Lance Olsen

Head in Flames

for Andi,

sine qua non

The sadness will last forever.

— VINCENT VAN GOGH

Look: I am standing inside the color yellow.

Look: something wells up at the corner of Theo van Gogh’s vision as he bikes to work one morning one hundred and fourteen years later.

Look: the short fat filthy pig peddling among the herd of short fat filthy pigs in his faggot blue T-shirt faggot striped suspenders faggot gray jacket faggot tattered jeans.

The vast fields of ripe wheat in July.

A dreary Tuesday in November.

You stepping leisurely from the doorway into Allah’s will.

Afternoon sunshining in my chest. The high yellow note swarming. How the dusty heat sparkles the atmosphere with flecks of light.

Vincent van Gogh’s brother’s great grandson, peddling.

He’s where he’s supposed to be you where you’re supposed to be and this is how you bring two trajectories together.

How these elements unspool into a ravishing Sunday.

Peddling, Theo absentmindedly imagines himself a pudgy forty-seven-year-old puffer fish with short blond curls darting on an old black bike among a school of them on Linnaeus Street.

How nothing is unexpected any longer.

Not something you hear: something you inhabit. Its own acoustic body. Skin.

The cool fog gauzing Oosterpark ahead. Sky a dull vaporous aluminum. Air noisy with diesel fumes.

Waiting in the doorway until he reaches the end of this block and then you will simply walk into the future.

Auvers-sur-Oise: 1890.

Amsterdam: 2004.

Someday they will write about these things.

Look: this is as far as I’ve got. Perhaps this is all I have to say.

Theo already enjoying the idea of the cigarette he plans to light upon reaching his production company in fewer than ten minutes.

Look: just here just like this.

We must try to mature more quietly.

The nicotine inhalation. The energizing burn. Pleasure’s smoky rush.

Like this and nothing else.

Because everyone possesses talent at twenty-five, said Degas, that little French lawyer who doesn’t get enough sex. The difficulty is to possess it at fifty.

Already his fourth today.

Because in the end words don’t count.

Because pleasure is not necessarily happiness.

Yellow signs, red signs, green sliding by as the lively intersection pulls into sight.

They pretend they do but they don’t.

Dirt paths intersecting before my easel like a gigantic yellow cross among immense yellow widenesses.

The shop selling coffee beans. The glassfront pharmacy. Cozy woodlined Cafe ‘T Span with tables spread outdoors even this late into the shivery gray year. Sliding by.

They pretend language is spirit rising between your lips but it is really a bony black cat with a broken back heaped among garbage bags in the alley.

Timelessness wedging time in two.

Carolus Linnaeus: the staide Swedish father of taxonomy. That one. His street.

Waiting in the doorway thinking about how in grade school they said stand up Mohammed Bouyeri parse that sentence Mohammed Bouyeri conjugate that verb Mohammed Bouyeri and then looked surprised when Mohammed Bouyeri did.

The difficulty is to possess it at fifty.

Every organism tagged in its jar.

Thinking about how they smiled down at you cheeks in-sucked with amusement like you were one of those cleft-palette kids.

In town, people call me Monsieur Vincent as they civil by on the packed-earth lanes.

Cozy to a fault, these northern countries.

Because language can do anything that’s the danger not the other way around you have to be careful with it.

Out of familiarity, you see: Monsieur Vincent.

Gezellig.

Learning how to smile back politely.

Out of fondness.

Give me a shot of juniperish jenever, a bouquet of gaudy tulips, and a fucking sweet, they say, and I’ll be content.

But you were as Dutch as those faggots were as much them as they were themselves.

An ultramarine drill jacket sans collar, sans tie. Floppy straw hat. Baggy pants, beat-up shoes, rotting teeth, receding chin, butchered earlobe. At thirty-seven.

Son Lieuwe, twelve, eyes jarring blue as his father’s, told Theo across the breakfast table this morning (bright red coffee cup, boiled tan egg, pink slice of ham on toast) that he, Theo, stank like a human ashtray.

Because it isn’t what comes out of your mouth that gathers but the weight inside your fist.

Monsieur Vincent: a gardener, a fisherman.

Theo blinks in delight at the abrupt memory.

The weight inside your fist inside your pocket.

My ocean: this yellow. My flowerbed: these fields.

It doesn’t please that I’ve placed humans among the Anthro-pomorpha with the macaques and marmosets, Linnaeus pointing out, but man is getting to know himself.

You didn’t understand this and then you did.

Skin that you can hear.

Gezellig.

Standing in the doorway.

Here: how?

Still, Theo can think of worse. He can think of much worse.

You don’t need words to raise it.

If only I could remember what I have seen.

Tall white lampposts lining the street.

You don’t need words to bring His tongue down upon the faithless.

Because I have tried to make it simple.

Gezellig.

You don’t need words to teach.

Because I have tried to make it simple, and failed.

Inverted J’s frilled with empty flowerpots. Imagine spring: the colors.

You don’t need language to pull your fist from your pocket.

Again.

Up ahead: the brick church steeple, gold rooster weather-vaning atop the cupola.

How do words explain the way you felt standing beside your mother in the local bakery when you were seven listening to the hag behind the counter scolding her for not speaking Dutch properly?

Keeping my first toothache to myself for a week because I refused to admit that I had already begun to decay. At twelve.

Theo navigates around a slower cyclist, a young woman with backpack and black headscarf. He dings his little bell deferentially, glides past, computing what the day will hold for him.

How every month you have to help your father fill out government forms because he never learned how to read or write your face burning beside his at the kitchen table.

It could be said tat color in painting is like enthusiasm in life.

A dull caravan of meetings.

How you had to spell out to him what it meant when the parents of your best friend didn’t invite you to his birthday party.

If you practice—

The new article for his website, The Healthy Smoker. The phone call to smart, proud, quietly sexy Ayaan, nudging her to move forward with the next script.

How they shoved you into a black box at the back of their brains and actively forgot you there.

— you can see things more Japanese.

A leisurely afternoon holed up in the studio, editing, a-sea in shell-gray cigarette smoke.

Then you looked around and discovered all the others crowded into the same black box as you.

Lemon, flax, primrose.

The black spiked fence backed by unclothing trees hemming the park.

How your father couldn’t get his mind around what you were saying and then slowly he did and then the quick look in his eyes.

Blackbirds.

The somber gray miniature bunker of a pissoir to the left of the southeastern gates.

His eyes narrowed into recognition.

You can experience colors by their textures, smells, sounds.

The blue and white tram.

Their silent heat.

Dear Theo: If I fail here, what does my loss mean? — Your losing brother

Linnaeus: a poet who just happened to become a naturalist, August Strindberg remarking.

Your father’s taut stillness charging the room.

Straw, sand, saffron.

06/05: Theo’s in-progress Hitchcockian tribute to the limp-wristed baldy who was nine days away from becoming Prime Minister when—

You thought your father would hit you.

The mornings hovering in bed in my small room with the single skylight, refusing to rise because I wasn’t quite sure I was me.

Pim Fortuyn.

You braced yourself against his impending open hand.

Because I wasn’t sure I wasn’t.

On the other side of the fence, the dark pond punctuated with white birds.

You’re not the only one in the universe your father replied flat as the Dutch landscape.

Sometimes my lives fell on the same day.

Look: gulls lifting.

Quit complaining he said at last quit feeling sorry for yourself.

Staring at the ceiling, wondering if the memories that rushed me were in fact mine or a stranger’s from whom I caught them like a bad cold.

Herring gulls, black-backed, Mediterranean.

It’s easy your father said you get respect by earning respect and you earn respect by working like you mean it.

Still, Gauguin liked my sunflowers, once he had had a chance to study them a while.

Pim shot dead in the busy parking lot at the state-owned media park where he’d just given an interview, by one Volkert van der Graaf, a vegetarian and animal rights activist. At fifty-four.

Put your back into your life quit whining like a woman.

Gauguin painting me painting my sunflowers last November in Arles, the rumor of a summer backdrop at the bleak cusp of winter, telling me about his someday plans to sail to the tropics.

Gezellig: the bee buzz in its abdomen.

You began to snivel which made him ask Why did Allah give me this girl instead of a man what did I do to deserve it?

To live on fish and fruit, Gauguin explained, brush loving canvas.

The row of clunky black bicycles feeding at the trough of a bike stand.

Disgusted your father pushed past you out of the room wanting nothing to do with his son anymore.

Busy, Gauguin said. But interesting.

Six bullets pumped at close range into Pim’s head, neck, and chest — in the defense, van der Graaf later told the police, of threatened minks everywhere.

How do words explain how embarrassed you felt for your parents not because they missed what was going on but because they knew exactly?

Was I or wasn’t I that red-haired boy who modeled a clay elephant and then smashed it on the floor because his mother praised it more than he thought it strictly merited?

A vegetarian. An animal rights activist. Six shots to the head, neck, and chest.

The look in your mother’s eyes across the breakfast table as she tried to place what you’d become.

It is not easy to say.

Van der Graaf changing his story, declaring at his trial that he had actually killed Pim to protect Muslims who couldn’t protect themselves.

Because your parents knew exactly yet had to pretend the opposite because they were too proud to show just how humiliated they actually were?

There is the little red-haired boy whose parents sent him away to Mr. Provily’s boarding school in Zevenbergen twenty eternal kilometers north: the one standing in his suit on the establishment’s steps, waving goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, his mother and father’s carriage diminishing relentlessly.

Muslims, minks, and other vulnerable groups, listing van der Graaf.

Thinking about how your earliest recollections aren’t of an event but of a feeling—

Japonisme: the intense hues, the two-dimensional decorative patterns, the way the world motifs into design.

A vegetarian.

The need to watch out for your parents because others openly treated them like children.

The prints you happened across in Antwerp. How the moment you saw them your work jostled into something fuller.

Because you do what you have to do, if you want people to think about what you’ve thought.

How you and your friends were simply let loose on the streets as if in a Moroccan village because—

Twenty and twenty-five are bad enough, thirty sheer incubal lancination.

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.

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?

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.

Hey mate you eat cats and dogs?

Because it is mine, of course, I responded.

In the Catholic schoolgirl uniform with the bare midriff and gray bobby socks. The video. Yes. That one.

Khaled explaining how he began speaking to small groups in private flats and the back rooms of provincial shops like this.

The silvery snap startles the afternoon.

Blond pigtails. Pink ribbons.

How he’d fled Assad’s secular Syrian dictatorship flew to Frankfurt on a false passport how the German faggots refused to grant him asylum and so he had to look for another place to go.

The violent flinch slapping you back.

Lolita from Louisiana.

Explaining how he’d heard Holland was an easier country than Germany to operate in illicitly and so he crossed the border.

The weather happening inside my chest.

Theo caught up with her in the backseat of a New York taxi one morning. It was May. It was 2004. She was in the States to attend a friend’s wedding. Theo didn’t say hello. He didn’t apologize for the year’s radio silence. He just started talking.

Explaining how Muslims departing from the true faith are infidels who deserve to perish at the hands of believers.

The afternoon languaging around me.

It took half a block before Ayaan understood it was Theo on the other end of the line.

Muzzles.

The earsplitting gardens outside my window at Saint-Rémy.

He was going on about how he’d been invited to chair this big debate over the immigration question, only one of the participants, Abu Jahjah, who ran a group of young Arab men, said he would refuse to participate if Theo attended.

When you meet the unbelievers strike them in the neck the Quran urging.

Acute mania with hallucinations of sight that have caused you to mutilate yourself, the director explaining to me upon admission.

Can you imagine such a thing happening in Holland? Theo asked Ayaan, aghast. Who did this to our dumb bitch of a country?

The faithful do not take Jews and Christians as friends anyone who embraces them becomes one of them the Quran elucidating.

My opinion is that you, Monsieur, are subject to epileptic fits at very infrequent intervals, quite possibly complicated by the deleterious effects of absinthe.

Hit me baby one more time.

It is not you who slay them it is Allah moving through you.

The young man in the shabby suit stands before his first class of poor thirteen-year-old English boys at the small boarding school in Ramsgate, at a loss for what to say.

Before long, some of Jahjah’s gorillas started threatening him. It was more than Theo could bear.

Collars. Leashes.

Saint-Rémy: a medieval monastery made madhouse on the verge of a village hemmed by olive groves, cypress trees, and hot-breathed daymares.

On the next episode of his talk show, A Nice Chat, Theo called Jahjah the Prophet’s Pimp and told his gorillas to go fuck themselves.

The Muslim commander asking the caliph Umar after sacking Alexandria in 642 A.D. what to do with its library.

Each morning the no-longer young man waking in his cell, feeling inconsolably not bad.

What should I do now? Theo asked Ayaan.

The caliph responding of the library’s 700,000 volumes They will either contradict the Quran in which case they are heresy or they will agree with it in which case they are superfluous.

Dear Theo: Doctor Théophile Peyron, proprietor, is a naval man with no qualifications. The sum of my treatment consists of soaking in a tub of cold water for two hours twice a week. Afternoons, I pace the clotted garden. Evenings, I read

Shakespeare’s history plays. The food tastes moldy and filled with infinite sadness. —…

You’re a filmmaker, right? Ayaan answered. Go make a film.

And so they burned the books to heat bathwater for the soldiers.

Behind the faded green flowered curtains: the iron bars on his one tiny window, through which he painted the sun rising redly on the square field of wheat beyond.

A week later they met for lunch at a small Indian restaurant along Prinsengracht. Theo’s first words upon spreading his napkin over his lap: What kind of film?

Allah Akbar.

The no-longer young man never including the bars in his compositions.

Ayaan said she’d have to think about it. To make sure she did, Theo called her on her mobile several times over the next few weeks.

Blindfolds.

The white cap of a woman bending to reach for a dry branch.

Write a screenplay for me, Theo urged her. Any moron can write a screenplay. All you have to do is say stuff like Exterior, Day; Interior, Night. What’s so hard about that?

Khaled explaining how the first landing on the moon was faked by the CIA with the help of that famous Jew director Stanley Kubrick the agents involved murdered to erase the evidence.

If you could see the olive groves just now — the leaves, old silver, and silver gathering into green against the blue sky and the orange plowed earth — you would know there was no such thing as I.

A huge man with shaved head and nose ring gleaming goldly being led along the sidewalk by his black-and-white pocket dog with frantic unbendable legs.

Handcuffs.

You must get out of bed today, Monsieur, Dr. Peyron telling the no-longer young man with the scratchy blanket tugged over his head. You must learn to get a grip on yourself.

A lollipop-purple Vespa’s lawnmower engine bumble-beeing by.

Asking his congregation why four thousand Jews in New York decided to remain home on 9/11.

On whom? Monsieur Vincent querying muffledly.

Anything too stupid to be said is sung, Voltaire once quipping — and hence: the birth of opera.

Everyone knew Saddam was a Jew as well.

Dear Theo: I’m afraid I can’t sleep on this pillow. It stinks of dreams. Do you happen to have a spare you could part with? — Vincently Yours

And then: I think I may have something, Ayaan one evening calling to tell Theo.

The Americans who gave money to Saddam were also controlled by the Jews naturally.

Was I or wasn’t I that red-haired boy who every Sunday on his march to church to hear his father preach decelerated as he passed the headstone of his baby brother, Vincent, who had died one year to the day before he was born, and after whom he was named?

Theo was submerged in a patchouli bubble bath, cigarette in one hand, glass of single malt scotch in the other, warm washcloth over his closed eyes.

Sores boiling water peeling skin burning flesh dissolving bowels.

Perhaps this is all I have to say.

He splashed to cognition like a roiled seal breaching.

A fire that licks you forever because even as your flesh chars and your juices spit you form a new skin which then ignites in turn.

An artist spends his entire life trying to create thought instead of children.

I see this barefooted woman standing alone in the center of a room, Ayaan told him.

The Sheik everyone started calling him he knew so much.

It is July. It is 1869. There is a man who looks very much not unlike me sitting for the first time in Amsterdam’s old art museum in a gallery restless with Rembrandts.

She’s veiled, this woman, but her veil is fashioned from diaphanous black material, thereby challenging Allah to examine what he has created.

Thinking about how you invited Khaled to your flat in Amsterdam began introducing him to your friends.

Dark landscapes perturbed by uprooted trees below ominous skies.

On her body is written the Sura Fatiha, the opening verse of the Quran, which she starts reciting obediently.

The Sheik they said is so wise he knew five times more than even you Mohammed Bouyeri.

Rembrandt’s increasingly brash brushstrokes, pointing both to the painting of the painting and the paining of his hope.

In the name of Allah, the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful: Praise be to Allah, the Lord of the Universe, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful, Master of the Day of Judgment. You alone we worship, and You alone we ask for help...

Before long Jason and Jaime had established connections with jihadists in Spain and had plans in place to blow up the houses of parliament.

Theatrical chiaroscuro.

Her head lowers, eyes fix upon the prayer mat before her.

Purple bondage rope.

But it was the faces in his self-portraits that clung to the sitting man’s attention, how they hemorrhaged across a life from smirked youth with amok hair to backbroke age with bulbous nose and blasted brown eyes.

When she finishes the recitation, though, she does something extraordinary.

They appointed you the group’s intellectual you posted tracts under the name Abu Zabair.

A man on fire.

She raises her head to confront the camera’s lens with a strong steady gaze.

Weekends your friends and the Sheik himself gathering at your flat eating Pringles drinking black coffee cross-legged on the rug in front of your laptop watching the DVDs you made.

Here: how?

What should we call it? asked Theo, aslosh amid disintegrating bubble islands.

Compilations of mpegs you downloaded from ji-hadist websites public executions holy warriors wrapped in scarves and balaclavas beheading foreign unbelievers in orange jumpsuits.

Look: it is late afternoon, the sky ashing. I am lying on my back on a dirt path. I am trying to sit up, trying to rise, and then the world is whirlpooling.

Submission, Ayaan said: the meaning of the Arabic word Islam.

Is that him?

It is September. It is 1897. I—

Islam does not adapt to anything, you see. You must adapt to Islam.

Daniel Pearl Nicholas Berg Kim Sun-il.

Life being what it is, Gauguin noting, one dreams of revenge.

Oh baby, baby.

The women stoned strangled their throats cut.

It is January. It is 1882. On a prowl through The Hague’s brothels and back alleys, the man who could on a good day pass as my slightly healthier brother finds Sien on a lamp-lit corner, waiting for business.

On A Nice Chat, Theo always wore suspenders, chainsmoked, and, as a parting gift, presented his guests with little cactus plants.

The holy warriors wearing gloves so as not to defile their hands with the infidels’ blood.

It is October. It is 1876. There is a young man who doesn’t look completely unfamiliar preaching his first sermon at Reverend Mr. Slade-Jones’s mangy school in Isleworth.

Little cactus plants.

How you and your friends laughed at the kneeling faggots as they sometimes pled for their lives.

The title being Sorrow is Better than Joy.

I’m deeply religious, Theo explaining to one of his devout guests. I worship a pig. His name is Allah. Do you know him?

How sometimes they sat silently unaware of whether they were to be spared or dispatched until they flinched under the blade’s first slice.

The sermon turning out to be somewhat less than what might be referred to as a crowd-pleaser.

When I’m not with you I lose my mind Give me a—

Theo whispersinging as he fishes along.

Quranic recitations soundtracking on the videos as the infidels’ heads were sawn off.

The not completely unfamiliar young man nevertheless remaining undeterred.

Hit me baby one more time.

Although you were always taken aback by how relatively little blood was involved in the cleansings you would have expected more.

Dear Theo: Destroy all your books save for your Bible. — With a handshake in thought, Vincent

Thumbing idly through the newspaper over breakfast, Arcade Fire playing on the sound system, Theo happened across a piece about a new survey on religion in the United States, and his interest snagged.

A falcon hanging over desert scr—

When Monsieur Vincent was with Sien, he wasn’t himself. He decided that’s why he was so happy.

Ninety-two percent of Americans were confident of God’s existence, the survey reported.

The video quality never the best all smeary perhaps you were missing something it was difficult to tell.

Look at us turning our backs on the difficult moments, Doctor Gachet once commenting to me from behind his easel in his garden, apropos of nothing.

Pinkying free a ragged thread of morning ham from between two back teeth, Theo leaned forward.

The gargling-whistling noises suddenly abbreviated tended however to make up for the lack.

Groggy with piety is how the young man’s increasingly concerned sister Elisabeth described her brother during his visit home over the Christmas holidays.

Six out of ten prayed daily.

Afterward the holy warrior ritually wiping his gory knife twice on the shirt of his victim just as the Saudi executioners do.

The green fairy being another name for absinthe.

More believed in heaven than hell, conveniently.

How Nouredine spent his wedding night with his veiled bride on a mattress in your flat eating lightly buttered microwave popcorn and watching American contractors being slaughtered.

A sip of flaming licorice.

Eight out of ten in miracles.

The Shariah you wrote is a sacred independent sovereign system for life that cannot be under the authority of false human systems because it exists to wipe such systems from the face of the earth.

Gray is soft as surrender.

Six out of ten that God is quote a person with whom people can enter a relationship unquote.

To withdraw from the infidels means hating them, being their enemy, being revolted by them, loathing them, fighting against them with every f&er of your body.

The young man felt like an old man, refused to eat meat, got by only on bread and boiled vegetables, secretly flagellating his chafed back with a fat rope, sleeping on the floor of a cold shed behind his family’s house without a blanket.

It was the last statistic Theo encountered which tickled him most: that one in five of those identifying themselves as atheists also believed in God.

Eat halal food pray travel to Mecca embrace jihad but if you feel no hatred for the enemies of Islam you will always remain a heathen.

Biding his time for an augury, then biding his time some more.

Nature abhors a fact.

One afternoon the rumble in your staircase the rapping at your door the police raiding your flats arresting the Sheik four of your friends throwing them in jail but praise be to Allah they somehow overlooked you.

Yet the auguries remaining voiceless.

Theo laughing aloud on his bike at the very idea and wondering: the cute coed with the heart-shaped ass— where did she go?

The filthy bastards convinced you were nothing to them even though you tried to tell them differently I am Allah’s fiery sword you said That’s nice they said Now get the hell out of here.

Voiceless and invisible.

Theo casts a quick glance over his shoulder. She must have already been swallowed up by this morning’s commotion.

You delivered pizzas to your friends in their cells cursed the guards as you passed but they pretended you weren’t there the shits.

Sleeping on the floor of a cold shed behind his family’s house without a blanket — except that the young old man couldn’t sleep.

The shape, it occurs to him, of his ex-wife’s derrière.

No actual crime having been committed no laws broken they explained after a few days and so they let everyone go easy as that.

His sensorium finching in agitation against the night’s window.

Christianity: a tragedy with a happy ending, someone once called it.

Prowling your neighborhood like a cat caught in sleet.

Every day his head hungover with the effort.

One nearly gives up on music, thinks Theo, and then—

For us the closed travel agencies offering cheap flights to Morocco and Turkey.

Looking is not as simple as it looks, Pissarro once remarking beside me on the observation deck of the Eiffel Tower, his eyes locked against the whirligigging height.

— and then you stumble across a group like Arcade Fire and you relocate a reason to listen again.

For us my father’s unbearable servility.

A sip of flaming licorice: to help extinguish the waking blaze in the mind’s engine.

My son. Ours. A sign that we have shared the same space.

The dreary row houses with graffiti on their walls satellite dishes blooming like Teflon-gray mushrooms among clotheslines fluttering with sheets shirts djellabas.

It is April. It is 1879. The less-than-young man is in a metal basket hurtling down the gullet of the Marcasse coal mine in the Borinage district to see for himself the daily lives of the wretches and wrecks to whom he will preach.

Theo understanding he doesn’t miss her so much as he misses the person he used to be when he was with her.

Grim women in dark headscarves leaking from the supermarket bulky plastic grocery bags hanging from each arm.

Five hundred meters above, daylight shying to a star in an otherwise joltingly black sky.

The thought of Theo having just finished a thirteen-part series for Dutch TV called Najib and Julia: his retelling of Romeo and Juliet.

Five or six men your age hanging around the scruffy kebab joint in thigh-length T-shirts baggy pants baseball caps waiting for something they couldn’t name even if you asked them.

Sour air. Water seepage.

This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it, John Adams once commenting.

Is that—

The miners’ lamps glistening off wet stone walls.

Najib: the clever young man of Moroccan descent living in one of Amsterdam’s dish cities, delivering pizzas to save enough money to attend university. His father’s health botched from his years at the factory.

No.

The unyoung man nonlived, like the miners, in one of the ramshackle huts scattered through the woods and along the muddy dirt roads.

Najib’s mother bewailing her fate of being forced to live in this infected land. His sister, in jeans and headscarf, lounging on the couch, watching Lebanese pop groups on MTV.

It’s my house I paid for it I own it it’s mine now get—

In any case, it was lovely to have known him.

Julia: the cute young Dutch woman from a wealthy family living in an expensive part of The Hague, hoping to be chosen for the national field hockey team. Her father a policeman who married above his station. Her mother strung out on a series of New Age fads and the prim rose garden she keeps out back.

You don’t need me your father saying I don’t need you.

He handseled his warm clothes to them, dressed in a tatty army jacket and crumpled hat, ceased washing the coal dust from his face.

Floris, Julia’s lanky blond trainer, is in love with her. She doesn’t happen to share his sentiments.

You standing there in the kitchen feeling your father’s eyes hating you.

Such unorthodox behavior putting off his mission sponsors who refused to renew his appointment, explaining in a letter to him he quote lacked God’s oratory gift unquote.

One afternoon Julia enters a clothing store.

The devil be with you for this uselessness you’ve become your father saying.

Don’t worry yourself, Pissarro confiding as we rambled along the duckshit green Oise one spongy May afternoon, hands knotted behind our backs like a pair of ancient philosophers. God takes care of imbeciles, children, and artists.

A shop girl is busy harassing Najib, accusing him of stealing, saying: All fucking Moroccans are fucking thieves. Julia admires how calm Najib remains, how he refuses to allow his dignity to falter before the shop girl’s loathing.

You have been the greatest disappointment in my life if only I had never been burdened with this woman of a son what evil did I commit to bring on such a punishment?

I sold a painting once.

When the shop girl finally huffs and wanders off, Julia approaches Najib with a compliment.

Feeling your stereotypical father turning you into another stereotype.

Once.

They exchange phone numbers. They arrange a date.

And then—

Once.

Enraged by Julia and Najib’s augmenting relationship, Floris attacks his rival in the street, knocks him from his scooter, kicks him as he tries to regain his footing. Theo loves this scene. The way the music works. The way the light tinks off chrome.

And then it is the last night and it is Ramadan and you are sitting cross-legged with your friends in your flat.

To Anne Boch, the Belgian painter’s sister, for four hundred francs.

Do well, and—how does that line go?

A time for fasting prayer good deeds.

Dear Theo: I would like to write you about many things, yet I feel in the end such an endeavor is useless, yet I keep writing. Why? —V.

Do well, and you will have no need of ancestors, Voltaire observing.

Is it—

It is February. It is 1890. No, that’s—

Julia’s father and Floris’s insisting the couple stop seeing each other.

Talking about the old days over lentil soup garbanzo beans diced tomatoes chopped celery cinnamon cumin turmeric cilantro leaves.

Some of these—

Najib’s family horrified by their son dating an unbeliever, his mother panicky he will elope with one just like his older sister did — and then what will others think of the woman?

How you used to get high tell crazy stories watch every movie by Angelina Jolie Brad Pitt Jodie Foster.

Four hundred francs.

The showdown taking place on Julia’s father’s yacht: a struggle between Floris and Najib exploding.

Belly-laughing at the way things turned out. What riches.

Somewhere in the midst of it, Floris shoves his rival. Hard.

All the possibilities available to you and here you are living this one praise be to Allah.

Look:

Najib tumbling back over the railing.

Sometime after midnight Rashid and Ahmed and you strolling along the Sloterplas pond a few blocks away from your flat just like—

It is early evening, the sky bruising.

Unable to swim, Najib splashing wildly, crying out for help.

— like a trio of ancient philosophers plugged into their iPods.

I am—

How Floris hesitates, suspended.

You stopping long enough to point up at the amazing sky.

I am—

His enemy slipping under.

How peaceful you saying like everything has finally arrived in its rightful place.

I am lying on my back on a dirt path, a squall inside my rib-cage, then I am stumbling through the dusk down into town.

Julia’s family refuses to permit their daughter to attend Najib’s funeral.

Each of you casually fingering your ear buds back into position and returning to the Quranic prayers cycling in your heads.

My legs sans sinews.

Several weeks later Julia drives to the beach at sunset, exits her car, and, still clothed, wades into the North Sea.

Because nothing else needed to be said anymore.

My arms no longer my arms.

The gray-foamed waves veiling her head.

The broken-backed cat.

A nail glowing bluely in the center of my chest.

A choppy surface and nothing else.

How do words explain the way you feel thinking about what it must have been like for your father to step off the train at the Central Station in 1965?

Dear Little Brother: You don’t need words to bring God’s tongue to those around you. — Your second selfing

Part empty-headed melodrama, part obvious propaganda, the reviewers called it.

An outsider cooped among outsiders in some cheap hotel in some uninterpretable country willing to do whatever it took in order to provide for his family back home.

Hoping.

All the intellectual resonance of a pop song.

The sanctimonious Dutch.

Yellow and blue irises vitaling the sides of the road even at this hour.

But interesting.

The faggots boasting about their long history of tolerance while willfully forgetting the opportunism wrapped up inside it the indifference Welcome to our country now shut the fuck up and scour our fucking toilets you fucking muzzies.

It is so easy to finish things, Toulouse-Lautrec once saying to me over a pipe in a Montmartre café. Nothing is simpler than to complete paintings in a superficial sense. Never does one lie so cleverly as then.

The elfin scriptwriter, Justus van Oel, urging Theo to conclude the series on a slightly more heartening note.

Diaperheads sand niggers camel jockeys.

The thatched roofs bobbling into view.

That’s just how he phrased it: a slightly more heartening note.

The Huguenots the Surinamese the Turks it didn’t matter.

Notre Dame d’Auvers-sur-Oise: sober, somber, heavy gray Gothic despite its peaked stained glass window with Mother and Child and crimson and cobalt splashes.

Perhaps Najib’s and Julia’s mothers could meet somewhere, Justus proposing — a café, say; a park bench — to console each other for the loss of their kids.

Yet even three fourths of the filthy Jews living here at the beginning of World War II found themselves by the end herded into the next life.

Taking in its dead mass through closed eyes feels like living inside a stone.

You know, Theo, Justus elaborating: through tragedy, reconciliation; through adversity, triumph.

We were all the same power-hosing out their oil tankers.

Pigeons fluffing cooily in the thick moss across the church’s slate roof.

Suggesting, Theo rewording, that one day Muslims and Christians, Moroccans and Dutch, will learn to exist in peace?

Laboring in their steel factories asphalting their highways.

Grumpy Gauguin in Arles: depressed, ill, in debt — but painting.

Justus shaking his head yes over his pipe at an outdoor café on the leafy canal.

Makak they called us.

It was difficult not to hug him, love him exactly for what he wasn’t.

Ah, Theo replied, I see what you mean. He banged down his empty scotch tumbler. Absolutely not.

A kind of monkey.

Love him for what he might have been.

There must be zero room left for hope.

Hey Osama they’d say come here.

It was difficult not to shadow him through the shadowy streets, razor in fist.

Just like in life.

Come here Abdul.

Randy Toulouse-Lautrec in Montmartre:

Sans McMysticism.

You don’t need words to explain how your father’s friends felt when they realized there were no longer any jobs left even here even under those miserable conditions.

Adult torso roosting atop moppet legs.

Sans our little invisible playpal God, who aren’t in heaven, hollow be Thy name.

Your father watching Moroccan bakeries Turkish kebaberies coffee houses spreading through what was suddenly his neighborhood.

Pince-nez, tidy beard, spindly cane: the inbred issue of Comte Alphonse and Comtesse Adèle, first cousins.

Because you do what you have to do, if you—

Because even the old working-class Dutch didn’t want to live anywhere near your kind anymore.

The syphilitic dwarf with hypertrophied genitals, Gauguin referring to him as.

We had fun, her derrière and I.

Religious tolerance being how they describe it.

And a taste for his own invention, Tremblement de Terre, with his buttered breakfast croissant.

The Amalfi coast.

My father and mother stranded on this desolation linked to the homeland by satellite dishes food and the memory of a memory of belief.

Tremblement de Terre: Henri’s Earthquake: half absinthe, half cognac.

Following dinner on the heated terrace at Roberto’s in the Amsterdam Hilton, Theo let his hand linger upon smart, proud, quietly sexy Ayaan’s shoulder after helping her with her coat.

The kind of tolerance that makes you feel small stupid shut out of something you don’t even want to be a part of.

Meeting Toulouse-Lautrec for the first time as we studied figure drawing at Fernand Cormon’s studio shortly after my arrival in Paris.

He didn’t mean to do it and then he did.

You striving so hard to become one of them that without warning you realized you were no longer the man reflected in the shop windows you passed.

Preposterously proper Professor Cormon in his frockcoat, drudging on his ladder at his large historical canvases of prehistoric lake dwellers.

History being the shared science of our ignorance and un-happiness, someone pointing out.

You fitting in too well too easily was the problem.

I am swaying in place in front of Notre Dame d’Auvers-sur-Oise, listening to the ghosts of miners coughing beneath the soles of my defeated workman’s boots.

Ayaan discretely stepping out from under, leaving Theo’s hand to levitate, puzzled, while she continued with what she had been saying as if everything had always been in its rightful place.

Become who you’ve been all along the Sheik telling you over a slice of DiGiorno four-meat pizza you could smell the garlic.

Poppies so intensely orange you can hear their colors.

Can we ever really ruin anything except the possibility of love?

If this is tolerance what exactly is its opposite?

Tinfoil shrillness.

Because most people’s tombstones should read: Died at 30. Buried at 60.

Your own sister confiding one evening last spring as you ratted your way through the city When I make love to my boyfriend I get into a panic but it you know feels so good you still do it even though it’s forbidden by Allah and everything.

On my knees, holding my bloody chest.

The two university girls, one blond, one brunette, at the party at that shit of a director’s spaciousness.

Your own sister.

It is January. It is 1882. Prowling through The Hague’s brothels and black alleys, the fellow who could on a good day pass as my slightly healthier brother finds Sien, undone at thirty-two, pregnant, face a smallpox wreck, holding her five-year-old daughter’s hand on a lamp-lit corner, waiting for business.

Holed and coked up in the second-floor loo, giggling fun-nygassedly, confounded by the intricacies of the blonde’s bra snaps.

Who were those people to pretend they were your parents?

Dear Theo: A woman must breathe on you for you to be a man. — Your fruitless sibling

The brunette still wore braces.

You could hear all the doors slamming behind you.

What else could the stoop-souled fellow do except offer to take her in?

Someday you’re going to weep what you sew, Theo’s ex noting, apropos of nothing, as they postprandialed the Tuileries.

How a few hours ago you watched from your living-room window while a pasty glow made an incompetent attempt to suffuse the pasty gray.

For what she might have been.

Theo’s stunning middle-aged Vietnamese tart, Tam, in her black back-seam stockings, silk gloves, high heels, and thoroughly nothing else every Thursday in the Red Light District.

How you ate two strawberry Pop-Tarts with a glass of milk on the couch beside Ahmed and how almost without noticing you were done eating.

Sien was not nice. Sien was not good. But neither was I.

Some people get expensive haircuts, some manicures, Theo enlightening one of his ecclesiastical interviewees. I happen to get well-laid on a reliable basis, thank God.

Ahmed slouching back to sleep and when you were able to think again you were peddling along Overtoom.

Still, she accompanied me and, for a year, more or less, give or take, we built ourselves a minor world.

Tam tickling Theo stretched out pudgily on the unmade bed, belly wubbling in glee.

The weight inside your fist inside your pocket.

A little family in a little flat — this is what we made of ourselves: Sien, her girl Maria, and, come July, her carmine-cheeked Willem screeching in the cradle.

Stink of the jasmine air freshener shaped like a Buddha dangling in a corner of her cubicle.

We have all been mentally disappeared the Sheik informing you over a Philly-steak-and-cheese Hot Pockets.

Monsieur Vincent first believing in God, and then less so, and then simply nostalgiaing after His goneness.

The middle-aged teacher with pixie hairhack Theo met after a school play in which Lieuwe cameoed as a laconic linden with cardboard trunk and construction-paper leaves.

Thinking about the last time you roamed the crowded neighborhood streetmarket teeming with Moroccans Turks Surinamese plying their wares.

Dear Theo: When you wake up in the morning and find yourself not alone, but rather see a fellow creature lying beside you, it makes the universe seem so much friendlier. — The last Vincent left

Oh baby, ba—

Egyptian pop music blasting from CD stalls Hindu film tunes from DVD stores all that life.

The bottomless depths in which I slept those days, eyeless fish tummying the sea floor.

This film’ll be a cinch to pull off, Theo telling Ayaan as he guided her arm into her coat sleeve. Trust me.

Humus couscous mangoes vats full of yogurt-and-cucumber.

When Gauguin accused me of humorlessness, I advised him to examine the horizon of my Peach Blossoms in the Crau. That, Paul, I said, is where you will detect, tucked among the insignificant French hills above the quaint cottages and peach trees in white blossom, a Lilliputian version of Mount Fuji.

The Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and Nancy Drew being the first books Ayaan fell in love with as a girl in Kenya, she took Theo back by reporting over her shallow bowl of tagliatelle alla carbonara and glass of Merlot.

You having cycled this route repeatedly because there was no room for surprise.

Always look harder, Paul.

Because they spoke to her, Ayaan said, of imagination, adventure, independence.

Because you know exactly what you are doing.

It is October. It is 1883. The man who once could have passed as my slightly healthier brother gently closing the door to the couple’s flat behind him, peeling away one skin, slipping into another.

Because they represented the inverse of her grandmother’s tales of suspicion and danger.

Because you know exactly how.

In love perhaps too strong a formulation for what he might have been with Sien.

Lucky person: the meaning of Ayaan in Somali.

Because this is—

Depressed, ill, in debt.

I mean, said Theo over his creamy tiramisu, why write a fucking string of grant proposals? Let me just take care of it myself. Jesus. It’s not like we’re trying to make the goddamn Titanic or something, right?

The shop selling coffee beans the pharmacy with its glass front.

Sien at some point having decided to reoccupy her position on that corner next to that gas lamp, apparently.

On the glittery nightstreet, Theo performing a goofy joyjig before his new collaborator, scarlet scarf serpent-ing behind him.

Air noisy with diesel fumes.

More or less behind my faux brother’s bent back.

The nicotine inhalation. The ener—

8:36, the clock in the shop window selling washing machines announcing.

While my faux brother minded her children.

The Dirty Paper: title of the homemade pamphlet Theo produced in primary school.

Jubilant faces of Palestinian kids in east Jerusalem.

Because he didn’t know what else to do.

Its principal focus being on legion satisfactions to be savored in matters concerning shit and piss.

On 9/12.

It’s not exactly as if you’ve been our breadwinner, dearest, Sien reminding him from her chair in the corner, elbow on knee, palm on cheek, stare on floor.

The periodical running to a robust two issues.

Hoping.

It’s not exactly as if you’ve been the man of the house.

Pleasure’s smoky rush.

Motorists honking horns in Nablus gunmen firing assault rifles in elation into the chalky air.

How Monsieur Vincent put down his pencil one morning, picked up a brush, put down his sketchbook, propped up a canvas, and everything became something else.

Theo’s headmaster’s expression as the monocled mongoose thumbed through it: there would never be anything more electrifyingly rewarding than that.

Your sister’s wild eyes as you slowed down in search of a parking space eased in set the brake reached over the gearshift and backhanded her across her filthy mouth.

This breath and that.

Stupid little suburban middle-class shock.

You could have done anything just then a corner of her lower lip swelling a fingernail-sized smear of blood across it.

Monsieur Vincent: an as-if painter. For fewer than nine years.

Theo, ten, making his directorial debut: an 8mm film of his friends eating excrement, the discomfortingly convincing special effect courtesy of pulped ginger-snaps.

You fucking whore you saying to her calmly you fucking little whore as you sidled back into traffic.

Nine. 1881–1890.

Theo, seven, regularly standing on a bench in the garden, in Napoleonic solitude, booming impromptu speeches at quote my fellow countrymen unquote to the shrubbery.

Crowds hiving the streets of refugee camps in Lebanon the West Bank waving Palestinian flags distributing sweets bull’s-eye America and no Rambo to save the day this time.

Civilization will not attain perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.

Wassenaar, Theo’s boyhood neighborhood: a hushed cosmos of rolling lawns, white villas, ambassadorial residences, gravel drives, thatched roofs, stone lanterns, porcelain tea cups, good books, sturdy gates.

Your own sister.

Émile Zola once proclaimed.

Pink ribbons. Blond pigtails.

An HS2000 the Turk teen selling it to you referring to the merchandise as.

Look: Monsieur Vincent is approaching the inn, evening sky gyring purple, black, and yelloworange, wobbly buildings blousing at him.

Theo’s clan distended with socialists trailing aristocratic pedigrees.

You spoke for five minutes it was a relatively simple exchange.

Dear Theo: She has never seen what is good, and so how can she be that? — Undoingly V.

Better this by far, he supposes, than the other thing.

They told you to meet him in Vondelpark near the bridge leading to the gazebo on the small island in the middle of the pond.

Monsieur Vincent shuffling, bowed unremarkably, palming his upper abdomen as if with niggling heartburn.

Theo’s uncle refused to sign the loyalty oath required by the Nazis during the War, joined the Resistance, forged papers, hid Jews, and, days before the War’s conclusion, was executed among the lunar dunes near the North Sea.

Polymer-framed magazine-fed striker-fired he explained with obvious pride.

The Ravoux family, proprietors, relaxing over a bottle of Merlot on their café terrace after the weekend’s hustle, fixes on him faltering up the street.

Theo’s grandfather tossed into a concentration camp for working on an underground newspaper while abetting Jews, and his instinctive reaction upon being released in 1944: to resume his illegal activities straightaway.

Cost-effective reliable innovative.

Madame Ravoux half-rising from her wicker chair.

How, Sunday mornings, Theo’s family parked around the living-room fireplace to read aloud, not from the Bible, but from Voltaire.

Originally used by law enforcement in Croatia.

Dear Theo: It often seems to me that the night is much more alive and richly colored than the day. —V., undone

Jellyfish music: the stuff you hear everywhere these days.

A product you can trust.

Monsieur Vincent, she saying, suspended above her seat, we were anxious. We are happy to see you return. Have you perhaps had some sort of difficulty?

How they tuned in at 9:45 a. m. to the radio station featuring a member from the Society of Humanists discussing how one might live a spiritual life sans the dual barbiturates of God and His Chump Off The Old Blank.

Allah Akbar the Turk teen saying before mixing among other pedestrians along the path and evaporating.

No, I heard Monsieur Vincent’s voice responding, but I have—

Jellyfish music, and, next, lung-tensingly: Arcade Fire.

Carpet pilot.

But I have—

Theo’s article for The Healthy Smoker this morning will call attention to a bracing—

Pube face dune coon.

I have—

— a bracing statistic: by 2015, fifty-two percent of Amsterdam’s population will be of foreign origin, the majority Muslim.

Papa Ganoush.

Monsieur Vincent was unable to introduce a period to his sentence-in-progress.

The same being the fate for Europe in general. 2015.

Waiting in the doorway thinking about how you already knew what you were going to write before you began how it spilled from the very center of your Mohammedness.

How I sometimes believed that I sometimes believed.

All men are born with a nose and ten fingers, Voltaire penning, but no one is born with a knowledge of God.

Your sister’s lower lip puffing.

Monsieur Vincent crossed the hall laboriously, laboriously commenced his climb to his room.

Theo’s article will argue no religion or minority should be immune to censure or ridicule.

Blood smear or lipstick smear it was difficult to tell which in the flickery late-night streetlights.

The golden age has not passed, Signac once observing as we explored the carcass of the Roman amphitheatre in Arles. It lies in the future.

Why should we accept such racist notions as the one presuming Westerners are the only people capable of dissenting from their traditions, Muslims somehow too backward to think for themselves?

Graping like a tick feeding on the corner of her mouth.

The Potato Eaters: I sometimes judged that I had accomplished so much.

Noticing how the authorities have failed to—

9mm.

I sometimes judged that I hadn’t.

— have failed to confront the Islamic danger here, Ayaan saying, glass of wine poised before her lips, helps me better understand, I think, why so many Dutch collaborated with the Nazis.

The inside measurement of the gun barrel.

Artist being, not a profession, but a condition.

Jarring blue eyes.

Open letter to Hirsi Ali you wrote in the name of Allah the Beneficent the Merciful—

The peasant family — three women, two men — sitting around a table in a murky room lit only by a single overhead lamp, everything thick-brushed bistre and bitumen highlighted with a weird soapy green.

Lieuwe balled up in bed, delighted—

Shedding your Western clothes your faithless friends.

Noses and knuckles knobby as the tubers the peasants are eating.

You Europeans do not appreciate what you have, she saying softly. This is your real weakness.

There is no aggression except against the aggressors.

Skin the color of dusty unpeeled potatoes.

You seem incapable of asking yourselves if tolerance has limits, and, if so, what those limits might look like.

Dear Mrs. Hirsi Ali since your appearance in the Dutch political arena you have been constantly busy criticizing Muslims you are not the first not the last to have joined the crusade against us.

All the studies of them through the winter: oil sketches, lithographs, and then—

And so here you are, faced with the end of a way of life full of humor and cabaret, where it is natural to risk offence without the fear of violence.

It seems you are blinded by your own burning unbelief Mrs. Hirsi Ali and in your rage are unable to see you are just one more instrument of the real enemies of Islam.

— another failure.

How does it feel?

Mrs. Hirsi Ali I don’t blame you for this as a soldier of evil you are simply doing your job.

After some hesitation, Monsieur Ravoux rose to his feet and stole to the staircase to see if he could hear anything, yet all above him was hush.

Theo, seventeen, gaining on his bicycling teachers in his yellow Mini Cooper and splashing them as he swished past, then raising his hand in a gesture of nonchalant wonder suggesting he mustn’t have seen the culprit puddle approaching.

This letter is God willing an attempt to stop your evil and silence you forever may it cause your mask to fall off.

To hell with perspective.

And, without warning, Ayaan recounting to Theo mat-ter-of-factly how, when she was six, her father in jail for his political views, her mother absent for long stretches, her grandmother resolved she would respect the old traditions, and so she prepared a special table for Ayaan, her sister, and her brother in the bedroom.

I would like to begin by mentioning your recent proposal to screen Muslims regarding their ideology on job applications whose implementation has revealed the rotten face of your masters.

Sometimes that’s all you can hope for: one failure leading to others, interestingly.

Imagine the spring. The colors.

It is a fact that Dutch politics is dominated by many Jews the product of Talmudic Schools.

Look: Monsieur Vincent is lying very still on his mattress, arms by his sides, eyes shut, curious to see what he will dream next.

Ayaan’s grandmother, poisoned by what life had done to her, was unusually cheerful all week long.

A curved machete too.

The process of making us feel small in the right way, perhaps being one function of art.

When the day arrived, Ayaan recounted, aunts filled my house.

A curved machete and a smaller kitchen knife.

Your shadow summarized by the moon.

Some I knew. Some I had never seen before. The atmosphere was merry. I wasn’t frightened. My grand mother assured me I had been dirty. Now it was time to be cleansed.

This is the saying of Rabbi Simon ben Yohai—

Number 5, my parallelogram kingdom: up a winding flight of stairs, across a narrow landing, the first of two doors on the left.

They ushered me in, lifted me onto the table.

— even the best gentiles must be killed what do you think of that you are part of a Jew government that pleads for genocide.

The green and gray walls.

They eased me onto my back and three women held me down. That’s when I realized something bad was going to happen.

There will come a day when one soul will not be able to help another.

Twenty-four wooden planks comprising my floor.

My grandmother leaned toward me, telling me to spread my legs and grit my teeth.

A day of horrible tortures you wrote which will go together with the terrible cries pressed out from the lungs of the unjust and on that great day the atmosphere will be rife with FEAR.

I counted them, and I counted them again, just to be sure.

If God created us in his own image, Voltaire proposing, we have more than reciprocated.

There is one certainty of existence that everything comes to an end even the blade of grass sticking out of dark earth touched by sunlight and rain will ultimately rot into dust and disappear.

One cupboard. One chair. One steel-framed bed.

There was a man in the room: a scrawny blacksmith who wore a thin, scruffy beard. As my eyes fell on him, he produced a pair of scissors.

When the sun will be rolled up.

One pitcher. One washbasin. One chamber pot.

Everyone commenced chattering.

When the stars will fall.

One window set in the ceiling that ogles out onto brick wall and delft-blue rectangle.

I tried to writhe free, but couldn’t.

And when the sea will be brought to a boil.

A white sunlight splinter slicing across the floor.

The man stepped forward, reached between my thighs, and began jabbing and tugging at my clitoris as if he were milking a goat.

And when the girl who was buried alive will be questioned about every sin for which she was punished.

3,50 francs a day.

I howled in disbelief that they could do this to me, that no one was on my side.

And the pages will be flung open.

Linseed oil. Turpentine.

The scissors descending between my legs.

And Hell will be set aflame.

Cigar smoke.

The sound of gristle crunching.

On that day the soul will know what it has performed.

Smoldering coal from the stove in the Ravoux’s restaurant below.

The pain leoparding inside my skull.

On that day brother will flee from brother.

A delicate flatus of manure from the street.

It is just this once in your life, my grandmother whispered in my ear by way of encouragement.

And the mother from the father.

Bitter hay. Bitter urine. Baking bread.

Be strong, girl, she said.

And the woman from her children.

I read Hans Christian Andersen to my students to show them how to be dazzled.

My panic, my outrage, my shame cramming that room with noise.

And every one of them on that day shall possess an occupation which is enough for them.

Their favorite story: “What the Moon Saw”: how the world appeared from the point of view of an orbiting satellite.

The scrawny blacksmith scissoring off my inner labia and clitoris.

Of course you as an infidel extremist don’t believe in such things do you Mrs. Hirsi Ali?

3,50.

Make your Bibi proud, she whispered.

I challenge you with this letter to prove that you are right.

That’s it. That’s all.

It went on and on.

Mrs. Hirsi Ali you wish Death if you are really convinced you are correct because only if you wish Death are you being truthful.

Still, I sold a painting once, and three were exhibited in the Paris Salon des Artistes Indépendants.

Another blue and white tram grating through the inter—

Those who never wish to die are afraid of what their hands have brought forth.

Three.

Theo, humming, glances down at his watch.

Islam has withstood many enemies and persecutions yet your crusades have only served to fan our flames of belief.

It was March. It was 1888. I remember.

And then came the sewing shut.

Islam is like dead plants that form into a diamond through years of high temperatures and pressure a hard stone that will defeat any attempt to break it to pieces.

I think I remember.

A long dull needle prodding clumsily against my outer lips, then piercing through.

Give us death to give us happiness.

It is April. It is 1888. The not unfamiliar painter, inspecting his morning’s work, notices his brushstrokes have come to enjoy no system whatsoever.

Prodding and piercing through again.

You Mrs. Hirsi Ali are an intellectual terrorist.

Pink peach trees, whiteyellow pear, purple plum: he has shocked his canvas with slashes of verve.

The scrawny man bent over me. He snipped off the thread with his teeth.

You are a free-speech fundamentalist.

Listen—

To this day, I can’t forget his breath.

The heavens and the stars will receive the news.

I want to say someone is speaking to me.

It smelled like chicken shit.

AYAAN HIRSI ALI YOU WILL SMASH YOURSELF TO BITS AGAINST ISLAM!

Monsieur Vincent leaving behind patches of quick thick paint wherever they fell among patches of uncovered fabric.

And next he was done.

There will be no mercy shown to the purveyors of injustice.

Aesthetic savageries, he referred to them as.

How the room frisked with celebration.

Be forewarned that the death you are trying to prevent will surely find you.

I am tempted to say, he jotted Bernard, the result is so disquieting that it will be a godsend to those arriving at painting with fixed preconceptions about technique.

My brother had gone before me, Ayaan explained. My sister would go after.

I surely know that you O America will be destroyed.

Indiscretion perhaps being one function of art.

Coffee in a bright red cup.

And I surely know that you O Europe will be destroyed.

One of the most beautiful things to do is paint darkness.

The blacksmith must have slipped several times during the procedure because, just before I passed out, I became aware of deep scores across my thighs.

And I surely know that you O Holland will be destroyed.

Look: Monsieur Vincent is lying crooked, curled into himself, knees to the chin, listening to someone else’s voice trying to infiltrate his moanage.

Hours later I awoke to discover my legs slicked with blood.

And I surely know that you O unbelieving fundamentalists will be destroyed.

Popularity is always a bad accident.

My legs had been tied together, my grandmother elucidating affectionately as she stroked my hair, to prevent me from moving them: to expedite the formation of my scar, you see.

And I surely know that you O Hirsi Ali will be destroyed.

Mouth cloudage.

As I mended, the flash of pain when I urinated was sharp as the mutilation itself, again and again.

You signed it—

Yes: the voice is saying—

So I wear this thick, bumpy scar between my legs, Ayaan telling Theo as if perhaps commenting on a bland bowl of rice before her on the table.

— The Sword of Unified Belief

Listen—

When Theo, thirteen, set off firecrackers in the middle of his math class one afternoon, his parents were asked to locate a different school for their son.

The Sword of Unified Belief and then Ahmed was slouching back to sleep and you were peddling along Overtoom into headlines.

What seems to be the problem? Monsieur Ravoux is asking. Are you ill?

I don’t want to be a cretin of habit when I grow up, being Theo’s answer when his mother and father demanded to know why their son had done such a thing.

The kids’ jubilant faces.

It is September. It is 1888. To paint outside in the dark, Monsieur Vincent has rigged a hat rimmed with candles. His burning crown, he calls it.

Theo scrutinizing his hand lingering on her shoulder.

You hate the people you are trying to save exploit Islam to further your own ends and expect us to take it sitting down Mrs. Hirsi Ali.

Homo sapiens being the only species to have created God.

I VOTED for you!

Only we won’t take it sitting down we know what this feels like we have known for fourteen centuries.

To have created God and to have killed him.

Theo closed his eyes and his ex was standing there.

The crusaders the Mongol invaders.

Monsieur Vincent setting up his easel on a street corner in Arles while the locals make wide sweeps around him, eyes elsewhere, as if civilly avoiding a fresh pile of horse droppings in the middle of the road.

Theo opened his eyes and his ex was standing there.

Your mother’s eyes Who are you now?

Propped in bed, Monsieur Vincent is lifting his shirt to display to Monsieur Ravoux the admittedly illogical nearly bloodless bullet hole in the region of his heart.

In defense of threatened minks everywhere.

And now?

Crossing the town square, his back loaded like a porcupine with painting equipment.

This great ruck of goat-fuckers.

The British occupiers the Americans in Iraq.

My teeth. My god.

8:38.

Destroy them thoroughly the Sheik instructing you and your friends over lukewarm Cokes and Cheetos Puffs.

It is January. It is 1890. Henry de Groux, that Symbolist fop with the widow’s peak, is refusing to allow his work to be displayed alongside Monsieur Vincent’s craziness at Les XX exhibition in Brussels. Brave little Lautrec limps up and challenges him to a duel. Signac vows to pick up the fight, should Henri fare less than excellently in it.

November already.

You have built a career out of portraying yourself as a lifelong victim Mrs. Hirsi Ali that’s very clever of you.

The voice is—

Death being a sexually transmitted disease, Pim once sharing with Theo on a balcony outside a party in honor of a famous Dutch drag queen.

Thinking you are better than the rest of us who were born here but you are a liar Mrs. Hirsi Ali there is no way around it.

We were made for heaven, but we live in hell.

The garret in Positano.

A liar aswirl in an ocean of faggots clowns and kikes.

Monsieur Vincent is stumbling through the du—

Scrutinizing.

Remove the sodomite’s head from his body the imam recommending on your video then burn the black coffin into which the cursèd refuse is flung.

No. That’s not it.

The whole town of white and pink buildings clinging to the cliff above the turquoise sea along the Amalfi coast.

Look: the short fat filthy pig peddling.

Monsieur Ravoux’s voice overwhelming the room, appalled: What in heaven’s name have you done?

God being a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh, Voltaire once famously volunteering.

Erase them from the face of the earth ruin their economies set their companies on fire the Sheik teaching over Diet Squirts and a bowl of Panda licorice chews.

Dear Theo: I have used up more than one hundred tubes of paint this past fortnight. Would you by any chance be in a position to spare a few francs that I might continue with my mission? — Mercilessly yours, Vincent

The nightstreet, glittery.

You’re thirsty but it’s too late for such nonsense.

That poem by Heinrich Heine commencing: This is awful weather.

A joyjig.

How your dying mother tucked her bony hands against her bony cheek and stared stubbornly across the room at what the next life offered since this one had failed her so miserably.

Fishermen know the sea is dangerous, the storm terrible, I replied to de Groux outside the exhibition, yet they never find these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore.

Allah Allah oxen free.

Sink their ships bring down their planes the Sheik coaching over Chocomels and curry-flavored Tijgernootjes.

The idea of yellowness.

Theo doggystyling his ex against the terrace’s balustrade before she was his ex, breakfast table behind them, sun thrilling his bare shoulder blades.

Approaching the doorstep of his fate.

The high-pitched color.

Theo waving merrily at the young couple several terraces over that happened to catch sight of them. Perhaps they were on their honeymoon.

Your mouth dry.

My father always believing in his own self-righteousness.

The quartet sharing an outrageous moment.

Come to me you think that’s it come to me.

Your mouth dry.

Theodoor van Gogh is such a naughty boy.

The Sword of Unified Belief you signed your letter and then you moved to your farewell poem.

The light within him was black.

Again.

A child playing by himself among trash bags in the alley.

Look: I am reaching out my hand to shake Gauguin’s for the first time.

And, afterward, coffee and a platter of melon slices, grapes, strawberries at the umbrellaed table overlooking the shimmering infinity.

You.

It appears I have tried to kill myself, Monsieur Vincent responds in a tone that suggests he is every bit as taken aback by this fact as the next man.

Theo’s ex in front of him, demanding: Who the fuck did you shag THIS time? WHO?

So this is my final word

Riddled with bullets

Baptized in blood

As I had hoped.

I’m glad I haven’t learned how to paint, he explaining to Gauguin’s back, the master inspecting Monsieur Vincent’s sunflowers. Think of what I might have lost.

The scarlet bung of a quotation bobs to the surface of Theo’s memory.

You a poet a Renaissance man who suspected?

Look: the photograph of me sitting with Bernard at a lone table on the banks of the river, empty road punctuated with a few leafless trees and a grungy inn to my left. Bernard’s bearded face looking over my shoulder at the camera.

I desire to go to hell and not heaven, for in the former place I shall enjoy the company of popes, kings, and princes, while in the latter only beggars, monks, and apostles.

Your teachers smiling down at you.

Of me, however, there survives only this trace: a black top hat, a black-coated back, a pair of legs protruding from a stool.

Who said that?

Amused.

My voice declaring: I am thirsty. I want my pipe.

Rise and shine or there’ll be no time for breakfast, Theo singsonged softly, and Lieuwe responded from deep beneath his quilt-and-pillow barricade: You are sooooo uncool, Dad. Seriously.

How does it feel?

Monsieur Vincent swaying over Gauguin’s bed at three in the morning, noticing the niceties of his face in the char-coal-and-cinder gloom.

Pasticceria Bruno on LaGuardia Place in the Village: the one with bulbous fruit and vegetable marzipans that emptied your eyes with elation each time you eased your teeth into them.

The corner of her lip graping.

What the hell’s the matter with you? Gauguin growling into nightblur. Go back to BED!

Bananas. Oranges.

Stand up Mohammed Bouyeri.

And next poor Doctor Gachet’s drained ash-blue eyes are above me, busying being interested in the bandages he is pressing to my chest.

Children don’t grow up — our bodies get bigger and our minds get torn up.

Parse that sentence conjugate that verb.

A glass of green fairy, please.

Our minds or our hearts?

But they never imagined what you were capable of did they.

It is May. It is 1888. Monsieur Vincent is working at his easel, dreaming of nesting an artist’s commune in his small yellow house with the green door and green blinds in Arles.

N.Y.U. students, musicians, chess players, solitary readers, drug dealers, dog walkers, hoola-hoopers, pot smokers, unicyclists, drunkards, sword swallowers, and homeless men and women pigeoning around the fountain in Washington Square.

They had their impressions but the thought of you wasn’t among them.

Artists bonding like brothers in Monsieur Vincent’s abode in Monsieur Vincent’s imagination, sharing ideas, expenses, and profits from the collective sale of their works.

Scotches in the Dove one floor below street level, a heavy rain spilling outside, spattering through the open French windows in the well at their backs.

How your sister became a stranger in the break of a heart.

An experiment in existing.

Red brocade, ornate gold moldings, frilly pillows and matching teacups knolled with snack mix.

Your soul in this ragged sheet made of skin.

An experiment in writing our own lives.

Theo doesn’t remember what he and his ex spoke about over those drinks.

Send all the psychiatrists you want—

Challenging, stimulating, supporting: we would be wild.

Theo doesn’t care.

Send all the psychiatrists you want but you will never be able to understand.

Intent on fabricating the opposite of wallpaper.

Rise and shine or—

You are here to live out loud.

Intent on fabricating various methods of stirring one in the midst of one’s somnolence.

And then you hear Arcade Fire and are reminded why you listen to music in the first place.

Your existence a shout.

Are we still perhaps in the process of experiencing Sunday? I ask.

Une Année Sans Lumière. In the Backseat. Those songs.

This thing called a person remaining always larger than reason.

The Japanese draw quickly. Like a lightning strike.

Curious suckerfish, someone once describing critics and producers as.

For the hypocrites I have one final word Wish DEATH or hold your tongue and sit.

Would you take a deep breath for me? Doctor Gachet, I believe, requesting.

It is what it is, Ayaan saying. I am what I am.

It’s easy your father saying you get respect by earning respect and you earn respect by-

I would, as it turned out, not.

We can shoot the whole thing in a day, Theo proclaiming, pulling out his pocket calendar, gauging. How does July 26th work for you?

Death always being a believer’s only way home.

I want to say these human figures surrounding me are large and full of poetry.

But your name can’t be associated with the project, Ayaan said. It’s too dangerous by half.

Watching your thoughts appear on the notepad as Allah speaks them through you.

An experiment in rejoicing open hearts and opens minds.

Bullshit, Theo replied. I’ve been threatened by Jews, Christians, and Social Democrats. No one shoots the village idiot.

You accumulating into you.

And then that stopped.

The Dutch, Ayaan non-sequitured, seem to me to be nostalgic for something that never existed, but whose loss they keenly feel.

Remember this time—

I tell them: I want my pipe and I want my brother.

Theo sneezes into his jacket sleeve: agh-HOOOO.

Remember this time you will move through it.

Sweating, Monsieur Vincent attempts turning onto his side.

Gezondheid.

It’s like snapping a photograph of a vista along the roadway and then slipping back into your car and leaving that spot forever.

In the end—

That evening Ayaan and Theo decided to make a sequel to Submission as well. It would address, among other topics, the abuse of homosexuals in Islamic cultures.

This spasm of convergence.

One function of art perhaps being to take reality by surprise.

I’m a Hollywood writer, someone once noting, and so I put on a sports jacket and take off my brain.

November second: 11/2.

In the end we shall have had enough cynicism and skepticism, Monsieur Vincent responding to Monsieur Pissarro on the banks of the duckshit green Oise that spongy May afternoon, and we shall want to live more musically.

Noticing the lights at the intersection ahead are with him, Theo speeds up inconsiderably.

112: the number for emergency services throughout Europe.

Dwelling in liquid architecture.

August 29th: the film airing on the talk show Summer Guests. In its wake, nothing happened.

A poet.

Someone’s hand badgering me.

And then nothing happened some more.

Faggot blue T-shirt faggot striped suspenders faggot gray jacket faggot tattered jeans.

Shoo.

Holland simply rolled over and fell back to sleep.

The absence of unexpected things all around you.

Shouldn’t there be a single word meaning homesick for the land of colors?

Per usual. Cf.: Heinrich Heine.

Here he—

My brother stacking the paintings I bestowed upon him through the years one atop the other in Papa Tanguy’s bedbug-infested spare room above his art-supply shop.

After Submission was made, Theo never saw Ayaan again.

A quick inhalation and you step from the doorway mount your bicycle wobble forward it begins.

I’d like one more Monday, if I may.

After an especially productive session, the Vietnamese tart Tam telling Theo the following story, apropos of nothing, while the filmmaker dressed:

The effortlessness surprises you.

Look: Monsieur Vincent appears to be having some difficulty catching his breath.

Once upon a time, there was a husband and wife, who for years believed they shared the same soul, then slowly came to hate each other. They parted company, yet could not push each other from each other’s heart.

Amsterdam opening for you.

Monsieur Vincent scrawling in paint on the walls of Gauguin’s room later that night: I AM THE HOLY SPIRIT! I AM THE HOLY SPIRIT!

Seven months on, the couple reunited, realizing in the intervening time an important certainty about life: love is a choice you make from instant to instant.

You watch yourself riding.

The lettering so large, stridently green, it caused Monsieur Vincent’s back teeth to ache.

On the following morning, the heretofore-undetected aneurysm in the wife’s neck burst and she collapsed to the floor, dead, as she stepped off her treadmill, at 34.

Angling through the hodgepodge throng.

We shall not attempt to remove the bullet, Doctor Gachet declaring somewhere beyond my Vincentness.

Let us call her Lieke.

Petting the handle.

There is no necessity.

Let us call him Leif.

Dear brothers and sisters my own end is near—

The little house on the street corner: yellow of butter with a garnish of green shutters and door.

This is how the world comes at us, tart Tam theorizing, pink feather tickler stroking black gloved hand.

But this certainly is not the end of the story.

A painter being a man too absorbed with what his eyes see, and so I believe I shall go blind for a little while.

I’ve never made but one prayer to God, and a very short one, Theo quoting Voltaire to Ayaan as they parted that night: O Lord make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted my request.

Believe in nothing that can’t annihilate you.

Keep this object like a treasure, Monsieur Vincent advising as he passed his severed left earlobe wrapped in newspaper to Rachel, his favorite prostitute, the one who wore no makeup, at the Arles bagnio, on Christmas Eve.

The first woman, her beetle-brown eyes filling the screen, speaks: O Allah, as I lie here wounded, my spirit broken, I hear in my head the judge’s voice as he pronounces me guilty. The sentence I am to serve is in your words.

Believe in me.

It is January. It is 1889. The non-stranger with the bandaged head trundles down a frozen road on the outskirts of town, a pack of teenagers dogging him, taunting.

The woman and the man guilty of adultery or fornication: flog each of them with a hundred stripes; let no compassion move you.

They will write about these things.

Blue irises.

Two years ago, on a sunny day, while on the souk, my eyes were caught by those of Rahman, the most handsome man I have ever met. He suggested we convene in secret, and I said—

— yes says the whore yes young naive and in love perhaps but we thought Your Holiness was on our side we shared affection trust a deep respect for each other how could you—

A good painting, I want to say, being equivalent to a good deed.

— how could you disapprove, and why?

You have entered your own so-called experimental film.

Hands are propping me up.

Our bodies our canvases.

The second whore she says—

When am I?

What shall we paint today?

— When I was sixteen my father broke the news to me in the kitchen you are going to marry Azziz he is from a virtuous family he will take good care of you but once—

It is June. It is 1889. Monsieur Vincent is sitting straight-backed at the little table in his cell at Saint-Remy, eating his oils off his palette with a spoon.

— but in my marital home my husband approached me, and ever since I recoil from his touch, am repulsed by his scent, even if he has just had a bath. O Allah, most high, You say—

— men are the protectors and maintainers of women because you have given the one more strength than the other.

He finds his encounter with midnight blue almost humbling, given the large black lozenges it produces in his field of vision when he lets it melt on his tongue custardly.

I feel at least once a week the strength of my husband’s fist on my face.

The third whore speaks she says Once in a while I sin I fantasize about feeling the wind through my hair or the sun on my skin at the beach.

A certain aching enlivens the center of my chest.

Humming to himself, Theo catches sight of a dark shape swooping in from his left.

Steady.

The death animal, respiring.

Across the breakfast table, Lieuwe: Dad, seriously, you stink just like a human—

Parse that sentence Mohammed Bouyeri.

Teenagers peer into the windows of the house in Arles as the non-stranger with the bandaged head crouches in front of the sofa, eyes shut, pretending to be air.

Another fish, Theo imagines, faster than the rest, in a what do you call it and one of those prayer hats.

Steady.

Or have we already splashed into Monday? I startle myself by following up.

Matters have changed since my father’s brother Hakim began staying with us. He waits till I am alone at home, then he comes to my—

— to my room and orders me to do things to him.

For four hundred francs.

Top down on the red rented Audi S4, Theo and Lieuwe sang obscure Beatles tunes as they flew along the autobahn on their way to the International Film Festival in Berlin.

When I told my mother she said she would take it up with my father but my father ordered us not to question his brother’s honor.

I love you, Anne Boch.

Something in the way the fish begins arcing toward him hooks Theo’s attention.

But that day is gone.

Roses.

How their eyes meet for less than a heartbump.

You feel it becoming lighter than the phrase you spoke in passing at the market last week.

I love you, Anne Boch.

A djellaba: that’s the—

The Moroccan desert blushing at sunset.

A brief dream: Toulouse-Lautrec kneeling behind a little puppet theatre, using naked dolls to try to explain something to me.

His: brown as a beetle’s.

A wolf.

I know a town not far from Paris called Auvers, Pissarro offering as he perched on the edge of Monsieur Vincent’s cell bed in Saint-Rémy. There’s a physician there who is sympathetic towards artists, dabbles in painting, and knows something about psychiatry.

Mean Mr. Mustard.

A bloody knife blade up in the snow.

Perhaps, Pissarro adding, you’d like me to contact him on your behalf?

Well, you should see Polythene Pam She’s so good-looking but she—

The wealth in my fist.

Homo sapiens being the only species to have learned how to torture.

Ashtray.

The riches.

Except for cats, of course. The mice, you know.

Laughing.

You watch yourself veering in.

It is not knowing that makes life a one-way journey on a train: you travel swiftly, but cannot distinguish any object around you very clearly, and you will never see the engine.

A pudgy young guy in a dark djellaba. Wearing Nikes.

Let the faggot lick.

At last: my pipe.

O Allah, Hakim is gone, now that he knows I am pregnant.

If you live—

Small miracles.

What’s this? Theo wondering loosely.

The verdict that killed my faith in love, says the whore, is written in your holy book.

Merci.

Faith in you, submission to you, feels like—

— is self-betrayal, she says.

The smoky ru—

What’s—

And then you sense yourself leaving language.

Touching without touching. That is precisely how to put it.

The guy sharking down on him.

Timelessness wedging time in two.

It is somehow magical that I am propped up in this bed, here, now, sipping this water, surveying this future.

The realization arrives as a bantam kick: the guy seems to have recognized him, seems to have singled him out.

I have done nothing my whole life but turn to you.

Like a Japanese emperor.

A fan?

Faster.

Dear Theo: How does one become mediocre? By compromising with the world, I sometimes want to say. — Your fond hopelessness

Theo likes fans.

You are flying.

Lilac astors with yellow souls.

And now that I pray for salvation, under my veil, you remain silent as the grave.

Flying.

The church belling clumsily atop the hill.

Theo likes fans and doesn’t like them.

Grip firmly, the Turk teen instructing. You see?

It is July. It is 1890. Monsieur Vincent is both here and there.

Fans reminding Theo of what he has accomplished in life, yet interrupting him at precious ordinary moments like this.

Today you have other parents.

The situation being what it isn’t.

Dinner done, Theo helping Ayaan on with—

You have another family.

If I’m not painting, I’m partially someone else.

White mollusk on her shoulder: him.

Wrap your non-dominant hand around the side of the frame. Like this.

Monsieur Vincent can imagine far less interesting moments to inhabit than the present.

That song.

He actually used the word non-dominant, as if having memorized a pamphlet.

Arms akimbo, my mother looming over my smashed clay elephant, at a loss for how to proceed.

Which?

Your bike drops out from under you, and then you are happening.

Someone’s voice levels an indifferent sentence in my direction.

The first bullet whumps into Theo’s biceps, yanking his momentum right.

Align both thumbs to point downrange.

Pay no attention.

His black bicycle shimmying.

A stuttery instant: the world endeavoring to take in what has begun evolving in its midst.

A vocal suspension.

His wounded arm letting go.

Look: the crowd yawning open around you.

Monsieur Vincent examines his defeated workman’s boots protruding from beneath the covers several leagues across the ashy swamp of blanket.

The blueness of them.

Fairness speaking through you.

If in fact they are his workman’s boots, and not, say, a neighbor’s, a golem’s, a stranger’s, a strangler’s.

The second and third bullets into his abdomen.

Your feet should be shoulder width apart.

Montmartre, 1887: windmills, vegetable gardens, farmers tilling their undersized plots.

And, then, Theo: sans bicycle, sans thought, hand raised as if attempting to halt oncoming traffic.

Blade your body.

One day I noticed with curiosity that the universe had commenced vibrating with color.

Theo stunned.

Stand with a slight lean forward.

Shimmering. Mosaic.

Asking: Can’t we talk about this?

Your dominant elbow nearly straight.

The name of my brother and sister-in-law’s new baby: Vincent.

Can’t we—

Aim by viewing with your dominant eye.

After me, you see.

The fourth and fifth in the region of his heart.

You’re here. You’re nowhere else. After his poor painter brother.

Theo stumbling a single step back, looking down at the injuries developing on him, at a loss for how to proceed.

This second is everywhere.

And so I close my eyes and visit the sea.

Onlookers fetching up in mid-step, crying out, dodging down side streets, ducking behind cars.

Aim for the center mass.

Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer: a red fishing boat, a green, a blue, another blue rocking down the taupe beach.

Like an American science-fiction movie from the Fifties, a witness later reported.

Believe in me.

I make no apologies for my brushstrokes.

Theo rotating in place with deliberation.

Squeeze the trigger with constant pressure.

Like a lightning strike: my pen in my sketchbook.

They out-honeymooning the honeymooners several terraces over.

Time your firing with your breathing.

After his poor painter brother. Imagine. After me.

The room hollowing with her voice that wasn’t there.

Inhale.

Blue-veinish baby skin.

Theo trundling across the honking road among halting traffic.

Exhale.

Baby fragrance: the faint parmesany whiff of vomit.

The guy with the gun dogging him. Leisurely.

Discharge a round.

The bar at the Caf Alcazar.

And after the coffee and platter of melon slices, grapes, and strawberries at the umbrellaed table, down to the beach for a swim.

Discharge a round.

I remember.

Later, a witness reported that it appeared as if Theo were trying to shoo away flies from his wild blond head.

Make sure to retake aim after each shot, for the recoil will have offset your alignment.

My father is now part of my audience. He holds a naked doll in each hand. They take turns in girlish versions of his voice naming the varieties of my sonnish failures.

Another that he seemed to be addressing the street beneath his feet as he progressed from one side to the other, repeating, almost under his breath—

Take your time.

The bar at the Cafe Alcazar never closed.

— don’t do this—

Take your—

Shortly after ten p.m., the place started magneting those without cash for lodging. They ordered cheap drinks, rested their heads on folded arms, and wafted into sleeplessness.

No one interceding.

A falcon hanging over desert scrub.

For Monsieur Vincent, who remained awake three nights in a row to paint the bar in order to pay an outstanding bill from its proprietor, the café became a harsh, lopsided, shuddering contrast of reds, greens, and loneliness.

No one at all.

Discharge a round.

After his poor painter brother’s dead little brother, too: my other Vincent.

Gezelligheid.

Living fully these minutes that have finally been given you.

Raising my head above the water, looking around briefly, and sinking back under again.

Mercy.

A holy gift.

Open your mouth, Doctor Gachet requesting near my offended left ear.

Better him than me, the others apparently thinking. Better them than us.

You hope these minutes will last forever.

Swallow, he says, spooning me a viscous elixir.

Attaining the far bike lane, Theo lowers himself daintily to the cinnabar asphalt and sits with his legs veed open before him.

After the gun goes off, continue pulling the trigger until it stops, then release and prepare for the next round.

Monsieur Vincent humping his shoulders and ghouling his face in disgust.

Raggedy Theo.

Discharge a round.

Remember: in celebration, in hope, I painted for baby Vincent the branches of an almond tree in cream blossom against a cerulean sky.

Not yet.

This improves accuracy and reduces shot-to-shot variation, just as follow-through does for, say, a golfer or a tennis player.

Kissing little Vincent’s soft baby pate.

Behind Theo a shop selling washing machines.

Inhale.

Your rotten teeth screeching at the harsh sweetness.

When he raises his palm again—

Discharge a round.

And, in the evening, how the sea became a limitless apricot glistering.

— the sixth in his left shoulder.

A holy gift.

I sat on the beach, Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer at my back, trying very hard to see.

A young woman screaming.

You become aware of a young woman in a black scarf screaming at you six steps to your right.

A brief dream: I reach for an orange.

Some shots ignoring him.

You have never been so happy.

My hand passing through.

Some joining with him.

The woman holding her little boy’s hand.

Dear Theo: This evening Gauguin and I plan to take a tour of the brothels so as to study them more closely. — Your knight errant

Piiiiinnnnnn-twang: ricochets.

The boy’s face untroubled as if, perhaps, watching TV.

I could have lingered there forever.

Don’t do this.

The faggot’s filthy pig eyes climbing up your torso.

When Monsieur Vincent experiences the terrible need for religion, he sometimes strolls out into the darkness and paints the stars.

Please.

You remember—

Black birds: a bewilderment of them inside my head.

Please.

You can feel them.

Did I mention I am thirsty? Perhaps.

Well., you can syndicate any boat you row.

Inhale.

Yes, I believe I—

You can’t do that! the young woman with the boy yelling. You can’t do that!

You remember—

Crows.

The barefooted unbeliever standing alone in her veil in the center of the room.

In Nablus: gunmen firing assault rifles. A squall of black smiles.

Stink of the jasmine air freshener dangling in a corner of Tam’s cubicle.

Yes, I can, you glancing over casually and informing her as you reload your gun.

No apologies whatsoever.

Raggedy Theo, sprawled, waiting for the next thing.

Her boy mesmerized by the sermon you deliver without words.

An orange slice sounds so good right now.

You’re a Leo, some moron in a peasant dress once informing him at a party. Your element is fi—

Look: you have become a teacher.

How it would fruit coolly on my tongue.

The Tuileries.

Professor Bouyeri.

I would like to hear my mother’s voice one more time.

After dinner, we strolled through the tinseling bluegraylight.

Blood smear or lipstick smear.

I remember—

Your ruling planet: the sun. Your secret desire: to be famous. Theo endured the twit temporarily because she was in her early twenties and flaunted a pink bob and pert tits.

It was difficult to tell which in the flickery late-night streetlights.

A certain aching.

You like to think you’re special, she told him. You love attention and will do almost anything to get it.

Allah moving your mind to move your hand.

As if my chest were not thinking more and more for itself.

At the party in the Hague for that shit of a director.

Your voice the snap of an oily blue 9mm.

I remember—

Dazed.

Listen to them listening to you.

Dear Theo: Here is the truth about aesthetic matters: you should never become slave to your model. It all ends there. — Your daily complication

The seventh and eighth in the region of his groin.

Go.

Always simplify your shapes, Monsieur Vincent advising Bernard at the lone table on the banks of the river.

Theo doesn’t flinch.

Look: his sins seeping into his lap.

Another day paling into itself through my unvast nonpalace.

Rather, it is his body flinching for him.

This morning is a holy privilege. Embrace it.

Call it another day.

Firecrackers crackling to life inside Theo’s school desk as he cat-grinned.

Because it isn’t what comes out of your mouth that counts.

Gulls lifting over a seaside town.

Somewhere in the world it is a holi—

It’s never that.

Plummeting.

The fierce desire to always be here.

Because it never ends with words.

A telegram, Monsieur Ravoux announcing at some point during the duringness.

There is nothing bluer.

Everything you ever wanted sitting in front of you on the road.

Although Monsieur Vincent is less than entirely clear about the strict context of the announcement: has one been sent, imagined, received?

Breathing.

If you can call that sitting.

Like wild harpy’s hair: the magpie’s nest in the tall acacia.

Look: he’s—

The way—

Two dark gray marbled eggs.

Breathing.

Leave us.

Monsieur Vincent promises he will have to think about this later.

The ninth with a jolt in his neck.

Look at his soul leap.

No, you may not paint my—

Startled by its copious transgressions.

Dear Theo: Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. — Your unmoored captain

Reaching up shakily to finger the gargling he has become.

You standing in the bike lane, admiring your invention.

But now Monsieur Vincent has other concerns. He must, for instance, attempt to determine who seems to be holding his hand.

Theo laughs aloud on his bike: the cute coed with the heart-shaped ass: where—

The seconds arresting around you.

If in fact it is anyone at all.

— no, something else, what, I don’t, a charcoal beach beneath a charcoal sky, what’s, yes, maybe in the—

Pride’s passing flush.

More paint: this is always one answer to many questions a man might pose.

Theo lowering, lowering, lowering his chin to chest.

And then plunking your gun into your pocket and turning your attention to the other thing.

Yes: it’s lovely, this sensation.

— in the middle of a raucous silence—

Come and drink my fucking coffee you fucks.

Or Sien’s body—

— open my mouth, to do what, launch my voice, what voice, into the—

After that particular outing, you never spoke with your sister again.

Or Sien’s body convexed against mine in the night, licorice singe of absinthe on our breaths, without end.

Eyelids half drawn.

She became the stranger she had always been.

The steady pressure indicating the presence of more than an uncomplicated acquaintance.

Swaying.

Remember these smells. Remember those places.

And one day Monsieur Vincent took it into his head to frame some of his canvases and paint the frames both to expand and disrupt their viewer’s sense of perspective and closure.

Listening to the music of himself.

Tangier. Fez.

An orange slice’s blatant tang.

The concept of arms progressively disappointing him.

Another mother.

Isn’t it…? Perhaps not.

Theo lying methodically back in the bike lane against his will.

The little boy paying attention to his world for the first time.

Although it is the night.

Arms extending above his head.

He will always remember this.

Air unexpectedly excited with baking bread. Breakfast below.

Right leg straight. Left knee crooked.

Another father.

You wait and you wait, and then Monday is here before you know it.

— my boy beside me, I—

Blindfolds.

The anarchist artist is not—

An evening in Casablanca: playing football on the beach with your new friends.

And, next:

— my boy beside me, in the car, yes, top down, speeding through spring—

Under a magnificent magenta sunset.

This new voice among voices.

— rain spilling—

Who could ever forget it?

The poetry of complexity, someone once—

Makak.

Me.

— in the process of being left behind—

Nip of the sea in our sinuses as we feinted, dodged, sprinted along the sand.

A familiar one, I want to say.

A kind of monkey.

Speaking to Monsieur Vincent. Speaking to me, you see.

In the distance, the predictable sirens emerging.

It’s me, the atmosphere claiming around Monsieur Vincent’s bird-swarmed head.

At last.

The anarchist artist is not the one who creates anarchist paintings, Signac once noting as we wandered among the spice stands in Arles’s street market.

His heart beating beneath your hand.

Mounds of rusty brown cinnamon.

— saying something, saying—

An uncertain pulsing.

Rather, he is the one who fights with all his individuality against official conve—

As if his heart is trying to think of something, but can’t, quite.

Pumpkiny turmeric.

— my wife beside me at the party, unwifing—

The heat of your gun against your thigh: a pocket-sized sun.

My brother. My Theo. Here.

The ending that isn’t an ending slanting into view.

There is nothing more artistic than to—

Come here, Abdul.

It’s me, Vincent, the atmosphere saying. Do you know me?

Because there was no room for error.

Of course, I reply, then add: don’t I?

Palm pressing down.

Bold red paprika.

— rushing along the autobahn, our windsucked voices, the—

Because there was no room for surprise.

I have to confess I seem to have misplaced myself.

When he prays, he has to—

Eyes closed, I picture him speaking to me as he speaks to me.

He has to sit in a chair.

It is June. It is 1890. When Theo and Jo detrain with their new baby for a picnic at Auvers, Monsieur Vincent insists on bringing his nephew around to display for him the animals menageried at Doctor Gachet’s residence.

I offer you this.

Coriander: toasted mustard’s tint.

My palm pressing down on your unbelieving heart.

Eight cats. Eight dogs.

What do we have to lose except ourselves? And then we are free.

We are alone. We are talking.

I offer you my spite.

All the best are left unfinished.

My machete.

Propped against pillows, Monsieur Vincent smoking his pipe contentedly.

I offer you yourself.

An everyday family gathering, one might mistake this for.

You are what has become of your thoughts.

Look: my boots on the horizon. Again.

Allah’s language honed to the shape of a blade.

Chickens, rabbits, ducks: Doctor Gachet’s runted, caterwauling ark.

— what’s, yes, a hand, good, someone out th—

I offer you my mother, my father, my sister, my brothers.

I wish I could hear what I have to say. I suspect it might be not wholly without interest.

In a chair.

The others having vacated the room, lent us a few minutes to ourselves, we speak about this and that as if we don’t believe we are losing.

It’s like opening a window.

Marguerite Gachet serving us tea in her father’s garden overlooking the shaggy treetops and terracotta roofs of Auvers.

Most Beneficent, Most Merciful, Most Gracious.

How is your little boy?

It’s like opening a window. I give you the only thing left I have to give. I give you Mohammed.

My question, evidently.

O Allah: open the hearts of every non-Muslim to the beauty and truth of Islam.

Even a peacock. Yes, even one of those. Can you see?

— until the ambulance—

King of the Day of Reckoning.

Train feathers: a series of eyes fanning splendidly.

Swallow this.

How once, when we were children, we stole two dark gray marbled eggs from the nest in the acacia, then returned them early the next day, flocked by guilt at what we had done.

A pudgy young man in the dark djellaba lifting a knee to brace Theo’s ribcage.

Kissing knife to neck.

And, afterward, a short perambulation through Doctor Gachet’s abundance of color, little Vincent’s head cupped against my bony shoulder.

Yanking back a shock of hair.

I evict you from your body.

Call it morning. Why not?

— imagine the, sirens, listen, strange pain, settle back, let it come—

Sawing.

Dayspring.

Resistance equal, say, to carving through a tough slab of steak.

A brief dream: this man on fire.

Once you start, there’s no stopping.

Dayspring: a complete melody in a single word.

Dear Everybody—

Although it is the night.

They were there in the videos, naturally, and when you practiced on goats in the basement during the holy days, but at close range they form another register of sloppy wheezing sounds altogether.

My brother: all the way from Paris.

— wait, what’s, wait, open your—

You aren’t prepared for the vertebrae.

All that distance. The inexplicable good fortune.

You thought you would be, but you aren’t.

Well, my Theo responds. Both Jo and little Vincent are doing well.

They won’t give under your weight.

The eggs having been contaminated by human touch, the mother magpie refused to take them back.

You grind down.

And so they rotted where they lay among the wild harpy’s hair.

Yet you can’t seem to crunch through.

You should drink something, Theo says, offering me my own water glass.

— the blueness of—

Harder.

Holding my hand while I sip.

And then deciding: this will have to do.

There wouldn’t happen to be a half bottle of absinthe on the premises, Monsieur Vincent inquiring, would there?

Two elderly women, arm in arm, weeping as they watch.

Good enough. Good enough.

— than to love people.

And, next: a pudgy young man in a dark djellaba is rising to his feet near the corner of Linnaeus Street and Oosterpark, knees popping wetly.

Letting your machete clink to the road behind you.

Monsieur Vincent refuses to paint the iron bars.

He consults the clock in the shop window selling washing machines.

8:51.

There are, after all, limits to what one might be willing to do. Aren’t there?

Reaching into his other pocket, as if in search of a match.

The morning still quite young. The day spanning out.

Listening to him talk, I remember how, sharing a bedroom as boys, we developed our own private tongue.

Extracting the smaller kitchen variety.

A child playing by himself among th—

An intricate system of illegibility for the rest of the world, about which the rest of the world cared not in the least.

Extracting the note.

Squatting once more, laying it out neatly on his chest.

Each letter living in a dwelling one to the left of its genuine address.

Inhaling.

Like a cloth napkin at an elegant restaurant.

A code no one was interested in breaking.

Inhaling and exhaling.

Gathering all the strength in your shoulder and upper back.

I haven’t thought about that for almost thirty years, Monsieur Vincent saying, pleased, smoke misting from his mouth as if hot coals were smoldering in his lungs.

And, with the knife, pegging the note home.

Bull’s eye.

Side by side, the two of us giggling through the Hour of the

Wolf.

Extracting a second piece of paper, unfolding it, letting it flutter down to join its companion.

Your poem.

To pass the time, I take in the bone structure beneath my brother’s face.

Then turning to the nearest bystanders and commenting quietly—

When you are born a woman, you must live as a woman.

The in-between hour when your babbling fears haunt you.

Mulling.

What token will you leave them with?

The hour of births. The hour of deaths.

Studying their scribbled expressions, he adds:

And now you all know.

Are you in any pain? Theo quizzing.

Minutes scraping against the morning.

You listening to them listening.

I close my eyes and dream, surrounded by everyone I know.

It’s that easy. That’s the thing.

To always be here.

The pudgy young man in a dark djellaba inspecting the body as if he might a rolled-up rug at a bazaar, and, an afterthought, delivering it a few hard kicks.

Then you simply turn and stroll away.

I painted two yellow books and a burning candle on Gauguin’s otherwise empty armchair: his portrait.

The crowd slowly converging on what has been left behind.

Without hurry crossing the road, cattycorner-ing for the park.

For mine, I painted my own empty wicker chair, on its seat my pipe and tobacco pouch.

The din of the world revisiting you as you become just another pedestrian among the general infestation of them.

Gauguin/van Gogh: like that.

Just another commuter on his way to his daily lifelessness.

I wish I could pass away exactly like this, Monsieur Vincent commenting, apropos of nothing.

The thing being not to run.

Don’t, Theo saying.

Not to glance back.

Please.

The thing being to become imaginary as the sirens flood the streets around you.

Twenty-four wooden planks. That’s it. That’s—

And then—

A visual duet.

And then—

Look: Monsieur Vincent appears to be having some difficulty catching his—

— this is where your plan simply ends.

White light vaporing the room.

Walk into the park, they told you. Misplace yourself, they told you.

Snow dusting a plowed field.

But not what to do next.

My Vincentness having, it would seem—

And so you keep pushing forward, brain blind.

Three shrill red rectangles hanging in the air.

The world all at once becoming—

My Vincentness having usurped the environment of other people and objects.

The world all at once becoming greener, commotion everywhere, the grassy field and dark pond widening before you.

Pulling pipe from lips, I answer:

You move up a wide concrete path.

Yes. I believe so.

An elderly couple strolling arm-in-arm in front of you. A teen boy pushing a pram.

How the roses—

A terrier walking its owner.

Thinking in images.

They see me, if they see me at all, as negligible visual dissonance in their surroundings.

Or might it conceivably be past noon already?

Oblivious of history blazing around them.

Will the wonders nev—

You progress north, autumn soiling every inhalation.

Monsieur Vincent wanting to laugh, but his chest having other matters on its mind.

The pond swinging lazily to your left, the black spiked fence to your right.

This conversational business is killing me.

Your gaze tracking the ground a meter ahead of your sneakers.

Plains of corn backed by hills. Canary. Pale green. Mauve.

Your grayblackwhite footblur.

My ocean: this yellow. My flowerbed: these fields.

Around you, everyone fulfilling his role.

I am lying on my back on a dirt path, trying to—

Everyone being who he or she needs to be.

No. That’s not it.

You will return to your flat. That is what you will do.

Gray is soft as surrender.

No, that is not what you will do.

It is July. It is 1869. I am sitting in a gallery restless with Rembrandts.

You will do something else. You will—

The bulbous nose. The blasted brown eyes.

You will tram to the Central Station. You will train to France. To Switzerland. Germany.

Although it is the—

You will sink into a new life.

An orange, I say, surprising myself.

The one you never anticipated would extend beyond 8:45 a.m.

Rachel?

You will call the Sheik. He will explain things. He will tell you..what? He will tell you—

Dear Theo: I have nature and art and poetry. If that isn’t enough, what is? — Your unvincenting brother,_

He will tell you—

Chiaroscuro.

You will not call the Sheik.

The trouble with the past, Toulouse-Lautrec commenting, is that the bitch is full of facts.

You will—

Noses and knuckles knobby as the tubers they’re eating.

Italy. No, Greece. Spain.

To hell with perspective. Let the cascading rooms begin.

You will cross by ferry from Algeciras to Tangier.

Keep this object like a treasure, you told her, passing Rachel the package with the best of you inside.

You will rent a car and drive into the desert. Catch a bus and ride into the desert. Stand by the side of the road, hitchhiking.

It’s like opening a win—

You will find your uncle’s house.

In his hat rimmed with shivering candles, Monsieur Vincent looks like nothing so much as a flaming sunflower in the night.

The one your father built down by the river. Beige clay bricks. A yellow door.

Is he sleeping?

Dawn pinking sand dunes all the way out to the horizon.

Is he sleeping?

The magnificent magenta—

Theatrical chiaroscuro.

Casablanca.

The acrid bite of hay.

You will not drive into the desert. You will not find your uncle’s house. You will do something else. You will—

Is that him?

When you raise your head again, three policemen in bulletproof vests are washing toward you up the path.

A man on fire walks into your room.

One opens his mouth to speak. In a single motion you dodge left, slip your hand into your pocket, remove your gun, and start shooting.

Give me your ears, says the man on fire. Give me your eyes.

He grips his side and crumples.

Is he sleeping?

And then you are running.

Sien waiting on her lamp-lit corner in a drizzle, discounting herself to passers-by in lavender undertones.

You are veering left, following the pond’s curve, shouts scrambling at your heels.

Blue irises: never forget those.

The bridge. The trees hazing past.

Wooden slats thumping beneath your feet.

My world: this bed, these springs, my racked back.

The important thing being to—

Monsieur Vincent is reaching out his hand to shake Gauguin’s for the last time.

— being to breathe.

The pistol, once in my pocket, now in my palm.

Steady-

My ache growing tentacles.

Steady inhalations and exhalations.

Through my chest. Down my arms.

Let the faggot—

Droll Mount Fuji among those insignificant French hills.

Because if you lose your breath, you lose this race.

Sky rushing away from him.

Because if you lose this race, you lose yourself.

The important thing being to—

Rugbying into an old man with cane.

— being to breathe.

The grunting impact.

How his body pitches sideways, cane airborne.

That’s it. That’s—

You don’t alter your pace.

Eleven hundred drawings.

You barrel on.

Panting like a hamster’s heart beating.

Although it—

Into a woman wearing a raincoat and transparent plastic rain hat, her red and white grocery bag detonating.

No. That’s—

Apples. Breadsticks. Deodorant. Juice box. Bushy broccoli. Batteries. Sponge. Blackbrown bottle of soy sauce.

Take reality by surprise.

Scattering a pack of squealing girls on their way to school.

The rustle of—

Your shoulder keening.

It is late afternoon. I am sure of it.

And out again into the open, white bandstand with black iron skeleton pumping at the adrenaline edges of your vision.

Unless it is evening.

The tidy row of vacant park benches watching over the pond.

— I—

And then another cluster of police clumping down the path straight at you.

Five of them. Eight.

The bliss of infant smell.

You pivot right, zag across the blanching lawn—

Remember—

— aiming for the wading pool—

— lungs searing in a frying pan—

Pink peach trees: you mustn’t forget those.

— flames rolling up and down your legs—

Give me your hands, says the man on fire. Give me your lips.

— landscape throbbing into whiteout—

— they calling for you to stop—

— drop your gun—

More paint, please.

— or they’ll shoot—

— others swarming out of the trees—

— weapons drawn—

— and so, in the end, this is what you will do: you will—

I am standing inside the color yellow.

— you will shut your eyes—

— like this—

— running into them—

— shouting—

stumbling, sightless, forward—

— their gravities pulling you in—

— the contents of the universe falling out of your head—

— your gun rising again—

— firing into the rosy light—

The silvery snap startles the afternoon.

— a bullet amazes your thigh—

— spinning you left—

Look:

— the thrill of it opening your eyes—

— and next—

— and next you are lying among leaves—

— on your back on the dirt path—

— trying to sit up, scrabble to your feet, only the faggots are already upon you—

— a hands-and-legs flickering—

— you are on your side suddenly—

— on your belly—

— leaf bits grinding against your cheek—

— your arms yanked back—

— knee jagged into your spine—

— and you are wondering where your gun has gone, why you can’t seem to reach it—

— their language returning you to Mohammed—

— handcuffs snicking into place—

— and they are shouting at you, telling you what you will do next—

— you will stop struggling, this is what you will do next, you will stop resisting arr—

— you will do what you are told, and you will do it now—

— because your options have sifted down to this one—

— and there you are standing, hobbled, a hot nugget inside your thigh, the world become someone else’s—

— locked between a pair of them—

— one behind you, one in front—

— you can smell the egg the faggot ate for breakfast—

— the hatred on his breath—

— you are glaring into his faithless eyes—

— watching his faithless mouth move as if it has something to say—

— only you can’t hear a thing—

— because you are smiling too hard—

— because it occurs to you they think they’ve got you—

— because they believe they’re taking you away—

— because you are hovering before them, smiling, wrists fastened behind you, saying, almost civilly, almost politely:

You believe what you believe—

— think what you think—

— but you’ll be seeing more of me—

— I promise—

Content

Lance Olsen
Head in Flames