U in a movie called La Notte

(2016)

This is an excerpt from an ongoing work-in-progress called U. Following on from 16 Sculptures, it’s my attempt to apply the re-creative/invocative precepts of object-oriented writing to cinema, in the form of a novel, through the agency of a character called U, described in the first chapter as follows:

U not I as I not me. U is you and not-you, U see. A she-we me-he U-be to foresee. U less a person than a thing-to-be. Other, brother; demonology. A thing in its thingishness, unthinking and curved. Curved upwards, as though expecting to be filled – a gap; the sky is not a sea. I is he if he were a she. Instead, it’s a U: bombed-out we. Perpetuous cartography! Endless morphology! U a place spread out in all its animacy. U a fog that floats into and infests with agency. Subject, object – sobject, in all its delinquency. U: product (ding!) of endless immateriality.

So: anti-autofiction, if you will. The chapters read as self-contained stories, and so excerpts have already been published here and there. The one below, after Antonioni’s film, was originally published in Flash Art in 2016.

Milan a city U’ve never been to before. So U can admire the scape without getting caught up in referencing it. Glass elevator reflecting cityscape going down. The sounds of industry – tapered minor violence. The Italian capital of industry. We like the sounds of violence because they never stop. 

Writer in hospital bed about to die. Doctor injects him with morphine. Ask what it is to be done. 

The friends arrive in a vehicle. Birds twerp on a sunny day. Deranged slut in the hallway wants hubby’s cock. Nursie sends her back to room. 

Next door is where the great man lies. It would be futile to operate. Operation successful, but the patient died, he jokes. 

He’s sick of all the pretending. He knows that death is upon him. All this longing for release, now the regrets. Self-doubt of the master. The dying master compliments the younger. The younger loves the old master, who isn’t even old. Just dying. Mother appears. A mother, a wife, a younger writer, an older. Death permeates the air, the smell of sickly sweat. The buildings of Milan. All built by sweating men. Helicopter flies over. The concert you didn’t go to. 

Wife can’t take anymore, goes outside to cry. 

Madwoman corners husband, the younger writer, in the hallway on the way out; asks him for a light. She drags him into her room and attempts to devour him. He kisses her, lets himself be kissed by her, though he knows she’s insane. Before it can go any further, they are interrupted by nurses, who come in and slap the shit out of the girl, strap her to the bed. 

The young writer and his wife drive through the streets of Milan, on their way to the party for his new book. Traffic’s bad. He tells his wife about the incident with the mad girl. She says it would make a good short story. Call it The Living and the Dead. The wife doesn’t care. When was the last time she was moved. 

Giovanni Pontano. That’s the young writer’s name. They all swarm around him. A time when people still read books, before literature became obsolete. Husband signs books; wife is bored. She finishes her drink, leaves. 

The busy streets of a city of industry. The people moving through it, rushed, immune to the disorder they form bits and pieces of. Wife stands before a fountain. The men before her laughing. A crumbling façade a sign of poverty. Try to comfort the crying toddler outside of it, then give up with a smile. 

The writer returns home alone to bourgeois apartment building. The sound of an English-language instruction record on the phonograph. Maid informs wife hasn’t returned. Writer says she can go home. 

In his office, books and newspapers everywhere. Look through the curtains at the street down below. 

The built city. Wife in the scape. Noise in the sky, like rockets passing by. 

She meets the gaze of nearly every male figure that crosses her. She is looking, looking. Moving and watching on this fine spring day. Rest Ur head against a column, Jeanne Moreau, U are lovely, don’t U know. Men and their beastliness. A group of young hoodlums, two of them beating each other. Basta! she screams. Basta! The winner puts his shirt on, smiles at her through a bloody nose. She turns to go and he follows after, as though she were his expected reward. 

It is late afternoon, the siesta hour, the day starting to die. Someone shooting off fireworks in a field. People stand around watching. She joins, to feel herself one of the crowd. The crowd staring up at the sky. Soon that won’t be, can’t be enough. And so she suspends her stare and will walk elsewhere. 

Husband wakes up in his office. Lidia still not home. Now the sun nearly gone. The neighbor on the balcony. Hasn’t seen her either. 

Tall gridular structure called apartment building. I love Ur geometric rigidity. Love me like a telephone ringing. 

Kids firing rockets in a field, she says through the telephone. Come to the café. Let us wander the way a husband and wife should. 

Why here? It’s where she ended up, is all. His studied, serious glare. Hers quizzical. It hasn’t changed. The everything. The rust. The boys with rockets over there. A fine gay old song. We could dance to it were we not in a field of abandonment, standing on an old railroad track…

Wife’s in the bathtub. She doesn’t wanna stay in no more. He says we’ll go to the party. Millionaires collect intellectuals, she notes; he’s picked U. Her/their old world charm. Fix self drink in the kitchen. Sexy new dress she’s wearing, all frilly back lace and exposed cleavage. This a time when gesture counted. Button me up. Wife doesn’t want to go to party. They’ll go somewhere else.