Jay Fox - THE WALLS

We train ourselves not to question in this manner: avoid anticipation, avoid disappointment. It's one of those banal aphorisms that the cynical pass down to those of us too eager and green to recognize that intuition is just another word for induction. Yet it's impossible to ignore the desire to decipher the silent language uttered by the woman sleeping in the other room. Do they, women, go through this, too? Or is this one of those things that men have to experience, and then lie about when asked if it happens to them? We certainly have a lot of those, don't we? The reflection in the mirror can't keep a straight face. He's clearly still thinking about last night as opposed to the consequences of today, so perhaps it is best not to address any more questions to him until he has had a chance to calm down some. Then again, prosopopoeia may be my only means of interlocution for some time.

What am I supposed to do? Should I be passive and let her decide how this thing pans out? It seems to be the safest option unless she wants someone who's assertive. But all women want that, don't they? Well, yes, unless it impugns their independence. But that's kind of the point of being assertive, isn't it? You make decisions, and people are left with the option of either following suit or getting the fuck out of your way. So, really, if you want someone to be receptive to your assertiveness, you need to either hope that they appreciate the assertive type or anticipate that they are passive enough to go by what you say. Welcome back to square one. Being passive means you're a pussy; being assertive means you're a dick. And, as it is for an asexual, neither organ seems all that appealing. And why did Natasha go back to Hycroft Drive without her Valtrex?

As I walk into the kitchen to get myself a glass of water, I am confronted by the smell of cigarette smoke. Unless Vinati has picked up the habit in the past five minutes, this doesn't make any sense. I notice a wispy trail coming form the unscreened window. I poke my head out. On the fire escape sits a stout woman with wet hair and a flush face. She wears a robe with an emblem of Warner Brothers cartoon character on the left breast. She looks to me with confusion, peers down to my towel, up to my dry hair, and then smiles. “Upstars,” as she point to herself. “Mi husband, he no like…uh…smoke,” she says in a voice that I can only describe as small. She smiles again.

“It's fine.”

“D'jew smoke?” She produces a pack from a small pocket.

“No,” I respond in a similarly small voice. “I just wanted to see where the smell was coming from.” She sticks her neck out. “The smell,” I respond as I point to my nose. She goes to stub out the cigarette, but I stop her. “No,” I laugh. “I just…smelled it,” I point again. “Curioso; no bother.” She smiles a little less enthusiastically. “Hasta luego.” She responds in kind, but is clearly bewildered by the incident.

So now what? If this were a novel, and I the protagonist, I would expect the author to give me something to do, but Vinati doesn't even have cable. Is this what people mean by Kafkaesque? Probably not. It'd be Kafkaesque if I suddenly became Vinati's roommate, or, worse, Vinati — and if you cue Webern's “Entflieht Auf Leichten Kaehnen” with Wurlitzer accompaniment, you may have something out of Lynch (and if you somehow get the crack-addicted crocs to come into the bedroom to discuss the differences between heat death and cold death while Vinati pulled out a bottle of lube, admonished my sheepishness, and redirected my thrusting, you'd have something out of Pynchon [and if you have the crocs join in on the action…well, then you'd have some whole new animal on your hand, perhaps a lost Sade epic]).

The walls of her living room are a good source of entertainment. Most of the decoration in the room consists of framed photographs. There is no real symmetry in the way they are distributed, nor is there a sense of continuity in the style, make, or color of the frames. There is a repeated motif of six — or, rather, a repeated motif of rows, columns, twos, threes. On the windowsill there is a chaotic tangle of metal, a shape that could provide the visualization of 'cacophony'. It is clearly a picture-frame — the evidence of this coming from the piece of glass at the center of the motionless contraption, as well as the detachable piece on the back that connects body to the slanted leg that keeps the thing from tumbling to the floor — but it is empty.

I begin to examine the photographs individually. The content ranges from G to PG-13, which is fairly typical unless one ends up in the home of an exhibitionist, a professional photographer, a professional collector of photography, or someone who just really digs porn and wants everyone to know that they really dig porn. So there's no R ratings, certainly no NC-17s or Xs or XXXs. A meditation on the material that necessitates not only one extra “X”, but two, is not indulged.

Vinati appears infrequently. The girl who I assume to be Natasha, the roommate, is ubiquitous. There are pictures of her with the family in Manhattan, in Rome, in Paris, on an estate in some mountainous region with a profusion of goats in the background: those types of pictures in which all but one of the subjects are ostensibly annoyed or frustrated over the penchant of the one person for taking extended-family photographs in the middle of busy sidewalks, in front of famous landmarks, and without any minor blemishes such as closed eyes, erected middle-fingers, protruding tongues, invasive strangers oblivious to the shot, or obvious conveyances of hatred directed at either the dipshit who cannot figure out how to operate the camera — which features a toggle switch and a rather large button with an icon of a flashing camera in the center — or the one who has decided that it is family picture time. In many instances she is both the photographer and one of the subjects, though only when she is with her friends. She makes the same face in these pieces: lips puckered, left eye looking up and to the right, right eye squinted as though in the midst of a wink. Her right arm extends out, toward the viewer; her left arm is always around someone displaying a similar expression, and sometimes this individual has a left arm around yet another person with an equally jovial, intoxicated, or frenetic countenance. She appears poolside with two friends. Her body type is athletic, maybe even aerodynamic. The two other girls in this picture are equally thin, though one of them apparently hasn't learned her alphabet well enough to know that B does not follow C. The three of them are beautiful, perhaps beautiful in that way that some call exotic. Most of her friends and family share this quality. Even the majority of the men could be described by those three adjectives — tall, dark, handsome — that are used to make women swoon unless they are attributed to a black man (tall = imposing; dark = savage or shadowy; handsome = alluring only in his depravity). There is a close-up shot of an eye. It's difficult to say if this is a representation of the panopticon (if said panopticon is an apparatus under state or corporate control; if the previous assumption actually raises a bigger question concerning the inability on the part of citizens to disambiguate corporate- and state-sponsored surveillance; if this question actually misses the far more disturbing truth about the nature of the information age, which is that citizens have eliminated the distinction between public and private discourse by eliminating self-censorship, transmitting extremely sensitive self-identifiers, and participating in a culture of puerile and unrelenting self-description within a public interface accessible to and often provided by either the state or the corporate powers they should fear; which raises the even more distressing question of whether or not these citizens are, therefore, responsible not merely for the perspicuity or pervasiveness (which entails invasiveness) of said power structures, but the very construction of said panopticon) or if this was the result of there being one remaining shot on a roll of film that needed to be developed, like, now. Perhaps the bookshelf can provide an answer.