Free Better Living Through Plastic Explosives by Zsuzsi Gartner Page A

long as someone was talking, I had a palette to work with. The nasal Upper Canada monotone of my life-class instructor produced oddly compelling anorexic oatmeal-streaked buttocks and breasts (you may imagine how this annoyed the model, who was rather voluptuous and rosy hued, but the sketches earned me instant recognition as an iconoclast). My roommate’s throaty smoker’s laugh gave me a series of large canvas magma flares in reds, oranges, and basalt. The melancholy-flecked sound of my Estonian landlady talking to her daughter over the telephone, a small umbral gem.
    Recorded voices, digitized voices, mediated voices didn’t have any effect. This synesthesia only worked “live.” Walking along a crowded street was quite literally a psychedelic experience. “Your voice is damaged swimwear,” I told a stranger waiting for a bus, a pimply-faced teen whose girlfriend poked him in the ribs with her pointy little elbow before he could respond. “You sound like fresh cement,” I said to a waitress midway through her recitation of the daily specials.
    I was flying, that’s what it felt like. Until the day I came across a man whose voice I couldn’t see.
    Have you ever had a demon lover, Shayana?
    Forget bad-boy musicians or beautiful vampires. I’m talking about the kind of man who turns his dirty dishes over and, when both sides are used, throws them out in a way that is both ceremonial and completely nonchalant, and has you utterly, utterly convinced that this is a “philosophy.” A man who adds not one but three umlauts to his name for a devastating Teutonic effect. I’m talking about a terrifying and destructive charisma.
    He was famous for a time, and then infamous. This was the mid-eighties, when money flowed towards the neoexpressionists like blood from an unstanched head wound. Basquiat. Fischl. Salle. Schnabel. He was the unacknowledged leader of the neo-geo movement, a concerted assault on the neo-expressionists, whom he deemed hopeless—and dangerous—Romantics. (A danger to art, that is.) You may have come across his name somewhere recently because of the unresolved court case, in a Vanity Fair or an Interview (although your periodical tastes may run more towards Us and Hello! —to each his or her own, I always say). There is a Facebook group, Mephisto’s Muses, devoted to his memory. (I’ll leave you to judge for yourself the degree of collective self-absorption involved there.) Did he have a disarming grimace? I honestly can’t remember.
    I’m going to tell you a story, Shayana, and don’t be alarmed if it doesn’t immediately make sense. Good stories seldom do.
    Once upon a time a young woman encountered a man. It doesn’t matter how they met. One moment she was up in the air, the next she was falling to earth but didn’t care. The man was not what anyone would call handsome or young. His hair was stiff and matted, his belly soft, his breath sulphuric; his eyes had slits for pupils, like a goat’s. But when he spoke, all she could see and hear was his voice. She could feel his voice, she knew she could find him anywhere through echolocation. It was as if she had become a bat. A small, needy fruit bat.
    He said her name often, and every time he did so it was as if he were pinning her to a corkboard, each pronouncement of her name a kind of claiming. Why did he want her so? This went on for some time, this living blind in a cave with only his voice for company, seldom venturing out in human form.
    Near the end of that honeymoon period, they were in someone’s basement den after a long night of flitting from club to club. How he loved the clubs! The body heat, the insistent beats, the obliteration of the senses, the fawning recognition of slinky creatures. The light above the billiard table was bothering his eyes. Unscrew the bulb, he told her. And she did, with her bare fingers, barely flinching while