It has happened before. One sets aside a scrap of a memoir and, returning to it some months later, finds one’s prejudices confirmed. The bits of wisdom and prescience shudder jewel-like, too congratulatory for one to do anything but pause and marvel, slow and savor. And however many the tinfoil mistakes they are at best small ones, easily passed over with a shrug and a self-deprecatory ‘oops.’ But five, six, ten years later? Lie after foolish lie, miscalculations and idiot judgments in unstoppable flood. What truths remain might be discovered in phrased solitude at every hundredth page. But hindsight is merely fatigue made wise with disappointment. And so, whatever profundity, actaeoned by its entourage of trivia, seemed once-true as midnight-stroked chimes in a world a decade and a half now gone, remains, for better as for worse, as true as any yet-unbroken promise.
Dionysius gets drunk, he says, so that she’ll speak through him.
He insists that it didn’t end.
Or if it did, then it didn’t end badly.
Or if it did, then it wasn’t a bad end as bad endings go, not when one had so much wealth in the way of dreadful comparison.
The pause after each ‘why’ grew longer and longer.
Why had she jumped from a speeding car?
Why had she put her fist through that window pane?
Why had she slit her wrists in watery darkness, as the stylus scratched, jumping and stuck for hours, in the groove at the end of Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata number 8?
He’s not a channeling sort of drunk so it’s unlikely he actually believes she’s using any Purgatorial cigarette breaks to send word games back to the dwindling fold.
It’s the kind of possibility that she’d herself have spent hours circling contentedly before settling on a final princely negative.
Was Virginia W. close to some truth when she wrote that the dead live on in the fractured and fading memories of those left behind?
Was Betsy F. close when she said that the Lizard King was brought to tumescent resurrection each time the opening notes of ‘Love Me Two Times’ sounded from jukebox or stereo, each time some teenybop on a retrokick slips a rose onto the rainwet pedimental shrine at Pere Lachaise, retiring to a discrete distance before plunging committed fingers down the inside front of her blue jeans?
He found temporary comfort, temporary answers in her own words.
As ever too many words, far too many words.
The slowest song she’d ever written.
(* second slowest according to the dour ones down at the Archives but official if one discounted the never-recorded, never-performed ‘Nail To The Bone’, a lugubrious rape memorial the chord progression of which had been cheerfully ripped off from Richard & Linda Thompson’s ‘Calvary Cross’.)
But … the chorus of this slowest song began: Nostalgia’s just another word for suicide …; these words repeating twice before the gracenote mask-removal of …and suicide’s just another word.
She claimed she’d written it in a single sober sitting and on a six-string bass purely to complicate the history, but found she could never remember the words unless triple-fucked and seeing double.
At some point in the near future he’ll stop answering questions.
Posed by others, posed by himself.
It’s all there in the lyrics, he’ll say, and those who peer close enough will discover he isn’t lying.