Max Mueller

The Queen and I sat at the bar waiting for the bartender to notice us. She looked happy. I glanced at her new husband who was sitting in a booth along the wall. He was probably bald under his frayed baseball cap. His cheeks looked at once healthy and miserable. 

Her head was tilted to one side. When I looked at her, it felt like I was looking at a painting. 

- Your eyes look smaller, she said.

There was a long pause.

- And your face looks more animated.

I thought of Szamanka.  

- I feel more myself, I replied.

She shifted on the barstool. 

- Hmm. There’s a part of you that’s kind of like a woman.

‘Yes,’ I thought, the concept coming into greater focus. A strange thought but a simple one. There’s a part of me that’s like a woman. The tenderest part. 

- And I don’t connect with that part of you.

Months later, the sun was peeking over the mountains by the lake. I sipped coffee. It was dirt in my mouth. The city could have been a bad dream.    

The water - the way it moved, the way it reflected the sky, the trees, the mountains, the rocks, us - formed rings of gray, blue, and green with a vividness that can’t be described. My face, as reflected in the rippling water was my mother’s father’s, the one who screamed and slapped my grandmother across her face. My huge, knobbed beak of a nose passed down from desert dwellers sucking up dusty air. My eyes were shrinking, as though trapped by the mask-like smiling countenance surrounding them. They were like two soulful black holes bored into the center of my skull.  

- You have those Scorpio eyes, said E—-, leaning close. I told him I wanted to go inside.

I was on the couch, across the room, pretending not to notice her, sensing she could feel my waves breaking against her. In my shame, it seemed my eyes were tearing into her skin with each passing glance. She must have been mildly confused if she cared at all. My apology was just another silent arc on the horizon.

In the morning I drank the dirt-coffee. The sun leaked out from behind the clouds. With my eyes closed, I felt it as a wash of warm gold. The word love seemed to dissolve in that golden light.  

When I got back to the city I let go.  

I was dancing in the subway with plastic bags on my feet. Smack-a-smack-a-smack. The passengers tried not to make eye contact with me, pretending not to hear me hissing from the gaps between my several stubborn teeth. When I wasn’t riding every line to the last stop in search of clues, I was in some burned out building or other bringing dead rats back to life, trying to work my way up to a full bodied human.

That was until my daughter was stillborn. Szamanka gave birth on a bed of newspapers and I held the little girl in my arms, the only words in my mind, over and over, ‘not fast enough, not fast enough, not fast enough.’

Paint chips like hospital green flower petals were falling past the blazing white of a brick opening. I’d figured I could get myself to go crazy enough to believe in magic. Crazy enough to conjure up a religion of teaming forests to fill this cold little body. 

My father once dreamed he was a coin falling through the deep blue depths of the ocean. It was an odd feeling - to be a coin turning over and over, drifting toward the encroaching darkness - but it was a peaceful feeling. 

I made a motion with my hand, as though I was plucking a flower from above my head and thus, grasping my daughter’s soul in my fist I fell through the floor into the ocean below. My bone thin fingers placed her safe within her ancestor’s dream. She became the coin. She became many things, all of them cold and hard. It was my final act of magic love.

No magic, no money. 

I cleaned myself up and took a job.

Botta and the Fuzzy let me crash at their place. They painted the guest room the deepest blue they could find.

I placed a quarter on the deep blue pillowcase and slept on my knees in gratitude.  

Andrea de Sade appeared one day in the Fuzzy and Botta’s kitchen. She had a large, grotesque painting she was looking to sell them. It was doughnuts on flower stems, flesh like fruit, fruit like flesh, impossibly wet rotund bellies, acrobats tumbling over a severed head, the mermaid parade on acid. The candy colored heart of America in a blender.

She told the Fuzzy she found me cute. 

- He has weird little eyes. 

I slunk next to her and the Fuzzy on the couch and we watched Almodovar’s Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down. 

When the Fuzzy drifted off to bed we were alone. 

- Almodovar’s depiction of sex is very different from Zulawski’s, I said.

- How so?

- Well -

I was searching for the words.

- For one, Almodovar’s camera tends to be more static. It feels set at an ironic distance. It’s a colder analysis of sex. Zulawski is much more impassioned and sensual. His camera is flying everywhere, exploring bodies…

I began to trail off. I couldn’t tell whether my argument was obvious to the point of cliche or simply false.

- Have you seen Possession? I asked.

- Yes. She said.

- Oh, so you have. 

It was silent for a moment. 

- I’ve been thinking about possession a lot lately - the concept, not the movie. I’ve been reading Andrea Dwarkin. 

- I haven’t heard of her, I said. 

- She’s a feminist writer who writes about how women are possessed by a culture that hates them. 

The idea moved me. It caused me to speak earnestly about how our true nature reveals itself when we are alone. I wanted to stop but couldn’t. 

- One should only act as one would in those moments but in doing so one puts oneself outside of culture entirely. 

- I never know how to act, she said. 

My breath was taken away. 

- I guess I’ll go.

And she grabbed her coat from the arm of the couch. Then, standing, she leaned over and kissed me on the mouth. A pure bright shock of electric energy went through my body. I imagined myself to be a woman. I focused my energies on embodying a pure sensuality. There was a rippling pool of sensuality between us. We stumbled into my bed. I was not in possession of her or anyone.

-  I wish I could send you my thoughts through my hand.

Her eyes were closed. The muscles that make up her face were at rest.

- Because so many thoughts are not words. 

After we came she left.

I couldn’t sleep so I headed downtown and sat in a diner. It was raining. I drank a cup of coffee for two hours, ate toast, paid, and went to work at the World Trade Center. I thought about how unnatural it is to surround oneself with glass. I wanted to be in a hot and dirty hotel room, with flying giant roaches, sweating wallpaper, and stories on the TV of some serial murderer who had just escaped from the county prison. I wanted to live in the America Andrea painted, an America where I’m just a conduit for filth, pain, and pleasure. 

That weekend, as I was leaving a bar in a bright orange dress, I ran into Andrea. She saw me and her eyes lit up. I left anyway and she texted to ask if I was okay. I said I was. She asked to come over the following night. 

We were both sitting on the guest bed, our backs against the deep blue pillows. She wanted to read from my book of Bergman screenplays. We got several pages into The Seventh Seal before she broke character and said,

- Come on, direct me. 

I didn’t feel like it. She put Bergman aside.

- Can I read you something? she asked and pulled from her bag a book of child pornography.

Listening to the passage, my mind fell apart. The barefoot child, long hair streaming, was running through frame after frame of ordered moral compositions. Lighten up, buckle down. The world of ideas, the world of flesh, the world of passing entertainment, the world of novel fascination, the world of steel tipped boots, the world of uncontrollable desire, the world of human truth. The child ran through frame after frame, world after world.  

She was looking at me. The passage was done. It was my time to speak.

- What,

And I faltered, looking for the words and the meaning behind them. 

- do you like about it? 

I saw her face fall. Maybe she was thinking, ‘I thought he’d understand but he doesn’t.’

- It’s like the opposite of Dwakin, she said, somewhat cryptically.

Having not read Dwarkin, I wasn’t sure what she meant. Having read Dwarkin now, I still don’t know. 

- You like extreme points of view, I offered. 

- Well he’s not actually raping kids. This is fiction.

The tone of her voice was pure disgust. We were silent.

- Did I see you wearing a dress the other day? Her demeanor taking on an air of curiosity. 

- Yes, I said and was relieved to be tossing any words into the air at all. 

- Why? 

Shit. 

- Well, 

And it took me an eternity to respond. 

- there’s a part of me that’s kind of like a woman. 

De Sade looked at me with ferocious interest. The smile on her face was wolfish. 

- What’s a woman?

I was stunned. I wanted nothing to do with this conversation. What’s a woman? So many points of perspective. What’s a woman? So direct, so impossible to steer the car from the icy cliff. What’s a woman? Words are like nets, words are like ball gags, words string you up, twist your body into the weirdest shapes, lock your face in a horrifying mask, move your arms and legs for you. What’s a woman?

She was standing at the foot of the bed. 

- Come on, I won’t be offended, she said in a childish voice, placing her hand on her hip and leaning to one side. It was a pose I hadn’t seen from her. 

- I really don’t want to answer, I said standing.

We batted this around for some time, her trying to coax me into enough vulnerability to share the answer to a question that I believed had no answer. 

- What is a man?

I finally hit on. 

- A man is disciplined. He can endure pain. He’s strong…

Whatever. 

- Okay, I said, a woman is, well, she can see around corners. 

I looked to her for confirmation. None. I hated myself. 

- She has, is kind of magic, sort of. 

None. And I stopped. 

Magic: a celebration or a burden? Liberatory or pejorative? 

I’m not sure what happened next. I imagine we fell silent. Eventually, and I do remember this, she was lying on the bed, curled into a ball, her head on the pillow. I was stroking one of her temples, under her hair, with two fingers. 

- I feel like a cat, she purred.

She had on a warm smile. My blood was cold. I got up, probably saying nothing, and walked to the bathroom. ‘This is bad, this is bad’ my mind kept saying and I worried that I might mutter it aloud as I stood in front of the toilet bowl hoping I’d pee. 

When I returned to the room, the door hit something as I pushed it open. It was de Sade. She was crouched on the floor, her sweatshirt on, the hood pulled over her head and scrunched up so that only her eyes and nose peeked out. A pair of handcuffs were in her hands - movie props that I’d hidden away and she must have found by digging through my stuff. She seemed transfixed and turned them over and over, doing and undoing the latches. I sat down on the bed and stared at her. In my mind I kept saying, ‘This is the part where you say something. So… say something,’ but I had nothing. We stayed like that for five minutes. 

- I’m going to go, she said. 

- You can sleep here if you want.

I thought maybe - I don’t know what I thought. 

- I don’t want to have sex tonight. 

Like a spear, straight and sharp. Had I just invited her to have sex with me? It didn’t feel like I had, but… what else?

She left. I lay down in the bed and didn’t sleep.  

It had been months since I’d heard from de Sade. In the meantime, I’d picked up Intercourse by Andrea Dwarkin. The experience changed the way I fucked and carried on, and it put de Sade back on my mind. Then, out of the blue, just as I was thinking of her on some night or other, she asked if she could come over. I was not in the mood so I said ‘no.’ Instead we agreed to watch Hard to be a God with Botta and the Fuzzy. 

It somehow happened that, at the last minute, neither Botta nor the Fuzzy could join us. De Sade decided to stay home. I never saw her again. 

Bleary eyed and exhausted I watched Hard to be a God anyway. 

The first half hour was like scaling the face of a cliff. It was like searching for my reflection in a rippling puddle of crude oil. Endless shots of I’m not sure - a blurry hand in the foreground - long haired fatties, unkept, unshaved, no sense of interiority or, or, the words fail me. It was as if I was seeing a parade of animals, trained in obscure ritual. Or, rather, it was as if I were a new born baby watching the grizzled brutality of incomprehensible adulthood. Or, or, or. I don’t remember. I stopped, smoked a cigarette, and felt alone.