talk, just to mention a few examples. In Being and Time (1927) idle chatter is discussed at length as a suspicious tool. Gossip is what “releases one from the talk of genuine understanding”; it is symptomatic of the falling of Dasein (being); it is simply unrooted.
Gossip or idle chatter is what does not directly enter discourse and resists borders. It is a collective unrooted communication chain evolving erratically within daily life, and it is embedded in oral and familial practices. Within a binary understanding of the world, gossip (or girl talk) is associated with feeble chatter as the opposite of doing and action. Yet gossip is not really a binary chain of reactions. Gossip goes beyond a binary worldview through a performative score that is jumping from one body to the other. Artistically, it offers a way to infiltrate a world where binary and identity-politics thinking are no longer part of the chatter.
Could gossip, idle chatter, small talk—these vectors of personal communication—offer a form of art, music, and literature? Could a psst become a sound of information exchange? The unrooted words, the whisperings of pleasure are there at school.
In the case of Carrión and Amsterdam, gossip was drawing light on the way learning and communication chains are at work, combined with an elegant look into the choreography of teaching and learning.
Here in Rome at the American Academy, small gossip arrows took over the everyday behind the closed doors, among colleagues attempting to begin new friendships and new ways of understanding the world. It is not about content but about the choreography of intimacy. It is not about knowledge but about the ecology of the daily concerns within a community. It is not about a clear trajectory but the nonlinear formation of desire and intimacy. It is not about the melodic sound of discourse but about the subtle noises that lie dormant in one’s body.
Stolen kisses, night walks, or small looks while waiting for the #75 bus open up toward a broader artistic production of the world. How does the perception of each other’s work change based on intimate information? Small pink communication vectors of private information open up the “public persona” and the daily general performance. It is in spaces of trans-action that small talk evolves familiarly close.
Gossip is there in community forming, constantly shifting from the periphery of knowledge formation. It is there and then it isn’t, without claims to history, but with a practical solution on hand.
In 1986, a few years after the experiment of Ulises Carrión, the theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick reevaluated the role of gossip within language and community building. She praised its art, the bodies through which it flows. For her, gossip had less to do with the transmission of necessary knowledge and more with the refinement of skills for “making, testing, and using unrationalized and provisional hypotheses about what kinds of people there are to be found in one’s world.”
Idle chatter opens up paths and strategies of self-reinvention, -formation, and -redistribution. Small talk stands at the interlinking of sexual, social, and cultural reproduction.
Gossip is a privileged form of giving and receiving information. Gossip is for you and me when I’m no longer me. Gossip is for finding other people with whom to share a worldview.
My study on gossip is part of a broader research on “Performance Art, Ulises Carrión, and the Conceptual Body,” initiated at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (2015); continued during an education through the Parliament of Bodies (a public program) of documenta 14 with the Society of Friends of Ulises Carrión (2016–17); and ultimately articulated during the Mondriaan Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome (2017–18).
She was eighteen, walking some time after midnight down the main road of Holyhead, a port town in Wales from which the skimmer goes to Dublin. She and her friend Patrick had hitchhiked from London with some forty pounds between them. The route had been almost put out of business by the chopper service from London, and a schedule in a plastic case told them that the next boat went at noon. Already cold and hungry, they looked with increasing frustration for an all-night chip shop, train station, or church. The town was empty under the streetlights, and shuttered tightly against a sharp October wind off the Irish sea. Nothing was open. In the little fishing harbor the boats rocked about madly.
Cursing Holyhead and wanting to see the ocean, they walked out toward the jetty, along a street of disrepaired modest houses facing an oily freight canal. They kicked a beer can noisily down the street. Some of the houses had graffiti on them; football crap, couples' names, political oaths. "Niamh a USA" was spraypainted across the front door of one. They looked at each other ironically, two New England kids months and miles from home.
It was colder on the jetty, whitecaps flashing in the darkness and a coarse spray flying high over the seawall. They hunkered down behind a wall with the wind at their backs.
"What do you want to do?" she asked Patrick. He was older and wiser than her, and two years sober with Alcoholics Anonymous and she was worried that this situation would make him want to drink. "Never get too cold, too tired, too hungry, or too angry" went one of the many AA slogans pasted on the walls of the shabby meeting rooms they visited together in London.
"We gotta get indoors," he said. "We'll get back to town and hail a cop car. There's a police station somewhere in this shithole."
"Sounds great. Sit on a bench in a police station all night."
"They might let us sleep in a cell." He rubbed his eyes. "You want to freeze to death out here?"
"Fuck, dude."
She put up her collar and began walking back along the frontage road. Just past the "Niamh" house, she stopped. Patrick was looking at the house. The door was very slightly ajar, too much to be locked. They looked up and down the empty street, then walked over and squinted through the crack. In the little entry foyer, some newspapers lay crumpled. They went inside and closed the door behind them. A second door was closed, but the lock barrel was missing. Looking through it, she saw a staircase. Patrick knocked politely on the door, waited and knocked harder. They shoved the door, pushing some rubbish with it, and walked into the house.
She looked up the stairs and froze. The light was hitting the wallpaper and seemed to almost pass through it. It was squared off by shadows, its source somewhere above her. Her heart began to pound rapidly and she turned to Patrick but he had gone into the ground floor room. She glanced up again at the rectangle of light and then followed him.
The place was trashed. At one end of the room was a kitchenette with all the cabinets open and dirty dishes piled on the counter and in the sink. Against the back wall, a brokenbacked couch of indeterminate color had cushions and possessions strewn about. A candle was stuck to the table and she lit it and sat down on the couch. Patrick found a few more candle-ends and pulled the curtain across the single window and in a minute the room was illuminated.
They rifled through the cabinets and came up with a big can of beans, a tin of herring, and a can with no label. She also found a smelly rubber "winemaking kit." They opened the beans with a clean knife, heated them a little over two candles, and ate them with the knife. Then they ate the herring. The can with no label was full of some nasty English meat. On the table was a quarter-full pouch of Virginia tobacco and some loose papers, she rolled a sloppy cigarette and lit it and looked around.
Someone had moved out—or just left—in a hurry. They began trying to figure out who he was. The console was gone. Stuck between the couch cushions was a little envelope of digital photo prints. In one picture, a straggly-haired man sat in this room, posing earnestly with a young girl who stood holding a miniature wooden guitar. The guitar was sitting broken on a folding chair. In other pictures a very pretty Scandinavian-looking woman smiled frankly at the camera. In the pictures the house was sunny and neat. There was a debit book, the top few checks stained with brown ash. They opened a drawer and found a sheaf of letters, in Dutch, all signed “love, Mika.” There were some court papers relating to possession of cocaine. The man’s name was David Robathan.
Patrick lay down in the La-Z-Boy chair, pulled his jacket over his head, and went to sleep. She sat on the couch smoking and watching the candles flicker in the drafty room. Outside she could hear the cold ocean and beneath it the sound of some immense engine idling. She lay down and closed her eyes and tried uselessly to sleep. She looked out at the staircase and stood up.
The light shone hard and bright on the wall as she came up the stairs. To the right of it was an absurd black velvet painting of a tiger poised to attack. She was very frightened and wanted to stop and go back down, but she knew that if she did, the fear would keep her up all night and she was too tired for that. The door to the bathroom was open and it looked clean; it suddenly occurred to her that illogically someone could be sleeping up here. She tiptoed to the door, the light pouring around the edges of it. For a moment she held her hand in the light and looked at it. The light was chemical yellow and her hand was shaking. Then she gently pushed open the door, ready to run if she had to.
The room was painted light blue and was immaculately clean, the bedcover smooth and taut across the twin bed. Fifteen feet outside the window the heavy halogen streetlight streamed in past the heavy open curtains. She caught her breath and began to laugh quietly. The room looked very bright and comfortable. On the bedside table an alarm clock ticked away beside a pretty wooden box. The birch dresser had empty drawers and a few men’s socks and underwear, and in the little top drawer a neat gold chain lay curled on a bit of paper. She closed the curtains and lay down carefully on the bed, the springs gently creaking.
I believe in what is gentle in us, despite what we have done
I believe I can praise everything I am not permitted to become
I believe there is no love in bluntness
But in the struggle for attention
Which is light
Are they watching me through my laptop webcam? Yesterday, Angela came to my place for our screenwriting meeting and she had a piece of white masking tape on the round lens of her computer camera. I didn’t notice it right away. Actually, I didn’t notice it at all: it was Andrea, who was there with us, who pointed that out to me. I’ve never considered covering it; that has always sounded like paranoia to me. But I saw that piece of tape and I wondered: What if they really were watching me? What would they see? Would they see me watching a movie, or a trial on TV, or a series? Would they see me while I’m working, getting pissed off, smiling, becoming exhausted? Would they see me at screenwriting meetings; me, talking about my novels; me, reading passages, articles, stories, novels, screenplays out loud; me, whispering to myself, “I’ll never make it…”; me, saying to myself, “Come on! You can do it! Go for it!”? Would they see me and my boyfriend watching TV series, movies, or arguing about our job or about us? Would they see me and my boyfriend making love? (I don’t know; I’ve never thought about that.) Would they see me talking on the phone with my father, with my friends, with my business relations; me, having a coffee, a cigarette, having lunch or dinner while watching or reading something on my PC? Would they see me alone, in numberless hotel rooms, falling asleep while watching something, sleeping, waking up, closing the laptop lid, lifting it again, then teaching writing classes? Would they see me smiling, crying, railing against myself or against other people, absolving me and other people; me saying “I’ll never make it…” and then “I’ll make it! Of course I will, won’t I?” and someone answering: “Of course you will!”? Are they really watching me through my laptop webcam?
If so, who’s watching? And why? In order to know who you are and monitor market trends—so they say—to locate the supply and steer the demand, offering items you didn’t even know you were craving—but you do crave them—to keep an eye on who you are, what you do, and to blackmail you. Would I be blackmailable if they watched me?
I don’t think I would be, but who even knows what I do in front of my own laptop, or before my boyfriend’s laptop, or even before my colleagues’ laptops? I don’t. I can’t even recall it. Maybe I said something I wasn’t supposed to say, or did something I wasn’t supposed to do; perhaps something I said has been waxed for good and when the “reign of control“ comes, I’ll be blackmailable once and for all. Forget this “reign of control” stuff! It’s just paranoia… We are under the reign of control already—or so they say. I’d rather not think about it.
And yet, Angela has a piece of tape stuck on her laptop, but she needs to remove it whenever she wants to make a video, and then, I think, if somebody’s watching her, she’ll be watched as well, and her boyfriend too, who’s got a similar piece of tape on his laptop. In any case, they’ll be watched through the surveillance cameras installed everywhere in the streets. We’ll be blackmailable, all of us. We all have a small skeleton in our closets—we must have—a small skeleton of a brilliant, clean white hue, a teeny tiny skeleton in our image and likeness, who, if asked, couldn’t wait to spill the beans. And if they are actually watching me—right now, through my laptop, on the street, on social networks (Angela’s come to my place again today; she’s forgotten her computer, so we’re working on mine; they’ll watch both of us), if they are controlling me, let that be, let everyone know everything about me, about my relatives, my friends. And on that day when what we are comes back to bite us, I won’t be ready, I’ll be blindsided. I’ll stammer, “I didn’t think that…,” and I’ll look at myself in my laptop webcam, giving in to the battle.
White African
What are you doing here?
I’m glad you talked about solutions not problems?
Are you a whore?
Are you a man?
People stare and laugh...
while we eat dinner in restaurants.