‘Cusser, like cuss words. You don’t know that term?’
‘I know that term, Dad, but I didn’t think I was a cusser. I just thought I was a freak.’
‘No, Myra, come on. You’re not ... ’
I don’t know why I felt like crying. My mouth swarmed with cheese grease.
‘Cusser sounds cool,’ said Jeff. ‘I wanna be a cusser too. How do I get Rose of Versailles?’
‘Call me,’ Lee said. ‘I have a digest compilation of the first year. Call and I’ll bring it to you after school or something one day.’
Lee ripped a piece of the empty pizza box and she wrote down her number on the back. Jeff, I thought, blushed. My father stood up and stuck Lee’s cardboard number on the fridge with a magnet. I felt my gut, the pizza, the flute in my gut.
‘Have a good time, kids,’ my father said later, tipsy, framed by the door. ‘Next time you can invite Aaron too. What do you say, Myra?’
Lee answered for me. She was definitely not a kid. ‘Okay, Neil. It was great to meet you. Bye, Jeff!’
I galloped down the porch stairs. My father, alone and gaunt from the house light behind him, watched me and Lee crawl into Aaron’s car.
Aaron kissed me open-mouthed in the front seat. His tongue was lukewarm.
‘Mmmmmm, you girls hittin’ the sauce with your dad?’
‘A glass, just a glass.’
Aaron backed out of our driveway. The light in Jeff’s room went on. I hoped my father hadn’t seen me and Aaron.
Chris’s party was in the east end of the city. I knew we’d be passing by Filmore’s. I was thinking about how I’d get there later, after this party that was supposed to be so important. I’d called Elijah’s room and he hadn’t answered.
‘So ... Lee says she gave Chris your opus.’ Aaron squeezed my thigh too hard and I jumped. ‘When am I gonna get to read it too?’
‘I can’t believe you did that. Lee! That was my fucking first draft!’
Lee and Wils were making out in the back seat. Wils waved his hand at me, as in: go away. They kept kissing. I couldn’t believe she did that. And that she was fucking ignoring me.
‘My, my, Myra, don’t stress.’ Aaron wove in and out of the streetcar tracks. ‘Chris is open. He’s got a lot of connections. He’s starting the university tonight, right, Wils? Like, modelled on the free-school movement of the sixties. Maybe he’ll discuss your essay or something.’
Aaron jammed on the gas to get around every car he could.
‘I don’t know,’ Wils said, his mouth half in a kiss. ‘Ask this one. She’s the expert.’
‘I just thought Chris would want to read it,’ Lee said quietly. ‘Shows how much I admired it, right?’
My essay had stalled. I could not imagine this Chris or Ms. Bain or Mr. Rotowsky reading it and passing me. I was getting more sucked into the internet porn and there was less and less of a connection with the comfort women, or any other historical aspect, like the last slave ships to land at Key West. Everything was changing and stalled because of the master-slave dialectic, because of Hegel. I believed that everyone now, not just pornographic actresses or the Muselmanner, but everyone, according to Hegelian dialectic, was on the continuum of being a slave. ‘The Master-Slave dialectic describes in narrative form the encounter between two self-conscious beings,’ I read on Wikipedia, ‘who engage in a struggle to the death before one enslaves the other – only to find that this does not give him the control over the world that he sought.’
The slave’s self-consciousness, according to Hegel, not the master’s, sublates into Absolute Knowledge.
This was changing everything for me. Sublation meant cancelling out and preservation; both, together, at the same time. You could get rid of something and protect it too. I realized that I wanted to sublate myself to Elijah. I wanted to be consumed by him and elevated by him and preserved in the process. I didn’t know how to do this. This didn’t seem inevitable. Did I have to struggle to the death? And what about Gayl?
I heard sounds from the back seat of the car, grunts being stifled. Lee’s grunts. I started thinking about Gayl.
‘Who is Flannery O’Connor, you guys?’
‘Oh yeah, my girl Flannery!’ Aaron shouted. The whole car shifted left. A streetcar beeped and we jerked in front of it. Lee screamed and then laughed, getting off on Aaron’s speed.
‘Take it easy back there, dudes!’ Aaron shouted.
Aaron had his little bag full of drugs on his lap. It was a circle of red leather with a zipper that went all the way around. He lit a joint, I think to distract himself.