Count the present days until today arrives (NATASHA)

 

(all I heard about Fay was that she was the Bard book editor, and that her clothing taste was all Dior, Nitch Schiesen, besides Russian, I only spoke good German, and that she always smoked Macoboy or Black Russian cigarettes in an English Dunhill holder, with cinematic dignity. Fay and her radio room, everything was quiet upon my arrival at La Guardia Airport, K ​​and I were well-fornicated and chatty the entire plane ride—in the hotel restaurant, the maître d' ordering the lobster to be poached in white wine and then flambéed in Pernod and covered in cardinale sauce (made with the shells, the sauce, K said, laughing in his fighter pilot jacket and offering a "literary conclusion" to everything, as if he were speaking to me: "Welts-chmerz, the tedium of life, full of things poorly assimilated by the brain out of sheer laziness," he said, K, that he was now my Hausfreund, a close friend, without any Wahn Wahn, the Life's Great Illusion --- The next morning, at the publishing house in Manhattan, somewhere, Les Fréres Books, with a desk and computer people in the corners, K greeted Fay with a beautiful smile from long ago and said, "This is Natasha," running her hand over my belly, laughing, as if she were keeping a bomb in my belly. Fay laughed and said, "Sit down." --- K picked up a NYT newspaper and said "First Impressions," bored, "reading this is like making a rag dance in a basin of paint, a familiar tone of old moral machinery recycling the same ill-defined feelings in a constant rehash of immediate intentions, always talking about THINKING as a kind of code to reach an agreement with some business lobby bent on politics." --- K looked at me like a cornered animal, afraid of Bard's arrival among us, at night, calling Fay aside for fear of my reaction, with loose pieces of the plan floating in his head, a new idea shining with cold sweat, with no liberating effect in his gaze --- "Ja, Ja, Feind" I said "Si, Sim, Enemy. Nicht War?" Isn't it?'' I said, and he replied to Fay: "That's not what we're thinking about right now. We're just technicians," and Fay added: "We don't spend twenty-four hours a day thinking about death, contrary to what they say." --- "Fay spends more time lying down, reading, than working on covert operations. Much more interior shots than exterior shots, in our little film." K said, "Our useful time as spies is practically up, less than a month left until our retirement." K said, with a feeling of eternal vacation of someone who has already foreseen everything down to the smallest detail --- "So..." I asked. "Now they want to use me to change him, to change Bard's self-image, to tear him away from his life of fame, regular sex, and a peaceful married life. They want to buy my desire to dominate him and take him away from his wife," I said. I was very apprehensive about K and Fay's reaction, obscurely excited. Each step of the plan was only revealed to me moments before it was "acted," as if in a disgusting profession, a Dirnenwohnheime, a Mason of Tolerance, a Brothel, I a blonde Aphrodite with a perfect body. It would have been easier when Bard was socially and economically weak, now came a rich Bard, with strength of character and self-control. If he gets angry, he can hold out indefinitely, and much money to conquer women, many Viennese sirens, as he likes to imagine for his detective books, between political assassinations and factional terror --- "Maybe I can hold Bard here alone long enough for a little pinch of a feeling of power," he said to me --- "In any case, we're already working with Blanca, on the other front," Fay said --- "Ready to use people as things?" he said --- "It's the decline of civilization. Natasha is right," K said, laughing --- "I remember a K story where the character, a sort of Gore Vidal Kalki, reduces all of humanity to small groups of old men, drunks, and retired spies on ghost ships sailing aimlessly on the ocean after the Apocalypse. At the end of the story, the same desire each of us has to exert absolute power over others emerges, exactly the same as before the end of the world. Nothing had apparently changed; with or without the world, it was the same thing. The appetite for power and control is what builds and brings down empires. Exactly the same thing that, on a microscopic scale, in the habitual subliminal restlessness of our personal encounters, tilts the steering wheel of dominating energy toward this or that ego," Fay said --I remembered that on the plane trip K had called Fay "short, accurate reports about suns and moons in colorful graphs about men and their ecosystems of figures," and later he said there in the room that Fay was referring to an old text of his, where he defined the "great prize of power" as the "unlimited possibility of killing with a tranquil pleasure, in an overwhelming joy of consuming the panting breath of men in the shadows, swallowing their faces like Saturn and flooding the world with blood and horror." --- "This is a barely confessable feeling that inhabits the filthy cellars of the human unconscious," K continued. "Agents and spies and counter-spies and weapons and secret power plans, and obscure infiltrations and brainwashing with enormous media, cinematographic and advertising apparatuses; here, at most we can say that we reflect this game, and Bard means for us the conclusion of the elaboration and transport through the world of an enormous scandalous dossier that must be converted into a succulent literary Steak au Poivre by a star writer on the verge of co-optation. In other words, it's a groundwork, not a James Bond-type adventure. Not even Le Carré's pragmatic imagination, which was undoubtedly also quite delirious, could account for our "phenomenon in situ," so cunning it seems to be to conceive of it, with its demand for well-specified time and space and hours of reading in bed until one understands that everything in Antonina's Book is not only real, but is HAPPENING at this very moment, I mean, HAPPENING UNTIL NOW, it is a LIVING BOOK, which invites us (WE, PSYCHOTIC READERS) to ACT," concluded K, laughing --- So yo tchum, Razdyevay, Da ya dolzhen razdyevat 'ssya, and then they arrived in the living room, scoth, jazz, we smoked in a boudoir, yo it wasn't really the universal standard of life there, it was no one above the horrors of power and language, Zamolchi yo and my tricks, a nitchtozhestvo, with a movement of the head that was to freeze Bard's arrival in thought, avoid a mistaken negotiation, not make law for myself, play my role simply and in Gdye Doktor Ropyr, Kto, how much stuff concentrated in the space of a cigarette --- how much interest I give to sex, to sex in a fluid state, an excess of lies with a pinch of Truth, all in a pearl of culture, with a lot of tension inside, and DENARO, VERY DENARO, in a bankrupt theater I could be a CIA agent, betray everyone and get a job in an American television commercial, my legs are divine --- demanding ten acres in Westwood just for me, in Los Angeles, to be you)