Rachel Levy
Thief
If you’re reading, then you’re growing. Then you hardly are paid. So you live with your friends, like brothers. The cheapest arrangement for graduate students: one house, by a tree, on some thin string of ground, which is Kansas. Shit on the grass, on the stoop. In the wind. There’s a smudge on the lens of the sky, smells like shit. I don’t know your surnames. Still, I know what you’re called. You are Greg and Kyle and Micah and Jerome.
Go home, friends. Hang a poster on the wall. It’s famous and French. Acéphale. The portrait of the headless man. The silly man. The man has lost his head. He is missing his head, and that’s a significant detail.
Because fascists once called for a return to values like yours: communal living, brotherly friends, reading and growing, but with a head. There’s a difference—
“That’s what she said!” says Jerome.
Now Kyle is groaning, flips the hair off his face. “Too soon,” he says. “Wait for Micah.”
“He doesn’t get it,” says Greg.
“I do get it!” says Jerome.
“Then prove it,” says Greg.
“The difference,” says Kyle.
“Is spreading,” says Greg.
“Her thighs,” says Micah.
Jerome, red hot, a Valentine rose, shrieks, “That’s what Alice B. Toklas said!!”
[GENERAL LAUGHTER / APPLAUSE]
Greg and Kyle and Micah and Jerome.
Acéphale.
Odd, really. The friends’ strange portrait does figure a head in the form of a skull which is placed on the groin of the man with no head except for the head that hangs on his groin in the shape of a skull—
But does the skull really count as a head? It could’ve belonged to anyone, the skull. A virgin? The headless man who wears a virgin’s skull on his—see, so the head isn’t properly his. If it’s even a head. Which it probably isn’t, categorically. The logic won’t hold. The difference is spreading. Is stretching the skin.
What is friendship?
Wanda steals from Greg.
Wanda steals the photo of Greg’s father. Faded, creased. It looks like shit. She tucks it in the elastic band of her underwear. Is Wanda a thief?
It happens like this. Greg is proud. “Look, my father—”
“Okay.”
Greg isn’t finished. “My father,” he says. He closes his eyes. “You know that feeling you get when you simultaneously loathe and absolutely respect a person?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s more than a feeling. It’s a way of being in the world. It’s like asking a question without expecting an answer because you prefer the ache of the open to the easy fascism of convention. Leave the answers to the historians and Goebbels, am I right? Or the waitress with her Whaddya-want? Whaddya-want? It’s like, I’ll tell you, sweetheart, if you promise to comply. Here’s an idea. Don’t give me what I want. That’s what I want. And, Wanda, if you’ll forgive me this once for naively seeking the universal through the particularity of an eroticism, then I’ll wager you this: it’s what everyone wants.”
Wanda holds the photo. She presses her thumb on the face.
“I’m sorry,” Greg says. “I’m still talking, aren’t I? And you’re so kind, too. You’re like the opposite of judgmental! You’re probably thinking: Typical Greg! Going off on some tangent about the nature of desire!”
Acéphale, Acéphale, Acéphale.
Acéphale is vulnerable when nobody’s home. If Wanda knew the way in, then she’d ruin the portrait—like weather, the rain.
It will rain.
One afternoon, the way presents itself via Greg. He hands Wanda a copy of the key.
“In case I lose mine,” he says.
“Then borrow Jerome’s,” says Wanda.
“Suppose he loses his, too?”
“Then borrow Micah’s,” says Wanda.
“Suppose he loses his, too.”
“Then you’ll call Kyle.”
“Think about it,” says Greg. He smiles. “There’s so much to lose.”
Wanda steals from Greg. She steals the photo of Greg’s father. Faded, creased. It looks like shit. She tucks it in the elastic band of her underwear.
Is Wanda a thief?
It happens like this. Greg is talking. Wanda is thinking about stealing.
“My father was almost a priest,” Greg laughs. “My father knew God was real, but his knowledge wasn’t totalizing or anything. One day he was lounging on a chaise by the pool, and next to him there was this utterly empty chaise. I mean it was unbearably, painfully empty, and my father was overcome by a feeling of certainty. He knew then that God wasn’t there. I can’t explain it, but Kierkegaard said—”
“What,” says Wanda. “What did he say.”
“I forget,” says Greg. “Something to do with his girlfriend. She refused to forgive him. It was simultaneously sexy and inhumane.”
Greg overuses the word “simultaneously,” which functions to irritate my person, my prose. Don Quixote is simultaneously comic and tragic. The hymen is a ghostly veil which your desire wants to love and murder, simultaneously. The novel attacks the body of the text and the body of woman, simultaneously. Lolita is simultaneously comic and tragic. “You are the night,” writes Georges Bataille, simultaneously bleeding from his throat and violating the girl. The viewer simultaneously sees and is seen by René Magritte’s blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue eye. Tender tycoon, what is the test of intelligence? The ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the wherewithal to maintain arousal. Simultaneously intelligent and irritating, Greg is thirty-two years old.
Well, sometimes it’s like this. Someone, somewhere, has described the ravaged body of a “female aristocrat,” or a “virginal peasant,” or even a “prostitute,” most likely a prostitute, and the friends are touched while reading. They’re touching each other.
Or it’s something to do with the man from La Mancha. The mantis-shaped man looms up. Over the law. And yet, he is also helplessly lodged in a quivering jelly dome called “Fantasy.” This gives the friends a feeling. A friendly feeling? And onward runs the thin, folded horse. Hooves swarm to a bunch: the punk’s pink tongue tests the sheet of bubblegum. Stretches the skin. Enters the world. Like rain. It will rain.
Silly man. Barber’s basin. Rain.
Fuck.
Silly basin. The barber’s puppy. Shakes its wide, hairy hips. Yells with a tongue bent out, wants to swell the man’s heart. The mantis-shaped man. Looms up. Over the library. Massages your mood. Like weather. Stretches the skin.
Fuck.
Say there’s a friend or institution. He promises to grant you an island or world. And onward runs—–Shit!! He is comically thwarted by the reality of the current geopolitical arrangement. His failure grows love, binding the brothers.
And don’t discount the ancient tradition of sentimental pornography, featuring the sassy pupil and the childlike master. One says, “The time has come, dear friend, for your genius to flee like a whore from the burning brothel of your body.” The other just closes his eyes, accepts finitude. Then the friends who are reading are bound by a feeling, acutely erotic and practically political. They experience a collective thrill.
As if the library were God and a slut holding your love in her thighs like a sticky, sacred conjunction: Greg and Kyle and Micah and Jerome and Greg and Kyle and Jerome and Micah and Greg and Kyle and Micah and Jerome.
Like the clouds are vials belonging to a stodgy scientist-type, and you and your friends—you’re the pesky punk radicals. You knock over the vials. Spilling the contents. Collectively coming to a feeling, a feeling. Fuck. What is the feeling?
It’s raining, it’s weeping. It’s so fucking brotherly!!!!!!
Kansas, whole Kansas. The town. The campus. That grass. One red pig, or a lily, lily sheep? One sheep—fuck it. There’s farmland, a field—crows all over it. Those little oily pies. Beak-ends tucked up in the husks. Smeared on the organs, on the seeds that rest in the belly of the man who is pierced by a rod. Sun’s out, lovely like that in the harvest. Hardworking.
Farmers are fathers and sons and brothers, plus the one who is pierced by a thick wooden rod. The one who is staked to the ground, as crazed as a crucifixion nine hours in. Dancing on a stick, he’s spilling hay, spilling oils. He’s shedding crows like black helium balloons snipped free of their taught, intestinal strings. The swollen airborne bundles, she wants to take a pin to them. Make them pop. Make them quiet. Fuck it—shut them up!
The maniac man is staked to the ground, deep in a field of tall Kansas wheat. He calls out, a stupider Jesus. Claims he’s a knight, he’s a knight, he’s a knight. All he can do is talk of himself, so he says he’s in love with a woman. He really believes it. That he loves her, a woman! Fuck him, fuck him—
She will murder his horse.
Wanda could be in it: Kansas. Like, inside it. The dingiest corner of the campus café holds its sex like an odor, like the weather. Smells like shit. The roundest, stickiest table. Some humanities students/friends are studying the history of the novel.
There once was a person in a novel who willingly abdicated his purchase on totality. This produced certain structural effects which have something to do with 1) the “supreme spasm of infinite masturbation” and 2) the homo-social ligature binding brothers from different mothers of unequal socioeconomic standing. Years later, there came a novel, in which the artist really reveals his cards by fingering a crack in the silent clay edifice of his tasteless piece of handmade pottery (a figure for the structural instability of the text). And then there was a transgressive novel—
Anyways.
The humanities students are kissing and crying because they are moved by the intimacy of reading. They are sharing a mammoth piece of blueberry coffeecake, poking their forks at the crumbling body like concerned citizens sifting through the remains of a decimated brothel.
“What happened?”
“Who knows.”
“Any survivors?”
“What do you care.”
“What does your mother care, I fucked her here last night!”
“Mama, no!”
They compile their notes.
“The long-standing deep nature of these ties this trusting friendship unfailing friendship intelligence rigor strict sense of academic responsibility the difficulty is always to distinguish between on the one hand a sexual violence that is tolerable in a way because it is structural the violence which inhabits relations of passion and love devotion and good will profoundly touches profoundly touches the worthiness of our university unfailing friendship work devotion and good will a fine spirit of cooperation justice attachment to the university this trusting friendship pleasure respect gratitude neither any coercion or violence nor any attack on the presumed “innocence” of a twenty-seven- or twenty-eight-year-old woman where does she find the grounds devotion and good will how can she claim to have the right to initiate such a serious procedure with pleasure with all the friendship intelligence rigor integrity the future and the reputation bear witness worthiness of our university unfailing friendship at work at work worked for so long so long with pleasure respect with pleasure and gratitude with all the friendship the friendship and devotion.”1
The students are buoyant with relief, for they had expected to uncover evidence of discrimination beyond the limit of the tolerable. They’d expected to find violence, assault—even rape. But, as it turns out, these themes aren’t central. They’re present, sure. But they’re separate. They exist as a few little lonely, little lonely threads woven into the highly complex tapestry that is the history of the novel. Actually, in many ways, these threads are akin to running mascara or that popular chorus beloved by the unthinking masses. The lurid details. Some tawdry bars of elevator music gone shrill, now shriller. It is dishonest and unethical to sew them into the center of an argument, which sometimes occurs at school and wrecks everyone’s learning. The students glare in Wanda’s direction.
“Gender is like a frontispiece but metaphysical,” Greg says. “I know this, you know this. Thus, it is sinisterly disingenuous to compare people of faith with ‘powerful men,’ or, I don’t know, ‘camouflaged collaborationists,’ hiding in the Americas, and longing, silently longing, for one final communion with the illicit, the impossible—”
Greg closes his eyes.
He smiles.
“Faith is intelligence,” he says. “God wasn’t there, and my father knew it. He was so young then, twenty or twenty-five. He was better looking than I am. Well, maybe it’s hard to tell. I love this photo because—”
“You’re ashamed of your father,” says Wanda.
“I don’t want to become my father,” says Greg. “As a human being, sure, he’s problematic, no doubt about it! But you have to realize he’s from another time.”
“He’s an imbecile,” Wanda says.
“Actually? He’s an extremely ethical person. Do you even want to get to know me? I mean, really understand—”
“No.”
“Because here I am: the photo, my father, and I’ve got a brother, too. Of course the relationship between brothers is, it’s huge, and people who aren’t brothers, they can’t understand, because brothers are forced to enjoy farcical wandering like Don Quixote, and it’s almost sexual, well, it is sexual, and that’s what’s so intense, but my father didn’t have a brother so—”
From here the sun really does resemble a baby pervert, but big. Big. Golden boy, cherubically bloated. Fucking sick, but it’s true. He’s real. Sun up top. Soft and round, round. Round. Watches things clogging the countryside, all the barns can’t contain: this lyrical land with some shitty debris. Four p.m., and the yellow-fucking disc jerks himself down a notch. Falls down, a little. Golden, large-faced boy casting shadows on dumb objects, shading the corn yellow-yellow. The white wheat, brown dust, and the boots.
The fathers and sons are working the fields, and then there’s the Quixote staked to the earth like the shit-son of the Christian-Christian God. Fuck, it smells like shit over here. There’s human shit mixed in with the cows’. Human shit stuck to the soles of the boots, flecking the laces. Flecking the toe, the big, big toe.
The Big Toe and The Language of Flowers. The Big Toe, The Language of Flowers, and Mouth. Mouth. Mouth. The Big Toe, The Language of Flowers, Inner Experience, and Mouth. Mouth. Mouth. Sovereignty. Mouth. Sovereignty. Mouth. Sacred World, The Solar Anus, Mouth. Mouth. Mouth. Sacred World, The Solar Anus, Mouth. Mouth. Mouth. The Notion of Expenditure. Mouth. The Notion of Expenditure. Mouth. The Notion of Expenditure, The Meaning of the General Economy—“Aaaaghaghahahaha!”
The farmers are coming.
She will kill the Quixote’s horse.
She poisons it and she rides to the limit, to the highest peak of the ripe, ripe cliff near the spot where the trash is dumped in Kansas. She pushes it—ill, confused—over the edge. It screams like a person. Not like a fiction like a person. Huge horse ass. Sun tumbling, down, down. Down. She masturbates.
Wanda steals the photo. Now it’s pinned to her skin by the waistband of her underwear. This happens in Kansas. Call her a thief. Straight switch. Or a stick. The rod. The scepter, a stick, or the rod. Some wickerwork? What is wickerwork?
Fuck.
In Kansas the night is pitch and you are a vomiting star. You are a poor and puking little thing. Are you twinkling? “Don’t fucking touch me,” you say. You shrug out of my reach. Have you misplaced your phone? Check the pocket of your jeans.
He will find you in Kansas, the lovely man from La Mancha. He hides on the face of the creep in the corn. His head is lodged in the break of the day, his life held fast by the cleft of the tree. Even the dew becomes him, a measure of idiocy to slicken the air. And when morning arrives, don’t forget why you’re here. You are educated. You are so, so educated. You are in debt. Gilded by pain. Reverent and mild. You are somebody’s treasure now. You are somebody’s burden. Maybe you are mine. Tell me what you deserve. Shall we get it over with? Or do you enjoy the wait?
Kansas. What is Kansas.
Fuck.
The photo, Wanda’s underwear. Wanda’s hip. Her left hip.
Greg’s father, facing down.
She is a thief. She is a thief, she is. A bundle of twigs for flogging. A scepter or stick, the rod. What, a shoot from some shitty willow?
Fuck.
NOTES
1 Jacques Derrida, “Letter from Jacques Derrida to Ralph J. Cicerone, then Chancellor of UCI,” July 25, 2004, Jacques-Derrida, accessed December 9, 2017, http:www.jacques-derrida.org/Cicerone.html and “Politics of Difference,” in For What Tomorrow . . . A Dialogue (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004).