Lance Olsen - Head in Flames

History being the shared science of our ignorance and un-happiness , someone pointing out.

You fitting in too well too easily was the problem.

I am swaying in place in front of Notre Dame d’Auvers-sur-Oise, listening to the ghosts of miners coughing beneath the soles of my defeated workman’s boots.

Ayaan discretely stepping out from under, leaving Theo’s hand to levitate, puzzled, while she continued with what she had been saying as if everything had always been in its rightful place.

Become who you’ve been all along the Sheik telling you over a slice of DiGiorno four-meat pizza you could smell the garlic.

Poppies so intensely orange you can hear their colors.

Can we ever really ruin anything except the possibility of love?

If this is tolerance what exactly is its opposite?

Tinfoil shrillness.

Because most people’s tombstones should read: Died at 30. Buried at 60 .

Your own sister confiding one evening last spring as you ratted your way through the city When I make love to my boyfriend I get into a panic but it you know feels so good you still do it even though it’s forbidden by Allah and everything .

On my knees, holding my bloody chest.

The two university girls, one blond, one brunette, at the party at that shit of a director’s spaciousness.

Your own sister.

It is January. It is 1882. Prowling through The Hague’s brothels and black alleys, the fellow who could on a good day pass as my slightly healthier brother finds Sien, undone at thirty-two, pregnant, face a smallpox wreck, holding her five-year-old daughter’s hand on a lamp-lit corner, waiting for business.

Holed and coked up in the second-floor loo, giggling fun-nygassedly, confounded by the intricacies of the blonde’s bra snaps.

Who were those people to pretend they were your parents?

Dear Theo: A woman must breathe on you for you to be a man. — Your fruitless sibling

The brunette still wore braces.

You could hear all the doors slamming behind you.

What else could the stoop-souled fellow do except offer to take her in?

Someday you’re going to weep what you sew, Theo’s ex noting, apropos of nothing, as they postprandialed the Tuileries.

How a few hours ago you watched from your living-room window while a pasty glow made an incompetent attempt to suffuse the pasty gray.

For what she might have been.

Theo’s stunning middle-aged Vietnamese tart, Tam, in her black back-seam stockings, silk gloves, high heels, and thoroughly nothing else every Thursday in the Red Light District.

How you ate two strawberry Pop-Tarts with a glass of milk on the couch beside Ahmed and how almost without noticing you were done eating.

Sien was not nice. Sien was not good. But neither was I.

Some people get expensive haircuts, some manicures, Theo enlightening one of his ecclesiastical interviewees. I happen to get well-laid on a reliable basis, thank God.

Ahmed slouching back to sleep and when you were able to think again you were peddling along Overtoom.

Still, she accompanied me and, for a year, more or less, give or take, we built ourselves a minor world.

Tam tickling Theo stretched out pudgily on the unmade bed, belly wubbling in glee.

The weight inside your fist inside your pocket.

A little family in a little flat — this is what we made of ourselves: Sien, her girl Maria, and, come July, her carmine-cheeked Willem screeching in the cradle.

Stink of the jasmine air freshener shaped like a Buddha dangling in a corner of her cubicle.

We have all been mentally disappeared the Sheik informing you over a Philly-steak-and-cheese Hot Pockets.

Monsieur Vincent first believing in God, and then less so, and then simply nostalgiaing after His goneness.

The middle-aged teacher with pixie hairhack Theo met after a school play in which Lieuwe cameoed as a laconic linden with cardboard trunk and construction-paper leaves.

Thinking about the last time you roamed the crowded neighborhood streetmarket teeming with Moroccans Turks Surinamese plying their wares.

Dear Theo: When you wake up in the morning and find yourself not alone, but rather see a fellow creature lying beside you, it makes the universe seem so much friendlier. — The last Vincent left

Oh baby, ba—

Egyptian pop music blasting from CD stalls Hindu film tunes from DVD stores all that life.

The bottomless depths in which I slept those days, eyeless fish tummying the sea floor.

This film’ll be a cinch to pull off, Theo telling Ayaan as he guided her arm into her coat sleeve. Trust me.

Humus couscous mangoes vats full of yogurt-and-cucumber.

When Gauguin accused me of humorlessness, I advised him to examine the horizon of my Peach Blossoms in the Crau . That, Paul, I said, is where you will detect, tucked among the insignificant French hills above the quaint cottages and peach trees in white blossom, a Lilliputian version of Mount Fuji.

The Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and Nancy Drew being the first books Ayaan fell in love with as a girl in Kenya, she took Theo back by reporting over her shallow bowl of tagliatelle alla carbonara and glass of Merlot.

You having cycled this route repeatedly because there was no room for surprise.

Always look harder, Paul.

Because they spoke to her, Ayaan said, of imagination, adventure, independence.

Because you know exactly what you are doing.

It is October. It is 1883. The man who once could have passed as my slightly healthier brother gently closing the door to the couple’s flat behind him, peeling away one skin, slipping into another.

Because they represented the inverse of her grandmother’s tales of suspicion and danger.

Because you know exactly how.

In love perhaps too strong a formulation for what he might have been with Sien.

Lucky person: the meaning of Ayaan in Somali.

Because this is—

Depressed, ill, in debt.

I mean, said Theo over his creamy tiramisu, why write a fucking string of grant proposals? Let me just take care of it myself. Jesus. It’s not like we’re trying to make the goddamn Titanic or something, right?

The shop selling coffee beans the pharmacy with its glass front.

Sien at some point having decided to reoccupy her position on that corner next to that gas lamp, apparently.

On the glittery nightstreet, Theo performing a goofy joyjig before his new collaborator, scarlet scarf serpent-ing behind him.

Air noisy with diesel fumes.

More or less behind my faux brother’s bent back.

The nicotine inhalation. The ener—

8:36, the clock in the shop window selling washing machines announcing.

While my faux brother minded her children.

The Dirty Paper: title of the homemade pamphlet Theo produced in primary school.

Jubilant faces of Palestinian kids in east Jerusalem.

Because he didn’t know what else to do.

Its principal focus being on legion satisfactions to be savored in matters concerning shit and piss.

On 9/12.

It’s not exactly as if you’ve been our breadwinner, dearest , Sien reminding him from her chair in the corner, elbow on knee, palm on cheek, stare on floor.

The periodical running to a robust two issues.