No, you may not paint my children, Monsieur Vincent, they informed me graciously in the language of lacy sanguinity void of guttural backbone.
Said someone once.
Just to see what he would do and then breaking into light-spirited laughter.
Some of these aren’t lies.
The delectable adolescent joy of crossing the line of good taste. Repeatedly.
As if it were a joke as if his life were a simple joke.
Look: the pistol, once in my pocket, now in my palm.
There’s nothing like it: their faces, their stupid little suburban middle-class shock.
Can’t take a bit of a laff?
Dear Theo: I am a musician interpreting the works of great composers — Rembrandt, Millais, Delacroix — yet—
Offended by the audacious truth of it lying there unwrapped like—
Bit of a leg pull?
— yet I don’t seem to be able to afford ink or paper. Do you happen to have a little spare cash you could part with? —V.
— like an uncooked chicken on the counter.
The café owner smiling so broadly his eyes almost disappeared.
I turn the gun over like a sea thing pinched up on the beach.
Theo can make them do what they dodge doing themselves. That, he decides, has always been his single contribution to culture.
Come and drink my fucking coffee you fucks.
Brushstrokes multiplied like words from syllable to paragraph.
No one ever promised that thinking was going to be easy.
I’ll piss in it for you.
From syllable to paragraph, and then that changed.
Holman, the rumpled journalist, phoning one evening to let Theo know Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the controversial new addition to parliament, was dining at his house. It was February. It was 2003.
Where do you go from there?
Red tasting rowdy like copper shavings.
You should drop by if you aren’t doing anything, Holman told Theo. You should hear the sorts of things this woman is saying.
After high school you tried bookkeeping then information technology then educational relief work but everything reminded you of other possibilities even if you couldn’t name what they were.
A twenty-two-year-old man, recently returned from a stillborn attempt at looking busy in a London art gallery, doodles on a pad in the airless back room at his podgy Uncle Cent’s in Paris: a silly pen-and-ink drawing of a runt tree gagged with branches.
Theo had been attending another dinner party. He excused himself, saying he needed to use the loo, then slipped out the front door.
Thinking about how when your mother died you decided not to attend the funeral in Morocco she already in Allah’s hands the case already closed.
Translating the Bible from Dutch into French, German, English, its verses staticking through his hands and arms and jittery legs.
Pasicceria Bruno on LaGuardia Place. Remember?
You began to refuse to shake hands with women instead.
All the other people inhabiting my head.
The doorbell rang, Ayaan later confided to Theo, and this loud, dumpy, disheveled guy with a high-pitched voice erupted into the room, blundered in her direction, and wrapped her in a bear hug, white smudge of cocaine still visible upon his upper lip.
You began threatening chums you caught drinking alcohol in bars.
Look: here I am, easing back the pistol’s hammer.
I’m Theo van Gogh, the guy bellowed, and I VOTED for you!
Shouting down acquaintances in cafés when they dared disagree with you.
Look: here I am, pointing it at the crux of my longing.
Peddling, Theo commences humming to himself.
You grew a beard while shedding your Western clothes your faithless friends.
Thumbing the trigger, focus floating up to the fields.
Shocked Ayaan had never seen such a public display in this country. She decided she liked it.
You smoked dope drank beer went to the cinema surfed the Web and then you didn’t.
I see every room of the house in which I grew up, every path, every plant in the garden, the magpie’s nest in the tall acacia in the graveyard of the church where my father used to preach.
Thought callousing into belief—that, perhaps, being the most accurate way of putting it.
You taking special pleasure in the scandal of fetish sites.
Someday there will be no one left to remember these things.
Theo stayed no longer than ten minutes, a storm uproar-ing in the living room, then passing over as quickly as it had struck.
Asphyxiation plastic love amputees.
How they called my father the Handsome Pastor, even though they found his sermons dull as Dusseldorf at dawn.
Theo’s hum so deep among his vocal cords he can feel more than hear the melody.
Sans arms sans legs.
A canvas by Jacob van Ruisdael that you live in.
Ayaan had the impression, she told him later, that Theo was the sort of person who had the compulsive urge to goad and insult even his closest friends, preferably on live TV.
Then you met Nouredine the illegal from Morocco and this thing became that thing and everything became something else.
Blue: the sharp scent of what happens just past the farthest brink.
Laughing, Theo replied: You’re a great judge of character. You’re the heroic politician. I’m the village idiot. We should do something together sometime.
I want to show you someone who will change your life Nouredine said I want to show you something you’ll never forget.
The low avocado line of trees edging the horizon.
Britney Spears, it ripples through Theo’s thoughts.
And then one evening he took you around to hear Abou Khaled preach in back of an internet phone store in Schiedam black jacket over white djel-laba.
My eyes are sometimes emerald, sometimes hazel. It’s the oddest thing.
Theo waited more than a year after the first meeting to ferret out Ayaan’s phone number from a friend.
The fury of his Takfir sermons bolting between Dutch and Arabic.
Why are you frightened of your own shadow? the doctors at Saint-Rémy asked me.
I am a farce to be reckoned with, Theo told her.