Film Noir
from Hotel Lautréamont (1992)
Just the washing of the floors under him was cause for hope. If there was a flaw in something precious, it meant one or more persons had been inducted already. When they heard about it it would come to seem as though the rich background was you, your space. It lent you a furious dignity that you breezed right through. No more apples on the dashboard, this is cheating the real thing, earnest with life and self-assurance. And when you died they remembered you chiefly. It was two lights on a rowboat, a half-mile off shore as the evening breeze drew nigh, cementing relationships. And it seemed as though they always heard you, loud you, that otherwise nobody remembered except conveniently. When the inevitable abrupt change arrived I looked to you for reflected confirmation of what was happening to me, and unfortunately got it. The afternoon windows released their secrets in a flood as though no one had ever had any. In the downpour distinct noses and adam’s-apples could be determined in a mounting hush of congratulation soon to be shattered by a train’s ear-peircing whistle: the doors slid shut, there was nothing to do except wait for another train, yet this one still stayed on the platform. Too bad suicide is discouraged in certain modern climates and situations; it makes for such a neat ending; nevertheless we will brush on, clinging to separate ideas as though they made a pattern. And all shall be insulted at the end where the going gets sticky beyond any apology, beyond dried beans and casual sex, beyond even the neighbor’s girl in a schoolyard, half a century ago when things still seemed pretty modern and underlying motives were the same though not the dark, intricate working out of them. Say we just landed, like strangers in a hole: what manner of manners is to be cut out of us, what sails trimmed for the descent into the matter of the sun. Are Americans sexier, she breathed, or what is it that gives their nudes a subliminal variation on this often rehearsed enterprise, until we can see into it, arranging differences? And that moan you heard was just idle gossip, someone running around to instruct the clerks of our compassion in rules, rhetoric or some other tell-tale destiny if we are about to get it right again. But on the curb of the residential street where wind thrives and the locals shrug off any connection to the scenery, back where it was bad, the same dichotomy obtains. We and they. It’s not much more simple than that. And as I approach the master switch for instructions, there are little smiles of recognition everywhere, in the curdled clouds, on the reluctant shore, to tell us it’s safe to go home. I hope they can come. They can sleep under my bed.