The Descartes Highlands by Eric Gamalinda

Author:Eric Gamalinda
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2014-09-22T16:00:00+00:00

We are held in place by gravitational forces

She is explaining to me that casa in Italian is pronounced with a z, not with an s. It’s the smartest thing she must have said all night. We have just seen Gianni Amelio’s Le chiavi di casa, a film about a young reckless father who finally takes the responsibility of looking after his autistic son. In the middle of the film, when the kid gets lost, she takes my hand and places it under her skirt. She has pulled the front of her panties down. The lost kid hops on a train and is found several scenes later in a police precinct, where his distraught father decides he can’t carry this burden after all. Her pubic hair is heavily matted and moist. She keeps her eyes closed for the rest of the film.

Later we are sitting in a garden café, surrounded by painstakingly fashionable and studiedly rebellious East Village types. She chose the place herself. She is some kind of poet, activist, and performance artist, and she “blossoms” (her word) in a place like this.

I met her on the Internet. She likes to send random, scathing reviews of books and music to Amazon.com in order to pull their customer ratings down a star or two. I sent her an e-mail saying I admired her candor. That is the first thing we talk about. She says she feels a sense of triumph when other people read her posts and get righteously upset. She imagines her words spreading like a virus, and the author or artist anguishing over her reviews. I imagine her life must be meaningless outside of this activity, but that she is probably unaware of it. She is much older than I expected, but I go to the movie with her anyway. I am convinced that if I could find someone, be in some kind of a relationship, that would even out what I have going with Yuki. It would be a fair balance. She has a small pixie face but her eyes can’t hide a certain hostility (toward injustice, racism, or corrupt politics, perhaps) and make her look older and incredibly tired. Her hair has frizzled dry with constant coloring, a kind of Mercurochrome alizarin that glows like embers under the café’s track lights. She is a vegetarian, chewing on her salad greens mincingly, like a rabbit, as though the prospect of nourishment terrifies or repulses her.

A few minutes after we sit down, a gray-haired man comes by and says he just happens to be three tables away. He is wearing a shabby plaid flannel shirt and looks like some adjunct in a university somewhere, or a perpetually struggling artist, one of the city’s innumerable below-poverty eggheads. Accepting a kiss on the lips from him, she tells him she’s busy right now but will give him a call. She tells me he was last week’s date. She says she can tell if people haven’t been fucked in a while because

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