madness is my easy chair

Wanda is taking laps around the room, her evening constitutional. Upon each knick-knack (we call the room “the museum”) which she’s collected on her nocturnal scavengings she lays an inquisitive gaze, and sometimes a bold hand, if she has discovered a fitter place for it elsewhere. By the end of this exercise every object will have been relocated at least once. I am in the big devouring chair behind a copy of Topaz’s “A Psychedelic History of Brazil” - his final and most critically panned novel. My eyes read the line “… in the house on the cliff beneath an asphyxiated sky she screamed at the top of her lungs for poor lost Geoffrey, though he sat beside her on The World’s Most Uncomfortable Sofa,” while Wanda prates on about Farineo’s failing liver, how she cannot bear to have a dead ex-lover in her life. I, who spend much more time with Farineo than with Wanda, know that he really puts it on for her benefit, a sort of maudlin cirrhosis theater. He told me about pulling at the skin of his cheeks before meeting her at the cafe, to make himself more haggard and inflamed. I do not want to listen to Wanda but nor can I stand Topaz’s contrived esoterica. I had made a fetish of his God-awful prose and derived a perverted satisfaction from lauding it to the disbelief of knowing Wanda and pretentious Farineo. Farineo especially got sore, as I still refuse to read a word of his writing, telling him instead it is enough for me to lie on the mattress in my room next to his and imagine the literary atrocities I hear forming to the muffled metronome of his hysterical typewriting. I picture horses circling a cobble-stone courtyard instead of his yellow fingers with their torn and dirty nails erratically groping the keys from which the letters and numbers long ago disappeared. Because when I see those fingers I see too Wanda’s skin beneath them, a younger, less destroyed Wanda, whose past relations with Farineo have given me a sour retroactive jealousy. I sit very low in the chair listening to Wanda, not reading, just mentally saying the words to myself off the page, when a feeling of non-existence, of being flattened to a dull two-dimensional domesticity in which nothing has moved for thirty years and all the colors have forgotten themselves, causes me to begin reading aloud. Wanda does not stop circling or speaking. “Geoffrey, for his own part, had learned to disappear from himself, an act that left him feeling giddy with mischief, as if he’d tiptoed from the room while his wife dusted the mantelpiece with her back to him. Outside the window, which was over the cliff, through a precipitous four-square of unclouded blue, a dog barked, impossibly. So this is Brazil, so this is Brazil, Geoffrey thought as he winged away from himself and somersaulted into the pinched winter atmosphere. From that height out over the final jut of crumbling orange rock he mentally squeezed the shrubs that acned the valley floor a mile below.” Oh, it is truly awful, it makes a grim rictus of my jaw, but Wanda begins to stutter and pause, so I keep on: “Flying like this, he let fall his ego like sandbags from a hot air balloon. His childhood memories dropped away to nothing, and he went higher. He arched his back in imitation of the sun’s curve. He grinned into the slapping wind. He cried, vomited, and pissed into the blue… he tumbled away from his waste. Passing through a cloud, he filled his mouth with damp cotton. Oh, boy! But there weren’t enough miles in the universe to put between him and himself, and all the while he remained umbilically attached. Suddenly his name came hurtling toward him, and he looked back at the widening speck of his wife approaching through the sky. She sort of ran through the air, dipping awkwardly, straining, struggling to keep her apron out of her face…”