kagablog

The telephone rings. Abraxas answers it grumpily. “We are having breakfast together. I’ll pick you up in thirty minutes.”

It is Miss Dirty Pop, the piano virtuoso. She’s wearing orange glow-in-the-dark sneakers. He orders a toasted cheese, tomato and onion sandwich on white bread. The Mexican waiter forgets the onion. Forgets the hot milk with the double espresso. Forgets his own name. Forgets to inhale after exhaling. Forgets to learn to speak English. Forgetting is as intrinsic to the Mexican waiter as pretending is to the art school graduate.

Miss Dirty Pop can’t go back to Japan. “My brand of non-conformism isn’t exactly stimulated there.”

“Japanese people always look like they are being tortured. Especially when they smile.” She blanches. No matter how critical of the system they may be, Japanese people always hate to hear their country ill-spoken of by foreigners.

They discuss the nutritional value of starlight. The Devil’s First Born Son is on a pontificatory roll. “Children need to bask in starlight. It feeds their souls and helps develop the fecundity of their imaginative process. In short, star-light is as vital as protein and vitamin C.”

Miss Dirty Pop’s eyes mist up with tightly held-back tears. She knows he is right; feels a stabbing pain of guilt for raising her marvelous daughter in the starless ocean of grey murk that is Amsterdam. She hands the penniless Abraxas a hundred dollar note.

“I think of you often.”

He holds the restaurant door open for her, they step out onto Sixth Ave.

“Thanks for the money.”

He can’t wait to spend it. Is genuinely grateful.

“You can babysit my daughter next time you’re in Amsterdam. Teach her things.”

“She can teach me.”

Arm in arm on the way to the 28th Street Subway they celebrate Helios’ smiling beams. Abraxas is animated; the crisp hundred dollar bill and extraordinarily tasty (free) breakfast doing wonders for his articulation of Kozmic truths. He manoeuvres his way onto her right side.

“My mommy taught me always to walk between a lady and the curb; in the event of a car splashing water on them his body would serve as her shield.”
Miss Dirty Pop is amused and pleased by his olde worlde sense of chivalry. “In Japan a woman has to walk two steps behind a man so as not to stand on his shadow, which is considered more important than her body. It is most impolite to stand on someone’s shadow. A grave discourtesy.”

Abraxas’ megalomaniacal delusions of priesterly grace pour to the fore as the hereditary schizophrenia begins to take hold. He declaims loudly. “I consider the shadow’s relationship to the body to be analogous to the body’s relationship to the soul. All three operate within strictly defined dimensional parameters. All are individuated manifestations of a self that is an increment of Godhead. In the same way that the three-dimensional body is aware of the ostensibly flat and barren existence of the two-dimensional shadow, so is the four dimensional soul aware of and equally pitying of the three dimensional body.
“Conversely, just as the body can be conceptually aware of the existence of the soul but not subject it to measurements – for it exists outside of the measurable quantifiable dimensionality that is space-time – so the shadow can intuitively conceive of the body’s existence but has no way of confirming this.

“Eternity may be expressed in the sense that the shadow’s shadow too exists and is equally pitying of its own shadow, and indeed, the soul is merely a shadow of its own soul. The chain of continuities keeps going in both directions continuously eternally but not in a straight line, in fact the movement takes the form of a double-helix spiraling over, into and outside of itself; this shape is the DNA of God, otherwise known as the unspeakable name.

“All manifestations that we can perceive, all phenomena, are nothing more than constituent elements in the sub-atomic cluster of events comprising his being.”

Throughout the rant, Abraxas carefully avoids stepping on the cracks in the pavement, thus giving his gait a surreal lilt that serves to lighten the ponderous impact of his sermonising. Indeed, watching him deliver it, Miss Dirty Pop is unable to resist a chuckle. This makes him feel good about himself and he fingers the hundred dollar bill with pride, knowing that he fully deserves it.