James Pate - The Fassbinder Diaries

The film critic touched the blank spot where her thoughts continued to appear: the itchy thoughts and the ugly thoughts and the thoughts with pierced and stricken faces.

Mieze is in a white summer dress and battered parka, she wears a red wig, a wig with curls at the shoulder, she hasn’t worn a wig in years and she is not sure why she is wearing one tonight, she is beside the jukebox dancing to Ray Charles. There is an icy winter light in her thoughts and a breezy winter night outside and a paper moon in the sky and an endless shadowy road extending through her mind. There is a voice singing in the middle of the hour. The voice of Ray Charles or someone who used to be called Ray Charles.

Franz is sitting in a chair, he is in jeans and a Nina Hagen T-shirt, and in his right pocket is a pack of gum, and in his left are his keys and a lighter and one joint and a notebook that includes the directions to a party they might or might not go to later in the evening. His hands have thought of other types of rooms. His left knee is scarred from a bike accident that occurred at the age of seventeen and his other knee is already in another town with other rooms, dreaming among other and warmer knees.

The bar window shining in the middle of the voice. Ray Charles singing from another millennium. The winter dance. The parka and wig and white summer dress dance. The ghost party dance. Mieze with two drunken arms raised and tongue tingling. Franz at the party he will never go to nor hear stories of nor forget about. The jukebox surrounded by winter air.

The mouth will swallow the finger. Then the next finger. Then the rest of the hand. The air will blow through the window and the sleeves. The siren sound will move through the wind and branches and the thoughts near the edge of town. The grass will grow through the fingers and out of the mouth. The film will play. The film has already played. Trees in the foreground and wind through the branches and wind against the theater walls. The mouth in the movie being red and anonymous and stricken. The mouth being old and homeless and chapped. The mouth surrounded by beard and wet melting snow. The thoughts blowing from the edges of the movie, torches lit, the villagers gathering.

In the garden small pockets of fat appeared under the trees. They quivered in the light and vibrated in the film. Then the pockets turned into fatty mouths. They salivated. They were fleshy and wormy and slick. None of us knew why or what they wanted or what thoughts they’d had or what memories they’d pursued in order to arrive here.

My girlfriend spent her most private hours whispering prayers in Pig Latin. Her gods were named after extinct flowers. There were televisions in our house tuned to the Red channel. It glowed with its red light. She lingered by the window and watched the garden grow extended tangles of hair. She ate fat and digested fat. I ate fat and digested fat. But other fats returned. Other hair and their memories. Pockets with saliva in the corners.

Another man loved her but we knew he was dead and often missing. His face quivered in the light of the airier gods. He said her shoulder was a gristle party. He said her hair had been longer than centuries. He said in Baltimore the last of spring. In New York the remainder of the fall. Our house digesting both fat and the memory of fat and gods growing hair in our corners.

She broke a mirror with her heel and left marks of blood for us to follow. The games consisted of screwdrivers and falsified Indian folklore and stories of slaves making slasher films in the forest, their shirts like clouds in a greased sky. We wondered how long we could sleep in a sleepless house and how much fat we could digest before the memory of fat faded.

The man who loved my girlfriend claimed to be a dying fish gasping in the middle of the floor and an untold chronicle of Christ and the meatiest part of Plato’s afterbirth. He warned us Plato’s sperm glowed in his mouth, the money shot of wisdom. And the fat thickening in the Baltimore sun and the fat glistening in the New York sun.

The slow accumulation of capital continued unabated. There was nothing any of us could do about it. But I suspected things were bad. Bad and getting worse. My wife gave me a car antenna for Christmas. And a gutted radio for the new year. And broken earphones for my birthday. And a dull record needle for Easter. But that’s how things played out that year. That’s how things were, when I think back on it. She’d lock herself up in our bedroom and yell at me, calling me a whore and a jackal. The slow accumulation of wealth continued unabated. There was nothing any of us could do about it. Did we continue to have sexual intercourse? Yes, but as if some god or demon possessed our bodies during the act, our bodies and part of our minds. A red demon or a yellow and icy god. We had a new car, at least it was new to us, this blue Cadillac. We’d drive through the night sometimes, or at least until one or two in the morning. We’d drive all through the city. Good neighborhoods. Not-so-good neighborhoods. Some of the houses looked like there were whole families lying dead inside, shot up. The slow accumulation of capital continued unabated. There was nothing any of us could do about it. And then if you’re like me you start to think what if it was true, what if there really is a family in that house all shot up. And what if one of them is a little bit alive, a grandmother whose small finger, the one on her left hand, is ever so slightly twitching. The slow accumulation of capital continued unabated. There was nothing any of us could do about it. There were hot nights and breezy nights and nights so still it was like you could hear a twig break and cooler nights and nights that felt like they’d happened a hundred years ago and nights that felt like they were being dreamt up by someone lying in bed, someone you didn’t even know, someone you did not ever want to know, and nights where the sky completely opened up, and nights that smelled like earth, that had that muddy smell, and nights that came from nowhere and nights that would go nowhere, and hot nights and breezy nights and nights so still it was like you could hear a twig break and cooler nights and nights that felt like they’d happened a hundred years ago and nights that felt like they were being dreamt up by someone lying in bed, someone you didn’t even know, someone you did not ever want to know, and nights where the sky completely opened up, and nights that smelled like earth, that had that muddy smell, and nights that came from nowhere and nights that would go nowhere, and hot nights and breezy nights and nights so still it was like you could hear a twig break.

The film critic is driving through white nights and black days, through red cities with nothing but empty sidewalks and windows. She reaches an appropriate place to stop. It looks like a prison that had once been a ballroom. It seems to be a school with its brains knocked out.

She walks through an infinite white corridor, until she reaches the funeral. The casket is full of the blackest coffee. The service includes chairs and three doors that lock from the inside.

She is the only one present so far. Though there are a few figures of clay in some of the chairs. And figures of moist velvet on other chairs. Some of the figures are shaped like heads, though most are torsos, and there are a few legs shivering. All of the figures look like they have only recently been brought inside from sitting out in a rain of ash.