Because with sports and women anything was possible.
Sometimes Monsieur Vincent asked his prostitutes to pose for him at no additional charge after the task was done.
What comes to mind when you say Washington Square Park.
Thinking about how you descended through the Rif mountains in your white Peugeot to discover you were no longer able to converse with your relatives your Berber having eroded that much.
Look: it is—
Self-righteousness, self-pity, self-hatred—
Everyone your own age having bolted for Europe to find work unable to make a living growing corn or olives in the hard red clay.
Sometimes I settled for still lifes — bottle, apple, pear— which recently had become all the rage, the bourgeoisie searching for new wallpaper to match their minds.
— the triumvirate engine of any good totalitarian religion.
You preferring to spend your time hanging out in cafés in Oujda listening to Western pop music Britney Spears hit me baby one more time your favorite in those days.
That painting, you once heard a rosaceous woman in a bird-shredded toque say in your brother’s gallery, would go so very well with my green couch.
The De-Enlightenment, Pim referring to the situation as.
Backstreet Boys Ricky Martin Sugar Ray Cher.
But that was now and again enough. More than enough. Riches.
The college couple guiding a bike between them, she with a knapsack over one shoulder and faded jeans plumping the curves of her heart-shaped ass.
Do you believe in life after love?
Three lemons next to an empty bottle of absinthe.
An ass to be seriously cherished.
Your friends telling you you were a lot more fun when you were stoned on hash a real raconteur they said the stories you told.
Nine-hundred paintings: nearly one a day for the last three months.
Wake up, my treasure, Theo whispered, leaning over Lieuwe’s bed.
Your father’s knees in such bad shape from years of menial labor he can no longer kneel when he prays.
Nearly one a day.
Annoying Lieuwe’s hair, Theo took in his son’s musty fragrance, but Lieuwe only sleepgroaned from somewhere else, trying to will his dad out of his dreams.
He has to sit in a chair.
They just kept coming. Like a brushfire in the brain.
Time for another day of waterboarding at school, sweet one, Theo singsonged.
Almost forty years in this country eight children a cramped flat a dishwasher’s salary and your father has to sit in a chair when he prays.
Eleven hundred drawings.
Another day, dearest, of being taught how not to think by those who can’t.
Yet back in Douar Ikhammalen your father is a local star he built the modest mosque with the minaret covered in red yellow green mosaics down by the river with his own savings.
Eight-hundred letters.
Rise and shine or there’ll be no time for breakfast.
A house for his brother nearby.
They just kept burning, and then they didn’t just keep burning.
When he sensed Lieuwe alert, Theo launched a gently ferocious tickle attack.
And for us?
Look: a life, give or take.
Theo being careful to apply exactly the right amount of pressure beneath the boy’s armpits, down his flanks.
This flat in a dank gray neighborhood from the fifties.
But let that be enough.
Father cubbing with son.
Garbage bags tossed into the street from second story windows.
Some of these are lies.
Lieuwe balled up on the bed in delighted convulsions.
Goats slaughtered on the balcony during holidays entrails stinking for days before someone got around to chucking them out.
A poetry of complexity.
The Quran telling the story of how Allah allowed the Prophet to marry his friend’s six-year-old daughter and consummate the marriage when the girl was nine.
The culture of consumption they call it.
Please don’t think too hard, the still lifes say. It will only get you into trouble.
Theo’s middle-of-the-night note to himself: It’s not my fault that some citizens hang on to the fundamentally uncivilized faith of a little-girl-fucker who roamed the desert in 666.
Because it consumes them.
In French: nature morte.
Ayaan in the Q&A after a public lecture: They froze the moral outlook of billions in the amber of the seventh century — brutal, bigoted, fixated on controlling women.
It eats them up spits them out.
Nearly one a day for the last three months.
Union Square. The greenmarket.
They say braless Dutch girls in their T-shirts and knee-torn jeans are easy but they’ve always turned you down no matter what you did no matter how nice you were to them.
A murder of mustaches.
The arch in Washington Square.
My beard just unruly enough to frighten them.
Hovering in bed, ciphering whether I might be the bearer of that face gazing out from the canvas: red hair combed back to reveal its hasty retreat at the temples, burl on the flagrant nose, full beard, blondish eyebrows, retreating chin.
Fundamentalism in all its forms — Christian, Jewish, Muslim: the socially sanctioned excuse to abandon all humor.
Good.
And next—
Someday they will write about these things.
How cancer slowly replaced your mother lying on her side in bed hands tucked against her bony cheek staring across the room at what her life had become.
Prussian blue, Persian red, pumpkin orange, parrot green: like touching someone without touching.
And next Holman is phoning.
It is Allah’s will she whispered to you it is what I deserve.
I am a stranger here.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
The five drunk Australian teenagers passing the café where you sat over a cup of coffee the faggots called out to the owner smiling at them from the doorway Hey mate you eat cats and dogs?