Vol. II. Issue. III September 2011 - The Criterion: An International ...

www.the-criterion.com The Criterion: An International Journal in English ISSN 0976-8165
He says, “We need glasses. Get us glasses.”
I hate to follow his orders, but I do anyway. When I come back, he’s got my camera ready and
he says, “Sit down over here.”
I say, “We have the same hair. Did you ever notice, before?”
He acts appalled, “You’re right – “
He takes a picture of our hair side by side as he balances a glass of wine in his teeth. Hair
overlapping hair, we don’t know whose is whose. I don’t know why he only drinks white wine.
I offer him Fernet, but he won't drink it. I offer him whiskey too, but no. Apple Juice? Out of
the question. As I aim with the camera, his hand lifts up to me and then it is upon me. His
fingernails gently scrape the skin of my arm, leaving tracks. My skin writhes. I want to push his
hand away, but I don't.
Maybe there are other people who behave worse than this. For me it’s bad, anyway. I know I’m
being bad. I’m going through my worst time, in a way. The suspension of death hangs over my
head each moment. These hours with Seth are to help reach for it. They are the means for me to
travel towards my father’s death, in slow motion, in waiting. I’m in a zone of loss, predicting
loss. It is my own expression of loss, via decadence. But the loss hasn’t come, yet. It is
suspended. I’ve known about the cancer for over a year now.
Seth patterns a line of cocaine on the back of a book of Pasternak’s poems with the title, My
Sister – Life. In Seth I find a strange sense of possibility. Seth is the agent that pushes me to
embody the deployment of the death that I know belongs to me. He rolls a dollar bill into a cone
the width of a nostril. Somehow in my slippery logic, I’ll be the death of my father. It’s both an
honor and a curse. I'm tearing apart my bond, my familial bond, and replacing it with something
recklessly worse. He dips his head toward the book, positioning the cone over the line of
powder. This is rebellion, kind of. It is rebellion mixed with inevitable loss. My dad is almost
dead now. It’s coming like a storm. Or this is the storm. The dust flies up the rolled bill as Seth
sniffs. It disappears and he falls backward onto my pillow the book still dangling in his hand.
“I love this book,” he says. He passes it to me along with the dollar bill.
I haven't told Seth that my father has cancer yet and that he's dying right now, as we sniff
cocaine. And the reason is that I don't know if he would care. When I finish snorting my line,
he grabs the book back from me and starts to read as if performing a soliloquy. Through other
texts or paintings, we rehearse life. Art becomes us as we become it. I want him to stop reading
it, but he can’t. He is so full of the sound of his own voice and his overly emphasized syllables
with their thick, thick crust of speech. After he’s done with the poem, he drops the book on the
floor and starts searching in his bag for his tobacco and rolling papers.
Seth is getting older. He’s in his thirties already. He has dark under eye circles and an almost
insulting smile. But there is charm somewhere. He rolls a cigarette and then sits back on the
bed, lifting his legs up and stretching them out. He leans back like James Dean, like he’s
practiced this pose. He smokes in my bed.
"Call me Olympia," I say. I pull my sweater over my head and drop it on the floor. I walk over
to my vanity and put on a necklace that my grandmother bought me from Tiffany’s and I spray
perfume on my wrists. Olympia slips like a djinn into my body.
"Do you know about Olympia, Seth?”
“No. Tell me,” he says.
“Olympia is the name for whores who have been appropriated by artists, eaten up then spit out.
Both immoralized and immortalized.”
“Come here,” he says.
Vol. II. Issue. III 274 September 2011