Unreasonable Cuts

Among my neuroses is this sense that I should be able to squeeze gold out of any detail, like if I can’t make up a story about the furniture I’m sitting on I’ve already failed and should give up on everything. Besides I’d rather talk about the seat across from me, this yellow mustard colored sofa-like seat, not quite a canape but softer and deeper than any kind of regular chair, specifically designed for mobile workers with Macbooks sewn to the fronts of their jeans to lean back in as they type, and the fabric I don’t have a word for is sturdy but soft – I want to say plush – and the color was inspired by the designer’s trip to Dijon, where she took a walk through the mustard fields and knelt down and felt the dirt in her palms and pressed her hands into it so the soil pushed up through the spaces between her fingers and she recited a kind of prayer of devotion to the earth and to the fragrance of the yellow flowers around her and swore that if she ever got the opportunity she would learn to cut and dye fabrics and she would design furniture in this color and only this color, and she would fill the world and the spaces people lived in with this shade of yellow. Why should only the past be sepia toned, she said, and her companions who didn’t understand and really didn’t have any interest in kneeling down in a farmer’s field were convinced that she’d been affected by the sun, and they told her as much and she said, yes, that’s just it, we should all be in the sun, we should feel like we’re in the sun, and the one guy who didn’t usually talk that much but was studying cosmology and astronomy and things like that, so he knew about the physicality of stars, said quietly that’s not what you would see if you were in the heliosphere itself, that in fact it would look rather different which is all academic, if you will, as without stating what kind of instrumentation we’re talking about, we can assume that the extreme heat of being close enough to the sun to be enveloped in its light emissions would, if not completely melting or possibly even disintegrating us, almost certainly have rendered us blind and incapable of appreciating it. At which point the future designer stood up and looked wildly around her, arms up as if beseeching the support of an invisible crowd, and she threw her head back and shouted to the sky, I NEVER LIKED ANY OF YOU. This led to an awkward walk back toward the car they’d rented and were sharing and it was the astronomy nerd’s turn to drive them back to town where the four of them were also sharing a single room in a hostel with four beds. On the country highway back to Dijon they had to wait in line with about thirty other cars. The gendarme who came to the window, which they all agreed was exceedingly polite and friendly behavior for a cop, explained that there had been a motorcycle accident and it would be some time. Person number three (that’s me) had been drinking wine in the back seat the whole trip and got out to pee behind a French maple and have a cigarette. The last person we haven’t met yet told a story: she had a great uncle who’d been in the War, the second world one, had met his wife, her great aunt, here in Dijon and brought her back to the States to live with him and raise a family. Her family’s house here had been mostly destroyed but the cellar was still intact and before they left with the Army he stashed four cases of local wine that had been bottled in the 30s, before or after the phylloxera rot she wasn’t sure, but either way it was valuable stuff for collectors and after her great aunt died in the 1980s he was sick with a few different kinds of cancer and he took a plane over here under the auspices of coming along for one of the annual Normandy celebrations or somesuch, and he took a taxi all the way from Paris back to Dijon and found the address where a new house had been built in the ‘50s over the foundation. He befriended the people who lived there, a younger couple with a child and a cocker spaniel, and told them the story about his wife but not about the wine. They offered to let him sleep on a twin bed in the laundry room, as he hoped they would, and when they were asleep that night he went down to the basement and found that there was just about a meter of drywall over the spot where he’d hidden the wine. He'd been prepared for this and told the taxi driver to wait for him down the street at midnight. He went back up the basement stairs and found the cocker spaniel waiting for him at the threshold of the kitchen and the living room. He jabbed at it with his boot, then a little harder, then it started yapping and running around and he opened the front door and it ran out into the yard, standing and facing the door and yapping at him, and he went back downstairs as he heard the yelling in French from the bedrooms and he used the sledge hammer the owners kept down there for some reason to break through the drywall and in the hole behind there he reached through the brick and he took out one bottle at a time until his sack was full and he went back up and out the back door and crossed the neighbors’ yards until he got to where the taxi was supposed to be.