Lance Olsen - Head in Flames

How your father couldn’t get his mind around what you were saying and then slowly he did and then the quick look in his eyes.

Blackbirds.

The somber gray miniature bunker of a pissoir to the left of the southeastern gates.

His eyes narrowed into recognition.

You can experience colors by their textures, smells, sounds.

The blue and white tram.

Their silent heat.

Dear Theo: If I fail here, what does my loss mean? — Your losing brother

Linnaeus: a poet who just happened to become a naturalist , August Strindberg remarking.

Your father’s taut stillness charging the room.

Straw, sand, saffron.

06/05: Theo’s in-progress Hitchcockian tribute to the limp-wristed baldy who was nine days away from becoming Prime Minister when—

You thought your father would hit you.

The mornings hovering in bed in my small room with the single skylight, refusing to rise because I wasn’t quite sure I was me.

Pim Fortuyn.

You braced yourself against his impending open hand.

Because I wasn’t sure I wasn’t.

On the other side of the fence, the dark pond punctuated with white birds.

You’re not the only one in the universe your father replied flat as the Dutch landscape.

Sometimes my lives fell on the same day.

Look: gulls lifting.

Quit complaining he said at last quit feeling sorry for yourself.

Staring at the ceiling, wondering if the memories that rushed me were in fact mine or a stranger’s from whom I caught them like a bad cold.

Herring gulls, black-backed, Mediterranean.

It’s easy your father said you get respect by earning respect and you earn respect by working like you mean it.

Still, Gauguin liked my sunflowers, once he had had a chance to study them a while.

Pim shot dead in the busy parking lot at the state-owned media park where he’d just given an interview, by one Volkert van der Graaf, a vegetarian and animal rights activist. At fifty-four.

Put your back into your life quit whining like a woman.

Gauguin painting me painting my sunflowers last November in Arles, the rumor of a summer backdrop at the bleak cusp of winter, telling me about his someday plans to sail to the tropics.

Gezellig: the bee buzz in its abdomen.

You began to snivel which made him ask Why did Allah give me this girl instead of a man what did I do to deserve it?

To live on fish and fruit, Gauguin explained, brush loving canvas.

The row of clunky black bicycles feeding at the trough of a bike stand.

Disgusted your father pushed past you out of the room wanting nothing to do with his son anymore.

Busy, Gauguin said. But interesting.

Six bullets pumped at close range into Pim’s head, neck, and chest — in the defense, van der Graaf later told the police, of threatened minks everywhere.

How do words explain how embarrassed you felt for your parents not because they missed what was going on but because they knew exactly?

Was I or wasn’t I that red-haired boy who modeled a clay elephant and then smashed it on the floor because his mother praised it more than he thought it strictly merited?

A vegetarian. An animal rights activist. Six shots to the head, neck, and chest.

The look in your mother’s eyes across the breakfast table as she tried to place what you’d become.

It is not easy to say.

Van der Graaf changing his story, declaring at his trial that he had actually killed Pim to protect Muslims who couldn’t protect themselves.

Because your parents knew exactly yet had to pretend the opposite because they were too proud to show just how humiliated they actually were?

There is the little red-haired boy whose parents sent him away to Mr. Provily’s boarding school in Zevenbergen twenty eternal kilometers north: the one standing in his suit on the establishment’s steps, waving goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, his mother and father’s carriage diminishing relentlessly.

Muslims, minks, and other vulnerable groups, listing van der Graaf.

Thinking about how your earliest recollections aren’t of an event but of a feeling—

Japonisme: the intense hues, the two-dimensional decorative patterns, the way the world motifs into design.

A vegetarian.

The need to watch out for your parents because others openly treated them like children.

The prints you happened across in Antwerp. How the moment you saw them your work jostled into something fuller.

Because you do what you have to do, if you want people to think about what you’ve thought.

How you and your friends were simply let loose on the streets as if in a Moroccan village because—

Twenty and twenty-five are bad enough, thirty sheer incubal lancination.

On the televised debate, Pim flaunted his flamboyant gayness before the Muslim cleric until the imam exploded, denouncing him as the embodiment of all depravity, at which point Pim turned to the camera and noted calmly that this is the kind of Trojan horse of intolerance the Dutch are inviting into their society under the banner of multiculturalism.

— because there was nobody to teach you how to fear Allah’s crackle.

Ten minutes after that, I’m thirty-seven, standing before this easel at this crossroads among these fields, a loaded pistol potbellying my pocket.

Theo could, if he studied Pim’s features carefully enough on the television screen, just make out the mischievous grin.

How you could neither blame your parents and their friends nor rely on them as they swept the Netherlands’ streets hauled away its rubbish cut its grass scrubbed its toilets mopped its floors cooked its food filled its potholes hosed its busses squeegeed its shop windows.

Auvers-sur-Oise simply breaks off after the stone fences, and then this glorious yellow racket.

Islam being a perpetually backward culture for one reason, the former Marxist sociologist arguing: it is unwilling to criticize its own assumptions.

Put your back into your life Mohammed grow a beard.

Poor Doctor Gachet, hobby painter and homoeopathist with those drained ash-blue eyes: what will he think?

That October in New York.

The Moroccan desert blushing at sunrise.

Dear Theo: When a blind man tries to lead another blind man down the road, I suppose they will both eventually tumble into the ditch. — Vincentlessly yours

Same-sex intercourse carrying the death penalty in Mauritania.

Thinking about how when an Eskimo wants to catch a wolf he plants a bloody knife blade up in the snow.

It is entirely not impossible that Doctor Gachet will be less than dismayed upon receiving the news.

Northern Nigeria, Sudan, Yemen.

Plucked its chickens washed its dishes made its beds took care of its dying parents scraped out its asbestos absorbed its poisonous chemicals.

Refusing to resort to my own life.

Stoning, hanging, firing squad.

The wolf is attracted to the knife by the scent slicing its tongue on the blade yet it won’t stop drinking its own blood until it has bled itself to death.

Ten teeth gone by thirty-one, the rest an aching looseness in my jaws.

Ayaan recalling on her cell phone from the backseat of a cab in Manhattan that, in Saudi Arabia, it was routine after noon prayers on Friday to decide whether to go home for lunch or out to see people getting their hands cut off in the public square.