Les frères

"Tell me about Delilah."

It was the first time Dean Skeller had dared to utter her name, his two pensive eyes groaning for resolution and the exploration of Truth and all its bounties, and so, recalling the half-smirk absurdity of Cameron and mustering my best mask of unhurt and ambivalence, I cradled the surly glass of rum and pondered

"She was a love," I said, growling each word, punctuating with swigs of cold anxiety and a shot of self-realization, "a vulgar little love that died as all shallow things must do. Flowers on a tomb, a fading comet, a brilliant bursting lightbulb, death and all its splendor, Delilah was life, she was everything, she was nothing, she was the Void, she was not Sophia and for that I both hated her and loved her, for to love is to hate and confine and need and cling and unfulfill and regard, rather than redefine"

He pressed a glass against those spinning grey eyes, steel in the face of stainless obscenity, mindfulness in the mindless humming of asinine guitar, strumming infinity and purchasing rounds of abstinence for all the sane and sober minds seeking completion in a midnight dreary dalliance, and then Dean said, "So you never knew her, and instead of exploring her, sharing your nova madness that you continually huff about, you abandoned her on a city block and left her with a rainy glass of teardrop sadness?"

I sunk in shame, recounting on my mental abacus the crimes committed against Delilah and against myself, and knew that in his goldminer way Dean sought to purge me of my sins, directing me to wisdom and peeling away my pavement self delusion, and so I pondered and slithered and considered the power of the Fates and all the impossibility of romance and the shocking truth of the capitalist notions of investment that plagued the hearts of lovers and the poorly minded, and I knew then what I must say. "I never knew her and never opened my sanctum heartbreak to her because I needed her to feel secure, she was empty and I tried to fill her with my knowledge, I tried to burn necessity into her consciousness and elevate her to a throne, a divine seat of will and thought and prowess fortune coronation regality elegance profession. . ."

He snickered, the way that Lucifer must have snickered, that knowing deception that had led to the Truth, the waiting serpent fangs that promised good and evil, that defined the Paradise that only through ignorance and the blind acceptance of God's word could man retain his immortal spirit and remained saved and unsullied by the flames of sin that burden every waking soul and demand for salvation through the intervention of flesh and immortal christening, he snickered as such and said, "I think you wanted to see yourself within her, turn her and polish her into a mirror, and when she wouldn't taste of your cigarette, when she wouldn't smell of your sweat, when she would not think of your volition and wake at your demand, I think you realized that you are a martinet, you want a puppet, you need formless uncreation rather than a sculpted wonder"

"Perhaps," I lit a dreary half-cigarette and smoldered with anxiety, knowing that I had been branded with unfortunate half-truth and would have to use a sieve to sort knowledge from the grit and sand that stuck to my subconscious like black tar, and I smoked and listened to myself and the rhythms of the night and the sound of glasses clinking against an open bar and wondered if I had not gone completely mad for and from Delilah all those months ago