Monograph by Simeon Berry

Author:Simeon Berry
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2015-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

VII. storied

Visiting N.’s friend, who is manic and disquietingly translucent.

N. says that it’s because, in college, she gave birth to a baby with no brain. She has never quite recovered.

So I’m not prepared for her bragging about how she stuck with a guy for six months because the way he drove her Corvette made her climax in the passenger seat.

The friend and I go to the store for groceries in this storied vehicle, and she mentions that she is always insanely jealous of N.’s lovers, except for me. She waits for me to respond.

N. thinks my universe falls apart due to thermodynamics: karma does not add up.

If everyone’s being reborn all the time, then where do the new souls come from? She leans back, satisfied.

I imagine the type of occult accountant who could come up with this total. Then think of Pythagoras: Number is the ruler of forms and ideas and the cause of gods and daemons. I love these cross-century squabbles.

The morning after N. sleeps with me for the first time, I sneak out to the grocery store to get breakfast.

I don’t know her very well, so I buy two fruit tarts, two éclairs, four kiwis, a carton of raspberries, three kinds of yogurt, and a rose.

The cashier takes it all in. Um. Either she was really good, or you were really bad.

Chandler certainly knew how to be alone. The best parts of his books are where the hero just hangs out in his office being metaphysically bored. The prose is at its most vibrant and alive then.

But you can’t trust his analogies: Alcohol is like love. . . . The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off.

Don’t mistake this for language. This is a blueprint. You don’t poison ideas with arguments—you poison them with diagrams.

I am supposed to write an invocation for a friend of N.’s who is getting married. We fight over my draft for hours. It is not, she says, about them, about love.

I talk about the Curies distilling seven tons of pitcheblende in order to get a tenth of a gram of radium. How they lived in poverty in an unheated shack and had to take turns stirring the slag with a heavy iron bar for hours. But they were happy together.

I leave out the part where Marie dies from having blithely carried radioactive vials around in her coat pocket.

She kept test tubes of the stuff in her desk and loved the pretty blue-green light it gave off in the dark.

The tenser things get, the more N. wants a kid. But we might have to adopt, because of my bad genes: alcoholism, schizophrenia, depression . . . the whole sick crew.

Maybe we could go to Ireland. N. brightens up. But we’d have to raise her Catholic.

Every time I consider explaining to N. which parts of this I find upsetting, I envision putting a gun to my head and exploding my cranium. In a cartoonish fashion, but still.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.