How does it feel?
Monsieur Vincent swaying over Gauguin’s bed at three in the morning, noticing the niceties of his face in the char-coal-and-cinder gloom.
Pasticceria Bruno on LaGuardia Place in the Village: the one with bulbous fruit and vegetable marzipans that emptied your eyes with elation each time you eased your teeth into them.
The corner of her lip graping.
What the hell’s the matter with you? Gauguin growling into nightblur. Go back to BED!
Bananas. Oranges.
Stand up Mohammed Bouyeri.
And next poor Doctor Gachet’s drained ash-blue eyes are above me, busying being interested in the bandages he is pressing to my chest.
Children don’t grow up — our bodies get bigger and our minds get torn up.
Parse that sentence conjugate that verb.
A glass of green fairy, please.
Our minds or our hearts?
But they never imagined what you were capable of did they.
It is May. It is 1888. Monsieur Vincent is working at his easel, dreaming of nesting an artist’s commune in his small yellow house with the green door and green blinds in Arles.
N.Y.U. students, musicians, chess players, solitary readers, drug dealers, dog walkers, hoola-hoopers, pot smokers, unicyclists, drunkards, sword swallowers, and homeless men and women pigeoning around the fountain in Washington Square.
They had their impressions but the thought of you wasn’t among them.
Artists bonding like brothers in Monsieur Vincent’s abode in Monsieur Vincent’s imagination, sharing ideas, expenses, and profits from the collective sale of their works.
Scotches in the Dove one floor below street level, a heavy rain spilling outside, spattering through the open French windows in the well at their backs.
How your sister became a stranger in the break of a heart.
An experiment in existing.
Red brocade, ornate gold moldings, frilly pillows and matching teacups knolled with snack mix.
Your soul in this ragged sheet made of skin.
An experiment in writing our own lives.
Theo doesn’t remember what he and his ex spoke about over those drinks.
Send all the psychiatrists you want—
Challenging, stimulating, supporting: we would be wild.
Theo doesn’t care.
Send all the psychiatrists you want but you will never be able to understand.
Intent on fabricating the opposite of wallpaper.
Rise and shine or—
You are here to live out loud.
Intent on fabricating various methods of stirring one in the midst of one’s somnolence.
And then you hear Arcade Fire and are reminded why you listen to music in the first place.
Your existence a shout.
Are we still perhaps in the process of experiencing Sunday? I ask.
Une Année Sans Lumière. In the Backseat. Those songs.
This thing called a person remaining always larger than reason.
The Japanese draw quickly. Like a lightning strike.
Curious suckerfish, someone once describing critics and producers as.
For the hypocrites I have one final word Wish DEATH or hold your tongue and sit.
Would you take a deep breath for me? Doctor Gachet, I believe, requesting.
It is what it is, Ayaan saying. I am what I am.
It’s easy your father saying you get respect by earning respect and you earn respect by-
I would, as it turned out, not.
We can shoot the whole thing in a day, Theo proclaiming, pulling out his pocket calendar, gauging. How does July 26th work for you?
Death always being a believer’s only way home.
I want to say these human figures surrounding me are large and full of poetry.
But your name can’t be associated with the project, Ayaan said. It’s too dangerous by half.
Watching your thoughts appear on the notepad as Allah speaks them through you.
An experiment in rejoicing open hearts and opens minds.
Bullshit, Theo replied. I’ve been threatened by Jews, Christians, and Social Democrats. No one shoots the village idiot.
You accumulating into you.
And then that stopped.
The Dutch, Ayaan non-sequitured, seem to me to be nostalgic for something that never existed, but whose loss they keenly feel.
Remember this time—
I tell them: I want my pipe and I want my brother.
Theo sneezes into his jacket sleeve: agh-HOOOO.
Remember this time you will move through it.
Sweating, Monsieur Vincent attempts turning onto his side.
Gezondheid.
It’s like snapping a photograph of a vista along the roadway and then slipping back into your car and leaving that spot forever.
In the end—
That evening Ayaan and Theo decided to make a sequel to Submission as well. It would address, among other topics, the abuse of homosexuals in Islamic cultures.
This spasm of convergence.
One function of art perhaps being to take reality by surprise.
I’m a Hollywood writer, someone once noting, and so I put on a sports jacket and take off my brain.
November second: 11/2.
In the end we shall have had enough cynicism and skepticism, Monsieur Vincent responding to Monsieur Pissarro on the banks of the duckshit green Oise that spongy May afternoon, and we shall want to live more musically.
Noticing the lights at the intersection ahead are with him, Theo speeds up inconsiderably.
112: the number for emergency services throughout Europe.
Dwelling in liquid architecture.
August 29th: the film airing on the talk show Summer Guests. In its wake, nothing happened.
A poet.
Someone’s hand badgering me.
And then nothing happened some more.
Faggot blue T-shirt faggot striped suspenders faggot gray jacket faggot tattered jeans.