R

..Who were we, R and I, anyway?
..There is always an other, others. The night (ночь) teems with them. At the bottom of the lake, a femicide dreams our world in the year 3022. An infanticide dreams her world in the year 10322, and so on. The world itself (Мир) is a virus, self-replicating and mutating inside the cells of other worlds. Worlds move laterally between each other at the same time as they are enfolded within one another, like a matryoshka doll. Worlds commit incest, homicide, suicide, cosmocide, etc. Putin, supposedly, dreams of being the Tsar, but he also dreams of raising gas prices for the U.S. midterm elections. I’ve had a tender feeling for Putin ever since the CIA put out that he’d suffered a series of strokes as a child, leaving him an emotional isolate and a sociopath. I suspected I’d suffered the same. My mom drank when she was pregnant with me, but we’re Slavs, after all. R’s cousin who lives in Orange County adopted a girl from Korea, who turned out a nymphomaniac, and a boy from Siberia, who’d been born with fetal alcohol syndrome and whose only desire was to serve in the U.S. military, or, if not in the U.S. military, then in some mercenary outfit (he thought about fighting with the YPG in Syria). But everyone turned him down. It’s because he’s a retard, R’s mom said, never one to mince words. Those Russians were born funny, she said. She was an upstanding member of the #Resistance. She spoke five languages as a child, including Russian. I watched a Polish movie called Never Gonna Snow Again about a Ukrainian mutant and mystic masseur from Chernobyl who goes around seducing the bored housewives of the Polish nouveau riche at the same time as curing them of their various spiritual ailments. It’s never gonna snow again, and all the insects of my childhood died off. The femicide at the bottom of the lake still knows how to dream of snow, of insects, but she’s stopped to punish us. Or maybe she’s forgotten. One day the lake will dry up. This world will die the penultimate time when the last world that remembers it dies, and for the final time when the last world that remembers the world that remembers our world dies. That’s just how things go. It’s never gonna snow again, and all the insects of my childhood died off.

***

..I am in the pornohagiographic world of a ketamine trip. When I come down, I see a text from R: I miss you, and I liked your last pieces. I don’t respond. My silence is a test. If you really love me, I’m saying, become a cosmonaut for me. Undertake orphic journeys for me. Compose your song of death for me. Let your severed head sing floating on the sea, washing up on the island of Lesbos. I need you to hear my scream across the icy chasms between us. I need you to meet me in my dreams again, or in dreamspace, dreamtime. I need you to undo time itself, entropy itself. I need you to take us back to the streets of San Telmo again. I need you to resurrect everything, from our love to Lautaro, our dead and inbred cat with the congenital heart defect. I need you to undo all the damage, not just the damage you did me, but the damage the world does to the world, the damage from before we were born. I need you to put my heart back together again and make me a pisco sour with the cheap lime juice and the artificial sugar syrup from the Lider supermercado. I need you to swallow my cum again in the summer. I need you to talk us out of being deported in the deepest night of nowhere Patagonia. I need you to be friends with my mom again, to interpret between us. I need you to laugh at the fascistic pieties of Boston again after the marathon bombing, to laugh in the face of state violence, brutality, borders, cops, bankers, reactionary blowhards of all stripes, liberals, washed-up lead singers of riot grrrl bands, shitty writers, shitty artists, shitty musicians, handsy bosses, rich white girls, prison guards, sexually desperate men, manic-depressive women in their sixties, the psychosexual failures of your imperialist brother, all the people you’ve outsmarted, the ones who tried to get you to play by the rules, the ones you stole money from, the ones you cheated and cheated on, the ones who got in the way of the revolution, again. I need you to get completely shitfaced with me before going out because your social anxiety is like a terminal cancer and because you’re having fun djing for me again. I need you to smoke Camel crushes with me again. I need you to get drunk with me at a bar in a foreign country and antagonize everyone we meet, especially the ones trying to seduce you, seduce us, again. I need you to play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with me again. I need you to tell me about our pact again, the one about how we’d never leave each other. I need you to go to art exhibits put on by the schizophrenic patients of Third World insane asylums with me again. I need you to hold me again. I need you to say cruel shit to me for no reason again, but forget you said it. I need you to starve yourself and lie in bed catatonically for days, staring at the ceiling, wishing you’d never been born, again. I need you to be the only one who can see the truth again. I need you to drink Fernet and coke with me at precisely five p.m. every day at quaint little bars in Buenos Aires again. I need you to tell me about your dreams in the morning again. I need you to make the national dish of every foreign nation on the day of every presidential or parliamentary election again, hoping the left wins, but knowing it probably won’t, and the dish will be cold and inedible by the time the results are in anyway. I need you to have sex with me in Provincetown in the ocean at night while the crabs bite our feet again. I need you to meet an attractive, somewhat shady Chilean couple with me in the surfing town of Pichelemu, who invite us down to the beach to drink wine and as soon as we get there start fucking beneath the stars. I need us to talk about the deaths of our loved ones again. I need us to sit by your cousin Kerstin’s grave again, Kerstin who died when she was younger than I am now, and look out at the Bay, again. I need us to remember again. I need us to be happy again, and unhappy, too, because to tell the truth, we were unhappy more often than we were happy, but it’s not that we were never happy, that’s important to note, too. This is what my silence says.
..As for my writing, it’s all been for her since the day we met. She was my muse, though not in the usual sense, and I was her memory, she who claimed not to be able to remember much of all. Sometimes she said I was being too cruel, that she liked my writing better when I wrote from a place of love. That was a place I didn’t trust, so I could only access it accidentally, stumbling onto it like a landmine. All my writing was for her since the first time I read her anything I wrote, nervously, my piece on Stalin and Mandelstam, the Cold War, Isaac Deutscher’s non-Jewish Jew, etc., in our apartment on the sixteenth floor in Santiago. All my writing was for her since the afternoon we met Pedro Lemebel in the Metales Pesados bookstore in Bellas Artes and decided to become his stalkers, his truest readers, his crazed exegetes. All my writing was for her since that first summer when I would write with a bottle of Jameson into the night while she slept on the little cot on my floor on the tiny sun porch that was my bedroom, surrealist poems about coitus and madness inspired by Paul Éluard, prophetic stories about me as an alcoholic writer named Joseph Roth dying of cirrhosis in my fifties in her family’s house on Montauk, she having died twenty years before, of pancreatic cancer, like her cousin. Joseph Roth who spent his last days drinking himself to death in a holy alcoholism and struggling to remember, remember her, against the tides of fascism, of oblivion, against the tides of forgetting, which wear us all down, at the end of the day, there’s nothing we can do about it, and that’s okay, even love dies, especially love dies, and that’s okay, what can we do about it, really?, nothing, really.