On Irony 2021: An Erotic Fiction

1. He says, “I grasp your thoughts well in advance of your becoming so-to-speak aware of them.” He that says is the young, chestnut-haired student fishing coins out of his jeans. He that says is tipping the cab driver. 1998, Ottawa.
2. She undoes her red hair. Shoulder and street lights. She stands next to the cab in the early morning breeze of late summer. She issues a concerned expression with her painted mouth and picks nervously at a crease in her black, strapless dress.
3. He says that there is no reason to be alarmed. He pulls a pack of Camels out of his tattered blazer. He says, “I am a peaceful oracle…I would never use your thoughts against you. Besides, you are a veritable innocent…you have nothing to be ashamed of…”
4. He has that boy grin. She has that matronly concern.
5. She says, “Do you mean to say that you have been listening to my thoughts since I approached you and your friends in the bar? Do you mean to tell me that you are a psychic and that neither you nor your friends sought to warn me of this highly pertinent, and perhaps disturbing information, in advance of your, shall we say…landing me?” The laugh that follows is an uneasy laugh.
6. He says he is no psychic, cupping her slight hands in his darkened palms.
7. The cab pulls away from the curb and disappears.
8. He and she are doing different kinds of physical touching as they walk.
9. Chrome door at the back of the house where she unlocks the myriad rusting latches with a key eventually scrounged up, after much insidious shuffling of bills and crumpled receipts, from the lower depths of her snakeskin purse. Showing him up the dank wooden staircase to her father’s attic.
10. She says, “This is my room.”
11. He smiles and moves up three steps in order to kiss her for a long moment in the doorway.
12. The room is painted dark purple and its doors, oval window, and picture frames are all trimmed black. At one end of the room there is a small kitchenette with a stove, oven, sink, miniature refrigerator, and stacks of black milk crates. At the other end sits a small futon mattress surrounded by candles. Anaïs Nin, Byron, Shelly, Wordsworth, futurist Russian poetry, and large harcover anthologies, as well as numerous Penguin paperbacks and a picture of the young woman’s family feeding ducks in the rain by a large Canadian lake. In the photo the young woman, who is twenty-six years of age at present (1998, Ottawa), appears to be no more than seven. Gaudy Christmas lights are stapled to the walls and appear to be the only potential source of light other than the candles. Whatever available light there is reveals prints of all the famous paintings, such as Nightwatch and The Kiss, the amassed roughage hung randomly on the dark and somber walls as if flung there—
13. She places a record on the phonograph.
14. "I positively loathe all manner of modern music," he deadpans, and she shoots him a perturbed look. She has put on Bauhaus.
15. “What about the Moonlight Sonata?” she asks, maybe disingenuously and definitely distantly.
16. He says, “No, no, Mozart gives me anxiety. I can’t listen to him when I am drunk.” She has a swing in sentiment. They cozy up for a bit.
17. Giggling strangely, she goes to the stove to boil water, and he walks over to the phonograph, grabbing a different Bauhaus record from the top of the pile and dropping it onto the player. The record begins to spin and the student slowly lowers the needle into the black grooves at the very edge of the acetate.
18. She asks him if he is really an oracle.
19. He begins to flip the rpm switch on the phonograph back and forth so that the music plays at the right pace one second and speeds up comically the next. Naturally, she asks him what he’s doing.
20. He says, "I’m becoming…I’m becoming part of the creative process. If you give me some wine I promise I will tell you everything. In all truth, I generally do only drink red wine, but this, I am sure, will be just fine for now. Okay, I will tell you everything, but first you must promise to listen to everything I have to say and then wait until I am finished before you respond. Like, okay. When I told you that I was an oracle and that I had been reading your mind, as you may recall, you had just finished telling me about your male friend with whom you were supposed to have some celebratory drinks tonight, what with it being your birthday and whatnot, and you complained about his insensitivity and about the horror you felt at his not showing up. You told me over and over, all night in fact, whether you were aware of doing so or not, that you were repulsed because nobody has ever been so cruel as to have ever subjected you to rejection so…abjectly. In such a…a birthday-like situation. I sensed that you loathe solitude more than any other fated thing and this is why you project a guise of individuality and a self-reliance. It is a mask you wear in order to hide your real face which fears, more than any thing else, abandonment. This was only emphasized by the way that you spoke of your fellow employees at the department store, who make you self-conscious and bitter precisely because they are so friendly to you. Yes, but they are stupid and insensitive, sure, but you still need them to like you, don’t you? Yes. Complete and utter abandonment. Also you spoke a great deal, roundaboutly mind, of your love for your father and your contempt for your mother, thus, unwittingly, drawing attention constantly to a conceptual placement of your ego-self within a quintessential embarrassing triad. Now, the whole effect of my feigning being an oracle, blessed with a kind of gift of clairvoyance, was intended to be one of fissure. It was hoped that by opening our gradual discourse of mutual codes to a real psychic, electromagnetically phenomenological framework, the Oedipal triad would be torn asunder by its own dunderheaded and hugely stubborn impracticality. You understand? What purpose does repression maintain in the face of clairvoyance? You would no longer feel a need to authenticate your guise through these boring reminiscences or whatever, while simultaneously offering yourself to me so openly. I mean, right? The systematic placement of your parents on opposite poles of a psychic tug-of-war! It was hoped that you would espy no longer value in suppressing your more authentic proscriptive codes beneath the inauthentic centralized defences. All that about the human mechanism which is plastic, false, pretence. You understand? I was not interested in seeing the scars of your socialization! I hoped you would see that I, being a psychic oracle, could easily see through the pretence of subjecthood that you so fiercely present, its reification utterly fatuous. I was addressing a series of codes under the pretence of making conversation. It did not matter whether you believed whether I was an oracle or not, nor even whether I could actually read your thoughts. Just by processing the codes that I presented you were forced to apprehend your environment and the consequent goings on between us from a more open perspective. I was trying to do you a favour, I think. I was trying to do us a favour, babe. Repression is the enemy. I was saddened to see you so painfully repress your fear of abandonment. Whether you see it or not, I am actually even doing you a favour just by coming home with you. I am placing a much-needed break in the cycle. Are you beginning to understand?"
21. She feels bullied and says so. But she commits internally to retaining some good humour in the face of it all.
22. He says, “I know, I know. You see how easily I get sidetracked? I like this wine. You see, although all you folks are right to trace the genealogy of irony as a modal apparatus first and foremost back to Socrates and then Kierkegaard, like history were merely dominoes of some shit, I have problems with them. Particularly with Kierkegaard. You see, Kierkegaard is correct in assuming that irony enables a removed condition of spectatorship over the goings on of human life, but he is, I believe, specious in his directing irony away from play and into a further avocation of grounds for religious faith. You, being a student of literature, must be familiar with Derrida’s concept of play within the realm of theory. Play is the result of our being cognizant of our inability to ascertain our ends, our finitude. Have you read Speech and Phenomenon? No matter. You can see it in Foucault as well, and I know you’ve read Foucault. He has his theory of the paradox of origin, paradox, of course, being fundamental to Kierkegaard’s notion of irony. The Order of Things I think, which states that while the question of origin always returns to us, bearing the pressing voice of necessity, our capacity to retrieve it is ever slipping away. We are caught in a vortex of fundamental paradoxes which underpin even the first instance of the newborn’s perception. We are always staring the impossibility…the impossibility of our ends…staring them…in the face. You see? This can be expanded to a point where we realize the impossibility of our imagining, since we are cognizant beings and thus endless processors of code, the possibility of our own death. And beneath these fundamental paradoxes lie a parade of miniature equivalents which decorate all of our moments of connection whether analytic, and thus basically objective, or synthetic, and therefore not, or not really. Everywhere we look we see contradiction in the gaze and the contradiction or impasse inherent to the gaze itself. There is no order beyond that which we impose. Or, I suppose, allow to be imposed. Thus, the lifeworld opens up to two different modes of play: imposition and performance. Imposition upon the horizon and performance our coming to be revealed…brought to the world…because, you see, we are flung here quite randomly. This is the manner of irony I present to those who are fortunate enough to come into contact with me. I am always shifting my relations to objects, people, texts, and ideas while simultaneously searching for new performative idealities in and of myself. Language is the most direct vein into this manner of irony and that is why my favourite ironist of all time, and the one most influential on me personally, is Groucho Marx. Yes, very much so. And it is just this manner of play that manages to save us from the anxiety that Heidegger warns us of and the despair of which Kierkegarrd speaks. Despair, as a totalizing process, is displaced along with the centralized configurations of self which are deemed necessary by the stupid in order to provide a semblance of…of continuity in…their…lives. I mean, after so much time, have we learned nothing from Nietzsche? Should we not be constantly revising ourselves through unconscious machines of desire? As I see it we all of us would be better off as an army of Groucho Marxs using language and cultural forms as a diving board into the absurd. We ought to all ask for tea we have no intent of…imbibing. Always building prisons around ourselves and escaping from them with the next gesture. Always shedding our performative skins. There is no despair in a mind that wanders conditionally. If the prison is new, and I posit this loaded term prison as no mere metaphor but rather as an anatomical mimesis of selfhood, the centre or the…the looking out upon...then so too is the ground or horizon to which it is fastened. With a new ground comes the abolition of old scars, do you understand? The great…
23. She says, “Wow.” She has bee sipping meditatively from her small teacup. She says, “I can see that you have given this much thought.” She had, however, physically gotten up about halfway through the tirade.
24. He reclines on the futon mattress and begins to undress himself with his left hand, starting with the blazer, working through the vest and dress shirt, and ending with the jeans, clutching, the whole time, a volume of Anaïs Nin's letters in his free hand.
25. He proposes they take a shower and she walks him through the complications that would appear to decisively forestall any such recourse.
26. He says, “I only told you that I made that psychic oracle business up in order to move onto the topic of irony without first having to tie up any loose ends concerning my powers as an oracle. It so happens, in all actual fact, that I am honestly psychic, as are those appalling friends of mine with whom I was seated at the bar when you met me.”
27. She says, “Fine, fine, I believe you.”
28. He that says throws away the book which he has held the whole while in his right hand and it makes a thump on the floor as it lands unseen to he and she who stare at one another still, as if dancing cobras in a charmer’s trance. She laughs again, more genuinely this time, and puts her mouth to his. They kiss passionately as she runs a hand up and down the ladder of vertebrae at the top of his spine. He rubs the small of her back with one hand and cups her cheek softly with the other. After a moment they fall back into the mattress, he arched rigidly above her, holding himself up with one hand and now clumsily working off his underpants with the other. They kiss some more as she clasps his buttocks and begins to pant loudly. Her head snaps back and he kisses her throat and the nape of her neck with his probing tongue. He says, “If I were going to take a man’s breath away, to kill him, I would hit him here with all of my strength.” He kisses her there, much more forcibly than before. She shuts her eyes tight and sighs deeply, teeth clenched together and lips slightly parted in a kind of rabbit smile. He says, “But you I could never hurt.” With a free hand she slides off her panties and grabs hold of his erect penis. He arches his back and collapses next to her on the mattress. She verbally commands that he enter her. He says nothing, but rapidly goes to work. He sits up, for a time, with his arms anchored behind him. She drapes her arms around his neck and sticks her tongue in his mouth. They make love in this position until his arms begin to tire and he resorts to flipping her over, thereafter mounting her from behind. She pants deeply for a moment, throwing her head back, until she suddenly freezes. She says that she wants to be able to see him. He pulls out, letting her roll over, having proven unable to turn her over and remain inside of her simultaneously, then renters from on top, cradling her in his arms. She moans heavily, already reaching orgasm. He increases the intensity of his thrusts until her body seizes in ecstasy, her insides convulsing. Oh my God, et cetera. She rests her head on a pillow, struggling to hold her breath. Stasis is all shattered all about. He rolls half over to her side, resting on his elbow, and continues to make love to her with slow, gentle thrusts. She lies motionless but issues sighs of pleasure, bending her neck with tense resignation as he works his left hand under her brazier and languidly massages her breasts. She is also stimulating herself. This goes on for some time. Eventually she begins to reach orgasm for a second time. This time, however, instead of moaning passionately, she emits a static noise that resonates tremendously. She can take no more, hollering like a lunatic, fully overcome by the orgasm, letting go of everything and falling back against the mattress with her eyes shut.
29. She asks him if he has cum. He that says says, “I’m an ironist; I never cum—”