How you ate two strawberry Pop-Tarts with a glass of milk on the couch beside Ahmed and how almost without noticing you were done eating.
Sien was not nice. Sien was not good. But neither was I.
Some people get expensive haircuts, some manicures, Theo enlightening one of his ecclesiastical interviewees. I happen to get well-laid on a reliable basis, thank God.
Ahmed slouching back to sleep and when you were able to think again you were peddling along Overtoom.
Still, she accompanied me and, for a year, more or less, give or take, we built ourselves a minor world.
Tam tickling Theo stretched out pudgily on the unmade bed, belly wubbling in glee.
The weight inside your fist inside your pocket.
A little family in a little flat — this is what we made of ourselves: Sien, her girl Maria, and, come July, her carmine-cheeked Willem screeching in the cradle.
Stink of the jasmine air freshener shaped like a Buddha dangling in a corner of her cubicle.
We have all been mentally disappeared the Sheik informing you over a Philly-steak-and-cheese Hot Pockets.
Monsieur Vincent first believing in God, and then less so, and then simply nostalgiaing after His goneness.
The middle-aged teacher with pixie hairhack Theo met after a school play in which Lieuwe cameoed as a laconic linden with cardboard trunk and construction-paper leaves.
Thinking about the last time you roamed the crowded neighborhood streetmarket teeming with Moroccans Turks Surinamese plying their wares.
Dear Theo: When you wake up in the morning and find yourself not alone, but rather see a fellow creature lying beside you, it makes the universe seem so much friendlier. — The last Vincent left
Oh baby, ba—
Egyptian pop music blasting from CD stalls Hindu film tunes from DVD stores all that life.
The bottomless depths in which I slept those days, eyeless fish tummying the sea floor.
This film’ll be a cinch to pull off, Theo telling Ayaan as he guided her arm into her coat sleeve. Trust me.
Humus couscous mangoes vats full of yogurt-and-cucumber.
When Gauguin accused me of humorlessness, I advised him to examine the horizon of my Peach Blossoms in the Crau. That, Paul, I said, is where you will detect, tucked among the insignificant French hills above the quaint cottages and peach trees in white blossom, a Lilliputian version of Mount Fuji.
The Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and Nancy Drew being the first books Ayaan fell in love with as a girl in Kenya, she took Theo back by reporting over her shallow bowl of tagliatelle alla carbonara and glass of Merlot.
You having cycled this route repeatedly because there was no room for surprise.
Always look harder, Paul.
Because they spoke to her, Ayaan said, of imagination, adventure, independence.
Because you know exactly what you are doing.
It is October. It is 1883. The man who once could have passed as my slightly healthier brother gently closing the door to the couple’s flat behind him, peeling away one skin, slipping into another.
Because they represented the inverse of her grandmother’s tales of suspicion and danger.
Because you know exactly how.
In love perhaps too strong a formulation for what he might have been with Sien.
Lucky person: the meaning of Ayaan in Somali.
Because this is—
Depressed, ill, in debt.
I mean, said Theo over his creamy tiramisu, why write a fucking string of grant proposals? Let me just take care of it myself. Jesus. It’s not like we’re trying to make the goddamn Titanic or something, right?
The shop selling coffee beans the pharmacy with its glass front.
Sien at some point having decided to reoccupy her position on that corner next to that gas lamp, apparently.
On the glittery nightstreet, Theo performing a goofy joyjig before his new collaborator, scarlet scarf serpent-ing behind him.
Air noisy with diesel fumes.
More or less behind my faux brother’s bent back.
The nicotine inhalation. The ener—
8:36, the clock in the shop window selling washing machines announcing.
While my faux brother minded her children.
The Dirty Paper: title of the homemade pamphlet Theo produced in primary school.
Jubilant faces of Palestinian kids in east Jerusalem.
Because he didn’t know what else to do.
Its principal focus being on legion satisfactions to be savored in matters concerning shit and piss.
On 9/12.
It’s not exactly as if you’ve been our breadwinner, dearest, Sien reminding him from her chair in the corner, elbow on knee, palm on cheek, stare on floor.
The periodical running to a robust two issues.
Hoping.
It’s not exactly as if you’ve been the man of the house.
Pleasure’s smoky rush.
Motorists honking horns in Nablus gunmen firing assault rifles in elation into the chalky air.
How Monsieur Vincent put down his pencil one morning, picked up a brush, put down his sketchbook, propped up a canvas, and everything became something else.
Theo’s headmaster’s expression as the monocled mongoose thumbed through it: there would never be anything more electrifyingly rewarding than that.
Your sister’s wild eyes as you slowed down in search of a parking space eased in set the brake reached over the gearshift and backhanded her across her filthy mouth.
This breath and that.
Stupid little suburban middle-class shock.
You could have done anything just then a corner of her lower lip swelling a fingernail-sized smear of blood across it.
Monsieur Vincent: an as-if painter. For fewer than nine years.
Theo, ten, making his directorial debut: an 8mm film of his friends eating excrement, the discomfortingly convincing special effect courtesy of pulped ginger-snaps.
You fucking whore you saying to her calmly you fucking little whore as you sidled back into traffic.
Nine. 1881–1890.
Theo, seven, regularly standing on a bench in the garden, in Napoleonic solitude, booming impromptu speeches at quote my fellow countrymen unquote to the shrubbery.