Lance Olsen - Head in Flames

Some of these—

Najib’s family horrified by their son dating an unbeliever, his mother panicky he will elope with one just like his older sister did — and then what will others think of the woman?

How you used to get high tell crazy stories watch every movie by Angelina Jolie Brad Pitt Jodie Foster.

Four hundred francs.

The showdown taking place on Julia’s father’s yacht: a struggle between Floris and Najib exploding.

Belly-laughing at the way things turned out. What riches.

Somewhere in the midst of it, Floris shoves his rival. Hard.

All the possibilities available to you and here you are living this one praise be to Allah.

Look:

Najib tumbling back over the railing.

Sometime after midnight Rashid and Ahmed and you strolling along the Sloterplas pond a few blocks away from your flat just like—

It is early evening, the sky bruising.

Unable to swim, Najib splashing wildly, crying out for help.

— like a trio of ancient philosophers plugged into their iPods.

I am—

How Floris hesitates, suspended.

You stopping long enough to point up at the amazing sky.

I am—

His enemy slipping under.

How peaceful you saying like everything has finally arrived in its rightful place .

I am lying on my back on a dirt path, a squall inside my rib-cage, then I am stumbling through the dusk down into town.

Julia’s family refuses to permit their daughter to attend Najib’s funeral.

Each of you casually fingering your ear buds back into position and returning to the Quranic prayers cycling in your heads.

My legs sans sinews.

Several weeks later Julia drives to the beach at sunset, exits her car, and, still clothed, wades into the North Sea.

Because nothing else needed to be said anymore.

My arms no longer my arms.

The gray-foamed waves veiling her head.

The broken-backed cat.

A nail glowing bluely in the center of my chest.

A choppy surface and nothing else.

How do words explain the way you feel thinking about what it must have been like for your father to step off the train at the Central Station in 1965?

Dear Little Brother: You don’t need words to bring God’s tongue to those around you. — Your second selfing

Part empty-headed melodrama, part obvious propaganda , the reviewers called it.

An outsider cooped among outsiders in some cheap hotel in some uninterpretable country willing to do whatever it took in order to provide for his family back home.

Hoping.

All the intellectual resonance of a pop song .

The sanctimonious Dutch.

Yellow and blue irises vitaling the sides of the road even at this hour.

But interesting.

The faggots boasting about their long history of tolerance while willfully forgetting the opportunism wrapped up inside it the indifference Welcome to our country now shut the fuck up and scour our fucking toilets you fucking muzzies .

It is so easy to finish things, Toulouse-Lautrec once saying to me over a pipe in a Montmartre café. Nothing is simpler than to complete paintings in a superficial sense. Never does one lie so cleverly as then.

The elfin scriptwriter, Justus van Oel, urging Theo to conclude the series on a slightly more heartening note.

Diaperheads sand niggers camel jockeys.

The thatched roofs bobbling into view.

That’s just how he phrased it: a slightly more heartening note .

The Huguenots the Surinamese the Turks it didn’t matter.

Notre Dame d’Auvers-sur-Oise: sober, somber, heavy gray Gothic despite its peaked stained glass window with Mother and Child and crimson and cobalt splashes.

Perhaps Najib’s and Julia’s mothers could meet somewhere, Justus proposing — a café, say; a park bench — to console each other for the loss of their kids.

Yet even three fourths of the filthy Jews living here at the beginning of World War II found themselves by the end herded into the next life.

Taking in its dead mass through closed eyes feels like living inside a stone.

You know, Theo, Justus elaborating: through tragedy, reconciliation; through adversity, triumph.

We were all the same power-hosing out their oil tankers.

Pigeons fluffing cooily in the thick moss across the church’s slate roof.

Suggesting, Theo rewording, that one day Muslims and Christians, Moroccans and Dutch, will learn to exist in peace?

Laboring in their steel factories asphalting their highways.

Grumpy Gauguin in Arles: depressed, ill, in debt — but painting.

Justus shaking his head yes over his pipe at an outdoor café on the leafy canal.

Makak they called us.

It was difficult not to hug him, love him exactly for what he wasn’t.

Ah, Theo replied, I see what you mean. He banged down his empty scotch tumbler. Absolutely not.

A kind of monkey.

Love him for what he might have been.

There must be zero room left for hope.

Hey Osama they’d say come here .

It was difficult not to shadow him through the shadowy streets, razor in fist.

Just like in life.

Come here Abdul .

Randy Toulouse-Lautrec in Montmartre:

Sans McMysticism.

You don’t need words to explain how your father’s friends felt when they realized there were no longer any jobs left even here even under those miserable conditions.

Adult torso roosting atop moppet legs.

Sans our little invisible playpal God, who aren’t in heaven, hollow be Thy name.

Your father watching Moroccan bakeries Turkish kebaberies coffee houses spreading through what was suddenly his neighborhood.

Pince-nez, tidy beard, spindly cane: the inbred issue of Comte Alphonse and Comtesse Adèle, first cousins.

Because you do what you have to do, if you—

Because even the old working-class Dutch didn’t want to live anywhere near your kind anymore.

The syphilitic dwarf with hypertrophied genitals, Gauguin referring to him as.

We had fun, her derrière and I.

Religious tolerance being how they describe it.

And a taste for his own invention, Tremblement de Terre , with his buttered breakfast croissant.

The Amalfi coast.

My father and mother stranded on this desolation linked to the homeland by satellite dishes food and the memory of a memory of belief.

Tremblement de Terre: Henri’s Earthquake: half absinthe, half cognac.

Following dinner on the heated terrace at Roberto’s in the Amsterdam Hilton, Theo let his hand linger upon smart, proud, quietly sexy Ayaan’s shoulder after helping her with her coat.

The kind of tolerance that makes you feel small stupid shut out of something you don’t even want to be a part of.

Meeting Toulouse-Lautrec for the first time as we studied figure drawing at Fernand Cormon’s studio shortly after my arrival in Paris.

He didn’t mean to do it and then he did.

You striving so hard to become one of them that without warning you realized you were no longer the man reflected in the shop windows you passed.

Preposterously proper Professor Cormon in his frockcoat, drudging on his ladder at his large historical canvases of prehistoric lake dwellers.