flashback
- Peter Magliocco
In(-2) that mulch of lost time we call the genesis of the 21st Century: when temporal concerns are blurred between one millennium & the next. Inside the vertical white bldg. with its several stories leading to an invisible roof you could see through to infinitesimal reaches, unbound at last. I made the mistake of taking a room there a few days after the last L.A. earthquake. The Big One. The one which leveled most high-rises into smog-haze and residue for dissertations by termites. "Up yer ass if I'll go into such a mutherfuckin' place," Elena Gordiva, a resolute whisky drinking partner -- & one of the world's great exotic dancers before the quake damaged her beautiful right ankle -- exclaimed. On my door an oval mirror revealed Elvis' pudgy, woebegone face just before he died. No one could see it but me, though together we watched the mirror as the tall cinematic bldg. continued to sway intermittently from the ongoing aftershocks, and through a scenic picture window the still smoking ruins of L.A. throbbed with smoky allure.
I told her we would imagine completely the final filming of our digital lives together. What would the purpose of touching be at this point, she cursed, taking the designer medicine? This sentence Elena whispered into the pale shell of my word-absorbing ear, not even sure if she were hearing herself. Begin at the beginning? From the sequestered film studio lab (somewhere within the white bldg., "its church-like domicile of a centerpiece dominating the sere landscape with faux-futuristic architecture, I tell you is really ancient, you bullshitter") she desired we see it all again the way it played in the mirror, its gilt-ornate frame belonging to old masters and new. "Don't leave this room," I told her. The mirror: eye of the original lens reflecting us. The beginning pictographs of all history & time-redeemed swirled about her as Elvis disappeared from us, until Elena too was gone from the bldg.'s depressing off-white partitions and strangely lit rooms. Where now gods dissected one another in the name of a lost mankind. Where the King kneeled before her splendid naked figure and blessed himself, far from thoughts of lusty murder, from the Venus in furs Rubens saw in her ample fleshy folds -- apart now from the very beginning of such depictions & their fixed evolution through the architectonics of desire she breathed in, choking as one does on the musty fungus adhering to archived film & dustbooks, to old & time-bound books one should never open, touching with a finger the many images of forebears who shared her sex with that perfect facial skin of a Raphael Madonna, or Leonardo's St. Anne kneeling next to Vermeer's young girl with a glistening pearl recasting luminescently! The crucified impostor's crooked, dead body as a cast-off white robe at our feet. Elena shrieked. I dropped my drink, the glass breaking neatly on the Italian marble floor. She had come back to me: blind & broken, wavering there, whimpering, "I saw why it has happened " in a guilt-heavy whisper from her throat, counterpointed by low sobs. "We're out of place. In the wrong time and place." Elena asked why I, her Interpreter, could only speak aloud the words silence should have taken from us. Kneeling, now nude and bleeding from the mirror cuts, she wept from deep loss. "Let's all drink to magic, art & life," I wink with penultimate abandon, smelling the breath of her body, before these images & words overturn for good like the vertical white bldg. now swaying. I return to the bar, making a fresh drink. On the t.v. screen one of the King's old musicals plays on, as if it had never been tampered with -- or interrupted.
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