kept boy of a pimply internet billionaire, Carmigan Lash feels the
imminence of death when driving side streets to the liquor store.
In this wealthy, intellectual town, it is less unique to feel the
imminence of death in every pulse of the urban hive than it is to sit behind
the wheel, pass through the security gates, and drive, personally, to the
liquor store. The home bars of pimply internet billionaires are stocked --
stocked with loganberries and vitamin powders and antioxidants and frozen soy
concentrates, okay, but stocked nonetheless. Carmigan closes his mind
against the aluminum streams of individually packaged mortals and conjures
instead a golden margarita beach, on which thirty guests will tonight kick
the sand of professional achievement into each other's salt-rimmed glasses.
At the party, Carmigan, having performed his duties (minor compared to
the servers and coordinators), pretends to feel out of place and complains to
Werner about his out-of-place feeling.
Werner is only too impatient to conceal the rather flamboyant outfit
of artsy, androgynous Carmigan in the upstairs closet of his personal life.
It is their standard maneuver. Privately uninhibited, criminally so with the
dark-skinned, thick-tongued, purported "exchange student" Carmigan Lash,
Werner is publicly whiny and egotistic, rash and intemperate. He believes
his sudden, unexpected ascendance demands from his character a counterbalance
of merit and permanence: a robe of divinity and a crown of petulance.
He coldly dismisses Carmigan as if he were a servant, whether
concubine or eunuch the guests cannot confirm. To mitigate the suspicion
they are afraid Werner might have detected in their silent stares at the
lithe and mysterious Carmigan Lash, the guests recover quickly and offer
Werner, their skinny, twenty-six-year-old Missouri-born superior, the soft
mouths of adulation and the hard eyes of loyalty. Werner's employees choose
to assume the figurative positions Carmigan must assume literally.
Carmigan, like an employee, rationalizes on the grounds of necessity
and derived privilege. Carmigan is a poor immigrant who has managed to earn
financial support for the sustenance of not only his body but also his mind.
He is an artist, and Werner is his patron, albeit an unlikely, unwilling, and
uneducated one. Carmigan must develop his artistic mind in secret, while his
body deteriorates openly for Werner.
While the party continues, Carmigan, hiding in one of the upstairs
jacuzzis, reads an aphoristic passage in an obscure book he chose almost
randomly at the bookstore: "The mind preserves the memory of specific
suffering as caution against pursuing it in the future. The mind works not
nearly as hard to preserve the memory of specific pleasure. The mind has not
forged a way for us to be emotionally conscious of this imbalance. And so we
overvalue suffering as the main lot in life because it is what we most
remember. This is largely a tragedy. Humans are yet an evolving species.
The misinterpretation of proportion is like suffering: too easy. Imagination
is work."
Carmigan, half-asleep in the percolating bath, dreams of a man,
paralyzed from the waist down, who defies his tragedy by reconstructing his
home not to accommodate his legs but to celebrate his arms. There are rope
ladders, ceiling bars, pulleys. The man, ape-like, swings, climbs, flies.
There are nets if he falls. There are hammocks if he tires and caves if he
is sad. The man must have some money to accomplish the restructuring, and
yet he must have the idea in the first place, the capacity to make his vision
real, and the good sense to work within what he has at last created.
In his art, which is not yet sculpture and never has been painting,
Carmigan asks and attempts to answer the question: What don't I feel I
understand, but feel I desperately need to?
[END]
© David Barringer 2001
