Oola. Brittany Newell

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      More versed in books than in real life, I took this to be the moment where we would fall in love. Yes, I footnoted this moment, made a mental note to remember—the song playing (Leonard Cohen), her smile one beat too late, Tay’s fluttering proximity as he arm-wrestled with the couple beside us.

      “Really?” was the only thing I could think to say. “The high-speed trains, you mean?”

      She nodded once. “Just picture them. So trim, so clean. I don’t need to explain it, do I?”

      She didn’t. “No.”

      “And what about you?”

      Before I could answer, there was a crash behind us. Tay had initiated a party-wide game of Marry/Fuck/Kill. In his excitement he’d knocked over a vase. “It’s your last night on earth!” he howled, waving the displaced flowers. “You can do all three! The question is, to what degree?”

      “Oh no,” sighed Oola. She took a long sip. “I certainly don’t want to play.”

      “What do you want to do instead?”

      She barely considered. “I want to take drugs and move weirdly to music.” She laughed at herself. “Oh my God. Big dreams, baby.”

      Could you have resisted her, even if you’d had an inkling that this beauty was an act? I had that inkling, but still dove in; in fact, I was curious to see what lay behind it, what bear trap her luminous foliage hid. On which side of the ampersand did I fall in the S&M construct? I wanted her to tell me.

      In middle school, I once placed a cellophane bag of gummy worms in my crush’s gym locker. The next day, she was in hysterics because they’d melted in her sneakers and she thought it was a killer mold. Look at the color! she bellowed. Have you ever seen anything like that? The girls gathered round to inspect the neon monstrosities (or so I’m told). What if it’s radioactive? one breathed. Worse yet, she was marked as tardy by our ex-Marine gym teacher because she’d refused to put the sneakers on, bravely marching out to the track in her ballet flats and regulation sweatpants. I was the king of failed gestures. I planted the flowers that carried the blight.

      I should tell you that I’m not a cheery person. Simply put, the sight of an old man eating his breakfast invariably moves me to tears. Pervert, my freer friends bellow. Leave him to his applesauce. But the thought of this foodstuff further destroys me. As a reader, you should be glad of my morose streak. Happy people bake brownies, save lives for a living, only write to unwind or express their innermost feelings to the person they love in a long-winded handwritten letter. They put three stamps on the envelope (pictures of birds, they say slyly, to symbolize freedom) and feel crushed when X never writes back. Being unhappy has made my life generally brighter and better than most of my friends’, because when the shit hits the fan for them, they feel slighted, offended; they look around with their mouths hanging open, as if to say, Can you believe it? They do laps around their mailboxes. They pull out glossy clumps of hair and mail these to their ever-more-horrified exes. Meanwhile, I get off on I told you so. I nod hello to the fuckery.

      Looking at Oola then, with her misty movements and delayed laugh, I figured she might also be unhappy, in that deep-seated neutral way that predisposes one to the occult and slow movies, and this, go figure, made my spirits soar. Perhaps, at last, I’d found someone to wring and bitch with, a body who’d been broken along roughly the same axis. Perhaps she’d find my blue genes Springsteen-sexy.

      “Listen to this,” she was saying. “I love him so.” Leonard Cohen still played, chosing an invisible woman with his hard words of love. She and I were caught between her invisible thighs, monoliths nudging us nearer together, while the batting of her invisible lashes recirculated the air in the room. “All these lonely musicians with songs about loving women. Do you ever wonder about the logistics of that?”

      Was she flirting with me? I couldn’t tell. “Sometimes.”

      “I do. A single musician will have, like, so many songs about love, more songs than lovers.” She waved her hand across her face. “By my count, at least. And not love in the abstract but specific love, for a specific girl. Down to the details: Your pale blue eyes. Visions of Johanna. Lola Lola. Aaaaaangie. I’d like to get all these girls in a room together. Do you think they’re real?”

      “I’m not sure.”

      “Take Serge Gainsbourg. He was ugly.” She splayed her hands, as if to demonstrate ugliness. “Was he really in love every time he wrote a song about it? Or did he have some major heartbreak that he kept coming back to? I read that’s what T-Swift does. She’s cathexed. Maybe these guys write love songs as a form of purging. Or wishful thinking. Or, uh, picking at a wound. Or because they can’t help it. Or maybe they choose a girl at random, whoever they last slept with.” She smiled to herself, revealing her large and slightly rounded teeth. “Maybe songwriting is like, you know, alchemy. Makes a bland girl suddenly babely. What do you think?”

      I blushed a bit, thinking of the strange habit I’d developed while traveling alone. In any particularly beautiful moment, when camping in a bombed-out farmhouse on the Bosnian–Croatian border, for instance, I found myself thinking of strangers, girls and boys whose first names, much less a worked-over memory of their light-speckled eyes, I had no rightful claim to. Similar to how one sees a lover’s face everywhere, superimposed onto billboards or kids’ bodies, I hallucinated the most random faces until they eventually took on the familiar quality of the beloved—hazy, sleepy, piqued. I would picture these relative strangers on the beach beside me, equally sunburned, my accomplices in awe. I imagined myself explaining the local delicacies (of which I knew nothing) to the severely scoliotic girl who worked at the front desk of my hometown library. Her name and age were lost, but something in the architecture of, say, Stockholm evoked her bony shoulders. Soccer jerseys emerged from my mind, limp wrists, missed patches on a shaven thigh, or the blond hauntings of a beard. I caught a glimpse of an impossibly young drag queen in a club in Tokyo and carried her with me, by rail and air, her hairless limbs to be unfolded only when I stopped to nap in public parks. With the sun on my face, I pictured her sitting crisscross in the grass, ten feet away, watching me.

      Waiters were the easiest prey. I fell in love at a merciless rate: For four days I thought nonstop about whomever I’d last sat beside on a particularly bumpy bus ride, so long as they were young. I used their profile as a sort of shelf upon which to rest my brain, a soft (or so I imagined) body to split life’s rarebits with. That is, until another waitress called me sir or fiddled, so disastrously, with the string of her apron. The violation (and I knew it was one) was not how I imagined these bodies or in what positions, but simply that I recalled them at all, dug up the 0.001 percent I knew and took fantastic license with the rest—more kleptomaniac than common creep. Could Oola already sense this neediness in me?

      “Maybe they write the songs in advance,” I said carefully, addressing a point just above her head, “and have to find someone to fill them after the fact. Have to find a girl with a short skirt and a long jacket, or however that one goes.”

      “Could be.” She nodded vigorously, carried by the conversation’s momentum. “It’s funny too how love songs are, like, always in the second person. Have you noticed that? Hey, little girl, is your daddy home; your body is a wonderland; you make me feel like a natural woman.” She spoke these lyrics briskly. “So even if the girl’s not named, she’s there. She hovers. It’s a weird instinct, isn’t it, the second person? I—want—you—so—bad. It’s so public. Girls and boys everywhere will pretend to be that You or Your. Even if it’s your Your, like if you know СКАЧАТЬ