Are you Frenhofer? I asked.
Are you stupid?
Yes, but that is beside the point. Is this the Key-Ask?
That’s Key-Osk.
Of course it is.
It’s a pun.
If you say so. I’d like copies made of these keys.
His name tag read nicolas poussin. He looked at the keys. A couple of these keys say Do Not Duplicate.
I realize that. That’s why I want only copies of them. Do you always obey rules? You don’t look like someone who follows all the rules.
Why do you say that?
Just something about you, a kind of death thing.
You’re really giving it a tug, aren’t you? Okay, I’ll make them.
Just like that?
Just like that. To advance your story. Tell me, old man, what are these keys to, eh?
One fits a closet full of controlled substances.
Cool. He paused at the very old key. I can’t do anything with this ancient thing. Is it real?
I don’t know. Let me have that one. He took the old key off the ring and handed it to me. I put it in my pocket.
His tag now read jan mabuse.
Jan Mabuse paused at the last and smallest key. This key is beautiful, he said, and as he said it the traffic around the kiosk slowed or at least appeared to slow. This key is perfect. He hesitated, as if afraid to attempt duplication of the last key, which was in fact the key to the drug cabinet, but he could not have known that.
I spoke to him, told him that the perfect key, like anything perfect, was but mere shadow, apparition, wraith. I told him that Orpheus should never have looked back. I studied his paint-darkened lips and said, Make the key.
His tag now read: fernand léger. He made the key, with the whirring, screeching, and buffing that I had wanted.
He did not charge me for my copies. He instead put down his protective goggles and prepared to leave. I asked him where he was going. He told me he was going home. No more keys for me, he said; his tag read claude lantier.
32
Sensuality, or more precisely lust, is the nonpareil Petri tureen for the breeding of ruinous and catastrophic miscalculation. I knew that, it having been a lesson I learned early in my so-called adult life, and so modeled my behavior, regarding all dealings with love and or lovers, actual and potential and imagined, on a robot I once saw in a movie when I was twenty-seven. I had smoked quite a bit of pot and the character might well have not been a robot, but I remember him as a robot nonetheless and his unfeeling and distant approach to matters of the heart seemed just about right. So, even though my short-afro-ed night nurse, her name will be now Clarabelle, made my heart flutter, or was it my medication, or worse? and even though she caused me to assemble a montage of some of my more fondly remembered erections, I did not and would not trust or confide in her completely. She had after all been intimate with Harley and loneliness and self-loathing can only explain so much. She had, on a purely animalistic plane, a plane worth noting and visiting, somehow bridged that experiential gap between the discrete and the continuous, between the distinct actuality of past conditions and the ephemeral, expanding, enduring, and untouchable attachment to those conditions, states of affairs, cases, hard-ons.
She was standing authoritatively behind her station desk, was Clarabelle. Her light-green smock covered with pastel smiley faces and the V-slit of her collar pointing seductively down to her, I assumed, nonexistent cleavage. I had already placed the original set of keys at the far edge of her desk and I believe she had pretended not to see me do it.
Finally, she looked at them. I wonder where those came from.
What?
Those keys.
Oh.
Are they yours?
Not mine.
Sarah, Sarah, are these your keys?
Not mine?
Anthony, are these yours? Clarabelle held them high and jingled them.
Nope.
I guess the owner will turn up, she said. She put them into her drawer.
Do you believe in time travel? I asked her.
I guess not.
It’s just as well. Apparently, given that the occurrence of time dilation, whether based on velocity or gravity, doesn’t allow backward travel, we could only hope to get you as old as me and that would sort of defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it?
You’re an interesting man.
I was once, I think. I’m pretty sure I thought so then. More fool me.
You know, I really don’t like Harley, she said.
I nodded. I wondered if she thought that was supposed to make me like her more. I nodded some more.
What do you see when you look at me?
This was a great question and it took me completely off guard. I looked up at the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling of the hallway. I see a river in Iowa, I said. The first place I saw my wife naked. All we did was swim that day.
That’s sweet.
I’m a sweet man.
33
I
My first self-conscious attention to a heading. I. A pronoun denoting the self. Me. It is also the letter representing an imaginary unit in math, the unit that lets the real number system extend to complex numbers. Me. I’m sorry, my best and favorite lover said to me, you are imaginary. I suggested that she multiply me by i and give me another look and try. But all of this to prolong a deferral, right?
I could see Billy fishing in some far-off stream or pond even though I did not know if he liked fishing or had ever fished in his what I imagine to be staid accountant’s life with his daughter beside him teasing him about something or another perhaps the way he said the word apricot and there he was reeling in empty hook after empty hook happy because his girl was there with him and maybe his wife but wasn’t it odd Billy thought there by that stream or pond how when a child dies all other relationships seem so so so dismissible forgettable shallow though he knew that she must have been around perhaps in a backyard garden with an older or younger version of their daughter she teasing her mother about the fact that she wore her rubber boots on the hottest and driest days but Billy was with his daughter and then he was not but instead lying deader than dead against that bank his arms and legs akimbo his eyes open and lost-looking in the bright sun because there was no heaven no stream no daughter to revisit though someplace along that stream bank that riverbank she lay like him so so so still veins and arteries and curious things-closed all kisses having been blown up a skirt hiked up just over her knee her hands looking like they had wrung the last water from a towel pots and pans piled up the bank waiting for Billy to wash after the last dinner the last supper conjuring that lie of a story where that Iscariot guy did the brave thing and pointed out a toga-clad Jimmy Swaggart to the goose-stepping authorities and some others who were tired of reading letters from living souls who had ceased or failed ever to recognize the difference between hopes and lies. So blow me a kiss sweet Jesus Billy said and I will let it light on my ass and my daughter will remain skirt-hiked-dead on a shore and friends will make tea make tea make tea and then visit in the cold dark of night Point Dume