Editing Malady (section)

==Love==
Seconds or minutes or days later, it is time now to continue our
story. I say "our" story, because it belongs very much to you as well.
Not as this is written, no, but as it is read, now, it belongs to you more
than to me. Or maybe you left, maybe you gave up - I have a feeling I
might have lost a few at the end of the last chapter. No matter - I will
go on alone. I will finish this book, even if you never so much as picked
it up. But you are here, and that is good, because Aristotle needs you.
See, I will be fine if this barbaric yawp of mine sounds out forever into
nothingness, but Aristotle - no, Aristotle will live a different fate. You
bring him to life, you imagine him and coax him into being - that is
why this is our story. That is why it's worth it. I can live but a single
life, but our guy can live a thousand times. Do you see the beauty? I
do. Do you see the tragedy? It is there too, but I won't dwell on that. I
know that's there's little use talking about our world, when we are
faced with a world of infinite possibility, but I do want to be honest.
Above all else, I want to be honest and original - honestly original and
originally honest. That is my way, and that is Aristotle's way too.


It turns out Ari is going to have to go to college. Why? Because
that's where he meets the girl. I know there are a lot of good books
with no girl and no love story, but this isn't one of them. Aristotle is a
lover, and he really digs smart chicks, so he's got to go to college.
Scratch that - he went to college - he's two years in by the time we pick
back up. Which school isn't all that important, but it's small, and it's
liberal, and the education is really top notch. Now, Ari flirted with the
idea of a philosophy major, but ultimately, with a name like his, the
pressure was just too much. He went instead into Computer Science -
fitting, given what we know about him, how he touched those keys.
There was still something sexual about his relationship with those
machines. It was no longer the obsequious obsession of youthful lust,
but a more adult thing. He needed his space, and they needed theirs.
Occasionally they would stay up all night together, he and the
machines, but they could also go days without each other, not longing
and wistful, but certain that they would meet again. Ari spoke to the
machines as well as anyone, and though he had much to learn, it was
clear that he had a bright future in the field. Artificial Intelligence was
of particular interest, but this isn't science fiction, and we'll leave it at
that.


Work was starting to pick up by the second week of September. It
was eight or nine by the time Ari left the lab. He wore boots now, and
tight jeans, and though he was still exactly six feet tall from toe to top,
his hair loomed at least four inches above that. It was wild and
unkempt, nested by the roll of fingers, and frayed by the hygiene that
he desperately lacked. That night, as he paced across the lawn, his
mind was still wrestling with some question of logic or language. He
hardly felt he had walked at all by the time he reached his room.
Thomas was inside. Ari and Thomas had gotten lucky, and they knew
it. They were assigned to each other as roommates in their first year,
and realized soon afterward that they had become best friends.


"Hey dude."


"What up?"


"Man, did you just get done?"


"Yeah, I've been working for like twelve fucking hours... Do we have
any gin?"


"Yeah, it's in the fridge."


"Cool."


"You wanna go to Robin's house? I hear it's like two kegs an a DJ."


"Yeah, sounds good."



Well, they went to Robin's, Ari and Thomas, and that's where it
happened. The thronging masses spilled out onto the lawn, and inside
it was sweat and noise and booze and revelry. Ari and Thomas weaved
through bodies, gaining ground towards the door, hoping there was
beer left, and glad that the DJ was playing Outkast. Ari saw here.


"Who's that?"


"That's Lucy. You don't know her?"


"No. God damn. She's beautiful."


Thomas explained that Lucy was a senior, but that she'd been abroad
last year. He said she was single. Ari forgot about the beer and the
Outkast, and the dance floor full of bodies writhing in youthful
convulsion. He walked towards Lucy. By this point in his life, are had
been told several times that he had a very powerful gaze. One girl had
told him it was smoldering, in fact, and that when he looked at her she
felt hot. Ari looked at Lucy with all of his intensity - a gaze that could
shatter platters, he hoped. The cyclops-heat-ray of I-wanna-fuck-you
looks. Lucy looked back. Then something happened that shook Ari up.
Lucy kept looking. Usually, Ari found, you could tell something by how
a person looked back. Folks that wanted him would usually look away,
but look back to see if he was still there. Folks that didn't would look
for a little and then turn away for good. But Lucy did neither, she just
stared back. Their eyes were locked from across the room, and I think
that maybe, just maybe, you could ha ve felt the heat of that
connection if you had walked between them just then.


"I'm Lucy."


"I'm Ari."


It was all very clear. Everyone at the party that night saw them
sitting together on the lawn. Ex-flames cast hexes and guys shot looks
of envy. But to Ari and Lucy, it might as well have been their own little
room at the Chelsea Hotel. Thomas danced his signature herky-jerky
twist, and Robin thanked them for coming, but it was as if the world, a
glacier floating softly, was melted by the spectral heat of their locked
eyes. They spoke softly, wanting no one to hear, wanting only to speak
more softly, until their words became nothing, and they could speak
only with the phantasm of flesh. She studied language, and her words
were deliberate. He studied computation, and his words were
calculated with all the intelligence he possessed. The glacier melted
faster, becoming a torrent which flooded out around them, engulfed
them, carried them. The flock had gone, Thomas had gone, and Robin
slept soundly inside. Their hands met at four twenty-seven in the
morning. Her fingers slipped under his, or his over hers - it wasn't
exactly clear. The grass was wet, their bodies quaked. They were sober
now, as they had hoped, and they walked, not quietly at all, to Lucy's
apartment. By the time the key turned in the cylinder, they had
unlocked each other, given up secrets that had gone so long without
being spoken that they were almost forgotten. Ari liked Hafiz and
Gunter Grass. Lucy liked Virginia Woolf and Wallace Stevens. Ari had
a scar on his left foot, and the stretch marks from his rapid change in
proportions. Lucy had a crooked toe, and a birthmark below her left
shoulder blade. Lightbulbs, dragonflies, windowpanes, and dust -
memory and agony and hope and regret - children, marriage, heritage,
creed - art and artifice, silence and din, buzzing and vibrating and
dancing before the key turned in the lock.


Lucy lit the candles that she kept by her bed, as she had likely done
so many times before. Ari finally understood the light of combustion.
For the first time in either of their lives, they made love. Unafraid and
completely sanguine, they worked for each other, made pleasure into a
language of debate. He was inside her, but she was as much inside him,
hands on each others' shoulders, and faces on each others' necks. They
spoke each others names, and called out to a god that neither of them
were sure existed. Fogged windows, the flickering of flames, eyes so
open in the furnace of their love, and then release.


The sun was rising as they finally collapsed, as it rises now over this
revolutionary world. The sun was rising, and he laid his head on her
still beating chest. 'I've found her,' he thought, as he slipped into
dream. 'I've found him,' she thought, as she cradled his head, and
finally slept.


I, for one, am glad that they found each other - happy to know,
even if it's all a fiction, that people can find each other amidst this
sturm und drang. I knew that the first woman to meet his gaze would be
the first to win his heart. What remains unclear is whether she was the
only one, was going to be the only one, going to have been the only
one. Perhaps there will have been countless others, but I have a good
feeling about Lucy. She's smart and strong and so articulate. He needed
her, I think, to be the man he must be, must be becoming, must have
become. And no less importantly, she needed him. They were right for
each other, in that time and that place, in those simple days before the
plot thickened, before things got strange. The electricity of their love
woke them both.


Aristotle had not moved in the night, Lucy had stayed as still as
stone, the weight of his face as an anchor on that sea of dreams.
Nobody will ever know who stirred first that next afternoon, but
before that ethereal veil of the night had lifted, they were making love
again. They made love often in those days, loudly and at all hours. They
came to know each others' bodies - as abstract forms, and as
extensions of their own. Aristotle wrote poems. He spoke of Lucy as
an unexplored continent, as mist and mountain mixing in the morning.
He saw her freckles as constellations, her eyes as oceans converging
into singularity. She ran her fingers through his nested crown, and
touched his face in the night.


By December, the grass was sealed in it's white winter tomb.
Nobody would see ground again until march at the earliest. Lucy stood
at the entrance to the student center swathed and bundled against the
bitter wind which descended from the arctic airmass and crashed
down on their little college. Ari was still in his Automata lecture, but
she knew that he would soon cone shuffling slawntways down the path
that nameless men shoveled slick each morning. It was just before two
o'clock, and the sun was hidden behind a silver sheath of nimbus. Lucy
loved the way that Aristotle smiled across distance. She could easily
have wood outside the building where his class was held, she knew by
now which door he would use, and that he would stay and chat with
Professor Warburg for five minutes once the lecture was over, but she
didn't. She preferred to stand there, half a block away, and to watch as
aristotles eyes searched the bleak landscape, and finally lit up with the
recognition of her white peacoat. He wore a bright red woolen trench
coat, and earn the stood together, they reminded people of a candy
cane. Perhaps it was because of the sea, but it had to do also with the
almost cloying consistency of their rapport.


"We don't have time for fighting."


In their own eyes, and in the eyes of the people that knew them best,
Lucy and Aristotle made each other better. They smiled now even in
the mornings, because they had woken together and knew that they
would sleep together again that night. Lucy was full of art, sometimes
drawing Ari, but more often drawing for Ari, even if she only
sometimes showed him. It was a simple kind of love they shared - most
aptly compared to a rock or a river. Strong and sure, it just seemed so
natural - like it was part of the right order of things.


February brought strong storms and the drifting snow, but it was
no matter. When the white oblivion of winter came, they were happy
to stay inside, warm with wine and whine and the muted throb of jazz
records. They built snowmen and igloos, and kissed each others' noses
until the red went away. They cooked and slept, and studied ferocious.
Neither if them had been very diligent students before they met, but
now they were, because they wanted to be. They spent less time with
their friends than they were used to, but it didn't bother them a bit,
and their friends didn't mind because it was all so exceedingly clear.


I have to wonder, at this point, if you believe all this. I mean, I
know you don't believe it, but I wonder if it is even believable. Does it
ring true, I guess is what I'm asking. You see, so far, Aristotle's story
has been in lockstep with my own. It's not exactly the same, but it
mirrors mine in many ways. Still, Aristotle lives only in these leaves of
symbols, and I am made of flesh. What gives credence to the I that I
utter, when Aristotle's love seems like only a fiction? It was not a
fiction.


Not to them, st least. It was the realest thing in their young lives -
more tangible than Bayesian classifiers or deep grammar. Aristotle
could hold her and know that life was not an abstract thing, he could
see her and realize with all the lucidity of his consciousness that the
spiral of civilization arced on into the cosmos, and that the march of
humanity was not in vain, because it had brought them to each other.
Their love for each it her transformed in that winter tomb, becoming a
love for life, and for the world which cradled their corporeal selves.
What higher praise can a love receive than "the love of life because it
allows for love"? There is none. What purer love could one attain than
one which makes no ownership claim? One could not attain such a
love.


In April the verdure returned, and the young lovers passed hours
on roofs. They sat usually at the cornice of one arch, to which they had
found a passage, and which seemed to be theirs alone. They smoked
cigarettes and needed other They did not need to need each other, but
they wanted to, and they allowed themselves to, because they knew
devotion when they saw it. They spoke honestly about how beauty had
changed into whatever was before them. They still locked eyes and
were no less unner ved by the spectacle of a soul laid bare and
unblinking. They had fallen in the fall, and now in the majestic
springtime their love was in bloom. It was splendored, certainly, but it
was not ornate. It not a peacock, but a sculpture of a peacock, the lines
made clean, and the metal cast by an expert hand.


What hand? This hand. Not that in a sculptor, or an expert for that
natter, but only that I made this love as a testament to what love is, or
at least fab be. I met Lucy once, in a darkroom. But she was not meant
for me. Lucy was meant for Aristotle, who is only my fruition and is
not me. Even if I also have stretch marks. Lucy is not my creation, but
she is also not so real. She is only what I longed for, but what Aristotle
got. Perhaps it is better to live in symbols


"I love you, Lucy"
"I love you, Ari"


"I love you, Ari"
"I love you, Lucy."


"Like a rock and a river."
"Like a river and a rock."


Please, read those lines a few more times - it is what Aristotle
would want, if he could speak to you as I can. Let Ari hear tho lines a
few more times, and let him speak from the heart. He cannot read this
book himself, though he knows it better than we will ever know. He
cannot read this book himself, and so you must read it for him.