“Side-effects vary,” Trixi continues, her tone now one with the small print, “but the weirdest one I saw was the…what'd they call it?”
“Palindromes,” Jane replies. “There was also complete retroluction.”
“Retro-what?”
“-Locution.”
“Yeah, she spoke backwards for, like, three days.”
“Like the midget from Twin Peaks?”
“Sure,” Trixi nods cautiously. She's young [as is our narrator, but apparently the infamous Connie had a thing for Lynch during their relationship]. “But, like, she actually spoke backwards. And she didn't know she was doing it, either. She didn't believe me until I recorded a conversation, and then played the tape back.”
“That's pretty weird.”
“She also spoke in palindromes,” Jane reiterates. “She'd say a phrase, and then utter the same phrase in reverse. It was like an echo.”
“Yeah, and she didn't know she was doing that, either.”
“Did she get any ulcers?”
“Or pterolabia?”
“No. For her, I think the biggest concern is the anal leakage. This is the first time Nixi has worn a skirt in a month,” she says as she notices that just about every man in the bar, including the twink brigade by the bar and the bear couple on a nearby couch, cannot help but stare to the wall-less psyche-ward. Likewise, we all glance over to see her busy boogying away in pink sequined glory with little to no regard for rhythm, public opinion, or the second law of thermodynamics. “Anal leakage, guys,” Trixi adds. We all turn away.
“No one wants to hear that,” Aberdeen chimes in as his hand falls on Trixi's thigh. She looks to him with daggers.
Dialog deteriorates. Jane, however, takes it upon herself to strike up a conversation with me. Aberdeen and Tomas, meanwhile, begin spouting out observations about the various people in the bar with derogatory and occasionally clever cynicism. Trixi and Mixi laugh to themselves and look eager to bring up subjects that don't involve the fashion statements made by those who fail to speak with Shakespearean eloquence. “So you're the Coprolalia guy, huh?” she asks glacially.
“That I am.”
“So you're just going to bars in the city looking for him?”
“Yeah.”
“That doesn't seem particularly productive.”
“You'd be surprised. I meet a lot of characters — some helpful, some not.”
“How close are you to finding him?” warmer now. “James and Tomas seem to think that you're on to something you're not telling them.” Wait, nope, that's condescension.
“Not really. I just think that he's not what most people would consider the artistic type.” She looks to me in bewilderment, probably because my response anticipates her next question. “I mean, I'm fairly sure he's just a normal guy who—”
“What do you mean by normal?” she asks as she tries to push her eyebrows together without using her hands.
“I don't mean 'normal', like, you know, there is a sense of normal.” Her brows touch. “I guess I just feel like he's a working-class guy, who probably has a job that he doesn't really like all that much — you know, like a character in a bad existentialist novel. Somebody once called him an artiste manqué, but I feel like this misses the point. People nowadays believe that artists have to be successful in order to qualify as such, but I don't agree. In fact, I believe that Mann articulated this point better than anyone else, especially in Tonio Kröger. And Coprolalia certainly resembles that character, even if he is a member of the working class. He's both, you know. And that's the draw.”
“Do you feel you know what he looks like? Do you feel like you know him?”
“No, but I can guess that he's probably in his late-thirties, maybe even early-forties. He's white, Jewish, with big ears, apparently. I feel like he's the type of guy you pass on the street without noticing. And that's the point I'm trying to get at: He doesn't want to be famous or anything because he's afraid that that will mean he has to live up to something that he's not.”
“He's the absurd creator!” Tomas shouts.
“Sure.”
“What does that mean?”
“Have you ever read Camus' Myth of Sisyphus?”
“No.”
“Well, it, Sisyphus, is analogous to The Stranger. He's referencing something from the former — I think.” Tomas nods enthusiastically, and even pulls the book out of the bag he has with him. I smile in return. “I would recommend you read The Rebel before it — it's way better.” She smiles. “As I was saying, he just has these moments of brilliance that he wants to convey to the world, even though the medium he's chosen makes everything he does completely ephemeral. And, yes, I know ephemeral is a relative term — ephemeral can be measured in minutes, days, months, years, eons: a second in the life of a person is capable of filling up a library and the Earth's history is a molecule of ink that is but a fraction of a letter in a sentence within a footnote in the trillion volume history of the universe. But he seems to really, sincerely not care. He just creates. And that's all he does — create and express something that just dwells inside of him. In a sense, that's all art is: a prolonged epiphany that captures something that's kind of rational and kind of irrational and beyond the typical capacity of language. You know, a-and maybe some of his stuff is convoluted because he tends to have these epiphanies when he's half in the bag; but, I mean, he's not there to expound — or elucidate, rather — on every line that he writes. He just wants to express himself. There's something very pure in that. I mean, people have these silly ideas, and suddenly they end up producing great works around them. DeLillo wrote White Noise because he thought it'd be funny to have a college that offered Hitler Studies. D.H. Lawrence wrote a novella based on the idea of Jesus getting a boner.” She squints. “The whole book leads up to one line: 'Christ has risen.'” She gives a begrudging smile. “I'm rambling, aren't I?”
“Kind of.”
“But isn't that so great — that he's just a normal guy doing all of this?”
“And, by normal, you mean working as a drone and finding escape in alcohol?”
“No, I think normal means not being a celebrity,” I counter with a slightly ornery tone. “He lives the way most of the people in this city live. You know, as students we sometimes forget that New York isn't just populated by Suits and Radicals; there's this huge middle ground of people, who are hard-working, middle-class, and, typically, pretty intelligent.”
“You honestly think that the majority of the people in this city are intelligent? Just who have you been talking to?”
“They're intelligent; they're just not that insightful. You know, they can understand a lot if you give them a chance; they're just not that good at coming up with it on their own.” I pause. “I think it has something to do with the way religion is taught now days, to be honest; then again, this could just be a side-effect of some larger problem plaguing our society.”
“Like religion.”
“Look: People are told that it's wrong to interpret the Bible, that it's the Word of God, and that it should be read as one reads the newspaper. But if you ask any religious scholar — who's not of the Evangelical persuasion, of course — they'll tell you that there are three levels to scripture: the literal, the allegorical, and the spiritual. You can't read it all literally, otherwise you end up with a myriad of contradictions; and, if you have contradictions, as well as the premises that the Bible is the Word of God and that the Word of God is always true, then you have an invalid argument on your hands. So it can't all be read literally — unless you believe that God can contradict Himself, which, of course begs the far more important question: why should one care what the Bible says at all if no one can tell which passage, if any, can be trusted. And that's where the beauty of religious study comes in. Just look at Gersonides — he concluded that Song of Songs isn't just a poem about love; it's a manual that outlines the proper way to approach the study of God's Word, which, oddly enough, parallels what Plato said in his Republic.”