Fiction and Drama

There were speakers everywhere, pointed out upper-story windows, throbbing on porches, wedged in the crooks of trees, and the sum of so much blasted music composed a surprisingly gentle mélange above which burbled the happy shouts and shrieks of classmates greeting each other after a summer apart. So this, Irma thought, was the Parties.

I had hidden everything. Monitors were not allowed to talk about themselves with residents. We could lose pay, placement, and good standing. You can find me in the DSM, I said.

This is her break. Her good thing. She refers to it as her Success. The money is enough to quit Bill’s, leave that stupid town, accept an internship in London. For a year or so, at the parties she now attends, she regularly brings it up. Crazy, isn’t it, what some people will pay for a piece of cardboard?

 — Wait, what did he call you? Sadiya said. Julio applied everything he’d learned of hermeneutics, philology, and translation theory to give Sadiya a serviceable definition of pinche güey — It’s like [Napoleon Dynamite voice] freakin’ idiot — Is it, Sadiya said, I always fancied Chuy more a Pedro type — Wooow, Julio said, you are literally the Danger of a Single Story — Says the guy whose only exposure to South African culture was District 9 — Hey, you forgot the 2010 FIFA World Cup — I didn’t forget, I just didn’t want to relive that trauma .

As things stand, the field of psychiatry offers us no precise definition for such cases of fleeting madness as those experienced by Mohammed Shatta, though literature has preserved an account of the phenomenon from the perspective of one of its more notable sufferers: L’avenir dure longtemps, by the French philosopher Louis Althusser.

The murdered Poet became for him the gash in the center of the sun, the model and the justification for being misunderstood. From the audience, during academic conferences, he hurled passionate and senseless accusations at the speakers, which were met with chuckles and mild feelings of guilt. Even though he had a stable relationship and many occasional lovers, more and more it seemed to him that the double seduction left unfulfilled on that far-off day was the one true memorable event in his life.

Fateh and Fatimah lived on the westernmost edge of Simpelveld, at the end of a long row of apartment blocks, in the tallest building in the vicinity. To the west were sunken lanes that ascended into low hills; to the east the paved street that led to the town proper. I blew out a thick stream of smoke, musing that, as in a cartoon depiction of anger, I was literally blowing off steam.

That night I dreamed that my dad had died. The lectern at the service was too high and nobody could see me. I didn’t know what to say, so I gave a eulogy about someone I knew a little better who was still alive. When I woke up, my pillow was drenched with sweat. Had my speech been well received? I did some googling and learned that lecterns are between forty-five and forty-eight inches tall. I am nearly a foot taller than that. Thank God.