Jay Fox - THE WALLS

There are the eventual platitudes of departure: hands on hands, lips on cheeks, desires unfulfilled. “It was a pleasure meeting you. You have my number, right?” I respond with a slow nod. “Well, we'll be in touch.” We shake hands. It is far more official than it needs to be.

“She's something, isn't she?” Patrick says once she exits the room. “Great pianist. She kind of reminds me of a young Herbie Hancock when she plays with the band — a lot of improvisation, a lot of…let's say… jeu . Her solo work has become very different recently. Some of it is ambient; some of it is written to emulate the composers of the fin de siècle . She would probably get upset if she heard me say either, especially about the ambient composers.”

“Why?”

“She thinks only hacks create ambient music. She feels the same way about the majority of minimalists when it comes to literature. I can't help but agree with her. If you are searching for essence by muting the cacophony of existence, then you're a theoretician, not an artist.”

“I see.”

We are both quiet for a moment.

“Hold on…here we go. I just love these last three lines,” he begins. Cue Patrick in five, four, three, two, one…

He has an anachronistic voice, one that is deep and heavy on the tremolo. It's not something that you'd expect. Given the circumstances, however, everything here seems not only permissible, but possible too. “That was nice,” I say gingerly. He nods. “So what do we do now?”

“Let's get fucking pissed.”

The phone call wakes Sean. He denies this with a languid urgency even as the words stumble blindly through an alien world of syntaxes and semantics that only a moment ago must have made some kind of sense to him. The confused stupor doesn't last too long; soon his voice has become hurried, surly, and lacking in the lexical elements typically found in his dialect of intellectualism — one that is far more pedagogical than pedantic. He lights a cigarette.

“You're going to have to backtrack a bit,” he groans. “You were at an A-R-E party?”

“Yes,” I respond quickly. “Somewhere in south Williamsburg.” It's quite possible that I'm still drunk. I can't really tell anymore. And then there's the problem of my short-term memory, which has become a miasma of conflicting realities. I remember leaving for the train at five because Yevgeny, a man of Herculean stature with a chickpea nose, thin lips, and torpid eyes, suspended his conversation on the etymology on the word “Popsicle” to explain that the hour fell within the domain of the hare, and that this, he felt, assured a swift return home. I don't remember the ride all that well; my entrance into the apartment is quite possibly a memory from a few days ago. It's something of a terrain vague , a region suffuse with the detritus of dream and the fading opacity of consciousness.

There's a haze over most of the memories from last night. Some reels are projected through an obsidian lens; some appear to be edited with little regard to continuity or context. I know that Poot Moint's second set lasted until four or so. I remember looking to a clock shortly after they finished and mentioning the time to Daphne. The set included, among many other songs, “I Can't Give You Anything But Love,” “Them There Eyes,” “Magilla,” “Sixteen Tons” (which was sung by a man who looked exactly like Duke Ellington), as well as a David Grisman tune that no one seemed to know by name (Andreas, the drummer, abandoned the kit and played djembe, Daphne took up a cigarette, the bassist played bass, the guitarist played mandolin, the Domesticon performed miracles on violin, and one of the nudists played flute). Cobalt bitterly lamented over his inability to remember the song's title; he thought the world of the composer, and was ready to embark into freaky realms of masochism because he couldn't come up with so much as the name of the album on which the track appeared. Their final set ended with a song about a famous street in Paris. I don't remember its name.

There were a lot of conversations, perhaps the most interesting of which took place during a mid-set intermission. Andreas had broken the last of his sticks and had run out to the car to get a pack of pair ones. The topic of discussion was phrenology, a subject I know very little about beyond the fact that it systematically interprets the topography of the head. A jazz-cat named Louis thought it to be an intriguing pseudo-science, and had taken it upon himself to study its methods with Derrida in mind. He was a rather odd character, one of those ambiverts who likes to confess more and more information you don’t care about the longer they speak to you. If he got too extroverted, however, asking him to repeat himself was a sure-fire reset button — he was terribly self-conscious of his English.

On top of being interested in phrenology, he was a rather brilliant mathematician. Daphne asked him the odds of her and I having the same number of hairs on our heads. He told us that they were about one hundred and fifteen times better than either her or my chances of winning the lottery, though, he added after a moment of pensive introspection, that this was taking into account a hypothetical world, one in which the two subjects under consideration (myself and Daphne, in this case) were potentially either fully endowed with hair or entirely bald. He and his friend, another Parisian, looked like members of the Cab Calloway Orchestra and, even with limited English skills, managed to employ a plethora of depression and war-era slang. The two of them hated cigarettes, which was surprising as they were French, jazz aficionados, and…well, French. He scolded Daphne, the Domesticon, and a man known only as Le Zouave for smoking, saying that each cigarette reduces an individual's life expectancy by seven seconds (or minutes, I don't remember exactly). “I–I plan on being crushed by an air conditioning unit, you know,” the Domesticon said as he pulled out a pack of Old Testaments. “Total accident. So, um, you know,” as he lit his cigarette, which faintly smelled of brimstone, “I don't know if that really applies to me. But, you know, I'm a fair guy, so I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll inform the guy who puts the thing, the uh, the air conditioner, in — you know, one of those guys you see at Yankee games and on the Jersey shore and at home with the, um, the other gorillas in the Bronx Zoo — that I've been a smoker for several years now, and that he should, you know, that he should install the unit incorrectly a few years in advance. You know, that way, that way, we can both be winners in this situation: your theory about smoking will be right and I'll get to prove that I have free will.” Kind of a bomb. “Seriously though, I love smoking. My shrink though, a-a real Freudian, he always tells me that it's an oral fixation — smoking, that is. And I asked him, you know, do people really carry that with them all their lives? Can it be developed? You know, can you…can you imbue that type of behavior in a person? He said that smoking can bring it out in a person, sure, and that it's, you know, one of those traits that can remain dormant or latent for years if there's no habit to, you know, I guess draw it out. Ever since that day, I've doubled the number of packs that I buy.”

Le Zouave shrugged. “You are smoking more?”

“Oh, the second pack's not for me. No. It's for my wife.” Rim-shot. “I see you have the sticks, Andreas.” An affirmation. “Daphne, are you ready?” The guitarist, Lucas, motioned for the two to return to the stage. The Domesticon turned to Le Zouave. “And you wanted to sing Sexy Bones a bit later?”

“It is C'est si bon .”

“I'm terribly sorry,” he replied. “I guess my mind's a bit preoccupied, you know, being around Daphne and all.”