—DON’T YOU REMEMBER YOU TOLD ME YOU LOVED ME, BABY?   

 

The Doomed Romantic, or An Evening with Dennis Cooper

 

 

       Looking out the window, hoping to see a pink moon among the shelves of roaming cloud cover, the doomed romantic sits listening to Nick Drake. 

       There are millions of thought fragments, like bits of beach sand, running through the doomed romantic’s bony skull, but none are sticky enough.

       His dog yawns nervously, like a misplaced secret. Even the books, stacked up like dead soldiers, wear leery and skeptical expressions, a brazen betrayal of the inanimate. 

       Nick’s fragile vocal delivery warbles as it meets the largest window, shimmying against the pane, not willing to abandon its desperate sojourn. The sound waves, ingenious as they are, make themselves into their own meek battering rams, but it’s no use, and eventually the music drops dead of exhaustion.

       The doomed romantic thinks there’s enough juice left in him to light a small lamp, so he plugs his fingers into a socket, feeling them sizzle in a kind of charred ecstasy. When the entire block goes black, the doomed romantic feels a nudge because he knows this is the last outage he’ll ever witness. 

       The lamp’s weak scrim of light is all that remains, and so the doomed romantic decodes a love poem written on the underside of his forearm. It takes him the rest of the night, the rest of his life, but once he has the solved mystery committed to memory, he unplugs himself and closes his eyes to sleep.