Chapter Six

“’Sup?”
“’Sup?”
“Nada niente.”
“Counter or a table?”
“I’d rather take a table and actually sit for a bit.”
The waitress seats us, we order our “red wine” and accept her menus so she isn’t offended that we’re treating her diner as a bar.
“We might order food in a bit.”
“Take your time, sunshine.”
“So…Jack Sprat, eh?”
I’m biting my nails, he’s biting his nails.
“Oh I’ve already forgotten about that. It was nothing. I was on a roll in the moment, that’s all.”
“No c’mon, I wanna hear about it. I need a warm up for the next topic at hand anyhow.”
“Well it was nothing really. Something like, if women need to be stuffed then they should be as full as they can during doin’. If men need to stick all they got out then they should focus all they got on the wiener. They should have an empty gut going into it so when they think about pushing their gut out the only thing available should be the wiener as to maximize the stuffing. Ladies should have full guts so they feel completely stuffed when the wiener comes in, men should be empty so they feel like they’ve given it all, follow? Jack Sprat and his wife make a lot of sense. Whatever. It was nothing really. I was just on a flow.”
“Yeah well tell me that again after I tell you point two. I can’t really concentrate until the next one afterall.”
“Honestly I hope to never tell it again. It was just an exercise.”
“O.K. listen then, ready? I know Lydia too.”
“What!”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Yes. Last time I was heading to Sweden to pick up a Saab for a rich regular at the bar so he could avoid taxes and save money even with my flights included if all I did was buy it with his card and drive it to the port to be shipped back home – I stayed with your sister, didn’t she tell you?–“
“No?”
“—Well I took the same Icelandic Air Take a Break deal. I also only stayed one night, but the difference is that I was there in the summer when the sun never set and I tore all in to Reykjavik.”
“No.”
“Yes. I drank like a fucking fool from bar to bar and of course I fell for her too and you know why?”
“Why?”
“Because she tried to steal my wallet.”
“No.”
“Yes. I catch the cunt’s hand on my ass pocket. ‘Are you really trying to steal my wallet?’ and she’s like ‘Yes’ with an absolutely straight face, emotionless.”
“Hence you fall in love.”
“Exactly, but I also didn’t realize she was a junkie. I misread her lack of shame as chutzpah not death. So I’m shocked at her lack of shock and all I can say is ‘Well you can’t. You can’t steal my wallet. That’s not O.K.’ and she responds with ‘Only because we’re in Iceland.’
‘Come again?’
‘I could steal your wallet if we were in Europe or America, but not in Iceland. We’re between Old and New World thieving genes here which is also why our language is being brushed aside. We all speak English as well as Icelandic.’
‘I’m sorry, slow down. Why is your language being brushed aside?’
‘Because we’re not good thieves. We’re neither European nor American. Thieving improves diction and all language is thieving. Thieving is one of the great tools for the advancement of language because you’ve got to prepare yourself to articulate sharp and quick refutes if you get caught. The best thieves can talk themselves out of ever catching heat. I’m talkin’ from getting caught red handed by a convenience store teller all the way up to the war crimes tribunal. Didn’t you hear how poorly I argued my defense before?’
‘Yes, but that worked, that worked. I was thrown off. Look who’s left flirting with the thief as we speak.’
‘Well because it was in English not my own language. English is the language of the perfect thief. It’s written in an addendum that considers every word that isn’t English also English. Since you’ve stolen all the words out of the court you can’t be held accountable in English. You own both ‘guilty’ and ‘aquitted’ and if they fail you you can just steal their equivalents in another language and now they’re English too.’
‘I disagree. If I asked you if you were stealing my wallet before and you said oui I’d have been equally befuddled and I’d still be flirting with you.’
‘That’s only because you’re hearing it as an English word. Oui has already been stolen by English. So have ja, si, and every other word that has yet to be stolen. You wrote in the clause. Hey buy me a drink mister, gin and tonic. I still gotta tell you about how our numbers work better than both worlds’ numbers though.’
‘Hello, I’m Gary.’
‘And I am Lydia.’ “
“Pale blue eyes?”
“Yes.”
“Lifeless but gorgeous?”
“I’m telling you it’s the same Lydia. She talked the same way as yours…Listen, the only difference is that she lied to you and now I’m thinking she probably lied to me too. Her father was not a Russian.”
“What?”
“I’m telling you. Hold on though, before she gets further into her family and the thieving gene she digresses into the fusion of base systems, how Iceland being situated between worlds has been forced to adopt both the base five and bass six systems.
“So it’s like, ‘Of course base five is the most practical. It fits in with the metric system. It’s also the most obviously beautiful. The poets have already unearthed its toils with phi throughout nature’s groves like the five overlapping pedals of a rose. And it is tremendous that the most practical system should turn out to be the most beautiful as well. But I like your base six too. We all do in Iceland. The foot, the mile, the yard. We believe its beauty has yet to reap its deserved regard. There’s a reason for it and it’s been used elsewhere in history too. You can find it. This seemingly inefficient system, you can find it. The speakers of Sanskrit used base six. Well that means something to me. So my theory is that it’s based on two times three equals six. Two being binary is the lowest common denominator of what we base all systems on. Three being the Trinity is what we hope lies beyond what we base all systems on. This is why all pub songs are written in beer swigging threes. The number transports. Three is the Other. Therefore the On times the Other equals six, base six. The Off times the If equals six, base six. Two systems that draw a stalemate in court, so what do you do? You multiply them to graph their overlap! What ground do both of these perfect systems agree on? Where does their light bend? Thirty. Five times six equals thirty. What is thirty but a three and a zero? What is a zero but two parentheses that have spent so much time partitioning off nothing that they’ve fused together at either end forming a wall around nothing? Five times six equals the Trinity next to nothing!
Five times six…equals the Trinity next to nothing!’ and I suck down my drink.”
“The bartender steps in over this one, ‘Lydia!’ and so she gets back into her only slightly less fringed genealogy which according to her her family stems from a long line of Tinker thieves whose thieving gene diluted through interracial marriages once they emigrated to America degrading them to petty thieves. This is what I went to Iceland to sit through, dude. She keeps going about how her father got it up in his head that he had to repatriate himself to Ireland to smoke out the ancient dominant Tinker thieving gene and resurrect his family’s past grifting glory. He sets about petty thieving his way up the Eastern seaboard to Halifax where he stowed away on a boat to Reykjavik, got caught stealing in town and rather then send him to jail they banished him to a northern village where he settled down, found a wife, and made Lydia.”
“Her dad was an American!”
“Her dad was probably Reykjavik’s village idiot, my friend. I think we were both grifted.”
“Ho my -- let’s face it then, she never had a dad did she?”
“So she kept going on about how the European city was once the bastion of generations of great thieves. She believed people were once born or not born a thief, you either were or you weren’t, and her whole proof rested on the difference between American and European villages. She’s like ‘So why is there such a discrepancy in these two sentences:
I spent my summer as an au pair in a village in New Jersey.
I spent my summer as an au pair in a village in Ireland.
One makes you shudder, one makes you envious. I’ll tell you why. Ages ago the great thieves lived in the cities because naturally the cities had better things to steal. Then the blights and pogroms scrambled everything up. The whole lot is shaken. They move to America and every gene is thinned across the entire pool. Everyone’s screwing everyone. Everyone’s a thief, but just a little. So whereas in the past the European thieves would have procreated with other thieves, now it didn’t matter. Everyone was out of their element and just fucking like Darwin’s Galapagos finches during droughts and heat waves. Now every American is born with the thieving gene, it’s just recessive, whereas in Europe you’re still either born with the dominant gene or not.’
And then I catch the fucking slut’s hand on my ass pocket again!
‘Did you just try to steal my wallet again!?’
‘Bestimmt!’
‘Well you’re an awful thief.’
‘I know. That’s because I’m caught between the two worlds.’
‘Well quit it O.K? You’re theories have yet to congeal their way to sense.’
‘Yes, that’s true. Well what I’m trying to say is that the American villages lack the bucolic associations the European hamlets invoke because that’s where the American thieves live. See, since you were all born with the recessive thieving gene it’s never activated until times are rough, until you’ve been stressed to the limit. So whereas Europe’s most successful cities have its most successful thieves, America’s most successful cities have the least thieves. The outposts, the dying cities, and the limbos in between are where your last ditch recessive thieving genes are pushed to their limits and boiled to the forefront.’
So I’m like, ‘Holy shit chick, you’re actually pulling this theory through. If we spent all night together I bet we could resuscitate it all the way babe. If you push me to my limit you’ll bare witness firsthand for your research’ and she sucks down the rest of her drink, orders another and points to me to the bartender like I’m supposed to pay. Fine, I do. And I’m beginning to think she’s one of those people born without facial muscular tissue because she never shows an expression through the endless chatter. Her words are on, her moves are off, as in there are none.”
“Spooky.”
“I know, frightening.”
“Well could you roll?”
“’Course I could roll! Did I want to was the question, Keep in mind I could barely see straight by this point anyhow –“
“So maybe it wasn’t the same Lydia.”
“I’m telling you it’s the same Lydia, but to find out if I wanted to commit to this cut or not I needed to know if she could roll too or if this spiel was just something she’d practiced and stored up in her cap that she’d unload on the flocks of fresh fleece-ables who find Reykjavik through Icelandic Air’s Take a Break program thereby gifting herself to free drinks through some false front. It’s been done before. They get away without putting out. I’m not sure how that behooves them, but chicks do it all the time. So I told her the cold makes her think too much. It makes things appear as if they have boundaries. In the heat things melt together. In the north you have marriages, in the south they have mirages. Nothing is as defined as this clear icy air makes it seem. The plainness of frozen air is the greatest mirage of all and you all fall for it up here. Genes shmenes,’ I said.”
“Nice work on the schmenes, the nail in the coffin, eh?”
“So she’s like, ‘Are you so ignorant as to not believe in genes?’ and so I say, ‘Well you got time for a wee parable?’ and seeing as she doesn’t respond and I can tell the bartender’s got one ear on my words anyhow I take the podium:
‘An American goes on vacation to Brazil and he’s lying on a hammock on the beach early one morning reading a pulp thriller with one eye and watching a fisherman net fish close to shore with the other. The fisherman comes back with three big fish and starts to leave the beach. The American asks where he’s going –‘ “
“The American speaks Portuguese?”
“It’s a parable, relax. So the Brazilian says ‘Well I’m going home.’
The American says, ‘But it’s still early. There are many more fish to catch.’
The Brazilian says, ‘What do I need those fish for? I have enough here to feed my family and a guest. In my garden grows a lemon tree I’ll squeeze for my marinade. My wife and her sister are walking through the jungle as we speak to rendez vous with herbs and hickory. My son scours the seaside for his charming supple guest.’
The American says, ‘Because with more fish you could sell them at a stand in the market.’
‘But why would I want to do that,’ the Brazilian responds.
‘Because with the extra income you can buy yourself a boat.’
‘And why should I want to do that?’
‘Because with a boat you could catch even more fish and start a fishing company and one day you could buy a whole fleet of boats and sell a whole market’s worth of fish! Wouldn’t you like to see your family name on the side of a boat?’
‘But I still can’t see why I’d want to do that?’ the Brazilian says.
‘Because then you could go public, option out your stocks, and one day son you could retire or vacation on a beach in Brazil with your family where you lie on a hammock eating fresh caught fish like me!’
To which the Brazilian takes a deep breath and redirects, ‘With all due respect sir, what do you think I’m about to go do right now?”

The wine arrives.
“Something for yous to eat?”
“No thanks. In fact, I was thinking you could even tally up and drop the check whenever you want so we’re tempted less to order a second round.”
“As you like, precious.”

“Months go by when one day sweaty men in suits that do not compliment their shapes arrive at the Brazilian’s hammock with eviction papers. The American, incensed by his defeat, has bought the beach and a fleet of fishing boats and for the sake of the brochure he offers ‘the locals’ employment at slave wages. Pride packs the Brazilian’s bags and he heads to the city for work rather then compromise the life he once knew. Within a generation the American corporation has relocated its offices to the southern city to be closer to its booming fishing operation. The fault in the original metaphor is contagious. Northerners are buying the beaches en masse, taking over the cities and the Southerners are being pushed to the brink. They will show them what it means to arrive! Everywhere they’re shoved in the south is gradually being taken over by the northern companies and their employees and their precision. They have nowhere else to run but north.
“A century passes in which the pigmentation power schema flips. The tropics are now a land of rich whitey who left abandoned northern cities in their wake that the poor browns were eventually pushed to. Sao Paolo is pink, Reykjavik is black.
“A millennium passes in which the whites of the south have developed color and the blacks of the north have lost theirs and everyone meets up in the brown. In the brown world the notion of race briefly departs dialogue as all boundaries blur and migration is casual. If history has proven one thing it has proven that things are blurry and with the acceptance of blurry there is a final acceptance that to live amongst cold and darkness is pathological because it mirages into fine lines. Therefore all power concentrates around the equator, the belt!
“Another millennium passes. The most powerful have sat in their thrones on the equator for generations upon generations and they are black as coal. But there are white people in the tropics as well. These are the porters who work the night shift. They’re only option of sunlight is if they were to move up to the cold north because all day jobs in the south are occupied by the black and brown power elite. They have to choose heat with no sun or sun with no heat. So in the north where the white people work during the day they’ve developed another race yet! The Northern Translucent Night Race! These are the night porters of northern cities who neither receive sun nor heat. The Translucent Night Race! Skin as thin as rice paper, hair pallid as http, fingernails visible within and without, in the cold, in the dark, working menial labor, bitter as sabers, they hate blacks and the liberals empathetically embrace all of their errors and the Jews still bemoan their exodus from Egypt and captivity in Babylon!”
“You mine as well have told her about your comic book collection! When was the last time science fiction ever got anyone laid my friend? I’ll go as far to say that science fiction is the embodiment of all things misogynistic. True misogyny doesn’t even account for women. That’s hate. That’s science fiction. Someone regaling on crude love or brimstonicly bewailing sexual inequity does not hate the opposite sex. They’re just confused. They’re working through shit. If you sweat about something it means you care about it, you’re dedicated to the issue. That’s love. Science fiction though, c’mon Gary, that’s misogyny! Golf, golf is pure misogyny. The irreverent grace by which the golfer swings his club? Misogyny! Sunday morning political talk shows, that’s misogyny. The issues are irrelevant. Their mere existence is misogyny. See now I’m unsure again if this really was the same Lydia we’re talking about. She might have just been offended at your misogyny and not been my junkie Lydia after all.”
“It was the same Lydia! Don’t blind yourself to the facts. You’re only adding extra baggage for yourself if you continue to deny what your heart knows. That Lydia up there, that Lydia was neither of ours. Two Lydia’s like them in Reykjavík!?”
“Would that really surprise you?”
“C’mon man, anyhow no one’s ever heard my whole Night Race thing except you. The bartender trailed off after the Brazilian left the beach and Lydia, well she wasn’t ever really with me to begin with so I just stopped talking after awhile, sucked down my drink, and tried to re collect my confidence again on my walk to the next bar.”
“I don’t know, maybe this other Lydia trailed off ‘cause she heard as many loopholes in your story as were in hers.”
“Loopholes? The Northern Translucent Night Race is solid! C’mon, I could flesh that out and polish it up in an hour. Air tight in an hour, you know that, Chris. If you were to tell me it lacked poesy well I could meet you there, but give me two hours for that. In two hours the Northern Translucent Night Race would be one air tight solid poem! You know it.”
“Yeah but it isn’t, so where does this discussion end? I dare you, I dare you to make it an air tight poem and flush yourself into the cyborg dystopias of misogyny. Yeah, that’s what the plight of women worldwide need, right – another perfectly flush air tight sci-fi.”
“O.K. you’re right, Chrissy. No, instead they need you as their advocate!”
“Hey, what do you got going on today?”
“Nada mooch. I think I’m supposed to meet either your brother or Jules or someone for happy hour in a bit.”
“Feel like giving Rockwell a call? I was supposed to meet him like an hour ago and I really don’t see it happening anytime soon. I’m hoping I’ll be liberated by happy hour last call though.”
“Yeah, who knows? Same as always, just call.”
“Word, best to Eva. Is it best?”
“Perfect.”
“Word, then give a call.”

Unsure of whether or not our brief liquid lunch proved that Gary was or was not liberated, well I take that as evidence that he was.
I walked down to the St. Claire Diner earlier rather than ride my bike because I needed to do some shopping on the way back, buy some weapons and armor before I faced this wordless letter head on: an exotic grape from an exotic land she passed on sitting at a table with me in, cigarettes, a booze I shared with another woman in another life, coffee.
My stomach was ill. The air in my chest turned on itself and it fell clouded and heavy to my gut.
I passed two of the local crazies on my ill walk back home. When I first moved to the neighborhood a few years ago they always seemed to be a million miles away from everyone else around. They’re eyes transported to a far away land. Now every time I return home after a long tour they’re about the only consistencies I can count on. The two local crazies of Carrol Gardens who I always thought were never here have in fact weathered every other change around. Their dependable distance is more here than any of the rest of us.
The pain in my stomach was getting worse and worse as I neared my increasingly dreaded apartment building to face the foe tête-à-tête out on the open field.