C. Irreconcilable Differences
In the hotel bar I was sitting next to an elderly, avuncular man with a Sinterklass greybeard. Wearing a green beret, he looked to be well past mid-century, though his cheeks, instead of rosy, were mottled blue. "It occurred to me, son, that all people really want out of life is to be remembered." He was drinking gin, knocking them back with studied regularity: one of those extra-careful drunks who knows the value of maintaining appearances, he'd rather drop dead from gastric poisoning than squander a drop, or do anything indicative of sloth. Though each time he raised the glass a gigantic rumbling commenced from within, his girth began to tremble so that I became instantly solicitous (would he fall over on me like a bloated pendulum?). So very natty, manicured, his flesh was baby-pink powdered in spots, thrown on the way some men throw on after-shave.
I was toying with a beer, contemplating immolation. Tainted by that irregular low-wire act, I was now inextricably marked by perversion. I WAS ONE OF THEM. Unapproachably disconsolate. Yet the greybeard went on as if I were gregariously all-ears. "Had me a nephew once — bright, studious, good-looking lad — spotless character. Went in the service, fought in the ongoing Iraqi conflict, died a hero in the Persian Gulf. Decorated. You're in the service, aren't you, lad?" I nodded warily. "Why, one wonders, are you HERE instead of THERE?" I had often asked myself that very question, and gave an uneasy smile, the kind where your teeth might belong to an unearthed skull. "No bother," he waved it off, "the fact is that you're here, and there's nothing can alter that, is there?" He smiled expansively. "Name's Alowish Curd, Esq., from New York, New York. Salesman by profession. Prosthetics of every scope and size, you can't top our prices. Well? What do you go by, young feller?"
I told him.
"Luke? A Biblical name, by God! Let me buy you one, Luke." He motioned to the bartender. "Ori! Give the boy a hairchaser!"
"No, really, no thank you. I've got a beer here."
"Nonsense! Live a little!"
Ori poured me out a gin. He was a stout man in ungainly suspenders who displayed a wattle-face, with a girth the equal of his patron. A nauseously damp cigar hung from his lower blubber lip, around which he grunted positive or negative indications. "Have one yourself, Ori."
"Uf," said Ori, pouring one out. He also had thick-lensed glasses reflecting a thousand points of light — all of them turned off.
Curd raised his glass for a toast. "Here's to the wife of every God-fearin' man that ever lived. After many a summer dies the mongoose." Ori grunted, and we drank. The two stout gentlemen knocked theirs back while I swallowed a devastating half-sip. It was not my brand of poison. "Ye hardly hit yours, kid!" cried Curd unbelievingly. "Whatsa matter?"
I explained that it was good shit, but I was regrettably hungover. Curd laughed uproariously. "All the more reason to tip it, my boy! Sweet Christ." He patted the ends of his beard. "They do turn out some different G.I.s these days. Hit me again, Ori ol' man."
* * * *
I lost sight of Curd some hours later. Thoroughly blitzed by barleycorn, I went up to my room for a spell and sacked out, wondering how I'd ever cover the coming troubles. Getting away from Curd was a difficulty beyond belief, yet I managed it finally by becoming a besotted party-poop soon to be immured in the water-closet. (Screw it, let the greybeard track me down. He had enough of my vomit to trace.)
Fortunately one could exit downstairs without being clocked from the bar (Curd was sitting at the far end anyway), so out I went when the coasters cleared and the dusk had blanketed nearby Haarlem with easy shade. It was getting darkly late. Also it occurred to me, grievously, that the lady of ague (I was already pegging Lelica with labels, sorting women out like countless brands of soup) was an accomplice to my debasement-in-the-basement, but somehow I yearned for a recount, a reassessment of her role in the matter. I was scoured by rash marks — subtly infirm reddening welts populated my torso, I was itchy with chagrin and physical nonplus, not caring how Nieppe had perpetrated such a deed despite my naively breath-baited consent.
It was Lelica who kindled regret in my vision, it was Lelica I yearned to flog with my burgeoning wrath and befuddlement. She that stroked me, let me buffet her priceless hands, let me knot her wealth of hair into tangled riddles, ratty onto decay. LELICA. I was back on that street, trundling my groggy wheels out from insensitive traffickers, looking for the drawn blinds of her window. I would smash down that opaque pane if need be, flood that ash-domicile with city air and let that putridity waft onto those occupants without centers, just hardcore hollow. Bring them to their senses for Lelica. Only her of course.
No one stirred from that unlit fastness when I rustled the door. Forlorn, I sat on her steps for whatever duration, watching predominantly male passers-by scurry along the environs, some looking obliquely askance, others with sure mission guiding each stride. I lowered head to knees and rocked. Drowsing and waiting for her reckoning, even forgiveness or balled fist.
When she found me there was a greyness in the sky, but the sharp mist was broken by yet another day's promise.
* * * *
Lelica has the face of a Raphael Madonna marred by a demented simper, or so I dreamed when she led me through the nettling maze of those labyrinth streets, pulling me along, her hand gripping my wrist. I wanted to cry out that it was all right, I simply wanted rest, but was unable to vocalize the request, to pierce whatever bedeviling haze (or grog of unsettled sleep) beset me.
Stopping before an apartment building, she checked the surroundings, seemed unsure, then abruptly dragged me through this stout-wood door into a nondescript, rather pathetic-looking foyer (a room that had originally some other less demanding function, such as musty storage?), and began the incredible task of hoisting me and my beleaguered, outstretched arm up another nearly vertical Dutch flight of stairs.
I boggled instantly, falling, crumpling back down the three stairs I'd managed to trip up and almost over. "Lucius!" she cried, attending to me, muttering encouraging endearments. This, understandably, was a relief no doubt, pratfalls being my home turf specialty regardless of whatever unsettling locale. She dropped her purse, and began lifting me — with zealous concentration, putting my arm over her shoulder — into a wobbling, upright position. Holding me there, she began pinching my cheeks.
I gaped in disapproval, my quasi-consciousness abruptly clear of deluding flotsam. I was looking (stunned and semi-shocked) into the holy-beige compass of her compassionate features, and a tricky second of lucidity flew by, until I was wondering why-and-how anyone would be conning me into thinking I was cared for, even nursed. With the weight of seraphic indifference — the helios of my soul, that is — still sublimely contaminating my fate, I imagined. I suffered the discrete sensation of experiencing her face as dreadfully inseparable from one I once loved, and wildly attempted to essay my free hand in the direction of her hair-overlapped ear, which I unsuccessfully tried to smooth forward. She sighed and gruntingly turned me in an upstairs direction, paused to doubtlessly plant her feet, and began shoving me up those terrible stairs.
Mercifully the teetering ascent ceased at the first landing. Lelica, allowing no breather, brought me through the yellow-lit hall to a door upon which she knocked quietly and urgently. It opened sometime later to reveal a disgruntled gentleman in tattered robe. He eyed Lelica, then myself, as if we might be interplanetary door-to-door salespersons, and I remembered him from the bar.
"He's sick," she whispered. Almost besides the point. Herr Doctor with his sallow, wart-honed countenance and boss-bearing, exuded a stoic lack of curiosity. He eventually recognized Lelica, however, the way one might recognize a long-time functionary returning from what might be an unnoticed absence, and gestured us inside. After examining me, the doctor said, "This one's all right. Perfectly fine."
"Oh no," protested Lelica, "he looks fit to die, surely there's something wrong."
"Nothing physical," he replied. "And nothing he might have picked up."
I knew what he meant. I was down, I suppose, with some incurable sloth, something which had eroded my capacity to interact with the facts of life. I saw it all that simply, my consuming disability, whatever it was that undercut my belief in myself and another person. It may be solipsistic to say that NOBODY-FEELS-AS-I-DO, but it's downright suicidal to prefer myself as love object over the affections of others, or struggling to earn that contact when I believed it besides the point anyhow. You could say I was fucked-up — art and everything I once held as an earnest buffer between these problems was just another dodge, and now I had nothing to cover my rear. No delusions, strength of will, beneficial ignorance — nothing. And my humanistic illusions were streams of vapor in the face of complexes, fixations, and the like.
I looked at Lelica and hoped again. She was a shimmer resuscitating past purity, unlike the others who had succumbed to the madness. I looked upon her in wonder, at a loss to explain any curious obsession on my behalf. Her face, taut and pale, was trembling slightly, and her beauty was the evanescent kind I had looked upon in Symbolist works — a sensitivity exacerbated into dull delirium. If she were mad, then I was a monster beyond captivity. I was like a replica which had soured into dire imitation. "Give me something while you're at it," she told Herr Doc. He came back with a bottle of Darvons and winked at her. As she paid him, I turned to see the doctor was now wearing a beard — Curd's greybeard — and just finished pressing it into place. He smiled wonderfully down at my incredulous features. "How do you do?" he winked at me. "You're fine, lad, just fine. A little rest, a little Valium — you'll be rip-roaring in no time." He patted Lelica on her buttocks. "What's a girl like you doing with — "
"Forget it," she said.
Doctor Curd looked a trifle hurt. "Well don't get worked up, child. I only asked a civil question."
* * * *
Sometime later, I accompanied Lelica one day through the winding streets of A-dam. We were soused on hashish and Rhinegarten wine, totally swept away by tidings of intoxication.
We stopped on the bustling sidewalks, peering into shop windows, eye-balling the customers when she pulled me at one point against the wall. Quite drastically I thought. Lowering her shades onto her nasal-bridge and earnestly beseeching me, perhaps, into an understanding of her exigent whims: "I took a vow, Lucius," she fairly hissed, her ice-pale lips arching with each drawn-out, lingering syllable; she might have been instructing me in the rudiments of Venus Slang II. "I belong to The Burgher only. Do you understand? To him alone."
I couldn't control my laughter (half a donut in my mouth, wiggling with mirth, crumbs flaked down my jacket), and suddenly felt an immense capacity for loving her, as ineluctably true as any natural fact. She reached out a gloved hand and pressed my forearm in the same endearing manner. "I took a vow to be an outcast just as one might vow to become a nun." This was too corny and I told her so. Usually I was the ineffable cornball, Americana idiot-kid, but she was surpassing me now and I told her so. "Der Leiber, ugh, that's all your cyber-pornography ... "
"No," she insisted, drawing closer, breathing into my face. "It was a solemn avowal with something indefinable. Not good, not bad, but more like a law onto the realm of devotion."
"See? Where does it get you, that Porn?" I kept laughing.
She was breaking up before my eyes, Lelica the Canal Street diva, breaking up and I couldn't understand it as being serious, something about it was so unnaturally funny.
"It's beyond you, punk," she said sardonically, letting me go. "Why do I worry myself you'll understand? You'll see it someday, you'll come bringing a lodestone of galling truth ..." She became unintelligible. I quizzically regarded her now, unsure but game anyhow. It angered me for a moment, being privy to things I never understood yet was expected to vouchsafe every mind-numbing reality laid before me. As if that had become my primary function. Indecently privy to all a woman's theatrical angst which was above my head anyway, so why become riled because one couldn't muster up the proper clinical sophistication?
"You and your fucking sister — "
"She's not my sister."
"Hell, whatever she is. I'm just the artist-G.I. thinking about freedom. If I was your old man or your pimp Nils I wouldn't be hearing this number ..."
"Well pretend you're someone close to me, darling."
I kissed her then, feeling her lips liquidize into mine, until the street sounds became a musical accompaniment courtesy of John Cage. Where did I get my nerve? When we unconnected I said, "Listen. Do you know what I distinguish you by, the evidence I swore proved we'd be some kind of faithful friends rather than otherwise? Any number of scarifying trifles, but chiefly your aquamarine scarf and the way it drapes across the sweetness of your flesh. Now I can't quite see it. It's a cold day, somewhat drizzly, and your ..." I pointed to her buttoned-up coat collar. I was in fine form now and fingering the flask inside my blue suede jacket. "Anyway, I know what you want up here. I'm hip and getting accessible. I'm on the loose from olive drab mayhem. There's a glint in the eye of your want, my dear. I've seen it brooding there for quite awhile. I've seen it because maybe you wanted me to. Damned if I know why, but I see it. Good old Pre-Raphaelite cranial-gone decadence, Victorian dodo bird — that's what that glint says. Fucked to the gills. Versions of Ophelia racked out on the bier of time, saddled with sperm."
She caressed my bearded cheek as I produced the flask. It was cool the way Dutch pedestrians streamed in-and-out of our corner purview, taking busy citizen stock of us and never missing a beat in the cadence of their knowing strides. Yes, it was something to marvel at, and I was really getting ripped. It had crept up on the boy, it was that murderous Geneva gin along with the wine.
"Say it," she prompted acerbically. We were walking again, and she was staring skyward, neck arched in a Parmigianino-crooked manner. "Say that our ages prevent us from true rapprochement. Say that our nationalities make cohesion impossible." A very Spanish-looking gentleman with mustaches sidled by, amused at our spectacle.
"I can never believe the worst isn't over," I said.
The City is a marvel, I thought to myself, holding Lelica's waist. I could just stop and raise my feeble arms to the firmament, scolding doldrums from the faithless air. Scattering crumbs for all humankind, dousing fires with my flask. "If something's too horrible to comprehend," I told Lelica suddenly, "perhaps it belongs to the brink of past forgetting." That was a confession of regret, I knew, but one not without a positive paradox lurking underneath.
Not much later we ran into Frip in a bar by Canal Street — or it was where he found us actually, looking like he'd just been through the maw of some creature suffering indigestion. "There you bloody are," he spat out, lurching against the table, hunkering there. He was sweating with unruly hair, his tie undone and flapping about like a second, more colorful tongue. "Lelica ... what the damned shit, I've been hustling about for days like this, tryin' to track you down." Lelica looked unconcerned, lighting a cigarette.
"To hell with your fucking lot," she said.
Frip slammed his open hand on the table, rattling our beers. "He's got to come back NOW. And it would help matters if you showed up now and then. Have you forgotten your position? You're a part of this, you know."
"Rubbish. I'm not a slave in your mad lives, Fripper. For God's sake, either sit down or behave yourself. You're attracting attention."
"I know damn well what I'm attracting," Frip said in an irate whisper. He slammed his hand down again. "This pig G.I. must come back, do you understand? He must be returned — Nils' orders. And Nils is becoming homicidal, I assure you."
"Nils is an asshole," she scoffed.
"Regardless. A right is a right, a wrong is a ... is a ... shit." He drunkenly twirled his forefinger, staring at me, and I wanted to know more about old Nils.
"And an asshole is an asshole, pathological at that."
Frip sat down, blotting his forehead with a frilly handkerchief. "Of all the damned insanity. I don't like this myself, goddamit."
"Gezelligheid," I toasted him.
Frip commented that if I learned words so fast, I'd better learn the truth outside them also.
"Let me tell you something, Frip old boy," I said expansively, for I was drunk on my ass and feeling the power of communion. I went on to tell him that bondage was only the truth of ruse. I became nostalgic, rambling on about the glory of things, how all of us yearn for another chance — existing in what magical time — when all our energies are unbreakably focused on aspirations denying the impossible.
"This jake is croaked," Frip said. "Think I'll sober myself with a beer."
"We shall not return," Lelica said.
Frip looked jaded. Sighing with resignation, he lit a cheroot. "We're all of us displaced soldiers at heart. I have my orders. I work for Nils. So do you, Lelica, last time I checked." Raising his hands, Frip began to carry on dramatically. All of this, he said, was becoming frightfully "directionless." It was aggravating, and he was frazzled after being worried two weeks by the enormity of it. Still he had his work to do, and that included retrieving "this military non-entity, this son of a bitch." Namely me. It was beyond him, yet wouldn't Nils cut his throat if he failed? Frip glowered menacingly, his face flurried with onslaughts of funk. Lelica, too, might find her beautiful body "lethally abused" should she prove recalcitrant. It was something Frip dreaded thinking about, assuming a compassionate demeanor momentarily, then re-focusing his hostility back at me. "Come on, you little fucker, drink up before I waste you on the spot."
"I'll summon the police," Lelica warned.
"You'll what? You frigging Nazi bitch."
"Isn't ugliness unbecoming to this undertaking?" I ventured. I went on to question this lout's right to abuse a shared sensibility he had only a beggar's glimpse of. If one could only understand the vagaries of being, the chasms of existence ...? This fact meant philosophizing was out of the question, that meditation was a matter demanding a little lower omphaloskepsis. That a drink to one's health might well be the vise of all liquid waste. Mad Frip could only comprehend the insipidness of the moment. If he were indeed a part-time troubadour, with guitar and spangled pants, he would be singing to the sober phantoms of society, replete with their banked faces and wizened championing of all little horrors like himself. Angrily Frip hustled us from the bar's tacky confines, having covered the bill. He managed to still converse beratingly with Lelica and maul me simultaneously. Soon blood coiled from my nostrils, the sight prompting Lelica to issue a shrill, fulsome tirade of obscenity. Then Frip released me, wavering, his putto-blue eyes looking back half-askance. Lelica guided a hand to my cheek. Her face quivered beneath the pale mask time's membrane was shredding. It will be consummated, she assured me, the settling of irreconcilable differences, and soon together we'd be roving towards a sublime exultation. She turned, unaccountably anointing Frip on the throat with the crimson brush of her lips. "Be very careful with him, won't you. Tell Nils not to wait up for me. Tell Nils I might return should he let this young man become himself."
"Why don't you tell him?" Frip demanded, wiping blood from his cheek.
Peter Magliocco, writer/artist/editor, was raised in Southern California but has spent over 20 years editing the underground lit-zine, ART:MAG, out of Las Vegas, Nevada. His bio appears in the Marquis' Who's Who in America, 2005-06... Known as The Mag Man in small press circles, his futuristic novel, Nu-Evermore, appeared in 2002 — also later as an ebook — via Trafford Publishing (in cooperation with his own Limited Editions Press) ... Another novel, Hiawatha Rocks, was published by Airleaf, with a book of poetry and art, Ex Literotica, in '06 from Publish America.