‘Balls.’
‘An incongruous central blackness could have served to accentuate the terrible whiteness that had been in ineluct —’
‘The entire historical effect of a seminal program was horribly, horribly altered. Terribly altered.’
‘Eisenstein and Kurosawa and Michaux walk into a bar.’
‘You know those mass-market cartridges, for the masses? The ones that are so bad they’re somehow perversely good? This was worse than that.’
‘— so-called phantom, but real. And mobile. First the spine. Then not the spine but the right eye-socket. Then the old socket’s fit as a fiddle but the thumb, the thumb doubles me over. It won’t stay put.’
‘Fucks with the emulsion’s gradient so that all the tesseract’s angles appear to be right-angled, except in —’
‘So what I did I sat right up next to him, you see, so in a sense he didn’t have room to stalk or draw a bead, Keck had said they needed a good ten m., so I cocked the hat just so, just ever so slightly, like so, just cocked it over to the side like so and sat down practically on the man’s knee, asked after his show-carp, he keeps pedigreed carp, and of course you can imagine what —’
‘— more interesting issue from a Heideggerian perspective is a priori, whether space as a concept is enframed by technology as a concept.’
‘It has a mobile cunning, a kind of wraith- or phantom-like —’
‘Because they’re emotional more labile at that stage.’
‘ “So get dentures?” she said. “So get dentures?” ‘‘
‘Who shot The Incision? Who did the cinematography on The Incision?’
‘— way it can be film qua film. Comstock says if it even exists it has to be something more like an aesthetic pharmaceutical. Some beastly post-annular scopophiliacal vector. Suprasubliminals and that. Some kind of abstractable hypnosis, an optical dopamine-cue. A recorded delusion. Duquette says he’s lost contact with three colleagues. He said a good bit of Berkeley isn’t answering their phone.’
‘I don’t think anyone here would dispute that they’re absolutely fetching tits, Melinda.’
‘We had blinis with caviar. There were tartines. We had sweetbreads in mushroom cream sauce. He said it was all on him. He said he was treating. There was roast artichoke topped with a sort of sly aiolí. Mutton stuffed with foie gras, double chocolate rum cake. Seven kinds of cheese. A kiwi glace and brandy in snifters you needed two hands to swirl.’
‘That coke-addled fag in his Morris Mini.’
The prosthetic film-scholar: ‘Fans do not begin to keep it all in the Great Convexity. It creeps back in. What goes around, it comes back around. This your nation refuses to learn. It will keep creeping back in. You cannot give away your filth and prevent all creepage, no? Filth by its very nature it is a thing that is creeping always back. Me, I can remember when your Charles was cafe with cream. Look now at it. It is the blue river. You have a river outside you that is robin-egg’s blue.’
‘I think you mean Great Concavity, Alain.’
‘I meant Great Convexity. I know what is the thing I meant.’
‘And then it turned out he’d put ipecac in the brandy. It was the most horrible thing you’ve ever seen. Everyone, all over, spouting like whales. I’d heard the term projectile vomiting but I never thought that I — you could aim, the pressure was such that you could aim. And out come his grad technicians from under the tablecloth’s like overhang, and he pulls out a canvas chair and clapper and begins filming the whole horrible staggering spouting groaning —’
This ultimate cartridge-as-ecstatic-death rumor’s been going around like a lazy toilet since Dishmaster, for Christ’s sake. Simply make inquiries, mention some obscure foundation grant, obtain the thing through whatever shade of market the thing’s alleged to be out in. Have a look. See that it’s doubtless just high-concept erotica or an hour of rotating whorls. Or something like late Makavajev, something that’s only entertaining after it’s over, on reflection.’
The striated parallelogram of P.M. sunlight is elongating in transit across the coop’s eastern wall, over bottle-laden sideboard and glass cabinet of antique editing equipment and louvered vent and shelves of art-cartridges in their dull black and dun cases. The mole-studded man in the equestrian helmet is either winking at her or has a tic. There’s the pre-suicide’s classic longing: Sit down one second, I want to tell you everything. My name is Joelle van Dyne, Dutch-Irish, and I was reared on family land east of Shiny Prize, Kentucky, the only child of a low-pH chemist and his second wife. I now have no accent except under stress. I am 1.7 meters tall and weigh 48 kilograms. I occupy space and have mass. I breathe in and breathe out. Joelle has never before today been conscious of the sustained volition required to just breathe in and breathe out, her veil recessing into nose and rounded mouth and then bowing out slightly like curtains over an opened pane.
‘Convexity.’
‘Concavity!’
‘Convexity!’
‘Concavity damn your eyes!’
The bathroom has a hook and a mirrored medicine cabinet over the sink and is off the bedroom. Molly Notkin’s bedroom looks like the bedroom of someone who stays in bed for serious lengths of time. A pair of pantyhose has been tossed onto a lamp. There are not crumbs but whole portions of crackers protruding from the gray surf of wopsed-up bedding. A photo of the phalloneurotic New Yorker with the same fold-out triangular support as the blank cartridge’s anti-ad. A Ziploc of pot and EZ-Widers and seeds in the ashtray. Books with German and Cyrillic titles lie open in spine-cracking attitudes on the colorless rug. Joelle’s never liked the fact that Notkin’s father’s photograph is nailed at iconic height to the wall above the headboard, a systems planner out of Knoxville TN, his smile the smile of a man who wears white loafers and a squirting carnation. And why are bathrooms always way brighter lit than whatever room they’re off? On the private side of the bathroom door she’s had to take two damp towels off the top of to close all the way, the same rotten old hook for a lock never quite ever seeming to want to fit its receptacle in the jamb, the party’s music now some horrible collection of mollified rock classics with all soft rock’s grim dental associations, the business side of the door is hung with a Selective Automation of Knoxville calendar from before Subsidized Time and cut-out photos of Kinski as Paganini and Léaud as Doinel and a borderless still of the crowd scene in what looks like Peterson’s The Lead Shoes and rather curiously the offprinted page of J. van Dyne, M.A.’s one and only published film-theory monograph.[81] Joelle can smell, through her veil and own stale exhalations, the little room’s complicated spice of sandalwood rubble in a little violet-ribboned pomander and deodorant soap and the sharp decayed-lemon odor of stress-diarrhea. Low-budget celluloid horror films created ambiguity and possible elision by putting ? after THE END, is what pops into her head: THE END? amid the odors of mildew and dicky academic digestion? Joelle’s mother’s family had no indoor plumbing. It is all right. She represses all bathetic this-will-be-the-last-thing-I-smell thought-patterns. Joelle is going to have Too Much Fun in here. It was beyond all else so much fun, at the start. Orin had neither disapproved nor partaken; his urine was an open book because of football. Jim hadn’t disapproved so much as been vacant with disinterest. His Too Much was neat bourbon, and he had lived life to the fullest, and then gone in for detoxification, again and again. This had been simply too much fun, at the start. So much better even than nasaling the Material up through rolled currency and waiting for the cold bitter drip at the back of your throat and cleaning the newly spacious apartment to within an inch of its life while your mouth twitches and writhes unbidden beneath the veil. The ‘base frees and condenses, compresses the whole experience to the implosion of one terrible shattering spike in the graph, an afflated orgasm of the heart that makes her feel, truly, attractive, sheltered by limits, deveiled and loved, observed and alone and sufficient and female, full, as if watched for an instant by God. She always sees, after inhaling, right at the apex, at the graph’s spike’s tip, Bernini’s ‘Ecstasy of St. Teresa,’ behind glass, at the Vittoria, for some reason, the saint recumbent, half-supine, her flowing stone robe lifted by the angel in whose other hand a bare arrow is raised for that best descent, the saint’s legs frozen in opening, the angel’s expression not charity but the perfect vice of barb-headed love. The stuff had been not just her encaging god but her lover, too, fiendish, angelic, of rock. The toilet seat is up. She can hear a helicopter’s chop somewhere overhead east, a traffic helicopter over Stor-row, and Molly Notkin’s shriek as an enormous glass crash sounds off in the living room, imagines her beard hanging aslant and her mouth ellipsed with champagne’s foam as she waves off the breakage that signals good Party, can hear through the door the ecstatic Melinda’s apologies and Molly’s laugh, which sounds like a shriek: