It's been awhile and for that, I am sorry.
From his bed Laurent sees a dark figure walk through the frame of his open door and stop near the light switch. He pulls the covers more so over his face and pretends that he does not notice his sister. He was thinking of calling it an early night. She flicks the light switch on and off rapidly to get his attention:
--Laurent.
Laurent shifts his eyes toward her and grunts to let her know that she has been heard. Sister leaves the light on and walks over to his bed, the wooden floor creaking under her feet. She sits down on the sheets where her brother's legs are withdrawn back to his curled body. Laurent, the fetus. Brother hears her handling something glasslike in her hand. A silver clutch rests in her lap.
--Laurent, we've got some really, really good weed left over from yesterday. If you're not asleep yet, we should load my pipe.
Sister holds out a glass smoking pipe. The bowl of the purple glass is filled with ground up weed and topped off with the light green crystal remains sifted from the bottom chamber of his sister's weed grinder. Laurent sits up in his bed:
--Thank God.
He takes the pipe into his left hand and wraps his thumb around the carburetor of the bowl. Sister places her Zippo lighter into his right hand. Laurent lifts the pipe up to his lips and begins to flick the lighter, but stops:
--Shouldn't we use the vaporizer? I don't have any incense to burn and I don't want our friends to smell the weed.
--Their room is on the opposite side of the house! I suppose I'll go grab some incense from downstairs. I think you should finish this bowl and then load another. Beforehand, if you would, get a bathrobe on or something and then go put on a good vinyl.
Sister slowly pats the exposed calf of Laurent's leg and sets off to grab the incense. Laurent goes back to lighting the pipe. He enjoys the way the top of the mound in the pipe lights up and the way the ground up bits of green bud shrivel as smoked. The harder his drag of smoke, the brighter the bowl becomes. He sets the pipe onto his nightstand and ascends out of his bed naked, an action performed almost as a seamless stretch. He walks straight from his bed to his bathroom and stops in front of the mirror above his sink. He spends hours out of the year just gazing. The body looks so much better completely naked. He thinks to himself how when he wears his trousers little love handles appear at the waist. But now, his frame is smooth. He never envisioned himself having a "chiseled" physique. He appreciates how some fat sometimes obscures his abdominal muscles. There is something romantic to him about how little effort he puts into his body. His chest hair is perfect now. He turns around then peeks over his shoulder to see his backside. A few hairs poke out of his upper back. I'll have to remember to shave these later. He goes further down with his eyes to his rear end, one of his favorite parts to his body. Nice ass. He then throws on a black bathrobe and ties it shut, so as to be modest.
Brother and Sister share much of themselves with each other. They are not quite best friends. Siblings cannot ever declare themselves "best friends." No two people under familial obligations can shrug of that unconscious sense of duty and that tug-of-war understanding of physicality and touch. So there are flimsy boundaries that are hung up every now and then to remind themselves that this should maybe be done this way and that, that way.
Sister comes back to the room waving the incense around in her right hand like she might be wielding a magical wand. She walks in cheerfully, but also somewhat dutifully, because she is his sister as he is her brother. Laurent walks back to his bed as she sets down the alabaster bowl that will hold the incense as it burns onto his nightstand. While loading the second bowl, she asks her brother:
--Have you decided?
Laurent sits down on his comforter slowly as he points out the remains of the bowl in her purple pipe:
--On what?
--On a vinyl, you freak.
Laurent says to his sister that she should put on whatever she likes. She tells her brother that she is always having to decide upon everything. She rants, but she does like being the one to always select the vinyls for Laurent to play on his turn table, as well as the food and the company they keep. Sister sees how withdrawn and, sometimes, even reclusive Laurent has become over the past few years. His inability to act with confidence is often disgusting in her eyes. Some nights she is cast under the magnetism of Laurent. Then, some nights she is so repulsed by what appears to her to be a bizarrely resolute laziness that she throws down whatever her hands are occupying--a vinyl, a book, a DVD she was excited about viewing with her brother earlier--and storms off to bed or to the backyard to let off some steam near the swimming pool. Lazy Laurent. That is what she would think if tonight was one of those times. Instead, she gives her brother a few options from which he can make a decision. The way in which she lays out the potential musical geniuses for tonight's program is very airy and bright with dada-esque flourish:
--We have Miles Davis' Feeling Blue. Well, actually let's not, it seems we have enough of that color hovering about you tonight. Let's see, there's Bitches Brew. Perhaps, but there is also Duke Ellington, Serge Gainsbourg, Charlie "Bird" Parker…
--Put on Bird.
Sister looks up from Laurent's stash of music with some surprise to his ready choice:
--Bird it is.
Laurent receives the vinyl from Sister and places it on the turn table. Sister climbs onto Laurent's bed with the pipe as he starts from the top of the record's A side. Sister lights the bowl and inhales the smoke. She tilts her head back and lets the smoke escape. It billows out slowly and thick under her nose. She takes a quick breath and the smoke cloud is swiftly sucked back into her mouth. Brother looks at his sites and acknowledges her good form. Sister than releases the smoke again. She swishes her head from side to side under the unpredictable, wicked scat-play of Davis' trumpet.
Brother:
--Nice ghost inhale
The two of them take in the erratic scales of the saxophone and become a single unit. Brother and Sister, content.
Sister is both drawn to and repulsed by Laurent's inarticulate sadness. Also, she is fully aware of his act. Only, she is not consistently able to detect the mechanics behind each of his gestures. What is the cause for Laurent's melancholy this evening? Is it a lover Sister does not know about?
Now there are just ashes in the bowl of Sister's pipe. Sister loads the next bowl. The breaths they take from the first hits of the new bowl are clean and pure. As they make there way down the bowl of weed, they space out. Laurent's bedroom grows vast and bright. Sister is mesmerized by the spiraling vinyl record that seems to hover above the turn table. Brother notices a gaping hole in the crown molding that blends wall with ceiling.
We've go to mend that crack.
Sister begins to rouse out of her ritualistic high as the record player's needle, having already moved into the most inward orb of the B side to Laurent's Charlie "Bird" Parker anthology, lifts its beak from the vinyl. A scene comes to Sister's mind. One of thousands she has a day. Just like Brother. She has fun imagining where this little tableau will go. She looks at Laurent (Right now she will think of him as another man named Frank. Frank might be a mysterious acquaintance whom she always took for a very furtive peeper). She gives to "Frank" what she practices to herself every evening in the mirror--the LOOK:
--Darling, do you sometimes think a saxophone is really just a siren meditating from within a gold sarcophagus?
Laurent turns his head to meet her eyes. Is that really one of the lines from the script? He can see plainly that she is now acting by the way that she slings her arms behind her head to play with a sensual pose in her making. How many times must she have read that line to herself today? Laurent:
--Darling, I do not. I appreciate the saxophone because it's more enigmatic than that. Its art is built from caprice and improvisation. If not that, then it is a window for the suppressed, but it's not stifled itself. Nothing about it sounds imprisoned.
--Is that so? (Sister suspects that Laurent's lecture is muddled) You know so much more about these things than I do.
Perhaps, so that he he will not be upstaged, Laurent also assumes a front. He looks at Sister's direction a couple of feet away on his bed comforter, no longer into her eyes, but into those of another women. A woman without transparent craft. He holds this image in his mind and, in the eyes of this new women he imagines an ocean tide falling back, crawling back to its mother and revealing glistening artifacts of earlier motion. And what evidence does the water in her eyes hold? She seems to pull him in closer with each breath she takes. He looks and sees fragments pointing back to prehistoric nebulae caving in and exploding in starlight cadence, luminescent jellyfish stranded by ocean tide. She hums along to the velvet improvisations and he wonders. There is not one reflection, but always an infinite number.
Sister feels that Laurent is winning this scene. Laurent looks smokey and tortured. Sister hurls her effort into a new direction:
--There really is nothing like having a really reliable drug dealer.
This gets Laurent laughing for a few seconds. He nods his head and sinks back into his pillows. His mind is elsewhere, as if what he performs comes from something adrift, something dreamy and torrid. His participation in the conversation with Sister is only surface level. Sister wonders on and on about him. He is her brother. The siblings are masters of feuding and keeping each other in check, sporting against each other. When they go to sleep, their own gods play against each other to keep the action in motion. The impulse cannot die. Some occasions call for their warring dreams to come together, unite in fermatas of sibling truce, if, say, for example, something outside of the family threatened to take this life away from them, the life they began building for each other two years earlier when Mr. and Mrs. Yardley went back to America and allowed the siblings to remain in this mansion. The summer excursion of two years ago became a suspended reality for the two.The impulse cannot die.
Laurent:
--Now you choose the music and give me a cigarette, will you?
--You must have been going insane for these past few hours. I offered you one after dessert tonight, you know.
Sister sees Laurent's craft as him wanting to appear perpetually absent from whatever room he finds himself. Come on. This act only works for a little while. You can't play the mysterious card over and over. Everyone gets so tired with the whole thing. Sister selects Gainsbourg's Histoire de Melody Nelson.
Laurent satisfies his craving for a cigarette and grounds his high. Serge speaks seductively into the lush night. If Laurent had a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost to drive right now, he might go off into the night looking for his muse (she would be riding her bicycle) and then he would crash into her. He looks down onto the bedroom floor. A stack of his own jazzy travel fiction lies tilted, ready to tip over onto the floor. With one struck match, the sprawl would give into burning devastation. So he would like to fancy. He thinks of this not yet materialized muse across the sea of his cushiony comforter. These are the depths he wants to explore.
But the siblings know that there is just Sister and Brother here tonight and there are boundaries. Reared competitively against each other, they both love and hate the other.
Throughout the night little snid-bits of conversation come and go. But, more increasingly, there are suspensions of sound that wear on the siblings. They begin to lack any attentiveness that would be necessitated to keep a night such as this burning. Eventually there is closure to this night scene. Brother sinks into the fabric under his bathrobe. Sister sinks into the fabric under her white frock. Laurent walks down into the basement of the day, the space underneath the drunken, sleeping giant of summer. How grand is this framework around their bodies, gilded with dragonfly mint! They call out to the night, asking it to last. The ceiling fan spins. They sleep, they sweat down on the comforter below.
