Pariah - excerpts, pt. 2

Gertrude did not know of her sex, skin, or self. She was everything at once.

You lost your spark Shiraz.

She worked in aesthetics, in the shapes and sounds and spaces in between, the way odd combinations flurry your semantic sense and memory. She believed we had, or at least ought to have, moved past the idea of a “story”. Of “plots”.

My period’s late. This time makes it too many times. What could that mean?

I saw her for the first time, her and her gorgeous cheekbone, buckled lips, and stygian hair, in my tepid Tuesday discussions. Eyes are spoken about enough, but my heart faltered every time I looked into hers. She lived with such fierce individuality; her silhouette burned into the air like a brand.

         I will never let people consolidate an opinion of me. That’s how they take control of you. Always keep them guessing and they can never own you, she would say.

         Think about it. Somebody sees you yielding once. Now they think you’re a pushover. Now they own you. Now your life is determined. How you interact with them is set in stone. Because they only see you in one way.

I came here enchanted by Eve Babitz and barbiturates. I wish I could live her stories. I’d live my own stories if I could, save for the morbid ones. Morbid, she would roll her eyes and laugh at herself.  Anybody’s fiction is better than the life they lead.

         A series of disgusting generalisations and disgusting hypocrisies led her to resent her father. Had he changed or had she never lifted her eyes off the silver plate? The question annoyed her; it spoke to her hypocrisies too.

         I don’t believe in rules. I don’t believe in authority. I don’t acknowledge them.

         If anybody persisted in catechising her, she would empty her eyes and look blankly ahead. All had been made true to her in the 4th grade.

         You seek to cut the provenance written into your name - like a Tabriz carpet - following you around like a tail on a prophesied problem child or the shadow of your old dog. Cut it off. You owe nothing to the facts of your life.

         He’d be lying if he said Gertrude wasn’t the reason for how he thinks today. He lies often.

         People who don’t understand Waiting for Godot are not my people.

…

The classroom was stuck in dusk. We were about 13 students. It was the discussion for my History of the Middle East class. I was always late to class and I stared at her; she returned a look, a look but not a stare.

My TA started with introductions.

Hi, my name’s Lizzie, I’m a third year psycho-bio major and I took this class because my family’s Armenian so I thought this would be a good way to, you know, understand my heritage more? Yeah.

Great!

         Hey. Uhm. My name’s Huang-Bo. Uhm. I’m double majoring in Economics and Statistics. I took this class to learn more about Palestine. I’m a first year, I forgot to say. Sorry.

         Hey no worries man, that sounds great.

         What’s good guys, I’m Cameron, I’m a second year Finance and Communications major, I’m excited about this class because it interests me. And the middle east is just so…interesting. And Israel and Palestine and all that. You know.

         Great.

         My name’s Shiraz, I’m a second year, I’m studying comparative literature, and I took this class because I loved Mughal history in middle school and wanted to learn more about it.

         Yeah well I don’t think Professor Gabriel includes a lot about the Mughals, its covered a bit in the Gunpowder Empires, uhhhhh, but yeah great!

         She was the last.

         Hi. I’m Gertrude, I’m a third-year anthropology major, minoring in philosophy. I took this class because it’s the last requirement I need to fulfill for the core curriculum. I also read a book on Mehrunissa and liked it.

Yeah! Well, yeah, great! You have to get that degree at the end of the day. And Mehrunissa, well she was a Mughal princess so you and, oh man, sorry what was your name again, I need some time to attach each word to all of your faces!

         Shiraz.

         Right! Well you and Shiraz already have a common interest. Study group, haha!

         His name was Mr. Maxwell and was an insufferable TA. Years later I’d understand him when I had to search for answers in all those uncooperative beady eyes that hadn’t done the readings they were taking out student loans to read. At least he tried to solve for the silence. I gave up far too easily, far too quickly.

Naturally, this was a classroom discussing 9/11 and American media. We spoke of manifest destiny, military corruption, imaginative geographies. Government media apparatus. We chanted us vs. them. We laughed at the naivety of thinking capitalism to be the cause of everything bad. We talked about arranged marriages and dowries and how Ottoman legal documents subverted historiographical understandings of women in court. We are so smart.

I would learn how much people enjoy palaver; the classroom was never without it. We heard of asymmetrical power balances in Middle Eastern governments, American interference inspired by a lust for oil, and an excess of kindness when nobody really meant it.

And well on apartheid and proxy wars, no please, you go ahead.

No, no, you.

No, I’m so sorry, you must.

No I insist.

Insist?

Yes I do, truly, assuredly. Sincerely.

Sincerely.

Certainly.

Well, if you sincerely insist, then…

Absolutely.

Absolutely certain?

Certain.

Well then, just to piggyback off your point, I-

I might kill you.

Certain?

…

Seven years later, she returned.

I’m in town for 5 nights. Can I stay at yours?

On the first night, I knew this would all be over soon.  

On the fourth night, we ate dinner to a mood of stolid affection like old people and their dentures. The night was old. The restaurant glowed like a warm belly. People moved in gouache strokes to a jazz club palette. Time stood still, we ate in the half-counts between candle flickers and hidden seconds caught in amber. Odors of tobacco and caramel gilded over like syrup. It was an impressionist painting. The painting was crowded and full of people in a forgotten salon; the painter was in the mood for fleshy reds, stained glass; warm bellies and warm diamonds.

Others would recount the delicious squab in bordelaise, sweetbreads and squash beignets, complimentary bread and butter (in this economy!), and a cherry clafoutis to be ordered forty-five minutes prior (a priori! he would joke and be met with contempt). Or they would recount the sparkling titter of music and marble footfall, and the exceptionally well-tailored suits of the waiters, the discerning brow and moustache of the maître d’, or perhaps how the vintage chandeliers refracted through glasses of vintage Bordeaux, leaving bloodied pools of light on the table linen in such a special way, that special, special night. We said nothing to each other. Sat in a leather booth, tucked away at the derriere, blowing on a hot spoonful of clafoutis, I recounted looking out the window and seeing myself years later watching us through the window. The person that’s speaking this, is he standing outside or sitting inside, with her, expecting everything to be a memory and not enjoying the only time he’ll live it. I don’t know.

She said she loved French restaurants even though she couldn’t stand the amount of butter. God, they put it in everything! Despite that, something about the opulence, she would say, about the color and the decadence of the bourgeoise air, she would add, made it seem as if Proust and her shared a life. I could only coddle my love for so long before it died. We used to talk about retiring in Saint-Emilion.

They grow bitter when envy is somehow brought up. They struggle in saying what they really wish to say to each other.

         I don’t like jealous people.

         Maybe because you’ve never had to be jealous of anybody.

         Maybe.

         That’s it?

         Maybe.

         I guess we’re doing this again.

As the night grew older, they danced.

Outside, the Arts District trudged on like a steam engine. Shadows stalked the streets. Steam skimmed the midnight air. The ornaments of the city – the cars, the traffic signals, the billboards and glowing signs – formed a sea of red poppies, flowing like a seeping wound from the shimmering arteries of its eponymous angel-city.

…

Shiraz waits in the library, eyeing a copy of Gertrude Stein’s poems, eager to snatch it.

Wood and dictionaries flank me at every corner. I am bound by a terrifying red fleet of English dictionaries. I am lignified; in sylvan asylum, eroticized in a bookish way. Obliques of light catch the dust. The silence, punctuated by the sapphic tension between the two librarians, tells me that this is a delicious library.

The books are chocolates and marzipan and tinsel-wrapped truffles; nougats, toffees and caramels; lurid foils are the bright colors of nostalgia and her metaphors; jaded hazelnuts, orangey oranges, strawberry-milk-white-candy; blue pralines, pink fudge, violescent éclair. Shiraz picks one, anticipating blots of licorice and ink to spell out the other life that could have been lived. This is a library of rainbowed spines, deckled in rows like their deckled edges, arched over politics and literature like the loveable cuckold professor at his desk. The smell of old clothes and old cabinets, armoires and coincidentally grandparents, is the smell of these books. Papered confectionary opens itself; he is caught in the perfumed web of allusions to Shakespeare and Samuel Jonson.

Handbound artifacts, discerning spines, thick hardcovers, antique leather, frayed buckram, austere titles like Heidegger’s Destiny, Chaucer’s Tales, A Handbook to Milton’s Poetry, Legouis and Cazamian’s A History of English Literature, Young’s Analytical Concordance to the Bible, the Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, Beowulf – interpretations, Brontë essays, the Marprelate Tracts. And now, papered confectionary opens itself upto you. Pages lick up at wounds of doubt and concern and semantics, in what way is Beckett not a prophet? Now a tame impish Beckett is naked in the yellow light of its protective cover. In what way is language not a measure, the way science claims the metrics of the soul? More. Montaigne’s malaise hums like a drone, flirting with questions of death. Thomas Mann. Stendhal’s artifice. Rubied passages of Proust become your own memories. As if Proust and I shared a life. Words like antiquity and premodern and antithesis and the Ottoman empire ring in the threads of her soul, like a harp. They make her happy.

He sits there for three hours until his next lecture. Before leaving, he filches the copy of Gertrude Stein’s poems.

I want to go back.

…

Bouazizi. Exegesis. My abyssinian djinn.

Inwit and indwelling, idyllic. The idyll of my life was ruined.

 Rimland, chaparall.

As the night grows older, they dance.

by Advik Lahiri