The Absolutes by Molly Dektar

Author:Molly Dektar [Dektar, Molly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

With relief, I surrendered into a new period immediately. I texted him every other day and he always responded quickly, even though I had no idea where he was in the world. It was easy to understand things now. He told me to download the music he was listening to, sacred music that was like listening to math, or Romantic music led by lesser-known conductors, and even though he pressed me for my opinions and, what was more, incorporated them and referenced them later, he’d always finish three times as fast as I, and know every note, and point out motifs and key passages, while my mind wandered. I was honest with him about what I felt, but my opinions always sounded so murky compared to his, so subjective. He was too fast. He was fissioning and frustrated and hot, hot, hot. He liked being pulled in many directions, he liked many obligations and, I knew, many secrets. He overspilled and overwhelmed me.

He loved surreal tales of obsession and distress, the stories of operas or of the composers or the musicians. In every other time before the present day, he said, before, that is, capitalism and its games and mechanisms, the only way to get social groups to cohere, to move beyond their self-centered loneliness, was through some kind of appeal to the sublime, to religion or other special knowledge. Everything in his mind was fused and luminous—music, the state, his father’s skills, private desire, poetry, paintings, his heretical ancestors. He loved religion but had a high tolerance for the more abstract, schematic kind of religious thought. I kept trying to meet him there, to understand. He would often get rabidly excited. This was part of his magnetism.

Part of his magnetism was his mysticism. He strongly believed that some things were just good and some things were just bad. He said, when it comes to justice, if we all most want for the others to get what they want, then we have an empty set, with no sense of the good. Nicola truly believed that there was good and he knew what the good was and not everyone could know.

And yet when I pressed him to tell me what the good was, he became evasive, and this was part of his magnetism too—he was an endlessly complexly unfolding flower. When you think all the petals have opened, there’s a whole other tight core inside, which opens to reveal another tight core, and there was something nightmarish about this side of him, because he was endlessly subtle and endlessly concealing and every conversation ended too soon.

On the phone he’d ask me how I was. What I was thinking about. What I was reading. He barely talked about where he was, and never about business, his father, or Iris. He wanted to talk to me about music and history. I wished he would confide in me, but I could tell I played a specific role in his life. His family was filled in by what he left out.

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