Chapter vii
to: allie, bestest girlfriend
from: janie aggrieved (middle name: enraged), aka your favorite exchange student
allie, man, i’m truly sorry the only human being i truly hate has to be my mom;
spoke to velvet [host mother] yesterday
we cried together, and she said all moms do stupid things; but no matter how stupid it is, it’s still mom’s express desire and she has to respect it; but she said she understands everything all too well, and she’s with me, she’s there for me; she’s really there for me…
forest [host father]… sucks ass. he suddenly grew a pair and started taking this host father thing seriously; told me i couldn’t see Him, and that was it, and all types of other bullshit; and he said that in this house what he says goes, etc; and i ended up crying in his arms, and he cried with me, but then again i was only crying because of him getting a hard on over this stuff in the first place;
duuuuude… these people were okay with it, because they had no reason not to be okay with it – until mom obsessively specified that the program says no boyfriends, and emphasyzed that she forbids it as well
fuuuuuuuuuck
honestly
i hope i just never see her again; my only releif is that im away from her now; although, if this happened back in the old country, i would have left home by now and not gave a fuck once and for all; believe me allie: ONCE AND FOR FUCKING ALL.
now i have to sit here and think how stupid one person’s obsession can be
this hasn’t changed anything
i’ll still see sterne [forbidden boyfriend]
this only brought us closer;
but the disapointment, this sensation of ramming my head against the wall, makes me think fuck em all every last one and fuck their fucking ‘protection’, makes me wanna tear my clothes off one day and just take sterne fucking take him, make him a boyfriend like it says in the fucking definition; like fucking enough already, you know; the moment is approaching; yeah, like in donnie darko, when you’re sick of all the shit and you just simply fucking do it, just absolutely shitting on all the rules and norms and programs and MOMS and rules
normally, i wouldn’t have even thought of doing it
but now, i even know the day it’s happening: wednesday
come wednesday, i probably wont be a virgin anymore; that’s just a fait divers; because the rest are idiots, and if im the only thing that can hurt them then so fucking be it; poshli vy vse nahui, suki
limits suck, but ive reached the limit
yours,
the rebel child inside you
The browncoat found this letter in his mailbox one day and imagined it must have been dropped there by mistake. He scratched his cerebra and jogged lazily through all the people in his building and determined that the likeliest recipient was the blond airhead whom he always heard running, presumably for fitness because she had a smiling face, down the stairs and up the stairs and around the block and in her tiny apartment three storeys above him. He read in until he reached the line that started in ‘we cried together’, lost what little interest he had in the situation and dropped the letter, half-removed from its envelope, on the floor, without bothering to crumple or shred it.
The child’s letter landed gently onto the carpeted floor and stayed there, written side up, waiting for another tenant to walk by, one whose curiosity wouldn’t resume its natural flaccidity so easily. It was even conceivable that the first person to notice it and pick it up would be its lawful recipient, but the browncoat did not bother with such irrelevancies and went back to his room.
The browncoat had been a student at the biggest university in Moscow for two and an half years. He refused to live in any of the university’s halls of residence and rented a one-room flat in a tedious building in a tedious cerebral eclipse part of the city. He had his own bathroom but shared a kitchen with the other people who rummaged around on his storey. The browncoat would frequently go into the kitchen late at night when most of the others, responsible young bureaucrats and rubicund young builders and Rubenesque young chambermaids, were maximising their mourning efficiency and ulterior earning potential in their respective tonically warm beds, the restorative pods of the happiest production, and late in the night would he remove all the milk bottles from the kitchen and he opened and took them to his room, taking great delight in the way the glass bottles clicked and scratched each other in his arms in what to him were agonisingly loud noises that would force a snoring platoon to come to attention but wilted pathetically before the vulgar health of the tenants’ sleep, and in the inevitable little spills that he would come back to and push into the little creaks in the parquetry with the tips of his shoes and hope the spills would remain visible so as to give any potential detective a trail to follow to the scene of the secret crime but none would come. And in his room the brownback would place all the milk bottles on the table open before him and most times there would be six to seven bottles and he would summon the blond airhead from three storeys above him to the insides of his closed eyelids and think hard on her and in a few minutes spill himself into the first milk bottle. And then he would think on the blond airhead again and this time it took longer but not by much and he would cataract into the second bottle. And then he tried to use the blond airhead again but she had been all used up all thoughtout all thoughtup and he had to resort to other females and males of similar anonymity and athletic inclinations and he would squeeze himself into every one of the remaining milk bottles, and by the time he was done which was three to seven minutes per spill and the additional pair of minutes of recovery he required before the last two rounds he was quite soft in the head and reddened and his veins were angry but also proud at him. And he would close the milk bottles and shake all of them until the flocculent islands that lingered rootless on the surface of the milk that he always wanted to christen but somehow always forgot to map into his cerebral domains had been wholly consumed by the uniformity and lesser density of all the sickly white around them. And he would embrace all the bottles and struggle to open his door and walk across the vulnerable corridor that always took him to the kitchen and leave the bottles where he had found them and although he would always remember the exact initial position of each bottle relative to the others and which way each of their labels had faced and even how they had tilted he always made minor intentional mistakes and arranged them too carefully too rationally and too efficiently and always thought a kindred mind would have noticed and become suspicious but the scurrilous residents of his storey were too closed to the world of the milk bottles and never cared and could barely recognize which bottle was theirs when they drank cold milk in the morning. Twice the browncoat braved discovery even further and opened two fresh bottles that had been sealed for the morning and replaced the seals and bottle caps in noticeably clumsy dispositions and the unity of virgin milk bottle and seal and cap was irremediably broken but in the morning the owners of the deflowered bottles would either not pay attention to how the seals came off far too easily or think their neighbours had opened their bottles by mistake but abstained from drinking and were too embarrassed to tell them and so it was ultimately of no importance that the seals had been broken. And he did this each night and his neighbours smiled at him in the mourning, laughing at his sluggish demeanor and poor cuntry boy adaptations to the cycles of an active city life.
And the browncoat would go to his university in the afternoon and listen to courses he stuck his tongue in his ears to wash off as soon as he left the lecture halls and walk among many students of the same course, some nodding and some debating the merits of the ideas and some walking alone, their faces washed off in their long hair, and some reciting the knowledge words of the course into their sleeves until all material evil had been warded off. And the courses were brief and the work a thing of mirrors and translations and the browncoat had as always more than enough time for staring and walking.
And he decided to serialk
ill his time and added some fresh faces, experimentally, and he ate with the fresh faces and off the fresh faces before the course at the university and the fresh faces looked all around him in curiosity and talked and their talk was thunderclap and their tongues flicked and hooped and pounced on the biggest toughest words and slithered around the words and bit their necks and injected them with their mollifiers and could thereupon taste and chew the big words up as was their pleasure. And the smaller tongues of the fresh faces would not brave the biggest words, which were loners, but stalked the wordhordes with old men’s patience and crept upon the weaklings, the antediluvians and the hatchlings, and brought the weak words down and mounted them and bit into their rumps and the smaller tongues of the fresh faces went not hungry.
And in the lecture hall the professor was talking of writing and spilling, spilling oneself onto the page and wafting oneself into the world, and always the spilling was of blood and ink, fungible, for ink must flow downhill, and that hill was death. And the map of death is evident in the shortest and simplest letter, the unprotected I, a letter so black and conquerable its nude defenders had no choice but to die with honour or in either cowardice. And there were many ways to suicide on the page, and the professor talked of writers with a text so compressed and sharp it shredded its own pages into tiny, identical black and white pieces, like a puzzle, text so sharp it opened the throat of the author rehearsing it in his mind, staging and dancing the suicide, and brownback was sleepy. And the professor spoke of writers hanging themselves from a tree branch made entirely of ocean, and of worlds of broken eggshells hungry for the open throats of characters and writers alike.
And the browncoat wondered whether lactates could kill his potentialities in progeny and whether one of his neighbours would fall pregnant and defeated before their morning milk because mysterious were the paths trodden by the will of the lord so he had been taught in all his books and all his courses and if the lord wished to grant the browncoat perpetuation then so would it be even if it be through the calcareous mouths of his voluble morning neighbours.
And there was one who titled himself brownback’s self-anointed favourite fresh face, an insolent dark student whose course was even longer and more caliginous that the brownback’s, and this new student often walked to the browncoat’s flat with the browncoat, and he often would come up to the browncoat’s storey and come into his room. And there the new student would susurrate blind milky nothings into the browncoat and he would fuck the browncoat and always very quickly and very cleanly, and then the new student would stay in the browncoat’s one-room apartment and he would read the white sheets on the browncoat’s bed and would sometimes write on the sheets and sometimes dress up in them and walk back to his own room in a student hall of residence clad in the browncoat’s sheets. And once after fucking the browncoat the new student asked for some good white paper and a pencil, and the browncoat was to remain very still, and within an hour the new student had painted a good functional portrait of the brownback. And the new student hung the portrait on brownback’s wall and left the apartment. And brownback tolerated the portrait for many of his university years, although he had never been painted prior to this, and the price the new student had had to pay for the portrait was never seeing browncoat again.
And the brownback had two small mirrors in his flat, and he took one off the wall and on it he drew using the same pencil the new student had used an excellent copy of the new student’s portrait of brownback. And the browncoat’s version of the new student’s portrait was much improved and less gravitated earthward by the demands of verisimilitude and had far better movement, and fury in it. And then the browncoat approached his second mirror, which was still hanging on his wall, and he stared hard inside the second mirror and then punched it so hard the mirror was permanently broken but not in fragments merely cracked survival and the shock of the punch was so great the second mirror never displayed another reflection and was permanently reduced to repeating and repainting the last image it remembered before the punch and this was the long stare of the browncoat. And the browncoat returned to the first mirror and started bending and folding and creasing it and at first the mirror threatened to break but the browncoat knew how to write his will through the small wounds in between his knuckles and the first mirror did not break and it finally bent and was submissive and the browncoat fashioned an envelope out of it. And the browncoat repeated the bending upon the second mirror and despite similar resistance and shrieks and protests of unnaturalness the second mirror, she of the immortal frozen browncoat, folded also and became an envelope. And the browncoat sent both envelopes to the hall of residence where the new student had a room, and the new student opened both envelopes and cut his fingers and inside each envelope he found a rejection slip and a commemoration of a bonfire of some vanities or others. And the new student never came up to the browncoat again and forgot the walk from the course to the browncoat’s street.
And after two and an half years of his course brownback finally removed the new student’s pencilling of the browncoat from his wall and burned it using a redheaded match and tossed it out of the window in midburn. The portrait writhed and coiled in its fall and landed in a small ditch still filled with muddy rainwater from that mourning's downpour and the parts that weren't submerged kept burning for a while, until the drenched and the charred met and a sarcastic sizzle was all the browncoat got for his efforts. When browncoat returned to his flat that evening there was still a puddle in the small ditch but no remains of the portrait.
And on the full-bodied rictus of the browncoat’s experience of the city, university stood bulbous and dominant as a curvaceous accumulation of pus rooted upon the very sole of the browncoat’s right foot, rendering any movement impossible without screams of pain and generous, illiquid slushes of molten fatty. And the fresh faces bred of the university’s suppuration would crawl underneath the browncoat’s skin like worms of pus, and traverse the entirety of his body without finding an adequate breeding ground for their parasitic pus ideas, for the pus worms bred by speaking and by snaking their pustulous speech behind the ball of the browncoat’s eye, up his nose and down his ears and straight through his tears would they shoot words carved in purulent drool. But not all their speech was so immediately viscid, the host organs had to be seduced first, so the fresh faces and the professors charioting them in fervid races across the browncoat’s undersoil engaged for him and others in tourneys of amative dialectics where fresh faces would duel one another with blades of soapbubble and hilts of lilies. And the elegance of their games was thraldom for an open mind and the competition gentle and the lights unceasing. The cursive duels caressed their spectators down to their very core, and the professors and the fresh faces almost always believed that core to be reason and utility and the human grasping of æviternity, and the soporific gentleness of their lilies flew soothingly from the duellists to the spectator’s sacred soul. And the browncoat watched this war of roses, this flower-throwing contest. And the fresh faces spake and thought as though it were easy to make a rose petal fly anywhere, fly not float, especially forwards, without an iron pellet ‘neath it. And they told him so and they saw no reason to give up.
And the browncoat never thought particularly hard on much of what truly concerned and occupied the professors and the fresh faces, so his mind did not need to breathe at all in their alien atmosphere and there were no cracks in it for their pusworms to blade through. He did not need to think, for each night, long after his games with the milk bottles, he would grow awake and require no more physical sleep and he would stand up on his bed. And in this lucidity his member would shoot up and tattoo itself onto his stomach, strangled red with its own momentum, seeking to reënter the undifferentiated safety and flaccid quiet of an imaginary womb hidden underneath the omphalos. But then matin would insinuate itself through the open windows, and in the matin his flesh thawed, cruciferous, and fell again into the despondent vigilance of the shrivelled leper. And the brown
back loved his flesh no more than he sacrificed to his mind, but at least the matin and its ever nascent population of fresh faces were mostly uninterested in his flesh and wanted only the simple kenosis of his mind.
And yet this would not happen, the pusworms would not get an empty, fertile cradle in the brownback’s cranium, because his mind already knew no terms resistance limits definitions and did not exert itself in distinctions judgments feelings retentions-of-sapience and had no words to defend repel divide apprehend and no logics had ever irrigated its desiccation and no cartographies blackened it with desire and discrimination. The brownback did not find their reason strange or violently unpleasant, he simply learned to live alongside reason and remain indifferent to its tempestuous echolalia and its untiring territorial provocations and its staunchly intentional prosopagnosia.
And so the browncoat abdicated himself from his reserved chair at the university, and gave back all the books and returned unto the fresh faces their opinions and exegeses and forgot his morning walk from the flat to the lecture hall. And the professors were not much deranged by browncoat’s departure since the remaining bodies were warm and the sedentary pulpit faces were fresh and neatly folded and freshly painted so not dry and the professors could steal the fresh faces’ thin watercolors and fingerpaint and watch the real moustaches shoot forth from the fresh faces.
And when the brownback made his final return from his previous university he was stopped at his door by one of his neighbours whom the brownback had never heard utter a word before and the taciturn neighbour asked the browncoat whether he knew why he the neighbour had always been so taciturn. And the browncoat did not know and the neighbour said that he would tell the browncoat of it and the taciturn neighbour’s mustache moved as he spoke.
The neighbour had been a man once and he had had a wife and also friends of a great many condiments of personality. And the former man and his friends escaped to a sordid bar one night and other men did not take kindly to them and there was escalation and one of the other men lost an eye and one of the other men died the following mourning. And the former man appeared to be responsible and so was sent to jail for a dozen labors of four movements and twelve notes each. And the former man had not been a rich man and left his wife almost nothing and his poor wife had never worked a day in her poor life and so she struggled awhile and stayed with friends but they hadn’t many friends and all the friends had been the former man’s and they never could forgive the poor wife for stealing part of the former man away from the night of the former man’s friends and so the poor wife could not stay with any of the friends long. And after there were no more friends and no relatives for the wife and the man both had been orphans the poor wife began to starve but could not take up work for it was beneath her and she would have to learn new skills and her soul was not capacious enough and the hours were horrible. And the poor wife grew in her decision and she became a whore; and a good whore she was for she was very popular and all the former man’s friends came to see her and paid good money for her but she gave back some of their money so long as they would not talk to her during. And the poor wife failed to lose her looks and lustre in all of the twelve years and she led a good if boring life materially and the former man’s friends, all married friends themselves, could never stop seeing her and were very much addicted to her smell and her lazy veins. And the former man got out of his jail and as soon as he was released he ran to his former house but no one was there and he asked the neighbours who were all new faces to him if anyone lived there and they said yes a lovely decent lady lived there and he asked if they knew where he could find her for he needed to see her and it could not wait and the new neighbours nodded in comprehension and gave the former man the address of his poor wife’s brothel although they did not tell him it was a brothel for they thought there was no need he must have known already since he was asking for her in the familiar desirous desperation of other passers-by and they the neighbours were smiling unto him. And the man ran to his poor wife’s brothel and saw it was a brothel but did not stop for contemplation not for one second for business was his and the former man entered the brothel and saw his poor wife at the bar but she did not see him and he approached the sallow bawd and paid for an hour with his poor wife and issued clear instructions and the bawd understood and she went to the poor wife and told her to hurry upstairs and wait in there with a blindfold and not speak until spoken to and the former man ascended the rather short staircase for some men were more obese than he
And then the taciturn neighbour opened the door to his own room and walked in and did not pause his retelling and shut his door and moved on echoless footstep and his soft machine lost its brittle words in the brittle movements of his mustache. And the browncoat knew he the browncoat would make himself at home in an absent life so very much like the taciturn neighbour had made himself a durable home in his own absent life. Certainly there was little else he could do.
Chapter vii