Fiction / Bryan D. Price

:: Wasting disease ::

Can no longer eat. Body rejects everything. Urinating all the time, etc.

Layla brings me magazines. Some guitar magazines and an art one. The art one is glossy with heavy pages. Astonishing article in the art magazine. A profile of someone not known to sit for interviews. An artist who lives near here. Actually only a few miles away.

I had known the artist many years ago. We had gone to school together and were close. When he transferred to art school I dropped out altogether. We lost touch. I knew he was from here but assumed that the more successful one becomes the further one wants to be from their point of origin.

I fixate on a strange detail. The artist has a border collie who is aggressive around other dogs. Because of this fact, every night he ingests half an edible, waits about a half hour and then, with a single record loaded onto his portable music device, walks the dog for as long as it takes for the album to end (leaves apartment usually between 9:30 and midnight).

I’m aware of how overused the metaphor of the labyrinth is. The reason though that it’s overused is because those of us who are bedridden or otherwise delimited by the four walls of our minds, which is to say our imaginations, find the idea of the labyrinth potent—particularly when we close our eyes. In fact, at this point I don’t even have to close my eyes to see what I imagine and what I can no longer imagine.

When the interviewer asked the artist which records he listened to on his dog walks he provided her with a list of ten (placed in a stand-alone box on the page) three of which I had never heard of—Faust IV, Shotgun Wedding (Lydia Lunch and Rowland S. Howard), and Ask the Ages (Sonny Sharrock). I ask Layla to go to the store and buy them for me.

I keep returning to the art magazine which contains the profile of the artist. It stays with me in bed. I ask Layla to get rid of the guitar magazines. I look at his apartment, his studio, his handmade furniture and fixate on the cement floors. He has cement floors in both his apartment and his studio. I look at his face. He looks young still. He wears a floppy black hat and a paint-spattered leather apron. He sits on a metal stool. He doesn’t smile. I think how sophisticated people don’t smile—to smile is to open oneself up to ridicule. To allow oneself to be photographed is enough vulnerability.

Gray and noxious outside the window. Tree trimmers and then eerily quiet. The artist began as a minimalist. No geometric shapes or even paint. Everything in graphite. Impossibly thin lines. Minimalist in its insistence on not only monochrome and repetition but restraint. Lines both hard and soft. The interviewer suggests that minimalism is something to be abandoned or grown out of. The artist gently pushes back. There is a two-page spread of the artist in his studio standing before an immense canvas, which has an almost Pre-Columbian quality. The words used to describe his new work are mythopoetic, religious, and geologic time.

In her working capacity (prospect researcher for a biomedical nonprofit) Layla has procured the address of both the artist’s apartment building and studio (also his ex-wife’s home in Portland, Oregon and his parent’s home in Carlsbad). She offers to drive me by. I take her up on it. The apartment is very modern (concrete and glass). Very open and light, no frills. The studio is housed in a nondescript building on the border between downtown and Little Italy. According to some research it used to house a glove factory. No sign of the artist walking the streets.

Had Layla take the television away. Can no longer defend what it does to my time which is to say my life. Now only music and reading. Hear from very few people—an increasingly dwindling number. Layla says I am hidden away like a seed. I need to make the first move. Imagine or visualize some reconciliations and conclude it’s not worth it. She brings me some pulpy things to read (Friends of Eddie Coyle, etc.) and some catalogues of the artist’s work that she has found somewhere. She’s very hush-hush about her methods.

Late afternoon and looking over the artist’s early pieces. One, called 9971 Lines, is really concentric circles. A useless density to it that makes me want to do something similar but I don’t know what. There is nothing true or perfect about it which makes it, in its own way, true.

There are subtle shifts in the atmosphere that make me aware of my pain. Maybe the better way of putting it is my sensitivity. I feel things more thoroughly. See things more clearly. I smell the past. Not in an esoteric way but there are odors in the air that bring me back to specific points in the past. They say when death comes it does so with the puzzle pieces or fragments of your life in its hands.

Have not worked in six weeks. Am girding myself for the insurance nightmares. Begin to feel guilty. Layla usually deals with such things—paperwork, business, etc. Money is getting tighter. Will need to tighten our belts. To have less of something like money is to become claustrophobic. We waste money but we also waste away. I read about old nostalgia deaths from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Wasting disease. Language creates distance between thought and reality. The artist does collages with leaves, the deader the better, he says (like paper). Layla shows me a picture of him in Venice from a different magazine. He wears the same floppy black hat. His reclusiveness is noted. He doesn’t smile.

Layla brings me Philip K. Dick (A Scanner Darkly) and Borges (Fictions). Fall asleep trying to understand what I just read. Wake up and re-read it. Headaches persist. Ask Layla to get me new lightbulbs.

It is easy to get lost in the labyrinth of one’s imagination. Much easier than in fiction (films, books, etc.). It takes a special kind of mind to get truly lost in fiction. One has to be bred that way or at least have it inflicted upon them from a very young age. For some it is just a habit of getting lost or wanting to get lost—the need to bloody the former purity of silence. Layla raises the blinds every morning and shuts them at night. Otherwise I am counting leaves and shingles and raindrops and airplanes (which I hear rather than see).

We are in the habit now (me and Layla) of driving by the artist’s apartment. I wear a raincoat and hat. The raincoat is made by London Fog and hasn’t fit me since I was in my twenties. I bought the hat in Portland with Layla when we took our first trip together. Layla parks across the street and I drink tea laced with a little whisky. The light in his apartment has only been on once.

The sun never came out today. Not for a second. Not for a millisecond. All possibilities make sense on such days. Or, put differently, nothing seems possible.

It’s no longer sexual with Layla. It was getting that way even before all this. I want her to be free—free of me, etc.—but I also want her to stay. It is not easy to square ones selfishness with one’s altruism.

Movies—I watch movies in bed with Layla on a laptop. She rarely spends the night. Even on nights like this. It will be 11:45 or 12:00 and she’ll still get in her car and go to her new place. I imagine some man is there waiting for her but I don’t want to bring it up. Don’t want to upset what seems to be so peaceful between us. She watches what I want to watch—My Life to Live, Annie Hall, Paris, Texas. She likes them too but she’s seen them with me a hundred times. It is my life raft, this bed, and everything else is the ocean.

This began as something along the lines of a diary of sickness and I had a list of things I didn’t want to write about: politics (fascism), my father, the abortion, wars (past and present), dreams, (explicit) sex.

Out-patient surgery. Lying in bed. Layla sleeps on the couch. Listens to old records (Richard and Linda Thompson, Elvis Costello) and cries.

Fire today. Not far from here. I smelled it at first and then went outside. Didn’t have to get far to see the cloud in the distance. Pink on gray (or gray on pink). Neighbors came out as well. People I hadn’t seen in months (or spoken to rather). Halloween decorations everywhere—skeletons, witches, ghosts. Inflatable things that subsist on air compressors clicking on and off through all hours of the day and night. Strange new world. Must have something to do with how infantilized we’ve become (adults failing to grow out of their childhoods).

It occurs to me that Layla needs a less conspicuous car (she’s currently driving a seventies-era Beetle convertible that’s pea soup-green). The artist’s light was on and then we saw him walking his dog. The car stood out, drawing his gaze (he saw us). I locked eyes with him for a half-second. Seemingly no recognition.

With an X‑ACTO knife I take apart the original magazine with the profile of the artist. Very carefully on one of Layla’s cutting mats I run the knife along the pages, separating the images from the text. I put each individual piece in clear plastic protective sheathing so that I could see each side. Layla finds a telephone number affiliated with the artist. I call it and leave a rambling message, or half a rambling message, before hanging up.

Diet has become very strange. At this point still seems like a guessing game. A kind of drawing down into nothing. I only feel good when there’s nothing inside me. Clean, pure, empty, straight, nothing. Energy comes from some tertiary place—mystical. God speaks crystal clear through the emptiness of the chasm.

The end is here. Layla cries, sobs actually. Very intense, even uncomfortable. Doesn’t come out of nowhere but still surprises me. A day later she pretends it was a mystery or outlier and then we hold onto each other. It is so loveless the way we grasp that it seems as full of love as anything I’ve ever experienced. I imagine turning her away from me and lifting up her skirt so that we can fuck one last time. But I can’t bring myself to try such a thing.

The artist introduces himself as Vince. I try not to acknowledge anything strange (knowing his name’s not Vince). He doesn’t recognize me or let on that he does. I’m walking Bailey who Layla’s sister and brother-in-law have left in my care while they’re in Munich for a few months. Bailey and the artist’s dog (named Rogue) sniff each other but there is no aggressiveness. It is said that Bailey has this kind of calming effect on other dogs.

Over time I realize the artist, more or less, has a fixed route and it is easy to insinuate myself into his routine. I have Layla pick me up an array of edibles and try to match the artist’s state of mind (if that’s possible). I see things in a clearer way, lines are sharper. I see myself as if through the window of a passing bus. I am gaunt—a tattered, empty coat. A ghost.

It is not odd for the artist to take his earphones off when he sees me. We talk about music sometimes. I don’t ever mention Faust, et al. When he asks me about music I am tempted to lie—as he has lied about his name. I tell him a few things from a class I took on modern classical music. Charles Ives, Edgard Varése, Steve Reich. When I ask him what he does for a living he says something that I’ve never heard a person say in real life: he says he’s independently wealthy. Later, he refers to himself as an investor. He speaks of money in terms of “figures”—the high six-figures or low seven-figures. I am deeply disappointed that this is the ruse he has chosen.

The part of the city where the artist lives exists on the edge between urban and suburban or between the vertical urban core and its earliest quasi-suburbs, which is to say neighborhoods of tightly packed single family homes with small two and three-story apartment buildings interspersed. His building is across from a grocery store surrounded by a parking lot with a small architecturally interesting library at the edge. The neighborhood slightly to the northwest is known more for its nightlife. Sometimes we encounter straggling revelers and other times people out stealing catalytic converters.

It is not clear who I’m talking to and why I’m being so mysterious. Knowledge (or experience) is our advantage or can be used to our advantage. To hold back or make obscure. To keep in my own storehouse of memories only to be used as currency in case of emergencies.

I find money grotesque and people who venerate it, evil. I hide this and feign ignorance when I ask the artist about money and what he invests in. I make it so I might want to get involved in investing (even though I have no money to invest). He says the most stable sector is real estate—rental property. He specializes in distressed assets throughout the south and Midwest. He begins to say a few things about cryptocurrency but I am transfixed by Bailey shitting shamefully on the sidewalk. It is clear that she prefers to do such things closer to nature.

Layla has left me. Everyone has left me. Bailey remains. It is true what they say—that dogs are loyal.

I stay up late doing research on the artist. He has been in Spain—Bilbao. There is a photo of him in his black floppy hat and black suit. He wears a red shirt and a braided leather tie with turquoise in it. Again, the word reclusive is used. There is a painting of his called The Secret which was made using an image of Wyeth’s Christina’s World torn into 312 pieces, rearranged into an engridded collage and then painted onto an enormous canvas that is roughly 26 x 12 feet. People with lots and lots of money want it. The lesson: bigger is better.

Is the artist’s development of a fictive self a part of his supposed reclusiveness? A need to protect the core at the center of his being? Does he hide it from me alone because I am a parasite or like a vampire? Recently read an article about his being represented by a world famous art dealer who brokered deals between the artist and a Saudi Prince, a Russian oligarch, a tech billionaire. The latter of whom was also referred to as “reclusive.”

Since the artist insists on maintaining a fiction, I have as well. At first he didn’t seem interested in me as a person with their own history or background. He didn’t even ask my name which is how uninterested he was. To him I was just a fellow dog walker, a figure of no of importance. Now though, I have forced my own fiction upon him. I have told him my name is Slavoj Jureček and I’m an oncologist with a clinic near the park. I don’t tell him that it’s world famous but in my mind it is.

Passing an empty lot that has been overtaken by nature I notice mint growing through the chain link. I touch it and smell my fingers. While I do this the artist tells me about a product he is investing in—a ring that you wear while you sleep that helps you with lucid dreaming. He says it has something to do with regulating blood flow, circulation, Vitamin D. He shows one to me. Because it is dark out I can’t tell if it’s black or dark grey. He puts it in my hand and it feels heavy.

One night we encounter a third—another dog walker. Her name is Marta and she has a Shiba Inu named Mothra. Mothra belongs to Marta’s roommate who is in Bulgaria recording traditional folk music. She refers to this as his “fieldwork.” The artist, again, introduces himself as Vince. We stand beneath a palm tree talking about Marta’s shirt which has Fernando Pessoa on it. She tells us that she made it herself. She refers to herself as a graphic designer.

I’m not tired anymore. Fear has exited my consciousness. I am no longer thinking about the end, the biblical end, the apocalypse, Armageddon. Like sex, death has a way of clarifying things.

Marta is Spanish. Just being around her makes me almost violate my dictum on fascism. It’s not that she’s fascist (quite the opposite) but she brings her knowledge to bear on new or present things. Things happening outside our bubble that I was trying not to dwell on too much anymore. Her grandfather, she tells us, barely escaped Francoist forces only to meet a similar bad end elsewhere. He made his way to Lisbon and then Mexico City where Marta’s father was born. Her father, she tells us with dead seriousness, was a poet and her grandfather murdered by death squads in the Dominican Republic.

Marta asks us if we’d like to come back to her apartment and watch The Spirit of the Beehive which she owns on laser disc. Her laser disc player, she said, is “top of the line.”

The artist tells us about investing. Tells us about the biohacking paradigm and how the altruism economy is dead. He tells Marta about the company developing the dream ring. Instead of just letting her hold the “prototype,” as he did with me, he gives it to her to keep. I comfort myself knowing it’s a fraud.

I think about our closeness or former closeness. How close were we, me and the artist. I don’t know. It seemed substantive at the time. What is friendship. Or kinship or fealty. Did we have a real affinity for one another. Was it love. For one it can be love and for the other it is colorless, odorless—nothing. He lies as easy as breathing and yet so do I (but only as a response in accordance with my mutilated ego). The ring—where did he get it? He wears another one that is identical to the one he gave Marta. He asks her about lucid dreaming and she says she takes it off when she sleeps. I can tell he is hurt by this.

When we get to Marta’s she offers us mushrooms. Her roommate has some convoluted connection to a mushroom farm in Oregon. She strains them into a tea. Normally I’d decline but I feel particularly nihilistic, like nothing matters anymore. I go through with it. I’m already dead.

Marta’s apartment is spacious. There’s a couch, a coffee table, a piece of furniture made of wood and glass that holds an enormous television and, to its left is the top of the line laser disc player she told us about. She shows us an ad campaign she is working on for a local chain of Vietnamese restaurants. She puts The Spirit of the Beehive on, but without the sound. She is playing a CD—the Rolling Stones album Some Girls. I bob my head slowly to “Beast of Burden” and look at the lights of downtown which reveal themselves unsteadily through a light drizzle. Marta shows me in a book how during the Operation Condor days the Argentines used this song (among others) to mask the cries of the tortured.

The conversation has ceased. Marta had put on some kind of very nondescript electronic music that has the power of sucking the energy out of the room. The artist drinks from a coffee cup filled nearly to the top with red wine. Marta lights a Kool. I’d like a smoke but I have to maintain the fiction that I’m an oncologist even though I’m not quite sure anyone remembers or even believes me.

Out of nowhere I say something that has been going through my head since earlier in the afternoon. Isn’t it strange, I say, how everybody laughs. The artist is silent, looks annoyed. Marta giggles uncomfortably and asks, what do you mean. I say, isn’t it strange that the human reaction to something funny or uncomfortable is to laugh, no matter what language you speak. It’s like breathing or knowing not to breathe when you’re under water. Marta continues to look at me, like she’s looking into my soul, trying to figure out if I’m real or a hallucination. All I can think is how human it is to laugh, transhuman or transhistorical rather. Something that links me to Jesus or Odysseus (or whoever he was based on) and everyone else who has walked the earth for the last hundred or two hundred thousand years. I turn my mouth into the slightest bit of a smile and Marta laughs uproariously. It’s not clear to me if it’s a put on or not.

For some reason Marta starts cooking a whole chicken. We go outside with flashlights to gather thyme and rosemary and she cooks it in a cast iron skillet with garlic and butter. I look at my watch and it’s just after eleven o’clock. She pours me a small glass of Bénédictine which I drink in a single swallow. I notice that the first three buttons of her shirt are unbuttoned and she’s not wearing a bra. My pulse quickens.

When we were in college I would drive the artist into San Francisco. We would go over the Golden Gate Bridge and I felt as if life was opening up to me—a real life with sharp edges and carnal disappointments. He’d tell me about Bill Burroughs and Joan Vollmer and Brion Gysin and I wouldn’t have much to tell him because I didn’t yet know anything. We’d go to City Lights Bookstore and Tosca and Specs and Vesuvio Café and pretend we were things we were not. Things we would hopefully be one day, but for me: no, never, nothing. Now he looks younger than I, like there was never any parity between us. His punishment is to not only withhold himself from me, what he has become, but to withhold my own past as well. When I turn around Marta is hacking up a pineapple with a meat cleaver. She wants to serve it with the chicken.

It’s as if I’ve fallen asleep and when I awake the artist and Marta are talking about money or if not money exactly than the future of money or society’s future. I realize the artist has internalized conversations he must have had about what men of elaborate means plan to do with the new world once this one has exhausted itself or they themselves break it. There is a bottle of ouzo in front of them. They are in an embrace and Marta motions me over as if she wants me to join them. I pretend not to notice her. All I can think about is Layla in bed with another man who has a penis the size and shape of a banana and my memory or ghost only brings to her mind small feelings of guilt and sympathy. Marta says my name, my false one, and I smile gamely. The artist unbuttons a few more buttons and rummages around in there. I take the bottle of ouzo and what they’re doing rapidly becomes more intense. I am both here and not here. They need and don’t need me.

They shut the door and I take one of Marta’s Kools. Exhale, I think, this is almost over. And then without thinking too much about it, I begin to go through her things. Nothing too personal. Rifle through some drawers, look at her bills, her CDs and laser discs. It’s not often you get to see how a stranger lives, how they eat, what kinds of objects they gather around themselves. Personal objects are the exterior that reflect the interior. She had a framed square of peg board above her drafting table where she hung her tools—straight edges, razorblades, brushes. For a half-second I look at the razorblades and think about cutting my wrists on her couch. Then I notice cans filled with pencils and pens and try to blot out the image of me bleeding to death on the couch.

On her drafting table was a half-done flyer for a punk show. I moved the mismatched letters around and realized there was something erotic about spying on Marta, having this access to her inner life, which was ironic, given what else was going on. But I didn’t want that. I’ve never been interested in sharing or exhibitionism. In the end it doesn’t matter what I want—I don’t think my presence was truly desired. Marta was just being hospitable.

The last thing I do is go through her books. I am on the precipice of leaving. It’s not light yet but the dead of night when it’s at its most cold and lonely. They are in the middle or throes of it. I take Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle off the shelf and open it up. It doesn’t take long for me to get frustrated with my lack of immediate understanding. Marta is screaming and I can feel the apartment tremble. I read the same aphorism twice and make a note to read it later. Then I just slip it into my bag. This will be mine forever but forever’s not a long time.

From the writer

:: Account ::

I wrote this story in 2024. It began as a kind of formal experiment. I wanted to write something in fragments that wasn’t just one long text broken into fragments after the fact (a thing I sometimes lazily do) but written intentionally that way as the story progresses. Like how Susan Sontag wrote “Against Interpretation” (in early drafts, I similarly used numbers). I also wanted to write something about art and illness. I like the idea of gently dipping into the mystery or detective genre (the staking out of the artist). And I also like the idea of the doppelganger, in this case the artist appearing to withhold his identity from the narrator, and, in turn, the narrator pretending to be someone else as well. Bad dogs is another theme. When I wrote this I had a bad dog that we had to walk late at night to avoid other dogs (RIP Georgie). I also like writing about people taking drugs, if it’s funny, like how Pynchon does it (not that I’m close). And fascism. I have an enduring fascination with Latin American or Iberian forms of fascism, which I feel guilty about, because we have (and had) it just as bad in the United States. Finally, and no offense to those of you who are filthy rich, but I hate rich people and I think that is somewhat evident in the way I depict the artist’s milieu, however subtle. Or maybe not, I’m not sure writers are good judges of their own sense of subtlety.

Bryan D. Price is the author of A Plea for Secular Gods: Elegies (What Books, 2023) His stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Noon Annual, Epiphany Magazine, EPOCH, The Glacier, and elsewhere. He lives in San Diego, California.