Chekhov's Firearm
The woman who played my torso and the man who played my tongue and the flayed rabbit that played my heart and the flayed rabbit that played my brain and the wall with flecks of shit on it that played my chest and the million tongues of grass licking at nothing that played my hair and the scorched dollhouse that played my genitalia and the suicidal movie star that played my lungs and the electrical outlet that played my mouth waited in the field for me to fire my gun.
The Fassbinder Diaries: Day 364
The film critic searches in the dewy weeds for her glasses. The sky above her spotted by pink and purple clouds. The film critic in silk pajamas tapes a postcard of a Neapolitan skull over his stricken and comatose desk. Outside it is snowing, great gusts of it swirling against the black mirror of the window. The film critic stands in a patch of tiger lilies looking for the switchblade a boyfriend had given her on her sixteenth birthday. The film critic feels the hair on his legs twitch in the dark. She wears a red raincoat and is thinking about the canvases Edward G. Robinson paints in Scarlet Street, works with jagged shadows and smashed daylight, his heart a charred wad of leftover beef. The film critic watches a short film in a cold movie theater, his eyes lit like city streetlamps. His memory occasionally feels like a series of white walls on a beach, their bottom halves puckered by gunfire and their upper halves faded by continual daylight. The film critic wears an emerald robe with a dragon on its back as she searches in the grass for the slender gin-flavored cigar she has dropped. She is twenty-three and thirty-six and forty-one and her most recent nightmares flash with a glacial light.
The Fassbinder Diaries: Day 733
The film critic passed by in the back seat of a blue Pontiac at the age of six, the radio playing, with the desert all around her. She counted cacti shadows until she fell asleep. Her forehead was warm, the window cold. The film critic drank Jim Beam as he rode quickly around on his bike, searching for the right address, or a part of the town that looked familiar. A bird chirped in a film set centuries ago, along the leafy outer boroughs of an empire. In the film critic’s most recent dream she made love to a high school boyfriend on a bed that was really the desert, a pink desert consisting of salt instead of sand. It burned their eyes and mouths and scraped away at their bare skin. Under their skin was a landscape of irregular beauty, like layers of stained marble. The film critic bought another postcard from the only café that remained opened in the town. A faded postcard and an empty café. In the backseat of a blue Pontiac, the radio going, shadows to the left and wind coming from the right. The angular paintings by Edward G. Robinson in Scarlet Street, the naked girl forced to eat shit with a fancy spoon in Salò. The first scenes in the film unfolding during a never changing dusk. The film critic talked to her mirror, the film critic spoke with his cat.
Footage
The film critic touched the blank spot where her thoughts continued to appear: the itchy thoughts and the ugly thoughts and the thoughts with pierced and stricken faces.
Part Four. The Crucifixion of Maria Braun
Winter Dance
Mieze is in a white summer dress and battered parka, she wears a red wig, a wig with curls at the shoulder, she hasn’t worn a wig in years and she is not sure why she is wearing one tonight, she is beside the jukebox dancing to Ray Charles. There is an icy winter light in her thoughts and a breezy winter night outside and a paper moon in the sky and an endless shadowy road extending through her mind. There is a voice singing in the middle of the hour. The voice of Ray Charles or someone who used to be called Ray Charles.
Franz is sitting in a chair, he is in jeans and a Nina Hagen T-shirt, and in his right pocket is a pack of gum, and in his left are his keys and a lighter and one joint and a notebook that includes the directions to a party they might or might not go to later in the evening. His hands have thought of other types of rooms. His left knee is scarred from a bike accident that occurred at the age of seventeen and his other knee is already in another town with other rooms, dreaming among other and warmer knees.
The bar window shining in the middle of the voice. Ray Charles singing from another millennium. The winter dance. The parka and wig and white summer dress dance. The ghost party dance. Mieze with two drunken arms raised and tongue tingling. Franz at the party he will never go to nor hear stories of nor forget about. The jukebox surrounded by winter air.
Midnight Movies
The mouth will swallow the finger. Then the next finger. Then the rest of the hand. The air will blow through the window and the sleeves. The siren sound will move through the wind and branches and the thoughts near the edge of town. The grass will grow through the fingers and out of the mouth. The film will play. The film has already played. Trees in the foreground and wind through the branches and wind against the theater walls. The mouth in the movie being red and anonymous and stricken. The mouth being old and homeless and chapped. The mouth surrounded by beard and wet melting snow. The thoughts blowing from the edges of the movie, torches lit, the villagers gathering.
Fat
In the garden small pockets of fat appeared under the trees. They quivered in the light and vibrated in the film. Then the pockets turned into fatty mouths. They salivated. They were fleshy and wormy and slick. None of us knew why or what they wanted or what thoughts they’d had or what memories they’d pursued in order to arrive here.
My girlfriend spent her most private hours whispering prayers in Pig Latin. Her gods were named after extinct flowers. There were televisions in our house tuned to the Red channel. It glowed with its red light. She lingered by the window and watched the garden grow extended tangles of hair. She ate fat and digested fat. I ate fat and digested fat. But other fats returned. Other hair and their memories. Pockets with saliva in the corners.
Another man loved her but we knew he was dead and often missing. His face quivered in the light of the airier gods. He said her shoulder was a gristle party. He said her hair had been longer than centuries. He said in Baltimore the last of spring. In New York the remainder of the fall. Our house digesting both fat and the memory of fat and gods growing hair in our corners.
She broke a mirror with her heel and left marks of blood for us to follow. The games consisted of screwdrivers and falsified Indian folklore and stories of slaves making slasher films in the forest, their shirts like clouds in a greased sky. We wondered how long we could sleep in a sleepless house and how much fat we could digest before the memory of fat faded.
The man who loved my girlfriend claimed to be a dying fish gasping in the middle of the floor and an untold chronicle of Christ and the meatiest part of Plato’s afterbirth. He warned us Plato’s sperm glowed in his mouth, the money shot of wisdom. And the fat thickening in the Baltimore sun and the fat glistening in the New York sun.