I’d like it if all this sneezed unheeded, I’d like forgetfulness to pompously nibble all the compensation neurosis larva implanted inside. Even emptied down to the muddy tissues adorning my crotch, I’d remain shaven, forsaken in Nevers, I don’t deserve anything but this dank hollow, the hollow in my brain where both my nails break and my voice and the short skirt blew away and the short skirt blew away and the short skirt blew away.
I wish I could remember fish.
Study (Reload)
You’re alone in the room. You’re alone and you killed me. You can stay where you are and curse your remorse or so many other things. The smoking lounge is quite cool on the verge of summer. Don’t touch the dice, it’s not your turn anymore. Your case was laborious because of your scattered memory. Handicapped from the word go, I gave you an extra turn, around the board and of the screw.
I’m Dr. Black, I’m your uncle from America. That cute little face of yours took quite a few hits when it ran into the doors and lighted signs. Your frizzy whiskers must’ve been cut or else no one would’ve gone over the river and through the woods. The enclosure was set with bushy barbed wire, an approach known to be efficient with scapenannygoats. You incorporated the vagi-clean curettage, your insurance will reimburse you for the operation. I won’t give you back what was devoured. I won’t give anything back to you, not your memory, not any praise, not even an eye for your eye. That’s not what I’m here for. Even if it’s obvious that I lied to you. I told you when I came in: I’m not here to judge you. I am here to listen to you, maybe to deliver you, to observe, accompany your foul confessions. I’m not here to judge you, I insist on that, and I add: there’s a difference. When I said judge I wasn’t thinking about a verdict, I was thinking about the pain, under pain penalty of death, there’s enough of that, enough so much that the pain seems like sorrow.
So I am accusing you. What does it matter that you’ve become aware of the motive, what does it matter that the time of the crime for you is integrated into your biological clock, what does it matter that your tears try to clean the black-and-blue marks making such a mess of my neck, what does it matter that the hysterical, rhythmic lungbursts from your sobbing could wake the dead, including my own remains.
I’m Dr. Black, I’m telling you: I’m the Mandarin. There was an M-Moment, there was a trigger, there was an undeniable choice. May 24, 1995, I submit for your approval seventeen minutes past midnight, seventeen minutes fourteen seconds, my archives, I agree, are among the most impressive you’ll find. You didn’t have too much to drink. You never have too much to drink. You drink just enough. His name was Bernard Levinstein. His belly was as swollen as his wallet. You hesitated quite a while, observing him in the bar, in that bar where Dianeless so many others hunted. You accepted when you saw the ohso-baroque black of his American Express card. You were wavering the whole last hour, his name-dropping was already troubling you, your quivering ovaries did a little dance. You didn’t order one last Bellini. Deep inside you didn’t sing a children’s lullaby as he punched in the third door security code. You didn’t send for the automatic pilot at first contact with his parchment-ribbed skin. You tried everything to get the best moans out of him. You even guided him so he could make you come. Besieging phone you hoped he’d finally call. Your tears weren’t fake. You crumbled, you were suffocating with anxiety, rage, and bitterness. You sacrificed that old Mandarin, first cold-pressing of the button. You immolated me, in fact you demanded an immediate investment return. Since then you’ve not checked your momentum, index finger pad cataclysmic thrust without ever worrying about the slightest consequence. Because Bernard Levinstein finally did respond, a little fixed-term contract on TV, a few society dinners, a handful of connections. And an adorable, persistent, impulsive little flea, you jumped from one head to another, one network to another, from a bald head to a blow-dried one, sometimes you choked on the anti–hair loss, anti-dandruff scents, today’s shampoos including the benefits of intrusive fragrances. And the more you gorged yourself, your nose in their roots, the more you filled your ducts with their blood, their blood their precious blood globules every cell a promise of possibilities multiplied by ten, fractal Rh images, in up to your flank, you were dear Aline, but yes, remember, because the more vampiric your state, your essence became, dear Aline, stop your whining, the more you turned me into a trepanned martyr of eternal returns.
Inside me there’s not a single organ, not a single thought, that you managed to save. With your bare hands you choked stop your screaming my dear, dear Aline, every, well I wouldn’t exactly say every moral sense, but I’m not far from it. You are a rock sea, a hardened pond, a swamp so sterile that havoc itself refuses to grow there. Lucidity, dear, dear Aline, lucidity is something you and you alone have eradicated from your cerebellum. Women are all born lucid, did you know that Aline, it’s an advantage supplied by nature to arm them at a young age, nature likes to counter objectification. Without lucidity you couldn’t be a woman, you’d be a puppet. But with a subconscious if Lacanian psychoanalysis agrees. A puppet, Aline, dear, darling Aline, take this and blow your nose, a puppet is nothing but a perishable object, a race toward repairs, sisterhood death, neuron excision with the compliments, obviously, of the boss.
There’s no pain to inflict no sentence to serve because no punishment can be crueler than the wasting away of your soul, my child. But let me reassure you: your survival instinct has been preserved. When one limb is sick, the whole body unites to perform a separation from the gangrenous organ. It’s your heart, Aline, your heart and the small of your back exhausted in their fall, it’s your skin, Aline, your ridiculed epidermis, your cerulean eyes and their irises bleached from such crudeness, from nonnative, overblown fiat lux ambition, it’s your body, Aline, your divided body because pantomimes always end in puzzles, that commanded you, treated you with autophagy, devouring your memories, eradicating the crime, yumyumming the encephalon, but you must be familiar, right my sweet, Aline, with the itching torture known as phantom limb.
I am that limb, Aline, I’m your brain and so much more. I’m your memory, and it will always survive, you need to understand, this is my role, I am the spectral guardian of the incinerated memories at the bottom of your belly, I’m a crucial guardian and a pile of other things. I accuse Miss Scarlet of knocking me off on May 24, 1995, at seventeen minutes past midnight Greenwich mean time in the Kitchen with the monkey wrench and on and on and secondarily with a soupspoon not even made of real silver. I accuse Miss Scarlet of subjecting, on a daily basis, it’s one-way, the Mandarin to the death of a thousand cuts. I accuse Kitchen Miss Scarlet with the backing of the monkey wrench.
You’re alone in the room. You’re alone and you killed me. There are five of them in the Study, you’re alone in the smoking lounge. I’m on the board and won’t leave until the end of the game. Omniscient Narratrix, bring in the next one.
Professor Plum
They weren’t locks of hair that Esther abandoned once her eyelids closed, they weren’t locks of hair that wound up on the bolster, red, flat, silky ribbons, slightly thorny where the waves curled, little crowns with split ends that highlighted the anemia of their sleeping source such wishing-well curved eyelashes, with no red hole on the right side Esther Duval let her hypnotic roots pour out their serpentine tentacles, Esther Duval daughter of no one according to her, Esther in alcoholanviled sleep some nights with a one-eyed moon only entrusted her mane to the rough pillows in Mathias’s bedroom so it could finish off the last frail verses of its dervishing in languishing, rolling knots.
They weren’t locks of hair, they were tendrils, plant or bug or maritime Saint Esther, invertebrate actress and martyr Esther, by the stingy light of the bedside lamp Mathias loved to collect up the seeds of her foolishness, get them to sprout, coat them with syrupy-reference fertilizer, put them through the sifter with uncertain rhythm, flip them, flip them nauseatingly high in his loquacious brain, at that time there was room in Mathias’s vast brain, so much roo
m he often didn’t know what to do with it, so much room that his verbose insomnias always put it to good use.
Mathias really liked to play in his brain, especially when Esther’s little body was within reach of his cortex, it was a dry, veiny body, a notebook or a hesitant palimpsest book, Mathias hesitated so much he always always hesitated some and then some more, back then Mathias had a blue, elastic-harnessed notebook, a pad that had been assaulted, gang-banged by one ballpoint pen and thick-leaded pencil after the other, a dog-eared pad he couldn’t let go of, just as he couldn’t let go of Esther back when Mathias still had some room in him and in Esther, Esther who would be buried on March 12, 2006, in the cemetery in Carrières, Carrières-sur-Seine (near Paris), with its downtown its riverbanks its viaduct its high school Les Pierres Vives and still farther afield its cemetery, fetid suburban houses dark lapping water disparate tufts of grass brown steel fences open sesame cement alleyways straight marble slabs, oh so well behaved, kilos of gravel gravel makes the shoes of the living scream out, notice the cowardly measures, the feverish resistance, the survivors’ pride, but who are these organs crunching over our heads wonder the dead with their fists over their ears, a few plastic flowers, look at b-24, a few vases with stagnant water, b-24 hit of course hit and sunk as will be the redheaded Esther Duval on March 8, 2006, a few rancid bouquets, turn left to the south no more to the right, a few shriveled stems rotting in the glass heart, the gold cross next to the Lopez family plot, clean little tombstones for high school girls cut to the quick on the inside of their wrists, our scorched Esther will be hit and then sunk in b-24, on March 30, 2006, because there’s a delay no matter the work site it’s a fact you always know to count plan include the time the workers need, on March 30 b-24 here’s Esther’s grave Esther Duval (1973–2006) You’ll always be our angel and soon we’ll be with you again.
Esther’s grave is ugly, almost as ugly as the Lopez family plot and Martin and Jacqueline Pasquier’s tiny tomb. Maybe Esther’s grave is ugly because it’s abandoned. Plucked bare of any offering. The Lopezes really like all sorts of knickknacks, the Pasquiers have a half-wilted rose taunting its neighbor in its cellulose robe. Esther’s grave is as smooth as the skin she presented to the decision-making blade on March 8, 2006. March 8, 2006, will be a Friday and Esther even more tired than usual. Esther will be tired, in other words, because it isn’t enough to be precise, 1. Weakened or exhausted by exertion. Because it isn’t enough to be precise a tired muscle, heart, brain because any light shed on the motives troubling those who commit suicide a tired person, one experiencing tiredness is interwoven with nonsense and blinding dregs filling the air with the stench of catechism and what’s worse: citizenship. To feel very tired. ☞ aching, broken, drained, exhausted, worn-out, don’t compare suicide and desertion don’t compare broken boundaries to marrow A. weary, and cowardly withering B. dead (FIG.), understand once and for all ground-down, overworked, shattered, smashed, spent; accept it once and for all fam. all-in, done, finished, out of commission, pooped, spent, wrecked, it so happens that sometimes along fallow land certain fields prove to be objectively beat, bushed, sapped, sucked dry, zonked more sterile than the rock that will replace the heart of all the survivors (see also To be done in*, to be at the end of the line*, to be at the end of your rope*, to be at the end of your tether*, to drag your feet*, to drag your heels*). Some gardens can’t be cultivated Tired and lacking energy. ☞ dejected, depressed, overwhelmed, fam. Out of sorts. In human skulls lucidity digs deep tunnels where bitter winds gust Tired out by noise, by chaos: dazed, stunned, stupefied. Inside the breeze remains a persistent draft salmonella eroding the courage of birds AMUSING. He’s been tired since he was born, he was born tired it’s called the reality ◊ principle. BY EXT. ARCH. That which shows, indicates tiredness. No matter the context never say think that suicide’s the easy option A tired face. ☞ haggard suicide is the easy voice A tired appearance suicide is spineless bundles of cowardice. 2. BY ◊ EXT. Disturbed. Never ring deceitful trinity faltering mailman craziness To have tired blood, a tired liver.—Weak, never say think she’s lost her mind correlation reason because the chicken or the egg the worm-eaten soul the pierced heart never say think he she a little sick. ☞ unwell. Indecency swallows up the body always steeped in splattering mourning as the remains go by She’s a little tired and won’t be in class today. Suicide is a choice 3. (1878) FIG. Something that’s been used a lot, lost its sparkle, its newness. Binary clinical application every problem has a solution ☞ crumpled, damaged, deformed, faded, old, used, worn. Suicide is a decision a decision it’s unusual how can you classify such a dynamic act as weak when everyone is subjected to horizontal lineage Tired clothes, shoes. A tired book. Suicide always distresses family and friends as opposed to their gregariousness suicide is a testosterone-stinking clinamen suicide is an antidemocratic act suicide is the island of rejection autophagy crucible living currency 4. BY EXT. Tired of: weary of. ☞ bored, disgusted, exasperated, fed-up, jaded. Esther Marie Angèle Duval, March 8, 2006, at 11:19 p.m. will know that the next minute and every single one thereafter are nothing but leaden misery (see also To have enough of) Esther Marie Angèle Duval daughter of Marguerite Jeanne Clémence Pesséans (housewife) and Georges André Duval (sales agent) born on December 7, 1973, at the Clinique Sully (Maison-Lafitte, in the Yvelines) will figure out for herself that her pregnancy reached full-term. To be tired of one’s mistress. She won’t write a letter and will push closed the door to the big bathroom To be tired of living. To combat the smell, she’ll empty two liters of bleach on the tile “Tired of writing, bored with myself, disgusted by others” (Beaumarchais). She’ll wear a pale little smile as she does this, a sporadic twist at the left corner of her mouth, thinking that she was altruistic right up to the end. She’ll the fill the bottom of the tub with pink strawberry gel, chromatic preparation, cocktail formulation, Esther will wonder will I dissolve like a duck my soul a sugarloaf will I dissolve my blood is grenadine and my heart brown sugar. Stretched out on the enamel her wrists freed Esther will remember: Of all the words banished in the twenty-first century, it seems that hope is the biggest pariah of all. Poetry flees for fear of being ridiculous; novels turn the other way so as not to seem affected; writers confronting this obscure mafia quickly come to gnaw on their own knuckles: they’re taken for politicians. Esther will remember, and in her emptying brain the title will echo, the title and the author of such awkward lines, Escale chez Persephone, Mathias Rouault, one last little ringlet, one last tango in Carrières-sur-Seine, Escale chez Persephone that’s where I’m going my love and not just for the winter, not just for six months, Escale chez Persephone that’s where I’m going my love and I won’t be back, I’m not wheat, the beautiful dozing seeds, the nourishing grain, and yet the worms will make their own fat from my body.
As Esther’s red begins to dilute, Mathias will be in Paris and unaware of the whole thing. Mathias will be in Paris and will never know that Esther’s remains will have to wait a long time to be reheated. On June 17, 2020, her mother, January 25, 2024, her father, April 5, 2041, her younger and divorced sister. Esther will know that her body will be cold and that it will be really bored for a number of decades before the cracked wood several decades before the corroded wood bends beneath another rough box, years and years before the molasses can take, years and years before Catherine on top of dad on top of mom on top of Esther can finish the Duval & Co. stew. Mathias won’t know any of this. Mathias won’t know what became and what will become of the one he whispered burn burn this witchcraft to at night, Mathias won’t know and couldn’t care less.
Mathias Rouault is thirty-two years old. And on this day Mathias doesn’t remember Esther anymore. How many pale Loreleis Laures Beatrices has he consumed locked up in ink it doesn’t matter in the end or in the beginning. Mathias Rouault has run out of room in his brain to keep flipping words when he can’t sleep. Mathias Rouault has run out of room, it happened a long time ago, a long time after Esther’s creeping locks
and those of other sleepers who followed her square dance on the pillow parquet.
It’s almost time to hear from to Mathias’s brain. To hear it narrate the bitter strangulation of each of its zones, no Music of the Spheres for this oozing organ. It’s almost time to catch a glimpse of the increasingly exponential paraphernalia clogging the circuits and interfering with the flow in this dilapidated place. But it’s still too early. It’s barely noon. According to tradition, the train where Mathias is sitting is en route from Angoulême, the literary tradition forgets that the suburbs of Paris are bustling with frustrations and desires that are very similar to the ones sheltered by the hideous word “province,” the literary tradition doesn’t take into consideration the strength of the ivory piercing the gums of the Paris region’s young residents. If it was simply out of literary tradition, all these cemented eyelashes would be less disturbing. When it’s only tamed topographically, Paris loses its sparkly appeal, no sunrise view–inspired quotes, just muffled, blistering rage, constantly ravaging the hearts of the Cinderellas on the last rer of the night. Mathias is not a victim of social disintegration. He’s just a martyr of the cultural ravine.
Not a Clue Page 9
