Deepa

In the evening the geckos chirp around our old Queenslander from high up on the walls. I didn’t
know what the sound was until mom told me. I live here with her and we live otherwise alone.
I’ve torn ligaments in my ankle and knee and now I am bed ridden. The birds chirp at dawn. I
am up at most hours. I have trouble sleeping. I have trouble with my thoughts. Every thought,
every once organic, natural idea or notion is take apart and looked at from various angles again
and again until all the spontaneity, all the magic of it is drained. I am beginning to develop too a
disgust with organic, and often too inorganic form; there is too much detail in nature and not
enough in the constructs of man, man’s constructs seem too rigid, nature’s too inundated with
variety.
I hear noises from the attic at night. I believe some people may be living up there.
Everything around me, ideas and memories, as much as tangible realities, are slowly being
reduced to simple geometric patterns. I recall a bout of group love making which I recently
undertook with my Swedish friend, and two beautiful 19 year olds. I recall the face of one of the
teenagers slowly defragmenting into bold block colors; a bright yellow strip for the nose, a
pastel purple patch making up the cheek and chin, a warm reddish hue around the eyes,
something strange and unplaceable going on with the shoulder, or something like that.
Suddenly all four of us were halfway up Everest, Quentin Tarentino’s Pulp Fiction was playing
from somewhere out of sight. Tickets to see it were 200 rupees. My Swedish friend had wanted
to go but I didn’t particularly give a damn.
Sure, it was a very interesting little film; gentle and gracious, almost feminine in places,
objectionably violent of course, there is no doubt about that, but ultimately gentle, demure and
bashful in first viewing, emerging shyly but quite graciously in later viewings, with something
delightful, consoling and feminine in its under-lying message. Nonetheless, I was not
interested.
‘I don’t want to go’ I’d said to Dana, ‘I want to go back into town and paint. I realize that I’ll
need your shoulder to cry on from time to time while I’m there too, so join me, let’s go’
But he did not respond anything to this.
Some time passed. I felt I did not particularly want to be stuck there on that mountainside with
him. I did not particularly want to be stuck anywhere with him.
The charms of night life in the city had quickly lost their fascination for me, the initial pleasure
of discovery was giving way to a strong desire to withdraw from life.
I soon found myself sitting in a bar with Dana, my Swedish friend, with a few cold beaded
Everest beers on the table before us. I soon worked on a painting of another Swedish young
man in the bar. A rather boorish lout, who appeared to me in brutal cubist forms.
As I worked Dana told me about his genius, comparing it to the genius of other men past and
present.
‘Oh Dana I’ve heard this all before’ I said to him with a sigh, without looking over from my
canvas, which was then mounted on my collapsible tripod easel, ‘you are the finest artist since

Van Gogh, the greatest writer since Shakespeare, yet you haven’t actually painted or written a
single thing have you?’
‘No, but one must think himself a man of the world if he wishes to be one.
Like, like, Eliot, don’t you think?’
‘Oh please’
‘All I’m saying is that books should be built up on one’s own tissue or not at all. The struggle is
not to record experience but rather to record oneself, the book then does not properly exist,
nor should it ever have to. There is only my tissue, my guilt, transmuted by God only knows
what alchemy, into a few glorious pages’
‘What pages hey, Dana? What pages, god damnit?’
‘I am a man of ideas, not of books, one does not have to write to be a writer, you of all people
should know that; some of the greatest writers of this planet have not written a single page,
and some of the lousiest, endless volumes. This idea of a book; it does not exist.
And when I talk in this knowing way, I intend you to imagine the work of genius I could write if I
put my principles into action. Though, alas, I am too well read to make the attempt—or perhaps
too well bred, as, in order to write well one must first be convinced that every book ever
written was written specifically for him, made for him to borrow from; the art rather is in
paying back these loans, and with interest, and this, this, is far harder than it sounds’
An oppressive mood of sadness weighed down these words.
I took another deep sip from my Everest and looked back at my canvas.
Soon the subject of it came over to where Dana and I were sitting in the dim lit corner of the
bar.
‘No this is not real’ he said to me as he indicated to my painting, ‘I need a real painting, not a
cartoon or weird one’
I wanted his money, so I painted white over my canvas and began again.
‘Wait, I wanted the weird one as well’ he then said.
‘Well it’s a bit too late for that now, isn’t it?’ I replied.
The young man then sat down with Dana again and talked to him in Swedish.
I happen to speak the language rather well so I listened in on their conversation.
‘Yes, that was rather a unique world for me’ I listened as the young man said to Dana, ‘where
money might’ve been in short supply, but imagination, wit, and down right absurd ideas were
never lacking. I would often find myself lost in thought during moments of rest, or in various
uncertain situations. I entertained many lovers. I’d given up on my academic studies in Oslo and
after an extended illness, had to undergo a period of recuperation in a Spanish mountain
village, with the family of a close friend…’
As the young man talked on in his beautiful lyrical Swedish, I never wanted his tale or that
evening to ever end. Soon he spontaneously broke into song. He sat with his eyes closed and
his head full of long blonde hair tilted back as he drunkenly sang songs which told of longing
and heartache and loss and loneliness and love and redemption.

I did not catch all of the lyrics as my Swedish is not what it used to be, but one didn’t need to
understand all the words to catch their unmistakable tenor.
I soon began to weep as I continued to work on the sketch. His voice had unmistakably known
pain. ‘That was gorgeous’ I said to the young man when he was done.
‘Oh, thank you man’ he replied.
‘No, really, that was so beautiful’ I replied.
‘Thank you, thanks a lot, I mean that’ he replied.
‘I don’t want to sound weird or anything but I feel almost as if you were making love to me as
you sang’
The young man laughed slightly then said, ‘Er, thank you’
Soon the table was alive with raucous bursts of laughter, the young man wouldn’t stay still for a
second as I painted him, but I didn’t mind at all.
After he left with his painting, I muttered to Liz, who was then sitting with us, ‘worst fucking
fare of the evening...’
She also works in retail; sitting in one spot for an extended period trying to seduce customers
into buying her wares.
I am still unsure about her, whenever she is with me she always seems as if she wants to goad
me into feeling some form of strong, violent emotion; to see me flushed with rage, or in a kind
of ebullient sexual happiness.
Dana and I took her back to Dana’s hotel room later that evening. Two hours later, I was glad to
be rid of the place and the pair of them.
I stood on the street outside as I smoked a cigarette and looked up at the stars. I felt like
violently yelling; out of anguish or ebullition, I could not say.
I walked on thru the cold street, locals stood in groups around small fires and one of them
handed me a potato she’d baked over one such fire.
Soon I was watching some young ladies making love over a table in a bar, one of the girls was
soon abandoned there. I continued to sip from a cold beer I was then drinking.
Dana briefly came back to the bar and I talked to him about this and that.
We briefly spoke more about what’d happened with the two nineteen year olds. I argued that
the color blue on them had been there to symbolize the blessed Virgin, the mother of God; that
the very posture and gestures of the pair was derived from the way that medieval artists had
depicted The Visitation.
‘No, no, no’ Dana had replied to all this, ‘their representations were far more figurative, more
dissociative, based upon the laws of perception, using nature only as a model; there was
something in their behavior that went beyond dignity—a certain rigidity to it’
‘Perhaps’ I replied, ‘Perhaps’ I took another pull on the cigarette I was then smoking.
And there was a particularly beautiful girl in the bar that evening.
All of the boys looked at her as she laughed and smiled, as she danced wanly as she stood with
them at the pool table.
After awhile she approached the table where Dana and I were sitting.

‘I saw you painting that guy in here before’ she said to me, ‘Do you do portraits of people?’
‘Sometimes’ I replied.
‘I feel like I just have to get a portrait done! Can you do me with my friends as well?’
I shrugged with a sigh at this.
‘Or, you don’t have to if you don’t want’
‘Nah, it’s alright’
‘Or you don’t have to put all of them in it if you don’t like. You could just do one of me if its
easier. Whatever’s easiest really’
‘Whatever, man. It’s been a long day’
‘Ok, so um, with my friends then?’
‘Sure’
‘Great. And how much would you like for it?’
‘I don’t know man. Whatever you like’
‘Ok, I’ll just go and get my friends’
‘Mm’
The young woman and her friends presented themselves to me in awkward, distorted forms. I
saw narrow spaces between them, and in their eyes a flickering desire to devour each other, to
commit unspeakable acts of violence and aggression.
‘Can you paint me without red hair?’ the girl soon asked me as she peered round at my
painting, ‘It’s not my natural colour’
‘No…’ I replied.
‘Oh… Oh, ok, you’re the artist, it’s up to you’
Later when I showed the girl the finished painting she said to me of it, ‘Aw, I look sad in it’
‘Sometimes when you’re painting others you’re also kind of painting yourself’ I replied.
‘Oh, ok’ the girl paused for a moment while she contemplated the painting, then added, ‘I like
it’
‘Best thing I’ve ever painted’
‘You missed my beauty spot though!’
I then jabbed a big glob of black paint in the middle of the girl’s face in the painting.
‘Oh, ok, thank you’
‘Mmhm’
‘The glorification of the personality of an artist is just as important as the glorification of his
works’ Dana then chipped in to me here from where he was sitting beside me at the table.
This was too much for me.
‘Ah, why don’t you fuck off hey Dana?’ I then said to him, ‘I mean, why don’t you just fuck off,
hey? I mean why don’t you just fuck off?’
‘It’s clear now that the effect your work is having on you is not always a positive one.
At every phase in your life, one needs only to think of the stylistic and thematic references of—’
I violently struck Dana in the face here, he toppled off from his stool with the force of the blow
and I then pounced on top of him and continued to violently strike him in the face.
‘You careless, boorish, sniveling…‘ I spat at him as I struck him, ‘Do you not know anything
about art?’ Soon Dana succeeded in knocking me off of him. He did not make any attempts to

attack me there after and we rather both just laid there on our backs panting. A rather large
group of people had crowded around us by then. I looked over at Dana. He had a busted lip and
a bruise around one of his eyes. Blood was dripping out of his nose and also running down from
a cut on one of his cheeks.

I'm sorry I said to him, it just shits me... Like I just, I can’t remember ever asking your opinion
on my career or my art once. I mean, who are you anyway man? I’ve know you for what, like, 4
days, you dumb fuckin’ drongo cunt’
Dana then got up and left the bar, glaring at me as he did so.
The group around me seemed to be quite accepting of my outburst.
One of the young men in the crowd gave me a hand up. ‘God what a fucking asshole...’ I then
said to him of Dana, ‘I was getting so fucking sick of that guy, you have no idea’
The French girl I’d painted then said to me, ‘I really like your painting and I’m sorry about that
guy’
‘Don’t worry about it’ I replied, ‘it’s not your fault, he just really, really doesn’t know when to
keep his fucking mouth shut’
‘Mm’
Another guy from the pool table came over and looked at the painting.
‘Hey can you do me a favour?’ I then asked the French girl.
‘Sure’
I paused for a moment.
‘Well what is it?’ she then asked me.
‘Well, I can’t tell you here’
‘Oh, it’s one of those kind of favours...’
‘Yeah.
…Let me paint you again, somewhere else, without all these people here, somewhere with just
me and you’
‘…Ok, I’d like that’
The French girl and I caught a cycle rickshaw to a restaurant some friends of mine were dining
at, to take a few drinks with them, before heading back to my guest house.
As we sat in the back of the cycle rickshaw I lit myself a cigarette and expanded more to the girl
about my artistic heritage. ‘The main stages in my creative life can easily be traced on the basis
of my sculptures alone’ I told her, ‘as I always try to transform my basic ideas on content and
design into various media, materials and dimensions. In their range my sculptural works cannot
be compared with my paintings and graphics; but they have a special place in my output
because of the very emphatic and concentrated form in which they represent my artistic ideas’
‘Fascinating’
‘Yeah, yeah, thanks, I often get that’
We continued to ride on.
‘Oh driver hurry up would you?’ I soon called out to our cycle rickshaw driver.
I took another pull on my cigarette and then muttered to the French girl, ‘the damn coolies in
this town, I’ll tell you’

‘Yeah it is often pretty bad’ she replied.
The French girl and I soon found ourselves in the new restaurant, where I was supposed to be
meeting my friends. It was a squalid, tacky little back alley affair, obviously built to cater mainly
to the locals.
‘Well it’s certainly not the Ritz!’ the French girl said to me with a slight laugh as we entered the
restaurant and this annoyed me.
‘Well, I should think that’s pretty bloody obvious’ I snapped at her.
My friends soon arrived. Soon they all had their laptops out with them and were talking
business with the gooks; one of them was particularly gorgeous; thin, petite, tight jeans, short
black hair, real nightmare material. I watched her. I couldn’t even talk. I couldn’t even move.
Soon she and her friends walked to the front of the restaurant to pay. I looked at her legs in her
tight jeans, at the curve in her back. I watched as she walked out of the restaurant.
‘Ah, the hell with it’ I soon thought to myself and ran off after her.
I caught up with her and her friend then said to her, ‘How much?’
‘Excuse me?’ she replied.
‘You heard me; how much?’
‘How much for what?’
‘How much to spend the night with you? Please no games. Just tell me how much. Name your
price.
‘I’m not a prostitute’
‘Not for 500 dollars?’
The girl looked blankly at me.
‘Not even for 600?’ I went on.
‘You don’t even have 600 dollars’
‘Ok, well, fair point, how about 200 then?’
‘300?’

Look, I'm going to give you 200, that's how much I'd usually Pay.
‘I’m not for sale, goodnight’
The girls then walk off mumbling to each other in their native tongue.
When I got back to the restaurant the French girl was no longer there.
‘Oh you little fucking bitch...’ I thought to myself.
Liz and I soon caught another cycle rickshaw to the next bar everyone was going to.
The rickshaw driver accidently took us to the wrong spot.
‘Useless’ I muttered to Liz, ‘absolutely fucking useless. I swear to god’
A friend of ours who'd passed away recently was standing in the middle of the road, calling a
friend to ask him for directions to the end of the street.
‘I miss making love to you’ I said to Liz as our rickshaw driver peddled us on thru the night,
‘when are we going to make love again? With just you and me and not that asshole Dana
there?’
‘I don’t know, play your cards right, and maybe tonight’

‘Do we have to do too much shit with your friends first though? It’s nothing personal, but how I
do loathe them’
‘Be nice. I promised that I’d have drinks with them after work. Just stay for a little while’
‘Oh, ok’
Liz and I soon joined the others in the bar. Our friend Dan soon arrived to join the others and I.
He was a stubbled, kind of chubby young Israeli man, who talked about sex like a 15 year old
school boy might; ‘do you guys think I should fuck this Brazilian chick tomorrow though?’
We all knew the directions to the new bar by then.
I walked while Liz and I rode in the rickshaw. Slowly everything around us was reduced to a few
pictorial elements; tone, dimension, shape slowly came to be conveyed in more and more
economic means. Soon thin lines and little dots were indicating buildings and pedestrians, while
my impetuous strength and agile elegance were precisely portrayed with a few quick strokes.
Soon Liz and I laid on our backs and were finished. The city was burning all around us, horns
were blaring from somewhere and garish rock music was playing.
‘You know ever since I first met you, I wondered how you’d react if I were to kiss you’ I soon
said to her, ‘even if it were just on the cheek or the shoulder. I drank a 40 to myself that first
night we were all out together and still didn’t have the courage to try’
Liz paused for a moment then said, ‘So what happened to that French girl you painted?’
‘Not much’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Wait did you say, what happened to that French girl you painted, or what happened with her?’
‘I said what happened to her’
‘Oh, yeah, she fucked off...’
‘After she saw you chase off after that other girl?’
‘Yeah, yeah.
…You know, for awhile I believed that sadness was favorable to thought; that sorrow was the
basis of life’
‘And now?’
‘Well, I suppose I still do, but more so I now see that that sadness has to be channeled into
something; art has meaning, life does not’
‘Teach me how to paint’
‘You already know. Every child is an artist, they teach him how not to paint, how not to write at
school. Forget everything you know and you can write, you can paint again’
‘Did you love that French girl?’
‘I love everyone’
‘Even Dana?’
‘Yes, even Dana’
‘The whole world stops when you’re beside me’
‘I feel the same. The sadness no longer seems oppressive, but something beautiful, humane,
sincere, meaningful— the people who I see in the streets and bars of any big city, the beggars,
the blind, the lonely and impoverished women, the homeless children...’

Suddenly some locals came up out of the streets at us.
‘Get out of the streets!’ they shouted at us, as they whipped around us at greater and greater
speeds. One of this mob even threw a rock at me, a large one, large enough to concuss, if not
kill me if it’d struck me in the head.
I bravely stood before Liz with my hands held wide, ready to defend her should any of the
group make a sudden lunge at us.
‘Shit’ I thought to myself, ‘danger’
The men cackled horribly at us as they continued to circle about us at subhuman speeds; soon
they were nothing but a black blur in the gloom.
‘I love you’ I said to Liz, ‘stay close to me and I’ll get us out of this’
The thugs continued to throw pebbles and rocks at us as they circled us. A rather large one
violently struck me in the ankle and I fell down to one knee.
‘Ah fuck’ I cried out in pain.
‘You bastards!’ I then shouted out at the amorphous blur, ‘you won’t get away with this! You
bastards!’
The black circle drew in closer. Another rock struck me somewhere on the head.

I woke up in a hospital sometime later.
I could see that my right leg and ankle were both heavily bandaged. I had a cannula in the back
of my wrist and felt very drowsy. Using my free hand which wasn’t connected to the cannula I
touched my forehead to discover that there were some bandages around it also.
As I came to I noticed that my hospital room was full of my friends; Liz, Dana, the Israeli guy,
the weird gay guy whose name I never learned, they were all there.
‘You guys came, it...’ I begun.
‘Yes, we came’ Dana replied.
‘The dream, it came true’ I went on, ‘the trees, conspiring to run away, to up root and build an
entirely new forest for themselves somewhere, it all came true’
‘Yes Max, it did’ Dana replied.
‘I’m sorry, I’ve been such a sad case’
‘All is forgiven’
‘I wonder if this is not the solution to things...’
‘How do you mean?’ Dana replied.
This annoyed me.
‘Oh wake up Dana’ I snapped at him, ‘You want to spend each and every one of your days
entombed in this asphalt city, watching summer after summer drift past as if from behind bars?
You want to spend your days as, as what? Twelve hour timepieces, divided into your ridiculous
illogical proportions, hovering about me like a fly, telling me what to eat, when to work, when
to sleep— of whom to sleep with? Huh? Huh?
You’re not happy. I look upon your face, into your eyes and I can see that, I can see that right
away, but instead of digging yourself out of your own hole, instead you choose to inflict your
misery, your sadness, your dreary pontification upon everyone else around you and I’m sick of
it. I’m not having it’

I noticed a few other people in the room were smiling at this.
‘And don’t you smirk the rest of you’ I then said, ‘like you’re any better. I suppose I’m supposed
to be glad that you’re all here now, am I?
Well, if it wasn’t for all of you I wouldn’t be in this damn mess in the first place; I’m on crutches
for god knows how long. I cant put any pressure on my bad leg; it’ll hurt like all hell if I try and
I’ll just fall right down to the ground like a sack of potatoes, and god knows how long it’s gonna
be like that for, or if I’ll ever even walk properly again— but look, everyone’s here now, so all is
forgiven, no harm no foul, I’m so glad to see all of you. I just, I can’t—‘ I began to weep. Liz
looked away from me as I tried to catch her eye and Dan didn't say anything as he looked down
into his smartphone.
Soon I was ejected from the hospital and we were all traveling by rickshaw to a new restaurant.
When we arrived there were new pretty white faces, new brown ones, some more beers and
some food.
Dan talked of his plans of finding molly for us, of how he gave a guy some money before he saw
the drugs.
‘Bad form man’ I told him, ‘bad form’
I glanced about at the people seated around me some more.
‘These people aren’t your friends’ I thought to myself, ‘I don’t much care about them and they
don’t much care about you...
Oh, just what the hell am I doing here?’
I drank some more beers and at a point they all started to seem like such fine people again.
‘I gave him 30’ I listened as Dan said to someone from the other side of the table, ‘Went up
from 20 as apparently it was 39 grams as well as some hash.
Nah dude, number one rule of buying drugs’ someone down the table replied to this, ‘never
hand over the money before you've seen the merchandise.
I bet you're jealous that I had passionate sex with him...& I then listened as the chubby olive-
skinned Swedish girl from the group whose name I could not then place told someone or
another, ‘because everyone wants to do that’
get C-Man over here I soon caught Liz say, & I bet his face will look more beautiful in the
candle light as well.
More talking and drinking followed.
‘I can’t leave, can I?’ I soon thought to myself, ‘because of my leg, I literally can’t leave without
someone helping me into a cab, back to my hotel’
The days went on. It soon grew too much for me and I booked a flight back home.
I called Deepa the day before I left and she seemed well.