The individual is the seat of a constant process of decantation, from the vessel containing the fluid of future time, sluggish, pale and monochrome, to the vessel containing the fluid of past time, agitated and multicolored by the phenomena of its hours.

—Samuel Beckett, Proust

◆

Raphael rose from his sheets, shaking those copper curls which his paramours—curling a lock around their fingers in the prologue to a tryst—always seemed so pleased to describe as cherubic. He was tired of that epithet. A residue of cum lingered on his tongue. He sipped from a cup of cold rosehip tea left untasted the night before, but the tea was bitter—the tea was acrid. His throat clenched, his stomach spasmed coldly. He spat back into the cup.

The walls of the dorm room were wide and blank and tall. One window opened onto a silent green courtyard where sometimes a butterfly would streak yellow  before vanishing into the boughs of green trees. Heat and light conspired with Raphael’s eyes to coat the courtyard in a breathless glaze: the leaves on the trees were as still and vivid as lost time. He felt suffocated with hunger, a hunger never satisfied because he never came any closer to the trees than looking: What a mouth wanted could be kissed or tasted, but what the eyes wanted, what else could the eyes do but see? The trees were green, they were bright. The walls of his bedroom met in high corners; the corners reverberated coldly along their edges. Everything profoundly revealed its own surface.

And there were no new notifications on his phone, either. He tossed it onto his pillow. The screen’s dim glass reflected the green courtyard; the silent leaves; another fluttering daub of yellow.

Raphael was ashamed. After so many years of pretending not to want, he had said, at last: I want. But after he spoke, he heard nothing except the echo of his own voice. Day after day he waited. He had spent so many hours waiting, waiting—waiting for some other bespectacled sylvan fairy to see him standing in the hazy blue beam of a strobe and lift a delicate finger, beckoning him to a distant bed. But instead he had left Emily Dickinson half-read beside his pillow; had forgotten his cup of tea and danced half-heartedly at Melusina’s Bath with some friends who he didn’t much care for and who didn’t much care for him, then absconded to a dim beer-encrusted bathroom and followed a succession of messages on Grindr to the bed of, for god’s sake, an Economics major. He had sucked cum from the man’s cock like venom from a wound. He had swallowed it all, but returning along the quiet dewy streets of Asphodel in the early morning, opening the wrought-iron gate of the college and climbing a winding stone staircase, hadn’t brushed his teeth, and fell asleep, in a fit of dizziness, atop his bedquilt. To fill a Gap, Insert the Thing that caused it—

It was already past twelve. Morning had come and gone. Every time he woke late—every time he woke to a slant of light so firm and dead and alluring; a scene so established and impenetrable—he remembered that his seeing was not an essential function of the world. The early afternoon had already completed itself and in fact resisted his late arrival. He fell back onto his pillow, attempting to recall other mornings, untouched by memory because they had caused nothing, been caused by nothing, were nothing more and nothing less than instants, full of the hot, mesquite-scented breeze, the clandestine tinkling of wind-chimes, and somewhere in the strawberry bushes, a mourning dove whose spherical cooing broke upon his ears in sedimented rings of sound. Such mornings were his hoard of riches. But now, past twelve on a Friday in Asphodel, they failed to sweeten his mind; now, even though he closed his eyes, Raphael felt reverberating the dull intransigence of his dorm room—the walls, the corners, the rectangle of lurid immobile trees. He was alone. His tongue was sour with the tang of last night’s cum.

◆

An hour later he woke again. A yellow rayon robe hung beside his bed. Eyes closed, he fumbled carelessly for the fringe, which slipped between his fingers, soft, cool, unworldly, so that suddenly, halfway inside a memory, Raphael was stroking the surface of a pond, and now at last he was sheltered, insulated by leaves and branches, folded into a beatific gloom: and this enfolding was composed neither solely of recollected senses, nor of nostalgia, but something more diffuse, more auroral—the haunting of his mind by an earlier version of itself. And though a perfect irrevocable Friday proceeded unaltered on the other side of his eyes, Raphael had proven, for now, that he did not need its nourishment.

He grasped a corner of fabric, pulling until the robe began to spill swiftly, silkily off its hook; then, with a flick of his wrist, whipped it toward the bed, where it fell and settled—in glossy folds and flat yellow lengths—on his chest. The room was offended at this sudden flash of extravagance. The walls loomed; the corners sharpened. But Raphael laughed. Raphael laughed and the room—the room which was only as powerful as his silence—winced, retreated, shrank back to its own proportions. He slipped the robe over his shoulders and slid off his bed, tying it loosely around his waist.

As he sauntered out into the empty living room, he wondered briefly and not without pleasure whether any of his roommates would open their doors at that moment, and the fantasy followed him into the hall; a still image of Valentine appeared in his mind; Valentine, partial to guitar riffs, mathematical riddles, and states of drunkenness so extreme they delivered him into a sort of glossolalic rapture, under whose influence he declaimed a homily on the nature of prisms which Raphael had now heard on three separate occasions, before three separate audiences; Valentine blushing behind his stubble in a pair of threadbare blue boxers, which so daintily draped his cock (the same cock which Valentine had once sheepishly described as bent, but Raphael had not so much as glimpsed save through light-limned cotton) that they inevitably formed a crumpled scrim upon which the silhouette of fact was decorated by the livid detail of Raphael’s fantasies; and the irresistible intimation that the fragile blue fabric which clung so loosely to Valentine’s hips was on the verge of floating away—like Aphrodite’s ellipsis of sea foam—further vivified the vision, so that (thought Raphael wordlessly as he opened the bathroom door, recalling at the same time some memory of kitchen curtains lifted lightly by a breeze, inviting him to a grassy yard) ‘my skin never fails to prickle whenever he glances my way…’

This image was followed by another—lips rouged, eyelashes long and languorous—of Raphael himself (like Marilyn in the wind), one leg bent coquettishly in front of the other, grasping his robe with an air of scandalized dishabille. But, the bathroom door closing behind him, he immediately felt a hot gust rush from his head to his heart; because what if Valentine didn’t  feel the same? What if this fantasy was less the elaboration of a fact than the inflammation of a delusion? But there had been details, so many details, foremost among them the intense awkwardness which, despite twelve months of gossip, vodka and autumn leaves; twelve months of condoms, snowstorms and shared silences; twelve months of ecstatic overwrought conversations whirling with forgotten and oft-repeated revelations and punctuated only by the burning orbs of cigarettes and joints which by dawn would disperse at last into slow eddies of incense while outside the windows water slipped from leaf to leaf and flowers yawned pinkly in sweet half-slumbering breaths—the intense awkwardness which hovered and haunted any room in which he and Valentine were left alone, sober: because they had cried drunkenly into one another’s arms and yet? Yet lounging on couches in the vast thin silence before the bells began to chime for five o’clock, that silence as thin and flavorless as a final steep of tea, something more than late-afternoon lassitude hung between them, rendering their glances half-covert, almost shy. At these times Raphael (who was now turning the shower knobs, testing the heat, stepping onto the cold brown tiles) sensed a fear emanating from Valentine, which sometimes exacerbated his shyness into a cagey, hesitant sulk, because the terms between the two of them, the terms of the intimacy from which speaking would be or not be possible, those terms were unsettled by Raphael’s hope for romance with a willowy bookish boy, by which epithet Valentine could be described; but (thought Raphael, muttering, veiled in droplets of water) was that all? Was that really all? Because Valentine’s fear (the ghosts of his eyes roving, seeking) seemed to be addressed to something inside himself (seeking, roving through the perpetual dusk of the mind), something of which Raphael’s presence—and those rustling insubstantial wings rising from Raphael’s shoulders which were his desire taking form, overhanging them both, enfolding them both in a canopy of blue etherealized feathers—had made him faintly aware, in the living room late in the afternoon. And this awareness, faint as it was, was extraordinarily unsettling: Valentine (conjectured Raphael soaping his skin) felt that if he were not careful, if he did not foreshorten his phrases, his glances, then something might happen (because there was a topaz pulsing, burning in some far crevice of Valentine’s mind which his roving ghost-eyes forbore from revealing to him, a frozen topaz waiting to melt into a confession) which could not, most certainly could not happen because he loved women, and Raphael (thought Raphael, adorning himself briefly with Valentine’s eyes) was not a woman. But what was he, really? Raphael (insulated from a flawless green Friday by the hot howling shroud of water pouring over his head in this stall whose narrowness offered him a brief privacy reminiscent of what he imagined nuns felt kneeling, praying in the cells of their convents as tongues of fire gilded their supplicating bodies) Raphael did not float through rooms with dainty butterfly-parabolic steps or execute those prototypical fey angularities of a flicked wrist and was too broad-shouldered to even be considered epicene, except for the apparently cherubic glow of his cheeks; but within the domed desert of his skull, swarms of pearl-eyed rattlesnakes at all hours slithered and hissed on the scent of those rare iridescent eggs (those eggs—hidden and rehidden in an endless Easter panic—which Raphael called his ‘pieces of mind’) nestled in the crooks of prickly pears or cratered in drifts of sand, with whose silver yolks the snakes hungered to lacquer their lips, erasing meanwhile with innumerable slither-scribbles any brief attempt at language inscribed into the red dust by a wispy turquoise-dissolving hologram of Raphael himself, hunched, shuffling slowly backward while composing stanzas with a branch of twisted mesquite and an irrepressible devotion to delicacy materialized in thoughts (too awestruck to be spoken, too involuted to be remembered, lost as soon as he thought to write them, in waking life, on a slip of paper) which rivaled the moon in their coldly amorous ventriloquism of a distant light—but the light of what?

“Morning,” shouted Valentine as he blew through the bathroom to take a piss.

Suddenly everything became literal. Raphael was reduced to the proportions of his body. Or now at last, even if the vision couldn’t nourish him—now at last he was a butterfly? Because he was pinned by tiny needles (the hands of the clock) to a frame (bathroom, September 15th) and there was no more fluttering of wings, no more colorful dust: no more loop-de-loop among the ribs of Proteus’ glitching carcass. His visions were anesthetized.

Raphael turned the knobs; the water ceased. Now he was wet, pink, shriveled. Lost in the aftermath of a rebirth. The walls of the stall refused to acknowledge him; they stood expressionless and eternal, pretending to be a mausoleum for the embalmed corpse of a dead king. Living matter offended them. Raphael was an error. Something pierced him—and he opened the door, tumbling out unwillingly like the translucent flesh of a lobster. Onto the unblemished plate of a Friday afternoon.

“Morning,” he said, shivering. Without a form to take. Valentine still stood unseen astride a toilet as Raphael—nauseatingly enthralled by the glittering plash of piss—dried off, wrapped the towel around his waist and once more donned the yellow robe, water dripping from his lashes. The cool contact of the fabric reminded him of some television rerun he fell asleep watching as a child (Dallas, winter, 1996), wherein a woman, seated above an array of creams, pigments and powders as mysterious as a painter’s palette, prepares for an evening with a man, her lips parted, her eyes wide as she leans toward a mirror making quick black flicks along her lashes and slow red irrevocable strokes around her lips, then dreamy, coquettishly demure as she lifts a bouquet of roses from the ottoman beside her, buries her face in them, inhales deeply as if absorbing their extremely mortal sensuality, then rises, ripples down the hallway in a shimmering robe, searching breezily for a vase—and remembering what he had imagined to be her pleasure in imagining the man imagining her rippling down the hall, half-dressed, flowers in hand, Raphael was able to absorb, in turn, the affect of a woman who has just smelled her lover’s roses.^♥

His faith was blithe; his cheeks were flushed. He reached for his toothbrush. Meanwhile Valentine gave his cock a few final shakes, releasing one after another arpeggio of aural glitter, which Raphael’s inner mind—longing for a past that never was—processed romantically, extrapolating a Roman fountain, green summer shadows, and honeysuckle tumbling from a ruined arch: 

‘Let me stroll your ancient streets…’

Because it was not Raphael himself who felt that longing, who spoke those words, but the nameless woman behind whom Raphael—having steeped those roses, those lipsticks, that slow cascade of covert smiles, fanned fingers, and rustling fabrics for so many years in the liquoring swamp of his subconscious—had projected an extravagant past, longing, speaking wistfully through him as he lifted the toothbrush and pressed paste onto its bristles, while his sleeves slipped and collected in deep golden folds at his elbows with such an air of sensuous ease that he could not help but imagine her into more than his mannerisms, more than his expressions, but by breathless induction to mistake her for himself until, lifting the toothbrush to his lips, he was not merely haunted, but possessed. When we sit together, close, we melt into each other with phrases

Valentine slouched out of the toilet stall and, insulating himself from the immediate coincidence of their gazes, rubbed his face vigorously.

‘Am I Medusa, that you refuse to meet my eyes…’ whispered the rustling woman.

But Raphael only said: “Have you had lunch yet?”

^♥ This affect belonged not only to the ‘woman,’ but also the actress, who had perhaps imitated, in the conscious gestures of her performance, an old Hollywood black-and-white film she first saw as an adolescent, in which a woman receives roses from her lover—and certainly she had herself received roses from a lover at some point and at that point had imitated, less consciously, the same gestures, and was now, that is, in the moment of her performance, investing this third bouquet with the accumulated dream of the roses she had received and the roses, the silver roses, that she had imagined receiving when she first watched a starlet sigh on screen, so that by the time Raphael, preparing to brush his teeth, had unwittingly inherited it more than half a century later, the ‘ritual of roses’ had achieved the fortitude, not only of an affect, but of an artifact.