Continuous Aspect

Julian Robles

Every month or so, late at night around two or three, J sends me stories about a character named V. V is J’s middle initial. V is like J. V has done most of the things J has done in his life, and has thought most of the thoughts J has. V is crueler than J. V likes hip-hop. J likes hip-hop. V tells lies. J tells lies.

I live in another city now, far away from J. This city sits across an ocean; it exists on a continent with rich and violent cultural histories, with sculptures and museums, and many languages are spoken here. Friends tell me I am lucky to live in this city, which, when they visit, they say is like New York—or like specific parts of New York that are considered hip. I don’t agree with the comparison, but I never say so.

In this city I ride my bike anywhere I want, which is often to parks and to art galleries, where I’ll pass entire afternoons. Other days I ride my bike to bars and clothing stores and museums, and to work, of course. On Tuesday evenings I ride my bike to language classes. I’ve become quite proficient in this new language, though I still struggle with the conjugation of certain verbs and with gaps in my vocabulary. The instructor suggests speaking to friends and watching movies or reading books. I do those things, but there’s something else that happens after language classes which I don’t imagine she has a solution for.

Some nights as I bike home I am overcome by a vast loneliness. I feel small, and physically I am small, but more than that I feel reduced, as though my body has slipped into a vanishing point within one of the countless paintings that hang in the museums I visit. I then remember how so many of those paintings were created by artists from this city (or from nearby cities and countries) who have, perhaps thousands of times, depicted the streets I bike on—or an idealized version of these streets. Their lasting achievement: a continent where horizon and linear perspective are laws of nature. And sometimes I wonder if those artists weren’t also anticipating the idealized version of every person who came after them; if, when I am riding home after language classes, I am experiencing what it’s like to inhabit a more perfect version of myself.

Since we live so far from one another, J’s stories reach my email inbox at around eight or nine my time, during my commute to work. These stories always play out the same way: V floats from event to event, a vagabond in a surrealist landscape whose geographies are shaped by the threat of violence. This violence permeates his dreams. It is an inheritance bestowed by the country his family is from. It brushes past his lips like a breeze. But violent things never happen—not to V, at least. V is a writer or wants to be a writer. V is a stranger and a voyeur. He lies and cheats and he hopes his art will absolve him. Literature flows all around him. In some of these stories he encounters—or has long broken up with—a woman like me. Her name is P. Sometimes her name is D, but usually it is P. At the end of every story V is alone.

Occasionally J’s stories are published. More and more they can be found in respected literary magazines, or selected in contests by well-known writers and editors. He sends me links to those stories, too. There is one sitting in my inbox now. It’s titled “Saving Lives,” and I know better than to believe that anyone will be saved in it. And I should know better than to read it.

Recently J has become fond of effaced and nameless narrators, though these narrators invariably resemble V. In this way J is similar to B, who wrote songs about me.

I met B on a friend’s rooftop in the city that I am from. He was interested in my taste in music. He said he was interested in my paintings, too, though he found their abstraction difficult to comprehend. Above all he complimented my taste in music. B was in a band. That was something easy to talk about.

B struggled with erectile dysfunction the summer we met. I never told anyone, only J. B didn’t actually have erectile dysfunction, not more than the usual amount, but I lied to J because he kept pestering me about B. It was clear he wanted to have something over him and I knew that would do it. What did happen that summer was that I watched B and his band perform in small bars. The music was fine, never anything more than that. I think the sex was fine, too, but I don’t remember it. After about two months I never remember it, except if something spectacular or terrifying happened.

B once said that if he could be gifted with a different type of musical talent he would choose to be a rapper; and then he said that if he could choose to practice any art form other than music he would be a painter. He said it’s hot watching painters move their bodies while they work. I told him not all paintings are as big as the ones I was working on at the time. Sometimes you sit in one place and only move your arm. He nodded and said, Your paintings are good. I would make paintings exactly like yours.

Then one day B stopped talking to me. No text messages. No phone calls. He wrote a song about why he’d changed his mind and posted it online.

When J writes about B, he changes his name to A or G, or to names beginning with the letter A. V has gotten into fistfights with A or G. V has imagined cuckoldish fantasies involving himself, A, and P (or D). V and G have had long, pointless debates about music and art at bars and at parties in their friends’ apartments. Sometimes a narrator with a voice like V’s describes the life of a character like B, and in these stories B is doomed to suffer humiliation and irony.

Last month I stopped seeing N, who detests irony. I learned this the first time we met. He had just taken a photograph of me.

I look at that photograph now, and as a record of the dialogue exchanged between us that day—between our voices and bodies—it is useless. I can barely remember what I told him about myself, or where we went to eat, or what I thought about him when I rode my bike home afterward. Instead I remember the banal. All the banal things I’ve never heard N or J or B talk about. I’m not embarrassed to say that I look at the woman in the photo, with her wavy brown hair, shoulder length and tucked behind her ears, and rather than pondering forms of light and shadow, all I remember is that I had gotten a haircut the day before. I remember that was the shortest my hair had ever been, and the night before I had gone to bed worrying that it would be too thick and poofy to fall the way I like. But the next day it looked great.

I admire thoughts like these, because there’s no fooling oneself into believing that they are unique. Imagine the most profound observation; or imagine an insight arrived at during a lively discussion on a first date in a sophisticated city: I think and think for hours each day, and occasionally notice that I’ve done exactly that—think. Now I’ll try claiming credit for what I’ve thought, when, as far as it concerns me, the thought may as well have been thought by anyone. And it is, by anyone but me.

Of course, I didn’t tell N any of that. He took a photo of me at the edge of a river, in this city where I live, and two weeks later he mailed me a print. If I told him the story of the haircut (which is too uneventful for someone like J to call a story), he would say, Oh, obviously I knew there was something new and uncertain about you then. That’s why I took the photo.

N loves uncertainty in people, especially when it is paired with sincerity. One day, out of the blue, he told me to stop him if I ever detected irony in his photos. I don’t know what he meant by that: stop him. I didn’t ask. I said, I’ll try my best.

In some of J’s stories, P is only implied. What this means is that over the course of the story, V’s interactions with P diminish, sometimes over the course of several years, to the point that she begins to resemble a ghost or an illusion. In this way it is my existence which is uncertain. Crucial to this effect is V’s memory of P’s voice, which he describes as sounding not like a voice, exactly, but like an old recording of a voice—a forgotten, heartbreaking sound.

N used to say that he wished he could capture my voice in his photographs (and he once gave me a print in which he claims to have come close). B wrote songs about a girl whose voice fades into a breeze.  

In this city where I live, if I seek the solitude, I can go whole weekends without hearing myself speak, sometimes longer. Then I attend language classes where my voice must bear a certain heaviness as it bends to produce new consonant clusters and diphthongs, where it strains under foreign declensions and rigid syntax. I cherish this labor. There is no literature in the sound it produces, only itself, striving.

There are other kinds of labor I cherish. My work at my office job, for example, which N and J know very little about. Then there are my paintings and drawings. I still paint when I find the time, but I consider the pieces to be modest and trivial, regardless of what L, the guy in the flat above me, believes. L is a filmmaker and a poet. The first time he saw my paintings I was out of town and had asked him to water my plants. When I got home he insisted I sell him one. And later, when we were seeing each other more frequently, I explained that I want my creations to be trivial. That’s the point, I said. I know they’re good—great, even, and I’m not concerned with anything more than that. These days I’m only interested in minor things. No, I don’t believe you, he said smiling. He shook his head and put his arm around my waist.

A line in a short story: Her voice reminded me of my girlfriend’s: small and faraway even with her lips right up to my ear.

During the months we were together I never read J’s writing—he hadn’t been published yet and he was too shy to share the drafts. He said he was writing about childhood. It’s bad, he said after I asked to see a story. I wasn’t sure if he meant the writing or the childhood.

But I do remember the first time he emailed and wrote, You’ll like this one. Now I read those words all the time: if J writes, You’ll like this one, then I know to expect a story about art—what J thinks art is. Although it’s never actually about the art. In the pages that follow V will become obsessed with a performance, an artist, a painting. He will exhaust himself, leave himself half-dead trying to grasp every contour of the experience of it. Of course, it becomes more sinister than that. Through V, J has tried articulating a confusing belief that the fabric underlying experiences of art is a silent dialogue shared between people (What about landscape paintings, P once asked. Even landscapes, V said); so through V, J will destroy every person he knows for even a glimpse at the fabric. Because V and J don’t know what is a picture and what is hope.

In his most recent email J writes, I’m not really sure about this story, is it clear this is meant as a critique? I’m trying something anti-art, anti-narrative, does the form convey that? I don’t know about the ending, can you please tell me? Please, I don’t know. I don’t know.

Obsessions. Each man comes with his own obsessions and with his list of recommendations. N brought me books on architecture after I told him I didn’t know much about the topic. He loves using the term public space. He loves the word more than the thing. B likes pop music from twenty years before we were born or music that imitates that style. We sat in his bedroom and he told me who was bad and who was great and who he wanted to sound like and who wasn’t appreciated enough. I still have a stack of zines L left on my kitchen table. He only respected independent publishers and Third Cinema. L taught me what Third Cinema is. J claimed to have read and reread all the Latin American writers—in English and Spanish. I was skeptical. I told him he didn’t need to impress me: That’s a lot of names, I said. I own a lot of books, he replied. But what most surprised me was his obsession with the writing of religious-minded women from rural towns in the Midwest. Later this fixation on piety would make sense. Naturally V shares in J’s obsessions, which include mirrors, sixteenth-century Flemish painters, and maps.

Last week I heard from N for the first time since ending things. He sent me a text message warning me to stay away from L on the grounds that L is a cut-rate artist. As proof he included a photo of a poem written by L and published in a magazine I’ve never heard of. In the poem the speaker briefly mentions a person named P. Sound familiar? N asked. I didn’t know they knew each other or that L was going to do that, but when I saw N’s message I could only laugh.

I replied to N with a picture of a photograph he—N—had taken of me on my balcony one morning. In the photograph I am wearing a big T-shirt, maybe N’s, maybe J’s from long ago. I’m not wearing anything underneath, but you wouldn’t know from looking at the photo. My legs stretch into the empty chair across the table from me. The trees that shade my balcony are in bloom, which means I would be on the lookout for bees. I’m terrified of bees for reasons that have never been clear to me—I’ve never been stung or anything. N wouldn’t have known that when he took the photo. J never knew either. The table is circular and coated with white metallic paint that has begun to chip. The legs of the table, which at their ends curl upwards like scrolls, are streaked with rust. Apparently it has recently rained: a puddle of copper-colored water has collected near the table’s legs in a small depression on the balcony. My own leg has a rust-colored scab above the knee. I can’t remember from what, maybe a minor bike accident on the commute to work. In the photo my face is turned away from the camera—watching for bees—concealing all but a triangular blur of cheekbone above my shoulder. My hand is raised to shade my eyes from the sun. My hair is still short. I like it short.

Another obsession of V’s: ballet. Ballet and amateur porn.

I still send J nude photos of myself. I send them to B and to N and L too. N messages back saying he wishes he could take the photos himself. He wants to help me get the angles. I wish so badly, he says. B responds by asking if I have time to call and talk about the way he ended things. L asks if it’s okay for him to send a nude back. L always asks permission for the smallest things—and only the small things. J will write about my nudes later, but it won’t be P or D who sent them, because he’s always made P into such a bore. It will be one of his other ex-girlfriends, like M or S or C or T. If you ever read about this, it won’t be my body.

Normally I take these photos while I bathe. I prop my phone along the ledge of the tub and then I pose with my head turned to the side, tilted slightly downwards; other times I look directly into the camera with a mischievous smile. I like to do things with my hands, too. Let one graze my breast or obscure half of my face. Feel the fingers skirt the edge of a nipple. My favorite is when I bend my head back and stare at the ceiling. While I’m gazing upwards, I swallow and feel the flesh in my neck strain against the rings of my trachea. It almost hurts. Then I slide my hand down from my shoulder to my chest and between my legs, and it feels so good that I never want to look down again.

Less than a week after N has sent the message warning me about him, L comes marching down the stairs. He has apparently learned of N’s attempts at amorous warfare. L knocks for five minutes and stands silently outside the apartment door for another ten. I hear the wood floor creak beneath his feet. You’re crazy, he shouts at last. He leaves and immediately comes back, this time playing a song from his phone. It must be a song he and I have talked about loving, but through the door the sound is so muffled that the song is unidentifiable. I know you’re in there, he says. Even his voice sounds different. I sit cross-legged on my couch and close my eyes, and in the stillness between breaths I almost forget where I am. He could be anyone. Is that another of your songs about me, B? I say. Who is that? L asks. Who is B? Another minute passes and he leaves.

So many lives to choose from, but he has reduced literature to two letters standing upright and solitary as tombstones. Is it an insufficiency of imagination, these initials and personas?

“Every man is the same man,” wrote an Argentine whose work J idolizes. “No one is anyone.” In that case, nothing of a need for V. Any letter but J is superfluous—and to write that one letter is already to cleave him, leaving us three: J, a text called J, and I.

Sometimes I imagine all the fragments of my body that are scattered around this city, and around the cities in my artists’ imaginations. At the outskirts of my neighborhood there is a narrow pedestrian bridge beneath which dozens of train tracks diverge and expand. I often walk my bike across the bridge on the commute to work, and some mornings I stop to admire how those simple, brittle lines recast this city into a broad, ancient plain of metal and wood. A playful illusion which some might call order or art, to be seen and unseen. I’ve thought about drawing it. And yet, I would never choose to give my body to this image—give as in the triangle of cheekbone that N’s photograph has smudged across my balcony, and which can never be unseen; or the photographed woman at the edge of the river whose hair now glistens beneath the currents. Give as in my voice, hushed and blue, whipped by the waves of some song’s distant ocean; as in my lips and shoulders abandoned in cities I’ve never visited, in stories J creates.

I wrote something that, strictly speaking, is not true. V is not like J. V is often described doing worse things than J has ever done, as though by convincing people that he and V are one, as though by seemingly confessing his worst impulses, J’s real-life sins will be preemptively forgiven. But maybe that is an unkind interpretation of his intentions. J is, for the most part, kind and thoughtful. He makes an effort to be as thoughtful as possible, and sometimes I wonder if V isn’t a cruel lash he turns against himself.

One night J called instead of writing—only once—and tearfully revealed that he couldn’t imagine sustaining the will to live another two years, another year, in a world in which he felt so disconnected from other people. Even V has never sounded so hopeless.

Or am I misremembering: was it V who said that, after all?

Almost a year after I moved to this city, J sent me a story that I couldn’t look at. I didn’t read his emails for weeks afterward. It was winter, when I take the train to work instead of my bike. After I read the story I got off at the next station and almost vomited on the platform.

The story appears to have six characters, but really there are only four. Here’s what happens: First we are introduced to V. V is a writer. V has written a story and sent it to a woman named P, though it is never revealed whether she actually receives it. V’s story is about two lovers: a man named J and a woman also named P (both of whom, it becomes clear, correspond to their real-world counterparts). So, for simplicity’s sake, let’s begin again: V sends a story to P. This story is about their past relationship. V has fond memories of P, but most of the time he remembers her as though she is a ghost. One day he has a fabulous, cruel idea: he writes a story about their relationship told from the point of view of an actual ghost. The ghost is named X—he didn’t even bother to change her name. X is my dead sister.

Now let’s start over one last time: J writes a story about the life he and I once shared and he sends the story to me. His story is narrated by my dead sister, X. In this story, X’s spirit has followed P—me—on and off for years. One day, X returns to find a different ghost floating near her sister. This other ghost is named U. U corresponds to U—he didn’t bother to change her name, either. U was a friend of J’s and mine whose ghost is now tethered to J for reasons the story only hints at. The ghosts U and X become friends, and that summer they join J and P as the lovers travel across countries with old cities and famous museums. Everywhere they go, J and P discuss art and have sex and talk about their love and their fears. X and U, our ghostly observers, listen to our conversations, commenting on the events of the trip and holding their own discussions alongside us. At one point, after I share a childhood memory of X, J almost tells me about a fight he and U had the night before she died. The details surrounding the cause of the fight are deliberately vague, but it doesn’t matter—in the end J loses his nerve and says nothing. The summer ends and, as planned, J and P break up. J returns to the city they are from and P stays to start a new job in the city I now live in. U is forced to leave with J. X remains with her sister, reflecting on the departure of U and pondering if the dead owe anything to the living. In the final scene, my sister looks on while I water plants on the balcony of my apartment.

L knew of lots of people who had died. In the country his parents fled from things are just like that, he said. He talked about this in his films and poems. In one video, he recorded his mom telling the story about the day his uncle was killed in a bombing. The recording was part of something bigger, he said. She was crying and shaking, pushing her fists into her eyes. I’d never been so mad in front of him. I asked, Why are you doing that? You’re making her kill him. You’re killing her brother all over again.

B didn’t know anyone who had died, not even a grandparent. He knew he should be thankful for that fact, but he believed the absence of the experience negatively impacted his art. He could spend hours detailing the biographies of his favorite rappers and the death that had hollowed out their lives. This one’s mom was shot right in front of him. That one’s best friend was murdered in a drug deal gone wrong. This other saw his dad overdose in the kitchen. Then there are all the rappers who had themselves died, always too young.

When I finally responded to J it was with a photo of me in the bathtub. In that photo—the first I ever sent—the detachable shower head dangles delicately from my left hand, and I stare directly into the camera. My lips are slightly parted, as if forming a letter or uttering a secret. A white blur of teeth is just visible through the space between them. In the background is a bottle of shampoo and a washcloth. My hair was still long then, and it is piled atop my head in a messy bun from which long curls have come undone. I’m flushed from my chest up to my neck. And my heart, which is not visible, is racing faster than ever before. I could feel the blood pulsing into my fingertips; my skin burned at the back of my throat.

The next week I sent another photo. The next month J sent a short story.

I finally got around to reading the most recent email. Its contents were nothing new—typical V: menacing voyeur, mirrors, art, death. It wasn’t until I reached the end of the story, and a wave of relief passed over me, that I realized how excited and afraid I’d been to read it. Maybe that makes me sound vain or as though I’m more messed up than other people, as though I lack self-respect or I’m not angry enough about what he did to my sister. And if I said that sometimes the idea of hearing her speak, even in a voice that belongs to J, is too tempting to ignore—maybe that would make me sound like P. Some nights, when I bike home from language class, I pretend that I really am P:  

I imagine how if I existed in a story written by J, or even a story written by some of the famous women that J admires, then this would be a disappearing city, and I a disappearing woman. I imagine a place where ghosts loom over me and make beautiful observations about the horizon, and these ghosts aren’t my sister, but rather my own voice receding across an impassable chasm in time. From above I appear fuzzy and vague, nameless, not as an act of refusal but as a result of inescapable technocratic erasure and a psyche unmoored from reality. I look exactly like the photo N has taken of me by the river. I mean, I look like the imitation of a photo—I mean, a stray strand of hair curves around my chin in perfect imitation of the lines of the current. And my eyes are made of water. In the story this photo tells, which is the story J writes, my work is rote and mindless. I ride my bike everywhere, which is often to museums and art galleries, where I’ll pass entire afternoons. Here I develop kinships with obscure, minor artists, the ones no one ever cared for—as forgotten and disappeared as me. In this city my life has no beginning or end, except in language.

And on nights that I pedal home from language class, I’ll keep imagining that dream city until it dissolves into laughter. I’ll laugh breathlessly at J’s faith in it, and my occasional faith in it, as its image becomes replaced by a city exactly like this one: where some days I ride buses instead of bikes; and I miss the train and arrive to work late and become frustrated with my absentmindedness. Where I begin to doubt if I can survive this loneliness, so far from home, and then I need to speak to people from my past, even the ones that make the loneliness worse. In this city, I spill coffee on my white shirts and get haircuts every six weeks, and when I chop vegetables in the kitchen I think about art far less often than I do about buying new socks and shampoo. The only language on my mind is this new one, when I listen to children in the park playing and shouting in a grammar that lacks the continuous aspect.

I’ve thought of emailing J back and telling him how wrong he got it—but, no, even the banal can’t remain a refuge. He’d want to write about it. Because V has never let the banal be.

A month ago I saw L for the last time. No screaming or music, that was my one condition. After we slept together, I told him to leave all his zines on the table and asked him to keep sharing his poems with me despite the way things had to end. He thanked me tearfully, he used the word “grateful.”

Some nights before bed I hear him through the ceiling, pacing around his flat. It never bothers me; I’m a heavy sleeper. The next morning I can expect a terrible poem about a girl named P (or D) slipped under my door. I send these poems to J and tell him how much I admire L’s writing. I’m still waiting for a response.

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Julian Robles is a Mexican (-American) writer. He lives in Estado de México.