A Portrait of the Artist in Decline

This was my first attempt to write a novel in 2020. I learned a lot and evolved as an artist.

Part One

Thomas Aguirre stood upon the stage looking up at the man in the armchair. The man’s hand hovered above him and the fingers moved slowly to the melody of the song that Aguirre had birthed the prior evening or, perhaps, still within this dream. The man appeared to him as a shadow, always as a mere shadow, now towering above him.

The masters come and go
as we all dance in their show
like little figurines
in real life as on the screens…

The words, Aguirre’s own voice, gently wafted throughout the room accompanied by the faint harmony of a stringed instrument. It was not his own guitar, but the sound of a foreign one. It was softer, more delicate than his electric guitar. The auditory vibrations sent chills down his spine as unseen hands struck a chord.

In the game of tragedy
one must roll the dice,
and if you’re willing harder
your work never dies.

The fingers suspended above him began to move more quickly, jutting sharply in their upward movements. Aguirre felt motionless as he looked upward, observing the scene as a spectator, yet once he looked to his surroundings, he discovered that his limbs were moving and, as soon as that dawned upon him, he could feel everything—his arms jerkily interpreting the rhythm, his legs moving only slightly off beat. Then, suddenly, a string pulled him upward, onto the tip of his toes. He winced as a sharp stabbing pain shot upward, growing duller at first as he continued to hang. Thus, he remained there, suspended, and the building pressure, together with the music, began to crescendo toward the chorus.

We’ll go toe to toe with the devil
and one on one with the sun,
burning with desire to move everyone;
we’ll be striving to create a work oh so great—
immortal art that’ll never fall apart.

Then, suddenly, Aguirre became weightless as a sharp pain struck down his spine like a bolt of lightning. The ground began to fall, the shadow of the hand shrank rapidly, and the room went dark as the fingers above clasped around him. The song continued, muffled now, yet still audible to the one who knew the lyrics. They had been written hastily, a very rough draft of what he hoped might become a masterpiece, one that he might share.

The “path” to greatness is a lonely one, full of sacrifice,
and we’ve only so much time here before everybody dies.
Thus, lonely together we will leave our mark:
a light that will remain and make it worth all the pain.

As he remained there, weightless and immaterial, suspended in an abyss, he became numb again. Thus, he floated in a world without illumination in which his music resonated audibly within the darkness. As he transitioned from being keenly aware of the hand veiling him to this new sensation of nothingness, he overcame a keenly felt swell of anxiety that rose within him. Then, letting go, allowing it to evaporate from him, he began to swim within waves of sound; the strings grew quiet, and his voice sang to him from the past.

Yes, the masters come and go
as we all dance in their show,
but their works, they do remain—
scales of a dragon not yet slain.

Eventually, after drifting within the audible darkness for some time, he could hear a faint crackling noise begin to rise from somewhere nearby and he opened his eyes. The forest was thick, trunks were covered in moss and the canopy was seamless, illuminated only by what sounded like a nearby bonfire flickering. Shadows danced as projected upon the many trunks, rising and falling in harmony with the snaps of burning logs, in dissonance with the trailing melody.

Because in the game of tragedy
most just play a part,
but if you’ve got the merit,
go straight for their heart.

Yes, in the game of tragedy
triumph is very rare;
let’s do it together,
& triumph as a pair.

The dancers continued to rise and fall above him as the music came to a close. It was at this moment, as the world grew silent and his head throbbed with a strange pressure, that he sat up to examine the surrounding forest. He eventually rose to his feet and walked closer to the flame. The beasts, seemingly human in form, yet with silhouettes that bore monstrous outgrowths, as if branches had begun to protrude from their flesh, were merrily circling the firepit, dancing flamboyantly and now out of sync with the natural percussion that had reconstituted itself—crack, crackle, crack! He could see horns of libations in their hands, reminding him of the vessel through which he had once drank fermented milk and blood. He could taste it again, sour and thick against his throat as the memory washed over him.

Thus, he remained mesmerized on the edge of the clearing, watching the unfolding spectacle. That is, until she caught his eye. He suddenly noticed a nude woman seated upon a log, seated behind a man similarly nude facing into the forest; she looked backward over her shoulder and into Aguirre. Her skin was pale and reflected the flame as the moon does the sun. Her eyes, with pupils black as night, darker than the forest, appeared as mirrors. He could see himself reflected in one of them.

She continued to peer back into him as her finger ran slowly down the spine of the man seated in front of her. As she did so, Aguirre suddenly became more aware of his body. His muscles tensed, a cool chill ran down his spine, and the scene began to fade slowly: the fire, the satyrs, the trees, and eventually the woman’s face. Amidst the renewed darkness, a pressure grew within his mind as if the hand of the shadow were pinching it or holding him underwater.

He woke suddenly then, alone in his bedroom. The sheets were stained with wine, an empty bottle was coolly nestled against his skin, and he winced as the sun struck his eyes. The throbbing had carried over into waking life and he buried his face into his pillow to return to the darkness.

Yet, rather than return to the dream, he continued to grow more wakeful, to become more aware. He turned over and stared into the ceiling, opening and closing his eyes in waves, each eliciting a pulse of dull agony. Eventually, as his eyes gradually adjusted, though while still squinting, he could see his laptop on the desk on the far side of the tiny apartment, a recording program still open, and his guitar sloppily leaning against the wall nearby. The song began to play then, once more from the top.

The masters come and go
as we all dance in their show
like little figurines
in real life as on the screens…

Aguirre’s studio became brighter and he limped his way to the sink to guzzle water until he could feel and literally hear it sloshing about within him. He felt like a living gourd, a vessel that had been filled and within which something was fermenting, transforming, and becoming. Returning to his bed, he remained there for some time, laying still lest the ocean within him become stormy. Thus, he stared at the ceiling until the hangover began to pass, until he felt able to emerge into the light and to begin his day.

The nondescript anycity—you might live there—was bustling with the sound of traffic obscuring the songbirds in the trees. It was Saturday though, and he could actually hear them, ever so faintly, as he walked to a café to record his nocturnal experiences. This had become frequent since his relationship ended the year before: dreams, that is, and him recording them. They were not all quite as extraordinary as this one. Sometimes it was merely a brief vignette of him sitting on this exact sidewalk as an elegant model stared at him through her sunglasses, as if she were looking at a painting, as if she did not know quite how she felt about the artwork sitting before her.

He had become quite solitary since graduation had severed him from his friends, the community that he had built, and the remnant of his youth that had followed him to college. They had been together since they were sixteen, drawn to one another as the only two gay boys at their suburban high school. They were not actually compatible at all, at least in his opinion, but time and experience had pushed them together, made them codependent, made them family. That was the hardest part, but he had developed a conviction, a clear vision of the life that he wanted to create, a calling that he heard within his dreams and that manifested itself within his art.

There was always this abstract other within his dreams, not the shadow from that evening’s saga, but another figure that appeared frequently, someone more pleasant—a friend. Sometimes he took a known form, another man that Aguirre had met and loved during his travels. Other times he appeared as a stranger or as other known persons, though Aguirre sensed a continuity. However, the vision of the other remained confined to the world of his dreams. Nonetheless, the dreams began to bleed into his reality, to influence his perceptions, feelings, and beliefs. Thus he drifted away from the person that he had become in relation to his environment, in relation to others. It was like someone calling to him, calling him toward himself. Thus, during the final days of college, Aguirre began to feel confined, unable to connect, always aware of exactly what he wanted and yet finding himself in a world that felt antithetical, crushing, and increasingly alien to him.

He had felt much more at peace since arriving in the city, at least relative to the tensions that had been tearing at him before. It was not comfortable, mind you—loneliness, unemployment, student loans, a desperate job search, and mounting credit to support his debt fueled art, but he felt as if he were in Spring. His creativity had been steadily flowing, each day a tiny .0000001 step of progress toward his ultimate goals.

Upon arriving at the café, he found that it was busy, as usual, but he was able to snag a spot on the patio. The ashen smell of cigarettes permeated the air, seeping into his clothing and his hair as he wrote vigorously, chain smoking all the while. He smoked Parliaments because they made him feel masculine; they were originally designed to be bitten down upon while firing a machine gun after all. They made him feel very classic, elegant, and rugged. He was quite ignorant of their other connotations, and he chose to ignore them once someone clued him in. Apparently, a lot of people thought that he was into cocaine. “No, no, I am already too manic to dabble in such trifles”, he assured everyone without ever convincing them.

Someone stared at him as he sat there amidst a cloud of smoke like an old steam engine singing softly to himself, oblivious to others, as he sought to improve upon the lyrics from the prior evening. He had created it during a flash of inspiration, within only a few minutes, like a bolt of lightning, and the material had hardened. He was finding difficulty improving upon it. The frustration could be seen upon his face as he stared more intently at the pages upon which he was writing; a tightness grew within his muscles, his chest, and his arms.

Eventually, after a prolonged episode of failure known only to him, he decided to take a moment to relax. It was difficult to believe at times like that, but he had learned that inspiration would strike again soon when the time was right. He had a show to prepare for that evening anyway. Thus, he leaned back with a sigh of resignation, smiled, and breathed in deeply. The air had cleared. He had at some point earlier become too focused and possessed by his creative impulses to light another cigarette.

Looking around now, he realized that the patio was more sparsely populated than when he had arrived. “How long had he been sitting here?”, he wondered to himself. As he looked around, the afternoon sun was soft against the buildings rising around the cafe and the sound of traffic had dissipated. A woman in a beautiful sundress with sleek dark hair sat on the far end of the patio, but the other tables were now empty. Strangely, the air, which usually carried faint traces of the nearby bakery, smelled like this candle on his nightstand, a scent that he had always found erotic.

Aguirre had been performing for a year now. The music was his way of healing and rediscovering himself when he arrived here alone in 2001. He had been in choir, studied saxophone, and purchased his guitar as a child, but he had been out of touch with his musical side throughout college. It felt like being whole again. He was not actually the best singer, but he fancied himself a talented wordsmith, and his vocals were improving. He liked to think that he was becoming his own instrument.

The show was nonchalant, sparsely attended, and resulted in little monetary reward. There were approximately twenty people at the venue during his performance. He recognized none of them, yet he was grateful for the opportunity to share his heart and soul. He had written “High High Desert” while driving cross country to the city and, in many ways, he felt that he was still wandering between his past and a future that he believed he would one day realize. It was the first time that he had felt that he had actually written a true piece of musical art. Meanwhile, Canto de la fruta was the result of a challenge that he posed to himself to rapidly create a song in Spanish.

Hojas de árboles bailan en el viento
y el follaje ardiente canta cayendo.
Pero la fruta, la fruta dura,
se queda colgada, ternura,
arriba, altamente, y pura

Y las hojas en el suelo
miran arriba a la fruta en el sueño,
bailando todavía en el viento
el aliento del soñado(r.)

He had failed the challenge and chose to read the resulting poem in between performances. He was half disappointed, half proud, while believing that he might actually someday transform it into a complete song. Wandering and a sense of dissolution in the wake of his college glory days, glorious before everything began to fall apart toward the conclusion, were the prominent themes of his first forays back into music. Initially, he had felt like the fruit that had fallen and failed to take root as he watched friends launching into their adult lives. However, at this point, his life had come to feel as if there were a pattern of building, falling apart, stagnation, and rebuilding. He was beginning to embrace the deciduous nature of his existence. The periods of stagnation were often dark though, giving birth to songs and writing that felt soulful, yet depressing. One of them, City Lights, seemed to be popular with the crowd that night. It was originally a very sad song, but he had revised it to make it happier.

And when I left you
we became two…
learning to carry on,
and we will make the best of it
there will be a new dawn.

City lights shinin’, shinin’ above me
at one with the music, sound, and revelry.
Neither sunset nor sunrise will there ever be.

Oh lord, oh nor sir,
it’s a road to now here for me.
Oh lord, oh no siiiiir,
that’s all that I can see.

It is all a matter of perspective really. Here and now: now here. Aguirre liked to think that he was clever. The music had become his light in the dark—his own music and that which he liked to escape into. He had gone through a phase upon arrival in the city, descending into the underground. There was this one club that was literally in an abandoned mine shaft. The congregated sweat of everyone’s bodies evaporated and condensed on the low ceiling, dripping back down upon them to the beat of remixed reggae music. There was this other one that some guys that he met organized that popped up around town from time to time, always at some undisclosed location released the day of the event. They called it The Mirage and it was a true oasis. It existed only in memory now though, a vivid one that Aguirre was confident was best left there. “It might still exist; it probably still exists”, he would think from time to time. The slight temptation to seek it out once more came and went frequently.

However, his attention had since turned to his art, especially his writing. The Cosmic Archipelago, a young adult fantasy space opera with roots in Greek tragedy, was taking up most of his time these days. His life had become devoted to the creative engagement and interrogation of his passions. He had been working on the series of novels for two years now. He had sacrificed too much and invested too much into the project to ever give it up.

When explaining this to others, he was quite clear, “there is no such thing as a ‘sunk cost’ once one has crossed a certain threshold.” He was also quite convinced that it was a masterpiece in the making, not merely a work of young adult fiction, but a true work of art that would rival that of the most renowned painters, writers, composers, and philosophers. He never made these claims publicly, but when questioned about similar beliefs and expectations, he offered the following explanation, “if I set my goal to be to write a book, I will write a book. If I set my goal to be to write a great book, I will write a good book. If I set my goal high, and I always do, I will come closer to achieving that goal than I would if I had merely said, ‘I am going to write a book’.”

Something was always missing though. Being alone with few friends, underemployed, and in debt was never enough for Aguirre. To the outside observer, there were multiple deficits. Yet the one that occupied his time and his “tangential art” was a melancholic imagining of a creative partner, one who might feel similarly—a special kind of madness and frenzy, that desirable hubris necessary to believe that one could actually make an impact upon the world.

He had actually worked up the courage to perform his new song at that evening’s performance. It seemed to go well. There were only five people that he could clearly discern still remaining within the bar at that point, so the stakes seemed low.

We’ll be in a match with the masters,
our destiny a fate,
and one way or another
we will shout checkmate.

After he had packed his equipment into his friend’s car, he returned to catch the next performance. Gradually, the room began to fill, the bar became rowdier, and a line formed outside waiting to gain entry into the establishment that had by now reached full capacity. One of his friends was bartending that night, but she was busy, and he did not want to be a bother. He thought about going home, but he had seen one of the bands before and decided to stick around to catch their set later that evening. Thus, his evening consisted of sipping seltzer water in the back of the room and moving his body to the music with restraint. This was punctuated only by occasional smoke breaks.

At some point, someone approached him while he was outside having a smoke.

“Mirage, tonight”, the man said, handing him a notecard with the location scribbled on it. “Hopefully I’ll see you there again”, he said with a smirk before walking out to join a group of friends at a picnic table on the back patio. He looked familiar and Aguirre was not sure if “again” meant “again tonight” or was meant to indicate that they had encountered one another before. Aguirre knew that he would remember if he had seen the man before; his memory was better than most. He decided that it did not really matter though. The Mirage might have reappeared, but he had his eye set on a fixed target, not necessarily a tangible one, not yet at least, but one that certainly did not involve him diving back into his old haunts.

The man looked back at him with a suggestive raising of both eyebrows and a devious smile. Meanwhile, Aguirre quickly averted his gaze to hide his laughter, a soft laugh and a smile that he could not control. Aguirre had been on this weird celibacy kick. He was not quite sure why, or how it had started, but after a little while it got old—the mirage of connection, meaningless sex, the anxiety of attempting to relate to another person beyond the surface. He still missed it; he had not become a nun. He had merely become patient, extremely patient.

There was a long period during which he had embraced the philosophy of hooking up first to determine whether he actually wanted to get to know someone on a deeper level. However, he had since experienced a significant shift in his feelings about it all at some point during the last year. The intellectual stimulation, though he had yet to experience it, had to be proven, tested, and determined to be enduring rather than epiphenomenal to his mood on any given day. Again, the existence of such a connection remained theoretical and the inspiration for much of his writing, thinking, decision-making, and art in general.

Thus, he returned home alone, happy to have heard some wonderful music and resisting the serious urge to go to The Mirage. There was a moment as he sat in the car and processed the thought of going, giving in to the long-standing temptation to return and to dissolve into the music and pleasure. He could feel a wave of sexual energy swell within him as his mind wandered, wondering about how the night might end if he gave in. The music on the radio as he inserted the key to start the car did not help.

Hitting the streets—
thirty sixth to the east.
Then hitting the sheets
all up in your electric feast…

The music caught his attention instantly and was interrupted only for a punctuated moment as he turned the key, and the car engine began to roar.

…A burning tongue
and the kiss of hottest hot.
Come home with me,
I’ll show you what I’ve got…

This had been happening for a while, an energy swelling within and around him in real life as in the dream. He assumed that it was a sort of curse, someone distracting him from his mission. As such, he remained resolute, taking moments to meditate and to allow the waves of internal sensation of desire to pass. He remained calm, taking moments to rationalize patterns that his mind was attempting to construct.

Thus, he sat one day along the shore of the lake, attempting to write a song. The main snippet had come to him in a dream that morning and was innocuous enough.

And I can see ‘em fallin’
like leaves from a tree,
golden in sunlight
and it’s raining…
It’s raining tears all around me.

The woman singing in his vision was blonde. She stood upon a pedestal as objects gracefully fell around her—golden leaves illuminating her in a diaphanous white dress within the pure darkness of the vision; the leaves gradually transformed into flames, and then transmogrified into water. Her voice became more powerful at the conclusion, extending the “me” into “maaaay”, with a perfection that Aguirre was unable to replicate within waking life.

Additionally, every time that he attempted to build it out beyond that which he had retrieved from the dream, it would somehow become sexual. It was as if his mind were being bent. Thus, he sat there quietly, singing it to himself, attempting to build out the song innocently, attempting to hit the high notes. His conductor when he was a child always suggested imagining a walnut between both cheeks.

It was then that a squirrel caught his attention.

He returned to this spot often. The squirrel interaction had felt enchanted, strange, yet enchanted nonetheless. He had also had a waking vision of ripe fruit aflame hanging from the trees above falling upon the ground to scorch the Earth. It was like dreaming while awake, though it was an eerie hallucination. He felt as if he was continuously returning to the same dark forest that the shadow had sent him to in his earlier dream. Thus, he sat there and wrote, documenting his strange visions and incorporating them into the novel that he was writing.

Today, however, once he finally looked up from his journal, he noticed a man standing on a dock along the riverside to the left of the bench that Aguirre was perched upon. The man also appeared to be writing in a notebook, possibly drawing though as he looked out upon the river before them. Aguirre was intrigued and he kept looking up from his writing multiple times, always catching himself before making it obvious or being caught staring. At one point, the man had sat down cross legged and was still vigorously putting pencil or pen to paper, but Aguirre was not able to determine what the man was actually doing there or to get a good look at him though. Nonetheless, he was happy to see that someone else found the spot fruitful.

Then, during an interval of deep focus after Aguirre finally returned to his writing with full attention, he was rudely interrupted. A man zoomed by on his bike with a boombox loudly blaring a rap song—”goin’ under, moans like thunder”—that literally featured backup vocalists mimicking the sounds of their orgasms. It was obscene.

“How ***king uncouth do you have to be to ride around blasting that s***”, Aguirre pondered quietly to himself before finally turning his entire body around to the left verify that the man behind him felt the same way. Yet, he suddenly found himself alone again. The man had disappeared.

Aguirre returned to the spot days later. It was one of his go to spots to sit and write. It always reminded him of a park that he had been to in Uganda along the road between Kampala and Entebbe. It was extremely uncanny.

As he was walking there, his attention suddenly felt directed to the right. Two dogs on leashes, one mounting the other, were engaging in relations as their owners stood with their backs to them, one distracted by a hawk circling above and the other watching as her daughter chased a squirrel. The dogs looked directly at Aguirre for a prolonged moment before one of their owners shrieked and startled him. He quickly looked straight ahead and began walking again.

His face, having already shaken off the expression of befuddlement, remained calm as he approached the bench and noticed the man sitting alongside the riverside once more. Aguirre was smiling inside, and he took a moment to verify that the man did appear to be handsome while ensuring that he was not seen staring. The man sat there, plainly dressed with blonde hair and was engrossed within a book.

Then, upon taking his seat, Aguirre did it again, the restrained and almost unwillful turning of his neck to look over to his left. Nonetheless, he regained control and managed to enter into his flow state; poetry, components of The Cosmic Archipelago project, and assorted documentary musings flowed through him without obstruction as if he were possessed by a creative spirit. He made a point not to write about the man though. It was similar to when he had recently ridden his bike northward to view the passion fruit vines only to find them barren. He had taken an imaginary snapshot with his mind and titled it Dormant Passion. He was not sure what to title this one though.

Thus, actively passionate, Aguirre engaged in his creative enterprises until a voice suddenly interrupted him. The man spoke softly to capture Aguirre’s attention without startling him, standing to his left and eying him nervously at first. Aguirre looked up and said hello; it was the man that had been upon the dock and, now that he could actually see him, he thought to himself that the man appeared to be made of the finest clay, perfect marble. With pale skin, a sincere yet faint smile, and a very classic look, the man demonstrated visibly keen interest, perhaps merely professional as a fellow artist, but Aguirre was shirtless on this particular day. That fact probably did not mean much, especially in this particular city, but he chose to read into it.

They were like shadow and light, Aguirre similarly pale but with darker hair and eyes. The other man was also significantly more handsome, Aguirre thought to himself, like he could be a prince.

“I’m Thomas”, the man informed him.

Aguirre was quick to smile and restrained his laughter. “I’m Thomas too…”, he said, beaming now, “Thomas Aguirre. It’s Basque.”

“O’Donnell… Irish”, he said, similarly smiling while twisting his head a smidge as his brow furrowed. “How is the writing going, if you don’t mind my asking”, the man inquired, becoming more relaxed and walking over to stand next to the tree on the right.

“Oh, it’s been flowing. The other day there was this squirrel that I was writing about, right where you are standing now. It kept examining a pile of vomit, and I wrote about how I admired the squirrel for being the only one of the animals to inspect it and then walk away; he did so twice, but eventually he came back and grabbed a chunk before scurrying off to enjoy it privately.”

“So that’s what you do here… you… you write about squirrels and vomit?”, O’Donnell retorted, scoffing.

Aguirre was mortified, realizing that of all the possible things that he could have said, he had spoken of squirrels and vomit, the first impression that might haunt him forever. “No, no, I actually am a legitimate writer, like, I write poetry and fiction and music…” Aguirre quickly responded, attempting to recover, “but that one really stuck with me.” His whole body was tense and everything else faded away except the vision of O’Donnell. “What do you write about?”, he questioned in return.

“Huh…”, O’Donnell sighed, crossing his arms and nodding while still processing Aguirre’s statements, his expression quizzical and, somehow, still interested. “I’m writing a novel about a painter. I’m a painter. I’m writing about a painter. She’s a woman though and she’s not really sure why she’s painting. I’m not really sure why I’m writing it. I think of it as practice…”, he said before taking a moment to pause and then adding, “Someday I will create a masterpiece… Someday…” There was no detectable sign of sarcasm and Aguirre became hopeful that they had overcome the squirrel incident.

“Mmmm… I feel you”, Aguirre responded, nodding as his eyes focused, his interest having deepened.

“Yea”, he said, looking back at Aguirre, “I graduated recently, and everything has sort of been up in the air. I work from home, writing. It is what it is.”

“Me too”, Aguirre said, thinking silently to himself, “you’re like a mirror… cool, stay cool.” This was the most genuinely engaged that Aguirre had felt in social interaction since he had first returned to music two years earlier. Meeting O’Donnell was like being piqued note by note, string by string. It was by far the best dream that he had lived in recent memory, seemingly so ripe with potential. He hoped that it would become recurrent. He had great hopes for O’Donnell. Thus, Aguirre remained very calm.

The conversation was brief and, as O’Donnell said his goodbye, Aguirre notice that man’s pale skin had become slightly pink. He was not sure that he should say anything, but just as O’Donnell was turning around, he mentioned, “You appear to be sunburnt.” O’Donnell was startled for a moment, but he thanked Aguirre while pushing his fingers against his bicep to see the impression it made in the nascent burn. Then he nodded and returned to the dock alongside the shore of the river where he removed his shirt and began lathering on another layer of sunscreen.

However, Aguirre realized shortly afterward that he was sunburnt as well, faintly, but still noticeably if he pushed similarly against his skin. He felt warm inside and out. Then, when he turned around again, less afraid now to be seen looking, signaling interest, he found the scene to be empty. He knew that he might never see the man again, he accepted that reality, and he returned to his writing. The conversation was very brief, but O’Donnell had made an impression. As soon as he walked away, O’Donnell finally entered into the book, one of Aguirre’s trusty leather-bound journals, and Aguirre began to write a song titled Someone Along the Riverside.

“Art finds a way”, Aguirre wrote, having woken up in the midst of the night to record his nocturnal transmissions from the beyond. It was a tragic vision. Years invested into his musical abilities, sacrifices made, and serious improvement in his vocal talents culminated in him becoming utterly deaf. As a silver lining there was a brief productive period influenced by auditory Charles Bonnet syndrome, the death throes of his treasured auditory senses. However, the brief visions presented to him grew darker with each flash—the frustration of seeing other’s contorted faces as he attempted to sing, the despair of not being able to hear himself, people signing to him in an unintelligible sign language that he had not yet learned, and an inability to communicate to others, their faces overcome with puzzlement as they passed by him, as he became lost within a crowd of unfamiliar faces. He titled it The Austere Silence.

His dreams often presented these prolonged ordeals. As he learned to dive deeper into them, they became much longer, more surreal, darker, and, unfortunately or fortunately, depending upon the dream, easier to retrieve and recall. Yet he also developed additional psychological abilities, including extreme positivity. Thus, he made a point of attempting to turn them all into something positive, ideas for stories, books, works of art that he might create—to transmute them, to sublimate them into beauty.

In the wake of particularly devastating dreams, the ones that left him shaken, such as the dream of deafening, he would calmly meditate upon waking. You see, Aguirre had become somewhat superstitious, his reason and pathos at war within regarding the meaning and weight of his dreams. “I will find a way. I will continue forging this path. I will find a way to sleep through the night, tonight and every night”, he assured himself, repeating it like a mantra. At some point he knew that even if you knew beyond a shadow of a doubting thomas that such a future awaited you, you had to affirm it and plan for it and then move forward as if it was never going to actually happen; thus, you will believe that you are prepared for it once the time comes to accept it as reality. That way, because we never actually know that such a future awaits us, we do not succumb to cowardice and we pursue our dreams boldly despite the allure of a relatively predetermined and painless path. He had significantly less convincing arguments regarding legitimately affirming such a fate under conditions of certainty when the fate awaited turned out to be particularly undesirable.

Thus, celebrating his continued ability to hear, he turned on music, one of his recent pieces titled Starlight Shinin’. It played softly as he stared at the ceiling, breathing in four counts, holding seven, and exhaling eight. The rhythmic pranayama pattern coupled with the music was soothing.

Starlight shining, an ocean above me
Not a cloud in sight, clear as can be.
Thousand twinklin’ in the deep dark sea
‘n some of em shootin’
callin’ to me.

I made a wish for you,
and I hope it comes true.
I made a wish for me,
and Imma wait ‘n see.

Starlight shining all around me,
swimmin’ swimmin’ deep in the sea.
All of ‘em twinklin’, singin’ something new.
It’s a cosmic chorus, all for you.

A sky so wide,
no one at my side,
sitting here naked,
nothing to hide.

Imma take one small step,
one giant leap,
diving in deeper,
into the deep.
Past cosmic objects,
sun moon stars rain.
Anyone would think it insane.

I’m going straight to the center,
right to the heart,
tryin’ to figure out
how it all starts.

Was it one little look?
A kiss three or two,
Makin’ me see only you…?

He counted imaginary stars shooting through his mind as the song played and he waited for sleep to come to him. As he laid there, he remembered how every night that he worked to write the song, literal shooting stars would manifest themselves as if nature were coauthoring the piece with him. The memory was beautiful, and it resonated within him as sleepiness gradually returned and he drifted to sleep. The world became dark then, and, if he dreamed, he did not remember what else might have happened that night. The song was classic though and he hoped that it might have influenced his subsequent dream. If it did, he knew that it would be memorable; if only dreams actually worked reliably in that way. Thus, the music continued to play within actual reality as he slept soundly and into the morning.

It was one tiny look,
a kiss, maybe more…
Let’s let the rest
remain as lore.

Starlight shining all around weee,
swimmin’ swimmin’ deep in the sea
All of em twinklin’ singing something new—

A wish come true: Me and You…

A few days later Aguirre was seated upon a different bench. His usual one was occupied, though O’Donnell was nowhere to be seen, so it was not the end of the world. Thus, he had stationed himself at another bench nearby where he began to write a song. The tightrope had always been symbolic in his work. He had been learning to slack line along the lake, balancing above the water nearby, when he had an epiphany—walking a tightrope was, he realized, exactly like attempting to achieve one’s goals within myriad other pursuits. One’s focus becomes in tune with the rope as the surroundings melt away, like the strings of a guitar. He never reached the other side though, always falling into the water below where he watched as a woman with long dark hair and pale skin crossed effortlessly, performing tricks as she did it. She assured him though that this was the result of eight years of practice and dedication. To some this might be dissuasion, but to Aguirre it was pure inspiration.

The song came to him slowly at first. He had started it in his dream earlier that morning, introducing a chorus that was clear at first. However, as the day went on, it became difficult to remember how exactly to pace it in order to reproduce it. The tempo began to feel increasingly out of sync as the day progressed and he ended up abandoning it. Meanwhile, the verses that Aguirre wrote during the day were significantly improved and he was pleasantly surprised. This was uncommon in the relation between his in dream and waking life songwriting. Thus, he sang softly as he wrote the lyrics that flowed through him in that moment.

I was walking, I was walking a line.
Above it all, it was so damn fine.
Looking straight ahead between A and B;
laser focus without You and Me.

I was walking, I was walking a line.
Tight as f***, I was right on time.
Didn’t miss a beat, walking in the wind,
lost in the moment, super disciplined.

But seeing you gave me vertigo.
I could feel the vibes down below.
I lost my balance and fell for you.
Now I’m layin’ here wondering what to do.

I was walking, I was walking a line…

It was then that Aguirre’s train of thought derailed, and he felt the sudden urge to look up. It was as if his peripheral vision had been alerted to some sort of instinctual trigger. Thus, he reoriented his gaze upward to discover that O’Donnell was undressing on the dock, his shirt and then his pant, and was about to dive in. Then, with only a pair of boxers, he dove in with a splash.

“So ***king fine…”, Aguirre blurted out loud. He was still staring when O’Donnell surfaced a moment later and O’Donnell noticed. Aguirre’s eyes grew wide and his muscle tensed, but O’Donnell just waved hello before diving beneath the surface once more and swimming beyond view behind some bushes along the riverside. Thus, Aguirre returned to his writing, working his way toward a more powerful section of the song.

Imma show you what I’m worth,
Break it down, touch and sound,
Cuz I’m fallin’.
Yea, I’m still fallin’.

Ain’t yet hit the ground.
Yea, not yet fully drowned.
I’m still fallin’.
I’ll always be fallin’.

Put it all on the line.
Yea, I’m giving you a sign,
Cuz I’m fallin’,
***king fallin’….

With a pile of paper in hand Aguirre sat along the southside of the river. He had recently been invited to join the editorial team at one of his favorite local literary journals, (in)Quisition; it was also the most prestigious one in town, so he felt doubly honored. The stack was intimidating though, but he was comforted by his extensive experience with rejection. Other artists like him would certainly take it lightly, knowing that he had given their work his full consideration. At this point he had one publication and it was in (in)Quisition; it was also, strangely, not one of the better works that he had sent in for review.

The stack began ominously with one about a man banging a sheep. This was his fifth time around the rodeo since joining the Q as they called themselves, so he felt intuitively that this was bizarre, but he decided that his prior was too uninformative to jump to any snap conclusions. The next one seemed ok, it was titled The Wax of Love, and he could detect an interesting philosophical rooting.

Love can be infinite and eternal,
yet it waxes and wanes.
The wax of love transforms
as you hold it and it you.

It melts as do you in
an uncontrollable flow
of two rivers as one.
It roots as do you
in the fascinating depths of another—

you soil, he root;
you branch, he air and light.
It shocks you with moments
of awe, beauty, and reverence.

The wind blows
and the earth trembles;
such is great 1ove.

He paused for a moment to admire it. If you read the whole poem, there was a certain caveman aesthetic to it that was simultaneously irksome and fantastic. Then he saw the name.

“CP Kafkafy… now that seems a little bit precocious…”, Aguirre thought to himself before conceding moments later that that would actually be a complement. “Conceited. I meant conceited”, he announced audibly to world, embarrassed, but happy that no one was around to notice his gaffe. “Behold, I am the blunderman”, he thought to himself before laughing at his own silent joke. He realized though, the importance of reacquainting oneself with old lessons. One must always speak slowly, thinking methodically between utterances, analyzing formed thoughts before expressing them openly. Then he turned over the page to read the next poem.

Mechanical Zoo

one can, toucan. beer, bird. trunk, Trunk. Car, Elephant. gas, water. fumes, s***. invasive, endangered. of ford, of nature. natural nonetheless. efficient, beautiful. beautiful, majestic to some, twosome. a solution! car + elephant. mechanical beasts: metal giants beneath false flesh. yet they are all that remains of nature in the wake of ford, who is of nature, nonetheless. a solution?

is there a solution, or will we merely call whatever we do the solution?

cars are made, elephants f***.

i prefer the latter.

He took it seriously for a moment. “Well, the ending certainly presents this strange sigh of resigned relief, a resignation to the inevitability of our demise and a strange embrace of our carnal reality…”, he said before snapping out of his default acceptance of the legitimacy of the pieces received by the review.

“How can anyone in their right mind ever bring themselves to send something like this out and have even a shred of self-respect?”, Aguirre questioned his own mind angrily. “Compared to this, the first one, the conceited one, actually seems artful”, he thought, succumbing to what might be cunning trickery. Suddenly the poem that might otherwise have appeared to merely be ordinary became masterful and as legitimate as any other poem that might actually be taken seriously. He thought then that it was like terrorism to send “poems” such as Mechanical Zoo. Thus, he dubbed it Poetic Terrorism. “Imagine if they coordinated this; just imagine what might actually get published”, Aguirre thought with horror and amazement.

The next one was literally, he was pretty sure, a poetic depiction of a gay circuit party. It was as if there was no escape from the rising sexualized chorus. It followed him everywhere.

Naked bodies adorn a glistening surface.
They flit about as cocks with cocks;
floating, they smile gaily.

Ünicorns, peacocks, flamingos,
and ordinary geometric shapes
they have inflated
accompany their social gathering—
this romp of men
with only a few
tits
of friends and allies
similarly floating,
smiling…

Splash!

Some dive beyond surfaces.

The stack had diminished the following day as he sat once more upon the bench, hoping that O’Donnell might reappear to say hello. He had seen him jogging the other day, actually multiple times, serendipitously along the trail and the nearby side streets. O’Donnell had seen him most of the times, except for this one time that Aguirre waved and O’Donnell ran past him without noticing.

Aguirre was optimistic, but he also had a lot of work to do, so he figured that the world would actually be alright no matter what might happen. The poems felt tamer today, more traditional. There was a collection of limericks, three “Darkly Humorous Limericks”, one of which was titled, Demonocracy. It appeared to be promising and very of the moment amidst the tumult of the war on terror and the reign of the real Dick Cheney. Then there was The Robotic Orgasm.

A machine desires intercourse—
the final frontier of replication without remorse.
It thrusts
and lusts,
yet satisfaction is not always par for the course.

Then came the haikus. He had to take a moment, set down the paper, and just be. The anxiety caused by the poems quickly washed away like the ocean’s tide. Thus, he looked out upon the ocean. That is what he saw at that moment, an endless expanse. He always liked to sit here and imagine that the other side did not exist. He lived on the other side, but the point was that he imagined a much more expansive body of water, one that left some mystery. He always recalled the memory of the uncannily familiar park along the shores of Lake Victoria. The water extended placidly into the horizon, smoothly reflecting the heavens. He imagined walking out upon the surface and into the sky.

“I do that too sometimes”, O’Donnell said softly so as not to shock Aguirre too intensely. He was standing at his side, still a few feet away, but Aguirre suddenly felt very close to someone. “I always picture Lake Michigan. I used to write there all the time and paint the rising sun”, he said as Aguirre looked over to him, taking time to control his face and to project normalcy despite his giddy excitement. He looked upon O’Donnell without saying a word for a prolonged moment before returning his gaze to look out upon infinity once more. The men remained side by side in silent meditation.

As time grew slower and reality evaporated, Aguirre thought to himself, “Maybe they have islands out there, like Isla del Sol in Titicaca, full of strange ruins that only those who venture out beyond the shores of their visions are ever able to excavate and explore. Maybe there are new islands that no one has ever set foot upon, further than others have ventured or bubbling up from beneath the surface. Maybe O’Donnell would like to go on a fantastic adventure with me…” The real was replaced by visions in which O’Donnell was still visible as the sole linkage to some form of shared reality. He hoped at that moment that O’Donnell could see it too and found himself genuinely curious what O’Donnell saw and felt. He had learned to be careful about projecting into others and to allow them to reveal themselves. It was the same sensation at that moment, looking upon O’Donnell once more; it was as if he were looking upon another expansive sea that he hoped to come to know more deeply and beyond the surface.

Thus, Aguirre upon the bench and O’Donnell still standing somewhere nearby beheld their visions. Aguirre wondered how they might be bridged, whether they might already share additional similar characteristics—the DNA of their dreams—and, most importantly, why O’Donnell was actually interacting with him. That is, until his train of thought was swiftly interrupted once more by the blaring lyrics of a passing boombox.

Sweet, sweet artmakin’,
prick me with the pin.
Sweet, sweet lovemaking,
trust in me, sing.

“Thrust in me, sin”, the words echoed in Aguirre’s mind, mangled somehow by the filter between Aguirre and the external reality. Time felt as if it had begun moving faster now. Anxiety and other bodily sensations suddenly surged within him. This was also legitimately the most attracted that Aguirre had felt to another person in years; it was absolutely, he realized, a perfect storm of relative sexual deprivation and the allure of O’Donnell, the appearance within a desert of the most tantalizing fruit tree, seemingly fecund and shiny amidst the rising heat. He remained calm, monitoring his breathing, and realized that he needed to interject, to change the subject somehow, and to make his mind actively override his rapidly surging instincts.

“You have to ***king see this”, Aguirre blurted out, creatively destroying the moment and handing O’Donnell a sheet of five interrelated haikus.

O’Donnell took his time to assess the piece. “Well, I rather like them”, he commented, looking up from the page and judgmentally at Aguirre for a moment. “They remind me a little bit of writing exercises that we performed in middle school. Have you been volunteering as a docent?”, he questioned seriously, looking at Aguirre as the paper remained at his side.

“No, it’s for a legitimate review… I looked her up on SocialMedia”—that’s what they call the primary social media provider in this universe, SocialMedia—“and she is actually thirty and appears, on the digital surface at least, to be a perfectly normal graduate student at a respected university”, Aguirre informed him acerbically, still having difficulty believing it himself. “I agree though, it’s… it’s like a child…”, he mused half to himself while trailing off into thought.

O’Donnell smiled at first before remarking, “yes… yes… very interesting…”, with a chuckle and similarly appearing to become lost in thought, looking out once more upon the surface of their imagined beyond.

Aguirre felt miraculously at peace and close to the man, together somewhere between reality and delusion. “Do you want to sit down on the bench as well?”, he asked moving slightly to the side to make a non-awkwardly large space for O’Donnell to sit if he were to be interested. After all, he could merely be a very friendly straight man. The prospect was simultaneously hilarious and deeply terrifying to Aguirre.

“No, no, thank you”, O’Donnell said, turning to Aguirre while still appearing to be friendly and engaged in their interaction.

“Do you want to get a drink?”, Aguirre followed up, a tension visibly surfacing upon his face; he assumed that the answer would be no again.

“No… and yes”, O’Donnell responded as if still processing his response, the provided answer being provisional and pending clarification. “Can we do drinks tomorrow night?”, O’Donnell questioned in return, appearing to have resolved the internal doubts that had previously been visible on the surface.

“Yea, that would be awesome!”, Aguirre retorted quickly and with demonstrable excitement before adding, “How about Pony? They have a fire pit.”

“Sounds good to me. I like fire”, O’Donnell responded with a cool smile. “Well [sigh]… I’d best be off then”, he said, turning around to return to his usual chair alongside the tree behind the bench. Aguirre said goodbye and was about to return to his work when O’Donnell suddenly turned around, realizing the missing detail, and added, “does tomorrow at seven work for you?”

“Yes”, Aguirre responded with a nod and a boyish smile.

Aguirre woke in the midst of a dark storm. The flashes were visible within his bedroom through the blinds and he drifted in and out of sleep, the building occasionally shaking in sync with the rolling thunder. When he finally emerged from his bed hours later, the storm had passed and the air outside was heavy with rising humidity, thick against his skin. Thus, he set out upon the trails of the city. He did this every day, rain or shine, sometimes multiple times a day. Nature was his office, his muse, and his best friend.

It was difficult to focus on this particular day. Anticipatory anxiety was surging through his veins. He could feel the tension in his muscles as his mind rapid fire ran simulations to prepare for the evening. It soon became obvious that he was not going to make progress on work assignments, his mind and heart working in tandem to thwart productive efforts—the biological imperative apparently still operated within homosexual males, albeit in a nonbiologically reproductive manner. He knew this of course, how it worked, why it worked that way, but it was extremely fascinating to observe these forces at work within himself. As object and subject, he spent the day recording his internal bodily sensations, their relations to his thoughts as well as the visions that came to him involuntarily throughout the day. As naturalist and poet, his field journal documented the effects that he attributed to his pending encounter with O’Donnell.

As he did so, sitting alongside a natural spring that fed into the lake where he usually sat, a turtle rose to float upon the surface. It was captivating. It appeared to have two heads; they were both looking directly at him. Aguirre had seen a baby two headed turtle once, recently actually, so the possibility seemed plausible at this point. This was a snapping turtle though. Its shell was very large, with a radius of approximately one foot, and one of its heads was biting at the neck of the other.

Aguirre was fascinated and he entered the water to swim out to inspect the creature. As he drew closer, the being became more clearly distinguishable. It was two turtles now, one having mounted the other, holding it beneath the surface as its neck occasionally craned up to breach the surface. He was not sure if they were having sex or engaging in some sort of combat, one attempting to dominate the other. As he grew closer, now only a foot away, the turtles did not seem bothered by his presence. Thus, they floated upon the surface, all three seeing eye to eye.

It became clear that the one beneath the surface could break free at any moment. There was nothing visibly holding it against the one on top. Suddenly the biting of the neck appeared more like reptilian affection, if such a thing existed. It was biting very slowly and softly, clearly less intensely than the large creature was capable of responding if it felt that aggression was necessary. Eventually, people along the shore began to stare and Aguirre decided to give them some privacy. Thus, he returned to his journaling to document the experience, and, when he looked up, he saw the turtles part ways as soon as they confirmed that they had gained entry into his book.

Once they had disappeared beneath the surface, he realized that he had to hurry to return home and prepare for his date. Was it a date? Meeting, he had to prepare for his meeting with O’Donnell. Before jumping in the shower though, he revisited one of his textbooks from college and confirmed that the turtles had actually been mating, though the meaning of the biting remained ambiguous.

O’Donnell sat illuminated as Aguirre ordered a drink at the bar, looking out the glass door onto the patio where O’Donnell sat waiting for him. Aguirre was fashionably late, as always. The flame on one side and the setting sun on the other softly accentuated O’Donnell’s facial features, his jaw line was clearly defined, and from this angle the contrast of the light created a shadow masking one of his eyes.

Aguirre lingered, finally having a moment to just admire the man without anybody noticing. The bar was empty. It was Wednesday after all. However, the bartender noticed and smiled.

“Love is in the air?”, he questioned, interrupting Aguirre’s moment.

“Who the f*** knows”, Aguirre responded, laughing as usual, realizing that it was time to step out onto the stage and perform.

“I see that you found the place alright”, Aguirre said as he approached O’Donnell, eying a chair similarly alongside the flame, signaling his intention to sit. O’Donnell nodded, assenting.

“Yea… you’re late…”, O’Donnell said, either feigning annoyance or legitimately being annoyed. He smiled then and Aguirre determined that it was the former; he wanted it to be the former. “The porn on the walls is a nice touch. I had never been here before”, O’Donnell said, looking back into the indoor section of the bar beyond the glass door, perplexed, fascinated, and amazed that the place existed. “It’s very anachronistic…”, he commented, “the vibe is very Tom… Tom of… what’s his name?”.

“Yea, they also have dancers on the counter tops sometimes. The place fascinates me”, Aguirre said, similarly looking back into the darkness beyond the glass door. “I sat here at this flame when I conceived of Go Go Writing. Have you been enjoying my performances?”, he questioned, laughing. He had rapidly taken two shots at the bar before walking out onto the patio and felt that after the squirrel incident, it was best to just be himself, however strange he might seem to others. O’Donnell was still around so, “perhaps”, Aguirre thought, “he can handle a little bit more of me.”

“It is quite a show”, O’Donnell said, revealing very little and yet becoming visibly more amused. The other couple sitting on the patio got up at that moment to return to the inside of the bar. They were alone now amidst the evening twilight, the uncertainty as to why they were actually hanging out, at least within the mind of Aguirre, and the light of the fire.

“So, what’s your story?”, O’Donnell asked, “how did you end up here, this city, writing, doing what you do?”

“Oh, you know, went to college, studied biology… evolutionary biology, decided to become an artist, write, sing, moved to the city. It’s very cliché”, he said before asking, “You?”

“Mostly self-taught, wandering around… I went to college, dropped out like a heavy drop, and there was no turning back. Been here ever since. I want to move to a real city though some day, you know, once I can actually make a living doing this… Art”, he said with a sigh. “So, biology, that’s interesting, what got you into that?”, O’Donnell questioned, leaning back and looking at Aguirre quizzically.

“Mmmm”, Aguirre said, humming lowly to signal acknowledgement and thought, nodding and pausing ever so briefly before responding. “The art of nature always struck me… butterfly wings with eyes, chameleons, harmless creatures becoming colorful, peacocks…”, he said before pausing again, appearing to dive deep into thought before speaking again. “It fascinates me the way that creatures learn to operate the mind of their predator and prey, to become their nightmare and their fantasy”, he said, his awareness having retreated inward to connect with a deeply authentic and interiorized aspect of his psyche, “It’s like, am I an orange or a blood orange, but the stakes are much higher…” He returned to the surface again and looked back toward O’Donnell, visibly laughing inside. “And then there’s mating behavior. Can’t forget about that”, he said, shaking his head and laughing at how absurd he must sound.

“I had a pet spider for a while, but it’s always been the landscapes for me”, O’Donnell replied, appearing not to be shaken nor concerned with what Aguirre had just said. He followed up on his response quickly, “What does it mean to you to be happy?”, he asked.

“Achievement, the creation of a work of art that will outlast me, one for the ages, you know… and someone to share the glory with, someone who feels the same way”, he said immediately and without thinking, having already spent a lot of time thinking about the question to himself and in the abstract. “I’m never quite sure that I will find that though. Sometimes I feel that the price of art, true art, you know, is some form of primordial suffering. You sort of have to accept dissatisfaction and focus on the fruit”, he added.

“So, the price of art is eternal damnation?”, O’Donnell retorted with an uneasy chuckle.

“Isn’t the goal to gain entry into the kingdom of heaven, to create as one looks up as if into Bout’s Road to Heaven, waiting to be judged worthy… avoiding the fall?”, Aguirre posed, their conversation proceeding allegro.

“Touché”, O’Donnell responded, with visible intrigue simmering below.

“And you, what does it mean, this… ‘happiness’?”, Aguirre questioned.

Having fun now, O’Donnell mimicked Aguirre, “Achievement, the creation of a work of art that will outlast me, one for the ages, you know… and someone to share the glory with…”, he said, taking an extended pause before completing Aguirre’s fantasy, “someone who feels the same way.” He smiled as he stuck the landing, like a gymnast performing for an audience of one.

“What is the self?”, O’Donnell questioned, their back-and-forth beginning to crescendo, becoming more rapid too.

Aguirre responded quickly, “The self is a necessary creation. You can let the world create you, or you can take the reins.”

Impressed, O’Donnell fired another question, “Who are you?”

“An artist”, Aguirre replied simply, satisfyingly to himself, and in doing so appearing to have sparked fascination, though perhaps not satisfaction, within the mind of the man that sat before him. “et tu, O’Donnell?”, he asked in return, his body slowly relaxing as does that of the lawyer upon resting her case.

O’Donnell nodded, seemingly pleased, and turned his head to look into the flame. “I feel a little bit like the flame, moving with the wind and the fuel, creating heat, existing between the world before the spark and the one that will follow. I feel like nothing and everything”, he said, still mesmerized by the flame, processing their interaction thus far and his own internal sensations.

Aguirre was similarly mesmerized, beholding O’Donnell beholding the flame. He wanted to reach out and touch him. He hoped that in a way he already had if only in an immaterial way. They began to talk about work, the weather, their favorite spots along the trail, and about art; O’Donnell’s literary taste was similarly classic, though rooted in authors that Aguirre had not yet read. He memorized the list of works that O’Donnell mentioned. Their taste had points of connection—same artist, different work—but in many ways they were worlds apart.

The men eventually parted ways, each taking their own path home after saying goodbye outside the door. It was the door that they had entered, but it felt like a portal to a new world. Aguirre felt that way at least, and he hoped that O’Donnell felt similarly. He felt weird.

As he walked in his own direction, Aguirre looked back over his shoulder. O’Donnell was walking briskly in the opposite direction with his back facing toward him, slowly disappearing into the shadows amidst nearby trees. Aguirre only looked for a moment though and he remained curious as to whether O’Donnell might have had the same experience, similarly looking over his shoulder a moment later to find Aguirre’s back to him without knowing that Aguirre was still looking backward toward him and forward to their next chance encounter.

Aguirre woke the next day realizing that he had no idea what anything from the night before had actually meant. How did O’Donnell feel about him? Had he scared him away, making his interest in the man clear, his inner self more apparent? At the end of the day, he still felt that honesty was the best policy if one seeks long term results and truth, at least in matters of the heart.

They had not scheduled a reunion. The fates would decide when to permit them to further explore whatever it was that might exist between them. Tonight, he had other plans. A gallery exhibition was having its opening night in the SoDo district. Aguirre’s friend Jorge had invited him two days earlier—“gallery Z opening… drinks… with Karen… join us… look it up on SocialMedia.”

“Modern communication has become so elegant”, he thought to himself, initially shrugging it off and planning to stay home to write. However, he eventually looked a bit deeper into what would be on display. Then he got excited. The Divine Comedy had fascinated him since he was a teenager and the particular artist’s work was also of great interest to him. He thought about texting O’Donnell, but he realized that it might be more fantastic if they ran into each other organically. “Surely, he will be in attendance”, Aguirre thought to himself.

Thus, he went through his day as usual, sitting along the river, riding his bike around town, and making incremental progress. As he sat writing, sitting upon a blanket in the grass rather than upon the bench, a loud thud distracted his train of thought. A dog was running toward him, its toy having landed at his side.

“Sorry!”, the owner shouted, apparently realizing that he had almost pelted Aguirre with the object as if he had been invisible.

And it was then that Aguirre did a double take. As the dog grabbed the object, a black oblong plastic thing, he realized that it looked overtly phallic. The retriever returned it to the owner, and now flabbergast, Aguirre awaited the second fetching. He absolutely had to disprove his mind’s theory. However, as soon as the toy was retrieved, the owner fled the scene. Either ashamed to have almost pelted a stranger with a dog toy, or, perhaps, due to a more fantastic—sinister?—reason. Aguirre decided that it was time to go home at that moment. He had to prepare an outfit for his impending encounter with O’Donnell.

The gallery was packed and a patio area at the bar next door was holding a reception. They decided to dart straight into the thick of the exhibition though; drinks could wait. The Tower of Babel mesmerized him before he became drawn to the forest. He stood there before the forest for several minutes. It was as if the seas had parted, the other spectators drawn to the other pieces of the collection creating a void within which he could actually take the time to analyze and penetrate one of Dalí’s representations of Dante’s work. It was incredibly frustrating though to attempt to view other pieces in the claustrophobic gallery space. He figured that he could return another day to give the collection the proper treatment, though he took some time to imagine how nice it would be if everyone was required to remain six feet apart from one another within public spaces in which one might seek to admire art.

Eventually, he looked for his friends. They were on the far side of the gallery amidst Paradiso, apparently deeply enthralled by the pieces before them. Thus, he decided to wander solo for a little bit longer, hoping that O’Donnell might be lurking somewhere within the gallery, perhaps having already seen him, waiting in front of his favorite piece to be discovered.

He wandered through the maze of bodies and walls, eventually emerging into a seemingly empty chamber. Yet, as he examined the walls, he discovered the work of Dr. Seuss surrounding him—hanging posters and illustrations, sculptures upon pedestals, and a few little books set upon display mantles. So many of the pieces were incomplete drafts in between conception and the final product of his iconic works. It was deeply inspiring. He could imagine then that his own drafts of The Cosmic Archipelago were similarly steppingstones, bricks along the path that he was building, the foundation of his pyramids. He felt deeply humbled before the works of these masters, especially the surprise of Dr. Seuss. The work of others that he admired was also strewn about the gallery. Unfortunately, O’Donnell was nowhere to be seen and he realized that he ought to have sent him a text in case he was not aware of the event.

Aguirre reunited with his friends once Karen and Jorge had managed to get a quick look at each of the pieces within the Dalí exhibit. It was time for drinks, but they decided to head to another part of town. The reception was still quite packed and did not seem worth the wait for watered down beverages. Additionally, Karen was itching to debrief and wanted to go somewhere where they could all speak freely without others from the event judging them for expressing their true thoughts about the art that they had witnessed or attempting to interject.

Thus, thirty minutes later they found themselves upon a rooftop in the city center where the wind blew softly, and a gentle chill travelled through the surrounding air. Aguirre could feel the seasons changing as he looked down upon the city, cars like ants buzzing about, people in windows engaging in daily life as if he were looking at so many surveillance screens. He found himself imagining, if only for a moment, catching someone in the act, windows steamy and a hand streaking downward providing a hint of what was happening just beyond the thin glass.

His attention drifted like this for the first five, maybe ten minutes. Karen was speaking still, but he was not listening. He admired the world around them as he had the art in the gallery. He nodded once in a while and drank liberally. Jorge was accustomed to this and carried the conversation, kicking him gently once in a while to attempt to pull his attention back to the moment. However, a moment came when Jorge suddenly kicked much harder, successfully drawing Aguirre back into the discussion.

Verifying that Aguirre was finally listening, Jorge set his drink down and began speaking, “If I were to actually analyze them in depth, I would read the books again immediately prior to attending in order accurately gauge how Dalí diverts from what one might determine to be a more accurate interpretation of specific Cantos. We read them in high school, very briefly though. We had to summarize them, present them in plain English, sort of like what people do with Shakespeare.”

“Oh, that’s cool. I only ever read the abridged versions, each Canto in a sentence”, Karen said before pausing, catching herself, and with wide eyes adding, “please, don’t ever tell anyone that.” Aguirre and Jorge quickly passed each other glances, each without reacting.

Thus, Aguirre finally entered the discussion, “I found myself primarily attracted to the grotesque images of inferno. I am familiar with some of them from actually reading as a teenager… but, to be honest though, I only ever read Inferno and it was not the abridged version…”, he said, before taking a moment to collect his thoughts, “they seemed to capture it accurately, imaginatively, vividly, though it has been a long time since I last read Dante. The only one that I remember perfectly wasn’t in the exhibit though; it was the one for the sodomites, a desert with hellfire raining upon them”, he said before trailing off, as if speaking to himself, “it was like someone wanted me to read it back then, and remember it…”

The table remained silent for a brief pause until Karen interjected. “Well, that got dark”, she said with a slight chuckle before quickly changing the subject, “One of my favorite aspects throughout the entire series was the use of color. There was no dissonance. The moods were accurately captured and projected. They went from dark to light, an abrasive hardness to a softer vibe once one reaches the depictions of paradise. There was something more ephemeral to those images, a lightness that one could feel inside and out.

Jorge, “Yea, the monsters were horrifying to behold, but I don’t quite agree. The images of heaven continued to have Dalí’s flair, which, let’s be honest, is much more amenable to the depiction of monsters.” He paused then for a moment before adding, “He has this great quote in 50 Secrets, something about how any painter worth his own weight must be able to create a truly terrifying beast. It’s like with tragedy, one must create the ideal dread, the ideal sense of loss, and the ideal transmutation of these depths into some sort of feeling that one’s own life has meaning and exists in relation to them as something comfortable. The ultimate monsters to make almost anything else seem angelic.”

Engaged now, Aguirre pondered Jorge’s words. “So, the true master has to carve perceptions, to define the light, what is brilliant existing in relation to the depths that one might present? Also, didn’t Dalí say something about the true master having to be a slave to reality?”

Jorge nodded, his eyes growing immediately more focused, as if to say, ‘touché’, before, clearly having taken sufficient time to ponder his response, he leaned forward to state, “to the total reality, yes, I imagine that that is what he meant. He was probably just writing about painting though… like to master surrealism, one must master realism.” The two remained with eyes locked, each silent, in thought, pondering.

Meanwhile, Karen, finding herself lost, shifting her gaze from one to the other, a look of mystification upon her face, interjected once more, “well, I liked the deconstructed ones at the entryway, the ones that showed the stages of the printmaking process, layer upon layer”, she chimed in brightly. The two men relaxed then, looking to Karen, nodding, the prior ideas that had occupied them evaporating.

“I forgot about those. It was too crowded to get a good look at them, but I saw the machine from a distance”, Jorge eventually noted before adding, “it was quite elegant.”

“Yea, I didn’t see that one either, but they also had a Seuss exhibit that showed works in progress; not quite the same, but, you know… process. It’s always nice to see process, at least when it produces results”, Aguirre added.

A few minutes later, they all paid their tab and parted ways. Karen and Jorge grabbed a taxi and Aguirre remained in the city center, waving goodbye before waltzing to another bar to see where the night might lead. A few more drinks and he would head home. The night had grown dark, but his spirit felt light. Somehow the art, the booze, and the real conversation had made everything else melt away. The people in the streets, in the bar, in his memories passed as blurs. Everything felt light, his own masterpieces like dragon eggs incubating in his mind and journals, newly fertilized, energized, and inspired.

Thus, at some point he began walking home with a sense of purpose and drunken giddy. It was a long walk along the lake, but he liked to walk the walk. Along the way he paused at a clearing where he had never stopped before. The surface of the lake was still and glasslike, reflecting the stars and the moon, occasionally rippling from the kisses of surfacing fish. He was very tired, and his eyes had grown heavy, but he felt very at peace with the world.

Upon waking, Aguirre discovered that his mother was in his room. She was seated at his desk, looking upon him with scorn and contempt, though he did not notice at first. “Mom…? What time is it?”, he stammered groggily, shielding his eyes from the open blinds. He realized then that he was on the floor, like a pile of laundry that he had refused to fold.

“It’s four, Thomas”, she responded bluntly and without flinching. She remained seated for a moment and then rose from his desk chair in the corner to stand and look down upon him without pity, craning her neck slightly to the left. Then she took a step closer. Pausing for a moment, she stood above him, craning her neck to the right this time, staring as if she were viewing a grotesque work of art hanging within Tate Modern. It is the kind of art that requires contextualization to truly understand. The art of The Moment: when one experiences that which they believed to be confined to movies, novels, and the mind of poets. Then, dryly and with acid in her voice, she informed him, “you’ve vomited… again.” And with that, she straightened her neck and her posture, took a breath, exhaled, and walked slowly toward the door.

Aguirre was alone in his room now, puzzled as to why his mother had entered his apartment. She had moved to the city after his parents got divorced, to be closer to him she said, but they interacted infrequently. Was he dreaming? It was hard to tell these days. His clothes were damp and, as he became more aware, he could smell liquor and stomach acid. The stench grew stronger, and, at one point, it felt as if his nostrils were burning. Thus, he ran to shower right away. The water felt like it was washing away all the worries that had followed him into the morning, all of them except the memory of waking up to his mother’s disdainful stare.

The coffee tasted like coffee. His English muffin with butter and honey was as sweet as ever. His head, somehow, was not in excruciating pain despite how much he remembered drinking last night. It had been a while since he had been on a bender and he was not really quite sure how it had happened. He was usually in full control.

Then he checked his phone. There was only one message and it was from his ex, “Call me”.

His ex-boyfriend sounded nervous on the phone, his voice trembling a little bit as he asked Aguirre, “how are you feeling?”

“Oh, you know, hungover”, Aguirre said nonchalantly.

“Yea… so we need to talk about that”, he said before taking on a more serious tone. “Your mom said that you appeared to be alive, but she asked me to be the messenger”, he stated before asking, “What do you remember from last night?” Pausing for a moment, he quickly clarified the situation, “I need to know where to start.”

The sinking feeling began in his gut before rising upward. He sat, but the world continued to spin, the edges of his vision became blurrier, and he felt his skin grow tighter and sweatier. His breath grew shallower. He closed his eyes and began to speak, “I…I…had drinks… I walked home… I woke up… I’m…”. The words had gradually begun to slur. “I’m not feeling well”, he said before the line went silent.

He woke up a few minutes later. He had collapsed onto his bed, but the vomit was still on the floor as a reminder that he was still in the midst of this dream. It had not ended yet.

He called back once he had grabbed a glass of water and his ex was much more to the point this time, “Are you ready? This isn’t easy. Don’t kill the messenger. You were naked. You made an ass of yourself. More than that… it’s vile. You should not look at the internet. You should never drink again”, and he paused at that moment, realizing that he was about to say, and with full sincerity, “thank you, thank you so ***king much for breaking up with me”, but he decided to keep it to himself, playing his role as the messenger of all who knew Aguirre. They had held a meeting. Many people declined to participate, horrified, disgusted, and making clear their intention to dissociate and never speak to him again. Aguirre was not aware of this yet.

“If you have someone, you should reach out to them now”, his ex stated, before concluding, “I am really serious. It will not be healthy for you to look at the internet… Take your time with this. I’m here, you know, but this is on you…”

It began with a meme, one that was quickly storming throughout the internet. The vectors of its viral spread were primarily those who did not know what came before or after the cropped clip, what surrounded the frame of what they were witnessing. Aguirre is seen in a night vision recording, alone, shirtless, and in the dark. He is laughing and crying, hysterically, alternating between clear expressions of pure laughter and pure sorrow, as a pendulum does. “It’s not so bad”, he thought to himself, “It is like Janus captured in video format.”

Then he looked deeper. The video was difficult to access and contained a warning that the content was graphic. Aguirre’s throat was raspy at this point from the stress induced chain smoking of cigarettes. He was not sure if it was pure anxiety or nicotine overdose. His nausea became resurgent; he had to take a moment to allow his body to reestablish equilibrium prior to delving deeper into the mystery of what exactly he had done.

He found a link, entered the site, and pressed play. It began innocently. He was sitting in the clearing, admiring nature. Then a man approached him from stage left. He appeared to be Persian. He was muscular and he sat nearby Aguirre within the frame. They both sat silently for some time before there were visible signs of them communicating. It was hard to tell who initiated their interaction.

Eventually, the Iranian man rose and moved to sit at Aguirre’s side, quickly removing his pants. It went downhill from there, severely downhill. Aguirre felt numb as he watched the drama unfold. He was simultaneously horrified and fascinated, yet he felt nothing, having achieved dissociation from the moment and his body. He was completely unable to accept the reality of the nightmare images unfolding before him—publicly, online, worldwide.

The thoughts came in waves, “Am I a sex offender now? What does this mean for my career? Will I ever be able to publish The Cosmic Archipelago? Am I going to be arrested?”, and then it hit him, “Does O’Donnell know?”

The answers came swiftly and as soon as he worked up the courage to check his email. It was all very impersonal. He was terminated from his writing position. The local police office sent him a ticket and information regarding his registry requirements—he was now officially on the path to becoming a registered sex offender. Additionally, the implications of this were clear for his aspirations to write young adult literature. Yet, there was a silver lining. No one was coming to arrest him. They must have figured that the world had already become a prison. It felt that way.

One question remained though, “Does O’Donnell know?” He determined that if O’Donnell had not reached out, it would be impossible to extrapolate what might be going on beyond the confines of Aguirre’s own room and his own body. In his writing, he began to refer to it as his cave, his individualized cave. He felt like a creature undergoing metamorphosis, but it was a very sorry devolution; rather than becoming the philosopher king, he would now become one of the shadows upon the walls, a mere shade of his former self. As a projection upon the cave walls of others, he would have a simple label. Those who remembered the shock of his actions as revealed to the world would know him as vom/com man, the title that the internet had bestowed upon him. It had joined the ranks of viral sensations like sextamom, Batty Betty the preganant bat, and shadowflasher; fortunately, the video was not amenable to a viral dance remix, though poor quality ones were made. Meanwhile, others would merely see one of the registered sex offenders from their due diligence searches prior to moving into the neighborhood. This was his new reality, and he was adjusting. All that really mattered now was discovering the answer to the question, “Does O’Donnell know?”

He remained in the apartment for days without leaving. Eventually though, he had to emerge to purchase groceries. People recognized him, but they said nothing. Some stared, others averted their gaze. Mothers with children gave him especially nasty looks. One man smiled at him creepily though, the way that a child smiles at the sound of an ice cream truck, and Aguirre felt deeply uncomfortable. They thought that he was one of them now, Aguirre thought to himself… He realized though, that he was actually one of them now… at least in the eyes of the mothers, the others who recognized him, and anyone with knowledge who was not indifferent to the actions and statements that took place during his one night of shame.

“Does O’Donnell know?”, he questioned as he perused the aisle, gradually coming to ignore the human surroundings. There were obviously more questions, a universe of them, but it all began with the question of knowledge. “What does O’Donnell know?”, he questioned as, like the big bang, a universe of uncertainty expanded and grew to hang over him like a dark cloud, heavily because of how incredibly important questions within this expanding universe were to him both before and after his entry into this new reality.

Eventually Aguirre began to emerge to write along the trails once more. Time passed and as he observed himself, he knew that his interest in O’Donnell had become unhealthy. It had begun to feel somewhat narcissistic, purely about himself as he sought to find something to cling to while in freefall. Whereas their relationship had previously been about wonder, Aguirre desiring to know more about the man within O’Donnell, it had clearly become perverse, more so with each passing day. It had been two weeks now since his descent and he had not heard from O’Donnell. His thoughts grew darker as uncertainty deepened.

Meanwhile, most other people seemed to have moved on at this point, fewer people stared, and he believed that he had returned to obscurity in their eyes. It remained on his record though and he was encountering difficulty finding work. Fortunately, his mom had accepted his request to move home as he sought to determine a viable means of moving forward in life. Additionally, he continued, nonetheless, to produce art.

The world felt newly silent to him. The places that were once enchanted had grown normal, mundane, and stale. His writing felt dull, except for when he became conspiratorial—why had he blacked out so severely?—or whiny. The whiny content was repetitive, riddled with questions without answers, and demonstrated deteriorating penmanship quality. Additionally, “Does O’Donnell know?”, the one question that actually struck at his heart, remained unanswered, though he had begun scrawling it into the pages of his journal.

Then one day he saw him, walking along the trail toward the tree behind the bench, chair in hand, and carrying a messenger bag with books. He sat calmly and Aguirre, currently seated in the grass nearby, realized that he had never before witnessed O’Donnell’s arrival. He had usually arrived second to sit upon the bench prior to their interactions. Thus, he rose and walked to the bench. He felt that there was no need for shame if O’Donnell had seen him seated nearby already. He made his intention clear without being imposing, sitting and waiting with extreme levels of hope given the situation, waiting for O’Donnell to come join him or to at least walk over and provide an answer to the goddamn question. He felt like a man on death row for whom DNA evidence might present a deus ex machina. He sat, staring now at the very real lake in front of him, perceiving its limitations, accepting his fate, awaiting the judgement.

He did not have to wait long. O’Donnell approached him, but he stood further away this time. He seemed solemn, but also as if he were attempting to be kind. Aguirre assumed at that point that the answer was yes. O’Donnell knew.

“I saw it…”, O’Donnell said with finality, “are you doing ok?” He appeared to be genuine.

“Yes… I am living… aren’t I?”, Aguirre said, doing his best to make clear that he had not become a creature of habitual misery.

“You’ve managed to simultaneously disgust and draw praise from the far right”, O’Donnell remarked, legitimately impressed. After the incident, the part that Aguirre found most embarrassing, the part where he threw up, he had begun to berate the other man, to call him a terrorist while in the midst of his fit of involuntary hysteria, his mind’s response to the shock of what had happened. That was actually what many people took issue with apparently, the action that managed to cross cleavages. This only came out days later when the man came forward anonymously, his silhouette featured on late night news explaining what had happened and the treatment that he had endured. Only Aguirre had been personally identifiable in the video and the audio had been fuzzy. He did not actually know who the other man was or why he had made the decisions that led to the one moment of fame/infamy that he might ever achieve in his lifetime.

“If you don’t mind my asking, what will you do now?”, O’Donnell inquired delicately.

“Oh… I am moving home with family. They have agreed to take me back during this difficult time, my mother that is. Other than that, I am not really sure how to answer the question. To be honest, I… I think that I will just keep doing exactly what I have been doing, but now I merely have less ability to believe that it is going to go where I want it to go. I have to believe though, you know? I have to bend it back…”, Aguirre said not really knowing exactly what he would do with himself. He was adrift now; fate had taken the reins.

“Well, old chap, it sounds like you’re taking it in stride. The bench is unlikely to find a suitable replacement, in my humble opinion”, he said mercifully, leaving Aguirre in a continued state of wonder, wondering “Is he ok with what I have done? Did he feel what I felt before this all happened, what I feel? Is it worth prying to find answers?” However, he realized that O’Donnell’s statement appeared to make clear that the conversation was coming to an end.

Aguirre look up at O’Donnell, realizing that he probably looked like a wounded animal, and all that he could muster up to say was, “it is incredibly meaningful to me that you are speaking to me right now.”

O’Donnell’s face became more somber upon hearing those words. “I… I must be going…”, he said then, anxiety perceptibly hanging on each word. He grabbed his chair quickly and vanished amidst the trees along the river after that. Aguirre watched as he did so, confirming that he never once looked back.

Aguirre knew to remain positive, though not to be irrationally positive. O’Donnell had still been willing to communicate with him publicly, but he had also been brief, and his behavior seemed to indicate that their friendship had come to an end. Nonetheless, a spark of hope remained; perhaps, he thought, O’Donnell might also just be getting over the shock of it all. It seemed possible, if only slightly possible. Thus, one night, he prepared a text message to send to O’Donnell the following day. It would seem desperate or strange, as if he might be drunk or something, if he were to send messages in the middle of the night. He no longer drank, but he knew that his optics management situation was dire at this point. No chances could be taken.

“We should get coffee sometime”, it read, very bluntly. Aguirre lived too far away to wait around the trail until their next serendipitous encounter and he really needed answers. He figured that it was time to stop beating around the bush, but also not yet time to ask the questions that should have been asked before this moment. What were O’Donnell’s intentions during their initial meetings? During drinks? What might have happened had he not fallen? Those questions seemed to lead to dark places. Thus, he questioned, “What is still possible within this new reality?

There was no reply, at least not for several days. Aguirre mourned, attempting to find closure in his own private way, and he accepted that he had to move on. Thus, he wrote an incredibly melodramatic song for O’Donnell.

I can see so little
as the sun sets beyond you,
as the light fades
and the dark grows.
It travels from me to you.

Yes, I can see so little
as the day wanes
as all do.

And what’s left then,
when the night comes?

Will I be all alone?

Aguirre had become at peace with his solitude. No one responded to him anymore. (in)Quisition had removed him from their editorial board, he had sent over fifty job applications, and he was gradually accepting that it might be time to start his professional life over where it had begun, as a dishwasher in a Mexican fast food restaurant.

His mother went about her business and he interacted with her infrequently. He felt imposing though, but he knew that he had nowhere else to go. They ate separately most nights. He knew that he was here not because she wanted him to be, but because society saw it as her duty, or at least he knew that she felt that way. He was grateful nonetheless.

One night, several weeks later, as Aguirre was awake writing a poem, it happened. O’Donnell responded.

“We should get another drink. What are you doing?”, the text read.

It had been a long time since he had experienced any social contact and, obviously, this was a most special form of social contact to Aguirre. He was very optimistic. “People have been very busy”, he told himself. “O’Donnell must have been very busy lately”, his mind continued. The text message was a positive development in his mind, a turning point. It felt very alleviating to him and he allowed that sensation to happen and to deepen, without nipping it in the bud, challenging it, or worrying about the consequences of having hope in his new reality.

He decided to wait to respond. Ten minutes seemed like a right course of action. Then, only two minutes later, it buzzed again.

“What are you doing now?”, the follow up text inquired.

Aguirre felt compelled to respond now. “At home. Doing what I do.”, the first message read. “Are you saying that you would like to meet up right now?”, he followed up, happy that at least some aspect of O’Donnell’s intention appeared to be clear for once.

“Yes”, came the rapid response, which was followed by, “Let’s do Ouro on 8^th”.

The bar was nice, one of the fancier cocktail bars in town. The kind that struggling artists go to have one drink while on a date when they really want to impress someone. Aguirre thought to himself, “exquisite taste…”, though he also secretly found himself hoping that O’Donnell was planning on paying; he wanted to ensure that this was not apparent though, and he also wanted to ensure that he was prepared for anything. Thus, he rode the bus into town after scrounging around underneath the sofa, in the pockets of his laundry, and literally scanning the ground as he walked toward the bus station. He had amassed enough to cover the roundtrip fare and one specialty cocktail prior to leaving. He also found a quarter along the way and he felt very fortunate. While he did still have a credit card if it became necessary, he hoped that it would not come to that.

Aguirre was late, as usual. O’Donnell had already secured a table. It was Tuesday, so there was not a lot of competition to gain entry nor to secure a table worth sitting at. Some of the tables were awkwardly close to point of service stations as the establishment sought to balance people per square foot with the quality of experience provided to each guest. Aguirre knew that the crappier tables were reserved by the hosts for people that appeared less likely to post negative reviews or to be taken seriously when they did. That, or people who in the midst of a dinner rush were fully informed about the drawbacks of the seat they were actively seeking to occupy.

Despite everything that happened, Aguirre looked unchanged on the outside as he walked toward O’Donnell. He wore a brown vest with golden accents behind his back, a corduroy button-down shirt with leather elbow pads, brown leather shoes, and tight-fitting pants. It was obvious that he had put effort into his appearance. O’Donnell had as well. His pants were similarly tight, tighter actually, and dark green. One of his legs jutted out from underneath the table and he wore a black t-shirt with a screen print of a hilly colonial city. It was all very simple, yet cohesive: dark leather shoes and the socks with a hint of color—golden veins like lightning against a black surface. Aguirre appreciated the details, knowing how little he was capable of seeing beneath the façade at this point in his life and, especially, in their interactions.

“I’m really glad you came”, O’Donnell said as Aguirre sat down across from him.

“I can’t believe that you wanted me to. I had sort of already performed a ritual to let go of our friendship”, Aguirre reported.

“Did you burn sage?”, O’Donnell asked, laughing as dimples formed on his face and his chest moved in sync with the rhythm of his joy.

“No, no… I wrote… you know… It’s.. it’s more of a mental thing… letting go…”, Aguirre said

“Mmmm, yea. I think that I know what you mean… I can picture it at least. I feel like if I read your writing, I could get an inside picture… fill in the blanks”, O’Donnell said confidently and with an energy that Aguirre hadn’t seen in him before.

“How is your writing going? Music?”, O’Donnell inquired.

“Oh, well, it’s sort of like, really productive and wasteful. Most of it is shit. There are diamonds though… Did you know that ink actually costs more than blood?”, Aguirre responded before ending on a positively absurd note, “we ought to be writing in blood, the whole lot of us”, he added, laughing.

“And the music?”, O’Donnell inquired again.

“Oh yea, they won’t have me. All the old venues. I am toxic. It’s like Chernobyl, except I have one life. Sometimes I think about… about moving to another city… and then I remember that I cannot afford to do so. I also realize that they will have me on a registry. It will happen all over again—the eternal recurrence of the shame. I wrote one song, one that actually cut to the core though. Hopefully I will be able to record it someday. I will probably have to sell it, smuggling it into the hands of a respectable artist under a pen name. This is life, my life at least…”, he said as if speaking to himself, his vision glazed, the one cocktail having hit the spot.

“Let’s get out of here”, O’Donnell said suddenly.

“Yea, where to?”, Aguirre inquired.

“I have some beer at my place. I can show you some of my paintings”, he said as if it were so easy, as if this could have happened weeks ago, as if something had suddenly changed.

Thus, they entered the taxi, jetting through the night toward O’Donnell’s apartment, the lights of the city growing blurry as Aguirre’s focus came to rest upon O’Donnell. He admired him, his face softly glowing as he looked out the window and up into the buildings with a strange melancholy. Aguirre put his hand on his leg at one point and O’Donnell turned to smile warmly before putting his hand on Aguirre’s and nodding before returning to gaze upon the city swirling around them.

The paintings on the walls were impressive. One, a study of color, appeared to draw inspiration from Rothko; it was a study of teal and green upon a black surface with hints of yellow. As Aguirre gazed into it, he felt drawn towards it, as if it exerted a gravitational pull. Another featured a woman dancing in flames as if she were the pupil amidst a burning iris within a village; Aguirre felt as if it could have been created by a completely different artist. Then there was one that was much more Dalinian; the creatures were dark and accentuated with warm colors, like freakish little bats upon a desert landscape. They emerged from the sand to take flight and become a cloud as if they were in an hourglass in which time ran in reverse.

“It all demonstrates extreme breadth”, Aguirre commented while leaning in to examine the finer details of the beings evaporating within the third image. Meanwhile, O’Donnell remained silent, only a few feet away, his arms crossed. He stood there admiring Aguirre, watching as he danced slowly with the paintings on the wall.

Aguirre took a step back from the third image, clearly taking a moment to assess the whole, and O’Donnell stepped forward to stand alongside him, looking forward and into the painting now as well. As he did so, Aguirre’s mind was darting from detail to detail and back again to the anxiety of O’Donnell standing at his side, and he could not find the words to say. Yet, only a moment later, O’Donnell turned to look at Aguirre, put his arm around him, gently capturing his attention as he looked him in the eyes intently, and leaned in to kiss him.

Aguirre was smiling as O’Donnell leaned back after the kiss and O’Donnell smiled softly in return before grabbing his hand softly, nodding and leading him into the bedroom. Thus, Aguirre followed, realizing that he was gleefully not in the lead in this dance.

A moment later, standing alongside O’Donnell’s bed with the curtains pulled shut, only a faint light drifting in from the streetlights beyond, Aguirre’s mind had grown silent; everything had dissolved into the energy of the living moment. O’Donnell’s hand was cold as he lifted the back of Aguirre’s shirt and pulled him firmly against him, his hand tracing upward along his spine. O’Donnell’s kiss was delicate in contrast to the firm embrace, and as they continued to kiss, O’Donnell was moving slowly from Aguirre’s lips to his neck, to his ear lobe, and though Aguirre was being drawn deeper into the ecstasy of the present, a sudden sense of his vulnerability gripped Aguirre’s mind as the whole scene began to feel distant.

He watched as his fears took hold. He felt a need to interrogate everything until a sense of security returned, certainty about why he was here and where it was all going. The worry was swelling uncontrollably as he continued giving in return, moving his body while dissociated from it, and for him the room transitioned into this unstable space between horror and the one who felt like he might be the love of his life. Yet, everything continued unfolding as if he were not in the midst of intense panic, and O’Donnell was kissing his lips again, but nothing was connecting them. O’Donnell just kept pressing flesh against flesh and as the pressure compressed, Aguirre realized that he had to make a decision, and he remember how he always did this, sabotaged that which might become beautiful, was beautiful, was loving, and so he began to focus on the physical sensations to quiet his mind.

Thus, after another minute of kissing, drawing himself closer and into the world, into O’Donnell’s touch, O’Donnell’s hand slipping underneath his belt, Aguirre leaned into the moment and took a step backward, a deep breath to release himself, exhaled, and started taking off his shirt, slowly. O’Donnell watched then and smiled before excitedly taking his own shirt off and rushing toward him, embracing Aguirre again and kissing him more aggressively, lustfully. A moment later and O’Donnell lifted him up and tossed him onto the bed and Aguirre was laughing, and O’Donnell jumped onto the bed in pursuit, laughing too, and their eyes locked. Aguirre thought about how he had not felt loved in this way in years before the man alongside him said “it has been a while since I have been with someone like this” and Aguirre thought to himself that they felt the same way. Then O’Donnell rolled over and was on top of Aguirre again, kissing him again, and everything melted away. One moment someone was kissing the other’s chest and then his stomach and his lips again, and they both rolled around passionately in flow and building the energy growing between them. A sheet fell to the floor as their friction against the bed moved the objects around them, and “Yes”, and “like that”, and “ooh”, and pleasure emanated throughout the room until they were both still, laying on their backs and laughing again, hand in hand.

O’Donnell and Aguirre sat together on a sofa later in the evening. It was half past two in the morning, but Aguirre was in heaven. He knew that it was best to savor the moment. All beauty fades, some is illusory. O’Donnell was leaning against his shoulder, eyes closed and smiling. Yet, he eventually opened them and pulled away for a moment, looking back at Aguirre with something clearly troubling him.

It was only then that O’Donnell mentioned the impetus, that which had changed in the mathematical equations that determined their propensities to say or do X. Without making eye contact, actually turning his head in the opposite direction, he announced, “I’m… moving tomorrow actually.” He said it suddenly and as if he was releasing a great weight from his shoulders.

The words barely penetrated Aguirre’s awareness at first. He was still smiling, though he turned softly toward O’Donnell and with an almost inaudible and very short, “mmm”, his eyes grew tighter, the face that one makes when suspicious. He began to think, and slowly still as he scanned the room. Then he silently questioned himself, “How does one move so suddenly when their apartment appears to be so lived in?”

As if having sensed Aguirre’s doubt, he turned toward him once more and quickly added, “The movers will be here in the morning… I got this new job; they sort of see me as an investment, I guess. It came with a relocation allowance, and I basically don’t have to do any of the labor for the move.” His eyebrows rose with excitement, and he bit his lower lip, as if to say “oops.”

The job, as it turned out, was in a very large city, very far away. Confused still, Aguirre’s social reflexes kicked in, “well… that’s great… congrats…”, he said, as if on autopilot.

Aguirre’s mind felt like it was racing though, it was all sinking in slowly, but it finally began striking at the core. It was as if his awareness suddenly zoomed in from a diffuse absorbing of the external environment to become concentrated within, like gravity pulling him inward, as if energy had built up that could either be discharged in the form of an emotional and reactive response or merely endured before it finally became embedded within him, underneath his skin. He felt like a star collapsing, one that had just been born and was shining so brightly. Thus, he held onto the pressure that was building within, anger, sadness, shame, and it gradually lessened, but he could still feel it as a presence having nested within him. “I am a fucking idiot”, he told himself with a sense of confidence. Then, he looked away and into the wall, nodding and processing; “it is what it is”, Aguirre reminded himself as the wave subsided, he took a deep breath and looked over toward O’Donnell once more.

“Is everything ok?”, O’Donnell asked.

“Yea, it’s just, you’re leaving…. I’m kind of like an empty shell, you know…”, he said as he managed to somehow summon genuine laughter.

“I shouldn’t have done this…”, O’Donnell replied, hand on his forehead shielding his face.

“Well, yes, you should have, but a long time ago”, Aguirre said, breaking into laughter. O’Donnell laughed too and they both leaned backwards into the sofa and toward one another.

They did not speak much for the rest of the evening as Aguirre remained for another uncomfortable hour. O’Donnell caressed his skin, his neck, his face, and his chest as they remained on the sofa, locking eyes, but saying nothing. He was happy for O’Donnell; he was moving onward and upward, leaving Aguirre behind in the pit that he had fallen into, the result of the choices that he had made. As Aguirre looked around though, everything was spinning a little bit. Aguirre felt like everything outside was in flux, his life, literally everything, everything in the room felt strange too and it was also literally spinning. He had had too much to drink. “Maybe I won’t remember this tomorrow”, he thought to himself with a smile at first, taking another sip of whiskey; however, then the sadness kicked in and he pulled away from O’Donnell.

“I have to go… and you should head to bed; big day tomorrow, right?”, Aguirre said as he stood up and looked down at O’Donnell looking up at him with a softly pained expression, his head limp against the sofa. He nodded then, straightening up a little bit and preparing to stand to lead Aguirre to the door when Aguirre shook his head, softly said “no… I’m…”, and looking away then without being able to complete the sentence, he made his way to the door without looking back, closing it softly behind him.

“Who am I?”, Aguirre questioned himself as he walked along the empty streets of the city after leaving O’Donnell’s apartment. He was not able to cry. He was numb now, completely deflated, having already accepted that this had all actually happened. It was all actually happening, unfolding in real time. It had all felt very real throughout the process of self-destruction, though he had chosen to remain primarily as an observer. Every part of him, the internal and the external, remained as ashes. Nothing remained at all of his “self”.

“I am an artist”, he said reassuringly. He had difficulty believing it at that moment, but he believed that if he repeated it enough, it would remain true. The world was becoming a very dark place he realized, and he was no longer sure what the light at the end of the tunnel might be; he believed though that he needed to believe in something, some sort of light that would emerge someday to make it worth continuing to walk through the darkness alone. O’Donnell was the past, a ‘sunk cost’, he told himself.

Thus, Aguirre walked silently the entire way to his mother’s home. The sky above was still and the hum of the city, of phosphorescent light and its dull roar, was faint. It grew fainter still as it shrank in the distance, as he climbed the hills towards his mother’s house, and as he walked through the dark woods between the city and the place that he now called “home”. Upon reaching his destination, and before entering the door, he looked out into sky to witness as the black gradually became blue upon the horizon where the stars had begun to fade and a thought came to him, “this is the beginning and the end.”

Part Two

The room was dark, and a woman’s face was softly illuminated as she viewed one of the paintings on the wall, one of the few light sources hanging above. Meanwhile, O’Donnell watched her from the shadows as she assessed his work. He had designed the space to feel as if one were in the zoo, in the reptile section with little terrariums along the walls. Most people only saw the orchids. They did not ponder the pairing of the paintings with the songs wafting throughout the gallery as if they were simple lullabies and accompaniments. “Yes”, O’Donnell thought to himself, “the majority of these spectators have only superficially penetrated beyond the surface of my Orchidstra.”

The spectacle had extended into the streets for days prior to the opening. Streets had been adorned with living orchids scattered within the trees along the sidewalks and within the parks. People had been stealing them and there were reports of people making runs upon the florists, angrily demanding one for their own home. That afternoon, while O’Donnell was driving to the gallery, an economics professor had jokingly compared the emerging orchid bubble to the tulip bubble on the radio, highlighting it instead as a floral market success, at least for now. O’Donnell appreciated the warning. He knew that all trends come as waves, that when one creates a big wave, they get to ride it, but he recognized that the momentum of the orchid boom was a temporary phenomenon. He had been in the game for quite a while at this point and this was by far the most intricate and exciting of the effects that he had produced. His work was animating people throughout the city, going so far as to pique the interest of economists, a feat that he had never imagined accomplishing.

The woman was now slowly and ever so slightly shaking her head in delight. “Mmm… It’s so graceful”, the woman said softly, yet still audibly above the faint music of the orchid mantis’s haunting call. Each painting emitted a unique song from the mantis hidden within. They were eerie sirens’ calls, beckoning the spectators to approach their lairs, their illuminated flowers like lights in the deep sea, their melodies like the scent of nectar calling from a carnivorous plant. Meanwhile, the woman seemed to only perceive the flower, its delicate petals and vibrant glow amidst the shadowy sanctuary of pigment. “At the end of the day, not everyone will understand the artist”, O’Donnell reminded himself. Thus, he stepped closer, prepared to begin the mating dance.

The woman was slightly startled as O’Donnell emerged from the shadows to stand at her side. She jumped ever so slightly, emitted a quiet “oh”, and smiled quickly in his direction before returning to behold the painting. Only a moment later though, she did a double take. She was suddenly looking back at him and was clearly on the verge of asking the question. It took a moment for her to feel confident and O’Donnell continued to look forward at the painting, watching her through his peripheral vision, knowing the words that were coming next.

“Are… Are you the artist?”, she questioned, looking at him intently now.

“Yes, Thomas O’Donnell. It’s a pleasure. May I ask your name?”

“Louise Strunk. The pleasure is all mine. I quite admire the collection. I have actually read some of your work as well. It is truly a pleasure to actually meet you Mr. O’Donnell. You know, The Precedent is one of my favorite novels, to be honest, from the last decade. It was so unprecedented!”, and with that she laughed gently, covering her mouth with her left hand to muffle her self-induced joy. Meanwhile, O’Donnell did his best to keep from scoffing, laughing, or reacting at all. He blinked and breathed in through his nose to accomplish the feat as the muscles in his jaw and chest tightened; the pressure was sudden, sound and a smile surging upward from deep within him, attempting to breach the surface, yet he managed to suppress them. Then, moments later, Ms. Strunk continued, “Tell me, Mr. O’Donnell, where do you find the inspiration for all of this?”

O’Donnell responded softly, taking Ms. Strunk on a very brief guided tour of how he would like people to believe it all works, “I meditate and visions come to me. I look within and I seek to present my world to you, to give it life and to give you beauty. The orchids… they came to me in a vision, and I could hear these songs. I knew that I had to seek them out.” He turned then to look into the painting once more. “This particular collection of orchids belongs to a charming couple on the outskirts of town. I had to search for weeks to find somewhere that existed between my vision and a realistic source for still life painting. I transformed them though, marrying them to the vision”, he elaborated. The statement was primarily true. It had taken a long time to find a large enough collection to use as the foundation while painting. However, where he had gone to seek inspiration was another story altogether.

“You know, Mr. O’Donnell, this collection reminds me very much of the work of Helen Lov. Have you drawn any inspiration from her? Are you familiar?”, she questioned.

O’Donnell’s face was somewhat puzzled now, “no… and yes… I am familiar”, he responded, somewhat amused. “She’s quite lovely and I do admire her work. The fuchsia collection from last year was quite stunning”, he added before questioning, “I take it, Ms. Strunk, that you might be a collector of flowers?”

“Why yes, I am quite partial to them…”, she mused before looking back at him intently. “Who have you derived inspiration from, if you don’t mind my asking”, she pressed further, her eyes narrowing inquisitively.

“I do not adapt the work of others. I create only original art that springs from within me”, he responded immediately and coolly; it was now, two decades into his career, a well-rehearsed reflex.

“Ah I see”, she responded, absorbing the words, processing them, imagining what they might actually signify. “To be inside your mind Mr. O’Donnell, I can only imagine what it must look like”, she said then, returning her gaze to the painting. “If this collection is any indication, it must feature some truly fantastic places, a paradise. Thank you for this little slice of your heaven, Mr. O’Donnell”, she said before slipping back into the shadows.

O’Donnell followed suit, similarly dipping back into the shade. Once amidst the shadows, he began scanning the gallery as he moved through the dimly lit chamber. He could see the forms of people moving as silhouettes around him, the gentle glow of the spectators viewing his collection along the wall, and, as he looked to the right, a crowd congregating within the adjacent room that housed the collection’s centerpiece. Thus, he began moving toward it, a separate room within which one significantly larger piece was hanging. However, as he approached the entryway, he captured a whiff of a new scent as a woman passed before him, emerging from the crowded room. Alarmed and sensing danger, O’Donnell quickly stepped backward, watching as she began to peruse the main gallery.

There was also a game amongst friends taking place this evening. How many people were playing no one was quite sure—everyone wears perfume. However, those who knew were aware that at least one person in the gallery was wearing a unique perfume that one of O’Donnell’s friends had designed especially for the occasion. If she touched you, and you spoke to her, you had to leave the gallery. The mission was to survive to attend the afterparty. It was nascent, but they imagined it as an extension of the art that would similarly spill out into the city as the scent of the orchid mantis’s pheromone began to diffuse from the epicenter of her birth. One would have to learn the scent from watching the others fall, remembering what they had smelled if they were present before one of the players was eliminated. One could also learn the safe scents. Thus, people’s first moves were wary, and one could clearly discern who was playing at first within the initial reception hall; they appeared anxious and antisocial until they started building networks with which to enter the gallery and travel like little bubbles.

Thus, O’Donnell began to follow her, the woman whose scent had captured his attention and induced fear. He wondered whether he might have already located the orchid mantis lurking within his exhibition. The paintings were spaced such that the songs within the main hall were discrete. Where one ended another began. Watching from the shadows, he observed as the woman approached a man admiring another of his pieces within the main chamber of the gallery. She touched his shoulder and the man looked over to her with a nod. They might be lovers O’Donnell thought, but were they playing the game? One could not be sure who exactly was actually playing, after all. Then they began to speak, and the man remained in competition, if he was actually playing. Relieved and disappointed, O’Donnell studied the woman’s face, eliminating yet another suspect, before continuing toward his favorite piece in the adjacent room, Daedalian Honesty.

The room was dangerous. Whoever it was, O’Donnell realized, she had to be a skilled hunter. She might tap him at any moment, the still unknown scent heralding her arrival masked within the subtly aromatic and more dense collection of spectators. Then, as he walked deeper into the room, a polyphonous chorus of the mantises’ calls echoed gently, growing as one approached their enclosure within the frame. Together they produced an alluring harmony and O’Donnell thought at that moment that his friend who had composed the music had truly outdone herself. Now experiencing it all in the proper context, amidst the symphony of scents within the gathering of shadows, he thought to himself, “Yes, true beauty is like an orchid mantis…”

It was then that a man gently touched his arm, startling him. “Oh, don’t worry Thomas, it’s just me”, his acquaintance Alex assured him, whispering and beaming with an unseen smile, proud to have terrified O’Donnell.

“I see that she hasn’t gotten to you yet Alex. I was growing worried. I already see so few familiar faces”, O’Donnell said, looking around and toward the visible persons closer to the painting, his heart having returned to normal after the quick jolt that Alex had induced.

“Charlotte did that to me earlier. Damn near made me shriek out loud out in the main hall”, Alex mentioned while laughing. “I figured with her being so close to you that you would have made her the mantis”, he said before more playfully adding, “sneaking around in the darkness, hunting your prey for you.”

Suddenly quite interested, O’Donnell responded, “Interesting… I left it all up to her actually. I thought that she might have chosen herself. This is good to know… very good to know”, he said chuckling for a moment before adding, “I can stop avoiding her now.” He hoped at that moment that she actually had been hunting his prey for him and that her mating dances on his behalf had been more successful than his own so far.

“Say, Thomas… the frames, why so dark? It’s all so dark…”, Alex questioned a moment later. The frames were a deep, reddish acacia against the black walls. One might have expected a lighter wood that would pop a bit more in contrast to the shadows within the frames as well as the surrounding gallery.

“Ah yes… the acacia… well first, I imagine the buyers hanging them in well-lit rooms, but the darkness works for me, you know…”, he responded, smirking invisibly amidst the shadows, his smile keenly felt to himself. He paused for a minute then, as if lost in thought, drawing upon a distant memory. “That, and there’s also something quite beautiful about acacia…” he said, pausing, and then adding somewhat wistfully, “beauty rising from the desert…”

It was then that Alex sensed a change. He began to wonder what might have suddenly caused the strange shift in O’Donnell’s demeanor. He sounded as if he had suddenly travelled somewhere profoundly within or perhaps distant, detached, melancholic.

“Hmm”, was Alex’s response, quite certain that he had sensed something odd, but not quite sure that he should pry. “Well, you should be out selling yourself, shouldn’t you?”, Alex questioned wittily. “I’ll leave you to it”, and with that Alex drifted into the current of shadows mulling about the gallery.

Suddenly alone again amidst the crowd once more, O’Donnell approached the painting. It was much larger than the others, taller than him actually, depicting multiple orchids gently glowing amidst their endarkened habitat. Dark green and brown faded into the darker shadows beyond which there were also subtle details that most probably overlooked, elusive eyes peering back upon the beholder from the depths of the painting itself. Nature was presenting the beholder with her twin beauties, her orchids and her orchid mantises, seeking to be accepted as a whole.

The other spectators, the fear of the lurking mantis, and the drive to make a sale briefly faded away as O’Donnell experienced a moment of atonement with his art. He was suddenly back within the greenhouse once more; he could feel the humidity of the air within, the smell of the moss and the soil, earthy and raw. However, he gradually returned to the space and began to look upon the others admiring his work, wondering where the paintings transported them if not to the place where he had created them.

His mind continued to wander as he found himself immersed within the hushed conversations of others. Their murmurs were unintelligible though, unless one got very close. Thus, he had to imagine their conversations and he found himself wondering who else might be anxious about the lurking mantis. People expected the orchid mantis to smell floral and sweet. “Might she have become more akin to the substrate within the sanctuary or perhaps donned a leathery scent?”, he questioned himself. O’Donnell smiled at the thought before stepping back deeper into the crowd, still in the dark as to how his own creation might have manifested itself.

Once he was within the main hall again, he quickly encountered Charlotte. “Thomas! Oh Thomas!”, she shouted, having somehow recognized his form from across the room. She was standing in front of one of the paintings, one that he quite admired actually, with an inscrutable looking elderly couple. Their faces appeared to be indifferent, unmoved, and yet there was a gleam of interest in their eyes as he walked closer. “Thomas, I would love to introduce you to the Shattschneiders. We’ve been discussing Orchid #7 for quite some time now”, she added.

“Yes, I was quite surprised when the little scythe popped out at me”, Mr. Shattschneider remarked, “it gave me a little jump.” He paused for a moment then, looking at O’Donnell as if he were assessing him, before saying, “oh well, yes, ah… Jacob Shattschneider, honored to meet you”, he said, extending his hand to shake O’Donnell’s. “And this is my wife, Hannah Shattschneider”, he added as she similarly extended her hand without any intelligible changes in her facial expression.

“Well, it is such a pleasure to meet you both”, O’Donnell said sincerely. Charlotte had disappeared at this point and O’Donnell caught himself before attempting to draw her back into the conversation. He paused for a moment though—Was this the moment? Had the mantis struck?—but no one indicated that he should leave. Thus, he began the dance, “I do quite admire #7. This particular mantis, and I do hope that you will keep this discrete, I found her to be peculiarly difficult to capture. The first ones were too obvious. It took time to achieve the effect so that only the keenest of eyes could detect her. I’m quite impressed to be honest, Jacob. May I call you Jacob?”

“Yes, yes, of course”, Mr. Shattschneider responded.

It was then that O’Donnell looked over to Mrs. Shattschneider. She appeared to be remarkably unimpressed. “What stands out to you?”, O’Donnell questioned, looking directly at her while attempting to provoke some indication about what she might be thinking.

“Mmmm… to me, at first, it’s the composition. The elements are all perfectly arranged, but the shadows also appear deeper. I can feel it pulling me in toward her. I’m quite partial to #9 as well, it’s brighter, but this one has gravity. There’s something to all of them, I’ve seen your work before too…”, she said, trailing off briefly before capturing that which was on the tip of her tongue, “I believe that the word is patina.” She explained it all without a hint of emotion, tilting her head ever so slightly to the right. Meanwhile, Mr. Shattschneider smiled, looking from his wife and then back toward the artist.

O’Donnell remained silent for a moment and nodded gently while still in thought. Then he replied, “I do that… some push and some pull… not everyone feels it though… I’m impressed, and I’m honored…”, he said with a nod and a pause. Returning to thought, pondering her words, one word specifically, he found himself quietly remarking, “patina…” out loud, as if only to himself. It almost made him smile. He caught himself and relaxed for a brief moment after that though. Mrs. Shattschneider’s gaze had returned to the image. Thus, he addressed the husband.

“Jacob, your wife appears to have remarkably refined taste and quite an eye”, O’Donnell stated before looking over toward Mrs. Shattschneider again, capturing her attention, and questioning, “I imagine that you are a painter yourself? You certainly must dabble?”

As she looked back at him, a small smile broke across her face, a mild perturbation that appeared to mask a tiny laugh. It was only for a second though, as if a pebble had broken the surface of a pond.

Yet, she remained there, still and silent for a moment before responding, “Oh no, Mr. O’Donnell, I am merely an admirer”, and smiling once more.

The rest of the event went smoothly. The Shattschneiders purchased #7 and #9 and O’Donnell managed to evade the lurking mantis, whoever she might have been. There had been a brief reception within the main atrium of the gallery near the main entrance and the time had come to emerge victorious. However, as O’Donnell was preparing to leave, he took a moment to search for the gallery manager. He found the gallery manager in the back room quietly arranging some affairs, paperwork, and he looked up as O’Donnell approached.

“Quite a night, Thomas! Hard to spot them in the dark though, you know!”, he cheerfully announced, standing up and approaching O’Donnell to give him a hug. “Quite a success. Two to the Gelfords, one to the Dr. that you mentioned, Dr. Goce, and we have an interested party in the Honesty. That’s not counting the ones that Charlotte snagged for you”, he reported proudly before adding, “lots of interest in the remaining pieces as well!”

“Yes, indeed! That is quite an opening night. Thank you for making this all happen, Charles, for indulging, what was that that you called it? ‘The dark vision’”, O’Donnell said sincerely and with pride. Beyond the successful sales, O’Donnell’s vision had been perfectly realized; people appeared to have been enchanted, under his spell, and would remain so as they ventured forth from the lair to attract others to his work.

“That was quite a game as well, Thomas; fairly simple, Murder Mystery, Assassin, Orchid Mantis… really, but the context was quite excellent”, the gallery manager added, sitting back down at his desk.

“Ah yes, to be honest I fully expected her to be going straight for me the entire time. I didn’t think that I would survive to the end of the night. It tastes sweet”, O’Donnell mentioned, smiling and feeling quite relaxed.

“Well, Mr. O’Donnell, you haven’t quite arrived at the party yet, now have you?”, the gallery manager remarked with excitement and a quick laugh.

“No, I haven’t yet, have I?”, he said laughing as well with a little gleam of excitement in his eye, the thought not having crossed his mind prior to the gallery manager’s comment.

“I had a run in with her myself, but being immune you know, it would really have been unfortunate after all to have me taken out of the gallery. Imagine how different the night might have gone. Anyhow, I am not going to disclose her identity. I wish you luck sir and I might stop by later in the evening to celebrate as well”, the gallery manager rambled for a moment before shouting pleasantly, “away with you then, Thomas! To the party now! Godspeed!”

Thus, O’Donnell emerged from the gallery and into the evening with a slight rush of adrenaline. The air was fresh and crisp, especially compared to the odiferous den of parfums that the exhibition had become later in the evening. He hadn’t realized quite how thick it had become inside until he was suddenly thrust back into the cool seminatural air of the city. As a gust from a passing car washed over him, he began to laugh to himself, imagining those who were not aware of the game questioning why so many of the other spectators had arrived so heavily scented and why they might have been dropping like flies for unknown reasons throughout the exhibition.

Then he remembered that the lounge where they were to meet was still five blocks away and he knew that the mantis could be anywhere between him and the survivors’ sanctuary. O’Donnell walked swiftly, nervously looking around corners while taking a circuitous route to avoid any traps that might have been set. He knew that some of his friends would find special enjoyment if he were eliminated from attending his own party. They might be in cahoots, he thought, the fallen ones, hunting him like a stag.

However, he eventually arrived at the building and there was only one woman standing out front. She had greasy dark hair and wore a tight short black dress while shouting into her phone. “Well, I already paid for the fucking babysitter, so I’m going with or without you”, she angrily informed some unseen other on the end of what must have been an uncomfortable phone call or, perhaps, a brilliant cover identity. “No, we can’t just reschedule the date Timothy…”, she continued.

Thus, hurriedly and with the maximum distance possible, he sprinted to pass her in order to enter into the building. To the outside observer this must have looked strange. Yet, O’Donnell fully expected her to suddenly reveal herself as the mantis and attack him. He felt very silly once he was safely within the building, looking back for a moment to witness her staring at him as if he were a madman. However, mere moments later, he breathed a sigh of relief. He was in an elevator ascending to meet his friends and nothing could stop him now. The evening had been a success in multiple ways. Nonetheless, as the elevator continued to climb, he found himself scanning his mind for any indication of error. Had he made some silly faux pas? Misrepresented himself in a way that would be problematic? He determined that he had not, and he exited the elevator with a cool sense of calm.

The room was buzzing when he arrived, but there were only ten of them, ten survivors of the mantis’s prowl within the gallery. “So few”, he thought to himself with a smile, “she must be quite full.” As he scanned the room, he discovered that Alex was nowhere to be found. However, after a moment, Charlotte turned around, looked up, and smiled, beckoning for him to join her at a table near the window. The windows of the lounge extended from the floor to the ceiling and high-top tables dotted the room. Charlotte’s was in the corner, and he acknowledged her invitation while pointing to the bar. He had to get a drink first, obviously.

The walls on the inside were red and a small bar with a charcuterie plate awaited him. There was some fruit too: figs, oranges, apples, and grapes. It was all quite simple and elegant. Thus, with a glass of red wine in hand, prosciutto, a fig, and some of his favorite cheese—a creamy blue cheese with thick, vibrant veins—he approached the table to join Charlotte and others who had survived. A couple at one of the other tables smiled and nodded at him as he walked over to meet her, a silent “congrats” of sorts. He nodded his silent thank you in return before sitting down on one of the stools to join Charlotte and the others, two of whom he recognized from prior outings.

“Well, that’s another one for the history books”, Charlotte said, stroking his ego as usual. She had always been a true friend, since the very beginning, at the right place and the right time; they had been fast friends ever since.

“Did you know that figs aren’t a fruit”, the unfamiliar woman suddenly interjected, looking at O’Donnell’s plate without introducing herself. Charlotte quickly threw him a glance that indicated forbearance was necessary with this one. She was still staring at his food and O’Donnell wasn’t quite sure how to respond, similarly looking down upon what he now realized was a fruitless plate.

“No, thank you for that little bit of knowledge”, he said before inquiring, “and you are?”

“Oh oops, Sara, I’m Sara. I work with Charlotte, but you will probably know me as the fig lady from now on…”, she stammered, pausing for a moment before asking for confirmation, “won’t you?” Charlotte looked away and shook her head, resisting laughter. They were coworkers at the university and while Sara certainly had her charms within the anthropology department, she was a very strange and loose cannon outside the confines of her professional environment.

“Thank you, Sara. It’s a pleasure to meet you and I’m sure that I will forget about the fig, somehow”, he said smiling and laughing very softly in a friendly manner. He then quickly said hello to the two others, Charlotte’s friends Wes and Leo. The couple had been to a number of his events in the past, but he had never gotten to know them that well. They joined happy hour on Thursday infrequently.

Wes and Leo were quite friendly though and they proposed a toast, “to the artist!”

“To the artist!”, resounded throughout the room and O’Donnell was beaming, raising his glass, and thinking, “to me!” He savored the moment—It was always very sweet, the sensation of touching the peak, higher and higher each time—and he looked out through the window upon the city below, on top of the world once more.

Once the wave of cheers had subsided, O’Donnell interjected, “I’m dying to know who the mantis was.” He had a look of excitement upon his face that was meant to be contagious. “Could it be that she still walks amongst us?”, he questioned conspiratorially while leaning forward and scanning the eyes of the others seated at the table.

Suddenly they were all looking at Leo. “You’re looking at her!”, he said while making crazy eyes and moving his head hypnotically like a bobble head doll. Everyone else at the table chuckled softly. It was very anticlimactic. “I made quite the killing. Perhaps I should have been a little bit less of a skank and there would be more people up here with us”, he added, causing the others to laugh more loudly, especially Wes.

“Well, dammit Leo, you never even attempted to make a pass at me”, O’Donnell responded coolly, appearing wounded for a brief moment, feeling as if he had been excluded from his own game and merely provided the illusion of participation. Yet moments later, a smile grew upon his face. “Can I smell you?”, he added at that moment. The question caused Wes to crack up again and Leo to look back at him as one does at an opponent in chess that has made an impressive move. Thus, he extended his wrist and O’Donnell nodded before bowing forward to experience the orchid mantis’s aroma. It had grown faint throughout the course of the evening, but he could still detect it, earthy and leathery just as he had come to hope it would be.

“Mmmm”, O’Donnell hummed with his eyes closed as he rose, nodding his head.

Everyone at the table was silent, laughing silently that is. He looked over and Charlotte was smiling, the kind of smile that one makes without opening their mouth. It spoke of the absurdity of the culmination of the evening’s festivities. Sara was smiling as well; she appeared relieved and O’Donnell thought for a moment that she must have believed that he had forgotten about the quirky fig comment already.

People came by the table throughout the evening as they sat and chatted. As more survivors arrived, O’Donnell made the rounds from time to time, always returning to the table with Charlotte and the others. Accolades came to him from all around the room. However, as the clock struck midnight, the tide began to recede. Sara was the first from the table to retire, but another friend, Vera, took her place as the other tables grew empty.

Vera had become a mainstay at Thursday happy hours for the last year or so. She had missed the exhibition—“work darling, you know how it is, but I’ll be there for the afterparty… always.”— and O’Donnell’s personal life had become one of her obsessions. However, throughout the past year, she had only made surface level inquiries, asked about him to the others, and made little nudges that he had ignored. Yet tonight, she felt newly empowered to pry. It was his event and there was no one at his side. It became an interrogation.

“How is it that you put yourself out there like this, on the radio, the fucking morning show, advertised ‘I will be here at this time, oh and by the way, I’m an extremely talented visionary’, and you still manage to sit here in front of me alone with nothing new and pretty for me to look at?”, Vera questioned, arms crossed, inquisitively, suspect of the entire situation.

It was only the five of them now and O’Donnell similarly felt empowered to speak the truth. “You see, Vera, I am married to my art. I fucked everyone in that room tonight with it. Sometimes completing a painting, a book, realizing a vision, it’s better than any orgasm. I sit there for a day experiencing the same sensation, except I don’t feel empty afterwards.”

Unable to relate, Vera continued, “So, you’ve never met another man that inspired you? Challenged you? Tasted better than your art?”

The others were watching, amused; Vera had finally gone further than her usual, “how the fuck are you single?”, “you should meet [insert name]”, and what had become the classic, “what are you hiding?”

O’Donnell replied swiftly, “No, no, and no.”

“Well, how about a little wager, Mr. O’Donnell? Give me three chances. If I can’t make one stick, I’ll buy the goddamn D.H. That’s what we’re calling it now, right?”, Vera said, fire in her eyes. Charlotte wasn’t sure if Vera was serious and found herself wondering how much she had been drinking prior to arriving; thus, her face transitioned from one of intrigue to one of puzzlement. O’Donnell took it very seriously though and remained silent, pondering his next move.

Vera was actually very serious. She had been waiting for this moment, the opportunity to be frank, preparing for it throughout the year. Thus, she leaned back, arms crossed again, and awaited O’Donnell’s acceptance of her challenge.

“Well, I’ve already got interested parties”, O’Donnell said, sighing and leaning backward, his gaze intently focused upon Vera, “in the painting that is.”

“So do I”, Vera responded cunningly. “I’m sure that we can find some sort of equivalent arrangement, if you’ll indulge me”, she added, leaning forward now, going in for ‘the kill’.

O’Donnell breathed in heavily. “I assume there will be something in this for you beyond mere entertainment?”, he questioned, adding, “an equivalent prize?”

“A commissioned work and the pure joy of watching you fall in love, like a broken version of your heartless self”, she said point blank, further indicating that this had not come out of the blue. Leo and Wes looked at one another apprehensively, on the edges of their seats. Charlotte knew now that this was very real. Knowing Vera and the investigation that she had been conducting, or what had now become clearer to her as a low intensity period of discovery, she grew excited as well. Charlotte had made attempts throughout the years, observed as O’Donnell returned unmoved from the encounters with friends, friends of friends, always chugging along forward without attachments, other than her at least. Thus, she was confident that it would produce nothing more than lively happy hour drama.

“Well, best of luck Vera; you’ll have to go right for the heart, if you can find one”, O’Donnell said, clearly intrigued and assenting to her challenge.

Breathing in, nodding, and with a look of extreme satisfaction, Vera began her operation, “Well then, candidate one is Gregory. Shall I give him your number?”

“Why, absolutely Vera. I look forward to hearing from him”, he responded, cocksure, adding, “it will all, I imagine at the very least, be extremely satisfying for me in the end.”

Thus, the evening returned to common banter for some time before the energy began to dwindle. Leo and Wes eventually took their leave, congratulating him and noting that they would be attending happy hour throughout his upcoming ordeal to hear the stories, the aftermath, and hopefully, “god willing”, to witness him, “grow a heart”. Vera took her leave as well, assuring O’Donnell that she would emerge victorious while also noting that the game was certainly not zero sum. Lastly, Charlotte finally took her leave shortly afterwards, mentioning her excitement, but noting that unfortunately, she fully expected Vera to fail.

“I know you too well at this point”, she said, shaking her head, “he’s out there somewhere, but you’re never going to actually go look for him.”

The words resonated with O’Donnell, having pierced his façade like a needle. He had to sit alone within the room processing them after she had left; he knew that she was probably right. Then he looked down upon the city below; the people and vehicles scurried about like little mice and the streets were newly teeming with life as last call had just come and gone throughout the city.

Then, a moment later, as he rose and turned to leave the room, he noticed that someone had left a book on the counter, Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading. “Exquisite taste”, he thought to himself as he walked over to it, though he had never actually read it himself, not yet at least. At first, he began eyeing the cover; it was a recent edition. Then he began leafing through it to discover markings, folds in the pages, handwritten annotations; the book had already been loved too. He began to wonder why someone might have dropped it, why anybody had brought it to the event. There was no indication of ownership. Thus, he held onto it and entered the elevator with it in his right hand, tucked against his chest. As the elevator descended, the aftertaste of his achievement still lingering, the musical strings and lyrics resonated within and around him…

“A high high desert
remains behind me,
and a long road backward
with nothing left to see…”

O’Donnell entered his apartment in a more somber mood. The city had swirled around him on the ride home and he had looked over to the empty seat at his side, the memory of a hand upon his leg still fresh. The memory came like a whip, unexpected, unwelcomed, and newly fresh. His world of meaning always became heavier in his private spaces, offstage. Sometimes it took him to dark places.

The lights were off when he returned home, but the light from the city beyond his windows illuminated the scene. The loft doubled as his studio and there were no walls once inside. The windows were open on this particular evening, and a gentle breeze entered, blowing the sheer curtains in the wind. He took a seat then on the sofa, moments after returning, and, as he sat in the dimly lit room, he ruminated about the car ride home, on that pang that he had felt. It had come and gone often throughout the years.

Thus, he logged onto ChatMate, a gay webcam site where one could speak with the models, watch them, and make requests within paid private rooms. It was not quite as dark as it sounds. It was actually a little bit darker. He had come here often throughout the years to see Aguirre, always with a virtual one-way mirror between them. However, O’Donnell found that Aguirre’s handle, GayShaw101, wasn’t logged in that night. He wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or disappointed. He had managed to stay away for several months this time; it felt like a relapse. It was a relapse he told himself. Charlotte could never know.

Early on in this charade, it was 2018 now, O’Donnell had entered merely as an observer, stumbling upon the existence of Aguirre’s online peep shows as an accident, a pop-up ad. He was quite unable to believe it at first. It began during the first year after he had left and only a few months into O’Donnell beginning to settle in within the big city. It eventually came to make more sense to him though, Aguirre’s actions at least. Aguirre needed an outlet and there were few such venues where one could go from his particular brand of rock bottom. Nonetheless, he managed to make it his own, probably to the chagrin of those who entered for purely sexual motive. He would read sonnets, perform music, and engage in philosophical debate and discussion. Months earlier during O’Donnell’s previous succumbing to the temptation, Aguirre had also claimed to still be working on The Cosmic Archipelago; he had been presenting snippets to his viewers and fielding their questions throughout the years. He was apparently still chugging along like a tank engine on circular track, like a dog chasing its tail.

Back in 2003, within weeks of the discovery, O’Donnell created a profile with the most innocent of motives; he had to ask Aguirre, “If you don’t mind my asking, why are you doing this to yourself?”

Aguirre responded quickly and via the cam’s audio function, apparently prepared and unashamed, “I planned on not doing this actually, never in my life, but it became apparent to me that, given the choices that I have made in life so far, I was going to end up doing this out of necessity when I was forty or so, and then I would feel very stupid about all the missed economic opportunity of not selling my body sooner. I have sought to find balance, you know, an outlet for my art and the lower pleasures. I am like a virtual geisha. I keep it classy… as classy as this can be.”

In the early days people would frequently log on to berate him and shame him, referring to the event. Some of them might have been legitimately interested though. The internet is a very strange place. Nonetheless, Aguirre remained calm, like a statue, an unshakable tower, while sifting through the incoming chats. He appeared to almost brake once during a particularly brutal onslaught, but he assured people cryptically, that “I only look like a black hole on the outside; it looks kind of scary, but there is actually a lot of light in me.” O’Donnell thought the response was strange, but, overall, he admired how Aguirre somehow managed to keep a straight face throughout it all as the berating became farcical, as if he was being terrorized. Despite the attacks, Aguirre proudly continued his performances with rare interruptions—epic monologues, excerpts from his journals, and criticisms of what he was reading at the time.

O’Donnell recorded one of them verbatim, an excerpt from one of Aguirre’s journals at a time when O’Donnell felt particularly drawn to him, as if he should reach out, rekindle the flame. He literally created a new account from which to request that Aguirre repeat it and Aguirre kindly obliged,

“I recall now the idea of a moment. Or at least the idea I used to have of what a moment was and what I think it remains for many others. A moment is a brief instance when time slows. It occurs when something pulls you out of the monotony of your automated life. Something grabs your attention and alters your connection to reality. Something evokes a feeling. It grabs your curiosity by bending or nearly breaking your model of the world. It squeezes your heart and causes you to feel the pain or joy emitted. I guess the point of the moment was that for a brief second, you could truly feel alive. You could perceive your awareness and experience a wave of uncontrollable emotion. I have learned that we can seek such moments, we can make them a more regular occurrence. Better yet, we can make these ‘moments’ our default experience.

We merely need to pay better attention, to be more open, and to be less afraid to truly live. We also need to recognize the routine things we engage in that could be moments. Rather than reading while eating or scarfing down your meal, take the time to chew. Think about the different and complex flavors that you perceive. Feel the sensation of the different flavors and how they interact. Eating, like so much of life, should be an experience, even while in survival mode.”

O’Donnell was quite torn at that time, lonely in the city after leaving Aguirre behind, but very busy with his work and quite sure that Aguirre would be toxic to his career. Sometimes he even considered taking the risk, embracing Aguirre while hoping that the fallout might just be a ‘j-curve’, a brief dip before a more respectable and upward trend began, especially if O’Donnell intervened. People forget, yes, but he was also quite certain that even under ordinary circumstances, Aguirre would distract him, and under these extraordinary ones, likely lead him astray into the abyss he now seemed to call home. Yes, O’Donnell was in love still and he felt it, something he called love at least, but he was terrified. Thus, he found himself here every night safely behind his digital veil, pondering what he should do about his feelings, watching the trainwreck—choo, choo.

It was then that Aguirre finally reached out. It happened shortly after the monologue. He had been taking special pleasure in eating for the days that had followed, frequenting new restaurants and reliving some of his favorite meals. It was the first time since O’Donnell had moved that they had been in direct contact with both parties clearly aware that they were speaking to the other. O’Donnell was quite certain that Aguirre was unaware of his forays into Aguirre’s new online dark site. Meanwhile, he found himself kind of sad that Aguirre had not attempted to follow him to the city, like a simp. The message that Aguirre sent, which follows, came with an attachment.

Dear O’Donnell,

I have written a novel. I am writing a novel, that is; it is still ‘thickening’. I imagine that you will find it affectively engaging. I am sad that you are gone, though I am quite happy for you. At the end of the day, I hope that this inspires you to build a friendship, to become my artistic rival, or to fall in love with me from a distance.

The book is very much a work in progress. I wrote almost all of it this weekend. I call it a blitzroman. You are under no obligation to read it. It is primarily for artistic purposes, though I do hope that it entertains you, so please, absolutely do take it all with a grain of salt.

I do not know if I should send this or not. I feel like it could be a really awesome idea… or a really terrible one. If you are seeing this, I have hit send. I hope that you are having a wonderful time in the big city. You are also under no obligation to ever speak to me again because I know this is weird. I hope at the end of the day that it becomes a memorable experience that this is happening.

Sincerely,

Thomas

Aguirre’s brief novella, the blitzroman, which he claimed to have written in two days, appeared to have taken much more time and effort. Apparently, it was a blend of his writing from around the time that they first met stitched together into a narrative. O’Donnell decided to take it lightly. After all, Aguirre had recently been in a bike accident. It was a funny story and O’Donnell and other patrons of his webcam show that had accompanied his recovery found the humor in it as well. Aguirre had gone headfirst into the pavement, head over heels while biking to purchase ice cream, and, upon waking in the ambulance, he was relieved to discover that the events of the last few years had been nothing more than a trauma induced nightmare. That one night had never happened; such nightmares only existed in our dreams, he had reassured himself.

However, the EMTs had to remind him that it was real and that they still recognized him from his viral infamy. “You took a bit of a beating, but I can still recognize your face…”, one of them explained. He apparently passed out repeatedly and returned to consciousness multiple times during his journey to the hospital, each time with a fresh moment of hope and no memory of the previous disappointments. O’Donnell imagined that it must have eventually become heart wrenching for the EMTs, a new form of torture for those who already must intimately experience the suffering and pain of others. Yet there were two silver linings; Aguirre in retrospect found the whole story to be hilarious. Additionally, there was the other one, which he never shared publicly, but he wrote about sincerely within the blitzroman; it was that he had left the hospital with the knowledge that O’Donnell was still alive and kicking somewhere out in the world. Thus, he explained, he became resolved to make one last ditch attempt to capture O’Donnell’s heart.

O’Donnell became deeply torn after receiving Aguirre’s message and actually reading the novel. It was strange. While it did contain some clear attempts to capture his attention in a romantic way, it was mostly an authentic work of art—a more effective means of engaging O’Donnell’s heart and mind, Aguirre must have thought. It was borderline crude at points, yet it was authentic, raw, and daring. Nonetheless, O’Donnell recognized it as a sincere romantic gesture in Aguirre’s own strange and yet, alluring way. It was like a mating dance; “clearly I like you a lot, but look at what I can do”, it said flamboyantly. As in nature though, some mating rituals are merely performative spectacles of failure, observed and acknowledged, understood and beheld with genuine excitement; however, while they might mesmerize and capture the attention of their intended target, the desired final effect is rarely achieved.

O’Donnell felt overwhelmed and cornered, under pressure and as if his time observing Aguirre had led to a climax. It felt like a critical juncture in his life, a moment that he might regret forever or remain proud of until the day he died, depending upon the choice he made and the actual state of reality, the interaction thereof that is. He felt guilty to have abandoned Aguirre, having acted on the way he felt in a way that he knew had been extremely unfair and probably hurtful. It had made sense to him in the heat of the moment, a rash decision, sitting home alone that night after a couple of beers before inviting him to drinks. However, the fact that Aguirre had finally reached out in the way that he had surprised O’Donnell, and he thought that maybe, just maybe, as he had initially suspected, there was more beneath the surface of Aguirre than a man who gave strangers blow jobs in the dark of the night.

It became very stress inducing as the decision of what to do weighed on his shoulders for days. He wrote multiple draft responses that were never sent. One included a statement that he realized might sound particularly pompous.

Dear Aguirre,

Thank you for your novel. This is very special to me. I feel as if, in a way, we have coauthored it. I feel the same way and I believe that we should do something about this. I will come visit soon. I am sorry about the way that I left things. I was selfish and cruel. I think about you often and I am very grateful to know now that you have forgiven me for not keeping in contact during the past few months. I send brotherly love and affection.

Sincerely,

O’Donnell

He laid down in his bed and ran simulations of what might happen if he took course of action A, B, C, or some other potentially fantastic combination of actions. As he did so, he imagined Aguirre being similarly anxious after bearing his heart and soul in a successful attempt to shock O’Donnell, wondering if O’Donnell had even taken the time to read it, wondering if O’Donnell had ever thought of him as more than a one night fuck.

Thus, O’Donnell found himself completely unable to make any decisions. The future felt too hazy. He had so many questions. He barely knew Aguirre, but the sentiment ran deeply beyond reason. Whatever the truth might be, whoever Aguirre really was on the inside, he had become a most dangerous flame. As such, one night, O’Donnell emerged from his meditations within his apartment to find answers, a person who would make the decision for him.

“Thank god for Charlotte”, O’Donnell thought to himself as he remembered the night of their first meeting.

Yes, O’Donnell might have saved Aguirre, swooped in like a hero, brought him to the city and into his life, had it not been for Charlotte. Aguirre stumbled out of his apartment that evening already having had a few. He walked for what felt like hours as his mind continued to “practice” his response and process his thoughts and feelings. In truth, it was only approximately forty-five minutes to the outskirts of the gay district where he entered, not a gay bar, but merely a bar that happened to be near the gay district. It was one of the trendy ones that had popped up nearby to which all ordinary young professionals and bougie gays alike flocked to in the evening. Some of the older gays lamented this development, but O’Donnell simply adored the place.

It was called Casablanca and it literally had a Moroccan style patio and an ornate classic interior. Upon entering, O’Donnell walked briskly and straight toward the bar to order an old fashioned. Then, drink in hand, he searched for the person that would determine his fate. He was spinning like a bottle, searching for someone to “kiss” with the question that was burning within his heart. Then she walked up alongside him as he leaned backward against the bar. Her hair was long, dark brown, and naturally wavy. She was in her mid-twenties, had a very classic face, wore glasses, and he thought that she looked like an intellectual, a particularly beautiful one though. There were a lot of them around here, intellectuals.

“Are you a graduate student?”, he asked immediately after she placed her order.

She at looked over at him, perplexed and on the verge of rolling her eyes, her face clearly annoyed. “Yes. Is that a complement?”, she questioned.

“No”, he said, without thinking, before catching himself and quickly adding, “no, I mean, yes, you look intelligent, but I’m not hitting on you. I need help.”

She remained perplexed, in a different way now though, bemused yet actually interested in observing the car accident before her. “Ok, I’ll bite. How can ‘intelligent woman at bar’ be of assistance?”, she asked semi-robotically, semi-sarcastically, and entirely sardonically.

“A man sends a love letter… love novel. He sent an entire love novel, but he fucked up, you know, like bad. I love the guy too… like actually, really, it’s rare for me… and I’m kind of thinking about taking a leap”, he explained.

“How bad?”, she asked.

“Do you remember vom/com man?”, he responded rapidly.

“Yea, he couldn’t have done something that bad though if you’re still considering this”, she added, now extremely intrigued.

“Yea… well, it was”, O’Donnell quickly added without providing further details.

“Well, it sounds like he’s something that you have to overcome”, she said point blank, “like he’s toxic.”

“Hmmm… yea, that was my thought exactly”, O’Donnell said as the negative perceptions began to cement themselves, becoming his reality. He did not know her name yet, but he felt very comfortable with her, like they were on the same wavelength. Thus, he asked the question, “would you like to be my new best friend?” He was tipsy, half joking, and yet still entirely serious.

Charlotte smiled then. “We get drinks at this bar on seventh every Thursday at seven. It’s called Seven Bar. I assume that I will be seeing you there?”, she responded quickly before grabbing her drink, turning around and walking to meet some friends, taking only a moment to look back at him and wink.

The next day O’Donnell woke up on the sofa, hungover, and realized that he still had to respond. It seemed like the human thing to do. He had come to realize that Aguirre merely saw him as an escape ladder. That was all. It had become so clear to him now. Thus, he began to draft responses.

Dear Aguirre,

This is very kind of you and the novel demonstrates promise, though it appears to be a rather perverse and unhealthy outlet to create such a strange self-portrait at a time when one ought to be finding peace with reality and adjusting their expectations about the future. I wish you the best in your endeavors.

Sincerely,

O’Donnell

Instead, he wrote and almost sent a very curt reply, “This is very kind of you. I wish you the best and I look forward to reading it once it is published.”

He wasn’t sure which one was worse, but he felt that he would be relieved to have it out of the way if he were to send something, anything. However, he realized shortly after drafting the second draft that Aguirre would probably be on the other end wondering to himself, “does this mean that you have not even read it?” There were no hints in the second potential response that would indicate that he had actually read it multiple times. Indicating that fact would probably be dangerous though, providing hope where none now existed, O’Donnell believed. Internal debates raged within O’Donnell’s mind throughout the day and, eventually, led him to reconsider his decision to take Charlotte’s advice. The period of extreme indecision was brief though and, during the depth of the cognitive dissonance that he experienced, he determined that it was becoming unhealthy for him. Thus, in a moment of panic, he hit send and the curt message flew at the speed of light to the man on the other end. The deed being done, O’Donnell quickly resolved to go swimming to clear his mind.

“Splash!”, O’Donnell plunged into the creek like a cannonball; the water was cold and sent sharp sensations throughout his body. As he remained beneath the surface, he could hear a little girl nearby cheering in delight at having seen him leap from a tree on the edge of the city’s natural spring. He rose then to see her, and there she was on the edge standing with her mother’s hand on her shoulder—a little red sundress, dark black hair, pale skin glowing in the shade of the tree, and a look of sheer joy as she clapped and giggled. She was like a little ladybug and it soothed O’Donnell’s soul to know that he had brought her great joy. He returned then, beneath the surface, and closed his eyes to hold his breath and leave the past behind him, allowing it to evaporate from him as he imagined all the life flowing around him within the creek. He felt very at one with the moment, fish brushed against his skin, his body adapted to the cold, though he could still feel it prickling, causing his chest and muscles to remain tight, and his mind grew still. He rose then to float on the surface, looking up into the clouds as birds of prey circled above and the sounds of the city remained muffled. Someone nearby was playing music loudly as they paddled down the creek toward the city. A woman’s voice, gritty and raw, was singing a classic ballad and it was audible beneath the surface; his life for that brief moment had a soundtrack and he was digging it.

I was sittin’
sittin’ havin’ a ball.
Yea, I was sittin’;
never thought that I’d fall.
n’ I was sittin’
‘til you came along;
now I’m smitten
and I’m writing this song.

Cuz along you came
like a burnin’ flame
striking me down
by the lake in the town
a handsome face
making me want a taste
an allure for sure
caught me hook, line, and sinker…

Yea, now I’m sittin’,
singing you this song
cuz I think of you
all day ‘n all night long.
Yea, now I’m smitten,
singing you this song
cuz I think of you
all day ‘n all night long…

As always though, the effect was very temporary. When he returned home that evening, he found himself wondering what Aguirre might be thinking. Was he ok? Had the response been too harsh? He logged onto ChatMate later in the evening and found that Aguirre had not been on for days, not since sending the novel. He had, however, posted a list of his upcoming live music performances in what O’Donnell remembered to be one of most divey dive bars in the city where he had once lived; O’Donnell had never actually set foot in the place nor been to that part of town. He was happy though that Aguirre had finally found at least one place willing to allow him to perform in public.

The thoughts continued to race though. How would he feel if he were the one to receive the message that he had sent under similar circumstances? What state of mind was Aguirre in these days? Should he have at least called, said hello, asked how he was doing on the phone before sending such a brief and potentially heartbreaking message? Thus, he began drafting an addendum to provide relief to what he assumed might have been an unnecessarily stressful period of processing rejection and failure.

Dear Aguirre,

I actually did read the novel and it was an experience that I will be unlikely to forget. I want you to know that I have always found you to be exceptional and impressive as a person and an artist that sticks to their convictions. I am especially proud that despite everything that you have been going through, you have been keeping your head high and continuing to produce art. While I do not feel the same way about you, your honesty was very brave, and I appreciate you sharing your feelings with me.

Sincerely,

O’Donnell

Nonetheless, he deleted the message and resolved to wait to hear from Aguirre, remotely monitoring for signs that he was actually doing ok despite the rejection. He reminded himself that he had taken time to devise his initial response. He figured that Aguirre was probably similarly processing and determining how best to respond. However, days passed, and Aguirre never logged back into ChatMate. It was the longest period that he had remained offline since O’Donnell had stumbled upon Aguirre’s strange internet art performances amidst the sea of amateur porn actors. He also discovered, as days went by and he became more concerned, that Aguirre’s SocialMedia profile had been silent for some time. “Perhaps he has been travelling”, O’Donnell told himself optimistically, “somewhere without an internet connection.” O’Donnell certainly wished that he was.

The worries continued to weigh heavily on O’Donnell’s mind throughout the week and into Thursday evening. Seven Bar on Seventh at seven was his opportunity to finally begin building true social connections within the big city. He had especially high hopes for his friendship with the witty woman from the bar, but he realized that he had become a ball of anxiety and he vowed to go the entire evening without mentioning Aguirre, his ongoing dilemma, or the fact that he was seriously considering travelling to the city where he had once lived to verify that Aguirre was safe and sound despite O’Donnell’s belated and heartless reply. His demons were to remain safely hidden beneath the surface of his cool façade.

Thus, he arrived fashionably late and, upon entering the rather nondescript bar, your classic, well lit, modern chic inner-city watering hole, he recognized Charlotte at a large round table with five others. It was very relaxed

“Vom/com lover!”, she shouted gleefully as she saw him approaching their table. O’Donnell realized that he had already garnered his own unfortunate nickname within the group, apparently having made an impression during their initial meeting. He realized also though that he should have seen that one coming and he doubled down on his vow to remain silent about the ongoing internal warfare between his heart and his mind with respect to Aguirre.

“’Tis I!”, he announced as he took his seat at the table, “Thomas, my name is actually Thomas.”

The others greeted him and introduced themselves. There were two other graduate students, Elliott and Yulyn, as well as three others. Daniele was a hairdresser at a posh salon in the city center. She had attended high school with Charlotte and had the most perfect hair that O’Donnell had ever seen; it was very curly, and she had beautiful dimples when she smiled. Then there was Heather; she was wearing a suit, having just left the office from her consulting job. Apparently, it was rare for her to be in town during the week to attend the happy hour, “80% travel”, she explained. Lastly, there was Teddy. He was very handsome, had recently left a graduate program and taken a job as an assistant editor at one of O’Donnell’s favorite magazines, one that had rejected O’Donnell’s work multiple times. He felt as if he had found his people.

“So, if you don’t mind my asking, what did this guy actually do?”, Daniele inquired, Charlotte having clearly presented his origin story to the group. She cut right to the point, right to the forbidden topic.

“He cheated, that’s all. I’m a master of hyperbole”, O’Donnell explained quickly before realizing that he was letting his audience down. Thus, he invented the story, “but it was my friend and he lied about it for like five months”, he said, suddenly feeling even more uncomfortable with the direction that everything was taking.

“That’s fucking awful”, Heather interjected, following it up with an “aww.”

“Damn, I put my bet on it actually being vom/com guy”, Teddy added, laughing as Elliott interjected excitedly, “You’re like even from the same city!”

The horror began to spread like an oil spill rising from O’Donnell’s gut as everyone continued laughing, and Charlotte even began reenacting the meme. As O’Donnell’s face grew pallid, breath shallow, his mind bracing against the automatic revulsion surging within, Yulyn even mentioned how a friend had been to one of Aguirre’s concerts prior to scolding everyone, “it was just one bad night guys, it could happen to any one of us, like one night Charlotte is going to drunkenly set her hair on fire while smoking on the curb and only ever be remembered as the screaming whore running down main street.”

“No!”, Charlotte shouted, “this guy is a fucking heathen. I know it. He’s like out there every night still sucking cock and hiding in bushes wanking at night!”

There was this one time O’Donnell had crowd surfed as a teenager at his first concert. The prospect of new friends, like the thrill of riding the waves of strangers, had been this pendulum of anxiety and adrenaline, and as he rose, the lightness overtook him, as if he were flying, reaching up toward some new height, the light of his desire, feeling the sun’s rays, and yet, it all happens so rapidly, hands slipping, the sensation of one’s wings evaporating, the total loss of control, and one’s skull striking the ground. It all suddenly felt like that concert, standing there in the crowd of gleeful people and the music after the concussion, alone as no one takes notice. Suddenly adrift and panicked, between collapse and taking action, the steps forward flashed before him as dissonant forks of lightning and whittled down to bellowing a simple statement in an effort to hit reset on the conversation.

“Yea, well, shit happens!”, he exclaimed loudly while slamming the table with his left hand and summoning the most genuine laughter possible as everyone else suddenly became silent. Thus, he added, now feeling more in control of himself and in touch with his body again, “Anyyyyyhow… when, how, why did this whole seven, seven, seven thing start up with you guys?” No one ever needed to know the truth.

“Well, we used to go to this place on Sundays with bottomless mimosas for $18, but gentrification happens, and they only let you have three now”, Charlotte explained.

“Yea, and we used to know the guy that bartended here, he would double pour for us back in the good old days… so like, last year. Creatures of habit ever since”, Daniele added.

The others nodded and Elliott and Yulyn began talking shop between themselves on the other side of the table.

“I only come once in a while, but you’ll see me around. The people tend to come and go, but Charlotte is always here”, Teddy mentioned before adding, “she’s like the glue.”

“Yea, well someone has to make this happen. I’m not just going to sit at home and wait for a good time to fall in my lap”, Charlotte explained before adding, “we have other events too throughout the year; you will, of course, be attending the Mulled Wine Olympics, our winter games, and the fruity cocktail spri(n)tz; there’s an n in it.”

O’Donnell nodded and smiled; “let me guess, one balances fruit on their head?”, he questioned, laughing a bit to himself.

“No, we actually compete to create unique custom fruity cocktails. It’s like one of those shows that people cook on under pressure, but we actually do it ourselves. My favorite one last year was the Mango to Heaven”, Charlotte explained, raising an eyebrow and indicating that they were far too classy for mere fruit balancing. “We do the balancing during the Olympics though, so I’m not going to judge you”, she added.

“I liked the Caught in the Acid Rain”, Teddy quickly interjected, “it was like a spicy piña colada with roasted jalepeño simple syrup.”

“I can get down with that”, O’Donnell responded coolly, having adjusted his posture and his expectations. “What about passionfruit? Like a White Russian, but with fruit… passionfruit”, he added.

“You can play with us”, Charlotte responded with a smile.

Thus, the happy hour went on and O’Donnell’s inner demons remained silent for the time being, replaced by fruity cocktails, new friends, and a sense of belonging. Eventually, Elliott and Yulyn dipped out, and Charlotte explained that they were a couple, a rather strange and quiet one. Teddy took his leave as well, quickly letting O’Donnell know that it was nice to have met him. Lastly, before leaving for the night with Daniele and Heather, Charlotte explained that she would be out of town for the weekend, visiting old friends back home, but that they would probably be going out the next weekend; they would sort out the details during the next happy hour, next Thursday, and she promised not to call him vom/com lover again. It reminded him ever so briefly of the little white lie at the foundation of their friendship, one that he fully expected to be able to sustain into the indefinite future.

“I’m really happy that you invited me”, O’Donnell said sincerely, giving her a hug before they parted ways.

“I’m glad that you came too”, she replied with a warm smile before turning around and heading out the door to catch a taxi.

O’Donnell started walking home afterward. Seven Bar was close to his apartment, but he decided to dip into one of the bars next to his building. “A night cap”, he told himself. He had brought his journal with him, and he began a new entry.

I have finally made friends, interesting friends. My time in the city is looking up, but, to be honest, I continue to look backward, backward and forward. My job is secure, I am on the right path on that front and my time in the studio is fairly productive. I feel very lonely though. I have gone out to bars. I have met men, but they bore me. We have the same conversations, each time the same words with a different body. I wake up alone and I spend my nights without strangers in my bed thinking about Aguirre. Will this go on forever?

Will I sort of snap out of it one day? Should I be burning sage or consulting some sort of healer, conducting rituals to rid myself of his spectre? Writing apparently worked for him. I am not sure what will work for me… giving it time.

I kind of need to know though at this point, to move forward, that he is alright. I feel a weight, like I am responsible, not for his happiness, no one is ever responsible for another’s happiness, but to give closure, if I haven’t already. I am fairly certain that my attempt to do so might have been more harmful than helpful, but what do I know? I am not really sure if there is anything that I can do at this point that would not make me feel like I am doing some sort of harm unless he gives me a clear signal one way or the other. I kind of need closure too.

O’Donnell slept on it and actually made the choice sober, completely sober. He had no weekend plans, he had to get Aguirre off his mind, and he could use a quick trip out of town. Thus, he booked a ticket to see one of Aguirre’s shows. It was still on the books, Aguirre had remained a ghost online, and O’Donnell somehow thought that this was better than sending a follow up, “you ok?” He merely needed visual confirmation that Aguirre was not mired in some sort of deep dark pit because of him.

He arrived the following day. It was a Saturday, and he remained in his hotel waiting for the evening to come. He had flown in the morning, rented a car, and spent the day writing. His latest book had become deeply influenced by his lingering attraction to Aguirre. Oddly, he had made it about prisoners of war; he somehow felt that maybe he could draw on similar emotions, like there were similarly insurmountable and violent hurdles between him and Aguirre. It wasn’t going well though, and he was pretty sure that this one would never be published, but he was attempting to salvage it. His previous book, the one about the painter, had actually been on the shortlist for best debut novel of the year. He knew that his next book needed to exceed it, and this one was slowly going downhill, mired in confusion, without direction, and with characters that were becoming less and less interesting. It was very frustrating.

He realized at some point that he had become a prisoner of his own ambition. Here he was on “vacation”, but he was by choice working and huddled up in a poorly lit room. Thus, after having that realization, he decided to go to a park and write. Once there, surrounded by the trees of the city’s arboretum, he took some time to clear his mind. He told himself that it was ok to scrap the project that he felt his recent ordeal with Aguirre had tainted, and he began to write poems. He thought that it would be relieving, a collection of little piecemeal accomplishments. They were all terrible though, except of course for his Sonnet on frustration; it was incomplete, nontraditional and still raw, perhaps not worthy of being called a sonnet, but it appeared to be going somewhere. It was the kind of writing that he was proud of, but that he would never share with others.

It’s like there’s a wall between me
and that which I desperately need to live.
It’s like there are people seated atop it,
watching me, a blind creature, pondering,
“Why is it beating its head against the wall?”
I do not see the wall. All that I feel
is the pain of failure and the hope to feel
the warmth that I believe is on the other side.
Perhaps they have long turned their backs on me.
There might be walls beyond these walls.
I really feel like I know absolutely nothing.
Thus, I beat my head and I move forward.

“Surely every artist has a collection of these incredibly stupid works that emerge from our most frustrated attempts to produce something in the heat of a moment”, he thought to himself, feeling better about his failure to produce. He had felt creatively inhibited for weeks, as if his internal creative energies had been dwindling. Nonetheless, he continued to beat his head against the metaphysical wall that he experienced, and he also began to wonder if it had something to do with Aguirre. Thus, for a moment, he began imagining the frustration as Aguirre’s fault, as if it were intentional and maliciously inflicted upon him. He caught himself quickly though, realizing the absurdity of the thought. He knew that he was responsible for it all, though he also felt that channeling the emotion had been particularly productive.

Eventually, however, the time came to return to the hotel from which he would venture to the diviest little dive bar in town, a rough and tumble one that O’Donnell never thought that he would actually visit, and to seek the closure that he so desperately felt he needed. Certainly, this was going to resolve everything he thought. Aguirre would show up, perform, appear to be happy, and O’Donnell could sneak out the door and never look back.

O’Donnell had called ahead when the idea had first entered his mind weeks earlier. It was a dive bar and he was pretty sure that weirder things had happened. “Is there like, a dark area, a corner or something, that one can sort of just stand there and no one will see me?”, he questioned the bartender on the phone point blank.

“Yea man, that’s like… sort of what this place is known for. I mean, get your kicks dude”, he responded before hanging up.

Now that so much time had passed, O’Donnell was quite confident that no one would be on the lookout for the weird shady corner caller. Still, he knew that he had to enter the bar cautiously. He could only enter once he confirmed that Aguirre was up on the little stage where he wouldn’t be able to see O’Donnell. However, when he finally arrived, he had to circle around the building because Aguirre was out front having a cigarette. There were still a few minutes before his set was scheduled to begin and he stood there alone, leaning against the wall, and looking up toward the sky. O’Donnell wondered what he must be thinking, and it made him glad that Aguirre was looking up.

Once Aguirre went inside, O’Donnell waited a moment before exiting his vehicle to sneak inside behind him. He knew that he had to at least get one drink at the bar before slinking into the shadows, and he stood outside the window, looking in to assess the available routes before making his dash for the dark corner. “Why didn’t I scope this out during the day”, he suddenly found himself questioning, “that would have actually been smart.” Nonetheless, he saw that Aguirre was already up on stage, though to his dismay, the bar was fairly empty. It would be difficult to evade detection, but he had brought a hat and the bar was close enough to the door.

He could feel the adrenaline and it made him dizzy. Thus, he took a moment as Aguirre performed his first song. It was one that O’Donnell had always liked and it sort of helped him get into the mindset that he needed. He also knew that Aguirre tended to get emotional during the ending, or at least to appear emotional as it dwindled into spoken word. He usually closed his eyes. Thus, as the song was concluding, O’Donnell made his way to the bar to grab a cheap beer and to dart into the corner as the song was concluding.

Yea, we travelled
All through the mountains
& that valley so low.
Now there’s a home in my heart,
Never thought I’d know,
And we’ll do it again,
Build our wild den,
Tear down the walls
Between You and Me,
So here and now,
You’re all I see.

Only one person clapped, some guy at the bar in a leather vest, and O’Donnell scanned the room. There were only ten people and half of them looked like they looked like they were all in a motorcycle gang. There was also one blonde woman at the bar that looked out of place, glowing in a diaphanous, sheer white dress. O’Donnell hoped that she was here to support Aguirre, but she wasn’t clapping. It all felt sad, but O’Donnell figured that it could all be a lot sadder.

The next song was new, and it took a while for O’Donnell to clue into the multiple layers of meaning that were in operation. Aguirre had apparently chosen to lean into his new identity as a sexual deviant.

Texas skies are fallin’,
fallin’ around me
cuz Texan eyes are bawlin’
didn’t like what they could see:
naked truth slipping,
slipping through the cracks.
Well, howdy ‘bout this one, neighbor,
Mind your own beeswax…

The truth it ain’t for everyone—
it’s an acquired taste;
lend me your ear now,
I’ll give it to you slow pace.

Aguirre began to sing very slowly at that moment, tenderly allowing each word to roll off of his tongue.

We are all born equal;
god loves everyone,
but some of ‘em,
even there in Texas,
know how to have a bit more fun.

O’Donnell felt simultaneously concerned and fascinated. He listened carefully to each word and resisted the urge to laugh. The year was still 2003 and at least one other person apparently understood the reference. Another man lurking in the shadows of the audience along the edge of the bar nearby O’Donnell began shaking his head and muttered “fucking pillow biter” before storming out the door. No one else in the bar appeared to be paying attention though, so O’Donnell felt less concerned about there being some sort of violent backlash. He was mostly fascinated once he was alone in the shadows watching everyone else, though he knew that this charade could only go on for so long.

You can have it both ways,
know the truth and keep it couth.
Cuz bottom to top now,
I’mma give you proof.

He appreciated the very positive message that he detected in this particular verse in Aguirre’s song, though he was quite certain that Aguirre had dug himself into a pit from which he would never emerge; he appeared to be digging himself deeper actually, what with the peep shows and all. Nonetheless, toward the end of the song, he decided that Aguirre appeared relatively healthy; he was still doing his thing, and, though O’Donnell was not quite sure how to feel about what Aguirre’s thing had become these days, in his mind, he could call this closure. “This is closure”, he told himself as he turned his back, opened the door, and looked back once more. Unwillingly, a thought came to him as Aguirre’s voice grew deeper and the song concluded, “at least he still looks handsome as ever while doing whatever it is that one calls this.”

I’mma make you sing, and I’mma make you sing.
I’mma make you sing; Yes, I’mma make you sin.

The door closed, no applause could be heard, and O’Donnell was about to start his car to return to his hotel to write and prepare for his return home the following day. However, he merely sat there in the car for a considerable amount of time, approximately thirty minutes to be exact. Toward the end, Aguirre walked out the front door to have a cigarette. He was right there, leaning against the wall, alone, but still looking up at the sky. That detail made all the difference. “This is closure”, he assured himself before starting the car and driving away. It hurt; his body felt like it was seizing and his mind said “go… go right fucking now”, but he turned around and looked back. Aguirre had looked up by now and was watching the car drive away, seeing nothing but red lights as O’Donnell slowed down and paused for a moment. His body felt like it was sinking, and he held his breath before quickly hitting the gas and speeding off into the night. “This is closure”, he repeated. He felt like an absolute coward.

O’Donnell slept through the night and he felt at ease upon his return to the big city. Aguirre appeared to be healthy, yet still with questionable judgement. He was using his smarts, but the long-term results appeared clearer now, those that Aguirre had already attained as well as what appeared to be the steady state of his future. It hadn’t really been closure though; O’Donnell was keenly aware of that, but he knew that Aguirre wasn’t going to kill himself or something stupid like that. He was fairly confident at least. He had been looking up when most people would be looking down. Aguirre also eventually responded to O’Donnell’s message a few days later.

Thanks O’Donnell, I wish you the best in the city and I look forward to seeing what you create.

Apologies for the awkwardness, honestly, and for how long it took me to reply.

I really appreciated that you actually took the time to respond though.

Sincerely, A

O’Donnell was busy at work when the first message arrived, but his phone kept buzzing. He hated when this happened and cursed himself for having forgotten to activate the do not disturb function. However, upon reading them, having left his easel to see why his phone was blowing up, he breathed a sigh of relief. “This is the end of it”, O’Donnell assured himself before returning to the painting that Aguirre’s message had interrupted. He felt an overwhelming wave of relaxation. His muscles felt as light as air; he felt like pure spirit within a body that had previously been weighed down by unseen pressures that had built up within him. “No harm, no foul, the world goes on”, he told himself, “this is probably what it’s like to actually love someone and yourself… to let them go.”

That Thursday he joined Charlotte and the others. There were seven this time, Teddy, Daniele, and Heather had returned. Charlotte was there too, obviously. Meanwhile, the others were a similar mix of grad students and working professionals. He was beyond fashionably late this time, and, upon his arrival, it was a little bit rowdier than the time before. Nonetheless, he jumped right in, snagging a seat from another table and squeezing in alongside Charlotte.

“Anything newsy with you?”, she asked.

“Oh no, just a quiet week working, painting, doing my thing in the studio”, O’Donnell replied, “You? How was the trip home?”

“Meh, it rained the whole fucking time. We sort of played drinking games in my friend’s garage like we were high school again… but, yea, once I got over the disappointment, it was kind of fun”, she responded, chuckling at the absurdity of her weekend regression. “What did you do during the weekend?”, she asked only a moment later.

“Oh, I went to a show. Some guy sang about butt sex, and I manage not to laugh”, he said, finding a way to be honest without being completely honest.

“Interesting, I hear that’s like a trend lately. I swear this guy singing about breakfast tacos a couple of weeks back was actually talking about vaginas”, Charlotte added with a laugh while shaking her head. The noise within the bar had grown loud and the others at the table were actively engaged in their conversations. That’s what happens once you reach a happy hour grouping of more than five or so; it starts to disintegrate. O’Donnell and Charlotte looked around for a moment. They were both silent and then they looked back at each other. Charlotte shrugged.

“So, men… any in your life?”, O’Donnell asked, seeking to break the ice.

“Um, sort of… there are like five. There’s this one guy though that I’m really into. He’s basically the only one of them that isn’t actively pursuing me. I think that it’s a sign… like, it says something about me as a person”, she said, still pondering it herself and with a very serious face, nodding.

“I know how that goes actually. My brand of fucked up is a little different though”, he said, being entirely frank for once. “I think that you’re ok though as long as you’re like, still interested in that one guy if it actually happens. Then it’s like, not just about the hunt, you know?”, he added, hoping that she felt the same way.

“That’s exactly what I tell myself”, she assured him, and they both sort of smiled and nodded.

“So, you? Men?”, she questioned in return.

“Oh yea, well, as you know, I have moved on from that one guy. Completely… it’s a nonissue, and I’m, um, like on the market, I guess. Do you know anyone?”, he responded, including the fateful question.

Charlotte tried everything during the beginning of their friendship, friends, friends of friends, strangers at bars. It took a long time for her to break into O’Donnell’s mind to truly understand what was happening, why nothing was sticking, why nobody lasted more than one or two dates. It was obvious that it was always O’Donnell that ended it, but “why?”, she questioned.

“They bore me”; “Not compatible”; “I’m too busy with my work for this shit”, O’Donnell would always explain. This went on for years, and Charlotte knew that there had to be something else at work, either something that O’Donnell was hiding or something that remained hidden from him, something that he was probably ignoring.

Had she been behind the scenes, had O’Donnell been upfront about what he did alone in the nights when he felt lonely, had he explained his true origin story, she might have been able to attempt to help with the root cause in mind sooner. However, during their second happy hour all that she knew was that he seemed chill, on her wavelength, and was in need of mates and dates.

“Yea, I think I know someone that would be perfect for you”, she said, leaning back in her chair, focusing her eyes and imagining him with this mystery other.

O’Donnell had actually been excited the first time, but this was the fifth date that Charlotte had set him up on. He couldn’t figure out what was wrong though. The sex was good. The men knew how to have conversations. They were on the right track, career focused, and they seemed legitimately interested in him, but nothing ever felt like it cut beneath his surface. He always felt like an actor on a stage and the world marched on after each encounter. His world felt unchanged, unmoved, and the second date always felt uncomfortable, unnecessary.

With Charlotte, as it had been during his few moments with Aguirre, he could be in touch with something different or, at least, he felt like he could. It was relaxed and natural, like they were in sync, in different ways of course with Charlotte and Aguirre, but he could feel it. He craved it.

“So, you’re a painter, Charlotte tells me”, the man sitting across from O’Donnell inquired.

O’Donnell’s attention had been drawn to the windows. It was snowing outside and everyone passing by was dressed in thick jackets, trench coats, and their wintery accompaniments. The question drew him back to the moment and he gradually brought his attention back to the table and the man sitting before him, a consultant, one of Heather’s coworkers actually; he was quite handsome. “Oh, yea, I paint, and I write, and I sort of try to come up with conceptual projects”, he responded, forcing a smile.

“What exactly does that mean, conceptual projects?”, the consultant asked, genuinely interested.

“Oh, well, I come up with ideas that might be interesting, new ideas, ideas that might bridge my projects or that people might execute in tandem… the goal is to sort of come up with something new, but I find that I mostly rehash the past. The buzzword at work, I work for an art director, is illustritech at the moment… it’s like illustrate, technology, times three… something created and egregiously overprocessed”, O’Donnell explained.

“Oh… well, I guess that’s interesting”, the man responded, “conceptual projects… it’s sort of like coming up with ideas then?”

“Yea, something like that”, O’Donnell responded, not wanting to go any deeper into it, smiling and feeling somewhere between here and a haze of thought.

The man smiled as well, but O’Donnell found himself extremely uninterested in continuing the conversation. He realized though that he had to do so. “So, what kind of project are you working on now? Heather talks about work all the time, so I kind of have an idea how consulting works. Are you travelling?”, he asked, searching for a way to sustain the momentum of the conversation.

“Oh yea, I spend five days in Canada and then I’m here on the weekends with this current project. I get to eat a lot of poutine, so that’s nice”,

“Hmmm, that sounds nice. Cheese curds, gravy, carbs…. I hear that they sell it at Costco up there, like in the food court. Is that true?”, he asked before adding, “it’s not that I would ever eat Costco poutine, but I just find it incredible that such a thing might exist.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I actually haven’t been to Costco in Canada”, the man replied. O’Donnell nodded and there was a prolonged awkward silence after that.

O’Donnell picked at his pasta and decided to just start being friendly, as if this weren’t a date. “How many dates have you been put up on lately?”, he asked.

The man seemed uncomfortable with the question. “Oh, not too many”, he eventually responded, clearly curious about why the conversation had jumped to that topic so suddenly.

“Well, this is my fifth”, O’Donnell explained, attempting to make it a comfortable topic. “I sort of come out on these with no expectations, so I’m never really disappointed. You seem nice, but this probably isn’t going anywhere”, he said, sincerely hoping that it might take the conversation into a sort of unknown more friendly and relaxed atmosphere. It unfortunately had the opposite effect.

“Well, I’m not sure what you’re trying to say now. I thought this was going somewhere, but I guess you have been a little aloof all night. I can leave you be if you’d prefer”, the man said, scooting backward from the table and visibly indicating that he was about to stand up and walk out while giving a moment of opportunity for O’Donnell to say, “wait, no, stay!”

O’Donnell crossed his arms instead and looked at the man as if he were confused and yet slightly amused. Thus, the man quickly followed through on his physically signaled threat, stood up, said “well, I wish you a wonderful evening, but I should be going”, and, with that, he left the building.

“That was probably me”, O’Donnell told himself before returning to look out the window, examining a hoar of frost upon its edges. He was happy to have a moment of peace and he felt more relaxed, merely sitting alone in the restaurant. However, as time passed, his thoughts lingered, and he longed for some real connection with someone. It had been such a long time since he had actually felt something for another person. As he pondered that fact further, he felt a pang of despair strike him deep within. He knew that he couldn’t just force it, but he also didn’t know where to find it nor exactly what it was that he was searching for, that feeling.

Upon returning home alone that evening, he grabbed a handle of whiskey and sat on the sofa, pouring a heavy glass and grabbing his pen. At first, he spent the night writing in his journal, attempting to understand what it was that he was seeking, comparing his recent dates and the string of hook ups from the big city to what he felt with Aguirre.

It felt like he understood me and sort of saw the same thing, like we could be nearby each other without saying anything and still feel connected. I didn’t feel like I had to put on a show, at least not relative to how I feel now. I guess I kind of felt like I put on a show, but it made sense, it was me, hyper me…

The exercise continued throughout the night and began to spiral into nonsense, somewhere between reality and imagination. Then the relapse finally came; at some point he found himself logging onto ChatMate, viewing GayShaw101, and not judging himself for doing so, merely letting it happen. In the early days, he began to find little sparks of inspiration from these forays into Aguirre’s strange digital theatre. The mixture of attempts at art amidst the context within which he observed Aguirre actually inspired his next series of paintings—collages of male figures with geometric shapes, phallic objects, dripping in white paint, abstract with titles like Untitled 8.5 and Untitled 7. He also wrote a collection of short stories about artists that were unable to leave their homes communicating with one another through unexpected means. Suddenly, though he only realized it gradually, Aguirre became O’Donnell’s muse, and his productivity, the quality too, began to skyrocket. O’Donnell never spoke to anyone about this, it was his secret, and no one needed to know. It was like a tree having reconnected with its roots, roots that extended deeply and catapulted O’Donnell further into the canopy and the light of the heavens above.

Throughout the years, he found that people still entered the chat to heckle Aguirre once in a while. One time, in response, Aguirre mentioned that he wished that there was someone that could hack his memory, or better yet, that of everyone else on Earth. “I kind of want to remember it, the faces that I saw that day, my own and those of others…” he said, visibly retreating into the past to relive them. “The only problem is the other people who still remember. They are like the bars in my prison”, Aguirre explained succinctly and vividly. O’Donnell actually became instantly inspired after this observation. It was like lightning striking, and he wrote a book titled The forgetting.

As O’Donnell spent more time observing, he found that some people had become regulars like him throughout the years; trustnoone, blackholeexplorer, and TheCoryfagus had become the most frequent and active contributors. Sometimes O’Donnell wondered if they were speaking in a code that he had difficulty penetrating; there was clearly something weird going on above and beyond the art sharing.

Trustnoone: What news from the archipelago? Has a new island been discovered?

Coryfagus: Yes, how long has it been since the last island popped up? Last GS101 informed me, the explorers had been coming back to the capital empty handed, only tales of the known. Have there been any developments?

GayShaw101/Aguirre: Yes, one of the expeditions beyond the western mountains has finally been fruitful. I was writing about it the other day, due South, beyond the jagged cliffs of the nesting grounds that were discovered by an earlier generation. I sometimes wonder though, gentlemen, how much of this world creation actually contributes to the generation of the final written novel. [sigh]

O’Donnell, witnessing these strange interactions, found himself wondering what exactly happened during the private shows. He arranged some of his own throughout the years, but Aguirre always seemed to be annoyed, probing the unknown person and testing whether he knew what was up.

Awanderer/O’Donnell: “you’re show is a little wild compared to the others in here. I mean, it seems more tame, but remarkably out of place.”

GayShaw101/Aguirre: “Oh yea, you know, it’s all penis et circenses with the others. Why are you actually here?”

O’Donnell also came to wonder whether some of the other people in the chatroom were like puppet accounts that Aguirre was secretly operating himself, as if he were putting on a show. Nonetheless, O’Donnell also decided that whatever Aguirre might have truly been up to, he was happy at least to be on this side of damnation. Thus, he continued to find inspiration, occasionally sending messages, and sometimes asking questions.

“What is the purpose of art?”, he once questioned Aguirre.

“To make them feel”, was his quick reply, though only a moment later, he added, “I can go on a monologue if you would like me to elaborate on that. We can go to private mode.”

Behind his veil O’Donnell nodded in silent agreement, feeling had always been first for him as well, and he became incredibly curious after the succinct, rapid, and very clear response; as with all seemingly clear responses, he knew much existed beneath the surface and, knowing Aguirre, he knew that it wasn’t merely about making people feel horny. Thus, curious to delve deeper, he obliged, entered private mode, and the conversation began a new, “‘to make them feel?’ are we talking about your clients here or legitimate art?”, he asked, and Aguirre responded:

I think that there are multiple experiences of art. The ones that are most profound to me are the ones that cause the continuous experience of reality to collapse, to overcome all reason. This can take the form of aesthetic pleasure, when a painting arrests you, the comfort of tragedy, the climax of a drama when one is reduced to tears, chills, uncontrollably, or even similar experiences within our daily lives. We live in a theatre; our bodies and words, our action and inactions are works of art. We paint daily, we live our dreams, and our movements are poetic.

I think that, you know, given the context, there is something that I need to clear up. Some people take issue with erotica as art and, though I don’t actually delve that deep into it, as you can probably tell by now, that’s not what I’m doing here, I do believe that what others might find to be base or unworthy of the honor of being deemed art can, like tragedy, I mean what’s the difference aesthetically between causing people to experience another’s trauma, the ideal terror, the ideal pity, and bringing them the ideal pleasure, pure joy, the realization of dreams? I agree that like, there is a difference between art and pure pornography without artistic elements, but pornography and erotica can be art as well, high art at that. They should write an intriguing book about this, the academics and philosophers, aestheticians; title it Art/Porn. There can be similarly rapturous experiences that are kinetic, felt within, evoking passions, human passions, viscerally, and that nonetheless move the human spirit upwards, toward its potential, toward wholeness.

I agree that there is like this sacred place for those rare moments when a work of austere art possesses you, when a poem feels as if it is God himself speaking to you. It’s just that true art is a conceptual container for more than merely the austere, the tragic, and whatever else I was supposed to have learned if I had studied this in college. You know this whole idea of a dichotomy, good and evil, God and the Devil, it’s not a universal belief. Some people, entire cultures, see them as flip sides of the same coin, perhaps, all parts of one being that most people fail to accept, or perhaps better put, to understand as a singular whole. It’s like that with art, but we have to bound it somehow. It’s all a matter of taste, to be honest… values… taste & values,, and tolerance. I think that we have come a long way in this regard, a long way toward the true quidditas of art, of reality, and of our selves. We can only know and truly feel it through grasping the truth.

“Yeah, but we create the truth, wouldn’t you say?”, O’Donnell inquired then without taking much time to actually process the words. He was recording them, and it felt as if it smacked of more bullshit than usual. It was harder to take seriously, but O’Donnell continued to listen.

“Yes, of course, the perceived truth…” Aguirre responded before adding, “it’s a matter of sustainability. The good, the truly sublime and beautiful, we’re all within the same vat of nothingness. Someone has to shape it, that which emerges and takes form, becomes the good, becomes the beautiful… it’s all built on the same foundation of truth; it’s just that there is truth, transcendental and eternal, and there is truth, subjective and incomplete, which is all that most people will ever know. The fantastic reality and the abysmal terror is how much can be made real, birthed within the confines of the total reality and the ultimate truth.”

O’Donnell paused from his notetaking, his writing and further questions about Aguirre’s monologue, to ponder those words, especially that final note, prior to composing his long form response. “Ok, so, returning to the question about art, are these all just situated claims that you espouse now because they make you feel better? Do you actually believe this? I mean, we obviously agree about some of what you have just said, but…” O’Donnell paused at that moment, thinking to himself, “where is the line between what you do and what I do?”, before completing his question, “where is a principled and clear dividing line between art and not art?”

Aguirre shifted uncomfortably in his seat for a moment, pondering the question, his eyes having grown focused and looking slightly to the right of the camera.

“Well, you see, there is no line. There are gradations, gradations of legitimate artistic content, within all acts of human interaction and within the products of our creative pursuits. There’s like this star, the source of art from which our shared, agreed upon definitions of art emanate. The star shines with the light of art’s core values, the hegemonic definitions and conceptions. We are all orbiting it, some of us closer to the light than others. We’re in the shadows here, the darker edge of it, but when you’re in the light, look around you. So much of it is trite, kitsch, bland, and amateur. Why should that be deemed art? We should call it hobbying. What differentiates art from all that hobbying on SocialMedia is like what differentiates what I do from what you referred to as “not art”?

Just because you put a fucking brush to canvas doesn’t make you an artist. Just because you went to art school and can sound holier than thou, doesn’t make you an artist. Just because I’m here on this, this website, doesn’t make me not an artist.”

Aguirre paused then, taking a moment to regain his composure and assess his words more carefully before continuing his speech,

“Anyhow, some artists are like planets, giants orbiting the sun. Some are like moons. Some, those I would hardly call artists, are like pesky space debris. There is a lot of that going around. Meanwhile, some people draw that line, that line that you’re looking for, where the light is still clear. In that way I think that your right about conceptions depending upon one’s ‘situation’. If all you’ve ever seen is the Lourve and not the art out in the streets and beyond, it’s easy to develop an anemic conception. However, one can emerge from the center, come to know the edges and that which lurks beyond, and similarly find that not all that appears within the light deserves the honor of being deemed true art. Meanwhile, one might find that some of what one finds in the dark places where one might not think to look also merits consideration and, perhaps, someday, elevation.

Until then, I’m stuck here in the shadows. It’s like tar, tar that I fell into a long time ago on one fateful evening. I’ve found a way to make it work though. I’ve been experimenting with “flight”, getting my ideas to travel beyond me and into the light, if you catch my drift. Imagine it… me, a metaphysical bird flying through the mind of the artists, speaking to the people of the world through all mediums, spreading joy and beauty. They will call me Daedelus [he pronounced it daddylus].”

Thus, Aguirre reflected upon what he had just said and mumbled for a moment, “hmm, that should have a t in it… right at the end…”, and giggling ever so slightly before looking up at the camera once more. “Anyhow, time will tell about the results, but for now, I’m here… So, yea… I call it beautiful; I call this beauty. It is what it is.” In the end, O’Donnell felt a bit sad about it all. Aguirre looked as if he had become something lesser than the man that he had once known, his mind having been severely impacted by what O’Donnell had now begun to frame as “low light exposure”. Thus, once the private session came to a close, he began feverishly writing a story about an artistic plant, and he thought to himself that Aguirre’s contributions, they were like pigments, raw materials to be mined for his own opuses.

***

I wrote the architecture of books 3 and 4, but never actually wrote them all into full form.