After about five minutes, Daphne decided that she had to make a quick announcement before performing the next number. “Okay…so I know that it's really rude to try out new stuff on small, captive audiences, but we're kind of lacking on instrumentation tonight. All we have are kazoos and the piano over there.”
“Don't forget the bottles,” Andreas chimed in.
“And wine bottles. Sorry about that.” Caesura. “I guess I have a melodica, too, but that's neither here nor there. Anyway, we're going to do something that we haven't quite perfected, but we all think it could be the most entertaining composition we've ever worked on.” A meager applause was awarded to the band. “Here we go.”
What followed was a version of Ravel's “Boléro” that consisted only of kazoos.
“So a car accident?” Faxo says once the applause has died down. He raises his glass to his mouth.
“Any requests?” Daphne asks as the rest of the band approaches the bar.
“Popcorn!” Patrick yells from the other side of the bar.
“Popcorn?”
“What do you do?” I overhear one of the women ask Patrick.
“In my leisure time I play with paper.”
Daphne is looking at the piano as if it is a chessboard.
“Yeah. A car accident.”
Faxo stares to the whiskey in front of him. One of the cubes pops. “He was just waiting for a light, just minding his own business, and some drunk asshole just rammed into him.”
“Yeah.”
Daphne begins to tool around with the piano in an attempt to remember Patrick's request. Her frustration is discernible even as a familiar melody begins to form. A counterpoint soon follows. It is slow, methodical, perhaps even cerebral. The rest of the band, meanwhile, has taken another five bottles of wine back to a table next to the piano. They begin to slide them back and forth as if they are air-hockey pucks.
Faxo takes a small sip from the dram glass. He stares to it for a long time. “It could have been anyone.”
“I know.”
“It could have been anybody. The only thing that mattered was being in that place at that time. And that's what's so heavy. It could have been anybody, but it had to be him.”
Someone once said — or, if they haven't said it yet, someone will eventually say — that all eloquence is pain. It's true, but it's conditional. It speaks of pain that's been digested and ruminated upon, even if only for a short time. The initial pain, however, deprives eloquence of its wealth and rotundity. And if this eloquence is to be considered poor, then Faxo is in poverty.
20
“This is not an article about Coprolalia; this is a fucking elegy,” Sean says over the phone.
“What?”
“What you sent me. This is utter nonsense. What were you thinking? What are you thinking?”
The clock reads Sanskrit. “What time is it?”
“Are you drunk?”
“What?”
“You're drunk. It's nine in the morning, and you're drunk.”
“No, you just woke me up. What the hell are you so pissed off about?”
“What am I so pissed off about? What am I so pissed off about? You have to be fucking kidding me.” He takes a long drag. “Your article makes me out to be an elitist and a charlatan. Are you trying to undermine everything that I've said and done for the past fucking decade?”
“It's not that—”
“Then what, huh? What is it?”
“It's that you were looking at each piece. It's not—”
“Oh, yes, it's about the context.” Frustrated sigh. “This is simply too much. And the epitaph, which reads…let me see…ah yes: 'It is not that I would forbid the likenesses which are wrought in marble or in bronze; but as the faces of men, so all similitudes of the face are weak and perishable things, while the fashion of the soul is everlasting, such as may be expressed not in some foreign substance, or by the help of art, but in our own lives'. What type of pretentious shit is this?”
“It's Tacitus.”
“I know it's fucking Tacitus,” with jackhammer enunciation. “But Tacitus? Really? And not just Tacitus; no, it’s some fucking obscure, Victorian translation. You honestly expect me to believe that some random Jew from Midwood has Tacitus written on his tombstone?”
“If you knew his father, you would.”
“Oh, yes, the deli owner: a peddler of porn, cigarettes, and beer just loves his fucking Tacitus. What? Is he a retired philologist?” He lights another cigarette.
“Well, actually he kind of is.”
Another sigh. “This is pathetic.”
“Why is this pathetic?”
“For one, you completely dismissed the fact that at least three new Coprolalia exhibits have appeared in the past week and a half. The first is a reference to Midas in some shithole down in Red Hook. It was the same bar I told you to examine, and yet you managed to miss one of the most obvious examples of Coprolalia's wit that I've ever seen. The second is a portion of a haiku recently discovered in Park Slope. Finally…” He takes a long drag. “You think this is funny?”
“Actually, yeah, it's pretty amusing.”
“And why is that?”
“You were about to tell me about the piece called Et In Arcadia Ego. I already know about that one.”
“So you've been reading my blog?”
“No.”
Caesura.
“Furthermore, the Midas thing in what you call a shithole is actually a reference to one of the regulars there. And finally, the haiku, provided it's the one that appeared on a toilet, is the work of none other than Tomas and James.” I light a cigarette of my own. “And sorry for erasing it. I guess I should have let it dry.”
Caesura.
“Hello? Sean, you still there.”
“You little motherfucker.”
“Excuse me?”
“So you weren't looking to find him at all. You just wanted to learn his style so you could duplicate it. Yes, and you want people to believe he's dead because you want to take credit for everything that both he and you do from now on—”
“Wait a minute, Sean. That doesn't make any sense at all. I was only after the truth.”
“You do realize that what you said could potentially ruin my reputation and my career. If anyone takes this shit seriously, I’m out of a job.”
“I'm fully aware of that.”
“After what I did for you?”
“You didn't really do much of anything, Sean.”
“It won't be published in the magazine.” This is not a guess. “It's my word against yours.”
“It is.”
Caesura.
“So what will you do with this…this abomination?”
“I'll probably shop it around some.”
“You do know that I will deny everything you say?”
“Yes, I figured that. I'm not that worried about it anymore.”
“The Rubicon is not a shallow river.”
“Let the die be cast.”
Epilogue
Union Square is always a problematic meeting place. It is large, filled with landmarks, pedestrians, protesters, canvassers, skateboarders, lunatics — the typical New York melee, though this is perhaps its apotheosis. It is the navel of New York City, or at least Manhattan. Whereas Midtown is the voice, and therefore mouth of corporate America, and Wall Street is the cock by which the rest of the country is repeatedly sodomized, Union Square is where all of the forces meet and coalesce — Apollonian and Dionysian, Capitalist and Socialist, Republican and Democrat.