SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue Two - Journal - Page 90
SINE QUA NON
of a months-long relationship. A dinner table complete with a full meal and winking candles,
followed by a collection of sex toys, bottles of booze, museum paintings in gilded frames. A
different woman emerged from behind one of the paintings (a Gauguin) in holey jeans and
paint-spattered Docs. A look passed between this woman and Darius, a glance loaded with
sparks and dilated pupils and private smiles. (Licorice lips.) “Hi there,” he mouthed to her
for all to see.
The auburn-haired woman saw this in the midst of a conjoined pirouette with Darius.
He dropped his grip on her hand and she stumbled away, nearly fell on her ass. She shouted
at him—“I knew it, goddammit! You're so erratic!”—but he reached out for the Gauguin girl,
tried to pull her into his dance step where he still twirled. But she moved away, slipped behind
the painting which glided toward the shadows. The auburn-haired woman marched off in the
other direction. Just before reaching the wings, she doubled back, snatched her mysterious
book from the folds of the still-twisting bedsheets then flitted into oblivion.
Darius stood there in his cape looking shellshocked. He turned round and round in a
solitary spotlight as all the props and detritus of the relationship seemed to spirit themselves
away. The moon sign, meanwhile, had gone dark.
Dr. Luz watched in shadows from the set of the clinic's waiting room which had remained
unchanged through the whirlwind which had just taken place downstage. Darius addressed
the darkness beyond the spotlight that made his face a shining specter in the stillness that
now settled over everything. “The pattern repeated itself, one lover to the next, ad infinitum.”
A woman playing an accordion appeared from the shadows and crossed the boards. The
wheezing klezmer tune she played became the music that swirled all around. Darius turned
to her, tried to grasp her sleeve but then another woman crossed their path carrying a palette
and fistful of paintbrushes. (And was the moon sign beginning to glow again?) Yet another
woman circled around them on a beach cruiser. A shirtless man with a towel around his waist,
a silver-haired woman in a red velvet evening gown, a dozen others of all shapes and sizes
and ages, crossing and recrossing the floorboards. The tune sped up, rhythm surging. Darius
turned and gawked, watching everyone come and go in a complex choreography of motion
and movement and collision-avoidance. He became the epicenter of a fast-moving and fluid
dance number where each of his partners grasped his hand in turn, some of them pressing
a kiss to his lips. His lovers, every one of them. A rushing whirlpool of connection and
separation and reconnection, a galaxy churning on itself as the moon sign in the background
grew brighter and brighter until its illumination blazed like the sun. Darius, mindless, spun
in the vortex.
At the music's crescendo, the rhythm relaxed and the accordion tune began to slow.
The whole sequence flowed in reverse. Darius's partners faded away, one by one, into the
darkness beyond the curtains, until there was just a handful, then only two, and finally—as
the accordion (off-stage now) sustained a single, breathy note that stretched and stretched—
one solitary woman on the park bench with her guitar. She strummed and softly sang the last
lines of “Corcovado” and the world went quiet except for the mellow burr of the neon sign
that read Dr. Luz.
Out there, the audience shifted and settled in anticipation. Darius, from downstage,
swept towards the woman with the guitar. He held his wings aloft like flags, but she rose and
passed behind the gardenias so that when he reached the spot, she was gone. He stood there
under the moon sign even as it faded with the music back into a dull glow like a lightbulb
on a dimmer switch.
Alone now. Though he could see the actress who played the guitar girl standing just
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