A Night With No Stars

XXIII. Happiness Is a Warm Gun

You'd be wrong to think that it's just a slapdash quiz taken in makeshift accommodations. Oh no. I'm standing on the set and I see how strong it is. The props are surprisingly precise. The machine rotating the stage has been around even longer. The farthest galaxies have been turned on. Oh no, there's no question, this must be the premiere. And whatever I do will become forever what I've done.

​Shit, shit, shit. He had spent the majority of his youth, except for the last five years, on the theater boards, talking, prattling, and rambling. He had whole poems, novel passages, and acts from plays etched in his brain. He could recite hour-long monodramas without even a stutter. Back in high school, he'd been quite known for having an appropriate lyrical reference for every situation. That's how he'd managed to charm Ewelina, back when he'd still fancied himself a romantic. But now his mind was just blank.

I do not love you except because I love you; I go from loving to not loving you, from waiting to not waiting for you; my heart moves from cold to fire. I love you only because it's you the one I love; I hate you deeply, and hating you bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you is that I do not see you but love you blindly.

​No, he couldn't speak about love. No matter how fitting it was, settling for platitudes would be shooting himself in the foot. It was curious, though, because he never used to understand these words. Love itself, sure, but all these melodramatics—fire and ice, dying from longing, loving someone so much it almost turned into hatred—if someone had asked him before, he would have said that it was just for show, pretty nonsense used for making good art. If he'd been to categorize it, he'd have put it in a 'fantasy' pile. But it turned out that this pretty nonsense was a real thing. What next? Aliens? God?

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz;

​No, no. Everyone knew, loved, and was going to do 'Howl'. He needed something groundbreaking. Unprecedented.

Fuck. Two days until the audition, and he had no poem.

if you're going to try, go all the way. otherwise, don't even start. if you're going to try, go all the way. this could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, jobs and maybe your mind. go all the way. it could mean not eating for 3 or 4 days. it could mean freezing on a park bench. it could mean jail, it could mean derision, mockery, isolation. isolation is the gift, all the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. and you'll do it despite rejection and the worst odds and it will be better than anything else you can imagine. (...) all the way. you will ride life straight to perfect laughter, it's the only good fight there is.

Should he salute Aleks by going for his favorite author? It seemed wrong not to make him a part of this audition somehow. It wouldn't have even been happening if not for him.

Black and stiff, but not a bad fit. Will you marry it? It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof against fire and bombs through the roof. Believe me, they'll bury you in it. Now your head, excuse me, is empty. I have the ticket for that. Come here, sweetie, out of the closet. Well, what do you think of that? Naked as paper to start but in twenty-five years she'll be silver, in fifty, gold. A living doll, everywhere you look. It can sew, it can cook, it can talk, talk, talk. It works, there is nothing wrong with it. You have a hole, it's a poultice. You have an eye, it's an image. My boy, it's your last resort. Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.