The Antimuscarinic

“At the advent of the Renaissance in Italy, it had been discovered that a tincture of Atropa Belladonna, when diluted and then dropped into a lady’s eyes, blocked the nerve receptors in the eye muscle that contracts the pupil. Her pupil would then reach the outer boundary of the iris giving her a doe-eyed look. The men of Florence and Rome found this sexually stimulating. Belladonna was incorporated in the regimen of ladies at court, who knew full well that the import of attracting a well-suited courtier out weighted the importance of being able to see. At any given dinner party, the male guests would be interspersed with lady companions with eyes utterly brimming with the table’s candlelight, impossibly shiny. Eyes like onyx.

“Belladonna contains scopolamine and hyoscyamine. When ingested, Belladonna is a hallucinogenic. It often induces delirium. When dropped in the eyes, user will experience profound visual distortions and an increased heart rate. Habitual Belladonna dropping is fatal.”

 

George did not need to be told that women will kill themselves slowly for fashion. Emily had been working on the same take-out for three days now. The article did not state how long an abuser of Belladonna could be expected to live. One year? Five? Dear Emily. How long was she planning on?

George read “eyes like onyx” inadvertently several times over again, interrupting his assimilation of the last paragraph as his eyes would flicker back to that moment.

His first year at Colombia he had attended a rave with a girl from New Mexico on scholarship for her work as an archeologist. The rave was in Jersey in a warehouse hidden by a south bank of trees. Accustomed to parties with cocaine neatly lined on the sill, George started to feel waves of depression then anxiety as the archeologist deftly slipped into his convoluted posture, guiding his dance with her hipbone. A velvety sort of panic began to warp his chest wall.

It wasn’t difficult to find a drug once he had convinced himself that he needed it.

George remembered how amused he’d been looking at the unassuming pill. It could have been children’s aspirin. Then the layers of heaven peeled off. Above the swinging colored lights he could clearly see the stars with child-like awe. Sweat was forming on the back of the archeologist’s neck. Her sweat smelled of clementines. He followed, with unprecedented joy, the lines her skeleton made, across her shoulders, the spine in the neck, the straight jaw, the delicate bones in her ear.

Her eyes! Completely open! Did she break her lock? Or was he seeing in her eyes a reflection of his – his eyes surely – an owl perched above a lake in the moonlight. “You’re a lake,” he whispered to the most delicate of bones. For the first time, uninterrupted, his breath returned to him and left him as he continued, “Made out of what made me.”

George never told Emily about the rave. They weren’t in habit of telling each other most things, it is true, but George felt the experience something grander than most of their secrets and had wanted to, really, tell her that we are all elements.

Wording…

No doubt she’d express a snobbish sentiment, hinting such parties so be beneath them. Bella Donna. George entertained the image of her swinging about in a bustle and tiny corset, bending delicately over her hand of cards to brush what looked like confectioner’s sugar from her nose.

Probably Just Indigestion

The only apple left was a sad, slightly squishy thing. The pears wouldn’t be ripe enough for at least another three days. George reminded himself that even the most perfect-looking apples aren’t always edible. He remembered vividly slicing into an apparently flawless Pink Lady a few months ago and starting back at sight of its rotten core, already fuzzy with mold. By the same logic, an apple spotted with various imperfections did not automatically classify it inedible. So George resigned himself to the wrinkled Granny Smith, sinking his teeth into the pink blush (or was it a bruise?) and watched the rain leave legs on the window.

The sun was just about to reach his boomerang point, but gray clouds and heavy moisture scattered his light so thoroughly that George couldn’t say exactly were he was. When New York got this way, especially being so close to the park, it was all but indistinguishable from Paris in its grayest, winter moments. Harsher lights from television sets cut through the haze intermmitently as apartments in the complex across took refuge from the spring’s storm with Barefoot Contessa.

In a reoccurring dream of his, he was standing in front such a window, in such a rain. The clouds were the only landscape, and would crowd the window like schools of curious fish against the tank in an aquarium. He was always alone in this dream, dressed as a true professional with silver cuff links and impeccably pressed trousers. He loathed smoking when he was awake, thanks to Emily, whose Marlboro Lights would invade all space (and the world is mostly space) with its death-like musk. Yet here, in this dream, staring at the window and the rain, he’d be smoking.

He smoked, but mostly counted. Aloud he would recite, “Eight, seventeen, one hundred thirty seven, two, sixty six, twenty four…” as if announcing the tape from a stock marque. The numbers never stayed the same. He was unable to distinguish a pattern. He would stand and recite, with more confidence and clarity than his waking voice embodied until the clouds moved from gray to black. It was at this point in the dream when George would feel fear. There was a power pervading the space that didn’t permit him to move from his position at the window, reciting the numbers. Still the numbers would come, forcing their way out of his mouth with increased urgency, as beads of sweat ran down his neck, his chest, down his right thigh.

The dream had, undoubtedly, connection with his line of work, but there was something with a more serious flavor embedded. Having analyzing the dream several times over, often at 5:30 a.m. in a little diner on 67th with a small pastry and coffee so strong it came with grind dregs at the bottom, George thought it unfortunate that he should find his voice (so eloquent he sounded! A reincarnation of Don LaFontaine surely, if LaFontaine was resurrected an accountant!) only to be bound by the invisible power, the dream concluding in fear.

George would wake in a sweat. He’d dry his face with the cool side of the pillow before standing, dressing quickly, setting his glasses carefully in place and patting pockets to be sure of his wallet. They knew him at the diner now. They knew him to be eccentrically quiet and owl-eyed, who might or might not remember to bring reading material. The sensations of helplessness and fragility that the dream left him with would take him at least an hour to shake off, stirring his coffee obsessively dissolving every last of the five sugar cubes.

He wasn’t dreaming now. He was eating an apple. Numbers were nevertheless running through his mind. A new client had recently entrusted him with $200,000. The client had expressed interest in a mutual fund that George had composed for a few fellow consultants, but no, now, George thought, the world of silver and gold was about to receive a little shaking. George must tell him, as soon as this entire apple had made its way to his stomach, that his money would make him infinitely more if he entrusted it to the wave that was about to come.

Je Suis Une Gamine

“And now,” he said, “let’s play a game.”

Emily had agreed to see him only on account of historical import, on her part: his presence when she was twelve, thirteen and fourteen could not be undone. His youthful dare-devilry excited her barely-adolescent sex… and what with that delicious wavy hair, good god. Mr. Darcy! and all that.

She could not force her eyes away from the horrendous tattoo. Emily realized that that dare-devil existed better as potential energy. Seeing what he’d done with that reckless head… besides that tattoo who knows?… only impressed upon her the importance of thinking things through thoroughly.

“Is this a verbal game? The type we think aloud and surrender the modus operandi of our minds?” Emily asked.

“I can’t imagine you showing me anything more than you’d like to. You’ve always held your cards like this.” He held an invisible hand close to his chest.

Emily prided herself on her poker game.

“So anyway,” he continued, “The Game.” He held his thumbs and indexes in frame. ” The next street over has a thrift shop.”

Yes, Emily knew it.

“In the southeastern corner there’s a room full of little figurines. You pick one that represents who you thought I would grow up to be while attending school and, another, representing what I am now.”

“Ugh,” Emily thought, “the blue in that tattoo.” Aloud: “You’ll do the same for me?”

“That’s the game.”

The figurines had no thematic boundaries. The cowboys were sitting with angels and cocker spaniels. There were several mirrors extending their hodgepodge diorama into infinity. She found an iron wolf. Then she found a dashboard hula doll.

Emily bought them and waited out his indecisiveness at the northeastern end with the hats and cocktail shakers.

Once when they skipped classes, they stole his grandfather’s Siata and took it to a sheepherder’s where they sat on the hood smoking, watching a Kelpie herd the sheep. She had leaned back so as to unobtrusively observe his profile. His nose was active, his lashes and eyes dark and fascinated. The small hairs on his forearms were at attention. A born predator, truly.

He found Emily in a cloche. He set two figurines down. She handed him her selection. She bend down to face his figurines at eye level. The first was a plastic bride meant for the crown of a wedding cake. The second was a brass girl, a twiggy thing holding out a bunch of sticks. Emily lifted her and found inscribed on the back, “Hans Christian Anderson’s Little Match Girl.”

“That’s the closest I could get to a chain smoker,” he explained. He lifted up the Hula Girl. “Fuck you.”

Glass Man

Let me hold your heart like a cup

Of coffee. I haven’t eaten today at

all… shakey. My chest steals against

the caffeine and hinders my breathing

what warmth I would feel if my blood

had more oxygen. I’ve steeled myself

for what you’ll do to me: my jaw will lock

a real bitch on the little bone offered.

 

Yes, like this, your heart like this

especially fragile. My hands don’t

slip too often, but should it be only

think: pieces of porcelain all over the linoleum

it might be the china doll’s head.

Looking over the pieces I might

make out some of her face, following

a blush of cheek there a mouth

painted that way. You must forgive me.