On the televised debate, Pim flaunted his flamboyant gayness before the Muslim cleric until the imam exploded, denouncing him as the embodiment of all depravity, at which point Pim turned to the camera and noted calmly that this is the kind of Trojan horse of intolerance the Dutch are inviting into their society under the banner of multiculturalism.
— because there was nobody to teach you how to fear Allah’s crackle.
Ten minutes after that, I’m thirty-seven, standing before this easel at this crossroads among these fields, a loaded pistol potbellying my pocket.
Theo could, if he studied Pim’s features carefully enough on the television screen, just make out the mischievous grin.
How you could neither blame your parents and their friends nor rely on them as they swept the Netherlands’ streets hauled away its rubbish cut its grass scrubbed its toilets mopped its floors cooked its food filled its potholes hosed its busses squeegeed its shop windows.
Auvers-sur-Oise simply breaks off after the stone fences, and then this glorious yellow racket.
Islam being a perpetually backward culture for one reason, the former Marxist sociologist arguing: it is unwilling to criticize its own assumptions.
Put your back into your life Mohammed grow a beard.
Poor Doctor Gachet, hobby painter and homoeopathist with those drained ash-blue eyes: what will he think?
That October in New York.
The Moroccan desert blushing at sunrise.
Dear Theo: When a blind man tries to lead another blind man down the road, I suppose they will both eventually tumble into the ditch. — Vincentlessly yours
Same-sex intercourse carrying the death penalty in Mauritania.
Thinking about how when an Eskimo wants to catch a wolf he plants a bloody knife blade up in the snow.
It is entirely not impossible that Doctor Gachet will be less than dismayed upon receiving the news.
Northern Nigeria, Sudan, Yemen.
Plucked its chickens washed its dishes made its beds took care of its dying parents scraped out its asbestos absorbed its poisonous chemicals.
Refusing to resort to my own life.
Stoning, hanging, firing squad.
The wolf is attracted to the knife by the scent slicing its tongue on the blade yet it won’t stop drinking its own blood until it has bled itself to death.
Ten teeth gone by thirty-one, the rest an aching looseness in my jaws.
Ayaan recalling on her cell phone from the backseat of a cab in Manhattan that, in Saudi Arabia, it was routine after noon prayers on Friday to decide whether to go home for lunch or out to see people getting their hands cut off in the public square.
Cafés dance bars gambling halls—
Where did the twenty-year-old version of myself, teeth intact, go?
Paris: after dinner, we strolled through the tinseling bluegray light.
— television video games miniskirts—
In any case, it was lovely to have known him. I’m sure he meant well.
Since the fall of the Shah in 1979, the Iranian government having executed more than four thousand people for committing homosexual acts.
— tight jeans T-shirts pornography perfume.
Life gifting you things for the first half, then quietly beginning to take them away, one by one, for the second.
Flogged. Beheaded.
Knife after knife in the snow.
Cobalt.
Life imprisonment in Bangladesh, Guyana, India, Maldives, Burma, Pakistan, Qatar, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Uganda.
The culture of entertainment.
Cobalt, too, I want to say, is a divine color.
In Bahrain, Algeria: the lash, fines.
Democratic slavery.
Sunday afternoons are so unpretending here.
Looking is not as simple as it looks.
An evening in Casablanca.
Dear Theo: There is nothing more artistic than to love people. — Unably yours, V.
As the end of the world nears, contending Heinrich Heine, it will be best to move to the Netherlands, for that’s where everything happens fifty years after anywhere else.
Playing football under the magenta sunset.
I need air.
When in New York it is 3 p. m., in Amsterdam it is 1954.
Remember that.
The acrid bite of hay in sunshine.
Joggers. Rollerbladers. Women pushing prams.
You smoked dope drank beer went to the cinema surfed the Web.
Happiness without the other thing being another means of possuming who we aren’t.
The duckshit green pond fringed with tall grasses worming through the park.
You smoked dope drank beer went to the cinema surfed the Web and then you didn’t.
Dear Theo: Our society’s preoccupation with elbowing sorrow from the soul makes each of ours a little more shrunken and shoddy every day. — All ways yours, V.
In the middle of the night the idea swept over Theo: this morning’s article will recount Ayaan’s story about how in Somalia, where she was born, little girls are made pure by having their genitals cut out.
You drove into never-ending desert.
After I rendered the two squat girls down the road with their gopher cheeks, gargoyle mouths, and elfish eyes, the townspeople I approached in the lanes informed me graciously: No, you may not paint my children, Monsieur Vincent.
Theo scribbled a note in the pocket-sized pad he kept on his nightstand and sledded back to sleep.
You participated in plays walked single-file down the hallways because you wanted to take that look out of your parents’ eyes.
But what I saw was what I saw, was it not?
How in Jeddah women wore the equivalent of black tents to disguise their features, their shapes, so as not to spin men mad with desire.
Thinking about how ashamed you feel that it has been five years since you visited your father’s village.
Human models invariably proving less than easy to come by.
You could tell which way those black-tented women were facing, Ayaan saying, only by the direction in which the tips of their black shoes pointed.
Thinking about how sports and girls terrified you.
I was compelled to represent my selves, my acquaintances, the cottages and landscapes because I couldn’t afford to pay a professional model to sit still.
Only the robe worn by the Prophet’s wives could prevent women from roaring the world into confusion.