A community of lovers--no matter if the lovers want it or not, enjoy it or not, be they linked by chance or accident, or by l'amour fou--has as its ultimate goal a series of disasters in infinitesimal doses.
SCENE 10
THE LETHAL LEAP
(Scene opens on a photograph of an empty bar at twilight. One can hear the sounds of people chattering away and drinking, the sound of truck roaring by, and the insistant beat of some piano playing a Cole Porter tune. As the ORACLE begins to speak a series of photographs is shown of the empty bar from different angles, also of used glasses, napkins, trash, matchbooks, and things people have left behind from the night before).
THE ORACLE (her voice is strong and distant, it senses everything, but doesn't completely understand it all): A dead man's hands are a strange thing, like his whisper, or his paintings they just don't make sense anymore. Incessant voices spasm in me, draging me through inventories of stories and events that always point to something else--like forgeries. A man, an artist, perhaps, came to me once--he named himself, Michael, he spoke about his dreams for a woman who never returned his calls. I gave him answers to implacable questions, oblique gestures, and small doses of the truth. He wanted to be released from his cravings for immortality, the endless exhibitions, the cynical messages from friends, and the mishmash of seductions and suicides. Something came out of me, smuged insights--that he would emerge unexpectedly from a rupture, as violent and invisible as sunburst or a secret code--that he would slip between the walls of history and dissapear. He did not answer me with another question, like so many of them do: will I be on the cover of this or that, will I sell beyond the market price, will I become something more than my work, will it become more than me, and will I be remembered in death? He mumbled about his wish to kill a lover, to keep the lover for himself, himself alone, to steal the lover in defiance of every law, every moral authority---you don't know what that is . . . ? He kept repeating this statment over and over unworking it until it dispersed into his drink. As he wandered away from my table, my oracle cards, and my gaze--a voice came to me from Eurydice as she spoke to Orpheus, "art is the venmon of immortality." (As the ORACLE speaks these lasts words a photograph of a woman in blue by the farthest wall appears, she is alone, and a haze of ghostly smoke surrounds her. In the distances the of train can be heard passing).