I.
Sartre was an asshole. Short, too. De Beauvoir was ugly. They were both ugly. Why would they have sex with each other? Probably because they were lonely and couldn’t fuck anyone else, but still wanted to. If Sartre wasn’t a writer, nobody would want to fuck him. If de Beauvoir wasn’t a feminist, everybody would want to fuck her.
Cafés are conducive to thought. Maybe it’s the coffee and the silence under the shadows of skyscrapers. Maybe the dark-haired twenty-somethings with black, thick-rimmed glasses and Macintosh laptops remind you of who you don’t want to be. Maybe people watch too many Goddard movies. Maybe they think one day while writing in a café a tall, pretty blond artist or musician with hair waving in the winds off the Atlantic will walk in and save them. Actually, nobody watches Goddard movies except the people who don’t matter. The people who don’t matter are the people who like books by Sartre and de Beauvoir and movies by Goddard. I see them in their apartments as they grow smaller with the space between the walls. They write a line or two in a faux-leather journal they stole from a bargain shop, think it’s great, feel good for a little while, put the journal somewhere and forget about it. The people who don’t matter are the people who forget, and the people who forget are always the saddest ones.
When I grow up I’m going to remember everything from everywhere. One time I read about this Tibetan Zen technique for having a nearly perfect memory. They would imagine that their minds where organized into file cabinets with specific categories, then visualize themselves storing information in the cabinets like you would a file. I could learn that. I could learn to lucid dream too, and I wouldn’t be afraid. I could learn to fly within dreams that have no walls, only distances, stretched in symmetry in nothingness.
Remembering is not enough, though. Like how I felt when I first kissed a girl. The kiss didn’t matter as much as the fact that I was doing something that I thought I should be doing, like a rite of passage or something. It was the obligation. I stuck my tongue down her throat. Her breath stank and she stepped on my little toe. I want to remember feeling alone when she left. Three days later I asked her to go out with me and she said she would. I didn’t care and ignored her until she dumped me. It felt good to be alone again at recess and lunch where I could think about how I was alone. I hoped somebody noticed me doing nothing.
There’s this documentary about Bonnie and Clyde that said they would get turned on during robberies. Imagine pointing a loaded gun to someone’s head as they’re crying and begging for their life, about to piss themselves. Then Clyde gets a big fat hard-on. Bonnie gets damp in her unmentionables, if she’s wearing any.
There’s this theory that the part of the brain that is active when a person sees a really sexy person is the same part of the brain responsible for addiction. In the same way someone shoots up smack or stuffs their face with cake three times a day, a person would screw themselves to death if they had the chance. Bonnie and Clyde didn’t really want money or danger. They just wanted to get off more and more, better and better.
Chocolate cake sounds good. Maybe I’ll shoot some smack and then rob a bank.
II.
He dared me to bite his lips as hard as I could until they almost bled in the cold looming corridors of the Lower East Side in Manhattan’s grid-shaped locking caress. Our strangest of bodies tangled and ripped in spit. Dripping tongues forced the winter’s loud talking into a whisper, droned out by the honking of taxicab foreigners. And the voices and faces of Alabamans as I grabbed your cock in the doorway of St. George’s while the three guys from New Jersey talked about the end of the world. Flicking your earlobes in between spouts of vibrating air from my rounded mouth, promising the moon hung low and tiding in Queens, after breakfast, and how we both kissed that fat girl we met when smoking Malboros, spilling our gin and tonics, and how sad she was when we left. You said I was a liar for not wanting your eyes memorized in my eyes, but when I wrote in a note in unwitting cursive left on your pillow as your face billowed, turning away from me, showing your unmarked back, naked and smooth-skinned, barely streaming in strands of black, that “God bless your black heart,” I meant it.
And if I could again, I would, and take you and cocoon you and put you into my pocket and take you home, perch you on the windowsill above the Victorian radiator beside a photograph of me in a flowing dress skipping in the sands of Montauk, the photograph of me that doesn’t exist. So put away your passage home and come not-exist with me and together in some dried, sunlit woodland we’ll idly pretend we are of the steppes among fireplaces and bearskin rugs, as you touch my mapless skin until it melts into your fingertips that by then will tingle, and shake like bells ringing in an aftermath that was once my soul.
You have my soul; can’t you see it as it dangles from your mouth into my hands as I try to catch it as it falls? I don’t know you, but I love you because I don’t know you, and when we’ll know each other our love will rot like aging teeth and it scares me because rotting is what I do best. But don’t let me be scared and forget me and together it can be like that photograph next to you.
III.
— You think too much.
— You don’t think enough.
— I think I know enough to know about you.
— You only think you know. You think you know what I think, but you don’t.
— What do you think?
— I think about how you think about how you know me knowing you.
— Sometimes I don’t want to know you.
— Remember when you didn’t? Remember when we would pass each other? We were
anonymous then.
— But aren’t we already?
IV.
They sat in the lukewarm water and got high. It became a habit when he began taking hot baths to soothe his back and would refuse to get out when it was time to shoot up. Instead of making him come out, she decided to go in. Besides, she liked the hot water on her body, and how her skin would tingle all the way from her legs to spine to neck. Together they would embrace each other like non-identical twins still in their mother’s womb, experiencing the outside world as only fragments of a reality that to know would mean they would finally be in the world.
But they didn’t want to be free. It never was about freedom. The drug enabled them to create the prison that was their minds, a prison in which they could barricade themselves under a drapery of silence, the prison that was their new womb.
They would sit in the water for so long that drowning was a danger, although neither one of them thought it was possible. There was a chance of one person passing out from an angelic high, drowning as the other overdoses or shuts their eyes so tight to block out the light that they could no longer stay conscious. This was true, but two of them simultaneously? This would never happen.
And it never did. They would sit atoning in the nothingness that was the murky water, entombed in porcelain-plated iron.
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