Lance Olsen: Head in Flames

Cafés dance bars gambling halls—

Where did the twenty-year-old version of myself, teeth intact, go?

Paris: after dinner, we strolled through the tinseling bluegray light.

— television video games miniskirts—

In any case, it was lovely to have known him. I’m sure he meant well.

Since the fall of the Shah in 1979, the Iranian government having executed more than four thousand people for committing homosexual acts.

— tight jeans T-shirts pornography perfume.

Life gifting you things for the first half, then quietly beginning to take them away, one by one, for the second.

Flogged. Beheaded.

Knife after knife in the snow.

Cobalt.

Life imprisonment in Bangladesh, Guyana, India, Maldives, Burma, Pakistan, Qatar, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Uganda.

The culture of entertainment.

Cobalt, too, I want to say, is a divine color.

In Bahrain, Algeria: the lash, fines.

Democratic slavery.

Sunday afternoons are so unpretending here.

Looking is not as simple as it looks.

An evening in Casablanca.

Dear Theo: There is nothing more artistic than to love people. — Unably yours, V.

As the end of the world nears, contending Heinrich Heine, it will be best to move to the Netherlands, for that’s where everything happens fifty years after anywhere else.

Playing football under the magenta sunset.

I need air.

When in New York it is 3 p. m., in Amsterdam it is 1954.

Remember that.

The acrid bite of hay in sunshine.

Joggers. Rollerbladers. Women pushing prams.

You smoked dope drank beer went to the cinema surfed the Web.

Happiness without the other thing being another means of possuming who we aren’t.

The duckshit green pond fringed with tall grasses worming through the park.

You smoked dope drank beer went to the cinema surfed the Web and then you didn’t.

Dear Theo: Our society’s preoccupation with elbowing sorrow from the soul makes each of ours a little more shrunken and shoddy every day. — All ways yours, V.

In the middle of the night the idea swept over Theo: this morning’s article will recount Ayaan’s story about how in Somalia, where she was born, little girls are made pure by having their genitals cut out.

You drove into never-ending desert.

After I rendered the two squat girls down the road with their gopher cheeks, gargoyle mouths, and elfish eyes, the townspeople I approached in the lanes informed me graciously: No, you may not paint my children, Monsieur Vincent .

Theo scribbled a note in the pocket-sized pad he kept on his nightstand and sledded back to sleep.

You participated in plays walked single-file down the hallways because you wanted to take that look out of your parents’ eyes.

But what I saw was what I saw, was it not?

How in Jeddah women wore the equivalent of black tents to disguise their features, their shapes, so as not to spin men mad with desire.

Thinking about how ashamed you feel that it has been five years since you visited your father’s village.

Human models invariably proving less than easy to come by.

You could tell which way those black-tented women were facing, Ayaan saying, only by the direction in which the tips of their black shoes pointed.

Thinking about how sports and girls terrified you.

I was compelled to represent my selves, my acquaintances, the cottages and landscapes because I couldn’t afford to pay a professional model to sit still.

Only the robe worn by the Prophet’s wives could prevent women from roaring the world into confusion.

Because with sports and women anything was possible.

Sometimes Monsieur Vincent asked his prostitutes to pose for him at no additional charge after the task was done.

What comes to mind when you say Washington Square Park .

Thinking about how you descended through the Rif mountains in your white Peugeot to discover you were no longer able to converse with your relatives your Berber having eroded that much.

Look: it is—

Self-righteousness, self-pity, self-hatred—

Everyone your own age having bolted for Europe to find work unable to make a living growing corn or olives in the hard red clay.

Sometimes I settled for still lifes — bottle, apple, pear— which recently had become all the rage, the bourgeoisie searching for new wallpaper to match their minds.

— the triumvirate engine of any good totalitarian religion.

You preferring to spend your time hanging out in cafés in Oujda listening to Western pop music Britney Spears hit me baby one more time your favorite in those days.

That painting, you once heard a rosaceous woman in a bird-shredded toque say in your brother’s gallery, would go so very well with my green couch.

The De-Enlightenment, Pim referring to the situation as.

Backstreet Boys Ricky Martin Sugar Ray Cher.

But that was now and again enough. More than enough. Riches.

The college couple guiding a bike between them, she with a knapsack over one shoulder and faded jeans plumping the curves of her heart-shaped ass.

Do you believe in life after love?

Three lemons next to an empty bottle of absinthe.

An ass to be seriously cherished.

Your friends telling you you were a lot more fun when you were stoned on hash a real raconteur they said the stories you told.

Nine-hundred paintings: nearly one a day for the last three months.

Wake up, my treasure, Theo whispered, leaning over Lieuwe’s bed.

Your father’s knees in such bad shape from years of menial labor he can no longer kneel when he prays.

Nearly one a day.

Annoying Lieuwe’s hair, Theo took in his son’s musty fragrance, but Lieuwe only sleepgroaned from somewhere else, trying to will his dad out of his dreams.

He has to sit in a chair.

They just kept coming. Like a brushfire in the brain.

Time for another day of waterboarding at school, sweet one, Theo singsonged.

Almost forty years in this country eight children a cramped flat a dishwasher’s salary and your father has to sit in a chair when he prays.

Eleven hundred drawings.

Another day, dearest, of being taught how not to think by those who can’t.

Yet back in Douar Ikhammalen your father is a local star he built the modest mosque with the minaret covered in red yellow green mosaics down by the river with his own savings.

Eight-hundred letters.

Rise and shine or there’ll be no time for breakfast.

A house for his brother nearby.

They just kept burning, and then they didn’t just keep burning.

When he sensed Lieuwe alert, Theo launched a gently ferocious tickle attack.

And for us?

Look: a life, give or take.

Theo being careful to apply exactly the right amount of pressure beneath the boy’s armpits, down his flanks.

This flat in a dank gray neighborhood from the fifties.

But let that be enough.

Father cubbing with son.

Garbage bags tossed into the street from second story windows.

Some of these are lies.

Lieuwe balled up on the bed in delighted convulsions.

Goats slaughtered on the balcony during holidays entrails stinking for days before someone got around to chucking them out.